REST IN THE CHURCH
EXHIBITS a considerable falling oil' compared with its predecessor, both in the attraction of the book and the ability of the writer. There are to be found in it all the defects of From Oxford to Rome, without the power of that rather remarkable production. There is the same fragment- ary and inartistical mode of presenting the story as before; but, unluckily, there is no variety or interest in the matter of the tale. The persons are nearly as dreamy and unreasonable in their yearnings and aspirations ; but they are not placed in situations to excite either care or sympathy, nor have they so much attraction in themselves. A still greater source of failure is, that the mental struggles of the leading persons have no suffi- cient human or religions interest and result. In From Oxford to Rome,
the struggles of Eustace A between Anglicanism, Tractarianism, and Popery, his dissatisfaction with Romanism when he got to it, and his relapse to his old communion in the hour of death, had at least a meta- physical interest, and so to speak a story. The fate of his sister Margaret, whose fanatical husband deserted her and her children for a Popish con- vent, was more interesting, for the real depth of the distress ; there was be- sides something fresh as well as peculiar in the general stratum and senti- ments of the book. Rest in the Church displays little more than the dregs of this novelty ; the results proposed are of the poorest kind in themselves, and without any general conclusion at all. A sketch of the principal characters will indicate the nature of the tale.
Emil Norman, the hero, is a Tractarian divine, but without any of the charm attaching to Eustace; indeed, his whole function seems to be to form, in conjunction with his sister Ursula, the religious character of the heroine, Helen Riddesdale. His exertions in this way are to the reader rather of the " slowest "; nor, indeed, is any concern felt for him whatever. In the huddled-up conclusion, he is made to turn Romanist; partly because his bishop has rebuked and suspended him for innovations in his parish ; partly because a Romanist lady, on bidding him farewell, grasps his wrist and warns him, in all the emphasis of capital letters, to remember, "there is but ONE CHURCH—ONE ALONE."
Helen, the heroine, is the beautiful, high-spirited, and petted daughter of General Riddesdale. The veteran is anything but a Puseyite; and when his fashionable daughter is converted to oddities, he is wroth, and gets the offending curate dismissed the parish. Ursula Norman, how- ever, accompanies her friend Helen to steer her through the dangers of a London fashionable campaign, now that she is alive to its rocks and quicksands; and this is successfully accomplished by Ursula's presence and the advice of her brother. In the sequel, General Riddesdale dies, and the once repudiated Emil Norman attends his deathbed. Helen' as we understand, turns Romanist, and retires to a convent in the Holy Land— for no better reason than because her Romanist cousin Ximene died there, in the creed in which she had been born.
Ursula Norman is perhaps too godly clever—has too much of the spi- ritual director about her—to be very attractive in a fiction ; but more of the sentiment of romance attaches to her than any of the others. In early girlhood, she has been crossed in love, and henceforth she devotes herself to religion ; and though the idea of her trouble has come from the circulating library, it inspires more sympathy than the theology and casniatry of Rest in the Church. Ursula also is consistent : she does not desert the Anglican colours for those of Rome, but is left waiting for the establishment of a counterpart of the Sisters of Charity.
The professed object of Rest in the Church is to inculcate the beauty of obedience. In her logic the writer fails as completely as she did in From Oxford to Rome, if not more so. The principal persons often do not exhibit obedience at all. Emil Norman first relies upon his own "pri- vate judgment" in becoming a Tractarian; he sets up his "private judg- ment" against his rector and his bishop; and though there is no judgment displayed in his conversion to Rome, there is will, which must be worse. Helen reasons before she obeys, in submitting to go into the world in compliance with the wish of her father ; she reasons herself towards the Church of Rome, if not into it. A veil is drawn over the deathbed of General Riddesdale; but reflection appears to have induced him to apply to Mr. Norman, and it is to be supposed he formed a judgment upon what was told him. The only truly obedient person is the born Romanist, Ximene Riddesdale ; who does obey her confessor against her inclination: and this is the only way in which religious obedience can be shown—sub- mission to the ministers of the church in which one is bred. Even there, however, judgment ought to be exercised, to know whether the minister is truly expounding the voice of the church ; the most devout Romanists sometimes have recourse to "further advice."
The absence of any sufficient story or even incident, with the paucity of matter of a really attractive kind, seems to have urged the author upon seeking effect by writing. This, as was to be expected, has not succeeded. The periods are rather long and lumbering than forcible, and from an un- due accumulation of images in one sentence, or on one subject, the atten- tion is wearied ; the description becomes literal from an analogous cause. The following are some of the beat passages, and most illustrative of the composition.
TEMPTATIONS OF HIGH LIFE*
To Town, for the last few weeks of the season, Lady Helen and General Riddes- dale journied. London was still in high carnival; gayety and lustre, crowd and dissipatioe, opened to them on every side. The spnng had been one of unusual bustle; and the few thousands whose presence gives life, and whose migration abandons the Metropolis to its million of nobodies, remained in their unbroken circles shedding attractions and amiabilities over the charmed quarters. The house in Spring Gardens was besieged with welcomes; and invites for the closing month of fashion assailed the new arrivals like so many perfumed missiles. And the temptations of high class pressed upon the path of the neophyte. What these temptations are, perhaps those only who have been set, for a while at least, in their midst, can at all realize: whether they extend in equal force to any extra-metropolitan society., we much doubt. An hereditary aristocracy, vast wealth and luxury, and unfathomable pride, with the negation of a church, are . their latent occasions: and these, indeed, may be found in provincial dwellings; but the immunity of numbers and the neighbourhood of a court create new fea- tures in the illustrious, and deepen those elsewhere developed. There is a multi- tude whose party custom it is to decry the patrician race—to call it a moral vio- lence, a fountain of sin, a source of curses; these will neither understand our meaning nor our elucidation. There is a number of vampire people of whom high birth is more esteemed than canonization; these, entrenched within their own assiduous blindness, will aver that more blessed is the noble in his temptations than the mean man in his simplicity: there is a meagre-hearted sect, who, because their own furniture and accoutrements are by no means irreproachable, would wage a war of extermination against all that are so, and become content only then when they should see everything superior to their upstart selves reduced to the level possible to their own attainment—these, no doubt, will readily pronounce piety and nobility to be utterly incongruous. But one who would truly comprehend the difficulties of uniting in the high life of present England, of London, religion with rank—one who would learn how to pray for those who are "set in slippery places "—let him use his entree, if he have one, into one or two of the houses of the great—not the nouveaux riches, but the chivalrous, ideal, historic class; let him dwell for a while in the midst of their silken refinements, live and walk and abide in their golden chambers, partake of the delicate joys which are indigenous there; see, and suffer to enter into him, the propriety, the polish, the purity, the perfume of every bright saloon, and of every movement and every motive there,— the indescribable grace, the ineffable civilization, the exquisite humanity, the charity, the absence of noise, of hurry, of astonishment, of every infliction of pain, of every confusion. But his plainness will recal times when the rich furniture and the fragrant things, and order, and propriety, and lowliness of air, were gifts given to the house of God, while in the "own house" of the Christian man the crucifix was the object most costly and conspicuous: he perhaps will disadvanta- geously compare these times and those, and question for a moment the presence of Christian faith in those illuminated and "celled" houses. Let him abide longer, and discover the high valuation these great in their secret hearts set upon their greatness; their scorn of the vulgar mass, who are to them as beasts of bur- then; their conviction that equipages and genealogies are the supreme good; and the tacit, latent, pervading laxity as to countenancing wrongdoing, by an obli- viousness most polite but most sinful: let him remark the princely independence of authority, the reckless display of power, the indignant rousing at the remotest implication of contempt: let him fully see, feel, and understand all this, and let him consider whether the Catholic Church, that image of ancient majesty, before which mortal crowns and coronets mast be as dust, could be set up in the midst of these rival and new splendours—how these people could endure the entrance into their earthly paradise of the severe celestial rule; solitude, fasting, celibacy, poverty, martyrdom: and, alas ! he will be too ready to question whether, by even the hardest possibility, these rich can come into the kingdom of God.
THE TRAcTARIAN wiTH THE sEcTARIAN DEAD.
As the curate returned to the church, from what he supposed his concluding duty, he was met by another mourning group, bearing among them a little coffin. The persons were known to him by sight, and in a moment the whole of an un- happy fact flashed upon his mind. They were of those who since the meeting- house had been opened were seldom or never seen in their former place at church; while, though two children had been added to their family, they had not brought them for baptism; and the remark made by the clerk sate the recent death of the infant, for whom the grave had been hurriedly preparing, occurred to him, and accounted for his not having received the due notice with the rest. The emergency was sudden, but it was no embarrassment: Mr. Norman had not now to resolve to resist the first attempt of mixing the dust of the baptized and the infidel together in that consecrated ground which lay around him. Ac- cordingly, he quietly asked the leader of the funeral group if the child had been baptized; and being informed, as he anticipated, that it had not, said that the corpse must then be interred in a part of the churchyard which he indicated, and without the customary rites. The man, the father of the deceased child, was of a rough and altercating spirit; and the lessons of Voluntarm he had imbibed left him, as may be conceived, none the more disposed to obedient sub- mission to Church power than the natural heart ever is. At first he asserted his rights, and declared that his mother and two of his children lay beside the spot where the grave had been opened, and that this should be placed with them. lie was reminded that they had been made members of Christ through the holy sacramenta, and therefore were fit aubjects for Christian burial and the objects of all Christian hope; while this infant, though not through its own fault, had been deprived of these privileges, and left in the infidel state, and must therefore, while resigned to God's mercy, ever abundant, but in such cases nupromised, be 'operated from the holy in its death, the cleansed from the unclean, the defiling from the purified: and at these calm but decided reasons he did not restrain the expreseion of a dogged anger, while his wife broken-heartedly implored the cons- passionate feelings of the clergyman. It was a grievous scene, and Mr. Norman felt that he needed indeed His strength who said, "I came not to send peace on the earth, but a sword," to nerve his arm to firmly pass that sword between the Truth and Error then.
Several persons having collected about the party, he desired the parents and mourners to follow him to the vestry; and there, when they were gathered round him, some weeping, some filled with evil feelings, he, with no bitterness, but earnestly and faithfully, opened to them the Scriptures. * • The persons addressed, though poor and of very slender education, understood all this plainly enough: they had heard it all before, long needed though it was since, from the pulpit of the church, and in the catechizings, and by thew cottage fireside, from the lips of the same faithful teacher; but they had never heard it under the like circumstance, never when it came so impressively home to them; and now it smote upon their hearts with a double force. It was evident that they were humbled and softened; and then Mr. Norman spoke to them more tenderly, and with that soul-winning sympathy which the firmest, we had almost said the severest mind, best knows how to give. Not a word more of resistance was offered to his directions for the interment of the corpse; and he left them, generously promising to discharge for them the whole expenses of the funeral, which would be considerably enhanced by the preparation of another grave, and to send his own servant to the ground to prevent any uncomfortable circumstances arising from the case, as many idlers had by that time assembled in curiosity of the result.
From the preface the reader learns that the book is so far unfinished, that it was intended to be continued to a greater length and with added cha- racters. It may be thought that the incompleteness partly explains the comparative failure: hut we do not think so. There is neither action, in- cident, nor sympathy with the persons, their character, or their fate; and when the elements of success are wanting, extension would rather add to tediousness than remove it.
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