RELIGIOUS BRUTALITY.
THE exhibition of gross brutality with which not only Mr. Lyne, but, as appears by a considerable mass of evidence, the unhappy ladies who are suspected of sharing his views and perhaps of confessing to his brother-clergymen, have been received in Lombard Street by crowds of well-dressed roughs, is not only a disgrace to the English nation in the way in which every brutal and cowardly act is a disgrace to us, but is a symptom, we fear, of a flaw in the national character in which we have probably few rivals amongst the nations of the globe. Of course we know, or think we know, that we English, as Protestants, are not so much inclined to persecute as Roman Catholic nations would be in our place. To many true Roman Catholics persecution has seemed a duty. Their theory has been that heresy arises more often from a perversion of the will than blindness of the understanding, and that the true remedy for it, is, therefore, none other than the true remedy for crime,—punishment, which they look upon as at once retributive, deterrent, and reformatory. This theory, we Pro- testants,—thanks at first to the doctrine of free grace as the con- dition of true belief, and thanks subsequently to our perception of the involuntary character of a vast number of other influences which go to make up our creed,—have, for all practical purposes, finally rejected ; and have pretty well decided that every man is to be allowed to hold his own highest faith in peace, so long as he will respect national law, and not insult the faith of others. Had Mr. Lyne been a Catholic priest, preaching in a Catholic chapel, neither he nor the ladies who might have confessed to him or his brother priests, would have, in all probabi- lity, received any outrage. They would have been permitted to believe and act as their religion taught them without interference from any mob, well or ill dressed. But the case is apparently wholly different where a new and eccentric view of the national religion is preached, or even supposed to be preached,—for by all accounts Mr. Lyne preached no novelties at all in Lombard Street,—by one who professes to belong to us, and to explain to us any outlandish view of our own faith. Then the national sense of property in religion is touched ; the savage temper with which we fight for our property coalesces with that bull more savage temper with which we resent the assertion of new claims upon our con- science ; and we meet the intruder with that double wrath which we deal out to trespassers on our land, who, in the act of thus trespassing, profess to assert ,a right and exercise an authority over us which we neither understand nor recognize.
And here we get, we imagine, near the root of the religious brutality of the English, which is intense and outrageous in precise proportion to the degree in which the new claim on our belief or obedience seems to approach and concern us. While the people feared Popery, and imagined the Pope could atill regain his hold
on England, the Roman Catholics were the objects of chronic and fierce insult. Now that we fear Popery but little, the Roman Catholics are as little disturbed as the Jews or the Mahometans ; but the fierce resentment is transferred to the party which is aping Popery within the Protestant boundary. We are perfectly tolerant of anything, however new, which does not profess to come to us with its claim. But any spiritual novelty besieging us and demand- ing our surrender rouses, not moral study, moral discrimination, -and in the end, it may be, moral resistance and repudiation, but physical rage, and sends apples, stones, brickbats, or words coarser, harder, and more insulting than any of them, flying through the air in all directions. We English cannot hear an unaccustomed and unintelligible assertion of authority over our consciences with- out clenching our fiats, and preparing a shower of mud, a battered hat, a broken head, and a bloody nose for the person who asserts it. We have a sort of notion that we have conceded free license to Christian ministers to say a certain number of -things to us about our duty and our salvation, but that who- -ever goes beyond that well-defined limit, and astonishes us by any new demand, is taking a gross personal liberty with us which -almost invites and compels a blow, an oath, or at the very least a personal affront. If any man says to us that it is our duty to believe in the Trinity, or the Resurrection, or Immortality, or in everlasting punishments, or the sacredness of the Sabbath, or judgment, or the law of love, or justification by faith, or any other Protestant doctrine,—whether we think it trite or false, we find no fault with him beyond assigning our particular reasons for declining, if we do decline, to do what he bids us. But if the -same man tells us that celibacy is a high virtue, that Christian poverty is a grace, that prayer for the dead is a duty, and -confession a sacrament, then we knock off his hat, call him .disgraceful names, pelt him with the nearest missiles, and on the whole regard him as we should a notorious liar, bully, coward, and thief. The modern Briton, like the ancient Jew, holds any innovation in the demands made upon his conscience, as a personal insolence, positively demanding instant and corporeal chastisement as the only appropriate reply. When St. Paul said that he had been sent to the Gentiles,—which was true,—the Jews cast off their clothes, threw dust into the air, and cried out "Away with such a fellow from the earth, for it is not fit that he should live!" and when Mr. Lyne is supposed to preach a new asceticism,— which we all of us hold to be false,—we English, with precisely the same passion of resentment and a great deal coarser language, pelt him with apples, try to overturn his cab, and tear the clothes off the backs of his friends.
And observe that the falsehood or truth of the message brought us, either makes absolutely no difference in the bru- tality of this mode of receiving it, or else makes a differ- ence unfavourable to ourselves. That those who have some indistinct sense of being in the wrong, of being reproached by a higher light which they ought to receive, should rage and imagine vain things against the new claim upon their consciences, is comparatively natural. That those who are, and know themselves to be, in the right, should fall into a frenzy at an appeal, the force of which they have measured and found wanting, is simply disgraceful. The truth, no doubt, is, however, that the cases are precisely on the same footing, and that the fact of being in the right or in the wrong is simply an accident to creatures of moral custom so blind and -furious, that they double the fist of their consciences against any new claimant for their obedience, instead of opening their minds anxiously to all that has any novelty for them, and simply reject- ing with the equanimity of deliberate decision what they have fully weighed and condemned. We believe that this mad and -vulgar anger against Brother Ignatius, instead of proving a deliber- ately Protestant attitude of conscience, proves the absence of any living conscience on the subject at all,—proves the irri tation of uneasy surprise, of panic, confusion, embarrassment, which would naturally have recourse to blows and personal insults. The conscience whose first impulse it is to resent as a personal affront a false but sincerely- -made claim for its allegiance, is all but certain to resent as a personal affront a true, if equally startling, claim for its allegiance. 'The resort to insults indicates, alike in either case, unpreparedness for meeting or entertaining any new influence, evil or good, human or divine, or part one and part the other,—in short, a fierce wish for a closed and shut-up moral life,—which we take the liberty of saying is no moral life at all. Moral life is life open towards God ; and life open towards God will be far too strong to feel only savage irritation, at a demand for a hearing from any other side.
And yet it may be said, and we think with truth, that this
brutal turn which the English conscience takes, when any un- pleasant claim is pressed from a quarter which has a prima facie authority, like that of a section, however extreme, of the National Church, does indicate a real sensibility at bottom to the claims of the supernatural upon it, and a good deal of fear of its power to disturb the terms of the comfortable composition which it has made therewith. It behaves like a man who ha paid hush-money to an accomplice, when the latter asks for more, as the price of still preserving the secret, after he had already imposed his own terms and had them accepted for keeping it. Englishmen fear the supernatural, agree to a certain compromise with it, and are beyond everything angry if the terms of that compromise are not kept by those whom they regard as their official teachers. Espe- cially if the new disturber of the peace conies with a story which sounds hostile to all that they find most rounded, most soft, most comfortable in their own existence,—assurance of salvation on easy terms, domestic quiet, wealth approaching luxury,—they feel as if a burglar were breaking in upon their rest and security, as if no punishment were too bad for him, as if the ruffian ought to be scourged out of society on the spot. It will be said, however, that this is not what makes them angry, that it is the sense of the sacredness of domestic life which the new Ritualistic party threatens, that excites their ardent indignation in its defence. Now, this is precisely what we deny. So far as men identify a profound sense of holiness, a true religious power, with what is attacked by the new ascetics, they will not be thus angry. They will feel that they themselves are on a vantage-ground, and that the assailants are denouncing what they do not understand, and making out that to be the highest stage of sanctity which is really the lowest. This coarse passion against the Ritualistic party, this disposition to run them down by bullying insults and blows, is not born of religious reverence for what the Ritualists attack, but of un- easy doubt whether the denunciations of our comfortable selfish- ness are not founded in truth. It is not the men who know that they have been brought nearer to God by family life, and the wealth they may have had it in their power to distribute, and by the rejection of all sacerdotal magic as a mere veil between themselves and God, who will feel amazed and furious at the new talk of celibacy and Christian poverty and absolution,—but rather those who have found family life at best only a sleepy indulgence, wealth a mere reservoir of pleasures, and personal prayer a bore. These are the class of persons who will feel most restless at the new dialect they hear around them. Would it not perhaps be really better for them if they had had no wives to care for their little comforts, no wealth to get what they want as soon as they want it, and if they had had a priest who could have managed for them what they cannot manage for themselves? There is the root of their rage and fury, the animating force which drives the brickbats and points the insults. They are haunted by the feeling that there is a super- natural force somewhere claiming to be admitted into their lives, that it is not in their lives as it is, on the contrary, that it has been kept at a distance by formal treaty and compact, and hence they fear that every new demand made upon them is the returning voice of the banished and dreaded power. So far, therefore, from regarding such vulgar riots as those of Lombard Street as a testimony to Protestant conviction and to the desperateness of the cause of the new superstition, we regard them as the most un- healthy conceivable signs for the soundness of our Protestantism and as the best omens these new religious adventurers could desire that the camp which they 'wish to surprise is already helpless, and prepared to surrender to a sufficient force.
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