1850.

Political and religious opinions of my relations.—The Rev. James Bardsley.—Protestant controversy with Rome.—German neology.—The inspiration of the Scriptures.—Inquiry into foundation for the doctrine.—I cease to be a Protestant.—An alternative presents itself.—A provisional condition of prolonged inquiry.—Our medical adviser.—His remarkable character.—His opinions.

All my relations were Tories of the most strongly Conservative type, and earnestly believing members of the Church of England, more inclined to the Evangelical than to the High Church party. In my early youth I naturally took the religion and political color of the people about me.

There was at Burnley in those days a curate who has since become a well-known clergyman in Manchester, Mr. James Bardsley. He was a man of very strong convictions of an extreme Evangelical kind, and nature had endowed him with all the gifts of eloquence necessary to propagate his opinions from the pulpit. [Footnote: Since then he has become Canon and Archdeacon.] He was really eloquent, and he possessed in a singular degree the wonderful power of enchaining the attention of his audience. We always listened with interest to what Mr. Bardsley was saying at the moment, and with the feeling of awakened anticipation, as he invariably conveyed the impression that something still more interesting was to follow. His power as a preacher was so great that his longest sermons were not felt to be an infliction; one might feel tired after they were over, but not during their delivery. His power was best displayed in attack, and he was very aggressive, especially against the doctrines of the Church of Rome,—which he declared to be "one huge Lie."

Of course a boy of my age believed his own religion to be absolutely true, and others to be false in exact proportion to their divergence from it, as this is the way with young people when they really believe. It was my habit to take an intensely strong interest in anything that interested me at all, and as religion had a supreme interest for me I read all about the Protestant controversy with Rome under Mr. Bardsley's guidance, in books of controversial theology recommended by him. My guardian, with her usual good sense, did not quite approve of this controversial spirit; she was content to be a good Christian in her own way and let the poor Roman Catholics alone, but I was too ardent in what seemed to me the cause of truth to see with indifference the menacing revival of Romanism.

A large new Roman Catholic church was erected in Burnley, and opened with an imposing ceremony. There was at that time a belief that the power of the Pope might one day be re-established in our country, and the great results of the Reformation either wholly sacrificed or placed in the greatest jeopardy. Protestants were called upon to defend these conquests, and in order to qualify themselves for this great duty it was necessary that they should make themselves thoroughly acquainted with the great controversy between the pure Church to which it was their own happiness to belong, and that corrupt association which called itself Catholicism. I had rather a bold and combative disposition, and was by no means unwilling to take a share in the battle.

All went well for a time. The spirit of inquiry is not considered an evil spirit so long as it only leads to agreement with established doctrines, and as an advanced form of Protestantism was preached in Burnley Church, I was at liberty to think boldly enough, provided I did not go beyond that particular stage of thought. Not having as yet any disposition to go beyond, I did not at all realize what a very small degree of intellectual liberty my teachers were really disposed to allow me.

One occasion I remember distinctly. Mr. Bardsley was at Hollins, where he spent the evening with us, and in the course of conversation, as he was leaning on the chimney-piece, he spoke about German Neology, which I had never heard of before, so I asked what it was, and he described it as a dreadful doctrine which attributed no more inspiration to sacred than to profane writers. The ladies were shocked and scandalized by the bare mention of such a doctrine, but the effect on me was very different. The next day, in my private meditations, I began to wonder what were the evidences by which it was determined that some writers were inspired and infallible, and what critics had settled the question. The orthodox reader will say that in a perplexity of this kind I had nothing to do but carry my difficulty to a clergyman. This is exactly what I did, and the clergyman was Mr. Bardsley himself.

He was full of kindness to me, and took the trouble to write a long paper on the subject, which must have cost him fully two days' work,—a paper in which he gave a full account of the Canon of Scripture from the Evangelical point of view. The effect on me was most discouraging, for the result amounted merely to this, that certain Councils of the Church had recognized the Divine inspiration of certain books, just as certain authoritative critics might recognize the profane inspiration of poets. After reading the paper with the utmost care I felt so embarrassed about it that (with the awkwardness of youth) I did not even write to thank the amiable author who had taken so much trouble to help me, and I only thanked him briefly on meeting him at a friend's house, where it was impossible to avoid the interchange of a few words.

This autobiography is not intended to be a book of controversy, so I shall carefully avoid the details of religious changes and give only results. I do not think that anything in my life was ever more decisive than the receipt of that long communication from Mr. Bardsley. The day before receiving it I was in doubt, but the day after I felt perfectly satisfied that the Divine inspiration of the books known to Englishmen as the "Scriptures" rested simply on the opinion, of different bodies of theologians who had held meetings which were called Councils. The only difference between these Councils and those of the Church of Rome was, that these were represented as having taken place earlier, before the Church was so much divided; but it did not seem at all evident that the members of the earlier Councils were men of a higher stamp, intellectually, than those who composed the distinctly Roman Catholic Councils, nor was there any evidence that the Holy Spirit had been with those earlier Councils, though it afterwards withdrew itself from the later.

The Protestant reader will perhaps kindly bear with me whilst I give the reasons why I ceased to be a Protestant, after having been so earnest and zealous in that form of the Christian faith. It appeared to me—I do not say it is, but it appeared to me, and appears to me still—that Protestantism is an uncritical belief in the decisions of the Church down to a date which I do not pretend to fix exactly, and an equally uncritical scepticism, a scepticism of the most unreceptive kind, with regard to all opinions professed and all events said to have taken place in the more recent centuries of ecclesiastical history. The Church of Rome, on the other hand, seemed nearer in temper to the temper of the past, and was more decidedly a continuation, though evidently at the same time an amplification, of the early Christian habits of thinking and believing.

With this altered view of the subject the alternative that presented itself to me was that which presented itself to the brothers Newman, and if I had found it necessary to my happiness to belong to a visible Church of some kind, and if devotional feelings had been stronger than the desire for mental independence, I should have joined the Church of Rome.

There were, indeed, two or three strong temptations to that course. My family had been a Catholic family in the past, and had sacrificed much for the Church of Rome when she was laboring under oppression; for a Hamerton to return to her would therefore have been quite in accordance with those romantic sentiments about distant ancestors which were at that time very strong in me. Besides this, I had all the feeling for the august ceremonial of the Catholic Church which is found in the writer who most influenced me, Sir Walter Scott; and there was already a certain consciousness of artistic necessities and congruities which made me dimly aware that if you admit the glories of ecclesiastical architecture, it is only the asceticism of Puritan rebellion against art that can deny magnificence to ritual. I had occasionally, though rarely, been present at High Mass, and had felt a certain elevating influence, and if I had said to myself, "Religion is only a poem by which the soul is raised to the contemplation of the Eternal Mysteries," then I could have dreamed vaguely in this contemplation better, perhaps, in the Roman Catholic Church than in any other. But my English and Protestant education was against a religion of dreaming. An English Protestant may have his poetical side, may be capable of feeling poetry that is frankly avowed to be such—may read Tennyson's "Eve of St. Agnes" or Scott's "Hymn to the Virgin" with almost complete imaginative sympathy; but he expects to believe his religion as firmly as he believes in the existence of the British Islands. Such, at least, was the matter-of-fact temper that belonged to Protestantism in those days. In more recent times a more hazy religion has become fashionable.

My decision, therefore, for some time was to remain in a provisional condition of prolonged inquiry. I read a great deal on both sides, and constantly prayed for light, following regularly the external services of the Church of England. Here the subject may be left for the present.

The reader is to imagine me as a youth who no longer believed in the special inspiration of the Scriptures, or in their infallibility, but who was still a Christian as thousands of "liberal" Church people in the present day are Christians.

Before resuming my religious history, I ought to mention an influence which was supposed by my friends to have been powerful over me, but which in reality had slightly affected the current of my thinking. Our medical adviser was a surgeon rather advanced in years, and whose private fortune made him independent of professional success. As time went on, he allowed himself to be more and more replaced by his assistant, Mr. Uttley, one of the most remarkable characters I ever met with. In those days, in a northern provincial town, it required immense courage to avow religious heterodoxy of any advanced kind, yet Mr. Uttley said with the utmost simplicity that he was an atheist, and the religious world called him "Uttley the Atheist," a title which he accepted as naturally as if it implied no contempt or antagonism whatever. He was by no means devoid of physical courage also, for I remember that at one time he rode an ugly brute that had a most dangerous habit of bolting, and he would not permit me to mount her. He was excessively temperate in his habits, never drinking anything stronger than water, except, perhaps, a cup of tea (I am not sure about the tea), and never eating more than he believed to be necessary to health. He maintained the doctrine that hunger remains for a time after the stomach has had enough, and that if you go on eating to satiety you are intemperate. He disliked, and I believe despised, the habit of stuffing on festive occasions, which used to be common in the wealthier middle classes. I confess that Mr. Uttley's fearless honesty and steady abstemiousness impressed me with the admiration that one cannot but feel for the great virtues, by whomsoever practised; but Mr. Uttley had a third virtue, which is so rare in England as to be almost unintelligible to the majority,—he looked with the most serene indifference on social struggles, on the arts by which people rise in the world. Perfectly contented with his own station in life, and a man of remarkably few wants, he lived on from year to year without ambition, finding his chief interest in the pursuit of his profession, and his greatest pleasure in his books. He so little attempted to make a proselyte of me that, when at a later period I told him of a certain change of views, concerning which more will be said in the sequel, he was unaffectedly surprised by it, and said that he had never supposed me to be other than what I appeared to the world in general, an ordinary member of the Church of England. My intimate knowledge of Mr. Uttley's remarkable character must have had, nevertheless, a certain influence in this way, that it enabled me to estimate the vulgar attacks on infidels at their true worth; and though my own theistic beliefs were very strong, I knew from this example that an atheist was not necessarily a monster.

The only occasions that I remember in youth when Mr. Uttley might have influenced me were these two. Being curious to know about opinions from those who really held them, and being already convinced that we cannot really know them from the misrepresentations of their enemies, I once asked Mr. Uttley what atheism really was, and why it recommended itself to him. He replied that atheism was, in his view, the acceptance of the smaller of two difficulties, both of which were still very great. The smaller difficulty for him was to believe in the self-existence of the universe; the greater was to believe in a single Being, without a beginning, who could create millions of solar systems; and as one or the other must be self-existent the difficulty about self-existence was common to both cases. The well-known argument from design did not convince him, as he believed in a continual process of natural adjustment of creatures to their environment,—a theory resembling that of Darwin, but not yet so complete. I listened to Mr. Uttley's account of his views with much interest; but they had no influence on my own, as it seemed to me much easier to refer everything to an intelligent Creator than to believe in the self-existence of all the intricate organizations that we see. Still, I was not indignant, as the reader may think I ought to have been. It seemed to me quite natural that thoughtful men should hold different opinions on a subject of such infinite difficulty.

The other occasion was, when in the vigor of youthful Protestantism I happened to say something against the Church of Rome. Mr. Uttley very quietly and kindly told me that I was unjust towards that Church, and I asked him where the injustice lay. "It lies in this," he replied, "that you despise the dogmas of the Church of Rome as resting only on the authority of priests, whereas the case of that Church is not exceptional or peculiar, as all dogmas rest ultimately on the authority of priests." To this I naturally answered that Scriptural authority was higher; but Mr. Uttley answered,—"The Roman Catholics themselves appeal to Scriptural authority as the Protestants do; but it is still the priests who have decided which books are sacred, and how they are to be interpreted." His conversation was not longer than my report of it, and it occurred when I met Mr. Uttley accidentally in the street; but though short, it was of some importance, as I happened at that time to be exercised in my mind about what Mr. Bardsley had told us concerning "German Neology." Subsequent observation has led me to believe that Mr. Uttley attributed more originating authority to priests than really belongs to them. It seems to me now that they take up and consecrate popular beliefs that may be of use, and that they drop and discard, either tacitly or openly, those beliefs which are no longer popular. Both processes have been going on, for some years very visibly in the Church of Rome, and the second of the two is plainly in operation in the Church of England.