THE BISHOP OF LONG ISLAND ON INDIVIDUALISM.* Tins is an

interesting and, in some respects, an important book, though its importance lies more, perhaps, in the ques- tions it suggests, than in the attempted solution of them. Its strength is in diagnosis, rather than in remedy. It seems to us, however, a pity that the book should have taken the form of sermons, as both the subject and the congregation must have suffered thereby. While, on the one hand, we shudder to think of Cambridge Undergraduates, on short November afternoons, sitting through sermons which average nearly sixty pages in length ; on the other, we should say that the conventional re- quirements of preaching have hampered Bishop Littlejohn in dealing with his subject. Rhetoric is not his strong point, and we imagine that close and philosophical argument is ; so that the fancied necessity which has led him to clothe his argument in rather artificial rhetoric has weakened and confused his reasoning.

But the importance of the subject, and the general sagacity of the author's warnings, would outweigh more faults of style and method than we can detect in this book. Bishop Little- john sees in Individualism the source of most of the reigning evils in Church and State. By individualism, he means, though he never clearly defines it, the tendency which leads the individual " to overrate himself, and correspondingly to under- rate what is external to himself." To this disposition, brought about by the progress of civilisation, and even by Christianity itself, the evils from which we are suffering in morality, in reli- gion, in politics, and in art, are due. It must be met by counter-truths, which shall lay stress on all that can humble the pride of the individual, by returning to the old method in theology, and beginning with God, rather than man ; by com- bining the two dominant modern philosophies, so as to extract from them the truths which both imperfectly contain ; and lastly, by defending and restoring the great institutions which are the natural and divinely-ordained guardians of morality, order, and religion, and the great bulwarks against a false indi- vidualism, viz., the family, the State, and the Church.

Now, while we agree in the main with the author's view of the subject, and believe that the remedies he mentions are effective, yet we must point out certain defects in his method of exposition which take much from the value of the book. His warnings, in the first place, lose their force from the indefinite- ness of the foe he is attacking. He does not define individual- ism, and he weakens the conception still more by ascribing too much to the influence of this vague abstraction. We all remem- ber sermons which utterly fail to touch us personally, which never draw blood, because all possible evils are ascribed to the one fault the preacher is trying to depict. Pride which pro- duces murder, sloth which habitually results in burglary, cannot be, we argue, the pride and the sloth we are conscious of ; there- fore, we need not listen to the preacher. Surely, Bishop Little- john falls into the common snare of preachers, when he declares, for instance, that the shortcomings of modern Art are due to individualism. There is a good deal of self-consciousness in modern Art, and it suffers thereby ; but self-consciousness is not the same as individualism. And even if it were, it is not the only influence. Doubt is the cause of much that is poor and weak and pointless in Art, and doubt, though some of it may be due to indi- vidualism, is by no means identical with it. Again, the msthetic failings that Bishop Littlejohn deplores are often the result of the Positivist element in modern thought, and Positivism, so far from being individualist, is its exact opposite, for it strives to make men realise their common humanity, and to weld closer rather than loosen the bands that unite society. An exaggeration similar to that which leads Bishop Littlejohn to trace all evils to individualism, is noticeable in his depreciation of the powers and

• Individualism : Its Growth and Tendencies. with Some Suggestions as to the Remedy for Its Eoits. Sermons Preached before the University of Cambridge in November, 1E60. By the Right Rev. A. N. Littlejohn, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Long Island. Cambridge ; Deighton, BeU, and Co. 1E81.

achievements of modern civilisation. There is an obvious fallacy in saying that "the higher man enthrones himself in Nature's

domain, the greater his subjection" to Nature's powers, and in supporting this by instancing the electric telegraph, which

serves indifferently " the bad and the good, the devilish and the angelic, in the life of man." Surely it is not upon Nature that this and other great inventions have made us more dependent, but upon the moral standard of the race, and the co-operation of men.

There is anotherfallacy in our author's contention that the intel- lectual progress of the age, by its very diffusion, has reduced all to a level, so that what we have gained in the spread of culture we have lost in individual genius. He is quite run away with here by his metaphors :—

"The limits within which the intellectual property of each genera- tion shall be confined would seem to have been fixed by some yet undiscovered law. The larger the number who are permitted to share in the estate, the more there are to resist the encroachment of great individual ownerships. Or to change the figure, given portions of the soil have each a certain aggregate of productive power. Each will grow a certain amount of timber, and it is for the owner to decide whether he will have a thousand trees of medium size, or a

hundred of extraordinary dimensions There seems to be something like this in the growths from the intellectual soil."

Surely here the author has used a misleading illustration to explain a non-existing phenomenon. It is not true, or at least, we cannot as yet say whether it is true, that there are fewer intellectual giants among us ; we should say that while the relative greatness of our greatest intellects is, of course, less than it was when the masses were quite illiter- ate, there is nothing, except that we are, as it were, too close to the hills to see their height, to show that the absolute greatness has decreased. And Bishop Littlejohn's analogies are obviously quite worthless as explanations of his assumed fact.

A more serious defect in our eyes is the author's evident sympathy with the Manselian philosophy of religion. Though in one passage he expressly rejects it " as final or complete," yet in others he seems; at least implicitly to hold its funda- mental doctrines. Thus, he not only implies, in arguing against the " absolute philosophy," that the difference between the reason of God and the reason of man is one of kind, and not only of degree, but in a still more dangerous passage he argues that though the " psychological supremacy " of conscience may be established, ethical writers have " not established its moral infallibility." This, by the way, is surely something like an inversion of the truth. And, he adds, " they have not proved that its authority extends over all moral truth offered to it from without ;" which must mean that man's conscience cannot judge of the morality of revelation. This seems to us to lead straight to Atheism, or at least to Agnosticism. It is, we believe, the starting-point from which many have reached that gloomy goal. Unless man's moral sense is something else than a blind guide, the most convincing, because the closest proof of God's existence in Nature, falls to the ground. The discre- pancies between the Bible and man's conscience can, at all events, never be a proof of inspiration, yet this doctrine would nearly make them such. Bishop Littlejohn, indeed, himself in

other passages declares, in direct opposition to those we have referred to, that it is the individual's " right to decide, in the last resort, in all matters of personal obligation ; that he should

never act against his conscience f' but what does this mean, if conscience cannot judge all moral questions, if indeed it is "an authority within ourselves which, practically, is not the same in any two persons ?" The anther is so desirous to prove the necessity of a Church and of social order, that, like many other writers, he goes far to overthrow the moral, to say nothing of the intellectual, perceptions upon which all human societies must rest.

Nevertheless, we believe that Bishop Littlejohn, in the main, has seen and warned us against a real danger ; and further, has shown us, though vaguely and not very helpfully, the time remedy. Many of his remarks about the family and the State are singularly apt and true. For instance, the permanence of the marriage tie cannot be better defended than by referring it, as he does, to the primary object for which marriage is intended : —" It is ordained to bring new life into the world, and its obligations to that life are as irrevocable as that life itself." And though to most English thinkers it may be a hard saying, yet we believe that no adequate philosophy is possible without that admixture of realism which Bishop Littlejohn supplies in his theory of the relation of the

individual to society. " We must reach the idea of an,

one of these organic institutions, whether the family, or the State, or the Church, not by first supposing a number of human beings, each complete in himself, and then by combining them to form the institutions ; but we must first think, conceive, the institutions, in order to know the individuals." At the same time, we cannot but regret that when the author has reached the climax of his argument, he should shirk the task of proving, in his own words, the " conscious, continuous, responsible per- sonality of the nation," and should instead refer us to a note, where we find what is, we must confess, to us an absolutely unintelligible dissertation by one Mr. Mulford. Bishop Little- john could have surely put it into far clearer language for himself.

And yet there is a fundamental want in the book, which our agreement with its main object only makes us feel the more. We want something practical as to the result of all this warn- ing. If it is—as we agree with Bishop Littlejohn it is—so important for men to feel themselves, in religion, members of a body, controlled by its laws, heirs of its traditions, sharers in its larger life, can he not show us how to make them feel this ? No amount of teaching will do it, so long as the fact of a Church has no real effect on men's individual lives. The Family and the State are realities, entering into our lives at every moment, controlling us when we think we are most independent; and in spite of Bishop Littlejohn's warnings, we do not believe there is any prospect of an individualist revolt against the State, at least. The tendency seems to us to be all in the direc- tion of Socialism, not Individualism. But in spite of the greatly increased preaching about the Church, is it not the case that the real Church feeling, as distinguished from Individualism and Congregationalism, which is only a step in the same direction, is decreasing, at least in England? And what does the Church do, besides preaching, to counteract this? Our own belief is that till the Christian brotherhood is made a reality, individualism in religion will increase. The Quakers attempted something of the kind, but, because their practice was combined with strange doctrinal denials of obvious truths, the attempt has failed. A Church of benevolence, without sacraments, has no real vitality. Bat a Sacramental Church must realise its corporate existence in practical union and conscious brotherhood, or it will fail, before Individualism on the one hand, and Positivism on the other. That Bishop Littlejohn should have so strongly felt the danger, and warned us against it, is the great merit of his book ; that he should have only indirectly suggested, instead of thoroughly working out and applying, the remedy, is its great defect. But on the whole, we are grateful to him for what he has done, and should be still more grateful if he would apply his evident philosophical powers and learning to a solution, in a larger book, of the problem he has here raised. The reconcilia- tion of the claims of the individual with those of society -demands a fuller treatment than can be given in three sermons.