6 AUGUST 1881, Page 17

A SCOTCH DISCIPLE OF CARLYLE.*

AFTER reading these discourses with some care, we must confess that we can feel no certainty concerning their author's special object in publishing them, and that we are utterly unable to

understand why, when he had decided upon the publication, he should refrain from placing his name upon the title-page. There is nothing, or next to nothing, in the volume sufficiently unsound to expose him to censure from the authorities even of a Church on the northern side of the Tweed, so the reserve can- not be accounted for by an instinct of self-preservation ; and what the author has to say—his message, as he would probably call it —is not sufficiently novel or striking to arouse that measure of interest which anonymity only heightens, but cannot create. In addition to these considerations, there is another, which is even more obvious. It is not said whether these sermons have or have not been preached, but we are distinctly told that the lecture on Thomas Carlyle was delivered, and, therefore, the authorship of " The Strait Gate " and its companion discourses must be known to the hearers of the lecture, and probably to many others besides. The point is not of much importance, but the gratuitous anonymity, taken in conjunction with a somewhat ambitious preface, is an indication that the writer attaches a degree of importance to his work which is hardly likely to be attributed to it by many of his readers.

It will be inferred from what has been said that we do not regard these discourses as of great value, and we at once admit that the inference is just. As a mere contribution to homiletic literature, they would not demand more than the briefest notice ; but they do possess a certain peculiar interest as a concrete illustration of the nature of the influence exerted by two or three great modern writers—notably, by Thomas Carlyle—upon that very large class of minds in whom intellectual sensibility is in excess of intellectual vigour. Such minds do not originate, but they are fascinated by originality of either matter or form, and drawn by an irresistible attraction to what may be described in the slang of the day as " sensational" thought. Still, though they are drawn to it and though they devour it eagerly, they cannot assimilate it ; no vital chemistry acts upon the raw material, which, therefore, remains an alien and a disturbing substance, the result naturally being that the intellectual out- come of such minds is deficient in homogeneity, and, therefore, deficient also in pith, point, and force.

This volume is the work of such a mind as this,—a mind by no means destitute of native intelligence and capability, but entirely overweighted by a mass of extraneous material which it cannot carry, and beneath which it lies practically helpless. The opening sentences of the preface are full of promise, and are on that account all the more irritating, as they raise expecta- tions which the succeeding pages bitterly disappoint. We there learn that:-

" The discourses that follow are selected from a few which were written from time to time amid other duties, and they were con- ceived from a stand-point which will not be regarded, I imagine, out of harmony with rational belief. After some little study of other religions, and in the light of a certain measure of philosophical speculation up to date, I am convinced that the Christian religion is the only faith which has yet appeared which is at once worthy of the Maker of man, agreeable to man's nature, and suited to his The Strait Gate, and Other Discourse', with a Lecture on Thomas Carlyle. By

a Scotch Preacher. Edinburgh Andrew Elliot. •

case ; and the discourses given indicate the grounds on which this. conviction rests. My idea is that Christianity is so germane to- humanity under existing conditions that it is its own witness, and that it needs only to be exhibited in its own light to command the credit and confidence it bespeaks. It is essentially a spiritual system ; that is, it is representative of the true and eternal life of the spirit, and needs only to be conceived as such, to be accepted as ' the way, the truth, and the life.' "

We do not quote this passage as embodying any originality of view, for of course the thought in it is so familiar that, were it not for its inexhaustibly illuminating power, we might be dis- posed to call it trite ; but to show that the writer really does

understand the reason of his existence as a present-day- preacher, which is, as we take it, the setting forth of Christ- ianity as something the vital reality of which can be universally apprehended and also universally accepted, because not depend- ent upon anything which can be made a matter of controversy

by reasonable men. Unfortunately, experience has taught us by many painful examples that men may know exactly what needs to be done, and yet prove unable to do it, and the most recent example of this inability is provided by the Scotch preacher. We do not deny that there is much in this volume which bears upon and helps to bear out the grand theorem stated in the passage we have quoted : but the book, as a. whole, is small, inconclusive, fragmentary,—an illustration of what in painting is expressively called " niggling" work. The cause of this has been partly indicated, and we must devote• the remainder of our space to exhibiting the method of its operation.

A large portion of the long preface, from which a few sen-

tences have been quoted, is devoted to a statement of the preacher's attitude towards the most prominent forms of modern Christian thought ,which consists of criticisms, hasty, shallow, and therefore necessarily unfair, of the three great parties which are popularly known as High, Low, and Broad. Of no one of these parties does the writer seem to possess the full comprehension requisite for such very authoritative judicial utterances, and the animadversions would call for no comment, were it not for some curious sentences which occur near the close of them. We are told that:— "The master-defect of the Broad-Church creed, t me, is this,— that it fails to recognise the polar principle in Christianity as the radical, essential principle of all valid, spiritual life. This is what ihr known in the Christian system as, in its initial stage, the doctrine of the new birth, and the fact of which Christ alone, of all spiritual teachers, insists on as essential not only to entrance into, but even to the recognition of, any kingdom of God on earth. The doctrine, doubtless, has been frightfully misconceived in the Church systems generally, as it could not fail to be, ever since the notion took posses. sion of her that her proper function was to comfort men with the

of heaven hereafter, instead of withal training them in the mys- tery of a heavenly life here ; but none the less is it, rightly regarded, a fundamental principle and a distinctive feature of the Christian

faith There are only two men known to me in the genera- tion we belong to who have clearly and persistently preached this principle, and these men are, so far as I have remarked, distrustfully regarded by all sections of the Church. I am proud to think of them as my own countrymen, one of them to the core a Scotchman, and the other directly inoculated with Scotch blood. The one is Thomas Carlyle, and the other John Ruskin, to both of whom, I trust, the Church will" ere long confess a debt."

We do not care to defend the, to us, unknown heresiarchs here identified with the Broad-Church party from a charge to which,. it would seem, all other parties are equally obnoxious ; but it is impossible to avoid a pause at the curious statement that a " polar " and "fundamental" principle of Christianity has been practically ignored by all accredited Christian teachers, and been preached " clearly and persistently " only by two lay writers,who are "distrustfully regarded by all sections of the Church." If this be a fact, it is a fact sufficiently important and sufficiently startling to justify any writer in devoting a volume, or if necessary several volumes, to a statement of the evidence in its favour ; and readers of this particular volume may be pardoned if they pay less attention to the views of the Scotch preacher himself, than to what he has to tell them concerning the views of the eminent writers who stand alone in their com- prehension of Christianity. Mr. Ruskin may, however, be set aside at once, for he has, with almost aggressive humility, pro- fessed to be only a follower of his " master;" and Thomas Car- lyle, therefore, stands alone as a nineteenth-century interpreter of the central verities of the Christian faith. The Scotch. preacher naturally adopts the most obvious and reason- able method of vindicating the astounding claim .which he sets up on behalf of the philosopher of Chelsea, and his six discourses are studded with quotations from, Mr. Carlyle's voluminous works ; but, curiously enough, we find little in these quotations that has more dis- tinct bearing upon Christianity than it has, for ex- ample, upon Mahommedanism, and nothing that has any bearing at all upon what we are told is its " polar principle." The phrase the " new birth " has a certain mystical quality which might have attracted Mr. Carlyle, though we cannot remember that he ever used it; but it is certain that if lie had used it, he would have used it in an esoteric and entirely non-theological sense, that would have been more satisfactory to Mr. Frederick Harrison than to Cardinal Manning, or even to the Scotch preacher. It is clear that the author of these discourses, like many thousands of other readers, has been, in the original sense of the word, " fascinated" by Mr. Carlyle ;- has become convinced, first, that utterances which have impressed him so vaguely, yet so strongly, must be true ; and next, that they must not only be true, but that they must contain the very truth which happens to stand in greatest need of emphatic proclamation. Exclusive or almost exclusive devotion to any one author is certain to lead into this error all but the most cautious readers, and cautious readers are not wont to expose themselves to danger. Gabriel Betteredge, iu Mr. Wilkie Collins's story of The Moonstone, professed to find in .Robinson Crusoe a solution for every practical problem of life ; and Sartor liesartus is to the Scotch preacher what Defoe's narrative was to the English butler. It need hardly be said that this method of treating the work of a great writer not only does injustice to truth, but also to the great writer himself. There is much that is stimulating and much that is elevating in Mr. Carlyle's work, and all that is elevating has some sort of affinity with Christianity; but to speak of him as a distinctively Christian teacher is an abuse of language. In the strict sense of the word, he was not even a religious teacher, for religion seems to us to demand a personal object of love and reverence ; and for this demand, Mr. Carlyle, both by his speech and his silence, consistently manifested a supreme scorn. We might, indeed, go further than this, and say that not a few of his most characteristic utterances were not merely non- Christian, but absolutely anti-Christian. The genius of such books as the Latter-Day Pamphlets and the Life of Frederick is not simply alien to the genius of the New Testament, but directly opposed to it ; and we confess our astonishment that any Christian preacher can possibly fail to perceive such obvious antagonism. The Scotch preacher, however, does fail to per- ceive it ; and though in his extravagantly indiscriminating eulogy of Carlyle, the Frederick has no more than a mention, the Latter-Day Pamphlets, with all their cynicism and mis- anthropy, are classed with two or three other works, as con- stituting unitedly " a perfect repertory of wisdom, bearing on all that is radical and vital to any just, social relationship of man to man." The writer's non-success in transforming Mr. Carlyle into a father of the Church is made almost amusingly manifest, by the impression which his numerous quotations leave upon the mind of the reader. They absolutely refuse to harmonise with their conventional surroundings of divisions and subdivisions, of exposition and edification, and seem to be asking themselves, " What are we doing here ?" We have seldom seen a more curious instance of the mistake of putting new wine into old bottles, than is provided by this attempt to make Christian sermons a vehicle for the proclamation of a new and very vague gospel according to Carlyle.