Gerard Manley Hopkins on coming to believe in God

Giving alms can change your mind

St. John Henry Newman received Gerard Manley Hopkins into the Church in 1866 and Hopkins entered the Jesuits a few years later and was ordained in 1877. One of the great poets of the nineteenth century, he was not published much in his lifetime. His college friend Robert Bridges, by then Poet Laureate, edited and published some of them thirty years after his death, in a book titled simply Poems. The letter, written in 1879 from “Catholic Church, St. Giles, Oxford,” is found in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Letters.

Hopkins tells Bridges that he wants to see him a Catholic or a least a believer in God and knows that Bridges thinks the decision dependent on his own thinking. He’d once suggested prayer but now has a different suggestion.

But I have another counsel open to no objection and yet I think it will be unexpected. I lay great stress on it. It is to give alms. It may be either in money or in other shapes, the objects for which, with your knowledge of several hospitals, can never be wanting. I daresay indeed you do give alms, still I should say give more: I should be bold to say / give, up to the point of sensible inconvenience. . . .

He tells Bridges he must feel

the difference between paying heavily for a virtue and not paying at all. It changes the whole man, if anything can; not his mind only but the will and everything. . . . [A] man may be far from belief in Christ or God or all he should believe, really and truly so; still the question to be asked would be . . . what good have you done?

I am now talking pure Christianity, as you may remember, but also I am talking pure sense, as you must see. Now you may have done much good, but yet it may not be enough: I will say, it is not enough. I say this, you understand, on general grounds; I am not judging from particular knowledge, which I have no means to do and it would be very wrong and indiscreet.

In the next letter to Bridges, who seems to have written three letters objecting to Hopkins’ suggestion, he explains:

I added something about it needing the experience to know what it feels like to have put oneself out for charity’s sake (or one might say for truth’s sake, for honour’s sake, for chastity’s sake, for any virtue’s sake). I meant: everybody knows, or if not can guess, how it feels to be short of money, but everybody may not know, and if not cannot well guess, how it feels to be short of money for charity’s sake, etc as above. . . .

[M]y thoughts were these — Bridges is all wrong, and it will do no good to reason with him nor even to ask him to pray. Yet there is one thing remains — if he can be got to give alms, of which the Scripture says (I was talking to myself, not you) that they resist sins and that they redeem sins and that they will not let the soul go out into darkness, to give which Daniel advised Nabuchodonosor and Christ the Pharisees, the one a heathen, the other antichristians, and the whole scripture in short so much recommends; of which moreover I have heard so-and-so, whose judgment I would take against any man’s on such a point, say that the promise is absolute and that there is for every one a fixed sum at which he will ensure his salvation, though for those who have sinned greatly it may be a very high sum and very distressing to them to give — or keep giving: and not to have the faith is worse than to have sinned deeply, for it is like not being even in the running.

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