Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 13

John Knox alone defied both his threats and his persuasions. Good reason has Scotland to be proud of Knox. He only, in this wild crisis, saved the Kirk which he had founded, and saved with it Scottish and English freedom. But for Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been landed on the eastern coast. The conditions were drawn out and agreed upon for the reception, the support, and the stay of the Spanish troops. Two-thirds of the English peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth, and Alva waited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only that quiet would not be. Instead of quiet came three dreadful years of civil war.

Scotland was split into factions, to which the mother and son gave names. The queen's lords, as they were called, with unlimited money from France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow; all the border line was theirs, and all the north and west. Elizabeth's Council, wiser than their mistress, barely squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to keep Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but there her a.s.sistance ended. She would still say nothing, promise nothing, bind herself to nothing, and, so far as she was concerned, the war would have been soon enough brought to a close. But away at St. Andrews, John Knox, broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still thundered in the parish church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten thousand trumpets braying in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the Lowlands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found in the man of religion a match for the man of honour. Before Cromwell, all over the Lothians, and across from St. Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow--through farm, and town, and village--the words of Knox had struck the inmost chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Pa.s.sing over knight and n.o.ble, he had touched the farmer, the peasant, the petty tradesman, and the artisan, and turned the men of clay into men of steel. The village preacher, when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and ca.s.sock, and donned morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household became for the nonce a band of troopers, who would cross swords with the night riders of Buccleuch. It was a terrible time, a time rather of anarchy than of defined war, for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women and children tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings of poor men were dangled day after day from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from Elizabeth would have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never speak; and, maddened with suffering, the people half believed that she was feeding the fire for her own bad purposes, when it was only that she would not make up her mind to allow a crowned princess to be dethroned.

No earthly influence could have held men true in such a trial. The n.o.ble lords--the Earl of Morton and such-like--would have made their own conditions, and gone with the rest; but the vital force of the Scotch nation, showing itself where it was least looked for, would not have it so.

A very remarkable account of the state of the Scotch commons at this time is to be found in a letter of an English emissary, who had been sent by Lord Burleigh to see how things were going there. It was not merely a new creed that they had got; it was a new vital power. 'You would be astonished to see how men are changed here,' this writer said.

'There is little of that submission to those above them which there used to be. The poor think and act for themselves. They are growing strong, confident, independent. The farms are better cultivated; the farmers are growing rich. The merchants at Leith are thriving, and, notwithstanding the pirates, they are increasing their ships and opening a brisk trade with France.'

All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen Mary was still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It surprised the English; still more it surprised the politicians. It was the one thing which disconcerted, baffled, and finally ruined the schemes and the dreams of Maitland. When he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had gained everybody, and, as it turned out, he had all his work still to do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent Alva would not risk invasion till Scotland at least was a.s.sured. As time pa.s.sed on, the English conspiracies were discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed up with the plots to murder Elizabeth; and Elizabeth at last took courage and recognised James. Supplies of money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the tide turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the ascendant.

The great families one by one came round again; and, as the backward movement began, the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and tremendous impulse. Even the avowed Catholics--the Hamiltons, the Gordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells--quailed before the wail of rage and sorrow which at that great horror rose over their country. The Queen's party dwindled away to a handful of desperate politicians, who still clung to Edinburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's 'peace-makers,' as the big English cannon were called, came round, at the Regent's request, from Berwick; David's tower, as Knox had long ago foretold, 'ran down over the cliff like a sandy brae;' and the cause of Mary Stuart in Scotland was extinguished for ever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Maitland, the cause of all the mischief--the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all Britain--died (so later rumour said) by his own hand. A n.o.bler version of his end is probably a truer one: He had been long ill--so ill that when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried into the cellars as unable to bear the sound. The breaking down of his hopes finished him. 'The secretary,' wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, 'is dead of grief, being unable to endure the great hatred which all this people bears towards him.' It would be well if some competent man would write a life of Maitland, or at least edit his papers. They contain by far the clearest account of the inward movements of the time; and he himself is one of the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of the Reformation history.

With the fall of the Castle, then, but not till then, it became clear to all men that the Reformation would hold its ground. It was the final trampling out of the fire which for five years had threatened both England and Scotland with flames and ruin. For five years--as late certainly as the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew--those who understood best the true state of things, felt the keenest misgivings how the event would turn. That things ended as they did was due to the spirit of the Scotch commons. There was a moment when, if they had given way, all would have gone, perhaps even to Elizabeth's throne. They had pa.s.sed for nothing; they had proved to be everything; had proved--the ultimate test in human things--to be the power which could hit the hardest blows, and they took rank accordingly. The creed began now in good earnest to make its way into hall and castle; but it kept the form which it a.s.sumed in the first hours of its danger and trial, and never after lost it. Had the aristocracy dealt sincerely with things in the earlier stages of the business, again I say the democratic element in the Kirk might have been softened or modified. But the Protestants had been trifled with by their own natural leaders. Used and abused by Elizabeth, despised by the worldly intelligence and power of the times--they triumphed after all, and, as a natural consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon the fruits of the victory.

The question now is, what has the Kirk so established done for Scotland?

Has it justified its own existence? Briefly, we might say, it has continued its first function as the guardian of Scottish freedom. But that is a vague phrase, and there are special accusations against the Kirk and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other things than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intrusive, superst.i.tious, a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood over again with a new face--these and other such epithets and expressions we have heard often enough applied to it at more than one stage of its history. Well, I suppose that neither the Kirk nor anything else of man's making is altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which lay before it when it had got over its first perils. Scotch patriotism succeeded at last in the object it had so pa.s.sionately set its heart upon. It sent a king at last of the Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty; and it never knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between James Stuart and his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily as did his mother; and, when he got to England, he found people there who told him it would be easy to destroy it, and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him in trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland would have been to destroy the life out of Scotland. Thrust upon them by force, it would have been no more endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps sooner, have had what the Irish call the 'rale thing' back again. The political freedom of the country was now wrapped up in the Kirk; and the Stuarts were perfectly well aware of that, and for that very reason began their crusade against it.

And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, philosophical, intellectual thing which some people think it ought to have been, how would it have fared in that crusade; how altogether would it have encountered those surplices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of Claverhouse? It is hard to lose one's life for a 'perhaps,' and philosophical belief at the bottom means a 'perhaps' and nothing more.

For more than half the seventeenth century, the battle had to be fought out in Scotland, which in reality was the battle between liberty and despotism; and where, except in an intense, burning conviction that they were maintaining G.o.d's cause against the devil, could the poor Scotch people have found the strength for the unequal struggle which was forced upon them? Toleration is a good thing in its place; but you cannot tolerate what will not tolerate you, and is trying to cut your throat.

Enlightenment you cannot have enough of, but it must be true enlightenment, which sees a thing in all its bearings. In these matters the vital questions are not always those which appear on the surface; and in the pa.s.sion and resolution of brave and n.o.ble men there is often an inarticulate intelligence deeper than what can be expressed in words.

Action sometimes will hit the mark, when the spoken word either misses it or is but half the truth. On such subjects, and with common men, lat.i.tude of mind means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quant.i.ty of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad surface, the stream is shallow and languid; narrow the channel, and it becomes a driving force. Each may be well at its own time. The mill-race which drives the water-wheel is dispersed in rivulets over the meadow at its foot. The Covenanters fought the fight and won the victory, and then, and not till then, came the David Humes with their essays on miracles, and the Adam Smiths with their political economies, and steam-engines, and railroads, and philosophical inst.i.tutions, and all the other blessed or unblessed fruits of liberty.

But we may go further. Inst.i.tutions exist for men, not men for inst.i.tutions; and the ultimate test of any system of politics, or body of opinions, or form of belief, is the effect produced on the conduct and condition of the people who live and die under them. Now, I am not here to speak of Scotland of the present day. That, happily, is no business of mine. We have to do here with Scotland before the march of intellect; with Scotland of the last two centuries; with the three or four hundred thousand families, who for half-a-score of generations believed simply and firmly in the principles of the Reformation, and walked in the ways of it.

Looked at broadly, one would say they had been an eminently pious people. It is part of the complaint of modern philosophers about them, that religion, or superst.i.tion, or whatever they please to call it, had too much to do with their daily lives. So far as one can look into that commonplace round of things which historians never tell us about, there have rarely been seen in this world a set of people who have thought more about right and wrong, and the judgment about them of the upper powers. Long-headed, thrifty industry,--a sound hatred of waste, imprudence, idleness, extravagance,--the feet planted firmly upon the earth,--a conscientious sense that the worldly virtues are, nevertheless, very necessary virtues, that without these, honesty for one thing is not possible, and that without honesty no other excellence, religious or moral, is worth anything at all--this is the stuff of which Scotch life was made, and very good stuff it is. It has been called gloomy, austere, harsh, and such other epithets. A gifted modern writer has favoured us lately with long strings of extracts from the sermons of Scotch divines of the last century, taking hard views of human shortcomings and their probable consequences, and pa.s.sing hard censures upon the world and its amus.e.m.e.nts. Well, no doubt amus.e.m.e.nt is a very good thing; but I should rather infer from the vehemence and frequency of these denunciations that the people had not been in the habit of denying themselves too immoderately; and, after all, it is no very hard charge against those teachers that they thought more of duty than of pleasure. Sermons always exaggerate the theoretic side of things; and the most austere preacher, when he is out of the pulpit, and you meet him at the dinner-table, becomes singularly like other people. We may take courage, I think, we may believe safely that in those minister-ridden days, men were not altogether so miserable; we may hope that no large body of human beings have for any length of time been too dangerously afraid of enjoyment. Among other good qualities, the Scots have been distinguished for humour--not for venomous wit, but for kindly, genial humour, which half loves what it laughs at--and this alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it belongs have not looked too exclusively on the gloomy side of the world. I should rather say that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry, the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well, under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born--this through the week, and at the end of it the 'Cottar's Sat.u.r.day Night'--the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together, and irradiated with a sacred presence.--Happiness! such happiness as we human creatures are likely to know upon this world, will be found there, if anywhere.

The author of the 'History of Civilisation' makes a nave remark in connexion with this subject. Speaking of the other country, which he censures equally with Scotland for its slavery to superst.i.tion, he says of the Spaniards that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious, temperate, pious people, innocent in their habits, affectionate in their families, full of humour, vivacity, and shrewdness, yet that all this 'has availed them nothing'--'has availed them nothing,' that is his expression--because they are loyal, because they are credulous, because they are contented, because they have not apprehended the first commandment of the new covenant: 'Thou shalt get on and make money, and better thy condition in life;' because, therefore, they have added nothing to the scientific knowledge, the wealth, and the progress of mankind. Without these, it seems, the old-fashioned virtues avail nothing. They avail a great deal to human happiness. Applied science, and steam, and railroads, and machinery, enable an ever-increasing number of people to live upon the earth; but the happiness of those people remains, so far as I know, dependent very much on the old conditions. I should be glad to believe that the new views of things will produce effects upon the character in the long run half so beautiful.

There is much more to say on this subject, were there time to say it, but I will not trespa.s.s too far upon your patience; and I would gladly have ended here, had not the mention of Spain suggested one other topic, which I should not leave unnoticed. The Spain of Cervantes and Don Quixote was the Spain of the Inquisition. The Scotland of Knox and Melville was the Scotland of the witch trials and witch burnings. The belief in witches was common to all the world. The prosecution and punishment of the poor creatures was more conspicuous in Scotland when the Kirk was most powerful; in England and New England, when Puritan principles were also dominant there. It is easy to understand the reasons. Evil of all kinds was supposed to be the work of a personal devil; and in the general horror of evil, this particular form of it, in which the devil was thought especially active, excited the most pa.s.sionate detestation. Thus, even the best men lent themselves unconsciously to the most detestable cruelty. Knox himself is not free from reproach. A poor woman was burned at St. Andrews when he was living there, and when a word from him would have saved her. It remains a lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to knowledge, is no subst.i.tute for it; that when conscience undertakes to dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.

It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the official report of the proceedings:--Towards the end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch'

called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again.

Her legs were put in the caschilaws--an iron frame which was gradually heated till it burned into the flesh--but no confession could be wrung from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched, perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was placed in the 'lang irons'--some accursed instrument; I know not what.

Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home, crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumbscrew, which brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything they wished. She confessed her witchcraft--so tried, she would have confessed to the seven deadly sins--and then she was burned, recalling her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence.

It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more wholesome lesson--more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand that in their most cherished convictions, when they pa.s.s beyond the limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.

The student running over the records of other times finds certain salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is pa.s.sed over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation, may call us a nation of a.s.sa.s.sins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in Scottish character.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.[C]

Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they could have kept clear of superst.i.tion, and followed on upon the track of the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to understand the conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee, and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral n.o.bleness there was among them; surely there were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time, and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's acceptance of it? and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right have we to hope that with the same natures, the same pa.s.sions, the same understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate possession of the vacant pedestal?

I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of my friend. In the opinion even of Goethe, who was not troubled with credulity, the human race can never attain to anything higher than Christianity--if we mean by Christianity the religion which was revealed to the world in the teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more limited reprobation by our own Reformers of the creed of mediaeval Europe is not more just or philosophical.

Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth, hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pa.s.s over into the possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.

We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable epitaph. If Catholicism really is pa.s.sing away, if it has done its work, and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us farewell, and give us G.o.d speed on our further journey.

In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers, and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing; and habit and superst.i.tion cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful symbolism becomes at last no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the era of the Caesars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in the form which it a.s.sumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.

Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the G.o.ds. There is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small wickedness of common men offers no a.n.a.logy. Moreover, these and other such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once a.s.sumed an importance, the intensity of which made every other question insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how G.o.d could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity of philosophic speculation.

Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be, the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether _matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. G.o.d would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its purity tainted by the pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes of its companion--the fleshly l.u.s.ts which waged perpetual war against the soul.

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its control.

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy G.o.d whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle, and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the h.e.l.lenists, the Therapeutae, those strange Essene communists, with the innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the best of the remainder had ranged themselves--Manicheism and Catholic Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian--Catholicism in which the Jewish--element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over words and straws.

Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in _matter_, it was so far a conclusion which both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the h.e.l.lenistic Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil had crept into matter. He could not allow that what G.o.d had created could be of its own nature imperfect. G.o.d made it very good; some other cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.

In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither decay nor death, nor unruly appet.i.te, nor any change or infirmity, was pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.

But with the fatal apple all this fair scene pa.s.sed away, and creation as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease, storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned pa.s.sions of the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic strength--the carnal l.u.s.ts, unruly appet.i.tes, jealousies, hatreds, rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal change which had pa.s.sed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore, thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a 'possession' by the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from Adam till Christ, groaned and travailed under Satan's power. The n.o.bler nature in man still made itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over-strong for it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protestants are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to modern thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; because from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable. Without his flesh, man was not, or would cease to be. But the natural organisation of the flesh was infected with evil, and unless organisation could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom G.o.d had first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a new organic cell; and around it, through the virtue of his creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it pa.s.sed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, He took a human body, and He kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to a.s.sure their senses. But s.p.a.ce had no power over it, nor any of the material obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and his body obeyed.

He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone whither who could tell? At last He pa.s.sed away to heaven; but while in heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!--his very material body, in which and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material substance, to leaven the old natural substance and a.s.similate it to itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death, but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had no power. Circ.u.mcision availed nothing, nor uncirc.u.mcision--but a _new creature_--and this new creature, which the child first put on in baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to render a more complete obedience, he would at last pa.s.s away to G.o.d through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes, like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of G.o.d.

The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but G.o.d? G.o.d Himself! Who but G.o.d could have wrested his prize from a power which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal adversary? He was G.o.d. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the substance which He a.s.sumed; and being Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.

Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints. They desired to overcome their animal bodies, and antic.i.p.ate in life the work of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and Him.

Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the n.o.blest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of G.o.d, the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests, a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, represented Christ and administered his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was presented in the Temple, and first entered on his Father's business; and the baptised child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to a.s.sist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the union. Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and move is soiled, and Christ has antic.i.p.ated our wants. Christ did penance forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his own flesh--for that which was already perfect did not need subduing--but to give to penance a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with us--when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near, beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death, but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last anointing before his pa.s.sion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem to decay--to decay--but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but pa.s.ses off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where there is no sin, and G.o.d is all and in all!

FOOTNOTES:

[C] From the _Leader_, 1851.

A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.[D]

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed pract.i.tioner had been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor b.u.t.ts, it is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would at present be found. Const.i.tutions have changed with habits of life, and the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor b.u.t.ts had no cognizance; new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been thousands and tens of thousands.

Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased, might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute, without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.

A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr. Jellinger Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times.' He appealed to the common sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious, had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the confusion. We do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not; but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us with an unintelligent and languid a.s.sent, were set thinking for ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea for a clear one.

It was an excellent ill.u.s.tration of the true claims of authority and of the value of open enquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to his own opinion as the instructed man. The instructed man, however right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers it, and all of us are the better for the business.

Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened when the only reply to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer-Royal, where the rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer-Royal--as it was, if we remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. Symond's presumption--would have brought an action against him in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of course, he would have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso, and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.

As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its capacity for self-defence, so practically, in every subject except one, errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and the liberty of opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so evident that to argue in favour of it is almost absurd--might be expected to have been applied, as a matter of course, to the one subject where mistake is supposed to be fatal,--where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity.

Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk most of faith show least that they possess it. But there are deeper and more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in courtesy. They are generalisations which are not considered likely to require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire, it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick, the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in themselves which correspond to their creed: the more pa.s.sionate, or--as some would say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarra.s.sment to the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of Satan.

Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more formidable than they are at present--much about 'the right of private judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it; but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases, is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression, as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion, the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere, and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony with common sense and common subjects have not been the least successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing, or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not force a way into his house and prevent him.' The ill.u.s.tration fails of its purpose.

In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but n.o.body ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.