Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

clay, of Goothe's 'spirit that denies.'

Robert came forward with a roll of papers in his hands.

His first, words were hardly audible. Rose felt her color rising, Lady Charlotte glanced at her nephew, the standing group of men cried, 'Speak up!' The voice in the distance rose at once, braced by the touch of difficulty, and what it said came calmly down to them.

In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the experiences of this evening. When he did he would generally say, briefly, that as an _intellectual_ effort he had never been inclined to rank this first public utterance very high among Elsmere's performances. The speaker's own emotion had stood somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps, when he feels less.

'I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more cogently in conversation,' Flaxman would say--though only to his most intimate friends--'but what I never saw before or since was such an _effect of personality_ as he produced that night. From that moment at any rate I loved him, and I understood his secret!'

Elsmere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the club for the hearing they had promised him.

Then he passed on to the occasion of his address--the vogue in the district of 'certain newspapers which, I understand, are specially relished and patronized by your association.'

And he laid down on the table beside him the copies of the 'Freethinker' and of 'Faith and Fools' which he had brought with him, and faced his audience again, his hands on his sides.

'Well! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. I want to reach your sympathies if I can in another way. If there is anybody here who takes pleasure in them, who thinks that such writings and such witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these sheets do really help the cause of truth and intellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position from the front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox Christian, or the Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but always and inevitably, the man who writes it and the man who loves it! His mind is possessed of an inflaming and hateful image, which drives him to mockery and violence. I want to replace it, if I can, by one of calm, of beauty and tenderness, which may drive him to humility and sympathy. And this, indeed, is the only way in which opinion is ever really altered--by the substitution of one mental picture for another.

'But in the first place,' resumed the speaker, after a moment's pause, changing his note a little, 'a word about myself. I am not here to-night quite in the position of the casual stranger, coming down to your district for the first time. As some of you know, I am endeavoring to make what is practically a settlement among you, asking you working-men to teach me, if you will, what you have to teach as to the wants and prospects of your order, and offering you in return whatever there is in me which may be worth your taking. Well, I imagine I should look at a man who preferred a claim of that sort with some closeness! You may well ask me for "antecedents," and I should like, if I may, to give them to you very shortly.'

Well, then, though I came down to this place under the wing of Mr. Edwardes' (some cheering) 'who is so greatly liked and respected here, I am not a Unitarian, nor am I an English Churchman. A year ago I was the rector of an English country parish, where I should have been proud, so far as personal happiness went, to spend my life. Last autumn I left it and resigned my orders because I could no longer accept the creed of the English Church.' Unconsciously, the thin dignified figure drew itself up, the voice took a certain dryness. All this was distasteful but the orator's instinct was imperious.

As he spoke about a score of pipes which had till now been active in Flaxman's neighborhood went down. The silence in the room became suddenly of a perceptibly different quality.

'Since then I have joined no other religious association. But it is not--God forbid!--because there is nothing left me to believe, but because in this transition England it is well for a man who has broken with the old things, to be very _patient_. No good can come of forcing opinion or agreement prematurely. A generation, nay, more, may have to spend itself in mere waiting and preparing for those new leaders and those new forms of corporate action which any great revolution of opinion, such as that we are now living through, has always produced in the past, and will, we are justified in believing, produce again. But the hour and the men will come, and "they also serve who only stand and wait!"'

Voice and look had kindled into fire. The consciousness of his audience was passing from him--the world of ideas was growing clearer.

'So much, then for personalities of one sort. There are some of another, however, which I must touch upon for a moment. I am to speak to you to-night of the Jesus of history, but not only as an historian. History is good, but religion is better!--and if Jesus of Nazareth concerned me, and, in my belief, concerned you, only as an historical figure, I should not be here to-night.

'But if I am to talk religion to you, and I have begun by telling you I am not this and not that, it seems to me that for mere clearness' sake, for the sake of that round and whole image of thought which I want to present to you, you must let me run through a preliminary confession of faith--as short and simple as I can make it. You must let me describe certain views of the universe and of man's place in it, which make the framework, as it were, into which I shall ask you to fit the picture of Jesus which will come after.'

Robert stood a moment considering. An instant's nervousness, a momentary sign of self-consciousness, would have broken the spell and set the room against him. He showed neither.

'My friends,' he said at last, speaking to the crowded benches of London workmen with the same simplicity he would have used toward his boys at Murewell, 'the man who is addressing you to-night believes in _God_; and in _Conscience_, which is God's witness in the soul; and in _Experience_, which is at once the record and the instrument of man's education at God's hands. He places his whole trust, for life, and death, "_in God the Father Almighty!_"--in that force at the root of things which is revealed to us whenever a man helps his neighbor, or a mother denies herself for her child; whenever a soldier dies without a murmur for his country, or a sailor puts out in the darkness to rescue the perishing; whenever a workman throws mind and conscience into his work, or a statesman labors not for his own gain but for that of the State! He believes in an Eternal Goodness---and an Eternal Mind--of which Nature and Man are the continuous and the only revelation.'...

The room grew absolutely still. And into the silence, there fell, one by one, the short, terse sentences, in which the seer, the believer, struggled to express what God has been, is, and will ever be to the soul which trusts Him. In them the whole effort of the speaker was really to restrain, to moderate, to depersonalize the voice of faith. But the intensity of each word burnt it into the hearer as it was spoken. Even Lady Charlotte turned a little pale--the tears stood in her eyes.

Then, from the witness of God in the soul, and in the history of man's moral life, Elsmere turned to the glorification of _Experience_, 'of that unvarying and rational order of the world which has been the appointed instrument of mans training since life and thought began.'

'_There_,' he said slowly, 'in the unbroken sequences of nature, in the physical history of the world, in the long history of man, physical, intellectual, moral--_there_ lies the revelation of God. There is no other, my friends!'

Then, while the room hung on his words, he entered on a brief exposition of the text, '_Miracles do not happen_,' restating Hume's old argument, and adding to it some of the most cogent of those modern arguments drawn from literature, from history, from the comparative study of religions and religious evidence, which were not practically at Hume's disposal, but which are now affecting the popular mind as Hume's reasoning could never have affected it.

'We are now able to show how miracle, or the belief in it, which is the same thing, comes into being. The study of miracle in all nations, and under all conditions, yields everywhere the same results. Miracle may be the child of imagination, of love, nay, of a passionate sincerity, but invariably it lives with ignorance and is withered by knowledge!'

And then, with lightning unexpectedness, he turned upon his audience, as though the ardent soul reacted at once against a strain of mere negation.

'But do not let yourselves imagine for an instant that, because in a rational view of history there is no place for a Resurrection and Ascension, therefore you may profitably allow yourself a mean and miserable mirth of _this_ sort over the past!'--and his outstretched hand struck the newspapers beside him with passion--'Do not imagine for an instant that what is binding, adorable, beautiful in that past is done away with when miracle is given up! No, thank God! We still "live by admiration, hope, and love." God only draws closer, great men become greater, human life more wonderful as miracle disappears. Woe to you if you cannot see it!--it is the testing truth of our day.'

'And besides--do you suppose that mere violence, mere invective, and savage mockery ever accomplished anything--nay, what is more to the point, ever _destroyed_ anything in human history? No--an idea cannot be killed from without--it can only be supplanted, transformed, by another idea, and that one of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox! In the moral world you cannot pull down except by gentleness--you cannot revolutionize except by sympathy. Jesus only superseded Judaism by absorbing and re-creating all that was best in it. There are no inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of humanity. The religion of the day with all its faults and mistakes, will go on unshaken so long as there is nothing else of equal loveliness and potency to put in its place. The Jesus of the churches will remain paramount so long as the man of to-day imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge from loving the Jesus of history.

'But _why?_ you will ask me. What does the Jesus of history matter to me?'

And so he was brought to the place of great men in the development of mankind--to the part played in the human story by those lives in which men have seen all their noblest thoughts of God, of duty, and of law embodied, realized before them with a shining and incomparable beauty.

... 'You think--because it is becoming plain to the modern eye that the ignorant love of his first followers wreathed his life in legend, that therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, you can put him aside