THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]

[12] Guardian, 6th March 1889.

Mrs. Ward, in the Nineteenth Century, develops with warmth and force the theme and serious purpose of Robert Elsmere; and she does so, using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect, in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a Summa Theologiae, or a Divina Commedia, or a Novum Organum, or a Calvin\'s Institutes, or a Locke On the Understanding, or an Encyclopedia, or a Candide, which sets people thinking more than usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a "New Reformation" Mrs. Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials and passionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad. Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience, and range of illustration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination; and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let them speak.

It is to imagination that Robert Elsmere makes its main appeal, undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what, with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book like Supernatural Religion, that the gist of the argument lies. The alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins. Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that he had assurances and pledges which could not fail him, that God was in the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book, which was its guaranteed witness, and by which God still spoke to his soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible, far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanctity was not so to all—was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more knowing than himself—was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he thought himself in full possession of the truth which God had given him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of Christianity. He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further, that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another; the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere, comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been, which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve God in a Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than any of the old ones could be—of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper "A New Reformation."

In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book. Robert Elsmere rests on the achievements of historic criticism, chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between bad translation and good; the old way of reading, quoting, and estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless, narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts true life and character and human feeling and motives into the personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity—"A New Reformation."

Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she likens to the difference between good translation and bad, in dealin............