Nor is his relation to the three-cornered embroglio within the Church itself anywhere set forth in detail. Almost it would seem as if he dwelt in some charmed corner of the fold into which the reverberations of those terrific words _Broad_ and _High_ and _Low_ penetrated only as a subdued muttering. To supplement this defect I have myself been reading some of the literature of that contest, and among other things a series of able papers on _Le Mouvement Ritualiste dans l'eglise Anglicane_, which M. Paul Thureau-Dangin has just published in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The impression left on my own mind has been in the highest degree contradictory and exasperating. One labours incessantly to know what all this tumult is about, and I should suppose that no more inveterate and vicious display of parochialism was ever enacted in this world. To pa.s.s from these disputes to the religious conflict that was going on in France at the same time is to learn in a striking way the difference between words and ideas; and even our own pet transcendental hubbub in Concord is in comparison with the Oxford debate vast and cosmopolitan in significance. The intrusion of a single idea into that mad logomachy would have been a phenomenon more appalling than the appearance of a naked body in a London drawing-room, and it is not without its amusing side that one of Newman's a.s.sociates is said to have dreaded "the preponderance of intellect among the elements of character and as a guide of life" in that perplexed apologist. Ideas are not conspicuous anywhere in English literature, least of all in its religious books, and often one is inclined to extend Bagehot's cynical pleasantry as a cloak for deficiencies here, too: the stupidity of the English is the salvation of their literature as well as of their politics. For it is only fair to add that this ecclesiastical battle, if paltry in abstract thought, was rich in human character and in a certain obstinate perception of the validity of traditional forms; it was at bottom a contest over the position of the Church in the intricate hierarchy of society, and pure religion was the least important factor under consideration.

Two impulses, which were in reality one, were at the origin of the movement. Religion had lagged behind the rest of life in that impetuous awakening of the imagination which had come with the opening of the nineteenth century; it retained all the dryness and lifeless cant of the preceding generation, which had marked about the lowest stage of British formalism. Enthusiasm of any sort was more feared than sin. Perhaps the first widely recognized sign of change was the publication, in 1827, of Keble's _Christian Year_, although the "Advertis.e.m.e.nt" to that famous book showed no promise of a startling revolution. "Next to a sound rule of faith," said the author, "there is nothing of so much consequence as a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion"; and certainly, to one who reads those peaceful hymns to-day, sobriety seems to have marked them for her own. Yet their effect was undoubtedly to import into the Church and into the contemplation of churchmen something of that enthusiasm, trained now and subdued to authority, which had been the possession of infidels and sectaries.

What sudden blaze of song Spreads o'er the expanse of Heaven?

In waves of light it thrills along, The angelic signal given-- "Glory to G.o.d!" from yonder central fire Flows out the echoing lay beyond the starry choir;--

such words men read in the hymn for _Christmas Day_, and they were thrilled to think that the imaginative glow, which for a score of years had burned in the secular poets, was at last impressed into the service of the sanctuary.

Another impulse, more definite in its nature, was the shock of the reform bill. In his _Apologia_, Cardinal Newman, looking back to the early days of the Tractarian Movement, declared that "the vital question was, How were we to keep the Church from being Liberalised?" and in his eyes the sermon preached by Keble, July 14, 1833, on the subject of _National Apostasy_, was the first sounding of the battle cry. Impelled by the fear of the new democratic tendencies, which threatened to lay hold of the Church and to use it for utilitarian ends, the leaders of the opposition sought to go back beyond the ordinances of the Reformation, and to emphasise the close relation of the present forms of worship with those of the first Christian centuries; against the invasions of the civil government they raised the notion of the Church universal and one. The first of the famous Tracts, dated September 9, 1833, puts the question frankly:

Should the Government and the Country so far forget their G.o.d as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, _on what_ will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must Christ's ministers depend?

A layman might reply simply, _On the truth_, and Shorthouse, as we shall see, had such an answer to make, though couched in more circuitous language. But not so the Tract:

I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built--OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT.

That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement, which united the claims of the imagination with the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical development led the way to Rome. In the Church at large, the new leaven worked its way slowly and confusedly, but in the end it created a tripart.i.te division, which threatened for a while to bring the whole establishment down in ruins. The first of these, the High Church, is indeed essentially a continuation, and to a certain extent a vulgarisation, of the Oxford Movement. What had been a kind of epicurean vision of holy things, reserved for a few chosen souls, was now made the vehicle of a wide propaganda. The beautiful rites of the ancient worship were a powerful seduction to wean the rich from worldly living and no less a tangible compensation for the poor and outcast. At a later date, under the stress of persecution, the leaders of the party formulated the so-called Six Points on which they made a final stand: (1) The eastward position; (2) the eucharistic vestments; (3) altar candles; (4) water mingled with the wine in the chalice; (5) unleavened bread; (6) incense--without these there was no worship; barely, if at all, salvation. The Low Church was, in large part, a state of pure hostility to these followers of the Scarlet Woman; it was loudly Protestant, confining the virtue of religion to an acceptance of the dogmas of the Reformation, distrusting the symbolical appeal to the imagination, and finding the truth too often in what was merely opposition to Rome.

Contrary to both, and despised by both, was the Broad Church, which held the sacraments so lightly that, with the Dean of Westminster, it joined in communion with Unitarians, and which treated dogma so cavalierly that, with Maurice, it thought a subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles the quickest way to liberty of belief. Yet I cannot see that this boasted freedom did much more than introduce a kind of license in the interpretation of words; it transferred the field of battle from forms to formulae.

From this unpromising soil (intellectually, for in character it possessed its giants) was to spring the one great religious novel of the English language. I have thought it worth while to recall thus briefly, yet I fear tediously, the chief aspects of the controversy, because only as the result of a profound and, in many respects, violent national upheaval can the force and the inner veracity of _John Inglesant_ be comprehended. Mrs. Shorthouse fails to dwell on this point; indeed, it would appear from her record that the noise of the dispute reached her husband only from afar off. Yet during the years of composition he was dwelling in a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throw of the Oratory, where, at that time and to the end of his life, Cardinal Newman resided, having found peace at last in the surrender of his doubts to authority.

The thought of that venerable man and of the agony through which he had come must have been often in the novelist's mind. And it was during these same ten years of composition that the forces of Low and High were lined up against each other like two hostile armies, under the banners of the English Church Union and the Church a.s.sociation. The activity of this latter body, which was founded in 1865 for the express purpose of "putting down" the heresy of ritualism, may be gathered from the fact that at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund of some $250,000 for the sake of attacking High Church clergymen through the processes of law. Not without reason was it dubbed the Persecution Company limited.

Now it may be possible with some ingenuity of argument--Laud himself had aforetime made such an attempt--to regard the Battle of the Churches as a contest of the reason; in practice its provincialism is due to the fact that it was concerned, not with the truth, but with what men had held to be the truth. That Mr. Shorthouse was able to write a book which is in a way the direct fruit of this conflict, and which still contains so much of the universal aspect of religion, came, I think, from his early Quaker training and from his Greek philosophy. It would be a mistake to suppose that, on entering the Church of England, he closed in his own breast the door to that inner sanctuary of listening silence, the _innocuae silentia vitae_, where he had been taught to worship as a child. At the time of the change he could still write to one who was distressed at his decision: "I grant that Friends, at their commencement, held with a strong hand perhaps the most important truth of this system, the indwelling of the Divine Word." In reality, there was no "perhaps" in Mr. Shorthouse's own adherence to this principle, both before and after his conversion; only he would place a new emphasis on the word "indwelling." The step signified to him, as I read his life, a transition from the religion of the conscience to that of the imagination, from morality to spiritual vision. This voice, which the Quakers heard in their own hearts alone, and which was an admonition to separate themselves from all the false splendours of the world, he now heard from stream and flowering meadow and from the decorum of courtly society, bidding him make beautiful his life, as well as holy.

Henceforth he could say that "all history is nothing but the relation of this great effort--the struggle of the divine principle to enter into human life." And in the same letter in which these words occur--an extraordinary epistle to Matthew Arnold, asking him to embody the writer's ideas in an essay--he extends his Quaker inheritance so far as to make it a cloak for humour, a humour, as he says, in "a sense beyond, perhaps, that in which it ever has been understood, but which, it may be, it is reserved to _you_ to reveal to men." One would like to have Mr. Arnold's reply to this divagation on _Don Quixote_. Mr. Shorthouse had, characteristically, adapted the book to his own spiritual needs as a representation "of the struggles of the divine principle to enter into the everyday details of human life."

It was, I say, his unforgotten discipleship to George Fox and to Plato which preserved Mr. Shorthouse from the narrowness of the movement while permitting him to be faithful to the Church. In the Introduction to the Life an ecclesiastical friend distinguishes him from the partisan schools as a "Broad Church Sacramentarian." I confess in general to a strong dislike for these technical phrases, which always savour a little of an evasion of realities, and bear about the same relation to actual human experience as do the pigeonholes of a lawyer's desk; but in this case the words have a useful brevity. They show how he had been able to take the best from all sides of the controversy and to weld these elements into harmony with the philosophy of his inheritance and education. The position of Mr. Shorthouse was akin to that of the Low-Churchmen in his hostility to the Romanising tendencies and his distrust of priestcraft, but he differed from them still more essentially in his recognition of the imagination as equally potent with the moral sense in the upbuilding of character. To the Broad-Churchman he was united chiefly in his abhorrence of dogmatic tests. One of his few published papers (reprinted in the Life) is a plea for _The Agnostic at Church_,--a plea which may still be taken to heart by those troubled doubters who are held aloof by the dogmas of Christianity, yet regret their lonely isolation from the religious aspirations of the community:

There is, however, one principle which underlies all church worship with which he [the agnostic] cannot fail to sympathise, with which he cannot fail to be in harmony--the sacramental principle. For this is the great underlying principle of life, by which the commonest and dullest incidents, the most unattractive sights, the crowded streets and unlovely ma.s.ses of people, become instinct with a delicate purity, a radiant beauty, become the "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace."

Everything may be a sacrament to the pure in heart.... Kneeling in company with his fellows, even if all recollection of a far-away past, with its childhood's faith and fancies, has faded from his mind, it is impossible but that some effect of sympathy, some magic chord and thrill of sweetness, should mollify and refresh his heart, blessing with a sweet humility that consciousness of intellect which, natural and laudable in itself, may perhaps be felt by him at moments to be his greatest snare.

But he separated himself from the Broad Church in making religion a culture of individual holiness rather than a message for the "unlovely ma.s.ses of people," in caring more for the guidance of the Inner Voice than for the brotherhood of charity or the a.s.sociation of men in good works. In his idea of worship he was near to the High Church, but he differed from that body in ranking sacerdotalism and dissent together as the equal foes of religion. The efficacy of the sacrament came from its historic symbolism and its national acceptance, and needed not, or scarcely needed, the ministration of the priest. He thus extended the meaning of the word far beyond the narrow range of ecclesiasticism.

"This sunshine upon the gra.s.s," he wrote, "is a sacrament of remembrance and of love." When, in his early days, Newman visited Hurrell Froude's lovely Devonshire home, there arose in his mind a poignant strife between his loyalty to created and to uncreated beauty. In a stanza composed for a lady's autograph alb.u.m he gave this expression to his hesitancy:

There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart, One who could love them, but who durst not love; A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.

'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move His easy-captured eye from each fair spot, With unattached and lonely step to rove O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot.

Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.

No such note is to be found in the letters written by Mr. Shorthouse during his holidays among the Welsh hills; he looked upon the inherited Church as the instrument chosen by many generations of men for their approach to G.o.d, but he was not afraid to see the communion service on the ocean waters when the heavenly light poured upon them, even as he saw it at the altar table.

If he differed from the Broad Church mainly in his loyalty to Quaker mysticism, it was Platonism which made the bounds of the High Church too narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at one time to say that Plato possessed a truer spiritual insight than St. Paul, and it was in reality a mere extension of the sphere of Platonism when, in what appears to be the last letter he ever wrote (or dictated rather, for his hands were already clasped in those of beneficent Death), he avowed his creed: "That Image after which we were created--the Divine Intellect--must surely be able to respond to the Divine call. The greatest advance which has ever been made was the teaching, originally by Aristotle, of the receptivity of matter.... I should be very glad to see this idea of _John Inglesant_ worked out by an intelligent critic."

Beauty was for him a kind of transfiguration in which the world, in its response to the indwelling Power, was lifted into something no longer worldly, but divine; and he could speak of our existence on this earth as lighted by "the immeasurable glory of the drama of G.o.d in which we are actors." It was not that he, like certain poets of the past century, attempted to give to the crude pa.s.sions of men or the transient pomp of earth a power intrinsically equivalent to the spirit; but he believed that these might be made by faith to become as it were an illusory and transparent veil through which the visionary eye could penetrate to the mystic reality.

For the particular act in this drama, which he was to write out in his religious novel, he went back to the seventeenth century, when, as it seemed to him, the same problem as that of the nineteenth arose to trouble the hearts of Englishmen, but in n.o.bler and more romantic forms.

There was, in fact, a certain note of reality about the earlier struggle of Puritan, Churchman, and Roman Catholic, which was lacking to the quarrel of his own day. John Inglesant is the younger of twin sons born in a family of Catholic sympathies. A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds one not a little of Father Holt in _Henry Esmond_, is put in charge of the boy and trains him up to be an intermediary between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. To this end his Mentor keeps his mind in a state of suspense between the faiths, and the inner and real drama of the book is the contest in Inglesant's own mind, after his immediate debt to Rome has been fulfilled, between the two forms of worship.

In part the actual narrative is well conducted. Johnnie's relations to Charles I., and especially his share in that strange adventure when the King was terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, are told with a good deal of dramatic skill. So, too, his own trial, the murder of his brother by the Italian, his visits to the household of the Ferrars at Little Gidding, and some of the events in Italy--these in themselves are sufficient to make a novel of unusual interest. On the human side, where the emotions are of a dreamy, half-mystical sort, the work is equally successful; in its own kind the love of Inglesant and Mary Collet is beautiful beyond the common love of man and woman. But the novel fails, it must be acknowledged, in the expression of the more ordinary motives of human activity. Johnnie's ingrained obedience to the Jesuit is one of the mainsprings of the plot, yet there is nothing in the story to make this exaggerated devotion seem natural. In the same way Johnnie's attachment to his worldly brother is unexplained by the author, and sounds fantastic. A considerable portion of the book is taken up with Inglesant's search for his brother's murderer, and here again the vacillating desire of vengeance is a false note which no amount of exposition on the part of the author makes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's hero burns for revenge one day, and on the next is oblivious of his pa.s.sion, in a way that simply leaves the reader in a state of bewilderment. Curiously enough, it was one of the incidents in this hide-and-seek portion of the story, found by Mr. Shorthouse in "a well-known guide-book," that actually suggested the novel to him. For my own part, the sustained charm of the language, a style midway, as it were, between that of Thackeray and that of Hawthorne, not quite so negligently graceful as the former nor quite so deliberate as the latter, yet mingling the elements of both in a happy compound--the language alone, I say, would be sufficient to carry me through these inadequately conceived parts of the story. But I can understand, nevertheless, how in the course of time this feebleness of the purely human motives may gradually deprive the book of readers, for it is the human that abides unchanged, after all, and the divine that alters in form with the pa.s.sing ages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is better equipped for the future; his novels are not concerned with phases of religion, but with the moral consciousness and the feeling of guilt, which are eternally the same.

And yet it will be a real loss to letters if this nearest approach in English to a religious novel of universal significance should lose its vitality and be forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr. Shorthouse has gone below the shifting of forms and formulae to the instinct that lies buried in the heart of each man, seeking and awaiting the light. I have already referred to those early chapters, the most perfect in the book I think, wherein is told how Johnnie, a grown boy now, visits his childhood's masters and questions them about the Divine Light which he would behold and follow amid the wandering lights of this world. Mr.

Shorthouse believed, as he had been taught at his mother's knee, that such a Guide dwelt in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of all men, and that we need only to hearken to its admonition to attain holiness and peace. He thought that it had spoken more clearly to certain of the poets and philosophers of Greece than to any others, and that "the ideal of the Greeks--the G.o.dlike and the beautiful in one"--was still the lesson to be practised to-day. "What we want," he said, "is to apply it to real life. We all understand that art should be religious, but it is more difficult to understand how religion may be an art." And this, as he avows again and again in his letters, was the purpose of his book; "one of many failures to reconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect of life," he once calls it.

But if, intellectually, the vision of the Divine Light was vouchsafed to Plato more than to any other man, historically it had been presented to the gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the life and death of Jesus.

The precision of dogma, even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr.

Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief in the Bible," he wrote; "I advocate belief in Christ." Somehow, in some way beyond the scope of logic, the idea which Plato had beheld, the divine ideal which all men know and doubt, became a personality that one time, and henceforth the sacraments that recalled the drama of that holy life were the surest means of obtaining the silence of the world through which the Inner Voice speaks and is heard.

To some, of course, this will appear the one flaw in the author's logic--this step from the vague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling in the world of matter, and shaping it to their own beautiful forms, to the belief in the actual Christian drama as the realisation of the Divine Nature in human life. Yet the step was easy, was almost necessary, for one who held at the same time the doctrines of the Friends and of Plato; their union might be called the wedding of pure religion and pure philosophy, wherein the more bigoted and inhuman character of the former was surrendered, while to the latter was added the power to touch the universal heart of man. As Mr. Shorthouse held them, and as Inglesant came to view them, the sacraments might be called a memorial of that mystic wedding. They brought to it the historic consciousness and the traditional brotherhood of mankind; they were the symbolism through which men sought to introduce the light into their own lives as a religious art. Now an art is a matter to be perceived and to be felt, whereas a science, as Newman and others held religion to be, is a subject for demonstration and argument. How much religion in England suffered from the attempt to prove what could not be caught in the mesh of logic, and from the endeavour to make words take the place of ideas, we have already seen. You may reason about abstract truth, you cannot reason about a symbolism or a form of worship. The strength of _John Inglesant_ lies in its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to precedent, and in its frank search for the human and the artistic.

It was in this sense that Mr. Shorthouse could speak of his book as above all an attempt "to promote culture at the expense of fanaticism, including the fanaticism of work": but we shall miss the full meaning of his intention if we omit the corollary of those words, viz.: "to exalt the unpopular doctrine that the end of existence is not the good of one's neighbour, but one's own culture." I do not know, indeed, but this exaltation of the old theory that the chief purpose of religion is the worship and beat.i.tude of the individual soul, in opposition to the humanitarian notions which were even then springing into prominence, is the central theme of the story. Certainly with many readers the scene that remains most deeply impressed in their memory is that which shows Inglesant coming to Serenus de Cressy at the House of the Benedictines in Paris, and, like the young man who came to Jesus, asking what he shall do to make clear the guidance of the Inner Light. There, in those marvellous pages, Cressy points out the divergence of the ways before him: "On the one hand, you have the delights of reason and of intellect, the beauty of that wonderful creation which G.o.d made, yet did not keep; the charms of Divine philosophy, and the enticements of the poet's art; on the other side, Jesus." And then as the old man, who had himself turned from the gardens of Oxford to the discipline of a monastery, sees the hesitation of his listener, he breaks forth into this eloquent appeal:

I put before you your life, with no false colouring, no tampering with the truth. Come with me to Douay; you shall enter our house according to the strictest rule; you shall engage in no study that is any delight or effort to the intellect; but you shall teach the smallest children in the schools, and visit the poorest people, and perform the duties of the household--and all for Christ. I promise you on the faith of a gentleman and a priest--I promise you, for I have no shade of doubt--that in this path you shall find the satisfaction of the heavenly walk; you shall walk with Jesus day by day, growing ever more and more like to Him; and your path, without the least fall or deviation, shall lead more and more into the light, until you come unto the perfect day; and on your death-bed--the death-bed of a saint--the vision of the smile of G.o.d shall sustain you, and Jesus Himself shall meet you at the gates of eternal life.

We are told that every word went straight to Inglesant's conviction, and that no single note jarred upon his taste. He implicitly believed that what the Benedictine offered him he should find. But he also knew that this was not the only way of service--nor even, perhaps, the highest. He turned away from the monastery sadly, but firmly, and continued his search for the light in that direction whither the culture of his own nature led him; he showed--though this neither he nor Mr. Shorthouse, perhaps, would acknowledge--that at the bottom of his heart Plato and not Christ was his master, and that to him practical Christianity was only one of the many historic forms which the so-called Platonic insight a.s.sumes among men. To some, no doubt, this attempt to make of religion an art will savour of that peculiar form of hedonism, or b.a.s.t.a.r.d Platonism, which Walter Pater introduced into England, and _John Inglesant_ will be cla.s.sed with _Marius the Epicurean_ as a blossom of aesthetic romanticism. There is a certain show of justification in the comparison, and the work of Mr. Shorthouse quite possibly grants too much to the enervating acquiescence in the lovely and the decorous; it lacks a little in virility. But the difference between the two books is still more radical than the likeness. Though absolute truth may not be within the reach of man, nevertheless the life of John Inglesant is a discipline and a growth toward a verity that emanates from acknowledged powers and calls him out of himself. The senses have no validity in themselves. He aims to make an art of religion, not a religion of art; the distinction is deeper than words. The true parentage of the work goes back, in some ways, to Shaftesbury, with whom an interesting parallel might be drawn.

In the end Inglesant returns to England, after years spent in France and Italy among Roman Catholics, and accepts frankly the religious forms of his own land. His character had been strengthened by experience, and in following the higher instincts of his own nature he had attained the a.s.surance and the sanct.i.ty of one who has not quailed before a great sacrifice. The last scene in the book, the letter which relates the conversation with Inglesant in the Cathedral Church at Worcester, should be read as a complement to the earlier chapters which describe his boyish search for what he was not to find save through the lesson of years; the whole book may be regarded as a link between these two presentations of the hero's life. It would require too many words to repeat Inglesant's confession even in outline. "The Church of England,"

says the writer of the letter, "is no doubt a compromise, and is powerless to exert its discipline.... If there be absolute truth revealed, there must be an inspired exponent of it, else from age to age it could not get itself revealed to mankind." And Inglesant replies: "This is the Papist argument, there is only one answer to it--Absolute truth is not revealed. There were certain dangers which Christianity could not, as it would seem, escape. As it brought down the sublimest teaching of Platonism to the humblest understanding, so it was compelled, by this very action, to reduce spiritual and abstract truth to hard and inadequate dogma. As it inculcated a sublime indifference to the things of this life, and a steadfast gaze upon the future, so, by this very means, it encouraged the growth of a wild unreasoning superst.i.tion."

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that those words, taken with the plea which follows, express the finest wisdom struck out of the long and for the most part futile Battle of the Churches; they were the creed of Mr. Shorthouse, as they were the experience of the hero of his book. I would end with that image of life as a sacred game with which Inglesant himself closed his confession of faith at the Cathedral door:

The ways are dark and foul, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we cannot see. We are like children, or men in a tennis court, and before our conquest is half won the dim twilight comes and stops the game; nevertheless, let us keep our places, and above all things hold fast by the law of life we feel within.

This was the method which Christ followed, and He won the world by placing Himself in harmony with that law of gradual development which the Divine Wisdom has planned. Let us follow in His steps and we shall attain to the ideal life; and, without waiting for our "mortal pa.s.sage," tread the free and s.p.a.cious streets of that Jerusalem which is above.

THE QUEST OF A CENTURY

[The scientific part of this essay, indeed the central idea which makes it anything more than a philosophic vagary, is borrowed from an unpublished lecture of my brother, Prof. Louis T. More, who holds the chair of Physics in the University of Cincinnati. If I have printed the paper under my name rather than his, this is because he, as a scientist, might not wish to be held responsible for the general drift of the thought.]

The story is told of Dante that in one of his peregrinations through Italy he stopped at a certain convent, moved either by the religion of the place or by some other feeling, and was there questioned by the monks concerning what he came to seek. At first the poet did not reply, but stood silently contemplating the columns and arches of the cloister.

Again they asked him what he desired; and then slowly turning his head and looking at the friars, he answered, "Peace!" The anecdote is altogether too significant to escape suspicion; yet as _The Divine Comedy_ is supposed to contain symbolically the history of the human spirit in its upward growth and striving, so this fable of the divine poet may be held to sum up in a single word the aim and desire of the spirit's endless quest. So clearly is the object of our inner search this "peace" which Dante is said to have sought, and so close has the spirit come again and again to attaining this goal, that it should seem as if some warring principle within ourselves turned us back ever when the hoped-for consummation was just within reach. As Vaughan says in his quaint way:

Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest And pa.s.sage through these looms G.o.d ordered motion, but ordained no rest.

It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaseless intellectual fluctuations of mankind backward and forward as the varying fortunes of the contest between these two hostile members of our being,--between the deep-lying principle that impels us to seek rest and the principle that drags us back into the region of change and motion and forever forbids us to acquiesce in what is found. And I believe further that the moral disposition of a nation or of an individual may be best characterised by the predominance of the one or the other of these two elements. We may find a people, such as the ancient Hindus, in whom the longing after peace was so intense as to make insignificant every other concern of life, and among whom the aim of saint and philosopher alike was to close the eyes upon the theatre of this world's shifting scenes and to look only upon that changeless vision of

central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation.

The spectacle of division and mutation became to them at last a mere phantasmagoria, like the morning mists that melt away beneath the upspringing day-star.

Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in whom the imperturbable stillness of the Orient and the restless activity of the Occident meet together in intimate union and produce that peculiar repose in action, that unity in variety, which we call harmony or beauty and which is the special field of art. But if this harmonious union was a source of the artistic sense among the Greeks, their logicians, like logicians everywhere, were not content until the divergent tendencies were drawn out to the extreme; and nowhere is the conflict between the two principles more vividly displayed than in that battle between the followers of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world of change to their haunting desire for peace by denying motion altogether, and the disciples of Herac.l.i.tus, who saw only motion and mutation in all things and nowhere rest. "All things flow and nothing abides," said the Ephesian, and looked upon man in the midst of the universe as upon one who stands in the current of a ceaselessly gliding river. The brood of Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while avoiding the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and morality alike. "The war over this point is indeed no trivial matter and many are concerned therein,"

said he, not without bitterness.

It is, when rightly considered, this same question that lends dramatic unity and human value to the long debate of the mediaeval schoolmen.

Their dispute may be regarded from more than one point of view,--as a struggle of the reason against the bondage of authority, as an attempt to lay bare the foundation of philosophy, as a contest between science and mysticism; but above all it seems to me a long conflict in words between these two warring members within us. The desire of infinite peace was the impulse, I think, which drove on the realists to that "abyss of pantheism," from the brink of which the vision of most men recoils as from the horror of sh.o.r.eless vacuity. In this way Erigena, the greatest of realists, spoke of G.o.d as that which neither acts nor is acted upon, neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if frightened by these blank words, avowed that G.o.d though he does not love is in a way Love itself, defining love as the _finis quietaque statio_ of the natural motion of all things that move. On the other hand it was the impulse toward unresting activity which led the nominalists to deny reality to the stationary ideas of genera and species, and to fix the mind upon the shifting combinations of individual objects. In this direction lay the labour of accurate observation and experimental cla.s.sification, and it is with prefect justice that Haureau, the historian of scholastic philosophy, closes his chapter on William of Occam, the last of the schoolmen, with these words: "It is then in truth on this soil so well prepared by the prince of the nominalists that Francis Bacon founded his eternal monument,"--and that monument is the scientific method as we see it developed in the nineteenth century.

The justification of scholastic philosophy, as I understand it, was the hope of finding in the dictates of pure reason an immovable resting-place for the human spirit; the recoil from the abyss of pantheism and absolute quietism was the work of the nominalists who in William of Occam finally won the day; and with him scholastic philosophy brought an end to its own activity. But a greater champion than William was needed to wipe away what seems to the world the cobwebs of mediaeval logomachy. Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ accomplished what the nominalistic schoolmen failed to achieve: it showed the impossibility of establishing by means of logic the dogma of G.o.d or any absolute conception of the universe. Henceforth the real support of metaphysics was taken away, and the study fell more and more into disrepute as the nineteenth century waxed old. Not many men to-day look to the pure reason for aid in attaining the consummation of faith. That consummation, if it be derived at all from external aid, must come henceforth by way of the imagination and of the moral sense. We say with Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing admiration and reverence, the oftener and the more persistently they are reflected on: the starry heaven above me, and the moral law within me."

But neither the imagination nor the conscience alone, any more than reason, can create faith. They may prepare the soil for the growth of that perfect flower of joy, but they cannot plant the seed or give the increase; for they, both the imagination and the conscience, are concerned in the end with the light of this life, and faith looks for guidance to a different and rarer illumination. Faith is a power of itself; _fidem rem esse, non scientiam, non opinionem vel imaginationem_, said Zwingle. It is that faculty of the will, mysterious in its source and inexplicable in its operation, which turns the desire of a man away from contemplating the fitful changes of the world toward an ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow, or a mere name, of peace in absolute changelessness. Reason and logic may have no words to express the object of this desire, but experience is rich with the influence of such an aspiration on human character. To the saints it was that peace of G.o.d which pa.s.seth all understanding; to the mystics it was figured as the raptures of a celestial love, as the yearning for that