Robert Buchanan | Page 9

think they are true, in so far as they recognise what I have at least attempted to do in poetry, I am proud to quote them. I am ready to admit au rest, that my religion is only a yearning, my hope only a hope, born even out of a certain kind of despair; but through all the aberrations of a stormy personal career, and amid all the vicissitudes of fame and fortune, I have never ceased to cherish it, and the day it dies within me will be the day of my intellectual and moral extinction. It includes, I need not say, the forlorn and perhaps foolish faith of my childhood--the faith (to be carefully distinguished from belief) in personal immortality, in a supreme God or Good, and in the Life after Death. A faith very much out of fashion. To many good and wise men, to many more men who are neither good nor wise, such a faith is merely a survival from the lower forms of intelligence, and will become less and less possible as human beings realise the actual conditions of existence and energise more and more unselfishly for the good of the great and perfect being, Humanity. But to me, a dreamer of dreams, the 'dumb, wistful yearning' is born solely and wholly, not out of love for the race, but out of acute, intimate, possibly selfish personal love; my religion, like my charity, begins at home, and my philanthropy is only the generalisation of individual experience and affection. It is this fact which has made me, after thirty years of thought on religious subjects, see in the Christian religion, as still preached and taught, the hereditary enemy of human aspiration. Christianity is not dead; it will never die so long as the deductive method, arguing from generalisations to particulars, possess any fascination for the human mind, in preference to the method which instructs religion on the basis of particular and individual proofs and discovers in it the only possible solution of an eternal enigma."
In writing to Mr. Leslie Stephen, in the year 1896, he said:--
"I always feel that this life is worthless without the idea of permanence in the affections, and I am afraid I reiterate the thought too often in my writings. And the very idea of Evolution, if upbuilt of limitless death and suffering, is horrible without some further explanation. . . . I know that I am struggling in deep waters and can land on neither side--neither on the side of orthodox Religion, nor on that of outright Materialism--so that I am in danger of pleasing no one. But I have a very clear idea, nevertheless, of where I am drifting. Intellectually speaking, I find no ground whatever for believing in a Divine solution of this Puzzle--emotionally, I feel surer. I cannot say that I am of your opinion that this life is worth anything without another and a higher. Frankly I hope I shall never think so."
Meanwhile his father's editorship throve, and he soon became the proprietor of the paper. By that time the Glasgow Sentinel, though still of limited circulation, was a recognised power in Glasgow. The leaven was slowly working. After the abolition of the stamp duty on newspapers the Sentinel acquired, with a large increase of subscribers and purchasers, an increase of influence in due proportion. Meantime, for the better furtherance of the boy's education he was sent to a boarding-school at Rothesay, in the Island of Bute.
It was a small school, kept by a person named Munro, whom Robert afterwards recalled as a delicate, gentle, pink-complexioned man, who would sit in the middle of the schoolroom bathing his poor aching head with cold water, and suffering all the martyrdom of nervous headache. The boarders were chiefly boys from Glasgow or the neighbourhood, but there were a couple of dingy-complexioned lads from Demerara, and several little girls from the same mysterious region. If the boy's religious studies had been previously neglected, they were now vigorously and rigorously pursued. The good schoolmaster, catering for pious parents, dosed his scholars daily with long Scripture lessons and hymns to be got by heart. There were prayers too, morning and evening, grace before and after meat, while on Sunday the scholars were marched away to Port Bannatyne to hear two services and two long sermons, with an interval between for refreshments, consisting of a few biscuits partaken of in a chilly schoolroom attached to the "kirk." Sick as he had become of social outlawry, the boy thought all this highly proper and respectable, not that it failed to bore him as it did the others, not that he failed to slumber tranquilly during the sermon, or to play odds-and-evens with marbles during the service, but he always looked back on those