CHRISTIANITY AND EMPIRE.
TWO letters which appeared in the Spectator of July 22nd, strikingly illustrate in different ways that loss of national self-confidence and governing faculty to which we have several times alluded. Our correspondent, who signs himself " G. W.," does not attempt to deny the " decline of the ruling sentiment " among us, but welcomes the fact as a proof of the " growth of the democratic con- science and intelligence." For him, the common citizenship which binds us to the men of our own race scattered throughout the self-governing Colonies is only a " Pan. Britannic gimcrack," the possession of India only an un- fortunate responsibility which we have inherited, as Mr. Morley puts it, from " the unlucky prowess of our ancestors." This is the ordinary case of the " Little England" man, who is unable to see that any benefit results either to ourselves or to mankind, from our position at the head of a great Empire. The letter of our other correspondent, the Rev. J. Andrewes Reeve, betrays a different spirit, and one which, though at first sight more deserving of sympathy, is, just for that reason, more difficult to combat, while it is no less dangerous as a solvent of Empire, and no less fatal to the due perform- ance of those duties which our history has imposed upon us. According to this view, what we have deemed a sign of weakness, is in reality not weakness but strength, and a proof of courageous faith in the ethical teaching of Christianity. Mr. Gladstone, in his surrender to the forces of Irish dis- affection, is but carrying into the field of politics the Christian principles of charity and the forgiveness of sins ; and if we only persevere with such a policy, we shall finally obtain the reward which is promised to the meek, that " they shall inherit the earth." As we said before, the religion which inspires these political views seems to us more akin to Rousseauism than to Christianity, and if carried out to its logical con- clusions, would at once put an end to all government. Christianity teaches the forgiveness of sins, and the law of love and charity, in the sense that we are to root out of our minds all feelings of personal malice and revenge, and to see in all men, beneath the lowest depths of their wickedness, infinite possibilities of good. It does not, however, teach the natural goodness of man, or tell us to shut our eyes to facts, and act as if the false were true. But, according to this new Evangel, we are not only to extend Christian charity to the fomenters of Irish crime and disaffection, but to love them so much, as to be blind to their conduct in the past and the proba- bility of their repeating it in the future. Must we also interpret the golden rule in the shallow sense that the Judge ought not to inflict punishment on the criminal? If we could only be consistent in our obedience to this new law of charity, it might have something to recommend it ; but its essential falsehood is proved by the fact that it is impossible to apply it in any single instance without at the same time violating it. If we are charitable towards the self-constituted leaders of the Irish movement, and give them what they ask for, we may be delivering the Irish people over to a degrading and incompetent tyranny. And in any case we are imposing a yoke upon the people of Ulster which they dread so much that even civil war seems preferable. Again, Christianity teaches the duty of meek- ness and humility, and its spirit is utterly opposed to all bluster and violent self-assertion, either in the individual or the nation. But it would be the very perversity of interpretation to take this as a recommendation of supine and invertebrate feebleness in the individual; and it is no less perverse to make it an excuse for a national abdication of rights and responsibilities. Beneath the humility of Christ himself, who is the perfect exemplar of lowliness of heart, there was the sublimest self-assertion. And we should show none of the true spirit of Christian humility, but rather a very un-Christian cravenness of heart, is asking the people of India to do what they cannot do, rule themselves, or in being slow to defend our Empire from danger or aggression, either from without or within. If the British power has a beneficent influence among the nations of the earth ; if the British Empire is, as Lord Rosebery said, the greatest secular agency for good in the world, then our manifest duty, according to the Christian or any other code of ethics, is to maintain that Empire is all its majesty and strength, and cultivate at the same time as much as possible the Christian virtues of meekness and humility. We may be sure that a large measure of the true Christian spirit will aid rather than retard us in the performance of our duties of government ; but the feeling which prompts us to surrender an Empire in order that we may embark on a course of moral self-cultivation, does not spring from Christianity, but from Rousseauism, which can see nothing in a great historical Empire but an obstacle to human perfection ; or, if not from Rousseauism, then from what is closely akin to it,—that artistic religion of self-consciousness and self-culture, which since the time of Goethe, has been one of the chief diseases of our century. And there is also not a little of the spirit of Oriental fatalism and non-resistance to evil in this mood of ours, which impels us as a nation to withdraw from the work of the world, lest we should stain our hands in doing it.
This is not the place for dealing with the profound speculative and theological difficulty which is at the root of all these aberrations. The difficulty, we suppose, con- sists in this, that duty often assigns to a man or to a nation a work which gives a certain bias to the individual or national character, and interferes with the attainment of an abstract perfection. But in practice any one can see the distinction between a healthy moral conscience and that over-scrupulousness which springs from too much occupation with self, and leads to weakness and inefficiency. A man can hardly spend his life in the work of this im- perfect world and emerge absolutely stainless. The administrator of an Indian district, or a resident Magis- trate in a disturbed county in Ireland, cannot have his mind always fixed on the law of Christian charity, or into nto practice the command to resist not evil. His business is to preserve order and to suppress crime wherever he finds it, and if, in the performance of this duty, his character acquires a certain hardness, one feels nevertheless that h e life is infinitely nobler and more useful than that of the man who stays at home, and by dint of shutting his eyes to the evils of the world, cultivates a spirit of vague and languid toleration. And may it not in like manner be the duty of a nation to accept the work plainly put before it, without troubling too much about the limitations of national character to which the due performance of that work may give rise ? Certainly, true Christianity gives no sanction to the self-consciousness which is occupied with its own salvation rather than with its work, or to the fatalistic notion that we ought to avoid entering the lists with evil, lest our own righteousness should suffer in the combat. Christianity, both by precept and example, teaches the duty of battling with evil. Christ's own life was a continual and strenuous conflict with the wickedness of the world, though its serenity and perfection often make us forget the fact. From this point of view, the incident of the overturning of the money-changers' tables, which to Renan, anxious to reduce Christianity to the level of a misty sentimental Rousseauism, seemed a momentary lapse into Judaic iconoclasm, may contain a most salutary lesson for this too sentimental and self-conscious generation. Let any one who feels a difficulty in reconciling government and the exercise—if necessary, the stern exercise—of authority with the ideal of Christianity, ponder on that incident, and he will see that the rule that the wise shall compel the foolish, and the good the bad, derives a sanction from the story of a divine life. And it is no objection that in our dealings with the wickedness of this wicked world, we cannot reproduce the calmness and serenity combined with the unremitting effort of such a life. The self-consciousness which is abashed by the necessary severity of Government and sternness of Empire, seems to us to spring not so much from anxiety to carry the Christian spirit into the duties of everyday life, as from a wish to usurp the position of the Founder of Christianity, and to carry the imitation of him to the point of a. literal reproduction of the incidents of his outward career,—in the same way that we are often recom- mended to adopt Communism, according to the example of the early Christians. And this malady of self-conscious weakness is so prevalent among us, that one would gladly weloome'any signs of the survival of a power of prompt and unhesitating action, or of rough and even ruthless decisiveness.
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