Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the Church Part 21

"Almighty and everlasting G.o.d, who hast given to Thy servants, in confession of true faith to recognize the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and in the power of Majesty to pray to the Unity; we ask that by the firmness of that faith we may be always defended from all adverse things, who livest and reignest G.o.d through all ages. Amen."

Turning to our Collect, we find we have first slipped in the word "us"

before "Thy servants," and by that little insertion have slipped in the squire and his jockey, and the public-house landlord--and any one else who may chance to have been coaxed, swept, or threatened into church on Trinity Sunday, and required the entire company of them to profess themselves servants of G.o.d, and believers in the mystery of the Trinity.

And we think we have done G.o.d a service!

"Grace." Not a word about grace in the original. You don't believe by having grace, but by having wit.

"To acknowledge." "Agnosco" is to recognize, not to acknowledge. To _see_ that there are three lights in a chandelier is a great deal more than to acknowledge that they are there.

"To worship." "Adorare" is to pray to, not to worship. You may worship a mere magistrate; but you _pray_ to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The last sentence in the English is too horribly mutilated to be dealt with in any patience. The meaning of the great old collect is that by the shield of that faith we may quench all the fiery darts of the devil.

The English prayer means, if it means anything, "Please keep us in our faith without our taking any trouble; and, besides, please don't let us lose our money, nor catch cold."

"Who livest and reignest." Right; but how many of any extant or instant congregations understand what the two words mean? That G.o.d is a living G.o.d, not a dead Law; and that He is a reigning G.o.d, putting wrong things to rights, and that, sooner or later, with a strong hand and a rod of iron; and not at all with a soft sponge and warm water, washing everybody as clean as a baby every Sunday morning, whatever dirty work they may have been about all the week.

On which latter supposition your modern Liturgy, in so far as it has supplemented instead of corrected the old one, has entirely modelled itself,--producing in its first address to the congregation before the Almighty precisely the faultfullest and foolishest piece of English language that I know in the whole compa.s.s of English or American literature. In the seventeen lines of it (as printed in my old-fashioned, large-print prayer-book), there are seven times over two words for one idea.

1. Acknowledge and confess.

2. Sins and wickedness.

3. Dissemble nor cloke.

4. Goodness and mercy.

5. a.s.semble and meet.

6. Requisite and necessary.

7. Pray and beseech.

There is, indeed, a shade of difference in some of these ideas for a good scholar, none for a general congregation;[43] and what difference they can guess at merely muddles their heads: to acknowledge sin is indeed different from confessing it, but it cannot be done at a minute's notice; and goodness is a different thing from mercy, but it is by no means G.o.d's infinite goodness that forgives our badness, but that judges it.

[43] The only explanation ever offered for this exuberant wordiness is that if worshippers did not understand one term they would the other, and in some cases, in the Exhortation and elsewhere, one word is of Latin and the other of Saxon derivation.[44] But this is surely a very feeble excuse for bad composition. Of a very different kind is that beautiful climax which is reached in the three admirably chosen pairs of words in the Prayer for the Parliament, "peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety."--EDITOR.

[44] The repet.i.tion of synonymous terms is of very frequent occurrence in sixteenth century writing, as "for ever and aye,"

"Time and the hour ran through the roughest day" (Macbeth, i. 3).

"The faultfullest," I said, "and the foolishest." After using fourteen words where seven would have done, what is it that the whole speech gets said with its much speaking? This Morning Service of all England begins with the a.s.sertion that the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to confess our sins before G.o.d. _Does_ it so? Have your congregations ever been referred to those sundry places? Or do they take the a.s.sertion on trust, or remain under the impression that, unless with the advantage of their own candour, G.o.d must remain ill-informed on the subject of their sins?

"That we should not dissemble nor cloke them." _Can_ we then? Are these grown-up congregations of the enlightened English Church in the nineteenth century still so young in their nurseries that the "Thou, G.o.d, seest me" is still not believed by them if they get under the bed?

Let us look up the sundry moving pa.s.sages referred to.

(I suppose myself a simple lamb of the flock, and only able to use my English Bible.)

I find in my concordance (confess and confession together) forty-two occurrences of the word. Sixteen of these, including John's confession that he was not the Christ, and the confession of the faithful fathers that they were pilgrims on the earth, do indeed move us strongly to confess Christ before men. Have you ever taught your congregations what that confession means? They are ready enough to confess Him in church, that is to say, in their own private synagogue. Will they in Parliament?

Will they in a ball-room? Will they in a shop? Sixteen of the texts are to enforce their doing _that_.

The next most important one (1 Tim. vi. 13) refers to Christ's own good confession, which I suppose was not of His sins, but of His obedience.

How many of your congregations can make any such kind of confession, or wish to make it?

The eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth (1 Kings viii. 33, 2 Chron.

vi. 26, Heb. xiii. 15) speak of confessing thankfully that G.o.d is G.o.d (and not a putrid plasma nor a theory of development), and the twenty-first (Job xl. 14) speaks of G.o.d's own confession, that no doubt we are the people, and that wisdom shall die with us, and on what conditions He will make it.

There remain twenty-one texts which do speak of the confession of our sins--very moving ones indeed--and Heaven grant that some day the British public may be moved by them.

1. The first is Lev. v. 5, "He shall confess that he hath sinned _in that thing_." And if you can get any soul of your congregation to say he has sinned in _any_thing, he may do it in two words for one if he likes, and it will yet be good liturgy.

2. The second is indeed general--Lev. xvi. 21: the command that the whole nation should afflict its soul on the great day of atonement once a year. The Church of England, I believe, enjoins no such unpleasant ceremony. Her festivals are pa.s.sed by her people often indeed in the extinction of their souls, but by no means in their intentional affliction.

3. The third, fourth, and fifth (Lev. xxvi. 40, Numb. v. 7, Nehem. i. 6) refer all to national humiliation for definite idolatry, accompanied with an entire abandonment of that idolatry, and of idolatrous persons.

How soon _that_ form of confession is likely to find a place in the English congregations the defences of their main idol, mammon, in the vilest and cruellest shape of it--usury--with which this book has been defiled, show very sufficiently.

6. The sixth is Psalm x.x.xii. 5--virtually the whole of that psalm, which does, indeed, entirely refer to the greater confession, once for all opening the heart to G.o.d, which can be by no means done fifty-two times a year, and which, once done, puts men into a state in which they will never again say there is no health in them; nor that their hearts are desperately wicked; but will obey for ever the instantly following order, "Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous, and shout for joy, all ye that are true of heart."

7. The seventh is the one confession in which I can myself share:--"After the way which they call heresy, so worship I the Lord G.o.d of my fathers."

8. The eighth, James v. 16, tells us to confess our faults--not to G.o.d, but "one to another"--a practice not favoured by English catechumens--(by the way, what _do_ you all mean by "auricular"

confession--confession that can be heard? and is the Protestant pleasanter form one that can't be?)

9. The ninth is that pa.s.sage of St. John (i. 9), the favourite evangelical text, which is read and preached by thousands of false preachers every day, without once going on to read its great companion, "Beloved, if our heart condemn us, G.o.d is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things; but if our heart condemn us _not_, then have we confidence toward G.o.d." Make your people understand the second text, and they will understand the first. At present you leave them understanding neither.

And the entire body of the remaining texts is summed in Joshua vii. 19 and Ezra x. 11, in which, whether it be Achan, with his Babylonish garment, or the people of Israel, with their Babylonish l.u.s.ts, the meaning of confession is simply what it is to every brave boy, girl, man, and woman, who knows the meaning of the word "honour" before G.o.d or man--namely, to say what they have done wrong, and to take the punishment of it (not to get it blanched over by any means), and to do it no more--which is so far from being a tone of mind generally enforced either by the English, or any other extant Liturgy, that, though all my maids are exceedingly pious, and insist on the privilege of going to church as a quite inviolable one, I think it a scarcely to be hoped for crown and consummation of virtue in them that they should tell me when they have broken a plate; and I should expect to be met only with looks of indignation and astonishment if I ventured to ask one of them how she had spent her Sunday afternoon.

"Without courage," said Sir Walter Scott, "there is no truth; and without truth there is no virtue." The sentence would have been itself more true if Sir Walter had written "candour" for "truth," for it is possible to be true in insolence, or true in cruelty. But in looking back from the ridges of the Hill Difficulty in my own past life, and in all the vision that has been given me of the wanderings in the ways of others--this, of all principles, has become to me surest--that the first virtue to be required of man is frankness of heart and lip: and I believe that every youth of sense and honour, putting himself to faithful question, would feel that he had the devil for confessor, if he had not his father or his friend.

That a clergyman should ever be so truly the friend of his parishioners as to deserve their confidence from childhood upwards, may be flouted as a sentimental ideal; but he is a.s.suredly only their enemy in showing his Lutheran detestation of the sale of indulgences by broadcasting these gratis from his pulpit.

The inconvenience and unpleasantness of a catechism concerning itself with the personal practice as well as the general theory of duty, are indeed perfectly conceivable by me; yet I am not convinced that such manner of catechism would therefore be less medicinal; and during the past ten years it has often been matter of amazed thought with me, while our President at Corpus read prayers to the chapel benches, what might by this time have been the effect on the learning as well as the creed of the University, if, forty years ago, our stern old Dean Gaisford, of the House of Christ, instead of sending us to chapel as to the house of correction, when we missed a lecture, had inquired, before he allowed us to come to chapel at all, whether we were gamblers, harlot-mongers, or in concealed and selfish debt.

I observe with extreme surprise in the preceding letters the unconsciousness of some of your correspondents, that there ever was such a thing as discipline in the Christian Church. Indeed, the last wholesome instance of it I can remember was when my own great-great uncle Maitland lifted Lady ---- from his altar rails, and led her back to her seat before the congregation, when she offered to take the Sacrament, being at enmity with her son.[45] But I believe a few hours honestly spent by any clergyman on his Church history would show him that the Church's confidence in her prayer has been always exactly proportionate to the strictness of her discipline; that her present fright at being caught praying by a chemist or an electrician, results mainly from her having allowed her twos and threes gathered in the name of Christ to become sixes and sevens gathered in the name of Belial; and that therefore her now needfullest duty is to explain to her stammering votaries, extremely doubtful as they are of the effect of their supplications either on politics or the weather, that although Elijah was a man subject to like pa.s.sions as we are, he had them better under command; and that while the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much, the formal and lukewarm one of an iniquitous man availeth--much the other way.

[45] In some of the country districts of Scotland the right of the Church to interfere with the lives of private individuals is still exercised. Only two years ago, a wealthy gentleman farmer was rebuked by the "Kirk Session" of the Dissenting Church to which he belonged, for infidelity to his wife.

At the Scottish half-yearly Communion the ceremony of "fencing the tables" used to be observed; that is, turning away all those whose lives were supposed to have made them unfit to receive the Sacrament.

Such an instruction, coupled with due explanation of the nature of righteousness and iniquity, directed mainly to those who have the power of both in their own hands, being makers of law, and holders of property, would, without any further debate, bring about a very singular change in the position and respectability of English clergymen.

How far they may at present be considered as merely the Squire's left hand, bound to know nothing of what he is doing with his right, it is for their own consciences to determine.

For instance, a friend wrote to me the other day, "Will you not come here? You will see a n.o.ble duke destroying a village as old as the Conquest, and driving out dozens of families whose names are in Domesday Book, because, owing to the neglect of his ancestors and rackrenting for a hundred years, the place has fallen out of repair, and the people are poor, and may become paupers. A local paper ventured to tell the truth.

The duke's agent called on the editor, and threatened him with destruction if he did not hold his tongue." The n.o.ble duke, doubtless, has proper Protestant horror of auricular confession. But suppose, instead of the local editor, the local parson had ventured to tell the truth from his pulpit, and even to intimate to his Grace that he might no longer receive the Body and Blood of the Lord at the altar of that parish. The parson would scarcely--in these days--have been therefore made bonfire of, and had a pretty martyr's memorial by Mr. Scott's pupils; but he would have lighted a goodly light, nevertheless, in this England of ours, whose pettifogging piety has now neither the courage to deny a duke's grace in its church, nor to declare Christ's in its Parliament.

Lastly. Several of your contributors, I observe, have rashly dipped their feet in the brim of the water of that raging question of Usury; and I cannot but express my extreme regret that you should yourself have yielded to the temptation of expressing opinions which you have had no leisure either to found or to test. My a.s.sertion, however, that the rich lived mainly by robbing the poor, referred not to Usury, but to Rent; and the facts respecting both these methods of extortion are perfectly and indubitably ascertainable by any person who himself wishes to ascertain them, and is able to take the necessary time and pains. I see no sign, throughout the whole of these letters, of any wish whatever, on the part of one of their writers, to ascertain the facts, but only to defend practices which they hold to be convenient in the world, and are afraid to blame in their congregations. Of the presumption with which several of the writers utter their notions on the subject, I do not think it would be right to speak farther, in an epilogue to which there is no reply, in the terms which otherwise would have been deserved. In their bearing on other topics, let me earnestly thank you (so far as my own feelings may be permitted voice in the matter) for the attention with which you have examined, and the courage with which you have ratified, or at least endured, letters which could not but bear at first the aspect of being written in a hostile--sometimes even in a mocking spirit. That aspect is untrue, nor am I answerable for it: the things of which I had to speak could not be shortly described but in terms which might sound satirical; for all error, if frankly shown, is precisely most ridiculous when it is most dangerous, and I have written no word which is not chosen as the exactest for its occasion, whether it move sigh or smile. In my earlier days I wrote much with the desire to please, and the hope of influencing the reader. As I grow older and older, I recognize the truth of the Preacher's saying, "Desire shall fail, and the mourners go about the streets;" and I content myself with saying, to whoso it may concern, that the thing is verily thus, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear. No man more than I has ever loved the places where G.o.d's honour dwells, or yielded truer allegiance to the teaching of His evident servants. No man at this time grieves more for the danger of the Church which supposes him her enemy, while she whispers procrastinating _pax vobisc.u.m_ in answer to the spurious kiss of those who would fain toll curfew over the last fires of English faith, and watch the sparrow find nest where she may lay her young, around the altars of the Lord.

Ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN.

APPENDIX