If in few ages the great bulk and the most popular portion of literature has more prostituted itself to purposes of sensational or at most æsthetic enjoyment, it is at least as doubtful if in any previous age our highest literature has more emphatically and persistently devoted itself to proclaiming this great doctrine of the Cross. Sometimes directly and explicitly, oftener by implication, this is the ultimate theme of those who are most deeply influencing the spirit of the time. Our finest and most widely recognised pulpit oratory is at home here, and only here:
Maurice and Arnold, Trench and Vaughan, Robertson and Stanley, James Martineau and Seeley, Thirlwall and Wilberforce, Kingsley and Brooke, Caird and Tulloch, different in form, in much antagonistic in what is called opinion, are of one mind and heart on this. The thought underlying all their thoughts of man is that “higher than love of happiness” in humanity which expresses the true link between man and God. The practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, “Love not pleasure—love God. Love Him not alone in the light and amid the calm, but through the blackness and the storm. Though He hide Himself in the thick darkness, yet” give thanks at remembrance of His holiness. “Though He slay thee, yet trust still in Him.” The hope to which they call us is not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless future. It is the hope of a true life now, struggling on and up through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the crown of thorns.
Even evangelicism indirectly, in great degree unconsciously, bears witness to the truth through its demand of absolute self-abnegation before God: though the inversion of the very idea of Him fundamentally involved in its scheme makes the self-abnegation no longer that of the son, but of the slave; includes in it the denial of that law which Himself has written on our hearts; and would substitute our subjection to an arbitrary despotism for our being
“made partakers of His holiness.” One of the sternest and most consistent of Calvinistic theologians, Jonathan Edwards, in one of his works expresses his willingness to be damned for the glory of God, and to rejoice in his own damnation: with a strange, almost incredible, obliquity of moral and spiritual insight failing to perceive that in thus losing himself in the infinite of holy Love lies the very essence of human blessedness, that this and this alone is in very truth his “eternal life.”
Among what may be called Essayists, two by general consent stand out as most deeply penetrating and informing the spirit of the age—Carlyle and Ruskin. To the former, brief reference has already been made. In the work then quoted from, one truth has prominence above all others: that with the will’s acceptance of happiness as the aim of life begins the true degradation of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his regard. Never since has Carlyle’s strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as biographical illustrations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength and energy with righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward and visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the many-headed hydra of wrong.
Of Ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. They have read him to little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in art, all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially unified by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man’s moral relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him of that Divine image in which he is made,—all things else, joy, beauty, life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political relations, is referred, is—not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous, sentimental, or æsthetic, but—the measure in which may thereby be trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him God’s minister, not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth, beauty, and purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools, the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of nature than are Fra Angelico’s angels, or Tintoret’s Crucifixion. But that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement.
In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his noble “Ode to Duty” has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other singers; who,
moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears
“The Godhead’s most benignant grace;”
for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged, and toilsome. Take almost any one of Tennyson’s more serious poems, and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. “Ulysses” is no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear. “The Lotos-eaters” are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to seek—ease and release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the ceaseless straining on toward right. “In Memoriam” is the record of love “making perfect through suffering:” struggling on through the valley of the shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light “behind the veil.” “The Vision of Sin” portrays to us humanity choosing enjoyment as its only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so profound, that even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but breathe out in sad bewilderment, “Is there any hope?”—can but dimly see, far off over the darkness, “God make Himself an awful rose of dawn.” In one of the most profound of all His creations