Chapter XV: Introduction (15)

One day when I had been lunching at her house, Miss Cushman asked whether I would drive with her in her brougham to call on a friend of Mrs. Somerville, who had particularly desired that she and I should meet,—a Welsh lady, Miss Lloyd, of Hengwrt? I was, of course, very willing indeed to meet a friend of Mrs. Somerville. We happily found Miss Lloyd, busy in her sculptor’s studio over a model of her Arab horse, and, on hearing that I was anxious to ride, she kindly offered to mount me if I would join her in her rides on the Campagna. Then began an acquaintance, which was further improved two years later when Miss Lloyd came to meet and help me when I was a cripple, at Aix-les-Bains; and from that time, now more than thirty years ago, she and I have lived together. Of a friendship like this, which has been to my later life what my mother’s affection was to my youth, I shall not be expected to say more.

On my way home through France to Bristol from one of my earlier journeys and before I became crippled, I had the pleasure of making for the first time the acquaintance of Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur. Miss Lloyd, who knew her very intimately and had worked in her studio, gave me an introduction to her and I reported my visit in a letter to Miss Lloyd in Rome.

“Mdlle Bonheur received me most cordially when I sent up your note.
She was working in that most picturesque studio (at By, near Thoméry).
I had fancied from her picture that she was so much taller and larger
that I hardly supposed that it was she who greeted me, but her face is
_charming_; such fine, clear eyes looking straight into one’s own, and
frank bearing; an Englishwoman’s honesty with a Frenchwoman’s
courtesy. She spoke of you with great warmth of regard; remembered
everything you had said, and wanted to know all about your sculpture
studies in Rome. I said it had encouraged me to intrude on her to hope
I might persuade her to fulfil her promise of stopping with you next
winter, and added how very much you wished it, and described the
association she would have with you, sketching excursions, _bovi_, and
Thalaba” (Miss Lloyd’s Arab horse). “She said over and over she would
not go to Italy without going to see you; and that she hoped to go
soon, possibly next winter.... Somehow, from talking of Italy we
passed to talking of the North, which Mdlle. Bonheur thinks has a
deeper poetry than the South, and then to Ireland, where she wishes to
go next summer (I hope stopping at my brother’s _en passant_) and of
which country she said such beautiful, dreamy things that even I grew
poetic about our ‘_Brumes_,’—to which she quickly applied the epithet
‘grandiose,’—and our sea, looking, I said, like an angel’s eye with a
tear in it. At this simile she was so pleased that we grew quite
friends, and I can only hope she will not see that sea on a grey day
and think me an impostor! Nothing I liked about her, so much, however,
as her interest in Hattie Hosmer, and her delight in hearing about her
_Zenobia_[20] (_triumphans_) in the Exhibition; at which report of
mine she exclaimed: ‘That is the thing above all others I shall wish
to see in London! You know I have seen Miss Hosmer, but I have never
seen any of her works, and I do very much desire to do so’.... Her
one-eyed friend sat by painting all the time. She is not enticing to
look at, but I dare say, not bad. I said I always envied friends whom
I caught working together and that I lived alone; to which she replied
‘_Je vous plains alors!_’ in a tone of conviction, showing that, in
her case at all events, friendship was a very pleasant thing. Mdlle.
Bonheur showed me three or four fine pictures she is painting, and
some prints, but of course I was as stupid as usual in studios and
only remarked (as a buffalo might have done,) that Roman _bovi_ were
more majestic and like Homeric Junos than those wiry little Scotch
short-horns her soul delighteth to honour. But O! she has done a Dog,
_such_ a dog! Like Bush in outward dog, but the inner soul of him more
profoundly, unutterably wise than tongue may tell! a Dog to be set up
and worshipped as Anubis. Certainly Mdlle. Bonheur is a finer artist
than Landseer in this, his own line. I wish she would leave the cattle
and ‘go to the dogs.’”

My last journey but one to Italy was taken when I was lame; and, after my sojourn at Aix-les-Bains, I spent the autumn in Florence and the winter in Pisa; where I met Cav. d’ Azeglio as above recorded. Miss Lloyd rejoined me at Genoa in the spring to help me to return to England, as I was still (after four years!) miserably helpless. We returned over Mont Cenis which had no tunnel through it in those days; and, on the very summit, our carriage broke down. We were in a sad dilemma, for I was quite unable to walk a hundred yards; but a train of carts happily coming up and lending us ropes enough to hold our trap together for my use alone, Miss Lloyd ran down the mountain, and at last we found ourselves safe at the bottom.

After another very pleasant visit together to her friend Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur, and many promises on her part to come to us in England (which, alas! she never fulfilled) we made our way to London; and, within a few weeks, Miss Lloyd—one morning before breakfast,—found, and, in an incredibly short time, _bought_ the dear little house in South Kensington which became our home with few interruptions for a quarter of a century; No. 26, Hereford Square. It was at that time almost at the end of London. All up the Gloucester Road between it and the Park were market-gardens; and behind it and alongside of it, where Rosary Gardens and Wetherby Place now stand, there were large fields of grass with abundance of fine old lime trees and elms, and one magnificent walnut tree which ought never to have been cut down. Behind us we had a large piece of ground, which we rented temporarily and called the “_Boundless Prairie_,” (!) where we gave afternoon tea to our friends under the limes, when they were in bloom. On a part of our garden Miss Lloyd erected a sculptor’s Studio. The House itself, though small, was very pretty and airy; every room in it lightsome and pleasant, and somehow capable of containing a good many people. We often had in it as many as 50 or 60 guests. In short, I had once more a home, and a most happy one; and my lonely wanderings were over.

CHAPTER
XV.
_LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES._
_LITERARY LIFE._

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

“The sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.”

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.

“December 2nd,
“32, De Vere Gardens, W.

“My dear Miss Cobbe,

“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.

“I am, ever sincerely yours,
J. F. STEPHEN.”

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.