Puslapio vaizdai
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tiguous to it. Swarms of thieves, trained from infancy to their business of plunder, and of prostitutes turned nightly into our thoroughfares to ply their deadly seduction, carry with them the taint of demoralization into all the other sections of the social body. That physical wretchedness which we have selfishly allowed to accumulate, passing by it, like the Levite, on the other side of the road, avenges itself upon our supineness and neglect, by permeating the entire mass of uplying humanity with a moral typhus, perilous to every family in the land, and carrying into not a few the germ of death. What can Christianity do with this terrific mass of rottenness? Ragged Schools and ragged Kirks are admirable institutions in their way-but alone they will never Christianize this region of the shadow of death. Most efficient they are as pioneers of benevolence into the heart of this matted jungle of poverty, ignorance, vice, and crime—but they are pioneers only. They may heroically carry religious truth into the haunts of desperation-but religious truth cannot well abide there. The spiritual man must be in some measure, at least, contemplative, and contemplation asks privacybut with the class to which we refer there is scarcely a possibility of retirement. In order to religious emotions there must be some maintenance of self-respect-but self-respect cannot linger amidst the dirt, brutality, and hopelessness, the vicious and polluting sights and sounds of scenes like these. The culture of piety requires a frequent reference of the mind and heart to God, in his works and wordbut here almost all the facts met with are embodiments, not of the divine but the human, and radiate not purity but corruption."

We refer to Mr. Miall's painful pictures of over toil and popular ignorance, only to express our regret that he closes them by saying, that he deprecates the intervention of Government in the matter. Does he deprecate the intervention of the people of England in the matter? Does he deprecate the people of England doing upon system, and with combined resources, and unity of method, what individually, upon his own showing, in the past they have not done,-and what, in the future, there seems no more reasonable probability that they will or can do? Has not the result of individual efforts and supplies been long enough looked to and waited for? What is Mr. Miall's own powerful description of existing vice, ignorance, and animalism, but a judicial summing-up against it, an awful finding of its miserable and hideous insufficiency? Yet he closes with begging that the system, or rather no-system, which has had such results, may not be interfered with. He still trusts in volun

taryism, after writing its condemnation. Nor is the use that is made of the word 'Government' in this connection quite ingenuous. Are the people of England, when applying by their collective voice, and their constitutional methods of self-government, a competent remedy to enormous social evils, unmanageable by efforts of a random nature and conducted on a smaller scale, a mere nose of wax in the fingers of cabinet ministers to be twisted as they please? What can be more insidious than the employment of the word 'Government,' to stir the political prejudices and passions that have so unhappily been enlisted in this question, and have so successfully impeded the great work of National Education? Who ever dreamed of consigning the people to the Government, to be drilled and educated according to their notions? Who ever complains of the Government for bringing criminals to justice, or sending letters through the post? Has England no constitutional method of redeeming herself from destruction by a National Decree, without being told that she is pitifully in the hands of the Government? Is the Nation giving legal expression to its purposes, the Government? Assuredly it is, but not in the sense insinuated, as if the executive were our masters. This kind of language (we do not now refer to Mr. Miall, but to a party he has countenanced) is only an appeal to hidden passions which, as obstructives, more than serve the purposes of truth and reasoning.

Under political religionism our Author includes all attempts to dispense Christianity through institutions devised and upheld by the State. The Church of England has latterly been affording rich opportunities for one of Mr. Miall's tastes, principles, and power, to select varied sketches of her dissensions, corruptions, inconsistencies, and insufficiencies. The pictures are for the most part not overdrawn, though they have a colour from the artist's hand-but the most ample, and conspicuous, condemnation of the Church of England does not close the question. Because our present Establishment is manifestly unjust in principle, in spirit anti-national, and in practice mischievous, it does not follow that there are no beneficent provisions for religious life and culture which a People may constitutionally adopt.-The great body of the Clergy are said to be drawn into the Church through inducements

that are not spiritual. The great impediment in village districts to any irregular effort to save the people is said to be the authorised clergyman, the parish priest. The effect on the popular mind of sacerdotal claims is thus represented :

"If upon the serving of a summons to a besieged fortress, to open its gates to lawful authority, it should appear that there are two parties insisting in the name of their sovereign, upon prompt compliance with his demand, one of whom, however, warned the besieged that they alone had authority to receive submission, and that the fulfilment of the terms offered could not be guaranteed by any but authorized servants of the Crown, is it not certain that the moral impression likely to be made upon the insurgents by the offer vouchsafed them, would be suspended until some decision had been arrived at as to which of the parties before the gates of the fortress represented the supreme authority? and would it not be probable that doubts would occur whether either the one or the other could make good their professions? Some such result as this is produced by the distinction set up between an authorized and an unauthorized ministry. The reluctant will which a sympathizing and hearty exhibition of Divine forgiveness might have gained, is called upon to determine in the first instance a question of apparently rival pretensions-a question, too, in the discussion of which some of the most unlovely of human qualities must need come into prominence and there cannot be a reasonable doubt that, in myriads of instances, the interposition of this inquiry has acted like a breakwater against the subduing force of God's manifestation of his mercy, and in myriads of others has operated to obtain, in the place of a childlike and unsophisticated surrender of the whole being to the moral government of God, an act of partizanship having more regard to the pretensions of the herald, than to the character of the tidings which he came to announce."

Hence come ritual religion and regard to holy orders on the part of those attached to the Establishment by education and habit; total indifference on the part of the neglected many; and a vulgar distaste for unauthorized teaching, a sensitive shrinking from dissent, on the part of all those rich and respectable, who are somewhat ambitious, but whose position in society is not very clearly established.

In the face of this whole state of things, Mr. Miall exposes the platitude of offering Christianity as the remedy. Most true: but that is just the difficulty. It is the absence of Christianity that is deplored. And the

question is, how is it to get life and operation? No one doubts that if men were Christians all would be right. But how in the condition of our people, are you to get them to become Christian? When men become Christian their souls have flowered-but with multitudes the living seed is not in their hearts, and the soil will not receive it.

“As a rule, and speaking of classes rather than of every individual of which the class may consist, we are bold to say that people huddled promiscuously together, and crowded as our lowest poor into filthy domiciles, cannot be made religious—that people strained with unintermitting toil, exhaustive of all elasticity of body and mind, cannot be brought to take an active interest in moral truths—and that people who have surrendered themselves to political religionism cannot be influenced by a gospel which they take care shall never, if they can help it, come across them for consideration. It may be very well, and it seems very pious, to say, 'Preach the Gospel-go on preaching the gospel-that, after all, is the only way to recover lost souls.' But preaching the gospel in England, every body knows, would not be the way to save souls in New Zealand—in order to this, there must be, not preaching only, but preaching within the hearing, and in the language of those who are to be regenerated. Physical obstacles must be overcome by physical meanspolitical obstacles by political means. For the purpose of the New Zealanders, he would, in the outset, best meet the necessity of the case, not who could preach the gospel in England, but who could steer a ship to the antipodes, and who could master the language, and adapt himself to the habits, of the natives. So with regard to our own poor, and our politically prejudiced, what is wanted is, that the distance between us and them should, in the first place, be conquered. The hindrances in the way, so far as they are concerned, are of as immovable character by direct religious agency, as if they were geographical . . . . . When will they [Christian professors] get clear of the childish error, that religious acts are only acts performed by religious means; or come to know that any act, whether it be prayer to God, or street-cleansing for men, whether it be arguing away a prejudice of infidelity, or removing a tax upon oppressed but patient industry-every act which is done from a religious motive, and with a view to religious ends, is as much an offering of affectionate and faithful homage to the Saviour, as if it had taken the most spiritual form, or had been presented in the most solemn worship?"-P. 399.

Accordingly foremost among our Author's remedial suggestions, is the removal of all external obstructions to the

vis medicatrix of vital Christianity. He asks, first and almost solely, for circumstances in which the souls of men may be impregnated with religious life. Not that his reliance is on circumstances, but on spiritual vitalityonly there are outward conditions that have the power of suppressing this, and that render the soul inaccessible to the gospel. The tardy success that has attended Christianity would seem to show that, however in itself well fitted, by the views of God it presents, to draw the minds of men into sympathy and union with His character and intentions, there must be some signal defect in the mode of its administration ;-that though an energy of God to save souls by showing the righteousness of faith to faith, some disastrous element of weakness and failure belongs to the manner and the instruments of its application. Mr. Miall affirms, and who can deny it, that a nobler, a diviner style of Religion must be manifested in the persons of Christian men before Christianity can repeat again its first triumphs over the spiritually dead. A more faithful image of Christ in living men would work the old wonders. This is true: but how are these personal powers to be provided? Spiritual influence can indeed work all miracles; there are no limits to what is possible to it. A word, a look, a tone, an impression of goodness received from itself, are energies of God for the conversion of men that are not subject to any calculation. But who can furnish these living Instruments?—It is no small matter, however, clearly to perceive that our hope is not machinery, nor dead means however industriously plied, -but in the power of living spirits,-and that as the fullest image of God must have the most power to awaken divine sentiments in man, only those who live, and act, and speak in Christ's spirit can reproduce his energy, and draw men's souls by an attraction kindred to his. It is much to see the false dependence on Propositions, and Creeds, and means of Grace, cast away, whilst unbounded Faith is expressed in all living representatives of God himself. Such a Faith, earnestly held and nobly uttered, is itself a foundation for new hopes of Christianity and man; and for those Churches one of whose servants worthily proclaims it. Personal intercourse, of the freest kind, between the religious and the non-religious is Mr. Miall's

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