Bible and Sword (25 page)

This was what made him a philanthropist: the Bible enjoined him to be exactly that—to love his fellow man. Born into the ruling aristocracy, related by marriage to the two great Whig prime ministers of his time, sought after by both parties for cabinet office, which he consistently refused in order to remain above party for the sake of his welfare work, Lord Shaftesbury was the personification of
noblesse oblige
. He really believed he
was
his brother’s keeper—especially the wretchedest brother’s. He really believed that his endowments of rank, ability, and influence obligated him to help the underprivileged. He really believed that the charity and love preached by the gospels was the sum total of all man needed to know or practice, and he practiced them. To say that he was a friend and benefactor of the poor is to use one of those overfamiliar phrases that will pass under a reader’s eyes unnoticed. Yet Lord Shaftesbury was literally and exactly what the phrase says: a doer-of-good to the poor, to thieves, to lunatics, to cripples; to children, chained at five years old to coal carts underground, to wizened “climbing boys” squeezed into soot-filled chimneys, to all humans who existed in the half-starved, ragged, sick, shivering sixteen-hour-a-day squalor that was the life of the laboring class in those happily unregulated days. It was Lord Shaftesbury who forced
through Parliament the Ten Hours Bill (the Factory Act), credited with staving off revolution in the industrial counties, as well as the Mines Act, the Lunacy Act, and the Lodging House Act, which Dickens called the finest piece of legislation ever enacted in England up to that time.

What has all this to do with Palestine? it will be asked. The point is that Lord Shaftesbury’s zeal for “God’s ancient people,” as he always styled the Jews, was the outcome of this same entire acceptance of the Bible that had made him a philanthropist. He worked just as hard to restore the Jews to Palestine as he did to pass the Ten Hours Bill, though not one in ten who ever heard of Lord Shaftesbury is aware of it, famous men being generally remembered for their successes rather than their failures. But, despite all his zeal on the Jews’ behalf, it is doubtful if Lord Shaftesbury ever thought of them as a people with their own language and traditions, their own Torah and law and spiritual guides honored through a hundred generations. To him, as to all the Israel-for-prophecy’s-sake school, the Jews were simply the instrument through which Biblical prophecy could be fulfilled. They were not a people, but a mass Error that must be brought to a belief in Christ in order that the whole chain reaction leading to the Second Coming and the redemption of mankind might be set in motion.

Belief in the Second Advent, Lord Shaftesbury told his chosen biographer, Edwin Hodder, “has always been a moving principle in my life, for I see everything going on in the world subordinate to this great event.” And privately he wrote: “Why do we not pray for it every time we hear a clock strike?” Since, according to prophetic Scripture, the return of the Jews was indispensable to this great event, Lord Shaftesbury, says Hodder, “never had a shadow of a doubt that the Jews
were
to return to their own land.… It was his daily prayer, his daily hope. ‘Oh, pray for the peace of Jerusalem!’ were the words engraven on the ring he always wore on his right hand.”

Like all men in the grip of an intense belief, Lord Shaftesbury felt the touch of the Almighty on his shoulder, a commandment to work personally for the “great event.” In company with other great Victorians he never doubted that human instrumentality could bring about Divine purposes. This was a principle as yet unacceptable to the Jews. Not until they came to perceive, beginning in the 1860’s, that they would have to act as their own Messiah did the return to Israel actually become realizable and ultimately realized. Previously the Christians had been in more of a hurry to hasten the coming of their Messiah, either because they felt more in need of salvation or because the fatalism born of an old exile had not laid its deadening hand on them.

The urgency was felt again in England at the time of the Evangelical Revival. For now the pendulum had swung back again, after the Hellenic interlude of the eighteenth century, to the moral earnestness of another Hebraic period. Eighteenth-century skepticism had given way to Victorian piety; eighteenth-century rationalism was again surrendering to Revelation. And as the inevitable accompaniment of the return to Hebraism we find Lord Shaftesbury espousing the restoration of Israel in almost the same terms as the Cartwrights and the Puritan extremists. This was not because Hebraism in Matthew Arnold’s sense had anything to do with modern Jews, but because it was an ethos inherited from the Old Testament. And whenever Christians returned to the authority of the Old Testament they found it prophesying the return of its people to Jerusalem and felt themselves duty-bound to assist the prophecy.

The England of Lord Shaftesbury’s generation was almost as Bible-conscious as the England of Cromwell. The religious climate had warmed up considerably since the casual days when Pitt held cabinet meetings on Sunday. (A Shaftesbury would as soon have failed to keep the Sabbath as would an orthodox Rabbi.) During the eighteenth
century the old religious fervor of the Puritans flickered only among the Nonconformists. After the shock of the “atheistic” French Revolution it came back to the Established Church, warming its cold hearths, infusing a new piety into its fox-hunting, place-hunting complacency. This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism’s horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief. Churchgoing, preaching, absolute belief in the Bible became fashionable again. Trevelyan quotes a passage from the
Annual Register
of 1798: “It was a wonder to the lower orders throughout all parts of England, to see the avenues to the churches filled with carriages. This novel appearance prompted the simple country people to enquire what was the matter.”

The matter was neo-Puritanism, and once again England was to choke on an overdose of holiness. The Evangelicals, like the Puritans, have inspired ridicule by their fervor, their sense of mission, their preaching, Sabbath-worship, and bibliolatry. A wit has said of the Puritans’ struggle with the Crown that one side was wrong but romantic, the other right but repulsive, and we tend to think of the Evangelicals in the same light. A lot of ridicule has stuck to the reputation of Lord Shaftesbury, the archetype as well as the acknowledged lay leader of the Evangelical party. It hurts the economic historians, the Marxians and Fabians, to admit that the Ten Hours Bill, the basic piece of nineteenth-century labor legislation, came down from the top, out of a private nobleman’s private feelings about the Gospel, or that abolition of the slave trade was achieved not through the operation of some “law” of profit and loss, but purely as the result of the new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals. But take a historian who is not
riding the economic hobbyhorse and you will find him concluding, like Halévy, that it is impossible to overestimate the influence of the Evangelicals on their time. Granted that they were not thinkers, not reasonable or graceful or elegant; granted that, including Lord Shaftesbury, they were in some ways rather silly. Yet they were the mainspring of early Victorian England, and their effect remained long after their heyday was over. Even the opponents of religion in the nineteenth century were religious. Throughout the prolonged battle between faith and science, between the defenders of the Bible as Revelation and the discoverers of the Bible as history, which convulsed the Victorian age, splitting families and friends as sharply as any physical civil war, both sides shared equally the seriousness and high moral purpose inherited from the Puritans. There was nothing lax or latitudinarian about either.

In our day it has become almost impossible to appreciate justly the role of religion in past political, social, and economic history. We cannot do it because we have not got it. Religion is not part of our lives; not, that is, comparably to its part in pretwentieth-century lives. But the twentieth century is the child of the nineteenth, and if England in the twentieth century undertook the restoration of Israel to Palestine, it was because the nineteenth was by and large religiously motivated. Trevelyan chose as the four popular heroes of the age Shaftesbury himself, Gladstone, General Gordon, and Dr. Livingstone, because all of them regarded life as a religious exercise. Strachey, whether he admits it or not, chose his four Eminent Victorians, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon, for the same reason. Both Gladstone and Manning had Evangelical beginnings, and though one ended High Church and the other Roman Church, both acknowledged Shaftesbury’s inspiration. Manning, in fact, named him
the
representative figure of the age.

“I am an Evangelical of the Evangelicals,” proclaimed Lord Shaftesbury, and, as the name implies, his was a missionary movement. It was bound and determined to bring everyone else to acceptance of the same faith, to a share in the same salvation—especially the Jews.

For the Jews were the hinge. Without them there could be no Second Advent. They were the middle member of the Evangelical’s unbreakable syllogism. Biblical prophecy = Israel converted and restored = Second Advent. Of course, if rationalism, which cuts the prophetical connection between New Testament and Old, leaving only a historical connection, is allowed to crack the syllogism, the whole thing falls apart. Therefore rationalism must be held at bay. This Lord Shaftesbury understood well enough. “God give me and mine grace,” he prayed, to stem “the awful advance of saucy rationalism.” Thirty-odd years later he still had no use for the new “science” that men were trying to put on a par with God. Especially he disliked apologists for the Bible who attempted to reconcile it with science. A diary entry of 1871 says: “Revelation is addressed to the heart and not to the intellect. God cares little comparatively for man’s intellect; He cares greatly for man’s heart. Two mites of faith and love are of infinitely higher value to Him than a whole treasury of thought and knowledge. Satan reigns in the intellect; God in the heart of man.”

This remarkable passage expresses the core of the dominant religious philosophy in the first half of the Victorian epoch. It explains how it was possible for the Evangelicals to waste so much energy and good will on the delusion of converting the Jews. More intellect and less soul would have shown the project to be of doubtful success; but, as Shaftesbury would have said, to admit doubt was to admit Satan’s foot inside the door. And so they did not doubt. On the contrary, Charles Simeon, clerical leader of the Evangelical party, regarded conversion of the Jews, according to his biographer, “as perhaps the warmest interest of his life.”

Of all the gospel societies spawned around the turn of the century, the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews was for many years the most popular. Its list of noble patrons glittered like a court circular (including one Sir Oswald Mosley, vice-president of the Society in 1850). Its cornerstone for chapel and school buildings was laid in 1813 by the Duke of Kent, brother of the King and the father of Queen Victoria. It was considered by Basil Woodd, the great Evangelical educator, as his “favorite institution” among the swarm of groups that claimed his membership. Its prestige threatened to overshadow even that of the Church Missionary Society, whose preachers were compelled to take as their text, “Is He the God of the Jews Only?”

The Jews’ Society, as it was familiarly called, was to become the chief rostrum from which Lord Shaftesbury and his fellow enthusiasts pursued their darling object; establishment of an Anglican Bishopric in Jerusalem and restoration of an Anglican Israel on the soil of Palestine. Founded in 1808 in an upsurge of evangelical enthusiasm that produced the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society, the Church Missionary Society, and many others, the Jews’ Society set about its avowed purpose with a series of “demonstration sermons” every Wednesday and Sunday evening, designed to prove Jesus as the Jews’ Messiah. A church was leased from the French Protestants and renamed the Jews’ Chapel. A free school was established in the hope that Jewish families might be sufficiently attracted by the offer of free education to send their children. Within three years the school could boast nearly four hundred pupils, of whom, however, only the most uncharitably inquisitive would pause to note that fewer than a fifth were Jews.

After five years of existence the Society had a list of some two thousand contributors, whose names fill fifty pages of small type and whose donations ranged from a few shillings to one hundred pounds. It had acquired its
own real estate, a square renamed “Palestine Place,” in which the Chapel, schools, and Hebrew College for Missionaries were erected. It published its own monthly periodical,
Jewish Intelligence
. By 1822 its reputation was such that the annual meeting was held at Mansion House with the Lord Mayor officiating. By 1841 the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and twenty-three bishops, or “nearly all the Episcopal bench,” were added to the list of patrons, as well as one duke and assorted marquises, earls, viscounts, reverends, and right honorables. By 1850 the Society had seventy-eight missionaries employed in thirty-two branch offices from London to Jerusalem and an expenditure of twenty-six thousand pounds.

In the Society’s annual reports, from which these proud and happy facts are taken, the only modest claim is the number of converts; sometimes this is shyly omitted altogether. In 1839, after thirty years of operation, the Society had collected a total of two hundred and seven adult converts in London, or an average of six or seven a year. For its foreign missions it could report, for example, from Bagdad: Jewish population, 10,000, three missionaries, two converts. Or from Smyrna, Jewish population 1,500, no converts, mission closed. The Society was a success, of course, but not at the receiving end. However, that did not matter. Its beneficent sponsors continued to propagate Christianity among the Jews, intent on St. Paul’s dictum that the Church would be forever incomplete without them and unaware that this was a prospect of very little concern to the Jews.