LETTERS TO ME SCATTERED.
WE doubt the wisdom of republishing these letters in one colleo- tion. Letters, whether private or published, however valuable at the moment when they are written, are, and are meant to be, ephemeral, except in very unusual instances, and we do not dis- cern any sufficient reason for rescuing those before us from the commou fate. Yet we may be mistakeu. Different minds assimi- late different kinds of fool, and that which seems distastefully plain fare to one man may be eagerly swallowed by his neighbour, —with a better appetite. There are thousands who take heart again from the notes of "Auld Lang Syne " or "Home, Sweet Home," to whom a sonata of Be.ethoveu's would convey little-mean- ing, awaken no thrill. Shall we say they have no music in their souls ? The subtlest devil, men with much culture and narrow sym- pathies have to fight, is intellectual contempt. Why will " Evange- line " be read by thousands, while " Fifine"—which, crabbed as it is, has a hundred times the stuff in it,—will scarcely be opened by tens-? or further—though conscious we are risking the scornful looks of most or our readers—why has the beauty and wisdom of Wordsworth remained unheeded or distasteful to the hundreds-of thousands who have devoured the platitudes of Tupper ? Be.. cause the mass or men are philistines, ignorant, without brains, without mind, without sweetness and light, cry its full chorus the disciples of the great apostle of culture. Is- it not just possible that our contempt is a little uncalled for? May it not be that very much which is mere platitude or worse to us may be something higher than the daily thought of those who, therefore, take pleasure therein,—who, striving after something which shall express the thoughts which so often lie dumb within them, stretch out their hands to that which, though below one, is above another, and judged by other measurement than our line may be higher on their feet and knees looking up. ward, than we wlio, after all, may be very puny, though standing. on their shoulders. A very short time since the present writer was. compelled to listen to a sermon which in the impatience of the moment was put down as abominably common-place, till we held our peace, finding a man who had as much right to elbow-room in the world as we, and whose skill in his own work was far greater,, his burden heavier, had found in the words we despised, human- sympathy and help, encouragementin his daily fight, in short had. found an element of strength we missed.
Now we had to let these and similar thoughts have what Mr.. M. Arnold would call their free-play, around the central fact, Mr. Lynch's book, before we could, by any means, do it the justice it. deserves. We have here a series of papers, written to the "Scattered," under which name Mr. Lynch includes-" the thought-- ful minority in the multitude of professed Christians." But the thoughtful minority, who were in Mr. Lynch's mind were not by any means the same as the class so designated generally among literary men. They were rather the young men and women "from learned leisure far," who in the raid st of the city moil, and all the wear- and tear of an over-busy life, "often peculiarly acquainted with grief," "would know the truth" :—we might add, and in it find freedom :—Mr. Lynch adds, and in it find rest. The words belong to different schools, but originate with one Master, and are often synonymous in thought. There are few Mr. Lynch addresses who will not realise that he understands- their case when he speaks of them as "sickening at the rancid unction which would bedaub a man, instead of teaching and convincing him." The "Scattered" Mr. Lynch addresses are, he says, usually persons of more than average capacity, though sometimes of less than the average general education. Such persons would be materially helped by them papers as they appeared from time to time, slight but suggestive, not undertaking systematic teaching, but just a kindly hand held out to the self-taught traveller to help him a little further on his. way. They are to the ordinary and impartial reader distinctly injured by being put into theirpresent form, but it may be that this. little volume is a sort of treasure-home to those to whom int-scattered pages in days past proved useful. When Mr. Lynch says to -those impatient of tradition that 'while incrusting, it may- also contain the truth' an incrustation may be a protection,' he dates a fact which, platitude as it may be to those who have opportunity to sift evidence, is a weapon in the hands of many who, with no • Letters to the Scattered. By Thomas T. Lynch. London : Strabau and Co. 1872. such power, are in constant contact with, those who would break to pieces every ark that its treasure might be more easily discovered. In the first letter there are some valuable hints on the relative value of theology to religion :—" So surely," he writes, "as the brain has its sheltering skull, so surely will living Christianity
have a doctrinal tenement. The bones seem the least liv- ing part of our frame, yet within them is the marrow." 41 Friends, when it is wise, because a skull is dry and hideous, to say, that brain and marrow have no need of bone, then it will be wise, because the Church of the living God has around it a neglected graveyard, cumbered with the fragments of dead theologies, to say that a living religion can dispense with theology altogether." Yet Mr. Lynch himself is no theologian. Some of the saddest pages of his history were in connection with that fact. And his eonacioumeas of his own dislike to a dogmatic labelling of Christian principles is illustrated with not unpungent satire in a little anecdote, for the extreme homeliness of which he apologises with the remark, "Dignity is but in its novitiate if it is too puncti- lious." We give it as it stands, because even in its extreme simpleness it is the key to much in the history of one whose life is worth comprehending :—
"Two or three days ago, then, we dined with a little child whose mamma had prepared for him a very wholesome and delightful pudding.
What is in it ?' said the child.—' There's an egg in it,' said the mother. —' Where's the egg ?' asked the child, after close and incredulous in- spection.—' It is mixed with it,' she explained.—It was impossible to doubt mamma ; so the puzzled little believer went on with his dinner. There was much bewilderment in his faith, but not a whit the less relish in his pudding. Now, there are many grown men and women (not CAristianly full-grown men and women) that, unless they see the very form of a doctrine, will not believe they can have the nutriment of it. They ask, 'Where's the egg?' and if you say, 'It is mixed with it; why, the doctrine of Atonement (or of Justification by Faith, or of Sanctifica- tion by the Spirit, as the case may be) was diffused through the whole of what was said,' they shake their heads suspiciously. They will have nothing to do with such preaching, or such books, or such people. If we tell them, 'There must be bones of creed as well as marrow of religion,' some of them would say, Ay, ay, that's good !" But if we say, 'Surely it is an unhappy and inconvenient limitation of service for so useful and variously applicable a thing as an egg, when a man demands that it shall ibe always boiled, or at least fried, that he may be sure an egg is an egg. Doubtless, seeing is believing ; but ought not tasting to be believing too? He who cannot taste an egg unless he sees it, cannot taste it so very exquisitely, one would think, even when he does see it ; '—if we say thus, it is to be feared some of them will be offended, perceiving that we have spoken the parable against them."
Further on, when writing upon the spirit of inquiry, he says.
4' The very question, is there a God? if uttered unhatefully, has in it a tone of prayer, as if a man besought the dreadful Infinite Nothing that it would cease to be Nothing and become sympathy." And again, "If a man be inquiring about Christianity, he should not meet its historic and spiritual argument with a pitiful sharp- ness, as if one might fight the terrible battle of life with only a pin for a weapon." And again he not inaptly says, "There are men
who talk as if Humanity, being Christianised, Christ might with- draw." We are reminded too of much which Mr. Maurice embodied, in language which has to many of us become sacred, in Mr. Lynch's pages on the fact that Christ was in the world spiritually before He was so historically. The thought is diluted because the recipient in this case could not bear a strong solution, but the same thought is there, clothed in abundant and to our minds distasteful metaphor. Mr. Maurice would have said, A man when he is very much in earnest does not on such a subject need metaphors, and rightly from his side ; but there was One who, seeing, and seeing without contempt, how hard and dense some men's hearts could be, "without a parable spake not unto them." Nevertheless this temptation to let analogy run wild is a veal defect in Mr. Lynch's writing. The most unpleasant instance of it occurs in the fourth letter. We cannot imagine anything more weakening to the effect of the first two lines than the ten which follow :—
" Let, then, the expanded Christian Creed be reduced to this sitn- plicity: a cry, a confession, a song unto Christ of, 'My Lord and my God.' Taking this as the root of Christian Doctrine, then, I say, the floweris Atonement. And if you cast this root into the flowing and troubled waters of human thought, from it, in due time, the full creed will spring ; rising, like the great Regina Lily, it will elastically upbear upon these waters, as they swell and fall, its broad reticulated doctrinal expansions, whose glory and crown shall be this Flower Atonement. And if Atonement is the flower, Redemption is the fruit."
We think few men have devised a happier answer on the much vexed question of inspiration (apart from critical inquiry) than Mr. Lynch, in the few words in which he tells the scattered, that he thinks of inspiration as the soul of the Bible, while the words are its body.
Of the lighter papers in this collection we have little to say. We do not doubt there are minds to which they convey much meaning, but we confess, when, as in the chapter on "What Advantage has the Dissenter ?" the discussion is carried on be- tween "Dr. Differ and Mr. Fast, Mr. Dry, Mr. Quite, and Mr. Chuckle," we are not anxious to make one of the company. "The Man and the Gentleman" is written on the same level, and yet one definition of a gentleman will probably stick to the minds of Mr. Lynch's readers. "A gentleman is a man with the brutish- ness taken out of him." Mr. Matthew Arnold would have put that for us into a page of exquisite English, but we are not sure be would have made the meaning more apparent. It might well have been that while he was yet amongst us, the author of these pages would have felt some pain at the thought that these his lighter papers could be properly appreciated only by uncultivated, though honest and intelligent natures ; but looking down from some clearer height where that noble much-tried spirit now must dwell, will it not rather be a source of purest pleasure if he knows it, —that his spirit, while fettered with its earthly garment, was cast in such a mould that he could speak with a tongue under- stood by "the people," could touch in homely phrase their highest thought, and lead them, not in our way or his way, but in their own way, to an end they did not see from the beginning.
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