Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament/James Allanson Picton
VIII.
JAMES ALLANSON PICTON.
"'Come wander with me,' she said,
'Into regions yet untrod,
And read what is yet unread
In the manuscripts of God.'"
JAMES ALLANSON PICTON, the author of "The Mystery of Matter," is one of those rare persons who, to use his own quaint phrase, have "gone through materialism, and come out at the other side." Such an explorer, it will readily be admitted, well deserves a place in this or any other series of pioneers of progress. But I would rather not be the chronicler of his toilsome journey. No wonder if the St. Thomas'ssquare congregation, Hackney, found difficulty in following their spiritual guide on his dim and perilous way. But, though the path which Mr. Picton has cleft through the materialistic jungle be arduous for ordinary mortals to tread, it is, in my opinion, the best that has yet been cleared. "Narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Mr. Picton makes a clean sweep of the supernatural, but imparts to the natural a lofty significance which more than compensates for the loss. "All forms of finite existence may, for aught I care, be reduced to modes of motion; but motion itself has become to me only the manifestation of the energy of an infinite life, in "which it is a joy to be lost. To me the doctrine of an eternal continuity of development has no terrors; for, believing matter to be, in its ultimate essence, spiritual, I see in every cosmic revolution a 'change from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.' I can look down the uncreated, unbeginning past without the sickness of bewildered faith. My Father worketh hitherto. My sense of eternal order is no longer jarred by the sudden appearance in the universe of a dead, inane substance foreign to God and spiritual being."
"Thus at the roaring loom of time I ply,
And weave for God the mantle thou seest him by."
All religions, properly so called, conceive of phenomena as the outcome of an eternal, incomprehensible power, "which makes for righteousness" throughout the universe. Every irreligious system, on the other hand, regards the phenomenal altogether apart from its source. The question then arises. Which way of looking at the mighty enigma is the more philosophic? The positivists reply, and Mr. Bradlaugh replies, "Aye know nothing of the source, nor can know." But their parade of ignorance almost presupposes the reality of that of which they profess to be ignorant.
"The same intellectual constitution which makes science possible—the impulse to seek after the reason of things and their completeness—implies in its very germ an already existing, though inarticulate, belief in ultimate substance and in an infinite unity. Further, the very fact that our mental faculties cannot work without suggesting this dim majesty which is beyond their ken, compels a constant reference thereto, which, as it is involved in the laws of thought, cannot be without practical import." Our positivist brethren will, of course, seek to impugn the validity of such reasoning; but they are, as a rule, persons so superstitiously anti-superstitious that their objections may be discounted almost by anticipation. In any case Mr. Picton believes that he has passed clean through the prevalent materialism, and emerged into a spiritual effulgence, which irradiates, in some degree, the darkest crannies of human destiny. He has unbounded faith, that is to say loyalty, to the divine will, as he apprehends it.
But, if his own faith in the Eternal overflows, his charity towards those who have stopped midway in the ascent of the materialistic hill of difficulty is equally without limit. "Take the philosopher," he says, "who thought out, or thinks he has thought out, his system of the universe. Finding no place therein for a God such as he was taught to speak about and dream about in his childish years, he calmly says, 'There is no God at all.' … He is confident in his system of the universe, and is assured that it always works together under the same conditions to the same ends. He would stake his life upon the certainty that impurity and duplicity and dishonesty must bring misery and confusion into the commonwealth. Now, such a man has far more trust in the Lord than ever he supposes. Through despair of presenting that inconceivable Being in any form whatever to his consciousness, he fancies that he dispenses with the thought entirely. But the more nearly he comes to a realization of oneness in that system of the universe which he thinks he has wrought out, the more nearly does he come to the thought of God. The more confidently he rests in the certain working of moral as well as of physical laws, the more does he manifest that which, in our minds, is equivalent to trust in the Lord. Under any form of religion, and under no form of professed religion, then, the exhortation of the text, 'Trust in the Lord and do good,' may be carried out, and its creed asserted." In a word, Mr. Picton's charity induces him to ascribe religion to the professedly irreligious. He compels them to come in.
Discussing the problem of the immortality of the soul, he says, "We should not repine if the larger life beyond death remains a hope too grand for any earthly form. I live,—this I know; and all around me is a Power, immeasurable, inscrutable, of which I can only think that it lives more grandly and mightily than I, folding me in its embrace, and making a reverent feeling of my own nothingness the supreme bliss. Whence I came I know not; whither I go I cannot tell: but every moment of true communion with the Infinite opens out eternity. Whatever tenfold complicated change has happened or may come, however strangely the bounds which now limit my personal life may be broken through, however unimaginably my consciousness of God may be enlarged, it is impossible that the more real can be merged in the less real; and, while material phenomena are but phantoms, God himself only is more real than I."
The above quotations give but a faint impression of this remarkable work, "The Mystery of Matter," which, along with an earlier volume, "New Theories and the Old Faith," goes further towards revivifying true religion, by rendering it credible, than all the heavy tomes of orthodox theology which have appeared within the last decade. Mr. Picton has combined science, logic, disciplined imagination, and fervent piety in the execution of a task of immense difficulty; and the result is a cogent testimony to the indestructibility of essential religion in the soul of man.
"Still Thou talkest with Thy children
Freely as in eld sublime;
Humbleness and truth and patience
Still give empire over time."
James Allanson Picton was born in Liverpool in the historic year of reform, 1832. His father, whose name was recently so honorably before the public as the originator and chairman of the Liverpool Free Library and Museum, was then a well-to-do architect, a stanch Liberal in a community abounding in political re-actionaries, a cultivator of letters in a hive of commercial industry. He is the author of the "Memorials of Liverpool," a model work of the land, and would now have been occupying the mayoralty chair in the town council but for unscrupulous aldermanic partisanship.
At an early age young Picton was sent to what was then known as the High School, the upper branch of the Mechanics' Institution, where up to his sixteenth year he continued to make steady progress in all the ordinary, and some of the extraordinary, branches of study. On leaving school, Picton entered his father's office, and for the next three years of his life diligently set himself to master the requirements of the paternal profession, which, if he had continued to follow it, would pretty certainly have been to him a lucrative calling. But eventually he abandoned it for, as he believed, a higher, if less remunerative, occupation.
Inspired from his youth up with philanthropic sentiments, Picton had become an enthusiastic Sunday-school teacher; and this experience led him to think of the ministry as a suitable sphere of action. He was never very orthodox in his religious beliefs: how could a mind capable of such profound speculation so be? But he had an eye to his main object,—the moral elevation of the poor and ignorant; and he decided that the pastoral fulcrum of Independent Nonconformity was the best for his purpose, which may be doubted. Accordingly, at nineteen years of age, he resumed his studies, and was entered simultaneously as a student of the Lancashire Independent College and of Owens College, Manchester. At the latter institution he stood first in classics at his final examination. In 1855 he took the master's degree in classics at London University, and his academic studies were at an end. In 1856 Mr. Picton's career as an Independent minister began. The start was not promising. Suspected of heterodoxy, he was black-balled by the zealous shepherds of the Manchester ministers' meeting, who appear to have applied to him pretty much the now somewhat obsolete argument, " He is an atheist. Ecce signum! he doesn't believe in the Devil."
"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word."
The orthodox pastors, however, had gone a step too far. Public opinion strongly manifested itself against such an act of barefaced intolerance; and, by a suspension of rules, Mr. Picton was admitted to the pastorate of a congregation at Cheetham Hill, Manchester.
His work there lay chiefly among the poor and destitute, for whom no man seemed to care. For the children he composed a model little "Catechism of the Gospels;" and for the instruction of adults he and Mr. Arthur Mursell delivered weekly lectures on suitable subjects in the large room of a "ragged school." In 1862, however, while thus beneficently engaged, the bull's-eye of orthodoxy was again turned on him. In connection with the centenary of "Black Bartholomew," he published a discourse entitled "The Christian Law of Progress," which was pronounced to be "of dangerous tendency." Thereupon the heretic removed to Leicester, where he succeeded to Dr. Legge's charge; but his "tendencies," it is deplorable to relate, became worse instead of better. He fell into bad company, particularly that of Mr. Coe, the Unitarian minister, and a powerful contingent of Radical working-men, whom he was in the habit of addressing in his chapel on Sunday afternoons on such unhallowed topics as "True Radicalism," "The Rights of Man," the death of Ernest Jones, the Jamaica outrages under Gov. Eyre, &c. As in Galilee, so in Leicester, the common people heard their teacher gladly; but the uncommon folks took a different view of the matter. What amounted to a vote of want of confidence in Mr. Picton 's ministry was passed; and, though very active steps were taken to prevent his departure from Leicester, the heresiarch felt constrained to turn his face towards our metropolitan Babylon, which, with all her drawbacks, is generally large-hearted enough to welcome able and earnest exponents of the most diverse opinions, whether religious or political.
In 1869 Mr. Picton succeeded to the pastorate of St. Thomas's Square, Hackney. Here his "tendencies" were as bad as ever. He resumed his evil habit of Sunday lecturing, and the intelligent artisans of the neighborhood flocked to hear him. For two successive seasons the critical period of English history from the reign of Elizabeth to the revolution of 1688 was subjected to systematic criticism, and Mr. Picton was never more gratified than by the appreciation of solid instruction exhibited by his auditors. A working-men's club was next started,—an institution which survives in the Borough of Hackney Working-men's Club, one of the most useful and prosperous undertakings of the kind in London. In 1870 preparations for the first London School Board election began, and Mr. Picton was among those who were solicited by the electors to offer themselves as candidates. He complied; and, though then necessarily but little known to the general London public, secured a seat through the devotion of his friends, more particularly those of the working-class. And the confidence then reposed in him was twice renewed with even greater emphasis by the constituency. For three years he filled a most responsible post on the committee of school management, before which are laid all the details of school affairs.
Throughout an advocate of "education, secular, compulsory, and free," he was not unnaturally believed by many besides myself to have deserted the Radical standard in favor of the present immoral "compromise" of the religious difficulty,—the offspring of a foul liaison between church and chapel. But this, I am assured, is a misapprehension of Mr. Picton's position. Finding that the compromisers, while pretending to exclude from the schoolrooms one catechism, had practically introduced as many creeds as the total number of sects to which board teachers belong, he exerted himself, with very limited success, to mitigate the evil by increasing the moral at the expense of the theological instruction. As it is, Mr. Picton, after nine years' hard work on the board, has been compelled, chiefly by the unsatisfactory state of his health, to seek a temporary respite from public duties; and the minds of our children are meantime at the mercy of a motley crew of Romanist, Anglican, Ritualist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Unitarian, and atheist instructors, to make or mar at their good pleasure. The result is easy to predict,—a general sapping of the foundations, both of religion and morals. Birmingham in this matter has fallen low enough; but she has not jet reached the metropolitan depth of degradation.
Some months ago Mr. Picton resigned his pastorate of the St. Thomas's-square congregation, and he is at present enjoying a well-merited rest from his labors. He does not intend to resume ministerial functions. I believe, but possibly to throw his entire energies into literary and political pursuits. The gifted authoress of "The True History of Joshua Davidson" hazards the prediction that if Christ, who "went about doing good," were to re-appear on the earth in our day, it would be in the character of a Radical politician; and, if it is meant simply that the platform and the press are now more powerful agencies for good or evil than the pulpit, it were hard to differ from her. Able, single-minded men like Picton are sadly wanted in Parliament; and the churches will, as a rule, be glad to be rid of persons of such "dangerous tendencies." His political contributions to "The Fortnightly," "Macmillan," and "The Weekly' Dispatch," have, apart from his platform utterances, marked him out as a vigorous political thinker, on whom Radical constituencies should keep an eye. He is a tried soldier in the ranks of democracy, who well deserves promotion at the people's hands, all the more so because he would be the last to seek it.