Practically, the amount of confusion prevalent in the church of Corinth,
arising from irregularities incident to the exercise of “tongues,”
and to the undisciplined energies of a mixed congregation, appears to
have almost rivalled the disorder in the theatre of Ephesus, when the
whole city was filled with confusion, and some cried one thing, and
some another; for the assembly was confused, and the most part knew
not wherefore they were come together. So, when the whole church of
Corinth were come together into one place, and all spoke with tongues,
to outsiders that for the nonce stepped inside they must appear mad. All
things were done indecorously and in most admired disorder. Now, St. Paul
was for having all things done decently and in order. “For God is not the
author of confusion, but of peace.” Order is Heaven’s first law. The same
apostle is prompt to remind the Thessalonians that he behaved himself not
disorderly among them; and this he did because he heard that there were
some among them which walked disorderly—ἀτάκτως. The apostolic canon for
both Corinth and Thessalonica, and all other churches, is, Πὰντα δὲ κατὰ
τάξιν γινέσθω. Let them all walk by this same rule, and all mind this
same thing.
* * * * *
As with the sect of Pythagoreans, virtue was defined to be a harmony,
unity, and an endeavour to resemble the Deity,—so the whole life of man,
they taught, should be an attempt to represent on earth the beauty and
harmony displayed in the order of the universe. It was the doctrine of
Pythagoras himself, that by action as well as by thought the individual
as well as the state should represent in themselves “an image of the
order and harmony by which the world was sustained and regulated.” But as
Prior puts it, when he considers the heavens, the starry worlds of God’s
ordaining, or ordering,—
“How mean the order and perfection sought
In the best product of the human thought,
Compared to the great harmony that reigns
In what the Spirit of the world ordains!”
Lord Lytton suggestively pictures to us one of his characters alone in
the streets by night, striding noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under
the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem
to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method—“Man’s
order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker’s order, remote,
infinite, is so beyond man’s comprehension of what _is_ order.” Chauncy
Hare Townshend expresses the same idea in an address to the stars:—
“Distance deceives the sight. Ye move and sway
With life; yet are your hoverings on the brink
Of ruin but the freedom and the play
That binds your dance of beauty, link to link,
In woven joy that shall not fail nor shrink.
... Thrones arise and sink,
Earth is transformed beneath you: ye remain,
Clasping distracted man with Order’s sacred chain.”
So Wordsworth, addressing as it were a deified idea of Duty, pays this
homage:—
... “Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.”
Well may Hooker speculate on what would become of man, were Nature to
intermit her course, and leave altogether, though but for a while, the
observation of her own laws; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected
over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres
should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn
themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of
heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it
were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and rest himself;
if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of
the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture—“See we not
plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of Nature is the stay
of the whole world?” Again to quote from “The Mystery of Evil,” the same
star-gazer speaking:—
“Do I not climb in you, O blessèd host,
The way of symbols, shining steps to God?
When most man knows you, he is certain most
One law unswerving reigns from star to clod.”
“Of law,” says Hooker, at the close of his first book of Ecclesiastical
Polity, with an eloquence which has ever been most admired by the
most admirable masters of English prose,—“Of law there can be no less
acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the
harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the
very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from
her power: both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever,
though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent,
admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” Considering when he
wrote, what he wrote, and to what purpose and in what spirit he wrote,
there seems to us a beautiful consistency in Richard Hooker’s deathbed
meditations, as related in the familiar memoir by Izaak Walton. Found
by his trustiest visitor, “deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to
discourse,” and asked what was the subject of his present thoughts, he
replied, “That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and
their blessed obedience and order, without which, peace could not be in
heaven; and oh, that it might be so on earth!”
There is not, affirms a modern divine, a corner of the world, nor
a process of nature, nor a piece of God’s handiwork of any kind
whatever, on which His love of order is not written with a plainness
not to be mistaken. “System and method, law and order, symmetry and
punctuality, are conspicuous everywhere; indicating at once the value
attached to these things in the mind of God, and his dislike for their
opposites—confusion, fitfulness, irregularity.” Nor is the Divine love of
order a quality that ever leads to stiffness, formality, or monotony; for
it is shown to be constantly associated with beauty, variety, and freedom.
M. Jules Simon interpolates into his argument for the vast preponderance
of good over evil in the world, a casually expressed identification of
good with order: “le bien, c’est-à-dire, l’ordre, car dans le monde le
bien et l’ordre ne font qu’un.”
“Some think Disorder means God’s moral plan;
But Evil oscillates in certain bounds.
Ten thousand causes check the rage of man:
His utmost crimes a wall of brass surrounds;
Mere weariness exhausts War’s yelling hounds;
And, if all fail, Death comes with his great wave,
That levels all the hollows and the mounds
Of human life. Who then shall be so brave
As of Confusion found in God’s large thoughts to rave?”
Readers familiar with the writings first and last of Mr. Carlyle, will
readily call to mind many a terse utterance in vindication of the Divine
authorship and Divine authority of order. _Dis_order he pronounces to be
a thing which “veracious created Nature, even because it is not Chaos and
a waste-whirling baseless Phantasm,” rejects and disowns. “_Dis_order,
insane by the nature of it, is the hatefullest of things to man, who
lives by sanity and by order.” “All Anarchy, all evil, all injustice,
is, by the nature of it, ... suicidal, and cannot endure.” “Arrangement
is indispensable to man; Arrangement, were it grounded only on that old
primary evangel of Force, with Sceptre in the shape of Hammer!” Such
sentences admit of almost infinite multiplication. “Anarchy, hateful as
Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and so must itself soon
die.” Hence this philosopher’s partiality for “heroes,” even of the least
estimable type, provided they have will and force to replace confusion
by order. Cortès is not among the specified Heroes of his special
Hero-worship; but he deserves a place by reason of the preamble to that
code of ordinances, as the conqueror of Mexico himself terms them, which
he set forth in restraint of his army: the essential purport of this
preamble being, that in all institutions, whether Divine or human (if the
latter have any worth), order is the great law.
It was in support of the cause of social order that Luther took to
exposing the dangers due to ignorant innovators, and strenuously declared
that “God Himself constituted certain authorities to direct the world;
for it is a great feature in His magnificent system, that there shall be
order here below.” Doctor Martin may, in this respect, be called a man
after our Hero-worshipper’s own heart; such another as the one of whom
he wrote,—“Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care;
here is the man that has declared war with it, that will never make peace
with it. Man is the Missionary of Order; he is the servant, not of the
Devil and of Chaos, but of God and the universe.” And Christian doctrine
teaches that the order and beauty of the outward world are symbols of
that inward order and symmetry, that peace and purity of heart, that
universal harmony between God’s will and man’s will, which it is one
great object of Christianity to establish.
“Then quick I ran my glance about the globe,
To find Religion link’d with Order’s aim,
Ruling by love and light,”
says the Christian poet, who has, however, to deplore the disappointments
of his quest. Of all orderly things that are beautiful in God’s eyes, it
has been said, there can be none so beautiful as an orderly or holy soul.
“Once in this world the sight presented itself in spotless beauty and
brilliancy.” Everything there seen was in its place: reason, conscience,
will, feeling, instinct, appetite, “all most beautifully arranged; each
was in perfect health, and all were in thorough harmony with the will of
God.” But that was God manifest in the flesh. Order incarnate. Without
Him, in the material world, was not anything made that was made. Apart
from Him, the moral world is without form and void, and darkness covers
the face of its deep. Order, in fine, is the indispensable postulate of
every given cosmos. In the words of Schiller—
“It is the keystone of the world’s wide arch;
The one sustaining and sustained by all,
Which, if it fall, brings all in ruin down.”
Of the Church as a family, George Herbert, ever quaint in his devotion,
sings or says—after a depreciation of his own unruly thoughts:
“But, Lord, the house and family are Thine,
Though some of them repine.
Turn out these wranglers, which defile Thy seat:
For where Thou dwellest all is neat.
“First Peace and Silence all disputes control,
Then _Order_ plays the soul;
And giving all things their set forms and hours,
Makes of wild woods sweet walks and bowers.”
So Dryden traces to harmony this universal frame—a cosmos evolved from
chaos, from a heap of jarring atoms that, at the Divine summons,—
“_In order_ to their stations leap.”
Shaftesbury contends that the admiration and love of order, in whatever
kind, is “naturally improving to the temper, advantageous to social
affection, and highly assistant to virtue—which is itself no other than
the love of order and beauty in society.” In the meanest subjects of the
world, he goes on to say, the appearance of order gains upon the mind,
and draws the affections towards it. “For ’tis impossible that such a
Divine order should be contemplated without ecstasy and rapture; since
in the common subjects of science, and the liberal arts, whatever is
according to just harmony and proportion is so transporting to those
who have any knowledge or practice in the kind.” In another place he
elaborates the thesis, that whatever things have order, have unity of
design, and concur in one, and are parts constituent of one whole—just as
a symphony is a certain system of proportioned sounds. It is noteworthy
that Pythagoras deduced his celebrated theory of the music of the
spheres from his assumption that everything in the great arrangement
(κόσμος) which he called the world must be harmoniously arranged (and
that, accordingly, the planets were at the same relative distance as the
divisions of the monochord, etc.) Divine as the philosophy of Plato is
commonly esteemed, there are, on the other hand, occasional glimpses in
it of what one of his commentators calls the “appalling doctrine” that
God alternately governs and forsakes the world—the world when he forsakes
it, suddenly changing its orbit, so that all things are in disorder, and
mundane existence is totally disarranged: “only after some time do things
settle down to a sort of order, though of a very imperfect kind.” Spinoza
takes order to be a thing of the imagination, as also he does right and
wrong, useful and hurtful—these being merely such, he argues, in relation
to us. But this would not prevent him, from his stand-point, assenting to
the ethical import of order—as expounded for instance by the Shakspearian
Ulysses:
“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place, ...
Office, and custom, in all line of order....
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy.”
Order, writes Southey, is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body,
the peace of the city, the security of the State. Diogenes held with the
Dorian lawgivers, that order (κόσμος) is the basis of civil government.
As the beams to a house, it has been said, as the bones to the microcosm
of man, so is order to all things. Balzac is treating of _harmonie
politique_ when he says that harmony is the poetry of order, and that
“the peoples” have a keen need of order. The racy author of the “Biglow
Papers” discourses in his shrewd, homely style, on the indispensableness
(not that he uses such a word) of orderly established law:—
“Onsettle _that_, an’ all the world goes whiz,
A screw is loose in everything there is.”
Mr. Carlyle, in his apology for Knox in the act of pulling down
cathedrals—as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue—urges that he was
precisely the reverse of that. Knox, he maintains, wanted no pulling down
of stone edifices, but wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of
the lives of men. “Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature
of his life that he was forced to dwell so much on that.” Every such man,
on Mr. Carlyle’s showing, is the born enemy of disorder—hates to be in
it; but what then? “Smooth falsehood is not order; it is the general sum
total of disorder. Order is truth—each thing standing on the basis that
belongs to it. Order and falsehood cannot subsist together.” And it is
in treating of another of his heroes elect, that the same philosopher
contends on behalf of such others of them as seem to have worked as
revolutionary men, that nevertheless every great man, every genuine
man, is by the nature of him a son of order, not of disorder—a seeming
anarchist, yet to his whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. “His
mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly,
chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order.” Is
not all work of man in this world, we are emphatically asked, a making of
Order?
The Abbé Duval, writing to Mme. Récamier, as her spiritual counsellor,
bids her engrave this elementary truth on her heart of hearts: “Gravez
au-dedans de vous-même cette première vérité que la religion veut
_l’ordre_ avant tout.” Whatsoever doth make manifest is light, and it
is light that reveals a cosmos where before, in the words of Thomson, a
formless grey confusion covered all:—
“As when of old (so sung the Hebrew bard)
Light, uncollected, through the chaos urged
Its infant way; nor Order yet had drawn
His lovely train from out the dubious gloom.”
That a scrupulous regard for order, in some sort, is nevertheless
compatible with a very low standard of moral worth, is recognised and
illustrated by poet Crabbe—prose-poet the good parson was, not quite in
the accepted sense—in a series of pithy, if not pungent rhymes:—
“The love of order—I the thing receive
From reverend men, and I in part believe—
Shows a clear mind and clean, and whoso needs
This love, but seldom in the world succeeds;
And yet with this some other love must be,
Ere I can fully to the fact agree;
Valour and study may by order gain,
By order sovereigns hold more steady reign;
Through all the tribes of nature order runs,
And rules around in systems and in suns:
Still has the love of order found a place
With all that’s low, degrading, mean, and base,
With all that merits scorn, and all that meets disgrace:
In the cold miser, of all change afraid,
In pompous men in public seats obeyed;
In humble placemen, heralds, solemn drones;
...
Order to these is armour and defence,
And love of method serves in lack of sense.”
Exceptions allowed for, as in every rule, yet is the rule sufficiently
approved, that order is heaven’s first law. The poet of “The Angel in
the House” in style, and spirit, and sentiment, how salient a contrast
to Crabbe, utters the conceit (_poeticè_) in one of his tender preludes,
that—
“Sweet Order has its draught of bliss
Graced with the pearl of God’s consent,”—
a conceit that allows of wide application, as do many of those of so
suggestive a writer.
But to conclude. When the judicious Hooker—to call him by his
conventional epithet—lay a-dying, he expressed his joy at the near
prospect of entering a World of Order. The author of “The Book of the
Church” emphasises the import of holy Richard’s “placid and profound
contentment,” by reminding us that because he had been employed in
ecclesiastical polemics, and because his life had been passed under the
perpetual discomfort of domestic discord, the happiness of heaven must
have seemed in Hooker’s estimation, to consist primarily in Order, as,
indeed, in all human societies this is the first thing needful.
_SWEET SLEEP, AND ITS FORFEITURE._
PROVERBS iii. 24.
To him that keepeth sound wisdom and instruction is the promise given,
not only that he shall walk in his way safely, and his foot shall not
stumble,—this for daytime and its activities,—but further, as regards
night-time and its contingencies, that when he lies down he shall not
be afraid; yea, he shall lie down, and his sleep shall be sweet. So He
giveth His beloved sleep, of whom the Psalmist said, “I laid me down and
slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.” Surely, in order that one
may pray with full purpose of heart the prayer, Let me die the death of
the righteous, and let my last end be like his! one should live the life
that may warrant the nightly petition, Let me sleep the sleep of the
just, and let mine eyes close quietly in slumber even as his.
Macbeth, within this minute a murderer, _ipso facto_ realizes the
appalling truth, that between him and placid sleep there is, from
henceforth and for evermore, a great gulf fixed, as impassable as abysmal.
“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,⸺’
_Lady M._ What do you mean?
_Macb._ Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep; and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!’”
How sleeps Lady Macbeth after that night? Ask her physician and
waiting-woman, and watch with them the sleep-walking scene. “To bed,
to bed, to bed.” But what avails _that_ to the somnambulist, ever in
semblance washing her hands, and complaining of the smell of blood
upon them still, and that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
them? Now and then one meets with a sceptic as to lost sleep being the
inevitable sequent upon crime; and no doubt there are exceptions. Mr.
G. Wingrove Cooke, in his letters from Chinese waters, thus describes
the captive Mandarin, Yeh, whose fellow-passenger to Calcutta he was:
“He goes to bed at eight o’clock, and while we are reading or writing
or playing chess, he sleeps the sleep of infancy—an unbroken slumber,
apparently undisturbed by visions of widowed women and wailing orphans.
This man-killer, after slaying his hundred thousand human beings, enjoys
sweeter sleep than an innocent London alderman after a turtle dinner.”
Perhaps that is not saying much,—considering what a turtle dinner
comprehends and superinduces. But the next sentence says a good deal; it
is to be hoped, a great deal too much: “So false are traditions; so false
are the remorseful scenes of Greek and English tragedies.” One would be
sorry, for the dignity of human nature, to believe that all is fiction
the poets tell us of cases in which _non avium citharæque cantus_, or any
other aids and appliances, _somnum reducent_. “Wherefore to me,” asks
Clytemnestra,—
... “is solacing sleep denied?
And honourable rest, the right of all?
So that no medicine of the slumbrous shell,
Brimmed with divinest draughts of melody,
Nor silence under dreamful canopies,
Nor purple cushions of the lofty couch,
May lull this fever for a little while.”
Impressive in history, not romance, as Plutarch tells it, is the story of
Pausanius as a haunted man, from the hour that Cleonice fell dead at his
feet, pierced by his sword. “From that hour he could rest no more.” Her
spectre perturbed him every night. Henceforth, nor poppy, nor mandragora,
nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, could ever medicine him to that
sweet sleep which he owed yesterday. As a guilty spirit says of guilt, in
one of Landor’s fragments,—
“It wakes me many mornings, many nights,
And fields of poppies could not quiet it.”
Modern fiction abounds with examples to the purpose. There is Colonel
Whyte Melville’s remorseful woman of the world bidding her young friend
good night, and meaning it all the more because her own good nights are
dead and gone: “What would I give to yawn as honestly as you do, and to
sleep sound once again, as I used to sleep when I was a girl!” There is
Mr. Trollope’s Lady Mason, so wistfully, so vainly longing for rest—to be
able to lay aside the terrible fatigue of being ever on the watch. From
the burden of that necessity she has never been free since her crime was
first committed. “She had never known true rest. She had not once trusted
herself to sleep without the feeling that her first waking thought would
be one of horror, as the remembrance of her position came upon her.” As
with the royal lady pictured by the laureate,—
“Many a time for hours
In the dead night, grim faces came and went
Before her, or a vague spiritual fear—
Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors,
Heard by the watcher in a haunted house,
That keeps the rust of murder on the walls—
Held her awake. Or if she slept, she dream’d
An awful dream ...
... and with a cry she woke.
And all this trouble did not pass, but grew.”
There is Donatello, in Hawthorne’s “Transformation,” succumbing to a
stupor, which he mistakes for such drowsiness as he has known in his
innocent past life. There is Albert Maurice, in “Mary of Burgundy,”
gazing on the Vert Gallant of Hannut as he lay in a deep, sweet sleep—so
calm and tranquil, though within the walls of a prison, suffering from
injuries, and exposed to constant danger; gazing with a sense of envy and
regret, “which few, perhaps, can appreciate fully, who have not felt
the sharp tooth of remorse begin its sleepless gnawings on the heart. He
would not have disturbed such slumbers for the world; and, withdrawing
again with a noiseless step, he retired to his own chamber, and cast
himself down upon his bed, to snatch, at least, that heated and disturbed
sleep, which was all the repose that he was ever more to know on earth.”
To such as him can nothing bring back, in the hour and power of darkness,
more than an embittered memory of times
“When that placid sleep came o’er him
Which he ne’er can know again.”
An innocent comforter in a modern tragedy offers a disquieted spirit the
assurance, as regards the object of his disquiet, that “’twill away in
sleep.” But his answer is,—
“No, no! I dare not sleep—for well I know
That then the knife will gleam, the blood will gush,
The form will stiffen!”
From the night of the massacre of Glencoe, Glenlyon, as Macaulay tells
us, was never again the man that he had been before that night. The
form of his countenance was changed; and “in all places, at all hours,
whether he waked or slept, Glencoe was for ever before him.” As with a
distinguished foreigner of a later generation, _Depuis ce moment, point
de sommeil, point de repos; il croyait toujours voir un glaive arrêté sur
sa tête_. In such cases, the sleepers start from broken slumbers, as if
starting back from the edge of a precipice; for,—
“Their whole tranquillity of heart is gone;
The peace wherewith till now they have been blest
Hath taken its departure. In the breast
Fast following thoughts and busy fancies throng;
Their sleep itself is feverish, and possest
With dreams that to the wakeful mind belong.”
“Something like a stupid sleep oppresses me,” writes one of Henry
Mackenzie’s characters; “last night I could not sleep. Where are now
those luxurious slumbers, those wandering dreams of future happiness?
Never shall I know them again.” Falkland avows to Caleb Williams, the
involuntary master of his master’s fatal secret, that “from the hour the
crime was committed” he has not had an hour’s peace: “I became changed
from the happiest into the most miserable being that lives; sleep has
fled from my eyes.” And Caleb Williams himself testifies in an after
chapter, “The ease and light-heartedness of my youth were for ever gone.
The voice of an irresistible necessity had commanded me to ‘sleep no
more.’” They that do murder, says Roscoe’s Violenzia,—
“Never sleep more, never more taste of peace,
Quaff poison in their drink, see knives in the dark,
And ever at their elbow horror walks,
Shaking them like a palsy.”
The bitter contrast—ah, for the change ’twixt now and then!—is forcibly
worded by Bosola in the “Duchess of Malfi”:—
“O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps
On turtle’s feathers! whilst a guilty conscience
Is a perspective that foreshows us hell.”
_ONCE DENIED, THRICE DENIED._