THE PROPHET.
MR. LLEWELYN DAVIES, who of all men living, pro- bably, except the members of Mr. Manrice's own family, understood Frederick Denison Maurice best, has declared in the Contemporary Review that his calling must be described as mainly that of the Prophet,—in other words, of the impassioned preacher "pouring forth warnings and encouragements to his own genera- tion," and constantly distressed by the failure of that genera- tion to apprehend his meaning. Mr. Maurice himself, in what the present writer has often regarded as his most effective book,— his book on "The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament,"— has told us what he himself considered the calling of the prophet to be. It was, in the first place, he said, a calling for which it was quite possible to be educated. The " Schools of the Pro- phets " were the natural places of preparation for the effectual work of a prophet. " The Jewish prophet, as we have found him in the Scripture records which we have gone through, was not pri- marily or characteristically a foreteller. The essence of his office did not lie in what he announced respectingthe future, though he might speak of it very decisively and authoritatively. Nor did he seek to draw any special wonder to himself as an improviser, though he might be called upon to speak out at once on great emergencies that which had been put into his heart. But the sole power which the prophet possessed of declaring that which should be, arose from his knowledge of that which had been and which was. He meditated in the law of the Lord, and in that law did he exercise himself day and night. In this exercise he learnt what was in conformity with the law, what was contrary to it. In this exercise he learnt to believe in a Divine Teacher, and to commune with Him, to believe in Him as a permanent and continual Teacher, as the guide of his own heart; to believe that all other men's hearts were right, so long as they were under the same guidance, and wrong when they were breaking loose from it. The fruits of revolt his inward monitor enabled him to foresee and to predict. The prediction might take a general form, and point to a distinct issue or a number of issues ; it might speak of that which was definite and immediate. There would be the same proof in both cases that the word came from a hidden source, and from a moral being ; a proof addressed to the conscience of the hearer, seeing that the prediction would always come forth with some warning respecting his actual conduct, some denunciation of an idolatrous or unrighteous act. Everything, then, that was sudden in these utterances bore wit- ness to previous trains of thought and habits of reflection. So far from wishing to deny the existence of these, as if they inter- fered with the genuineness of his inspiration, the prophet would be grieved if his hearers did not give him credit for them. If his utterances seemed to be fortuitous, they could not bear the witness which he desired they should bear of a permanent ruler; they could not remind the listener of the deep foun- tain from which they had proceeded, or encourage him to ask in wonder and awe whether that fountain was not also in himself. The knowledge of passing events, too, would be sought for, not declined by the true prophet. He had no need to bandage his eyes, that the spectator might be sure he derived his insight from some other source than actual observation. He might observe, he was bound to observe whatever came before him, in any way, from any quarter. All facts were to him signs of a divine purpose, solemn indications of truths which they could not themselves make known, but which nevertheless lay in. the heart of them, and which God would discover to the
patient and faithful seeker Supposing the habitual belief and work of the prophet to have been of this kind, it does not seem very strange that he should have been an educator of others, or that one main object of his education should have been to fit them. for the exercise of functions like his own." We have quoted this long passage because it seems to us to delineate very vividly that side of the prophet's mind which Maurice himself possessed. He had the deepest belief in the power of education to fit him for such an office as his, and had spent long years in the preparation for it. He valued it greatly as a means of acting upon others, and devoted much of his own time and his own means to the work of education. He had the strongest belief in the teaching of the past and the signs of the present, as intepreted by the Divine Spirit. He believed in the moral value of historical studies as few of his stamp have ever believed in them. He studied the minutiae of political and social events as few spiritual teachers of our time have had patience to study them. He utterly distrusted " improvised " oracles of all sorts. And yet he poured out his soul on the lessons of history and the signs of the times, with all the passion of a man whose heart was in the task of reading those lessons and interpreting those signs aright. " There is no flight," he said, for the prophet, " into quiet• religions contemplation ; he cannot persuade himself that he is to prove his difference from his countrymen, and his superiority to them, by withdrawing from the circle of interests in which they are dwelling. He may pass hours or months of solitude, but he will not be away from the events which are befalling them; he will be more deeply occupied with them ; he will be contemplating them with a closeness and intensity to which the mere actors in them are strangers." And that certainly describes most accurately Mr. Maurice's own attitude towards the events of his time. How far, then, did he prove a true prophet in the denunciation, from a truly spiritual point of view, of the worst evils which he discerned in himself and in others P in the sympathy which he accorded, from the same point of view, to its noblest tendencies ? and finally, in discerning the direction in which evil was most to be feared for the future, and in which good was most to be antici- pated ? We will try and answer these questions with full honesty, for our reverence for Maurice is quite too deep to say of him one word that can have the savour of mere compliment, or even of excessive appreciation.
No one can doubt that Manrice's denunciations of the coldness, of the opinionativeness, of the oracular irresponsibility, of the insolence and arrogance of our life, of the superficiality of its sympathy with so many types of feeling, and of its want of depth, were directed, in the first place and with most ardour, against those evils in himself; and only in the second place, and with much less heat, against those evils in others. He confesses very early in life to his father the frigidity which he felt in his own heart, which he terms a " vice ;" and in middle-life de- scribes himself to Mr. Ludlow as " a cold-blooded animal, very incapable, I know, of entering into the enthusiasms of better men ;" and he meant to the utmost what he said. Moreover. he actually did more than any one man we could name to open his own heart, and the hearts of all on whom he had any in- fluence, to the wants, and hopes, and enthusiasms of other men.. Never was praise so generous as his for the slightest evidence of good, even in works with which he had, on the whole, little sympathy. Never was sacrifice more generous than hie for the various practical schemes by which he hoped to awaken the sympathies between class and class. Never was preaching so sure as his preaching to be illustrated by practical effort. Never was opinionativeness more eagerly repented of, or more anxiously abjured, than his own opinionativeness ; and never was there effort made more ardent than his to help men to discern the difference between the truth in which they abso- lutely and unreservedly trusted, and the view or theory which they patronised and connected triumphantly with their own discriminating intellects. Never was knight-errantry more healthy and noble than Maurice's against the tyranny of un- digested and often shallow public opinion, or indignation deeper against the irresponsibility of anonymous journalism. The present writer did not and does not agree in the belief that the signing of names is any protection against these evils, or that anony- mousness tends to increase them; on the contraryf he holds that signed journalism, both in England and France, tends to foster petty vanities more effectually than unsigned. But that is a matter of detail. The present writer, at least, as a journalist of old stand- ing, can bear witness that no great teacher has done so muchin. his day to prophesy against the many idolatries into which the worship of public opinion runs, and to strike down these idolatries, as Mr. Maurice. Again, who has taught us more than he of the attractiveness and mischief of widely-diffused and superficial sympathies, such as best suit our age ? Of one re- markable man,—for whom in later life he felt much deeper admiration,—be said, with just discrimination, "the circumfer- ence of his thoughts is enlarging. continually. I wish they had a centre." And it was after that centre, and after referring life to the true centre, that he habitually strove for himself, and it was this that he most severely reproached himself for missing or passing by.
If we pass from Maurice's continual and most earnest endeav- our to understand truly the past and present,—we may say parenthetically with regard to the past, that his history of philosophy is one of the most memorable and one of the most painstaking endeavours to enter into the heart of long-past ages which our literature contains,—to his tact in discovering the good and evil tendencies of the future, we should accord him, so far as we can judge, considerably less of the prophetic insight, except, indeed, as regards the centre of all his thoughts,—the theological tendencies of the day. That he predicted again and again in years long past the outbreak of Atheism which, in its fullness, we have only seen since his death, and have then seen at its worst, in the very form in which he predicted it,—the atheistic persecution of Atheism,—every one who knows his writings will admit. But that on secondary subjects, such as the political drift of popular tendencies, he was much more misled by his deep Conservatism, and his profound sensitiveness to English feeling, than some other political observers, we freely admit. Undoubtedly, he was hardly more far-sighted than Mr. Gladstone in relation to the American Civil War, and was surpassed in moral discern- ment on that subject by some of his own most intimate friends. Undoubtedly, again, he was much less far-sighted than Mr. Gladstone in relation to the political destiny of the Mahom- medan races, and he more or less misled some of us,—the present writer amongst the number,—in his relative appreciation of the political worth of Russia and Turkey. These were subjects on which Mr. Maurice's moral insight was more or less blinded by his historical Conservatism, and his passionatelove for the old lines as regards both Constitutional Government and English traditions. But these are, indeed, small matters, when we com- pare them with that far-sighted and puifyingteaohing of his on theology, and that noble protest against a narrow and petty com- mercialism, by which he raised the whole temper of English
artisans. Nor was his personal insight without a prophetic force. Witness this passage, in a. letter written concerning the Oxford election in 1847 :—"Mr. Gladstone gave up place that he might confess, what he need not have confessed, what it would have done him good with his Oxford constituents not to have con- fessed. Whether he was wrong or right about Maynooth, this was the reverse of following expediency; it was acting upon principle. It is a Lind of principle which you have need of at Oxford ; it is the very principle which saves a man from be- coming the slave of circumstances, which is in effect the same thing as making his steadfastness depend on his determination not to understand circumstances. For the steadfastness of l3alaam in refusing to turn aside when the creature on which he rode refused to go forward, is precisely the stoadfastness of our country gentlemen, be they High or Low Churchmen, and false prophets. They do not believe that facts are angels of the Lord, saying, Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther ;' they merely kick, and beat, and rave, determined to do what they cannot do, always mistaking adherence to their own maxims for obedience to the divine will." There is a great share of the luminousness of the true prophet there. But it was in his insight into the evils of our social life that yaurice's prophetic insight was most powerfully illustrated.
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