‘It is a vocation which gives an insight into men’s motives, and reveals by what influences masses of men are moved, but it shows thedark, rather than the bright side of human nature; and one who is not disposed to make due allowances for the peculiar circumstances in which he is placed, is apt to be led by it into the mistake, that the large majority of mankind are knaves. It fills the mind with a variety of knowledge relating to the events of the day, but that knowledge is apt to be superficial; since the necessity of attending to many subjects prevents the journalist from thoroughly investigating any. In this way it begets desultory habits of thought, disposing the mind to be satisfied with mere glances at difficult questions, and to delight in passing lightly from one thing to another. The style gains in clearness and fluency, but is apt to become, in consequence of much and hasty writing, loose, diffuse, and stuffed with local barbarisms and the cant phrases of the day. Its worst effect is the strong temptation which it sets before men to betray the cause of truth to public opinion, and to fall in with what are supposed to be the views held by a contemporaneous majority, which are sometimes perfectly right and sometimes grossly wrong.’
‘It is a vocation which gives an insight into men’s motives, and reveals by what influences masses of men are moved, but it shows thedark, rather than the bright side of human nature; and one who is not disposed to make due allowances for the peculiar circumstances in which he is placed, is apt to be led by it into the mistake, that the large majority of mankind are knaves. It fills the mind with a variety of knowledge relating to the events of the day, but that knowledge is apt to be superficial; since the necessity of attending to many subjects prevents the journalist from thoroughly investigating any. In this way it begets desultory habits of thought, disposing the mind to be satisfied with mere glances at difficult questions, and to delight in passing lightly from one thing to another. The style gains in clearness and fluency, but is apt to become, in consequence of much and hasty writing, loose, diffuse, and stuffed with local barbarisms and the cant phrases of the day. Its worst effect is the strong temptation which it sets before men to betray the cause of truth to public opinion, and to fall in with what are supposed to be the views held by a contemporaneous majority, which are sometimes perfectly right and sometimes grossly wrong.’
In regard to the influence of newspapers on style, it has been noted that since their cheap issue, colloquial simplicity has vanished. ‘A single number of a London morning paper,’ observes a writer inBlackwood‘(which, in half a century, has expanded from the size of a dinner napkin to that of a breakfast tablecloth, from that to a carpet, and will soon be forced by the expansion of public business into something resembling the mainsail of a frigate), already is equal in printed matter to a very large octavo volume. Every old woman in the nation now reads daily a vast miscellany, in one volume royal octavo; thus the whole artificial dialect of books has come into play as the dialect of ordinary life. This is one form of the evil impressed upon style by journalism; a dire monotony of bookish idiom has stiffened all freedom of expression.’[38]As to its effect on themorale, when pursued exclusively as a material interest, one of the most acute and observant of modern French writers says:—‘Le journal, au lieu d’être un sacerdoce, est devenu un moyen pour les partis; de moyen, il s’est fait commerce; et comme tous lescommerces, il est sans foi ni loi;’ and in allusion to the French, bitterly adds, ‘nous verrons les journaux, dirigés d’abord par des hommes d’honneur, tomber plus tard sous le gouvernement de plus médiocre, qui auront la patience et lâcheté de gomme elastique qui manquent aux beaux genies, ou à des epiciers qui auront de l’argent pour acheter des plumes.’ Macaulay, says a French critic, ‘a conservé dans l’histoire, les habitudes qu’ il avait gagnées dans les journaux.’ Journalism has proved an effective discipline for statesmen; the late prime minister of Sardinia first dealt with public questions in the columns of a political journal.
But whatever facility of expression and tact in the popular exposition of political science may be acquired by the statesman or annalist, in the practice of journalism, there is no doubt that the worst perversions of ‘English undefiled’ have originated in, and been confirmed by, newspapers. On this subject, an American writer, at once philosophical, erudite, and liberal, who has treated of the history and influence of the English language with remarkable insight and eloquence, emphatically testifies to the verbal corruptions and consequent moral degradation of the newspaper press. ‘The dialect of personal vituperation,’ says Marsh, ‘the rhetoric of malice in all its modifications, the Billingsgate of vulgar hate, the art of damning with faint praise, the sneer of contemptuous irony, have been sedulously cultivated; and, combined with a certain flippancy of expression and ready command of a tolerably extensive vocabulary, are enough to make the fortune of any sharp, shallow, and unprincipled journalist who is content with the fame and the pelf.’
The interest which belongs to newspapers, as arenas for discussion and records of fact, is greatly marred by the abuses of the press. No more humiliating exhibition of human passion can be imagined than printed scurrility; and no meaner or more contemptible influence of skulkingtreachery than anonymous libels. By what anomaly base spirits enact and endure insult in this form, which public opinion and the faintest self-respect compel them to resent when orally uttered, we have never been able to explain. It is, however, a satire on the alleged freedom we enjoy in this country, that any malicious poltroon, who has the means to purchase types, may defame the character, and thereby injure the prosperity, of any one towards whom he entertains a grudge, with comparative impunity. Indeed, if a man comes before the public in any shape, even in that of a benefactor, he is liable to gross personal attacks from the press; here the shafts of envy, of party hatred, of blackguardism and of detraction, find a covert whence they may be sped with deadly aim and little or no chance of punishment. To realize at once the moral grandeur and the degrading abuse of which the press is capable, one should read Milton’s discourse on theLiberty of Unlicensed Printing, and then a history of cases under the law of libel. The choice of weapons is allowed his enemy even by the inveterate duellist; but there is this essential dishonour in the attacks of the practised writer—that he adroitly uses an instrument which his antagonist often cannot wield. Thus the laws of honourable warfare are basely set aside; and cowardice often wins an ostensible triumph. The meanest threat we ever heard was that of a popular author towards a spirited and generous but uneducated farmer with whom he was in altercation, and who proposed a resort to arms:—‘I hold a pen that shall point the world’s finger of scorn at you!’ The cheapest abuse is that which can be poured out in newspapers; and besides the comparatively defenceless position of the assailed, if he have no skill in pencraft, it is the more contemptible because premeditated; the insulting word may be uttered in the heat of rage, but the slanderous paragraph goes through the process of writing and printing;—it is, therefore, the result of a deliberate act. The ‘scar of wrath’ left on the heart by the partisancombats of the press is seldom honourable, and the records of duels, persecutions, and street-fights, originating in libels, is one of the most degrading, to all concerned, of any in social history. Vituperation and invective, Billingsgate and the cant nicknames of newspaper controversy, belong to the most unredeemed species of blackguardism. No wounds rankle in the human bosom like those inflicted by the press; and no agent of redress should be used with such thorough observance of the golden rule. ‘The French,’ says Matthew Arnold, ‘talk of the “brutalité des journaux Anglais.” What strikes them comes from the necessary inherent tendencies of newspaper writing not being checked in England by any centre of intelligent and urbane spirit, but rather stimulated by coming in contact with a provincial spirit.’
From these various capabilities and liabilities of journalism we may infer what are the requisites of an editor. It is obvious that his intellectual equipment should be more versatile and complete than that demanded by any other profession. He is to interpret the events of the day, and must, of course, be versed in the history of the past; he is to speak a universal language, and the gifts of expression must be his chief endowment; he exercises a mighty influence, and, therefore, judgment, self-respect, a recognition of rights and duties, and a benevolent impulse are essential. Thejuste milieubetween moral courage and respect for public sentiment should be his goal. It is a significant fact that, in this country, where there are more readers than in any other, and, at the same time, entire freedom of the press, journals have not attained to the intellectual standard of the best of foreign origin, nor has the profession of an editor reached the rank it has in Europe. With a few exceptions, the vocation has been adopted, as school-keeping used to be, as the most available resource. Cleverness has usually been the substitute for acquirement; loyalty to some dogma for philosophy, and glib phrasesand cant terms for style. In some memorable cases, where the London system of a division of labour is resorted to, and the French practice of careful rhetoric and reasoning applied to current topics, the result has approximated to what a leading journal should be. Such names as Franklin, Russell, Thomas, Duane, Buckingham, Walsh, Gales, Noah, King, Hoffman, and the eminent contemporary editors of America, bear, it must be remembered, but a very small proportion to the sum total of newspapers published in this country; and it is the average ability and character of editors to which we refer. Yet familiarity alone blinds us to the ‘extraordinary talent’ exhibited in the journalism of our times. ‘I’ll be shot,’ says Christopher North to the shepherd, ‘if Junius, were he alive now, would set the world on the rave as he did some half century ago.’
The rarest and most needful moral quality in an editor is magnanimity. Of all vocations this is the one with which narrow motives and exclusive points of view are most incompatible. It is true that the office is self-imposed; but in its very nature is included a comprehensive tone of mind and feeling; the editor, therefore, who pronounces judgment upon a book, a work of art, a public man, or popular subject, according to his personal animosities or selfish interests, annuls his own claim to the position he occupies. If the pulpit, the medical chair, the justice’s bench, or the authority of elective office is exclusively used by an individual for direct personal ends, for the exclusive emolument of friends, or the gratification of private revenge, the perversion is resented at once and indignantly by public opinion; and the same violation of a general principle for a particular end is equally unjustifiable in the press. Yet how many journals serve but as channels for the prejudices, the likes and dislikes, the plans and whims of their editors; so that at last we recognize them, not as broad and reliable expositors of great questions and criticaltaste, but as mouthpieces for the spite, the flattery, and the ambition of a single vain mortal! For such evils Milton’s arguments, for patient toleration of all kinds of printed ideas, are the best remedy: ‘Punishing wits,’ he says, ‘enhances their authority; errors known, read, and collated, are of main service toward the speedy attainment of what is truest; and though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength.’ With all its defects, therefore, the emanations of a free press are the best expositors of the immediate in taste, opinion, and affairs; and copies ofThe Times, theCourt Journal, andBell’s Life in London, deposited under the corner-stone of a modern English edifice, are as authentic memorials of the country and people as they exist to-day, as the styles of Grecian architecture, or the characteristics of Italian painting, of epochs in the history of art, and far more detailed, minute, and elaborate. The complex state of society, the multitudinous aspect of life, the progress of science, and its influence on social economy, can indeed only be designated by such a versatile record. The miserable little gazzettas issued in the south of Europe, containing only the diluted news of the French journals; the spiritedfeuilletonsof the cleverest authors of the day that appear in the latter, the enormous advertising sheets in this country, and the able rhetoric and argument of the daily press in Great Britain, are so many landmarks and gauges of the civic life, the mental recreations, the prosperity, and the political intelligence of these different countries. Although Fanny Kemble snubbed the press-gang, ironically so called,—perhaps in this age there is no office capable of a higher ideal standard and a more practical efficiency combined, as that of the public writer. Let us suppose such a man endowed with the greatest faculty of expression, learned in history and the arts, with philosophic insight and poetical sensibility, chivalric in tone, unitingthe principles of conservatism and reform, devoted to humanity, generous, heroic, independent, and ‘clear in his great office;’ and thus furnished and inspired, waging the battle of honest opinion, a staunch advocate of truth, stripping the mask from fanaticism and dishonesty, and shedding pure intellectual light on the common mind;—no more noble function can be imagined. Seldom, however, is the ideal of an editor even approached; and hence the wisdom of an eclectic system and a division of labour; concentrating upon the same journal the humour of one, the statistical researches of another, the learning of a third, and the rhetoric of a fourth, until all the needful elements are brought into action for a common result.
In periods of war, emigration, or catastrophes of any kind, the newspaper becomes a chart of destiny to the heart, and is seized with overwhelming anxiety to learn the fate of the absent and the loved; and, in times of peace and comfort, it is the readiest pastime. What traveller does not remember with zest the intervals of leisure he has spent, under the trees of the Palais Royal, over a fresh gazette; or the eagerness with which, in an Italiancafé, he has devouredGalignaniwith his breakfast? It is difficult to imagine how the social reforms that distinguish the age could have been realized without the aid of newspapers; or by what other means popular sympathy could be kindled simultaneously on both sides of the globe. In view of such offices, we must regard the editor as a species of modernimprovisatore, who gathers from clubs, theatres, legislative halls, private society, and the streets, the idea and the elemental spirit of the hour, the topic of the day, the moral influence born of passing events, and then concentrates and elaborates it to give forth its vital principles and absolute significance.
As a medium of controversy, the advantages of the newspaper are signal. In 1685, the discussion of popery in England was carried on by means of tracts issued from thepresses of Oxford, Cambridge, and London; and some of the pamphlets of Defoe, Steele, and other popular writers, had a large sale; but the circulation of these vehicles of argument was limited compared to the daily journals of our day; and in order to reach the people, controversialist and agreeable essayists, from the times of ‘Sir Roger L’Estrange’ to that of ‘O. P. Q.,’ have wisely availed themselves of newspapers. That they now aid rather than form public opinion, however, is quite obvious. The implicit faith once bestowed upon editors has departed; and no class are more pertinacious in asserting the right of private judgment than habitual readers of journals; they derive from them materials of discussion rather than positive inferences. Yet there are two qualities that in Great Britain and America gain an editor permanent admirers—good sense and an individual style. The thunder, as Carlyle calls it, of Edward Sterling in the LondonTimes, and the plain words of Cobbett, are instances. In fact, the same qualities insure consideration for a newspaper as for an individual; tone, manliness, grace or vigour, full and free knowledge, wit and fancy, and the sincerity or geniality of the editor’s character, are not less recognized in his paragraphs than in his behaviour. But as a general rule, as before suggested, in the United States, the press is the expositor, not the herald, of opinion; the newspapers simply mark the level of popular feeling; their criticism seldom transcends the existent taste, and their tone is rarely elevated above that of the majority. Between the radical and the conservative there appears no medium; and newspapers symbolize these two extremes. In our large cities there is always one newspaper which has a name for respectability, of which its editors are extremely jealous; it never startles, offends, or inspires, but pursues an even, unexceptionable course, is praised by old people who have taken it for years, and desire that it shall contain their obituary; its news, however, is usually stale, its opinions timid, and its spirit behind the age. To represent theopposite element, there is always a vigorous, speculative, and fresh-toned newspaper, which continually utters startling things, and suggests glorious impossibilities; it is the exponent of reform, a harbinger of better times, and appeals to hope and fancy, rather than to memory and reflection. Now the experienced reader will at once perceive that an editor, worthy the name, should be an eclectic, and combine in his own mind and work the expression of both these extremes of opinion and sentiment; but it is found, by experiment, that a hobby is the means of temporary success,—that a catholic temper is unappreciated, and that, in a republic, combativeness and self-esteem are the organs to be most profitably addressed.
There is a very large class whose reading is confined to newspapers, and they manifest the wisdom of Pope’s maxim about the danger of a little learning. Adopting the cant and slang phrases of the hour, and satisfied with the hasty conjectures and partial glimpses of truth that diurnal journals usually contain, they are at once superficial and dogmatic, full of fragmentary ideas and oracular commonplace. If such is the natural effect upon an undisciplined mind of exclusive newspaper reading, even the scholar, the thinker, and the man of refined taste is exposed to mental dissipation from the same cause. A celebrated French philosopher, recently deceased, remarkable for severe and efficient mental labour, told an American friend that he had not read a newspaper for four years. It is incalculable what productiveness of mind and freshness of conception is lost to the cultivated intellect by the habit of beginning the day with newspapers. The brain, refreshed by sleep, is prepared to act genially in the morning hours; and a statistical table, prepared by an able physiologist, shows that those authors who give this period to labour, most frequently attain longevity. Scott is a memorable example of the healthfulness and efficiency attending the practice. If, therefore, the student, the man of science, or the authordissipates his mental vigour, and the nervous energy induced by a night’s repose, in skimming over the countless topics of a newspaper, he is too much in relation with things in general to concentrate easily his thoughts: his mind has been diverted, and his sympathies too variously excited, to readily gather around a special theme. Those intent upon self-culture, or intellectual results, should, therefore, make this kind of reading a pastime, and resort to it in the intervals of more consecutive thought. There is no element of civilization that debauches the mind of our age more than the indiscriminate and exclusive perusal of newspapers. Only by consulting history, by disciplining the reasoning powers in the study of philosophy, and cherishing a true sense of the beautiful by communion with the poets,—in a word, only by habitual reference to standard literature, can we justly estimate the record of the hour. There must be great examples in the mind, great principles of judgment and taste, or the immediate appeal to these qualities is ignorantly answered; whereas, the thoughtful, intelligent comments of an educated reader of journals upon the questions they discuss, the precedents he brings in view, and the facts of the past to which he refers, place the immediate in relation with the universal, and enable us to seize upon essential truth. To depend for mental recreation upon newspapers is a desperate resource; not to consult them is to linger behind the age. De Tocqueville has shown that devotion to the immediate is characteristic of republics; and this tendency is manifest in the prevalence of newspapers in the United States. They, in a great measure, supersede the demand for a more permanent native literature; they foster a taste for ephemeral topics and modes of thought, and lamentably absorb, in casual efforts, gifts and graces of mind which, under a different order of things, would have attained not only a higher, but a lasting development. The comparative importance of newspapers among us, as materials ofhistory, is evidenced by the fact that the constant reference to their files has induced the historical societies to propose an elaborate index to facilitate the labours of inquirers, which has been felicitously called a diving-bell for the sea of print. A list of the various journals now in existence would be found to include not only every political party and religious sect in the country, but every theory of life, every science, profession, and taste, from phrenology to dietetics, and from medicine, war, and odd-fellowship, to literature, catholicism, and sporting. Tribunals and punsters, not less than fashion and chess-players, have their printed organ. What was a subordinate element, has become an exclusive feature. ‘In those days,’ writes Lamb, ‘every morning-paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs at sixpence a joke.’ NowPunchandCharivarimonopolize the fun, and grave and gay are separately embodied. The cosmopolitan nature of the people would as obviously appear in the number of journals issued in foreign languages, each nation and tribe having its newspaper organ; and an analysis of the contents, even of one popular journal for a single year, would be found to touch the entire circle of human knowledge and vicissitude, without penetrating to a vital cause, or expanding to a comprehensive principle, yet affording a boundless horizon;—astronomical phenomena,causes célèbres, earthquakes, the advent of a greatcantatrice, shipwrecks and revolutions, battles and bankruptcies, freshets and fires,émeutesand hailstorms, gold discoveries, anniversaries, executions, Arctic expeditions, World’s Fairs, the utterance of patriots, and the acts of usurpers; all the materials of history, the suggestions of philosophy, and the visions of poetry, in their chaotic, elemental, and actual state. It is evident that more excitement than truth, more food for curiosity than aid to reflection, more vague knowledge than actual wisdom, is thus promulgatedand preserved. The harvest of the immediate is comparatively barren; and life only proves the truth of Dr. Johnson’s association of intellectual dignity with the past and future. The individual, to be true to himself, must take a firm stand against the encroachments of this restless, temporary, and absorbing life of the moment represented by the newspaper; he must cleave to Memory and Hope; he must look before and after, or his mind will be superficial in its activity, and fruitless in its growth.
There is no mechanical invention around which cluster such interesting associations as that of printing; the indirect agency of the press and of journalism is remarkable; and this is owing to the relation they bear to the world at large, and to personal improvement. The newspaper office has always been a nucleus for wits, politicians, and literati,—a nursery of local genius, and a school for knowledge of the world, and criticism. In Franklin’s autobiography, the natural effect of even a mechanical connection with the press is memorably unfolded; and scarcely a great name in modern history is unallied with some incident or activity connected with the daily press. Otis, Adams, Hancock, and Warren, used to meet at the office of theBoston Gazette, and write essays on colonial rights in its columns. Talleyrand and Louis Philippe frequented the sanctum of an editor in the same town, to read theMoniteurand discuss news. Chateaubriand first heard of the king’s flight from a stray newspaper picked up in a log hut in the backwoods of America; and it sent him back at once to the army of the Princes. Horne Tooke’sDiversions of Purleywere written to beguile his imprisonment occasioned by a libel; and his trial resulted in making parliamentary reports legal. Hunt’s prison-life, for which he was indebted to his comments on the Prince-Regent in theExaminer, is the most charming episode in his memoirs; and some of the noblest flights of Erskine’s eloquence arose from the defence of those prosecuted for constructive treason based on thefree expression of opinion in regard to public questions. Jefferson thought Freneau’s paper ‘prevented the Constitution from galloping into a monarchy;’ it was in the columns of a daily journal that Hamilton defended the proclamation of neutrality. It has been said that the most reliable history of the French Revolution, and wars of the Republic, could be gleaned from the pages of an American journal of the day, conducted by a man of political knowledge and military aptitude, who combined from various prejudiced foreign papers what he deemed an authentic narrative of each act in the drama; and it is certain that the best account of the massacre and the destruction of the tea—from which dates our Revolution—are to be found in the contemporary newspapers. Never was contemporary history so copiously and minutely written as in the newspaper annals of the war for the Union. In fact, the best history thereof has been compiled by an assiduous collator from current journalism. The history of censorship in Europe in modern times is the history of opinion, of freedom, and of society. We felt the despotism of the King of Naples in all its baseness, only when a writer of genius told us, with a sigh, that he had been driven to natural history as the only subject upon which he could expatiate in print without impediment. Thus we see how the fate of nations and the experience of individuals are associated with the press; and how its influence touches the whole circle of life,—evoking genius, kindling nations, informing fugitives, and alarming kings.
‘It is neither the vote nor the laying on of hands that gives men the right to preach. One’s own heart is authority. If he cannot preach to edification, he is not authorized, though all the ministers of Christendom ordain him.’
Thuswrites a popular preacher of the conservative sect in theology: recognizing a spiritual fact and conviction which tempts us to analyze and define, as a subject of natural history, the function and fame of the preacher. The term by its derivation is the most generic word to indicate clerical vocation; ‘to say before,’ to proclaim, inculcate, preach; in other words, to be the herald and representative of truth, right, faith, and immortal hope,—such is the basis and logical claim of the preacher’s authority, under whatever form, creed, or character. They may be divided into the inspired, the ascetic, the jovial, the belligerent, the finical, the shrewd, and the ingenuous. The ‘oily man of God’ described by Pope, Scott’s Covenanter, and Friar Tuck, the disinterested Vicar of Fielding, Shakspeare’s good friars and ambitious cardinals, Mawworm, Mrs. Inchbald’s Dorimel, the gentle hero of the Sexton’s Daughter, Manzoni’s Prelate and Capuchin, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s Monks, are genuine and permanent types, only modified by circumstances. All that is subtle in artifice, all that is relentless in the love of power, all that is exalted in spiritual graces, all that is base in cunning, glorious in self-sacrifice, beautiful in compassion, and noble in allegiance, has been and is manifest in the priest.His great distinction is based upon the fact that ‘the church, rightly ministered, is the vestibule to an immortal life.’ He is at once the author of the worst tyranny and the grandest amenities of social life. The traveller on Alpine summits blesses the name of St. Bernard, and descends to Geneva to shudder at the bigoted ferocity of Calvin. The picture of the good pastor in theDeserted Village, and Ranke’sLives of the Popes, give us the two extremes of the character. The spiritual heroism of Luther, the religious gloom of Cowper, and the cheerful devotion of Watts, are but varied expressions of one feeling, which, according to the frail conditions of humanity, has its healthy and its morbid phase, its authentic and its spurious exposition, and is no more to be confounded in its original essence with its imperfect development and representatives, than the pure light of heaven with the accidental mediums which colour and distort its rays.
Theprestigeof the clerical office is greatly diminished because many of its prerogatives are no longer exclusive. ‘When ecclesiasticism became so weak as to be unable to regulate international affairs, and was supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician was more than a rival for the confessor, in the town the mayor was a greater man than the abbot.’[39]The clergy, at a former period, were the chief scholars; learning was not less their distinction than sanctity. In every intelligent community, this source of influence is now shared with men of letters; and even the once peculiar office of public instruction, is now filled by the lecturer, who takes an evening from the avocations of business or professional life, to claim intellectual sympathy or impart individual opinions. But the great agent in breaking up the monopoly of the pulpit has been the press. Written has in a great measure superseded oral thought. Half the world are readers, and the necessity ofhearing no longer exists to those desirous of knowledge. The sermons of the old English divines abound with classical learning and comments on the times, such as are now sought in periodical literature. In Latimer, Andrews, and Donne, we find such hints of the prevailing manners as subsequently were revealed byThe Spectator. The philosophy of antiquity and the morals of courts, the facts of distant climes, all that we now seek in popular books and the best journals, came to the minds of our ancestors through the discourses of preachers. American ministers, prior to and at the era of the Revolution, were the expositors of political as well as religious sentiments. Independent of the priestly rites, therefore, a clergyman, in past times, represented social transitions, and ministered to intellectual wants, for which we of this age have adequate provision otherwise; so that the most zealous advocate of reform, doctrine, or ethical philosophy, is no longer obliged to have recourse to the sacerdotal office, in order to reach the public mind. This apparent diminution of the privileges of the order, however, does not invalidate but rather simplifies its claims. In this as in so many other functions of the social economy, progress has the effect of reducing to its original elements the duties and the influence of the profession. Education, once their special responsibility, and popular enlightenment on the questions of the hour, being assumed by others, the preacher is free to concentrate his abilities on theology and the religious sentiment. Division of labour gives him a better opportunity to be ‘clear in his great office.’ It is reduced to its normal state. Except in isolated and newly-settled communities, there is not that incessant appeal to his benevolence and erudition: to heal the sick, reconcile litigants, argue civic questions, teach the elements of science, promote charities; in a word, to be the village orator and social oracle, are not the indispensable requisites of a clergyman’s duty which they were before the Newspaper and the Lyceum existed. Heis, therefore, at liberty to imitate the apostles of Christianity and the fathers of the church, and bring all his power to awaken devotion and faith, and all his learning to the defence of sacred truth. That the time and capacity of the profession are diffused, and the sympathy of its members enlisted in behalf of other than these aims, is, indeed, true; but this is a voluntary and not an inevitable result, and only proves that the spirit of the age overlays instead of being penetrated and ruled by the priestly office.
‘Civilization,’ says Lamartine, ‘was of the sanctuary. Kings were only concerned with acts; ideas belonged to the priest.’ And, by a singular contradiction, with the general progress of society, the same class, as a whole, have proved the most antagonistic to innovation even in the form of genius, whose erratic manifestations are jealously regarded as inconsistent with professional decorum. Hence Byron, in one of his splenetic moods, exclaimed to Trelawney: ‘When did parsons patronize genius? If one of their black band dares to think for himself, he is drummed out or cast aside like Sterne and Swift.’ On the other hand, venerable physicians say that the clergy are the most efficient promoters of medical innovations; and that quackery owes its socialprestigein no small degree to their countenance.
After the Reformation, this office, as such, lost its specialty; the right to exercise it was no longer peculiar; and in all societies and epochs, when a great activity of the religious sentiment, or an earnest discussion of questions of faith prevailed, men prayed, sermonized, commented on Scripture, and mingled all the duties of the clerical vocation with their own pursuits. Thus the English statesmen of Cromwell’s time were versed in divinity, exhorted, and published tracts in behalf of their creeds. Theology was a popular study; and the kingdom swarmed with lay-preachers. Sects, too, repudiated official leaders; and even among the Pilgrim Fathers of New England,ministers betrayed a jealousy of encroachments on the part of their unconsecrated brethren. Many Christians also recognized spiritual gifts as the exclusive credentials of a priesthood. Church, not less than State prerogatives were challenged by republican zeal; and the historical authority of the order being thus openly invaded, a new and more rational test was soon applied, and preachers, like kings, were made amenable to the tribunal of public opinion, and obliged to rest their claims on other than traditional or educational authority. ‘On conserva,’ says Rochambeau, writing of American society at the period of the Revolution, ‘au ministre du culte le première place dans les repas publics; il bénissoit le repas; mais ses prérogatives ne s’entendoient pas plus loin dans la société.[40]Cet exposé,’ he adds, evidently in view of priestly corruption in France, ‘doit amener naturellement des mœurs simples et pures.’[41]‘They,’ says the historian of preachers at the time of the Revolutionary war, ‘dealt in no high-sounding phrases of liberty and equality; they went to the very foundations of society, showed what the rights of man were, and how those rights became modified when men gathered into communities. The profound thought and unanswerable arguments, found in these sermons, show that the clergy were not a whit behind the ablest statesmen of the day in their knowledge of the great science of human government. In reading them one gets at the true pulse of the people, and can trace the steady progressof the public sentiment. The rebellion in New England rested on the pulpit, received its strongest impulse, indeed its moral character, from it; the teachings of the pulpit of Lexington caused the first blow to be struck for American independence.’
The tendency of all the so-called liberal professions is to limit and pervert the development of character, by giving to knowledge a technical shape, and to thought a prescriptive action. Conformity to a specific method is unfavourable to original results, and organization often does injustice to its subjects. Only the strong men, the brave, and the highly endowed, rise above such restrictions. It is a kind of social necessity alone which reconciles the man of scientific genius to seek the passport of a medical diploma,—the logician to exert his mind exclusively before a legal tribunal, and the votary of religious truth to sign a creed and become responsible to a congregation. How constantly each breaks away from his respective sphere to expatiate in the broad kingdom of letters! Would Humboldt have written theCosmoshad his life been confined to a laboratory, or a round of medical practice? Would Burke have theorized in so comprehensive a range if chained to an attorney’s desk, or Sir Henry Vane’s martyrdom acquired a holier sanction from the mere title of priest?
At the first glance, so distinct are the phases of the office that it is difficult to realize its identity. The ideal of a village pastor like Oberlin, self-devoted, in a secluded district, to the most pure and benevolent enterprise,—the life of a Jesuit missionary in Canada or Peru, who seems to incarnate the fiery zeal of the church he represents,—the complacent bishop of the Establishment, listlessly going through a prescribed form, and his very person embodying worldly prosperity; and the inelegant but earnest Methodist swaying the multitude at a camp-meeting in the wilds of America,—consider the vast contrast ofthe pictures: the dark robe, lonely existence, and subtle eye of the Catholic; the simple, friendly, conscientious toil of the poor vicar; the scholarship and good dinners of the English bishop; the cathedral decked with the trophies of art, and fields lit up by watch-fires; the silence of the Quaker assembly, and the loud harangue and frantic moans of the ‘revival;’ the solemn refinement of the Episcopal, the intellectual zeal of the Unitarian, and the gorgeous rites of the Roman worship; and an uninformed spectator, to whom each was a novelty, would imagine that a totally diverse principle was at work. To the philosophic eye, the ceremonies, organization, costume, rites, and even creeds of Christian sects, are but the varied manifestations of a common instinct, more or less mingled with other human qualities, and influenced in its development by time and place. Traced back to its source, and separated from incidental association, we find a natural sentiment of religion which is represented in social economy by the preacher. Simple as was the original relation between the two, however, in the process of time it has become so complicated that it now requires no ordinary analytical power to divest the idea of the priest from history, and that of religion from the church, so as to perceive both as facts of human nature instead of parts of the machinery of civilized life. To do this, indeed, we look inward, and derive from consciousness the great idea of a religious sentiment; and then ask ourselves how far it is justly represented in the institutions of the church and the persons of her ministers. Let this process be tried by a man of high endowments, genuine aspirations, and noble sympathies, and what is the result? ‘Milton,’ says Dr. Johnson, in his life of that poet, ‘grew old without any visible worship,’ a phrase which, considering the superstition of the writer, and the exalted devotional sentiment of the subject, has, to our minds, a most pathetic significance. It tacitly admits that Milton worshipped his Maker; itbrings him before us in a venerable aspect, at the time when he was blind, proscribed, and indigent; we recall his image at the organ, and seem to catch the symphonies ofParadise Lostand theHymn on the Nativity; and yet we are told by the greatest votary of religious forms and profession among English literary men—one who was oppressed by the sense of religious truth, and a slave to church requirements, that, in his old age, the reverential bard had no ‘visible worship.’ It is an admission of great moment; it is a fact infinitely suggestive. Why did not Milton practically recognize any organized church, or publicly enact any prescribed form? Not altogether because he had tasted of persecution, and been driven, by the force of individual opinion, away from popular rites; but also, and to a far greater degree, because he had so fully experienced within himself the force and scope of the religious sentiment, and found in its prevalent representation, not an incitement, but a hindrance to its exercise.
In the patriarchal age, the head of a family was its priest; and, in all ages, the true and complete man feels a personal interest and responsibility, a direct and entire relation to his Creator, that will not suffer interference any more than genuine conjugal or parental ties. The so-called progress of society has rendered its functions more complex, and broken up this simple and natural identity between the offices of devotion and those of paternity. It has not only made the priestly office distinct and apart from domestic life, but shorn it of glory by the cumbrous details of a hierarchy and badges of exclusiveness; and lessened its sanctity by changing the grand and holy function of a spiritual medium and expositor into a professional business and special pleading. What are conventional preachers but theemployésof a sect? And so regarded, how is it possible to rejoice ‘in the plain presence of their dignity?’ Called upon by a thoroughly earnest soul in its deep perplexity and agonizing bewilderment, what can they do butrepeat the commonplaces of their office? How instantly are they reduced to the level of other men, when brought into contact with a human reality! The voice of true sympathy, though from ignorant lips, the grasp of honest affection, though from unconsecrated hands, yield more of the balm of consolation in such an hour, because they are real, human, and therefore nearer to God, than the technical representative of His truth. The essential mistake is, that instead of regarding the man as something divine in essence and relation, a perverse theology assigns that quality to the office. It is what is grafted upon, not what is essential to, humanity, that is thus made the nucleus of reverence and hope, whereas priesthood and manhood are identical. The authority of the former is derived from the latter; by virtue of being men we become priests—that is, servants—of the Most High; and not through any miraculous anointing, laying on of hands, courses of divinity, or rites of ordination. ‘How,’ says Carlyle, ‘did Christianity arise and spread abroad among men? Was it by institutions and establishments and well-arranged systems of mechanism? Not so. On the contrary, in all past and existing institutions for those ends, its divine spirit has invariably been found to languish and decay. It arose in the mystic deeps of man’s soul; and spread abroad by the “preaching of the word” by simple, altogether natural, and individual efforts; and flew like hallowed fire from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated by it.’ Accordingly, if merely professional representatives of the church, as such, hold a less influential position now than formerly, it is not because the instinct of worship has died out in the human heart, nor because men feel less than before the need of interpreters of the true, the holy, and the beautiful; it is not that the mysteries of life are less impressive, or its vicissitudes less constant, or its origin and end less enveloped in sacred obscurity; but it is because more legitimate priests have been found out of the church than in it; because thatinstitution and its ministers fail to meet adequately the wants of the religious sentiment; and it has been discovered that the Invisible Spirit is more easily found by the lonely seashore than in the magnificent cathedral; that the mountain-top is an altar nearer to His throne than a chancel; and that the rustle of forest-leaves and the moaning of the sea less disturb the idea of His presence in the devout heart, than the monotonous chant of the choir, or the conventional words of the preacher. We have but to glance at the pictures of clerical life, so thickly scattered through the memoirs and novels of the day, to realize the necessity of an eclectic spirit in estimating the clerical character—whose highest manifestations and most patent abuses seem entirely irrespective of sect. A Scotch clergyman, writing, in 1763, of the society at Harrogate, ‘made up of half-pay officers and clergymen,’ thus describes the latter: ‘They are in general—I mean the lower order—divided into bucks and prigs; of which the first, though inconceivably ignorant, and sometimes indecent in their morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were unassuming, and had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves like gentlemen. The other division of them, the prigs, are truly not to be endured, for they are but half-learned, are ignorant of the world, narrow-minded, pedantic, and overbearing.’[42]Contrast with this estimate of a class Victor Hugo’s portrait of an individual in hisProvincial Bishop—‘Monseigneur Bienvenu,’ so called, instinctively, by the people: ‘The formidable spectacle of created things developed a tenderness in him; he was always busy in finding for himself and inspiring others with the best way of sympathizing and solacing. The universe appeared to him like disease. He auscultated suffering everywhere. The whole world was to this good and rare priest a permanent subject of sadness seeking to be consoled.’
The absolute need of separating in our minds the idea of the clerical man as a natural development of humanity—a normal phase of character—from the historical idea of the same personage, is at once evinced by the immense distance between the lives, influence, and traits of the men who have conspicuously borne the office of public religious teachers and administrators in different sects, ages, and countries; as for instance, Ximenes, Wolsey, Richelieu, Whitfield, Channing, George Herbert, and Dr. Arnold; in position, habits, and relations to the world, how great the contrast! And yet each represented to society, in a professional way, the same principle; the former with all the pomp of hierarchal magnificence, and all the influence of executive power, and the latter by the force of patient usefulness, earnest simplicity, and individual moral energy. Between Puritan and Pope, what infinite grades; between Jewish rabbi and Scotch elder, how diverse is the traditional sanction; and how little would a novice imagine that the bare walls and plain costume of a Friends’ meeting had the least of a common origin with the gorgeous decorations of a minster! Thus do the passions, the tastes, and the very blood of races and individuals modify the expression of the same instinct; worship is as Protean in its forms as labour, diversion,hygiène, or any other human need and activity. Philosophy reconciles us to the apparent incongruity, and reveals beneath surplice, drab-coat, and silken robe, hearts that pulsate to an identical measure.
The best writers have recognized the clerical tone of manners as significant of the social condition of each period. Burnet thought more highly of hisPastoral Carethan of his History; and Baxter’sReformed Pastoris an indirect but keen testimony to the decadence of the clergy. Macaulay cites Fielding’s parson. Sir Roger’s chaplain in theSpectator, Cowper’s rebuke of the ‘cassocked huntsmen,’ the Stiggins of Dickens, and Honeyman of Thackeray, are but a popular reflex of that deep sense of the abuse of aprofession which is the highest evidence of its normal estimation. And the types of the vocation seem permanent. Every era has its Whateley, its Lammenais, and its Spurgeon—or men in the church whose gifts, tone, and mission essentially correspond with these. When George Herbert abandoned court for clerical aspirations, a friend protested against his choice ‘as too mean an employment;’ and yet so truly did he illustrate the spiritual grandeur of his office that the chime which called to prayer from the humble belfry of Bemerton, was recognized by the country people as the ‘saint’s bell.’ It was his holiness, and not his attachment to the ritual year, that inspired his example while living, and embalmed his memory; lowly kindnesses were ‘music to him at midnight;’ charity was ‘his only perfume;’ to teach the ignorant, in his estimation, ‘the greatest alms;’ and a day well spent, ‘the bridal of the earth and sky;’ his humanity, spiritualized by Christian faith and practice, so essentially constituted him a priest that, ‘about Salisbury,’ writes his brother, ‘where he lived beneficed for many years, he was little less than sainted.’ He drew an ideal from his own soul, and for his own guidance, in theCountry Parson.
To the reverent mind that dares to exercise freely the prerogative of thought, the constant blending of human infirmity with the method of worship is painfully evident: the instinct itself, the sentiment—highest in man—is thus ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;’ what is beautiful and true in the ceremonial, or the emblem, arrays itself to his consciousness so as to intercept the holy beams that he would draw from the altar. Let him obey the waves of accident, and pause at shrines by the wayside; and according to circumstances will be the inspiration they yield. Thus turning from the gay Parisian thoroughfare, at noonday, he may pace the chaste aisles of the Madeleine, and feel his devotion stirred by the solemn quietude, the few kneeling figures—perhaps by the dark catafalque awaiting the dead in the centre of the spacious floor; and thenwhat to him is the doctrine of transubstantiation? Religious architecture is speaking to his heart. The voices of the choristers at St. George’s Chapel, at Windsor, may touch his pious sensibility; but if his thoughts revert to the ruddy dean, his good dinners, and indulgent life, and the poor, toilsome vicars, which make the Establishment a reflection of the world’s diversity of condition—the pampered and the drudged; or, if he notes the prayer that the Queen may be preserved ‘in health andwealth,’ how sanctity ceases to invest the priest and the ritual, thus typical of human vanity and selfishness! ‘We know not,’ wrote Jerrold, ‘and we say it with grief, but with profound conviction of the necessity of every man giving fullest utterance to his thoughts—we know not, in this world of ours, in this social, out-of-door masquerade, a more dreary shortcoming, a greater disappointment to the business and bosoms of men, than the Established Church. Its essence is self-denial; its foundations are in humility and poverty; its practice is self-aggrandizement and money-getting.’ Nor is the reverse of the picture, the contrast between the high and low clergy, less inauspicious. ‘A Christian bishop,’ writes Sydney Smith, ‘proposes, in cold blood, to create a thousand livings of one hundred and thirty pounds each,—to call into existence a thousand of the most unhappy men on the face of the earth—the sons of the poor, without hope, without the assistance of private fortune, chained to the soil, ashamed to live with their inferiors, unfit for the society of the better classes, and dragging about the English curse of poverty, without the smallest hope that they can ever shake it off. Can any man of common sense say that all these outward circumstances of the ministers of religion have no bearing on religion itself?’ On the other hand, what divine significance to the pious soul, ‘as through a zodiac moves the ritual year,’—in the altar, the font, the choral service, the venerable liturgy, the holy emblems and hallowed forms whereby this Church is consecrated to the hearts of herdevout children, and the reverence of sympathetic intelligence.
Buckle, drawing broad inference from extensive and acute research, unmodified by sympathetic observation, wrote an historical treatise, rich in knowledge and philosophy, to prove that Spain and Scotland owe whatever is hopeless and hampered in their intellectual development to the tyranny of priests and preachers. It was a special plea, but it serves to illustrate, with comprehensive emphasis, the antagonism between Ecclesiasticism and Christianity; for, viewed individually, as a social phenomenon, and not the mere exponent of an organization, the preacher or teacher of the right, advocate of the true, representative of faith, becomes a distinct and personal character, and is identified with humanity. It is when the man and the function coalesce, and the former transcends and spiritualizes the latter, that, in history and in life, all that is great and gracious in the vocation is memorably vindicated. Under this genuine aspect, Rousseau found his ideal of happiness in the life of a villagecuré, Chateaubriand renewed the heartfelt claims of religion in eloquently describing its primitive and legitimate benignities. Mediæval ecclesiasticism commenced its purifying though inadequate ordeal through the heroism of Savonarola at Florence and Sarpi at Venice. Current literature, indeed, continually and clearly states the problem; and illustrates the question with a frequency and a talent which indicate how largely it occupies the popular mind. To discriminate between the preacher’s conventional office and his spiritual endowment,—between Christianity as a sentiment and a dogma, between the religious and the temporal authority, between the church as an institution and a faith, is an emphatic mission of artist and author in our age. Witness the salient discussions of the ‘Roman question,’ the pleas and protests of Gallican and Ultramontane, the conservative zeal of the Puseyite and liberal encroachments of the progressive clergy, and the picturesqueor psychological fictions which instruct and beguile modern readers.[43]Both literature and life in modern times, while they attest the official decadence of the clergy, as a political and theological organization, still more significantly vindicate their normal influence as a social power. ‘Not as in the old times,’ says a philosophical historian, in allusion to the clergy of America, ‘does the layman look upon them as the cormorants and curses of society; they are his faithful advisers, his honoured friends, under whose suggestion and supervision are instituted educational establishments, colleges, hospitals—whatever can be of benefit to men in this life, or secure to them happiness in the life to come.’[44]
There are types of character that prophesy vocation; and we occasionally see in families a gentle being, so disinterested, thoughtful, and above the world in natural disposition, that he seems born to wear a surplice, as one we can behold officiating at the altar by virtue of a certain innate adaptation; and so there are men of strong affections, early bereft, and thereby alienated from personal motives, and thus peculiarly able to give an undivided heart to God and humanity; or, through a singular moral experience, initiated more deeply than their fellows into the arcana of truth, and hence justified in becoming her expositors. In cases like these, a more than conventional reason for the faith that is in them causes them to speak and act with an authority which is its own sanction, and hence springs what is vital both in the life and the literature of the visible church. Sacerdotal biography, the achievements of the true reformer, the literary bequests of the genuine pulpit orator, and the results of efficient parochial genius, attest the reality of such characters; they are of Nature’s ordaining, and sectarianism itselfis lost sight of in their universal and grateful recognition—as witness St. Augustine, Fenelon, Luther, Wesley, Fox, and Frederick Robertson. Landmarks in the history of our race, oases in the desert of theological controversy, flowers in the garland of humanity, they ‘vindicate the ways of God to man,’ and are the redeeming facts of ecclesiastical life. Above the system they illustrate, beyond the limits they designate, and providential exceptions to a general rule, we instinctively accept them as holding a relation to the religious sentiment and the highest interests of the world that only a profane imagination can associate with the pretensions of the thousands who claim their fraternity. This idea of asserting the human as consecrated and not usurped by the priestly, has ever distinguished the veritable ecclesiastical heroes. Lammenais, when a mere youth, was arrested for his eloquent advocacy of freedom and faith; ‘we will show them,’ he said of the civil tribunals, ‘what kind of amana priest is.’
Dupuytren, the most celebrated French surgeon of his day, was destitute of faith, and by his powerful mind and brusque hardihood overcame the individuality of almost every one who approached him. One day a poorcuréfrom some village near Paris called upon the great surgeon. Dupuytren was struck with his manly beauty and noble presence, but examined, with his usual nonchalance, the patient’s neck, disfigured by a horrible cancer. ‘Avec cela, il faut mourir,’ said the surgeon. ‘So I thought,’ calmly replied the priest; ‘I expected the disease was fatal, and only came to you to please my parishioners.’ He then unfolded a bit of paper and took from it a five-franc piece, which he handed to Dupuytren, saying: ‘Pardon, sir, the little fee, for we are poor.’ The serene dignity and holy self-possession of this man, about to die in the prime of his life, impressed the stoical surgeon in spite of himself, though his manner betrayed neither surprise nor interest. Before thecuréhad descended half the staircase, he was called backby a servant. ‘If you choose to try an operation,’ said Dupuytren, ‘go to the Hotel Dieu; I will see you to-morrow.’ ‘It is my duty to make use of all means of recovery,’ replied thecuré; ‘I will go.’ The next day, the surgeon cut away remorselessly at the priest’s neck, laying bare tendons and arteries. It was before the days of chloroform, and, unsustained by any opiate, the poorcurésuffered with uncomplaining heroism. He did not even wince. Dupuytren respected his courage; and every day lingered longer at his bedside, when making the rounds of the hospital. In a few weeks thecurérecovered. A year after the operation, he made his appearance in thesalonof the great professor with a neat basket containing pears and chickens. ‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘it is the anniversary of the day when your skill saved my life; accept this humble gift; the pears and chickens are better than you can find in Paris; they are of my own raising.’ Each succeeding year, on the same day of the month, the honest priest brought his grateful offering. At length Dupuytren was taken ill, and the physicians declared his heart diseased. He shut himself up with his favourite nephew and refused to see his friends. One day he wrote on a slip of paper, ‘Le medécin a besoin du curé,’ and sent it to the village priest, who quickly obeyed the summons. He remained for hours in the dying surgeon’s chamber; and when he came forth, tears were in his eyes, and Dupuytren was no more. How easy for the imagination to fill up this outline, which is all that was vouchsafed to Parisian gossip.
Whoever has gone from Roman church or palace—his soul yet warm with the radiant figures and divine expression of saints and martyrs as depicted by the inspired hands of the Christian artists of the fifteenth century—into the gloomy and damp catacombs, where the early disciples met in order to enjoy ‘freedom to worship God,’ must have felt at once the solemn reality and the beautiful triumph of faith, in its unperverted glow—on the one hand nerving thebeliever to cheerful endurance, and on the other kindling genius to noble toil; and, before this fresh conviction, how vain appeared to him the mechanical rite and the cold response of conventional worship! The truth is that the history of religion is like the history of love; a natural and divine sentiment has been wrested into illegitimate service; ambitious pretenders, like the wanton and the coquette, abuse to selfish ends what should either be honourably let alone or sacredly cherished. This process, at once so habitual and so intricate—working through formulas, tradition, appeals to fear, the power of custom, the imperative needs and the ignorant credulity of the multitude—has gradually built up a partition between heaven and earth, obscured spiritual facts, made vague and mystical the primitive relation of the soul to the fatherhood of God, and thus induced either open scepticism or artificial conformity. In painting, in music, in literature, in the wonders of the universe, in the mysteries of life, and in human consciousness, the sentiment asserts itself for ever; but to the genuine man of to-day is allotted the ceaseless duty of keeping it apart from the incrustations of form, the perversion of office, and the base uses of ambition and avarice.
The lionism of the pulpit is another desecration. London and New York must have their fashionable preachers as well as favouriteprima donnas, and the phenomena attending each are the same. Intellectual amusement, exclusiveness, themode, thus become identical with that which is their essential opposite, and the meekness and sublimity of the religious function is utterly lost in a frivolous glare and soulless vanity. The pew itself is a satire on existent Christianity; the very organ-airs played in the fashionable churches, by recalling the ball-room and the theatre, are ironical; and to these how often the elegantly-worded commonplace of the preacher is a fit accompaniment—so well likened, by a thoughtful writer, to shovelling sand with a pitchfork! Thank Heaven, we have perpetually theVicar of Wakefield and Parson Adams to keep green the memories of that genial simplicity and honest warmth of which modern refinement has deprived the clerical man. They, at least, were not effigies. Heroism as embodied in Knox, scholarship in Barrow, zeal in Doddridge, holy idealism in Taylor, sacred eloquence in Hall and Chalmers, earnest aspiration in Channing and Robertson,—these and like instances of a fine manly endowment, give vitality to the preacher and significance to his ministrations.
In a recent farce, that had a run at Paris, and caricatures English life, the curtain rises on a deserted street, hushed and gloomy, through which two figures at last slowly walk on tiptoe: as they approach, and one begins to address the other, the latter, raising his finger to his lips, whispers ‘C’est Soonday,’ and both disappear: the comedy ends, however, with a prodigious dinner of beef and beer. Absurd as such pictures of a London Sabbath are, they yet indicate a suggestive truth, which is, that the extreme outward observance in Protestant countries, of one day in seven, by repudiating all pastime, is the best proof of a conscious defect in the social representation of the religious instinct, exactly as the festivity of continental people, on the same day, illustrates the opposite extreme of indifference to appearances. It is probable that neither affords a just index of the state of feeling; for domestic enjoyments in the one case, and attendance at mass, by sincere devotees, in the other, are facts that modify the apparent truth. It is highly probable, also, that in this age of free inquiry and general intelligence, what has been lost in public observance has been gained in individual sincerity. There is not the same dependence on the preacher. Devotional sentiment is fed from other sources. It has come to be felt and understood as never before, that man is personally responsible, and must seek light for himself, and repose on his own faith. Accordingly, he is comparatively unallied to institutions, and will no longer trust for spiritual insightto a mortal as frail and ignorant as himself. The redeeming fact is to be sought in the existence of the sentiment itself. The sensuality of a Borgia makes more impressive the sanctity of Fenelon; because of the artificial funeral eulogies of Bossuet, we are more sensible to the practical efficiency of Father Matthew; Calvin’s intolerance heightens the glory of Luther’s vindication of spiritual freedom; the fanaticism of the Methodist, the subtlety of the Jesuit, the cold rationalism of the Unitarian, the dark bigotry of the Presbyterian, the monotonous tone of the Quaker, the refined conservatism of the Episcopalian, and other characteristics of sects, philosophically considered, are but the excess of a tendency which also manifests its benign and desirable influence as an element of Christian society. What liberal mind can reflect upon the agency of the English Church, pregnant of abuses as it is, without feeling that she has greatly contributed to preserve a wholesome equilibrium amid conflicting agencies, to keep intact the dignity and hallowed associations of worship, to calm the feverish impulses, and prolong a law of order amid chaotic tendencies? What just observer will hesitate to award to Dissenters the honour of imparting a vital spirit to the listless body of the Church, renewing the sentiment of religion which had become dormant through conventionalism and oppressive institutions, and making its divine reality once more a conscious motive and solace to the world? How much have the eminent preachers of liberal Christianity, in New England, done toward enlarging the charity of sects, elevating the standard of pulpit eloquence, and giving to the priestly office moral dignity and intellectual force! Who that has witnessed the life-devotion of the Sisters of Charity, in a season of pestilence, seen the tears on the bronze cheeks of hardy mariners at the Bethel, or heard the bold protest of the educated divine, above the voice of public opinion, at a social crisis, pleading for principle against expediency, and has not, for the moment at least,forgotten dogmas in grateful appreciation of the general benefits resulting from the direct inspiration of that sentiment, which the preacher, of whatever creed, is ordained to illustrate? Truly has it been said, that ‘it is the spirit of the soul’s natural piety to alight on whatever is beautiful and touching in every faith, and take thence its secret draught of spiritual refreshment.’ Even popular literature enforces the argument. The lives of Fox, Wesley, Fenelon, Arnold, Chalmers, and Channing, illustrate the same truth, that the man can sanction the priest, the soul vindicate the office, and the reality of a sentiment reconcile or sublimate discordant creeds.
That good maxim of the brave English lexicographer, ‘Clear your mind of cant;’ and the noble appeal of Campbell’s chivalric muse, who asks—