THE PILGRIM AND THE SHRINE.*

WE are told in our author's preface, what the study of these volumes is quite enough to verify, that this quasi-fiction is the "simple record of an actual life of our day—this unaffected picture of a true child of the century and his life in three worlds." This obviously auto- biographic sincerity gives this story almost all its interest. There is a certain vividness in some of its pictures of life and scenery, an unquestionable truthfulness in its descriptions of mental states and religious musings, a curious shrewdness now and then in its prac- tical criticisms,—as, for instance, when the author suggests that "perhaps a succession of races, like a rotation of crops, is part of nature's method for turning the earth to the best account,"—and everywhere perfect purity and naturalness of feeling. But it is not a powerful book as a whole, and can only be an instructive one to persons in a very peculiar stage of mental development. It professes to be the record of a religious progress "from fear to love," —from superstition to freedom. But before the book commences the autobiographer has really utterly abandoned his Calvinistic superstitions, and at its close he has not yet attained anything that we can call either the freedom of faith or the faith in freedom. A more perfect record of intellectual stationarinesswe have never read ; and when we are told that it is the history of progress we are simply puzzled. From beginning to end the author is apparently a sincere and logical pantheist, disbelieving wholly in any personal * rhe Pilgrim and the swine; or, Passives from the Lift and Correspondence of Herbert Ainelie, B.A. Cantab. 3 vols. London: Tinsley. God, or in any capacity of man to attain truth on the subject of God. The only difference between the beginning and the close is that the autobiography begins in unhappiness and ends in bliss, — the change being caused by a happy marriage which adds a certain element of unction to the language which the author uses concern- ing what he deems the unknown cause of the universe. But this scarcely strikes us as an improvement on the more reserved lan- guage of the early portion of the story. The fault of this book,— considered in the light in which it clearly claims to be considered —as the history of a true mind struggling to attain the largest truth of which man is capable in relation to theology,—is that it is more like the indefinitely magnified history of a very youthful meta- physical self-confidence, than the history of a calm, but anxious, dis- crimination between the greater and the less difficulties of an ardu- ous problem. The difficulties are all true difficulties,—there is no ex- aggeration or insincerity anywhere,—but there is also no movement. Where the writer broke away from the Calvinism of his youth, there precisely he remains, in what appears at times like an extasy of self-satisfaction, in the maturity of his intellectual powers. It was only artistically fit that there should be rawness and vague- ness of thought at the outset, but we were scarcely prepared for the repetition of the same rawness and vagueness of thought at the end without, as far as we can see, any growing appreciation of the true pivots on which the greatest of these questions turn. Few men who have gone through all these great problems for themselves would hesitate to describe Herbert Ainslie's letters and journals as wanting in power to discriminate the deeper from the more superficial aspects of the great questions with which he deals. The enumeration of his favourite books and authors would alone gauge the general character of the autobiography. They are the sort of books which captivate a man at college, and which captivate him in great measure by force of their deficiencies, or rather, perhaps, through the one-sided force which makes them deficient. Mr. Bai- ley's " Festus " is to Herbert Ainslie "a new Apocalypse," and he calls it his "Bible ;" Carlyle's "Hero-Worship" first teaches him the meaning of "revelation ;" Southey's Tha/aba, Bulwer's Caztons and Zanoni are amongst his best prized works. Finally, Emerson's essays are "a never failing spring of refreshing and fountain of wisdom." All these books are, we think, more or less books for lads to find their delight in. Some of them, of course, are also books which, for various high qualities of imagination and humour, maturer minds will value, and wherein they will find elements of wisdom ; but, perhaps, the character which applies to them all is a certain vague unreality and romanticism, from which a mind dis- ciplined and trained carefully to weigh its own thoughts revolts. Our author subsequently declares his admiration for Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Social Statics," as the "Euclid of morals "—a book of stricter method, but of even narrower and more curiously contracted premisses than any other of his philosophical guides.

The presumption thus furnished by the author's favourite books seems to us entirely verified by his own rather chaotic and discur- sive meditations. Herbert Ainslie once remarks, "It seems to me as if I had never really known anybody,—only a few prim, timid, contracted phantoms, made up of conventionality and theology, shrinking from the thought of their own nature, and wearing a perpetual mask, as if to hide their reality even from themselves ; the sole visible aim of their lives being to dry up all human sympathy into the spiritual selfishness of devotees." And really at times we are almost tempted to think he is right. So completely does his intellect seem to confine itself to the two alternatives of Calvinistic bibliolatry and pantheistic naturalism, that one would suppose he had never practically met with any deep school of thought as far removed from the one as from the other. In one passage (vol. iii., p. 210), the author, or his alter ego, Mr. Herbert Ainslie, tells us that he loves to find a substratum of symbolic truth—of "mystic meaning "—in the legends he has come to reject i.e., "in the things that so many people have so long believed and so dearly cherished. It is painful to have to regard it all as pure nonsense, and to have to look upon the world as little better than an asylum for idiots." But judging from the specimens he gives us of this attempt to justify the false beliefs of his fellow-creatures by discovering a nucleus of spiritual truth, he does very little indeed towards vindicating them from the semi-idiotic character he had so much deprecated attributing to them. The only expla- nation we can find of this, is that our author really knows little or nothing of the highest and widest types of Christian faith.

The first point which we notice as the great weakness of the book is this,—that though almost the whole of its speculation turns on the alternative of the free-will, or absolutely necessary development, of man's nature, and though the latter is virtually assumed by him from beginning to end, he never seems to see for a moment the vital character of the issue, and never devotes even a single page to its discussion with himself. Nay, he is not even aware of his own contradictory assumptions on the subject. This,—if there be a moral axiom in the book anywhere,—is the one axiom which is con- stantly appearing in it :—

" Where, then, is responsibility ? What is that ' Sin ' of which so much account is made by our instructors? Can anything act in variance to its own nature? Surely not ; and no one is the author of his own nature. Thus it would seem that there is no merit or deserts no punish- ment, no reward. There are consequences that grow naturally out of previous conditions; and which are more or less pleasant to the indi- vidual in proportion as they are in harmony with his nature and condi- tions. Man may have a perception of the conditions most favourable to him, and act BO as to obtain the greatest amount of happiness of which his nature is capable. But he must be previously endowed with such powers of perception, and is in no way blameable for being without them. To blame the nature of anything is to blame the source from which that nature proceeds. The past has produced the present, and the present is

producing the future What men mean by one being ' wicked ' is that he does not act in accordance with what they believe to be their greatest convenience, and his own greatest satisfaction. That is, they believe that they know better than he does what is the best course for him to follow. Every man must act so as to place himself according to the beat knowledge he has. He cannot help doing so ; for that which seems to him to produce for him the most happiness is his strongest motive, and he cannot do otherwise than follow that."

And yet we are told in one place (vol. iii., p. 142), that "repent- ance" is the recognition of a higher ideal, or perception of the con-

trast between our actual and our possible ; while the strength of our regret for misdeeds must be in proportion to our consciousness of power to have acted otherwise, and of the mischief which they

have caused." Yet, as we have seen, the author denies absolutely the power to have acted otherwise,—though never discussing the grounds of his denial ;—and the view just quoted is not the maturer and riper view of his later thought, for the other view that there is no good and no evil except to our own limited (and erroneous) human conceptions has been explicitly reiterated again (vol. iii., pp. 88-9), and is indeed the assumption pervading the whole autobiography. It is clear that on that assumption, "repentance" is a radically false mood of mind, for which the resolve to act differently under like circumstances in future, ought to be substi- tuted. You cannot repent of that which you could not have helped. You cannot repent of having red hair or having talked in your sleep, for you had "no power to act otherwise." Yet this indis- pensable condition of repentance is a wholly imaginary condition of things, according to the main and constantly reiterated axiom of our author's scepticism. We hold it clear, therefore, that the investigation he has pursued is, on this most critical and central point, not one which has led him to understand himself. We call it a "critical and central" point because on it both his ethical and religious theory must necessarily very largely depend. For a man who believes in free-will, pantheism is an almost impos- sible conception. No one can believe that the great procession

of natural causes welded together in one iron chain of cause and effect can issue,—when it reaches man,—in a power to break

that chain and exercise a real alternative choice between two or more equally open paths of development. Once believe in moral freedom as a fact, however closely limited the freedom, and scarce any one would refer man back to a generating necessity. The effect can hardly be, not only greater than, but wholly different in kind from, the cause. On the question, therefore, of freedom or necessity hinges the acceptance or rejection of the Pantheistic hypothesis which our author has accepted without even examining it. And on the same question really hinges the nature of the moral law. "Morality," says Herbert Ainslie, "is essentially one with physical truth. It is a kind of transcendental physiology." And that is consistent enough in one who believes that nature develops the so-called mind and conscience of man out of his physical nature by a necessary process, but it is quite inconceivable to one who be. lieves that moral obligation is distinct in kind from physical impulse, and marks a stage of being which cannot in any way receive its explanation from below. On this great central point,—the truth or falsehood of the freedom of the will,—depends the whole atti- tude in which we look for the true guidance of the will. If the will is but the last link in an ascending chain of natural causes, we look for its " law " of action to that chain of natural causes. If it is the first sign of a true creative power in man, it cannot but look for guidance to the nature of some free being like itself, and not to the mere law of natural antecedents. The author of this book wholly ignores this most critical of all questions, while assuming, without even an inward symptom of hesitation, the solution against which all human law, language, custom, and common opinion revolt.

This seems to us the decisive evidence of superficial thought,

and we find the same unsatisfactory treatment of the question of revelation. The one idea on this subject which runs through the book, and which is expressed six times if it is expressed once, is the a priori impossibility of revelation. We will take the most careful statements of this a priori impossibility which we can find :— " ' What you call a revelation is an impossibility, for it necessitates a prior knowledge of the divine in order to know that anything is divinely predicated. All that a man can know is that he has a strong, an over- powering impression' it may be ; but of the source of that impression he can know nothing. And of its nature he can only judge by comparing it with his ordinary experience. An infallible revelation requires an infallible interpreter, and both are useless without an infallible under- standing to comprehend the interpretation.'" Or again :— " 'But do not the positive gentlemen limit the power of the Almighty in denying that He can impart knowledge to us directly ? ' asked Mr. Travers.—' By no means. They only hold that we are so constructed as to be incapable of obtaining any knowledge except by means of ex- perience, or impressions made upon our minds.'—' But impressions may be made upon our minds by God Himself, as well as by the things He

has made ? True. But how are we to know which of our impressions come directly from God, unless we have some previous knowledge of Him ; that is, knowledge prior to experience; that is, impressions prior to impressions ? ' "

It is scarcely too much to state that the history of Herbert Ainslie's passage "from fear to love" is little beyond an amplification of these two passages, with a few appropriate illustrations. Yet, what does it come to,--except that the first impression made on the conscience from within by that superhuman goodness to which we give the name of God, cannot be identified with the origin of

any previous impression ? Does not the same criticism apply precisely to the first impression made on the infant by its mother? Being the first, it cannot be known to proceed from its mother.

Not till a number of such impressions have been made can they be tied up into a concrete personal impression. Well, grant that,—does it prove that the child can never in after life know that its mother has spoken to it? Our knowledge of God is solely of an inward power of personal goodness—a goodness so personal as to check us when we go wrong, to spur us

to do right. Is our knowledge that a new message comes to us from this personal inspirer of the conscience at all more defec- tive or uncertain than our knowledge that a new message comes to us from human lips ? We should say that, on the whole, it is less so. It might be possible to impersonate falsely the human form,—but it cannot be possible to impersonate falsely the Spirit of God, for no subordinate angel who delivered His message could authenticate it without His Spirit ; —there is no such thing as

apparent goodness to the conscience, no power of imitating God's voice with a spurious message, and yet eluding His inward repudia- tion of the message so given. All, therefore, that can be meant by these repeated demonstrations of the impossibility of revelation,—

is that no external authority asserting itself as God's can overrule the inward authority of God in the conscience. But this is not only not an overthrow of revelation, but the highest teaching of revela- tion itself. Revelation is only an appeal of God through the channels of external life,—through history,—to the conscience of man; and the Christian Apostles are eager in their assertion that no external authority, 'not an angel in heaven,' could override the divine witness in their own hearts to the divinity of their Master. We do not see, therefore, what Mr. Ainslie gains by repeating so often and with so much emphasis that if a revelation

does come from God we could not know it. We clearly can know

that no efforts of ours have ever attained to understanding a tithe of the meaning of the divine spirit within us which the mere study of Christ's words and life brings at once, in one great flood, into our conscience. And that is,—to our minds,—the sole mean- ing of revelation.

On the whole, the history of Herbert Ainslie's mind is not the history of a powerful mind thoroughly grappling with the problems which it discusses. And to us there is something sentimental in the type of pantheism which he ultimately embraces. Better a thousand times Spinoza's grand intellectual pantheism than such pantheism of sentiment as the following :—

" If it be that we are but portions of the infinite consciousness, endowed with a brief individuality, again to return and to be merged in the great whole ;—tentacula put forth to gain experiences for the Universal Parent, —when we return with memories loaded with ecstacies which become part of the Universal Experience, and thrill through the very centre of all sensation, how complacently will the Infinite regard us as the agents of so much delight to Himself ! Especially if our joy has been alloyed by no admixture of pain to others ; for that, too, would be transmitted, and be counted a set-off against our contribution of pleasure."

The Pilgrim and the Shrine stands or falls by the thoroughness of religious investigation, and by this we are bound to judge it. Indeed, in this respect, it is far more striking than as a novel, —for not one character in the book is really painted so as to become visible to the reader. On the other hand, the pictures of Californian and Australian scenery are singularly vivid, and traced -with a great deal of poetical feeling. Sincere autobiography has always a profound interest of its own, and this book has that interest to the fullest extent ; but it has not the interest of pro- gressive thought, nor, as we think, the interest of typical thought, —thought which traces out the true lines which all future learners must follow, if they are to find their way to the light at all.