Chapter 23

And here, perhaps, lay the secret of the extraordinary personal influence which he exercised; namely, in that truly formidable element which underlaid a character which (as one said of him) "combined all that was noblest in man and woman; all the tenderness and all the strength, all the sensitiveness and all the fire, of both; and with that a humility which made men feel the utter baseness, meanness, of all pretension." For can there be true love without wholesome fear? And does not the old Elizabethan "My dear dread" express the noblest voluntary relation in which two human souls can stand to each other? Perfect love casteth out fear. Yes: but where is love perfect among imperfect beings, save a mother's for her child? For all the rest, it is through fear that love is made perfect; fear which bridles and guides the lover with awe--even though misplaced--of the beloved one's perfections; with dread--never misplaced--of the beloved one's contempt. And therefore it is that souls who have the germ of nobleness within, are drawn to souls more noble than themselves, just because, needing guidance, they cling to one before whom they dare not say or do, or even think, an ignoble thing. And if these higher souls are--as they usually are--not merely formidable, but tender likewise, and true, then the influence which they may gain is unbounded, for good--or, alas! for evil--both to themselves and to those that worship them. Woe to the man who, finding that God has given him influence over human beings for their good, begins to use it after awhile, first only to carry out through them his own little system of the Universe, and found a school or sect; and at last by steady and necessary degradation, mainly to feed his own vanity and his own animal sense of power.

But Mr. Maurice, above all men whom I have ever met, conquered both these temptations. For, first, he had no system of the Universe. To have founded a sect, or even a school, would be, he once said, a sure sign that he was wrong and was leading others wrong. He was a Catholic and a Theologian, and he wished all men to be such likewise. To be so, he held, they must know God in Christ. If they knew God, then with them, as with himself, they would have the key which would unlock all knowledge, ecclesiastical, eschatological (religious, as it is commonly called), historic, political, social. Nay even, so he hoped, that knowledge of God would prove at last to be the key to the right understanding of that physical science of which he, unfortunately for the world, knew but too little, but which he accepted with a loyal trust in God, and in fact as the voice of God, which won him respect and love from men of science to whom his theology was a foreign world. If he could make men know God, and therefore if he could make men know that God was teaching them; that no man could see a thing unless God first showed it to him--then all would go well, and they might follow the Logos, with old Socrates, whithersoever he led. Therefore he tried not so much to alter men's convictions, as, like Socrates, to make them respect their own convictions, to be true to their own deepest instincts, true to the very words which they used so carelessly, ignorant alike of their meaning and their wealth. He wished all men, all churches, all nations, to be true to the light which they had already, to whatsoever was godlike, and therefore God-given, in their own thoughts; and so to rise from their partial apprehensions, their scattered gleams of light, toward that full knowledge and light which was contained--so he said, even with his dying lips--in the orthodox Catholic faith. This was the ideal of the man and his work; and it left him neither courage nor time to found a school or promulgate a system. God had His own system: a system vaster than Augustine's, vaster than Dante's, vaster than all the thoughts of all thinkers, orthodox and heterodox, put together; for God was His own system, and by Him all thing's consisted, and in Him they lived and moved and had their being; and He was here, living and working, and we were living and working in Him, and had, instead of building systems of our own, to find out His eternal laws for men, for nations, for churches; for only in obedience to them is Life. Yes, a man who held this could found no system. "Other foundation," he used to say, "can no man lay, save that which is laid, even Jesus Christ." And as he said it, his voice and eye told those who heard him that it was to him the most potent, the most inevitable, the most terrible, and yet the most hopeful, of all facts.

As for temptations to vanity, and love of power--he may have had to fight with them in the heyday of youth, and genius, and perhaps ambition. But the stories of his childhood are stories of the same generosity, courtesy, unselfishness, which graced his later years. At least, if he had been tempted, he had conquered. In more than five-and-twenty years, I have known no being so utterly unselfish, so utterly humble, so utterly careless of power or influence, for the mere enjoyment--and a terrible enjoyment it is--of using them. Staunch to his own opinion only when it seemed to involve some moral principle, he was almost too ready to yield it, in all practical matters, to anyone whom he supposed to possess more practical knowledge than he. To distrust himself, to accuse himself, to confess his proneness to hard judgments, while, to the eye of those who knew him and the facts, he was exercising a splendid charity and magnanimity; to hold himself up as a warning of "wasted time," while he was, but too literally, working himself to death--this was the childlike temper which made some lower spirits now and then glad to escape from their consciousness of his superiority by patronising and pitying him; causing in him--for he was, as all such great men are like to be, instinct with genial humour--a certain quiet good-natured amusement, but nothing more.

But it was that very humility, that very self-distrust, combined so strangely with manful strength and sternness, which drew to him humble souls, self-distrustful souls, who, like him, were full of the "Divine discontent;" who lived--as perhaps all men should live--angry with themselves, ashamed of themselves, and more and more angry and ashamed as their own ideal grew, and with it their consciousness of defection from that ideal. To him, as to David in the wilderness, gathered those who were spiritually discontented and spiritually in debt; and he was a captain over them, because, like David, he talked to them, not of his own genius or his own doctrines, but of the Living God, who had helped their forefathers, and would help them likewise. How great his influence was; what an amount of teaching, consolation, reproof, instruction in righteousness, that man found time to pour into heart after heart, with a fit word for man and for woman; how wide his sympathies, how deep his understanding of the human heart; how many sorrows he has lightened; how many wandering feet set right, will never be known till the day when the secrets of all hearts are disclosed. His forthcoming biography, if, as is hoped, it contains a selection from his vast correspondence, will tell something of all this: but how little! The most valuable of his letters will be those which were meant for no eye but the recipient's, and which no recipient would give to the world--hardly to an ideal Church; and what he has done will have to be estimated by wise men hereafter, when (as in the case of most great geniuses) a hundred indirect influences, subtle, various, often seemingly contradictory, will be found to have had their origin in Frederick Maurice.

And thus I end what little I have dared to say. There is much behind, even more worth saying, which must not be said. Perhaps some far wiser men than I will think that I have said too much already, and be inclined to answer me as Elisha of old answered the over- meddling sons of the prophets:

"Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head to-day?"

"Yea, I know it: hold ye your peace."

Footnotes:

{0} The edition of "Literary and General Essays" that this transcription was taken from also contained "Phaethon; or, Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers" as the final part. This has been released separately by Project Gutenberg and is not, therefore, duplicated here.--DP.

{1} This Lecture was given at Harrow in 1873, and in America in 1874.

{35} Fraser's Magazine, November, 1853.

{61} "Poems," by Alexander Smith. London: Bogue. 1853. Fraser's Magazine, October, 1853.

{103} Fraser's Magazine, September, 1850.--"In Memoriam." Moxon, Dover Street. 1850.--"The Princess, a Medley:" by Alfred Tennyson. Third Edition. 1850.--"Poems:" by Alfred Tennyson. 1852.

{127} North British Review, No. XXXI.--1.--"Elliott's Poems." London, 1833.--2. "Poems of Robert Nicoll." Third Edition. Edinburgh, 1843.--3. "Life and Poems of John Bethune." London, 1841.--4. "Memoirs of Alexander Bethune." By W. M'Combie. Aberdeen, 1845.--5. "Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver." By William Thorn, of Inverury. Second Edition, London, 1845.--6. "The Purgatory of Suicides." By Thomas Cooper. London, 1845.--7. "The Book of Scottish Song." By Alexander Whitelaw. Edinburgh, 1848.

{187} Fraser's Magazine, March, 1849.--"Sacred and Legendary Art." By Mrs. Jameson. 2 vols. London. 1848, Longman and Co.

{199} Since this was written, Mrs. Jameson's volume on the Legends of the Madonna has succeeded excellently in giving us, if not a complete, yet still a readable and modest picture of medieval Mariolatry.

{210} We are sorry to see, however, that Mrs. Jameson has been so far untrue to her own faculty as to join in the common mistake of naming Raphael's well-known cartoon at Hampton Court, "Elymas the Sorcerer struck Blind." On the supposition that this is its subject, its method of arrangement is quite unworthy of the rest, as the action would be split into the opposite corners of the picture, and the post of honour in the centre occupied by a figure of secondary importance; besides, the picture would lose its significance as one of this great series on "Religious Conviction and Conversion." But, strange to say, Raphael has all the while especially guarded against this very error, by labelling the picture with a description of its subject. Directly under the central figure is written, "Sergius Paulus, Proconsul, embraces the Christian faith at the preaching of Paul." Taking which simple hint, and looking at the face of the proconsul (himself a miracle of psychology) as the centre to which all is to be referred, the whole composition, down to the minutest details, arranges itself at once in that marvellous unity which is Raphael's especial glory.

{269} This Lecture was given at Chester in 1871.

{278} An arcade in the King's School, Chester.

{299} Fraser's Magazine, September, 1856.--"Hours with the Mystics." By Robert Alfred Vaughan, B.A. Two Volumes. London: John W. Parker and Son. 1856.

{309} Why has Mr. Vaughan omitted to give us a few racy lines on Sir Matthew Hale's "Divine Contemplations of the Magnet," Sir Kenelm Digby's "Weapon-Salve," and Valentine Greatrake's "Magnetic Cures"? He should have told the world a little, too, about the strange phenomenon of the Jesuit Kircher, in whom Popery attempted to recover the very ground which Behmen and the Protestant Nature-mystics were conquering from them.

{337} Macmillan's Magazine, May 1872.