The Pleasures of England | Page 3

you must all
turn out what you are to be, and find out what you are to know, for
yourselves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities and
inner consciences:--whereas the old idea of education was that the baby
material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to
be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and treated by its
Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or mannered as they
chose, not as it chose, and filled, when its form was well finished and
baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla honey, or

Arabian spikenard.
Without debating how far these two modes of acquiring
knowledge--finding out, and being told--may severally be good, and in
perfect instruction combined, I have to point out to you that, broadly,
Athens, Rome, and Florence are self-taught, and internally developed;
while all the Gothic races, without any exception, but especially those
of London and Paris, are afterwards taught by these; and had, therefore,
when they chose to accept it, the delight of being instructed, without
trouble or doubt, as fast as they could read or imitate; and brought
forward to the point where their own northern instincts might
wholesomely superimpose or graft some national ideas upon these
sound instructions. Read over what I said on this subject in the third of
my lectures last year (page 79), and simplify that already brief
statement further, by fastening in your mind Carlyle's general symbol
of the best attainments of northern religious sculpture,--"three
whalecubs combined by boiling," and reflecting that the mental history
of all northern European art is the modification of that graceful type,
under the orders of the Athena of Homer and Phidias.
And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of the matter, I greatly
marvel that your historians never, so far as I have read, think of
proposing to you the question--what you might have made of
yourselves without the help of Homer and Phidias: what sort of beings
the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the Dane, might have been by
this time, untouched by the spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of
Agricola, and sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted
in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and sands of Elbe? Think
of it, and think chiefly what form the ideas, and images, of your natural
religion might probably have taken, if no Roman missionary had ever
passed the Alps in charity, and no English king in pilgrimage.
I have been of late indebted more than I can express to the friend who
has honoured me by the dedication of his recently published lectures on
'Older England;' and whose eager enthusiasm and far collected learning
have enabled me for the first time to assign their just meaning and
value to the ritual and imagery of Saxon devotion. But while every
page of Mr. Hodgett's book, and, I may gratefully say also, every
sentence of his teaching, has increased and justified the respect in
which I have always been by my own feeling disposed to hold the

mythologies founded on the love and knowledge of the natural world, I
have also been led by them to conceive, far more forcibly than hitherto,
the power which the story of Christianity possessed, first heard through
the wreaths of that cloudy superstition, in the substitution, for its
vaporescent allegory, of a positive and literal account of a real Creation,
and an instantly present, omnipresent, and compassionate God.
Observe, there is no question whatever in examining this influence,
how far Christianity itself is true, or the transcendental doctrines of it
intelligible. Those who brought you the story of it believed it with all
their souls to be true,--and the effect of it on the hearts of your
ancestors was that of an unquestionable, infinitely lucid message
straight from God, doing away with all difficulties, grief, and fears for
those who willingly received it, nor by any, except wilfully and
obstinately vile persons, to be, by any possibility, denied or refused.
And it was precisely, observe, the vivacity and joy with which the main
fact of Christ's life was accepted which gave the force and wrath to the
controversies instantly arising about its nature.
Those controversies vexed and shook, but never undermined, the faith
they strove to purify, and the miraculous presence, errorless precept,
and loving promises of their Lord were alike undoubted, alike rejoiced
in, by every nation that heard the word of Apostles. The Pelagian's
assertion that immortality could be won by man's will, and the Arian's
that Christ possessed no more than man's nature, never for an
instant--or in any country--hindered the advance of the moral law and
intellectual hope of Christianity. Far the contrary; the British heresy
concerning