Nothing else of real importance has occurred since my last communication.
XIII.
Lambkin’s Sermon.
A man not over-given to mere words, Lambkin was always also somewhat diffident of his pulpit eloquence and his sermons were therefore rare. It must not be imagined that he was one of those who rebel vainly against established usage. There was nothing in him of the blatant and destructive demagogue; no character could have been more removed from the demons who drenched the fair soil of France with such torrents of blood during the awful reign of terror.
But just as he was in politics a liberal in the truest sense (not in the narrow party definition of the word), so in the religious sphere he descried the necessity of gentle but persistent reform. “The present,” he would often say, “is inseparable from the past,” but he would add “continual modification to suit the necessities of a changing environment is a cardinal condition of vitality.”
It was, therefore, his aim to keep the form of all existing institutions and merely to change their matter.
Thus, he was in favour of the retention of the Regius Professorship of Greek, and even voted for a heavy increase in the salary of its occupant; but he urged and finally carried the amendment by which that dignitary is at present compelled to lecture mainly on current politics. Mathematics again was a subject whose interest he discerned, however much he doubted its value as a mental discipline; he was, therefore, a supporter of the prize fellowships occasionally offered on the subject, but, in the determination of the successful candidate he would give due weight to the minutiae of dress and good manners.
It will be seen from all this that if Lambkin was essentially a modern, yet he was as essentially a wise and moderate man; cautious in action and preferring judgment to violence he would often say, “transformer please, not reformer,” when his friends twitted him over the port with his innovations.[68]
Religion, then, which must be a matter of grave import to all, was not neglected by such a mind.
He saw that all was not lost when dogma failed, but that the great ethical side of the system could be developed in the room left by the decay of its formal character. Just as a man who has lost his fingers will sometimes grow thumbs in their place, so Lambkin foresaw that in the place of what was an atrophied function, vigorous examples of an older type might shoot up, and the organism would gain in breadth what it lost in definition. “I look forward to the time” (he would cry) “when the devotional hand of man shall be all thumbs.”