There are pageants in which all the material splendors that man arrays
co-operate. Nations of slaves and divers have searched the sands of
ocean and the bowels of earth for the pearls and diamonds which adorn
the spectators. Transmitted as heirlooms from generation to generation,
these treasures have shone on consecrated brows and could be the most
faithful of historians had they speech. They know the joys and sorrows
of the great and those of the small. Everywhere do they go; they are
worn with pride at festivals, carried in despair to usurers, borne off
in triumph amid blood and pillage, enshrined in masterpieces conceived
by art for their protection. None, except the pearl of Cleopatra,
has been lost. The Great and the Fortunate assemble to witness the
coronation of some king, whose trappings are the work of men’s hands,
but the purple of whose raiment is less glorious than that of the
flowers of the field. These festivals, splendid in light, bathed in
music which the hand of man creates, aye, all the triumphs of that hand
are subdued by a thought, crushed by a sentiment. The Mind can illumine
in a man and round a man a light more vivid, can open his ear to more
melodious harmonies, can seat him on clouds of shining constellations
and teach him to question them. The Heart can do still greater things.
Man may come into the presence of one sole being and find in a single
word, a single look, an influence so weighty to bear, of so luminous a
light, so penetrating a sound, that he succumbs and kneels before it.
The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are
within us. A single secret of science is a realm of wonders to the man
of learning. Do the trumpets of Power, the jewels of Wealth, the music
of Joy, or a vast concourse of people attend his mental festival? No, he
finds his glory in some dim retreat where, perchance, a pallid suffering
man whispers a single word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted
in a mine, reveals to him a Science. All human ideas, arrayed in every
attractive form which Mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated
in a wayside ditch. Three worlds, the Natural, the Spiritual, the
Divine, with all their spheres, opened their portals to a Florentine
exile; he walked attended by the Happy and the Unhappy; by those who
prayed and those who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. When the
Sent of God, who knew and could accomplish all things, appeared to three
of his disciples it was at eventide, at the common table of the humblest
of inns; and then and there the Light broke forth, shattering Material
Forms, illuminating the Spiritual Faculties, so that they saw him in his
glory, and the earth lay at their feet like a cast-off sandal.
Monsieur Becker, Wilfrid, and Minna were all under the influence of fear
as they took their way to meet the extraordinary being whom each desired
to question. To them, in their several ways, the Swedish castle had
grown to mean some gigantic representation, some spectacle like those
whose colors and masses are skilfully and harmoniously marshalled by the
poets, and whose personages, imaginary actors to men, are real to
those who begin to penetrate the Spiritual World. On the tiers of this
Coliseum Monsieur Becker seated the gray legions of Doubt, the stern
ideas, the specious formulas of Dispute. He convoked the various
antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they all appeared,
in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which art embodies
Time,--an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the other a broken
globe, the human universe.
Wilfrid had bidden to the scene his earliest illusions and his latest
hopes, human destiny and its conflicts, religion and its conquering
powers.
Minna saw heaven confusedly by glimpses; love raised a curtain wrought
with mysterious images, and the melodious sounds which met her ear
redoubled her curiosity.
To all three, therefore, this evening was to be what that other evening
had been for the pilgrims to Emmaus, what a vision was to Dante, an
inspiration to Homer,--to them, three aspects of the world revealed,
veils rent away, doubts dissipated, darkness illumined. Humanity in all
its moods expecting light could not be better represented than here by
this young girl, this man in the vigor of his age, and these old men,
of whom one was learned enough to doubt, the other ignorant enough
to believe. Never was any scene more simple in appearance, nor more
portentous in reality.
When they entered the room, ushered in by old David, they found
Seraphita standing by a table on which were served the various dishes
which compose a “tea”; a form of collation which in the North takes the
place of wine and its pleasures,--reserved more exclusively for Southern
climes. Certainly nothing proclaimed in her, or in him, a being with the
strange power of appearing under two distinct forms; nothing about her
betrayed the manifold powers which she wielded. Like a careful housewife
attending to the comfort of her guests, she ordered David to put more
wood into the stove.
“Good evening, my neighbors,” she said. “Dear Monsieur Becker, you do
right to come; you see me living for the last time, perhaps. This winter
has killed me. Will you sit there?” she said to Wilfrid. “And you,
Minna, here?” pointing to a chair beside her. “I see you have brought
your embroidery. Did you invent that stitch? the design is very pretty.
For whom is it,--your father, or monsieur?” she added, turning to
Wilfrid. “Surely we ought to give him, before we part, a remembrance of
the daughters of Norway.”
“Did you suffer much yesterday?” asked Wilfrid.
“It was nothing,” she answered; “the suffering gladdened me; it was
necessary, to enable me to leave this life.”
“Then death does not alarm you?” said Monsieur Becker, smiling, for he
did not think her ill.
“No, dear pastor; there are two ways of dying: to some, death is
victory, to others, defeat.”
“Do you think that you have conquered?” asked Minna.
“I do not know,” she said, “perhaps I have only taken a step in the
path.”
The lustrous splendor of her brow grew dim, her eyes were veiled beneath
slow-dropping lids; a simple movement which affected the prying guests
and kept them silent. Monsieur Becker was the first to recover courage.
“Dear child,” he said, “you are truth itself, and you are ever kind.
I would ask of you to-night something other than the dainties of your
tea-table. If we may believe certain persons, you know amazing things;
if this be true, would it not be charitable in you to solve a few of our
doubts?”
“Ah!” she said smiling, “I walk on the clouds. I visit the depths of
the fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the singing
flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant colors shine!
I wear the seal of Solomon; I am a fairy; I cast my orders to the wind
which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes can pierce the earth
and behold its treasures; for lo! am I not the virgin to whom the pearls
dart from their ocean depths and--”
“--who led me safely to the summit of the Falberg?” said Minna,
interrupting her.
“Thou! thou too!” exclaimed the strange being, with a luminous glance
at the young girl which filled her soul with trouble. “Had I not the
faculty of reading through your foreheads the desires which have brought
you here, should I be what you think I am?” she said, encircling all
three with her controlling glance, to David’s great satisfaction. The
old man rubbed his hands with pleasure as he left the room.
“Ah!” she resumed after a pause, “you have come, all of you, with the
curiosity of children. You, my poor Monsieur Becker, have asked yourself
how it was possible that a girl of seventeen should know even a single
one of those secrets which men of science seek with their noses to the
earth,--instead of raising their eyes to heaven. Were I to tell you how
and at what point the plant merges into the animal you would begin
to doubt your doubts. You have plotted to question me; you will admit
that?”
“Yes, dear Seraphita,” answered Wilfrid; “but the desire is a natural
one to men, is it not?”
“You will bore this dear child with such topics,” she said, passing her
hand lightly over Minna’s hair with a caressing gesture.
The young girl raised her eyes and seemed as though she longed to lose
herself in him.
“Speech is the endowment of us all,” resumed the mysterious creature,
gravely. “Woe to him who keeps silence, even in a desert, believing
that no one hears him; all voices speak and all ears listen here below.
Speech moves the universe. Monsieur Becker, I desire to say nothing
unnecessarily. I know the difficulties that beset your mind; would you
not think it a miracle if I were now to lay bare the past history of
your consciousness? Well, the miracle shall be accomplished. You have
never admitted to yourself the full extent of your doubts. I alone,
immovable in my faith, I can show it to you; I can terrify you with
yourself.
“You stand on the darkest side of Doubt. You do not believe in
God,--although you know it not,--and all things here below are secondary
to him who rejects the first principle of things. Let us leave aside the
fruitless discussions of false philosophy. The spiritualist generations
made as many and as vain efforts to deny Matter as the materialist
generations have made to deny Spirit. Why such discussions? Does not man
himself offer irrefragable proof of both systems? Do we not find in him
material things and spiritual things? None but a madman can refuse to
see in the human body a fragment of Matter; your natural sciences, when
they decompose it, find little difference between its elements and those
of other animals. On the other hand, the idea produced in man by the
comparison of many objects has never seemed to any one to belong to the
domain of Matter. As to this, I offer no opinion. I am now concerned
with your doubts, not with my certainties. To you, as to the majority of
thinkers, the relations between things, the reality of which is proved
to you by your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover,
do not seem Material. The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in
man, with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which
he perceives among the innumerable forms of Nature,--relations so
multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one
has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who
can reckon their correlations? Is not the fraction which you know, in
relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity? Here,
then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly
obliges you to conceive of a purely Spiritual world.
“Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders,--Matter
and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a
universe invisible and infinite,--two worlds unknown to each other. Have
the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being? have they
a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of man? do they
hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us therefore spring over
and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths presented to our minds in
the union of a Material universe and a Spiritual universe,--a creation
visible, ponderable, tangible, terminating in a creation invisible,
imponderable, intangible; completely dissimilar, separated by the void,
yet united by indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives
equally from the one and from the other! Let us mingle in one world
these two worlds, absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but
conjoined by fact. However abstract man may suppose the relation which
binds two things together, the line of junction is perceptible. How?
Where? We are not now in search of the vanishing point where Matter
subtilizes. If such were the question, I cannot see why He who has, by
physical relations, studded with stars at immeasurable distances the
heavens which veil Him, may not have created solid substances, nor why
you deny Him the faculty of giving a body to thought.
“Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe
are one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from
substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that presses
upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in
us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and
unnamed things compose--in order to fit the problem of Creation to the
measure of your logic--a block of finite Matter; but were it infinite,
God would still not be its master. Now, reasoning with your views, dear
pastor, no matter in what way God the infinite is concerned with this
block of finite Matter, He cannot exist and retain the attributes with
which man invests Him. Seek Him in facts, and He is not; spiritually and
materially, you have made God impossible. Listen to the Word of human
Reason forced to its ultimate conclusions.
“In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only
two states are possible between them,--either God and Matter are
contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter. Were
Reason--the light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its
existence--accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not
invent a third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God.
Let human philosophies pile mountain upon mountain of words and of
ideas, let religions accumulate images and beliefs, revelations and
mysteries, you must face at last this terrible dilemma and choose
between the two propositions which compose it; you have no option, and
one as much as the other leads human reason to Doubt.
“The problem thus established, what signifies Spirit or Matter? Why
trouble about the march of the worlds in one direction or in another,
since the Being who guides them is shown to be an absurdity? Why
continue to ask whether man is approaching heaven or receding from it,
whether creation is rising towards Spirit or descending towards Matter,
if the questioned universe gives no reply? What signifies theogonies and
their armies, theologies and their dogmas, since whichever side of the
problem is man’s choice, his God exists not? Let us for a moment take up
the first proposition, and suppose God contemporaneous with Matter.
Is subjection to the action or the co-existence of an alien substance
consistent with being God at all? In such a system, would not God become
a secondary agent compelled to organize Matter? If so, who compelled
Him? Between His material gross companion and Himself, who was the
arbiter? Who paid the wages of the six days’ labor imputed to the great
Designer? Has any determining force been found which was neither God nor
Matter? God being regarded as the manufacturer of the machinery of the
worlds, is it not as ridiculous to call Him God as to call the slave who
turns the grindstone a Roman citizen? Besides, another difficulty, as
insoluble to this supreme human reason as it is to God, presents itself.
“If we carry the problem higher, shall we not be like the Hindus, who
put the world upon a tortoise, the tortoise on an elephant, and do not
know on what the feet of their elephant may rest? This supreme will,
issuing from the contest between God and Matter, this God, this more
than God, can He have existed throughout eternity without willing what
He afterwards willed,--admitting that Eternity can be divided into two
eras. No matter where God is, what becomes of His intuitive intelligence
if He did not know His ultimate thought? Which, then, is the true
Eternity,--the created Eternity or the uncreated? But if God throughout
all time did will the world such as it is, this new necessity, which
harmonizes with the idea of sovereign intelligence, implies the
co-eternity of Matter. Whether Matter be co-eternal by a divine will
necessarily accordant with itself from the beginning, or whether
Matter be co-eternal of its own being, the power of God, which must be
absolute, perishes if His will is circumscribed; for in that case God
would find within Him a determining force which would control Him. Can
He be God if He can no more separate Himself from His creation in a past
eternity than in the coming eternity?
“This face of the problem is insoluble in its cause. Let us now inquire
into its effects. If a God compelled to have created the world from all
eternity seems inexplicable, He is quite as unintelligible in perpetual
cohesion with His work. God, constrained to live eternally united to His
creation is held down to His first position as workman. Can you conceive
of a God who shall be neither independent of nor dependent on His work?
Could He destroy that work without challenging Himself? Ask yourself,
and decide! Whether He destroys it some day, or whether He never
destroys it, either way is fatal to the attributes without which God
cannot exist. Is the world an experiment? is it a perishable form to
which destruction must come? If it is, is not God inconsistent and
impotent? inconsistent, because He ought to have seen the result before
the attempt,--moreover why should He delay to destroy that which He is
to destroy?--impotent, for how else could He have created an imperfect
man?
“If an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man attributes
to God we are forced back upon the question, Is creation perfect? The
idea is in harmony with that of a God supremely intelligent who could
make no mistakes; but then, what means the degradation of His work,
and its regeneration? Moreover, a perfect world is, necessarily,
indestructible; its forms would not perish, it could neither advance nor
recede, it would revolve in the everlasting circumference from which it
would never issue. In that case God would be dependent on His work;
it would be co-eternal with Him; and so we fall back into one of the
propositions most antagonistic to God. If the world is imperfect, it
can progress; if perfect, it is stationary. On the other hand, if it
be impossible to admit of a progressive God ignorant through a past
eternity of the results of His creative work, can there be a stationary
God? would not that imply the triumph of Matter? would it not be the
greatest of all negations? Under the first hypothesis God perishes
through weakness; under the second through the Force of his inertia.
“Therefore, to all sincere minds the supposition that Matter, in the
conception and execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with God, is
to deny God. Forced to choose, in order to govern the nations, between
the two alternatives of the problem, whole generations have preferred
this solution of it. Hence the doctrine of the two principles of
Magianism, brought from Asia and adopted in Europe under the form of
Satan warring with the Eternal Father. But this religious formula and
the innumerable aspects of divinity that have sprung from it are surely
crimes against the Majesty Divine. What other term can we apply to
the belief which sets up as a rival to God a personification of Evil,
striving eternally against the Omnipotent Mind without the possibility
of ultimate triumph? Your statics declare that two Forces thus pitted
against each other are reciprocally rendered null.
“Do you turn back, therefore, to the other side of the problem, and say
that God pre-existed, original, alone?
“I will not go over the preceding arguments (which here return in full
force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the questions
raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds; let us
look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory. If God
pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him; Matter was
therefore drawn from His essence; consequently Matter in itself is
non-existent; all forms are veils to cover the Divine Spirit. If this
be so, the World is Eternal, and also it must be God. Is not this
proposition even more fatal than the former to the attributes conferred
on God by human reason? How can the actual condition of Matter be
explained if we suppose it to issue from the bosom of God and to be
ever united with Him? Is it possible to believe that the All-Powerful,
supremely good in His essence and in His faculties, has engendered
things dissimilar to Himself. Must He not in all things and through all
things be like unto Himself? Can there be in God certain evil parts
of which at some future day he may rid Himself?--a conjecture less
offensive and absurd than terrible, for the reason that it drags back
into Him the two principles which the preceding theory proved to be
inadmissible. God must be ONE; He cannot be divided without renouncing
the most important condition of His existence. It is therefore
impossible to admit of a fraction of God which yet is not God. This
hypothesis seemed so criminal to the Roman Church that she has made the
omnipresence of God in the least particles of the Eucharist an article
of faith.
“But how then can we imagine an omnipotent mind which does not triumph?
How associate it unless in triumph with Nature? But Nature is not
triumphant; she seeks, combines, remodels, dies, and is born again; she
is even more convulsed when creating than when all was fusion; Nature
suffers, groans, is ignorant, degenerates, does evil; deceives herself,
annihilates herself, disappears, and begins again. If God is associated
with Nature, how can we explain the inoperative indifference of the
divine principle? Wherefore death? How came it that Evil, king of
the earth, was born of a God supremely good in His essence and in His
faculties, who can produce nothing that is not made in His own image?
“But if, from this relentless conclusion which leads at once to
absurdity, we pass to details, what end are we to assign to the world?
If all is God, all is reciprocally cause and effect; all is _One_ as God
is _One_, and we can perceive neither points of likeness nor points of
difference. Can the real end be a rotation of Matter which subtilizes
and disappears? In whatever sense it were done, would not this
mechanical trick of Matter issuing from God and returning to God seem
a sort of child’s play? Why should God make himself gross with Matter?
Under which form is he most God? Which has the ascendant, Matter or
Spirit, when neither can in any way do wrong? Who can comprehend the
Deity engaged in this perpetual business, by which he divides Himself
into two Natures, one of which knows nothing, while the other knows all?
Can you conceive of God amusing Himself in the form of man, laughing at
His own efforts, dying Friday, to be born again Sunday, and continuing
this play from age to age, knowing the end from all eternity, and
telling nothing to Himself, the Creature, of what He the Creator, does?
The God of the preceding hypothesis, a God so nugatory by the very power
of His inertia, seems the more possible of the two if we are compelled
to choose between the impossibilities with which this God, so dull a
jester, fusillades Himself when two sections of humanity argue face to
face, weapons in hand.
“However absurd this outcome of the second problem may seem, it
was adopted by half the human race in the sunny lands where smiling
mythologies were created. Those amorous nations were consistent;
with them all was God, even Fear and its dastardy, even crime and its
bacchanals. If we accept pantheism,--the religion of many a great human
genius,--who shall say where the greater reason lies? Is it with the
savage, free in the desert, clothed in his nudity, listening to the sun,
talking to the sea, sublime and always true in his deeds whatever they
may be; or shall we find it in civilized man, who derives his chief
enjoyments through lies; who wrings Nature and all her resources to put
a musket on his shoulder; who employs his intellect to hasten the hour
of his death and to create diseases out of pleasures? When the rake of
pestilence and the ploughshare of war and the demon of desolation have
passed over a corner of the globe and obliterated all things, who will
be found to have the greater reason,--the Nubian savage or the patrician
of Thebes? Your doubts descend the scale, they go from heights to
depths, they embrace all, the end as well as the means.
“But if the physical world seems inexplicable, the moral world presents
still stronger arguments against God. Where, then, is progress? If all
things are indeed moving toward perfection why do we die young? why do
not nations perpetuate themselves? The world having issued from God and
being contained in God can it be stationary? Do we live once, or do
we live always? If we live once, hurried onward by the march of the
Great-Whole, a knowledge of which has not been given to us, let us act
as we please. If we are eternal, let things take their course. Is the
created being guilty if he exists at the instant of the transitions? If
he sins at the moment of a great transformation will he be punished for
it after being its victim? What becomes of the Divine goodness if we are
not transferred to the regions of the blest--should any such exist?
What becomes of God’s prescience if He is ignorant of the results of the
trials to which He subjects us? What is this alternative offered to man
by all religions,--either to boil in some eternal cauldron or to walk
in white robes, a palm in his hand and a halo round his head? Can it
be that this pagan invention is the final word of God? Where is the
generous soul who does not feel that the calculating virtue which seeks
the eternity of pleasure offered by all religions to whoever fulfils
at stray moments certain fanciful and often unnatural conditions, is
unworthy of man and of God? Is it not a mockery to give to man impetuous
senses and forbid him to satisfy them? Besides, what mean these ascetic
objections if Good and Evil are equally abolished? Does Evil exist?
If substance in all its forms is God, then Evil is God. The faculty of
reasoning as well as the faculty of feeling having been given to man
to use, nothing can be more excusable in him than to seek to know the
meaning of human suffering and the prospects of the future.
“If these rigid and rigorous arguments lead to such conclusions
confusion must reign. The world would have no fixedness; nothing
would advance, nothing would pause, all would change, nothing would be
destroyed, all would reappear after self-renovation; for if your mind
does not clearly demonstrate to you an end, it is equally impossible to
demonstrate the destruction of the smallest particle of Matter; Matter
can transform but not annihilate itself.
“Though blind force may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent
force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from God, why should it meet
with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate? Where is God?
If the living cannot perceive Him, can the dead find Him? Crumble,
ye idolatries and ye religions! Fall, feeble keystones of all social
arches, powerless to retard the decay, the death, the oblivion that
have overtaken all nations however firmly founded! Fall, morality and
justice! our crimes are purely relative; they are divine effects whose
causes we are not allowed to know. All is God. Either we are God or God
is not!--Child of a century whose every year has laid upon your brow,
old man, the ice of its unbelief, here, here is the summing up of your
lifetime of thought, of your science and your reflections! Dear Monsieur
Becker, you have laid your head upon the pillow of Doubt, because it is
the easiest of solutions; acting in this respect with the majority
of mankind, who say in their hearts: ‘Let us think no more of these
problems, since God has not vouchsafed to grant us the algebraic
demonstrations that could solve them, while He has given us so many
other ways to get from earth to heaven.’
“Tell me, dear pastor, are not these your secret thoughts? Have I evaded
the point of any? nay, rather, have I not clearly stated all? First, in
the dogma of two principles,--an antagonism in which God perishes for
the reason that being All-Powerful He chose to combat. Secondly, in the
absurd pantheism where, all being God, God exists no longer. These two
sources, from which have flowed all the religions for whose triumph
Earth has toiled and prayed, are equally pernicious. Behold in them the
double-bladed axe with which you decapitate the white old man whom you
enthrone among your painted clouds! And now, to me the axe, I wield it!”
Monsieur Becker and Wilfrid gazed at the young girl with something like
terror.
“To believe,” continued Seraphita, in her Woman’s voice, for the Man
had finished speaking, “to believe is a gift. To believe is to feel.
To believe in God we must feel God. This feeling is a possession slowly
acquired by the human being, just as other astonishing powers which you
admire in great men, warriors, artists, scholars, those who know and
those who act, are acquired. Thought, that budget of the relations which
you perceive among created things, is an intellectual language which can
be learned, is it not? Belief, the budget of celestial truths, is also a
language as superior to thought as thought is to instinct. This language
also can be learned. The Believer answers with a single cry, a single
gesture; Faith puts within his hand a flaming sword with which he
pierces and illumines all. The Seer attains to heaven and descends not.
But there are beings who believe and see, who know and will, who love
and pray and wait. Submissive, yet aspiring to the kingdom of light,
they have neither the aloofness of the Believer nor the silence of the
Seer; they listen and reply. To them the doubt of the twilight ages
is not a murderous weapon, but a divining rod; they accept the contest
under every form; they train their tongues to every language; they are
never angered, though they groan; the acrimony of the aggressor is not
in them, but rather the softness and tenuity of light, which penetrates
and warms and illumines. To their eyes Doubt is neither an impiety, nor
a blasphemy, nor a crime, but a transition through which men return upon
their steps in the Darkness, or advance into the Light. This being so,
dear pastor, let us reason together.
“You do not believe in God? Why? God, to your thinking, is
incomprehensible, inexplicable. Agreed. I will not reply that to
comprehend God in His entirety would be to be God; nor will I tell you
that you deny what seems to you inexplicable so as to give me the right
to affirm that which to me is believable. There is, for you, one
evident fact, which lies within yourself. In you, Matter has ended in
intelligence; can you therefore think that human intelligence will
end in darkness, doubt, and nothingness? God may seem to you
incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in all
things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman. Why should
His craft stop short at man, His most finished creation?
“If that question is not convincing, at least it compels meditation.
Happily, although you deny God, you are obliged, in order to establish
your doubts, to admit those double-bladed facts, which kill your
arguments as much as your arguments kill God. We have also admitted that
Matter and Spirit are two creations which do not comprehend each other;
that the spiritual world is formed of infinite relations to which the
finite material world has given rise; that if no one on earth is able
to identify himself by the power of his spirit with the great-whole of
terrestrial creations, still less is he able to rise to the knowledge of
the relations which the spirit perceives between these creations.
“We might end the argument here in one word, by denying you the faculty
of comprehending God, just as you deny to the pebbles of the fiord the
faculties of counting and of seeing each other. How do you know that the
stones themselves do not deny the existence of man, though man makes
use of them to build his houses? There is one fact that appals
you,--the Infinite; if you feel it within, why will you not admit its
consequences? Can the finite have a perfect knowledge of the infinite?
If you cannot perceive those relations which, according to your own
admission, are infinite, how can you grasp a sense of the far-off end to
which they are converging? Order, the revelation of which is one of your
needs, being infinite, can your limited reason apprehend it? Do not ask
why man does not comprehend that which he is able to perceive, for he is
equally able to perceive that which he does not comprehend. If I prove
to you that your mind ignores that which lies within its compass, will
you grant that it is impossible for it to conceive whatever is beyond
it? This being so, am I not justified in saying to you: ‘One of the two
propositions under which God is annihilated before the tribunal of our
reason must be true, the other is false. Inasmuch as creation exists,
you feel the necessity of an end, and that end should be good, should it
not? Now, if Matter terminates in man by intelligence, why are you not
satisfied to believe that the end of human intelligence is the Light of
the higher spheres, where alone an intuition of that God who seems so
insoluble a problem is obtained? The species which are beneath you have
no conception of the universe, and you have; why should there not be
other species above you more intelligent than your own? Man ought to be
better informed than he is about himself before he spends his strength
in measuring God. Before attacking the stars that light us, and the
higher certainties, ought he not to understand the certainties which are
actually about him?’
“But no! to the negations of doubt I ought rather to reply by negations.
Therefore I ask you whether there is anything here below so evident
that I can put faith in it? I will show you in a moment that you believe
firmly in things which act, and yet are not beings; in things which
engender thought, and yet are not spirits; in living abstractions which
the understanding cannot grasp in any shape, which are in fact nowhere,
but which you perceive everywhere; which have, and can have, on name,
but which, nevertheless, you have named; and which, like the God
of flesh upon whom you figure to yourself, remain inexplicable,
incomprehensible, and absurd. I shall also ask you why, after admitting
the existence of these incomprehensible things, you reserve your doubts
for God?
“You believe, for instance, in Number,--a base on which you have built
the edifice of sciences which you call ‘exact.’ Without Number, what
would become of mathematics? Well, what mysterious being endowed with
the faculty of living forever could utter, and what language would be
compact to word the Number which contains the infinite numbers whose
existence is revealed to you by thought? Ask it of the loftiest human
genius; he might ponder it for a thousand years and what would be his
answer? You know neither where Number begins, nor where it pauses, nor
where it ends. Here you call it Time, there you call it Space. Nothing
exists except by Number. Without it, all would be one and the same
substance; for Number alone differentiates and qualifies substance.
Number is to your Spirit what it is to Matter, an incomprehensible
agent. Will you make a Deity of it? Is it a being? Is it a breath
emanating from God to organize the material universe where nothing
obtains form except by the Divinity which is an effect of Number? The
least as well as the greatest of creations are distinguishable from
each other by quantities, qualities, dimensions, forces,--all attributes
created by Number. The infinitude of Numbers is a fact proved to your
soul, but of which no material proof can be given. The mathematician
himself tells you that the infinite of numbers exists, but cannot be
proved.
“God, dear pastor, is a Number endowed with motion,--felt, but not seen,
the Believer will tell you. Like the Unit, He begins Number, with which
He has nothing in common. The existence of Number depends on the Unit,
which without being a number engenders Number. God, dear pastor is a
glorious Unit who has nothing in common with His creations but who,
nevertheless, engenders them. Will you not therefore agree with me that
you are just as ignorant of where Number begins and ends as you are of
where created Eternity begins and ends?
“Why, then, if you believe in Number, do you deny God? Is not Creation
interposed between the Infinite of unorganized substances and the
Infinite of the divine spheres, just as the Unit stands between the
Cipher of the fractions you have lately named Decimals, and the Infinite
of Numbers which you call Wholes? Man alone on earth comprehends Number,
that first step of the peristyle which leads to God, and yet his reason
stumbles on it! What! you can neither measure nor grasp the first
abstraction which God delivers to you, and yet you try to subject His
ends to your own tape-line! Suppose that I plunge you into the abyss of
Motion, the force that organizes Number. If I tell you that the Universe
is naught else than Number and Motion, you would see at once that we
speak two different languages. I understand them both; you understand
neither.
“Suppose I add that Motion and Number are engendered by the Word, namely
the supreme Reason of Seers and Prophets who in the olden time heard the
Breath of God beneath which Saul fell to the earth. That Word, you
scoff at it, you men, although you well know that all visible works,
societies, monuments, deeds, passions, proceed from the breath of your
own feeble word, and that without that word you would resemble the
African gorilla, the nearest approach to man, the Negro. You believe
firmly in Number and in Motion, a force and a result both inexplicable,
incomprehensible, to the existence of which I may apply the logical
dilemma which, as we have seen, prevents you from believing in God.
Powerful reasoner that you are, you do not need that I should prove to
you that the Infinite must everywhere be like unto Itself, and that,
necessarily, it is One. God alone is Infinite, for surely there cannot
be two Infinities, two Ones. If, to make use of human terms, anything
demonstrated to you here below seems to you infinite, be sure that
within it you will find some one aspect of God. But to continue.
“You have appropriated to yourself a place in the Infinite of Number;
you have fitted it to your own proportions by creating (if indeed you
did create) arithmetic, the basis on which all things rest, even your
societies. Just as Number--the only thing in which your self-styled
atheists believe--organized physical creations, so arithmetic, in the
employ of Number, organized the moral world. This numeration must
be absolute, like all else that is true in itself; but it is purely
relative, it does not exist absolutely, and no proof can be given of its
reality. In the first place, though Numeration is able to take account
of organized substances, it is powerless in relation to unorganized
forces, the ones being finite and the others infinite. The man who can
conceive the Infinite by his intelligence cannot deal with it in its
entirety; if he could, he would be God. Your Numeration, applying to
things finite and not to the Infinite, is therefore true in relation to
the details which you are able to perceive, and false in relation to
the Whole, which you are unable to perceive. Though Nature is like unto
herself in the organizing force or in her principles which are infinite,
she is not so in her finite effects. Thus you will never find in Nature
two objects identically alike. In the Natural Order two and two never
make four; to do so, four exactly similar units must be had, and you
know how impossible it is to find two leaves alike on the same tree,
or two trees alike of the same species. This axiom of your numeration,
false in visible nature, is equally false in the invisible universe of
your abstractions, where the same variance takes place in your ideas,
which are the things of the visible world extended by means of their
relations; so that the variations here are even more marked than
elsewhere. In fact, all being relative to the temperament, strength,
habits, and customs of individuals, who never resemble each other, the
smallest objects take the color of personal feelings. For instance, man
has been able to create units and to give an equal weight and value to
bits of gold. Well, take the ducat of the rich man and the ducat of the
poor man to a money-changer and they are rated exactly equal, but to
the mind of the thinker one is of greater importance than the other; one
represents a month of comfort, the other an ephemeral caprice. Two and
two, therefore, only make four through a false conception.
“Again: fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a
fragment is a finished whole. Does it not often happen (have you not
many proofs of it?) that the hundredth part of a substance is stronger
than what you term the whole of it? If fraction does not exist in the
Natural Order, still less shall we find it in the Moral Order, where
ideas and sentiments may be as varied as the species of the Vegetable
kingdom and yet be always whole. The theory of fractions is therefore
another signal instance of the servility of your mind.
“Thus Number, with its infinite minuteness and its infinite expansion,
is a power whose weakest side is known to you, but whose real import
escapes your perception. You have built yourself a hut in the Infinite
of numbers, you have adorned it with hieroglyphics scientifically
arranged and painted, and you cry out, ‘All is here!’
“Let us pass from pure, unmingled Number to corporate Number. Your
geometry establishes that a straight line is the shortest way from one
point to another, but your astronomy proves that God has proceeded
by curves. Here, then, we find two truths equally proved by the
same science,--one by the testimony of your senses reinforced by the
telescope, the other by the testimony of your mind; and yet the one
contradicts the other. Man, liable to err, affirms one, and the Maker
of the worlds, whom, so far, you have not detected in error, contradicts
it. Who shall decide between rectalinear and curvilinear geometry?
between the theory of the straight line and that of the curve? If, in
His vast work, the mysterious Artificer, who knows how to reach His ends
miraculously fast, never employs a straight line except to cut off an
angle and so obtain a curve, neither does man himself always rely upon
it. The bullet which he aims direct proceeds by a curve, and when you
wish to strike a certain point in space, you impel your bombshell along
its cruel parabola. None of your men of science have drawn from this
fact the simple deduction that the Curve is the law of the material
worlds and the Straight line that of the Spiritual worlds; one is the
theory of finite creations, the other the theory of the infinite. Man,
who alone in the world has a knowledge of the Infinite, can alone know
the straight line; he alone has the sense of verticality placed in a
special organ. A fondness for the creations of the curve would seem to
be in certain men an indication of the impurity of their nature still
conjoined to the material substances which engender us; and the love of
great souls for the straight line seems to show in them an intuition of
heaven. Between these two lines there is a gulf fixed like that between
the finite and the infinite, between matter and spirit, between man and
the idea, between motion and the object moved, between the creature and
God. Ask Love the Divine to grant you his wings and you can cross that
gulf. Beyond it begins the revelation of the Word.
“No part of those things which you call material is without its own
meaning; lines are the boundaries of solid parts and imply a force
of action which you suppress in your formulas,--thus rendering those
formulas false in relation to substances taken as a whole. Hence the
constant destruction of the monuments of human labor, which you supply,
unknown to yourselves, with acting properties. Nature has substances;
your science combines only their appearances. At every step Nature
gives the lie to all your laws. Can you find a single one that is not
disproved by a fact? Your Static laws are at the mercy of a thousand
accidents; a fluid can overthrow a solid mountain and prove that the
heaviest substances may be lifted by one that is imponderable.
“Your laws on Acoustics and Optics are defied by the sounds which you
hear within yourselves in sleep, and by the light of an electric sun
whose rays often overcome you. You know no more how light makes itself
seen within you, than you know the simple and natural process which
changes it on the throats of tropic birds to rubies, sapphires,
emeralds, and opals, or keeps it gray and brown on the breasts of the
same birds under the cloudy skies of Europe, or whitens it here in the
bosom of our polar Nature. You know not how to decide whether color is a
faculty with which all substances are endowed, or an effect produced by
an effluence of light. You admit the saltness of the sea without
being able to prove that the water is salt at its greatest depth. You
recognize the existence of various substances which span what you think
to be the void,--substances which are not tangible under any of the
forms assumed by Matter, although they put themselves in harmony with
Matter in spite of every obstacle.
“All this being so, you believe in the results of Chemistry, although
that science still knows no way of gauging the changes produced by the
flux and reflux of substances which come and go across your crystals and
your instruments on the impalpable filaments of heat or light conducted
and projected by the affinities of metal or vitrified flint. You obtain
none but dead substances, from which you have driven the unknown force
that holds in check the decomposition of all things here below, and of
which cohesion, attraction, vibration, and polarity are but phenomena.
Life is the thought of substances; bodies are only the means of
fixing life and holding it to its way. If bodies were beings living of
themselves they would be Cause itself, and could not die.
“When a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is
shared by all creations according to their faculty of absorption, you
proclaim him mighty in science, as though genius consisted in explaining
a thing that is! Genius ought to cast its eyes beyond effects. Your men
of science would laugh if you said to them: ‘There exist such positive
relations between two human beings, one of whom may be here, and
the other in Java, that they can at the same instant feel the same
sensation, and be conscious of so doing; they can question each other
and reply without mistake’; and yet there are mineral substances which
exhibit sympathies as far off from each other as those of which I speak.
You believe in the power of the electricity which you find in the magnet
and you deny that which emanates from the soul! According to you, the
moon, whose influence upon the tides you think fixed, has none whatever
upon the winds, nor upon navigation, nor upon men; she moves the sea,
but she must not affect the sick folk; she has undeniable relations
with one half of humanity, and nothing at all to do with the other half.
These are your vaunted certainties!
“Let us go a step further. You believe in physics. But your physics
begin, like the Catholic religion, with an _act of faith_. Do they not
pre-suppose some external force distinct from substance to which it
communicates motion? You see its effects, but what is it? where is it?
what is the essence of its nature, its life? has it any limits?--and
yet, you deny God!
“Thus, the majority of your scientific axioms, true to their relation to
man, are false in relation to the Great Whole. Science is One, but you
have divided it. To know the real meaning of the laws of phenomena must
we not know the correlations which exist between phenomena and the law
of the Whole? There is, in all things, an appearance which strikes
your senses; under that appearance stirs a soul; a body is there and a
faculty is there. Where do you teach the study of the relations which
bind things to each other? Nowhere. Consequently you have nothing
positive. Your strongest certainties rest upon the analysis of material
forms whose essence you persistently ignore.
“There is a Higher Knowledge of which, too late, some men obtain a
glimpse, though they dare not avow it. Such men comprehend the necessity
of considering substances not merely in their mathematical properties
but also in their entirety, in their occult relations and affinities.
The greatest man among you divined, in his latter days, that all was
reciprocally cause and effect; that the visible worlds were co-ordinated
among themselves and subject to worlds invisible. He groaned at the
recollection of having tried to establish fixed precepts. Counting up
his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through ether, he had explained
their coherence by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction.
You bowed before that man of science--well! I tell you that he died in
despair. By supposing that the centrifugal and centripetal forces,
which he had invented to explain to himself the universe, were equal, he
stopped the universe; yet he admitted motion in an indeterminate
sense; but supposing those forces unequal, then utter confusion of the
planetary system ensued. His laws therefore were not absolute; some
higher problem existed than the principle on which his false glory
rested. The connection of the stars with one another and the centripetal
action of their internal motion did not deter him from seeking the
parent stalk on which his clusters hung. Alas, poor man! the more he
widened space the heavier his burden grew. He told you how there came
to be equilibrium among the parts, but whither went the whole? His mind
contemplated the vast extent, illimitable to human eyes, filled with
those groups of worlds a mere fraction of which is all our telescopes
can reach, but whose immensity is revealed by the rapidity of light.
This sublime contemplation enabled him to perceive myriads of worlds,
planted in space like flowers in a field, which are born like infants,
grow like men, die as the aged die, and live by assimilating from their
atmosphere the substances suitable for their nourishment,--having
a centre and a principal of life, guaranteeing to each other their
circuits, absorbed and absorbing like plants, and forming a vast Whole
endowed with life and possessing a destiny.
“At that sight your man of science trembled! He knew that life is
produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or
inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the
movement which appertains to it. Then it was that he foresaw the
crumbling of the worlds and their destruction if God should withdraw the
Breath of His Word. He searched the Apocalypse for the traces of that
Word. You thought him mad. Understand him better! He was seeking pardon
for the work of his genius.
“Wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or rise
upon a rain-cloud, or plunge into the fiord and reappear a swan. If
science or miracles were the end and object of humanity, Moses would
have bequeathed to you the law of fluxions; Jesus Christ would have
lightened the darkness of your sciences; his apostles would have told
you whence come those vast trains of gas and melted metals, attached
to cores which revolve and solidify as they dart through ether, or
violently enter some system and combine with a star, jostling and
displacing it by the shock, or destroying it by the infiltration of
their deadly gases; Saint Paul, instead of telling you to live in God,
would have explained why food is the secret bond among all creations and
the evident tie between all living Species. In these days the greatest
miracle of all would be the discovery of the squaring of the circle,--a
problem which you hold to be insoluble, but which is doubtless solved in
the march of worlds by the intersection of some mathematical lines whose
course is visible to the eye of spirits who have reached the higher
spheres. Believe me, miracles are in us, not without us. Here natural
facts occur which men call supernatural. God would have been strangely
unjust had he confined the testimony of his power to certain generations
and peoples and denied them to others. The brazen rod belongs to all.
Neither Moses, nor Jacob, nor Zoroaster, nor Paul, nor Pythagoras, nor
Swedenborg, not the humblest Messenger nor the loftiest Prophet of the
Most High are greater than you are capable of being. Only, there come to
nations as to men certain periods when Faith is theirs.
“If material sciences be the end and object of human effort, tell
me, both of you, would societies,--those great centres where men
congregate,--would they perpetually be dispersed? If civilization were
the object of our Species, would intelligence perish? would it continue
purely individual? The grandeur of all nations that were truly great was
based on exceptions; when the exception ceased their power died. If such
were the End-all, Prophets, Seers, and Messengers of God would have lent
their hand to Science rather than have given it to Belief. Surely they
would have quickened your brains sooner than have touched your hearts!
But no; one and all they came to lead the nations back to God; they
proclaimed the sacred Path in simple words that showed the way to
heaven; all were wrapped in love and faith, all were inspired by that
_word_ which hovers above the inhabitants of earth, enfolding them,
inspiriting them, uplifting them; none were prompted by any human
interest. Your great geniuses, your poets, your kings, your learned men
are engulfed with their cities; while the names of these good pastors of
humanity, ever blessed, have survived all cataclysms.
“Alas! we cannot understand each other on any point. We are separated by
an abyss. You are on the side of darkness, while I--I live in the light,
the true Light! Is this the word that you ask of me? I say it with joy;
it may change you. Know this: there are sciences of matter and sciences
of spirit. There, where you see substances, I see forces that stretch
one toward another with generating power. To me, the character of bodies
is the indication of their principles and the sign of their properties.
Those principles beget affinities which escape your knowledge, and
which are linked to centres. The different species among which life is
distributed are unfailing streams which correspond unfailingly among
themselves. Each has his own vocation. Man is effect and cause. He is
fed, but he feeds in turn. When you call God a Creator, you dwarf Him.
He did not create, as you think He did, plants or animals or stars.
Could He proceed by a variety of means? Must He not act by unity
of composition? Moreover, He gave forth principles to be developed,
according to His universal law, at the will of the surroundings in which
they were placed. Hence a single substance and motion, a single plant, a
single animal, but correlations everywhere. In fact, all affinities are
linked together by contiguous similitudes; the life of the worlds is
drawn toward the centres by famished aspiration, as you are drawn by
hunger to seek food.
“To give you an example of affinities linked to similitudes (a secondary
law on which the creations of your thought are based), music, that
celestial art, is the working out of this principle; for is it not a
complement of sounds harmonized by number? Is not sound a modification
of air, compressed, dilated, echoed? You know the composition of
air,--oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. As you cannot obtain sound from
the void, it is plain that music and the human voice are the result of
organized chemical substances, which put themselves in unison with the
same substances prepared within you by your thought, co-ordinated
by means of light, the great nourisher of your globe. Have you ever
meditated on the masses of nitre deposited by the snow, have you ever
observed a thunderstorm and seen the plants breathing in from the air
about them the metal it contains, without concluding that the sun has
fused and distributed the subtle essence which nourishes all things here
below? Swedenborg has said, ‘The earth is a man.’
“Your Science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry indeed
beside the light which bathes a Seer. Cease, cease to question me; our
languages are different. For a moment I have used yours to cast, if it
be possible, a ray of faith into your soul; to give you, as it were, the
hem of my garment and draw you up into the regions of Prayer. Can God
abase Himself to you? Is it not for you to rise to Him? If human reason
finds the ladder of its own strength too weak to bring God down to it,
is it not evident that you must find some other path to reach Him? That
Path is in ourselves. The Seer and the Believer find eyes within their
souls more piercing far than eyes that probe the things of earth,--they
see the Dawn. Hear this truth: Your science, let it be never so exact,
your meditations, however bold, your noblest lights are Clouds. Above,
above is the Sanctuary whence the true Light flows.”
She sat down and remained silent; her calm face bore no sign of the
agitation which orators betray after their least fervid improvisations.
Wilfrid bent toward Monsieur Becker and said in a low voice, “Who taught
her that?”
“I do not know,” he answered.
“He was gentler on the Falberg,” Minna whispered to herself.
Seraphita passed her hand across her eyes and then she said, smiling:--
“You are very thoughtful to-night, gentlemen. You treat Minna and me as
though we were men to whom you must talk politics or commerce; whereas
we are young girls, and you ought to tell us tales while you drink
your tea. That is what we do, Monsieur Wilfrid, in our long Norwegian
evenings. Come, dear pastor, tell me some Saga that I have not
heard,--that of Frithiof, the chronicle that you believe and have so
often promised me. Tell us the story of the peasant lad who owned the
ship that talked and had a soul. Come! I dream of the frigate Ellida,
the fairy with the sails young girls should navigate!”
“Since we have returned to the regions of Jarvis,” said Wilfrid, whose
eyes were fastened on Seraphita as those of a robber, lurking in the
darkness, fasten on the spot where he knows the jewels lie, “tell me why
you do not marry?”
“You are all born widows and widowers,” she replied; “but my marriage
was arranged at my birth. I am betrothed.”
“To whom?” they cried.
“Ask not my secret,” she said; “I will promise, if our father permits
it, to invite you to these mysterious nuptials.”
“Will they be soon?”
“I think so.”
A long silence followed these words.
“The spring has come!” said Seraphita, suddenly. “The noise of the
waters and the breaking of the ice begins. Come, let us welcome the
first spring of the new century.”
She rose, followed by Wilfrid, and together they went to a window which
David had opened. After the long silence of winter, the waters stirred
beneath the ice and resounded through the fiord like music,--for there
are sounds which space refines, so that they reach the ear in waves of
light and freshness.
“Wilfrid, cease to nourish evil thoughts whose triumph would be hard to
bear. Your desires are easily read in the fire of your eyes. Be kind;
take one step forward in well-doing. Advance beyond the love of man and
sacrifice yourself completely to the happiness of her you love. Obey me;
I will lead you in a path where you shall obtain the distinctions which
you crave, and where Love is infinite indeed.”
She left him thoughtful.
“That soft creature!” he said within himself; “is she indeed the
prophetess whose eyes have just flashed lightnings, whose voice has
rung through worlds, whose hand has wielded the axe of doubt against our
sciences? Have we been dreaming? Am I awake?”
“Minna,” said Seraphita, returning to the young girl, “the eagle swoops
where the carrion lies, but the dove seeks the mountain spring beneath
the peaceful greenery of the glades. The eagle soars to heaven, the dove
descends from it. Cease to venture into regions where thou canst find
no spring of waters, no umbrageous shade. If on the Falberg thou couldst
not gaze into the abyss and live, keep all thy strength for him who will
love thee. Go, poor girl; thou knowest, I am betrothed.”
Minna rose and followed Seraphita to the window where Wilfrid stood. All
three listened to the Sieg bounding out the rush of the upper waters,
which brought down trees uprooted by the ice; the fiord had regained
its voice; all illusions were dispelled! They rejoiced in Nature as she
burst her bonds and seemed to answer with sublime accord to the Spirit
whose breath had wakened her.
When the three guests of this mysterious being left the house, they were
filled with the vague sensation which is neither sleep, nor torpor,
nor astonishment, but partakes of the nature of each,--a state that is
neither dusk nor dawn, but which creates a thirst for light. All three
were thinking.
“I begin to believe that she is indeed a Spirit hidden in human form,”
said Monsieur Becker.
Wilfrid, re-entering his own apartments, calm and convinced, was unable
to struggle against that influence so divinely majestic.
Minna said in her heart, “Why will he not let me love him!”