The Fair Haven

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Having heard him thus far, and being unable to understand, much less
to sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to anything which I
had heard elsewhere, I said to him, "Either our Lord did say the
words assigned to him by St. Luke or he did not. If he did, as they
stand they are bad, and any one who heard them for the first time
would say that they were bad; if he did not, then we ought not to
allow them to remain in our Bibles to the misleading of people who
will thus believe that God is telling them what he never did tell
them--to the misleading of the poor, whom even in low self-interest
we are bound to instruct as fully and truthfully as we can."

He smiled and answered, "That is the Peter Bell view of the matter.
I thought so once, as, indeed, no one can know better than yourself."

The expression upon his face as he said this was sufficient to show
the clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was anxious
to get to the root of the matter, and said that if our Lord never
uttered these words their being attributed to him must be due to
fraud; to pious fraud, but still to fraud.

"Not so," he answered, "it is due to the weakness of man's powers of
memory and communication, and perhaps in some measure to unconscious
inspiration. Moreover, even though wrong of some sort may have had
its share in the origin of certain of the sayings ascribed to our
Saviour, yet their removal now that they have been consecrated by
time would be a still greater wrong. Would you defend the spoliation
of the monasteries, or the confiscation of the abbey lands? I take
it no--still less would you restore the monasteries or take back the
lands; a consecrated change becomes a new departure; accept it and
turn it to the best advantage. These are things to which the theory
of the Church concerning lay baptism is strictly applicable. Fieri
non debet, factum valet. If in our narrow and unsympathetic
strivings after precision we should remove the hallowed imperfections
whereby time has set the glory of his seal upon the gospels as well
as upon all other aged things, not for twenty generations will they
resume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which our fussy
meddlesomeness will have disturbed. Let them alone. It is as they
stand that they have saved the world.

"No change is good unless it is imperatively called for. Not even
the Reformation was good; it is good now; I acquiesce in it, as I do
in anything which in itself not vital has received the sanction of
many generations of my countrymen. It is sanction which sanctifieth
in matters of this kind. I would no more undo the Reformation now
than I would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century. Leave
the historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow together until
the harvest: that which is not vital will perish and rot unnoticed
when it has ceased to have vitality; it is living till it has done
this. Note how the very passages which you would condemn have died
out of the regard of any but the poor. Who quotes them? Who appeals
to them? Who believes in them? Who indeed except the poorest of the
poor attaches the smallest weight to them whatever? To us they are
dead, and other passages will die to us in like manner, noiselessly
and almost imperceptibly, as the services for the fifth of November
died out of the Prayer Book. One day the fruit will be hanging upon
the tree, as it has hung for months, the next it will be lying upon
the ground. It is not ripe until it has fallen of itself, or with
the gentlest shaking; use no violence towards it, confident that you
cannot hurry the ripening, and that if shaken down unripe the fruit
will be worthless. Christianity must have contained the seeds of
growth within itself, even to the shedding of many of its present
dogmas. If the dogmas fall quietly in their maturity, the precious
seed of truth (which will be found in the heart of every dogma that
has been able to take living hold upon the world's imagination) will
quicken and spring up in its own time: strike at the fruit too soon
and the seed will die."

I should be sorry to convey an impression that I am responsible for,
or that I entirely agree with, the defence of the unhistoric which I
have here recorded. I have given it in my capacity of editor and in
some sort biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain that
it is likely, or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of any
considerable number of Christians. But, surely, in these days of
self-mystification it is refreshing to see the boldness with which my
brother thought, and the freedom with which he contemplated all sorts
of issues which are too generally avoided. What temptation would
have been felt by many to soften down the inconsistencies and
contradictions of the Gospels. How few are those who will venture to
follow the lead of scientific criticism, and admit what every scholar
must well know to be indisputable. Yet if a man will not do this, he
shows that he has greater faith in falsehood than in truth.

CHAPTER III

On my brother's death I came into possession of several of his early
commonplace books filled with sketches for articles; some of these
are more developed than others, but they are all of them fragmentary.
I do not think that the reader will fail to be interested with the
insight into my brother's spiritual and intellectual progress which a
few extracts from these writings will afford, and have therefore,
after some hesitation, decided in favour of making them public,
though well aware that my brother would never have done so. They are
too exaggerated to be dangerous, being so obviously unfair as to
carry their own antidote. The reader will not fail to notice the
growth not only in thought but also in literary style which is
displayed by my brother's later writings.

In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded to, he
had written during his time of unbelief:- "Why are we to interpret so
literally all passages about the guilt of unbelief, and insist upon
the historical character of every miraculous account, while we are
indignant if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the
precepts concerning human conduct? He that hath two coats is not to
give to him that hath none: this would be 'visionary,' 'utopian,'
'wholly unpractical,' and so forth. Or, again, he that is smitten on
the one cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the
offender over to the law; nor are the commands relative to
indifference as to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence to
be taken as they stand; nor yet the warnings against praying in
public; nor can the parables, any one of them, be interpreted
strictly with advantage to human welfare, except perhaps that of the
Good Samaritan; nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in such passages as
were already the common property of mankind before the coming of
Christ. The parables which every one praises are in reality very
bad: the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal
Son, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and Foolish
Virgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a Vineyard, are
all either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a very low estimate
of the character of God--an estimate far below the standard of the
best earthly kings; where they are not immoral, or do not tend to
degrade the character of God, they are the merest commonplaces
imaginable, such as one is astonished to see people accept as having
been first taught by Christ. Such maxims as those which inculcate
conciliation and a forgiveness of injuries (wherever practicable) are
certainly good, but the world does not owe their discovery to Christ,
and they have had little place in the practice of his followers.

"It is impossible to say that as a matter of fact the English people
forgive their enemies more freely now than the Romans did, we will
say in the time of Augustus. The value of generosity and magnanimity
was perfectly well known among the ancients, nor do these qualities
assume any nobler guise in the teaching of Christ than they did in
that of the ancient heathen philosophers. On the contrary, they have
no direct equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology. They are
heathen words drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with the
same heathen ideas of high spirit and good birth as belonged to them
in the Latin language; they are no part or parcel of Christianity,
and are not only independent of it, but savour distinctly of the
flesh as opposed to the spirit, and are hence more or less
antagonistic to it, until they have undergone a certain modification
and transformation--until, that is to say, they have been mulcted of
their more frank and genial elements. The nearest approach to them
in Christian phrase is 'self-denial,' but the sound of this word
kindles no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas of
generosity and nobility of conduct. At the thought of self-denial we
feel good, but uncomfortable, and as though on the point of
performing some disagreeable duty which we think we ought to pretend
to like, but which we do not like. At the thought of generosity, we
feel as one who is going to share in a delightfully exhilarating but
arduous pastime--full of the most pleasurable excitement. On the
mention of the word generosity we feel as if we were going out
hunting; at the word 'self-denial,' as if we were getting ready to go
to church. Generosity turns well-doing into a pleasure, self-denial
into a duty, as of a servant under compulsion.

"There are people who will deny this, but there are people who will
deny anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would not
have condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A
Midsummer Night's Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever
wrote; but there is no arguing against this. 'Every man,' said Dr.
Johnson, 'has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a
right to knock him down for it.' But even granting that generosity
and high spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ,
allowance must be made for the lapse of two thousand years, during
which time it is only reasonable to suppose that an advance would
have been made in civilisation--and hence in the direction of
clemency and forbearance--whether Christianity had been preached or
not, but no one can show that the modern English, if superior to the
ancients in these respects, show any greater superiority than may be
ascribed justly to centuries of established order and good
government."

* * * * *

"Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ, about
which so much has been written; is it one which would meet with all
this admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time?
Surely it offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison
with that offered by other highest ideals--the old Roman and Greek
ideals, the Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal."

* * * * *

"As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount--where it is
not commonplace it is immoral, and vice versa; the admiration which
is so freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out to
be but of the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers,
who have made great reputations by telling people what they perfectly
well knew; and were in no particular danger of forgetting. There is,
however, this excuse for those who have been carried away with such
musical but untruthful sentences as 'Blessed are they that mourn:
for they shall be comforted,' namely, that they have not come to the
subject with unbiassed minds. It is one thing to see no merit in a
picture, and another to see no merit in a picture when one is told
that it is by Raphael; we are few of us able to stand against the
PRESTIGE of a great name; our self-love is alarmed lest we should be
deficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we should be considered to
be so; as if it could matter to any right-minded person whether the
world considered him to be of good taste or not, in comparison with
the keeping of his own soul truthful to itself.

"But if this holds good about things which are purely matters of
taste, how much more does it do so concerning those who make a
distinct claim upon us for moral approbation or the reverse? Such a
claim is most imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ: are
we then content to answer in the words of others--words to which we
have no title of our own--or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived
opinion, and come to the question with minds that are truly candid?
Whoever shrinks from this is a liar to his own self, and as such, the
worst and most dangerous of liars. He is as one who sits in an
impregnable citadel and trembles in a time of peace--so great a
coward as not even to feel safe when he is in his own keeping. How
loose of soul if he knows that his own keeping is worthless, how
aspen-hearted if he fears lest others should find him out and hurt
him for communing truthfully with himself!

* * * * *

"That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain something
considerable--this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing,
or whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence in
comparison with the allowing oneself to be deceived. So in like
manner with being bored. The man who lets himself be bored is even
more contemptible than the bore. He who puts up with shoddy
pictures, shoddy music, shoddy morality, shoddy society, is more
despicable than he who is the prime agent in any of these things. He
has less to gain, and probably deceives himself more; so that he
commits the greater crime for the less reward. And I say
emphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold as a
Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash nor
wear, but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and blunders,
and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood of Nessus.

"Oh! if men would but leave off lying to themselves! If they would
but learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes, and
exercise their moral discrimination, making it clear to themselves
what it is that they really love and venerate. There is no such
enemy to mankind as moral cowardice. A downright vulgar self-
interested and unblushing liar is a higher being than the moral cur
whose likes and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies that
stand between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most
sacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a mess
of pottage--a mental serf too abject even to know that he is being
wronged. Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune
timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secret
chambers of his heart!

"We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel that
he was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving.
He has done wrong--still we can understand it, and he may yet have
some useful stuff about him--but what can we feel towards one who for
a small motive tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he
is lying? What useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a thing
be made of, and what lies will there not come out of it, falling in
every direction upon all who come within its reach. The common self-
deceiver of modern society is a more dangerous and contemptible
object than almost any ordinary felon, a matter upon which those who
do not deceive themselves need no enlightenment."

* * * * *

"But why insist so strongly on the literal interpretation of one part
of the sayings of Christ, and be so elastic about that of the
passages which inculcate more than those ordinary precepts which all
had agreed upon as early as the days of Solomon and probably earlier?
We have cut down Christianity so as to make it appear to sanction our
own conventions; but we have not altered our conventions so as to
bring them into harmony with Christianity. We do not give to him
that asketh; we take good care to avoid him; yet if the precept meant
only that we should be liberal in assisting others--it wanted no
enforcing: the probability is that it had been enforced too much
rather than too little already; the more literally it has been
followed the more terrible has the mischief been; the saying only
becomes harmless when regarded as a mere convention. So with most
parts of Christ's teaching. It is only conventional Christianity
which will stand a man in good stead to live by; true Christianity
will never do so. Men have tried it and found it fail; or, rather,
its inevitable failure was so obvious that no age or country has ever
been mad enough to carry it out in such a manner as would have
satisfied its founders. So said Dean Swift in his Argument against
abolishing Christianity. 'I hope,' he writes, 'no reader imagines me
so weak as to stand up in defence of real Christianity, such as used
in primitive times' (if we may believe the authors of those ages) 'to
have an influence upon men's beliefs and actions. To offer at the
restoring of that would be, indeed, a wild project; it would be to
dig up foundations, to destroy at one blow all the wit and half the
learning of the kingdom, to break the entire frame and constitution
of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the
professors of them; in short, to turn our courts of exchange and
shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of
Horace where he advises the Romans all in a body to leave their city,
and to seek a new seat in some remote part of the world by way of
cure for the corruption of their manners.

"'Therefore, I think this caution was in itself altogether
unnecessary (which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of
cavilling), since every candid reader will easily understand my
discourse to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, the
other having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent
as utterly inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and
power.'

"Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world would
relapse into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity which have
created and preserved civilisation. And what if some unhappy wretch,
with a serious turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes all
this talk about Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act upon
it? Into what misery may he not easily fall, and with what life-long
errors may he not embitter the lives of his children!

* * * * *

"Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out our eyes if
they offend us; we conventionalise our interpretations of these
sayings at our will and pleasure; we do take heed for the morrow, and
should be inconceivably wicked and foolish were we not to do so; we
do gather up riches, and indeed we do most things which the
experience of mankind has taught us to be to our advantage, quite
irrespectively of any precept of Christianity for or against. But
why say that it is Christianity which is our chief guide, when the
words of Christ point in such a very different direction from that
which we have seen fit to take? Perhaps it is in order to compensate
for our laxity of interpretation upon these points that we are so
rigid in stickling for accuracy upon those which make no demand upon
our comfort or convenience? Thus, though we conventionalise
practice, we never conventionalise dogma. Here, indeed, we stickle
for the letter most inflexibly; yet one would have thought that we
might have had greater licence to modify the latter than the former.
If we say that the teaching of Christ is not to be taken according to
its import--why give it so much importance? Teaching by exaggeration
is not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy of a being higher than
man; it might have been well once, and in the East, but it is not
well now. It induces more and more of that jarring and straining of
our moral faculties, of which much is unavoidable in the existing
complex condition of affairs, but of which the less the better. At
present the tug of professed principles in one direction, and of
necessary practice in the other, causes the same sort of wear and
tear in our moral gear as is caused to a steam-engine by continually
reversing it when it is going it at full speed. No mechanism can
stand it."

The above extracts (written when he was about twenty-three years old)
may serve to show how utter was the subversion of his faith. His
mind was indeed in darkness! Who could have hoped that so brilliant
a day should have succeeded to the gloom of such mistrust? Yet as
upon a winter's morning in November when the sun rises red through
the smoke, and presently the fog spreads its curtain of thick
darkness over the city, and then there comes a single breath of wind
from some more generous quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shines
again, and the gloom is gone; or, again, as when the warm south-west
wind comes up breathing kindness from the sea, unheralded, suspected,
when the earth is in her saddest frost, and on the instant all the
lands are thawed and opened to the genial influences of a sweet
springful whisper--so thawed his heart, and the seed which had lain
dormant in its fertile soil sprang up, grew, ripened, and brought
forth an abundant harvest.

Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps feel
that his scepticism was precisely of that nature which should have
given the greatest ground for hope. He was a genuine lover of truth
in so far as he could see it.

His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according to
them, and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in later
life they served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men and to
such only--the enormity of his own mistakes. Better that a man
should feel the divergence between Christian theory and Christian
practice, that he should be shocked at it--even to the breaking away
utterly from the theory until he has arrived at a wider comprehension
of its scope--than that he should be indifferent to the divergence
and make no effort to bring his principles and practice into harmony
with one another. A true lover of consistency, it was intolerable to
him to say one thing with his lips and another with his actions. As
long as this is true concerning any man, his friends may feel sure
that the hand of the Lord is with him, though the signs thereof be
hidden from mortal eyesight.

CHAPTER IV

During the dark and unhappy time when he had, as it seems to me,
bullied himself, or been bullied into infidelity, he had been utterly
unable to realise the importance even of such a self-evident fact as
that our Lord addressing an Eastern people would speak in such a way
as Eastern people would best understand; it took him years to
appreciate this. He could not see that modes of thought are as much
part of a language as the grammar and words which compose it, and
that before a passage can be said to be translated from one language
into another it is often not the words only which must be rendered,
but the thought itself which must be transformed; to a people
habituated to exaggeration a saying which was not exaggerated would
have been pointless--so weak as to arrest the attention of no one; in
order to translate it into such words as should carry precisely the
same meaning to colder and more temperate minds, the words would
often have to be left out of sight altogether, and a new sentence or
perhaps even simile or metaphor substituted; this is plainly out of
the question, and therefore the best course is that which has been
taken, i.e., to render the words as accurately as possible, and leave
the reader to modify the meaning. But it was years before my brother
could be got to feel this, nor did he ever do so fully, simple and
obvious though it must appear to most people, until he had learned to
recognise the value of a certain amount of inaccuracy and
inconsistency in everything which is not comprehended in mechanics or
the exact sciences. "It is this," he used to say, "which gives
artistic or spiritual value as contrasted with mechanical precision."

In inaccuracy and inconsistency, therefore (within certain limits),
my brother saw the means whereby our minds are kept from regarding
things as rigidly and immutably fixed which are not yet fully
understood, and perhaps may never be so while we are in our present
state of probation. Life is not one of the exact sciences, living is
essentially an art and not a science. Every thing addressed to human
minds at all must be more or less of a compromise; thus, to take a
very old illustration, even the definitions of a point and a line--
the fundamental things in the most exact of the sciences--are mere
compromises. A point is supposed to have neither length, breadth,
nor thickness--this in theory, but in practice unless a point have a
little of all these things there is nothing there. So with a line; a
line is supposed to have length, but no breadth, yet in practice we
never saw a line which had not breadth. What inconsistency is there
here, in requiring us to conceive something which we cannot conceive,
and which can have no existence, before we go on to the investigation
of the laws whereby the earth can alone be measured and the orbits of
the planets determined. I do not think that this illustration was
presented to my brother's mind while he was young, but I am sure that
if it had been it would have made him miserable. He would have had
no confidence in mathematics, and would very likely have made a
furious attack upon Newton and Galileo, and been firmly convinced
that he was discomfiting them. Indeed I cannot forget a certain look
of bewilderment which came over his face when the idea was put before
him, I imagine, for the first time. Fortunately he had so grown that
the right inference was now in no danger of being missed. He did not
conclude that because the evidences for mathematics were founded upon
compromises and definitions which are inaccurate--therefore that
mathematics were false, or that there were no mathematics, but he
learnt to feel that there might be other things which were no less
indisputable than mathematics, and which might also be founded on
facts for which the evidences were not wholly free from
inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

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