Ends and Means

Abstract

We have already seen why Edmund Gosse was right to see his Victorian father as the last of the seventeenth-century Puritans. When Edmund Gosse, as a young man, went alone to London for the first time his father badgered him with a constant flow of letters. But the anxiety that his father expressed in these letters was not about his moral behaviour — the vulnerability of an innocent youth exposed to the temptations of London — but about the intellectual part of his son’s faith. As Gosse put it: ‘these incessant exhortations dealt, not with conduct, but with faith’, In this, as in so many other ways, the Victorian millenarian captured the authentic spirit of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Means do not matter if the ends are right; we discover ends from Scripture, above all from the Book of Revelation.

This propaganda of beneficence, this constant attention to the moral and physical improvement of persons who have been neglected, is quite recent as a leading feature of religion, though indeed it seems to have formed some part of the Saviour’s original design. It was unknown to the great preachers of the seventeenth century, whether Catholic or Puritan, and it offered but a shadowy attraction to my Father, who was the last of their disciples.¹