Yeast: a Problem | Page 3

it good. The doctor meanwhile
(unless he be one of Hesiod's 'fools, who know not how much more
half is than the whole') is content enough to see any part of his
prescription got down, by any hands whatsoever.
But there is another cause for the improved tone of the Landlord class,
and of the young men of what is commonly called the aristocracy; and
that is, a growing moral earnestness; which is in great part owing (that
justice may be done on all sides) to the Anglican movement. How
much soever Neo-Anglicanism may have failed as an Ecclesiastical or
Theological system; how much soever it may have proved itself, both
by the national dislike of it, and by the defection of all its master-minds,
to be radically un-English, it has at least awakened hundreds, perhaps

thousands, of cultivated men and women to ask themselves whether
God sent them into the world merely to eat, drink, and be merry, and to
have 'their souls saved' upon the Spurgeon method, after they die; and
has taught them an answer to that question not unworthy of English
Christians.
The Anglican movement, when it dies out, will leave behind at least a
legacy of grand old authors disinterred, of art, of music; of churches too,
schools, cottages, and charitable institutions, which will form so many
centres of future civilisation, and will entitle it to the respect, if not to
the allegiance, of the future generation. And more than this; it has sown
in the hearts of young gentlemen and young ladies seed which will not
perish; which, though it may develop into forms little expected by those
who sowed it, will develop at least into a virtue more stately and
reverent, more chivalrous and self-sacrificing, more genial and human,
than can be learnt from that religion of the Stock Exchange, which
reigned triumphant--for a year and a day--in the popular pulpits.
I have said, that Neo-Anglicanism has proved a failure, as
seventeenth-century Anglicanism did. The causes of that failure this
book has tried to point out: and not one word which is spoken of it
therein, but has been drawn from personal and too-intimate experience.
But now--peace to its ashes. Is it so great a sin, to have been dazzled by
the splendour of an impossible ideal? Is it so great a sin, to have had
courage and conduct enough to attempt the enforcing of that ideal, in
the face of the prejudices of a whole nation? And if that ideal was too
narrow for the English nation, and for the modern needs of mankind, is
that either so great a sin? Are other extant ideals, then, so very
comprehensive? Does Mr. Spurgeon, then, take so much broader or
nobler views of the capacities and destinies of his race, than that great
genius, John Henry Newman? If the world cannot answer that question
now, it will answer it promptly enough in another five-and-twenty
years. And meanwhile let not the party and the system which has
conquered boast itself too loudly. Let it take warning by the Whigs; and
suspect (as many a looker-on more than suspects) that its triumph may
be, as with the Whigs, its ruin; and that, having done the work for
which it was sent into the world, there may only remain for it, to decay

and die.
And die it surely will, if (as seems too probable) there succeeds to this
late thirty years of peace a thirty years of storm.
For it has lost all hold upon the young, the active, the daring. It has
sunk into a compromise between originally opposite dogmas. It has
become a religion for Jacob the smooth man; adapted to the maxims of
the market, and leaving him full liberty to supplant his brother by all
methods lawful in that market. No longer can it embrace and explain all
known facts of God and man, in heaven and earth, and satisfy utterly
such minds and hearts as those of Cromwell's Ironsides, or the Scotch
Covenanters, or even of a Newton and a Colonel Gardiner. Let it make
the most of its Hedley Vicars and its Havelock, and sound its own
trumpet as loudly as it can, in sounding theirs; for they are the last
specimens of heroism which it is likely to beget--if indeed it did in any
true sense beget them, and if their gallantry was really owing to their
creed, and not to the simple fact of their being--like others--English
gentlemen. Well may Jacob's chaplains cackle in delighted surprise
over their noble memories, like geese who have unwittingly hatched a
swan!
But on Esau in general:--on poor rough Esau, who sails Jacob's ships,
digs Jacob's mines, founds Jacob's colonies, pours out his blood for him
in those wars which Jacob himself has stirred