and whatever individuality is lost in the process, we may feel assured that the devil has too much to do with, to make us care to be rid of it.
But how to arrive at this? so easy as it is to suggest on paper, so easy to foretell in words. Raise the level of public opinion, we might say; insist on a higher standard; in the economist's language, increase the demand for goodness, and the supply will follow; or, at any rate, men will do their best. Until we require more of one another, more will not be provided. But this is but to restate the problem in other words. How are we to touch the heart; how to awaken the desire? We believe that the good man, the great man, whatever he be, prince or peasant, is really lovely; that really and truly, if we can only see him, he more than anything will move us; and at least, we have a right to demand that the artificial hindrances which prevent our lifting him above the crowd, shall be swept away. He in his beautiful life is a thousand times more God's witness than any preacher in a pulpit, and his light must not be concealed any more. As we said, what lies in the way of our sacred recognition of great men is more than anything else the Protestant doctrine of good works. We do not forget what it meant when the world first heard of it. It was a cry from the very sanctuary of the soul, flinging off and execrating the accursed theory of merits, the sickening parade of redundant saintly virtues, which the Roman Church had converted into stock, and dispensed for the benefit of the believers. This is not the place to pour out our nausea on so poor, yet so detestable a farce. But it seems with all human matters, that as soon as spiritual truths are petrified into doctrines, it is another name for their death. They die, corrupt, and breed a pestilence. The doctrine of good works was hurled away by an instinct of generous feeling, and this feeling itself has again become dead, and a fresh disease has followed upon it. Nobody (or, at least, nobody good for anything) will lay a claim to merit for this or that good action which he may have done. Exactly in proportion as a man is really good, will be the eagerness with which he will refuse all credit for it; he will cry out, with all his soul, 'Not unto us—not unto us.'
And yet, practically, we all know and feel that between man and man there is an infinite moral difference; one is good, one is bad, another hovers between the two; the whole of our conduct to each other is necessarily governed by a recognition of this fact, just as it is in the analogous question of the will. Ultimately, we are nothing of ourselves; we know that we are but what God has given us grace to be—we did not make ourselves—we do not keep ourselves here—we are but what in the eternal order of Providence we were designed to be—exactly that and nothing else; and yet we treat each other as responsible; we cannot help it. The most rigid Calvinist cannot eliminate his instincts; his loves and hatreds seem rather to deepen in intensity of colouring as, logically, his creed should lead him to conquer them as foolish. It is useless, it is impossible, to bring down these celestial mysteries upon our earth, to try to see our way by them, or determine our feelings by them; men are good, men are bad, relatively to us and to our understandings if you will, but still really, and so they must be treated.
There is no more mischievous falsehood than to persist in railing at man's nature, as if it were all vile together, as if the best and the worst which comes of it were in God's sight equally without worth. These denunciations tend too fatally to realise themselves. Tell a man that no good which he can do is of any value, and depend upon it he will take you at your word—most especially will the wealthy, comfortable, luxurious man, just the man who has most means to do good, and whom of all things it is most necessary to stimulate to it. Surely we should not be afraid. The instincts which God has placed in our hearts are too mighty for us to be able to extinguish them with doctrinal sophistry. We love the good man, we praise him, we admire him—we cannot help it; and surely it is mere cowardice to shrink from recognising it openly—thankfully, divinely recognising it. If true at all, there is no truth in heaven or earth of deeper practical importance to us; and Protestantism must have lapsed from its once generous spirit, if it persists in imposing a dogma of its own upon our hearts, the touch of which is fatal as the touch of a torpedo to any high or noble endeavours after excellence.
'Drive out nature with a fork, she ever comes running back;' and while we leave out of consideration the reality, we are filling the chasm with inventions of our own. The only novels which are popular among us are those which picture the successful battles of modern men and women with modern life, which are imperfect shadows of those real battles which every reader has seen in some form or other, or has longed to see in his own small sphere. It shows where the craving lies if we had but the courage to meet it; why need we fall back on imagination to create what God has created ready for us? In every department of human life, in the more and the less, there is always one man who is the best, and one type of man which is the best, living and working his silent way to heaven in the very middle of us. Let us find this type then—let us see what it is which makes such men the best, and raise up their excellencies into an acknowledged and open standard, of which they themselves shall be the living witnesses. Is there a landlord who is spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a vanishing emotion of pleasure—rather let us seize him and raise him up upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps, their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man has done what they have a right to require that others shall do.
So it might be through the thousand channels of life. It should not be so difficult; the machinery is ready, both to find your men and to use them. In theory, at least, every parish has its pastor, and the state of every soul is or ought to be known. We know not what turn things may take, or what silent changes are rushing on below us. Even while the present organisation remains—but, alas! no—it is no use to urge a Church bound hand and foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any wholesome activity. If the teachers of the people really were the wisest and best and noblest men among us, this and a thousand other blessed things would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to grasp. Corruptio optimi est pessima; the national Church as it ought to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in the most hopeful moral condition.
FOOTNOTES:
[AA] Written 1850.