DEAN CHURCH ON THE MELANCHOLY SIDE OF RELIGION.

THE late Dean of St. Paul's is the last preacher whom we should be disposed to accuse of preaching a gloomy

religion. Nowhere else is there one by whom we could find fuller justice done to the grandeur and beauty and hope and joy which the religion of Christ produces in human life. Nowhere else is there one who shows us so plainly the natural greatness of man, even before the supernatural teaching of Revelation had brought out that which was noblest in our life. He has appreciated the meaning of mere civilisation itself,—that god of the progressive party,—as no other religious teacher has appreciated it. He is full of the admirations which mere intellect and art and subtle thought have elicited from the most sympathetic of cultivated minds.

No one has understood better the finer beauties of poetry, the wonderful voice given even by those who are not religious, to the passions and the anguish of unregenerate man. If ever there were a preacher who could not be accused of ignoring the mightier aspects of the natural man, it was the late Dr. Church. And yet the new volume of his Sermons,* which contains many of the finest things he has written, and some of the noblest passages in the English language, is more remarkable from beginning to end for the insight it shows into what we may call the gloomy side of religion, than even for the note of triumph which usually concludes his survey of the religious solution of the riddles he unfolds.

The volume begins with a singularly fine study of Pascal, one of the greatest of those who have sounded all the depths of human anguish as well as of human faith. It selects from amongst our own English divines Bishop Butler, of whom we always think as the greatest of those severe and almost austere thinkers who have yet done justice to the nature of man even in its least regenerate aspects. It gives us discussion after discussion of the secret of our great religious disappointments, devoting one singularly fine sermon to that special subject. And it ends with one of the most powerful pictures we have ever met with of "the awful shadow" which broods over the Christendom of our own day :-

" No stranger collection of mistakes and surprises could be made than a list of the falsified predictions of the wisest men. History is full of them. We know not what awaits us ; and with all that makes us glad, no one can be blind to changes, to pres- ages, of a very different kind. We see in our day energy, daring, confidence, force of character, even self-devotion, given, as I don't think they were ever given before, to the overthrow, the suppres- sion, the extinction of what we believe to be the hopes of man- kind. I am not speaking of our own case alone ; Christendom, after all, is one, and all are interested in the fortunes of every part ; and all over Christendom there is the same awful shadow. Apparent dim, facies. Not doubtfully visible in the darkness of

The appalling future as it nearer draws,

there are the new enemies with which Christian faith, and all that it involves and protects, will have to reckon. To the old spirit of mockery, coarse or refined, to the old wrangle of argument, also coarse or refined, has succeeded the spirit of grave,

• Published by Macmillan and Co.

measured, determined negation—no longer raising quostiose and urging objections, but starting from the assumption that everything is decisively and finally ruled against us, that an in- telligence and all honesty, it may be reluctantly, views our claims as hopeless. It is in the air, this implacable foe. It fears not to speak out ; it imposes its axioms and its principles on society and legislation ; but, in still more subtle and impalpable ways, it meets us at every turn, in literature, in the press, in what furnishes nine-tenths of the reading and thinking of the thousands who read." (pp. 346-7.) No one can say that the late Dean Church was a pessimist. He did justice at least as full to the greatness that shows itself in the present day as he did to the dark threads by which our whole civilisation is shot. But that is exactly the reason why he of all our great preachers faced the evil and the misery

of life so boldly. He was not afraid to look it straight in the face, because he had the key to all true courage. And there- fore he of all our modern thinkers is the most impressive, when be shows us the melancholy which tracks every step of our great faith as surely as the sun brings out the blackness of the clouds which have just swept over our heads.

Indeed we doubt if any great thinker ever was an optimist in the sense of feeling the brightness more keenly than he felt the darkness of human life and energy. After all, the sense of pain, of suffering, of failure, of sin, is deep within

us, while the grandeur and splendour of our hopes are almost all given to us only in anticipation, in promise, on conditions,—many of them what men count very stern con-

ditions,—and at a cost paid in the bitterest disappoint- ments and by the most scalding tears. We all believe that if we are faithful, if we hold fast to the grace whiels is given us, we may yet attain to a destiny far greater than any which we could have reached without all these throes and pangs. We do not doubt the existence of that fullness of joy,of those statesof existence of which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the immeasurable sweetness and bright- ness. We do not doubt that a "beatific vision " awaits those who can comply with the conditions, which far exceeds the highest auguries with which the strangely broken sunshine of human life, has ever inspired us. But in the meantime our nature always clings to us, in spite of the promise of its redemption. We cannot escape its weakness, its meanness, its sudden failures, its singular mixture of what is low

with what is high. We are always living in our own shadows, though we have great gleams of light from above. As Dean

Church finely says, in his account of what Pascal teaches ea, " On our knees we need to remember the deep abysses of judgment and mercy in which the foundations of our prayers are laid." Without the deepest possible distrust of what clings so close to us, of what we may call the contemptible side of our nature, we cannot really long, as we should, for what is offered to us by Christ's beatitudes. No one has

felt "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" like St. Paul, and without so feeling it, he could not have felt that ecstasy of gratitude for the promised deliverance from it which he has expressed in his memorable foretastes of what is to displace and to succeed it. " The whole creation," he thought, "groaneth and travaileth to-

gether until now." And it has groaned and travailed ever since, and will go on groaning and travailing while maa is man, until his nature is really transformed into the

likeness of him in whose promises we trust. All the greater thinkers of this world, old or new, have felt, the shadows and the anguish before they have obtained any vision of the " kindly light" which is to lead them through

the encircling gloom. Pascal brooding over the anguish of life, Bishop Butler riding about very fast on his black pony, and subduing the agitation of his heart at the superficiality and folly of his age by the rapid exercise, are painted by Dr. Church as representatives of two very different countries and ages in this modern world, and yet two equally sombre and equally triumphant. For the point of departure from which both started was the same, the profound displeasure with which they recognised what was in them, and compared it with those glimpses of a more noble existence of which they enjoyed the glorious hope, but also felt the present impossibility. While they were what they were, they groaned and travailed with St. Paul. If, remaining as they were, they could have put off that groaning and travailing, they would have put off also the capacity for that greater existence for which they longed, when they might see the Eternal as he is, and be so trans- formed by communion with him that all the littleness and impurity of their nature would be burned away. How could the light be loved if the darkness had not been felt as pain- fully even as the ancient demigod felt the Nessus-shirt which burned deep into the marrow of his bones P Dr. Church points out not only that the most religions of the numberless Christians who have diffused Christianity among the nations of the world throughout the last nineteen hundred years, have been the greatest sufferers from the pangs with which the natural man is pierced when he tries to conform himself to the high ideal of the divine example, as well as from those much deeper pangs by which he is pierced when he makes no such endeavour, but that the history of the Christian

faith itself is full of disappointments,—such disappointments as John the Baptist suffered when he sent from the prison in

which he was languishing out his life, to ask whether he whom he had made known to the people was indeed the Christ, though

instead of setting his great forerunner free, he went quietly on preaching to the inhabitants of Galilee, without assuming the power popularly attributed to the Messiah. " We expect,"

says Dr. Church, " to be disappointed in the world; but to be disappointed in what has come to heal and save the world, this is bitterness indeed." And yet how often have we been so disappointed:-

" I suppose that such a feeling is the feeling of many—the

feeling, at times, perhaps, of every one who thinks at all—about the general result of religion in the world. Religion is so great in its ideas : it is so partial and imperfect in fulfilling them. Its words of promise are so magnificent and unstinted,—promises of forgiveness, of cleansing, of victory, of restoration, of improve- ment, of elevation, of joy, of peace ; yet in the plain matter-of- fact realities of life and character, they seem on a large scale to come on the whole to so little. Its pledges of grace and strength are so boundless ; yet why are men still so weak—why is good- ness, not to say saintliness, so rare ? Its rules of living, its standard of motive and action, are pitched as high as they can be, and are exemplified in the Holiest and most adorable of Lives ; but to how few is the Sermon on the Meant and St. Paul's description of charity the real law of conduct ? And then, again, consider the descriptions of religion in the Bible, the prospects which prophecy holds up before us, the anticipations to which the language of prophecy has always given rise, the loftier and more spiritual interpretation put on them in the New Testament : what might it not have seemed reasonable, in the days of the Apostles, to look forward to, of the victories of religion ; what might they not have hoped for, from the gifts of Pentecost, the labours of preachers, the sufferings of saints and martyrs." (pp. 302-3.) Yet the explanation is the same for the many apparent failures of religion in history, as for its many apparent failures to heal the individual heart. It is this,—that the social nature of man is as wayward and impenetrable by sudden impressions as the individual nature of man. Great

impressions are made, and then they subside. And not till an interval of indifference is past, do new and still deeper

impressions make their way again to the heart of society.

Renovation and restoration are long and wearisome pro- cesses, and would inevitably end in failure were they not always springing up afresh from their divine source, deep in the deepest sources of our redemption. The great lesson both of life and history is that Regeneration is a slow and very gradual process, though it may have sudden beginnings. The medium in which Christianity has to work is a highly resisting medium, though fortunately our nature can never lapse into content with its own poverty. Only by a succession of severe dis- ciplines is even the most nearly Christian society gradually

moulded into something a little more like the Christian ideal than it was ; and as the centuries go on, the prospect of success still becomes more dim, not because the end is more distant, but because our sight becomes more keen into the great distance which has yet to be traversed.