Part 4 (1/2)
The next morning she duly presented herself after breakfast, and this time they got to grips far more thoroughly than before with the question of miracles and of New Testament criticism generally. In a letter to her husband (published in the _Recollections_) she calls it ”a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences,” and describes how ”at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so formidable!” But she stuck to her points and found, as she thought, that for all his versatility he was not really familiar with the literature of the subject, but took refuge instead in attacking her own Theistic position, divested as it was of supernatural Christianity. ”I do not say or think you 'attack' Christianity,” he wrote to her two days later, ”but in proposing a subst.i.tute for it, reached by reduction and negation, I think (forgive me) you are dreaming the most visionary of all human dreams.”
He enclosed a volume of his _Gleanings_, marking the article on ”The Courses of Religious Thought.” Mrs. Ward replied to him as follows:--
_April 15, 1888._
DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--
Thank you very much for the volume of _Gleanings_ with its gracious inscription. I have read the article you point out to me with the greatest interest, and shall do the same with the others. Does not the difference between us on the question of sin come very much to this--that to you the great fact in the world and in the history of man, is _sin_--to me, _progress_? I remember Amiel somewhere speaks of the distinction as marking off two cla.s.ses of thought, two orders of temperament. In myself I see a perpetual struggle, in the world also, but through it all I feel the ”Power that makes for righteousness.” In the life of conscience, in the play of physical and moral law, I see the ordained means by which sin is gradually scourged and weakened both in the individual and in the human society. And as to that sense of _irreparableness_, that awful burden of evil both on the self and outside it, for which all religions have sought an anodyne in the ceremonies of propitiation and sacrifice, I think the modern who believes in G.o.d and cherishes the dear memory of a human Christ will learn humbly, as Amiel says, even ”to accept himself,” and life, as they are, at G.o.d's hands.
Constant and recurrent experience teaches him that the baser self can only be killed by constant and recurrent effort towards good; the action of the higher self is governed by an even stronger and more prevailing law of self-preservation than that of the lower; evil finds its appointed punishment and deterrent in pain and restlessness; and as the old certainty of the Christian heaven fades it will become clear to him that his only hope of an immortality worth having lies in the developing and maturing of that diviner part in him which can conceive and share the divine life--of the soul. And for the rest, he will trust in the indulgence and pity of the power which brought forth this strangely mingled world.
So much for the minds capable of such ideas. For the ma.s.ses, in the future, it seems to me that charitable and social organization will be all-important. If the simpler Christian ideas can clothe themselves in such organization--and I believe they can and are even now beginning to do it--their effect on the democracy may be incalculable. If not, then G.o.d will fulfil Himself in other ways.
But ”dream” as it may be, it seems to many of us, a dream worth trying to realize in a world which contains your seven millions of persons in France, who will have nothing to say to religious beliefs, or the 200,000 persons in South London alone, amongst whom, according to the _Record_, Christianity has practically no existence.
And the letter ends with a plea that the faith which animated T. H.
Green might fitly be described by the words of the Psalm, ”my soul is athirst for G.o.d, for the living G.o.d.”
To this Mr. Gladstone replied immediately:
ST. JAMES'S STREET.
_April 16, 1888._
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I do not at all doubt that your conception of _Robert Elsmere_ includes much of what is expressed in the opening verses of Psalm 42. I am more than doubtful whether he could impart it to Elgood St., and I wholly disbelieve that Elgood St. could hand it on from generation to generation. You have much courage, but I doubt whether even you are brave enough to think that, fourteen centuries after its foundation, Elgood St. could have written the _Imitation of Christ_.
And my meaning about Mr. Green was to hint at what seems to me the unutterable strangeness of his pa.s.sionately beseeching philosophy to open to him the communion for which he thirsted, when he had a better source nearer hand.
It is like a farmer under the agricultural difficulty who has to migrate from England and plants himself in the middle of the Sahara.
But I must abstain from stimulating you. At Oxford I sought to avoid p.r.i.c.king you and rather laid myself open--because I thought it not fair to ask you for statements which might give me points for reply.
Mr. Gladstone evidently believed he had been as mild as milk--he knew not the terror of his own ”drawn brows!”
_Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone._
_April 17, 1888._
I think I must write a few words in answer to your letter of yesterday, in view of your approaching article which fills me with so much interest and anxiety. If I put what I have to say badly or abruptly, please forgive me. My thoughts are so full of this terrible loss of my dear uncle Matthew Arnold, to whom I was deeply attached, that it seems difficult to turn to anything else.
And yet I feel a sort of responsibility laid upon me with regard to Mr. Green, whom you may possibly mention in your article. There are many people living who can explain his thought much better than I can. But may I say with regard to your letter of yesterday, that in turning to philosophy, that is to the labour of reason and thought, for light on the question of man's whence and whither, Mr. Green as I conceive it, only obeyed an urgent and painful necessity. ”The parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of bones and marrow”--words which I have put into Grey's mouth--were words of Mr. Green's to me. It was the only thing of the sort I ever heard him say--he was a man who never spoke of his feelings--but it was said with a penetrating force and sincerity which I still remember keenly. A long intellectual travail had convinced him that the miraculous Christian story was untenable; but speculatively he gave it up with grief and difficulty, and practically, to his last hour, he clung to all the forms and a.s.sociations of the old belief with a wonderful affection. With regard to conformity to Church usage and repression of individual opinion he and I disagreed a good deal.
If you do speak of him, will you look at his two Lay Sermons, of which I enclose my copy?--particularly the second one, which was written eight years after the first, and to my mind expresses his thought more clearly.
Some of the letters which have reached me lately about the book have been curious and interesting. A vicar of a church in the East End, who seems to have been working among the poor for forty years, says, ”I could not help writing; in your book you seemed to grasp me by the hand and follow me right on through my own life experiences.” And an Owens College Professor, who appears to have thought and read much of these things, writes to a third person, a propos of Elsmere, that the book has grasped ”the real force at work in driving so many to give up the Christian creed. It is not the scientific (in the loose modern sense of the word), still less the philosophical difficulties, which influence them, but it is the education of the historic sense which is disintegrating faith.”--Only the older forms of faith, as I hold, that the new may rise! But I did not mean to speak of myself.
When the famous article--ent.i.tled ”Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief”--appeared in the May _Nineteenth Century_, there was nothing but courtesy between the two opponents. Mrs. Ward sent the G.O.M. a copy of the book, with a picture of Catherine's valley bound into it, and he replied that the volumes would ”form a very pleasant recollection of what I trust has been a 'tearless battle.'” Many of the papers now reviewed both book and article together, and the _Pall Mall_ ironically congratulated the Liberal Party on ”Mr. Gladstone's new preoccupation.”
”For two and a half years,” it declared, the G.O.M. had been able to think of nothing but Home Rule and Ireland. ”But Mrs. Ward has changed all that.” The excitement among the reading public was very great. It penetrated even to the streets, for one of us overheard a panting lady, hugging a copy of the _Nineteenth Century_, saying to her companion as she fought her way into an omnibus, ”Oh, my dear, _have_ you read Weg on Bobbie?” Naturally the sale received a fresh stimulus. Two more three-volume editions disappeared during May, and a seventh and last during June. Then there was a pause before the appearance of the Popular or 6s. edition, which came out at the end of July with an impression of 5,000. It was immediately bought up; 7,000 more were disposed of during August, and the sale went on till the end of the year at the rate of about 4,000 a month. Even during 1889 it continued steadily, until by January, 1890, 44,000 copies of the 6_s._ edition had been sold. But as the sale had then slackened Mr. Smith decided to try the experiment of a half-crown edition. 20,000 of this were sold by the following November, but the drop had already set in and during 1891 the total only rose to 23,000. But even so, the sale of these three editions in the United Kingdom alone had amounted to 70,500.