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THE TRUE TEMPTATION
OF JESUS.
BY
PROFESSOR F. W. NEWMAN.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Sixpence.
�TURNBULL AND SPEARS; PRINTERS, EDINBURGH
�THE TBUE TEMPTATION OF JESUS.
VERY one who has opened the New Testament is
aware that in the first and third Gospel a
remarkable story is found (alluded to also in the
second Gospel) in which the devil is represented to
have assailed Jesus with three special temptations,
and to have been repelled by quotation of Old Testa
ment texts. That it is impossible to maintain the
literal truth of this account has been reluctantly con
ceded by writers, who, like the author of “ Ecce
Homo,” are wholly unconcerned to ascertain when,
where, by whom, and with what means of knowledge,
these narratives were penned. Those who desire to
save their credit, try to rid them of a damaging burden
by declaring this scene to be allegorical. No spectator
is pretended. The idea that Jesus communicated
such inward trials to his disciples is contrary to
everything which is reported concerning his char
acter: for he is everywhere represented as wholly
uncommunicative, self-contained, more or less
mysterious, and moving in a separate region of
thought and feeling from the disciples. Evidently
this story does but express the opinion of the first
Christians, while Jesus was as yet believed to be only
human, that he, as others, must have had a struggle
against temptations, and therefore, against the devil.
It is not here intended to point out what is plain of
itself, that none of the temptations are worthy of the
acumen attributed to the experienced and wily Satan;
E
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The True Temptation of fesus.
and are merely puerile in fiction, whether Jesus be
imagined as the Second Person of the Divine Trinity,
or merely as a great and holy, but human prophet.
Here I intend to give prominence to that which I
believe to be the fundamental trial of a religious
reformer, especially when he attains great ascendancy
and commands high veneration. But first I must
say, I shall be truly sorry, if any Trinitarian read
these pages, and find himself wounded. I do not
address him. I argue on the assumption that Jesus
was subject to human limitations like all the rest of
us, and that it is our duty to criticize him and the
story of him, if it be of sufficient importance.
AV hat are the temptations of the prophet, can be no
secret in the present day: we see them in the
ordinary life of the admired preacher. To be run
after by a multitude, to be ministered to by fascinated
ladies, to see grey-haired men submissively listening
and treasuring up words,—easily puffs a young
preacher into self-conceit. In one who has too much
strong sense to be drawn into light vanity, fresh and
fresh success inspires, first, the not unreasonable hope
or belief that he is fulfilling a great work, and is
chosen for it by God, (not for his own merit, but be
cause, if a work is to be done, some one must be
chosen for it); next, an undue confidence in the truth
and weight of his own utterances, an extravagant
conviction that whoever resists his word, impugns
God’s truth, and makes himself the enemy of God.
In the denunciations of Luther against Zuingle, his
own wiser and more temperate coadjutor, in the
vehemences of John Knox, in the cruelty of Calvin
to Servetus, we see variously developed the same
dangerous tendency. If we cast the eye eastward,
to more illiterate nations, to those accustomed to
revere the hermit and the semi-savage as akin to the
prophet, to peoples whose homage expresses itself by
prostration, we see the tendency of the prophet to
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
7
assume a regal and dictatorial mien even in the garb
of a half naked Bedouin. Many an eastern monk or
prophet, Syrian, Persian, or Indian, has been obeyed
as a prince; some have been attended on by large
armies : to some the native king has paid solemn
obeisance. In ancient Greece, where philosophy
overtopped religion, ascetic philosophers have been
accepted as plenipotentiary legislators; in which, no
doubt, we see portrayed, on a small scale, the legis
lative influence of a Buddha, a Confucius, or a
Zoroaster. When an Indian prophet found it natural
for multitudes to kneel to him or to prostrate them
selves, how hard must it have been to accept such
homage and retain a sense of human equality! how
hard not to think it reasonable that others bow down,
and unreasonable that any stand up and argue with
the prophet as his equal!
In the Gospels and Acts the habit of prostration
among these nations is sufficiently indicated; and we
see how it is resented (according to the narrative) by
Peter. When Cornelius falls at Peter’s feet and does
homage (certainly intending respect only, not divine
worship), Peter regards it. as quite unbecoming from
a man to a man. But Jesus is represented as accept
ing such homage without the least hesitation, and
apparently with approval. The cases are not few,
nor confined to any one narrative. Matt. viii. 2,
“ There came a leper and worshipped him.” Matt,
ix. 18, “There came a certain ruler and worshipped
him.” Matth. xiv. 33, “ They worshipped him, say
ing, Of a truth thou art the [or a] Son of God.”
Matt. xv. 25, “Then came the woman and
worshipped him, saying, Lord! help me.” On this
Jesus comments approvingly, “ 0 woman, great is
thy faith.” Matt. xvii. 14, “There came a certain
man, kneeling down to him and saying, Lord ! have
mercy on my son ! ” Matt. xx. 20, “ There came
the mother of Zebedee’s children, worshipping him,”
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The True Temptation of fesus.
Matt, xxviii. 9, “ They held him by the feet and wor
shipped him—this is after the resurrection, thereby
differing in kind from the rest. The same remark
applies to verse 17. We have substantially the same
fact in Mark i. 40; v. 6, 22, 33 ; vii. 25 ; x. 17. In
the last passage the rich young man kneels to Jesus: he
was not so represented in Matt. xix. 6. Luke v. 8,
“ Simon Peter fell down at Jesus’ knees.” Luke v.
12, “A man full of leprosy fell on his face, and be
sought Jesus.” In Luke vii. an account is given,
perhaps not at all authentic. A woman is repre
sented to bathe the feet of Jesus with her tears, and
wipe them dry with her long hair, and after that,
anoint them with ointment and kiss his feet inces
santly. Jesus, according to the narrative, highly
applauds her conduct, and avows that “ therefore,, her
sins, which are many, are forgiven.” Such conduct
on his part is far above criticism, if he was either a
person of the Divine Trinity, or a superhuman being,
who existed before all worlds and all angels, being
himself the beginning of the creation of God. I can
not doubt that the writer, called Luke, believed Jesus
to be superhuman, and therefore found no impro
priety in the conduct here imputed to him; but I
do not understand how any one who regards him as
a human being, can fail to censure him in the
strongest terms, if he believe this account. As I see
special grounds for doubting it, (inasmuch as it looks
like a re-making of the story reported in Matt,
xxvi. 6-13, which it exaggerates), I lay no stress upon
it: but even in that other account there is a selfcomplacency hardly commendable in a mere man.
Again, in Luke viii. 20, we read, “the woman fell
down before him.” She does not fall down in
Matt. ix. 22; therefore, here also the story may
have been “ improved ” by credulity. But it is need
less to follow this topic further. Suffice it to say,
that though we do not know exactly how much to
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
9
believe, though we have frequent reason to suspect
exaggeration, yet the narratives all consistently
represent Jesus to have received complacently an
unmanly and degrading submission from his followers,
such as no apostle would have endured for a moment;
and it is hard to believe that such reports could have
gained currency, with no foundation at all. If, there
fore, we are to criticize Jesus on the belief that he
was man, and not God, nor a superhuman spirit, we
must admit, I think, that a real and dangerous
temptation beset him in this matter. He was prone
to take pleasure in seeing men and women profound
in their obeisance, prostrate in mind and soul before
his superior greatness ;—for prostration of the body
brings satisfaction to pride, only as it denotes
prostration of soul. It is difficult, with these narra
tives before us, to think that Jesus took to himself
that precept which Peter gives to the elders, that
they be not lords over God’s heritage, but be subject
one to another, and clothed with humility, that they
may be ensamples to the flock. Indeed, unless we
utterly throw away all the narratives, it is hardly too
much to say, that this is the very opposite to the
portrait of Jesus. If we will accept the theory that
he was superhuman, we can justify his immeasurable
assumption of superiority; but the fact remains, that
in places, too many to reject, he puts himself forward
as “ lord over God’s heritage.”
Two classes of facts, presented in the narratives,
must be carefully separated. The former is the
general superiority asserted by Jesus for himself;
the latter, is the special assumption of Messianic dig
nity. On the latter, there is notoriously an irrecon
cilable diversity of the fourth gospel from the rest.
The writer of the fourth, unquestionably ascribing to
Jesus pre-existence with God in some mysterious
way, and sonship in a sense perfectly unique, repre
sents his Messiahship as notorious to John the
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The True Temptation of^Jesus.
Baptist, to Andrew and Philip, from the very begin
ning, says it was avowed by Nathanael (whoever
this was), and preached by Jesus to Nicodemus
and to the woman of Samaria. All this is in so
flat contradiction to the three first gospels, that
nothing historical can be made out of the account;
and in trying to attain a true picture of Jesus, I
necessarily set aside the fourth gospel as a mischie
vous romance.—Nevertheless, the element which I
call an assumption of general superiority, is as com
plete and persistent in the three first gospels as in
the fourth.
Keshub Chunder Sen entitles it “ a sublime
egotism” in Jesus, to say, “Come unto me, and I
will give you rest: take my yoke upon you, and
learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in spirit.”
Yet if Luther, or John Knox, or Wesley had said it,
we should adduce it in proof that he was eminently
lacking in that very grace,—lowliness of spirit,—for
which he was commending himself. But is this the
only egotism ascribed to him in Matthew ? Nay,
but in the celebrated beatitudes of the sermon on
the Mount, which some esteem the choice flower and
prime of the precepts of Jesus, he winds up with,
“ Blessed are ye when men shall speak evil against
you falsely for my sake.” He does not say “for
righteousness’ sake,” if the narrative can be trusted.
The discourse continues like itself to the end, for in
the close he says : “ Many shall say to me in that
day, Lord ! Lord ! have we not prophesied in thy
name, .... and then will I profess unto them, I
never knew you : depart from me, ye that work
iniquity.” This is, it may be said, a very energetic
way of declaring, that no pretence of following in his
train as a prophet could compensate for personal
iniquity. As such we may accept it: but it remains
clear, that he is claiming for himself a position
above the human; such as no beauty or truth of teach-
�The True Temptation of fesus.
11
ing could ever commend, as rightful from men to a
man, to the conscience of those reared in the schools
of modern science : while of course, if he claimed to
be higher than man, the first reasonable necessity,
and therefore his first duty, was to exhibit the
proofs of supernatural knowledge and authority.
Undoubtedly, the alternative lies open of disbelieving
the Evangelist. It may be urged, that the text
represents Jesus as also saying that in his name
they will claim to have cast out devils and done
many wonderful works; but that this is an exaggera
tion belonging to a later time, and so therefore
may the pretensions be, with which it is coupled.
Well; so be it: let us then look further.
According to Matt. ix. 6, Jesus claimed power
to forgive sin ; he brought on himself rebuke for it,
but proceeded to justify himself by working a miracle.
Whence did his disciples get the idea of his advancing
such extravagances, if really he did not go farther
than his disciples James and John? Presently after,
he is represented as preaching that he is the bride
groom of the Church, in whose presence the disciples
cannot mourn, and therefore ought not to fast; but
that when he is taken away, then they will fast.
How very peculiar and strange a sentiment to invent
for him, if it was not uttered ! Does it not rather
seem to have the stamp of individualism and truth,
thoroughly as it is in harmony with the tales of his
rejoicing to see men and women kneel before him ?
Next when Jesus sends out twelve disciples to say,
“ The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” he is repre
sented to assert, that it shall be more tolerable for
Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than
for the house or city which has not received his
messenger. Surely, if any one were now to knock
at our house door with such a formula of words, and
on the strength of it expect to be accepted with the
honours of a prophet, only the weak-minded would
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The True Temptation of Jesus.
give him pleasant reception. Yet no ground what
ever appears for believing that there was anything
•to accredit such messengers then, any more than now :
certainly nothing more appears in the narrative,
which quite consistently everywhere holds, that
Jesus regarded the non-reception of his messengers as
a super-eminent guilt, merely because it was he who
sent them.
When it is added, “ ye shall be hated of all men
for my name's sake," we are perhaps justified in
esteeming that prediction as an after-invention of
popular credulity. But in the same discourse (Matt,
x. 23) we alight for the first time on the remarkable
phrase, “ The Son of Man,” afterwards indisputably
applied by Jesus to himself. “ Ye shall not have
gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man
he come.” No one but Jesus himself ever calls him
the Son of Man. Whatever he then meant, the
book puts into his mouth yet more of sublime
•egotism. “Whosoever shall confess me before men,”
x(says he), “ him will I confess before my Father which
is in heaven : but whosoever shall deny me before
men, him will I also deny before my Father which is
heaven. He that loseth his life for my sake shall
find it. He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he
that receiveth me, receiveth Him that sent me.”
Certainly, when we begin to pare down these utter
ances, and try to reduce them to something that
would not be highly offensive in James or Paul, we
seem in danger of cutting away so much that is
characteristic, as to impair all confidence in what
remains. But unless we are bound to reject the
pervading colour of the narrative, I feel it not too
much to say, that in a mere man, the self-exaltation
approaches to impiety. What can it concern any
of us, that his brother-man should “deny him” before
our common Father? How suddenly would the
honour which we felt for a preacher be turned into
�The True Temptation of fesus.
13
grief and disappointment, or even indignation, if
we heard him to say, “ Blessed is he, whoever shall
not be offended in me!” He would fall in our
esteem, from the highest pinnacle to a very low
place, nor could any pretence of “ sublime egotism ”
save him.
In the same chapter in which the last words occur
(Matt, xi.) the Evangelist goes on into language not
dissimilar to that of the fourth gospel. “ All things
are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man
knoweth the Son but the Father: neither knoweth
any man the Father save the Son; and he to whom
soever the Son will reveal him.” When it is
considered that, although the nucleus of this gospel
probably existed before the first century was ended,
we have absolutely no guarantee that the text was
finally settled, as we now have it, much before the
time of Irenaeus, toward the close of the second
century; no one has a right to be very confident that
this passage, so strongly smacking of the doctrines
which won ascendancy in that century, was not intro
duced at a later time. Perhaps the more reasonable
course here, is to strike out verse 27, (about the Son
and the Father) as foisted upon Jesus by a later
generation. What then shall be said of the words
which follow, already quoted, “ Come unto me, take
my yoke on you, and I will give you rest?” I can
accept them, if he is God, or a pre-existing Mighty
Spirit. I cannot accept them if he was only man : I
then do not entitle them sublime at all, but some
thing else.
Something or other to the same effect is for ever
cropping up in this narrative of Matthew, which I
purposely take as giving a more human representation
of Jesus than Luke or J ohn. He is presently reported
to say (Matt. xii. 6), “ In this place is one greater
than the temple............... the Son of Man is Lord even
of the Sabbath day.” Unless his words have been
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The True Temptation of fesus.
monstrously distorted, he intended to assert that he
was himself the Son of Man spoken of by Daniel the
Prophet, that he was personally greater than the
temple, and was Lord even of the Sabbath-day.
Will any one say, that Jesus merely claimed the
right possessed by every man to interpret the law of
the Sabbath by the dictates of good sense, and that
he regarded every pious man as greater than a temple
built of stone; and that the egotistic form of his
utterance was an accident ? In that case it certainly
was a highly unfortunate accident, and we may add, an
accident often repeated, which generated in his dis
ciples a veneration for him too great for humanity.
But accident so systematic is surely no accident at
all. If a good man who makes no pretensions is
worshipped as a god after his death, he is guiltless :
but if a man be worshipped as a god, who has
made enormous personal pretensions,—and if a
decisive weight in the argument for worshipping
him is, that he has left us no choice between
worship and reprobation, can one who regards
the superhuman claims untenable, doubt that self
exaltation and monstrous vanity was a deplorable
foible in the prophet ? I find only two ways of
avoiding the disagreeable inference : (1), by the
theory of Paul, or some higher theory; (2.) by so
rejecting all our accounts of his doctrine and miracles
alike as untrustworthy, that nothing is left us to
trust at all, nothing on which a faithful picture of
Jesus can be founded.
From beginning to end the narrative has but one
colour as regards the self-exaltation of Jesus. Matt,
xii., “Behold! a greater than Solomon is here.”
Matt, xiii., “ Many prophets and righteous men have
desired to see the things which ye see, and hear the
things which ye hear. Blessed are your eyes, for
they see; and your ears, for they hear.” And what
was this so precious instruction ? the Parable of the
�The True Temptation of'Jesus.
15
Sower ! Surely no sober-minded person can esteem
this so highly above all the teaching of Hebrew
sages.
But I pass to a new topic in the sixteenth chapter
of Matthew,—the anger of Jesus, when he is asked
for a sign from heaven. He replies by calling the
persons who asked him hypocrites, when evidently,
according to the notions of that age and nation, it
was a most reasonable and proper request. In fact,
the narratives elsewhere represent him as giving
them miraculous signs, which are signs from heaven,
in abundance; insomuch that, if he had been repre
sented as here appealing to these signs, and alleging
that these very persons had already witnessed them
plentifully, his imputation of hypocrisy might have
seemed natural. But that is not his line of argument.
He says : “ A wicked, and adulterous generation seeketh
after a sign,” as though the desire itself were wicked
ness, “ and there shall no sign be given unto it, but
the sign of the prophet Jonas.” And he left them
and departed. Such words refuse a sign not to the
individual only, but to the generation. Are we then
to believe that he consistently repudiated all pretence
of working miracle ? that he esteemed the desire of
seeing a miracle wrought, in confirmation of his pre
eminent claims, to be such a fatuous absurdity, that
he had a right to heap contumelious epithets on the
head of any one who asked for it ? In favour of
this opinion, appeal may be made to the epistles of
Paul, who does not betray any knowledge whatever
that Jesus had wrought miracles. Let us tentatively
adopt this view. Then, first, what a heap of gross
misrepresentation is put before us in all four narratives
if Jesus not only never affected to work miracles,
but even vehemently flouted the idea itself and
rebuked those who desired it. Next, it will follow
that no justification of his high pretensions was
even attempted by him, and therefore no denuncia-
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The True Temptation of Jesus.
tion of men for neglect of him was reasonable. It
follows that those resolved to justify him must cut
out all his denunciations likewise. Who will write
for us an expurgated gospel, to let us know what
was the true Jesus ? Who will convince us, that
a history thus garbled can ever be truly recovered,
or deserves our intent study ?
In the same chapter of Matthew (the sixteenth)
the momentous question is proposed to his disciples,
“ Whom say ye that I am ']'” According to the
narrative, he first gave them the hint, what to reply,
by a leading question, “ Whom do men say that I, the
Son of Man, am ? ” but perhaps that is only a stupid
exaggeration of the narrator, who did not see what
it would imply. Let us then drop this portion of the
words.
He feels his way cautiously with the
disciples, and sounds them. Simon Peter replies,
“ Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Again I ask, Is this narrative grossly and delusively
false ? or may we trust a vague outline ? According
to it, Jesus is lifted by the reply into a most exalted
state, “ Blessed art thou, Simon son of Jonas,” says
he, ££ for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto
thee, but my Father which is in heaven............... I
will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven*
and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven, .... &c.” After this outburst,
what is it that we read as a consequence ? “ Then
charged he his disciples that they should tell no man
that he was Jesus the Christ.”
It seems utterly irrational and unworthy alike of
* Any one who doubts whether Jesus ever uttered such
words, may fortify the doubt by opining that the words
have got into the gospel from Rev. iii. 7, where nevertheless
Jesus, so far from giving the “power of the keys ” to any
apostle, retains the power strictly in his own hand. The
words in Rev. iii. 7, are borrowed from Isaiah xxii. 22,
which have no reference to Messiah at all, according to any
scientific interpretation,
�The True Temptation of fetus.
17
the most High God and of his specially anointed
Prophet (if one special Prophet was indeed so
promised), that Messiah should come into his
nation,—should expect subjection of mind from all
around,—should haughtily evade, instead of enlight
ening, those who mildly inquired into his claims to
authority; finally, should sedulously preserve his
incognito, and forbid his disciples to tell that he was
Messiah. Men may be either convinced or com
manded. To convince them you must kindly and can
didly answer their difficulties, and allow them to argue
against you; you must meet their questions as plainly
and honestly as possible, not browbeat or threaten
the interrogators, nor marvel over their unbelief and
stupidity. You must descend in the argument on
to a perfect level with the man whom you desire to
convince, and entirely lay aside all airs of authority,
even if you have authority. That is one course of
proceeding; but it is the very opposite of that
imputed to Jesus. But if men are to be commanded,
if submission is to be required of them, you must
make some display of power.* In that case you
seek to convince them, not that a precept is wise, or
a doctrine is true, but that you, its enunciator, have
a special right of dictation, drawing after it in the
hearer a special duty of submission. Of course, those
with whom the idea of miracles is inadmissible, do not
ask for signs from heaven; not the lessmustthey justify
the countrymen of Jesus in requiring from him some
credentials, when he claimed submission and used a
dictatorial tone. If the nation believed miracles to
be the marks of Messiah, and was in error, it
* Men of science appeal to power as an argument why
they should be believed, when want of leisure or talents
forbid the mastering of their arguments : thus Astronomers
appeal to their fore-knowledge of eclipses, and their power of
finding the longitude by their tables ; Electricians appeal to
the telegraph, and so on.
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The True Temptation of fesus.
belonged to Messiah to unteach them the error,
and, as one aware of their folly, to take precautions
lest miracles be imputed to him. Surely it was
quite unjustifiable, to require submission from Priests
and Pharisees, yet exhibit to them no credentials what
ever of the mighty function with which he was
invested. If words dropping from the mouth of
Messiah were divine commands, which it was impious
to dispute, nothing could supersede the public an
nunciation of his office, and the display of his
credentials, whatever they might be. No evasions
are here endurable, on the ground of the political
danger to be incurred, or the propriety of giving
insufficient proof in order to try people’s “ faith.”
To say that political danger forbade, is to say that
God sent Messiah insufficiently prepared for his work,
and afraid to assume His functions publicly. As to
trying “ faith ” by insufficient proof, nothing can be
less rightful or more pernicious. If the proof ad
duced be of the right kind and appropriate, it cannot
be excessive, but may be defective; and if defective,
it is a cruel trap, as if designed to lead honesty astray.
The only plausibility in this notion rises from con
fusion of truths which we ought to see by light from
within, with truths which can only be established
from without. No man can know by his inward
faculties that a Messiah is promised from heaven,
nor what will be the external marks of Messiah.
False Messiahs had already come. To accept lightly
any one as Messiah was the height of imprudence, and
certainly could not be commended as pious. Under
such circumstances, to dissemble Messiahship, and
work upon susceptible minds by giving them evidence
necessarily imperfect, was conduct rather to be
imputed to a devil, than to a prophet from God, if
done with serious intent. Those who defend it,
plead that the evidence was moral, and did not need
external proofs. If so, on the one hand full freedom
�The True Temptation of'Jesus.
19
of investigation was needed, not authority and brow
heating ; on the other, this alleges external proof to
be worse than superfluous,—to be in fact misleading;
so that to plead for its “ insufficiency” as a needful
trial of faith is a gross error. If external evidence
was wholly inappropriate, the producing of that
which you concede to be insufficient does but tend to
confuse ■ and mislead the simple-hearted, and cause
unbelief in the strong-headed. But if external evi
dence is admissible and appropriate at all for faith
to rest upon, then it ought to be in quantity and
quality sufficient to make the faith reasonable and
firm. If only internal light is to the purpose of
faith, and external evidence was not wanted for
Messiah, then neither was an authoritative Messiah
wanted at all; that is, a teacher to whom we should
submit without conviction; then it was right to
claim that Messiah would convince by argument and
reply to questions; would invite question or opposi
tion, not dictate and threaten; then we have to
sweep away the greater part of the four Gospels as a
false representation of Messiah. Whatever else may
have been true, one thing is certainly false;—that
God sent a special messenger to teach authoritatively,
and that the messenger thus sent forbade his disciples
to publish his character and claims.
From narratives so disfigured by false representa
tion, as every one is obliged to confess them, who
does not believe the miracles, and seeks to defend
Jesus by remoulding the accounts of Him ; how can
any one be blamed for despairing to arrive at accurate
and sound knowledge concerning his character and
teaching? What right has any one to expect to
recover lost history, or to think worse of his brother
if he regard the effort to be waste time ? Yet if I
were to say, I seem to myself to know nothing of Jesus,
I should speak untruly; for in the midst of the obscurity
and the inconsistencies of the narratives, there are
�20
’The True Temptation of Jesus.
some things unvarying, many things very hard to in
vent, and others unlikely to be invented, yet easily
admitting explanation, if we reason about Jesus as
we do about every other public teacher or reformer.
The details of doctrine are often untrustworthy, but
the current, the broad tendencies, the style and tone
of the teacher, seem to have made too strong an
impression to be lost, though round them has been
gathered a plentiful accretion of mistake and fable.
In outline we must say that the first peculiarity of the
preacher was, that he did not comment upon the law
and prophets, but spoke dictatorially, dogmatically,
as with authority—a thing quite right and proper,
while only moral truth is taught, which makes appeal
to the conscience of the hearer. But the Jews,
accustomed like the modern English to nothing but
comment and deduction from a sacred book, were
apt to enquire of Jesus by what right he spoke so
confidently, and paid so little deference to the learned.
On one occasion he is said to have given a very fair
reply, to the effect that they had listened to the
preaching of John the Baptist, without asking his
authority: “If John might preach to you dogmati
cally, why may not 12 ” was the substance of that
argument. But it is clear that, numbers of honest
sincere Jews, impressed by the moral weight in these
preachings, had begun to inquire whether this was
not a renewal of divine prophecy, whether divine
prophets must not have some recognizable note of
their mission, other than the influence of their doc
trine on the human conscience; whether, in fine,
Jesus might not be the expected Messiah. This was
a very anxious question, especially since delusive
Messiahs had appeared; but it was a question that
Jews were sure to make, and the three narratives
before us, defective as they are, persuade me that it •
was made, both in private talk, and in direct interro
gation to Jesus.
Now if we accept to the full the traditional Jewish
�The True Temptation of fesus.
21
belief of what Messiah was to be, (which falls short
of the dignity ascribed to him by Christians),
it is incredible that after commencing his public
functions he should remain ignorant of his being
Messiah, or need confirmation from his disciples or
from others. But if Jesus had little trust in learned
Rabbis or traditional doctrine, he may have had a
very vague and imperfect belief as to what Messiah
was to be; and the idea that he himself was Messiah
may not have at all occurred to him, until after he
had experienced the zeal of the multitude, and was
aware that a rumour was gone abroad among the
people, that “ a great prophet was arisen,” and that
some said he was the Messiah. Can any one study
his character as that of a man, subject to all human
limitations, and not see, that the question, “ Am I
then possibly the Messiah ?” if at all entertained,
instantly became one of extreme interest and anxiety
to Jesus himself? Indeed from the day that it
fixed itself upon him for permanent rumination his
character could not but lose its simplicity. Pre
viously he thought only, What doctrine is true
morality ? What are the crying sins of the day 2
But now his own personality, his own possible
dignity, became matters of inquiry ; and the inquiry
was a Biblical one. He was brought hereby on to
the area of the learned commentator, who studies
ancient books to find out what has been promised and
predicted about a Messiah. An unlearned carpenter,
however strong and clear-minded while dealing with a
purely moral question, was liable to lose all his super
iority and be hurtfully entangled when entering into
literary interpretation. Wholly to get rid of tradi
tional notions was impossible, yet enough of distrust
would remain, to embarrass fixed belief and produce
vacillation. Nothing is then more natural, than
that the teacher should desire to know what was the
general opinion concerning him, should be pleased
when it confirmed his rising hopes, should be elated
�22
The True Temptation of fetus,
when Simon Peter declared him to be Messiah, and
should bless his faith, even if not with the extrava
gance of giving him the keys of the kingdom of
heaven; finally, should be displeased with himself
-and frightened at his own elation, and, in order to
repair his error, should charge his disciples to tell
no one that he was Messiah; not that he desired to
keep the nation in ignorance, but because he was
himself conscious of uncertainty. After this his
conduct could not be straightforward and simple.
Such is the only reasonable interpretation which
I have ever been able to see, of this perplexed and
perplexing narrative, which is not likely to have
grown out of nothing. Jesus came into a false
position from that day, and of necessity (as I think)
his whole character must have changed for the worse.
Thenceforth, the dogmatism which had been a mere
form of teaching, and had involved arrogance only
in appearance, changed into definite and systematic
personal assumption. It is not likely that he began it
so early, or ever carried it so far, as even the narrative
of Matthew pretends; for as a caricaturist exag
gerates every peculiarity of a face, making its promi
nences more prominent, so does tradition deal with
the popular hero. I pretend not to know how much
is exactly true; but it comes before me as certain
fact, that the true temptation of Jesus was the
whisper made to him, “ Are not you possibly the
Messiah ?” and by it the legendary devil overcame
him. That whisper has cost to Europe an infinite
waste of mind and toil, no end of religious wars,
cruelties, injustices, anathemas, controversies, without
bringing any sure advance of religious truth to man
kind. How much more convulsion of hearts and
entanglement of intellects, how much of violent
political upturnings are inevitable, before European
nations can now become able to learn that to think
freely is a duty, and that religion is spiritual and
rational, not magical and supernatural ?
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The true temptation of Jesus
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Newman, Francis William [1805-1897.]
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Place of Publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 22, [2] p. : ill. (port.) ; 18 cm
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 4. The portrait is a photo that has been cut out and pasted to the title page. Publisher's list on unnumbered pages at the end. Date of publication from British Library catalogue.
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Thomas Scott
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[1871]
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G4858
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Jesus Christ
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Christianity-Controversial Literature
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ-Temptation
Morris Tracts
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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.
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Price 6d.
Questions to which the Orthodox are earnestly requested to give Answers
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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
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The spiritual serfdom of the laity
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Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
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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.
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Thomas Scott
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[1871]
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G4862
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Church of England
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Text
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English
Church of England
Laity
Morris Tracts
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Text
yVlUMAL
AND
‘ Read it again, and tell me, who was she ?’
‘Well, wines are best to drink where they are grown.
And tales to tell where they are old and known ;
But Mumal was a fair false sorceress,
Whose wiles brought half the East to nakedness,
Whom Mendra and the king set out to see.
Before hei’ house what seemed a river ran,
And here they met a crazy beggar man
Who said “ Ye soon shall be forlorn like me.”
The king turned back, the river ran too high :
Mendra went forward, and he found it dry.
He passed the roaring lions, made of stone,
The seven couches, where her shadows lie,
Who stretched to clasp him as he hurried by,
And found the couch where Mumal sat alone,
Too idle to do anything but love.
So he went back and made his boast thereof,
Nor showed her to the envious king, save he
Would serve them at their feast on bended knee :
Who paid the scorn with bonds, yet nightly freed
In the dear prison of her arms he slept
Till once he found not whom her sister kept.’
‘ And lost his faith, but not his love ; now read
In the seven-gated hold
Mendra sits, bound sevenfold
With the meshes of fine gold;
There they cast him to grow old.
And the hold hath seven eyes,
Where the king hath set his spies,
Set to spin the captive’s sighs
To a deadlier web of lies.
There when night is at the noon
Mendra wails beneath the moon.
1 Of. ‘Tuhfatu-1 Kiram’ in Sir H. Elliott’s History of India, voh i., pp. 345—341
and Captain Burton’s Sindh, pp. 114—125.
�MUMAL AND MENDRA.
‘ Where did she go when I could not follow?
Where is she gone whom. I held so dear ?
She is false and fair, and her heart is hollow;
I called her name and she did not hear.
If she had loved me she would have heard,
Though my voice were only the voice of a bird,
Singing far away as the flight of a swallow,
She would have heard me, called me to follow;
If she had loved me she would have heard.
Faster than any swallow can fly,
I came to her under the cloudy sky,
With neither moon nor stars above,
And never a guiding light but Love,
And the fleetest steed that would follow my track
Panting after me under the spur,
Should journey three days ere he turned back,
But I journeyed in three hours to her ;
And all my magic was only Love.
She taught me Love’s magic, I know it yet,
She taught me, and how could she forget ?
She could have heard me, I know, far away,
If she could not hear she had only to stay,
To stay for her love where the roses blow,
If she loved me, what ailed her to go ?’
In the garden at Mayapur,
Where the magic lions of Mumal roar,
Sitting alone on the magic bed,
Mumal also made moan, and said :
4 Seven weeks, and day by day,
I make the fountain of gladness play;
Seven weeks, and night by night,
I burn in my bower the lovers’ light;
Seven weeks, and I always wear
The lovers’ flower in my scented hair;
Seven weeks, and I wmtch and pray,
Saying, “Surely he comes to-day;” '
Seven weeks and he is away.
Is Mendra dead that he comes no more
To the garden of love at Mayapur ?
If he lives, he can come if he will,
Yet I know while he lives he loves me still.’
301
�302
MUMAL AND MENDRA.
Over against the prison tower,
Mumal hath spoken the word of power.
In heaven the Lord of lovers heard,
Before she spake it the mighty word,
And none of the seventy-seven spies
Beheld her palace of love arise :
But Mendra saw it with hungry eyes,
And he marvelled what Mumal came to do,
And he said, ‘ The false is seeking the true;’
And he waited a space while the palace grew
’Twixt the prison bars and the boundless blue.
When the palace builders went away,
Mumal stood at the window the livelong day.
Mendra looks forth every morn
To greet his love with a smile of scorn.
Mendra looks forth every eve
To see if his love still waits to grieve;
From morning to eve his curtains fall,
Lest his beloved, who loves him well,
Should see but his shadow upon the wall,
And all day the loveless laugh in hell,
To think that one night’s fickleness
Should have put hex' delight so far away,
That she might not find it in many years;
Though she never had loved her love the less
For the night that her sister made hei' stay.
But every morn and every even
Tears are shed in the lovers’ heaven,
And the tears of heaven are healing tears.
Over against the tower again
Mumal hath builded a palace of pain ;
She watches there as she watched before
To lure Mendra home unto Mayapur ;
And Mendra also will never miss
The exquisite pain, the shuddering bliss,
To sit in his chains and to know that a queen
Is pining to see him, and he unseen.
About the seven-gated hold
She builded her palaces seven fold ;
Seven moons she watched in each
To see her love and to hear his speech ;
�DRAWN DY E. F. CLARKE.
MUMA L AND MENDRA.
��MUMAL AND MENDRA.
All her reward was, morn by morn,
To know that he watched how she brooked his scorn ;
All her rest was to know at eve
He had known she was there to love and grieve ;
While he did not forget, though he did not forgive,
He loved her enough to help her to live.
But when six times seven moons were past,
And she entered the fairest palace and last;
She panted greatly in hope and fear,
Saying, ‘ I have done and the end is near;
Will Love accept of me even yet ?
I have been patient and sorely tried,
There is only one night for Love to forget,
Only one little stain for Love to hide,
When he wraps me up into the light at his side.
0 Love, accept of me even yet,
For the tears wherein I am purified.’
And the Lord of death who is Lord of love,
Who is over and under the souls of all,
Considered her voice when he heard her call:
And he strengthened her out of his house above.
And she walked to the window with steady pace,
And she looked her last with a quiet face.
She looked forth into the dewy dawn,
And already the curtains of black were drawn ;
She looked again through the noon-day skies,
And the sable curtains did not rise;
She watched till she saw the golden moon,
And the curtains were drawn as at morn and noon,,
‘ 0 love, there is nothing to see,’ she said,
‘ 0 love, you will have me cover my head;
If love hideth himself what is left to see,
Though I hide myself love shall discover me,
Love shall behold me, and only he,
0 love, there is nothing to do,’ she said,
And she bowed to her love, and she was dead.
And because of the love that had made them one,.
Binding their souls in a band for ever,
That either might tangle, but never sever,
He understood that her watch was done,
303
�304
MUMAL AND MENDRA.
That she had forgotten that love was pain,
In the land of the Lord who makes all things plain,
And he said, ‘ She is gone where I must follow,
She will guide me now, for she holds me dear,
To the land beyond the flight of the swallow,
To the far-off land that is always near.’
Now the spies had said, ‘ 0 king, we see
No sin in Mendra concerning thee;’
So the king commanded to set him free.
But ere they came to his release,
He also had entered into peace.
Long ago, and long ago,
Mumal and Mendra ceased from woe,
In the land where seven rivers flow,
Yet they, whose hearts are molten in one,
By the fire that burns beyond the sun,
Thank the Lord of lovers unto this day
For Mumal’s and Mendra’s love, and pray
To the Lord, who healed the pain and strife,
They had while they sought to the Lord of-life,
Crying out, with short ecstatic breath,
To the Lord of love, who is Lord of death,
Laughing at life which is hard and hollow,
Till out of the prison of hope and fear
The fluttering spirit is free to followr
To the far-off land that is alwTays near.
G. A. Simcox.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Mumal and mendra: a legend of Scinde
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Simcox, George Augustus
Clarke, E.F. (ill)
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 300-304 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (November 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873. Drawing by R.F. Clarke, engraved by C.M. Jenkin. Mumal and Mendra is a mythical love story in ancient Indian history.
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[s.n.]
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[1871]
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G5336
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Poetry
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<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 (Mumal and mendra: a legend of Scinde), 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>
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Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
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Text
ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
BY THE LATE
EEV. JAMES CRANBROOK,
EDINBURGH.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Threepence.
��ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
-----------------PURPOSE this evening to discourse to you upon
“The Formation of Religious Opinions.” The
subject is closely connected with, and arises out of
what I was saying last Sunday evening. I shall
therefore quote the same passage as a text, 1 Cor. x.
15, “I speak as unto wise men; judge ye what I say.”
But what I aim at to-night is to make some practical
observations that I think we are too apt to lose sight
of. Indeed, people seldom follow any principle or
rule in forming their opinions upon questions of
religion. They pick them up at hap-hazard; or
simply retain what they had been taught in their
youth. And even where they come to a resolution to
investigate the subject, and form a judgment for
themselves, they seldom go about it systematically.
One person recommends this book, another person
recommends that book. They read them, and adopt
the opinions which seem the more probable, or to
which particular circumstances incline them. But it
is very seldom they can give you a reason which will
bear strict scrutiny and investigation why they have
chosen one opinion rather than another.
The general spirit of one’s culture and mental
character has more to do with the adoption of
opinions in the majority of cases than anything else.
I
�4
The Formation of
Some men are naturally very narrow-minded, and the
education they have received has not tended to cor
rect the narrowness. They will incline, therefore, to
whatever is. narrow and bigoted. Others, again, are
generous, liberal, and free: whatever partakes of
their own generosity, liberality, and freedom will
therefore seem to them to have a preponderance of
evidence on its side. Some are learned in ancient
literature, and have thoroughly imbibed its spirit.
What harmonises with this will seem to them as
true. Others are addicted to metaphysical specula
tions, and can only discern truth in what presents
itself under the formulae sanctioned by their school.
Whilst others have the purely scientific spirit, and
require all religious opinions before they accept them
to be subjected to the tests of their special methods.
And thus it is each one has certain predilections
which very materially influence him when he thinks
about religious questions and endeavours to make
up his mind as to what is true. They look at
the questions subjectively, rather than objec
tively—study them in relation to their own
thoughts and feelings rather than as they are in
themselves, and resting on evidence which needs to
be examined simply according to its own merits.
And this will be the case with a large number for a
long time to come.
To form an independent rational opinion upon
any subject affecting the higher interests of life re
quires an amount of training and leisure few possess.
The majority must take their opinions at second
hand, and they will naturally take those which are
most in accordance with their own tastes, inclinations,
and culture. It is just the same, for example, in
questions of politics or legislation, as in questions of
religion. These questions depend upon a scientific
knowledge of human nature, its laws and tendencies,
upon a thorough knowledge of all the circumstances,
�Religious Opinions.
5
the conditions physical, intellectual, and moral of
the country, and a foreseeing sagacity capable of
calculating the effects of a given measure upon a
country in such a condition and in such circumstances,
the people of which are subject to those fixed laws of
human nature. Now, I suppose there are not fifty
members of the House of Commons who possess this
knowledge, or who attempt to study these questions
scientifically. Yet we all hold some opinion or
other about the questions. And the opinions we
hold are adopted just in the same way as the majority
adopt their religious opinions, i.e., according as they
agree, harmonise and are in accordance with our
tastes, inclinations, tendencies and general culture.
And opinions upon very many other subjects are
adopted by the mass of people in just the same way.
But you will see that there can properly be no cer
tainty about opinions so received. Their truth or
untruth will be a mere matter of chance, depending
upon accidental circumstances. And it is unworthy
of a man capable of thought and reasoning, not to
form his opinions upon a rational and trustworthy
method. It becomes, therefore, each one of us to seek
out the true method by which our religious opinions
may be formed.
The methods by which real students have formed
their religious opinions have always been the methods
they have followed in their philosophical enquiries—
indeed, religious opinions have never been anything
more than the outcoming of the various systems of
philosophy in this region of religious thought. It
was, for example, the imaginative philosophy of
Plato, modified by neo-Platonism and the Alexand
rian school which determined the theological or reli
gious opinions of the Church of the third, fourth, and
fifth centuries. The method of inquiry pursued by
the philosophers was the method adopted by the
theologians, and the resultant philosophy and theology
�6
The Formation of
were one harmonious whole. So again the special
philosophy which embodied itself in the writings of
Locke, found its religious expression in the theological
school of the English Deists, in the Unitarianism of
Priestley and Belsham, and in certain broad, or, as
they were then called, latitudinarian sections of the
reputed orthodox churches. So, once more, the
transcendental philosophy which Coleridge did so
much to bring into reputation, has furnished F. D.
Maurice and his school with their method and the
basis of their system, and is greatly influencing the
thinking and forms of religious opinion amongst
many who are striving hard to retain their orthodox
position. At the same time the severe method of
positivism is working in another direction and revo
lutionizing the religious opinions of all who come
under its influence.
These illustrations, then, will serve to show you
that the very first step for us to take, when seeking to
form our religious opinions, is to determine upon the
method by which our enquiries shall be conducted.
The method will inevitably determine the conclusions
at which we shall arrive.
But here a certain school interposes and claims for
its method an absolute control over our inquiries. It
says, “ God has given us a revelation in a book, and
the only method we ought to pursue is to take a
grammar and dictionary, ascertain the precise literal
meaning of the book, and accept that as the absolute
truth and rule.” But let us see if this method be as
conclusive as they seem to suppose. We will take a
precept, not a dogma, and that one spoken by the
highest, truest lips, Matt. v. 38, &c., “Ye have heard
that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth—(you will recollect that that is a law laid
down for the guidance of courts of justice, see Ex. xxi.
23, &c., so that Christ is here referring not to taking
personal vengeance, but to getting one who has injured
�Religious Opinions.
7
you punished by law): but I say unto you resist not
evil (by bringing him before the magistrate); but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn
to him the other also. And if any man will sue
thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have
thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to
go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that
asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not thou away.”
Now, I ask respecting these precepts, as I have asked
before on frequent occasions, does any sensible per
son in the present day think they are to be obeyed?
Are we never to prosecute at law those doing us an
injury ? If any one prosecute us for an unjust claim
are we not to defend our cause ? Are we to give
to every beggar ? And are we never to refuse to
lend to those who want to borrow ? There can be
but one answer, and that answer will be in direct
contradiction to the precepts. I ask then upon what
ground, by what authority, these plain, simple and
direct precepts of Christ, spoken in unmistakeable
language, are modified or set on one side ? It will be
said, one's common sense sees they are inapplicable,
and would be unworkable in the present day in our
circumstances. Precisely so. But see what this in
volves. You apply your common sense, or reason, or
judgment, whatever you like to call it, to these pre
cepts and set them aside by its authority. Then you
apply your common sense, reason, or judgment to
other precepts, and by its authority pronounce them
still obligatory. You have left your grammar and
lexicon, and you are trying these precepts by tests
furnished by your own mind. Their authority really
rests therefore not upon the claims of him who
spoke them, but upon the judgments you have
formed respecting them. It is you who pronounce
them binding or not binding in virtue of some
test your judgment has supplied.
�8
The Formation of
. Now, what I say, and what the whole drift of this
discourse is intended to shew, is that it is of the
first importance that in selecting this test by which
moral precepts, doctrines and religious opinions of
all kinds are to be tried, you be guided by right and
rational principles or rules, in other words that
your method of enquiry be sound and good.
In searching for this method it is a fortunate thing
for us that we have the history and experience of up
wards of two thousand years to help us. For we are
thus enabled at all events to see where and how
others have failed, and to avoid the same blunders.
All the old systems of opinion have broken down
and failed to hold their ground against the advancing
tide of progress. Each one in turn has given place
to something fresh and has never revived excepting
under a new phase and with great modifications.
The system of St Augustine, for example, is said to
have been revived by Luther and other Reformers.
And without doubt the statement is partially true,
but no one who knows the writings of Augustine and
Luther would say the Augustine theology of the
sixteenth century is precisely the same as the
Augustine theology of the fourth. The questions are
looked at, argued, and concluded upon under different
phases, under different modes of culture. It is not
the theology of Augustine, it is the theology of
Augustine moulded, modified and permeated by the
spirit of the sixteenth century. The old questions
come up, but they come in a new dress, and they are
discussed from a different standing ground. And so
it has ever been, a constant flux of systems, succeed
ing and superseding each other, but the old questions
ever returning to be debated over again.
Now, how is it that all these discussions and
philosophies have failed to settle these questions or
to give us, at least, some points settled which should
be debateable no more for ever, and from which we
�Religious Opinions.
9
might set out upon fresh and more extended inquiries.
The answer appears to me quite plain. They failed
because their methods of inquiry were vicious from
the very beginning. They started upon untested
assumptions, and built up their theories by imagin
ative reasonings, the elements of which were furnished
by their fancies alone. Sometimes, indeed, they
would appeal to facts of consciousness or of man’s
history, i.e., facts of the inner or of the outer life ;
but when they did so, they interpreted them by
assumptions or fancies wholly gratuitous, and the
facts therefore became as worthless as their fancies.
Thus, as an example, the Semitic and Western con
ceptions of God assumed his similitude to man in
mind, while not also in body. Now, that assump
tion once made the remaining conceptions, and the
interpretations of his proceedings would legitimately
follow according to what men at the time being found
in themselves. Accordingly, at one time his govern
ment was represented as that of an arbitrary despot;
at another time, as that of a constitutional king, his
actions being limited by supposed principles of eternal
right and fitness; at another, as that of a still more
merciful sovereign striving to find a remedy against
the terrible mischief done by his too severe law; and
now recently as a father governing his family and
never chastening but in love. But each and all of
these representations are equally true for those who
have believed them, and equally founded upon a
purely gratuitous assumption, viz., that there is such
a resemblance between the mind of God and man
that you may reason from the principles, modes of
thought, and of action in the one, to the principles,
modes of thought, and of action in the other.
Now, I deny that there is the least pretence in
reason for this assumption. It is purely fanciful and
baseless. There are no means of proving that it is
true, if it be true. And therefore the whole system
�io
The Formation of
of the divine government built upon it is as worthless,
as uncertain, and as irrational as its base. But, say
those who make and rest upon this assumption, if
God be not like to man in his mental character and
principles of action, what is He like ? I answer, I
do not know. But say they, if you do not know,
what affections, dispositions, characteristics, will you
ascribe to him 1 I answer, I ascribe none. Then say
they, you are left in the hands of this terrible
almighty power, in total ignorance of his intentions
towards you. I reply, not so, I know many of
his intentions towards me with tolerable certainty.
I find that he always acts in the same way,
by the same laws, causing the same antecedents
to be followed by the same consequents, the same
causes by the same effects, the same conditions by the
same results. So far, therefore, as I know these
causes, conditions, laws (call them what you please),
I know precisely what God’s intentions are. His
intentions concerning me are, that whenever I come
under any one of these laws, conditions, or causes,
that the consequences he has attached to it in the
order of things shall inevitably follow. And that is
enough for me to know. I have no longing after the
impossible, the comprehension of the Infinite and
Absolute. . I know, as the late Sir William Hamilton .
expressed it, the length of my tether. I acquiesce in
my conditioned knowledge.
Now, this illustration has not been a digression
from our enquiry into the right method of forming
religious opinions. It has expounded it. It lias
shown how baseless, uncertain and fluctuating must
be all systems originated in mere speculative fancies
and assumptions. It has shewn there can be only
one method fixed, certain, and unchangeable—that,
namely, which is purely based upon facts, and brings
all its reasonings to the test of facts before it finally
accepts as true its conclusions. It is by this method
�Religious Opinions.
11
the whole advance in every kind of human knowledge
has been made. So far as it was pursued in ancient
times what was discovered by it, is as true to day as
it was then. Every great deliverance from human
ignorance and superstition has been wrought out by it.
There is not an enlightened conception of the divine
government but what may be traced to its influence
acting directly or indirectly upon the mind. From
its conclusions there can be no possible appeal. It
is the highest and ultimate test of all truth, of all
speculation, of all reasoning. What it ascertains
must be true as long as the world lasts, and its
judgments can never be set aside, excepting by
assumption into higher and more general truths. It
is the only method left to us in this nineteenth
century. But now, you say, where shall we find the
facts to which this method is to be applied, and upon
the study of which all our religious opinions are to be
formed ? I answer, in the whole experience of man,
in general, and in your own special experience in
particular, and this experience carries us out of
ourselves recollect, in virtue of the relations we
sustain to the external world. Whatever is evolved
in your religious experience constantly, under the
same conditions that is for you a religious fact, and
forms the basis of a true religious opinion—the basis
of a true religious opinion for you, recollect, not the
basis of a general religious opinion true for all men.
For our individual peculiarities and circumstances
constitute individual conditions which may lead to
results altogether untrue in the experience of other
men. Yet that these conditions may be true for you
cannot be questioned. It is an individual truth
affecting only yourself. You come into contact, for
example, with some great and sublime object in
nature which immediately produces in you feelings
of reverence and awe, and suggests the idea of a
present good and beneficent Creator calling forth
�12
The Formation of
your love and trust. That, therefore, is the fact of
your experience, and you found upon it the opinion
that it is the tendency of such objects to produce
such results. Now that opinion is true for you
individually. But you extend your inquiries to the
experience of other men, and then you find that
these results do not always follow. In some you find
there is the deep feeling produced by contemplating
the object, but no suggestion of the idea of God.
In others, the idea of God is suggested, but it is
accompanied by fear and terror. So that you correct
the conclusion of your personal experience by the
wider experience of mankind, and instead of
saying that the grand objects of nature tend to
suggest the idea of God and to produce love and
trust, you say these objects tend to produce these
effects under certain conditions only.
Your re
ligious. opinion is modified, generalized by a more
extensive observation of facts. The first opinion
founded upon your own experience is still true for
you, because your mind is in that condition under
which this love for and trust in God follow; but it is
not a general truth and your opinion has to be
modified accordingly.
But now, suppose you are not content to rest here.
You want to ascertain which is the normal, proper
and natural condition and result, that which ends, as
in your own mind, in love and trust, or that which
ends in terror and apprehension. Still you have
nothing but the facts to guide you. You begin
therefore by examining and scrutinizing more closely
the facts. You find in those in whom the terror is
excited some humanised conception of God which
clothes him with attributes which have a malignant
aspect towards man, and by examination you find
that this conception rests upon the baseless assumption
that God must be like man, and so like malignant
and fierce men. Or in other cases you find it has
�Religious Opinions.
13
been produced by some great calamity, which has
produced the impression that God delights in calamity,
an impression depending upon a few circumstances
and not upon general observation. On the other hand,
your own trust and love rest upon no such ground.
You do not pretend to know God as he is in himself;
but by extensive observation you find that upon the
whole his operations in nature are beneficent and
good, leading to human well being and happiness.
You observe that the calamities are the result of
conditions which may for the most part be controlled
and constitute a system of discipline which is benefi
cial and merciful. Seeing therefore that the real facts
call forth the love and trust, and that it is fancy or
an imperfect observation of a few facts that inspire
the mistrust and fear, you form the generalized
religious opinion that those conditions in which the
apprehensions of God’s presence call forth trust and
love, are the true, normal, and proper conditions of
man. Nor could anything possibly shake that opinion
but such an appeal to the facts as would shew you
had misconceived or misinterpreted them.
But possibly some one may say, this method will
answer very well in such a question as you have pro
posed, but will it apply to all, such as the peculiar
doctrines of Christianity for example1? Now, I have
already answered that question in effect. For leaving
out of consideration the evidences by which the
authority of Christianity has to be established,
involving as they do the questions of miracles, which
is purely one of facts, I remind you of what I have
already said about the interpretation. Every one
interprets by his system of philosophy formed by his
judgment according to certain methods. The ultimate
appeal in these questions of interpretation is not to
the grammar and lexicon, but to the principles held
by the interpreter. Hence the opposite conclusions
come to by men equally sincere, equally learned,
�14
Fhe Formation of
equally pious, and equally skilled in interpretation.
The Calvinists, for example, the older Unitarians, and
the Arminians equally believe in the divine authority
of the New Testament or of Christ. They equally
strive to find out the meaning of the text. They
come to opposite conclusions. Why1? Oh, the bigots
of each party would say, because the others do not
come with an open mind, but seek only their own
preconceived opinions. I have, however, nothing to
do with the bigots just now. The real cause is,
because each comes with his own system to the inter
pretation, and so arrives at different results. And
it could not from the nature of things be otherwise,
whether men know it or not. So that in reality the
ultimate appeal is to these judgments formed before
consulting the oracle, and all depends upon the method
by which those judgments are formed.
Take, for example, the doctrine of the atonement.
Now, the Calvinist holding certain views about
God’s justice, government &c., interprets the passages
speaking of Christ’s death in one way, and gives to the
atonement one meaning. The Arminian, holding
modified views of God’s justice and government, and
exalting higher his love, interprets the same passages
in another way, and gives to the atonement a modified
meaning. Whilst the older Unitarian, holding other
views of God’s character, apd exalting his love still
higher than the Arminian, interprets the passages in
quite another way, and does not hold the doctrine of
the atonement in the Calvinistic sense at all. Now
how can any one form an opinion upon these three
different modes of interpretation ? Only by determin
ing the truth or the untruth of the principles upon
which their system of interpretation is based; and that
must be done by the method I have explained. If
any one do not care for any of these systems, and
wishes to determine the question simply upon its
own merits, how can he do so but by a reference to
�Religious Opinions.
15
facts ? Do all those who believe in the atonement get
delivered, so far as we see, from the consequences of
their past sins 1 Would the drunkard, for example,
who has drunk himself into a state verging on
delirium tremens, get saved from the fit which was
coming upon him to-night, by a sudden conversion
experienced at twelve o'clock this morning ? And
secondly, do none but those who so believe, amend
their lives and reap all the good and happiness of
the amendment ? There can be but one answer to
such questions, and it is determined by matters of
fact easily ascertained, and from which there can be
no appeal.
I trust, then, I have said enough to explain the
method by which our religious opinions must be
formed. There is none other left to us amidst the
jarring controversies of the day. At all events, of
this we are quite sure, whatever we come short of,
through this method (for myself I do not think we
shall come short of any then) yet whatever we do
grasp will be unalterable and infallibly sure.
It
will rest on a basis of fact which cannot be
removed. In this method is certainty, and in this
alone. All others are a delusion and a snare.
But let me conclude with one caution. Above all
things, in the use of this method, do not too hastily
generalize your conclusions. See to it that you have
a sufficient number of facts to form your opinion upon.
There is no greater evidence of a philosophical ’mind
than the power of suspending one’s judgment until
all the evidence is before one; as there is no greater
proof of a weak mind than hesitancy after the con
clusions are formed. And herein doubtlessly lies the
danger to which those employing this method are
exposed. Too often they want to rise to certainty
by a leap. Most enquirers get impatient of delay.
After a rapid glance over a few facts, selected it may
be but from one class, age, or type, they rashly conclude
�16
The Formation of Religious Opinions.
that they have comprehended the universal law. They
mistake the individual and it may be accidental
process for the general, and therefore go blundering
on into all sorts of errors. The very first requisite
to the formation of true religious opinions, as of all
others, is patience, caution, suspension of judgment
until the whole field of facts is surveyed and nothing
left out that is essential to the result. Then the con
clusion, so far as it goes, will be as certain as the fact of
one’s own existence. And then recollect, as an
encouragement to this patience and suspension of
judgment, that religion may exist actively where the
opinions are yet in abeyance, for truthful, well
formed opinions are not necessary to religious feeling
and life; although on the other hand the opinions
once formed have a momentous result on the
religious life.
Be deliberate then, scrutinize, weigh, compare,
discount all fancies and all prejudices, earnestly
judge by the facts widely inducted, and God will
guide you into all truth.
TURNBULL AND SPEABS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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On the formation of religious opinions
Creator
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Cranbrook, James
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
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[1871]
Identifier
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CT166
G5742
G5745
G5749
RA1602
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Rationalism
Religion
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (On the formation of religious opinions), identified by <span><a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Faith and Reason
-
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Text
2S2.4
THE VOYSEY CASE,
FROM AN
HERETICAL STAND-POINT.
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
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THE VOYSEY CASE,
FROM AN HERETICAL STAND-POINT.
-.... ■»---F the National Church is unable to fill its pews, it
. has at least succeeded of late in filling the air with
gossip. Its recent history has been a series of public
scandals. The excommunication of a heretic is fol
lowed by the insult of the bishops to a Unitarian
invited by themselves to assist in the revision of the
received version of the Bible, and this is succeeded by
the legal reprimand of a Ritualist, all combining to im
press the country with the idea that the Establishment
has come to a pass when “ apostolic blows and knocks ’*
have become the normal condition of its existence.
The most salient feature in the most important of these
events was, perhaps, its inevitableness. The most
zealous adherents of the church plainly recognised
that if Mr Voysey were brought to trial, orthodoxy
could not gain its case except at a heavy cost. They
saw that the trial would be the means of circulating
the heretic’s opinions, and would invest him with the
eminence of a martyr. But the church had no choice.
If a clergyman with such views could retain his
pulpit, there could be no reason why Socinians of
simple Theists should not close their several chapels,
and reinforce the rationalistic party in the church to
an extent that would destroy its distinctive character
and supernatural authority altogether. So the Church
I
�4
The Voysey Case,
was placed at the mercy of the Vicar of Healaugh, and
could only be saved from reviving an antiquated pro
cedure, sure to injure itself more than him, by the
quiet resignation which he refused to accord. There
is a Bavarian fable of a boy gathering strawberries,
who treated with rudeness an aged woman who met
him with a petition for some berries. In return for
this unkindness the old woman gave the boy a fine
casket, out of which, however, when the boy opened
it, came two small worms, which grew in size until
they coiled about the boy’s limbs, and drew him far,
and ever farther, into the dark forest, where he still
wanders in the toils of the mighty serpents. The
myth may express more than the lesson of Bavarian
mothers that small sins swell into fatal habits; it
may describe the miserable necessities which, in the
course of time, may be evolved from the rich casket of
power obtained by a church for its scorn of reason.
Bound fast in the coils of that superstition and bigotry
which it has preferred to progress and charity, it is
drawn into the dark forest to which its selected
masters belong, and cannot free itself even at the
bidding of obvious self-interest. The trial came, and
with it the incidents which have filled all heretics
with delight. For some days Mr Voysey virtually
edited the London papers, and turned the Times into
a rationalistic tract. There was enough orthodox
irritation at this, but it is difficult to rage a fact out of
existence. Nor can it be shown that this advantage
was unfairly gained by Mr Voysey and his fellow-free
thinkers. This charge has been made in various
quarters, and, since it involves the chief features of
importance in the case, it may be well to consider it
more closely.
Soon after the judgment of the Privy Council was
delivered, the Times in a leading article, atoned for
the wide publicity which it had been the chief means
of giving to the views of the heretic, by a remonstrance
which states the case of those who censure Mr
�From an Heretical Stand-Point.
5
Voysey’s position plausibly enough. The Times
says :—
“ Before the most conspicuous tribunal in the
world—for Rome itself can show no such hearings,
no such judgments, or so many readers—Mr Voysey
preaches the Universal Creator and the Loving Father
of all, in clear and lucid contrariety to every doctrine
that could seem to contradict, qualify, or obscure the
first teaching of Nature, and, as he believes, the essen
tial truth of Holy Writ. Nobody can complain that
Mr Voysey has this seeming advantage. Ours is an
atmosphere of discussion. It is our boast to try all
things, and hold fast to that which is good and true.
'But if Mr Voysey, and free inquirers in general, may be
congratulated upon a success which is the very utmost
they can have expected,—the. success of a fair trial
and a world-wide publicity,—it remains to doubt
whether this success, such as it is, has been lawfully
.obtained, and whether Mr Voysey’s position be as
good as he believes his teaching to be. Had he any
right to deny all the distinctive doctrines of his
church, claiming at the same time to be held an honest
subscriber and faithful minister, with no other pos
sible hope than that he might thereby proclaim his
denial the louder and further to all the world? We
cannot think so.”
Passing by the naive confession implied in this pas
sage, that the eminent prosecutors and the Lord
Chancellor cannot hope to gain by publicity as much
advantage for their orthodox views, as Mr Voysey for
his heresies, let us examine the main charge brought
against the integrity of the expelled Vicar’s position.
It is no secret that Mr Voysey had to make up his
mind to press his appeal between parties which urged
him to anticipate an inevitable sentence by a sur
render, and those who besought him to demand the
decision which has been obtained. The latter party
probably regarded the course they advised as per
fectly consistent with a belief that even if Mr Voysey
�6
The Voysey Case,
had gained his case, it would have been his truest
course to leave the church. Even if it could be
shown that, by means of legal technicalities, a teacher
of Mr Voysey’s opinions could manage to escape
expulsion from the church, the far greater moral
question remains, whether a man of earnest convictions,
especially one who believes it his especial task to
maintain them publicly, is justifiable in adhering to
formularies plainly not framed to represent those
convictions, and, at best, capable of expressing them
only- by strained and unusual interpretations. But
conceding that the thirty-nine articles are not the
honest physiognomy of Mr Voysey’s faith, there were
other elements in the relation in which he found him
self to the church which rendered the practical ques
tion of duty far more complex than the theory of his
accusers admits. It is by no means the whole of
Mr Voysey’s case that he courted the publicity which
a trial would secure for his views. As Vicar he was
related not only to the ehurch, but to the nation of
people which that church is endeavouring to enlist in
its service. His position made him for the moment
the representative and spokesman of the religious
rationalism of England, and the only one who could
demand and wring from the church an answer to a
question of paramount importance to every free
inquirer in this land. The question is, .What is the
exact price which the National Church demands for
its advantages ? How much of the young man’s free
dom, how much of his natural reason and conscience,
must be laid down at this step and at that step on
the path of promotion ?
Undoubtedly, it is deplorable that there should be
any such question as this, but that it exists is not the
fault of the rationalists in the country, but of the
church itself. If the terms of the contract between
the clergyman and the church have become so confused
that it is no longer certain whether an entrance to holy
orders signifies an acceptance of the articles in their
�From an Heretical Stand-Point.
7
ordinary sense, it is because the church itself has long
been indulging its eminent beneficiaries in heresy. Such,
indulgence has not been without advantages to the
church. If the church had, during the last two genera
tion, separated, like sheep and goats, all who held to
the creeds and articles in their popular sense, and those
who subscribed them under unusual interpretations, it
would certainly have lost thcFprelatcs and scholars who
have most reached the heart of the people and won the
attention of the world. But if it is an advantage for a
church to be represented in the world of thought and
literature by such men as Whately, Arnold, Baden.
Powell, Thirlwall, Stanley, jowett, Maurice, and Kings
ley, this is an advantage that, like every other, has to
be paid for. The church has long paid for the cham
pions thus drawn from the literary and philosophical
classes by offering them terms upon which they could
enjoy the large opportunities it could give them for
their congenial work. This indulgence of heresy was
extended even to the protection of the writers of the
Essays and Reviews,—a book which denied the super
natural authority of the Bible, the depravity of man,
the benefit of Foreign Missions, and miracles, and whose
heresies were so formidable that even the American
Unitarians declined to republish it in that country.
.And when the prosecution against Bishop Colenso also
failed, it seemed as if there were no limit to the tolera
tion of free thought in the church. The Unitarian
and Theistic Chapels seemed left without a raison
d! titre, and such young men as were inclined to the
ministry were freely saying, “ Surely we can have no
fear in entering a church which tolerates Arian and
Theistic bishops, Darwinian deans, and Socialistic
canons.”
But inside and outside of the church there has been
an increasing perception that this state of things was
morally indefensible. The increase of casuistry was a
ruinous rate at which to obtain toleration in the Estab
lishment, and the prospect of securing a church repre
�8
The Voysey Case,
senting all phases of religious thought was marred by
the danger that such an institution when it came
would equally represent the average Jesuitism of the
nation. The real believers in the articles in their
obvious sense, and they who utterly rejected them,
alike felt that Dr Colenso and Dr Wilberforce could
sit upon the same episcopal bench only by some mere
trick, and that to one or the other the creed was not a
real face but a mask. Rumours were afloat to feed
the misgivings of sincere men of all beliefs. It was
whispered that one divine was in the habit of shifting
the reading of prayers to his Subordinates, and that a
certain bishop was in the habit of prefacing his reading
of the creeds with the announcement that he read them
not as a believer in them, but as an officer of the
Queen. It is creditable to the honesty of the country
that those who were interested in keeping the standard
of church orthodoxy vague, were not strong enough to
overcome the determination that the vagueness should
end, and if the apparent policy of the church to embrace
all varieties of opinion were proved to be final, that its
formularies should be altered to suit the fact. To
compel this issue and decision no case could have been
more perfect and opportune than that of Mr Voysey.
The church had indeed tolerated all his heresies, but it
had tolerated them as distributed through many in
dividuals, each of whom held his segment of rationalism
in connection with such an eminent or even courtly
following, or held it with such dexterity of statement,
that he could not be made a fair test, and remained in
the church as its bait for clever young men. But all
these heresies converged at last in one man. The
honest orthodoxy of the church at last saw all the
Broad Church heretics with one neck, that neck being
Rev. Charles Voysey’s; and the outside world saw that
the destiny of the church depended upon whether that
neck could be cut off or not.
This, then, was a much greater aim than that mere
publicity for his opinions which, the Times says, was
the utmost success Mr Voysey could hope to obtain.
�from, an Heretical Stand-Point.
9
He and his friends aimed to compel the Church to
show its hand, and their right—their duty—to do so
was as clear as their intention was manifest. Are we
told that a man ought not, and need not, to enter holy
orders without knowing distinctly the terms of the con
tract to which he commits himself, and that if he dis
cover afterwards that he cannot fulfil his part of it he
should quietly resign the corresponding advantages ?
To this it may be replied (1.) that, for the reasons
already stated, the clergyman cannot—or hitherto could
not—know just what he was committing himself to.
The Church itself, by the retention of the more emi
nent or dexterous heretics, has confused the sense of
subscription at the very moment that it has increased
the inducements to it. Does the subscriber commit
himself to the opinions of Dr Pusey or Professor
Jowett?—to those of Dr Liddon or those of Dean
Stanley? It is not the Voseys who have produced
this confusion. Nay, (2.) so far from aiding the young
divinity-student, before whom the same Church lays
the Essays and Reviews and the Prayer-book, to avoid
the error of committing himself to its work prematurely,
it waylays him at a period of life when his future con
clusions cannot be foreseen, and with profferred fellow
ships and livings bribes him to take the dangerous
step. If he hesitate, the Church eagerly rebukes his
hesitation, and lures him on to the false position, in
stead of encouraging the utmost caution. From the
first moment that it gets hold of a single finger of him
the Church watches him jealously to manipulate his
mind for its own purposes. No sooner does the stu
dent begin to follow Archbishop Whately’s advice,
and misgive that he may not mistake, than the Church
addresses itself to the work of repressing the misgiv
ings, and furthering the mistake until it is irretriev
able. No sooner does the youth begin to doubt and
inquire than he is surrounded by weeping friends and
sighing parsons, who grieve over him and pray over
him, until, envying perhaps the old martyrs who were
�io
The Voysey Case,
simply burnt, the sensitive heart yields itself to fetters
forged from its^own affections. If any one thinks that
this is an exaggerated statement of the fact, let him
read the life of Dr Arnold, written by Dr Stanley. A
sceptic from boyhood, Arnold no sooner turned his
eyes upon the doctrine of a Trinity than he doubted it.
Straightway clerical friends whisper, and mourn over
him as if he had been guilty of some crime, and at
length they hit upon a plan for him. It is not to
warn him that if he enters the Church it will be a risk
to his own character, and a danger to the Church: the
scheme is,—and John Keble is to be credited with it,
—Let us make haste and harness Arnold in the Church!
Before he has time to think any more, get him in a
living, and committed to parish work I (3.) The youth
thus bribed and ensnared into the Church, if, as in the
case of Mr Voysey and many others, he discover that
he is out of his place, has been seriously wronged.
The best years of his preparation for the work of life
have been devoted to a career which he must now
abandon; and this grave injury is enhanced by the
grossly unjust disabilities which legally close against
one who had entered holy orders the awards of poli
tical life, and the professions in which his special
studies might still be of some service.
These, then, are the facts which have to be con
sidered in estimating the rights and duties of a man in
the position of Mr Voysey, who, having entered the
ministry of the church in good faith, arrives at con
clusions whose consistency with the articles he has
subscribed is questionable. Surely he has a right to
decide how he can make the misstep, for which he is
in the smallest degree responsible, the most con
spicuous warning to other young men who are being
lured into holy orders, of the fetters that await them;
and it is difficult to see how he could do so more
effectually than by compelling the Lord Chancellor
to pronounce solemnly that the simple and clear views
of natural religion held by himself are forbidden to
�From an Heretical Stand-Point.
-II
the beneficiaries of the National Church. The decision
is given, and our feet rest upon truth more firmly
than before.
It remains to inquire whether that decision, while
showing us more clearly where we stand, reveals a moral
.and religious state of things worthy of England, or
worthy of the intelligence and the conscience of this
age.
To what does the judgment of the Lord Chancellor
amount?
It distinctly affirms 1, that “ Christ bore the punish
ment .due to our sins, and suffered in our stead,” and
that “ He was crucified to reconcile His Father to us
/that is, to mankind), and was a sacrifice,”—sacrifice
also being defined as an “ offering to God.” 2. It
asserts the existence of “ original dr birth sin,” that
such sin u exists in every one descended from Adam; ”
that children are by nature “childrenof God’s wrath;”
and that it was for this original sin that Christ was a
sacrifice. 3. It re-affirms the Nicene and Athanasian
creeds, the doctrine of a Trinity, and declares that JesuS
was supernaturally conceived, that he is to be worshipped
as God, and that he will return as the Judge of the
earth on the last day. 4. It declares that no clergyman
has a right “upon his own taste and judgment, to
assert that whole passages of the canonical books are
without any authority whatever,” or can “ expound
one part of Scripture as repugnant to another.” These
.points represent the substance of the thirteen counts
which have been sustained in the indictment against
Mr Voysey. They represent the plain creed freshly
labelled upon every clergyman who stands in a pulpit
of the National Church.
No one can read the passages from Mr Voysey’s
Sling and Stone, which are held to be in contravention
with the above creed, without recognizing that they are
such as are familiar in the writings of the Broad Church
clergy. No one acquainted with the teachings of the
leaders of that school can doubt that the new heretic
�12
The Voysey Case,
has fed upon them, or that he honestly represents the
substance and tendency of their belief. It maybe
doubted whether Mr Voysey, before leaving.the church,
might not have very properly availed himself of the
opportunity for retractation offered him, and asserted
that he believed the Thirty-nine Articles as they are
interpreted by the distinguished theologians and officials
of the church, whose opinions he quoted in his defence.
When he offered those quotations, the court, unable to
break their force, evaded it by saying that the line of
argument implied that it should try the cases of each
of the distinguished divines in question. The evasion
was sufficient for the convenience of-the Judicial Com
mittee of the Privy Council; but it was insufficient to
alter the fact that the court was necessarily trying the
divines in question, and was compelled to sentence
them along with Mr Voysey. To each and all of them,
—bishops, deans, canons, clergymen,—the Church and
State with authoritative voice have said, “You hold
your positions illegally and dishonestly, unless you
believe that God is an angry and jealous monarch, and
man a child of Satan, and unless you believe unre
servedly all the statements contained in the Bible.”
One word further about the offer to Mr Voysey of
an opportunity for retractation. How grand and
worthy a proposition is this for a church representing
the national morals to make! Only say you believe
what you do not believe, says the church, and you are
quite welcome to. our pulpit! If Mr Voysey had fol
lowed the example of Cranmer, and put forward a
retractation to be itself retracted at the end, one can
imagine its character to be somewhat as follows:—
. “ I hereby renounce and deplore my wicked belief
that God is a loving Father. I affirm, on the con
trary, my faith that He is a jealous and wrathful being,
who will torture untold millions of men, women, and
children by fire for ever. I hold accursed my former
belief, that God is just and merciful, and affirm that
even the eating of a piece of forbidden apple by a
�From an Heretical Stand-Point.
13
man who lived six thousand years ago, was enough ta
make Him damn the whole human race to eternal
misery,—a curse which would have been carried into
execution, had it not been for the timely interference
of a certain Pontius Pilate, who, assisted by one
Judas, sacrificed to God the blood of the most innocent
being in the world, the sight of which blood so pleased
God, that He was prevailed upon to save from the
said damnation a select few at least of mankind.
Asking forgiveness of the Church for all I have said
to the contrary, I now declare my implicit belief
that a certain Jewish peasant was born 1871 years
ago without a human father, and that he was Almighty
God. Also that three are one, and one is three. I
believe that a serpent in Eden and Balaam’s ass
talked, and that Jonah resided three days and nights
in a whale’s belly, whence he emerged quite safe. I
believe that soothsayers turned rods to snakes; in the
existence of sorcerers and witches and devils. I be
lieve that all new-born babes are totally depraved, and
that God looks upon them with feelings of anger.
And finally, I believe that all who do not believe
these things shall without doubt perish everlastingly!”
This is a retractation which every eminent clergy
man of the Broad Church really makes in the hearing
of the world every time he ascends a pulpit, or offici
ates in any way, since the Lord Chancellor’s judgment.
No protest against that judgment cantear off the creed
which now adheres to each of them, plainly legible in
the eyes of the world. There it will adhere until they
can reverse the judgment, or bring themselves to say
with John Sterling—Adieu, O Church ! The world
will await with anxiety, perhaps with some sternness,
their action. It may sympathise with them as they
approach the dregs of their cup, but the situation
admits of no concealment, and the truth cannot be
compromised. Mr Voysey is their child. They have
nourished and reared him. Whatever may be their
views of the dogma of vicarious suffering, there will be
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The Voysey case, from an heretical stand-point
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Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
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Place of publication: London
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Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 4. Publisher's list on unnumbered pages at the end. Date of publication from KVK.
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Thomas Scott
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[1871]
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Heresy
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Bible-Criticism and Interpretation
Charles Voysey
Heresy
Morris Tracts
-
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Text
I the
true temptation
OF JESUS.
BY
PBOFESSOK F. W. NEWMAN.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Sixpence.
\
�WRNBUII, AND SPEAKS, PRINTEE3, EDINBURGH
�THE THUE TEMPTATION OP JESUS.
VERY one who has opened the New Testament is
aware that in the first and third Gospel a
remarkable story is found (alluded to also in the
second Gospel) in which the devil is represented to
have assailed Jesus with three special temptations,
and to have been repelled by quotation of Old Testa
ment texts. That it is impossible to maintain the
literal truth of this account has been reluctantly con
ceded by writers, who, like the author of “ Ecce
Homo,” are wholly unconcerned to ascertain when,
where, by whom, and with what means of knowledge,
these narratives were penned. Those who desire to
save their credit, try to rid them of a damaging burden
by declaring this scene to be mytfwW. No spectator
is pretended. The idea that Jesus communicated
such inward trials to his disciples is contrary to
everything which is reported concerning Jlis charJtl acter: for Jte is everywhere represented as wholly
I uncommunicative, self-contained, more or less
mysterious, and moving in a separate region of
thought and feeling from the disciples. Evidently
this story does but express the opinion of the first
Christians, while Jesus was as yet believed to be only
human, that he, as others, must have, had a struggle
against temptations, and therefore, against the devil.
It is not here intended to point out what is plain of
itself, that none of the temptations are worthy of the
acumen attributed to the experienced and wily Satan;
E
I
�6
The True Temptation of fesus.
and are merely puerile in fiction, whether Jesus be
imagined as the Second Person of the Divine Trinity,
or merely as a great and holy, but human prophet.
Here I intend to give prominence to that which I
believe to be the fundamental trial of a religious
reformer, especially when he attains great ascendancy
and commands high veneration. But first I must
say, I shall be truly sorry, if any Trinitarian read
these pages, and find himself wounded. I do not
address him. I argue on the assumption that Jesus
was subject to human limitations like all the rest of
us, and that it is our duty to criticise him and the Z
story of him if it be of sufficient importance.
i
hat are the temptations of the prophet, can be no
secret in the present day: we see them in the
ordinary life of the admired preacher. To be run
after by a multitude, to be ministered to by fascinated
ladies, to see grey-haired men submissively listening
and treasuring up words,—easily puffs a young
preacher into self-conceit. In one who has too much
strong sense to be drawn into light vanity, fresh and
fresh success inspires, first, the not unreasonable hope
or belief that he is fulfilling a great work, and is
chosen for it by God, (not for his own merit, but be
cause, if a work is to be done, some one must be
chosen for it); next, an undue confidence in the truth
and weight of his own. utterances, an extravagant
conviction that whoever resists his 'word, impugns
God’s truth, and makes himself the enemy of God.
In the denunciations of Luther against Zuingle, his
own wiser and more temperate coadjutor, in the
vehemences of John Knox, in the cruelty of Calvin
to Servetus, we see variously developed the same
dangerous tendency. If we cast the eye eastward,
to more illiterate nations, to those accustomed to
revere the hermit and the semi-savage as akin to the
prophet, to peoples whose homage expresses itself by
prostration, we see the tendency of the prophet to
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
7
assume a regal and dictatorial mien even in the garb
of a half naked Bedouin. Many an eastern monk or
prophet, Syrian, Persian, or Indian, has been obeyed
as a prince; some have been attended on by large
armies : to some the native king has paid solemn
obeisance. In ancient Greece, where philosophy
overtopped religion, ascetic philosophers have been
accepted as plenipotentiary legislators; in which, no
doubt, we see portrayed, on a small scale, the legis
lative influence of a Buddha, a Confucius, or a
Zoroaster. When an Indian prophet found it natural
for multitudes to kneel to him or to prostrate them
selves, how hard must it have been to accept such
homage and retain a sense of human equality! how
hard not to think it reasonable that others bow down,
and unreasonable that any stand up and argue with
the prophet as his equal!
In the Gospels and Acts the habit of prostration
among these nations is sufficiently indicated; and we
see how it is resented (according to the narrative) by
Peter. When Cornelius falls at Peter’s feet and does
homage (certainly intending respect only, not divine
worship), Peter regards it as quite unbecoming from
a man to a man. But Jesus is represented as accept
ing such homage without the least hesitation, and
apparently with approval. The cases are not few,
nor confined to any one narrative. Matt. viii. 2,
“ There came a leper and worshipped him.” Matt,
ix. 18, “There came a certain ruler and worshipped
him.” Matth. xiv. 33, “ They worshipped him, say
ing, Of a truth thou art the \or a] Son of God.”
Matt. xv. 25, “Then came the woman and
worshipped him, saying, Lord! help me.” On this
Jesus comments approvingly, “ 0 woman, great is
thy faith.” Matt. xvii. 14, “There came a certain
man, kneeling down to him and saying, Lord 1 have
mercy on my son ! ” Matt. xx. 20, “ There came
the mother of Zebedee’s children, worshipping him,”
�'8 .
The True Temptation of fetus,
Matt, xxviii. 9, “ They held him by the feet and wor
shipped him—this is after the resurrection, thereby
differing in kind from the rest. The same remark
applies to verse 17. We have substantially the same
fact in Mark i. 40; v. 6, 22, -33 ; vii. 25 ; x. 17. In
■the last passage the rich young man kneels to Jesus: he
was not so represented in Matt. xix. 6. Luke v. 8,
“ Simon Peter fell down at Jesus’ knees.” Luke v.
12, “A man full of leprosy fell on his face, and be
sought Jesus.” In Luke vii. an account , is given,
perhaps not at all authentic. A woman is repre
sented to bathe the feet of Jesus with her tears, and
wipe them dry with her long hair, and after that,
anoint them with ointment and kiss his feet inces
santly. Jesus, according to the narrative, highly
applauds her conduct, and avows that “ therefore, her
sins, which are many, are forgiven.” Such conduct
on his part is far above criticism, if he was either a
person of the Divine Trinity, or a superhuman being,
who existed before all worlds and all angels, being
himself the beginning of the creation of God. I can
not doubt that the writer, called Luke, believed Jesus
to be superhuman, and therefore found no impro
priety in the conduct here imputed to him; but I
do not understand how any one who regards him as
a human being, can fail to censure him in the
strongest terms, if he believe this account. As I see
special grounds for doubting it, (inasmuch as it looks
like a re-making of the story reported in Matt,
xxvi. 6-13, which it exaggerates), I lay no stress upon
it,: but even in that other account there is a selfcomplacency hardly commendable in a mere man.
Again, in Luke viii. 20, we read, “the woman fell
down before him.” She doers not fall down in
Matt. ix. 22; therefore, here also the story may
■have been “ improved ” by credulity. But it is need
less to follow this topic further. Suffice it to say,
that though we do not know exactly how much to
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
9
Relieve, though we have frequent reason to suspect
exaggeration, yet the narratives all consistently
represent Jesus to have received complacently an
unmanly and degrading submission from his followers,
such as no apostle would have dndured for a moment;
and it is hard to believe that such reports could have
gained currency, with no foundation ctif nil. If, there
fore, we are to criticise Jesu'S on the belief that he ~z
was’man, and not God; nor a superhuman spirit, we /
must admit, I tliinlt, that a real and dangerous
temptation beset him in this matter. He was prone
to take pleasure in seeing men and women profound
in their obeisance, prostrate in mind and soul before
his superior greatness ;—for prostration of the body
brings satisfaction to pride, only as it denotes
prostration of soul It is difficult, with these narra
tives before us, to think that Jesus took to himself
that precept which Peter gives to the elders, that
they be not lords Over God’s heritage, but be subject
one tb another, and clothed with humility, that they
may be ensamples to the flock. Indeed, unless we
utterly throw away all the narratives, it is hardly too
much to say, that this is the very opposite to the
portrait of Jesus. If we will accept the theory thit
he was superhuman, we can justify his immeasurable
assumption of superiority; but the fact remains, that
in places, too many to reject, he puts himself forward
as “ lord over God’s heritage.”
Two classes of facts, presented in the narratives,
must be carefully separated. The former is the
'general superiority asserted by Jesus for himself;
the latter, is the special assumption of Messianic dig
nity. On the latter, there is notoriously an irrecon
cilable diversity of the fourth gospel from the rest.
The writer of the fourth, unquestionably ascribing to
Jesus pre-existence with God in some mysterious
way, and sonship in a sense perfectly unique, repre
sents his Messiahship as notorious to John the
�io
The True Temptation of^Jesus.
Baptist, to Andrew and Philip, from the very begin
ning,—to be avowed by Nathanael (whoever this
was),''and to be- preached by Jesus to Nicodemus
and to the woman of Samaria. All this is in so
flat contradiction to the three first gospels, that
nothing historical can be made out of the account;
and in trying to attain a true picture of Jesus, f :
necessarily set aside the fourth gospel as a mischie|w~~
ous romance.—Nevertheless, the element which I
call an assumption of general superiority, is as com
plete and persistent in the three first gospels as in
the fourth.
Keshub Chunder Sen entitles it “a sublime
egotism” in Jesus, to say, “Come unto me, and I
will give you rest: take my yoke upon you, and
learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in spirit.”
Yet if Luther, or John Knox, or Wesley had said it,
we should adduce it in proof that he was eminently
lacking in that very grace,—lowliness of spirit,—for
which he was commending himself. But is this the
only egotism ascribed to him in Matthew 1 Nay,
but in the celebrated beatitudes of the sermon on
the Mount, which some esteem the choice flower and
prime of the precepts of Jesus, he winds up with,
“ Blessed are ye when men shall speak evil against
you falsely for my sake.'’ He does not say “ for
’
righteousness’ sake,” if the narrative can be trusted.
The discourse continues like itself to the end, for in
the close he says : “ Many shall say to me in that
day, Lord ! Lord ! have we not prophesied in thy
name, .... and then will I profess unto them, I
never knew you : depart from me, ye that work
iniquity.” This is, it may be said, a very energetic
way of declaring, that no pretence of following in his
train as a prophet could compensate for personal
iniquity. As such we may accept it: but it remains
clear, that he is claiming for himself a position
above the human; such as no beauty or truth of teach-
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
11
ing could ever commend, as rightful from men to a
man, to the conscience of those reared in the schools
of modern science : while of course, if he claimed to
be higher than man, the first reasonable necessity,
and therefore his, first duty, was to exhibit the
proofs of supernatural knowledge and authority.
Undoubtedly, the alternative lies open of disbelieving
the Evangelist. It may be urged, that the text
represents Jesus as also saying that in his name
they will claim to have cast out devils and done
many wonderful works; but that this is an exaggera
tion belonging to a later time, and so therefore
may the pretensions be, with which it is coupled.
Well; so be it: let us then look further.
According to Matt. ix. 6, Jesus claimed power
to forgive sin ; he brought on himself rebuke for it,
but proceeded to justify himself by working a miracle.
Whence did his disciples get the idea of his advancing
such extravagances, if really he did not go farther
than his disciples James and John? Presently after,
he is represented as preaching that he is the. bride
groom of the Church, in whose presence the disciples
cannot mourn, and therefore ought not to fast; but
that when he is taken away, then they will fast.
How very peculiar and strange a sentiment to invent
for him, if it was not uttered ! Does it not rather
seem to have the stamp of individualism and truth,
thoroughly as it is in harmony with the tales of his
rejoicing to see men and women kneel before him ?
Next when Jesus sends out twelve disciples to say,
“ The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” he is repre
sented to assert, that it shall be more tolerable for
Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than
for the house or city which has not received his
messenger. Surely, if any one were now to knock
at our house door with such a formula of words, and
on the strength of it expect to be accepted with the
honours of a prophet, only the weak-minded would
�12
The True Temptation of fetus.
give him pleasant reception. Yet no ground what
ever appears for believing that there was anything
to accredit such messengers than, any more than now^
certainly nothing more appears in the narrative,
which quite consistently everywhere holds, that
-Jesus regarded the non-reception of his messengers as
a super-eminent guilt, merely because it was he who
sent them.
When it is added, “ ye shall be hated of all men
for my uamds sake’' we are perhaps justified in
esteeming that prediction as an after-invention of
popular credulity. But in the same discourse (Matt,
x. 23) we alight for the first time on the remarkable
phrase, “ The Son of Man,” afterwards indisputably
applied by Jesus to himself. “ Ye shall not have
gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man
be come.” No one but Jesus himself ever calls him
the Son of Man. Whatever he then meant, the
book puts into his mouth yet more of sublime
egotism. Whosoever shall confess me before men,
(says he), him will I confess before my Father which
is in heaven : but whosoever shall deny me before
men, him mil I also deny before my Father which is
heaven. He that loseth his life for my sake shall
find it. He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he
that receiveth me, receiveth Him that sent me.”
Certainly, when we begin to pare down these utter
ances, and try to reduce them to something that
would not be highly offensive in James or Paul, we
seem in danger of cutting away so much that is
characteristic, as to impair all confidence in what
remains. But unless we are bound to reject the
pervading colour of the narrative, I feel it not too
much to say, that in a mere man, the self-exaltation
approaches to impiety. What can it concern any
of us, that his brother-man should “ deny him ” before
our common Father 1 Hqw suddenly would the
honour which we felt for a preacher be turned into
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
ij
.grief and disappointment, or even indign^tipp, -if
pve heard him to say, “ Blessed is he, whoever shall
not be offended in me!” He would fall in our
.esteem, from the higli/est pinnacle to a very, low ^7
•.place, nor could any pretence of “ sublime egotism ’
save him.
" In the same chapter in which the last words occur
(Matt, xi.) the Evangelist goes on into language.not
dissimilar to that of the fourth gospel. “ All things
are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man
knoweth the Son but the Father: neither knoweth
any man the Father save the Son; and he to whom
soever the Son will reveal him.” When it is
considered that, although the nucleus of this gospel
probably existed before the first century was ended,
we have absolutely no guarantee that the text was
finally settled, as we now have it, much before the
'time of Irenseus, toward the close of the second
century; no one has a right to be very confident that
this passage, so strongly smacking of the doctrines
■which won ascendancy in that century, was not intro
duced at a later time. Perhaps the more reasonable
course here, is to strike out verse 27, (about the Son
and the Father) as foisted upon Jesus by a later
generation. What then shall be said of the words
which follow, already quoted, “ Come.unto me, take
my yoke on you, and I will give you. rest?” I can
accept them, if he is God, or a pre-existing Mighty
Spirit. I cannot accept them if he was onLy man : I
then do not entitle them sublime at all, but some
thing else.
h .
Something or other to the same effect is for.ever
cropping .up in this narrative of Matthew, which I
purposely take as giving a more human representation
of J esus than Luke or John. He is presently reported
to say (Matt. xii. 6), “ In this place is one greater
than the temple. .... the Son of Man is Lord even
of the Sabbath day.” Unless his wotds have been
�14
The True Temptation of Jesus.
monstrously distorted, he intended to assert that he
was himself the Son of Man spoken of by Daniel the
Prophet, that he was personally greater than the
temple, and was Lord even of the Sabbath-day.
Will any one say, that Jesus merely claimed the
right possessed by every man to interpret the law of
the Sabbath by the dictates of good sense, and that
he .regarded every pious man as greater than a temple
built of stone; and that the egotistic form of his
utterance was an accident ? In that case it certainly
was a highly unfortunate accident, and we may add, an
accident often repeated, which generated in his dis
ciples a veneration for him too great for humanity.
But accident so systematic is surely no accident at
all. If a good man who makes no pretensions is
worshipped as a god after his death, he is guiltless^ ;/
but if a MAN be worshipped as a god, who has i
made enormous personal pretensions,—and if a
decisive weight in the argument for worshipping
him is, that he has left us no choice between
worship and reprobation, can one who regards
the superhuman claims untenable, doubt that self
exaltation and monstrous vanity was Ja deplorable
foible, in the prophet ? I find only two ways of
avoiding the disagreeable inference : (1), by the
theory of Paul, or some higher theory; (2.) by so
rejecting all our accounts of his doctrine and miracles
alike as untrustworthy, that nothing is left us to
trust at all, nothing on which a faithful picture of
Jesus can be founded.
From beginning to end the narrative has but one
colour as regards the self-exaltation of Jesus. Matt,
xii., “Behold! a greater than Solomon is here.”
Matt, xiii., “Many prophets and righteous men have
desired to see the things which ye see, and hear the
things which ye hear. Blessed are your eyes, for
they see; and your ears, for they hear.” And what
was this so precious instruction ? the Parable of the
�ThqTrue Temptation of'Jesus.
r5
Sower ! Surely no sober-minded person can esteem
this so highly above all the teaching of Hebrew
sages.
\
.
But I pass to a new topic in the sixteenth chapter
of Matthew,—the anger of Jesus, when he is asked
for a sign from heaven. He replies by calling the
persons who asked him hypocrites, when jevidently,
according to the notions of that age and nation, it
was a most reasonable and proper request. In fact,
the narratives elsewhere represent him as giving
them miraculous signs, which are signs from heaven,
in abundance j insomuch that, if he had been repre
sented as here appealing to these signs, and alleging
that these very persons had already witnessed them
plentifully, his imputation of hypocrisy might have
seemed natural. But that is not his line of argument.
He says : “ A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh
after a sign,” as though the desire itself were wicked
ness, “ and there shall no sign be given unto it, but
the sign of the prophet Jonas.” And he left them
and departed. Such words refuse a sign not to the
individual only, but to the generation. Are we then
to believe that he consistently repudiated all pretence
of working miracle ? that he esteemed the desire of
seeing a miracle wrought in confirmation of his pre
eminent claims to be such a fatuous absurdity, that
he had a right^o heap contumelious epithets on the
head of any one who asked for it ? In favour of
this opinion, appeal may be made to the epistles of
Paul, who does not betray any knowledge whatever
that Jesus had wrought miracles. Let us tentatively
adopt this view. Then, first, what a heap of gross
misrepresentation is put before us in all four narratives
if Jesus not only never affected to work miracles,
but even vehemently flouted the idea itself and
rebuked those who desired it. Next, it will follow
that no justification of his high pretensions was
even attempted by him, and therefore no denuncia-
�16
'The True Temptation of Jesus.
tion of men for neglect of him was reasonable. It
follows that those resolved to justify him must cut
out all his denunciations likewise. Who will write
for us an expurgated gospel, tQ let us know what
was the true Jesus 1 Who will convince us, that
a history thus garbled carij. ever be truly recovered,
or deserves our intent study ? .
In the same chapter of Matthew (the sixteenth)
the momentous question is proposed to his disciples,
Whom say ye that I am ?” According to the
narrative, he first gave them the hint, what to reply,
by a leading question, “ Whom do men say that I, the
Son of Man, am ? ” but perhaps that is only a stupid
exaggeration of the narrator, who did not see what
it would imply. Let us then drop this portion of the
words.
He feels his way cautiously with the
disciples, and sounds them. Simon Peter replies,
“ Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Again I ask, Is this narrative grossly and delusively
false ? or may we trust a vague outline ? Accprding
to it, Jesus is lifted by the reply into a most exalted
state, “ Blessed art thou, Simon son of Jonas,” says
he, “ for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto
thee, but my Father which is in heaven............... I
will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven*
and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven, .... &c.” After this outburst,
■what is it that we react as a consequence ? “ Then
charged he his disciples that they should tell no man
that he was Jesus the Christ.”
It seems utterly ^irrational and unworthy .alite of
* Any one who doubts whether Jesus ever uttered such
words, may fortify the doubt by opining that the words
have got into the gospel from Rev. iii. 7, where nevertheless
Jesus, so far from giving the “power of the keys ” to any
apostle, retains the power strictly in his own hand. The
words in Rev. iii. 7, are borrowed from Isaiah xxii. 22,
which have no reference to Messiah at all, according to any
scientific interpretation.
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
the most High God and of his specially anointed
Prophet (if one special Prophet was’ indeed so
promised), that Messiah should come into his
nation,—should expect subjection of mind from all
around,—should haughtily evade, instead of enlight
ening, those who mildly inquired into his claims to
authority; finally, should sedulously preserve his
incognito, and forbid his disciples to tell that he was
Messiah. Men may be either convinced or com
manded. To convince them you must kindly and can
didly answer their difficulties, and allow them to argue
against you; you must meet their questions as plainly
and honestly as possible, not browbeat or threaten
the interrogators, nor marvel over their unbelief and
stupidity. You must descend in the argument on
to' a perfect level with the man whom you desire to
convince,, and entirely lay aside all airs of authority,
even if you have authority. That is one course of
proceeding; but it is the very opposite of that
Imputed to Jesus. But if men are to be
if submission is to be required of them, you must
make some display of POWER.* In that , case you
seek to convince them, not that a precept is wise, or
a doctrine is true, but that you, its enunciator, have
a special right of dictation, drawing after it in the
hearer a special duty of submission. Of course those
with whom the idea of miracles is inadmissible, do not
ask for signs from heaven; not the less must they justify
the countrymen of Jesus in requiring from him some
credentials, when he claimed submission and used a
dictatorial tone. If the nation believed miracles to
be the marks of Messiah, and was m error, it
* Men of science appeal to power as an argument why
they should be believed, when want of leisure or talents
forbid‘the mastering of their arguments : thus Astronomers
appeal to their fore-knowledge of eclipses, and their power of
finding the longitude by their tables ; Electricians appeal to
the telegraph, and so’ on.
�18
The True Temptation of Jesus.
belonged to Messiah to unteach them the error,
and, as one aware of their folly, to take precautions
lest miracles be imputed to him. Surely it was
quite unjustifiable, to require submission from Priests
and Pharisees, yet exhibit to them no credentials what
ever of the mighty function with which he was
invested. If words dropping from the mouth of
Messiah were divine commands, which it was impious
to dispute, nothing could supersede the public an
nunciation of his office, and the display of his
credentials, whatever they might be. No evasions
are here endurable, on the ground of the political
danger to be incurred, or the propriety of giving
insufficient proof in order to try people’s “ faith.”
To say that political danger forbade, is to say that
God sent Messiah insufficiently prepared for his work,
and afraid to assume His functions publicly. As to
trying “ faith ” by insufficient proof, nothing can be
less rightful or more pernicious. If the proof ad
duced be of the right kind and appropriate, it cannot
be excessive, but may be defective; and if defective,
it is a cruel trap, as if designed to lead honesty astray.
The only plausibility in this notion rises from con
fusion of truths which we ought to see by light from
within, with truths which can only be established
from without. No man can know by his inward
faculties that a Messiah is promised from heaven,
nor what will be the external marks of Messiah.
False Messiahs had already come. To accept lightly
any one as Messiah was the height of imprudence, and
certainly could not be commended as pious. Under
such circumstances, to dissemble Messiahship, and
work upon susceptible minds by giving them evidence
necessarily imperfect, was conduct rather to be
imputed to a devil, than to a prophet from God, if
done with serious intent. Those who defend it,
plead that the evidence was moral, and did not need
external proofs. If so, on the one hand full freedom
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
19
of investigation was needed, not authority and brow
beating ; on the other, this alleges external proof to
be worse than superfluous,—to be in fact misleading;
so that to plead for its “ insufficiency” as a needful
trial of faith is a gross error. If external evidence
was wholly inappropriate, the producing of that
which you concede to be insufficient does but tend to
confuse and mislead the simple-hearted, and cause
unbelief in the strong-headed. But if external evi
dence is admissible and appropriate at cdl for faith
to rest upon, then it ought to be in quantity and
quality sufficient to make the faith reasonable and
firm. If only internal light is to the purpose of
faith, and external evidence was not wanted for
Messiah, then neither was an authoritative, Messiah
wanted at all; that is, a teacher to whom we should
submit without conviction; then it was right to
claim that Messiah would convince by argument and
reply to questions ; would invite question or opposi
tion, not dictate and threaten; then we have to
sweep away the greater part of the four Gospels as a
false representation of Messiah. Whatever else may
have been true, one thing is certainly false;—that
God sent a special messenger to teach authoritatively,
and that the messenger thus sent forbade his disciples
to publish his character and claims.
From narratives so disfigured by false representa
tion, as every one is obliged to confess them, who
does not believe the miracles, and seeks to defend
Jesus by remoulding the accounts of Him ; how can
any one be blamed for despairing to arrive at accurate
and sound knowledge concerning his character and
teaching? What right has any one to expect to
recover lost history, or to think worse of his brother
if he regard the effort to be waste time ? Yet if I
were to say, I seem to myself to know nothing of Jesus,
I should speak untruly; for in the midst of theobscurity
and. the inconsistencies of the narratives, there are
�ip
The True Teinptatiqn of ffsuT
some things unvarying, many things very hard to in
vent, and-others unlikely to be invented, yet easily
admitting explanation if we reason about Jesus as
we do about every other public teacher or reformer.
The details of doctrine are often untrustworthy, but
the-current, the broad tendencies, the style and tone
of the teacher, seem to have made too strong an
impression to be lost, though round them has been
gathered a plentiful accretion of mistake and fable.
In outline we must say that the first peculiarity of rhe
preacher was, that he did not comment upon the law
and prophets, but spoke dictatorially, dogmatically,
as’with authority—a thing quite right and proper,
while only moral truth is taught, which makes appeal
to the conscience of the hearer. But the Jews,
accustomed like the modern English to nothing but
comment and deduction from a sacred book, were
apt to enquire of Jesus by what right he spoke so
confidently, and paid so little deference to the learned^
On one occasion he is said to have given a very fair
reply, to the effect that they had listened to the
preaching of John the Baptist, without asking his
authority : “ If John might preach to you dogmati
cally, why may not I ? ” was the substance of that
argument. But it is clear that, numbers of honest
sincere Jews, impressed by the moral weight in these
preachings, had begun to inquire whether this was
not a renewal of divine prophecy, whether divine
prophets must not have some recognizable note of
their mission, other than the influence of their doc
trine on the human conscience; whether, in fine,
Jesus might not be the expected Messiah. This was
a very anxious question, especially since delusive
Messiahs had appeared; but it was a question that
Jews were sure to make, and the three narratives
before us, defective as they are, persuade me that it
was made, both in private talk, and in direct interro
gation to Jesus.
Now if we accept to the full the traditional Jewish
�The True Temptation of Jesus.
belief of what Messiah was to be, (which falls short
of the dignity ascribed to him by Christians),
it is incredible that after commencing his public
functions he should remain ignorant of his being
Messiah, or need confirmation from his disciples or
from others. But if Jesus had little trust in learned
Rabbis or traditional doctrine, he may have had a
very vague and imperfect belief as to what Messiah
was to be; and the idea that he himself was Messiah
may not have at all occurred to him, until after he
had experienced the zeal of the multitude, and was
aware that a rumour was gone abroad among the
people, that “ a great prophet was arisen,” and that
some said he was the Messiah. Can any one study *
his character as that of a man, subject to all human/ '
limitations, and not see, that the question, “ Am I
then possibly the Messiah ?” if at all entertained,
instantly became one of extreme interest and anxiety
to Jesus himself? Indeed from the day that it
fixed itself upon him for permanent rumination his
character could not but lose its simplicity. Pre
viously he thought only, What doctrine is true
- morality ? What are the crying sins of the day ?
But now his own personality, his own possible,
dignity, became matters of inquiry; and the inquiry
was a. Biblical one. He was brought hereby on to
the plane of the learned commentator, who studies
ancienAbooks to find out what has been promised and
predicted about a Messiah. An unlearned carpenter,
(\
however strong and clear-minded^ while dealing with a
purely moral question, was liable to lose all his super
iority and .be hurtfully entangled when entering into
literary interpretation. Wholly - to get rid of tradi
tional notions was impossible, yet,enough of distrust
would remain, to embarrass fixed belief and produce
vacillation, . Nothing is then more natural, than
that the teacher should desire to know what was the
general opinion concerning him, should be pleased
when it confirmed his rising hopes, should be elated
�2
The True Temptation of Jesus.
when Simon Peter declared him to be Messiah, and
should bless his faith, even if not with the extrava
gance of giving him the keys of the kingdom of
heaven ; finally, should be displeased with himself
and frightened at his own elation, and, in order to
repair his error, should charge his disciples to tell
no one that he was Messiah^not that he desired to
keep the nation in ignorance, but because he was J
himself conscious of uncertainty. After this his
conduct could not be straightforward and simple
Such is the only reasonable interpretation which
I have ever been able to see, of this perplexed aid
perplexing narrative, which is not likely to have
-nnf.hino-false
___ ™ ^4grown out of nothing. Jesus came into a false
rUv and of necessity* as 1 think*
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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The true temptation of Jesus
Creator
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Newman, Francis William [1805-1897]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 22 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: The portrait is a photo that has been cut out and pasted to the title page. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. Date of publication from KVK. An annotated (proof?) copy bound in Conway Tracts 31.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
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[1871]
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CT159
G5743
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Jesus Christ
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Text
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English
Christianity-Controversial Literature
Conway Tracts
Jesus Christ
-
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Text
THE WEDDING
DAME WINDSOR’S,
AND
W THAT WAS SAID ABOUT IT BY
IN
RELATIONS AND FRIENDS,
AND BY THE
ZI OYS OF St. STEPHEN’S SCHOOL.
i«*8t !
W iJfDON : A. RITCHIE, 15, WINE OFFICE COURT, FLEET STREET.
Price Sixpence.
?
�J. COEN, PRINTER,
15, WINE OFFICE COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON.
------ y
when I first saw the vessel?
cg-crnx uvu<nu ax
�Webbing nt Same Wxnbsof s.
GrH
WHAT RELATIONS SAID ABOUT IT.
3N ame
Windsor is a widow, a little over fifty, of ample
fd rtune, and possessor of several spacious houses.
r|er husband, good soul, who was universally re
31! jected,
died suddenly, to the deep regret of every-
.1 le, and left her with a family of nine children, five
idi ‘which are daughters, two of them being unmarried,
?
e 1 'er eldest daughter, who was greatly esteemed, on
in<
ccount of her comeliness and graces, was united,
91
|me years since, to a fine German, who lives in a
71
driving hotel in Berlin, the sign of which has been
b
|tely altered from the “ King William ” to the
aißi IKaiser,” and which change of style is expected, at
a early period, when the present landlord, who is an
|d man, dies, to prove highly advantageous to the
'¿w occupier.
1 Two other daughters, Alice and Helen, are also
3.”i
S:
�1
o
3
n:
4
married to Germans, whose incomes, although liberal, U.P'1
are not equal to that of the former, nor are theiri Ldh
future promotions in life anything so promising.
.] L-j ■
Mrs. Windsor’s eldest son, who has a large yearly ufi?
income in his own right in some tin mines, which
were profitably worked during the young man’s;
minority by his prudent father, inherited a consider^ y N
able fortune when he came of age. This lucky fello^j
was married, about eight years since, to a handsoma Lj®
li
Danish lady, which event gave great satisfaction at
I
the time, as the young girl came from an old stock,
ir.
o
b
t
b
e
>>
?
3
e
•(
t
and was mighty winning in her behaviour both to
rich and poor.
Teddy, for that is the young man’s
4*
name, is likewise heir to three rich domains, and will, [¿i
be more looked up to when he comes into that ancieni tn
property.
He has seen much of the world, having
gone round it with observant guides, and has picked be
up varied knowledge.
Few men, it is said, can, hn
01
better understand a genuine cigar, and his experience jgqx
of fire-engines is also great, as he rarely fails to enjoy
a run upon them, with some smart mates, when a big h ■
run.
1t
* blaze illumines the town where he lives.
Now, one evening, Mrs. Windsor, who was desirous
|l
> when I first saw the vessel.”
I"
�5
getting her single children off her hands, being
amn one with her eldest unmarried daughter, Louise, at
0
•ii Leir own house in the north, at a place called Bahl
fi 'orrell, she spake motherly unto the lass regarding
li. ■ 3r affections towards a young man of those parts,
Ij.
o ha had beguiled the damsel’s heart, and whose
d afl sits had been much encouraged by the glad dame
t mention thereof, the innocent girl coloured up,
Epd hid her blushing face on her mother’s bosom,
)|hereat the maternal dame kindly hinted that her
rt ild was quite free to marry the honest Gael, if such
rfere her real wishes, and she graciously gave her
¿nsent to the match,
The whole of the family, at
•me and abroad, were at once made acquainted with
te proposed wedding, the news of which was ill
ovtifceived by some of them, because of their very high
hfwate.
The brother-in-law at Berlin, thought, for
q I? part, that the young lass would do better by belirij
ming the wife of one of his kinsmen, especially as
fwq
3 own expectations of a rise were very great; how-
ff-J
er, he would not strongly urge against the wedding,
such were the wish of the two people, and Mrs.
»¿bl indsor approved of the same.
3.”—
.
Si
�o
6
Teddy thought the choice of a more distinguished 1..4.
fl
partner advisable, but, lighting a fresh Havannah,
3
said ma might advise about the matter as she pleased: [
so he left them, to look after his horses and to attend
I *
to his book at the club.
Alf, on being spoken to about it, didn’t see wb !
1
/I
Louie shouldn’t marry who she liked, provided hi li,„ j
I
was really a proper fellow, and likely to make : :..i>
hi
Y
ir
o
kind husband, as he was sure Archy would, and hi H .
■ r *
hoped when the couple put out to sea, the sails o b
matrimony would swell with many a pleasant gale. I
j
Leo said he preferred a match of the kind, ant , .
b
thought mother would be more liked by everybody | ..
■ t
b
le
»
?
P
for letting Master Lome come into the family, whc |.
he was sure, would make his sister happy, and wha 1 ,
I r'
else had they to care about.
Little Beatry almost jumped for joy, and said sh j
was so glad ma would let Louie have Archie ; i ;
>e
r<
a
would be so nice to have them living in England, a 1
?;
their new house.
«
Q.
a
i
she would not lose her, but be able to go often t
Cousin George, who is blind, got some one to wr|
a note for him, which he sent from abroad, bearing| |
F
d
■ti________ _________________ ,
s when I first saw the vessel.”
�-b®«d abbed-out Hanover stamp.
In it he was rather
psihij molding about the affair; but as he had lately lost a
'.av/d town, and was vexed, considering himself cruelly
iteqi nposed upon by friends who, he thought, should
juve treated him better, Mrs. Windsor and her family
et down his disfavour to Louie’s wedding to bad
iesq.d emper, so they took no heed of his cold words.
ynA
Another cousin George—he of Cambridge—hap-
Ao in lened to drop in while the affair was being talked
"''M
>ver, with his red coat rather splashed, for he had just
g...nej )een seeing his soldiers do their work in the Park,
gd u )n being spoken to about the suit, he gave it his
•(insj iearty approval, and thought it high time such silly
ifoiid lotions of shutting out certain people from the family
p-rel were done .away with. He had kicked against such a
do* foolish rule himself, and in defying people’s remarks
.. bfi had found no reason to repent of his course; and
why shouldn’t Louie be as happy with a Scotch
noiva swain as with any foreign fellow with a sounding
hibI name that meant nothing.
He knew the boy, and
jodlliked his good sense, which would always carry him
hoi well through the world, and prove creditable to
in ou Louie.
�0
Aunt Augusta was too infirm to come, but she
wrote, saying that in her young days such things
were deemed shocking.
However, as times are sol
altered now, she would not dream of hindering the
5
new idea, the more so as her niece, Mrs. Windsor,
had determined on setting the change.
/I
1
?”•
i?'
ip
se
1H
ja
a-,
_a
:
a
th.
sa
>i
»e
as when I first saw the vessel.”
�9
YHAT
THE . FAMILY
ADVISERS
SAID
ABOUT IT.
ft]
.as Irs. Windsor, who is a model of household order,
jiu< rould not seriously move about her daughter’s pro-
.o^gosed wedding without consulting certain family
dvisers, whose opinions thereon should finally decide
d a er how to act.
She therefore bade Some men of
he ood repute and knowledge to come down to her
hiA welling on an island at the edge of the sea, where
?
ight confer with her and advise on the matter
hey miL
ri
nq h lat pressed upon her heart.
- sill Then certain prudent chiefs assembled at her house,
J ad, after listening to her words, they counselled
illy thereon.
An elder, named Hatherley, deeply
h rJ i,rned in the law, spake of the practices of times
»st, and declared that no statute in the books of the
n
j a1 ws of the land hindered the marriage; but rather,
• odi
thought, were it to be contracted between the
a srsons proposed, it would bring felicity to them, and
s.”-
�10
command favour with all people. A councillor nameJ
Gladstone next gave utterance, and would have
waxed into a flow of artful words, but that the occa
sion needed only his mind to be declared in simple
speech.
The virtues of Mrs. Windsor’s daughter, he
said, claimed the best of husbands, and that maternal
solicitude and sagacity which had caused those mani
fold virtues and graces to bud and ripen, were the
surest guarantees that a match so wisely arrangea
should continue auspicious to the end.
Ko legal
prohibition against it existed, and Mrs. Windsor, by
sanctioningthe same, would complete her daughter’l
happiness, and revive her own popularity.
The !
chief, Granville, with rare gentleness of tongue and
manner, said he knew the laddie well, and had
marked his shrewdness and good parts.
He felt !
assured that if Mrs. Windsor desired him for a sori j
in-law, no loss of dignity or respect towards he) i
would follow on that account; indeed, by grafting st I
honourable a branch to her own ancient stock, everl I
one would be pleased, and regard her more affec t
tionately.
After several others had all likewise spoken, on
when I first saw the vessel.”
�11
■iirtgi]
blister Lowe, who is keeper of the treasure-chest,
boied
Littered to the same purpose.
rZ" -ua
toair will need a little money wherewith to keep house
Besides, he said, the
'“mofhonestly, and I will speak to my good master, Mister
7 JlulBull, who will not in the least begrudge to give them
eilthe few thousands that I shall name, so that they
Sh^Jmay lack nought to support their state decently and
rtj)ai?}freflect his honour.
£)
e.”—
Sh
�12
WHAT WAS SAID BY DECENT CITIZENS
AND SOME CHURLS.
i
The intended wedding, being well bruited abroad
was in all men’s moutbs, who spake of it one to the
ii
r
,r
o
other, wishing Dame Windsor’s daughter abundant
joy to the end of her days.
In the highway which is called Parliament-street,
in the City of Westminster, a citizen thereof, and a
b
t
f
e
?
p
5
se
ri
a
7;
.«<
man of much substance, meeting one of his fellows,]
also of ample means, being a tradesman of the Wests
End, bade him good day, and pointed out to him
certain M.P.’s who were driving to the House to
speechify and to say “Aye” for a proposed yearfy
gfant to Miss Windsor, the young lady about to be
married.
He then talked of the matter, assured that
the Members would with one consent agree to the
moderate dotation, for that the damsel deserved the
same, and that they would the more heartily bestow
h
a
i
if
;d
----is when I first saw the vessel.”
�13
ifi because her mother had wisely set aside a perverse
e tie on her child’s behalf.
f
“Tea, and a right thing, too,” answered the
stener, “ for the swain is reported well worthy of
fist > fair a bride ; besides, ’tis a good sign when custom,
Gfflj
lb4 unded in pride, loses its force, having only age to
mo ¡commend it.
As well preserve a dung-heap on a
Wife ithway, because it was made by Caesar’s horse.
way with nuisances, say I, whether they encumber
Ind or weigh heavily upon man.
JOJ
By-the-bye, it is
pmoured that Mrs. Windsor is coming more amongst
L ; and I’m sure that her wonted face will bring
imshine to us again, and waken shouts that had wellj 4'
igh died away.”
| When these men of quality had parted, a labourer,
ib.
b
fending to his work along the flags, overtook another,
■hose pipe gave forth a cloud wreathing behind over
is shoulder.
Then the former asked for a light, and
iiey two went on, forgetting care in their smoking,
¿id filling the wind with the smell of their tobacco.
4T 1
-11.. I
i “ It gives me joy, mate, to see thee journeying to
4j ■job.
Is it for long F”
I “ Nay, only for a week, to make gas-piping for the
V 1
»/A J
e.”—
_
Si
�3
jy
14
flare that will light the shops at night, when the grand f
!
■y
wedding comes off.”
“ Of Mrs. Windsor’s daughter ?”
“ Yes ! and rarely for better purpose did fiery stars ,
turn the dark streets into day, to amuse the crowds,
than will the glowing ciphers kindled everywhere on
that coming occasion.
Why, I’ll burn a tallow-wicJ
myself to tell the world that another ban is blotted j
i
from the earth.”
“ Eh ! they’re going to vote her a round sum to
night at the House yonder, and I only wish that all]
r
)
>
t
the money they gave went to as good a use.
It’s
quite time that husbands for Dame Windsor’s single)I
daughters were found at home, without hunting fori
them in the land of sour krout.”
“ But one Taylor is going to pitch in against the
. i
grant.”
“ He ain’t got the pluck; and if he had he’d be
laughed down, as he ought to.
Let him slip intJ
real abuses, and he’s my man; but as for goinJ
|
agin that, why he’s as mischievous as the brawlera
who pretend to be working men; but who filch
their living from simpletons by spouting.”
t____
when I first saw the vessel.”
u.
�F
15
>’ “ At any rate Dame Windsor has touched the
>[ n^ ight key in this instance, which pleases everybody.
a '¿J1 inly she should begin to come out more, to enliven
[at# ne folks a bit, and set some trade moving.”
1'idZI
^slg
fiilT
Here the men ceased to discourse, having come to
place where their feet should turn opposite ways.
Thus the whole populace talked of the marriage,
h nd rejoiced much that Dame Windsor esteemed her
[aughter’s welfare beyond the tyrannous whim of
t'A
EQxds ashion.
inff
But certain obscure Odgerites, noisy and churlish
-wol
fellows, whom few men heeded, strove to stir up the
n nultitude against the reasonable dowry that John
Bull, in the largeness of his heart, was bent upon
giving to the bride.
These disturbers lifted up their
n Voices in pot-houses, while they swilled with the hire
iXlj
juggled from the pockets of the simple; yet their
¡iiivyavings were not regarded by peaceable folks, who
■wlreverenced Dame Windsor the more for her sound
iWit and love for her daughter, in that she might
mlinarry the man of her own choice, and one of her own
a country.
So the brawlers, whose tongues were as brands,
GB
�sank into limbo, and there was mirth throughout the
land, the rich and the poor loyally beseeching a life
long blessing on the wedding of Dame Windsor’s
daughter.
J. Cocn, Printer, 15, Wine-Office-Court, Fleet-street, London.
I first saw the vessel.”
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The wedding at Dame Windsor's and what was said about it by relations and friends, and by the boys of St. Stephen's School
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 17 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by J. Coen, Fleet Street, London. A satire on the wedding of Princess Louise Caroline Alberta to the Marquess of Lorne (later 9th Duke of Argyll). Text partially obscured by binding.
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A. Ritchie
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[1871]
Identifier
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G5453
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Monarchy
Marriage
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[Unknown]
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<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 wedding at Dame Windsor's and what was said about it by relations and friends, and by the boys of St. Stephen's School), 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>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Louise Caroline Alberta
Marriage
Monarchy
Princess of Great Britain
Satire
Weddings
-
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Text
Reprinted {for wide and gratuitous distribution) from
“ The Scotsman" of Tuesday, November 28, 1871.
The Holy Bible : with an Explanatory and
Critical Commentary. By Bishops and other
Clergy of the Anglican Church. Edited by F.
C. Cook, M.A., Canon of Exeter. Vol. I. The
Pentateuch. London : John Murray.
This is the first instalment of a work which, under
the name of the Speaker’s Bible, has been expected by
the public for the last seven years. The idea of it
originated during the excitement created in religious
circles by the appearance of “ Essays and Reviews ” and
the critical performances of such writers as Bishop
Colenso and Dr Samuel Davidson. The principles
maintained in such productions were calculated to shake
the popular faith in those ideas of Inspiration and
Biblical Infallibility which, however much questioned
or even denied on the Continent, had long held undis
puted sway in the average English mind. By many
persons of the highest respectability the prospect of a
change in this respect was viewed with disapprobation
�2
and apprehension, and many pamphlets and treatises
appeared, intended to guard the public mind against
what were believed to be the dangerous doctrines of the
innovating critics. Among others, the present Speaker
of the House of Commons interested himself in the
maintenance of the traditional views, and suggested to
the Archbishop of York the advantages that would
accrue to orthodox opinions by the publication of a
comprehensive Commentary on the Scriptures, in which
the latest results of Biblical learning should be pre
sented in such a manner that a layman of ordinary
education might have no difficulty in seeing the ground
lessness of the objections raised against the opinions in
which he had been reared. The Archbishop adopted
the suggestion, and got together a number of coadjutors,
expressly confined to the clergy of th e Church of Eng
land, the first-fruits of whose labours, after various
delays and the cogitations of several years, are now
before the public.
In judging of such a work, it is only fair to bear in
mind to whom it is addressed, by whom it is executed,
and what object it has in view. It is intended for the
laity, is meant to reconcile them to the ordinary evan
gelical view of the authority of Scripture, and is the
production of persons who regard themselves bound in
honour to maintain that view. In such circumstances
we cannot expect the exhibition of scholarly processes,
or much in the way of bold or even independent re
search or speculation. It would not have been too
much, however, to expect that so extensive and wealthy
a corporation as the Church of England might have
given proof of the possession of a fair amount of ripe
Old Testament learning, and of skill and decision in
the defence of whatever critical positions were assumed.
This expectation, however, is to a large extent disap
pointed. The Commentary, so far as it has gone, does
not exhibit great or original Hebrew scholarship, or
mature acquaintance with criticism. It is tiie work of
�3
men who are intelligent rather than learned in the
subject with which they deal. It would be unfair to
deny that a very great deal of information, historical
and exegetical, has been collected and judiciously
arranged for the purpose of a popular elucidation of the
text; but it is mainly a transference from Continental
sources, and the one or two authorities whom we have
at home. The lay reader will be saved the drudgery
of hunting through Smith and Kitto for the explana
tions suitable to different passages and subjects, but
that is really about the most that can be said of by far
the larger portion of the notes and excursuses. This
is no doubt a very useful work to have done, but it is
work of a decidedly humble order. Perhaps the most
original contribution to the volume is an Egyptological
essay by Canon Cook, which is well done both as a
rtsumt of existing materials and as an independent
criticism of their import. But even of this production,
meritorious though it be of its kind, it must be observed
that it is very doubtful how far it is likely to impress
the mind of an ordinary reader with the views which
the Commentary was designed and executed to promote.
Its main object is to confirm and illustrate the narra
tive of the Pentateuch from the Egyptian monuments,
and from these sources it is undoubted that strong evi
dence is adduced in support of the authenticity of many
statements in the Sacred Record. But it will not
escape the notice of a vigilant reader of this kind
of evidence (and Canon Cook’s essay is only one of
many such), that it fails to authenticate that class of
statements for which authentication is most needed.
It produces confirmation of the ordinary and natural
events of history, but none whatever of those super
natural events which are the main or only stumblingblock to many readers, and the great object of modern
scepticism. It is interesting to find side-light thrown
in from the monuments upon the history of Abraham
and Joseph, Pharaoh and Moses, and to see that the
�4
current of ordinary events there narrated is in harmony
with the actual conditions of Egyptian history and
society at the period; hut it is very remarkable that
no similar corroboration can be produced from those
monuments of any of the miraculous and more extra
ordinary narratives which are the real sources of religious
perplexity in connection with the Biblical record. On
such events as the messages'from Heaven to Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob, and others, the predictions of Joseph, the
swallowing up of Moses’ and Aaron’s rods by those of
the magicians, the plagues, the dividing of the Red
Sea, and the like, the monuments are dumb. In
matters where there are no difficulties of faith, this
kind of apologetic is profuse in confirmation ; it begins
to fail only at the point where faith needs to be
assisted. It may well be questioned whether such a
system of defence as this does any good to the cause
which it is designed to support. Canon Cook’s essay,
moreover, illustrates another mistake which is not
seldom committed by apologetic writers in the excess
of their eagerness to maintain what they believe to be
important positions. They often seek to defend their
position too well, and in their zeal, use means of pro
tection which have the effect of throwing open to
attack, or even surrendering other parts of the general
scheme which it may be equally essential to their pur
pose to maintain. For instance, Canon Cook, in his
anxiety to establish an early authorship for the Penta
teuch, makes it extremely difficult to establish a
similar early authorship for the Book of Judges.
He finds it necessary for his argument to show that
during the time of the Judges, Judea was con
tinually traversed or occupied by the Egyptian or
Assyrian hosts in their strategical movements in search
of each other. Had the Book of Judges been a con
temporary record, it is not conceivable that it should
have contained no reference to such transactions, any
more than it is possible to imagine a history of Belgium
�5
■written without an allusion to the battle of Waterloo
or those inarchings, counter-marchings, and conflicts
which made it the cockpit of Europe. Of course, if
the Book of Judges is made out or conceded to be
comparatively modern, the case is to that extent
strengthened for those who contend for a later author
ship of the whole Old Testament Scriptures.
If the Anglican clergy could not have produced, or
were not, in terms of their undertaking, hound to pro
duce, a great work of original scholarship and criticism,
they might at least have been expected to perform with
dexterity and resolution the special task which they
avowedly took in hand—the reconciliation of the
average popular mind to the traditional views. It
cannot, however, be said that they have been very suc
cessful here. The people on whom the book will tell
most powerfully in the interests of orthodoxy are those
who, for want of intelligent interest in critical ques
tions, will never read it. The fact of the book, and its
size, will produce a favourable impression on them. It
will set them at rest to know that the Bishops have
demolished Colenso and Davidson, for is not here the
confutation in a dozen volumes to be triumphantly
pointed to 1 Must not the Bishops be right when
they have so much to say for themselves 1 People,
however, who will read the book with a desire pos
sibly to have apprehensions allayed, and who will
moreover read it, not with open mouth, but with some
little degree of discrimination, are likely to experience
considerable disappointment. In not a few instances
they may find themselves constrained to ask in un
pleasant surprise, as they notice the forced character of
many of the arguments employed, “ Is this all that the
clergy have to say for themselves 1” And the general
impression left upon their minds seems likely enough
to be that, while Colenso and Davidson, and what is
vaguely called the Rationalising school, may be assail
able on various points of detail, there is more to be
�6
said for many of their positions than they had imagined
possible. They will he dissatisfied and staggered by
the haziness and hesitation with which many important
topics are treated in the Commentary, and, instead of
the simple, well-defined, thorough-going views of Scrip
ture in which they had been trained, and which they
may have expected to find vindicated out-and-out, they
will find themselves introduced to concessions and
compromises, and to a degree of uncertainty and in
definiteness of view, which is in effect a kind of help
less scepticism.
To take one or two examples. It is not unusual for
the commentators to assume that the divergencies
among critics opposed to themselves are a sufficient
proof of the unreasonableness of their opposition to the
view which they themselves uphold. For instance, in
dealing with the authorship of the Book of Leviticus,
we are told that “ the theories which are counter to its
Mosaic origin are so much at variance with each other
—no two of them being in anything like substantial
agreement—that it does not seem worth while to notice
them in this place.” Accordingly, there is no special
argument of any kind advanced in support of the
Mosaic authorship of this book. This can hardly but
be unsatisfactory to a reader of average discernment.
He will not fail to notice, that however much the anti
Mosaic theorists may differ in their positive opinions,
there is “substantial agreement” among them in the
negative opinion that, whoever wrote the book, Moses
did not; and he will scarcely be able to avoid feeling
that it would have been well to explain how so many
people who have learnedly investigated the matter,
have unanimously gone astray, and that the matter is
not properly disposed of by a mere assertion that the
opinions of such persons are of no consequence.
It appears to be considered a matter of great im
portance to show that Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
No doubt this is part of the traditional faith, but if it
�7
be an essential part of it, the readers of this Com
mentary are not likely to be greatly reassured upon the
point. The writers seem to be affected with consideraable diffidence as to the power of their arguments, and.
when all is done, to be prepared for making indefinite
deductions from the breadth of their conclusion. Two
kinds of arguments are used. The first is, that Christ
has recognised Moses as the author of the Pentateuch.
To doubt the Mosaic authorship is accordingly repre
sented as “ impeaching the perfection and sinlessness
of Christ’s nature, and seeming thus to gainsay the
first principles of Christianity.” If such an argument
be good at all, it requires no confirmation. But the
commentators proceed to fortify the impregnable, by
endeavouring to show from historical and internal
testimony that Moses might have written the Pen
tateuch, and that he probably did so. It will be diffi
cult for a reader of ordinary shrewdness to avoid ask
ing why, if Christ’s word on the matter is so con
clusive as it is alleged to be, it should be necessary to
back it up by what must be at the best delicate and
questionable inference. If the iron bridge is safe, why
should it be buttressed with pasteboard ? And then,
wrhen all is done, it is found that the Mosaic author
ship is only asserted in a modified manner. It is
admitted that Moses may have incorporated into his
work documents by other hands, and that in later
generations, particularly after the Babylonish captivity,
ten or eleven centuries subsequent to Moses, there was
probably a recension, comprising various unknown re
arrangements, explanations, and assertions ; so that
the view with which the reader is left is, that perhaps
Moses wrote a great deal of the Pentateuch, but which
parts are his, and which are his predecessors’ or editors’,
we have not now the means of determining. If the
Mosaic authorship is of the religious importance which
seems to be ascribed to it, surely this is not a satisfac
tory position in which to leave the subject.
�8
This perplexity is apt to be increased by the way in
which it is proposed to reconcile the existing Biblical
text with various parts of the testimony of modern
science. The commentators admit the difficulty that
is presented by the very great antiquity which they
concede to the origin of man in view of the limited
duration of human history as given in the genealogies
which occupy the early chapters of Genesis, even with
the extraordinary length of life there ascribed to the
Patriarchs. In explanation, they resort to the supposi
tion that the genealogies are not complete ; and in
answer to the objection, that they present every ap
pearance of completeness, they tell us that we must
“ consider all that may have happened in the trans
mission of the text from Moses to Ezra, and from Ezra
to the destruction of Jerusalem.” But if the text
could be tampered with in the way here indicated in
one important matter, why not in many others 1 and
what criterion have we by which to single out what is
really original and what has been interpolated, or alto
gether transformed, between the dates of Moses and
Ezra, or Ezra and the destruction of Jerusalem ? And
it is not only the text which grows uncertain in the
hands of the commentators; the interpretation of it
appears to become equally precarious. It is certainly
the popular and traditional view, that whatever the
Bible says is true, and that it says what the natural
meaning of its language conveys. The commentators,
however, introduce two principles which appear fitted
to create very great confusion in the minds of persons
who have been accustomed to read the Scriptures with
the old simple theory respecting their authority and
significance. They affirm it to be “ plain that a
miraculous revelation of scientific truths was never de
signed by God for man,” and leave us to understand
that we are to look for revealed guidance only to those
parts of the Scriptures which contain their “ testimony
to Divine and spiritual truth.” They do not, however,
�9
furnish any directions for drawing the line between
what is “ scientific truth ” and what is “ Divine truth.”
There are various historical statements and metaphysi
cal doctrines contained in the Scriptures, and it may
easily be conceived that the plain reader, having got
over his first surprise of learning, that he must not take
Scripture as his rule of faith in everything, should be
anxious to know whether and when seeming affirma
tions on such matters are to be accepted as revelation.
This anxiety cannot fail to be increased by the second
principle laid down by the commentators, which is,
that although the Bible does not give revelations upon
scientific matters, yet anything it does say upon such
things must be true, and therefore wherever the appa
rent meaning of Scripture is contradicted by undoubted
science, we must conclude that the apparent meaning
of Scripture is not the real meaning, and must be con
tent to believe that the real meaning of Scripture would
be recognised as true, if we could only know what the
real meaning is.
A good illustration of the working of this method of
interpretation is afforded by the mode in which the
commentators treat the history of creation in the first
chapter of Genesis, which they appear to regard as
dealing with 11 scientific ” as distinguished from “ divine
and spiritual” truth. The traditional interpretation
of this passage, as is well known is, that the universe
was made in six days, and in the manner and order
which are suggested by the natural meaning of the
words. The commentators, it need hardly be said,
allow that this interpretation cannot stand in the pre
sent day, but hold that, nevertheless, the conclusion
must not be drawn that the narrative is mythical, or in
any way erroneous. It is quite correct, only we do not
know fully what it means; but in so far as we do
know, we see that it accords with science. We fear,
however, that the difficulties against which this con
clusion is pressed will leave a disconcerting impression
�10
on the mind of the reader who has been accustomed to
the old and thoroughly unhesitating view of Biblical
infallibility. To show that, so far as understood, the
narrative in Genesis is in agreement with science, the
commentator, leaving aside minute discrepancies, alleges
that the order in which organised beings have succes
sively appeared on the earth is represented in Scripture
in substantially the same manner as by science.”
“ The chief difference,” it is said, “ if any, of the two
witnesses would seem to be, that the rocks speak of
(1) marine plants, (2) marine animals, (3) land plants,
(4) land animals ; whereas Moses speaks of (1) plants
[it should be land plants], (2) marine animals, ( 3) land
animals; a difference not amounting to divergence.
As physiology must have been nearly, and geology
wholly, unknown to the Semitic nations of antiquity,
such a general correspondence of sacred history, with
modern science, is surely more striking and important
than any difference in details.” But surely there is
an amount of begging the question here that is quite
impermissible. Even supposing it were of no conse
quence that the Mosaic account omits the “ marine
plants ” altogether, and that other differences in
“ details ” could be fairly left out of the account, is
it to be said that where the order is restricted to three
things—marine animals, land plants, land animals—
there is no discrepancy worth mentioning between the
history which places the marine animals before the
land plants, and that which places the land plants
before the marine animals ? If this is not a substantial
difference on the question of order, what is likely to be
held as a difference ? Manifestly, if the scientific order
is adhered to, it is necessary to fall back upon the pre
sent unintelligibility of Genesis, as is done with the
rest of the narrative in question. Perhaps the word
unintelligibility does not best describe the view of the
commentators in this matter. They seem not so much
to hold that the words mean nothing, as that they
�11
may mean anything, and that the Hebrew language in
such places as this has no ascertainable fixed signifi
cance. Thus they maintain that the word “ created,”
as applied to the “heavens and the earth,” means
“ formed out of nothingbut that same word
“ created,” as applied to the marine animals, they
affirm to mean merely “ made ” out of pre-existing
materials. But this word “ made,” applied in the sense
just mentioned to the land animals, has, in their view,
a totally different meaning from what it has when
applied to the sun, moon, and stars, which are appa
rently represented as formed after the creation of light.
In this case, to “ make ” the sun, moon, and stars,
means merely to “make them appear ” by rolling away
the clouds and vapours which had previously concealed
them. It will certainly alarm not a few of the laity to
learn that Hebrew lexicography is in so very uncertain
a condition.
There are various other cases in which the tradi
tional and apparent sense of the Biblical narrative is
departed from, not for any assigned lexical or gram
matical reasons, but because otherwise it appears difficult
to face modern scientific habits of thought. The his
tory of the Ball is substantially given up as an alle
gory, although the confusion of tongues at the Tower
of Babel is taken as simple history in tlie„. apparent
sense of the words. The Deluge, however, is treated
with more effort. It is explained as only partial,
confined to the district of Mesopotamia, where the
hills are very low, and beyond which- the human race,
notwithstanding the long antiquity already conceded
to it, and the powers of rapid multiplication claimed
for it in the commentary on Exodus in connection
with the Israelites, is not supposed to have spread.
The height of the water, apparently alleged in Scrip
ture to be fifteen cubits above the highest mountains in
the world, is thus to be calculated in relation to nothing
loftier than the elevations of Babylonia. “ The in
�12
habitants of the ark,” it is said, “ probably tried the
depth of the Deluge by a plumb-line, an invention
surely not unknown to those who had acquired the
arts of working in brass and iron, and they found a
depth of fifteen cubits.” The ark is rested “ perhaps to
the south of Armenia, perhaps in the north of Pales
tine, perhaps somewhere in Persia, or in India, or
elsewhere.” It appears to be forgotten, that extend
ing the area of the Deluge to India, not to speak of
“ elsewhere,” interferes with its proposed limitation to
Mesopotamia, and that the proximity to India of the
Himalayan range, rather tends to take from the em
ployment of heaving the lead, somewhat grotesquely
ascribed to Noah and his family, any air of proba
bility which it may be supposed to possess.
The endeavour to tone down the miraculous cha
racter of certain of the narratives from their apparent
meaning, which is illustrated in the instance now
quoted, is also shown otherwise. The plagues of
Egypt are laboriously described as mainly a mere in- ,
tensification of the natural calamities and distresses
of the country. Balaam and his ass are treated as
follows: — “ God may have brought it about that
sounds uttered by the creature after its kind became
to the prophet’s intelligence as though it addressed
him in rational speech. Indeed, to an augur, priding
himslf on his skill in interpreting the cries and move
ments of animals, no more startling warning could be
given than one so real as this, yet conveyed through
the medium of his own art; and to a seer pretending
to superhuman wisdom, no more humiliating rebuke
can be imagined than to teach him by the mouth of
his own ass. The opinion that the ass actually uttered
with the mouth articulate words of human speech, or
even that the utterance of the ass was so formed in
the air as to fall with the accents of man’s voice on
Balaam’s ears, seems irreconcilable with Balaam’s be
haviour.” We shall give but one other instance in
�13
which popular surprise will probably be created vv
the departure of the commentators from the apparent
and traditionally accepted interpretation of the text.
The seeming discrepancy between the Exodus and the
Deuteronomy versions of the Fourth Commandment,
in respect of the conflicting reasons assigned for its
enactment, is well known. The commentary, however,
explains that these “ reasons annexed ” formed no part
of the command as issued, however much the narra
tives appear to assert it, and that the First Table of
the Decalogue, as originally given, probably ran thus :
—1. Thou shalt have no other God before me. 2.
Thou shalt not make to thee any graven image. 3.
Thou shalt not take the name of Jehovah thy God in
vain. 4. Thou shalt remember the Sabbath-day to
keep it holy. 5. Thou shalt honour thy father and
thy mother. This abbreviated Decalogue, we should
suppose, will be exceedingly welcome to schoolboys.
The parts omitted are accounted for as expositions and
comments dictated oil separate occasions from the
issuing of the original decrees. Still, with all the
deductions, it will be observed that “ Remember the
Sabbath ” of Exodus, and “ keep the Sabbath ’’ of
Deuteronomy, remain unreconciled, and the question
between an original command or the resuscitation of
an ancient one is left undecided.
From such illustrations, which might have been
multiplied, it will be plain that in the view of the com
mentators the Bible may very clearly seem to mean a
certain thing, and yet may mean something very
different; nay, its apparent meaning may look as if it
were unmistakeably distinct and indisputable, and yet
its real meaning may be undiscoverable by human
sagacity. The effect of such teaching, so utterly op
posed to thejjerspicuzYus claimed for Scripture by the
Reformers, must be to produce great perplexity in the
minds of those for the re-establishment of whose faith
this Commentary is professedly constructed. They will
be irresistibly urged to ask, “ What part of Scripture
�14
can we ever be sure that we really understand ? Here
are certain parts of it which we and the generations
before us thought were as clear as noonday, and on
the strength of that conviction were endeavouring most
dutifully to believe, and even condemning or persecut
ing other people for disbelieving ; and yet it turns
out that they mean something totally different, or that
their meaning is absolutely undiscoverable. Where is
this to stop ? If the account of creation does not
mean what it seems to mean, how can we be sure
that the account of Justification means what it seems
to mean ? It is true the commentators wish it to be
understood that this dubiety attaches only to “scientific’
statements, and not to those that affect “ divine or
spiritual truth ? ” But who is to tell which is which ?
On the whole, we cannot grant that the aim of the
Commentary seems likely to be much advanced by its
publication. People who have no difficulties, and want
to have none, may be helped by its appearance to
hector the perplexed, if possible, a little more loudly.
But waverers, if we may use the expression, are in
danger of being confirmed in their wavering. Yet we
would not like to say that it is a useless, or that it is
not a respectable work. It will form a good intro
duction to the subject for those who want to get a
compendious glimpse of the latest state of the questions.
We are bound also to say that it is free from acrimony
and abusiveness, and if not written always with scientific
impartiality, is invariably pervaded by a gentlemanly
tone. It promises to be the most notable work pro
duced by the conjoint labours of English divines since
the Thirty-nine Articles and the Westminster Confes
sion, and the future Church historian will probably
point to it as an important landmark in the history of
British theology, as showing how many important
positions had come, since the formation of those
memorable documents, to be regarded as very uncertain,
or even untenable, towards the last quarter of the
nineteenth century.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The Holy Bible: with an explanatory and critical commentary
Description
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Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 14 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: "Reprinted (for wide and gratuitous circulation) from 'The Scotsman' of Tuesday November 28 1871". From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. A critique of 'The Holy Bible' by Bishops and other Clergy of the Anglican Church. Edited by F.C. Cook.... Vol. 1: The Pentateuch. London: John Murray. Date of publication from KVK.
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[Thomas Scott]
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[1871]
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G5476
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Bible
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[Unknown]
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<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 Holy Bible: with an explanatory and critical commentary), 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>
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English
Bible-Commentaries
Bible. O.T. Pentateuch
Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
-
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Text
BELIEFS OF UNBELIEVERS.
A
*
LEOTU«E
DELIVERED BY THE
.
>
REV. 0. B. FROTHINGHAM,
IN BOSTON, U.S.
>
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
��THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEVERS.
----- —-----N a Swedenborgian book written thirty years ago on
the inspiration of the Bible, one finds a descrip
tion, copied from an official report made to the govern
ment by a Mr James, of a “ horrid desert” occupying
hundreds of square miles of the territory between the
Mississippi river and the Rocky Mountains. The
picture of this desolate waste, with its unsightly and repulsivevegetable growths, its swarming locusts (on which
the Mississippi hawk swooped and fed), its venomous
and enormous snakes, is a thing to haunt the reader’s
dreams. But now through this region the Pacific
Railroad runs, and one steams away through the
golden, far-off West, looking vainly from rear plat
forms of cars for this land of darkness and the shadow
of death, and finding instead a region capable of sup
porting an immense agricultural population, the future
site of pleasant homes. The great American desert is
a myth. Similar accounts have been handed down to
us of intellectual and moral deserts in Europe and
elsewhere—great spaces of territory or of time, covered
with the prickly thorns of disbelief, cursed with poison
ous vegetable growths, infested with deadly serpents,
made hideous by unclean animals, awful with the dark
flappings of demoniac wings. Such a district the
Roman empire before the coming of Christ was long
supposed to have been; and it is the more liberal
scholarship of our own generation which has shown it
I
�t
4
Beliefs of Unbelievers.
to us in fairer colours—taught us that then and there,
* even, men hoped, and trusted, and prayed, and believed,
' and endeavoured, and attained—that the empire had
soinething to bestow on Christianity, as well as Chris
tianity on the empire—that the time and state were
neither worse nor better than they should have been,
but lay directly in the track of historic progress. We
know that human nature exhibited there all its attri
butes, its best as well as its worst; that it produced
sages, reformers, and saints; grew philosophers by the
dozen ; noble men and women by the score; that it
rectified laws, remedied abuses, restrained crime, re» * ,'A
buked sin, and in the usual way pushed itself out into
the light and atmosphere of virtue. Renan makes it
pretty clear that the middle of the second century, so
long regarded as given over to the devil, was neither
worse nor better than it ought to have been, and Lecky
shows that the Roman empire neither experienced con
version nor needed it. One by one the deserts are dis
closed in their native fertility, and the shapes of moral
grandeur are revealed in spots where nothing was
r ’’;.
supposed able to exist. In like manner a beam or two
of illumination may well be thrown into the dreaded
shadow-land of so-called infidelity, by bringing to the
light of day the beliefs of the unbelievers. With the
worst side of infidelity the church-going world is
familiar enough. It will be allowable, to day, to pre
sent the best side of it. But nothing shall be unfairly
extenuated or exaggerated, since the only thing worth
our having is the truth.
In every age of Christendom there have been men
whom the church named “ infidels,” and thrust down
into the abyss of moral degradation. The oldest of
these are forgotten. The only ones now actively ana
thematised lived within the last hundred years, and
owe the blackness of their reputation to the assaults or
superstitions that still are powerful, and the dogmas
that are still supreme. The names of Chubb, Toland,
L .
�The Beliefs oj Unbelievers.
Tindal, of Herbert of Cherbury, Shaftesbury, and
Bolingbroke, though seldom, spoken now, are men
tioned, when they are mentioned, with scorn and
horror. The names of Voltaire and Rousseau recall at
once sermons and verdicts that our own ears have
heard. The memory of Thomas Paine is still a stench
in our nostrils, though he has been dead sixty years—
so deep a stamp of damnation the church fixed on him.
Even a man as well intentioned as Adam Storey Farrar,
who must have studied his themes for himself, falls into
the vulgar slang of the pulpit when speaking of these
men who dared to reject the prevailing beliefs of Chris
tendom. It will be years before the grass will be al
lowed to grow green on their graves. Disbelievers they
were. He claimed for them that honour. It is their
title to immortality. Doubtless they were deniers,
infidels, if you will. They made short work of creed
and catechism, of sacrament and priest, of tradition
and formula. Miraculous revelation, inspired Bible,
authoritative dogma, dying Gods and atoning Saviours,
infallible apostles and churches founded by the Holy
Ghost, ecclesiastical heavens and hells, with other fic
tions, their minds would not harbour. They criticised
mercilessly the drama of the redemption, and spoke
more roughly than wisely of the great mysteries of
the Godhead. But, after their fashion, they were
great believers. In the interest of faith they doubted;
in the interest of faith they denied. Their nay was a
backhanded method of pronouncing “ yea.” They
were after the truth, and supposed themselves to be
removing a rubbish-pile to reach it. Toland, whose
“ Christianity not Mysterious” was condemned to the
flames by the Irish Parliament, while the author fled
for protection to England, professed himself sincerely
attached to the pure religion of Jesus, and anxious to
exhibit it free from the corruptions of after times. So
Thomas Paine wrote his “Age of Reason” as a check
to the professors of French Atheism. One author in
�6
The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
1646 enumerates 180 “flagrant heresies,” one of which
was: “ That we may walk with God as well as the
patriarchs.”
These unbeliefs were born of the spirit of the age.
It was a time of terrible shakings. The axe had fallen
on the neck of a king, and the halberd had smitten the
images of the saints. Scarcely an authority stood fast,
and not one was unchallenged. The infidels felt this
spirit first. Fidelity to its call was their faith. They
believed in the sovereignty of reason, the rights of the
individual conscience. They had that faith in human
nature which is the faith of faiths. It is a faith hard
to hold ; and these infidels found it so in their time.
If anything is clear, it is that faith is large in propor
tion as it dares to put things to the proof. Fear and
laziness can accept beliefs ; only trust and courage will
question them. To reject consecrated opinions demands
a consecrated mind—at all events, the moving impulse
to such rejection is faith—faith in reason ; faith in the
mind’s ability to attain truth; faith in the power of
thought, in the priceless worth of knowledge. The
great sceptic must be a great believer. None have so
magnificently affirmed as those who have audaciously
denied; none so devoutly trusted as they who have
sturdily protested. Not willingly do good men under
mine deep-planted beliefs or throw precious hopes
away. Small pleasure does it give to noble minds to
pull down roofs beneath which for ages people have
found shelter. If they are indifferent to others’ sorrow
they must have some thought for themselves. Is there
pleasure in having ill-will, hate, persecution, in order
that they may belittle the world and themselves ? Is
it such a privilege to be without faith in the world
that men are willing to lay down their lives for it ? Is
it true, as I read lately on a sarcastic page, that “ the
most advanced thinker of our times takes an enlight
ened delight in his father, the monkey ? When he
has sunk his pedigree as man and adopted as family-
�The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
7
tree a procession of baboons, superior enlightenment
radiates from his very person, and his place of honour
is fixed in the illuminated brotherhood.” I know of
none who profess such a creed, but if there be any such,
what martyrs so devoted as they, who are willing to
abrogate humanity in the cause of knowledge, and to
immolate their immortal being on the altar of creative
law ! The great provers have dared to prove because
they were sure that their proving must result in the
establishment of truth.
The beliefs of the unbelievers, being fundamental,
are few. The creed of the infidel is short, but few nobler words have been written than some of the utter
ances of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and other English
infidels. Francis W. Newman’s creed is: “God is a
righteous governor, who loves the righteous, and an
swers prayers for righteous men;” but this may be
abbreviated by omitting the last clause. Speaking
more particularly of some of the half-forgotten English
infidels, the creed of Herbert of Cherbury was a uni
versal religion implanted in the minds of all men;
Charles Blount’s that God was to be worshipped by
piety alone ; Tindal asserted the immutability of God
and the perfection of this law; Lord Shaftesbury
opposed the sensational philosophy of Locke, and main
tained the existence of an immutable principle of faith
and duty in the breast; Anthony Collins received a
letter from Locke, in which occurs this sentence:—
“ Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth’s
sake is the principal part of human perfection in this
world and the seedplot of all other virtues; and if I
mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with
in anybody;” Thomas Chubb referred Christianity,
like any other religion, to the law written on the heart;
Bollingbroke taught belief in the existence of a supreme
being of infinite wisdom and power. In England
infidelity planted itself on reason and common-sense,
stood by the broad facts of nature, maintained the unity
*
♦
�8
The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
of God, the order of the world, and the welfare of all
creatures in it.
French infidelity was of a different cast, for it was
born of different experiences. The French infidel was
by necessity a revolutionist. France had neither free
press, free parliament, nor free debates. There were
no public meetings and no discussions. A government
decree forbade the publication of any book in which
questions of government were discussed ; another made
it a capital offence to write a book likely to excite the
public mind; a third denounced the punishment of
death against any one who spoke of matters of finance
or who attacked religion. Besides the worship of
reason and the search for truth, it was a fiery and pas
sionate protest against injustice. There was no free
dom in the France of Voltaire’s time. Almost every
French writer of that epoch, whose writings have
survived the age in which they were produced, suffered
fine or imprisonment, or the suppression of his works.
Voltaire was again and again imprisoned. Rousseau
was exiled, and his works publicly burned. The whole
intellect of France, thus thwarted, insulted, goaded to
madness, rose in insurrection against the government.
But the only hopeful way of assailing government was
to assail the church. Religion was weak in comparison
with royalty. Divinity hedged the king but not the
priest. The clergy had greatly degenerated in charac
ter, and had forfeited by their hypocrisy the respect
even of the immoral. Thus the church offered the
first point to the attack of the outraged genius of France.
That attack was too headlong and furious ; the church
recovered from it and heaped infamy on the names of
its enemies. But that offal-heap is disappearing, and
we see now that even these sinners lived and died in
the faith. Their courage was kindled at the upper
and not the nether fires. The love of truth and of
humanity constrained them, and their foes were dog
matism and superstition.
�The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
9
One cannot do justice to the faith of these men by
a bare enumeration of their religious opinions ; but it
is interesting to know that Voltaire believed in a per
sonal God and trusted in immortality. The inscription
on his tomb—“ He combatted the Atheists ”—wears
an impressive look. I read Voltaire’s confession of
faith in sentences scattered all over his pages, which,
written most of them in heart’s blood, attest the fact
that this terrible infidel had a soul of faith great
enough to save him. It saved many beside. The
soul of Voltaire quickens France to-day, a soul of re
volution, but of regeneration as well. The inspiration
of Diderot was the spirit of intelligence, not the spirit
of unbelief. His atheism was the protest of a glowing
heart against a freezing divinity. His belief in a great
God instead of a little one. Can any good thing be
urged for materialists like Helvetius, or atheists like
Dr Holback ? Their articles of faith were indeed few.
They rose in such wrath against the church that they
struck away the last vestige of religion, leaving neither
God nor immortality. Man was for them an ingenious
piece of mechanism—the universe a machine. But
they taught an obedience to the laws of nature, which,
if fully carried out, would almost make God’s kingdom
come on earth as it is in heaven. Sensible men have
done talking about the infidelity of Rousseau—the
apostle of sentiment in religion, the prophet of the
conscience, the passionate eulogist of Jesus. The sen
timentalists win glory to-day by their repetitions of his
thoughts on the absolute goodness of God and the
large hospitalities of heaven. Our republican state is
not more indebted to him for its idea of man than is
our church for its idea of deity.
We come to Tom Paine—his name was Thomas,
but that name being Christian is not yet given him
by respectable people—Tom Paine, “ the foul-mouthed
infidel,” the “ ribald blasphemer,” “ the man of three
countries, and disowned by all-—English in his deism.
�io
The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
American in. his radicalism, French in his scoffing
temper,” the hugbear of the priest, the anti-Christ of the
preacher. They that deny to him beliefs have never
read his writings—they that refuse to him a faith
must explain his heroism as they can. The “ Age of
Reason,” dreadful book, which all revile because none
read it, opens with this statement: “I believe in
one God, and no more ; and I hope for happiness
beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man;
and I believe that religious duties consist in doing
justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our
fellow-creatures happy.” “The world my country;
to do good my religion,” was this unbeliever’s motto ;
and to him we owe this exquisite definition: “ Re
ligion is man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his
heart.” There was a soul of faith in him ; and in
these days he would take rank with our beloved
Theodore Parker.
Character was the test of conviction, and these
unbelievers must be judged by their acts. They were
not saints, and very few men are. Their character
would compare favourably with any of the so-called
believers of their age. There were few to speak a
word for the atheist Diderot; yet for a few such athe
ists the church would not be made worse. Clergymen
had copied the small virtues of Voltaire, multiplied
them by ten, and perfumed them with asafetida, while
his great virtues were beyond their comprehension.
The prominent traits of Paine’s character were bene
volence, tenderness to the weak, and hatred of wrong
and oppression. When we test the faiths of our un
believers by their works, we find them men, like the
rest of us, sharing the faults, sometimes the vices, of
their times, but all had a certain nobility of soul, and
some were heroes. Lord Barrington speaks of “ the
virtuous and serious deists ” of his time. Taylor calls
Herbert of Cherbury “ a man of religious mind.” Sir
James M'Intosh describes Shaftesbury as “ a man of
�The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
11
many excellent qualities; temperate, chaste, honest,
and a lover of his country.” “ The principal traits in
the character of Voltaire,” says Jules Barin, “ were
benevolence, tenderness to the weak, hatred of wrong
and oppression.” Indeed Voltaire’s grand acts of
heroism are well known to all who have read anything
about him— his devoted efforts to obtain a reversal of
the sentence against the family of Jean Calas—victim
at once of sanguinary superstitions and brutal laws—
an effort which lasted three years, “ during all which
time,” he declares, “ I reproached myself with every
smile as if it were guilt ”—was only one of his selfsacrificing attempts to .aid the weak and oppressed.
We find him paying the debts of the poor, restoring
the fallen fortunes of one and another, making himself
a benevolent providence wherever he found suffering.
Surely at the end he could say, “ I have fought a good
fight, I have kept the faith.”
The new day-spring that is coming over the hills
has reached even the low grave of Thomas Paine, and
is covering it with flowers. The foul spectres that
gathered there no longer appear to those that have eyes
to see. Every true American should know at least
something of the great qualities of Thomas Paine.
Every true American should know that it was he who
struck the key-note of the Revolution by his “ Common
Sense.” Every true American should know that his.
“ Crisis,” written in an hour of extreme discourage
ment, electrified the army, put a soul into the country,
and was worth to the failing cause of independence
more than an army with banners. His first sentence,
“ These are the times that try men’s souls,” is still the
patriot’s battle-cry in the last struggle. Every true
American should know and should love to remember
that when these two publications were having an
enormous sale—the demand for the former reaching
not less than 100,000 copies, and both together offered
to the author profits that would have made him rich—
�12
The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
that man, poor and overworked, refused a cent of re
muneration for his toil, and, like a prince, nay, rather
like a true friend of man, freely gave the copyright to
every State in the Union. Every true American should
know and delight to tell how Thomas Paine, in his
period of public favour and of intimate friendship
with the founders of the government, declined to accept
any place or office of emolument, saying, “ I must be
in everything, as I have ever been, a disinterested
volunteer. My proper sphere of action is on the com
mon floor of citizenship, and to honest men I give my
hand and my heart freely.” Every true American
should know and should not forget that when the
State of Virginia made a large claim on the general
government for lands, Thomas Paine opposed the claim
as unreasonable and unjust, though at that very time
there was a resolution before the Legislature of Virginia
to appropriate to him a handsome sum of money for
services rendered. He knew it when he wrote. He
knew what would be the effect of his writing ; but not
for any private considerations would he hold back his
protest. Every true American will be glad to know
that Paine, though an Englishman, had such love for
republican institutions that he declared he would rather
see his horse “ Button ” eating the grass of Bordentown
or Morrisania than see all the pomp and show of
Europe.
No private character has been more foully calumni
ated in the name of Gfod than Thomas Paine’s. Dead
now for more than sixty years, few people care, per
haps, whether he was slandered or not j but, speaking
as a historian alone, one would be justified in demand
ing attention to a fully detailed vindication of this
name, so remarkable in our own annals. Speaking
not as a historian, but as a free-religionist, surely one
may be allowed a brief space wherein to show that
infidels had their virtues as well as their beliefs ; that
the territory occupied by the unbelievers is not a
�The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
13
barren desert, bnt a fruitful domain wherein the
humanities dwell and the angels sing. All the gravest
charges against Paine have been utterly disproved, and
have fallen to the ground. We have left, the memory
of a man full of zeal for God and for humanity—not
a saint, indeed, but surely not a sinner above all who
dwelt in Jerusalem. He drank more brandy than was
wise, or would now he deemed dignified, but the
eminent Christians of his time more than kept him
company. He was no dandy, but is dandyism reckoned
an apostolic grace ? He used snuff, but is snuff-taking
so much more heinous than smoking, which is said
to be a clerical weakness, that it makes all the difference between the believer and the infidel? He lost
his temper sometimes, but what amount of orthodoxy
will make it sure that a good man's temper shall never
fail ? There were magnificent moments in this much
maligned life. It was one of them when the French
Assembly met, to order the execution of Louis XVI.,
and Thomas Paine protested in the name of liberty
against the deed. “ Destroy the king,” he cried, “but
save the man. Strike the crown, but spare the heart.”
The members, in a rage, would not believe their ears.
“ These are not the words of Thomas Paine,” resounded
from every side of the chamber. “They are my
words,” said the undaunted man. But they cost the
hero his reputation, and came near costing him his
life.
Ah, what do we not owe to the few who have had
the courage to disbelieve ! The men who bore hard
names through life, and after death had harder names
piled like stones over their memories ! The men who
lived solitary and misunderstood, who were driven by
the spirit into the wilderness ; who were called infidels
because they believed more than their neighbours;
and heretics because they chose the painful pursuit of
truth in preference to the idle luxury of traditional
opinion; and atheists because they rested on a God so
�14
The Beliefs of Unbelievers.
large that the vulgar could not see his outline; and
image breakers because they adored the unseen Spirit;
and deniers of the Christ because they affirmed the
Eternal Word ! What do we not owe them, who went
about shaking their heads, and murmuring no with
their lips, their hearts all the while saying yes to the
immortals 1 They, after all, are the builders of our
most splendid beliefs. Almost all our rational faiths
we must thank them for, liberators that they are ! It
is they who have hunted the old devil from the high
ways and byways of creation. To them we owe
deliverance from witchcraft, priestcraft, and the mani
fold shapes of superstition. They have taught us to
read the Bible with open eyes. They have interpreted
the sweet humanity of Jesus. Who but they have
practically taught us the preciousness of the eternal
life, have rescued us from the tyranny of creeds, and
purchased with their blood the soul-freedom which is
our birthright ? We will cry with Erasmus : “ Holy
Socrates, pray for us.” We will say with Schleiermacher: “Join me in offering a lock of hair to the
shade of the rejected Saint Spinoza. Full of religion
was he j and full of the Holy Ghost.” And if there
were a louder voice calling on us to lay tears, vows, and
purposes on the graves of all faithful infidels and be
lieving unbelievers, we would say amen and amen.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The beliefs of unbelievers: a lecture
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Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
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Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 14 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. A lecture delivered in Boston on January 8th 1871.
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Thomas Scott
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[1871]
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G5467
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Agnosticism
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English
Agnosticism
Conway Tracts
Unitarianism
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FIRST PAPER.
1 L’Art pour l’Art ’ is a motto that supplies us with a very satisfactory
definition of the aim and purport of the poetry of those early times
when men, not having lost their fresh childlike rejoicing in the present,
sang—if they had the power to sing—aimlessly ‘ wie der Vogel singt,’
just only because
Das Lied das aus der Kehle dringt
1st Lohn der reichli ch lohnet.
,
But every year is now carrying us farther away from a state of things
in which it is possible that there should be produced poetry of the kind
to which this definition is applicable. The great flood of subjectivity
which has made its way into all modern thought has brought with it
problems pressing for answer in such a crowd as to leave no room for
thinking or feeling to be exercised unconsciously and without purpose.
Of the poets now writing amongst us we cannot say that their work
is 1 pour l’Art.’ In the generation immediately preceding theirs there
was, indeed, one poet—Scott—who contrived to keep himself apart, as
on an island, nntouched by the waves of restless subjective thought
that had come over the intellectual life of his age, and who retained the
power of purposeless poetical utterance. But has there been produced,
since his, any poetry seeking no further office than to become a beauti
ful or noble piece of art ? Does not all, or by far the greater part of
that which is of recent origin, seem to be sent forth for the purpose of
gaining satisfaction of one kind or another for the craving self-con
sciousness of the writers, and of their contemporaries who are to share
in the results of their quest? Poetry, like every other power which
man has at command, has now been forced to take its part in supplying
the two great wants, Pleasure and Truth—which, little felt in simple
primitive times, become passionately urgent in a state of high civilisation
and culture. We have not now—and probably the world will never
have again—poets who are poets and nothing more. What we have
now is truth-seekers and pleasure-seekers gifted with the power of
�172
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
artistic perception and imagination, of rhythmical or melodious ex«
pression, and using these gifts to seek what without them they would!
have sought by other means.
The school of thought which is content to regard pleasure as the
satisfaction for which all desires are craving, uses its poetry to go forth,
and bring in full richness of pleasures ; careless, if only there can be
found in them beauty and delight, from whence they come and of what
sort they are. Not the value of a man’s work as art, but the power it
has to awaken in writer or readers a stranger susceptibility to
pleasure of sense or imagination, is here the measure of his success.
There is a great deal of poetry which seems on its surface to be alto
gether the free playing of spontaneous instincts, but which we find,
if we look a little deeper into it, to have at bottom the principle of
utilitarianism, not of art.
Nor can the men whose desires are towards the satisfaction of truth
be poets more unconscious of a purpose. To find that satisfaction for
themselves and for others is the aim towards which all their faculties
are bent, and in proportion as their search is successful these men
become teachers and preachers. The poet on whose characteristics the
following pages will contain a few thoughts—Mr. Robert Browning—
is one whose gifts as a poet, strong and true as they are, are perhaps
oftener than any contemporary artist’s, merged in his character as
preacher of what he has gained as a truth-seeker. I cannot but think
that the full value of his work can only be estimated by recognising
him first in his office of preacher rathei’ than of poet.
Any reader who has had patience enough to force his way through
the bristling hedge of complicated sentences that forms so much of the
outer fence of Browning’s writings, and has gone in and got hold of
intelligible meaning, must surely perceive that he has to do with some
thing which cannot be judged of by aesthetic tests,. We feel that what
is to be found there is the work of a man who is bound by all the
impulses of his nature to preach what he believes and to persuade
other men. He seems to have chosen the office of poet voluntarily, for
the sake of this preaching ; partly because the rythmical form of words
will carry his doctrine where it might not otherwise reach and partly
because amongst the truths he would set forth, there are some which
are of the kind that to men’s present faculties must be always only
as sights half seen, as sounds half heard, and which become dimmer
and fainter if the attempt is made to define them into the accurate
form and articulate speech of ordinary prose. Browning’s place is
amongst the teachers whose words come forth allowed by their own
conscious will; not amongst the artists controlled by involuntarily
instincts.
His poetry is not a great artist utterance that has fulfilled its end—
or at least the only end with which the artist is concerned—when once
it has got outside the mind in which it originated into audible sound
�BROWNING- AS A PREACHER.
173
or visible form, whether that sound be heard or that form be seen or
not; but it is a message intended to travel (the sender hardly cares
how, provided that the end be reached) from the heart and brain of
one man to the hearts and brains of those who will hear him. The
necessity that is laid upon him, through his instincts, is the ‘ When
thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren ; ’ and the setting himself
to his work as a poet seems to be his choice of the way in which he
will obey that impulse. Not for his own sake does poetry seem to be
a necessity to him. As far as his own needs are concerned, such a man
could afford to be silent. It is neither for the relief nor for the pleasure
of self-utterance that he speaks. Nothing that he has written
betokens the weakness and incapacity of_reticence that have opened the
mouths of so many poets in a great strong bitter crying, which
they tuned into beautiful music whose sweetness might ease them of
their pain. Nor has he that irrepressible joy in beauty for its own
sake which forced Wordsworth to tell of the loveliness of the visible
world.
And we cannot attribute his becoming a poet to the pressure of
dramatic instincts. Though in power of imagining dramatic characters
it is he and he only who at all fills the office’of modern Shakespeare,
yet there is something in his manner of exercising that power which
tells us that in him it is subordinate to some other motive. This
difference there is between Browning and other poets who could
create ‘ men and women,’ that w’hereas with others the production
of life-like characters seems to be the aim and end, with him it is only
the means to a further end—namely, the arguing out and setting
forth of general truths. He cannot, as others have done, rest
satisfied with contemplating the children of his imagination, and find
the fulfilment of his aim in the fact of his having given them existence.
It seems always as if his purpose in creating them was to make them
serve as questioners and objectors and answerers in the great debate
of conflicting thoughts of which nearly all his poetry forms part. His
object in transferring (as he can do with such marvellous success)
his own consciousness, as it were, into the consciousness of some
imagined character, seems to be only to gain a new stand-point, from
which to see another and a different aspect of the questions concerning
which he could not wholly satisfy himself from his own point of view.
He can create characters with as strongly marked individualities as
had ever any that came out of the brain of dramatist or novelist, but
he cannot be content to leave them, as Shakespere did the characters
he created, to look, all of them, off in various directions according to
whatever chanced to suit best with the temper and disposition he had
imagined for them. Still less can he leave to any of his men and
women the vraisemblable attribute of having no steady outlook at
anything in particular. They are all placed by him with their eyes
turned in very much in the same direction, gazing towards the same class
�174
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
of questions. And, somehow, Browning himself seems to he in com
pany with them all the time, hearing their different reports of the
various aspects which those questions present to each of them ; and
judging and choosing between all these different reports, in order to
give credence to the true one. The study of no individual character
would seem to him of much value, unless that character contained
something which should help to throw light upon matters common to
all humanity, upon the questions either as to what it is, or as to what are
its relations to the things outside humanity. Desire to know the truth,
and to make other men know it, seems to be the essential quality of
his nature, and his poetry only its separable accident — a garment
which it wears because if finds such best suited to it in the nineteenth
century, but which it might very likely have gone without, if placed
among the surroundings of some other age. If we can fancy him
transferred back some five hundred years ago, he would be found
surely not among the followers of the 1 gaye science/ as a trouvère
or troubadour, exercising his art to give pleasure at the court or the
knightly castle, but rather in the solitude of a monastic cell, gazing
with fixed eyes into the things of the unseen world, until they became
the real, and the shows of earth the unreal, things ; or, later on, would
surely have been a worker, not in the cause of the great art revival of
the sixteenth century but of its Reformation movement. One can fancy
how grandly he would then have preached his gospel of the sanctity
of things secular, in rough plain Luther-like prose, with the same
singleness of purpose with which he now, as a poet, sets himself to
preach a gospel—needed more than all others by his contemporaries—
of the reality and presence of things immaterial and extra-human.
Browning’s poetry has one characteristic which gives its teaching
peculiar influence over contemporary minds. I mean the way in which,
all the while being perfectly free from egoism, it brings its readers in
some inexplicable way into a contact with the real self of the author,
closer and more direct than that which we have with any other poets
through their writings. Once you succeed in construing the compli
cated thinking and feeling of this or that passage of his, you feel,
not that youtare seeing something that a man has made, but that you
are in the immediate presence of the man himself. I know of no other
writings (except J. H. Newman’s) having this peculiarity to such a
degree (it is in this that the secret of the fascination of those wonder
ful sermons of Newman’s consists). These two men, so different,
have yet this in common, that there is something in their written
words which communicates to the men who read them the thrill of
contact with the.pulsations of another human life. And the knowledge
that there is the real living mind of another man speaking to your
mind, gives a restful sense of reality that is the starting-point of all
belief and of all motive to action. Surely anyone who has received
this from Browning must feel as if there would be a miserable ingrati-
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
175
tu.de in the sort of criticism which should carp at his poetry for its
lack of polish in style or prettiness in ideas.
Browning is greater than his art, and the best work which his poetry
does is to bring you into his own presence: and once there you no
longer care what brought you there, and feel as if it mattered very
little whether the means of communication had been poetry or other
form of words. Tennyson’s art is greater than Tennyson ; and it is
with it, and not with the man himself, that you have to do.
Of course, though Tennyson can have no direct influence as a teacher
over anyone who feels thus about him and his work, yet his indirect
influence over the minds of men is not to be lightly accounted of. His
poetry is what it is, and may be accepted by us as we accept a beauti
ful painting or piece of music, as an end in itself. Acting through our
aesthetic perceptions, it affects the tone and colour of our moods. And
most of us know by experience that the character of our thinking is in
a great measure dependent upon moods and feelings open to impres
sions of this sort. It is of course no slight gift that Mr. Tennyson has
given to his contemporaries when he has shown them ideas so pure and
calm and noble, by the contemplation of which their own lives may
unconsciously become purer and higher.
Acknowledging this influence that he has, and giving him due honour
for it, all I would say is that there is another kind of influence which
he cannot exercise, and that his poetry, though making nineteenth cen
tury problems so constantly its theme, is not to be reckoned amongst the
books that give any real availing help against the modern 1 spectres of
the mind.’ To the needs of vital doubt it is no more than if it told us
tales of fairy-land. And this because of its failing to give us that entire
satisfaction as to its being truth subjective, which alone could be our
guarantee for its being able to help in guiding us to truth objective. In
the times when neither our hearts nor brains can get hold of the sense
of reality in anything around us, we find that instead of aiding us ‘ aus
diesem Meer des Irrthums aufzutauchen,’ all that Tennyson’s poetry
seems to have done for us is to have made a beautiful word-phantom,
having a semblance of wise human counsel, to add another to the
number of the appearances that with aspects beautiful or horrible are
floating over and under and around us, and perpetually eluding our
grasp. Fai’ more is to be gained at such times from poetry even such
as Clough’s, which, though it carries you to no farther resting-place, at
least lets you take hold of one substantial thing—'the veritable mind of
a human being, doubting with its. own doubts and having its certaintainties its own, each of those certainties, however few and imperfect,
having a distinct place as independent testimony to truth.. . ?
Browning brings from out of his own individuality something which
he did not receive from his age, and which he offers to it as a gift, and
which is of a spirit so foreign to the atmosphere into which it comes
that he requires men to accept him as a. teacher before attaining to
�176
BROWNING- AS A PREACHER.
sympathy with. him. This that he has to give is some of the intense
earnestness of Puritanism, and the strenuousness of effort which gave
heroic grandeur to the old asceticism. He offers this to a state of
society, which along with all its practical vigour and perseverance in
the affairs of men’s outer lives, has so much of aimlessness and aban
donment of self-direction in all that concerns the life of inner thought
and feeling.
Other men of present and recent times have had a like gift to bestow,
but their manner of giving it was such as to make its acceptance for
the most part impossible. J. H. Newman and the company of men
who, with him, were the Puritans and ascetics of the nineteenth century,
have gained no permanent influence as teachers of their age. Teachers
of their age, indeed, they did not attempt to be, but only of whoever
should be willing to betake himself out of it back into mediaeval modes
cf thought; and with the thoughts and difficulties of the men who
refused to do this, they either could not or would not sympathise nor
have anything to do. Hence, the vigour and thoroughness of their
own individual lives was able only very partially to affect the thinking
and feeling of the world around them. But Browning undertakes the
work which they would not attempt. The chief glory of his labour is
that he has taken so much of what was good in the old Puritan spirit,
and has brought it into harmony with the wider knowledge and larger
life of later times. He devises for the fixedness of moral purpose and
power of asceticism, which are the inherent characteristics of his own
nature, another and a worthier use than the uses which in old times
men had been wont to make them serve. He sees in moral fixedness a
means that may be used not to check intellectual advance, but to help
it forward by steadying its aim; and he finds that asceticism is capable
of becoming, from having been the old monkish discipline of repression,
the nobler acncriaic of the mental athlete, which is to prepare him for
strenuous exertions whereby all parts of his human nature may
develop themselves to the full.
The idea of a struggle and a wrestling in which the wills of men are
to be engaged—the central idea of early and mediaeval Christian
thought—is recognised fully and distinctly by Browning in all that he
has written. He holds that men’s business in this world’is labour and
strife and conquest, and not merely free unconscious growth and
harmonious development. He differs thoroughly from the modern
thinking, which sees no moral evil distinct from and antagonistic to
good; and again and again, directly or indirectly, his poems let us see
how wide is his separation, both in belief and feeling, from the many
poets of these present days, who have returned to the idea round which
the old Greek poetry had all revolved, of the powerlessness of man’s
will and the drifting of his life before an unalterable destiny. In a
recent . criticism on Tennyson’s and Browning’s characteristics,1
1 Professor Dowden’s lecture on ‘ Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning,’ The Dublin
Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art (1867-68). London: Bell & Daldy.
�177
BROWNING- AS A PREACHER.
Browning is distinguished as being pre-eminently the poet of impulse.
This he doubtless is, but it seems to me that his chief point of difference
from the majority of modern poets, is his being emphatically the poet
of the will.
That this is the characteristic feature of his poetry strikes one most
forcibly if one chances to take up a volume of it immediately after
reading his contemporary Matthew Arnold’s sufficiently to have let
one’s mood take the impress of his. The transition from the one man’s
conception of life to that of the other seems like the waking from one
of those nightmare dreams in which we have the sense of being for
ever passive (all the while struggling in vain not to be) under
some Compelling that is horrible and yet mockingly sweet; to find
Ourselves restored from this to the wide-awake state of things, in
which we regain the consciousness of freedom of action.
There is much in which he makes common cause with J. H. Newman
and the men who were imbued with his spirit. They and Browning alike
realise the individuality of each human life, and the struggle which is
for each man a separate work to be entered into by his self-determined
will, and feel the intense mysteriousness of human personality. And they
may be classed together as protesters against nineteenth-centuryism—
the habit of thought which makes so little account of these things.
The question on which they part company is the question as to whether
the impulses which men find within them are to be opposed by their
wills as enemies, or to be accepted by them as allies in the struggle
that has to be engaged in. While, on the one hand, by Newman and
those like-minded with him, the only guide internal to man which is
acknowledged as having the authority of a voice from the invisible
world, is the conscience—the sense of a law binding to the doing of
one sort of actions and the refraining from another sort (the law by
making its presence thus felt being in itself evidence for its giver) ;
by Browning, on the other hand, other mental phenomena to be found
in human nature are accepted, as having first their intellectual signifi
cance as evidences ‘ whence a world of spirit as of sense’ is made plain
to us, and afterwards their moral uses in raising us from the world of
sense into the world of spirit.
Our human impulses towards knowledge, towards beauty, towards
love—all these impulses, the feeling of which is common in various
degrees to all men, and the expression of which by some few among
them is Art—are reverenced by him as the signs and tokens of a world
not included in that which meets our senses, as the
Intuitions, grasps of guess,
That pull the more into the less,
Making the finite comprehend
Infinity.
j
-“-not of course that Browning does not also recognise the evidential
force of conscience as an internal witness, but still, I think, it is chiefly
VOL. IL—NO. VIII.
K
�178
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
in the human impulses which in the world of sense are never satisfied,
that he considers the subjective evidence for the spirit world to lie.
And from this difference in the grounds of his and Newman’s beliefs
there results a difference in their whole conception of man’s life and its
aims. The part of human nature which alone Newman will acknow
ledge as a divine guide is a part which in itself furnishes no principle
of growth or progress (the conscience being only a power capable of
restraining and directing), and the ideal life in this world is therefore,
according to him, only a state of waiting, a walking warily in obedience,
until some other state shall be reached in which man shall be in a
condition to begin growth. According to him the business of the
earthly life is only to get safely out of it as out of an enemy’s country.
And as a natural result of his theory of the earthly life, we find that
Newman, even with all his vivid perception of each human soul’s
individual existence, becomes unable to sympathise with diversities of
individuality: no scope for human diversities being allowed by the
theory which sets all men to the same sort of work—the mere work of
escaping (each with his unused individualities) to some future condition
in’which life, in the sense of an active and growing state, may begin.
But Browning, on the other hand, having taken all the higher human
impulses and aspirations to be evidences whereby we discern an order
of things extending beyond the world of which sense is cognizant,
becomes able to conceive of the life that now is, as a condition, not of
mere waiting and watching—not as a struggle only on the defensive
against evil, in which safety is the only kind of success sought for—but
as a state in which growth and progress are to be things of the present
—in which the struggle is to be for acquisition and not alone for
defence. His recognition of impulse as a guide to be accounted divine,
makes him recognise human nature as being furnished with means of
self-evolving growth and action, and not merely of obedience to laws
given from without.
Browning’s theory of human impulse removes him from a sort of
asceticism which he would doubtless have been capable of exercising
(if his judgment had decided in favour of it) as unflinchingly and as
fiercely as mediaeval monk or modern ascetic, such as Newman or
Baber. He, like them, could have preached and practised the restraining
of human feelings and hopes, and the reducing of life to a toilsomelymaintained condition of high-wrought quiescence. He is too entirely
filled with the sense of the resolute human will to have ever let himself
be driven along, Swinburne-like, by mighty art impulses. He would
have been able to separate his thinking wholly from their influences,
had it not been that he had deliberately accepted them as guides which
ought to be followed. The moral half of him is stronger than the
eesthetic ; and the stronger could have crushed out the weaker if it had
not chosen to yield it willing honour. A mind such as his is solitary
and ascetic in its natural temperament; yet by his creed Browning
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
179
gains catholicity of thought and of interests. Wide sympathy with
^dissimilar types of human character would be a thing not to be looked
for in a thinker who realises so intensely the mysteries of his own indivi
dual existence, if it had not been that he had taken those very things in
which their dissimilarity lies—their multiform impulses—as the many
witnesses for the same truths, each witness requiring to be understood
by a reverent and appreciative sympathy. To a man whose whole
soul could be absorbed by the vividly realised vision of an Easter Day,
desires such as Abt Vogler’s towards ideal beauty of sound; as those
of Paracelsus towards knowledge; of Aprile towards love; and the
restless battle-ardour of Luria, would seem trivial, and not worthy of
detaining the eyes to search into them and analyse their peculiarities,
Were it not for his belief that in all such desires an infinite meaning’
could be discerned ; and that they were the varying pledges, given to
various human beings, of the individual immortality of each. Prom
this his belief there follows a wide development of human sympathy
which has a peculiar value, because of its not being the expression of
naturally gregarious tendencies, but of an originally self-concentrated
nature, transferring, as it were, its own consciousness, with all its
intensity, into the diverse human individualities that come under its
notice.
Very wide indeed is this sympathy. All human feelings and aspira
tions become precious in Browning’s eyes, not for what they are, but for
what they point to. He becomes capable of seeing a grandeur (poten
tial though not actual) in human aims whose aspect would be, to
Careless unsympathising eyes, ridiculous rather than sublime. For
instance, the instinctive craving after perfection and accuracy, which
had for its only visible result the expending of the energies of a lifetime
on the task of determining the exact force and functions of Greek
particles, is treated by Browning, in that very noble poem of his, ‘ The
Grammarian’s Funeral,’ with no contemptuous pity, but is honoured as
being a pledge of the limitless future, which, lying before all human
workers, renders it unnecessary that a man should slur over the
jjiinutiee of his work hastily, in the endeavour to compress into a life
time all that he aims at accomplishing.
The sort of asceticism which Browning’s theory of impulse
makes impossible to him, is that which fears to let the senses enjoy
¡tile whole fulness of earthly beauty, and seeks to narrow and enfeeble
¡the affections, and to stifle men’s noble ambitions. Yet his poetry
keeps for its characteristic spirit that other asceticism which implies
the using of the world’s material beauty and human passion, not as
ends in themselves, but as means whereby man’s spirit may reach to
the heights above them, there to find new steps by which to ascend.
He counsels no abstinence from beauty for the senses, but it is to be
to men not as a banquet, but as a draught which will give them
¡strength for labour, the fuller the draught the greater the strength.
k2
�180
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
He, more than any other poet, has ever present with him these two
ideas : that the world—the material and the human—contains what is
‘very good;’ and also that ‘ the fashion of this world passeth away.’
His noble christianised Platonism takes ‘ all partial beauty as a pledge
of beauty in its plenitude.’ His mood the pledge never wholly suffices.
The earth is to him ‘ God’s ante-chamber ’—God’s, not a devil’s—yet
still only an ante-chamber.
Asceticism of this kind is the great glory of his doctrine as a preacher.
It may be that, considering him solely as a poet, he loses somewhat by
it. One sort of beauty there is of which it deprives his work, how
ever great may be the compensating gains. This is the artistic
beauty of pathos, of which Browning’s poetry is wholly, or almost
wholly, devoid. There are two kinds of pathos lying on opposite sides
of the position which Browning occupies as a thinker. One of these
is the pathos of mediaeval art, and the other the pathos of pagan art.
And with neither of these has he anything to do. The old ascetic
conception of the earthly life gives a strange yearning tenderness,
infinitely pathetic, to the manner in which the early and mediaeval
hymn writers and the modern mediaevallists, Newman and Faber, look
onward as if from out of a desert or an enemy’s country to the far-off
unseen world—their ‘ Urbs Beata Jerusalem,’ their ‘ Paradise,’ their
‘ Calm land beyond the sea.’ But Browning has no need nor room for
pathos of this sort: the tender ‘ Heimweh ’ of this has no place amongst
his feelings. He does not image to himself the life after death as a
home, in the sense of a state that shall be rested in and never ex
changed for a higher. He conceives of it as differing from the life
that now is, not in permanency, but in elevation and in increase of
capacities. And the earth has its own especial glory, which he will
not overlook, of being first of an infinite series of ascending stages,
showing even now, in the beauty and love that is abroad in it, the
tokens of the visitings of God’s free spirit.
The feeling which we commonly callpathos seems, when one analyses
it, to arise out of a perception of grand incongruities—filling a place
in one class of our ideas corresponding to that in another in which
the sense of the ludicrous is placed by Locke. And this pathos was
attained by mediaeval asceticism through its habit of dwarfing into
insignificance the earthly life and its belongings, and setting the mean
ness and wretchedness which it attributed to it in contrast to the faroff vision of glory and greatness. But by Browning no such incon
gruity is recognised between what is and what shall be.
Another sort of pathos—the Pagan—is equally impossible to him.
This is the sort which results from a full realising of the joy and th®
beauty of the earth, and the nobleness of men’s lives on it; and
from seeing a grand inexplicablenes in the incongruity between th©
brightness of these and the darkness which lies at either end of them
—the infinite contradiction between actual greatness and the apparent
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
181
nothingness of its whence and whither—the mystery of strong and
beautiful impulses finding no adequate outcome now, nor promise of
ever finding it hereafter—human passion kindling into light and glow,
only to burn itself out into ashes—the struggle kept up by the will of
successive generations against Fate, ever beginning and ever ending in
defeat, to recommence as vainly as before—the never-answered ‘ Why ? ’
uttered unceasingly in myriad tones from out all human life.
The poetry of the Greeks gained from the contemplation of these
things a pathos, which, however gladly a Christian poet may forego
such gain for his art, was in its sadness inexpressibly beautiful. The
Iliad had a deep under-current of it even in the midst of all its healthy
childlike objectivity; and it was ever present amongst the great
tragedians’ introspective analysings of humanity.
High art of later times has for the most part retained this pagan
beauty. Though there is no reason to think that there was any
paganism in Shakespeare’s creed, yet we cannot help feeling that,
whether the cause is to be sought in his individual genius or in
Renaissance influences, the spirit of his art is in many respects pagan.
In his great tragedies he traces the workings of noble or lovely human
character on to the point—and no further—where they disappear into
the darkness of death ; and ends with a look back, never on towards
anything beyond. His sternly truthful realism will not, of course,
allow him to attempt a shallow poetical justice, and mete out to each
of his men and women the portion of earthly good which might seem
their due : and his artistic instincts'—positive rather than speculative
—prefer the majesty and infinite sadness of unexplainedness to any
attempt to look on towards a future solution of hard riddles in human
fates. ‘ King Lear,’ for instance, is pathetic because of its paganism ; and
would, be spoiled, or at all events changed into something quite differ
ent, by the introduction of any Christian hope. One of the chief artistic
effects of the story is the incongruity between the wealth of devotion
poured out by Cordelia’s impulses of love and the dreary nothingness
in which those beautiful impulses end. If there was anything in it to
leave with us the impression that this was not the end of all, and that
this expenditure of love was not in vain, but had its results yet to
come, the story could not call forth in us an emotion of such keen and
tender pity. And in this tragedy, as in Shakespeare’s others, one of its
greatest effects, as art, is produced by the idea which had acted so
mightily on the minds of old Greek poets—the powerlessness of man’s
moral agency against his destiny. Hamlet, for instance, ends in ac
complishing nothing of what he has set before him as his aim. Some
thing, over and above his own irresoluteness is hindering him. He
becomes, through no fault of his, the murderer of a harmless old man,
and breaks the innocent young heart of Ophelia, becoming to her
another link in the chain of involuntary evil, and being the cause of
her unconscious sin of self-destruction. (It is as sin that Shakespeare
�182
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
regards Ophelia’s suicide ; and this parodox of his, of guilt without
moral volition is thoroughly Greek—akin, e.g. to the tragic aspect of
the crime of CEdipus.)
So too, in Othello’s character, there is no lack of noble impulses •
yet they are productive of no results. His fate, taking advantage of
the one vulnerable part of his nature, impels him to the destruction
of all his happiness by the murder of Desdemona. And the artist
breaks off, taking the murdered and the murderer out of our sight,
and leaving with us only the impression of the irreparableness of
the deed, and of the mysteriousness and inevitableness of the innocent
suffering and almost involuntary guilt that came upon two human
creatures. The effect of the tragedies depends upon the total absence
in them of anything which might suggest the possibility of a future
answer to the great ‘ Wherefore ? ’ which their endings evoke from our
hearts. Their pathos arises out of their tacit exclusion of hope.1
The contrast between the spirit (apart of course from any thought
as to the relative poetical rank) of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and of
Mr. Browning’s greatest tragic work, ‘ The Ring and the Book,’ is very
striking. The impression which the latter leaves upon the reader’s
mind is that of a great solemn looking forward, which absorbs into
itself all emotions of pity that might have been awakened by Pompilia’s
innocent suffering and Caponsacchi’s love ; and which mitigates the
hatred which we must feel for Guido, by the thought that even for him
a far-off possible good may be waiting. The spirit of Shakespeare’s
tragic art (however much the form may differ from the classical) has
much of the sort of completeness which was characteristic of Greek
art. There is no suggestiveness in it of a state of things out of the
reach of his art, and therefore he allows you to feel to the full (as far
as you are able) any emotion which the character and circumstances
of his dramatic creations should properly give rise to. When once he
has shaped and fashioned his men and women, he leaves them with
you—fixed as a sculptor might, leave his work—in attitudes which
appeal perpetually to one or other of your human feelings, with no
indication of such attitudes not being the only possible ones in which
they might appear. But Browning never completes, or would have
his readers complete, the emotions called forth by his dramatic art.
He checks them, while as yet only half realised, by his perpetual
suggestiveness that what his art represents is only a portion of a great
1 There is an analogy between the poetry of ancient and modern paganism, and
some of 'the greatest poems in the modern art—music. The spirit which seems
to pervade Beethoven’s is essentially pagan. He is the great musical poet of un
answered seeking. There is joyousness enough in his music to contrast with its
tones of mighty Faust-like despair; but I have never heard a passage of it that
suggested emotions of hope or deep restful happiness. Outside the world in which
Beethoven and his art move, there is for him only a ‘ dim gray lampless world.’
Outside the world of Mendelssohn, however, who is no pagan, there is an infinite
encircling love, to which he sings his ‘Lobgesang.’ He seeks—and finds.
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
183
unknown whole, without knowing, which neither he nor you can
determine, what the feelings with which you regard the portion ought
to b©. Considering, as he does, every human life as only a glimpse of
a beginning, its minglings of greatness and imperfection have not for
him the same aspect of pathetic mysterious paradox which they have
for those poets who, either from their creed or from their v’/tioc, regard
it as a rounaed whole.
The absence of any pagan spirit in Browning’s writings deprives
them also of a sort of beauty that belongs to so much of the modern
poetry of external nature. Paganism is the source whence many
poets have drawn their adoration of that loveliness of the earth—
serene and terrible, outlasting and unmoved by human struggles.
When these men behold the infinity of her beauty, they merge in their
adoration of it all dissatisfactions with human life ; attaining to one
kind of intellectual repose, by giving up hope to find satisfaction for
thought or moral feeling, and by taking instead, for solace, the
unmeasured pleasure of «esthetic perception.
Shelley’s creed, taking the visible world for its all in all, has for its
product the intense vividness with which he perceives the richness
and glory of the sights of that world. He looks at, rests in, the
beauty that he sees ; and it becomes more to him than it can be even
to Wordsworth, who, with all his devotion to external nature, looked
through rather than at her. And Shelley’s poetry derives its strange
intangible pathos from its having all this aesthetic brightness to set in
contrast over against the darkness that surrounds those ‘ obstinate
questionings ’ from within, which again and again, in spite of his own
desire, distract his mind from its joyous vision of what is without.
And there is a sort of passionate grasping, clutching rather, at the
light of the sun, and all the sights and sounds and fragrances of the
earth, which belongs especially to pagan poetry, ancient or modern,
and which tells of a prizing of these things not for their own mere
beauty’s sake, but chiefly because in the perception of them life is
implied, and the separation from them means extinction and dark
nothingness. This idea, so all-pervading in the old Greek feeling for
External nature, finds in our own days its chief exponent in Swinburne.
I know of nothing in contemporary poetry that is so supremely
pathetic as the perpetual alternations in those wonderful choruses in
his ‘ Atalanta in Calydon,’ between a wild revelling in the freshness
and exuberant gladness of the earth, in the rush of her joyance,
when—
‘ in green underwood and cover,
Blossom by blossom the spring begins ’—
and a wailing lamentation over the life of man who has for his portion
on the earth
* light in his ways,
And love and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,
And night and sleep in the night.’
�184
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
Yet whose doom is only to abide there during a brief space, knowing
neither content nor hope.
‘ His speech is a burning fire,
With his lips he travaileth,
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes fore-knowledge of death.
He weaves, and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap ;
His life is a watch or a vision,
Between a sleep and a sleep.’
The poem of ‘ Atalanta ’ is of course a direct utterance of modern
paganism, and not merely expressive of historical sympathy with ancient;
and is a specimen, most perfect of its kind, of that eesthetic beauty of
which Browning’s poetry is rendered incapable by the creed in which
his strong, earnest mind, never able to rest without getting down into
the realities that nnderlie the visible surface of things, finds the Sub
stantial reality that it seeks.
Yet it may indeed be that the feeling gained by Browning’s onward
gaze of expectation is higher, even if considered purely as an artist's
feeling, than that of the wistful pathos that comes to other poets
through their sense of a seeking baffled alike behind and before. And,
it may be that our inability instantly to recognise it as higher, is because
of our having, although contemporaries with Browning, lagged behind
him in thought and aspiration ; and not having as yet attained to tho
conception towards which his poetry reaches in its beautiful imperfect
grandeur, of a Christianity and Art—nowhere destructive of each other
—two parts of one great Revelation.
E.
Dicktnson West.
�
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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Browning as a preacher. Part 1
Creator
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West, Elizabeth Dickinson
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 171-184 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2: Attribution of journal title and date from Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1871]
Identifier
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G5317
Subject
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Poetry
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<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 (Browning as a preacher. Part 1), 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>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
Robert Browning