Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its true goal. As I said with regard to wealth: Let us look at the life of those who live in and for it, so I say with regard to the religious organisations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Nonconformist, a life of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of a human life completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfection!

Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one of the religious organisations of this country, was a short time ago giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question and how do you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organisation as you yourself reflect it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness? Indeed, the strongest plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of perfection held by the religious organisations,-expressing, as I have said, the most widespread effort which the human race has

yet made after perfection,-is to be found in the state of our life and society with these in possession of it, and having been in possession of it I know not how many hundred years. We are all of us included in some religious organisation or other; we all call ourselves, in the sublime and aspiring language of religion which I have before noticed, children of God. Children of God;-it is an immense pretension!— and how are we to justify it? By the works which we do, and the words which we speak. And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, privatim opulentia,to use the words which Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome, unequalled in the world! The word, again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most hits our collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circulation in England, nay, with the largest circulation in the whole world, is the Daily Telegraph! I say that when our religious organisations, which I admit to express the most considerable effort after perfection that our race has yet made,— land us in no better result than this, it is high time. to examine carefully their idea of perfection, to see whether it does not leave out of account sides and forces of human nature which we might turn to great use; whether it would not be more operative if it were more complete. And I say that the English reliance on our religious organisations and on their

[ocr errors]

ideas of human perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,-mere belief in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete, a harmonious perfection.

Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, its desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom from fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this machinery, even while it insists that it is machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief men do themselves by their blind belief in some machinery or other,-whether it is wealth and industrialism, or whether it is the cultivation of bodily strength and activity, or whether it is a political organisation,— or whether it is a religious organisation,-oppose with might and main the tendency to this or that political and religious organisation, or to games and athletic exercises, or to wealth and industrialism, and try violently to stop it. But the flexibility which sweetness and light give, and which is one of the rewards of culture pursued in good faith, enables a man to see that a tendency may be necessary, and even, as a preparation for something in the future, salutary, and yet that the generations or individuals who obey this tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of the hope of perfection by following it; and that its mischiefs are to be criticised, lest it should take too firm a hold and last after it has served its purpose.

Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech at

Paris, and others have pointed out the same thing,-
how necessary is the present great movement towards
wealth and industrialism, in order to lay broad founda-
tions of material well-being for the society of the
future. The worst of these justifications is, that they
are generally addressed to the very people engaged,
body and soul, in the movement in question; at all
events, that they are always seized with the greatest
avidity by these people, and taken by them as quite
justifying their life; and that thus they tend to
harden them in their sins. Now, culture admits the
necessity of the movement towards fortune-maling
and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows that the
future may derive benefit from it, but insists, at
the same time, that the passing generations of indus-
trialists,-forming, for the most part, the stout main
body of Philistinism,-are sacrificed to it. In the
same way, the result of all the games and sports which
occupy the passing generation of boys and young men
may be the establishment of a better and sounder
physical type for the future to work with. Culture
does not set itself against the games and sports; it
congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a
?
good use of its improved physical basis; but it points
out that our passing generation of boys and young'
men is, meantime, sacrificed. Puritanism was perhaps
necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English
race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical
domination over men's minds and to prepare the way
for freedom of thought in the distant future; still,
culture points out that the harmonious perfection of

22

generations of Puritans and Nonconformists have been, in consequence, sacrificed. Freedom of speech may be necessary for the society of the future, but the young lions of the Daily Telegraph in the meanwhile are sacrificed. A voice for every man in his country's government may be necessary for the society of the future, but meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed.

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth,-the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future. Look at the course of the great movement which shook Oxford to its cen

« ZurückWeiter »