The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

294

Lizfe of Benjamin Jowett

[CHAP. X

ignoring plain facts, or industriously obscuring them,
or explaining them away, and the civilization of the
age in danger of becoming, as he himself described
humanity without religion, 'a truncated, half-educated
sort of being.' The average English layman 'cared for
none of these things.' His withers were unwrung.
Looking at the matter from outside, he only saw the
prima facie discrepancy between seventeenth-century
Articles, or mediaeval formularies (already at variance
with each other), and nineteenth-century enlightenment2.
It followed that no enlightened person should become
a clergyman, and that the clergyman who became
enlightened and let men know it should be unfrocked.
It did not occur to such observers to ask the further
question, what then would happen to religion? Nor
did they stop to think that by maintaining silence,
the Essayist might have served his personal interest,
but would have sacrificed a noble end. Hence they
were ready to join in the cry of ' disloyalty.'
Mr. Carlyle, the Chelsea oracle, who often cared not
whom or what he smote, so he smote hard enough,
was at once ready with his epigram. He had himself
proclaimed the 'Exodus from Houndsditch 3,' but had
not shown a way through the Wilderness; yet the
moment some one from within the camp spoke words of
truth and soberness, he broke out with 'The sentinel who
deserts, should be shot 4.' And the organ of sceptical Con1 Epistles of St. Paul, third force, vol. iii. p. 8: 'Rode with
edition, vol. ii. p. 96. Carlyle... Carlyle against the
2 See Letters of Matthew Arnold, Essayists on dishonesty ground
vol. i. pp. 131, 135, 178. and atheistic. Some who cling
3 His quaint phrase forgetting to Carlyle's authority in such a
rid of Hebrew old clothes, that is, matter may bear to be reminded
of Jewish tradition. of the more considerate utterance
4 Cf. the Life of Bishop Wilber- of John Stuart Mill: 'I hold