God, the Clergy, and Some Modern

U

Writers

BY THE REV. HENRY S. WHITEHEAD, M.A.

NBIASSED thought and examination reveal that God does not change and that the clergy are not, necessarily, queer. The clergy are much the same as other members of their race, the human. Like the Apostles, mostly rugged fishermen, many of them are even robust. Nowadays they are climbing Mount McKinley, in the trenches, coaching football teams or writing books the same as other men. There comes to mind that notable figure of "muscular Christianity" Moses, the negro monk of the Thebaid who is alleged to have captured and bound four brigands who attacked him in his lonely cell, and, slinging them in pairs over his shoulders, carried them several miles across the sand to the nearest church where he flung them down before the altar as a preliminary to their conversion!

Moses of Nitria antedated Stephen Langton and Alcuin of York by several centuries. These later decadent persons performed no feats greater than to frame Magna Charta and regulate Charlemagne. Neither would have been able to manage the four brigands. But anyone who chose to form his opinion of the clergy of to-day by reading about them in the works of modern writers would inevitably acquire the idea that the degeneracy herewith indicated had progressed more rapidly than either the probabilities or the facts would indicate. The cleric of modern literature is a curious personage. Sometimes he is a crank, sometimes merely an imbecile, often only wooden and inert, abnormal and untrue to life. He is afraid of cows. Less manly than the feminists themselves, he languishes at things called pink teas, and does moderately well at croquet.

The silly young parson in "Penrod" is an excellent example. The Rev. Mr. Kinosling is not only an ass, he is an impossible ass. He is the only abnormal character in that charming and

popular book. One gets the same impression from the books of Victor L. Whitechurch, widely read in England, and in which all the clergy seem gratuitously overdrawn. Out of several dozen clerical characters which have appeared in the fiction of several great weeklies during the past seven or eight years I recall only one who is a natural human being. This is the hero in one of Dr. Rowland's tales in the Saturday Evening Post who was a clergyman only in name, he having allowed himself to be made a deacon in the Episcopal Church out of gratitude to the missionary society which had paid for his edcuation! The hero in "The Inside of the Cup" is almost as thoroughgoing an ass as Hall Caine's "Christian " the Rev John Storm, or as any of the other bewildering types of clerics in that tale of religious paranoia.

This tendency to make clergymen absurd is comparatively recent. The clergy of earlier authors are not thus conspicuous. Stiggins is perhaps the best known of the earlier types. Stiggins was not a member of the Establishment, it is true, and his eccentricities are such as belong to his date and type, but he does not stand out conspicuously from the other Pickwickians. Winkle is an exaggerated adolescent, Tupman an exaggerated old beau, Snodgrass an exaggerated literary bluffer, the elder Weller a very epitome of fat coachmen. Pott and Slurk overdo their rhetoric, their cowardice, and their defiance, and Stiggins is no more overdrawn than they; he fits into the tale exactly.

But Kinosling does not fit into the "Penrod" story exactly because he is the only exaggerated character in the book. He is a burlesque parson, while the barber is an every-day barber, and is comic just because he talks and acts exactly like an everyday barber. Marjorie Jones is a normal little girl with beaux, Mr. Schofield a normal businessman. The things done by Sam Williams, Rupe Collins, Bartet the dancing master, and Delia the cook are reasonable things, while Kinosling is abnormal and unreasonable. The things the other characters say might have been taken from dictaphones; but no mortal lips of a live parson ever framed the effervescent inanities which pour in one continuous stream from the mouth of Mr. Tarkington's

clerical saphead. He is as appropriate in the story as a slapstick would be in a delicate comedy.

It is true that a clergyman may be odd, pedantic, wicked, crazy, or comic, but so also may be a jockey, a grocer, a plumber, a doctor of medicine, or a vegetable pedlar. But there is nothing in the dress, manners, conversation, or general appearance of the clergy as a class to mark them off as especially amenable to the kind of literary treatment they almost invariably receive. The clergy are not addicted to practices which are unusual and therefore, by good psychology, ridiculous, like the wearing of monocles. They do not habitually give utterance to strange cries in public as do the uncouth collectors of rags and old iron. Even the clerical silk hat when worn is not vivid scarlet like the hat of the rotund negro who advertises second-floor dentists' offices on the avenues of great cities.

Most educated men, such as are capable of writing books, are familiar with the clergy. Mr. Tarkington, by his portrayal of the minor character Ladew in "The Conquest of Canaan” has demonstrated that he understands clergymen, and yet Kinosling crops up in "Penrod." Mr. Winston Churchill is a Churchman of prominence and yet the central character in "The Inside of the Cup" is unlike a real clergyman. After ten years' active parochial work he does not know how to make a parish call. Mr. Whitechurch, more than any of the others, should know his subject, for he is an ecclesiastical writer. His books bear the same relation to the Church as those of Eden Philpotts to Dartmoor or W. W. Jacobs to sailormen. Yet Mr. Whitechurch's numerous clergymen are absurd images while his other characters are natural and sane.

This phenomenon of undue exaggeration may be explicable on the ground that it lies in the same plane as the general impression that if a talking woodchuck should be discovered it would be in Winsted, Conn., or that every resident of Hackensack, N. J., habitually goes about in overalls and chin whiskers,— except, of course, the women, who are equipped with sunbonnets and gingham aprons, and invariably carry milkpails. As a matter of fact Winsted is a factory town in a prosaic, industrial

district, the last place to look for the marvels of natural history so familiar to the constant readers of metropolitan dailies; while Hackensack is a suburban town almost entirely populated by city businessmen and their families. In other words the phenomenon may be that a crystallized literary technique has been unquestionably accepted by modern writers.

All this could have only such value as attaches to it as a fact in the general field of literary criticism if it were not accompanied by a kindred technical point of view regarding God. The years since the opening of the twentieth century have seen produced notable work from a whole group of writers who are interested in God as a subject for literary composition, and in this time a great deal has been published in which God has been prominent. Algernon Blackwood, H. G. Wells, G. Lowes Dickinson, G. B. Shaw, Donald Hankey,—it would be easy to make a long list,-have "featured" God in their books. So have a great host of poets and versifiers of every known school and description. The Great War, cutting abruptly into this period of renewed production has greatly enhanced the literary value of God to the writers because it has turned the minds of the reading public away from froth to actualities. God, the Central Actuality of the universe, has been thrust upward and forward into human consciousness, and hence into the open light of intellectual consideration for the whole educated world. Therefore we see the unprecedented phenomenon of popularity accruing to writers who present in verse and essay and even in fiction the various subjective Gods of their own variant intellects. God has been, as it were, exploited, pantheistically, transcendentally, deistically, and by the various kinds of agnostics. Every imaginable half-formed, speculative, reconstructed, and impossibly idiotic kind of God that the queer minds of men can transmute into the objective of modernistic appreciation through the medium of literary expression has been rushed into print, from the God of Rabindranath Tagore to the God of Donald Hankey. In fact it becomes more and more surprising the more one thinks of it, that a cubist has not given this weary world another prod by producing a purple and green portrait of

the God of Remy de Gourmont; or an agile torsionist a bust of the tutelary divinity of Ezra Pound done in a medium of cigar ashes and honey.

Mr. Wells seems to have made the deepest and widest impression with his God,-the God of Britling, the Invisible King, the Animator of the Soul of a Bishop,-that curious, limited, tripartite deity which Mr. Wells himself and most of his public believe he has discovered but who really is an old acquaintance to the delver into the lore of the Early Spring of Christianity. It is, however, in his chapter on "The Religious Revival," a matter of fifteen pages in "Italy, France and Britain at War” that Mr. Wells in undertaking again the role of a religious prognosticator has done me the favor of corroborating a favorite idea, the theory that people seem to employ two distinct intellects when they attempt to think. One of these is a workable intellect used for the everyday affairs of life, such as raising babies, purchasing boots, or constructing silo tanks. The other is a flabby thing devoted exclusively to the consideration of religious matters.

In the book just referred to Mr. Wells takes up various aspects of the War with the masterly reasoning and cultivated prophetic propensities and acute sense of balance derived from many years of literary craftsmanship and leaves his reader stirred, or convinced, or intelligently hostile as he always does. But when the reader reaches the little chapter on religion he might suppose it had been interpolated by one of Mr. Wells' enemies to destroy the book as a work of art, just as one might, with similar intent, crudely introduce a putty image, moulded by a house painter, among the Elgin Marbles. What has happened is only that Mr. Wells has, for these fifteen pages, shut off the splendidly-running, high-powered engine of his trained intellect, and while this rests, he uses his other intellect, which might be described in the argot of the garage as a "one-lunger.'

With his God at the back of his mind, Mr. Wells discusses the religious aspects of the War. He speaks of three definite things: 1, The Pope's Attitude to the War; 2, Essex ladies asking Co-operation of the Wells Household in Prayer; 3, An