LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
RETREATS.
• [TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR."]
'Sfa,—Retreats are too valuable to the cause of real religion, daward and practical, to be damaged by such a champion of that cause as yourself without any protest in their favour. Your article indicates with penetrating clearness a danger of which no religious man can be unconscious, the danger of nu- :reality. It is not, of course, confined to religious people; if we were to discard religion because we or other religious people 'were unreal, we should have to do the same with morality, on precisely similar grounds; but because religion is the highest, the danger of religious unreality, and the offence given by it to -others, are proportionately great. The present generation, with All its " :sculls:us," has hardly done more than make the danger change its disguise. In fact, when we look at the hurry of the time, its enormous half-digested reading, its large intellectual paper currency of words and phrases and opinions seldom re- cashed into the 'bullion of thoughtwhich they represent, one might be inclined to call it a special danger of our day, if one did not suspect that these deepest human tendencies seem " special " -to each generation in turn. Anyhow, it is grave enough and pressing enough. It haunts alike the most opposite forms of .religions life; it is not avoided by the use or by the disuse of
.outward acts.
Time remedy is to be compelled to think, and if possible to Teel and to imagine. And for compelling people to think on their own and others' deepest things, the things which we call
spiritual, we have, I 1.11: convinced, no instrument like Retreats. In no ecclesiastical interest, and in full view, I hope, of the gravity and breadth of the religious issues now at stake among , us, I should say deliberately that nothing (at all in the same kind) was so likely to serve the cause of religion as an increas- ing use of Retreats, by clergy and laity of the most various
types of character and Christian opinion. I am sanguine that on further inquiry you would yourself be led. to endorse this opinion. For I believe that retreats supply in great
measure the very need which you describe. -You Object that they are too much crowded with religious services, and
you quote a programme of a day of retirement arranged. by the Bishop of Exeter. But the fact is that that 'day is hardly a retreat at all, as any one may see for himself, who looks at the time-table which you print, and calculates the length of the intervals which would be left for meditation in chapel or the Bishop's garden, after services, addresses, and.
meals have been deducted. Here, in our English way, the dis- tinctive features of an institution are almost sacrificed in the effort to make it. practically acceptable to a large number of people. It is difficult for the clergy to spare much time, and many of them would suspect or dread any scheme which seemed to require a prolonged exercise of the spiritual faculties. Whether it is well thus to meet people more than half-way in such a matter, is a point of which you, Sir, will agree that the Bishop .
of Exeter is a better judge than we can be. The same thing has been done elsewhere, and warm expressions of gratitude have seemed to show that even this largely diluted dose of the strong medicine of retirement from ordinary routine could produce very sensible effect. But I am heartily at one with you in say- ing that the organisers of such days should realise that, in order to meet the wishes or fears of a larger number, they have largely sacrificed the essential character of a retreat.
But suppose that you have a retreat of three or Of four nights, including two or three whole days, and that on each of these days you have your time so arranged that (after all
deductions and interruptions, and besides a time for air and exercise), you get three spaces of something like two hours
of uninterrupted silence and priVacy ; and suppose that with these opportunities for private appropriation of what is said, some person (who, if not a "spiritual Socrates," is considerably above the average of his hearers in spiritual maturity and in- sight) leads your thoughts in a series of addresses along topics of the most fundamental spiritual kind—(no opening to it retreat is more common than the simple challenge to ask yourself " what was the end for which God gave you your being ?")—or that he analyses some of the principal forms of evil for the closer searching of conscience, or indicates new bearings upon faith or duty of truths already believed. Suppose a retreat of this kind (such are the retreats now in use by more people, clerical and lay, than is generally known), and I think the ordinary Englishman would shrink from it, because it gave him not too little, but too much time for self-searching and self- collection, because it withdrew him too much and not too little from his ordinary life. In fact the criticisms which one commonly hears about retreats arc of this kind. People dread to be too high wrought, or doubt the value of impressions made lateen them- selves under circumstances so unlike those in which they ordinarily live. These criticisms may have their value, though, like all criticisms made without experience of the thing criti- cised, they are apt to be wide of the mark ; and they ignore the far graver danger, which I cannot help hoping that your article may lead some people to face. But, at least, they may be taken as some evidence that retreats are something very unlike the ordinary routine of religious conventionalities. And expertis erode. Those who have tried will tell you how wonderfully the "hard-baked crust of routine" is pierced, and the mind startled, braced, and refreshed. by the luminous way in which the real character of things and their true proportion come out, when they are brought under the light of the great spiritual truths.
You will agree that if this is so, the question whether there should be more or fewer offices of worship in the day, is one on which we can afford, if need be, to differ. For myself, I should plead that they are felt as a rest and refreshment from the strain of a retreat (which is, by-the-bye, one of the great proofs of its reality) ; that they bring the individual, at a time of heightened iatrospection, into repeated and wholesome contact with the inspired. standards, aud with, the current of religious life and thought contained in the Psalms or Collects which generations have used ; and (which is specially to the purpose of your article) that the familiar words and forms sparkle at such a time with vivid, meanings, the light of which does not wholly leave them when routine is, resumed, and. which supply far the best remedies against the con- ventional performance of that routine. If people will use the thing, then let them knock it about as they will, till it takes the form which most completely suits their needs, And there ought not to be, and is not, the least reason why all the details of a retreat should be used alike by all. But, meanwhile, I would earnestly represent that no minor objections should hinder retreats from doing the much that they can do to meet our greatest need, which is an increase in the number of those who have genuine, deep, appropriated convictions on moral and spiritual matters, and to whom it is a real and familiar thing to gauge the complicated difficulties of personal and corporate conduct by some principles more adequate than the curious amalgam of truth and falsehood, of half-understood and half- reconciled principles, which makes up what we call public opinion. It would be hard to say whether it is to clergy or to laity that they have most to give.—I am, Sir, &c., E. S. TALBOT.
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