CHAPTER XXIII.
EARL OF SHAFTESBURY
Diaries of 1830–40—The first English Vice-Consul for Jerusalem—Lord Lindsay’s travels in Egypt and the Holy Land—A guarantee of five Powers—Lord Shaftesbury’s conception of a spiritual centre for the Jewish nation.
The Zionist idea not only has a long and unbroken history in England; it links together periods and men of the most widely different convictions and emotions. This truth is illustrated by the fact that at the very time when Sir Moses was endeavouring to found a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, another famous man, one of the greatest Christians in this country, was working in his way and according to his lights, with similar enthusiasm and strength of conviction, for precisely the same cause. This was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–1885), one of the most interesting personalities of the age, a man of the soundest intellect and the keenest perceptions, sagacious, far-seeing, of great honesty of purpose, modest and averse from notoriety, an ardent Christian and a broad-minded philanthropist.[¹]
[¹] In Lord Shaftesbury, the earnest Christian philanthropist, the world was not slow to recognize the most eminent social reformer of the nineteenth century. The Duke of Argyll (1823–1900) thus described him in a memorable speech in the House of Lords, and the eulogy was endorsed by Lord Salisbury (1830–1903): “The family motto of the Shaftesburys, ‘Love, serve,’ was well exemplified in the character of his life. His efforts and his influence were interwoven with many of the most humane movements of two generations. Pre-eminently the friend of the poor, the degraded and the outcast, his generous sympathies and his ceaseless labours on behalf of the classes in whom he took so deep an interest, have given him a high place in the illustrious roll of benevolent Englishmen. The epitaph which the Eastern Rabbi desired for himself might with perfect truth be applied to Lord Shaftesbury, ‘Write me as one who loves his fellow-men.’”
Lord Shaftesbury writes in his Diaries[¹] on September 29th, 1838:—
[¹] Edwin Hodder: The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, London, 1886.
“Took leave this morning of Young, who has just been appointed Her Majesty’s Vice-Consul at Jerusalem! He will sail in a day or two to the Holy Land. If this is duly considered, what a wonderful event it is! The ancient city of the people of God is about to resume a place among the nations, and England is the first of the Gentile Kingdoms that ceases ‘to tread her down.’ If I had not an aversion to writing, almost insuperable, I would record here, for the benefit of my very weak and treacherous memory, all the steps whereby this good deed has been done, but the arrangement of the narrative, and the execution of it, would cost me too much penmanship; I shall always, at any rate, remember that God put it into my heart to conceive the plan for His honour, gave me influence to prevail with Palmerston, and provided a man for the situation, who ‘can remember Jerusalem in his mirth’” (vol. i., p. 233).
It was, as we see, a sublimely conceived notion of Lord Shaftesbury’s that Jerusalem was about to resume a place among the nations, and that England was destined to carry out God’s designs.
He continues on October 3rd, 1838:—
“Lord Lindsay’s[¹] ‘Travels in Egypt and the Holy Land’ are very creditable to him, ... Egypt will yield largely in confirmation of the Jewish records; and Palestine, when dug and harrowed by enterprising travellers, must exhibit the past with all the vividness of the present. The very violences of Ibrahim Pasha[²] (1789–1848) (the Scourge of Syria) have opened the first sources of its political regeneration by offering free access to the stranger in the repression of native lawlessness; hundreds now go in a twelvemonth when one trod the way in a quarter of a century, and the Bible is becoming a common road-book” (Ibid.).