THE RELIGIOUS CHARLATAN.

 When Dickens died there were some hard things said of him as a caricaturist of religion. Yet the Bishop of Manchester did not find that fault with him, and Dean Stanley, who stood by his grave in Westminster Abbey when he was laid in it, spoke of him as a faithful and good man. It is undeniable that he liked to show up Stiggins and Chadband and Pecksniff, and the moral pocket-handkerchiefs and the Borrioboola-Gha mission ; and in his unfinished story of Edwin Drood there is some of his sharpest and most subtle satire in the conversations between Mr. Crisparkle and the Dean of the Cloisterham Cathedral, and all the old life-long contempt of moral pretence in his broad and absurd sketch of Mr. Honeythunder, the professional philanthropist. Thackeray, too, in the Reverend Lemuel Whey, exposes himself to the same charge of caricaturing religion. There are good people who gravely make this charge. There are those who wish that at least the two great novelists had not seemed to be ridiculing serious things. Indeed, and is Mr. Dombey a serious thing ? Is Chadband, as king, in a spirit of love, "What is terewth ? " a serious thing ? Is Stiggins a serious thing ? And because these impostors are pilloried, are Fénelon, or Charles Wesley, or Dr. Channing brought into contempt ? Would not Wilberforce and Clarkson and Garrison laugh as heartily as any of us at the fine eyes of Mrs. Jellyby so firmly fixed upon the woes of Borrioboola-Gha that she cannot see the holes in her children's stockings ? Dickens and Thackeray, and sound, healthy creative genius everywhere and always, laugh to scorn the unctuous religious charlatan, and the world of honest people cries Amen. The story-tellers and the dramatists, whose business is to describe life, paint him because they see him on all sides. The huge smiling Captain Gullivers take the ludicrous Lilliputian upon their finger, and show him to the amusement of mankind, and the little creature has no resource but to insist that the great truth-teller is a blasphemer. No, no ; the religious charlatan, the man whose shallow vanity, ignorance, rhetoric, histrionic extravagance, and unbounded impudence are displayed upon the platform or in the pulpit, is the real caricaturist of religion, and the blasphemer of all high and holy things. And he is sure vehemently to denounce Dickens for making fun of serious subjects. The business of the religious charlatan, to which he assiduously devotes his time and efforts, is to advertise himself. His life is passed in feeding his own vanity. He seizes every occasion to present himself to public attention; and metaphorically to stand on his head and dance the tight rope for public applause. He is a harlequin, a clown, appearing in the most unexpected places. The moment you see his face you smell sawdust. When he opens his mouth you expect the familiar salutation, " Here we are again ! " There is a circus atmosphere all around you. The throng is as eager for the expected excitement as an old Park pit when the curtain was about to rise upon Finn in Paul Pry, or Fanny Ellsler in the Cracovienne. Human genius would be unjust to itself and to the world if it did not expose this masker to the sober censure of mankind. For it is to prick such bubbles and scourge such charlatans with scorn that Providence vouchsafes the penetrating eye and the faithful hand to the poet and the story-teller. Their scorching touch avenges the wrong done by the religious charlatan both to Heaven and to human nature. And that no comedy may be wanting, as he writhes and withers under the consciousness of general contempt, he exclaims that to unmask him is to lay guilty hands upon the Lord's anointed. This religious charlatan, of course, speaks with the authoritative air of one who has been admitted to the Divine secrets. He affects a familiarity with Providence, and, as if he had private celestial information, gravely announces that this or that is "God's purpose," and that " God means " so and so. A shallow coxcomb, whose sole object is to make some kind of impression upon the crowd before him, and who has evidently no fine spiritual sympathies or interests — who knows neither human life nor the wants of men and women, and to whom the ecstatic heights and awful depths of human experience are as unknown as the sublime secrets of science or the noblest aspirations of the soul — flippantly sets forth the Divine intentions to hearts smitten by unspeakable sorrow, or hungering and thirsting for the truth. And while he does this, while, panoplied in ignorance and conceit, he calls himself the Lord's interpreter, the religious charlatan is furious with the Pope, for instance, for doing the same thing. Who is this impostor ? Against whom is all this levelled ? Against nobody but the religious charlatan. Does the gentle reader not know him ? As he peruses his newspaper, which has now become the history of every day, Sundays not excepted, does he never recognise in the detailed report of speech, or sermon,or prayer, the religious acrobat, thimble-rigger, charlatan ? Is there no name — say, Mawworm, Pecksniff, Joseph Surface — which he often sees in his paper, and which suggests to him one thing only, and that thing humbug ? Does he never find himself in a public meeting at which he hears a speech full of ignorance and denunciation atoning for its folly by its fury, and giving the quasi-sanction of religion to the absurdest crudities and to suggestions equally sanguinary and silly ? Does he not know that the orator really means nothing evil, means, indeed, nothing whatever except to make himself a little conspicuous, to produce momentary applause, to be mentioned in the morning papers— in a word, to advertise himself! And when the scientific satirist, Dickens or Thackeray, puts a pin through the flimsy babbler, and labels him religious charlatan, is the satirist blaspheming and sneering at religion! Or if the gentle reader strays into a church and finds a man in the pulpit evidently straining to say something either in prayer or sermon which will be odd enough, or grotesque enough, or startling enough to be seized by a sensational reporter to be printed in a newspaper, something which is plainly meant to give the speaker a little notoriety, does it never occur to him that he is listening to a religious charlatan ! The charlatan is not wholly responsible for himself. When religious societies seek first for a preacher who will "draw," they promote charlatanism. The ground-and-lofty tumbler presents himself, and the crowd comes in to gape and stare. The whole affair is no longer religious. Having built a costly church, the society must pay for it, and as the payment depends upon the crowd, and the crowd upon the attraction, there must be an attraction suitable to the tastes of the crowd. Knowing that his "attractiveness " or power to "draw " is the real tenure of his position, why should the attraction be blamed if he tries constantly to leap higher and jump further? There, is no prosperous religious charlatan at this moment who does not know that if he should stop his tricks to-morrow he would be thought to have become tame and commonplace, and he would feel that his position was in danger. Poor fellow ! there is nothing for it but leaping higher and jumping further. The moral effect of the religious charlatan is most depressing. The simple seeker who hears his stage thunder, his flippant familiarities with the Divine counsels, his unsparing denunciations of sinners, his delight in depicting a theatrical hell with all the approved " properties," and the eagerness with which he plunges others into it, while he assumes his own high favour with Heaven, inevitably asks, "What kind of Heaven can it be of which this sanctimonious popinjay is an ambassador, and what Divine truth can be properly interpreted by such a harlequin ?" The simple seeker measures the charlatan by the standard of the Master, and contrasts him with the lovely portrait of the true disciple in the Deserted Village. He thinks of John Wesley in the Foundry, of George Fox under the tree, of Roger Williams in his boat, of Dr. Channing in his pulpit, of George Whitefield upon the common ; of the sublime heroism and self-sacrifice and suffering of the saints, young and old ; of the simple fidelity and purity and earnestness and modesty of the Christian character and life in the new days as in the old, in the familiar circumstances of this time as in the stranger setting of the past — and his contempt for the charlatan deepens into indignation as he thinks of the Christian. The clown in the circus is amusing, but the charlatan in the pulpit is repulsive. You can not dislike the clown, but the charlatan is a moral nuisance.—Harpers Magazine.

Yass Courier (NSW : 1857 - 1929), Tuesday 16 June 1874, page 4