The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
As to drums and flags, we should never think of encouraging these
as toys for our children lest we should excite in their minds a warlike,
and consequently a wicked spirit. ... We will try to prepare them,
not to be generals in the field, but heroes in the moral world. 25
Boys had to suppress their masculinity to be good Christians: ‘Now, why
is it you boys are always ashamed of your best side – anxious to be thought
gruff and hard-hearted? I fancy it is because you dread all things to be
called unmanly – “soft”.’ Their mothers were the source of, and should
remain the constant inspiration for, their true religion:
You will stand by her open grave in the churchyard, and you will
weep – for men and boys shed tears – ay! – hot tears over their
mothers’ graves, and there will come back to your memory all the
kindly things she did for you, and all the good words she said to
you, and all the tears she shed for you, and the sacrifices of pleasure
she made for you, until the thought of it all swells your heart to
bursting. Yes, one day you will remember! . . . Never get too big, or
too busy, or too manly for mother’s love and mother’s counsel. 26
Adult men were constantly challenged in religious discourse about their
masculinity. In 1878, the British Messenger mounted a series on ‘Are you
a man?’
My friend, are men – real, downright, genuine men – men that would
meet God’s high purpose, plentiful now? Has our boasted civilization
largely produced them? Do they congregate in our towns and
great commercial cities? Have our political schemes and parties, even
our numerous churches and chapels, evoked them? Is the crop really
good? 27
Even the men of ‘so-called Christian nations’ did not supply ‘what in God’s
sight would be accounted a man’. Heaven’s definition was at variance with
earth’s: ‘We are fully aware that according to men’s own ideas of themselves
there are plenty of men, that they are to be numbered by the million,
and no bad specimens of the race either’. But men defined manly qualities
in physical terms: courage, muscular strength, brains, independence. These
were not God’s definitions: ‘to be a man, a true and real man, we must
keep the “body in subjection,” put a rein upon the appetites, and a bridle
on the passions. So far as anyone fails in this, he ceases to be a man, and
takes level with the brutes.’ The ‘unclean person’, anyone who ‘lives after
the flesh’, is not a man. Even intellect is not enough: ‘Is the drunkard, with
brain soddened in strong drink, a man?’ 28 A true man has feminine qualities;
he has sympathy and compassion for other men, is righteous, ‘has
mastery over his lower self’, and has ‘the courage of the truth’. True men
have been ‘a moral and spiritual power in the world’: Abraham, Paul,
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