3. Perhaps, amongst ourselves in modern times, a characteristic symptom of the settling into this still lower condition is a per- version of the gift of humour. Humour is not here the joyous bubbling out of a wayward spring that flows to cheer and refresh. It expresses not so much brightness and delicacy of perception as a tendency — essentially commonplace at heart — to turn every- thing over to show its least impressive side, and to provoke one's
i8o THE MAN THAT IS BLESSED
own meaningless sense of superiority by a sportive or satirical view of its exceeding flatness. The tone of weariness in it may not be very marked, but is yet evident to the reflective listener. You could not call it gaiety. Indeed, persistent perversion of the healthy meanings of life — and perversion of meaning is perhaps here the root-idea of the " scorn " — could scarcely prompt much gaiety. The tone of those who most skilfully and divertingly practise it cannot be expected to be quite that of the lark.
But perhaps we shall find no humour ; only the tone of a man who knows life well, and with a certain finality, having " lost his illusions " about it. He will not be surprised by any appearance either of practical and devoted idealism or of any baseness. He knows just how much and how little there is in either. Perhaps if your own beliefs are intense and earnest, he will listen to an expression of them quite respectfully, if he is in the mood, and even show you what seems like a certain personal sympathy. He is so grave and considerate that you think you are impressing him at last. But the real subject of his consideration is the place you are to fill in his private museum of moral curiosities. Your serious resolution is just part of this general odd fact of life to him ; and his very tolerance, exempt from all fellowship with you, is only the smooth completion of inner complacent scorn.^
(1) There is religious scorn, which has its classical illustration in the spirit of the Pharisees, and which in our time was admirably described by Hutton in his well-known essay on the "Hard Church." It is that spirit of narrow and arid intellec- tualism which starts either with the letter of Scripture or certain theological axioms, and then proceeds to infer and to deduct, till at last it has forged an iron chain with which to bind, first its own mind, and then the minds of other people.
^ The delusion that our human belief is commensurate with the spiritual influences of God, — nay, is a sure pledge, and the pledge, of those influences, — constitutes not merely the essence of bigotry, but almost all the other far from capricious peculiarities which distinguish the inquisitorial theology of the Hard Church. This it is which makes its theologians so eager to find, in marks of bare power, some grounds for God's authority quite distinct from His character; because, having an idolatrous regard for
1 H. Foston, The Waiting Life, 22.
PSALM I. I
i«i
faith, as a sort of charm, they want to find some iron foundation for it sufficiently unspiritual to remain unshaken when God Him- self is hidden from the heart. They think they have discovered that foundation ; they believe it unassailable ; they think that wherever God acts at all they should recognize Him by this mark ; they look out for that mark ; if they do not see it they scold and say, "God is not with you; on the contrary, corrupt human nature is with you ; what you struggle to express is wholly opposite in nature to what I have attained ; my belief is even more certain to me than any conviction I could possibly have that God has any part in your belief or no belief ; you are either a liar or an idiot." ^
(2) There is also worldly scorn, and this is illustrated in the case of persons who have achieved material success and lost their sense of proportion, and regard rank and riches as the final standard of manhood. While they may not say it, they have come in the background of their minds to look upon a man with slender possessions as a poor creature who has failed, to expect deference from those who are not as rich as themselves, to resent all independence on the part of any one who owes his living to them, and to treat the claims of intelligence and of culture to at least an equal place with those of worldly goods as a sentimental impertinence.
(3) There is one other scorn which may not be passed over ; it is that of the evil-liver. When a man in his youth first breaks those commandments of virtue which are written both in his body and in his soul, he has qualms of conscience and fits of repentance. He will frankly confess that he has done wrong, and he is willing to promise amendment. By and by he comes to such a callousness that he will defend his very vices as a necessary part of nature, and an intention of the Creator, and he will ridicule the restraints and decencies of virtue. When a man old and grey- headed sets himself to corrupt youth by foul conversation, and closes his life with only one poignant regret, that he can no longer practise the sins which he loves, then one sees scorn rank and full blown, and ready for the burning, whose damnation tarrieth not.