It would not be difficult for those who are acquainted with

Tennyson's earlier history, to discover the church of which he is

a member, and the section of it whose views he adopts. _In

Memoriam_ takes us into the interior of his father's

parsonage, to the Christmas hearth decorated with laurel, and the

old pastimes in the hall; to the witch-elms and towering

sycamore, whose shadows his Arthur had often found so fair; to

the lawn where they read the Tuscan poets together; and the

banquet in the neighboring summer woods. We almost hear the songs

that then pealed from knoll to knoll, while the happy tenants of

the presbytery lingered on the dry grass till bats went round in

fragrant skies, and the white kine glimmered, couching at ease,

and the trees laid their dark arms about the field. "The merry,

merry bells of Yule," with their silver chime, are referred to

more than once in Tennyson's poems. They seem to be ever ringing

in his ears. They controlled him, he says, in his boyhood, and

they bring him sorrow touched with joy.

It is in singing of Arthur Hallam that the poet's faith in the

immortality of the soul is brought out with beautiful clearness.

The bitterness of his grief draws him to the "comfort clasped in

truth revealed," and he looks forward with hope to the day when

he shall arrive at last at the blessed goal, and He who died in

Holy Land shall reach out the shining hand to him and his lost

friend, and take them "as a single soul." (_In Memoriam_,

lxxxiii.)

From the verses addressed to the Rev. F. D. Maurice, (January,

1854.) we learn that one of Tennyson's children claims that

gentleman as his godfather, and we gather from it and other

poems, what all the Laureate's friends know, that his sympathies

are with the _Broad Church_, of which Mr. Maurice, Kingsley,

Temple, the Bishop of London, and Dr. Stanley are distinguished

leaders. It is one of the peculiarities of this school to

moderate the torments of the lost and to deny that they are

eternal, to hope that good will in some way be the final goal of

ill, and that every winter will at last change to spring. It

cannot be disputed that this teaching is at variance with

Catholic doctrine; but it is one which Tennyson puts forward with

singular modesty, describing himself as

"An infant crying in the night;

An infant crying for the light;

And with no language but a cry."

_In Memoriam_, liii.

The _Broad Church_, as its name implies, professes large and

liberal views. Not wishing to be tried by too strict a standard

itself, it repudiates all harsh judgments on others. Accordingly,

we find in Tennyson few allusions to errors, real or supposed, in

the creed of others. He regards as sacred whatever links the soul

to a divine truth. He has many friends who are Catholics, and we

have heard that he has expressed sincere anxiety to publish

nothing relative to the Catholic religion calculated to give

offence to its followers.

{147}

There are few lines in his volumes which grate on the most pious

ear, and no devout breathings in which we do not cordially join.

It is in one of his earlier poems, and only in sport, that he

makes the Talking Oak tell of--

"Old summers, when the monk was fat,

And, issuing shorn and sleek,

Would twist his girdle tight, and pat

The girls upon the cheek,

Ere yet, in scorn of Peter's pence,

And numbered bead, and shrift.

Bluff Harry broke into the spence,

And turned the cowls adrift."

In conning his verse, therefore, the Catholic mind is at ease; it

lights on no charges to be repelled, and (so far as we know,

after long and close study of every line he has published) no

mistakes regarding our faith which require to be rectified. There

are those who imagine that in _St. Simeon Stylites_, he has

wilfully misrepresented the character of a Catholic saint; but we

venture to entertain a more lenient opinion, and shall endeavor

presently to justify it. It is in a tone of irony, such as we

must admire, that he describes the "heated pulpiteer in chapel,

not preaching simple Christ to simple men," but fulminating

"against the scarlet woman and her creed," and swinging his arms

violently, as if he held the apocalyptic millstone, while he

predicts the speedy casting of great Babylon into the sea.

(_Sea Dreams_.) Nor are there wanting points of contact

between Tennyson's ideas on religious matters and some of those

dwelt on by Catholic divines. Thus he, like Dr. Newman, finds the

arguments for the existence of God drawn from the power and

wisdom discoverable in the works of nature, cold and inconclusive

in comparison with that one which arises from the voice of

conscience and the feelings of the heart. The cxxiiid section of

_In Memoriam_ runs singularly parallel with this beautiful

passage in the _Apologia_, (p. 377:)

"Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my

conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist

or a polytheist, when I looked into the world. ... I am far

from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God,

drawn from the general facts of human society; but these do not

warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my

desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within

me, and my moral being rejoice."

The arguments adduced by infidels, in support of their unbelief,

have never been rebutted in verse more cleverly than by Tennyson.

His blade flashes like lightning, and severs with as fine a

stroke as Saladin's scimitar. _The Two Voices_ may be cited

in proof, and also the following passages in the matchless elegy

on Arthur Hallam:

The Fates not blind, (_In Memoriam_) iii.

Life shall live for evermore. (_In Memoriam_) xxxiv.

If Death were death, love

would not be true love, (_In Memoriam_) xxxv.

Individuality defies the tomb, (_In Memoriam_) xlvi.

Immortality, (_In Memoriam_) liv. lv.

Doubt issuing in belief. (_In Memoriam_) xcv.

Knowledge without wisdom. (_In Memoriam_) cxiii.

Progress, (_In Memoriam_) cxvii.

We are not all matter. (_In Memoriam_) cxix.

The course of human things, (_In Memoriam_) cxxvii

These verses are no doubt the record of a mental conflict carried

on during some years of the author's earlier life--a battle

between materialism and spiritualism, between faith and unbelief,

reason and sense. The _Two Voices_ is philosophy singing, as

_In Memoriam_ is philosophy in tears. The _English

Cyclopaedia_ well calls the last poem "wonderful," and adds:

"In no language, probably, is there another series of elegies so

deep, so metaphysical, so imaginative, so musical, and showing

such impassioned, abnormal, and solemnizing affection for the

dead."

But it is now time to point to those passages in which Tennyson

may be said to have, more particularly, Catholic aspects. Be they

few or many, they are worth noticing, even though they prove

nothing but that a Protestant poet of the highest order has such

aspects, intense, striking, and lovely in no ordinary degree.

{148}

Every true poet is in a certain sense a divine creation, and

nothing but a celestial spark could ignite a Wordsworth, a

Longfellow, or an Emerson. It has ever been the delight of the

ancient church and her writers to discover portions of her truth

among those who are separated from her visible pale. Far from

grudging them these precious fragments, she only wishes they were

less scanty, and would willingly add to them till they reached

the full measure of the deposit of the faith. It would be easy to

make out a complete cycle of her doctrine in faith and morals

from the poems of Protestant and Mohammedan authors, but it would

be only by combining extracts from many who, in matters of

belief, differ widely from each other. In looking through the

Laureate's volumes for traces of the church's teaching, we are in

a special manner struck by his treatment of the invocation of the

departed. With what deep feeling does he invite the friend, who

is the subject of his immortal elegy, to be near him when his

light is low, when pain is at its height, when life is fading

away. (_In Memoriam_, xlix.) It reminds us of good Dr.

Johnson's prayer for the "attention and ministration" of his lost

wife, as Boswell has given it us. Can any Catholic express more

fully than the Laureate the frame of mind becoming those who

desire that the departed should still be near them at their side?

(_In Memoriam,_ 1.)

"How pure at heart and _sound in head_,

_With what divine affections bold_.

Should be the man whose thoughts would hold

An hour's communion with the dead.

"In vain shall thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day,

Except, like them, thou too canst say,

My spirit is at peace with all.

"They haunt the silence of the breast,

Imaginations calm and fair,

The memory like a cloudless air,

The conscience as a sea at rest.

"But when the heart is full of din,

_And doubt beside the portal waits_.

They can but listen at the gates.

And hear the household jar within."

_In Memoriam_, xciii.

"If I can," says the dying May Queen in _New Year's Eve_--

"If I can, I'll come again, mother, from out my resting-place;

Though you'll not see me, mother, _I shall look upon your face_;

Though I cannot speak a word, _I shall hearken what you say_,

_And be often, often with you, when you think I'm far away._"

It is not, therefore, in a vague and dreamy way, but with the

full force of the understanding, that Tennyson invokes the

spirits in their place of rest. It is not merely as a poet, but

as a Christian, that he exclaims:

"Oh! therefore, from thy sightless range,

With gods in unconjectured bliss.

Oh from the distance of the abyss

Of tenfold, complicated change,

"Descend, and touch, and enter: hear

The wish too strong for words to name;

That in the blindness of the frame

My ghost may feel that thine is near."

_In Memoriam_, xcii.

We say "as a Christian;" for we warmly repudiate the harsh

interpretation which is often put on his words addressed to the

Son of God:

"Thou _seemest_ human and divine,

The highest, holiest manhood thou."

"See," it is said, "this is the most you can get from your

favorite about Christ--that he _seems_ divine. It is an

appearance, a semblance only." Now, this reasoning is most

unfair. The remainder of the verse implies his godhead--

"Our wills are ours, we know not how;

Our wills are ours, _to make them thine._"

The verses which follow are a prayer to Christ, imploring from

him light and aid, wisdom and forgiveness. (Prefatory lines to

_In Memoriam_)

{149}

In fact, it is evident from other parts of Tennyson's elegy, that

he does not use the word _seem_ in the sense of appearing to

be what a thing is _not_, but in the sense of its appearing

to be _what it is_. Thus, in the fifth stanza, below the

lines just quoted, we have--

"Forgive what _seemed_ my sin in me;

What _seemed_ my worth since I began;

For merit lives from man to man,

And not from man, O Lord! to thee."

So again, _In Memoriam_, xxxiii.,

"O thou that after toil and storm,

May'st _seem_ to have reached a purer air;"

where "_seem_ to have reached" is equivalent to "thou who

_hast_ reached," with that delicate shade of difference only

which belongs to Greek rather than to English diction. Thus the

verb [Greek text] is repeatedly used in the New Testament as an

expletive, not meaningless to the ear, though adding no distinct

idea which can be expressed in a single word, [Greek text], (St.

Matt. iii. 9,) means to all intents, simply, "Say not in

yourselves," and [Greek text] (Gal. ii. 9) means, "who were

really the pillars they seemed to be." Such passages, it is true,

prove nothing as to Tennyson's use of the word _seem_, but

they do illustrate it. The perfect godhead of Christ is brought

out fully in the sermon preached by Averill in _Aylmer's

Field_. "The Lord from heaven, born of a village girl,

carpenter's son," is there styled in the prophet's words,

"Wonderful, Prince of Peace, the Mighty God."

When the Laureate prays that his very worth may be forgiven, he

employs the language of deep humility which meets us so

constantly in the writings of Catholic saints. It reminds us of

their prayers to the Father of Lights that the best they have

ever done may be pardoned, that their tears may be washed, their

myrrh incensed, their spikenard's scent perfumed, and their

breathings after God fumigated. It is no shallow view that he

takes of repentance when he makes Queen Guinevere ask:

"What is true repentance but in thought--

Not e'en in inmost thought to think again

The sins that made the past so pleasant to us?"

_Idylls of the King._

He has been accused of making St. Simeon Stylites a

self-righteous saint. That he makes him ambitious of saintdom is

true, but this hope which he "will not cease to grasp," is

fostered by no sense of his own merits, but, on the contrary,

springs from the deepest possible conviction of his unworthiness.

He describes himself as

"The basest of mankind,

From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,

Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet

For troops of devils mad with blasphemy."

He proclaims from his pillar, his "high nest of penance,"

"That Pontius and Iscariot by _his_ side

Showed like fair seraphs."

He details, indeed, in language strikingly intense, his

sufferings, prayers, and penances; but he disclaims all praise on

account of them, and ascribes all his patience to the divine

bounty. He does not breathe or "whisper any murmur of complaint,"

while he tells how his teeth

"Would chatter with the cold, and all his beard

Was tagged with icy fringes in the moon;"

how his "thighs were rotted with the dew;" and how

"For many weeks about his loins he wore

The rope that haled the buckets from the well.

Twisted as tight as I could knot the noose;"

yet the climax of it all is, "Have mercy, mercy: take away my

sin."

The Catholic aspects in _St. Agnes' Eve_ and _Sir

Galahad_, are no less marked than those of _St. Simeon

Stylites_.

{150}

As a devout breathing of a dying nun, the first of these poems is

touching and exquisite. The snows lie deep on the convent-roof,

and the shadows of its towers "slant down the snowy sward," while

she prays and says:

"As these white robes are soiled and dark.

To yonder shining ground;

As this pale taper's earthly spark,

To yonder argent round;

So shows my soul before the Lamb,

My spirit before Thee;

So in mine earthly house I am,

To that I hope to be."

All heaven bursts its "starry floors," the gates roll back, the

heavenly Bridegroom waits to welcome and purify the sister's

departing soul. The vision dilates. It is mysteriously

vague--mysteriously distinct:

"The sabbaths of eternity.

One sabbath deep and wide--

A light upon the shining sea--

The Bridegroom with his bride!"

There is in such verse an indescribably Catholic tone. It is like

the heavenly music of faith, which pervades the _Paradise_

of Dante, and which (in spite of the lax lives of the authors)

runs through the "Sacred Songs" of Moore, and the _Epistle of

Eloisa_, and _The Dying Christian's Address to his Soul_,

by Pope. But if Tennyson has proved equal to portraying a

Catholic saint, he has also depicted most graphically a Catholic

knight of romance. Sir Galahad, one of the ornaments of King

Arthur's court, (_Idylls of the King_., p. 213,) whose

"strength is as the strength of ten,

Because his heart is pure,"

goes in quest of the Sangreal--the sacred wine. He hears the

noise of hymns amid the dark stems of the forest, sees in vision

the snowy altar-cloth with swinging censers and "silver vessels

sparkling clean." He sails, in magic barks, on "lonely mountain

meres," and catches glimpses of angels with folded feet "in

stoles of white," bearing the holy grail.

"Ah! blessed vision! _blood of God!_

My spirit beats her mortal bars.

As down dark tides the glory slides,

And star-light mingles with the stars. ...

So pass I hostel, hall, and grange.

By bridge and ford, by park and pale.

All armed I ride, whate'er betide.

Until I find the holy grail."

_Poems_, p. 336.

A Catholic aspect may sometimes be observed in a single word.

"And so thou lean on our fair father Christ," (_Idylls,

Guinevere_, p. 254,) may perhaps sound strange to some ears,

and is familiar to Catholics only. "He alone is our inward life,"

says Dr. Newman, speaking of Christ; "He not only regenerates us,

but (to allude to a higher mystery) _semper gignit_; he is

ever renewing our new birth and our heavenly sonship. In this

sense he may be called, _as in nature so in grace, our real

Father_." (_Letter to Dr. Pusey_, p. 89.) Hence, in the

Litany of the Holy Name we say, "Jesu, _Pater_ futuri

seculi," and "Jesu, _Pater_ pauperum."

The Catholic who well understands his own faith will always be

very scrupulous about disturbing that of others. If there is

anything abhorrent to him, "it is the scattering doubt and

unsettling consciences without necessity." (_Newman's

Apologia_, p. 344.) There is a well-known poem in _In

Memoriam_, (xxxiii.,) which admirably illustrates this

feeling. We quote but one verse, as the reader's memory will no

doubt supply the rest.

"Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,

Her early heaven, her happy views;

Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse

A life that leads melodious ways."

The theory and practice of the wisest Catholics conform to the

spirit and letter of this injunction. Their devotional life, too,

is perfectly reflected in Tennyson whenever he writes of prayer.

{151}

There is a depth of feeling in his expressions on this subject

which reaches to the fact that prayer is the truest

religion--that it is the link which unites man more closely to

his Creator than any outward acts, any meditations, any professed

creed, and is the spring and current of religious life.

"Evermore

_Prayer_ from a living source within the will,

And beating up through all the bitter world,

Like fountains of sweet water in the sea,

Kept him a living soul"

_Enoch Arden_, p. 44.

"Thrice blest _whose lives are faithful prayers_.

Whose loves in higher love endure:

What souls possess themselves so pure?

Or is there blessedness like theirs?"

_In Memoriam_, xxxii.

Thus again, in the _Morte d'Arthur_, which was a forecast of

_The Idylls of the King_, we are reminded of the efficacy of

prayer in language worthy of being put into a Catholic's lips:

"Pray for my soul. _More things are wrought by prayer_

_Than this world dreams of_. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats.

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

_For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God._"

In the following lines, on the rarity of repentance, there is a

reference to the coöperation of human will with divine grace,

which equals the precision of a Catholic theologian:

"Full seldom _does_ a man repent, or _use_

_Both grace and will_ to pick the vicious quitch

_Of blood and custom_ wholly out of him.

And make all clean, and plant himself afresh."

_Idylls of the King_, p. 93.

In the same poem we find lines of a distinctly Catholic tone on

the repentant queen's entering a convent, and on a knight who had

long been the tenant of a hermitage. Guinevere speaks as follows:

"So let me, _if you do not shudder at me_,

Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;

Wear black and white, and be a nun like you;

Fast with your fasts, _not feasting with your feasts_;

Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys.

_Bid not rejoicing_; mingle with your rites;

Pray and be prayed for; _lie before your shrines_;

Do each low office of your holy house;

Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole

To poor sick people, richer in his eyes

Who ransomed us, and haler, too, than I;

And treat their loathsome hurts, and heal mine own;

And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer

The sombre close of that voluptuous day

Which wrought the ruin of my lord the king."

_Idylls of the King_, p. 260.

The hermitage is thus described:

"There lived a knight

Not far from Camelot, now for forty years

A hermit, _who had prayed, labored, and prayed_.

And ever laboring had scooped himself

In the white rock a chapel and a hall

On massive columns, like a shorecliff cave.

And cells and chambers: all were fair and dry."

_Idylls of the King_, p. 168.

Among Tennyson's earlier poems, the picture of Isabel, "the

perfect wife," with her "_hate of gossip parlance, and of

sway_," her

"locks not wide dispread.

Madonna-wise on either side her head;

Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign

The summer calm of golden charity;"

and

"Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed

With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,"

_Poems_, pp. 7, 8,

is worthy of a Catholic matron. The description of St. Stephen,

in _The Two Voices_, has all the depth and pathos of the

poet's happiest mood; and, though neither it, nor some other

passages which have been quoted, contain anything distinctively

Catholic as opposed to other forms of Christianity, it is

strongly marked with those orthodox instincts to which we are

drawing attention:

"I cannot hide that some have striven,

_Achieving calm_, to whom was given

The joy that mixes man with heaven;

Who, rowing hard against the stream,

Saw distant gates of Eden gleam.

And did not dream it was a dream;

But heard, by secret transport led,

E'en in the charnels of the dead,

The murmur of the fountain-head--

Which did accomplish their desire,

Bore and forbore, and did not tire;

Like Stephen, an unquenched fire,

He heeded not reviling tones.

Nor sold his heart to idle moans.

Though cursed, and scorned, and bruised with stones;

But looking upward, full of grace.

He prayed, and from a happy place

God's glory smote him on the face."

_Poems_, p. 299.

{152}

We are anxious not to appear to lay undue stress on these

extracts. Let them go for as much as they are worth, and no more.

We do not stretch them on any Procrustean bed to the measure of

orthodox. Others might be adduced, of a latitudinarian tendency,

but they are few in number, and do not neutralize the force of

these. In view of many passages in Shakespeare of a Catholic

bearing, and of several facts favorable to the belief that he was

a Catholic, M. Rio has come to the probably sound conclusion that

he really was what he himself wishes to prove him. We put no such

forced interpretation on our extracts from Tennyson as M. Rio has

certainly put on many which he has brought forward from the

Elizabethan poet; but we think that they are sufficiently cast in

a Catholic mould to warrant us in applying to Tennyson the words

which Carlyle has used in reference to his predecessor:

"Catholicism, with and against feudalism, but not against nature

and her bounty, gave us English a Shakespeare and era of

Shakespeare, and so produced _a blossom of Catholicism_."

(_French Revolution_, vol. i. 10.)

But religion, as we have said, does not occupy a prominent place

in Tennyson's pages. He is, in the main, like the great

dramatist--a poet of this world. Love and women are his favorite

themes, but love within the bounds of law, and woman strongly

idealized. License finds in him no apologist, while he throws

around purity and fidelity all the charms of song. The most rigid

moralist can find nothing to censure in his treatment of the

guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere, the wedded love of Enid

and Geraint, the meretricious love of Vivien, and the unrequited

love of Elaine. If Milton had, as he intended, [Footnote 43]

chosen King Arthur as the subject of his epic, he could not have

taken a higher moral tone than Tennyson has in the _Idylls of

the King_, and, considering how lax were his notions about

marriage, it is probable he would have taken a lower one.

[Footnote 43: See his _Mansas_, and Life, by Toland, p.

17.]

King Arthur's praise of honorable courtship and conjugal faith is

too long to be quoted here, but it may be referred to as equally

eloquent and edifying. (_Idylls of the King_.)

The Laureate has learned at least one secret of making a great

name--not to write too much. "I hate many books," wrote Père

Lacordaire. "The capital point is, to have an aim in life, and

deeply to respect posterity by sending it but a small number of

well-meditated works." This has been Tennyson's rule. With six

slender volumes he has built himself an everlasting name. He has,

till within the last few months, seldom contributed to

periodicals, and when he has done so, the price paid for his

stanzas seems fabulous. The estimation in which he is held by

critics of a high order amounts, in many cases, to a passion and

a worship. The specimen he has given of a translation of the

_Iliad_ promises for it, if completed, all that Longfellow

has wrought for the _Divina Commedia_. The attempts he has

made at _Alcaics, Hendecasyllabics_, and _Galliambics_

in English have been thoroughly successful, and stamp him as an

accomplished scholar. (_Boädicea_, etc., in _Enoch Arden

and other Poems_.) As he does not write much, so neither does

he write fast. The impetuous oratory of Shakespeare's and Byron's

verse is unknown to him. He never affects it. He reminds us

rather of the operations of nature, who slowly and calmly, but

without difficulty, produces her marvellous results.

{153}

Drop by drop his immortal poems are distilled, like the

chalybeate droppings which leave at length on the cavern floor a

perfect red and crystal stalagmite. "Day by day," says the

_National Review_, when speaking on this subject--"day by

day, as the hours pass, the delicate sand falls into beautiful

forms, in stillness, in peace, in brooding." "The particular

power by which Mr. Tennyson surpasses all recent English poets,"

writes the _Edinburgh Review_, "is that of sustained

perfection. ... We look in vain among his modern rivals for any

who can compete with him in the power of saying beautifully the

thing he has to say."

O degli altri poeti onore e lume,

Vagliami 'l lungo studio e 'l grande amore

Che m' han fatto cercar lo tuo volume. [Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: _L Inferno_, i. 82.]

During a long period, the originality of Tennyson's verse was an

obstacle to its fame, and indeed continues to be so in the minds

of some readers. His use of obsolete words appears to many

persons affected, while others applaud him for his vigorous

Saxon, believing, with Dean Swift, that the Saxon element in our

compound tongue should be religiously preserved, and that the

writers and speakers who please us most are those whose style is

most Saxon in its character. If Tennyson has modelled his verse

after any author, it is undoubtedly Shakespeare, and the traces

of this study may perhaps be found in his vocabulary. Yet no man

is less of a plagiarist; not only his forms of thought but of

language also are original, and though he owes much to the early

dramatists, to Wordsworth and to Shelley, he fuses all metals in

the alembic of his own mind, and turns them to gold. His love of

nature is intense, and his observation of her works is

microscopic. Yet he is never so occupied with details as to lose

sight of broad outlines. In 1845, Wordsworth spoke of him as

"decidedly the first of our living poets;" but since that time

his fame has been steadily on the increase. Many of his lines

have passed into proverbs, and a crowd of feebly fluttering

imitators have vainly striven to rival him on the wing. What the

people once called a weed has grown into a tall flower, wearing a

crown of light, and flourishing far and wide. (_The Flower.

Enoch Arden_, etc., p. 152.) A concordance to _In

Memoriam_ has been published, and the several editions of the

Laureate's volumes have been collated as carefully as if they

were works of antiquity. Every ardent lover of English poetry is

familiar with Mariana, "in the lonely moated grange;" the good

Haroun Alraschid among his obelisks and cedars; Oriana wailing

amid the Norland whirlwinds; the Lady Shalott in her "four gray

walls and four gray towers;" the proud Lady Clara Vere de Vere;

the drowsy Lotos-Eaters; the chaste and benevolent Godiva; Maud

in her garden of "woodbine spices;" the true love of the Lord of

Burleigh, and the reward of honest Lady Clare. The highest praise

of these ballads is that they have sunk into the nation's heart.

They combine the chief excellences of other bards, and remind us

of some delicious fruit which unites in itself a variety of the

most exquisite flavors. This richness and sweetness may be

ascribed in part to that remarkable condensation of thought which

enriches one page of Tennyson with as many ideas and images as

would, in most other poets, be found scattered over two or three

pages. "We must not expect," wrote Shenstone in one of his

essays, "to trace the flow of Waller, the landskip of Thomson,

the fire of Dryden, the imagery of Shakespeare, the simplicity of

Spenser, the courtliness of Prior, the humor of Swift, the wit of

Cowley, the delicacy of Addison, the tenderness of Otway, and the

invention, the spirit, and sublimity of Milton, joined in any

single writer." Perhaps not.

{154}

But Shenstone had never read Tennyson, and there is no knowing

what he might have thought if he had conned the calm majesty of

_Ulysses_; the classical beauty of _Tithonus_ and the

_Princess_; the luxuriant eloquence of _Locksley Hall_;

the deep lyrical flow of _The Letters_ and _The

Voyage_; the _'cute_ drollery of the _Northern

Farmer_; the idyllic sweetness of _OEnone_; the grandeur

of _Morte d'Arthur_; the touching simplicity of _Enoch

Arden_; the power and pathos of _Aylmer's Field_; the

perfect minstrelsy of the _Rivulet_, and the songs, _O

Swallow, Swallow_, and _Tears, Idle Tears_; and the

sharps and trebles of the _Brook_, more musical than

Mendelssohn.

Far be it from us to carp at any poetry because it proceeds from

one who is not a Catholic. We believe, indeed, firmly that, if

Tennyson had been imbued with the ancient faith, it would have

cleared some vagueness both from his mind and his verse. But in

these days, when Socinianism, positivism, and free-thinking in

various shapes are taking such strong hold of educated men, we

rejoice unfeignedly to find popular writings marked, even in an

imperfect degree, with Christian doctrine and feeling. The

influence exerted by the Laureate in the world of letters is

great, and we have, therefore, endeavored at some length to show

how far it is favorable, and how far unfavorable, to the cause of

truth. Though unhappily not a Catholic, we recognize with delight

the fact that he is not an infidel, and we feel persuaded that

some at least of our readers will be pleased at our having placed

in a prominent point of view the redeeming features in the

religious character of his poetry.

-------------

Poland

When, fixed in righteous wrath, a nation's eye

Torments some crowned tormentor with just hate.

Nor threat nor flattery can that gaze abate;

Unshriven the unatoning years go by;

For as that starry archer in the sky

Unbends not his bright bow, though early and late

The syren sings, and folly weds with fate,

Even so that constellated destiny

Which keeps fire-vigil in a night-black heaven,

Upon the countenance of the doomed looks forth

Consentient with a nation's gaze on earth:

To the twinned powers a single gaze is given;

The earthly fate reveals the fate on high--

A brazen serpent raised, that says, not "live," but "die."

Aubrey de Vere.

-------------

{155}

Professor Draper's Books. [Footnote 45]

[Footnote 45:

1. _Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical;

or, Conditions and Course of the Life of Man_.

By J. W. Draper, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Chemistry

and Physiology in the University of New York.

New York: Harper & Brothers. 1856. 8vo, pp. 649.

2. _History of the Intellectual Development of Europe_.

By the same. Fifth edition. 1867. 8vo, pp. 628

3. _Thoughts on the Civil Policy of America_.

By the same. Third edition. 1867. 8vo, pp. 323.

4. _History of the American Civil War_.

By the same. In three volumes.

Vol. I. 1867. 8vo, pp. 567.]

Professor Draper's works have had, and are having, a very rapid

sale, and are evidently very highly esteemed by that class of

readers who take an interest, without being very profoundly

versed, in the grave subjects which he treats. He is, we believe,

a good chemist and a respectable physiologist. His work on Human

Physiology, we have been assured by those whose judgment in such

matters we prefer to our own, is a work of real merit, and was,

when first published, up to the level of the science to which it

is devoted. We read it with care on its first appearance, and the

impression it left on our mind was, that the author yields too

much to the theory of chemical action in physiology, and does not

remember that man is the union of soul and body, and that the

soul modifies, even in the body, the action of the natural laws;

or rather, that the physiological laws of brute matter, or even

of animals, cannot be applied to man without many important

reserves. The Professor, indeed, recognizes, or says he

recognizes, in man a rational soul, or an immaterial principle;

but the recognition seems to be only a verbal concession, made to

the prejudices of those who have some lingering belief in

Christianity, for we find no use for it in his physiology. All

the physiological phenomena he dwells on he explains without it,

that is, as far as he explains them at all. Whatever his personal

belief may be, his doctrine is as purely materialistic as is Mr.

Herbert Spencer's, which explains all the phenomena of life by

the mechanical, chemical, and electrical changes and combinations

of matter.

It is due to Professor Draper to say, that in this respect he

only sins in common with the great body of modern physiologists.

Physiology--indeed, all the inductive sciences--have been for a

long time cast in a materialistic mould, and men of firm faith,

and sincere and ardent piety, are materialists, and, therefore,

atheists, the moment they enter the field of physical science,

and deny in their science what they resolutely affirm and would

die for in their faith. Hence the quarrel between the theologians

and the _savans_. The _savans_ have not reconciled

their so-called science with the great theological truths,

whether of reason or revelation, which only the fool doubts, or

in his heart denies. This proves that our physicists have made

far less progress in the sciences than they are in the habit of

boasting. That cannot be true in physiology which is false in

theology; and a physiology that denies all reality but matter, or

finds no place in it for God and the human soul, is no true

physiological science. The physiologist has far less evidence of

the existence of matter than I have of the existence of spirit;

and it is only by spirit that the material is apprehensible, or

can be shown to exist. Matter only mimics or imitates spirit.

{156}

The continual changes that take place from time to time in

physiology show--we say it with all deference to

physiologists--that it has not risen as yet to the dignity of a

science. It is of no use to speak of progress, for changes which

transform the whole body of a pretended science are not progress.

We may not have mastered all the facts of a science; we may be

discovering new facts every day; but if we have, for instance,

the true physiological science, the discovery of new facts may

throw new light on the science--may enable us to see clearer its

reach, and understand better its application, but cannot change

or modify its principles. As long as your pretended science is

liable to be changed in its principles, it is a theory, an

hypothesis, not a science. Physiologists have accumulated a large

stock of physiological facts, to which they are daily adding new

facts. We willingly admit these facts are not useless, and the

time spent in collecting them is not wasted; on the contrary, we

hold them to be valuable, and appreciate very highly the labor,

the patient research, and the nice observation that has

collected, classified, and described them; but we dare assert,

notwithstanding, that the science of physiology is yet to be

created; and created it will not be till physiologists have

learned and are able to set forth the dialectic relations of

spirit and matter, soul and body, God and nature, free-will and

necessity. Till then there may be known facts, but there will be

no physiological science. As far as what is called the science of

human life, or human physiology, goes, Professor Draper's work is

an able and commendable work; but he must permit us to say that

the real science of physiology he has not touched, has not

dreamed of; nor have any of his brethren who see in the human

soul only a useless appendage to the body. The soul is the

_forma corporis_, its informing, its vital principle, and

pervades, so to speak, and determines, or modifies, the whole

life and action of the human body, from the first instant of

conception to the very moment of death. The human body does not

exist, even in its embryonic state, first as a vegetable, then as

an animal, and afterward as united to an immaterial soul. It is

body united to soul from the first instant of conception, and man

lives, in any stage of his existence, but one and the same human

life. There is no moment after conception when the wilful

destruction of the foetus is not the murder of a human life.

As we said on a former occasion, or at least implied, man, though

the ancients called him a microcosm, the universe in little, and

contains in himself all the elements of nature, is neither a

mineral nor a vegetable, nor simply an animal, and the analogies

which the physiologist detects between him and the kingdoms below

him, form no scientific basis of human physiology, for like is

not same. There may be no difference that the microscope or the

crucible can detect between the blood of an ox and the blood of a

man; for the microscope and chemical tests are in both cases

applied to the dead subject, not the living, and the human blood

tested is withdrawn from the living action of the soul, an action

that escapes the most powerful microscope, and the most subtile

chemical agent. Comparative physiology may gratify the curiosity,

and, when not pressed beyond its legitimate bounds, it may even

be useful, and help us to a better understanding of our own

bodies; but it can never be the basis of a scientific induction,

because between man and all animals there is the difference of

species.

{157}

Comparative physiology is, therefore, unlike comparative

philology; for, however diverse may be the dialects compared,

there is no difference of species among them, and nothing hinders

philological inductions from possessing, in the secondary order,

a true scientific character. Physiological inductions, resting on

the comparative study of different individuals, or different

races or families of men, may also be truly scientific; for all

these individuals, and all these races or families belong to one

and the same species. But the comparative physiology that

compares men and animals, gives only analogies, not science.

We do not undervalue science; on the contrary, what we complain

of is, that our physiologists do not give us science; they give

us facts, theories, or hypotheses. Facts are not science till

referred to the principles that explain them, and these

principles themselves are not science till integrated in the

principles of that high and universal science called theology,

and which is really the science of the sciences. The men who pass

for _savans_, and are the hierophants and lawgivers of the

age, sin not by their science, but by their want of science.

Their ideal of science is too low and grovelling. Science is

vastly more than they conceive it; is higher, deeper, broader

than they look; and the best of them are, as Newton said of

himself, mere boys picking up shells on the shores of the great

ocean of truth. They, at best, remain in the vestibule of the

temple of science; they have not entered the penetralia and knelt

before the altar. We find no fault with Professor Draper's

science, where science he has; we only complain of him for

attempting to palm off upon us his ignorance for science, and

accepting, and laboring to make us accept as science what is

really no science. Yet he is not worse than others of his class.

The second work named in our list is the professor's attempt to

extend the principles of his human physiology to the human race

at large, and to apply them specially to the intellectual

development of Europe; the third is an attempt to apply them to

the civil policy of America, and the fourth is an attempt to get

a counter-proof of his theories in the history of our late civil

war. Through the four works we detect one and the same purpose,

one and the same doctrine, of which the principal _data_ are

presented in his work on human physiology, which is cast in a

purely materialistic mould. They are all written to show that all

philosophy, all religion, all morality, and all history are to be

physiologically explained, that is, by fixed, inflexible, and

irreversible natural laws. He admits, in words, that man has

free-will, but denies that it influences events or anything in

the life and conduct of men. He also admits, and claims credit

for admitting, a Supreme Being, as if there could be subordinate

beings, or any being but one who declares himself I AM THAT AM;

but a living and ever-present God, Creator, and upholder of the

universe, finds no recognition in his physiological system. His

God, like the gods of the old Epicureans, has nothing to do, but,

as Dr. Evarist de Gypendole, in his _Ointment for the Bite of

the Black Serpent_, happily expresses it, to "sleep all night

and to doze all day." He is a superfluity in science, like the

immaterial soul in the author's _Human Physiology_. All

things, in Professor Draper's system, originate, proceed from,

and terminate in, natural development, with a most superb

contempt for the _ratio sufficiens_ of Leibnitz, and the

first and final cause of the theologians and philosophers.

{158}

The only God his system recognizes is natural law, the law of the

generation and death of phenomena, and distinguishable from

nature only as the _natura naturans_ is distinguishable from

the _natura naturata_ of Spinoza. His system is, therefore,

notwithstanding his concessions to the Christian prejudices which

still linger with the unscientific, a system of pure naturalism,

and differs in no important respect from the _Religion

Positive_ of M. Augusta Comte.

The Duke of Argyle, in his _Reign of Law_, which we reviewed

last February, a man well versed in the modern sciences, sought,

while asserting the universal reign of law, to escape this system

of pure naturalism, by defining law to be "will enforcing itself

with power," or making what are called the laws of nature the

direct action of the divine Will. But this asserted activity only

for the divine Being, therefore denied second causes, and bound

not only nature, but the human will fast in fate, or rather,

absorbed man and nature in God; for man and nature do and can

exist only in so far as active, or in some sense causative. The

passive does not exist, and to place all activity in God alone is

to deny the creation of active existences or second causes, which

is the very essence of pantheism. Professor Draper and the

positivists, whom he follows, reverse the shield, and absorb not

man and nature in God, but both God and man in nature. John and

James are not Peter, but Peter is James and John. There is no

real difference between pantheism and atheism; both are absurd,

but the absurdity of atheism is more easily detected by the

common mind than the absurdity of pantheism. The one loses God by

losing unity. and the other by losing diversity, or everything

distinguishable from God. The God of the atheist is not, and the

God of the pantheist is as if he were not, and it makes no

practical difference whether you say God is all or all is God.

To undertake a critical review of these several works would

exceed both our space and our patience, and, moreover, were a

task that does not seem to be called for. Professor Draper, we

believe, ranks high among his scientific brethren. He writes in a

clear, easy, graceful, and pleasing style, but we have found

nothing new or profound in his works. His theories are almost as

old as the hills, and even older, if the hills are no older than

he pretends. His work on the Intellectual Development of Europe,

is in substance, taken from the positivists, and the positivist

philosophy is only a reproduction, with no scientific advance on

that of the old physiologers or hylozoists, as Cudworth calls

them. He agrees perfectly with the positivists in the recognition

of three ages or epochs, we should rather say stages, in human

development; the theological, the metaphysical, and the

scientific or positivist. In the theological age, man is in his

intellectual infancy, is filled with sentiments of fear and

wonder; ignorant of natural causes and effects, of the natural

laws themselves, he sees the supernatural in every event that

surpasses his understanding or experience, and bows before a God

in every natural force superior to his own. It is the age of

ignorance, wonder, credulity, and superstition. In the second the

intellect has been, to a certain extent, developed, and the gross

fetichism of the first age disappears, and men no longer worship

the visible apis, but the invisible apis, the spiritual or

metaphysical apis; not the bull, but, as the North American

Indian says, "the manitou of bulls;" and instead of worshipping

the visible objects of the universe, as the sun, moon, and stars,

the ocean and rivers, groves and fountains, storms and tempests,

as did polytheism in the outset, they worship certain

metaphysical abstractions into which they have refined them, and

which they finally generalize into one grand abstraction, which

they call Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah, Theus, Deus, or God, and thus

assert the Hebrew and Christian monotheism.

{159}

In the third and last age there is no longer fetichism,

polytheism, or monotheism; men no longer divinize nature, or

their own abstractions, no longer believe in the supernatural or

the metaphysical or anything supposed to be supramundane, but

reject whatever is not sensible, material, positive as the object

of positive science.

The professor develops this system with less science than its

inventor or reviver, M. Auguste Comte and his European disciples;

but as well as he could be expected to do it, in respectable

English. He takes it as the basis of his _History of the

Intellectual Development of Europe_, and attempts to reconcile

with it all the known and unknown facts of that development. We

make no quotations to prove that we state the professor's

doctrine correctly, for no one who has read him, with any

attention, will question our statement; and, indeed, we might

find it difficult to quote passages which clearly and expressly

confirm it, for it is a grave complaint against him, as against

nearly all writers of his school, that they do not deal in clear

and express statements of doctrine. Had Professor Draper put

forth what is evidently his doctrine in clear, simple, and

distinct propositions, so that his doctrine could at once be seen

and understood, his works, instead of going through several

editions, and being commended in reviews and journals, as

scientific, learned, and profound, would have fallen dead from

the press, or been received with a universal burst of public

indignation; for they attack everything dear to the heart of the

Christian, the philosopher, and the citizen. Nothing worse is to

be found in the old French Encyclopedists, in the _Système de

la Nature_ of D'Holbach, or in _l'Homme-Plant_, and

_l'Homme-Machine_ of Lamettrie. His doctrine is nothing in

the world but pure materialism and atheism, and we do not believe

the American people are as yet prepared to deny either God, or

creation and Providence. The success of these authors is in their

vagueness, in their refusal to reduce their doctrine to distinct

propositions, in hinting, rather than stating it, and in

pretending to speak always in the name of science, thus: "Science

shows this," or "Science shows that;" when, if they knew anything

of the matter, they would know that science does no such thing.

Then, how can you accuse Professor Draper of atheism or

materialism; for does he not expressly declare his belief, as a

man of science, in the existence of the Supreme Being, and in an

immaterial and immortal soul? What Dr. Draper believes or

disbelieves, is his affair, not ours; we only assert that the

doctrine he defends in his professedly scientific books, from

beginning to end, is purely physiological, and has no God or soul

in it. As a man. Dr. Draper may believe much; as an author, he is

a materialist and an atheist, beyond all dispute: if he knows it,

little can be said for his honesty; if he does not know it,

little can be said for his science, or his competency to write on

the intellectual development of Europe, or of any other quarter

of the globe.

{160}

But to return to the theory the professor borrows from the

positivists. As the professor excludes from his physiology the

idea of creation, we cannot easily understand how he determines

what is the infancy of the human race, or when the human race was

in its infancy. If the race had no beginning, if, like Topsy, "it

didn't come, but grow'd," it had no infancy; if it had a

beginning, and you assume its earliest stage was that of infancy,

then it is necessary to know which stage is the earliest, and

what man really was in that stage. Hence, chronology becomes

all-important, and, as the author's science rejects all received

chronology, and speaks of changes and events which took place

millions and millions of ages ago, and of which there remains no

record but that chronicled in the rocks; but, as in that record

exact dates are not given, chronology, with him, whether of the

earth or of man, must be very uncertain, and it seems to us that

it must be very difficult for science to determine, with much

precision, when the race was, or what it was, in its infancy.

Thus he says:

"In the intellectual infancy of the savage state, man transfers

to nature his conceptions of himself, and, considering that

everything he does is determined by his own pleasure, regards

all passing events as depending on the arbitrary volition of a

superior but invisible power. He gives to the world a

constitution like his own. The tendency is _necessarily_

to superstition. Whatever is strange, or powerful, or vast,

impresses his imagination with dread. Such objects are only the

outward manifestations of an indwelling spirit, and, therefore,

worthy of his veneration." (_Intellect. Devel_. p. 2.)

We beg the professor's pardon, but he has only imperfectly

learned his lesson. In this which he regards as the age of fetich

worship, and the first stage of human development, he includes

ideas and conceptions which belong to the second, or metaphysical

age of his masters. But let this pass for the present. The author

evidently assumes that the savage state is the intellectual

infancy of the race. But how knows he that it is not the

intellectual old age and decrepitude of the race? The author,

while he holds, or appears to hold, like the positivists, to the

continuous progress of the race, does not hold to the continuous

progress of any given nation.

"A national type," he says, (ch. xi.,) "pursues its way

physically and intellectually through changes and developments

answering to those of the individual represented by infancy,

youth, manhood, old age, and death respectively."

How, then, say scientifically that your fetich age, or the age of

superstition, the theological age of the positivists, instead

being the infancy of the nation, is not its last stage next

preceding death? How determine physiologically or scientifically

that the savage is the infant man and not the worn-out man? Then

how determine that the superstition of which you have so much to

say, and which, with you, means religion, revelation, the church,

everything that claims to be, or that asserts, anything

supernatural, is not characteristic of the last stage of human

development, and not of the first?

Our modern physiologists and anti-Christian speculators seem all

to take it for granted that the savage gives us the type of the

primitive man. We refuted this absurd notion in our essay on

_Faith and the Sciences_. There are no known historical

facts to support it. Consult the record chronicled in the rocks,

as read by geologists. What does it prove?

{161}

Why, in the lowest and most ancient strata in which human remains

are found, along with those of extinct species of animals, you

find that the men of that epoch used stone implements, and were

ignorant of metals or unable to work them, and, therefore, must

have been savages. That is, the men who lived then, and in that

locality. Be it so. But does this prove that there did not,

contemporary with them, in other localities or in other quarters

of the globe, live and flourish nations in the full vigor of the

manhood of the race, having all the arts and implements of

civilized life? Did the savages of New England, when first

discovered, understand working in iron, and used they not stone

axes, and stone knives, many of which we have ourselves picked

up? And was it the same with Europeans? From the rudeness and

uncivilized condition of a people in one locality, you can

conclude nothing as to the primitive condition of the race.

The infancy of the race, if there is any justice in the analogy

assumed, is the age of growth, of progress; but nothing is less

progressive, or more strictly stationary, in a moral and

intellectual sense, than the savage state. Since history began,

there is not only no instance on record of a savage tribe rising

by indigenous effort to civilization, but none of a purely savage

tribe having ever, even by foreign assistance, become a civilized

nation. The Greeks in the earliest historical or semi-historical

times, were not savages, and we have no evidence that they ever

were. The Homeric poems were never the product of a savage

people, or of a people just emerging from the savage state into

civilization, and they are a proof that the Greeks, as a people,

had juster ideas of religion, and were less superstitious in the

age of Homer than in the age of St. Paul. The Germans are a

civilized people, and if they were first revealed to us as what

the Greeks and Romans called _barbarians_, they were never,

as far as known, savages. We all know how exceedingly difficult

it is to civilize our North American Indians. Individuals now and

then take up the elements of our civilization, but rarely, if

they are of pure Indian blood. They recoil before the advance of

civilization. The native Mexicans and Peruvians have, indeed,

received some elements of Christian civilization along with the

Christian faith and worship; but they were not, on the discovery

of this continent, pure savages, but had many of the elements of

a civilized people, and that they were of the same race with the

savages that roamed our northern forests, is not yet proved. The

historical probabilities are not on the side of the hypothesis of

the modern progressivists, but are on the side of the contrary

doctrine, that the savage state belongs to the old age of the

race--is not that from which man rises, but that into which he

falls.

Nor is there any historical evidence that superstition is older

than religion, that men begin in the counterfeit and proceed to

the genuine,--in the false, and proceed by way of development to

the true. They do not abuse a thing before having it.

Superstition presupposes religion, as falsehood presupposes

truth; for falsehood being unable to stand by itself, it is only

by the aid of truth that it can be asserted. "Fear made the

gods," sings Lucretius; but it can make none where belief in the

gods, does not already exist. Men may transfer their own

sentiments and passions to the divinity; but they must believe

that the divinity exists before they can do it.

{162}

They must believe that God is, before they can hear him in the

wind, see him in the sun and stars, or dread him in the storm and

the earthquake. It is not from dread of the strange, the

powerful, or the vast, that men develop the idea of God, the

spiritual, the supernatural; the dread presupposes the presence

and activity of the idea. Men, again, who, like the professor's

man in the infancy of the savage state, are able to conceive of

spirit and to distinguish between the outward manifestation and

the indwelling spirit, are not fetich worshippers, and for them

the fetich is no longer a god, but if retained at all, it is as a

sign or symbol of the invisible, Fetichism is the grossest form

of superstition, and obtains only among tribes fallen into the

grossest ignorance, that lie at the lowest round of the scale of

human beings; not among tribes in whom intelligence is

commencing, but in whom it is well-nigh extinguished.

Monotheism is older than polytheism, for polytheism, as the

author himself seems to hold, grows out of pantheism, and

pantheism evidently grows out of theism, out of the loss or

perversion of the idea of creation, or of the relation between

the creator and the creature, or cause and effect, and is and can

be found only among a people who have once believed in one God,

creator of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible.

Moreover, the earliest forms of the heathen superstitions are, so

far as historical evidence goes, the least gross, the least

corrupt. The religion of the early Romans was pure in comparison

with what it subsequently became, especially after the Etruscan

domination or influence. The Homeric poems show a religion less

corrupt than that defended by Aristophanes. The earliest of the

Vedas, or sacred books of the Hindoos, are free from the grosser

superstitions of the latest, and were written, the author very

justly thinks, before those grosser forms were introduced. This

is very remarkable, if we are to assume that the grossest forms

of superstition are the earliest! But we have with Greeks,

Egyptians, Indians, no books that are of earlier date than the

books of Moses, at least none that can be proved to have been

written earlier; and in the books of Moses, in whatever light or

character we take them, there is shown a religion older than any

of the heathen mythologies, and absolutely free from every form

of superstition, what is called the patriarchal religion, and

which is substantially the Jewish and Christian religion. The

earliest notices we have of idolatries and superstitions are

taken from these books, the oldest extant, at least none older

are known. If these books are regarded as historical documents,

then what we Christians hold to be the true religion has obtained

with a portion of the race from the creation of man, and, for a

long series of years, from the creation to Nimrod, the mighty

hunter or conqueror, was the only religion known; and your

fetichisms, polytheisms, pantheisms, idolatries, and

superstitions, which you note among the heathen, instead of being

the religion of the infancy of the race, are, comparatively

speaking, only recent innovations. If their authenticity as

historical documents be denied, they still, since their antiquity

is undeniable, prove the patriarchal religion obtained at an

earlier date than it can be proved that any of the heathen

mythologies existed. It is certain, then, that the patriarchal,

we may say, the Christian religion, is the earliest known

religion of the race, and therefore that fetichism, as contended

by the positivists and the professor after them, cannot be

asserted to have been the religion of the human race in the

earliest stage of its existence, nor the germ from which all the

various religions or superstitions of the world have been

developed.

{163}

But we may go still farther. The attempt to explain the origin

and course of religion by the study of the various heathen

mythologies, and idolatries, and superstitions, is as absurd as

to attempt to determine the origin and course of the Christian

religion by the study of the thousand and one sects that have

broken off from the church, and set up to be churches themselves.

They can teach us nothing except the gradual deterioration of

religious thought, and the development and growth of superstition

or irreligion among those separated from the central religious

life of the race. In the ancient Indian, Egyptian, and Greek

mythologies, on which the author dwells with so much emphasis, we

trace no gradual purification of the religious idea, but its

continual corruption and debasement. As the sects all presuppose

the Christian church, and could neither exist nor be intelligible

without her, so those various heathen mythologies presuppose the

patriarchal religion, are unintelligible without it, and could

not have originated or exist without it. The professor having

studied these mythologies in the darkness of no-religion,

understands nothing of them, and finds no sense in them--as

little sense as a man ignorant of Catholicity would find in the

creeds, confessions, and religious observances of the several

Protestant sects; but if he had studied them in the light of the

patriarchal religion, which they mutilate, corrupt, or travesty,

he might have understood them, and have traced with a steady hand

their origin and course, and their relation to the intellectual

development of the race.

We have no space to enter at length into the question here

suggested. In all the civilized heathen nations, the gods are

divided into two classes, the Dii Majores and the Dii Minores.

The Dii Majores are only the result of a false effort to explain

the mysterious dogma of the Trinity, and the perversion of the

Christian doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son, and the

Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost. The type from which these

mythologies depart, not which they realize, is undeniably the

mystery of the Trinity asserted, more or less explicitly, by the

patriarchal religion; and hence, we find them all, from the

burning South to the frozen North, from the East to the West,

from the Old World to the New, asserting, in some form, in the

Divinity the sacred and mysterious Triad. The Dii Minores are a

corruption or perversion of the Catholic doctrine of saints and

angels, or that doctrine is the type which has been perverted or

corrupted, by substituting heroes for saints, and the angels that

fell for the angels that stood, and taking these for gods instead

of creatures. The enemies of Christianity have sufficiently

proved that the common type of both is given in the patriarchal

religion, hoping thereby to get a conclusive argument against

Christianity; but they have forgotten to state that, while the

one conforms to the type, the other departs from it, perverts or

corrupts it, and that the one that conforms is prior in date to

the one that corrupts, perverts or departs from it. No man can

study the patriarchal religion without seeing at a glance that it

is the various forms of heathenism that are the corrupt forms, as

no man can study both Catholicity and Protestantism without

seeing that Protestantism is the corruption, or

perversion--sometimes even the travesty of Catholicity.

{164}

The same conclusion is warranted alike by Indian and Egyptian

gloom and Greek gayety. The gloom speaks for itself. The gayety

is that of despair--the gayety that says: "Come, let us eat,

drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Through all

heathendom you hear the wail, sometimes loud and stormy,

sometimes low and melodious, over some great and irreparable

loss, over a broken and unrealized ideal, just as you do in the

modern sectarian and unbelieving world.

But why is it that the professor and others, when seeking to give

the origin and course of religion, as related to the intellectual

development of the race, pass by the patriarchal, Jewish, or

Christian religion, and fasten on the religions or superstitions

of the Gentiles? It is their art, which consists in adroitly

avoiding all direct attacks on the faith of Christendom, and

confining themselves in their dissertations on the natural

history of the pagan superstitions, to establishing principles

which alike undermine both them and Christianity. It is evident

to every intelligent reader of Professor Draper's _Intellectual

Development of Europe_, that he means the principles he

asserts shall be applied to Christianity as well as to Indian,

Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology, and he gives many broad

hints to that effect. What then? Is he not giving the history of

the intellectual development of Europe? Can one give the history

of that development without taking notice of religion? If, in

giving the natural history of religion, showing whence and how it

originates, what have been its developments, its course, its

modifications, changes, decay, and death, by the influence of

natural causes, science establishes principles which overthrow

all religions, and render preposterous all claims of man to have

received a supernatural revelation, to be in communion with the

Invisible, or to be under any other providence than that of the

fixed, invariable, and irresistible laws of nature, or purely

physiological laws, whose fault is it? Would you condemn science,

or subordinate it to the needs of a crafty and unscrupulous

priesthood, fearful of losing their influence, and having the

human mind emancipated from their despotism? That is, you lay

down certain false principles, repudiated by reason and common

sense, and which all real science rejects with contempt, call

these false principles science, and when we protest, you cry out

with all your lungs, aided by all the simpletons of the age, that

we are hostile to science, would prevent free scientific

investigation, restrain free manly thought, and would keep the

people from getting a glimpse of the truth that would emancipate

them, and place them on the same line with the baboon or the

gorilla! A wonderful thing, is this modern science; and always

places, whatever it asserts or denies, its adepts in the right,

as against the theologians and the anointed priests of God!

The mystery is not difficult to explain. The physiologists, of

course, are good Sadducees, and really, unless going through a

churchyard after dark, or caught in a storm at sea, and in danger

of shipwreck, believe in neither angel nor spirit. They wish to

reduce all events, all phenomena, intellectual, moral, and

religious, to fixed, invariable, inflexible, irreversible, and

necessary laws of nature. They exclude in doctrine, if not in

words, the supernatural, creation, providence, and all

contingency. Every thing in man and in the universe is generated

or developed by physiological or natural laws, and follows them

in all their variations and changes.

{165}

Religion, then, must be a natural production, generated by man,

in conjunction with nature, and modified, changed, or destroyed,

according to the physical causes to which he is subjected in time

and place. This is partially true, or, at least, not manifestly

false in all respects of the various pagan superstitions, and

many facts may be cited that seem to prove it; but it is

manifestly not true of the patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian

religion, and the only way to make it appear true, is to not

distinguish that religion from the others, to include all

religions in one and the same category, and conclude that what

they prove to be partially true of a part, is and must be true of

the whole. That this is fair or logical, is not a matter that the

physiologists, who, where they detect an analogy, conclude

identity, trouble themselves at all about; besides, nothing in

their view is illogical or unfair that tends to discredit priests

and theologians. Very likely, also, such is their disdain or

contempt of religion, that they really do not know that there is

any radical difference between Christianity and Gentooism. We

have never encountered a physiologist, in the sense we use the

term here, that is, one who maintains that all in the history of

man and the universe proceeds from nature alone, who had much

knowledge of Christian theology, or knowledge enough to be aware

that in substance it is not identical with the pagan

superstitions. Their ignorance of our religion is sublime.

We have thus far proceeded on the supposition that the professor

means by the infancy of the savage state the infancy of the race;

we are not sure, after all, that this is precisely his thought,

or that he means anything more than the infancy of a particular

nation or family of nations is the savage state. He, however,

sums up his doctrine in his table of contents, chapter i., of his

_Intellectual Development_, in the proposition: "Individual

man is an emblem of communities, nations, and universal humanity.

They exhibit epochs of life like his, and like him are under the

control of physical conditions, and therefore of law;" that is,

physical or physiological law, for "human physiology" is only a

special department of universal physiology, as we have already

indicated. It would seem from this that the author makes the

savage state, as we have supposed, correspond, in the race, in

universal humanity, as well as in communities, to the epoch of

infancy in the individual. But does he mean to teach that the

race itself has its epoch of infancy, youth, manhood, old age,

and death? He can, perhaps, in a loose sense, predicate these

several epochs of nations and of political or civil communities;

but how can he predicate them all of the race? "Individuals die,

humanity survives," says Seneca; and are we to understand that

the professor means to assert that the race is born like the

individual, passes through childhood, youth, manhood, to old age,

and then dies? Who knows what he means?

But suppose that he has not settled in his own mind his meaning

on this point, as is most likely the case; that he has not asked

himself whether man on the earth has a beginning or an end, and

that he regards the race as a natural evolution, revolving always

in the same circle, and takes, therefore, the infancy he speaks

of as the infancy of a nation or a given community. Then his

doctrine is, that the earliest stage of every civilized nation or

community is the savage state, that the ancestors of the

civilized in every age are savages, and that all civilization has

been developed under the control of physical conditions from the

savage state.

{166}

The germ of all civilization then must be in the savage, and

civilization then must be evolved from the savage as the chicken

from the egg, or the egg from the sperm. But of this there is no

evidence; for, as we have seen, there is no nation known that has

sprung from exclusively savage ancestors, no known instance of a

savage people developing, if we may so speak, into a civilized

people. The theory rests on no historical or scientific basis,

and is perfectly gratuitous. In the savage state we detect

reminiscences of a past civilization, not the germs of a future

civilization, or if germs--germs that are dead, and that never do

or can germinate. There are degrees of civilization; people may

be more or less civilized; but we have no evidence, historical or

scientific, of a time when there was no civilized people extant.

There are civilized nations now, and contemporary with them are

various savage tribes, and the same may be said of every epoch

since history began. The civilized nations whose origin we know

have all sprung from races more or less civilized, never from

purely savage tribes. The physiologists overlook history, and

mistake the evening twilight for the dawn.

But pass over this. Let us come to the doctrine for which the

professor writes his book, namely, individuals, communities,

nations, universal humanity, are under the control of physical

conditions, therefore of physical law, or law in the sense of the

physiologists or the physicists. If this means anything, it means

that the religion, the morality, the intellectual development,

the growth and decay, the littleness and the grandeur of men and

nations depend solely on physical causes, not at all on moral

causes--a doctrine not true throughout even in human physiology,

and supported by no facts, except in a very restricted degree,

when applied to nations and communities. In the corporeal

phenomena of the individual the soul counts for much, and in

morbid physiology the moral often counts for more than the

physical; perhaps it always does, for we know from revelation

that the morbidity of nature is the penalty or effect of man's

transgression. It is proved to be false as applied to nations and

communities by the fact that the Christian religion, which is

substantially that of the ancient patriarchs, is, at least as far

as science can go, older than any of the false religions, has

maintained itself the same in all essential respects, unvaried

and invariable, in every variety of physical change, and in every

diversity of physical condition, and absolutely unaffected by any

natural causes whatever.

The chief physical conditions on which the professor relies are

climate and geographical position. Yet what we hold to be the

true religion, the primitive religion of mankind, has prevailed

in all climates, and been found the same in all geographical

positions. Nay, even the false pagan religions have varied only

in their accidents with climatic and geographical positions. We

find them in substance the same in India, Central Asia, on the

banks of the Danube, in the heart of Europe, in the ancient

Scania, the Northern Isles, in Mexico and Peru. The substance of

Greek and Roman or Etrurian mythology is the same with that of

India and Egypt. M. Rénan tells us that the monotheism so firmly

held by the Arabic branch of the Semitic family, is due to the

vast deserts over which the Arab tribes wander, which suggest the

ideas of unity and universality; and yet for centuries before

Mohammed, these same Arabs, wandering over the same deserts, were

polytheists and idolaters; and not from contemplating those

deserts, but by recalling the primitive traditions of mankind,

preserved by Jews and Christians, did the founder of Islamism

attain to the monotheism of the Koran. The professor is misled by

taking, in the heathen mythology he has studied, the poetic

imagery and embellishments, which indeed vary according to the

natural aspects, objects, and productions of the locality, for

their substance, thought, or doctrine.

{167}

The poetic illustrations, imagery, and embellishments of Judaism

are all oriental; but the Jew in all climates and in all

geographical positions holds one and the same religious faith

even to this day; and his only real difference from us is, that

he is still looking for a Christ to come, while we believe the

Christ he is looking for has come, and is the same Jesus of

Nazareth who was crucified at Jerusalem, under Pontius Pilate.

We know the author contends that there has been from the

beginning a radical difference between the Christianity of the

East and that of the West; but we know that such is not and never

has been the fact. The great Eastern fathers and theologians are

held in as high honor in Western Christendom as they ever were in

Eastern Christendom. Nearly all the great councils that defined

the dogmas held by the Catholic Church throughout the whole world

were held in the East. The Greeks were more speculative and more

addicted to philosophical subtleties and refinements than the

Latins, and therefore more liable to originate heresies; but

nowhere was heresy more vigorously combated, or the one faith of

the universal church more ably, more intelligently, or more

fervently defended than in the East, before the Emperors and the

Bishop of Constantinople drew the Eastern Church, or the larger

part of it, into schism. But the united Greek Church, the real

Eastern Church, the church of St. Athanasius, of the Basils, and

the Gregories, is one in spirit, one in faith, one in communion

with the Church of the West.

The author gravely tells us that Christianity had three primitive

forms, the Judaical, which has ended; the Gnostic, which has also

ended; the African, which still continues. But he has no

authority for what he says. Some Jewish observances were retained

for a time by Christians of Jewish origin, till the synagogue

could be buried with honor; but there never was a Jewish form of

Christianity, except among heretics, different from the

Christianity still held by the church. There are some phrases in

the Gospel of St. John, and in the Epistles of St. Paul that have

been thought to be directed against the gnostics; and Clemens of

Alexandria writes a work in which he uses the terms

_gnosis_, knowledge, and _gnostic_, a man possessing

knowledge or spiritual science, in a good sense; but, we suspect,

with a design of rescuing these from the bad sense in which they

were beginning to be used, as some of our European friends are

trying to do with the terms _liberal_ and _liberalist_.

Nevertheless, what Clemens defends under these terms is held by

Catholics to-day in the same sense in which he defends it. There

never was an African form of Christianity distinct from the

Christianity either of Europe or Asia. The two great theologians

of Africa are St. Cyprian and St. Augustine, both probably of

Roman, or, at least, of Italian extraction.

{168}

The doctrine which St. Cyprian is said to have maintained on

baptism administered by heretics, the only matter on which he

differed from Rome, has never been, and is not now, the doctrine

of the church. St. Augustine was converted in Milan, and had St.

Ambrose, a Roman, for his master, and differed from the

theologians either of the East or the West only in the unmatched

ability and science with which he defended the faith common to

all. He may have had some peculiar notions on some points, but if

so, these have never been received as Catholic doctrine.

The professor might as well assert the distinction, asserted in

Germany a few years since, which attracted some attention at the

time, but now forgotten, between the Petrine gospel, the Pauline

gospel, and the Joannine gospel, as the distinction of the three

primitive forms of Christianity which he asserts. We were told by

some learned German, we forget his name, that Peter, Paul, and

John represent three different phases or successive forms of

Christianity. The Petrine gospel represents religion, based on

authority; the Pauline, religion as based on intelligence; and

the Joannine, religion as based on love. The first was the

so-called Catholic or Roman Church. The reformation made an end

of that, and ushered in the Pauline form, or Protestantism, the

religion of the intellect. Philosophy, science. Biblical

criticism, and exegesis, the growth of liberal ideas, and the

development of the sentiments and affections of the heart, have

made an end of Protestantism, and are ushering in the Joannine

gospel, the religion of love, which is never to be superseded or

to pass away. The advocate of this theory had got beyond

authority and intelligence, whether he had attained to the

religion of love or not; yet the theory was only the revival of

the well-known heresy of the Eternal Evangel of the thirteenth

century. So hard is it to invent a new heresy. It were a waste of

words to attempt to show that this theory has not the slightest

foundation in fact. Paul and John assert authority as strenuously

as Peter; Peter and John give as free scope to the intellect as

Paul; and Peter and Paul agree with John in regard to love or

charity. There is nothing in the Gospel or Epistles of John to

surpass the burning love revealed, we might almost say concealed,

so unostentatious is it, by the inflamed Epistles of Paul. As for

Protestantism, silence best becomes it, when there is speech of

intelligence, so remarkable is it for its illogical and

unintellectual character. Protestants have their share of native

intellect, and the ordinary degree of intelligence on many

subjects; but in the science of theology, the basis of all the

sciences, and without which there is, and can be, no real

science, they have never yet excelled.

Nor did the reformation put an end to the so-called Petrine

gospel, the religion of authority, the church founded on Peter,

prince of the apostles. It may be that Protestantism is losing

what little intellectual character it once had, and developing in

a vague philanthropy, a watery sentimentality, or a blind

fanaticism, sometimes called Methodism, sometimes Evangelicalism;

but Peter still teaches and governs in his successor. The

Catholic Church has survived the attacks of the reformation and

the later revolution, as she survived the attacks of the

persecuting Jews and pagans, and the power and craft of civil

tyrants who sought to destroy or to enslave her, and is to-day

the only religion that advances by personal conviction and

conversion.

{169}

Mohammedanism can no longer propagate itself even by the sword;

the various pagan superstitions have reached their limits, and

are recoiling on themselves; and Protestantism has gained no

accession of territory or numbers since the death of Luther,

except by colonization and the natural increase of the population

then Protestant. The Catholic Church is not only a living

religion, but the only living religion, the only religion that

does, or can, command the homage of science, reason, free

thought, and the uncorrupted affections of the heart. The

Catholic religion is at once light, freedom, and love--the

religion of authority, of the intellect, and of the heart,

embracing in its indissoluble unity Peter, Paul, and John.

The professor's work on the intellectual development of Europe

proves that religion in some form has constituted a chief element

in that development. It always has been, and still is, the chief

element in the life of communities and nations, the spring and

centre of intellectual activity and progress. Even the works

before us revolve around it, or owe their existence to their

relation to it, and would have no intelligible purpose without

it. The author has written them to divest religion of its

supernatural character, to reduce it to a physiological law, and

to prove that it originates in the ignorance of men and nations,

and depends solely on physical conditions, chiefly on climate and

geographical position. But in this patriarchal, Jewish, Christian

religion there is something, and that of no slight influence on

the life of individuals and nations, on universal humanity, that

flatly contradicts him, that is essentially one and the same from

first to last, superior to climate and geographical position,

unaffected by natural causes, independent of physical conditions,

and in no sense subject to physiological laws. This suffices to

refute his theory, and that of the positivists, of whom he is a

distinguished disciple; for it proves the uniform presence and

activity in the life and development of men and nations, ever

since history began, of a power, a being, or cause above nature

and independent of nature, and therefore supernatural.

The theory that the rise, growth, decay, and death of nations

depend on physical conditions alone, chiefly on climate and

geographical position, seems to us attended with some grave

difficulties. Have the climate and geographical positions of

India, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, essentially

changed from what they were at the epoch of their greatness? Did

not all the great and renowned nations of antiquity rise, grow,

prosper, decline, and die, in substantially the same physical

conditions, under the same climate, and in the same geographical

position? Like causes produce like effects. How could the same

physical causes cause alike the rise and growth, and the decay

and death of one and the same people, in one and the same

climate, and in one and the same geographical position? Do you

say, climate and even physical geography change with the lapse of

time? Be it so. Be it as the author maintains, that formerly

there was no variation of climate on this continent, from the

equator to either pole; but was there for Rome any appreciable

change in the climate and geography from the time of the third

Punic war to that of Honorius, or even of Augustulus, the last of

the Emperors? Or what change in the physical conditions of the

nation was there when it was falling from what there was when it

was rising?

{170}

Nations, like individuals, have, according to the professor,

their infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death. But why do

nations grow old and die? The individual grows old and dies,

because his interior physical machinery wears out, and because he

must die in order to attain the end for which he lives. But why

should this be the case with nations? They have no future life to

which death is the passage. The nation does not rise or fall with

the individuals that found it. One generation of individuals

passes away, and another comes, but the nation survives; and why,

if not destroyed by external violence, should it not continue to

survive and thrive to the end of time? There are no physical

causes, no known physiological laws, that prevent it. Why was not

Rome as able to withstand the barbarians, or to drive them back

from her frontiers, in the fourth century, as she was in the

first? Why was England so much weaker under the Stuarts than she

had been under the Tudors, or was again under the Protector? Or

why have we seen her so grand under Pitt and Wellington, and so

little and feeble under Palmerston and Lord Russell? Can you

explain this by a change of climate and geographical position, or

any change in the physical conditions of the nation, that is, any

physical changes not due to moral causes?

We see in several of the States of the Union a decrease, a

relative, if not a positive decrease, of the native population,

and the physical man actually degenerating, and to an extent that

should alarm the statesman and the patriot. Do you explain this

fact by the change in the climate and the geographical position?

The geographical position remains unchanged, and if the climate

has changed at all, it has been by way of amelioration. Do you

attribute it to a change in the physical condition of the

country? Not at all. There is no mystery as to the matter, and

though the effects may be physical or physiological, the causes

are well known to be moral, and chief among them is the immoral

influence of the doctrine the professor and his brother

physiologists are doing their best to diffuse among the people.

The cause is in the loss of religious faith, in the lack of moral

and religious instruction, in the spread of naturalism, and the

rejection of supernatural grace--without which the natural cannot

be sustained in its integrity--in the growth of luxury, and the

assertion of material goods or sensible pleasures, as the end and

aim of life. There is always something morally wrong where prizes

need to be offered to induce the young to marry, and to induce

the married to suffer their children to be born and reared.

So, also, do we know the secret of the rise, prosperity, decline,

and death of the renowned nations of antiquity. The Romans owed

the empire of the world to their temperance, prudence, fortitude,

and respect for religious principle, all of them moral causes;

and they owed their decline and fall to the loss of these

virtues, to their moral corruption. The same may be said of all

the ancient nations. Their religion, pure, or comparatively pure,

in the origin, becomes gradually corrupt, degenerates into a

corrupt and corrupting superstition, which hangs as a frightful

nightmare on the breasts of the people, destroying their moral

life and vigor.

{171}

To this follows, with a class, scepticism, the denial of God or

the gods, an Epicurean morality, and the worship of the senses;

the loss of all public spirit--public as well as private virtue,

and the nation falls of its own internal moral imbecility and

rottenness, as our own nation, not yet a century old, is in a

fair way of doing, and most assuredly will do, if the atheistic

philosophy and morality of the physiologists or positivists

become much more widely diffused than they are. The church will

be as unable, with all her supernatural truth, grace, life, and

strength, to save it, as she was to save the ancient Graeco-Roman

Empire, for to save it would require a resurrection of the dead.

The common sense of mankind, in all ages of the world, has

uniformly attributed the downfall of nations, states, and

empires, to moral causes, not to physiological laws, climatic

influences, or geographical position. The wicked shall be turned

into hell, and all the nations that forget God. Righteousness

exalteth a nation, and sin is a reproach to any people. This is

alike the voice of inspiration and of universal experience. The

traveller who visits the sites of nations renowned in story, now

buried in ruins, of cities once thronged with a teeming

population, the marts of the world, in which were heard, from

morning till night--till far into night--the din of industry, and

marks the solitude that now reigns there; the barren waste that

has succeeded to once fruitful fields and vineyards, and observes

the poor shepherd that feeds a petty flock on the scanty

pasturage, or the armed robber that watches for a victim to

plunder, receives a far less vivid impression of the dependence

of nations on physical causes and conditions, than of the

influence of the moral world on the natural, and reads in legible

characters the meaning of that fearful penalty which God

pronounced, when he said to the man: "And the earth for thy sake

shall be cursed." The physical changes that have come over

Assyria, Syria, Lybia, Egypt, and Palestine, are the effects of

the moral deterioration of man, not the cause of that

deterioration.

The professor, after dilating almost eloquently, and as a sage,

on the changeability, the transitoriness, the evanescent nature

of all the visible forms of things, says: "If from visible forms

we turn to directing law, how vast the difference! We pass from

the finite, the momentary, the incidental, the conditional, to

the illimitable, the eternal, the necessary, the unshackled. It

is of law I am to speak in this book. In a world composed of

vanishing forms, I am to vindicate the imperishability, the

majesty of law, and to show how man proceeds in his social march

in obedience to it," (_Ibid_. p, 16.) This sounds well; but,

unhappily, he has told us that communities and nations, like

individuals, are under the control of physical conditions, and

_therefore_ of law. If _therefore_ of law, then under

the law of physical conditions, and consequently of a physical or

physiological law. He dwells on the grandeur of this conception,

and challenges for it our deepest admiration. But we see not much

to admire in a purely physical law manifesting itself in

ceaseless instability, metamorphosis, and death. Will the author

forgive us, if we hint that he possibly does not very well

understand himself, or know precisely what it is that he says?

Hear him. "I am to lead my reader, perhaps in a reluctant path,

from the outward phantasmagorial illusions which surround us and

so ostentatiously obtrude themselves on our attention, to

something that lies in silence and strength behind.

{172}

I am to draw his thoughts from the tangible to the invisible,

from the limited to the universal, from the changeable to the

invariable, from the transitory to the eternal; from the

expedients and volitions so largely _amusing_ in the life of

man, to the predestined and resistless issuing of law from the

fiat of God." (_Ibid_. p. 16, 17.) Very respectable

rhetoric, but what does it mean? If it means anything, it means

that the visible universe is unreal, an illusion, a

phantasmagoria; that nothing is real, stable, permanent, but law,

which lies in silence and strength behind the phantasmagoria, and

that this law producing the illusion, dazzling us with mere

sense-shows, is identically God, from whose fiat the

phantasmagorial world issues. Is not this grand? is it not

sublime? The scientific professor forgets that he may find

readers, who can perceive through his rhetoric that he makes law

or God the reality of things, instead of their creator or maker,

simply their _causa essentialis_, the _causa immanens_

of Spinoza, and therefore asserts nothing but a very vulgar form

of pantheism, material pantheism, indistinguishable from naked

atheism; for his doctrine recognizes only the material, the

sensible, and by law he can mean only a physiological law like

that by which the liver secretes bile, the blood circulates

through the heart, seeds germinate, or plants bear fruit--a law

which has and can have no indivisible unity.

If the professor means simply that in the universe all proceeds

according to the law of cause and effect, he should bear in mind

that there are moral causes and effects as well as physical, and

supernatural as well as natural; but then he might find himself

in accord with theologians, some of whom, perhaps, in his own

favorite sciences are able to be his masters. It is not always

safe to measure the ignorance of others by our own. No theologian

denies, but every one asserts the law of cause and effect,

precisely what no atheist, pantheist, or naturalist does do, for

none of them ever rise above what the schools call _causa

essentialis_, the thing itself, that which, as we say,

_makes_ the thing, makes it itself and not another, or

constitutes its identity. Every theologian believes that God is

logical, logic in itself, and that all his works are dialectical

and realize a divine plan, which as a whole and in all its parts

is strictly and rigidly logical. If the professor means simply to

assert not only that all creatures and all events are under the

control of the law of cause and effect, but also under the law of

dialectics, there need be no quarrel between him and us; but in

such case, if he had known a little theology, he might have

spared himself and us a great deal of trouble, for we believe as

firmly in the universal reign of law as he or his Grace of

Argyle. But he would have gained little credit for original

genius, depth of thought, profound science, or rare learning, and

most likely would not have lived to see any one of his volumes

reach a fifth edition.

But we must not be understood to deny in the development of

nations or individuals all dependence on physical conditions, or

even of climate and geographical position. Man is neither pure

spirit, nor pure matter; he is the union of soul and body, and

can no more live without communion with nature, than he can

without communion with his like and with God. Hence he requires

the three great institutions of religion, society, and property,

which, in some form, are found in all tribes, nations, or civil

communities, and without which no people ever does or can

subsist.

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Climate and geographical influences, no doubt, count for

something, for how much, science has not yet determined. There is

a difference in character between the inhabitants of mountains

and the inhabitants of plains, the dwellers on the sea-coast and

the dwellers inland, and the people of the north and the people

of the south; yet the Bas Bretons and the Irish have not lost

perceptibly anything, in three thousand years, of their original

character as a southern people, though dwelling for that space of

time, we know not how many centuries longer, far to the north.

Among the Irish you may find types of northern races, some of

whom have overrun the Island as conquerors; but amid all their

political and social vicissitudes, the Irish have retained, and

still retain, their southern character. The English have received

many accessions from Ireland and from the south, but they remain,

the great body of them, as they originally were, essentially a

northern people, and hence the marked difference between the

Irish character and the English, though inhabiting very nearly

the same parallels of latitude, and subject to much the same

climatic and geographical influences. The character of both the

English and the Irish is modified on this continent, but more by

amalgamation, and by political and social influences, than by

climate or geography. The Irish type is the most tenacious, and

is not unlikely in time to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon. It has a

great power of absorption, and the American people may ultimately

lose their northern type, and assume the characteristics of a

southern race, in spite of the constant influx of the Teutonic

element. What we object to is not giving something to physical

causes and conditions, but making them exclusive, and thus

rejecting moral causes, and reducing man and nature to an

inexorable fatalism.

In the several volumes of the professor, except the first named,

we are able to detect neither the philosophical historian nor the

man of real science. The respectable author has neither logic nor

exact, or even extensive, learning, and the only thing to be

admired in him, except his style, is the sublime confidence in

himself with which he undertakes to discuss and settle questions,

of which, for the most part, he knows nothing, and perhaps the

sublimer confidence with which he follows masters that know as

little as himself.

We own we have treated Professor Draper's work with very little

respect, for we have felt very little. His _Intellectual

Development of Europe_ is full of crudities from beginning to

end, and for the most part below criticism, or would be were it

not that it is levelled at all the principles of individual and

social life and progress. The book belongs to the age of

Leucippus and Democritus, and _ignores_, if we may use an

expressive term, though hardly English, Christian civilization

and all the progress men and nations have effected since the

opening of the Christian era. It is a monument not of science,

but of gross ignorance.

Yet in our remarks we have criticised the class to which the

author belongs, rather than the author himself. Men of real

science are modest, reverential, and we honor them, whatever the

department of nature to which they devote their studies. We

delight to sit at their feet and drink in instruction from their

lips; but when men, because they are passable chemists, know

something of human physiology, or the natural history of fishes,

undertake to propagate theories on God, man, and nature, that

violate the most sacred traditions of the race, deny the Gospel,

reduce the universe to matter, and place man on a level with the

brute, theories, too, which are utterly baseless, we cannot

reverence them, or listen to them with patience, however graceful

their elocution or charming their rhetoric.

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Morning At Spring Park.

Along the upland swell and wooded lawn

The aged farmer's voice is heard at dawn:

That well-known call across the dewy vale

Calls Spark and Daisy to the milking-pail.

The robin chirps; from farm to farm I hear

The bugle-note of wakeful chanticleer;

And far, far off, through grove and bosky dell,

The dreamy tinkle of sleek Snowflake's bell.

The huddling sheep, just loose from kindly fold,

Their nibbling way along the hill-side hold;

And timid squirrels and shy quails are seen

Flitting, unscared, across the shaded green.

The low horizon's dusky, violet blue

Is tinged with coming daylight's rosy hue,

Till o'er the golden fields of tasselled corn

Breaks all the rapture of the summer morn.

Through forest rifts the level sunbeams dart,

And gloomy nooks to sudden beauty start;

Those long, still lines which through rank foliage steal,

Undreamed-of charms among the woods reveal.

The yellow wheat-stooks catch the early light;

Far-nested homesteads gleam at once to sight;

While, from yon glimmering height, one spire serene

Points duly heavenward this terrestrial scene.

Long may the aged farmer's call be heard.

At dewy dawn, with song of matin bird.

Among his loving flocks and herds of kine,

A guileless master, watchful and benign.

And, when no more his agile footstep roves

These flowery pastures and these pleasant groves,

Good Shepherd, may thy call to fields more fair

Wean every thought from earth, make heaven his care!

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Nellie Netterville; Or, One Of The Transplanted.