WHY I DON'T.
IDON'T go to church, and I do not know why I should mind 1. stating, in the interests of truth, the reasons which really induce me to abstain from that usually beneficial custom. Two of them are of i.he baser sort, and as we are telling the truth, it is best perhaps to mention them first, and make a clean breast of it. Owing to accidental circumstances, not worth explaining here, I am under no social, or domestic, or friendly compulsion to go. Nobody -is scandalized because I stay at home, nobody grieves, nobody -quotes me, or is at all likely to quote me, as an evil example to my neighbours and the parish. If anybody did, my wife perhaps excepted, it would make no difference ; but they do not, and one great reason for going to church as a regular habit of life is in my case absent. Then I have reasons for enjoying one day of quiet at home. It is my only day in the week of per- fect mental rest, a rest which would be entirely gone if I were forced to listen to anything on any subject, theologic or otherwise. It is the only day on which I feel master of my whole time, can do what seems. good to . me without feeling that a duty is being neglected, can sit in a chair without either the reality or the pre- tence of other occupation. It is pleasant and healthful so to sit, pleasant and healthful to be at ease, pleasant and healthful to be clear for twenty-four hours of the small worrits and big tasks which take all paradisaical savour out of English life. My nature would be a worse- nature without it, and if I wanted ohuroh ever so much I should, go on week-days. It seems to• me that the clergy, with their quiet lives, never understand this crave for rest, never comprehend how fiercely active the intellectual life of a politician always is, whether he be Member, or,writer, or philan- thropist. These reasons weigh, and weigh heavily, though, even were they 'both absent, I should not be able to bring myself habitually to attend church. I could not do it, and I am about to try to state honestly why. " Church," as we use the -word every week, implies an hour and a half of worship among other worshippers, and half an hour's steady listening to a sermon,, bad, good, or indifferent. I dislike both, though not from the same rea- sons. Prayer is not only sacred to me as an exercise, but I believe in the divine response to it with a strength which would compel Professor Tyndall to set me down as a fool ; but public prayer is merely a disagreeable formality. I do not pray, and cannot pray, with the prayers. I want in prayer to think my own thoughts and use my own words, and do both at my own time, and be, above all, truthful before the Almighty; not to plead to Him, for example, against sudden death, when I think it decidedly preferable to slow dying. The thoughts of those who framed the Missal, which we translated, are very noble thoughts, and I recognize their noble- ness ; but they are not my thoughts, are not like my thoughts at the time when they are uttered. No thoughts could be, if I had to say them twice over under two different sets of mental circum- stances; and to say them every week, under indefinitely changing pressures and experiences, gives use a feeling a hypocrisy. I have no objection to the services. Loftier ideas were never couched in words fitter to convey them, but when once learned by heart their advantage for me is ended. They benefit as a psalm benefits, and I cannot pray a psalm. It is right to pray for all conditions of men, if I am feeling for all conditions of men at the moment ; but if I am not, it is an act of hypocrisy for which I am morally greatly the worse, and I can never make my thought and the Prayer-Book thought run together. I am wanting to pray for more light when the congregation is singing the Te Deem. That emotion of worship which mere association with multitudes also worshipping produces in some men I cannot feel. I ought, it may be, but I do not ; not being by nature gregarious.
{ could pray in an empty church, or one of the Continental cathedrals, which give the mind a sense of solitude ; but not in a crowd, still less in a crowd emitting intermittent murmurs, least of all in a crowd not praying its own thoughts. Chapel is worse than church. The thought is not mine any more than before, and is expressed in far inferior words. Of course if I believed association in worship a duty I should try to do it, however dis- agreeable, but I do not. The object of worship is to establish a closer relation with the Almighty, and as this object is not at- tained by me in attending any external service whatever, whether of prayer, or praise, or commemoration, I stay away. Other people go, and benefit, as other people go to public meetings and benefit ; but why should I be required to feel gregarious worship healthful, any more than gregarious discussion?
Then there is the sermon. As to worship, my feeling is, I imagine, individual, or so far individual that there is little sym- pathy to be hoped for or feared, the majority of human kind feeling the electric influence of association. But about the ser- mon, I am about to state honestly what I believe thousands of -men feel secretly. I dislike good sermons just as much as bad. it is not the length, or the feebleness, or the mannerism of the speech which annoys me, as it seems to annoy most men who -write about sermons, but the speech itself. I do not want to be lectured even by a great lecturer. I object to the usual basis of the very best sermon ever delivered in a Christian Church,—that I am a great sinner, come there to help to be saved. I am not. I am rather a good fellow, with a distinct purpose to lead a good life according to my lights, and a strong wish that it could be made, and I could be made, nobler and more efficient for the service of God and His creatures. If the preacher can 'help me towards that, I will go and hear him ; but he never does, and never will do. He tells me I have deserved hell, and shall have it, unless I go this way or that. I have not deserved any- thing of the kind ; no decent Bishop, who knew the whole truth, would inflict anything of the kind; my dearest friend would shrink with horror at the idea of imposing anything of the kind ; and God is better than any Bishop, more loving than any friend. I want to get nearer Him, not to escape a doom I do not believe in, and I cannot get nearer by assenting in external act to ideas I at heart reject. That eternal preaching of selfishness as the highest impulse offends and annoys me till every sermon does positive harm. Better starve to feed Bethnal Green, than starve to be released oneself from all future sense of hunger. Then be the preacher ever so good, he must, in each sermon, have one of three objects—to state Christian doctrine, or illustrate Christian ethics, 'or warm his hearers' hearts towards Christ and God,—must be either theologic, or moral, or emotional. I do not want his theology. In nine cases out of ten I know three times or thirty times as much theology as he does. No doubt, in the tenth case he can teach me, but he would not do it in a sermon intended for babes and sucklings. If be would give me information about the things which worry me, the doubts whether law is not irreversible, whether God be the author or the exponent of the law, whether virtue and vice are not mental phenomena, whether all that we say or seem be not "a dream within a dream," he might do me good ; but he will not do it, is perhaps right in not doing it. 'Then why am I to weary myself with his account of justification by faith, or the three witnesses, or the differences of Romanism and Protestantism, which I know quite as much about as he does, it may be more ? No mathematician could or would sit out weekly lectures on the Binomial Theorem, or the laws of numbers, after he bad once acquired them ; and why should men who have really learnt dogmatic theology be compelled to perpetual repetitions of things they know by heart ? Why cannot the preacher begin, as the lecturer does, at the point his class has reached ? In morals any good preacher could no doubt teach, for every heart is a repertory of new facts awaiting collocation, but he never will do it. He will preach against all manner of temptations of which average nineteenth-century men do not really feel one, and leave them to fight their own as best they may. My special temptation is a desire for intellectual ease ; to leave duty undone if duty involves hostility, to conceal the truth if the truth costs friends or reputation. I fight that, I trust, but I am not helped in the fight by a sermon against all manner of sins which I know, as well as the preacher, are bad, and which I am as unlikely as he is to commit. If he would assume that the people before him are decently good, law-honest, as people say, and then try to make them better, and nobler, and better fitted to receive the Spirit, he would be worth attention ; but he won't ; he would think it a dere- liction of duty to accept what in hundreds of congregations must be the simplest fact. There must be hundreds of congregations in which of all the men and women before the preacher not a tenth have any direct sin on their consciences except perhaps one, and while he never mentions that one, except in the vaguest way, he will never accept their real status in all other matters. He preaches as to children who do not clearly see what the Command- ments mean. Emotional preaching ought to do me good, no doubt, but the simple truth is it does'nt. I am not warmed to religious feeling by a " splendid sermon," any more than I am warmed to political feeling by a splendid speech. It may be very wicked, but that is the simple truth. You might as well ask a deaf man to tremble under Handel's Israel. I belong to the Eng- lishmen of the day, I have been trained all my life to dissect elo- quence, and distrust sentiment, and dislike unction ; and the training tells on eloquence in the pulpit, just as much as eloquence in the forum. I can no more be made into a Christian by Mr. Spurgeon than into a Radical by Mr. Bright. There is conceit in all that, bad conceit ; but then if every man said his thought, would not every man seem conceited ?
I must add to all these reasons or causes one more, which in- fluences, I suspect, thousands as well as me, and that is a kind of loathing for doctrinal terminology. Many people have it about legal terminology. It is in both cases quite unfair, as every science must have its own words, and naturally adopts those of the language in which its text-books were originally written. But it weighs. I can listen patiently and even enjoyingly to . dis- cussions on instinctive emotion, but discussions on the " carnal mind," which is almost exactly the same phrase with a more strictly ethical meaning, annoy and repel me. I neither defend nor extenuate the feeling, see no more sound reason against being called an " experienced Christian" than against being called a soldier with wounds, but the phraseology worries me none the less. I suppose the truth is, the words are used by stupid men to conceal their own want of meaning, until they disgust in the mouths of those to whom they have full definitions ; but whatever the cause, the fact is so. Listening to such preaching is to -me like reading a speech before the Scotch Court of Session, where eloquence staggers under the burden of necessary barbarisms—one reason among many why, as it seems to me, lay theologians are a° much more pithy than the clerical. They write English, instead of eternally repeating Greek words, upon which every man who hears them puts his individual sense.
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