And in either case, also, we trust the sharp and heavy lessons of the war will not be lost upon us. To speak at present with due contempt of those advocates of peace and utility, once so loud and confident, now so downcast and bedraggled, would be like painting the lily, or heaping ridicule on Pantaloon. Yet let the present fever once pass, and we fear, unless stimulants are applied, the old lethargy will return. And therefore we say, whether there be peace, or war to obtain peace, let our military power be not only maintained, but augmented. Let us not again be caught asleep, and with our quiver empty. Let those who so strongly insist on placing our army in depreciatory comparison with that of France, study the comparative circumstances of the two armies before the war began. They will find among our neighbours no skeleton of an army, no weak sketch or outline of what should be a cavalry, no neglected or half-equipped artillery, no insufficient medical staff, and no defunct commissariat. Let men who cheerfully pay the premium of fire insurance, to secure themselves against the chance of conflagration, learn to regard as equally thrifty the maintenance of a safeguard against the explosive elements so rife in Europe. Let our army be so modelled and provided in peace, that it may readily assume the proportions of war. And, above all, let us devise some means, more efficient than any we now possess, for recruiting our regiments, and rendering military service more alluring to our population.
Let us also, when peace returns, think and speak of our national achievements during the war, in a tone equally removed from the vainglorious outcry which heralded imaginary successes, and the sullen whimperings which are now heard for a presumed discomfiture. “We may find in these achievements ample reason for congratulation. That the army was few and ill-provided, only augments the glories of Alma and Inkermann. At three thousand miles from home we landed that army on the territory of the greatest military power in Europe, and laid siege to his naval stronghold. Amid the snows of winter and the heats of summer the siege advanced: not for a day, since the army landed, have our guns been silent; not for a day have the waters of the enemy’s coasts been unfurrowed by our keels, bearing ammunition to the batteries and supplies to our troops. On a spot separated from us by the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Euxine, we have maintained our army, more than supplied its losses, poured into the country the largest ordnance and projectiles in steady and enormous profusion. And when these had done their work, when the town for which the Czar disputed with desperate and exhaustive efforts was abandoned in ruins and ashes, a larger force than England ever before possessed, rested for the winter amid those distant regions in comfort and plenty. Such, broadly stated, are among the marvellous exploits which England has achieved in the war.
RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE.[[17]]
There are few things more difficult to understand and acknowledge than the essentially one and indivisible nature of that puzzling personage, Man, with all his diverse occupations. An ingenious process of mental anatomy, carefully distributing to every pursuit its little bundle of faculties—his head to his business, his heart to his home, and to his religion a vague ethereal principle, which, for want of a better title, we call his soul—seems always to have been a more agreeable idea to the philosophic and speculative, than that bolder presentment of one whole indivisible being, which calls the man to love his Maker “with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his strength, and with all his mind.” We prefer, with instinctive subtilty—for human nature has wiles in its weakness—the easier morality of division; and a hundred distinctions straightway start up for the confusion of the one poor individual creature, who indeed is little able to bear, in any of his occupations, the subtraction of any of his powers. But the issue is that we cheat the world when we only mean to cheat God, and lose the genial and joyous privilege to “do all things heartily,” while we calculate with trembling how much belongs to Religion, and how much to Common Life.
Not to say that Common Life has always borne somewhat of a contemptible aspect to the philosophy of men: asceticism is more than a Romish error—it is a natural delusion as universal as the race; and however dubious we may be about the hermit’s cell and its mortifications, a dainty oratory, calm and secluded, a little world of Thought or of Art, commends itself much to the imagination of the “superior classes” even in these progressive times. Our modern prophets appeal to a select and refined audience, and have nothing to say to the crowd. We have abundant missions to the poor, but few loving assaults upon the common. Strange enough, we are all best satisfied to go out of our way in the service of God and our neighbour—and tasks outré and self-imposed are more pleasant to our perversity at all times than those that lie direct in our path.
Among all the vague big utterances of the day, professing so much and profiting so little, it is pleasant to fall upon anything so manful and truth-telling as the little book whose name stands at the head of our page. And it startles us with a grateful and pleasant surprise to see those magical words of authority upon the homely brown cover of Mr Caird’s sermon, which, doubtless, despite all our independence, have given it entrance to many a house and table where sermons are not generally favoured reading. What is it which has been honoured by “Her Majesty’s Command?” It is not anything addressed by special compliment to Her Majesty; indeed—all honour to the faithful preacher and his royal auditors—one has to turn to that same brown cover before one has the least idea that such a rare and exceptional personage as a Queen was seated among the Aberdeenshire lairds and peasants while Mr Caird expounded the common way of life. A throne is the most singular and isolated of all human positions. To us low down here in life’s protected levels, there is no comprehending that strange, lonely, lofty, imperial existence, which knows no superior, nor within its reach any equal; and when the Sovereign, shut out from lesser friendships, elects into one great friend the vast crowd of her people, one cannot refuse to be moved by the noble simplicity of the expedient. Other monarchs have done it before Queen Victoria, but very few with equal, and none with greater success; and this sermon is a singular present from a Prince to a Nation. A condescending interest in our welfare, and a certain solicitude for public morality, are matter-of-course virtues pertaining to the throne, whoever may be its occupant; but a very different and far deeper sentiment lies in the heart of this distinct reference to our understandings and sympathies, which is the highest testimony of satisfaction that the Queen and her royal husband can give to an address which moved and impressed themselves. We are sufficiently accustomed to the pure and dignified example of our liege lady—sufficiently acquainted with the wise exertions of the Prince for the common weal—to receive both without much demonstration; but there is something in the quiet humility and kindness of this united action which touches the heart of the country.
We honour the preacher, too much absorbed with his greater errand to take advantage of so good an opportunity of paying court to his Sovereign; and it is still more honourable to the royal pair who listened, that it was no disquisition upon their own exalted office—no enthusiastic voice of loyalty, urgent upon the honours due to the crown—nor indeed any discussion whatever of the particular relationship between monarch and people—which moved them to this marked and emphatic satisfaction. The Queen presents to us earnestly, an address in which herself is not distinguished even by a complimentary inference—a lesson unsoftened by the remotest breath of flattery, and without even a “special application.” God save the Queen! We take our princely friend at her word, acknowledging with what a noble honesty she shares with us, bearing her own full part of all the daily duties of common life.
Mr Caird’s sermon strikes at the very heart and root of all our living—it is not a recommendation of good things or good books, or any exclusive manner of existence, but a simple laying open of that great secret which is the very atmosphere and breath of religion. “Neither on this mountain nor at Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth.” This preacher is not content that anything which God has cleansed should be called common or unclean—he will not consent that a tithe of our faculties and emotions, like a tithe of our lands or our riches, should be reserved for God, making careful separation between the profane and the holy. He is willing, as Paul was, that we should have full use of all our powers, which, Heaven knows, are small enough for all that has to be borne and done in this laborious world. Strange argument to quicken those dull toils which even good men call secular and worldly!—strange charm to speed the plough, to guide the ship, to hasten every day’s triumphant labours through its full tale of animated hours! “Whatsoever you do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men.” It is on this great principle of life and labour that the author of this able exposition founds his reasonings, as he shows us how well we may reconcile diligence in business with fervour of spirit, and brighten ordinary occupations with the full force and radiance of godliness. The lesson comes with especial force in these days, when we are beguiled by the most sweet voices of the Ritualist and the Mystic on either side of us, and are much persuaded to a vulgar disparagement of the honest necessary work of this earth. How it may become holy work—and how we ourselves, surrounded by its cares, vexations, and trials, are in reality placed in the most advantageous position for proving and glorifying our Lord and Leader, who had share of all these labours before us, is the burden of this message; and we do not doubt it will show to many men, how much nearer than they suspected, even in their very hands and households, if they will but do it, lies the work of the Lord.
Preachers and religious writers, as a general principle, are strangely timid of permitting to the Church any intercourse, more than necessity compels, with the world; and we fear our good ministers would be sadly disconcerted were they compelled to consider with Paul what it would be right to do, “if any of them that believe not, bid you to a feast, and ye be disposed to go”—a hypothesis which, however, does not much alarm the Apostle. But Mr Caird, with a singular boldness, takes the very “world itself—the coarse, profane, common world, with its cares and temptations, its rivalries and competitions,” as the true “school for learning the art” of religious living; and is no advocate for theoretical and self-secluding Christianity. “No man,” he says, “can be a thorough proficient in navigation who has never been at sea, though he may learn the theory of it at home. No man can become a soldier by studying books on military tactics in his closet; he must in actual service acquire those habits of coolness, courage, discipline, address, rapid combination, without which the most learned in the theory of strategy or engineering will be but a schoolboy soldier after all.... Tell us not, then, that the man of business, the bustling tradesman, the toil-worn labourer, has little or no time to attend to religion. As well tell us that the pilot, amid the winds and storms, has no leisure to attend to navigation—or the general on the field of battle to the art of war. When will he attend to it? Religion is not a perpetual moping over good books—religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances: these are necessary to religion—no man can be religious without them. But religion, I repeat, is mainly and chiefly the glorifying God amid the duties and trials of the world—the guiding our course amid the adverse winds and currents of temptation by the starlight of duty and the compass of Divine truth—the bearing us manfully, wisely, courageously, for the honour of Christ, our great Leader, in the conflict of life.”
Wise doctrine, bold as it is wise; but how strange is the popular impression which makes cowardice, by some strange magic, a Christian virtue, and holds “he who fights and runs away,” for the spiritual hero. In everything else our hearts rise and swell to trace the brave man’s progress through deaths and perils; but here we count it his best policy to retreat into a corner, to thrust ambitions, powers, and pleasures, tremulously away from him, and “to be religious.” To be religious!—the word itself speaks eloquently of its true meaning—a spirit potent, sweet, and all-pervasive, and not a thing or series of things,—yet notwithstanding how eager we are to do instead of to be, in this most momentous matter. Mr Caird has finely discriminated this life and soul of religion, and the influence which true faith exercises upon everything around it, in his description of how the mind acts on latent principles—how an unexpressed remembrance or anticipation runs through actions and thoughts which have no direct connection with it; and how hopes, of which we were not even thinking, sway and move us, invisible and silent agents in our commonest ways. We recommend this portion of his sermon to all thoughtful readers.