Alas,it will be found,I doubt,that in England more than in any country,our Public Life and our Private,our State and our Religion,and all that we do and speak (and the most even of what we think ),is a tissue of half-truths and whole-lies;of hypocrisies,conventionalisms,worn-out traditionary rags and cobwebs;such a life-garment of beggarly incredible and uncredited falsities as honest souls of Adam's Posterity were ever enveloped in before.And we walk about in it with a stately gesture,as if it were some priestly stole or imperial mantle;the foulest beggar's gabardine that ever was."Englishman dare believe the truth,"says one:"he stands,for these two hundred years,enveloped in lies of every kind;from nadir to zenith an ocean of traditionary cant surrounds him as his life-element.He really thinks the truth dangerous.Poor wretch,you see him everywhere endeavoring to temper the truth by taking the falsity along with it,and welding them together;this he calls 'safe course,''moderate course,'and other fine names;there,balanced between God and the Devil,he thinks he can serve two masters,and that things will go well with him."In the cotton-spinning and similar departments our English friend ks well that truth or God will have hing to do with the Devil or falsehood,but will ravel all the web to pieces if you introduce the Devil or -veracity in any form into it:in this department,therefore,our English friend avoids falsehood.But in the religious,political,social,moral,and all other spiritual departments he freely introduces falsehood,hing doubting;and has long done so,with a profuseness elsewhere met with in the world.The unhappy creature,does he k,then,that every lie is accursed,and the parent of mere curses?
That he must think the truth;much more speak it?That,above all things,by the oldest law of Heaven and Earth which man violates with impunity,he must and shall wag the tongue of him except to utter his thought?That there is a grin or beautiful acceptable grimace he can execute upon his poor countenance,but is either an express veracity,the image of what passes within him;or else is a bit of Devil-worship which he and the rest of us will have to pay for yet?Alas,the grins he executes upon his poor mind (which is all tortured into St.
Vitus dances,and ghastly merry-andrewisms,by the practice)are the most extraordinary this sun ever saw.
We have Puseyisms,black-and-white surplice controversies:--do ,officially and otherwise,the select of the longest heads in England sit with intense application and iron gravity,in open forum,judging of "prevenient grace"?a head of them suspects that it can be improper so to sit,or of the nature of treason against the Power who gave an Intellect to man;--that it can be other than the duty of a good citizen to use his god-given intellect in investigating prevenient grace,supervenient moonshine,or the color of the Bishop's nightmare,if that happened to turn up.I consider them far ahead of Cicero's Roman Augurs with their chicken-bowels:"Behold these divine chicken-bowels,O Senate and Roman People;the midriff has fallen eastward!"solemnly intimates one Augur."By Proserpina and the triple Hecate!"exclaims the other,"I say the midriff has fallen to the west!"And they look at one aher with the seriousness of men prepared to die in their opinion,--the authentic seriousness of men betting at Tattersall's,or about to receive judgment in Chancery.There is in the Englishman something great,beyond all Roman greatness,in whatever line you meet him;even as a Latter-Day Augur he seeks his fellow!--Poor devil,I believe it is his intense love of peace,and hatred of breeding discussions which lead whither,that has led him into this sad practice of amalgamating true and false.
He has been at it these two hundred years;and has carried it to a terrible length.He couldn't follow Oliver Cromwell in the Puritan path heavenward,so steep was it,and beset with thorns,--and becoming uncertain withal.He much preferred,at that juncture,to go heavenward with his Charles Second and merry Nell Gwynns,and old decent formularies and good respectable aristocratic company,for escort;sore he tried,by glorious restorations,glorious revolutions and so forth,to perfect this desirable amalgam;hoped always it might be possible;--is only just ,if even ,beginning to give up the hope;and to see with wide-eyed horror that it is at Heaven he is arriving,but at the Stygian marshes,with their thirty thousand Needlewomen,cannibal Connaughts,rivers of lamentation,continual wail of infants,and the yellow-burning gleam of a Hell-on-Earth!--Bull,my friend,you must strip that astonishing pontiff-stole,imperial mantle,or whatever you imagine it to be,which I discern to be a garment of curses,and poisoned Nessus'-shirt at last about to take fire upon you;you must strip that off your poor body,my friend;and,were it only in a soul's suit of Utilitarian buff,and such belief as that a big loaf is better than a small one,come forth into contact with your world,under true professions again,and false.You wretched man,you ought to weep for half a century on discovering what lies you have believed,and what every lie leads to and proceeds from.O my friend,honest fellow in this Planet was ever so served by his cooks before;or has eaten such quantities and qualities of dirt as you have been made to do,for these two centuries past.Arise,my horribly maltreated yet still beloved Bull;steep yourself in running water for a long while,my friend;and begin forthwith in every conceivable direction,physical and spiritual,the long-expected Scavenger Age .
