We ought to welcome with all our hearts the searching scrutiny, which students and philosophers of all Christian nations, and of all shades of belief, whether Christian or not, are engaged upon, as to the facts on which our faith rests. The more thorough that scrutiny is the better should we be pleased. We may not wholly agree with the last position which the ablest investigators have laid down, that unless the truth of the history of our Lord—the facts of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension—can be proved by ordinary historical evidence, applied according to the most approved and latest methods, Christianity must be givenup as not true. We know that our own certainty as to these facts does not rest on a critical historical investigation, while we rejoice that such an investigation should be made by those who have leisure, and who are competent for it. At the same time, as we also know that the methods and principles of historical investigation are constantly improving and being better understood, and that the critics of the next generation will work, in all human likelihood, at as great an advantage in this inquiry over those who are now engaged in it, as our astronomers and natural philosophers enjoy over Newton and Franklin—and as new evidence may turn up any day which may greatly modify their conclusions—we cannot suppose that there is the least chance of their settling the controversy in our time. Nor, even if we thought them likely to arrive at definite conclusions, can we consent to wait the results of their investigations, important and interesting as these will be. Granting then cheerfully, that if these facts on the study of which they are engaged are not facts—if Christ was not crucified, and did not rise from the dead, and ascend to God his father—there has been no revelation, and Christianity will infallibly go the way of all lies, either under their assaults or those of their successors—they must pardon us if even at the cost of being thought and called fools for our pains, we deliberately elect to live our lives on the contrary assumption. It is useless to tell us that we know nothing of these things,that we can know nothing until their critical examination is over; we can only say: “Examine away; but wedoknow something of this matter, whatever you may assert to the contrary, and, mean to live on the knowledge.”
But while we cannot suspend our judgment on the question until we know how the critics and scholars have settled it, we must do justice, before passing on, to the single-mindedness, the reverence, the resolute desire for the truth before all things, wherever the search for it may land them which characterizes many of those who are no longer of our faith, and are engaged in this inquiry, or have set it aside as hopeless, and are working at other tasks. The great advance of natural science within the last few years, and the devotion with which many of our ablest and best men are throwing themselves into this study, are clearing the air in all the higher branches of human thought and making possible a nation, and in the end a world, of truthful men—that blessedest result of all the strange conflicts and problems of the age, which the wisest men have foreseen in their most hopeful moods. In this grand movement even those who are nominally, and believe themselves to be really, against us, are for us: all at least who are truthful and patient workers. For them, too, the spirit of all truth, and patience, and wisdom is leading; and their strivings and victories—aye, and their backslidings and reverses—are making clearer day by day thatrevelation of the kingdom of God in nature, through which it would seem that our generation, and those which are to follow us, will be led back again to that higher revelation of the kingdom of God in man.
The ideal American, as he has been painted for us of late, is a man who has shaken off the yoke of definite creeds, while retaining their moral essence, and finds the highest sanctions needed for the conduct of human life in experience tempered by common sense. Franklin, for instance, is generally supposed to have reached this ideal by anticipation, and there is a half-truth in the supposition. But whoever will study this great master of practical life will acknowledge that it is only superficially true, and that if he never lifts us above the earth or beyond the dominion of experience and common sense, he retained himself a strong hold on the invisible which underlies it, and would have been the first to acknowledge that it was this which enabled him to control the accidents of birth, education, and position, and to earn the eternal gratitude and reverence of the great nation over whose birth he watched so wisely, and whose character he did so much to form.
“From one thing to another,” said Tom, “they got to cathedrals, and one of them called St. Paul’s ‘a disgrace to a Christian city.’ I couldn’t stand that, you know. I was always bred to respect St. Paul’s; weren’t you?”
“My education in that line was neglected,” said Hardy, gravely. “And so you took up the cudgels for St. Paul’s?”
“Yes, I plumped out that St. Paul’s was the finest cathedral in England. You’d have thought I had said that lying was one of the cardinal virtues—one or two just treated me to a sort of pitying sneer, but my neighbors were down upon me with a vengeance. I stuck to my text though, and they drove me into saying I liked the Ratcliffe more than any building in Oxford; which I don’t believe I do, now I come to think of it. So when they couldn’t get me to budge for their talk, they took to telling me that everybody who knew anything about church architecture was against me—of course meaning that I knew nothing about it—for the matter of that, I don’t mean to say that I do.” Tom paused; it had suddenly occurred to him that there might be some reason in the rough handling he had got.
“But what did you say to the authorities?” said Hardy, who was greatly amused.
“Said I didn’t care a straw for them,” said Tom;“there was no right or wrong in the matter, and I had as good a right to my opinion as Pugin—or whatever his name is—and the rest.”
“What heresy!” said Hardy, laughing; “you caught it for that, I suppose?”
“Didn’t I! They made such a noise over it, that the men at the other end of the table stopped talking (they were all freshmen at our end), and when they found what was up, one of the older ones took me in hand, and I got a lecture about the middle ages, and the monks. I said I thought England was well rid of the monks; and then we got on to Protestantism, and fasting, and apostolic succession, and passive obedience, and I don’t know what all! I only know I was tired enough of it before coffee came; but I couldn’t go, you know, with all of them on me at once, could I?”
“Of course not; you were like the six thousand unconquerable British infantry at Albuera. You held your position by sheer fighting, suffering fearful loss.”
“Well,” said Tom, laughing, for he had talked himself into good humor again. “I dare say I talked a deal of nonsense; and, when I come to think it over, a good deal of what some of them said had something in it. I should like to hear it again quietly; but there were others sneering and giving themselves airs, and that puts a fellow’s back up.”
“Yes,” said Hardy, “a good many of the weakest and vainest men who come up take to this sort of thing now.They can do nothing themselves, and get a sort of platform by going in for the High Church business from which to look down on their neighbors.”
“That’s just what I thought,” said Tom; “they tried to push mother Church, mother Church, down my throat at every turn. I’m as fond of the Church as any of them, but I don’t want to be jumping up on her back every minute, like a sickly chicken getting on the old hen’s back to warm its feet whenever the ground is cold, and fancying himself taller than all the rest of the brood.”
I have spoken of that which I cannot believe; let me speak to you now of that which I do believe, of that which I hold to be a faith, the faith, the only faith for mankind. Do not turn from it because it seems to be egotistic. I can only speak for myself, for what I know in my own heart and conscience. While I keep to this, I can speak positively, and I wish above all things to speak positively.
I was bred as a child and as a boy to look upon Christ as the true and rightful King and Head of our race, the Son of God and the Son of man. When I came to think for myself I found the want, the longing for a perfectly righteous king and head, the deepest of which I was conscious—for a being in whom I could rest, who was in perfect sympathy with me and all men.“Like as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God,”—these, and the like sayings of the Psalmist, began to have a meaning for me.
Then the teaching which had sunk into me unconsciously rose up and seemed to meet this longing. If that teaching were true, here was He for whom I was in search. I turned to the records of His life and death. I read and considered as well as I could, the character of Christ, what he said of himself and his work; his teachings, his acts, his sufferings. Then I found that this was indeed He. Here was the Head, the King, for whom I had longed. The more I read and thought the more absolutely sure I became of it. This is He. I wanted no other then, I have never wanted another since. Him I can look up to and acknowledge with the most perfect loyalty. He satisfies me wholly. There is no recorded thought, word or deed of his that I would wish to change—that I do not recognize and rejoice in as those of my rightful and righteous King and Head. He has claimed for me, for you, for every man, all that we can ask for or dream of, for He has claimed every one of us for his soldiers and brethren, the acknowledged children of his and our Father and God.
But this loyalty I could never have rendered, no man can ever render, I believe, except to a Son of man. He must be perfect man as well as perfect God to satisfyus—must have dwelt in a body like ours, have felt our sorrows, pains, temptations, weaknesses. He was incarnate by the Spirit of God of the Virgin. In this way I can see how he was indeed perfect God and perfect Man. I can conceive of no other in which he could have been so. The Incarnation is for me the support of all personal holiness, and the key to human history.
What was Christ’s work on earth? He came to make manifest, to make clear to us, the will and nature of this Father, our God. He made that will and nature clear to us as the perfectly loving and long-suffering and righteous will and nature. He came to lead us men, his brethren, back into perfect understanding of and submission to that will—to make us at one with it; and this he did triumphantly by his own perfect obedience to that will, by sacrificing himself even to death for us, because it was the will of his and our Father that he should give himself up wholly and unreservedly; thus, by his one sacrifice, redeeming us and leaving us an example that we too should sacrifice ourselves to Him for our brethren. Thus I believe in the Atonement.
Christ was not only revealed to those who saw him here. He did not only go about doing his Father’s willhere on earth for thirty-three years, eighteen hundred years ago, and then leave us. Had this been so, he would certainly in one sense have been revealed, in the only sense in which some orthodox writers seem to teach that he has been revealed. He would have been revealed to certain men, at a certain time, in history, and to us in the accounts which we have of him in the Gospels, through which accounts only we should have had to gain our knowledge of him, judging of such accounts by our own fallible understandings. But He said, “I will be with you always, even to the end of the world.” “I will send my Spirit into your hearts to testify of me;” and He has fulfilled his promise. He is revealed, not in the Bible, not in history, not in or to some men at a certain time, or to a man here and there, but in the heart of you, and of me, and of every man and woman who is now, or ever has been, on this earth. His Spirit is in each of us, striving with us, cheering us, guiding us, strengthening us. At any moment in the lives of any one of us we may prove the fact for ourselves; we may give ourselves up to his guidance, and He will accept the trust, and guide us into the knowledge of God, and of all truth. From this knowledge, (more certain to me than any other, of which I am ten thousand times more sure than I am that Queen Victoria is reigning in England, that I am writing with this pen at this table,) if I could see no other manifestation of Christ in creation, I believe in the Trinity in Unity,the name on which all things in heaven and earth stand, which meets and satisfies the deepest needs and longings of my soul.
The knowledge of this name, of these truths, has come to me, and to all men, in one sense, specially and directly through the Scriptures. I believe that God has given us these Scriptures, this Bible, to instruct us in these the highest of all truths. Therefore I reverence this Bible as I reverence no other book; but I reverence it because it speaks of him, and his dealings with us. The Bible has no charm or power of its own. It may become a chain round men’s necks, an idol in the throne of God, to men who will worship the book, and not Him of whom the book speaks. There are many signs that this is, or is fast becoming, the case with us; but it is our fault, and not the Bible’s fault. We persist in reading our own narrowness and idolatry into it, instead of hearing what it really is saying to us.
I believe that the writers of Holy Scripture were directly inspired by God, in a manner, and to an extent, in and to which no other men whose words have come down to us have been inspired. I cannot draw the line between their inspiration and that of other great teachers of mankind. I believe that the words of these, too, just in so far as they have proved themselves true words,were inspired by God. But though I cannot, and man cannot, draw the line, God himself has done so; for these books have been filtered out, as it were, under his guidance, from many others, which, in ages gone by, claimed a place beside them, and are now forgotten, while these have stood for thousands of years, and are not likely to be set aside now. For they speak if men will read them, to needs and hopes set deep in our human nature, which no other books have ever spoken to, or ever can speak to, in the same way—they set forth his government of the world as no other books ever have set it forth, or ever can set it forth.
But though I do not believe that the difference between the inspiration of Isaiah and Shakespeare is expressible by words, the difference between the inspiration of the Holy Scripture—the Bible as a whole—and any other possible or conceivable collection of the utterances of men seems to me clear enough. The Bible has come to us from the Jewish nation, which was chosen by God as the one best fitted to receive for all mankind, and to give forth to all mankind, the revelation of Him—to teach them His name and character—that is, to enable them to know Him and in knowing Him, to feel how they and the world need redemption, and to understand how they and the world have been redeemed. This Bible, this Book of the chosen people, taken as a whole, has done this, is in short the written revelation of God. This being so, there can beno other inspired book in the same sense in which the Bible is inspired, unless we, or some other world, are not redeemed, require another redemption and another Christ. But as we and all worlds are redeemed, and Christ is come, and God has revealed his name and his character in Christ so that we can know Him, the Bible is and must remaintheinspired Book, the Book of the Church for all time, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken, as they will find who try to take from it or add to it. There may be another Homer, Plato, Shakespeare; there can be no other Bible.
The longing for a Deliverer and Redeemer of himself and his race was the strongest and deepest feeling in the heart of every Jewish patriot. His whole life was grounded and centred on the promise and hope of such an one. Just therefore when his utterances would be most human and noble, most in sympathy with the cries and groanings of his own nation and the universe, they would all point to and centre in that Deliverer and Redeemer—just in so far as they were truly noble, human, and Godlike, they would shadow forth His true character, the words He would speak, the acts He would do. Doubtless the prophet would have before his mind any notable deliverance, and noble sufferer, ordeliverer of his own time; his words would refer to these. But from these he would be inevitably drawn up to the great promised Deliverer and Redeemer of his nation and his race, because he would see after all how incomplete the deliverance wrought by these must be, and his faith in the promise made to his fathers and to his nation—the covenant of God in which he felt himself to be included—would and could be satisfied with nothing less than a full and perfect deliverance, a Redeemer who should be the Head of men, the Son of man, and the Son of God.
Men may have insisted, may still insist, on seeing all sorts of fanciful references to some special acts of his in certain words of the Bible. But I must again insist that men’s fancies about the Bible and Christ are not the question, but what the Bible itself says, what Christ is. The whole book is full of Him, there is no need to read Him into any part of it as to which there can be any possible doubt.
Holding this faith as to the Scriptures, I am not anxious to defend them. I rejoice that they should be minutely examined and criticised. They will defend themselves, one and all, I believe. Men may satisfy themselves—perhaps, if I have time to give to the study, they may satisfy me—that the Pentateuch was the work of twenty men; that Baruch wrote a part of Isaiah; that David did not write the Psalms, or the Evangelists the Gospels; that there are interpolations here andthere in the originals; that there are numerous and serious errors in our translation. What is all this to me? What do I care who wrote them, what is the date of them, what this or that passage ought to be? They have told me what I wanted to know. Burn every copy in the world to-morrow, you don’t and can’t take that knowledge from me, or any man. I find themallgood for me; so, as long as a copy is left, and I can get it, I mean to go on reading them all, and believing them all to be inspired.
Our Lord came proclaiming a kingdom of God, a kingdom ordained by God on this earth, the order and beauty of which the unruly and sinful wills of men had deformed, so that disease, and death, and all miseries and disorder, had grown up and destroyed the order of it, and thwarting the perfectly loving will of God.
In asserting this kingdom and this order, our Lord claimed (as he must have claimed if indeed he were the Son of God) dominion over disease and death. This dominion was lower than that over the human heart and will, but he claimed it as positively. He proved his claim to be good in other ways, but specially for our present purpose by healing the sick, and raising the dead. Were these works orderly or disorderly? Every one of them seems to me to be the restoring ofan order which had been disturbed. They were witnesses for the law of life, faithful and true manifestations of the will of a loving Father to his children.
Yes, you may say, but he did other miracles besides those of healing. He turned water into wine, stilled the waves, multiplied loaves and fishes. These at any rate were capricious suspensions of natural laws. You say you believe in natural laws which have their ground in God’s will. Such laws he suspended or set aside in these cases. Now were these suspensions orderly?
I think they were. The natural laws which Christ suspended, such as the law of increase, are laws of God. Being his laws, they are living and not dead laws, but they are not the highest law; there must be a law of God, a law of his mind, above them, or they would be dead tyrannous rules. Christ seems to me to have been asserting the freedom of that law of God by suspending these natural laws, and to have been claiming here again, as part of his and our birthright, dominion over natural laws.
All the other miracles, I believe, stand on the same ground. None have been performed except by men who felt that they were witnessing for God, with glimpses of his order, full of zeal for the triumph of that order in the world, and working as Christ worked, in his spirit, and in the name of his Father, or of him. If there are any miracles which do not on a fair examination fulfil these conditions—which are such as aloving Father educating sons who had strayed from or rebelled against him would not have done—I am quite ready to give them up.
You have another charge against Christianity. You say it is after all a selfish faith, in which, however beautiful and noble the moral teaching may be, the ultimate appeal has always been to the hope of reward and fear of punishment. You will tell me that in ninety-nine of our churches out of a hundred I shall hear this doctrine, and shall find it in ninety-nine out of every hundred of theological or religious works.
If it be so I am sorry for it. But I am speaking of Christ’s Gospel, and I say that you will not find the doctrine you protest against there. I cannot go through our Lord’s teaching and his disciples’ to prove this. I ask you to read for yourselves, bringing honest and clear heads to the study, and not heads full of what you have thought, or this and the other man has preached or written, and I say that then you will give up this charge.
But as I have tried to do in all other cases, so here, I will tell you exactly what my own faith on this matter is.
Christ has told me that the only reward I shall ever get will be “life eternal,” and that life eternal is toknow God and Him. That is all the reward I care about. The only punishment I can ever bring on myself will be, to banish myself from his presence and the presence of all who know him, to dwell apart from him and my brethren, shut up in myself. That is the only punishment I dread.
But this reward he has given us already, here. He has given us to know God, and knowing God involves entering his kingdom, and dwelling in it. That kingdom Christ has opened to you, and to me, here. We, you and I may enter in any hour we please. If we don’t enter in now, and here, I can’t see how we are ever likely to enter in in another world. Why should not we enter in? It is worth trying. There are no conditions. It is given for the asking.
I think you will find it all you are in search of and are longing for. Above all, you will find in it and nowhere else, rest, peace—“not a peace which depends upon compacts and bargains among men, but which belongs to the very nature and character and being of God. Not a peace which is produced by the stifling and suppression of activities and energies, but the peace in which all activities and energies are perfected and harmonized. Not a peace which comes from the toleration of what is base or false, but which demands its destruction. Not a peace which begins from without, but a peace which is first wrought in the inner man, and thence comes forth to subdue the world. Not a peacewhich a man gets for himself by standing aloof from the sorrows and confusions of the world in which he is born, of the men whose nature he shares, choosing a calm retreat and quiet scenery and a regulated atmosphere; but a peace which has never thriven except in those who have suffered with their suffering kind, who have been ready to give up selfish enjoyments, sensual or spiritual, for their sakes, who have abjured all devices of escape from ordained toils and temptations; the peace which was His who bore the sorrows and sins and infirmities of man, who gave up himself that he might become actually one with them, who thus won for them a participation in the Divine nature, and inheritance in that peace of God which passeth all understanding.”
This kingdom of God is good enough for me at any rate. I can trust him who has brought me into it to add what he will, to open my eyes, and strengthen my powers, that I may see and enjoy ever more and more of it, in this world, or in any other in which he may put me hereafter. Where that may be is no care of mine; it will be in his kingdom still, that I know; no power in Heaven or Hell, or Earth can cast me out of that, except I myself. While I remain in it I can freely use and enjoy every blessing and good gift of his glorious earth, the inheritance which he has given to us, his father’s children, his brethren. When it shall be his good pleasure to take me out of it he will not take me out of but bring me into more perfect communion withhim and with my brethren. He nourisheth my heart with good things on this earth, he will not cease to do this anywhere else. He reveals himself to me here, though as a man I cannot take in his full and perfect revelation, but when I awake up after his likeness I shall be satisfied—and not till then.
One stumbling block in your way is, you say, that you are revolted and kept at arm’s-length by the separatist and exclusive habits and maxims of those who profess to have the faith you want. Many of them are kind, exemplary men, but just because they are Christians, and in so far forth as they are Christians, they are calling to you to come out from amongst the people of the world—to separate yourselves from an adulterous generation.
Against this call something which you know to be true and noble in you rises up. You have felt that what your age is crying out for, is union. You acknowledge the power of that cry in your own hearts. You want to feel with all men, and for all men. If you need a faith at all, it is one which shall meet that cry, which shall teach you how all men are bound together; not how some may be separated from the rest. You will not be false to your age. You will have no faith at all, or a faith for all mankind.
Keep to that; take nothing less than that; only look again and see whether that is not just what Christ offers you. Again I urge you not to look at his followers, real or professing—look at him, look at his life.
Was He exclusive? Did ever man or woman come near him and he turn away? Did he not go amongst all ranks, into every society? Did he not go to the houses of great men and rulers; of Pharisees, of poor men, of publicans? Did he not frequent the temple, the marketplace, the synagogue, the sea-shore, the hillside, the haunts of outcasts and harlots? Was he not to be found at feasts and at funerals? Wherever men and women were to be found, there was his place and his work; and there is ours. He who believes in him must go into every society where he has any call whatever. Who are we that we should pick and choose? The greatest ruffian, the most abandoned woman, that ever walked the face of this earth, were good enough for our Lord to die for. If he sends us amongst them, he will take care of us, and has something for us to do or speak, for or to them. The greatest king, the holiest saint on earth, is not too high company for one for whom Christ died, as he did for you and me. So, if he sends us amongst great or holy people, let us go, and learn what he means us to learn there.
I know how deeply many of you feel and mourn over the miseries and disorder of England and the world—how you long to do something towards lightening everso small a part of those miseries, rescuing ever so small a corner of the earth from that disorder. I know well how earnestly many of you are working in one way or another for your country and your brethren. I know what high hopes many of you have for the future of the world and the destiny of man. I say, mourn on, work on; abate not one jot of any hope you have ever had for the world or for man. Your hopes, be they what they may, have never been high enough—your work never earnest enough. But I ask you whether your hopes and your work have not been marred again and again, whether you have not been thrown back again and again into listlessness and hopelessness, by failures of one kind or another, whether you have not felt that those failures have been caused more or less by your own uncertainty, by your having had to work and fight without a leader, with comrades to whom you were bound only by chance, to journey without any clear knowledge of the road you were going, or where it led to?
At such times have you not longed for light and guidance? What would you have not given for a well of light and hope and strength, springing up within you and renewing your powers and energies? What would you not have given for the inward certainty that the road you were travelling was the right one, however you might stumble on it; that the line of battle in which you stood was the line for all true men, and was marchingbreak at the point which had been given you to hold, whatever might become of you? Well, be sure that light and guidance, that renewal of strength and hope, that certainty as to your side and your road, you are meant to have; they have been prepared, and are ready, for every man of you, whenever you will take them. The longings for them are whispered in your hearts by the Leader, whose cross, never turned back, ever triumphing more and more over all principalities and powers of evil, blazes far ahead in the van of our battles. He has been called the Captain of our Salvation, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Lamb who was slain for the world; He has told us his name, the Son of God and the Son of Man; He has claimed to be the redeemer, deliverer, leader of mankind.
My younger brothers, I am not speaking to you the words of enthusiasm or excitement, but the words of sober every-day knowledge and certainty. I tell you that all the miseries of England and of other lands consist simply in this and in nothing else, that we men, made in the image of God, made to know him, to be one with him in his Son, will not confess that Son our Lord and Brother, to be the Son of God and Son of man, the living Head of our race and of each one of us. I tellyou that if we would confess him and lay hold of him and let him enter into and rule and guide us and the world, instead of trying to rule and guide ourselves and the world without him, we should see and know that the kingdom of God is just as much about us now as it will ever be. I tell you that we should see all sorrow and misery melting away and drawn up from this fair world of God’s like mountain mist before the July sun.
I do not ask you to adopt any faith of mine. But as you would do good work in your generation, I ask of you to give yourselves no peace till you have answered these questions, each one for himself, in the very secret recesses of his heart, “Do I, does my race, want a head? Can we be satisfied with any less than a Son of man and a Son of God? Is this Christ, who has been so long worshipped in England, He?”
If you can answer, though with faltering lips, “Yes, this is He,” I care very little what else you accept, all else that is necessary or good for you will come in due time, if once he has the guidance of you.
My faith has been no holiday or Sunday faith, but one for every-day use; a faith to live and die in, not toargue or talk about. It has had to stand the wear and tear of life; it was not got in prosperity. It has had to carry me through years of anxious toil and small means, through the long sicknesses of those dearer to me than my own life, through deaths amongst them both sudden and lingering. Few men of my age have had more failures of all kinds; no man has deserved them more, by the commission of all kinds of blunders and errors, by evil tempers, and want of faith, hope, and love.
Through all this it has carried me, and has risen up in me after every failure and every sorrow, fresher, clearer, stronger. Why do I say “it?” I mean He. He has carried me through it all; He who is your Head and the Head of every man, woman, child, on this earth, or who has ever been on it, just as much as he is my Head. And he will carry us all through every temptation, trial, sorrow, we can ever have to encounter, in this world or any other, if we will only turn to him, lay hold of him, and cast them all upon him, as he has bidden us.
My younger brothers, you on whom the future of your country, under God, at this moment depends, will you not try him? Is he not worth a trial?
Precious as his love was to him, and deeply as it affected his whole life, Tom felt that there must be somethingbeyond it—that its full satisfaction would not be enough for him. The bed was too narrow for a man to stretch himself on. What he was in search of must underlie and embrace his human love, and support it. Beyond and above all private and personal desires and hopes and longings, he was conscious of a restless craving and feeling about after something which he could not grasp, and yet which was not avoiding him, which seemed to be mysteriously laying hold of him and surrounding him.
The routine of chapels, and lectures, and reading for degree, boating, cricketing, Union-debating—all well enough in their way—left this vacuum unfilled. There was a great outer visible world, the problems and puzzles of which were rising before him and haunting him more and more; and a great inner and invisible world opening round him in awful depth. He seemed to be standing on the brink of each—now, shivering and helpless, feeling like an atom about to be whirled into the great flood and carried he knew not where—now, ready to plunge in and take his part, full of hope and belief that he was meant to buffet in the strength of a man with the seen and the unseen, and to be subdued by neither.
Far on in the quiet night he laid the whole before theLord and slept! Yes, my brother, even so: the old, old story; but start not at the phrase, though you may never have found its meaning.—He laid the whole before the Lord, in prayer, for his friend, for himself, for the whole world.
And you, too, if ever you are tried—as every man must be in one way or another—must learn to do the like with every burthen on your soul, if you would not have it hanging round you heavily, and ever more heavily, and dragging you down lower and lower till your dying day.
The English prejudice against Franklin on religious grounds is quite unreasonable. He was suspected of being a Freethinker, and was professedly a philosopher and man of science; he was a friend of Tom Paine and other dreadful persons; he had actually published “An Abridgment of the Church Prayer-Book,” dedicated “to the serious and discerning,” by the use of which he had the audacity to suppose that religion would be furthered, unanimity increased, and a more frequent attendance on the worship of God secured. Any one of these charges was sufficient to ruin a man’s religious reputation in respectable England of the last generation, but it is high time that amends were made in these days. Let us glance at the real facts. As a boy, Franklin had thedisease which all thoughtful boys have to pass through, and puzzled himself with speculations as to the attributes of God and the existence of evil, which landed him in the conclusion that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions. These views he published at the mature age of nineteen, but became disgusted with them almost immediately, and abandoned metaphysics for other more satisfactory studies. Living in the eighteenth century, when happiness was held to be “our being’s end and aim,” he seems to have now conformed to that popular belief; but as he came also to the conclusion that “the felicity of life” was to be attained through “truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man,” and acted up to this conclusion, no great objection from a moral or religious standpoint can be taken to this stage of his development. At the age of twenty-two he composed a little liturgy for his own use, which he fell back on when the sermons of the minister of the only Presbyterian church in Philadelphia had driven him from attendance at chapel. He did not, however, long remain unattached, and after his marriage joined the Church of England, in which he remained till the end of his life. What his sentiments were in middle life may be gathered from his advice to his daughter on the eve of his third departure for England: “Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of devotion in the Common Prayer-Book isyour principle business there, and if properly attended to will do more toward amending the heart than sermons.... I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better than the man, as sweet and clear waters come through very dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head as you seem to express some inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you do.” As an old man of eighty, he reminded his colleagues of the National Convention (in moving unsuccessfully that there should be daily prayers before business) how in the beginnings of the contest with Britain “we had daily prayers in this room.... Do we imagine we no longer need assistance? I have lived now a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God rules in the affairs of men.” Later yet, in answer to President Yates, of Yale College, who had pressed him on the subject, he writes, at the age of eighty-four: “Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe; that he governs it by his providence; that he ought to be worshipped; that the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children; that the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.” These are his “fundamentals,” beyond which he believes that Christ’s system of morals and religion is the best the world is ever likely to see, thoughit has been much corrupted. To another friend he speaks with cheerful courage of death, which “I shall submit to with less regret as, having seen during a long life a good deal of this world, I feel a growing curiosity to be acquainted with some other; and can cheerfully, with filial confidence, resign my spirit to the conduct of that great and good Parent of mankind who has so graciously protected and prospered me from my birth to the present hour.” One more quotation we cannot resist; it is his farewell letter to his old friend David Hartley: “I cannot quit the coasts of Europe without taking leave of my old friend. We were long fellow-laborers in the best of all works, the work of peace. I leave you still in the field, but, having finished my day’s task, I am going home to bed. Wish me a good night’s rest, as I do you a pleasant evening. Adieu, and believe me ever yours most affectionately,—B. Franklin.”
As to his relations with Paine, they should have reassured instead of frightened the orthodox, for he did his best to keep the author of “The Rights of Man” from publishing his speculations. Franklin advises him that he will do himself mischief and no benefit to others. “He who spits against the wind, spits in his own face.” Paine is probably indebted to religion “for the habits of virtue on which you so justly value yourself. You might easily display your excellent talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and thereby obtain a rankamongst our most distinguished authors. For among us it is not necessary, as among the Hottentots, that a youth, to be raised into the company of men, should prove his manhood by beating his mother.”
Of course, it is more satisfactory to one’s own self-love, to make every one who comes to one to learn, feel that he is a fool, and we wise men; but, if our object is to teach well and usefully what we know ourselves there cannot be a worse method. No man, however, is likely to adopt it, so long as he is conscious that he has anything himself to learn from his pupils; and as soon as he has arrived at the conviction that they can teach him nothing—that it is henceforth to be all give and no take—the sooner he throws up his office of teacher the better it will be for himself, his pupils, and his country, whose sons he is misguiding.
“When one thinks what a great centre of learning and faith like Oxford ought to be—that its highest educational work should just be the deliverance of us all from flunkeyism and money-worship—and then looks at matters here without rose-colored spectacles, it givesone sometimes a sort of chilly, leaden despondency, which is very hard to struggle against.”
“I am sorry to hear you talk like that, Jack, for one can’t help loving the place after all.”
“So I do, God knows. If I didn’t, I shouldn’t care for its shortcomings.”
“Well, the flunkeyism and money-worship were bad enough, but I don’t think they were the worst things—at least not in my day. Our neglects were almost worse than our worships.”
“You mean the want of all reverence for parents? Well, perhaps that lies at the root of the false worships. They spring up on the vacant soil.”
“And the want of reverence for women, Jack. The worst of all, to my mind!”
“Perhaps you are right. But we are not at the bottom yet.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that we must worship God before we can reverence parents or women, or root out flunkeyism and money-worship.”
“Yes. But after all can we fairly lay that sin on Oxford? Surely, whatever may be growing up side by side with it, there’s more Christianity here than almost anywhere else.”
“Plenty of common-room Christianity—belief in a dead God. There, I have never said it to any one but you, but that is the slough we have got to get out of.Don’t think that I despair for us. We shall do it yet; but it will be sore work, stripping off the comfortable wine-party religion in which we are wrapped up—work for our strongest and our wisest.”
Everybody, I suppose, knows the dreamy delicious state in which one lies, half asleep, half awake, while consciousness begins to return after a sound night’s rest in a new place which we are glad to be in, following upon a day of unwonted excitement and exertion. There are few pleasanter pieces of life. The worst of it is that they last such a short time; for nurse them as you will, by lying perfectly passive in mind and body, you can’t make more than five minutes or so of them. After which time the stupid, obstrusive, wakeful entity which we call “I,” as impatient as he is stiff-necked, spite of our teeth will force himself back again, and take possession of us down to our very toes.
The sun was going down behind the copse, through which his beams came aslant, chequered and mellow. The stream ran dimpling down, sleepily swaying the masses of weed, under the surface and on the surface; and the trout rose under the banks, as some moth orgnat or gleaming beetle fell into the stream; here and there one more frolicsome than his brethren would throw himself joyously into the air. The swifts rushed close by, in companies of five or six, and wheeled, and screamed, and dashed away again, skimming along the water, baffling the eye as one tried to follow their flight. Two kingfishers shot suddenly up on to their supper station, on a stunted willow stump, some twenty yards below him, and sat there in the glory of their blue backs and cloudy red waistcoats, watching with long sagacious beaks pointed to the water beneath, and every now and then dropping like flashes of light into the stream, and rising again, with what seemed one motion, to their perches. A heron or two were fishing about the meadows; and Tom watched them stalking about in their sober quaker coats, or rising on slow heavy wing, and lumbering away home with a weird cry. He heard the strong pinions of the wood pigeon in the air, and then from the trees above his head came the soft call, “Take-two-cow-Taffy, take-two-cow-Taffy,” with which that fair and false bird is said to have beguiled the hapless Welchman to the gallows. Presently, as he lay motionless, the timid and graceful little water-hens peered out from their doors in the rushes opposite, and, seeing no cause for fear, stepped daintily into the water, and were suddenly surrounded by little bundles of black soft down, which went paddling about in and out of the weeds, encouraged by the occasional sharp, clear, parental“keck—keck,” and merry little dabchicks popped up in mid-stream, and looked round, and nodded at him, pert and voiceless, and dived again; even old cunning water-rats sat up on the bank with round black noses and gleaming eyes, or took solemn swims out, and turned up their tails and disappeared for his amusement. A comfortable low came at intervals from the cattle, revelling in the abundant herbage. All living things seemed to be disporting themselves, and enjoying, after their kind, the last gleams of the sunset, which were making the whole vault of heaven glow and shimmer; and, as he watched them, Tom blessed his stars as he contrasted the river-side with the glare of lamps and the click of balls in the noisy pool-room.
And then the summer twilight came on, and the birds disappeared, and the hush of night settled down on river, and copse, and meadow—cool and gentle summer twilight, after the hot bright day. He welcomed it too, as it folded up the landscape, and the trees lost their outline, and settled into soft black masses rising here and there out of the white mist, which seemed to have crept up to within a few yards all round him unawares. There was no sound now but the gentle murmur of the water, and an occasional rustle of reeds, or of the leaves over his head, as a stray wandering puff of air passed through them on its way home to bed. Nothing to listen to, and nothing to look at; for the moon had not risen, and the light mist hid everythingexcept a star or two right up above him. So, the outside world having left him for the present, he was turned inwards on himself.
The nights are pleasant in May, short and pleasant for travel. We will leave the city asleep, and do our flight in the night to save time. Trust yourselves, then, to the story-teller’s aërial machine. It is but a rough affair, I own, rough and humble, unfitted for high or great flights, with no gilded panels, or dainty cushions, or C-springs—not that we shall care about springs, by the way, until we alight on terra-firma again—still, there is much to be learned in a third-class carriage if we will only not look while in it for cushions, and fine panels, and forty miles an hour travelling, and will not be shocked at our fellow-passengers for being weak in their h’s and smelling of fustian. Mount in it, then, you who will, after this warning; the fares are holiday fares, the tickets return tickets. Take with you nothing but the poet’s luggage,