If I have not summed up these cases fairly, the novels and romances in question are in everybody’s hands to convict me of the unfairness. I have simply sketched the leading points as they remain in my memory, not referring to the books again to pick out what would best serve my purpose. It is not my fault if the personages, who looked so great and grandiose in the flowing and ample draperies of romance, do not strip well for anatomy.
Now, what is common to all these cases of conversion? This: that the characters become religious, not when healthy, but when diseased; the religion in every case is exhibited as a drug for the sick, not as wholesome food for the healthy. While you are sane, well and hearty, doing your work in the world deftly, sound in mind, and wind, and limb, and fairly prosperous, you have no need of this religion—you can get through the world very well without it. But when your fortune is lost, your sweetheart dead or married to another, your courage cowed, your heart broken, your mind diseased, your self-respect humiliated, then you long for and embrace Christianity (or whatever religion is dominant around you): it is a soft pillow for the aching head, a tender couch for the bruised body, a flattering nurse for the desolate invalid. I can scarcely add that it is a medicine for the sickness, for its medicinal virtues are hardly shown; but it is, at any rate, as we read of its effects in these books, a narcotic and an anodyne for restlessness and pain. It is a religion to die with, not to live with. All these things, so soothing and beneficial to the invalid, are nauseous and noxious to the healthy.
A man could no more live vigorous life on such religion than he could live vigorous life couched tenderly, pillowed softly, nursed assiduously, and drugged with narcotics and anodyne all the days of his life.
Is the religious world willing to accept this view of religion? It would seem so by the remarkable popularity of these books. This view may be correct or incorrect, wise or foolish; at any rate, it is strangely at variance with the view commonly ascribed to “Muscular Christians,” and strangely identical with that which Dr. Newman explicitly avows in the most eloquent pages of his “Apologia.” People generally consider “Muscular Christianity” as a clever and cheerful improvement on the old solemn ascetic Christianity, as a doctrine which fully recognises the goodness of the common world and common worldly life, as a liberal cultus which does not sacrifice body to soul any more than soul to body, but is at once gymnastic and spiritualistic in its “exercises”; a vague notion is abroad that, whereas the early religion of Christ and his apostles was of sorrow and suffering, this, its latest development, is a religion of happiness and health; in short, it is believed that “Muscular Christianity” has added the Gospel(1) of the body and this life to the primitive Gospel of the soul and the next life: and yet the most popular and vigorous writer of this new school, after exhausting a very fertile imagination in the suggestion of methods and modes by which godless sinners may be converted to godliness, has absolutely found no other process effectual than this of showering upon them misfortunes, humiliations, afflictions, calamities (such as do not in real life fall upon one human being in a thousand, and working results such as they would not work in one real human being out of ten thousand); until health and hope, self-respect and the capacity for sane joy are altogether destroyed in them, the manhood and womanhood overwhelmed and crushed out of them; after which he brings in these miserable wrecks and relics of what were once men and women as all that he can contribute to the extension of the Church, which ought to be the cheerful congregation of wholesome men and women throughout the world, the richest flower and ripest fruit of humanity. If the Church of the future is to be composed of creatures like Mr. Kingsley’s Convertites, Westminster Abbey must be turned into a Grand Chartreuse, and St. Paul’s into an Hospital for Incurables, and the metropolitan Cathedral of England must be Bedlam.
1. The Gospel of the body and this life has been powerfully preached in the most explicit terms on the Continent. In England we have been too prudish to advocate it so clearly, although it is, of course, essential to the most enlightened Positivism and Secularism. That much-abused book the “Elements of Social Science” preaches it with more thoroughness, knowledge and ability than any other English work I have met with. I do not pretend to be wise enough to judge this book, and so far as I can judge it, I differ from it in many respects; but on the broad question of the spirit in which it is written, I do not fear to assert that no honest and intelligent man can find pruriency and impurity in it, without he brings the pruriency and impurity in his own heart and mind to the study of it. I can understand ascetic Christians abhorring it, I can understand timid Freethinkers being frightened by it because they are timid; but I cannot understand men who claim to be bold and honest Freethinkers avoiding it as an unholy thing merely because of the subjects it treats, without reference to the mode of treatment, and without sympathy for the admirable motives which manifestly incited the author. He may well say with the most brilliant and daring of all who have preached this Gospel of the body in our age (this Gospel which is so sorely needed to complement and modify the exclusive Gospel of the soul—this Gospel which Plato preached along with the other, while Jesus preached the other only), he may well say with Heine
Doch die Castraten Klagten,
Aïs ich meine Stimm’ erhob;
Sie Klagten und sie sagten;
Ich sange veil zu grob.
[THE PRIMATE ON THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD]
(1876.)
The Archbishop of Canterbury is making his second quadrennial visitation to his diocese, and delivering an elaborate Charge to the clergy, in seven instalments. Of these the first two are reported at considerable length in the Times of the 27th and 28th inst., a couple of columns of small print being given to each. The Times has moreover generously vouchsafed a leading article of encouragement and approval on each; and surely the State Church ought to be proud of such lofty patronage, and Lambeth Palace ought to be very grateful to Printing House Square. The Daily News could only spare half a column for the first; and the Daily Telegraph, whose exuberant Christianity, hot and strong as boiling rancid oil, amazes the world on every great festival of the Church, showed its estimate of the importance of our Primate’s manifesto by allotting to it eight or nine lines of small print at the foot of a column—a pickpocket in a police-court gets as much notice.
Let us glance down the Times’ reports, pausing at anything worth a note if not by its intrinsic value yet on account of the position of the speaker:—