Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge Part 14

And again:

"Our Sundays are very peaceful days in this lazy land of the West.

We go to church-a very necessary part of an Englishman's education-lunch immediately, and then loaf on the downs over the creek, and I read to him till he yawns or goes to sleep; then we both play with Flora among the heather-or botanize-and go to church again."

This letter led me, knowing as I did how p.r.o.nounced Arthur's views were, to ask him why he took Edward to church, and the line that he intended to take with him generally with regard to religious matters.

"I have given the question," he writes, "a great deal of thought, and feel my way fairly clear now. Ideally, as an experiment, I should like to tell a boy nothing about religion-teach him merely his moral duty-till he is of age; then put the Bible into his hands. There would be, of course, a great deal-the 'purely mythological or Herodotean element,' as Strauss calls it-and the miraculous element generally, that he would probably at first reject; but if he was of an appreciative nature-and I am presupposing that, because I don't think the theory of education is for the apathetic and unsensitive-he would see, I believe, not only the extraordinary sublimity of language and expression, but the unparalleled audacity and magnificence of thought and aspiration. That he would realize the points in which these conceptions were wild, deficient, or childish, would not blind him, I think, to the grandeur of the other side.

"As a matter of fact, we mix up moral duty with intellectual and spiritual so clumsily, and force it so inopportunely and immaturely upon our children, that if in later years questionings begin to arise, or complications in any part of life, the smash that follows is terrific: the whole thing goes by the board.

"For instance: many a man who undergoes a moral conversion will reject his whole intellectual growth angrily and contemptuously as savoring of the times of vanity. In my scheme such a waste would be impossible; the two would be on different planes and not inextricably intertwined.

"Besides, I think that young men suffer terribly from the shock inflicted on their affection and traditional sentiment.

"They grow up with certain stereotyped conceptions on religious subjects, certain dogmas imperfectly understood but crudely imagined and gradually crystallized into some uncouth shape.

"The prejudices of children, and ideas that have grown with them, are, I think, ineradicable in many cases.

"Let us take three instances of such ordinary conceptions-'Grace,'

'the Resurrection of the Body,' 'The Holy Spirit.'

"Here are three vast conceptions. The anxious parent endeavours to explain them to the child: who, in his turn, receives three grotesque and whimsical ideas which represent themselves to him something in the following shape:

"_Grace_. The quality which he detests in his schoolfellows; in which the 'model boys' are pre-eminent; which he knows he dislikes and loathes, and yet is rather ashamed to say so. The boy who 'rebukes' his schoolfellows for irreverent or loose conversation, the boy who is always ready in his odious way to do a kindness, the boy who is never late for school-these seem to him to be the kind of figures that the clergyman is holding up in his sermon as ideal types of character, to be imitated and reverenced, and for whom he has in his young soul the most undisguised and wholesome loathing.

"Of course it is a misconception-but whose fault? Do you blame a tender wayward mind for not having a philosophical grasp of the ideal? Whereas, if you weren't ashamed to let him understand that the young rascal who is always in mischief and behindhand with his work, but who is yet affectionate, generous, and pure, though he is quarrelsome and not particular in his talk, is a far finer fellow, both in point of view of this world and the next than the smooth-faced prig who thanks his Lord that he is not as this publican.

"_The Resurrection of the Body_. Intelligent people who are also reverent and good, in their anxiety to be faithful to the letter of dogma as well as to its spirit, prefer to cling to these words rather than confess, what is quite certain, that an absolutely literal sense was attached to these words by the framers of them; they were scientifically ignorant of the fact that matter is disintegrated and disseminated so rigorously that there may be component particles of a hundred of his predecessors in one human body now existent. No symbolical _interpretation_ of the words nowadays will account for their being the expression of what was erroneously believed to be a possibility; and to say, as I have heard a Church dignitary of poetical and metaphysical mind say, that the phrase means that the power resident in every individuality to a.s.similate to itself certain particles will not desert the individuality even after death, but will continue to a.s.sert itself in some way-possibly in a spiritual or unmaterial manner-to say this, is to state a strong scientific probability; but, after all, it is only a probability at best, and is certainly not what the words as they stand in the Creed were meant to mean by the persons who framed them and the first wors.h.i.+ppers who repeated them. In the case of children the effect is at once laughable and lamentable. They are made to retain the phrase; no explanation is offered, and, if sought for, s.h.i.+rked. And so it resolves itself into a wonder, dimly conscious of profanity, as to whether Tim Jones the carpenter with the wooden leg, will have a new one; and whether papa will have the wart on his cheek or not, and how he will look without it. Of course these are elementary speculations; but they are true ones, for they were literally my own at an early age. Such speculations are certainly better avoided; and, indeed, all early speculation on dogmatic questions at all is better not suggested.

"_The Holy Spirit_. When I was a child, the dogma of the Trinity caused me the most terrible perplexity, which was all the more distressing because it was shrouded in a kind of awful remoteness, by the reticence, the bewildered and serious reticence, with which my elders approached the subject; but besides the identification with and the appearance as a dove, the term Comforter-and Paraclete, as some of the hymn-books had it-the expression, '_proceeding from_ the Father and the Son,' mystified me completely. The three aspects of the central Unity-G.o.d as Creator, as the Ideal of Humanity, as the Inspirer of it-is a very subtle and advanced idea; yet it is maintained that symbols should be taught first, before they are understood, so that gradually the growing mind should come to realize and appropriate what it already knows.

"This is a very sophistical and ingenious defence. But it seems to break down in practice. How many people reject the idea when realized, simply, as I hold, on account of the grotesque and fantastic conceptions that the immature and overstrained mind collected about it-conceptions which no amount of _reason_ is later able to overcome! And how many never grow to realize it at all!

Besides, even of those who do, it is admitted that almost all need a reconstruction _some time_, a breaking-up of what would otherwise be crystallized formulae, a _conversion_, in fact. Have you ever seen a high nature grow up from boyhood to manhood in undisturbed possession of a vital faith? I confess that I never have!

"I can not help feeling a dismal possibility, that future students of religion, looking over a nineteenth century 'child's catechism,' will laugh, or rather drop their hands in blind amazement-for in truth it is no laughing matter-at the metaphysical conglomerate of dogma, driven like a nail into the heads of careless and innocent children (such, at least, as have had, like myself, the advantage of a religious bringing-up), just as we turn over with regretful amus.e.m.e.nt and pathetic wonder the doctrinal farrago of a Buddhist or a Hindu.

"And all this because people can't wait. He must have a 'dogmatic basis,' they say, the sinew and bone of religion, when the poor child's head can not even take in their ideas, let alone his emotion appreciate them.

"The consequence is, that I can't bring myself to use these words except in societies where I know I shall not be misunderstood.

"Influence, the indestructibility of matter, aspiration-those are what Grace, the Resurrection of the Body, the Holy Spirit mean to me now; great and living and integral parts of my creed, which I not only glow to reflect about, but which surround and penetrate my life daily and hourly with ever-increasing thankfulness.

"Yet, on the other hand, some people depend so much on tradition: they never have a reconstruction of ideas; memories and a.s.sociations are all in all to them. They are the 'Bands' people of my former cla.s.sification.

"And so I want to give Edward both. I take him to church. When he asks me questions I will answer them, but I am glad to say he does not at present. I send him out before the sermon: that is responsible for a good deal of harm. 'Ye shall call upon him to avoid sermons'

should be in the rubric of _my_ baptismal service.

"Then we read some of the Old Testament history as 'history of the Jews,' and Job and Isaiah and the Psalms as poetry-and I am glad to say he is very fond of them; and parts of the Gospels in Greek, as the life and character of a hero. It is the greatest mistake to impose them upon children as authoritative and divine all at once. It at once diminishes their interest: we ought to work slowly up through the human side.

"The Pauline Epistles I have given him to read in extracts. I believe they are best in extracts-one can omit the controversial element.

And he has taken, as children do, to the Revelation enormously, and gets much mysterious delight from it.

"A long and wearisome letter this, and not, I feel, satisfactory. I haven't done justice to the side of tradition, the _jussum et traditum_, but that is the fault of my mind. I have only been professing to represent the other side.

"I would like to thrash the matter out further. I wish you would come down and see us. Tredennis has a sombre beauty, even in winter-a 'season of mists' with us. The magnolia on the south wall is blooming, though we are only two days off Christmas. Our love to you.

"Arthur Hamilton."

I subjoin another extract, on the education of the moral faculty.

"I have always held that the concentration of thought upon morality is a very dangerous system of life. Morality should be an incidental basis to life, not to be brooded over unless some grave disorder should arise. We breathe, and eat, and sleep, and pay no heed to those processes; and indeed both physiologists and moralists exclaim, in the case of those natural processes, that the healthier we are the more unconscious will those processes be.

"So it should be with moral things. If a grave obstruction or contradiction befall any one; if he behaves in a way that violates his usefulness, or his own or others' self-respect; then, if he will not reform himself, we must warn him, or treat him as a physician would: but to abuse a healthy nature for not considering the reasons of things, not having a moral system, not 'preparing for death,'

when, by the very const.i.tution of his nature, he does not require one, is a very grave blunder. Moral anxiety is a sign of moral _malaise_, or, far more commonly, a sign of physical disorder.

"It is an ascertained fact that those periods when morals have been imposed on man as his sole and proper business and subject for contemplation have been unprogressive, introspective, feeble times.

"No, leave morals out of the question directly, unless you see there is grave cause for interference. Give one or two plain warnings, or rather commands.

"Try to raise the _tone_ generally; try to make the young soul generous, ardent, aspiring. If you can do that, the fouler things will fall off like husks. Above all things, make him devoted to you-that is generally possible with a little trouble; and let him never see or hear you think or say a low thought, or do a sordid thing. If he loves you he will imitate you; and while the virtuous habit is forming, he will have the constant thought, 'Would my father have done this? What would he say, how would he look, if he could see me?' Imagination is sometimes a saving power."

I venture to insert a letter in which he touches delicately on the subject of s.e.xual sin. He would never speak of it, but this was written in answer to a definite question of mine apropos of a common friend of ours.

"I must confess that I do not realize the strength of this particular temptation, but I am willing to allow for its being almost infinitely strong. I don't know what has preserved me. It is the one thing about which I never venture to judge a man in the least, because, from all I hear and see, it must hurry people away in a manner of which those who have not experienced it can not form any conception.

"You ask me what I think the probable effect that yielding to such temptation has on a man's character. Of course, some drift into hopeless sensualists. About those I have my own gospel, though I do not preach it; it is a scarcely formulated hope. But of those that recover, or are recovered, all depends upon the kind of repentance.

The morbid repentance that sometimes ensues is very disabling. All dwelling on such falls is very fatal: all thoughts of what might have been, all reflections about the profaned temple and the desecrated shrine, though they can not be escaped, yet must not be indulged.

I always advise people resolutely to try and forget them in _any_ possible way-banish them, drown them, beat them down.

"But a manly repentance may temper and brace the character in a way that no other repented fall can. It is the brooding natures which make me tremble; in healthier natures it is the refiner's fire which stings and consecrates: '_Sanat dum ferit_.'

"But the subject is very repugnant to me. I don't like thinking or talking about it, because it has its other side; the thought of a woman in connection with such things is so unutterably ghastly; it is one of the problems about which I say most earnestly 'G.o.d knows.'"

One other letter of this period, is worth, I think, inserting here.

"Tredennis, August 29.

"I had an instructive parable thrown in my way to-day, containing an obvious lesson for Eddy, and a further meaning for myself. Eddy came running to me about eleven, to tell me there was a man in the garden.

I hurried to the spot he indicated; and there, in a kind of nook formed by a fernery, his head resting in a great glowing circle of St. John's wort, and his feet tucked up under him, lay a drunken tramp, asleep. He was in the last stage of disease; his face was white and fallen away, except his nose and eyes, which were red and bloodshot; he had a horrible sore on his neck; he was unshaven and fearfully dirty; he had on torn trousers; a flannel s.h.i.+rt, open at the neck; and a swallow-tail coat, green with age, b.u.t.toned round him. His hat, such as it was, lay on the ground at his side. Edward regarded him with unfeigned curiosity and dismay. While we stood watching him, he began to stir and s.h.i.+ft uneasily in his sleep, as a watched person will, and presently woke and rolled to his feet with a torrent of the foulest language. He was three-parts drunk. He watched us for a moment suspiciously, and then gave a bolt. How he accomplished it I don't know, for he was very unsteady on his feet; but he got to the wall, and dropped over it into the road, and was out of sight before we could get there. He evidently had some dim idea that he had been trespa.s.sing.

"Edward inquired what sort of a man he was.

"'An English gentleman, in all probability,' I said, 'who has got into that state by always doing as he liked.' And I went on to point out, as simply as I could, that everybody has two sets of desires, and that you must make up your mind which to gratify early in life, determining to face this kind of ending if you fix upon one set.

'Early in life,' I said, 'when this gentleman was a well-dressed clean boy like you, one of the voices used to whisper to him at his ear, "Eat as much as you can; that is what you really like best;"

while the other said, "If you eat rather less, you will be able to play football, or read your book better; besides, you will be your own master and less of a beast."

"'But he wouldn't listen; and this is the result.'