Before resuming my religious history, I ought to mention an influence which was supposed by my friends to have been powerful over me, but which in reality had slightly affected the current of my thinking. Our medical adviser was a surgeon rather advanced in years, and whose private fortune made him independent of professional success. As time went on, he allowed himself to be more and more replaced by his assistant, Mr. Uttley, one of the most remarkable characters I ever met with. In those days, in a northern provincial town, it required immense courage to avow religious heterodoxy of any advanced kind, yet Mr. Uttley said with the utmost simplicity that he was an atheist, and the religious world called him "Uttley the Atheist," a title which he accepted as naturally as if it implied no contempt or antagonism whatever. He was by no means devoid of physical courage also, for I remember that at one time he rode an ugly brute that had a most dangerous habit of bolting, and he would not permit me to mount her. He was excessively temperate in his habits, never drinking anything stronger than water, except, perhaps, a cup of tea (I am not sure about the tea), and never eating more than he believed to be necessary to health. He maintained the doctrine that hunger remains for a time after the stomach has had enough, and that if you go on eating to satiety you are intemperate. He disliked, and I believe despised, the habit of stuffing on festive occasions, which used to be common in the wealthier middle classes. I confess that Mr. Uttley's fearless honesty and steady abstemiousness impressed me with the admiration that one cannot but feel for the great virtues, by whomsoever practised; but Mr. Uttley had a third virtue, which is so rare in England as to be almost unintelligible to the majority,—he looked with the most serene indifference on social struggles, on the arts by which people rise in the world. Perfectly contented with his own station in life, and a man of remarkably few wants, he lived on from year to year without ambition, finding his chief interest in the pursuit of his profession, and his greatest pleasure in his books. He so little attempted to make a proselyte of me that, when at a later period I told him of a certain change of views, concerning which more will be said in the sequel, he was unaffectedly surprised by it, and said that he had never supposed me to be other than what I appeared to the world in general, an ordinary member of the Church of England. My intimate knowledge of Mr. Uttley's remarkable character must have had, nevertheless, a certain influence in this way, that it enabled me to estimate the vulgar attacks on infidels at their true worth; and though my own theistic beliefs were very strong, I knew from this example that an atheist was not necessarily a monster.
The only occasions that I remember in youth when Mr. Uttley might have influenced me were these two. Being curious to know about opinions from those who really held them, and being already convinced that we cannot really know them from the misrepresentations of their enemies, I once asked Mr. Uttley what atheism really was, and why it recommended itself to him. He replied that atheism was, in his view, the acceptance of the smaller of two difficulties, both of which were still very great. The smaller difficulty for him was to believe in the self-existence of the universe; the greater was to believe in a single Being, without a beginning, who could create millions of solar systems; and as one or the other must be self-existent the difficulty about self-existence was common to both cases. The well-known argument from design did not convince him, as he believed in a continual process of natural adjustment of creatures to their environment,—a theory resembling that of Darwin, but not yet so complete. I listened to Mr. Uttley's account of his views with much interest; but they had no influence on my own, as it seemed to me much easier to refer everything to an intelligent Creator than to believe in the self-existence of all the intricate organizations that we see. Still, I was not indignant, as the reader may think I ought to have been. It seemed to me quite natural that thoughtful men should hold different opinions on a subject of such infinite difficulty.
The other occasion was, when in the vigor of youthful Protestantism I happened to say something against the Church of Rome. Mr. Uttley very quietly and kindly told me that I was unjust towards that Church, and I asked him where the injustice lay. "It lies in this," he replied, "that you despise the dogmas of the Church of Rome as resting only on the authority of priests, whereas the case of that Church is not exceptional or peculiar, as all dogmas rest ultimately on the authority of priests." To this I naturally answered that Scriptural authority was higher; but Mr. Uttley answered,—"The Roman Catholics themselves appeal to Scriptural authority as the Protestants do; but it is still the priests who have decided which books are sacred, and how they are to be interpreted." His conversation was not longer than my report of it, and it occurred when I met Mr. Uttley accidentally in the street; but though short, it was of some importance, as I happened at that time to be exercised in my mind about what Mr. Bardsley had told us concerning "German Neology." Subsequent observation has led me to believe that Mr. Uttley attributed more originating authority to priests than really belongs to them. It seems to me now that they take up and consecrate popular beliefs that may be of use, and that they drop and discard, either tacitly or openly, those beliefs which are no longer popular. Both processes have been going on, for some years very visibly in the Church of Rome, and the second of the two is plainly in operation in the Church of England.
CHAPTER XIV.
1851.
First visit to London in 1851.—My first impression of the place.— Nostalgia of the country.—Westminster.—The Royal Academy.—Resolution never to go to London again.—Reason why this resolution was afterwards broken.
In the year 1851 I went to London for the first time, to see the Great Exhibition. Our little party consisted only of my guardian, my aunt, and myself.
My first impression of London was exactly what it has ever since remained. It seemed to me the most disagreeable place I had ever seen, and I wondered how anybody could live there who was not absolutely compelled to do so. At that time I did not understand the only valid reason for living in London, which is the satisfaction of meeting with intelligent people who know something about what interests you, and do not consider you eccentric because you take an interest in something that is not precisely and exclusively money-making.
My aunts knew nobody in London except one or two ladies of rank superior to their own, on whom we made formal calls, which was a sort of human intercourse that I heartily detested, as I detest it to this day.
Our lodgings were in Baker Street, which, after our pure air, open scenery, and complete liberty at Hollins, seemed to me like a prison. The lodgings were not particularly clean—the carpets, especially, seemed as if they had never been taken up. The air was heavy, the water was bad (our water at Hollins was clearer than glass, and if you poured a goblet of it beady bubbles clung to the sides), there was no view except up street and down street, and the noise was perpetual. A Londoner would take these inconveniences as a matter of course and be insensible to them, but to me they were so unpleasant that I suffered from nostalgia of the country all the time.