RADICALISM AND REVELATION.
THE Rev. Stewart Headlam has introduced a discus- sion into the London School Board which is just of the kind that shows how little power Revelation has at the present time over the minds of men. He thinks that the prophet Amos is boycotted by the Committee of the School Board because he was too much of a Radical, and Mr. Headlam would prefer him to Jeremiah, because Jeremiah appears to him to have been less thoroughly Radical than Amos. We wonder that the school of poli- ticians who are so anxious for the evacuation of Egypt by the British troops, did not reply that they would not give up Jeremiah for the world, because Jeremiah's prophecies against the Egyptian alliance are so persistent and reiterated, that they might have the result of training up a number of voters who would eventually turn the scale in favour of evacua- tion. Some day we shall have a Radical pressing the Acts of the Apostles on the Board as a book specially important for the political education of children, on the ground that it sanctions the principle of balloting for an Apostle, and so endorses secret voting ; or we may have the people who are eager for free education, endeavouring to prove that the schools of the Prophets were supported by payments from the State Treasury, and that no school-pence were paid for them. The Books of Samuel will be selected with a special view to the denunciation of the people of Israel for desiring a King, and motions will be made to exclude those passages in the apostolic Epistles in which honour to the King and obedience to the secular authorities are specially enjoined. The statisticians will object to the chapter in which David is punished for numbering the people, and the teetotallers will insist on a special selection of the chapters which give us an account of the Rechabites, and hold them up to reverence. Mr. Stewart Headlam has himself endeavoured to get an account of the year of Jubilee included in the teaching of the Board schools, on the plea that it will set forth proper prin- ciples of land legislation ; and we should not be surprised at a motion by the friends of Disestablishment to exclude all the books of Scripture in which reference is made to the building and support of the Temple by Kings, or to grants-in-aid of tribute money.
The truth is, that we have come to a time when a good many people care for Revelation only if it supports their own opinions, and are quite ready to repudiate it if it does not. Is the book Conservative, or is it Radical ? ' is a question which seems to us exquisitely absurd when it refers to a Revelation intended to penetrate far beneath the surface of human opinion, and to show us what there is in the character of God which ought to mould all human opinion into its likeness, by showing us how faithful is the Divine Being to customs and institu- tions which really elevate the human character, and how utterly he abhors and how indignantly he often overturns them,—so that there is not left "one stone upon another,"— where they only simulate the religion which they were founded to foster, and become mere landmarks of an obsolete faith instead of nurseries of one which is living and vigorous. Revelation is at least as Conservative as it is Radical, as Radical as it is Conservative. It is neither merely for the sake of being either. It is Conservative not because men are tena- cious of all that they have once possessed, for Revelation teaches, by line upon line and precept upon precept, that it is often an excellent thing for men, being what they are, to be deprived of what they had once possessed. It is Radical not because men are impatient of authority, for Revelation teaches nothing if it does not teach that without submission to authority there is no real moral and spiritual discipline for man. Revelation is Conservative only of those institutions and habits which really shelter and develop the spiritual nature of man, and, moreover, only so long as they do shelter and develop it. It is Radical only when the authority to which submission is required has become an evil authority which distorts or stunts the nature that it ought to strengthen and mould into symmetry and beauty ; and even then it always teaches us that some fresh authority is to be substituted for the authority which is struck down, and usually one to which a deeper and more passionate loyalty is properly due. There is no abstract Con- servatism or abstract Radicalism in Revelation, only Conser- vatism of that which is divine, and Radicalism for the purpose of rooting up that which is subversive of what is divine in order to replace it by that which is fuller of divineness than the old exhausted standard. The notion of picking and choosing from Revelation what suits best human opinion, is a repudiation of the very idea of Revelation. Opinionativeness is surely the very opposite of faith, and we cannot conceive a funnier travesty of Revelation than that which would result from selecting those parts of it which only confirm us in what we have determined to think, instead of dwelling on that in it which our minds have utterly failed to assimilate, and applying ourselves most sedulously to the teaching which teaches us most. " Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," was our Lord's reminder even to the Apostles. Reve- lation is above us, not beneath. If we are to select lessons at all, we should select those lessons which have hitherto come home to us least, not those which have come home to us most. We do not agree with the speaker at the London School Board who recommended that the Radical prophets should be specially selected for the schools in which rich men's children are taught, and the Conservative prophets for the schools of the poor, because we cannot admit that any such classification of the prophets is even possible. But he certainly had wandered less widely from the true appreciation of the proper function of Revelation than Mr. Stewart Headlam. Revelation was intended to correct the faults of human nature ; it was not intended to stimulate and exaggerate those faults.
And this leads us to say that we cannot look upon the modern habit of treating politics as a regular religion, with any satisfaction. It is supposed to be a sign of earnestness, but it is a sign of earnestness in the wrong place, which renders earnestness in the right place almost impossible. Whether your politics be Liberal or Conservative, whether they be popular, or critical and cautious, they ought surely not to be a religion. It can never be a question of absolute right and wrong whether more or less power should be conceded at once to the people, though it must be a ques- tion of absolute right and wrong whether you ought to sanction injustice when you have the power to insist on doing justice. But the wisdom or folly of any particular shade of political opinion, is really a very complex question, a ques- tion that involves a very careful judgment on the tendencies of the time, on the dangers involved in refusing or conceding new power to the people, on the character of the evidence as to the manner in which the candidates for this new power are likely to use it, on the actual value of the institutions which are assailed and the reasons for assailing them, in short, on a number of difficult questions which can only be safely judged by the sagacious use of a considerable experience and a generous insight into the signs of the times. Surely nothing can be clearer than that when Samuel, for instance, rebuked the popular craving for a Monarchy among the people of Israel at the very time when he recognised that it was God's will that that craving should be gratified, he both saw something that was culpable in the temper of the people who envied the glitter of the Oriental Monarchies with which the humbler authority of the Judges was contrasted, and yet saw that the worldly taint to which he was yielding could only be cured, so far as it could be cured at all, by yielding to it, and letting the people ascer- tain for themselves what the dangers of despotism were. Well, it seems to us that there is precisely the same kind of com- plexity in the politics of the present day. It often happens that what one class of thinkers earnestly and strenuously oppose is really worthy of that earnest and strenuous opposi- tion, while yet it may very well be true that it is not for the good of the people as a whole that that opposition should be successful. And it is a most difficult and delicate problem to determine whether a righteous opposition to a popular move. ment may not have been carried far enough, as far as it is consistent with the due education of the people that it should be carried, or whether, on the contrary, a little more strenuous. ness and a little higher faith are all that is needed to make the opposition successful, and to turn the tide of popular feeling into a higher channel. No more delicate and difficult problem can be stated, and it is a grave fault of character to hold one's political judgment on it with so much perverse tenacity as to be unable to recognise what is good in the views of our antagonists simply because we see very clearly what is evil in them. We should say that there have been not a few in- stances in which the nobler party was defeated, and yet was in a sense rightly defeated, as having advocated a policy for which the people were at the time unfit. Jeremiah, like Samuel, no doubt represented the nobler Jewish policy of his time; but it was a policy for which the people were unpre- pared, and it produced more effect upon them in its defeat than it would have done, perhaps, had it triumphed. We have seen the same thing happen more than once or twice in our own day. The blow struck at the policy of Free-trade in the United States has probably done more for the cause of Free-trade than any defeat of the Protectionists could have done. It may well happen that if Home-rule should be ultimately carried, the success of that movement will do more to restore a true Union,—not "of hearts," but of minds and consciences,—by an early reversal of the measure, than could ever have been achieved by the success of the cause for which, nevertheless, the Liberal Unionists are rightly labouring with all their might. These are all matters in which it does not do to give oneself away wholly, as we may do and ought to do, to any true religion. A great deal has to be taken into account in politics besides right and wrong. As we do not know a more depre- ciatory description of a man's religion than to say that with him it is rather a political than a moral or spiritual creed, so we do not know a more depreciatory description of his politics than to say that with him politics are a religion. Politics ought not to be a religion. The man who is a Liberal with all his heart under one set of circumstances, ought perhaps to be a Conservative with all his heart under another, and is only his true self if he changes from the one creed to the other. And, of course, the same may be said with equal truth of a change in the opposite direction. To make a religion of politics is almost as grave a blunder as to make politics of a religion.
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