YALE
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

THE
EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

PRINTED EY
GEORGE LEVEY, WEST HARDING STREET.

THE

EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE,

By MONCURE D. CONWAY.

Respect the gods, but keep them at a distance. CoNrucius.

LONDON:
JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN, 74 fcf 75, PICCADILLY.
1870.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by
MONCURE D. CONWAY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of
New York.

0 7k<2
^3

The pure Earth is situated in the pure Heavens.
The soul which has passed through life with purity and
moderation obtains the gods for fellow-travellers and guides,
and rests in the abode suited to it. There are indeed many and
wonderful places in the Earth, and it is neither of such a kind
nor of such a magnitude as is supposed by those who are
accustomed to speak of the Earth, as I have been persuaded by a
certain person.
Socrates.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
How I left the World to Come for that
which Is  17
I.
The Habitat of Christianity .... 31
II.
The Church Auction  41
III.
St. Alban's  53
IV.
An Old Shrine  61
V.
ISENORIMM  79

viii CONTENTS.

VI. PAGE
Zauberpfeife  89

VII.
Contrivances  95
VIII.
Christian Idealism  105
IX.
The Cross  115
X.
Via Crucis  125
XI.
Pentecost  145
XII.
Bunhill Fields  253

XIII.

A o;ta

The Old Tabard 161

XIV.
The Doctrine of Trust .... 175
XV.
One Voice  % lg7

CONTENTS. ix
XVI. PAGE
Cross Roads  195
XVII.
A Fete-Dieu at Trouville  207
XVIII.
A Vigil  ".217
XIX.
Old Temples  227
XX.
Christ on the Ass  235
XXI.
" Deo erexit Voltaire "  245
XXII.
Confessions of Christendom  257

An English Sinai . . . ~°.r^y . . 265

XXIV.
Graves at Bournemouth  279
XXV.
The Cataract and the Rainbow .... 297

CONTENTS.

XXVI. PAGE
The Unchurched  307

XXVII.
The Rejected Stone  317
XXVIII.
Pixy-led  341
XXIX.
Our Eumenides  353
XXX.
" Godless Schools "  363
XXXI.
The God with the Hammer  373
XXXII.
The Pilgrim's Last Reflections .... 387

THE

EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

HOWT I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME
FOR THAT WHICH IS.

When will you take us as a dear father takes his son by both
hands, 0 ye gods, for whom the sacred grass is trimmed ?
Whither now ? On what errand of yours are you going, in
heaven, not on earth ? Kig-Veda-Sanhita.

The stars tell all their secrets to the flowers, and if we only
knew how to look around us we. should not need to look above. But
man is a plant of slow growth, and great heat is required to bring
out his leaves. He must be promised a boundless futurity to induce
him to use aright the present hour. In youth fixing his eyes on
those distant worlds of light, he promises himself to attain them, and
there find the answer to all his wishes. His eye grows keener as he
gazes, a voice from the earth calls it downward, and he finds all at
his feet.
Margaret Fulleh.

HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME
FOR THAT WHICH IS.

ARLY in my childhood, my parents en
trusted me to the care of the well-known
guide, Mr. Bunyan, to be taken from the
City of Destruction to the Celestial City, where
they themselves had long resided. My venerable
and kind guide beguiled the way with interesting
stories, but could not prevent its being a hard journey.
Indeed, when we came to the chief difficulties and
dangers of the road, he would generally disappear
from my side, confessing that he could not render
me any assistance, and joining me again only where
the way became pleasant and plain. So ere I reached
my teens I had struggled in the Slough of Despond,
and before they had passed had conversed alternately
with Messrs. Greatheart and Feeblemind, encoun
tered Apollyon, and seen the inside of Doubting
Castle. At last, not without some wounds and bruises, I

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

fell swooning at the gates of the city. On waking,
I found myself inside, surrounded by many friends
and relatives, who warmly congratulated me on my
escape from the City of Destruction and the perils
of the way, and had much to say in praise of the
Lord of the city in which they lived. The title
of this great potentate was, I learned, the Prince of
Otherworldliness, and my sole occupation would be
to sit upon a purple cloud with a golden trumpet,
through which I was to utter perpetually glorifica
tions of his magnificence, and inform him how much
reason he had to be satisfied with himself.
For a time this was pleasant enough. The
purple cloud acted as a screen against many dis
agreeable objects. The dens of misery and vice,
the hard problems of thought, the blank misgivings
of the wanderers amid worlds unrealised, were all
shut out from view ; and though I was expected, as
a matter of form, to say I was a miserable sinner, it
was with the distinct understanding that I was all
the more our Prince's darling for sayino- so.
At length, however, the novelty of all this began
to wear off. I felt my arms getting stiff with disuse.
It seemed to me that our Prince must be sufficiently
aware by that time of his grandeur, and it appeared
almost egotistical to call his attention further to my
own insignificance, besides the doubtful sincerity of
doing so while I regarded myself as one of his elect.
But, alas, these were but the beginnings of my per-

HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 11
ception of the drawbacks attending a residence in
the domain of Otherworldliness. Reports were con
stantly reaching us of pilgrims who had perished
by the way in a certain pit whose fiery mouth my
guide had pointed out to me on the journey from
the City of Destruction. I was expected to rejoice
in, rather than commiserate, their fate, as being
essential to the dignity of our sovereign ; but this
was very difficult, and the more I reflected on the
subject, the more it seemed to me a questionable
source of majesty.
As time waxed on, I perceived that our city was
not only growing in size, but altering its character.
Going one day to the city gate, I found that it had
been removed to make way for a much broader
entrance, and I met a very miscellaneous crowd
coming in. Seeing that they were much fresher in
their looks than I had been after the same journey,
I conversed with some of them, and learned for the
first time that the Celestial Railway had been
opened, and that this had led to a tide of immigra
tion. The pilgrim could now travel in a first-class
carriage, and his pack be checked through. A
pilgrim has since made the world familiar with this
result of the enterprise of Mr. Smooth-it-away.
His account, however, is, as I have learned, not
entirely accurate ; for instance, the Slough of
Despond was not filled up by volumes of French
and German philosophy, but by enormous editions

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

of an English work showing the safest way of in
vesting in Both Worlds. Moreover, it is but just to
say that the engineering feat by which the Hill
Difficulty was tunnelled is due to Professor Moon
shine, whose works showing that the six days
Df creation mean six geological periods, and that
miracles are due to the accelerated workings of
natural law, also furnished the material of a patent
key, by which many pilgrims are enabled to pass
with ease through Doubting Castle. The new pil
grims informed me that most of them had been for
some time residing in Vanity Fair, but that, by
various measures of conciliation, that fascinating and
fashionable resort had become a suburb of the
Celestial City, and was incorporated with the do
main of Otherworldliness. Having read in Mr.
Bunyan's Guide-Book that our city was of pure
gold, they had some thoughts of settling in it. Many
of them having thus established themselves in our
realm, it began to show startling changes. There had
been, for instance, no part of my old road along which
I had passed more shudderingly than the Plain Ease
and Lucre Hill, where I heard the groans of those
who had fallen through its treacherous sward into
the silver-mines. What was my astonishment now
to see a beautiful park of just the same kind, a hill
the very image of Lucre Hill, made in the very
centre of our city ! This place became the fashion
able promenade and place of resort. Ladies there

HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 23
displayed the cross as a golden ornament, and all
around it was a bazaar, where the pearl of price was
dealt in by tradesmen, who rejoiced in the inscription
over the park-gates — " Godliness is Gain."
There gradually grew within me a deep mis
giving, and I began to dwell on memories of the
so-called City of Destruction, on which, as I was
surprised to learn, fire had not yet been rained
down. One day I got hold of a journal printed in
that city. From it I learned that there were things
going on there which seemed strangely inconsistent
with the bad character I had always heard given
to it. Men and women there, so I read, were
devoting their energies to the education of the ig
norant, the help of the poor ; they were searching
reverently into the laws of nature ; they were cele
brating in beautiful poems a Ruler of their city
whose name was Love, who sent his rain and sun
shine on the evil and the good. There were innocent
children passing with laughter and dance into the
healthy vigour of maturity. Reason, Liberty, Jus
tice, Wealth, were there advancing, and Science was
clearing from the sky of Faith every cloud of fear
and superstition.
As I pondered these reports, the purpose grew
within me to make an excursion, at least, to that city,
which I had left too early in life to know much of
personally ; and so one day I went to the station
and asked for a ticket to the City of Destruction.

24 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Amazed at my request, the station-master informed
me that there were no trains running that way for
passengers, — they had only arrangements for bring
ing people away from that accursed place ; and he
further advised me to be cautious lest I should be
put under restraint as a fit subject for the lunatic
asylum : there was a flourishing institution of that
character in the city.
After this I kept quiet for a time, and tried to
be contented with my purple cloud and trumpet ;
but in vain. I confided to my parents my desire to
return for a time to my native place, but they wept
at the bare mention of the project, and evidently
feared that my wits were going. Again I waited,
and sought to believe that it was best to remain
where I was. At length, however, there came to
me one who spoke with a voice not to be disobeyed.
He laid on me a burden, and gave me a shield called
Truth, and said : " Henceforth thou shalt be a pil
grim. From a world believing the incredible, adoring
where it should abhor, thou shalt depart, never to
return. Whither, shall be opened to thee as thou
shalt journey ; whence, is already plain."
Then I turned my face toward the old world I
had so painfully left. As I drew near the border of
our Prince's domain, I was met by one of his officers,
who informed me that I should find a bad road,
and that the country was almost impassable. " In
building the railway by which pilgrims to the

HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME.

Celestial City now travel so comfortably," he
said, " all the disagreeables and dangers they once
had to encounter have been heaped on the path you
propose to undertake. The dirt taken from the
tunnel of the Hill Difficulty you will now find piled
across your road. The Slough of Despond, displaced
on our line, has settled in the way by which you
must go. All the sorrows and pains once besetting
the path of Christian now waylay him who would
fly in the face of what has become the respectable
and popular religion."
Nevertheless, I went on. But before I had
reached the verge of the Prince's dominions a large
number of his liveried servants ran after me, and
began pelting me, crying : " Infidel ! Atheist !
Neologist ! Pantheist ! Madman !"
Somewhat bruised, I hastened onward. Soon,
however, there stood before me, preparing his darts,
a monster, whom I at once recognised. "Why,
how is this, Apollyon ?" I cried : " when last I
encountered you, you were trying to prevent pil
grims from reaching the Celestial City ; surely you
do not oppose their return ?" " Times are changed,"
he replied ; " since the railway has been opened, I
have been taken into the employment of the Prince
of Otherworldliness." Thereupon he let fly his
darts, on each of which was written its name:
" Popularity," " Parsonage," " Patronage," " Pro
motion," and the like. But with the aid of my

z6 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
shield I managed to pass him ; and though after
ward I had a dreary imprisonment in Doubting
Castle, its lock yielded to the key of Trust, which
some former pilgrim had dropped on the floor, and
I arrived at last within sight of the great city.
But it was yet very distant ; and, being weary
after my long and toilsome journey, I ventured to
approach a house which I saw. As I came nearer
I perceived that it was the house of the Interpreter,
and for some time I hesitated to go further, appre
hending that he too would oppose my return. Re
membering, however, that the obstacles to my
leaving the Celestial City had been chiefly raised
by those who had opposed my journey toward it, I
hoped that the Interpreter might also have changed
his allegiance, and I knocked at his door. My hope
was true. He met me with a hearty welcome, and
declared to me that the City of Destruction had
changed its character as much as the Celestial
City, and that he was anticipating in the future
the same class of pilgrims returning thither as
those who had once sought the realm of Other
worldliness. The Interpreter lit his candle and said: "Do
you remember the picture I formerly showed you,
in a private room, of a very grave person ?" " I do,
indeed," I said ; " and this was the fashion of it :
it had eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in
its hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips,

HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 27
the world was behind its back, it stood as if it
pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang
over its head." " That picture," he said, " gradually
became so dingy, that once, when an old artist came
hither, I accepted his offer to clean and retouch it ;
you shall see it as he left it." On entering the
well-known room, I saw that the portrait had been
changed in several particulars. The grave person's
eyes now looked downward; the book, partially
closed, was placed on one side ; and the world, which
had been behind, was now immediately under his eyes,
and covered with inscriptions; the crown of gold
suspended over his head had changed to luminous
dust." When I asked the meaning of this change,
the Interpreter said : " I will show you a new
scene commanded by this house, which will unfold
the significance of the picture." Thereupon, he
took me to the top of the house, from which could
be seen the two rival cities. What was my sur
prise to see a dark cloud gathering over the City of
Otherworldliness, with lightnings flashing from it,
while over the so-called City of Destruction shone
a beautiful rainbow ! " Thus," said the Interpreter,
" that which exalteth itself must be abased, and
that which humbleth itself shall be exalted. The
city which, from being the domain of the lowly
friend of man, the carpenter's son, has been given
over to those who care more for bishoprics and
fine livings than for mankind, has become the City

28 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
of Destruction ; while that which has cared rather
for man whom it can, than for God whom it cannot,
benefit, has become the City of Humanity, which
shall endure for ever."
The Interpreter then said that, as there were
unhappily few pilgrims as yet going in my direction,
he would be able to accompany me on a part of
the way. I was not so near, he said, as I might sup
pose. " That great metropolis which you see is
not the city you seek; it is Bothworldsburg, and,
though commercially connected with the City of
Humanity, owns allegiance to the Prince of Other
worldliness, whose powerful agencies therein are
marked by its spires. Its inhabitants pass six-
sevenths of their time in this world, and during the
other seventh pray to their Prince, and protest
loudly against taking any thought at all for this
life. The confines of Bothworldsburg blend with
those of the City of Humanity, which you can
hardly trace out from here, and, indeed, may have
some difficulty in finding. You must go through the
tedious paths of Study, Reality, and Devotion, and
when you arrive at the suburbs you will still have
to be a pilgrim amid many nights and days before
you reach the heart of the city. After arriving
there, you will be left a good deal to your own guid
ance : the inhabitants are very busy ; they do not sit
on purple clouds blowing golden trumpets. The
only prayer to the Lord of that city is work; the only

HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 29
praise is virtue. Its treasures are not obvious, but
in hard ores'. You will find the pavements golden
only when you can transmute them to gold ; and
only if you have found a pearl to carry in your own
breast will its gates become pearl."
Thereupon we set out on our way. Bothworlds
burg, in which most of my wanderings occurred, so
nearly resembled the metropolis in which these
records and reflections are published, that I think
it best to use its familiar names and events. This
may be somewhat startling at first, and to some
may seem even vulgar. But having abandoned my
purple cloud, there is nothing better left me, out of
which to build my visions, than London clay ; and
I can only regret it if its importance and capabilities
are exaggerated by eyes which have been so long
absorbed in otherworldly visions. At any rate, I
can promise my reader that we shall be near that
lowly vale where the pilgrims listened to the song
of the shepherd's boy who " wears more of that herb
called heart's-ease in his bosom than he that is clad
in silk and.velvet," and where, as Mr. Bunyan states
on good authority, pearls have been found.

T^

THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY.

To worship in a temple not your own is mere flattery.
Chinese Analects.

Your scheme must be the framework of the universe ; all other
schemes will soon be in ruins. The perfect God, in his revelations of
himself, has never got to the length of one such proposition as you,
his prophets, state. Have you learned the alphabet of Heaven, and
can oount three ? Do you know the number of God's family ? Can
you put mysteries into words ? Do you presume to fable of the in
effable ?
Thoreau.

THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY.

S9]N the city of the Prince of Otherworldliness
I had generally passed my Sundays listen
ing to denunciations by his divines of all
the people and all the opinions which we had left in
the world from which we had escaped. Abandoned
by us, it was, of course, — or so these divines asserted,
— abandoned by everything good. But on the first
Sunday after I had come near the world that is,
the Interpreter proposed that we should go to our
devotions in a garden of wild animals.
Do not, I pray you, reader, look upon that spot
as too vulgar and near for the pilgrim to ask your
company to it. Seen with eyes long accustomed to
otherworldly sights, it is nothing less than human
society in masquerade. These are the perfect shapes
of passions ; here are the bulls and bears of the
Exchange, the diplomatists, the aristocrats in fine
plumage. Men will one day twine their laurels
about the head that can set these cries and screams

34 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
to music, and interpret the thousand realms whose
open secrets hide in these curious creatures. Every
hair on them is a history ; a myriad suns burn in
their eyes ; on their foreheads, as on anvils, thought
was fashioned ; yonder beautiful woman is the sum
of their selected shapes : out of their instincts crys
tallised at last the crown-jewels of Humanity, —
Reason, Love, Worship.
Much did I admire that in this little circuit there
was displayed the knowledge and dexterity which
had given to each its right environment. Here is a
bit of Arctic, there of contiguous Tropic ; the fish
finds its Southern Sea with the familiar reef, the
wading-bird its fish-pond : all are supplied by the
art which knows that Nature is commanded by
obedience. " How faithfully," said the Interpreter, " is each
animal here inscribed with the liberties and limita
tions of its habitation I These long bare legs and
long neck and bill mean a subsistence by fishing in
shallow water; those powerful wings and talons
imply heavy prey borne to the mountain-top. Every
sharp eye, or velvet foot, or thick neck, assigns a
freedom and outlines a prison. Death awaits the
most powerful beyond its habitat.
" Are the laws governing man and his institu
tions less inexorable? Absolutism has disappeared
from this country for the same reason that bears have.
So animal and human sacrifices have disappeared

THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY. 35
because the religious habitat they once found here
has been destroyed. A tropical bird might be mis
guided enough to find its way into Windsor Forest
some day. Taylor, the Platonic enthusiast, once
sacrificed a bull to Zeus in his back parlour. The
bird must flutter into some warm room or perish ;
and the practical worshipper of Zeus must obey his
landlady's summons to the police-court.
"Let us imagine, for a moment, an England
which has never heard of the Bible or of Christianity.
A traveller comes from some foreign land, and
describes the religious beliefs of its inhabitants.
He represents them as maintaining that many
centuries ago Almighty God came down out of
heaven and was born as a human infant; that the-
reason for his doing so was that the human race
had sprung from a man and a woman who, by eating
an apple he had forbidden them to eat, had brought
down a curse upon the whole world, under which
every human being is, to the end of time, born
utterly depraved, and, unless his or her nature
be miraculously changed, must burn in everlasting
fire after death. The Creator, unable to mitigate-
this penalty accruing to mankind for the misdeed of
their first parents, was nevertheless moved with pity
for humanity thus going on to endless torments, and
conceived a scheme for saving them. That scheme
was to be himself born on earth, a member of the
accursed human family ; to prove himself to be God

36 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
by working wonders which no mortal could work ;
to take upon himself the sins and curse of the earth
and' of all its inhabitants ; to suffer himself all the
pains and penalties which had awaited the whole race
of men; and, having thus satisfied the unalterable
law, to offer mankind, as the conditions of their salva
tion, that each one who should by faith in this plan
believe that his sins, which deserved eternal torture
by fire, had been already suffered for, — who should
pray to have the divine suffering vicariously imputed
to his particular case, and also glorify God suffi
ciently for so acting, — should be granted a free par
don for the ancestral sin ; while all those who should
not personally fulfil these conditions should proceed,
as before, into eternal misery, as the just punishment
for the eating of the forbidden apple by the first
human pair, whatever might be their own moral
character. " What would be the comments of the supposed
unchristianised England upon such a narrative as
this ? and what would be its inferences concerning
¦the government, customs, and physical features of
the country in which such a religion prevailed?
Not in a fruitful and pleasant land, we should say,
could such beliefs spring up, but amid rock and
desert, where Nature seemed resting under a curse.
It is the faith, we should say, of a people who regard
all human suffering, disease, and death as evidences
of divine anger; who, being without science, regard

THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY. 37
all unusual phenomena as expressions of an arbitrary
power, and would thus look for miracles to attend
any revelation from their deity. They would conceive
of the deity as like unto themselves, — likely, there
fore, to be born of a woman. They must imagine
their god something like their barbaric king, whose
mere word were law, disobedience to which, because
of his grandeur, would make a heinous crime out of
a peccadillo, such as the eating of a prohibited apple.
They would believe in certain infernal powers whose
business it is to keep a furnace of fire always burning
for the punishment of offenders against the majesty
of this more powerful king ; which would also sug
gest that this tribe dwelt in a disagreeably hot
climate. They would believe that their deity, like
their monarch, could only be approached on bended
knees, and that he is fond of flattery and glorifica
tion. It would be no anomaly in their government
that one man should be punished for the crime of
another. " But what should we say — assuming as yet that
there is no authority for the creed described — did
we learn that the people who built great temples
and maintained a vast priesthood in devotion to
those beliefs were dwelling in a country and amid
general ideas and customs just the reverse of those
inferred ? — that they inhabited a green and beautiful
land, while believing all Nature to be under the
blighting curse of God ; that when ill they call in a

38 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
physician, though believing disease and death to be
visitations of the divine will; that they will im
prison as an impostor one who professes to work
miracles, and would not permit the testimony to a
miracle of a thousand witnesses to determine the
distribution of an estate, while they maintain that
one in the form of man did, within historic times,
repeatedly raise the dead to life and violate the
order of Nature ; that they would unseat a judge
who should order the death-penalty for the worst
theft, while worshipping a God who punishes millions
with eternal tortures for an apple eaten thousands
of years before they were born ; that, with courts
of law in which no man can be prosecuted for the
sin of another, they believe that all men merit, and
many receive, endless agonies at the hands of God
for an offence they never committed, and that the
only exculpation for any is derived from the tor
tures of an innocent person in their place ; that they
would despise an earthly sovereign who should be
fond of adulation, and would regard the glorification
•of such an one to obtain favours as disgusting syco
phancy, while they believe that their God can be
pacified and coaxed by such appeals to his vanity,
and teach every child that the chief end of man is
to glorify God and enjoy him for ever ; that, with a
language which calls various crimes inhuman, un
natural, unmanly, they proclaim their belief that
humanity is desperately wicked, and the natural

THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY. 39
man a child of the devil ; that, while thus believing
human nature totally depraved, their politicians
seek popular favour by promising to do right instead
of wrong, and their tradesmen trust daily to the
common integrity; and, lastly, that these people,
believing that millions of those around them — in
cluding some of their own children, relatives, and
friends — are in imminent danger of suffering all
the intensified agonies that the wrath of God can
inflict, and that vast numbers are now so suffering,
or doomed to suffer, do nevertheless go quietly
about their business, enjoy themselves in society,
and in every way act as if all were going on plea
santly. " This people, we should say, have somehow got
dressed in a religion that does not belong to them, —
a borrowed religion, transferred from some desolate
land and barbarian age, which, contradicted as it is
point for point by its whole environment, is essen
tially incredible to those professing it, — a creed
which could exist amid such conditions only as
the fauna or flora of the Tropics can exist in
an English park, that is, by the help of an artificial
habitat." When we left the garden, a messenger came to
the Interpreter to inform him that a number of pil
grims from the City of Otherworldliness had been
seen in the distance, and so he had to hasten home
to receive them. Nevertheless, before leaving me,

40 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
he gave me a number of letters of introduction to
friends of his in the city, and a good chart and guide
book, so that with these, and his well:remembered
instructions, I have felt that he was with me in
spirit on my yet unended pilgrimage.

II.

THE CHURCH AUCTION.

They sold the favour of the Prince to the Vizier, and the Vizier
sold the Empire. They sold the law to the Cadi, and the Cadi sold
Justice. They sold the altar to the Priest, and the Priest sold

Heaven.

Volney.

Tell me, ye pilgrims, who so thoughtful go,
Musing, perhaps, on objects far away,
Come ye from wandering in such distant land
(As by your looks and garb we must infer),
That you our city traverse in her woe,
And mingle with her crowds, yet tears withhold,
Like persons quite unconscious of her state ? Daxte.

THE CHURCH AUCTION.

WENT to seek an auction-room, where, I
had heard, some Cures of Souls were to be
sold. The company was thin, and evi
dently had misgivings about the property. A
Jew bid for one of the livings, but the smile that
faintly showed itself on the faces present — caused
possibly by the oddity of a Catholic duke selling a
Christian Cure of Souls to a Jew — caused him to
withdraw. The auctioneer could hardly have had
much of that kind of property to dispose of, and
perhaps he just a little overpassed the bounds of the
sentiment around him when he accompanied his
graphic picture of a parsonage and its lawns with
hopeful suggestions that the aged clergyman, then
in occupation, would soon be evicted by the sum
mons to another world. It became, indeed, plain
that the auctioneer was a bungler for this once, at
least, and he did not succeed in selling, if I remem
ber rightly, one of the livings.

44 ' AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
At length the bidders fell away one by one, and
the auctioneer departed. I lingered at the door,
looking out on some persons who were carrying
holly to the market, for Christmas was near, and
upon some children, who had already managed to
coax a few premature smiles out of Santa-Claus.
Turning around I found that a singular company
had entered the room, and the auction was about to
recommence. But this time it was a new auctioneer
who had the matter in hand, — a shadowy individual,
with piercing eye and a low voice, — a voice, how
ever, insinuating and cunning enough. It was.
waxing toward the twilight of a foggy day, and
the auctioneer seemed almost a phantom speak
ing to phantoms. Amid occasional murmurs, and
with some pauses, he spoke somewhat after this
wise: " Gentlemen, the auctioneer who has just gone
did not half know his business, or else he little
comprehended the nature of the property he offered
you. I take his place, and would remind you that
this is no common lot. These churches have cost a
great deal. Their founder had to be nailed on a cross
that they might be built. Their walls are cemented
with the blood of faithful hearts, the blood of con
fessors and martyrs. Thousands perished to put
them in the state of repair in which I offer them
to you. They are consecrated by centuries of sor
row and sacrifice ; in them souls have inly burned

THE CHURCH AUCTION. 45
with the flame of devotion, stricken hearts raised
their supplications to One who alone could fathom
their needs ; souls have brought to those altars their
burdens of sin and sorrow, and earnest minds aspired
there to know the mysteries of life and death. Their
bells have rung in merrily the happy and sad years
of wedlock, and again have tolled above the sobs of
mourners. Their spires have pointed grief and
poverty from earthly struggle to eternal peace. All
these have gone to swell the market value of the
five Cures of Souls which the light of the blessed
Reformation and the grace of the Duke of Norfolk
enable me to offer you this day.
" What ! does no one bid yet ? Did I hear some
one muttering about money-changers scourged from
the temple, or another call it outrageous that the
Cures of Souls should be put up at auction ? Gen
tlemen, we are not children ; let us not refer to the
childhood of the world for our precedents. We
belong to a National Church which represents the
apotheosis of decency. A whip of small cords, even
for those who make the house of God a den of
thieves, were vulgar and fanatical in these days.
Above all, let us have no mawkish or hypocritical
sentimentalism here. We are Englishmen, who
know the pearl of price to be a pound sterling, and
we pray that our Queen may live long in health
and wealth. As for this church auction, permit me
to remind you that it is no novel thing. The Chris-

46 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
tian Church of old was no sooner built, and the
miserable scaffold at its base, on which its founder
perished like a slave, raised to shine on its towers
as the symbol of honour, than the imperial pre
decessors of his Grace our Duke put it up at
auction. Truth bid for it; Justice, Humanity,
Holiness did the same ; but Royalty and Supersti
tion joined their purses and outbid the others. They
have owned and conducted it to this day. Through
them it is that the worshippers in it sit on cushions
instead of on the cold hill-side. It is due to them
that the successors of wretched fishermen, following
one whd had not where to lay his head, do now get
fine episcopal salaries and palaces.
" Gentlemen, it is a commercial age. Every
thing is in the market. What will you have ? quoth
God ; pay for it and take it. Observe those saw-
grinders at Sheffield ; their work demands that each
shall live but half of his appointed years, and that
the half he does live shall be passed in a dark and
dismal Hades, bound, Ixion-like, around the grind
ing wheel. What wondrous muscles and sinews are
there ! All the skill of the world could not make
the least vein in him, or a drop of the red stream
that courses through it. Myriads of ages contri
buted to give that flash to his eye ; and every divine
element of the Universe to organise that incompre
hensible brain that thinks and feels behind all.
What are these fine churches compared with that

THE CHURCH AUCTION. 47
temple framed by God for his own abode, which
without scandal is bought every hour by worshipful
Cutlers and Colliers, and other Masters? Who
that has a mother, or sister, or daughter need be
reminded of the sacred and tender emotions that
cluster about the heart of woman? But pass through
the Haymarket, or — the distance is but little — hover
with the crowd about the doors of the fashionable
church where the millionaire buys his young bride,
and tell me if womanhood is not in the market.
" Nay, gentlemen, repair to the pulpits them
selves ; is not every' prayer, every sermon, bought
and paid for? There is, indeed, an old story that
the world once offered all its kingdoms if the
founder of Christianity would only modify his ideas
of worship, and that he refused ; but we must await
the results of modern criticism before crediting such
preternatural narratives as that. At any rate, we
have England to deal with, not ancient Judea,
where, it has been truly said, " they didn't know
everything." Does any man here believe that the
thirteen hundred livings in the hands of the House
of Lords, or the livings, representing an annual
income of two millions sterling, subject to private
patronage, are mainly disposed of to the humblest
and devoutest clergymen, without reference to any
earthly or political considerations? If so, let him
move a return of the number of Liberal clergymen
enjoying livings owned by Conservative landlords.

48 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Let him explain why the clergy resist Irish dis
establishment in a phalanx almost as solid as that
with which the Dissenters, reading the same Bible
and worshipping the same Christ, advocate it, if
he would show the Church pulpits unpurchasable
by any interest. But I need not confine my state
ment to any one Church. Look abroad through
Christendom, and decide whether the scholarship,
the ability, the ingenuity, and the eloquence, which
still maintain its dogmas, are not retained by fees.
Does that learned Oxonian believe that the world
was made in six days ? Does he believe that on the
seventh day God rested, and was refreshed after
the fatigue of creation ? Does he believe Athana
sius, when he says Christ is Almighty God, rather
than Jesus, when he says, c My Father is greater
than I;' and does he believe that all who ad
here to the latter belief shall without doubt
perish everlastingly? Does he believe that God
has prepared everlasting fires, that he sends mil
lions into the world knowing that they will even
tually burn in the same, and that among those
who will suffer that vengeance are all disbeliev
ers of the orthodox creed ? Does he believe that
Newton, Hume, Channing, Franklin, Schiller,
Goethe, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, Emerson, Mazzini,
Garibaldi, are all destined to be damned, and that
the generation they have been somehow empowered
to train is to follow them to perdition? Does he

THE CHURCH AUCTION. 49
believe that God has assigned as the one Plan of
Salvation a scheme which the majority of the best
brains constructed by himself find utterly incredible,
— a scheme which the chief men of Science find
contradicted by every fact of nature, and the jurors
of Philosophy find revolting to reason? If the
scholarly graduate does not believe this, why does he
preach it ? Has he not been knocked down at the
bid of some grand Abbey, or Chapel, or Cathedral ?
Has he said, ' Get thee behind me,' to Promotion ?
What has poor undowered Heresy to offer the young
minister? Who shall look for the scholarly divine
to utter the talismanic word in his heart, when he
knows that at that moment the walls around him
must crumble, and he be left to take his chance
with the hunted foxes, but without even their cer
tainty as to holes ?
" Some foolish people, gentlemen, had fancied
there was one wing of the clergy about to with
draw itself from the market. I say foolish, because
such an exceptional course could be pursued by no
aggregate interest ; not because there are not eccen
tric religionists who are now and then unwilling to
exchange their convictions for the whole world.
The particular clerical body to which I allude is
constituted of those called Ritualists. These men
had been showing such a restless and reckless an
tipathy to our most valuable religious standards
that, albeit they had not much sense, some seemed

50 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
to think they could not be bought up by the Estab
lishment. They stood between their altar and
the court of law. On the altar was throned
Almighty God, claiming, in their belief, certain
definite obeisances ; on the bench sat an English
man authorised to continue to them the advantages
and properties of the Establishment on condition
that such obeisances should be withheld. As many
genuflections as you please, gentlemen, as many
altar-lights for God as you desire, only you must
go out of our Church with them, as your Master
went out of the Synagogue ! A plain choice was
here to be made between God and man. The result
was never doubtful. The Ritualists would like to
be on the side of God ; they must be on that of the
Property. " Consider these things, I pray you, gentlemen,
and confess that it is but a straining at gnats to
object to the selling at auction of the five churches,
which I now again offer to the highest bidder, —
saint or sinner, — without condition, save that no
nonconformist shall preach in any one of them, be
he the angel Gabriel. Set in them clergymen who
shall teach men how to invest successfully in hea
venly scrip. Let the children learn, as they did at
the Big Tabernacle, that fleeing to Jesus means tea
and cake at a distinguished brother's house, and
limitless measures of the same hereafter. Let youno-
and old there study the law and the profits. How

THE CHURCH AUCTION. 51
much was the popularity of Christ's name increased
in mediaeval Europe after it was stamped on a gold
coin, and his leadership (ducatus) meant a ducat!
And is not the name of God on our own coins?
Wherever our race goes, this sanctity of the pro
fitable thing appears — as, across the ocean, in the
Almighty Dollar. Other races may be proverbially
' gay>' ' romantic,' ' theoretical :' we are shopkeep-
ing; and in the sacred name of British Trade I
offer you these Cures of Souls. Who bids ?
" Going — going — gone !"

III.

ST. ALBAN'S.

Ke Loo asked about serving the spirits of the dead. The Master
said, "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their
spirits?" Ke Loo added, " I venture to ask about death." He was an
swered, " While you do not know life, how can you know about
death?" Chinese Classics.

They say, through patience, chalk
Becomes a ruby stone ;
Ah, yes ! but by the true heart's blood
The chalk is crimson grown. Hafiz {Emerson's tr.).

ST. ALBAN'S.

HE reference to the Ritualists in the auc
tioneer's harangue made me determine
to visit St. Alban's Church. I have
always had a little niche in my heart for the
proto-martyr of Britain. As saints go, he was,
perhaps, the most honest we have ever had in this
region. He had none of that pious ingenuity
which, at Rome, could convert a statue of Jupiter
into Peter with his keys. He said plainly to the
barbarians, " These deities to whom you offer sacri
fices are not deities, but devils; and he that offers
prayers or sacrifices to them, so far from securing the
objects of his desire, will have everlasting tortures
in hell for his reward." The deities thus blasphemed
were not accustomed to postpone their retaliations
to a future world, as poor Alban soon had reason to
know. The clergyman and worshippers at the
London church named after him were, about the
time of my going there, giving some indications that
they would prove equally uncompromising with

56 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Alban toward their opponents. That, at least, would
be a sign of life, and therefore hopeful.
I went early enough to see them lighting their
candles, and could not help thinking of the foolish
virgins trimming their lamps. Give us, O buried
Ages, of your oil, for our lamps of the Present have
gone out ! Yet there was a singular archaeological
interest about the scene. The legend of the Romans
and Huns, above whose slain hosts two spectral
armies arose to continue the battle in the air, seemed
realised in the ritualistic controversy. These vest
ments and candles were the ghosts of ancient ban
ners and war-fires, once the insignia of real religions.
Would that one could add just enough to the fore
head of yonder strong-headed priest to enable him
to trace to their sources the candles on his altar ! —
gathered there, as he might be amazed to find, from .
the torches of Isis, Demeter, Ceres, from the She-
chinah of Israel, from the altars of Sun-worship,
from the Baal-fires, or Bel-fires, and Bon-fires,
which still light up certain dark corners of Europe
where paganism managed to linger longer than else
where : for the pagans {pagani, rustics ; or heathen,
dwellers on the heath) hold on to old religions which
have been trampled out in the cities.
A poet looked while the sun shone upon a sod,
and a flower answered. A poem flowered in his
mind at the same moment. It was the face ' of a
goddess smiling from the earth in those tinted petals,

ST. ALBAN'S. 57

who should be named Demeter. By Zeus, the Sky,
she has conceived, and the floral offspring he will
name Persephone. But now Winter comes —
Pluto, the god of Hades, he shall be called — and
snatches the flower away. Demeter, mourning her
lost child, searches through the earth, attended by
sunbeams for torches, and finds Persephone at last
(a seed) in the Underworld. The sunbeams assure
the partial victory of Demeter : they lead the flower
to upper light and air again ; but on condition that she
shall pass one-third of the year (winter) with Pluto.
This was the simple allegory dramatised in the
Mysteries of Eleusis, revived in Rome in the myth of
Ceres and Proserpine. It fell upon the stony ground
of literalism in unimaginative Rome, and the com
mon people worship Ceres as the supreme power
over the fruitfulness of land and cattle, and even of
mothers. The temple raised to conciliate her in
time of famine at Rome becomes the temple of the
farming and labouring classes : hence, presently, of
political importance. In it the decrees of the Senate
must be inspected by the tribunes of the people.
Allied thus with the Democracy which is to sway
Europe, Ceres gained a kind of immortality. Europa
herself, after whom the continent was named, was
probably a modification of the same goddess ; and
we call our grains cereals after Ceres. It is not
wonderful that the despised Christians were glad to
ally themselves with this religion of the people,

58 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
nor that the two should be jumbled in the brain
of Constantine, — who was wont to consult pagan
oracles as to how he should propagate Christianity,
— and should through him pass together to mould
Western Christianity.
Thus it happens that, as Constantine had " Soli
Invicto " on his coins, while the cross was on his
banners, the priest here in St. Alban's, bowing before
a cross, says, "Light of lights." From Eleusis,
not from the Bible, he recites, " He descended into
hell." Then he goes on with his brief discourse to
declare his altar a real altar, with God actually and
supernaturally present upon it. This is the immor
tality which Ceres has obtained. The story should
have been told of her, rather than of Tithonos, that
the granted petition for immortality was followed
by such decrepitude that the recipient was glad
to be transformed to a grasshopper. To this
miserable form has the beautiful myth of Egypt,
Greece, and Rome shrunk, as observable at St.
Alban's. Nevertheless, there was a certain fervour about
the sermon that set me asking whether Ritualism
itself may not be, in a certain way, a Proser
pine lost in Hades, a seed for which sunbeams are
searching? Hides there not a germ of life in
this doctrine of the " real presence," little suspected
by this devout somnambulist? At least he does
not hold that God wrought in the earth eighteen

ST. ALBAN'S. 59

centuries ago as he no longer does, or that his won
ders were limited to Palestine. It is sad to see
galaxies shrunken to St. Alban's candles, and Na
ture under a paten, and the long line of Seers
and Prophets ending in this poupee in painted
clothes. It is not delightful to witness a marionnette
performance of the sacred drama of the Universe.
Yet at each moment, and with each phrase, the
Ritualist was groping with bandaged eyes near the
holiest truths. As one sees in caverns quaint repe
titions of the forms of Nature, even to star-chambers
or mimic firmaments, so does one find in the under
ground foliations of St. Alban's a mystical imitation
of the upper- world growths of the human heart,
and even of the vault of Reason. May we not
hope that, as the law has come in to spoil these
miserable vestments and dwarfed symbols, the
Ritualists may be driven to some point where a
gleam of the Day may reveal to them that it is a
cellar they have mistaken for a saloon ? Indignant,
oppressed, their dry breasts heated once more with
the feeling that they are no longer free, — still better,
their minds forced once again to do duty in con
sidering their position in England, and their con
sciences roused to question whether every hour they
are not accepting the thirty pieces of the Estab
lishment for the betrayal of their Lord, — there
may yet come a time when some strong human spirit
shall enter here with wand of light, to touch this

60 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
altar till it expand again to the green earth, and
transform these candles into lamps of Science,
Liberty, Art, — into the beams which search all sods
where thoughts are repressed, and into constella
tions above, chanting to holier fires within that Real
Presence which fills and thrills the Universe.

IV.

AN OLD SHRINE.

Dushmanta. Where is the holy retreat of Maricha ?
Mdtali. A little beyond that grove, where you see a pious Yogi,
motionless as a pollard, holding his thick bushy hair, and fixing his
eyes on the solar orb. Mark ; his body is half covered with a white
ant's edifice made of raised clay ; the skin of a snake supplies the
place of his sacerdotal thread, and part of it girds his loins ; a number
of knotty plants encircle and wound his neck ; and surrounding
birds' nests almost conceal his shoulders.
Dushmanta. I see with equal amazement both the pious and their
awful retreat. It becomes, indeed, pure spirits to feed on balmy air
in a forest blooming with trees of life. Sacontala.

AN OLD SHRINE.

HE sun shone fair on old Canterbury on
the day when the new Archbishop was to
be consecrated; and on that morning I
made my way to the little church of St. Martin, on
the hill near the city. Thence I gazed over the ruin
of the old Christian church, which was built on the
preceding ruin of an ancient British temple, until
my eye was fixed on the stately Cathedral. Time
gradually drew its perspective about those towers,
and they stood as Hercules' Pillars at the end of a
voyage of twelve centuries. But not even time
can measure the vast distance between little St.
Martin's here and the Cathedral there. Through
what ages of sunshine and frost, by what waterings
with tears and blood, did this small brown seed which
Ethelbert permitted to be planted in his kingdom
expand to that great flower !
On this hill it was that Augustin the monk
stood, meditating on the fate of the uncompromising
Alban, his predecessor, — a fate for which he had

64 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
no taste whatever. As he gazed on the old capital
of the nation he had been sent to convert, a spirit
hovered near him, and said, " All these will I give
thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me ! "
Augustin cried, " Get thee beh — But stay ; who
art thou ? " "I am the chief deity worshipped by
this people. Make me thy enemy, and thou shalt
share the fate of Alban ; make me thy friend, and
instead of this little hut, where the king permits
thee to worship thy saints, thou shalt have over
there a palace, and a gorgeous Cathedral, with a
throne from which thou and thy successors shall
rule England." " Let us compromise," replied
Augustin. "I cannot exactly and by name worship
thee and thy fellow-deities, but I will respect thy
insignia and thy sacred days. My churches shall
be twined with holly; they shall be built beside
thy sacred wells, and near the holy oaks. Thy
miracles and those of our saints will blend verv
naturally. In short, if thou and thy gods will only
consent to be christened into new names, the change
need be only so much as can be effected by a handful
of water." The contract was signed, and Augustin
had his throne and his Cathedral. Insignificant St.
Martin's will not do for a Christ allied to Royalty.
Since then the glacial centuries have moved
on, each scratching a sign of its march on some
stone of the building yonder.
The most notable spot in the Cathedral, to my

AN OLD SHRINE. 65

mind, was one of which no one has been able to
give any account. Canterbury was the place of
splendid shrines, and religious history is full of the
accounts of pilgrimages to them from all parts of
the world. Of these, the most distinguished was
that of St. Thomas a Becket, a mass of gold and
gems. The great historic shrines have all their
original positions well known, and in front of some
of them are the marks of pilgrims' knees. But
about none of these great shrines are such evidences
of popular devotion as about the mysterious spot on
one side, of which there is no history or trace
except the pavement which pilgrims' knees have
worn into hollows. Who was this Unknown
God? Had it been found necessary to invest a
Christian Saint with the sanctity of some image
of the native religion? Had Ethelbert's Queen,
now St. Bertha, been costumed as a Madonna,
because she bore the holiest name of the Saxon
Mythology ?
Much applause has been awarded Gregory and
Augustin for their method of borrowing for their
Church the glories of paganism. It is claimed to
be highly philosophical to recognise the unities
underlying various religions. But there is a differ
ence between Philosophy and Jesuitism. Alban
honestly saying — what Augustin believes as well —
that the heathen deities are devils, is a nobler figure
than the Jesuit in America commending Jesus to
E

66 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

the savages as a chief who scalped one thousand of
his enemies in a single day.
If there were anything needed to make Augustin
uglier in the matter, it is that he hardly fulfilled
the conditions under which he secured the union of
Church and State. Once on his throne, he seems to
have overruled the popular worship as vigorously as
he could, short of incurring any peril for himself
like that which overtook Alban. Canterbury
Cathedral, as established by him, must be looked
upon as the first Conservatory built to secure for
Christianity a habitat in the North, where no unim-
ported element was friendly to it. Those who occu
pied his throne after he was dead did not regard it
as necessary to be bound by his shrewd contract
with the existing deities. Some bits of the famous
old windows and carvings still remain to show with
what beauty the Church saints looked down upon
the people ; but in the crypt — copied, perhaps, from
the walls of older periods — the grinning and de
formed figures are still to be seen, each, probably,
the representative to the newer pagan generation
of some god of their forefathers. And this contrast
between the saintly faces and the horrible besti
alities physiognomically represents the difference
between the condition of their respective adherents.
Thenceforth, for the believer all that is good, for
the heretic all that is bad. The land is divided
among those who conform most aggressively, and

AN OLD SHRINE. 67

they who conform not shall wear the bronze collars
of the others. The succeeding generations can be
more easily dealt with; for the priestly horror of
any education but that which trains the neck for
the priestly yoke was already in full vigour, and
the very cradle-sides were made to teach that ever
lasting tortures by fire awaited all who should doubt
or deny; these lessons being also continually im
pressed by a practical anticipation of such fires for
notorious heretics. On the other hand, for the
implicit belief, Heaven, — its radiance reflected in
the palaces and cathedrals it was competent to be
stow in advance upon favourites. Poor Odin and
Thor, now sadly out at elbows, were fairly put to
shame. For that matter, they might, indeed, have
claimed brotherhood with him in whose name they
were exterminated; but it was by no means a
peasant befriending his fellow-peasants, at the cost
of crucifixion, who was talked of in England in
those days, but a triumphant Prince, whose celestial
glory and power over quick and dead gleamed upon
the earth in the pomp of kings and in the swords
and splendours of Crusaders, Templars, Hospitallers,
and what not, who bore his banner through the
world. Such was Conservatory Number One. It was
strongly built. The shrine, now nameless, which
had proved such a powerful rival to those of im
ported- saints, was removed. But a day came when

68 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
the wind and weather beat in upon those of a
Becket, of Dunstan, and the rest, and they too
mouldered away. There is hardly any roof lower
than the blue dome through which the elements
will not find their way. An honest monk spake in
Germany, and the golden shrines of Canterbury
turned to ashes. The honest monk shuddered at
what he had done, and was presently ready to join
those who would rebuild the Conservatory anew;
but his mistake was in thinking it was his work.
He merely summed up and named the composite
work of a thousand years, in which German thought
and Saxon honesty had honeycombed quite silently
the Augustinian fabric. All the kings and priests,
their horses and men, could not undo the work that
had been done.
Things must undergo many repairs in order to
last, and with every repair something must perish.
After looking at the grotesque images carved on
capitals in the crypt, and concluding that their ori
ginals were Christian caricatures of pagan deities, I
passed a little way on, and saw much refuse, made
by the workmen then engaged in repairing the
building. The heaps presented an odd jumble. At
one spot there were old pulpits, and old seats, and
benches for kneeling. Who had spoken from the
pulpits, and who had knelt ? Had one set of dogmas
been uttered and heard, or had each successive pul
pit known some " wing,"— in its time high, hard,

AN OLD SHRINE. 69

or broad.? One might suppose the figures of the
pillars to be grinning their delight on the heaps of
rubbish on another side. Many poor saints, in
whose interest they had been caricatured, were
here piled in fragments, awaiting transfer to some
dust-hole. The sandalled feet of one propped the
nose and eyes of another ; armless hands completed
footless legs ; and mitres, sceptres, cowls, crowns,
swords had tumbled into a common confusion. Dust
to dust ! They were the pillars of the first Con
servatory, the decorations of the second. What
fragments a century of revolutions had spared, time
had at length pulverised, and they must go to rest
upon the dust of the gods they superseded, slowly
forming the rock on which the next higher temple
shall be built.
For there was a Conservatory Number Two to
be built for the exotic, which the toil of centuries
had not been able to acclimatise. The materials of
the old one could plainly not be used, save, as we
have seen, for ornamental purposes, — as the castel
lated turrets, which once meant utility, still decorate
mansions raised in an age of peace, or we follow as
sports the serious occupations of savage life. The
old weapons of the Church have been broken.
Earthly government has found it necessary to miti
gate some of the rigours of divine law. Hell-fires
can no more be anticipated at Smithfield, nor the
earthly heaven be secured to believers so absolutely

70 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
as before. Nevertheless, there remains the power
to urge all the more the terrors and rewards of the
future, and — for these must grow weak — Society
may still wield its ostracisms and distribute its ad
vantages for the coercion of opinion. The Thirty-
nine Articles shall mean many things, but one thing
definitely shall they mean: thirty-nine pieces of
money to him who shall betray Reason for them. To
them shall be given the Keys of Knowledge, and
only he shall enter the University who will lay
down his independence at the threshold. Every
heretic shall see the difference between his own and
his orthodox neighbour's coffers. As for the clever
young scholars, if they become restless under the
task of believing the incredible, there shall be pro
vided the chloroform of promotion and luxury,
under which surgeries can be easily performed on
the mind. Has any young theologian a tendency to
doubt, or to write radical books? Make him a
Head Master, a Canon, a Dean, a Professor, or a
Bishop. Thus it came to pass that, on the fourth day of
February, 1869, a great crowd of cultivated people
sat together in Canterbury Cathedral — Conserva
tory Number Two of the Incredible Creed — to
witness the consecration of a plain old Scotch gen
tleman to the task of presiding over the work of
maintaining in Great Britain the worship of a dead
Jew.

AN OLD SHRINE. 71

Before the white Gothic throne — the ancient one
from which Augustin ruled within sight — I sat
waiting. A buzz of gay conversation filled the
building. Each clergyman who entered was dis
cussed; the poor clergymen in seedy coats, their
wives in old-fashioned bonnets, were greeted with
titters. Bonnets, in proportion to their antiquity,
retain their ancient power to render their wearers
invisible to many. Some of these country faces
were fresh as roses climbing on cottage-doors;
about others hovered the faces of children whose
love they had gained ; now and then some appeared
on which were reflected the sad smiles of invalids
over whom they had bent. There were signs that
these and their husbands — they of the seedy coats
— came from regions where the ministry of Christ
still retains a meaning. These had not come for a
pic-nic, like those whose mirth they excited.
Gradually all became still ; the solemnity of the
occasion wrought its effect, and we returned to our
thoughts. An old window, refashioned out of the
fragments of some older one, attracted my attention.
It may have been that which is the last memorial
of a Becket in the Cathedral. If so, he is in a
very chaotic condition. A horse's head here, a
human leg there, an old mitre linked on to a nose
and chin, make a somewhat grotesque impression.
While I was endeavouring to piece together St.
Thomas again, the time arrived when the clergy

72 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
should piece together all that remained of the broken
materials that once went to the making of a real
Archbishop of Canterbury.
An old Gregorian chant is wafted to us from
far away outside. A breathless stillness falls upon
the multitude. The distant strain is very sweet;
it may have been the very chant which Augustin
and his monks sang as they marched from the sea
shore to Canterbury. At any rate, it came out of
the sacred heart of a Past when faith was real;
it was such music that built the walls of cathedrals,
and its true refrain is in that music before which
their walls are falling.
The chanters now enter the building, where the
organ takes up their strain, and the slow beat of the
footsteps of the procession keeps time, — as it were,
personating the march of centuries. The ecclesiastics
enter, and among them the slightly bent but still
stately old man— the centre now of all eyes — who
is painfully going through his part. Two young
men in full evening dress carry his train, which
stretches some yards behind him. Could I be
mistaken in thinking there was a shade of humilia
tion on his face ?
There was something sadly unreal about the
whole affair ; but where can the eye alight on any
thing in the religious world more real ?
When the ceremony was over, I went back to
St. Martin's. The two most eminent Deans that

AN OLD SHRINE. 73

Canterbury ever knew were there. They stood
together, gazing silently on the window stained with
a picture of St. Martin in the act of cutting his cloak
in two to give half of it to the naked beggar crouch
ing near his horse's head.
While we were all sauntering about the diminu
tive building, a voice arrested our attention. A
strange-looking man, with limp white cravat and
threadbare coat, had got up into the little pulpit.
His white locks fell about a face wrinkled with care,
down upon his shoulders. His glittering eye held
us as that of the Ancient Mariner did the Wedding
Guest. Thus he spake :
" St. Martin's Church faces Canterbury Cathe
dral. The lowliness of the one and the grandeur of
the other do not alone mark different eras of the
English Church ; they mark two totally distinct reli
gions. The one means the Saint who sacrifices his
raiment for the needy; the other means a Saint
who sacrifices the needy to his raiment. What are
our grand cathedrals, with their great revenues, but
the rich gold-embroidered cloaks of a Jewish pea
sant, whose position has in England become
princely ?
"I am a poor country clergyman, with a large
family, and one hundred and fifty pounds a year.
For thirty years I have bent shivering, like the
beggar on the window there, near the door of a
magnificent Cathedral. Before the altar of that

74 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Cathedral a Bishop — who has been unable to do
any work for ten years — moulders away, awaiting
the day when he shall be carved there in stone,
when he will do as much good as he does now.
Fifty people get their living out of the revenues of
that Cathedral. They keep up a daily service for
about twenty-five daily listeners. These attend
ants are from wealthy families in the neighbour
hood, who have nothing else to do. The com
mon people never go there. What can I see in that
Cathedral but a great pile of loam in the centre of
a barren field ? What could I not do for my own
culture, for my own ability to serve, for the poor
and ignorant around me, if the wealth of this useless
heap were distributed for the religious advantage
of the people? As it is, what do I find under the
shadow of those majestic towers ? I will not speak
of the daily anxiety, and the effort to make both
ends meet; nor of a certain happy girl who has
faded into the pale and careworn mother who toils
and suffers at my side. But there is the need of
servility to the wealthy, who think themselves
St. Martins if they throw us an occasional shilling ;
there is the parasite of ignorance creeping over my
children's minds ; there is the subtle scepticism and
despair deposited by each day in my own.
" Yet a compensation has come, though late. I
have been trained by sorrow to know that the religion
of the Church is not the religion of him who, to those

AN OLD SHRINE. 75

who cried, ' Lord, Lord ! ' — but left the naked un
clothed and the hungry to starve, — replied, ' I never
knew you ! ' I see the saintliness of Martin well
enough ; and I know that, were he now living and
powerful, the sword which there passes through
his velvet cloak would pass through and through
every Cathedral and every big ecclesiastical salary
in England, and the humanity of to-day would re
ceive that which was bequeathed to it by the
humanity of the past. I discern, with eyes sharp
ened by pain, that the faith of the past built
cathedrals and splendid shrines because they be
lieved them to be gateways of eternal salvation,
and that they who now enjoy them do so without
acknowledging the faith that built them. Is yonder
great endowment to be administered in the letter
or in the spirit? If in the letter, it belongs
to the Roman Catholics ; if in the spirit, it should
be applied to those aims and ideas which consti
tute the real faith of the English people. The
bequest of the faith of one age cannot belong to
that faith which another age has abjured. Do the
English people believe in eternal hell-fire, in devils,
in the potency of saints, without which no cathedral
was ever yet built? Do pilgrims swarm along the
Old Kent Road as in Chaucer's day ? Amid the
conflict of sects, the surgings of scepticism, the only
shores of belief, as solid as that on which were
built and endowed our cathedrals, are popular

76 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
education, freedom of thought, political liberty,
and the rescue of the masses from pauperism,
disease, and vice. Therefore, though to me there
is left only a weak arm and a feeble voice, the
last effort of both shall be made here and now. To
the Church I bid an eternal adieu. And it is given
me to prophesy the end for which I cannot work —
that a Spirit is advancing, which shall send those
idle Cathedrals to follow their master in doing good;
which shall scatter the Archbishops' revenues and
thrones and vestments, as King Henry scattered
the jewels and gold of a. Becket's shrine ; and of all
the grand establishments which the Universe has
disestablished, not one stone shall be left upon
another. The twelve centuries which to-day looked
down from the towers of Canterbury, and saw the
proud array of Bishops and Clergy, who leave the
great causes and forget the heavy wrongs of the
present to fulminate against stiff-necked Jews and
defunct Pilates, shall be followed by an Age which
shall look down from a loftier height upon Truth's
golden harvests waving over the spots whereon
they stand. All this I see, O my brothers, as this
day I turn from the Church, with its splendid in
signia, and come hither to begin anew the path of
my ministry where the Church began — with the
Saint dividing his cloak with the beggar."
When the old clergyman had ceased, he tottered
and nearly fell. The two Deans, who had been

AN OLD SHRINE. 77

gazing on the stained windows, sprang forward and
bore him to their own carriage, in which he was
driven away.
Sometimes I have thought that this scene, and
the strange sermon, and the aged seer himself, must
all have been a dream ; but, again, certain burdens
of warning that have since issued from Canterbury
and Westminster suggest that others besides myself
must have been impressed on that occasion.

V.

ISENGRIMM.

" And now look at me," the old ruin said ; " centuries have rolled
away, the young conqueror is decrepit now ; dying, as the old faith
died, in the scenes where that faith first died, and lingering where
it lingered. The same sad sweet scene is acting over again. . .
The village church is outliving me for a few more generations ; there
still -ring, Sunday after Sunday, its old reverend bells, and there
come still the simple peasants in their simple dresses. . . . Yet
is not that, too, all passing away? . . . The fairies dance no
more around the charmed forest ring. . . . The creed still seems
to stand, but the creed is dead in the thoughts of mankind." J. A. Froude.
Tiger ! Tiger ! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry ?
Did He who made the lamb make thee ?
William Blake.

MJJj?.

ISENGRIMM.
j]N a cowled wolf, carved in the choir of an
old church, I recognised the features of
Isengrimm.
Isengrimm is the suggestive name given by the
Norse fable to the wolf in human shape whom the
missionaries made into a monk. When, however,
they would have him say Paternosters, all they
could get was a pious prayer for lamb, lamb ; and
"his thoughts were ever to the woodward."
How Isengrimm was converted, and made monk,
one may easily find in the Heimskringla and other
chronicles of those ages. Olaf entering peaceful
villages, and offering their inhabitants the alterna
tives of being burnt or baptised ; Charlemagne with
his motto, " Christianity or death ; " Augustin, with
Ethelbert to back him, ready to slaughter twelve hun
dred Welsh monks who, accepting Christ, were not
so certain about the Pope, — such were the preachers,
attended by divine prodigies, who persuaded Isen
grimm to be a monk. Did he hesitate ? — a pan of

82 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
live coals is placed beneath his belly, and he is asked,
" Wilt thou now believe in Christ ? " Does he
mutter a prayer to the elements that have cradled
his strength ? — an adder is set to crawl down his
throat. Pondering these arguments, Isengrimm at
length consents to baptism, and to say Christian
grace henceforth over his lamb. But, meanwhile,
what are Olaf, Charlemagne, Ethelbert, and the
rest, but baptised Isengrimms ?
Fine enough are the reports that reach Rome.
Miracles are wrought, the heathen converted, ar.d
each missionary must have his cathedral. How nu
merous are the converts in the Sandwich Islands
when the anniversary of the Society for the Propa
gation of the Gospel in Foreign Lands is about to
take place, and the collections to be made ! How
wonderful have been the cures in the Hospitals for
incurable maladies when subscription-time arrives !
There was a vast deal of human nature in man even
twelve or fifteen hundred years ago. The Pope
congratulates himself that the Angles are now
Angels, and his priests in the North have their
reward. But how to deal with Isengrimm, who, from
beneath his cowl, begins lustily to demand his lamb
again, and to yearn for the woods where his old
altars stand? Neither torture nor baptism has,
it seems, gone beyond the skin of him ; nay, he
even prowls dangerously around the cathedral doors,

ISENGRIMM. 83

and snaps up an Alban now and then. The fact is,
he must have his lamb and his woods. So Isengrimm
calls Odin Christ, and continues to worship him ;
he goes to church because it is built over his long
time holy well, and is adorned with his holy oak ;
and he does not relish his day of sacrifice less be
cause, provided he will call it Christmas, the meat
shall be roasted instead of consumed, and be enjoyed
by himself instead of by the gods. All this is cer
tainly better than being burnt himself, and is cheaply
purchased by submission to a little holy water, —
itself not impossibly, say the missionaries, derived
from Mimir's Well.
Isengrimm's nature is, in fact, part of this uni
verse, and it is not easy to cheat the laws that play
through him. We see the pebble falling to the
earth ; we do not see the earth moving in due pro
portion to meet the pebble. Yet move it does ; and
though ancient history reports only how the religion
of the North was lost in Christianity, the history
that is yet to be written Will show that it conquered
only to be conquered. " She that liveth in luxury
is dead while she liveth." The Church filled the
North with monasteries, universities, cathedrals ;
but the only effective voices obtained from them in
the end have been those of the descendants of Isen
grimm, — the voices of Luther and Knox, of Goethe
and Grimm, of Bauer and Strauss. These report
how his thoughts are still ever to the woodward;

84 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
and though there his old deities linger only as
shrunken into gnomes and pixies, or the ghastly
procession of the Wild Huntsman, or have perished
altogether, yet they pass away only to rise again
under the wand of Science, which is now Isen
grimm's religion. In the fair laws of that Nature
which he has never ceased in his heart to adore,
Odin and Thor, Baldur and Freyja, shine again
from their niches, and Bertha returns to befriend
mankind. Christianity fulfilled in the North the prophecy
of the Edda : — Surtur from the South wends
With seething fire ;
The falchion of the mighty one,
A sun-light flameth.
Mountains together dash,
Giants headlong rush,
Men tread the paths to Hell,
And Heaven in twain is rent.
But Science shall no less surely fulfil the rest of
the prophecy ; for, amid Surtur's conflagration,
Lif and Lifthrasir
Shall keep themselves hid
In Hodmimir's forest ;
The dew of the dawn
Shall serve them for food,
And from them spring the races.
Who can mistake the tone of the authentic voices
of Anglo-Saxon civilisation to the Theology which

ISENGRIMM. 85

still stands declaring that all who do not accept it
shall without doubt perish everlastingly ?
" Depart! " cries the human Conscience. " Your
creed refers to benighted eras when men believed
that evil and sin were the mere whims of a Supreme
Being, like the most frivolous among themselves;
one whose mere word could make the eating of an
apple a deadlier sin than murder : it belongs not to
a day when the highest voice in every soul declares
the eternal laws, which God himself dare not
violate." " Depart ! " cries Common Sense. " Your mira
cles and legends belong to an age when men could
not see a lunatic without fancying a devil was in
him, or a meteor without believing it the arrow of
a god : it has no part or lot in a generation to which
sciences are revealing the laws of cause and effect."
" Depart ! " cry the Senses. " Your story of a
blighted and ruined world may do for Syrian deserts,
or for monks and nuns who have buried themselves
in unillumined cloisters ; but on the green slopes of
Western Europe, and amid its cheerful populations,
every flower, every singing bird, proves it a prodigy
of falsehood ; and every happy home, with its loving
mother and bright-eyed child, every honest man, is
a contradiction to your wild superstition of the fall
and the depravity of human nature."
" Depart ! " cries the Democracy of the West.
" Your despotic deity, with his hell for all who do

86 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
not glorify him enough, and sugar-plum heaven
for his flatterers, is an idol copied from some bar
baric king among his courtiers, with his racks and
his patronages' beside him : it has no place in nations
where rulers are as much subject to the laws as the
people, for whom, and not for princes, laws are
established ; and where the poorest cannot be pun
ished but under codes that all must make and all
obey." " Depart ! " cries the aspiring Religious Senti
ment. " To the earnest inquiry of liberated hearts
for truth, you have been proved the false reply;
now you stand in the light : there stationed across
the path, mocking all knowledge, browbeating every
brave seeker for truth, frightening the young with
your bogies, flattening the heads of babes to make
their brains into your own image and likeness,
you are the enemies of all the great tendencies and
ideals of this age, which, but for you, could even
now perhaps attain the true faith and build the
genuine shrine for which the Spirit of Man weeps
and watches."
Thus, in chorus, rise all noble voices. As the
fires of Smithfield have made way for the Meat
Market, so, after them, have the flames of God's
eternal Smithfield faded out of the marts and daily
life of the people. There is not a man or woman
in London whose practice accords with a belief in
the promises and threats of the Christian creed.

ISENGRIMM. 87

How would it affect that man at his work, or in the
theatre, if he believed that his child at home were
in remote danger of being burnt for even five
minutes ? The man who should offer his cheek to
the smiter, his cloak to the robber, — who should not
resist evil, but let scoundrelism have its way, — or the
man who should take no thought for the morrow, — is
not the kind of man anyone wishes his son to be.
Who is it that sells all he has and gives to the poor?
Well enough, all this, for those who look for the
swift destruction of the world, and are laying up
treasures for a kingdom coming out of the sky ; but
not for sane men, who eat the earth and find it
sweet, and know that it will survive, as it has in
the past, the advent and departure of many celestial
kingdoms. England is the Cemetery of Religions :
Druidism, Odinism, Romanism, came from afar to
find their graves here ; and behold the feet of them
which have buried those religions are at the door,
and shall carry out also that which remains to
frighten fools and make hypocrites of the able,
moulding no heart to simplicity and grandeur.

VI

ZAUBERPFEIFE.

By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night,
and travailed through a Region of smooth or idle Dreams, our His
tory now arrives on the Confines, where daylight and truth meet us
with t>. clear dawn, representing to our view, though at far distance,
true colours and shapes. Milton.
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds :
At which the universal host up sent
A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond
"Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night. Milton.

ZAUBERPFEIFE.

URING the famous trial of Saurin v. Star
and Kennedy, I went to watch the case in
the interest of a silent and unrecognised
party thereto. The incident of most interest to my
client was this : on the production of a scapular in
court, the Lord Chief Justice requested that it
might be handed up for his inspection, confessing
that he " did not know what a scapular was." Has
it come to this ?
Running through the European mythology one
finds, in many variations, the legend of the magic
music to whose measure all must keep step. From
the falling of the walls of Jericho before the ram's
horn of Joshua, or the rising of those of Thebes to
the lyre of Orpheus, the old story passes to the
magic horn with which Roland, at Roncesvalles,
called his warriors from afar, or the flute by which,
as he reappeared in fairy romance, he freed his
lovely May-bird from the wicked enchantress.
Adopted by Christianity in Germany, we find the

92 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
magic pipe making the Jew dance among thorns
until his wickedness is punished. And in England
the same protean pipe is discovered sounding one of
the first notes of Protestantism. " A mery Geste
of the Frere and the Boye," first " emprynted at
London in Flete-streete, at the sygne of the Sonne,
by Wynkin de Worde," relates how the boy re
ceived, as one of three gifts, a pipe of magic power :
All that may the pipe here
Shall not themselfe stere,
But laugh and lepe about.
This original " Tom, Tom, the piper's son," did not
confine his cunning instrument to making cows and
milkmaids dance. He so wrought upon a Friar that
he capered until he lost
His cope and scapelary
And all his other wede.
Was this profane lad but Henry the Eighth in dis
guise? Was his pipe the bugle of Cromwell? What
ever it may have been in history that made the
English priest dance out of his cope and scapulary,
we know what to-day represents the magic pipe, to
whose sound all must move, and even mountains
open, as they did before the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
It is the steam-whistle. This it is to whose shrill
remorseless note the age goes burrowing, tunnelling,
bridging oceans, soaring over Alps and Rocky

ZAUBERPFEIFE. 93

Mountains. The great steam-shuttles weave races
and nations together. Can a people who travel by
steamships fall back to swimming on a log in their
religion? Men cannot, for any great length of
time, be content to pass six days of the week in
the Nineteenth Century, and recur to the means
and methods of the Year One on the seventh. The
Lord Chief Justice does not know what a scapular
is. Some successor of his will be equally at a loss
about my Lord Chief Justice's Wig. And the dance
must go on till scapular, wig, and surplice shall all
be found only in the Museum.
Sharp, startling, by no means pleasant to the ear,
is this steam-whistle, piercing through our quietest
hour, invading our religious repose, dispelling slum
ber. It is, at present, too close to us. Only in its
far echoes can we hear its softened tones; there
its notes are spiritualised to the sounds they must
bear to the ear of the future, when it shall be said,
Happy were they who dwelt near the fountains
of those strains that built our hundred-gated civi
lisation! Noises reach not so far as music. The
horns of Oberon, of Roland, called men to war and
dismay ; but the struggles have passed away, and
to us those horns bring only gentle and prophetic
strains. So pipe on, pitiless engineer! Assiduous thou
only to clear thy track, and bring certain bales and
freights safe to yonder mart; but even now, to

94 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
the wild echoes thou hast set flying, the very dust
marches into shapes of beauty. Above the bass of
Commerce is the clear tenor of Fraternity. Lo,
there is a music on the air, as of the breaking of
millions of chains ! From Italy, Russia, America,
Spain, the echoes return in the happy voices of
liberated hearts and homes. The dragons crawl
away to their caverns. This one generation, with
its vulgar steam-whistle, has witnessed the vanish
ing of more shadows from the earth, has seen more
men and women disenthralled, more rays of intel
lectual light shed abroad upon mankind, than any
ten generations which have preceded it ; and, ere it
ceases, that shrill signal shall swell to the trump
of the Last Judgment, bringing to the bar of Hu
manity every creed or institution of the earth.

VII.

CONTRIVANCES.

The Supreme Intelligible is to be apprehended with the flower of
the Intellect.
By devoting the illumined Intellect to piety you shall preserve
the changing forms of piety. Zoroaster.
Between us be truth ! Woe,
Oh, woe upon the lie ! It frees not the breast
Like the true-spoken word; it comforts not, but tortures
Him who devised it, and returns,
An arrow once let fly, God-repelled, back
On the bosom of the archer ! Goethe's Iphigenia.

CONTRIVANCES.

T is the wail of the Nineteenth Century that
one hears in Browning's Paracelsus ; most
of all in that
Sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride.
Over the sea the galleys bore the pilgrims seeking
the promised island where they should build their
shrines in peace. At last they are cast upon a rock.
They bring forth their statues, and build their
shrines, and sit together singing that their task is
done ; when, lo ! the gentle islanders from the spot
they were really seeking come in happy throngs to
tell them that their isles, with olive-groves and
temple-gates, are waiting for them and their shrines.
The pilgrims have awaked from their dream too
late. They see now how desolate is the rock which
has received their precious freight, but they say, —
Depart!
Our gifts, onoe given, must here abide.
Our work is done ; we have no heart
To mar our work.

98 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Cast, after its weary voyage over dark seas of
misgiving and doubt, on this desolate shore of dogma,
the human heart, in its pressing need of worship,
invested the bareness with its own illusions, and
raised thereon its holiest shrines. With the barren
myths and dogmas — lava-streams once, now cooled
to rock — sacred ideals and precious humanities have
become associated. Were it not so, not all the
bribes could avail to keep Christianity here one day
longer. To that old human heart, which it holds
accursed, it is indebted for what vitality it still pos
sesses, through the illusions softening its hard
outlines. My next visit was made to a small island in the
great sea of London, where were gathered a little
company of those who were trying to make the best
of the " first fault." Their lucid statues shone upon
the bare walls of a dismal room. It was Christmas-
eve. On the wall was that emblem so dear to
radicalism — the cross — made of evergreen, and be
neath it the legend : " Behold, I create all things
new." I pretty soon found that it was a Society of
Scholars established for the Contrivance of Means
to hold on to the Symbols of Christianity. Chief
among them was the noble brow and luminous eye
of the great preacher of London (not your popular
divine, orthodox reader, but an unpopular divine,
who preaches to a few scores of people only !), who,
in his conversation, dwelt much on the importance

CONTRIVANCES. 99

that Theists should not consent to be divorced from
the great religious heart and history of Christendom,
but that the continuity of our religious development
should be preserved.
Thereon a guest ventured to comment somewhat
after this wise :
It were well enough to devote our energies to
the preservation of the continuity of its religious
development to the race, were it in danger ; but the
reality of such continuity can no more be broken
than our political or physical continuity.
We do not call our diamonds coal, nor our
opals flint, though such they essentially are. Why
should our modern ideas be called Christian, ad
mitting they are simple crystallisations out of
that substance, and not rather combinations of many
religions ? So far as the fact itself is concerned,
it is no more a just statement to say that our
pure Theism is Christian because it was, perhaps,
necessarily preceded by a Christian training, than
to say that the American President is a King
because his office was modified from the English
throne. When words cease to be physiognomical, they
become masks. Many persons of religious and
political insight invest their ideas and schemes with
a Christian phraseology because of the prestige
which that phraseology has with the people whom
they desire to influence. But prestige is simply

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

prcestigium, deceit; and surely that is a dangerous
weapon for a true cause to use.
What did Paul gain for us by using the sacrificial
language ; or George Fox, by setting his inner light
under the textual bushel ; or Swedenborg, by hiding
his gold in scriptural ore? They gained stupid
converts to whom they had no right, and whose low
ideas gained new leases of life through the vitality
of the new ideas about which they gathered only to
petrify them.
If the swift and the lame are to walk together,
the pace must be that of the lame. Every radical
ism has been gradually pressed into the service of
a false conservatism by the failure of idealists to
remember this fact.
The rationalist who uses the Christian name
cannot with his single voice drown the voices of the
centuries which have affixed to that name the sense
which it bears for the common people. And though
he may thereby win a temporary, though purely
physical, advantage for some idea or cause, he will
surely find in the end that he has been unravelling
with one hand what he has been weaving with the
other. The phraseology used to-day in the interest
of progress cannot be denied to-morrow when it is
pressed into the service of reaction. From the same
pages which just now furnished the Reformer with
the Golden Rule, will be brought for Brigham Young
the examples of polygamy, and for the Pope texts

CONTRIVANCES.

favourable to celibacy. If Christ's words are good
to be hurled against formalism, they are no less
good to fill the air with good and evil spirits for
the Spiritists. Jesus helped to harbour the fugitive
slave in New England; Paul returned him to his
master in Ohio.
The continuity alone worth having is that which
belongs to the very protoplasm, so to speak, of the
moral nature, whose value and vitality depend on
the completeness of its transformations. The transi
tional is always weak and ugly. Nature is glad to
bury, almost beyond the skill of the 'palaeontologist
to discover them, the few links needed between her
types. For the same reason we see around us
Quakerism, Unitarianism, Swedenborgianism, and
Christian Socialism, sinking in chronic decline,
though each represents some fragmentary trait of
the higher religious type. They are the vestiges of
advanced minds who marched through the world
with averted faces, seeking to draw the past forms
with them.
Surely, if there is one thing amply provided for
in this world, quite able to spare the superservice-
able aid of reformers, it is the religious " continuity "
of our race. In the proportion that innovations
affect things long held to be vital, the conservatism
of society becomes stony. A new medical system,
involving health and life, has far more to encounter
than a new plough. And when a new religious

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

idea, affecting interests of an eternal nature, is ad
vanced, a cross in one age, a faggot in another, and
anathemas always, are the first natural replies to it.
The minds tending to abstract modes of thought
are rare enough to warrant the concentration of their
force upon the truth they see. For one pushing in
the new direction, there are sure to be ten thousand
pulling the other ; and, were the mere formal con
tinuity insisted upon of even real value, it is never
in danger from insufficient advocacy.
But the conservatism which alone is healthy is
that which chiefly works to preserve the essential
by means of the modifications necessary to adjust it
to inevitable changes of social and moral conditions.
No animal, it is shown, has any trait which is
not now, or has not at some period been, of
vital importance to it. Similarly we may conclude
that every religious form or rite was once real, every
watchword of conservatism was once the watchword
of radicalism, all things old were once new. The
Litany, idly repeated by happy-hearted youth, who
yesterday were at croquet and cricket, was the out
burst of stricken hearts amid convulsions of nature,
war, plague, and famine: uttered now, it is the
mummy of a revival, set up where a real one is
impossible. The first silent Quaker meeting was
accidental ; the emotion of that hour is vainly sought
for by the formal imitations of its silence. And so
the rantings, shoutings, love-feasts, communions,

CONTRIVANCES.

103

baptisms, are attempts to recover the ecstasies of
shining moments by copying the superficial inci
dents that attended them, — attempts as absurd as
the famous fidelity with which the Chinese manu
facturers imitated the tea-set they were required to
replace, even to the extent of preserving all the
cracks and flaws of the originals. By this fatal
following of the letter, the prophets of the past are
made to conspire against their own visions in the
present. The dogma of a Trinity was, in its origin,
the petrifaction of elements devised by bold free
thinkers in their advance from polytheism to mono
theism : as held over the world now, it is Plato and
Philo forced to impose a fetter upon their own
brother-spirits who to-day would fulfil their aims.
Religious history thus presents a series of adaptations,
each in its day an innovation, but for which the de
velopment of the moral sentiment would have been
arrested. That which calls itself conservatism ad
heres to forms that must become fossil, whereas any
true conservatism must rescue the essence by trans
ferring it to forms which have their life yet to live.
Mere impenetrability is not conservatism.
In an old town I read on an ancient tablet the
eulogium upon a public-spirited citizen who had
built in the centre of it a substantial market-house ;
and near it was another in commemoration of a
citizen who had removed the same when, in the
course of the town's growth, it had become an

104

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

obstacle, — replacing it with a handsome square.
Ah, could the citizens only have looked with as
much common sense on the mouldy church, with
its mouldier creed, standing near !

VIII.

CHRISTIAN IDEALISM.

To what religion do I belong? To none that thou mightst
name. And wherefore to none ? For Eehgion's sake. Schiller.
Never did sculptor's dream unfold
A form which marble doth not hold
In its white block. Michel Anoelo Btjonarotti

CHRISTIAN IDEALISM.

CONSTITUENCY will create its own
representatives. After ages clamorous for
philosophical supporters of the existing
creed, there is no reason to question the sincerity
of those thinkers who believe that, along with the
virtues and graces enshrined by the earnest and
ignorant people under the gloomy roof of Christian
dogma, there may be set up also the pure ideals
of Reason and Religion. Difficult as some find it to
see anything but casuistry in the attempt of the
Broad Church to uphold the Thirty-nine Articles
with one hand, and the facts of Science with the
other, one need not doubt that eminent Liberal
Christians have convinced themselves that Chris
tianity, rightly interpreted, includes the highest
modern ideas of religion and philanthropy. The
eye is the most cunning of painters, and, as Words
worth says, brings to land and sea a light that never
was upon them. There is no object that cannot be
transfigured in the light of pious sentiment. For
ages the serpent was supplicated and worshipped by

108 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Turanian tribes, through fear of it ; but when the
Serpent-God comes in contact with the higher
Jahvistic or Astral religions, which declare it
accursed, and bid it crawl on its belly in the dust
for ever, does it obey? Nay, it is caught up by
the higher faith; it climbs on the staff of Moses, of
JEsculapius, of Mercury ; its spots are raised to typify
the adorable stars of heaven, its coil is the circle of
eternity, its curve is the tracery of the rainbow.
The sacrifice of men to the king-serpent in the
realm of Dahomey is far removed from the saying of
the Hindu Scripture: "Justice is so dear to the
heart of Nature, that if in the last day one atom of
Injustice should be found, the Universe would
shrivel like a snake-skin to cast it off for ever."
The distance between the deadly reptile in the dust,
and " the serpent that is lifted up," is not more vast
than that between the Cross that leads Constantine
and that which fills the eye of Channing.
What worshipful ideal has not the ingenious
mind of man managed to stuff into the onion, —
with its layers repeating in miniature the planetary
envelopes of Chaldaean astronomy, — and manifold
other things intrinsically mean, which it found
representing some crude notion or ignorant fear of
savage tribes ! The advancing religion begins with
attempting to exterminate that which it finds, but
generally ends by compromising with it. It breathes
a new life through existing forms.

CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 109
The result of this process is, that whatever now
chooses to call itself Christianity will be found only
some chapter in the intellectual and moral history of
the race. One age exaggerated personal details
concerning Jesus ; another petrified his tropes into
dogmas: each finds in his teachings an alphabet
ready to spell the sentence desired of it ; and each
interpreter, fired with the spirit of his age, feels
himself a crusader rescuing the Holy Faith from in
fidel corruptions. Here is our mystic of to-day, for
example, who finds all the Nineteenth Century
covered by Christ. He has suffered under Alex
andria, and been buried under Rome ; now shall he
rise as an Englishman, an American. " Justifica
tion by faith is honesty in trade," cries the radical ;
" and regeneration is Socialism." " I am deter
mined," cries the abolitionist, "to know nothing
among you but the black man and him enslaved."
" Every supper must be the Lord's supper," says
the dietetic apostle. And similarly the birth from
a virgin, baptism, and all the mysteries, are made to
do duty on the teeming platforms.
In an old, small, dismal room, I heard one
haranguing his slender auditory in this fashion :
" A measuring-worm lifting itself upward, then
prone upon the earth; a serpent, star-spotted,
flower-spotted, slipping from one skin to another,
yet ever surrounding the earth ; the climbing, fall
ing sea; — by such types have mankind, in many

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

lands and ages, expressed their perception of the
peristaltic movement of the universe. Man looks up
to the wondrous heavens, and awe, the mother of
worship, is born within him : the needs of earth drag
him back again, and the lowest objects are adored.
From materialistic chaos, and the supplication of
deadly reptiles, inspired by dread, comes the rebound
to astronomic religion. From the fatal oppression of
the stars, which could look pitilessly down on adoring
task-masters and groaning bondsmen, the eye turns
earthward again. Out of the silent mythologie
heavens one star alone shines for the wise men,
the star moving westward, to disappear there where
its glory is born on the earth ; and e Glory to God
in the highest' begins to mean good will to men.
The poets of an era, they are the sons of the
morning, theirs is the angel-chorus; not from the
legends of apostles, but from the full hearts that
soar into song, comes the grandeur of a people
turning from Cassar on his throne to a peasant
on his ass. This man, then, — the carpenter's son,
come of our meanest village, without place to lay
his head, — hath the truth in his heart, palpable to
him as to Caasar his sceptre; he, in his loneliness
and poverty, is the favourite and son of God ! Who
is he that overcometh the world, but he that can
pierce through its glittering shows, and see this
Nazarene peasant to be the son of God? From
that moment the old heavens begin to fade ; on the

CHRISTIAN IDEALISM.

seer's eye shines already the new heaven, to whose
every tint the new earth must respond. The pro
cession of growths on earth must follow the proces
sion of seasons in the sky. A new firmament of
ideas vaults above man, and each must trace itself
on the sod of human life.
" ' There is nothing new under the sun,' said
the sage. ' Behold, I make all things new,' said the
seer. A thousand revolutions germinated when the
people knelt before a right and true, and a poor, man.
He was born amid the wild winter, said the poets ;
his infant head was laid low amid the beasts of the
stall : his cause must struggle with the hostile ele
ments of an icy conservatism ; its helpless infancy
must be confided to donkeys, who shall mingle
many a bray with this new gospel. All the old
fables about Jahve, Zeus, and the rest, shall
swathe this babe. Nevertheless, to us this child is
born; where he enters idols shall fall, oracles be
struck dumb, and all the signs of the heavens hold
themselves honoured in weaving an aureole about
the brow of a Man. This babe shall consecrate
every babe ; this mechanic shall establish the dig
nity of labour ; this pauper shall liberate slaves and
strike off the burdens of the poor.
" Slowly, however, and not without another
backward swing of the pendulum. Not easily do
Kings and priests surrender their power, though
they may be quite willing to baptise it in names

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

beloved of the people. What cares your priest
whether the oracle that overpowers the common
sense he fears be named Delphos, Church, Pope, or
Bible ? What cares the King whether he rule by
authority of Jupiter or of Jesus, so that the masses
look upon his Kingdom with awe, as identical with
the Kingdom of God ? Can High-Priest or ambi
tious monarch afford to waste all this enthusiasm
about one Jesus of Nazareth? The Scribes and
Pharisees hate him, but the people tread one upon
another to see and hear him. Pilate knows well
where his Roman master's interests lie, and steadily
sets himself to save Jesus — as some think, did save
him, cheating the cross of its victim. The French
usurper to-day affixes the seal of his dynasty to the
poor man's title to his cot, and says : ' If I fall, your
title falls with me.' The conqueror of the past in
vested his tenure with a name that had become the
treasure of the poor. The priesthoods hasten to
array their gods in Christian garb, and twine the
superstitions by which they exist about the Cross.
And now, on the banner floating from palace and
temple, there is a cross, with ' Hoc signo vinces' be
neath it; a cross, however, nearly resembling the
sword by which Christianity was overcome while it
conquered, to be transmitted to this day as the most
powerful defender of every wrong against which
Jesus hurled his great heart. The last of the Caesars
held the stirrup of a Christian Pontiff; so far had

CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 1 1 3
that religion, which Tacitus found so despicable,
triumphed. But the emperor knew his menial ser
vice would be fully paid. These Western Nations
have coined the hearts' blood of many generations
to pay for that fatal triumph.
" When the cross, from being a slave's gallows,
shone out in the sky as the imperial symbol of Con
stantine, it marked the reaction of the world from
the religion represented in the lowliness and simple
humanity of the Nazarene peasant. Skyward again
went the mind of man, and saw Christ there blend
ing with the constellations of gods and goddesses,
who also, no doubt, had been toiling and suffering
men and women, raised now into barren abstractions
by a similar force. And when Christianity turned
from the earth and man, whom it had consecrated, to
attend to God and his heavens, the ancient deities
mounted to their niches in its temple, not, however,
as of old, in their warm living and life-giving forms,
— in those forms they now haunted the earth as
demons, — but as a celestial court, in cold apotheosis.^
Not duty to man, who needed it, but to God, who
needed it not ; not fidelity to the world, but con
tempt and hatred of it; not human virtue, but rites
and prayers, recounting to God the items of his
magnificence ; not mercy, but sacrifice, in which
reason and human affection replaced as victims the
roasted flesh he was formerly thought to enjoy; not
actual men, but fictitious angels ;— these became
H

1 14 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
the insignia of the poor wayside preacher of justice,
love, and peace. To seek his sepulchre over the
slaughtered bodies of his brothers ; to adore him as
God, and kill all who did not ; to invoke him as a
deity one day of the week, and crucify him as a
man through the rest: so did the dead Jesus
reenthrone every wrong against which the living
Jesus had protested. To a Pope willing to limit the
real Christ to another planet altogether, while in
vesting every scheme of selfishness and ambition
with the sanctity of his name, why should not a
Ca?sar be stirrup-holder ?
" Caesar still lives ; but under him, as before,
Jesus suffers. Once more is he buried in the rich
man's tomb. Will he rise again to be, as at first,
the lowly friend of man ?"
None ventured an answer. But as I went away
I met a child astride a stick horse, beguiling himself
with the pretence that he was carried by that which
he carried; and the question, "Will Christ rise
,again?" seemed to me to depend upon another: how
long will endure the religious infancy of the world,
which, after Jesus has been made to follow and
reflect every ascent and descent of society for fifty
generations, still holds the illusion that he carries,
but is not carried ?

IX.

THE CROSS.

I desire that whatever merits I may have gained by good works
may fall upon other people. May I be born again with them in the
heaven of the blessed, be admitted" to the family of Mi-le, and serve
the Buddha of the Future ! Hiouen-thsang.

Firmian merely replied: "More than one Saviour has already
died for the earth and man ; and I am convinced that Christ will one
day take many pious human beings by the hand, and say to them :
' Ye, too, have suffered under Pilates.' " Jean Paul Richter.

Far easier to condemn his injurers,
Than for the tongue to reach his smallest worth.
Michel Angelo Btjonabotti.

THE CROSS.
jlEARLY all the incidents of my pilgrimage
were connected with places close around
my London home. Once, however, I
found myself at the ancient convent of Troitska
(Trinity), in Russia. Among other things which I
saw there was a little plate of agate, set with costly
jewels, bearing on it a picture of the Cross, with a
human figure upon it, and a kneeling monk with
clasped hands stretched out toward it. All this it
was declared was in the grain of the agate when it
was found in its quarry. As the work of Nature it
had been adored and adorned by the Metropolitan
Plato, and by him bequeathed to the convent. So
delicately were the figures inwrought with the
crystal, that it seemed almost as marvellous as a
work of art as it could be if considered a natural
production. And though I was forced to conclude
that it was an ingenious instance of the pious frauds
one meets at every step in priest-ridden countries,
the fact was still before me that the Cross must

n8 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
have been very deep in human nature before any
artist could have laboured so hard to represent it as
dear to physical nature. Indeed, no other symbol
reaches so far back in the religious history of the
race. Jesus spoke to those around him of bearing
the Cross, long before he saw it raised on his own
path; and though some have fancied that he in
using, and his disciples in comprehending, the
phrase, foresaw the end awaiting him, there is
reason to believe that it came to him as a surprise
and a terror, and that he felt as if God had forsaken
him because he was not rescued from it. The truth
is, it was a symbol in many lands long before it was
adopted by Christianity.
We read of many ancient and modern religions,
of gods many and lords many, all of them sur
rounded with fables and symbols ; and at first sight
it seems amazing that the human mind could invent
so many. But when they come to be sifted by
Comparative Mythology, we are rather astonished
to find there are so few. The myths of the New
Testament are repetitions of those of the Old,
mingled with those of Greece ; and the mythology
of Greece is mainly a modification of that of Egypt.
But most of these, again, had previously done duty
in Chaldaaa, Arabia, and Persia. There is but
one religion, as there is but one animal. Super
stition has an old stock of sacred legends, and Moses,
Zoroaster, Gautama, Jesus, have been successively

THE CROSS.

dressed from the same old wardrobe ; until now, when
they are threadbare, we can trace every shred of them
back to the first crude speculations with which man
looked out upon the mystery above and around him.
Of all the symbols, the most universal was the
Cross. The gods, said Plato, have built this uni
verse after the sign of the Cross. One finds the
Cross raised on old Druidical stones in Brittany,
with peasants kneeling around. Such pedestals
have been selected by priests to indicate the triumph
of Christ over paganism ; but some, at least, of the
ancient temples where they stand are themselves
cruciform, and the Christian Cross only a later leaf
out of that old stem.
It has had many meanings. It has had a serpent
twined about it, and a man nailed on it. It has sig
nified generation in one age, and regeneration in
another. Archaeology may find some of the many
languages it has spoken ; but it is probable that the
interpretation which the human heart has gradually
fixed upon it is the foundation of all crosses, and
that we may now accept it as a symbol of sacrifice,
whose significance will grow as the religious senti
ment grows.
In ordinary times it is difficult for us to appre
ciate the power of a symbol. Poets and orators
have told us how long the old British flag has borne
the battle and the breeze: on that symbol every
line has been traced by some epoch, and the heroic

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

achievements of centuries are summed up in its
devices. Yet we pass it commonly without notice.
But let a war break out between England and some
foreign country to-day, and to-morrow the old flag
would float out from a million houses like blossoms
in Spring. Faces would flush and eyes grow moist
as they saw it borne along the streets by determined
men. A heat like that of which it was born would
bring out its ancient inscriptions. And so, when
wrong seeks again to crucify right, a holy light
gathers around the old banner of religious devotion.
When John Brown, of Harper's Ferry, was about
to be hung for his armed attack on Slavery in Vir
ginia, all saw a new shape in the gallows erected
for him, from the negro preacher, who said to
his swarthy hearers, " John Brown is your Saviour ;
he dies for you; his blood will redeem you," —
up to Emerson, who said, " If he shall die on the
gallows, he will make it glorious like a Cross;"
and Victor Hugo, who drew a weird picture of the
hanging man, and wrote under it, Ecce ! The story
of one struggling cause is the story of all. The
Smithfield stake, the thumbscrew, the Virginian
gallows, the social ostracism of a heretic, — they are
all crosses, whatever the actual shape they take.
Dr. Rowland Williams said to English Chris
tians : " You will never convert the Hindoos to the
Trinity, or to our form of Christianity, any more
than you can grow our flowers in their soil or cli-

THE CROSS.

mate ; you can only christianise them by showing
that our religion is a higher development of what
their religion teaches — justice and self-denial." In
a country whose priests condemned Dr. Williams
for so saying, and crucified, to the best of their
ability, the man who dared be a Bishop after
writing in the same book with him, we can hardly
hope that his admonition will produce any effect ;
we may look rather for a continuance of the
missionary effort which returns the cross to the
purposes it served while as yet it was a Roman
gibbet, and magnifies Jesus as the industrious captain
of gunboats, ready to fire on all villages which will
not accept him. But the poor pagans cannot so long
bear the cross laid upon them by Christendom with
out discerning some of its deeper meanings. The first
Roman Catholic missionaries who tried to plant their
Church in Japan were slain. It was made a criminal
offence to name the name of Christ in Japan. But
lately a Japanese man cautiously unfolded from his
garment one of their old crosses, and showed it to
an American officer in that region, saying it had been
handed down as a precious heirloom in his family.
He knew no Christian .or Catholic dogma, but only
that those who cherished that cross had one by one
suffered and died for it. So much alone had power
to survive. Many errors are the distorted shadows of truths.
So much is true even of vicarious sacrifice, that one

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

thing yields its life to feed the life of another: the
corn of wheat is victim of the full ear; the mother
is consumed before her babe, as by a flame of devo
tion. It is true, also, that Jesus, like every martyr,
bears on his cross the sins of us all. The spirit that
nailed him there is the spirit which animates every
rejection of truth, or persecution of truth's mes
sengers. The blood of Abel comes upon every
generation that partakes the spirit of Cain.
But sacrifice — a word meaning simply a religious
act — has been perverted to mean the parting with
some interest to please God. Even educated people
speak of the virtues of self-sacrifice, as if it were
other than a relic of human sacrifice. Yet even in
the days of human sacrifice there was rarely a
thought of offering up the " self" to the god ; rather
it was the soul parting with flesh to attain a higher
joy. The hope of rejoining her husband made the
flame of his pyre cool to the Indian widow's heart.
It is unworthy of many who use the phrase to speak
of the preference of rectitude to animalism, or of
justice to wealth, as the sacrifice of self. 'Tis the
realisation of self. The yielding of a lower for a
higher pleasure is the epicurean art of him who will
feast on the dainties of existence. The monkish
legend that the Cross of Christ was made of the
wood of Eden's Tree of Life has more truth in it.
Whether the Cross were originally a rudely-desio-ned
tree, or whether a phallic symbol, it meant fruit

THE CROSS. 123

and birth, and only such labours and pangs as attend
these ; and so far as it is rescued from the Christian
superstition, which has degraded it to the altar
of a human sacrifice, it will mean man bearing
his appointed fruit, — finding therein his supremest
self. The Cross has its roots deeper in nature than, the
priests of Troitska have found, and its fruit is
perennial. The light of sacred story does indeed,
as says the hymn, gather around it. As out of the
old heaven of stars worshipped by ChaldEean shep
herds one star came to point the way to a holier fire
kindled on earth, out of the fading constellations of
Christian mythology the Cross will still stand to
guide the pilgrim. There are more languages upon
it than Pilate ever inscribed; it has its word for
every age or land, and for every conflict between
what is base and what is noble without and within
us. The old proverbs about it are sufficiently
translatable. Every Cross hath its inscription. The
Cross will put to flight any demon. Crosses are
ladders to heaven. No cross, no crown.
For this symbol denotes a thing done for the
rio-ht. It is action alone that supplies to sentiment
the sun and rain without which it must remain
barren. And where right and true action is, there
shines the sign which illuminates all true Scriptures.
Comte has been counted insane when he named his
servant-woman in his Calendar of Saints ; but it

124 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
may have been done in his sanest moment. The
radiance of all suns is in the minutest sunbeam ;
the humblest duty done has God at its core.
So returned I from Troitska to London, passing
many old crosses on the way, — memorial crosses,
market crosses, spire-crosses. They were but sha
dowy fingers pointing to others meekly borne by
exiles and heretics in far-off islands and obscure
homes. These I sought out, and some said of their
cross, It is a thorny stem, but bears roses. But
most of them knew not of any cross. They were
like the Puritan Pilgrims, who could not endure
the sight of any church cross, because the bleak
shore and Arctic sky of New England shaped one
too real to be represented by that which had be
come the symbol of crucifiers rather than of the
crucified. So saith the pilgrim to each who has found- his
post in the conflict, to each who has caught some
gleam of the ideal shining over his earthly lot, —
Name not thy cross, but bear it, and it will bear
thee.

VIA CRUCIS.

Quosque patiere, bone Jesu !
Judsei te semel, ego ssepius crucifixi ;
Hli in Asia, ego in Britannia,
Gallia, Germania.
Bone Jesu, miserere mei et Judaeorum !
Sir Thomas Browne.

VIA CRUCIS.

RE human sacrifices still offered to idols in
England ?
What is an idol ? It is anything set
up as having an authority independent of reason
and conscience, or requiring a service not primarily
based on considerations of human welfare. It need
not be a visible image. Let it command the action
without persuading the reason, let the service paid
it be for its own majesty, in however slight a degree,
and not purely for the well-being of man : it is an
idol — be it book, creed, or holy day. He who
conceives of a deity governing not entirely for the
governed, or one who cares whether men obey or
disobey, believe or deny his existence, for his own
sake, conceives of an idol.
Every idol has human sacrifices offered to it.
An idol may be recognised by this — that a service
is paid it because claimed; such service, whether
it prove in some respects advantageous to man or
not, involving a sacrifice of so much freedom and of

128 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
so much devotion to humanity. Those sacrificed
need not be bound and slaughtered bodily on an
altar; the principle is in action where the least
thing which conscience and common sense would
prescribe, were there no God at all, for the develop
ment or happiness of mankind, is set aside for the
glory, or at the demand, of a deity. The Nestorian
Christians of the mountain districts will kill a
man found travelling on Sunday ; but if the health
of London labourers, or their mental improvement,
be subordinated to the religious observance of the
same day, they are just as really sacrificed. The
Skopsis of Russia mutilate themselves in obedience
to Christ's unmistakable commendation of those
"who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom
of heaven's sake;" but if, in obedience to a supposed
divine authority, a man believes anything that, upon
human statement, he would reject as incredible, he
has mutilated himself far more seriously than the
Russian fanatic : he has sacrificed his reason. Health,
intellect, instinct, culture, happiness, — if these be
sacrificed, how can it be said there is no human
sacrifice ?
On Good Friday, I went with a learned Mus
sulman to follow about the London Docks a clergy
man celebrating the " Stations of the Cross." The
Cross, in black, was by the gates, on the walls,
over the altar; to it the priests and their people
knelt, crossing themselves. Some visitors seemed

VIA CRUCIS. 129

astonished — not so my friend from Calcutta. He
was already familiar with symbols covering temple
walls. And when the procession started to follow
the veiled cross through the streets, he needed not
to draw upon his oriental imagination to see how
slight an increase of thickness in the veil was re
quired to make it a procession of Brahmins follow
ing the goddess Durgha with hymns ; or of Moham
medans following with funereal march the image of
Hoosain, the Prophet's grandson, slain by the man
whose guest he was.
Through many wretched streets we passed. By
our sides thronged the ragged, the diseased, the
miserable ; women of the street, caricaturing the
hymns with loud screaming ; scoffing men and boys.
Many long hymns about "Jesu" were sung: over
and again the clergyman, in his quaint skull-cap
and monkish dress, told the story of the ancient
tragedy. At no time did Calvary excite so much
sympathy as the wailing of a wounded child near
one of the " Stations." The preacher preached
without feeling, the priests sang with hollow voices,
and no one along this Way of the Cross seemed at
any time moved, save one woman who, in a moment
of enthusiasm, hurled a large bowl at the procession,
with a wild malediction on " the Puseyites." The
bowl struck pretty sharply the hand that now
records the incident; but the priest claimed the
martyrdom of the malediction, and said at the next

130 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Station, " Do you fear being called a Puseyite ? —
we must bear our Cross !"
The Mussulman, as I have intimated, did not
find the affair very novel, and his patience gave
way; but before he left me, on the way to the
Fourth Station, he inquired particularly into the
meaning of Good Friday, and why it was celebrated
in all the churches ; and I was constrained to tell
him that on that day, according to the Christian
religion, a great human sacrifice was offered up to
appease the offended majesty of God. The Cross
was an altar, the bleeding man upon it was there
by divine requirement, in atonement for the sins of
the world. And are the people willing to accept
salvation through the death of a good man ? Even so.
But is this the view of the masses of Christians, or
only of a few eccentric religionists? Alas, it is
only the eccentric few who do not believe it ! And
how far does this idea affect the social and moral
life of the people ? It penetrates every vein of our
civilisation ; there is no man, woman, or child in
this kingdom who is not in some way and degree —
morally, mentally, physically, or politically — sacri
ficed to the God who, as this people believes, was
only restrained from sending us all to eternal
tortures by his satisfaction through that human
sacrifice. This Cross which attracted two or three hundred
curious followers in the East of London was only

VIA CRUCIS. 131

the shadow of the actual one borne through this land
day by day, and year by year. Could this people
only have had for that one day the eye of the wor
shipper of Allah, they would have found their
Good Friday a mirror, and in it beheld the fearful
face of the religion that is turning their heart to
stone. They would have left their clergy and their
choristers to pray and chant to empty pews, and
gathered like the weeping daughters of Jerusalem
at Trafalgar Square. It was there the crucified
peasant really stood that day, crying : " Is it no
thing to you, O all ye that pass by, that these my
brothers hunger unfed and shiver unclothed, and
that in the wretched dens they have left are pale
women and children with the nails of poverty and
disease piercing their hands and feet ? Spare your
sympathies for a cross and victim turned to dust
these many ages, and know that every coin that
goes to the honour of that victim, when it might
save these miserable ones, changes him from a friend
to a crucifier of men !"
Or the worshippers of the Churches, had they
possessed the Mussulman's eye, might have gathered
together in St. Bartholomew's Church, to see
twenty-five aged widows crouching on the floor to
pick up twenty-five sixpences. Long years ago a
wealthy lady bequeathed money, that on every
Good Friday twenty-five such widows should find
on her gravestone as many sixpences, to be theirs

132 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
if they could and would stoop for the same. The
lady's gravestone is now undiscoverable; but here
are the poor old women torturing their stiff joints
to get to the sixpences. "Why not," murmured
one or two present, — " why not give the poor crea
tures the sixpences without all that ado ?" Little
did such realise the revolutionary character of their
murmurs. The chemist tried to draw the birth
mark from his wife's cheek ; the birth-mark vanished
— the wife lay dead. The old custom in St. Bar
tholomew's may fall into desuetude ; but to abolish
it consistently were to touch the tenure of every
institution in England. What are all our charities,
our endowments, but the picking up of sixpences
from the gravestones of the dead ? What is our
education but the deciphering of literatures that are
but the mouldering epitaphs of other lands and
ages? What is our religion, what are these cele
brations of Good Friday, but a crouching of human
beings, with painful humiliations, to take from a
hero's grave the treasures he had earned? We are
ruled by dead men. Every acre of ground is fol
lowing the wills of those whose names are utterly
forgotten by the generations they are still able to
feed or starve. The purest reason or justice must
bow to the precedents of bleached crania. The
Constitution is the collective wisdom of the vast
Parliament of skeletons by which we are governed.
In Church and State the living generations are

VIA CRUCIS. 133

sacrificed to their ancestors. All of which was
sufficiently visible on Good Friday to every eye not
itself the product of the System ; and it is the true
Via Crucis around the world !
I was one of a horror-stricken company which
listened to the fearful story of an Indian family,
whose parents reared and cherished in their home a
crocodile, regarding it as a god. When the reptile
grew large enough, it devoured one of the children.
The parents, so far from thinking any the worse of
the beast, looked upon it as a favour to the child to
be so incorporated with their deity. Of course the
last penny of our company was at the service of
any missionary ready to go to the region where the
incident was said to have occurred.
But there are intelligent Indians in England
who might have read in the newspapers of April 9,
1870, the following: —
The "Peculiar People" again.— At the last Orsett Petty
Sessions, John Baker, a man in respectable circumstances, was
charged before the Revs. W. H. Richards, J. Windle, and J. Blom-
field, with having neglected to provide necessary medical aid for his
child, Jesse Baker, aged two years and eight months, who, it was
presumed, had been allowed to die without any medical assistance.
This is the fourth case of helpless children belonging to this sect,
now very numerous in Essex, having been allowed so to die within
the past few weeks. ,
Mr. A. H. Hunt, clerk to the Orsett Board of Guardians, attended
for the prosecution, and stated that the summonswas taken out by
the guardians, who considered it now their duty to take the matter
up, owing to several deaths having lately occurred, and prosecute
according to the powers given to them by a recent statute, 31st and

134 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
32nd Vic. c. 122, sec. 37, which enacts that where parents allow
their children to die without medical aid they shall be liable to six
months' imprisonment. This was the second child the defendant had
within the past few weeks allowed to die.
Mr. A. W. Mercer, surgeon, was next called, and his evidence
went to show that he was ordered by the Coroner to make a post
mortem examination of the body of another child belonging to the
defendant, and while performing the operation he saw the second
child now alluded to in the present case lying very ill. As the first
child had been allowed to die without medical assistance, he strongly
urged the mother and three other women to permit him to give the
child some medicine, as it was very dangerously ill ; but the mother
and the other women positively refused him permission to give the
child anything. He then advised them to put a plaster upon it and
give it stimulants, but that they also refused.
Ann Cunningham stated that she was one of the three sisters who
attended the child. It had every nourishment, but had no medicine.
Everything that was possible to do for it according to their religion
was done. The elders were sent for, and they laid hand on it, and
they anointed it with the holy oil.
That being the case for the prosecution, the magistrates asked
the defendant what he had to say to the charge.
The Defendant. — What I have to say is this : the Lord saved me
from my sins eleven years ago, and I now go according to the
Scripture, and follow Christ. In the days of Christ, just before
he departed, he said, " If I depart, I will send the Comforter unto
you ;" and it was that Srjirit which I received eleven years ago that
guided me to fulfil his commands in this case. The Word of God
tells me to pray, and that if any are sick, let him send for the elders
of the Church to anoint the sick with oil, and pray over him. This
is what" I believe in, and what I have done ; and if my child had not
been sick unto death, it would have recovered ; but as it did not
recover, it was the Lord's will that it should die. In the last chapter
of St. Mark, does it not say of them that believe, " In my name shall
they cast out devils; . . . they shall lay hands on the sick, and
they shall recover" ?
Here a number of brethren and sisters who were in the court shouted
out — " Yes, yes ; blessed be his name !" and other similar ejaculations-
The Chairman. — But there is nothing in that to tell you not to
send for a doctor.

VIA CRUCIS. 135

The Defendant. — There is no passage in the whole book where I
am told to send for a doctor. The command is, " Send for the elders
of the Church, and let them lay hands on him and anoint him with
oil." One of the elders of the Church, named John Butcher, was next
called, who stated that he was a wharfinger, and one of the elders ;
the child's mother sent for him, and he went and laid hands
upon it, prayed over it, and anointed it with oil, on several occa
sions. The Clerk. — What name do your denomination give themselves ?
Witness. — Just what the Bible says we are — " a chosen and a
peculiar people, holy unto the Lord." We are not ashamed of our
name. There were other elders sent for besides me. We had a
prayer-meeting in the room, and there was a lot of us there the night
the child died. We held the meeting from seven till nine.
The Chairman. — What would you do yourself if you had a leg
broken ? You would send for a medical man then, would you not ?
Witness.— Ii I live unto God, I shall not have a broken leg ; if I
do not, I might be liable to such a chastisement. God has promised
to take care of the righteous, and there have been no broken legs
amongst us.
After very voluminous evidence, the bench retired for consultation.
The Chairman, on returning, said they gave the defendant credit
for sincerity, hut they were bound to convict. Nevertheless, as it
was under a recent Act, not generally known, they would exercise a
power given to them to discharge him now on entering into his own
recognisances to come up for sentence when called upon. They
hoped such a case would not occur again.
The Defendant.— Well, I mean to go on exactly as I have done ;
and whether I break the law or not, I mean to follow Christ, and put
my trust in him. I bless God now for having taken my case up.
It is he that has come to my assistance now.
Here a number of the brethren and sisters shouted, " Yes, yes ;
praise him and trust in him."
The parties then left the court, evidently under the belief that the
defendant was a rescued martyr.
No doubt, if the reverend magistrates who heard
this case had been so inclined, they could have

136 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
strengthened the case of the Peculiar People. They
might, for instance, have reminded them of the
warning against physicians represented in the case
of King Asa : " In his disease he sought not to the
Lord, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with
his fathers." They might have remembered the
case of the woman who had an issue of blood, " and
had suffered many things of many physicians, and
had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered,
but rather grew worse," but who was healed by
touching the garment of Jesus. At any rate, they
must have known that the position taken up by the
parents was impregnably based upon the Bible, and
it is not likely they will ever be brought up to
receive sentence.
But can any honest man deny that the four
children thus slain before the Bible were any the
less victims to an idol than the Hindoo child de
voured by the crocodile-god of the Ganges ?
In the same newspaper which reports the trial
of the Peculiar People there is an account of a
great meeting held at St. James's Hall to advocate
religious education. It was attended by several
Dukes, several Earls and Lords, and by thirteen
Members of Parliament. The Chairman, an Earl,
said that " in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the
religion of the working man was simply what he
read in the Bible," and that what they demanded
was that "the Bible, and the teaching of the

VIA CRUCIS. 1 37
Bible, should be for the children of the Empire an
essential." What does the working man derive from the
Bible ? Not long ago a man named Mobbs was
executed for murdering a boy, from whom he had
received no provocation whatever. The entire
absence of any apparent motive for the deed led
the prisoner's counsel to put forward a plea of in
sanity. Before his execution, Mobbs made a con
fession, in which he traced his deed to a morbid
condition of mind produced by reading two things ;
one was a copy of the Illustrated Police News, with
a pictorial account of the Alton murder ; the other,
the story of Cain and Abel. This was the
food which fed the wild beast in Mobbs into fatal
strength. When the confession was published, there
was a great outcry against the Illustrated Police
News. That was to be expected :
The dog that's lame is much to blame.
The editor of the Police News said in his letter to
the Times : " If a picture representing the Alton
tragedy acted as an incentive to the commission of
crime, in an equal degree did the book to which the
prisoner alludes in 'the following passage: (I had a
book about Cain and Abel in my dinner-basket;
that book was given me by my grandfather just
before he died.'" Nevertheless, this editor, wincing
under public censure, promises to be more cautious

138 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
in future. But has any disseminator of the Bible
shown similar compunction ? Is not the Bible
Society as busy to-day as ever taking care that
wherever there is a Mobbs he shall have the story
of Cain and Abel in his dinner-basket ? Are not
Earls, Dukes, Lords, and Members of Parliament
— even such friends of the working man as Thomas
Hughes — declaring that " for the children of the
Empire an essential" shall be that they shall be
taught to read and regard as the Word of God a
book which contains stories so gross, sensual, and
cruel, that if they were contained in any other book
the police would make a raid upon the book-shop
where it was sold? The Judge who sentenced
Mobbs told him he was instigated to commit his
crime by the Devil. Mobbs, about to die, says one
instigator of his crime was the fourth chapter of
Genesis. But a legion of Mobbses studying
murder from the pages of the Bible cannot move
the Idol, in obedience to which we are taxed
to place the stories of Cain and Abel, Joseph and
Potiphar's wife, Lot and his daughters, Jael and
Sisera, David and Uriah, Solomon with his 700
wives and 300 concubines, and a hundred other
atrocities, into the hands of apprentices, prisoners,
and little boys and girls.
Alas for our children ! The stony Idol is un
moved by the accumulated evidence that the school
children ignore what is pure and beautiful in the

VIA CRUCIS. 139

Bible, — that being as far beyond their young expe
rience as Kant's metaphysics are beyond their intel
ligence, — and dwell upon the stories they can
comprehend. Millions of hearts and minds first
soiled by contact with these obscene pages are
offered by each generation as a holocaust to the
Idol of Christendom. We notice the more salient
instances, but the whole case can alone be appre
ciated if we remember that, where hearts fall before
temptations which others withstand, it implies a
secret moral decay at work beforehand. The
weakening of moral forces in human beings through
the perusal of the Bible in early life proceeds
during an age not easily subjected to scrutiny by
themselves or others; but no one who remembers
his or her school-days can fail to recall scandals of
a kind that have hardly names, much less reports in
detail, outside of that book. Is not this human
sacrifice ?
What has the Bible done for the people who,
as the Earl said, "in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred" find there their only religion? It has
been the text-book of the oppressor in every age.
It has murdered thousands of innocent people with
its sentence, " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to
live." It binds millions to-day under the tyrant's
foot with its commands : " Obey the magistrate ;"
"Obey them that have the rule over you, and
submit yourselves ;" " Resist not evil." In America,

140 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
slavery reigned for two generations from a throne
formed out of the Bible, which showed Jehovah
proclaiming a slave-code from Sinai, and Paul
aiding slave hunters, admonishing slaves, even if
they could be free, to prefer their chains, and fur
nishing the motto of the slave-driver, " Servants,
obey your masters." Abolitionism arose in America
contemporaneously with heresy; it was pioneered
by unbelievers in the authority of the Bible ; and
the last link to yield in the slave's chain was the
link forged by that book.
The world had to wait for a government founded
on the equality and freedom of mankind until such
infidels as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams
came into power; and when that government was
corrupted by the Mosaic and Patriarchal institution
of Slavery, four millions of negroes had to await
the rule of a President who early in life wrote an
essay advocating the religious opinions of Thomas
Paine, and who, when besought on the hustings to
deny a charge of infidelity brought against him,
said he "would die first," and admitted that he
was not a believer in Christianity. A friend of
President Lincoln stole and burnt his essay on
Infidelity (1835), but the world does not need it to
know that the Edict of Emancipation could not,
any more than the Declaration of Independence,
have been the work of a believer in the Bible. The
author of the Life of Jesus told me, as I walked

VIA CRUCIS.

141

with him on the banks of the Neckar, that he was
originally induced to write that work by the con
viction that Germany could never be free so long
as the people believed in Supernaturalism. A
people, he said, who have an authority acting
above, and not through, their faculties, are so far
intellectually paralysed. They are in the power of
an idol, and can be easily overawed by it ; when it
is held up, the common sense goes out of them, and
they will yield rights which no earthly power,
unaided by superstition, could extort from them.
How is it in England ? Are the faculties of the
people acting healthily ? The English people have
a love of truth ; yet even after the Convocation of
Bishops has been forced to admit that the English
version of the Bible contains thousands of errors of
translation, it is possible for eminent personages to
resist the correction of those errors by raising
fears that the place of the book in the popular
veneration may not survive any alteration of its
words ! The English people have a strong sense of
justice ; yet so paralysed is it in the presence of
the Bible, that they are ready to compel those
who believe that book to be one the worst possible
for children, to furnish money to distribute it
among their neighbours' children. Mr. Mill must
pay to have the children of the poor taught that
there is an eternal hell and devils; Sir Charles
Lyell circulates the view that the world was made

142 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
in six days; Professor Huxley is affirming to the
working classes the striking piece of palaeontology
that in the time of Balaam there was a talking ass !
Were there no idol in the case, would the English
people, at the end of so many centuries of struggle
for the rights of conscience, sacrifice those rights, so
far as they belong to the freethinking minority,
and force them to contribute to the dissemination of
what they hold to be great and dangerous error ?
I have told of the crocodile devouring the Hindoo
child, and of the four English children thrown by
their Christian parents into the jaws of death, and
these fearful child-sacrifices may seem very far from
our own homes. But there are sacrifices and
sacrifices, and there are few homes in Christendom
wherein, in some form or other, the children are
not victims of the Bible. To a royal sensualist,
called in that book the wisest of men, is attributed
the proverb, " Spare the rod and spoil the child."
That sentiment has been the cause of more cruelty to
childhood, wrong to human nature, and bad train
ing, — it has made more cowardly, deceitful, sneak
ing men and women, — than any other sentiment
ever uttered. Entering every school and every
home with the authority of a divine command,
the rod has appealed to the meanest motives, and
fostered every animalism. The child's will must be
broken. But why not break its back ? You would
make the child a facsimile of yourself; you will

VIA CRUCIS. 143

" bring down its spirit" to your own level, and teach
it that the evil of wrong is physical suffering, and
that the beauty of holiness is a sugar-plum ; and yet
perhaps you wonder that the world is so full of sly
and selfish people ! It is true, indeed, that some grow
to be noble and manly despite the rod, for broken
wills can sometimes knit like broken bones; but on
many faces that are mere ciphers appended to the
real figures of the world, — foreheads that are
but the graves of individual minds, — the wise are
reading the monition, Spare the child and spoil the
rod. To this dreary list of sacrifices offered up to
the Idol must be added the Bible itself. Invalu
able as a record of the early life, the superstitions
and aspirations, the heroisms and speculations of
mankind, the student may find here the most com
plete and rounded chapter of his own biography.
Taken not as food but as facts, there is use for the
faults and follies it records, as well as for its true
thoughts — even as in nature the poisons have their
place as well as the fruits. But regarded as an
authority over the reason, which alone can read it
discriminatingly, the light that is in it is turned to
darkness ; its prophets are made to veil their own
visions as reflected in ours, and men whose excel
lence consisted in confronting the popular creed,
and refusing to kneel to the conventional idols, are
quoted to make men servile and timid before the

144 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
synagogues, and faithless to the great inspirations
and scriptures, of their own day.
Such is the religion which finds in Good Friday
its most solemn fast, and in a human sacrifice its
central idea. But across the darkness of the day,
which symbolises the ignoble sacrifice of us all, there
was this year one gleam of light. At the Crystal
Palace, some thousands of people collected and
. played '•' Kiss-in-the-Ring " all day. Some anti
quaries tell us that the game may have been an
ancient pagan rite or festival. Possibly the merry
makers at the Crystal Palace were unconsciously
celebrating some prehistoric " Good Freyja's day."
It is a reminder that all gods must die ; and the
eye of faith may look forward to a future when the
solemnities of Good Friday will have become sports,
and its associations, including the Stations of the
Cross, call for archaeological ingenuity.

XL

PENTECOST.

Every prophet whom I send goeth forth to establish religioi
not to root it up.
Thou wilt be asked, " By what dost thou know God ?" Say, " B
that which descendeth upon the heart;" for could that be prove
false, souls would be utterly helpless. There is in thy soul a certai
knowledge, before which, if thou display it to mankind, they wi
tremble like a branch agitated by the strong wind. Sasan.
Devoutly look, and nought
But wonders shall pass by thee ;
Devoutly read, and then
All hooks shall edify thee ;
Devoutly speak, and men
Devoutly listen to thee ;
Devoutly act, and then
The strength of God acts through thee.
Ruckert ( Wisdom of the Brahmin).

PENTECOST.
MADE my way to the door of the Arch
bishop's palace, meaning to attend a great
Congress of Bishops therein convened from
all parts of the world. An individual in livery at
the door could not find on his list of delegates the See
I represented, and refused me admission. There
fore I was fain to sit by the gate, and observe the
prelates as they passed in. I could but think them
the successors of those divines whom Milton called
the sumptuously-cared-for "dividual movable" re
ligions of the well-to-do people of his day, and they
had been evidently "better breakfasted than he
whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on
green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem." As I
looked, I saw ten thousand pounds walk in, and
after him seven thousand, five thousand, and other
goodly and portly figures. So far as I could see,
the chapel they entered differed in some respects
from the hill-sides and the fish-boats of Jerusa
lem and Galilee.. And though one or two seemed.

148 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
heavily weighted with Colenso, whatever crosses
they had seemed hardly heavy enough to make
them faint.
After they had all gone in I listened, and,
though the words were not easily distinguishable,
they seemed, as intoned, to be: "We have done
those things which we ought to have done, and have
left undone those things that we ought to have left
undone, and are altogether in the soundest condi
tion." I may have mistaken the exact words used,
but the tone was unmistakable. I also heard
" Lord ! Lord !" repeated many times. Soon after,
I read a Pastoral Address which these Bishops had
put forth. Every phrase in it was borrowed from
ancient prophets and apostles, who, fortunately
for our knowledge of thenj and their sayings, did
not go quite so far back from their own times for
language or thoughts with which to appeal to the
people around them. No doubt there were in Paul's
day prelates who addressed men in the phrases, and
appealed to them against the sins, of fossil genera
tions ; but we know as little about them as posterity
will know of the Bishops whom the late Archbishop
of Canterbury convened in London.
Weary at last of sitting before the closed doors
of the archiepiscopal palace, and the night coming
on, I bent my steps to a dismal little room in the
City, where had been called a meeting of Free
thinkers. They were one and all poor people,

PENTECOST. 149

many of them artisans. Some of them had seen
the insides of prisons in the days when that was
the answer of the Prince Regent to those who
questioned whether he were Adonis and Maecenas
blended in one, or the argument of the Church to
those who circulated Paine's Age of Reason. These
aged ones here counted over their scars, recognised
their triumphs, and handed their old flag — the
prouder for its tatters — to the young who sat
around them. There was brought in an aged
woman who had witnessed the struggles of exe
crated infidels, and her dim eyes spoke, though
her tono-ue could not, her Nunc dimittis. It was
enough that Englishmen could think and utter
their thoughts, could read and write, without fear.
There were young men, and young women too,
who rose and consecrated themselves with burning
words to lives of devotion to " the Cause." Higher
and higher came the tide of feeling ; it overflowed
in the tears of eyes happy with the vision of a
liberated England; it swelled in eloquent speech,
under which all bent as branches under a strong
wind. Here was enthusiasm, devoutness, joy!
It was revealed to me in that moment that I sat
with the followers of Moses, singing their songs in
the Wilderness ; with the first disciples of Ahmed,
kneeling in the desert with eyes uplifted to the
one Allah, before whom every idol must fall; with
those who pressed out into the wilderness to listen

150 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
to one clothed in camel's hair, who proclaimed the axe
laid to the root of the tree. I knew this ancient
fire kindling every eye, touching every tongue. It
had burnt on altars through the long night of
superstition ; it had burnt in the unconsumed bush
before Moses, and enveloped the burning mountain
where Zoroaster stood ; it had been kept by Vestals
through temples long crumbled; Phoenixes had
passed through it to renewed life ; Prometheus had
brought it from heaven to deify men ; it had lighted
Isis in her search for Osiris, and Demeter in her
wanderings after Persephone ; it had lit up the star
of Bethlehem; it had flashed its lightnings from
Sinai to Calvary; it had descended in cloven
tongues on Galilean fishermen, and raised them to
be apostles. And even as I detected the old, old
fire in its new manifestation, behold, there entered
in that meeting of infidels one with shining- face,
who said : " To-day have I wandered through
London to find my mother, my sister, my brother.
I sought them first among those who preside over
the Church called after my name. But I knew
them not. They on their cushions knew not me
in my carpenter's garb, but suspended their cries of
' Lord ! Lord !' until I could be put out. Then, as
I passed by this room, I heard some at the door
denouncing those within as ' infidels,' ' agitators,'
' heretics.' The familiarity of those phrases in old
days led me to enter. And though you will not

PENTECOST. 151
name my name, I read it on your foreheads ; though
you despise the gilded crosses of Churches, I see on
each a heavier cross than any Christian has to bear
in these days. I am content. He is not my brother
who names my name, but he who will give his
life to mankind. Take my hand, O my brothers,
my sisters ; for ye too wear thorns for crowns. My
peace is yours, my joy is on your countenances.
Ye are children of the Holy Ghost, for the Spirit
of the Age is to each age its holiest breath, and
special revelation. Your differences are nothing,
your errors but little, in the presence of this breath
which unites and inspires you to maintain the rights
of Humanity, the sanctity of reason, the liberty of
thought, and this high faith in the destiny of man to
rise above all that afflicts and degrades him."

XII.

BUNHILL FIELDS.

Every drop of his blood had eyes that looked downward. He
knew the heroes of 1776, but could not recognise those of to-day
when he met them in the street. Emerson on Daniel Webster.

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to
revenge any wrong ; hut delights to endure all things, in hope to
enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and con
tention, and to weary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is
of a nature contrary to itself. I found it alone, being forsaken. I
have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate
places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection,
and eternal noly life. James Naylor.
Set not thy foot on graves ;
Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament,
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,
His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried :
Go, get them where he earned them when alive, —
As resolutely dig or dive. Emerson.

BUNHILL FIELDS.

NDER the gray October sky I started forth
to witness the formal re-opening of Bunhill,
or Bone-hill, Cemetery. I passed by the
spot where Cromwell after death hung on the
gallows ; by the old fields where the martyrs died,
but where now the stately market stands ; by the
house where Milton was born, possibly by that where
he hid himself from the wrath of the Restoration.
" Milton, thou shouldst have lived to see this hour,"
when my Lord Mayor, and my Lord Shaftesbury,
and Members of Parliament, and noted Clergymen,
are coming together to compete for the best eulogy
and profoundest homage to the men whom their
predecessors hunted to their graves.
Around the vacant space in the centre of the
great city huge factories stood roaring at their
work. Their brick walls and big signs frowned
upon the vacant ground, seeming to say, " Why is
this waste ? This parcel of ground, with its idle
grave-stones, might at this moment be coining

1 56 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
millions of pounds." But the commerce of London,
surging up against the confines of the silent field,
was there restrained as by a spell. Commerce had
indeed made an effort to appropriate that ground,
but had heard the command, Thus far, and no
farther. The religious hearts of England had
gathered round it, and formed a sacred circle
which no pecuniary interests could overpass. And
the silence of this field loudest chanted the requiem
of those whose bones moulder in it. For here rest
men and women who, while living, similarly with
stood those potent interests which recoil before their
dust, when self-interest said to them, Sell us
your souls ; do not stand by a faith which brings you
only a crust of bread ; give up those idle visions which
are carrying you into prisons ; take sides with us,
and we will load your tables with plenty ! The
sacred circle in their breasts, whose walls did not
then fall before such interests, finds its fit monu
ment in the silent sanctity of Bunhill Fields,
and in the sentiment which still finds something
more useful than gold. The Unitarian Lord Mayor,
the Nonconformist Member of Parliament, and the
Nobleman of the Church of England, utter in
accord the homage of the hour. Not one of them,
it may be, believes the dogmas of Wesley, or Watts,
or George Fox, or Lardner, or Defoe, or Bunyan ;
yet alike they bow before these mighty shades.
For it is only in the present, where personal

BUNHILL FIELDS. 157

interests or prejudices are affected, that men raise
their little creeds above essential nobleness and
moral grandeur.
The ceremony was over. About one tomb
especially the crowd gathered. On it lay the carved
figure of John Bunyan. On one side is a picture
of the pilgrim with his staff toiling under his
burden; on the other, the burden has rolled off as
he clasps the foot of the cross. It bears an inscrip
tion showing that it has been of late repaired under
the presidency of an Earl whom I need not name.
The same nobleman was good enough to patronise
the Pilgrim in his address on the same day; he
called the old tinker, with gracious familiarity, " a
glorious old fellow." One was forced to reflect
how different he was from the Earls who in old
times conceived that the best place for Bunyan was
Bedford Gaol. When the nobleman left I was fain
to follow him, and the first thing he did was to pick
up a hard stone and fling it at a man walking a little
before him. The man turned : could I believe my
eyes ? — it was John Bunyan ! The noble lord not
only stoned this pilgrim, but called on the clergymen
around him to do the same ; and many of them did
so. Wounded, the poor man went on his way, until,
at last, he fainted. I followed, and asked him his name ;
but even as I did so, though the likeness to Bunyan
remained, I saw that it was a certain heretical Bishop.
Returning again to the sepulchre garnished

158 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
with the nobleman's name, with his denunciations
of those who stoned the prophets of England still
ringing in my ears, I sat down, alone now, before
the tomb. "Alas!" I cried, "can men see the
true and great only when their names are traced in
dust? Shall we for ever go on raising the crosses
of the past over our churches, and crucifying the
sacred causes of to-day ? It is easy to praise the
Bunyans of three centuries ago; but how about
their true brothers whom we meet in the street?
When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith
in the earth ? or would not the very men who now
worship his name crucify him, even as they crucify
every sacred human cause which represents him ?"
The lips of the stone figure seemed to smile
with their old serenity, and the voice said, with
a meaning gathered out of the intervening cen
turies, " Steadily believe concerning the things
that are invisible."
I listened for some further word. Whether it
was the whispering of the wind, or the hum of
looms, or fancy's coinage of the voices in the street,
it seemed as if there came to me, as I sat there,
these* words : —
" Yes, steadily believe and endure as seeing the
invisible. There never was heroism, nor martyr
dom, nor saintly devotion, which is not now dis
coverable in every part of the earth. Their sacred
camp is ever near. Where the scholar is devotino-

BUNHILL FIELDS. 159

his life to rescue the weak and ignorant; where
the thinker gives his hand to the undowered
cause of a hated truth ; where the man of Science
follows Nature with a faithful love, which refuses
to divide its loyalty with superstition, what
ever the bribe; where in loneliness, with courage
and devotion, the gifted and the true are pursuing,
amid doubt and misgiving, over crag and torrent,
the Truth that has called to them, — there, be thou
sure, are Bunyans, and Miltons, and Knoxes, and
the next pilgrims in the procession of faithful souls
that can never end. But do thou hasten hence.
Not by the kissing of their bones, or the garnishing
of their tombs, or the believing of their creeds, can
the brave and free be honoured; but by an in
dependence and fidelity like their own. He is
most like Christ who stands as bravely before his
Church (so called) as Christ did before the conven
tional creeds of his day. Rise and go hence ; seek
not to live by substituting for virtue of your own
the praises of others' virtues ; borrow not their oil
for your lamp ; heed thine own aim."

XIII.

THE OLD TABARD.

0 thou who towerest above the flights of conjecture, opinion,
and comprehension, whatever has been reported of thee we have
heard and read ; the congregation is dismissed, and life drawn to a
close, — and we still rest in our first encomium of thee. Saadi.
Nor times shall lack when, while thp work it plies,
Unsummoned powers the blinding film shall part,
And, scarce by happy tears made dim, the eyes
In recognition start ! Clough.

THE OLD TABARD.

HE Pilgrims of Chaucer's time, who started
from their old inn in Southwark to have
their several aches and ailments healed at
the shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury, little knew
how far they would journey in time. The trans
figuring power of poetry, which of old raised
earthly heroes into constellations, has set them
among the galaxies of Westminster Abbey, where,
from their beautiful window, they look down upon
our generation to remind it that the faith of one age
is happy if it can become the artistic decoration of
the ages that follow. What the faded picture on
board still preserved over the door of the old house
standing where the Tabard stood — on which one
could some years ago detect a horse's and, it may
be, a pilgrim's head — is to the memorial window
erected by the Dean of Westminster, so is the faith
of those who sought the shrine of St. Thomas to
that of the preacher in whom the ancient Abbey
climbs to its last century-blossom. Sitting in the
light of that glass, passionate with saintly forms, I

i 64 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
listened to the far-reaching words of the preacher.
They were alive with the pulses of the present.
" Were a man to imitate with literal exactness the
personal life of Christ, he would be living an es
sentially unchristian life. We must minister to
the exigencies and needs of our own time in the
spirit which animated Christ in his dealings with
his time." "When Jesus was on earth, he said to
his, disciples, ' Ye believe in God, believe also in
me ;' were he now living, he would probably have
to say, ( Ye believe in me, believe also in God.' "
From his shining exaltation Chaucer responded,
" Truth shall thee deliver, 'tis no drede." But the
responses of those who sat in the seats, so far as
their faces expressed them, seemed very different.
Sitting with their Prayer-books before them, with
dull formality, the majority of them were evidently
listening to the preacher's surplice. In the* dim
light of the Abbey his words took the shapes of the
tombs and arches ; and if he had declared himself
an atheist, — in his ingenious way, — I verily believe
it could have startled few, but must have entered
the ears of those about him as a devout expression
of faith. For the present the Prayer-book, and
the traditions with which he is invested, are too
strong for him. Even the light of a burning dia
mond is lost if .set under a bushel. May his golden
candlestick be removed into its place, where the
eyes that long for it may rejoice in its light !

THE OLD TABARD. 165
In the tap-room of the Tabard there was a
collection of working people eating their noon-day
meal of cheese or sausages and drinking beer.
There were eight or ten men and three or four
women, to whose conversation I listened, as I
awaited the leisure of the publican to take me
through the more ancient inn near by. They were
discussing the existence of God. I took my notes
carefully, and they are as follows : —
A. — "I don't say there be no God; I only say
I don't see any signs of him. Look at the vice and
misery in Lunnun. I think, if you or I was om
niscient and omnipotent, we'd soon manage to put a
stop to some things going on in Lunnun."
B. — "But wat do you 'n' I know about Lun
nun, and wat's good for it ? It's like people pray-
ino- about the weather; one wants rain, t'other
shine : one man's meat's another man's pizen."
A. — " Yes, that may be so about the misery, —
we mayn't know what's good for people ; but we do
know that murder an' thievery an' all that ain't
good fur nobody. Ef God made the world, seems
as ef he put as much bad as good into it."
C. — " But God made man a free agent, and so
he had to let him be bad if he liked."
A. — "Yes; but ef he's all-knowin', he must
'ave known when he sent a man into the world
whether the man was a-goin' to commit murder ; and
ef he sent him here knowin' that, whose fault is it ?"

166 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
D. — " AH that's what we don't none of us know
nothin' at all about."
A. — " That's just what I say. So, when a
feller tells me about God, I say he's tellin' me
what he knows nothin' about."
E.— "Well, I'll tell you what I think. So
long as a man is well 'n' 'earty, he may go on
thinking what he pleases about God or no God.
But what does he say when he's brought down on
his back, groanin' with pain ? Says he, ' Lord,
have mercy upon me !' "
F. — " Yes, he may say so as often as he pleases,
but he'll go on groanin' jest the same, unlest the
doctor can do somethin' fur 'im. A good many
people have said, ' Lord, have mercy !' but they 'n'
their child'n go on a-dyin' all the same."
The last speaker was an aged white-haired man,
and his eyes twinkled like steel. His hard saying
was followed by an ominous silence. He had
dropped his seed into a soil too congenial, made up
as it was of weary struggles with poverty and pain,
not to give it root. Since the days when Chaucer's
Pilgrims went to Canterbury to have their ailments
healed by touching shrines, how many tears have
flowed unheeded, how many sighs received no pity,
how many prayers remained unanswered ! A long
pilgrimage it has been from St. Thomas's shrine to
the desolate denials mingling with the beer and
sausages of the Tabard of to-day. In how many

THE OLD TABARD. 167
lowly rooms — for it is no fancy sketch I have given
— are such conversations going on ? — one, it may
be safely affirmed, for every pulpit which instructs
the poor amid their sorrows to believe that there is
a God who may and can relieve those sorrows if
they shall pray to him sufficiently. Many aching
bones must have returned from idle pilgrimages to
Canterbury ere an English king could have carted
its shrines to their dust-holes; and if other invisible
shrines are disappearing from the faith of the people,
it is because every dogma concerning them is
proved false by millions of lives each day. Our
Churches are busy sowing Atheism.
Could I be mistaken in thinking that this was
the audience, rather than that in the Abbey, to
which the preacher I heard there was really com
missioned? They sat there in gloom, the chill of
scepticism upon them, awaiting him. He did not
come. Must they, then, go out again to their work
and their dismal lot, unsunned by any higher faith
or hope ? At this moment one who had remained in
a corner silent, and cloaked, advanced and spoke : —
" Had I been an atheist when I entered this
room, my brothers, I have heard enough to prove
to me the existence of God, and that chiefly from
those who have doubted or denied that existence —
as they may suppose; for what they have denied
is not God, but certain fancies concerning him,
each, no doubt, of some value in its day, set up by

1 68 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
men, and made into idols by their followers. When
Montalembert accused Proudhon of atheism, the
latter justly replied, ' If not to believe in M.
Montalembert's god constitute an atheist, I am
one.' And thus it is when the Churches have
brought before you a god as the Supreme Mechanic
who created a Universe which there is no reason
to suppose was ever created ; or a god who rules
men with an eternal hell for threat, and a rose-
water heaven for reward; or a god who wishes to
be flattered by glorifications; or a god who can be
induced to suspend the laws of nature, and raise the
dead, or save you from disease and poverty ; — your
rejection of such deities is a rejection of human
speculations only. But is there nothing in your
very rejection of these idols of dogma which
suggests a true God ? You reject them, I conceive,
because they come in collision with your common
sense and your common feeling; that is, you have
within you a standard which such gods do not come up
to, — an ideal they shock. No father or mother here
would treat a child as God is said to treat men and
women — loading them with sorrow, surrounding
them with evil and temptation, and punishing the
millions for their inevitable sins (not to speak of
sins they never committed) with interminable and
purposeless tortures. But thus you testify to certain
great elements in this Universe which cannot be
left out of this question. What about this mother's

THE OLD TABARD. 169
heart? Whence comes it? Millions on millions of
mothers are at this moment wearing out their lives
for their children. This love is the same in every
one of them. Might we not safely say that there is
a great mother-principle, an element of love, per
vading this Universe ?
" Again : I speak to you, and you understand
me, because I appeal to something in you which is
also in me — call it our common sense or our
common reason, which you will ; it means that
thought is the same in us all. All men in the
world who are not idiots will see together that two
and two make four ; and every thing that can be
equally proved will command the assent of all intel
ligences. May we not, then, add to the love-prin
ciple in the Universe a thought-principle also ?
" Now, you may feel a difficulty here. Admit
ting that there is a love and a law of reason com
mon to mankind, what evidence is there that either
exists outside of men and women ? Maternal love
may be the sum-total of the hearts of mothers,
and universal reason the sum of human thoughts.
" To this I answer, that everything else about
us refers to a larger quantity of the same outside of
us. The body of man is an epitome of the world
he lives in. Is there limestone in our bones ?
 there are great strata of the same in the earth.
Is there iron in the blood ?— it stretches through the
planet, — nay, as we are beginning to see, through

170 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
many planets. It is the same with all the chemic
elements of which we are composed. They are not
exhausted by the sum of animal forms, but are
universal constituents. But if feeling and reason
are as definitely parts of us as bone and blood, why
should we not equally conclude that these are re
ferable to vast outlying elements of the same per
vading the Universe ?
" In this world, organs and their functions
everywhere report and represent the elements sur
rounding them. The fin implies water : the wing
implies air; find an eye, — there must be light.
Fathom with a microscope the vast depths of
a rain-drop, and you shall find every zoophyte in
the little globe environed by just the elements
which are needed for its day of life. Each organ
corresponds with an outer law, as hook to eye.
When we rise in the scale of form until we come to
the higher elements of human nature, shall we con
clude that for the first time this harmony is broken
— that here is an intellectual eye, but no light ;
here a spiritual ear, but no sound to reply to it ?
" The Supreme Reason is not what we make it ;
it makes us what it will. The discoverer does not
find in the heavens or the earth the reflection of his
own notions; he finds there intelligent laws,
which set aside and reverse the crude theories of
men ; and like Kepler he cries, ' Great God, I think
thy thoughts after thee !' Not all the suffrages of

THE OLD TABARD. 171
mankind could make the three angles of a triangle
equal to three right angles. Your own scepticisms
show that the facts of the human heart and brain
cannot be dogmatised down. Not any more can
they be scoffed down. Voltaire said : ' Whether or
not God made man in his own image, it is very
certain man has made God in his image.' It is
even so : from my feeble thought I trace the
Universal Thought; listening to my best heart, I
hear the beat of an Infinite Heart.
" But when I go beyond this, and try to explain
how these invisible elements are related to the ex
ternal world, or how they consist with the discords
and evils of society, I am warned that I have not
yet learned the relation of my thought or feeling
to my own body. We have not yet learned the
alphabet of that science whose last problem so
many parsons are ready to explain with glibness.
Poor William Blake once declared that on walking
down a lane he had touched the sky with his stick.
Our churches and chapels are full of preachers who
have evidently done the same to their sky. Omni
science is the commonplace attribute of barbarous
religions. But the age of Thought is reticent, and,
when pressed to speak, asks with Confucius, ' Do
heaven and earth speak ? ' Man has been defined as
the talking animal ; but rather he is the being who
in great emergencies can, like the sheep before his
shearers, be dumb ; and who, amid the squeak and'

172 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
chatter concerning the unknowable, opens not his
mouth. " Yet will I not admit that my truth is unpro
ductive. It is something that above and through
the darkness a tender eye is watching, akin to
yours, friend, as you look on those you love. Your
child may be even beyond your power to help ; still,
it is something that you sit there with soothing
hand and loving voice. And if this be sustaining
amid the grief and evil of our lives, it is a yet more
positive and practical good that our minds and
hearts may find traced in themselves the presence
of the great laws around them by which they may
work to sure success. It is the blending of some
faculty with a universal power which insures every
real result. There must be a vital principle in the
individual, or the greatest power without will be
unavailing : the same light which will lead a seed
to its flower will shine on the rock and leave it
still a rock after a thousand years. On the other
hand, without the light, the seed will remain a seed
for a thousand years. Man must bring his private
power into cooperation with the great laws, or his
work will be inadequate. What is the human
hand, with all its cunning, compared with the same
hand wedded to the laws of steam or electricity ?
" There is a law in every heart in the Universe
responsive to the benevolence of a human being.
There is an order in every atom, every planet,

THE OLD TABARD. 173
related to the constitution of the human mind.
Each individual task has a public end, and it is
environed by laws and forces by whose aid alone it
can be accomplished. To each man that work is
worship, that end his only attainable deity. By it
he is uplifted ; it must represent to him the strength,
the beauty, and the joy of God. Loving that, he
will love God. If he obey the supreme law of his
own being, it matters not whether he define him
self as atheist or theist. Other gods are the gods
of the dead — of John, Paul, Chrysostom, Calvin ;
this is the God of the living. We cannot live
on the bread that was sown and harvested in
ancient Greece or Palestine. Nature still blooms
with the unfailing power that gives corn and wine
to every creature.
" And it is because of this that Humility is the
root of all virtues. A man may have many faults,
and yet do well ; but if he have no humility he can
never rise to the height of his own ideal — nay, his
ideal will fade out. How great is that darkness !
Self-assertion, egotism, conceit, pride, — these are
the deadly enemies of the true and faithful life ;
and this because they prevent a man seeing that
his excellence is not in his individual will, but in
the great principles without which he is nothing.
Remove man from the great moral forces, — truth,
justice, love, knowledge, — and there is not a bird
feeding its young but is a nobler object than he.

174 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
 r
His nobility above all things is that for him there is
a door opening on the divine currents : he enters it
a beggar ; he stands there a prince. But what is a
man whose aim is self-centred? — a candle never
touched with light, a stone never fitted in any wall,
but left in the path as a danger. Humility is the
condition of strength because it combats the weak
ness of eccentricity and isolation, and raises man to
the circle of unfailing forces. He will hold all he
has subordinate to the great aim. In this lowliness
is born the transfigured self-esteem, or self-rever
ence, and self-reliance. It is necessary that a man
should reverence the constitution of his own mind,
because of its relations to the supreme laws of
which it is an organ. Self-surrendered, he is vic
torious ; serving, he rules ; making himself dust, he
will reach the forces by which the dust climbs to a
soul in flower or crystal.
" Now, farewell, my brothers and my sisters.
May you each know that the highest point of heaven
is just above you ; that the ladder reaching to it
rises from your lot, however little ; that there is
no motto more royal than ' I serve ! ' "
I had already detected in this speaker my old
friend the Interpreter. When he had finished, the
sceptic said : " Friend, will you take a mug of beer
with me?" The beer was wretched, but the Inter
preter told me he would not have exchanged it for
finest wine.

XIV.
THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST.

0 Creator of the essence of supports and stays,
0 thou who showerest down benefits,
0 thou who formest the heart and the Soul,
0 Fashioner of forms and shadows !
The Soul is a flame from among the flames of the fire of thy
residence of sovereignty !
Yezdan is hid by excess of light.
He causeth the shadow to fall ;
The Inflamer, who maketh the blood to boil.
Thy world of forms, the city of bodies, the place of earthly things, is
long and broad and deep.
Thou art the Acoomplisher of Desires.
The eyes of purity saw thee by the lustre of thy substance :
Dark and astounded is he who hath seen thee by the efforts of the
Intellect. ' The Persian Litany.

Lift up your heart upon the knees of God ;
Losing yourself, your sniallness and your darkness,
In his great light who fills and moves the world,
Who hath alone the quiet of perfect motion. Sterling.

THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST.

WENT to the banquet of the Literary
Fund, and listened to the speeches of the
eminent men gathered there. Of them
all I remember one sentence. A man of science,
alluding to the charge urged against science that it
was cold, said : " Though she freeze me, yet will I
trust in her." Such was the echo in the nineteenth
century of the faith of Job. More lately we have
heard the reply of the Church to the man of science.
A Dean, who once signalised himself by denouncing
Shakespeare as a godless play-actor, has further
adorned his ministry with an anathema on science.
He declares the men of science to be worse than
idolaters; and accuses them of bringing down out
of the sky, and digging up out of the earth, " evi
dences against God." Fancying, no doubt, that he
is trusting God when he rejects the records of
Nature, the Dean thanks God he is not like the
scientific blasphemers, who prefer to believe the
facts of earth and sky rather than the speculations
concerning them of a Jew who lived in the infancy
M

178 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
of human knowledge. It did not occur to him to
inquire why God had stored up evidences against
himself in his worlds. He would probably be
amazed and indignant if any one should maintain
that he who worships a God who has said one thing
by Moses and the opposite by Nature is really the
idolater, — the worshipper of an impossible monster.
All the Deans in England cannot make a disbelief
in the laws by which we are surrounded anything
but a disbelief in God himself. All the sentimen
talists cannot make a fear of the effects of following
the truth of Science, whithersoever it may lead,
other than a distrust of the wisdom organised in
Nature. Unbelief is none the less hollow because
masked in respect for some ancient book, nor super
stition less heartless because disguised as religious
sentiment. The man who really believes follows
that which he believes, fearless of consequences.
The champions of Liberty said, " Though it cost
our lives, yet will we stand by Liberty," — and so
we are free men this day. The Reformer said,
" Though we die, we will proclaim the Truth," —
and the prison of the soul lies in fragments around
us. The man of Science — the truest successor
of the apostles discoverable in our time — cries :
" Though knowledge destroy every temple ; though
it shatter my own and my neighbours' creed;
though it bring on me the anathemas of Deans;
though it isolate me, freeze me, — yet, because it is

THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 179
knowledge, because it is truth and no lie, I will
trust in it." And because it has laboured in this
spirit, Science has unrolled before this age a new
heaven and a new earth ; it has gained some secret
from every smallest grass-blade and insect; it has
carried tha light of every star beyond the eye down
to the deeper eye of intelligent admiration; it has
kindled the heart and brain of this generation till
they illumine as torches a Universe once darkened
with the shadows of superstition and fear. But for
the high trustfulness of such, there would be no
faith left in the earth.
Nothing is more winning in childhood than its
trustfulness. Nature has provided that, for many
years after we are born into this world, everything
about us shall train in us a spirit of trustfulness
toward those around us. The babe must cling to
its mother without misgiving that her breast will
cease to nourish and protect it. The growing child
has accumulated, by long experience of the ten
derness watching over it, a fund of confidence on
which the parents may draw. The love may be
manifested in disappointment, but the gathering
tear cannot blind the upward look of filial trust.
And where a child has been so unhappily trained
that its faith can only live by indulgence, we feel
that the chief beauty of childhood has vanished. It
would seem that the Eternal Love has provided
that mankind shall pass through the age of help-

180 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
lessness, in which it must trust others for every
good, in order that this habit of confidence may be
engendered ; so that when in after years the pa
rental providence has been withdrawn, and man
must trust his own arm for earthly good, he may
the more readily feel after and find the pervading
principle of which parental love is the highest
earthly manifestation. The history of the race is
a steadfast advance toward the conception of a
parental Deity.
The theological representation of this spirit of
trust is its deformity. It is as if a child should
make the father's care a reason for reckless
ness. It is the fatalism of Egypt, which permits
the birds to prey on the corn, the beasts on the
people, and filth to accumulate, in deference to the
will of Allah. Our missionaries do but carry the
ruins of Christ's faith to the ruins of Mohammed's.
The healthy development of this spirit is that
which would say to the people : " To trust God is
to trust the laws of his universe ; it is to trust your
own faculties, and the laws of cause and effect.
You are distrusting him when you accept as his
providence that which you have power to control.
The only way to pray for a thing is to work for it
in accordance with the conditions under which that
thing is to be attained. Anything else, whatever
Cant may teach, is the moral indolence which ex
pects some god to do your work."

THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST.

In the inner world, we are told, we must let the
hearts and minds of dead Jews declare the creed of
the Nineteenth Century. The Dean clearly cannot
see why this age has been given a brain of its own
at all. " Leave off your investigations," he says to
the man of science ; " Moses has settled these things
long ago. You must not trust Reason, but God."
But this is as if a young man were invited to trust
Luck instead of Work. The very essence of faith
is corrupted when a man can be induced to abnegate
the task of his faculties, and yield his thinking and
feeling to be done by others. The true doctrine 0/
Trust is of endless application.
Lately, a band of men were gathered together
at Lausanne, in Switzerland, to consult and con
trive that all the nations of Europe might be made
into a fraternity of peaceful powers, its swords
beaten into ploughshares, its spears into pruning-
hooks, its fruitful lands converted into a fair Garden
of Humanity, where all should be prosperous and
all enlightened. The utterances of this group of
poets and dreamers were received in the outer
world with mingled pity and mirth. To reach
Lausanne, they had to pass frontiers bristling with
bayonets. They had brought their rose-mist under
the shadows of fortresses. Around them stood
empires armed to the teeth, glaring upon each
other. Some of them were exiles forced to cherish
their Utopias in far-off islands. Around them were

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

selfish rulers, aided by servile agents, sustained by
ignorant populations. Why should not the world
smile to see them fanning their little ember amid
these icebergs, which they proposed to melt into a
peaceful sea of universal brotherhood ?
They were engaged in something a little more
obviously, but not more really, absurd than that
which is employing every reformer or idealist. The
League for the education of every English child in
undenominational schools ; the Secularists trying to
convince every human being that his or her energies
belong to an actual, rather than a possible, world ;
the Socialist who would secure to each the just
wage of his work ; the champion of woman who
demands that her right shall be respected, and that
our politics shall be refined by her moral genius;
the Liberal believer who would raise mankind to the
worship of what is worthy, — all these are bringing
their several sparks to melt vast and icy institutions
which represent a winter in the whole sky of
humanity. What do the kings of the earth care for
Victor Hugo's prophecies of the good time coming,
when they feel the congenial atmosphere of the
season which, were they unmade, would remake
them, filling the sky ?
But yet, again, why is it that the dreamers go
on with their manifestly absurd efforts ? Why do
the reformers, the freethinkers, go on workino-
unweariedly upon the never-yielding world, be-

THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 183

sieging the fortresses of wrong with arrows power
less as sunbeams ?
These are the children of Trust. These endure,
seeing the invisible, toiling on to the city that hath
foundations !
The farmer sows his seed in full faith that the
seasons, the dews, the sunshine, will lead them to
their harvest. He is not dismayed when, after his
seed-time, snow and ice cover the earth: he has
reasons for seeing beyond snow and ice. He has
known many seeds kept safe under all storms, — nay,
nourished by them, — to wave in triumph at last.
And these tillers of a more sacred soil know well
that the law of their seed of truth is also the law of
that larger seed, the great world. They will trust
the relationships of the universe against all appear
ances of hostility between this and that. They will
still believe that the world is secretly conspiring with
the right, and that when emperors are dead and
temples decayed the old hunger of mankind for
justice and truth will work on, and the rays and
rains never fail which shall at last lead every living
germ to its flower. So, above the laughter of the
world, I listen to the .^Eolian strain of faith which
lingers in the earth, bringing the melodies of hearts
that stood firm to their work through the watches of
the long night, — the old music, to which atoms
march and worlds move, — and krfow well that its
old power is not exhausted. With it is a subtle

1 84 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
summer breath, not to be felt by tyrants, trans
fusing the frozen air. Dream on, O brothers of
Lausanne ! no wind blows, but whispers your truth ;
no sunbeam falls, but reveals it to some eye ; the
ebbing, flowing tides follow it with fluid steps, and
the stars in their courses.
To realms more difficult and shadowy the spirit
of Trust attends her child, even where the human
spirit rises with trembling wing to the last verge of
time, and, looking down the dim vista beyond the
grave, questions — Whither? We have arrived at
an age which no longer can, even if it would, trust
its sacred treasures of hope to the frail and flimsy
vessels of tradition. To Thought there can be no
authority but Reason. The world has long trusted
the determined assertions of immortality so com
pletely, that now, when those assertions are ques
tioned, it turns out that the human mind has no
single clear proof of a future existence. Socrates
gives plausible speculations; Modern Philosophy
feeds itself with a few probabilities ; while Science
shows the problem still standing, a Sphynx with
sealed lips, just beyond the reach of the human
faculties. But if deep in our own thought and love
we have caught the lineaments of a Supreme
Reason ; if, whatever mystery surround the relation
of that central Intelligence to a world apparently
unconquered by it, we still see in history the stead
fast triumph of moral over brute forces, and armies

THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 185
vanquished by ideas, — we have found a truth on
which man may pillow his head in the darkness.
It shall not be different — this law — whether it
affect a soul or a world. Why should I be anxious
concerning the voyage or the distant shore, if
Wisdom hold the helm, and the breath of Love fill
the sail? Shall I realise elsewhere the ideals
earth has failed to fulfil ? Shall I clasp again the
kindred hearts parted from me by death ? I know
not. This I know, that the Inspirer of affections,
the Source of unattained ideals, lives.
Some of us have already lived long enough to
prefer annihilation to that eternal Sabbath, passed
in full sight of the agonies of the damned, which
once seemed to us the summum pulchrum of immor
tality : it may be that we should in a proportionately
advanced phase of insight equally abhor anything we
can now conceive as individual immortality, which
already one philosopher discovers means, as com
monly taught, the wearing out of one's old boots in
some other world. At any rate, 'tis as vain to vex
our lives with anxieties concerning the unknowable,
as it were to refuse the food of our own zone
because it is not the tropical luxury mentioned in
some traveller's book.
Confucius said : " The divine spirit which the
superior man cherishes flows on in equal extent
with heaven and earth." 'Trained by the faith in
the working of good, even where evil seems to

i86

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

reign; observant of the fires revealed by night,
and the growths fed by decays ; living for the idea
which is everywhere resisted, but steadily trium
phant, — the man of trust will at least know that
this Universe is nowhere under the direction of
Chance or of any Devil; and if he doubt the
common belief concerning the future, it will be in
the hope of something transcending it.

XV.

ONE VOICE.

The peculiar nature of the Scholar's occupation consists in this :
that science, and especially that side of it from which he conceives of
the whole, shall continually burst forth before him in new and
fairer forms. Let this fresh spiritual youth never grow old within
him ; let no form become rigid and fixed ; let each sunrise bring him
new joy and love in his vocation, and larger views of its significance. Fichte.
Through, brothers, through, — this be
Our watchword in danger or sorrow :
Common clay to its mother dust,
All nobleness heavenward !
Korner.

ONE VOICE.
FOLLOWED the great revolutionary
thinker of our time to hear him deliver
his address as Lord Rector of the chief
Scottish University. On that notable morning I
saw this severest critic of the people pursued with
plaudits along the street. The students rose with
wild enthusiasm to welcome the opponent of all
they were accustomed to hear from their professors
and their parents. He stood there, the chief of
all, a portent of these times. Honoured he was,
because his path had been marked by no mean
compliance with the world, — a path as unsullied as
any that had been trod by the shades of the great
and faithful which we saw standing by his side.
But his presence was significant of even more than
the profound rectitude of the yet unwarped youth
who, touched with a fine enthusiasm, had called
him there.
Amid the confused landmarks of the present
time, the young are asking with increasing concern,

190

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

" What shall we do ?" The deluge of inquiry has
floated the old institutions ; many of them are going
to pieces, others sinking waterlogged. Life has
outrun the ancient guides; libraries have become
fossil thoughts; and we have reached a condition
somewhat like that which originated our old uni
versities, where students gathered to hear what had
not yet been embodied in books or institutions.
There is a perception abroad that our living waters
have left the old channels, and are beginning to
cut new ones for themselves. And among those
engaged on the new channels the young men had
fixed on one of the sincerest, and called on him to
stand here and justify his work.
That day I did not envy Palestine or Arabia
their prophets, nor Germany her reformers ; all
preceding dawns glowed on this face, all their
burdens were on this voice, as, with the eloquence
of perfect conviction, he uttered once more that
which had been the soul of all his teachings. One
simple line he has added to the creed of youth.
Where to the old question, " Who made you ? "
the child answers, " God ; " this man cries, " O
child, if God made thee, he meant thee !" Again,
he insisted that each human being enters this world
for an assigned task; that wisdom consists in dis
covering it, religion in accomplishing it. All
reading, all teaching, must be determined by the
mental hunger rising from it; all worship is

ONE VOICE.

humility before it, all joy is to be found at the
core of it, all sorrow attaches to the infidelity which
abandons that.
But is this true ? Does each of the swarming
millions around us represent some divine thought?
It is a hard saying. So many seem missent or
accidentally sent into this over-populated society of
ours ! We have discovered how to make our
chimneys consume their smoke ; we can turn
our garbage to golden grain; but we still go on
carting men to the gallows or the colonies quite
helplessly. Yet now and then from their dumb
ranks some voice comes telling us of a beauty
hidden beneath their hard animalism, as when
Ebenezer Elliott's tears hiss upon his anvil, and
his hammer beats out : —
Flowers of thy heart, 0 God, are they, —
Cast thou not them as weeds away,
Their heritage a winter's day :
God save the People !
Flowers ! What pains have gone into the archi
tecture of the humblest daisy ! And is not each
humble man of more value than many daisies ?
Are we, in not finding a high use for each human
being, — in whom dwells a life that defies explana
tion, — prone to confuse our ignorance with the
wisdom in Nature, which has done nothing by
redundance, inscribing its sign for the intelligent

192 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
as surely on the wing of a fly as on that of an
archangel ?
There is a mystical meaning in that word by
which each man names his vocation ; it is his calling.
Something has, then, called to him. Something
significant, too, there is in each man's sensitiveness
concerning his calling. The physician is not an
noyed when told he cannot build a ship; but the
wound is deep if he is charged with incompetence
in his own profession. Then there come to us the
old monitions of the great: Be thyself; Know
thyself; Look into thy heart, and write; with
Chaucer's dying word —
Rede well thyself, that other folk canst rede.
We know, too, — the humblest know, — the up-hill
work of doing what is against the grain of us, and
the lightness of the labour we love. We know
how vain it is to try and keep Burns a ploughboy
— how vain to make poets of those who ought to be
ploughboys, and whose wooden shoes may be heard
clattering through all their rhymes. Saul will
hardly make your herdsman, nor Jesus your car
penter; Cimabue is but a poor shepherd, and
Newton a mere bungler as haberdasher; George
Fox and Bohme are not the men you would bid
stick to their last. It is not arbitrary reversible
power we are under, but unalterable laws ; and so
long as there is no life, however obscure, without its

ONE VOICE. 193

ideal, we must heed the man there who has lived
the word he utters, and believe, indeed, that for
each there is an appealing task, with which each
must rise or fall, commissioned to bind or loose on
earth that which shall in every world be so bound
or loosed. In a church in Venice I saw a representation
in marble of Jesus at the moment when he cried in
the synagogue, " The spirit of the Lord is upon
me." He had been put forward by the priest to do
one thing — he did quite another and an unexpected
thing. The artist had put into the young man's
face a radiance and joy beyond what I had con
ceived stone could express. The hair floats back,
the eye dilates, the face, as it were, blooms under
the light that has fallen upon it in that moment of
turning from the prescribed path to the true path.
He has thrown off the shackles of the synagogue,
and, clearing the altar like a winged god, appeals
from the plan of parent and priest to the verdict of
his own spirit.
It may be the legends did not comprehend their
own significance when they gave as that youth's
first words, "I must be about my Father's busi
ness;" and as his last, " It is finished." Between
the work undertaken and the work finished there
lay wildernesses of temptation, gardens of agony,
scourgings and thorn-crowns, but there lay no fal
tering of the faithful steps. No visions of tasks

191-

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

declined, no ideals turned by neglect to fierce fallen
angels, haunted that supreme moment, but only the
clear response : " Thou hast overcome ; thou hast
realised thy soul ; thy Father's business with thee
on earth is finished."

XVI.
CROSS ROADS.

0 gracious Pan, and ye other gods who preside over this pla
grant that I may be beautiful within, and that those external thii
which I have may be such as agree with a right internal disposit
of mind, and that I may account him to be rich who is wise and ji
Socrates.

If a man lose his fowls or his dog, he knows how to seek the
There are those who lose their hearts, and know not how to se
them. The duty of the student is no other than to seek his hea
He who employs his whole mind will know his nature. He w
knows his nature knows Heaven. Mencius.
One who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment, to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or had for human kind,
Is happy as a lover, and attired
With sudden brightness, like a man inspired ;
And through the heat of conflict keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.
Wordsworth.

CROSS ROADS.
WALKED amid the ancient ruins at St.
Andrew's, seeking to spell out from the
stones the storms that shaped them, from
the walls and towers the ages they represent; and the
bracing winds from over the sea seemed like the
strong pure voices of the great out of the past, as
they might be refined from all that was hard and
crude, raised into harmony with truths which waves
and winds repeat. Ah, this sweet benediction of
death ! this filtration by time of the transient from
the permanent, so that the true man surely finds his
place in the great brotherhood of souls not to be
parted by climes or ages, or the opinions belonging
to them ! There is no difference : whether it be
Voltaire or John Knox, the voices of the great
at last accord in the chant which goes on from age
to age, while the temples wherein they worshipped,
or which they assailed, crumble into common
ruin. It was the spirit of John Knox which sum
moned lately the foremost political thinker of

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

England, and afterwards the historian of the age
of Elizabeth, to represent St. Andrew's University
and advise its youth. Without these, the brave
old warriors of independent thought could not be
made perfect.
The earnest men thus summoned felt the full
gravity of the opportunity afforded them. A
common instinct guided both to address themselves
to the unwritten chapter of Moral Science, — to the
Ethics of Intellect. The advance of popular educa
tion amid new modes of thought and expression
makes the theme one of increasing urgency ; and the
scholar in the vanguard already finds himself steer
ing perilously between the Scylla of falseness to his
insight and the Charybdis of defiance toward others,
fraught with affliction to those whom he would only
love and bless. Many a firm spirit, with wing
eager to flutter out of the open cage-door, is asking
at this moment, " Must I sacrifice everything to
this new abstract belief of mine? Shall I forget
business relations, bruise friendships, grieve those
nearest and dearest, overshadow the social prospects
of my children^ by openly identifying myself with
the despised and rejected truth? or may I not
silently cherish my higher faith under apparent
conformity ?"
These are not easy questions to answer. Few
things are so sacred as our personal relations. It
seems hard that any duty should require us to

CROSS ROADS. 199

shatter the unity of our homes. And, as a matter
of fact, it cannot be doubted that vast numbers are
worshipping at altars inwardly abjured, because the
sword of their spirit, though strong enough to carve
through iron, is not fine enough to divide the
yielding veil of personal affection ; and this all
the more because the Church, more anxious for
outward than for inward allegiance, hastens to
mitigate its creed privately for every clever youth,
and speaks with double tongue.
The Pilgrim hastened to listen to what the two
eminent and liberated thinkers, would say to the
young men of St. Andrew's on this great issue ; but,
alas, instead of being furthered on his journey, he
found himself left without any clear sign-post at
cross roads. What a symptom it is of the chaotic
condition of thought in this transitional era, that
two mature and accomplished scholars should, on
such an occasion, solemnly call young men to con
trary paths ! Regarding the same shore, one cries,
Sail North ! the other, Sail South ! In the presence
of these youths — of orthodox training, many of them
looking to the ministry — both of the University
Rectors referred to assumed that it is impossible
for an educated mind to believe the doctrines of
the reigning Churches. The question was there
before them, What were those youths to do ? Were
they to remain in the Church and slily undermine
its doctrine ? Were they to disappoint parent and

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

Church, and openly war upon the dogmas counting
on their support ?
For once it seemed to be the voice of Erasmus,
rather than that of John Knox, speaking through
those honoured lips — ever strong upon the weaker
side — which said, " Let all who conscientiously can
remain in the Church, whether their interpretations
of its doctrines be the usual ones or not. Be
careful not to leave the national provisions for reli
gious teaching and worship in the hands of bigots.
A Church is far more easily improved from within
than from without."
Hardly half-battles, either, were the words of
the historian, though their thrust was deeper.
" Those who are in possession of the field are
bidding high for the intellect which is becoming
alienated. Radicalism must be reverent, but it
must be self-truthful. Be honest with yourselves,
whatever the temptation; tamper not with your own
minds; the Evil Spirit Humbug is abroad. But
remember that all long-established formulas once
held living truths, which must be respected; that,
after all, you of the advanced views may be wrong ;
that others have the same right as you to their
opinions ; that truth's destiny does not depend upon
you ; and that the social courtesy which forbids us
to say in private what would give pain to others,
forbids us equally in public to obtrude opinions
which offend those who do not share them."

CROSS ROADS.

Listening to both of these voices the Pilgrim
thanks Heaven that heroes sometimes live lives
that can outweigh their occasional nods !
It may be, indeed, that if every young listener at
St. Andrew's were in the habit of weighing words,
he might detect in the language of the Rector for
1867, not advice for free men, but advice to pri
soners, how they may make the best of their hard
lot. It is the tendency of the advice, as given to
youths who need not be prisoners, which seems to
look downward. Stay inside if you possibly can,
it says : if by unusual interpretations, by hook or
by crook, you can hold on to the Establishment
without being actually expelled by force, do so, for
the advantages of being there are very great. Is
this an encouragement to frankness, simplicity,
straightforwardness, or to the casuistic habit of
mind ? Is it trusting in truth, or in truth's oppo
site, prestige ? Advantages in this world continue
to demand their price, and whether it be better
that our young men should turn themselves into
intellectual prestidigitateurs to secure power in the
Establishment, or whether they should pay every
opportunity it offers to be men
Whose armour is their honest thought,
And simple truth their only skill,
is a question on which the Pilgrim appeals from the
Rector of St. Andrew's to the man who paid

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

a seat in Parliament to defend the political equality
of an Atheist.
If thinkers abandon the Church, the national
provision for religious instruction will indeed be
monopolised by the stupid ; but if, as the theory in
question assumes, the Church represent falsities to
the masses, does not he who remains in it sanction
those falsities? Three-fourths of his weight must
inevitably go in favour of the interpretation it bears
to the aggregate mind, whatever reservations be in
his own mind, or even in his speech. We do,
indeed, all sustain institutions mingled with error,
but, if faithful, only those wherein truth and utility
are preponderant, and the error plainly and pro
fessedly unconstitutional ; but where a thing is
preponderantly hurtful, and its organic law false, —
where for every true utterance it proclaims a thousand
superstitions, — shall we not say that the one way for
that institution is that it shall be utterly relegated
to meanness and stupidity ? When the brains are
out, it will die. It is the deep game of injustice and
error to bribe with promises of opportunity for good
the piety and wit which alone can renew their lease
of life. What will not the usurper in France
give for the adhesion of the literary men in his
projects of oppression ?
Unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou
united ! Let the true life of the age ebb away from
every strand of wrong, leaving there the hulks to

CROSS ROADS. 203

rot ; let it beat with full tide to the shores where
wait the ships for whose voyage hearts are pining,
to float which is to bear the freight of truth to
spirits that hunger, straining their eyes to the
horizon throughout the earth ! He is happy who has
attained a society of kindred minds, and every such
environment is to the individual mind as a fortress
beneath his tower of vision. But let him have
other aims than that for which his stronghold was
raised, and it becomes his prison. When faces cease
to become physiognomical, they become masks.
Every teacher who stands before the community
with an expression of forms and articles which are
not the real features into which his spirit would
freely organise itself, wears a mask through which
every tone from behind will be changed, every look
perverted, and the people will hear what they came
to hear, whatever be said. What power is wasted
thus from age to age! One of Plato's disciples,
anticipating Munchausen, compared his master's
thouo-hts to words frozen in the air as soon as
uttered, to be heard long after when thawed out
by a warmer season, as voices falling out of the
air upon astonished travellers. • The conceit may
well suggest the great truths which, amid the mass
of ritual and error, must have been uttered in the
temples of many lands, by advanced souls trying to
express themselves through the old forms and
phrases. Every such thought is frozen in the icy

204 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
death around it, there to remain till some reformer
brings a spring-tide, expressing itself in its own leaf
and flower, when the age that least needs them
hears on the summer air the plaintive prophecies
and far-reaching sentences which were withheld from
those who first heard or read them because not
bravely separated from contemporary superstitions.
Undoubtedly there are some vigorous voices heard
beyond their cloisters ; but they only remind us what
we are losing, for their strength is divided, their
sense confused. If this age realised the need of a
purer mental morality, it would be startled at find
ing it possible, when a venerable and scholarly
clergyman closes a long ministry, for a friendly and
faithful listener to represent that in that time the
great themes of his ministry have been the " divine
character of man as man," and the " belief in a
universe of law, and in the progress and develop
ment of man as a part of that system of law;" and
for another listener, equally friendly and faithful, to
represent the same long ministry as devoted to
showing that man " has fallen away from God," and
"that law and progress without God and Christ
are as the godless world of Richter's vision."* So
much for the help of those who become part of the
Church in order to reform it.
Across this road the historian clears another :
* See the criticisms in the Pall Mall Gazette (November, 1869) on
the Rev. F. D. Maurice and his ministry in Vere Street.

CROSS ROADS. 205

whither tends that ? By his rule, the young man
whose mind has abandoned the old moorings of
belief would strictly conform his personal relations
with his changed views. He would adhere to no
Church or Party which did not represent his private
opinions ; but he would be reticent in stating those
opinions except where they are welcome, — that is,
he would advocate them where they required no
advocacy; he would not publicly assail the aban
doned principles, nor seek to enthrone those he has
attained. And the first reason for this course is
that it is a primary duty not to offend others, who
have as good a right to their opinions as he has to his.
So far as this advice would characterise the spirit
and style of our advocacy of 'unpopular convictions,
nothing could be wiser. Nearly every opinion may
be stated in a gentle or in an offensive way. An
Oriental prince asked two interpreters to explain his
dream. One said, " You will lose all your
relatives, then die yourself." The monarch ordered
this prophet of evil to be beheaded. The other
said, " Your majesty will survive all your rela
tions." The prince loaded this one with favours,
though his interpretation was really the same
as that of the other. Thus there are two ways
of doing things. The adherent of Truth should
not hold her up in a form that shall repel, but
in that which shall attract. But to bid him hold
his peace about his convictions in deference to

206 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
those opposed to them would have silenced Jesus
before the Pharisees, Paul before the image-makers
of Ephesus, and Luther at the Diet of Worms.
The young man turns to a pillar of savourless salt
on the day he shall follow that strange admoni
tion. Nor does the fact that each dead formula
once contained a living spirit warrant its claim
to remain as an obstacle in the path of that
now required by the living spirit. But, after all,
it is said, he of the advanced views may be wrong.
Certainly he may be; and until he has pondered that
fully, the more silent the better. There is good
need that the young lads of St. Andrew's should be
reminded of the danger of committing them
selves hastily to immature speculations, and also
that it is a frivolous mind which thinks it neces
sary to cover everybody with ill-considered doubts.
So long as one has only half-thoughts and unfledged
speculations, it were miserable self-conceit to call the
attention of the Universe to them. But convictions
— the word is fronq con and vincere, and refers to
things which have finally conquered heart and
mind — are more serious; and every noble mind will
not merely Orpah-like kiss his mother of conscious
Truth, but cleave unto her — following that whither
soever it may lead, sharing its fate, willing to be
buried with it.

XVII.
A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE.

The roads tending to God are more in number than the breathings
of created beings. Sasas.
Be to the best thou knowest ever true
Is all the creed.
Then, be thy talisman of rosy hue,
Or fenced with thorns that, wearing, thou must bleed,
Or gentle pledge of love's prophetic view,
Thy faithful steps it will securely lead.
Margaret Fuller.

A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE.

J1HAT Wordsworth desired— that his days
should be linked each to each by natural
piety — is fulfilled in the religious life of
these simple peasants around the watering-place
of Trouville-sur-Mer. A walk along embowered
paths brings one to the ancient statue revered by
the people as the Virgin of the Forest. Was it
originally meant for the Madonna, or for a priestess
of the Druids ? Was it Mary ? was it Velleda ?
There is no cross nor inscription. It may be
that as Ma, Maia, Mary, she has received the
veneration of successive generations. Among all
the mottoes which surround her now, the majority
signify that she is regarded as the tutelary di
vinity of fishermen and sailors. "To her who
saved me from the wreck;" "To her who rescued
me in a storm;" "The Star of the Sea,"— such
are the tributes to her; the last being fre
quently repeated. It may have been the Goddess
of Beauty, who rose out of the sea-foam, that
became thus, through the dangers and storms en-

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

countered by her worshippers, consecrated to a
deeper meaning than she had for the Romans who
brought her hither, and, blended with the loving
Madonna, stood forth now as the providential star
shining for those who go down to the sea in ships.
Ere she became invested with this tenderer light,
she may have served to gather about her all the
gentler elements of beliefs yet earlier, and softened
the wild reign of Odin ere she mitigated the severe
sway of Jahve.
Whoever the saint may be whose day returns
for celebration among these people, it is always the
Virgin who receives their homage. All other forms
have waned into dimness beside the light of the
Mother whom they ever behold throned in the
heavens. Two of the Sundays which I passed at
Trouville were devoted to the Fete-Dieu — the
ancient festival of the sacrament, instituted by
Urban IV. just six hundred years ago, neglected
now in the chief Gallican cities. Early in the
morning the young men and maidens and the
children of the neighbourhood gathered together
and formed a procession. The girls were all arrayed
in white, and the young men decorated with gar
lands. The youths bore in their hands leaves of
corn and green flags and clover ; the children had
little baskets filled with rose-leaves. With these
all the streets through which the priests bore the
sacrament were strewn, and the town soon became

A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE.

carpeted with flowers. Altars were raised at
various points in the streets, and the chanting pro
cession went all day from altar to altar, at each of
which a Mass was said. There was now and then a
reminiscence of the old miracle -plays. A child
dressed with a strip of wool about the loins, and
bearing a long wooden cross, represented John the
Baptist ; and, led by the hand of this one, another,
dressed in a blue robe and bearing a silver cross,
impersonated the infant Jesus. There might be
something a trifle grotesque to sophisticated eyes in
seeing these sacred infants refreshed now and then,
as they were, with gingerbread; but to these
simple people the impression was not marred by
any such sense of incongruity, and no doubt the
children truly represented the facts of the case. A
lovely young girl of about eighteen years, who, in
addition to her pure white dress, wore a long veil
reaching to her feet, represented the Virgin Mary ;
and as the procession turned from the Mass she bent
low, and each child threw a handful of rose-leaves
upon her as she passed. Everywhere along the
street, and in the church, which all at length entered,
there were banners festooned with flowers and
inscribed with endearing names to the Virgin — the
favourite being, " The Star of the Sea." The
Virgin was no dogma to these fishermen, but an
ever-watching eye of love above that element upon
which and by which they lived.

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

Not to be disconnected from the cheerful words
of the priest, the glad notes of the choir, and the
radiance of serene faith and happiness upon all, was
this idea of a tender Mother above them all. They
were not haunted by any devil, nor overshadowed
by the fear of hell. They were undoubting believers
in a faith which made them happy, as a faith well
might which had replaced the jealous Jahve with
a supreme maternal love.
The day after I had witnessed this I saw near
a House built in the park of the Great Exposition
a set of rigid long-faced men from London dis
tributing tracts to those who passed by. Some of
these tracts I accepted and glanced through before
tearing them to pieces. They were redolent of
brimstone ; warned people that they were going to
hell ; exhorted Catholics to abjure their idolatries,
particularly the worship of Mary; and described
God as in high wrath, and Christ as one about to
descend as minister of divine vengeance. Most of
those who passed looked on the colporteurs with
the merest curiosity as a part of the show.
Why should people dethrone out of their hearts
a supreme loving mother, and raise in her place an
angry jealous autocrat? Let any man compare
that happy religious festivity at Trouville with the
gloomy services of a London Chapel, and say which
is preferable. The religion of the Catholic peasant
is indeed unenlightened, but is it more so than the

A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE. 213
incredible creed of " Evangelicals," who bring no
evangel, no glad tidings, but only. tidings of woe?
Who could associate rose-leaves, with hell-fires, or
wreathe the Torturer of Souls with evergreen?
It is inconceivable that any faith can be perma
nently vanquished by one less attractive than
itself. It may be said that in Germany and England
the present hard deity of Protestantism did replace
the tenderer being adored by Catholic populations.
It is true that, along with the sunshine and flowers
of the old faith, there eame miasmas in the summer
air, and reptiles creeping among the flowers, and
that in the vigorous wrath which would ex
terminate these, and flash purifying lightnings
through the atmosphere, many beautiful growths
were destroyed. The human heart in its indigna
tion was not discriminating; they who bore the
cross in their lives would not look upon the shape
of it which had become the symbol of corruption,
and they would not tolerate the Mother who seemed
to have become allied with the Mother of Harlots.
So the winter of Puritanism came on. Yet beneath
its snow every seed of Faith's old summer was safely
kept for the fairer spring-tide. If one would find the
reappearance of the floral festivals of Trouville, he
must look to New England when Puritanism has
had its full outcome. There, in the merry summer
festivals of the most liberal or " radical " churches,

214 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
he will find the same joy blooming beneath the sunny
faith which, under Channing, Parker, Emerson, and
many another, has flowered out of the storm-
nurst stem of Puritanism. " Gotama made a new
song for the old god." The whole task of the
religion which is there the direct heir of Calvinism
has been for nearly two generations the breathing
of a new life on the fields which its frosts have
so long and so necessarily bound, to lead out the
blossoms again; and although the Madonna re
appears no more on the altars from which she was
withdrawn, the love she signified is preserved in the
ever-watchful God whom Theodore Parker addressed
in his prayers as " our Father and our Mother."
It is an indication of the depth of the imperish
able sentiment which gladdens the creed of the
Catholic peasant, that from the time when the wor
ship of the Virgin was overthrown by Protestantism
her heavenly office was transferred to her holy
child, so that the pictures of Jesus came to repre
sent, no longer a man, but a man with the long
locks and tender aspect of a woman.
The sage and the seer conversed, and the
dervise listened. Afterward the sage said, "All
that the seer sees, I know." The seer said, " All
that the sage knows, I see." But the dervise said,
" All that the sage knows, and the seer sees, I
feel." The heart has a logic of its own. These
peasants are reaching by blind ways, unknown to

A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE. 215
our colder Anglo-Saxon brains, the happier faith
toward which our thinkers are struggling.
'Tis an old theme, my brothers, this Divine
Love, and it cannot be exhausted. Men have not
outlived it, angels cannot outlearn it. It swayed
the ancient world by many a fair god and goddess;
its light has been cast over ages of Christian con
troversy and warfare ; it is still the guiding Star of
the Sea to each voyager after the nobler faith. The
youth leaves the old shore of belief only because
love has left it. His starved affections will no
longer accept stone, though pulverised flour-like
and artfully kneaded, for bread. Their white sails
fill the purple and the sombre seas, and they hail
each the other to ask for the summer land where
faith climbs to beauty, and the lost bowers of child
hood's trust may be found again. A prosperous
voyage to you, brave brothers !

xvm.

A VIGIL.

Let the simple soul extend unimpeded its fiery energy. The
immortal heart should be the leader; but let all your eyes look
upward ! Zoroaster.

What hath not man sought out and found,
But his dear God ? who yet his glorious love
Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground
With showers, with frosts, with love and awe.
George Herbert.

A VIGIL.

N the Vigil of the Immaculate Conception
of the Virgin Mary I went to listen to
the discourse of a good-hearted priest.
His argument was, that since, as Protestantism
admitted, Jesus could only be free from the taint
of our common humanity by a miraculous concep
tion, so was it necessary also that his mother should,
in the same manner, have been secured from
hereditary sin. It was but a step in consistency,
yet it was that. The neighbouring clergyman, who
holds this theory in horror, nevertheless preaches
it, and helps to build every convent where women
are taught that motherhood is impure, every time
he declares that human nature is depraved, and that
Jesus was born without a human father.
Then I went to a gathering of Men of Science
to hear a paper read on the relative nature of the
sexes in all parts of the world. Having proved to
his own satisfaction that the female sex was every
where inferior to the male, the author of the paper

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

denounced the efforts now being made for the
elevation of women, and asked, " For what end is
woman created?" His answer was — ''Maternity."
Then straightway he proceeded to show that by
that word he meant simply the bringing of children
into the world. Even if this were all that is implied
in the word Mother, one might say that no kind
or amount of human knowledge were too much for
woman, and that every college should throw open
its doors for her. But is that all? That woman
with the babe in her arms is to bear it again, a man;
from her pains and labours a character is to be
added to society. Shut out from colleges, she is to
educate a soul; excluded from politics, she is to
train voters and legislators. Her mother's work
shall be felt for good or ill in every nerve of the
world, which holds — somewhat uneasily, one is glad
to see, in these'last days— the end of her existence
to be that of a prolific animal.
Against the theories of the priest and the savant
I weighed the wisdom of a child I knew who could
not be induced to say the Lord's Prayer unless she
were permitted to insert " Mother" in its first
clause. The testimonies of ages were summed in
the protest of her spirit: the goddesses beside their
gods ; the Madonnas of Mexican, Buddhist, Egyp
tian, and Chinese temples; Aditi, Isis; Ceres, Freyja,
Mary, — they all came as Morning Stars to sing their
chorus around this child, over whose cradle the kind

A VIGIL. 221
mother who meant them all had watched till God's
eye shone through hers.
An old legend relates that, when Mary fled with
the infant Jesus into Egypt, she once entered a
temple of Serapis, where all the images of the
country's deities were collected. At the moment
when she entered, all the statues fell from their
niches, and lay shattered on the floor. The wor
shippers prostrated themselves, and bewailed their
ruined idols; but when they presently looked up,
they saw in the place of each fallen statue a radiant
white-winged angel, and, crowned above them all,
Mary with the holy babe in her arms.
Well, the ages passed, and Mary, with her child,
hardened into stone.' Three hundred years ago,
when Tetzel stood at her altar selling every vice,
and she, with the saints around her, stood cold and
still with no word to utter, a holier mother entered,
and the floor was heaped with the fragments of the
idols of the Church. It has taken their worshippers
long to perceive that in their places arose that day
the shining forms of living virtues.
There came a day when, as the boy Martin
Luther sang his songs in the street, a true Madonna
took him into her home, loved him, taught him.
He who had seen the beauty of Ursula's life was
not to be deceived by a painted doll superintending
the sale of adultery for ducats. That gilded puppet
he struck down, and thenceforth the long-imprisoned

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

ideal of a holy womanhood ascended to the heart of
God, descended to the life of man, and passed on to
lead man to his nobler society. Calvinism was but
the chaos of the shattered idols which fell when
Virtue entered the Church; but when above that
ruin the human heart looked up without fear, and
caught the smile of a Father's face in the Heavens,
it really worshipped the Madonna. For it is
woman who represents the principle of Love in
this Universe. To her the great offices of affec
tion are confided, and to her sufferings and tasks
its profounder laws and secrets are disclosed.
The father loves also, but because he has been
taught by her. Where woman is a slave, the father
is a stern patriarch; only as she has gradually gained
equality, influence, reverence, has he been able to
make his name one offender association. And as
this perpetual Madonna has made the civilised
home, she must proceed to civilise the school and
the state, and to ennoble human character. We
need only contrast the cultured home with our
corrupt politics, we need only look from our social
intercourse to the snarling of nation with nation, to
see where the influence of woman remains to be felt.
Where man reverses the fiat of his ancient instinct,
and claims that " it is good for man to be alone,"
there is he barbarous still. But woman " is not fit
to be a soldier." That is her credential to lead to
the ages of peace. She is inharmonious with every

A VIGIL. 223
remnant of barbarism, with all that is passing away
— with war, with hustings mobs; but how stands
she related with the society for which good men
are striving?
All suns mean the light by which I walk. The
new heaven of ideas opened for this age signifies a
new earth also. The Madonna disappearing from
her constellation reappears in many warm human
forms : first of all, in the ideal of manly character.
Every man worthy to be out of prison must
now be in good part a woman; and just in the
proportion that the masculine nature ascends to
the strength which comes of a receptive spirit, — so
far, that is, as it is mystically married to the femi
nine nature, — it is touched to the finer issues of
existence. No one can be noble but by noble
passions. The manly heart shall be the most vir
ginal. (For the satire which has confined the
word virgin to one sex shall be perceived when
men have learned to exact of their own souls that
which they exact of woman !) We know a good
woman when we see her : which of her qualities is
it would disgrace a man ?
Effeminacy !
Behold the great Sisterhood of Saviours : what
foreheads shine more fair in the history of those
who have raised the earth by noble passions than
theirs? The stately Iphigenia finds her nuptial
and her glory in dying for her country ; Antigone

224 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
cannot be parted by any power or terror from her
brother's corpse ; Hypatia will perish with her gods ;
the Countess Emily Plater, the Maid of Orleans,
leap forth as divine lightnings, scorning danger and
death. Above all, behold that unmoved figure
amid the wild storms on the summit of Calvary!
With cruel mockeries the martyr on his cross is
buffeted. Where are his disciples ? " They all
forsook him and fled." He looks around on the
glaring eyes, hears the scoffing words, and cries,
"My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Had
he looked downward, he would have seen a figure
clasping his cross, a face turned with agony to meet
his last look, which would have mutely said,
" Poor sufferer, thou art not forsaken. A love like
thine own hovers near thee." There stood by the
cross of Jesus his mother ; and as she stands there
she is the prophecy of the Madonnas of all noble
causes. She forecasts the far-shining year when
there shall be manly women and womanly men.
Happy they who, by sharing her fortitude and
devotion, have realised in their own breasts a
picture of her more saintly than artist ever drew or
priest adored.
It was for a far-and-wide pilgrimage through the
earth that the Madonna abandoned the altars of the
Church. She ascended to blend with and soften
the wrathful Jehovah into a loving Father; she
gave a second birth to Jesus, and from being a

A VIGIL. 225

severe judge he became the gentle pleader for man;
she entered the breast of man, and his strength was
mystically married to her finer power, to make
ideal character. But not yet were her ministrations
ended. With his deeper eye man could now recog
nise her sacred form moving along the pathways of
the earth, could trace her in the soothed brow of
sickness, in the ray that lighted the home of toil, in
a warmth that lingered about fireless hearth-stones,
in steps of light and love radiant amid the selfish
ness of commerce. He could see the reappearance
of good mothers in good men. (Of Auguste Comte
many things may be forgotten, but not that he
placed his wife and servant-girl in his Calendar of
Saints. )
A Roman Catholic priest said, " It was a fear
ful loss to you Protestants when you gave up our
Blessed Mother." To him the Pilgrim replied with
this fable. A child found, then lost, a beautiful
butterfly. She sought it again with tears. Mean
while, the butterfly had alighted softly on the child's
head, and remained there during the search. Have
we, then, lost the Blessed Mother ? Some of us
have found her at our sides, the Madonna of every
day life, bringing intimations of the Eternal Heart
to our firesides, whispering all unconsciously by her
fidelity and tenderness, "O human heart, surely
thou canst trust the Source of the hearts of good
women." One day, as I shall hope, even you,
p

226 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
priestly brother, will awake to the perception that,
while you have been glorifying the dead Mary with
new dogmas, and hurling anathemas on the educa
tion and elevation of the living Mary, they who
have most, of all, as you say, lost the Madonna, are
really embodying her soul in a new era of civilisa
tion. Behold, it is the Vigil of the Bridal Day
of Man and Woman in the State, and the stars
prophesy of the offspring of that great marriage
— the reign of Love, and ages of Peace.

XIX.

OLD TEMPLES.

Each age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of
foolish young people ; its superstitions appear no superstitions to
itself. But after a short time down go its folly and weakness, and
the memory of them ; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation
assumes the form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our
sight clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and colour. The
revelation of reason is this of the unchangeableness of the fact of
humanity under all its subjective aspects, that to the cowering it
always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients
are only venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was
trivial ; as the sun and stars affect us grandly only because we can
not reach to their smoke and surfaces, and say, Is this all ?
Emerson.
The empty ruins, lapsed again
Into Nature's wide domain,
Sow themselves with seed and grain,
As Day and Night and Day go by,
And hoard June's sun and April's rain. Allingham.

"o&£j

OLD TEMPLES.

TURING the last Exposition at Paris I
visited the International Chess Tourna
ment. It was a somewhat strange ex
perience to sit in that silent room and witness the
solemnity of these champions from various parts of
Europe and America grappling with each other
in mimic strife, while nations with their great
competitions roared around them. They were
fine-browed men, too, scholarly in their casual
talk, and it was almost grotesque with what in
tensity of feeling or flushes of despair they hurled
pawn against pawn, and knight against knight.
Alexander the Great confessed with shame, it is
said, his interest in this game ; and yet it has
survived the interest in his wars.
There is a legend of the origin of Chess, which
I have heard, that the warriors in some old evenly-
fought never-decided battle were finally trans
formed into these little figures, that they might
continue their struggle to the end of time without

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

disturbing the rest of the world. The fable is not
a bad one as concerns other matters. Men have
always been pursuing apparently vast things, which
seemed to them to have no end of importance, but
which Time reduces, until for later generations they
become as chess kings and chess bishops. There are
men who, indeed, still carry on the game amid the
world of real interests, but the masses look on with
wonder. Here, for example, at the door of the
building where the players sit at their tourney, is a
small Hebrew temple, erected by some silly London
Society for the Conversion of the Jews, which
contains a model of the Holy Sepulchre at Jeru
salem and of all the churches that cluster around it.
There are temples, convents, shrines, chapels,
altars, mosques, representing about fifteen peoples
of the earth. The part owned by each is defined
by a special colour, and the model — it was made by
command of the Viceroy of Egypt — may be taken to
pieces, showing you all that is inside and beneath the
sacred spot. Here is stratum on stratum, — Coptic,
Syrian, Greek, Armenian, Russian, Roman, English,
even American. Remove a Greek temple, and
under it is a Roman Catholic " Chapel of the Three
Crosses;" beneath that, again, some temple burrows
to a rock said to have been rent at the crucifixion.
While one race claims that it holds the spot where
Jesus was buried, another boasts its possession of
that where the manger lay ; for rivalry has worked

OLD TEMPLES. 231

the miracle that Jesus should have been born and
reared, been tried, scourged, crucified, and buried,
all within this little circle of space! As the ex
hibitor went on with his explanations the smile
went round at the little religious chess-board,
and his story of the jealousies and antagonisms
surrounding it ; and yet the model represented the
bitter and bloody wars of over a thousand years.
Not the smallest shrine but cost the best blood of
the generation which fixed it there. The march of
the Crusaders shaking the world has ended with
Lord Shaftesbury and his journeymen soul-savers,
and a generation of which few would give a drop of
blood out of their finger to decide whether Pope
or Sultan should own the spot where Jesus was
buried. It is sometimes said that culture chills en
thusiasm. It may be true: they who have pon
dered the course of the world have detected the
shadows that seem so solid to the ignorant. They
see the great aims of one age dissolving into the
fanaticism or sport of the next. They see the cards
and dice that once divined destinies reduced to be
the amusements of idle hours, and anticipate
the day when the insignia of the Churches, which are
already of more importance as pieces of- a political
game than as related to the religious interests of
mankind, shall become the prey of the antiquary.
With what mere curiosity does this crowd visit the

232 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
models of Mexican, Egyptian, and other ancient
temples in the Park of the Exposition ! How
little did the victims who counted themselves happy
that their blood might redden these old altars, or
the priests who slew them, dream that they were
merely furnishing a few hieroglyphs for the future
archaeologist ! This Siamese praying - machine,
which twirls out its hundred and twenty prayers
per minute, these Hindoo idols, do they excite
more laughter or wonder than our European hells
and devils will excite a hundred years from now ?
They will be quoted to prove the barbarism of the
society in which they found believers.
Wherefore did the old temples exist, and what
end do the monsters still worshipped by men
answer? What purpose has this universe in lead
ing Mexicans to slaughter their children before
idols, or Japanese to believe in the existence of
green devils with asses' ears? A question suffi
ciently answerable if we look at the fossil monsters
which pioneered man in his advent to this planet.
Not beautiful by any means was Ichthyosaurus,
yet through him and his ugly comrades came the
temper and force of man, even as the fashioned iron
passed from ore to furnace, and from anvil to anvil.
The artist does well who rests the pedestal of his
fair statue on griffins ; his hero is the transfigura
tion of their vitality. If the old temples and the
battles about absurd dogmas have passed into

OLD TEMPLES. 233

chessmen, not so the strength they added to our
sinews. Maximilian found lately 15,000 Mexi
cans as ready to be shot for the cause of their
country as their ancestors had been ready to bleed
on altars for a fictitious deity. The shrines of the
Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem did not sink into insig
nificance before they had weighed the forces of
every race, and apportioned to each its right position
and territory. These were the touches that crystal
lised, the new society of Europe. The boy with his
whistle explores the laws of sound ; in his play, he
trains himself to harmony with the earth's centre of
gravitation ; the wing of the butterfly he chases will
blend at last with great ideals, will shine in galaxies.
The world is a larger man, the man is a smaller
world, and our lives repeat in embryonic changes
the history of our race. Nay, we are individually
liable to arrests of development such as are now
found binding whole races of men to the world's
childhood. There are Asias of thought as well as
Americas of thought. Many a man who lives for
six days of each week in civilised society worships
on the seventh in ancient Mexico.
How many of us would proceed another step if
we saw the farther end of our path, and the final
outcome of the thing we are pursuing ? Will this
grand avenue change at length to a squirrel-track,
and run up a tree? I heard a philosopher commend
his friend, a chemist, whom he found converting his

234 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
old shirts into loaf-sugar. Is there not a chemistry
by which the human spirit also may convert its
cast-off raiment into sweetness ? There is nothing
which the worship of Thought cannot transmute.
He who humbly adores the supreme Reason will
derive from each old creed or temple its contri
bution. The poet looked on the chambered nau
tilus sailing on with its old sealed-up chambers for
hull and ballast, and sang —
Build thee more stately mansions, 0 my soul,
As the swift seasons roll ;
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outworn shell on life's unsounded sea.

'^-raaoS);

XX.

CHRIST ON THE ASS.

There are two things which I abhor — the learned in his infi
delities, and the fool in his devotions.
Mahomet.

Be of good cheer ; the sullen Month will die,
And a young Moon requite us by and by :
Look how the old one, meagre, bent, and wan
With age and fast, is fainting from the sky !
Omar Khayyam.

CHRIST ON THE ASS.

N the Roman Catholic cathedral of Cincin
nati, Ohio, I found a painting by poor
Haydon, which through many fortuities
had found its way thither. It represented the
entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem seated on an ass.
With all the intensity of personal feeling pervading
the works of that artist, — who, with his high ideal,
had an unequal execution, — he had placed in this
picture his divinity and his devil. Wordsworth and
Voltaire stand among those looking on — the former
as a devout disciple, the latter as a scoffing Sadducee.
Voltaire has his chin in the air, and has nothing
but contempt for the whole affair; Wordsworth
bends so low that his obeisance seems rather to the
ass than to the man seated on it. The work is
probably more suggestive than the artist intended,
One cannot help being reminded of the great modern
poet's abasement of his genius before the gallows
and under the dogmas of the Church, and of how
the great French iconoclast too often contented

238 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
himself with mere denial, and, as the Germans say,
threw out the baby with the bath.
The legend represented in the picture itself
shows us how long the kind of reverence illustrated
by Wordsworth has degraded the symbols of reli
gion. Zechariah wrote, " Behold, thy King cometh
unto thee : he is just, and having salvation ; lowly,
and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of
an ass." The earliest Society for the Conversion
of the Jews was very much of the same kind with
the latest, and, in its eagerness to prove that all the
prophecies were literally fulfilled by Jesus, mistook
the Hebrew idiom of Zechariah, who meant by the
ass and the colt one animal only ; and it is recorded
that Christ's disciples " brought the ass, and the
colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him
thereon" — thus making Jesus ride into Jerusalem
on two animals ! We may not therefore be sure that
Jesus really rode into Jerusalem on an ass at all ;
but the story is an abundant witness of the fact that
a blind worship of the letter forces the highest truth
of every age to ride upon superstition and stupidity.
Whether it be the Old Jerusalem or the New
Jerusalem, the reforming spirit must deal with the
donkey element in human nature, and conciliate its
stubborn bigotry. The geologist may discover
what he pleases, but Society can receive his dis
covery only if it be seated on the cosmogony of
Moses. Freedom may be good, but you must make

CHRIST ON THE ASS.

239

it out somehow that the patriarchs held no slaves,
and Paul returned no fugitive. Whatever reform
you will have you can get, provided you can show
that it is a " return to the old principles of the con
stitution;" to prove it simply an improvement on
the same were fatal. Baptise your atheism, or
Comtism, or anti-marriage doctrine, or other
radicalism, as Primitive Christianity, seat it on a
text, and you will have a fair chance for your
New Jerusalem.
I would not underrate the ass ; he is a patient
and strong beast, with all his stubbornness and other
drawbacks. I can tolerate him even when he comes
on two feet, and lifts up his unmistakable voice in
Parliament against Reform, or in Convocation against
Church Disestablishment. But I cannot join in
the chant and homage of Holy Ass Day. It is by
the side of the apotheosis of the conservative quad
ruped that the scoff of Voltaire must be judged.
The claim he made on St. Louis, " He should have
been above his age," has been applied to Voltaire
in censure ; but as he recedes from us we perceive
that his satire and laughter were the other side of a
reverence for ideals, the ragged threads of one side
of a tapestry whose cartoon on the other is not with
out majesty. There is a background to that scoffer
not to be seen by the age that includes the ass along
with the Christ in its homage. The fire in the smithy
may be traced to the sun, the blacksmith's blow on the

240 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
anvil employs the energy of every planet; and the
great Denier, kindling revolutionary fires in which
things held sacred shall be consumed, is not to be
estimated as a mere hand and rapier without alliance
with the hot pulses of the outraged heart of Man.
The only pure Theism of this age is that which the
remorseless assaults of Voltaire on Christian My
thology has rendered possible. Nevertheless, it is
just because he did his work so well that we need
not do it over again. We can lay our palm before
the heroic prophet of Jerusalem without prostrating
ourselves for the honour of having his ass ride over
us, or even mingling with our homage a respect for
the current superstitions above which he could not
always rise.
But what shall we say of the cultivated Euro
peans whose god is a dead Jew ? Wordsworth
bowing there before the social and religious de
formities of his time is really crucifying the man
he believes himself worshipping. It was just that
kind of reverence which sacrificed the brave reformer
to the High Church of Palestine, and to the popular
prejudices of his time ; and it is the same principle
which in all times will devoutly immolate truth on
the shrines which have ceased to represent it. It
is that which will sacrifice human love to a marriage
form, and human intelligence to a university cur
riculum, and liberty to an ancient order.
We are swayed by the dead. Their skeleton

CHRIST ON THE ASS. 241
hands are extended over the surface of society, and
in obedience to them we drug ourselves and our
children with calomel, and stab with lancets; we
train the young as if they were to live in the age
and country of Pericles or Augustus ; we read them
ghost-stories and witch-stories out of the Bible more
horrible than the contemporary ones which we
severely prohibit. Our property represents the wills
of the dead in its distribution ; our charities will not
leave the channels they marked out, though through
them they flow from the poor to the rich. And if
even our Poets Laureate are found celebrating the
churches of the dead, and the gallows, and war, and
aristocracy, and, amid all the flaming swords before
which tyrannies are falling, can find none, to praise
but the rusty Exealiburs of mythical ages, what
chance is there for rescuing the people from their
bondage to the Corpse-dynasty ? If the light sent
to us have turned to darkness, how great is that
darkness !
It is true, as has been said, that we are per
mitted to look upon the old symbols and repre
sentatives of religion with a reverence which in
the age and country of Voltaire would have been
servility and cowardice; but it by no means follows
that this will continue to be possible to us. The
abasement of the Wordsworths implies the con-
temptuousness of the Voltaires. During the Twelve
Days' Mission of the High Church in London, Vol-
Q

242 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
taire edited the daily press. Holy vestments became
" ecclesiastical petticoats." It will not do to tempt
the retractile element in human nature too far. Ice
will burn, and fire will freeze, and superstition will
engender atheism. But unless we are to be given
over to a mere succession of reactions, and to oscillate
between donkey-worship and the bitterness which,
with Voltaire, says of Jesus, " I pray you, let me
never hear that man's name again ! " we may turn
from the two side-figures of Haydon's picture to
honour one who seems to realise the true use of the
ass. We can put our own bit in the mouth of the
conservative animal, and make him bear us. As
true chemistry came seated on alchemy, and
astronomy was borne on astrology, we can hail the
religion of an ideal manhood, though born among
the beasts of the stall, and borne down to us on the
religious animalism which moves only by reason of
a devil's prong behind and a bundle of heavenly
hay in front.
The old creeds grew out of human nature as
genuinely as weeds and flowers out of the earth.
It is well enough that the gardener, whose business
it is to pull them up, should despise them as pig
weed, wormwood, chickweed, shadblossom : so they
are, out of their place ; but the botanist picks up
the same, and recognises them as Ambrosia,
Stellaria, Amelanchalia, Amaranth. Natura nihil
agit frustra. Let us coax each to yield its last bud.

CHRIST ON THE ASS. 243
To that end the resisting force will help us: the
reluctant sod and seed-shell will by their stubborn
ness give the stem mineral for its stateliness, and
conserve a relation between root and flower which
shall sustain the latter in its aspiration to the
heavenly hues.
A sage reminded his friends that the donkey was
one of their poor relations. We must reflect, too,,
that he has seen better days. There was a time when
the donkey was a masterpiece, and, turning from the
ugly alligators and kangaroos which preceded him,
Nature coyed his amiable face with the admiration
of Titania. Since then higher animals have come,
and have outrun and outwitted him ; but we ought
not to mock him because he is down in the world.
His family, though poor, is still large and respect
able in Church and State. Their family names
now are Precedent and Dogma. We must, indeed,
resist their pretensions to rule us, but not forget that
nearly every precedent was once a landmark of pro
gress, and every dogma, compared with some pre
vious dogma, the watchword of a vanguard. There
was a day when the dogmas of Satanic Power, Total
Depravity, the Trinity, were advances upon yet
gloomier theories, and had their martyrs. It was
some Socinus who first imagined a Mother of
God, a Channing who announced the doctrine of
Purgatory. There was a day when slavery was
the merciful alternative of the wholesale slaughter

244 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
of captives, when the omission of woman from
political equality meant her security from the
terrors of military life, and when the gallows meant
a restraint upon the wild passions of private ven
geance. Respecting now not what these are, but
what they meant, remembering that we live in
the reign of man, not in that of donkey, we may
compel each to bear us to our Jerusalem.

XXI.

"DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE.

May they who celebrate thy name by wax-light at noonday
tolerate such as are content with the light of the sun !
Voltaire's Prayer.

There are blind ways provided ; the foredone
Hearty weary player in this pageant world
Drops out by, letting the main masque defile
By the conspicuous portal. I am through — just through.
Robert Browning.

"DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE."

HROUGH the beautiful garden of Voltaire's
chateau at Ferney we walked, some of
us with a sad reverence in our hearts;
others came to " do the place," or " despatch " it, in
ways facilitated by Mr. Cook's Tourist Tickets.
Theology was present with approved antidotes to
the poisoned atmosphere. "Voltaire was terribly
afraid of lightning," said one. "When a storm
came, he used to run and hide in that room."
" You are not quite right," returned a bystander ;
" he was not afraid of the lightning, but, for fear
of giving priests a new text to proclaim the divine
wrath against free thought, he took precautions."
" But he died a horrible death," said Whitecravat.
" Not so horrible as Christ's," returned our Me-
phistopheles, "though the priests did manage to
make it uncomfortable, and their successors have
managed to make it terrible." "You seem,"
remarked Theology, "to think Voltaire did well
to unsettle human faith as much as he could."

248 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
" He hardly unsettled it more than Jesus and Paul
and Luther did." " But they put something in
the place of what they removed." " See" there,"
returned the other, " what Voltaire built up." He
pointed to the little church, on which was written,
" Deo erexit Voltaire." " You smile ; but if, as I
imagine, you are Protestants, you might without
untruth write on your churches, " Erexit Voltaire."
Unless he, or some man such as he, had written
as he did, you would all have relapsed into the
clutches of the Pope. He it was that placed
reformation beyond reaction, and set you on the
path where your children, if not yourselves, may
one day find a Being who may be worshipped
without a total degradation of the human soul.
He who weeds the field raises the corn. Voltaire
was as the eye of God on earth in his day, trans
fixing every error dishonouring to man ; he was
a Sceptic." At the word Theology shuddered.
"You shudder; but have you ever considered
the profound significance of that word Sceptic?
The word o-Kz<rtra,v. means ' to consider ;' it signifies,
strictly, to shade the eyes for better vision. A
Sceptic, then-, is one who shades his eyes in order
to look steadfastly at a thing. He will shade his
eyes (thus!) of all but the light necessary for
seeing, will protect himself from garish public
opinion, will dismiss prejudice and self-interest, and

"DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE." 249
steadily examine each thing that claims his acqui
escence. There are many words of a similar cha
racter, gentlemen, which you may be accustomed
to pronounce only as if you touched a serpent,
which, however, have their fair origin. What is a
' Latitudinarian' but one whose views have breadth?
What is a ' Freethinker ' but one who refuses to
think as a slave? And what is the 'heretic' but
one who is resolved to choose (ai^o-cu) the faith
he will hold, instead of employing a priest to do
his thinking and his believing for him? The
dishonour which the Churches have brought upon
these words is a confession that they have found
that the ' considerer ' of their faith rarely ends in
accepting it ; that the man of broad opinions is
never content with their pin-hole outlook on the
Universe ; that free thought is fatal to their fetters ;
that the ' chooser ' of his own faith is not often
found choosing theirs."
Theology slipped away affronted. The man
whom it had aroused had, however, by this time
a little company around him, attracted by curiosity.
He was a queer figure, and as he spoke his chin
seemed to become sharper, his nose to bend out
like an interrogation, and his eyes shone like lamps
from their cells, until I could almost fancy it was
the portrait of Voltaire himself come out of the
little room where we had been gazing on it, to haunt
his old grounds again. He was about to leave us,

250 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
but some of those present cried, " Give us another
sermon !" A cynical smile came over his features
as he turned again and spoke as follows : —
" The time will come, ladies and gentlemen,
when everybody will be amazed that intelligent
men should feel wounded at a defence of the
duty of mankind to inquire, to consider, to doubt,
before building faith and life on any proposition.
Theology, in desiring an unthinking adhesion, claims
that we should give up the well-tried rule of every
day life, where it is only by testing things by
doubts that we can come to correct conclusions.
There are, indeed, great differences between men
in this direction; as the English writer, Charles
Lamb, says, ' The shapings of our heavens are the
modifications of our constitutions, and Mr. Great-
heart or Mr. Feeblemind is born in every one of us.'
One man will weep in secret that he cannot believe
the Incarnation or the miracles ; another will swallow
all mysteries, and only regret he hasn't more. One
poor saint will grope through the world melancholy,
doubting if he is regenerate, or whether he pleases
God ; another is perfectly assured that he is of the
elect, that he is God's darling, and gives himself no
trouble about it.
"Which of these is learning the lesson of this
Universe? Which is the really humble and sur
rendered soul? Let that be answered by our
first deeper glance at this our mysterious Life,

"DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE." 251
where we find ourselves as in mid-ocean with
neither shore in sight. The motto of the good
Montaigne was, ' Que scais-je ?' Philosophy every
where echoes that question. While man is but a
bundle of senses, he never doubts: Nature will
first wean him, and that by causing him to doubt
his senses. The child putting a stick in the
water sees it broken; taking it out again, he
sees it unbroken : his senses have deceived him.
He will see stars nearly touching each other, and
afterwards learn that they are billions of miles
apart. He will hear a reply to his voice in the
ravine, and discover no one there but himself. He
will see a flat earth, and be compelled to believe it
round. He will next discover that every piece of
real knowledge began by a doubt cast on the senses,
and discover that Doubt is the method of knowledge.
" What is certain ? In all sciences the schools
contradict each other. The historians are equally
at variance. Caesar and his wars, Homer and his
songs, these are the subjects of critical battles al
most as hot as any the one fought or the other sang
of, — supposing, that is, that Cassar fought, and
that Homer lived ! Is our existence even certain ?
An eminent thinker has declared that the man
who has never doubted his own existence may
be sure he has no aptness for metaphysical in
quiries. Why should we believe what we see to
have absolute existence, when each morning we

2S2 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
awake to the illusiveness of figures as fully believed
in while dreaming ? — and dreams are not wilder
than some things which pious and well-meaning
people declare they have seen! Nay, can we be
confident of the absolute truth of our own rational
conclusions ? All of us have given up some opinions
that once seemed as reasonable as those we now
hold. " And even if any one thinks he has found
a solid shore to this sea of ebbing and flowing
theories and negations, shall he denounce the
man who, unable to find such point of certainty,
at least steers true toward what he believes to be
truth ? I, for one, should call the Sceptic the ideal
man, with Nature's finest clay and clearest flame in
the make of him. He stands for justice against
autocracy in the sphere of thought^ holding the
balances with unflinching though human hand. He
will "press established positions hard : their fallacies
will appear if they have them, or if they have none
they will be made firmer. The young discoverer
knows that the current opinion was only the con
clusion of some previous young discoverer. Blind
indeed must he be who does not see that such scep
ticism is the garment of a real faith ; that unbelief
expresses itself by the sloth or indifference which
sits down to the comfortable conventional creed,
and cries out with alarm lest the sceptic should
topple over God's throne ; while the great believer

" DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE." 253
is he that calmly trusts the solidity of the Universe,
has no misgiving that an honest thought can mar
its destiny, and ever follows the Truth (however
thorny priests make the path !), though it make him
a wanderer past the warm and inviting temples
of Superstition. Think you it was pleasant for
Voltaire to be hounded through the country while
living, with the certainty of having his body kicked
as if it were that of a dog after death ? It could
only have been a living faith in his own heart, and
the presence of a sustaining spirit of truth, which
withheld the servile word that might easily have
made him the darling of France. He stood to his
post in the army of martyrs.
" The theologian referred to his death-bed.
But let us recall the death-bed of the greatest
freethinker who ever trod the earth. A young
mechanic appeared preaching in the streets of
Jerusalem, and with him the spirit of doubt was
let loose as never before on this earth. His doubts
led him when a child, it is said, to the doctors'
feet, where he was found inquiring in the
temple ; they led him to the wilderness, to the cold
mountain and the midnight air. He brought the
existing order into doubt. Pharisee and Scribe,
Temple Service and Palace, Church and State,
bear witness by their wrath that a formidable ques
tioning of all things is at hand. So his death-bed
is a cross; his death-cry, ' My God, why hast thou

254 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
forsaken me ! ' A terrible freethinker's end ! Yes,
every drop of his blood was paid for free thought !
Every wound in his body, as we see it there, pleads
that men should be large and free, unbelievers of
all untruth ; that the soul should plant itself firmly
on its instincts, and hesitate for ever ere it sanction
What it suspects to be false, knowing that every
falsehood is a seed of injury. Around that free
thinker's death-bed the voices of the darkness, agony,
and death cry out to us all, ' Be freethinkers ! If
you must be so with a crown of thorns for your only
reward, a cross your last bed, a mother's^powerless
tears at your feet your only sympathy, still be
thinkers and be free ! '
" What love of such a being as that is worthy
of him, or of the grandeur of your own soul ? Is
it the love of a trembling slave ? Is a blind, un
reasoning, therefore undoubting, acceptance a fit
homage to him who died for spiritual liberation ?
" Thou brave young man, to whom faculties are
given to be the germs of other faculties that shall
for ever aspire to the Infinite Light, cherish every
doubt that comes of simplicity and truth ! As the
little polyp shows on itself a dot, which draws 'to
itself strength until it expands into another orga
nised animal, so the doubt that arises is the germ of
some higher truth to be unfolded. Cherish every
doubt ! To quarrel with these throes of the mind,
whereby new truths are born, were to quarrel with

" DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE." 255
the fire-seethings at the heart of the world, which
shall presently cast up through the boiling seas
some fair island for the habitation of man. For
there is nothing solid which was not once fluid,
nothing stable which was not doubted and tried.
Scepticism is the only path to a noble certainty.
' He,' says Lord Bacon, ¦ who will commence with
certainties shall end with doubts ; but he who is
content to commence with doubts may arrive at
certainties.' " This invites you, I know, to unrest of mind
and sleepless nights; but who would evade the
eternal laws, and say to the Spirit of Life, ' Pass
on ! animate the world ; kindle every star ; let the
great heart beat from ocean to ocean ; let the power
fill full every trunk, branch, leaf, vein of nature,
— but leave me alone to sleep ! Let none of the
divine currents fill or thrill me ! ' For you can
write the history of this Universe on -the smallest
leaf of the forest ; it i3 Motion and Rest .- Rest the
sleep, Motion the dream; Rest the prose, Motion
the poetry ; Rest the sleeping princess, Motion the
prince whose kiss unchains her spell; These enter
the inward world as the twin sisters, Doubt and
Certainty. There is nothing certain save through
doubt of its contrary, nothing doubtful save by the
greater certainty of that which brings it into doubt.
This conflict means a more stable peace. ' The
wisdom that cometh from above is first pure, then

256 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
peaceable.' In regions too cold for life the traveller
desires to sleep ; his sleep were not more fatal than,
to the mind, the certainty which is content to
slumber amid the evil and ignorance in this world.
"Yet this unresting life of the inquiring soul
is not fair and good in itself, but only as the pro
phecy of a higher repose. It is thus with what we
call the beauty of motion : motion is not the ele
ment of beauty, but in it we have a succession of
attitudes and rests. The gazelle as it leaps presents
a series of beautiful pauses : of any one of them we
should weary; but each movement promises a
position more full of beauty than the last. The
aspiring human spirit suggests height beyond height,
truth beyond truth, in its grand discontent with low
and partial attainment.
" The seer beheld a great sea of darkness
beneath ; but above, a greater sea of light flowing
for ever downward. Victorious Light ! — into every
soul some ray enters, enough to warm us with love,
enough to show the path before us. The shadows
lift not, but the one ray that inspires the spirit
which rises above fear arid pain, and endures for
the invisible truth and right, is the morning star
of a perfect day."

XXII.

CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM.

Kung-fu-tzee said, " Yeu, permit me to tell you what is know
ledge. What you are acquainted with, consider that you know ;
what you do not understand,, consider that you do not know it : this
is knowledge." The failing of men is that they neglect their own field to dress
that of others. Chinese Analbots.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats, though unseen, among us. Shelley.

CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM.

N a small room I found a few serious men
and women gathered together to listen to
a Positivist teacher. My heart was drawn
out toward the preacher as he sat by his little table
in the plain schoolroom, explaining his faith with
tempered earnestness, without any rhetorical flourish,
depending entirely upon his conviction, serenely
assured that the universe moved harmoniously
around that ! His worship was for Humanity, not
as the shadow of any sublimer substance, but as in
itself a great and essentially divine Being, capable
of awakening the noblest enthusiasms and passions
of the individual soul. The forms of this worship
were old. There should be a calendar of saints and
saints'- days corresponding with those of the only
Church the founder of Positivism knew ; the saints,
however, were real, — the great men and women
whose thoughts and discoveries are moulding the
present race of human beings. Yet the forms were
just those which had impeded and persecuted and

260 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
crushed many of the very saints held up for our
homage. It was strange to hear in this company of
scholars the echo of some of the vulgarest conven
tionalities about woman, her place and education,
about the relative value of sciences, and concerning
liberty of opinion. The stupidest Tory would have
heard this theory of woman with satisfaction. The
man who spends his days seeking the insect which
shall add the missing link in the chain of life stretch
ing from the zoophyte to Shakespeare, here found
himself as a lackey in the presence of the superior
caste of those whose discoveries put bread into our
mouths. And because no man can demand tolera
tion for the belief that two added to two make five,
therefore free thought in religion is a delusion !
The method was that of the Chinese shoe. Once
decide that your infant's foot is not minimum, but
maximum ; that society and science and religion,
just as they are struggling into existence, are
full-grown and ready to be stereotyped, — and
M. Comte is in order. Not having reached that
point, the Pilgrim felt the previous question moved
in his mind, and went away glad that the teacher had
about him chiefly the taught already ; hoping that
the insect-hunter would still follow his fly as de
voutly as if it were an angel, that woman would still
struggle for her place at the side of man in the
work of the world, and that religious thought would
not clip its wings for this latest cage.

CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 261
Yet why this rebellion of Christians against
Positivism ? All around us are Churches claiming
for their several deities just the same enthralment
which Positivism claims for its deity, Humanity.
We are to follow ancient forms, to subordinate
sciences, to celebrate saints ; and no one is to regard
it as an impertinence, so long as it is all for some
being imagined by ancient Jews or Greeks to be a
god. Must we not conclude that the contempt of
Comte's religion really marks the more disinterested
criticism of Christendom upon its own method?
Christendom has been brought by this French
devotee face to face with its own forms, separated
from association, and from the habits and interests
which have gradually become implicated with them,
presented in their naked reality; and it detests them.
It was not very far from where the Positivists
met that I found the " Spiritualists" assembled. A
speaker and medium from America was engaging
their attention ; and their warmth, their enthusiasm,
their implicit faith that they were in communica
tion with the World of Spirits, were sufficient to
suo-o-est the feeling that might have prevailed at
some meeting of the earliest disciples of Christ after
the crucifixion, as they listened for the sound of
the trumpet and awaited the descent of heavenly
hosts. Amid these believers, their tongues touched
with pentecostal fire, their eyes radiant with in
visible visions, I sat among the blind unbelievers,

262 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. m 
and they prayed for our conversion with a sincere
sympathy. The tables they saw floating to my
eyes were still; their messages for me were de
monstrably false, their trance-revelations mere
trash. Yet when they appealed to the history of
the world for the veracity. of their experiences,
when they referred to the Witch of Endor, to the
angels that opened prison-doors for Paul and Silas,
to the dumb spirits, the possessed souls, the walking
on water, told of in the Bible, how could I but
sympathise with their indignation at the contempt
heaped upon them by Christians ? Here are mul
titudes of living witnesses to events exactly similar
to those which Christendom claims as its creden
tials. Here are unimpeached men and women, living
in an age of scepticism and science, open to our
tests and cross-examinations : are we to give them
less credence than we give to people who lived in
crude, unscientific, universally superstitious ages,
and who cannot be examined at all? What ex
planation can be given of the aversion of believers
in Christian supernaturalism from these con
temporary miracles ? Spiritism is only the appear
ance of their own mythology in a form detached
from their associations and interests ; it is legendary
Christianity brought for the first time to a point
where it can receive their own impartial verdict ¦
and we know now what the human mind in this
age really thinks of it.

CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 263
There is a story told on the Mississippi of a
man of that region who, being on a steamer for the
first time, saw an individual in the saloon, whom
he addressed civilly, but received no answer. Re
peating his question, he still obtained no reply ;
whereupon he uttered very decided and not com
plimentary opinions upon the personal appearance
of his silent fellow-passenger. This individual, as
it turned out, was unaccustomed to the brilliant
mirrors of the American steamers, and he went off
in happy unconsciousness that his contemptuous
criticisms had been all upon himself.
Positivism represents the hereditary body of
Christianity, Spiritism its soul. The reception with
which they are meeting plainly proves that, if either
the forms or the beliefs of the common theology
could at once disappear, they could never be re
established; that they remain only because no real
or disinterested verdict upon them in their own
names can at present be secured. The judges are
parties to the case. For the present, however, it
is much that we have virtually carried it against
them, by confession of judgment, in the suit of
Common Sense and Free Thought against the
Spiritist John Doe and the Positivist Richard Roe.
Our posterity will not fail to apply the principles
thus determined to things not contemplated by our
Christian denouncers of contemporary miracles and
of systems restrictive of the spontaneity and free-

264 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
dom of heart and mind. There are things that
have a name to live, but are dead. A thousand
witnesses to the resurrection of a dead man could
not change the ownership of an acre before any
Court in England. Is this a people that will con
tinue to shape its religion on the supposed testimony
of a few Jewish fishermen, long dead, to events
thus assumed to be incredible?

XXIII.

AN ENGLISH SINAI.

A soldier of- the kingdom of Ci lost his buckler, and, having
sought for it a long time in vain, he comforted himself with this
reflection : " A soldier of our camp will find it ; he will use it."
Confucius.

I could not live — couldst thou ? — to hear a truth
Cry loudly in the heart, and strangle it.
Were this the end, no other life beyond,
Better to perish thus, our dust unurned
(So it might nourish still a living flower),
Bather than breathe such breath as hourly kills
The truth that blooms within. VrviA Perpetua.

AN ENGLISH SINAI.
NGLISHMEN are still fumbling about
Mount Sinai in the East. Even from the
noon of the nineteenth century it is only
through a perspective of six thousand years that men
can see the summits where, amid smoke and flame,
the laws of God are published. Yet Mount Sinai
were a hillock but for the man that stood thereon ;
and wherever a right and true man stands, there the
earth rises heavenward, and the world trembles
under the touch of God.
The road by which the Pilgrim sought his Sinai
lay across the lonely heath that stretches toward the
little village of Christchurch. Lonely as it was, he
felt himself, journeying thither, but the next in a
procession of those who, in ages past and present,
had found something to attract them through those
barren fields. Into the sea stretches Hengistbury
Head, where, in early days, Saxon, Dane, and Roman
successively landed, and built fortresses from which
they sallied forth to conquer and rule the land—

s68 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

each to disappear in due time, leaving some con
tribution of blood or power to be wrought into the
character and laws of this people.
By many a superstition is this old region haunted.
In the distance rises St. Catherine's Hill. There,
where the chapel of that Saint stood, the ghosts of
the old pagans buried in surrounding mounds were
wont, it was said, to throng, seeking to be shriven,
and so rescued from purgatory. Legend also says
that it was originally intended to build Christchurch
on that hill, but after the materials had been carried
thither they were borne at night by invisible agents
to the spot where the church now stands. In the
course of building a beam was found too short, and
it was miraculously lengthened. This beam was
left uncovered, in order that the worshippers might
see it, until very lately. The great square 'tower is
a landmark in the distance, and as one approaches
it the barren heath spreads into the green meadows
that fringe the course of the Avon, which, having
passed the homes of Sidney and Herbert, the altars
of Stonehenge, and the soaring spire of Salisbury,
has become serene in its silvery solitude, as it reflects
the old church borne to its banks by the more silent
stream of Time. For many generations are traced
in its various architecture. The finest part is Nor
man, and has externally a beautiful lattice-work in
stone, and a carved representation of cottage tiles.
These architectural characters bear us back to the

AN ENGLISH SINAI. 269
origin of cathedrals. In early times the rich could
have in their castles or mansions each his private
chapel or oratory ; but the poor must needs combine
their humble means to provide a temple for them all,
worthy the holy ones they adored. But this build
ing which held their common shrines and altars was
at first but a larger cottage, with the same roof-
tiles and lattices as the humble dwellings around
it. The dormer windows of the cottage are still
preserved in the steeple, which is the roof elongated
so as to be a guide for pilgrims or wayfarers to the
sacred home which was for all. But cathedrals
have so long been separated from the life of the
poor, — their significant signs have so long been
mere architectural ornaments,— -that those for whom
they were originally built can no longer recognise
any thread connecting their homes with them. The
sexton of Christchurch explained that the tile-work
was probably meant to imitate fish-scales ! The
internal construction of the cathedral means just as
little to the worshippers ; the nave is no more a
navis, or ark of safety, the transept no more a hedge
separating the sacred from the profane. Wherever
these are now built, they are artificial ruins.
The old reredos at Christchurch represents the
pedigree of Jesus and the adoration of the Magi.
Beneath is Jesse asleep : out of his loins grows a
tree whose many branches curve into niches for the
reputed ancestors of Christ. In the centre the

270 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
mother reclines, upholding the infant, before whom
the Wise Men, and with them a crowned King, are
prostrate. From the time when the moral gran
deurs of the earth were represented in the bending
of Scholarship and Royalty before the peasant who
bore about him only spiritual splendours, pass we
over ma ny ages to the modern part of Christchurch,
which holds the shrine we are seeking — the monu
ment of Shelley. There, beside the fatal boat, his
head supported also by a faithful Mary, lies the
scholar who would not bow to the one before
whom his ancient brothers came from the East
to bend. His face findi in this marble the repose
which the world decreed he should only attain in
death. Perhaps it is because the ancient positions
of the holy child and the king are now reversed, and
the knees of the Church-Christ have become quite
supple before aristocratic privilege, that the most
notable object in this Christian Cathedral is the
memorial of one on whom, while living, the Chris
tian world shrieked out curses. He who replied to
such curses that he had rather be damned with
Plato than saved with those who anathematised
him, has here his cenotaph among those whose only
records are that they died under the blessing of the
Church. In this old haunt of superstition its direst
foe has his monument ! Should this marble form,
in the soft twilight, throb with the life and con
sciousness of Shelley, possibly he would not feel

AN ENGLISH SINAI. 271
any nearer to the symbols around him, but rather
prefer the old persecution to the homage secured by
the potency of a baronet's demand.
Indeed, a modern Spiritist might easily suppose
that the phantom of Shelley had been already at
work in the choir, where old carvings represent a
fox in the guise of a priest preaching to a flock of
geese; a farmer praying while a solemn dog laps
his bowl of milk behind him ; and a king and a priest
conspicuous in hell. At any rate, we may be sure
that these were carved by the Shelley principle
in Nature ; and such ornaments in the church of
the eleventh century implied an infidel's memorial
in that of the nineteenth century. Yet, could he
walk these old aisles, uncongenial as he might find
all his contemporary environments, the poet might
bring with him a perception of a subtle relationship
to those whose aspirations built the gray walls, and
to those who, from windows passionate with heavenly
light, look with warm glances upon his pale marble.
The poet, says Schiller, is the son of his time.
The poets who appeared on the horizon in the
earlier part of this century were not the morning
stars of the new era, but rather the fiery shapes
about an era going down in blood. Of them one
alone from the evening star of a setting is recog
nisable as the morning star of a rising day. By his
side is Byron, in whom the ages of egotism reach
their final flower and perish; with Shelley comes

272 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

the first streak of the day of Humanity. The one
will have his private sorrow ride him like a wild
foaming steed driven by a demon; the other will
have his grief spring up in human sympathy, his
wrong signify every man's right.
Were our Sciences equal to rightly reporting
the embryology of Shelley, many a phenomenon in
the present mental and moral condition of England
would be made plain. A magician in his Field
Place nursery dressing up his sisters as demons
to obey his potent wand; an alchemist in Sion
School experimenting to find the elixir of life ; a
practitioner of the Black Art at Eton — where as
yet Chemistry is a prohibited study — engaged, as
he confesses to the terrified tutor, in " raising the
Devil ;" a mysterious boy who will not fag, and has
that young world crying at his heels, " There goes
mad Shelley !" a lover already, and writing with
the beloved the romance of Zastrozzi, — he has drawn
some drop of sap from every stratum of superstition
beneath his feet, and passes them by swift transmu
tation to the incipient radicalism which breaks the
shell at Oxford and walks forth a horror to students
and professors.
There follows a prelude of ominous dreams.
Oxford consists at the time of a number of professors
who are busy milking a veteran and barren cow
for students who assiduously hold a sieve for pail.
Their labours are suspended for a moment by the

AN ENGLISH SINAI. 273
apparition of a young gentleman, son of a Member
of Parliament, who goes about cursing the King,
denying the existence of God, and predicting the
extraction of food for the millions from air and water,
the instantaneous communication of thoughts over
any distances, and the universal travelling by air.
It is not, of course, a long work to put this wild
creature on a stage-coach, and send him off, before
proceeding to work with the heifer and the sieve
again. It is true that the laws have prematurely
decided that an Oxonian shall not be burnt for
writing an atheistic tract, but there still remain
exile from college, exile from a father's house, and
exile from the heart that is nearest.
Now let us raise our thanks to those who alone
never fail us, — the blind conservatives ; to the pro
fessors who gave us a prophet whom they might
have made into a metaphysical bookworm ; to Miss
Harriet Grove, who resigned us her lover to be the
lover of mankind ; to Sir Timothy Shelley, M.P.,
who enabled us to get out of his proposed politician
a champion of Humanity. It makes one tremble to
think that Shelley was once a baronet's son, under
the roof of Oxford, at an age when, as in so many
other cases, the Spirits might have been whispered
out of him ! How much we owe to Scholastic stu
pidity can be especially appreciated by a generation
which has seen a Prime Minister, long dwarfed
under the spell of Oxford, released by its suicidal

274 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
simplicity, rising to a stature knightly enough to
grapple with the greatest ecclesiastical wrong of his
country, and to raise the flag of rationalism over
the Episcopal Bench ! Yes, Oxford, — thou dull
whetstone of Saladin scimitars, — in our praise to
Conservatism, the great nether stone of the mills of
God, we cannot forget thee until thou also shalt be
ground exceeding small !
Shelley, said Leigh Hunt, seemed like a spirit
that had darted from its orb and found itself in ano
ther planet. " He was pious toward Nature, toward
his friends, toward the whole human race, toward
the meanest insect of the forest." " I never knew
such an instinct of veneration," says Hogg. Robert
Browning has described Shelley's poetry as "a
sublime fragmentary essay toward a presentment of
the correspondency of the Universe to the Deity."
This was the man for whom Oxford had nothing but
a curse! This was the "atheist" for whom the
England that adored George the Fourth as the
finest gentleman in Europe could furnish no home !
Such reverence, wonder, worship, never before or
since fed with their sacred oil a purer spirit; he
ascended bravely the smoking mount, and returned
to the calf-worshippers below with the light of
eternity on his face, and they knew him not !
Shelley was the first-born of a generation of souls
commissioned to revolutionise the thought and faith
of England. After him there was a Shelley in every

AN ENGLISH SINAI. 275
sane man born of an English mother, and the siege
against Superstition began, never to be raised.
The tragedy of Shelley's life was the warning of the
Church to all who should ever attempt to think
freely and bravely. It was a proclamation of piracy
against every barque that should cast its old moor
ings and sail the seas with God. His life was never
lived ; it was scattered like bits of some exquisite
mosaic never pieced together. They alone know the
splendid design who can carry out in imagination,
and colour with the pigments of their own hearts,
the great forms suggested by the fragments of his
song and his life. Such — so has our Christendom
steadily declared — such, so outlawed and ruined,
shall be every life which is hurled against us and
our dogmas. Do we require more lamentations
over " Lost Leaders," more recantations in Scot
land or Cambridge, more humiliations before Con
vocation, to prove how potent is the threat? Bend
or be broken ! is still the word of the Church to the
scholar yearning for his ideal life; live the life,
think the thought, we prescribe, or perish with all
your hopes unfulfilled around you !
But, sad and fragmentary as was his life, it shines
out like a rainbow above those who have surrendered.
Beside their finest embroidered ensigns we lift this
strip torn by shot and shell from the banner of a
great cause, and know that there is still room for
the lilies to blossom upon it. Lo, beneath the

276 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
tattered life and name and work of Shelley let the
scholars of this day gather, and take their oath of
knighthood. What part has a scholar with the
savage creed that wears the scalp of Shelley at its
belt ? What place has he in the assembly of those
who count the belief in an angry, jealous, arbitrary
Jehovah to be pious, and call the aspiration which
soars above the idols of fools atheism ? Why should
the man of culture exclude from his social circle the
man who talks bad grammar, or dismiss the servant
who believes in witches, but welcome the surpliced
or kid-gloved believer in hells, devils, and Balaam's
talking ass ? The scholar is not the retained advo
cate of the party that pays best. He is not the
attorney for commerce, nor the professional casuist
of those who would combine the advantages of con
ventionality with those of simple truth. Better he
should again be a hermit than dwell in society at
the cost of honour. As yet, alas, though subtle as
the serpent, our Scholarship has also its double
tongue, uttering now that which is true, next that
which is sordid. From the day when Shelley was
banished from Oxford, no scholar has remained under
the flag of the common Christianity save through a
visible servility. But it is spiritual perjury ! If
we demand that the banker shall be honest in money
matters, that the soldier shall be brave, that the
judge shall be just, shall we be satisfied that he who
is consecrated to Reason shall weakly or meanly

AN ENGLISH SINAI. 277
part its sacred raiment among those who would
feign trick out their lucrative creeds or customs
with its divine sanctions ?
Shelley brought the Orthodoxy of England to its
Judgment Day. Up to his time there were great
and honest scholars in the Churches ; but the cruelty,
the coarseness, the ignorance inherent in those
Churches was then revealed, the falsehood was
exposed; and only by some kind of bribery, con
scious or unconscious, can any genius or real
culture be found there longer. We ought to be
able to depend upon the honour of the Scholar
not to compromise the purity of the light he is
set to feed and guard. There is needed a Scholar's
caste, removed from the world of Self-seekers; a
brotherhood of those whose verdict is the dictate
of absolute reason and rectitude ; the fraternity of
those who, amid a world that weighs eternal verities
in their relation to gold and fashion, steadily say,
" Unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou
united ! "
We have lived long since Shelley's time; the
brave thinker finds many a warm hand to clasp his
where the exiled poet found but few, and those the
hands of fellow-exiles ; but superstition still reigns
over the conventional world : it is cruel as ever ; and
he can hardly be sure that he has fought the good
fight, and kept his trust, who does not feel that he
has read a chapter of his own experience in the life

278

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and drunk of the cup of
which he drank. For, though no man knoweth his
grave unto this day, he saw God face to face, and
brought upon the tables of a broken heart the laws
of those called out of spiritual bondage.

XXIV.

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH.

This is the Law of God, that virtue is the only thing that is
strong. All the parts of human life, in the same manner as those of a
statue, ought to be beautiful. Sayings op the Pythagoreans.

One voice alone, one harp alone, begins ;
But soon joins in the ever fuller choir.
The people quake : they feel
A glow of heavenly fire.
One day, when rest my bones beside a fane
Where thus assembled worshippers adore,
The conscious grave shall heave,
Its flowerets sweeter bloom. Klopstock.

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH.

QUARTER of a century ago a prophet
stood in his London pulpit and uttered
these words : —
" In that old St. Pancras, with its ancient burial-
ground, at a remote corner, those who are disposed
for such a pilgrimage may find a spot, an unobtru
sive unostentatious tomb, built some forty years
ago by William Godwin for Mary Wollstonecraft ;
and where, some few years ago, those who had been
united in life became blended in the grave. When
people can rightly estimate their benefactors ; when
nobility is judged of by intellect and spirit, and not
by title and station ; when woman's wrongs are
righted, and man's rights are recognised; when
achieved freedom throws its light and lustre back
on those who toiled through the transition-time,
and were but as stars that rose and set again before
the coming day, — then will crowds frequent that
now solitary corner ; laurels will be planted around
that humble monument, and sculptured marble will

282 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
tell what public gratitude awards to those who lived
and wrote and spent the best energies of their lives
in preparing the way for man's redemption from
social and political bondage."
In a beautiful churchyard at Bournemouth
sculptured marble now tells that there rests the
dust of the author of Political Justice, the authoress
of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and their
daughter, the widow of the poet Shelley. The
clergyman who, chiefly at his own expense, built
this charming church, and now preaches in it,
naturally resisted the importation of such unhal
lowed remains and uncongenial phrases into its
vicinity. But there are certain forces stronger
than clergymen; and there, close to the Keble
window, sharing the light that kindles the windows
glowing with the faces of saints and apostles,
stand the tombs of three people who, while living,
were types of moral heresy.
In the church, I listened as the priest read con
cerning the lives and sayings of some of those
through whose fair forms the light fell upon his
page, and reflected on those spirits whom Dante
saw in the lower world, who could see plainly
things in the far past, and even in the future, but
to whom the present was all confusion. And my
response to him was : " Sir, among all those holy
ones who adorn your Church, none more patiently
lived and suffered up to their crowns of light than

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 283
those you so reluctantly admitted to their repose
under the cypresses out there. And if these faith
ful ones — dreaded by the clergy in their day, by
you hallowed with every tint of glory — could live
and move, be you sure they would gather around
the grave you dread, and say, ' This is our brother,
these are our sisters.' "
The Luther of Morality has not yet appeared.
The Reformers of the Seventeenth Century over
threw the Theology of the Church, but they neces
sarily left the morality of the Protestant world
essentially monastic. The morality of Protestantism
is unrelated to the age in which we live; and so
every wrong finds it easy to secure the defence of
pulpits. Theology brings out its texts to strengthen
the slave's chain, to oppress woman, to make the
Sabbath a prison for the poor. We are grown-up
men and women in commerce, in steam locomotion,
and telegraphic intercourse : in our estimates of
right and wrong we still dwell in the cloister. It
follows from this preservation of a dead ethical
body that there is hardly any form of wrong which
cannot flourish without conflict with the old fences
of Church or State. Selfishness, coldness, inhu
manity, hardness of heart, they are all quite secure ;
yet their reign promises the reaction which shall
lead on the Ethical Reformation. The value of the
Reformation under Luther was the degree to which
it turned the attention of mankind from observances

J
284 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
to virtues, from rites to practices : the morality
related to it, and yet to come, must turn man from
ordering his conduct with reference to other worlds
and their awards, and hold him to his obligations to
this world, to his fellow-man, and his own heart. It
will shift the arena of life from heaven to earth ; it
will direct all moral effort toward man who can,
instead of toward God who cannot, be benefited by
it; it will declare all possible duties to be duties
to man — man in us or outside of us. It will thus,
at the foundation, blend what have hitherto been
separated — Religion and Morality.
Religion is essentially man's duty to himself.
On the instant that a man has reference in his con
duct to some satisfaction conferred upon God, his
act is an act of superstition, for his deity is assumed
to be dependent on man for his happiness, and is
thus regarded as subject to the passions of men. A
man is religious who reveres his own soul sufficiently
to be loyal to its dictates, to cherish and cultivate its
faculties, and to preserve it from .guilt. But this
fidelity to the sacred self is the centre of any true
fidelity to others ; only by disobeying the laws of
our own nature can we wrong others. Separate our
relations to others from self-truthfulness, and our
service to them, though it may be what they desire,
is harmful to them — the mere catering to their pre
judices, or indulgence of their faults— and therefore
essentially immoral.

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 285
Supposing our eyes, then, fairly turned to the
conditions and needs of the planet upon which we
must live and work, we look upon humanity no
longer as an aggregate of souls that may be damned
or saved hereafter, but as a society of human beings,
each endowed with faculties whose highest object is
to be unfolded and devoted freely to their definite
and appropriate work, as it is the object of a torch
to give light. To this view a man is lost when his
faculties are stunted into incompetency ; to save a
soul means to reap from it what it can do for the
cultivation and well-being of this world. Morality
thus becomes the law and means whereby human
faculties may secure their growth and their right
application. That would be a moral law which
should secure this, that an immoral law which should
prevent it.
That which is now called Morality directly and
deliberately stunts or even ruins the faculties of
man, and on principle. This will appear to those
who consider its standards of nobility, commercial
success, Sabbath-keeping, expediency; but beside
the graves of Bournemouth I revert only to that
point upon which our hereditary monastic morality
is most stern and uncompromising — marriage. Alas,
how many graves are there in the world over which
might be carved that grim idol, marriage, about
whom nearly all our social superstitions are en
trenched, with his blood-reeking altar !

286 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
What is the moral difference between the pur
chase of a wife for a night in the Haymarket, and
the purchase of one for life in St. George's Church?
There is everything to be said for the Haymarket
proceeding as compared with that at Hanover
Square ; it does not pretend to be religious, it does
not systematise itself in the forms of a home. Pro
stitution may be guilty of many sins ; the marriage
of convenience, the marriage for an establishment,
the diplomatic marriage, commit the same sin once,
but it does not end. Do you say, Judge not ? Nay,
judge not you, that you be not judged ! So long as
Society cares only for the marriage-licence and the
priest's blessing ; so long as it receives with a smile
the woman legally bought, and commends Mary
Wollstonecraft to the Thames river because her
true love does not fulfil its forms; so long as it
holds that chastity demands the sacrifice of every
woman who has in any instance disregarded its
laws, and makes the street or the brothel the only
possible refuge for thousands purer than many of
those who shut the door in their faces : so lono- as
it prefers secret sin, intrigue, the hate in the
chamber behind the smile in the drawing-room, the
daily lesson of hypocrisy learned by children, and
whited sepulchres called homes, to honest divorce ¦
so long as it will encourage the young man and
maid who have made an incongruous marriage
to starve their hearts and waste their lives rather

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 287
than confess the mistake, and seek out the hearts
needed for their perfection; — so long will those
whose eyes are cleared of superstition see the throne
of Marriage, like that of Dahomey, resting upon
human skulls.
Nothing but superstition ever sacrifices human
beings to institutions. The origin of the marriage
superstition is pagan. The vestal, doomed to a
living burial if her vow was broken, reappeared as
the nun. The old idea of conciliating a heavenly
autocrat by taxation of herds, by roasted meat,
by offering up the fruit of the body for the
sin of the soul, survived in the asceticism which
made eunuchs of the priests of Cybele, the
eunuchs "for the kingdom of heaven's sake"
commended in the New Testament, the Skopsi
of the present day in Russia, the celibates of the
Roman Catholic priesthood, the Bachelors of Eng
lish Universities. Those who could insult every
mother by declaring that the only good man was
born of a virgin, naturally pronounced marriage a
concession to human weakness, an indulgence which
could be made tolerable only by the authority of
the Church. Hence the " sacrament " of marriage ;
and hence the superstition which lingers about it in
regions once governed by the Church.
Like every other superstition, it is suicidal.
Permitting the minimum of freedom in its regula
tion and duration, marriage finds the young already

AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

dreading it. The number increases of those who
shrink from stooping to a doorway which leads to
what may be, indeed, a happy home, but may be,
too, an iron prison from which there is no escape
but over the ruins of character. Formosa now
excites sympathy ; presently she will gain respect
When finally she shall deserve respect, when she
also shows that she can be faithful as lover and
mother, the lock-and-bolt system will break down.
Society will ere long be glad enough to assimilate
contracts between man and woman to contracts
between partners in business. Then love will dis
pense alike with the bandage on its eyes and the
constable's aid. And as for the thousand phantoms
in the distance, — the deserted wives, the abandoned
children, &c, — though the worst of them are less
terrible than the realities of the present, we will not
be frightened by them into any distrust of the laws
of the universe. The new seed will shape itself into
sufficient branches and leaves; the rains will not
cease, nor the sunshine. When wants come, wants
will be met. Even the poor African has learned
that "if the Alguana-tree will die to-morrow for
lack of water, water will come to-morrow." The
organic forms around us did not spring panoplied
from the brain of any Jove; each fibre, antenna,
organ, records a circumstance encountered and an
energy put forth to meet it. The adequate marriage
will begin its growth when mankind set themselves

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 289
to discover what will help man and woman rather
than what will help God. When it is felt that wife-
murder is a heavy price to pay for a literal con
formity with the supposed sentence of Jesus con
cerning divorce, we shall consult reason in the
matter rather than the crude reaction of a pure
soul against the corruptions of a period.
Am I told that woman dreads the easy divorce?
Naturally, for the prejudices and arrangements of
Society have not been adapted to the easy divorce.
Let her know that, under the changed sentiment
which shall follow changed law, she will meet with
sympathy where now she would encounter suspicion;
let her know that she will, if divorced from one she
loves not, have only her fair share of the burdens
entailed by the original mistake; and she who of
all persons suffers most if the home be false will
welcome the freer marriage.
In England we smilingly walk our halls of Eblis,
covering the fatal wound; but our neighbours across
the Channel are frank. Their moralists cannot blot
out the proverb that "Marriage is the suicide of
Love." Is it any truer here than there that, as a
general thing, the courtesies of the courtship survive
in the marriage? "Who is that domino walking
with George?" asks Grisette No. 1, as reported by
Charivari. " Why," returns Grisette No. 2, " do
you not walk behind them, and listen to what they
say?" "I have done so, and they do not say a
T

2ao AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
word." " Ah, it is his wife." But what might be
George's feeling if he knew that his wife might
leave him some morning? "If conserve of roses
be frequently eaten," they say in Persia, " it will
produce a surfeit." The thousands of husbands and
wives yawning in each other's faces at this moment
need not go so far for their proverb. If it be well,
as it seems to me to be, that this most intimate
relation between man and woman should be made
as durable as the object for which it is formed will
admit, surely the bond should be real to the last,
a bond of kindliness, thoughtfulness, actual help
fulness. So long as the strength of the bond lies
simply in the disagreeable concomitants of breaking
it, so long as it is protected by the very iron hard
ness which makes it gall and oppress, what need is
there of the reinforcement of it by the cultivation
of minds, the preservation of good temper, and con
siderate behaviour? Love is not quite willing to
accept the judge's mace for his arrow. When the
law no longer supplies husband or wife with a cage,
each must look to find and make available what
resources he or she has for holding what has been
won. We may then look for sober second thoughts
both before and after marriage. Love, from so long
having bandaged eyes, will be all eye. Every real
attraction will be stimulated when all depends
upon real attraction. When the conserve becomes
fatiguing, it will be refreshed by a new flavour, not

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 291
by a certificate. From the hour when a thought
of obligation influences either party to it, the mar
riage becomes a prostitution.
These things are not written against the real
marriage, not to defend licentiousness or levity in
the relations between the sexes. They are written
in the interest of a conservation of that purity and
sincerity which marriage originally aimed to secure
between them, but which must now be set aside in
a spirit equally solemn with that which first named
it a sacrament. Nothing here written is so severe
an arraignment of it as the satire of the cynical
press and the club, which find in the bazaar of
daughters, and the girl and the wife "of the
period," their favourite target ; or let what 1 write
be read by the light of the Divorce Court. It
is premature to say what the new marriage is to
be : Necessity — God and Nature, that is — must
instruct each step in our progress toward that,
The inadequate institutions which have been be
queathed us out of the past are the cast seeds of
withered flowers. The resuscitation of the same
flowers is impossible. Meanwhile, it is but a false
conservatism which says, Let us live on the seeds
as they are; the true says, Let us sow them; let
us part with them, that we may obtain what is
really in them. Only a few can live on the seeds ;
as they shall rise from the dust, they will be a
harvest for mankind. A true faith would fearlessly

292 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
sow the very stars for seed if their autumn had
come. All religion and all ethics are summed up in
Justice. In religion, Justice appears holding her
sacred balances between all our passions and
faculties, demanding that I shall not give to one
part of me what is due to another. Devotion shall
not rob health, nor the senses reason, nor intellect
the affections. The selfish faculty may destroy
the harmony of character, as the face may be de
formed by being heaped into a monstrous nose.
In morality, Justice appears forbidding the artificial
inequality between man and man. Immorality is
such by not respecting the equal right of another.
The criminal seeks happiness, which is legitimate ;
but he seeks it by destroying the happiness of
others, which is illegitimate. The lawful con
ditions by which any desired object may be
obtained simply represent the rights of others, by
which every faculty is limited, or rather directed ;
to violate those conditions is so much injustice.
But this injustice is also an injustice to the wrong
doer himself. Therefore there is no difference
between religious and ethical law. Whether it be
manifested as the sacrifice of health to lust or
to piety, — or of the permanent to the transient, — or
of the public good to private ends, — or of Humanity
to a national interest,— or of labour to capital,— or
of the people to privilege,— the one old serpent

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 293
with tail in mouth encircling the tree of Life is
for ever Injustice.
But the Golden Rule has now no hell-fire with
which to enforce its command to the individual;
and the worn-out legal machinery which we have
inherited cannot overtake the ingenuities of selfish
ness in commercial or social life. There is hardly any
one who fears the poor Devil, especially since his
nonsuit in English Courts; and there are few
oppressions which cannot conform to the letter of
our ancient laws.
It is true that our situation is not comfortable.
Unhappy is the king-crab in the interval between
its shell just cast and that not yet formed. But a
fact cannot be groaned or raged out of existence.
We can only console ourselves with the reflection
that the increasing immunities which selfishness
finds, as fears and phantoms fade, and prisons are
cheated by the waxing light, are themselves
disciplinary. Liberty will not fail to tax her
gifts. These crumbling laws were reached through
a long experience of lawlessness; they represent
the progress of man through a wild liberty to self-
control. The forces which guided man through
many formidable experiments to his social contract
cannot perish with their forms. He will find that
edged tools will still cut, and fire burn. And as with
increased knowledge and liberty life becomes more
valuable, and its resources more various, the dangers

294 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
of self-mutilation, the horrors of the penalties for
which priests can no longer promise heavenly com
pensation, will but shift the flames from a possible
future to an actual present. If we have ' lost
Satan as a " bogie " for weak minds, we have also
lost him as an apology for our sins. If we can
sway the balances of judge and jufy by a sufficiently
weighty lawyer's fee, and grind the poor within the
formulas of law, and oppress woman by our sove
reignty in our " castles," we cannot help thereby
inviting the human heart to follow us beyond the
traditional confines, and laying the foundations of
new and adequate laws. The fox reveals, and so in
the end mends, the hole by which he escapes. We
are indebted to the street robbers for our street
lights, to tyranny for our republics. In the Mills
of God there are nether as well as upper stones,
and to the former as much as to the latter is due
the fineness of the flour.
For, lo, the one great law, Justice, is to the moral
what gravitation is to the physical world : no planet,
no pebble, but must obey it. " Law," saith the
Brahmin, "is all hands and feet; it is all faces,
heads, and eyes ; and, all ear, it sitteth in the midst
of the world, possessing the whole. It is the inside
and the outside, the movable and immovable of all
Nature. From the minuteness of its parts, it is incon
ceivable. It standeth at a distance, yet is present.
It is that which now destroyeth, now produceth.

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 295
It presideth in every breast. Justice, being over
turned, will overturn." He who knoweth this,
though seeming weakest, shall move firmly as the
sun on paths where the strongest who know not
justice shall fail.

XXV.
THE CATARACT AND THE
RAINBOW.

The dice of God are always loaded. Greek Proverb.

He my servant is dear unto me who is free from enmity, the
friend of all nature, merciful, exempt from pride and selfishness, the
same in pain and pleasure, patient of wrongs, contented, constantly
devout, of subdued passions and firm resolves ; ... of whom man
kind are not afraid, and who of mankind is not afraid ; . . . who
is unsolicitous about the event of things. Bhagavat Geeta.

The moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on : not all your piety and wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
With Earth's first clay they did the last Man knead,
And there of the last Harvest sowed the seed :
And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
Omar Khayyam.

THE CATARACT AND THE
RAINBOW.

STOOD by Niagara, gazing on its smooth
pitch, and its islet of green, holding their
own steadfastly above the mad dash and
deafening roar of the waters. The winds came
howling out of the cavern beneath : on the pendent
harp they changed to melodies. Above all stood
the shimmering rainbow, and its sweet prophecy
said, — Over this mad rage hovers the circle of
inviolable law. No drop of the cataract but gathers
to its sphere, and rises or falls, by the law that
shapes and moves the gliding planets overhead.
The winds too have their eternal channels. Fear
thou not, therefore, the wild roar of human passions,
nor the seemingly unchained freaks of human will.
Climb to their table-rock, and over them shall be
seen bending the luminous arch that softly chains
them in their pit.
What is it in the idea of Necessity from which
we recoil ? Alas, cries one, it makes us machines,
the good man a machine turning out good, the evil

300 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
man a machine turning out evil ; there is no longer
responsibility ; praise and blame are alike idle : nay,
why should we act at all ? why not fold our arms,
and bow before the events which transcribe what is
written on the iron leaf ?
Not of much worth is the argument from conse
quences — not properly, indeed, an argument at all.
Is a thing true ? If so, its consequences sink into
questions of personal convenience. The extent to
which it will affect our prejudices or habits is not
more admissible, in the consideration of a truth,
than the consequences to our capital at the bankers
of assuming 2 + 2=4 are admissible in determining
arithmetical law. Yet, since reason is so often
paralysed by the phantoms it conjures up, one
may condescend to remind the timid that men are
very apt to be mistaken in estimating the results
of opinions they do not hold. Every belief has an
environment of related beliefs. If the believer in
free agency were able to isolate the belief in neces
sity from its related outlooks, and attach it to his
own present opinions, it might paralyse his activi
ties; but, that being impossible, let him remember
that, when he has arrived at the point of the road
reached by the fatalist, he may see other visions
now withheld from him. Paul, Mohammed, Crom
well, Milton, the Puritans who founded New
England, John Calvin, Frederick the Great, Carlyle,
Emerson, have all been earnest believers in Neces-

THE CATARACT AND THE RAINBOW. 301
sity; has it destroyed their energies? The truth
is, that instead of men having their self-reliance or
their power paralysed by believing in destiny, it
has in every age proved to be a source of inspiration
and force ; their lives have been solemnised by the
faith that they were recording on earth the decrees
of Heaven. Each such believer has felt himself
not merely a man engaged in what might or might
not turn out effectual, but rather an organ of the
inevitable — as it were, the hand of God himself
touching and moulding the world.
But this, it may be said, is the effect the doctrine
of Necessity has had when given great men to work
upon. How, then, would it logically affect common
people ? First, we should cease to take credit for
our good actions. Egotism would have less place
in our work. Next, we should be less angry with
the wrong-doer. We should trace his vice to some
malformation. We might restrain him as we would
a tiger, but with as little indignation as we have
for the tiger. These new principles might tell in
calmer estimates, and in the abolition of all punish
ments which bear traces of vindictiveness. But
would the absence of pride and revenge, the acces
sion of humility and charity in human character
and in our laws, be such a terrible evil ?
We do not choose our temperament, which
makes us grave or gay, conservative or radical,
religious or worldly, and determines the degree and

302 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
character of our influence. It may depend upon
the race whose blood is in us, on the climate in which
we are born, on our forgotten ancestors ; but where
soever forged, it is a link no man ever broke.
We do not choose our intellectual gifts. New
ton's father cannot make him a haberdasher, nor
Turner be made a barber. On this fatal difference
of gifts depend poverty and wealth, success and
failure ; and their outcome is in the condition of
Science, Literature, Art, and Religion.
Is man any more free to choose good or evil,
right or wrong ? The Creed will depend upon the
country, the time, the family, amid which he is
born. Here he will be a Christian, there a Moham
medan. The like facts will determine his morality.
Here he will have one wife, there four; here he
will help his neighbour, there he will eat him. Or
if we find the stone, bronze, iron, and steam ages
surviving side by side in our cities, each will be.
faithfully reflected in our statistics, in our courts,
and in our drawing-rooms.
But may not man cultivate or control what is in
him? May not the bad disposition be corrected
somewhat, and the dull mind quickened ? Behold
the next bar of Fate — Circumstance! Whether
mind and heart will be restrained or developed
shall be determined by the lot without, conspiring
with the motive within. Is the lot a den of vice ?
—a home of luxury ? Will the man have means 0/

THE CATARACT AND THE RAINBOW. 303
education, leisure to think ? or, if the lot be poor,
will there be the inherent power of Burns or Frank
lin 'to rise above it? The chain within coils into
that without.
HoW, then, comes the word "freedom" into our
language ? and how is Dr. Johnson to be answered
— " Sir, we know we are free, and that's an end of
it " ? Our reply is, we know we are not free, but
that our action is determined by motives. Our feeling
that we are free is part of the general illusion which
is an element in our destiny. " Nature is helped by
no mean, but Nature makes that mean ; " and her
sure plan is secured by the consciousness of volition
up to the point where a higher energy can work.
The child does not see beyond its game ; Nature
looks to the training of its limbs and faculties, and
humours its fancies. Man's praise and blame are
the terms of a larger game ; but they have no deeper
root than the consciousness which attests one thing
to the ignorant, another thing to the enlightened.
Dr. Johnson's reply begs the question ; the neces
sitarian does not know he is free, but the contrary.
The rudest and crudest belief which is deep enough
to control instinctive action may claim the support
of what is called consciousness as if it were a special
faculty, but which has never been shown to be any
faculty at all. The feeling of freedom in action
and power of choice is part of the destiny of per
sons in certain stages of development; but beneath

304 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
works the inevitable fact. Why do we praise or
blame, why reward or punish ? Because we know
that men are impelled by motives; and praise, blame,
reward, punishment, supply the strongest motives.
Why, then, do we seek to influence men toward
this or that course of conduct, when we know that
they will surely do what they must ? Because we
must. Cannot a man do what he chooses ? Yes ; but he
can only choose under limits. He cannot choose to
subsist on poisons, nor to leap over the moon.
But what are these walls by which we find our
selves enclosed? They are eternal laws. From
them we derive all our real freedom. The man who
has a mill to be turned finds in the laws of falling
water the enlargement of his power. Marrying the
feeble individual hand to electricity, gravitation,
light, heat, its power is indefinitely multiplied.
On the other hand, suppose our ignorance, our
passion, were really unchained; suppose we could
inflict a real harm on the universe. Were that
glad tidings? What mean poets when they. sing,
" He maketh the wrath of man to praise him," — or,
" Truth crushed to earth will rise again ;" or prophets
when, in the face of seeming evil and oppression,
they recognise the steady triumph of Justice ? They
see that circular line which the far-seeing Greeks
drew around all their representations of human con
flict, the line that cannot be overpassed in a uni-

THE CATARACT AND THE RAINBOW. 305
verse which has an all-compelling purpose. If we
ascend into Heaven, it is there; if we make our
bed in Hell, it is there. Adieu, Doubt ! He who
recognises the beautiful laws which cannot be
marred will, amid the seeming chaos of selfishness
and wrong, dwell in calmness, and see them
Forging, with swart arms of oflfence,
The silver seats of innocence.
The captain does not fear that some day waves will
lose their power to sustain ships. The merchant,
loading his vessel on the sand, has no misgiving that
some day the tide will fail to reach the water-mark.
The man of faith has no fear that evil will turn
out to be the end of the universe. Happy as a
co-worker for the aim that cannot fail; raising his
private scheme into harmony with the universal
purpose ; renouncing all merit, as he sees his abso
lute dependence for all nobleness upon forces and
principles to which his personality is surrendered ;
pitying, but never fearing or hating, those who are
morally deformed, — he who has caught a gleam
from the beautiful Necessity wherewith we are
surrounded, draws near to the starry rest, and is
lulled by the music of storms. Snows alight on
him as crystal crosses and petals ; hails he will see
as masked sunbeams.
The rainbow rose and fell as the cataract raged
against its rocky walls — rose and fell, and sometimes U

306 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
seemed broken and flitting away like a luminous
snake. But evermore it returned, and, seeming to
yield, held the monster fast in its soft circle. Even
so, as the great American has reminded us,
when the gods could not bind the Wolf Fenris
with steel or with mountain weights, the soft silken
thread around his foot held him. It bent with his
bendings, and was concealed by its minuteness. In
his wildest range of ferocity it was with him — spun,
possibly, of his own hair. So Niagara sends up the
spray for its rainbow. So Tyranny draws after it
its own Nemesis. So every wrong rouses the right,
and danger excites vigilance, and Humanity moves
on its orbit, balanced between action and recoil.
Whoso knows this will carry the might of gravita
tion into his purpose; he will match the elements
with their like in himself; his self-reliance will be
fatal, conspiring with the inviolable winds and the
stars in their courses.

XXVI.

THE UNCHURCHED

Make thyself dust to do anything well. Saadi.

If you want to find the true magic pass into heaven, scores of
rival professors press round you with obtrusive supply : if you ask,
in your sorrow, Who can tell me whether there be a heaven at all ?
every soul will keep aloof and leave you alone. All men that bring
from God a fresh deep nature, — all in whom religious wants live
with eager power, and who are yet too clear of soul to unthink a
thought and falsify a truth, — receive in these days no help and no
response. James Martineau.

Blacken thy heavens, Jove,
With thunder-clouds 
I honour thee ? For what ?
Hast thou the miseries lightened
Of the down-trodden ?
Hast thou the tears ever banished
From the afflicted ?
Have I not to manhood been moulded
By omnipotent Time
And by Fate everlasting, —
My lords and thine ? Goethe's Prometheus.

THE UNCHURCHED.

SAT amid the circle of ancient stones at ,
Stonehenge; then visited the fine Ca
thedral at Salisbury, and paused in its
circular Chapter-house ; then, coming out, watched
some boys at play. The lads had drawn a diagram
of many compartments on the ground, and, hopping
after their oyster-shells, kicked them from point to
point till the circular base was reached. The dia
gram was a very fair ground-plan of a cathedral.
The urged oyster-shell is, as some antiquaries
say, a travesty of the ancient initiate passing from
point to point — catechised here, baptised there,
repeating his shibboleth further on, anointed,
confirmed, until at last he is received into the
inner circle.
The thing in common with Stonehenge, Salis
bury Chapter-house, and the boy's game was the
circle. Church is probably Circ, with the c
Italianised. The circle was of old the type of the
Deity, as reflected in the round horizon, the sun
and moon. Dancing dervishes, fiery Bel-wheels,

310 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
circular processions, all repeated on earth the
celestial motions: and the Church became the
visible abode of Him who had not yet been seen,
as "the circle whose centre is everywhere, whose
circumference nowhere."
Thus in the beginning of Christianity, so soon
as it was able to describe a circle for itself, we
find the saints within, the profane without. The
initiated could only be admitted by passwords. The
passwords, gradually collected, form the creed.
The centre from which the first circle or church
was described was its pretension to hold the one
Ark of safety. Under Luther's blow that circle
was broken up into points. One of these points
became the centre of the next circle ; it was the
authority and infallibility of the Bible. Science
has destroyed that. What will be the next circle ?
— the Church of the future ?
In its long history one fact stands out, though
the Church has been strangely unconscious of it;
namely, that while by mysterious rites in one
age, and by dogmatic confessions in another, it has
been initiating its proselytes, it has itself been
indoctrinated and pressed from phase to phase by
the great human circle around it. Its hard line
drawn about the believers has been again and a^ain
broken, widened, reformed, in spite of its fierce
hostility, though it now cherish among its shib
boleths the alterations forced upon it by pressure

THE UNCHURCHED. - 311
from the unchurched world. Its growth has been
like that of a tree. The young sap and the
fresh integument of the living season harden
into the trunk as the last annual ring added ; and
this too shall be surrounded by a ring that is not in
the tree, but in the sod, the clouds, the light. When
the new circle is to be formed around the old
Church, the living forces will be found gathering
outside of it. The Voice will be heard, not in the
Synagogue, but crying in the Wilderness. The
people will be moved by aspirations of which the
Church knows nothing. Where it once controlled,
it will be led through reluctant compliances. Such
are the signs fatal to Churches. Compromise will
always stretch the existing circle to the utmost;
but at last it must break up into new centres, in
some one of which enough vitality may be found for
the development of the new organisation.
Such is the critical period that has overtaken the
Christian Church in our own time. The tremen
dous fact, which cannot be argued or raged out of
existence, is, that the great interests of our time
gather about the unchurched world. Nobody can
pretend that the leading literature, science, philoso
phy, or art, are within the Church. Our greatest
scholars and thinkers are what the Church is com
pelled to regard as infidels. The rising generation
is sitting at the feet of men of genius who train it
into antagonism to the Church. No Church is now

312 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

found leading in any great social or political move
ment: the movements concerning woman, land,
education, go on without their aid, and generally
against their hostility. In due time the Churches
will take credit for the successful issue of them all ;
but for the present they chant their creeds before
mouldy altars, and stand on the canvas of our time
like Michael Angelo's " Entombment" — a group of
blurred faded figures, of which the only one plainly
.discernible is a Dead Christ.
What will be the circle wide enough to enclose
the excommunicated Nineteenth Century ? We
have had a Church of Priestly Authority, a Church
of Biblical Authority, a Church of Christ ; there
is nothing left for us but a Church of God. In
that common term of all religions, which priests
have preserved in their superstitions only as
a seed is kept through ages in the shroud of a
mummy, we may behold the germ of the next reli
gion of mankind. All our Evangelical Alliances,
our Protestant Unions, our OEcumenical Councils,
will but tear its mouldy vesture more and more
into shreds; all our scepticism, philosophy, and
science will but more and more warm that seed into
life. Simple Theism has but few churches now ; it
is a newly-discovered and as yet unexplored conti
nent; but so was America a little while ago. They
who, like Plymouth Pilgrims, have settled in the
winter time on its rocky verge know little as yet of

THE UNCHURCHED. 313
its prairies, savannahs, and Eldorados; but they
already see that it is to be the next great home of
human hearts and thoughts. While they reject the
creeds, the Science and Literature of our age are
reverent. This shows that the marriage of Faith
and Reason is already consummated ; and to their
nobler offspring the Future belongs as an inherit
ance. Heart and Intellect, so long separated by
Superstition, shall accord in spirit, and to their har
monies the steps of men shall move as move the
planets above to the music of blended Wisdom and
Love. Utopian Pilgrim ! thine is but one vision among
many ; thy neighbour's prophecy is that there shall
be no Church at all in the Future. He sees bands
of men leagued for practical earthly ends — Tem
perance, Education, Equality of Women, Sabbath
Reform, and the like ; but no society for the culture
of the religious or moral sentiment.
It is even so. And, happily, the energy that
has built the fair forms we see above, around, be
neath us, will still work on beyond our visions, and
may be trusted to the end. Bit by bit they grew,—
these exquisite forms, — each a sum of creative de
mands and supplies. Not a feather, not an antenna
among them, but records the new environment
which evoked it. No race in its zone, no zoophyte
in its rain-drop, but is the exact epitome of its
circumstances. The changed form gathers all

314 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
that went before it; the forms become fluent under
the same need that shaped them, and Nature con
serves herself by change. That which passes, passes
because it is no longer necessary. The traditional
creed passes with the need which formed it. Every
fossil in the earth tells its story. It is not necessary.
Men are virtuous without it. It no longer implies
self-denial or any divine passion to believe it.
The cross has become golden, and may be coined
into money. The virtues it once implied gather
with the freethinkers and reformers who will not
bow to it. The impulse which separates them
from Christendom is the centre of a new creation.
What that new creation will be we can, indeed, only
imagine ;- but we know that the Spirit which built
Christianity when Judaism fell, which built Pro
testantism when Romanism crumbled, cannot be
crushed under the ruins of any temple. We know
that, like the bird with the tropic flower on its
wing, the bear with the polar snows on its coat, the
form will correspond to the characteristics of the
age in which it shall appear ; that its science, litera
ture, liberty, philanthropy, will all be raised and
repeated in it. We know that, as man bears in his
brain all the animal passions and instincts that pre
ceded him, no altar that ever flamed, no incense, or
chant, or rite, or prayer, will fail to pour its essence
into the new creed, though a single word be enouo-h
to utter it. The old hunger of the soul, its old need

THE UNCHURCHED. 315
of raiment and shelter, have not survived the blights
of superstition and the frosts of denial to fail us at
the last.
Onward, ye children of the new faith ! The sun
of Christendom hastes to its setting, but the hope
never sets of those who know that the sunset here
is a sunrise there.

XXVII.

THE REJECTED STONE.

The principles of the superior man commence with the duties of
common men and women, but in their highest extent they illuminate
the universe. Chinese Analects.

At the last day men shall wear
On their heads the dust,
As ensign and as ornament
Of their lowly trust. Hafiz.

THE REJECTED STONE.

OME years ago I was wont to repair on
Sunday mornings to Smithfield to hear
the orators of the open air discourse on
the great problems of these times. There is no
theory or heresy conceivable by the human mind
which was not ventilated on that hallowed acre.
No eloquence that I could find in any Church
seemed to me comparable with the rudest speech of
these unkempt infidels, who showed what fruit
stakes of wood, quickened by fires fed with human
blood, may bear after some generations. The
butchers who now occupy that spot never hewed
and hacked meat more cleverly than their prede
cessors cut up dogmas; and the market hardly com
pensates for the loss of this unroofed cathedral, or
furnishes more genuine food for the body than was
then dealt out to the mind of the artisan. But its
worshippers betook themselves to the parks and
squares. Here, however, they were interrupted;
the police were empowered to make them "move
on." One Sunday morning I saw in one of the open

320 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
spaces a man walking backward, pursued, apparently,
by a mob, in whose faces he was shaking his fists.
Drawing near, I found that it was a street speaker
and his audience fulfilling the condition of moving
on. Thus for a year or so they moved, until the
new railway arches at St. Pancras were built ; under
these the preachers, lecturers, and disputants are
now permitted to collect themselves and their
thoughts. There I have followed them, and listened
through many a summer evening to such wisdom as
can alone lift up its voice in the streets.
A few orthodox preachers appear on the scene,
to pray and sing and utter the old inducements of
future woe and bliss : but they bring their listeners
with them ; and it is a performance of actors too
poor to have engagements, with the cast-off scenery
of regular establishments, and hardly excites more
than the smile of those who pass by to attend the
real attractions of the place. As one approaches,
he might fancy that he had got into a courtyard of
Bedlam. A confused din of voices coming from the
centres of contiguous groups, each struggling with
the other in the air, pelts the wayfarer like a con
sistency of rain, snow, and hail. But let one stop
and take heed ; he will find himself at a focus in
the whispering-gallery of the world. There is
no question discussed in the great Universities
or Church Councils, or Parliaments, but is dis
cussed here.

THE REJECTED STONE. 321
On a certain night I stood for an hour between
three groups, one of which was discussing the au
thority of the Catholic Church, the second the mira
cles, the third the existence of God. Archbishop
Manning never urged a stronger argument for the
necessity of a Church authorised to interpret the
Bible than was there uttered by one of the poorest
of his flock. " You admit the authority of the Bible
as the- word of God?" he asked of his antagonist.
" Certainly." " But you say every man must put
his own interpretation upon it ? " "I do." " Now,
suppose a lawyer were to go before a Court of Law
with a case, and claim the right to put his own inter
pretation on the laws of England, what would the
Judge say to him ? He would say, Sir, these laws
have been interpreted by our Courts before you
were born. I have got to follow the precedents.
I can't set my own private opinions, much less
yours, against the former decisions of this Court.
And if it has been found necessary to establish
Courts to interpret the laws of England, is it
not just as necessary to have an authority to inter
pret the laws of God ? "
While the poor Protestant was fumbling about
for his reply to this I gave heed to the assailer of
miracles. " Why don't they happen now ?" he cried.
" Because the time of miracles is past. They were
needed to call the attention of the people to Chris
tianity then." " Well, aren't they needed to support

322 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Christianity now ? John Stuart Mill don't believe it,
Professor Huxley don't believe it, the foremost men
of this age don't believe it. There are thousands on
thousands of people in London who pay no attention
to it. Now, you just raise to life out of the grave
yard one of our dead children in the name of Christ,
and the Churches won't remain empty." Such was
the echo of Strauss, of Parker, of Renan, which
found its way through the lips of an artisan in
patched clothes. But the largest crowd was
gathered around one who was fiercely denying the
existence of God. " If there is a God, why are you
permitted to suffer? Why do ignorance, crime,
and wrong run riot through the land ? What would
any man among you do if he were omniscient and
omnipotent? Would he not be found in every
home of misery and want and sickness, relieving
distress, restoring health ? Would he not remove
from the world tyranny, ignorance, and sin ? Are
we to suppose that there is an omnipotent God who
doesn't show as much benevolence toward his crea
tures as a man would who had the same power?
Look at the earthquakes that- swallow men up
like flies," — and so on, with much more of the
same sort.
Here were the sheep; where were the shep
herds ? Chanting empty services to emptier pews ;
standing beside their cold altars and cryino-, Ho,
all ye that hunger, come and hear us read about

THE REJECTED STONE. 323
bread that was sown, harvested, and eaten in ancient
Palestine !
Seest thou these great temples ? There shall not
be left of them one stone upon another which shall
not be cast down. Their builders have rejected the
stone which evermore breaks to its own measure all
that falls upon it, which grinds to powder that upon
which it falls. The oath of the Universe is pledged
that only that shall stand which has for its corner-stone
Mast. Amid cathedrals built for the splendour of
Popes or the glorification of God, institutions raised on
the assumption that the people were made for them,
not they for the people, dogmas holding the human
heart and reason fit sacrifices for them, the steadfast
forces of Fate have quarried from the rejected
instincts and necessities of the masses that rude
block lying in the mud at St. Pancras which shall
one day be recognised as the corner-stone on which
alone any temple can rest securely. The Voices at
St. Pancras are not the voices of ignorant working
people ;. they are, to those that can receive it, the
voices of Elias, of half-clad John in the Wilderness,
which must first come. Only before one who, in
conformity with human nature, can increase, can
their fatal negations decrease.
The worship of the Nazarene peasant and car
penter has its Avatar to-day in the interest gather
ing about the little and the lowly. At last an age
has arrived which begins to understand the secret

324 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
revealed to St. Augustine that " God is great in
the great, but greatest in the small."
First came Science, the one true representative
of the Apostolic Succession in this age, reversing
all estimates of high and low. Studious rather of
actual flies than of possible angels; turning from
the infinite to search into the infinitesimal ; finding
the philosopher's stone in every pebble; circum
navigating the rain-drop and reporting its curious
tribes ; pursuing insects as ardently as suns ; read
ing in flowers the laws of constellations; tracing the
bursting of cosmical rings and the generation of
worlds in a spinning drop of oil ; exploring primeval
forests in frost-pictures on window-panes ; following
each step in the ascent of the worm to man ; showing
the consent of solar systems to the motion of a
finger, — Science has come to this generation
wearing on its head the dust, and has taught us
to see in that dust a crown more glorious than
ever adorned the brow of Royalty.
Next came Poetry, turning at last from the
emptiness of the glittering, to the treasures of the
leaden, casket: Burns, and the "wee, modest, crim
son-tipped flower " disturbed by his plough ; Words
worth, with his reflector turned to the field, holdino-
a celandine ; Hood setting to sweet minors the
sighs of the sempstress; Leigh Hunt and Keats
competing as laureates of the cricket and the grass
hopper ; Carlyle rising to song once, as the moth

THE REJECTED STONE. 325
found its pyre in his candle; Goethe twining the
mystical tendrils of souls about the little Gypsy
Mignon ; Browning telling of the destinies of em
pires bound up with the carols of the barefooted
Pippa from the silk-mills; the tender humanities
of Beranger, of Lowell, of Whittier, and of Walt
Whitman, who shows the Leaves of Grass as fit
subjects for his epic as Homer found for his the
Heroes of Troy.
The whole transcendental movement of New
England, which gave to America its only distinctive
literature, which sketched its ideal in Brook Farm
communities and realised it in the abolition of
Slavery, unfolded beneath the breath of the Seer
of Concord, who knew —
There is no great, there is no small,
To the Soul that maketh all ;
And where it goeth all things are,
And it goeth everywhere.
I am not unmindful that the chief Minnesinger
of our time still dresses his Muse in court costume,
and still rehearses to charmed drawing-rooms the
deeds of kings and knights ; nor that those he has
inspired are more listened to as they sing of the
Medeas, Atalantas, and Tristrams, than Clough lin-
o-erino- with the peasant- dance amid the heather, or
Allingham and Barnes, whose morning glories climb
on cottage-doors, or Robert Buchanan setting the
footfalls along the Strand to melody. But may not

326 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
the drawing-rooms be under an illusion about their
favourites ? As the Pre-Raphaelists, seeking an ex
tinct Art, ploughed the furrows of an Art to come ; as
Culture, recoiling from vulgar comradeship, travels
eastward till it gets westward, — even so, by many
blind ways, even those most antiquarian, the dream
of Poetry leads to the one Shrine. Tennyson will
voyage with Ulysses rather than with Paddy on his
emigrant ship ; but at last on Californian sands
they will sit together, and see the old world with
the same distrust, and say, " We will return no
more ! " That which has enabled Tennyson to
touch the heart of his age is the degree to which
he has represented its vague and profound scepti
cism. Subtly interfused with nearly every poem
he has written is the spirit he has received from the
popular unrest, the moral misgiving and intellectual
doubt, whose waves are steadily drowning all that
cannot float. The Woman's Rights Reformers find
their texts in The Princess ; and In Memoriam is the
sustaining air for all Left Wings. The secularist
lecturer takes from the " Lotus-eaters " his burden
against the present, and from " The Two Voices "
his curtain against the future. Vainly will men
fight their shadows. Carlyle is still compelled to
further the human equality he made necessary when
he tore crowns of painted paper in pieces ; Father
Newman stands powerless before the Frankenstein
of Rationalism he conjured up. The Spirit of the

THE REJECTED STONE. 327
Age is the divinity that shapes our ends, and
cares little for our rough-hewing of the same; it
can allow seeming reactions and illusive eccen-
tricity; for, whatever tacks the ships may make,
its magnet is hid near every compass, and will
bring them all to one port at last.
The novelist, — the real preacher of our times, —
once minding only high things, now aspires to
things of low estate. The romance of the past
gathered about the castles and mansions of the
great, and sought the company of lords and
ladies. But these are now left to penny novels
read by ambitious domestics, incurious concerning
their own familiar lot. The romances which have
really made an impression on this age have been
those which have had for their themes the opera
tives of factories, the artisan radical, the dens of
Field Lane, the Toilers of the Sea or Les Miserables
of France, or the poor Uncle Toms of the Planta
tion. The success of Charles Dickens is the most
significant literary phenomenon before us. This
graduate of Fleet Street has woven the haunts of
wretchedness and sin in London into a texture of
pathos, humour, and beauty. No one can walk
those streets' with the same eyes as before since he
plunged into their turbid life and emerged with
hands laden with pearls — pearls from the hearts of
thieves and outcasts. There is a divine sparkle in
every heap of rubbish. It is as if our coal-dust should

328 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
crystallise to diamonds. Humanity, forgetting the
fine people of Walter Scott and Bulwer, turned to
acknowledge a debt to this figure-head of London
deeper than is due to all the sermonisers around
him. Not the Churches, but him, we thank for the
brightest rays that shine with Christmas mornings.
Children unconsciously twine the laurels of their
happier life about the brow which has laughed
Squeers with his ferule out of existence, and caused
the flowers of gladness to bloom along their paths,
so long blighted by Puritanism : Chadband and
Stiggins read on their merry faces a reign of
terror, others the radiance of a new era in our
civilisation. And when at last that grave lay open
in the ancient Abbey, to close at last upon some
part of all of us, and the people and their children
came and heaped it with flowers, each flower was
a symbol of the fragrance, the tints innumerable,
which had bloomed at his touch out of lives and
hearts that were dead, through him made alive
again. Lastly, what has been the history of Art in
England ? With splendid antecedents, from decorat
ing Southern palace and cathedral with goro-eous
tableaux, Art came hither to suffer a decline gradu
ated according to the liberation of the people from
the past it expressed, up to the day when a par
ticularly English Parliament ordered the finest
pictures in the country to be burnt. No longer to

THE REJECTED STONE. 329
be dragged at the wheels of the most exquisite of
chariots is this unromantic Englishman; he will
betake him to the driving of his own ugly cab.
How shall the flower thrive when the stem is
broken ? The Englishman had utterly lost the
faith which had culminated in the art of Raphael,
concerning whom he cried, Away with your Ma
donnas ! give us your fat naked women instead of
them ! So Raphael, and the long line of post-
Raphaelists, gave those mixtures of paint and
patriotism, of figment and pigment, which passed
here for high art, until the true prophet of Eng
lish Art came; meek and lowly he came, riding
on an ass !
But at this point of our pilgrimage we reach
the house of an Interpreter, at whose feet we may
well sit in silence for a space.
" Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden,
a square brick pit or well is formed by a close-set
block of houses, to the back windows of which it
admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom
of it is obtained out of Maiden Lane, through a low
archway and an iron gate ; and if you stand long
enough under the archway to accustom your eyes to
the darkness, you may see on the left hand a narrow
door, which formerly gave access to a respectable
barber's shop, of which the front window, looking
into Maiden Lane, is still extant, filled in this year
(1860) with a row of bottles, connected in some

330 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
defunct manner with a brewer's business. A more
fashionable neighbourhood, it is said, eighty years
ago than now — never, certainly, a cheerful one —
wherein a boy being born on St. George's Day,
1775, began soon after to take interest in the world
of Covent Garden, and put to service such spec
tacles of life as it afforded. No knights to be seen
there, nor, I imagine, many beautiful ladies ; their
costume at least disadvantageous, depending much
on incumbency of hat and feather, and short waists ;
the majesty of men founded similarly on shoe-
buckles and wigs ! . . . ' Bello ovile dov' io dormii
agnello : ' of things beautiful, besides men and
women, dusty sunbeams up or down the street on
summer mornings ; deep-furrowed cabbage-leaves
at the greengrocer's ; magnificence of oranges in
wheelbarrows round the corner, and Thames' shore
within three minutes' race. None of these things
very glorious ; the best, however, that England, it
seems, was then able to provide for a boy of gift ;
who, such as they are, loves them — never, indeed,
forgets them. The short waists modify to the last
his visions of Greek ideal. His foregrounds had
always a succulent cluster or two of greengrocery at
the corners. Enchanted oranges gleam in Covent
Gardens of the Hesperides, and great ships go to
pieces to scatter chests of them on the waves. That
mist of early sunbeams in the London dawn crosses
many and many a time the clearness of Italian air ;

THE REJECTED STONE. 331
and by Thames' shore, with its stranded barges and
glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne lake
or Venetian lagoon — by Thames' shore we will die.
. . . He attaches himself with the faithfullest child -
love to everything that bears the image of the place
he was born in. No matter how ugly it is, — has it
anything about it like Maiden Lane, or like Thames'
shore? If so, it shall be painted for their sake.
Hence to the very close of life Turner could
endure ugliness which no one else of the same
sensibility would have borne with for an instant.
Dead brick walls, blank square windows, old
clothes, market-womanly types of humanity — any
thing fishy and muddy, like Billingsgate or Hun-
gerford Market, had great attraction for him ; black
barges, patched sails, and every possible condition
of fog. . . . No Venetian ever draws anything
foul; but Turner devoted picture after picture to
the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot,
dust, and dusty texture ; old sides of boats, weedy
roadside vegetation, dung-hills, straw-yards, and all
the soilings and stains of every common labour.
And, more than this, he could not only endure, but
enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden
wreck after the market. . . . Even his richest vege
tation in ideal work is confused. . . . The last
words he ever spoke to me about a picture were in
gentle exultation about his St. Gothard, ' that
litter of stones which I endeavoured to represent.'

332 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
The second great result of this Covent Garden
training was, understanding of, and regard for, the
poor, whom the Venetians, we saw, despised ; whom,
contrarily, Turner loved, and more than loved —
understood. . . . Reynolds and Gainsborough,
bred in country villages, learned there the country
boy's reverential theory of 'the Squire,' and kept it.
They painted the Squire and the Squire's Lady as
centres of the movements of the universe, to the end
of their lives. But Turner perceived the younger
Squire in other aspects about his lane, occurring
prominently in its night scenery as a dark figure,
or one of two, against the moonlight. . . . ' That
mysterious forest below London Bridge ' — better
for the boy than wood of pine or grove of myrtle.
How he must have tormented the watermen, be
seeching them to let him crouch anywhere in the
bows, quiet as a log, so only that he might get
floated down there among the ships, . . . which
ships also are inhabited by glorious creatures — red-
faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over the gun
wales, true knights over their castle parapets. . . .
Among the wheelbarrows, and over the vegetables,
no perceptible dominance of religion ; in the narrow
disquieted streets, none; in the tongues, deeds,
daily ways of Maiden Lane, little. Some honesty,
indeed, and English industry, and kindness of heart,
and general idea of justice ; but faith of any national
kind, shut up from one Sunday to the next, not

THE REJECTED STONE. 333
artistically beautiful even in those Sabbatical exhi
bitions, its paraphernalia being chiefly of high pews,
heavy elocution, and cold grimness of behaviour. . .
This religion seems to him discreditable — discredited
— not believing in itself; putting forth its authority
in a cowardly way ; watching how far it might be
tolerated; continually shrinking, disclaiming, fencing,
finessing : . . . not to be either obeyed or combated
by an ignorant yet clear-sighted youth ; only to be
scorned." Thus was trained the first artist whose eye was
atwin with the country, through which it ran to and
fro like the eye of the Lord, — a veritable Peer, by
divine right, of England. Art thou he that should
come ? Behold, the poor have the Gospel preached
to them. The apotheosis of cabbage-leaves, sailors,
fish-women, is at hand ; these shall decorate sea and
land, and shine in the firmament.
Turner was himself blinded by excess of light, no
doubt ; and the eyes, long trained to copying dark
old pictures by altar-lights, gazed upon this dawn
of English art only at cost of seeing a spot on the
heart of its sun, or of sore eyes. But ancient art
sank fossilised to its stratum when Turner began to
paint England — its Labour, its Sorrow, and Death.
The Pre-Raphaelist Brothers are the first to see
that the old flowers have withered, must be hence
forth honeyless for ever ; and they will wander back
to the old clime and age whence the seeds of them

334 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
were wafted. Let the shadow go back on the dial
beyond the age of Raphael ! Let us repair to the
light-fountains of the morning world, when as yet
there was some childlike faith and enthusiasm among
men ! Thither went the earnest pilgrims only to
find a desert, but a desert from which they could
see, as never when near to it, the seed of all the
faded arts of Greece and Italy thickly strewn in
Covent Garden and Maiden Lane, — their first grass-
blade prophecies appearing in the glories which
Turner had thrown on the walls of English homes.
' Happy for the wild prophet, for the eye-dazzled
school he founded, and for us — the people — that the
Interpreter arose whose words we have already
read ; who, always eloquently, albeit sometimes fit
fully, has managed to utter to this English race the
great admonition, that no Art can ever spring up
here unless it spring from the hearts and homes of
the people ; that never until the homes of the poor
are happy can the mansions of the rich be beautiful ;
and — this above all — that any true Art must be the
fair expression of the faith that is, not of creeds that
have had their day and their flower in Greece and
Italy. Heine stood with his friend Alphonso before
the cathedral at Rheims. " Why," said Alphonso,
" cannot such structures be built now ? " " That,"
replied the poet, "was built by an age of convic
tions ; ours is an age of opinions."

THE REJECTED STONE. 335
How little does the copyist in the Venetian, or
Florentine, or English Gallery understand the prac
tical need which created the work he imitates ! He
would repeat, for applause of dilettanti, a picture
which was wrought to save the unlettered poor
from hell, and allure them heavenward ; he would
make a prettiness of saints and demons who on the
old canvas waged a war with eternal issues for the
soul of the peasant, who thus only could realise the
mighty drama of heaven and earth. The domes are
copied when the shrines for which they were built
have perished ; and the spire in which the roof of
the cottage was transfigured, pointing the peasantry
from afar to their common religious dwelling, re
mains only to show the poor the particular spot with
which they have nothing at all to do. For some
time yet these things may call themselves Art. The
graceful serpent having glided away elsewhere, we
must stuff this its cast skin as well as we can, and
persuade ourselves that its faded spots are the stars
of heaven. Meanwhile the living line of grace and
beauty in its seeming death is already putting forth
for eyes subtle as its own the jewels that shall
adorn its new sheath.
What convictions have we corresponding to those
which sculptured the Phydian Jove or the Milonian
Venus, or painted the great Italian pictures, or
built St. Peter's dome? None. Then for the
present no real Art. The one thing we really

336 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
believe in is Scepticism : this is the inspiration of
our Science, of our clamour for more education, of
our democracy ; they are all the utterances of the
clear and vigorous Misgiving which distinguishes
this age. But in these directions alone can we find
the tendencies which, shadows as they are, point
toward the faint gray that must flush to the dawn
of Art. Our very Scepticism having sent .us into
Town-halls and Corn-exchanges in England, and into
Free Schools, Universities, and State-houses in
Germany and America, these begin to gather a cer
tain elegance about them. The American School-
house rises in the smallest village like a castle. The
Birmingham Town-hall has more poetry about it
than any of the Churches around it. The Hoe
cylinder press has a touch of transcendentalism in
its gentle power. The gas-fixtures are putting
forth pendent lilies. There are graceful forms visible
at the cattle-shows. A tint of beauty shines upon
all these green shoots, that mark each where some
sinew of necessity has given its stroke of work in
good faith.
Poor things are these. Be it admitted. But
whence came those splendours of ancient art we
copy and recopy ? Those illuminated letters of old
manuscripts were but the shapes of hut or tree or
animal footprint with which the savage marked for
his fellow the fact he would convey. The blending
tree-branches, the trefoil flower, swell to the Gothic

THE REJECTED STONE. 337
pile ; and the sunrise is photographed on the flam
boyant wall. The cornice was the rude Northman's
shield against the snow ; the fringe on the tower
was made for cross-bows. The simple devices of
necessity in one age become the ideals of another.
The serious occupations of their ancestors become
the sports of the luxurious. The primitive trade
marks become heraldic arms. There is not a beauty
shed upon us by the fading Arts of the past which
was not born of some effort of man to adjust his life
to the emergency before him, just as the Covent
Garden greengrocer worked a hundred years ago,
as now, all unconscious that one sane mind at least
would find his incidental "litter" fit to grace the
summit of St. Gothard.
Yet I would not say that the Arts of the past
have accomplished their work. Locked up, here
at least, from the people, — especially on the one day
when they might see them, — they have not yet done
the only work they can do ; they have not stimulated
the horny lens in the labourer's brow into an eye.
There is beauty enough all around us, had we eyes
to see it. " Mr. Turner," said a sagacious lady, " I
never saw anything in Nature like your picture
there." "Don't you wish you could?" answered
the artist. The artist is he who sees a thing ; the
rest of us see but a little surface of any object.
When the people have eyes, Apollos and Madonnas
will walk the streets before them. Can any art
T

338 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
equal, O mother, the shining hair and blue eyes of
thy child ? One day, an eye like that which looks
from the parent to the babe will be taught to scan
the vast cartoons of Eternal Beauty covering earth
and sky, and not only the one darling lineament of
it revealed by love.
Who built the grandeurs of Baalbec? The
conviction that induced three hundred of the Car
thaginian youth to lie victims upon its altar for the
good of their city. Baal, Jupiter, Jahve, — the Sun
in his manifold apotheoses, — they have had their
kingdoms, their sacrifices; but Humanity has its
temples and altars yet to come. Already the flower
of the American youth has shown itself ready to die
for the most despised of races ; and over their graves
shall ascend the conviction that to create man him
self, to rescue him from degradation and unfold his
powers, is the high task of the coming Art. In its
light, the finer souls shall look upon the meanest
abode where a human Spirit dwells with a reverence
equal to that which ancient Syrians felt for the temple
of the Sun ; and what was once done for saints and
gods shall be done for men and women. So wrought
the original Creators of Art. A beggar sat for one
of the apostles in the Vatican, a barefooted flower-
girl for one of its angels. But I dream of a yet
higher Art, which shall make the beggar an apostle
of God — not in paint, but in reality ; which shall
transform the flower-girl to an angel in deed and in

THE REJECTED STONE. 339
truth; under whose touch dead hearts and strong
brains shall come forth, like rock from the quarry,
to rise in the walls and domes of a humanised
world. Of the creations of that future Art, the
greatest sculptures and pictures of the past are but
sketches and studies ; its destiny shall be to realise
those patterns " seen on the Mount" in purified
towns, happy homes, clean and sweet tenements,
universal education, beautiful health, and, above all,
in securing to every human being the freedom to
carve his or her own being into the character for
which each life exists, — the statue worthy to be
unveiled in the presence of God and man.

m^

XXVIII.

PIXY-LED.

No one can foresee the quantity of light which will be generated
by letting the People be in communication with men of genius.
This combination of hearts will be the Voltaic Pile of Civilisation.
We know of nothing too lofty for the people. . . The multitude —
and in this lies their grandeur — are profoundly open to the ideal. . . .
The more divine the light, the more is it made for the simple soul.
Victor Hugo.

It seems His newer will
We should not think at all of Him, but turn,
And of the world that He has given us make
What best we can.
Clough.

PIXY-LED.

ANDERING in Wales I found a rustic who
believed in pixies, and I deciphered from
his dialect his notions concerning them.
There were not many of them nowadays, he said,
with evident satisfaction, and especially few in the
neighbourhood of the railways ; but still they could
be occasionally heard in the woods and under the
earth, and every now and then a traveller was misled
by them. How was he misled ? Why, he seemed
to see his own house-gate just before him, but when
he came near it, it was somewhere else; or there might
be something to attract him which always glided
somewhere else, and really was nothing at all ; and
so he wandered far from his way. (Here was the
Hindu Yoganidra, or Illusion, holding her own
within sight of the Atlantic !) To my further ques
tioning he replied that the pixy-spell had to yield
to either of two antidotes ; if the victim turned any
garment he had on inside out he recovered his wits,
or else when the next Sabbath dawned he would be

344 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
released from the delusion. On hearing this grave
account I at first experienced a certain delight at
getting so near to the ancient religion of our ances
tors ; but the next moment the antiquary in me
. was shamed : I remembered that I was a pilgrim
toward the shrine of a human religion, and bethought
me with thankfulness that the pixies had almost
vanished, and that only one here or there could now
be found who believed in their existence. Happy
are we that live in an age and land of light and
knowledge, I said, whom Science has taught to look
upon the fern or the toadstool as an organism of
wisdom, and not as the hiding-place of an elf that
waylays and misleads us !
But when I wandered through the cities of Eng
land and Scotland, and saw the behaviour of the people
on the first day of each week, the credulous Welsh
man did not seem so isolated as before. Surely the
Sunday had laid a spell upon the people similar to
that which it had been said by him to dissolve. For
six days of the week we go about in our right senses;
but on Sunday our populations lose their wits, and
stray helplessly from their own Nineteenth Century
homes to wander amid the delusions of antiquity.
On Saturday the English people are among the
most sensible people in the world ; on Sunday, the
stupidest. The parallel between the pixy-led and the Sab
bath-led people is not so fanciful as it- may at first

PIXY-LED. 345

appear. Our Science of Mythology has proved the
pixies to be the shrunken forms of the once power
ful gods of Northern religion, lingering, since
Christianity outlawed them, in a size diminished
for the requirements of the nursery, and lurking in
the superstitions of districts unvisited by the school
master. But it is equally true that the sanctity of
the Seventh Day is the survival of the old worship
of Ashtaroth or Astarte, Queen of Heaven, — the
Moon, that is, which renews itself in four quarters
of seven days each. There is even a trace of the
intelligence previously ascribed to the Sun and
Moon in the Mosaic account of their creation — " the
greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to
rule the night ;" and the belief hides in our word
" lunacy," as well as in various rustic superstitions
concerning the new moon. This new moon is con
tinually associated with the Sabbath in the Bible,
and it is the consent of scholars that the festivals of
the two originated together. The priests of Moses
retained the sacred days and festivals of the older
faith — festivals known to Assyrians, Arabs, Indians,
and even Peruvians — but of course associated them
with their own deities. At first the sanction of the
Seventh Day observance was that Jahve had rested
on that day after his toils of creation; but that seems
to have been not sufficiently impressive, since in the
second edition of the Decalogue the Sabbath is
associated only with the deliverance of Israel from

346 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Egypt. It became so powerful, that a man could be
stoned to death for the slightest work done on that
day ; yet its sanctity must have to a great degree
vanished at the time when Jesus experienced less
inconvenience from his repeated violations of it than
he now would in a Scottish village. Since his time
the Seventh Day observance has lingered only among
Jews and a few barbarous tribes.
As Moses adopted the festivals of the Moon, the
Christians, after the death of Jesus, adopted the
festivals of the Sun. As Moses associated the Sab
bath with Jahve, the Christians connected the
Sun's Day with Jesus. There is no reminiscence
of Jahve's rest, but a curious mingling of Mosaism,
Sun-worship, and Christianity, in the first explana
tion we have of the observance of the Sun-day by
Christians. It is that of Justin Martyr (a.d. 147):
" We all of us assemble together on the day of the
Sun, because it is the first day, in which God
changed darkness and matter, and made the world.
On the same day also Jesus Christ our Saviour rose
from the dead."
The Sabbath was as gloomy as the night over
which the deity to whom it referred ruled, and the
Day of the Sun was joyous. So it remains on the
Continent of Europe to this day. But the reaction
against Roman Catholic usages which followed the
Reformation, the existence of the command about
the Sabbath in the Decalogue, and a certain dismal

PIXY-LED. 347

element in the Anglo-Saxon man, combined to lead
on the revival of Judaism known as Puritanism, and
with it the blending of the Sunday with the Sab
bath, notwithstanding the furious protests of Luther,
Calvin, and the other Reformers. " If anywhere,"
cried Luther, " the day is made holy for the mere
day's sake, — if anywhere anyone sets up its ob
servance upon a Jewish foundation, — then I order
you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to
feast on it, to do anything that shall reprove this
encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty."
The Sabbath and the Sunday are as much rem
nants of old mythologies as the pixies. But they
have not diminished in size like the pixies. It is
indeed marvellous that the old Moon-deity is still
strong enough in Great Britain to receive human
sacrifices. Here are Baal (the Sun) and Ashtaroth
(the Moon), with their idolaters in full power, and
human health, happiness, and improvement bound
as victims on their altars ! Our Sabbatarians do
not, like the Nestorian Christians, honestly fulfil
the Jewish law, and kill the man who travels or
works on Sunday ; but they confine the people in
their dens of filth or the gin-shop, and deprive them
of the noble opportunities of their one free day.
And, to complete the irony of the case, we send
missionaries to the poor wretches who cast them
selves under the Car of Juggernaut ! The Car of
Juggernaut may be as bad as a Scotch Sabbath, —

348 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
I have never seen it, — but it is hard to pass on Sun
day by the reeking closes of Edinburgh, where the
poor are barred in by superstition, and, from fields
where the birds are singing and the sun shining, to
look down upon the spires of that city, without
seeing each shape itself- to a horrid idol, with
humanity wasting, as by a slow fire, before it.
We are, indeed, not so bad as that in England ;
nevertheless, the main body of the Sunday is here in
the power of the idol, especially so far as the poor
are concerned. The rich can go to the Zoological
Gardens on Sunday. They can have their open
libraries, pictures, music, and games at home. The
clergy, disregarding — they, their servants, and their
sextons — so much of the Commandment as does not
suit them, find their pleasure on that day, well
knowing that, under the law " Whosoever doeth
work therein shall be put to death," every one of
them would have been stoned to death by the con
gregation of Israel. But although the law of Eng
land is so much more merciful than the law of
England's God that men cannot be stoned to death,
the Poor Man's Sunday is still a disgrace to our
civilisation. The Sunday question is a very large one. It
concerns not only one-seventh of every human life,
but the whole leisure time of labouring millions.
To them destiny presents only so much release from
drudgery and physical bondage. An ancient satirist

PIXY-LED. 349

represents a carpenter with his log of wood hesi
tating whether he shall make it into a god or a
stool. England places every working man before
his Sunday, and compels him to shape it to a Sab
batarian idol or a Satyr of the public-house. But
what might not be made of this beautiful material !
On that day Art might cast its ray across the dismal
lot of Toil ; the wonders of Science, the crystals of
the Earth, the curiosities of History and Nature,
the pictorial illustrations of human achievements,
heroisms, and the celebrations of grand epochs,
might kindle, refine, and ennoble those who now
live and die as in caverns ; they might count their
higher, their real lives by luminous Sundays,
remembering each as having brought them some
new thought or uplifting ideal; they might sing,
with George Herbert,
The Sundays of man's life,
Threaded together on Time's string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the Eternal Glorious King!
But the pixy-spell is upon us, and it can be
removed only by a complete change of our religious
raiment inside out. To make that day what it
should be involves a revolution in the fundamental
ideas of religion. It would imply a belief in a deity
detached from a book ; in a living, and not a dead,
deity ; in a deity to whom every day belongs ; in a
deity not dependent for his happiness or equanimity

350 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
upon human abasement before him. That every day
is the Lord's Day, and that every human interest
religiously sacrificed is offered to an idol, as much
as if it were roasted meat offered to his palate or
incense to his nostrils, is a transcendent faith to
whose height we shall not so easily climb. The
Sunday will follow the development of human faith :
it has reflected the mystery of the changing Moon,
it has invested the greatness of the Giant Mechanic
who built the universe in six days, it has been
abased before the power that swallowed up Pharaoh
and his hosts, it has shone with the gladness of
Apollo rising with his radiant chariot, it has followed
the glooms and the glories of religion in its oscilla
tions between fear and hope, heaven and hell ; and
when the religion of Humanity shall arrive, it will
faithfully reflect the happiness and welfare of Man.
And because so much is implied in it, there
is no cause that demands more the faithful service
of the thinker and the philanthropist than that
which demands the opening of museums, art-galleries,
lecture-rooms, and concerts on the Sunday. That
is a fatal servility that leads liberal believers to
defer to the prejudices of neighbours and servants,
and suspend games and pleasures on Sunday. Our
neighbours and servants require our testimony
against those chains which our timidity helps to
strengthen. We have no right to set up in our
homes, side by side, the God of Truth and our

PIXY-LED.

351

neighbour's idol. Our thought and our deed should
be one. If a thing be false, let no true man or
woman bend before it. If it be true, let it be
organised in our homes and in our lives. It is but
little, O my brothers, that we can do to lighten
the superstitions that degrade and afflict mankind,
— little enough at best ; all the more should it be
our very best !

XXIX.
OUR EUMENIDES.

Minerva. I have settled in this place these mighty deities,
hard to be appeased ; they have obtained by lot to administer all
things regarding men. But he who has not found them gentle
knows not whence come the ills of life. iEsoHYLVS (Erin

She saw
Through every world.
* * *
Thrice she was burnt,
Thrice she was born,
Oft, not seldom,
And yet she lives. The Voluspa.

OUR EUMENIDES.

NE of them- 1 saw driving, with snaky lash,
a vast herd of miserable men, women, and
children. She drove them by the palace-
gates, past the splendid clubs, through noble parks.
On her forehead was written Pauperism. The
wretched ones passed by the Ministers of State
driving in their carriages to Parliament, and, hold
ing out their wasted arms, cried, " Help us to reach
some land where we can find work and bread !"
The Ministers said, " Be ye fed," and passed on.
I followed, and saw many fall by the way and
perish, and to all of these were distributed tracts
" On the Goodness of God." As the human herd
was driven on it became vaster, and others of
the Eumenides came to help drive them.; the name
of one was Crime, of another Disease, of yet
another Drunkenness. These drove them until
they were lost in gin-shops, in hospitals, in work
houses, in fens and dens.
And I saw that when their work for the moment

356 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
was done, ere repairing to find other wretched ones
to pursue, the Eumenides were like each other : they
were sisters ; and all the daughters of Ignorance.
Why have not the poor work to do ? While
civilisation has multiplied the employments of in
telligence and skill, it has diminished those of
ignorance. We have educated iron and wood, fire
and vapour, to do the work of the ignorant; but
we have not educated men and women to do work
on the higher plane where labour is more than ever
demanded. Left in ignorance, the paupers are also
without the restraints of culture and foresight, and
their increase is like the spawning of the low animal
orders. Nay, there would seem to be a fearful
tendency in pauperism to stimulate sexual passions.
In France the carp for breeding are kept from much
food, and are called peignards. Thus ignorance
begins the sad work which over-population com
pletes. And yet for all these hands there are waste
places of the earth calling. Who can bring together
the idle power and the idle land? Not a squire
archy desiring an ever-glutted labour-market ; not
a government which instinctively suspects any
proposal that has the misfortune to be humane; —
not these, though they saw England transformed to
one vast city, with its woods, parks, open spaces — its
very lungs — in atrophy! Not a Church which
teaches the poor that this earth was meant to be the

OUR EUMENIDES. 357

howling wilderness it is, and that their concern
must be to avoid future, and not present, hells !
Not the silly Samaritans whose cruel charities
tempt the beggar to remain on the street, and who,
in their pietistic care for the hypocrites who call
themselves " the worthy poor," neglect those saddest
victims of all, the devil's poor ! Not the " Charities,"
with their endowments running through antiquated
channels away from those they were meant to aid !
And yet there is no man or woman we meet in
the street who would not turn aside and give his or
her last shilling to save a fellow-creature from
starving, if on that shilling it were certain life or
death depended. With such resources of com
passion all around them, the poor are starving ; and
for each one that actually starves, how many draw
near to it ! nay, how many whose death is ascribed
to specific disease could have conquered that disease
with sufficient nourishment, warmth, and care !
Is Crime not also the daughter of Ignorance ?
The crime against property is the grasp of the
blindfolded after happiness. Those who really see
the necessary inviolable conditions through which
objects can be alone truly reached will not attempt
the impossible plan. The preventing grace of
Common Sense is enough to restrain men from
putting ice under the pot they would have boil.
Crimes of brutality and passion are but the natural
effects of having wild animals running at large in

358 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
society. When the tiger is four-footed, and the
serpent in the dust, we understand them and provide
cages; but when they come two-footed, in human
guise, we raise no bar to their freedom. The
gallows is a poor hole in the top of our kettle to
escape the dangers of a force which, trained and
mastered, would draw the freights of civilisation.
The prison is our miserable apology for being less
able to harness man-power than horse-power for
beneficent ends. Saadi met a stranger seated on
a tiger which bore him quietly ; to him, paralysed
with fear, the stranger said, " O Saadi, withdraw not
thy neck from the yoke of God, and nothing shall be
able to withdraw its neck from thy yoke." Every
animal in field or jungle represents a special
faculty ; each has climbed into the heart and
brain of man, that it may be our lowly saviour
from some weakness or evil ; Fatima has only to
offer her hand, and her beast becomes a prince !
Disease is the very physiognomy of Ignorance.
The mass of mankind are conceived in ignorance,
and trained without knowledge. Did all the mal
formations of mind and heart inherited or fostered
by the ignorant motherhood of the world appear in
physical traits, the majority of people would be
humped and crippled ; as it is, to the ignorance of
parents, to the stupidity of those who, as was once
said, perpetually " throw drugs of which they know
little into a body of which they know less," and to

OUR EUMENIDES. 359
the general unreason which still does not recog
nise that every centre of disease sends out a ghoul
to prey upon the whole body of Society, it is to
be attributed that not only mankind, but their
Theology and Politics, are in a condition of normal
invalidism. Calvin's liver-troubles became organised
into a body of divinity, Swedenborg's lunacy into
Swedenborgianism ; the Church Litany was the
outcry of a people stricken by plague, pestilence,
and famine. The clergyman's sore throat afflicts
also his sermon. My Lords' gout tells in their
legislation ; and it is impossible not to perceive that
the Irish Land Bill, the Education Bill, and other
schemes are suffering from parliamentary late hours.
What shall we say of the direst Fury of all —
Drunkenness ? It is heart-breaking to see the
amount of earnestness, love, humanity, wasted (or
nearly so) in the effort to rescue men from that
evil. To men who have been created by stimu
lants, and whose every sense exists by its stimulant,
the prohibitionists come with denunciation of stimu
lants. They would suppress public-houses in a
world where in every growth — rice, sugar-cane,
cocoa-nut, vine, palm, sycamore, walnut, banana,
honey, every fruit — nay, the very grass ! — Nature
proffers the stimulating cup to human lips.
Because of the sore-eyed, give up light ! it cries.
Avoid the basin, since thousands have been drowned
in water ! Have the weaknesses of reformed

360 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
inebriates reappeared in this intemperate Tem
perance? "If a man strive for masteries, yet is
he not crowned except he strive lawfully." The
Russian Skopsi have a short method against sexual
vice. We can put an end to the picking of pockets
by a general amputation of hands. But a stream is
not destroyed by foreclosing a particular channel.
To a great extent drunkenness has been mas
tered in the higher classes of society. Let any one
compare the customs of respectable people in old
times with those now prevailing. The ladies still
leave the gentlemen at the table after dinner, but
not now because those gentlemen are in a con
dition unfitting them for the society of ladies.
Afternoon or evening marriages are still illegal, but
not now because men of property are not supposed '
to know what they are about toward the close of
the day. The old competition as to the number
of bottles that can be poured into one human skin is
past, and the gentleman is no longer normally to be
looked for under the table. But what has produced
this change ? We commonly say, " civilisation,"
" general enlightenment," and so on : but these
mean only that life has gained new resources ; that
art, science, literature, travel, intellectual occupa
tions, have become rivals of the bottle ; that there
are many stimulants where . all were once concen
trated in one or two. Life to the educated becomes
too rich in pleasures to be thrown away. The man

OUR EUMENIDES. 361

who, amid the various resources now opened up,
ruins himself or his fortunes by drink, is regarded
as a fool.
But how is it with the impoverished and the
ignorant? They are still under the doom of
drudgery. The glass of gin still furnishes their
only available paradise of forgetfulness. Their
inward resources are unopened. Life is not so
precious, passed in a den of filth, or on the tread
mill of toil, that they should care much for its ruin.
The drunken classes are the classes without hope.
Now and then the man of genius is found ruining
himself by indulgence in drink, but— except in cer
tain hereditary cases — disappointment, inability to
meet his ideal, have brought him to it; for there
is a pauperism of soul as well as of body.
For the victims that have accumulated among
us there should be inebriate asylums. The mad
dening adulterations should be surely curbed.
The cheap wines, Hght fruit -waters, and pure
beers, which secure soberness on the Continent of
Europe, may easily be introduced into England, and
they will be when a Chancellor of the Exchequer
comes who can estimate the costliness of the
revenue he obtains by taxing them. But the
root of drunkenness will not be touched until the
new resources of life which have sobered the
educated and comfortable shall be within reach of
the poor.

362 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Thus we find that the Furies are sisters ; when
we know the cause and bearing of one evil, we
know all of them. Where we have classes holding
privileges and interests apart from the common
welfare of mankind ; mothers and wives trained to
be social toys, rather than wise companions of
men and instructors of children ; Churches preach
ing the natural corruption of new-born babes, and
the superior importance of some other world than
this, — there shall we find the essential evil, that
may fly from heart to head, from spirit to flesh,
but will never be healed but by a general reform
of the whole constitution of things.
Any reform which does not deal radically with
human ignorance is as the sweeping away of this
or that snow-drift while winter is yet in the sky
and the snow still falling.
To us also, as to the wise Greeks, the Furies
will be known as the Eumenides — "the well-
meaning" — if they scourge us to the angels of
which they are shadows.

XXX.

"GODLESS SCHOOLS.

That which makes our view of the present state of the world a
source of perplexity and horror is the consideration that every human
heart bears in itself a type, more or less distinct, of those powers
and that happiness which have been the portion of the most exalted
minds. There is perhaps no spot on earth, however dreary, in
which the germs of many plants, and the larva? of shining and light-
winged insects, are not hidden, though for thousands of years
undeveloped, and still expecting the warm breeze that shall call
them out in life and beauty. Sterling.
They stole the only wealth I had, —
Though poor and old, the sun, at least, was mine.
Beranger.

GODLESS SCHOOLS.'

jINE morning, on the invitation of an Evan
gelical friend, I accompanied a deputation
from the A.L.W.L. to the President of
the Board of Trade. These mystic letters repre
sent the Association for the Leavening of the Whole
Lump. The Minister received us courteously,
and, the interview having been opened with a
prayer by the chaplain of the Association, the
Chairman proceeded to explain the objects they
had in view. The Society had been formed, he
said, by a number of persons who had observed
with sorrow the immoralities and infidelities of the
world, and had come to the conclusion that they were
due to the sad divorce that existed between the
occupations of mankind and the Word of God. In
the progress of society, men had been drawn to
obtain many of their physical needs from common
sources — but, alas, these sources were generally
secular. We had godless bakeries, godless boot-
shops, and godless groceries. Was it any wonder

366 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
that men who were thus, from the crown of their
head to the soles of their feet, made up of un-
sanctified substances should be reprobates? The
apostle had warned us that, whether we eat or drink,
we should do so to the glory of God; yet how
could this be the case so long as our workshops and
markets are in their present unblest condition ?
The chairman was followed by a baker, who
said that nothing would be easier than to identify
the bread of the body with the bread of life. He
hoped to see the time when no loaf could be legally
purchased which had not on it a text of Scripture ;
nay, was it too much to demand of the Parliament
of a Protestant Christian People that on one side of
every loaf should be stamped the words, " No
Popery !" and on the other, for the good of Jews,
" Christ- murderers !" ? At present, even infidels are
licensed to establish bakeries, and it is doubtful
whether prayers are said over half the barrels of
flour from which the people get their daily bread.
Were it not better that families should have no
bread at all than that they should thus destroy
their souls for the sake of a mere physical existence ?
A bootmaker said that all that the preceding
brother had said of godless bakeries might refer
equally to the godless boot-shops by which society is
shod. He had been long deeply interested in the
soles of men, and was convinced that the reason
why so many tread the Broad Way that leadeth to

"GODLESS SCHOOLS." 367
Destruction is, that their feet are encased in godless
leather, instead of being shod with the Preparation
of the Gospel of Peace. For himself, he had long
used in the making of boots and shoes tracts printed
by the Tract Society ; but, such was the perversity
of the human heart, his manufactures were even
less popular than those of other shops. He thought
the law might at least demand that only Protestant
and orthodox Christians should be permitted to sell
boots, and that the Lord's Prayer should be said
over every customer before taking his measure.
Others present protested successively against
godless breweries, groceries, barber-shops, &c, and
the scandal that we should be kept in order by a
godless police was vehemently denounced.
The Minister promised to give the weighty
matter which the deputation had at heart his very
best consideration, and bowed us to the door, to
which the Dean our Chaplain advanced backwards,
invoking the divine blessing upon the Board of
Trade. Who this godly man was I did not learn at the
time, but have since concluded that it was the Dean
of Norwich; for very soon after I read in the
papers that a meeting held to consider the subject
of education had been startled by an opinion ex
pressed by that divine to the effect that, " though
secular education may promote civilisation, civilisa
tion is not evangelisation nor christianisation."

368 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Had the meeting been called to consider how the
hovels of the poor might be cleansed, the same pro
found mind would no doubt have ventured the
declaration that cleanliness is not godliness, and
insisted that there should be no bathing but
baptism. Or the chaplain may have been the clergyman
whom I heard append to the maxim that parents
have no more right to starve their children's minds
than to starve their bodies, the declaration that they
had just as little right to starve their children's
souls as to starve their minds or bodies, — in sublime
oblivion of the fact that, while we agree about the
nature of bread, and the nature of reading and
writing, what one thinks food for the soul another
believes to be poison.
The English people have compared the statistics
of every crime with the statistics of ignorance, and
have been brought face to face with the fact that
the training of children in ignorance is really the
crippling of their energies, the corruption of their
morals; and that, in the presence of facts that
amount to national disgrace, right and duty compel
the State to see that every child is educated. The
children being those of Catholics, Jews, Rationalists,
and Protestant Christians, it follows plainly that
compulsory schools which they are all taxed to sup
port cannot in justice teach what either regards
as harmful. England has not the right to compel

"GODLESS SCHOOLS." 369

the Catholic child to listen to the reading of the
Protestant Bible, nor the Jewish child to learn
of the New Testament; nor to insist that the
child of the Rationalist shall be taught that Balaam's
ass spoke. It may be done, but it is unjust; and
the scheme incorporating it must suffer — as it is
now suffering in America — the fate of all injustice.
The alliance of the oppressed against a wrong,.
and the overthrow of that wrong, is only a question
of time. This simple position is met by an outcry against
"godless schools." But to some among us every
school must be godless. The denominational schools
of England are godless to all who do not believe in
the god they have set up. Trinitarian, Unitarian,
Calvinist, Jew, worship deities as different as
Brahm, Allah, and Jesus. But they all agree that
men should know how to read, write, count, and
comprehend the principles of honesty, justice, ve
racity, and benevolence. The teaching of any
special form of religion is technical, and one man
has the same right to tax me to turn his son out an
accomplished Positivist, that another has to tax me
to make his son a Christian.
The question is, can we by cooperation extend
our means so as to secure to every child the educa
tion that each finds good for his own, whatever be the
profession, trade, or religion to which he desires
him to belong ? If we cannot separate the general
A A

370 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
education which all require from the special reli
gious teaching which some desire, it only proves
that such cooperation is impossible. But it is no
solution to say that we must pay to have our neigh
bours' children taught what we are unwilling to
have our own taught. It is to add meanness to
injustice to invite us to be satisfied with, keeping
our children from school while the Bible is being
read or the religion we believe false is taught ; as
would be felt even by orthodox obtuseness if every
Christian in England were taxed for the propaga
tion of Brahminism in India. A man can partly
counteract an error taught his own child, but he is
gravely asked to consent to aid in propagating what
he holds- to be falsehood beyond his power of
control or remedy J
I do not wonder at the horror which the orthodox
have of "godless schools." Their misgivings are
quite natural. It may be safely assumed that, when
human minds are reared under the simple rain and
light of knowledge, the results will not be what they
have been under the manipulations of priests. When
the working man has learned to cast an eye of in
telligence into nature, it will be unlikely enough that
he will find in sun or moon the god of Calvin, or in
the blue sky or green earth suggestions of the lake
of fire and brimstone. It has required a great deal
of special instruction to lead mankind to believe the
popular theology, and it is not without a certain

"GODLESS SCHOOLS." 371
satisfaction that the freethinker welcomes the ad
mission that minds may be trained to explore all
actual knowledge without finding any basis for the
Thirty-nine Articles or the Westminster Catechism.
Nor need the freethinker conceal his consent that
the fears of the orthodox are founded on truth. He
knows that the cry for education, which is the arch
of light spanning the cloud of misery and vice
around us, will not vanish before its promise is ful
filled. Its meaning is that Superstition is to be
lifted from the hearts and minds of this people, and
its end may be secured by the devious no less surely
than by the direct path. It is not his cause that
need fear the turning of Town Councils into reli
gious debating clubs, the struggle in every village
over the religion to be taught in schools, the boring
of children by Bible-readings and catechisms. It is
the season that is in the sky which decides whether
the falling rain shall turn to ice or flowers. The
spirit and tendency of this age will determine the
effect of the application of a permissive Act of Uni
formity to compulsory education. The secularist
lecturer has his reasons for carrying the Bible in his
pocket as well as the clergyman ; and his interpreta
tion of it will not suffer by its appearance as a badge
of religious oppression. For the reading of the Scrip
tures of a particular religion, in schools supported
by taxation of those who disbelieve that religion,
can only be regarded as an oppression. It is not

372 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
contended that there are not Bibles enough for all
who desire them, and opportunities to have the same
read to the children of those who look upon the
English Bible as the Word of God. To bring it,
therefore, into the common schools is to clothe the
teacher so far with the functions of a priest, and to
raise a sectarian flag, and with it all the jealousies
and suspicions of opposing creeds, over the school
which should be dear to all as their own home. And
because a school does not do this, but bears to all
the light they need, undiscoloured by the symbols
which have caused the religious wars of history, to
call it godless is to say a great deal for Atheism.
If it be godless, so are the fountain and the sun
shine.

XXXI.

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER.

It was revealed unto me : What other men trample on shall be
thy food. George Fox.

Action translates death into life, fable into verity, speculation
into experience ; freeing man from the sorceries of tradition and the
torpor of habit. The eternal Scripture is thus expurgated of the
falsehoods interpolated into it by the supineness of the ages. Alcott.

The question is not : Art thou
In the nobility ?
This is the question : Is there
Nobility in thee ? Gleim.

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER.

j]RESH from visiting the St. Pancras Arches
: — the Mars Hill of London, above whose
altar to the Unknown God I had seen
sitting Science, Poetry, Literature, and Art — I
found my way into the Strangers' Gallery of the
House of Commons. As I listened to the debate
there were suddenly " roars of laughter." In a
moment of forgetfulness some statesman had alluded
to the English people as " our own flesh and blood."
Had he got hold of that skeleton of Tom Paine
which infidels are said to be keeping somewhere,
and dangled it before the club of wealthy gentle
men, he could not have been more scoffed. And
why should not Parliament, as then constituted,
laugh at the idea that the masses were of one flesh
and blood with its honourable members? One
cannot get in the woof what was not put into
the web, nor of privilege and class interest obtain
the recognition of Humanity.
The cachinnation passed out of Westminster

376 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
Hall, and went sounding through the country. It
came into collision with some sounds of quite a
different kind, — with the voices, now plaintive, now
jubilant, of sufferers soothed and healed in the
asylums of charity ; with the appeals of Leagues
against every form of wrong and degradation ; with
the triumphant songs of millions liberated in
America ; with the burden of ancient faith, which
has come down over many laughing Parliaments,
concerning man, " Thou hast made him a little
lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with
glory and honour!" All these contrary voices,
with which the laughter came into hard collision,
some of us could hear in the gallery, and we looked
down with some anxiety on those below, who seemed
not to hear them. There seemed, however, to be
one ear keener than the rest among them, for an
individual, amid much derision, uttered the following
brief speech, which I must give from memory, as I
have not been able to find it in any newspaper, nor
in Hansard. He said : —
" Amid what revolutionary smoke and flame —
mountain blazing to mountain — have been published
the Rights of Man ! How dim must the parlia
mentary eye have become to which all the war-fires
of English histo have not furnished light enough
by which to read on every man the charter of his
rights ! Does a stomach imply food ; a hand, work ;
lungs, air; exhaustion, rest ; intellect, culture ; con-

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 377
science, moral freedom ; hope, happiness ? Does
he who, with a mind that might be improved, must
pass through life with his talent buried in the earth,
suffer no wrong ? Why is light given to a man
whose way is hid ? Are hope, aspiration, capacity
for delight, — found in every wretchedest man in
London, as in the most fortunate, even as bone
answers to bone in the two, — are these but ingenious
schemes to add the torture of Tantalus to the
routine of Ixion ? If a Devil be not at the head of
this Universe, then man is marked all over with his
rights; and in manifold hideous vices, corruptions,
sufferings, — in the nameless ghouls that batten on
youth and beauty in our streets, — in false weights
and measures, political dishonour, social coarseness
and frivolity, — in the inability of the best men and
women to be more than fragments of themselves, —
in the chimpanzee chatter of churches and chapels,
and the universal inoculation of Jesuitism, — Society
is suffering the retributions of those who have denied
the mass of men their divinely-certified rights. The
most fearful hell Swedenborg found was perhaps
that whose occupants fancied they were in heaven,
and sang praises for their happiness. As I re
member, Swedenborg began seeing his visions
in London, a region in which men may still be
heard thanking God for Jerusalems that are really
Gehennas. But mark you, gentlemen, no Parlia
ment which has only shouts of derision for those

378 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
who speak of the toiling people around us as our
own flesh and blood — "
Here the laughter burst out again to such an
extent that the speaker could not proceed. As he
sat down a heavy blow, as from a tremendous mallet,
was given to the door, which fell before it, and in
there stalked a huge stern man with a hammer in
his hand.As he glanced around on the assembly, the
laughter sank to what sounded very much like a
death-rattle. With a voice of thunder, the grim
intruder spake as follows : —
" There came a day when Odin, ' the terrible
and severe god, the Father of Slaughter, he who
giveth victory and reviveth courage in the conflict,
who nameth those that are to be slain,' — founder
thus of the Age of Chivalry which shaped Europe,
— became weary and dejected, and, resting on his
sword, which was also his sceptre, asked—' Cannot
Love be as well as Hate, Life as well as Death ? '
Then he called Thor, his first-born son, and set a
crown upon his head ; but when Thor asked for the
sword, Odin gave into his hand in lieu thereof a
hammer, saying, ' The Kingdom of the Destroyer
is necessary, but brief; the Kingdom of the Builder
shall never end.' Thenceforth in the centre of every
globule of Northern blood sat enthroned the ideal —
Man fulfilling his twofold destiny as labourer and
god.

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 379
" The Southern and Oriental formulas into
which the Anglo-Saxon race has been coerced for a
few centuries cannot destroy this throne. When
the spasmodic effort to obtain things by genuflexion
and lip-service, whereinto we have been galvanised,
has passed away, and the worship which is work
prevails, and it is known that Luck is the veritable
Loki whose evil progeny Thor destroys, that all
things are attainable through fulfilment of their in
tervening conditions, and only thus attainable, — then
the god with the hammer, too real to care whether
he be called carpenter's son or by other title, will
have fulfilled the destiny assigned him by the All-
Father. " For a long time the Wolf Fensir, the Serpent
Midgard, prevail over Thor. The labourer knows
no further than to cross himself, or whine psalm-
tunes, and pay his Peter's pence. The man whose
daily life is a grapple for life and death with the
laws of Nature knows nothing of those laws, such
knowledge being reserved for those who never come
in any perilous contact with gravitation or explosive
gases. The wheels of our progress are splashed
with their blood. Opie, the artist, explained to a
questioner concerning his wonderful colours, 'I
mix them with my brains.' Poor Paddy has re
versed the case, and mixes his brains with the
materials. As we drive over our roads, our waggons
rattle on his brains ; the train speeds on iron that

380 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
has entered his soul ; and whenever any great work
is undertaken — as the tunnelling of a mountain, or
the building of a bridge or church — instead of the
bulls and sheep the ancients used to sacrifice on
similar occasions, we offer up a hecatomb of Irish
men. " For these miserable ones, for whom the
universe holds no relief but the cup of gin and the
begetting or conceiving children wretched as them
selves, what hope ? None, unless the capitalist can
be made to feel that he is doling out pitiful and
unjust wages, not to Sullivan or to Smith, but to
Almighty God; no hope, unless his eye can be
quickened to see beyond the uncouth body and
brutal brow a soul of quite infinite stature, a flower
of God's heart, — by no means a weed, though drest
for a while in weeds, — crowned with the light of an
eternal destiny. No matter how long it has been
sepulchred, even if until it stinketh, the Christ
of this age has no higher work than to cry to that
entombed Thought, ' Come forth ! Unbind him
hand and foot ; take away the napkin which shuts
away from those dull eyes the everlasting stars of
truth ! ' We do not say he should not roll your
hogshead, we only demand that he shall not be nailed
up body and soul in your hogshead. We only
ask that you shall not take him, whose only crime
is that he is ever coining his heart and brain for the
capitalist, and set him in this world for ever at the

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 381
Criminal's Pump, where, at any minute's cessation
from drudgery, the water rises to the drowning-
point. We demand that study shall be no longer
made to him synonymous with starvation.
" Does anyone believe the present relations
between Capital and Labour can endure ? They
will endure just as long as the labourer is imbruted,
and does not know his own worth.
" Think what Capital is. It is sinews and nerves
in metallic forms ; it is accumulated head-aches and
heart-aches of drudges, sempstresses, servants ; it is
" a catacomb of human bones. Your pound sterling
represents so much labour — that is its only value.
" Think what Labour is. It is the one thing
valuable : without it your bread is field-dust ; your
butter, grass. Take it away from your ship, and, lo !
you are a savage swimming on a log ; from your
fine dwelling, and you must burrow like a mole for
every stone in it.
" So long as Labour holds in unconsciousness the
keys of the gateways to all good, it will be cheated
as were the Red Indians, who were easily enticed
to sell states for glass beads. But the Titans will
not slumber for ever. The poor-school, the penny
press, have not been so unproductive as some sus
pect. That man should be a hammer without the
added god can never be the perpetual fact of
Society. Therefore the hammer strikes.
" In the Laws of Menu it is written : ' Justice,

382 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
being destroyed, will destroy ; being preserved, will
preserve : it must therefore never be violated.' The
Hebrew prophet cried : ' I will come near to you in
judgment: I will be a swift witness against those
that oppress the hireling in his wages.' Wages?
A wage is a gauge or measurement of work done.
It does not mean that he who sows, plants, picks,
lifts, drives, polishes, spins, weaves, and thus trans
forms dust and dirt to beauty and commodity, shall
have a thousandth part of what accrues to him who
shelters these transactions, but never sees them until
they shine in his purse or his mansion. And be
cause a false balance is an abomination to the Lord,
and because, ' when God loathes aught, men pre
sently come to loathe it too,' the present relation of
Capital and Labour cannot stand. Nemesis has yet
her wheel and rudder for sea and land, and trade is
everywhere pursued by the Law that underpaid
labour is the dearest ; as the poor iron-forger put it,
where there is cinder in the pay, there is cinder in
the iron. When we think we have been very clever,
and saved, much, our ship is going to pieces, our
train is smashed on broken rails, we are eating,
drinking, and thinking taint and disease. The
labourers, going downward, not only drag us with
them, but manage, by pauperism and other atrocities,
to filch back the very money we move Heaven and
Earth to save. The pauper stops the way. The
criminal stands there steadily and painfully extract-

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 383
ing from the hide of us what the hand has refused.
Nay, there is something mysteriously passing from
our heart as well as from our hide. ' Who is
weak,' cried Paul, ' and I am not weak ?' The
Queen hears that three men have starved to death
in one week, and writes to her Minister that she
feels that thereby her reign has been sullied.
" Mr. John Ruskin — the noble spirit of whose
works on social questions will survive their inci
dental crudities, as Luther's heart survives his no
tions about consubstantiation and the devil — has
recently advanced the opinion that the radical vice
of all political economy is that it rests on the prin
ciple that the only true estimate of the value of
labour is what that labour can be bought for. If
the labour-market is over-full, then labour will be
cheap, and vice versa. But Mr. Ruskin maintains
that where a labourer is employed to do so much or
so many hours' work, his just wage is what will
exactly repair his expenditure of physical energy,
and the number of cubic feet in sheltered space
requisite for his healthy lodging. The question, he
maintains, is really a chemical one, to be properly
decided by a medical commission.
" It is far easier to pronounce this absurd than
to prove it so. It at least demands as much for a
man as for a steam-engine, which will strike work
for ever unless it be fed with precisely the amount
of force it puts forth. But the fatal vice of the

384 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
theory is, that no medical commission could measure
the working man's expenditure on his work. The
labourer is more than a working man ; he is also a
man working. After his loss of physical energy
has been restored, what chemistry is there that can
measure or repair his loss in not being able to know
his wife and child, to enjoy a home, to give one
thought to the sacred Universe around him ? What
medicinal art can distil for him the intellectual life
absorbed from his hours by the sod, or recover for
the brain its glories lavished upon the satisfaction of
an animal's wants? First, indeed, man is a machine
worked by so much heat ; but next he is a great
spiritual hunger, which will take the fruit it craves
from the Serpent if its God deny the same.
" But the day will come when thinking men
will do honour to the man who proposed that the
poor should be not only paid, but ' considered ;'
and who would fain have substituted for the mere
buying and selling of human sinews and hearts a
standard of value which should respect — albeit, on
the mere physical plane — the individual need of
each man. Here, at least, is a strain of the old
Love that hears the young ravens when they cry.
"When the hammer of Thor was held by the
giant Thrym, and buried eight miles beneath the
gelid rocks of Jotunheim, it was only throuo-h
Freyja, Goddess of Love, that it could be regained.
The fable grew out of our race, and we live to

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 385
make it history. It is by the working of a Mighty
Love — a Love that cannot find repose amid the
declined tasks of humanity even by bestowing seven
millions of pounds annually in charity — that Labour
is to be recovered from the icy oppressions of Self
ishness, unearthed from hard necessities, and made
the beautiful service of a divinity."
When the man with the hammer had finished,
he took his seat in the House without resistance ;
for the laughter of Parliament over the flesh-and-
blood ioke had indeed ended in a death-rattle.

^

XXXII.

THE PILGRIM'S LAST
REFLECTIONS.

The Nurakh sages ask, What use is there for a prophet in this
world ? A prophet is necessary because men are connected with each
other in the affairs of life : therefore rules and laws are indispensable,
that all may act in concert, that there may he no injustice in giving
or taking or partnership, but that the order of the world may
endure. And it is necessary that these rules should proceed from
God, that all men may obey them. The Persian Desatir.

All made in the likeness of the One,
All children of one ransom,
In whatever hour, in whatever part of the earth,
We draw this vital air,
We are brothers ; we must be bound by one compact :
Accursed he who infringes it,
Who raises himself upon the weak who weep,
Who saddens an immortal spirit. Manzoni.

o£JJ

THE PILGRIM'S LAST
REFLECTIONS.
FTER all, one of those gentlemen so recently
employed by the upper classes to laugh
down the rights of man in Parliament
might not be without something to say for himself.
" You have the majority, it is true," he might say ;
" so had Herod and Pilate when they joined hands.
But I know that one with Truth is a more real
majority. The rights of man ? Read the statistics
of false measures, the statistics of gin and beer;
walk through St. Giles's with your pockets shut
tight and your eyes wide open; visit the police
court; watch the crowd gathered about the prize-
ring; and tell me what you think of their sacredness.
How would you like such people to make laws for
you ? Linger a little under the arches at St.' Pancras,
and listen to the religious ranters ; then put it to
the vote of the assembly what shall be your creed."
Lately I read the legend of a youth caught up
in the air by an angel, with whom he floated over
the world, that he might see the whole of it. The

39° AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
angel went too near the stars for him. " Let us go
lower," said the youth; "I love the earth." The
angel went lower — near enough for him to see the
outlines of continents. " Lower yet ! " said the
' youth ; " I love the smell of the earth, its scented
trees and grass ; and the bright ships, the fishermen,
are dearer to me than hemispheres and continents."
So the angel went lower still. But now they saw
sad scenes : a poor slave and his wife pursued by
blood-hounds ; they saw them plunge in the river,
hand in hand, to find freedom in death. They saw
an army besieging a city ; shot and shell bore death
among women kneeling with babes in their arms.
The city falls ; the survivors are given over to the
cruelty and lust of the victorious soldiery. They
saw the dens of cities where the human image is
seared out of men and women by vice. And now
the young man's wings began to droop. " Higher,
higher !" he cried to the angel. " I have seen
enough — too much ; let us soar higher ! " " Nay,
not so," replied the angel ; " thou hast seen, not too
much, but too little ; we must go lower." Then,
lowering their wings, they skimmed the earth like
swallows, and they saw men and women coming
from far and near to break every fetter of the
slaves whose cry they had heard ; they saw hover
ing near the pillaged city a host with white banners
binding up the wounded, warring upon war; and
amid the dens of vice they saw busy workers building

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 391
schools, asylums, hospitals; nay, even amid the
wretched and vile they found many heroically
vanquishing the dangers and temptations of their
hard lot, and, coming closer still, saw tints of kind
liness and feeling in tainted hearts, — in all, the hope
and prophecy of a fairer destiny.
May it not be that our philosophers and politi
cians also too generally come but close enough to
see the outlines of nations, or the aggregates of
populations ?

FINE lady once refused to purchase a
picture she had ordered of the French
painter Millet, because by the side of a
gardener in it, pruning his vines, there was a basket
of manure. She saw not that it was a basket of
lilies, nay, a basket of roses for the cheeks of the
gardener's children in the cottage hard by. Lord
Palmerston did not say many things one cares to
remember ; but he did once remind us that " dirt
is but matter out of its place."
The philosophical opponents of democracy are
not apt in these days to undervalue men because
they are lowly. Their fault is that they cannot
see in crime energy "out of place," nor lilies in
the dung of animalism. So far as the honest and
io-norant workers are concerned, they say — " But
the whole power and value of this ploughman is that

392 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
he shall stick to his plough. The democrats would
carry him to the hustings, where he is instantly
transformed to a clod." But the democrat disclaims
that his movement is theoretical. Democracy is the
withdrawal of authority from those whose use of it
is shown to be worse than anarchy. " Mud-turtles
we, the people, may be ; but science has shown us
how close is the creeping reptile to the soaring bird,
and there is enough of the wing-principle in us to
enable us to detect a fish pretending to be an eagle
or a ploughman trying to be a peer. We shall
follow with devotion true leaders when they come :
our democracy means that we discharge the pre
tenders who stand in the way of real and authentic
representatives and rulers. We fearlessly lay the
axe to the root of the tree that cumbers the ground,
with full faith in the vitality of the earth, and the
human seed, and the unfailing seasons, which know
when leaves must rot to feed the germs of future
growths."

EMOCRACY in America has shown
itself to have been the effort of Society
to pass from an arbitrary to a natural
classification. No sooner has the last vestige of
the unreal aristocracy disappeared with the slave-
holding class, than Radicalism starts forward with
the demand for an educational qualification in the

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 393
suffrage. To demand that every voter shall be
able to read is little, but when readers alone are
electors the standard must ascend-.

AN any good thing come out of Nazareth ?
The carpenter's son comes to make our
old mud-ball blossom with divine glory ;
Homer passes, singing ballads for bread, and un
consciously opening the fountains of a river that
shall refresh every intellectual growth of Europe ;
Mohammed writes on palm-leaves and the shoulder--
blades of sheep the sacred chants on which nine
thousand millions of souls shall float heavenward;
Luther comes from forging iron to melt Europe in
his heart-furnace and pass it into a new mould ;
Shakespeare comes from a farmhouse on the by
way and creates a new literature ; Burns follows
the plough till its share reaches to the heart of
humanity, and imperishable harvests of thought and
beauty mark where he has trod ; — yet still the world
lifts its eyes beyond the insignificant Nazareths,
and looks for help to the next descendant of Solo
mon and the chief synagogue-seats of Jerusalem.
And, in sooth, Nazareth cannot produce the con
ventional great man. The man it sends out is one
whom the world suffers because it must. But who
would willingly trust his son to the hard training or

394 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
the visionary aims of the Juda?an street preacher?
Our common standards are conventional, and any
departure from them is, in the vast majority of
households, thought of only with dread. Even our
great men, who have gained their strength from
struggles with poverty and disparagement, are
anxious to shield their own children from gradua
tion in the same rough University, and virtually
consecrate them to the conventional idols. There
probably has never been a great thinker, poet, or
scholar, from whom some tributary of power might
not be traced back to where it was held in a
"brain or character formed amid the humble realities
and the discipline of manual labour. Yet perhaps
the best relation between them and the lowly
workers may be that expressed by Heine : " I love
the people, but I love them at a distance. I have
always battled for the emancipation of the people —
that has been the business of my life ; still, in the
hottest moments of the fight I have shrunk from
the least contact with the masses."

HERE are, indeed, two vicious extremes of
Society — two corresponding classes — from
whom little is to be hoped: the agricul
tural labourers, reduced by ignorance, drudgery,
and servility to a colourless mass of stupidity;

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 395
and those whom hereditary wealth and genera
tions of luxurious idleness have rendered almost
equally characterless and brainless. But of the
classes between these — the artisan and the middle
class — there is no reason to think that less is to
be anticipated from the training of the former
than from that of the latter, in their respective
bearing upon the political or intellectual develop
ment of the country. The artisan is the intimate
neighbour of fact and reality. Theories and fancies
will not hammer his iron or hew his stone. Every
stroke of his arm translates the law of cause and
effect. The superstition of the savage, that he ab
sorbs the strength of the foe he slays, is fulfilled
for this wrestler with the hardness of nature. The
crude thing moulded to his will prints its history on
the character. Patience, Perseverance, Courage,
Necessity, form the habit of his mind. No insin
cerity or trick can serve in his struggle ; in every
case so much real effect answers the like real force
put forth. He is independent, too; his capital is
in his hand, and he has not mortgaged his opinions
for an estate or a family name. His creed is,
perhaps unconsciously for the present, Laborare est
orare. Such qualities must be, in whatever crude
form, mixed with the artisan class like the alu
minium diffused in clay, or stretching like veins of
marble and metal through the stratum to which the
artisan belongs. The gold slept in California for a long

396 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
time before the miners came. But can human
society go on with its shams and formalisms, its
shreds of Red Tape for politics, and its puppet-show
religions, for want of just those real and practical
qualities which are stored up in the common people?
Shall we long prefer cobwebs to words of iron and
steel ?

VERYWHERE our thinkers, dreamers,
poets, are recognising in the people an
as yet unconstituted Court of Appeal.
He who has an idea not yet received is sustained
by the belief that mankind will ultimately give it
due embodiment. The visionary, looking to the
people, sees of the travail of his soul, and is
satisfied. The reformer, the martyr, know well
that the coarseness of the masses is superficial and
temporary; their ultimate justice is certain.

|HO shall be the Man of the People ?
Will Democracy, as some apprehend,
abolish great men? Will it. raise the
mass and lower the individual ? Are we to pay
the splendid exceptional names for the more
intelligent aggregate, and bring down the mountain
summits to fill up the valleys ?
No doubt certain kinds of distinction may pass

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 397
away before the elevation of the people. Already
it seems doubtful if the West can see another
Wellington or another Napoleon I. It requires
warlike ages to produce such men ; and such
ages require peoples capable of being thoroughly
drilled and massed. The development of individual
opinion, the evolution of personal interests, tend to
discussion, arbitration, therefore to peace. That
crowns must be lowered needs no proof. Already
it is not for the opinions of the Royal Heads of
England, Prussia, or Austria, that men care, but for
those of Gladstone, Bismarck, Von Beust. The
one crown which stood out above ministries is being
lowered. And as crowns sink into mere ornaments,
aristocracies also, resting upon accidental, not real,
advantages, must fade away. The diplomatist, too,
— JwrAooe, or double-faced man, that is, — can hardly
be a hero again. The people have uttered no very
loud cry for duplicity as yet. We can well spare
such eminences. There was a mysterious period in
the history of our planet which seems to have de
manded things that swam about like animate islands,
or stalked through forests, thirty feet high in their
claws. When the time drew nigh that they should
disappear, no doubt they met in conclave, and de
plored that, under the levelling tendencies of Nature,
they were to be reduced ; and contempt enough
probably was heaped upon a poor little two-legged
animal, only five or six feet high, beginning to

398 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
compete for forest and swamp with megalosau-
rians of position and of ancient families. Caesar,
Charlemagne, Napoleon, Wellington, Talleyrand,
Palmerston, — what are they beside the brain of the
Stratford poacher and London play-writer ? They.
are subjects for the palaeontologist of history.
But will the elevation of the people tend to
reduce the salient summits of human character and
genius ?
Let a graduated scale be made of the compara
tive degree to which in all countries the people have
been admitted to power, and the scale will stand
as well for the comparative number of distinguished
philanthropists and literary men in the same.
How many poets under the Tsar ? How many
men of science under the Pope ?
America, as yet in her babyhood, has already
produced finer thinkers than Austria can reckon at
the end of her centuries. Nor are there any names
in America of which the people are more proud
than those of Franklin, Emerson, Motley, Irving,
Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Chan
ning, Phillips, and Theodore Parker. These men
were or are men of the people, and not one of them
has ever been a reactionist against the cause of
human equality.
The Man of the People is to come out of the
heart of the people, and be related to it. He shall
inherit their integral force. All the darkly-stored

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 399
elements of the coal-seam shall shine out in that
diamond. It seems very long ago now since
Democracy was answered, — " The coarse will elect
the coarse, the ignorant choose ignoramuses: each
will vote for the man who most reflects his own
baseness or prejudice." Yes, long ago; for since
then the masses have been heard shouting for Mill,
applauding Carlyle along the streets of Edinburgh ;
the Laureate must hide from their enthusiasm ; they
crowd the halls where Dickens reads, or Stanley
preaches, or Huxley lectures. They have been
sending the House of Commons its chief literary
men. It is Oxford that rids itself of " that
damned intellect : " it is vulgar Greenwich which
receives and sustains the most scholarly Prime
Minister England ever had. And the thinkers for
whom the people have shown most enthusiasm are,
in nine cases out of ten, those who have vigorously
confronted popular errors and superstitions.
The Man of the People must be the interpreter of
their hearts, not the smooth reflector of the dismal
outside of them which they are ashamed of, and are
clamouring for teachers to help them get rid of.
He shall be" genuine, at least, as they ; not uttering
cheap applause of things accepted, but words costly
as Luther's or Knox's, to speak which is as genuine
and perilous work as that of the miner underground.
However fine or transcendent, the great man hence
forth must be the son of his time, bearing upon him

400 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
the burden of its sins and afflictions ; without com
pliance ; not by any means doing his work for the
past, or for posterity. If Jesus had gone 1 800 years
backward to find his work, we should probably hear
as little of him now as the future will of the stupid
brother who occupies the bright Sunday morning
with his master's fulminations against the Pharisees.
We get even less from those who fancy unborn
generations will be dependent on their speculations.
The men of past days who serve us even now were
they whose work was put forth to meet the human
need before them, by the same laws that, by steady
adaptation of means to ends, gave each insect its an
tennas, and man his faculties ; which now in other
spheres must translate the law by which they have
been formed into a method of work, if they would
do anything of real or permanent value. That
which is done for this hour, and in its light, other
hours may not recognise, but will surely feel.
The " Coming Man" will, like Homer, sing his
song to his villagers. He will be related to his
time and country as hook to eye. The proverb of
dwellers amid deserts is, "He who digs a well or
plants a grove is sure of heaven."
" Things are not what they seem," says the poet.
Things are oftener the reverse of what they seem,
adds the man of science. Our fathers said the sun
moved round the earth — we know the earth moves
round the sun. They said the earth is flat — we

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 401
know it to be of the form farthest from flatness.
They said the sky is solid, a firmament — we know
it to be the thinnest of fluids. But in the moral, more
than in the external, world, the actual knowledge
of the present is diametrically opposite to the super
ficial impressions of pre-scientific ages. A salient in
stance is the change in the estimate of man. Great
men have, indeed, in every age recognised the
worth of man. The Hebrew poet saw him as one
crowned by the Deity with glory and honour, and
Paul saw him to be " the temple of the living God."
Mencius said, " He who knows his nature, knows
heaven ;" Plato said, " He who knows himself,
knows all things in himself;" and Socrates did but
translate the Greek word avQpunro; in saying,
" There is a natural love of wisdom in the mind of
man :" preparing the way thus for Hermes' sentence,
" Man is a mortal God," and the warning of the
Theurgists, " On beholding yourself, fear !" " The
intelligible Deity is understood with the flower of
the intellect," said Zoroaster. And, indeed, there
is no man who has seriously influenced mankind,
who has not lived and thought under a sense of the
grandeur of man. But the summit of human nature
requires a mind large enough to create the per
spective necessary for seeing it. The average mind,
impaled by the care of the moment, its eye riveted to
the foreground, sees but the coarse surface of man
kind, and holds their nature cheap and vile. Thus all
c c

402 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
religions are infected with the contempt of man,
and the majority are based upon the belief in his
degradation. The Ark can be touched only by
the few anointed ones. The Eleusinian Mysteries
could not begin until the priest had cried, " Hence,
ye profane !" Jesus gave the sop to Judas ; but the
Catechumens said, " Holy things to holy men."
It was not difficult to imagine such wretched
creatures being damned by the million.
Whether it was because the East swarmed with
superfluous populations at a time when in the West
every man counted for something, or because of the
inherent genius of the German people, certain it
is, that the common people in Northern Europe
were always held in esteem, if not reverence. They
related that the daughter of a giant came to her
father's castle with something folded in her apron.
" What hast thou there ? " asked the giant. " A
beautiful plaything which I found crawling about in
a field." With that she took from her apron a
peasant with his plough and oxen. The giant said
sternly, " Go, put those creatures back where thou
didst find them. If the dwarf folk laboured not in
the valley, it would fare ill with the giants in the
mountain." It is not a little droll to see the religion based
on contempt and denial of man half digested by the
race which produced such a fable as this. What
competition to gather in these totally-depraved

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 403
wretches ! What endless societies to seek and save
the men and women whom God holds so merely
damnable ! Millions of money shall go to provide
that every perishing pauper shall at least starve
with a tract in his hand, and that the savage of the
South Seas, though he eat his missionary, shall at
least be induced to say Christian grace over him.
Nay, every theory, philosophy, doctrine, leaps into
the arena, crying, " My kingdom for a majority ! "

JHERE is but one institution which has not
shared the general tendency and passion
for the recovery and elevation of the poor
— the Christian Church. While clamorous for
their allegiance, it sees unmoved that very class
to which Jesus belonged, to follow which to the
hill-sides he abandoned the Churches of his time,
wandering shepherdless on the bleak rocks of
Atheism. " Artisan " is fast becoming in England
another name for infidel, as "turner" already is in
Germany. The alienation of the people from the
Church is, indeed, no new thing ; but it is now for
the first time that a Tribunal has been formed
able to hear and decide on the case of the ignorant
and the poor against the false Shepherds. That
Tribunal has been formed by the increased hu
manity of every department of human interest

404 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
except the Church. Government, Science, Litera
ture, Art, Social Philosophy, absorbed in the
problem of human welfare, turn now, and say of
the one institution that to the cry for bread
offers a dogmatic stone, " Why cumbereth it the
ground ? "
It is but natural that the gardeners should
petition for time in which to dig about the barren
tree, and try to make it bear fruit ; but how can we
hope for such a result when the very life has ebbed
away from its roots ? Time was when the leading
thought and scholarship were in the Church ; now
their pulpit is the magazine, the daily press, the
hall of science, Parliament. How can the Churches
guide the people, when all their sermons for a year
cannot gain as much attention as a single lecture
by Professor Tyndall on Dust ?
The Church might, indeed, be left to the processes
of natural decay, were it not occupying the place
where a true Church might stand, giving to
starving soul's those solutions of their doubts which
thinkers have gained for themselves in their soli
tudes, but are now without the means of bringing
to bear on the dismal riot of unbelief and despair.
When men are drowning, they who cannot save
must at least not be permitted to use the life-boats
for pleasure excursions.

THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 405

j|ND now to you, O freethinkers, liberals,
emancipated souls, the Pilgrim utters this
his final word.
We have deeply learned that God is our Father !
we need to feel as deeply that every man is our
brother. Who of you, if his own son or brother
were the victim of some delusion that darkened
life, would spare effort to relieve him of it? Yet
all around us are the children of our common
Father tossed from the delusion that God is a
Tyrant to the delusion that there is no God at all.
As we look into the past, we see what men have
done for the love of Christ, — what they have sur
rendered and endured in their misdirected zeal and
passion for him whom they adored as a Saviour. As
much as they loved the dead, let us love the living
Christ — Humanity. Surely Truth and Spiritual
Liberty should not have less power to animate and
inspire, or to command sacrifices, than Superstition !
There is a story of the Holy Grail which the
Laureate has passed by, but which we may remember.
In the days when men wandered through the world
seeking that cup, made of a single precious stone,
holding the real blood of Christ, a Knight left
England to search for the same in distant lands.
As he passed from his door, a poor sufferer cried to
him for help. Absorbed in his grand hope, the
Knight heeded him not, but went on. He wandered
to the Holy Land, fought in many wars, endured

406 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
much, but found not the precious cup ; and at last,
disappointed and dejected, he returned home. As
he. neared his own house, the same poor sufferer
cried to him for help. " What dost thou require ?"
asked the Knight. The aged man said, " Lo, I am
perishing with thirst." The Knight dismounted and
hastened to fetch a cup of water. He held the
half-clad sufferer in his arms, raised his head, and
proffered the water to his parched lips. Even as he
did so the cup sparkled into a gem, and the knight
saw in his hand the Holy Grail, flushed with the
true blood of Christ. And you, my brothers, may
wander far, and traverse many realms of philosophy
and theology, to find the truth which represents the
true life-blood of the noblest soul ; but you shall
find it only when and where you love and serve as
he did. If you can but give to the fainting soul
at your door a cup of water from the wells of truth,
it shall flash back on you the radiance of God. As
you can save, so shall you be saved. And be you
sure that when you are really moved by the
outcries of famished hearts and brains, as by the
waitings of helpless babes, — when you deeply long
to bear light and hope to men, — the ways of doing
so will open before you, even as undreamed energies
to fill them full shall be born within you.

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Bristol, Mr. Corker, and Mungo Midge.
Melchior Gorles. By Henry Aitchenbie. & vols.
8vo, £1 us. 6d.
**+ The New Novel, illustrative of " Mesmeric Influence,' or whatever else we may choose to
term that strange power which some persons exercise over others.
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VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS.
AN INTERESTING VOLUME TO ANTIQUARIES.
y Lists of the Roundheads and Cavaliers in the
ril War, 1642. 4to, half morocco, handsomely printed, price 7s. 6d.
hese most curiona Lists show on which side the gentlemen of England were to he found
the great conflict between the King and the Parliament Only a very few copies have been
•ef ully reprinted on paper that will gladden the heart of the lover of choice books.
na Gharta. An Exact Facsimile of the Original
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1 printed on fine plate paper, nearly 3 feet long by a feet wide, with
s Arms and Seals of the Barons elaborately emblazoned in gold and
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t, price 6d. UNIFORM WITH "MAGNA CHARTA."
of Battle Abbey; or, a List of the Principal
Lrriors who came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror
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ninated Charter - Roll of Waterford, Temp.
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aimile, coloured by hand, including an anoient View of the City of
iterford. Subscribers, 20s. ; Non-subscribers, 30s. [Preparing.
t the very limited impression proposed, more than 150 copies have already been subscribed
ancient Illuminated Roll, of great interest and beanty, comprising all the early Charters
its to the City of Waterford, from the time of Henry II. to Richard 11. Full-length Portraits
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k," with the Arms of the Earls, Barons, and Knights who were
sent at the Siege of this Castle in Scotland, 26 Edward I., a.d.
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* arms known to exist
Now publishing in monthly parts, price is.
iw and Complete Parochial History of Cornwall,
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erest. Volume I. now ready, price 16s.
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VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS.

MR. SWINBURNE'S NEW BOOK.
*** "J. wonderful literary performance." — "Splendour of
style and majestic beauty of diction never surpassed." — WILLIAM
BLAKE: A Ceitical Essay/. With facsimile Paintings,
coloured by hand, from the original drawings painted by
Blake and his wife. Thick 8vo, pp. 350, 16s. with a sense of
vitality." — Daily
'"¦^c News, Feb. 12,

" An extraordi
nary work : vio
lent, extravagant,
perverse, calcu
lated to startle, to
shock, and to alarm
many readers, but
abounding in SsJSjKS __
beauty, and cha- „-,. ""?*¦> !
racterised by intel
lectual grasp. . .
. . His power of
word - painting is
often truly won
derful—sometimes,it must be ad
mitted, in excess,
but always full of
matter, form, and
colour, and instinct

"It ia in every
way worthy of Mr.
Swinburne's high
fame. In no prose
work can be found
ft passages of keener
poetry or more
finished grace, or
more impressive
HiKr JVi harmony. Strong,
vigorous, and
musical, the style
sweeps on like
a river." — Sunday
Times, Jan. 12,
1S68.

Mr. Swinburne's New Poem. — A Song of Italy.
Pcap. 8vo, toned paper, cloth, price 33. 6d.
*** The AtheruBUm rcmarkB of this poem—" Seldom has such a chant been heard so full of glow,
strength, and colour."
Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. Third Edition.
Price 9s.
Mr. Swinburne's Notes on his Poems, and on the
Reviews which have appeared upon them, is now ready, price is.
Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. New Edition,
fcap. 8vo, price 6s.

Mr. Swinburne's Chastelard.
Edition. Price 7s.

A Tragedy. New

Mr. Swinburne's Queen Mother and Rosamond.
New Edition, fcap. 8vo, price 5s.
Mr. Swinburne's Bothwell. A NEW POEM.
[In preparation.

John Camden Hotten, 74 and 75, Piccadilly, W.

>7

VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS

Original Edition of Blake's Works.
NOTICE. — Mr. Hotten has in preparation a few facsimile copies (exact
os to paper, printing — the water-colour drawings being filled in by an
artist) of the Original Editions of the Books written and Illustrated
by William Blake. As it is only intended to produce — with utmost
care — a few examples of each work, Mr. Hotten will be glad to hear from
any gentleman who may desire to secure copies of these wonderful books.
The first volume, " Marriage op Heaven and Hell," 4to, is now being
issued, price 30s., half morocco.
" Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man he is, if he still be living.
Be is the Blake whose wild designs accompany a splendid edition of 'Blair's Grave.' He paint, m
water-colours marvellous strange pictures — visions of his brain — which he asserts he lias seen. They
have great merit. I must look upon him os one of the most extiuordiuary persons of the age." —
Chaelbs Lamb.
George Chapman's Plays, from the Original Texts.
Edited, with Notes and an Introduction, by Algernon Charles
Swinburne. 4 vols., tastefully printed, uniform with Wm. Pickering's
Editions of the "Old Dramatists." [In preparation.
HNIFORM WITH MR. SWINBURNE'S POEMS.
Fcap. 8vo, 450 pages, Pine Portrait and Autograph, 7s. 6d.
Walt Whitman's Poems. (Leaves of Grass, Drum-
Taps, &c.) Selected and Edited by William Michael Rossetti.
" Whitman is a poet who bears and needB to be read as a whole, and then the volume and torrent
of his power carry the disfigurements along with it and away. — He is really a fine fellow." —
Chambers's Journal, in a very long Notice, July 4th, 1868. f
*^" A great deal of prejuaice in, this cowntry has been shown against
this very rema/rkable author. His work should be read by independent
mmds, and an opinion formed totally apart from the attacks that have
been made upon him.
Rossetti's Criticisms on Swinburne's Poems. Price
3s. 6d-
The Prometheus Bound of iSschylus. Translated in
the Original Metres by C. B- Cayley, B.A. Cloth, price 33. 6d.
SECOND EDITION.— Now ready, 4to, 10s. 6d., on toned paper,
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Bianca. Poems and Ballads. By Edward Brennan.
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VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS.

Fair Rosamond, and other Poems. By 33. Mont-
gomerie Ranking (o£ the Inner Temple): Fcap. 8vo, price 6s.
Strawberry Hill, and other Poems. By Colburn
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" It is a bright, clever little book, in which we find a great deal of good rhyme, and somo genuine
and pleasing poetry. There are several charming pictures of the historic group, which we know
from Horace Walpole'fl letters and Sir Joshua's paintings."— Morning Star,

Infelicia. Poems by Adah Isaacs Menken. Illus
trated with NUMEROUS GRACEFULLY PENCILLED DESIGNS DRAWN ON
wood, by Axfked Concanen. Dedicated, by permission, to Charles
Dickens, with photographic facsimile of his letter, and a very beau
tifully engraved portrait of the Authoress. In green and gold, 5s. 6d.
"A pathetic little
volume exquisitely
got up." — Sun, full of

pathos and senti
ment, displays a
keen appreciation of
beauty, and has re
markable earnest
ness and passion,"-—
Globe. 41 A loving and
delicate care has
been bestowed on
perhaps the dain
tiest pages of verse
that have been
' issued for many
years."— Lloyd's
News. 11 Few, if any,
could have guessed
the power and
beauty of the
thoughts that pos
sessed her.soul, and
found expression in
language at once
pure and melodious.
.... Who shall
say Menken was not

a poet? Through
out her verse there
runs a golden thread
of rich and pure
poetry. " — Press.
" There is a pas-
si on ate richness
about many of the
poems which is al
most startling." —
Sunday Times.
"What can we
say of this gifted
and wayward
woman, the exist
ence of whose better
nature "'ill be sug
gested for the first
time to many by the
posthumous disclo
sure of this book?
We do not envy the
man who, reading
it, has only a sneer
for its writer; nor
the woman who finds
it in her heart to
turn away with
averted face." —
New York Sound
Table.

" An amazing little book, unhappily poHthumoua, which a distinguished woman has left as i
legacy to mankind and the ageB."— Saturday Review.

Anacreon in English. Attempted in the Metres of
the Original. By Thomas J. Arnold. A choice little volume, price 4s.
The Village on the Forth, and other Poems. By
Philip Latimer. Just published, elegantly printed, price 3s. 6d.
"Chips from a Rough log; or, Extracts from a
Journal kept on board the good ship " Parisian," by Hamilton D
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19

VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS.

Poems from the Greek Mythology, and Miscel
laneous Poems. By Edmund Ollier. This day, cloth neat, 53.
what he has written is enough, and more than enough, to give him a high rank amongst the
most successful cultivators ol the English Muse."— Globe.
Poems. Characteristic, Itinerary, and Miscellaneous.
By P. P. Eoe. Part I.— Eythmical Etchings of Character. II.—
Tracings of Travel. III.— Minor Poems. IV.— Translations. Price
7s. 6d.
Facts and Fancies from the Farm. Poems fcy James
Dawson. Fcap. SVo, neatly printed, 2s. fid.
" Here we have some very pretty and readable poetry—some of it so much above the average as
to warrant expectations of something far better, and we shall look forward with interest to the next
volume from the same hand." — Globe.
The Idolatress, and other Poems. By Br. James
Wills, Author of "Dramatic Scenes,'* "The Disembodied," and of
various Poetical Contributions to "Blackwood's Magazine." Price 6s,
*' One great merit of the l Idolatress' is to be found in the ability with which the writer has con
trasted a spiritual faith and its claims on the conscience, with a material faith that captivates the
Imagination through the Benses." — Athenceum, July 11th, 1868.
Lyrics and Bucolics. The Eclogues of Virgil, a
Selection from the Odes of Horace, and the Legend of the Sibyll.
Translated by Herbert Notes, Esq. An elegant little volume, bound
in blue and gold, carmine edges, price 4s. 6d.
By the same Author. — An Idyll of the Weald. With
other Lays and Legends. By Herbert Notes, Esq.. In uniform
binding, price 9s.
Tha New Poetical Satire.— Horse and Foot; or,
Pilgrims to Parnassus. By Bichard Crawlet. "I'll not march
through Coventry with them, that's flat." Price 3s. 6d.
$®> The "Pall Mall Gazette" has just given two columns of satisfac
tory criticism upon this work.
Wit and Humour. By the "Autocrat of the Break
fast Table." In crown 8vo, toned paper, elegant, price 3s. 6d.
*«* A volume of delightfully humorons Poems, very similar to the mirthful verses of Tom Hood.
Readers will not be disappointed with this work.
Songs of the Nativity. — Old English Religious
Ballads and Carols. An entirely new collection of Old Carols, including
some never before given in any collection. With Music to the more
popular Edited by W. H. Hdsk, Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic
Society. In small 4to, with very beautiful floriated borders, in the
Renaissance style, cloth gilt, price 12s. 6d.

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VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS.

In preparation, an entirely
New Book toy the late Artemus Ward. Edited toy
his executors, T. W. Eobertson and E. P. Hingston. Illustrated with
3J pictures, taken from his world-renowned Panorama.
Immediately, cloth, very neat, 2s. 6d.
The Works of Charles F. Browne, better known as
"Artemus Ward." Portrait by Geflowski, the Sculptor, and fac-
similes, &c.
History of Playing Cards. With Anecdotes, Ancient
and Modern Games, Conjuring, Fortune-Telling, and Card-Sharping.
With Sixty curious illustrations. Skill and Sleight-of -Hand ; Gambling

and Calculation ; Cartomancy and Cheating ; Old Games and Gaming.
Houses; Card Bevels and Blind Hookey; Piquet and Vingt-et-un;
Whist and Cribbage ; Old-Fashioned Tricks. Pp. 550, price 7s. 6d.
" A highly-interesting volume. "—Morning Post.
Cruikshank's Comic Almanack. A complete set, as
published in the original numbers from 1835 to 1853. 19 vols., neatly
bound in 5 vols., half-morocco, Roxburgh style, £3 3s. Containing.
Merri Tales, Jests, Humorous Poetrt, Whims, Oddities, &c, by
Thackerat, Thomas Hood, Albert Smith, and other well-known
comic writers. Illustrated with nearly One Thousand Woodcuts
and Steel Engravings by the inimitable George Cruikshank and
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Mr. Sprouts his Opinions. The New and Genuine
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Whiteing. New Shilling Edition now ready.
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VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS.

Wright's (Thomas, M.A.) History of Domestic
Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages. 1862.
Thick small 4to. Illustrated with a great profusion of most inte
resting woodcuts, drawn and engraved by Fairholt, from the illumi
nations in contemporary MSS. and other sources. Cloth, bevelled
boards, red edges. Sells at 21s. New, 10s. 6d. only.
Direct application must be made to Mr. Hotten for this Work.
Caxton's Statutes of Henry VII., 1489. Edited,
with Notes and Introduction, by John Rae, Esq., Fellow of the Royal
Institution. In remarkable facsimile, from the rare original, small
folio,
The earliest known volume of Printed Statutes, and remarkable as
being in English. It contains some very curious and primitive Legis
lation on Trade and Domestic Matters, such as : —

Price of Hats and Caps
French Wines
Act for Peopling Isle
of Wight
Against Butchers

Giving of Livery
Concerning Customs
Fires in London
Rebels in the Field

Correcting Priests
Against Hunters
Marrying a Woman
against her Will, &c.

Genealogical Collections concerning the Sir-Name of
Baird, and the Families of Auchmedden, Newbyth, and Sauchton
Hall in particular. With copies of old letters and papers worth pre
serving, and account of several transactions in this country during the
last two centuries. Reprinted from the original MS. in the Advo
cates' Library, Edinburgh. Price to Subscribers, 10s. 6d. [Preparing.
*t* The present edition will include an appendix containing a large amount of fresh genealogical
Information. The work is one possessing general interest, foreign to most Family Histories. No
pains will be spared to make the work an accurate and beautiful one. As the impression will be
limited strictly to 1W copies, early application must he made to secure them.
ANECDOTES OF THE "LONG PARLIAMENT" OF 1645.
The Mysteries of the Good Old Cause : Sarcastic
Notices of those Members of the Long Parliament that held places,
both Civil and Military, contrary to the Self-denying Ordinance of
April 3, 1645 ; with the sums of money and lands they divided among
themselves. In 4to, half morocco, choicely printed, price 7s. 6d.
Warrant to Execute Charles I. An Exact Facsimile
of this Important Document in the House of Lords, with the Fifty-
nine Signatures of the Regicides, and Corresponding Seals, admirably
executed on paper made to imitate the Original Document, 22 in. by
14 in. Price 2s. ; by post, 2s. 4d. Handsomely framed and glazed,
in carved oak of an antique pattern, 14s. 6d.
Warrant to Execute Mary Queen of Scots. The
Exact Facsimile of this Important Document, including the Signature
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VERY IMPORTANT NE W BOOKS ^^^_^
Best Guide to Beading Old MSS.,- Records, &c—
"Wright's Court Hand Restored; or, Student's Assistant in Reading
Old Deeds, Charters, Records, &c." Half morocco, ios. 6d.
$3f A New Edition, corrected, of an invaluable work to all who
HAVE OCCASION TO CONSULT OLD MSS., DEEDS, CHARTERS, 8fC. It
contains a series of Facsimiles of old MSS. from the time of flie Conqueror,
Tables of Contractions and Abbreviations, Ancient Surnames, Sfc.
Handbook of Family History of the English Counties :
Descriptive Account of 20,000 most Curious and Rare Books, Old
Tracts, Ancient Manuscripts, Engravings, and Privately - printed
Family Papers, relating to the History of almost every Landed Estate
and Old English Family in the Country ; interspersed with nearly Two
Thousand Original Anecdotes, Topographical ana Antiquarian Notes.
By John Camden Hotten. Nearly 350 pages, very neat, price 5s.
*+* By far the largest collection of English and Welsh Topography and Family History ever
formed. Each article has a small price affixed for the convenience of those who may desire to
possess any book or tract that interests them.
Higgins' (Godfrey) Celtic Druids ; or, an attempt to
show that the Druids were the Priests of Oriental Colonies, the
introducers of the first or Cadmean System of Letters, the Builders of
Stonehenge, of Carnac, and other Cyclopean Works in Asia and
Europe. 4to, numerous plates of Druid monuments, rare, 32s.
*..* The most philosophical digest of the existing information upon the origin of Druldica]
Worship. Copies have been sold for £7. At the above price the book is ridiculously cheap, com
pared with the sums of money that have been paid for it very recently. Large paper copy, boards.
45s., very scarce.
Direct Application must be made to procure at these reduced prices.
Esholt in Airedale, Yorkshire : the Cistercian Priory
of St. Leonard, Account of, with View of Esholt Hall. Small 4to,
is. 6d.
London Directory for 1667, the Earliest Known
List of the London Merchants. i2mo, very choicely printed, price
6s. 6d. See Review in the Times', Jan. 22.
*** This curious little volume has boBn reprinted verbatim from one of tho only two copies known
to be in existence. It contains an Introduction pointing out some of tho principal persons mentioned
in the list
For historical and genealogical purposes the little book is of the greatest

EXACT FACSIMILE, LETTER FOR LETTER, OF THE EXCES
SIVELY RARE ORIGINAL,
Much Adoe about Nothing. As it hath been sundrie
times publikely acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine
his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare, 1600.
*#* Small quarto, on fine toned paper, half -bound morocco, Roxburghe
style, only 4s. 6d. (Original price, ios. 6d.)
24 John Camden Hotten, 74 and 75, Piccadilly, W,

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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