218 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



prepared by private tuition. Mr. Eliot strongly 

 confirmed my impression that the chief defect in 

 the American public system of education is the 



absence of schools corresponding to the best 

 type of our English grammar-schools. 



— Nineteenth Century. 



ON KEEPING SILENCE FROM GOOD WORDS. 



By K. E. B. 



WHY should the simple and reverent men- 

 tion of the name of God in conversation 

 at an ordinary dinner-party cause a sudden chill, 

 an awkward break in the conversation, as though 

 some solecism, some offense against good man- 

 ners, had been committed ? Why should any 

 approach to a discussion on religious subjects be 

 impossible in general society ? People talk free- 

 ly enough on politics, on art, on science, on litera- 

 ture ; more freely still on the mere personal gos- 

 sip of the day ; the one subject which is by gen- 

 eral consent proscribed is that which by general 

 consent is allowed to be the most important, and 

 which one might therefore suppose to be the most 

 interesting. It is worth while to inquire into the 

 cause of so singular a phenomenon. 



The first and most obvious answer to the 

 question which we have proposed would be, that 

 this reticence arises from reverence. No one, it 

 will be said, talks much in ordinary company of 

 that which he most reveres ; in calling such sub- 

 jects sacred, we imply that they are not to be pro- 

 faned by rude handling, but are to be kept as it 

 were in a shrine apart from the traffic of the 

 every-day world. It may be so ; and yet if it be 

 so, it is a phenomenon peculiar to us English 

 Protestants. For the Hebrew of old, whose rev- 

 erence as uttered by Psalmists and Prophets has 

 been the type of all the deepest thoughts of men 

 ever since, habitually spoke with his neighbor of 

 God and of divine things. " As the Lord liveth," 

 seemed to him the simplest and most natural way 

 of affirming his belief in what he said. The Mo- 

 hammedan has no lack of reverence ; yet it is as 

 natural to him to speak of Allah as it is to us to 

 speak of Nature ; nor would it be easy to find 

 words more deeply reverent, more touchingly 

 natural, or more simply pathetic, than those of 

 the aged Nanyk Pasha, who, in lamenting the 

 fall of his nation, said to the correspondent of 

 the Daily News : " Allah is great. If he wills that 

 we are to come through this trouble, he will find 

 means to do so. We have done our best. We 

 have now no help, no hope, but in him. If be 



wills that we are to perish, we are content." The 

 English Puritan of the seventeenth century, 

 though he did not express it in the same conven- 

 tional forms with ourselves, was full of reverence 

 for the unseen world ; yet he, like the Hebrew of 

 the Old Testament who in so many other respects 

 he resembled, habitually and naturally spoke of 

 the unseen as though it were the world in which 

 he lived and moved. Or, to come nearer to our 

 own day, the Tyrolese peasant who raises his hat 

 to each road-side crucifix that he passes, speaks 

 of the " liebe Herr Gott " as familiarly as he does 

 of the officials of his native village. It is true 

 that a cultivated mind will shrink from a famil- 

 iarity of speech which to a ruder taste will seem 

 natural ; yet there is, one should think, some me- 

 dium between over-familiarity and the total ig- 

 noring of the subject. 



A very different answer to our question will 

 be given by many in the present day. Of course, 

 they will say, people nowadays do not speak of 

 religion, because they do not really believe in it. 

 The Hebrew, who believed that God was about 

 his path and about his bed ; the Mohammedan, who 

 believes that Allah compasses him round by an 

 iron chain of destiny ; the Puritan, who believed 

 that he and the ruler of the universe were bound 

 to each other by a special covenant — these be- 

 lieved, and therefore spoke : but the modern Eng- 

 lishman, who believes in evolution and natural 

 laws, and to whom, therefore, the old idea of a 

 Deity regulating and arranging from hour to hour 

 all the affairs of men and the course of Nature is 

 altogether foreign, will talk of a science which 

 he believes, and not of a religion which he does 

 not believe. Here, probably, we have got some- 

 what nearer to the root of the matter. No doubt, 

 a very considerable number of our most highly- 

 educated and thoughtful men have ceased to hold 

 any definite form of religious belief; yet for the 

 most part these are the very men who do not 

 shrink from speaking, and speaking out, on re- 

 ligious subjects ; you will be more likely to hear 

 a religious discussion introduced by a scientific 



