George William Erskine Russell

“ Page 300 "To forgive our human wrongs is Christian-like and commendable; but we have no commission to forgive those which have been done to the cause of religion and of liberty; we have no right to grant immunity or to shake hands with those who have poured forth the blood of our brethren."
But let us keep our vengeance for those who by their own actions have justly incurred it. The very intensity of our desire to punish the wrong-doer should be the measure of our unwillingness to inflict torture on the helpless and the innocent. "Lest we grow hard"—it should be our daily dread. ”

“ It is just by mastering these rebellious tendencies that we can make our souls our own. If we went into the war believing in the sacredness of Freedom, Brotherhood, and Right against Might, it would be a moral collapse to emerge from it believers in tyranny, imperialism, and the rule of the strong. "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." On that "end" we must keep heart and eye unflinchingly fixed; and strive to add one more to the age-long triumphs of endurance. ”

“ Whatever be the source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic principle. It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure its victim. "Hatred," said George Eliot, "is like fire—it makes even light rubbish deadly."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution." ”

“ A funeral under the sapphire sky and blazing sun of June loses nothing of its sadness—perhaps is made more sad—by the unsympathetic aspect of the visible world. December does not suspend its habitual gloom because all men of goodwill are trying to rejoice in the Birthday of the Prince of Peace. We all can recall disasters and disappointments which have overcast the spring, and tidings of achievement or deliverance which have been happily out of keeping with the melancholy beauty of autumn.
In short, Nature cares nothing for the acts and sufferings of human kind ”

“ For people who, like myself, were reared in the Gladstonian tradition, it is a shock to be told by those who are in immediate contact with young men that for the rising generation he is only, or scarcely, a name. For my own part, I say advisedly that he was the finest specimen of God's handiwork that I have ever seen; and by this I mean that he combined strength of body, strength of intellect, and spiritual attainments, in a harmony which I have never known equalled. To him it was said when he lay dying, "You have so lived and wrought that you have kept the soul alive in England." ”

“ The power of the outward reaches the inward chiefly through the eye and the ear. Colour, as Ruskin taught us, is not only delightful, but sacred. "Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.... Consider what sort of a world it would be if all flowers were grey, all leaves black, and the sky brown." The perfection of form—the grace of outline, the harmony of flowing curves—appeals, perhaps, less generally than colour, because to appreciate it the eye requires some training, whereas to love colour one only needs feeling. ”

“ Our forefathers abolished the tyranny of the Crown. Successive Reform Acts have abolished the tyranny of class. But what about the tyranny of capital? Is Democracy safe from it?
I do not pretend to be clearer-sighted than my neighbours; but in the mist each of us sees the form of some evil which he specially dislikes; and to my thinking Bureaucracy is just as grave a menace to Freedom as Militarism, and in some ways graver, as being more plausible. We used to call ourselves Collectivists, and we rejoiced in the prospect of the State doing for us what we ought to do for ourselves. ”

“ It was a Tory Government which in the London Riots of 1866 made, as Matthew Arnold said, "an exhibition of mismanagement, imprudence, and weakness almost incredible." Next year the Fenians blew up Clerkenwell Prison, and the same acute critic observed: "A Government which dares not deal with a mob, of any nation or with any design, simply opens the floodgates to anarchy. Who can wonder at the Irish, who have cause to hate us, and who do not own their allegiance to us, making war on a State and society which has shown itself irresolute and feeble?" ”

“ Perhaps, as long as it was only other people's liberty which was imperilled, we could look on without concern. Perhaps we never realized the value of Freedom, as the chief good of temporal life, till the prospect of losing it, under a world-wide reign of force, first dawned on our imagination. Perhaps—and this is the happiest supposition—we have learnt our lesson by contemplating the effects of a doglike submission to Authority in corrupting the morals and wrecking the civilization of a powerful and once friendly people. ”

“ We cannot tell how much of those seventy years of strenuous labour will live, or how far Gladstone will prove to have read aright the signs of the times, the tendencies of human thought, and the political forces of the world. But we, who were his followers and disciples, know perfectly well what we owe to him. If ever we should be tempted to despond about the possibilities of human nature and human life, we shall think of him and take courage. ”

“ After all said and done, it is the home that, in the vast majority of cases, influences the soul and shapes the life. What will the homes of England be like when the war is over? Will they be homes in which the moral law reigns supreme; where social virtue is recognized as the sole foundation of national prosperity; where the "strange valour of goodwill towards men", is revered as the highest type of manly resolution? ”

“ From his chair he has listened to Peel, to Russell, to Palmerston, to Disraeli, and to Gladstone, and he still survives as a depository of their eloquence. He is himself popular beyond the fair expectations of one who has so important a part to play in the disciplinary arrangements of a popular assembly; for he is exceptionally amiable and genial by nature, is an excellent sportsman, and has cultivated a special taste for letters. ”

“ Englishmen, as a rule, are absorbed in action; it is to them a religion, and it takes the place of a philosophy.
At this moment all England is acting, from the King and the War Cabinet to the children who play at soldiers in the gutter. There is no distinction of class, or sex, or temperament. All alike feel that they must be doing something to win the war, and that they would die or go mad if they were restrained from action. ”

“ I grant the theory; but I ask myself if I am really bound by it to love all these my fellow-citizens, whatever their conduct and character may be. Love is an elastic word; and, if I am to love the Germans, I must love them in some very different sense from that in which I love my country and my race. It really is, in another form, the old controversy between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The "Enthusiasm of Humanity" is a noble sentiment; but the action of our fellow-members of the human family may be such as to render it, at least for the moment, impossible of realization. ”

“ At the best of times, if you divide the nation into strata, you would find large sections in which Liberty had no worshippers and very few friends. It had long been one of the bad signs of the times that the love of Liberty had almost ceased to animate what are called, in the odious language of social convention, "the upper classes." For generations the despised and calumniated Whigs had maintained the cause of Freedom in their peculiarly dogged though unemotional fashion, and had established the political liberties of England on a strong foundation. ”

“ He never realized the force of the saying that men who have only worked together have only half lived together. It was truly said that he understood MAN, but not men; and meek followers in the House of Commons, who had sacrificed money, time, toil, health, and sometimes conscience, to the support of the Government, turned, like the crushed worm, when they found that Gladstone sternly ignored their presence in the Lobby, or, if forced to speak to them, called them by inappropriate names. ”

“ To set one's face as a pudding is the characteristic action of all weak Governments. Lord Randolph Churchill once attracted notice by enouncing the homely truth that "the business of an Opposition is to oppose." A truth even more primary is that the duty of a Government is to govern; to set its face, not as a pudding, but as a flint, against lawlessness and outrage; to protect the innocent and to punish the wrong-doer. ”

“ The men of £100,000 a year—not numerous, according to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but influential—have been as meekly acquiescent as clerks or curates. Men who own half a county have smiled on an Act which will destroy territorial domination. What is the explanation? Was their silence due to patriotism or to fear? Did they laudably decline the responsibility of opposing a Government which is conducting a great war? Or did they, less laudably, shrink from the prospect of appearing as the inveterate enemies of a social and economic revolution which they saw to be inevitable? ”

“ But alike the Englishman who acts and the Englishman who talks look askance on the people who think. Our national history is a history of action, in religion, in politics, in war, in discovery. It is only now and then that an Englishman can allow himself a moment for contemplation, for the endeavour to "see into the life of things," for contact with those spiritual realities of which phenomena are only the shadows. Burke did it, but then he was an Irishman. Lord Beaconsfield did it, but then he was a Jew. Gladstone did it, but then he was a Scotsman. ”

“ Alike in storms and in fair weather, at times of crisis and at times of reaction, he has been the unswerving and unsleeping champion of the spiritual claims of the English Church, and the alert, resourceful, and unsparing enemy of all attempts, from whatever quarter, to subject her doctrine and discipline to the control of the State and its secular tribunals. The eager and fiery enthusiasm which pre-eminently marks his nature awakes a kindred flame in those who are reached by his influence ”

“ All the best elements of a great and glorious ceremonial were displayed—colour and form and ordered motion; noble music set to stirring words; and human voices lifted even above their ordinary beauty by the emotion of a high occasion. The climax, wisely ordered, was our tribute of gratitude to the United States, and never did the "Battle-hymn of the Republic" sound its trumpets more exultingly. For once, the word "Ritual" might with perfect propriety be separated from its controversial associations, and bestowed on this great act of patriotic pageantry. ”

“ If the world could be exhaustively divided into two classes-the Educated and the Uneducated—I suppose that I should be included in the former, though I anticipate an inevitable sarcasm by allowing that I should find myself perilously near the dividing-line. It is more to the purpose to say that, whatever my own educational deficiencies, I have always been keenly interested in the education of other people, and have preached incessantly that the State has a sacred duty to its boys. ”

“ But no sooner was the Royal Assent given to the Bill than the Mirage—that deceitful image of joy and refreshment—receded into the dim distance, and men woke to the disheartening fact that, though power had been transferred from the aristocracy to the middle class, the poor were as badly off as ever. The visible effects of that disillusionment were Chartism, rioting, and agrarian crime, and there was a deep undercurrent of sullen anger which seldom found expression. ”