John Keble, the gentle saint of the Tractarian movement, when he saw the Whigs preparing to attack the property of the Church, proclaimed that the time had come when "scoundrels should be called scoundrels." And the Tractarians had no monopoly of vigorous invective, for, when their famous "Tract XC." incurred the censure of an Evangelical dean, he urbanely remarked that "he would be sorry to trust the author of that tract with his purse."
Macaulay, on the morning after a vital division, in which the Whigs had saved their places by seventy-nine votes, wrote triumphantly to his sister—
"So hang the dirty Tories, and let them starve and pine,
And hurrah! for the majority of glorious seventy-nine."
The same cordial partisan wrote of a political opponent that he was "a bad, a very bad, man; a disgrace to politics and to literature;" and, of an acquaintance who had offended him socially, "his powers gone; his spite immortal—a dead nettle."
The great and good Lord Shaftesbury, repudiating the theology of "Ecce Homo," pronounced it "the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of Hell;" and, dividing his political favours with admirable impartiality, he denounced "the brazen faces, low insults, and accursed effrontery" of the Radicals; declared that Mr. Gladstone's "public life had long been an effort to retain his principles and yet not lose his position;" and dismissed Lord Beaconsfield as "a leper, without principle, without feeling, without regard to anything, human or divine, beyond his personal ambition." In the same spirit of hearty prejudice, Bishop Wilberforce deplored the political exigencies which had driven his friend Gladstone into "the foul arms of the Whigs." In the opposite camp was ranged a lady, well remembered in the inner circles of Whiggery, who never would enter a four-wheeled cab until she had elicited from the driver that he was not a Puseyite and was a Whig.
"Mamma," asked a little girl of Whig parentage, who from her cradle had heard nothing but denunciation of her father's political opponents, "are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?" And her mother judiciously replied, "My dear, they are born wicked and grow worse."
But alas! they are "gone down to Hades, even many stalwart sons of heroes,"—with King William at their head, and Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Leicester, and Keble and Macaulay and Froude in his wake—men who knew what they believed, and, knowing it, were not ashamed to avow it, and saw little to praise or like in the adherents of a contrary opinion.
They are gone, and we are left—an unprejudiced, but an invertebrate and a flaccid, generation. No one seems to believe anything very firmly. No one has the slightest notion of putting himself to any inconvenience for his belief. No one dreams of disliking or distrusting a political or religious opponent, or of treating difference of opinion as a line of social cleavage.
In old days, King Leopold of Belgium told Bishop Wilberforce that "the only position for a Church was to say, 'Believe this or you are damned.'" To-day nothing in religion is regarded as unquestionably true. When the late Archbishop Benson first became acquainted with society in London, he asked, in shocked amazement, "What do these people believe?"—and no very satisfactory answer was forthcoming. If society has any religious beliefs (and this is more than questionable), it holds them with the loosest grasp, and is on the easiest terms of intercourse with every other belief and unbelief. The most fashionable teachers of religion have one eye nervously fixed on the ever-shifting currents of negation, talk plausibly about putting the Faith in its proper relation with modern thought, and toil panting in the wake of science; only to find each fresh theory exploded just at the moment when they have managed to apprehend it.
We used to be taught in our nurseries that, when "Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers," it was our duty to "Take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs;" and the student of folklore will be pleased to observe in this ditty the immemorial inclination of mankind to punish people who will not square their religion with ours. The spirit of religious persecution dies hard, but the decay of prejudice has sapped its strength. It does not thrive in the atmosphere of modern indifferentism, and admirable ladies who believe that Ritualists ride donkeys on Palm Sunday and sacrifice lambs on Good Friday find it difficult to revive the cry of "No Popery" with any practical effect.