“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,
Voll Schmerz und voller Hohn!
O Haupt zu Spott gebunden
Mit einer Dornenkron,
O Haupt sonst schön gezieret
Mit höchster Ehr und Zier,
Jetzt aber hoch schimpfiret:
Gegrüsset seist du mir!”
Though the German translation does not come near the powerful majesty of the original, yet such was the effect produced on me that I saw the bleeding head before my eyes, and cried and cried until my mother had to comfort me by assuring me that the sufferer was now in Heaven and that it was only a song to be sung in church. How deeply such scenes seem engraved on the memory; how vividly they return when the rubbish of many years is swept away and all is again as it was then, and the caput cruentatum looks down on us once more, as it did then, with the human eyes full of divine love, so truly human that one could say with St. Bernard, “Tuum caput huc inclina, in meis pausa brachiis.” But willingly as I listened to these readings at home, and full as my heart was of love to Christ, I suffered intensely when I was taken to church as a young boy. It was a very large church, and in winter bitterly cold. Even though I liked the singing, the long sermon was real torture to me. I could not understand a word of it, and being thinly clad my teeth would have chattered if I had not been told that it was wrong “to make a noise in church.” Oh! what misery is inflicted on childhood by this enforced attendance at church. When a church can be warmed the suffering is less intense, but a huge whitewashed church that feels like an ice-cellar is about the worst torture that human ingenuity could have invented to make children hate the very name of church. These early impressions often remain for life, and the worst of it is that the idea remains in the minds of children, and of grown-up people too, that by going to church and repeating the same prayers over and over again, and listening to long and often dreary sermons, they are actually doing a service to God (Gottesdienst). Why does no new prophet arise and say in the name of God, as David did in the name of Jehovah, “Sermons and long prayers ‘thou didst not desire’”?
Many years later I had to discuss the same question with Keshub Chunder Sen, the Indian Reformer. He wanted to know what kind of service should be adopted by his new church, the Brahmo Somaj; his friends thought of sermons, singing, and processions with flags and flowers through the streets. “No,” I said to him, “service of God should be service of men; if you want divine service, let it be a real service, such as God would approve of. Let other people go to church, to their mosques or their temples, but take you your own friends on certain days of the week to whatever you like to call your meeting-place, and after a short prayer or a few words of advice send some of them to the poorest streets in the city, others to the prisons, others to the hospitals. Let them pray with all who wish to pray, but let them speak words of true love and comfort also, and when they can, let them help them with their alms. That would be a real Divine Service and a divine Sunday for you, and you would all come home, it may be sadder, but certainly wiser and better men.”
I am afraid he did not agree with me. He did not think that true religion was to visit the poor and the afflicted. That might do for a practical people like the English, but the Hindu wanted something else, he wanted some outward show and ceremony for the people, and at the same time some silent communion with God. Who can tell what different people understand by religion? and who can prescribe the spiritual food that is best for them? “Only,” I said, “do not call it practical to encourage millions of people to waste hours and hours in mere repetition, and to spend millions and millions in supplying this cold comfort, when next door to the magnificent cathedral there are squalid streets, and squalid houses, and squalid beds to lie and die on.”
The religious and devotional element is very strong in Germany, but the churches are mostly empty. A German keeps his religion for weekdays rather than for Sunday. When the German regiments marched, and when they made ready for battle, they did not sing ribald songs, they sang the songs of Luther and Paul Gerhard, which they knew by heart and which strengthened them to face death as it ought to be faced.
Fortunately, while enforced attendance at church was apt to produce the strongest aversion in the young heart against anything that was called religion, religious instruction both at home and at school too was excellent, and undid much of the mischief that had been done during cold winter days. True religious sentiments can be planted in the soul at home only, by a mother better even than by a father. The sense of a divine presence everywhere, πἁντα πλἡρη θεὡν, once planted in the heart of a child remains for life. Of course the child soon begins to argue, and says to his mother that God cannot be at the same time in two rooms. But only let a mother show to the child the rays of the sun in the sky, in the streets, and in every corner of the house, and it will begin to understand that nothing can be hid from the eyes of Him who is greater than the sun. And when a child doubts whether the voice of conscience can be the voice of God, and asks how he could hear that voice without seeing the speaker, ask him only whose voice it can be that tells him not to do what he himself wishes to do, and not to say what he could say without any fear of men; and his idea of God will be raised from that of a visible being like the sun, to the concept of a presence that never vanishes, that is not only without, in the sky, in the mountains, and in the storm, but nearer also within, in the sense of fear, in the sense of shame, and in the hope of pardon and love.
At school our religious teaching was chiefly historical and moral. There was no difficulty in finding proper teachers for that, and there were no attempts on the part of parents to interfere with religious instruction or to demand separate teaching for each sect. It is true that religious sects are not so numerous in Germany as they are in England. Some, though by no means all, children of Roman Catholic and Jewish parents were allowed to be absent from religious lessons. But most parents knew that the history of the Jewish religion would be taught at school in so impartial and truly historical a spirit as never to offend Jewish children. Respect for historical truth, and an implanted sense of the reverence due to children, would keep any teacher from making the history of the Christian Church, whether before or after the Reformation, an excuse for offending one of the little ones committed to his care. If Jews or Roman Catholics wished for any special religious instruction it was given by their own priests or Rabbis, and was given without any interference on the part of the Government. But such was at my time the state of public feeling that I hardly knew at school who among my young friends were Roman Catholics, or Lutherans, or Reformed. I must admit, however, that the very name of Luther might have offended Roman Catholics. He was represented to us as a perfect saint, almost as inspired and infallible. His hymns sung in church seemed to us little different from the Psalms of David, and I well remember what a shock it gave me when at Oxford, much later in life, I heard Luther spoken of like any other mortal, nay, as a heretic, and a most dangerous heretic too. When I was a boy I remember that in some places the same building had to be used for Protestant and Roman Catholic services. All that, I am afraid, is now changed, and the old liberal and tolerant feeling then prevailing on all sides is now often stigmatized as indifference, and by other ugly names. It should really be called the golden age of Christianity, and this so-called indifference should be classed among the highest Christian virtues, and as the fullest realization of the spirit of Christ.
Thus we grew up from our earliest youth, being taught to look upon Christianity as an historical fact, on Christ and His disciples as historical characters, on the Old and New Testaments as real historical books. Though we did not understand as yet the deeper meaning of Christ and of His words, we had at least nothing to unlearn in later times, or to feel that our parents had ever told us what they themselves could not have held to be true. Our simple faith was not shaken by mere questions of criticism, or by the problem how any human being could take upon himself to declare any book to be revealed, unless he claimed for himself a more than human insight. The simplest rules of logic should make such a declaration impossible, whatever the sacred book may be to which it is applied. Granted that the Pope was infallible, how could the Cardinals know that he was, unless they claimed for themselves the same or even greater infallibility? It is far more easy to be inspired than to know some one else is or was inspired; the true inspiration is, and always has been, the spirit of truth within, and this is but another name for the spirit of God. It is truth that makes inspiration, not inspiration that makes truth. Whoever knows what truth is, knows also what inspiration is: not only theopneustos, blown into the soul by God, but the very voice of God, the real presence of God, the only presence in which we, as human beings, can ever perceive Him.
How often have I in later life tried to explain this to my friends in France and in England who endured mental agonies before they could arrive at the simple conclusion that revelation can never be objective, but must always be subjective. I may return to this question at a later period of my life, when I had to discuss with Renan, at Paris, with Froude, Kingsley, and Liddon, in England, and tried to show how entirely self-made some of their difficulties were. At present I have only to explain how it was that I had never to extricate myself from a net in which so many honest thinkers find themselves entangled without any fault of their own; as Samson, when he awoke, found himself bound with seven green withs and had to break them with all his might before he could hope to escape from the Philistines. The Philistines never bound me. During my early school-days these difficulties did not exist, but I have often been grateful in after life that the seven locks of my head have never been woven with the web.
I remember a number of small events in my school-life at Dessau, but though they were full of interest to me, nay, full of meaning, and not without an influence on my later life, they would have no meaning and no interest for others, and may remain as if they had never been. The influence which music exercised on my mind, and, I believe, on my heart also, I have related in my Musical Recollections. The image of those passing years, though its general tone was melancholy, chiefly owing to my mother’s melancholy, seemed to me at the time free from all unhappiness. My work at school and at home was not too heavy; I was fond of it, and very fond of books. Books were scarce then, and whoever possessed a new and valuable book was expected to lend it to his friends in the little town. If a man was known to possess, say, Goethe’s works or Jean Paul’s works, the consequence was that one went to him or to her to ask for the loan of them. And not only books, but paper and pens also were scarce. The first steel pens came in when I was still in the lower school, and bad as they were they were looked upon as real treasures by the schoolboys who possessed them. Paper was so dear that one had to be very sparing in its use. Every margin and cover was scribbled over before it was thrown away, and I felt often so hampered by the scarcity of paper that I gladly accepted a set of copybooks instead of any other present that I might have asked for on my birthday or at Christmas. I am sorry to say I have had to suffer all my life from the inefficiency of our writing master, or maybe from the fact that my thoughts were too quick for my pen. In other subjects I did well, but though I was among the first in each class, I was by no means cleverer than other boys. In the lower school work was more like conversation or like hearing news from our teachers. The idea of effort did not yet exist. The drudgery began, however, when I entered the upper school, the gymnasium, and learnt the elements of Latin and Greek. Though our teachers were very conscientious, they tried to make our work no burden to us, and the constant change of places in each class kept up a lively rivalry among the boys, though I am not sure that it did not make me rather ambitious and at times conceited. Still, I had few enemies, and it seemed of much more consequence who could knock down another boy than who could gain a place above him. I feel sure I could have done a great deal more at school than I did, but it was partly my music and partly my incessant headaches that interfered with my school work.