ARDENT AGNOSTICISM.
THE death of Mr. Cotter Morison has deprived the English literary world of one of the most learned and brilliant of that paradoxical group of men who may properly be termed ardent agnostics, men who press their agnosticim with a sort of apostolic unction, and ask us to serve man, as the best men serve God, with a zeal as disinterested and as absorbing as ever missionaries have displayed in the conversion of the heathen. Mr. Cotter Morison has left no work behind him at all adequate to the impression of ability which he produced on the minds of those who could appreciate what he had done. But his studies of St. Bernard, of Gibbon, of Macaulay, and of Madame de Maintenon have supplied no mean test of his purely literary skill; while his last work, on "The Service of Man," burns with the zeal of a sombre enthusiast who would risk as much to suppress the degraded classes, or at least to prevent them from transmitting their degraded nature to a future generation, as ever an Apostle risked in order to infuse into those classes the spiritual fire of a divine renovation. Mr. Cotter Morison, though he was so thoroughgoing an agnostic that he eagerly desired to sweep what he regarded as the obstacle now presented by Christianity out of the path of human progress, was nothing if not, in his own peculiar sense, religious. His books are full of what we may call unction. He says of Gibbon that women who could enter into his great book " are better fitted than men to appreciate and to be shocked by his defective side, which is a prevailing want of moral elevation and nobility of sentiment. His cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause. The tragedy of human life never seems to touch him, no glimpse of the infinite ever calms and raises the reader of his pages. Like nearly all the men of his day, he was of the earth earthy, and it is im- possible to get over the fact." Of Macaulay he says that his "utter inability to comprehend piety of mind, is one of the most singular traits in his character, considering his ante- cedents," and it is evident that he regards it as one of the most serious blemishes in Macaulay's character. Of Madame de Maintenon he writes with even sterner reprobation when he is describing what George Eliot called the "other-worldliness "of her religions observances :—" With reference to spiritual affairs, though punctilious about her salvation, she always treats the matter as a sort of prudent investment, a preparation against a rainy day which only the thoughtless could neglect. All dark travail of soul, anguish, or ecstasy of spirit, were hidden from her." And he marks strongly his dislike of her " utter lack of all spiritual—we will not say fervour, but sensi- bility." On the other hand, no one can reproach Mr. Cotter Morison with any want of such sensibility, if that is to
be called spiritual sensibility which seems to covet the feelings of a saint without believing in any object for those feelings. " The true Christian saint," he says in
" The Service of Man " (p. 196), " though a rare phenomenon, is one of the moat wonderful to be witnessed in the moral world ; so lofty, so pure, so attractive, that he ravishes men's souls into oblivion of the patent and general fact that he is an exception amongst thousands or millions of professing Christians. The saints have saved the Churches from neglect and disdain." "What needs admitting, or rather proclaiming, by agnostics who would be just, is that the Christian doctrine has a power of cultivating and developing saintlineaa which has had no equal in any other creed or philosophy. When it gets firm hold of a promising subject, one with a heart and head warm and strong enough to grasp its full import and scope, then it strengthens the will, raises and purifies the affections, and finally achieves a conquest over the baser self in man of which the result is a character none the less beautiful and soul- subduing because it is wholly beyond imitation by the less spiritually endowed. The ' blessed saints' are artists who work with unearthly colours in the liquid and transparent tints of a loftier sky than any accessible or visible to common mortals?' Clearly there is no lack of "religious sensibility " here. And the amazing thing is that those saints whom Mr. Cotter Morison so much admired, not only filled their souls with the worship of what he regarded as an empty dream which had no existence in any world, but trained their hearts and minds on a firm belief in what he held to be a moral delusion which could not be too soon exposed and expelled from all rea- sonable natures, namely, that there are such realities as human responsibility, sin, merit, demerit, and penitence. In a word, Mr. Cotter Morison wanted to keep the saintly character without its daily bread,—to keep the " anguish or ecstasy of spirit," which arises exclusively from the faith in a perfect Being who condemns or approves us, without the faith to which it is solely and exclusively due. It was a very strange state of mind. We can understand the saint, and we can understand the scoffer at saintly illusions. But we cannot understand the fervour with which the man who wants to expose the illusions, delights in the spiritual delirium which these illusions have produced.
Certainly it is not easy to explain how a man with so keen an insight into both character and history as Mr. Cotter Morison's study of Madame de Maintenon, for in- stance, betrays, could have admired passionately the type of character which was produced by the belief in what he held to be mischievous superstitions, and could have desired to sweep away those superstitions while retaining the type. Perhaps the best explanation of these ardent agnostics, of these believers in the ecstasy of a spiritual communion with mere memories and hopes, is to be found in the fact that they are all more or less capricious in their individual prejudices, men who, like Comte, institute impossible devotions which make nobody devout, and draw up calendars of miscellaneous notables which are to include some of the saints, and replace the others by persons of very dubious merit. Mr. Cotter Morison, with all his learning and all his enthusiasm and unction, fre- quently showed traces of a singularly capricious and uncatholic judgment, which accounts in some degree, perhaps, for his admiration of air-fed idealists. Thus, in his little study of Macaulay, he expends much indignant wrath upon him for repeating to himself a great part of Milton's " Paradise Lost " on board the ship which was taking him to Ireland :—" The com- plaint is," he wrote, " that Macaulay's writings lack meditation and thoughtfulness. Can it be wondered at, when we see the way in which he passed his leisure hours ? One would have supposed that an historian and statesman, sailing for Ireland, in the night on that Irish Sea would have been visited by thoughts too full and bitter and mournful to have left him any taste even for the splendours of Milton's verse. He was about to write on Ireland and the Battle of the Boyne, and had got up his subject with his usual care before starting. Is it not next to incredible that he could have thought of anything else than the pathetic, miserable, humiliating story of the connection between the two islands? And he knew that story better than most men. Yet it did not kindle his mind on such an occasion as this. There was a defect of deep sensibility in Macaulay,—a want of moral draught and earnestness,—which is characteristic of his writing and thinking." Surely there never was a more amazing outburst of indignation than this. It would seem that Mr. Cotter Morrison wants men of genius always to reflect the reflections which are specially appropriate to the particular situation in which they find them- selves; to be in a mood appropriate to Ireland as they approach Ireland, and a mood for historical survey as they prepare them- selves for the writing of history. A more capricious assumption of pedantic appropriateness between the mind and its anticipated interests could hardly be conceived. Shakespeare might have taught a man of much less capacity than Mr. Cotter Morison that some of the most reflective characters are disposed to joke when they are on the very edge of the most solemn experience, and to rise lightly, as it were, with wings into the air, on the eve of approaching calamity. It is the mark of a doctrinaire to demand, on pain of censure, the mood conventionally appropriate for the occasion from such men as Macaulay. And the same remark
may be made concerning Mr. Cotter Morison's still stranger criticism on Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome,"—all the more
remarkable that it is preceded by a very fine and true apprecia- tion of the literary value of the ballads themselves,—namely, that it was not " worthy of a serious scholar to spend his time in producing mere fancy pictures which could have no valve beyond a certain prettiness, in the prolongation from age to age of romantic historical descriptions instead of sifted truth.' " " Could we imagine," he asks, " Grote or Mommsen or Ranke or Freeman engaged in such a way without a certain sense of degradation ?" To which we should certainly answer, not merely with an emphatic yes, but further, that if these historians had the capacity to produce such ballads as Macaulay's " Lays," they would rise indefinitely in our esteem by producing them, instead of falling lower in it, as Mr. Morison thought they should, because they did not employ their time in "sifting " truth, instead. Criticisms like this seem to us to betray the wilfulness and caprice which have entered as an alloy into the characteristics of most of the curious group of men who have been what we have called ardent agnostics. They are men who indulge themselves in arbitrary intellectual caprices of their own,—in killing the root of what is great, while insisting on keeping the greatness ; in lamenting the abuse of some petty habit of thought by which they lay great store, and attributing to it a kind of value of which it is wholly destitute. Mr. Cotter Morison strangely combined the eloquence and fervour of Christian sentiment with the scornful fastidiousness and critical pedantry of a systematic thinker who sternly rejected all that did not fit into his system. " Agnostics," he boasts, " when smitten by the sharp arrows of fate, by disease, poverty, bereavement, do not complicate their misery by anxious misgivings and fearful wonder why they are thus treated by the God of their salvation. The pitiless, brazen Heavens overarch them and believers alike; they bear their trials or their hearts break, according to their strength. But one pang is spared them,—the mystery of God's wrath, that he should visit them so sorely." Yes, that pang is spared them, and the strength which it gives is spared them also. The Christian knows that whether it is retribution for his sins, or purging for purification, or stimulus intended to give him higher spiritual strength, the pang which comes from above is full of power. But the ardent agnostics of our own day want to throw all the ardour of faith into the propagation of an agnostic service of humanity, and that is an impossible combination which only a capricious intellect could imagine. You cannot combine Gibbon's cold intellect with a saint's passion for communion with "the infinite." You cannot advocate the service of a limited posterity of mortal beings with the passion which is due to the regeneration of a world of immortal beings ; and though here and there, as in such eloquent critics as Mr. Cotter Morison, the paradox may seem to be achieved, we may be quite sure that either the agnostics of the future will cease to be ardent, or that the ardent devotees of the future will cease to be agnostic.
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