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