RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE.[17]

There are few things more difficult to understand and acknowledge than the essentially one and indivisible nature of that puzzling personage, Man, with all his diverse occupations. An ingenious process of mental anatomy, carefully distributing to every pursuit its little bundle of faculties—his head to his business, his heart to his home, and to his religion a vague ethereal principle, which, for want of a better title, we call his soul—seems always to have been a more agreeable idea to the philosophic and speculative, than that bolder presentment of one whole indivisible being, which calls the man to love his Maker “with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his strength, and with all his mind.” We prefer, with instinctive subtilty—for human nature has wiles in its weakness—the easier morality of division; and a hundred distinctions straightway start up for the confusion of the one poor individual creature, who indeed is little able to bear, in any of his occupations, the subtraction of any of his powers. But the issue is that we cheat the world when we only mean to cheat God, and lose the genial and joyous privilege to “do all things heartily,” while we calculate with trembling how much belongs to Religion, and how much to Common Life.

Not to say that Common Life has always borne somewhat of a contemptible aspect to the philosophy of men: asceticism is more than a Romish error—it is a natural delusion as universal as the race; and however dubious we may be about the hermit’s cell and its mortifications, a dainty oratory, calm and secluded, a little world of Thought or of Art, commends itself much to the imagination of the “superior classes” even in these progressive times. Our modern prophets appeal to a select and refined audience, and have nothing to say to the crowd. We have abundant missions to thepoor, but few loving assaults upon thecommon. Strange enough, we are all best satisfied to go out of our way in the service of God and our neighbour—and tasksoutréand self-imposed are more pleasant to our perversity at all times than those that lie direct in our path.

Among all the vague big utterances of the day, professing so much and profiting so little, it is pleasant to fall upon anything so manful and truth-telling as the little book whose name stands at the head of our page. And it startles us with a grateful and pleasant surprise to see those magical words of authority upon the homely brown cover of Mr Caird’s sermon, which, doubtless, despite all our independence, have given it entrance to many a house and table where sermons are not generally favoured reading. What is it which has been honoured by “Her Majesty’s Command?” It is not anything addressed by special compliment to Her Majesty; indeed—all honour to the faithful preacher and his royal auditors—one has to turn to that same brown cover before one has the least idea that such a rare and exceptional personage as a Queen was seated among the Aberdeenshire lairds and peasants while Mr Caird expounded the common way of life. A throne is the most singular and isolated of all human positions. To us low down here in life’s protected levels, there is no comprehending that strange, lonely, lofty, imperial existence, which knows no superior, nor within its reach any equal; and when the Sovereign, shut out from lesser friendships, elects into one great friend the vast crowd of her people, one cannot refuse to be moved by the noble simplicity of the expedient. Other monarchs have done it before Queen Victoria, but very few with equal, and none with greater success; and this sermon is a singular present from a Prince to a Nation. A condescending interest in our welfare, and a certain solicitude for public morality, are matter-of-course virtues pertaining to the throne, whoever may be its occupant; but a very different and far deeper sentiment lies in the heart of this distinct reference toourunderstandings and sympathies, which is the highest testimony of satisfaction that the Queen and her royal husband can give to an address which moved and impressed themselves. We are sufficiently accustomed to the pure and dignified example of our liege lady—sufficiently acquainted with the wise exertions of the Prince for the common weal—to receive both without much demonstration; but there is something in the quiet humility and kindness of this united action which touches the heart of the country.

We honour the preacher, too much absorbed with his greater errand to take advantage of so good an opportunity of paying court to his Sovereign; and it is still more honourable to the royal pair who listened, that it was no disquisition upon their own exalted office—no enthusiastic voice of loyalty, urgent upon the honours due to the crown—nor indeed any discussion whatever of the particular relationship between monarch and people—which moved them to this marked and emphatic satisfaction. The Queen presents to us earnestly, an address in which herself is not distinguished even by a complimentary inference—a lesson unsoftened by the remotest breath of flattery, and without even a “special application.” God save the Queen! We take our princely friend at her word, acknowledging with what a noble honesty she shares with us, bearing her own full part of all the daily duties of common life.

Mr Caird’s sermon strikes at the very heart and root of all our living—it is not a recommendation of good things or good books, or any exclusive manner of existence, but a simple laying open of that great secret which is the very atmosphere and breath of religion. “Neither on this mountain nor at Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth.” This preacher is not content that anything which God has cleansed should be called common or unclean—he will not consent that a tithe of our faculties and emotions, like a tithe of our lands or our riches, should be reserved for God, making careful separation between the profane and the holy. He is willing, as Paul was, that we should have full use of all our powers, which, Heaven knows, are small enough for all that has to be borne and done in this laborious world. Strange argument to quicken those dull toils which even good men call secular and worldly!—strange charm to speed the plough, to guide the ship, to hasten every day’s triumphant labours through its full tale of animated hours! “Whatsoever you do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men.” It is on this great principle of life and labour that the author of this able exposition founds his reasonings, as he shows us how well we may reconcile diligence in business with fervour of spirit, and brighten ordinary occupations with the full force and radiance of godliness. The lesson comes with especial force in these days, when we are beguiled by the most sweet voices of the Ritualist and the Mystic on either side of us, and are much persuaded to a vulgar disparagement of the honest necessary work of this earth. How it may become holy work—and how we ourselves, surrounded by its cares, vexations, and trials, are in reality placed in the most advantageous position for proving and glorifying our Lord and Leader, who had share of all these labours before us, is the burden of this message; and we do not doubt it will show to many men, how much nearer than they suspected, even in their very hands and households, if they will but do it, lies the work of the Lord.

Preachers and religious writers, as a general principle, are strangely timid of permitting to the Church any intercourse, more than necessity compels, with the world; and we fear our good ministers would be sadly disconcerted were they compelled to consider with Paul what it would be right to do, “if any of them that believe not, bid you to a feast, and ye be disposed to go”—a hypothesis which, however, does not much alarm the Apostle. But Mr Caird, with a singular boldness, takes the very “world itself—the coarse, profane, common world, with its cares and temptations, its rivalries and competitions,” as the true “school for learning the art” of religious living; and is no advocate for theoretical and self-secluding Christianity. “No man,” he says, “can be a thorough proficient in navigation who has never been at sea, though he may learn the theory of it at home. No man can become a soldier by studying books on military tactics in his closet; he must in actual service acquire those habits of coolness, courage, discipline, address, rapid combination, without which the most learned in the theory of strategy or engineering will be but a schoolboy soldier after all.... Tell us not, then, that the man of business, the bustling tradesman, the toil-worn labourer, has little or no time to attend to religion. As well tell us that the pilot, amid the winds and storms, has no leisure to attend to navigation—or the general on the field of battle to the art of war. Whenwillhe attend to it? Religion is not a perpetual moping over good books—religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances: these are necessary to religion—no man can be religious without them. But religion, I repeat, is mainly and chiefly the glorifying God amid the duties and trials of the world—the guiding our course amid the adverse winds and currents of temptation by the starlight of duty and the compass of Divine truth—the bearing us manfully, wisely, courageously, for the honour of Christ, our great Leader, in the conflict of life.”

Wise doctrine, bold as it is wise; but how strange is the popular impression which makes cowardice, by some strange magic, a Christian virtue, and holds “he who fights and runs away,” for the spiritual hero. In everything else our hearts rise and swell to trace the brave man’s progress through deaths and perils; but here we count it his best policy to retreat into a corner, to thrust ambitions, powers, and pleasures, tremulously away from him, and “to be religious.” To be religious!—the word itself speaks eloquently of its true meaning—a spirit potent, sweet, and all-pervasive, and not a thing or series of things,—yet notwithstanding how eager we are todoinstead of tobe, in this most momentous matter. Mr Caird has finely discriminated this life and soul of religion, and the influence which true faith exercises upon everything around it, in his description of how the mind acts onlatentprinciples—how an unexpressed remembrance or anticipation runs through actions and thoughts which have no direct connection with it; and how hopes, of which we were not even thinking, sway and move us, invisible and silent agents in our commonest ways. We recommend this portion of his sermon to all thoughtful readers.

It is not a very usual fortune for sermons in this day—but this one has flashed into the heart of several vexed questions, and surprised many minds into involuntary unanimity—and when we are told that we must fight our battles with our religion, and not for our religion’s sake extend the conflict, it is a great cheer and encouragement to us, heavily labouring in the common road, and unable to choose a more exalted way. Surely Christianity, of all things, has least need to be timid; yet we fear that much pious and well-intentioned training has had the effect of conferring an additional charm upon the world’s blandishments—the charm of forbidden pleasure—rather than of encouraging the neophyte manfully to pass them by. We have been half saddened, half amused, many a time, by a preacher’s terrified denunciation of the irresistible attractions of some theatre or assembly, which in truth was the dullest sham of pleasure-making that ever wearied man; and it is sad to see often an incompleteness and contraction in that life of unmistakable piety which ought to be the broadest, the most genial, and the most fully furnished of all the states of man.

Yes, we are all too apt, unconsciously and by implication—despite its being impracticable under present circumstances, Popery having made it dangerous—to take the life of the eremite, self-contained and contemplative, as the true type of the religious life; and it is strange to hear that we ourselves, astray among the noise of cities, or bearing the burdens of the soil, should be more fit exemplars of God’s service than any soul secluded in church or temple, and safe from the vulgar dangers of the world. Yet no one will be bold enough to say that Mr Caird has not established his position, and few serious minds can refuse to respond to this serious and powerful call upon them.

This sermon is admirably clear and simple in its diction, as well asweighty in its matter; there is little of the passion and vehemence of oratory, but a great deal of power, subdued and held within control; and the grave plain language of the preacher is luminous and dignified, worthy of the theme. We are indebted to Mr Caird for a manly exposition of what is possible to common people in everyday existence—triumphs of faith and principle beyond the reach of those who fly from the combat and the agony,—and grateful to his Royal hearers for sending to us all a lesson which makes no distinctions among us, either of wise and unwise, or of great and small.

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.

1.Labour: its Rights, Difficulties, Dignity, and Consolations.An Address delivered to the Mechanics’ Institute at Hull. BySamuel Warren, D.C.L., Q.C., Recorder of Hull.

2. The law of France takes a different view of such labour-contracts for life, prohibiting them on the ground that they are in reality not conducive to, but subversive of personal liberty.

3. “One of those combinations,” says Mr Warren, “was bound together by this oath (so atrocious that were it not on record in the authentic ‘debates’ of the day, I would not cite it):—‘I, A. B., do voluntarily swear, in the awful presence of Almighty God, and before these witnesses, that I will execute with zeal and sincerity, as far as in me lies, every task and injunction which the majority of my brethren shall impose on me, in furtherance of our common welfare; as,—the chastisement of nobs,the assassination of oppressive and tyrannical masters, or the demolition of shops that shall be deemed incorrigible: and also that I will cheerfully contribute to the support of such of my brethren as shall lose their work in consequence of their exertions against tyranny, or shall renounce work in resistance to a reduction of wages.’”

4. “To make her clergy fit ministrants of that priestcraft which is its certain fruit, the Romish system draws after it the enforced celibacy of their order, and so their separation from all the purifying and humanising influences which God’s holy ordinance of marriage sheds over a married priesthood; and, lastly, through the ever-encroaching presence, amidst the sanctities of family life, of one thus invested with a character of supernatural holiness, whom all are bound to make the official depositary of every secret, and who is cognisant of every real or suspected infirmity of his devotee, and so (unavoidably) of those who have shared with him in the sins he has from time to time confessed, it dissolves the most sacred ties by which God has bound society together,—introducing another, and how often an adverse counsel between father and child, between the mother and her daughter, between the husband and the wife of his bosom.”—Bishop of Oxford’s Sermon on the 5th of November 1855.

5.Numismata Hellenica.A Catalogue of Greek Coins, collected byWilliam Martin Leake, F.R.S., one of the Vice-Presidents of the Royal Society of Literature. With Notes, a Map, and Index. London, 1854.

6. A peasant, driving an ass, met Octavianus as he came out of his tent at daybreak; and being asked his name, he replied, “Eutyches”—And your ass’s name?—“Nicon.”

7.Childe Harold, ii. 45.

8.Irene, Act i. scene 1.

9.Leake’sNorthern Greece, iv. 46.

10. Admiral Smyth, in hisCabinet of Roman Imperial Medals.

11.Iliad, ii. 739.

12. “An Old Contributor at the Sea-side,” Nos.CCCCLXXX. andCCCCLXXXI.

13. Here, by the way, let us cite in a foot-note a description of statuary from theGolden Ass of Apuleius. It illustrates the mode of regarding sculpture in a very realistic period. It is a description of the entrance-hall to Byrrhœna’s house. “Conversing in this way, we had proceeded but a few paces ere we arrived at Byrrhœna’s house. The hall was most beautiful, and had statues of the Goddess of Victory, raised on pillars which stood at the four corners. The wings of the figures were expanded; their dewy feet seemed to brush the surface of a rolling sphere, although it moved not; and they looked not as if they were attached to it, but hovered in the air. A statue of Diana, in Parian marble, occupied a level space in the middle of the enclosure. The figure was singularly beautiful: the garments of the goddess were blown back by the wind; she seemed in the act of running directly towards you as you entered, and awed you by the majesty of her godlike form. Dogs supported the goddess on either side, and these too were of marble. Their eyes were fierce and threatening, their ears erect, their nostrils open, their jaws agape to devour;and had any barking been heard in the neighbourhood, you would have thought it proceeded from their marble throats. A thing, also, in which the excellent sculptor had given proof of the most consummate art, was this, that the fore-feet of the dogs, uplifted to their chests, were in the act of running, while the hind feet pressed the ground. At the back of the goddess stood a rock wrought to resemble a grotto, overgrown with moss, grass, leaves, and brushwood, with vines and shrubs here and there; and the reflection of the statue gleamed from the polished marble within the grotto. Over the extreme edge of the rock hung apples and grapes, most exquisitely wrought, and in which art, rivalling nature,had so counterfeited their originals that you would have thought they might be gathered for eating, when fragrant autumn had breathed upon them the tints of maturity. And if, leaning forward, you had beheld the streamlets, which gently rippled as they ran beneath the feet of the goddess, you would have thought that, like clusters of grapes which hang from the vine,they too resembled real life in the faculty of motion.

14. It is curious to see the amount of fun which these writers extract from every little peculiarity of Cockney speech. There is an insane use of the relative pronoun, which is of immense service. We cannot remember a good quotation from the play-writers, but here is one from Thackeray:—“Gallant gents and lovely ladies,List a tail vich late befel,VichI heard it, bein on dutyAt the Pleace Hoffice, Clerkenwell.Praps you know the Fondling Chapel,Vere the little children sings:(Lor! I likes to hear on SundiesThem there pooty little things!)In the street there lived a housemaid,If you particklarly ask me where—Vy it vas at four-and-twenty,Guilford Street, by Brunswick Square.Vichher name was Eliza Davis,And she went to fetch the beer:In the street she met a partyAs was quite surprised to see her.Vichhe was a British sailorFor to judge him by his look:Tarry jacket, canvass trowsiesHa-la Mr T. P. Cooke.”

“Gallant gents and lovely ladies,List a tail vich late befel,VichI heard it, bein on dutyAt the Pleace Hoffice, Clerkenwell.Praps you know the Fondling Chapel,Vere the little children sings:(Lor! I likes to hear on SundiesThem there pooty little things!)In the street there lived a housemaid,If you particklarly ask me where—Vy it vas at four-and-twenty,Guilford Street, by Brunswick Square.Vichher name was Eliza Davis,And she went to fetch the beer:In the street she met a partyAs was quite surprised to see her.Vichhe was a British sailorFor to judge him by his look:Tarry jacket, canvass trowsiesHa-la Mr T. P. Cooke.”

“Gallant gents and lovely ladies,

List a tail vich late befel,

VichI heard it, bein on duty

At the Pleace Hoffice, Clerkenwell.

Praps you know the Fondling Chapel,

Vere the little children sings:

(Lor! I likes to hear on Sundies

Them there pooty little things!)

In the street there lived a housemaid,

If you particklarly ask me where—

Vy it vas at four-and-twenty,

Guilford Street, by Brunswick Square.

Vichher name was Eliza Davis,

And she went to fetch the beer:

In the street she met a party

As was quite surprised to see her.

Vichhe was a British sailor

For to judge him by his look:

Tarry jacket, canvass trowsies

Ha-la Mr T. P. Cooke.”

15.The Corsican Brothersis not an afterpiece, but to show what kind of writing is allowed to pass in even so successful a melodrama, let me quote a single speech: “At all events, you heard what I said to my servants; the houseaswellasthey is at your command; use it, then,asif it were your own, and consider yourselfassincerely welcomed by the motherasyou will be by the sonassoonashe comes in.”

16. In proof that such an impression existed, we may quote an extract from a private letter of our correspondent, Lieutenant-Colonel Hamley, to ourselves, dated Camp,7th December 1854:—“I think Liprandi’s army might have been not merely routed, but annihilated, any time during the last month till the bad weather set in, having placed itself in a perilous position; and of the two attacks on the fortress the French is, or ought to be, the true one—ours merely auxiliary; but it would be indiscreet to say so. But the campaign once finished, all such subjects will be open to discussion.”—Ed.

17.Religion in Common Life: a Sermon, preached in Crathie Church, before Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Albert.By the Rev.John Caird, of Errol. Published by Her Majesty’s Command.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESTypos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Back to Index Next