Our remedy is, therefore, not to destroy the institution of Nature, but to reform the candidates who undertake to embrace it. An ethical religion would reprobate the sacrilegious bargains in which bodies are exchanged for gold, and refuse to accord them the honorific title of marriage, which is first and foremost a union of souls. Time and again have we seen that the springs of all things are in the invisible world, from the breath of a flower to the energy that pulsates in the great bosom of the ocean, or governs the movements of the uttermost star. It is so here. Not the transference of bodies, of titles, of wealth or station, are the sacrament. They are merely the accessories, the outward form, the symbol of something higher and Diviner far, of the invisible love, which is everywhere, yet manifests itself in especial manner in these two souls, speaking even in their very countenances of an emotion supreme and irresistible. An ethical religion, wholly based upon and identified with morality, would refuse to sanction any marriage but that we have described, a union based upon a supreme affection between two who had worthily prepared themselves for its consummation, and believed in the permanence of their tie.

With regard to the modern maiden—the Dodos and their kindred swains—it would be infinitely preferable that they did not degrade the sanctity of a natural sacrament by profanely prostituting it to their temporal and social convenience. Far better that they betook themselves to "the marriage after the truth of nature" than to the great human institution of which Milton sang:—

Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, True source of human offspring!

They do but defile it by their patronage, and having manifestly spoiled themselves by their reckless lives for the entertainment of any emotion deeper than mere sensuousness, they are bound at length to bring a noble institution into contempt, and drag it down in their own fall. You do not believe, we would say to them, in the eternity of soul and love, and therefore the nature sacrament is not for you. But having presented yourselves at its sacred table, and partaken of its rites, do not, if only for motives of mere decency, betake yourselves to the denunciation of that of which, indeed, you were never worthy.

Week by week, at the services of the ethical Church, we see numbers of young men who doubtless aspire one day to share in the benediction which a true marriage alone can bring them. Their presence is welcome as a testimony to the virility and inspiration of the ethic creed which is strong enough to prevail over other inducements which would take them far afield. It shows that spirit overcomes the flesh, and that the culture of the mind is not postponed to the relaxation and enjoyment of the body.

What the ethical religion says to all such as they is this: Live so as to be worthy of that which you one day hope to receive at Nature's hands—a pure, good and true wife. Somewhere, in some corner of this earth, unknown to you, unknown to her, she is being made ready for the hour of your espousals. You will know her when you see her. Wait until you do. Remember the requisite preparation of the body, and now forget not the preparation of the mind.

Marriage is based on friendship, that true kinsman of love, which made a poet call his friend "O thou half of my own soul!" [2] Your wife must be your friend. True love, the love of which true marriages are made, is friendship transfigured—the halo, the glory, of a supreme emotion coming to crown that which is most enduring on this earth. Just as we say that our religion is morality, is duty, only etherealised by viewing it as the expressed mind and will of the Soul of all souls, the World-intelligence, so do we think of marriage as based on a union of souls by friendship, inspired by a deep mutual respect, not for what the partners have, but for what they are, and finally made glorious in the light of an unfading love. Live, we would counsel you, so as to be worthy one day of the reverence of a woman's pure and untried soul.

And our message to womanhood is not dissimilar. Live, we would say, so that you be worthy of the respect, of the homage of all men. Your nature is such that virtue in you has a double charm, wherefore you are visibly marked out as the treasury wherein the ideal is enshrined and handed down through all the generations of men.

A nation is, ethically speaking, worth just what its women are worth, and we must therefore rejoice, and greatly rejoice, to know that the contention which is being increasingly put forth by women, that the men who demand their sisters' hands should themselves be arrayed in suitable wedding garment, is convincing evidence of a strong ethical enthusiasm which is beginning to pervade the sex, and a determination to ennoble more and more that one great sacramental ordinance of Nature, marriage.

All things transitory But as symbols are sent; Earth's insufficiency grows to event; The indescribable, Here it is done, The ever-womanly leadeth us Upward and on. —GOETHE.



[1] Pp. 431-443.

[2] "Dimidium animae meae" (Horace).



XII.

THE ETHICAL CHURCH AND POSITIVISM.

The appearance within the last hundred years of different philosophical attempts to produce a synthesis which should combine at once a system of thought for the guidance of the mind, and a source of enthusiasm for the inspiration of the heart, is significant of many things, but chiefly of two. In the first place it is evidence that the present has outgrown the past; that the religion of medievalism is inadequate to modern needs; that

Still the new transcends the old, In signs and tokens manifold.

And, next, it would appear to indicate the serious disposition of the new Age. If we find the thinkers of humanity uniformly tending towards a given direction, we may be sure there is an undefined, perhaps unconscious, though none the less real, desire on the part of the age to be led thither. Thus, at the close of the last century, Immanuel Kant, while undermining the ground on which the faith of old rested, attempted that new presentation of religion, as essential and sovereign morality, with which we are so familiar. And, within half a century of the foundation of the new Church, we meet with another bold and comprehensive effort to revivify religion, which had grown cold in the heart of his country, by showing that its chief expression is to be found in that "love of the brotherhood" whereby Jesus Christ declared his own truest followers would ever be known. "We tire of thinking and even of acting," this foremost of the thinkers of his age declared, but "we never tire of loving". I need not say that these are the words of Auguste Comte, one of the two men in this nineteenth century who had learning enough to grasp the universal knowable, and genius enough to express it in a clearly defined philosophic system. His fellow and compeer, of course, is our own Herbert Spencer.

Now, no one will be able to even dimly appreciate the significance of the work of Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte unless he realises that the inspiration which moved them both was that which we call religion. As the rivers flow into the sea, so the streams of knowledge converge at a point which marks the limits of the finite, the boundaries of the Infinite. There never was a system of thought yet which did not culminate in the sublimity of religion. From the first system of all, the immortal Aristotle's, down to Kant's, Comte's and Spencer's in our own times, the issue is always the same: philosophy leads the way to the Boundless; it lifts the veils of the Eternal. And therefore Kant and Comte, each in his own way, while setting forth their exposition of intellectual truth, endeavoured to provide a stimulus to move the heart of man to put its plain teachings into execution.

Though at first sight there appears to be nothing but irreconcilable opposition between the critical and positivist systems, there is, nevertheless, a fundamental unity which Comte was quick enough to detect, for he pronounced Kant "the most positive of all metaphysicians". What led him to this conviction was the fact that the German philosopher had, like himself, based his whole idealism on the sure ground of morality which cannot be overthrown. As Spinoza was called by Novalis "a God-intoxicated man," so Comte was described by Mill as "morality-intoxicated," for in the purity and elevation of his ethical conceptions he comes nearest of all to the austere standard set up by Kant and Emerson.

Nor do the points of resemblance stop here. In the course of this chapter it will become ever more evident that there is no irreconcilable opposition between the ethical religion of Kant and the Religion of Humanity of Comte, nay, that there appears to be a well-grounded hope that the Church of the Future, which we salute from afar, and towards the building of which we are each contributing our share, will in the main embrace as its essential features the teaching of these two great men. For that Church will aspire to guide men in their private and in their public capacities, in their individual and in their social life. The ethic of Kant, the categorical imperative of duty, will be the inspiration of the individual; the Politique Positive of Comte will govern him in his social and political relations, while in the supreme concern of worship, I venture to foretell a widening of the Comtist ideal so as to admit of such conceptions as underlie the philosophical belief of Mr. Spencer, that the world and man are but "the fugitive product of a Power without beginning or end," whose essence is ineffable. Thus the agnosticism of to-day will contribute to the reverence of the future, while I firmly believe that the religion of Humanity will come to be so interpreted as not to wholly exclude belief in an Existence anterior to man and to all things, from whom he and all he knows aboriginally sprang, unto whom he and all things ultimately return. Nothing shall be lost of these words of life which have fallen from Wisdom's lips; they are treasured now in many hearts, and some day, near or distant, they will be one and all incorporated in some diviner gospel than any which has yet been heard, and preached in some church, vast enough, catholic enough, for the inspiration of the race. Reposita est haec spes in sinu meo.

In the meantime, we must attempt something of a succinct statement of the ethical, social and religious system with which the name of Auguste Comte is associated.

It is clear that he was early impelled to a study of the principles on which society rests by the disorganisation into which his country had fallen, after the upheaval of the Revolution and the disasters of the Napoleonic era which succeeded it. It may even be the truth that his bold and subversive teaching in religious matters was due to a profound conviction that the virtue of the old ideals had been completely exhausted, and that if society was to be regenerated, it must be by a radical reformation of the theoretic conceptions on which it had been held to repose. Certainly there was a vast deal in the contemporary history of France to confirm Comte in his belief that Catholicism had spent its force. At a period of crisis in a nation's history, thinking men naturally look about them for some strong influence, for some commanding ideal which can serve as a rallying point in times of social dispersion, and help to keep the severing elements of the body politic together. But what had religion done for France in the hour of her trial? So little, that the country had to wade through blood in order to reach a measure of political emancipation which England had long enjoyed. In fact, it was the corruption of religion in the person of its official representatives, its intellectual degradation in the eyes of the thinkers, which helped to provoke the catastrophe. What wonder, then, that a mind so penetrating and alert as Comte's early arrived at the conclusion that the ancien regime in religion, no less than in politics, must be abolished if progress was to be possible among men?

Comte, then, was essentially a social philosopher. His work, indeed, is encyclopaedic—not one whit less so than Spencer's—but the aim he persistently kept in view was the service of man by the reconstruction, through philosophy and religion, of the foundations on which civilisation rests. It is impossible not to be impressed by the grandeur of his conception, and the consuming energy with which he addressed himself to its realisation. He seems to recall to us Browning's Paracelsus, whose "vast longings" urged him forward to some surpassing achievement, to some heroic attempt

To save mankind, To make some unexampled sacrifice In their behalf, to wring some wonderous good From heaven or earth for them.

When a young man of only twenty-four years, he had already published his first work, entitled A Plan of Scientific Works necessary to reorganise Society, thus striking the keynote of his career. We can feel nothing but the strongest admiration for the man who from the first determines to subordinate knowledge, life and love, to the service of the human race. It was Comte's incessant teaching that the sciences were to be cultivated, not as ends in themselves, but as means whereby to further human welfare. He would have the astronomer and physiologist pursue their tasks, not merely for the sake of acquiring knowledge, for the gratification of the curiosity to know, but for the betterment of man's lot. And for the same reason he insisted on the pre-eminence of the sympathetic affections over the intellect. The reason, he declared, must ever be the servant, though not the slave, of the emotions. Altruism, or the service of others (a word of his own coining), must be made to prevail over egoism or selfishness. There could not be a nobler conception of human duty.

What was the source of the miseries which had driven the people of France to rebellion but the selfishness of absolute monarchs, of dissolute nobles who ground their dependants to the dust of destitution, and of a corrupt hierarchy of clergymen contemptuous of the people, hypocritical in their conduct, and slaves of the crown? An astounding revelation that elementary religion should be preached again in France by a layman who had turned his back in disappointment on all that priests and the past represented!

And what is the source of the degradation of our own cities but this same curse of selfishness which is ready to march to opulence and luxury over the bodies of the starved and poisoned toilers of our towns and factories, and thinks it can justify its barbarity by an off-hand reference to Political Economy and its irrefragable laws? "Supply and demand"—sacrosanct enactments of man's brains—how shall they prevail over the clear dictates of the conscience that thunder in our ears that it is murderous to grind the life out of the poor in the name of an economical fetish? Is not the man more than the meat, and the body more than the raiment? How shall not man, then, be better than many economical laws? If the laws outrage our sense of justice, then are they false laws, because false to reason, and they must be abolished. The unrestricted domination of the competition theory which urges men to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, and pay the very lowest wages that poor outcasts are forced in their destitution to accept—is that to be the permanent condition of large masses of toilers in the towns of the richest country in the world? Is the matchbox-maker to go on for ever turning out a gross for 2 1/4d., providing her own paste and string? Are wretched women to toil from morning till night folding sheets—sheets of cheap bibles at 10s. a week and pay lodging and keep a family out of it? Are men and women to be decimated by consumption in the poisoned atmosphere of some of our factories? No commonwealth can exist on such a basis, and if economical laws are invoked in its support, those laws are an infamy. No wonder Carlyle fiercely denounced it all as "a wretched, unsympathetic, scraggy atheism and egoism".

Well, Auguste Comte had witnessed all this and possibly worse than this in Prance. He knew the institutions of his country and of his age, and he came to the deliberate conclusion that if any progress was to be made, if this degrading egoism was to be put down, this callous insensibility on the part of employers towards the labourers, whose slow martyrdom produces the wealth they enjoy, the whole scheme of social philosophy would have to be reconsidered and a new foundation provided whereon to build the commonwealth. "You want altruism in place of egoism; sympathy instead of selfishness," he preached. "How are you going to obtain it? For eighteen centuries now you have been walking in one beaten path, following one and the same light, listening to the same spiritual guides. What have they taught you? Whither have they led you? To the impasse which you have now reached. Has not the time come to begin anew; to reconstruct, to reorganise society? And this time it must be sans dieu, sans roi, par le culte systematique de l'Humanite."

Such is the remedy proposed by Auguste Comte for the malady of the modern world; this is his revolutionary scheme for the establishment of society on such a basis as would conduce to progress. It involves, as may be seen, the disavowal of the belief in God and king; the substitution of a republic for a monarchy, and of humanity for God. Comte conceived religion as the concentration of the three great altruistic affections, namely, of reverence towards that which is above us; of love towards that which helps and sustains us, and benevolence towards that which needs our co-operation. Religion being in his judgment a supreme concern of life, though always subordinated to the larger interest of social welfare, he was anxious to provide the new commonwealth with an idealism which should set before man a Being able to evoke these three great emotions. Formerly man had bestowed them on God; Comte thought he had found a more excellent way in suggesting that they might far more appropriately and profitably be exercised on mankind. The service of God, therefore, being changed into the service of man, he contended that the course of things would set steadily in a higher direction, because all the immense energy and enthusiasm which the worship of God had been able to provoke in the past would be available in the cause of suffering, down-trodden and persecuted humanity. He wished to dam the stream of devotion flowing towards the churches and God, and divert it into channels that had far greater need of it—the unsatisfied and unprovided needs of all mankind.

Is it urged that religion apart from a belief in God is an impossibility? Doubtless such is the conviction of great numbers of people, and, it must be confessed, such usage of the word is not consonant with prevalent custom. Still the emotion which Comte experienced for Humanity was such as no other word would adequately express. As Mr. Mill remarks in his chapters on the Positivist System (p. 133)—

It has been said that whoever believes in the infinite nature of duty, even if he believe in nothing else, is religious. Comte believes in what is meant by the infinite nature of duty, but he refers the obligations of duty, as well as all sentiments of devotion, to a concrete object, at once ideal and real; the human race, conceived as a continuous whole, including the past, the present and the future. . . . Candid persons of all creeds may be willing to admit that if a person has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty towards which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a religion. . . . The power which may be acquired over the mind by the idea of the general interest of the human race, both as a source of emotion and as a motive to conduct, many have perceived; but we know not if any one before Comte realised so fully as he has done all the majesty of which that idea is susceptible. It ascends into the unknown recesses of the past, embraces the manifold present, and descends into the indefinite and unforeseeable future. Forming a collective existence without assignable beginning or end, it appeals to that feeling of the infinite which is deeply rooted in human nature, and which seems necessary to the imposingness of all our highest conceptions.

However, we must now endeavour to briefly trace the steps whereby Comte arrived at what certainly must be acknowledged a most startling conclusion.

A study of universal history, of which he must be acknowledged an absolute master, had convinced him that all human institutions, be they beliefs, forms of society or government, scientific conceptions, or modes of thought in general, have passed through three distinct stages. These three stages he called the theological, metaphysical and positive. In the first stage history shows that man explained the origin of everything by explicit reference to wills like his own, though, of course, invisible; and ultimately, by an appeal to one supreme Will. Thus, a thunderstorm, the rise and setting of the sun, the ebb and flow of tides, the succession of seasons and crops are all explained by the agency of unseen wills, powers, or divinities. As time advances, progress is so far made that all minor deities are merged in the belief in one supreme Being who created the universe and is ever responsible for its continuance in existence.

But man at length awakens to the need of a more proximate explanation of phenomena, and, by such experiment as he is capable of, endeavours to ascertain, through their intrinsic properties or their outward manifestations, the cause or causes of their being. He leaves the skies and comes to earth, and seeks to read the secret of things by examining the things in themselves. This, Comte denominates the "metaphysical" stage, mainly, because the solutions given were bound up with abstractions of physical realities. Thus, if you asked Aristotle why a vegetable grew, he would reply that it had a "nutritive soul," or principle, which enabled it to assimilate food. If one asked why heavy bodies fall, or why flame and smoke ascend, the answer would be because everything tends to go to its natural place, implying, thereby, that there was some occult power or tendency in bodies to behave in certain definite ways. Those were the days of the time-honoured legends about Nature "abhorring a vacuum," tolerating no "breaks," and the wonders of her "curative force". These phrases about abstractions were held to be adequate explanations of any of the facts about nature or man.

At length, there came the period when men demanded a straightforward answer to plain questions, and refused to acquiesce in the reply that opium puts us to sleep because there is a dormitive virtue resident in it. The powers of observation and experiment having increased, it became possible by scientific test and analysis to satisfy the desire for a more immediate knowledge, and thus to discover, for example, that water is water, not because it possesses the form of aquosity, as the Scholastics would have said, but because it is chemically composed of oxygen and hydrogen. This last stage Comte called the "positive," and hence we perceive what he means when he calls his entire system by that name. It marks his conviction that those methods which are so successful in the discovery of truth in scientific matters should be applied to the solution of the problems of sociology and religion. In other words, "positive" and scientific are practically synonymous terms, the system pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal. Thus, for Comte, sociology, of which he may truthfully be described as the founder, is as much a science as chemistry or astronomy. It deals with its subject-matter, man, in precisely the same way as the astronomer with the stars. And the same is also true of religion.

Such is the famous Law of the three States, which has always been treated by friend and foe as the key to the Comtean philosophy. It only concerns us now to describe the use he made of it in abolishing the belief in God, and thus attempting to revolutionise the conception of religion.

Closely associated with his Law of the three States is another which he calls the Law of the Wills and Causes. In fact, there is practically no difference between that law and the first or theological stage through which human knowledge goes. It may be enunciated thus: Whenever the human mind is in ignorance of the proximate causes of a given phenomenon, it tends to ascribe it to the agency of superior and invisible powers. Hence, ignorance of nature, which modern science has largely remedied, led men to ascribe to "the act of God" innumerable events, even the appearance of Halley's comet, which we now unhesitatingly refer to subordinate agencies. Why, then, urged Comte, should we continue to believe in even one supreme Cause, when we may hope, with the advance of science, to give an explanation of every natural occurrence or fact? Convinced on social grounds that belief in the Deity had been of no service to mankind, he sought for philosophical reasons to justify his surrendering the tenet, and thus formulated the famous law which has just been enunciated. If that law is valid and universal in its application, we should have to surrender all hope of Comte's co-operation with what we hold to be rational religion. But it is because I am so convinced that it is that very law, so finely framed and stated by Comte, which makes it impossible to dispense with belief in a supra-mundane Power, that I adhere to the ideal which I sketched in the beginning, that Kant and Comte will be found to be, after Christ, the master builders of the second temple which is to be the religious home of the ages to come.

For what does his famous law amount to? To nothing beyond this, that we are warranted in believing that no single fact, no individual phenomenon, of nature exists, but will be one day explained by the all-conquering advance of physical science. But surely his most enthusiastic adherent will admit that when every phenomenon has been singly explained, only half the work, and that by far the less significant part, has been done. If the human mind is eager, and legitimately eager, to explore the scene of nature's manifestations, much more will it be necessary to attempt some solution of the vaster fact of their concatenation, of their miraculous combination into that whole which we call the universe. It is not so much the isolated phenomena which strike the mind with such overpowering bewilderment, as the manifest fact that in their infinite diversity and innumerable varieties, they are all subordinated to one vast end—the constitution and the good of the whole. Explain every sun that lines the eternal path into the Infinities, where no telescope can penetrate—what is that to the mind that knows that the numberless series is bound together by laws which they as unhesitatingly obey as an animal when it walks? Hence, by the very terms of his own law, Comte is compelled to restore to the human mind its belief in a Power other than the world, for if our only justification for discarding that belief is that science will explain one day the individual phenomena of the universe, it is plain that man's science can never hope to explain the origin of the worlds themselves and the infinite complexities of their mutual relations. And if science cannot hope to do that, the mind of man must, under penalty of going to disruption, assent to the belief that there is a World-Power who is responsible for the conscious production of the universe, and therefore of ourselves.

And I am glad to be able to say that Comte never expressly excluded this belief. On the contrary, he asserts that if a cosmic hypothesis is to be held at all, that of an intelligent Mind is far more probable than atheism. Indeed of atheism he has written as caustically as the most orthodox could wish. He expressly contends that the theory of design is far more probable than blind mechanism, and if he excludes theism, it is not so much for philosophical as for social reasons. Consumed with a passion for human betterment, seeing that the "love of God" had deplorably failed as an incentive to morality, he made the tremendous effort of endeavouring to substitute the love of man as a stimulus towards the accomplishment of duty. If Comte denied God, let the Churches and ecclesiastics of France and of Europe bear the responsibility. It was the disastrous condition into which Europe had fallen under their guidance which led him to despair of "God" as a rallying point for humanity.

But there is, I submit, no inherent necessity in the Positivist system to insist on the dogmatic exclusion of such theism as we profess under the guidance of Emerson and Kant, and it is gratifying to be able to quote so sympathetic a supporter as J. S. Mill in favour of this interpretation. "Whoever regards all events as parts of a constant order, each one being the invariable consequent of some antecedent condition, or combination of conditions, accepts fully the positivist mode of thought: whether he acknowledges or not an universal antecedent on which the whole system of nature was originally consequent, and whether that universal antecedent is conceived as an intelligence or not." [1]

I need not say that to us who believe in Mind as the necessary antecedent to all things, the positivist spirit, so defined, is essential truth. We believe in the Great Being revealed in the eternal order of the physical worlds and in the eternal order of the moral law. Our worship of God is therefore a worship of goodness or morality, an ideal of justice, as seen in the lives of only the elect spirits of the race, and thus "the worship of Humanity" is also the worship of God. For where is God revealed as worshipful except in the lives of the great and good? And if religion be defined to be morality as taught in the lives of the holiest servants of mankind, in what do we differ essentially from the ennobling conceptions of Auguste Comte? The service of man is seen to be the service of God, for we know nothing of God until we have learnt to serve goodness and minister to our brother man. The day will come when Comte will be honoured in the universal Church as an apostle of true religion, because, like Kant, he showed men that there is nothing holier or diviner on this earth than a life consciously conformed to the obedience of august laws. Comte, no less than his brother philosopher, is a servant of humanity, and therefore a servant of God, and we conceive that both thinkers have laid mankind under an immeasurable debt by showing us that that emotion of reverence which all men instinctively feel towards a Power greater than man, cannot be worthily satisfied except by a conscious endeavour to live as befits our rational nature, and to serve "the brethren" out of love.



[1] Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 15.



XIII.

THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW

AS SEEN IN HELBECK OF BANNISDALE.

Cynical observers of the tendencies of the age tell us that, like the Athenians of Paul's days, we are "lovers of new things". Doubtless we are, for this century, this "wonderful century," as it has recently been described, is a new age or there never was one. Hence, just as Spinoza saw everything sub specie aeternitatis, we may very well have a tendency to see many things sub specie novi. New things, astonishingly new things, in every imaginable department of life have been witnessed by men who saw the opening years of the century, and fin-de-siecle as we are, the capacities of man are apparently as inexhaustible as ever.

It would indeed be passing strange were religion an exception to the uniform progress everywhere in operation. Doubtless the aspect of that supreme concern of life does change less rapidly, but change it does and must: eppur si muove. And it is significant, as one of the most striking results of the beneficent movements of our time, that, in the English-speaking countries at least, one of the most powerful, because the most far-reaching, stimuli to religious progress has been supplied by the hand of a woman.

It has always seemed to me that Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere was the making of an epoch, and when so shrewd an observer of the times, so enthusiastic an admirer of "the old ways" as Mr. Gladstone, thought the book worth criticising and censuring, he bore eloquent testimony to the effect it was evidently destined to produce. Its influence has unquestionably been great. There are many people who owe to it their first acquaintance with modern religious thought. Numbers of the younger clergymen of the Establishment must have been profoundly moved by it, because the faith of an Anglican is a comparatively elastic thing compared with the rigidity of supernatural conceptions which distinguishes the Roman Catholic communion. It may even be true that these sporadic outbreaks of Ritualism, which are so seriously threatening to "trouble Israel's peace," owe no little of their force to the far-reaching effects of the new religious controversy. The Newcomes of to-day, like their prototype in the novel, may very well have come to the belief that there is no salvation from that besetting demon of reason and "intellectual pride," but in a religion of sensuousness and externalism which Sydney Smith, himself, of course, a clergyman, once contemptuously designated as "painted jackets and sanctified watering-pots". Panem et Circenses! Bread and games! Give them fumes of incense, blare and blaze of sounds and lights, and they may learn to forget that there ever was such a thing as a school of biblical criticism which has turned orthodoxy into a heresy against reason by telling the truth about the Bible.

Biblical inspiration being attenuated to almost vanishing point, there is nothing left but to appeal to the Church—not, indeed, to the Church of to-day, lost amid the mazes and intricacies of sects and schisms, but to that venerable fiction, "the undivided Church" of the first few centuries of our era, and thus brand religion with the stigma of retrogression by proclaiming it the only thing which is incapable of progress.

Not infrequently is a progressive movement attended at first by a partial reaction, and it is not at all unlikely that Ritualistic clergymen have been terrified into an increased reliance upon forms and rites by the disastrous effects produced upon many of their followers or fellow-churchmen by the new controversial methods of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

Now, what is this new controversy? It consists in the adoption of the handiest implement available to literary genius, namely, the novel, or fictional history, and by consummate critical and constructive skill, showing the disintegration of the old faiths and the building up of the new in the life of some representative man or woman. There is much more in such a novel than appears. First, there is the work of the scholar, of the man of research. He is like the miner who works underground and digs out of the hard earth that "gem of purest ray serene," the truth. Then comes the artist, just as cultured as the scholar, and only less learned, who polishes the gem and gives it its setting in pages of brilliant writing, and what is more important still, weaves it subtly into the daily life of some human being to whom it has been slowly and always painfully introduced. Or, to vary the metaphor, this new controversy is an inoculation performed by one who possesses a masterly acquaintance with the circulatory system of the spiritual anatomy, and is enabled thereby to describe with unerring accuracy the precise effects of the new ideal at every stage of its progress through the soul. You see before you the experiment of a new ideal, at first only suggested, then partially welcomed and even loved. Then the awful struggle in which no quarter can be given on either side, and the final victory of the truth. Such is the new controversy, the world of truth brought down to the world of life, the fertilising streams of knowledge turned by some strong, wise hand, into the narrow channel of an individual existence for the purification and recreation of life.

Naturally, the distinguished authoress turned her attention first to the Anglican Church, the most cultured and liberal of the Christian communities. Evangelical dissent cannot at present be said to be interesting, at any rate from the point of view we are considering to-day. It is destitute of the historic associations of Anglicanism, and has been, until very recently, identified with ideals little suggestive of the intellectual or the beautiful. It can scarcely be said to lend itself to effective dramatic or artistic treatment. I am by no means forgetful of George Eliot, but every one will see at a glance that the handling of the religious question by that incomparable genius is entirely different from that of Mrs. Ward in the books we are noticing. Robert Elsmere stands for a system of theology and faith. Dinah Morris speaks for herself; out of the abundance of a pure and beautiful heart her mouth speaks words of wondrous grace and truth.

Hence, having held up the mirror to the face of Anglicanism, our authoress has turned her attention to that older Church, so rich in memories of the past, with so unequalled a record in the service of humanity, and able even to-day to command the allegiance, the nominal allegiance at all events, of more than two hundred million beings. In Helbeck of Bannisdale we have the world and life of Roman Catholicism displayed with a minuteness and a precision which I should have thought scarcely possible to one not "of the household of the faith". It is, indeed, an ideal world, a world that belongs to the past, for the Helbecks have all but passed away. The Time-Spirit has been too much for them, and that beautiful old-world courtesy, that silent, shrinking piety which was nurtured on memories of martyr-ancestors who were broken on the rack for the ancient faith, and long years of isolation and the proud contempt of the world, is now, as some Catholics regretfully deplore, a thing of the past.

No one knows this better than Mrs. Ward, and she has, I conceive it, purposely chosen a type such as Helbeck, almost an impossible survival in our time, because she could not otherwise have made Catholicism interesting.[1] Nor could she have succeeded in pressing home her own rooted conviction of the hopelessness of any attempt at compromise between the new spirit of reason and life and that of the faith of saints and martyrs. The modern Catholic, who stultifies himself and vilifies his faith by apologetic articles in this or that secular review, in which he attempts to show that the Church which taught the inspiration of Genesis and condemned Galileo was all the time not untrue to the scientific conceptions of Copernicus and Darwin, is a very poor person in the eyes of many of us; and one thing is abundantly certain, that by no possibility could even Mrs. Ward have made him the hero of a novel. For a Helbeck, who has reckoned up the chances of life, and deliberately made his choice, casting in his lot wholly with an idealism for which the modern world has absolutely no sympathy, we can and do feel a deep respect. But for your ambidextrous apologist or theologian, the fellow who can make words bear double meanings, and even infallible oracles tell contradictory stories, we have nothing but contempt, because he is a trifler with truth.

And, now, we may turn to the book.

Mrs. Humphry Ward has long taught us to expect excellence, and in Helbeck of Bannisdale we are not disappointed. She does not work, indeed, on so large a canvas as in Robert Elsmere, nor do her materials allow her to be quite so interesting as in that masterpiece. At all events, that is my individual opinion. The atmosphere is very close throughout the book, and one has a feeling that the windows of that old, old house of Bannisdale have not been opened for centuries. One breathes a stifling air. Light and freedom come alone through that delightful creation, Laura Fountain, a creature you do not easily forget, with an instinct, rather than a reasoned conviction, of rational truth and liberty, a being of almost wild impulse, clever, though partially educated, but good to the heart's core. Altogether, a winsome, lovable girl, and tragic as was her end, one scarcely knows whether she was not happier in her fate, hurried hence on the swift waters of the river she had grown to love, than she ever could have been in her projected marriage with one to whom religion meant almost unmixed gloom. Doubtless Helbeck found consolation in it, but it was such as he was unable to allow others to share. Noble as we instinctively feel the man to be, tender as is the passion wherewith he envelops the object of his love, the shadow of the Cross is ever there. Forgotten in the first sweet hours of their mutual avowal, it soon reveals its sorrowful presence, and gradually deepens into such unutterable gloom that the broken-hearted girl is forced to surrender first love and then life to the inexorable exigencies of his old-world creed.

This, then, is the issue of the dramatic interest of the story, that the attempt to unite the living with the dead ends in the destruction of the living, in the breaking of hearts, in one case, even unto death. For the lives and loves of Helbeck and Laura must be regarded as allegories of the eternal truths which encompass us. It may seem a harsh, a needless thing to cloud the closing page with such sudden and unutterable woe. Why should not these two pass out of each other's lives, as do numberless others who realise the mistake of their projected union? There is no reason whatsoever save this, that all things whatsoever are written in Helbeck of Bannisdale are, like the history of Isaac and Ishmael, told as in an allegory. They are symbols of the gulf which separates the new life from the old, and they serve to convey the reasoned conviction of the distinguished authoress that the inspiration of the "Ages of Faith" is inadequate to the complex needs of the larger life of to-day.

These two unhappy beings illustrate that law of growth and progress which forbids the youth to indulge in the pleasures of the child, or the man to find his recreation in the pastimes of youth. And as with man, so with the race. There was a time when the world was full of Helbecks, an age when the religion of the Cross was the highest, holiest, known. But man, in his maturer years, has outgrown that, just as the Cross supplanted an idealism more imperfect than itself: and the proof of its inadequacy is seen to-day in the blaze of evidence supplied by the slow and inevitable decay of those peoples who were once its steadiest champions. Spain and Portugal are being numbered among the dead. Italy and France are making violent endeavours to escape their doom, by restricting the liberties of the official representatives of their legally established Church, because they instinctively feel that their dogmatics mean death to the peoples who live by them. Hence, the cry, le clericalisme, voila l'enemi! in France, and the libera chiesa in libero stato! in Italy. The modern state, the modern man cannot live by the old ideals: the dead would strangle the living. And, therefore, Laura Fountain, the modern maiden, must die.

For, look at Alan Helbeck. He is a man who felt, who knew, himself to be an anachronism, a man who had realised so fully the genius of his religion, that he was thoroughly uncomfortable in the society of any who were alien to it. He saw none of his neighbours; once only he had been induced to attend a hunt ball. The doctrine, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, he adopted in all its rigidity. He fulfilled Newman's ideal to the very letter: he was "anxious about his soul". He never gave anything else a serious thought. To escape hell—that nameless terror which stirs the soul of man to its very depths, as Mrs. Ward very aptly quotes from Virgil on her title page—this was the purpose for which Helbeck of Bannisdale conceived he had been placed here by a beneficent God. And on the supposition that "Acheron" is a reality, Helbeck was absolutely right. If hell is indeed "open to Christians," and if the path to life be exceeding strait and narrow, our bounden duty, as men of common sense, would be to "go sell all we had and give to" orphanages, like the Squire of Bannisdale, and appease this gloomy God by a life of austerity and utter renunciation.

Why, then, do not all Christians turn Helbecks? Simply because for the very life of them they cannot believe in their own inspired eschatology. Verbally, of course, they assent to the whole code of immoralities connected with future retribution, but "a certain obstinate rationality" in them prevents their translating their faith into practice. Hence, the Catholics we meet are no more Helbecks than ourselves. They do not believe in emptying their houses for the sake of orphanages, fasting rigorously in Lent, abstaining from intercourse with their fellow-beings, or going about chanting, "Outside the Church no salvation". Quite the contrary. But the truth remains that Helbeck was true to the ideal, and because he was, it is possible to see a romance and a dignity in his life, not always observable in his modern co-religionists. Nobody has anything to say against their "version" of Christianity, because it is, to all intents and purposes, identical with the sane ideals supplied by modern thought. No French or Italian statesman would have one word to say against them, but they have a morbid dread of Helbecks. If the Helbeck ideal were multiplied indefinitely, it requires very little foresight to pronounce the gradual extinction of the commonwealth. A nation of men who were simply and seriously living so as to escape Hades would make a speedy end of the most prosperous community.

And yet this man had once lived, aye and loved. But his love was lawless, and when all was over, he is taken by a church dignitary in Belgium to witness the death of a bishop. The prelate, weak in body, but strong in faith, is vested in his pontifical robes, and makes an extraordinary impression upon the young layman by the fervour with which he makes his final profession of faith. While in the exaltation of spirit produced by this solemn scene, he is induced to attend a "retreat," or series of spiritual exercises, to be conducted by a Jesuit in a house of their Order. "Grace" had apparently not finally triumphed, because he was within measurable distance of expulsion owing to the indifference of his behaviour. However, the preacher took him seriously in hand, and after one more stirring appeal to absolute self-surrender to the Cross, or, in plain language, to turn his back on the common human life of men, Helbeck's conversion is finally effected, and from that day to the close of his life at Bannisdale, his one thought was the Cross and the safety of his soul.

He had been living this melancholy existence for a number of years, when Laura Fountain, the daughter of a Cambridge professor, and a member of the Ethical Society there (so we are told), broke in upon his life. Her father, as much for pity as for love, had married as his second wife the sister of Alan Helbeck, and during his life had apparently succeeded in teaching her something of the gospel of reason, because Augustina practically abandoned her creed. But on the death of her husband, it revived, and she experienced a longing to return to her old home. Of course, there was joy before the angels and her brother Alan at the penitent's return. Being absolutely dependent for her creature comforts on her step-daughter, there was nothing for it but for Laura to accompany the invalid, and prepare to spend some of her time in the house of a rigid professor of a religion which her father had taught her to despise.

The utmost skill is shown in the gradual transformation of their feeling, from one of pitiful condescension on the one side and undisguised revolt on the other, to sentiments of growing esteem and respect which ripen at length into a love which is tender and deep. The love scene which ensues on that early summer morning when Helbeck discovers the "wild pagan" girl, as he thought her, in a state bordering on exhaustion, after her long walk across country through half the night, is a very beautiful and touching one, and reveals all the mastery which the authoress commands of the language and mystery of the emotions. The image of the infidel child had stolen into the strong, stern man's heart, and, next to the master passion of his life, his sombre religion, completely dominated him. They become engaged, to the almost inexpressible scandal of the household, from the sour old housekeeper up to Father Bowles, with his "purring inanities"—a wonderful creation—and the courtly Father Leadham, a Jesuit and a Cambridge "convert". But Helbeck holds out, trusts bravely to "the intercession of saints" and the attractiveness of Catholic worship, and thus some days of unclouded sunshine enter into his dark and troublous life. Like the gentleman he is, he makes no attempt at proselytism, and gives his word that by no speech or act of others shall his future wife be molested.

They spend a few weeks at the sea, where Bannisdale and all it represents is forgotten. Laura has grown to love and lean upon this strong, resolute man. She enjoys an almost unique experience in triumphing over a life which had been believed to be inaccessible to woman's influence. But the sunshine is soon overcast. They are back again in that atmosphere of depression which Bannisdale exhales, and the agony begins. The poor girl sees the life from the inside, so to speak, and the hopelessness of it all dawns upon her like a desolation. Never could she bring herself to say and do the things she sees and hears about her; a voice she cannot still seems to rise from the depths of her being, defying her to go back on her past and forget the life and example of her father. "You dare not, you dare not," it kept saying to her. No, the system would hang like a pall of death between her and her love: she could never possess his heart. Half of it, more than half, would be given to that ideal of gloom he worshipped as the Cross, which he correctly interpreted as the essence of the Catholic teaching. When, finally, Helbeck stands by the account given of the life of the Jesuit saint, Francis Borgia, who cheerfully surrenders his wife, disposes of his eight little children and then goes off to Rome "to save his soul" by becoming a Jesuit, the cup is full. Her lover tells her the story of his own life, how he had been brought to his present ideals—a story of exceeding great pathos, which utterly overcomes the sensitive, shrinking girl by his side—but it was the end. Half-hysterically she falls into his arms, and Helbeck almost believes the great renunciation is to follow. "His heart beat with a happiness he had never known before." But he was never farther from the truth. "It would be a crime—a crime to marry him," the heart-broken girl sobbed, when she reached the privacy of her own room.

And so she turns her back on Bannisdale. But fate compels her to return. Her step-mother is dying, and Laura's presence is indispensable. Once again the old battle is renewed 'twixt love and creed, and in her anguish this child of the modern world resolves to force herself to submit that she may save her love. Father Leadham can, he must, convince her. Has he not convinced Protestant clergymen and other learned people? Why not a poor, untutored girl such as her? But it was never to be. She was afraid to lose her love, but there was something in her which conquered fear, and it reasserted itself at the last. "I told you to make me afraid," she had once said to Helbeck in one of their sweet moments of reconciliation, "but you can't! There is something in me that fears nothing, not even the breaking of both our hearts."

And so, with the awful inevitableness of a Greek tragedy, the action moves towards the closing doom. It is sad beyond words, and we are grateful for Mrs. Ward's noble reticence. "The tyrant river that she loved had received her, had taken life, and then had borne her on its swirl of waters, straight for that little creek where, once before, it had tossed a human prey upon the beach. There, beating against the gravelly bank, in a soft helplessness, her bright hair tangled among the drift of branch and leaf brought down by the storm, Helbeck found her."

He carried her home upon his breast, and at the last they laid her amongst the Westmoreland rocks and trees, in sight of the Bannisdale woods, in a sweet graveyard, high in the hills. The country folk came in great numbers, and Helbeck, more estranged than ever now, watched the mournful scene from afar.

Such is the tragedy of faith and love, which bequeathed to the already lonely and sorrowful man memories so unspeakably sad, and led this new Antigone to immolate herself in so awful a manner—"a blind witness to august things".

For us there remains but one question. Helbeck, it is plain, can never win Laura, but can Laura ever hope to win Helbeck?

One would have to answer with many distinctions. In the first place, much has been done already. The true Helbeck type is fast disappearing, buried or lost in inaccessible places like the fells of Westmoreland, or Breton castles, far from the highway of humanity's daily life. Had not Mrs. Ward reminded us of him, we should have almost forgotten his existence. The modern spirit, of which Laura is the type, has steadily eliminated the species.

Next, though Roman Catholicism occupies a far different position from that it held in the days when Yorkshire and Lancashire were plentifully studded with houses and homes such as Bannisdale, it must be remembered that the successors of the sixteenth century Helbecks are only magni nomines umbra. To the modern Catholic, religion is less than ever a life to be lived, a distinct type to be created; it is increasingly recognised merely as a creed to be believed. Helbeck of Bannisdale you could pick out of a crowd, but a congregation at the Oratory or Farm Street differs in nothing from one at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, or the smartest Congregational chapel. They all mingle indistinguishably in the "church parade" and are lost.

It is the victory of the "world" overcoming "faith".

The modern Catholic believes with the Church as against the world, in the importance of "orders" or the truth of transubstantiation and infallibility, but his life is with the world. Emphatically, his conversation is not in heaven. He is one of us. He is like Nicodemus, a disciple in secret, for various reasons, of which he is probably utterly unconscious. His Catholicism no more alienates him from modern life than Wallace's profound belief in phrenology puts him beyond the pale of science. His differences with the modern world are purely speculative, having little or no bearing on practical life, and therefore the world is content to take Catholicism at its own valuation. How far this is from Helbeck one can easily divine, but Laura has brought them leagues from that Westmoreland home of impossible ideals and all it symbolises.

At the same time, no one need look for the disappearance of that speculative system known as modern Catholicism. The type, the life indeed has gone, and gone for ever; but there will always be a "crowd which no man can number," who prefer to sit and submit to being up and doing for themselves. Reason and authority must ever continue to be the watchwords of the two great sections into which humanity is divided on the religious question. They must ever be contrasted as habits of mind, as sources whence faith arises. But it needs no exceptional discernment to see that the religion of the strenuous and progressive, the peoples who move the world and make its history, cannot by any possibility known to us be a religion of undiluted authority. As a man is, so are the gods he worships, for the gods are the ideal. Therefore the progressive nations who find it impossible to stand still, not to speak of looking back, will more and more recede from even the remnant of the Helbeck ideal which remains to us to-day, and find their inspiration in a religion which is advancing like themselves. What! science grow, knowledge increase, freedom advance, and religion only stagnate! Perish the thought! Our religion, like our knowledge, grows from day to day, because it is only through the deepening knowledge of the universe and of himself that man is enabled to rise to a proportionate knowledge of That of which all things are but transitory symbols. Creeds and systems, prisons of the infinite spirit of man, never can they befit the age in which the ideal of progress has entered, like an intoxication, into the soul. "The snare is broken and we are delivered." Woe to the man, woe to the people, who are content to sit or stand! Woe to them whose hope is in the dead past, and not in their living selves! Woe to the faith that has no better message for the eager, palpitating generations of to-day, than a bundle of parchments from the third or fourth century, or the impossible practices of an age when the life of the world stood still! They shall never inherit the earth. The new heaven, the better land, is reserved for the strenuous and the progressive alone, for "the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away".



[1] The Rev. Father Clarke, of the Jesuit Society, in the Nineteenth Century of September, 1898, refuses to recognise Helbeck as true to the Catholic type. Certainly, he is not a modern Roman Catholic, and probably Mrs. Ward knows this as well as her critic. The question is, which conforms to type, the old or the modern English Catholic? Mr. Mivart's "liberal catholic" criticisms of Father Clarke in the October number of the same review are good, very good, reading.



XIV.

THE RELIGION OF TENNYSON.

Prophecy and poetry are the embodiment in artistic form of the abstract conceptions of the philosopher. As the philosopher thinks, so the prophet preaches, so the poet sings. Thinking, speaking, singing, are the three acts in the ascending scale of the soul's self-manifestation. Generally speaking, these high functions are not found in their perfection in one and the same soul; rarely do you meet with the spirit of the philosopher, prophet and poet incarnate in one mortal frame. Such enterprise is too great for all but the greatest, and amongst these may possibly be classed the poet-prophet of Israel, Isaiah, the writers of some of the Vedic hymns and Hebrew psalms, and Jesus of Nazara, whose soul was full of music, and whose thinking and preaching will probably fill the thoughts of man throughout all time.

The significance of philosophical and prophetic teaching in religion is a frequent subject of thought in our circles, and now the recent publication of Tennyson's life enables us to say something of the Religio Poetae—the idealism which inspired the soul of a nineteenth century poet.

The poet's name is not without significance and interest. It is a Greek word signifying "maker" or "creator"—Poietes. There is a philosophy in language however much we continue to ask, "What's in a name?" When those wonderful Greeks wished to express the thinker's art, they spoke of Sophia or wisdom; when they heard the first preacher who told them of their innermost selves, they called him the Prophetes or prophet, the man that speaketh forth as from an illimitable deep; and when they listened to the soul of music coming from the lips of a Homer or a Sappho, they called it by the most expressive name of all, "making" or "creation". The poet was a creator. And so he is if we come to think of it. Out of the materials supplied to him by the thinking of other intelligences, he weaves his song of joy and beauty which holds our senses as in a spell, and steeps our souls in ecstasy. He is a "reed," to use an expression of Tennyson himself, "through which all things blow to music". He is the creator of the ideal world par excellence; the keys of the Unseen are in his keeping.

We say that he transfigures the thoughts of other intelligences, that he turns his genius to the rhythmic expression of the towering fantasies of the philosopher. And he does. Poetry without thought would be a jingle—a word which, if we may trust the reviews, is a satisfactory account of much of the "minor" poetry of the day. If a man does not see somewhat deeper into himself and things than the average human being, never among the sacred band of lyric souls can he find a lasting place. Philosophy is the propaedeutic of poetry. But surely, it may be urged, the book of nature is open to every one, and a poet's soul may sing of that without any need of the philosopher's interpretation. Has not some of the sublimest verse been Nature poetry? True, but this undoubted fact only confirms our statement. When Wordsworth interprets nature in song, he is borrowing from a philosopher; he is reading the thoughts of an intelligence other than his own. He is revealing to you the innermost thoughts of that supreme Mind, who conceived the beautiful whole, and made it to be a thought of himself. The deepest thinker is he who thinks his thoughts into deeds. There is a First Philosopher as there is a First Poet or Maker, and because we are in our innermost selves of his kindred, we have the power to think his thoughts again, and create an ideal world which shall be the counterpart of his own. Men may be philosophers and poets because the First Poet and First Thinker is their Parent.

This is not mysticism, still less imagination, but the soberest of realities. In it you read the interpretation of the indisputable fact that the world's greatest poets were men of intensely religious feeling. They come so near to the Supreme Poet that their sense of the Infinite is extraordinarily developed. It is gravely questionable whether a man can be a great poet unless the influence of his great prototype be a power in his life; unless his religious instincts be reverently cultivated. A religious sense is needful to the highest flights. Go over the greatest names of the past and present and you will see how "the Over-soul" has been the truest source of inspiration. The unknown singers of the Vedic hymns, Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, and in our days, Tennyson and Browning—in them all the religious sense, the instinct of communion with the unseen world, is a distinguishing mark and characteristic. A name here and there may be quoted on the other side, but as far as my memory serves me for the moment, it would appear on closer examination that such were exceptions only in appearance. An excess, not a defect, of reverential feeling is often the explanation of such non-manifestation of religious emotion as we may notice. With Goethe, they would appear to feel the presumption of individualising, the great Soul of the worlds by even so much as naming him.

Who dare name him, and who confess I believe him!

There is a reverent as well as an irreverent impatience of forms associated with the Formless and the Infinite; and because of it one never yet heard or read of a man truly great who had not the profoundest reverence for religion. But, however that may be, it is plain that we are justified in speaking of a poet's religion, and in discussing the religious conceptions which took shape in the soul of one of the two great poets of the Victorian era.

Five years ago Tennyson passed hence, "crossing the bar" on that tideless sea, still as the silent life which left its worn-out frame to "turn again home". So much as the great poet desired that the world should know of his own aspirations, his hopes and fears of the great Hereafter, has been given to us in his own sweet singing, and a memoir written by his son. It turns out that Tennyson was no exception to his noble order. Like all the great singers he was a man of faith—a man penetrated to his heart's core with the sense of the indestructible character of the religious instinct, and of man's deep need of communion with the Great Life which is within and beyond him—the Soul of souls whom men call God.

The significance of this fact is not to be lost upon reflective minds. In an age when positive science has made a progress which borders almost on the miraculous; when discoveries of the innermost secrets of nature, coupled with astounding combinations of her elements and forces, which supply us with the chemical contrivances and implements for further research surpassing the wildest dreams of astrologers and alchemists of old, there has been an unmistakable tendency to push the Divine agency farther and farther back in the chain of phenomenal causation, until it would appear that it had been finally thrust out of the world altogether. "I have swept the heavens with my telescope," said Lalande, "and I have not found your God." "The heavens are telling no more the glory of God," said Auguste Comte, "but that of Herschel and Laplace." Is it indeed so? The past has done all in its power to make it so, and Lalande and Comte represent the inevitable and natural reaction against the incredible puerilities, the stupid, obstinate opposition to all science not in conformity with the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, or the fables incorporated in the Hebrew Cosmogony. But that past is past indeed, and never can come back again. The world returns no more to discarded ideals; the conception of theology as "queen of the sciences" is as hopelessly impossible in the civilised world as the Divine right of kings.

The result is that prophets and poets are "men of God" still, and notwithstanding Lalande and Comte, the heavens are not so dazzling as to quench for them the glory of a Diviner revelation which they scarce conceal. I frankly say that I had rather believe all the fables of the Talmud and the Koran than that the empty shadows of a vulgar superstition are all that lie beneath the stately verse of "In Memoriam," or the "Rabbi Ben Ezra" of Browning.

The religion of Tennyson is a perfume which fills much that he writes. It is a "spirit" which broods over many a song, but is incarnate, so to speak, in the elegy which immortalises the tomb of his lost friend. For Tennyson, the spirit of poetry is the spirit of religion—a blowing to music of the deepest thoughts of the philosopher. In "Merlin and the Gleam" we may read this as in an allegory:—

Great the Master And sweet the magic, When o'er the valley In early summers, O'er the mountain, On human faces, And all around me Moving to melody Floated the gleam.

The spirit of poetry, which bade him follow on in spite of discouragement, touched all on which it hovered with a mystic light, "moving him to melody". It was the soul of religion, binding the spirit of man to nature and to "human faces" in themselves, and to the Supreme, in whom all is One.

But what is an allegory in the spirit of the gleam is a reality in the song of love, "passing the love of women," which he laid as the noblest offering ever yet made at the bier of a departed friend. The religion of Tennyson is there, but the poem must be carefully studied if its true inwardness is to be grasped. Isolating a few stanzas wherein the poet, alarmed and perplexed at the cruelties and terrors of Nature, her dark and circuitous ways, her astounding prodigality and wastefulness, lifts up in his helplessness "lame hands of faith," and falters where once he firmly trod, many writers have professed to see in Tennyson the expression of a reverent agnosticism. Such agnosticism we may all respect, for it is very different from the noisy, clamorous thing which, aping in name the humility of greater men, insists that the sense limitations imposed upon its own intelligence shall forthwith be erected into a dogma to be accepted as infallible by everybody else's intelligence. Be as reverent as Darwin in your agnosticism, as tolerant as Comte, we would say to such men, and there is much to commend in your teaching; but spare us the ridiculous spectacle of a handful of pamphleteers and minor essayists arraigning the sublimest philosophy ever known to the world, and consecrated by the homage of ninety out of every hundred thinkers who have ever approached its study, as a system erected upon a mirage—the image of a man's own personality distorted by its projection into the infinite. Tennyson himself once said that "the average Englishman's god was an immeasurable clergyman, and that not a few of them mistook their devil for their god", That may very well be, but the philosophers of the world who have built the house of wisdom are not "average Englishmen," and to describe their theism as the imagination of an immeasurable man—surpliced clergyman or otherwise—is a criticism, not of the philosophers, but of their would-be critics. Non ragionian di lor, ma guarda e passa!

But Tennyson was a passionately convinced theist. With that scrupulous voraciousness which, according to those who knew him most intimately, was his leading characteristic, he surveys nature not only with the reverent eye of a mystic, but with the exact vision of science, and faithfully reports what he sees—so faithfully, indeed, that he was hailed by Tyndall in, the sixties as "the poet of science". Loving truth, "by which no man yet was ever harmed," he does not hesitate to portray nature "red in tooth and claw with ravine shrieking against the creed" of a moral and beneficent power. And when no reconciliation is obvious he can but "faintly trust the larger hope" and point hence where possibly the discords of life will be resolved into a final harmony.

What hope of answer or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil!

But these facts, however unmistakable, are powerless to alter the main inevitable conclusion that beneficent power does rule the cosmos, though they may modify it provisionally, until a better insight into the workings of nature supplies us with a clue to the mystery's solution. He is a sorry philosopher indeed who will insist that nothing whatever can be known because everything cannot be known, that an established fact must be no fact because no explanation of it is forthcoming. Tennyson is not one of these thriftless people, and the "In Memoriam," read aright, leads one upward "upon the great world's altar-stairs that slope through darkness up to God".

The poem is a drama of life. It was not written at one time or one place, but over a path of some years. Those years and places are a symbol of the ever-changeful thoughts and moods of man who communes much with the world concealed behind the veil of sense. It is the vivid portraiture of the soul, its sorrows, doubts, anxieties, and aspirations; it tells of the eclipse as well as of the dawn and meridian of faith. In fact, it is Tennyson's own religious life which is the life of uncounted numbers in these latter times. Before the supreme sad experience, the sudden, and to him incomprehensible, death of Arthur Hallam, the poet had agnostic leanings. He did then veritably fail and "falter" before the questions of life and death which beset him. His long years of comparative poverty, "the eternal want of pence," his failure to attract any measure of attention, his long-delayed marriage as far off as ever, the res angusta domi which made his family dependent upon him, all conspired to shut out the vision of anything but an iron necessity controlling him and everything. Such lives are infinitely pathetic, and perhaps one had rather devote oneself to ministering to minds distressed like these than to any other form of charitable enterprise. Such souls have been wounded inexpressibly; they are sore to the most delicate touch, and gentle indeed must be the hand, and soft the voice, which would comfort stricken creatures like these. To think of such afflicted spirits is to recall the picture of the ideal servant of Jahveh, of whom Isaiah sings in words of unearthly beauty: "A bruised reed he shall not break and a smoking flax he shall not quench," for only by ministrations such as these can they be healed.

Strangely enough, as it would seem, it was the last and saddest experience of all, the blow which almost crushed his life, which brought the young soul back to health and strength. It was the hand of death, inopportunely touching the fairest and noblest thing he ever hoped to know, which helped him to see that—

My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is.

The conception of such a life as that of his lost friend, annihilated with the vanishing of the touch of his hand and the sound of his voice, was plainly an impossible one, and if one remembers all the bright hopes, the extraordinarily brilliant future which, in the judgment of all who knew him, were buried with that young life, it is impossible to marvel at the change his death produced in the heart of his poet friend.

Now this temporary eclipse of faith is truthfully set forth in the poem, together with the manifold reasons which weigh at times so powerfully, even with the most devout minds, suggesting that the universe is not "righteous at heart". We all know them well, for we have felt them, and it is a comfort for us to be assured that minds more penetrating, consciences more sensitive, and emotions far deeper, have been enabled to withstand the shock which nature so rudely deals at our moral instincts, and to believe with a fervour and enthusiasm conquering all obstacles, that—

Good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete.

It is "the heart-piercing, mind-bewildering" mystery of evil and pain which has quenched the light in many a sincere and fervent heart. But it is not for ever. Two things we may remember for our guidance amid all this weltering sea of sorrow and distress. First, it is not all nature. It is only a side of it; and if it is the most obvious, it is only because it is a breach of the order and beneficence so uniformly obtaining. And next, the holiest hearts, the spirits of the just made perfect on earth were not adversely influenced by it. In spite of it all, an elect spirit, such as Jesus of Nazara, could patiently endure a life of austerity, and meet a death of unspeakable anguish with a calmness and resignation seldom equalled and never surpassed. "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," is a serious rebuke to those who suffer so little and complain so loudly that the times are out of joint, the world as probably as not the work of malignity or indifference, and that he is no God who does not stretch forth an omnipotent hand to slay the accursed thing of evil where it stands. This is in very deed "the crying of an infant in the night". We forget when we utter these foolish things that we ourselves should be among the first to fall beneath that avenging hand.

And so with Tennyson. It was the visitation of evil in its most mournful shape—the cold hand of death that fell upon the brow of his beloved friend—which opened his eyes. His faith in goodness, in beneficent purpose, was restored. The cloud was lifted for evermore. He married. Wedded love, mystic symbol, sacramental image of a union higher still, came at length as an added blessing, after years of expectancy and disappointment. "When I wedded her the peace of God entered into my heart," he wrote. His cup was full; "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," and therefore he sang that stately invocation, that sublime Magnificat which, we may well believe with his own most intimate friends, will endure while the lips of men frame the sounds of our English speech.

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why; He thinks he was not made to die; And Thou hast made him: Thou art just.

Thus were "the wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth" forgotten in the song of adoration, which is in reality the epilogue of the elegiac drama. We can almost imagine its coming after the closing glory of the bridal hymn which sings to its last note of God:—

That God which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off Divine event, To which the whole creation moves.

A wedding on earth—that of his sister—is thus for him the symbol of that love eternal which moves all things: Amor che tutto muove, of Dante's peerless song. That light of love once seen anew he never lost. As life declined it grew in intensity: brighter and more reassuring than ever did it glow as the darkness of earth began to close round him. It was borne in upon him with a depth of conviction too deep for utterance that death was but a fact, like any other in our many-sided life, that it was but a momentary occurrence, in no wise impeding that progress of the individual spirit in that path which has been with philosophic accuracy described by the Hebrew psalmist as "the way everlasting". The most perfect prayer is that: "Lead me in the ever-lasting way," for it is the destiny of man to one day reach that journey's end; to be one day perfect; to be absolutely conformed in mind and will to that most sacred of realities—the moral law.

It was this new vision which dawned on his soul, when the face and form of his much-loved friend was taken away, and filled him with a profound calm as the inevitable hour drew near.

I can no longer But die rejoicing, For through the magic Of Him, the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood There on the borders Of boundless ocean, And all but in Heaven, Hovers the gleam.

In the old days long past, when, tormented with doubts, embittered by disappointment, he would fain be rid of his burden, the voice of the Master kept ever repeating:—

"Follow the gleam".

And so he followed—followed it through life, over the wide earth, until the land's end was reached. But even then the Spirit did not forsake him. The "gleam" still shone like a star in the deepening sky, till it stood at length over the waters at the gates of the great bar that led out into the Infinite. And last of all, the "call," clear and unmistakable; and there sure enough, waiting beyond the bar, was the "Pilot," the Master of the gleam, "ready to receive the soul".[1]



[1] Jean Valjean's death in Les Miserables.



XV.

"THE UNKNOWN GOD."

The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold; Above the cloud, beneath the clod, The Unknown God, the Unknown God." —WILLIAM WATSON.

One great function of poetry is to keep open the road which leads from the seen to the unseen world, and as the last echoes of this noble poem die away, it would seem as though a door had been opened in heaven and an unearthly vision had been revealed to our wondering eyes. It is as though some strange inspiration had fallen upon one suddenly, like that which the seer in the Apocalypse felt when he said, "And immediately I was in the spirit". The truth is we have been led into the invisible world, we have gained with the poet "a sense of God". The strange, undefinable attraction of the infinite is upon us.

Perhaps we have not yet learnt how strong that fascination is; how that it is not only the source of that inner light which we see reflected in the countenance of the philosopher and saint, but that it is powerful to arrest the attention of men who are for ever saying that no such reality exists, or, that even if it does, man need no more concern himself about it. Has he not the solid earth and the realm of sense? Why should he seek what is beyond it? O caecas hominum mentes! Man cannot help himself. Well does the ethic master say, "What is the use of affecting indifference towards that about which the mind of man never can be indifferent?" And why not? Because man came thence? There is that in us "which drew from out the boundless deep". In some incomprehensible way the infinite is in us, and we are therefore restless, dissatisfied ultimately with all that is not it. "The eye is not filled with sight nor the ear with hearing," for in us there is the capacity, and therefore, in our best moments, the yearning to see and hear something which sense can never give. Greater than all that is here, in silent moments, when the senses are tired and disappointment steals over us, the truth of the insignificance of things bursts upon us. "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature," says Pascal in the Pensees, "but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not mass its forces to accomplish his destruction. A breath, a drop of water may destroy him. But even though the world should fall and crush him he would still be more noble than his destroyer because he knows that he dies, but the advantage which the world possesses over him—of that the world knows nothing." And, therefore, the universe is nothing to him who is conscious that there is that in man which made all worlds and shall unmake them—the eternal Mind, one and identical throughout the realm of intelligence.

This is no dreaming, but an interpretation of man and nature necessitated by the undeniable facts of life. The finite does not exhaust man's capacities, it cannot even satisfy them. He was made for something vaster. He is ever seeking the boundless, the infinite. Hence the most positive, the most scientific of philosophers, Mr. Herbert Spencer, believes that there is one supreme emotion in man, utterly indestructible, the emotion of religion; and what is religion but the yearning I have described for communion, not with the world, vast and entrancing as it is; not with humanity, admirable, even worshipful in its highest estate; but with that which transcends them and all things, the enduring reality which men call Divine? Spencer and Emerson are at one. Nothing but the Infinite will ultimately satisfy man.

Such are the thoughts awakened by the music of this poet's song, which haunts one with a sense of the mystery of the illimitable. I do not read it as a confession of agnosticism, save in the sense in which all philosophers are ready to admit that our knowledge of the ultimate reality of existence is as mere ignorance compared with what we do not, and cannot, know of it. I read it rather as a profession of the higher theism, or, if you will, of the higher pantheism, for it is immaterial how far we go in maintaining the Divine immanence, provided we safeguard the sovereign fact of individuality and abstain from all confusion of the human personality and the Divine.

There is prevalent a most erroneous impression that the Divine immanence and personality are two irreconcilable conceptions, and that to assert that the All is a person or an individual is at once to limit its universality. Such is not the case, as an analysis of the conception of personality will show. The philosophic term "person" is utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is sufficient for the constitution of itself in being, and were they endowed with intelligence they would be further distinguished by the honorific title of person. Man is a person, because a subsistent, self-sufficing individual, furthermore endowed with reason. A fortiori is the All a person, because if the Supreme is not self-sufficing, then nothing or nobody is. Hence we have to point out in reply to the strictures of the opposite philosophic school that so far from infinitude being an obstacle to individuality or personality, the Infinite alone, in the strict sense of the word, can be called a person, because in the Infinite or the All alone is absolute self-sufficiency realised. From the very fact, then, of the omnipresence of the Divine, because—

In my flesh his spirit doth flow Too near, too far for me to know;

because, to use Emerson's language, "God appears with all his parts in every moss and every cobweb," or Mr. Spencer's, which comes to identically the same thing, "All the forces operative in the universe are modes or manifestations of one Supreme and Infinite Energy"—because of these momentous facts we ascribe personality to the Infinite, with no detriment to its immanence, since of no other being could they by any possibility be true. Theist or pantheist, it matters very little by what name men call themselves so long as they do not imprison themselves within the walls of the false version of the philosophy of relativity, which binds them over to acknowledge nothing beyond their five external senses, to identify the unseen with the unknown, and thereby to stunt and ultimately to atrophy the sublime powers, transcending the insignificant senses we share with the animal world, as the sky towers above earth, whereby this noble poem of the "Unknown God" was given us by William Watson.

And here we may turn our attention to the poem itself, to see, if I do not misinterpret it, the evidences of that ethic creed, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the moral law, which we acknowledge as the only rightful basis of religious idealism.

In the first place, it is only amid the silence of the soul, when the voice of the senses is still, that we "gain a sense of God" at all. It is a vision of the mind—of mind knowing Mind, of soul transcending all distinctions and recognising itself. It is the sublime region of the higher unity into which subject and object are taken up and their distinction forgotten or lost. It is at night-fall, in sight of the awful pathway of the stars which, one would think, should fill man with a sense of his immeasurable littleness, it is then that he realises that this boundless splendour is nothing compared to him, for something more than a million worlds is with him, in the eternal Mind whence all this majestic vision rose.

When, overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day; Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.

But of what God? for there are gods many and lords many. There is the known God, of whom the Western world has heard so much now these two thousand years, the God of the most ancient Hebrew Scriptures, themselves acclaimed as his unique and authentic revelation, the embodiment of absolute truth. That God has not been forgotten yet. Just now his temple is thronged with worshippers.[1] Ministers of religions in America, archbishops in Spain, are eager in their invocations, and if we may believe our newspapers, the Cardinal of Madrid guaranteed the harmlessness of American cannon and rifles to those who will implore his assistance through the intercession of saints. It is the war-cry of old: "The Lord is a Man of War!"

But the moral sense, the Divinity within, as contrasted with the Divinity in the skies, tells the poet that this old-world god is an idol, a glorified image of man in his "violent youth," a "giant shadow hailed Divine".

Not him that with fantastic boasts A sombre people dreamed they knew; The mere barbaric God of Hosts That edged their sword and braced their thew: A God they pitted 'gainst a swarm Of neighbour gods less vast of arm.

He is well known, this "God of Hosts". Doubtless once he was the Divinity of the worlds that stream across our sky, subsequently transformed into the god of battles, who ranged himself on the side of his favourites, baffled their foes by super-human strategy or even knavery, the god of carnage and bloodshed, progenitor, in direct line, of him who afterwards was preached as the god of devil and hell. What has taught the poet, what has taught man to disavow such a Divinity?—

A God like some imperious King, Wroth, were his realm not duly awed; A God for ever hearkening Unto his self-commanded laud; A God for ever jealous grown Of carven wood and graven stone.

No church, no official religion, no cleric or synod of ministers appears to have raised a hand to inaugurate the emancipation of the Western world from its degrading belief in a "God of Hosts". It is only now, during the last thirty or forty years, that stragglers here and there are coming into camp and making their submission to the "sovereignty of ethics," the supremacy of the moral law, which dooms to eternal death divinities such as Odin, Jahveh and Zeus. It is to the emancipation of the conscience of humanity from the paralysing guidance of the great ecclesiastical corporations of the past that we owe that famous band of scholars, who, antecedently convinced on moral grounds that such conceptions of the Divine were sheer profanities, set about an exhaustive study of the origins and text of the biblical literature, together with an equally painstaking research into the history of kindred religions, which has resulted in the vindication of the root doctrine of prophetic and ethical religion—the absolute and unlimited sovereignty of the moral law, and the consequent identification of morality with religion. They have made sacerdotal, sacrificial religion an impossibility to all who are at pains to inform themselves of the facts: they have banished for ever the presence of that—

God whose ghost in arch and aisle Yet haunts his temple—and his tomb; And follows in a little while Odin and Zeus to equal doom; A God of kindred seed and line; Man's giant shadow hailed Divine.

And now there comes a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abasement, in the presence of the Immensities around us, and yet a passionate vindication of man's right to sit in judgment on an idol-god such as this!

O streaming worlds, O crowded sky! O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot.

The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more masterfully asserted. Of old we learned that man was "made in the image of God," but now we see that the—

God of our fathers, known of old— Lord of our far-flung battle-line—

he to whom we still raise our supplicating cry—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!—[2]

we know that he is made in the image of man. Unless a movement of retrogression sets in; unless we have to submit to a paralysis of moral stagnation, the day must inevitably come when the "Lord God of Hosts," "the Man of War," "the God of Victories," whom Spanish viceroys and captains are incessantly invoking in their proclamations, will be swept into oblivion with the curse of war which gave them birth. But that hour of retrogression and decay shall never sound for humanity. A nation here, a people there, may drop out of the ranks; the last remnant of empire may fall from their unworthy hands, but as I have faith in the eternal order, as I bow before the everlasting Power which makes for moral progress, I know that war has served its purpose amongst men, and that the day must come when it will be finally abolished as unworthy of rational beings. At any rate, the war-god is not he in whose image the perfected man was made, for—