Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Equipped mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest self-devotion, he had been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the process of the translation of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had come to reflect upon the problem which the Old Testament presents. In a manner which is altogether marvellous he worked out critical conclusions parallel to those of Old Testament scholars on the Continent. He was never really an expert, but in his main contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite severe pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that biblical studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a development in which scholars of these nations are not behind the best scholars of the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson Smith in Edinburgh and of Dr. Briggs in New York have now little living interest. Yet biblical studies in Scotland and America were incalculably furthered by those discussions. The publication of a book like Supernatural Religion, 1872, illustrates a proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal circles, for taking up a contention just when those who made it and have lived with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to warrant the assertions above made.
More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service rendered to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and interpretation of religion at the hands of literary men. That country and age may be esteemed fortunate in which religion occupies a place such that it compels the attention of men of genius. In the history of culture this has by no means always been the case. That these men do not always speak the language of edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite worth is that the largest minds of the generation shall engage themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought concerning Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for example, of Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold—to mention only types.
[CARLYLE]
Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the Border; his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his mother with her frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he learned Latin, 'the priestliest man I ever beheld in any ecclesiastical guise.' The picture of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the Church. Such had been his mother's prayer. He took his arts course in Edinburgh. In the university, he says, 'there was much talk about progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.' He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the man for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become intellectually incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely miserable, bordering upon despair. He has described his spiritual deliverance: 'Precisely that befel me which the Methodists call their conversion, the deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth a sacred flame of joy in me.' With Sartor Resartus his message to the world began. It was printed in Fraser's Magazine in 1833, but not published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message. Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.
He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to be alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes needless. Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he desired he in no small measure achieved—that his readers should be arrested and feel themselves face to face with reality. His startling intuition, his intellectual uprightness, his grasp upon things as they are, his passion for what ought to be, made a great impression upon his age. It was in itself a religious influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of sternest truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler meaning than they had had before. His French Revolution, his papers on Chartism, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from 1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work. In his brooding sympathy with the downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the social movement. He felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no one has told us with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our democratic institutions. His word was a great corrective for much 'rose-water' optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is, however, often lacking. The mythology of an absentee God had faded from him. Yet the God who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the sun in the heavens, was a God over the world, to judge it inexorably. Again, it is not difficult to accumulate evidence in his words which looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the religious benefit of pantheism, the sense that God is in his world, Carlyle often loses.
Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it difficult to realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a different look. Carlyle was never weary of pouring out the vials of his contempt on 'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was a man more opposed to the idea of a godless world, in which man is his own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence. His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable appeal to him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superstitions and hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty was so ineffable, all effort to approach him so unworthy, that almost instinctively he would call upon the man who made the effort, to desist. So magnificent, all his life long, had been his protest against the credulity and stupidity of men, against beliefs which assert the impossible and blink the facts, that, for himself, the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to say, in their naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were half-querulously denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should be found credulous and self-deceived. From this titan labouring at the foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at ships as they pass by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was Carlyle's friend.
[EMERSON]
Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these voices—Newman, Carlyle, Goethe—there came to us in the Oxford of my youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear and pure voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new and moving and unforgetable as those others. Lowell has described the apparition of Emerson to your young generation here. He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination.' Then he quotes as one of the most memorable passages in English speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, confiding themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying a perception which was stirring in their hearts, working through their hands, dominating their whole being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim insistence upon labour and righteousness but of his scorn of happiness, and then says: 'But Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness and veracity. In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope, that was Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this Emerson was great.'