Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge, Arthur Christopher Benson [the little red hen ebook txt] 📗

amount of _reason_ is later able to overcome! And how many never grow to realize it at all! Besides, even of those who do, it is admitted that almost all need a reconstruction _some time_, a breaking-up of what would otherwise be crystallized formulæ, a _conversion_, in fact. Have you ever seen a high nature grow up from boyhood to manhood in undisturbed possession of a vital faith? I confess that I never have!

"I can not help feeling a dismal possibility, that future students of religion, looking over a nineteenth century 'child's catechism,' will laugh, or rather drop their hands in blind amazement—for in truth it is no laughing matter—at the metaphysical conglomerate of dogma, driven like a nail into the heads of careless and innocent children (such, at least, as have had, like myself, the advantage of a religious bringing-up), just as we turn over with regretful amusement and pathetic wonder the doctrinal farrago of a Buddhist or a Hindu.

"And all this because people can't wait. He must have a 'dogmatic basis,' they say, the sinew and bone of religion, when the poor child's head can not even take in their ideas, let alone his emotion appreciate them.

"The consequence is, that I can't bring myself to use these words except in societies where I know I shall not be misunderstood.

"Influence, the indestructibility of matter, aspiration—those are what Grace, the Resurrection of the Body, the Holy Spirit mean to me now; great and living and integral parts of my creed, which I not only glow to reflect about, but which surround and penetrate my life daily and hourly with ever-increasing thankfulness.

"Yet, on the other hand, some people depend so much on tradition: they never have a reconstruction of ideas; memories and associations are all in all to them. They are the 'Bands' people of my former classification.

"And so I want to give Edward both. I take him to church. When he asks me questions I will answer them, but I am glad to say he does not at present. I send him out before the sermon: that is responsible for a good deal of harm. 'Ye shall call upon him to avoid sermons' should be in the rubric of _my_ baptismal service.

"Then we read some of the Old Testament history as 'history of the Jews,' and Job and Isaiah and the Psalms as poetry—and I am glad to say he is very fond of them; and parts of the Gospels in Greek, as the life and character of a hero. It is the greatest mistake to impose them upon children as authoritative and divine all at once. It at once diminishes their interest: we ought to work slowly up through the human side.

"The Pauline Epistles I have given him to read in extracts. I believe they are best in extracts—one can omit the controversial element. And he has taken, as children do, to the Revelation enormously, and gets much mysterious delight from it.

"A long and wearisome letter this, and not, I feel, satisfactory. I haven't done justice to the side of tradition, the _jussum et traditum_, but that is the fault of my mind. I have only been professing to represent the other side.

"I would like to thrash the matter out further. I wish you would come down and see us. Tredennis has a sombre beauty, even in winter—a 'season of mists' with us. The magnolia on the south wall is blooming, though we are only two days off Christmas. Our love to you.

"Arthur Hamilton."

I subjoin another extract, on the education of the moral faculty.

"I have always held that the concentration of thought upon morality is a very dangerous system of life. Morality should be an incidental basis to life, not to be brooded over unless some grave disorder should arise. We breathe, and eat, and sleep, and pay no heed to those processes; and indeed both physiologists and moralists exclaim, in the case of those natural processes, that the healthier we are the more unconscious will those processes be.

"So it should be with moral things. If a grave obstruction or contradiction befall any one; if he behaves in a way that violates his usefulness, or his own or others' self-respect; then, if he will not reform himself, we must warn him, or treat him as a physician would: but to abuse a healthy nature for not considering the reasons of things, not having a moral system, not 'preparing for death,' when, by the very constitution of his nature, he does not require one, is a very grave blunder. Moral anxiety is a sign of moral _malaise_, or, far more commonly, a sign of physical disorder.

"It is an ascertained fact that those periods when morals have been imposed on man as his sole and proper business and subject for contemplation have been unprogressive, introspective, feeble times.

"No, leave morals out of the question directly, unless you see there is grave cause for interference. Give one or two plain warnings, or rather commands.

"Try to raise the _tone_ generally; try to make the young soul generous, ardent, aspiring. If you can do that, the fouler things will fall off like husks. Above all things, make him devoted to you—that is generally possible with a little trouble; and let him never see or hear you think or say a low thought, or do a sordid thing. If he loves you he will imitate you; and while the virtuous habit is forming, he will have the constant thought, 'Would my father have done this? What would he say, how would he look, if he could see me?' Imagination is sometimes a saving power."

I venture to insert a letter in which he touches delicately on the subject of sexual sin. He would never speak of it, but this was written in answer to a definite question of mine apropos of a common friend of ours.

"I must confess that I do not realize the strength of this particular temptation, but I am willing to allow for its being almost infinitely strong. I don't know what has preserved me. It is the one thing about which I never venture to judge a man in the least, because, from all I hear and see, it must hurry people away in a manner of which those who have not experienced it can not form any conception.

"You ask me what I think the probable effect that yielding to such temptation has on a man's character. Of course, some drift into hopeless sensualists. About those I have my own gospel, though I do not preach it; it is a scarcely formulated hope. But of those that recover, or are recovered, all depends upon the kind of repentance. The morbid repentance that sometimes ensues is very disabling. All dwelling on such falls is very fatal: all thoughts of what might have been, all reflections about the profaned temple and the desecrated shrine, though they can not be escaped, yet must not be indulged. I always advise people resolutely to try and forget them in _any_ possible way—banish them, drown them, beat them down.

"But a manly repentance may temper and brace the character in a way that no other repented fall can. It is the brooding natures which make me tremble; in healthier natures it is the refiner's fire which stings and consecrates: '_Sanat dum ferit_.'

"But the subject is very repugnant to me. I don't like thinking or talking about it, because it has its other side; the thought of a woman in connection with such things is so unutterably ghastly; it is one of the problems about which I say most earnestly 'God knows.'"

One other letter of this period, is worth, I think, inserting here.

"Tredennis, August 29.

"I had an instructive parable thrown in my way to-day, containing an obvious lesson for Eddy, and a further meaning for myself. Eddy came running to me about eleven, to tell me there was a man in the garden. I hurried to the spot he indicated; and there, in a kind of nook formed by a fernery, his head resting in a great glowing circle of St. John's wort, and his feet tucked up under him, lay a drunken tramp, asleep. He was in the last stage of disease; his face was white and fallen away, except his nose and eyes, which were red and bloodshot; he had a horrible sore on his neck; he was unshaven and fearfully dirty; he had on torn trousers; a flannel shirt, open at the neck; and a swallow-tail coat, green with age, buttoned round him. His hat, such as it was, lay on the ground at his side. Edward regarded him with unfeigned curiosity and dismay. While we stood watching him, he began to stir and shift uneasily in his sleep, as a watched person will, and presently woke and rolled to his feet with a torrent of the foulest language. He was three-parts drunk. He watched us for a moment suspiciously, and then gave a bolt. How he accomplished it I don't know, for he was very unsteady on his feet; but he got to the wall, and dropped over it into the road, and was out of sight before we could get there. He evidently had some dim idea that he had been trespassing.

"Edward inquired what sort of a man he was.

"'An English gentleman, in all probability,' I said, 'who has got into that state by always doing as he liked.' And I went on to point out, as simply as I could, that everybody has two sets of desires, and that you must make up your mind which to gratify early in life, determining to face this kind of ending if you fix upon one set. 'Early in life,' I said, 'when this gentleman was a well-dressed clean boy like you, one of the voices used to whisper to him at his ear, "Eat as much as you can; that is what you really like best;" while the other said, "If you eat rather less, you will be able to play football, or read your book better; besides, you will be your own master and less of a beast."

"'But he wouldn't listen; and this is the result.'

"Edward seemed to ponder it deeply. He tried to starve himself to-day at lunch; and I refrained from pointing out to him that abstinence from meat at lunch was not the _unum necessarium_, for fear of confusing the ingenuous mind. I like to see people grasp the concrete issue in one of its bearings. The principle will gradually develop itself; from denying themselves in one point, they will or may grow to be generally temperate; when confronted with overmastering and baser impulses, it may be they will say, 'Let me be ἐγκράτης ἐμαυτοῦ even here.'

"So much for Edward's lesson; now for my own. My first impulse was to loathe and reject the poor object, body and soul. He was merely the embodiment of long-continued vice. His body was a diseased framework, breaking quickly up, conscious of no pleasure but appetite, and now merely existing and held together by the desire of gratifying it; the little vitality it possessed, just gathering enough volume in the quiet intervals to satiate one of its three jaded cravings—lust, hunger, and thirst, and feebly groping after alcoholic and other stimulants to repair its exhaustion; the soul in her dreamy intervals drowsily recounting or contemplating lust past and to come—a ghastly spectacle!

"And yet I am bound to think, and do record it as my deliberate belief, that that poor, wretched, withered, gross soul is destined to as sure a hope of glory as any