- Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up his verse, as a loose writer would.26 He needs all the three;-especially those three, and no more than those- ‘creep’, and ‘intrude’, and ‘climb’; no other words would or could serve the turn, and no more could be added. For they exhaustively comprehend the three classes, correspondent to the three characters, of men who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical power. First, those who ‘creep’ into the fold; who do not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility of office or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, and unawares direct, the minds of men. Then those who ‘intrude’ (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the common crowd. Lastly, those who ‘climb’, who, by labour and learning, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and authorities, and become ‘lords over the heritage’, though not ‘ensamples to the flock’.
- Now go on:-
Of other care they little reckoning make, Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast. Blind mouths-
I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly.
Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the Church – those of bishop and pastor.
A ‘Bishop’ means ‘a person who sees’.
A ‘Pastor’ means ‘a person who feeds’.
The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.
The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,- to be a Mouth.
Take the two reverses together, and you have ‘blind mouths’. We may advisably follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule; though it may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke: it is the king’s office to rule; the bishop’s office is to oversee the flock; to number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies, of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain the history, from childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back street, Bill and Nancy, knocking each other’s teeth out!-Does the bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon them? Has he had his eye upon them? Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop, though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop,- he has sought to be at the helm instead of the masthead; he has no sight of things. ‘Nay,’ you say, it is not his duty to look after Bill in the back street’. What! the fat sheep that have full fleeces – you think it is only those he should look after while (go back to your Milton) ‘the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw’ (bishops knowing nothing about it), ‘daily devours apace, and nothing said’?
‘But that’s not our idea of a bishop.’27 Perhaps not; but it was St Paul’s; and it was Milton’s. They may be right, or we may be; but we must not think we are reading either one or the other by putting our meaning into their words.
- I go on.
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw.
This is to meet the vulgar answer that ‘if the poor are not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritual food.’
And Milton says, ‘They have no such thing as spiritual food; they are only swollen with wind.’ At first you may think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of ‘Spirit’. It is only a contraction of the Latin word ‘breath’, and an indistinct translation of the Greek work for ‘wind’. The same word is used in writing, ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth’; and in writing, ‘So is every one that is born of the Spirit’;28 born of the breath, that is; for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it in our words ‘inspiration’ and ‘expire’. Now, there are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled,- God’s breath, and man’s. The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man’s breath – the word which he calls spiritual – is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last, and fatalest sign of it, is that ‘puffing up’. Your converted children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to the fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and, pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work;- these are the true fog children29 -clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bagpipes for the fiends to pipe with – corrupt, and corrupting,- ‘Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw’. - Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their interpretation of this power: for once, the latter is weaker in thought; he supposes both the keys to be of the gate of heaven; one is of gold, the other of silver: they are given by St Peter to the sentinel angel; and it is not easy to determine the meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who ‘have taken away the key of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves.’
We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see, and feed; and of all who do so it is said, ‘He that watereth, shall be watered also himself.’ But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered himself; and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight – shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter: he who is to be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That command to the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, ‘Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out’,30 issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for every help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced; so that he is more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and farther outcast as he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as ‘the golden opes, the iron shuts amain’.
- We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is rightly called ‘reading’; watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves always in the author’s place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be
