The (almost really) Complete Works of Lewis Carroll

To the Editor of the St. James’s Gazette

Sir,—Will you permit me, as a tolerably senior member of this university, to make a few remarks on the miserable story of undergraduate profanity which appeared in your columns last Thursday? I wish to point out that whatever disgrace this outrage may be thought to entail on the junior portion of our residents must in justice be shared by the senior portion, who are setting them, more and more from year to year, the evil example of jesting about sacred things. This, our latest development of irreverence, startling though it be as a great and sudden stride on the downward path, is but the logical outcome of a fashion that has taken firm hold on Oxford society, and is slowly eating away, like a canker, the very heart of our religious life.

I have resided in this university for nearly forty years, and during that time have spent some seven or eight thousand evenings in college “common rooms,” and have heard, at a moderate computation, some twenty thousand anecdotes (many of them, of course, told for the twentieth time). My impression is that there has been a gradual, but very real and steady, change in the tone of the anecdotes that have thus obtained currency and won applause among the senior men. This change has been in one respect for the better, in that it is very seldom indeed now that any such anecdote depends for its point on some objectionable double entendre; but it has been in another respect distinctly for the worse, in that anecdotes whose point consists in a comic allusion to some Bible text, or the existence of evil spirits, or the reality of future punishment, or even the name of God, are more freely bandied about and more openly enjoyed, not only by laymen, to whom such things may possibly be mere myths not worthy of any respect, but even by ordained clergymen, to whom, if to any living men, these things are solemn realities.

I can easily imagine one of the very undergraduates who perpetrated this outrage sitting at breakfast with some reverend “don” and hearing from his lips, told with unmistakeable gusto, some utterly profane comic story, and afterwards saying to himself, “Well, if he, a sworn defender of Christianity, can thus make game of things he professes to believe, how much more may I, who neither believe nor profess to do so!”

But it is not in Oxford alone that these “signs of the times” are patent; they are to be found in our light literature, in parliamentary debates, in newspaper articles—nay, in our very pulpits. “He that runs may read” the change that is coming over English society generally. More and more are we beginning to treat as mere toys the words and symbols which represent the most sacred elements of the religion which, as a nation, we still profess; more and more is the acknowledgment of any real purpose in this life, or any practical belief in a life to come, made matter for gay banter or for cold sarcasm. We shudder to hear yelled along our streets the vile blasphemics which the “Salvation Army” has now made so common: but are they worse than others? Is not their noisy irreverence but the logical outcome of the whole drift of modern thought?

I copy the following sentence from an article, entitled “My First ‘Season,’” in the St. James’s Gazette of December 4:—“When Dixon the next morning dropped hints that as churchwarden he had heavy calls upon him, and that I had not told him whether I would take those two sittings which had hitherto gone with the house, I told him point-black that, when I wanted to hear what the Reverend Bellerby Lowder had to say, I would run my chance of finding an empty seat.”

This passage is worth noting, as a plain expression of the popular notion that the only possible motive, for attendance at public worship, is the wish to hear what the preacher “has to say.”

I also copy the following passage from the report of the meeting of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in the Standard of the same date:—

Mr. Parnell: It is my answer, and upon that answer I will stand or fall.

Mr. Healy: Then you will fall. (Cheers.) And now that both sides have made up their minds, what is the use of further debate? (Cheers and interruptions.)

Mr. Leamy: Away with him! Away with him!

Mr. John O’Connor: Crucify him! (Cries of “Oh!”)

Mr. Condon: I think that is an expression that should not be made use of. (Hear, hear.)

Mr. Sexton: Mr. Parnell, I think you will agree with me that the interests of good order cannot be advanced by observations which, under the circumstances, are nothing but blasphemous. (Cheers.)

I prefer to leave this shameful record without remark.

This Oxford scandal may yet, I hope, work some good, if only it serves to open the eyes of unsuspecting persons to the goal that lies before us, in case the coming years should carry on, as surly as hitherto, the work of the past. No real belief in Christianity can possibly long co-exist with a general practice of making all holy things ludicrous. A section of us may still cling to the ancient Faith: but it will be a dwindling section, holding its way, as best it can, through taunts, perhaps through persecutions, in the midst of a nation of infidels.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,