MR. GLADSTONE ON RELIGIOUS ROMANCES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 8192, 1 March 1890, Page 2 (Supplement)

MR. GLADSTONE ON RELIGIOUS ROMANCES.

THE January number of Merry England will contain an article by Mr. Gladstone, which he penned after reading "Ellen Middleton," a novel written in 1544, and republished a few years ago, by the late I Lady Georgina Fullerton. Mr. Gladstone, prefacing his account of the work, declares that it is seldom that readers have the good fortune to find the true preacher in the guise of a novelist, as well as with the vestments of the female sex. Too truly it may be said of many novels of she day that, while they have escaped from the rudeness and grossnees of earlier times, it has boon by an artificial and unhealthy process—they have diffused the poison, not expelled it; they are whited sepulchres ; and their uncleannes* remains within, because they are still intended to stimulate appetite, not to minister food. In another class of romance, where religion is more copiously infused and more distinctly exhibited, the combination is generally inharmonious and repulsive. "Indeed," the right hon. gentleman affirms, " we fear that many fictions of the class termed religious may have produced a revulsive effect. "Ellen Middleton" he describes as having " the most pointed religious aim, the least of direct religious teaching ; it has the least effort and the greatest force; it is the least didactic and the most instructive. It carries, indeed, a tremendous moral; and were this an age of acute and tender consciences, practised in self-examination and intensely sedulous in making clean the inner chambers of that heart of man which is ordained to bo the Redeemers abiding place, we might fear for its producing "here and there wounds over deep and sharp. But our authoress has to deal with a dull and hardened state of the public mind, and she can do something towards quickening and arousing it. Let us not conceal from ourselves that men cannot live for generations, and almost for centuries, deprived of any other spiritual discipline than such as each person, unaided by the external forces of the Church and tho testimony of general practice, may have the desire and the grace to exercise over himself, without being tho worse for it. We must needs have lost much both of the tone that such discipline was intended to maintain and of tho power to discern and realise the detriment we have incurred. Indeed, the notions have gone abroad among us, and that not only where avowed ungodliness prevails but likewise in connection with very strict professions of religion, that the inward direction and government of the spirit are not a great, arduous, and perpetual work, bub a more corollary, following a3 matter of course, or little more, upon the sincere adoption of certain doctrines and therefore that they need not be made the subject of a distinct solicitude and care ; that the inward, consequences of sin, though never corrected by confession, by efforts of pain conscious and sustained, by restitution—those various parts of the process of repentance which test and ascertain its solidity, may be neutralised by the mere lapse of -time, and, so to speak, taken up and absorbed like the ill-humours of the body ; that it shows a want of faith, end savours of Judaism, or some other ism; to employ detailed and systematic means for the purpose of working out Christian renovation. Against this false philosophy and false religion the writer of the work before us does battle, not by any logical analysis and exposure of its deceptiveness, but exhibiting to us the machinery of a human heart in full play amidst the trials which critical combinations of circumstances present, and instituting before our eyes the appeal to its living experience. She has I assailed that which constitutes, as wo j are persuaded, the master delusion of | our ■■-■? ■■:. 'me and country, a:«>, in the I - ay of; -arable, and by awful exampiis has shown us how they that would .-..void tho deterioration of the. moral life within them must strangle their infant sins by the painful acts and accessories of repentance, and how, if we fall short of this by dallying with them, WO nurse them into giants for our own misery and destruction." Mr. Gladstone then briefly relates a part of the story of Ellen Middleton, who is an orphan, educated in her uncle's house. Stung by the petulant reproaches of her cousin, Ellen strikes her, in a fit of anger ; the child falls into a stream close by, and is drowned. A single voice utters the words, "She has killed her;" but for some time there is no other sign that there had been a witness to the scene. The fall is taken for an accident. Ellen at first did not tell the truth, then she would not, and then she could not. Her uncle says, " You arc-now our child, Ellon." From this beginning of a sin the tissue of the tale is woven. With the secret buried in her breast Ellen broods over the act, and is driven to seek excitement. She has two ardent admirers, Henry Lovell and Edward Middleton, and the former having been the witness of the death of Ellen's cousin in the stream, is able to road with accuracy the subsequent state of the wretched girl's mind. He'determined to make use of his knowledge for tho purpose of displacing his rival in Ellen's heart. Edward, " dissatisfied with the exaggeration and fitfulness of her life, and with tho appearance of an interest in Henry, .goes abroad. But the time came when, her inward pains not having assuaged, the heroine conceives the idea of confessing to a clergyman, who, howover, talked to her of mundane things, "when the secret of a life of anguish, the confession of an overburdened conscience was trembling on her lips." Mr. Gladstone, proceeding with his analysis, and moralising upon tho case of this clergyman, continues : " Religion of late years lias been driven back in great part from that acknowledged position of prominence and authorised power which it once used to occupy in ordinary life ; although not absolutely ' rclegated'into obscure municipalities and rustic villages,' yet it cowers and skulks in society, and manifests nob itself until, by some careful application of the touchstone, it has ascertained in what quarter sympathy exists. Or else, in minds more fearless, "or less dolicate, it projects upon the surface, not in its natural effluence, but according to some harsh and crude form, with effort and with assumption. In this state of things it is hard, even for the priest, to bo so absorbed in the sen?o of that vocation that attends him whithersoever he goes as not ordinarily to remit somewhat of the character and bearing that .belong to it ; and wo believe that if the interior" of hearts were opened, there would appear to bo many who moot together in discourse, and who simply from fear and mutual distrust, keep their conversation far below the tone at which it would be most congenial to them all. And yet it is not by violence of effort that this state of things can be amended. It must bo by the diffusion of the atmosphere of devotion in which men can meet and breathe freely. It must be by tho recognition of 'those symbols of religion which have become so faint and few among us, and among which will be prominent the broad and clear development of tho clerical character, both as it respects tho obligation of the clergy to live nearer to God than others, and likewise as regards the making full proof of their ministry, and fitting the whole demeanour to tho special and, so to speak, specific form which belongs , to it."