Volume Ii Part 13 (2/2)
Christian as I was, the revengeful lines of Byron long influenced me:--
”If we do but watch the hour, There never yet was human power, That could evade, if unforgiven, The patient search and vigil long Of him who treasures up a wrong.”
No sermon, no prayer, no belief, no Divine command, rendered me neutral towards those I disliked. Neither authority nor precept had force which gave no reason for amity. But when I came to understand Coleridge's saying that ”human affairs are a process,” I could see that patience and wise adaptation of condition was the true method of improvement, since the tendency to n.o.bleness or baseness was alike an inheritance nurtured by environment. If tempest of the human kind came, precaution and not anger--which means ignorance taken by surprise--was the remedy. Pity takes the place of resentment. Clearly, vengeance did but add to the misfortune of destiny.
I oft pondered Hooker's saying, that ”anger is the sinew of the soul, and he that lacketh it hath a maimed mind.” Nevertheless, I am content to be without that ”sinew.” Anger is rather the epilepsy of the understanding than the dictate of reason. I had come to see that there are no bad weeds in Nature--but much bad gardening. The reasons of amity had become clear to me, and that Helvetius was right. We should ”go on loving men, but not expecting too much from them.” Even Hooker could not win me back to the profitless pursuits of anger and retaliation.
These bygone days left their instruction with me evermore. In them I learned consideration for others. Whatever my convictions, I was always the same to my mother. The wish to change her views never entered my mind. She had chosen her own. I respected her choice, and she respected mine. In after years, when I visited Birmingham, I would read the Bible to her. She liked to hear my voice again as she had heard it in earlier days. When her eyes became dim by time I would send her large type editions of the New Testament, and of religious works which dwelt upon the human tenderness of Christ. The piety of parents should be sacred in the eyes of children. Convictions are the food of the soul, which perisheth on any other diet than that which can be a.s.similated by the conscience.
One of the bygones which had popularity in my day was silence, where explicitness was needed. Nothing is more grateful to the young understanding than clear, definite outlines. _The Spectator_ (July 23, 1891) said that ”Dean Stanley could not at any time have exactly defined what his own theology really was.” George Dawson, who charmed so many audiences and was under no official restraint, never attempted it.
Emerson, who criticised everybody who had an opinion, never disclosed his. Carlyle, who filled the air with adjurations to sincerity of conviction, carefully concealed his own. They who take credit for advising the public what to believe should avow their own belief. Otway, crossing the street to Dryden's house, wrote upon his door: ”Here lives Dryden, a poet and a wit.” Seeing these words as he came out, Dryden wrote under them: ”Written by Otway opposite,” which might mean: ”This is but a partial and friendly estimate written by my neighbour who lives over the way, opposite to me”; or, it might mean that ”It is written by Otway--the very 'opposite' of 'a poet and a wit.'” Ja.n.u.s sentences are the very grace of satire, because they offer a mitigating or a complimentary construction; but in questions of conscience, ethics, or politics, uncertainty is an evil--an evil worth remembering where it can be avoided.
”Socialists” were liable to indictment who officiated in a place not licensed as a place of wors.h.i.+p. Such a license could be obtained on making a declaration on oath that their discourses were founded on belief in the cardinal tenets of the Church. Two social speakers were summoned to swear this. One was the father of the late Robert Buchanan.
He and his colleague did so swear to avoid penalties, though they swore the contrary of the truth. I joined with other colleagues in protesting against this humiliation and ignominy. And in another way imprisonment came to all of us. Silence or the oath was the alternative from which there was no escape. The question then arose, ”Was the existence of Deity so certainly known to men that inability to affirm it justified exclusion from citizens.h.i.+p?” Thus it was of the first moment to inquire whether it was so or not, and what was regarded as an atheistical investigation became a political necessity in self-defence. Was there such conclusive knowledge of the Unknowable as to warrant the law in making the possession of it a condition of justice and civil equality?
Thus the refutation of Theism became a form of self-defence, and without foreseeing it, or intending it, or wis.h.i.+ng it, I was, without any act of my own, engaged in it.
This narrative concerns those who deplore the rise and popularity of independent thinkers, alien to received doctrine. Few persons are aware how or why agnostic advocacy was welcomed and extended. Surely this is worth remembering. The tenet bore statute fruit, for the Affirmation Act came out of it.
It will be a satisfaction to students of spiritual progress to know that the extension and legalisation of the rights of conscience, brought no irreverence with it. The sense that the nature of Deity was beyond the capacity of dogmatism to define, created a feeling of profound humility in the mind; the incapacity which disabled me from a.s.serting the infinite premises of Theism rendered denial an equal temerity. What tongue can speak, what eye can see, what imagination can conceive the marvels of the Inscrutable? I think of Deity as I think of Time, which is with us daily. Who can explain to us that mystery? Time--noiseless, impalpable, yet absolute--marshals the everlasting procession of nature.
It touches us in the present with the hand of Eternity, and we know it only by finding that we were changed as it pa.s.sed by us.
CHAPTER XLIV. DIFFICULTY OF KNOWING MEN
Events of the mind as well as of travel may be worth remembering.
Columbus, high on a peak of Darien, saw an unexpected sight--never to be forgotten. Of another kind, as far as surprise was concerned, though infinitely less important in other respects, was my first reading of a pa.s.sage of Pascal, which more than any other revealed to me a new world of human life. The pa.s.sage was the well-known exclamation:--
”What an enigma is man? What a strange, chaotic and contradictory being?
Judge of all things, feeble earth-worm, depository of the Truth, ma.s.s of uncertainty, glory and b.u.t.t of the universe, incomprehensible monster!
In truth, what is man in the midst of Nature? A cypher in respect to the infinite; all, in comparison with nonent.i.ty: a mean betwixt nothing and all.”
Everybody knows that not only in different nations, but in the same nation, mankind present a strange variety of qualities and pa.s.sions.
The English are outspoken, the Scotch reticent, the Irish uncertain, the American alert, the French ceremonial. Even our English counties have their special ways of action. London is confident, Birmingham dogged, Manchester resolute, New-castle-on-Tyne has greater modesty and greater pride than any other place. Yes; every one agrees with Pascal that man is a bewildering creature. He is proud and abject, generous and mean, defiant and craven, standing up for inflexible truth, and lying in his daily life. As Byron says, ”Man is half dust, half deity.” If we go far enough in our search we find people of all qualities. Everybody sees these characteristics of countries and cla.s.ses. Everybody recognises these conflicting elements of character in a race; but what amazed me was to perceive that they are to be found in _each_ person in varying proportion and force--they are all there. The varieties of the race are to be found in the same individual. No man who understands this ever looks upon society as he did before. Not knowing this fact, not calculating upon it, error, distrust, disappointment, estrangement, grow up needlessly.
Twice within the public recollection, two political parties in England have been formed, and made furious by a common ignorance. During the great Slave War in America, the Southern planter was held up as a gentleman of polished manners, of cultivated tastes, a paternal master and courteous host By others he was described as selfish, sensual, tyrannical, with whom any guest who betrayed sympathy with slaves had an unpleasant time. Both accounts were true. The same model gentleman who showered upon you courtly attentions would tar and feather you if he found you display emotion when you heard the shriek of the slave under the whip. Later, Parliament, the press, and the Church were divided upon the character of the Turk. One party said he was tolerant, picturesque, abounding in concessions and hospitality. The other party described him as subtle, evasive, treacherous, vicious, and cruel. No one seemed to recognise that all the while he was both these things. He was an adept in personal deference, generous in professions, evasive and treacherous--in short, ”Abdul the d.a.m.ned.” To those from whom the Sultan had anything to hope, his graciousness was superb--to those at his mercy he was rapacious and murderous.
The Circa.s.sians will offer their daughters to the Turk--they send their virgin beauty into the market of l.u.s.t, and then fight for the purchasers. The Hindoos seem a gentle, unresisting, rice-minded people; yet have such capacity of heroic and vigilant reticence, that though we have been masters of India for one hundred and fifty years, it is said by experienced officials, we do not know the real mind of a single man.
The Zulus have savage instincts and habits; but they are honest, speak the truth, and despise a man who is angry or excited.
Thiers, the great French statesman, had trust in individuals, but despised the ma.s.ses. Yet the ma.s.ses pulled down the Bastile, where only gentlemen were imprisoned and not themselves. The ma.s.ses were moved by a generous dislike of oppression as strongly as Thiers himself.
President Was.h.i.+ngton, looking only at the corruption of cla.s.ses he came in contact with, predicted evil to the future of American society. Yet, one hundred years after, a latent n.o.bleness of sentiment appeared, which gave a million of lives in order that black men with large feet, as was scornfully said, should be free.
Because oppression had made, for years, a.s.sa.s.sination frequent in Italy, many thought every man carried a stiletto, and did not know that Italians are more patient and cooler-headed on great occasions than Englishmen or Frenchmen.
The Irish do not conceal that they are our enemies, and ruin every English movement in which they mingle, yet who have such brightness, drollery of imagination as they? Or who will stand by a friend of their country at the peril of their lives without hesitation as they do?
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