Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
And this exactly falls in with what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, who may
almost be called the Colenso of love and marriage,--such a revolution
does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does
in our ideas on religion,--tells us of the notions and proceedings of
our kinsmen in America. With that affinity of genius to the Hebrew
genius which we have already noticed, and with the strong belief of
our race that liberty is the law of human life, so far as a fixed,
perfect, and paramount rule of conscience, the Bible, does not
expressly control it, our American kinsmen go again, Mr. Hepworth
Dixon tells us, to their Bible, the Mormons to the patriarchs and the
Old Testament, Brother Noyes to St. Paul and the New, and having
never before read anything else but [224] their Bible, they now read
their Bible over again, and make all manner of great discoveries
there. All these discoveries are favourable to liberty, and in this
way is satisfied that double craving so characteristic of the
Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine,
Henry the Eighth,--the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving
for legality. Mr. Hepworth Dixon's eloquent writings give currency,
over here, to these important discoveries; so that now, as regards
love and marriage, we seem to be entering, with all our sails spread,
upon what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, its apostle and evangelist, calls a
Gothic Revival, but what one of the many newspapers that so greatly
admire Mr. Hepworth Dixon's lithe and sinewy style and form their own
style upon it, calls, by a yet bolder and more striking figure, "a
great sexual insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race." For this end
we have to avert our eyes from everything Hellenic and fanciful, and
to keep them steadily fixed upon the two cardinal points of the Bible
and liberty. And one of those practical operations in which the
Liberal party engage, and in which we are summoned to join them,
directs itself entirely, as we have seen, to these cardinal points,
[225] and may almost be regarded, perhaps, as a kind of first
instalment or public and parliamentary pledge of the great sexual
insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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