The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson (books to read this summer txt) 📕

is bounded by huge pine-clad precipices, wreathed with snow and crowned with cloud; but to Meyrick it does appear quite definitely what we are, and as for the end, well, the avenue of the world seems to lead up to a neat classical building with pillars and a pediment, that is called the temple of reason and common-sense.

I do not know what Meyrick's religious views are; he attends his College chapel with a cool decorum. But I suspect him of being a quiet agnostic. I do not think he cares a straw whether his individuality endures, and he looks forward to a progress which can be tabulated and statistics about the decrease of crime and disease that can be verified; that, I am sure, is his idea of the Kingdom of Heaven.


XL


I have been staying with a friend in Yorkshire, in an out-of-the-way place, and I have seen a good deal of the parish clergyman there, who is rather a pathetic person, I think. It seems to me that he belongs to a type which is perhaps becoming more common, and the fact makes me somewhat anxious about the future of the Church of England, because it is a type that does not seem to me to correspond to the needs of the day at all. He was, I believe, the son of a solicitor in a small country town; he was educated at a local grammar-school, and went up to a small Cambridge College; here he took a pass-degree, and then went into a Theological College, of a rather advanced High-Church type. Having received a so-called classical education, he had no particular intellectual interests. He was not an athlete; he worked just enough to secure a pass-degree, and spent his time at Cambridge in mild sociability. He takes no interest in politics, books, art, games, or even agriculture. Just when his mind began to expand a little he went off to the Theological College, where he was indoctrinated with high ecclesiastical ideas, and formed a great idea of the supreme importance of his vocation. He had no impulse to examine the foundations of his faith, but he meekly assimilated a large number of doctrinal and traditional propositions, such as the Apostolic succession, the visible corporate Church, the sacrificial theory of the Eucharist, priestly absolution, and so forth. He is a believer in systematic confession, but is careful to say that this was not inculcated upon him, but only indicated, and that his belief in it is based on practical experience. He also imbibed a great love of liturgical and ceremonial usage. He was for a short time a country curate, and married a clergyman's daughter. His College gave him the living which he now holds, which is fairly endowed; and having some small means of his own, he lives comfortably. I will add that he is a thoroughly kindly man, and very conscientious in the discharge of what he conceives to be his duty. He has a great many services on Sunday, somewhat sparsely attended. He reads matins and vespers every day in his church, and gives an address on saints' days. But he seems to have no idea what his parishioners are doing or thinking about, and no particular desire to know. He is assiduous in visiting, in holding classes, in teaching; he has no sense of humour whatever; and the system of religion which he administers is so perfectly obvious and unquestioned a thing to him, that it never occurs to him to wonder if other people are not built on different lines. I have often, attended his church and heard him preach; but the sermons which I have heard are either expositions of high doctrine, or else discourses of what I can only call a very feminine and even finicking kind of morality; he preaches on the duty of church-going, on the profane use of scriptural language, on the sanctification of joy, on the advisability of family prayer, on religious meditation, on the examples of saints, on the privilege of devotional exercises, on the consecration of life, on the communion of saints, on the ministry of angels. But it seems all remote from daily life, and to be a species of religion that can only be successfully cultivated by people of abundant leisure. I do not mean to say that many of these things do not possess a certain refined beauty of their own; but I do feel that farmers and labourers are not, as a rule, in the stage in which such ideas are possible or even desirable. I have seen him conduct a children's service, and then he is in high content, surrounded by clean and well-brushed infants, and smiling girls. He sits in a chair on the chancel steps, in a paternal attitude, and leads them in a little meditation on the childhood of the Mother of Christ. Whenever he describes a scene out of the Bible, and he is fond of doing this, it always sounds as if he were describing a stained-glass window; his favourite qualities are meekness, submissiveness, devotion, holiness; and he is apt to illustrate his teaching by the example of the Apostles, whom we are to believe were men of singular modesty because we hear so very little about them. The modern world has no existence for him whatever; and yet one cannot say that he lives in the Middle Ages, because he knows so little about them; he moves in a paradise of cloistered virgins and mild saints; and the virtue that he chiefly extols is the virtue of faith; the more that reason revolts at a statement, the greater is the triumph of godly faith involved in accepting it unquestioned.

The result is that the little girls love him, the boys laugh at him, the women admire him, the men regard him as not quite a man. The only objects for which he raises money diligently are additions to the furniture of the church; he takes a languid interest in foreign missions, he mistrusts science, and social questions he frankly dislikes. I have heard him say, with an air of deep conviction, when the question of the unemployed is raised, "After all, we must remember that the only possible solution of these sad difficulties is a spiritual one."

The pity of it all is that he is so entirely complacent, so absolutely unaware that there is anything amiss. He does not see that people have to be tenderly and simply wooed to religion, and that they have to be led to take an interest in their own characters and lives. His idea is that the Church is there, a holy and venerable institution, with undeniable claims on the allegiance and loyalty of all. Worship is to him a man's first duty and privilege; and if he finds that one of his parishioners thinks the services tedious, tiresome, or unintelligible, he looks upon him as a child of wrath, perverse and ungodly. The one chance a clergyman has to gain the confidence of the men of his congregation is when he prepares the boys for confirmation; but the vicar sees them, each alone, week after week, and initiates them into the theory of the Visible Church and the advisability of regular confession. I confess sadly that it does not seem to me to resemble Christianity at all; in the place of the shrewd, simple, tender, and wise teaching of Christ about daily life and effort, the duties of kindness, purity, unselfishness, he gives an elaborate picture of rites and ceremonies, of mystical and spiritual agencies, which play little part in the life of a day-labourer's son. If he would learn something about the points of a horse instead of about the points of an angel, if he would study the rotation of the crops instead of the rotation of Easter-tide, he would find himself far more in line with his flock: if he would busy himself with getting the boys and girls good places, he would soon have a niche in the hearts of his parishioners; all that he does is to give a ploughboy, who is going off to a neighbouring farm, a little manual of devotion, with ugly and sentimental chromo-lithographs, and beg him to use it night and morning.

His wife is of the same type, a prim and colourless woman, who believes intensely in her husband, and devotes herself to furthering his work. They have three rather priggish children, whose greatest punishment is not to be allowed to teach in the Sunday-school.

One does not like to laugh at a man whose whole life is spent in doing what he believes to be right; but he seems to have no hold on realities, and to be quite unable to throw himself, by imagination or sympathy, into what his people want or need. He has no belief in secular education, and thinks it makes people discontented and faithless. He is generous with his money, spending lavishly on the Church, but he does not believe in what he calls indiscriminate charity. The incident which has touched him more than any other in the course of his ministry, he will tell you, is when a poor old woman on her death-bed confided to him a few shillings to be spent on providing an altar-frontal. He gives a Sunday-school feast every year, which begins with a versicle and a response. "Thou openest Thine Hand," he says in a rich voice and the children pipe in chorus, "And fillest all things living with plenteousness." The day ends with a little service, which he thoroughly enjoys.

Even the services themselves are a dreary business, because he insists on the whole thing being choral; and little boys in short cassocks, with stocking-legs underneath, howl the responses and monotone the prayers to the accompaniment of a loud raw organ. He reads the lessons in what he calls a devotional way, which consists in reciting all episodes alike, the song of Deborah or the victories of Gideon, as if they were melancholy and pathetic reflections. He is fond of Gregorians and plain-song. The choirmen consist of a scrofulous invalid, his own gardener and coachman, and a bankrupt carpenter, given to drink and profuse repentance. But he is careful to say that he did not suggest the introduction of a choral service--"it was forced upon him by the wish of certain earnest and devoted helpers."

The fact is that the man is, as the children say, a real goose. There is nothing manly, vigorous, or sensible about him; he sometimes deplores the indifference of his parishioners to what he calls true Churchmanship, but he never thinks of comparing his ideal with the Gospel or with the actual conditions of the world. He seems to be hopelessly befogged; he is as certain as only a virtuous or stupid man can be that the religious system which he inculcates is the exact and deliberate development of the Spirit of Christ; and to hear him talk, you would suppose that the only joy in heaven resulted from a rumour that another church was added to the list of sanctuaries which had daily matins. The hopeless difficulty is that he considers his system so pure and lovely that to modify it in any way would seem to be a grievous compromise with worldliness, a violation of his high calling; he looks forward confidently to the time when the people of England will be a devotional and submissive flock, crowding daily to their village sanctuaries, and going back home with the glow and glory of the heavenly mysteries radiating from them in grave smiles and pious ejaculations.

It all seems to me a profoundly melancholy business. One does not wish to prevent people from worshipping God in the vicar's way, if they feel that thus they draw near to the divine presence; but