CORRESPONDENCE.
TOLERATION.
[To EDITOR or TH1 "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—Thomas Carlyle, on returning from a short visit to Belgium, was giving me an account of his trip, and in describing the priests, whom he said that he met at every turn of the streets, in their black cassocks, he added,—" It did me harm to see them."
By one of those whirligigs of memory which we all know of, the incident came back to me while I found myself re- peating in reference to another story of priests and black gowns and shovel hats,—"It does me good to read it." The story which I found so beneficent was that series of idylls—charm- ing little pictures—which Mrs. Ady has given us in Jean Francois Millet's records of his life, and in which your readers have, I am sure, found no little enjoyment. I refer to the account of the book and its contents which was given lately in the Spectator. It is not a mere word-jingle which thus brings these two comments together ; there is a real relation between the two though it be through contradictories. All who remember Carlyle know how he bated Popery. Even when some of us hopeful enthusiasts were expecting that a reform and reconstitution of the Church of Rome was possible at the hands of the well-meaning Pio Nono, Carlyle maintained that it was all as useless as to attempt to repair a kettle of which nothing but the rust was left. And many Englishmen, if not quite so fierce in their denunciations as was Carlyle, bold him to be, in the main, right. Many English- men, even if tb ey were not born north of the Tweed, seem to have this horror of Popery bred in them as a part of their inherited national life. "Life would not be worth having without its pre- judices" was once said to me by a statesman; and it must be confessed that many of us Englishmen would say, or at least feel, that life would lose some of its charms without this hatred, and would be rather pleased than otherwise to think that we agreed with Carlyle, even though it did us harm so to agree with him. Even the calmer and more judicial minds among us will be found to condemn the claims of the " un- historical monarchy " and to enter protest against it as an arrest of Christian culture and civilisation,—an arrest which soon becomes a retrogression.
Henry VIII. advised his Parliament not to be too curious in their sumps hues, or too obstinate in their mumpsimus, in the matter of Church reform. But while in no country was this attempt at a middle course more thoroughly made than in England, in none has it been more thoroughly repudiated by the "unhistorical monarchy" of Papal Rome from the days of Henry down to the Encyclical of the present Pope pronouncing on the non-validity of Anglican Orders. It must be the duty of Englishmen (God's Englishmen, as Milton calls us) to hate, as Carlyle did, the superstition which requires us to hold as essentials of our Christian faith that mumpsimus and hocus-pocus are good Latin, and must be always employed in the highest forms of that worship of God which is the first need of our life. In the study and the closet it may be easy to feel it to be our duty as well as our right to be intolerant of this intolerance of Popery. Yet when we meet the signs and symbols of it in the corners of the streets as Carlyle did, we feel that it does us harm. And then we know how pleasant it is, how much good it does us in our deepest spiritual life, to have such evidence as we have in the book I have referred to, of a Christian life which we have been sharing with those humble peasants. It does us good, not harm, to see the black gown of the Abbe, Millet's great uncle, as he comes back from morning Mass, and only lays it aside to take part with his more than ordinary strength of muscle in the ploughing or reaping of the fields of the little peasant freehold of the family, or builds there a wall of stones which no arm but his can lift, and forms charming pictures of this village life, in which Jean Francois Millet was born and had been brought up. It has been told already how in early childhood the wonderful boy awakened deeper than common thoughts and feelings in the minds and hearts of the successive Cures of the village as well as in his own family. It is touching to read of the fatherly love for the wondrous boy shown by one after another of these pions men condemned to childlessness by an enforced celibacy ; how by the Bible and Virgil they trained him in the knowledge of God and the study of Nature, and with something of pro- phetic strain warned him with words of sympathy of the hard lot of suffering which he must expect as the faithful follower of such teaching. There was no mumpsimus or hocus-pocus here. It was the true call of the voice of God and of Nature which the boy heard through the months of these men ; and the answer of his life—" framed in the silent poesy of form " —was, like that of the Hebrew boy of old,—" Speak, Lord,
for Thy servant heareth."—I am, Sir, Sc., E. S.
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