EPISCOPAL PENNY-A-LINING.
THE essence of Dr. Wilberforce's great illustrative genius, we take to be a certain loving familiarity in dealing with the sublime, and a certain noble sublimity in dealing with the familiar, —a style which glorifies common things and makes us familiar with the most celestial verities in the same breath. We had occasion between two and three months ago to remark on the Bishop's bold handling of " the Sun " and " Price's patent candles," which he held up as it were one in each hand,—or at least compared, for rhetorical purposes, the one with the other in the same magni- ficent sentence, so that though the Sun never for a moment seemed too great for the episcopal candlestick which presented it to ad- miration, yet Price's patent candles (which it was the Bishop's rhetorical object to disparage) swealed and guttered miserably in its neighbourhood, till none who heard the Bishop speak, how- ever much they might have been opposed to him, would have dared to attempt acting as save-all to those unfortunate luminaries. "If you levy a rate," said the Bishop, " there must be an end to the voluntary teaching of the poor for the sake of Christ. By compul- sion, I maintain, you would be taking the Sun out of the system, and substituting for it the miserable fabricated lights of Price's manufacture." In the Bishop's speech of this day week on the Oxford Test Abolition Bill at Buckingham he almost surpasses himself in his use of this rich and grandiose penny-a-lining style not, perhaps, that any one metaphor was at once quite as digage and sublime as that which made Price's composites pale before the Sun, but that in the wealth and freedom of the Bishop's metaphors there was a prolific versatility and familiar resource which remind us even more of the literary kaleidoscope of a penny-a-lining rhetorician, than anything the Bishop has yet produced. In his great Buckingham oration, the Bishop of Oxford was bent on proving that the Bill for abolishing the test of subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles and other formularies of the Church, as well for graduates as the members of Convocation and the College Fel- lows of both Universities, is a bad Bill. In the course of a short statement on this subject, he used no less than four great metaphors, the beach metaphor, the bottle metaphor, the electric-machine metaphor, and the coat-tag metaphor. This was profuse rhetoric in itself, and will befound to be even more than profuse, lavishly super- abundant, when we consider the very slender nature of the connec- tion between the four great metaphors in question and the arguments to which they are attached. First, as to the beach metaphor ; after describing the concessions already made to Dissenters by the two Universities, the Bishop rose into his first flight,—" the govern- ment of the Universities and the tuition in the Colleges were, however, reserved for those who were members of the Church of England ; but now they found that claims were being made for further concessions, and the history of all concessions showed that when one thing was conceded it led to another claim being made, and that the wave which beat majestically on the distant beach a short time ago, was found to be advancing near to the town which the beach sheltered." Here "the wave" is undoubtedly the Dissenting bodies, the town is the Church Constitution of the Universities, and the beach appears to be the restrictive Test Acts, while the " majestic " beating of the wave must be the agitation car- ried on by the Dissenting bodies fifteen years or so ago, which Dr. Wilberforce, for some unexplained reason, seems to think more majestic' than the same agitation now. But the great feature of the metaphor is its remarkable and almost ingenious discordance with the thought. The Bishop intended apparently to explain how a concession led to a further claim being made, and he illustrates by a metaphor taken from cases in which no concession is ever made, in which no further claim can ever be lodged,—the advance of the tido being, of course, at once caused and limited by laws which are wholly independ- ent either of concession on the one hand, or the growing craving whetted by concession on the other. When the sea encroaches on any coast, the encroachment is certainly not caused by previous concessions' of beach, any more than when it retires from any coast, is that retirement caused by aggressive human assaults on its domain. So far, too, from the beach protecting the town from the sea, the beach is the rampart thrown up by the sea itself ; so that if the metaphor would hold water at all, the University Test Acts should be the rampart thrown up by the "majestic wave" of Dissent, to mark its own natural limits. If the right reverend orator had gone in search of a metaphor which should,—not illus- trate, but darken his counsel by words without knowledge, he could not have done better than introduce this unfortunate beach. He was thinking apparently of a breakwater rather than a beach, but so long as he had something ' majestic,' with a roar and a
picturesque line of foam in it, he did not much mind for the sense.
Then the Bishop, having missed his way among the breakers,
betakes himself, in his great fertility of resource, to a humbler metaphor, and, like Mr. Pecksniff moralizing on the simple furni- ture of his own breakfast-table, descants on a bottle. In this case his object was to show that young men can't be taught to discrimi- nate truth from error, till they have been taught something of the positive side of truth ;—for which reason he protested against easeMating dissenters or sceptics with the Churchmen who dis- charge the tutorial and paternal duties of the teachers and Heads of Colleges. "Is it possible to put a young man's mind into the position of receiving truth, while at the same time you are telling him, Mind, you are to come by your own critical discrimination to a judgment as to what you will receive ' ? Is it not as if you were to pour a certain liquid into a bottle and say, Mind, if you think the liquid is not the best, you can stop your mouth and not receive it' ?" This is the playful style of metaphor, but at least as wide of the mark as the ' majestic wave ' which encroached so much on the concessions of the beach a few sentences before. If the students' minds be really as passive as bottles into which fluids are decanted, it is quite certain that, like bottles, they could be just as easily emptied out again and filled with some other fluid. It is precisely the complete passivity of the bottle which prevents its being affected, one way or the other, by the contents it receives. Young men's minds, just so far as they resemble bottles in receiving religious teach- ing, are certainly provided against either benefit or injury from it. It is only so far as their minds are actively employed in em- bracing, rejecting,—in a word, discriminating—what they hear, that advantage or harm can be anticipated from it. The truth is, that no positive religious truth can be or ever is imparted at all without furnishing the learner with the means of discriminating it from closely allied error. And no young man who either loses or gains a faith at College does so without reading and canvassing opinions of the most opposite kind, and perfectly well knowing how many great authorities are opposed to the belief which he adopts. Whatever may be the real disadvantage of turning a College into a Babel of contradictory religious creeds, which we are not disputing, no metaphor could be chosen less likely to illustrate that disadvantage than the Bishop's playful comparison of a young man's mind to an empty bottle, which cannot choose but take any fluid into it which the person who holds it in his hand chooses to pour in.
If neither the Bishop's beach nor the Bishop's bottle will hold water, the Bishop's electric machine is still less serviceable than either of them. We can't believe that the Bishop uttered this great metaphor in the form in which it is reported, for we are quite sure he must be aware that glass is a non-conductor of electricity, and not a conductor of it. But even if this alteration is made, the metaphor strikes us as as unintelligible a little bit of rhetorical ornament as ever. This is what the Standard reports the Bishop to have said ;—the Times' reporter apparently got so worried with the metaphor that he omitted it altogether :— " Would they send a lad at the most malleable period of his intellec- tual and moral training under the control and management of one who was one of the most intellectual of his kind, and who might also be the most winning and proselytizing infidel, and who might be assisted by others like himself, and allow the lad to bo exposed to the pernicious example set before him ? Like the electric fluid, which, propelled through the glass conductor, struck the brass knob, the electric cur- rent from these infidel professors would strike and ruin the heart of their child."
Suppose any correction you please in this wonderful but pseudo-scientific penny-a-lining, and what a feat of rhetoric it remains! The sceptical teaching is an " electric current," the heart of the• learner a " brass knob," and whether the glass non-conductor be the good Churchmen, or the Church services at Oxford, or whatever it be, what a medley of flaunting figures the episcopal rhetoric is ! Would it be less appropriate to express a metaphorical fear whether the electric current of good sense after passing through the non-conductor of episcopal dignity, might not strike and ruin the brass knob of the Bishop's brain ?
The Bishop's last metaphor is the coat-tag metaphor. He is trying to refute the force of the statement that as the national religion now has not always been the national religion, the old national religion (Catholicism) has at least as good a right in the Colleges as the new one (Anglicanism). Dr. Wilberforce says :-
"It was no answer to his argument to say that changes had been made in the religion of the country since these endowments. There was nothing in that. The main principle was the same now as then. They had not now the superstitions and corruptions that formerly
surrounded the Church—that was the tag that hung upon the coat. They bad cut off that tag of superstition, and had now only the good broadcloth left," —the bearing whereof on the point illustrated is surely difficult to see. If the peculiar Romanist doctrines are only " tags" to the coat, why should those who like both coat and tags be excluded from the Colleges ? Why should they not associate with those who wear the coat without the tags ? If transubstantiation, worship of the Virgin, celibacy, &c., be mere ornamental tags to the Protestant coat, we do not understand the justice of the Bishop's objection. If they be more than this, we have not the least notion of the drift of the Bishop's metaphor. It seems to us that Dr. Wilberforce grasps at every concrete image that suggests itself to his loose thought, and uses it whether it be useful or useless,—indeed the very opposite of useful,—for his purpose. If he were to call the special Romanist doctrines boot laces or buckles, we should be neither more nor less able to inter- pret this curious instance of his lust for bad metaphor.
We have thought it worth while to expose the curious literary excrescences in the speech of this Episcopal penny-a-liner, because they seem to us representatives of the pretentious hollow- ness of his thought and his theology. Dr. Wilberforce is a man of great popular reputation and influence in the Church ; and his popular reputation and influence seem to us founded on no solid foundation of conviction at all. Often you may see what a mature man's intellectual sincerity is worth, as well from mere literary style as from the substance of the thought put forward. We believe this to be the case with the Bishop of Oxford, and we must say that we have never come across an insincerer, more showy, and pretentious style of expression than his, not only in the speech we have examined, but in almost all the speeches we have read of his for years. Bad gilding on a worse material,— that describes the Bishop of Oxford's rhetoric.
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