"Looked at from what I may term 'externals,' we simply present to the world at large the ignoble spectacle of a nation of usurers trembling over our money-bags; looked at from internals, I perceive that we are suffering from a moral opiate, to the action of which I attribute the unhappy complaints that I have endeavoured to describe. This pernicious narcotic has been absorbed by us for hundreds of years unsuspected and unperceived under the guise of a popular theology. We have become so steeped in the insane delusion, now many centuries old, that we are a Christian nation, that I anticipate with dread the reaction which will take place when men awaken to the true character of the religious quackery with which they have been duped, and, overlooking in their frenzy the distinction which exists between ancient and modern Christianity, will repudiate the former with horror, which, after all, does not deserve to be condemned, for it has never yet been tried as a political system in any country. Individuals only profess to be theoretically governed by it. Nor would it be possible, as society is at present constituted, for any man to carry out its principles in daily life. That any statesman would be instantly ruined who should openly announce that he intended to govern the country on purely Christian principles, may be made clear to the simplest comprehension. For instance, imagine our Foreign Minister getting up in the House of Commons and justifying his last stroke of foreign policy upon the ground that we should 'love our neighbours better than ourselves, or penning a despatch to any power that we felt 'persecuted' by blessing it. When do we even do good to anybody in our national capacity, much less to them 'that hate us'? We certainly pray like Chinamen when we want to propitiate an angry Deity about the cattle-plague; but who ever heard of 'a form of prayer to be used' for nations 'who despitefully use us.' Fancy the Chancellor of the Exchequer informing us that instead of laying up for the nation treasures upon earth, he proposed realising all that the country possessed and giving it to the poor. Christian Churchmen and statesmen do not therefore sufficiently believe in the power and efficacy of the Christian moral code to trust the nation to it alone. Hence they have invented ecclesiastical organisations and theological dogmas as anodynes; and the people have been lulled into security by the singular notion, that if they supported the one and professed to believe in the other, they were different from either Mohammedans or Bhuddists. In a word, it is the curse of England that its intellect can see truths which its heart will not embody. The more I think of it the more I am disposed to risk the assertion, that if, as is supposed, the moral code called Christian is divine, it is only not practicable, literally, by the nation for lack of national heart-faith. I tell you this in confidence, for I am already considered so wild and visionary upon all these matters, and so thoroughly unsound, that I should not like it to be generally known, for fear of its injuring my political prospects. In the mean time it will very much assist me in arriving at some of my conclusions, if you will kindly procure for me, from any leading member of the Legislature, lay or clerical, answers to the following questions:—
"First, Whether Jonah could possibly have had anything to say to Nineveh which would not apply with equal force to this Christian metropolis?—and if so, What?
"Second, Specify the sins which were probably committed in Chorazin or Bethsaida, but which have not yet been perpetrated in London.
"Third, As statecraft (assisted by priestcraft) consists not in making the State better but richer, explain why it is easier for a collection of rich men—called a nation—to be saved, than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but not so easy for one man.
"Fourth, Does the saying that the love of money is the root of all evil apply to a nation as well as to an individual?—and if not, how does it happen that the more we accumulate wealth, the more we increase poverty and misery and crime?
"That is enough for the present. But oh! what a string of questions I could propound to these stumbling pagans, stupefied by the fatuous superstition that their country is safer than other countries which have come to judgment, because they are called by a particular name! Is there among them all not the faintest consciousness of an impending doom? or is the potency of the drug such that it is impossible to raise a cry loud enough to rouse them? Why will they go on vainly trying to solve the impossible problem of Government, never seeing that whatever system is introduced is merely a rearrangement of sinners; that voters are like cards—the more you shuffle them the dirtier they get; and that it is of no use agitating for a reform in the franchise without first agitating for a reform in the consciences of those who are to exercise it, and in the fundamental principles of the policy upon which we are to be governed.
"Wisely saith the greatest poet of the age, as yet, alas! unknown to fame:—
"Reformers fail because they change the letter,
And not the spirit, of the world's design.
Tyrant and slave create the scourge and fetter—
As is the worshipper, will be the shrine.
The ideal fails, though perfect were the plan,
World-harmony springs through the perfect man.
We burn out life in hot impatient striving;
We dash ourselves against the hostile spears:
The bale-tree, that our naked hands are riving,
Unites to crush us. Ere our manhood's years,
We sow the rifled blossoms of the prime,
Then fruitlessly are gathered out of time.
We seek to change souls all unripe for changes;
We build upon a treacherous human soil
Of moral quicksand, and the world avenges
Its crime upon us, while we vainly toil.
In the black coal-pit of the popular heart
Rain falls, light kindles, but no flowers upstart.