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Changed character of the romance of religion: the Psalms in the lives of religious leaders Baxter, Law, John Wesley. Charles Wesley, William Wilberforce, Keble, Manning, New- man, Thomas Arnold, Julius Hare, Neander, Charles Kings- ley, Stanley, Chalmers, Irving; the Psalms in the lives of men of science Locke, Humboldt, Maine de Biran, Sir W. Hamilton, Sir James Simpson, Romanes; the Psalms in literature Addison, Cowper, Boswell, Scott, Byron, Hogg, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Fitzgerald, Ruskin, Carlyle.
THE first seventy years of the eighteenth century lie like a plain between two ranges of hills. Behind it rise the picturesque highlands, in which the theology of the Middle Ages had fought every inch of ground with Protestantism, and where the voluptuous sensibility of the Cavalier had crossed swords with the stem morality of the Puritan. Before it loom the volcanic heights of the French revolu- tionary era, destined to be the scene of new conflicts, where once more, without thought of compromise or acquiescence, opposing principles contended for absolute victory. Between the mountain ranges extends the plain of the eighteenth century, rich and fertile, but deficient in many of the virtues which flourish best on more barren soils and in more bracing air.
England under the last two Stuarts had retained the heat of a life-and-death struggle, though the fire was already burning low. Men acted, thought, spoke, and wrote with something of the romance and passion of their ancestors. At least they preserved the grand manner, if they had lost the high-toned sentiment which was its impulse. But in the age of Anne, and still more under the House of Hanover, the temperature was chilled. Society banished enthusiasm from politics, philosophy, literature, religion, and took its ease. In politics loyalty gave place to expediency, divine right to constitutional monarchy. In philosophy reason and experience dethroned faith and tradition; the thought of Locke, clear, sensible, and practical, reigned supreme. In literature passion, spontaneity, imagination were succeeded by the finish, taste, restraint, and intellectual fancy of an impulse which had lost the fervour of youth.
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In religion, the change was equally conspicuous. Alarmed at the results of Catholic zeal or Puritan fervour, society invoked the aid of the established religion to control extra- vagance, to restrain vehemence, and strengthen order. Never was the Church, in a sense, more popular. Never was Christianity more ably defended; but it was on the ground of human reasonableness alone. Its most powerful champions fought with the weapons of their assailants, and rejected the aid of all that was miraculous, mysterious, supernatural. Cold and rational, they endeavoured to argue men into goodness, appealed to a system of rewards and punishments, ignored the power of the heart or the imagination. The re- sult was disastrous. Religion grew formal, full of propriety, drowsy, prosperous. Its authority was put forward with cautious regard to the probability of its acceptance. Seeming to distrust itself, it was regarded as something which could be ignored, not as something which imperatively demanded to be either obeyed or condemned. The devotional cast of mind, the enthusiasm, the mystery, the prophetic vision, the martyr's passion, were left behind in the natural sanctuaries of the mountains. Nothing remained but a religion of the plains low-lying, level, utilitarian, prosaic.
During the last half of the eighteenth century, the dying embers of religious fervour were fanned into flame by the Methodists and the Evangelicals. Meanwhile new forces were coming into play which gave fresh impulse and direction to every form of national life. Industrial development was advancing with rapidity. Science shook off its dilettantism, and became a power. As the nineteenth century advanced, the mental attitude of inquirers grew to be scientific. The supremacy of theology was challenged; the claim of authority sifted or denied. Out of the shock of the collision emerged the religious parties in the Church as we know them to-day. Bitterly opposed as they were, and are, in love of the Psalter they were united. Under new impulses, the romance of religion revived, though in an altered form. It has not disappeared, nor even diminished; but it has changed in character. It has passed from without to within, from action to thought, from deeds to emotions. It has become, for that reason, less adapted for pictorial treatment. The Psalms, as of old, still nerve men and women to suffer, to dare, to endure. But, on the stage of history, the opportunity of witnessing for the faith grows rarer as the world becomes more tolerant or more indifferent to diversity of opinion. Religious tragedies are still played on every side of us, and in our midst. If they could be revealed, they would have the special interest of familiar conditions and contemporary circumstances. They would come closer to us than scenes of martyrdom. But modem tragedies of religion are, for the most part, withdrawn from observation, enacted in the privacy of home rather than on the public stage. Their scene is the human heart, or the human brain. The rack, the dungeon, the scaffold, are all there. But the torture is the chill agony of doubt, the iron grip of remorseless logic, the keen analysis of searching introspec- tion, the desperate effort to hold or regain cherished beliefs, to shake off the gradual deadening of senses once susceptible to holy impressions, to resist the creeping numbness of nerves formerly responsive to sacred influences. To the vanquished, come the solitude, the void, the darkness of lost creeds; to the victors, belong the peace and triumph of a faith that has withstood the test. The scene is less dramatic, less picturesque. But the trial is not less fiery than the stake. Who can say that the drawn-out agony of those who have succumbed does not exceed the pains of those who, upheld by triumphant confidence in their cause, have endured the most exquisite tortures of the body ? Who, on the other hand, will assert that the peace and joy of those, whose faith withstands the trial, may not equal the most ecstatic vision of his risen Lord that ever gladdened the straining eyes of the Christian martyr at the moment of his supremest anguish ?
It is well that the choice of subjects is thus, in one sense, narrowed, at the moment when the multifarious activities of modem life widen the field so indefinitely that selection, necessarily arbitrary, must now appear capricious. History may illustrate something of the debt, which, during the last two centuries, men and women have owed to the Psalms. The mystery of existence forces itself upon our attention. The eternal questions of whence ? and why ? and whither ? have never been more insistent, rolling in upon us like the monotonous surges of the inarticulate sea. With tense nerves and strained senses, men and women ask, what is life, and what is death. No sound of answer comes, except the echo of their own voices reverberating through a cavernous void;
and happy are they who, turning in their weariness to the Psalter, find that its words wrap them round like a folding sense which brings them peace. Of all this vast sum of human experience, history takes no account. For every recorded incident, there are millions of cases, unknown beyond the secret chambers of the heart, in which the Psalms have restored the faith, lifted the despair, revived the hopes, steeled the courage, bound up the wounds of the struggling, suffering hosts of humanity.
On the lives of leaders in the various religious movements which mark the period, may be traced the influence of the Psalms.
Here are the words, " And call upon His name, and declare His works among the people" (Ps. cv., verse i), which are inscribed upon the pulpit at Kidderminster, once occupied by Richard Baxter (1615-92), one of the first and greatest of Nonconformist divines, the eloquent preacher, the voluminous theological writer, patient alike under the lifelong pains of disease and thirty years of almost incessant persecution. A man whose personal holiness was never disputed by his bitterest opponents, and a model parish priest, he so trans- formed Kidderminster, that " on the Lord's day there was no disorder to be seen in the streets; but you might hear a hundred families singing psalms, and repeating sermons as you passed through them." The use of the Psalms by his parishioners at Kidderminster might well have been the fruit of Baxter's special influence; some may even have been sung in his own metrical version. A Paraphrase on the. Psalms of David (1692) was among the products of his gigantic literary labours, and his own words show that he found in the Psalms a daily support. In 1662, at the age of forty-seven, he had married Margaret Charlton, a girl of gentle birth and " strangely vivid wit," the faithful, tender companion of whom he paints a loving portrait in his Breviate of her Life. " It was not," he writes, " the least comfort that I had in the converse of my late dear wife, that our first in the morning and our last in bed at night, was a psalm of promise, till the hearing of others interrupted it."
Baxter's Saint's Everlasting Hesf and Call to the Uncon- verted are masterpieces of devotional literature, whose wide- spread popularity still endures. Scarcely less powerful, though far less popular, has been the influence of the Serious Call (1729) of William Law (1686-1761), "a nonjuror, a wit, and a saint, who seems to have believed all that he professed, and to have practised all that he enjoyned." As literature, the book is read for its masterly style and for the keen satire of its portraits. As a call to devotion, it was the first book which made Dr Johnson think " in earnest of religion." Lord Lyttelton could not lay it down till he had read it through, called it "one of the finest books that ever was written," and only wondered that it " had been penned by a crack-brained enthusiast." On the two Wesleys, on Whitefield, on Evan- gelicals like Venn, Newton, and Scott, on leaders of the Oxford movement like Keble or Newman, its influence was profound. At the present day, when the churchmanship of Law is again in the ascendant, the ascetic tone of the Serious Call finds readers, with whose principles it is more in harmony than with those of Methodist or Evangelical.
At the time when Law wrote, the bare externals of religion were punctiliously observed. But the divorce between precept and practice was absolute. It was on this contrast that Law's logical intellect seized, and the Serious Call invites Christians to practise what they professed, to "live more nearly as they prayed." To the use of the Psalms, as an aid to that devotion which dedicates a life to God, one of Law's most eloquent chapters (chapter xv.) is devoted. (< Do but so live," he says, " that your heart may truly rejoice in God, that it may feel itself affected with the praises of God, and then you will find, that this state of your heart will neither want a voice, nor ear to find a tune for a psalm." He bids men imagine themselves "with Moses when he was led through the Red Sea." " Do you think that you should then have wanted a voice or an ear to have sung with Moses, * The Lord is my strength and my song, and He is become my salvation,' etc.?" The chapter closes with a selection of the psalms which are best adapted for devotional use. Psalm cxlv., "I will magnify Thee, 0 God, my King, and I will praise Thy Name for ever and ever," is his choice for a morning hymn. " The 34th, 96th, ioyd, mth, i46th, 147^," are such as wonderfully set forth " the glory of God, and, therefore, you may keep to any one of them at any particular hour as you like; or you may take the finest parts of any psalms, and so, adding them together, may make them fitter for your own devotion."
Here are the words of Psalm cxxx., " Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, 0 Lord: Lord hear my voice," etc., which John Wesley (1703-91) heard sung on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 24th, 1738, as an anthem at St Paul's Cathedral. The psalm was one of the influences that attuned his heart to receive that assurance of his salvation by faith, which the evening of the same day brought to him in the room at Aldersgate Street. On the foundation of that sure confidence, his intense energy, organising genius, and admi- nistrative capacity built up, for the most part from neglected materials, the mighty movement that still bears both his name and the impress of his structural mind. For half a century, as he rode up and down the country, his voice sounded louder and louder, till it penetrated every comer of the kingdom, rousing once more the sense of the need of personal religion, and stirring anew the numbed perception of unseen spiritual realities. On March and, 1791, he died at the Chapel-house in the City Road, London. It was with the words of the Psalms that he met the approach of death. Gathering his remaining strength into the twice-repeated cry, '�The best of all is. God is with us!" he lay for some time exhausted. One of the bystanders wetted his parched lips. "It will not do," he said; "we must take the consequence;
never mind the poor carcase." Pausing a little, he cried, " Thy clouds drop fatness!" (Ps. Lxv., verse 12); and soon after, " The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge " (Ps. xlvi., verse 7). Throughout the night he was heard attempting to repeat the words. The next morning he was dead.
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With a psalm also died Charles Wesley (1707-88). The first hymn-book compiled for the use of the Church of England was John Wesley's Collection of Psalms and Hymns, printed at Charlestown in 1736-7. Wesley regarded hymns as a powerful means both of expressing the devotional feelings and of establishing the faith of his followers. He himself wrote or translated many that are still in popular use. But the great hymn-writer of the movement, and perhaps the greatest hymn-writer the world has ever known, was his younger brother. Of Charles Wesley's 6500 hymns, some are unsurpassed in beauty, and rank among the finest in the English language. Throughout his life, they were the form in which he found the truest expression for his deepest feelings. On his deathbed, in March 1788, the train of thought suggested by Psalm Ixxiii., verse 25 (" My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever"), took shape in verse. It was the last exercise of his wonderful gift. Calling his wife to his side, he dictated to her the lines:
" In age and feebleness extreme, What shall a sinful worm redeem ? Jesus, my only hope thou art, Strength of my failing flesh and heart;
0, could I catch a smile from thee, And drop into eternity! "
As Luther's success had stirred the dormant energies of the Roman Catholics, so the Methodists roused the Church of England from her lethargy. A new spirit of life was breathed into the Establishment by men like Newton, Scott, Venn, and Simeon. Of the personal and practical religion of the Evangelicals, William Wilberforce (1759-1833), who moved and finally carried the abolition of the Slave Trade (1807), may be taken as a representative. The brilliant young man, whose gay wit charmed the town, who played faro while George Selwyn held the bank, gambled with Fox, was the bosom friend of Pitt, flirted with Mrs Crewe, bandied criticisms with Madame de Stael, or sang ballads to the Prince of Wales, passed in 1785 through that crisis of the mind and character, which men of his school of religious thought call " conversion." The change never turned his natural gaiety into moroseness. He remained the same charming companion, but his purpose in life was fixed; he would devote his time and talents to philanthropic efforts, and especially to the abolition of the Slave Trade.
Numerous passages in his Diary show how largely this hidden life was fed by the study of the Psalms. Granville Sharpe (1735-1813), his predecessor and colleague in the work of abolishing the Slave Trade, sang, night and morning, "a portion of the Hebrew Psalms to his harp." So Wilberforce studied his Psalter. In his Diary for 1803, he writes : " I am reading the Psalms just now, comparing the two versions, and reading Home's Commentary. What wonderful com- positions! What a decisive proof of the Divine origin of the religion to which they belong! There is in the world nothing else like them." In 1807 he had gained two personal triumphs. He had carried his Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and he had kept his seat for Yorkshire. Neither event elated him. It is in the language and spirit of the Psalms that his reflections on his political successes are expressed, as he meditates on such texts as, " Not unto us, 0 Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy Name give the praise" (Ps. cxv., verse i). In 1819, in the midst of the bustle of London life, and the disturbances which threatened the domestic peace of the country, his own mind was serene. " Walked from Hyde Park corner, repeating the ngth Psalm, in great comfort," is the entry in his Diary. A year later, came the king's coronation, and Queen Caroline's claim to be crowned. For taking the unpopular side against the queen, Wilberforce was violently attacked, especially by Cobbett. To a man of his temperament, the pain was bitter. It was to the Psalms that he turned. " The Jist Psalm, which I learned by heart lately," he tells his wife, " has been a real comfort to me."
On the Psalms is based the most popular of all the writings of John Keble (1792-1866), the " true and primary author " of the Oxford movement. His own metrical Psalter (1839) is little used and little known. But though the Psalms supply none of the texts by which the hymns are suggested and prefaced, it is from the Psalter that Keble drew the inspiration of The Christian Year (1827). In his " Dedication " he avows his model:
" O happiest who before Thine altar wait,
With pure hands ever holding up on high The guiding Star of all who seek Thy gate, The undying lamp of heavenly Poesy.
" Too weak, too wavering, for such holy task
Is my frail arm, 0 Lord; but I would fain Track to its source the brightness, I would bask In the clear ray that makes Thy pathway plain.
" I dare not hope with David's harp to chase The evil spirit from the troubled breast;
Enough for me if I can find such grace To listen to the strain, and be at rest."
A text from the Psalms haunted the memory of Henry Manning as an undergraduate at Oxford, when his religious opinions were yet unformed, and his ambitions still centred on political life. As cardinal and archbishop, the same words bore to him their daily message. "The Psalms and the Lessons," he says in an autobiographical note on the years 1829-31, "were always a delight to me. The verse 'Why art thou cast down, 0 my soul,'" etc. (Ps. xlii., verse 6), " always seemed a voice to me. Every day in the daily Mass it comes back to me."
In Newman's Dream of Gerontius, some striking passages are echoes from the Psalms. Gerontius dies, murmuring the familiar words of Ps. xxxi., verse 6:
" Novissima hwa est: and I fain would sleep. The pain has wearied me ... Into Thy hands, 0 Lord, into Thy hands. . . "
His " struggling soul quitted its mortal case," and is borne by the angel into the presence .of the just and holy Judge. As the soul and its guardian mount upwards, the angelic choirs hymn their Maker's praise in lines, whose opening stanza recalls Psalms cxlviii. and cl.:
<( Praise to the Holiest in the height, And in the depth be praise;
In all His words most wonderful;
Most sure in all His ways!
The great Angel of the Agony pleads with Him whom he had strengthened in the garden, and the soul of Gerontius lies prone at the " dear feet of Emmanuel," .. . happy,
" For it is safe, Consumed, yet quickened, by the glance of God."
Then, as the Angel commits his charge to the temporary keeping of the Angels of Purgatory, the Souls within the golden prison break into a solemn chant, which is a para- phrase of part of Psalm xc.:
" i. Lord, Thou hast been our refuge in every generation;
2. Before the hills were born, and the world was, from age to age Thou art God.
3. Bring us not. Lord, very low; for Thou hast said. Come back again, ye sons of Adam.
4. A thousand years before Thine eyes are but as yesterday, and as a watch of the night which is come and gone," etc., etc.
Here are the words " 0 give me the comfort of Thy help again; and stablish me
with Thy free spirit" (Ps. li., verse 12) which the great headmaster of
Rugby, Thomas Arnold, repeated, as, in June 1842, he lay on his deathbed in the
torture of angina pectoris. Here is the text Psalm xvii.,
verse i6 in which Julius Hare specially delighted. " When," wrote Whewell, his old college friend at Trinity, Cambridge, "the Psalm was read to him before his spirit departed, he thanked those who had thus chosen the words of Scripture which he so especially delighted in; with these sounds of glory singing in his ears, ' I will behold Thy presence in righteousness; and when I awake up after Thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it,' our dear friend fell into that sleep from which he was to awake in the likeness of Christ." To Neander, Hare and the Cambridge Liberals of his circle looked for the reconciliation of revelation with intellect, and here is the Psalm " The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want" (Ps. xxiii., verse i) which was sung by the German students to celebrate the last1 birthday of the great German theologian (January 6th, 1850). Here, again, is the favourite psalm of Charles Kingsley Psalm Ixxvi. " How strange," he writes, when voyaging up the Rhine in August 1851, and looking on the hills crowned with the ruined strongholds of freebooters, " that my favourite psalm about the hills of the robbers (hills of prey) should have come in course the very day I went up the Rhine." Here, lastly, is the favourite text of Dean Stanley, a choice characteristic alike of the man and of his work: "I see that all things come to an end; but Thy commandment is exceeding broad " (Ps. cxix., verse 96).
In the religious history of Scotland, no event since the Reformation created so profound an impression as the secession of the Free Church ministers. May i8th, 1843. Here too the Psalms were at work. Of that movement, Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) was the leading spirit. In early life he had hovered on the verge of atheism. But in 1810 he had thrown off the spell, and his original, independent mind passed from misery into what he himself described as "Elysium." Hence- forward, though, to quote his words, " he could not speak of the raptures of Christian enjoyment: he thought he could enter into the feeling of the Psalmist ' My soul breaketh out for the very fervent desire that it hath alway unto Thy judgements'" (Ps. cxix., verse 20). The depth of his con- viction, the intensity of his enthusiasm, the fire of his natural eloquence, triumphed over the rugged uncouthness of his manner. No preacher of his day produced so strong and irresistible an effect.
To secure spiritual independence from civil control in matters which to him and his followers seemed vital, he and four hundred and seventy ministers resigned their livings, and joined the Free Church. With that memorable " Disrup- tion," the Psalms were twice associated. It was from the words, "Unto the godly there ariseth up light in the darkness" (Ps. cxii., verse 4), that Chalmers preached a sermon in 1 Neander died July i4th, 1850.