Two Centuries
The Settlement effected by our 'Healing Parliament' in the Year
of Grace 1660, though accomplished under universal acclamations
from the four corners of the British Dominions, turns out to have
been one of the mournfulest that ever took place in this land of
ours. It called and thought itself a Settlement of brightest
hope and fulfilment, bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels
and bonfires could make it: and we find it now, on looking back
on it with the insight which trial has yielded, a Settlement as
of despair. Considered well, it was a settlement to govern
henceforth without God, with only some decent Pretence of God.
Governing by the Christian Law of God had been found a thing of
battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult thing:
wherefore let us now abandon it, and govern only by so much of
God's Christian Law as--as may prove quiet and convenient for us.
What is the end of Government? To guide men in the way wherein
they should go; towards their true good in this life, the portal
of infinite good in a life to come? To guide men in such way,
and ourselves in such way, as the Maker of men, whose eye is upon
us, will sanction at the Great Day?--Or alas, perhaps at bottom
_is_ there no Great Day, no sure outlook of any life to come;
but only this poor life, and what of taxes, felicities, Nell-
Gwyns and entertainments, we can manage to muster here? In that
case, the end of Government will be, To suppress all noise and
disturbance, whether of Puritan preaching, Cameronian psalm-
singing, thieves'-riot, murder, arson, or what noise soever, and
--be careful that supplies do not fail! A very notable
conclusion, if we will think of it; and not without an abundance
of fruits for us. Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn-
gallows, as the type of Puritanism found futile, inexecutable,
execrable,--yes, that gallows-tree has been a fingerpost into
very strange country indeed. Let earnest Puritanism die; let
decent Formalism, whatsoever cant it be or grow to, live! We
have had a pleasant journey in that direction; and are--arriving
at our inn?
To support the Four Pleas of the Crowns and keep Taxes coming in:
in very sad seriousness, has not this been, ever since, even in
the best times, almost the one admitted end and aim of
Government? Religion, Christian Church, Moral Duty; the fact
that man had a soul at all; that in man's life there was any
eternal truth or justice at all,--has been as good as left
quietly out of sight. Church indeed,--alas, the endless talk and
struggle we have had of High-Church, Low-Church, Church-
Extension, Church-in-Danger: we invite the Christian reader to
think whether it has not been a too miserable screech-owl
phantasm of talk and struggle, as for a 'Church,'--which one had
rather not define at present!
But now in these godless two centuries, looking at England and
her efforts and doings, if we ask, What of England's doings the
Law of Nature had accepted, Nature's King had actually furthered
and pronounced to have truth in them,--where is our answer?
Neither the 'Church' of Hurd and Warburton, nor the Anti-church
of Hume and Paine; not in any shape the Spiritualism of England:
all this is already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it
is; a thing that Nature does _not_ own. On the one side is
dreary Cant, with a _reminiscence_ of things noble and divine;
on the other is but acrid Candour, with a _prophecy_ of things
brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and
yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks
thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of
'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is
also in these days declaring itself naught, unable to keep the
world from taking fire.
The theories and speculations of both these parties, and, we may
say, of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be things
which the Eternal Veracity did not accept; things superficial,
ephemeral, which already a near Posterity, finding them already
dead and brown-leafed, is about to suppress and forget. The
Spiritualism of England, for those godless years, is, as it were,
all forgettable. Much has been written: but the perennial
Scriptures of Mankind have had small accession: from all English
Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather binding or in paper
wrappage, how many verses have been added to these? Our most
melodious Singers have sung as from the throat outwards: from
the inner Heart of Man, from the great Heart of Nature, through
no Pope or Philips, has there come any tone. The Oracles have
been dumb. In brief, the Spoken Word of England has not been
true. The Spoken Word of England turns out to have been trivial;
of short endurance; not valuable, not available as a Word,
except for the passing day. It has been accordant with
transitory Semblance; discordant with eternal Fact. It has been
unfortunately not a Word, but a Cant; a helpless involuntary
Cant, nay too often a cunning voluntary one: either way, a very
mournful Cant; the Voice not of Nature and Fact, but of
something other than these.
With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars,
controversies, with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections,--it
is her Practical Material Work alone that England has to shew for
herself! This, and hitherto almost nothing more; yet actually
this. The grim inarticulate veracity of the English People,
unable to speak its meaning in words, has turned itself silently
on things; and the dark powers of Material Nature have answered:
Yes, this at least is true, this is not false! So answers
Nature. Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have become
Cotton-trees; and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven
shirts,--hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to be
distributed, capable to cover the bare backs of my children of
men. Mountains, old as the Creation, I have permitted to be
bored through: bituminous fuel-stores, the wreck of forests that
were green a million years ago,--I have opened them from my
secret rock-chambers, and they are yours, ye English. Your huge
fleets, steamships, do sail the sea: huge Indias do obey you;
from huge _New_ Englands and Antipodal Australias, comes profit
and traffic to this Old England of mine! So answers Nature. The
Practical Labour of England is _not_ a chimerical Triviality: it
is a Fact, acknowledged by all the Worlds; which no man and no
demon will contradict. It is, very audibly, though very
inarticulately as yet, the one God's Voice we have heard in these
two atheistic centuries.
And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and
impediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet
intelligible to no man! How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it
not to be the Voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a Voice
of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And have a Hell in England,--the
Hell of not making money. And coldly see the all-conquering
valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million, in their
Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law;--mumbling to
ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-
demand, Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man: Free-trade,
Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel
yet preached!
As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour; as if godlike
Labour and brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A serious,
most earnest Mammonism grown Midas-eared; an unserious
Dilettantism, earnest about nothing, grinning with inarticulate
incredulous incredible jargon about all things, as the
_enchanted_ Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea! It is mournful
enough, for the present hour; were there not an endless hope in
it withal. Giant LABOUR, truest emblem there is of God the
World-Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker; noble LABOUR, which
is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest
throne,--staggering hitherto like a blind irrational giant,
hardly allowed to have his common place on the street-pavements;
idle Dilettantism, Dead-Sea Apism, crying out, "Down with him, he
is dangerous!"
Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a soul in the
body of him, and take his place on the throne of things,--leaving
his Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of
said throne.