In the patriarchal age, the head of a family was its priest; and, in all ages, the true and complete man feels a personal interest and responsibility, a direct and entire relation to his Creator, that will not suffer interference any more than genuine conjugal or parental ties. The so-called progress of society has rendered its functions more complex, and broken up this simple and natural identity between the offices of devotion and those of paternity. It has not only made the priestly office distinct and apart from domestic life, but shorn it of glory by the cumbrous details of a hierarchy and badges of exclusiveness; and lessened its sanctity by changing the grand and holy function of a spiritual medium and expositor into a professional business and special pleading. What are conventional preachers but the employés of a sect? And so regarded, how is it possible to rejoice ‘in the plain presence of their dignity?’ Called upon by a thoroughly earnest soul in its deep perplexity and agonizing bewilderment, what can they do but repeat the commonplaces of their office? How instantly are they reduced to the level of other men, when brought into contact with a human reality! The voice of true sympathy, though from ignorant lips, the grasp of honest affection, though from unconsecrated hands, yield more of the balm of consolation in such an hour, because they are real, human, and therefore nearer to God, than the technical representative of His truth. The essential mistake is, that instead of regarding the man as something divine in essence and relation, a perverse theology assigns that quality to the office. It is what is grafted upon, not what is essential to, humanity, that is thus made the nucleus of reverence and hope, whereas priesthood and manhood are identical. The authority of the former is derived from the latter; by virtue of being men we become priests—that is, servants—of the Most High; and not through any miraculous anointing, laying on of hands, courses of divinity, or rites of ordination. ‘How,’ says Carlyle, ‘did Christianity arise and spread abroad among men? Was it by institutions and establishments and well-arranged systems of mechanism? Not so. On the contrary, in all past and existing institutions for those ends, its divine spirit has invariably been found to languish and decay. It arose in the mystic deeps of man’s soul; and spread abroad by the “preaching of the word” by simple, altogether natural, and individual efforts; and flew like hallowed fire from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated by it.’ Accordingly, if merely professional representatives of the church, as such, hold a less influential position now than formerly, it is not because the instinct of worship has died out in the human heart, nor because men feel less than before the need of interpreters of the true, the holy, and the beautiful; it is not that the mysteries of life are less impressive, or its vicissitudes less constant, or its origin and end less enveloped in sacred obscurity; but it is because more legitimate priests have been found out of the church than in it; because that institution and its ministers fail to meet adequately the wants of the religious sentiment; and it has been discovered that the Invisible Spirit is more easily found by the lonely seashore than in the magnificent cathedral; that the mountain-top is an altar nearer to His throne than a chancel; and that the rustle of forest-leaves and the moaning of the sea less disturb the idea of His presence in the devout heart, than the monotonous chant of the choir, or the conventional words of the preacher. We have but to glance at the pictures of clerical life, so thickly scattered through the memoirs and novels of the day, to realize the necessity of an eclectic spirit in estimating the clerical character—whose highest manifestations and most patent abuses seem entirely irrespective of sect. A Scotch clergyman, writing, in 1763, of the society at Harrogate, ‘made up of half-pay officers and clergymen,’ thus describes the latter: ‘They are in general—I mean the lower order—divided into bucks and prigs; of which the first, though inconceivably ignorant, and sometimes indecent in their morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were unassuming, and had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves like gentlemen. The other division of them, the prigs, are truly not to be endured, for they are but half-learned, are ignorant of the world, narrow-minded, pedantic, and overbearing.’[42] Contrast with this estimate of a class Victor Hugo’s portrait of an individual in his Provincial Bishop—‘Monseigneur Bienvenu,’ so called, instinctively, by the people: ‘The formidable spectacle of created things developed a tenderness in him; he was always busy in finding for himself and inspiring others with the best way of sympathizing and solacing. The universe appeared to him like disease. He auscultated suffering everywhere. The whole world was to this good and rare priest a permanent subject of sadness seeking to be consoled.’
The absolute need of separating in our minds the idea of the clerical man as a natural development of humanity—a normal phase of character—from the historical idea of the same personage, is at once evinced by the immense distance between the lives, influence, and traits of the men who have conspicuously borne the office of public religious teachers and administrators in different sects, ages, and countries; as for instance, Ximenes, Wolsey, Richelieu, Whitfield, Channing, George Herbert, and Dr. Arnold; in position, habits, and relations to the world, how great the contrast! And yet each represented to society, in a professional way, the same principle; the former with all the pomp of hierarchal magnificence, and all the influence of executive power, and the latter by the force of patient usefulness, earnest simplicity, and individual moral energy. Between Puritan and Pope, what infinite grades; between Jewish rabbi and Scotch elder, how diverse is the traditional sanction; and how little would a novice imagine that the bare walls and plain costume of a Friends’ meeting had the least of a common origin with the gorgeous decorations of a minster! Thus do the passions, the tastes, and the very blood of races and individuals modify the expression of the same instinct; worship is as Protean in its forms as labour, diversion, hygiène, or any other human need and activity. Philosophy reconciles us to the apparent incongruity, and reveals beneath surplice, drab-coat, and silken robe, hearts that pulsate to an identical measure.
The best writers have recognized the clerical tone of manners as significant of the social condition of each period. Burnet thought more highly of his Pastoral Care than of his History; and Baxter’s Reformed Pastor is an indirect but keen testimony to the decadence of the clergy. Macaulay cites Fielding’s parson. Sir Roger’s chaplain in the Spectator, Cowper’s rebuke of the ‘cassocked huntsmen,’ the Stiggins of Dickens, and Honeyman of Thackeray, are but a popular reflex of that deep sense of the abuse of a profession which is the highest evidence of its normal estimation. And the types of the vocation seem permanent. Every era has its Whateley, its Lammenais, and its Spurgeon—or men in the church whose gifts, tone, and mission essentially correspond with these. When George Herbert abandoned court for clerical aspirations, a friend protested against his choice ‘as too mean an employment;’ and yet so truly did he illustrate the spiritual grandeur of his office that the chime which called to prayer from the humble belfry of Bemerton, was recognized by the country people as the ‘saint’s bell.’ It was his holiness, and not his attachment to the ritual year, that inspired his example while living, and embalmed his memory; lowly kindnesses were ‘music to him at midnight;’ charity was ‘his only perfume;’ to teach the ignorant, in his estimation, ‘the greatest alms;’ and a day well spent, ‘the bridal of the earth and sky;’ his humanity, spiritualized by Christian faith and practice, so essentially constituted him a priest that, ‘about Salisbury,’ writes his brother, ‘where he lived beneficed for many years, he was little less than sainted.’ He drew an ideal from his own soul, and for his own guidance, in the Country Parson.
To the reverent mind that dares to exercise freely the prerogative of thought, the constant blending of human infirmity with the method of worship is painfully evident: the instinct itself, the sentiment—highest in man—is thus ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;’ what is beautiful and true in the ceremonial, or the emblem, arrays itself to his consciousness so as to intercept the holy beams that he would draw from the altar. Let him obey the waves of accident, and pause at shrines by the wayside; and according to circumstances will be the inspiration they yield. Thus turning from the gay Parisian thoroughfare, at noonday, he may pace the chaste aisles of the Madeleine, and feel his devotion stirred by the solemn quietude, the few kneeling figures—perhaps by the dark catafalque awaiting the dead in the centre of the spacious floor; and then what to him is the doctrine of transubstantiation? Religious architecture is speaking to his heart. The voices of the choristers at St. George’s Chapel, at Windsor, may touch his pious sensibility; but if his thoughts revert to the ruddy dean, his good dinners, and indulgent life, and the poor, toilsome vicars, which make the Establishment a reflection of the world’s diversity of condition—the pampered and the drudged; or, if he notes the prayer that the Queen may be preserved ‘in health and wealth,’ how sanctity ceases to invest the priest and the ritual, thus typical of human vanity and selfishness! ‘We know not,’ wrote Jerrold, ‘and we say it with grief, but with profound conviction of the necessity of every man giving fullest utterance to his thoughts—we know not, in this world of ours, in this social, out-of-door masquerade, a more dreary shortcoming, a greater disappointment to the business and bosoms of men, than the Established Church. Its essence is self-denial; its foundations are in humility and poverty; its practice is self-aggrandizement and money-getting.’ Nor is the reverse of the picture, the contrast between the high and low clergy, less inauspicious. ‘A Christian bishop,’ writes Sydney Smith, ‘proposes, in cold blood, to create a thousand livings of one hundred and thirty pounds each,—to call into existence a thousand of the most unhappy men on the face of the earth—the sons of the poor, without hope, without the assistance of private fortune, chained to the soil, ashamed to live with their inferiors, unfit for the society of the better classes, and dragging about the English curse of poverty, without the smallest hope that they can ever shake it off. Can any man of common sense say that all these outward circumstances of the ministers of religion have no bearing on religion itself?’ On the other hand, what divine significance to the pious soul, ‘as through a zodiac moves the ritual year,’—in the altar, the font, the choral service, the venerable liturgy, the holy emblems and hallowed forms whereby this Church is consecrated to the hearts of her devout children, and the reverence of sympathetic intelligence.
Buckle, drawing broad inference from extensive and acute research, unmodified by sympathetic observation, wrote an historical treatise, rich in knowledge and philosophy, to prove that Spain and Scotland owe whatever is hopeless and hampered in their intellectual development to the tyranny of priests and preachers. It was a special plea, but it serves to illustrate, with comprehensive emphasis, the antagonism between Ecclesiasticism and Christianity; for, viewed individually, as a social phenomenon, and not the mere exponent of an organization, the preacher or teacher of the right, advocate of the true, representative of faith, becomes a distinct and personal character, and is identified with humanity. It is when the man and the function coalesce, and the former transcends and spiritualizes the latter, that, in history and in life, all that is great and gracious in the vocation is memorably vindicated. Under this genuine aspect, Rousseau found his ideal of happiness in the life of a village curé, Chateaubriand renewed the heartfelt claims of religion in eloquently describing its primitive and legitimate benignities. Mediæval ecclesiasticism commenced its purifying though inadequate ordeal through the heroism of Savonarola at Florence and Sarpi at Venice. Current literature, indeed, continually and clearly states the problem; and illustrates the question with a frequency and a talent which indicate how largely it occupies the popular mind. To discriminate between the preacher’s conventional office and his spiritual endowment,—between Christianity as a sentiment and a dogma, between the religious and the temporal authority, between the church as an institution and a faith, is an emphatic mission of artist and author in our age. Witness the salient discussions of the ‘Roman question,’ the pleas and protests of Gallican and Ultramontane, the conservative zeal of the Puseyite and liberal encroachments of the progressive clergy, and the picturesque or psychological fictions which instruct and beguile modern readers.[43] Both literature and life in modern times, while they attest the official decadence of the clergy, as a political and theological organization, still more significantly vindicate their normal influence as a social power. ‘Not as in the old times,’ says a philosophical historian, in allusion to the clergy of America, ‘does the layman look upon them as the cormorants and curses of society; they are his faithful advisers, his honoured friends, under whose suggestion and supervision are instituted educational establishments, colleges, hospitals—whatever can be of benefit to men in this life, or secure to them happiness in the life to come.’[44]
There are types of character that prophesy vocation; and we occasionally see in families a gentle being, so disinterested, thoughtful, and above the world in natural disposition, that he seems born to wear a surplice, as one we can behold officiating at the altar by virtue of a certain innate adaptation; and so there are men of strong affections, early bereft, and thereby alienated from personal motives, and thus peculiarly able to give an undivided heart to God and humanity; or, through a singular moral experience, initiated more deeply than their fellows into the arcana of truth, and hence justified in becoming her expositors. In cases like these, a more than conventional reason for the faith that is in them causes them to speak and act with an authority which is its own sanction, and hence springs what is vital both in the life and the literature of the visible church. Sacerdotal biography, the achievements of the true reformer, the literary bequests of the genuine pulpit orator, and the results of efficient parochial genius, attest the reality of such characters; they are of Nature’s ordaining, and sectarianism itself is lost sight of in their universal and grateful recognition—as witness St. Augustine, Fenelon, Luther, Wesley, Fox, and Frederick Robertson. Landmarks in the history of our race, oases in the desert of theological controversy, flowers in the garland of humanity, they ‘vindicate the ways of God to man,’ and are the redeeming facts of ecclesiastical life. Above the system they illustrate, beyond the limits they designate, and providential exceptions to a general rule, we instinctively accept them as holding a relation to the religious sentiment and the highest interests of the world that only a profane imagination can associate with the pretensions of the thousands who claim their fraternity. This idea of asserting the human as consecrated and not usurped by the priestly, has ever distinguished the veritable ecclesiastical heroes. Lammenais, when a mere youth, was arrested for his eloquent advocacy of freedom and faith; ‘we will show them,’ he said of the civil tribunals, ‘what kind of a man a priest is.’
Dupuytren, the most celebrated French surgeon of his day, was destitute of faith, and by his powerful mind and brusque hardihood overcame the individuality of almost every one who approached him. One day a poor curé from some village near Paris called upon the great surgeon. Dupuytren was struck with his manly beauty and noble presence, but examined, with his usual nonchalance, the patient’s neck, disfigured by a horrible cancer. ‘Avec cela, il faut mourir,’ said the surgeon. ‘So I thought,’ calmly replied the priest; ‘I expected the disease was fatal, and only came to you to please my parishioners.’ He then unfolded a bit of paper and took from it a five-franc piece, which he handed to Dupuytren, saying: ‘Pardon, sir, the little fee, for we are poor.’ The serene dignity and holy self-possession of this man, about to die in the prime of his life, impressed the stoical surgeon in spite of himself, though his manner betrayed neither surprise nor interest. Before the curé had descended half the staircase, he was called back by a servant. ‘If you choose to try an operation,’ said Dupuytren, ‘go to the Hotel Dieu; I will see you to-morrow.’ ‘It is my duty to make use of all means of recovery,’ replied the curé; ‘I will go.’ The next day, the surgeon cut away remorselessly at the priest’s neck, laying bare tendons and arteries. It was before the days of chloroform, and, unsustained by any opiate, the poor curé suffered with uncomplaining heroism. He did not even wince. Dupuytren respected his courage; and every day lingered longer at his bedside, when making the rounds of the hospital. In a few weeks the curé recovered. A year after the operation, he made his appearance in the salon of the great professor with a neat basket containing pears and chickens. ‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘it is the anniversary of the day when your skill saved my life; accept this humble gift; the pears and chickens are better than you can find in Paris; they are of my own raising.’ Each succeeding year, on the same day of the month, the honest priest brought his grateful offering. At length Dupuytren was taken ill, and the physicians declared his heart diseased. He shut himself up with his favourite nephew and refused to see his friends. One day he wrote on a slip of paper, ‘Le medécin a besoin du curé,’ and sent it to the village priest, who quickly obeyed the summons. He remained for hours in the dying surgeon’s chamber; and when he came forth, tears were in his eyes, and Dupuytren was no more. How easy for the imagination to fill up this outline, which is all that was vouchsafed to Parisian gossip.
Whoever has gone from Roman church or palace—his soul yet warm with the radiant figures and divine expression of saints and martyrs as depicted by the inspired hands of the Christian artists of the fifteenth century—into the gloomy and damp catacombs, where the early disciples met in order to enjoy ‘freedom to worship God,’ must have felt at once the solemn reality and the beautiful triumph of faith, in its unperverted glow—on the one hand nerving the believer to cheerful endurance, and on the other kindling genius to noble toil; and, before this fresh conviction, how vain appeared to him the mechanical rite and the cold response of conventional worship! The truth is that the history of religion is like the history of love; a natural and divine sentiment has been wrested into illegitimate service; ambitious pretenders, like the wanton and the coquette, abuse to selfish ends what should either be honourably let alone or sacredly cherished. This process, at once so habitual and so intricate—working through formulas, tradition, appeals to fear, the power of custom, the imperative needs and the ignorant credulity of the multitude—has gradually built up a partition between heaven and earth, obscured spiritual facts, made vague and mystical the primitive relation of the soul to the fatherhood of God, and thus induced either open scepticism or artificial conformity. In painting, in music, in literature, in the wonders of the universe, in the mysteries of life, and in human consciousness, the sentiment asserts itself for ever; but to the genuine man of to-day is allotted the ceaseless duty of keeping it apart from the incrustations of form, the perversion of office, and the base uses of ambition and avarice.
The lionism of the pulpit is another desecration. London and New York must have their fashionable preachers as well as favourite prima donnas, and the phenomena attending each are the same. Intellectual amusement, exclusiveness, the mode, thus become identical with that which is their essential opposite, and the meekness and sublimity of the religious function is utterly lost in a frivolous glare and soulless vanity. The pew itself is a satire on existent Christianity; the very organ-airs played in the fashionable churches, by recalling the ball-room and the theatre, are ironical; and to these how often the elegantly-worded commonplace of the preacher is a fit accompaniment—so well likened, by a thoughtful writer, to shovelling sand with a pitchfork! Thank Heaven, we have perpetually the Vicar of Wakefield and Parson Adams to keep green the memories of that genial simplicity and honest warmth of which modern refinement has deprived the clerical man. They, at least, were not effigies. Heroism as embodied in Knox, scholarship in Barrow, zeal in Doddridge, holy idealism in Taylor, sacred eloquence in Hall and Chalmers, earnest aspiration in Channing and Robertson,—these and like instances of a fine manly endowment, give vitality to the preacher and significance to his ministrations.
In a recent farce, that had a run at Paris, and caricatures English life, the curtain rises on a deserted street, hushed and gloomy, through which two figures at last slowly walk on tiptoe: as they approach, and one begins to address the other, the latter, raising his finger to his lips, whispers ‘C’est Soonday,’ and both disappear: the comedy ends, however, with a prodigious dinner of beef and beer. Absurd as such pictures of a London Sabbath are, they yet indicate a suggestive truth, which is, that the extreme outward observance in Protestant countries, of one day in seven, by repudiating all pastime, is the best proof of a conscious defect in the social representation of the religious instinct, exactly as the festivity of continental people, on the same day, illustrates the opposite extreme of indifference to appearances. It is probable that neither affords a just index of the state of feeling; for domestic enjoyments in the one case, and attendance at mass, by sincere devotees, in the other, are facts that modify the apparent truth. It is highly probable, also, that in this age of free inquiry and general intelligence, what has been lost in public observance has been gained in individual sincerity. There is not the same dependence on the preacher. Devotional sentiment is fed from other sources. It has come to be felt and understood as never before, that man is personally responsible, and must seek light for himself, and repose on his own faith. Accordingly, he is comparatively unallied to institutions, and will no longer trust for spiritual insight to a mortal as frail and ignorant as himself. The redeeming fact is to be sought in the existence of the sentiment itself. The sensuality of a Borgia makes more impressive the sanctity of Fenelon; because of the artificial funeral eulogies of Bossuet, we are more sensible to the practical efficiency of Father Matthew; Calvin’s intolerance heightens the glory of Luther’s vindication of spiritual freedom; the fanaticism of the Methodist, the subtlety of the Jesuit, the cold rationalism of the Unitarian, the dark bigotry of the Presbyterian, the monotonous tone of the Quaker, the refined conservatism of the Episcopalian, and other characteristics of sects, philosophically considered, are but the excess of a tendency which also manifests its benign and desirable influence as an element of Christian society. What liberal mind can reflect upon the agency of the English Church, pregnant of abuses as it is, without feeling that she has greatly contributed to preserve a wholesome equilibrium amid conflicting agencies, to keep intact the dignity and hallowed associations of worship, to calm the feverish impulses, and prolong a law of order amid chaotic tendencies? What just observer will hesitate to award to Dissenters the honour of imparting a vital spirit to the listless body of the Church, renewing the sentiment of religion which had become dormant through conventionalism and oppressive institutions, and making its divine reality once more a conscious motive and solace to the world? How much have the eminent preachers of liberal Christianity, in New England, done toward enlarging the charity of sects, elevating the standard of pulpit eloquence, and giving to the priestly office moral dignity and intellectual force! Who that has witnessed the life-devotion of the Sisters of Charity, in a season of pestilence, seen the tears on the bronze cheeks of hardy mariners at the Bethel, or heard the bold protest of the educated divine, above the voice of public opinion, at a social crisis, pleading for principle against expediency, and has not, for the moment at least, forgotten dogmas in grateful appreciation of the general benefits resulting from the direct inspiration of that sentiment, which the preacher, of whatever creed, is ordained to illustrate? Truly has it been said, that ‘it is the spirit of the soul’s natural piety to alight on whatever is beautiful and touching in every faith, and take thence its secret draught of spiritual refreshment.’ Even popular literature enforces the argument. The lives of Fox, Wesley, Fenelon, Arnold, Chalmers, and Channing, illustrate the same truth, that the man can sanction the priest, the soul vindicate the office, and the reality of a sentiment reconcile or sublimate discordant creeds.