A great deal has been said by the admirers of Thomas Paine about the abuse and injustice heaped upon his name, and the prevarications concerning his life, by press and pulpit and those who profess a life of love, meekness and humility. But we should remember that all this vilification was really the tribute that mediocrity pays genius. To escape censure, one only has to move with the mob, think with the mob, do nothing that the mob does not do—then you are safe. The saviors of the world have usually been crucified between thieves, despised, forsaken, spit upon, rejected of men. In their lives they seldom had a place where they could safely lay their weary heads, and dying their bodies were either hidden in another man's tomb or else subjected to the indignities which the living man failed to survive: torn limb from limb, eyeless, headless, armless, burned and the ashes scattered or sunk in the sea.
And the peculiar thing is that most of this frightful inhumanity was the work of so-called good men, the pillars of society, the respectable element, what we are pleased to call "our first citizens," instigated by the Church that happened to be in power. Socrates poisoned; Aristides ostracized; Aristotle fleeing for his life; Jesus crucified; Paul beheaded; Peter crucified head downward; Savonarola martyred; Spinoza hunted, tracked and cursed, and an order issued that no man should speak to him nor supply him food or shelter; Bruno burned; Galileo imprisoned; Huss, Wyclif, Latimer and Tyndale used for kindling—all this in the name of religion, institutional religion, the one thing that has caused more misery, heartaches, bloodshed, war, than all other causes combined. Leo Tolstoy says, "Love, truth, compassion, service, sympathy, tenderness, exist in the hearts of men, and are the essence of religion, but try to encompass these things in an institution and you get a church—and the Church stands for and has always stood for coercion, intolerance, injustice and cruelty."
No man ever lifted up his voice or pen in a criticism against love, truth, compassion, service, sympathy and tenderness. And if he had, do you think that love, truth, compassion, service, sympathy, tenderness, would feel it necessary to go after him with stocks, chains, thumbscrews and torches?
You can not imagine it.
Then what is it goes after men who criticize the prevailing religion and shows where it can be improved upon? Why, it is hate, malice, vengeance, jealousy, injustice, intolerance, cruelty, fear.
The reason the Church does not visit upon its critics today the same cruelties that it did three hundred years ago is simply because it has not the power. Incorporate a beautiful sentiment and hire a man to preach and defend it, and then buy property and build costly buildings in which to preach your beautiful sentiment, and if the gentleman who preaches your beautiful sentiment is criticized he will fight and suppress his critics if he can. And the reason he fights his critics is not because he believes the beautiful sentiment will suffer, but because he fears losing his position, which carries with it ease, honors and food, and a parsonage and a church, tax-free.
Just as soon as the gentleman employed to defend and preach the beautiful sentiment grows fearful about the permanency of his position, and begins to have goose-flesh when a critic's name is mentioned, the beautiful sentiment evaporates out of the window, and exists only in that place forever as a name. The Church is ever a menace to all beautiful sentiments, because it is an economic institution, and the chief distributor of degrees, titles and honors.
Anything that threatens to curtail its power it is bound to oppose and suppress, if it can. Men who cease useful work, in order to devote themselves to religion, are right in the same class with women who quit work to make a business of love. Men who know history and humanity and have reasonably open minds are not surprised at the treatment visited upon Paine by the country he had so much benefited. Superstition and hallucination are really one thing, and fanaticism, which is mental obsession, easily becomes acute, and the whirling dervish runs amuck at sight of a man whose religious opinions are different from his own.
Paine got off very easy; he lived his life, and expressed himself freely to the last. Men who discover continents are destined to die in chains. That is the price they pay for the privilege of sailing on, and on, and on, and on.
Said Paine:
The moral duty of a man consists in imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God manifested in the creation towards all creatures. That seeing as we daily do, the goodness of God to all men, it is an example calling upon all men to practise towards each other, and consequently that everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty.
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The pen of Paine made the sword of Washington possible. And as Paine's book, "Common Sense," broke the power of Great Britain in America, and "The Rights of Man" gave free speech and a free press to England, so did "The Age of Reason" give pause to the juggernaut of orthodoxy. Thomas Paine was the legitimate ancestor of Hosea Ballou, who founded the Universalist Church, and also of Theodore Parker, who made Unitarianism in America an intellectual torch.
Channing, Ripley, Bartol, Martineau, Frothingham, Hale, Curtis, Collyer, Swing, Thomas, Conway, Leonard, Savage—yes, even Emerson and Thoreau—were spiritual children, all, of Thomas Paine. He blazed the way and made it possible for men to preach the sweet reasonableness of reason. He was the pioneer in a jungle of superstition. Thomas Paine was the real founder of the so-called Liberal Denominations, and the business of the liberal denominations has not been to become great, powerful and popular, but to make all other denominations more liberal. So today in all so-called orthodox pulpits one can hear the ideas of Paine, Henry Frank and B. Fay Mills expounded.
JOHN KNOX
The repentance of England requireth two things: First, the expulsion of all dregs of popery and the treading under foot of all glistering beauty of vain ceremonies. Next, no power or liberty must be permitted to any, of what estate, degree or authority they be, either to live without the yoke of discipline by God's word commanded, or to alter one jot in religion which from God's mouth thou hast received. If prince, king or emperor would enterprise to change or disannul the same, that he be the reputed enemy to God, while a prince who erects idolatry must be adjudged to death. —John Knox
[Illustration: John Knox]
John Knox the Scotchman, Martin Luther the German, and John Calvin the Frenchman, were contemporaries. They constitute a trinity of strong men who profoundly influenced their times; and the epoch they made was so important that we call it "The Reformation." They form the undertow of that great tidal wave of reason and commonsense called the Italian Renaissance. And as the chief business of the Hahnemannian school of medicine was to dilute the dose of the Allopaths, and the Christian Scientists confirmed the homeopaths in a belief concerning the beauties of the blank tablet, so did Luther, Calvin and Knox neutralize the arrogance of Rome, and dilute the dose of despotism.
Knox, Luther, and Calvin were hunted men. They lived stormy, tumultuous lives, torn by plot and counterplot. Very naturally, their religion is filled with fever and fear, and their God is jealous, revengeful, harsh, arbitrary, savage—a God of wrath.
Only a bold man, rough and coarse, could have defied the reigning powers and done the work which Destiny had cut out for John Knox to do. His power lay in the hallucination that his utterances were the final expressions of truth. Had he known more he would have done less.
Life is a sequence, and we are what we are because this man lived. To the memory of John Knox we acknowledge our obligation; but we realize that for us to accept and adopt the conclusions and ideals of one who lived in such tempestuous times is no honor to ourselves, nor to him.
The Christian Church has preached five special phases of belief, as
follows: First, Religion by Definition; Second, Religion by
Submission; Third, Religion by Substitution; Fourth, Religion by
Culture; Fifth, Religion by Service.
All of these phases overlap, more or less, and the difference in sects consists simply in the amount of emphasis which is placed upon each or any particular phase. And this is largely a matter of temperament.
The Catholic Church emphasizes definition above all things. You are told the nature of evil; the Godhead, the trinity, the sacraments, the "elements" are explained, and the syllabus and catechism play most important parts. Before you are confirmed you have to memorize many definitions: little girls of ten glibly explain the difference between a mortal and a venal sin, and boys in knee-breeches discourse upon the geography of other worlds, and the state of sinners after death.
Next to Religion by Definition is Religion by Submission, and usually they go together. Persons too stupid to define can still submit. Service is not an essential, and in fact service without definition is usually regarded as hideous, "the righteousness of an unbeliever being as filthy rags." However, if it were not for the service rendered by the monks, priests and nuns, the Catholic Church could never have retained its hold upon humanity. Its schools, asylums, hospitals and houses of refuge have been its excuse for existence, and the undoing of the infidel. But service with the Catholic Church is emphasized only for the priesthood—the laity being simply asked to define, submit and pay. Culture and character are left to natural selection, and the thought that any person but a priest could have either is a very modern hypothesis. In way of Religion by Definition, Saint Paul was the great modern exponent. That the Theological Quibblers' Club existed long before his time we know full well. In fact, the chief invective of Jesus against Judaism was that it had degenerated into a mere matter of dispute concerning intricate nothings.
When Paul was brought before Gallio, the brother of Seneca, Gallio paid his respects to the same quibbling propensities against which Jesus had inveighed, by saying, "If it were a matter of wrong or of wicked villainy. O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: but if they are questions about words and names and your own law, look to it yourselves; I am not minded to be a judge of these matters."
Pity and piety have nothing necessarily to do with Religion by Definition. We can all recall men of acute minds who thought themselves pious, who had bartered their souls away in order to become senior wranglers. Intellect lured them on into wordy unseemliness; their skill in forensics became a passion, and to embarrass and defeat the antagonist became the thing desired, not the pursuit of truth. They fell victims to their facility in syntax and prosody—semi- Solomons in Scriptural explanations, waxing wise in defining the difference 'twixt hyssop and myrrh.
Forty years ago no town in America was free from joint debates where the disputants would argue six nights and days together concerning vicarious salvation, baptism, regeneration, justification and the condition of unbaptized infants after death. Debates of this kind set the entire populace by the ears, and at post-office, tavern, grocery, family table, and even after the disputants had gone to bed, reasons nice, and subtleties hairsplitting were passed back and forth, until finally the party getting worsted fell back on maternal pedigrees, and epithet took the place of logic.
If the matter ended merely with the weapons of wordy warfare, it was fortunate and well, for these eyes have seen a camp-meeting where singletrees, neck-yokes, harness-tugs and scalding water augmented arguments concerning foreordination as taught by John Calvin and freewill as defined by John Knox.
Theological wrangles belong essentially to a pioneer people: an earnest, stubbornly honest people, whose lives are given over to a battle with the elements and the brute forces of Nature, always argufy.
Submission is not recognized in their formula except as a word, and their abnegation takes the form of a persistent pursuit of the thing desired, by following another trail. Such persons are always very proud, and the thing upon which they most pride themselves is their humility, and absence of pride.
"Morality comes only after physical self-preservation is secure," says Herbert Spencer, and with culture it is the same, and so the word is not in the bright lexicon of pioneers. All of their service is of the Connecticut variety—if you need things, they have them for sale. And so we get the wooden-nutmeg enterprise, and the peculiar incident of the New Haven man at the Pan-American Fair, who sold wooden nutmegs for charms and bangles. But one day, running out of wooden nutmegs, he went to a wholesale grocer and bought a bushel of the genuine ones, and these he palmed off upon the innocent and unsuspecting, until he was brought to book on the charge of false pretenses. Human service, as taught by Jesus of Nazareth, has only been tried in a very spasmodic way, except for advertising purposes. The world has now, for the first time in history, reached a point where as a vital problem the production of wealth is secondary to the question of how we shall distribute it. And so the Religion of Service is being seriously considered, and perhaps will soon be given a trial. The man who said that the number of marriages was in exact ratio to the price of corn spoke wisely. What he meant was that physical well-being directly affects all of our social relations. It is exactly the same with our religion. Economics and religion are very closely related. People in a certain physical environment have a certain religion. A tired and overworked people, enslaved as chattels or by the spirit of the times, find solace in a mournful religion, and a haven of rest hereafter— also, in the contemplation of a Hell for those who believe differently from what they do. They sing, "All Days Will Be Sunday By and By," or "Sweet Rest in Heaven." If they are oppressed by debt and mortgages that gnaw, they sing, "Jesus paid it all, yes, all the debt I owe." A warlike people whose wealth has come from conquest will shout the English National Hymn and take joy in such lines as "Confound their knavish tricks," expressed as a prayer.
The Religion of Culture flowers best in those with seven generations of New England clerical ancestry, or a carefully pruned F. F. V. family-tree. It goes with just a little and not too much C. B. & Q. and Old Colony eight per cent guaranteed, or wide ancestral acres. Most Unitarians and Episcopalians hold a caveat on culture and have character by the scruff. The Religion of Culture has a flavor of thyme and mignonette, and a gleam of old silver plate handed down as heirlooms. It means leisure, books on the shelf, well-filled woodsheds, and cellars stocked with vegetables.
It is leisurely, kindly, intelligent, gentle beautiful. The Religion of Culture is exclusive, and slips easily into social caste, which is spiritual and mental ankylosis. Its disadvantages are that to pursue culture is to frighten her far afield, and have her elude you. To strive for character is to lose it.
People who strive for health are headed for the sanatorium, for vitality plus comes only to those who do not think much about it; and likewise character is evolved best by those who forget character and lose their lives in service. Dyspeptics are people who have no faith in their digestive apparatus.
The Reformation revolved around Definition and Substitution. We escape the doom we deserve through the death of some one else. This belief in Substitution goes with an age that never doubted the beauty of capital punishment, and was worked out by men familiar with block, broadax and basket. Luther, Calvin and Knox possessed the elements of Submission, Character and Service only in rudimentary form. Substitution and Definition were their cornerstones.
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That sturdy reformer, Martin Luther, was born in Fourteen Hundred Eighty-three. He was nine years old when Columbus turned the prow of his caravel to the West and persistently sailed on.
Luther's father was a miner—a day laborer—and the lad's childhood was grim and cheerless. He sang on the streets, and held out a ragged cap for pennies. His fine, sweet voice caught the ear of a priest, and the boy's services were used at the altar. The lad was alert, active, intelligent, ambitious. Very naturally he was educated for the priesthood. He became a monk, and evolved into a preacher of worth and power.
A prosperous and successful church always produces a class of dignitaries given over to sloth and sensuality. From a sublime idea, with a desire to benefit and to bless, the church degenerates into an institution for the distribution of honors, and an engine for punishment for all who oppose it. To Martin Luther religion was a matter of the heart, and his soul was filled with the thought of service. At the same time he had ability in the matter of definition. He began calling upon the Church to reform, and demanding that priests repent. Very naturally the priests thought it absurd for Luther to try to bring the righteous to repentance. They laughed. Later they scowled. Then they called on Doctor Luther to mend his manners, and not make the Church and himself ridiculous in the eyes of the world.
Had Luther had an eye on the main chance he would at this time have pulled in his horns, and chosen other texts, and been promoted in due course to a bishopric; for although the man was small in stature, yet he carried the crown of his head high and his chin in. What he had before simply stated he now began to prove. The small hand of authority, gloved in imitation velvet, here lifted Luther out of a position of power and honor as "District Vicar," a place that spelled promotion, and put him back as a grade school-teacher. Had the Pope been really infallible and the church authorities all-wise, they would have killed Luther, and that would 'a' been an end on 't. Leniency just then was an error in judgment. Luther set about bolstering his mental position. The more he thought about it, the more firmly convinced was he that his cause was just.
Where thinkers are, there is thought. Thinkers think anywhere, in country, village, town—in prison. Wittenberg was obscure, more than half of the students were charity boys, the professors were thin, dyseptic and glum, or fat and opinionated—all repeated the things they had been taught, save Martin Luther alone.
And on the thirty-first day of October, Fifteen Hundred Seventeen, Luther tacked upon the church-door his ninety-five theses, and offered to debate them 'gainst all the Church Fathers that could be mustered.
Trite, indeed, are the propositions now. Rome has really accepted them all, even to that one which hints that we, too, are divine in degree, just like our Elder Brother. Challenges on the church-doors of colleges were common, but coming from a semi-silenced priest, and directed at the Pope's emissary, ah! that was different. Even at that, the whole affair would have been lost in local oblivion, had not the few zealous boys who loved Luther started their two printing-presses in the cellar of the church, and worked night and day pulling proofs. The printing-presses did it! Without the typesetter, the make-ready man, and the sturdy lads who pulled the lever, Luther's voice would not have reached across the campus.
But lo! Luther was talking to the world, not to sleepy Wittenberg! Luther was requested to appear at the Vatican—more properly, the Castle Angelo. He ignored the invitation. Another summons followed. Luther went into hiding. He was arrested, tried and condemned, and sentence suspended. He was again tried, this time by the Emperor and the Electors, and again condemned. The formal sentence of death only awaited, and then for him the fagots would flare and the flames crackle.
His friends captured him, they of the printing-presses, helped by others, and bore him away to a prison where his enemies could not follow. Many a man has been thrown into prison by his enemies, but who besides Luther was so treated by his friends! Public sentiment was with him—Germany stood by him—but best of all the printers pulled the proofs, and four-page folders edited by Martin Luther went fluttering all over the world, protesting man's right to think.
So he lived out his days, did Martin Luther, on parole, under sentence of death, working, thinking, writing, printing. And over in France a serious, sober young man, keen, mentally hungry, translated one of Luther's pamphlets into French, and printed it for his school-fellows. Having printed it, he had to explain it, and next to defend it—and also his action in having printed it. The young man's name was Jean Chauvain. He spelled it "Caulvain" or "Calvain." The world knows him as John Calvin.
* * * * *
John Calvin was a Frenchman, but it is well to remember that the typical Frenchman, like the typical Irishman and his brother the Jew, exists only in the comic papers, and on the vaudeville stage. The frivolous and the mercurial were not in Calvin's make-up.
The parents of Calvin were of that same sturdy, seafaring type which produced Millet, Auguste Rodin, Jules Breton, and other simple, earnest and great souls who have done great deeds. Calvin was the true Huguenot type.
Peasant ancestry and a nearness to the soil are necessary conditions in the formation of characters who are to re-map continents, artistic or theological. The Puritan is a necessary product of his time.
However, Calvin had the advantage of one remove from actual hardship, and this evidently refined his intellect, and relieved him of world stage-fright. His father was a notary or steward in the employ of the De Mommor family. Very naturally, the boy mixed with the scions of royalty on an equal footing, for pom-pom-pull-away knows no caste, and a boy's a boy for a' that. At twelve years of age, he felt himself quite as noble as those of noble blood, and so expressed himself to his playmates. Probably they found it convenient to agree with him. Their nickname for him was, "The Accusative."
The world accepts a man at the estimate he places upon himself. There was a De Mommor lad the same age of John Calvin, and one three years older. In his studies he set them both a pace, and so correct and diligent was he that when the De Mommor lads were sent down to Paris, the tutor insisted that John Calvin should go, too, and a benefice was at once made out for him providing that he should be educated for the priesthood. Legend has it that at this time, being then fifteen years old, he admonished his parents in the way of life, and instructed them how to conduct themselves during his absence.
At eighteen he was preaching, and soon after was given a living and placed in charge of a country parish. It was about this time, when he was between nineteen and twenty years of age, that a copy of one of Luther's pamphlets fell into his hands. It was a pivotal point. Thrones were to totter, families be rent in twain, millions of minds receive a bias! This serious, sober young priest, freshly tonsured, took the pamphlet to his garret and read it. Then he set about to refute it. Luther's arguments did not so much interest Calvin as did the man himself, the man who had defied authority.
And really Calvin did not like the man: Luther's rollicking, coarse and blunt ways repelled this studious and ascetic youth. The one thing that Calvin admired in Luther was his self-reliance. Suddenly it came over Calvin that life should be religion and religion should be life, and that in the claims of the priesthood there was a deal of pretense.
In refuting Luther he grew to admire him. He resolved to eliminate the tonsure and dress in citizens' clothes. His resolution stuck, and as soon as his hair had grown out, he went home and told his father and patron that he had abandoned theology and wished to study law. And so he was sent to Orleans and placed in the office of the eminent judge, Peter de Stella.
But theology is a matter of temperament, and instead of writing briefs, Calvin began translating Luther's Bible into French. He was requested to relinquish this pastime long enough to draw up a legal opinion concerning the divorce of our old friend Henry the Eighth.
Calvin was never wrung by days of doubt nor by nights of pain. He parted from the Church without a struggle, and adopted as his motto, "If God be for us, who can be against us?"
He again began to preach. He was a duly ordained priest in good standing—technically, at least—in the Catholic Church. He had all the confidence of a sophomore—age did not wither him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety. He questioned and contradicted everybody, young or old, regardless of position. But so cleanly was the man's mode of life, so intellectual, so personally unselfish and sincere was he, that although heretics were being burned in France by twos and sevens, yet for several years no hand was laid upon him.
Finally, in spite of the De Mommors, a legal notice was served upon Calvin, signed by King Francis in person, asking him to desist, and giving him three months to get back in the theological traces, making peace with his superiors.
Calvin always had a taste for printing, and now at his own expense he translated the "De Clementia" of Seneca into French and had the book printed, dedicating it to the king. This was his brief for clemency and at the same time an argument for free speech. Seneca's father had a college of oratory, and Seneca said: "Let the people talk. If they be right the king can not be harmed; but if they be wrong they will merely hurt themselves: kings can afford to exercise clemency."
The book was really an insult to the king, since it assumed that Francis had never read Seneca. This doubtless was a fact; but Francis, instead of studying up on the old Roman, simply issued an order for the arrest of Calvin. Calvin quit Paris in hot haste, and no doubt thereby saved his head.
Doctor Servetus, a physician and learned monk from Spain, was then in Paris giving popular lectures "against Lutherism and such other similar forms of grievous error." Servetus was a "Papal Delegate"— what we would call "a revivalist." Calvin thought Servetus had him especially in mind. So he issued a challenge at long distance to debate the issues publicly. Servetus accepted the challenge, but the arrangements fell through. Calvin found refuge in Strassburg, then at Basle, being politely sent along from each place, finally reaching Geneva. He was then twenty-four years old.
At Geneva he at once made his presence felt by attempting to organize a reformed or independent Catholic Church. For this he was asked to leave, and then was expelled, living in retirement in the mountains. Two of the syndics who had brought about his expulsion died, as even syndics do, and Calvin returned, informing the populace that the death of the syndics was a punishment upon them for their lack of welcome to a good man and true.
From this time Calvin turned Geneva into a theocracy, and the city was sacred to prayer, praise and Bible study. Students flocked from all over Christendom to hear the new gospel expounded. They came from Germany, France, England and Scotland. The air was full of unrest. And among others who came out of curiosity, to study, or perhaps because they were not needed at home, was a man from Edinburgh. He was six years younger than Calvin, but very much like him in temperament.
His name was John Knox. Servetus was a rhetorician, controversialist and diplomat—gentle, considerate, gracious. He belonged to that suave and cultured type of Catholic that wins to the Church princes and people to education and wealth. He has been likened by John Morley to Cardinal Newman.
After Calvin reached Geneva he entered into a long correspondence with Doctor Servetus, and the debate which had been planned was carried on by correspondence. Servetus proposed to Calvin that the postponed debate should take place in Geneva. Calvin replied that if Servetus came to Geneva he would burn him alive.
Now, there were really many more Catholics in Switzerland than dissenters, or "Protestants," and Servetus, knowing Calvin's weakness for exaggeration, did not take his threat seriously. So Servetus journeyed by leisurely stages southward, on his way to Naples, but he never reached there. He stopped at Geneva, like other pilgrims, "to study the new religion."
Geneva was the home of free speech, and this being so, Servetus had just as good a right there as Calvin. But Calvin looked upon the coming of Servetus as a menace, and honestly thought, no doubt, that Servetus was in the personal employ of the Vatican, with intent to collect evidence against "the new faith." Calvin aroused the community into a belief that their rights were being jeopardized.
Servetus was arrested and thrown into prison. The charge was heresy—a charge that at this safe distance makes us smile. But the humor of heretics charging heretics with heresy, and demanding that they should be punished, did not dawn upon John Calvin.
Heresy is a matter of longitude and time.
The trial lasted from August until September. Calvin supplied the proof of guilt by bringing forward the many letters written him by Servetus. The prisoner did not deny the proof, but instead sought to defend his position. Calvin replied at length, and thus did the long- postponed debate take place.
The judges decided in favor of Calvin.
The next day Servetus was burned alive in the public square.
"I interceded for him," said John Calvin; "I interceded for him—I wanted him beheaded, not burned."
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The encyclopedia records that John Knox was born at Haddington, Scotland, in the year Fifteen Hundred Five. As to the place, there is no doubt; but as for the time, Andrew Lang, after much research, places the date as Fifteen Hundred Fifteen.
Usually men, eke women, bring the date of their birth forward, but Knox with much care set his back. He justified himself in this because, when he was twenty, he was explaining the difference between truth and error with great precision, and to give the words weight he added ten years to his age, explaining to a finikin friend that at twenty he knew more than any man of thirty that could be produced. And this was doubtless true.
John Knox came of a respectable family of the middle class. He was independent, blunt, bold, coarse, with an underground village vocabulary acquired in his childhood that he never quite forgot.
At the grammar-school he was the star scholar, and at Saint Andrews quickly took front rank and set his teachers prophesying. And the peculiar part is that all of their prophecies came true, which proves for us that infant prodigies sometimes train on.
John Knox became a priest and a preacher of power before he was twenty-five. In temperament he was very much such a man as Luther, save that Luther was considerable of a joker. Luther had more common- sense than Knox, but what Knox lacked in humor he made up in learning. In fact, his love of learning was his chief weakness. He was as self-reliant as a black Angus. At twenty-six Knox made a vow that he would no longer kneel. This led to a rebuke from Cardinal Beaton, followed by the retort courteous.
About this time he met George Wishart, and the men became fast friends. Four years passed and a chapter in history was played that wrenched the stern nature of John Knox, and for once broke up the icy fastness of his heart and caused his tears to flow. That was the burning at the stake of Wishart on the campus in front of Saint Andrews.
That his Alma Mater should lend itself to such a horrible crime in the name of justice caused Knox to break forth in curses that reached the ears of those in power, and had he not fled, the Fate that overtook Wishart would have been his.
George Wishart was of Scottish birth, but had spent some time in Germany, and had caught the spirit of Luther. All accounts agree that he was a gentle and worthy character, and very moderate in his expressions. He was a teacher at Cambridge, and his first offense seems to have been that he translated the New Testament from Greek into English, without permission.
He came to Saint Andrews and gave a course of lectures, it being the custom then for colleges to "exchange pulpits." Knox attended these lectures and heard Wishart for the first time. The Catholics making a demonstration against Wishart, Knox became one of a volunteer bodyguard.
Being on familiar terms with the great men of Edinburgh, Wishart was chosen by Henry the Eighth for the very delicate errand of going to Scotland and interceding for the hand in marriage of Mary Stuart, the infant "Queen of Scots," with Edward, the infant son of our old friend. Wishart seems to have been an unwilling tool in this matter, and his action set Catholic Scotland violently against him.
Persecution pushed him on into unseemly speech, and Cardinal Beaton set the sure machinery in motion that ended in the death of this strong, earnest and simple man who had not yet reached the height of his powers.
The fires that consumed the body of George Wishart fired the heart of
John Knox, and from that hour he was the avowed foe of the papacy.
Two years later, Cardinal Beaton was assassinated by "parties unknown." But Knox, having often cheerfully referred to Beaton as "a son of Beelzebub," was accused of hatching the plot, even though he did not personally take a hand in executing it.
Shortly after the death of Beaton, Knox, believing the atmosphere had cleared, came back to Edinburgh and preached at the Castle. Soon he had quite a following, but of people who he himself says, in his "History of the Reformation," were "gluttons, wantons and licentious revelers, but who yet regularly and meekly partook of the sacrament." Knox saw plainly this peculiar paradox, that every reformer is followed and professed by lawbreakers who consider themselves just like him. These rogues who took the sacrament regularly were the cause of much annoyance to Knox, and gave excuse for many accusations against him.
Knox preached a sermon entitled, "Killing No Murder," attempting to show how, when men used their power to subjugate other men, their death becomes a blessing to every one.
The Castle was stormed by Catholics, in which a brigade of French took part. Knox and various others were taken to France, and there set to work as galley-slaves. Escaping through connivance he made his way to Geneva, attracted by the fame of Calvin.
But his heart was in Scotland, and in a year he was back once more on the heather calling upon the papal heathen to repent.
John Knox was in Geneva three different times. He was a heretic, too, and his heresy was of the same kind as that of Calvin. And as two negatives make an affirmative, so do two heretics, if they are strong enough, transform heresy into orthodoxy. To be a heretic you have to be in the minority and stand alone.
Calvin had a high regard for Knox, but they were too much alike to work together in peace. Calvin was never in England, and in fact never learned to speak English; but Knox spoke French like a native, having improved the time while in prison in France by studying the language. There were several hundred English refugees in Geneva, and Calvin appointed Knox pastor of the English church. This was in Fifteen Hundred Fifty-four, the year following the death of Servetus. Knox deprecated the death of the Papal Delegate, but looked upon it lightly, a mere necessity of the times, and "a due and just warning to the Pope and the followers of the Babylonish harlot."
When Luther was forty-two he married "Catherine the Nun," a most noble and excellent woman of about his own age, who encouraged him in his very trying position and sustained him in time of peril.
Calvin married Idalette de Bures, the widow of an Anabaptist whom he converted.
Calvin was not a lover by nature, and explained to the world that his marriage was simply a harmless necessary defi to Rome. Happily the venture proved a better scheme than he wist, and after some years, he wrote, "I would have died without the helpmeet God sent me—my wife, who never opposed me in anything." John Knox was married when thirty- eight to the winsome Marjorie Bowes, aged seventeen, the fifth child of Mary Bowes, whom he had ardently wooed in his youth. His boast to the mother that "Providence planned that you should reject me in order that I might do better," was an indelicate slant by the right oblique.
Marjorie withered in the cold, keen atmosphere of theological definition, and died in a few years.
And then Fate sent a close call for the Reformer in the daring, dashing person of Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary's mother was Mary of Guise, a French woman discreetly married to King James of Scotland. Knox always bore a terrible hatred toward Mary of Guise, and all French people for that matter, for his little term in the galleys. Hisbook, "The Monstrous Regiment of Women," had Mary Tudor, Mary of Guise, and Mary, Queen of Scots, in mind. Queen Elizabeth paid a compliment to the worth of the author by outlawing him for "his insult to virtuous womanhood."
Men who hate women are simply suffering from an overdose. Knox was a woman-hater who always had one especially attractive woman upon his list, with intent to make of her a Presbyterian. In this he was as steadfast as the leader of a colored camp-meeting.
Mary, Queen of Scots, had no more landed on Scottish soil from Catholic France than Knox fled, fearing for his head. Ere long he came back and sought a personal interview with the young queen, just turned twenty, "with intent to bring her heart to Jesus." They seemed to have talked of other themes, for "she was exceeding French and frivolous and stroked my beard when I sought to explain to her the wickedness of profane dancing."
Then Mary tried her hand at converting Knox to the "Mother Church." And as a last inducement legend has it that she offered to marry him if he would become a Catholic. Here John Knox coughed and hesitated— she was getting near his price. He was he saw the devil's tail behind her chair. He rushed from her presence, quaking with fear.
Stormy interviews followed, back up by handy epithets in which they
both proved expert. It was a pivotal point. Had John Knox married
Mary, Queen of Scots, there would have been no Presbyterian Church, no
Princeton, no Doctor McCosh, no Grover Cleveland.
On March Twentieth, Fifteen Hundred Sixty-three, the banns were read between John Knox and Margaret "Stewart," or Stuart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, and a forebear of our own Tom Ochiltree. The young lady was two months past sixteen years old. The Queen was furious, for the girl, being of Royal blood, "should really have consulted me before renouncing her religion for this praying and braying man with long whiskers."
There was full and just cause for indignation, for although Mary was then safely wedded to Darnley, preparing to have him assassinated (and later to lose her own head), she yet regarded John Knox as her private property.
Marriage merely added another trouble to the stormy and burdened life of our great reformer. He had successfully fought the powers of Rome; the queenly daughter of Henry the Eighth, and Anne Boleyn had found him incorrigible and given him up as a hopeless case; Calvin could not tame him; but now a chit of a girl with retrousse nose, who should have been at work in a paper-box factory, led him a merry dance, and the voice that had thundered threat and defiance piped in forced assent. December strawberries, I am told, lack the expected flavor.
When Knox died, he left a widow aged twenty-five, come Michaelmas. She wore deep mourning, and so did Mary, Queen of Scots, but Mary explained that her deep veil was merely to hide her smiles.
In two years the widow married Andrew Ker, notorious for having once leveled a pistol at the Queen. The widow survived Knox just sixty-two years, and died undeceived, not realizing that she had once been wedded to a man who had shaped a great religion—one whom Carlyle, his countryman, calls the master mind of his day.
JOHN BRIGHT
I have often tried to picture to myself what famine is, but the human mind is not capable of drawing any form, any scene, that will realize the horrors of starvation. The men who made the Corn Laws are totally ignorant of what it means. The agricultural laborers know something of it in some counties, and there are some hand-loom weavers in Lancashire who know what it is. I saw the other night, late at night, a light in a cottage-window, and heard the loom busily at work, the shuttle flying rapidly. It ought to have a cheerful sound, but when it is at work near midnight, when there is care upon the brow of the workman—lest he should not be able to secure that which will maintain his wife and children—then there is a foretaste of what is meant by the word "famine."
Oh, if these men who made the Corn Laws, if these men who step in
between the Creator and His creatures, could for only one short
twelvemonth—I would inflict upon them no harder punishment for
their guilt—if they for one single twelvemonth might sit at the
loom and throw the shuttle! I will not ask that they should have the
rest of the evils; I will not ask that they shall be torn by the
harrowing feelings which must exist when a beloved wife and helpless
children are suffering the horrors which these Corn Laws have
inflicted upon millions.
—John Bright
[Illustration: John Bright.]
The Society of Friends—I like the phrase, don't you? The thought of having friends, and of being a friend, comes to us like a benison and a benediction. Friendship is almost a religion: the recognition in your life of the fact that to have friends you must be one is religion.
The Quakers did not educate men to preach: they simply educated them to be Friends—and live. Those who "heard the Voice" preached. Most modern preachers do not follow a Voice—they only harken to an echo. The practical test with the Quakers was whether the man heard the "Voice" or not—if so, he could preach. Men were not licensed to preach—that is quite superfluous and absurd. Those who have to listen are the only ones to decide concerning whether the speaker has heard the "Voice" or not. As it is now, we often license men to preach who can not. The ability should be the license.
For, certain it is that men who can command attention need no testimonial from a commission in lunacy. People who have lived and are living are the only ones who have a message for living men and women.
George Fox plainly saw that a paid priesthood—specialists in divinity—created a caste, a superior class that exalted the pulpit at the expense of the pew. The plan tended to suppress the pew, for all the talking was strictly ex parte. It also tended to self-deception among the clergy, for they seldom heard the other side, and in time came to believe their own statements, no matter how extravagant.
People learn to think by thinking, and to talk by talking. In explaining a theme to another, it becomes luminous to ourselves.
And so Fox foresaw, with a vision that was as beautiful as it was rare, that to educate an entire congregation you must make them all potential preachers. Then any man who rises to speak is aware that a reply may follow from his mother, his wife, his sister or his neighbor.
And so the listeners not only listened to the person speaking, but they also always harkened for the "Inner Voice" and watched for the "Light Within." In all of which method and plan dwells much plain commonsense to which the world, of necessity, will yet return.
George Fox was the son of a Leicestershire weaver, and he was himself a weaver by trade. He had thoughts and he could express them. And so he traveled and preached in the marketplaces, at crossroads, on church-steps—just the religion of friendship: simplicity, industry, directness, truth.
No priests, no liturgy, no creed, no sacraments, no titles nor degrees—a religion of friendship! You should not kill your enemy, because he is your friend who does not yet understand you. To make war on others is to make war on yourself. Do as you would be done by.
Fox had no intention of founding an organization, nor was he in competition with any other religion. Such a movement, of course, depends entirely upon the quality of the man who advocates it. George Fox had personality—character—and so people flocked to hear him speak. His plea was so earnest, so direct, so vivid, so irrefutable, that as the listeners listened, some trembled with emotion. "Quakers," a scoffer called them, and this word, flung by an unknown hoodlum, stuck like a mud-ball. The name of the particular hoodlum, like the man who fired the Alexandrian Library, still lies mired in the mud from which he formed the ball that stuck. That ball escaped the fate of the mass because it hit a great man; had the thrower thought only to have attached his name, it might have gone down the ages linked with that of greatness.
In a short time Fox found himself in troubled waters. He had offended the Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Baptists, and to save himself and his people he finally banded them into an organization. About this time William Penn appeared (with his hat firmly on his head) and organized colonies of Quakers to go to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Quakers refused to accept the sacrament, claiming that no one part of life was any more holy than the rest, and that no one man was any more worthy of performing a rite than another.
Parliament then stepped in and made church attendance compulsory, the sacrament obligatory, and the protest against war and advocacy of universal peace a misdemeanor.
Those early Quakers were really people who had graduated from the Church. When the scholar graduates from school the teacher is proud, and friends send flowers and kindly congratulations. When you graduate from Church the preacher declares you are lost, and the congregation calls you bad names. Up to Sixteen Hundred Eighty-nine, things were not allowed to rest even there, for you were considered by the law to be the enemy of the State. In Sixteen Hundred Fifty-six, a thousand Quakers were in prison in England on account of their religious belief, several hundred had been hanged, a few were burned at the stake, many had their ears cut off, others were branded, and many others had their tongues bored through. But strangely enough, the number of Quakers increased. A king can't kill all his people, even if they are all wrong, and so in fear the government changed its tactics.
In Sixteen Hundred Eighty-nine came the Toleration Act, which put a stop to violent persecution, retaining merely the passive sort. The Quakers were excluded from all schools, colleges and universities, and from all right of franchise and the holding of political office; like unto the fond mother who orders her child to come into the house, and then when the child does not obey, says, "Well, stay out then!"
So the Quakers stayed out, not wishing to come in, but they had to pay tithes for support of the Established Church, whether they attended services or not. This arrangement still exists in America, only it has to be worked by indirection: instead of compelling everybody to pay for the support of the clergy, we reach the same point by allowing church property to be exempt from taxation.
Persecution having ceased, the Quakers quit proselyting and therefore ceased to grow. But the traditions remained and the sentiment of friendship of man for man remained to fertilize that wonderful year, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, the year that man was really discovered.
George Fox prepared the way for Susanna Wesley and her two great sons,
John and Charles.
George Fox believed and taught the equality of the sexes. He said that God's spirit might voice itself through a woman quite as readily as through a man; and it was with this thought in mind, and the example of the Quakers before her, that Susanna Wesley harkened to the Voice and spoke to the multitude. Later came little Elizabeth Fry, with a message for those in bonds, and also for those who had a fine faith in fetters, and a belief in chains and bars and gyves and the gentle ministry of the lash.
The wisdom of the paid priesthood lies in the fact that it renders a large number of men useless for anything else. Seven years in college emasculates the man. His very helplessness then makes him clutch the Church with a death-grip. He is a sailor who can not swim.
And these advocates, incapacitated by miscalled seminaries for alluseful endeavor, become defenders of the faith and prosecutors of all and each and any who fix their hearts on such simple and Godlike things as friendship and equality. Indeed, many of these advocates abjure the relationship of the sexes, tolerating woman only as a necessity, and as for themselves personally eschew her—or say they do.
The Society of Friends being essentially a Religion of Humanity, and therefore divine, regards man as the equal of woman. John Bright was always a bit boastful that one of his maternal grandparents was a Jewess who forfeited the friendship of her family by eloping with a Quaker—there is a cross for you! Joseph Bright, the father of John Bright, never voluntarily paid church-tithes. Every year the bailiff came, demanded money, was courteously refused, and proceeded to levy on goods which were carried away, duly advertised and sold at auction.
John Bright very early in life was delegated by his father to go and bid on the chattels levied upon, and this was his first introduction into business. For a time he himself paid church-tithes, but never without the protest, "I hereby pay this tax because I am obliged to; but entering my protest because I believe that this money is not to be used for either the glory of God or the benefit of man." Later, he went back to his father's plan and let the State levy.
His religion was one of friendship for humanity, and to him man was the highest expression of divinity. Also, he believed that the love of God could never even have been imagined were it not for the loves of men and women.
* * * * *
John Bright was born in Eighteen Hundred Eleven. He was the culminating flower of seven generations of Quaker ancestry. His father was a rich manufacturer at Rochdale, and being a Quaker, did not try the dubious experiment of making his children exempt from useful work in the name of education.
Be it known that John Bright had no part in that aristocratic and somewhat costly invention known as Bright's disease. This was the work of Doctor Richard Bright, a distant kinsman.
The parents of John Bright were both public speakers, and little John was an orator through prenatal tendency. A good plan for parents, or possible parents, to follow is to educate themselves in the interests of posterity, and this without asking that foolish question propounded by an Irish Member of Parliament, "What has posterity ever done for us?"
So this, then, is the recipe for educating your children: Educate yourself.
Beyond this, man inherits himself; he is both ancestor and posterity. I am today what I am because I was what I was last year; and next year I will be what I will be, because I am now what I ata. These were truths which were, very early in life, familiar to John Bright. Before he could speak without a childish lisp, his mother taught him to decide on his own actions. "I don't want to study; can't I go and wade in the brook?" once asked little John of his mother.
"Thee better go into the next room and listen for the Voice, then do as it says," answered the mother.
The boy went into the next room and soon returned, saying, "The Voice says I must study hard for half an hour and then I can go and wade in the brook."
"Very well," was the reply; "we must always obey the Voice."
At this time there was a wave of Socialism sweeping over England, originated largely by Robert Owen, a Welshman, who at the age of nineteen became manager, by divine right, of a Manchester cotton-mill. He was a man of splendid initiative, noble resources, generous impulses.
Robert Owen caught it from Josiah Wedgwood, and set out to make his cotton-mill a school as well as a factory. Among the good men he discovered and hired to teach his people was John Tyndall, one of the world's great scientists. Owen seized upon Fourier's plan of the "phalanstery"—five hundred or a thousand people living in one great palace, built in the form of a hollow square. Each family was to have separate apartments, but there would be common dining-rooms and one great laundry; certain people would be set apart to care for the children; there would be art-galleries, libraries, swimming-pools; and all these working people would have the benefits and advantages that now accrue only to the fortunate few. It was a scheme of co-operation, but Owen's people refused to co-operate—the world was not ready for it. Then Owen tried the plan in America, and founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana, which had the second public library in America, Benjamin Franklin having founded the first in Philadelphia.
Robert Owen thought he had failed, but he had not, for his ideas have enriched the world, and when we are worthy of Utopia it will be here.
John Bright's father caught it from Robert Owen, just as Owen had been exposed to Josiah Wedgwood. Great hearts never fail, no matter what occurs; even though they die, they yet live again in minds made better.
Joseph Bright had an auditorium attached to his mill, and often invited speakers to come from Liverpool or Manchester and give lectures to his people on science, travel or literature. By the time John Bright was twenty-one he was usually chosen to preside at these lectures. This, because he had learned to speak in Quaker meetings by speaking. He was quiet, simple, forceful, direct. In size he was small, but what he lacked in inches he made up in brain.
The grandfather of John Bright's mother was John Grattan, a Quaker preacher who spent five years in prison because he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the English Church. The life of Grattan descended as a precious legacy from mother to son, and all history was early made familiar to him through the teaching of this mother who passed away when the boy was eighteen. So she did not live to know the greatness of her son, but before her passing he had developed far enough so she prophesied that if ever a Friend were admitted to the Cabinet, John Bright would be that one. This prophecy, unlike so many born of the loving mother heart, came true, and this in spite of the fact that the Quakers up to this time had never had anything to do with politics.
Once John Bright was asked how he had been educated, and he replied,
"By my mother, with the help of the Rochdale Literary Society."
And it was a fact that this society, founded by Joseph and Martha Bright, that met weekly for more than thirty years, was almost a university, and served to set Rochdale apart as a city set upon a hill. This society discussed every topic of human interest, save politics and religion, boxing the compass of human knowledge. The wisdom, excellence, worth and benefit of such a society in a town is of an importance absolutely beyond compute. No religious institution can compare with it in beneficent results, carried on, as it was, by a businessman, his wife and their children, all quite incidentally! Were they not Friends, indeed?
By the process of natural selection, John Bright slipped into the place of superintendent of his father's mill, and before he was twenty-five was the actual manager. As such he had traveled considerably, making various trips to London, and also to the various cities of the Continent.
But now in his twenty-seventh year there had been a marked increase in Church-Rates, and the Church people were jubilant over the fact that the Quaker mill-owners, who never went to Church, were obliged to pay more to the support of the Church than any one else in the town. John Bright called a meeting of the Literary Society and invited all clergymen in the town to be present, and for once there was a breaking over the rules and both religion and politics were discussed. From that time to his death John Bright was a-sail upon a sea of politics. Here is a portion of that first political speech:
The vicar has published a handbill, a copy of which I hold in my hands; he quotes Scripture in favor of a rate, and a greater piece of hardihood can not be imagined, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," leaving out the latter part of the sentence.
I hold that to quote Scripture in defense of church-rate is the very height of presumption. The New Testament teems with passages inculcating peace, brotherly love, mutual forbearance, charity, disregard of filthy lucre, and devotedness to the welfare of our fellowmen. In the exaction of church-rates, in the seizure of the goods of the members of his flock, in the imprisonment of those who refuse to pay, in the harassing process of law and injustice in the Church courts, in the stirring-up of strife and bitterness among the parishioners—in all this a clergyman violates the precepts he is paid to preach, and affords a mournful proof of the infirmity or wickedness of human nature. Fellow townsmen, I look on an old church building—that venerable building yonder, for its antiquity gives it a venerable air—with a feeling of pain. I behold it as a witness of ages gone by, as a connecting link between this and former ages. I could look on it with a feeling of affection, did I not know that it forms the center of that source of discord with which our neighborhood has for years been afflicted, and did it not seem that genial bed wherein strife and bitter jarring were perpetually produced to spread their baneful influence over this densely peopled parish. I would that that venerable fabric were the representative of a really reformed Church—of a Church separated from the foul connection with the State—of a Church depending upon her own resources, upon the zeal of her people, upon the truthfulness of her principles, and upon the blessings of her spiritual head! Then would the Church be really free from her old vices: then would she run a career of brighter and still brightening glory: then would she unite heart and hand with her sister churches in this kingdom, in the great and glorious work of evangelizing the people of this great empire, and of every clime throughout the world. My friends, the time is coming when a State Church will be unknown in England, and it rests with you to accelerate or retard that happy consummation. I call upon you to gird yourselves for the contest which is impending, for the hour of conflict is approaching when the people of England will be arbiters of their own fate—when they will have to choose between civil and religious liberty, or the iron hoof, the mental thralldom of a hireling State priesthood. Men of Rochdale, do your duty! You know what becomes you. Maintain the great principles you profess to hold dear: unite with me in a firm resolve and under no possible circumstances will you ever again pay a tax to support a church: and whatever may await you, prove that good and bold principles can nerve the heart: and ultimately our cause, your cause, the world's cause, shall triumph gloriously.
* * * * *
Great men make room for great men. John Bright first met Richard Cobden in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four. Bright was then twenty-three years old, while Cobden had reached the mature age of thirty. Bright regarded him as a patriarch, and called at his office in Manchester with thumping heart. Cobden looked at young Bright with his intuitive glance and concluded he wanted work. Cobden saw by his caller's clothes that he was a Quaker, and in an instant had decided to employ him.
In relating the incident, years after, Cobden said: "I was wrong in my conclusions—I thought he had come to me for work; instead, he had come to hire me. He wanted me to go over to Rochdale and lecture for his Literary Society."
When you go to a businessman and ask him to lecture, you catch him with his guard down. Cobden was complimented—he asked questions about the Bright Mill at Rochdale, and was ashamed to note that, although it was only a few miles away, he did not know of the spirit of humanity that dwelt in that particular commercial venture. The Brights were doing the very things which he was advocating—making business both a religion and an art. "My love went out to the gentle-voiced stranger," said Cobden, "and I was ashamed at my ignorance concerning the fine souls at my very door, who were actually carrying into execution the things which I had prided myself on having originated."
So Cobden went over to Rochdale to lecture, and there began that friendship between two strong men which only death could sever, and possibly even death did not—I really cannot say. But for many years Cobden was to speak at Rochdale—several times a year. Whenever he heard the Voice he went over to Rochdale and told his friends, the millworkers, what had come to him.
"When I had a big speech to make in London I always visited Rochdale and gave my message first, for the Brights had trained their audiences to think, and if they understood, I felt I could take my chances in the House of Commons."
So Bright helped to evolve Cobden, and Cobden was a prime factor in the evolution of Bright. As the years went by, these men grew to look alike, and the term "David and Jonathan" seemed a fitting phrase for them, only no one could really say which was David and which Jonathan.
* * * * *
When John Bright was twenty-eight years old he married Elizabeth Priestman, a woman near his own age, and a person, like himself, of power. It seemed an ideal mating—they loved the same things. Many plans were made, for lovers are always given to planning. There was to be a cottage in the hills, where they were to live like peasants, without servants or equipage, and there John was to write a wonderful history of civilization, and make a forecast of the future, showing how the regeneration of the world was to come by wedding ethics to business.
The plan never materialized. John and Elizabeth journeyed together for two years, and then she died and was buried in her wedding-dress, holding a spray of syringa in her stiff, blue-veined hands.
John Bright had arranged to have the funeral very simple in all its arrangements—all quite Quaker-like. He himself was going to make a little speech, telling how the Voice had said to him that death was as natural as life, and perhaps just as good, and that she who was dead had no fear of death, but greeted it as an imitation, her only care being for the living.
But John Bright did not make the speech. He held in his arms his motherless baby girl, a little over a year old, and the baby laughed and pulled his hair in childish glee, and John Bright, groping for words, found them not. He took his seat, dumb. A Quakeress arose, a worker in the mills, and made the speech which he had intended to give—perhaps she made a better one.
John Bright had only turned thirty, but he thought that life for him was then and thereafter but a blank. He did not realize that whether death is an initiation for the dead or not, it surely is for the living. To stand by an open grave and behold the sky shut down on less worth in the world is a milestone—an epoch.
A month of dumb, dragging, bitter grief followed, and Richard Cobden came up from Manchester to visit his friend. Cobden had a message for Bright. It was this: "Grief hugged to the heart is a kind of selfish joy. To live is to think, to work, to act. At this moment thousands of women and children are starving in England—absolutely perishing for lack of bread. Come with me and help remove the tax that places food out of the reach of many. Transmute grief for the dead into love for the living. Let us never rest until the Corn Laws are abolished— Come!" To dedicate himself to humanity now seemed easy for John Bright. This he did, and life took on a great, quiet sanctity, purified and refined by death.
The baby girl grew into beautiful womanhood. She is now a grandmother with children grown, and true to tradition, as became the daughter of her father, she made herself notorious for the many and famous for the few, by heading an appeal to Parliament in favor of woman suffrage. For the same cause comes Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, daughter of Richard Cobden, and spends four months in jail for insisting that her political preferences shall be officially recorded. We do move that precious slow!
* * * * *
Bright now took up the big business of the Anti-Corn-Law League, and devoted himself to the issue, even to neglecting his private affairs. The "League" had headquarters in Manchester, and Bright was its practical head. Cobden was then making a tour of the provinces, speaking in schoolhouses, townhalls and marketplaces, endeavoring to show the folly of maintaining a tax on food. The idea was then conceived of Cobden and Bright traveling together, going into the enemy's country, and offering to debate the issue with all comers. The challenge aroused the people, and wherever the orators went, they spoke to the capacity of the hall. Cobden opened the debate, started the question in a half-hour speech, and then the meeting was thrown open for the opposition. Occasionally a man replied, often a clergyman of local oratorical reputation being put forward by the landlords.
Bright then finished him and polished him off in a way that made any further opposition impossible. Bright had certain well-defined ideas about the clergy that took with the people, and a braver man never stood on a platform. Here is a taste of his quality:
The declaration of the Church as by law established, makes me say that I believe that the Establishment has been the means of increasing individual piety and national prosperity. But individually I would ask, how comes it that England is now, as regards a vast proportion of her population, ignorant and irreligious—how is it that while the Church has had the King for its head and governor, the two Houses of Parliament to support it, and the whole influence of the aristocracy and landed gentry of the country to boot (with the advantage of being educated at Oxford and Cambridge, from which Dissenters have been shut out)—that while the Church has had millions upon millions to work upon, drawn not only from her own party, but from the property of Dissenters-I ask how comes it that England is neither a sober nor a moral country, and that vice in every shape rears its horrid front? Does it not prove that there is a radical error in the system? By the union of the people of England advantages of no trifling amount have lately been gained: the barrier of the Test Acts has been broken down; the system of parliamentary corruption has been stormed with success; and I trust the time is not far distant when the consciences of men will be no longer shackled by the restrictions of the civil power, when religious liberty will take the place of toleration, and when men will wonder that a monopoly ever existed which ordained State priests sole venders of the lore that works salvation.
The farmers were in opposition to the League, being told by the landlords that if breadstuffs were allowed to come into the United Kingdom free, the tillers of the soil would be made bankrupt.
Cobden was a ready speaker, and his knowledge of history and economics commanded respect, but Bright's oratory went to their hearts. Bright had a touch of the true Methodist fervor which won the hearer without making too much of a demand on his intellect.
Shortly after Cobden and Bright made their alliance, Cobden ran for Parliament and was elected. "The one thing that formed the pivotal point, and won the farmers, as well as the men of Manchester, was the oratory of John Bright," said Gladstone. The term "Manchester men" was flung at Cobden and Bright, and stuck. It meant that they were merely manufacturers, neither scholars nor gentlemen. Bright had modified the severity of the Quaker costume, but wore the soft, gray colors with hat to match, "because," said his enemies, "it is so effective."
Cobden being now in the House of Commons, Bright called himself "Secretary of the Exterior," and often fought the good fight alone, speaking on an average three nights a week, and the rest of the time attending to his business.
Two years after Cobden's election, Bright was obliged to purchase a suit of solemn black and a chimney-pot hat, for he, too, had been chosen a member of the House of Commons.
"Another Manchester man—I do declare, you know, it will be a convention of bagmen, yet!" remarked Sir Robert Peel, as he adjusted his monocle. Peel, however, grew to have a very wholesome respect for the Manchester men. They could neither be bribed, bought nor bullied. They had money enough to free them from temptation, and they could think on their feet. They were in the minority, but it was a minority that could not be snubbed nor subdued.
The total repeal of the Corn Laws came in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, but not until both Cobden and Bright had been threatened with criminal proceedings for inciting revolution. However, the ministry backed down, the new era came, and proved to be one of peace and great prosperity.
John Bright worked for humanity. To his voice, more than to any other,
Ireland owes her freedom from the "Establishment."