For some time before I took up my abode in London I had been writing busily for the press. When my active work at Bristol came to an end and I became for four years a cripple, I naturally turned to use my pen, and, finding from my happy experience of Workhouse Sketches in Macmillan’s Magazine that I could make money without much difficulty, I soon obtained almost as many openings as I could profit by to add to my income. I wrote a series of articles for Fraser’s Magazine, then edited by Mr. Froude, who had been my brother’s friend at Oxford, and who from that time I had the high privilege to count as mine also. These first papers were sketches of Rome, Cairo, Athens, Jerusalem, etc.; and they were eventually reprinted in a rather successful little volume called Cities of the Past, now long out of print. I also wrote many papers connected with women’s affairs and claims, in both Macmillan and Fraser; and these likewise were reprinted in a volume; Pursuits of Women. Beside writing these longer articles, I acted as “Own Correspondent” to the Daily News in Rome one year, and in Florence another, and sent a great many articles to the Spectator, Economist, Reader, &c. In short I turned out (as a painter would say) a great many Pot-Boilers. These, with my small patrimony, enabled me to bear the expense of travelling and of keeping a maid; a luxury which had become indispensable.
I also at this time edited, as I have mentioned, for Messrs. Trübner, the 12 vols. of Parker’s Works, with a Preface. The arrangement of the great mass of miscellaneous papers was very laborious and perplexing, but I think I marshalled the volumes fairly well. I did not perform as fully as I ought to have done my editorial duty of correcting for the press; indeed I did not understand that it fell to my share, or I must have declined to undertake the task. Mr. Trübner paid me £50 for this editing, which I had proposed to do gratuitously.
I had much at heart,—from the time I gave up my practical work among the poor folk at Bristol,—to write again on religious matters, and to help so far as might be possible for me to clear a way through the maze of new controversies which, in those days of Essays and Reviews, Colenso’s Pentateuch and Renan’s Vie de Jésus, were remarkably lively and wide-spread through all classes of society. With this hope, and while spending a summer in my crippled condition at Aix-les-Bains, and on the Diablerêts, I wrote to Harriet St. Leger:—
“I am now striving to write a book about present controversies and the future basis of religious faith. I want to do justice to existing parties, High, Low and Broad, yet to show (as of course I believe) that none of them can really solve the problem; and that the faith of the future must be one not based on a special History, though corroborated by all history.”
The plan of this book—named Broken Lights—is as follows: I discriminate the different sections of thinkers from the point of view of the answers they would respectively give to the supreme question, “What are the ultimate grounds of our faith in God, in Duty and in Immortality?” First, I distinguish between those who hold those grounds to rest on the Traditional Revelation; and those who hold them to be the Original Revelation of the Divine Spirit in each faithful soul. The former are divided again, naturally, into those who take their authoritative tradition from a Living Prophet, a Church, or a Book. But in Christian times we have only had a few obscure prophets (Montanus, Joseph Smith, Swedenborg, Brother Prince, Mr. Harris, &c.), and the choice practically lies between resting faith on a Church, or resting it on a Book.
I classify both the parties in the English Church who rest respectively on a Church and on a Book, as Palæologians, the one, the High Church, whose ground of religious faith is: “The Bible authenticated and interpreted by the Church;” and the other the Low Church, whose theory is still the formula of Chillingworth: “The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.”
But it has come to pass that all the distinctive doctrines of Christianity (over and above Theism) which the Traditionalists maintain, are, in these days, more or less opposed to modern sentiment, criticism and science; and among those who adhere to them, one or other attitude as regards this opposition must be taken up. The Palæologian party in both wings insists on the old doctrines more or less crudely and strictly, and would fain bend modern ideas to harmonize with them. Another party, which is generally called the Neologian, endeavours to modify or explain the old doctrines, so as to harmonize them with the ethics and criticism of our generation.
After a somewhat careful study of the positions, merits and failures of the two Palæologian parties, I proceed to define among the Neologians, the First Broad Church (of Maurice and Kingsley), whose programme was: “To harmonize the doctrines of Church and Bible with modern thought.” This end it attempted to reach by new readings and interpretations, consonant with the highest modern sentiment; but it remained of course obvious, that the supposed Divinely-inspired Authorities had failed to convey the sense of these interpretations to men’s minds for eighteen centuries; indeed had conveyed the reverse. The old received doctrine of an eternal Hell, for example, was the absolute contradiction of the doctrines of Divine universal love and everlasting Mercy, which the new teachers professed to derive from the same traditional authority. This school emphatically “put the new wine into old bottles;” and the success of the experiment could only be temporary, since it rests on the assumption that God has miraculously taught men in language which they have, for fifty generations, uniformly misinterpreted.
The other branch of the Neologian party I call the Second Broad Church (the party of Stanley and Jowett). It may be considered as forming the Extreme Left of the Revelationists; the furthest from mere Authority and the nearest to Rationalism; just as the High Church party forms the Extreme Right; the nearest to Authority and furthest from Rationalism. I endeavour to define the difference between the First and Second Broad Church parties as follows:—
“The First Broad Church, as we have seen, maintains that the doctrines of the Bible and the Church can be perfectly harmonized with the results of modern thought, by a new, but legitimate exegesis of the Bible and interpretation of Church formulæ. The Second Broad Church seems prepared to admit that, in many cases, they can only be harmonized by the sacrifice of Biblical infallibility. The First Broad Church has recourse (to harmonize them) to various logical processes, but principally to that of diverting the student, at all difficult points, from criticism to edification. The Second Broad Church uses no ambiguity, but frankly avows that when the Bible contradicts Science, the Bible must be in error. The First Broad Church maintains that the Inspiration of the Bible differs in kind as well as in degree, from that of other books. The Second Broad Church appears to hold that it differs in degree, but not in kind.”
After a considerable discussion on the various doctrines of the nature and limitations of Inspiration, I ask, p. 110, 111:—
“Admit the Inspiration of Prophets and Apostles to have been substantially the same with that always granted to faithful souls;—admit, therefore, the existence of a human element in Revelation, can we still look to that Revelation as the safe foundation for our Religion?”
“To this question the leaders of the Second Broad Church answer unhesitatingly: ‘Yes. It has been an egregious error of modern times to confound the Record of the Revelation with the Revelation itself, and to assume that God’s lessons lose their value because they have been transmitted to us through the natural channels of human reason and conscience. Returning to the true view, we shall only get rid of uncounted difficulties and objections which prevent the reception of Christianity by the most honest minds here in England and in heathen countries.’”
But in conclusion I ask—
“‘What influence can the Second Broad Church exercise on the future religion of the world? What answer will it supply to the doubts of the age, and whereon would it rest our faith in God and Immortality?’ The reply seems to be brief. The Second Broad Church would, like all the other parties in the Church, call on us to rest our faith on History; but in their case, it is History corroborated by consciousness, not opposed thereto. In the next Chapter it will be my effort to show that under no conditions is it probable that History can afford us our ultimate grounds of faith. Meanwhile, it must appear that if any form of Historical faith may escape such a conclusion and approve itself to mankind in time to come, it is that which is proposed by the Second Broad Church, and which it worthily presents,—to the intellect by its learning, and to the religious sentiment by its profound and tender piety.”—Broken Lights, p. 120.
These four parties, two Palæologian and two Neologian, thus examined, included between them all the members of the Church of England, and all the Orthodox Dissenters. There remained the Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers and Unitarians, and of each of these the book contains a sketch and criticism; finally concluding with an exposition (so far as I could give it) of Theoretic and of Practical Theism.
The book contains further two Appendices. The first treats of Bishop Colenso’s onslaught on the Pentateuch; then greatly disturbing English orthodoxy. The second Appendix deals with the other most notable book of that period; Renan’s Vie de Jésus. After maintaining that Renan has failed in delineating his principal figure, while he has vastly illuminated his environment, I give with diffidence my own view of Christ, lest Traditionalists should, without contradiction, assume that Renan has given the general Theistic idea of his character. After referring to the measureless importance of the palingenesia of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus, I draw a comparison between the New Birth in the individual soul, and the historically-traceable results of Christ’s life on the human race. (P. 167.)
“Taking the whole ancient world in comparison with the modern, of Heathendom with Christendom, the general character of the two is absolutely analogous to that which in individuals we call Unregenerate and Regenerate. Of course there were thousands of regenerated souls, Hebrew, Greek, Indian, of all nations and languages, before Christ, and of course there are millions unregenerate now. But nevertheless, from this time onward we trace through history a new spirit in the world: a leaven working through the whole mass of souls.”...
The language of the old world was one of self-satisfaction, as its Art was of completeness. On the other hand:
“The language of the new world, coming to us through the thousand tongues of our multiform civilization, is one long cry of longing aspiration: ‘Would that I could create the ineffable Beauty! Would that I could discover the eternal and absolute Truth! Would! O, would it were possible to live out the good, the noble, and the holy!’”...
“This great phenomenon of history surely points to some corresponding great event whereby the revolution was accomplished. There must have been a moment when the old order stopped and the new began. Some action must have taken place upon the souls of men which thenceforth started them in a different career, and opened the age of progressive life. When did this moment arrive? What was the primal act of the endless progress? By whom was that age opened?”
“Here we have really ground to go upon. There is no need to establish the authenticity or veracity of special books or harmonize discordant narratives to obtain an answer to our question. The whole voice of human history unconsciously and without premeditation bears its unmistakeable testimony. The turning point between the old world and the new was the beginning of the Christian movement. The action upon human nature which started it on its new course was the teaching and example of Christ. Christ was he who opened the age of endless progress.”
“The view, therefore, which seems to be the best fitting one for our estimate of the character of Christ, is that which regards him as the great Regenerator of Humanity. His coming was to the life of humanity what Regeneration is to the life of the individual. This is not a conclusion doubtfully deduced from questionable biographies; but a broad, plain inference from the universal history of our race. We may dispute all details; but the grand result is beyond criticism. The world has changed, and that change is historically traceable to Christ. The honour, then, which Christ demands of us must be in proportion of our estimate of the value of such Regeneration. He is not merely a Moral Reformer inculcating pure ethics; not merely a Religious Reformer clearing away old theologic errors and teaching higher ideas of God. These things he was; but he might, for all we can tell, have been them both as fully, and yet have failed to be what he has actually been to our race. He might have taught the world better ethics and better theology, and yet have failed to infuse into it that new Life which has ever since coursed through its arteries and penetrated its minutest veins.”
Broken Lights proved to be (with the exception of my Duties of Women) the most successful of my books. It went through three English editions, and I believe quite as many in America; but of these last all I knew was the occasional present of a single specimen copy. It was very favourably reviewed, but some of my fellow Theists rather disapproved of the tribute I had paid to Christ (as quoted above); and my good friend, Prof. F. W. Newman, actually wrote a severe pamphlet against me, entitled “Hero-Making Religion.” It did not alter my view. I do not believe that our Religion (the relation of our souls to God) can ever properly rest upon History. Nay I cannot understand how any one who knows the intricacies and obscurities attendant on the verification of any ancient History, should for a moment be content to suppose that God has required of all men to rest their faith in Him on such grounds, or on what others report to them of such grounds. In the case of Christianity, where scholars like Renan and Martineau—profoundly learned in ancient and obsolete tongues, and equipped with the whole arsenal of criticism of modern Germany, France and England,—can differ about the age and authority of the principal piéce de conviction (the Gospel of St. John), it is truly preposterous to suggest that ordinary men and women should form any judgment at all on the matter. The Ideal Christ needs only a good heart to find and love him. The Historical Christ needs the best critic in Europe, a Lightfoot, a Koenen, a Martineau, to trace his footsteps on the sands of time. And they differ as regards nearly every one of them!
But though History cannot rightly be Religion or the basis of Religion, there is, and must be, a History of Religion; as there is a history of geometry and astronomy; and of that History of the whole world’s Religion the supreme interest centres in the record of
Yet, as regards my own personal feeling, I must avow that the halo which has gathered round Jesus Christ obscures him to my eyes. I see that he is much more real to many of my friends, both Orthodox and Unitarian, than he can ever be to me. There is nothing, no, not one single sentence or action attributed to him of which (if we open our minds to criticism) we can feel sufficiently certain to base on it any definite conclusion, and this to me envelopes him in a cloud. Each Christian age has indeed, (as I remark in my Dawning Lights), seen a Christ of its own; so that we could imagine students in the future arguing that there must have been “several Christs,” as old scholars held there were several Zoroasters and several Buddhas. Just as Michael Angelo’s Christ was the production of that dark and stormy age when first his awful form loomed out of the shadows of the Sistine, in no less a degree do the portraits of Ecce Homo and the Vie de Jésus belong to our era of sentiment and philanthropy. We have no sun-made photograph of his features; only such wavering image of them as may have rested on the waters of Galilee, rippling in the breeze. I must not however further prolong these reflections on a subject discussed to the best of my poor ability in my more serious books.
After Broken Lights, I wrote the sequel: Dawning Lights just quoted above. In the first I had endeavoured to sketch the Conditions and Prospects of religious belief. In the second I speculated on the Results of the changes which were taking place in various articles of that belief. The chapters deal consecutively with Changes in the Method of Theology,—in the Idea of God; in the Idea of Christ; in the Doctrine of Sin, theoretical and practical; in the idea of the Relation of this life to the next; in the idea of the Perfect Life; in the Idea of Happiness; in the Doctrine of Prayer; in the Idea of Death; and in the Doctrine of the eternity of Punishment.
This book also was fairly successful, and went into a second edition.
Somewhere about this time (I have no exact record) I edited a little book called Alone to the Alone, consisting of private prayers for Theists. It contains contributions from fifteen men and women, of Prayers, mostly written for personal use, before the idea of the book had been suggested, under the influence of those occasional deeper insights and more fervent feelings which all religious persons desire to perpetuate. They are all anonymous. In the Preface I say that the result of such a compilation,
“‘Is necessarily altogether imperfect and fragmentary, but in the great solitude where most of us pass our lives as regards our deeper emotions, it may be more helpful to know that other human hearts are feeling as we feel, and thinking as we think, rather than to read far nobler words which come to us only as echoes of the Past.’ The book is ‘designed for the use of those who desire to cultivate the feelings which culminate in Prayer, but who find the rich and beautiful collections of the Churches of Christendom no longer available, either because of the doctrines whose acceptance they imply or of the nature of the requests to which they give utterance. Adequately to replace in a generation, or in several generations, such books, through which the piety of ages has been poured, is wholly beyond hope; and the ambition to do so would betray ignorance of the way in which these precious drops are distilled slowly year after year, from the great Incense-tree of humanity.’”
The remainder of the Preface, which is somewhat lengthy, discusses the validity of Prayer for the attainment of spiritual (not physical) benefits. It concludes thus—p. xxxvi.
“And, lastly, if Religion is still to be to mankind in the future what it has been in the past, it must still be a religion of Prayer. Nothing is changed in human nature because it has outgrown some of the errors of the past. The spiritual experience of the saintly souls of old was true and real experience, even when their intellectual creeds were full of mistakes. By the gate through which they entered the paradise of love and peace, even by that same narrow portal of Prayer must we pass into it. No present or future discoveries in science will ever transmute the moral dross in human nature into the pure gold of virtue. No spectrum analysis of the light of the nebulæ will enable us to find God. If we are to be made holy, we must ask the Holy One to sanctify us. If we are to know the infinite joy of Divine Love, we must seek it in Divine communion.”
This book was first published in 1871; one of the years of the rising tide of liberal-religious hope. A third edition was called for in 1881, when the ebb had set in. In a short Preface to this third edition I notice this fact, and say that those hopes were doubtless all too hasty for the slow order of Divine things.
“Nay, it would seem that, far from the immediate aurora of such a morning, the world is destined first to endure a great ‘horror of darkness,’ and to pass through the dreary and disaster-laden experience of a night of materialism and agnosticism. Perhaps it will only be when men have seen with their eyes how the universe appears without a thought of God to illumine its dark places, and gauged for themselves where human life will sink without hope of immortality to elevate it, that they will recognise aright the unutterable preciousness of religion. Faith, when restored after such an eclipse, will be prized as it has never been prized heretofore....
“And Faith must return to mankind sooner or later. So sure as God is, so sure must it be that he will not finally leave his creatures, whom he has led upward for thousands of years, to lose sight of him altogether, or to be drowned for ever in the slough of atheism and carnalism. He will doubtless reveal himself afresh to the souls of men in his own time and in his own way,—whether, as of old, through prophet-souls filled with inspiration, or by other methods yet unknown. God is over us, and Heaven is waiting for us all the same, even though all the men of science in Europe unite to tell us there is only Matter in the universe, and only corruption in the grave. Atheism may prevail for a night, but faith cometh in the morning. Theism is ‘bound to win’ at last; not necessarily that special type of Theism which our poor thoughts in this generation have striven to define; but that great fundamental faith,—the needful substructure of every other possible religious faith—the faith in a Righteous and loving God, and in a life for man beyond the tomb.”
The book contains 72 Prayers; half of which refer to the outer and half to the inner life. Among the former, are Noon and Sunset prayers; thanksgivings for the love of friends, and for the beauty of the world; also a Prayer respecting the sufferings of animals from human cruelty. In the second part some of the Prayers are named, “In the Wilderness”; “On the Right Way”; “God afar off”; “Doubt and Faith”; “Fiat Lux”; “Fiat Pax”; “Thanksgiving for Religious Truth”; “For Pardon of a Careless Life”; “For a Devoted Life”; “Joy in God”; “Here and Hereafter.”
I never expected that more than a very few friends would have cared for this book, and in fact printed it with the intention of almost private circulation; but it has been continuously, though slowly, called for during the 23 years which have elapsed since it was compiled.
I wrote the essays included in the volume “Hopes of the Human Race,” in 1873–1874. This has run through several editions. The long Introduction to this book was written immediately after the publication of Mr. Mill’s Essay on Religion; a most important work of which Miss Taylor had kindly put the proof sheets in my hands, and to which I was eagerly anxious to offer such rejoinder from the side of faith as might be in my power. Whether I succeeded in making an adequate reply in the fifty pages I devoted to the subject, I cannot presume to say. The Pessimist side, taken by Mr. Mill has been gaining ground ever since, but there are symptoms that a reaction is taking place, beginning (of all countries!) in France. I conclude this Preface thus—p. 53.
“But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most ungrateful, task of offering my feeble protest against the last words given to us by a man so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I needs must deem them) are more instructive to us than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of the generous ardour for the welfare of his race which flamed in his noble heart and animated his entire career.”
The book contains two long Essays on the Life after Death contributed originally to the Theological Review. In the first of these, after stating at length the reasons for supposing that human existence ends at death, I ask: “What have we to place against them in the scale of Hope?” and I begin by observing that all the usual arguments for immortality involve at the crucial point the assumption that we possess some guarantee that mankind will not be deceived, that Justice will eventually triumph and that human affairs are the concern of a Power whose purposes cannot fail. Were the faith which supplies such warrant to fail, the whole structure raised upon it must fall to the ground. Belief in Immortality is pre-eminently a matter of Faith; a corollary from faith in God. To imagine that we can reach it by any other road is vain. Heaven will always be (as Dr. Martineau has said) “a part of our Religion, not a Branch of our Geography.” But in addressing men and women who believe in God’s Justice and Love, I hope to show that, not by one only but by many convergent lines, Faith uniformly points to a Life after Death; and that if we follow her guidance in any one direction implicitly, we are invariably conducted to the same conclusion. Nay more; we cannot stop short of this conclusion and retain entire faith in any thing beyond the experience of the senses. Every idea of Justice, of Love and of Duty is truncated if we deny to it the extension of eternity; and as for our conception of God himself, I see not how any one who has realised the dread darkness of “the riddle of the painful earth,” can call him “Good” unless he can look forward to the solution of that problem hereafter. The following are channels through which Faith inevitably flows towards Immortality:
1st. The human race longs for Justice. Even “if the Heavens fall,” we feel Justice ought to be done. All literature, from Æschylus and Job to our own time, has for its highest theme the triumph of Justice, or the tragedy of the disappointment of human hope thereof. But where did we obtain this idea? The world has never seen a Reign of Astræa. Injustice and Cruelty prevail largely, even now in the world; and as we go back up the stream of time to ruder ages where Might was more completely dominant over Right, the case was worse and worse. Where then, did Man derive his idea that the Power ruling the world,—Zeus, or Jehovah, or Ormusd,—was Just? Not only could no ancestral experience have caused the “set of our brains” towards the expectation of Justice, but experience, under many conditions of society, pointed quite the other way. It is assuredly (if anything can be so reckoned) the Divine spirit in man which causes him to love Justice, and to believe that his Maker is just, for it is inconceivable how he could have arrived at such faith otherwise. But if death be the end of human existence this expectation of justice has been only a miserable delusion. God has created us, poor children of the dust, to love and hope for Justice, but He Himself has disregarded it, on the scale of a disappointed world. After referring to the thousands of cases where the bad have died successful and peacefully, and the good,—like Christ,—have perished in misery and agony, I say “boldly and so much the more reverently: Either Man is Immortal or God is not Just.”
2nd. The second line of thought leading us to belief in Immortality is,—that if there be no future life, there are millions of human beings whose existence has answered no purpose which we can rationally attribute to a wise and merciful God. He is a baffled God, if His creature be extinguished before reaching some end which He may possibly have designed.
3rd. The incompleteness of the noblest part of man offers so strange a contrast to the perfection of the other work of creation that we are drawn to conclude that the human soul is only a bud to blossom out into full flower hereafter. No man has ever in his life reached the plentitude of moral strength and beauty of which his nature gives promise. A garden wherein all the buds should perish before blooming, would be more hideous than a desert, and such a garden is God’s world if man dies for ever when we see him no more.
4th. Human love urges an appeal to Faith which has been to millions of hearts the most conclusive of all.
“To think of the one whose innermost self is to us the world’s chief treasure, the most beautiful and blessed thing God ever made, and believe that at any moment that mind and heart may cease to be, and become only a memory, every noble gift and grace extinct, and all the fond love for ourselves forgotten for ever,—this is such agony, that having once known it we should never dare again to open our hearts to affection, unless some ray of hope should dawn for us beyond the grave. Love would be the curse of mortality were it to bring always with it such unutterable pain of anxiety, and the knowledge that every hour which knitted our heart more closely to our friend also brought us nearer to an eternal separation. Better never to have ascended to that high Vita Nuova where self-love is lost in another’s weal, better to have lived like the cattle which browse and sleep while they wait the butcher’s knife, than to endure such despair.
“But is there nothing in us which refuses to believe all this nightmare of the final sundering of loving hearts? Love itself seems to announce itself as an eternal thing. It has such an element of infinity in its tenderness, that it never fails to seek for itself an expression beyond the limits of time, and we talk, even when we know not what we mean of “undying affection,” “immortal love.” It is the only passion which in the nature of things we can carry with us into another world, and it is fit to be prolonged, intensified, glorified for ever. It is not so much a joy we may take with us, as the only joy which can make any world a heaven when the affections of earth shall be perfected in the supreme love of God. It is the sentiment which we share with God, and by which we live in Him and He in us. All its beautiful tenderness, its noble self-forgetfulness, its pure and ineffable delight, are the rays of God’s Sun of Love reflected in our souls.
“Is all this to end in two poor heaps of silent dust decaying slowly in their coffins side by side in the vault? If so, let us have done with prating of any Faith in Heaven or Earth. We are mocked by a fiend.”—(Hopes, p. 52.)
5th. A remarkable argument is to be found in Prof. F. W. Newman’s Theism (p. 75). It insists on the fact that many men have certainly loved God and that God must love them in return (else Man were better than God); and we must reasonably infer that those whom God loves are deathless, else would the Divine Blessedness be imperfect, nay, “a yawning gulf of ever-increasing sorrow.”
6th. The extreme variability of the common human belief that the “soul of man never dies” makes it difficult to discern its proper evidential value, still it seems to have the Note of a genuine instinct. It begins early, though (probably) not at the earliest stage of human development. It attains its maximum among the highest races of mankind (the Vedic-Aryan, early Persian and Egyptian). It projects such varied and even contrasted ideals of the other life (e.g., Valhalla and Nirvana) that it cannot well have been borrowed by one race from another but must have sprung up in each indigenously. Finally the instinct begins to falter in ages of self-consciousness and criticism.
7th, lastly. The most perfect and direct faith in Immortality belongs to saintly souls who personally feel that they have entered into relations with the Divine Spirit which can never end. “Faith in God and in our eternal Union with Him,” said one such devout man to me, “are not two dogmas but one.” “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades. Thou wilt guide me by thy counsel and afterwards receive me to Glory.”
“Such, for a few blessed souls, seems to be the perfect evidence of things not seen. But can their full faith supply our lack? Can we see with their eyes and believe on their report? It is only possible in a very inferior measure. Yet if our own spiritual life have received even some faint gleams of the ‘light which never came from sun or star,’ then, once more, will our faith point the way to Immortality; for we shall know in what manner such truths come to the soul, and be able to trust that what is dawn to us may be sunrise to those who have journeyed nearer to the East than we; who have surmounted Duty more perfectly, or passed through rivers of affliction into which our feet have never dipped. God cannot have deluded them in their sacred hope of His eternal Love. If their experience be a dream all prayer and communion may be dreams likewise.”
In conclusion, while commending to the reader’s consideration what appears to me the true method of solving the problem of a Life after Death, I point to the fact that on the answer to that question must hang the alternative, not only of the hope or despair of the Human Race, but of the glory or the failure of the whole Kosmos, so far as our uttermost vision can extend.
“Lions and eagles, oaks and roses, may be good after their kind; but if the summit and crown of the whole work, the being in whose consciousness it is all mirrored, be worse than incomplete and imperfect, an undeveloped embryo, an acorn mouldered in its shell, a bud blighted by the frost, then must the entire world he deemed a failure also. Now, Man can only be reckoned on any ground as a provisionally successful work; successful, that is, provided we regard him as in transitu, on his way to another and far more perfect stage of development. We are content that the egg, the larva, the bud, the half-painted canvas, the rough scaffolding, should only faintly indicate what will be the future bird and butterfly and flower and picture and temple. And thus to look on man (as by some deep insight he has almost universally regarded himself) as a ‘sojourner upon earth,’ upon his way to ‘another country, even a heavenly,’ destined to complete his pilgrimage and make up for all his shortcomings elsewhere, is to leave a margin for believing him to be even now a Divine work in its embryonic stage. But if we close out this view of the future, and assure ourselves that nothing more is ever to be expected of him than what we knew him to be during the last days of his mortal life; if we are to believe we have seen the best development which his intellect and heart, his powers of knowing, feeling, enjoying, loving, blessing and being blessed, will ever obtain while the heavens endure,—then, indeed, is the conclusion inevitable and final. Man is a Failure, the consummate failure of creation. Everything else,—star, ocean, mountain, forest, bird, beast and insect—has a sort of completeness and perfection. It is fitting in its own place, and it gives no hint that it ought to be other than it is. ‘Every Lion,’ as Parker has said, ‘is a type of all lionhood; but there is no Man who is a type of all Manhood.’ Even the best and greatest of men have only been imperfect types of a single phase of manhood—of the saint, the hero, the sage, the philanthropist, the poet, the friend,—never of the full-orbed man who should be all these together. If each perish at death, then,—as the seeds of all these varied forms of good are in each,—every one is cut off prematurely, blighted, spoiled. Nor is this criterion of success or failure solely applicable to our small planet; a mere spark thrown off the wheel whereon a million suns are turned into space. It is easy to believe that much loftier beings, possessed of far greater mental and moral powers than our own, inhabit other realms of immensity. But Thought and Love are, after all, the grandest things which any world can show; and if a whole race endowed with them should prove such a failure as death-extinguished Mankind would undoubtedly be, there remains no reason why all the spheres of the universe should not be similar scenes of disappointment and frustration, and creation itself one huge blunder and mishap. In vain may the President of the British Congress of Science dazzle us with the splendid panorama of the material universe unrolling itself ‘from out of the primal nebula’s fiery cloud.’ Suns and planets swarming through the abysses of space are but whirling sepulchres after all, if, while no grain of dust is shaken from off their rolling sides, the conscious souls of whom they have been the palaces are all for ever lost. Spreading continents and flowing seas, soaring Alps and fertile plains are worse than failures, if we, even we, poor feeble, sinful, dim-eyed creatures that we are, shall ever ‘vanish like the streak of morning cloud in the infinite azure of the past.’”
The second part of this essay discusses the possible conditions of the Life after Death. I cannot summarize it here.
The rest of the volume consists of a sermon which I read at Clerkenwell Unitarian Chapel, in 1873, entitled “Doomed to be Saved.” I describe the disastrous moral consequences to a man in old times who believed himself to have sold his soul to the Evil One, and to have cast himself off from God’s Goodness for ever; and I contrast this with what we ought to feel when we recognize that we are Doomed to be Saved—destined irretrievably to be brought back, in this life or in far future lives, from all our wanderings in remorse and penitence to the feet of God.
The book concludes with an Essay on the Evolution of the Social Sentiment, in which I maintain that the primary human feeling in the savage which still lingers in the Aryan child, is not Sympathy with suffering, but quite an opposite, angry and even cruel sentiment, which I have named Heteropathy; which inspires brutes and birds to kill their wounded or diseased companions. Half-way after this, comes Aversion; and last of all, Sympathy,—slowly extending from the mother’s “pity for the son of her womb,” to the Family, the Tribe, the Nation, and the Human Race; and, at last to the Brutes. I conclude thus:
“Such is, I believe, the great Hope of the human race. It does not lie in the progress of the intellect, or in the conquest of fresh powers over the realms of nature; not in the improvement of laws, or the more harmonious adjustment of the relations of classes and states; not in the glories of Art, or the triumphs of Science. All these things may, and doubtless will, adorn the better and happier ages of the future. But that which will truly constitute the blessedness of Man will be the gradual dying out of his tiger passions, his cruelty and his selfishness, and the growth within him of the god-like faculty of love and self-sacrifice; the development of that holiest Sympathy wherein all souls shall blend at last, like the tints of the rainbow which the Seer beheld around the great White Throne on high.”
Beside these theological works I published more recently two slight volumes on cognate subjects: A Faithless World, and Health and Holiness. I wrote “A Faithless World” (first published in the Contemporary Review) in reply to Sir Fitzjames Stephen’s remark in the Nineteenth Century, No. 88, that “We get on very well without religion” ... “Love, Friendship, Ambition, Science, literature, art, politics, commerce, and a thousand other matters will go equally well as far as I can see, whether there is or is not a God and a future state.” I examine this view in detail and conclude that instead of life remaining (in the event of the fall of religion) to most people much what it is at present, there would, on the contrary, be actually nothing which would be left unchanged by such a catastrophe.
I sent a copy of this article when first published, (as I was bound in courtesy to do), to Sir James, whom I had often met, and whose brother and sister were my kind friends. He replied in such a manly and generous spirit that I am tempted to give his letter.
“I am much obliged by your note and by the article in the Contemporary, which is perfectly fair in itself and full of kind things about myself personally.
“The subject is too large to write about, and I am only too glad to take both the letter and the article in the spirit in which they were written and ask no further discussion.
“It seems to me very possible that there may be a good deal of truth in what you suggest as to the nature of the difference between the points of view from which we look at these things, but it is not unnatural that I should think you rather exaggerate the amount of suffering and sorrow which is to be found in the world. I may do the opposite.
“However that may be, thank you heartily for both your letter and your article.
“I am sure you will have been grieved to hear of poor Henry Dicey’s death. His life had been practically despaired of for a considerable time.
Several of these books of mine, dealing with religious subjects, were translated into French and published by my French and Swiss fellow-religionists, and also in Danish by friends at Copenhagen. Le Monde Sans Religion; Coup d’œil sur le Monde à Venir; L’Humanité destinée au Salut; La Maison sur le Rivage; Seul avec Dieu (Geneva Cherbuliez, 1881), En Verden uden Tro, &c., &c.
But all the time during the intervals of writing these theological books, I employed myself in studying and writing on various other subjects of temporary or durable interest. I contributed a large number of articles to the following periodicals:—
The Quarterly Review (then edited by Sir William Smith).
The Contemporary Review (edited by Mr. Bunting).
Fraser’s Magazine (edited by Mr. Froude).
Cornhill Magazine (edited by Mr. Leslie Stephen).
The Fortnightly Review (edited by Mr. Morley).
Macmillan’s Magazine (edited by Mr. Masson).
The Theological Review (Unitarian Organ, edited by Rev. C. Beard).
The Modern Review (Unitarian, edited by Rev. R. Armstrong).
The New Quarterly Magazine (edited by W. Oswald Crawford).
One collection of these articles was published by Trübner in 1865, entitled Studies New and Old on Ethical and Social Subjects; (1 vol., crown 8vo., pp. 466). This volume begins with an elaborate study of “Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Christ” (Theological Review, September, 1869), which I have often wished to reprint in a separate form. Also a very long and careful study of the Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians, which brought me the visits and friendships of a very interesting Parsee gentleman, Nowrosjee Furdoonjee, President of the Bombay Parsee Society, and of another Parsee gentleman resident in London. Both expressed their entire approval of my representation of their religion.
These Studies also contain a long paper on the Philosophy of the Poor Laws, which, as I have narrated in a previous chapter, fell into fertile soil on the mind of an Australian gentleman and caused the introduction of some of the reforms I advocated into the Poor Law system of New South Wales.
There were also in this volume articles on “Hades”; on the “Morals of Literature”; and on the “Hierarchy of Art,” which perhaps have some value; but I have not of late years cared to press the book, and have not included it in Mr. Fisher Unwin’s Re-issue of 1893 on account of the paper it contains on “The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes.” This article, which appeared first in Fraser’s Magazine, Nov., 1863, was my earliest effort (so far as I know, the first effort of anybody) to work out the very obscure and difficult ethical problem to which it refers, in answer to the demands of Vivisectors. I am not satisfied with the position I took up in this paper. In the thirty years which have elapsed since I wrote it, my thoughts have been greatly exercised on the subject, and I think I see the “Claims of Brutes” more clearly, and find them higher than I did. But, though I believe that I expressed the most advanced opinion of that time on the duty of Man to the lower animals, and of the offence of cruelty towards them, I here enter my caveat against the quotation of this article (as was lately done by a zealous Zoophilist) as if it still represented exactly what I think on the subject after pondering upon it for thirty years, and taking part in the Anti-vivisection crusade for two entire decades.
I have mentioned this matter especially, because it is of some importance to me, and also because I do not find that there is any other opinion which I have ever published in any book or article, on morals or religion, which I now desire to withdraw, or even of which I care to modify the expression. It is a great happiness to me at the end of a long and busy literary life, to feel that I have never written anything of which I repent, or which I wish to unsay.
A collection of minor articles, with several fresh papers of a lighter sort,—an Allegory, The Spectral Rout, &c.—was also published by Trübner in 1867, under the name of Hours of Work and Play.
In 1872 Messrs. Williams & Norgate published a rather large collection of my Essays, under the name of Darwinism in Morals and other Essays. The first is a review of the theory of ethics expounded in Darwin’s Descent of Man. I argue that the moral history of mankind (so far as it is known to us) gives no support whatever to Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis that Conscience is the result of certain contingencies in our development, and that it might, at an earlier stage, have been moulded into quite another form, causing Good to appear to us Evil, and Evil Good.
“I think we have a right to say that the suggestions offered by the highest scientific intellects of our time to account for its existence on principles which shall leave it on the level of other instincts, have failed to approve themselves as true to the facts of the case. And I think, therefore, that we are called on to believe still in the validity of our own moral consciousness, even as we believe in the validity of our other faculties; and to rest in the faith (well-nigh universal) of the human race, in a fixed and supreme Law, of which the will of God is the embodiment and Conscience the Divine transcript.”—Darwinism in Morals, p. 32.
In this same volume (included in the re-issue) are essays on Hereditary Piety (a review of Mr. Galton’s Hereditary Genius); one on The Religion of Childhood, on Robertson’s Life; on “A French Theist” (M. Pécaut); and a series of studies on Eastern Religions; including reviews of Mr. Ferguson’s Tree and Serpent Worship (with which Mr. F. was so pleased that he made me a present, of his magnificent book); Bunsen’s God in History, Max Muller’s Chips from a German Workshop, and Mrs. Manning’s Ancient and Mediæval India. Each of these is a careful essay on one or other of the oriental faiths referring to many other books on each subject. Beside these there are in the same volume two articles on Unconscious Cerebration and Dreams, which excited some interest in their day; and seem to me (if I be not misled by vanity) to have forestalled a good deal which has been written of late years about the “subliminal” or “subjective” consciousness.
In 1875, Messrs. Ward, Lock & Tyler, for whose New Quarterly Magazine I had written two long articles on Animals in Fable and Art and the Fauna of Fancy, asked my consent to re-publishing them in their Country House Library. To this I gladly agreed, adding my article in the Quarterly Review on the Consciousness of Dogs; and that in the Cornhill: “Dogs whom I have met.” The volume was prettily got up, and published under the name of “False Beasts and True.”
From the close of 1874, when I undertook the Anti-vivisection crusade, my literary activity dwindled down rapidly to small proportions. In the course of eight years I wrote enough magazine articles to fill one volume, published in 1882, and containing essays on Magnanimous Atheism; Pessimism and One of its Professors, and a few other papers, of which the most important,—the Peak in Darien,—gives its name to the book. It is an argument, (with many facts cited in its support,) for believing that the dying, as they are passing the threshold, not seldom become aware of the presence of beloved ones waiting for them in the new state of existence which they are actually entering.
After this book I wrote little for some years, but in 1888 I was asked to contribute an article to the Universal Review on the Scientific Spirit of the Age. I gladly acceded, but the Editor desired to cut down my MS., so I published it as a book with a few other older papers; notably one on the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse; a half-humorous study of the pros and cons of Life in London, and Life in a Country house.
After this, again, I published two editions of a little compilation, the “Friend of Man and His Friends the Poets;” a collection (with running commentary) of Poems of all ages and countries relating to Dogs, which were likely, I thought, to aid my poor, four-footed friends’ claims to sympathy and respect.
Of my remaining books, the Duties of Women, and The Modern Rack I shall speak in the chapters which respectively concern my work for Women, and the Anti-vivisection movement.