sort of relation, real or fancied relation, to their mythology or
worship. And the Mahometans, in times when they had universities and
professors' chairs, drew the whole of their philosophic systems from
Greece, without so much as ever attempting to connect these systems with
their own religious creed. But Christianity, on the other hand, the only
great doctrinal religion, the only religion which ties up--chains--and
imprisons human faith, where it is good for man's peace that he should
be fettered, is also the only religion which places him in perfect
liberty on that vast neutral arena where it is good for him to exercise
his unlimited energies of mind. And it is most remarkable, that whilst
Christianity so far shoots her rays into these neutral questions as to
invest them with grandeur, she keeps herself uncommitted and unpledged
to such philosophic problems in any point where they might ally
themselves with error. For instance, St. Austin's, or Calvin's doctrine
on free agency is so far Christian, that Christian churches have adopted
it into their articles of faith, or have even built upon it as a
foundation. So far it seems connected with Christian truth. Yet, again,
it is so far separate from Christian truth, that no man dares to
pronounce his brother heretical for doubting or denying it. And thus
Christianity has ministered, even in this side-chapel of its great
temple, to two great necessities: it has thrown out a permanent
temptation to human activity of intellect, by connecting itself with
tertiary questions growing out of itself derivatively and yet
indifferent to the main interests of truth. In this way Christianity has
ministered to a necessity which was not religious, but simply human,
through a religious radiation in a descending line. Secondly, it has
kept alive and ventilated through every age the direct religious
interest in its own primary truths, by throwing out secondary truths,
that were doubtfully related to the first, for polemical agitation.
Foolish are they who talk of our Christian disputes as arguments of an
unsound state, or as silent reproaches to the sanity or perfect
development of our religion. Mahometans are united, because the only
points that could disunite them relate generally to fact and _not_ to
doctrinal truths. Their very national heresies turn only on a ridiculous
piece of gossip--Was such a man's son-in-law his legitimate successor?
Upon a point so puerile as this revolves the entire difference between
the heterodoxy of Persia and the orthodoxy of Turkey. Or, if their
differences go deeper, in that case they tend to the utter extinction
of Islamism; they maintain no characteristic or exclusive dogma; as
amongst the modern Sikhs of Hindostan, who have blended the Brahminical
and Mahometan creeds by an incoherent _syncretismus_; or, as amongst
many heretics of Persia and Arabia, who are mere crazy freethinkers,
without any religious determination, without any principle of libration
for the oscillating mind. Whereas _our_ differences, leaving generally
all central truths untouched, arise like our political parties, and
operate like them; they grow out of our sincerity, and they sustain our
sincerity. That interest _must_ be unaffected which leads men into
disputes and permanent factions, and that truth _must_ be diffusive as
life itself, which is found to underlay a vast body of philosophy. It is
the cold petrific annihilation of a moral interest in the subject, by
substituting a meagre interest of historical facts, which stifles all
differences; stifles political differences under a despotism, from utter
despair of winning practical value to men's opinions; stifles religious
differences under a childish creed of facts or anecdotes, from the
impossibility of bringing to bear upon the [Greek: to] positive of an
arbitrary legend, or the mere conventional of a clan history--dead,
inert letters--any moral views this way or that, and any life of
philosophical speculation. Thence comes the soul-killing monotony (unity
one cannot call it) of all false religions. Attached to mere formal
facts, they provoke no hostility in the inner nature. Affirming nothing
as regards the life of truth, why should they tempt any man to
contradict? Lying, indeed, but lying only as a false pedigree lies, or
an old mythological legend, they interest no principle in man's moral
heart; they make no oracular answers, put forth no secret agitation,
they provoke no question. But Christianity, merely by her settlements
and fixing of truths, has disengaged and unfixed a world of other
truths, for sustaining or for tempting an endless activity of the
intellect. And the astonishing result has thus been accomplished--that
round a centre, fixed and motionless as a polar tablet of ice, there has
been in the remote offing a tumbling sea of everlasting agitation. A
central gravitation in the power of Christianity has drawn to one point
and converged into one tendency all capital agencies in all degrees of
remoteness, making them tend to rest and unity; whilst, again, by an
antagonist action, one vast centrifugal force, measured against the
other, has so modified the result as to compel the intellect of man into
divergencies answering to the line of convergence; balancing the central
rest for man's hopes by everlasting motion for his intellect, and the
central unity for man's conscience by everlasting progress for his
efforts.
Now, the Scholastic philosophy meddled chiefly with those tertiary or
sub-dependent truths; such, viz., as are indifferent to Christianity by
any reaction which they can exert from error in their treatment, but not
indifferent as regards their own original derivation. Many people
connect Scholasticism with a notion of error and even of falsehood,
because they suppose it to have arisen on the incitement of Popery. And
it is undeniable that Popery impressed a bias or _clinamen_ upon its
movement. It is true also that Scholasticism is not only ministerial to
Popery, but in parts is consubstantial with Popery. Popery is not fully
fleshed and developed apart from the commentaries or polemical apologies
of Aquinas. But still we must remember that Popery had not yet taken up
the formal position of hostility to truth, seeing that as yet
Protestantism was only beginning its first infant struggles. Many Popish
errors were hardened and confirmed in the very furnace of the strife.
And though perilous errors had intermingled themselves with Popery,
which would eventually have strangled all the Christian truth which it
involved, yet that truth it was which gave its whole interest to the
Reformation. Had the Reformation fought against mere unmixed error, it
could not have been viewed as a reforming process, but as one entirely
innovating. So that even where it is most exclusively Popish,
Scholasticism has often a golden thread of truth running through its
texture; often it is not Popish in the sense of being Anti-Protestant,
but in the elder sense of being Anti-Pagan. However, generally speaking,
it is upon the neutral ground common to all modes of Christianity that
this philosophy ranges. That being so, there was truth enough of a high
order to sustain the sublimer motives of the Schoolmen; whilst the
consciousness of supporting the mixed interests, secular and spiritual,
of that mighty Christian church which at that time was co-extensive with
Christianity in the West, gave to the Schoolmen a more instant, human,
and impassioned interest in the labours of that mysterious loom which
pursued its aerial web through three centuries.
As a consequence from all this, we affirm that the parallel is complete
between the situation on the one side of the early Greek authors, the
creators of Greek literature in the age of Pericles, and, on the other
side, of the Christian Schoolmen; (1) the same intense indolence, which
Helvetius fancied to be the most powerful stimulant to the mind under
the reaction of _ennui_; (2) the same tantalizing dearth of books--just
enough to raise a craving, too little to meet it; (3) the same chilling
monotony of daily life and absence of female charities to mould social
intercourse--for the Greeks from false composition of society and
vicious sequestration of women--for the scholastic monks from the
austere asceticism of their founders and the 'rule' of their order; (4)
finally the same (but far different) enthusiasm and permanent elevation
of thought from disinterested participation in forwarding a great
movement of the times--for the one side tending to the unlimited
aggrandisement of their own brilliant country; for the other,
commensurate with what is conceivable in human grandeur.
This sketch of Christianity as it is mysteriously related to the total
body of Philosophy actual or possible, present or in reversion, may seem
inadequate. In some sense it _is_ so. But call it a note or
'_excursus_,' which is the scholarlike name for notes a little longer
than usual, and all will be made right. What we have in view, is to
explain the situation of the Greeks under Pericles by that of the
Schoolmen. We use the modern or Christian case, which is more striking
from its monastic peculiarity, as a reflex picture of the other. We rely
on the moulding circumstances of Scholasticism, its awakened intellect,
its famishing eagerness from defect of books, its gloom from the exile
of all feminine graces, and its towering participation in an interest
the grandest of the age, as a sort of _camera obscura_ for bringing down
on the table before us a portraiture essentially the same of early Greek
society in the rapturous spring-time of Pericles.
If the governing circumstances were the same in virtue, then probably
there would be a virtual sameness in some of the results: and amongst
these results would be the prevailing cast of thinking, and therefore to
some extent the prevailing features of style. It may seem strange to
affirm any affinities between the arid forms of Scholastic style and the
free movement of the early Grecian style. They seem rather to be
repelling extremes. But extremes meet more often than is supposed. And
there really _are_ some remarkable features of conformity even as to
this point between the tendencies of Christian monachism and the
unsocial sociality of Paganism. However, it is not with this view that
we have pressed the parallel. Not by way of showing a general affinity
in virtues and latent powers, and thence deducing a probable affinity in
results, but generally for the sake of fixing and illustrating
circumstances which made it _physically_ impossible that the movement
could have been translated by contagion from one country to the others.
Roads were too bad, cities too difficult of access, travellers too rare,
books too incapable of transmission, for any solution which should
explain the chain of coincidences into a chain of natural causations.
No; the solution was, that Christianity had everywhere gone ahead
spontaneously with the same crying necessities for purification, that
is, for progress. One deep, from North to South, called to another; but
the deeps all alike, each separately for itself, were ready with their
voices, ready without collusion to hear and to reverberate the cry to
God. The light, which abides and lodges in Christianity, had everywhere,
by measured steps and by unborrowed strength, kindled into mortal
antagonism with the darkness which had gathered over Christianity from
human corruptions. But in science this result is even more conspicuous.
Not only by their powers and energies the parallel currents of science
in different lands enter into emulations that secure a general
uniformity of progress, run neck and neck against each other, so as to
arrive at any killing rasper of a difficulty pretty nearly about the
same time; not only do they thus make it probable that coincidences of
victory will continually occur through the rivalships of power; but also
through the rivalships of weakness. Most naturally for the same reason
that they worshipped in spirit and in truth, for the same reason that
led them to value such a worship, they valued its distant fountain-head.
Hence their interest in the Messiah. Hence their delegation.
_XVIII. THE MESSIANIC IDEA ROMANIZED._
The Romans, so far from looking with the Jews to the Tigris, looked to
the Jews themselves. Or at least they looked to that whole Syria, of
which the Jews were a section. Consequently, there is a solution of two
points:
1. The wise men of the East were delegates from the trans-Tigridian
people.
2. The great man who should arise from the East to govern the world was,
in the sense of that prophecy, _i.e._, in the terms of that prophecy
interpreted according to the sense of all who circulated and partook
in--or were parties to--the belief of that prophecy, was to come from
Syria: _i.e._, from Judea.
Now take it either way, observe the sublimity and the portentous
significance of this expectation. Every man of imaginative feeling has
been struck with that secret whisper that stirred through France in
1814-15--that a man was to come with the violets. The violets were
symbolically Napoleonic, as being the colour of his livery: it was also
his cognizance: and the time for his return was _March_, from which
commence the ever memorable Hundred days. And the sublimity lies in the
circumstances of:
1. A whisper running through Christendom: people in remotest quarters
bound together by a tie so aerial.
2. Of the dread augury enveloped in this little humble but beautiful
flower.
3. Of the awful revolution at hand: the great earthquake that was mining
and quarrying in the dark chambers beneath the thrones of Europe.
These and other circumstances throw a memorable sublimity upon this
whisper of conspiracy. But what was this to the awful whisper that
circled round the earth ([Greek: hê oikoumenê]) as to the being that was
coming from Judea? There was no precedent, no antagonist whisper with
which it could enter into any terms of comparison, unless there had by
possibility been heard that mysterious and ineffable sigh which Milton
ascribes to the planet when man accomplished his mysterious rebellion.
The idea of such a sigh, of a whisper circling through the planet, of
the light growing thick with the unimaginable charge, and the purple
eclipse of Death throwing a penumbra; that may, but nothing else ever
can, equal the unutterable sublimity of that buzz--that rumour, that
susurrus passing from mouth to mouth--nobody knew whence coming or
whither tending, and about a being of whom nobody could tell what he
should be--what he should resemble--what he should do, but that all
peoples and languages should have an interest in his appearance.
Now, on the one hand, suppose this--I mean, suppose the Roman whisper to
be an authorized rumour utterly without root; in that case you would
have a clear intervention of Heaven. But, on the other hand, suppose,
which is to me the more probable idea, that it was not without a root;
that in fact it was the Judæan conception of a Messiah, translated into
Roman and worldly ideas; into ideas which a Roman could understand,
or with which the world could sympathize, viz., that _rerum
potiretur_. (The plural here indicates only the awful nature, its
indeterminateness.)
I have, in fact, little doubt that it _was_ a Romanized appropriation or
translation of the Judæan Messiah. One thing only I must warn you
against. You will naturally say: 'Since two writers among the very few
surviving have both refuted this prophecy, and Josephus besides, this
implies that many thousands did so. For if out of a bundle of newspapers
two only had survived quite disconnected, both talking of the same man,
we should argue a great popularity for that man.' And you will say: 'All
these Roman people, did they interpret?' You know already--by Vespasian.
Now whilst, on the one hand, I am far from believing that chance only
was the parent of the ancient [Greek: eustochia], their felicitous
guessing (for it was a higher science), yet, in this new matter, what
coincidence of Pagan prophecy, as doubtless a horrid mistrust in the
oracles, etc., made them 'sagacious from a fear' of the coming peril,
and, as often happens in Jewish prophecies--God when He puts forth His
hand the purposes attained roll one under the other sometimes three deep
even to our eyes.
_XIX. CONTRAST OF GREEK AND PERSIAN FEELING IN CERTAIN ASPECTS._
Life, naturally the antagonism of Death, must have reacted upon Life
according to its own development. Christianity having so awfully
affected the [Greek: to] + of Death, this + must have reacted on Life.
Hence, therefore, a phenomenon existing broadly to the human sensibility
in these ages which for the Pagans had no existence whatever. If to a
modern spectator a very splendid specimen of animal power, suppose a
horse of three or four years old in the fulness of his energies, that
saith _ha_ to the trumpets and is unable to stand _loco_ if he hears any
exciting music, be brought for exhibition--not one of the spectators,
however dull, but has a dim feeling of excitement added to his
admiration from the lurking antagonism of the fugacious life attached to
this ebullient power, and the awful repulsion between that final
tendency and the meridian development of the strength. Hence, therefore,
the secret rapture in bringing forward tropical life--the shooting of
enormous power from darkness, the kindling in the midst of winter and
sterility of irrepressible, simultaneous, tropical vegetation--the
victorious surmounting of foliage, blossoms, flowers, fruits--burying
and concealing the dreary vestiges of desolation.
Reply to the fact that Xerxes wept over his forces, by showing that in
kind, like the Jewish, the less ignoble superstition of Persia--which
must in the time of Balaam, if we suppose the Mesotam meant to have been
the tract between the Euphrates and the Tigris, have been almost
coincident with the Jewish as to the unity of God--had always, amidst
barbarism arising from the forces moulding social sentiment, prompted a
chivalry and sensibility far above Grecian. For how else account for the
sole traits of Christian sensibility in regard to women coming forward
in the beautiful tale of the Armenian prince, whose wife when asked for
her opinion of Cyrus the Conqueror, who promised to restore them all to
liberty and favour (an act, by the way, in itself impossible to Greek
feelings, which exhibit no one case of relinquishing such rights over
captives) in one hour, replied that she knew not, had not remarked his
person; for that _her_ attention had been all gathered upon that prince,
meaning her youthful husband, who being asked by the Persian king what
sacrifice he would esteem commensurate to the recovery of his bride,
answered so fervently, that life and all which it contained were too
slight a ransom to pay. Even that answer was wholly impossible to a
Grecian. And again the beautiful catastrophe in the tale of Abradates
and Panthea--the gratitude with which both husband and wife received the
royal gift of restoration to each other's arms, implying a sort of holy
love inconceivable to a state of Polygamy--the consequent reaction of
their thought in testifying this gratitude; and as war unhappily offered
the sole chance for displaying it, the energy of Panthea in adorning
with her own needle the habiliments of her husband--the issuing forth
and parting on the morning of battle--the principle of upright duty and
of immeasurable gratitude in Abradates forming 'a nobler counsellor'
than his wife's 'poor heart'--his prowess--his glorious death--his
bringing home as a corpse--the desolation of Panthea--the visit and
tears of the Persian king to the sorrowing widow stretched upon the
ground by the corpse of her hero--the fine incident of the right hand,
by which Cyrus had endeavoured to renew his pledges of friendship with
the deceased prince, coming away from the corpse and following the royal
touch (this hand having been struck off in the battle)--the burial--and
the subsequent death of Panthea, who refused to be comforted under all
the kind assurances, the kindest protection from the Persian king--these
traits, though surviving in Greek, are undoubtedly Persian. For Xenophon
had less sensibility than any Greek author that survives. And besides,
abstracting from the writer, how is it that Greek records offer no such
story; nothing like it; no love between married people of that chivalric
order--no conjugal fidelity--no capacity of that beautiful reply--that
she saw him not, for that _her_ mind had no leisure for any other
thought than _one_?
_XX. OMITTED PASSAGES AND VARIED READINGS._
1.--DINNER.
In London and other great capitals it is well known that new diseases
have manifested themselves of late years: and more would be known about
them, were it not for the tremulous delicacy which waits on the
afflictions of the rich. We do not say this invidiously. It is right
that such forbearance should exist. Medical men, as a body, are as manly
a race as any amongst us, and as little prone to servility. But
obviously the case of exposure under circumstances of humiliating
affliction is a very different thing for the man whose rank and
consideration place him upon a hill conspicuous to a whole city or
nation, and for the unknown labourer whose name excites no feeling
whatever in the reader of his case. Meantime it is precisely amongst the
higher classes, privileged so justly from an exposure pressing so
unequally upon _their_ rank, that these new forms of malady emerge. Any
man who visits London at intervals long enough to make the spectacle of
that great vision impressive to him from novelty and the force of
contrast, more especially if this contrast is deepened by a general
residence in some quiet rural seclusion, will not fail to be struck by
the fever and tumult of London as its primary features. _Struck_ is not
the word: _awed_ is the only adequate expression as applied to the
hurry, the uproar, the strife, the agony of life as it boils along some
of the main arteries among the London streets. About the hour of
equinoctial sunset comes a periodic respite in the shape of dinner. Were
it not for that, were it not for the wine and the lustre of lights, and
the gentle restraints of courtesies, and the soothing of conversation,
through which a daily reaction is obtained, London would perish from
excitement in a year. The effect upon one who like ourselves simply
beholds the vast frenzy attests its power. The mere sympathy, into which
the nerves are forced by the eye, expounds the fury with which it must
act upon those who are acting and suffering participators in the mania.
Rome suffered in the same way, but in a less degree: and the same relief
was wooed daily in a brilliant dinner (_cæna_), but two and a half hours
earlier.
The same state of things exists proportionately in other
capitals--Edinburgh, Dublin, Naples, Vienna. And doubtless, if the
curtain were raised, the same penalties would be traced as pursuing this
agitated life; the penalties, we mean, that exist in varied shapes of
nervous disease.
2.--OMITTED PASSAGES FROM THE REVIEW OF BENNETT'S CEYLON.