BOOKS.

JOSHUA DAVIDSON.*

-WE do not wonder that this little book has attracted a consider- able amount of interest, nor that the lady to whom it has been, without contradiction, attributed, should be intending to republish it, with an explanatory preface making her object in writing it -somewhat more clear. At present it might be fairly enough attributed to either of two distinct aims,—sympathy with what she believes to be the socialistic as distinguished from the theo- logical side of Christianity, or, on the other hand, the desire to show that the socialistic element in Christianity, attractive as it is, is inconsistent with the developments of modern society, and that the attempt to realise the social ideas of the first Christian brotherhood in actual life can only lead to the shipwreck of noble schemes and the martyrdom of nobler lives. For ourselves, we should be disposed to refer the book to the first of these two -motives. We can hardly doubt that the life of Joshua Davidson is intended for an attempt to realise the life of Christ as nearly as -it can be realised among the working-class of our own nation and our own day ; nor that that conception has the ardent sympathy -of its author, although her mind is evidently assailed by the most searching doubts as to the practicability of this ideal. Joshua Davidson—it is of course obvious that Joshua is only another form -of Jesus, and Davidson an equivalent for the son of David—is a Cornish carpenter, who at fourteen years of age has the same sort of struggle with the rector and spiritual grandee of his parish in the parish church, which our Lord had at twelve years of age with -the Rabbis of Jerusalem in the Jewish Temple. There is no attempt to pursue the parallel into any painful or unseemly analogies. This book is as far as possible from a parody, nor is it

• even an attack, except incidentally, on the theology of orthodoxy ; it is a very fair and, with one exception, a skilful attempt to delineate the story of a spiritual-minded young man of the work- ing-class of our own day, beginning his career with the human life of Christ as his absolute ideal, and, in a much too narrow sense, his model, and gradually modifying his conception of it, as it is by no means improbable, perhaps even likely, -that a man of that class, oppressed by the heavy weight of social • circumstances, would modify it, in the course of an unassisted struggle with the principles and machinery of modern society. As we have stated, there is one point in relation to which the picture -cannot be regarded as skilful, and we may say at once that this -consists in a radical confusion between the hero's spiritual conception of social regeneration as proceeding from within, and his political -conception of it as depending on a reorganisation from without. -Joshua Davidson is delineated as far too clear-headed and high- souled to make this confusion, but he makes it nevertheless, and -in a manner so hopeless that his life is a mere tangle of inconsistent principles.

Joshua Davidson begins life with the most literal belief in every word of the New Testament, and with narrow enough notions of 'interpretation. He tries, in conjunction with his young com- panions, on the strength of our Lord's words about the faith which can remove mountains, to pray a great Cornish rock into the sea. He narrowly escapes death from poison and the venom of snakes, -on the faith of the saying, " These signs shall follow those that believe They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them." He rebukes the rector -of his pariah for living in luxury while the poor pine in wretched- ness. When he comes with his companion to London, they have -thrown off this literalism, and with it also much of the theology of the New Testament, retaining little but its Theism, its sympathy with the poor, and its profound compassion for the misery 'of sin, —which, by the way, Joshua Davidson conceives in a very different spirit from his Master, and very inconsistently, too, with the impressions we derive from his own Christ-like life, as essentially misfortune rather than guilt. He tries to reclaim -and in some instances succeeds in reclaiming the thief and the harlot. He opens night schools, and never turns away from the lowest depths of crime and degradation. But while he studies physical science with enthusiasm, he rejects the modern political economy as a tissue of falsehoods, and accepts in its place the very ill-defined doctrines—which the author would have done well, in case she understands them herself, which we doubt, to sketch for us some- what more clearly—of the International Association as to the rela-

• The True History s r Joshua Davidson. London: Bashful and Co.

tions of capital and labour. How little the authoress really knows on these subjects appears from her very odd identification of the Pall Mall and the Spectator (on page 147) as taking the same line in re- gard to Unionist questions. The truth is, that the Pall Mall has often indicated its opinion that our tone in this matter is as dangerous as we think its own tone narrow. But on the whole of this subject Joshua Davidson is very hazy indeed. And indeed the weak point of the book is, as we have already suggested, the extreme inconsistency tetween the spiritual faith which is re- presented as the groundwork of his private life, and the social or political fanaticism which makes him identify himself with the Paris Commune, fight for its existence, and die a martyr to the attempt to vindicate its fame. We can quite conceive a working-man of a sufficiently high moral calibre holding what we are told Joshua Davidson held, that " sin and misery are the removable results of social circumstances, and that poverty, ignorance, and class-dis- tinctions consequent, are at the roots of all the crime and wretched- ness afloat." But we cannot conceive a man of the spiritual nature attributed to Joshua Davidson holding this. He must have known that temptation and sin, however aggravated by circumstances, are independent of any particular class of human circumstances,—that they exist in the middle-class as well as in both upper and lower, and exist quite independently of the relations of class. And there is, moreover, a special incon- sistency in the attempt of a man who is represented as opposed in English society to any violent revolutionary scheme,--a scheme which he considers not only hopeless, but failing to strike at the root of the evil,—to wrest by violence the capital of a great nation from that nation's hands, for the sake of an experiment which,— paint it as tenderly as you will,—only the invasion of a foreign foe rendered momentarily practicable. There is something radically unreasonable in the attempt to unite a high and pro- foundly spiritual inward morality—a morality that makes the strictest personal purity and the most devoted self-sacrifice and humility its chief aim—with a political philosophy which throws the burden of sin upon outward circumstance, and hopes more from a social coup d'itat than from that Kingdom of God which comes not " with observation," of which you cannot say "lol here" or "lo ! there," because it is within us. However, this is what the author has attempted to combine in the portraiture of Joshua Davidson, and we cannot say that, with all her talent, she has succeeded. Paint it how you will, the revolt of the Commune was not an attempt to conquer the hearts of men for a new spiritual ideal, but an attempt to wrench power out of the hands of the rich and place it in the hands of the poor, who were, to say the least, not better prepared morally for its use than their oppo- nents. And this fact could not have been appreciated better than it was by Joshua Davidson, who is depicted as rejected and despised even amongst the London Committee of the International, on ac- count of that very Christian charity and tenderness of heart which he preached, and preached in vain, to his colleagues there. We say, then, that the author has made a profound mistake in not per- ceiving that either her hero would have had his political fanaticism cooled by his painful experience of the deficiency of his own companions and colleagues in the very qualities needful for a successful social revolution,—or else would have had his spiritual faith more or less subverted and merged in the fiery zeal of his new and more materialistic gospel.

The notion which appears to have misled the imaginary hero of this " true life," and we suppose the author also, is the notion that Christ himself preached a doctrine of regeneration of society by com- munistic methods as of the very essence of his teaching. We believe this to be a simple mistake. No doubt Joshua Davidson is quite right in supposing that there is no opening for any recognition of the hard-and-fast lines of political economy in Christ's teach- ing. In that teaching everything is made subservient to the exertion of true spiritual influence over the heart,—as it ought to be. You are to give to those that ask of you, and from those that borrow of you, you are not to turn away ; but in Christ's mouth this is no doctrine encouraging the trade of a professional beggar, but a method by which personal influence is to be gained over the hearts of those in close social relations with yourself. " Resist not evil" is a maxim by which generous self-forgetfulness is to win its way to the heart of selfishness. It cannot be too constantly re- membered that Christ's lessons were not given to a society of which the individual units were all loose and severed like those

of a modern city, but were intended rather for small com- munities almost as closely united in their personal relations as those of the various branches of a single family now are. They were not economical maxims, but modes of ap- proach to the heart. And as such, and wherever they can

be still so applied, they are as good now as they were then. Try to govern any really close personal relations,—be it those of master and servant or those of brother and sister,—on the maxims of political economy, and they would utterly fail in your hands. And so, too, when even towards a stranger you can establish such relations as Joshua Davidson did towards his immediate followers, towards the reclaimed street-walker and the reclaimed burglar, the maxims of political economy seem to ave no right or title to a hearing. Joshua Davidson's blunder is not in seeing this and laying it to his heart, but in not seeing that in communities made up of millions, if you are to have these close personal relations with any souls at all, you must treat millions as outside the circle of these intimate relations, and therefore treat them on principles to which the assumption of these inti- mate spiritual relations have no sort of application. And no conception can be more radically un-Christian than the attempt to establish communistic organisations for the general govern- ment of societies infinitely too large to be penetrated by those spiritual affections which can alone wield these organisa- tions successfully. This seems to us to be the radical mistake of Joshua Davidson' and of his biographer, and a mistake for which there is really no excuse in the New Testament. That the first Christian society was more or less a communistic society is certain, but it is equally certain that the communism was never regarded as of its essence. Christ gave his highest praise to Zaccheus, who only pretended to give half his goods to the poor, and to restore fourfold to those whom he had wronged, and gave it without making any sort of condition that Zaccheus should give away the rest of his property. Peter dis- tinctly told Ananias that there was no kind of pressure on him to bring into the common stock any property he did not wish to bring, and that his sole sin was his lying profes- sion. It is evident that from the very first, the communism of Christianity was purely tentative and voluntary,—the spon- taneous result of a profound common faith, but never enforced as a necessary principle of Christian discipleship. On the whole, then, considerable as are the power and beauty of this sketch of a modern Christian socialist, we cannot recognise it as distinctly conceived. Joshua Davidson is inconsistent with himself and with his Master. His notion of sin as a sort of misfortune, and not in any degree an infinite and immeasurable abuse of freedom, is utterly un-Christian, and his personal humility and nobleness are too great for his mechanical beliefs. The weak and the strong sides of the picture are not compatible with each other. And we will end our review with an extract illustrative of each in tarn, in re- lation to his treatment of the reclaimed street-walker, whom a philanthropist offers, in the first of our two extracts, to get into a reformatory, whereupon Joshua indignantly declares that he will not have her taught any doctrine of morbid repentance :- "With the woman perhaps I can do something. If she is young, she cannot be wholly hardened, and I could get her into the —Street Reformatory.'—' No,' said Joshua, I will not consent to her going into a reformatory. It is not that she needs. In a reformatory she will be continually reminded of what I want her to forget. She would be made morbid by incessant thought about herself; taught to say peniten- tial psalms when she should be set to learn some skilled employment that would be of use to her in the future. I wish her to be kept vir- tuous through self-respect, and by being placed beyond the need of going back to such a life. I do not want her to be weakened by a self- torturing contrition for the past, or terrified at the prospect of eternal damnation for the future. I want her to be lifted up, not cast down:— You surely do not make light of repentance f' cried Mr. C. warmly. 'What other assurance have we that she will not fail again ?'—' The best assurance, sir, will be to teach her self-respect and the means of gaining an honest living,' said Joshua.---, You are a rank materialist, Davidson I' said Mr. C. ' I cannot stand your referring sin to mere social conditions. Are there no such things as sins in high places? Poverty and ignorance are not the only roots of human wickedness!'

About the strongest, though,' Joshua answered.—' And the sins of luxury—'—' Make Mary Prinsep and her class,' interrupted Joshua. See here, sir' what are you asked to do?—to repair, in a very small way, the evil done by society. You represent society at this moment, and you are asked to undo a portion of your own bad work.'"

Joshua may have been right as to the Pharisaic tone of too many reformatories, but he was utterly outside the mind of Christ in speaking of sin as the mere external inheritance of evil social arrangements. In the following passage, however, he shows the nobler and more spiritual side of his character :-

"

At last he [Joshua Davidson] lighted on a good, tender- hearted, but timid woman, who received her in full faith, so far as the girl herself was concerned, but on the express condition that no one should ever know what she had been, and that there was to be no kind of communication between her and ourselves, or any of her old Church-court friends. To these terms Joshua advised her to submit; so with many tears poor Mary went away to take the place of a kitchen-maid in a family living at a little distance from London, where, as the lady said, she had a chance now of redeeming herself, and a new start given her altogether. And if I do well, Joshua, you will be pleased with me ?' she said, as she was bidding us good-by.—' More than pleased, Mary, he said. ' You know that I trust you, and that we both love you—John here as well as I. '—Mary's face was as white as the frill round her neck. 'Joshua,' she said, looking up at him, 'give me one kiss before I go ; it will help me.'—Joshua bent his noble head and kissed her tenderly.—' God be

with you, sister !' he said, and his voice a little failed And I will say the prayer you taught me, Joshua, regularly morning and evening, when I ain't too sleepy,' said Mary simply. 'And you will

pray for me too As I do ever, my girl,' said Joshua: and I be- lieve that God hears us l'—• Then He will hear me said Mary, with a: kindling face ; 'and I'll pray harder nor ever for the thing I want l"

The Joshua Davidson of this extract is certainly not the Joshua- Davidson of the Paris Commune.