W. H. Darkdale and Dells.
III.
From the Rev. Ambrose Bradley to the Right Reverend the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells.
Vicarage, May 31, 1880.
My Dear Bishop,—I am obliged to you for your kind though categorical letter, to which I hasten to give you a reply. That certain members of my congregation should have forwarded complaints concerning me does not surprise me, seeing that they have already taken me to task on many occasions and made my progress here difficult, if not disagreeable. But I think you will agree with me that there is only one light by which a Christian man, even a Christian clergyman, can consent to be directed—the light of his own conscience and intellect, Divinely implanted within him for his spiritual guidance.
I will be quite candid with you. You ask what has changed me since the day when, zealous, and, as you say, ‘perfervid,’ I was promoted to this ministry. The answer is simple. A deep and conscientious study of the wonderful truths of Science, an eager and impassioned study of the beautiful truths of Art.
I seem to see you raise your hands in horror. But if you will bear with me a little while, perhaps I may convince you that what I have said is not so horrible after all—nay, that it expresses a conviction which exists at the present moment in the bosom of many Christian men.
The great question before the world just now, when the foundations of a particular faith are fatally shaken, when Science denies that Christ as we conceive Him ever was, and when Art bewails wildly that He should ever have been, is whether the Christian religion can continue to exist at all; whether, when a few more years have passed away, it will not present to a modern mind the spectacle that paganism once presented to a mediaeval mind. Now, of our leading Churchmen, not even you, my Lord Bishop, I feel sure, deny that the Church is in danger, both through attacks from without and through a kind of dry-rot within. Lyell and others have demolished and made ridiculous the Mosaic cosmogony Strauss and others have demolished, with more or less success, the Biblical and Christian miracles. No sane man now seriously believes that the sun ever stood still, or that an ass spoke in human speech, or that a multitude of people were ever fed with a few loaves and fishes, or that any solid human form ever walked on the liquid sea. With the old supernaturalism has gone the old asceticism or other-worldliness. It is now pretty well agreed that there are substantially beautiful things in this world which have precedence over fancifully beautiful things in the other. The poets have taught us the loveliness of Nature, the painters have shown us the loveliness of Art. Meantime, what does the Church do? Instead of accepting the new knowledge and the new beauty, instead of building herself up anew on the debris of her shattered superstitions, she buries her face in her own ashes, and utters a senile wail of protestation. Instead of calling upon her children to face the storm, and to build up new bulwarks against the rising wave of secularism, she commands them to wail with her, or to be silent. Instead of perceiving that the priests of Baal and Antichrist might readily be overthrown with the weapons forged by their own hands, she cowers before them powerless, in all the paralysis of superstition, in all the blind fatuity of prayer.
But let us look the facts in the face.
The teachers of the new knowledge have unroofed our Temple to the heavens, but have not destroyed its foundations; they have overthrown its brazen images, but have not touched its solid walls. Put the case in other and stronger words. The God who thundered upon Sinai has vanished into air and cloud, but the God of man’s heavenly aspiration is wonderfully quickened and alive. The Bible of wrath and prophecy is cast contemptuously aside, but the Bible of eternal poetry is imperishable, its wild dreams and aspirations being crystallised in such literature as cannot die. The historic personality of the gentle rounder of Christianity becomes fainter and fainter as the ages advance; but, on the other hand, brighter and fairer grows the Divine Ideal which rose from the ashes of that godlike man. Men reject the old miracles, but they at last accept a miracle of human idealism. In one word, though Christianity has perished as a dogmatic faith, it survives as the philosophic religion of the world.