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XII.

 

            THE fate of England and the civilisation of the coming ages depend on the issue of our choice between the views of the two classes I am contrasting. Hence no pains must be spared to make the difference between them clear. As I said at the outset, my appeal is neither to tradition nor to authority, but to that which each man feels in himself to be true and good of himself. Because one man avows himself an intuitionalist and another an experientialist, it does not follow that there is any essential difference between them, One may have one

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faculty in excess, and another the other faculty; but all have both in varying proportions; and botch faculties ought to be cultivated with like industry. The reason why it is almost vain in our day to appeal to men’s intuitions is that the whole regime of modern society is ordered with an express view to the destruction of the intuitional faculty; and hence it has come that an appeal to moral considerations is now addressed to deaf ears. Interest, as divorced from and opposed to duty, almost alone has a chance of gaining an audience. This has held hood alike of the individual and of the general, until it has come that the only consideration that a statesman dares address to the country is that of “the interests of England” – a phrase invariably interpreted to mean her material, as distinguished from her moral, welfare.

 

            Those in whom the heart is sound, in that the intuitive faculty is still kept alive, will recognise the accuracy of the description which represents the two classes respectively as men who stand one at the summit and the other at the base of a mighty hill: the former, aloft in pure, clear, bracing airs, through which his vision can reach to distances impossible at a lower altitude; the latter, enveloped in the mists and clouds which hang around the sides and envelop in obscurity the

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dwellers in the valleys, so that men are forced to grope in darkness or with such artificial lights as they may devise, in order to find aught that they may require. The mountain is not so lofty but that words can be exchanged between those at its extremities; and loud and ringing is the voice with which the climber at the summit hails his friends below, entreating them to escape from the darkness and stifling fogs of the valley. “Here, at the level on which I stand,” he cries,” is no mist or cloud to intercept the view. The atmosphere is preternaturally clear, and the air, oh, so exhilarating and bracing! The sun, of which you never catch a glimpse, shines out bright and warm up here, and marches through the skies with a grand and stately tread, lighting up all the land as he goes, and shining directly into myself, vivifying and renewing my whole being. Only come and see for yourselves. Come and see how gloriously beautiful is existence, when one has found the right place and the right light for beholding it. Never, before I carne up here, did I know what it is to live and to be a MAN. Oh, glorious sun! Surely thou art the brightness of the glory and the express image of the person of Him, the great Triune – at once producer, sustainer, and

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renewer of existence! Surely it is no idolatry to adore thee as His representative and vicegerent, and to call thee also a God!”

 

            Hearing his accents of enthusiasm ringing loud and clear through the mists, the grovellers below listen, wondering what there can be up on those barren peaks thus to excite him. Looking in the direction whence the sounds proceed, they see nothing save the rolling roof of darkness that hangs over them. “Poor fellow,” they remark to each other, “he was always of an excitable temperament, and the air up there must have quite turned his head. It will be fortunate if be gets down safe, and in time for supper.”

 

In answer to his renewed entreaties to come up and see for themselves – for his sympathies are vivid, and a solitary pleasure is to him only half a pleasure – they declare that they do not believe a word he says. He may not mean to deceive, but every one knows how deceptive the atmosphere is apt to be at those unaccustomed heights. If he could enable them to see it for themselves from where they are, it would be a different thing; or perhaps if some of them, whose imagination could be trusted not to run away with them, were to come up on behalf of the others, it might be managed – but then it must

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be stipulated that they bring some of their valley fog with them. They dare not trust themselves out of that. It is the breath and life of their being.

 

            The pleas whereon the two orthodox classes respectively rest their case, are essentially one and the same. One is, that man, though once good, is totally depraved, and therefore incapable of seeing aright without priestly assistance; and the other, that man is only an educated beast, incapable of seeing at all, and able only to grope his way by the aid of his senses. As a beast, it has been argued lately, man belongs to Nature; Nature is cruel; wherefore man is insolent and presumptions when, by claiming to be superior to the beasts, he claims to be better than Nature. Thus is ignored the evidence of man’s whole history, to the effect that the world is intended, not as a final perfection, but as a place for the education of the consciousness, and a brief stage in the education of the individual – an education of which the possibility is inconceivable in the absence of the ministry of pain. Orthodoxy, speaking by the mouth of the physiologist and the biologist, virtually teaches that because the Master of the school of the world is sometimes compelled to employ severe measures, therefore the pupils are justified in torturing each other.

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But granting that man is only an “educated beast,” what do we, what do physiologists, I ask again, know about beasts? Can they tell us aught about the basis and nature of consciousness? Of that of beasts any more than of ourselves? If, as is indisputably the case, all consciousness is essentially one, and all life, all mind, all existence is one; and if, as is also indisputably the case, the end of existence is, for everything to which existence has been given, the fulfilment and development of its own allotment of consciousness; and if also, as would seem to follow from the eternity of the life of the whole, the life of the individual is indestructible, – if all this be so, then it is not man that is lowered, but the beast that is raised by the comparison, inasmuch as we are thereby compelled to regard it as but an uneducated, perchance a degenerated, man.

 

            The correspondence subsisting between the religious and scientific orthodoxies, in respect to the various stages of development of the doctrine of vicarious sacrifices, is curious and instructive. In both the earliest for m is botanical. In religion man offers innocent gifts of fruits and flowers in token of thankfulness to, and perhaps not without expectation of future favours from, his Maker; for it has always been the belief of

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primitive peoples that their gods really require and subsist upon the food offered to them in sacrifice. This stage corresponds to that which in science consists in the dissection and microscopical examination of plants, for the purpose of learning their structure, and comparing it with that of man.

 

            Passing beyond this stage, man sacrifices in religion sheep and oxen; and in science, the invertebrate animals, in which, owing to the rudimentary nature of their nervous systems, there is supposed to be but little faculty of sensation.

 

But the institution has now reached a stage at which blood has been tasted on both sides, the softer feelings are blunted, and the parties have become accustomed to the notion that man can in some way be benefited by the death and sufferings of the inferior animals. And it is argued that if by the death and sufferings of the inferior animals he obtains benefit, much more will he do so by those of a higher grade. Reflecting thus, the lower human consciousness, religious and scientific, shows itself ripe for a new development in the idea of sacrifice.

 

            People who believe in the soul have never been over-careful of the body. The value of the

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latter vanishes in view of the supreme importance of the former. Priests have not been slow to take advantage of this magnificent trait in the character of man. It has always been enough for them to represent that it was of use to give of the fruit of the body for the sin of the soul, in order to obtain the flower of a country’s youth and beauty for the sacrificial altar. The step from animals to man, when the priests declared that no sacrifice short of one of such a character would propitiate the gods, was therefore effected without difficulty; and with such universal success, that it is impossible to point to a single nation of all those mentioned in history that did not offer human sacrifices. The logic of sacrifice having once been conceded, and vicarious atonement having become the orthodox and only way of salvation, it was easily seen that no animal short of the sinning animal, man, could atone for man.

 

Thus far the victory remains with the sacerdotalists; for the physiologists, through the comparative lukewarmness of mankind where the body only is concerned, were unable to achieve the next stage in the development of their branch of the sacrificial idea. They have been compelled, therefore, for the most part, to be content with

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experimenting upon the most highly organised and sensitive animals, next to man, that they could obtain. Of course these were, by the very fact of their superior organisation and intelligence, man’s especial companions and friends – namely, cats, dogs, horses, and monkeys. The monkey has an especial attraction for the vivisecting physiologist, because of the exact resemblance of his brain to that of man. His antics, moreover, under torture, are found pleasantly to vary the monotony of a dry scientific exposition, as any one will find who takes the trouble to refer to the published records of such matters. For the vivisector’s humour is of the grimmest. After destroying with a red-hot wire the nerve of sight in a monkey’s brain, and paralysing one side of the animal, Professor Ferrier says of the application of a hot iron to the other side, that “active reaction ensued.” A contortion of agony is usually described as indicating “a great sensory stimulus.” The facts, we are told, are differently interpreted by experimenters. But even monkeys are a poor substitute for men, when it is a knowledge of man, for man, that is required. Only a few cases, however, are on record in which living human subjects have been experimented upon for the benefit of science the earliest instance I have

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been able to find is that of the Chinese emperor, Chow-sin, the last king of the dynasty Chang, who lived about B.C. 1700, and was therefore a contemporary of the Hebrew Joseph. The experiments performed by Chow-sin consisted in ripping up pregnant women in order that he might see the fetus in the womb; an experiment of a class frequently performed by physiologists in our days on animals about to give birth to young. Another experiment of Chow-sin’s contained a facetious element, which marked him a model vivisector. Seeing some people fording a river one very cold morning in winter, he remarked that they must have very good constitutions to bear the cold so well, and then ordered their legs to be chopped off, that he might view the marrow. Chow-sin, however, became, as the Rev. Dr. Morrison assures us, a synonym in China for all that was infamous in sensuality and cruelty.

 

There is a passage in an old Latin medical writer (I think Celsus) which is instructive in relation to this subject. After naming two of his predecessors who had vivisected men, he remarks, “For my part, I never experiment on anything that is alive; for I regard science as intended to cure, and not to cause, suffering.”

 

Religion has been more fortunate both as regards

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the willingness of its people, if not as regards the zeal of its priests. The descriptions given by recent travellers of human sacrifices in Africa, show that there is frequently no reluctance on the part of the victims to be sacrificed for the good of their fellow-tribesmen. At the death of a king of Dahomey the women attached to the royal precincts forthwith hasten to kill themselves, in order that their sovereign may not go into the presence of his ancestors unattended. Sacerdotalists cannot fail to appreciate, nor physiologists to envy, the faith that can prompt such self-abnegation. The decline of the taste for human sacrifices among some of the more civilised nations of antiquity, was, writes Dr. Kalisch, lamented as a piece of morbid sentimentality, and a sign of the national degeneracy.

 

While the sacrifice of ordinary men continued with unabated vigour, the feeling that something above an ordinary man – something that would include and cover all mankind – obtained favour with the priesthoods, especially of the nations in and about Canaan. The sacrifice of the son or daughter of a king or chief was thus regarded as possessing especial efficacy. The Hebrew sacerdotalists, to inculcate this belief, ascribed great merit to Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac.

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And notwithstanding that Abraham was restrained by an intuition of the wickedness of the practice, the Divine approval was represented as accorded to the intention, and to the alleged substitution of a ram, instead of to the patriarch’s faithfulness to his intuitions. When Mesha, king of Moab, was hard besieged by the Israelites, he offered his son upon the walls, and the besiegers retired in dismay, confident that even their own Jehovah was powerless to resist a sacrifice of so exalted a nature. The sacrifices of Jephtha’s daughter, and of the seven sons and grandsons of Saul by David, belonged to this category. Of the latter we are told, that “they hanged them in the hill before the Lord. And after that God was appeased for the land,” Failing to obtain a royal subject for their uses, the physiologists must be considered, for the present at least, as distanced in the race. It is true they are not yet at the end of their resources. But neither are the sacerdotalists.

 

Having reached the summit of the ladder of material life, and sacrificed the highest in the land without gaining thereby any abatement of the evils by which the earth was afflicted – for it was no business of the priests to tell people that they must lead more wholesome and industrious

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lives in order that by affording no provocation to plague, famine, or war, they might themselves minister to the prevention of their misfortunes; – that might have had the effect of leading them to suspect that they could dispense with the services of the priests altogether – it occurred to men that it must be the soul and not the body that was responsible for the evils of existence; hence it became necessary to find some means of sacrificing a soul or spirit instead of a body only. The conception, first of a man-god, and next of a god-man, afforded the desired solution; and as it was not possible to go beyond the sacrifice of a god, men were forced to be content. The world, it is true, was not rescued from its evils; and so the only resource was to suppose that it was beyond redemption, and to go on letting the priests have their way lest worse things befall.

 

I said that the physiologists were not yet at the end of their resources. True, their disbelief in the existence of souls precluded them from desiring to include a soul in the list of animals liable to vivisection; but there is one very favourite experiment of which the significance ought not to be unheeded. This is the practice of inoculating unsuspecting patients with the disease known as syphilis, for the benefit of

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science. Seeing that it is a characteristic of this disease, generally believed to be incurable, to be liable to taint the blood of whole successive generations, and produce diseases of the most dreadful kind, mental as well as physical, it is hardly too much to say that science has run sacerdotalism hard in the competition which has now lasted at least two thousand years.

 

It is scarcely necessary to say that neither class of sacrificialists has been more successful than the other in preventing or relieving the woes of humanity. On the contrary, impiety, crime, and disease are constantly showing themselves under new and more aggravated forms. This result is only what an unprejudiced observer, suspecting the existence in the world of some degree of moral government, and watching for tokens of its operation, would have expected. For the prevalence of the notion that their clergy and doctors were really taking the best means to save them, has prevented people from giving their own attention to the matter, and thereby withheld them from seeking a radical cause or cure for their maladies of whatever kind. Even now the world is not aware of the fact that everything that comes to be made a trade of, and to be associated with the element of pecuniary gain, is

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apt to deteriorate, and this in respect of the quality of the thing itself no less than of the class of persons who occupy themselves with it. Founded originally in enthusiasm, the noblest activities degenerate when made a matter of trade.

 

The orthodoxies cannot be expected to betray any misgiving that their whole principle of procedure is wrong, either as a matter of morals, or as a matter of therapeutics. The two businesses have grown up into enormous vested interests, with all sorts of grades of honour and merit, and with every kind of paraphernalia that can make a solemn show before the people. Like the famous religious “mysteries” of antiquity, they have their own codes for regulating the conduct of their members towards each other and the public, and their own terms of admission into their respective bodies, and their doctrines esoteric and exoteric. The sacerdotal order will not, for instance, admit any candidate to its ranks who openly announces his disbelief in the efficacy of vicarious sacrifice; and the Royal Society – for the patronage of the Crown is not withheld – refuses to admit any medical man to membership unless he can produce proofs of practical proficiency in the art of vivisection.

 

At the last meeting of this Society, its

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president, the distinguished botanist, Dr. Hooker, announced a donation of £6000 for the encouragement among us of original research in the physical sciences, and the proposal of the Government to add for the next five years £4000 annually to the present grant of £1000, which the Society expends chiefly in “providing investigators with instruments and assistance.” He described the course taken by the council in the matter of vivisection, and “its earnest remonstrance against the admission into the statute book of a principle essentially antagonistic to the progress of all natural knowledge.”

 

            I hope I am succeeding in making it understood what our orthodoxies really are, and what chance our honour and safety as a people have in their hands. It is by the tone and capacity of its intellectual classes that the true condition of a people must first be judged, as a soil must be judged by the character of its vegetation, a tree by its fruit. If our men and our principles are worthless for home use, they are worthless for exportation. If they mislead us and bring us to grief in our own affairs, they will do so where the affairs of others are concerned. The instinctive intuition of the true, the right, and the noble gone, it will be gone for one set of affairs as well as for another. At home we are in the depth of a spiritual winter.

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Let us carry that winter abroad, as we are called on by the orthodoxies to do, and the consequences both for ourselves and for mankind will be nought but weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

 

            To understand from what I have said of the orthodox scientific spirit, that I am a hater of science, or from what I have said of the orthodox religious spirit that I am no lover of religion, would be wholly to mistake the meaning of all that I have said. It is to the religion and science of the idea of which our present orthodoxies are degradations that I look for the final consummation of man’s high destiny. To me it is no reproach to a man to be called idealist, and unpractical. On the contrary, I regard the truest idealist as the most practical of men, for he is the one man who dispenses neither with facts, nor with the meaning of facts. I can point to scientists of the highest repute, the coming men of the scientific hopes of the future, who rave with indignant contempt if any one ventures in their presence to hint that the facts, to collect which they are sacrificing both the bodies of others and their own souls – such atrocious barbarities do they freely practise in satisfaction of the most aimless curiosity – have any meaning, or relation to each other. “Science consists,” say

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these model specimens of scientific orthodoxy, “in gathering and cataloguing facts, not in seeking to interpret them; since there is no interpretation to them, but everything in existence is accident and confusion. There is no sun to the system, no centre round which it revolves in harmonious and sympathetic order. Man, the world, the whole universe of being, are but the unmeaning vibrations of some unknown, unknowable medium, and he who thinks otherwise is an idealist and a fool.” Such be thy scientific gods, O England! and O Christendom!

 

Is further argument needed to prove that it is not the soul but the body of England; not her higher but her lower nature; not the once warm, generous heart that would dare and suffer any risk to save a fellow-being from oppression and cruelty; but a debased, over-fed, sensual, faithless, selfish body, through which her soul can by no means penetrate, and that prompts her to be indifferent alike to every principle of honour and humanity – whether she be called on by priests to defame her God by regarding Him as incapable of granting pardon to His own creatures without a sacrifice of blood; or by scientists to disgrace herself by consenting at their bidding and in their interests to sanction

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the infliction of torture upon myriads of defenceless animals; or whether, at the bidding of both of those classes, to commit the monstrous folly and wrong of authorising the chief priests and Pharisees of her National Church to immolate on the altar, whereat they seek to celebrate their proposed unnatural union with the miserable Greek fetish worship, a people she has ever protected, and whose welfare is bound up with her own highest interests. For this is, in plain English, the secret and motive of the whole conspiracy. It is for this that Mr. Gladstone has long and carefully watched and planned; it is for this that he has sought to rouse the country to frenzy against deeds which were even more the misfortune than the crime of the Turk, and more the crime of Russia than that of the Turk; it is for this that his every public utterance is skillfully devised; and it is for this that in the very latest manifesto from his pen he incites Greece to rise in arms, unprovoked, against her neighbour, and thus to cut the throat of its own independence by facilitating the approach of Russia to its shores.

 

Have I not said enough to show that orthodoxy is always cruel? That it must always have blood? Blood to save the soul; blood to save the body;

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and now blood to cement the union of two Churches which are much better apart: just as if we Englishmen really believed in human sacrifice, and held it to be “expedient that one man should die for the nation.”

 

Where, it must be asked, is the generosity, where the scrupulous conscientiousness of that naturally large and sympathetic mind that it can thus stoop to a base intrigue with a knot of sacerdotalists? The answer is at once a deathblow to the whole joint fabric and compact of orthodoxy and atheism. It has come to this because it has suffered its ideal of the Divine perfection to be befouled by a false and hideous doctrine. Mr. Gladstone has yet to learn that as a single flaw in a diamond destroys the value of the gem, so a single flaw in our conception of the ideal perfection vitiates our whole system of thought and conduct. Man is practically what he conceives God to be. If we do not recognise perfection in Him, we cannot attain, or even aspire to it in ourselves. For the believer in the sacerdotal doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, God is not synonymous with perfection, intellectual, moral, or physical. He represents the blind, relentless WILL of the pessimist, whose might is right, and than whom, he conceives, man has no better

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exemplar. Earth is no longer to be a school wherein to develop man’s lower consciousness into his higher. But henceforth all things are to be regarded from the standpoint of the outer and apparent self, and the soul is to be sacrificed to the supposed exigences of the body. And so the ineffable tragedy of the Soul enacted on Calvary is repeated on every plane of that world to redeem which it suffered in vain. And a Caiaphas is never wanting to pronounce sentence upon it.

 

In thus making the body the central standpoint from which to regard existence and formulate doctrines for its ordering, orthodoxy, alike in the sphere of religion, morals, and science, demonstrates that for it Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton have lived in vain, and that the sun still moves round the earth as its source and centre; that the sun and planets, and the whole stellar universe, are but offshoots and accidents of the earth, instead of the earth being itself but a satellite deriving its existence from the sun, and dependent on it for the means of enjoying that existence. Little doubt can there be that if orthodoxy, religious or scientific, would but reconsider the sentence it pronounced against Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo, and try for once to see what aspect the universe bears when viewed from its true centre, instead of

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continuing to blazon forth the antiquated teaching that the earth is the true self and centre of the solar system, and the sun but a pleasant illusion; that the body is the true self and centre of the human system, and the soul an illusion; and that it is all a mistake to suppose that there is a vivid and luminous centre from which the body of man or earth radiates; or that sun or soul is aught else than the outcome of the material envelope of the earthly sense – it would find just cause for holding down its head in bitterest shame.

 

The secret conclave of the Vatican well knew that the demonstration on the physical plane to the world of the truth long before perceived on the spiritual plane – the truth that the sun, and not the earth; the spirit, and not the body; God, and not man, is the true centre and self of each respective system – would when generally recognised in all its significance, be fatal to the whole fabric of the superstition whereby they throve. It was not the outward and astronomical, but the inward and spiritual truth that they strove to quench. For their fundamental dogma of a God redeeming by his death instead of by his life, was not likely long to survive the discovery that God’s vicegerent and representative to earth, the sun, undergoes no real death,

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notwithstanding his decline and apparent obscuration, but shines on, ever the same, undimmed and undying, giving light and life to all, without money and without price; and that when we lose his light, it is because we turn away or hide from him, and not because he turns away or hides from us.

 

It is through the failure of Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues, religious or scientific, to accord a practical recognition to this discovery, that they persist in viewing all things from the standpoint of the body, and seek to reproduce the sacrifices founded on the notion of a dying God. And it is through the resolve of sacerdotalism to turn to its own advantage the sacrifice consummated at the instigation of Caiaphas, by pretending that it was by the death so criminally inflicted upon Christ, and not by His life of self-sacrifice, that He constituted so potent an element in human redemption, – that we are now called on to repeat the deed.

 

            The soul is crucified whenever its counsels are rejected for those of the body, and that is whenever orthodoxy, sacerdotal or other, seeks to procure its own lower ends by the sacrifice of another. An unthinking multitude, meaning well, but not seeing very far, may shout, “Not this man but Barabbas.” The chief priests and

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Pharisees, all the art, science, and respectability of the nation may be in accord with them – not, however, for the national good, but for some secret interest, such as, perchance, the advancement of some favourite ecclesiastical project, some new development of sacerdotalism, which they would on no account disclose to the vulgar and uninitiated – but the end will always be the soul’s crucifixion instead of the body’s purgation. And England’s soul will be crucified should the counsels of Mr, Gladstone prevail, and Turkey be handed over to the tender mercies of Russia, merely to enable two ambitious sacerdotalisms, which have failed to find their own true centre, to escape the consequences of their adherence to a sanguinary and immoral doctrine, and to gratify their hatred of a rival sacerdotalism, and their dislike to a religion which wholly repudiates sacerdotalism and the vicarious principle.

 

The notion that we English are the true Israel in that we are the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, has long found favour with many who have discerned a certain spiritual resemblance between the Jews and ourselves. The notion rests on a basis which is far from being fantastic. There is much in our national character and history to suggest the thought that that

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exquisite soul, perfected by so much suffering, rejected by the body of Israel, and finally offered on Calvary, is the self-same that, after ascending to its own spheres, and leaving the world to the influences of its spirit, once more descended and alighted on England, making her its chosen people. Be this as it may, whatever the soul by whose inspiring aid we have done so much to redeem the waste places of the earth, and to plant in them sparks of the same high vitality, it is the soul of England – and not her gross body that has of late claimed exclusively to constitute England – which we are now summoned, as by a new Caiaphas, to sacrifice afresh. And when that sacrifice has been consummated, when place and power are lost to us as a nation, as they were to the Jews through their mad infatuation in listening to priests, little then will avail to redeem our lost estate, little will avail us or them, the cry of our rejected better nature, “Forgive them: they knew not what they were doing.”

 

If I seem to dwell at inordinate length and with extreme insistence on the relations in which the religious and intellectual sections of the community stand in regard to this question, I must plead that it is they who have assumed what I

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hold to be the most pernicious initiative, and that their very position gives them a power for evil which is possessed by no others. It is to these that we have hitherto given with unhesitating confidence the charge of our bodies, minds, and souls. And it is because they have abused that confidence, and we are under their guidance going fast to utter min, that it is necessary to point out with such plainness that no one can be in doubt, the fact that we must abandon them, and seek for new teachers and leaders. No doubt there are plenty to maintain that, putting the present question aside, we are in a very good and even improving case, and to assert that there are statistics which show a decided advance. But it has yet to be shown that material prosperity is any index to spiritual vitality.

 

The tests ordinarily proposed, such as a certain increase in the length of life, a certain diminution in the number of convictions for crime, a certain enlargement in the stature of the race, or increase in the number and splendour of our churches and schools, seem to me wholly fallacious, inasmuch as these do not of themselves constitute the elements which minister to the real progress of a nation, but may consist with both moral and intellectual deterioration. This a truth which,

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known thousands of years ago, obtained recognition in the days of David, of whom it is recorded that he, with his people, incurred a punishment of tremendous severity for instituting a census of their material strength, instead of trusting to their spiritual vitality.

 

It depends, for instance, upon the use to which our schools and churches are put, whether they do us good or harm. If the religion inculcated in our churches is to be the same doctrine of blood that it always has been; if the death, and Dot the life, of Christ is to be held up as the way of salvation, and if priests who are not prophets are still to be the ministers, – the multiplication of churches will be but the extension of that which constitutes the basis of all our evils. If our schools are to be applied simply to the process of reversing the old methods, if they are to be used for suppressing the reflective and synthetic faculties, as the sacerdotalists have ever used them for suppressing the analytic and perceptive; if, in a word, they are to represent the divorce of the head from the heart, as the Church has represented the divorce of the heart from the head, our last case will assuredly be worse than our first. Better to have men ignorant and superstitious, than intelligent and conscienceless. The advocates of “secular

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education” among us are not without need of a caution on this point. I would remind them that head and heart are as light and heat, male and female, to each other in the system of humanity, and cannot be divorced without certain ruin. The fear now is, that both are in danger of rejection in favour of that part of us whose function m the sustenance of both; and that in place of an education consisting in the development and regulation of head and heart, these are discarded in favour of the belly. In the address of one of the candidates at the recent school-board election, a single motive was urged on behalf of education. It was that our artisans are being driven out of the market through the superior intelligence of foreign artisans. Of the use of education in its true sense – as the means of developing the whole consciousness and character of the individual, and so making him more a man – not a word: Mr. Alderman Bennett’s sole appeal was to the stomach. He knew his constituency, if he did not quite know himself; for he was returned at the head of the poll for the City of London.

 

            The victory of the secular party was, nevertheless, a matter for lively satisfaction. It represented, first, the determination of our people to Lave education, and to have it homogeneous, cost

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what it might. And it represented, next, the discomfiture of the sacerdotal and blood party. Let us only get the stain of blood removed from our teaching, and w e shall not long remain content with the dry husks of a merely intellectual training. The life then will have a chance of obtaining recognition at last. For the present, however, it seems as if we must undergo depression to a still lower level of vitality, perhaps to an abyss of calamity, ere we accord a hearing to aught that does not appeal to our senses.

 

            Should England show herself at this crisis able to see the right and to do it, she will have reason to congratulate herself on every fresh accession to her churches, chapels, and schools; for when once really alive throughout her whole system, once fully conscious of the nature and place of her true centre, she will thoroughly purge her Church of that unclean thing, a sanguinary sacerdotalism. Not, however, by the remedies ordinarily suggested; not by amputation or depletion; but simply by loosening the bonds in which thought and utterance are now fettered, and allowing the light of freedom to enter her ecclesiastical portals. All error is, as I have said, but limitation. And limitation is catching. The limitations imposed upon thought and utterance in the Church have extended to and vitiated our very science, Our

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freethinkers are not free, because they make it a point of honour to reject the doctrines of the Church, whether false or true. The admission of free thought into the Church will remove the antagonism at present subsisting between the two sections, for neither sacerdotal nor scientific orthodoxy can long outstay the dawning rays of the intuitions which herald the rising of the soul, that sun at whose approach night vanishes, and all fetters fall away from thought. Freed from the bondage in which she has voluntarily enthralled herself, and admitting to her ministry all who, being duly counted competent, are spiritually impelled to become teachers of their fellows, the free Church of England. Will so lift up a true ideal of perfection as will draw unto her all her children, whatever their doctrine. For, being free, there will be no pretext for disunion or dissent. Only Iet England manifest a revived vitality, let her find her true spiritual centre, and there will be no limit to the spiritual heights to which she may aspire. Greek and Roman may then be left to revolve as they list in far-off systems of their own; and we shall be a I liberty to revolve, secure, content, and unmolested, round our own true centre and sun, – found at last, never again to be forsaken. It was by a rough but forcible

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term that the Hebrew prophets reprobated the tendencies of their people to exchange the God of Israel for those of other nations. It may be well to bring it to the minds of those among us who are proposing to exchange the God of England either for the blind, relentless Will-God of political Russia, or for the rudimentary Nature-God of the Greek Church, that the prophets of Israel called a similar quest, “Going a whoring after strange gods.”

 

            The phrase is not a mere phrase; it is the forcible expression of an actual fact. The seers of antiquity saw, as men can still see, if only they live purely enough and think earnestly enough – two processes essential to perfection, represented by “Water and the Spirit” – that the soul is no mere outcome or consensus of the bodily faculties, but an actual entity, a bright and indestructible flame; and that the body is but as the encasing glass through which the soul shines. And they saw that the functions of prophet and priest – two classes which are essentially male and female to each other – are, the one to tend and feed the flame of the soul, and the other to tend and keep clean the glass of the body. They saw also that as there is an individual soul of the individual, and a universal soul of the universe, so between these is a

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national soul of the people or race, and that every people is a people, individuated, united, and strong, in exact proportion as they suffer that national soul to manifest itself in the m as a nation, and cultivate or “worship” that soul, and strive to make themselves, its children, a perfect manifestation of it in the flesh. The reason why the term “renegade” has always been one of bitterest reproach, is that it has been, consciously or unconsciously, held to signify one who renounced the national soul to follow what was regarded as a strange god, namely, the soul of some other people, who, not being the true ancestral soul of his race, could have no claim on his allegiance. It was like changing one’s parents.

 

            In idolatries of this kind priesthoods have always been ready consenters, if not leaders. It is because a people’s perceptions of their own soul or deity have become dim, and their affections alienated through the evil teaching of those whose duty it is to keep alive in them the light of the ideal or true soul, that they fall away from faith to sense, and go after strange gods, fancying that they are better than their own gods, and can do more for them than their own; “for have they not,” it is argued, “done more for the peoples who worship them, and who are united and strong in their worship of them, than our gods

(p. 166)

are doing for us?” It has always been in such a crisis of a people’s history that the prophet has found his sternest mission. When the priest is faithless the people fall away; and when things are nearing their worst the prophet appears. The false priest cares nothing what or how many gods be worshipped, cares nothing whether they be of home or foreign growth, so long as the people do worship, and allow him to have the control of their worship. Every nation of antiquity has fallen and disappeared, simply because it has quitted its own for “strange gods.” And every priesthood of antiquity has ministered to such fall, either by leading or by following its people into idolatry. Unpatriotism is thus idolatry. It signifies the worship of laws and principles foreign to one’s own. The lesson of all history is, that the quenching of the light of the soul, by refusing to heed its intuitions, is at once the triumph of the false priest and the death of the true prophet; and that when the true prophet is unheeded and his counsels rejected, the ancestral soul of the people which has found in that prophet its perfected expression only to have it rejected, is virtually “crucified,” and so departs, leaving its renegade children to the destruction they have courted and ensured.

 

            The perfect man of any race is no other than

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the perfect expression in the flesh of all the essential characteristics of the soul of that race. Escaping the limitations of the individual man, such an one represents the soul of his people. Escaping the limitations of the individual people, he represents the soul of all peoples, or humanity. Escaping the limitations of humanity, but still preserving the essential characteristics of humanity, he represents the soul of the system of which the earth is but an individual member. And, finally, After climbing many a further step of the infinite ladder of existence, escaping the limitations of all systems whatsoever, he represents – nay, finds that he is – the soul of the universe, even “God” Himself, once “manifested in the flesh,” and now “perfected by suffering,” “purified, sanctified, redeemed, justified, glorified,” “crowned, with honour and glory,” and “seated for ever at the right h and of the Father,” “one with God,” even God Himself.

 

            Such is the spiritual history of every individual man and race who, instead of “falling away” to strange gods – the souls or selfs of other peoples – instead of cultivating its own lower nature and false self, refuses to quench its own spirit and extinguish its own soul, and perseveres to the end, cultivating its true self, and so “worshipping” its own soul.

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The soul, I have said, is crucified when its counsels are rejected. It is very important in our present case that we be certain which are the counsels of the soul, and which of the body. There is a test, hitherto an infallible one, by which this can be ascertained. The warning, “Woe unto you when all men speak well of you” is true now as ever where the soul is concerned. If in allying ourselves to Russia we obtain the applause of our chief priests and Pharisees, of our social magnates, of our literary, scientific, artistic, and other intellectual classes, and of the whole body of orthodox specialists, of whatever kind; if in allying ourselves to Russia we obtain the approbation of all the Governments of Europe, on the ground that we are doing the wise and sensible thing in abandoning our past policy of isolation, – the policy which consists in shutting ourselves up, as it were, with our own Jehovah, and imagining that we have a standard of right and wrong which transcends the standards of other peoples; and if, moreover, in doing all this, we gain the approval of our own false and superficial judgment, which is inciting us to become the executioners of what we fancy to be a Divine vengeance upon our erring brother, the Moslem, by offering him up as a bloody sacrifice to our own. Lower

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nature, at the instigation of a sanguinary orthodoxy, working on the behoof of the powers of darkness, incarnated in the great empire of the north, backed by our own sacerdotalists, “Woe, woe,” indeed, it will be to us “when all men speak well of us.”

 

            But how shall we speak of ourselves when, roused from our self-complacency by disaster after disaster, loss after loss, one depth of ruin fathomed only to find another abyss opening to receive us, we awake to find that the Power we have enabled to overrun Turkey has absorbed the whole region through which lies our road to the Orient; that the physical prestige which ministered to our possession of India is no longer backed by the consciousness of the spiritual affinity which constituted the true bond between us and the Hindoo; but that every bond, material and spiritual, has been rent asunder, and a hopeless and impassable barrier has been erected between us and the last remaining outlet for our sympathetic expansion?

 

            For, be it noted, the “Eastern question” does not terminate with the dominion of the Sultan. He is Pope or spiritual chief over a far vaster area. At this moment India is ours. But it is watching, with the same intense interest with which Christendom watches the conflict between

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the Papacy and modern, thought, the conflict between England and its vast rival, in relation to the fate of the holy places of Islam. How long, then, will India be ours if the counsels of Caiaphas prevail? The bonds between nations, as between individuals, are, as are also their antagonisms, spiritual, and it is from the spiritual feeling that the material expression takes its rise. The link that binds us to Turkey is the link that binds us to India. Both are spiritual in their real essence, and one broken, the other breaks also. Turkey is the point of contact, for good as well as for evil, between Islamism and Christendom. Turkey driven from Europe, Turkey engulphed in, or engulphing, pagan Russia, all Islam will be at hopeless enmity with all Christendom. India will be lost to England, and with it all the high hopes England’s soul entertained, when England had a soul and listened to it, of the regeneration of India, and, through India, that of all Islam.

 

Losing India, what is our condition? Our colonies, having attained their majority and succeeded to their inheritance, will be closed to us. Busied in completing their own development in conformity with their own conditions, they will desire and require to be left to themselves. There are no more colonies to be founded; for we Lave done our duty on the physical plane.

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and “replenished the earth” with a hardy and energetic stock, and one withal that has a spark of the great ancestral national soul of England burning more or less brightly within it. We have done our physical breeding, passed our period of animal fecundity, and now are in the autumn of our manhood and the full maturity – if only we have not destroyed our constitution by excess or luxury – of our intellectual faculties. Henceforth our mission is on the higher planes of the national consciousness; henceforth our work consists in, developing our own moral and spiritual nature, and in extending to others, even our brothers of humanity, the benefits of our gains. Now, where is it that, by our expenditure of those gains, we shall at once secure our own perfection and redeem our brethren? Where, but in the East? The whole East is open to us. In the East we have a career of the highest usefulness, and on the grandest scale that the most ambitious heart of a people can desire, – a career which will be a manifestation of that rightly-selfish sympathy, which cares to seek its own advantage, but only through the good of others. Thus finding her own true self, and cultivating it as her god, and so abnegating that lower and baser, that gross and outer animal self, at whose instigations – backed by the false priests and false prophets of the

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orthodoxies, in which the lower nature of man is ever formulating itself – England will multiply on the spiritual plane of the world’s consciousness as she has never multiplied on the physical; her spiritual seed shall rise up and call her blessed, and these shall be countless as the sands of the seashore. To her, achieving such triumphs on the plane of the spirit, all that she has done in the past on the plane of sense will seem but as the toys of his childhood seem to the matured, perfected, and triumphant man. Such is the prospect for our dear, but not old, not decrepit, England, if she but fling to the winds, as idle and wicked words, the counsels of a selfish and blood-stained orthodoxy, and suffer her great true heart to speak.

 

And what if she will not do this? What if she listens to the “prophets who prophesy falsely, and the priests who bear rule by their means?” Will the issue be that which she will love to have? Surely not. Her colonies gone, the East closed against her as with a door of steel, England will fall back into herself, like a sun that, used up and burnt out, withdraws from its place in the system it once filled with glory to itself and blessing to others, either leaving the planets to which it has given birth to shiver waste away in the lifeless void of space, or

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drawing them back into its darkened self to perish in its chill embrace; England will return into her limits of a thousand years ago, cabined, cribbed, confined within her four narrow seas, but shorn of the divine energy that had made her the redeemer of the world’s wildernesses. And then, having no spirit left to conquer the fresh worlds she might have conquered, she will devour in silence the remnant of her once great soul, finding no outlet for her activities but that of her spiritual prototype, Israel, – even the Israel who, since the rejection and loss of its soul, and of the heaven that had opened to its view only to close in darkness and fury upon its land, has devoted itself to the exclusive worship of the god of this world – gold – and the enjoyment of the only fruits which gold can buy, the Dead Sea apples of sense. Well will England do now to read anew the utterances of the prophets of Israel, those bitterest wailings that ever carne forth from hearts torn with anguish at the prospect of their country’s downfall through its own insensate pride and folly. For there, and there only in all the world’s literature, will she find the words that can express the sense she ought to have of the desolation which hangs imminent over her. And when she has read, and in the reading has, prodigal-like, come to herself, then,

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as I have said, will she also straightway fall on her knees and cry, “Father, I have sinned against Heaven and in Thy sight:” and rising, she will go, clothed and in her right mind, to the Moslem, and extending to him both her hands, still wet with tears of her repentance, will from the bottom of her heart exclaim, “Brother, forgive me, we were both in the wrong.”

 

But where is the England to whom such an appeal should be made? Where is the representative of that once great heart to which the weak and oppressed of the whole world were wont to fly for aid? We have weighed in the balance our principal great ones, and found the m utterly wanting in all that would fit them to be our guides in the present lowering wrath. To what section of society can we turn in reasonable hope of finding there a response to any appeal that demands either heart or head in return? Let us take what is called “Society” itself. What do we find it? Ignorant, frivolous, selfish, luxurious, vulgar, debauched by wealth, its nervous centres so over-stimulated and debilitated, mentally as well as physically, by the noxious substances it miscalls food and medicine, that no glimmering of a soul can by any manner of means shine through it; putting seeming in the place of being, and caring only for a tawdry soulless

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display; seeking its chief delight, – its men in bloodshed, and its women in the foulnesses of a divorce-court; capable of appreciating only a debased art, a blind science, a superficial policy, a fetish-worshipping ritual; – yet withal amazed and distressed when its daughters openly turn wantons and its sons sharpers; – plainly it is not to what in England is called “Society” that the appeal is to be made.

 

Our Legislature – that model of representative institutions – shall the appeal be to that? Representative government is indeed an admirable de vice when the people represented are themselves admirable. At present our Legislature is admirable, chiefly in that it does represent us. It is a faithful mirror to show us ourselves as we are. If w e do not like the i m age, that is not the mirror’s fault. We may pretend to despise a Legislature that so faithfully represents the selfish body of England that – when appealed to by the compassionate soul of England for protection for its poor, dumb citizens, who, being dumb and unrepresented in Parliament, have no voice in the making of the laws under which they live and suffer, and are thus utterly helpless unless represented by human hearts – it enacts a statute legalising the evil and protecting the tormentors; while, as if by

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way of apology and compensation for having been forced to interfere at all in their practices, the Government offers to give the chief society of inquisitors, out of the public treasury, a fivefold subsidy to provide additional victims for the torture. We may pretend to despise a Legislature that tramples under foot appeal after appeal from the toiling masses of England for permission to use the only day in the week they can spare from the necessities of the body, in expanding their minds and souls by the sight of their own treasures of nature and art in their own public galleries, and learning thereby to take larger and higher views of that wondrous Existence of which the culture of the true self is the only true worship. But there is no blood in such a worship as this would be; and so the orthodoxies say, No. We may despise, I say, our Legislature for these and all its like doings; but inasmuch as that Legislature is representative of ourselves, it is ourselves that we really despise, and rightly so, in despising it. It is; we who first require amendment. When this is accomplished, we shall have no cause to despise our representatives. The mirror will still return a true image, and we shall see it and be satisfied. But, as at present constituted, our Legislature represents what we must hope will

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soon be our past and renounced self, and not the self upon which depends the salvation of England.

 

            Indeed, on looking around for some one whom we may trust to guide us, some one at once capable and ingenuous, and seeing no one, the words used by our laureate on a precisely similar occasion, now nearly a quarter of a century ago – namely, on the eve of the war in the Crimea – come forcibly to mind. They are in his “Maud:” –

 

Ah! God, for a man with heart, head, hand,

Like some of the simple great ones gone

For ever and ever by,

One still strong man in a blatant land,

Whatever they call him, what care I,

Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat – one

Who can rule and dare not lie!

 

            And what is the prospect abroad? There all are against the people who, however imperfectly, with however many and grievous a slip, has so long been for the world the people who above all other people have shown themselves possessed of a conscience. Our envoy, going the round of the Courts of Europe, finds smiles and encouragement for the policy which, by bringing England into league with Russia, will end in the destruction alike of England’s

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conscience and England’s empire. And England’s foolish body is deceived by the delusive smiles and perfidious lips.

 

To that same foolish body the fact of the emancipation of Russia’s serfs is apt to appeal in proof that there is something of good, if not in Russia, yet in Russia’s Czar. Let this notion be at once dismissed. The emancipation of the serfs was forced upon Russia in self-defence. The nobles of Poland – that land from which Russia derives whatever she possesses of the higher elements of humanity, and which in return she crushes beneath an iron heel – had already completed a measure for emancipating their own serfs. The certificates of freedom were already printed, and in a very short period would have been distributed, when Russia heard of the movement, and felt compelled to checkmate it by anticipating and surpassing it. From any native impulse to good in the Czar himself, there is nothing to be expected. He has not exalted his throne in the estimation of his own people; and the monarch who fails to do that at home, is not entitled to favourable consideration abroad.

 

            Is it asked, – But is not the Russian also “a man and a brother?” A brother, if you will, is

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the reply, but hardly a man. Anatomically man, no doubt, but that suffices only for the external eye. It takes more than the visible organism of a man to make a man. Russia as a nation is in the carnivorous stage of its development; it will be man some thousand years or so hence; it is not so yet. The only affinity we have with Russia consists in the fact that under the degenerating influences of the orthodoxies, we are fast sinking to the stage out of which Russia has yet to rise. We are becoming a race of human carnivora. Man, as I have said, is so constituted that, while he attains his full perfection as man, in respect of all the higher faculties of man, only upon a diet, mental and physical, which is absolutely pure. He can, so far as his lower nature is concerned, exist, and to appearance even thrive, upon the foulest garbage. This fact holds good for soul as well as for body, despite all that the orthodoxies may assert to the contrary. There are mysteries – spiritual mysteries – delicately hinted in this wondrous mortal frame of ours, of the significance of which the physiologists, while they can give us chapter and verse, so far as the outward sense goes, for every part of it, are wholly incapable of discerning: mysteries indicative of the meaning of man and of the universe of which

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he is a product, and readily ascertainable, as is all knowledge good and necessary for man, without the selfish infliction of a particle of suffering upon aught that breathes and feels. But just as the prophet who is to tell us of the true nature and uses of the soul, and the priest who is rightly to minister thereto, have yet to appear; so has the true scientist yet to appear who is to tell us of the true nature and treatment of the body.

 

            Failing to discover any special class or classes to whom to address the appeal on behalf of the soul of England, it is straight to the heart itself of England that such appeal must be made. England still has, it is to be hoped, her ten thousand true workers, in every grade, from the artisan, with his hard yet skilful hand, to the student with his subtly elaborated brain, who have “not bowed the knee” to the “Baal” of the orthodoxies, but have remained true to their first love, the ideal of their intuitions. These are they who are at once the soul and the salt of every people; for they are they who ever do the right because it is the right, and leave the result to the Infinite. The modern world has displaced right in favour of rights, and in the exchange duty has come badly off. The modern world makes the ends everything, and sticks not at the means; and the criterion for its. Ends is its lower selfish nature. It is

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thus that all controversy – even this of “England and Islam” – turns upon the question of the true place of the self, the orthodoxies going all for the outer, and the soul and intuitions for the inner. The latter know that they are right, because they see as well as reason; the former, at best, only think they are right, because, not being able to see, they can only think, and this but feebly. Even the present Pope, not the least fallible of a long line of fallibles, has a better intuition in this question than the orthodoxies of England. Only three or four years ago this fallible Pope, when appealed to on behalf of a project for diminishing the terrible cruelties practised in Italy upon animals, declared that it was quite a mistake to suppose that Christians owe any duty to the lower animals. Herein “the Vicar of Christ” was one with the tormentors. He was fallible morally and fallible spiritually. He proved that he had even failed to discern the true or the full meaning of “Christ” in respect either to past or future. He did not see that in “Christ” all creation had been virtually taken up into God; nor did he see that Christendom was on the eve of the promulgation of a new dogma, – the dogma of the universal salvation of animals through their recognition by man as his brethren and

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essentially one with man, and in man “one with God.” If Christianity still lives, it must develop; and there are not wanting indications to show that it does live, though terribly debilitated through the efforts of the orthodoxies to kill it outright, – efforts ever being renewed on some fresh plane of the consciousness to smother it outright in blood. There are signs, I say, that Christianity – the true Christianity of the intuitions – is alive; and those signs point to the early promulgation of a new dogma which is even now far advanced in its development. True, and self-evident to the true, the new dogma will, like all its brethren, have its source in God, and its manifestation through individuals. Its promulgation will be the utter abrogation of the regime of blood and torture by which existence has so long been made hideous. The place of its issue can only be England; and its promulgation here will serve for a token of the independent vitality of that true Church of England, which is to rise Phoenix-like and glorious from the ashes of the present degeneration.

 

For it cannot possibly be to a false and sanguinary sacerdotalism. That earth will condescend to owe the promulgation of the new dogma of the redemption of the animals. It will be the work of those true priests – priests and prophets both – who, keeping alive on the altar of the national

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heart the sacred fire of the soul, will teach us to see ourselves in all things, all things in ourselves, in and around all things God, and in God all things.

 

The question of England and Islam presses. A few weeks, or perchance days, and we may find ourselves committed to a course that will inevitably plunge us and our England into hopeless perdition. It is only by the promptest and most strenuous action that the seers and feelers and knowers of England can save her. The course to be taken has the advantage of being perfectly plain and simple. When a man is in difficulties through faults to which he has himself been a party, the one person who is entitled to go to him and offer him counsel and aid, is he who, while standing his friend through thick and thin, has not spared rebuke. Those who have sought to influence him to their own advantage are, by every consideration of decency, precluded from obtruding their advice, or every presence, upon him. England alone has the right and the title to serve the Turk. Towards him, hers, and hers alone, is the divine privilege of the ministry of charity. Her alone can he trust; and, what is of enormous moment, her alone of the nations will the nations trust. Europe knows England, and, though watching her expected

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downfall with some eagerness, is also watching it with trepidation, not knowing what may become of the civilisation of Europe when the star of the one conscientious people in it has fallen from its place in the firmament, Europe will trust England, knowing that it is for her interest and honour, as well as her conscience, that she deal fairly with the Turk, and that she has no interest in doing other than establishing him firmly in his seat. Europe will trust England, knowing that it is also her interest so to commend herself to the people of her Indian Empire, as to renovate with cords of love the spiritual bonds wherewith they are already tied.

 

Russia alone will rave. But need England care for that distended north-east windbag whom one vigorous, well-planted blow will double up and sand howling to its gods? Russia, I have said, is of the order of the carnivora. It is the way with the carnivora to look very fierce and formidable until confronted by a true man. There is not a beast of the kind in all the forests that will not turn to go away when calmly confronted by a man with unquailing eye, – a man who does not feel afraid.

 

Let England, then, summon up her heart, and go straight to the Turk, and speaking, not in the

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name of her outer, false, apparent, and selfish self of the body, but in the name of her inner and true self, the soul that burns within her, with solemn Firmness say, “We, Christian and Moslem, Aryan and Semite, foremost representatives of our respective religions and races, are, to all intents and purposes, in the sight of God, of man, and of each other, wedded as man and wife to each other, in earthly and spiritual bonds – bonds not made with hands, eternal, indissoluble. One in outward interests as in inward conviction, we owe it to ourselves to become one in heart and spirit also. We owe this to ourselves and to the world also, in that we are the best representatives of the race of the prophets, the depositories of the only true faith, the faith in one God as the Father of all, and the hater of blood. For know, O Islam, that henceforth we also shall serve God bloodlessly, in body, mind, and spirit, Laving resolved to overthrow our sanguinary orthodoxies, which are even now discomfited and slain in our rejection of their counsels. Wherefore you, pure worshippers of Islam, need not shrink from touching our hand. If we, the witnesses to the only true faith, to the possessors of which it was promised thousands of years ago that they should inherit the earth, and that in them should all nations be blessed, – if we, the

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two witnesses on earth to the faith of the intuitions, fail, then will the earth sink deeper and deeper in blood until it be wholly lost. And so will your ancestral soul and ours, the souls of your father Abraham and of our parent Christ, have lived and died in vain. Come, then, let bygones be bygones, and we will lay our minds together to set your house in order within and without, and so do all things in ‘the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace,’ that the world, wondering, shall say, ‘See how these Pantheists love one another!’ for the lesser names then will be merged in the greater.”

 

Russia well knows that, by pretending to work with England, she can easily spoil all that England may do, so that the accomplishment of her purpose will but be deferred. Tremulous with anxiety lest her designs be seen through, already are her armies on the move to take up positions in the Sultanas dominions, whence she may not readily be dislodged. No time is to be lost. The Government sees the right thing, and is anxious to do it. But it has been sorely harassed by the action of the leaders of the party at present out of power. The unmeasured and unstatesmanlike denunciations of Turkey for an act of which the responsibility rests almost entirely with Russia, had the effect of leading

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Russia to believe that she had at last succeeded in hoodwinking England, and of paralysing our own Government at a moment when it had the need of its utmost presence of mind.

 

            Happily the truth is out now, and England will have only herself to blame if ever again she suffer Russia to get an advantage over her. The knowledge of an animal’s habits is a great safe-guard against its depredations. But something more than knowledge is wanting. England must act. Her former leaders have committed themselves so far that they may deem it impossible to retract. Let us not wait till they have considered the point. But let all good men and true, of every degree, gentle and simple, rich and poor, high and low, one with another, so meet and protest, and overwhelm the Government with urgent addresses, remonstrances, petitions, and all the whatnots wherewith it is the modern way of making that heard and done which we are perfectly sure is right, – that not a day longer than can be helped shall pass without a message being despatched to our envoy at Constantinople, desiring him to communicate our proposals to the Government of the Porte, and on obtaining its acquiescence, politely and firmly to inform the representative of Russia that England and

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Turkey have discovered that they can settle their own affairs without assistance; that England, as is well known, has no other interest or desire but to see Turkey prosperous; that they now thoroughly understand each other; and have agreed to devote themselves to love and good works for the rest of their natural lives. The envoy might also add a remark to the effect that England herself, not many years ago, incurred exceeding annoyance through the action of a certain foreign spiritual potentate who insisted on extending to his fellow-religionists within her borders, an interference which was but a feeble anticipation of that which the Czar now proposes to extend to his fellow-religionists in the Turkish dominions; and that while she cannot prevail upon herself to consent to an act of the same kind in the territories of an ally, she will take good care that nothing be left undone to benefit the populations in question.

 

And so, it will be exclaimed, you counsel England to encounter Russia, in a war of life and death, single-handed, or with only the aid of Turkey! I do so; without any hesitation or apprehension whatsoever, and in the fullest assurance that if Russia chooses single-handed to encounter England and Turkey, the consequences will be on her

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own head, But I hold that, being sure we are in the right, we have no call to take consequences into consideration at all. It is precisely the people who hesitate to do what they see to be right because they fancy they can foresee consequences also, who in this world always come to the direst grief. Ours is the duty, the consequences belong to another. It is only through that want of faith in the harmonious ordering and perfect moral government of the world, which in this age of all the orthodoxies has been adopted as a substitute for the faith which has made all the greatness of England, that we are found now to lay so much stress upon consequences. It all comes of our not perceiving that the world is alive. But there are those among us who do perceive, not merely that it must be, but that it is, alive, – alive with an intelligent and moral life; who know it both by reason and by direct vision. Let, then, the seeing lead the blind. I for one see that the world is alive. And as regards this present matter I see that it is our bounden duty to uphold Turkey and her regeneration to the utmost extent of our power. I say that this is just the one thing in the world that England has now to set herself to do, and that the sooner she sets about it, and the better the will with which she sets

(p. 190)

about it, the better for all concerned, The consequences of any dallying or half measures will fall upon our own heads.

 

Let this fact encourage us. The present crisis has come upon Russia while her Government is wholly unprepared to meet it. The Panslavist leaders, real authors of Turkish misrule, have attained their end so far as to force their Government to adopt their cause. That the Government exhibits reluctance to act, is not because it does not want to interfere in the affairs of Turkey, but because it is not in a state of preparation for war. Hence Russia as a whole will account it an immense relief should anything occur to show its Slav populations that war now would be ruinous.

 

Such all effect would be produced by a positive declaration on the part of England that she will undertake the defence of Turkey and the arrangement of its affairs, entirely by herself. So far from there being any war on account of such a step, Russia would gladly seize the first opportunity to retire from the position she has assumed.

 

            But supposing Russia did not so retire, but flung her swarming myriads upon Turkey? Well, Turkey has shown that she can give a very good account of Russian troops, even when

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left to herself. She would be fighting at home, fighting with soldiers who are perfect enthusiasts at the work; for it is a fixed belief of the Moslem, that death in fight with non-believers in their Prophet means instantaneous admission into heaven. Seeing then that even without England’s interference it is exceedingly doubtful whether Russia would get the better of Turkey, we need not be under any apprehension as to the result should England alone with Turkey confront Russia.

 

            No consideration of consequences, however, should be suffered to affect England’s action in the matter. All she has to look to is her duty. Better ruin be risked in the discharge of duty, than that certain duty should be shirked in order to avoid hypothetical ruin. Besides, what is ruin? There are instances both of nations and of individuals being saved by what they thought was ruin. England never had so much bad blood or ill-gotten wealth as now, which she would be all the better for losing; and she would travel on her way to the right with a cooler head, a clearer conscience, and a better heart for the loss of some of her present belongings, – mere deck-loads that they are! Are all Mr. Plimsoll’s homilies on jactura in vain? The Old Testament has an

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incident which well illustrates the kind of feeling with which a people that knows by direct intuition that it is in the right, should go into war.

 

            The prophet Elisha found himself surrounded by a large force which had been sent to capture him. His servant, on seeing his master and himself encompassed by horses and chariots and a great host, cried, “Alas, my master, how shall we do now? And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots round about Elisha.”

 

            Let us take a fresh departure. True Liberalism is ever true Conservatism. Even in the sphere of politics we cannot escape from the eternal verity seen so long ago, that “God created man in his own image, male and female.” In politics Liberalism is the male, and Conservatism is the female element. Divorced and antagonistic to each other, they are productive of evil only. United in the bonds of truest affection, they are the agents of all political redemption. “Secular” England is not yet quite rid of the Athanasian Creed or the doctrine of the Trinity.

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It is not Liberal England only that must reform herself to fit her for her part in the coming regeneration. Little good in the world can the man accomplish if the woman be not his coadjutor. Our Conservatism also must reform itself. Of these two perfected parents, will the new and true Church of England be the product; divine child of divinest love, redeeming England, redeeming the world, – by its bloody death? No – by its life, for its life will be the expression to the world – in Scripture phrase, the “manifestation to the Gentiles” – of the perfected soul of England; – of that soul which, like all souls, of men, of man, of animals, of every mode whatever of the infinite consciousness. From the heights to the depths, is one and the same soul, even God. And the sacerdotalist dares to talk of an “inhuman specimen of humanity!” Was I so far out in likening him to the “elder brother” in the parable? Surely the “great Liberal party” wants something more than a “new platform.” It wants new men to stand upon that platform.

 

            Why is it that all the isms have failed to take man whither he wants to go? It is because they are but isms, and have no pan before them. This, and this alone, is the reason why Theism fails to enlist men’s hearts. They cannot care for a God

(p. 194)

that is only a god. However great, he must be man also. Identity is essential. But if he is to include the whole of his creation, he must be something lower than a man. Something lower than a woman. He must be –––. But no; time is not yet for us; though the Hindoos saw it thousands of years ago. “Line upon line.” Not all truth at once. Only such as can be borne. But this I may say – When a man – or woman – finds himself animated by a soul – a soul that seems by its character to belong to one of the lower animals – let him consider before yielding to his lower impulses, that perchance it is such a soul which has become incarnate in him for the purpose of working out its own redemption and so rising to a higher plane of existence; and that if he fail to give its upward aspirations fair play, he will himself be drawn down by it to the level of the animal. The true lesson of vivisection, and of other moral monstrosities, is not a physical but a spiritual one. For it is that, not only are men descending to the level of the carnivorous animals, but that in taking possession of men in order that they themselves may rise, it may be that the carnivorous animals are at the same time operating to drag men down to their own level. I commend the prospect to the vivisecting physiologist. Inaccessible to pity for

(p. 195)

others, he will be all the more considerate for himself. The old rule, “With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again,” is still in full force. He insists that man is a carnivorous animal, not merely by degradation of habit, but by natural constitution. He insists, therefore, that it is necessary for the benefit of man to experiment upon animals constituted as he holds man to be – namely, carnivorous animals. Hence the risk the vivisector runs when he indulges his carnivorous propensities by inflicting torture upon the rudimentary animal soul. For while the tendency of the animal is upward into man, the tendency of the vivisecting, or otherwise selfish pain-inflicting-in-any-shape, man is downwards; so that it is only a question of time when the tormentor shall in his own person know what it is to be “experimented upon for the benefit of humanity.”

 

            The true Church of England will be no narrow sect striving with its brothers for place and profit, but will consist of the whole body of England regenerated by the “washing of water and of the spirit,” by pure living and true feeling – head and heart, thought and emotion, male and female, working together “in the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.”

 

            It is necessary thus to glance at the prospects

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which he before our English Church in the event of her undergoing such thorough purgation as will make her a perfect example of what I like to anticipate as constituting “The Reformation Completed.” To ally our Church, in her present state of health, with the scarcely vitalised Greek Church would be like, not quite, as I said before, wedding youth to age, but allying disease to infancy. That is the true, because charitable and hopeful, view to take of Russian religion; it is also the true, because charitable and hopeful, view to take of Russia itself. It is the Young Hercules of Michael Angelo – huge, ungainly, ill-knit – a giant in embryo, catching at everything that it sees within its grasp – not positively cruel, so much as ignorant that its great clutch hurts; and, to accord with all this, it has a baby face, and an expression that indicates the total absence, thus far, of anything approaching to an involutional development of its higher faculties. I think there is such a statue of the Young Hercules by the great sculptor; if not, there ought to be. His was a mind that must have had the conception I have described, even if he failed to work it out.

 

            A being of this character, be it nation or individual, may be one to be on speaking, and

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even friendly, terms with; but one cannot possibly mate an intimate of him, much less a husband or a wife. He would be dangerous even in his sleep; extending his big, ungainly limbs; and tossing his uncouth and ponderous form all unconsciously to himself, he would be sure to overlay and suffocate any smaller comrade, of however highly vitalised a temperament, who might adventure to share his couch. Surely a better prospect than this for our English Church is that which I have suggested; and if we only succeed in getting well hold of the idea, and of all that it involves, three-fourths of the existing inducements to combine with Russia against, or even in favour of, Turkey, will disappear.

 

            Do my readers know what means the striving of woman in this our age to obtain what are contemptuously called her “rights”? And what means also the bitter opposition of the men to the recognition of those rights? A good deal has been said and written on the subject, but I fail to gather that it has been put quite so clearly as it might be put; so I will endeavour to state it as it appears to me. It is all related to our main subject of “England and Islam” and the “Counsel of Caiaphas;” for a people’s difficulties grow out of a people’s own condition, just as a definite illness is, in the case of an individual, due

(p. 198)

to a previously disordered state of his constitution. Scientists tell us of “disease-germs” as sacerdotalists tell us of “evil spirits” who enact in the spiritual world a part corresponding to that ascribed to disease-germs in the material world. In this, as in many other things, scientists are discovering on the physical plane of the consciousness that which was long ago recognised as existing on its spiritual plane. Of the existence of vitalised “force-points,” the introduction of which into the constitution, and whose development there may be the cause of mischief, physical or spiritual, according to the plane for which they have affinity, there can be no doubt. But may it not be that they are in themselves neutral? and that only when, by man’s neglect of a proper standard of purity, his issues have already become degenerated, they can work him harm? The perfectly sound constitution has in it a divine alchemy, by virtue of which it turns everything that it comes into contact with into the pure gold of good man and woman. Had England’s issues been undegenerated, she had not come to her present pass.

 

            That we are beginning to know something on this matter is due to the industry and sagacity of Professor Tyndall. To this

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ingenious scientist are due also the thanks of the intuitionalist for the recognition he has accorded to the imagination as an instrument of scientific research. It is true he has not done this faculty of the mind anything like proper justice. But that is inevitable with one in Professor Tyndall’s position in the ranks of orthodoxy. It requires more vivid experiences on planes of the consciousness other than the merely physical, to enable a man to discern the true uses of the imagination. Professor Tyndall is, I believe, still a young man, being only lately married. Maybe he will have a good deal more to tell us some day, of the new meanings he will find in existence. Vivisection will not reveal them to him.

 

            Marriage is an institution admirably adapted for ministering to the due subordination of the outer, false, and non-luminous self of the body, to the inner, true, and luminous soul, which, burning ever brightly in the heart, makes for man the true self and home, and wins from him unconsciously the designation of “the better half.”

 

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