The attitude which men who have been born within that Church, but who have come to dissent from large portions of its theology, should bear to this great instrument of good, is certainly not less perplexing than the questions we have been considering in the preceding chapters. The most difficult position is, of course, that of those who are its actual ministers and who have subscribed its formularies. Each man so situated must judge in the light of his own conscience. There is a great difference between the case of men who accept such a position in the Church though they differ fundamentally from its tenets, and the case of men who, having engaged in its service, find their old convictions modified or shaken, perhaps very gradually, by the advance of science or by more matured thought and study. The stringency of the old form of subscription has been much mitigated by an Act of 1865 which substituted a general declaration that the subscriber believed in the doctrine of the Church as a whole, for a declaration that he believed 'all and everything' in the Articles and the Prayer-book. The Church of England does not profess to be an infallible Church; it does profess to be a National Church representing and including great bodies of more or less divergent opinion, and the whole tendency of legal decisions since the Gorham case has been to enlarge the circle of permissible opinion. The possibility of the National Church remaining in touch with the more instructed and intellectual portions of thecommunity depends mainly on the latitude of opinion that is accorded to its clergy, and on their power of welcoming and adopting new knowledge, and it may reasonably be maintained that few greater calamities can befall a nation than the severance of its higher intelligence from religious influences.
It should be remembered, too, that on the latitudinarian side the changes that take place in the teaching of the Church consist much less in the open repudiation of old doctrines than in their silent evanescence. They drop out of the exhortations of the pulpit. The relative importance of different portions of the religious teaching is changed. Dogma sinks into the background. Narratives which are no longer seriously believed become texts for moral disquisitions. The introspective habits and the stress laid on purely ecclesiastical duties which once preponderated disappear. The teaching of the pulpit tends rather to the formation of active, useful and unselfish lives; to a clearer insight into the great masses of remediable suffering and need that still exist in the world; to the duty of carrying into all the walks of secular life a nobler and more unselfish spirit; to a habit of judging men and Churches mainly by their fruits and very little by their beliefs. The disintegration or decadence of old religious beliefs which had long been closely associated with moral teaching always brings with it grave moral dangers, but those dangers are greatly diminished when the change of belief is effected by a gradual transition, without any violent convulsion or disruption severing men from their old religious observances. Such a transition has silently taken place in Englandamong great numbers of educated men, and in some measure under the influence of the clergy. Nor has it, I think, weakened the Church. The standard of duty among such men has not sunk, but has in most departments perceptibly risen: their zeal has not diminished, though it flows rather in philanthropic than in purely ecclesiastical channels. The conviction that the special dogmas which divided other Protestant bodies from the Establishment rested on no substantial basis and have no real importance tells in favour of the larger and the more liberal Church, and the comprehensiveness which allows highly accentuated sacerdotalism and latitudinarianism in the same Church is in the eyes of many of them rather an element of strength than of weakness.
Few men have watched the religious tendencies of the time with a keener eye than Cardinal Newman, and no man hated with a more intense hatred the latitudinarian tendencies which he witnessed. His judgment of their effect on the Establishment is very remarkable. In a letter to his friend Isaac Williams he says: 'Everything I hear makes me fear that latitudinarian opinions are spreading furiously in the Church of England. I grieve deeply at it. The Anglican Church has been a most useful breakwater against Scepticism. The time might come when you, as well as I, might expect that it would be said above, "Why cumbereth it the ground?" but at present it upholds far more truth in England than any other form of religion would, and than the Catholic Roman Church could. But what I fear is that it istendingto a powerful Establishment teaching direct error, andmore powerful than it has ever been; thrice powerful because it does teach error.'[60]
It is, however, of course, evident that the latitude of opinion which may be reasonably claimed by the clergy of a Church encumbered with many articles and doctrinal formularies is not unlimited, and each man must for himself draw the line. The fact, too, that the Church is an Established Church imposes some special obligations on its ministers. It is their first duty to celebrate public worship in such a form that all members of the Church of England may be able to join in it. Whatever interpretations may be placed upon the ceremonies of the Church, those ceremonies, at least, should be substantially the same. A stranger who enters a church which he has never before seen should be able to feel that he is certain of finding public worship intelligibly and decently performed, as in past generations it has been celebrated in all sections of the Established Church. It has, in my opinion, been a gross scandal, following a gross neglect of duty, that this primary obligation has been defied, and that services are held in English churches which would have been almost unrecognisable by the churchmen of a former generation, and which are manifest attempts to turn the English public worship into an imitation of the Romish Mass. Men have a perfect right, within the widest limits, to perform what religious services and to preach what religious doctrines they please, but they have not a right to do so in an Established Church.
The censorship of opinions is another thing, and in the conditions of English life it has never been very effectively maintained. The latitude of opinion granted in an Established Church is, and ought to be, very great, but it is, I think, obvious that on some topics a greater degree of reticence of expression should be observed by a clergyman addressing a miscellaneous audience from the pulpit of an Established Church than need be required of him in private life or even in his published books.
The attitude of laymen whose opinions have come to diverge widely from the Church formularies is less perplexing, and except in as far as the recent revival of sacerdotal pretensions has produced a reaction, there has, if I mistake not, of late years been a decided tendency in the best and most cultivated lay opinion of this kind to look with increasing favour on the Established Church. The complete abolition of the religious and political disqualifications which once placed its maintenance in antagonism with the interests of large sections of the people; the abolition of the indelibility of orders which excluded clergymen who changed their views from all other means of livelihood; the greater elasticity of opinion permitted within its pale; and the elimination from the statute-book of nearly all penalties and restrictions resting solely upon ecclesiastical grounds,—have all tended to diminish with such men the objections to the Church. It is a Church which does not injure those who are external to it, or interfere with those who are mere nominal adherents. It is more and more looked upon as a machine of well-organised beneficence, discharging efficiently andwithout corruption functions of supreme utility, and constituting one of the main sources of spiritual and moral life in the community. None of the modern influences of society can be said to have superseded it. Modern experience has furnished much evidence of the insufficiency of mere intellectual education if it is unaccompanied by the education of character, and it is on this side that modern education is most defective. While it undoubtedly makes men far more keenly sensible than in the past to the vast inequalities of human lots, the habit of constantly holding out material prizes as its immediate objects, and the disappearance of those coercive methods of education which once disciplined the will, make it perhaps less efficient as an instrument of moral amelioration.
Some habits of thought also, that have grown rapidly among educated men, have tended powerfully in the same direction. The sharp contrasts between true and false in matters of theology have been considerably attenuated. The point of view has changed. It is believed that in the history of the world gross and material conceptions of religion have been not only natural, but indispensable, and that it is only by a gradual process of intellectual evolution that the masses of men become prepared for higher and purer conceptions. Superstition and illusion play no small part in holding together the great fabric of society. 'Every falsehood,' it has been said, 'is reduced to a certain malleability by an alloy of truth,' and, on the other hand, truths of the utmost moment are, in certain stages of the world's history, only operative when they are clothed with a vesture of superstition. TheDivine Spirit filters down to the human heart through a gross and material medium. And what is true of different stages of human history is not less true of different contemporary strata of knowledge and intelligence. In spite of democratic declamation about the equality of man, it is more and more felt that the same kind of teaching is not good for everyone. Truth, when undiluted, is too strong a medicine for many minds. Some things which a highly cultivated intellect would probably discard, and discard without danger, are essential to the moral being of multitudes. There is in all great religious systems something that is transitory and something that is eternal. Theological interpretations of the phenomena of outward nature which surround and influence us, and mythological narratives which have been handed down to us from a remote, uncritical and superstitious past, may be transformed or discredited; but there are elements in religion which have their roots much less in the reason of man than in his sorrows and his affections, and are the expression of wants, moral appetites and aspirations which are an essential, indestructible part of his nature.
No one, I think, can doubt that this way of thinking, whether it be right or wrong, has very widely spread through educated Europe, and it is a habit of thought which commonly strengthens with age. Young men discuss religious questions simply as questions of truth or falsehood. In later life they more frequently accept their creed as a working hypothesis of life; as a consolation in innumerable calamities; as the one supposition under which life is not a melancholyanti-climax; as the indispensable sanction of moral obligation; as the gratification and reflection of needs, instincts and longings which are planted in the deepest recesses of human nature; as one of the chief pillars on which society rests. The proselytising, the aggressive, the critical spirit diminishes. Very often they deliberately turn away their thoughts from questions which appear to them to lead only to endless controversy or to mere negative conclusions, and base their moral life on some strong unselfish interest for the benefit of their kind. In active, useful and unselfish work they find the best refuge from the perplexities of belief and the best field for the cultivation of their moral nature, and work done for the benefit of others seldom fails to react powerfully on their own happiness. Nor is it always those who have most completely abandoned dogmatic systems who are the least sensible to the moral beauty which has grown up around them. The music of the village church, which sounds so harsh and commonplace to the worshipper within, sometimes fills with tears the eyes of the stranger who sits without, listening among the tombs.
It is difficult to say how far the partial truce which has now fallen in England over the great antagonisms of belief is likely to be permanent. No one who knows the world can be insensible to the fact that a large and growing proportion of those who habitually attend our religious services have come to diverge very widely, though in many different degrees, from the beliefs which are expressed or implied in the formularies they use. Custom, fashion, the charm of old associations, the cravings of their own moral or spiritualnature, a desire to support a useful system of moral training, to set a good example to their children, their household, or their neighbours, keep them in their old place when the beliefs which they profess with their lips have in a great measure ebbed away. I do not undertake to blame or to judge them. Individual conscience and character and particular circumstances have, in these matters, a decisive voice. But there are times when the difference between professed belief and real belief is too great for endurance, and when insincerity and half-belief affect seriously the moral character of a nation. 'The deepest, nay, the only theme of the world's history, to which all others are subordinate,' said Goethe, 'is the conflict of faith and unbelief. The epochs in which faith, in whatever form it may be, prevails, are the marked epochs in human history, full of heart-stirring memories and of substantial gains for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief, in whatever form it may be, prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity, which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and unfruitful.'
Many of my readers have probably felt the force of such considerations and the moral problems which they suggest, and there have been perhaps moments when they have asked themselves the question of the poet—
Tell me, my soul, what is thy creed?Is it a faith or only a need?
Tell me, my soul, what is thy creed?Is it a faith or only a need?
Tell me, my soul, what is thy creed?
Is it a faith or only a need?
They will reflect, however, that a need, if it be universally felt when human nature is in its highest andpurest state, furnishes some basis of belief, and also that no man can venture to assign limits to the transformations which religion may undergo without losing its essence or its power. Even in the field of morals these have been very great, though universal custom makes us insensible to the extent to which we have diverged from a literal observance of Evangelical precepts. We should hardly write over the Savings Bank, 'Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for itself,' or over the Bank of England, 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,' 'How hardly shall a rich man enter into the Kingdom of God,' or over the Foreign Office, or the Law Court, or the prison, 'Resist not evil,' 'He that smiteth thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also,' 'He that taketh away thy coat let him have thy cloak also.' Can it be said that the whole force and meaning of such words are represented by an industrial society in which the formation of habits of constant providence with the object of averting poverty or increasing comfort is deemed one of the first of duties and a main element and measure of social progress; in which the indiscriminate charity which encourages mendicancy and discourages habits of forethought and thrift is far more seriously condemned than an industrial system based on the keenest, the most deadly, and often the most malevolent competition; in which wealth is universally sought, and universally esteemed a good and not an evil, provided only it is honestly obtained and wisely and generously used; in which, although wanton aggression and a violent and quarrelsome temper are no doubt condemned, it is esteemed the duty ofevery good citizen to protect his rights whenever they are unjustly infringed; in which war and the preparation for war kindle the most passionate enthusiasm and absorb a vast proportion of the energies of Christendom, and in which no Government could remain a week in power if it did not promptly resent the smallest insult to the national flag?
It is a question of a different kind whether the sacerdotal spirit which has of late years so largely spread in the English Church can extend without producing a violent disruption. To cut the tap roots of priestcraft was one of the main aims and objects of the Reformation, and, for reasons I have already stated, I do not believe that the party which would re-establish it has by any means the strength that has been attributed to it. It is true that the Broad Church party, though it reflects faithfully the views of large numbers of educated laymen, has never exercised an influence in active Church life at all proportionate to the eminence of its leading representatives. It is true also that the Evangelical party has in a very remarkable degree lost its old place in the Anglican pulpit and in religious literature, though its tenets still form the staple of the preaching of the Salvation Army and of most other street preachers who exercise a real and widespread influence over the poor. But the middle and lower sections of English society are, I believe, at bottom, profoundly hostile to priestcraft; and although the dread of Popery has diminished, they are very far from being ready to acquiesce in any attempt to restore the dominion which their fathers discarded.
In one respect, indeed, sacerdotalism in theAnglican Church is a worse thing than in the Roman Church, for it is undisciplined and unregulated. The history of the Church abundantly shows the dangers that have sprung from the Confessional, though the Roman Catholic will maintain that its habitually restraining and moralising influence greatly outweighs these occasional abuses. But in the Roman Church the practice of confession is carried on under the most severe ecclesiastical supervision and discipline. Confession can only be made to a celibate priest of mature age, who is bound to secrecy by the most solemn oath; who, except in cases of grave illness, confesses only in an open church; and who has gone through a long course of careful education specially and skilfully designed to fit him for the duty. None of these conditions are observed in Anglican Confession.
In other respects, indeed, the sacerdotal spirit is never likely to be quite the same as in the Roman Church. A married clergy, who have mixed in all the lay influences of an English university, and who still take part in the pursuits, studies, social intercourse and amusements of laymen, are not likely to form a separate caste or to constitute a very formidable priesthood. It is perhaps a little difficult to treat their pretensions with becoming gravity, and the atmosphere of unlimited discussion which envelops Englishmen through their whole lives has effectually destroyed the danger of coercive and restrictive laws directed against opinion. Moral coercion and the tendency to interfere by law on moral grounds with the habits of men, even when those habits in no degree interfere with others, have increased. It is one of the marked tendencies ofAnglo-Saxon democracy, and it is very far from being peculiar to, or even specially prominent in, any one Church. But the desire to repress the expression of opinions by force, which for so many centuries marked with blood and fire the power of mediæval sacerdotalism, is wholly alien to modern English nature. Amid all the fanaticisms, exaggerations, and superstitions of belief, this kind of coercion, at least, is never likely to be formidable, nor do I believe that in the most extreme section of the sacerdotal clergy there is any desire for it. There has been one significant contrast between the history of Catholicism and Anglicanism in the present century. In the Catholic Church the Ultramontane element has steadily dominated, restricting liberty of opinion, and important tenets which were once undefined by the Church, and on which sincere Catholics had some latitude of opinion, have been brought under the iron yoke. This is no doubt largely due to the growth of scepticism and indifference, which have made the great body of educated laymen hostile or indifferent to the Church, and have thrown its management mainly into the hands of the priesthood and the more bigoted, ignorant and narrow-minded laymen. But in the Anglican Church educated laymen are much less alienated from Church life, and a tribunal which is mainly lay exercises the supreme authority. As a consequence of these conditions, although the sacerdotal element has greatly increased, the latitude of opinion within the Church has steadily grown.
At the same time, it is difficult to believe that serious dangers do not await the Church if theunprotestantising influences that have spread within it continue to extend. It is not likely that the nation will continue to give its support to the Church if that Church in its main tendencies cuts itself off from the Reformation. The conversions to Catholicism in England, though probably much exaggerated, have been very numerous, and it is certainly not surprising that it should be so. If the Church of Rome permitted Protestantism to be constantly taught in her pulpits, and Protestant types of worship and character to be habitually held up to admiration, there can be little doubt that many of her worshippers would be shaken. If the Church of England becomes in general what it already is in some of its churches, it is not likely that English public opinion will permanently acquiesce in its privileged position in the State. If it ceases to be a Protestant Church, it will not long remain an established one, and its disestablishment would probably be followed by a disruption in which opinions would be more sharply defined, and the latitude of belief and the spirit of compromise that now characterise our English religious life might be seriously impaired.
FOOTNOTES:[58]Alciphron, 6th Dialogue.[59]Nalsons'sCollections, i. 769, February 9, 1640.[60]Autobiography of Isaac Williams, p. 132. This letter was written in 1863.
[58]Alciphron, 6th Dialogue.
[58]Alciphron, 6th Dialogue.
[59]Nalsons'sCollections, i. 769, February 9, 1640.
[59]Nalsons'sCollections, i. 769, February 9, 1640.
[60]Autobiography of Isaac Williams, p. 132. This letter was written in 1863.
[60]Autobiography of Isaac Williams, p. 132. This letter was written in 1863.
Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognise his powers for good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognise that this power is not unlimited. Man is like a card-player who receives from Nature his cards—his disposition, his circumstances, the strength or weakness of his will, of his mind, and of his body. The game of life is one of blended chance and skill. The best player will be defeated if he has hopelessly bad cards, but in the long run the skill of the player will not fail to tell. The power of man over his character bears much resemblance to his power over his body. Men come into the world with bodies very unequal in their health and strength; with hereditary dispositions to disease; with organs varying greatly in their normal condition. At the same time a temperate or intemperate life, skilful or unskilful regimen,physical exercises well adapted to strengthen the weaker parts, physical apathy, vicious indulgence, misdirected or excessive effort, will all in their different ways alter his bodily condition and increase or diminish his chances of disease and premature death. The power of will over character is, however, stronger, or, at least, wider than its power over the body. There are organs which lie wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral constitution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.
It has often seemed to me that diversities of taste throw much light on the basis of character. Why is it that the same dish gives one man keen pleasure and to another is loathsome and repulsive? To this simple question no real answer can be given. It is a fact of our nature that one fruit, or meat, or drink will give pleasure to one palate and none whatever to another. At the same time, while the original and natural difference is undoubted, there are many differences which are wholly or largely due to particular and often transitory causes. Dishes have an attraction or the reverse because they are associated with old recollections or habits. Habit will make a Frenchman like his melon with salt, while an Englishman prefers it with sugar. An old association of ideas will make an Englishman shrink from eating a frog or a snail, though he would probably like each if he ate it without knowing it, and he could easily learn to do so. The kind of cookery which one age or one nation generally likes, another age or another nation finds distasteful. The eye often governs the taste, and a dish which, when seen, excitesintense repulsion, would have no such repulsion to a blind man. Every one who has moved much about the world, and especially in uncivilised countries, will get rid of many old antipathies, will lose the fastidiousness of his taste, and will acquire new and genuine tastes. The original innate difference is not wholly destroyed, but it is profoundly and variously modified.
These changes of taste are very analogous to what takes place in our moral dispositions. They are for the most part in themselves simply external to morals, though there is at least one conspicuous exception. Many—it is to be hoped most—men might spend their lives with full access to intoxicating liquors without even the temptation of getting drunk. Apart from all considerations of religion, morals, social, physical, or intellectual consequences, they abstain from doing so simply as a matter of taste. With other men the pleasure of excessive drinking is such that it requires an heroic effort of the will to resist it. There are men who not only are so constituted that it is their greatest pleasure, but who are even born with a craving for drink. In no form is the terrible fact of heredity more clearly or more tragically displayed. Many, too, who had originally no such craving gradually acquire it: sometimes by mere social influence, which makes excessive drinking the habit of their circle; more frequently through depression or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless, joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures, ifviciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case with all our pleasures. Many are keenly enjoyed when present, yet not seriously missed when absent. Sometimes, too, the effect of over-indulgence is to vitiate and deaden the palate, so that what was once pleasing ceases altogether to be an object of desire. This, too, has its analogue in other things. We have a familiar example in the excessive novel-reader, who begins with a kind of mental intoxication, and who ends with such a weariness that he finds it a serious effort to read the books which were once his strongest temptation.
Tastes of the palate also naturally change with age and with the accompanying changes of the body. The schoolboy who bitterly repines because the smallness of his allowance restricts his power of buying tarts and sweetmeats will probably grow into a man who, with many shillings in his pocket, daily passes the confectioner's shop without the smallest desire to enter it.
It is evident that there is a close analogy between these things and that collection of likes and dislikes, moral and intellectual, which forms the primal base of character, and which mainly determines the complexion of our lives. As Marcus Aurelius said: 'Who can change the desires of man?' That which gives the strongest habitual pleasure, whether it be innate or acquired, will in the great majority of cases ultimately dominate. Certain things will always be intensely pleasurable, and certain other things indifferent or repellent, and this magnetism is the true basis of character, and with the majority of men it mainlydetermines conduct. By the associations of youth and by other causes these natural likings and dislikings may be somewhat modified, but even in youth our power is very limited, and in later life it is much less. No real believer in free-will will hold that man is an absolute slave to his desires. No man who knows the world will deny that with average man the strongest passion or desire will prevail—happy when that desire is not a vice.
Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life. Here, as in most other things, opposite exaggerations are to be avoided. There is such a thing as looking forward too rigidly and too exclusively to the future—to a future that may never arrive. This is the great fault of the over-educationist, who makes early life a burden and a toil, and also of those who try to impose on youth the tastes and pleasures of the man. Youth has its own pleasures, which will always give it most enjoyment, and a happy youth is in itself an end. It is the time when the power of enjoyment is most keen, and it is often accompanied by such extreme sensitiveness that the sufferings of the child for what seem the most trivial causes probably at least equal in acuteness, though not in durability, the sufferings of a man. Many a parent standing by the coffin of his child has felt with bitterness how much of the measure of enjoyment that short life might have known has been cut off by an injudicious education. And even if adult life is attained, the evils of an unhappy childhood are seldomwholly compensated. The pleasures of retrospect are among the most real we possess, and it is around our childish days that our fondest associations naturally cluster. An early over-strain of our powers often leaves behind it lasting distortion or weakness, and a sad childhood introduces into the character elements of morbidness and bitterness that will not disappear.
The first great rule in judging of pleasures is that so well expressed by Seneca: 'Sic præsentibus utaris voluptatibus ut futuris non noceas'—so to use present pleasures as not to impair future ones. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, habitual extravagance and self-indulgence, if they become the pleasures of youth, will almost infallibly lead to the ruin of a life. Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.
In starting in life we are apt to attach a disproportionate value to tastes, pleasures, and ideals that can only be even approximately satisfied in youth, health, and strength. We have, I think, an example of this in the immense place which athletic games and out-of-door sports have taken in modern English life. They are certainly not things to be condemned. They have the direct effect of giving a large amount of intense and innocent pleasure, and they have indirect effects which are still more important. In so far as they raise the level of physical strength and health, and dispel the morbidness of temperament which is so apt to accompany a sedentary life and a diseased or inert frame, they contribute powerfully to lasting happiness. They play a considerable part in theformation of friendships which is one of the best fruits of the period between boyhood and mature manhood. Some of them give lessons of courage, perseverance, energy, self-restraint, and cheerful acquiescence in disappointment and defeat that are of no small value in the formation of character, and when they are not associated with gambling they have often the inestimable advantage of turning young men away from vicious pleasures. At the same time it can hardly be doubted that they hold an exaggerated prominence in the lives of young Englishmen of the present generation. It is not too much to say that among large sections of the students at our Universities, and at a time when intellectual ambition ought to be most strong and when the acquisition of knowledge is most important, proficiency in cricket or boating or football is more prized than any intellectual achievement. I have heard a good judge, who had long been associated with English University life, express his opinion that during the last forty or fifty years the relative intellectual position of the upper and middle classes in England has been materially changed, owing to the disproportioned place which outdoor amusements have assumed in the lives of the former. It is the impression of very competent judges that a genuine love, reverence and enthusiasm for intellectual things is less common among the young men of the present day than it was in the days of their fathers. The predominance of the critical spirit which chills enthusiasm, and still more the cram system which teaches young men to look on the prizes that are to be won by competitive examinations as the supreme end of knowledge, nodoubt largely account for this, but much is also due to the extravagant glorification of athletic games.
If we compare the class of pleasures I have described with the taste for reading and kindred intellectual pleasures, the superiority of the latter is very manifest. To most young men, it is true, a game will probably give at least as much pleasure as a book. Nor must we measure the pleasure of reading altogether by the language of the genuine scholar. It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very many would agree with him; but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural love of knowledge, and the weak health of his early life intensified this predominant passion. But while the tastes which require physical strength decline or pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most easily satisfied, one of the cheapest, one of the least dependent on age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. It is eminently a pleasure which is not only good in itself but enhances many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our powers of sympathy andappreciation, it adds incalculably to the pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of art, to the interest we take in the vast variety of events which form the great world-drama around us.
To acquire this taste in early youth is one of the best fruits of education, and it is especially useful when the taste for reading becomes a taste for knowledge, and when it is accompanied by some specialisation and concentration and by some exercise of the powers of observation. 'Many tastes and one hobby' is no bad ideal to be aimed at. The boy who learns to collect and classify fossils, or flowers, or insects, who has acquired a love for chemical experiments, who has begun to form a taste for some particular kind or department of knowledge, has laid the foundation of much happiness in life.
In the selection of pleasures and the cultivation of tastes much wisdom is shown in choosing in such a way that each should form a complement to the others; that different pleasures should not clash, but rather cover different areas and seasons of life; that each should tend to correct faults or deficiencies of character which the others may possibly produce. The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements of happiness as mere amusements can ever furnish. One set of pleasures, however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better things, exercise an injurious influence on character.Habitual novel-reading, for example, often destroys the taste for serious literature, and few things tend so much to impair a sound literary perception and to vulgarise the character as the habit of constantly saturating the mind with inferior literature, even when that literature is in no degree immoral. Sometimes an opposite evil may be produced. Excessive fastidiousness greatly limits our enjoyments, and the inestimable gift of extreme concentration is often dearly bought. The well-known confession of Darwin that his intense addiction to science had destroyed his power of enjoying even the noblest imaginative literature represents a danger to which many men who have achieved much in the higher and severer forms of scientific thought are subject. Such men are usually by their original temperament, and become still more by acquired habit, men of strong, narrow, concentrated natures, whose thoughts, like a deep and rapid stream confined in a restricted channel, flow with resistless energy in one direction. It is by the sacrifice of versatility that they do so much, and the result is amply sufficient to justify it. But it is a real sacrifice, depriving them of many forms both of capacity and of enjoyment.
The same pleasures act differently on different characters, especially on the differences of character that accompany difference of sex. I have myself no doubt that the movement which in modern times has so widely opened to women amusements that were once almost wholly reserved for men has been on the whole a good one. It has produced a higher level of health, stronger nerves, and less morbid characters, and it hasgiven keen and innocent enjoyment to many who from their circumstances and surroundings once found their lives very dreary and insipid. Yet most good observers will agree that amusements which have no kind of evil effect on men often in some degree impair the graces or characters of women, and that it is not quite with impunity that one sex tries to live the life of the other. Some pleasures, too, exercise a much larger influence than others on the general habits of life. It is not too much to say that the invention of the bicycle, bringing with it an immense increase of outdoor life, of active exercise, and of independent habits, has revolutionised the course of many lives. Some amusements which may in themselves be but little valued are wisely cultivated as helping men to move more easily in different spheres of society, or as providing a resource for old age. Talleyrand was not wholly wrong in his reproach to a man who had never learned to play whist: 'What an unhappy old age you are preparing for yourself!'
I have already mentioned the differences that may be found in different countries and ages, in the relative importance attached to external circumstances and to dispositions of mind as means of happiness, and the tendency in the more progressive nations to seek their happiness mainly in improved circumstances. Another great line of distinction is between education that acts specially upon the desires, and that which acts specially upon the will. The great perfection of modern systems of education is chiefly of the former kind. Its object is to make knowledge and virtue attractive, and therefore an object of desire. It does sopartly by presenting them in the most alluring forms, partly by connecting them as closely as possible with rewards. The great principle of modern moral education is to multiply innocent and beneficent interests, tastes, and ambitions. It is to make the path of virtue the natural, the easy, the pleasing one; to form a social atmosphere favourable to its development, making duty and interest as far as possible coincident. Vicious pleasures are combated by the multiplication of healthy ones, and by a clearer insight into the consequences of each. An idle or inert character is stimulated by holding up worthy objects of interest and ambition, and it is the aim alike of the teacher and the legislator to make the grooves and channels of life such as tend naturally and easily towards good. But the education of the will—the power of breasting the current of the desires and doing for long periods what is distasteful and painful—is much less cultivated than in some periods of the past.
Many things contribute to this. The rush and hurry of modern existence and the incalculable multitude and variety of fleeting impressions that in the great centres of civilisation pass over the mind are very unfavourable to concentration, and perhaps still more to the direct cultivation of mental states. Amusements, and the appetite for amusements, have greatly extended. Life has become more full. The long leisures, the introspective habits, thevita contemplativaso conspicuous in the old Catholic discipline, grow very rare. Thoughts and interests are more thrown on the external; and the comfort, the luxury, the softness, the humanity of modern life, andespecially of modern education, make men less inclined to face the disagreeable and endure the painful.
The starting-point of education is thus silently changing. Perhaps the extent of the change is best shown by the old Catholic ascetic training. Its supreme object was to discipline and strengthen the will: to accustom men habitually to repudiate the pleasurable and accept the painful; to mortify the most natural tastes and affections; to narrow and weaken the empire of the desires; to make men wholly independent of outward circumstances; to preach self-renunciation as itself an end.
Men will always differ about the merits of this system. In my own opinion it is difficult to believe that in the period of Catholic ascendency the moral standard was, on the whole and in its broad lines, higher than our own. The repression of the sensual instincts was the central fact in ascetic morals; but, even tested by this test, it is at least very doubtful whether it did not fail. The withdrawal from secular society of the best men did much to restrict the influences for good, and the habit of aiming at an unnatural ideal was not favourable to common, everyday, domestic virtue. The history of sacerdotal and monastic celibacy abundantly shows how much vice that might easily have been avoided grew out of the adoption of an unnatural standard, and how often it led in those who had attained it to grave distortions of character. Affections and impulses which were denied their healthy and natural vent either became wholly atrophied or took other and morbid forms, and the hard, cruel, self-righteous fanatic, equally ready to endure or to inflictsuffering, was a not unnatural result. But whatever may have been its failures and its exaggerations, Catholic asceticism was at least a great school for disciplining and strengthening the will, and the strength and discipline of the will form one of the first elements of virtue and of happiness.
In the grave and noble type of character which prevailed in English and American life during the seventeenth century, the strength of will was conspicuously apparent. Life was harder, simpler, more serious, and less desultory than at present, and strong convictions shaped and fortified the character. 'It was an age,' says a great American writer, 'when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these rude shores, having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong in him, bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience; on endowments of that grave and weighty order which give the idea of permanence and come under the general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore,—Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers,—who were elevated to powerby the early choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety rather than activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the State like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide.'[61]
The power of the will, however, even when it exists in great strength, is often curiously capricious. History is full of examples of men who in great trials and emergencies have acted with admirable and persevering heroism, yet who readily succumbed to private vices or passions. The will is not the same as the desires, but the connection between them is very close. A love for a distant end; a dominating ambition or passion, will call forth long perseverance in wholly distasteful work in men whose will in other fields of life is lamentably feeble. Every one who has embarked with real earnestness in some extended literary enterprise which as a whole represents the genuine bent of his talent and character will be struck with his exceptional power of traversing perseveringly long sections of this enterprise for which he has no natural aptitude and in which he takes no pleasure. Military courage is with most men chiefly a matter of temperament and impulse, but there have been conspicuous instances of great soldiers and sailors who have frankly acknowledged that they never lost in battle an intense constitutional shrinking from danger, though by the force of a strong will they never suffered this timidity to govern or to weaken them. With men of very vividimagination there is a natural tendency to timidity as they realise more than ordinary men danger and suffering. On the other hand it has often been noticed how calmly the callous, semi-torpid temperament that characterises many of the worst criminals enables them to meet death upon the gallows.
In courage itself, too, there are many varieties. The courage of the soldier and the courage of the martyr are not the same, and it by no means follows that either would possess that of the other. Not a few men who are capable of leading a forlorn hope, and who never shrink from the bayonet and the cannon, have shown themselves incapable of bearing the burden of responsibility, enduring long-continued suspense, taking decisions which might expose them to censure or unpopularity. The active courage that encounters and delights in danger is often found in men who show no courage in bearing suffering, misfortune, or disease. In passive courage the woman often excels the man as much as in active courage the man exceeds the woman. Even in active courage familiarity does much; sympathy and enthusiasm play great and often very various parts, and curious anomalies may be found. The Teutonic and the Latin races are probably equally distinguished for their military courage, but there is a clear difference between them in the nature of that courage and in the circumstances or conditions under which it is usually most splendidly displayed. The danger incurred by the gladiator was far greater than that which was encountered by the soldier, but Tacitus[62]mentions thatwhen some of the bravest gladiators were employed in the Roman army they were found wholly inefficient, as they were much less capable than the ordinary soldiers of military courage.
The circumstances of life are the great school for forming and strengthening the will, and in the excessive competition and struggle of modern industrialism this school is not wanting. But in ethical and educational systems the value of its cultivation is often insufficiently felt. Yet nothing which is learned in youth is so really valuable as the power and the habit of self-restraint, of self-sacrifice, of energetic, continuous and concentrated effort. In the best of us evil tendencies are always strong and the path of duty is often distasteful. With the most favourable wind and tide the bark will never arrive at the harbour if it has ceased to obey the rudder. A weak nature which is naturally kindly, affectionate and pure, which floats through life under the impulse of the feelings, with no real power of self-restraint, is indeed not without its charm, and in a well-organised society, with good surroundings and few temptations, it may attain a high degree of beauty; but its besetting failings will steadily grow; without fortitude, perseverance and principle, it has no recuperative energy, and it will often end in a moral catastrophe which natures in other respects much less happily compounded would easily avoid. Nothing can permanently secure our moral being in the absence of a restraining will basing itself upon a strong sense of the difference between right and wrong, upon the firm groundwork of principle and honour.
Experience abundantly shows how powerfully thesteady action of such a will can operate upon innate defects, converting the constitutional idler into the indefatigably industrious, checking, limiting and sometimes almost destroying constitutional irritability and vicious passions. The natural power of the will in different men differs greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable amelioration is very rare. Sometimes the strong influence of religion effects it. Sometimes it is effected by an illness, a great misfortune, or the total change of associations that follows emigration. Marriage perhaps more frequently than any other ordinary agency in early life transforms or deeply modifies the character, for it puts an end to powerful temptations and brings with it a profound change of habits and motives, associations and desires. But we have all of us encountered in life depraved natures in which vicious self-indulgence had attained such a strength, and the recuperating and moralising elements were so fatally weak, that we clearly perceive the disease to be incurable, and that it is hardly possible that any change of circumstances could even seriously mitigate it. In what proportion this is the fault or the calamity of the patient no human judgment can accurately tell.
Few things are sadder than to observe how frequently the inheritance of great wealth or even of easy competence proves the utter and speedy ruin of a young man, except when the administration of alarge property, or the necessity of carrying on a great business, or some other propitious circumstance provides him with a clearly defined sphere of work. The majority of men will gladly discard distasteful work which their circumstances do not require; and in the absence of steady work, and in the possession of all the means of gratification, temptations assume an overwhelming strength, and the springs of moral life are fatally impaired. It can hardly be doubted that the average longevity in this small class is far less than in that of common men, and that even when natural capacity is considerable it is more rarely displayed. To a man with a real desire for work such circumstances are indeed of inestimable value, giving him the leisure and the opportunities of applying himself without distraction and from early manhood to the kind of work that is most suited to him. Sometimes this takes place, but much more frequently vicious tastes or a simply idle or purposeless life are the result. Sometimes, indeed, a large amount of desultory and unregulated energy remains, but the serious labour of concentration is shunned and no real result is attained. The stream is there, but it turns no mill.
Most men escape this danger through the circumstances of life which make serious and steady work necessary to their livelihood, and in the majority of cases the kind of work is so clearly marked out that they have little choice. When some choice exists, the rule which I have already laid down should not be forgotten. Men should choose their work not only according to their talents and their opportunities, but also, as far as possible, according to their characters.They should select the kinds which are most fitted to bring their best qualities into exercise, or should at least avoid those which have a special tendency to develop or encourage their dominant defects. On the whole it will be found that men's characters are much more deeply influenced by their pursuits than by their opinions.
The choice of work is one of the great agencies for the management of character in youth. The choice of friends is another. In the words of Burke, 'The law of opinion ... is the strongest principle in the composition of the frame of the human mind, and more of the happiness and unhappiness of man reside in that inward principle than in all external circumstances put together.'[63]This is true of the great public opinion of an age or country which envelops us like an atmosphere, and by its silent pressure steadily and almost insensibly shapes or influences the whole texture of our lives. It is still more true of the smaller circle of our intimacies which will do more than almost any other thing to make the path of virtue easy or difficult. How large a proportion of the incentives to a noble ambition, or of the first temptations to evil, may be traced to an early friendship, and it is often in the little circle that gathers round a college table that the measure of life is first taken, and ideals and enthusiasms are formed which give a colour to all succeeding years. To admire strongly and to admire wisely is, indeed, one of the best means of moral improvement.
Very much, however, of the management ofcharacter can only be accomplished by the individual himself acting in complete isolation upon his own nature and in the chamber of his own mind. The discipline of thought; the establishment of an ascendency of the will over our courses of thinking; the power of casting away morbid trains of reflection and turning resolutely to other subjects or aspects of life; the power of concentrating the mind vigorously on a serious subject and pursuing continuous trains of thought,—form perhaps the best fruits of judicious self-education. Its importance, indeed, is manifold. In the higher walks of intellect this power of mental concentration is of supreme value. Newton is said to have ascribed mainly to an unusual amount of it his achievements in philosophy, and it is probable that the same might be said by most other great thinkers. In the pursuit of happiness hardly anything in external circumstances is so really valuable as the power of casting off worry, turning in times of sorrow to healthy work, taking habitually the brighter view of things. It is in such exercises of will that we chiefly realise the truth of the lines of Tennyson: