Hebraism,--and here is the source of its [152] wonderful strength,-- has always been severely preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion; of the difficulties which oppose themselves to man"s pursuit or attainment of that perfection of which Socrates talks so hopefully, and, as from this point of view one might almost say, so glibly. It is all very well to talk of getting rid of one"s ignorance, of seeing things in their reality, seeing them in their beauty; but how is this to be done when there is something which thwarts and spoils all our efforts? This something is sin; and the s.p.a.ce which sin fills in Hebraism, as compared with h.e.l.lenism, is indeed prodigious. This obstacle to perfection fills the whole scene, and perfection appears remote and rising away from earth, in the background. Under the name of sin, the difficulties of knowing oneself and conquering oneself which impede man"s pa.s.sage to perfection, become, for Hebraism, a positive, active ent.i.ty hostile to man, a mysterious power which I heard Dr. Pusey the other day, in one of his impressive sermons, compare to a hideous hunchback seated on our shoulders, and which it is the main business of our lives to hate and oppose. The discipline of the [153] Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it. As h.e.l.lenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind. It is obvious to what wide divergence these differing tendencies, actively followed, must lead. As one pa.s.ses and repa.s.ses from h.e.l.lenism to Hebraism, from Plato to St. Paul, one feels inclined to rub one"s eyes and ask oneself whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a n.o.ble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death.
Apparently it was the h.e.l.lenic conception of human nature which was unsound, for the world could not live by it. Absolutely to call it unsound, however, is to fall into the common error of its Hebraising enemies; but it was unsound at that particular moment of man"s development, it was premature. The indispensable basis of conduct and [154] self-control, the platform upon which alone the perfection aimed at by Greece can come into bloom, was not to be reached by our race so easily; centuries of probation and discipline were needed to bring us to it. Therefore the bright promise of h.e.l.lenism faded, and Hebraism ruled the world. Then was seen that astonishing spectacle, so well marked by the often quoted words of the prophet Zechariah, when men of all languages of the nations took hold of the skirt of him that was a Jew, saying:--"We will go with you, for we have heard that G.o.d is with you."+ And the Hebraism which thus received and ruled a world all gone out of the way and altogether become unprofitable, was, and could not but be, the later, the more spiritual, the more attractive development of Hebraism. It was Christianity; that is to say, Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who refused [155] himself everything;--"my Saviour banished joy" says George Herbert. When the alma Venus, the life-giving and joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished by the Pagan world, could not save her followers from self- dissatisfaction and ennui, the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refreshingly: "Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because of these things cometh the wrath of G.o.d upon the children of disobedience."+ Throughout age after age, and generation after generation, our race, or all that part of our race which was most living and progressive, was baptized into a death;+ and endeavoured, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. Of this endeavour, the animating labours and afflictions of early Christianity, the touching asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each, in its own way, incomparable, remain in the Epistles of St. Paul, in St. Augustine"s Confessions, and in the two original and simplest books of the Imitation.*
Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the [156] one, on clear intelligence, the other, on firm obedience; the one, on comprehensively knowing the grounds of one"s duty, the other, on diligently practising it; the one on taking all possible care (to use Bishop Wilson"s words again) that the light we have be not darkness, the other, that according to the best light we have we diligently walk,--the priority naturally belongs to that discipline which braces man"s moral powers, and founds for him an indispensable basis of character. And, therefore, it is justly said of the Jewish people, who were charged with setting powerfully forth that side of the divine order to which the words conscience and self-conquest point, that they were "entrusted with the oracles of G.o.d;"+ as it is justly said of Christianity, which followed Judaism and which set forth this side with a much deeper effectiveness and a much wider influence, that the wisdom of the old Pagan world was foolishness compared to it. No words of devotion and admiration can be too strong to render thanks to these beneficent forces which have so borne forward humanity in its appointed work of coming to the knowledge and possession of itself; above all, in those great [157] moments when their action was the wholesomest and the most necessary.
But the evolution of these forces, separately and in themselves, is not the whole evolution of humanity,--their single history is not the whole history of man; whereas their admirers are always apt to make it stand for the whole history. Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism are, neither of them, the law of human development, as their admirers are p.r.o.ne to make them; they are, each of them, contributions to human development,--august contributions, invaluable contributions; and each showing itself to us more august, more invaluable, more preponderant over the other, according to the moment in which we take them, and the relation in which we stand to them. The nations of our modern world, children of that immense and salutary movement which broke up the Pagan world, inevitably stand to h.e.l.lenism in a relation which dwarfs it, and to Hebraism in a relation which magnifies it.
They are inevitably p.r.o.ne to take Hebraism as the law of human development, and not as simply a contribution to it, however precious. And yet the lesson must perforce be [158] learned, that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces which bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man Hebraism itself is, like h.e.l.lenism, but a contribution.
Perhaps we may help ourselves to see this clearer by an ill.u.s.tration drawn from the treatment of a single great idea which has profoundly engaged the human spirit, and has given it eminent opportunities for showing its n.o.bleness and energy. It surely must be perceived that the idea of the immortality of the soul, as this idea rises in its generality before the human spirit, is something grander, truer, and more satisfying, than it is in the particular forms by which St.
Paul, in the famous fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians,+ and Plato, in the Phaedo, endeavour to develope and establish it. Surely we cannot but feel, that the argumentation with which the Hebrew apostle goes about to expound this great idea is, after all, confused and inconclusive; and that the reasoning, drawn from a.n.a.logies of likeness and equality, which is employed upon it by the Greek philosopher, is over-subtle and sterile? Above and beyond the inadequate solutions which Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism here attempt, extends the immense [159] and august problem itself, and the human spirit which gave birth to it. And this single ill.u.s.tration may suggest to us how the same thing happens in other cases also.
But meanwhile, by alternations of Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism, of man"s intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds, and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule. As the great movement of Christianity was a triumph of Hebraism and man"s moral impulses, so the great movement which goes by the name of the Renascence* was an uprising and re-instatement of man"s intellectual impulses and of h.e.l.lenism. We in England, the devoted children of Protestantism, chiefly know the Renascence by its subordinate and secondary side of the Reformation. The Reformation has been often called a Hebraising revival, a return to the ardour and sincereness of primitive [160]
Christianity. No one, however, can study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches without feeling that into the Reformation too,--Hebraising child of the Renascence and offspring of its fervour, rather than its intelligence, as it undoubtedly was,--the subtle h.e.l.lenic leaven of the Renascence found its way, and that the exact respective parts in the Reformation, of Hebraism and of h.e.l.lenism, are not easy to separate. But what we may with truth say is, that all which Protestantism was to itself clearly conscious of, all which it succeeded in clearly setting forth in words, had the characters of Hebraism rather than of h.e.l.lenism. The Reformation was strong, in that it was an earnest return to the Bible and to doing from the heart the will of G.o.d as there written; it was weak, in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renascence,--the h.e.l.lenic idea of pursuing, in all lines of activity, the law and science, to use Plato"s words, of things as they really are. Whatever direct superiority, therefore, Protestantism had over Catholicism was a moral superiority, a superiority arising out of its greater sincerity and earnestness,--at the moment of its apparition at any [161] rate,--in dealing with the heart and conscience; its pretensions to an intellectual superiority are in general quite illusory. For h.e.l.lenism, for the thinking side in man as distinguished from the acting side, the att.i.tude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible in no respect differs from the att.i.tude of mind of Catholicism towards the Church. The mental habit of him who imagines that Balaam"s a.s.s spoke, in no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked; and the one, who says that G.o.d"s Church makes him believe what he believes, and the other, who says that G.o.d"s Word makes him believe what he believes, are for the philosopher perfectly alike in not really and truly knowing, when they say G.o.d"s Church and G.o.d"s Word, what it is they say, or whereof they affirm.
In the sixteenth century, therefore, h.e.l.lenism re-entered the world, and again stood in presence of Hebraism,--a Hebraism renewed and purged. Now, it has not been enough observed, how, in the seventeenth century, a fate befell h.e.l.lenism in some respects a.n.a.logous to that which befell it at the commencement of our era.
The Renascence, that [162] great re-awakening of h.e.l.lenism, that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are, which in art, in literature, and in physics, produced such splendid fruits, had, like the anterior h.e.l.lenism of the Pagan world, a side of moral weakness, and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral fibre, which in Italy showed itself with the most startling plainness, but which in France, England, and other countries was very apparent too. Again this loss of spiritual balance, this exclusive preponderance given to man"s perceiving and knowing side, this unnatural defect of his feeling and acting side, provoked a reaction.
Let us trace that reaction where it most nearly concerns us.
Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. h.e.l.lenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo- European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of h.e.l.lenism. But nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man than the affinities we can [163] perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples and members of another; and no affinity of this kind is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strength and prominence of the moral fibre, which, notwithstanding immense elements of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of us English, and of our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius and history of the Hebrew people. Puritanism, which has been so great a power in the English nation, and in the strongest part of the English nation, was originally the reaction, in the seventeenth century, of the conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral indifference and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the Renascence. It was a reaction of Hebraism against h.e.l.lenism; and it powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of what we call a Hebraising turn, with a signal affinity for the bent which was the master-bent of Hebrew life.
Eminently Indo-European by its humour, by the power it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life, and of thus getting itself unfixed from its own over- [164] certainty, of smiling at its own over-tenacity, our race has yet (and a great part of its strength lies here), in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong share of the a.s.suredness, the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews. This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in shaping our history for the last two hundred years. Undoubtedly it checked and changed amongst us that movement of the Renascence which we see producing in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruits; undoubtedly it stopped the prominent rule and direct development of that order of ideas which we call by the name of h.e.l.lenism, and gave the first rank to a different order of ideas. Apparently, too, as we said of the former defeat of h.e.l.lenism, if h.e.l.lenism was defeated, this shows that h.e.l.lenism was imperfect, and that its ascendency at that moment would not have been for the world"s good.
Yet there is a very important difference between the defeat inflicted on h.e.l.lenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago, and the check given to the Renascence by Puritanism. The greatness of the difference is well measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance and usefulness, between [165] primitive Christianity and Protestantism. Eighteen hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism; primitive Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendent force in the world at that time, and the way of mankind"s progress lay through its full development. Another hour in man"s development began in the fifteenth century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through h.e.l.lenism. Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world"s progress, it was a side stream crossing the central current and checking it. The cross and the check may have been necessary and salutary, but that does not do away with the essential difference between the main stream of man"s advance and a cross or side stream. For more than two hundred years the main stream of man"s advance has moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness; the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part, of our nation, has been towards strictness of conscience. They have made the secondary the princ.i.p.al at the wrong moment, and the princ.i.p.al they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. This contravention of the [166] natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. In all directions our habitual courses of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves; everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.
NOTES
145. +Proverbs 29:18 is the source of the first pa.s.sage. I have not found the exact language of the second quotation, but the thought resembles that of Psalms 19:9-10: "The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb." King James Bible.
148. +Romans 3:31. "Do we then make void the law through faith? / G.o.d forbid: yea, we establish the law." King James Bible.
148. +Zechariah 9:12-13. "Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope: even to day do I declare that I will render double unto thee; / When I have bent Judah for me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a mighty man." King James Bible.
149. +Proverbs 16:22. "Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it: but the instruction of fools is folly." King James Bible.
149. +John 8:12. "Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." And again: John 9:4-5.
"I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. / As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." King James Bible.
149. +John 8:31-32. "Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; / And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
King James Bible.
149. +James 1:25. "But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." King James Bible.
149. +Proverbs 2:20-21 may be the pa.s.sage Arnold has in mind, although the language differs: "That thou mayest walk in the way of good men, and keep the paths of the righteous. / For the upright shall dwell in the land, and the perfect shall remain in it." One of the central devices in Proverbs is the metaphor of the "path"--of uprightness, folly, etc. King James Bible.
150. +Romans 1:18. "For the wrath of G.o.d is revealed from heaven against all unG.o.dliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness." King James Bible.
150. +Philomathes, "fond of knowledge, loving knowledge." (Liddell and Scott.) GIF image:
154. +Zechariah 8:23. "Thus saith the Lord of hosts; In those days it shall come to pa.s.s, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that G.o.d is with you." King James Bible.
155. +Ephesians 5:6. "Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of G.o.d upon the children of disobedience." King James Bible.
155. +Romans 6:3. "Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?" King James Bible.
155. *The two first books. +Arnold refers to the Imitatio Christi, attributed to fourteenth-century priest Thomas a Kempis. The Benham translation and a modern English translation are currently available from the College of St. Benedict at Saint John"s University Internet Theology Resources site. See also the Benham text link.
156. +Romans 3:1-2. "What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circ.u.mcision? / Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of G.o.d." King James Bible.
158. +See 1 Corinthians 15. Saint Paul wrestles in this chapter to explain the Resurrection"s promise. For example, refer to 15:50-53: "Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of G.o.d; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. / Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, / In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. / For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."
159. *I have ventured to give to the foreign word Renaissance, destined to become of more common use amongst us as the movement which it denotes comes, as it will come, increasingly to interest us, an English form.
CHAPTER V
[166] The matter here opened is so large, and the trains of thought to which it gives rise are so manifold, that we must be careful to limit ourselves scrupulously to what has a direct bearing upon our actual discussion. We have found that at the [167] bottom of our present unsettled state, so full of the seeds of trouble, lies the notion of its being the prime right and happiness, for each of us, to affirm himself, and his ordinary self; to be doing, and to be doing freely and as he likes. We have found at the bottom of it the disbelief in right reason as a lawful authority. It was easy to show from our practice and current history that this is so; but it was impossible to show why it is so without taking a somewhat wider sweep and going into things a little more deeply. Why, in fact, should good, well-meaning, energetic, sensible people, like the bulk of our countrymen, come to have such light belief in right reason, and such an exaggerated value for their own independent doing, however crude?
The answer is: because of an exclusive and excessive development in them, without due allowance for time, place, and circ.u.mstance, of that side of human nature, and that group of human forces, to which we have given the general name of Hebraism. Because they have thought their real and only important homage was owed to a power concerned with their obedience rather than with their intelligence, a power interested in the moral side of their nature almost exclusively. Thus they have [168] been led to regard in themselves, as the one thing needful, strictness of conscience, the staunch adherence to some fixed law of doing we have got already, instead of spontaneity of consciousness, which tends continually to enlarge our whole law of doing. They have fancied themselves to have in their religion a sufficient basis for the whole of their life fixed and certain for ever, a full law of conduct and a full law of thought, so far as thought is needed, as well; whereas what they really have is a law of conduct, a law of unexampled power for enabling them to war against the law of sin in their members and not to serve it in the l.u.s.ts thereof. The book which contains this invaluable law they call the Word of G.o.d, and attribute to it, as I have said, and as, indeed, is perfectly well known, a reach and sufficiency co-extensive with all the wants of human nature. This might, no doubt, be so, if humanity were not the composite thing it is, if it had only, or in quite overpowering eminence, a moral side, and the group of instincts and powers which we call moral. But it has besides, and in notable eminence, an intellectual side, and the group of instincts and powers which we call intellectual. No doubt, mankind makes in general its progress in a [169] fashion which gives at one time full swing to one of these groups of instincts, at another time to the other; and man"s faculties are so intertwined, that when his moral side, and the current of force which we call Hebraism, is uppermost, this side will manage somehow to provide, or appear to provide, satisfaction for his intellectual needs; and when his intellectual side, and the current of force which we call h.e.l.lenism, is uppermost, this, again, will provide, or appear to provide, satisfaction for men"s moral needs. But sooner or later it becomes manifest that when the two sides of humanity proceed in this fashion of alternate preponderance, and not of mutual understanding and balance, the side which is uppermost does not really provide in a satisfactory manner for the needs of the side which is undermost, and a state of confusion is, sooner or later, the result. The h.e.l.lenic half of our nature, bearing rule, makes a sort of provision for the Hebrew half, but it turns out to be an inadequate provision; and again the Hebrew half of our nature bearing rule makes a sort of provision for the h.e.l.lenic half, but this, too, turns out to be an inadequate provision. The true and smooth order of humanity"s development [170] is not reached in either way. And therefore, while we willingly admit with the Christian apostle that the world by wisdom,--that is, by the isolated preponderance of its intellectual impulses,--knew not G.o.d, or the true order of things, it is yet necessary, also, to set up a sort of converse to this proposition, and to say likewise (what is equally true) that the world by Puritanism knew not G.o.d. And it is on this converse of the apostle"s proposition that it is particularly needful to insist in our own country just at present.
Here, indeed, is the answer to many criticisms which have been addressed to all that we have said in praise of sweetness and light.
Sweetness and light evidently have to do with the bent or side in humanity which we call h.e.l.lenic. Greek intelligence has obviously for its essence the instinct for what Plato calls the true, firm, intelligible law of things; the love of light, of seeing things as they are. Even in the natural sciences, where the Greeks had not time and means adequately to apply this instinct, and where we have gone a great deal further than they did, it is this instinct which is the root of the whole matter and the ground of all [171] our success; and this instinct the world has mainly learnt of the Greeks, inasmuch as they are humanity"s most signal manifestation of it. Greek art, again, Greek beauty, have their root in the same impulse to see things as they really are, inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on fidelity to nature,--the best nature,--and on a delicate discrimination of what this best nature is. To say we work for sweetness and light, then, is only another way of saying that we work for h.e.l.lenism. But, oh! cry many people, sweetness and light are not enough; you must put strength or energy along with them, and make a kind of trinity of strength, sweetness and light, and then, perhaps, you may do some good. That is to say, we are to join Hebraism, strictness of the moral conscience, and manful walking by the best light we have, together with h.e.l.lenism, inculcate both, and rehea.r.s.e the praises of both.
Or, rather, we may praise both in conjunction, but we must be careful to praise Hebraism most. "Culture," says an acute, though somewhat rigid critic, Mr. Sidgwick, "diffuses sweetness and light. I do not undervalue these blessings, but religion gives fire and strength, and the world wants fire [172] and strength even more than sweetness and light." By religion, let me explain, Mr. Sidgwick here means particularly that Puritanism on the insufficiency of which I have been commenting and to which he says I am unfair. Now, no doubt, it is possible to be a fanatical partisan of light and the instincts which push us to it, a fanatical enemy of strictness of moral conscience and the instincts which push us to it. A fanaticism of this sort deforms and vulgarises the well-known work, in some respects so remarkable, of the late Mr. Buckle. Such a fanaticism carries its own mark with it, in lacking sweetness; and its own penalty, in that, lacking sweetness, it comes in the end to lack light too. And the Greeks,--the great exponents of humanity"s bent for sweetness and light united, of its perception that the truth of things must be at the same time beauty,--singularly escaped the fanaticism which we moderns, whether we h.e.l.lenise or whether we Hebraise, are so apt to show, and arrived,--though failing, as has been said, to give adequate practical satisfaction to the claims of man"s moral side,--at the idea of a comprehensive adjustment of the claims of both the sides in man, the moral as well [173] as the intellectual, of a full estimate of both, and of a reconciliation of both; an idea which is philosophically of the greatest value, and the best of lessons for us moderns. So we ought to have no difficulty in conceding to Mr. Sidgwick that manful walking by the best light one has,--fire and strength as he calls it,--has its high value as well as culture, the endeavour to see things in their truth and beauty, the pursuit of sweetness and light. But whether at this or that time, and to this or that set of persons, one ought to insist most on the praises of fire and strength, or on the praises of sweetness and light, must depend, one would think, on the circ.u.mstances and needs of that particular time and those particular persons. And all that we have been saying, and indeed any glance at the world around us, shows that with us, with the most respectable and strongest part of us, the ruling force is now, and long has been, a Puritan force, the care for fire and strength, strictness of conscience, Hebraism, rather than the care for sweetness and light, spontaneity of consciousness, h.e.l.lenism.
Well, then, what is the good of our now rehearsing [174] the praises of fire and strength to ourselves, who dwell too exclusively on them already? When Mr. Sidgwick says so broadly, that the world wants fire and strength even more than sweetness and light, is he not carried away by a turn for powerful generalisation? does he not forget that the world is not all of one piece, and every piece with the same needs at the same time? It may be true that the Roman world at the beginning of our era, or Leo the Tenth"s Court at the time of the Reformation, or French society in the eighteenth century, needed fire and strength even more than sweetness and light. But can it be said that the Barbarians who overran the empire, needed fire and strength even more than sweetness and light; or that the Puritans needed them more; or that Mr. Murphy, the Birmingham lecturer, and the Rev. W. Cattle and his friends, need them more?
The Puritan"s great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful,+ and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks [175] he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of a.s.surance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self. Some of the instincts of his ordinary self he has, by the help of his rule of life, conquered; but others which he has not conquered by this help he is so far from perceiving to need subjugation, and to be instincts of an inferior self, that he even fancies it to be his right and duty, in virtue of having conquered a limited part of himself, to give unchecked swing to the remainder. He is, I say, a victim of Hebraism, of the tendency to cultivate strictness of conscience rather than spontaneity of consciousness. And what he wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of. There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points.
The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points. Instead of our "one thing needful," justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence,--our [176] vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence, are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want.
And as the force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand, is h.e.l.lenism,--a turn for giving our consciousness free play and enlarging its range. And what I say is, not that h.e.l.lenism is always for everybody more wanted than Hebraism, but that for the Rev. W. Cattle at this particular moment, and for the great majority of us his fellow-countrymen, it is more wanted.
Nothing is more striking than to observe in how many ways a limited conception of human nature, the notion of a one thing needful, a one side in us to be made uppermost, the disregard of a full and harmonious development of ourselves, tells injuriously on our thinking and acting. In the first place, our hold upon the rule or standard to which we look for our one thing needful, tends to become less and less near and vital, our conception of it more and more [177] mechanical, and unlike the thing itself as it was conceived in the mind where it originated. The dealings of Puritanism with the writings of St. Paul afford a noteworthy ill.u.s.tration of this.
Nowhere so much as in the writings of St. Paul, and in that great apostle"s greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final. Now all writings, as has been already said, even the most precious writings and the most fruitful, must inevitably, from the very nature of things, be but contributions to human thought and human development, which extend wider than they do. Indeed, St. Paul, in the very Epistle of which we are speaking, shows, when he asks, "Who hath known the mind of the Lord?"+--who hath known, that is, the true and divine order of things in its entirety,--that he himself acknowledges this fully. And we have already pointed out in another Epistle of St. Paul a great and vital idea of the human spirit,--the idea of the immortality of the soul,--transcending and overlapping, so to speak, the expositor"s power to give it adequate definition and expression. But quite distinct from the question [178] whether St. Paul"s expression, or any man"s expression, can be a perfect and final expression of truth, comes the question whether we rightly seize and understand his expression as it exists. Now, perfectly to seize another man"s meaning, as it stood in his own mind, is not easy; especially when the man is separated from us by such differences of race, training, time, and circ.u.mstances as St. Paul. But there are degrees of nearness in getting at a man"s meaning; and though we cannot arrive quite at what St. Paul had in his mind, yet we may come near it. And who, that comes thus near it, must not feel how terms which St. Paul employs in trying to follow, with his a.n.a.lysis of such profound power and originality, some of the most delicate, intricate, obscure, and contradictory workings and states of the human spirit, are detached and employed by Puritanism, not in the connected and fluid way in which St. Paul employs them, and for which alone words are really meant, but in an isolated, fixed, mechanical way, as if they were talismans; and how all trace and sense of St. Paul"s true movement of ideas, and sustained masterly a.n.a.lysis, is thus lost? Who, I say, that has watched Puritanism,--the force which [179] so strongly Hebraises, which so takes St. Paul"s writings as something absolute and final, containing the one thing needful,--handle such terms as grace, faith, election, righteousness, but must feel, not only that these terms have for the mind of Puritanism a sense false and misleading, but also that this sense is the most monstrous and grotesque caricature of the sense of St. Paul, and that his true meaning is by these worshippers of his words altogether lost?
Or to take another eminent example, in which not Puritanism only, but, one may say, the whole religious world, by their mechanical use of St. Paul"s writings, can be shown to miss or change his real meaning. The whole religious world, one may say, use now the word resurrection,--a word which is so often in their thoughts and on their lips, and which they find so often in St. Paul"s writings,--in one sense only. They use it to mean a rising again after the physical death of the body. Now it is quite true that St. Paul speaks of resurrection in this sense, that he tries to describe and explain it, and that he condemns those who doubt and deny it. But it is true, also, that in nine cases out of ten where St. Paul thinks and speaks of resurrection, he [180] thinks and speaks of it in a sense different from this; in the sense of a rising to a new life before the physical death of the body, and not after it. The idea on which we have already touched, the profound idea of being baptized into the death of the great exemplar of self-devotion and self- annulment, of repeating in our own person, by virtue of identification with our exemplar, his course of self-devotion and self-annulment, and of thus coming, within the limits of our present life, to a new life, in which, as in the death going before it, we are identified with our exemplar,--this is the fruitful and original conception of being risen with Christ which possesses the mind of St.
Paul, and this is the central point round which, with such incomparable emotion and eloquence, all his teaching moves. For him, the life after our physical death is really in the main but a consequence and continuation of the inexhaustible energy of the new life thus originated on this side the grave. This grand Pauline idea of Christian resurrection is worthily rehea.r.s.ed in one of the n.o.blest collects of the Prayer-Book, and is destined, no doubt, to fill a more and more important place in the Christianity of the future; but almost as [181] signal as is the essentialness of this characteristic idea in St. Paul"s teaching, is the completeness with which the worshippers of St. Paul"s words, as an absolute final expression of saving truth, have lost it, and have subst.i.tuted for the apostle"s living and near conception of a resurrection now, their mechanical and remote conception of a resurrection hereafter!
In short, so fatal is the notion of possessing, even in the most precious words or standards, the one thing needful, of having in them, once for all, a full and sufficient measure of light to guide us, and of there being no duty left for us except to make our practice square exactly with them,--so fatal, I say, is this notion to the right knowledge and comprehension of the very words or standards we thus adopt, and to such strange distortions and perversions of them does it inevitably lead, that whenever we hear that commonplace which Hebraism, if we venture to inquire what a man knows, is so apt to bring out against us in disparagement of what we call culture, and in praise of a man"s sticking to the one thing needful,--he knows, says Hebraism, his Bible!--whenever we hear this said, we may, without [182] any elaborate defence of culture, content ourselves with answering simply: "No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible."
Now the force which we have so much neglected, h.e.l.lenism, may be liable to fail in moral force and earnestness, but by the law of its nature,--the very same law which makes it sometimes deficient in intensity when intensity is required,--it opposes itself to the notion of cutting our being in two, of attributing to one part the dignity of dealing with the one thing needful, and leaving the other part to take its chance, which is the bane of Hebraism. Essential in h.e.l.lenism is the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonising all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance; because the characteristic bent of h.e.l.lenism, as has been said, is to find the intelligible law of things, and there is no intelligible law of things, things cannot really appear intelligible, unless they are also beautiful. The body is not intelligible, is not seen in its true nature and as it really is, unless it is seen as beautiful; behaviour is not intelligible, does not account for itself to the mind and show the reason for its existing, unless it is beautiful. The [183] same with discourse, the same with song, the same with worship, the same with all the modes in which man proves his activity and expresses himself. To think that when one shows what is mean, or vulgar, or hideous, one can be permitted to plead that one has that within which pa.s.ses show; to suppose that the possession of what benefits and satisfies one part of our being can make allowable either discourse like Mr. Murphy"s and the Rev. W. Cattle"s, or poetry like the hymns we all hear, or places of worship like the chapels we all see,--this it is abhorrent to the nature of h.e.l.lenism to concede. And to be, like our honoured and justly honoured Faraday, a great natural philosopher with one side of his being and a Sandemanian with the other, would to Archimedes have been impossible. It is evident to what a many-sided perfecting of man"s powers and activities this demand of h.e.l.lenism for satisfaction to be given to the mind by everything which we do, is calculated to impel our race. It has its dangers, as has been fully granted; the notion of this sort of equipollency in man"s modes of activity may lead to moral relaxation, what we do not make our one thing needful we may come to treat not [184] enough as if it were needful, though it is indeed very needful and at the same time very hard. Still, what side in us has not its dangers, and which of our impulses can be a talisman to give us perfection outright, and not merely a help to bring us towards it? Has not Hebraism, as we have shown, its dangers as well as h.e.l.lenism; and have we used so excessively the tendencies in ourselves to which h.e.l.lenism makes appeal, that we are now suffering from it? Are we not, on the contrary, now suffering because we have not enough used these tendencies as a help towards perfection?
For we see whither it has brought us, the long exclusive predominance of Hebraism,--the insisting on perfection in one part of our nature and not in all; the singling out the moral side, the side of obedience and action, for such intent regard; making strictness of the moral conscience so far the princ.i.p.al thing, and putting off for hereafter and for another world the care for being complete at all points, the full and harmonious development of our humanity. Instead of watching and following on its ways the desire which, as Plato says, "for ever through all the universe tends towards that which [185] is lovely," we think that the world has settled its accounts with this desire, knows what this desire wants of it, and that all the impulses of our ordinary self which do not conflict with the terms of this settlement, in our narrow view of it, we may follow unrestrainedly, under the sanction of some such text as "Not slothful in business," or, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might," or something else of the same kind. And to any of these impulses we soon come to give that same character of a mechanical, absolute law, which we give to our religion; we regard it, as we do our religion, as an object for strictness of conscience, not for spontaneity of consciousness; for unremitting adherence on its own account, not for going back upon, viewing in its connection with other things, and adjusting to a number of changing circ.u.mstances; we treat it, in short, just as we treat our religion,--as machinery. It is in this way that the Barbarians treat their bodily exercises, the Philistines their business, Mr. Spurgeon his voluntaryism, Mr. Bright the a.s.sertion of personal liberty, Mr. Beales the right of meeting in Hyde Park. In all those cases what is needed is a freer play of consciousness [186] upon the object of pursuit; and in all of them Hebraism, the valuing staunchness and earnestness more than this free play, the entire subordination of thinking to doing, has led to a mistaken and misleading treatment of things.
The newspapers a short time ago contained an account of the suicide of a Mr. Smith, secretary to some insurance company, who, it was said, "laboured under the apprehension that he would come to poverty, and that he was eternally lost." And when I read these words, it occurred to me that the poor man who came to such a mournful end was, in truth, a kind of type, by the selection of his two grand objects of concern, by their isolation from everything else, and their juxtaposition to one another, of all the strongest, most respectable, and most representative part of our nation. "He laboured under the apprehension that he would come to poverty, and that he was eternally lost." The whole middle-cla.s.s have a conception of things,--a conception which makes us call them Philistines,--just like that of this poor man; though we are seldom, of course, shocked by seeing it take the distressing, violently morbid, and fatal turn, which [187]
it took with him. But how generally, with how many of us, are the main concerns of life limited to these two,--the concern for making money, and the concern for saving our souls! And how entirely does the narrow and mechanical conception of our secular business proceed from a narrow and mechanical conception of our religious business!
What havoc do the united conceptions make of our lives! It is because the second-named of these two master-concerns presents to us the one thing needful in so fixed, narrow, and mechanical a way, that so ign.o.ble a fellow master-concern to it as the first-named becomes possible; and, having been once admitted, takes the same rigid and absolute character as the other. Poor Mr. Smith had sincerely the n.o.bler master-concern as well as the meaner,--the concern for saving his soul (according to the narrow and mechanical conception which Puritanism has of what the salvation of the soul is), and the concern for making money. But let us remark how many people there are, especially outside the limits of the serious and conscientious middle-cla.s.s to which Mr. Smith belonged, who take up with a meaner master-concern,--whether it be pleasure, or field-sports, or [188]
bodily exercises, or business, or popular agitation,--who take up with one of these exclusively, and neglect Mr. Smith"s n.o.bler master- concern, because of the mechanical form which Hebraism has given to this n.o.bler master-concern, making it stand, as we have said, as something talismanic, isolated, and all-sufficient, justifying our giving our ordinary selves free play in amus.e.m.e.nt, or business, or popular agitation, if we have made our accounts square with this master-concern; and, if we have not, rendering other things indifferent, and our ordinary self all we have to follow, and to follow with all the energy that is in us, till we do. Whereas the idea of perfection at all points, the encouraging in ourselves spontaneity of consciousness, the letting a free play of thought live and flow around all our activity, the indisposition to allow one side of our activity to stand as so all-important and all-sufficing that it makes other sides indifferent,--this bent of mind in us may not only check us in following unreservedly a mean master-concern of any kind, but may even, also, bring new life and movement into that side of us with which alone Hebraism concerns itself, and awaken a healthier [189] and less mechanical activity there. h.e.l.lenism may thus actually serve to further the designs of Hebraism.
Undoubtedly it thus served in the first days of Christianity.
Christianity, as has been said, occupied itself, like Hebraism, with the moral side of man exclusively, with his moral affections and moral conduct; and so far it was but a continuation of Hebraism. But it transformed and renewed Hebraism by going back upon a fixed rule, which had become mechanical, and had thus lost its vital motive- power; by letting the thought play freely around this old rule, and perceive its inadequacy; by developing a new motive-power, which men"s moral consciousness could take living hold of, and could move in sympathy with. What was this but an importation of h.e.l.lenism, as we have defined it, into Hebraism? And as St. Paul used the contradiction between the Jew"s profession and practice, his shortcomings on that very side of moral affection and moral conduct which the Jew and St. Paul, both of them, regarded as all in all-- ("Thou that sayest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? thou that sayest a man should not [190] commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery?")+--for a proof of the inadequacy of the old rule of life, in the Jew"s mechanical conception of it, and tried to rescue him by making his consciousness play freely around this rule,--that is, by a, so far, h.e.l.lenic treatment of it,--even so, when we hear so much said of the growth of commercial immorality in our serious middle- cla.s.s, of the melting away of habits of strict probity before the temptation to get quickly rich and to cut a figure in the world; when we see, at any rate, so much confusion of thought and of practice in this great representative cla.s.s of our nation, may we not be disposed to say that this confusion shows that his new motive-power of grace and imputed righteousness has become to the Puritan as mechanical, and with as ineffective a hold upon his practice, as the old motive- power of the law was to the Jew? and that the remedy is the same as that which St. Paul employed,--an importation of what we have called h.e.l.lenism into his Hebraism, a making his consciousness flow freely round his petrified rule of life and renew it? Only with this difference: that whereas St. Paul imported h.e.l.lenism within the limits of our moral part only, [191] this part being still treated by him as all in all; and whereas he exhausted, one may say, and used to the very uttermost, the possibilities of fruitfully importing it on that side exclusively; we ought to try and import it,--guiding ourselves by the ideal of a human nature harmoniously perfect at all points,--into all the lines of our activity, and only by so doing can we rightly quicken, refresh, and renew those very instincts, now so much baffled, to which Hebraism makes appeal.