Yeast: a Problem | Page 4

up-- while his sleek
brother sits at home in his counting-house, enjoying at once 'the means
of grace' and the produce of Esau's labour--on him Jacob's chaplains
have less and less influence; for him they have less and less good news.
He is afraid of them, and they of him; the two do not comprehend one
another, sympathise with one another; they do not even understand one
another's speech. The same social and moral gulf has opened between
them, as parted the cultivated and wealthy Pharisee of Jerusalem from
the rough fishers of the Galilaean Lake: and yet the Galilaean fishers (if
we are to trust Josephus and the Gospels) were trusty, generous,
affectionate- -and it was not from among the Pharisees, it is said, that
the Apostles were chosen.
Be that as it may, Esau has a birthright; and this book, like all books

which I have ever written, is written to tell him so; and, I trust, has not
been written in vain. But it is not this book, or any man's book, or any
man at all, who can tell Esau the whole truth about himself, his powers,
his duty, and his God. Woman must do it, and not man. His mother, his
sister, the maid whom he may love; and failing all these (as they often
will fail him, in the wild wandering life which he must live), those
human angels of whom it is written--'The barren hath many more
children than she who has an husband.' And such will not be wanting.
As long as England can produce at once two such women as Florence
Nightingale and Catherine Marsh, there is good hope that Esau will not
be defrauded of his birthright; and that by the time that Jacob comes
crouching to him, to defend him against the enemies who are near at
hand, Esau, instead of borrowing Jacob's religion, may be able to teach
Jacob his; and the two brothers face together the superstition and
anarchy of Europe, in the strength of a lofty and enlightened
Christianity, which shall be thoroughly human, and therefore
thoroughly divine.
C. K. February 17th, 1859.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This little tale was written between two and three years ago, in the hope
that it might help to call the attention of wiser and better men than I am,
to the questions which are now agitating the minds of the rising
generation, and to the absolute necessity of solving them at once and
earnestly, unless we would see the faith of our forefathers crumble
away beneath the combined influence of new truths which are fancied
to be incompatible with it, and new mistakes as to its real essence. That
this can be done I believe and know: if I had not believed it, I would
never have put pen to paper on the subject.
I believe that the ancient Creed, the Eternal Gospel, will stand, and
conquer, and prove its might in this age, as it has in every other for
eighteen hundred years, by claiming, and subduing, and organising

those young anarchic forces, which now, unconscious of their
parentage, rebel against Him to whom they owe their being.
But for the time being, the young men and women of our day are fast
parting from their parents and each other; the more thoughtful are
wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards
an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism. Epicurism which, in my
eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely because it looks at
first sight most like an angel of light. The mass, again, are fancying that
they are still adhering to the old creeds, the old church, to the honoured
patriarchs of English Protestantism. I wish I could agree with them in
their belief about themselves. To me they seem--with a small sprinkling
of those noble and cheering exceptions to popular error which are to be
found in every age of Christ's church--to be losing most fearfully and
rapidly the living spirit of Christianity, and to be, for that very reason,
clinging all the more convulsively--and who can blame them?--to the
outward letter of it, whether High Church or Evangelical; unconscious,
all the while, that they are sinking out of real living belief, into that
dead self-deceiving belief-in-believing, which has been always
heretofore, and is becoming in England now, the parent of the most
blind, dishonest, and pitiless bigotry.
In the following pages I have attempted to show what some at least of
the young in these days are really thinking and feeling. I know well that
my sketch is inadequate and partial: I have every reason to believe,
from the criticisms which I have received since its first publication, that
it is, as far as it goes, correct. I put it