Anon., ‘Old Jonathan’ (1867)
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. . . .
Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won’t come, they won’t come, they won’t come! At the five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair.
‘Thank Heaven!’ said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857)
KEEP HOLY THE SABBATH
Our friends found Dr Proudie [the new Bishop of Barchester] sitting on the old Bishop’s chair, looking very nice in his new apron; they found, too, Mr Slope [the Bishop’s chaplain] standing on the hearth-rug, persuasive and eager, just as the archdeacon used to stand; but on the sofa they also found Mrs Proudie, an innovation for which a precedent might in vain be sought in all the annals of the Barchester bishopric!
There she was, however, and they could only make the best of her. . . .
‘Are the arrangements for the Sabbath-day schools generally pretty good in your archdeaconry?’ asked Mr Slope.
‘Sabbath-day schools!’ repeated the archdeacon with an affectation of surprise. ‘Upon my word, I can’t tell; it depends mainly on the parson’s wife and daughters. There is none at Plumstead.’
Mr Slope merely opened his eyes wider, and slightly shrugged his shoulders. He was not, however, prepared to give up his darling project.
‘I fear there is a great deal of Sabbath travelling here,’ said he. ‘On looking at the “Bradshaw”, I see that there are three trains in and out every Sabbath. Could nothing be done to induce the company to withdraw them? Don’t you think, Dr Grantly, that a little energy might diminish the evil?’
‘Not being a director, I really can’t say. But if you can withdraw the passengers, the company I dare say will withdraw the trains,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s merely a question of dividends.’
‘But surely, Dr Grantly,’ said the lady, ‘surely we should look at it differently. You and I, for instance, in our position: surely we should do all that we can to control so grievous a sin. Don’t you think so, Mr Harding?’ and she turned to the precentor, who was sitting mute and unhappy.
Mr Harding thought that all porters and stokers, guards, brakemen and pointsmen ought to have an opportunity of going to church, and he hoped that they all had.
‘But surely, surely,’ continued Mrs Proudie, ‘surely that is not enough. Surely that will not secure such an observance of the Sabbath as we are taught to conceive is not only expedient but indispensable; surely –’
Come what might, Dr Grantly was not to be forced into a dissertation on a point of doctrine with Mrs Proudie, nor yet with Mr Slope; so without much ceremony he turned his back upon the sofa. . . .
Mrs Proudie . . . had not . . . given up her hold of Mr Harding, nor ceased from her cross-examinations as to the iniquity of Sabbatical amusements. Over and over again had she thrown out her ‘Surely, surely,’ at Mr Harding’s devoted head, and ill had that gentleman been able to parry the attack.
He had never before found himself subjected to such a nuisance. Ladies hitherto, when they had consulted him on religious subjects, had listened to what he might choose to say with some deference, and had differed, if they differed, in silence. But Mrs Proudie interrogated him, and then lectured. ‘Neither thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man servant, nor thy maid servant,’ said she, impressively, and more than once, as though Mr Harding had forgotten the words. She shook her finger at him as she quoted the favourite law, as though menacing him with punishment; and then called upon him categorically to state whether he did not think that travelling on the Sabbath was an abomination and a desecration.
Mr Harding had never been so hard pressed in his life . . . She, seeing him sit silent and absorbed, by no means refrained from the attack.
‘I hope, Mr Harding, said she, shaking her head slowly and solemnly, ‘I hope you will not leave me to think that you approve of sabbath travelling,’ and she looked a look of unutterable meaning into his eyes.
There was no standing this, for Mr Slope was now looking at him, and so was the Bishop, and so was the archdeacon, who had completed his adieux on that side of the room. Mr Harding therefore got up also, and putting out his hand to Mrs Proudie said, ‘If you will come to St Cuthbert’s some Sunday, I will preach you a sermon on that subject.’
And so the archdeacon and precentor took their departure, bowing low to the lady, shaking hands with the lord, and escaping from Mr Slope in the best manner each could. Mr Harding was again maltreated [with a moist handshake]; but Dr Grantly swore deeply in the bottom of his heart, that no earthly consideration should ever again induce him to touch the paw of that impure and filthy animal.
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1855)
THE LATEST DECALOGUE
Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat
When it’s so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
The sum of all is, thou shalt love,
If anybody, God above:
At any rate shall never labour
More than thyself to love thy neighbour.
Arthur Hugh Clough, Poems (1862)
WARNING
Wherever a young man turns for worldly amusement he meets danger. Towns swarm with brilliantly lighted saloons, which hold out their meretricious attractions. There is the drama, music and art. It was ascertained that in two hours one evening six hundred young men entered one musichall in London. Were these rooms harmless, he would be an enemy to human happiness who objected to them. If they are demoralizing and ruinous to the health and character of the inexperienced, he is a friend who points this out. It is little suspected how women with bedizened head-dresses and flaunty robes are folding around them the last shreds of their modesty; how married men hide under white waistcoats polluted hearts; how, while ‘grey hairs dance, devils laugh and angels weep’; how bankrupts wear forced smiles; how the victims of disease and death hide their ghastliness by flowers, and light their rapid progress to the grave by flaming gas-light. It is little known how thousands of young men from the religious homes of
Scotland and Wales pass into a speedy oblivion after their feet have once crossed the threshold of these rooms in English cities. Alas, what a tale might be told of fathers’ hairs whitened, mothers’ hearts crushed, sisters’ eyes swollen with tears – over sons once the pride of their homes! . . .
Oh, there is a solemn irony of Scripture when it saith, ‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thine heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement. Therefore remove the cause of sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh.’
W. Guest, A Young Man’s Safeguard in the Perils of the Age (1878)
NO SPECIAL CREATION
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings who lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forces of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection (1859)
IS GENESIS TRUE?
You will, of course, expect that, since I have had the charge of this Diocese [Natal, South Africa], I have been closely occupied in the study of the Zulu tongue, and in translating the Scriptures into it. Through the blessing of God, I have now translated the New Testament completely, and several parts of the Old, among the rest the books of Genesis and Exodus. . . .
Here, however, as I have said, amidst my work in this land, I have been brought face to face with the very questions I then put by. While translating the story of the Flood, I have had a simple-minded but intelligent native – one with the docility of a child, but the reasoning powers of mature age – look up, and ask, ‘Is all that true? Do you really believe that all this happened thus – that all the beasts, and birds, and creeping things upon the earth, large and small, from hot countries and cold, came thus by pairs, and entered into the ark with Noah? And did Noah gather food for them all, for the beasts and birds of prey, as well as the rest?’ My heart answered in the words of the Prophet, ‘Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord?’ Zech.xiii.3. I dared not do so. My own knowledge of some branches of science, of Geology in particular, had been much increased since I left England; and I now knew for certain, on geological grounds, a fact of which I had only had misgivings before, viz. that a Universal Deluge, such as the Bible manifestly speaks of, could not possibly have taken place in the way described in the Book of Genesis, not to mention other difficulties which the story contains. . . . Knowing this, I felt that I dared not, as a servant of the God of Truth, urge my brother man to believe that which I did not myself believe, which I knew to be untrue, as a matter-of-fact, historical narrative. I gave him, however, such a reply as satisfied him for a time, without throwing any discredit upon the general veracity of the Bible history.
But I was thus driven – against my will at first, I may truly say – to search more deeply into these questions; and I have since done so to the best of my power, with the means at my disposal in this colony. And now I tremble at the result of my enquiries . . .
The first five books of the Bible – commonly called the Pentateuch . . . – are supposed by most English readers of the Bible to have been written by Moses, except the last chapter of Deuteronomy, which records the death of Moses, and which, of course, it is generally allowed, must have been added by another hand, perhaps that of Joshua. It is believed that Moses wrote under such special guidance and teaching of the Holy Spirit, that he was preserved from making any error in recording those matters which came within his own cognizance, and was instructed also in respect of events which took place before he was born – before, indeed, there was a human being on the earth to take note of what was passing. He was in this way, it is supposed, enabled to write a true account of the Creation . . . We may rely with undoubting confidence – such is the statement usually made – on the historical veracity and infallible accuracy, of the Mosaic narrative in all its main particulars. . . .
But, among the many results of that remarkable activity in scientific enquiry of every kind, which, by God’s own gift distinguishes the present age, this also must be reckoned, that attention and labour are now being bestowed, more closely and earnestly than ever before, to search into the real foundations for such a belief as this. . . .
The result of my enquiry is this, that I have arrived at the conviction – as painful to myself at first as it may be to my reader, though painful now no longer under the clear shining of the Light of Truth – that the Pentateuch, as a whole, cannot possibly have been written by Moses, or by anyone acquainted personally with the facts which it professes to describe, and, further, that the (so-called) Mosaic narrative, by whomsoever written, and though imparting to us, as I fully believe it does, revelations of the Divine Will and Character, cannot be regarded as historically true.
[Colenso went on to claim that Deuteronomy was a fake, and that the Chronicles had been falsified; there was great scandal; the Metropolitan of British South Africa deposed and excommunicated him, but the Privy Council restored him.]
John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, A Critical Examination of the Pentateuch (1862)
FACT AND FAITH
The myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in opposition to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to scorn; but the coeval imaginations current
among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose very name and age are admitted by every scholar to be unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared their fate, but, even at this day, are regarded by nine-tenths of the civilised world as the authoritative standard of fact and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities – whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of Science into the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party?
Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times Page 13
