THE NEW REPUBLIC.*

IT is not very easy to determine whether this clever squib be meant for anything more than a clever squib or not. That some of the leading Oxonians of the latitudinarian or more than lati- tudinarian school, and two of the chiefs of scientific investigation, are sketched in it, and most of them very skilfully sketched, with

a keen eye for the finer features of their writings, and not more of exaggeration than is essential to the very purpose of a satire, is obvious enough. The two leaders of science are much less strikingly painted, and indeed it would be difficult to identify Mr. Storks at all but for his enunciation of one cele- brated avowal of Professor Iltudey's,—that he should be very glad to become a machine, if he were not one already, on condi- tion of always going right as a machine. The sketch of Mr.

Stockton is more elaborate and more successful, but the author's labour of love,—or shall we say of the opposite feeling, which is often quite as fertile in labour as love itself ?—has been spent on the Oxonians. The Rev. Dr. Jenkinson, Mr. Luke, and Mr.

Rose are drawn with great ability, but with some malice, and the last of them at least with something like malevolence. On the

other hand, Mr. Herbert, who is plainly, in many respects at least, an alter ego of Mr. Ruskin's, is painted with a sort of sym- pathy and power that seem to indicate that this satire has a motive which is not purely negative,—that it is not intended

merely to expose the futility of the extreme latitudinarianism, but to suggest at the very least the great responsibility in- volved in the practice of using in an unreal and utterly non- natural sense the phrases by which a faith is expressed.

But Mr. Herbert appears to be as much the victim of the destructive philosophy as those who boast themselves

the teachers of it, the only difference, as he himself is made to confess, being, that though he, too, has lost his faith in God,

he remains "inconsolable for his loss." But we will quote a pas- sage, the major part of which we should like to think the key to

a book that is not otherwise all that we could have desired in one so fall of ability For I—who am I that speak to you? Am I a believer ? No, I am a doubter too. Once I could pray every morning, and go forth to my day's labour stayed and comforted. But now I can pray no longer. Yon have taken my God away from me, and I know not where you have laid him. My only consolation in my misery is that at least lam incon- solable for his loss. Yes,' cried Mr. Herbert, his voice rising into a kind of threatening wail, though you have made me miserable, I am not yet content with my misery. And though I, too, have said in my heart that there is no God, and that there is no more profit in wisdom than in folly, yet there is one folly that I will not give tongue to. I will not say, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace. I will not say we are still Christians, when we can sip our wine smilingly after dinner, and talk about some day defining the Father ; and I will only pray that if such a Father be, he may have mercy alike upon those that hated him, be- cause they will see not him ; and on those who love and long for him, although they no longer can see him.' Mr. Herbert's voice ceased. The curtain fell. The whirlwind was over; the fire was over ; and after the fire, from one of the side-boxes came a still small voice. 'Very poor taste,—very poor taste.' It was perceived that Dr. Jenkinson, having discovered almost immediately who was really to be the preacher, had stolen back silently into the theatre."

Now as our readers will at once see, even the force of Mr. Herbert's address is injured, and apparently deliberately injured, by the sneer at Dr. Jenkinson contained in the closing sentences, where the passage in Scripture describing Elijah's great vision is paro- died for the sake of imputing soreness and vanity to the high

* The New Repuhlie; or, Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House. 2 vols. London: Chan* and Windno. priest of latitudinarianism. We must say that the use of such a passage for such a purpose seems to us, in Dr. Jenkinson's words,

"very poor taste," and throws a certain doubt on the true drift of a book which reaches its climax in such a sneer.

But whatever may be the true drift of the author, there is no doubt that the satire on the unreality of what may be called Evangelical Agnosticism is extremely skilful. The whole account of the sermon which Dr. Jenkinson delivered from the stage of the theatre, standing "in the middle of a gorge in the Indian Caucasus,—the remains of a presentation of Prometheus Bound which had taken place last February," is an exceedingly mordant satire on the teaching which makes Christianity a mass of blunders, while treating Christ as if he were really the central object of Christian worship :—

"Later Judaism and primitive Christianity were both made up of a variety of systems, all honestly and boldly thought out, differing widely from each other, and called by the honourable appellation of heresies : and of these, let me remind you, it is the glory of the Church of England to be composed likewise.' 'Nor is this all,' he went on in a softer and more appealing tone; not only are all therm things so con- fused and doubtful, but we now see that, in the face of recent criticism, we cannot even be quite sure about any of the details of the divine life of our Lord. But in all this '—the Doctor's voice here became still more aerial, and he fixed his eyes upon the painted ceiling of the theatre, as though he were gazing on some glorious vision—' in all this there is nothing to discompose us. We can be quite sure that He lived, and that He went about doing good, and that in him we have, in the highest sense, everlasting life.' Let us then no longer fight against the conclusions of science and of oriticism, but rather see in them the hand of God driving us, even against our will, away from beliefs and teachings that are not really those of his son. If we do not do this—if we persist in identifying the false Christianity with the true—the false, when it is at last plucked rudely away from us, as it must be, will carry away a part of the true with it. And as long as we are in this state of mind, we are never for a moment safe. We can never open a philological review, or hear of a scientific experiment, without trembling. Witness the dis- cussions now engaging so much public attention on the subject of animal automatism, and the marvellous results which experiments on living subjects have of late days revealed to us, a frog with half a brain having destroyed more theology than all the doctors of the Church with their whole brains can ever build up again. Thus does God choose the 'weak things of this world to confound the wise.' Seeing, then, that this is the state of the case, we should surely learn henceforthnot to identify Christianity with anything that science can assail, or even question. Let us say rather that nothing is or can be essential to the religion of Christ which, when once stated, can be denied without ab- surdity. If we can only attain to this conception, we shall see truly that this our faith is indeed one that no man taketh away from us."

That touch about "a frog with half a brain," which responds automatically to the stimuli brought to bear upon it, being one of "the weak things of the world" intended by God to confound the mighty, is as good a caricature of the habit of so wresting Apostolic phrases as to make them support entirely new teachings of very different tendency from those to which they were first applied, as it would be easy for a satirist to light upon. And the exquisite suggestion that we ought to exclude from Christianity everything which, "when once stated, can be denied without absurdity," is as happy a criticism on the unmeaningness of the conformist rationalism as could be compressed into a single sen- tence. Very happily conceived, too, is the expression of Mx. Stockton's scientific contempt for Dr. Jenkinson's sermon, and Mr. Leslie's bitter apology for it :—

" Poor Dr. Jenkinson!' said Mrs. Sinclair, also in a melancholy voice ; 'I suppose he has never loved.'—' Ah,' exclaimed Mr. Stockton—lie voice was melancholy as well—' the whole teachings of that school have always seemed to me nothing more than a few fragments of science imperfectly understood, obscured by a few fragments of Christianity imperfectly remembered.'—' You forget,' said Leslie, 'that Dr. Jenkin- son's Christianity is really a new firm trading under an old name,,.und trying to purchase the good-will of the former establishment."

Mr. Luke, the great exponent of the "sweet reasonableness "of a Christianity which has only made the little mistake of attributing creation and salvation to a personal God, is a sketch the original of which no one can mistake, and the verses attributed to him, are very Ingeniously conceived so as at once to recall, and to render ridiculous, the truly fine poetry of the author satirised. But, of course, the vanity depicted is inordinate, and the great intellectual power of the caricatured writer is entirely suppressed. But perhaps the keenest and assuredly the most bitter satire in the book is the sketch of the languid student of msthetic principles, Mr. Rose, who thinks that all the active ages of the world have been leading up to the age of self-conscious enjoyment, and providing men with new sensations and perceptions for the appreciation of all the old pleasures and of many new ones which it only needed the discriminating power of culture, and complete indifference to the great practical ends of life, to enjoy. A more savage blow at the moral indifference of the resthetic temper to the welfare of -others than the following could not easily have been struck

"I was merely thinking,' said Mr. Rose, who had been murmuring to himself at intervals for some time, of a delicious walk I took last week, by the river side, between Charing Cross and Westminster. The great clock struck the chimes of midnight, a cool wind blew, and there went streaming on the wide wild waters with long vistas of reflected lights wavering and quivering in them; and I roamed about for hours, hoping I might see some unfortunate cast herself from the Bridge of Sighs. It was a night I thought well in harmony with despair. 4 Fancy,' exclaimed Mr. Rose, 'the infinity of emotions which the sad sudden splash in the dark river would awaken in one's mind,—and all due to that one poem of Hood's."

And his subsequent explanation that the real use of belief and of disinterested action is to thrill the nerves of those incapable of either, with a deep sense of the beauty of both, is not less telling, and much less malicious than one or two other studies of the same aesthetic student

The opinion,' said Mr. Rose, 'which, by the way, you slightly misrepresent, is not mine only, but that of all those of our own day who are really devoting themselves to art for its own sake. I will try to explain the reason of this. In the world's life, just as in the life of a man, there are certain periods of eager and all-absorbing action, and these are followed by periods of memory and reflection. We then look back upon our past, and become for the first time conscious of what we are, and of what we have done. We then see the dignity of toil, and the grand results of it, the beauty and the strength of faith, and the fervent power of patriotism, which, whilst we laboured, and believed, and loved, we were quite blind to. Upon such a reflective period has the world now entered. It has acted and believed already ; its task now is to learn to value action and belief—to feel and to be thrilled at the beauty of them. And the chief means by which it can learn this is art,—the art of a renaissance. For by the power of such art, all that was beautiful, strong, heroic, or tender in the past,—all the actions, passions, faiths, aspirations of the world, that lie so many fathom deep in the years—float upwards to the tranquil surface of the present, and make our lives like what seems to me one of the loveliest things in nature, the iridescent film on the face of a stagnant water. Yes, the past is not dead, unless we choose that it shall be so. Christianity itself is not dead. There is "nothing of it that doth fade," but turns "into some- thing rich and strange," for us, to give a new tone to our lives with. And believe me,' Mr. Rose went on, gathering earnestness, 'that the hap- piness possible in such conscious periods is the only true happiness. Indeed, the active periods of the world were not really happy at all. We only fancy them to have been so by a pathetic fallacy. Is the hero happy during his heroism ? No, but after it, when he sees what his heroism was, and reads the glory of it in the eyes of youth or maiden '" That the book makes fun of latitudinarian cant, and anthetic cant, and. of evangelical agnosticism, is thus clear enough. And it is also true that in the very subtle bit of cynicism devoted to showing that all the higher pleasures of life, and "the higher vicious pleasures as much as, if not more than, the virtuous," depend on the recognition of the mysterious gulf between right and wrong, the author intends to show how much the intensity of life has been increased, and its whole significance deepened, to good and evil men alike, by the Christian revelation. But if the inference intended is, as we rather hope, a positive one, one in favour of faith as a rational thing as well as a desirable thing, we hold it somewhat unfortunate that the only believer in the company of disputants who seems to have any seriousness at all should be one so very unequal to the position as Miss Merton. On the whole, this very successful squib and satire seems to us almost as well adapted,—we do not mean intended,— to advance the cause of the more thorough and deeper scepticism, as to damage the cause of that shallower and feebler scepticism which takes upon itself the airs, without sharing the life, of faith.