LETTER III.
TO A LADY WHO LAMENTED THAT HER SON HAD INTELLECTUAL DOUBTS CONCERNING THE DOGMAS OF THE CHURCH.
The situation of mother and son a very common one—Painful only when the parties are in earnest—The knowledge of the difference evidence of a deeper unity—Value of honesty—Evil of a splendid official religion not believed by men of culture—Diversity of belief an evidence of religious vitality—Criticism not to be ignored—Desire for the highest attainable truth—Letter from Lady Westmorland about her son, Julian Fane.
The difference which you describe as having arisen between your son and you on the most grave and important subject which can occupy the thoughts of men, gives the outline of a situation painful to both the parties concerned, and which lays on each of them new and delicate obligations. You do not know how common this situation is, and how sadly it interferes with the happiness of the very best and most pure-minded souls alive. For such a situation produces pain only where both parties are earnest and sincere; and the more earnest both are, the more painful does the situation become. If you and your son thought of religion merely from the conventional point of view, as the world does only too easily, you would meet on a common ground, and might pass through life without ever becoming aware of any gulf of separation, even though the hollowness of your several professions were of widely different kinds. But as it happens, unfortunately for your peace (yet would you have it otherwise?), that you are both in earnest, both anxious to believe what is true and do what you believe to be right, you are likely to cause each other much suffering of a kind altogether unknown to less honorable and devoted natures. There are certain forms of suffering which affect only the tenderest and truest hearts; they have so many privileges, that this pain has been imposed upon them as the shadow of their sunshine.
Let me suggest, as some ground of consolation and of hope, that your very knowledge of the difference which pains you is in itself the evidence of a deeper unity. If your son has told you the full truth about the changes in his belief, it is probably because you yourself have educated him in the habit of truthfulness, which is as much a law of religion as it is of honor. Do you wish this part of his education to be enfeebled or obliterated? Could the Church herself reasonably or consistently blame him for practising the one virtue which, in a peaceful and luxurious society, demands a certain exercise of courage? Our beliefs are independent of our will, but our honesty is not; and he who keeps his honesty keeps one of the most precious possessions of all true Christians and gentlemen. What state of society can be more repugnant to high religious feeling than a state of smooth external unanimity combined with the indifference of the heart, a state in which some splendid official religion performs its daily ceremonies as the costliest functionary of the Government, whilst the men of culture take a share in them out of conformity to the customs of society, without either the assent of the intellect or the emotion of the soul? All periods of great religious vitality have been marked by great and open diversity of belief; and to this day those countries where religion is most alive are the farthest removed from unanimity in the details of religious doctrine. If your son thinks these things of such importance to his conscience that he feels compelled to inflict upon you the slightest pain on their account, you may rest assured that his religious fibre is still full of vitality. If it were deadened, he would argue very much as follows. He would say: “These old doctrines of the Church are not of sufficient consequence for me to disturb my mother about them. What is the use of alluding to them ever?” And then you would have no anxiety; and he himself would have the feeling of settled peace which comes over a battle-field when the dead are buried out of sight. It is the peculiarity—some would say the evil, but I cannot think it an evil—of an age of great intellectual activity to produce an amount of critical inquiry into religious doctrine which is entirely unknown to times of simple tradition. And in these days the critical tendency has received a novel stimulus from the successive suggestions of scientific discovery. No one who, like your son, fully shares in the intellectual life of the times in which he lives, can live as if this criticism did not exist. If he affected to ignore it, as an objection already answered, there would be disingenuousness in the affectation. Fifty years ago, even twenty or thirty years ago, a highly intellectual young man might have hardened into the fixed convictions of middle age without any external disturbance, except such as might have been easily avoided. The criticism existed then, in certain circles; but it was not in the air, as it is now. The life of mankind resembles that of a brook which has its times of tranquillity, but farther on its times of trouble and unrest. Our immediate forefathers had the peaceful time for their lot; those who went before them had passed over very rough ground at the Reformation. For us, in our turn, comes the recurrent restlessness, though not in the same place. What we are going to, who can tell? What we suffer just now, you and many others know too accurately. There are gulfs of separation in homes of the most perfect love. Our only hope of preserving what is best in that purest of earthly felicities lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours, and a deep trust that the loyal pursuit of truth cannot but be in perfect accordance with the intentions of the Creator, who endowed the noblest races of mankind with the indefatigable curiosity of science. Not to inquire was possible for our forefathers, but it is not possible for us. With our intellectual growth has come an irrepressible anxiety to possess the highest truth attainable by us. This desire is not sinful, not presumptuous, but really one of the best and purest of our instincts, being nothing else than the sterling honesty of the intellect, seeking the harmony of concordant truth, and utterly disinterested.
I may quote, as an illustration of the tendencies prevalent amongst the noblest and most cultivated young men, a letter from Lady Westmorland to Mr. Robert Lytton about her accomplished son, the now celebrated Julian Fane. “We had,” she said, “several conversations, during his last illness, upon religious subjects, about which he had his own peculiar views. The disputes and animosities between High and Low Church, and all the feuds of religious sectarianism, caused him the deepest disgust. I think, indeed, that he carried this feeling too far. He had a horror of cant, which I also think was exaggerated; for it gave him a repulsion for all outward show of religious observances. He often told me that he never missed the practice of prayer, at morning and evening, and at other times. But his prayers were his own: his own thoughts in his own words. He said that he could not pray in the set words of another; nor unless he was alone. As to joining in family prayers, or praying at church, he found it impossible. He constantly read the New Testament. He deprecated the indiscriminate reading of the Bible. He firmly believed in the efficacy of sincere prayer; and was always pleased when I told him I had prayed for him.”
To this it may be added, that many recent conversions to the Church of Rome, though apparently of an exactly opposite character, have in reality also been brought about by the scientific inquiries of the age. The religious sentiment, alarmed at the prospect of a possible taking away of that which it feeds upon, has sought in many instances to preserve it permanently under the guardianship of the strongest ecclesiastical authority. In an age of less intellectual disturbance this anxiety would scarcely have been felt; and the degree of authority claimed by one of the reformed Churches would have been accepted as sufficient. Here again the agitations of the modern intellect have caused division in families; and as you are lamenting the heterodoxy of your son, so other parents regret the Roman orthodoxy of theirs.