Ends and Means

TL;DR: Gosse was right to see his Victorian father as the last of the seventeenth-century Puritans as discussed by the authors, and the anxiety expressed in these letters was not about his moral behaviour, but about the intellectual part of his son's faith.

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.