Short Studies on Great Subjects

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But surely, men say, the thing is simple. The commandments are simple.
It is not that people do not know, but that they will not act up to what
they know. We hear a great deal of this in sermons, and elsewhere; and
of course, as everybody's experience will tell him, there is a great
deal too much reason why we should hear of it. But there are two sorts
of duty, positive and negative; what we ought to do, and what we ought
not to do. To the latter of these, conscience is pretty much awake; but
by cunningly concentrating its attention on one side of the matter,
conscience has contrived to forget altogether that any other sort exists
at all. 'Doing wrong' is breaking a commandment which forbids us to do
some particular thing. That is all the notion which in common language
is attached to the idea. Do not kill, steal, lie, swear, commit
adultery, or break the Lord's day--these are the commandments; very
simple, doubtless, and easy to be known. But, after all, what are they?
They are no more than the very first and rudimental conditions of
goodness. Obedience to these is not more than a small part of what is
required of us; it is no more than the foundation on which the
superstructure of character is to be raised. To go through life, and
plead at the end of it that we have not broken any of these
commandments, is but what the unprofitable servant did, who kept his
talent carefully unspent, and yet was sent to outer darkness for his
uselessness. Suppose these commandments obeyed--what then? It is but a
small portion of our time which, we will hope, is spent in resisting
temptation to break them. What are we to do with the rest of it? Or
suppose them (and this is a high step indeed) resolved into love of God
and love of our neighbour. Suppose we know that it is our duty to love
our neighbour as ourselves. What are we to do, then, for our neighbour,
besides abstaining from doing him injury? The saints knew very well what
_they_ were to do; but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different
direction; and it does not appear that we have found them. 'We have
duties so positive to our neighbour,' says Bishop Butler, 'that if we
give more of our time and of our attention to ourselves and our own
matters than is our just due, we are taking what is not ours, and are
guilty of fraud.' What does Bishop Butler mean? It is easy to answer
generally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to
answer at all. The modern world says--'Mind your own business, and leave
others to take care of theirs;' and whoever among us aspires to more
than the negative abstaining from wrong, is left to his own guidance.
There is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which shall be
to him what the heroes were to the young Greek or Roman, or the martyrs
to the middle age Christian. There is neither track nor footprint in the
course which he will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale,
the hillside which he is climbing is strewed with black stones mocking
at him with their thousand voices. We have no moral criterion, no idea,
no counsels of perfection; and surely this is the reason why education
is so little prosperous with us; because the only education worth
anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a
character unless we have some notion of what we would form. Young men,
as we know, are more easily led than driven. It is a very old story that
to forbid this and that (so curious and contradictory is our nature) is
to stimulate a desire to do it. But place before a boy a figure of a
noble man; let the circumstances in which he has earned his claim to be
called noble be such as the boy himself sees round himself; let him see
this man rising over his temptation, and following life victoriously and
beautifully forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no
threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it.

People complain of the sameness in the 'Lives of the Saints.' It is that
very sameness which is the secret of their excellence. There is a
sameness in the heroes of the 'Iliad;' there is a sameness in the
historical heroes of Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best
with the circumstances of his age, and those who fight best with the
same circumstances, of course grow like each other. And so with our own
age--if we really could have the lives of our best men written for us
(and written well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was on
which they should insist), they would be just as like as each other too,
and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not
be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have
to be another--their enemies are not ours. There is a moral
metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form
or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of
us--not less, but more--more, as we are again and again told on Sundays
from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 'more'
consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is, that we are to work in
the spirit of love; but we are still left to generalities, while action
divides and divides into ever smaller details. It is as if the Church
said to the painter or to the musician whom she was training, you must
work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth; and then adding,
that the Catholic painting or the Catholic music was what he was _not_
to imitate, supposed that she had sent him out into the world equipped
fully for his enterprise.

And what comes of this? Emersonianism has come, modern hagiology has
come, and Ainsworth novels and Bulwer novels, and a thousand more
unclean spirits. We have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan
has swept the house and garnished it; but as yet we do not see any
symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there may be worse
states than Catholicism. If we wanted proof of the utter spiritual
disintegration into which we have fallen, it would be enough that we
have no biographies. We do not mean that we have no written lives of our
fellow-creatures; there are enough and to spare. But not any one is
there in which the ideal tendencies of this age can be discerned in
their true form; not one, or hardly any one, which we could place in a
young man's hands, with such warm confidence as would let us say of
it--'Read that; there is a man--such a man as you ought to be; read it,
meditate on it; see what he was, and how he made himself what he was,
and try and be yourself like him.' This, as we saw lately, is what
Catholicism did. It had its one broad type of perfection, which in
countless thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself--a
type of character not especially belonging to any one profession; it was
a type to which priest and layman, knight or bishop, king or peasant,
might equally aspire: men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all
sorts attained to it; and as fast as she had realised them (so to say),
the Church took them in her arms, and held them up before the world as
fresh and fresh examples of victory over the devil. This is what that
Church was able to do, and it is what we cannot do; and yet, till we can
learn to do it, no education which we can offer has any chance of
prospering. Perfection is not easy; it is of all things most difficult;
difficult to know and difficult to practise. Rules of life will not do;
even if our analysis of life in all its possible forms were as complete
as it is in fact rudimentary, they would still be inefficient. The
philosophy of the thing might be understood, but the practice would be
as far off as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only
profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your mathematician, or
your man of science, may discourse excellently on the steam engine, yet
he cannot make one; he cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman
in the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of
expansion, or of atmospheric pressure; he guides his hand upon the
turncock, he practises his eye upon the index, and he leaves the science
to follow when the practice has become mechanical. So it is with
everything which man learns to do; and yet for the art of arts, the
trade of trades, for _life_, we content ourselves with teaching our
children the catechism and the commandments; we preach them sermons on
the good of being good, and the evil of being evil; in our higher
education we advance to the theory of habit and the freedom of the will;
and then, when failure follows failure, _ipsa experientia reclamante_,
we hug ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the
fault is not ours, that all which men could do we have done. The freedom
of the will!--as if a blacksmith would ever teach a boy to make a
horseshoe, by telling him he could make one if he chose.

In setting out on our journey through life, we are like strangers set to
find their way across a difficult and entangled country. It is not
enough for us to know that others have set out as we set out, that
others have faced the lions in the path and overcome them, and have
arrived at last at the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us
heart--but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that the
difficulties are not insuperable. It is the _track_, which these others,
these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown
us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by
real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be
climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one
place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild
beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old
labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has
passed; they are no longer any service to us; we must walk in their
spirit, but not along their road; and in this sense we say, that we have
no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of real
service to us. It is the remarkable characteristic of the present time,
as far as we know--a new phenomenon since history began to be written;
one more proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another era.
In our present efforts at educating, we are like workmen setting about
to make a machine which they know is to be composed of plates and
joints, and wheels and screws and springs:--they temper their springs,
and smooth their plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and
screws, but having no idea of the machine in its combination, they
either fasten them together at random, and create some monster of
disjointed undirected force, or else pile the finished materials into a
heap together, and trust to some organic spirit in themselves which will
shape them into unity. We do not know what we would be at--make our
children into men, says one--but what sort of men? The Greeks were men,
so were the Jews, so were the Romans, so were the old Saxons, the
Normans, the Duke of Alva's Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These
were all men, and strong men too; yet all different, and all differently
trained. 'Into Christian men,' say others: but the saints were Christian
men; yet the modern Englishmen have been offered the saints'
biographies, and have with sufficient clearness expressed their opinion
of them.

Alas! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed children of this world
find their profit; their idea does not readily forsake them. In their
substantial theory of life, the business of man in it is to get on, to
thrive, to prosper, to have riches in possession. They will have their
little ones taught, by the law of demand, what will fetch its price in
the market; and this is clear, bold, definite, straightforward--and
therefore it is strong, and works its way. It works and will prevail for
a time; for a time--but not for ever, unless indeed religion be all a
dream, and our airy notions of ourselves a vision out of which our wise
age is the long-waited-for awakening.

It would be a weary and odious business to follow out all the causes
which have combined to bring us into our present state. Many of them lie
deep down in the roots of humanity, and many belong to that large system
of moral causation which works through vast masses of mankind--which,
impressing peculiar and necessary features on the eras as they succeed,
leaves individuals but a limited margin within which they may determine
what they will be. One cause, however, may be mentioned, which lies near
the surface, and which for many reasons it may be advantageous to
consider. At first thought it may seem superficial and captious; but we
do not think it will at the second, and still less at the third.

Protestantism, and even Anglo-Protestantism, has not been without its
great men. In their first fierce struggle for existence, these creeds
gave birth to thousands whose names may command any rank in history. But
alone of all forms of religion, past or present, and we will add (as we
devoutly hope), to come (for in her present form, at least, the Church
of England cannot long remain), Protestantism knows not what to do with
her own offspring; she is unable to give them open and honourable
recognition. Entangled in speculative theories of human depravity, of
the worthlessness of the best which the best men can do, Protestantism
is unable to say heartily of any one, 'Here is a good man to be loved
and remembered with reverence.' There are no saints in the English
Church. The English Church does not pretend to saints. Her children may
live purely, holily, and beautifully, but her gratitude for them must be
silent; she may not thank God for them--she may not hold them up before
her congregation. They may or they may not have been really good, but
she may not commit herself to attributing a substantial value to the
actions of a nature so corrupt as that of man. Among Protestants, the
Church of England is the worst, for she is not wholly Protestant. In the
utterness of the self-abnegation of the genuine Protestant there is
something approaching the heroic. But she, ambitious of being Catholic
as well as Protestant, like that old Church of evil memory which would
be neither hot nor cold, will neither wholly abandon merit, nor wholly
claim it; but halts on between two opinions, claiming and disclaiming,
saying and in the next breath again unsaying. The Oxford student being
asked for the doctrine of the Anglican Church on good works, knew the
rocks and whirlpools among which an unwary answer might involve him, and
steering midway between Scylla and Charybdis, replied, with laudable
caution, 'a few of them would not do a man any harm.' It is scarcely a
caricature of the prudence of the Articles. And so at last it has come
to this with us. The soldier can raise a column to his successful
general; the halls of the law courts are hung round with portraits of
the ermined sages; Newton has his statue, and Harvey and Watt, in the
academies of the sciences; and each young aspirant after fame, entering
for the first time upon the calling which he has chosen, sees high
excellence highly honoured; sees the high career, and sees its noble
ending, marked out each step of it in golden letters. But the Church's
aisles are desolate, and desolate they must remain. There is no statue
for the Christian. The empty niches stare out like hollow eye-sockets
from the walls. Good men live in the Church and die in her, whose story
written out or told would be of inestimable benefit, but she may not
write it. She may speak of goodness, but not of the good man; as she may
speak of sin, but may not censure the sinner. Her position is critical;
the Dissenters would lay hold of it. She may not do it, but she will do
what she can. She cannot tolerate an image indeed, or a picture of her
own raising; she has no praise to utter at her children's graves, when
their lives have witnessed to her teaching. But if others will bear the
expense and will risk the sin, she will offer no objection. Her walls
are naked. The wealthy ones among her congregation may adorn them as
they please; the splendour of a dead man's memorial shall be, not as his
virtues were, but as his purse; and his epitaph may be brilliant
according as there are means to pay for it. They manage things better at
the museums and the institutes.

Let this pass, however, as the worst case. There are other causes at
work besides the neglect of churches; the neglect itself being as much a
result as a cause. There is a common dead level over the world, to which
churches and teachers, however seemingly opposite, are alike condemned.
As it is here in England, so it is with the American Emerson. The fault
is not in them, but in the age of which they are no more than the
indicators. We are passing out of old forms of activity into others new
and on their present scale untried; and how to work nobly in them is the
one problem for us all. Surius will not profit us, nor the 'Mort
d'Arthur.' Our calling is neither to the hermitage nor to the round
table. Our work lies now in those peaceful occupations which, in ages
called heroic, were thought unworthy of noble souls. In those it was the
slave who tilled the ground, and wove the garments. It was the ignoble
burgher who covered the sea with his ships, and raised up factories and
workshops; and how far such occupations influenced the character, how
they could be made to minister to loftiness of heart, and high and
beautiful life, was a question which could not occur while the
atmosphere of the heroic was on all sides believed so alien to them.
Times have changed. The old hero worship has vanished with the need of
it; but no other has risen in its stead, and without it we wander in the
dark. The commonplaces of morality, the negative commandments, general
exhortations to goodness, while neither speaker nor hearer can tell what
they mean by goodness--these are all which now remain to us; and thrown
into a life more complicated than any which the earth has yet
experienced, we are left to wind our way through the labyrinth of its
details without any clue except our own instincts, our own knowledge,
our own hopes and desires.

We complain of generalities; we will not leave ourselves exposed to the
same charge. We will mention a few of the thousand instances in which we
cry for guidance and find none; instances on which those who undertake
to teach us ought to have made up their minds.

On the surface at least of the Prayer-book, there seems to be something
left remaining of the Catholic penitential system. Fasting is spoken of
and abstinence, and some form or other of self-inflicted self-denial is
necessarily meant. This thing can by no possibility be unimportant, and
we may well smile at the exclusive claims of a church to the cure of our
souls, who is unable to say what she thinks about it. Let us ask her
living interpreters then, and what shall we get for an answer? either no
answer at all, or contradictory answers; angrily, violently,
passionately, contradictory. Among the many voices, what is a young man
to conclude? He will conclude naturally according to his inclination;
and if he chooses right, it will most likely be on a wrong motive.

Again, _courage_ is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high
character. Among all fine people, old and modern, wherever we are able
to get an insight into their training system, we find it a thing
particularly attended to. The Greeks, the Romans, the old Persians, our
own nation till the last two hundred years, whoever of mankind have
turned out good for anything anywhere, knew very well, that to exhort a
boy to be brave without training him in it, would be like exhorting a
young colt to submit to the bridle without breaking him in. Step by
step, as he could bear it, the boy was introduced to danger, till his
pulse ceased to be agitated, and he became familiarised with peril as
his natural element. It was a matter of carefully considered, thoroughly
recognised, and organised education. But courage nowadays is not a
paying virtue. Courage does not help to make money, and so we have
ceased to care about it; and boys are left to educate one another by
their own semi-brutal instincts, in this, which is perhaps the most
important of all features in the human character. Schools, as far as the
masters are concerned with them, are places for teaching Greek and
Latin--that, and nothing more. At the universities, fox-hunting is,
perhaps, the only discipline of the kind now to be found, and
fox-hunting, by forbidding it and winking at it, the authorities have
contrived to place on as demoralising a footing as ingenuity could
devise.[AA]

To pass from training to life. A boy has done with school and college;
he has become a man, and has to choose his profession. It is the one
most serious step which he has yet taken. In most cases, there is no
recalling it. He believes that he is passing through life to eternity;
that his chance of getting to heaven depends on what use he makes of his
time; he prays every day that he may be delivered from temptation; it is
his business to see that he does not throw himself into it. Now, every
one of the many professions has a peculiar character of its own, which,
with rare exceptions, it inflicts on those who follow it. There is the
shopkeeper type, the manufacturer type, the lawyer type, the medical
type, the clerical type, the soldier's, the sailor's. The nature of a
man is

Like the dyer's hand,
Subdued to what it works in;

and we can distinguish with ease, on the slightest intercourse, to what
class a grown person belongs. It is to be seen in his look, in his
words, in his tone of thought, his voice, gesture, even in his
hand-writing; and in everything which he does. Every human employment
has its especial moral characteristic, its peculiar temptations, its
peculiar influences--of a subtle and not easily analysed kind, and only
to be seen in their effects. Here, therefore--here, if anywhere, we want
Mr. Emerson with his representatives, or the Church with her advice and
warning. But, in fact, what attempt do we see to understand any of this,
or even to acknowledge it; to master the moral side of the professions;
to teach young men entering them what they are to expect, what to avoid,
or what to seek? Where are the highest types--the pattern lawyer, and
shopkeeper, and merchant? Are they all equally favourable to excellence
of character? Do they offer equal opportunities? Which best suits this
disposition, and which suits that? Alas! character is little thought of
in the choice. It is rather, which shall I best succeed in? Where shall
I make most money? Suppose an anxious boy to go for counsel to his
spiritual mother; to go to her, and ask her to guide him. Shall I be a
soldier? he says. What will she tell him? This and no more--you may,
without sin. Shall I be a lawyer, merchant, manufacturer, tradesman,
engineer? Still the same answer. But which is best? he demands. We do
not know: we do not know. There is no guilt in either; you may take
which you please, provided you go to church regularly, and are honest
and good. If he is foolish enough to persist further, and ask, in what
goodness and honesty consist in _his especial department_ (whichever he
selects), he will receive the same answer; in other words, he will be
told to give every man his due and be left to find out for himself in
what 'his due' consists. It is like an artist telling his pupil to put
the lights and shadows in their due places, and leaving it to the
pupil's ingenuity to interpret such instructive directions.

One more instance of an obviously practical kind. Masters, few people
will now deny, owe certain duties to their workmen beyond payment at the
competition price for their labour, and the workmen owe something to
their masters beyond making their own best bargain. Courtesy, on the one
side, and respect on the other, are at least due; and wherever human
beings are brought in contact, a number of reciprocal obligations at
once necessarily arise out of the conditions of their position. It is
this question which at the present moment is convulsing an entire branch
of English trade. It is this question which has shaken the Continent
like an earthquake, and yet it is one which, the more it is thought
about, the more clearly seems to refuse to admit of being dealt with by
legislation. It is a question for the Gospel and not for the law. The
duties are of the kind which it is the business, not of the State, but
of the Church, to look to. Why is the Church silent? There are duties;
let her examine them, sift them, prove them, and then point them out.
Why not--why not? Alas! she cannot, she dare not give offence, and
therefore must find none. It is to be feared that we have a rough trial
to pass through, before we find our way and understand our obligations.
Yet far off we seem to see a time when the lives, the actions of the
really great, great good masters, great good landlords, great good
working men, will be laid out once more before their several orders,
laid out in the name of God, as once the saints' lives were; and the
same sounds shall be heard in factory and in counting-house as once
sounded through abbey, chapel, and cathedral aisle--'Look at these men;
bless God for them, and follow them.'

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