At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and the power which it was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely that the political authority of the white race will be allowed to reassert itself, it must be through their minds and through those other qualities which religion addresses that the black race will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be influenced at all.
I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy were treated in Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still maintains the French episcopate and priesthood. But I could not find that the Church of England in Jamaica either was at present or had ever been more than the Church of the English in Jamaica, respected as long as the English gentry were a dominant power there, but with no independent charm to work on imagination or on superstition. Labat says, as I noted above, that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the black babies, on the curious ground that Christians could not lawfully be held as slaves, and the slaves therefore were not to be made Christians. A Jesuit Father whom I met at Government House told me that even now the clergy refuse to baptise the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official returns, nearly two-thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica come into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become more popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father —— was doing what a good many other people do, making a general practice out of a few instances. Perhaps the blacks themselves who wish their children to be Christians carry them to the minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not be the Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in Jamaica; of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest praise. They, above all the religious bodies in the island, are admitted to have a practical power for good over the limited number of people which belong to them. But the Moravians are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in the highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost led me to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual authority, the Catholics might become more numerous than they are. The priests in Dominica were the only Europeans who, for their own sakes and on independent grounds, were looked up to with fear and respect.
The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises before us at the close of this waning century. The future of the West Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for 1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The masses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The masses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the misery produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus. Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian gods, it was not because they doubted whether gods existed at all, but because the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made wretched by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is against the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the telescope can search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only uniformity and connection of cause and effect—no sign anywhere of a personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific explanation; we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed, however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of reconciliation with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness to adapt itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian gods survived for seven centuries after Aristophanes with the help of allegory and 'economy.' The Church of Rome may survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle mocked at the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle seemed to think that the mass was the only form of faith in Europe which had any sincerity remaining in it.
A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from falling into devil worship is still to seek. Constitutions and belief in progress may satisfy Europe, but will not answer in Jamaica. In spite of the priests, child murder and cannibalism have reappeared in Hayti; but without them things might have been worse than they are, and the preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be better than none.
White authority and white influence may, however, still be preserved in a nobler and better way. Slavery was a survival from a social order which had passed away, and slavery could not be continued. It does not follow that per se it was a crime. The negroes who were sold to the dealers in the African factories were most of them either slaves already to worse masters or were servi, servants in the old meaning of the word, prisoners of war, or else criminals, servati or reserved from death. They would otherwise have been killed; and since the slave trade has been abolished are again killed in the too celebrated 'customs.' The slave trade was a crime when the chiefs made war on each other for the sake of captives whom they could turn into money. In many instances, perhaps in most, it was innocent and even beneficent. Nature has made us unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind. For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons or the slave of my own folly. Slavery is gone, with all that belonged to it; but it will be an ill day for mankind if no one is to be compelled any more to obey those who are wiser than himself, and each of us is to do only what is right in our own eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or emancipate themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive them back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade was the beginning of their emancipation.
CHAPTER XV.
The Church of England in Jamaica—Drive to Castleton—Botanical Gardens—Picnic by the river—Black women—Ball at Government House—Mandeville—Miss Roy—Country society—Manners—American visitors—A Moravian missionary—The modern Radical creed.
If I have spoken without enthusiasm of the working of the Church of England among the negroes, I have not meant to be disrespectful. As I lay awake at daybreak on the Sunday morning after my arrival, I heard the sound of church bells, not Catholic bells as at Dominica, but good old English chimes. The Church is disestablished so far as law can disestablish it, but, as in Barbadoes, the royal arms still stand over the arches of the chancel. Introduced with the English conquest, it has been identified with the ruling order of English gentry, respectable, harmless, and useful, to those immediately connected with it.
The parochial system, as in Barbadoes also, was spread over the island. Each parish had its church, its parsonage and its school, its fonts where the white children were baptised—in spite of my Jesuit, I shall hope not whites only; and its graveyard, where in time they were laid to rest. With their quiet Sunday services of the old type the country districts were exact reproductions of English country villages. The church whose bells I had heard was of the more fashionable suburban type, standing in a central situation halfway to Kingston. The service was at the old English hour of eleven. We drove to it in the orthodox fashion, with our prayer books and Sunday costumes, the Colonel in uniform. The gentry of the neighbourhood are antiquated in their habits, and to go to church on Sunday is still regarded as a simple duty. A dozen carriages stood under the shade at the doors. The congregation was upper middle-class English of the best sort, and was large, though almost wholly white. White tablets as at Port Royal covered the walls, with familiar English names upon them. But for the heat I could have imagined myself at home. There were no Aaron Bangs to be seen, or Paul Gelids, with the rough sense, the vigour, the energy, and roystering light-heartedness of our grandfathers. The faces of the men were serious and thoughtful, with the shadow resting on them of an uncertain future. They are good Churchmen still, and walk on in the old paths, wherever those paths may lead. They are old-fashioned and slow to change, and are perhaps belated in an eddy of the great stream of progress; but they were pleasant to see and pleasant to talk to. After service there were the usual shakings of hands among friends outside; arrangements were made for amusements and expeditions in which I was invited to join—which were got up, perhaps, for my own entertainment. I was to be taken to the sights of the neighbourhood. I was to see this; I was to see that; above all, I must see the Peak of the Blue Mountains. The peak itself I could see better from below, for there it stood, never moving, between seven and eight thousand feet high. But I had had mountain riding enough and was allowed to plead my age and infirmities. It was arranged finally that I should be driven the next day to Castleton, seventeen miles off over a mountain pass, to see the Botanical Gardens.