CHARLES DICKENS AND CHRISTIANITY.

 CHARLES DICKENS.— Injudicious friends may do a man as much harm as his most bitter foes, and we feel that this is likely to be the case with Charles Dickens, whose indiscriminating eulogists, in claiming for him merits which he did not possess, are drawing attention to defects which otherwise might have been suffered to remain in obscurity. In the praises of his genius we fully agree, albeit we think that even here there is a tendency to great extravagance. Such excess, however, is so natural in the state of feeling which the suddenness of his removal from us awakened, and in the desire to do ample justice to one of so genial and kindly a nature, that we certainly should not have taken notice of it but for the attempt on the part of some to hold up Charles Dickens as a great Christian teacher. Foremost among the offenders is Dean Stanley, whose sermon in Westminster Abbey, in which he surpassed himself in the extreme breadth of his views, was singularly feeble and injudicious. Of all the needless tasks such a man could have undertaken about the most needless was that of putting into the mouths of the young a defence for novel reading, and though Dickens towers far above the novelists, about the last claim we should set up for him is that of having set forth "profoundly Christian and evangelical truth." A teacher of the virtues of benevolence, of the evils of asceticism, of the blessedness of a jovial happy spirit of the duty of judging kindly the foibles and even the occasional sins of our neighbours, he was ; but a man may be all this without being the preacher of any profound Christian truth. We are glad to have it on the testimony of his friends that his reverence of our Lord was deep and sincere, but we fail to find evidence of this in his writings. That he had no sympathy with any of our Christian organisations, and that his charity was hardly so catholic as to include within its range men who appeared to him to be over-righteous, is, on the contrary, made abundantly clear. We would fain have forgotten that he has left behind him the portraits of Stiggins and Chadband, two of the most disgraceful caricatures in our language ; but these unwise praises force the recollection upon us, and prevent us from swelling the chorus. It is impossible at present to form a just estimate as to his permanent place in English literature ; but when the excitement of the time is past it will be a matter of surprise that even in that idolatry of genius to which we are so prone there should have been any to hold him up as one who has set before the Church some profound views of Christian truth or roused it to the discharge of neglected Christian duties.— English Independent.

Sydney Mail (NSW : 1860 - 1871), Saturday 15 October 1870, page 15