NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

The minds of many of the friends of Mr. Septimus Hansard appear to have been greatly exercised by my insertion of, and comments on, the newspaper paragraph respecting that gentleman’s ministrations to the poor of London.

I thought it unnecessary to take notice of the first communication which I received on the subject, from a fashionable lady, informing me, with much indignation, that Mr. Hansard had caught his fever in the West-End, not in the East; and had been sick in the best society. The following letter is of more importance, and its writer having accepted what he calls “my kind offer” to print it, I have no alternative, though he mistook, or rather misplaced, the real kindness of my private note, which lay in its recommendation to him,2 not to accept the offer it made.

“135, Waterlow Buildings, Wilmott Street,
“Bethnal Green, E., May 14, 1875.

“Sir,—In your 49th Letter you say that we clergy are not priests, and cannot sacrifice. You also say that we are wholly responsible for, and the efficient causes of, horrible outrages on women. In your 51st Letter you speak of my friend and chief, Mr. Hansard, as being courageous, impulsive, and generous, but complacent, and living a life “all aglow in vain”; and you compare him, in Bethnal Green, to a moth in candle-grease.

“I know that I, as a priest, am responsible for much wrongdoing; [176]but I must claim you, and all who have failed to be perfect stewards of their material and spiritual property, as responsible with me and the rest of the clergy for the ignorance and crime of our fellow-countrymen.

“But I would ask you whether Mr. Hansard’s life, even as you know it, (and you don’t know half the St. George-like work he has done and is doing,) is not a proof that we priests can and do sacrifice;—that we can offer ourselves, our souls and bodies?

“Of course I agree with you and Mr. Lyttel that the preaching of ‘Christ’s life instead of our lives’ is false and damnatory; but I am sorry that, instead of backing those who teach the true and salutary Gospel, you condemn us all alike, wholesale. I think you will find that you will want even our help to get the true Gospel taught.

“Allow me also to protest pretty strongly against my friends and neighbours here being compared to candle-grease. I fancy that on consideration, you would like to withdraw that parable; perhaps, even, you would like to make some kind of reparation, by helping us, candle-grease-like Bethnal-greeners, to be better and happier.

“I am one of those clergymen spoken of in Letter 49, and ‘honestly believe myself impelled to say and do’ many things by the Holy Ghost; and for that very reason I am bound to remember that you and other men are inspired also by the same Holy Ghost; and therefore to look out for and take any help which you and others choose to give me.

“It is because I have already received so much help from you that I write this letter.

“I am, yours faithfully,
“Stewart D. Headlam,
“Curate of St. Matthew’s, Bethnal Green.
“To John Ruskin, Esq., LL.D.”

[177]

I at first intended to make no comments on this letter, but, as I re-read, find it so modestly fast in its temper, and so perilously loose in its divinity, as to make it my duty, while I congratulate the well-meaning—and, I doubt not, well-doing—writer, on his agreement with Mr. Lyttel that the preaching of “Christ’s life, instead of our lives,” is false and damnatory; also to observe to him that the sacrifice of our own bodies, instead of Christ’s body, is an equally heretical, and I can assure him, no less dangerous, reformation of the Doctrine of the Mass. I beg him also to believe that I meant no disrespect to his friends and neighbours in comparing them to candle-grease. He is unaccustomed to my simple English, and would surely not have been offended if I had said, instead, “oil for the light”? If our chandlers, now-a-days, never give us any so honest tallow as might fittingly be made the symbol of a Christian congregation, is that my fault?

I feel, however, that I do indeed owe some apology to Mr. Hansard himself, to his many good and well-won friends, and especially to my correspondent, Mr. Lyttel, for reprinting the following article from a Birmingham paper—very imperfectly, I am sure, exemplifying the lustre produced by ecclesiastical labour in polishing what, perhaps, I shall again be held disrespectful, in likening to the Pewter, instead of the Grease, and Candlestick instead of Candle, of sacredly inflammable Religious Society.

Professor Ruskin on the Clergy.

“Not many years ago one might throw almost any calumny against the Church or her clergy without fear of contradiction or exposure. Happily, for the cause of truth and justice, those days are gone—unhappily, however, for the unfortunate individuals born too late for the safe indulgence of their spleen. Amongst these, we fear, must be reckoned Mr. Ruskin, the Oxford Professor of Fine Art. He issues monthly [178]a pamphlet, entitled ‘Fors Clavigera,’ being ostensibly ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain,’ but the contents of which do not appear likely to edify that class, even if the price (tenpence) were not prohibitory. In the forty-ninth of these letters a furious and wholly unjustifiable attack is made upon the Church. No abuse is deemed too unjust or too coarse to bestow upon the clergy, and they are assailed in a tone of vituperation worthy of the last century. The Professor says that,3 ‘in general, any man’s becoming a clergyman in these days implies that, at best, his sentiment has overpowered his intellect, and that, whatever the feebleness of the latter, the victory of his impertinent piety has been probably owing to its alliance with his conceit, and its promise to him of the gratification of being regarded as an oracle, without the trouble of becoming wise, or the grief of being so.’ Much more there is in the same insolent strain, as if the Professor’s head had been turned by the height of critical infallibility to which he has elevated himself, and from which he looks down with self-complacent scorn and arrogance upon all fallible humanity, clerical or lay. He concludes by appending ‘a specimen of the conduct of the Saints to whom our English clergymen have delivered the Faith.’ This specimen is afforded, according to Mr. Ruskin, in two cases of revolting and almost incredible barbarism, tried recently at Liverpool Assizes, in one of which an unoffending man was kicked to death by a gang of street ruffians, in the presence of an admiring crowd; and in the other case, a drunken female tramp, drenched with the rain, was taken into a field and outraged by half-a-dozen youths, after which they left her, and [179]she was found there next day dead. We need not enter into the details of these cases, which were given fully enough at the time; suffice it to say that in the records of no age or nation will any tales be found surpassing these two in savagery of mind and body, and in foulness of heart and soul. And what is Mr. Ruskin’s reason for resuscitating the memory of these horrors? What is the explanation that he has to give of them? What is the judgment that he has to pass upon them? Let our readers behold it for themselves in his own words:—‘The clergy may vainly exclaim against being made responsible for this state of things. They, and chiefly their Bishops, are wholly responsible for it; nay, are efficiently the causes of it, preaching a false gospel for hire.’ These words have the one merit of being perfectly plain. Mr. Ruskin does not insinuate his vile charge by any indirect hints or roundabout verbiage, but expresses his infamous meaning as unambiguously as possible. The clergy, he says, are ‘wholly responsible’ for the murders and rapes which horrify us, which, indeed, they ‘efficiently cause’; and the chiefs of these incarnate fiends are the Bishops.

“This very intemperate attack elicited a few temperate remarks from one of the maligned class. The Rev. E. Z. Lyttel, of Werrington, near Peterborough, wrote to Mr. Ruskin thus:—‘I have been reading your words to my conscience, but is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing the word Guilty? The Gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be safe and sound now and everlastingly. Is this a false Gospel preached for hire? If not, what other Gospel do you refer to?’ Mr. Lyttel seems to have thought that the charge brought against himself and his clerical brethren of causing murders and rapes [180]was too gross for notice, or too intoxicated to merit denial. He contented himself with the foregoing very mild reply, which, however, proved adequate to the occasion which called it forth. Mr. Lyttel was recently curate of St. Barnabas, in this town, and has also held a curacy in London. His personal experience gives him a claim to be heard when he assures the Professor that he knows that the morality of the parishes with which he is best acquainted has been made better, and not worse, by the self-sacrificing efforts of the clergy. It is also pointed out that while Mr. Ruskin has been freely travelling about in the enjoyment of beautiful scenery and fresh air, Mr. Lyttel and other clergymen have been occupied from day to day in stuffy rooms, in crowded parishes, amongst ignorant and immoral people. And whilst this censorious Oxford luminary makes a great fuss about getting paid for ‘Fors Clavigera’ and his other writings, Mr. Lyttel hints that surely the clergy should be paid for their teachings too, being quite equally worthy of their hire.

“Our ex-townsman has so effectually disposed of the Professor’s charges, that there is no need to endeavour to answer them further. We have only noticed them so far in order to show our readers the extent to which hatred of the Church becomes a craze with some persons, otherwise estimable no doubt, whose judgment is for the time swept away by passion. That there is no pleasing such persons is the more apparent from Mr. Ruskin’s curious comments upon the well-known story of the Rev. Septimus Hansard, the rector of Bethnal Green, who has caught the small-pox, the typhus fever, and the scarlet fever, on three several occasions4 in the discharge [181]of his pastoral duties among the sick poor. When he fell down in his pulpit with the small-pox, he at once said he would go to an hospital, but refused to enter the cab which his friends called, lest he should infect it; and, a hearse happening to pass, he went in it—a fine instance of courage and self-devotion. Mr. Hansard’s stipend is five hundred a year, out of which he has to pay two curates. And what has Mr. Ruskin to say to this? Surely this must command his fullest sympathy, admiration, and approval? Far from it. His snarling comment is as follows:—‘I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned at Tyburn, each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example or neglect.’ This peculiar mode of argument has the merit of being available under all circumstances; for, of course, if Mr. Hansard’s parish had happened to be Tyburn instead of Bethnal, Mr. Ruskin would have been equally ready with the glib remark that while the rector was saving one rich soul to Tyburn, he was leaving ten poor souls to destruction in Bethnal. Are we to understand that Mr. Ruskin thinks Mr. Hansard ought to be able to be in two places at once, or are we to shrug our shoulders and say that some persons are hard to please? The heroism of self-sacrifice Mr. Ruskin considers to be a waste and a mistake. Mr. Hansard’s life has all, says the Professor, ‘been but one fit of scarlet fever—and all aglow in vain.’ That noble-minded men should devote themselves to the noblest work of the Church for the love of Christ, and of those for whom He died, is apparently beyond Mr. Ruskin’s conception. Love of sensation, he says, is the cause of it all. ‘Sensation must be got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness.… And the culmination of the black business is that the visible misery drags and beguiles to its help all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble [182]type of English clergymen, and swallows them, as Charybdis would life-boats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent, in immediate business, but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease.’ We have read philosophy something like the above extract elsewhere before, and we think the philosopher’s name was Harold Skimpole. What the gospel is with which Mr. Ruskin proposes to supplant Christianity and to regenerate the world, we do not know. A gospel of this tone, however, published in tenpenny instalments, is not likely ever to reach the hands of the workmen and labourers of Great Britain, much less their hearts.

With this interesting ebullition, shall we call it, of Holy Water, or beautiful explosion,—perhaps, more accurately,—of Holy Steam, in one of our great manufacturing centres, a very furnace, it would appear, of heartfelt zeal for the Church, I wish I could at once compare a description of the effects of similar zeal for the—Chapel, given me in a letter just received from Wakefield, for which I sincerely thank my correspondent, and will assume, unless I hear further from him, his permission to print a great part of said letter in next Fors.

My more practical readers may perhaps be growing desperate, at the continued non-announcement of advance in my main scheme. But the transference to the St. George’s Company of the few acres of land hitherto offered us, cannot be effected without the establishment of the society on a legal basis, which I find the most practised counsel slow in reducing to terms such as the design could be carried out upon. The form proposed shall, however, without fail, be submitted to the existing members of the Company in my next letter. [183]

1 Action, observe, I say here; in thought I was too independent, as I said above. ↑

2 At least, I think the terms of my letter might have been easily construed into such recommendation; I fear they were not as clear as they might have been. ↑

3 I permit the waste of type, and, it may well be, of my reader’s patience, involved in reprinting (instead of merely referring to) the quoted passages and letter, lest it should be thought that I wished to evade the points, or, by interruption, deaden the eloquence, of the Birmingham article. ↑

4 Birmingham accepts, with the child-like confidence due by one able Editor to another, the report of Brighton. But all Mr. Hansard’s friends are furious with me for “spreading it;” and I beg at once, on their authority, to contradict it in all essential particulars; and to apologize to Mr. Hansard for ever having suspected him of such things. ↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.