Various

“ That organ which I constructed has a soul within it. All my life I have labored to know how to lodge my ideal of music within the compass of a single instrument. I have done this. The soul is there. But I know not how to play upon the organ, and they, in their blind rage, will not allow me to explain to them. Oh, if I could, before I die, but find Sebastian Bach! He would call to life the soul of music that lies sleeping in my organ, and prove to the world that Bèze is neither mad nor an impostor. ”

“ Jude’s Church, has a deep and powerful connection with religion. You have seen the mosaic, and have read, perhaps, the scroll which is attached to it. There is the figure of Time, a strong young man, full of hope, energy, daring, and adventure, moving on to take possession of life; and opposite to him there is that beautiful figure of Death, representing the breakings-off, the cuttings short, the baffling disappointments, the heart-piercing separations from which the fullest life and the most fiery energy cannot exempt us. ”

“ The age in which we live cannot be entirely given up to priggishness and the dry rot of sentiment, so long as any considerable company in it are wont to hang upon Johnson’s lips, without being offended by his jocular brutality, his strenuous piety, or his unflinching enmity to affectation. Of course a class still exists, perhaps it never was more numerous than it now is, whose nerves and lungs can endure the strong light and tonic air of Johnson’s vigorous genius, and who rejoice to think that no one ever tamed their tiger-cat. ”

“ Justice Stephen speaks, I apprehend, of another reason than this why Christian charity must not be expected to survive Christianity. The truth is (though he does not say it) that the charity of Science is not merely different from the charity of Religion; it is an opposite thing altogether. Its softest word is Væ Victis. Christianity (and like it I should hope every possible form of future religion) says, “The strong ought to bear the burdens of the weak. Blessed are the merciful, the unselfish, the tender-hearted, the humble-minded.” ”

“ There is no reason on earth why Mr. Arnold should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to his own view of its residual meaning; but then, in the name of sincere literature, let him find his own language for it, and not dress up this feeble and superficial hopefulness of the nineteenth century in words which are undoubtedly stamped with an ardor and a peace for which his teaching can give us no sort of justification. ”

“ To such undignified expedients does the pursuit of science lead the ardent modern psychologist. These domestic rivals of Dr. Forbes Winslow, the servants, who behold the enthusiastic investigator alternately drying his tongue in this ridiculous fashion, as if he were a blacksmith’s fire, and then squeezing out a single drop of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea from a glass syringe upon the dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion that master has gone stark mad, and that, in their private opinion, it’s the microscope and the skeleton as has done it. ”

“ Christians and Theists of all schools, on the other hand, have naturally deprecated with horror and dread such a cataclysm of faith as sure to prove a veritable Ragnarok of universal ruin. In either case it has been taken for granted that the change from a world of little faith, like that in which we live, to a world wholly destitute of faith, would be immensely great and far-reaching; and that at the downfall of religion not only would the thrones and temples of the earth, but every homestead in every land, be shaken to its foundation. ”

“ The results of the real spiritual phenomenon of Repentance (not Mr. Darwin’s child’s-play) are so profound and far-reaching that it cannot but happen that striking them out of human experience will leave life more shallow. No soul will survive with the deeper and riper character which comes out of that ordeal. As Hawthorne illustrated it in his exquisite parable of Transformation, men, till they become conscious of sin, are morally little more than animals. Out of hearts ploughed by contrition spring flowers fairer than ever grow on the hard ground of unbroken self-content. ”

“ The tariff (he says) is a form of slavery not less hateful because the whip is not exposed. No free people can or will bear it. There is but one course. The plan of protective robbery must be utterly eradicated from every law for taxation. With unflinching steadfastness, but moderately, without destructive haste or violence, the firm demand of freedom must be persistently pressed, until every dollar levied in the name of Government goes to the Treasury, and the vast millions now extorted for a class are left in the pockets of the people who earn the money. ”

“ In this vast moral interval, to say nothing of the interval of time which rapidity in administration, on the one hand, and slowness in administration on the other, scarcely ever fail to involve, there is an enticement to the indifferent part of the population, or to that bold and heroic part which dares to set up its private and painfully honest judgment against the judgment of a Chancery judge—to trade upon the bruited knowledge of a suspected well of evil, unchecked by unpalatable astringency in consumption of the draught. ”

“ On the other hand, all the moon-like things which are proposed to us as substitutes for Religion,—friendship, science, art, commerce, and politics,—have a very limited area wherein they shine at all, and leave the darkness around much as they found it. It is the special and unique character of Religion to deal with the whole of human nature all our pleasures and pains and duties and affections and hopes and fears, here and hereafter. ”

“ For the French novelist, for all his so-called realism, takes neither his characters nor his scenes from everyday life, his contention being that, were he to do so, he would produce a work so insufferably dull that no one would buy it. Writing, not as we do virginibus puerisque, but for readers who like the dots to be placed upon the i’s, he sets before them a succession of pictures from life, drawn often with great power and insight into human nature, nearly always with scrupulous exactitude of detail, and asserts—what cannot be denied—that they are true pictures. ”

“ Rogers, “but if my name should happen to reach that uncertain destination I trust I may be remembered, as Ben Jonson is, as a true lover of Shakespeare. But great as Shakespeare is, I don’t think that our admiration should ever be allowed to degenerate into slavish adoration. We ought neither to make a god of him nor a fetish. And I ask you, Mr. Dyce, as a diligent student of his works and an industrious commentator upon them, whether you do not think that very many passages in them are unworthy of his genius. If Homer nods, why not Shakespeare?” ”

“ These excellent stout professors and bearded warriors who are so thoroughly pleased with themselves, and who never suspect that anybody can be laughing at them, command our sympathies—perhaps because John Bull himself is not quite a stranger to the sensations that they experience.
Yet, when all is said and done, John Bull remains John Bull. German philosophy, French wit, American acuteness, the “garbo of the Italians”—these things are not for him, nor is he specially desirous of assimilating them. He is as God made him, and has an impression that worse types have been created. ”

“ Central Europe is the seat of music’s history. Our aspirations, intelligent activity, and association with the Continent, lead to our reflecting the workmanship of southern art in our serious compositions; this is not a struggle, as that to find vitality, but an achievement. This stage of imitation greatly characterizes modern English music effort. Even Arthur Sullivan, our modern land Dibdin, shows the intellectual side of his genius in imitation. The great mass of our modern melody is too conscious of structure to be true, too sentimental to be real. ”

“ I now turn to those less obvious consequences of the expected downfall of religion which would take place silently.
The first of these would be the belittling of life. Religion has been to us hitherto (to rank it at its lowest) , like a great mountain in a beautiful land. When the clouds descend and hide the mountain, the grandeur of the scene is gone. A stranger entering that land at such a time will commend the sweetness of the vales and woods ”

“ While we look to the men of Oxford for a thorough though tardy and late vindication of Wycliffe’s name and services to the University and to learning, we expect from the people of England a more effective and permanent memorial of Wycliffe and his work than can be raised by any number of scholars or members of the University. Wycliffe lived for God and for the people. ”

“ The evil influences of that dark epoch extended themselves in all directions North and South, cropping out in organised official peculations, in shameless political dishonesty, in reckless speculation, in monstrous lobbying, and in incredible excesses of public extravagance, based upon such a system of inordinate and unconstitutional taxation as no American in his senses could have been brought, before the outbreak of the civil war, to believe would ever for a moment be tolerated by the American people. ”

“ If human life is in the course of being fully described by science, I do not see what materials there are for any religion, or, indeed, what would be the use of one, or why it is wanted. We can get on very well without one, for though the view of life which science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy.... ”

“ It depends on the impossibility of human beings ever ceasing to watch with curiosity “the very pulse of the machine” when it is displayed as Johnson displayed it through the fortunate indiscretions of his friends, and when it is on the whole so manly, wholesome, brave, honest, and tender as it was in his. There will always be readers and admirers of what Johnson wrote. Let us welcome them; but let us not imagine that Johnson, as a great figure in letters, depends upon their suffrages. ”

“ Among those who have endured it there are, of course, as we all know, many who have reconciled themselves to the loss, and some tell us they are the happier. Yet, I think to the very last hour of life there must remain in every heart which has once loved God (not merely believed in or feared Him) an infinite regret if it can love Him no more; and the universe, were it crowded with a million friends, must seem empty when that Friend is gone. ”

“ Loserth of Czernowitz, ought to stimulate Englishmen, and more especially the graduates, fellows, and doctors of Oxford, to vindicate the University against the charge so justly and repeatedly made against it, of having treated with indifference and neglect the name and memory of one of her most illustrious sons. It is anything but creditable to Oxford that German scholars and princes should do the work which ought to be done by Englishmen—and of all Englishmen by the men of Oxford. ”

“ We find it impossible to believe that any sane man can really mean much of what this great poet tells us that he means. French vanity—and Victor Hugo, whether at his highest or at his lowest, is always essentially French—is not amusing. It is the kind of vanity which is painful to witness, and which cannot but be degrading to those who allow themselves to give way to it. But in the placid North German self-approval there is a child-like element, which is not unpleasing nor even wholly undignified. ”

“ Again, it will not merely belittle life, it will carnalize it to take Religion out of it. The lump without the leaven will be grosser and heavier than we have dreamed. Civilization, as we all know, bore under Imperial Rome, and may assume again any day, the hateful type in which luxury and cruelty, art and sensuality, go hand in hand. ”

“ The Christianity of our day tends, as it appears to me, more and more to resume the character of the Religion of Christ, i.e., the religion which Christ believed and lived; and to reject that other and very different religion which men have taught in Christ’s name. As this deep and silent but vast change comes over the spirit of the Christianity of modern Europe, it becomes better and better qualified to meet fearlessly the challenge, “Should we do well without religion in its Christian shape?” ”

“ Well, all we can say is that, in watering-down in this way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is doing nothing else, is doing what lies in his power to extinguish the distinctive significance of a great literature. The whole power of that literature depends from beginning to end on the faith in a Divine Being who holds the universe in his hand, whose will nothing can resist, who inspires the good, who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as he judges the hearts of men, and whose mind manifested in Christ promised to Christ’s disciples that which his power alone availed to fulfil. ”