Science and Morals and Other Essays by Sir Windle Bertram Coghill Alan (top rated books of all time .TXT) 📕

We have gone beyond the day of the absurd statement that thought (which is of course unextended) is as much a secretion of the brain as bile (which, equally of course, is extended) is of the liver. No one nowadays would commit himself to such a statement, and men in general would be chary of urging that we should not believe anything which we cannot understand. I have myself heard a distinguished man of science of his day—he is dead this quarter of a century—make that statement in public, wholly ignoring the fact that any branch of science which we may pursue will supply us with a hundred problems we can neither understand nor explain, yet the factors of which we are bound to admit. But there is undoubtedly a dislike to accepting anything which cannot be proved by scientific means, and a tendency to describe as "mysticism"—a terrible and damning term to apply to anything, so its employers think!—any explanation which postulates something more in the universe than operations of a physical and chemical character.

My own opinion is that the state of things which we are considering finds its explanation in history, and I propose to devote a short space to developing this view. Of course we might, and in some ways should, go back to the Reformation and to the destruction of religion which then took place. Let us, however, pass from that period to a time some hundred and fifty years ago and commence our investigations there, and in carrying them out I propose to make considerable use of the novels of different periods.

It is a truism that very little but the dry bones of history can be learnt from histories.

Nowadays people are sick of reading about more or less immoral monarchs, and more or less corrupt politicians, and it may be suspected that most of us have had our bellyful of wars now that the recent contest has come to an end. What one really wants to learn from history is how the ordinary folk, like ourselves, were getting on; what their ideas were; how the world wagged for them. Such information we are much more likely to get from memoirs and, since such works have been published, from novels. The novelist is not to be supposed to be committed to acceptance of all the remarks put into the mouths of his characters, but, if he is of the second, not to say the first flight (and, if he is not, he is not worth quoting), his characters and the general tone of his book will not be out of touch with the times to which they belong. Since the novel came into existence as something more than an occasional rarity, it is the novelists and not the players who are "the abstract and brief chronicles of the times," and it is to them that we shall apply for some of the information we desire.

To commence with the Georgian period, it is not too much to say that anything like real religion was scarcely ever at a lower ebb in England. This is not to say that there was an absolute dearth of religion. Law wrote his Serious Call during that period, and there are few books of its kind which have had a greater and more lasting effect. There were others of like but lesser character than Law, but, on the whole, no one will deny that the clergy of the Established Church (Catholics were, of course, in the catacombs) and the religion which they represented were almost beneath contempt. Look, for example, at Esmond, the typical novel of its period. Is there a single clergyman in it who is not an object of contempt, with the sole exception of the Jesuit, who, though a good deal of the stage variety, at least gains a measure of the reader's sympathy and respect? Thackeray was not himself a Georgian, it may be urged. That of course is true, but no one that knows Thackeray and knows also Georgian literature will deny that he was saturated with it and understood the period with which his book dealt better perhaps than those who lived in it themselves. But examine the novelists of the period; what about Fielding? Parson Adams is respectable and lovable, but the general average of parson and religion is certainly about as low as it can be. Fielding was not a religious man. Possibly, but what then of Richardson? We do not find religion at a very high level there; can anything well be more degraded than the figure cut by Mr. Williams in Pamela, for example—the miserable curate upon whom the heroine calls for help in her distress? But apart from that, look at the whole atmosphere of the book. Why, the moral is that if you resist the immoral onslaughts of your master long enough he will give in and marry you, and you will be applauded for your successful strategy by all the countryside. Such is the book which all agreed to praise as an example of all that a book ought to be from the point of view of virtue.

It will be admitted by all conversant with the facts that religion could hardly have been at a lower ebb than it was when what is known as the Evangelical Movement came to trouble the placid, if stagnant and turbid, pool of the Established Church. Of course it did not transform the Church entirely. Read Miss Austen's novels: the most perfect pictures of life ever written. There are, I suppose, some half-dozen clergymen, pleasant and unpleasant, depicted in them, and we may be sure that they fairly well represent the typical average country parson of the period. Whatever they may otherwise be, they all agree in one point, namely in the complete absence of any such thing as a trace of spirituality. But in the early nineteenth-century Evangelicanism—specially that terrible variety Calvinism—was the dominant factor where religion really prevailed as a living influence; and it is to its influence, I firmly believe, that we may attribute the genuine detestation of religion which was so marked a feature of a part of the Victorian and most of the succeeding time. I am not, of course, forgetting the Oxford Movement, but, important as that was and is, in its earlier years it was almost entirely confined to clerical circles, exercising comparatively little influence on the laity and practically none at all on that great middle class which had been so much affected by the Wesleys, Whitefield, Scott, Newton, and the other pundits of Evangelicanism. Take the characteristic novel of the movement, if novel it should be called, Newman's Loss and Gain: I do not remember a single male character in it who is not in Holy Orders or on the way thereto. Hence, so far as religious influences are concerned, it is to the Evangelical Movement that we have to look. Now, though in my opinion it was the parent of many evils, there is no doubt that there was in it real fervour; intense devotion; a genuine desire to know and do God's will; a burning love for our Lord; coupled with all which were the most distorted and distorting ideas of what was and what was not sin ever conceived by any brain. Of this creed I can speak from personal knowledge, for I was brought up in it and know it from bitter experience.

The exponents of these views were never tired of instilling into their pupils the need for conversion, which was supposed to be a sudden operation. I have heard persons name the exact moment by the clock and the day on which theirs took place, and it was often effected by a single text. I have seen the Bible of an eminent leader in this line which contains a number of texts painted round with colours, each of which was associated with the conversion of some particular individual. The process was supposed to be effected by the "acceptance of Christ," and though it was said to be free to all, it was clear to some at least of those who quite earnestly and really desired it, that, however ardent their desires, they could not secure their realisation. One was supposed to know in some mysterious manner that one was converted; the operation was permanent in its character; it could not be repeated; once thoroughly effected the converted person neither wished to sin nor really did sin. If anyone supposed to have been converted did relapse into evil ways, then he never had really been converted, but only seemed to have been. I have heard this circular form of argument urged most strongly by those who were (by constitution apparently) absolutely unable to see the illogical position which they were taking up. A further, and the most awful, part of the teaching was that however much one desired to be converted, and however earnestly one prayed for it, if one died without it damnation was certain. Lastly there was the encouraging thought that everything done prior to conversion was equally without merit; in fact, one might almost say, equally evil. These things were dinned into the heads of the young, in season and out of season; is it any wonder that so many of them grew up to hate religion? I remember myself the positive terror with which I went out even to minor entertainments, because I knew that in all probability close interrogation would be made as to my spiritual condition.

Let me be reminiscent and recall one case. I was a boy at school and spending my Easter vacation away from home and with friends. It was my lot to have to dine one night with an old friend of my father's, a person of some distinction, who having, I believe, been a viveur in his youth, had in later years embraced the most ferocious type of Evangelicanism. When the ladies had retired I was left alone with this formidable person, whom I eyed much as a rabbit eyes a snake into whose cage he has been introduced. Nor were my fears groundless, for no sooner was the room empty than he peremptorily demanded of me whether I was saved. On hearing my trembling but perfectly truthful reply that I really did not know, he struck the table with his fist (I can see the whole thing quite plainly to-day, though it is five-and-forty years ago), exclaiming, "Then you are a fool, and if you were to die to-night you most certainly would be damned." I ask those who were brought up in a more kindly and more rational scheme of Christianity whether it is any wonder that those whose youth was spent in these gloomy shades should welcome the thought that there was no such being as a God?

Associated with this gloomy creed a new series of sins was invented, as if there were not enough already in the world. It was sinful to dance, even under the most domestic and proper circumstances. It was a sin to play cards, even when there was no money on the game. It was a sin to go to the theatre, even to behold the most inspiring and instructive plays. It was even held by some, as we shall see, that the writing of stories or works of imagination was sinful. I once heard a professor of this creed express the doubt whether Shakespeare had not, on the whole, done much more harm than good, and state that he himself would not allow the works of Dickens to occupy a place in a hospital library, from which, as a