In Wonder all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends: and Admiration
fills up the interspace. But the first Wonder is the offspring of
Ignorance: the last is the parent of Adoration. The first is the
birth-throe of our knowledge: the last is its euthanasy and
_apotheosis_.
_Sequelæ: or Thoughts suggested by the preceding Aphorism._
As in respect of the first wonder we are all on the same level, how
comes it that the philosophic mind should, in all ages, be the
privilege of a few? The most obvious reason is this: The wonder takes
place before the period of reflection, and (with the great mass of
mankind) long before the individual is capable of directing his
attention freely and consciously to the feeling, or even to its
exciting causes. Surprise (the form and dress which the Wonder of
Ignorance usually puts on) is worn away, if not precluded, by custom
and familiarity. So is it with the objects of the senses, and the ways
and fashions of the world around us; even as with the beat of our own
hearts, which we notice only in moments of fear and perturbation. But
with regard to the concerns of our inward being, there is yet another
cause that acts in concert with the power in custom to prevent a fair
and equal exertion of reflective thought. The great fundamental truths
and doctrines of religion, the existence and attributes of God, and
the life after death, are in Christian countries taught so early,
under such circumstances, and in such close and vital association with
whatever makes or marks _reality_ for our infant minds, that the words
ever after represent sensations, feelings, vital assurances, sense of
reality--rather than thoughts, or any distinct conception. Associated,
I had almost said _identified_, with the parental voice, look, touch,
with the living warmth and pressure of the Mother, on whose lap the
child is first made to kneel, within whose palms its little hands are
folded, and the motion of whose eyes _its_ eyes follow and
imitate--(yea, what the blue sky is to the mother, the mother's
upraised eyes and brow are to the child, the Type and Symbol of an
invisible Heaven!)--from within and without, these great First Truths,
these good and gracious Tidings, these holy and humanizing Spells, in
the preconformity to which our very humanity may be said to consist,
are so infused, that it were but a tame and inadequate expression to
say, we all take them for granted. At a later period, in youth or
early manhood, most of us, indeed, (in the higher and middle classes
at least) read or hear certain PROOFS of these truths--which we
commonly listen to, when we listen at all, with much the same feelings
as a popular Prince on his Coronation Day, in the centre of a fond and
rejoicing nation, may be supposed to hear the Champion's challenge to
all the non-existents, that deny or dispute his Rights and Royalty. In
fact, the order of Proof is most often reversed or transposed. As far,
at least as I dare judge from the goings on in my own mind, when with
keen delight I first read the works of Derham, Nieuwentiet, and
Lyonet, I should say, that the full and life-like conviction of a
gracious Creator is the Proof (at all events, performs the office and
answers all the purpose of a Proof) of the wisdom and benevolence in
the construction of the Creature.
Do I blame this? Do I wish it to be otherwise? God forbid! It is only
one of its accidental, but too frequent consequences, of which I
complain, and against which I protest. I regret nothing that tends to
make the Light become the Life of men, even as the Life in the
eternal Word is their only and single true light. But I do regret,
that in after years--when by occasion of some new dispute on some old
heresy, or any other accident, the attention has for the first time
been distinctly attracted to the super-structure raised on these
fundamental truths, or to truths of later revelation supplemental of
these and not less important--all the doubts and difficulties, that
cannot but arise where the Understanding, _the mind of the flesh_, is
made the measure of spiritual things; all the sense of strangeness and
seeming contradiction in terms; all the marvel and the mystery, that
belong equally to both, are first thought of and applied in objection
exclusively to the latter. I would disturb no man's faith in the great
articles of the (falsely so called) Religion of Nature. But before the
man rejects, and calls on other men to reject, the revelations of the
Gospel and the Religion of all Christendom, I would have him place
himself in the state and under all the privations of a Simonides, when
in the fortieth day of his meditation the sage and philosophic poet
abandoned the problem in despair. Ever and anon he seemed to have hold
of the truth; but when he asked himself what he meant by it, it
escaped from him, or resolved itself into meanings, that destroyed
each other. I would have the sceptic, while yet a sceptic only,
seriously consider whether a doctrine, of the truth of which a
Socrates could obtain no other assurance than what he derived from his
strong _wish_ that it should be true; and which Plato found a mystery
hard to discover, and when discovered, communicable only to the fewest
of men; can, consonantly with history or common sense, be classed
among the articles, the belief of which is ensured to all men by their
mere common sense? Whether, without gross outrage to fact, they can be
said to constitute a Religion of Nature, or a Natural Theology
antecedent to Revelation, or superseding its necessity? Yes! in
prevention (for there is little chance, I fear, of a _cure_) of the
pugnacious dogmatism of _partial_ reflection, I would prescribe to
every man, who feels a commencing alienation from the Catholic Faith,
and whose studies and attainments authorise him to argue on the
subject at all, a patient and thoughtful perusal of the arguments and
representations which Bayle supposes to have passed through the mind
of Simonides. Or I should be fully satisfied if I could induce these
eschewers of mystery to give a patient, manly, and impartial perusal
to the single Treatise of Pomponatius, _De Fato_.[98]
When they have fairly and satisfactorily overthrown the objections and
cleared away the difficulties urged by this sharp-witted Italian
against the doctrines which they profess to retain, then let them
commence their attack on those which they reject. As far as the
supposed irrationality of the latter is the ground of argument, I am
much deceived if, on reviewing their forces, they would not find the
ranks woefully thinned by the success of their own fire in the
preceding engagement--unless, indeed, by pure heat of controversy, and
to storm the lines of their antagonists, they can bring to life again
the arguments which they had themselves killed off in the defence of
their own positions. In vain shall we seek for any other mode of
meeting the broad facts of the scientific Epicurean, or the
requisitions and queries of the all-analysing Pyrrhonist, than by
challenging the tribunal to which they appeal, as incompetent to try
the question. In order to _non-suit_ the infidel plaintiff, we must
remove the cause from the faculty, that judges according to sense, and
whose judgments, therefore, are valid only on objects of sense, to the
Superior Courts of Conscience and intuitive Reason! _The words I speak
unto you, are Spirit_, and such only _are life_, that is, have an
inward and actual power abiding in them.
But the same truth is at once shield and bow. The shaft of Atheism
glances aside from it to strike and pierce the breast-plate of the
heretic. Well for the latter, if plucking the weapon from the wound he
recognizes an arrow from his own quiver, and abandons a cause that
connects him with such confederates! Without further rhetoric, the sum
and substance of the argument is this:--an insight into the proper
functions and subaltern rank of the Understanding may not, indeed,
disarm the Psilanthropist of his metaphorical glosses, or of his
_versions_ fresh from the forge, and with no other stamp than the
private mark of the individual manufacturer; but it will deprive him
of the only rational pretext for having recourse to tools so liable to
abuse, and of such perilous example.