The Silent Isle

by Arthur Christopher Benson

The result is that the little girls love him, the boys laugh at him, the women admire him, the men regard him as not quite a man. The only objects for which he raises money diligently are additions to the furniture of the church; he takes a languid interest in foreign missions, he mistrusts science, and social questions he frankly dislikes. I have heard him say, with an air of deep conviction, when the question of the unemployed is raised, "After all, we must remember that the only possible solution of these sad difficulties is a spiritual one."

The pity of it all is that he is so entirely complacent, so absolutely unaware that there is anything amiss. He does not see that people have to be tenderly and simply wooed to religion, and that they have to be led to take an interest in their own characters and lives. His idea is that the Church is there, a holy and venerable institution, with undeniable claims on the allegiance and loyalty of all. Worship is to him a man's first duty and privilege; and if he finds that one of his parishioners thinks the services tedious, tiresome, or unintelligible, he looks upon him as a child of wrath, perverse and ungodly. The one chance a clergyman has to gain the confidence of the men of his congregation is when he prepares the boys for confirmation; but the vicar sees them, each alone, week after week, and initiates them into the theory of the Visible Church and the advisability of regular confession. I confess sadly that it does not seem to me to resemble Christianity at all; in the place of the shrewd, simple, tender, and wise teaching of Christ about daily life and effort, the duties of kindness, purity, unselfishness, he gives an elaborate picture of rites and ceremonies, of mystical and spiritual agencies, which play little part in the life of a day-labourer's son. If he would learn something about the points of a horse instead of about the points of an angel, if he would study the rotation of the crops instead of the rotation of Easter-tide, he would find himself far more in line with his flock: if he would busy himself with getting the boys and girls good places, he would soon have a niche in the hearts of his parishioners; all that he does is to give a ploughboy, who is going off to a neighbouring farm, a little manual of devotion, with ugly and sentimental chromo-lithographs, and beg him to use it night and morning.

His wife is of the same type, a prim and colourless woman, who believes intensely in her husband, and devotes herself to furthering his work. They have three rather priggish children, whose greatest punishment is not to be allowed to teach in the Sunday-school.

One does not like to laugh at a man whose whole life is spent in doing what he believes to be right; but he seems to have no hold on realities, and to be quite unable to throw himself, by imagination or sympathy, into what his people want or need. He has no belief in secular education, and thinks it makes people discontented and faithless. He is generous with his money, spending lavishly on the Church, but he does not believe in what he calls indiscriminate charity. The incident which has touched him more than any other in the course of his ministry, he will tell you, is when a poor old woman on her death-bed confided to him a few shillings to be spent on providing an altar-frontal. He gives a Sunday-school feast every year, which begins with a versicle and a response. "Thou openest Thine Hand," he says in a rich voice and the children pipe in chorus, "And fillest all things living with plenteousness." The day ends with a little service, which he thoroughly enjoys.

Even the services themselves are a dreary business, because he insists on the whole thing being choral; and little boys in short cassocks, with stocking-legs underneath, howl the responses and monotone the prayers to the accompaniment of a loud raw organ. He reads the lessons in what he calls a devotional way, which consists in reciting all episodes alike, the song of Deborah or the victories of Gideon, as if they were melancholy and pathetic reflections. He is fond of Gregorians and plain-song. The choirmen consist of a scrofulous invalid, his own gardener and coachman, and a bankrupt carpenter, given to drink and profuse repentance. But he is careful to say that he did not suggest the introduction of a choral service—"it was forced upon him by the wish of certain earnest and devoted helpers."

The fact is that the man is, as the children say, a real goose. There is nothing manly, vigorous, or sensible about him; he sometimes deplores the indifference of his parishioners to what he calls true Churchmanship, but he never thinks of comparing his ideal with the Gospel or with the actual conditions of the world. He seems to be hopelessly befogged; he is as certain as only a virtuous or stupid man can be that the religious system which he inculcates is the exact and deliberate development of the Spirit of Christ; and to hear him talk, you would suppose that the only joy in heaven resulted from a rumour that another church was added to the list of sanctuaries which had daily matins. The hopeless difficulty is that he considers his system so pure and lovely that to modify it in any way would seem to be a grievous compromise with worldliness, a violation of his high calling; he looks forward confidently to the time when the people of England will be a devotional and submissive flock, crowding daily to their village sanctuaries, and going back home with the glow and glory of the heavenly mysteries radiating from them in grave smiles and pious ejaculations.

It all seems to me a profoundly melancholy business. One does not wish to prevent people from worshipping God in the vicar's way, if they feel that thus they draw near to the divine presence; but it can only be a very small minority who will ever find satisfaction in this particular type of religion; and I must add that, for myself, I would not unwillingly see that minority reduced. It is a narrow, stuffy, and secluded region at best, remote from the open air, little alive to simplicity, manliness, humour, courage, and cheerfulness. What I resent about it is the solemn certainty with which this system is announced to be the eternal purpose and design of God for man. I am not in a position to say that it is not God's purpose, but nothing that I see in the world convinces me of it; and in any case I can only feel that if this type of religion continues to spread, which I believe it will do, if the better, more unaffected, more intellectual, more manly men begin to be alienated from the clerical profession, it will end in a complete indifference on the part of the nation to religion at all. The fault lies largely, I believe, with the seminaries. They have set up so exotic a standard, screwed up the ecclesiastical tone so high, that few but timid, unintellectual, cautious, and sentimental people will embrace a vocation where so many pledges have to be given. The type of old-fashioned village clergyman, who was at all events a man among men, kindly, generous, hospitable, tolerant, and sensible, seems doomed to extinction, and I cannot help thinking that it is a grievous pity. The new type of clergyman would think, on the other hand, that their disappearance is an unmixed blessing. They would say that they were sloppy, self-indulgent, secular persons, and that the improvement in tone and standard among the clergy was a pure gain; it all depends upon whether you put the social or the priestly functions of the clergyman highest. I am inclined to rate their social value very high, but then I prefer the parson to the priest. I dislike the idea of a priestly caste, an ecclesiastical tradition, a body of people who have the administering of mysterious spiritual secrets. I want to bring religion home to ordinary people, not to segregate it. I would rather have in every parish a wise and kindly man with the same interests as his neighbours, but with a good simple standard of virtuous and brotherly living, than a man endowed with spiritual powers and influences, upholding a standard of life that is subtle, delicate, and refined indeed, but which is neither simple nor practical, and to which the ordinary human being cannot conform, because it lies quite outside of his range of thought. To my mind, the essence of the Gospel is liberty and simplicity; but the Gospel of ecclesiasticism is neither simple nor free.

XLI

It was a pleasant, fresh autumn day, and the philosopher was in a good temper. He was my walking companion for that afternoon. He is always in a good temper, for the matter of that, but his temper has different kinds of goodness. He is always courteous and amiable; but sometimes he has a gentle irony about him and evades all attempts to be serious—to-day, however, he was both benevolent and expansive; and I plunged into his vast mind like a diver leaping headlong from a splash-board.

Let me describe my philosopher first. He is not what is called a social philosopher, a pretentious hedonist, who talks continuously and floridly about himself. I know one such, of whom an enthusiastic maiden said, in a confidential moment, that he seemed to her exactly like Goethe without any of his horrid immorality. Neither is he a technical philosopher, a dreary, hurrying man, travel-stained by faring through the ultimate, spectacled, cadaverous, uncertain of movement, inarticulate of speech. No, my philosopher is a trim, well-brushed man of the world, rather scrupulous about social conventions, as vigorous as Mr. Greatheart, and with a tenderness for the feebler sort of pilgrims. To-day he was blithe and yet serious; he allowed me to ask him questions, and he explained to me technical terms. I felt like a child dandled in the arms of a sage, allowed to blow upon his watch till it opened, and to pull his beard. "No," he said, "I don't advise you, at your age, to try and study philosophy. It requires rather a peculiar kind of mind. You will have to divest words of poetical associations and half-meanings, and arrive at a kind of mathematical appreciation of their value. You had much better talk to me, if you care to, and I will tell you all I can. Besides," he added, "much modern philosophy is a criticism of methods; it has become so special a business that we have most of us drifted quite beyond the horizon, like the higher mathematicians, into questions that have no direct meaning for the ordinary mind. We want a philosopher with a power of literary expression, who can make some attempt to translate our results into ordinary language." "Why could you not do it?" I said, "Ah," said he, "that is not my line! It needs a certain missionary spirit. The thing amuses and interests me; but I don't feel sure that it can be made intelligible—and moreover, I do not think it would be wholly profitable either. We have not determined enough; besides, ordinary people had better act by intuition rather than by reason. There are, too, many data missing, and perhaps the men of science will some day be in a position to give us some, but they have not got far enough yet."