Memoirs of Eighty Years. Thomas Gordon Hake
ten thousand boys have passed through the school since I bade farewell to its cloisters, but I am unable to say whether the system of non-religious teaching has been changed. Our reverend classical masters manifested no religious tastes; it may be due to their not having imbibed any when they were pupils like ourselves in the school. I do recollect Mr. Lynam, of whom I was a pupil for several years, correcting my pronunciation of Jōb, which I called Jŏb. If we were reading something from Scripture before him, I have wholly forgotten it; the occasion must have been so rare.
What the effect of religious ignorance may have been on so many before and after me, it is difficult to surmise. I have no recollection of any boy, in after-life, becoming a bishop or a millionaire. Nature was open to them; she is constantly carrying on revelations, and all must begin with these before entertaining Divine ones. The greater our acquaintance is with natural teaching, the better we are able to judge of religious. A well-educated scientific man would decide a religious question in five minutes which would take five hundred years for all the doctors of divinity to get to the bottom of. A large knowledge of Nature is requisite even to find a meaning for any inspired passage, and it is doubtful if any divine ever had training enough to understand fully any one important passage of Holy Writ. Those men who are recognized as having undergone inspiration were never able to state lucidly what they heard, but recorded it in such shape as must for ever puzzle the brains of the priesthood. If such men as the Herschels had been made the vehicles of a revelation, it would have been expressed to the world in such tangible language as shuts out all dispute.
The advantages of knowledge derived from observations made within the sacred precincts of Nature is that there is always a revelation going on, made by a silent, invisible power that we can question without offence. But the custodes of the holy archives greatly disapprove of such proceeding. The Catholic forbids the perusal of Scripture; the Protestant the perusal of Nature; and that reverend gorilla, the agnostic, inculcates the wisdom of studying all things and learning nothing. Surely he is the missing link!
I admire the clergy as gentlemen and men of education, but the fault is that they proceed from the university to the Church, and drop science and literature out of their daily life, returning to ignorance at the same pace as they quitted it as children. The cultivated class find it impossible to converse with them on any profitable grounds.
XIII.
My mother’s youngest brother was an officer of artillery, and, as adjutant, was always stationed at Woolwich. He had married the daughter of a Mr. Samuel Enderby, an oil-merchant, and a man of great wealth, living on Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, when first I knew his family, and afterwards moving to a mansion on Blackheath.
When a day’s holiday occurred, I and my cousin walked down to my uncle’s house, taking that of the Enderbys on our way. We were paid our travelling expenses both ways, though we never rode, but kept the money in our pockets, together with the heavy tips that we got at both houses.
My uncle did not attain the rank of captain, even, till middle age. Promotion in the artillery, going by rotation, was slow, and so long remained, owing to the Duke of Wellington’s narrow ideas, and brevet at last had to be substituted for real rank.
My uncle, however, died a lieutenant-general, with a good-service pension, followed by the command of a brigade.
My son, Alfred Egmont Hake, has given a true and pleasing account of my uncle, Henry William Gordon, and his family relations, derived from information supplied by me for his “Story of Chinese Gordon,” who was one of my uncle’s younger sons.
I had a strong love for this uncle, and he reciprocated the feeling; nay, more, he always overlooked my faults, which were not a few in the eyes of those relatives who were incompetent to judge me, and expected me to play the commonplace game in life for which, unfortunately, I was wholly unqualified.
Charles Gordon’s education was military only. His rapidity of perception and combination, so conspicuous in his command of an army, were left otherwise barren; he was, therefore, unable to grasp the great truths that surround our actual being, sacrificing their beauty and enjoyment to a meaningless superstition. He had even humour of the most delicate kind, without which no man of genius is ever born, for it is the crowning faculty of man’s intellect.
As possessing a judgment myself which reaches no conclusion before passing through an unprejudiced analysis of all things great and small concerning it, I have never been able to conceive a soldier’s duties accordant with a Christian’s, or to realize such an idea as that of a man leading one army of paid assassins against another, with a love of Christ, or of his Maker, or of mankind in his heart. The fact that men offer their own lives only shows how earnest they are in the profession of shedding blood. Those of the Mahometan class might infuse religion into slaughter; but not one of the disciples or evangelists could have done it, except one.
“Rich must a hero be in superstition
Who deems ’twas God who gave him his commission.”
Throughout his childhood and youth, Charles Gordon associated with soldiers. His family were of the military class; he imbibed the love of their profession. He had an acute mind, with faculties which, if trained, would have served for a philosopher; but he had not the originality that leads a man to educate himself, and to cast all falsehood out of his nature. A slight knowledge of physiology would have sufficed to root out most of his theological ideas; but that slight knowledge, even, he did not possess; and what he most wished might be, he believed. His name is great, but his reputation will rest finally on his military genius and his many virtues.
But to return to my subject. A day’s holiday at Woolwich was a pleasant pastime. It sometimes included a visit to Greenwich Hospital, sometimes a review, and more than once a sight of Richardson’s Theatre at Greenwich Fair-time, when all that is tragical in the world was enacted with all the rant that tradition had handed down from stage to stage.
XIV.
I passed my last remaining holidays with my mother at Exeter, the old dean and chapter town of the west. Exeter continues in my mind to be a mediæval city, its inhabitants a people of the middle ages. To enjoy the height of respectability it was necessary to have a visiting connection with the bishop of the diocese, and this secured the unenviable acquaintance of the dean, the Mr. Dean, the divinest of doctors, and the whole chapter, which, judging from its antecedents, owed its importance to and was in itself a mere Chapter of Accidents. To think how men, ignorant of all things save privilege and dogma, can testimonialize their fellow-citizens by means of a nodding smile! To be admitted into the close to eat mutton and red-currant jelly with the canons of the cathedral was a fortune of social rank, sufficiently ample to confer honour on the dozens who knew them. How strange is all this to minds of any magnitude! A string of minor infallibles, each the owner of dearly beloved brethren whom he condescends to despise, ruling over the pauper intellects and imaginations of a city!
Yet all these idolaters are great economists; instead of earning their own respectability, they seek to get it dirt-cheap by having it conferred upon them.
I found my mother in better circumstances; her younger uncle had died, and as he could not take his hoard away with him, he left it to be divided among his near relations, but the only one, the Rev. Robert Clarke, who bore his name, came best off; and he deserved it, not only for his own sake, but because he was already better off than most of those who profited under the will! This cousin was the kindest, the most clerically gentlemanlike of the cloth he favoured. The name of Clarke is on record at Hexham as that of liberal Church patrons.
But mediæval cities and people of the middle ages, still playing out the ancestral game, have their theatres. To that of Exeter I went to see Yates perform the part of Falstaff. I was deeply bitten by the fun, and