Very generous is Kingsley's sympathy, in "Alton Locke," with the lot of working people, but he believed that when the rebellious shoemaker fully realises that good priests would mitigate the lot of those who labour in workshops or in fields and mines, he will become reconciled to the Thirty-nine Articles. Alton Locke is a Church Chartist--not one of the Chartists of real life whom I knew, who were current in Kingsley's days, who signed the famous document which Place drew and Roebuck revised. They had principles. They did not seek paternal government of friendly Churchmen, nor of Positivists, nor that nobly organised kind of passive competence which Mr. Ruskin meditated for the people. The real Chartists--like the Co-operators--sought self-government for the people by the people. The alienation of the people from church and chapel was not founded on lack of spiritual patronage, or thirst for it, but from intellectual dissatisfaction with theological tenets.
Christians, from the Vatican to the Primitive Methodist conventicle, are all so persuaded of the infallibility of their interpretation of the Scriptures, and are so convinced of the perfect sufficiency of their tenets for the needs of all the world, that they regard difference of opinion as springing from wilful misunderstanding, or from the "evil heart at enmity with God"--a mad doctrine beneath the notice of the average lunatic. Natural variety of intellect, the infinite hosts of personal views, and the infinitude of individual experience--which silently create new convictions--are not taken into account, and conscientious dissent seems to the antediluvian theologian an impossibility. Even the most liberal of eminent Unitarians in England, W. J. Fox, regarded, what we now know as the Agnostic--hesitation to declare as true that which the declarer does not know to be so--as a species of mental disease.
That Kingsley lived in a refracting medium, in which the straightest facts appeared bent when placed in it, was evident when he wrote: "Heaven defend us from the Manchester School, for of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and atheistic schemes of the universe the Cobden and Bright one is exactly the worst." There was no reason why Kingsley should be a Chartist, since he had all he wanted secured, and had contempt in his heart for Chartist tenets. He wrote: "The Bible gives the dawn of the glorious future, such as no universal suffrage, free trade, communism, organisation of labour, or any other Morrison pill measure can give." He exulted in the existence of the forces which made against the people. He exclaimed: "As long as the Throne, the House of Lords, and the Press are what I thank God they are!" he was grateful. The state of things which existed, it was the object of Chartism to change.