THE

ANDOVER REVIEW:

A RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY.

VOL. VIII. — NOVEMBER, 1887.. No. XLVII.

THE STORY OF THREE PANICS

BY ONE WHO HAS LIVED THEM THROUGH AND DOWN.

FEAR has been defined in one of the Apocryphal Books as a "betrayal of the succours which reason offereth." But fear which is an endemic latent in every human heart sometimes rises into an epidemic. It fastens on numbers, and like Virgil's fame "gathers volume as it grows."

This is the philosophy of panics. Men are gregarious, whether for good or evil, and it must be confessed that to go with the multitude is more common in the case of evil than good. Like a flock of sheep, where the bell-wether leads, there they follow and plunge madly into any pit of destruction, numbers only adding to their confusion.

Such is a panic; it is the sudden terror of multitudes when fear becomes contagious and the idle dream of one becomes a waking reality to many, as in the well-known story of Gideon when the hosts of the Midianites fled at the rebuke of one.

The most common form of panic known in history is when an armed mob miscalled an army loses touch of its commander, and when they cry, as in the story of the Conscript at Waterloo, “ Nous sommes trahis." Our own Bull Run was a panic of this kind, and the North soon laid the lesson to heart, and by its frank acceptance of defeat and courageous facing the consequences of its own presumption soon showed the stuff it was made of, and, like Frederick the Great, learned the lesson of success in war through defeat.

It is not every one who can thus profit by mistakes. But the people who can thus turn round on themselves and wring victory in this way out of defeat and glory out of disgrace may be said to have the springs of greatness in them. Such a people cannot go

Copyright, 1887, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

very far wrong, when they can thus make "stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things."

The first lesson, then, of a panic is not to repeat the mistake and to wait to see whether the danger is as formidable as it seems. In military matters the evil generally cures itself. Drill and disci pline, as was seen with our Northern levies after Bull Run, soon bring an army into such a state of confidence in itself and its commander that the last thing which it has to fear is a surprise of this kind. It may be beaten in the open, since a pitched battle is only a great pounding match, as the Duke of Wellington once described it. One of the two opposing hosts must beat a retreat. But a regular army, if compelled to retreat, will do so in good order, and a panic in the disgraceful sense of the term is impossible. But against a panic in civil life, whether arising from some commercial disturbance or from some agitation in the upper air of religious thought, there seems to be no remedy of this kind. On the stock exchange, panics are of such regular recurrence that designing men who want to "bear" this, and "bull" that, reckon on untying the wind-bags of popular credulity as part of their stock in trade. It is little if at all better in the religious world than in the commercial world. Christ's sheep have been described with sad irony as "silly sheep." Some one or other, as they say, is going to take away their faith. Some bold engineer, who in the end is usually hoist with his own petard, has undermined one of the buttresses of their faith. In one age it is Voltaire or the Cyclopædia of last century; then it is Strauss or Renan, German theology," whatever that means, or some new paleozoic proof that genesis and geology are more irremediably opposed than ever.

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As to the real cause of alarm we can only say, as the sea-captain to one of his trembling passengers, "Sir, there is fear but no danger." Coleridge was once asked did he believe in ghosts? and his answer was that "he had seen too many." This letting daylight in on night-walking is the only way to deal with panics in the religious world. I have lived through three such panics in English life, and if the experience of the "old folk at home" can be of any use in protecting the rising generation of the new world against the recurrence of such periodical fits of folly, I shall not regret having to recall this experience of one who has had nearly forty years' acquaintance, more or less intimate, with the ways and modes of thought of the so-called religious world.

I was an undergraduate at Cambridge when the first of the three panics which I have to record took place. I remember the

ballad-singers bawling up and down Trumpington Street and under the windows of my college, which looked out on Great St. Mary's, a ditty of which I can only recall one line:

"The Pope 's a'coming! I feel so queer,

All the old women are quaking with fear;
The Pope's a'coming! oh dear, oh dear!"

The wag who wrote this jingle must have had some wit of his
own. It was a case of all the old women 66
a'quaking with fear,"
and the strangest part of it was that the old women who quaked,
or pretended to do so, were heads of houses, dons, professors, and
others of a class far too educated not to see to the bottom of the
nonsense of the Papal Aggression cry. By far the most discredi-
table feature of this appeal to stale prejudice in the cry of "No
Popery" was that Lord John Russell, who of all men should have
been the last in the world to lend himself to such a movement, put
himself at its head in his celebrated Durham letter. Had it been
some well-known light of Exeter Hall, as Sir Harry Inglis, or
Hugh Macneill, or a Dean Close who came out in this line, men
of moderate views would have laughed at their own fears, and
felt that they were fleeing when no man was pursuing. They
would have seen in this alarm of Papal Aggression only an echo
of the old ascendancy temper which opposed the Catholic claims
in 1828 on the ground that no Catholic could be a loyal man on
account of his divided allegiance. But Lord John Russell, well
known as an hereditary Whig and the champion of civil and reli-
gious liberty all the world over, was assumed to be a sound Lib-
eral who would never raise a note of alarm needlessly. The most
disgraceful panics thus arise when the leaders of opinion, whom
the common crowd of men look up to, join, whether from design or
cowardice, in the cry of "Stop thief." Then the stampede be-
comes general, and the only safe course for a man of sense in
such circumstances is to stand aside and let the crowd bawl itself
hoarse. It will not be long before, "some crying one thing and
some another, and the more part not knowing why they have
come together," it will be possible to call in the town clerk of
Ephesus and so to dismiss the assembly with the caution that they
do nothing rashly.

This was the case with the Papal Aggression panic of 1850. It subsided almost as rapidly as it sprang up. Pio Nono, after his short exile at Gaeta, had returned to Rome in 1850 under the protection of the French arms. The yellow flag of the temporal power and the French tricolor waved side by side over Rome, and