ON KEEPING SILENCE FROM GOOD WORDS. 



221 



in which things sacro digna silentio are or used 

 to be spoken of familiarly, not in the exceptional 

 confidence of intimate friendship, but in ordinary 

 intercourse, gives a painful sense if not of unre- 

 ality, at least of unfitness and indecorum. And, 

 on those who have been brought up from child- 

 hood in evangelical ways, the encouragement to 

 talk of their spiritual condition and to lay bare 

 the secrets of their souls is a perilous tempta- 

 tion to the fatal habit of letting words outrun 

 the truth, of saying more instead of less than 

 they feel. If religion is indeed a matter entirely 

 between each man and his God, then religious 

 conversation must be, except in very rare cases, 

 the profanation of the Holy of Holies. 



But there is, as we have tried to show, a 

 higher and a nobler conception of religion, a 

 conception which alone fits it for uuiversal ac- 

 ceptance, which makes it the bond of human 

 society, the consecrating influence of all human 

 life. To regard it as the kingdom of heaven 

 upon earth, as that which regulates the relation 

 not of the individual soul only, but of the fam- 

 ily, the nation, the race, with God ; as the prin- 

 ciple which is to raise men to a higher and purer 

 life, not hereafter only, but here and now, and 

 which therefore has to do not only with theology, 

 but also with political economy, with social sci- 

 ence, with education, with the thousand prob- 

 lems of the day — this surely would be to make 

 it no longer a monopoly of priests and churches, 

 but a matter also for statesmen, for social re- 

 formers, for men of science, for all who are doing 

 any kind of work for others. If God were re- 

 garded as standing in the same relation to hu- 

 manity that Queen Victoria holds theoretically 

 toward the British Empire, to speak of him in 

 discussing human affairs would be as natural as 

 it is to refer to the crown in talking of govern- 

 ment or legislation. It is because we regard 

 him not as the common Father of all men, but 

 as the Benefactor of a select few, that we shrink 

 from the mention of his name in any but this in- 

 tercourse of closest friends. 



That the habitual and, as it were, instinctive 

 reference of all subjects of human interest to the 

 highest standard is not incompatible with a 

 hearty and genial enjoyment of all simple and 

 natural pleasures, and with a manly and unaffect- 

 ed life and a keen interest in all political and 

 social questions, ought not to need proof; but it 

 might be proved by a reference to two biogra- 

 phies. The lives of Thomas Arnold and of 

 Charles Kingsley, in whatever else they may 

 differ, agree in this, that each sets before us the 



portrait of a man who from his heart believed in 

 a present God, and who was not ashamed or 

 afraid to speak of his belief. To Arnold, in- 

 deed, with his strong view of the identity of 

 Church and state, religion and politics were but 

 the concave and the convex side of one and the 

 same shield ; to him, in school management or 

 teaching, in social intercourse, in correspondence 

 with his friends, and in political pamphlets, 

 without Christianity everything was unmeaning. 

 He looked forward to a time when " the region 

 of political and national questions, war and 

 peace, oaths and punishments, economy and edu- 

 cation, so long considered by good and bad alike 

 as worldly and profane, should be looked upon 

 as the very sphere to which Christian principles 

 are most applicable." And his biographer tells us 

 how, in his ordinary school-lessons, "no general 

 teaching of the providential government of the 

 world could have left a deeper impression than the 

 casual allusions to it which occurred as they came 

 to any of the critical moments in the history of 

 Greece or Bome." And so again in the case of 

 Kingsley, we see at once from his letters and from 

 his recorded words that to eliminate from his con- 

 versation all mention of the kingdom of heaven 

 and its King would have been simply to impose 

 upon him silence as to all that he would have con- 

 sidered worth speaking of: to him the drainage 

 of Bermondsey, the relations of capital and labor, 

 the suffrage, secular education, were not less dis- 

 tinctly religious questions — might he not perhaps 

 have said that they were more religious questions ? 

 — than the constitution of Church synods, or the 

 jarrings of discordant sects, or the minute intro- 

 spection of a morbid conscience. Not that either 

 Arnold or Kingsley had the faintest tincture of 

 secularism : in both we recognize the same deep 

 reverence for and delight in Scripture ; in both, 

 though under somewhat different forms, we find 

 the same value for public worship as the expres- 

 sion of the social character of Christianity: in 

 both, the apparent mixing of things religious and 

 secular is not the lowering of the religious, but 

 the lifting the secular into a higher sphere. And 

 in both, too, not in spite of but in consequence 

 of their deep sense of religion and of a present 

 kingdom of heaven among men, we find the keen- 

 est delight in outward Nature, the freshest enjoy- 

 ment of out-door sports, and an almost boyish ex- 

 uberance of spirits alternating with the depression 

 to which, at times, both the one and the other, in 

 common with wellnigh all great souls, were liable 

 in presence of the contrast between what is and 

 what might be. Certainly neither in Arnold nor 



