Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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"Wine is sap, and grapes are wood,
The wooden board yields wine as good."

"But the time?--so infinitely shorter than that which Nature usually
occupies in the process?"

"Time and space are no Gods, as a wise German says; and as the electric
telegraph ought already to have taught you. They are customs, but who has
proved them to be laws of Nature? No; analyse these miracles one by one,
fairly, carefully, scientifically, and you will find that if you want
prodigies really blasphemous and absurd, infractions of the laws of Nature,
amputated limbs growing again, and dead men walking away with their heads
under their arms, you must go to the Popish legends, but not to the
miracles of the Gospels. And now for your 'but'--"

"The raising of the dead to life? Surely death is the appointed end of
every animal--ay, of every species, and of man among the rest."

"Who denies it? But is premature death?--the death of Jairus's daughter, of
the widow's son at Nain, the death of Jesus himself, in the prime of youth
and vigour--or rather that gradual decay of ripe old age, through which I
now, thank God, so fast am travelling? What nobler restoration of order,
what clearer vindication of the laws of Nature from the disorder of
diseases, than to recall the dead to their natural and normal period of
life?"

I was silent a few moments, having nothing to answer; then--

"After all, these may have been restorations of the law of Nature. But why
was the law broken in order to restore it? The Tenth of April has taught
me, at least, that disorder cannot cast disorder out."

"Again I ask, why do you assume the very point in question? Again I ask,
who knows what really are the laws of Nature? You have heard Bacon's golden
rule--'Nature is conquered by obeying her?'"

"I have."

"Then who more likely, who more certain, to fulfil that law to hitherto
unattained perfection, than He who came to obey, not outward nature merely,
but, as Bacon meant, the inner ideas, the spirit of Nature, which is the
will of God?--He who came to do utterly, not His own will, but the will
of the Father who sent Him? Who is so presumptuous as to limit the future
triumphs of science? Surely no one who has watched her giant strides during
the last century. Shall Stephenson and Faraday, and the inventors of the
calculating machine, and the electric telegraph, have fulfilled such
wonders by their weak and partial obedience to the 'Will of God expressed
in things'--and He who obeyed, even unto the death, have possessed no
higher power than theirs?"

"Indeed," I said, "your words stagger me. But there is another old
objection which they have reawakened in my mind. You will say I am shifting
my ground sadly. But you must pardon me"

"Let us hear. They need not be irrelevant. The unconscious logic of
association is often deeper and truer than any syllogism."

"These modern discoveries in medicine seem to show that Christ's miracles
may be attributed to natural causes."

"And thereby justify them. For what else have I been arguing. The
difficulty lies only in the rationalist's shallow and sensuous view of
Nature, and in his ambiguous, slip-slop trick of using the word natural
to mean, in one sentence, 'material,' and in the next, as I use it, only
'normal and orderly.' Every new wonder in medicine which this great age
discovers--what does it prove, but that Christ need have broken no natural
laws to do that of old, which can be done now without breaking them--if you
will but believe that these gifts of healing are all inspired and revealed
by Him who is the Great Physician, the Life, the Lord of that vital energy
by whom all cures are wrought.

"The surgeons of St. George's make the boy walk who has been lame from his
mother's womb. But have they given life to a single bone or muscle of his
limbs? They have only put them into that position--those circumstances in
which the God-given life in them can have its free and normal play, and
produce the cure which they only assist. I claim that miracle of science,
as I do all future ones, as the inspiration of Him who made the lame
to walk in Judea, not by producing new organs, but by His creative
will--quickening and liberating those which already existed.

"The mesmerist, again, says that he can cure a spirit of infirmity, an
hysteric or paralytic patient, by shedding forth on them his own vital
energy; and, therefore he will have it, that Christ's miracles were but
mesmeric feats. I grant, for the sake of argument, that he possesses
the power which he claims; though I may think his facts too new, too
undigested, often too exaggerated, to claim my certain assent. But, I say,
I take you on your own ground; and, indeed, if man be the image of God, his
vital energy may, for aught I know, be able, like God's, to communicate
some spark of life--But then, what must have been the vital energy of Him
who was the life itself; who was filled without measure with the spirit,
not only of humanity, but with that of God the Lord and Giver of life? Do
but let the Bible tell its own story; grant, for the sake of argument,
the truth of the dogmas which it asserts throughout, and it becomes
a consistent whole. When a man begins, as Strauss does, by assuming
the falsity of its conclusions, no wonder if he finds its premises a
fragmentary chaos of contradictions."

"And what else?" asked Eleanor, passionately--"what else is the meaning
of that highest human honour, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, but a
perennial token that the same life-giving spirit is the free right of all?"

And thereon followed happy, peaceful, hopeful words, which the reader, if
he call himself a Christian, ought to be able to imagine for himself. I am
afraid that writing from memory, I should do as little justice to them as
I have to the dean's arguments in this chapter. Of the consequences which
they produced in me, I will speak anon.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

NEMESIS.

It was a month or more before I summoned courage to ask after my cousin.

Eleanor looked solemnly at me.

"Did you not know it? He is dead."

"Dead!" I was almost stunned by the announcement.

"Of typhus fever. He died three weeks ago; and not only he, but the servant
who brushed his clothes, and the shopman, who had a few days before,
brought him a new coat home."

"How did you learn all this?"

"From Mr. Crossthwaite. But the strangest part of the sad story is to come.
Crossthwaite's suspicions were aroused by some incidental circumstance, and
knowing of Downes's death, and the fact that you most probably caught your
fever in that miserable being's house, he made such inquiries as satisfied
him that it was no other than your cousin's coat--"

"Which covered the corpses in that fearful chamber?"

"It was indeed."

Just, awful God. And this was the consistent Nemesis of all poor
George's thrift and cunning, of his determination to carry the
buy-cheap-and-sell-dear commercialism, in which he had been brought up,
into every act of life! Did I rejoice? No; all revenge, all spite had been
scourged out of me. I mourned for him as for a brother, till the thought
flashed across me--Lillian was free. Half unconscious, I stammered her name
inquiringly.

"Judge for yourself," answered Eleanor, mildly, yet with a deep, severe
meaning in her tone.

I was silent.

* * * * *

The tempest in my heart was ready to burst forth again; but she, my
guardian angel, soothed it for me.

"She is much changed; sorrow and sickness--for she, too, has had the fever,
and, alas! less resignation or peace within, than those who love her
would have wished to see--have worn her down. Little remains now of that
loveliness--"

"Which I idolized in my folly!"

"Thank God, thank God! that you see that at last: I knew it all along. I
knew that there was nothing there for your heart to rest upon--nothing
to satisfy your intellect--and, therefore, I tried to turn you from your
dream. I did it harshly, angrily, too sharply, yet not explicitly enough. I
ought to have made allowances for you. I should have known how enchanting,
intoxicating, mere outward perfections must have been to one of your
perceptions, shut out so long as you had been from the beautiful in art and
nature. But I was cruel. Alas! I had not then learnt to sympathize; and I
have often since felt with terror that I, too, may have many of your sins
to answer for; that I, even I, helped to drive you on to bitterness and
despair."

"Oh, do not say so! You have done to me, meant to me, nothing but good."

"Be not too sure of that. You little know me. You little know the pride
which I have fostered--even the mean anger against you, for being the
protégé of any one but myself. That exclusiveness, and shyness, and proud
reserve, is the bane of our English character--it has been the bane of
mine--daily I strive to root it out. Come--I will do so now. You wonder why
I am here. You shall hear somewhat of my story; and do not fancy that I am
showing you a peculiar mark of honour or confidence. If the history of my
life can be of use to the meanest, they are welcome to the secrets of my
inmost heart.

"I was my parents' only child, an heiress, highly born, and highly
educated. Every circumstance of humanity which could pamper pride was mine,
and I battened on the poison. I painted, I sang, I wrote in prose and
verse--they told me, not without success. Men said that I was beautiful--I
knew that myself, and revelled and gloried in the thought. Accustomed to
see myself the centre of all my parents' hopes and fears, to be surrounded
by flatterers, to indulge in secret the still more fatal triumph of
contempt for those I thought less gifted than myself, self became the
centre of my thoughts. Pleasure was all I thought of. But not what the
vulgar call pleasure. That I disdained, while, like you, I worshipped all
that was pleasurable to the intellect and the taste. The beautiful was my
God. I lived, in deliberate intoxication, on poetry, music, painting, and
every anti-type of them which I could find in the world around. At last I
met with--one whom you once saw. He first awoke in me the sense of the vast
duties and responsibilities of my station--his example first taught me to
care for the many rather than for the few. It was a blessed lesson: yet
even that I turned to poison, by making self, still self, the object of my
very benevolence. To be a philanthropist, a philosopher, a feudal queen,
amid the blessings and the praise of dependent hundreds--that was my new
ideal; for that I turned the whole force of my intellect to the study
of history, of social and economic questions. From Bentham and Malthus
to Fourier and Proudhon, I read them all. I made them all fit into that
idol-temple of self which I was rearing, and fancied that I did my duty, by
becoming one of the great ones of the earth. My ideal was not the crucified
Nazarene, but some Hairoun Alraschid, in luxurious splendour, pampering
his pride by bestowing as a favour those mercies which God commands as
the right of all. I thought to serve God, forsooth, by serving Mammon and
myself. Fool that I was! I could not see God's handwriting on the wall
against me. 'How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom
of heaven!'...

"You gave me, unintentionally, a warning hint. The capabilities which I
saw in you made me suspect that those below might be more nearly my equals
than I had yet fancied. Your vivid descriptions of the misery among whole
classes of workmen--misery caused and ever increased by the very system of
society itself--gave a momentary shock to my fairy palace. They drove me
back upon the simple old question, which has been asked by every honest
heart, age after age, 'What right have I to revel in luxury while thousands
are starving? Why do I pride myself on doling out to them small fractions
of that wealth, which, if sacrificed utterly and at once, might help
to raise hundreds to a civilization as high as my own?' I could not
face the thought; and angry with you for having awakened it, however
unintentionally, I shrank back behind the pitiable, worn-out fallacy, that
luxury was necessary to give employment. I knew that it was a fallacy; I
knew that the labour spent in producing unnecessary things for one rich man
may just as well have gone in producing necessaries for a hundred poor, or
employ the architect and the painter for public bodies as well as private
individuals. That even for the production of luxuries, the monopolizing
demand of the rich was not required--that the appliances of real
civilization, the landscapes, gardens, stately rooms, baths, books,
pictures, works of art, collections of curiosities, which now went to
pamper me alone--me, one single human soul--might be helping, in an
associate society, to civilize a hundred families, now debarred from them
by isolated poverty, without robbing me of an atom of the real enjoyment or
benefit of them. I knew it, I say, to be a fallacy, and yet I hid behind it
from the eye of God. Besides, 'it always had been so--the few rich, and the
many poor. I was but one more among millions.'"

She paused a moment as if to gather strength, and then continued:

"The blow came. My idol--for he, too, was an idol--To please him I had
begun--To please myself in pleasing him, I was trying to become great--and
with him went from me that sphere of labour which was to witness the
triumph of my pride. I saw the estate pass into other hands; a mighty
change passed over me, as impossible, perhaps, as unfitting, for me
to analyse. I was considered mad. Perhaps I was so: there is a divine
insanity, a celestial folly, which conquers worlds. At least, when that
period was past, I had done, and suffered so strangely, that nothing
henceforth could seem strange to me. I had broken the yoke of custom and
opinion. My only ground was now the bare realities of human life and duty.
In poverty and loneliness I thought out the problems of society, and seemed
to myself to have found the one solution--self-sacrifice. Following my
first impulse, I had given largely to every charitable institution I could
hear of--God forbid that I should regret those gifts--yet the money, I
soon found, might have been better spent. One by one, every institution
disappointed me; they seemed, after all, only means for keeping the poor
in their degradation, by making it just not intolerable to them--means for
enabling Mammon to draw fresh victims into his den, by taking off his
hands those whom he had already worn out into uselessness. Then I tried
association among my own sex--among the most miserable and degraded of
them. I simply tried to put them into a position in which they might work
for each other, and not for a single tyrant; in which that tyrant's profits
might be divided among the slaves themselves. Experienced men warned me
that I should fail; that such a plan would be destroyed by the innate
selfishness and rivalry of human nature; that it demanded what was
impossible to find, good faith, fraternal love, overruling moral influence.
I answered, that I knew that already; that nothing but Christianity alone
could supply that want, but that it could and should supply it; that I
would teach them to live as sisters, by living with them as their sister
myself. To become the teacher, the minister, the slave of those whom I was
trying to rescue, was now my one idea; to lead them on, not by machinery,
but by precept, by example, by the influence of every gift and talent which
God had bestowed upon me; to devote to them my enthusiasm, my eloquence, my
poetry, my art, my science; to tell them who had bestowed their gifts on
me, and would bestow, to each according to her measure, the same on them;
to make my workrooms, in one word, not a machinery, but a family. And
I have succeeded--as others will succeed, long after my name, my small
endeavours, are forgotten amid the great new world--new Church I should
have said--of enfranchised and fraternal labour."

And this was the suspected aristocrat! Oh, my brothers, my brothers! little
you know how many a noble soul, among those ranks which you consider only
as your foes, is yearning to love, to help, to live and die for you, did
they but know the way! Is it their fault if God has placed them where they
are? Is it their fault, if they refuse to part with their wealth, before
they are sure that such a sacrifice would really be a mercy to you? Show
yourselves worthy of association. Show that you can do justly, love mercy,
and walk humbly with your God, as brothers before one Father, subjects of
one crucified King--and see then whether the spirit of self-sacrifice is
dead among the rich! See whether there are not left in England yet seven
thousand who have not bowed the knee to Mammon, who will not fear to "give
their substance to the free," if they find that the Son has made you
free--free from your own sins, as well as from the sins of others!

CHAPTER XL.

PRIESTS AND PEOPLE.

"But after all," I said one day, "the great practical objection still
remains unanswered--the clergy? Are we to throw ourselves into their
hands after all? Are we, who have been declaiming all our lives against
priestcraft, voluntarily to forge again the chains of our slavery to a
class whom we neither trust nor honour?"

She smiled. "If you will examine the Prayer-Book, you will not find, as
far as I am aware, anything which binds a man to become the slave of
the priesthood, voluntarily or otherwise. Whether the people become
priest-ridden or not, hereafter, will depend, as it always has done,
utterly on themselves. As long as the people act upon their spiritual
liberty, and live with eyes undimmed by superstitious fear, fixed in loving
boldness on their Father in heaven, and their King, the first-born among
many brethren, the priesthood will remain, as God intended them, only the
interpreters and witnesses of His will and His kingdom. But let them turn
their eyes from Him to aught in earth or heaven beside, and there will be
no lack of priestcraft, of veils to hide Him from them, tyrants to keep
them from Him, idols to ape His likeness. A sinful people will be sure to
be a priest-ridden people; in reality, though not in name; by journalists
and demagogues, if not by class-leaders and popes: and of the two, I
confess I should prefer a Hildebrand to an O'Flynn."

"But," I replied, "we do not love, we do not trust, we do not respect the
clergy. Has their conduct to the masses for the last century deserved that
we should do so? Will you ask us to obey the men whom we despise?"

"God forbid!" she answered. "But you must surely be aware of the
miraculous, ever-increasing improvement in the clergy."

"In morals," I said, "and in industry, doubtless; but not upon those points
which are to us just now dearer than their morals or their industry,
because they involve the very existence of our own industry and our own
morals--I mean, social and political subjects. On them the clergy seem to
me as ignorant, as bigoted, as aristocratic as ever."

"But, suppose that there were a rapidly-increasing class among the clergy,
who were willing to help you to the uttermost--and you must feel that their
help would be worth having--towards the attainment of social reform, if you
would waive for a time merely political reform?"

"What?" I said, "give up the very ideas for which we have struggled, and
sinned, and all but died? and will struggle, and, if need be, die for
still, or confess ourselves traitors to the common weal?"

"The Charter, like its supporters, must die to itself before it lives to
God. Is it not even now farther off than ever?"

"It seems so indeed--but what do you mean?"

"You regarded the Charter as an absolute end. You made a selfish and a
self-willed idol of it. And therefore God's blessing did not rest on it or
you."

"We want it as a means as well as an end--as a means for the highest and
widest social reform, as well as a right dependent on eternal justice."

"Let the working classes prove that, then," she replied, "in their actions
now. If it be true, as I would fain believe it to be, let them show that
they are willing to give up their will to God's will; to compass those
social reforms by the means which God puts in their way, and wait for His
own good time to give them, or not to give them, those means which they in
their own minds prefer. This is what I meant by saying that Chartism must
die to itself before it has a chance of living to God. You must feel, too,
that Chartism has sinned--has defiled itself in the eyes of the wise, the
good, the gentle. Your only way now to soften the prejudice against it is
to show that you can live like men and brothers and Christians without it.
You cannot wonder if the clergy shall object awhile to help you towards
that Charter, which the majority of you demanded for the express purpose of
destroying the creed which the clergy do believe, however badly they may
have acted upon it."

"It is all true enough--bitterly true. But yet, why do we need the help of
the clergy?"

"Because you need the help of the whole nation; because there are other
classes to be considered beside yourselves; because the nation is neither
the few nor the many, but the all; because it is only by the co-operation
of all the members of a body, that any one member can fulfil its calling in
health and freedom; because, as long as you stand aloof from the clergy, or
from any other class, through pride, self-interest, or wilful ignorance,
you are keeping up those very class distinctions of which you and I too
complain, as 'hateful equally to God and to his enemies;' and, finally,
because the clergy are the class which God has appointed to unite all
others; which, in as far as it fulfils its calling, and is indeed a
priesthood, is above and below all rank, and knows no man after the flesh,
but only on the ground of his spiritual worth, and his birthright in that
kingdom which is the heritage of all."

"Truly," I answered, "the idea is a noble one--But look at the reality! Has
not priestly pandering to tyrants made the Church, in every age, a scoff
and a byword among free men?"

"May it ever do so," she replied, "whenever such a sin exists! But yet,
look at the other side of the picture. Did not the priesthood, in the
first ages, glory not in the name, but, what is better, in the office, of
democrats? Did not the Roman tyrants hunt them down as wild beasts, because
they were democrats, proclaiming to the slave and to the barbarian a
spiritual freedom and a heavenly citizenship, before which the Roman well
knew his power must vanish into naught? Who, during the invasion of the
barbarians, protected the poor against their conquerors? Who, in the middle
age, stood between the baron and his serfs? Who, in their monasteries,
realized spiritual democracy,--the nothingness of rank and wealth, the
practical might of co-operation and self-sacrifice? Who delivered England
from the Pope? Who spread throughout every cottage in the land the Bible
and Protestantism, the book and the religion which declares that a man's
soul is free in the sight of God? Who, at the martyr's stake in Oxford,
'lighted the candle in England that shall never be put out?' Who, by
suffering, and not by rebellion, drove the last perjured Stuart from his
throne, and united every sect and class in one of the noblest steps in
England's progress? You will say these are the exceptions; I say nay; they
are rather a few great and striking manifestations of an influence
which has been, unseen though not unfelt, at work for ages, converting,
consecrating, organizing, every fresh invention of mankind, and which is
now on the eve of christianizing democracy, as it did Mediæval Feudalism,
Tudor Nationalism, Whig Constitutionalism; and which will succeed in
christianizing it, and so alone making it rational, human, possible;
because the priesthood alone, of all human institutions, testifies of
Christ the King of men, the Lord of all things, the inspirer of all
discoveries; who reigns, and will reign, till He has put all things under
His feet, and the kingdoms of the world have become the kingdoms of God and
of His Christ. Be sure, as it always has been, so will it be now. Without
the priesthood there is no freedom for the people. Statesmen know it; and,
therefore, those who would keep the people fettered, find it necessary
to keep the priesthood fettered also. The people never can be themselves
without co-operation with the priesthood; and the priesthood never can be
themselves without co-operation with the people. They may help to make a
sect-Church for the rich, as they have been doing, or a sect-Church for
paupers (which is also the most subtle form of a sect-Church for the rich),
as a party in England are trying now to do--as I once gladly would have
done myself: but if they would be truly priests of God, and priests of
the Universal Church, they must be priests of the people, priests of the
masses, priests after the likeness of Him who died on the cross."