Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.

His Religion

His Religion.

The religion of the man of action is usually traditional or orthodox. All the social forces by which the ruler is himself ruled tend to breed in him a hereditary awe of the Upper Powers. Herbert Spencer has proved, and all history confirms the argument, that the earthly and heavenly hierarchies are inseparably connected. Whichever may be first—whether the spiritual is the earlier, as Dionysius the Areopagite, Quinet, and Fustel de Coulanges maintain, or whether the celestial is modelled on the terrestrial, as Voltaire wonld have said and Spencer asserts—the two closely reflect one another. Hence the secular arm commonly supports the ecclesiastical, and George III. made it a rule to stand up while the Hallelujah Chorus was being performed, as if it had at least an equal claim to such an honour with the National Anthem. The religion of the governing classes is usually conventional and is rarely personal, as with Cromwell, or sceptical, as with Frederick the Great, or philosophical, as with William von Humboldt, or universally tolerant, as with Alexander Severus or Akbar. It is now and then innovating, as was shown by Constantine and the early European kings who accepted Christianity and, at a later date, Protestantism. Sometimes it is reactionary, as with the Emperor Julian and the many sovereigns who have apostatized from Protestantism to Catholicism, but then the reversion is towards more religion, not less.

Grey's religion was that of the ruler or the ruling class. He was an orthodox Anglican, and, although he associated familiarly with avowed freethinkers, two of whom—the President and the Vice-President of the Freethought Associations of New Zealand—were members of his cabinet in 1877-8, and in private he was tolerant of dissent, he never abandoned his early position. His first book is strongly impregnated with the religious sentiment, and he avows that in times of trial he sought for consolation and support in religious beliefs and the perusal of the Bible. It is difficult for those who knew him in the last twenty years of his life to take those simple confessions quite seriously and equally difficult to doubt his sincerity. Religious faith of some kind was deeply ingrained in him. During his West Australian explorations, when more than once death seemed imminent, he fell back on religious consolations, and almost fifty years afterwards he did the same thing. He kept the Bible by him in 1838-9, and in 1884 he got up, as he confessed, at five o'clock in the morning to read the New Testament—in the original, it was understood. Yet there were few outward manifestations of belief. He quarrelled violently with the missionaries in New Zealand, but on just grounds. Therein resembling persons so unlike as Milton, Bismarck, and Henry Drumrnond,—all of them professedly religious men—he did not, in later years at least, attend Divine worship. In 1884, at a time of great trial and possible calamity, he began to conduct religious worship at Kawau on Sunday mornings. He read the Church of England service with simple dignity and with some impressiveness, but delivered or read no discourse. His library was not lacking in religious books. He possessed a complete set of the once-famous Tracts for the Times, and he had the works of Theodore Parker. To these in his trouble he had recourse, but found "something wanting" in them, as well he might. What is wanting—is it not?—is what Christians call the Cross of Christ—the gaining of eternal life through death to self and the world. That profound perception of the law of sacrifice and the darkening of "the Father's" face, or of the world and the cosmos, to the innocent wronged one generates a deeper theology than Parker in his optimism ever knew. It is also the supreme lesson which men of Grey's stamp never learn.

The problem is much of the same character as Bismarck's professions and practice present. "Fancy Bismarck believing in a God!" it was said when Busch's candid reminiscences, flavoured with pious declarations, were published. Bismarck was probably as sincere a believer as Cromwell, whose sincerity is not now so often disputed as it used to be. We shape the Deity in our own image, and the God of Cromwell, Bismarck, and Grey was doubtless a very different being to the Heavenly Father of the Gospels or the Christ-God who supplanted him.

In spite of his surprising perusal of the New Testament, Grey was not a New Testament Christian. The Beatitudes by no means expressed his ideal of life. He was not humble. "Blessed are the merciful" did he read —he who never spared? ''Blessed are they that hunger and thirst"—but one's sense of congruity is too severely shocked. He let the sun go down upon his wrath. Often cruel, hard-hearted, oppressive, tyrannical, relentless, and savagely vindictive, he was at times an old savage, whose heart had never been softened by religious influences, but only hardened by tragic experiences of life. His was an unawakened mind, and, though he speculated on many topics, he never allowed his clear intelligence to play on any of the mysteries of the Christian faith. He probably would have said, with Lord Acton, that he was not conscious of ever in his life having "held the slightest shadow of a doubt about any dogma of the" Church of England. His (believers in revealed religion would say) was an unconverted nature, where the primitive passions had never been purified in Heavenly furnaces and the principles of the natural man had never been illuminated by Divine light. We need not too harshly condemn one who had many a hard battle to fight, and who generally fought for the good cause. Only a few fighting statesmen—Cromwell, Guizot, Montalembert, Gladstone, McKinley,—have in the strife preserved "the whiteness of their souls."