High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The report observed that it had become fashionable for the upper and middle classes to attend worship if they wished to be seen to be entering into ‘the recognised proprieties of life’.37 However, it was also clear in large towns ‘how absolutely insignificant a portion of the congregations is composed of artisans’. It likened them to ‘the people of a heathen country’ and said they were ‘thoroughly estranged from our religious institutions’. More shocking, the author of the report, Horace Mann, noted a specific movement designed to degrade religion: ‘There is a sect, originated recently, adherents to a system called “Secularism”; the principal tenet being that, as the fact of a future life is (in their view) at all events susceptible of some degree of doubt, while the fact and the necessities of a present life are matters of direct sensation, it is therefore prudent to attend exclusively to the concerns of that existence which is certain and immediate – not wasting energies required for present duties by a preparation for remote, and merely possible, contingencies.’ Mann felt the working population and the ‘miserable denizens of courts and crowded alleys’ had bought into this ‘creed’ extensively, but unwittingly: he called them ‘unconscious Secularists – engrossed by the demands, the trials, or the pleasures of the passing hour, and ignorant and careless of a future’. He concluded: ‘the melancholy fact is thus impressed upon our notice that the classes which are most in need of the restraints and consolations of religion are the classes which are most without them.’

  Mann said the artisan could not go into a church without having some ‘memento of inferiority’ impressed upon him: and called for the abolition of the pew system. ‘Religion . . . has thus come to be regarded as a purely middle-class propriety or luxury,’ he observed.38 If artisans felt that class barriers, even beyond the pew system, made it difficult or unpleasant for them to attend church, then Mann felt the Church and the dissenting chapels should put on services especially for the working man and his family: he cited the example of ‘ragged churches’, emulating the Ragged Schools, that had sprung up in several working-class districts.

  Mann also felt that a serious obstacle to working-class attendance was the distinctly unchristian behaviour towards them of some of their social superiors whom they encountered at places of worship. He had detected ‘insufficient sympathy’ for the ‘alleviation of their social burdens – poverty, disease and ignorance.’ In this remark Mann identified himself, and the part of officialdom for whom he spoke, with the pursuit of perfection; but he also indicated how far the self-interest of many of the well-to-do set itself against such a notion. Although he conceded that the clergy led schemes to help the poor, the nature of much church philanthropy was not, he felt, designed to secure the gratitude of those who received it.

  He also touched on the suspicion that many of the poor had of the motives of the university-trained clergy with whom they came into contact, as if the Christian message were for social control rather than the salvation of souls. He asserted that the conditions in which the poor lived, notably the squalor of their housing, were simply too dreadful to create any faith in Christianity. He reflected that ‘teeming populations often now surround half empty churches, which would probably remain half empty even if the sittings were all free’.39 The only solution, he believed, was missionary work: and he cited the example of the Mormons, who had done such a thing with notably good results.

  The London City Mission had been founded in 1835, its 300 missionaries being sent out to distribute tracts to the poor in their homes and to talk to them about religion. Sometimes they would hold prayer meetings or Bible classes: but this was an isolated example. In time the missionary call would be taken up: though not in large numbers until a combination of William Booth and his Salvation Army at one end of the spectrum and the universities and the public schools at the other made a concerted effort to spread the word in the 1870s and 1880s. Mann was so convinced of the ‘urgency’ of the danger from godlessness in urban England that he suggested that ‘street-preaching’, under proper sanction and control, would not be a too energetic measure for ‘the terrible emergency’.40 For the moment, it was not more churches that were needed, but more curates. The incumbents of many urban parishes could not cope with the workload of the destitute, and urgently needed practical support.

  He also called for the greater involvement of laymen; for the development of more Sunday schools; and for the revival of the principle of suffragan bishops. Two new sees – Manchester and Ripon – had been created shortly before King William’s death for the expanding populations of Lancashire and the West Riding. All these proposals invited the same question: would the godless lower orders be remotely interested in taking advantage of the new opportunities for worship that it was proposed to offer them? Mann did not choose to speculate on this: he merely advised his masters in government that ‘no inconsiderable portion of the secular prosperity and peace of individuals and states depends on the extent to which a pure religion is professed and practically followed.’41

  This was the orthodoxy: and the reason why the limited State provision for education of the poor was made through the agency of the Church. Mann commended religion as an instrument of the very social control he had earlier said that the lower classes were so suspicious of: ‘Christian men become, almost inevitably, temperate, industrious, and provident, as part of their religious duty; and Christian citizens acquire respect for human laws from having learnt to reverence those which are divine.’ To Mann and the whole official and political class, indeed, such a notion justified the pursuit of perfection by means of extending godliness.

  It was also perceived to be a barrier – though Mann does not explicitly mention it – that the Established Church remained socially exclusive in terms of its clergy. The great majority were Oxford or Cambridge men. Anthony Trollope observed that the alumnus of a theological college, rather than an Oxbridge one, ‘who won’t drink his glass of wine, and talk of his college, and put off for a few happy hours the sacred stiffness of the profession and become simply an English gentleman – he is the clergyman whom in his heart the archdeacon does not love.’42 By implication, such a man would not find preferment easy, and his type was not encouraged. Religious tests as a condition of matriculating or taking a bachelor’s degree at Oxford and Cambridge were abolished in the two universities in 1854 and 1856 respectively. By 1878, however, 16,297 of the 23,612 English and Welsh clergy were still Oxbridge men.

  The 1851 census showed that there were nearly as many Nonconformists attending places of worship as there were Anglicans. The dissenting congregations had been greatly boosted by the repeal in 1828 of the Test and Corporation Acts, which had excluded their members from many areas of public life and from certain schools, from universities and from being beneficiaries of certain charities. Whether Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Plymouth Brethren or any other dissenting congregations, what united Nonconformity was its regard of State involvement in religion as handicapping freedom of conscience. The Nonconformists held great sway in the new urban communities, where they had colonised much of the new middle class. They were also among the strictest upholders of Protestantism, their literal interpretations of the Bible far exceeding the lax approach of many Anglican clergy that had so offended the Tractarians.

  Yet, as we shall see in the next two chapters, the paradox was that at a time of heightened religious consciousness and, in some places, even religious revival, the orthodoxies of religion, and even the idea of religion itself, were starting to be questioned as never before. Some who had been steeped in Anglicanism from the cradle, and who possessed some of the highest minds in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, began to have doubts about their interpretation of their faith, and about the Arnoldian view of the central part that it should play in life and society. Beyond them, however, a movement was growing up that sought to reject and undermine religion altogether.

  Karl Marx despised religion precisely because it offered consolation to the poor for their lot, and sought to anaes
thetise them against their suffering. This is why he branded it ‘the opium of the people’. He also saw it as a justification of a profoundly iniquitous social order. He wanted the proletariat to fight against it; and atheism would be the great ally in that struggle. This, as Chadwick has pointed out, is a different motivation for secularism from what was usual in the nineteenth century: it was irrelevant to Marx whether Christianity was true or not, for all that mattered was that it impeded the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  The new middle classes who felt alienated from Anglicanism were natural converts to dissent, and had the leisure and the opportunity – and, more to the point, usually the education – to engage in the philosophical processes that might lead them away from the Church but keep them within Christianity. An Act in 1843 increased funds to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to create new parishes and build new churches. It had had the strong support of Ashley, who also led private fund-raising drives to match the grants of public money. As Mill would find, professing atheism was a sure way of inviting obloquy, ridicule and character assassination: so the socialist movement took care to stand apart from the minority who happily declared themselves atheists.

  For this reason, around 1850, the word ‘secularist’ entered the language, used by the Birmingham lecturer and radical George Holyoake to describe himself and to avoid ‘the imputations of atheism and infidelity’.43 Holyoake had been imprisoned for six months for blasphemy in 1842, as the result of an answer he had given during a public lecture in Cheltenham, so understood better than most the importance of treading carefully. When T. H. Huxley popularised the use of ‘agnostic’ in the 1860s, Holyoake adopted that. During the 1850s secular societies sprang up in parts of England, often in a direct line of descent from Chartism, and by way of a final attempt to keep it going. They were most visible in the industrial heartland of Lancashire and the West Riding.

  By then, however, the battle was almost won. Men such as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Samuel Butler ensured the movement would carry heavier metal than its opponents. However, for most working men and their families, the drift to secularism came not after an intellectual battle, or a feeling that the Church was a weapon of social control that they had to fend off, but because of a lack of education and spirituality in their lives. Between 1841 and 1870 a total of 2,859 new and rebuilt Anglican churches were consecrated, nearly three times as many as in the previous thirty years: but this may have been simply as a result of an over-optimistic miscalculation by the Church, and only created an illusion of a godly nation.44 The religious superstructure could no longer cope, and the threat of damnation was a fairy story.

  The nature of Sundays was changing. Sports may not have been encouraged, but other distractions were becoming more frequent. In 1841 a young Baptist carpenter, Thomas Cook, organised the first railway excursion, for a temperance society. Within twenty years a London clergyman would complain about the temptation to people to treat Sunday as a ‘holiday’ because of the availability of such excursions.45 Within another decade or two, the bicycle would cut a further swathe through potential church attendance, with the opening of museums, parks, concert halls and galleries on Sunday afternoons playing their part. Among the lower classes in particular, the widespread availability of alcohol also militated against church attendance.

  By the 1840s one thing for certain had changed, which was that the Church had flung off its Georgian lassitude, not least as it better understood how these social and philosophical currents were threatening to undermine it. Any notion that the clergy were guilty of neglect of their duties, and preferred a life of ease, was not always supported by the facts. Gladstone, in November 1842, noted a remark made at dinner by Thomas Grenville that ‘the most remarkable change he had witnessed in the course of his long life’ was ‘without doubt the change in the character of the clergy’. Grenville elaborated that ‘in his earlier days, the young clergy were almost as a matter of course gentlemen indeed but unconcerned, in any serious sense, about their parishes or their duties: whereas now the rule was completely reversed and they were as a body zealously and devoutly set upon the work of their office.’46

  CHAPTER 6

  THE DOUBTING MIND: STRUGGLES IN THE SEA OF FAITH

  I

  THE MOST PROFOUND effect of the Oxford Movement was not John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism, predictable from 1833. It was the crises of faith and the reconsideration of religion it inflicted on many of those who came into contact with it. This became a widespread social and cultural phenomenon in the 1840s. As we have seen, it found its way even into fiction, such as in the case of Mr Hale, the doubt-ridden clergyman in Mrs Gaskell’s North and South. Hale seems an extreme, almost absurd figure, until one realises that his martyrdom had parallels in real life that were all too serious for those concerned. Hale’s experience was, as we shall see, not far removed from that of Arthur Hugh Clough, for whom it meant he could no longer subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, with their repudiation of the Catholic Church and the Pope and their insistence on this true form of Christianity – and, indeed, their assumption of the inevitable superiority of Christianity itself. Hale is a pathetically weak man – Clough had more moral fibre – but he had been ‘a perfect model of a parish priest’.1 He had a beautiful vicarage in a serene Hampshire village where his wife and daughter lived lives of fruitful ease, doing good works. Then he was assailed by ‘doubts’. ‘How I love the holy Church from which I am to be shut out!’ he protested to his bewildered daughter.2 But, like Clough, he is unable ‘to make a fresh declaration of conformity to the Liturgy at my institution’.3 Then, like Clough, he left his familiar surroundings, in his case for the industrial north, to work as a private tutor to a mill-owner whose education was neglected but who, in typical Victorian style, wished to improve himself. Like Clough, the Reverend Mr Hale died before his time, worn out by the consequences of his doubts, and brought misery upon his family. ‘I don’t think God endued me with over-much wisdom or strength,’ Hale confides in his best friend just before his martyrdom.4

  Other serious intellectuals in the Anglican tradition had their own problems too. For Matthew Arnold it led to a reconsideration of the profoundly religious teaching he had had from his evangelical father. For James Anthony Froude the debate about Christian worship rocked the foundations of his faith, and, once he came under the influence of Carlyle and his brand of Germanic theism, led to his fundamentally questioning Christianity. At Cambridge, away from these influences, Charles Kingsley found his Anglicanism moving into Christian socialism. All these men, in their different ways, proved the continuing power of religion over them, and the need either to reach an accommodation with it, to redefine it, or to adjust to a more secular society. They were but some of the most notable members of a movement that would have a very profound effect upon society. Each may have had his own response to the problem, but the cumulative effect was to start to weaken the grip of religion on Britain, and to advance a culture in which faith no longer played the dominant part.

  II

  As a Rugbeian Clough was, in the words of Lytton Strachey, ‘an exceptional kind of boy, upon whom the high-pitched exhortations of Dr Arnold produced a very different effect’ from the effect it had upon most others.5 He, and others like him, ‘fell completely under his [Arnold’s] sway, responded like wax to the pressure of his influence, and moulded their whole lives with passionate reverence upon the teaching of their adored master.’ Clough was absorbed almost into the Arnold family. The editor of Clough’s letters, Frederick Mulhauser, asserts that because of the absence of Clough’s family in America, ‘Rugby was his real home and [his] real father Dr Arnold.’6 The Doctor himself would not have disagreed: he wrote to Clough’s uncle Alfred, just as Clough was about to go up to Balliol in 1837, to say he regarded Clough ‘with an affection and interest hardly less than I should feel for my own son’.7

  Clough became a praepostor at Rugby, and head of School House – Arn
old’s own house. Strachey notes that Clough ‘thought of nothing but moral good, moral evil, moral influence and moral responsibility.’ He becomes the subject of one of Strachey’s better jokes. ‘Perhaps it was not surprising that a young man brought up in such an atmosphere should have fallen a prey, at Oxford, to the frenzies of religious controversy; that he should have been driven almost out of his wits by the ratiocinations of W. G. Ward; that he should have lost his faith; that he should have spent the rest of his existence lamenting that loss, both in prose and verse; and that he should have eventually succumbed, conscientiously doing up brown paper parcels for Florence Nightingale.’8 Clough certainly took his role as a moral exemplar seriously. Writing to his sister on 10 October 1835 he noted that ‘there is a deal of evil springing up in the School, and it is to be feared that the tares will choke much of the wheat . . . I am trying to show them that good is not necessarily disagreeable, that a Christian may be and is likely to be a gentleman, and that he is surely much more than a gentleman. It is a weary thing to look around and see all the evil, all the sin and wickedness of those with whom one must daily associate . . .’9

  He won a scholarship to Balliol, undermining his already weak health in the process. His success was a delight, but not a surprise, to Arnold and his school. He was regarded as by far the most brilliant product thus far of Arnold’s reign, and a glittering career at Oxford was deemed to be his desert. He was set to be the intellectual leader of his generation: he should have been one of the key forces that shaped Victorian England. Expectations took their toll upon him, however. On his return from Oxford at the end of November 1836, having sat the examinations, he was nursed by Mrs Arnold for several days while he recovered from the mental debilitation.