One other prod at the worthy Divine before we go. ‘I presume, reverent sir, that the instructions which Christ gave to his disciples apply to all the clergymen who profess to be the present representatives of those disciples?’
‘Undoubtedly they do.’
‘And yet he said, Doctor, “Leave wife and child and follow me.” How does that fit in with the existence of Mrs Pontiphobus and five little Pontiphobi? Oh Doctor, Doctor, claim what you will for the glorious Anglican Church, but not, for candour’s sake, not entire consistency with the so-called Divine revelation.’
Don’t imagine that I am pleading for celibacy of the clergy. I am pointing out an inconsistency, not defending a doctrine. In theory there is no doubt that the man who has no earthly encumbrances, and whose thoughts are not tied down to earth by the necessity of continually providing for the maintenance of a household and the comfort of a family, is likely to be the most efficient servant of a Church. But in practice it is a dangerous doctrine. Celibacy may produce a saint and it may produce a devil. It may raise a man among the angels or it may sink him among the beasts. Have we a right to play head-or-tails with a man’s soul in that fashion?
It was a cursed day when religion as taught by Christ was changed into religion as understood by Christians. Well has Froude said that the gospel comes from God but theology was invented by the devil. Well done, John Anthony, you have spoken a true and a brave word there.63 The simple self-denying life, the broad reforming spirit, the humble tender heart are all of Heaven, but the narrow tenets of our modern churches, the creeds and articles, the dogmas, the anathemas and the excommunications – they are weapons from the armoury of Gehenna. When religion is weeded of all forms of evangelistic gossip, and is founded upon elemental truth, there will be some hope of ending the petty bickerings of creeds, and of including the whole human family in one comprehensive faith.
These elemental truths are easily arrived at without the aid of book or preceptor. If a man could be born alone into the world, and could in spite of his isolation acquire a moderate degree of reasoning power, he would be able to evolve from his own resources a religion which, if less highly elaborated than our present ones, would at least be less open to criticism. Let us imagine this solitary philosopher and let us see how he arrives at his conclusions. Experience would soon convince him that there was never an effect without a cause – that wherever in the woods there was a nest, there must have been a nest-maker. Given a world, then, there could be no question that a world-maker existed, and a glance at the starry firmament would convince him that this maker must be a being of enormous and infinite power. Already, you see, our lonely man has attained to the idea of an omnipotent Creator. But he would soon get further than that. He could not wander through the woods in springtime and watch how bird, beast and plant have all been cared for, and had their wants foreseen and provided for, without realising that this maker was infinitely kind as well as infinitely powerful, and that no detail of his handiwork was so small as to escape him. Having attained this conception of the goodness of his Maker, shown in his own case by the rich grain and blooming fruits which lay ready for the plucking, it is but natural that he should conceive a respectful affection for the unseen cause, and that he should offer up thanks to him. So here we have our man praying to an all-merciful and omnipotent invisible Creator – and that without any teaching except the lessons contained in the broad, clearly inscribed pages of Nature. But now we come to a dangerous point in our lonely reasoner’s spiritual education. His idea of an all-kind father receives a severe shock when he observes that there are occasional phases of Nature which are by no means kind, but on the contrary which appear to him to be entirely malignant and vicious. The lightning splits and blasts the young oak, the hurricane beats down the rising grain, the icy winds blight the flowers and cut him to the very bone. How is this hard inexorable mood to be explained? Can it be made to tally with his original conception of infinite tenderness? There are only two lines of thought open to him. He may conceive the existence of a second spirit, evil in its nature, which occasionally asserts itself in the affairs of the world, or he may imagine that these things, although they appear objectionable to us, really serve some good end, and that they fulfill some necessary function in the grand scheme of Creation although our mortal eyes are too dim to understand what it is.
Having attained this point by the examination of all that was around him he would complete the evolution of his religion by turning his thoughts to his own internal consciousness with its subtle whisperings and promptings. Many thoughts and impulses he would find, some swaying him this way and some swaying him that, but over them all would sit Reason, the calm inflexible Judge, telling him that all were not alike but that there was good and bad in his own nature, even as he had seen it in the larger nature around him. ‘It is good to be kind to the poor helpless animals,’ says Reason, ‘for He who made you made them, and He gave you no permission to ill-use them. If He has been thoughtful of them, why should you be otherwise? It is good for the same reason to treat your fellow men with consideration should you ever chance to fall in with such. Gluttony is bad and so is drunkenness, for are you not ill after an excess, and illness enfeebles and degrades that body which has been made by the greatest of Architects.’ Thus would the solitary man build up a moral code as well as a religious belief, and without attaining the conception of a heaven or a hell he would humbly acknowledge himself to be a tool in the Master’s hand, and would do such duties as came in his way without fear and without question, obeying as far as he could fathom it the will of his Maker, not from any base hope of reward but from an inward sense of duty, and sustained the while by a deep-seated conviction that there was some destiny in store for him, and that the good Father would not treat his poor, tired workman in a scurvy fashion. This is elemental religion by which a man may build up for himself such a faith as is set down in the grand comprehensive verse of Micah. ‘And what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.’ It is a bald creed with no lurid hells or shining heavens, no original sins, or water-cleansings or wine-drinkings, or even any cogent necessity for the piling up of stones, or the ringing of bells; but it has the advantage that every link of it may be readily tested and rings true – so true that all future discoveries and sciences and philosophies can never materially alter it. There will be some grand movement soon in the direction of a purer and simpler creed. The old religions are mostly dead, and some of them have begun to putrefy.
Kant remarked that two things always filled him with awe and admiration: the moral sense within him and the stars above him. ‘Nature proves,’ says Jean Paul Richter,64 ‘that there is a creator, and history that there is a Providence.’ Those two observations contain the true core of all religions, and innumerable cut-and-dried dogmas or tawdry formalities will not advance us a hairbreadth. Oh that a man should take his religion as he does his name or the colour of his hair from his parents! How can advance be made while such a custom prevails? I do not envy the man who can treat a problem of such gravity in so haphazard a style, and can save himself thought by taking refuge behind ten generations of ancestors. Who would be ready to appeal to his grandfather upon questions of astronomy, of geography, of medicine? In this one grandest of all questions, however, nineteenth-century man is content to be stagnant, stuck up to the neck in the mud of the centuries, without advance or hope of advance. It is time that some few made a struggle to get out of the quagmire and to gain a more solid footing – but, alas, what a dead-weight of stolid, thoughtless humanity they will have to pull after them. I fear that they will be mostly content with having emancipated their own minds, and will throw the task down, exclaiming with Schiller, Gegen die dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens.65
‘Shake a man’s faith!’ That is one of those ridiculous phrases which continues to pass current in the world, however often it is proved to be base metal and nailed to the counter of truth. Shake a
man’s faith! Why, if it is shakable, the sooner he examines into it and either abandons it or else fortifies it, so as to render it less insecure, the better for him and the better for all. Of what practical value is a faith which is so delicate that it must be screened off from every gust of controversy? What does a citizen reply to his neighbour who comes to warn him that the bank in which he has placed his capital is by no means secure? Does he place his fingers in his ears and scream hysterically, ‘My father dealt with that bank before me. Oh, do not shake my faith in the bank!’? On the contrary, he thanks his neighbour, if he is a man of sense, and putting aside all preconceived ideas of the bank, he sets himself to examine how it now is, and whether his capital is in safety. The fact is that in spite of all loud-tongued assertions to the contrary, the human race does not take as keen or personal an interest in the choice of a religion as in the choice of an investment. When they are too lazy to question, they take credit for having an unquestioning faith. They find, like the American humourist, that they are saddest when they think.66
And when a man does from time to time stand up and protest against the great mangled mutilated creed, which is professed by four hundred denominations which are ever at one another’s throats as not being the ne plus ultra of religion, what a howling and a cat-calling there is from the poor mud-stuck wretches! How cheap it is to earn a reputation for piety by crying down the earnest enquirer, even as the Pharisees strutted about, reeking with virtue, when they had done to death the great radical reformer. Do you remember the story of the two European travellers who found their way to a village in South America where the inhabitants were all afflicted with goitre and had never seen a healthy man? The stunted, deformed wretches crowded round their visitors, pointing sardonically at them with derisive fingers and screaming, ‘They have no goitre! They have no goitre!’ So accustomed were they to the sight of their own hideous malformation that a healthy man appeared to them to be repulsive and grotesque. So a man who has had his mind trammelled and confined from his infancy, until it is as shrunken in its religious aspect as a Chinese lady’s foot, mocks and menaces when he sees a free healthy soul tasting all that is put before it, and exercising all the gifts with which the Great Creator has endowed it. Bring to the consideration of such questions a mind as plastic as wet plaster of Paris, but, having once formed your convictions, let it set as hard.
Conceive the great founder of the Christian religion returning in the flesh to this England of ours and walking down the Surrey side of the Thames, much interested in the noble river and in the bustling scenes around him. Presently he comes to a noble widespread building, tower-flanked and palatial, from the arched door of which there drives a handsome carriage containing an elderly, well-fed gentleman who is setting off for the House of Lords. ‘Pray, who is the owner of this great house?’ Christ asks of a bystander. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury.’ ‘And who is he?’ continues the enquirer. ‘Why, he is the representative in England of Christ of Nazareth who was crucified nearly two thousand years ago.’ Christ would look up at the gorgeous palace with its countless windows, and would look back at the dim-lit, low-roofed carpenter’s shop in which he spent the first thirty years of his life, and of the roving precarious existence which terminated on Calvary. Then he would glance after the rolling carriage and would recall the days when he rode his shaggy-haired old donkey into Jerusalem, or wore his sandals out by tramping over the countryside. A strange sort of representative this, truly!
But this would be only the beginning of his experience of the strange developments of Christianity. What is this howling, drum-beating band which comes surging down the Embankment? Here are red-vested men and tambourine-playing women waving, shouting, shrieking, gesticulating, with flushed faces and the wild light of fanaticism in their eyes. Christ steps aside, under the impression that he has come across some party of drunken revellers, or some private asylum perhaps out for its daily airing. As the noisy crowd goes by, however, he touches one of them upon the shoulder and asks who he and his companions may be. ‘We are the soldiers and followers of Christ of Nazareth,’ cries the fellow. ‘Do you come with us and be saved?’ At the words, the whole howling gang turn upon the mild-faced stranger and would have borne him away forcibly with them had he not escaped them by darting into a small brick building, the door of which happened to be ajar.67
A red-bearded man is preaching inside to a select meeting of the Chosen primitive Trinitarians.68 The august visitor stands at the bottom of the bare, whitewashed Chapel and listens. ‘We are the chosen of Christ,’ says the hard-faced minister. ‘Oh, my brethren, how can we thank him enough? We are not condemned to outer darkness as are the unbelievers and the heathen. We are not participators in the idolatry of the Mass, as are the hypocritical and bloody-minded Papists. We are not as those of the English Church who are rich in lawn and linen and all good things, but shall assuredly be cast, bound hand and foot, into the pit. We are not outcasts as are Wesleyans, Baptists and all others beyond our own fold. It is true that we are very few in number, but to us alone has God reserved the kingdom of heaven – ’ ‘And is this the outcome of my sublime doctrine of Universal charity!’ cries Christ, and hurries away, sick at heart.
Who should come in to see me this afternoon but the old officer who lives above me – a hatchet-faced, grizzly featured old gentleman with a skin tanned by many climates, and a slight limp from a Jezail bullet in the knee.69 For all his experiences and hardships he is as merry and as elastic in his spirits as a boy. I am not generally disposed to take to military men, recognising in them a certain pride of caste which is not warranted by their services to humanity, but his kindly, grey eyes and his frank apologies for what he called his intrusion won my heart at once.
‘A man gets down on his luck when he’s seedy,’ said he. ‘His mind gets a little morbid unless someone drops in and stirs him up. You don’t mind my lunkah, do you? I’ve been a confirmed smoker all my life, and I’ve never shirked my liquor. Yet I’m pretty well preserved for sixty-one – preserved in spirits, some people would say, eh?’ He laughed a creaking wheezy laugh at his own little joke, and lay back in my easy chair with his long thin legs stretched out and a thick cloud of blue smoke ascending from him.
‘I dare say that you have seen a good deal of sickness during your career, Major,’ I observed.
‘Seen a good deal and had a good deal,’ said he. ‘I had the devil of a dose of dysentery in the Afghan passes. They invalided me for that. I have had yellow Jack at Sierra Leone, malarious fever at Port Royal, and cholera at Shanghai. I can tell you that the British flag flies over a finer assorted collection of diseases than any nation can boast of. We are always talking of the resources and products of the Empire, but you don’t hear much of that side of the question. Britain produces the men and the Empire consumes them. Many a tall fellow has left his bones in Indian and African graves who ought in the course of nature to be now walking over the moors of Yorkshire or the Downs of Sussex. The great machine won’t run unless it’s greased with British lives.’
‘It is worth a sacrifice to preserve it,’ said I, ‘for the sun never shone on so grand a heritage as that which we are handing down to our descendants.’
‘No,’ said the Major thoughtfully. ‘No monarch on this earth ever had so many subjects as has Queen Victoria. They are a mixed lot, however, and will take a powerful deal of welding together. As long as the heart keeps right I have no fear for the limbs, but if once this tight little island of ours went wrong there would soon be gangrene in the extremities, and amputation of one or two of them might be needed to strengthen the rest. I hope I may not live to see the day. I have spent my life in helping to build it up, and I don’t want to see it undone before I die.’
Now this should be a lesson to me never again to judge a man rashly! From the little I had seen and heard of my fellow lodger I had conceived a poor opinion of him, and had thought more than once how objectless an existence his had been. Yet I find him upon closer acquainta
nce to be kind-hearted, intelligent and full of a noble purpose. If he has at times cheered his monotonous and solitary life by an extra glass of grog, which has made his old tongue wag faster and his heart beat stronger, who am I that I should blame him?
‘I should like to see a little more transfusion in the Empire,’ he remarked after a pause. ‘More black faces in the streets of London and more white ones in the country parts of India. We should find billets in England for a thousand bright Hindoo youths every year, and send out as many of our own young fellows to work at the tea and indigo. It would help us towards consolidating the union between the countries. A few Indian regiments in English garrison towns would have the same effect. As to our parliament, it should be a piebald assembly with every hue from jet to brown, red and yellow, with occasionally a bronze-coloured premier at the head of them. What’s the odds how much pigment a man has in his skin, if he has a level head and a loyal heart. Gad, sir, I’ve seen our British regiments glad enough of their help on the day of battle – why shouldn’t we be equally ready to have their assistance at our councils? The Aryan conquerors of England need not be ashamed to take into partnership the Aryan conquerors of India, even though their hide has been a little burned by their long stay in the tropics. Excuse my flying off at a tangent, won’t you? A lonely man gets so much thought bottled up in him that when he does open his mouth it just foams out of him. How is your ankle now?’
‘It darts a little from time to time,’ I answered.
‘And so does my knee, so we can condole with each other. It’s rheumatic weather. I can see that Afreedee now, with his seven-foot gun laid across a rock and his black eyes twinkling behind the sights.70 I saw that the rascal was aiming at me, and I made for him as hard as I could, but he rolled me over like a shot rabbit when I was about twenty paces off. A Sergeant of ours had his bayonet through his lungs before he had time to make off. Ugh, it’s a bad business is war – a very bad business.’
The Narrative of John Smith Page 6
