III
But I fear we have a great deal more to empty out of this world of his.
To begin with, we must jettison religion; or at any rate all religion that gets near to definition by words in a Credo. Religious formulae I think we may say that he hated; and equally that he had little use for ministers of religion. I can recall but one sympathetic portrait of an Anglican parson—the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Minor Canon of Cloisterham—and that in his last book, and with scarcely a shadow of a quality impinged upon it by his vocation, by Holy Orders: Crisparkle, Minor Canon and muscular Christian, well visualised, is a good fellow just as Tartar in the same story is a good fellow: nothing more. George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who disliked ecclesiastics, have to give them understanding, even sympathy, in some degree. Dickens merely neglects them. Unaccredited missionaries of the Gospel are humbugs all, in Dickens; uneducated Pharisees, Stiggins’s, Chadbands; devourers of widows’ (and widowers’) houses; spongers on the kindness and credulity of poor folk just a little more ignorant than they, while far more innocent. As for sacred edifices—cathedrals, churches—Dickens uses them as picturesque, romantic, mouldy, just as suits his convenience—a last harbourage for Little Nell or an object with a steeple suggesting to Mr. Wemmick—“Hullo! here’s a church!... let’s get married!” If Dickens ever conceives of a church as a tabernacle of any faith, I have yet to find the passage.
You must remember that, while Dickens wrote, Tractarian Movements, Unitarian Movements, Positivist Movements—Wiseman’s claim, Newman’s secession, the Gorham judgment, Bishop Colenso’s heresies—Darwin’s hypothesis, Huxley’s agnostic rejection of doctrine, and so on—that all these were agitating men’s thoughts as with a succession of shocks of earthquake. But all these passed Dickens by, as little observed as felt by him: simply disregarded.