The Anglicanism of Tristrarn Shandy: Latitudinarianism at the Limits

CAROL STEWART

In criticism of the last twenty to thirty years, arguments for the religious character of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) have been employed in the service of a conservative interpretation of the novel. On one level, this has served as a corrective to those responses to Tristrarn Shandy which would make it a post-modern narrative avant la lettre. The absence of closure in Sterne’s novel is not to be seen as proof that there is (as post-modernists would have it) nothing beyond - or nothing but - language: Sterne’s scepticism is to be seen, rather, as an acknowledgement of the limitations of human knowledge and the methods of human enquiry.’ In an influential article, Donald R. Wehrs placed Sterne in a tradition of ‘fideistic’ scepticism shared by Erasmus and Montaigne.’ This tradition arose as a response to the denial of Roman authority by Martin Luther. Luther contended that whatever the individual conscience is compelled to believe on reading Scripture constitutes truth: the Catholic apologists responded by pointing to the impossibility of certain knowledge. So much more reason, then, to suspend judgement and to rely, ultimately, on the traditions and authority of the Church. The scepticism of Erasmus, Montaigne and Cervantes, argued Wehrs, was also Sterne’s, as, presumably, was his ultimate reliance on ‘traditional’ faith, and his attitude of Christian humility. J. T. Parnell also argued for Sterne’s indebtedness to Erasmus and Montaigne, as well as his affinities with Swift, a writer whom many would consider very different in terms of tone and attitude.3 For Parnell, Sterne stood in the broad tradition of European Christian humanism. Parnell, too, characterised Sterne’s scepticism as conservative in tendency, and was very much in sympathy with Melvyn New’s vision of Sterne as an Augustan moralist, a view expressed in its earliest form in New’s Laurence Sterne as Satirist (1969).4 Here New argued that the conservative ethic of Sterne’s sermons Gnds its continuance in Tristrarn Shandy, a work where, for New, human folly is implicitly measured against absolute standards. Those ‘normative values’ are in turn provided by orthodox Anglicanism.

In his role as editor of the Florida edition of Sterne’s works, and most particularly as editor of the Sermons, New has reinforced this view of the author by encyclopaedic reference to Sterne’s sources in Anglican sermons and other pious works. While the New of the Florida edition of the Sermons found it difficult to support a reading of Tristrarn Shndy as theologically orthodox - conceding in his preface to the Notes that Sterne might have

British Journalfor Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (zoofj), p.239-250 OBSECS 0141-867X

240 CAROL STEWART

written the novel without thinking very much about his religious beliefs - he nevertheless made many points of connection between sermons and novel, thus making a case for the continuity of attitudes in both.5 New’s edition of the Sermons has attracted some adverse comment. Judith Hawley, for one, pointed to New’s omission of Sterne’s original and provocative title - The Sermons of Mr. Yorick - and his persistent down-playing of the personal and biographical dimension of the sermons.6 Paul Goring has argued that New’s insistence on the conventionality of Sterne’s sermons is overstated: one clerical contemporary of Sterne’s, at least, found the Sermons of Mr. Yorick eccentric and improper.7 In his recent Life, Ian Campbell Ross has also remarked that the not uncommon contemporary view that Sterne’s sermons were at best moral essays should at least qualify the view of Sterne as an entirely orthodox Anglican preacher.8 Useful though the contextualisation of Tristram Shandy by Wehrs and Parnell may have been, I would argue that it has led to another kind of anachronism: an aligning of Sterne and his novel with attitudes some 150 years or more distant in time without any acknowledgement of the mutations those ideas must necessarily have undergone in the intervening period, not to mention the difference of emphasis which must arise in writing of a different national, and confessional tradition.

The criticism of New, Wehrs and Parnell has also acted to obscure the very real liberal tendencies Sterne absorbed from the ‘Latitudinarian’ tradition, tendencies which he exploited and pushed to the limit in the secular medium of a novel. Latitudinarianism itself, it may be said, does indeed stand in the broad tradition of European Christian humanism, but it has a particular Anglican inflection and arises in a specific context. In order to maintain unity within the Church, the Latitudinarians of the seventeenth century stressed simplicity of doctrine, the moral life as the essence of Christianity, and a charitable attitude to religious difference, within certain limits: atheists and Roman Catholics were not to be tolerated. This limited tolerance is both replicated and expanded in Tristram Shandy. As readers of Tristram Shandy will know, Walter and Toby Shandy each have their own eccentric interests: Walter his systems of noses, and his arcane authorities, Toby his counterscarps and fosses. These are peculiarities that may be tolerated, so long as they do not disturb the peace. As Tristram writes: ‘so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, - pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?’9 From the 1640s onwards, calls for toleration in religion in England came from two very distinct groups: the Puritans or Dissenters on one hand, and on the other the moderate Anglicans.” William Chillingworth’s The Religion ofl’rotestants, A Safe Way to Salvation (1638) is one of the earliest expressions of this moderate tendency. It finds possibly its fullest expression in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, the ‘first generation’ of Latitudinarians. John Smith preached that it was wrong to condemn the creeds of other men, and that the mark of true religion was a free and generous spirit.” ‘Universal Charity’, states Whichcote, ‘is a Thing final in religion’.12

The Anglicanism of ‘Tristram Shandy ’ 241

In a sermon entitled ‘That the Unity of the Church is carefully maintained by sincere Christians’, Whichcote addresses the issue of disagreements between Protestants. All, he argues, ought to conform to the Anglican Church, but in a spirit of generosity and tolerance. From all sides, indeed, there should be less ‘sideings against one another: Part-takings, and Factions [...I competitions of Parties and envious Comparisons’. He goes on:

All Artists differ in their Notions: there are different Opinions in several Points of Philosophy: the several Constellations in the Heavens have different Influence: What is one Man’s Meat, is another’s Medicine, and another’s Poison. We differ in Age, in Stature, in Feature, in Gate, in Complexion, in Institution of Life, in Profession. These Varieties and Differences, as well as Harmonies and Proportions, explicate the infinite Wisdom of the Creator. Yet all, agreeing in Humane Nature, are fit Companions one for another, can take delight in each others Company.I3

This willingness to countenance differences of opinion could co-exist with the plea of the title for conformity. The tolerance expressed in this sermon is striking, but also a little misleading. Whichcote ends his sermon on the unity of the Church by excluding atheists, enthusiasts and hypocrites from the ranks of those who may be tolerated. Moreover, tolerance and charity were really required from the Latitudinarians’ opponents: those Puritans who found it difficult to conform with what, in their, eyes, was an imperfectly reformed Anglican Church. To overcome nonconformists’ difficulties with the Anglican liturgy, Whichcote contended that ceremonies and observances not specified exactly in the Scriptures are not crucial to salvation - to which the answer might be that there was, then, no need to impose them. For Anglicans, conformity could be more a matter of obedience to the civil authority and subscription to outward requirements such as the Book of Common Prayer: opinion and belief were private matters. A ’broad Church’ relatively tolerant of diversity, and the necessity for obedience could go hand in hand. In ‘A Sermon Preached before the House of Commons’ in 1647, Ralph Cudworth is enraptured by the text ‘Beloved, Let usLove one Another, for Love is of God’. ‘0 Divine Love!’, exclaims Cudworth, ‘the sweet Harmony of Souls, the Musick of Angels! [...I the Sourse of true Happinesse! the pure Quintessence of Heaven! that which reconciles the jarring Principles of the World, and makes them all chime together’.’4 Yet the sermon in which this exclamation occurs is a homily on the necessity of obedience to the Ten Commandments. Here Cudworth looks in two directions. Giving priority to the Scriptures, and emphasising the moral life as the essence of religion, pulled against the importance given to the sacraments by Archbishop Laud. In this respect Cudworth leans towards the Puritans. On the other hand, the emphasis on obedience tells against the fissiparous tendencies of those very debates about the nature of the national Church with which Parliament was currently occupied.

Sterne brought tolerance of difference to Tristram Shandy by way of Lockean psychology. In the chapter of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

242 CAROL STEWART

entitled ‘Of the Association of Ideas’, Locke reflects on the root cause of madness - meaning, for him, the connection of ideas which have no natural correspondence. ‘This wrong Connexion in our Minds of Ideas in themselves’, writes Locke, ‘loose and independent of one another, has such an influence, and is of so great force to set us awry in our Actions, as well Moral as Natural, Passions, Reasonings, and Notions themselves, that, perhaps, there is not any one thing that deserves more to be looked after’.IS Sterne’s narrative, though, is not perturbed by this ‘wrong connexion’: it is very much driven by the mind’s power to make seemingly arbitrary and whimsical connections, as when the act of coition reminds Mrs Shandy of the winding of the clock, or when Toby Shandy is reminded of the Siege of Namur by Walter Shandy’s zig- zagging action as he reaches for a handkerchief in his right coat pocket with his left hand. Sterne relishes what Locke fears: Locke’s qualms are Sterne’s characters. Indeed, it could be argued that Sterne extended the bounds of toleration within a writer who is himself, of course, central to liberalism. Annabel Patterson has argued that Locke’s Essay is of a piece with works which had a more explicitly reformist agenda, such as the Two Treatises of Government and Letters Concerning Toleration.16 In the Essay, she proposes, Locke laid a theoretical foundation for toleration by emphasising the obstacles which impeded an inquiry into truth: the misuse of language, the influence of custom, self-interest, and an exaggerated reliance on Scripture. There were no grounds, then, for anyone to impose his belief on others. Nevertheless, Locke could still believe that right reason might guide men to truth: seventy years later, with no such conviction, Sterne pushed the limits of tolerance a degree further.

In The Religion of Protestants, a work which was to prove most influential in terms of the Latitudinarian tradition, William Chillingworth addressed the central intellectual problem of the reformation: what was to be the criterion of truth, or the ‘rule of faith’ in religion.I7 It was a dilemma he experienced on a very personal level. Troubled by the lack of continuity between Protestantism and the early Church, and feeling that there must be an infallible judge in matters of faith, Chillingworth converted to Catholicism around 1630. Re- examining the issues whilst at the English Jesuit college in Douai, however, Chillingworth came to the conclusion that he had erred, and declared himself a Protestant again in 1634. The Religion ofProtestants was in part an intervention in a controversy. The Jesuit Matthias Wilson, writing under the pseudonym of Edward Knott, published in 1630 a work entitled Charity mistaken, with the want whereof Catholics are unjustly charged, for uflrrning, as they do with Grief, that Protestancy unrepented destroyes Salvation. Dr Christopher Potter replied in 1633 with Want of Charitie, justly charged on all such Rornanists, as dare (without truth or modesty) a@rrne, that Protestancie destroyeth Salvation. Knott responded in 1634 with Mercy and Truth, or Charity Maintained by Catholiques, and Chillingworth undertook a defence of Potter’s book against this reply. Knott, however, obtained proofs of The Religion of Protestants before publication, and put out a pamphlet of his own in 1636 to prejudice the public

The Anglicanism of ‘Tristrum Shandy ’ 243

against it. The Religion of Protestants answers this tract, defends Potter, and attacks Charity Main tained.

Knott had maintained that the doctrine of infallibility, applied to the Church, was essential: without some absolute authority, religion and faith must fail. (Lengthy extracts from Knott’s work were included in The Religion of Protestants so that Chillingworth might refute them.) ‘[Ilt must be agreed on all sides’, writes Knott, ‘that if that meanes which God hath left to determine Controversies [that is, the Church] were not infallible in all things [...I it could not settle in our minds a firme and infallible belief in any one’.18 Chillingworth, though, will admit that there is always room for doubt: ‘[Ilf I knew any one Church to be infallible, I would quickly be of that Church’ (RP, p.150). He himself had struggled with his return to the Church of England, having refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles in September 1635. Even within the Church to which he now subscribed, there was the possibility of error (RP, p.157):

we [Protestants] pretend not at all to any assurance that we cannot erre, but only to a sufficient certainty, that we do not erre, but rightly understand those things that are plain, whether Fundamentall or not Fundamentall: That God is, and is a rewarder of them that seek him: That there is no salvation but by faith in Christ: That by repentance and faith in Christ remission of sinnes may be obtained That there shall be a Resurrection ofthe Body ...

What he constructs in the pages of The Religion of Protestants, though, is a Church where there may be degrees of faith, or certainty. ‘All which God reveales for Truth is true’ is a thesis, as he terms it, which will admit of absolute certainty. For the hypothesis (Chillingworth’s term) ‘That all the Articles of our Faith were reveal’d by God’, we can only achieve ‘moral certainty’, or a certainty reliant on probability and the general consent of mankind (RP, p.36). At times, he phrases this position very positively. Religious faith does not involve - nor can it - an inappropriate standard of certainty (RP, p.325):

I doe heartily acknowledge and believe the Articles ofour faith to be in themselves Truths, as certain and infallible as the very common Principles of Geometry and Metaphysics. But that there is required of us a knowledge of them, and an adherence to them, as certain as that of sense or science, that such a certainty is required of us under pain of damnation [...I This I have already demonstrated to be a great errour...

A loving God will not punish those whose faith is less than absolute, or those who are unwittingly guilty of error: the barriers to acceptance within the Church of England were placed deliberately low.

Chillingworth argues that absolute certainty is, in the end, unattainable. No individual, no Church and no method of enquiry could hope to attain it. His approach, which Richard Popkin has called ‘mitigated scepticism’ is very different, then, to that of the Catholic apologists. Instead of suspending judgement and relying totally on the authority of the Church, Chillingworth

244 CAROL STEWART

offered a commonsensical, practical solution in the shape of his concept of ‘moral certainty’: the degree of certainty appropriate to the matter at hand. Chillingworth’s approach influenced Bishop John Wilkins and the Reverend Joseph Glanvill, and continued to exercise an influence right into the nineteenth century, when The Religion of Protestants was still being republished. In the Rule of Faith (1676) we find John Tillotson using Chillingworth’s concept of ‘moral certainty’ to deal explicitly with the challenge to religion from scepticism. Tillotson acknowledged that it was possible to doubt whether there was such a country as America. Reports of it could be fabricated: all men might be liars. But even without direct experience of the existence of America, we might nevertheless be assured, with a sufficient degree of certainty, that there was such a place. ‘The case’, he writes, ‘is the very same as to the certainty of an ancient Book and of the sense of plain expressions: we have no demonstration for these things, and we expect none: because we know the things are not capable of it’.I9 What we find in seventeenth-century Latitudinarianism, then, is not the fideistic scepticism which accords the Church a final authority, but rather a willingness to live without certainties or closure. Some might say that it was an attitude of which the Anglican Church stood in need. By the end of the sixteenth century, the doctrine of the English church as laid out in the Thirty-Nine Articles favoured the Calvinists by virtue of its assertion of predestinarianism, but the Elizabethan Prayer Book implicitly contradicted it.

Even as he acknowledged the force of the sceptical argument, Tillotson could still believe that reason allowed man limited access to the truth of revelation. Where Sterne differs is in making scepticism the grounding principle of his novel, and embracing its liberating possibilities, whilst still maintaining Anglican values. For Tillotson, the tolerance of uncertainty and incompletion was an irenical necessity: for Sterne it seems to have been, rather, an enabling condition. Indeed, open-endedness is equated, in Tristram Shandg, with Protestant liberty (TS, I, xiv, 32):

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, - straight forward: - for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left, - he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end: - but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid.

The need to establish certainty is associated, very literally, with a loss of freedom. The citizens of Strasburg, in Slawkenbergius’s tale, want to establish whether the stranger’s nose is real or not, and follow him out of their town. Meanwhile, the French march in and take it over. Against the search for certainty, Sterne opposes incompletion. Tristram’s story is incomplete because of his attempts to be totally inclusive, and for him this is not a defeat. Following his realisation that if he continues as he has begun he will, one

The Anglicanism of ‘Tristrum Shandy ’ 245

year hence, have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write than when he first set out, he wonders if this will be good for the readers’ eyes. He concludes: ‘It will do well for mine.’

In Catholic and Anglican thinking then, epistemological scepticism could co-exist with religious belief. The same may be said of Tristrum Shandy. To be sure, there are no emphatic endorsements of Providence after even the very different manners ofPamela and TornJones, but Tristrum Shundy still invokes the idea of providential compensations. We might remember Pope in An Essay on Man: ‘See some strange comfort every state attend.’ Walter Shandy proposes to counter the misfortune of Tristram’s crushed nose by naming his child Trismegistus, and he has recourse to ’that great and elastic power within us of counter-balancing evil, which like a secret spring in a well-ordered machine, though it can’t prevent the shock - at least it imposes on our sense of it’ (TS, IV, viii, 223). Here is a psychologising, one might think, of that conventional Anglican support, the Newtonian universe. When Toby strikes Walter’s shins with his crutch, Walter’s delight with his own wit about chances makes him forget about the pain in his leg. Tristram writes of the relief gained by throwing his wig up to the ceiling when he discovers that he has burnt a sheet of good writing. The pain of Toby’s wound is offset by the pleasure he gains from enacting sieges on the bowling-green. Walter Shandy’s grief over the death of Bobby is mitigated by the fragments of philosophy he is able to utter. It could be said that loss of balance, in the form of the weights in the sash-window, leads to the misfortune of Tristram’s accidental circumcision.

One could go on. Toby’s whistling of Lillabullero while Dr Slop reads the excommunication forms a kind of harmony-in-disharmony. Describing his father rising from the bed, Tristram speaks of ‘the transition from one attitude to another - like the preparation and resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all’ (TS , IV, vi, 221). Walter and Toby Shandy shaking their heads over women and childbirth, with entirely different thoughts in mind, might be regarded as concord in discord: ‘never did two heads shake together, in concert, from two such different springs’ (TS, IV, xii, 227). As various commentators have pointed out, the disorder and incoherence of the work are only apparent. The action of the last book is anticipated in the first. There is a definite and closely observed chronology. This is not to try to make Tristrum Shundy into Tom Jones - it is too idiosyncratic, too driven by the associative powers of the individual mind to conform to any over-arching structure. But it is still very much informed by the kinds of Christian consolation favoured by eighteenth-century minds.

Where Sterne goes beyond anything that could have been envisaged by Chillingworth or Tillotson, in terms of an acknowledgement of the absence of any ultimate authority - be it the authority of the Church or the authority of Scripture - is in the degree of freedom Tristrum Shundy allows the reader. As narrator of a novel, Tristram is not concerned to push to any conclusion, nor to persuade the reader of any proposition, argument or point of view. In this respect, Tristram the writer differs from Sterne the preacher, even though

246 CAROL STEWART

Sterne, as author of Tristrurn Shundy, would still promote the Latitudinarian virtues of tolerance and charity in his novel. Sterne’s treatment of his own sermon on ‘The Abuses of Conscience’ in the novel is telling. The sermon as delivered to York Minster in 1750 reaches the same ultimate vindication of received authority that New, Wehrs and Parnell would attribute to Sterne the author of Tristrurn Shundy : the unguided individual conscience is an unreliable instrument, not to be trusted on its own, but only insofar as it accords with ‘that law [...I already written’. Yet when the sermon is transferred to the novel, it is fragmented and interrupted, and interpreted in terms of the individual preoccupations of each member of the audience - not a congregation - in the parlour. A whole chapter on the attitude Trim adopts before speaking implicitly satirises the idea that rhetoric is an exact science (TS , II, xvii, 97):

He stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon: - which sound orators, to whom I address this, know very well, to be the true persuasive angle of incidence ...

However, it also turns the sermon very much into a performance: precisely the charge levelled at Sterne by his contemporaries. Moreover, when Sterne included the sermon in his novel, he did it in such a way as deliberately to problematise its authority. It is another curiosity which is discovered by accident, and it is delivered in an unorthodox manner by a character who only barely qualifies as a legitimate preacher, Trim having served as a chaplain’s clerk in his regiment. The after-life of ‘The Abuses of Conscience’ in Tristrurn Shundy suggests no particular respect for its content either. After Trim’s reading, it is lost again through a hole in Yorick’s pocket, trodden in the dirt by his horse’s foot, buried in the mire for ten days, and sold by a beggar for a half-penny. The fragmentation of Yorick’s sermon in Tristrurn Shandy might serve as a classic illustration of Mikhail Bakhtin’s argument that the novel, as a form of discourse, is opposed to any monologic system:

images of official-authoritative truth, images of virtue (of any sort: monastic, spiritual, bureaucratic, moral, etc.) have never been successful in the novel [...I For this reason the authoritative text always remains, in the novel, a dead quotation, something that falls out of the artistic context...20

Yorick’s sermon falls out of Stevinus’s writings on fortification: it is connected with embattlement and restriction.

The occasion for the original formulation of Latitudinarian values was religious dissension, and the desire to maintain unity within the Anglican Church. A confessional unity was, at that time, synonymous with national unity and cohesion. The subject of the sermon ‘The Abuses of Conscience’, and some of its content, were taken from Swift’s sermon ‘On the Testimony of Conscience’, which addresses this very issue. (Just how closely Sterne’s sermon follows Swift’s in terms of argument and phraseology is made clear in Lansing Hammond’s comparison of the two pieces in his study of Sterne’s

The Anglicanism of ‘Tristram Shandy’ 247

sources.)21 We do not know when ‘On the Testimony of Conscience’ was delivered - it is one of the few sermons by Swift to be published - but it clearly speaks from a time when nonconformity and recusancy were seen as threats to Church and State. Swift writes:

Men often say, a Thing is against their Conscience, when really it is not. For Instance: Ask any of those who differ from the Worship established, why they do not come to Church? They will say, they dislike the Ceremonies, the Prayers, the Habits and the like, and therefore it goeth against their conscience: But they are mistaken...”

No such anxieties figure in ‘The Abuses of Conscience’: Sterne’s concern is more with personal guilt and the individual’s propensity to self-deceit. By 1759 alarm or even mere uneasiness about differences of opinion in the nation was receding. Conditions had altered. The Toleration Act of 1689 had contained the threat from Dissent. A Protestant succession had been assured, and even for Sterne, domiciled in York, the threat of the Jacobite Rebellion was receding by 1760. It may be said that Laurence Sterne, at the time of writing Tristram Shandy, was not much more friendly to Catholicism than his Anglican predecessors, but the heat had undoubtedly gone out of the debate. The toleration Sterne shows Walter and Toby seeps into the treatment of other kinds of difference. The satire at the expense of the papist Dr Slop (a version of Dr John Burton, suspected supporter of the ‘45 Rebellion) is almost affectionate: he is one of the company accepted in the parlour, even if he does fall asleep during that part of Yoricks sermon which would be most likely to effect his conversion. For Sterne, as Carol Kay has argued, such documents as the excommunication of Ernulphus and the advice on intra-uterine baptism by the doctors of the Sorbonne are antiquarian curiosities: ‘Words that once dealt eternal death, words that save souls, now yield entertainment and satisfy whimsy and ~uriosity.’~3 In A SentimentalJourney (1768) Sterne was to extend the bounds of his tolerance to include a Catholic religious, in the shape of the Franciscan monk with whom he exchanges snuff-boxes.

With an emphasis on simplicity of doctrine and rationality, and with its relative dismissal of tradition and authority, Latitudinarianism could lend itself to reformist thought. In 1766 the Rev. Francis Blackburne, friend and biographer of the republican Thomas Hollis, published The Confessional, or a Full and Free Enquiry into the Right, Utility, Edification, and Success, of Establishing Systematical Confessions of Faith and Doctrine in Protestant Churches. Echoing Chillingworth’s famous declaration that ‘the Bible, I say, the Bible only is the religion of Protestants’, Blackburne argued that belief in the Scriptures as the word of God was sufficient for intending Anglican clergy, and that subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles should be ab0lished.~4 He too had struggled with subscription, and indeed contemplated leaving the Church in the 1750s. The controversy surrounding The Confessional led to the Feathers Tavern petition of 1771, and while the petition was defeated, it prompted some further examination of an unreformed British constitution. Blackburne and

248 CAROL STEWART

Sterne moved in the same circles in Yorkshire, with Sterne having at one time preached a sermon for the absent Blackburne, and sought his patronage. One cannot imagine Sterne struggling to the same extent with subscription, or willingly engrossing himself in matters of theological or political controversy. Writing for the Whig cause in 1741-1742 was a price he had to pay for the patronage of his uncle, Archdeacon Jaques Sterne, and in a letter to the York Gazetteer in November 1742 he repudiated party p0litics.~5 For much of his life, in any case, he was ambitious of preferment within the Church. What he did struggle with was the writing of sermons. In their own separate and distinct ways, we can see Blackburne and Sterne both questioning authority, and working out the liberal possibilities of Latitudinarianism. If Tristrurn Shundy began, as is generally supposed, as what now survives as ‘A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais’, then it began as a satire on sermons and sermon-writing. Preaching was not an activity Sterne undertook with the utmost conviction, nor necessarily with much respect for his own productions, even if he used the success of Tristrurn Shundy to promote a collection of his sermons. Sterne himself does not seem to have been happy with didacticism. In a letter to David Garrick in 1762, he gave his opinion of a play written by a lady:

’Tis from the plan of Diderot, and possibly half a translation of it - The Natural Son, or, the Triumph of Virtue, in five acts - It has too much sen t i en t in it, (at least for me) the speeches too long, and savour too much of Preaching - this may be a second reason, it is not to my taste...26

Writing fiction he found much more congenial. In a letter of 1761 he wrote: ‘I shall write as long as I live, ’tis, in fact, my hobby-horse: and so much am I delighted with my uncle Toby’s imaginary character, that I am become an enthusiast’ (Letters, p.143). In this respect, Tristrurn Shundy was in tune with the preferences of its readers. Few novels better illustrate the tendency for fiction to take priority over sermons in terms of reaching the public than Tristrurn Shundy: Sterne promoted his sermon by including it in a novel. Contemporaries were aware of the shift in reading habits. The Monthly Review for December I 759 praised Sterne’s ingenuity, and supposed didactic intent: ‘The address with which he has introduced an excellent moral sermon, into a work of this nature (by which expedient, it will probably be read by many who would peruse a sermon in no other form) is masterly.’

Sterne did indeed, as Melvyn New has argued, carry over to Tristrurn Shundy much of what was in the Sermons - more, perhaps, than has ever been generally appreciated. Tristrurn Shundy presents the reader with imagined characters, dramatic situations and appeals to feeling, but all of these were very characteristic of Sterne in the pulpit. Sterne’s imagining of the departure of the Prodigal Son in his sermon on Luke xv.13 - ‘And not many days after, the younger son gathered all he had together, and took his journey into a far country’ - might serve as a typical example:

I see the picture of his departure: - the camels and asses loaden with his substance, detached on one side of the piece, and already on their way: - the

The Anglicanism of ‘Tristram Shandy’ 249

prodigal son standing on the fore ground, with a forced sedateness, struggling against the fluttering movement of joy, upon his deliverance from restraint: - the elder brother holding his hand, as ifunwilling to let it go: - the father, - sad moment! with a firm look, covering a prophetic sentiment, ‘that all would not go well with his child,’ - approaching to embrace him, and bid him

Sterne supplies, at length, the ‘interesting and pathetic passages’ (Sermons, p.186) which the Scriptures leave out. He imagines the scene in the House of Mourning: ‘Behold a dead man ready to be carried out, the only son of his mother, and she a widow. Perhaps a more affecting spectacle - a kind and indulgent father of a numerous family, lies breathless ...’ (Sermons, p.19). In ‘The Case of Elijah and the Widow of Zerepath Considered’, a charity sermon, he imagines the thoughts of the Widow as she answers Elijah’s plea for food and drink, and in the sermon ‘Philanthropy Recommended’, Sterne provides an internal monologue for the Good Samaritan.

Sterne was practised in methods of engaging, and holding, his congre- gation’s attention, and some of those techniques are replicated in Tristrum Shundy. The opening sentence of the novel is moderately shocking, insofar as it offers an affront to ideas of filial piety: ‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me’ (TS , I, i, 5). Here we might see a version of the shock tactics which Sterne occasionally employed in the pulpit. The sermon on The Abuses of Conscience is on the text ‘For we trust we have a good conscience’, from Hebrews xiii.18. The preacher responds, sceptically, ‘TRUST! - Trust we have a good conscience!’ (Sermons, p.255). Walter Shandy wants the sermon to proceed so that he can find out ‘what kind of provocation the Apostle has given’. Similarly, the cryptic opening paragraph of Tristram Shandy engages the curiosity of Sterne’s imagined reader: ‘Pray, what was your father saying? - Nothing. [...I - Then positively, there is nothing in the question, that I can see, either good or bad’ (TS, I, i-ii, 5-6).

The fact that Sterne carried over to the novel values and methods which are to be found in his sermons is not in itself, though, proof of an inherent conservatism on the part of Tristram Shandy or its author. Latitudinarianism is a tradition which could find its way into liberal and even radical thought. John Gascoigne traces a line from Bishop Benjamin Hoadly’s notorious sermon of 1716 on ‘The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ’, in which he offered the view that Christ left behind him no judges over the consciences of the people, through Blackburne’s Confessional, to Anglican clergy such as John Disney and John Jebb who became Unitarians, and Christopher Wyvill, who remained within the Church and founded the reformist Yorkshire Association, which itself provided a model for subsequent reform movements.’’ Wyvill supported full religious toleration, which he saw as completing the programme of Latitudinarian predecessors such as Tillotson and Hoadly. However, the crucial difference between Sterne in the Sermons and Sterne in his novel is that in the former he occupied a position of authority, while in the latter he provided no such guide. In the end, the reader of Tristram Shandy is freer than

250 CAROL STEWART

the Latitudinarian preachers could, or would, have imagined to draw his or her own conclusions.

NOTES

I. A brief but useful survey of the relationship between theory and the study of Sterne may be found in Marcus Walsh’s introduction to the collection of essays in Longman Critical Readers: Laurence Sterne (London zooz). p.1-17.

2. Donald R. Wehrs, ‘Sterne, Cervantes, Montaigne: Fideistic Skepticism and the Rhetoric of Desire’, Comparative Literature Studies 25 (1988), p.127-51.

3. J. T. Parnell, ‘Swift, Sterne and the Skeptical Tradition’, repr. in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York 1998), p.140-58.

4. Melvyn New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist. A Reading of Tristram Shandy (Gainesville 1969). 5. The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New, in The Florida Edition of the Works of

6. Judith Hawley, Review article, Essays in Criticism 48 (1998), p.80-88. 7. Paul Goring, ‘Thomas Weales’s The Christian Orator Delineated (n.p. 1778) and the Early

8. Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne. A Life (Oxford 2001). p.244.328-30. 9. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandg, Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell

Laurence Sterne, 5 vols (Gainesville 1996), v.xx.

Reception of Sterne’s Sermons’, The Shandean 13 (zooz), p.87-97.

Ross (Oxford 1983) (hereafter TS), I, vii, 12. 10. See John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in England, 1558-1 689 (Harlow zooo), p.50. 11. Cambridge Platonists (1969), ed. C. A. Patrides (Cambridge 1980), p.136. 12. Cambridge Platonists, p.333. 13. Cambridge Platonists, p.81. 14. Cambridge Platonists. p.117. 15. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch

16. Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge 1997), p.256-60. 17. For an account of Chillingworth’s life and ideas, see Robert Orr. Reason and Authority. The

Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford 1967). H. G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, I 63 0-1 690 (The Hague 1970), relates Chillingworth’s ideas to the development of scientific method, while Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savanarola to Bayle, rev. edn (Oxford 2003), places The Religion of Protestants in terms of the wider debate.

(Oxford 1979). p.397.

18. William Chilliigworth, The Religion of Protestants (n.p. 1638) (hereafter RP), p.28. 19. John Tillotson, The Rule of Faith: Or An Answer to the Treatise of Mr. I. S. Entituled ‘Sure

Footing’etc. (n.p. 1676), p.118. 20. Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and

Michael Holquist (Austin 1981). p.344. 21. Lansing Van Der Heyden Hammond, Laurence Sterne’s ‘Sermons of Mr. Yorick’ (New Haven

1948), P.151-52. 22. Jonathan Swift, Sermons, ed. Louis Landa, bound with Irish Tracts I 720-23. ed. Herbert

Davis (Oxford 1968), p.151. 23. Carol Kay, Political Constructions. Defoe, Richardson and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume

and Burke (Ithaca 1988), p.212. 24. Francis Blackburne. The Confessional, or a Full and Free Enquiry into the Right, Utility,

Edification, and Success, of Establishing Systematical Confessions of Faith and Doctrine in Protestant Churches, 2nd edn (n.p. 1767), p.xlvi andpassim.

25. For a recent, nuanced account of Sterne’s Whig allegiances as expressed in Tristrarn Shandy, however, see Thomas Keymer, Sterne, The Moderns and the Novel (Oxford zooz), p.184-214.

26. Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford 1935), p.162. 27. The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. New, iv.187. 28. John Gascoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late

Eighteenth Century’, History 71 (1986), p.22-38.