Nevertheless, there was one extenuating circumstance—he had a pretty daughter, with whom a friend and school-fellow of mine was in love.
I have remarked on the strictly classical character of the school; but, after all, if one learns only one good thing well, one wishes to know others, and can teach one’s self. Then, classics have another advantage: Horace alone can make a gentleman. But what is more remarkable than all the other omissions in the school is, that the boys were never, individually, taught a word of religion. When it is remembered what a powerful influence the wealth of the clergy exercises, one must pause in wonder over the fact of religious teaching being a thing unknown. Religious machinery was everywhere visible. There was a grand organ in the gallery at one end of the dining-hall, over the doorway; there was an organist, Mr. Glen, to accompany the hymn or psalm during the daily services before meat, consisting of a bit of Bible and a thanksgiving, the Grecians being pro-chaplains. There was a form of prayer read by any boy in the wards who was handy at bed-time, and a chapter selected at his option; but no teaching of the Scriptures or of the Church dogmas, if we may except the services at Christ Church on Sundays. There may have been such an appointment as chaplain to Christ’s Hospital; if so it was strictly honorary, and kept a profound secret.
By the way, there was some religious improvement to be derived personally through the committing of a misdemeanour, the punishment for which was the getting a chapter in the Bible by heart. I profited by this myself in a curious manner, for, being a very sensitive boy, I made a bad reader, so, when called upon to perform the evening service, I always read the chapter which I knew by heart, and that so impressively and faultlessly, that I came off with much éclat.
I can still repeat that chapter, but no other.
XII.
Perhaps ten thousand boys have passed through the school since I bade farewell to its cloisters, but I am unable to say whether the system of non-religious teaching has been changed. Our reverend classical masters manifested no religious tastes; it may be due to their not having imbibed any when they were pupils like ourselves in the school. I do recollect Mr. Lynam, of whom I was a pupil for several years, correcting my pronunciation of Jōb, which I called Jŏb. If we were reading something from Scripture before him, I have wholly forgotten it; the occasion must have been so rare.
What the effect of religious ignorance may have been on so many before and after me, it is difficult to surmise. I have no recollection of any boy, in after-life, becoming a bishop or a millionaire. Nature was open to them; she is constantly carrying on revelations, and all must begin with these before entertaining Divine ones. The greater our acquaintance is with natural teaching, the better we are able to judge of religious. A well-educated scientific man would decide a religious question in five minutes which would take five hundred years for all the doctors of divinity to get to the bottom of. A large knowledge of Nature is requisite even to find a meaning for any inspired passage, and it is doubtful if any divine ever had training enough to understand fully any one important passage of Holy Writ. Those men who are recognized as having undergone inspiration were never able to state lucidly what they heard, but recorded it in such shape as must for ever puzzle the brains of the priesthood. If such men as the Herschels had been made the vehicles of a revelation, it would have been expressed to the world in such tangible language as shuts out all dispute.
The advantages of knowledge derived from observations made within the sacred precincts of Nature is that there is always a revelation going on, made by a silent, invisible power that we can question without offence. But the custodes of the holy archives greatly disapprove of such proceeding. The Catholic forbids the perusal of Scripture; the Protestant the perusal of Nature; and that reverend gorilla, the agnostic, inculcates the wisdom of studying all things and learning nothing. Surely he is the missing link!
I admire the clergy as gentlemen and men of education, but the fault is that they proceed from the university to the Church, and drop science and literature out of their daily life, returning to ignorance at the same pace as they quitted it as children. The cultivated class find it impossible to converse with them on any profitable grounds.