4.--THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

Religion under any of its aspects, revealing or consoling--religion in

connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when

_self_-evoked by a person of earnest nature, not imposed from without by

the necessities of monastic life, not caught as a contagion from the

example of friends that surround you, argues some 'vast volcanic agency'

moving at subterraneous depths below the ordinary working mind of daily

life, and entitled by its own intrinsic grandeur to ennoble the

curiosity (else a petty passion) which may put questions as to its

origin. In any case of religion arising, as a spontaneous birth, in the

midst of alien forces, it is inevitable to ask for its _why_ and its

_whence_. Religion considered as a sentiment of devotion, as a yearning

after some dedication to an immeasurable principle of that noblest

temple among all temples--'the upright heart and pure,' or religion,

again, as the apprehension of some mighty synthesis amongst truths dimly

perceived heretofore amidst separating clouds, but now brought into

strict indissoluble connection, proclaims a revolution so great that it

is otherwise not to be accounted for than as the breaking out of a germ

of the supernatural in man as a seed from a hitherto barren soil.

Sin is that secret word, that dark _aporréton_ of the human race,

undiscoverable except by express revelation, which having once been laid

in the great things of God as a germinal principle, has since blossomed

into a vast growth of sublime ideas known only to those nations who have

lived under the moulding of Scriptural truth--and comprehending _all_

functions of the Infinite operatively familiar to man. Yes, I affirm

that there is no form through which the Infinite reveals itself in a

sense comprehensible by man and adequate to man; that there is no

sublime agency which _compresses_ the human mind from infancy so as to

mingle with the moments of its growth, positively none but has been in

its whole origin--in every part--and exclusively developed out of that

tremendous mystery which lurks under the name of sin.

Yes, I affirm that even in its dreams every Christian child is invested

by an atmosphere of sublimity unknown to the greatest of Pagan

philosophers: that golden rays reach it by two functions of the

Infinite; and that these, in common with those emanations of the

Infinite that do not settle upon the mind until mature years, are all

projections--derivations or counterpositions--from the obscure idea of

sin; could not have existed under any previous condition; and for a

Pagan mind would not have been intelligible.

_Sin._--It is not only that the Infinite arises as part of the entire

system resting on sin, but specifically from sin apart from its

counterforces or reactions, viz., from sin as a thing, and the only

thing originally shadowy and in a terrific sense mysterious.

_Stench._--I believe that under Burke's commentary, this idea would

become a high test of the doctrine of the Infinite. He pronounces it

sublime, or sublime in cases of intensity. Now, first of all, the

intense state of everything or anything is but a mode of power, that

idea or element or moment of greatness under a varied form. Here, then,

is nothing _proper_ or separately peculiar to stench: it is not stench

_as_ stench, but stench as a mode or form of sensation, capable

therefore of intensification. It is but a case under what we may suppose

a general Kantian rule--that every sensation runs through all

gradations, from the lowest or most obscure and nascent to the highest.

Secondly, however, pass over to the contemplation of stench _as_ stench:

then I affirm--that as simply expounding the decay, and altering or

spoiling tendency or state of all things--simply as a register of

imperfection, and of one which does not (as ruins to the eye) ever put

on a pleasing transitional aspect, it is merely disagreeable, but also

at the same time mean. For the imperfection is merely transitional and

fleeting, not absolute. First, midst and last, it is or can be grand

when it reverts or comes round upon its mediating point, or point of

reaction.

The arrangement of my Infinite must be thus: After having expounded the

idea of holiness which I must show to be now potent, proceed to show

that the Pagan Gods did not realize and did not meet this idea; that

then came the exposure of the Pagan Gods and the conscious presence of a

new force among mankind, which opened up the idea of the Infinite,

through the awakening perception of holiness.

I believe that in every mode of existence, which probably is always by

an incarnation, the system of flesh is made to yield the organs that

express the alliance of man with the Infinite. Thus the idea of mystery,

[Greek: aporrêta], finds its organ of expression in the sensualities of

the human race. Again, the crime, whatever it were, and the eternal

pollution is expressed in these same organs. Also, the prolongation of

the race so as to find another system is secured by the same organs.

Generally, that is, for a million against a unit, the awful mystery by

which the fearful powers of death, and sorrow, and pain, and sin are

locked into parts of a whole; so as, in fact, to be repetitions,

reaffirmations of each other under a different phase--this is nothing,

does not exist. Death sinks to a mere collective term--a category--a

word of convenience for purposes of arrangement. You depress your hands,

and, behold! the system disappears; you raise them, it reappears. This

is nothing--a cipher, a shadow. Clap your hands like an Arabian girl,

and all comes back. Unstop your ears, and a roar as of St. Lawrence

enters: stop your ears, and it is muffled. To and fro; it is and it is

not--is not and is. Ah, mighty heaven, that such a mockery should cover

the whole vision of life! It is and it is not; and on to the day of your

death you will still have to learn what is the truth.

The eternal now through the dreadful loom is the overflowing future

poured back into the capacious reservoir of the past. All the active

element lies in that infinitesimal _now_. The future is not except by

relation; the past is not at all, and the present but a sign of a nexus

between the two.

God's words require periods, so His counsels. He cannot precipitate

them any more than a man in a state of happiness _can_ commit suicide.

Doubtless it is undeniable that a man may arm his hand with a sword: and

that his flesh will be found penetrable to the sword, happy or not. But

this apparent physical power has no existence, no value for a creature

having a double nature: the moral nature not only indisposes him to use

his power, but really creates a far greater antagonist power.

This God--too great to be contemplated steadily by the loftiest of human

eyes; too approachable and condescending to be shunned by the meanest in

affliction: realizing thus in another form that reconcilement of

extremes, which St. Paul observed: far from all created beings, yet also

very near.

'A conviction that they needed a Saviour was growing amongst men.' How?

In what sense? Saviour from what? You can't be saved from nothing. There

must be a danger, an evil threatening, before even in fancy you can

think of a deliverer. Now, what evil was there existing to a Pagan? Sin?

Monstrous! No such idea ever dawned upon the Pagan intellect. Death?

Yes; but that was inalienable from his nature. Pain and disease? Yes;

but these were perhaps inalienable also. Mitigated they might be, but it

must be by human science, and the progress of knowledge. Grief? Yes; but

this was inalienable from life. Mitigated it might be, but by superior

philosophy. From what, then, was a Saviour to save? If nothing to save

from, how any Saviour? But here arises as the awful of awfuls to me, the

deep, deep exposure of the insufficient knowledge and sense of what is

peculiar to Christianity. To imagine some sense of impurity, etc.,

leading to a wish for a Saviour in a Pagan, is to defraud Christianity

of all its grandeur. If Paganism could develop the want, it is not at

all clear that Paganism did not develop the remedy. Heavens! how

deplorable a blindness! But did not a Pagan lady feel the insufficiency

of earthly things for happiness? No; because any feeling tending in that

direction would be to her, as to all around her, simply a diseased

feeling, whether from dyspepsia or hypochondria, and one, whether

diseased or not, worthless for practical purposes. It would have to be a

Christian lady, if something far beyond, something infinite, were not

connected with it, depending on it. But if this were by you ascribed to

the Pagan lady, then _that_ is in other words to make her a Christian

lady already.

_Exhibition of a Roman Dialogue on Sin._--What! says the ignorant and

unreflecting modern Christian. Do you mean to tell me that a Roman,

however buried in worldly objects, would not be startled at hearing of a

Saviour? Now, hearken.

ROMAN. Saviour! What do you mean? Saviour for what? In good faith, my

friend, you labour under some misconception. I am used to rely on myself

for all the saving that I need. And, generally speaking, if you except

the sea, and those cursed north-east winds, I know of no particular

danger.

CHRISTIAN. Oh, my friend, you totally mistake the matter. I mean saving

from sin.

ROMAN. Saving from a fault, that is--well, what sort of a fault? Or, how

should a man, that you say is no longer on earth, save me from any

fault? Is it a book to warn me of faults that He has left?

CHRISTIAN. Why, yes. Not that He wrote Himself; but He talked, and His

followers have recorded His views. But still you are quite in the dark.

Not faults, but the fountain of all faults, that is what He will save

you from.

ROMAN. But how? I can understand that by illuminating my judgment in

general He might succeed in making me more prudent.

CHRISTIAN. 'Judgment,' 'prudent'--these words show how wide by a whole

hemisphere you are of the truth. It is your will that He applies His

correction to.

ROMAN. 'Will!' why I've none but peaceable and lawful designs, I assure

you. Oh! I begin to see. You think me a partner with those pirates that

we just spoke to.

CHRISTIAN. Not at all, my friend. I speak not of designs or intentions.

What I mean is, the source of all desires--what I would call your wills,

your whole moral nature.

ROMAN (_bridling_). Ahem! I hope Roman nature is quite as little in need

of improvement as any other. There are the Cretans; they held up their

heads. Accordingly they had their fire institutions, and that true

institution against bribery and luxury, and all such stuff. They fancied

themselves impregnable. Why, bless you! even Marcus Tullius, that was a

prosing kind of man and rather peevish about such things, could not keep

in the truth. 'Why, Cato, my boy,' says he, 'you talk.' And to hear you,

bribery and luxury would not leave one a stick to fight for. Why, now,

these same Cretans--lord! we took the conceit out of them in

twenty-five minutes. No more time, I assure you, did it cost three of

our cohorts to settle the whole lot of them.

CHRISTIAN. My friend, you are more and more in the dark. What I mean is

not present in your senses, but a disease.

ROMAN. Oh, a disease! that's another thing. But where?

CHRISTIAN. Why, it affects the brain and the heart.

ROMAN. Well, now, one at a time. Take the brain--we have a disease, and

we treat it with white hellebore. There may be a better way. But answer

me this. If you are generally affected, what right have you to bring, as

you are supposing, a diseased brain to a sound one? We Romans are all

sound--sound as a bell.

Then Christian goes on to the history of the fall. But the whole would

be self-baffled and construed away from want of sin as the antithesis of

holiness.

_Why St. Paul and the Athenians did not come to an Understanding._--So,

again, if you think that St. Paul had a chance with the Athenians. If he

had, it would tax his divine benevolence to see that he forbore to

pursue it. This attempt shows that he was under a misconception. He

fancied a possibility of preaching a pure religion. What followed? He

was, he must have been defeated. That is, practically, else why did he

not persist? But his confutation was the factual confutation of

experience. It was no go. That he found too surely. But why? I am sure

that he never found out. Enough that he felt--that under a strong

instinct he misgave--a deep, deep gulf between him and them, so that

neither could he make a way to their sense, nor they, except

conjecturally, to his. For, just review the case. What was the [Greek:

euangelion], the good tidings, which he announced to man? What burthen

of hope? What revelation of a mystery of hope arising out of a deeper

mystery of despair? He announced a deliverer. Deliverer! from what?

Answer that--from what? Why, from evil, you say. Evil! of what kind?

Why, you retort, did not the Pagans admit that man was lying under evil?

Not at all; nothing of the kind. But you are sure you have heard of such

things? Very likely. And now you are forced back upon your arguments you

remember specially that evil as to its origin was a favourite

speculation of theirs. Evil, in its most comprehensive designation,

whence is it? How came it? Now, mark, even to that extent, viz., the

extent indicated by this problem, the ancients had no conception of evil

corresponding to, no, nor dimly approaching to, a correspondence with

ours. They had no ineffable standard of purity; how, then, any function

of impurity? They had no ineffable doctrine of pain or suffering

answering to a far more realized state of perception, and, therefore,

unimaginably more exquisite; how, then, could they raise a question on

the nature or fountains of such pains? They executed no synthesis, and

could execute none upon the calamities of life; they never said in

ordinary talk that this was a world of sorrow, either apostrophizing a

newborn child, or a world of disappointment, bemoaning a mature victim;

neither as in the anguish of meditative reflection, nor in the prudence

of extenuating apology. The grand _sanctus_ which arises from human

sensibility, Perish empires and the crowns of kings, etc., first arose

in connection with Christianity.[30] Life was a good life; man was a

prosperous being. Hope for men was his natural air; despondency the

element of his own self-created folly. Neither could it be otherwise.

For, besides that, it would be too immeasurable a draught of woe to say

in one breath that this only was the crux or affirmation of man's fate,

and yet that this also was wretched _per se_; not accidentally made

wretched by imprudence, but essentially and irrevocably so by necessity

of its nature. Besides all this, which has a lurking dependency upon

man's calculations of what is safe, he sees that this mode of thinking

would leave him nothing; yet even that extreme consequence would not

check some honest or sincere or desperate minds from uttering their

convictions that life really _was_ this desperate game--much to lose

and nothing in the best case to win. So far there would have been a

dangerous gravitation at all times to the sad conclusion of Paganism.

But, meanwhile, this dangerous gravitation was too dangerous, and

Providence has deeply counteracted it by principles laid down in human

nature. I affirm that where the ideas of man, where the possible

infinities are not developed, then also the exorbitant on the other

field is strongly pulled up. No ideals of evil can take place except

under ideals of happiness that passeth all understanding. No synthesis

can ever be executed, that is, no annumeration of A, B, C into a common

total, viewed as elements tending to a common unity, unless previously

this unity has been preconceived, because the elements are not elements,

viz., original constituents of a representative whole (a series tending

to a summation), unless that which is constituted--that whole--is

previously given in idea. Since A and B and C could not be viewed as

tending to a unity, having no existence except through them, unless

previously that unity had existed for the regulation and eduction of its

component elements. And this unity in the case of misery never could

have been given unless far higher functions than any which could endure

Paganism, or which Paganism could endure. Until the sad element of a

diseased will is introduced, until the affecting notion is developed of

a fountain in man himself welling up the misery for ever, no idea of

misery could arise. Suffering is limited and transitory. What pain is

permanent in man? Even the deepest laceration of the human heart, that

which is inflicted by the loss of those who were the pulses of our

hearts, is soothed (if never wholly healed) by time. One agency of time

would avail for this effect were there no other. The features of the

individual whom we mourn grow dimmer and dimmer as time advances; and,

_pari passu_, the features of places and collateral objects and

associated persons from whom reverberated these afflicting reminiscences

of the lost object.

I return: Deliverer from what? From suffering or misery. But that was

not acknowledged, nor could have been, we could see no misery as a

hypothesis except in these two modes: First, as a radication in man by

means of something else, some third thing. Secondly, as a synthesis--as

a gathering under a principle which must act prior to the gathering in

order to provoke it. (The synthesis must be rendered possible and

challenged by the _à priori_ unity which otherwise constitutes that

unity.) As a metaphysical possibility evil was recognised through its

unfathomable nature. But this was because such a nature already

presupposed a God's nature, realizing his own ends, stepped in with

effect. For the highest form--the normal or transcendent form--of virtue

to a Pagan, was in the character of citizen. Indeed, the one sole or

affirmative form of virtue lay in this sole function, viz., of public,

of patriotic virtue. Since here only it was possible to introduce an

_additional_ good to the world. All other virtue, as of justice between

individual and individual, did but redress a previous error, sometimes

of the man himself, sometimes of social arrangement, sometimes of

accident. It was a _plus_ which balanced and compensated a pre-existing

_minus_--an action _in regressu_, which came back with prevailing power

upon an action _in progressu_. But to be a patriot was to fulfil a call

of the supererogatory heart--a great nisus of sympathy with the one sole

infinite, the sole practical infinite that man pre-Christian ever could

generate for his contemplation. Now, therefore, it followed that the

idea of virtue here only found its realization. Virtue, in fact, was not

derivatively or consequentially connected with patriotism, it was

_immanent_; not transitively associated by any links whatever, but

immanently intertwisted, indwelling in the idea. Therefore it happened

that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although

to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing,

trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful

realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That

would have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim

virtue and vice mere bubbles and chimeras. He who really thinks so even

we reasonably suspect of _practical_ indifference unless when we believe

him to speak as a misanthrope.

The question suppose to commence as to the divine mission of Christ. And

the feeble understanding is sure to think this will be proved best by

proving the subject of this doubt to have been a miracle-working power.

And of all miracles, to have mastered (not merely escaped or evaded)

death will be in his opinion the greatest. So that if Christ could be

proved to have absolutely conquered death, _i.e._, to have submitted to

death, but only to recoil from his power and overthrow it, to have died

and subsequently to have risen again, will, _à fortiori_, prove Him to

have been sent of God.

Not so. All and every basis of credibility must be laid in the _moral_

nature, where the thing to be believed is important, _i.e._, moral. And

I therefore open with this remark absolutely _zermalmende_ to the common

intellect: That from a holy faith you may infer a power of resurrection,

but not from a power of resurrection fifty times repeated can we infer a

holy faith. What in the last result is the thing to be proved? Why, a

holy revelation, not of knowledge, but of things practical; of agenda,

not scienda. It is essential that this holy should also be _new_,

_original_, _revelatum_. Because, else, the divinest things which are

_connata_ and have been common to all men, point to no certain author.

They belong to the dark foundations of our being, and cannot challenge a

trust, faith, or expectation as suspended upon any particular individual

man whatever.

Here, then, arises the [Greek: prôtontokinon]. Thick darkness sits on

every man's mind as to Christ's revelation. He fancies that it amounts

to this: 'Do what is good. Do your duty. Be good.' And with this vague

notion of the doctrine, natural is it that he should think it as old as

the hills. The first step to a saner view is, to understand--if a man

has sense enough to reach so high--that the subtlest discoveries ever

made by man, all put together, do not make one wave of that Atlantic as

to novelty and originality which lies in the moral scheme of

Christianity. I do not mean in the total scheme of Christianity,

redemption, etc. No, but in the ethics.

All ethics that ever Greece refined or Rome illustrated, was, and could

be, only the same universal system of social ethics--ethics proper and

exclusive to man and man _inter se_, with no glimpse of any upward

relationship.

Now Christianity looks upward for the first time. This in the first

place. Secondly, out of that upward look Christianity looks secondarily

down again, and reacts even upon the social ethics in the most

tremendous way.

_For my Book on the Relations of Christianity to Man._--S. T. C. cites

Jeremy Taylor, etc., for horrible passages on the gloomy state of the

chances for virtuous Pagans. S. T. C. in a more liberal generation is

shocked; and of course in his readers as in himself secretly, he

professes more liberal ideas. Aye, but how is he entitled to these

ideas? For, on further consideration, it is not Cicero only, or

Epictetus only, that would suffer under this law of Christianity viewed

in its reagency, but also Abraham, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hezekiah.

Because, how could they benefit by a Redeemer not yet revealed--nay, by

a Redeemer not even existing? For it is not the second person in the

Trinity--not He separately and abstractedly--that is the Redeemer, but

that second person incarnated. St. Paul apparently wished to smuggle

this tremendous question into a fraudulent solution, by mixing up

Abraham (with others pre-Christian and Christian) into the long array of

those whose _Faith_ had saved them. But faith in whom? General faith in

God is not the thing, it is faith in Jesus Christ; and we are solemnly

told in many shapes that no other name was given on earth through which

men could be delivered. Indeed, if not, how is the Messiah of such

exclusive and paramount importance to man? The Messiah was as yet (viz.,

in Abraham's time) a prophecy--a dim, prophetic outline of one who

_should_ be revealed. But if Abraham and many others could do without

Him, if this was a dispensable idea, how was it in any case, first or

last, indispensable? Besides, recur to the theory of Christianity. Most

undeniably it was this, that neither of the two elements interested in

man could save him; not God; He might have power, but His purity

revolted. Power (or doubtfully so), but no will. Not man--for he, having

the will, had no power. God was too holy; manhood too _un_holy. Man's

gifts, applicable, but insufficient. God's sufficient, but

inapplicable. Then came the compromise. How if man could be engrafted

upon God? Thus only, and by such a synthesis, could the ineffable

qualities of God be so co-ordinated with those of man.

Suppose even that a verbal inspiration could have been secured--secured,

observe, against _gradual_ changes in language and against the

reactionary corruption of concurrent versions, which it would be

impossible to guarantee as also enjoying such an inspiration (since, in

that case, _what_ barrier would divide mine or anybody's wilfully false

translations from that pretending to authority? I repeat _what_? None is

conceivable, since what could you have beyond the assurance of the

translator, even which could only guarantee his intentions)--here is a

cause of misinterpretation amounting to ruin, viz., after being read for

centuries as if practically meant for our guidance, such and such a

chapter (_e.g._, Jael and Sisera), long proscribed by the noble as a

record of abominable perfidy, has at length been justified on the ground

that it was never meant for anything else. Thus we might get rid of

David, etc., were it not that for his flexible obedience to the _clerus_

he has been pronounced the man after God's own heart.

Is it not dreadful that at the very vestibule of any attempt to execute

the pretended law of God and its sentences to hell we are interrupted by

one case in every three as exceptional? Of the deaths, one in three are

of children under five. Add to these surely _very_ many up to twelve or

thirteen, and _many_ up to eighteen or twenty, then you have a law which

suspends itself for one case in every two.

_Note in the argument drawn from perishableness of language._ Not only

(which I have noted) is any language, _ergo_ the original, Chaldæan,

Greek, etc., perishable even for those who use it, but also the vast

openings to error which all languages open to translators form a separate

source of error in translators, viz.:

1. The old one on my list that for them the guidance of inspiration has

ceased, else, if not, you must set up an inspiration separately to

translators, since, if you say--No, not at all, why, which then?

2. The uncertainty of a foreign language even in a day contemporary with

the original writer, and therefore over and above what arises from lapse

of time and gradual alterations.

_On Human Progress._--Oftentimes it strikes us all that this is so

insensible as to elude observation the very nicest. Five years add

nothing, we fancy. Now invert your glass. In 1642 Englishmen are

fighting for great abstract principles. In 1460-83 (_i.e._, 100 + 17 +

42 years before, or 159 years) they are fighting for persons, for rival

candidates. In 1460 they could not have conceived more than an Esquimaux

can entertain a question about the constitution of lyric poetry, or the

differential principles of English and Greek tragedy, the barest

approximation to questions that in 1642 are grounds of furious quarrel,

of bloody quarrel, of extermination. Now then, looking forward, you

would see from year to year little if any growth; but inverting your

glass, looking back from the station of 1642 to 1460, you see a progress

that if subdivided amongst all the 159 years would give to each _x_/0 as

its quota, _i.e._ infinity. In fact, it is like the progression from

nothing to something. It is--creation.

All the body of the Christian world would fly out in a rage if you

should say that Christianity required of you many things that were easy,

but one thing that was _not_. Yet this is undoubtedly true; it requires

you to _believe_, and even in the case where you know what it is to

believe, and so far are free from perplexity, you have it not in your

own power to ensure (though you can influence greatly) your own power to

believe. But also great doubt for many (and for all that are not

somewhat metaphysical) attends the knowledge of what is believing.

As to my mother's fancy that Sir W. Jones had found in the East proofs

of Christianity, having gone out an infidel.

To do her justice, never once after she had adopted a theory of

Christianity did she inquire or feel anxious about its proof. But to

review the folly of this idea.

1. That Christianity there where it reigned and was meant to reign

should be insufficient in its proofs; but that in a far distant land,

lurking in some hole or corner, there should be proofs of its truth,

just precisely where these proofs were not wanted. And again, that these

should be reserved for one scholar rambling into a solitary path, where

in a moral sense _nobody_ could follow him (for it _is_ nobody--this or

that oriental scholar). And we are sure that his proof was not of that

order to shine by its own light, else it would have resounded through

England.

2. That for many hundreds of years Christianity should have been

received, generation after generation should have lived under its vital

action, upon no sufficient argument, and suddenly such an argument

should turn up as a reward to a man in a country not Christian for being

more incredulous than his neighbours; how impossible!

That fraudulent argument which affects to view the hardships of an

adventurous life and its perils as capable of one sole impression--that

of repulsion--and secondly as the sole circumstances about such

adventures, injures from the moment when it is perceived: not

1. The writer only; no matter for him, worthless liar, how much he sinks

in the opinion of his readers: but

2. The Apostles. Now see the injury of falsehood. Suddenly it snaps, and

with a great reaction causes a jar to the whole system, which in

ordinary minds it is never likely to recover. The reason it is not

oftener perceived is that people read such books in a somnolent,

inactive state of mind, one-tenth coming to a subject on which they have

already made up their minds, and open to no fresh impressions, the other

nine-tenths caring not one straw about the matter, as reading it in an

age of irreflectiveness and purely through an act of obedience to their

superiors, else not only does this hypocritical attempt to varnish give

way all at once, and suddenly (with an occasion ever after of doubt, and

causing a reflection to any self-sufficient man, suddenly coming to

perceive that he has been cheated, and with some justification for

jealousy thenceforwards to the maker up of a case), but also it robs the

Apostles of the human grace they really possessed. For if we suppose

them armed against all temptations, snares, seductions, by a

supernatural system of endowments, this is but the case of an

angel--nay, not of an angel, for it is probable that when an angel

incarnated himself, or one of the Pagan deities, who was obliged first

to incarnate himself before he could act amongst men, or so much as be

seen by men, he was bound by all the defects of man, _i.e._, he could

choose only an ideal, so far ideal as to elude the worst effects from

vice, intemperance, etc. The angel who wrestled with Jacob probably did

his best; he was a stout fellow, but so was the patriarch. The very

condition of incarnation, and this because the mere external form

already includes limitations (as of a fish, not to fly; of a man, not to

fly, etc.) probably includes as a _necessity_, not as a choice, the

adoption of all evils connected with the nature assumed. Even the Son of

God, once incarnated, was not exempted from any evil of flesh; He grew,

passed through the peculiar infirmities of every stage up to mature

life; would have grown old, infirm, weak, had He lived longer; was

liable to death, the worst of all human evils, and was not, we may be

sure, exempted from any one fleshly desire with regard to sex, or

enemies, or companions, but because that divine principle, which also

_is in man_, yes, in every man the foulest and basest--this light which

the darkness comprehended not, and which in some is early extinguished,

but in _all_ fights fitfully with the winds and storms of this human

atmosphere, in Him was raised to a lustre unspeakable by His pure and

holy will.

If the Apostles were more celestially armed in any other sense than as

we are all armed from above by calling forth our better natures, if in

any other sense than as sorrow arms us by purifying our natures, as

sorrowful reflection, as meditation and earnest endeavours to resist our

angry instincts (which, on the contrary, how often do men _obey_ under

the vile pretence of being put by conscience on a painful duty), then, I

say, what were the Apostles to us? Why should we admire them? How can we

make them models of imitation? It is like that case of Anarcharsis the

Scythian.

It does certainly incense a Christian to think that stupid Mahommedans

should impute to us such _childish_ idolatries as that of God having a

son and heir--just as though we were barbarous enough to believe that

God was liable to old age--that the time was coming, however distant,

when somebody would say to him, 'Come, Sir,' or 'Come, my Lord, really

you are not what you were. It's time you gave yourself some ease

([Greek: euphêmi], time, indeed, that you resigned the powers to which

you are unequal), and let a younger man take the reins.' None but a

filthy barbarian could carry forward his thoughts so little as not to

see that this son in due time would find himself in the same

predicament.

Now mark how Christian lands would enforce this doctrine of unity by

horrid coercions. They hang, drown, burn, crucify those who deny it. So

that, be assured you are planting your corner-stone on the most windy of

delusions. You yourselves do not ascribe any merit to Mahommed separate

from that of revealing the unity of God. Consequently, if that is a

shaken craze arising from mere inability on his part, a little, a very

little information would have cut up by the very roots the whole

peculiarity of Islam. For if a wise man could have assembled these

conceited Arabians and told them: Great thieves, you fancy yourselves to

have shot far ahead of the Christians as to the point of unity, and if

you had I would grant that you had made a prodigious advance. But you

are deceiving quarrellers. It is all a word--mere smoke, that blinds

you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate

this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept

that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so

as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error:

these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the most absolute sense

one.

The most shockingly searching, influential, and permanent blunder that

ever has affected the mind of man has been the fancy that a religion

includes a creed as to its [Greek: aporrhêta], and a morality; in short,

that it was doctrinal by necessity, enactory, and (which has been the

practical part of the blunder) therefore exclusive, because:

1. With our notion of a religion as essentially doctrinal, the very

first axiom about it is, that being true itself it makes all others

false. Whereas, the capital distinction of the Pagan was--that given,

supposing to be assumed, 10,000 religions--all must be true

simultaneously, all equally. When a religion includes any distinct

propositions offered to the understanding (that is, I think, resting

upon a principle or tendency to a consequence by way of differencing

from facts which also are for the understanding, but then barely to

contemplate not with a power of reacting on the understanding, for every

principle introduces into the mind that which may become a modification,

a restraint; whereas, a fact restrains nothing in the way of thought

unless it includes a principle), it would rise continually in its

exclusive power according to the number of those propositions. At first

it might exclude all but ten, eight, seven, and so on; finally, as

integrated it would exclude all.

2. If you ask on what principle a Pagan believed his religion, the

question to him was almost amusing and laughable. I will illustrate the

case. A man meets you who inquires in a hurried, suppose even in an

agitated way, whether you met a tall man, blind of one eye, dressed in

such a coloured dress, etc. Now, does it ever occur to you that the

inquirer is lying? Lying! Wherefore should he lie? Or again, if you say

that your house stands under a hill, that three out of four chimneys

smoke, and that you must indeed try some of the inventions for remedying

this annoyance, would any man in his senses think of speculating on the

possibility that all this should be a romance? Or, to come nearer in the

kind of fact, if a man represented his family fortune as having been

bequeathed by a maiden aunt in the last generation, would any man say

otherwise than that doubtless the man knew his own benefactors and

relatives best? On this same principle, when Christ was mentioned as the

divinity adored by a certain part of the Jews who were by way of

distinction called Christians, why should a Roman object? What motive

could he have for denying the existence or the divine existence of

Christ? Even the idea of dissent or schism, some Jews worshipping, some

protesting, would not much puzzle him. Something like it had occurred in

Pagan lands. Neptune and Athene had contended for Attica. And under the

slight inquiry which he would ever make, or listen to when made by

others, he might wonder at the rancour displayed by the protesting

party, but he would take it for granted that a divinity of some local

section had been unduly pushed into pre-eminence over a more strictly

epichorial divinity. He would go off with this notion, that whereas, the

elder Jews insisted on paying vows, etc., to a God called Jehovah, a

section sought to transfer that allegiance to a divinity called Christ.

If he were further pressed on the subject, he would fancy that very

possibly, as had been thought, found or imagined in the case of Syrian

deities or Egyptian, etc., that perhaps Christ might correspond to

Apollo, as Astarte to Diana, Neptune of Latium to the Poseidôn of

Greece. But if not, that would cause no scruple at all. Thus far it was

by possibility a mere affair of verbal difference. But suppose it

ascertained that in no point of the symbols surrounding the worship of

Christ, or the conception of His person, He could be identified with any

previously-known Pagan God--that would only introduce Him into the

matricula of Gods as a positive novelty. Nor would it have startled a

Roman to hear that in India or any country large enough there should be

a separate Pantheon of many thousand deities, _plus_ some other Pantheon

of divinities corresponding to their own. For Syria--but still more in

one section of Syrian Palestine--this would surprise him _quoad_ the

degree, not _quoad_ the principle. The Jew had a separate or peculiar

God, why not? No nation could exist without Gods: the very separate

existence of a people, trivial as it might be in power and wealth,

argued a tutelary God, but, of course, proportioned to the destinies at

least (and in part to the present size) of the country. Thus far no

difficulties at all. But the morality! Aye, but that would never be

accounted a part of religion. As well confound a science with religion.

Aye, but the [Greek: aporrhêta]. These would be viewed as the rites of

Adonis, or of Ceres; you could not warn him from his preconception that

these concerned only Jews. Where, therefore, lodged the offence? Why

here, as personalities--for such merely were all religions--the God must

be measured by his nation. So some Romans proposed to introduce Christ

into the Roman Pantheon. But what first exploded as a civil offence was

the demand of supremacy and the inconceivable principle set up of

incompatibility. This was mere folly.

A much more solemn, significant and prophetic meaning than the common

one may be secured to the famous passage in St. Matthew--'And thou shalt

call His name _Jesus_.' This injunction wears the most impressive

character belonging to heavenly adjuration, when it is thus confided to

the care and custody of a special angel, and in the very hour of

inauguration, and amongst the very birth-throes of Christianity. For in

two separate modes the attention is secretly pointed and solicited to

the grand serpentine artifice, which met and confronted the almost

insurmountable difficulty besetting Christianity on its very threshold:

First, by the record of the early _therapeutic_ miracles, since in that

way only, viz., by a science of healing, which the philosopher equally

with the populace recognised as resting upon inspiration from God, could

the magistrate and civil authority have been steadily propitiated;

secondly, by the very verbal suggestion couched in the name _Jesus_, or

_Healer_. At the most critical of moments an angel reveals himself, for

the purpose of saying '_Thou shalt call His name Jesus_'--and why Jesus?

Because, says the angel, 'He shall heal or cleanse His people from sin

as from a bodily disease.' Thus, in one and the same moment is suggested

prospectively to the early Christian, who is looking forward in search

of some adequate protection against the civil magistrate, and

theoretically and retrospectively is suggested to the Christian of our

own philosophizing days, that admirable resource of what by a shorthand

expression I will call _Hakimism_. The _Hakim_, the _Jesus_, the

_Healer_, comes from God. Mobs must not be tolerated. But neither must

the deep therapeutic inspirations of God be made of none effect, or

narrowed in their applications. And thus in one moment was the panic

from disease armed against the panic from insurgent mobs; the privileged

Hakim was marshalled against the privileged magistrate; and the deep

superstition, which saw, and not unreasonably, a demon raging in a

lawless mob, saw also a demon not less blind or cruel in the pestilence

that walked in darkness. And, as one magnet creates other magnets, so

also the Hakim, once privileged, could secretly privilege others. And

the physical Hakim could by no test or shibboleth be prevented from

silently introducing the spiritual Hakim. And thus, whilst thrones and

councils were tumultuating in panic, behold! suddenly the Christian

soldier was revealed amongst them as an armed man.

'_Écrasez l'infâme_,' I also say: and who is he? It would be mere

insanity to suppose that it could be _any_ teacher of moral truths. Even

I, who so much despise Socrates, could not reasonably call him

_l'infâme_.

But who, then, is _l'infâme_? It is he who, finding in those great ideas

which I have noticed as revelations from God, and which throw open to

the startled heart the heaven of heavens, in the purity, the holiness,

the peace which passeth all understanding, finding no argument of

divinity, then afterwards _does_ find it in the little tricks of

legerdemain, in conjuring, in præstigia. But here, though perhaps roused

a little to see the baseness of relying on these miracles, and also in

the rear a far worse argument against them, he still feels uncomfortable

at such words applied to things which Christ did. Christ could not

make, nor wished to make, that great which was inherently mean; that

relevant, which was originally irrelevant. If He did things in

themselves mean, it was because He suited Himself to mean minds,

incapable of higher views; wretches such as exist amongst us of modern

days by millions, on whom all His Divine words were thrown away,

wretches deaf and blind and besotted, to whom it was said in vain: 'He

that looketh upon a woman,' and what follows, creating by a rod of

divinity in man's heart a far superior ideal of the moral; who heard

with indifference His 'Bless those who persecute you;' yes, listened

unmoved to His 'Suffer little children to come unto Me;' who heard with

anger His 'In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;'

who abhorred His great doctrine that the counsels of God were not read

in the events of things[31]; who slighted as trivial that prayer which a

wise man might study with profit for a thousand years; beasts, wretches,

that turned away deaf and blind, even as their sons turn away, from

these arguments of a truth far transcending all that yet had come

amongst men; but whilst trampling with their brutal hoofs upon such

flowers of Paradise, turned in stupid wonderment to some mere

legerdemain or jugglery.

_The Truth._--But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the

awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had

been a blank not filled by anything, not by any smoke or dusky tarnish

of suspicion, not filled by so much as any shadowy outline or vague

phantom of possibility, _there_ was now seen rising, 'like Teneriffe or

Atlas'--say rather, by symbolizing the greatest of human interests by

the greatest of human visual objects, like the snowy peaks of the

Himalaya, peaks that by men's feelings are referred to the heavens

rather than to the earth; to the beings 'whose dwelling is no thick

flesh,' rather than to men who have in no age succeeded in scaling them;

and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but

dread crashes of sound--again to fade or vanish, the colossal form,

never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[32] Where there had been nothing,

a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for

man, called The Truth. Why was it called _The_ Truth? How could such an

idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as [Greek:

hopoêtês] was sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the

exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement

of dissimulation a man was called by the title of _The Orator_, his own

favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no

other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses of _the_ imply a

momentary annihilation of the competitors, as though in comparison of

the ideal exemplification these minor and approximating forms had no

existence--or at least, not _quoad hunc locum_--as 'the mountain in

Sicily' would rightly indicate Etna), on the same artificial principle

they may imagine rhetoricians to have denominated (or if not, to have

had it in their power to denominate) some one department of truth which

they wished to favour as _the_ truth. But this conventional denomination

would not avail, and for two reasons: First, that rival modes of truth

(physics against mathematics, rhetoric against music) would contest the

title, and no such denomination would have a basis of any but a sort of

courtesy or vicarious harmonious reality from the very first. Secondly,

that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form,

division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing

at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by

glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to

the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic;

so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular

ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial

titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic

divines. Out of this idea the truth grew, next (suppose _x_) another

_Martyrdom_.

The difference between all human doctrines and this is as between a

marble statue and a quick thing. The statue may be better, and it may be

of better material; it may be of ivory, of marble, and amongst marbles

known to the ancient sculptors of several different kinds the most

prized; of silver gilt, of hollow gold, of massy gold, and in all

degrees of skill; but still one condition applies to all--whatever the

material, whoever the artist, the statue is inanimate, the breath of

life is not within its nostrils. Motion, spontaneity, action and

antagonist action, the subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty

laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth,

pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty--not one of these divine gifts

does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let

Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be

its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the

valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great

philosopher meets with the labouring man; both meet with the little

innocent child. All have the same undervaluation of the statue. And if

any man values it preposterously, it will be neither a great

philosopher, nor a labouring man with horny fists, nor a little innocent

and natural child. It will be some crazy simpleton, who dignifies

himself as a man of taste, as _elegans formarum spectator_, as one

having a judicious eye for the distinctions of form. But now, suddenly,

let one of the meanest of these statues begin to stir and shiver with

the mystery of life, let it be announced that something 'quick' is in

the form, let the creeping of life, the suffusion of sensibility, the

awful sense of responsibility and accountability ripen themselves, what

a shock--what a panic! What an interest--how profound--would diffuse

itself in every channel. Such is the ethics of God as contrasted with

the ethics of Greek philosophers. The only great thing ever done by

Greece or by Greek philosophers was the ethics. Yet, after all, these

were but integrations of the natural ethics implanted in each man's

heart. Integrations they were, but rearrangements--redevelopments from

some common source.

It is remarkable that the Scriptures, valuing clearness and fencing

against misunderstandings above all things, never suspend--there is no

[Greek: epochê] in the scriptural style of the early books. And,

therefore, when I first came to a text, 'If when,' I was thunderstruck,

and I found that this belongs to the more cultivated age of Hebrew

literature.

'_And the swine because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud,

it is unclean unto you_' (Deut. xiv. 8). Now the obvious meaning is,

_primâ facie_, that the ground of its uncleanness was its dividing the

hoof. Whereas, so far from this, to divide the hoof is a ground of

cleanness. It is a fact, a _sine quâ non_--that is, a negative condition

of cleanness; but not, therefore, taken singly the affirmative or

efficient cause of cleanness. It must in addition to this chew the

cud--it must ruminate. Which, again, was but a _sine quâ non_--that is,

a negative condition, indispensable, indeed; whose absence could not be

tolerated in any case, but whose presence did not therefore, and as a

matter of course, avail anything. For the reverse case occurred in the

camel, hare, and rabbit. They _do_ chew the cud, the absence of which

habit caused the swine to be rejected, but then they 'divide not the

hoof.' Accordingly they were equally rejected as food with the swine.

We see the great Jewish lawgiver looking forward to cases which actually

occurred nearly five hundred years after, as demanding a king, and again

looking still farther to cases eight hundred and a thousand years

after--their disobedience and rebellion to God. Now, many will think

that it must have been an easy thing for any people, when swerving from

their law, and especially in that one great fundamental article of

idolatry as the Jews so continually did, and so naturally when the case

is examined, to always have an easy retreat: the plagues and curses

denounced would begin to unfold themselves, and then what more easy than

to relinquish the idolatrous rites or customs, resuming with their old

rituals to God their old privileges? But this was doubly impossible.

First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that

with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the

trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct

clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour

God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would

offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile

by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of God slept often

for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His

large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up

with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a

whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind

maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a

reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions.

The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own

condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence

was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were

enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that

as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of

having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews

may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under

the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their

steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could

not recover the station from which they swerved. They that had now

realized the _casus foederis_, the case in which they had covenanted

themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made

that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that

the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth

itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and

the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.

In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a

total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save

them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to

hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their

judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by

seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false

alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all

substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the

ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.

If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through

all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and

forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the

post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly

introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two

millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic

explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a

general fire--that word by which sadness is spread over the face of

things, but also infinite grandeur--then may I rightly lay this as one

chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.

The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual

things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating

to that which shrinks up to a point--and observe, I do not mean that

being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed

as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes

as a real thing--when this happens, having no subjective existence at

all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the

same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge;

fancying, _e.g._, like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road

out of the wood in which they were then entangled.

It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature,

which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly

Boeckh--[Greek: en genei]--which does not mean that Gods _and_ men are

the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the

first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread

through thousands of years.

It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet,

'Qu'ont gagné les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290).

Now how _should_ that case have been tried thoroughly before the

printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospel _was_ so tried. True,

but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the

whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new

proof of its reality.

_An Analogy._--1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews,

probably, when rebuked for wickedness, replied, 'What! are we not the

peculiar people of God? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege

more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the

people of God--the chosen people--implied a license to do wrong, and had

a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better

than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.

2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to

repentance. It is odious to think of, this making God the abettor and

encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because God has

said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief

consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety;

though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to

account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they--such is

their thought--are encouraged to sin by the assurance that repentance

will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.

Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this means _real

penitence_;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we mean _real penitence_.'

'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not

possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath,

and protest against it as no privilege at all.

The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very

expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to

make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying

so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power

evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled

in her skirts.

_Idolatry._--It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's

(Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols--utterly wide of any real imperfection,

but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to

kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship

Apollo, _i.e._, a god to be in some sense false--belonging to a system

connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil

in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.

I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational

sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere

archæologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the

Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in

the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been

fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the

dimensions of Nineveh, how should _that_ make him a true prophet? Or

supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for

mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after

the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them,

they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.

_The sun stands still._ I am persuaded that this means no such

incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises

from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as

natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of

the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a

relation to a particular valley: that the sun could have stood still in

Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two

great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone

shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for

else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made

known to the central sanctity of that God whose miraculous interposition

had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not

then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which

subsequently created its sanctity did not occur till more than four

centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But

Shiloh existed, and Horeb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs.

And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle,

would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not

then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more

important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their

ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding

it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the

day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people

never reflect on the [Greek: to] positive of their reading? If they

_did_, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event,

as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of

time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of

this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people

and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters

(through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as

the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was

expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen

of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For

remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so

intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal

laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so

much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the

_final-cause_ day.

The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or

comment, or--which, in fact, is the meaning--any impulse or bias to the

reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz.,

the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to

talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books

without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception.

Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a

restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses,

already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.

Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of

many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might

which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local

residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and

three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of

Araunah?[33] Of that mystery, of that local circumscription--in what

sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But

this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly

understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the

man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes

in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts--yet mark me so far,

Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years.

Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense

understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended.

Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptered potentate

for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and

forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752 B. C. complete the period.

But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost.

The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next

think of the temptation to _mythus_. And, finally, of God's plan

unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the

confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations

there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the

attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem

to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire;

2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with

the purposes _now_ became necessary to God in order to remedy

_abnormous_ shifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of

the language of Scripture, I see the same illustration. Sir William

Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish

fit[34] as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praises the language of

Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no

dishonour if we say of God that, in the sense meant by Sir William

Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers

can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as

impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a

simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In

the schemata, because in the original ideas, God says indeed what man

cannot, for these are peculiar to God; but who before myself has shown

what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we

have the same identically. And when a language labours under an

infirmity, as all do, not God Himself could surmount it! He is

compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It

is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His

answers God is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere

in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless

by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), God is thwarted

and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from

the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language--I know its

secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high

abstractions--far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.

The power lies in the spirit--the animating principle; and verily such a

power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the

restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness,

goodness, and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power

which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in

reaching man _ex-abundantibus_ in so transcendent a way that mere excess

of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am

persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as

to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered,

uncorrupted, through the violent assaults of idolatries all round, and

the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,[35]

down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses--there was the labour

hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men

treating such a case as a simple _original_ problem as to God. But far

otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His

rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the

foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or

even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the

limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power

to receive, to sustain, to comprehend--not in the Divine power to

radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on

the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act,

and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is illustrated

by prayer; for, while we think it odd that so many prayers of good men

for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we

nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy,

as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and

all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and

remains wholly uninfluenced by it).

These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what

risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a

favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against

which they had been warned--in believing that they only were concerned

in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently

substituting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in

fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human

race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews

forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of

favour with God, but only a means of favour.

What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why God did not sooner accomplish

the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme

in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion

elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but

the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy

luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and

at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be

without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that

blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such

as would not have _been_ (_objectively_ would not have been, but still

less could it _subjectively_ have been) for the conception of man that

dreadful mystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been

measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first

sight shocking to say of God that He cannot do this and this, but it is

not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compass our

chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the _absolute_,

without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no

created intellect can range or measure--even one sole attribute of God,

His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by

certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent,

and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut

his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and

body.

5.--Political, etc.

Sir Robert Walpole, as to patriots, was like a man who has originally,

from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts,

which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to

deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circumstances, he

does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early

faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a class of appearances that,

after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more

ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his

courage and his wrath and his denial--than his challenge of the lurking

patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He

assaults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and

yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades--horrible

mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so

strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this

fact should have given me warning--should have exposed the frauds. But

no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much

wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he

should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a

highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side

should start a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert

him.

Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency

by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed,

in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.

'He took his stand upon the truth'--said by me of Sir Robert Peel--might

seem to argue a lower use of '_the_ truth,' but in fact it is as happens

to the article _the_ itself: you say _the_ guard, speaking of a coach;

_the_ key, speaking of a trunk or watch, _i.e._, _the_ as by usage

appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of

the particular perplexity.

The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman

emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the

Ostrogoths--the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.

Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of

authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is

the _principal_ in the concern--he makes the trunk, whereas the author,

quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.

* * * * *

_Case of Casuistry._--Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince

Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by

a country. _Ergo_ the inference that prudence would be, always if in

Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold

fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position?

6.--Personal Confessions, etc.

Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed

rule, of verbally uttering thanks to God for every chastisement, and who

say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and God seeing my

heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the

end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give

no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular

way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so

as not to mock God with his lips, give thanks simply on an _à priori_

principle, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness.

I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he

will never again see such a person (_i.e._, by being removed by death)

is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated

by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to

ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn,

despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest

nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new

chances and openings is lodged in every man far down below the

sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were

it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were

his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left

possible for him to commit suicide.

_Justice._--You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same

degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test

is, what will he _do_ for it? Suppose a man to propose rewards

exclusively to those who assisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have

equally seen that many did _not_ assist, even refused to do so. But X

perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for

truth and justice by exposing the undeserving.

It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible

to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking

insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc.

But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made

sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the

dispute, 'Is he wrong as a _poet_?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as

a _geometrician_?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is

capable of decision.

Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive

the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except

through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirations

_working together with time_.

Instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the

idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it

is villainous insensibility to the written.

Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on

the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an

abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her

accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the

discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he

is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing

to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total

destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and

the more angel she.

I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with

profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and

through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out

of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this

deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have

other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is

incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the

interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.

Upon trying to imprint upon my memory that at such a period the Argives

ceased to be called Pelasgi, and were henceforward called Danai, I felt

how impracticable (and doubtless in their degree injurious, for though

an infinitesimal injury only as regards any single act doubtless, yet,

_per se_, by tendency doubtless all blank efforts of the memory

unsupported by the understanding are bad), must be any violent efforts

of the memory not falling in with a previous preparedness.

_Music._--I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than

we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all

creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than

anything merely intellectual ever could.

It is remarkable (as proving to me the delibility of caste) that the

Sudras of Central India, during its vast confusions under the Mahrattas

have endeavoured to pass themselves for descendants of the Kshatriyas

(or warrior caste) by assuming the sacred thread, also assumed by the

Rajpoots, and also by some of the Sikhs.

I never see a vast crowd of faces--at theatres, races, reviews--but one

thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to

die. Strange it is that this multitude of people, so many of them

intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without

forethought or sense of the realities of life.

Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills

me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well

with other things.

This is curious:

Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure,

When ropes or opium can my ease procure?

This offends nobody, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:

When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,

_Self-murder_ is an honourable way--

though the same essentially, this shocks all men.

I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a

dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to

regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and

mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual

faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which

in my youth I fled.

The _Arrow Ketch_, six guns, is recorded in the _Edinburgh Advertiser_

for June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on

Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of

it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this

long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and

has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'

Anecdotes from _Edinburgh Advertiser_, for June and May. The dog of a

boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway

waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow passed away,

leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a

stepmother's wrath.

To note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old

ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting

plagues or typhus fever, want of granaries or mendacious violence

destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and

general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the

homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the

almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating,

moves.

In the speech of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (reported on June 14th,

1844), it is recited that boys 'left to stroll about the streets and

closes,' acquire habits so fixed, if not of vice, at least of idleness,

that in consequence of their not being trained to some kind of

discipline in their early years, the habit of vagabondizing acquires

such power that it is uncontrollable. And how apt and forcible was that

quotation in the place assigned it: 'If thou forbear to deliver them

that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou

sayest, _Behold, we knew it not_, doth not He that pondereth the heart,

consider it?'--consider it, regard it, make account of it.

_Manners._--The making game of a servant before company--a thing

impossible to well-bred people. Now observe how this is illustrative of

H---- Street.

I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend the objections of the

Westminster reviewer and even of my friend Dr. Nichol, to my commentary

on the strange appearance in Orion. The reviewer says that this

appearance (on which he seems to find my language incomprehensible) had

been dispersed by Lord Rosse's telescope. True, or at least so I hear.

But for all this, it was originally created by that telescope. It was

in the interval between the first report and the subsequent reports

from Lord Rosse's telescope that I made my commentary. But in the case

of contradiction between two reports, more accurate report I have not.

As regards the reviewer, there had been no time for this, because the

book, which he reviews, is a simple reprint in America, which he knows I

had had no opportunity of revising. But Dr. Nichol perplexes me. That a

new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further

stages will alter them, concerns me nothing, though referring to a

coming republication; for both alike apparently misunderstood the case

as though it required a _real_ phenomenon for its basis. To understand

the matter as it really is, I beg to state this case. Wordsworth in at

least four different places (one being in the fourth book of 'The

Excursion,' three others in Sonnets) describes most impressive

appearances amongst the clouds: a monster, for instance, with a

bell-hanging air, a dragon agape to swallow a golden spear, and various

others of affecting beauty. Would it have been any just rebuke to

Wordsworth if some friend had written to him: 'I regret most sincerely

to say that the dragon and the golden spear had all vanished before nine

o'clock'? So, again, of Hawthorne's face on a rock. The very beauty of

such appearances is in part their evanescence.

To be or _not_ to be. 'Not to be, by G----' said Garrick. This is to be

cited in relation to Pope's--

'Man never is, but always to be blessed.'

_Political Economy._--Which of these two courses shall I take? 1. Shall

I revise, extend, condense my logic of Political Economy, embodying

every doctrine (and numbering them) which I have amended or

re-positioned, and introduce them thus in a letter to the

Politico-Economical Society: 'Gentlemen, certain ideas fundamental to

Political Economy I presented in a book in the endeavour to effect a

certain purpose. These were too much intermingled with less elementary

ideas in consequence of my defective self-command from a dreadful

nervous idea, and thus by interweaving they were overlapped and lost.

But I am not disposed to submit to that wrong. I affirm steadily that

the foundations of Political Economy are rotten and crazy. I defy, and

taking up my stand as a scholar of Aristotle, I defy all men to gainsay

the following exposures of folly, one or any of them. And when I show

the darkness all round the very base of the hill, all readers may judge

how great is that darkness.' Or, 2. Shall I introduce them as a chapter

in my Logic?