Crying for the Light: or, Fifty Years Ago. Volume 2 of 3

“This is the condition of humanity; we are placed as it were in an intellectual twilight where we discover but few things clearly, and yet we see enough to tempt us with the hope of making better and more discoveries.” – Bolingbroke.

CHAPTER XI.
THE STRUGGLES OF A SOUL

There comes to us all a time when we seek something for the heart to rely on, to anchor to, when we see the hollowness of the world, the deceitfulness of riches; how fleeting is all earthly pleasure, how great is the need of spiritual strength, how, when the storm comes, we require a shelter that can defy its utmost force. Out of the depths the heart of man ever cries out for the living God. The actress Rose felt this as much amid the glare of life and the triumphs of the stage as the monk in his cloister or the hermit in his desert cell. Like all of us, in whom the brute has not quenched the Divine light which lighteth everyone who cometh into the world, she felt, as Wordsworth writes:

 
‘The world is too much with us, late and soon;
Getting and spending we lay waste our power.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away a sordid boon.’
 

She felt, as we all must feel, that there is something more than this feverish dream we call life – something greater and grander and more enduring beyond. To her the heavens declared the glory of a God, and the firmament showed forth His handiwork. To her day unto day uttered speech, and night unto night showed forth knowledge. She had no wish to shut out Divine speech. Her labour was how best to hear it, and most quickly to obey. The history of humanity testifies to this one all-pervading desire in ages most remote, in countries the most savage. As the great Sir James Mackintosh wrote to Dr. Parr in 1799, after the loss of his wife: ‘Governed by those feelings which have in every age and region of the world actuated the human mind to seek relief, I find it in the soothing hope and consolatory reflection that a benevolent wisdom inflicts the chastisements, as well as bestows the enjoyments of human life; that superintending goodness will one day enlighten the darkness which surrounds our nature and hangs over our prospects; that this dreary and wretched life is not the whole of man; that an animal so sagacious and provident, and capable of such science and virtue, is not like the beasts that perish; that there is a dwelling-place prepared for the spirits of the just, and that the ways of God will yet be vindicated to man.’ Our actress felt the same; she had, she felt, a soul to be saved, a God to be loved, a heaven to be won.

But how? Ah! that was the question. Naturally she turned to the old Church of Christendom, the Church that calls itself Catholic and universal. She went to the priest; he showed her a bleeding Saviour, and a burning, bottomless pit. She trembled as she stood in the old dim cathedral, where no light of heaven ever came, where no voice of mercy ever penetrated, where the whole air of the place was redolent of priestcraft and artifice and sham.

‘You,’ screams the priest, ‘are all unjust, extortioners, adulterers, dead in trespasses and sins. Give me money, and I will make it right with the Almighty. Down on your marrow-bones, eat fish on a Friday, count your beads, confess to me – a man no better than yourself – pay for Masses. In my hand is the key to eternal joy; pay my fees, and the door shall be unlocked, and you shall straightway go to paradise.’

Refuse, and he shows you an angry Jehovah, in His rage destroying a fair world which He Himself had called into being and filled with life, and sweeping millions into torments that never end. The sight is awful. Happily, reason comes to the rescue, and the priest and the cathedral, and the Mass and the music, the incense and wax lights, disappear.

Enter the State Church, not of the Romanist, but the Protestant, where you are told you are made a child of God in baptism, where the cure of souls is sold in the market-place, and where the Bishop, or overseer of the Church, often is put into his high position because he is a relative of a lord, or is a firm supporter of the Minister of the day. There is no room for the anxious inquirer in a Church which rejoices in the Athanasian Creed, and which regards all Free-Church life as schism. With its pomp and wealth and power, with its well-paid clergy, in time past on the side of the rich against the poor, of abuse and privilege against the rights of the people and the progress of the nation, the Church has left the masses whom it was paid to teach and save little better than heathen. You ask, What has it to do with the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter’s son? What is it but an institution to give an air of respectability to life, to confer a prestige on the church-goer, and to lend an additional charm to a State ceremony? Is it not there emphatically that, as a rule – to which there are splendid exceptions —

‘The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed;’

that is, if they need something more than a musical performance or a conventional observance?

‘Do you mean to say,’ said the actress to a clergyman’s wife, ‘that you can follow the psalms of the day, and ask God to crush your enemies and make them perish for ever?’

‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘I always repeat them all. You know, one does not believe exactly all one says. All you have to do is to give a general assent.’

This was what the actress could not do. Her Bible was a constant difficulty. She could believe it was the Word of God, but not all of it. Its contradictions puzzled and perplexed her. Give it up, said her worldly friends. Be happy in Agnosticism. Leave off thinking about the hereafter and a God. Believe what you see and hear. Life is short; it has not too much of joy in it. Be happy while you may.

In her distress she consulted a clergyman of the class more common now than they were then, who reject the term Protestant, and whose aim is the revival of what they call the Church Primitive and Apostolic.

‘You must be baptized,’ he said.

‘But I have been.’

‘Where?’

‘In a chapel.’

‘A mere form,’ was the reply. ‘Our Church teaches that man is made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, in and by holy baptism.’

‘I cannot see that.’

‘Then you are shut out, unless you are baptized, from the sacrament in which the body and blood of Christ are given to every one who receives the sacramental bread and wine.’

‘How do you prove that?’

‘Prove it: I don’t want to prove it. I fear you are in grievous error. Your duty and that of everyone is to obey the Book of God: a book not to be dealt with upon the same rules which are applicable to the works of man.’

And then they parted; he stern and resolved, she sorrowful and sad; he intimating something about it was a pity that people could not remain satisfied with the station of life in which they were born, which did not pour balm into a wounded soul. Happily for herself, however, she could exclaim with Sir Thomas Browne, ‘As for those mazy mysteries in divinity and airy subtleties in religion which have unhinged the minds of many, they have never stretched the pia mater of mine.’ But to gain this position was a work of time.

With an aching heart, once more the actress sought a clergyman. He was a Broad Churchman. There were no difficulties for him. In antiquated forms, in vain repetitions, in decaying creeds, there were difficulties, it might be; but one was not to bother one’s self about them. It was true that one had to conform to outward form, but the spirit was greater than the form. The time would come when the Church would burst its bonds, but at present all they had to do was to make the best of a bad situation. It seemed to her such church-worship was a sham. The man in the pulpit, the man in the pew, alike ignored the dead creed, and instead revelled in glib phraseology, in poetical nothings, in much-sounding rhetoric and ecclesiastical show and ritual. The chief things were the music, the millinery, and the show – the white-robed choristers, the dim religious light.

Then she thought of her old training among the Dissenters, and went to a chapel. She was staying at an old country mansion, when one Sunday morning the gentlemen were going to have the usual smoke in the stables, and examine the horses and the hounds, and to make a few bets about a forthcoming race, and there was a smile of perfect horror as she expressed her intention of going to the village meeting-house, while the ladies were inexpressibly shocked. No one went to meeting; it was low. One could not be received in society who was known to go to meeting.

‘I show myself once or twice in a year at church just to keep myself on good terms with society,’ said the gentleman of the mansion.

The actress went to the chapel, as nowadays the meeting-house is termed. It was as Gothic in style as it was possible to be. The singing was good. The preacher was a man of culture, and was dressed as much like a clergyman as was possible. The hearers were of the respectable middle class; the working man was conspicuous by his absence. But, alas! it was known the next Sunday that the quiet lady who had attended the previous Sunday was an actress from town. She found every eye turned towards her. There was quite a crowd to see her arrive and depart, and further attendance was impossible.

When are we to have a rational change in the land? We have had a Reformation that, incomplete as it was, freed us at any rate from the worship of the Mass. When is our religion to be free of Church creeds – of the Assembly Catechism – of the iron fetters of chapel trusts – of the traditions of the elders – of the influence of the fables and traditions and superstitions of the Middle Ages? When is a man to stand up in our midst and honestly utter what he believes, careless of his ecclesiastical superiors, of the frowns of deacons and elders? When are we to get rid of conventional observances and conventional forms? There is no place of worship in which it would be proper for me to enter without the chimney-pot hat, or take a brown-paper parcel in my hand. If I did so, I should be set down as little better than one of the wicked – as wicked as if I were to read the Weekly Dispatch on a Sunday, or spend an hour or two in a museum or a picture-gallery. When are we to realize that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath? Why are Churches to be less tolerant than the Master, who invited all to come, and who rebuked His ignorant disciples when they would have put obstacles in their way? It is hard to think how many souls have been thus driven away. You are an actress, said the Church to her; you must give up your profession. She felt that was wrong; that on the stage she could be as good a Christian as anywhere else. It was her happiness to believe in a

 
‘Father of all, in every age,
In every clime, adored —
By saint, by savage, or by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.’
 

Toleration is the great need of our day. But we need more: we need less of prayer that is not worship; of hymnology that makes men utter on their tongues what is rarely, if ever, in their hearts. We want more of honesty in all our public services, to whatever denomination we belong. We have far too much of indifference; too much of dogma; too much of silly sentimentalism; too much mysticism; too much morbid faith. Our missionaries often make converts, who are the worse, and not the better, for the use of their primitive creeds. The shapeless block of wood, hideously carved and fantastically ornamented, that I, in the sunlight, may look upon with scorn, my brother, living in the dark places of the earth, may look upon as the very highest type of his ideal god, and as such he may gaze upon it with reverence, and worship it with awe. And who am I that I may say that he is not the better for so doing? Who am I that I am to laugh as my happy sister prays, or to deprive her of a faith that ‘scorns delights and lives laborious days’? Would the savage be less a savage had he not before him that type of a Divine ideal? Would he be a better man if I were to blot that out of his being? Would that make him less selfish, less cruel; more kindly in act, more ready to do good? Would he be happier in the sunshine, braver in the battle and the storm? Yes, it is more religious toleration that we need, though we have, rather against the grain, ceased to burn heretics. And that comes only as knowledge increases, and the torch of science throws its light over the dark mysteries of Nature and her laws.

The difficulty with the actress was not faith, but the form; not with the Spirit, but with its manifestation in so-called Christian churches and among Christian men; not with the Divine idea, but its human expression. And that is the giant Difficulty of our day. It is impossible for any Church to realize its truest conceptions. It is in vain that finite man seeks to grapple with the problem of the infinite. It is told of St. Augustine, how once upon a time he was perplexed about the doctrine of the Trinity while he was walking on the seashore. All at once he saw a child filling a shell with water, and pouring it out on the sand. ‘What are you doing?’ said the old saint. ‘Putting the sea into this hole,’ was the reply. The child’s answer was not lost on the saint if it made him feel the main essence of Christianity is not a dogma, but a life.

The Church service day by day gets more ornate, more artificial, more of a show, and men and women go to it as a theatre. But, any rate, it is devotional so far as devotion is displayed in form, in the Free Churches, as they are called, or, rather, love to call themselves, for freedom is as much to be found in the Church service as in that of the chapel; the pulpit and the man who fills it play a more important part. The vanity which is in the heart of all of us more or less is gratified more than in the Church service, which has a tendency to sink the man and to exalt the function. The whole tone of the chapel service is personal. The man in the pulpit is the great ‘I am.’ The deacons have more or less the same spirit. Positively it is amusing: you enter before the time of commencing worship. Presently a man ascends the pulpit stairs. Is he the preacher? Oh no, he is only the man to carry up the Bible. Again the vestry door opens, and in the conquering hero comes. A deacon reverently follows. Is he going to assist? Not a bit of it. He merely shuts the pulpit-door, and sinks back into his native insignificance. The sermon over, then comes the collection. It seems, apparently, that this is the great thing after all. I remember once going into a chapel; the minister had a weak voice, I could not hear a word of the prayer or the sermon. The only thing I did hear, and that was pronounced audibly to be heard all over the place, was, ‘The collection will now be made.’ Organization is carried to excess, till it becomes weariness and destructive of the spirit. What is wanted is something simpler. Listen to the minister as he announces from the pulpit the engagements and arrangements for the week; and as to the sermon, how often is it a pamphlet, or an essay, or a newspaper leader! One feels also prayer is too long and wearying, and that the personal element is somewhat intrusive. It is there the Church has the advantage; the chapel-goer is disgusted if the minister does not call on him, if the deacon does not shake hands with him, if he himself has not some official standing as a member of some committee or other. The poet tells us,

 
‘God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.’
 

Not so says the Evangelical; it is by means of our fussy activity and mechanical organization that His wonders are performed. ‘It is,’ exclaims the Methodist, ‘a penny a week, a shilling a quarter, and justification by faith.’ No wonder that there are good Christians who never darken church or chapel doors. ‘It conduces much to piety,’ said the late Earl Russell to his wife, ‘not to go to church sometimes.’ And the actress was a Christian, godly, if not according to the godliness of Little Bethel. I don’t know that she kept the Sabbath holy; she loved that day to get away from town and the world, and to worship Him whose temple is all space and whose Sabbath all time. In the Roman Catholic or Protestant cathedral alike, she could worship, and from occasional attendances she often returned refreshed, but she could identify herself with no particular body. In the freer Churches of Christendom she would enter, and could leave all the better for the service, even if the preacher had, as preachers often do, proved unequal to her state of mind. Here she listened to an essay logical and profound, which touched on no matter of earthly interest, and was as vain and worthless as questions as to how many angels could stand on the point of a needle, or what were the songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women. There a raw youth thumped the pulpit, as he complacently dwelt on the doings of a God of whom his very idea was a caricature. Then there were ingenious clerics who spoke upon the ‘little horn’ in Daniel, and who, while ignorant of Cheapside and the City, could unfold the Book of Revelation, and to whom the prophecies were as easy as A B C. A good deal of what is commonly called good preaching was but to her an idle dream as preachers painfully tried to realise the past, and talked of distant lands, and worthy old patriarchs who had been dead thousands of years, and grand old prophets, who though able forces in their own times and amongst their own people, had little to do with the passions and prejudices of the living present. Even when the preacher was morbidly sentimental, as so many of them were – and that is why the men stop away, or only attend to please their wives – or too prone to take for granted fables which cannot stand a moment’s rational investigation, even, though they were more or less common to the mythology of every nation under the sun, poor Rose boldly faced the situation and sat it all out, though for all practical purposes she felt that she might just as well have listened to a lecture on the Digamma. One admits the force in many cases of associated worship, the charm of the living voice, of a good delivery, of a pleasing figure; and yet a man is not to be condemned as one of the wicked because his pew is empty at times, because he reads the Bible and says his prayers alone, because he is distracted by the delivery of stale religious commonplace.

But the Free Churches, are not they the home of free thought? Are they not leaders in religious reform? Alas! they all have their dogmas and creeds to the believer in which they promise eternal life, while to the unbeliever, no matter how honest he may be, or how pure in heart and life, there is anathema maranatha. If the Church of England apes the Church of Rome, what are we to say of the conventicle, with its antiquated creed and its obsolete theology? Are they not still, in spite of their boasted freedom, under the rule of St. Augustine and the monks? Nor can it well be otherwise. You take a young man, ignorant of the world, unversed in human nature; you shut him up in a college with others as ignorant as himself. You teach him theological conundrums rather than real life. Can such as they minister to a mind diseased? Am I to be saved by listening to such as they? Ah, no!

 
‘In secret silence of the mind,
My heaven, and there my God, I find.’
 

It was so with Rose as she wandered drearily from one church door to another, seeking rest and finding none. It was clear to her that there was no room for her in the narrow circle of the Churches.

As long as you are an actress, as long as you get your living by following the stage, said they all, you cannot be a church-member, forgetting that the stage itself was, in a prior age, but the child of the Church.

One day she tried the Quakers, but there the silence was too oppressive – nor did she feel called upon to make herself singular by a display of Quaker dress or Quaker speech.

One Sunday she was in Edinburgh, staying at the house of one of the University professors. She had heard much of Scotch piety, and she wanted to see what it was like. A grand scientific gathering was being held, and the house was full of men of science. In the morning she went to church. Again she was taken to church in the afternoon, very much against the grain; but she was in Rome, and had to do as the Romans did. In the evening there was a dinner-party. As they repaired to the drawing-room, the lady of the house said:

‘It is very questionable whether we shall see any more of the gentlemen to-night. If they rise from the table sober, they will come into the drawing-room. If they take too much, they will go up by the backstairs to bed.’

The lady of the house said this as if it were the most natural thing in the world, but it shocked Rose to find that, in the city where the Sabbath is observed more strictly than anywhere else, this was how the Sabbath night was spent, and, naturally, she had little respect for the piety which could attend church twice a day on the Sunday, and make the Sunday night a convivial carouse.

What was she to do? She went to many a Congregational, or Baptist, or Unitarian, or Episcopalian church in London, where she heard much that was helpful to her spiritual life – much that it did her good to hear.

‘You can’t join my church,’ said a popular divine to her.

‘Why not?

‘Because you are an actress. My deacons would not hear of such a thing.’

‘Have you ever been to a theatre?’

‘Never!’ was the emphatic reply.

‘How, then, can you condemn that of which you are ignorant?’ asked the actress.

‘Well,’ said the preacher, ‘I can go by popular report. Look at the lives of the professionals. Was not Kean a drunkard? Did not the Duke of So-and-so keep an actress? Did not So-and-so’ – naming a popular actor – ‘run off with another man’s wife?’

‘What of that?’ said Rose. ‘I am told your predecessor in your very chapel did the same.’

The preacher did not know what to say, except that there were black sheep in all professions, and that there was a Judas even among the Apostles, and it became them all to judge in charity of one another.

‘That is what I want of you,’ said the actress.

But the preacher did not respond to her appeal, and again she left the church for the world.

Another day she tried the Methodists. Unfortunately, as she stepped in they were singing:

 
‘And be the business of my life
To cry, “Behold the Lamb!”’
 

In that church she saw some Wesleyan tradesmen whom she knew. Was that the business of their lives? Of course not. Man comes into the world to get a living and to make the most of it. The secular life is not superseded by the religious life – only adorned and purified by it.

‘You must give up your calling,’ said they all.

Indignantly she asked herself, Why? Her acting was her one talent. Was one to hide it in a napkin? Certainly not, said common-sense, and for once common-sense was right. Was she not doing good in her way, finding people innocent amusement, and teaching them, as she repeated nightly the great words of the great dramatist of our land, something of the wonder and grandeur and pathos and mystery of life? Hers was not an art to be despised. Hers was not a course of life to be abandoned at the command of a bigot, be he Roman monk or Protestant preacher. There was a time when the stage was the teacher of the people; why should it not be so now? she asked herself. It was her resolve that it should be so, as far as it was in her power. For as Tom Campbell wrote:

 
‘Ill can poetry express
Full many a tone of thought sublime;
And painting, mute and motionless,
Steals but one glance from Time.
But by the mighty Actor brought,
Illusion’s wedded triumphs come;
Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And Sculpture to be dumb.’
 

‘Ah!’ wrote Wentworth to her, ‘we need not despair of Divine mercy. Christ is bigger and broader than the Church. You in your way, and I in mine, have wandered far in search of such happiness as earth can give, and found it to be of little worth, and the sects look on us as sinners, because we refuse to bow to the image they have set up, or to utter their Shibboleth. I know not that it matters much. I know not that it matters anything at all. How can any man or any set of men pretend to have penetrated the full meaning of Scripture, or that they can bid stand back those as humble and patient in the pursuit of truth as themselves?’

One day when Robert Hall had been having a conversation with Sir James Mackintosh, he told a friend: ‘Sir, it was the Euphrates pouring itself into a teapot.’ If a great orator like Hall could say that of a fellow-man, what can we say of such Divine revelation as comes to us either by the experiences of actual life or by the world of nature around us, or by the written Word which was and is Life? How can we grasp it? How can we cut it up into dogmas and creeds? How can we say to any brother man, Believe as I believe, or be damned? The Churches have tried to do so and failed, even when they had at their back the terrors of Inquisition or the sword of the Civil Magistrates. They are beginning to understand that it is all up with priestcraft, and that the Church as it exists to-day everywhere is in danger; that they cannot stop the onward march of the people; that they cannot say to the waves of free thought, ‘Hitherto shall ye come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.’ It is a kindly light that leads on, and we cannot stop. Take all the creeds, pile them one upon the top of another, and there is still a void, for the finite cannot grasp the Infinite, and man cannot by searching find out God. At the best we can but guess; at the best, and may we ever be that, we are but children crying for the light. Here we see through a glass darkly; let us humbly do our duty, and wait the time when all mystery shall be unravelled, when we shall stand face to face, when we shall know even as we are known.

Wentworth and Rose had resolved to become one in life, as they had been in years of struggle and endeavour. As she rose she dragged him upward and onward. God had come to him as his Father and his Friend. He was of no Church. He needed the aid of no priest. He distrusted the emotional sensationalism of what is called religious life. It had done little for him in the past – only helped him to his fall. Church members he had found no better than other men; church life just as worldly as that of the wicked. It needed not that he should enter man’s churches to see in all His glory and tenderness and love the Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; Him who had wept over impenitent Jerusalem, and had tears and pity for such frail women as Mary the Magdalene; who had said as He walked the crowded streets of Jerusalem, beneath the proud pillars of the Temple itself: ‘Come unto Me all ye that are weary and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest’; the lustre of whose life and the music of whose voice had bettered and brightened all time and space. It was no Agnostic’s dream that had made Wentworth a new man, but a great spiritual reality, of which he felt as sure as he did of his own existence, as he wrote:

 
‘O Thou, the God of life and light,
In whom all heaven and earth unite,
Fain would I raise my humble voice
And with all people round rejoice.
 
 
‘I cannot see Thee as Thou art,
I only know Thee with the heart.
All language fails me when I try
To shadow forth Thy Deity.
 
 
‘I love, I worship, I adore —
Can man give less, can God ask more?
That love in life I would translate,
And freely trust Thee with my fate.’