Such statements as these, however unacceptable to many Churchmen, will not avail to conciliate modern politicians, or to remove the fears which they entertain of ecclesiastical influence. Perhaps they will be inclined to say that the power which I claim for the spiritual body is really a more dangerous one than that which I renounce. ‘To admit the existence of a dominant hierarchy is the necessity of a statesman’s position; nay, he has not much right to complain of the necessity; it helps in common times to keep other sects quiet, and clergymen indifferent. But when you say that this hierarchy is the proper educator of the land, you are not content that it should be entertained with a bauble. You wish it to become practically and politically mischievous. That power which can educate a land must rule over its families, over its arts, its literature, its science, its ethics, its philosophy, nay, in one sense, as the head of the professional classes, over its law and its medicine. These are pretensions which no government in this day can tolerate further than as it is compelled to tolerate them by circumstances. The religious bodies in every country must undoubtedly affect its education for good or for evil; but they are happily broken into fragments, and it is the statesman’s business to see that they act, one and all of them, as religious bodies, and in no other character. The general education of the land he must gradually (for unquestionably there are many difficulties from old prejudices and institutions which he must remove before he can fully accomplish his desire) take under his own direction. If he allows it to be superintended by any ecclesiastical body, that body becomes just as dangerous as the Jesuits have ever been. For where has lain the real power of the Jesuits? Not in their government over courts, but over schools; not in the poison they have been able to infuse into the ears of monarchs, half so much as in the maxims of ecclesiastical submission and craft which they have communicated to children along with their primers and their grammars.’
In the first division of this work I have endeavoured to trace the history of some of those political and philosophical movements which have led men in our day to contemplate education as the only adequate means of preserving government and society. I shewed that the course of thought by which we had arrived at this opinion was altogether at variance with the practical results to which it seemed to be leading. The statesman demands education as a power for acting upon the spirits of men. But the statesman of our day has distinctly and formally repudiated the notion that he can deal with the spirits of men; he has blamed his forefathers for assuming any such authority. It seemed to us, therefore, that when the statesman claimed himself to be the educator of his land, he was involved in a strange contradiction. Yet it was a contradiction into which he had fallen most naturally. He found that a set of warring religious bodies were not competent to exercise the kind of influence over his subjects which he feels to be necessary for them. He wants them to be united and harmonised; a sect-educator sets them at strife. He will therefore do what he can. He will leave to these religious bodies the right of teaching their own dogmas; whatever else is included in the idea of education must be taken under his own immediate cognizance. And this course, awkward and inconvenient as it evidently is, nay, destructive of the very idea of education, seemed to us the only one which is left for the modern statesman, unless there were some spiritual body existing in the heart of his nation, which was as organic as the civil body, and able to perform those functions which by its own confession the civil body is incompetent to perform. Our subsequent inquiries have led us to believe that there is such a body; that it has established itself in the heart of every European nation; that it has been the teacher of every nation; that it has incorporated itself with the civil society; that the statesman finds the society with which he has to deal everywhere bearing witness of its existence; that he is obliged to depose this body from its functions before he can commence schoolmaster for himself. Such is the state of the question at present. I shall not enter into it at large, because it has been discussed elsewhere. But it is necessary for our present purpose that I should offer some indications of the difference between the effects of an education given by a national Church which understands its own powers and responsibilities, and one given—first, by the State: secondly, by a set of different sects; thirdly, by an ecclesiastical extra-national order, like that of the Jesuits. That I may follow the method in which I have supposed the objections to arise, I will speak very shortly of these kinds of education as they affect family life, science, art, and literature, popular ethics, and philosophy.
I. 1. I have already had occasion to speak more than once on the first of these subjects. I have shewn that a mere religious body, such as that of the Quakers, of the Calvinists, &c., though it may regard family life with reverence, though, at certain stages of its existence, it may even have preserved family life in great purity, cannot connect the institution of the family, as such, with its religion. The religious man is one who chooses for himself; who at a certain time has been led to seek for a new life, and a new fellowship expressive of this new life. Such is the notion in which a sect begins. It becomes exceedingly modified when the sect has established itself. Hereditary feelings and sympathies develop themselves; to desert the faith of forefathers, begins to be spoken of as an evil. But still the religious society subsists upon this principle. Those who are admitted into its privileges do not grow into them. The religious body is looked upon as something different in kind from the family. And therefore it is the common complaint in all sects, that wherever the hereditary habit has begun to prevail, the religion becomes a matter of course, its power is exhausted; some violent efforts must be made to revive it. Now such influences as these, I maintain, cannot by possibility cultivate the family life of a nation. They do not bring the spiritual life into any direct relation with the life of natural kinsmanship. And in a day when so many influences are threatening household sanctities, when so many schemes of universal society exist which cast them aside altogether, the statesman who has no better means of protecting them than that which is afforded by the teaching of religious sects, must be prepared to see them perish altogether. Where there are no political influences and motives at work, no trade-temper, no grand philosophical generalisations, the religious men in the sects may hope to keep alive the habit of respect and attachment among their children. Where these are abroad, they must tremble; at all events, he who believes that the existence of the nation depends upon the preservation of the domestic relations must tremble if these be their only guardians.
2. But what can the statesman himself do by his education to protect these relations? Nothing whatever. Ought I not rather to say, that of necessity he must do much to shake the confidence in them, and to impair their sacredness? It is no fault of his, it is the necessity of his position, a part of his duty, that he should aim at making men citizens. He cannot teach them to be sons and brothers, he is obliged to interfere with the duties which belong to them in these capacities. He must have his schools established upon the express principle, that the parents are not competent to teach, or to choose teachers themselves. He must treat the authority of the father as if its sacredness depended upon the authority of the law. All wise statesmen of antiquity felt this difficulty, and rejoiced to avail themselves of such means as they had of escaping from it. Modern statesmen should surely ask themselves with some earnestness, whether any helps for this purpose are within their reach.
3. That the Jesuit is not exactly the person to whom one can safely confide the custody of family life and relations, most of the persons with whom I am now arguing will acknowledge. And perhaps they will agree with me in thinking, nay, may wonder that I should make such a concession, that the evil of the Jesuit’s influence does not arise solely, or perhaps chiefly, from the particular opinions which he inculcates; that if there could be a Protestant order of the same kind, it would be almost equally mischievous. And wherein, then, upon my principle, does its evil consist? Precisely in this: I believe God has established a universal Church in the world, which grew out of a family, which embodies the idea of family life in its highest possible expansion. That idea, I believe, is preserved in freshness and reality, just so long as a strict unbroken connexion is kept up between its highest form and its lowest; so long as the application of the word Father to Him who was, who is, and who is to come, is felt to be no figurative abuse, but rather the only possible explanation of its most ordinary application. And I believe that Ignatius Loyola established a universal order of his own upon a principle altogether different from this Divine principle, nay, subversive of it; that such an order cannot be the means of preserving any part of the true constitution of society; that it must be continually interfering with it, and substituting something else in the place of it; that, above all, family order and this pseudo-ecclesiastical order must be perpetual, irreconcilable enemies.
4. If this be the case, I need not spend any words in proving that the spiritual and universal society of which we have discovered the signs, seeing that it assumes the family to be taken by baptism into God’s family, seeing that it supposes all civil duties and relations to grow naturally out of these first duties and relations, and seeing that it looks upon the highest ecclesiastical duties and relations as connected with the ordinary social duties, should be the great instrument for accomplishing that object which divided sects, the civil power, a seemingly universal fellowship cannot accomplish, that of building up and sanctifying the domestic society of every nation.
II. 1. How far religious bodies or sects can be trusted with the scientific education of a nation, may be judged from the difference of the feelings with which they have regarded science at different stages of their history. Almost without exception, the impulse of every sect, when its religious faith and sympathies were most strong, has been to look at science as something wholly alien from the nature of faith and not to be reconciled with it. Whether this has arisen from a Manichean horror of the outward world, or from a dread of it as something too holy to be touched, or merely from a dislike of the slow and cold methods by which a knowledge of its secrets is obtained, or, as in the case of the Quakers, from a certain dim intuition of a link between the laws of physical and spiritual investigation which ordinary philosophers had overlooked, the result has been the same. In a generation or two the case becomes altogether changed, at least to all outward appearance. Persons arise out of these sects who shew a genius for physical speculation, and devote themselves wholly to it; a notion pervades the members of the body generally that such pursuits cannot longer be discouraged, as they were in the days of their fathers; a few sturdy Protestants still remain to warn younger men against perils which a sure instinct tells them are most real; others, who fancy themselves more wise and enlightened, and yet withal very religious, explain what lessons respecting the Divine wisdom and goodness may be gathered from natural discoveries. This last change strikes some as a very promising one; to me it seems that the old state of things was far better. The old teachers were acting out a principle; they believed that the business of man’s life is to acquaint himself with his Creator, and to do His will; they did not see what these studies had to do with this great end, therefore they rejected them. Their descendants, when they first enter upon these pursuits, do not complain that the application of the maxim was narrow, they complain that the maxim itself was narrow; that men, if they attend properly to their religious duties, may bestow a fair portion of their time upon pursuits which have a different aim and motive. Soon, of course, these pursuits are felt to be genuine and real, the religious duties artificial and traditional; if the former are not wholly followed, and the latter neglected, there is, at all events, no sympathy between them. Then if there should come a religious revival, and the feelings which are embodied in the different sects should be able to influence public opinion, and to create what is called a religious world, the expedient is resorted to, of making science tell a tale about the truth of the Scriptures, and the being and attributes of God. A moral is wrung out of its facts, by fair means or by foul, often by most dishonest construction of evidence, often by positive suppression of that which has been proved. If any fact is brought to light which opposes a current notion in theology or a current interpretation of the Scriptures, it must not be fairly looked at; the question is raised whether there ought to be such a fact, and, therefore, whether we may recognize it supposing it should be one. The scientific men are rightly disgusted. They see that not only the cause of science but also of honesty is at stake; they begin to suspect an hypothesis the more for its gratifying religious feelings.
2. And here comes in the civil power, and says, ‘This we cannot permit; our subjects must be taught science fairly and truly. We must have railways and steam-engines. In the present state of society, our very handicraftsmen must understand something of the regulations of that machinery which they have to work; the knowledge of a multitude of subjects unknown to their ancestors is needful for them; your religious men may impart what corrections or draw what inferences you please, we must teach the things, we must give our countrymen a scientific culture.’
I have nothing to say in answer to this determination, but that I believe it will defeat itself. This teaching of a multitude of things is not, I fancy, scientific culture, but is fatal to it. The favourite name with those who defend this sort of education is the name of Bacon. Oh, that they would devote some real pains to the study of Bacon! They would find him denouncing as one of the main hindrances to scientific knowledge and scientific progress, the desire for facts which should be “fructiferous” and not “luciferous,” which should lead to mere results, and not to the search for higher principles. The whole object of his writings was to teach how in facts one may seek for laws; not how, out of a heap of observations, one may make first a theory and then a machine. To the passion for mere effects, and what are called practical results, he attributed most of the delusions and crimes of the alchymists. And unquestionably, if he were to reappear in our day, and were to hear himself eulogised as the man who had taught how much nobler a thing it is to make shoes than to seek for principles, he would believe that the very mischiefs out of which he had been the means of delivering his countrymen, were coming back upon them through the abuse of his own wisdom. Yet this is the doctrine which the statesman, who is merely a statesman, does inevitably adopt: this has ever been, and must ever be, the maxim of a State education.
3. The Jesuits cannot be accused of neglecting to give information on physical subjects to their scholars. Nor does it appear that they attempted to restore old theories on these matters, or to teach any other opinions than those which had the general sanction of philosophers in their day. As the Dominicans and the Franciscans were the means of reversing the papal decree against Aristotle, so it seems as if the Jesuits had practically reversed the decree against Galileo, rather eagerly availing themselves of the direction which men’s minds were taking towards physical inquiries, to turn them away from inquiries into subjects more immediately concerning themselves. Here, as everywhere, their instruction proceeded upon one principle, and in one regular, coherent system. Teach everything, be it physics, history, or philosophy, in such wise that the student shall feel he is not apprehending a truth, but only receiving a maxim upon trust, or studying a set of probabilities. Acting upon this rule, they could publish an edition of the “Principia,” mentioning that the main doctrine of it had been denounced by the Pope, and was therefore to be rejected; but, at the same time, recommending the study of the book as containing a series of very ingenious arguments and apparent demonstrations. There was no curl of the lip in this utterance, strange as it may seem to us, nor, in the sense we commonly give to the word, any dishonesty. The editors did not believe that Newton had proved his point. They had not enough of the feeling of certainty in their minds, to think that anything could be proved. All is one sea of doubts, perplexities, possibilities; the great necessity is to feel that we cannot arrive at truth, and that therefore we must submit ourselves to an infallible authority. This was the habit of their mind; whether it was a true one or no the religious man will be able to resolve when he has considered its effects in producing the scepticism of the eighteenth century; the scientific man, when he thinks how hopeless of progression those who cherish it must be.
4. Now a national Church, which believes that it exists for the purpose of cultivating the inward man, just as the civil power exists for the sake of the outward man, which believes that it has a commission and vocation for this end, must be a continual witness against all these notions of education. She cannot tolerate for an instant the sectarian notion, that the study of the laws according to which God has framed this universe is not a solemn and religious work, to be carried on reverently, in connexion with the study of the laws upon which He has constructed the moral universe. As she believes that there is a method for arriving at the knowledge of the one constitution, so she believes that there is a method for arriving at the knowledge of the other. There may be a connexion between these two methods, but they cannot be the same. The spiritual method is not honoured when you compel the physical facts into obedience to it; you are certain that they cannot contradict it; you are sure they will, at all events, illustrate it ten thousandfold more than all your moralities over them ever can. A national Church must believe in the highest sense that what is is right. This is the pillar of her own existence; this is what she opposes to the maxim of the world, that things are right which we make so by our rules and conventions; therefore she must teach her children to ask bravely and boldly, “What is?” encouraging them by all means to expect an answer; teaching them in what frame of mind to wait for it, to receive it, to give thanks for it.
But this lesson is very unlike that one which the civil power seeks to inculcate in its education. The spiritual teacher in his own sphere is occupied in leading men into the secret heart of things, in teaching them the laws of their own being, and their direct relation to the Creator. In this sphere of physical science he must act upon the same principle. He cannot merely teach facts and opinions, he must seek to guide his pupil into the knowledge of laws. This method he will follow with the higher or professional classes who are submitted to his discipline. He cannot change it, though he may alter altogether his scheme of instruction, when he is occupied with the lowest classes. For these, too, consist of men; of men who want to know, and who have a right to know, what that order is in which they are placed; what the meaning of the things which they are doing is; who must not merely be taught what they are to do, or merely be furnished with rules for doing it.
And therefore it is almost needless to say that such a teacher looks upon authority, not in the way in which the Jesuit does, as a substitute for truth, but as that which is to put us in the right way of searching after it. A national church believes that she is set in the midst of a nation by Him, “who for this end was born, and for this end came into the world, that He might bear witness to the truth,” in order that she may bear witness of it, and may rebuke the slavish and godless tempers which hinder men in any direction from seeking it; and that by leading them to know it she may make them free.
III. The treatment which literature and art are likely to receive from these different classes may be conjectured from the remarks which have been just made. Sects in their infancy reject both as worldly and heathenish, in their manhood and decline tolerate them as necessary indulgences, or endeavour to make them religious by sugaring them over with a Christian phraseology. The civil power encourages both, because they furnish certain measures of diversion and entertainment to different classes of the community; but determines their value by the degree in which they minister to immediate utility. The Jesuit favours all that kind of literary diligence which exhibits itself in laborious compilations, annals, chronologies, &c.; all that kind of art which may help to connect devotion more closely with the senses. So that in each of these forms of education, there is from different causes the same tendency to give to human utterances, whether in books, or pictures, or sculpture, or music, or architecture, an artificial, outward, fictitious character: to make them insincere expressions of that which is actually in the hearts of men; or else to make those hearts themselves insincere, by leading them constantly to aim at the production of some effect to which the names, “moral, useful, religious,” by a great abuse of language are applied. But if there be any body which really believes that it has a commission to cultivate the mind and spirit of a nation; to call forth in it that which is truest and noblest; to awaken the reason, the understanding, the affections; to give them their key-note, to bring out their different harmonies; such a body will feel that the men to whom God has given the power of expressing their own minds and the minds of their age, whether in words or in sensible forms, have a high vocation and a mighty responsibility; that the influences of the world are likely to choke their powers and prevent them from freely and happily expanding; that the spiritual mother is to brood over them with tender and affectionate care; to cheer them on amid outward and inward discouragements; to give them the soothing food and medicine of peaceful devotions and outward images of serenity and quietness; to stir them up by heroical examples, to make them conscious of their relation to the past and the future; to hold forth high and distant ends, that they may not be crushed by the influences of their age, or be tempted to court its approbation; to humble them that they may be exalted; to teach them how they may discover the invisible in the visible, instead of confounding them and bringing the higher under the conditions of the lower. While thus training the more illustrious citizens of the commonwealth, she is really marking out the course by which all should be trained who are to be citizens indeed; for to each God has committed some trust, which may be fulfilled for His glory and for the good of the land.
IV. 1. I will conclude this subject with a few words upon the subject of ethics. Strictly speaking, the sectarian does not recognize the existence of such a study. For he looks upon the religious man as taken into a position altogether different from that which other men occupy. He and they are not under the same law. There is a set of rules and maxims which they must observe, in order that they may be members of the family and citizens of the community to which they belong. The religious man submits to these, but he is subject to another set of Gospel influences, with which the ordinary man has nothing to do. Christian ethics mean the religion of the heart according to the Bible, they apply only to the converted; worldly ethics mean the regulation of the conduct according to the rules and maxims which are received among worldly men: these apply to the unconverted. Upon this shewing a morality for man as man does not exist.
2. Accordingly the statesman interferes, and says in this case as in the others, ‘Then you shall teach that morality which belongs to your position; I will teach that which belongs to mine. Men must acknowledge some rule of life. These subjects of mine, call them converted or unconverted, must be trained to some sense of their relations to each other. Mere legal penalties are not sufficient for them, they must be taught some reason for their conduct, some method of self-government.’ Of course these reasons and these methods must turn upon maxims of self-interest. How can they turn upon any other maxims? The statesman has been warned off the religious ground, this is all that remains to him.
3. Of Jesuit ethics I need not speak at length; they are in sufficiently bad odour among us, and probably in most nations of the Continent. What I wish to remark is, that all the evil which is in them has flowed from that first principle of establishing a universal order upon a human calculation of what is expedient for the preservation of the Church and of religion. Once construct a society of such power and of such coherency as the Jesuit society, and it is impossible, in the nature of things, that the preservation of this order should not begin to be regarded as the one great end, to which every other is subordinate. To keep this great machine in motion, to make it effective, everything must be sacrificed. I do not think that there is one pernicious maxim in the Constitutions which may not be legitimately deduced from this primary assumption. The Jesuits feel about morality, as about science, not that it is but that it has been made, and, therefore, that it may be remade for a higher object. The world has framed its maxims to keep itself alive; he may frame his maxims in order to keep the holy religious order alive. The object is surely better; the ways in both cases are determined by arrangement and convention.
4. Once again I say a national Church exists to protest against these outrages upon that which is the very ground of a nation’s existence. It affirms morality to be universal, in its highest form to be meant for all men and to be attainable by all men, seeing that the covenant of Baptism takes all who will receive it into the highest state which a man on earth can enjoy; the state in which he has all helps for resisting the powers of the flesh, the world, and the devil, which are seeking to rob him of his human privilege. It affirms morality to be in direct opposition to selfishness, not in its highest forms merely, but in its lowest; the penalties of the lawgiver, the prayers of the Church, being alike directed against this sin; one denouncing its outward effects, the other aiming at the extirpation of the internal disease. It declares morality, not in its highest forms only but in its lowest, to be grounded upon the character and will of God; subjection to that will being the lesson inculcated by the law, conformity to that character being the effect produced by the power of the Gospel. And, therefore, of necessity it must hate and curse all such schemes of morality as the Jesuits have sanctioned; schemes which pervert the truth that each individual case has peculiar points and delicate complications of its own which require wisdom and refinement and a freedom from rash habits of judging in the person who deals in them, into the confounding doctrine that there is no common law of right and wrong, or that no conscience for perceiving that law exists in the creatures to whom it is addressed.
I have but two remarks to make before I conclude this head of my subject. The first is, that I believe all the defects in national Churches, and in the education which they have communicated, may be traced to a notion which has prevailed far too generally in the members and ministers of them: either that their position is sectarian, that they are merely civil bodies constructed for certain civil ends; or, on the other hand, that they are merely parts of a religious society or order existing for purposes wholly foreign to those for which the civil power exists. Should therefore any opponent produce facts which illustrate the weakness and inefficiency of these Churches, or of any one of them, I shall be most willing to consider his statements. I am satisfied they will all tend to the confirmation of mine, that they will all tend to prove the inherent viciousness of those schemes of education which have at different periods suggested themselves as most plausible and satisfactory, that they will furnish another reason why every national Church should understand its own high position, and should zealously assert it. My other remark is addressed to the statesman. He has felt in most countries of Europe, he feels still, the peril of Jesuit influence, and the necessity of guarding himself against it. But what can he do? If he tries to get rid of the idea that there is one Catholic Church in the world, and treats religion as if it were merely a matter of private sectarian opinion, he will not hinder the Jesuits from entering his dominions and becoming masters of his schools. His tolerant maxims will make their settlement more easy; the earnest cry which will be raised throughout a land left to sectarian influence for some united body, some organic fellowship, will cause their appearance to be hailed with delight. Will he, then, in despair, resort to his own peculiar powers? Will he proscribe and banish the intruders, or put them to death? These methods, he knows, have been tried and tried in vain; the crushed order has risen again with all its other influences made stronger by the credit of persecution and of martyrdom. One barrier, and one alone, this subtle and Protean society knows that it cannot break through. A national Church, strong in the conviction of its own distinct powers, paying respectful homage to those of the State, educating all classes to be citizens by making them men; this is a spectacle which the Jesuit regards with wonder and despair. Where there is such a national Church he may be safely allowed to walk up and down in the land; the sting of his order is taken away; he may become a worthy and respectable member of the commonwealth. If the statesman be convinced that the maiming and ultimate suppression of such a Church is the true object of his policy, he must invent some new charm for laying this enemy. None has yet been discovered.