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    "I BELIEVE"

    AND OTHER ESSAYS

    BY

    GUY THORNE

    Author of "When it Was Dark," "First it was Ordained,"
    "Made in His Image," etc., etc.

    LONDON

    F. V. WHITE & CO., Limited
    14, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.

    1907


    RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
    BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
    BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




CONTENTS


      I. "I BELIEVE"
     II. THE FIRES OF MOLOCH
    III. THE HISTORICIDES OF OXFORD
     IV. THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERIL
      V. THE MENACES OF MODERN SPORT
     VI. VAGROM MEN
    VII. AN AUTHOR'S POST-BAG




DEDICATION

To F. V. WHITE, ESQUIRE.


MY DEAR WHITE,

The publication of this book is a business arrangement between you and
me. Its dedication however has nothing to do with the relations of
author and publisher in those capacities, but is merely an expression
of friendship and esteem. This then is to remind you of pleasant hours
we have spent together on the other side of the channel, in your house
at London, and my house in Kent.

Yours ever sincerely,

GUY THORNE.




"I BELIEVE"




I

"I BELIEVE"

"_Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision_."


When I was a boy I made an occasional invasion of my father's study,
and in the absence of more congenial matter tried to extract some
amusement from the shelves devoted to Christian apologetics. At any
rate the pictures of the portly divines, which sometimes prefaced
their polemics, interested me, and I was sometimes allured to read a
few pages of their scripture. I remember that I enjoyed the sub-acid
flavour of Bishop Butler's advertisement, prefixed to the First
Edition of his _Analogy_, at an early age, and I have thought lately
that in certain circles one hundred and seventy years have not greatly
modified the mental attitude.

Hear what the Rector of Stanhope who, as Horace Walpole said, was
shortly to be "Wafted to the see of Durham in a cloud of metaphysics,"
says about his literary contemporaries--

"It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons
that Christianity is not so much as a subject for inquiry, but that it
is now at length discovered to be fictitious, and accordingly they
treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among
all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a
principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of
reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the
world."

Perhaps the difference between the times of George the Second and
Edward the Seventh may be best discerned in the status and calibre of
the popular penmen who in either age have found, or furnished
amusement in a tilt against the Catholic Faith.

The man in the street, as we know him, did not exist in the eighteenth
century. He is the predominant person to-day, and he requires the
services of able authors to assure him of immunity, when he is
inclined to frolic away from chastity or integrity, much as did the
county members who pocketed the bribes of Sir Robert Walpole and
prated of patriotism.

Fortunately for society the man in the street is a very decent fellow,
and generally finds out before long that Wisdom's ways are ways of
pleasantness. A man may enjoy posing as an agnostic when he wants an
excuse for--as the <DW64> said--"doing what he dam please," but when he
takes to himself a wife, and children are born to him, a certain
anxiety as to the continuity and perpetuation of these relationships
begins to show itself. A man who has lost a little child, or waited in
agonizing suspense to hear the physician's verdict, when sickness
overshadows his home, discovers that he needs something beyond
negations, something that will bring life and immortality to light
again within his soul.

Moreover, the man in the street finds it necessary to come to some
decision on other problems of existence. He is a citizen and must
needs exercise his enfranchisement and give his vote at an election
now and again. He must help to decide whether the State shall ignore
religion and establish a system of ethical education, of which the
ultimate sanction is social convenience, or maintain the thesis that
Creed and Character are mutually inter-dependent.

As he pays his poor rate wrathfully, or with resignation, its annual
increase reminds him of the necessity of curing or eliminating the
unfit. When he reads of Belgian and Prussian colonial enterprise, or
ponders on the perplexing problem of the Black Belt which the Southern
States must solve, he is compelled to consider whether it is true
that "God has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all
the face of the earth," or whether this shall be accounted as another
of the delusions of Saul of Tarsus whom Governor Festus found to be
mad.

Indeed, our friend, the man in the street, when he becomes a family
man, without any pretensions to be a man of family, very often finds
himself face to face with other problems. Shall he simply sing with
the Psalmist "Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are
the young children. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of
them," or shall he be guided by the gloss of a modern interpreter who
maintains that the oriental quiver was designed to hold but two or
three arrows at most?

Even when the plain man confines his interests to his business and
seeks relaxations in "sport" alone, endeavouring to evade the puzzles
of politics and avoid all theologized inquiry, he cannot escape from
ethical consideration. Professionalism in athletics and questions of
betting and bribery contend with his conviction that there is
something which ennobles man in running and striving for mastery, and
it is futile to curse the bookmaker when his clients are so many, his
occupation so lucrative.

The average man gets little guidance from pulpit or press. It is dull
work reading sermons, even if sermons came in his way. From time to
time some eloquent bishop or canon is reported in the Monday morning
papers, but journalists know that the publication of a summary with,
in the case of a few of the preachers, some epigrams or denunciations,
is all that can be permitted or expected. These may arouse the
attention to the existence of evils, but give no guiding principle for
their cure.

The habit of attendance at some place of worship is easily abandoned
in the days of bachelor freedom, and rarely regained in maturer years.
Men for the most part find the preacher unconvincing. The usual
audience does not desire discussion of difficulties. When the honest
instinct of devotional worship is gratified by common praise and
prayer, the people who regularly go to church, elderly, and orthodox
in their own way, resent a demand upon their intellectual exertion,
and the Northern farmer of Tennyson hardly misrepresents them, "I
thought he said what he ought to ha' said and I comed away." The great
Nonconformist societies may, in some congregations, give a larger
latitude to the preacher, but his freedom is rather in the direction
of divinity than of ethics. Mr. Rockefeller is a prominent pillar of
Protestantism in the States, and Mr. Jabez Balfour, in another
congregation at Croydon, apparently knew no qualms of conscience
before his actual conviction, which was public, of sin.

There is an old proverb which tells us that "A man is either a fool or
a philosopher at forty"--and, though proverbs are often only venerable
prejudices in disguise, it is true that a man, who has attained his
eighth lustrum and is of average ability, generally has come to
certain definite conclusions as to the rudimentary laws of health. He
knows enough about his body to avoid fatal errors in diet, and has
learned the necessity of exercise and fresh air. But when he is called
upon, as a member of the body politic, to decide questions of ethics
on which the sanitation of society must depend, he feels himself at a
loss. To many people it will seem a hard saying that a man must be
either a fool or a philosopher at forty, but long ere he has reached
that age he will have encountered problems of philosophy which it is
impossible to shirk if he is to do his duty as a free man.

St. Paul, it is true, when writing to a Christian Community in Asia
Minor, bids them "beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy."
And the unfortunate habit of Bible Christians, of tearing a text from
a treatise and making it into a precept, has thrown a sort of
discredit upon philosophic thinking, while the mass of mankind will
always prefer rules to principles of conduct. But in vain do we
clamour against intellectual complications which are the inevitable
endowment of these days. Life is necessarily intricate, subtle and
anxious, and Democracy has made of each man a ruler and governor in
his degree. Is it possible to point to a single principle which shall
be a motive and a standard of duty, which shall establish a synthetic
method after the ruthless analysis of the later Victorian days?

How searching that analysis has been! Fifty years ago the man in the
street might rarely read the Bible, but he had a tolerably assured
conviction that the Bible was infallible, however resolutely he might
refuse its interpretation by an infallible church.

Then

     "...the Essays and Reviews debate Begins to tell on the
     public mind, and Colenso's views have weight."

Plain people were taught to look on the Old Testament as a library of
Hebrew literature containing not only poetry and history, but romance.

When Colenso's book first appeared, Matthew Arnold deprecated its
publication since it brought criticisms familiar to men of culture
before the notice of the public, without considering how the beliefs
of "the vulgar" might be upset.

The supercilious apostle of "sweetness and light," himself contributed
largely in later years to the general confusion in men's minds, and
the New Testament criticism has been introduced to the general public
by Mr. Arnold's accomplished niece.

Our friend, the man in the street, was all unprepared!

What had he ever been taught of theology, the Divine word to man? In
his school-days, if his father was an income tax payer he probably had
a weekly lesson in "Divinity," when he construed a few verses of the
Gospels in the Greek Testament, and showed up to his master, now and
then, a map of the journeying of the Apostle Paul in Asia Minor and
Eastern Europe. If his father expected him to be confirmed, in due
course, some lessons in the catechism were added for his benefit, but
prudent pedagogues took care not to endanger the popularity of a
school, whether public or private, by any definite teaching which
might be accused of being dogmatic. The head-master was probably a
person of unsuspected orthodoxy, with a possible deanery or bishopric
in view for his days of superannuation. His sermons in chapel used to
set a fine standard of conduct before the boys, and were gracefully
free from all mention of controversial questions. In due course they
were published with the title _Sermons at Yarrow_, and enterprising
parents turning over their pages would find little to criticize and
much to admire. The Cross, if presented at all in these publications,
was so bespangled with rhetorical jewellery that "Jews might kiss and
Infidels adore." And the children of Israel as public-school boys were
never painfully conscious of any great difference between themselves
and their baptized companions. But unfortunately only a few of the
boys came under the civilizing instruction of the Chief. Bright young
athletes from Oxford and Cambridge, lured into the ranks of pedagogy
by their love of football and cricket, were the assistant-masters. A
regular salary with holiday for a fourth of the year, the prospect of
early marriage, and a remunerative boarding-house, attracted them to a
pleasant position, and they had no wish to rebel against the
time-table which made them teachers of "Divinity" for at least one
hour in the week. All educated people should be tolerably familiar
with a book so largely used in quotation as the Bible, and the
succession of the Kings of Israel and Judah could be used in
strengthening the memory, whilst the stories of "Jehu and those other
Johnnies you know" were by no means devoid of picturesque incident.
Greek Testament could also be made useful in the acquisition of a
vocabulary, or in a lesson showing the difference between classical
and vernacular Greek. "Of course we must leave the application of
these studies to conduct to _Home influence_," the headmasters would
blandly observe, and between parent and pedagogue the teaching of the
Christian Faith fell neglected to the ground.

What chance had the boys so brought up, of forming any conception of
the essential truths of Religion? A superficial acquaintance with the
stories of Hebrew history, a perfunctory attendance at chapel, some
well-meant exhortations on the subject of temperance and chastity, as
the catechism was revived in their memories before they were brought
to be confirmed by the Bishop, and some ability "to translate and give
the context" of a few phrases from the Greek texts of the Gospels,
these were their intellectual religious equipment for a life of fierce
temptation from within and without. And when they encountered the
storm and stress of modern social life they found that the critics had
taken from them the old reverence of nursery days for "God's Book,"
their school training had taught them only a rough code of honour, and
their chief restraint from any ignoble impulse was a feeling that to
do certain deeds was not "good form."

A little lower down the social ladder the man in the street has fared
no better in his boyhood. In the public elementary schools he has had
a half-hour's lesson in Scripture and catechism five days of the week,
and annually the Diocesan, or the School Board, Inspector came round
to ascertain whether the Syllabus of religious teaching had been duly
followed. But only when devout parish priests had a talent for
teaching and a love for boys and girls was any attempt made to give
children a _religion_, and even in this case not very much could be
done for those who left school for ever when they were twelve years
old.

A generation ago Lord Sherbrooke, on the extension of the franchise,
told his contemporaries that it was time to begin "to educate our
masters"--but we have not gone very far in our instruction of
Christian Sociology, though as yet we have not adopted the Utilitarian
basis of morals accepted by the French Republic, and endeavoured to
establish principles of duty towards man without any reference
whatever to a duty towards God.

Can any one be surprised if the plain man be perplexed when he is
called upon to decide questions of economy and morality without any
guiding principle? As a matter of fact he makes no such effort.
"Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, for the day of the
Lord is near in the valley of decisions," but the sun and the moon are
darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining. The puzzled popular
vote is but as the swing of the pendulum, first to this side, then to
the other. "These fellows have been no good, let us give the others a
show."

Yet assuredly there is a principle which is guidance and strength if
only men could discern it. There are Teachers who can tell men of its
beneficent power, but they are as yet few in number, and their voices
are not sufficiently strong. When once these can get a hearing, men
welcome their evangel and find in it a guide of life.

I am persuaded that just as Bishop Butler, when he perused the preface
of his _Analogy_, had no prescience of the young fellow of Lincoln,
who was in a few years to give the Christian faith a fresh hold in the
hearts of the common people, who gladly heard him, so in our time many
of our Bishops seem unable to perceive the dawn of another "day of the
Lord."

Indeed, it is our misfortune in England that Bishops are almost
necessarily bad leaders. We are told when an election to the Papacy is
imminent that this or that Cardinal is in the list of "Papabili"--a
possible Pope--so in like manner we may almost select amongst the
undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge our future diocesans. These are
men clever, shrewd, and hard-working, of estimable private character,
and not without some modest patrimony. Early entered in the race for
preferment, ambitious, and yet, _mirabile dictu_, devout, they are
endowed first of all with the true qualification for episcopacy, a
capacity for compromise and a pliant political mind. _Sic itur ad
astra_ the excellent curate or tutor, the courteous and accomplished
chaplain to the Bishop, the eloquent canon and ecclesiastical courtier
is consecrated and enthroned. Henceforward for the rest of his days he
must hurry from his study table, crowded with correspondence, to his
confirmations, his diocesan society meetings, and his weary,
humiliating attendance at the House of Lords. What wonder if Bishops
discourage new ventures of faith, who have no time for thinking, no
time for reading, and perhaps, sometimes, too little opportunity for
prayer!

And so we find them not unwilling to accommodate the Catholic Faith to
the popular prejudice of the moment, acquiescing in an undogmatic,
undenominational, more or less Christian creed. Popularity becomes the
very breath of their nostrils, and they proceed to hide in an
appendix to the Prayer-book, the hymn _Quicunque vult_.

Yet the discerning can see that now is no time for keeping in the
background the great truths of religion. Already men are being
prepared in many ways to receive them.

The Christian Faith in England is no longer hampered by certain
arbitrary axioms of the Puritan Divines. In the sixteenth century men
were almost compelled by the exigencies of the situation to discover
some Infallible authority which they could set up over against the
Infallibility of the Church of Rome, and they endeavoured to treat
Holy Scripture as though the great library of Jewish and Christian
writers contained a complete code of consistent legislation. A text
was a convincing argument for the Divine right of Kings, or for
binding them in chains, for the burning of witches or the destruction
of a shrine, and although in the two following centuries the
Protestant ministers taught men to modify this conception, and to
realize the difference between the Old Testament and the New, the
popular idea of Revelation allowed small scope for theological
inquiry. The biographies of our literary men of the Victorian period
have shown us how they were tempted to separate themselves from all
public communion with the Church, by their misgiving that the Church
was committed to an impossible position. Carlyle groaned for what he
called an "exit from Houndsditch," some deliverance from the Rabbinic
interpretation and use of the Bible. Things are very different to-day,
as Henry Sidgwick says in a letter to Alfred Lord Tennyson published
by his son in a recent memoir. "The years pass, the struggle with what
Carlyle used to call 'Hebrew old clothes' is over, Freedom is won."
And in the result a scientific criticism of the Old and New Testament
is found to be compatible with, and often a compulsion to an
acceptance of the Christian creed, not the creed of Calvin, or the
Westminster Confession, but the reasoned statement of Nicaea. The
student of physical science no longer believes that if he goes to
church he must be taken to accept the cosmogony of Genesis, and on his
side he no longer stumbles at the difficulty of miraculous events. He
knows too much about the influence of mind over matter to say that it
is impossible that Jesus Christ and His Apostles should have healed
the paralytic and made the blind to see and the deaf to hear. He is no
longer "cocksure" of his capability of drawing a line of division
between the organic and the inorganic. He can conceive of the
existence of spirits which can control and modify the ordinary laws
of life. He finds it probable that evolution is not exhausted when Man
has come into being, and can look forward to a spiritual existence
without suspecting himself of superstition. Sacraments, the union of
the spiritual with the material, seem to him to be in accordance with
the laws of the Universe, and he would never now-a-days stigmatize
them as "Magic." However he may explain the methods by which cures
were wrought upon the afflicted, the scientific man of to-day would
not accuse St. Luke of falsehood because he tells us that, "God
wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul, so that from his body
were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases
departed from them and the evil spirits went out of them." Indeed the
man of science knows himself to be on the track of discoveries which
will show us secrets of personality and spiritual possession which
will banish for ever the absurd incredulity of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.

Who now-a-days would assert that "miracles do not happen," when men
like Sir Oliver Lodge are laboriously discovering some few of these
laws of the Universe which give us these portents and signs? Who dares
to sneer at Parthenogenesis or repeat the slander of Celsus about the
Mother of God? Men only who have grown rusty in reposing on their past
reputations and cannot see that materialism as a philosophy is dead