CARLYLE ON RELIGIOUS CANT.
MR. FROUDE makes of his last two volumes of Carlyle's life and letters one constantly recurring and perpetu- ally reiterated vituperation of cant; but what cant is, except that it is either absolutely insincere, or—a deeper stage still— sincere insincerity, neither Mr. Fronde nor Carlyle ever plainly says. In one place Carlyle suggests that the mere echoing of other persons' beliefs is pure cant, for he bewails himself much on the misery of living amidst echoes. " Ach Gott !" he says, "it is frightful to live among echoes." Well, if the echoing of other persons' beliefs—that is, believing their belief on their authority —be cant, we must all of us cant on all subjects on which we have not been able to satisfy ourselves. In that case, it is cant to echo the astronomer's prediction of an eclipse, or the wine- merchant's opinion of a brand of wine, or the farmer's of the con- dition of the crops. It would be cant to accept Mr. Carlyle's asser- tion that Sterling's was a "beautiful soul" which "pulsed auroras,"—indeed, as we suspect that to have been a bit of Carlylese cant, the echoing of it might really be cant. Nay, it would even be cant to take it on trust from him that " sea- green incorruptible" is a trustworthy description of Robespierre, or "fiery-real from the great fire-bosom of Nature herself" of Denton. We cannot all of us follow the researches of the historians any more than those of the astronomers or the tradesmen. If we are to have impressions at all on the subjects on which Carlyle himself has given us our impressions, we must "live among echoes." It cannot be cant simply to take on trust the work of others, or to echo on reasonable evidence what we have not had time to investigate for ourselves. Nay, to make original views for our- selves when we have not in reality the means of making them with anything like the justice and truthfulness with which others, whom we might follow and trust, can make them, is itself a very serious sort of cant, of which Carlyle was not un- frequently guilty. Some of his" Latter-Day Pamphlets" appear to us to have been full of attempts to be original on subjects which he did not really understand, though he treated with the most insulting contempt those who understood them far better than himself We should describe cant not as the echoing of others' views or faiths—which we very often ought to echo, because they are far better than any which we could possibly construct of our own—but as the pretence of bearing personal evidence to truths which are not original in us at all, and which are borrowed by us from others, on whose authority alone we accept them. Now, it is not every one who can bear personal testimony to the ultimate foundations even of religious truth, though every one with a religion at all can bear personal testimony to the spiritual strength it gives. No one knew this better than Carlyle, for he bore the most eloquent testimony to the depth of his own father's and mother's faith ; and yet, so far as we can judge, his profound scorn for traditional faiths struck in principle,—though, of course, he did not think so,—at the sincerity of theirs. He wrote with his usual wrath to Mr. Erskine of those who looked at the universe through the "helps and traditions of others." "Others," he said, "are but offering him their miserable spy-glasses, Puseyite, Presby- terian, Free Kirk, Old Greek, Middle-age Italian, imper- fect, not to say distorted, semi.opaque, wholly-opaque, and altogether melancholy and. rejectable spy-glasses, one and all if one has eyes left. On me, too, the pressure of these things falls very heavy ; indeed, I often feel the loneliest of all the sons of Adam ; and, in the jargon of poor grimacing men, it is as if one listened to the jabbering of spectres,—not a cheerful situation at all while it lasts I confess, then, Exeter Hall, with its froth-oceans, benevolence, Sm., ei6c., seems to me amongst the most degraded platitudes this world ever saw; a more brutal idolatry, perhaps,—for they are white men, and their century is the nineteenth,—than that of Mambo Jumbo itself It is every way very strange to consider what ' Christianity ' so-called has grown to within these two centuries, on the Howard and Fry side as on every other,—a paltry, mealy-mouthed religion of cowards,' who can have no religion bat a sham one, which also, as I believe, awaits its aboli- tion from the avenging power. If men will turn away their faces from God, and set up idols, temporary phantasms, instead of the Eternal One,—alas the consequences are from of old well- known." For him, at least, even the self-sacrificing labours of Howard and Elizabeth Fry in trying to improve the diabolical treatment of criminals once common in English prisons, were founded on pure cant, on a mealy-mouthed religion of cowards. Yet Carlyle's own religion was not, if he is to be judged by his letters, free from cant. For it was, by his own admission in later life, a religion which he could not reconcile with the facts of life as he apprehended them. At first his religion, which was cast in the stern old Hebrew type, insisted a great deal on the everlasting foundations of truth, on the permanent duty of honest industry, on the severe grandeur of constancy and good-faith, on the sub- limity of God's eternity, and on the magnificence of the heavens ; further, it poured the utmost contempt on miracle as exploded by science, treated the external story of the Gospel as childish legend, based the faith in human immortality on
a kind of intuition, and ridiculed all positive revelation as Hebrew old clothes. This is what Carlyle's faith was in his manhood. But, apparently, if Mr. Froude may be trusted,
it was more hesitating towards the end. He admitted, we are told, that his deep faith in Providence was without evidence,
if not against the evidence. When Mr. Froude told him, not
long before his death, that he (Mr. Fronde) "could only believe in a God which [sic] did something :—with a cry of
pain which I shall never forget, he said, He does nothing.'
For himself," adds Mr. Fronde, "however, his faith stood firm. He did not believe in historical Christianity. He did not believe that the facts alleged in the Apostles' Creed had ever really happened. The resurrection of Christ was to him only the symbol of a spiritual truth. As Christ rose from the dead, so
were we to rise from the death of sin to the life of righteous- ness. Not that Christ had actually died and had risen again. He was only believed to have died and believed to have risen, in an age when legend was history, when stories were accepted as true from their beauty or their significance." In a word, Christianity was not true, and all who "were pretending to believe, or believing that they believed, becoming hypocrites conscious or unconscious, the last the worst of the two, not daring to look the facts in the face, so that the very sense of truth was withered in them," were on the side of cant. "For each souls," says Mr. Fronde, describing Carlyle's belief in words, let us hope, a little stronger than he himself would have used," there was no hope at all" Such was Carlyle's own "Exodus from Houndsditch." After that exodus, he was compelled to admit that his faith in Providence was without evidence, or against the evidence, and that the Everlasting Will on whose absolute government of the world he rested so much," does nothing." If anybody had then turned round on him, and told him that he was not facing the facts truly, but deceiving himself with phantasms; that he had no right to denounce the Materialism of those who simply put away their faith in Providence because they found it, as he found it, "without evidence," if not against the evidence, and who had given up trust in an Everlasting Will which, so far as they could see, he had rightly described when he said, "He does nothing," what could he have replied which any Christian might not equally reply to his taunts ? He would probably have been wisely indifferent to the assertion that for his soul there was "no hope at all." He would perfectly well have recognised that,t, after all, he was not in the least insincere in holding by that passionate faith in Providence for which, when challenged, he could give no reason,—nay, against which he could suggest many reasons. He would have felt perfectly sure that, in spite of the pain with which he declared to Mr. Fronde that God "does nothing," it Jvas his own dullness and deadness which made the admission, and not his own life and insight. But would he ever have seen that it was as truly cant in him to deny the possibility of true faith in Christianity to men of education and knowledge, as it would have been cant in the Materialists, if, on the strength of such evidence as Mr. Froude gives us, they had denied sincerity to Carlyle ?
The truth is that no cant is worse than the cant of originality, and that no cant ought to have been more clearly recognised as cant by Carlyle. He himself was original only in what he omitted from the faith of his parents ; for no man could have retained more vividly the impress of the religious type which they had handed down to him. That he retained his faith in Pro- vidence and immortality at all, was the consequence of the faith long and carefully preserved by his ancestors, and by them transmitted to him. On the mere basis of his own imagina- tive vision he would have had no faith worth the name,— at most, indeed, a perception of the possibility of faith. Nay, is it not the lesson of Revelation itself that what we inherit in this way from our parents is not a prejudice, but a growing faculty of insight ; and that we ought to value nothing more than the type of character through which genuine belief in the spiritual world becomes possible ? Did not the Jews accumulate the results of their prophetic teaching for long generations of prosperity, calamity, exile, and dependent political life, before the time came at which a Christian Revelation was possible? And is it to be supposed for a moment that that long education was not expressly given in order that a new spiritual power might be developed in that people ? If valour is a great inheritance, if scientific habits of thought are a great inheritance, if the capacity for industry is a great inheritance, then, the capacity for spiritual belief is the greatest inheritance of all. Carlyle's proposal that
every religious man should set up anew on his own narrow basis of religious feeling, is one of the most revolutionary and anarchic ever made. We entirely believe that it is the duty of Christians to face boldly all the real facts which science or history or criticism may bring before them,
and to resign every element in their former faith which is really and truly inconsistent with those facts. But then they should carefully sift facts, and sift also the meaning of inconsist- ency. Nothing seems to as more profoundly ridiculous than Mr. Froude's repeated assertion that the Copernican astronomy is, for every sincere mind, a fatal blow to belief in the Incarna- tion. It would be much easier to make out a plausible case why the Copernican astronomy should be regarded as establish- ing the iron rule of fate, and therefore as absolutely inconsistent with Carlyle's doctrine of the "Everlasting No." The true use of historical religion should be to give each generation a different and much higher stand-point in belief than was enjoyed by the previous generation. The Church is not infallible; but the Church is not what Carlyle's theory seems to make it, an institu- tion which accumulates formulas, paralyses effort, and imposes error. Originality in religion is only useful just as originality in ethics is useful,—i.e., not as encouraging any man to throw off all the great heritage of conviction and habit which his fathers have transmitted to him ; but as enabling him to give new vitality to the highest elements of that heritage, and to aid in the gradual elimination of the lower and less noble elements,—a work of discrimination for which, as for all works of discrimination, a fine and reverent judgment is absolutely essential. Carlyle's judgment was in these matters not reverent,—was far too much penetrated by angry self-will. And we must say that on the subject of what is, and what is not, per- manent in religion, we estimate it as only somewhat less untrust- worthy than that of Mr. Fronde himself. And unless we were to go altogether outside the circle of men of genius, it would be impossible to pass on it a severer criticism.
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