MRS. TAISTLETTIWArTE.
UTE have not yet been fortunate enough to meet with George V V Eliot's Dinah,' or anything at all like her. Twice the present writer has heard a woman preach,—once as a boy, when an amiable old Quaker lady accustomed to address assemblies got herself unfortunately into a pulpit, and was so put out by that novel position that she lost, we will not say the idea (for there was none), but the state of mind, whatever that was, which was essential to the production of hortatory periods, and her husband had to ascend Visibly into the pulpit before the eyes of the congregation to extri- cate her by comfortable assurances of undiminished conjugal affec- tion from that intellectual or unintellectual dilemma. Again, last Sunday we had the privilege of witnessing apparently a much less unsuccessful specimen of feminine eloquence in which no vir ex machind was called in to assist at the tying together of a broken clue. But the experiment, smoothly as it ran, rather confirmed our boyish impression of the disqualifications of women as preachers, only substituting sincere regret at what seemed an unfortunate and mis- taken display of religious earnestness for the cruel glee with which thoughtless schoolboys are too apt to gloat over a visible moral catastrophe to their fellow-creatures. We should be the last to deny to women who possess any unique power of touching the hearts of others the right to sacrifice private feelings to the appeal of duty. But Mrs. Thistlethwaite does not, as far as we could judge, exercise any such power at all. Being a woman, and a pretty woman, and certainly in her own way very much in earnest, of course she " draws " much better than a man of the same mental qualifications as herself. The little lecture-room which calls itself the Marylebone Institute was crowded to excess half an hour before Mrs. Thistlethwaite began, and a motley assemblage, chiefly, we should say, of the shopkeepers of the neighbourhood, —not consisting more of men than of women,—struggled their
way into the bad air and bare standing-room of the place as if they looked forward to receiving a spiritual influence of no small power. A strong spiritual influence was certainly desirable to counteract the very depressing physical influence of the atmos- phere, which had that highly human flavour peculiar to the
close and ill-ventilated bedrooms of the non-bathing classes. Whether the audience were satisfied with their spiritual fare it was not very easy to say. Everything was decorously done, and none of them acted as if they were merely sightseers, but no deep religious impression of any kind was visible, and we doubt whether any was possible. Earnestness in a woman without power, affects one painfully. It is impossible to help feeling obliged to her for her entreaties,—quite impossible to steel oneself against her solicitudes as we should against a pertinacious
man's,—that gentleman's, for instance, who thanked God at un- necessary length for the power of Mrs. Thistlethwaite's sermon and prayed for ." our sister's" welfare after she had finished. Somehow, though she breaks through so much stronger a custom in order to be able to importune us, it is impossible to feel her spiritual importunities mere impertinences. But for that very reason a woman's spiritual solicitude and persistence when she fails to touch your feelings are more distressing. It is in some sense almost like receiving an offer from a woman, and not being able to reciprocate the feelings it expresses.
Mrs. Thistlethwaite is, we need scarcely say, a very narrow Evangelical. She explained in her introductory prayer that if there were any there led thither by an idle curiosity to see a poor lost soul on whom God had taken mercy, she trusted that idle curiosity might be ' solemnized' into a deeper feeling before the
service was over. This was the first stroke on that chord, but it was by no means the last ; therii was throughout, that painful harp- ing on a thin string, that vibrating eagerness without force or breadth, that flickering impetuosity, that chain of vagrant associa- tions sending off branches allusively in all directions from the one reiterated entreaty to abandon self-righteousness and accept the atoning blood of Christ but ever returning to the same point with- out finishing the other train of suggestion,—in a word, that reedy wail of conscientious spiritual effort, desiring to feel itself divinely authorized, and not quite succeeding in the attempt, which must have made every one sad who listened thoughtfully. To.be conscious of a voluble flow of weak entreaty, and to recog- nize the impossibility of meeting it half-way by any act of will whatever, is one of the most melancholy of htiman experiences. At the end of her sermon Mrs. Thistlethwaite gave out a hymn beginning, " I do believe, I will believe," with spasmodic accentua- tion of the ' do' and in which she entreated all her audience with almost feverish eagerness to join, evidently under a helpless kind of impression that it was an ' easy lesson' in belief, that if we. would only repeat the words with sufficient emphasis, we should' manage the act of belief in time. And this was expressive of the whole service. Mrs. Thistlethwaite impressed us as entirely destitute of any power to reach the deeper springs of faith in the human heart, and as compelled to make up for that deficiency nagging at the souls of her audience.
The truth is that a woman, in order to exercise any great religious influence, must, we take it, have much of the mystic in her as well as a rare simplicity of nature. Mrs. Thistlethwaitsi has nothing of the mystic in her, and, though sincere enough, has not a rare simplicity of nature. She is a little of an actress in her elocution, and in reading the hymn gave the note of admiration after ' ashamed of Jesus !' with something that we almost felt to be a pert pitch of indignation, and when she came to the end of the hymn where the prayer is breathed that Christ be not ashamed of me I' she sank her voice to a theatric whisper, and disap- peared behind some one else during the singing with too dramatic an effect. We felt immediately that there was none of that dreaminess about her nature which alone could completely save a woman in such a position from awkward self-consciousness, and so it certainly proved. Even in prayer she could not help citing her authority to prove to God her familiarity with His word,- " as Thou Last told us in the 17th Psalm " she said, in speaking of " awaking up after God's likeness,"—and this was only one of many indications how little she ever lost herself in the thoughts of the Bible, how intent she was upon correct citation. The heavy, drooping eyelids, the small, flexible, almost laughing mouth, and the quick, tossy movement of her head, all told of a nature sufficiently excitable, but not in the direction of either quietism or mysticism. Subsequently the whole of the sermon showed that Mrs. Thistle- thwaite belongs to the school which delights in theology only so far as it reveals a mysterious and gigantic transaction by which the soul is extricated from an apparently hopeless dilemma at a great price. She did not dwell on the divine love in its daily communion with human weakness, —she gloated over the " fountain filled with blood from Immanuel's veins," according to the revolting phraseology of oneof her hymns, till the healing of the great Physician sounded almost like a physiological rather than a spiritual process, and the whole air was filled with arterial and ensanguined images. The preacher took a long passage out of Luke ending with the parable of the Good Samaritan as her text, so that we had at first some hope we might be spared the usual caricature and distortion current amongst this school of St. Paul's doctrine of the Atonement, but it was soon evident that she regarded the whole passage as bearing directly on the dogma in question. She began at once with g',..ating that all are equally sinful, the baby just born as sinful as the worst sinner, and all equally in need of redemption. If we asked how this could be just, she replied that God needed no justification for what He did. When the Queen writes a letter about railways, do we expect her to justify her course? We fear we do, and if not, we fear Mrs. Thistlethwaite's argument would only prove that God is not naturally the object of love for any better reason than because He is so powerful, and so out the whole ground of faith from under her feet. However, that conceded, she proceeded to lay down that as God has willed it so, we all need redemption, and no works or fame of our own, not even the mightiest works of the mightiest writers, " like Macaulay's, for instance," will be of any use to the soul that is not saved by Christ's blood. Here was the mystery of redemption, the " things hid from the wise and prudent,"—like Macaulay,—" and revealed unto babes." Then followed the ques- tion of the lawyer who stood up and " tempted" or tried Christ, asking, "Master, what shall I do to be saved ?" Mrs. Thistle- thwaite was very hard upon this lawyer and knew all about him, —much more than the Evangelist appeared to know. It was a matter of " perfect indifference to him, PERFECT indiffer- ence," she reiterated, what answer Christ would make ; he only put the question in the vanity of indolent curiosity. She appeared to draw this large inference from his (tailing Christ master' only, remarking that Judas called Him master and never ' Lord,' and she called attention to the more reverential address of good master' of the rich young man whom Jesus loved. This was hard upon the lawyer, and she was yet harder upon him before she had done with him. His ' What shall I do?' was self-righteousness,— -he supposed he could do something to save himself. Our Lord answered him so fully in order, said Mrs. Thistlethwaite glibly, that He might "damn him out of his own mouth,"—which is surely introducing hypothetical and supererogatory damnation into the Bible very gratuitously indeed. Could she, we thought, be really so anxious about our souls, when she was so willing to damn—alto- gether hypothetically—this unfortunate lawyer about whom we know nothing, and, in doing so, to attribute a purely fanciful harsh- ness to our Lord ? Perhaps she was after all ; but had in her own mind identified this lawyer on account of the equivocal word " tempt " with something very evil indeed. Then she commented with great severity on his " willingness to justify himself " in ask- ing " Who is my neighbour ? " and told an irrelevant story of a young man, an acquaintance of hers, who maintained he had fulfilled the whole Law, and who afterwards, as she recounted eagerly,—not cruelly, but with dogmatic eagerness,—showed what his self-righteousness was worth by falling into open sin. And then she gave her interpretation of the story of the good Samaritan. The good Samaritan was not a Samaritan after all, he was only a form of our Lord Himself, because the Jews had taunted Him with being a Samaritan and having a devil. The robbed traveller was the lost soul of man, whom the minis- ters of the Law, the priest and Levite, would and could not aid. The good Samaritan was Christ, who poured in the oil and wine of His own blood, and provided for the saved soul afterwards at His own cost. Nothing good could have been done by any liuman being. The good Samaritan was meant to be a type of real goodness, and therefore was not a human being, but the incarnate Son of God. The "go and do likewise" to the lawyer was pure irony in Christ,—meant to show the absolute impossibility of man's doing likewise without being first redeemed ; —they were the words which " damned the lawyer out of his own mouth." A shocking parody, as it seemed to us, of the most beautiful of our Lord's parables!
Such, illustrated with many readings out of the Epistle to the Romans, was Mrs. Thistlethwaite's sermon. It was not eloquent, it was wholly devoid of tenderness, and as we have shown, full of harsh unfeminine constructions of the Gospel. It was very far from powerful. It was fluent, eager, excitable, variable, diverging occasionally into sharp, thin controver- sialiam, as when she denounced our Church for hanging _ up the tables of the Law over the altar as if they could save any man, and explained that she must do so whether it gave offence or not, nay, even " if a hundred cannons were pointed at me,"—a very wild supposition indeed, Mrs. Thistlethwaite. But on the whole, though an expression of the religion of those who love strong excitements, who have been saved themselves 'so as by fire,' the service was not exciting, but melancholy,—sincere enough, but a thin, conscious, treble of appeal, full of a woman's weakness and a woman's logic, yet without a woman's religious tenderness and warmth of feeling.
Previous page
