1
10
7
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/d0eca0afb40f99553130842f03de4728.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=pjcUI-pS7hFF6fsWB-WwpAbZLm9GRL8cRE13h48qEc%7Esll-HhxKmFuqRoVFh%7EZj%7EtB8G1-aqBflyHw2qKSwepI7CoIUOPzrlMPAd6du7gBw1FnJrDEb2sz9A-kPBvCFwhg6PW8Xeyo97Jh-hnowcBaDCuqAlGmTp-vPgaDgvZ-PhiIouhoQafXM%7E5ZNY1xrPz-t6mUOY8p3oLu5JVQdQCTIgbPuW96Y7S17HVkP92fB-9QyBJ2hl1smSBx34myBKGDIfRWASE0cpgTToO8FibCm8CUpcSD00BCInpUaCzxTCfIcUXusbncP1abaBhGULFL18B-htFwLOvnasy9TC7g__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
62cd4343cb28f8d7019ca82ad9857bd6
PDF Text
Text
THE SPIRITUAL SERFDOM
OF
THE LAITY.
MONCURE D.
CONWAY.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Sixpence.
�I g
11‘
�THE SPIRITUAL SERFDOM OF THE LAITY.
-----------4-----------
N view of the interest and sympathy with which
our people have
Itragedy enacted inbeen for some time gazingIon the
a neighbouring country, picture
a time when they will be able to recognise tragedies
at their own doors,—tragedies which, though not
written in blood, are no less appalling than those
that desolate smiling fields and villages.
Our
physical eyes are open, and can recognise terror and
agony; our commercial eyes ate keen to perceive the
ruin of trade and financial distress; our intellectual
eyes are so heavy that the wounded forms of Reason
and Religion writhe before us unheeded. Could the
moral and spiritual condition of England shape itself
in a visible form and physiognomy, it would, I think,
seem too heart-breaking for us to spare overmuch
sorrow or horror for the unhappy condition of Paris.
Those who have eyes to see the realities that are
invisible, have beheld this nation solemnly re
establishing the grossest superstitions of barbarism as
the only lawful and authoritative religion. At the
end of many generations, which have struggled for
liberty and light, a great nation, sitting in her highest
tribunal, orders to be dragged into her presence a
man who has dared to say that God is our Father,
and man our brother; she tries as a criminal one
who has affirmed the truth of Reason and Conscience,
and in his form binds the human spirit itself, hand
and foot, and casts it into outer darkness. “ Go ! ”
it has cried to the religious guides of the people,—
“ declare to the sorrowing world that they are all
born children of Satan; tell them they are tossed
between an angry God and a malignant Devil; tell
�6
The Spiritual Serfdom
them that the laws of Nature do not exist, but only
the caprice of a Giant Mechanic, who built the uni
verse and may knock it to pieces again at his pleasure;
bid them cower, bid them supplicate and whine like
slaves under the lifted lash, bid them deny common
sense, outrage instinct, believe the fables of savage
soothsayers, and put darkness for light, that they
may crawl into heaven by cowardice and save their
miserable little souls ! ”
Such are the glad tidings of great joy which Eng
land sends by its only authorised messengers to us
and to all men ! So does Reason suffer this day
under Pontius Hatherly !
I said the Church has cast the bound human spirit
itself into outer darkness. Well for us were it also a
place of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But it is not so. The saddest thing by far relating
to the fresh fetters which have been forged and
imposed upon the mind of the country, is, that it has
hardly elicited one groan or protest from the people.
A few plaintive cries have been tortured from the
more earnest and scholarly of the clergy, as the rack
upon which they are stretched gives another wrench ;
but the laity have generally shown only a stupid
servility. When Swedenborg related that in his
pilgrimage through Hell he found a company of
spirits there who fancied they were in Heaven, and
were thankful for that beatitude, I suspect he must
have been reflecting on his residence in London.
The people walk the streets cheerfully with their giltedged prayer-books, and, so far as we hear, sit
serenely in their pews; but though the Church,
unsunned by Reason, be called Jerusalem, it is none
the less Gehenna, and repose in it is more deplorable
than anguish.
We might have supposed that the laity have felt
diffident of their ability to deal with subjects blended
with law and theology; but unfortunately we have
just seen that in their own dealings with religious
�of the Laity.
7
questions in a region particularly their own, they
have shown themselves utterly servile to the besotted
bigotry of the times. The new school-system was
the reply of the governing classes to a demand of
the poor for education too stem to be longer un
heeded. Its establishment was amid a general
blaze of enthusiasm for the liberation of education
from denominationalism, and for universal toleration.
What has all this amounted to when cooled down ?
Simply that each man wished to keep other denom
inations than his own from getting the upper hand.
When the question of toleration, in principle, really
came up; when a party, too weak to find any defence
except in that principle, arose and begged not to be
compelled to help teach the children of the country as
true, biblical legends and dogmas they believed false,
all the denominations made common cause with each
other, to scorn their entreaty and protest. It was
not a convocation of clergy, but a School-board
controlled by the laity which, at the last discussion
on the subject in Guildhall, set before the country
a miserable scene of religious oppression and
triumphant bigotry. The most eminent man on
the London School-board* stood earnestly pleading,
in behalf of the helpless children of the nation, that
they should not be taught what is notoriously false,
and infamously obscene, simply because it is written
in the Bible. Shall little children be taught on the
authority of God that things are true which every
thinker knows to be false ? Shall we pick up poor
children from the gutters only to defile their minds
in the moral gutters of all the crimes, the grossnesses,
committed by a semi-barbarous eastern people ? Is
it educating little children to put into their hands
stories of incest, murder, butchery, anecdotes replete
with every detail of prurience and cruelty, and say,
these are the sacred revelations of God ?
The advocate of the children pleaded to a heart
* Professor Huxley.
�8
The Spiritual Serfdom
of stone, for he pleaded to superstition. The mas
sacre of the innocents under king Herod is a fable;
but the massacre of innocent minds and tender hearts
by the agents of king Bigotry is no fable; that goes
on, and will go on until from the hearts and homes
of the people there shall a cry be heard, as of
mothers weeping for their children, who will not be
comforted so long as the very light in them is turned
to darkness.
Since this event in our chief Parliament of Educa
tion, I have concluded that we have said enough,
if not too much, of the unfaithfulness of the clergy.
They cannot indeed be excused. They are the
beneficiaries of the Church, and owe to the people
truth in payment for their livings. They are the
accredited religious guides of the masses; they
have advantages for knowing, and opportunities for
speaking, which others have not. Nay, they occupy
the position of moral trustees; and as we expect
a banker to be honest in money matters, or a states
man to be faithful to public interests, so we have
a right to demand truth from ministers of truth,
and simple rectitude from the preachers of righteous
ness. But for all this we must remember that the
cultivated clergyman has a vast mass of fetish wor
shippers to deal with. If the very educational repre
sentatives of the people insist that the story of the incest
of Lot, and of the feline treachery and cruelty of Jael
shall be made a national school-book, what must be
the impenetrable hardness of the stratum beneath
them 1 We must remember, too, that the clergyman
who by study has discovered the falsehood of the
popular dogmas, has extraordinary temptations to
suppress his light. When a layman changes his
opinion it does not mean to him or his family a loss
of home, and of the means of livelihood; nay, the
layman in his private position has not even the
popular persecution of evil tongues to face. But if
the clergyman becomes heretical, in that moment
�of the Laity.
9
his whole life and prospect are revolutionized; his
home, his study, crumble around him; his earthly
prospects vanish, and he must begin life anew in
some field for which his 'studies have not prepared
him. The trial may not be so severe with men of
eminent genius, but even with them there remains
the severe trial of the dissolution of the ties and
friendships which have been knit by life and religious
sympathy. Hitherto we have seen this trying posi
tion of the clergyman acting not so much to suppress
his light altogether, as in causing it to be reflected
in indirect ways, investing creeds and formulas with
unreal meanings, and so managing to suggest the
truth he dare not openly and plainly espouse.
I take this to be the reason why great religious
renovations have so rarely in history originated with
members of the priestly class. In ev^ry age it is not
from Jerusalem but from the wilderness that the
voice is more likely to come proclaiming the axe laid
at the root of the evil tree. A Chinese grain-inspector,
Kungfutzee by name,—or Confucius as we call him,—
finds that the people need another kind of bread than
is made of grain. And in recalling his fore-runners
he looks beyond generations of priests to a certain
man of the people named E-Yin.- In times of disorder
E-Yin chose his opportunity for service. He said,
“ Heaven hath given life to this people, and sent
them who are first enlightened to enlighten those
who are last, and hath sent those who are first
aroused to arouse those who are last. These doctrines
which have aroused me will I bear to the people to
arouse them.” He thought that if there was a single
man or woman in the empire who was not benefited
by the higher truth, he was “ guilty of pushing them
in a ditch.” Buddha was a prince who made himself
of no reputation that he might save men, and be
came the poorest of wayside wanderers. Mahomet
was a soldier. Then we have the carpenter’s gospel,
with fishermen for its first disciples, and a lawyer for
�io
The Spiritual Serfdom
its chief apostle. When the priesthood had made it
“more lawful in Athens to do men harm than good,”
they had lost the force of any higher evolution from
their own order, and the next step must he made by
a sculptor, named Socrates, and a travelling scholar,
Plato. Mr Mill advised the young students at St.
Andrews to stay in the Church so long as they could
manage to do so, because an institution can be more
powerfully influenced and reformed from within than
from without. But history seems to show that the
inside reformers—like Savonarola, like Wesley, or,
in our own time, Father Hyacinthe and Dean Stanley
—have never been able to give a complete utterance
or do a rounded and permanent work. So much of a
man as is covered by a surplice must be lost to the
task set by the ideal order, which demands the whole
man. So I fanpy we must look to our philosophers
and poets, our men of letters and of science, to found
the new Church, and, for a long time, to build upon
the foundation. A blind conservatism among the
masses, and the habit of conceding to priests the
keeping of their consciences, and doing their religious
thinking for them, inherited from ages of clerical
domination, constitute the disparaging conditions
under which they have to labour.
I do not think that the apathy of the laity towards
the great works of religious liberation, arises from a pre
ponderant belief among them in the superstitions of the
Churches. Mr Kirkman, in his masterly pamphlet on
“The Infidelity of Orthodoxy,” published in this series,
by Thomas Scott of Ramsgate, tells a pregnant story
of a workman who, receiving his babe after the Vicar
had baptised it, kissed it fondly, and exclaimed, “ I
never kissed it before because I knowed it was not
the child of God; but I kiss it now because I know
it is.” The incident reveals the horrible ignorance
which prevails in the lower classes—a heathenism as
pitiable as any in the lands to which the benighted
workman gives his pennies to send missionaries. But
�of the Laity.
11
it is incredible that the middle and upper classes
believe the dogmas of orthodoxy. Every smile on
their faces contradicts the supposition. The cheerful
crowd on the streets, the gay companies at the theatre
and the concert, do not believe that they or their
children or friends are suspended over everlasting
fires, or live under the threat of an angry God.
Their sneers at Spirit-rappings, their incredulity at
ghost-stories, show them no believers in miracles,
and their laws against fortune-tellers and pretended
witches show that they disbelieve the possibility of
such sorceries as are related on many pages of the
Bible. I imagine that the real attitude of the more
intelligent laity towards the Church which they sup
port is expressed by a story which was vouched for
by the gentleman who related it in my hearing. A
distinguished Unitarian from America was a guest in
in the house of a London merchant, and was pleased
to find that they were in complete harmony in their
religious convictions. Nevertheless, when Sunday
came the merchant made ready to accompany his
family to the Church. The Unitarian said, “I am
astonished that after you have ridiculed the doctrines
of the Church you should still go to it.” The mer
chant replied, “ I go to it because it’s the established
thing, and if you’ll get your damned thing established
I’ll go to that.” The busy layman does not regard it
as within his province to think and examine religious
subjects at any time, and the general broil of the
theological world renders the duty of entering it
particularly uninviting just now. In trade he may
indulge in new stocks, but in religion he prefers to
invest in the old consols. Why does he have his
daughter married by a service coarse enough to call a
protest to her heart and a blush to her cheek ? It is
the established thing. Is it consoling, as he stands
beside the grave of his child to be told by the chap
lain that his darling has been consumed by God’s
anger, or does his heart respond to the thanksgiving
�12
The Spiritual Serfdom
there (so consistently!) offered up that it has been
taken out of this sinful world ? No ; but it is the
established thing.
I may be asked, why all this indignation against a
creed which is not believed ? I answer, that among
a large class of the ignorant it is believed, and on
these the cruel creed sits, a ghoul feeding on the
heart of childhood, despoiling the poor of the cheerful
faith in a divine Father that might light up a lot
which drudgery and superstition too often combine
to make hopelessly dark : (2), That where the creeds
are not believed, but are supported, there is a loss of
sincerity more injurious to character, than to the
mind were the gloom of ignorant credulity: (3),
Whether believed or disbelieved, the establishment
of superstition and falsehood in institutions enables
error to occupy the place where true religion might
be. To those who believe that religion is essentially
a phantom, the sight of false dogmas organised in
powerful churches and priesthoods is far less appalling
than to those whose eyes behold the spirit of Truth
waiting without, waiting ever from age to age, her
voice drowned by the screaming of fanaticism and
the droning of formalism, her drooping wings, appeal
ing eyes, and proffered gifts, all unrecognised. To
eyes that see this vision hovering over every cathedral,
church, or chapel, that has been raised to defend the
phantasms of barbarous ages, such church or chapel,
however ornate its architecture, darkens to a dungeon
unclean and hateful, and to such, the worshippers
walking the aisles, audibly clank their chains.
That woe which of old was pronounced against
those who frame iniquity in law, must be revived in
this generation against those who establish irreligion
on the throne of religion, and make apparent in
fidelity the only real fidelity. It is utterly impos
sible that the true temple can be erected so long
as the whole ground where it must stand is occupied
by the temple of Error.
It is that national
�of the Laity.
*3
establishment of dogmas which every thinker has
abjured inwardly, if not openly,—and of which
all other dogmatic oppressions are copies,—which
must fall. It is that which now plainly blocks the
path. It is that which while we plough and sow and
reap by aid of the advanced knowledge of our own
age, holds us in the field of religious culture toiling
along with the barbaric implements of ancient Syria.
It is that which takes the man wTho for six days has
been travelling by steam, and flashing his thought
ten thousand miles in a moment by the grand device
of science, and consigns him on the seventh to the
religious methods of savage ages. The Englishman
must here mount his donkey of dogma, or his
humped camel of tradition, and journey across the
thirsty deserts of mythology, while all around him
living fountains are playing, and the sunlight waits
to weave around him a religious civilisation corre
sponding to the grandeur of his material progress.
The popular creed contains no.idea won, no discovery
achieved, this thousand years. The Home Secretary,
Mr Bruce, says five thousand. For the defenders of
the Established Church have such faith in the reli
gious petrifaction of the country, that they are ready
to adopt theological unprogressiveness as the next
article of the new Downing Street Creed. Mr Miall,
in the course of the recent debate on Disestablishment,
having drawn a contrast between the scientific and
the religious progress of the country to the disparage
ment of the latter, is promptly put down by Mr Bruce
with the oracular statement—“ The end of science
will never be reached; but theology is in its very
nature and essence stationary.” Whatever confusion
may beset the Home Secretary’s intellect when he is
regulating cabs, he seems to have an easy omniscience
when attending to things divine and eternal. “The
relations of man to God remain now as they were
5000 years ago.” Therefore, argues Mr Bruce, our
knowledge of those relations is at an end. “ Hear,
�14
The Spiritual Serfdom of the Laity.
hear,” followed these profound statements; and when
afterwards Sir Roundell Palmer said, “You cannot
make new discoveries in religion,” there were actually
cheers! These gentlemen do not represent Colney
Hatch, and we must assume that in repudiating the
idea of any possible increase of religious enlighten
ment they speak the mind of the average defenders
of their Church. The Church then boasts of being
stationary, and we must sorrowfully accord its claim.
Its thoughts do not widen with the process of the
suns. Religious progress if it occur must be out of
and away from it. Its dogmas of the terrible God,
and the almost equally terrible Devil, of the blood
redemption, and hell, and miracles, did not require
such confessions to make of the proudest cathedral to
the eye of Reason a pre-historic hut, or cavern,
wherein fashionably-dressed men and women are
spiritually clad in the skins of wild beasts. The
magnificent inventions and discoveries of to-day find
our religion untold generations behind them: and there
it will remain, for the masses of the people, until
they themselves shall be seized with a deep dis
content at the anomaly, and from their vigorous
training in the work of the world, bring the sinews
of heart and brain which shall reassure the timid
pulpit and the time-serving press. “ The clock of the
universe has always somewhere an alarm bell,” said
Heber. It sounded for one part of Europe when the
Pope declared his infallibility, and it ere long tolled
the demise of his power. Heavy are our ears if we
cannot hear its ominous strokes in the re-establish
ment of irrational creeds, the imposition of super
stitious tests on the student, and the claim that
religion is the one thing unimprovable, put forth by
the Church of England; and it must surely sound the
knell of the Church or that of the spiritual liberty of
the people.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH*
�The following Pamphlets and Papers may be had on addressing
a letter enclosing the price in postage stamps to Mr THOMAS
SCOTT, Mount Pleasant, Ramsgate.
A Lay Sermon, for the Benefit of Clergy. Price 6d.
Eternal Punishment. An Examination of the Doctrines held by the Clergy of the Church of
England. By “ Presbyter Anglicanus.” Price fid.
Letter and Spirit. By a Clergyman of the Church of England. Price 6d.
Science and Theology. By Richard Davies Hanson, Esq., Chief Justice of South Australia.
Price 4d.
A Few Words on the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the Divinity and Incarnation of Jesus.
Price 6d.
Questions to which the Orthodox are earnestly requested to give Answers
Thoughts on Religion and the Bible. By a Layman and M. A. of Trin. Coll., Dublin. Price 6d.
The Opinions of Professor David F Strauss. Price 6d.
A Few Self-Contradictions of the Bible. Price Is., free by post.
English Life of Jesus, or Historical and Critical Analysis of the Gospels; complete in Six
Parts, containing about 500 pages. Price 7s. 6d., free by post.
Against Hero-Making in Religion. By Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
Ritualism in the Church of England. By “Presbyter Anglicanuf.” Price 6d.
The Religious Weakness of Protestantism. By Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 7d., post free.
The Difficulties and Discouragements which attend the Study of the Scriptures.
By
the Right Rev. Francis Hare, D.D., formerly Lord Bishop of Chichester. Price 6d.
The Chronological Weakness of Prophetic Interpretation. By a Beneficed Clergy
man of the Church of England. Price Is. Id., post free.
On the Defective Morality of the New Testament. By Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
The “ Church and its Reform.” A Reprint. Price Is.
“The Church of England Catechism Examined." By Jeremy Bentham, Esq. A Reprint.
Price Is.
Original Sin. Price 6d.
Redemption, Imputation, Substitution, Forgiveness of Sins, and Grace. Price 6d.
Basis of a New Reformation. Price 9d.
Miracles and Prophecies. Price 6d.
Babylon. By the Rev. P. S. Dbsprez, B.D. Price 6d.
Thoughts on a Free and Comprehensive Christianity. By Prof. P. W. Newman. Price fid.
The Church : the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Price 6d.
Modern Orthodoxy and Modern Liberalism. Price fid.
Errors, Discrepancies, and Contradictions of the Gospel Records, with special reference
to the irreconcilable Contradictions between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel. Price Is.
The Gospel of the Kingdom. By a Beneficed Clergyman of the Church of England.
Price 6d.
“The Meaning of the Age.” By the Author of “ The Pilgrim and the Shrine ” Price 6d.
“Jambs and Paul.” A Tract by Emer. Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
Law and the Creeds. Price fid.
Genesis Critically Analysed, and continuously arranged; with Introductory Remarks. By
Ed. Vansittart Neale, M.A. and M.R.I. Price Is.
A Confutation of the Diabolarchy. By Rev. John Oxleb. Price fid.
The Bigot and the Sceptic. By Emer. Professor F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
Church Cursing and Atheism. By the Rev. Thomas P. Kirkman, M.A., F.R.S., &c., Rector
of Croft, Warrington. Price Is.
Practical Remarks on “The Lord’s Prayer.” By a Layman. With Annotations by a
Dignitary of the Church of England. Price 6d.
The Analogy of Nature and Religion—Good and Evil. By a Clergyman of the
Church of England. Price 6d.
Commentators and Hierophants; or, The Honesty of Christian Commentators. In Two
Parts. Price fid. each Part.
Free Discussion of Religious Topics. By Samuel Hinds, D.D., late Lord Bishop of
Norwich Part I., price Is. Part II., price Is. 6d.
The Evangelist and the Divine. By a Beneficed Clergyman of the Church of Eng
land. Price Is.
The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Creeds,—Their Sense and their Non-sbnse. By a
Country Parson. Parts I., II., III. Price fid each part
A Reply to the Question, “What have we got to Rely on, if we cannot Rely on the
Bible?” By Professor F. W. Newman.
�List of Publications—Continued.
Another Reply to the Question, “What have we got to Rely on, if we cannot Rely on
the Bible? ” By Samuel Hinds, D.D., late Lord Bishop of Norwich. Price 6d.
The Utilization of the Church Establishment. By the Author of “The Pilgrim and the
Shrine,” “The Meaning of the Age,” &c. &c. Price 6d.
Modern Protestantism. By the Author of “The Philosophy of Necessity.’ Price 6d.
A Reply to the Question, “Apart from Supernatural Revelation. What is the Pros
pect of Man’s Living after Death? By Samuel Hinds, D.D., late Lord Bishop of
Norwich. Price 6d.
Tree and Serpent Worship. Price 6d.
A Review of a Pamphlet, entitled, “ The Present Dangers of the Church of England.”
By W. G. Clark, M.A., Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Price 6d.
The Twelve Apostles. Price 6d.
The Bibi.e for Man, not Man for the Bible. By a Conntry Vicar. Price 6d.
Is Death the end of all things for Man? By a Parent and a Teacher. Price 6d.
On the Infidelity of Orthodoxy. By the Rev. Thomas Kirkman, M.A., F.R.S. In Two
Parts. Price 6d. each Part.
“The Finding of the Book.” By John Robertson, Coupar-Angus. Price 2s.
On Moral Evil Price 6d.
The Claims of Christianity to the Character of a Divine Revelation, considered.
By W. Jevons. Price 6d.
The Unity of the Faith aiIong all Nations. By a Padre of the Established Church.
Price 6d.
Clergymen made Scarce. A Letter to the Bishop of London, by a Presbyter. Price 6d
On the Efficacy of Opinion in Matters of Religion. By the Rev. W. R. Worthing
ton, M.A. Price Sixpence.
Sacrf.d History as a Branch of Elementary Education. Part I. Its Influence on the
Intellect. Price Sixpence. Part II. Its Influence on the Development of the
Conscience. Price Sixpence.
On Religion. By a Former Elder in a Scotch Church. Price Sixpence.
The Nature and Origin of Evil. A Letter to a Friend, by Samuel Hinds, D,D., late
Lord Bishop of Norwich. Price Sixpence.
A. I. Conversations. Recorded by a Woman, for Women. Parts I. and II. Price 6d. each part.
The Passion for Intellectual Freedom By Edward Maitland. Price Sixpence.
Reason versus Authority. By W. 0. Carr Brook. Price 3d.
An appeal to the Preachers of all the Creeds. By Gamaliel Brown. Price 3d.
The Voysey Case. By Moncure D. Conway. Price 6d.
“Realities.” By P. A. Taylor, M.P.
The Beliefs of Unbelievers. By Rev. 0. B. Frothingham. Price 3d.
On the Causes of Atheism. By F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
The Bible; Is it “The Word of God? ” By T. L. Strange, late Judge of the High Court
of Madras. Price 6d.
A Woman’s Letter. Price 3d.
An Episode in the History of Religious Liberty. By Rev. Charles Voysey. Price 6d.
Thirty-nine Questio- s on the Thirty-nine Articles. By Rev. J. Page Hopps. Price 3d.
Intellectual Liberty. By John Robertson. Price 6d.
The Spiritual Serfdom of the Laity. By Moncure D. Conway. Price 6d.
Theology of the Past and the Future. By M. Kalisch, Ph.D. Reprinted from Part I. of
his Commentary on Leviticus. Price Is.
The Divergence of Calvinism from Pauline Doctrines. By Professor F. W. Newman.
Price 3d.
The Doctrine of Immortality in its Bearing on Education. By Presbyter Anglicanus.
Price 6d.
Friends to the cause of “ Free Inquiry and Free Expression” are earnestly requested to give
aid in the wide dissemination of these pamphlets.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The spiritual serfdom of the laity
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 14, [2] p. : ill. (port.) ; 18 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 4. Publisher's list on unnumbered pages at the end. Date of publication from KVK. The portrait is a photo that has been cut out and pasted to the title page. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1871]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G4862
Subject
The topic of the resource
Church of England
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The spiritual serfdom of the laity), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Church of England
Laity
Morris Tracts
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/69c585a8d0567a14830ea2e1cbe5a175.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=GfbAs6w9kROgNtmhoHG5dSlgWNSNGMhsNdXZ0cesdaWc%7Eo5l43ikMfqQsEf3iQii9vdcGByJoru9g%7EQ7Dn5hmv9SQJk22jKj0gsrmyrBj4P8402OKIwfMp7JLxwTxj-vyLmvRBHWpvR4AJWhWg-2PaGnSN2RC%7EVoCae3LgPUjL6Lp4N%7EwNp0e9RrSnZ0Fc0m48mTjTLtxO6lYbLND0JzSnVvHkHt3ND22MMAhKJTVDvBcup%7ExKMHvP-BdtsfxS%7EoW6zDU3w4U%7E4Jwc9mbnWJYv3UD6t8SjlEKUAT8FeQWqIyb4yE336b7JO5PsZ2UWVm17rz5cgs7ogy87mGY0tnmw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
efa07514c2a5b6205b97aac72633080d
PDF Text
Text
INTELLECTUAL
SUICIDE.
A
DISCOURSE
BY
MONCURE
Dm
CONWAY.
PRICE TWOPENCE.
�Smdlj ^laa $Ija^L
WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN
THE LIBRARY.
BY MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
The Sacred Anthology:
A book of
PRICESs.
d.
10
0
The Earthward Pilgrimage
5
0
Republican Superstitions.........................
2
6
David Frederick Strauss.........................
0
3
John Stuart Mill....................................
0
2
Sterling and Maurice.........................
0
2
Mazzini................................................
0
1
Revivalism................................................
0
1
.....................................
0
3
0
3
Religious Enthusiasm............................... 0
3
Ethnical Scriptures.........................
Thomas Paine
BY FRANCIS W. NEWMAN.
The Service at South Place Chapel,
Sunday, May 20th, 1860 ...
..
BY HENRY N. BARNETT.
�INTELLECTUAL SUICIDE.
Finsbury, June, 27^, 1875.
t
A great Italian actor has for some time been
bringing before our community a vivid representation of as sad a tragedy as ever haunted even the
imagination of Shakespeare.
The drama of
Othello may remind us of the demon of ancient
fable, which at first is a tiny worm, but gradually
swells to an enormous serpent, binding a giant in
its coils. It is the picture of a noble man,—brave,
generous, loving, simple. We see the first entrance
of a faint suspicion into his mind, through the de
vice of one who has found his vulnerable point; we
observe its growth to jealousy; we see it worming
its way upward, coiling around reason, eating into
the heart of love, till at last the hero is laid low, with
life, love, hope, fallen into ruin with him.
That is the tragedy of a very familiar plane of
our nature—-a border-region in us, where animal
�4
and moral instinctshave their interplay, manifested
in palpable results. But there are tragedies that
belong altogether to the invisible realm within
us, whose desolations make no such impression
on the senses. There is a man greater than the
bravest warrior. It was of that nobler being that
Shakespeare thought when he exclaimed, “What
a piece of work is man I how noble in reason ! how
infinite in faculties ! in form and moving how ex
press and admirable ! in action, how like an angel!
The pure
in apprehension, how like a god!
reason of man is that high and costly product which
all the ages were appointed to bear ; ’tis that con
summate flower of the world which reduces all
other things to mere leaves on its stem,—passions,
affections, actions, worthy as they are tributary to
its perfection. Who, then, can measure the tragedy
when some small intellectual cowardice, some little
compliance with falsehood, some apparently slight
error admitted through a crevice in the judgment,
swelling as it climbs, coils round the will, mounts
to the throne of reason, and degrades to a bond
slave of superstition, sect or party, the eye and
front that gave assurance of a man !
Throughout the earth the gospel preached by
nature to man is that of growth. This is the glori
ous marvel that is ever with us. Seed-grain climbing
�5
to waving harvest, acorn springing up to towering
oak; black coal crystallising to diamond, and
flint gathering the heat of the earth till as opal it
meets the dawn with tints pure as its own. On
every lowliest grass blade and leaf is written the
story of Ascension. And how great does that theme
become when it is seen in the growth of weak in
fancy to heroic manhood ! Behold the helpless babe
become ‘ a palace of sweet sounds and sights,’ or
culminating in the brain of Plato, of Shakespeare,
foreheads mated with the dome of Heaven. Or see
small barbarous colonies of rude men forming reli
gions, laws, arts—creating civilisations. All this
natural history and human history is the preface
to each individual existence, assigns its present
task, and surrounds it with the means and methods
of accomplishment. We have arrived at a period
when the secret which nature has been so long
striving to communicate to her human child has at
last been caught. It is, that what is mere renewal
in the earth must in man be improvement; that
which in lower nature is mere routine seed, and
blossom and fruit, and back to seed again—must
rise by reason to be progress that never returns on
its track. It must be seed and blossom, and fruit,
and then a permanently better fruit. Art appears—
the pictorial alphabet of natural forms and forces
�6
combined by reason and taste to convey ideas. Art
appears ; and briars climb to roses, wild gourds
to melons, bitter almonds to peaches—things which
nature never produced, only through ages suggested
until at last intelligence took the hint. But now
again—how slowly do we learn the secret which all
this outward culture is trying to tell us, the secret
of the mighty forces of inward culture ! The average
man is swiftly borne by a power realising the
fabled carpet, which transportedits possessor through
the air at his will : that power of steam for ages
slept unknown in fire and water ; but does it occur
to the wayfarer that nobler powers may be sleep
ing in his own mind ? Does it occur to the man
and woman admiring the artificial triumphs of the
horticultural show, that if the inner world of mind
and heart were suddenly to become visible and
made into a show it might appear as a jungle of
superstitions, a swamp of rank weeds of prejudice
and passion, with only here and there a stately
growth cultured by science ?
Every human intellect is a splendid possibility.
It has a natural history; it is endowed with poten
tial seeds that have a normal growth through
which they will certainly run. But what does that
natural normal growth amount to ? It is only an
increase of size and strength. You may say just
�7
the same of a gourd. The seed of it will grow, it
will creep along in the mud, it will spread, and
end in a bag of seeds worthless as itself. That
sweet fruit hid in each seed will remain for ever
hid unless art brings it out. That high product,
hid in each mind, will equally remain hid unless
art brings it into existence. You cannot get the
best of any mind without education. And this does
not supersede nor change a single law of the thing
cultivated, be it a flower or a mind; it is indeed
effected by the closest obedience to, and co-opera
tion with, the laws of that thing; it brings all that
is kno wn of those laws generally to bear upon the
individual seed or mind specifically, as the accumu
lated science of a thousand years may enter a room
to save one child’s life.
Now, the discovery that each mind represents
the possibility of a new variety of fruit, at once
raises our definition of intellect. We find that the
mass of minds go on reproducing the fatal averages
of opinion and belief: their creeds and customs are
hereditary; when they speak, you listen to their
great grandfather, as he listened to his, and so on
all the way back to some ancient Pope or Bishop,
historically dead, but really immortal as mental im
penetrability. "We must define intellect as that
which emerges out of this conventional mass, not
�8
indeed unrelated to it, but carrying its slumbering
powers to conscious realisation and effective action
through individual thought and will. Intellect must
become individual that it may be universal: that
is, each real mind must have had its own history,
exercised its actual faculties, and fought its own
obstacles all the way up to conscious unity with
great principles, which work on the unthinking
mass only, as it were, chemically.
And if, with this long genealogy, there is pro
duced at last a mind that really inquires and thinks,
holding for all a promise of real addition to their
higher nature, how bitter is the disappointment
when that new power is turned to ends that debase
and corrupt it! Ordinarily, indeed, this sad result
comes of the merest moral weakness. Intellect is a
marketable commodity, and unhappily it brings
most when put up at auction: still more unfor
tunately, error is able to bid higher than truth. All
around us we hear the outcries of fine intellects
sold to that miserable servitude—not always by
themselves either, but by the cruel kindness of
friends in the days of their immaturity. Were there
ever words more pathetic than those of the Dean
of highest position in England. A great news
paper asked, Why can not he be contented with
Westminster Abbey, without trying to mingle with
�9
dissenters ? Alas, sighs the great clergyman,
how can I be contented with Westminster Abbey
while it cuts me off from fellowship with so many
noble souls in all ages? Fetters are not less gall
ing because golden, nor even because they are his
torical. But wherever such groans are heard there
is life : wherever men are struggling with their
chains, they may be broken: the shadow of intel
lectual death is there where scholars, have suffo
cated doubt, denied their ideals, whom no cockcrow
can now awaken to their treason against Truth.
But besides this familiar form of mental extinction
through moral failure, there have arisen in these
last days certain temptations of a different kind
which threaten arrest of intellectual development.
Some minds seem to grow finely to a certain stage,
and then become weary of growth. Their powers
from growing upward turn downward like branches
of the weeping ash. They seem to give up all
they have won for the sake of rest, or impatience
of everything tentative and provisional. Having too
much character to relapse into worn out creeds,
they try to find it in some hard and fast system of
more modern invention, but equally fatal to evolu
tion of thought. A dogma need not be ancient in
order to be destructive of intellectual freedom. It is
the dogmatic spirit which is injurious; and by that I
�10
mean the holding on to an opinion without submit
ting it to the test of universal reason, without recog
nising facts that may be urged against it, or for its
modification. Every mind must form opinions, but
each opinion so gained is for a healthy mind held
only as a vantage point for farther attainment. Nor
will such a mind maintain its opinions less earnestly
than the dogmatist: for it knows well that so far as
any opinion is true it will still live in each new and
further truth. Each opinion is held as a seed to be
sown that it may be quickened to its more spiritual
body. But dogma means the petrifaction of opinion;
to commit one’s mind to stand by any incidental
form of thought in hostility to the thinking power
itself, is burial, not in fruitful earth, but mummied
imprisonment. I call it intellectual suicide. For
thought is mental motion. A poet has said—
The firefly only shines when on the wing :
So is it with the mind ; when once we rest,
We darken.
To put an end to intellectual movement is to bring
the intellectual life itself to its term; and that is
done whenever a mind yields itself to any theory or
system which claims to have reached final truth and
so bars the door against farther inquiry.
Now, this suicidal tendency has appeared in some
quarters where it might least have been expected.
We even see cropping up a sort of dogmatic atheism.
�11
The term 1 Atheism ’ was originally hurled as an
epithet by superstitious people against certain honest
minds who refused to bow down to deities demon
strably fictitious. Such minds said,“ Very well; if not
to believe in your jealous, wrathful,unjust god or your
anthropomorphic creator, make us atheists, have it
your own way.” But that brave and critical attitude
towards religious fictions did by no means raise the
particular denials into a dogmatic position, such as
atheism, if adopted as a philosophy, assumes. Does
any one know enough about this universe to lay it
down as a hard and fast principle that there is no
god ? He may say that the facts prove the non-exist
ence of such a being as Jehovah, or Allah, or the
Trinity of India, Egypt or Christendom ; but only a
being who has scaled all the heights and fathomed
the depths of this universe, can assume to set limits
to inquiry by affirming the non-existence of deity as
an everlasting principle. It is perfectly true that so
long as every question was answered by the word
“god,” scientific inquiry was impossible; but it is
equally true that to conduct every inquiry on the
assumption that there cannot be any god is to fore
close a legitimate direction of thought. Nor is it
philosophical to build a positive theory on a basis of
mere negation ; it is the poorest outcome of discus
sion to take for my creed that somebody else’s is
�12
false. It is often necessary to show that an existing
creed is not true; but that does not exonerate any
from trying to ascertain what is true; nor can any
healthy mind be content that inquiry shall end either
in the bog of bigotry on the one hand, or on the
other in the empty abyss of negation.
If it be thought a vain apprehension that freethinking is in danger of impawning both freedom
and thought by raising Atheism into a dogma, let
those who think so observe what has come of its par
tial organisation in Comtism or Positivism. Some
of the finest minds gave themselves up to that system,
which invested a series of negations with the import
ance of affirmations, and expressed them through
forms that had grown around discredited creeds. It
was rightly called Catholicism without a god. True,
the Positivist Church instituted the worship of Huma
nity as a divine entity; but such deification of Huma
nity was based upon the negative dogma, by repudia
tion of the sceptical method. Do not misunderstand
me as sharing the orthodox objections to their posi
tion. In every respect they are superior to their con
ventional censors. I have not the least idea that they
are grieving or insulting any being in this universe.
Nor are the Atheists and the Comtists among in
tellectual suicides. I do believe, however, that they
have cut some of their intellectual sinews. They
�13
have seriously diminished their power in the com
munity by assuming- that to be settled which is not
settled, and foreclosing- a true path of inquiry
marked out by the aspiration of all ages.
But there are some other modern systems which
appear to me fatal. There are minds which are
committing themselves to the delusion that the work
of intelligence is ended; the problems all solved;
God, heaven, hell, immortality, matter, spirit, all
at the finger-ends of any one who chooses to read
Swedenborg or visit some pretended seance of
ghosts. It is most painful to witness how many
fine minds have through years built up their edifice
of culture only to lay it in ruins under the insanity
which fell on that Swedish thinker, or still worse,
under the subtle art that now plays upon the weak
nesses of fine natures, and poisons minds with su
perstition through their tender longings for the loved
and lost. If the visions of Swedenborg and the
spirit-mediums who ape him be true, then there is
no use for either inquiry or intellect any more. All
science is an impertinence, and it would be better
that all libraries were burnt to-morrow. The vulgarest spirit-medium knows more than all the sages,
thinkers, philosophers, and scientific men that have
lived or now live—more than all of them put together
have ever attained. The collective intelligence of
�14
Germany, France, England, America is superseded,
and all their knowledge abolished completely—nay,
all the laws of thought abolished—so soon as we
agree that the secrets of an invisible universe are
made known to sheer ignorance without research,
without intellectual effort, and in utter defiance of
all verifiable knowledge.
*
Whether the great problems stated in the very con
stitution of the human mind, and by which that mind
must grow, be dogmatically solved by authority
or dogmatically ignored, or settled by the
solutions of insanity or of ignorance, in either case
it is the end of investigation and growth, the grave
of the intellect. That which a man seeth why doth
he yet seek for ? Man can, indeed, humanly find
truth; but what these familiars of the universe claim
is the truth that is ultimate. The mind of man can
distinguish truth and falsity by no surer test than
the invitation they offer it; error never points the
mind beyond itself, but every truth buds at the
moment it is attained to a larger truth; each truth,
like the fabled rod, blossoms in the hand of its right
master—the aspiring reason of man.
* Since this was written tidings have come that another fine
intellect has fallen into madness through Spiritism,—that of
Robert Dale Owen.
�15
It is melancholy enough when infirmity brings
on the decline of intellectual power, and man feels
the shadow of the night in which he can no longer
work. It is related of the sculptor Canova that
when he had just finished his figure of Christ, a
friend entering found him in tears. “ Alas ! ” said
the sculptor, “ I have for the first time produced a
work with which I am satisfied.” The premonition
of Canova was true; he never produced another
important work; he had recognised the sure sign
of decay when above his completed work no higher
ideal hovered with larger promise. But the fatal
sign is none the less certain where any mind reaches
that kind of certainty on great subjects which sees
no space beyond, no room for doubt, and feels no
desire for a larger view. This, too, may come in
due time, when man’s best is done, and the hands
may be fitly folded on the breast. But it is tragical
when a mind that should be growing rushes rashly
on that fate. I suppose it was shuddering at this
the German wrote :—“ If God held absolute truth in
his right hand and pursuit of truth in his left, and
offered me the choice of either, I would say, ' Truth
is for thee alone; for me, I cannot live but by the
endless pursuit of Truth.’ ”
It is even so. Absolute truth is not for man. I
know we all sometimes long for it. We are envi-
�i6
roned by doubts that sometimes reach very far;
there are veils that hang between the heart and
that destiny of its own love it longs to read. Little
wonder, perhaps, if craving ease for its pain, repose
from its weary search, it should consent to take the
opiate of superstition. But that is no true repose
or ease. The true satisfaction is to school heart
and mind into harmony with their law, and the
perpetual increase of attainment. Amid all the
fluctuations of thought, the floating of things worn
out, the streaming on of the tide of knowledge,
we must make up our minds to find a repose in
activity, like that of the lone albatross above the
seas, which sleeps on the wing. We must find
repose in the inward peace of a soul fitted to its
sphere. And when at last life faints, and nature
fails, the truth you have earnestly pursued through
life will be the one soft and sweet support on which
you may pillow your head for eternity.
WATERLOW AND SONS, PRINTERS, GREAT WINCHESTER STREET, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Intellectual suicide: a discourse
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 16 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Printed by Waterlow and Sons, [London] E.C. Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1. A list of the author's works available from South Place Chapel Library listed on preliminary page. Discourse delivered Finsbury, June 27th 1875.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[South Place Chapel]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1875]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3332
Subject
The topic of the resource
Free thought
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Intellectual suicide: a discourse), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Belief and Doubt
Doctrines
Dogma
Free Thought
Morris Tracts
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/d69bde3551c04ef141ef0415adebe641.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=RlOgfiixPJ4vIoCaOEZLcMFJQg4ZpFsW5Q%7EDL77ZKKhlX0lml6aTl%7EIQtIQ2H3ddMqbHE6RQR0C2tuhsU7GcAbp%7E8%7E36qzDkFmfWE03YsBrG8PZ85eGNH0cC5t-nvAjYpq-wbZ11%7E9Noq80rSs2QIlEt9uGfBeb-bzjDYxeXjEiA4%7Ez1FRPv9JQ5skFXtR%7EXx2ML6p00yLEn6PRpuVAHAm9UBu4O89aIB9%7EpV6U8CfLndVuMLEUwS4wtjrDIitctcEtTfdd8ktOQvbajpj6LwS3rv9DK1hZYMk58YeNJEJYgqbgv%7EspYQ7dNXKm%7EknFYZmZ1MFxnt-4vXpJXmMp1fw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
de68338dfa8c1e783d8667b9a48f94f6
PDF Text
Text
A NEW YEAR’S LETTER
FROM
JONATHAN TO JOHN.
Cassius. You love me not.
Brutus.
I do not like your faults.
Cassius. A friendly eye could never see such faults.
Brutus. A flatterer’s would not, though they do appear
As huge as high Olympus.
Julius Ceesar.
LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
1868.
��A NEW YEAR’S LETTER
♦
FROM
JONATHAN TO JOHN.
Dear John,—-I hope I need make no apology for
addressing you, in these critical times, on matters pro
foundly concerning us both. The wine-makers have a
belief that in the season of the blossoming of vines the
wine in its bottles ferments anew in sympathy, and then
chiefly breaks its bottles. Blood, John, is thicker
and more fiery than wine. Ours long ago flowed
from your heart, and it has never failed to be
stirred when your periods of change and agitation have
arrived. It was not by accident that our fathers
named their bleak home on these shores New England.
When your people were sending King James the
Second adrift to sea, the happy tidings thereof found
our ancestors at Boston doing precisely the same for
that monarch’s sub-king in New England. The stamp
of Cromwell’s foot, when he cried, “Take away that
�4
bauble !” was echoed along our coasts ; and when
Charles came back, and gave Whitehall its ghastly
coronet of skulls, there were few in this land who did
not hear above the ocean’s roar the groan of Bunyan in
his prison, and of Milton in his hiding-place. Then we
took to growing our own wine, and, somehow, it has
been imported by your people, and ever since you have
been visibly affected by our flowering season. Nature
makes very little of our lands and seas. The earthquake
at Lisbon toppled down a hundred chimneys in our
Boston. The revolution of America for independence
shook down a throne and an aristocracy in France, and
it formed a democratic party in England which has
been slowly and steadily revolutionising your society
and government from that day to this. We may as
well face the facts, John: we are one and the same
people; twenty millions of us have English blood in
our veins; our history is English history. We never
more plainly showed ourselves chips of the old block
than when we rebelled against the old block. And, on
the other hand, we cannot fail to perceive that, under
whatever disguises your internal troubles come, each,
when unmasked, is sure to turn out American. Trades’Unionism, Beales-ism, Fenianism—they are all, best and
worst, Americans. Abu Taleb wrote:
“ He who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.”
You feel, and I know, that every step of the English
people away from feudal forms is the later Mayflower
�5
struggling through storms to its New England. The
voices of the Robinsons and Standishes in your Par
liament are unmistakable; their Plymouth Rock is
ahead. And, in the converse, your instinct is equally
clear as to your feudal friends in this country. Old
England was planted here, in the South, alongside
of New England in the North; it battled stoutly
for two hundred and fifty years, until, in its final
struggle — notwithstanding your instinctive sympathy
and aid—it perished. We understood your sympathy
well enough. There are a dozen chapters of our history
through which the story of the Alabama runs. No
one man or generation is to blame for this antagonism.
We are in the hands of fate, which has its own remorse
less methods of providing that the New World shall not
be a mere duplicate of the Old. “ Perhaps,” said our
chief philosopher, on his return from England—“perhaps
the ocean serves as a galvanic battery to distribute acids
at one pole and alkalis at the other. So England tends
to accumulate her Liberals in America, and her Con
servatives at London.” All this involves the repulsion
of positive and negative; but it should mean only the
awakening of certain talents that have slept in our En
glish race, which is a magazine of the powers of many
races. And, in fact, John, whilst in our workshops
and telegraphs we make a good thing out of action and
reaction, positive and negative, I fear that, politically,
the new year finds us both, not the masters, but
the fools of fate. I have heard Mr. Seward and Lord
�6
Lyons speak to each other across a dinner-table in a
humanlike way; but in the Alabama correspondence
there is snarling and the show of teeth. Eighteen
hundred and sixty-eight finds us with a great cable
binding us together for good ends by means of positive
and negative poles; but when I read our Blue-Books, I
have to turn and see if they were not printed a hundred
years ago, when we were getting ready to fight. Are
we never to reach a new year which shall ring out
those sad years of the seventeenth century, when the
farms of our poor settlers were given away to English
noblemen ; when the English Church pursued over the
ocean and tried to crush the religion it had banished;
when the Charters of American Colonies were taken
away; when all that our fathers could wring from the
rock on which they had settled was taxed to carry on
wars and sustain projects which they detested ?
The appearance of your greatest novelist on our
shores at present reminds us that, above our feudal, or
monarchical, or democratic forms of society and govern
ment, there is a great commonwealth of thought which
owns loyal citizens in every civilised land. Fortunately
for us both, we are a reading people; and, fortunately
for all but your authors, we Americans have appro
priate your library to an extent that will, I trust, cause
astonishment and contrition in our coming generation.
We have crammed ourselves and our childreu with Mill,
Spencer, Grote, and Arnold; Thackeray, Dickens, and
George Eliot and Hughes have woven your country
�7
seats and your city dens into romance for us; Tennyson
has for some time filled up the poets’ corners of all our
papers; our babies lisp Carlylese; the other day I found
our soldiers, by their camp-fire on the Mississippi,
gathered around a fellow who was reciting to them, with
appropriate gesture, “ How they brought the good news
from Ghent to Aix,” as related by Robert Browning.
You produced these fine spirits; we welcome and love
them. With this friendly cloud of witnesses around,
let us sit down, this New Year’s Day, and look over our
unsettled accounts. The common heart and brain of
•our respective countries shall be our court of arbitra
tion.
And, first of all, John, let me say that I have, after
much severe experience, discovered that an ounce
balances an ounce. The assertion may seem to you
paradoxical, but I am quite serious in making it.
Lately, I read in one of your weekly journals the
question, “Why is it that with America France may
steal a horse, where England must not look over the
hedge ?” The question is most pregnant, and is answer
able thus: France’s theft comes at the end of two and
a half centuries of benefits; England’s look comes at
the end of two and a half centuries of unfriendliness.
The usurper in Mexico had behind him the help ren
dered by the French in Canada to the pinched and
freezing pilgrims of Plymouth, the free-trade between.
Nouvelle France and Boston, the sword of Lafayette,
the earliest recognition of American independence.
�8
This was the accumulated capital in the American heart
which he had to trade upon. England did not earlier
recognise, nor her rulers more sympathise with, those
who lately tried to destroy the United States; she did
not do anything half so offensive to the American
people as he who tried to establish the throne of a
Hapsburg in Mexico; but what she said and did was
added to a column of historical oppressions, unbalanced
by any entries of generosity. Do not turn red and
deny this, John; it is true. There are, indeed, long
neutral years in which you did us no wrong; you had
no occasion in them to do us any wrong; but neither all
this while has it occurred to you that there is a balance
against you among us. The traditional policy of Eng
land toward America required to be distinctly reversed.
I know how your living generation speaks of these
old days—how it repudiates the persecutions which,
having driven the Pilgrims from England’s side, still
pursued them, which robbed them of manufactures
and stifled them with Navigation Acts, and the hard
days of taxation which ended in the revolution; and
how it protests against having these sins of their
fathers visited upon the Englishmen of to-day. But
you cannot cancel your national debt, John, because it
was contracted by your dead ancestors. I observe that
your present family is comfortable and satisfied. I
looked in on your Pan-Anglicans the other day, and
was impressed by the unctuous way in which your
rotund Bishops, addressing Heaven, said, “ We have
�9
done those things that we ought to have done, and have
left undone those things that we ought to have left
undone, and are in a thoroughly soun.d condition.” I
was not trained in “ the Church,” and may not quote
the words exactly, but am quite sure that I give their
tone and spirit correctly. And I must say that I can
trace the same comfortable assurance in the way your
people have of throwing off their consciences the wrongs
they have inherited, while lifting no finger for their re
moval. A generation adopts every wrong it inherits,
and does not its best to redress. But if this is so,
what shall be said of a generation that steadily follows
instead of reversing the bad precedents of the past ? It
was not you, the contemporaneous John, who stoned
the Puritans, taxed our colonies, imprisoned our
sailors at Dartmoor, and burned our capital; but in
taunting the defenders of our Union, and helping those
who were seeking to establish a vast Slave-empire on the
ruins of our Republic, did you not prove yourself the
legitimate child of those who stoned our ancestors ?
The present cannot escape being interpreted in the
light of the past. Your people of the lower orders
sympathised with us in our dark hour—that is to say,
the unemigrated America in Europe sympathised with
its pioneer wing on this side of the Atlantic. And no
wonder, for our defeat would have moved back the
shadow on their dial many, many years. But their
interest in us is the other side of your instinctive dislike
of us and oppression of them.
�10
The fact is, John, the more we scrutinise your part
in our recent struggle the darker it appears. When
the rebellion broke out, you said you were with us, and
we believed it; we were grappling Slavery under the
watchwords of your own great emancipators—men
whom you bitterly persecuted, it is true, while they
were alive, but whose sons you have made baronets.
At last, we said, the Anglo-Saxon heart is one; pro
gressive America and Conservative England will be
hereafter right and left hands, working harmoniously
for great human ends. A mere accident was the spear
touch that revealed the hypocrisy of your sympathy.
An American officer seized two Confederate envoys on
one of your ships; instantly all England (rather impe
riously) demanded their restoration, and they were
restored; but under cover of the popular unanimity
against that act, your old and real hatred of America
grasped the sceptre again, and, in the face of former
declarations, maintained and wielded it to the end with
an enthusiasm, beside which your early Federal sym
pathy was ice. The newspapers with their ante-Trent
and post-Trent articles are no doubt on file at the
British Museum ; you will find them instructive read
ing. The former are stammering, the latter easy and
eloquent.
Thus, then, after eight generations, for each of which
your government had left some scar upon mine, the
ninth began with a kiss and a stab. You were defeated,
John; the Southern Confederacy was not more severely
defeated in our civil war than you were; and I do
�11
believe that you are sorry you were found on the
losing side. But it is the honest way to let you know
the full extent of the dangers that have been brought
upon us both by the course you then took. If
you could not free yourself from eight generations
of antipathy to a Republic which your persecu
tions established and made strong, neither can we
escape from the accumulated illustrations of the spirit
of feudal society etched in the shadow of every chapter
of our history, and every institution of our country.
Quisque suos patimur manes. You have managed to
make England the dark background of our Forefathers’
Days, our Thanksgiving Days, our Independence Days;
and every child is inevitably trained to associate his
holidays with, and fire his crackers at, English oppres
sion. (Ah, had you given us the right to say : “ Child,
that was the England of the far past: the England of
to-day does not tax Dissenters, nor burthen its colonies
(witness Jamaica), for the advantage of a class; it sees
how both parties won in our Revolution, and rejoices in
American Independence, not simply endures it, much
less welcomes its dangers!”
Consider the ingenuity by which the freest firstclass power of the Old World has become to the
United States the agent of all the annoyance that
despotism can inflict upon liberty! It is only about
seventy-five years since people were suffering in English
prisons for selling works which rehearsed the A B C of
the United States Government, and their author—poor
Tom Paine—fled from a State trial to France and to
�12
America. So into our diary it goes: In England
assertion of the “ Rights of Man” = imprisonment or
exile. Ben Franklin, welcomed in France, is snubbed
in England. Thomas Jefferson is slighted at Court.
These men gave Washington City its traditions, and
the Honourable Messrs. Chandler, Robinson, and others
are at this day, in their speeches against England, quite
unconsciously, avenging slights put by George III.
upon the representatives of a government he had been
forced to treat with, but never forgave.
Lately I was reading with peculiar interest, in
Howell’s State Trials, an account of the proceedings
against Henry Redgrave Yorke, James Montgomery,
and Joseph Gales, for some alleged seditious proceedings
and speeches at Sheffield, toward the close of the last cen
tury. This Mr. Joseph Gales, a man of great ability,
fled with his wife and child (seven years of age) to
Hamburg, and thence to America, and so escaped
the term in York Castle awarded to “ Citizen Yorke,”
to Montgomery “ the Christian poet,” and others. He
(Gales) was nearly penniless when he arrived at Phila
delphia, where the Congress of the United States then
sat. But he was soon editing the leading newspaper of
the city, a paper which afterwards migrated with Con
gress to Washington. There it became the chief journal
in America, and was, as the National Intelligencer, for
over forty years edited by the son who had fled from
England with his parents. The same refugee esta
blished a newspaper in North Carolina. American
�13
journalism was at its beginning more influenced by
these men, father and son, hunted out of Hallamshire,
than by all others. What is that influence, so far as it
affected American feeling toward England, likely to
have been ? When you burned our capitol in 1812,
one other house you thought worth burning, and did
burn—the office of Mr. Gales.
I tell you, John, there remain in our cities old
men who witnessed some of the events that have
left skeletons in your closets; men who have seen the
insides of your prisons ; who saw that recruiting officer
plunge with his horse among men, women, and children
at Castle Hill, Sheffield, cutting them down with his
sword; still more who heard those shrieks at Peterloo
which have never died out of the air. These men may be
poor and vulgar; but they are strong-headed men, who
have tongues touched with some of that flame which shot
out on your walls in the songs of the Corn Law Rhymer.
Thus you have been ever careful to keep our ancient
memories green. Many Mayflower ships, with fleeing
pilgrims aboard, have followed the track of the first;
and we all know that, when your troops were driven
hence, it was still against America they were let
loose, whether in France or England. There were
not wanting those among us who maintained that
a certain class in England was quite ready to treat our
people as rebellious subjects, if they got a chance;
that the spirit was willing, though the arm was weak.
Well, a kind of opportunity came ; and is it wonderful
�14
that the blood of ’76 stirred in our veins when we saw
the Alabama sailing from an English port by acknow
ledged connivance of English officials, with the boast of
its owner in Parliament, and, despite the affected
deprecations of ministers, entertained by your represen
tatives in every English port of the world, and cheered
on her voyage of destruction ?
A pound will only be balanced by a pound, John;
and—think me not transcendental—the rule holds when
it comes to tons.
The Alabama was no common ship. There was a
soul in it, breathed out of two and a half centuries. Its
hull sank to the bottom, but its ghost still sails the
seas, and I fear will haunt them for some time yet.
It is this “ Flying Englishman” that is now the spectre
ship. At this particular moment it has the Fenian flag
nailed to its mast.
We both know, John, that if you had not longed for
the overthrow of this Republic, the Alabama would
never have sailed from Liverpool; and, in our hearts, we
both know that if the Alabama had not sailed Fenianism
would never have been permitted to plot against you
openly in our cities. “ Its proper power to hurt each
creature feels.” You showed a marvellous alacrity in
discovering our vulnerable point, and we would not be
your genuine scion if we had not discovered yours. It
is surprising how much of this kind of thing can be
done within the precincts of municipal law—how much
war can be waged with the weapons of peace!
It so happens that there is but one nation on earth
�15
that can suppress Fenianism; and that nation is not
yours, John!
Do not throw down my letter at this point; I have
good reason to know your feelings on this matter, and
hasten to declare at once that I am no Fenian. If there
is anything that runs dead against the average native
American’s faith about his own country, it is the whole
Fenian theory. What America means to say to the
whole world is—“Your free Germany, your liberated
Ireland, your Tae-ping China, are here; all your
utopias are provided for here !” The mere fact that
the Fenians are making a tremendous ado about a
bit of Old World land, not by a tenth so big or fruitful
as the lands we are offering them for nothing out
West, is enough to settle the matter with our lower
classes. But we all have an inborn contempt for people
who foster interests and enthusiasms of clan or race,
separate from the aggregate of us, or who think it
nobler to be Irish than to be American, that is, of the
fraternity of races. The other day a wealthy citizen of
New York, being applied to for a subscription to help
some Fenian expedition to Ireland, took down his
check-book and said to the deputation, “ I will give you
one thousand dollars, provided no Fenian that goes shall
ever come back again !” I assure you he spoke our
average sentiment. With all our combing and washing
we have never been able to make a decent American of
the Irishman. On our most important questions he
seems to be utterly without principle, and votes with
.this or that party, according to its declarations about
�16
the internal politics of Great Britain! Fancy our Ger
mans testing us with Bismark or the mysterious hyphen
between Sleswick and Holstein! The worst of it is
that the Irish are so numerous that they are able to
bribe parties and demoralise our national politics.
There is something in all this, no doubt, more un
pleasant to you than if I should say we sympathised
with Fenianism and its objects; you detect that the
part we have in this ugly business — the part of a
masterly limitation of ourselves to the letter of our
restrictive laws—is one of simple unfriendliness to your
Government. It is even so. Were there a conspiracy
here to crush Garibaldi, we should certainly prevent it.
There is no feeling in America which can be depended
upon to sustain any officer who should go one hair’sbreadth beyond the law-line, or who should be very
officious even there, for the sake of England.
That is a sentence I have written with heaviness of
spirit, John I I pause upon it. And let it stand. Be
tween us be truth! We like your people personally:
we admire and try to imitate your beautiful homes: we
worship your poets, scholars, thinkers. But your Govern
ment seems to us a great apotheosis of Jesuitism, a hard
systematised selfishness, and we hate it. The utter abo
lition of the English Constitution from the face of the
earth would not evoke a sigh from a hundred of our
people; whilst tens of thousands would weep at the
death of certain of your poets and thinkers. No one of
us believes that anything but powerfully organised
�17
selfishness would give greater privilege and power
to a titled idiot than to an untitled Carlyle. None
among us imagine that it is anything but that ineradi
cable virus of Jesuitism, with which Europe has been
fatally inoculated, that taxes a man for a religion he
abjures, or admits a chimpanzee to the highest scho
lastic advantages, can he chatter the Thirty-Nine Ar
ticles, whilst excluding Martineaus and Mills. We
inherit your great history, and are proud of it; but
all of its bright epochs are to us those in which your
Government was defeated by some small untiring
band of reformers. With what groans you abolished
slavery! How you consoled the master with money,
without thought of the helpless negro! And when
opportunity offers, how eagerly do you take to the old
sport of negro-hunting you were forced to give up! No,
John, we never think of your Government as doing
a noble or humane thing except under the compulsion
of fear. We see you just now preparing to do some
thing for Ireland, and we understand it. It is the
old story. “ Because this widow troubleth me.”
Nevertheless, little as we love your Government,
it might, but for our late quarrel, have depended
upon a determined defence of its rights of national
amity in this country. Were France, or Switzer
land, or Italy, or Prussia, the object of a conspiracy
in the United States, our laws would harden into ada
mant before the conspirators. The whole theory of
foreign politics with America is summed up in “ Nonc
�18
intervention” and the 11 Monroe Doctrine,” which are
obverse and reverse of the same determination to avoid
all complications with the Old World, and to prevent the
repetition of its regime and its balance-of-power struggles
in the New World. So we have always been bin died
against any attempt to organise here movements against
foreign countries, even when advocated by the elo
quence of Kossuth, and at this very moment Mazzini
and Garibaldi are appealing to our strongest sympathies
in vain, so far as any material aid beyond private con
tributions of money is concerned. I do not contend
that this vehement antipathy to all intervention in
foreign affairs is right; but it exists, and Fenianism is
the only case in which it has not animated the law.
Fenianism passed eastward through rents in our fence
made by the prow of the Alabama when sailing west
ward. (How would those laws of yours have bristled
along the Mersey had the Alabama been starting out to
destroy Belgian or Danish commerce !)
While I am no Fenian, John, and while there is no
comeliness in Paddy that I should desire him, I do not
wish to vindicate myself from a suspicion of pity for
him. I feel a dull pain as I see him carted out West
to be manure for my seeds of civilisation, or as often as
I drive my coach over roads paved with his brains. (I
understand that you are drawing a metaphysical dis
tinction between Paddy and the Fenian; but you will
get nothing by that—there is a potential Fenian in
every Irish man and Irish woman.) I have before me
�19
at this moment the last cartoon of the Fenian in
Punch: it represents a huge monster of an Irishman
astride a barrel of gunpowder, to which he has applied
a fusee, whilst prattling children play around him, and
a mother nurses her babe behind him. I recognise the
portrait; it is the same ugly foreheadless fellow who
has repeatedly burnt the homes of poor negroes in
our large cities, slaying some and driving others into
the streets. He once dragged my foremost reformer
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his
neck, and hurled a huge stone at the head of my finest
orator, which would have killed had it struck him.
His shillelagh has here succeeded the tomahawk. Yes,
I recognise this Fenian on his, barrel; but when the
cartoon arrived in America there was just behind him
the figure of a man with round, full paunch and heavy
watch-seals, erecting a gallows, and of this latter the
Fenian was plainly the shadow! Who was it, John,
that, through long ages, pressed down that forehead
and weighted that brutal jaw? Who was it that shotted
those eyes with blood, and sank those gaunt, hungry
cheeks? You see no alternative but hanging your
Manchester and Clerkenwell prisoners; yet is it not sad
that you have assiduously reared children with one
hand for whom you must now rear a gallows with the
other ? I will not dwell on the ancient cruelty of British
rule in Ireland, or the law that men treated like savages
have a tendency to become such in reality; I am more
likely to be understood when I remind you that your
C2
�20
course has not been business-like. Your country is
now swarming with special constables; you have had
to refit your old castles and replenish your armaments,
as if suddenly relapsed into feudal ages; any Yankee
would have been ’cute enough to show you how the
money these things cost you might have been better
invested. With it and your church endowments in
Ireland you might even have transplanted Ireland,
might have given to every poor family a free transit
across the ocean, a snug farm on their arrival upon
your unutilised lands in Canada, planting in each
a kindly feeling toward England, in place of hate.
The swallows, it is said, shove their young out of the
nest to die when there are no flies with which to
feed them ; but men and women are of more value,
John, than many swallows; and the swallow-plan is
hardly a good model for English statesmanship. Your
nest is small—especially considering the room demanded
by your aristocracy—and there are more swallows than
flies; but your fledglings are of a kind that will not
die quietly, and, unprovided with another nest, propose,
at Cork, Sheffield, and elsewhere, to fight you for yours.
They will not get it for a century or so yet, I think;
but it will be many a long year before you and Mrs.
Bull will be able to rest quietly in your well-lined nest
with these exasperated, hungry home-exiles fluttering
and screaming around you. For I do not think so
hardly of you as to suppose that you can find any
deep repose under these circumstances. I have not
failed to observe the crumbs you have occasionally
�21
thrown out for the starvelings. But it evidently never
occurs to them that your gifts have higher motives than
your own desire for quiet and comfort; and the cla
morous demands have increased with their successes.
And, alas!—I cannot help reverting with pain to
what might have been—the only hand that could
have supplemented yours and satisfied them you have
estranged!
Nevertheless, to that estranged hand some millions of
them have appealed; and—despite your taxation in one
age and Alabama depredations in another—that hand
has been full enough to feed them, occasionally, on both
sides of the ocean. Having fed, it might have soothed
them, had you not paralysed it. As it is, all the
strength they have gained here has been converted into
animosity toward you ; and this, by slow accumulation,
has gathered to the dark and angry cloud which your
New Year’s sun of 1868 tries vainly to surmount.
You can hardly be in earnest in hoping that such
stupid blunders as that Clerkenwell explosion can have
any material effect in putting an end to Fenian ism.
It will no more perish from such stigmas , than the
British Government from the firing of Sepoys from
mortars, the burning of Kagosima, the butchery of
negroes in Jamaica. Nay, the immediate danger to
your and my relations in the future arises from that
crime which for the time is a blunder For you are now
plainly seized with fear, and fear is cruel. Your reta
liation promises to be not only severe, but blind; and
such retaliation will be followed by retaliation; for the
�22
men you fight with will, if you try to hide your own
cruelties under it, see at Clerkenwell only a more swift
and concentrated specimen of disasters chronic in their
own country: for every dying child or woman at
Clerkenwell they will recall one, or perhaps more, at
home. But when their retaliation becomes as furious as
it is likely to be—striking high—you may recur under
some form or other to your old weapon, martial law.
Now, it is just here, John, that it becomes my duty
to warn you that there is danger ahead. It is hardly
possible that you can take that weapon down without
using it upon Americans; and it is utterly impossible
that it can, however disguised, be used upon Americans
without firing the train which, in the way I have
shown, has been ingeniously laid between your Capitol
and mine.
The indignant appeals of Irish-American criminals
to the United States for protection as American citizens,
recently uttered in your court-rooms, reached our shores
at a peculiar political juncture. The old Democratic
party, long excluded from power, had just seen the
tide turn in its favour at local elections, and was
gathering its forces for the great national campaigns
of 1868. But it was in want of a new “ platform,”
and a taking party cry. For many reasons its former
watchword—“ States’ Rights”—is not yet a safe one;
on the question of Protection parties are divided and
confused; but what better could there be than the
cry coming from English prisons—“ Protection to
�23
American citizens”? It was at once caught up, and
the Democrats called a great meeting in New York to
proclaim it through the land. But the Republicans
were too shrewd not to see that a monopoly of such
a telling cry must not be permitted to its opponents;
and so when the great meeting was held the leaders
of both parties were present—Horace Greeley sat
beside Fernando Wood—and then ensued a grand com
petition in enthusiasm for the new watchword. Similar
meetings, marked by the same unanimity and enthu
siasm of all parties, followed in the largest cities of
the Union. When Congress assembled, it at once re
solved itself into a similar meeting, and no sooner had
the theme been started by the Democratic Mr. Robin
son, of New York, than he was distanced by the fulminations of the Republican Mr. Judd, from the West.
In short, at this moment it seems probable that we
are about to enter on a presidential campaign, wherein
the contest shall be which party shall get hoarsest with
shouting: A Truce for Domestic Strifes, and Pro
tection to Americans everywhere, or fight !
Now it were a serious error, John, to regard this as
one of the many bubbles that appear and disappear on
the surface of American politics. It is because of a
wide and deep popular feeling on this subject that
these politicians and parties are competing for the
representation of it. It is not a new subject between
us; and, since our struggle of 1812, our position on it
has been becoming what it is now—compulsory. When
�24
0
the Fenian prisoners called to us for protection, there
were two reasons why we could not take up their cause;
first, because formally they were criminals; second,
because our code of citizenship is the same with yours.
As a “ nation,” originally meant those born (nati) in a
country, we in America, inheriting the ideas and laws
of citizenship corresponding to that principle, were
satisfied with maintaining so much. But the great
tide of emigration, which has within this half-century
trebled the population and the power of the United
States, has deposited here a new kind of nationality
altogether. When the laws and principles of alienation
are to be decided by a nation of the alienated, the
result may be anticipated. One-third of the American
people are patriotic expatriates. The other thirds are
the descendents of those who were. The doctrine of
once a citizen always a citizen is one that is for us
excluded by a more unalterable constitution than any
that can be contained in precedents or written on paper.
There are sufficient reasons why only now we have
discovered that the right of a man to be protected in
the transfer of his allegiance is to us a vital one. The
first thought of the immigrant was to accumulate some
money, and get the habit and feeling of an independent
man; but having now accomplished that, it seems that
his next thought is to try and visit his old home and
early friends, and to enjoy some of the pleasures which
he remembers keenly, because they were longed for,
but never reached. The German yearns to visit his
�25
Fatherland, and the Irishman dreams of walking, in
proud independence, the streets that once knew him
only as a pauper. That these on their several wan
derings should be liable to interference, to conscrip
tion, and the like, the United States, of course, cannot
permit. A century ago you, John, were struggling
with Spain for the free right and security of an Eng
lish ship in any and all waters, even those solemnly
donated by the Pope to other powers. You did not
recognise any confirmation by the Universe of such
donations. The inducements of the naturalised, and the
disposition of the native, American to roam through
other lands, make each to his country somewhat the
same as her ship was to England in those days. But
I need hardly quote the past; a nation which has an
army defending the immunity of Englishmen from
wrong amid the perils of Abyssinian deserts, will not
require much apology for the hereditary sensitiveness of
Americans on a similar point; nor is there need that
either of us shall be blinded to the true nature of the
flame newly kindled in this country by the partisan
smoke mingled with it.
When we first began to look into this matter, two or
three years ago, we saw at once that there were but two
foreign nations with whom it could bring us into any
serious collision—England and Germany. No other
countries had a sufficient number of their former sub
jects naturalised in America, to induce them to take
any determined stand on the letter of the common law
�26
of nations in this matter. About two years ago some
American-Germans were claimed whilst visiting Prussia
for the ordinary military service, due from the subjects
of that power; but they were released after a careful
consultation between our governments, and the ques
tion has been probably postponed between us. Count
Bismark saw that our position was a necessary one,
and that all Prussia could gain by pressing us to defend
it was thirty millions of enemies, for which a half dozen
impressed and reluctant soldiers would be but a poor
compensation.
The question, then, for the moment, practically re
mains open only between England and America. We
have always demanded of every citizen naturalised in
this country a solemn abjuration of his allegiance to all
other countries; and that we shall now proclaim our in
tention of protecting such in all countries from any
claims arising out of former allegiance is absolutely cer
tain. In ordinary times, and as affecting ordinary
questions, I should have no apprehension of any im
portant disagreement between us about a modification
which America is forced to demand in laws made before
its discovery. Your own Canning showed us the neces
sity of our “Monroe doctrine,” and our new movement
does but contemplate an environment of every indi
vidual American with a Monroe doctrine. Your com
mon sense will suggest that laws good for the times that
produced them may be as useless as ruined castles for
other times. In ancient times the right of alienation
�27
would have been paramount to the right of desertion.
But now, whilst emigration is as useful to your over
crowded islands as immigration to our untilled lands,
you must see that the feudal law can never bring you a
shilling, a subject, or a soldier whom you would not be
safer and stronger without. What a farce were it, for
example, to hold as British subjects, for any national
purpose or trust whatever, your Fenian visitors, whom
you would rejoice to know were all in Walrussia! And
behind these particular aspects of the question lies the
general fact, that the principle of inalienable citizenship
is referable to a period of European history when no such
ideas of personal independence as now prevail existed;
when also steam and exploration had not yet distri
buted through the world those great centres of com
merce and civilisation, whose amity is secured by
their equality, and which really form a commonwealth
transcending national divisions.
All this, I say, might ordinarily, notwithstanding cer
tain difficulties of detail, be trusted to reach a natural
adjustment before the tribunal of our common reason.
But it may happen, I fear, John, that the very occa
sion for our strenuous determination to affirm the new
principle at this moment will constitute the obstacle to
your complete concession of it. For that principle would
not suffer us to stand aloof and see American citizens
punished under any kind of martial law. If they were
punished, it would have to be under laws and formulas
common (substantially) to England and America, and
�28
to all civilised countries. I fear we could not appreciate
your emergencies, nor agree, in our present mood, to
the necessity of extra-judicial trials for wandering Ame
ricans. You could not, you will remember, see the jus
tice of our taking from the Trent envoys journeying for
the avowed object of destroying the American Union.
The excitement produced here, even by the arrest of
that charlatan Train—whom you have made the hap
piest man in your dominions—justifies a fear that these
insurrectionists may succeed, after years of effort in that
direction, in dragging us into some kind of collision.
But be assured of this, John : if the Devil is to have
another triumph of that kind on this planet, it will not
be more than incidentally due to Fenianism, nor to any
real difference between us on the question of citizen
ship; nor will it be due to the Alabama depredations
in themselves; it will be beneath all ascribable to a
general feeling in America that you hate us — consti
tutionally, instinctively, bitterly hate us—and to a
suspicion, that will then have ripened to conviction, that
the peaceful development of our Republic is incompati
ble with your continued naval and commercial supre
macy. We are made up here of all the races of the
world, and in such questions are very apt to identify our
commonwealth with that of humanity; and there is a
question arising whether, on the whole, England is
using her supremacy and power for the welfare of man
kind, or the reverse.
Is it true, John ? Are you really our natural
�29
enemy? It were dreadful if our conceit and your
pride should trick us into thinking we are mortal
enemies, if at bottom we are allies or even friends.
We cannot get out of our ears those ringing shouts
with which your Parliament greeted every disaster to
the army of the Union; nor the sneers about the North
fighting for Empire, and the founding of a great nation
—coming as they did from your “Liberal” leaders.
They think differently now; yes, the mouse having dis
appeared, the cat is woman again; but we cannot forget
what was revealed in those terrible moments, and no
one of those men will ever again be looked upon as
other than a foe of the United States so long as they are
too meanly proud, too cowardly before party taunts, to
confess the wrong, despite the wounds it has inflicted,
or the evils to which it may lead.
On the other hand, the news has come to us that
your Parliament, at the end of its said hilarities, has, at
your suggestion, committed hari-kari before you. It has
under compulsion decided that it is a body which has
shown itself unrepresentative of you, and is now passing
out of existence. The direction from which the new
Parliament is coming seems for us to be signified by
the proposal of a Tory minister to concede us that
arbitration which a Liberal minister had denied. If
this is done in the dry leaf, what will be done in
the green ? I am already becoming suspicious of
my first hasty conclusions about your natural enmity
to us, John! There must be a great, friendly, and just
�30
people where such men as your Mill, Bright, Hughes,
Forster, Taylor, Stansfeld, Fawcett are produced, and
that sturdy crop of Radicals, Frederic Harrison, Goldwin Smith, Beasley, Morley, and the rest, whose rising
glow is visible across the ocean. There is a cry from
Chelsea, too—a cry sharp with the summed-up sorrows
of all your brakesmen, from Strafford to Robert Lowe—
suggestive of something else than the “republican bubble”
bursting. I see, too, that instead of getting slower, as you
get older, you are gathering momentum. It was but
yesterday, when the life of a nation is considered, that the
gentle officers of the first gentleman in Europe charged
upon that crowd of men, women, and children, in St.
Peter’s-field, at Manchester, with the, cry “ Strike down
their banners!” and struck them down with their
mottoes which demanded “ Extension of franchise,”
“Abolition of Corn Laws,” and the like: now I see
nearly every one of those banners, risen from their bap
tism of blood, floating in triumph on the old walls of
Westminster!
After due reflection, John, I mean to wait. I know
well, that in the end we are to be firm friends or
warring enemies; and remembering that one of your
philosophers says that hatred is inverted love, and
another that the unforeseen always comes to pass, I
mean to wait.
So I mean; but I must candidly say that I have still
fears that my intent may be thwarted. That Fenian,
sword, whetted on your stony past, is in the hand of
�31
a madman, and he cares little whether it is wielded
against feudal or democratic England. Our politics are
threatened here just now with another equinoctial storm,
wherein the balances of the elements may be held by
the race whose hatred of you has become their one
motive of existence. And my helm of State is in
the hand of a trickster who has taken a fancy that
|he phantom cruiser shall still be kept afloat. While
the majority of us mean peace, there is a strong and
subtle party here that means war.
Do you with me recoil from that poisoned weapon,
and from all imaginable laurels to be won by it ? Then
hold your pride in abeyance for a little; ascribe my
frankness to something better than Yankee insolence.
Own for a moment that there may be something more
important than u understanding the feelings of English
men ” even ; and give heed to counsel which is offered
in the sacred interest of Peace.
First of all, John, checkmate my ingenious Secretary
at Washington by paying the Alabama claims. I will
not urge that you can do it without perceiving that the
amount has gone out of your heavy purse; I will not hint
that it will cost you more to let the bill run on gathering
political interest. But it is of importance to maintain,
as I do, that you can do it without servility or loss of
dignity. The Minister under whom that infernal ship
got out has declared in Parliament that its escape is a
reproach and scandal to British law, and was effected
through the treachery of British officials. That is
�32
Q
ground enough on which to pay for its devastations.
Cash payment may commit you less than arbitration.
You can still hold your own views about the techni
calities of the matter; you have a perfect right to say
that you do it in the interest of peace; you are strong
enough and rich enough to be beyond the suspicion of
having any dishonourable motive; there is nothing mean
in saying, “ I think I am right, but, at any rate, I will be
rid of a bore ! ” This seems to me the wise plan, John ;
but if your chrysalid Government is not up to doing in
the large way what is so likely to be done in some way,
large or small, I do not see that it would be a humilia
tion to you to agree even to that stupid demand of Mr.
Seward that the recognition of the Confederacy as a
belligerent should also be submitted to arbitration.
“That is,” you said, “inadmissible;” but why? You
had good reasons for such recognition; in it you were
simultaneous with France, and a little later than Pre
sident Lincoln. You could not have lost on such a
question, and you would have given Mr. Seward a
severer fall than he has yet had — he, more than
all men living, being responsible for the early and re*
peated recognition by this Government of the belli
gerency of the South. You cannot, you may say,
admit the principle of submitting to foreign judgment
the internal policy and political course of Great Britain.,
But you have admitted that principle in offering to
submit the Alabama claims at all; they involve the
adequacy of your municipal laws and the policy of your
public servants. Still, I think your safest and most
�33
honourable course is to pay the money, and reserve
your position in your own terms. My fine Secretary
would certainly try to dodge this also; but the American
people are not fools nor heartless, John; and the day
when you pay or offer that money without external
compulsion will lay something stronger than a cable
between your shores and mine!
From that day the other side looms into view. You
cease to be in debt to us; and if we owe any debt to
you, that must begin to press. Let the beam lie level
between us once more, and at least the hand that seeks
to disturb it will bear its own responsibility. And if the
base shall attribute base motives, will it not be compen
sation enough that you have drawn around you, for all
emergencies, the undivided sympathy of your own
people ? Your working men, and their friends in Par
liament, have decided against your rulers in this
matter, John, and reduced you to petition for the arbi
tration you denied. What can you gain by allowing
tricksters to trade on this thing ? Will men say you
act from fear ? There is nothing dishonourable in fear
ing a calamity to mankind; still less in fearing to bear
the responsibility of causing one. Your history and
security enable your people to despise a charge of
cowardice; that, at least, America can never make.
The next thing, John, for you to do is to search your
Irish trouble to the bottom, and to do it at once.
Those executions at Manchester show, I fear, that you
are very far off the right track. The men ought to
have been set to break stones in the streets. The fear
D
�34
of death preponderates with all human beings—Irish
men excepted: to the average Fenian mind your gallows
in Manchester did but suddenly carry three poor men
from their Curraghs to Paradise—did but transform
three obscure men into Emmets, into martyrs and
heroes. Have you heard of John Brown ? He made
an armed attack on slavery a few years ago; he and
those of his comrades who had not perished in the
attack were executed; but we now know that what his
raid could not effect, his execution did much toward—
the abolition of slavery. It never pays to execute on
the gallows men who have not in them the malignity
and selfish passions for which the gallows was reared.
Your Manchester victims were not of the stuff of
murderers. You committed a blunder in hanging
them that might have proved more serious had it
not been for the offset given by the Fenians at
Clerkenwell. You will be wise now to present
your Manchester gallows to the British Museum,
and turn your energies to secure the fair thing for
Ireland. If your existence as a first-class Power is
is necessary, your retention of Ireland is necessary.
But the retention of Ireland as a chronic insurrection
no retention at all. There is a story of a man who
went about all his life with a serpent inside of him;
when it was hungry he must feed it, or it would start
into his throat and threaten to suffocate him, as it did,
I believe, at last. The world sees you, John, as the
man with a snake in his bosom; it sees that your
legislation for Ireland for many years has been food
�35
given for your own exigency, which has only strength
ened the snake. It has grown at length to be Fenianism,
and your question now is, Cannot the fearful thing be
disgorged? I do not hope for you that it will be an
easy matter, for it is plain to me that the grievances of
Ireland are profoundly involved in your entire govern
mental system. The principle of the Irish Church and of
the English Church is the same, only the prevalence of
Roman Catholicism in Ireland makes it there a heavier
burden and insult, because a Protestant Church is as
odious to them as an Atheistic Society would be to
English Dissenters. What would your English Metho
dists and Presbyterians say if they were made to support
a National Comtist Establishment? The Catholic be
lieves your Church as soul-destroying as Atheism; it is,
to him, a lie planted on the ruins of Truth. Similarly,
your British land laws and privileged class happen to
bear more heavily on agricultural Ireland than on manu
facturing and shopkeeping England; but it is all one
system, and it bears heavily on the working people every
where. It is only a question of time, of the increase of
population, when your English people will cut up your
estates and parks, and compel your lands to support
men and women instead of rabbits and pheasants.
So, I fear that, having taken hold of this Irish
trouble, and found how profoundly it is entangled with
institutions resting on social superstitions—how in
evitably the English Church must follow the Irish
Church, and the English land monopoly that of Ireland—you will betake yourself to your old habit of ad
�36
Q
,
ministering opiates. The Irish difficulty, if thoroughly
traced, must lead you to the very heart of your heri
tage of wrong. Are you, after your Christian centuries,
equal to losing your life that you may find it ? At any
rate, John, disgorge that Irish viper, whatever may
have to be disgorged with it.
Your endowments ? Throw them into the sea—any
thing—rather than let them longer send this stench
through the world. Were Paul alive, he would surely
find another Church to which he must say, “ The name
of God is blasphemed through you!” Here at least in
America the Jesuit sharpens his most effectual arrows
on that miserable wrong in Ireland. “You speak of the
cruelties of the Church of Rome in the past; read in
the history of the establishment in Ireland how Pro
testantism has improved upon Popes ! Or would you
illustrate Romish oppression of conscience ? Compare
it with the liberty which Protestant England allows
the poor Catholics of Ireland — how much is their
humiliation of to-day better than that which denied
them citizenship in the past!” In both Ireland and
America Romanism has at present no other bulwark so
strong as your Irish Church, Protestantism no darker
disgrace, and Christianity no deeper shame !
Away with that, John, and then let your living gene
ration address itself to retrace the inglorious victories
by which preceding generations have forced it into an
attitude of despotism towards Ireland, whose natural
sceptre is the gallows, whose kindest provision is the
right of self-exile. All that through centuries you
�37
sought and in the end happily failed to do with America,
you have, by many disastrous successes, had the misfor
tune to accomplish in Ireland: down the fatal necessary
grooves of injustice your conquest came, confiscating the
lands, destroying the manufactures, making penal the
worship of Ireland. The continuous effort to do exactly
the same by Puritan New England trained America to
be a nation. Ireland is not yet a nation; but what
ever elements of nationality it has have been distilled
from traditions of common sorrows and vainly resisted
wrongs
Through sad six hundred years of hostile sway,
From Strongbow fierce to cunning Castlereagh !
If these shall not at length crystallise into nationality
it will not be your fault, unless indeed you discover that
beating a child in order to make it love you, little likely
as it is to secure the object aimed at, is apt—if the child
have any fire in him—to quicken it to independent life.
There is enough land in Ireland to employ and feed
all the Irish that remain to you, John; there are the
sinews, there the soil; if you cannot in some way end
their unnatural divorce, the gods themselves cannot
save you I Your landlords? Make those men look
you in the eye, John ! Not one of them could trace
his land-title, but he would find it was once a trust
for his king and country, perverted by some self-seeker
to the advantage of himself and family; not one fee
or feu, but was originally a fides, or trust for the advan
tage of Great Britain; by no means for any absolute
advantage of Lord Holdfast, who is now making of
his trust a danger to the State, sowing in it dragons’
�38
teeth, to spring up as armed enemies instead of the
valiant retainers which it was given his ancestor to
furnish! It has been for some time becoming apparent
that your land-aristocracy are trying to outwit the laws
of the universe. Let them try to shut up the sunlight
in their mansions, and amid the darkness that ensues
they may meditate on the fact that when humanity at
large really requires their land it will be as impossible
for any one man to maintain it for private ends as to
appropriate the sun for his gaslight. If you will stand
by old principles, John, let them be the oldest. No
landlord is to be regarded as fulfilling the conditions of
the deed whereby your Queen gives him land, who
proposes to maintain an interest in it separate from, or
antagonistic to, the general welfare of his country. He
may not burn his house, nor turn it to a powder-mill,
ad libitum; nor may he turn it, as many of the Irish
landlords do, into a manufactory of explosive Fenians.
If in times of danger the charters of liberty can be sus
pended, surely those of property may be also. Ah!
could you enter upon your Irish task, asking only what
is right for all—emancipated from your superstitions
about class and about land, you could make of Ireland
England’s prairie-land, you could so establish prosperity
there that whatever unassimilable Celtdom survived
must betake itself (and by your aid would speedily
betake itself) to these eupeptic regions which are able
gradually to digest even Irishmen.
Fenianism, then, has two causes. One of these is the
general weakness of your system, John, predisposing
�39
you to the disease; the other, and incidental, cause is
that the general unfriendliness to you in America has
made us wink at its practical projects, that is, has
paused us to deal with the conspiracy according to the
letter, but not the spirit, of the law. In other words,
America and Ireland, with very different aims, have
to some extent made common cause about their griev
ances ; about as much, we think, as you made with
the Southern Confederacy. These two sources of
the evil will grow by neglect, a recognised Fenian
belligerency with its cruisers being not at all un
imaginable. There are a great many mean and
selfish men, John, in your country and mine, and our
squabbles play into their vile hands sadly. But let
England remember our long dreary past of wrong with
which she is associated; let her attest her repudiation
of that past by a deed reversing it, all the better if it
be one beyond arbitrated justice, a deed of magna
nimity; let her make of America an ally; then one
brave session of Parliament can lay the axe to the
root of the tree which poisons your air. Our national
disgust at the whole theory of Fenianism; our hatred
of intervention in Old-World quarrels ; the indifference
to clan-interests and race - antipathies which steadily
grows into something sterner than indifference in a
union of races; our impatience as a people with all fuss
about purely visionary and impracticable schemes; the
English history, speech, and literature we have inherited
and still cherish; all these, veiled for the moment by the
shadow you have thrown athwart our politics, would
�40
-
resume their •'vigour. Nothing entirely unpopular can
live in this country; and I know of no other thing
which, in a normal condition of American feeling, has
so many of the elements of unpopularity in it as Fenianism. I do not defend our coquetting with it; I
wish we had been mature enough to repel such help;
but we are very crude in many respects, John, and we
have not had the best paternal examples of magnani
mity to guide us. It takes us both a sadly long time
to get the civility of our homes into our legislatures,
our fleets, and our international dealings. Had it only
been that Earl Russell’s dog had bitten Mr. Adams’s leg,
what scented notes and inquiries had passed! If any
one had stolen Sir Frederick Bruce’s hat, Mr. Seward
had deputed the American army, if need be, to find it!.
But.it is a navy destroying our commerce; it is treason
aiming at your life ; so fang and claw are claiming their
right to settle the question. Cannot our sixty or seventy
millions manage together to show mankind that there
may be rays of humanity carried into the dismal swamp
of diplomacy ? May we not startle the world by show
ing that, while the Pope is canonising the Chassepot
Rifle, England and America can raise the Golden Rule
to be International Law ?
That the New Year may bring that sorrow for devils,
and triumph for angels, is, John, the honest desire of
Jonathan.
the
END.
• . . ’ -I
LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND.
Y
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A new year's letter from Jonathan to John
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 40 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Attribution from Virginia Clark's catalogue based on the content (Anglo-British relations) and a comparison to another 'Jonathan to John' letter, titled 'Lunatics', attributed to Conway by the 'Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals'. Printed by C. Whiting, London.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Chapman and Hall
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1868
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5623
Subject
The topic of the resource
International relations
USA
UK
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A new year's letter from Jonathan to John), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Great Britain-Foreign Relations-United States of America
United States-Foreign Relations
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/11657abd2aaf9f3230f72d63f4d6f341.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=ut2Hlidc9NhJNO6V-QnaNMDu5ONberndjBxH3Ebv14rEj-T5Mb9lL40syZYV%7EvDtqMEaeYc0WCZ-MWvuHqW93PUMm2t1azF9U4lVr54IYGkean3iDWDNqLNlE%7EAlwDelah1OgEq1m3x%7EDS9-Gl0zQ21rSpVxK%7EdW%7E9sM1uZqHr5B-V%7EbXK5z1xyAgvPOjeK1zNWKKe-TpVYMlCp23gnuYOyF343depSp8DBOt1Nd3k1rMGhG66IdfDKx8BxKH80i13Qw7Wp83rYr8vo7Mqa9AzG9KgR4ycNMHptor7JN-3IYQCfPXc2MmP4eYOgaouAAQKEvZXIFIi0sqFbjtSRbOQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
a78a51dd16df5c1bc85f6ff7c5b8724d
PDF Text
Text
��
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
[Necklace of Stories and other reviews]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5613
Description
An account of the resource
Collation: 1 leaf.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Extracts, handwritten, from reviews of Conway's works. 'Necklace of Stories' (Spectator, Athenaeum, Academy? 'Demonology and Devil-lore' (London World, March 19).
Subject
The topic of the resource
Book reviews
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1881]
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work ([Necklace of Stories and other reviews]), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
Moncure Conway
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/fe6781239e469b8c124f6e600cdde962.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=eiFWhm9OZRthB3h5cu0OPLiDdkrDuD3wicN5VnKlWfXqllPLWTYAnGuO5AKCPLjB2RRLKtznsFmtqEuqvQGAf1xWSD-%7EVZCSmHYJlcKu6a5RIdW3bwveocOWVjMYykrr7hI14lqzFDfbu1hNUZTXvxlLIj1%7Et29KpbRBlnPUabyrzjjHg5SvH3RI2RmwE%7EBHPIXxJ2e9sxpIDFGDte8Qq4XS5hKlB9kGFGRYuq%7EX8Lo7v8mesNFov9dehSPSD9kOR0pUnbbX9qlA47IS6gLg4atF1leUWClFfIlPG5Hy9KApFohyKZLXiRVfFLrp4RJFAZ0k2l6xoUHgPdgD2AE%7ELg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
f0a2459e50f0cdad9cd6f9d474eebca1
PDF Text
Text
THE
RELIGION OF CHILDREN
A DISCOURSE, WITH READINGS AND MEDITATION,
given at
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL,
OCTOBER
2i, 1877,
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
frige twopence.
�ORDER
1. Hymn 132—
“ Smiles on past misfortune’s brow.”—Gray.
2. Readings, pages 3 to 7.
3. Hymn 180—
“I think if thou could’st know.”—Adelaide Procter.
4. Meditation, p. 8.
5. Anthem 22—
“Gently fall the dews of eveP—Saralt P. Adams.
6. Discourse, p. 9.
7. Hymn, 191 —
“ Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill. ”—Tennyson.
8.
Dismissal.
�HYMN 132.
READINGS.
HEBREW PROVERBS.
My son, if base men entice thee,
■Consent thou not.
Walk not in the way with them :
Keep back thy foot from their paths :
Tor their feet run to evil.
.'Surely in vain the net is spread,
In the sight of any bird ;
But these lay snares for their own lives.
.Such are the ways of everyone greedy of gain;
The life of those addicted to it, it taketh away.
Because they hated knowledge,
Therefore they shall eat of the fruit of their own way,
And from their own counsel they shall be filled.
T’or the turning away of the simple shall slay them,
And the carelessness*of fools shall destroy them.
�4
ORIENTAL FABLE.
The learned Saib, who was entrusted with the education of the
son of the Sultan Carizama, related to him each day a story.
One day he told him this from the annals of Persia
“A magi
cian presented himself before King Zohak, and breathing on his
breast, caused two serpents to come forth from the region of the
king’s heart. The king in wrath was about to slay him, but the
magician said, ‘ These two serpents are tokens of the glory
of your reign. They must be fed, and with human blood. Thisvon may obtain by sacrificing to them the lowest of your people ;
but they will bring you happiness, and whatever pleases you isjust.’ Zohak was at first shocked ; but gradually he accustomed
himself to the counsel, and his subjects were sacrificed to the
serpents. But the people only saw in Zohak a monster bent on
their destruction. They revolted, and shut him up in a cavern
of the mountain Damarend, where he became a prey to the two
serpents whose voracity he could no longer appease.
“ What a horrible history ! ” exclaimed the young prince, when
his preceptor had ended it. “ Pray tell me another that I can
hear without shuddering.” “ Willingly, my lord,” replied Saib.
“ Here is a very simple one :—-A young sultan placed his confi
dence in an artful courtier, who filled his mind with false ideas of
glory and happiness, and introduced into his heart pride and volup
tuousness. Absorbed by these two passions, the young monarch
sacrificed his people to them, insomuch that in their wretchedness
they tore him from the throne. He lost his crown and his
treasures, but his pride and voluptuousness remained, and being
now unable to satisfy them, he died of rage and despair.” The
young prince of Carizama said, “ I like this story better than theother.” “ Alas, prince,” replied his preceptor, “itis neverthelessthe same.”
�5
FROM “THE SPIRIT’S TRIALS.”
By J. A. Froude.
A TALENT, of itself unhealthily precocious, was most unwisely
pushed forward and encouraged out by everybody—by teachers
Ld schoolmasters, from the vanity of having a little monster to
display as their workmanship; by his father, because he vms
anxious for the success of his children in life, and the quicker
they <mt on the better : they would the sooner assume a position
It had struck no one there might be a mistake about it. Tw one
could have ever cared to see even if it were possible they migat,
or five minutes’ serious talk with the boy, or to have listened to
his laurh, would have shown the simplest of them that t rey we. e
but developing a trifling quickness of faculty ; that the powe
which should have gone for the growth of the entire rec
bein-directed off into a single branch, which was su ed g
disproportioned magnitude, while the stem was quietly decaying.
L to the character, of the entire boy-his temper, dispos tion, health of tone in heart and mind, all that was presumem
It made no show at school exhibitions, and at east due dy
assumed no form of positive importance as regarded after
So this was all left to itself. Of course, if a boy knew half the
Iliad by heart at ten, and had construed the Odyssey through a
eleven, all other excellences were a matter of course. . .
was naturally timid, and shrunk from all the amusements and
Xes of other boys. So much the better : he would keep to his
books
He was under-grown for ms age, infirm, an un
healthy'"and a disposition might have been observed in him
even then in all his dealings with other boys and with Ins master
X evade difficulties instead of meeting them-a feature whi
should have called for the most delicate handling, anc uou
have far better repaid the time and attention which were w
�6
in forcing him beyond his years, in a few miserable attainments,
. . In a scene so crowded as this world is, or as the little world
of a public school is, with any existing machinery it is impossible
to attend to minute shades of character. There is a sufficient
likeness among boys to justify the use of general, very general
laws indeed. They are dealt with in the mass. An average
treatment is arrived at. If an exception does rise, and it happens
to disagree, it is a pity, but it cannot be helped. “Punish,” not
“prevent,” is the old-fashioned principle. If a boy goes wrong,
whip him. Teach him to be afraid of going wrong by the pains
and penalties to ensue—just the principle on which gamekeepers
used to try to break dogs. But men learned to use gentler
methods soonest with the lower animals. As to the effects of the
treatment, results seem to show pretty much alike in both cases ;
but with the human animal an unhappy notion clung on to it,
and still clings, and will perpetuate the principle and its disas
trous consequences, that men and boys deserve their whipping,
as if they could have helped doing what they did in a way dogs
cannot. . . It would be well if people would so far take
example from what they find succeed with their dogs, as to learn
there are other ways at least as efficacious, and that the desired
conduct is better if produced in any other way than in that. . .
On the whole, general rules should have no place in family
education. It is just there, and there perhaps alone, that there
are opportunities of studying shades of difference, and it should
be the business of affection to attend to them. When affection
i s really strong, it will be an equal security against indulgence
and over-hasty severity. . . .
I take it to be a matter of the most certain experience in
dealing with boys of an amiable, infirm disposition, that exactly
the treatment they receive from you they will deserve. In a
general way it is true of all persons of unformed character who.
�7
Come in contact with you as your inferiors, although with men it
cannot be relied on with the same certainty, because their feel
ings are less powerful, and their habit of moving this way or that
wZy under particular circumstances more determinate. But with
the very large class of boys of a yielding nature who have very
little self-confidence, are very little governed by a determined
will or judgment, but sway up and down under the impulses of
the moment, if they are treated generously and trustingly, it
may be taken for an axiom that their feelings will be always
strong enough to make them ashamed not to deserve it. Treat
them as if they deserved suspicion, and as infallibly they soon
actually will deserve it. People seem to assume that to be
governed by impulse means, only “ bad impulse,” and they
endeavour to counteract it by trying to work upon the judg
ment, a faculty which these boys have not got, and so cannot
possibly be influenced by it. There never was a weak boy yet
that was deterred from doing wrong by ultimate distant con
sequences he was to learn from thinking about them. It is idle
to attempt to manage him otherwise than by creating and foster
ing generous impulses to keep in check the baser ones. And
the greatest delicacy is required in effecting this. It is not
enough to do a substantial good. Substantial good is Oiten diy
or repulsive on the surface, and must be understood to be
valued ; just, again, what boys are unable to do. . . Strong
natures may understand and value the reality. Women, and
such children as these, will not be affected by it, unless it shows
on the surface what is in the heart. Provided you will do it in
a kind, sympathising manner, you may do what you please with
them ; otherwise nothing you do will affect them at all.
HYMN iSo.
�8
MEDITATION.
As we gather to-day, apart from the conventional world of
worshippers, we are still between those vast realms of moral
good and evil which are reflected in all human consciousness.
Beneath, stretches that abyss which human imagination has
peopled with demons and devils, and the manifold tortures of
souls in eternal pain and despair ; above, the fair realms of joy
with its spirits of light, angels, cherubim and seraphim. But
these are all within each of us. All those demons mean only
hearts sunk low in selfishness ; all those angels mean hearts
raised high in burning love. Not mean or poor is any lot which
gives room to deny self, to put all self-seeking passions under
foot, to ascend by the ardour and spirit of love. There is the
grand conflict between angel and demon waged, the struggle
between light and darkness, and there the victory is being won.
Great is love 1 Whether it sends its sweet influence through a
community or a home, whether it is saving a world or a heart,
great and divine is love! For it closes over and hides
the dark region of guilt and baseness within us, it quickens the
mind and expands the heart to their fulness of life. In each
heart are the two doors—one opening downward to the pit of
selfishness in all its forms, one opening upwards to the purest
joys ; and it is when we give all to the spirit of Love that the
hell is for ever conquered, and we build around us henceforth our
eternal heaven.
ANTHEM 22.
�THE RELIGION OF CHILDREN.
In some respects the child living in the present age
finds its lines fallen in pleasant places. It is not, like
its ancestors, tortured with nauseous drugs, nor so
much with the rod. The clergyman no longer pro
nounces over the babe at baptism, as he once did,
“ I command thee, unclean spirit, that thou come out
of this infantnor delivers it up to be dealt with as
if its natural temper and will were efforts of the unclean
spirit to get back again. In Iceland the old people
account for elves by saying that once when the Al
mighty visited Eve after the fall, she kept most of her
children out of the way because they were not washed;
on which these were sentenced to be always invisible,
were turned into elves, and became the progenitors of
such. But we are beginning to be more merciful than
that even for the unwashed, and have gone a consider
able way towards humanising them and making them
presentable.
�Id
As to their literary culture and entertainment, there
were probably more good and attractive books for
children published in the last ten years than in the
whole of the last century. Many of the finest writers
of our generation—Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne,
Kingsley—the list would be long—have rightly thought
it a high task of genius to write books for children.
But in religious matters the children can hardly be
congratulated on the age upon which they have fallen.
The child is a piece of nature—physical, mental, moral
nature. Heaven and earth meet in it; the laws of
reason are in its instincts as well as zoologic laws;
and these harmonise in it. The child is a unit. Con
science is for a time external; it knows good and evil
in the parental conscience, not in itself. There is no
divorce between the two kinds of goodness—what
is good for eye and mouth, and what is good, for the
soul. There is no fruit inwardly forbidden. Confucius
said 11 Heaven and earth are without doubleness,’’ but
Hebrew Scriptures say God has made all things double
—one is set against the other. Our theology has been
largely evolved out of this Hebraism, but our children
live morally in that primitive age which cannot realise
profoundly any dualism. The child, therefore, lives in
a heaven and earth without doubleness; if its parent
only consents to a thing, it feels no misgiving; but it
is early introduced to a religion full, not only of double-
�II
ness, but of duplicity. It is the gangrene of our
age that it says one thing and means another; professes one thing and believes another; and nearly
.
every child, taught any religion at all, is taug t mgs
incongruous. I used, in childhood, to wonder about
the meaning of that prayer in the Zh Dam,
e
us never be confounded;” but as time went on,
whatever else was obscure, the confusion grew clear.
Not only that old sense of a word which reqmres
philology to explain ; but the sense of every chapter
•n the Bible, every sentence in the Catechism,
requires the interpretation of knowledge and. expe
rience; whilst the sentences being m Eng ,
apparently, the young mind is compelled
p
some meaning into them-a meaning pretty certain
to be wrong—or else be put to confusion It is not,
however, the double tongue of formal teaching wh 1
is worst; the mental confusion is not so bad as the
moral; and there it is impossible to conceive anything
more anomalous than most of the rehg.ous induct o
—so-called—around us. It is the necessity of the
home, the nursery, and of the school, that the c>
should be taught to be forgiving, gentle knd and
never angry or hateful. It is instructed that all
X be «». But just so fast, and so far as
dogmas can be crammed into the child, it is1 asyste
which begins with God’s wrath against the whole
�12
world, and ends with Christ’s damnation of vast
multitudes. A little boy in an American family with
which I am acquainted, being in a passion with his
playmate, declared that he hated him, and never
would see him again. His sister rebuked him, told
him that was very wrong, and not like Christ. “ Christ
never hated and abused others, not even his enemies.”
“No,” said the boy, “but he’s going to.”
It may be that only one boy in many would be
clear-headed enough to say that, but many can feel
what one or none can say. It is impossible that
children can be taught in one breath a vindictive
Christianity and a gentle Christianity—dogmas of
fear and principles of trust—and not imbibe either
muddy waters of confusion or the waters of bitterness,
where they should find only fountains of light and joy.
In one respect the Reformation had an unhappy effect
upon the work of nurturing little children. It trans
ferred the care of “ saving its soul,” as it is called,
from the outside to the inside of a head too small to
manage it. In the Catholic family the drop of holy
water and sign of the cross on the child’s forehead are
alone required; and for many years it is mainly left to a
natural growth; at any rate, not encouraged to grapple
with everlasting problems.
Under the reformed
religion there grew an increasing anxiety as to how
the souls of the children were to be saved; and the
�13
way fixed on was to stimulate strongly its fears and its
hopes.
Luther brought with him a bright children s para
dise from the Church of Rome. Here is his letter to
his son, aged 4 :—•
il Grace and peace in Christ, my dearly beloved
little son. I am glad to know that you are learning
well and that you say your prayers. So do, my little
son, and persevere; and^hen I come home I will
bring home with me a present from the annual fair.
I know of a pleasant and beautiful garden into which
many children go, where they have golden little coats,
and gather pretty apples under the trees, and pears,
and cherries, and plums (pflaumen), and yellow
plums (spillen); where they sing, leap, and are
merry; where they also have beautiful little horses,
with golden bridles and silver saddles. When I
asked the man that owned the garden ‘ Whose are
these children ? ’ he said ‘ They are the children that
love to learn, and to pray, and are pious.’
“ Then I said, ‘ Dear Sir, I also have a son I he is
called Johnny Luther (Hanischen Luther). May he
not come into the garden, that he may eat such
beautiful apples and pears, and ride such a little
horse, and play with these children ? ’ Then the man
said ‘ If he loves to pray and to learn, and is pious,
he shall also come into the garden; Philip too, and
�14
little James; and if they all come together, then they
may have likewise whistles, kettle-drums, lutes and
harps; they may dance also, and shoot with little
crossbows.’
“Then he showed me a beautiful green grass
plot in the garden prepared for dancing, where hang
nothing but golden fifes, drums, and elegant silver
cross-bows. But it was now early, and the children
had not yet eaten. Thereupon I could not wait for
the dancing, and I said to the man, ‘ Ah, dear Sir,
I will instantly go away and write about all of this to
my little son John; that he may pray earnestly, and
learn well, and be pious, so that he may also come
into this garden; but he has an aunt Magdalene,
may he bring her with him ? ’ Then said the man,
(So shall it be ; go and write to him with confidence.’
Therefore, dear little John, learn and pray with de
light ; and tell Philip and James, too, that they must
learn and pray; so you shall come with one another
into the garden. With this I commend you to
Almighty God—and give my love to aunt Magdalene ;
give her a kiss for me. Your affectionate father,
Martin Luther.” (In the year 1530.)
It is plain that the man who wrote that letter was
himself a child. Thunder for the Emperor, lightning
for the Pope, but a shower of rainbows for little
Johnny. But that child’s paradise is now as obsolete
�iS
as the Elysian Fields, or the Indian’s happy hunting
ground There was already a worm amid its blossoms
while Luther described them: for Calvinism was
lurking near, with terrors to blacken not only the earth
but the blue sky. Happily for Johnny, his father was
not logical, else it might have occurred to him that if
prayer and piety were the way to reach the heavenly
garden, they would naturally be the chief occupation
there. But Calvin was logical; and there is no worse
affliction than your logical man when his premisses
are false. Calvinism made heaven into a large Presby
terian assembly, all the children turned to rigidly
righteous elders ; no children there at all. One by one
in the child’s paradise the blossoms fell blighted.
Instead of the dance, behold a Puritan Sabbath school;
instead of plums and cherries, texts and hymns ; cross
bows yield to catechisms ; and the child learned at last
that its heaven was to be a place where congrega
tions ne’er break up, and Sabbaths have no end.
Well, we have measurably recovered from that. . At
least, many well-to-do families have; the Puritan
paradise is one we are generally quite willing to give to
the poor. It is still largely the ragged-school para
dise, and I suspect that endless Sabbath fixes m many
a ragged boy the resolve never to go there. Meanwhi e,
for the children of a happier earthly lot, the fading away
of the little Luther paradise has left them almost none at
�i6
all. Protestantism, with its education, has shot out
into various theories of the future life for grown-up
people. The Reformer hopes for a scene of endless
progress. The Theologian imagines the supreme bliss
of seeing his own doctrines proved true, and his oppo
nents’ all wrong. The Baptist’s heaven shows the
sprinkling parson confounded; and the Wesleyan will
shout glory at the convicted Calvinist. “ There,” say all
of them, “ we shall see eye to eye”—that is, everybody
shall see as we always saw.
But what has all this to do with the children ? They
do not care for the theological heaven, nor the heaven
of endless progress. The learned Protestant world is
so absorbed in the controversy whether there be any
future at all, that it forgets the little ones who would
like to know whether it be a future worth having.
What is provided for them as the reward of their
prayers, piety, and self-denial ? They go to church ;
they read the Bible; they sit through the tragedy;
but when they look for the curtain to rise on beauty
and happiness, it rises on metaphysical mist, not by
any means attractive or even penetrable to a child.
Since, for us, Luther’s plum-paradise, and the
Puritan paradise, are equally gone beyond recall, we
may look at them calmly and impartially; and we
may see that both have their suggestiveness, and
point to a truth. Luther’s letter is a celebration of
�17
the child’s nature—the purity and sweetness and
even holiness of its little aims and joys. It is like
birds singing over again the old theme—“ Of such
is the kingdom of heaven.’’ But the paradise
Luther promised his child was much too definite.
He went too far into detail; and when little
Johnny grew from the age of four to ten or
twelve, and during that time had learned his lessons,
he would see his paradise losing its summer beauty.
By that time he might have outgrown the whistles, and
become careless of kettle-drums. He might prefer
gold in his pocket to a golden coat. He might find
it, as time went on, impossible to stimulate prayer by
a prospect of silver cross-bows, or even of yellow
plums. And so leaf by leaf, blossom by blossom, his
paradise would fade away; and it could never bloom
again.
On the other hand, the Puritan paradise, with all its
sombreness, did have the advantage of raising the
mind to large conceptions. It was false—cruelly false
__in crushing the innocent mirth and despising the
little aims of the child. That which Puritanism called
petty, was not petty. The boy at his sports is training
the sinews which master the world. The doll quickens
to activity maternal tenderness. It is said Zoroaster
was born laughing, and a sage prophesied he would
be greatest of men. That sage was wiser than the
�i8
Puritan. But it is not necessary to chill the mirth or
to dispel the illusions of childhood, in order to
keep it from the delusion of holding on to its small
pleasures as if the use of existence lay between a
penny trumpet on earth and a golden trumpet in
heaven.
It appears to me that the true religion of a child
is to grow ; and when it is old, its religion will
still be to grow. The child ■will turn from its toys ;
will return to them after longer and longer intervals ;
and lastly leave them, and turning say, “ Mother, what
shall I be when I grow up ? ”
If the mother only knew it, all the catechisms on
earth have no question so sacred as that! The
child that dreams of its future in the great wrorld has
already learned far enough for the time the pettiness
of life’s transient aims : it is already overarched by
an infinite heaven. In the great roaring world, seen
from afar, nothing is defined, nothing limited—it is a
boundless splendour of possibility. All that man
or woman may dream of heaven, a child may dream
of the great world of thought and action into which it
must enter at last, and find there a heaven or a helk
Religion can teach the child no higher lesson than
that, nor stimulate its good motives by any nobler
conception. As its sports train to manly strength, its
little pleasures develop the longing for intellectual
�i9
and moral joys. And if the parent’s tongue is not
equal to the high task of telling the truth about the
tragic abyss of evil to be shunned, or the beautiful
heights of excellence to be won, there are noble
books awaiting the child, the boy, the youth j ready
to meet every phase of the growth, and follow every
fading leaf with a flower more fair, more full of
promise than the cast-off toy or pastime.
What a training for the child entering upon school
life are the stories of Miss Edgeworth—a training in
manliness, independence, sincerity, and justice,
which can make the playground the arena of heroism
and duty ! And there is Scott: the horizon grows
lustrous with noble presences, as the boy reads.
Dickens will tell him the romance of humble life
how kindness and sympathy can find pearls in London
gutters, and scatter them again wherever they go.
Plutarch’s “Lives” frescoe earth and heaven with
heroic forms that remain through life as guardians of
conscience and measures of honourable conduct.
Happily the catalogue is long—too long to be now
repeated—of the good books which tell the young,
what brave and faithful men have done, and can do,
to help the weak, redress wrong, uplift truth and
justice, and make human lives melodious and beau
tiful amid the jarring discords of the world.
And the lives of noblest men and women have for
�20
their dark background the evils they conquered, the
wrongs they assailed; evils and wrongs which are the
■only real hell to be shunned. It is only the fictitious
hell that terrifies the child. The snare set on pur
pose to injure it by a “ ghostly enemy ” ; the dangers it
incurs unknowingly, from an invisible assailant it
may not avoid; these are the terrors that unnerve
and unman. The real dangers of life, when seen,
nerve the strength, man the heart, endow with resolu
tion and courage.
The old man said to a child afraid to go into the
dark—“Go on, child; you will see nothing worse
than yourself.” And that is the fundamental doctrine
for a child. All the hells—their mouths wide open
on the street—the seductive haunts of vice in all its
shapes—they are the creations of human passion and
appetite. According to what they find in us do those
fell dragons devour us, or else feel the point of our
spear in their throat.
And even so we make or mar our own heaven.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
The little boy came to his mother, angry and weep
ing, complaining that in the hills some other boy
had called him bad names. He had searched, but
could not find him. But the mother well knew that
other concealed abuser of her son. il It was,” she said,
�21
“but the echo of your own voice. Had you called
out pleasant names, pleasant names had been returned
to you; and all through life, as you give forth to the
world, so shall it be returned unto you.
Amid these ever-present hells and heavens your
child must move—onward from the cradle to the
grave : why give it dismay or hope of heavens and
hells not present ? Do not pour that living heart into
ancient moulds and examples, even the best. While
it has to thread its way through London, why give it
the map of Jerusalem? While it must live high or
low in the nineteenth century, why bid it build for a
distant age or clime? True it is, that a noble and
brave life is worthy to be studied, whether lived mthe
year One or One thousand or in r877 J but its noble
ness is in itself, not in its accidents of time and space,
not in its vesture of name and scenery. When a youth
reads of the fidelity of Phocion, is it that he may
confront Alexander, or withstand the follies oi
Athenians ? It is that he may be true and faithful m
his relations to living men and women. If he fancies
that it is like Phocion to slay the slain, and deal with
dead issues, let him repair to Don Quixote, and see
what comes of fighting phantoms and giants that do
not exist And if the life be that of Christ, the fact is
nowise changed. That life is not yet written ; we have
the figure-head of a Jewish sect, painted to suit itself, and
�22
-called Christ; the figure-head of Gentile sect, painted
to suit itself, and called Christ; and so we have a Greek,
an Alexandrian, a Roman, a Protestant Christ, each
with its sectarian colours and glosses; each an anomaly
.and an impossibility. There is no volume you can put
into the hand of a child, and honestly call the Life of
Christ. The time has not come when that great man
can be brought forth as he really was, to quicken men
instead of supporting prejudice. But where there is
no prejudice instilled, the heart may be trusted to
pick out from the New Testament the record of a
valiant soul, the deeds of a hero, thoughts of a sage,
death of a martyr; and these too will help to idealise
life for the young, and teach them its magnificent
possibilities. Let the child know well that all it reads
of Christ is true of itself. Let him know that all he
reads there or elsewhere which marks that or any
■other life off from human life, as something miracu
lous, is mere fable• and that his own daily life
is passed amid wonders equally great, and conditions
just as sacred and sublime. Ah, how sublime!
What tears are there to be wiped away ; what faces
of agony to which smiles may be called ; what wrongs
to be righted, high causes to be helped; what heights
of excellence to be won—summits all shining with the
saintly souls that have climbed them, and radiant with
the glories of which poets and prophets have dreamed I
�23
That teaching which belittles our own time, and
lowers our powers beneath those of any other, may be
called a religion, but it is a moral blight and a curse.
When we demand of our children the very highest
aims that were ever aspired to, the very truest,
noblest lives ever lived—nor let them be overshadowed
by any names, however great—then shall we see rising
our own prophets and heroes, and see our own world
redeemed by a devotion not wasted on a buried society,
by an enthusiasm no longer lavished on a world for us
unborn.
HYMN 191.
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins-of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.
DISMISSAL.
Printed
by waterlow and sons limited,
London wall, London.
�WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY.
BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
The Sacred Anthology: A Book
of Ethnical Scriptures.........................
The Earthward Pilgrimage
Do.
do.
Republican Superstitions.........................
Christianity
>.....................................
Human Sacrifices in England ..
David Frederick Strauss.........................
Sterling and Maurice.........................
Intellectual Suicide .
.........................
The First Love again.........................
Our Cause and its Accusers
Alcestis in England
.........................
Unbelief: its nature, cause, and cure ..
Entering Society ..
PRICES.
8.
IO
5
2
2
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
d.
0
0
6
6
6
0
3
2
2
2
1
2
2
2
NEW WORK BY M. D. CONWAY, M. A.
Idols and Ideals {including the Essay
on Christianity^ 350 pp.
7 6
Members of the Congregation can obtain this
work in the Library at 5/-.
BY A. J. ELLIS, B.A., F.R.S., &c., &c.
Salvation....................................................... 0
'
Truth
....................................................... 0
1
0
Speculation
..
••
■•
••
1
0
Duty
.•
.....................................'
The Dyer's Hand........................................... 0
1
2
2
2
2
2
BY REV. P. H. WICKSTEED, M.A.
0
1
2
The Modern Analogue of the Ancient
Prophet....................................................... 0
1
2
Going Through and Getting Over
••
BY REV. T. W. FRECKELTON.
BY W. C. COUPLAND, M.A.
The Conduct of Life
Hymns and Anthems
................................ 0
*
..
2
V-, 2Si-
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The religion of children : a discourse, with readings and meditation, given at South Place Chapel, October 21, 1877
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 23, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Includes extract from the text of 'The spirit's trials' by J.A. Froude. Printed by Waterlow and Sons Limited, London Wall. With a list of 'works to be obtained in the Library' of South Place Chapel at the end of pamphlet. Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[South Place Chapel]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1877]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3337
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religion
Education
Child rearing
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The religion of children : a discourse, with readings and meditation, given at South Place Chapel, October 21, 1877), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Child Rearing-Moral and Ethical Aspects
Children
Moral Education
Morris Tracts
Religious Education
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/6135383cac2ea4bfb4f734a58f8b45ec.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=nF1iOk8PJsgS%7EpgBMsrlDqU26mlTFI2mZ65l-Pd3oQmvGNuI4nNV3rjjjEhZPgDp-ldhON19mIoBcp9M5NIZ3y0m-XedKyosKHRJqY2ZQl-Geio2hNMeXjlQaHP-wnkBe2Dv%7EYnk6shkMumuwb5dFWDFCVmfWJiz7jZgDdT3MbzqZb4TjeUtE-xKq%7EEs7AdcHh2o4misPEY8tDQBTBnJNv19gb6vcBQpTBFKDChqP4lPhoZD39mwEOvkpAgnFPRc%7EM9MvV9on1cOWVeBNqN5u6fhcIAQJF2Bq2ahCXbR4A6ReDtY5g6qGT1uhjf-vjHPiEfKLhDlVOrPwhsCIzczng__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
aef544a340e85d54415865461e0cf37b
PDF Text
Text
[price sixpence.]
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
A STUDY ON THE LIVES
OF
STERLING AND MAURICE.
MONCURE D. CONWAY.
AUTHOR
OF
“THE
PRINTED
EARTHWARD
FOR
THE
PILGRIMAGE.”
AUTHOR.
XI, SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY.
�»«rii
i?.
�THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
r.
Amid the manifold currents of religious thought and
belief, the question which most concerns us is, not so
much the point at which a man may be at any given
moment, as the direction in which he is moving.
Which way is his face set ? The ship which is leaving
London to go down the river is virtually nearer the
sea than the ship at Gravesend which is pressing its
way towards the city. The question of direction is
important above all others in any consideration of the
religious life of an age. Dr. van Dollinger recently
delivered, at Munich, some admirable lectures upon
the religious history of England, which have been
widely circulated in this country. The real aim of
those lectures was to clear the way toward some union
between the English Church and the wing of the
Catholic Church which that reformer represents. It
is plain that he looks to the Ritualistic and High
Church elements in the English Church as represent
ing the nearest point of contact between the two.
And so they do apparently, but really it is otherwise ;
�4
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
though for the moment the advanced Catholics and the
English Ritualists are near each other in their super
ficial forms, they are animated by different spirits, they
are following contrary tendencies, and their proximity
is only that of two trains moving in opposite directions
which have for a little paused side by side at a junc
tion. Hence we have the remarkable phenomenon
that since the brave utterances of Dr. von Dollinger
have been heard, there has been almost no response
to them' from the Ritualists, whereas they have been
warmly welcomed by Rationalists within and out
side of the Church. These have felt that, whatever
may be the forms which still cling to the new
movement in the Catholic Church, it is in their
direction, it is for freedom, whilst the tendency of
those in this land who have surrendered the religious
liberties amid which they were born is toward that
very Papal authority against which the others have
rebelled.
These currents and counter-currents are not less
notable when they are found controlling the lives and
thoughts of individual men. Everywhere around us
.we see minds passing each other, seemingly near, but
bound for different latitudes of thought; everywhere
hearts torn asunder by the mastering tides they
cannot resist. These experiences do indeed make
the religious changes and evolutions of our time
a perpetual tragedy. It is significant of the un
happy condition of society in this respect, that the
birth of a profoundly religious nature implies a new
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
5
spiritual tragedy. It means the fresh divorcing of
earnest hearts, alienation of tenderest natures, the
reluctant estrangement of friends at the sad parting
of the ways. Who can tell what heart-breaks have
been suffered ere the brothers Froude or the brothers
Newman parted for paths that led on the one side to
Rome, on the other to Reason ? But there are hearts
that have a deeper relationship than that of blood,
and such were the two whose characters and lives have
suggested what I have to say at present. These two
men—John Sterling and Frederick Denison Maurice—
were intimate friends at college ; they were originally
united by the deeply religious temperament common
to both; they sat together under the instruction of
the same cultivated and earnest teacher, Archdeacon
Hare; they sat together at the feet of the greatest
thinker of their time, Coleridge; they were alike brought
under the quickening genius of Thomas Carlyle ;
their interests and lives were cemented by their inter
marriage with gifted women,, who were sisters, and by
their union in thefounding and editing of IheAthenceum.
But one had been born a Unitarian, and had turned
his back upon the door it opened toward liberty; the *
other had been born in the Church, and had steadily
set his face toward that door which the other had
abandoned. They passed by each other. Though
their hearts clung together to the end, their minds
passed each other. In a letter which I received some
years ago from Professor Newman, to whom Sterling
left the guardianship of his eldest son, he says :—r
�6
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS t
“ Though Sterling had totally renounced Christianity,
among his last words to me were, ‘There are no better
persons in the wide world than Frederick Maurice
and his wife.’ ”
Now observe this anomaly! Here are two culti
vated, sincere, true-hearted friends. If you had asked
them any question concerning a triangle, or a Greek
verb, they would have given one reply; had you
asked them their opinion concerning any political or
scientific or even ethical question, they would have
given probably the same answer, the answer of com
mon sense and common conscience. Guided thus by
the simple reason common to them, they could pass
arm in arm, and see eye to eye, amid the thousand
problems and concerns of life, until they come at last
to theology: one step into that, and lo, the two friends
fly wide as the poles asunder !
This is not an unusual case. It occurs every day.
Religion, since it became merged into theology, has
become the great dividing force of the world. And
that because theology has built up in the very heart of
a world, developed and civilised by reason, another
world that holds reason at a distance, and claims a
magical or supernatural influence that sets aside both
reason and law.
Into this little enchanted circle of the elect John
Sterling was partly born, and partly manipulated by
those agents of the Church who are always on the
look-out to allure talented youths into its pale, to keep
it from mouldering away. “ Have they not,” cried he
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
7
in the Debating Club at Cambridge, when discussing
the Church Articles, “a black dragoon in every parish,
on good pay and rations, horse-meat and man’s-meat,
to patrol and battle for these things?” He little
deemed in those days that he himself would ever
become a valuable recruit of the same patrol, and one
may estimate what kind and degree of force must have
been brought to bear in transforming the clear-seeing
radical of Cambridge to the curate of Herstmonceux But I cannot go into the details of his life.
His friend Carlyle has written the biography with an
inspiiation which makes the book one chapter of
England’s Holy Scriptures. No one can realise com
pletely the religious conditions amid which he or she
is bon, without reading that wonderful Life of Sterling.
I think any mind which reaches to the sense of that
book, will realise how serious are the dangers beset
ting thought in this age. We read in ancient fables
of youth walking between good and evil genii; of
Hercules between Virtue and Vice, and the like ; and
we recognise their meaning when we see the young
passing amid the temptations and the good influences
of the world.' But we are apt to think of the scholar,
fhinker, poet, if we know that they have risen above
;he coarse forms of evil, as freed from the worst
dangers of life. But it is not so. There is a mental
/ice corresponding to every moral vice.
Beside
jvery thinker, however pure his outward life, walk the
lark and the luminous powers. At every step they
ire allured by the proud estate of Error, and by the
�8
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
bribes of Falsehood. Temptations to utter smooth
things instead of right things; to leave the lonely
path of individual conviction for the gay bazaar where
opinions are bought and sold; temptations to hypo
crisy and cant, and conformity to social prejudice ;
these waylay the thinker at every step, and in most
cases prove too strong for the pleading of the faithful
intellect within.
These contrary influences, towards the close of the
last generation, were in a sense embodied in two
■remarkable men who appeared in London. When I
say that the evil intellectual influence of that period
was represented by Coleridge, I do not wish to say
anything to the personal discredit of that eminent
man. Had he not been a richly-endowed intellect,
and a man of high spiritual feeling, he could, not
indeed have exerted the influence over the young
men around him that he did exert. But he had not
courage ; he dimmed his light with opium; and
opinions which were only morbid with him, and of
whose evil tendencies he was partly unconscious, unfor
tunately chimed in with sluggishness of conscience
and temptations to untruth in the less peculiar minds
around him. He had spun a shining web of specu
lations out of his brain, in which all the dogmas
managed to nestle, and to appear what they were not.
He threw the disguise of philosophy around the
Trinity, plated over the Vicarious Atonement until its
base metal was no longer discernible, and so per
suaded young men who were commissioned to ra
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
9
tionalise the world, that the foolish systems of belief
around them might, by a little modification, become
the dicta of pure reason. All this,- true to his drugged
intellect, became false in nearly every mind that was
inoculated by it.
The contrary spirit, which had already animated
the brave protest of Shelley, was ultimately more fully
embodied in Thomas Carlyle. Whatever may be
thought of particular views of Mr. Carlyle, no one
can trace his long career without seeing that he has
been a type of the truthful and truth-speaking man.
During his long life there is no falsity he has seen and
not stigmatised, no sham with which he has not
bravely grappled. Amid pretences, servilities, trucklings to popular prejudice, abasements before fashion
able idols, he has for nearly half a century pursued,
amid early poverty as amid later success, the unsullied
path of intellectual rectitude, and never suffered a lie
to be wrung from his tongue. In the days when
many of the thinkers, who now fill the high places of
the country, were choosing what Power they would
serve, Carlyle appeared as the prophet of fidelity to
conviction, as the eloquent witness to self-truthfulness
and self-faithfulness, calling on each to bear his bur
then, and accomplish his task on earth. He spoke
to young men, says Emerson, with an emphasis that
deprived them of sleep. This Voice in the wilderness
was not less revolutionary because it was unconscious
—perhaps has always been to some extent uncon
scious—of its own practical bearings upon established
�10
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
dogmas and superstitions; but, at its tremendous
affirmation of the reality and grandeur of life, a hand
of flame appeared on every wall of church or cathe
dral, with authentic warning to the scholars in their
fine livings that they must hasten to the side of Truth,
who had no bishops’ palaces or even parsonages to
bestow, but camel-hair for raiment and wild-honey for
food. Carlyle and Coleridge we know often met,
conversed not unkindly however warmly, parted as
friends ; neither saw in himself the St. George, or in
the other the Dragon, of any moral conflict, nor could
the young men who gathered with equal reverence
to the oracles at Highgate and Chelsea recog
nise their fatal and eternal antagonism; but true
it is that for those cultivated youths, as time has
shown, the two men were really the reappearance of
Indra and Ahi, Apollo and Python, Siegfried and
Fafnir, in the sphere of Thought—the arrow of Light
piercing once more the Cloud-monster !
Between these two voices—-that of Coleridge trying
to patch up old dogmas so that young thinkers might
subscribe them, and that of Carlyle calling them to a
height from which the Church stood revealed as a City
of Destruction—many a youth made the bed whereon
he has since had to lie in peace or pain.
' But what I say of these two men must not be
pressed too closely in a chronological sense. There
was a foreground to them, or, we may say, the inter
necine Coleridge-element and Carlyle-element struggled
for some time before they took that personal shape in
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
îî
cultivated society, which especially influenced Sterling
and Maurice, and the youth of their time.
II.
It is near fifty years since that beautiful vision first
visited the young and reverent thinkers of the English
Church, whose outer signs the prosaic world has in
in these last days recognised and named “ The Broad
Church.” As of old, when its morning-stars appeared,
the watchers by night were sore afraid. But to those
who dreamed that dream of a Church broad enough
for Humanity, wide enough to include every thought,
every truth of the living age, it was as the consummate
flower of the Ages of Faith. Amid crumbling creeds,
and mouldering altars, they saw a National Church
emerging to be the home of all souls, the nest in which
the freest and purest minds might lay their young. In
this new Church all the old fetters were to turn to wings.
A soft mystical mist for them enveloped the ancient
formulas, and through it loomed in attractive grandeur
one central idea into which Christianity was to pour
its flood of life—the Incarnation. To this one doctrine
they saw the great religions of all races pointing ;
around it they saw the Heavenly Kingdom revolving ;
and to it they beheld mankind gravitating, as the
unifying principle of the world. Just so soon as the
dogmas which encrusted and deformed it were all
�12
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
cleared away, that doctrine of the manifestation of
God in Christ was to become the spiritual axis of
Humanity.
The fine enthusiasm which this idea kindled in
ardent and cultivated minds made the Broad Church
movement in its earlier years a romance. So true is
this that its first love could only express itself in the
language of fable and poetry. Nearly every promi
nent man in the movement began his career by writing
a religious novel. Some of these productions have
been suppressed, others altered, as one after another
their writers have fallen away from following the
dreams of their youth ; but there is no other way in
which a student of this time can get so near to the
heart that then beat in the Broad Church revival, as >by
reading such books as Sterling's “ Arthur Coningsby,”
Maurice’s “Eustace Conway,” Froude’s “Nemesis of
Faith,” Arnold’s “Oakfield,” Kingsley’s “Yeast,”
Smith’s “ Thorndale,” and Clough’s “Bothie of Toberna-Vuolich.” These works are not, indeed, all repre
sentative of the Broad Church, but they all help to
indicate the conditions of thought out of which it
arose, and together constitute an impressive chapter
in the religious history of England. In them we see
the old, hard, dogmatic strata softening, crumbling off
into tender stems and buds, and struggling to mingle
in the life-blood of man.
Notwithstanding the varieties of scene and character
represented in these novels, and the various literary
ability in them, they are, with one or two exceptions,
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
)1
K>
1}
Ik
?i
w
CH
9
9
b
FÉ
iq
fil
8ïl
ff!
B
10
nil
fffi
rii
ri?
ad
ufi
ÖE
really one book with two endings. They tell the story
of the modern Pilgrim’s Progress. In each we meet
the same hero—the young man of genius who has
abandoned the old creed as a City of Destruction, and
is pressing forward to the Celestial City of Truth. The
end of this pilgrimage is always, whoever be the pensman, written by either Coleridge or Carlyle, or by the
Coleridge or Carlyle principle in the universe. When
Coleridge is inspirer the young pilgrim having wan
dered in wildernesses of doubt, and through the deeps
and bye-ways of speculation, is sure to end at last in
the old church—its ancient furniture somewhat re
paired—to dwell there comfortably for the rest of his
life. His devious ways, his rationalising episodes,
have all led up to the grand discovery that by a little
metaphysical alchemy all he once saw as dross is
transmutable to pure reason and much fine gold. But,
on the other hand, where Carlyle inspires the story’s
end,* the pilgrim’s way leads to something more tragical,
so far as worldly result is concerned, but something
more heroic than a snug parsonage and a comfortable
living. The young man ends in the wilderness, under
the cold night, his little lamp, fed with borrowed oil,
burnt out; a sufficiently bleak region he has reached,
but the holy stars are over him;not a mere “smoke
canopy” mistaken for a heavenly vault, and he can
look up to the unattainable worlds of light with no
falsehood over his eyes, and follow their leading with a
steadfastness equal to their own.
As the embryologist can read an animal’s future in
1
�14
the parting of the ways:
•
its egg—prophesy, this will move on the ground,
that will soar in the air—so may one in these religious
novels find described the various careers of those who
wrote them. This is particularly true of those which?
in 1827, Sterling and Maurice both began writing.
Sterling’s appeared in 1833, under the title of
“Arthur Coningsby;” Maurice’s appeared a year or
so later, under the title of “ Eustace Conway;” each
was a prophetic chart of the spiritual voyage its writer
was destined to pursue.
Mr. Carlyle in his “Life of Sterling,” referred to
“ Arthur Coningsby,” unfortunately, from memory.
“It was,” he writes, “in the sunny days, perhaps in
May or June of this year (1833), that “Arthur
Coningsby” reached my own hand far off amid the
heathy wildernesses; sent by John Mill; and I can
still remember the pleasant little episode it made in
my solitude there. The general impression,it left
on me, which has never since been renewed by a se
cond reading in whole or in part, was the certain
prefigurement to myself, more or less distinct, of an
opulent, genial, and sunny mind, but misdirected,
disappointed, experienced in misery, nay crude and
hasty; mistaking for a solid outcome from its woes
what was only to me a gilded vacuity. The hero an
ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges
into life such as we now have it in these anarchic
times, with the radical, utilitarian, or mutinous heathen
theory, which is the readiest for inquiring souls; finds,
by various courses of adventure, utter shipwreck in
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
*5
this; lies broken, very wretched; that is the tragic
nodus, or apogee of his life-course. In this mood of
mind he clutches desperately towards some new
method (recognisable as Coleridge’s) of laying hand
again on the old Church, which has hitherto been
extraneous as if non-extant to his way of thought;
makes out by some Coleridgean legerdemain, that
there actually is a Church for him; that this extant
Church, which he long took for an extinct shadow, is
not such but a substance; upon which he can anchor
himself amid the storms of fate; and he does so, even
taking orders in it, I think. Such could by no means
seem to me the true or tenable solution.”
Nor had any such solution presented itself to
Sterling when he wrote “Arthur Coningsby.” Mr.
Carlyle’s memory has, for once, misled him. Arthur
Coningsby, the hero of the story, does indeed suffer
the wreck, as told in the passage I have just quoted,
and it is sad enough ; but he does not suffer the last
tragedy, of recovery through the intervention of self
deception and moonshine. He returns from the Reign
of Terror in Paris, where his radical hopes and dreams
went down like sunken argosies, to try to find, not
his old faith, but his old heart, in England. But she,
who through all had held it, was hopelessly in the
power of “ tyrannous fanaticism,” estranged as if she
had been a nun from this uncomprehended Bird of
the Desert. Then his heart breaks. He betakes
himself to a mouldering ruin on the sea-side, there
amid crumhlin<r walls which symbolise his perished
�16
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS:
visions, to consider whither he will fly from a world
which has become to him a valley of desolation.
Thence he writes to his nearest friend a bitter letter
of farewell. “A man,” so he writes, “ can propose to
himself but one of two objects—the world without
and the world within. I have almost equal contempt
for both........ Of religion, poetry, philosophy, formerly
in my eyes the three great subjects of human study,
and elements of human power, I think but as of fine
dreams, from which I have wakened and found myself
in darkness........ What can I hope for in all Europe
when there is scarcely one of its provinces in which
I have not heard the very same dull desperation which
I feel, expressed alike by its starving peasants and its
surfeited nobles? Our formal creeds and conven
tional systems, and worn-out modes of existence, con
tain no seed of strength or happiness
There is
another continent, Henry, than ours, in which, for a
time at least, I may perhaps find peace. I came
hither after a life of artificial society in fields and
eities, and found myself amid a lonely wilderness
of ruin, in which there is scarcely a breath of
actual life, or a shadow of present meaning. I sat
one evening upon the mouldering wall of the
terrace. The hum of insects, the occasional chirp
of birds, the wide, continuous whisper of the forests,
and the faint regular murmur of the dreaming ocean
were the only sounds that reached me. The black
woods sank on either hand to the waters, and the
sky before ’ me was steeped in splendour.........The
�STERLING AND MAURICE,
U
HI
xl
id
j£
QI
qf
els
$
di
4
fii
nJ
i'£2
.
55
(¿j
3
M
,flj
if
o<
afll
f££
Ic
¡XV
17
West, in which glades of delicate primrose were
mingled with wide fields of the richest crimson,
seemed an island of the immortals, and broad gar
lands and scattered flowers, of the same effulgent
hues, encircled it, and were relieved upon the blue
and quiet sky. One faint star, the star of the West,
rose trembling into view; and I thought, in the ex
travagance of lawless fancy, Is not that the genius,
and are not those the meadows, of a happier region
than any I have wandered in ? Why cannot I pursue
that radiance to its fountain, and win for myself a
heritage in that occidental paradise ? This was
idle dreaming. But in that instant there dawned
upon my mind, and piled itself against the heavens,
a vision of the American wilderness.......Your civili
sation seems to me a long, busy play, without plot or
end, and in which none of the characters perform
their parts even tolerably, except the confidants and
lacqueys. I will go and gaze upon another mode of
humanity......Consider me henceforth a sachem, a
hermit, an exile, a madman, what you will; as lost,
dead, gone for ever, but not as forgetful of your long
and undeserved kindness. Some future wanderer
in the western forests will perhaps stumble or pause
at a low mound in some dark thicket, but there will
be neither inscription nor emblem to inform him that
the bones of an English outcast were there laid in
earth by the hands of the red warriors.” So ends one
of the most impressive and eloquent books ever
written. But no, even that last wild sentence is not
�18
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS .“
the end; for on the blank beneath there is copied a
fatal sentence from JBschylus : 11 And evermore shall
tne burthen of the agony of thy present evil wear
thee down j for he that shall deliver thee exists not in
nature/’
With such sad spiritual convulsion had the morbid
religious conditions of his time afflicted this young
man, even in the preface of his life.
In ful
filling the dreary destiny so prefigured, he did in
deed shrink from, the bleak path for a brief space,
as we have seen, thereby losing perhaps the joy of
gaining inwardly the blessed Isles of Light which
his hero followed in the West. But this swerving
was not enough to mar the intellectual and moral in
tegrity of his life, whatever it may have cost him in
health, happiness, and repose.
It was perhaps the saddest day of Carlyle’s life when,
he heard that John Sterling had fallen a victim to the
Coleridgean “moonshine” as he called it, and entered,
the Church as a clergyman. For he knew well that it
was not his friend’s true place, and that the penalty to
be suffered must be inevitable. Friends of Sterling
have told me that this step was in good part due to
Sterling’s ill-health. Once in helping to put out a fire,
he had stood in the water for some time, and so con
tracted disease of the lungs. This weakness prevented
his giving his mind very patiently and thoroughly to a
subj ect, so that he was liable to stop at a mere resting
place of inquiry as if he had reached the goal. His
mind, too, was troubled with many doubts, and in a
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
19
moment of weakness he imagined that he could escape
them if he threw himself into ministerial work. More
over there occurred a disastrous episode in Sterling’s
life at this time connected with a Spanish revolution,
which had brought on a momentary reaction in his
mind favourable to all kinds of Conservatism. He
was under the shadow not only of doubt, but of a
dreary failure which caused the military execution of
two of his friends, and torturing considerations to him
self. In after years, Sterling, with a sad humour, said
his case at the time he entered the Church was like
that of “a young lady who has tragically lost her lover,
and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a convent, or
in any noble or quasi-noble way to escape from a world
which has become intolerable.” The results of this false
step could not be avoided. John Sterling had not been
long inside of the Church before he found the utter
hollowness of it; he found that instead of leaving his
doubts outside he had multiplied them, and made their
solution more difficult; he found himself there as in
the halls of Eblis, where the silent figures move about
with forced serenity, each hiding an incurable disease
which none would name or confess. But Sterling
could not suppress his cry; he escaped from the
dwelling-place of the slowly perishing. After a minis
terial career of exactly eight months, he discontinued
his functions through illness, but it proved to be his
eternal Adieu to the Church.
But, alas, it was years before he could disentangle
himself, and clear his relationship with men, of all the
�20
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS:
consequences of that eight-months’ error. He must
encounter the old patrol of “ black dragoons,” which
was not so bad; but he must untwine the withholding
arms of affection, and reach the path of truth over
the bruised hearts of those to whom he had in one
weak moment, committed himself. And thus in weary
explanations of his reasons for believing light to be not
darkness, nor two to be three, and in polite defence
against the plaintively pious who wished to convert him
(once two gentle ladies, whose “ timid omniscience”
he found reason to admire !)—were passed time and
strength which might have been bearing him onward to
clear and solid results of life. When through this pain
ful labyrinth he had at length made his way, he started
eagerly on the old path from which he had swerved,
and resumed that literary task which waited for his
beautiful genius, but the brief morning was past, its
roses already fading, and the untimely night at hand !
The great lesson of Sterling’s life is the solemn
warning it gives against the perils of intellectual waste
fulness.
Most impressively has it been enforced,
while with the tenderness due to the memory of one
who was rather a victim of his time than a falterer on
the path, by his friend and biographer, Carlyle. “Poor
Sterling, he was by nature appointed for a Poet, then,
— a Poet after his sort, or recogniser and delineator of
the Beautiful; and not for a Priest at all! Striving
towards the sunny heights, out of such a level and
through such an element as ours in these days is, he had
strange aberrations appointed him, and painful wander
�Sterling
and
Maurice.
21
ings amid the miserable gas-lights, bog-fires, dancing
meteors, and putrid phosphorences which form the
guidance of a young human soul at present! Nor till
after trying all manner of sublimely illuminated places,'
and finding that the basis of them was putridity, artifi
cial gas and quaking bog, did he, when his strength
was all done, discover his true sacred hill, and passion
ately climb thither when life was fast ebbing! A
tragic history, as all histories are ; yet a gallant, brave,
and noble one, as not many are. It is what to a
radiant son of the Muses, and bright messenger of the
harmonious Wisdoms, this poor world, if he himself
have not strength enough, and inertia enough, and
amid his harmonious eloquences silence enough, has
provided at present. Many a high-striving, too-hasty
soul, seeking guidance towards eternal-excellence from
the official black-artists, and successful professors of
political, ecclesiastical, philosophical, commercial,
general and particular legerdemain, will recognise his
own history in this image of a fellow pilgrim’s.”
Years ago I sought the grave of John Sterling, in
that beautiful ground of Bonchurch, beside the sea, an
emblem of his purity, his freedom, but also, alas, of his
unrest. Beside his grave I read the letter he wrote to
his friend Carlyle, from his- death-bed : “ I tread the
common road into the great darkness, without any
thought of fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty
indeed I have none. If I can lend a hand there, that
shall not be wanting.” I read, too, his letter to his eldest
son, written also with the shadow of death upon him :
�22
THE PARTING OF ’jHÉ WAYS \
tl When I fancy how you are walking in the same
streets, and moving along the same river, that I used
to watch so intently, as if in a dream, when younger
than you are, I could gladly burst into tears, not of
grief, but with a feeling that there is no name for.
Everything is so wonderful, great and holy, so sad and
yet not bitter, so full of Death, and so bordering on
Heaven. Can you understand anything of this ? If
you can, you will begin to know what a serious matter
our life is; how unworthy and stupid it is to trifle it
away without heed; what a wretched, insignificant,
worthless creature any one comes to be, who does not
as soon as possible bend his whole strength, as in
stringing a stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies first
before him.” Every word is wrung from his own
experience. He is feeding his son with red drops
from his heart. Out of his grave grew a graceful
fuchsia whose tints seemed to me the red of his deepveined breast and the whiteness of his purity. I
brought away a bloom to press in some sacred volume
of his thoughts; but I bore away also the lesson, that
life is long enough for all who live it truly, but is too
short for us to do over again what has been already
done for us. I have sometimes met with the notion
that there is a certain advantage in beginning with the
popular superstitions for the sake of the experience
gained in growing out of them. Even so great a man
as the historian Niebuhr, on the birth of his son
Marcus, writes to a friend that he means to teach
little Marcus all that he (the father) had unlearned,
�STERLiN^
and
Maurice.
23
Mid will make him believe all of Homer’s Mythology,
in order that his mind may be an epitome of the
history of the human mind. But the wise economy
of life is to start from the advanced ground won for us
by those who have gone before. The astronomer does
not need to discover over again every planet that has
been discovered, but uses the accumulated knowledge
of the past as the basis and point for a new departure.
And in no region of life can men afford to throw
away experience. Poor Sterling takes his backward
step, puts on the customary chains, and then spends
the best strength of his life in breaking those chains
and recovering the old free ground he had left.
Arriving there he finds all the old problems from which
he shrank still to be dealt with, but the time and
means of dealing with them are gone. So he wanders
on without attaining any solid rest for his mind ; the
idol falls, but he is unable to raise the true God in its
place ; and so he can only say to his son, and say to
us, with his last breath : “ Bend your whole strength
as soon as possible to doing whatever task lies first
before you.”
III.
We have seen that while John Sterling was uncon
sciously tracing out the path of his own destiny fortyfive years ago in “ Arthur Coningsby,” his nearest
friend, Frederick Maurice, was also writing a romance
�24
THE PARTING OF THE WATS :
of similar character—“ Eustace Conway.” This, too,
is an ominous book. The account which Mr. Carlyle,
under a mistaken impression, has given of Sterling’s
novel is closely applicable to that of Maurice, with
which indeed he would almost seem to have confused
it. This is indeed the apotheosis of the Coleridgean
Moonshine ! Eustace Conway, wandering amid the
same desolations of heart and brain as Arthur Coningsby, meets a German metaphysician—meets him
in Newgate prison!—who sprinkles the phosphorescent
light of decaying creeds over him, and the work is
completed by an exceedingly monotonous and end
less clergyman, the book ending with marriage-bells
for Eustace, and the embowered parsonage easily
imaginable just beyond. The story is fatally familiar;
it lives, moves, preaches around us daily: we need not
dwell on it. That Pure Reason naturally branches out
into thirty-nine great truths, and that these, by a happy
coincidence, are precisely the thirty-nine articles of the
Church which commands the religious authority and
endowments of the country,—this is the Rock upon
which the pious fictions of England are based, from
Maurice’s novel to the Establishment itself. But no
casuistry can make it other than the abdication of
Truth from the throne of the heart; to one who has
painfully and faithfully followed the leading of Reason,
its marriage-bells break out into a wild clangour of
despair, compared with which the spiritual loneliness
of Coningsby were Paradise.
But there is one thing notable about the novel with
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
2§
which Mr. Maurice began his literary life, that is the
view of human nature implied in it. There is an
amount of wickedness in the book quite appalling.
Desperadoes and libertines, abductions and seductions,
Newgate and other doubtful places, follow each other
in quick succession through the book, and one feels at
first as if its author had never known honest people,
But as one reads further it becomes sufficiently plain
that all this wickedness is theoretical. The tempta
tions are fanciful, the sins unreal, the crimes ludicrous j
they prove not only the innocence of the author, but
of the Cantabs, who manifestly furnished him with
inadequate models for the vices depicted. Never
theless, the generally disparaging view of human nature
implied in “ Eustace Conway,” has a certain interest
in connection with the author s change of faith which
must have occurred about the time that it was written.
It seems to me clear that the author of the novel in
question had received by inheritance some kind of
dogma of Human Depravity. And I think that it is of
the utmost importance that Unitarians of the present
day should be careful to weigh well, not only this, but
several expressions directly concerning Unitariamsm
in Dr. Maurice’s writings, if they would fairly estimate
his abandonment of that faith. In a majority of
cases there would, perhaps, be reason to suspect the
motives of a scholar who should pass from a Unitarian
family to the Church. But in the case of Maurice
we find that after suffering the chief crosses of heresy,
and surrendering the college prizes whose loss it en-
�THE PARTING OF THE WAYS i
tailed, he enters the least popular wing of the Church.
He was never a seeker of popularity or wealth; and his
fidelity to conviction, while he has seen men inferior
to him in every way promoted over his head, himself
ignored by a Church which could neither bend nor
bribe him, compels us to admit that his abandonment
Unitarianism was due rather to its defects than to
his. At the time the change was made, it was by no
means a downward step that he made; and it is a fair
criticism upon the average Unitarianism of that period,
surviving now as a mere party in the same denomina
tion, that it could not satisfy a man so devout and
disinterested as Maurice. It was a critical, scholarly
religion; but passionless, bloodless, without any
ardour of humanity. It was timid too, and made a
virtue of not prejudicing the minds of children, but
leaving them to grope their way to liberty, so that each
generation of Unitarians were expected to do their
fathers’ work over again. Then it was ever afraid of
being compromised by some brave mind. “I could
never,” said Sterling, to a friend who mentioned it to
me, “ I could never be a Unitarian. They take two
bites at a cherry.” His friend Maurice seems to have
disliked them because they tried to bite the cherry at allWhat kmd of Unitarianism he was acquainted with
may be gathered from the following passage from his
“Kingdom of Christ,” vol. i. p. 184:—“The more
thoughtful disciples of Unitarianism began to be struck
with another strange contradiction between the prin
ciples on which it rested, and the system in which
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
27
Vhey are embodied. The Unitarians were the great
assertors of the absolute unqualified love of God, in
opposition to all mythologies and theologies v hich had
preceded.
And Unitarianism was the first of all
theologies or mythologies which denied that the
Almighty had, in his own person, by some act of con
descension and sacrifice, interfered to redress the
evils and miseries of his creatures ! Every pagan
religion had acknowledged the need of an incarnation;
the modem Jew and Mahometan, nominally rejecting
it, is yet continually dreaming of it, and testifying to
its necessity—it was reserved for this religion, to make
it the greatest evidence and proof of love in a Divine
Being, that He merely pardons those who have filled
the world with misery j that He has never shared in
it; never wrestled with it; never devised any means
save that of sending a wise teacher, for delivering man
kind out of it.”
It would appear from this that the doctrine of the
love of God taught by the Unitarians, among whom
Mr. Maurice was born, was an oasis amid a desert of
orthodoxy. It was held along with the incongruous
concession that the universe is an arena for the struggle
of hostile camps. There is need that God should
wrestle with somebody or something; that the misery
and sin in the world are here without his consent,
and that he is driven to “devise” means of deliver
ance. The depravity of so many characters in
« Eustace Conway ” here appears in theological dis
tinctness, as if Unitarianism had never conveyed any
�the parting of the ways
:
other impression. Nay, the doctrine of the Unity of'
God must have been a mere arithmetical statement
in his conception of Unitarian tenets, else it could
hardly have admitted of the proximity of the quiet
assumption of a Universe of antagonistic, irrecon
cilable moral Powers.
In contrast with this dry,
fragmentary form of belief, there stood before him
the new movement or revival in the Church, then in
its first glow of enthusiasm; its very greatness of
promise concealing the hard fatal lines which it could
not overpass.
Undefined, an unevolved point of
light suggesting endless possibilities, arose that dream;
it has preceded a sad awakening, but it was a grand
one, and, until heart and flesh failed, was bravely
pursued.
By none more bravely pursued than by Frederick
Maurice. My belief is that his life casts a new and
less favourable light upon Coleridge than even that of
Sterling does. Maurice could never forgive Carlyle
for having called Coleridge’s teaching “ moonshine,”
and yet his own embodiment in warm, sincere life of
what had been mere metaphysics with Coleridge, sug
gests an aptness in Carlyle’s word. One day, when
Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb had been listening to
a long talk from Coleridge about the high reasonable
ness of Trinitarian dogmas, the former remarked, as
they were coming away, what a dreadful thing it is to
hear a man like Coleridge preaching such pious false
hoods. “ Ah,” said Lamb, “ Coleridge always will
have his fun.” This is not the only story one hears
�STERLING AND MAURICE,.
?£
current among the old friends of Coleridge which
suggests the superficiality which some felt in his
utterances. But in Maurice there was no fun in the
Highgate oracle; in him the Moonshine took flesh
and dwelt among us. To him fell the sad task of
pressing the Coleridgean doctrine that white is black,
and that the blacker black is the more is it white, to
the last logical extreme. For he was sincere. And
through his sincerity and bravery the intellectual
phantasm has been urged until it has dissolved into
thin air.
Perhaps the theological literature of this century
contains no writing more remarkable than one in
which Mr. Maurice defended the damnatory clauses
of the Athanasian Creed, in the name of charity.
“ To the best of my knowledge and recollection,” he
says, “ I never have felt tempted while reading this
Creed, however I may have felt tempted at other
times, to indulge one hard thought about the state of
any man who is living now, or has lived in former
times. I do not think that the Creed calls upon me
to do this; nay, I think that its awful language forbids
me to do it. I dare not ask myself who has com
mitted the fearful sin of ‘ confounding the Persons and
dividing the Substance,’ which it denounces. It may
not be the man who has used the most confused and
heretical forms of expression; it may not be the man
who has even seemed to the Church to be most selfwilled and refractory; it may be the man who is rest
ing most contentedly in his orthodoxy; it may be
�30
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
myself. Nay, have I not a witness within, that every
wrong act which I have done, or wrong thought which
I have cherished, so far as it has diminished , my sense
of the distinction between truth and falsehood, right
and wrong, has been of the nature of that sin which I
describe by the words ‘ Confounding the Persons,’
and has brought me into the danger of committing it ;
that every self-willed, unkind, schismatical act or
thought has been of the nature of that sin which I
describe by the words ‘ Dividing the Substance,’ and
has tended to bring me into it ?”
Even those who did not know the entire sincerity
of the writer of the above sentences, might be con
vinced of it by the absence from them of any con
sciousness of the amusing, not to say grotesque, dis
regard of any law of connection between means and
ends. With all the resources of language at command,,
to enjoin truthfulness and rectitude on the congrega
tion by describing falsehood and iniquity as “ Con
founding the Persons,” and to inveigh against self-will
and unkindness as “ Dividing the Substance,” would
seem to be a touch beyond the old grammarian’s
curse, “ May God confound thee for thy theory of
irregular verbs !” Would Mr. Maurice have selected
just those phrases to hurl against moral wrong? Were
they the natural physiognomy of his own face when it
grew awful in the contemplation of wrong? Were
“confounding the Persons and dividing the Sub
stance ” his own language against injustice, cruelty,
licentiousness ? It is impossible not to see that
�STERLING AND MAURICE'.
3*
Nature made one Maurice, Coleridge another. But
the latter was a real product, too—not a mercenary
one by any means—and it can only be explained, as
I think, by reference to that law of natural selection
which gradually evolves the paradox of the animal
world, and the paradox of the theological world,
under the long pressure of anomalous environment.
We who now live are witnessing the fading of the fine
dream of a Regenerated Church into emptiness. It all
ends in the barring of the doors against Reason and
the opening of them to Rome. Instead of becoming
more liberal, the Church has steadily become more
intolerant; instead of becoming more rational, it has
become more completely entangled in incredibilities..
The young men whom the leaders of the revival
allured into the Church, find themselves in a prison;
the thinkers who upheld for them the standard
“Subscription No Bondage,” are vainly endeavouring
to tear off the creeds with which they find them
selves freshly labelled, labels not to be torn off but
with the surplices to which they adhere ! The early,,
hopeful successes of these earnest and large-minded
men have already begun to reveal their unreality.
Dr. Arnold, and after him his pupil Dr. Temple,,
build up Rugby School into a centre of liberal thought;
and when they have passed away, the Church puts
a stupid Puseyite at the head of the School, to undo
all they have done. Maurice is set to teach Moral
Philosophy at Cambridge, and is followed by a
mere dogmatist. Such is the overpowering might of
�32
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS:
organised Error, that in the end it surely grinds up all
individual truth and' force to its own behest. The
history of the Broad Church is a simple record of the
waste for our generation’ of some of the finest intel
lects of the country.
One of the most startling exemplifications of
this was afforded by the ministry of Dr. Maurice
himself. After he had adopted the Coleridgean
notion that the Church creed and pure reason
are. harmonious, and that a man need only preach
popular superstitions profoundly to teach advanced
philosophy - he was settled at Vere Street Chapel
where his impressive ministrations were continued for
many years.
When, on becoming a Professor at
Cambridge, he resigned his Vere Street pulpit, the
event was deemed one of public importance, and a
great deal was written about him in the press. Among
other things there appeared in one of the papers a
letter written by one who had always attended the
Church, and he gave a statement of what had been
the doctrines and teachings which he had heard
during those years. The doctrines which this writer
represented as those taught by Dr. Maurice, were not
very different from those which are familiar to the
hearers of Mr. Martineau. Well, this letter was immediately followed by one from another of Dr.
Maurice’s parishioners, who had listened to him with
the same ieuerence during the same length of time,
and he declared that the teachings had been precisely
the reverse of what the first letter-writer had stated, in
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
33
every particular ! The two letters were written with
equal ability, and both in evident good faith ; and it
was plain that during the whole time these intelligent
hearers had been listening to two preachers as dif
ferent as the Archbishop of Canterbury from Bishop
Colenso ! Startling as such a discrepancy is, it is
after all natural. The new wine had been put into
old skins, and while a few recognised the wine as
new, more tasted only the savour of the old skins.
It is very rare that a clergyman can preach as vigor
ously as his gown. I heard Dean Stanley preach a
very heretical kind of Darwinism years ago, but the
seed, wrapped in Scriptural phrases, fell on the solemn
arches of the Abbey, fell on numerous prayer-books
and choristers, and when it sprang up it was as ortho
dox as if it had been sown by the dullest Evangelical
parson.
It seems to me astounding that, with such experien
ces as these behind them, some thinkers of the present
day should indulge the notion that the Church can be
reformed, and therefore, ought not to be disestablished.
With the Voysey decision paralysing every tongue in
the Church, with the Athanasian Creed put in new repair
for use on heretics, we are told that we are to hold on
to the Church and transform it into the Temple of
Pure Reason ! For that very object the Broad Church
arose; and the monument of its effort is built of the
wasted intellects of men who have seen the Church
steadily growing not broad but narrower; of minds
which having uttered their thought (however uncon-
�34
the parting of the ways
:
sciously) through a mask of dead formulas leave behind
a sharp debate whether they held the doctrine that
two and two make four or amount to ten !
Well do I remember the mornings I have passed
listening to Dr. Maurice, now nine years ago. There
was indeed vagueness in the theological statements,
and sometimes even ambiguity. I remember to have
thought once that the preacher was proclaiming the
sanctity of human reason, till he came out with a
conventional phrase to the effect that the necessity of
humbling the intellect of man constituted one of the
great purposes of the Incarnation. Again, while
dwelling on what seemed to methe hope of final salva
tion for all men, he broke in with mysterious utterances
implying the eternal nature of evil, if not the existence
of a personal Devil. Whenever he became theological,
it was to my eyes like a lamp trying to shine through
a London fog. I felt that he was at heart a rationalist
and a transcendents list, but the spell under which he
laboured of expressing himself through the language
of the second or the third century, rendered the
translation of his terms into plain English difficult.
This was, however, but incidental—the occasional
knot which the stem reached and passed in climbing
to its beautiful flower. There was a charm in Maurice’s
preaching which made one forget that it had faults.
The very face of the man was one on which every high
aim had impressed itself. It was the look of one
who had got every base passion under foot. The
white silken hair falling about a forehead radiant with
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
35
noble purity; the blonde face, smooth as a woman s,
the soft luminous eye beaming through the sombre
Church like a bit of blue sky; the voice, tender and
flexible, now deep and sonorous with emotion, now
clear and argumentative, again affectionate and cordial
-—these all helped to feather and direct the arrows of
light which the orator sent deep into the heart, to
defend its angels and slay its dragons. When I passed
from the Church after hearing him, I might feel
puzzled if asked just what doctrines he had been en
forcing, but invariably felt that I had been enriched,
enlarged, uplifted under a quickening and refining
influence. His earnestness roused, his spirituality
raised, his. hopefulness cheered, the listener’s mind.
As he rose to the higher strain, the dark old pulpit
seemed to vanish away, and he stood upon the pure
pedestal of his own character.
It was impossible not to recognise that it was not
alone the lofty mind of Maurice which cast its charm
around those who listened, but even more the singu
larly noble and devoted life he was living before us.
In his service to mankind he was lowly; but a city
that is set on a hill cannot be hid. There was no true
cause, no high purpose, which he did not aid. He
had a sympathy as wide as human sorrow. One of
our finest artists, Mr. Madox Brown, has painted a
remarkable picture entitled “Work.” In it rough
labourers are engaged on the street in all manner of
work—with brick and mortar, wheelbarrow and pick.
Some fine ladies are trying to pass the confusion they
�36
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
have made without soiling their dainty dresses. There
are two spectators of this scene—Maurice and Carlyle
who stand side by side. Carlyle’s face is breaking
into laughter at the scene, especially, we may suppose,
at the ladies holding their silks ; but Maurice’s face
is full of sadness as he gazes on the toiling men. The
expressions are characteristic. Carlyle sees in hard
work only so much happiness ; the implements of toil
are so many pinions bearing the labourer upward.
Maurice felt to the end that all this toil meant a
hard, weary lot • he recognised in it some mysterious
curse , and as he passed his life amid the labouring
poor, trying to uplift them, the doctrine of the descent
of the Son of God among men to save them was con
genial to him. He was not a sad man; he was ever a
hoper, with face set to the sunrise; but he had a
sympathetic nature, which could never see any hard
ship without feeling some of its weight on his own
shoulders.
The reputation Dr. Maurice has won is that of a
heretic. I believe this is due not only to the fact
that he was rudely ejected from his professorship at
King’s College by’the Principal, Dr. J elf, for denying
Eternal Punishment, but to the emphasis which his
life gave to practical truth. His theology is read
by the light of his humanity. He would never
sacrifice man to creeds, and he was willing to work
with an Atheist in a good cause. He has written
many theological books, but his more real monu
ment is that Working Men’s College which he built
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
37
up with aid of many a heretic ; and after the controver
sies he has aroused are forgotten, it will be remembered
that around his grave there gathered the aristocratic and
the poor, thelearned and theunleamed, theorthodoxand
the sceptical, all drawn by the sweet attraction of a soul
which dwelt with God as a child, with man as a brother.
That man should live such a life became at the
last John Sterling’s only creed; and by that creed
these two friends, whose minds Theology sundered,
are reunited in the memory they both leave. The
grave will hide more and more the incompleteness
of the one and the theological entanglements of the
other ; the common spirit of humanity by which they
were animated survives to remind us again, that though
Dogma may have power to divide noble intellects,
and to waste many energies in the struggle with in
credible creeds, or in the vain attempt to give them
life, Dogma has not the power to prevent every faith
ful soul from blending with every other in the real
service of Humanity.
Let me apply to these brother-spirits a poem written
by Arthur Hugh Clough, when he too was parting from
a dear friend, who left him on the path of inquiry to
find in Romanism a refuge from thought :
Qua cursum ventus.
As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day,
Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried;
�3$
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side :
E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those whom, year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged ?
At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered ;
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared !
To veer, how vain 1 On, onward strain,
Brave barks ! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides—
To that, and your own selves, be true.
But O blithe breeze, and O great seas,
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last!
One port methought alike they sought,
One purpose hold where’er they fare,
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas,
At last, at last, unite them there !
�THE EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. By Mon
cure D. Conway. Price 6s. 3d.
MAZZINI.
By Moncure D. Conway.
Price 3d.
To be had of the Author, at 11, South Place.,
Finsbury.
�BUDDHAGHOSHA ’S PARABLES. «Translated
from Burmese, by Capt. H. T. Rogers, R.E. With an
Introduction, containing Buddha’s “ Dhammapada, or
The Path of Virtue,” translated by F. Max Muller.
8vo, 12 s. 6d.
THE WHEEL OF THE LAW • or Three Phases
of Buddhism. Illustrated from Siamese Sources by the
Speculation of a Siamese Philosopher. A Buddhist
Gospel, or Life of. Buddha. A visit to the Phra Bat,
or Holy Footprint of Siam. With copious Notes. By
Henry Alabaster, Esq., Interpreter to Her Britannic
Majesty s Consulate-General in Siam. Demy 8vo, 14s.
A CATENA OF BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES,
from the Chinese. By S. Beal, B.A., Trin. Coll.. Cam
bridge ; Chaplain in Her Majesty’s Fleet, etc. Hand
some, 8vo, 15s.
THE CREED OF CHRISTENDOM : its Foun
dation and Superstructure. By William Rathbone
Greg. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, 6s.
THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN. By Winwood
Reade. Crown 8vo, pp. 552> handsomely bound in cloth.
14s.
EREWHON; OR, OVER THE RANGE.
Second edition. Post 8vo, pp. viii.—246, cloth.
{Nearly ready.
THEODORE
PARKER’S
CELEBRATED
DISCOURSE ON MATTERS PERTAINING TO
RELIGION. New Editions. People’s Edition, stitched,
is. 6d.; ditto, in cloth, 2s. 6d. Library Edition, with
ParkePs Portrait, cloth, 3s. 6d.; ditto, with Portrait,
and Introduction by Miss Cobbe, cloth, 6s.
London: Trubner & Co., 8 & 60, Paternoster Row.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The parting of the ways: a study on the lives of Sterling and Maurice
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 38, [2] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1. A selection of titles available from Trubner & Co. on back page.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[Printed for the Author]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[n.d.]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3328
Subject
The topic of the resource
Free thought
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The parting of the ways: a study on the lives of Sterling and Maurice), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Frederick Denison Maurice
Freethought
John Sterling
Morris Tracts
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/aa9034fb802a67f4f71e5c5df082a6ae.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=SiMJdZTg65Cg-sBpsfhKY7NcrkANs562F-yIHUBSY7-u0camaTm06ZUKcWurYsDXyJzqKLtbeXl85NMeTfVtItjbPap0KX1XTccbDPjj3e1gbDjOHilSKg8NNuNs7UqCKUWMCbxmhzCyQWaCjQH85eGOSqZnxDNvOGTztpK4M-42DAUp9W96YrpvPq%7EafU-tcL28oA87KMg4Gfb3Gu2EhLsMP7EuIowTBbGi9oijprW0lyV8RC07ovFtX8w78ww%7EW%7E4nI2SGGSv64Xhhhe8dfpyShm%7EDatee5EGxj0D4JYp9Mqhfy9BGQrPmZt664Z8j%7EeOEAKYLn8fPwo-ptDSkSg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
f10602be0024af9d0f5626730070fd08
PDF Text
Text
THOMAS CARLYLE:
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SOUTH PLACE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY,
FEBRUARY 13th, 1881,
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
LONDON :
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY.
Price 2d.
�LONDON
FREDEEICK G. HICKSON AND CO.
257, HIGH HOLBOEN, W.C.
�o
ANTHEM.
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,.
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve ;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind : We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
HYMN.
Though wandering in a strange land,
Though on the waste no altar stand,
Take comfort thou art not alone
While Faith hath marked thee for her own.
Would’st thou a temple ? Look above,
The heavens stretch over all in love :
A book ? For thine evangile scan
The wondrous history of man.
The holy band of saints renowned
Embrace thee, brother-like, around ;
Their sufferings and their triumphs rise
In hymns immortal to the skies.
And though no organ-peal be heard,
In harmony the winds are stirred;
And there the morning stars upraise
Their ancient songs of deathless praise.
After Carlyle.
�4
READINGS.
FROM “ ECCLESIASTICUS.”
Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat
us.
God hath wrought great glory by them through his great
power from the beginning.
Such as did hear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for
their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and
declaring prophecies :
Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their
knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent
in their instructions :
Such as found out musical tunes, and recited verses in
writing :
Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their
habitations :
All these were honoured in their generations and were the
glory of their times.
There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that
their praises might be reported.
And some there be, which have no memorial. . .
But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not
been forgotten.
With their seed shall continually remain a good inhen'tance. . . .
Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not
be blotted out.
Their bodies are buried in peace ; but their name liveth for
evermore.
The people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation
will show forth their praise.
�FROM THE WORKS OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
I.
How, when. I look back, it was a strange isolation I then
lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking
with me were but figures; I had practically forgotten that
they were alive, that they were not automatic. In the midst
■of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary ;
and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that I
kept devouring) savage also, as is the tiger in his jungle.
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have
fancied myself tempted and tormented of a Devil; for a Hell,
as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were
more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief,
the very Devil has been pulled down. You cannot so
much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all
void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility;
it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling
■on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh,
the vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death ! Why
was the Living banished thither, companionless, conscious ?
Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your
■God ? . . .
From suicide a certain aftershine of Christianity withheld
me. . . .
So had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony,
through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any
heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow
consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no
tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited
Faust’s Death song, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle’s splendour),
and thought that of this last friend even I was not forsaken,
�6
that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Havingno hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of
Devil; nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing could the
Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarian terrors, rise to me
that I might tell him a little of mind. And yet, strangely
enough, I lived in a continual indefinite, pining fear;
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what:
it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth
beneath would hurt me ; as if the Heavens and the Earth
were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I,
palpitating, waited to be devoured.
Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in
the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dogday, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little
• Rue Sainte-Thomas de TEnfer, among civic rubbish enough,
in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchad
nezzar’s Furnace, whereby ^doubtless my spirits were little
cheered ; when all at once there rose a Thought in me, and I
asked myself, 1 What art thou afraid of ? Wherefore, like a
coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering
and trembling ? Despicable biped ! what is the sum-total of'
the worst that lies before thee ? Death ? Well, Death ; and
say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil or Man
may, will, or can do against thee ! Hast thou not a heart;
can’st thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of
Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy
feet, while it consumes thee ! Let it come, then ; I will meet
it and defy it! ’ And as I so thought, there rushed like a
stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear
away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength,,
a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time the temper of my
misery was changed ; not fear or whining Sorrow was it, but
Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.
�Thus had. the JSverlasting JVo pealed, authoritatively through
•all the recesses of my Being, of my Me ; and then was it that
my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and
with emphasis recorded its protest. Such a Protest, the most
important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation
and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly
called. The Everlasting No, had said, “ Behold, thou art
fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s) ; ”
to which my whole Me now made answer, “ I am not thine,
but free, and for ever hate thee ! ”
It is from this hour that I incline to date my spiritual NewBirth, or Baphometic fire-baptism perhaps I directly there
upon began to be a Man.
II.
Sterling returned to England ; took orders,—‘ ordained
deacon at Chichester on Trinity Sunday, in 1834 ’ (he never
technically became priest.) ....
The bereaved young lady has taken the vail, then ! Even
so. “ Life is growing all so dark and brutal; must be re
deemed into human, if it will continue life. Some pious
heroism, to give a human colour to life again, on any terms, —
even on impossible ones !
To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some
morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting
life, act magically there and produce divulsions and convul
sions and diseased developments. So dark and abstruse,
■without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the course of pious
■genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown. No fixed
highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognized
paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, sub
merged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and
Unbelievability, of brutal living Atheism and damnable dead
�8
putrescent Cant : surely a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals;
Darkness, and. the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all
things from pole to pole ; and in the raging gulf-currents,
offering us will-o’-wisps for loadstars,—intimating that there
are no stars, nor ever were, except certain Old-Jew ones which
have now gone out. Once more, a tragic pilgrimage for all
mortals ; and for the young pious soul, winged with genius,
and passionately seeking land, and passionately abhorrent of
floating carrion withal, more tragical than for any !—A pil
grimage we must all undertake nevertheless, and make the
best of with our respective means. Some arrive ; a glorious
few : many must be lost,—go down upon the floating wreck
which they took for land. Nay, courage ! These also, so far
as there was any heroism in them, have bequeathed their life
as a contribution to us, have valiantly laid their bodies in the
chasm for us ; of these also there is no ray of heroism lost,—
and, on the whole, what else of them could or should be‘ saved ’ at any time ? Courage, and ever Forward !
Concerning this attempt of Sterling’s to find sanctuary in
the old. Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment
in such manner, there will at present be many opinions : and
mine must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere
pitying condemnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise and
unpermitted step. Nay, among the evil lessons of his Time
to poor Sterling I cannot but account this the worst; properly
indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology
and consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to
him. Alas, if we did remember the divine and awful
nature of God’s Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor
doomed creatures never did before—should we, durst we in
our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the
world’s Untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the Devil’s ?'
Only in the world’s last lethargy can such things be done,.
�and accounted safe and pious ! Fools ! “ Do you think the
Living God is a buzzard idol,” sternly asks Milton, that you
dare address Him in this manner ?—Such darkness, thick
sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious baseness, have
accumulated on us; thickening as if towards the eternal
sleep ! It is not now known, what never needed proof or
statement before, that Religion is not a doubt; that it is a
certainty,—-or else a mockery and horror. That none or all
of the many things we are in doubt about, and need to have
demonstrated and rendered probable, can by any alchemy be
made a “ Religion ” for us; but are and must continue a
baleful, quiet or unquiet, Hypocrisy for us ; and bring—
salvation, do we fancy ? I think, it is another thing they
will bring ; and are, on all hands, visibly bringing, this good
while I . . . No man of Sterling’s veracity, had he clearly
consulted his own heart, or had his own heart been capable
of clearly responding, and not been dazzled and bewildered
by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine, could have
undertaken this function. His heart would have answered :
11 No, thou canst not. What is incredible to thee, thou shalt
not, at thy soul’s peril, attempt to believe ! Elsewhither for a
refuge, or die here. Go to Perdition if thou must,—but not
with a lie in thy mouth-; by the Eternal Maker, no ! ”
III.
There is a perenninal nobleness, and even sacredness in
Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high
calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and
earnestly works ; in Idleness alone there is perpetual despair.
Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with
Nature ; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one
more and more to truth, to Nature’s appointments and regu
lations, which are truth.
�20
Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, thewhole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony,
the instant he sets himself to work. Doubt, Desire, Sorrow.
Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs,
lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day worker, as of every
man ; but he bends himself with free valour against his task,
and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off
into their caves.
Blessed is he who has found his work ; let him ask no other
blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose ; he has found it
and will follow it. Labour is Life ; from the innocent heart
of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial
Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God ; from his
inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness—to all knowledge,
‘ self-knowledge ’ and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins.
And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Persever
ance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken,
to do better next time ? All these, all virtues, in wrestling
with the dim brute powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows
in such wrestle, there and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt
continually learn.
Work is of a religious nature :—work is of a brave nature ;
which it is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is
as the swimmer’s : a waste ocean threatens to devour him ; if
he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant
wise defiances of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how
loyally it supports him, bears him as its conqueror along.
‘ Religion,’ I said, for properly speaking all true Work is
Religion ; and whatsoever religion is not work may go and
dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes,
and where it will; with me it shall have no harbour. Admi
rable was that of the old monks, ‘ Larborare est orare, Work
is Worship.’
�11
Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inar
ticulate, but ineradicable, forever enduring Gospel : Work,
and therein have well being. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven,
lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a spirit of
active Method, a Force for work:—and burns like a painfullysmouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till
thou write it down in benificent Facts around thee ! What is
immethodic, waste, thou shall make methodic, regulated,
arable ; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresover thou
findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy ; attack him
swiftly, subdue him, make Order of him, the subject not of
Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity and Thee ! But above
all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute-mindedness, attack it, I say, smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest
not while thou livest, and it lives, but smite, smite, in the
name of God! . . .
“ As to the Wages of work, there might innumerable things
be said. . . . Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward ?
“ My brother, the brave man has to give his life away.
Give it, I advise thee ; thou dost not expect to sell thy Life
in an adequate manner ? What price, for example, would
content thee ? The just price of thy Life to thee—why, God’s
entire Creation to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the
whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold : that is the
price which would content thee : that, and if thou wilt be
candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all; and for it thou
would’st have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal;—or
rather thou art a poor infinite mortal, who, in thy narrow clay
prison here, seemest so unreasonable ! Thou wilt never sell
thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner.
Give it, like a royal heart ; let the price be Nothing ; thou
hast then in a certain sense got all for it ! ”
�12
HYMN.
So here hath been dawning
Another blue day :
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away ?
Out of eternity
This new day is born ;
Into eternity
At night will return.
Behold it aforetime
No eye ever did ;
So soon it for ever
From all eyes is hid.
Here hath been dawning
Another blue day :
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away ?
Carlyle.
�13
ANTHEM.
The future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow;
We press still thorow,
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us,—Onward.
And solemn before us,
Veiled the dark Portal ;
Goal of all mortal :—
Stars silent rest o’er us,
Graves under us silent.
While earnest thou gazest.
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error ;
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.
But heard are the Voices,
Heard are the sages,
The Worlds, and the Ages :
“ Choose well; your choice is
Brief, and yet endless.
“ Here eyes do regard you
In Eternity’s stillness ;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave to reward you.
Work, and despair not 1 ”
Goethe, th. by Carlyle.
��THOMAS CARLYLE.
Thomas Carlyle was buried, on Thursday last, in the
village of Ecclefechan, long ago raised from obscurity
by being his birthplace, now consecrated by holding
his dust. The public eye had turned rather to that
spot near Edinburgh, where, amid the mouldering
walls of Haddington Cathedral, among her kindred,
lies the wife who so long shared the toils and
furthered the aims of his life. How strong were the
ties that bound him to that spot is shown in the
tribute on her tomb. It may, in a sense, be unim
portant where one is buried; yet when a man rests
from his labours, his works do follow him. If he
have lived for a high aim, his life is a testimony;
and, be it great or small, that testimony should be
faithful to the facts, and its influence continue in the
direction of the life. There was a genuine instinct
beneath the desire of the patriarchs to be gathered
to their people. Of Jacob it is written—“ These are
�16
the twelve tribes of Israel: and this is it that their
father spake unto them, and blessed them: every
one according to his blessing he blessed them. And
he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be
gathered unto my people : bury me with my fathers
in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite.
In the grave that is in the field of Macpelah, which
is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which
Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite,
fbr a possession of a burying-place. (There they
buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they
buried Isaac and his wife ; and there I buried Leah.)
The purchase of the field and of the cave that is
therein was from the children of Heth. And when
Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he
gathered up his feet into the bed and yielded up the
ghost.” The patriarch died in an Egyptian palace :
his son had become Prime Minister of Pharaoh: his
body might have rested in a pyramid. But whatever
lesson or lustre his name possessed must be reflected
on the humble people of whom he had come. If
Egypt wished to honour him it must go, as it did,
with its “ chariots and horsemen,” to the lonely field
in a distant land.
Not in accordance with the spirit of Carlyle’s life,
or his last charge to those around him, could he be
laid in any proud pyramid; not in Westminster
Abbey; not in Haddington Cathedral ; not even in
�17
such Arimathean sepulchre as the Scotch kirk would
have given him. Carlyle is gathered to his people,
not to their creed, but to their heart; to those who,
amid whatever ignorance, did their best for him, and
succeeded in nourishing in him the moral strength
which exerted a unique influence on the world.
Thomas Carlyle was a glorified peasant. Some
little time ago one of his aristocratic friends set
about showing that he was descended from a great
family which lived in a castle; but the sage smiled
at the attempt which for the rest came to nothing.
He was, indeed, the last of the family so lowly born.
From the first that sturdy and sensible stonemason,
his father, and his wise wife, steadily climbed towards
that height which their son reached, and their
descendants sustain. Nevertheless, they were at his
birth very poor. Within a hundred yards of the
spot where he now rests stands the small house of
which his parents occupied but two rooms. The
room in which this great man was born is humble
enough, lit by one little window. It is now occupied
by the village sexton who dug his grave.
And as he was thus born among the poor, so amid
peasants chiefly he was laid to rest. There was
sufficient manifestation of feeling throughout the
country to have made the funeral one of vast dimen
sions ; to avoid all appearance of an ostentation
always odious to him the place and day of the burial
�18
were kept private. Few even in Ecclefechan knew
them. Many were off installing a new minister in a
neighbouring village church. A red-coated fox hunt
was going on in fields near by. Only when the bell
began tolling did the inhabitants know of the hour.
With, exception of a few intimate friends who had
gone from London, and his relatives now far removed
in position from the circumstances amid which the
author was born, they who gathered around the
grave of Carlyle were mainly peasants. The public
school children gathered around the gates and on the
walls; the workpeople, chiefly youths, clung to the
iron railing of the enclosure. There was a profound
interest pictured on every face. An intense feeling
hushed the lowly groups who, amid the snow, with
heads uncovered, looked upon the wreath of flowers,
read the name and date, and perhaps realised that
here was one who with opportunities no better than
their own had won a high place in the heart and
honour of the world. Nay, with fewer advantages
than theirs, as they might be reminded by the bell
tolling from a School Board tower. There was no
such school in the days of Carlyle’s childhood.
And there they read the great man’s tribute to
his parents on their tomb—the words “gratefully
reverent of such a father and such a mother ”—and
learned that a man may depart from the creed of his
people, may leave behind their condition and their
�Wys, yet preserve the true heart of his early life, its
simplicity and humility. That grave will speak more
eloquently than the Kirk pulpit which could pronounce
HO benediction over it. An old peasant along the
road was heard to say to another, “ What a pity yon
man was an infidel! ” The two shook their heads
over their greatest countryman. Alas, how little
they knew of fidelity who could think of that life as
infidelity ! But their children will learn more from
that profound silence amid which the thinker was
laid to rest. They will know that the greatest man
that ever grew up there was one who had no part nor
lot in the dogmas taught them. No dogmatic tree
ever produced such fruits !
The lowly conditions of Carlyle’s early life,—the
pedestal that raises him in honour,—did also, as I
think, influence his teachings. He knew too much
of the poor, their ignorance and superstition, to
believe that their suffrage should be trusted in
government. At the same time he knew too much
of the nobility, gentry and parsons round about to
believe that their suffrage was much better. So he
came to his passionate worship of heroes, and
pursued his life-long dream of a time when they
Would take the place of nobles without nobility, and
of kings whose crowns were baubles. The milen
nial prophecy which the lad heard at Kirk—Christ
on the throne, Satan chained in the pit—became to
�20
the man a vision of the latter day, when the wisest
man should be king, and the worst man bound
down. But this thinker, who so resisted democracy,
has shown his faith m the fundamental worth of
the common people by the enthusiasm with which
he paid homage to the heroes sprung from them. He
wrote the life of Schiller, whose mother was a
baker s daughter ; he admired Richter, whose father
was a poor under-schoolmaster, and his mother a
weaver’s daughter; Paul Heyne in that “poor Chemnitz
hovel, with its unresting loom and cheerless hearth,
its squalor and devotion, its affection and repining;
and the fire of natural genius struggling into flame
amid such incumbrances, in an atmosphere so damp
and close.” Luther, the worker in iron; Dr. Johnson,
whom he calls “ the born king, likewise a born
slave ;” Robert Burns, in whom he saw “ the noblest
and ablest man in all the British lands,” holding the*
plough with hand worthy to sway the sceptre; these
were his heroes,—these his kings.
Their high
authority lay not in lineage, but in that divine right
of genius which had raised a lowly Nazareue to be
lord over kings. Very few of his worshipful heroes
were men of what is called high birth. Such was
this anti-democrat’s tribute to the masses. He
sometimes idealised men emerged from them; and
seemed hardly to do justice to the happier conditions
of life. Many men have utilised early advantages
�for great service to the common people,—John Knox,
for instance, and Cromwell, Voltaire, Washington.
Nevertheless, there is no nobler sight than the
steady victory of intellect, character, energy over
the obstacles which paralyse so many, and no epic
Carlyle wrote is grander than the epic that he lived.
Between that small room where Carlyle first saw
the light, and that smaller grave which hides bim
from the light, it is hardly a hundred steps: yet
what a Life-pilgrimage lies between those terms !
what stretches of noble years, of immense labours,
of invincible days rising from weary nights, mark
the fourscore years and five that led from the stone
mason’s threshold to a hero’s tomb 1
What could his parents give him ? An ever
present sense of an invisible world, of which this life
is the threshold,—a world of transcendant joys
marking the crown which the universe prepares for
virtue, with an underside of unspeakable pains which
mark the eternal brand fixed on evil-doing. Of this
world they could teach him little, only that it was a
place of brief probation by suffering and self-denial.
For the rest they can only send him to a poor little
school hard by. It, and Ecclefechan influences
generally, are travestied in the experiences of Herr
Teufelsdrockh in his native “Entepfuhl.” “ Of the
insignificant portion of my education which depended
on schools,” he says, “there need almost no notice
�22
be taken. I learned what others learn; and kept it
stored by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet no
manner of use in it. My schoolmaster, a downbent,
brokenhearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that
guild are, did little for me, except discover that he
could do little.” This poor schoolmaster pronounced
his pupil fit for one of the learned professions. That
meant the ministry. So the father must toil more,
and the mother save more, that Thomas may go to
the University and become a preacher.
But, meanwhile, there is another university than
that at Edinboro’, and little Thomas is already
studying in it more deeply than pedagogue or parent
suspects. That university is the universe itself, and
little by little he finds that Ecclefechan is a centre
of it. The little burn runs before the door ; as he
wades in it the brook whispers of its course as it
passes on to the river, on to the sea, out into the
universe. The swallows come from afar—from
Africa and other regions—to nestle in the eaves of
the house. The stage coach, as it comes and departs,
becomes mystical to the lad when he learns that it
connects the village with distant cities, and is weaving
human habitations together like a shuttle. The
village road leads to the end of the world.
But he is yet a little boy when he thus begins to
learn the alphabet and primer of nature and of this
world. With the invisible universe he is supposed
�to be familiar: the most ignorant Ecclefechan
peasant has explored God, Heaven and Hell; and
the cleverest lad among them is yet too young at
fourteen to make the discovery that such familiarity
with the invisible world is only another name for
total ignorance of that and this too. So the boy
takes his first step towards the pulpit: he is sent at
fourteen to the university. But there every step he
takes is away from the pulpit; unconsciously for a
long time, but with painful consciousness in the end.
To him, as to so many, that tragical experience had
to come of parting from the faith of father and
mother, and with it smiting the hearts he most
loved. It was the darkest day of that man’s life
when the hour came, so proudly anticipated by his
parents, when, with the high reputation he had
already gained, he should enter upon that ministerial
work which to them represented all that was glorious
on earth; and when, as that hour came, he confessed
to himself that he had no belief in what he was
expected to preach ; that he could never, with any
honesty of mind, enter the pulpit. This, then, was
the blighting end of all the hopes that had glorified
that little village home! This, then, was the only
payment he could make to his dear ones for the toils,
sacrifices, stintings his education had cost them!
And with what prospect to himself? What work
and what fate was there for a young heretic in
�24
Scotland seventy years ago ? He had no means ; he
certainly conld not depend on others. He tries
school teaching, bnt that is not his vocation, so is
not an honest one. He studies law, but finds that
even less to be his true work. He longs for action ;
but there is no post he can occupy, no work that
summons him, save only to be a writer of books.
But even for that he is hardly prepared. His ideal
of a book is very high. Only “ once in the two
centuries or often er there is a man gifted ” to write
a real book, he somewhere says. The true book is
ever the Word made flesh to dwell among us and
reflect a divine glory on rhe world. Carlyle’s youth
had passed and left the strong man still struggling
with cares and doubts—the great mind filled with
those “blank misgivings of a creature moving about
in worlds unrealised.”
The eagle poises long ere it swoops down, like
swift lightning, on its prize. This eye sun-kindled
is also sun-dazzled as its search first turns earthward
to find that which shall nourish the mighty heart
winged for daring flight. From that painful suspense
and long pause, when,—supporting himself by writing
cyclopaedic articles, mathematical treatises, and the
like,—Carlyle was more really eating his heart and
awaiting the opportunity of his genius,—there came
a sorrowful poem. It is one of the two or three
rhymed pieces he ever wrote, though the poetic
�25
faculty was supreme in him, transfering all his
work; the prophet’s burden on him was too painful
for his genius to rise into song. It is the ‘ Tragedy of
the Night-Moth,’ As the lonely scholar, daring great
things, reads Goethe’s mystic page, a bright-winged
moth flits in from the darkness: the tiny fire-worship
per circles around the candle, then darts into the
flame, and—puff!—the moth is dead!
“ Poor moth ! near weeping I lament thee,
Thy glossy form, thy instant woe ;
’Twas zeal for things too high that sent thee
From cheery earth to shades below.
“ Short speck of boundless space was needed
For home, for kingdom, world to thee !
Where passed unheeding as unheeded,
Thy slender life from sorrow free.
“ But syren hopes from out thy dwelling,
Enticed thee, bade thee earth explore,—
Thy frame, so late with rapture swelling,
Is swept from earth for evermore !
“ Poor moth ! thy fate my own resembles :
Me, too, a restless asking mind,
Hath sent on far and weary rambles
To seek the good I ne’er shall find.
“ Like thee, with common lot contented,
With humble joys and vulgar fate,
I might have lived and ne’er lamented,
Moth of a larger size, a longer date !
�26
“ But Nature’s majesty unveiling.
What seemed her wildest, grandest charms,
Eternal Truth and Beauty hailing,
Like thee I rushed into her arms.
“ What gained we, little moth ? thy ashes,
Thy one brief parting pang may show :
And withering thoughts for soul that dashes
From deep to deep, are but a death more slow.”
Hither, then, that village road which leads to the
end of the world had brought this pilgrim. When
he started out that world-end seemed to be ministry
in the Scotch Church. He toiled to that height and
found it a mere hillock,—many summits rising beyond
that. Other seeming mountains also turned to hills
beneath his ascending steps, until at last he came to
the highest, the ruggedest of all,—the soaring
summit of his own ideal.
But as he was climbing that stony mountain path,
with feet lacerated at every step, lo, a new light
shines around, a warm glow beneath which the path
is fringed with flowers. Woman’s love has come to
his side, taken his hand, looked deeply into his eye :
thenceforward no more is he to journey alone, or un
sustained, until that dark day, forty years later,
when she who had irradiated his home expired, and
he wrote on her grave that the light of his life was
gone out.
Bright and beautiful was that presence which was
�21
with the scholar when, amid as bleak and lonely a
region as eye can rest on, he undertook his life-task.
Along the fifteen miles of country road leading to that
solitude called Craigenputtock, their first home, one
passes a few spots which recall the influences under
which the Scottish child is brought up. One may pass
from the monument of Burns, at Dumfries, showing
the muse touching the youth on the shoulder as he
holds the plough; a few miles further, one may
pause at the grave of “ Old Mortality,” who passed
his time deciphering mossy inscriptions on tombs;
and near by may read the inscription which Walter
Scott wrote on the tomb he raised over Helen Walker,
whom he immortalised under the name of Jeannie
Deans—the girl who would not tell an untruth to
save her sister’s life, but did journey on foot to Lon
don, and saved her at last. The inscription says—
“ Respect the grave of poverty when combined with
love of truth and dear affection.” And that admoni
tion the pilgrim may well bear with him to the far
home amid the moors, where the same unswerving
veracity, combined with dear affection, took root and
sent their rich fruitage through the world of litera
ture.
For a long time there was poverty. His ideal was
too high for the world to care for it just then; yet
as he said, “ Experience charges dreadfully high
wages, but she teaches as none other.” He gathered
�28
richest invisible harvests from those dreary moors.
There was plain living and high thinking, and gradu
ally health came back.
Here, at Craigenputtock, Carlyle wrote “ Sartor
Eesartus.” He had written the “Life of Schiller,’’
but in “ Sartor Eesartus” he wrote his own spiritual
biography. It seemed at first a thankless task.
Publishers refused it. It lay silent for seven years,
and when it appeared by instalments in a magazine
the subscribers grumbled at it; but it found in
America one able to read in it the history of his own
spirit—the prophecy of a new life coming on all
souls. Ealph Waldo Emerson, who first collected
those papers, journeyed across the ocean that he
might grasp the hand and converse with the heart of
his intellectual brother. The last thing I ever heard
Carlyle say was, “ Give my love to Emerson. I still
think of his visit to me at Craigenputtock as the
most beautiful thing in my experience there.”
Carlyle was a great man to America before he was
known to his own country. He had even felt at one
time as if his destiny might lead to a residence in
America. He said to Edward Irving, “ I have the
ends of my thoughts to bring together, which no one
can do in this thoughtless scene. I have my views
of life to reform, and the whole plan of my conduct
to remodel; and withal I have my health to recover.
And then once more I shall venture my bark upon
�29
the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot
weather it, I shall steer west and try the waters of
another world.”
So he said when he was 25 years of age. But he
presently recognised the meaning of what Goethe
said to a youth who talked of going to the New
World,—-“Your America is here, or nowhere.”
London summoned him from his lonely hills. He
fixed his home here, and for more than a generation
lived and taught in a way that left London no need
to envy Athens with her Socrates. Socrates never
more resolutely exposed the shams of Athens. They
gave him poison. They began giving Carlyle critical
poison; but he outlived it and his critics; and
finally the throne offered him its Grand Cross of
Bath. He had not worked for such wages, however,
and Majesty’s gift was declined with thanks. It is
a pity he did not at least visit America, as he had
intended. He would have understood better the
depth and significance of that long struggle, culmi
nating in civil war, by which the Republic emanci
pated itself by setting free those enslaved within its
borders. During that struggle his voice was heard
on the wrong side ; but some years ago a lady whose
son had fallen in that war, sent him the Harvard
Memorial: he read the book containing the record of
those young men who saved and liberated their
country, carefully; and when that lady came to see
�30
him personally, he took her hand and said, even with
tears, “ I was mistaken.”
Carlyle’s name, through this mistake, could be
quoted by the slaveholder, but never justly. The
man was never really on that side. The servitude in
which he believed was entirely ideal. To him the
ideal Society would be one in which the ignorance
should be directed by knowledge, unwisdom controlled
by wisdom, and the indolent find their truer happi
ness in obedience to the order of true and good
leaders. There was something of sweet old Scotch
simplicity in this dream of the patriarchal life he
had read of in the Bible, but it never existed in any
modern community. In his eagerness to believe that
such a Utopia of perfect subordination between the
higher and lower might be realised, he lent a too
ready ear to the fanciful pictures which southerners
personally drew for him of their pastoral life. I have
often heard him talk of that southern Arcadia,
which I, who was born there, knew to be a chaos.
But no man was more opposed to injustice and
■oppression where he recognised them ; and no man
would more have overwhelmed the actual vices and
brutalities of negro slavery, had he lived amid them,
than he who detested the last French empire, and
whose latest protest was against placing a memorial
of its fallen heir in Westminster Abbey.
Carlyle has been called a Worshipper of Force,—
�31
of physical force. That is a superficial judgment.
It was moral force that he reverenced in Cromwell,
and in other heroes. He sometimes found that he
had misjudged his man, and confessed it. He was
severe on Sir Robert Peel when that Minister was
-most powerful, but when he saw in him the courage
to redress a wrong he revoked his sentences. He
idealised Frederick the Great,—-the freethinking
king, the friend of Voltaire,—but as his biography
of that monarch proceeded he discovered that he was
no hero in a moral sense, and at the close of the
labours which gave the world that great historical
work, he said to Varnhagen von Euse,—“I have had
no satisfaction in it at all, only labour and sorrow.
What had I to do with your Frederick ? ” Carlyle
respected physical force as the means of moral force.
As he bowed reverently before the hard hand of the
labourer who was changing a bit of chaos, a clod intofruit,-—saw in it a sceptre nobler than that of sham
kings,—so did he see in an army fighting for a right
cause a great implement bringing order out of dis
order. But he never respected mere brute force.
The purest force worked in silence. He who poured,
scorn upon Louis Napoleon when he was the strongest
ruler in Europe, was prompt to defend Mazzini when
a powerless exile in England.
I have heard an anecdote that, in a circle where
the Duke of Wellington was severely criticised, some
�32
one ended all censures by saying—“ Wellington was
so great a man that I have forgotten his faults.” The
same may be trulier said of Carlyle. Whatever
faults he may have had will be speedily forgotten in
the memory of his great services and grand life. It
was natural that he should be misjudged, because of
his unique character, and the powerful individuality
which held him aloof from all parties and all move
ments. Popular movements no sooner make roads
than they begin to wear ruts, and then settle down into
the ruts hopelessly. The popular notion, for example,
of what a Republic is, has become as much a formula
as the monarchial form of government. But that
kind of political conventionalism may prove as ham
pering as any older system. When Carlyle had
theoretically melted all the chains of the Past in the
fires of his just heart and brain, the popular leaders
expected him to pour their molten strength into this
or that democratic mould. They who hailed his
iconoclasm were bitterly disappointed at his rejection
of their new schemes. But the thinker believed that
the universe had a scheme of its own—a scheme far
vaster than any shaped by chartist or democrat;
and he preserved a true freedom when he bade men
work at what was before them, trust that each
further day would bring the light and strength for
that day, and the fairer order eventually appear.
Of the like character was his religious position and
�influence. He was one of the most religious men
that ever lived. His life was a long self-sacrifice, a
never-failing charity, an unceasing worship. There
fore, it could not be contained in any creed. 11 To
what religion do I belong ? ” wrote Schiller; “ To
none thou could’st name. And wherefore to none ?
Because of my religion.” It was only the fervour of
Carlyle’s religion which led him to turn from the
Scotch Church with a breaking heart: it was that
which ignored each hallowed dome which shut out
the vault of heaven, and the higher vault of reason,
beneath which, to his last day, he knelt with wonder
and aspiration. He could not see in the Church
Articles thirty-nine pillars supporting the universe,
and each sect was to him only some umbrella which
its devotees mistook for the sky. Fifty-six years
ago Carlyle reminded the world that while super
stition might degrade the world freethought could
never harm religion. He then paid his homage to
the man whose memory was a red-spectre to Chris
tendom,—even to Voltaire; and, chiefly, as he said,
because Voltaire “gave the death-stab to modern
superstition.” “ That, with superstition, Religion is
also passing away, seems,” he continued, “ a still
more ungrounded fear. Religion cannot pass away.
The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of
the sky ; but the stars are there, and will re-appear.
. . . . Old Ludovicus Vives has a story of a
�34
down that killed his ass because it had drunk up
the moon, and he thought the world could ill spare
that luminary. Let us not imitate him ; let us not
slay a faithful servant who has carried us far. He
has not drunk the moon ; but only the reflection of
the moon in his own poor water-pail.”
The doctrines which Carlyle learned at his mother’s
knee, though outgrown, survive in slight expressions
of his later years; just as the dialect of Dumfries
shire has a scholarly survival in that style which so
puzzled his critics. An afterglow of Calvinism is in
his necessitarian philosophy, and he uses the meta
phors of Gehenna to burn up the incredible cant
about Hell. In the same way his far-reaching
humanity is sometimes expressed in phrases that
belong to a past age of conservatism. M. Taine, in
his “ History of English Literature,” says that in
reading Carlyle’s volumes “ we discover, at last, that
we are in the presence of a most extraordinary
animal, relic of a lost family, a sort of mastodon
fallen on a world not made for him; ” and we
“ dissect him with minute curiosity, telling ourselves
that we shall probably never find another like him.”
There is some truth in this, too. There are some
men whose greatness is largely in their adequacy
to shove the world on beyond even themselves.
'Wordsworth was such a man: he renewed in man
that love and feeling for nature which gave a poetic
�35
soul to science ; and science went on with that
impulse, leaving the poet still with his ritual in
Grasmere Church. Another Wordsworth, or any
great man of kindred genius, can hardly he produced
again. Another Carlyle has been rendered as improbable'
by the momentum with which thought speeds on
the rpad where his own spur started it. That, how
ever, is true only of what is most casual in the man,
most on the surface. The heart of Carlyle still beats
in all the best aspirations of our time. It will be a
longer time than we shall live to see ere mankind
approaches the banner of this leader, much less
passes it. If any one will read attentively his essay
entitled “ Characteristics,” written fifty-six years
ago, he will find there a spiritual prophecy which
every thinker risen since has confirmed either by
failure or fulfilment, and which still remains a
prophecy, nay, a pillar of fire for all faithful men and
women to follow. That great essay, which, flashing
across the sea, kindled a new beacon in New Eng
land, gathering about it a fraternity of the free, was
but half understood then, is not fully comprehended
now. It is the first statement of the Religion of
Humanity. When Byron and many another were
filling the air with wailings, or curses, this inspired
peasant announced the faith that would move on
unhasting, unresting as the stars undisturbed in
in their eternal calm by the rise or fall of empires,.
�36
or of temples, or of deities made by man in his own
image.
“The doom of the Old,” he declared, “has long
been pronounced and irrevocable; the Old has passed
away ; but, alas ! the New appears not in its stead ;
the Time is still in pangs of travail with the New.
Man has walked by the light of conflagrations, and
amid the sound of falling cities; and now there is
darkness and long watching till it be morning. . . .
Deep and sad as is our feeling that we stand in bodeful
Night; equally deep, indestructible is our assurance
that the Morning also will not fail. Nay, already, as
we look round, streaks of a dayspring are in the east;
it is dawning ; when the time shall be fulfilled it
will be day. The progress of man towards higher
and nobler Developments of whatever is highest and
noblest in him, lies not only prophesied to Faith, but
now written to the eye of Observation, so that he
who runs may read.”
“Everywhere the eternal fact begins again to be
recognised, that there is godlike in human affairs.
In all dialects, though but half articulately, this
high Gospel begins to be preached; 'Man is still
Man.’ ” “ He that has an eye and a heart can even
now say : why should I falter ? Light has come into
the world; to such as love Light, so as Light must
be loved, with a boundless all-doing, all-enduring
love. For the rest let that vain struggle to read
�the mystery of the Infinite cease to harass us . . .
4 Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might ’ . . Behind us, behind each one of us lie six
thousand years of human effort, human conquest;
before us is the boundless Time, with its uncreated
and unconquered Continents and Eldorados, which
we, even we, have to conquer and create : and from
the bosom of Eternity shine for us celestial guiding
stars.
My inheritance, how wide and fair !
Time is my fair seedfield, of Time I’m heir.”
More than fifty years of brave life, of unswerving
fidelity, of unfaltering pursuit of truth, on the part of
him who so wrote, followed that first sign of a religion
for time, for this world,—a religion turned from
metaphysics about the Infinite to seek and save man
from the evils that afflict and degrade him. And we
may say of him who awakened the generation of
which we are spiritual offspring, that he is indeed the
heir of Time. What he sowed in that unbounded
seedfield, Time will not suffer to perish. That high
influence,—raised by death above all that transiently
enveloped it,—that Spirit which as it came from
deeps of experience shall call to every Deep,—will
remain to do its work for evermore.
Farewell, great and faithful father ! We, thy
children, born of the light that lived in thine eyes,
�38
offspring of the fire in thy heart which burnt all
fetters, bid thee farewell, now that thy hands are
folded on thy breast. But we know thou wilt remain
still with uswe shall see thy strong hand at work
wherever shams and falsities are falling; and when
the night is upon us we will remember thy long watch
and look for the morning-star ; and when the dawn
comes it will reveal thy face, no more in pain, trans
figured in the triumph of thy truth; and thy name
enshrined in every heart that shall live to reap in joy
the harvest thou in tears didst sow 1
���
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thomas Carlyle: a memorial discourse delivered before the South Place Religious Society, February 13th 1881
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 38 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Printed by F.G. Hickson & Co., London. Includes following texts: reading from Ecclesiasticus, works of Thomas Carlyle, and two hymns. Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[South Place Chapel]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1881]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3350
Subject
The topic of the resource
Sermons
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Thomas Carlyle: a memorial discourse delivered before the South Place Religious Society, February 13th 1881), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Morris Tracts
Thomas Carlyle