Some Private Views | Page 5

of home. His is no passionate cry to be admitted into the eternal city; he
murmurs sullenly, 'Let me rest.'
It was a favourite taunt with the sceptics of old--those Early Fathers of
infidelity, who used to occupy themselves so laboriously with scraping
at the rind of the Christian Faith--that until the Cross arose men were
not afraid of Death. But that arrow has lost its barb. The Fear of Death,
even among professing Christians, is now comparatively rare; I do not
mean merely among dying men--in whom those who have had
acquaintance with deathbeds tell us they see it scarcely ever--but with
the quick and hale. Even with very ignorant persons, the idea that
things may be a great deal worse for us hereafter than even at present is
not generally entertained as respects themselves. A clergyman who was
attending a sick man in his parish expressed a hope to the wife that she
took occasion to remind her husband of his spiritual condition. 'Oh yes,
sir,' she replied, 'many and many a time have I woke him up o' nights,
and cried, "John, John, you little know the torments as is preparing for
you."' But the good woman, it seems, was not disturbed by any such
dire imaginings upon her own account.
Higher in the social scale, the apprehension of a Gehenna, or at all
events of such a one as our forefathers almost universally believed in, is
rapidly dying out. The mathematician tells us that even as a question of
numbers, 'about one in ten, my good sir, by the most favourable
computations,' the thing is incredible; the philanthropist inquires
indignantly, 'Is the city Arab then, who grows to be thief and felon as
naturally as a tree puts forth its leaves, to be damned in both worlds?'
and I notice that even the clergy who come my way, and take their

weak glass of negus while the coach changes horses, no longer insist
upon the point, but, at the worst, 'faintly trust the larger hope.'
Notwithstanding these comparatively cheerful views upon a subject so
important to all passengers on life's highway, the general feeling is, as I
have said, one of profound dissatisfaction; the good old notion that
whatever is is right, is fast disappearing; and in its place there is a
doubt--rarely expressed except among the philosophers, with whom, as
I have said, I have nothing to do--a secret, harassing, and unwelcome
doubt respecting the divine government of the world. It is a question
which the very philosophers are not likely to settle even among
themselves, but it has become very obtrusive and important. Men raise
their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders when it is alluded to, instead,
as of old, of pulverising the audacious questioner on the spot, or even
(as would have happened at a later date) putting him into Coventry;
they have no opinion to offer upon the subject, or at all events do not
wish to talk about it. But it is no longer, be it observed, 'bad form' in a
general way to do so; it is only that the topic is personally distasteful.
The once famous advocate of analogy threw a bitter seed among
mankind when he suggested, in all innocence, and merely for the sake
of his own argument, that as the innocent suffered for the guilty in this
world, so it might be in the world to come; and it is bearing bitter fruit.
To feel aweary at the Midway Inn is bad enough; but to be journeying
to no home, and perhaps even to some harsher school than we yet wot
of, is indeed a depressing reflection.
Hence it comes, I think, or partly hence, that there is now no fun in the
world. Wit we have, and an abundance of grim humour, which evokes
anything but mirth. Nothing would astonish us in the Midway Inn so
much as a peal of laughter. A great writer (though it must be confessed
scarcely an amusing one), who has recently reached his journey's end,
used to describe his animal spirits depreciatingly, as being at the best
but vegetable spirits. And that is now the way with us all. When
Charles Dickens died, it was confidently stated in a great literary
journal that his loss, so far from affecting 'the gaiety of nations,' would
scarcely be felt at all; the power of rousing tears and laughter being (I
suppose the writer thought) so very common. That prophecy has been
by no means fulfilled. But, what is far worse than there being no
humorous writers amongst us, the faculty of appreciating even the old

ones is dying out. There is no such thing as high spirits anywhere. It is
observable, too, how very much public entertainments have increased
of late--a tacit acknowledgment