Culture and Anarchy | Page 8

by the Irish
Roman Catholics, who have never yet been seriously asked to accept it,
but who would a good deal embarrass him if they demanded it. And we
see philosophical politicians, with a turn for swimming with the stream,
like Mr. Baxter or Mr. Charles Buxton, and philosophical divines with
the same turn, like the Dean of Canterbury, seeking to give a sort of
grand stamp of generality and solemnity to this antipathy of the
Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress in the
future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter than swimming with the stream;
and we might gladly, if we could, try in our unsystematic way to help
Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Charles Buxton, and the Dean of Canterbury, in
their labours at once philosophical and popular. But we have got fixed
in our minds that a more full and harmonious development of their
humanity is what the Nonconformists most want, that narrowness,
one-sidedness, and incompleteness is what they most suffer from; [xix]
in a word, that in what we call provinciality they abound, but in what
we may call totality they fall short.
And they fall short more than the members of Establishments. The
great works by which, not only in literature, art, and science generally,
but in religion itself, the human spirit has manifested its approaches to
totality, and a full, harmonious perfection, and by which it stimulates
and helps forward the world's general perfection, come, not from
Nonconformists, but from men who either belong to Establishments or
have been trained in them. A Nonconformist minister, the Rev. Edward
White, who has lately written a temperate and well-reasoned pamphlet
against Church Establishments, says that "the unendowed and
unestablished communities of England exert full as much moral and
ennobling influence upon the conduct of statesmen as that Church
which is both established and endowed." That depends upon what one
means by moral and ennobling influence. The believer in machinery
may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates or to
legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister is to exert a moral and
ennobling influence [xx] upon Government. But a lover of perfection,

who looks to inward ripeness for the true springs of conduct, will
surely think that as Shakspeare has done more for the inward ripeness
of our statesmen than Dr. Watts, and has, therefore, done more to
moralise and ennoble them, so an Establishment which has produced
Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to moralise and ennoble
English statesmen and their conduct than communities which have
produced the Nonconformist divines. The fruitful men of English
Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the
pale of the Establishment,--Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or
two outside the Establishment, and Puritanism produces men of
national mark no more. With the same doctrine and discipline, men of
national mark are produced in Scotland; but in an Establishment. With
the same doctrine and discipline, men of national and even European
mark are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France; but in
Establishments. Only two religious disciplines seem exempted; or
comparatively exempted, from the operation of the law which seems to
forbid the rearing, outside of national establishments, of men of the
[xxi] highest spiritual significance. These two are the Roman Catholic
and the Jewish. And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, which,
though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan; and perhaps here, what
the individual man does not lose by these conditions of his rearing, the
citizen, and the State of which he is a citizen, loses.
What, now, can be the reason of this undeniable provincialism of the
English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists, a provincialism which
has two main types,--a bitter type and a smug type,--but which in both
its types is vulgarising, and thwarts the full perfection of our humanity?
Men of genius and character are born and reared in this medium as in
any other. From the faults of the mass such men will always be
comparatively free, and they will always excite our interest; yet in this
medium they seem to have a special difficulty in breaking through what
bounds them, and in developing their totality. Surely the reason is, that
the Nonconformist is not in contact with the main current of national
life, like the member of an Establishment. In a matter of such deep and
vital concern as religion, this separation from the main current of the
national life has [xxii] peculiar importance. In the following essay we
have discussed at length the tendency in us to Hebraise, as we call it;
that is, to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious side. This

tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur of religion,
and bears affecting testimony to them; but we have seen that