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

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Lzfe of Benjamin Jowett

[CHAP. V

you have the power of assuming ad libitum Aramaic documents
and oral Gospels, that I think the only thing to be done is to
prove it insoluble except in a general way....
To A. P. STANLEY.
BEAUMARIS, August 17, 1846... A thought has struck me often during the last few weeks,
which is, I think, comforting about one's vocation in life. Considering how little sympathy I have with the clergy, for I never
hear a sermon scarcely which does not seem equally divided
between truth and falsehood, it seems like a kind of treachery
to be one of them. But I really believe that treachery to the
clergy is loyalty to the Church, and that if religion is to be saved
at all it must be through the laity and statesmen, &c., not through
the clergy. Is there any reason to think that if the clergy with
their present intolerance, ignorance, narrowness and love of
pious frauds, could succeed to the utmost of their wishes, they
would produce any other revival than such a one as seems to
be going on in France at present, four out of five women
made semi-Catholics, four out of five men made semi-Infidels?
What I mean is, that I do not see that one need look upon
one's occupation as gone because the usual routine is very much
shut up. It is in reality a higher work that opens, trying to
make the laity act up to and feel their own religious principles.
Surely it is a surprising thing what a much higher tone they
have of late years taken, e.g. in the House of Commons, &c.,while,
at the same time, the old talk of the clergy about sacrilege, &c.,
Irish Bishoprics, Penal Acts, divine right of education, has been
gradually exploding. While Arnold was chiefly known among
the clergy, he was reviled and despised: I doubt whether, even
now, there are a hundred clergymen over forty who feel any
sympathy with him; but the laity ' rose at him.'
His theory of Church and State seems to me chiefly a mistake,
because it is for making a work outward and external which
should be inward and spiritual, and also because it implies that
Church and State is a device of statesmen or of Churchmen, and
not a natural dualism, which except among angels who are above
this world or infidels who know of no other, must ever be. It