Part 3 (1/2)

Who has not thrilled at the lofty question of Volumnia to Coriola.n.u.s:-

'Think'st thou it honourable for a n.o.ble man

Still to remember wrongs.'

Shall G.o.d be less honourable and remember the wrong done against him, not by his equals, but by his own frail creatures! To be unable to trust G.o.d is to degrade him. Those pa.s.sages in the New Testament which give the narratives most interest and dignity, are the parables in which a servant is told to forgive a debt to one who had forgiven him; in which a brother is to be forgiven until seventy times seven (that is unlimitedly); and the prayer where men claim forgiveness as they have themselves forgiven others their trespa.s.ses. What was this but erecting a high moral argument against the relentlessness of future punishment of erring man? If, therefore, man is to forgive, shall G.o.d do less? Shall man be more just than G.o.d? Is there anything so grand in the life of Christ as his forgiving his enemies, as he expired on the cross? Was it G.o.d the Sufferer behaving more n.o.bly than will G.o.d the Judge? Was this the magnificent teaching of fraternity to vengeful man, or is it to be regarded but as a sublime libel on the hereafter judgments of heaven?

The Infidel is Infidel to error, but he believes in truth and humanity, and when he believes in G.o.d, he will prefer to believe that which is n.o.ble of him. He will be able to trust him. Holding by no conscious error, doing no dishonour in thought and offering, his homage to love and truth, why should the unbeliever fear to die! Carlile saw not less clearly than this, nor felt less strongly, and he knew that only those fear death who have never thought about it at all, or thought about it wrongly.

Carlile's early career gave evidence of that iron hauteur which characterised him. In dedicating from Dorchester Gaol, his second volume of the _Republican_, to Sir Robert Gifford, the Attorney General of that day, (1820) he wrote, 'Grat.i.tude being one of the n.o.blest traits in the character of animals, both rational and irrational, _to which ever you may deem me allied_, I feel that I owe it to you.' Carlile taunted the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or as he most correctly styled it the Vice Society, saying that, 'next to their secretary, Pritchard, the lawyer, he had gained most by their existence,(1) and had sold more Deistical volumes in one year through their exertions than he should in seven, in the ordinary course of business.'(2) Carlile's cheerful disposition resisted the sombre influence of the dungeon, and he declared when Wedderb.u.m arrived at Dorchester Gaol that he would 'endeavour to get him chaplain, as the officiating one was so extremely fat that he could hardly get up to the pulpit, and when there, he was so long in recovering from the exertion, that he could not read the prayers with sufficient solemnity.(3)

1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.

2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 185.

3. Repub. vol. iii. p. 112.

The fourth volume of the _Republican_ Carlile also dedicated to Gifford, the Attorney General, beginning, 'My constant and learned friend, between you and the Vice Society I am at loss how to pay my courtesies, so as to avoid jealousy. You acted n.o.bly with my first volume. My second you neglected; and I had resolved to stop when I heard of your renewed prosecutions. I am sorry we did not understand each other better before.' A paragraph in the Dedication of his sixth volume to George IV.

was in these words, 'You are not only the head of the State but of the Church too, and as I am an intermeddler with the matters of both, I, your Banishment Act notwithstanding, dedicate my volume to both heads at once, with the most profound hope and prayer that neither of them may ache after reading it.' When Carlile took notice of Mease, he thus addressed him-'To Mr. Thomas Mease, grocer, draper, and methodist.' The letter to Mease, was dated 'Dorchester Gaol, December 18, year 1822; of the G.o.d that was born of a woman, who was his own father, and who was killed to please himself. The _immortal_ G.o.d that died.' The letter commenced thus,-'Sir Saint and Savage.' To Mr. Dronsfield he wrote-'I am not humble; civility to all; servility to none is the becoming characteristic of manhood.'(1) Alluding to the extensive sale of Wat Tyler, which had such an influence on his early fortunes, Carlile exclaimed, 'Glory to thee, O Southey! Happy mayst thou be in singing hexameters to thy old Royal Master, when thou hast pa.s.sed the _reality_ as well as the _vision_ of judgment! Yes, my patron! to that best of thy productions, ”Wat Tyler,” do I owe the encouragement I first found to persevere.(2)

Of his own Every Woman's Book, Carlile said, 'It had sustained Mr.

Cobbett's malignity-one of the most powerful venoms which the animal world had produced.'(3) Carlile characterised the weak point in his own character with severe felicity, when speaking of others. 'Conceit,' said he, 'is a malady of humanity, of which some people die.'(4) These words might stand as the epitaph of his own public influence. The following pa.s.sage occurred in that letter to me, alluded to in the preface. 'You, Southwell and others,' said he, 'are now where I once was, resting upon the mere flippant vulgarisms of what you and the world consent to call Atheistic infidelity, regulating your amount of wisdom by a critical contrast with other people's folly.(5) I hope we were never amenable to the censure with which this sentence opens: the concluding words are shrewd and instructive, which I repeat for the sake of those young gentlemen who take up infidelity as a pastime, instead as a principle.

1. Repub. vol. vii. p. 868.

2. Repub. vol. vii. p. 674.

3. Lion, vol. ii. p. 450.

4. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.

5. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.

It is due to Carlile to observe that the annoyance he marshalled against authority was chiefly retaliative. He disowned a placard put in his window, which said, 'This is the Mart for Sedition and Blasphemy,' as he deemed it an admission that he did vend something of the kind. 'I sell,'

said he, 'only truth and right reason.'(1) (In parenthesis it maybe observed, that he denied that any human tribunal was competent to declare what was blasphemy.) How much farther Carlile was impartial than are Christians, is evidenced by the fact that he published Bishop Watson's Apology for the Bible, in conjunction with Paine's Age of Reason.(2) In another respect he behaved as Christians never behave, he never questioned the youths he employed, nor any of his dependents as to their opinions, nor did he use any means to induce them to comprehend or adopt his.(3) He held his opinions too proudly to intrigue or supplicate others to accept them.

In candour, in independency of judgment, in perfect moral fearlessness of character, I believe Carlile cannot be paralleled among the public men of his time. Lovel writes:

He is a slave who dare not be,

In the right with two or three.

Carlile was no slave. He was able to stand in the right by himself against the world. One forgives his errors, his vanity, and his egotism, for the bravery of his bearing and his speech. Though Paine was his great prototype, he was prompt, both in his early enthusiasm and in his latter days, to acknowledge Paine's defects as a theologian. 'About ”G.o.d” Paine,' said he, 'was not altogether wise, but less unwise than the world at large.(4) In his earliest attachments, Carlile discriminated, 'I neither look,' wrote he 'on Mr. Gibbon nor Mr. Hume, as standards of infidelity to the Christian religion.'(5) He hesitated at Sh.e.l.ley's views of marriage, deeming them crude.(6) Carlile was able to take anything up or put anything down at the bidding of his judgment.

He said to Mr. Searlett, 'At present I am not a tinman, but I should never feel ashamed to return to it to earn an honest livelihood, if circ.u.mstances should render it necessary in this or any other country,'(7)

1. Repub. vol. v.r. 12.

2. Repub. vol. v. p. 89 3. Repub. vi. p. 778.

4. Scourge, p. 110.

5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 168.

6. Repub. vol. v. p. 148.

7. Repub. vol. ii. p. 403.