Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2)Holyoake, George Jacob
Philosophy
Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Holyoake, George Jacob
Holyoake, George Jacob, 1817-1906; Social reformers -- Great Britain -- Biography; Working class -- Great Britain -- Biography
In my time I have seen much good done by Christians with a view to
extend their faith. Some few, like Samuel Morley, who excelled all
lay Dissenters I have known in the manly sense of the dignity and
independence of Nonconformity, would do generous things from the
humaneness of their own minds alone. Some Quakers and Unitarians have
had this quality. Others, Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and orthodox
Christians, I have known to mitigate privation for the "Lord's sake,"
not for humanity's sake. This was to some extent the case of the Rev.
Frederick Denison Maurice, Canon Kingsley, and their noble colleagues,
Edward Vansittart Neale, Judge Thomas Hughes, and J. M. Ludlow.
They became Christian Socialists not so much because they cared for
Socialism, as Maurice owned his "object was not to Socialise society,
but to Christianise Socialism." Startled by the dislike and even
resentment against Christianity expressed by men of poverty and
intelligence at being asked to adopt a belief which brought them no
relief, Maurice, Kingsley, and their associates concluded that privation
was the cause of alienation from the Church. In like manner Dissenters
thought that it was the bad condition of industrial life which
kept working people from chapel. None realised that alienation from
Christianity had its seat in the understanding--in intellectual
dissatisfaction with the tenets of Theology. The absentees from church
and chapel alleged that no relief came of belief, and never had since
the days when manna fell in the Jewish wilderness, and loaves and fishes
were miraculously plentiful on the hills of Galilee. There was no sense
or profit in adopting a faith which had been unproductive for nearly
2,000 years. It had taken the slave, the serf, and the hired worker
a long time to see this. But at last experience had told upon the
thoughtful. But the theologians neither in the dominant, nor dominated
camps perceived it.
Very generous is Kingsley's sympathy, in "Alton Locke," with the lot of
working people, but he believed that when the rebellious shoemaker fully
realises that good priests would mitigate the lot of those who labour
in workshops or in fields and mines, he will become reconciled to the
Thirty-nine Articles. Alton Locke is a Church Chartist--not one of the
Chartists of real life whom I knew, who were current in Kingsley's days,
who signed the famous document which Place drew and Roebuck revised.
They had principles. They did not seek paternal government of friendly
Churchmen, nor of Positivists, nor that nobly organised kind of
passive competence which Mr. Ruskin meditated for the people. The real
Chartists--like the Co-operators--sought self-government for the people
by the people. The alienation of the people from church and chapel was
not founded on lack of spiritual patronage, or thirst for it, but from
intellectual dissatisfaction with theological tenets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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