English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Unless we appreciate how passionately these enquiries absorbed Gladstone, his political actions will often appear mysterious, not to say dotty. Take the first great crisis of his political life, and his first U-turn, the Maynooth affair. It had been a routine matter ever since the Act of Union for Parliament to renew each year the modest government grant to the Catholic seminary of St Patrick’s, Maynooth, a few miles from Dublin. Why should Gladstone so violently object to the 1838 renewal? Why did he change his mind and vote for renewal in 1842? Why, above all, having caved in, did he then resign on the matter in 1845? Worldly men were baffled at the time, and worldly biographers today are still scratching their heads.

  The violence of Gladstone’s opposition in 1838 arose largely from his being enmeshed in the final stages of The State in Its Relations with the Church, which stipulated in passionate terms that in the interests of national harmony the state had a duty to uphold the national Church and so by extension to deny support to any other Church. In relation to Ireland, this meant concentrating support on the Church of Ireland – an absurd proposition since the overwhelming majority were unbudgably Roman Catholic. Macaulay had no difficulty in making mincemeat of Gladstone, teasing him for his half-measures: ‘Why not roast Dissenters at slow fires?’

  The would-be theocrat soon abandoned the implications of his position, regretfully dismissing them as impractical in an imperfect world. But by following him through the steps of the argument, Bebbington shows us what he was trying to get at. We start life, Gladstone argued as a young man (and this was the basic position he never abandoned), born into a state as well as into a family: ‘Each man came into the world and practical life of the world under a heavy debt, in extent such as he could not estimate and in kind such as he could not pay . . . Hence each successive man has found a government and his first duty has been to submit to it.’

  ‘It is historically untrue,’ Gladstone asserts, ‘that existing governments emanated from popular will.’ The idea of a social contract is a pernicious fiction. He might in the course of time become something that could be labelled a Liberal, but he never became a Lockean, still less a Rawlsian. All his life he remained a dedicated follower of Aristotle and a believer that the most important fact about man was that he was a social animal. Gladstone was an Aristotelian Christian. Civil association was God’s will. Genesis had declared that it was ‘not good that man should be alone’. The polis was the highest form of koinonia, of that common life which demanded a surrender of the individual will. And the spirit of community had to be nurtured by reverence.

  Bebbington shows very clearly how this dwelling on the key quality of reverence led Gladstone astray into the extremist programme of The State in Its Relations with the Church. But the underlying question remains, even if now more often couched in secular terms, and it is still being tossed around, as Bebbington points out, by communitarians and others on both sides of the Atlantic, notably Amitai Etzioni, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Utilitarianism is not enough. If solidarity is to be a real presence in our lives rather than a hollow slogan, then there must be some shared focus of – I can’t think of a better word than reverence.

  Speeches by David Blunkett and Gordon Brown during the Labour years signalled a sea change in the party’s attitude. It no longer appeared to be Labour’s aim to foster a multicultural society in which no particular set of beliefs and customs might aspire to dominate. On the contrary, in our public practices, such as the ceremonies for welcoming new British citizens, we are to celebrate an overarching monoculture, comprising all its traditional elements, including – glory be – an oath of allegiance to the Queen. It is only within such a framework of reverence that minority religions and traditions can flourish. Stripped of its confessional bias, Gladstone’s argument is closely attuned to the revisions of New Labour.

  Gladstone wasn’t insensitive to the difficulties of reconciling reverence with tolerance. Long before he became a Liberal, he was decidedly liberal in his attitudes to other sects and faiths. He annoyed the Tractarian ultras by sticking up for Dissenters, then annoyed them again by speaking in favour of Jewish emancipation, then stuck up for them when they in turn were being hounded. ‘The ultimate issue,’ he declared in 1848, only a few years after Maynooth, ‘is social justice, or proportionate dealing as between man and man.’

  This expansion of tolerance accompanied – and was fuelled by – the decisive shifts in his religious allegiance, from the narrow evangelicalism of his youth to an Anglo-Catholicism as broad as it was high. This included above all a theological shift from his early concentration on the Atonement to a deep and lasting love of the doctrine of the Incarnation: that is, from a doctrine that emphasized the fallen state of man to one that celebrated the dignity that Christ had brought by assuming human flesh.

  There was an exuberant fleshliness about the religion of the mature Gladstone, a quality so strange and rich that it unnerves us as much as it unnerved his contemporaries. The night-walks with prostitutes began when he was at Oxford. They were a recurring source of temptation, to which his diaries make it fairly clear that he succumbed in one way or another. But these long conversations into the small hours betokened also his recognition of the equal worth of every human being, a worth which wasn’t diminished if the girl failed to reform. You get the feeling, in fact, that reform was only a secondary goal: the communion was the thing.

  The same carnality is a crucial quality in Gladstone’s writings on Homer. In scholarly terms, his claims to have discovered the origins of the Christian narrative in the fables of Mount Olympus may have been ‘nonsense’, to quote Jowett. Anthropologists joined with orthodox clergymen in an unusual alliance against Gladstone’s thesis and his picturesque illustrations of it. It was absurd to suggest that the doctrine of the Trinity had any connection with Poseidon’s trident. And to claim that Homer’s Latona prefigured the Virgin was to advance one of those theories which, as Matthew Arnold caustically remarked, was attended by the inconvenience ‘that there really exist no data for determining them’. Gladstone climbed down a bit, in his usual furtive, roundabout style, and admitted that much early religious practice could be explained as simple nature worship. But he persisted in his efforts to inject the religion of Homer into the British bloodstream as a corrective to the otherworldly tendencies of Christianity. Homeric religion was ‘filled with human geniality and warmth’, greatly preferable to what he termed ‘the Christianity of isolation’. Its anthropomorphic quality was what ‘associated it so closely with the whole detail of life’. Rather than finding the character of Zeus an embarrassment, Gladstone described the father of the gods as ‘the masterpiece of the Homeric mythology’, a figure whose frailties made him as sympathetic as Falstaff.

  For Gladstone, the Incarnation was not a formal charade (rather like those festivals of misrule at some schools when the masters take on the role of the boys); it was a full-blooded entering into the human state. And with this revaluation of human dignity comes a revaluation of liberty. In 1878, he admitted: ‘I did not learn when I was at Oxford that which I have learned since – namely, to set a due value on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty.’ Far from insisting on unquestioning submission as he had in youth, he now thought it ‘the business of every oppressed people to rise upon every reasonable opportunity against the oppressor’. Moreover, the working people were the best judges of their destiny: the masses were more likely to be right than the classes, by which he meant those vested interests which came together only for selfish purposes.

  He was no communist or socialist: ‘It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which human happiness or misery depends.’ Self-reliance was indispensable to a sturdy polis: ‘The best thing the government can do for the people is to help them to help themselves.’ So much, as Bebbington remarks, for the nanny state. This is Thatcherite rhetoric, but it is also the common political language of the twenty-first century. As an old man in 1892,
Gladstone commented that although retrenchment was currently out of fashion, it would be enforced again whenever the people demanded it – which was the case nearly a century later.

  Gladstone’s political ideas were too manifold and multiocular to be confined within a single political creed. If part of his philosophy finds echoes in present-day communitarianism, another part finds echoes in Michael Oakeshott’s ideas of the self-fashioning human agent; and another part again in Isaiah Berlin’s argument that diverse and incommensurable goals are endemic to the human condition. It is ironic that neither of these two latter-day sages, infinitely amiable as they were in many other ways, could bear to hear a good word said of the other. Yet both their doctrines have much in common with the thinking of the mature Gladstone.

  The reconciliation of solidarity and self-reliance remains the most difficult of political undertakings. As yet, the British political class, while perceiving its necessity, has fashioned only the preliminary rhetoric for it. By contrast, its actions in government throughout the twentieth century tended towards a more or less benign managerialism, mediated partly through the welfare state and partly through the state corporations such as the BBC and the publicly owned industries. Opportunities for the masses to make their own lives have been sparse and cramped. And there hasn’t been much perceptible convergence between what Gladstone called the masses and the classes.

  Equality of opportunity is supposed to bridge the gap. But is equality of opportunity a sufficient social creed, even if it were being abundantly realized, which it isn’t? No politician today would dream of imitating Gladstone’s words to a gathering of artisans in Greenwich in 1875: ‘Be not eager to raise your children out of the working class but be desirous that they should remain in that class and elevate the work of it.’ But is that so very far from what William Morris had in mind? If, by contrast, we place all our hopes on social mobility, some of us are bound to be disappointed.

  Gladstone annoyed almost everyone in one way or another. Liberals like Acton could not abide his insistence on the supreme importance of national allegiance. Conservatives were suspicious of his claims to trust the judgment of working men. Socialists did not care for his unabashed inegalitarianism. Capitalists were made uneasy by his assertion that material prosperity threatened the morale not of the poor, but of the prosperous classes. Progressives did not like his description of the late-Victorian period as ‘the age of sham’, symbolized by the arrival on the market of a butter substitute called ‘oleo-margarine’ – to the unhealthy influence of which he skittishly attributed the irrational revolt among the educated elite against the obvious virtues of Home Rule.

  What was intolerable above all was the old man’s oracular certainty, the insistence of that harsh voice with its flat Lancashire a. Labouchère did not object, as he indelibly put it, to Gladstone always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve but only to his pretence that God had put it there. And the worst of these divinely inspired revelations was that they never stopped.

  Can we imagine 5000 working men turning out today in pouring rain to listen to Gladstone for two or three hours, as they did again and again in the Midlothian campaign? Curiously enough, I think we can. For it was the same restless refusal to be satisfied which showed the people that he had not forgotten them.

  THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF METHODISM

  Sometimes intellectuals develop such an aversion to a subject that they can scarcely be persuaded to pay it even passing attention. For several decades in the last century, the free market became so repugnant to the intelligentsia that only professional economists – and by no means all of them – could bear to study its workings in any depth, let alone with any sympathy. Even less fashionable, and for far longer, has been the history of the Nonconformist Churches and of Methodism in particular. Apart from confessional historians, an anxious and partial fraternity, the general run of social historians tackled Methodism only as a source for the rise of the Labour movement, to test the truth of Harold Wilson’s remark that the British Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marx.

  That, for example, was the impetus behind the notorious chapter, ‘The Transforming Power of the Cross’, in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson, himself from a Methodist background, loathed Methodism. John Wesley, he claimed, had ‘dispensed with the best and selected unhesitatingly the worse (sic) element of Puritanism’. As a result, Methodism in its early years became ‘a ritualised form of psychic masturbation’, and ‘the blackening chapels stood in the industrial districts like great traps for the human psyche’. Yet at the same time the movement’s mysterious energizing qualities did impel Methodist working men and even preachers to take a leading part in working-class politics. In Thompson’s eyes, the appalling enthusiasm of the love feast and the camp meeting was thus transformed into the legitimate agitation of the protest march and the party rally.

  Personal revulsion against a narrow or gloomy Methodist upbringing could reach violent extremes. In Up from Methodism (1926), a sort of American Father and Son, Herbert Asbury, the great-great-nephew of Francis Asbury, the most indefatigable of all the Methodist pioneers in America, railed against the platitudes and mummeries of all faiths, but particularly that in which he had been raised. He vowed that if he ever had a son who showed any signs of becoming a preacher he would ‘whale hell out of him’.

  Opponents in the older Churches often pretended to ignore the Methodists and underplayed their impact. Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln, Wesley’s Oxford college, in his eighty-page essay ‘Tendencies of Religious Thought in England 1688–1750’, failed to mention Wesley once. When a leading local Methodist preacher said he was astonished that Oxford should so neglect a religious movement then (in the 1880s) numbering some 25 million members worldwide, Pattison interrupted: ‘Surely you mean 25,000’. Today, Methodism in the English-speaking world has declined in step with other Free Church traditions. But the number of adherents to Pentecostalism, which is unmistakably a lineal descendant of Methodism, has passed 250 million. If the present rate of growth in Africa, Asia and South America continues, by mid-century there may be a billion Pentecostals – as many as there would then be Hindus. Yet, as David Martin has argued, ‘because Pentecostalism is personal and cultural it does not need to deal in the violence intrinsic to political action, which is why it is virtually unnoticed by the Western media, and comes as a surprise to the Western academy’. It may seem odd that the affluent arbiters of secular and religious opinion should be hard on a religion which is so much the option of the poor, especially of the black female poor.

  But then that was the fate of Methodism in its heyday, and for the same reason: that although it recruited so widely among the working classes, whom the established Churches had such difficulty in reaching, it recruited them as Christian soldiers, and not as the shock troops of the Left. Which is why the evolution of Methodism and its critical reception remain of such relevance to us. David Hempton, of Boston University, a Methodist foundation, has written several first-rate studies of connections between Methodism and political and popular culture. His new book is a sharply focused account of Methodism in and for itself. Always readable and with a crisp turn of phrase, he provides an admirable introduction to this extraordinary subject, and also leads us on to ponder in what circumstances any religion can hope to survive the onrush of secular modernity, and for how long.

  Hempton begins by reminding us of the unexpectedly complex roots of Methodism. John Wesley was, after all, not only an Anglican priest, like his father and grandfather, but also a fair theologian and classical scholar. The peculiar doctrine he evolved and then enforced with his famous angry will was drawn from a bewildering array of elements: first, from Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf and the Moravian Pietists he met on his voyage out to Georgia on his first pastoral excursion, but also from patristic sources, such as Gregory of Nyssa; from Fenelon; from Jeremy Taylor (though with reservations); from Hooker; and Thomas à Kempis. What Wes
ley fashioned out of all this was highly individual. He dispensed with the quietism of the Moravians. In his view, ‘the ideal Christian life was one of ceaseless, cheerful activism’. He repudiated the gloomy predestination of Calvinism. Most controversial of all, he devised and vigorously defended a doctrine of entire sanctification, or Christian perfection. When Jesus said, ‘Be ye therefore perfect’ he meant what he said. To be sure, this doctrine was qualified by a theology of ‘responsible grace’, but it was this assent to perfectibility that marked out the Methodists and dowered them with their cheerfulness. This combination unleashed a restless, energetic faith that was both introspective and optimistic, egalitarian, missionary, often provoked by a dramatic conversion experience and dependent on a direct, unmediated relationship with God – the kind of religion which we have come to think of as typically American, in fact, and which Europeans find so unsettling in the Weltanschauung of George W. Bush, born an Episcopalian and born again as a Methodist.

  Such a faith, as Hempton shows, could spread with amazing rapidity across wild or unsettled terrain, as it did across America as the frontier moved west. Among immigrants or in new industrial settlements, Methodists could quickly come to dominate, as they did in the Cornish tin mines and the valleys of South Wales. They found it much harder to break into established religious cultures, especially in Roman Catholic countries or among peoples who were resistant to Anglo-American agriculture and commerce, such as the Native Americans. Methodists had to push on. As Bishop Francis Burns wrote from Liberia in 1859, ‘this staying here within hearing of the ocean’s waves will be the death of us! Christianity, in order to preserve its vitality among any people, requires expansion, and we must spread or die’. In fact they did both, as most white missionaries succumbed to disease within a few years of arriving in Africa. The burden of preaching was carried on very successfully by Africans and deepened by the numerous schools and colleges that the Methodists set up. The trouble was that the itinerant preachers – hardy, solitary, living for nothing except the joy of preaching the good news – inevitably gave way to married ministers, settled congregations and ambitious building programmes. The hallelujahs were drowned by arguments about the accounts. The grander the churches they put up to demonstrate that the Methodists really had arrived, the faster faded the freshness and spontaneity that had been their original appeal, and the more irrevocably the direction of the Church fell into the hands of the merchants and shopkeepers who were paying for it.