(Coventry Herald and Observer, 16 March 1849)
ON CERTAIN red-letter days of our existence, it happens to us to discover among the spawn of the press, a book which, as we read, seems to undergo a sort of transfiguration before us. We no longer hold heavily in our hands an octavo of some hundred pages, over which the eye laboriously travels, hardly able to drag along with it the restive mind: but we seem to be in companionship with a spirit, who is transfusing himself into our souls, and is vitalizing them by his superior energy, that life, both outward and inward, presents itself to us for higher relief, in colours brightened and deepened – we seem to have been bathing in a pool of Siloam, and to have come forth reeling. The books which carry this magic in them are the true products of genius, and their influence, whether for good or evil, is to the influence of all the respectable results of mere talent and industry, as the mighty Nile to the dykes which receive and distribute its heaven-fed waters. Such a book is The Nemesis of Faith. We are sure that its author is a bright particular star,1 though he sometimes leaves us in doubt whether he be not a fallen ‘son of the morning’.2 Much there is in the work of a questionable character: yet more which hardly falls within the scope of a newspaper editor’s notice: but its trenchant remarks on some of our English conventions, its striking sketches of the dubious aspect which many chartered respectabilities are beginning to wear under the light of this nineteenth century, its suggestive hints as to the necessity of recasting the currency of our religion and virtue, that it may carry fresh and bright the stamp of the age’s highest and best idea – these have a practical bearing, which may well excite the grave, perhaps the alarmed attention of some important classes among us. We will resign the work into the hands of judges of more ability, and more unquestioned credentials, only quoting one or two passages as a slight sample for our readers. Surely there is work for our augurs when a Clergyman writes thus of his co-ordinates: –
I cannot understand why, as a body, the Clergy are so fatally uninteresting: they who through all their waking hours ought to have for their one thought, the deepest and most absorbing interests of humanity. It is the curse of making it a profession – a road to get on upon, to succeed in life upon. The base stain is apparent in their very language, too, and an index of what they are. Their ‘duty’ – what is it? To patter through the two Sunday’s services. For a little money one of them will take the other’s duty for him. And what do they all aim at? Getting livings! – not cures of souls, but livings: something which will keep their wretched bodies living in the comforts they have found indispensable. What business have they, any one of them, with a thought of what becomes of their poor wretched selves at all? To hear them preaching, to hear the words they use in these same duties of theirs, one would suppose they really believed that getting on, and getting rich, and getting comfortable, were quite the last things a Christian should propose to himself. They certainly say so. Alas! with the mass of them, the pulpit keeps its old meaning, and is but a stage. Off the stage there is the old plate of the old world stories, the patronage of this rich man and that, the vacant benefice or Cathedral stall. So and so, lucky fellow, has married a Bishop’s daughter, and the Bishop himself has the best-dressed wife, and the best equipage in London: and oh, bitterest satire of all! the very pulpit eloquence with which they can paint the better life, the beauty of Christianity, is valued only as a means of advancing them into what they condemn… Oh, what a Clergyman might do! To have them all [the poor] for an hour at least each week, collected to be taught by him, really wishing to listen, if he will but take the trouble to understand them, and to learn what they require to be told. How sick one is of all sermons, such as they are! Why will men go on thrashing over and again the old withered straw that was thrashed out centuries ago, when every field is waving with fresh, and quit other crops craving for their hand…
But there are many other things besides what are in the Bible, which he (the Clergyman) ought to learn if he would assist the people to do what he tells them to do, if he would really give them rest from the painful vacancy of mind, which life spent in routine of never-ending work entails upon them; he should study their work, and the natural laws that are working in it: he should make another version of the Bible for them in what is for ever before their eyes, in the corn-field, in the meadow, in the workshop, at the weaver’s loom, in the market-places and in the warehouses… Let every flower have a second image to their eyes; let him bring in for witness to the love of the great Creator, every bird, every beast, every poorest insect; let the teeming earth tell of Him as in her unwearied labour-pangs she fashions up the material elements into the great rolling flood of life which ebbs and flows around them. They might do something, these Clergy, if they would go to work over this ground; labouring in good earnest would they be for the souls of mankind.3
The following passage is at least as forcible: –
The men that write books, Carlyle says, are now the world’s priests, the spiritual directors of mankind. No doubt they are; and it shows the folly and madness of trying still to enforce texts, that you do but silence a man in the pulpit, to send his voice along the press into every corner of the land. God abolished texts for all purposes, except of mischief and vexation, when he gave mankind the printing-press. What is the result of sustaining them, but that we are all at the mercy now of some clever self-assumer? and while our nominal teachers answer no end for us, except the hour’s sleep on Sunday, the minds of all of us, from highest Lords to enlightened operatives, are formed in reading-rooms, in lecture-rooms, at the bar of public-houses, by all the shrewdest, and often the most worthless, novel writers or paper editors. Yet even this is better than nothing, better than that people should be left to their pulpit teachers, such as they are.4