LETTER I. Huntley Parsonage, September 4, 18
I PROMISED so long ago to write to you, dear Arthur, that by this time, if you have not already forgotten me, you will at least have begun to think it desirable to forget me as soon as possible, for an ungrateful, good-for-nothing fellow ; but I am going to be very just, and pay heavy interest — and I think*letter debts are like all other debts. If you pay them when they are due, they are taken as a matter of course, and without gratitude ; but lep.ve them till your poor creditor leaves off expecting, and then they fall in like a godsend. So I hope you are already delighted at the sight of my handwriting, and when you get to the end of these long sheets, which I am intending to fill to j^ou, I shall be quite back again in my old favor. Perhaps, though, I am too sanguine ; I have nothing but myself to write about,no facts,no theories,no opinions,no adventures, no sentiments, nothing but my own poor barren individualism, of considerable interest to me, but I do not know why I should presume it will be so to you. Egotism is not tiresome, or it ought not to be, if one is sincere about oneself ; but it is so hard to be sincere Well, never mind, I mean to be, and you know me well enough to see through me when I am humbugging. A year has gone since we parted ; T have had nothing all this time to tell you, except that I was unsettled and uncomfortable, and why should I trouble you with that ? Now, you will see I want your help, so now I come to you. It is not that I have had any positive grievance, but I seem to have had hold of every thing by the wrong side.
My father is very anxious to see me settled into some profession or other, and here have the three black graces alterna.tely been presenting their charms to me, and I can't get the apple delivered ; I turn from one to the other, and the last I look at seems always the ugliest, always has some disagreeable feature I cannot reconcile myself with. I cannot tell why it is, Arthur, but I scarcely know a professional man I can like, and certainly not one who has been what the world calls successful, that I should the least wish to resemble. The roads they have to trav^el are beaten in by the unscupulous as well as the scrupulous ; they are none of the cleanest, and the race is too fast to give one time to pick one's way. I know men try to keep their private conscience distinct from their professional conscience, but it does not always do. Their nature, like the dyer's hand, is subdued to what it works in ; and you know a lawyer when you see him, or a doctor, or a professional clergyman. They are not simply men, but men of a particular sort, and, unfortunately, something not more but less than men — men who have sacrificed their own selves to become the paid instruments of a system. There may be exceptions where there is very great genius ; but I am not a genius, and I cannot trust myself to hope I should be an exception, and so I go round and round, and always end where I began, in difficulties. I believe you know something of my father — a more upright, excellent man never breathed ; and though not very clever, yet he has a breadth of solid understanding which, for such creatures as we men are, is far better furniture to be sent into the world with than any cleverness ; and I am sure there must be something wrong in my fastidiousness when he so highly disapproves of it. He was contented to laugh at me, you know, as long as I was at college, because my dreaming, as he called it, did not interfere with my succeeding there ; but it is quite another thing now, and he urges me again and again, almost with a severity of reproof which is bitterly distressing to me. I have shown talents, he says, of which it is my duty to make use ; the common sense of mankind has marked out the best ways to use them, and it is worse than ridiculous in a young man such as I am to set myself up to be different from everybody else, and to be too good to do what many of the best and wisest men he knows, are doing. My brothers were all getting on honorably and steadily, and why was not I ? It was true, he allowed, that unscrupulous men did sometimes succeed pi-ofessionally, but it was n@t •by their faults, but by their virtues, by activity and prudence, and manly self-restraint He added
something which made a deeper impression upon me than this ; for all this I had said often and often to myself. I had told him that as I had a small independence, I thought I might wait at least a year or two, and give myself time to understand my own wishes clearly before I committed myself. " You say you wish to be a man, Markham," he answered, '' and not a professional man. I do not propose to control you. At your age, and with your talents, you must learn what life is now, not from me, but from life itself; but if you v/ill hear an old man's opinion, I will give it you. If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting here over your books, supposing you will grow into it as a matter of course, by a rule of necessity, in the same way as your body grows old, it is the "very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man into his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character ; you must hammer and forge yourself one. Go out into life, you will find your chance there, and only there. You ask to wait. It is like a timid boy waiting on the river bank to take his plunge. The longer he stands shivering the harder he finds it. At the year's end you will see more difficulties than you see now, because you yourself will have grown feebler. Wait one more, and then you will most likely go on to the end, into your second childhood of helplesness."
What shall I do, Arthur ? It is so true, every word of this. I feel it is. I know it is ; and it is shameful, indeed, to rust into nothingness. Yet what to do ! Surely it were kinder far to train us out from our cradles into a course which should be chosen for us, and make us begin our crawling on the road we are to travel, with spellingbooks of law and physic, and nursery courts of justice, or diseased dolls to lecture or to doctor. All would be so easy then ; we should form each about our proper centre, and revolve calmly and surely in the orbit into which we were projected. It is a frightful business to bring us up to be only men, and then bid us choose for ourselves one of three roads which are to take us down again. For they do take us down. Unless we are in Fortune's best books, and among those same lucky sons of genius, for law or physic, we must learn a very dirty lesson, and train our lips into very smooth chicanery, or it is slow enough her wheel will move with us. Speak the truth, and the truth only, and in the first you are a fool, and in the second you are a brute. " Ah, well, but at least the Church is open to you," you will say, and that is what my father says. There the most fastidious person will find the purest
Course he could mark down for himself fall infinitely short of what is required of him. And you believe I always intended to be a clergyman ; yes, and it is true. I always did intend it ; and if you could tell the envy with which I watch my friends passing in within the precincts of its order into what ought to be the holiest and happiest of lives ; alas ! here too I seem to be barred out, and one of my worst sorrows is that I cannot tell my father why I am. I will tell you, Arthur, but not now. I must think well over what I am to write on that subject, and you shall have another letter about it. But, oh, what a happy life that is ! I cannot understand why, as a body, clergymen are so fatally uninteresting ; they who through all their waking hours ought to have for their one thought the deepest and most absorbing interests of humanity. It is the curse of making it a profession — a road to get on upon, to succeed in life upon. The base stain is apparent in their very language, too sad an index of what they are. Their "duty,'' what is it? — to patter through the two Sunday services. For a little money one of them will undertake the other's duty for him. And what do they all aim at ? — getting livings ! not cures of souls, but livings; something which will keep their wretched bodies living in the comforts they have found indispensable. What business have they, any one of them, with a thought of what becomes of their poor wretched selves at all ? To hear them preaching, to hear the words they use in these same duties of theirs, one would suppose they really believed that getting on, and getting rich, and getting comfortable, were quite the last things a Christian should propose to himself.
They certainly say so. Alas ! with the mass of them, the pulpit keeps its old meaning, and is but a stage. Off the stage there is the old prate of the old world stories, the patronage of this rich man and that, the vacant benefice or cathedral stall. So and so, lucky fellow, has married a bishop's daughter, and the bishop himself has the best dressed wife and the best equipage in London ; and, oh, bitterest satire of all ! the very pulpit eloquence with which they can paint the better life, the beauty of Christianity, is valued only but as a means of advancing them into what they condemn. Yet this need not be, and this is not what I shrink from. The Church is an ill-paid profession, and so of the men who make a profession the main thing in this life of ours, it must be contented with the refuse of the educated. Not more than one in fifty takes orders who has a chance in any other line ; but there is this one in each fifty, and so noble some of these units are, that they are not only enough for the salt of their class, but for the salt of the world too. Men who do indeed spend their lives among the poor and the suffering, who go down and are content to make a home in those rivers of wretchedness that run below the surface of this modern society, asking nothing but to shed their lives, to pour one drop of sweetness into that bitter stream of injustice : oh, Arthur, what men they are ! what a duty that might be ! I think if it is true what they say who profit by this modern system ; if there is indeed no help for it, and an ever increasing multitude of miserable beings must drag on their wretched years in toil and suffering that a few may be idle and enjoy ; if there be no hope for them ; if to-morrow must be as to-day, and they are to live but to labor, and when their strength is spent, are but to languish out an unpensioned old age on a public charity which degrades what it sustains ; if this be indeed the lot which, by an irrevocable decree, it has pleased Providence to stamp upon the huge majority of mankind, incomparably the highest privilege which could be given to any one of us is to be allowed to sacrifice himself to them, to teach them to hope for a more just hereafter, and to make the present more endurable by raising their minds to endure it.
I have but one comfort in thinking of the poor, and that is, that we get somehow adjusted to the condition in which we grow up, and we do not miss the absence of what we have never enjoyed. They do not wear out faster, at least not much faster, than the better favored ; that is, if you may reckon up life by years, and if such as we leave them may be called life. Oh what a clergyman might do ! To have them all for an hour at least each week collected to be taught by him, really wishing to listen, if he will but take the trouble to understand them, and to learn what they require to be told. How sick one is of all sermons such as they are ! Why will men go on thrashing ov^er and again the old withered straw that was thrashed out centuries ago, when every field is waving with fresh, quite other, crops craving for their hand ? Is it indolence or folly ? What is it ? I could linger on for hours over an employment I so much long for. It seems to be mine, as I dwell upon it; so entirely it is all I crave for; I have not talent enough to create fresh thought for strong cultivated men • but it has always been my delight to translate downwards what others have created ; and I have been so much about among the poor, and with all their faults and all their ignorance, I love their simple hearty ways so much that I could say with all my heart I felt myself called, as the Prayer Book says, to be their teacher ; and yet, and yet , • . . well, good bye, and bear with me.
Your affectionate
M. SUTHERLAND.
LETTER II. September 6
" "TT THAT possible reason can I have for not taking T T orders ? " you may well ask. I promised to tell you, and I will ; yet I know not what you will think of me when I have done so Wherever as yet I have even dared to hint my feelings, I have been met by looks so cold and withering that I tremble at exposing them even to you. 0, Arthur, do not — do not make my trial harder . — do not you leave me too — do not make me lose my oldest, my only friend. Do not be frightened, I have committed no crime, at least nothing which I can conceive to be a crime ; and yet they say it is one. Arthur, before I can be made a clergyman, I must declare that I unfeignedly believe all " the canonical writings of the Old Testament ; " and I cannot. What does it mean — unfeignedly believe it all ? That all the actions related there are good, and all the opinions true ? Not that, of course ; because then all that Job's friends said would be as true as what Elihu said, and Lot's actions as good as Abraham's. But, I suppose, we are to believe that all those books were written by men immediately inspired by God to write them, because He thought them good for the education of mankind ; that whatever is told in those books as a fact is a real fact, and that the Psalms and Prophecies were composed under the dictation of the Holy Spirit. Now I am not going to weary you with all the scientific difficulties and critical difficulties, and, worse than all, metaphysical difficulties, which have worn the subject so threadbare ; though I think but badly of this poor modern sophistry of ours, which stumbles on between its two opinions, and when it is hunted to its death, runs its head into the sand and will not see what it does not like to see.
If there were no difficulties but these, and only my reason were perplexed, I could easily school my reason ; I could tell myself that God accommodated His revelations to the existing condition of mankind, and wrote in their language. But, Arthur, bear with me, and at least hear me ; though my head may deceive me, my heart cannot. I will not, I must not, believe that the all-just, all-merciful, all-good God can be such a Being as I find him there described. He ! He ! to have created mankind liable to fall — to fall — to have laid them in the way of a temptation under which he knew they would fall, and then curse them and all who were to come of them, and all the world for their sakes ; jealous, passionate, capricious, revengeful, punishing children for their fathers' sins, tempting men, or at least permitting them to be tempted into blindness and folly, and then destroying them. O, Arthur, Arthur ! this is not a Being to whom I could teach poor man to look up to out of his sufferings in love and hope. What ! that with no motive but His own will He chose out arbitrarily, for no merit of their own, as an eastern despot chooses his favorites, one small section of mankind^ leaving all the world besides to devil-worship and lies ; that the pure, truth-loving Persian of the mountains, who morning and night poured out his simple prayer to the Universal Father for the good of all His children ; that the noble Greeks of Marathon and Thermopylae, the austere and stately Romans, that then these were outcasts, aliens, devil-worshippers; and that one strange people of fanatics so hideously cruel that even women and children fell in slaughtered heaps before their indiscriminating swords, that these alone were the true God's true servants ; that God bid them do these things, and, exulting in their successful vengeance as a vindication of His honor, compelled the spheres out of their courses to stand still and assist the murdering ! . . .
And why all this murdering ? Sometimes for sins committed five centuries past ; while, for those five centuries, generation was let go on to follow generation in a darkness out of which no deliverance was oflfered them ; for Israel monopolized God. It is nothing to say these were exceptive peculiar cases. The nation to whom they were given never thought them peculiar cases. And what is Revelation if it is but a catalogue of examples, not which we are, but which we are not to follow ? No, Arthur this is not God. This is a fiend. Oh, surely this is not the faith of men who worshipped the Father of mankind, but rather of the followers of a god who was but one of many, a god among gods — the God of Israel, as Baal was the god of the nations ; and I cannot think the disputes and jealousies of heaven are tried and settled by the swords of earth. No ! If I may believe that the Jews were men like the rest, and distinguished from the rest not by any difference in kind in the nature of their relations with Heaven, but by their own extraordinary character ; that, more than any set of men who ever lived, they realized the life and active energy of God upon earth — that tk^ey believed they were the favorites of Heaven — - and that, in spite of the savage fanaticism into which it sometimes plunged them, their faith did in a way make them what they professed to be, and produced fruits of a most wonderful kind — all is easy to me then. Winning Canaan by strength, it was natural they, or at least their children, should think that God had given it them ; and in those fierce and lawless times many dreadful things might be done, which at least we can understand and allow for, though in sorrow. But that the unchanging God should have directly prompted, should have interfered to assist in what humanity shudders at while it reads — oh, I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my
heart forbids me to reverence. It runs through the whole B
Old Testament this feeling, but with a few great exceptions, and it is little use to make particulars. David may have been the man after God's heart if the Israelites were His peculiar people ; and the furious zealots in the last desperate wars in Palestine were the same people as their fathers who slaughtered Amalek. David himself is the > great type of the race in his savageness and in his piety ! Who could believe that the same man who wrote the De profundis Domini could have craved to wash his footsteps in his enemy's blood ? The war of good and evil is mightiest in mightiest souls, and even in the darkest time the heart will maintain its right against the hardest creed. Bear with me, Arthur, we read the Bible with very different eyes. For myself, the most delightful trait in the entire long history is that golden thread of humanity which winds along below the cruelty of the exclusive theory, and here and there appears in protest, in touches of deeper sympathy for its victims, than are ever found for the more highly-favored. Who are those who most call out our tears ? Is it not the outcast mother setting down her child that she may not see it die, the injured Esau, the fallen Saul, Aiah's daughter watching by her murdered children, or that unhappy husband who followed his wife weeping all along the road as David's minions were dragging her to his harem ?
If the Church is a profession, I know all this is very weak and very foolish ; one might enter it then, accepting what it insists upon, in the same way as the lawyer takes the laws as he finds them, not perhaps as he would have them if he had to choose, but as facts existing which it is not his place to quarrel with. And many sensible people do accept the Bible in this way, they take it as it stands ; they are not responsible, and they are contented to draw reasonable doctrines from it, gliding over what is inconvenient. I know, too, there are some excellent, oh, most excellent people, deep and. serious people, who do not find the difficulties there at all which I find, and accept it all with awe and fear, perhaps, but still with a real serious conviction that it is all true. Perhaps it is. And then I ... I ... am .. . am.
And then there is another thing, Arthur, which seems to be taught, not in the Old Testament but in the New, whicJi I should have to say I believed ; a doctrine this, not a history, and a doctrine so horrible that it could only have taken root in mankind when they were struggling in the perplexities of Manicheeism, and believed that the Devil held a divided empire with God. I mean that the largest portion of mankind, these very people who live about us, feel with us, act with us, are our daily companions — the people we meet at dinner or see in the streets, that are linked in with us with innumerable ties of common interests, common sympathies, common occupations —these very people are to be tortured for ever and ever in unspeakable agonies. My God ! and for what ? They are thrown out into life, into an atmosphere impregnated with temptation, with characters unformed, with imperfect natures out of which to form them, under necessity of a thousand false steps, and yet with every one scored down for vengeance ; and laying up for themselves a retribution so infinitely dreadful that our whole soul shrinks horror-struck before the very imagination of it ; and this under the decree of an all-just, all-bountiful God — the God of love and mercy. • 0, Arthur ! when a crime of one of our fallen brothers comes before ourselves to judge, how unspeakably difficult we find it to measure the balance of the &in ; cause winding out of cause, temptation out of temptation ; and the more closely we know the poor guilty one, the nature with which he was born, the circumstances which have developed it, how endlessly our difficulty grows upon us ! — how more and more it seems to have been inevitable, to deserve (if we may use the word deserve) not anger and punishment, but tears and pity and forgiveness.
And for God who knows all ! who not only knows all but who determined all — who dealt us out our natures and placed us as it pleased Him ! " what more could have been done to my vineyard that I have not done ? " Alas ! then, if Omnipotence could not bring but wild grapes there why was the poor vineyard planted ? It never asked to be. Why fling it out here into these few miserable years ; when it cannot choose but fall to ruin, and then must be thrown into hell-fire for ever ?....! cannot tell. It may be from some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange disease ; but for me, and I should think too for every human being in whose breast a human heart is beating, to know that one single creature is in that dreadful place would make a hell of heaven itself. And they have hearts in heaven, for they love there. Justice ! v/hat justice ! I believe that fallen creatures perish, perish for ever, for only good can live, and good has not been theirs ; but how durst men forge our Saviour's words ^' eternal death " into so horrible a meaning ? And even if he did use other v/ords, and seem to countenance such a meaning for them (and what witness have we that He did, except that of men whose ignorance or prejudice might well have interpreted these words wrongly as they did so many others ?) . . . . But I am on dangerous ground ; only it seems to me that it would be as reasonable to build a doctrine on every poet's metaphor, or lecture on the organic structure of the Almighty because it is said the scent of Noah's sacrifice pleased Him, as to build theories of the everlasting destiny of mankind on a single vehement expression of one whose entire language was a figure.
I know but one man, of iliore than miserable intellect, who in these modern times has dared defend eternal punishment on the score of justice, and that is Leibnitz ; a man who, if I know him rightly, chose the subject from its difficulty as an opportunity for the display of his gQnius, and cared so little for the truth that his conclusions did not cost his heart a pang or wring a single tear from him. And what does Leibnitz say ? That sin, forsooth, though itself be only finite, yet, because it is against an Infinite Being, contracts a character of infinity, and so must be infinitely punished. It is odd that the clever Leibnitz should not have seen that a finite punishment, inflicted by the same Infinite Being, would itself of course contract the same character of infinity. But what trifling all this is Arthur ! The heart spurns metaphysics, and one good honest feeling tears their shrivelled spider webs to atoms. No, if I am to be a minister of religion, T must teach the poor people that they have a Father in heaven, not a tyrant ; one who loves them all beyond power of heart to conceive ; who is sorry when they do wrong, not angry ; whom they are to love and dread, not with caitiflT coward fear, but with deepest awe and reverence, as the all-pure, all-good, all-holy. I could never fear a God who kept a hell prison-house. No, not though he flung me there because I refused. There is a power stronger than such a one ; and it is possible to walk unscathed even in the burning furnace. What ! am I to tell these poor millions of sufferers, who struggle on their wretched lives of want and misery, starved into sin, maddened into passion by the fiends of hunger and privation, in ignorance because they were never taught, and with but enough of knowledge to feel the deep injustice under which they are pining ; am I to tell them, I say, that there is no hope for them here, and less than none hereafter ; that the grave is but a precipice off which all, all of them, save here one and there one, will fall down into another life, to which the worst of earth is heaven ? '' Why, why/' they may lift up their torn hands and cry in bitter anger, " why, Almighty One, were we ever born at all, if it was but for this ?" Nay, I suppose the happiest, the most highly favored, of mankind looking back over a long unchequered life, where all the best and highest which earth has to give her children has been scatterered at their feet, looking back and telling over their days, might count upon their fingers the hours which they had lived, which were worth the pains it cost their mother to bear them. And all for this ! No, Arthur, no ! I never can teach this ; I would not so dishonor God as to lend my voice to perpetuate all the mad and foolish things which men have dared to say of Him. I believe that we may find in the Bible the highest and purest religion
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