"L'expérience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur âge, ou leur
caractère, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le même rêve, et qu'elles
avaient toutes au fond du coeur un roman commencé dont elles attendaient
jusqu'à la mort le héros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie."
This "roman commencé," (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards
women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what
are the "barrières" which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it
has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon's
"Magico Prodigioso," where Justina conquers the fiend only by not
_consenting_ to ill!
----"This agony
Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul
May sweep imagination in its storm;
The will is firm."
And the baffled demon shrinks back,--
"Woman, thou hast subdued me
Only by not owning thyself subdued!"
[Illustration]
A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to
describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her
interposed, with stern sarcasm, "Speak out! Give things their proper
names! _Half words are the perdition of women!_"
[Illustration]
"I observe," said Sydney Smith, "that _generally_ about the age of
forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest." This
was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like
many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because,
_generally_, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty
of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.
[Illustration]
Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women; and
in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.
[Illustration]
Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and
brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more
powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful
relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to
sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to
torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour.
[Illustration]
"La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n'a jamais réussi, quoique
souvent essayée; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et
particulièrement de l'amour pour conduire l'homme à la vertu. Dans cette
route l'homme s'arrête toujours en chemin. L'amour inspire beaucoup de
bons sentiments--le courage, le dévouement, le sacrifice des biens et de
la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-même, et c'est là que la
faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits."--_St. Marc-Girardin._
I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true--or, if true, it is
true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is
self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of
self-sacrifice.
"Love was given,
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;
For this the passion to excess was driven,
That _self_ might be annull'd."
[Illustration]
In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a
strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to
hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such
intense haters.
[Illustration]
Our present social opinion says to the man, "You may be a vulgar brutal
sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so
long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be
held blameless." And to the woman it says, "You shall be guilty of
nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of
relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as
the most desperate criminal."
[Illustration]
96.
"It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to
certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in
different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the
adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy
with the feeling of others."--_Dr. Holland._
Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will
doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of
one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry
from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have
seen an infant in its mother's arms, before it could speak, begin to
whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and
bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch
of most truthful nature in Wordsworth's description of the desolation of
Margaret:--
"Her little child
Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,
And sighed amid its playthings."
[Illustration]
97.
"LETTERS," said Sir James Mackintosh, "must not be on a subject. Lady
Mary Wortley's letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable
book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a
question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to
another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not
business, and must never appear to be occupation;--nor must letters."
"A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine
genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine
graces of Madame de Sevigné's genius are exquisitely charming, but the
philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Staël are above the distinctions
of sex."
[Illustration]
98.
OF the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Staël once
said with most admirable and prophetic sense:--"It is a contest between a
_man_ who is the enemy of liberty, and a _system_ which is equally its
enemy." But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness
the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another, but cannot
get rid of their _system_.
[Illustration]
99.
The Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the
old Hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. "If
the Emperor, your father," said the Hetman, "had taken my advice, your
Majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes." "What was your
advice?" asked the Empress. "To put all the nobility to death, and
transplant the people into Russia." "But that," said the Empress, "would
have been cruel!" "I do not see that," he replied quietly; "they are all
dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been
taken."
Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable in this barbarian
logic!
[Illustration]
100.
IT was the Abbé Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had
lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty
ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of
snuff, and answered gravely, "Why, for fear the bishops should read
me!"
101.
When Talleyrand once visited a certain reprobate friend of his, who was
ill of cholera, the patient exclaimed in his agony, "Je sens les
tourmens de l'enfer!"
"Déjà?" said Talleyrand.
Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a
lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover
she has rejected. She frets at the _contretemps_. He makes use of the
occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still
he pleads--still she turns away. At length they are interrupted.
"Déjà!" exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very
different from that of Talleyrand; and on the intonation of this one
word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce
it, depends the _dénouement_ of the piece.
[Illustration]
102.
Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire
into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added,
"Il y manque deux choses; nos curés et nos hospitalières;" that is, he
felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical
treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and
will be supplied.
[Illustration]
103.
Those who have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision
in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for
self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly,
is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with
circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity
embraces an immense extent of objects and _objections_,--just as, they
say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less
likely to shy.
[Illustration]
104.
What we truly and earnestly aspire _to be_, that in some sense we _are_.
The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment
realises itself.
[Illustration]
105.
There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when
they only feel.
[Illustration]
106.
There are moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the
trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that
our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long
to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force
it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal.
[Illustration]
107.
If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes
brood over the heart like doves of peace,--they sometimes suck out our
life-blood like vampires.
[Illustration]
108.
To a Frenchman the words that express things seem often to suffice for
the things themselves, and he pronounces the words _amour_, _grâce_,
_sensibilité_, as if with a relish in his mouth--as if he tasted them--as
if he possessed them.
[Illustration]
109.
There are many good qualities, and valuable ones too, which hardly
deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old
time with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely passive
goodness, but active resistance to evil. I wonder sometimes why it is
that we so continually hear the phrase, "a virtuous woman," and scarcely
ever that of a "virtuous man," except in poetry or from the pulpit.
[Illustration]
110.
A Lie, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,--like a dead
wasp.
111.
"On me dit toute la journée dans le monde, telle opinion, telle idée,
sont _reçues_. On ne sait donc pas qu'en fait d'opinion, et d'idées
j'aime beaucoup mieux les choses qui sont rejettées que celles qui sont
reçues?"
[Illustration]
112.
"Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some
eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will
not suffice." And _thence_ do you infer the superiority of sense over
phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient
capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby
a foretaste of our immortality.
[Illustration]
113.
"Faith in the _hereafter_ is as necessary for the intellectual as the
moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian,
the present forms but the slightest portion of his
existence."--_Southey._
Goethe did not think so. "Genutzt dem Augenblick," "_Use_ the present,"
was _his_ favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or
slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the
most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over
which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past
and lay the foundation for the future.
[Illustration]
114.
"Je allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful significant phrase,
quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It
means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities
of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that
mind becomes.
[Illustration]
115.
"I wonder," said C., "that facts should be called _stubborn_ things." I
wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and
that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent
a fact into twenty different forms. "Il n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi
facilement que les faits,"--Nothing so _tractable_ as facts,--said
Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,--or as one
should say, mere matter of fact,--you can modify them to a purpose, turn
them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling,
and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.
[Illustration]
116.
Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many,
or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the
sympathies, rather than of the intellect.
It was said, and very beautifully said, that "one man's wit becomes all
men's wisdom." Even more true is it that one man's virtue becomes a
standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men.
117.
It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be
much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember
with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to
renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we
perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes
of that pain.
[Illustration]
118.
"Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light
as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental
eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now
appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such
clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous
clear sight had been a delusion."--_Blanco White._
Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison! Some
walk by daylight, some walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not
see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the sun.
He says in another place:--
"I am averse to too much activity of the imagination on the future life.
I hope to die full of confidence that no evil awaits me: but any picture
of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence
were already an insupportable burden on my soul."
How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and sickness of the
heart which "asks not happiness, but longs for rest!"
[Illustration]
119.
"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or
suffocate their fame when God hath commanded them to stand on high for
an example."
[Illustration]
120.
Carlyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of
eloquence to insincere purposes of vanity, self-interest, and
expediency:--"You blasphemous scoundrel! God gave you that gifted tongue
of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning
to us, not to be rattled like a muffin-man's bell!"
[Illustration]
121.
I think, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished
wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that
falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too
_young_ a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end,
it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into
every infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves concerned;
but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise
in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the
healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion
perhaps for truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every
vizor, but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower of strength,
leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into.
[Illustration]
122.
"There is a way to separate memory from imagination--we may narrate
without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain
indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid impressions; that
instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols:
such is the language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has passed,
and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed:--it is
a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the
novel-writer."--_Blanco White._
True; but a language in which the soul can converse only with itself; or
else a language more conventional than words, and like paper as a tender
for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a
proverb we have heard quoted: "Speech is silver, silence is golden." But
better is the silver diffused than the talent of gold buried.
[Illustration]
123.
However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in
conduct and in our external relations with, society there is ever a
levelling influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and
in the ordinary commerce of life, are the best and highest within us
brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling.
As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it
has itself instituted; so of society it may be said, that it allows of
no distinction but those which it can recognise--external distinctions.
We hear it said that general society--the _world_, as it is called--and a
public school, are excellent educators; because in one the man, in the
other the boy, "finds, as the phrase is, his own level." He does not; he
finds the level of others. _That_ may be good for those below
mediocrity, but for those above it _bad_: and it is for those we should
most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling
influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing
so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is
beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which we force ourselves to
assimilate to. This has been the perdition of many a schoolboy and many
a man.
[Illustration]
124.
"Il me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le ciel et la terre, le
plus beau don que Dieu ait fait à l'homme, la pensée, l'inspiration, se
décompose en quelque sorte dès qu'elle est descendue dans son âme. Elle
y vient simple et désintéressée; il la reproduit corrompue par tous les
intérêts auxquels il l'associe; elle lui a été confiée pour la
multiplier à l'avantage de tous; il la publie au profit de son
amour-propre."--_Madame de Saint-Aulaire._
There would be much to say about this, for it is not always, nor
generally, _amour-propre_ or interest; it is the desire of sympathy,
which impels the artist mind to the utterance in words, or the
expression in form, of that thought or inspiration which God has sent
into his soul.
[Illustration]
125.
Milton's Eve is the type of the masculine standard of perfection in
woman; a graceful figure, an abundance of fine hair, much "coy
submission," and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall risk
perdition.
And the woman's standard for the man is Adam, who rules and demands
subjection, and is so indulgent that he gives up to blandishment what
he would refuse to reason, and what his own reason condemns.
[Illustration]
126.
Every subject which excites discussion impels to thought. Every
expression of a mind humbly seeking truth, not assuming to have found
it, helps the seeker after truth.
[Illustration]
128.
As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken,--bleeding
at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to
heaven, and says, "God be praised! I suffer no more!" because to that
past sharp agony the respite comes like peace--like sleep,--so we stand,
after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been
torn up by the root; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the
heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest,--but of what kind?
[Illustration]
129.
To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think
rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly,--may this be
mine.
[Illustration]
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
(FROM A LETTER.)
We are all interested in this great question of popular education; but I
see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate
good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day
after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off.
All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses,
schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books; the ways and the means by
which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which
lies in most cases beyond our reach--the spirit sent from God. What do we
know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed, do we
know of any life? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but
child-life we treat as if it were no mystery whatever--just so much
material placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain form according
to our will or our prejudices,--fitted to certain purposes according to
our notions of expediency. Till we know how to _reverence_ childhood we
shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to
childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly
existence; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or
significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some
condition of being which is to follow--as if it were something separate
from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as
in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in
the estimation of Christ, childhood was something for its own
sake,--something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it
not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect
and lovely in itself as the flower which precedes the fruit. We
misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we
pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully; at the best
we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pull to pieces and put
together at pleasure--ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are!
And if we are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical
and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what
is spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of
children? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts,
perceptions, experiences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without
self-consciousness,--sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes so imperfectly
expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation--what do we know of
all this? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives,
and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that
inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings
which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children
by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own
feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-consciousness
before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief.
Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection in
childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of life such as
it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot
reascend the stream. We all, however we may remember the external scenes
lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that
part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward
life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with
the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about
children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we
confound our matured experience with our memory: we attribute to
children what is not possible, exact from them what is
impossible;--ignore many things which the child has neither words to
express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with
which children perceive, the keenness with which they suffer, the
tenacity with which they remember, I have never seen fully appreciated.
What misery we cause to children, what mischief we do them by bringing
our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices and senile experiences, to
bear on their young life, and cramp and overshadow it--it is fearful!
Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our earth, a sinful
childhood, a suffering childhood, are among the worst.
O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for
children,--for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate
humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society,--do you, when
you take evidence from jailors, and policemen, and parish schoolmasters,
and doctors of divinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician,
the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have
accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in
what fixed and uniform principles of nature to seek their solution, your
facts remain a dead letter.
I say nothing here of teaching, though very few in truth understand that
lowest part of our duty to children. Men, it is generally allowed,
_teach_ better than women because they have been better taught the
things they teach. Women _train_ better than men because of their quick
instinctive perceptions and sympathies, and greater tenderness and
patience. In schools and in families I would have some things taught by
men, and some by women: but we will here put aside the art, the act of
teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national
schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child,
brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school,
watched by an intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we deal
with that spirit which has come out of nature's hands unless we remember
what we were ourselves in the past? What sympathy can we have with that
state of being which we regard as immature, so long as we commit the
double mistake of sometimes attributing to children motives which could
only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes denying to them the
same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our
maturer life? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not made
up of separate parts, but is _one_--is a progressive whole. When we talk
of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river
flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.
[Illustration]
121.
I will here put together some recollections of my own child-life; not
because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence,
but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many
children; at least I have met with many children who throve or suffered
from the same or similar unseen causes even under external conditions
and management every way dissimilar. Facts, therefore, which can be
relied on, may be generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct
in education. What I shall say here shall be simply the truth so far as
it goes; not something between the false and the true, garnished for
effect,--not something half-remembered, half-imagined,--but plain,
absolute, matter of fact.
No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child. I have had something to
do with children, and have met with several more remarkable for
quickness of talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in
particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,--at least so it was
said twenty times a day. But looking back now, I do not think I was
particular even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than the usual
amount of mischief--so called--which every lively active child perpetrates
between five and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know, and the
usual dislike to learn; the usual love of fairy tales, and hatred of
French exercises. But not of what I learned, but of what I did _not_
learn; not of what they taught me, but of what they could _not_ teach
me; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under
current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak, and
you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if you will, and how you
will. As we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a
strange vividness. There is a period when the overflowing, tumultuous
life of our youth rises up between us and those first years; but as the
torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to
that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never
more forget!
In memory I can go back to a very early age. I perfectly remember being
sung to sleep, and can remember even the tune which was sung to
me--blessings on the voice that sang it! I was an affectionate, but not,
as I now think, a loveable nor an attractive child. I did not, like the
little Mozart, ask of every one around me, "Do you love me?" The
instinctive question was, rather, "Can I love you?" Yet certainly I was
not more than six years old when I suffered from the fear of not being
loved where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was
preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me. Whether those
around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do
not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered
me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a
deeper impression than childish passions usually do; and the
recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I guarded myself
against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonising thing which
men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If
such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has
saved me from the demoralising effects of the passion, by a wholesome
terror, and even a sort of disgust.
With a good temper, there was the capacity of strong, deep, silent
resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I
recollect that when one of those set over me inflicted what then
appeared a most horrible injury and injustice, the thoughts of vengeance
haunted my fancy for months: but it was an inverted sort of vengeance. I
imagined the house of my enemy on fire, and rushed through the flames
to rescue her. She was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to
draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I forced bars and bolts to
deliver her. If this were magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance;
for, observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humiliation to my
adversary; to myself the _rôle_ of superiority and gratified pride. For
several years this sort of burning resentment against wrong done to
myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel form, was a source of
intense, untold suffering. No one was aware of it. I was left to settle
it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not certainly by
religious influences--they passed over my mind, and did not at the time
sink into it,--and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either
when most needed. And as it fared with me then, so it has been in after
life; so it has been, _must_ be, with all those who, in fighting out
alone the pitched battle between principle and passion, will accept no
intervention between the infinite within them and the infinite above
them; so it has been, _must_ be, with all strong natures. Will it be
said that victory in the struggle brings increase of strength? It may be
so with some who survive the contest; but then, how many sink! how many
are crippled morally for life! how many, strengthened in some particular
faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character as a whole!
This is one of the points in which the matured mind may help the
childish nature at strife with itself. It is impossible to say how far
this sort of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened into the
character, if I had been of a timid or retiring nature. It was expelled
at last by no outer influences, but by a growing sense of power and
self-reliance.
In regard to truth--always such a difficulty in education,--I certainly
had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had
a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,--a mistake
into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those
who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie
was _wicked_; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of
others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked--it
was _dishonourable_. But I had no compunction about telling
_fictions_;--inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real,
and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener
taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of
impossibilities. In this respect "Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of
the first magnitude," was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been
twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense
of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a
virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my
own mind on this and some other important points.
I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without
food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I
would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to
recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate:
but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that
after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in
consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the _will_ was
petrified, and I absolutely _could_ not comply. They might have hacked
me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The
obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded
that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is
often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by
mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the
controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.
There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I
have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always
unacknowledged. It was fear--fear of darkness and supernatural
influences. As long as I can remember anything, I remember these horrors
of my infancy. How they had been awakened I do not know; they were never
revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for such fears, and held
my peace. At first these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were
vague; afterwards the form varied; but one of the most permanent was the
ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which
was an engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my
mind as a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end,
literally "like quills upon the fretful porcupine," and one hand with
all the fingers outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in
armour with nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all
surrounded with a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it
followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the
blessed light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I
trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never
expostulated, never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon
looming over Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the
"Pilgrim's Progress," was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were
certain phantasms without shape, things like the vision in Job--"_A
spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern
the form thereof_:"--and if not intelligible voices, there were strange
unaccountable sounds filling the air around with a sort of mysterious
life. In daylight I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to
defy all power and brave all danger,--that is, all danger I could see. I
remember volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among
which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only
with a little stick; but first I said the Lord's Prayer fervently. In
the ghastly night I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary
sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve
years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong
understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while
they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in
this way, I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and
strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and
does not encourage--the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the
evil.
People, in general, even those who have been much interested in
education, are not aware of the sacred duty of _truth_, exact truth in
their intercourse with children. Limit what you tell them according to
the measure of their faculties; but let what you say be the truth.
Accuracy not merely as to fact, but well-considered accuracy in the use
of words, is essential with children. I have read some wise book on the
treatment of the insane, in which absolute veracity and accuracy in
speaking is prescribed as a _curative_ principle; and deception for any
purpose is deprecated as almost fatal to the health of the patient. Now,
it is a good sanatory principle, that what is curative is preventive;
and that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness, may, in some
organisations, be induced by that sort of uncertainty and perplexity
which grows up where the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its
external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance an impure or
confined air.
Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind by a falsehood
uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember an absurd and yet a painful
instance. A visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints,
one of which represented an Indian widow springing into the fire kindled
for the funeral pile of her husband. It was thus explained to the child,
who asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her mother would be
burned? The person to whom the question was addressed, a lively, amiable
woman, was probably much amused by the question, and answered, giddily,
"Oh, of course,--certainly!" and was believed implicitly. But
thenceforth, for many weary months, the mind of that child was haunted
and tortured by the image of her mother springing into the devouring
flames, and consumed by fire, with all the accessories of the picture,
particularly the drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker
organisation, the results might have been permanent and serious. But to
proceed.
These terrors I have described had an existence external to myself: I
had no power over them to shape them by my will, and their power over me
vanished gradually before a more dangerous infatuation,--the propensity
to reverie. This shaping spirit of imagination began when I was about
eight or nine years old to haunt my _inner_ life. I can truly say that,
from ten years old to fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence;
one outward, linking me with the external sensible world, the other
inward, creating a world to and for itself, conscious to itself only. I
carried on for whole years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures;
one springing out of another, and coloured and modified by increasing
knowledge. This habit grew so upon me, that there were moments--as when I
came to some crisis in my imaginary adventures,--when I was not more
awake to outward things than in sleep,--scarcely took cognisance of the
beings around me. When punished for idleness by being placed in
solitary confinement (the worst of all punishments for children), the
intended penance was nothing less than a delight and an emancipation,
giving me up to my dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished
governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever met with in my life;
but nothing of this was known or even suspected by her, and I exulted in
possessing something which her power could not reach. My reveries were
my real life: it was an unhealthy state of things.
Those who are engaged in the training of children will perhaps pause
here. It may be said, in the first place, How are we to reach those
recesses of the inner life which the God who made us keeps from every
eye but his own? As when we walk over the field in spring we are aware
of a thousand influences and processes at work of which we have no exact
knowledge or clear perception, yet must watch and use accordingly,--so it
is with education. And secondly, it may be asked, if such secret
processes be working unconscious mischief, where the remedy? The remedy
is in employment. Then the mother or the teacher echoes with
astonishment, "Employment! the child is employed from morning till
night; she is learning a dozen sciences and languages; she has masters
and lessons for every hour of every day: with her pencil, her piano,
her books, her companions, her birds, her flowers,--what can she want
more?" An energetic child even at a very early age, and yet farther as
the physical organisation is developed, wants something more and
something better; employment which shall bring with it the bond of a
higher duty than that which centres in self and self-improvement;
employment which shall not merely cultivate the understanding, but
strengthen and elevate the conscience; employment for the higher and
more generous faculties; employment addressed to the sympathies;
employment which has the aim of utility, not pretended, but real,
obvious, direct utility. A girl who as a mere child is not always being
taught or being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the bond of
definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of self, will not in after
years be subject to fancies that disturb or to reveries that absorb, and
the present and the actual will have that power they ought to have as
combined in due degree with desire and anticipation.
The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment, which
enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a means
through which they guide both young and adult minds. Physicians who have
to manage various states of mental and moral disease understand this
well; they speak of the necessity of employment (not mere amusement) as
a curative means, but of employment with the direct aim of usefulness,
apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing. It is
the same with children. Such employment, chosen with reference to
utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would prove in many cases
either preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now think, it would
have been both.
There was a time when it was thought essential that women should know
something of cookery, something of medicine, something of surgery. If
all these things are far better understood now than heretofore, is that
a reason why a well educated woman should be left wholly ignorant of
them? A knowledge of what people call "common things"--of the elements of
physiology, of the conditions of health, of the qualities, nutritive or
remedial, of substances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most
economical and most beneficial way of applying both,--these should form a
part of the system of every girls' school--whether for the higher or the
lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and
attending Faraday's lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a
rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly
a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of
her husband's wages through want of management.
In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my
nature was exhausted in airy visions!
As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot
tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine
in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going
about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons;
or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which
would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears,
no tasks, and no laws,--except those which I made myself,--no caged birds
nor tormented kittens.
[Illustration]
Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me
tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A
great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in
hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I
cannot tell now--it was so; and if this sympathy with the external,
living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated,
and directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best
remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we were,
unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town
residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the
appearances of nature did truly "haunt me like a passion;" the stars
were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the shore,
the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by
the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects; the trembling
shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon;
these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind
is distinct. Wordsworth's poem of "The Daffodils," the one beginning--
"I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a
vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my hands
I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which
gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told me what I
did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my
own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures
unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson's
"Seasons" a favourite book when I first began to read for my own
amusement, and before I could understand one half of it; St. Pierre's
"Indian Cottage" ("La Chaumière Indienne") was also charming, either
because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in
pictures of an external world quite different from that I
inhabited,--palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing
draperies; and the "Arabian Nights" completed my Oriental intoxication,
which lasted for a long time.
I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first
religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting
together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain
books on childish or immature minds: If carried out, it would have been
one of the most valuable additions to educational experience ever made.
For myself I did not much care about the books put into my hands, nor
imbibe much information from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to
say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden books that did
the mischief, except in their being read furtively. I remember
impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament and
Goldsmith's "History of England," which I shudder to recall. Shakspeare
was on the forbidden shelf. I had read him all through between seven
and ten years old. He never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled
my mind with any disordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in
language I passed by without attaching any meaning whatever to it. How
it might have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or
sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and
obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the intelligence
of that sensitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had no
comprehension of what was unseemly; what might be obscure in words to
wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I found or
interpreted for myself--right or wrong.
No; I repeat, Shakspeare--bless him!--never did me any moral mischief.
Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,--though the Ghost in Hamlet
terrified me (the picture that is,--for the spirit in Shakspeare was
solemn and pathetic, not hideous),--though poor little Arthur cost me an
ocean of tears,--yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and
revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new,
beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most
wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy: Romeo and
Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays,
and far less than the Midsummer Night's Dream and Cymbeline. It may be
thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or
to be understood by a child:--no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
witty and wicked--only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying
on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the
Fourth,--the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and
Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.
Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me,
not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image
or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and
mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer's Odyssey (lent to
me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens
going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so that when the first
time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures
through blinding tears, I saw _that_ picture of Rubens, which all
remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and
refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens
and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the
contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache, in
which the child, scared by its father's dazzling helm and nodding
crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time.
The same parish clerk--a curious fellow in his way--lent me also some
religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that
more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all
Shakspeare's plays together. These so-called pious tracts first
introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the
excitements of a vulgar religion,--the fear of being hanged and the fear
of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself
into this,--that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out,
that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!
About Religion:--I was taught religion as children used to be taught it
in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I
believe--through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible
too early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New
Testament was too early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson
book, as the custom then was. The _letter_ of the Scriptures--the
words--were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising, long
before I could enter into the _spirit_. Meantime, happily, another
religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough, seemed to
me quite apart from that which was taught,--which, indeed, I never in
any way regarded as the same which I was taught when I stood up wearily
on a Sunday to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite
another thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment of faith
and adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into
my head to combine them; the first remained extraneous, the latter had
gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother joined
my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the Parables
especially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my interpretation of
them was in some instances the very reverse of correct or orthodox. To
my infant conception our Lord was a being who had come down from heaven
to make people good, and to tell them beautiful stories. And though no
pains were spared to _indoctrinate_ me, and all my pastors and masters
took it for granted that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could
be more confused and heterodox.
It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow
pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old.
Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed,
or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company,
until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming
so from sheer vanity.
The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may sometimes do
as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he
taught the multitude in parables.
A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it
into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years old),
and I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned
was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on
a volume of Sir William Jones's works--his Persian grammar--it revived my
Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given
was a Persian fable or poem--one of those traditions of our Lord which
are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of "St. Peter and the
Cherries," which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known
example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not
met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from
memory.
"Jesus," says the story, "arrived one evening at the gates of a certain
city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he
himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the
market place.
"And he saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together
looking at an object on the ground; and he drew near to see what it
might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck, by which he
appeared to have been dragged through the dirt; and a viler, a more
abject, a more unclean thing, never met the eyes of man.
"And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.
"'Faugh!' said one, stopping his nose; 'it pollutes the air.' 'How
long,' said another, 'shall this foul beast offend our sight?' 'Look at
his torn hide,' said a third; 'one could not even cut a shoe out of it.'
'And his ears,' said a fourth, 'all draggled and bleeding!' 'No doubt,'
said a fifth, 'he hath been hanged for thieving!'
"And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately on the dead
creature, he said, 'Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!'
"Then the people turned towards him with amazement, and said among
themselves, 'Who is this? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only HE
could find something to pity and approve even in a dead dog;' and being
ashamed, they bowed their heads before him, and went each on his way."
I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening and pathetic
impression left on my fancy by this old Eastern story. It struck me as
exquisitely humorous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me a
pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward so easy and so vulgar
to say satirical things, and so much nobler to be benign and merciful,
and I took the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of falling
into the opposite extreme,--of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of
the corrupt and the repulsive. Pity, a large element in my composition,
might have easily degenerated into weakness, threatening to subvert
hatred of evil in trying to find excuses for it; and whether my mind has
ever completely righted itself, I am not sure.
Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute are the perceptions,
and how permanent the memories, of children. I remember experiments
tried upon my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware of this, by
their being repeated, and, in some instances, spoken of, before me.
Music, to which I was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes made
the medium of these experiments. Discordant sounds were not only
hateful, but made me turn white and cold, and sent the blood backward to
my heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I cannot now account
for: for though, when heard for the first time, they had little effect,
they became intolerable by repetition; they turned up some hidden
emotion within me too strong to be borne. It could not have been from
association, which I believe to be a principal element in the _emotion_
excited by music. I was too young for that. What associations could such
a baby have had with pleasure or with pain? Or could it be possible that
associations with some former state of existence awoke up to sound? That
our life "hath elsewhere its beginning, and cometh from afar," is a
belief or at least an instinct, in some minds, which music, and only
music, seems to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was
about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright--she was then Fanny
Kemble--used to come to our house, and used to entrance me with her
singing. I had a sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary
might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with pleasure when I only
heard her step. But her voice!--it has charmed hundreds since; whom has
it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight than the little child
that crept silent and tremulous to her side? And she was fond of
me,--fond of singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also of
playing these experiments on me. The music of "Paul and Virginia" was
then in vogue, and there was one air--a very simple air--in that opera,
which, after the first few bars, always made me stop my ears and rush
out of the room. I became at last aware that this was sometimes done by
particular desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest others by
the display of such vehement emotion. My infant conscience became
perplexed between the reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it.
People are not always aware of the injury done to children by repeating
before them things they say, or describing things they do: words and
actions, spontaneous and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial and
conscious. I can speak of the injury done to myself, between five and
eight years old. There was some danger of my becoming a precocious
actress,--danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen done to other
children,--but I was saved by the recoil of resistance and resentment
excited in my mind.
This is enough. All that has been told here refers to a period between
five and ten years old.
[Illustration]
THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.
(FROM THE GERMAN.)
Once upon a time the lightning from heaven fell upon a tree standing in
the old primeval forest and kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And
it happened that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that
wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a distance, and, forcing
his way through the thicket, he flung himself down in rapture before the
blazing tree.
"O divine light and warmth!" he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms.
"O blessed! O heaven-descended Fire! let me thank thee! let me adore
thee! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro' every pulse, how lost,
how cold, how dark have I dwelt without thee! Restorer of my life!
remain ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial influence,
send love and joy to illuminate my soul!"
And the Fire answered and said to him, "It is true that my birth is from
heaven, but I am now, through mingling with earthly elements, subdued to
earthly influences; therefore, beware how you choose me for thy friend,
without having first studied my twofold nature. O youth! take heed lest
what appear to thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future time,
to fiery pain and death." And the youth replied, "No! O no! thou blessed
Fire, this could never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so
thankless? O believe it not! Let me stay near thee; let me be thy
priest, to watch and tend thee truly. Ofttimes in my wild wintry life,
when the chill darkness encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my
hair, have I dreamed of the soft summer breath,--of the sunshine that
should light up the world within me and the world around me. But still
that time came not. It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished
utterly before the light and the warmth had reached me, had it not been
for thee!"
Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the Fire answered him in
murmured tones, while her beams with a softer radiance played over his
cheek and brow: "Be it so then. Yet do thou watch me constantly and
minister to me carefully; neglect me not, leave me not to myself, lest
the light and warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee suddenly, and
there be no redress; and O watch thyself also! beware lest thou too
ardently stir up my impatient fiery being! beware lest thou heap too
much fuel upon me; once more beware, lest, instead of life, and love,
and joy, I bring thee only death and burning pain!" And the youth
passionately vowed to keep her behest: and in the beginning all went
well. How often, for hours together, would he lie gazing entranced
toward the radiant beneficent Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing
now a leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a handful of odorous
gums, as incense, upon the flame, which gracefully curling and waving
upwards, quivering and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine
oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into the glowing depths,
marvellous shapes, fairy visions dancing and glancing along. Then he
would sing to her songs full of love, and she, responding to the song
she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in softest whispers, so
loving and so low, that even the jealous listening woods could not
overhear; at other times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous
splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him all the wonders
and the beauties which lay around him, hitherto veiled from his sight.
But at length, as he became accustomed to the glory and the warmth, and
nothing more was left for the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal,
then he began to weary and to dream again of the morning, and to long
for the sun-beams; and it was to him as if the fire stood between him
and the sun's light, and he reproached her therefore, and he became
moody and ungrateful; and the fire was no longer the same, but unquiet
and changeful, sometimes flickering unsteadily, sometimes throwing out a
lurid glare. And when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the
flame unfed and unsustained, so that ofttimes she drooped and waned, and
crept in dying gleams along the damp ground, his heart would fail him
with a sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with such a rough
and lavish hand that the indignant fire hissed thereat, and burst forth
in a smoky sullen gleam,--then died away again. Then the youth, half
sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how bright, how glowing, how
dazzling was the flame in those former happy days, when it played over
his chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon his brow, and he
desired eagerly to recall that once inspiring glow. And he stirred up
the embers violently till they burned him, and then he grew angry, and
then again he wearied of all the watching and the care which the subtle,
celestial, tameless element required at his hand: and at length, one day
in a sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from the fountain
and poured it hastily on the yet living flame.----
For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven, shed a last gleam upon
the pale brow of the youth, and then sank down in darkness extinguished
for ever!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PAULINA.
FROM AN UNFINISHED TALE, 1823.
And think'st thou that the fond o'erflowing love
I bear thee in my heart could ever be
Repaid by careless smiles that round thee rove,
And beam on others as they beam on me?
Oh, could I speak to thee! could I but tell
The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell,
And struggle for expression! or set free
From the o'er mastering spirit's proud control
The pain that throbs in silence at my soul,
Perhaps--yet no--I will not sue, nor bend,
To win a heartless pity--Let it end!
I have been near thee still at morn, at eve;
Have mark'd thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve;
Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears,
Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears:
And communed with thy heart, till I made mine
The echo and the mirror unto thine.
And I have sat and looked into thine eyes
As men on earth look to the starry skies,
That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies!
Too quickly I read mine,--I knew it well,--
I judg'd not of thy heart by all it gave,
But all that it withheld; and I could tell
The very sea-mark where affection's wave
Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again,
And knew my lavish love was pour'd in vain,
As fruitless streams o'er sandy deserts melt,
Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt!
[Illustration]
LINES.--1840.
Take me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast,
And fold me there in everlasting rest,
The long day is o'er!
I'm weary, I would sleep--
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
I have had joy and sorrow; I have proved
What life could give; have lov'd, have been belov'd;
I am sick, and heart sore,
And weary,--let me sleep!
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come,
Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home;
Shut down the marble door,
And leave me,--let me sleep!
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
Now I lie down,--I close my aching eyes,
If on this night another morn must rise,
Wake me not, I implore!
I only ask to sleep,
And deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Theological Fragments.
1.
THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.
(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)
A certain holy anchorite had passed a long life in a cave of the
Thebaid, remote from all communion with men; and eschewing, as he would
the gates of Hell, even the very presence of a woman; and he fasted and
prayed, and performed many and severe penances; and his whole thought
was how he should make himself of account in the sight of God, that he
might enter into his paradise.
And having lived this life for three score and ten years he was puffed
up with the notion of his own great virtue and sanctity, and, like to
St. Anthony, he besought the Lord to show him what saint he should
emulate as greater than himself, thinking perhaps, in his heart, that
the Lord would answer that none was greater or holier. And the same
night the angel of God appeared to him, and said, "If thou wouldst excel
all others in virtue and sanctity, thou must strive to be like a certain
minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."
And the holy man was in great astonishment, and he arose and took his
staff and ran forth in search of this minstrel; and when he had found
him he questioned him earnestly, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee, my
brother, what good works thou hast performed in thy lifetime, and by
what prayers and penances thou hast made thyself acceptable to God?"
And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to be so questioned, hung
down his head as he replied, "I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not!
I have performed no good works, and as to praying, alas! sinner that I
am, I am not worthy to pray. I do nothing but go about from door to door
amusing the people with my viol and my flute."
And the holy man insisted and said, "Nay, but peradventure in the midst
of this thy evil life thou hast done some good works?" And the minstrel
replied, "I know of nothing good that I have done." And the hermit,
wondering more and more, said, "How hast thou become a beggar: hast thou
spent thy substance in riotous living, like most others of thy calling?"
and the man answering, said, "Nay; but there was a poor woman whom I
found running hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and her
children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt. And the woman being
very fair, certain sons of Belial pursued after her; so I took her home
to my hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all I possessed to
redeem her family, and conducted her in safety to the city, where she
was reunited to her husband and children. But what of that, my father;
is there a man who would not have done the same?"
And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these words, wept bitterly,
saying, "For my part, I have not done so much good in all my life; and
yet they call me a man of God, and thou art only a poor minstrel!"
At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by Von Schwind, which was
conceived in the spirit of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of
two twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of them, by profound
study, becomes a most learned and skilful physician, and ministers to
the sick; attaining to great riches and honours through his labours and
his philanthropy. The other brother, who has no turn for study, becomes
a poor fiddler, and spends his life in consoling, by his music,
sufferings beyond the reach of the healing art. In the end, the two
brothers meet at the close of life. He who had been fiddling through the
world is sick and worn out: his brother prescribes for him, and is seen
culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler touches his
instrument for the solace of his kind physician.
It is in such representations that painting did once speak, and might
again speak to the hearts of the people.
Another version of the same thought, we find in De Berenger's pretty
ballad, "_Les deux Soeurs de Charité_."
[Illustration]
2.
When I was a child, and read Milton for the first time, his Pandemonium
seemed to me a magnificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise,
for _that_ was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible and beautiful
too. The wondrous fabric that "from the earth rose like an exhalation
to the sound of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,"--the splendid piles
of architecture sweeping line beyond line, "Cornice and frieze with
bossy sculptures graven,"--realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had
once seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination: then the
throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,--the flood of light
streaming from "starry lamps and blazing cressets" quite threw the
flames of perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine, that he
always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a great statesman out of
place, a sort of leader of the Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend
was a hero, like my _then_ favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon, a
Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of his country;--such
was the moral confusion created in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no
horror; on the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic beauty of the
creation. I felt that I should like to go and see it; so that, in fact,
if Milton meant to inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height
of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better. Those who dwell with
complacency on the doctrine of eternal punishments must delight in the
ferocity and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of a vengeful
theology. Wicked latitudinarians may shudder and shiver at the images
called up--grotesque, abominable, hideous--but then Dante himself would
sternly rebuke them for making their human sympathies a measure for the
judgments of God, and compassion only a veil for treason and rebellion:--
"Chi è piu scellerato di colui
Ch' al giudicio divin passion porta?"
"Who can show greater wickedness than he
Whose passion by the will of God is moved?"
However, it must be said in favour of Dante's Inferno, that no one ever
wished to go there.
These be the Christian poets! but they must yield in depth of imagined
horrors to the Christian Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second
century) not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region of despair,
but makes the endless measureless torture of the doomed a part of the
joys of the redeemed. The spectacle is to give them the same sort of
delight as the heathen took in their games, and Pandemonium is to be as
a vast amphitheatre for the amusement of the New Jerusalem. "How
magnificent," exclaims this pious doctor of the Church, "will be the
scale of that game! With what admiration, what laughter, what glee, what
triumph, shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had been given out
as received into the skies, moaning in unfathomable gloom! Persecutors
of the Christians liquefying amid shooting spires of flame! Philosophers
blushing before their disciples amid those ruddy fires! Then," he goes
on, still alluding to the amphitheatre, "then is the time to hear the
tragedians doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own agonies! To
observe actors released by the fierceness of their torments from all
restraints on their gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer glowing
all over in his car of torture, and watch the wrestlers struggling, not
in the gymnasium but with flames!" And he asks exultingly, "What prætor,
or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by his munificence a
game of triumph like this?"
And even more terrible are the imaginations of good Bishop Taylor, who
distils the essence from all sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all
terrors, all plagues, and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and
vengeance to be held to the lips and forced down the unwilling throats
of the doomed "with violence of devils and accursed spirits!" Are these
mere words? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise what they express?
3.
I was surprised to find this passage in one of Southey's letters:--
"A Catholic Establishment would be the best, perhaps the only means of
civilising Ireland. Jesuits and Benedictines, though they would not
enlighten the savages, would humanise them and bring the country into
cultivation. A petition that asked for this, saying plainly, 'We are
Papists, and will be so, and this is the best thing that can be done for
us and you too,'--such a petition I would support, considering what the
present condition of Ireland is, how wretchedly it has always been
governed, and how hopeless the prospect." (1805.)
Southey was thinking of what the religious orders had done for Paraguay;
whether he would have penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten
years later, is more than doubtful.
[Illustration]
4.
The old monks and penitents--dirty, ugly, emaciated old fellows they
were!--spent their days in speaking and preaching of their own and
others' sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before them a
standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence, aspirations which nothing
earthly could satisfy, which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery
_comparative_, and their scale was graduated from themselves _upwards_.
We philosophers reverse this. We teach and preach the spiritual dignity,
the lofty capabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we seem to be
always speculating on the amount of evil which may or can be endured,
and on the amount of wickedness which may or must be tolerated; and our
scale is graduated from ourselves _downwards_.
[Illustration]
5.
"So long as the ancient mythology had any separate establishment in the
empire, the spiritual worship which our religion demands, and so
essentially implies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its purity
by means of the salutary contrast; but no sooner had the Church become
completely triumphant and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan idolatry
totally removed, than the old constitutional appetite revived in all its
original force, and after a short but famous struggle with the
Iconoclasts, an image worship was established, and consecrated by bulls
and canons, which, in whatever light it is regarded, differed in no
respect but the names of its objects from that which had existed for so
many ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith of the
Gentiles."--_H. Nelson Coleridge._
I think, with submission, that it differed in sentiment; for in the
mythology of the Pagans the worship was to _beauty_, _immortality_, and
_power_, and in the Christian mythology--if I may call it so--of the
Middle Ages, the worship was to _purity_, _self-denial_, and _charity_.
[Illustration]
6.
"A narrow half-enlightened reason may easily make sport of all those
forms in which religious faith has been clothed by human imagination,
and ask why they are retained, and why one should be preferred to
another? It is sufficient to reply, that some forms there must be if
Religion is to endure as a social influence, and that the forms already
in existence are the best, if they are in unison with human sympathies,
and express, with the breadth and vagueness which every popular
utterance must from its nature possess, the interior convictions of the
general mind. What would become of the most sacred truth if all the
forms which have harboured it were destroyed at once by an unrelenting
reason, and it were driven naked and shivering about the earth till some
clever logician had devised a suitable abode for its reception? It is on
these outward forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty
descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of the invisible grace
and majesty of spiritual truth."--_Prospective Review_, Feb. 24. 1845.
[Illustration]
7.
"Have not Dying Christs taught fortitude to the virtuous sufferer? Have
not Holy Families cherished and ennobled domestic affections? The tender
genius of the Christian morality, even in its most degenerate state, has
made the Mother and her Child the highest objects of affectionate
superstition. How much has that beautiful superstition by the pencils of
great artists contributed to humanise mankind?"--_Sir James Mackintosh_,
writing in 1802.
[Illustration]
8.
I remember once at Merton College Chapel (May, 1844), while Archdeacon
Manning was preaching an eloquent sermon on the eternity of reward and
punishment in the future life, I was looking at the row of windows
opposite, and I saw that there were seven, all different in pattern and
construction, yet all harmonising with each other and with the building
of which they formed a part;--a symbol they might have been of
differences in the Church of Christ. From the varied windows opposite I
looked down to the faces of the congregation, all upturned to the
preacher, with expression how different! Faith, hope, fear, in the open
mouths and expanded eyelids of some; a sort of silent protest in the
compressed lips and knitted brows of others; a speculative inquiry and
interest, or merely admiring acquiescence in others; as the high or low,
the wide or contracted head prevailed; and all this diversity in
organisation, in habits of thought, in expression, harmonised for the
time by one predominant object, one feeling! the hungry sheep looking up
to be fed! When I sigh over apparent disagreement, let me think of those
windows in Merton College Chapel, and the same light from heaven
streaming through them all!--and of that assemblage of human faces,
uplifted with the same aspiration one and all!
[Illustration]
9.
I have just read the article (by Sterling, I believe), in the "Edinburgh
Review" for July; and as it chanced, this same evening, Dr. Channing's
"Discourse on the Church," and Captain Maconochie's "Report on Secondary
Punishments" from Sydney, came before me.
And as I laid them down, one after another, _this_ thought struck
me:--that about the same time, in three different and far divided regions
of the globe, three men, one military, the other an ecclesiastic, the
third a lawyer, and belonging apparently to different religious
denominations, all gave utterance to nearly the same sentiments in
regard to a Christian Church. Channing says, "A church destined to
endure through all ages, to act on all, to blend itself with new forms
of society, and with the highest improvements of the race, cannot be
expected to ordain an immutable mode of administration, but must leave
its modes of worship and communion to conform themselves silently and
gradually to the wants and progress of humanity. The rites and
arrangements which suit one period lose their significance or efficiency
in another; the forms which minister to the mind _now_ may fetter it
hereafter, and must give place to its free unfolding," &c., and more to
the same purpose.
The reviewer says, "We believe that in the judgment of an enlightened
charity, many Christian societies who are accustomed to denounce each
others' errors, will at length come to be regarded as members in common
of one great and comprehensive Church, in which diversity of forms are
harmonised by an all-pervading unity of spirit." And more to the same
purpose. The soldier and reformer says, "I believe there may be error
because there must be imperfection in the religious faith of the best
among us; but that the degree of this error is not vital in any
Christian denomination seems demonstrable by the best fruits of
faith--good works--being evidenced by all."
It is pleasant to see benign spirits divided in opinion, but harmonised
by faith, thus standing hand in hand upon a shore of peace, and looking
out together in serene hope for the dawning of a better day, instead of
rushing forth, each with his own farthing candle, under pretence of
illuminating the world--every one even more intent on putting out his
neighbour's light than on guarding his own.
(Nov. 15. 1841.)
While the idea of possible harmony in the universal Church of Christ (by
which I mean all who accept His teaching and are glad to bear His name)
is gaining ground theoretically, _practically_ it seems more and more
distant; since 1841 (when the above was written) the divergence is
greater than ever; and, as in politics, moderate opinions appear (since
1848) to merge on either side into the extremes of ultra conservatism
and ultra radicalism, as fear of the past or hope of the future
predominate, so it is in the Church. The sort of dualism which prevails
in politics and religion might give some colour to Lord Lindsay's theory
of "progress through antagonism."
[Illustration]
10.
I Incline to agree with those who think it a great mistake to consider
the present conditions or conception of Christianity as complete and
final: like the human soul to which it was fitted by Divine love and
wisdom, it has an immeasurable capacity of development, and "The Lord
hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word."
[Illustration]
11.
The nations of the present age want not _less_ religion, but _more_.
They do not wish for less community with the Apostolic times, but for
more; but above all, they want their wounds healed by a Christianity
showing a life-renewing vitality allied to reason and conscience, and
ready and able to reform the social relations of life, beginning with
the domestic and culminating with the political. They want no negations,
but positive reconstruction--no conventionality, but an honest _bonâ
fide_ foundation, deep as the human mind, and a structure free and
organic as nature. In the meantime let no national form be urged as
identical with divine truth, let no dogmatic formula oppress conscience
and reason, and let no corporation of priests, no set of dogmatists, sow
discord and hatred in the sacred communities of domestic and national
life. This view cannot be obtained without national efforts, Christian
education, free institutions, and social reforms. Then no zeal will be
called Christian which is not hallowed by charity,--no faith Christian
which is not sanctioned by reason."--_Hippolitus._
"Any author who in our time treats theological and ecclesiastical
subjects frankly, and therefore with reference to the problems of the
age, must expect to be ignored, and if that cannot be done, abused and
reviled."
The same is true of moral subjects on which strong prejudices (or shall
I say strong _convictions_?) exist in minds not very strong.
It is not perhaps of so much consequence what we believe, as it is
important that we believe; that we do not affect to believe, and so
belie our own souls. Belief is _not_ always in our power, but truth is.
[Illustration]
12.
It seems an arbitrary limitation of the design of Christianity to
assume, as Priestley does, that "it consists solely in the revelation of
a future life confirmed by the bodily resurrection of Christ." This is
truly a very material view of Christianity. If I were to be sure of
annihilation I should not be less certain of the truth of Christianity
as a system of morals exquisitely adapted for the improvement and
happiness of man as an individual; and equally adapted to conduce to the
amelioration and progressive happiness of mankind as a species.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS,
MADE ON THE SPOT;
SHOWING SOME THINGS IN WHICH ALL GOOD MEN ARE AGREED.
I.
_From a Roman Catholic Sermon._
When travelling in Ireland, I stayed over one Sunday in a certain town
in the north, and rambled out early in the morning. It was cold and wet,
the streets empty and quiet, but the sound of voices drew me in one
direction, down a court where was a Roman Catholic chapel. It was so
crowded that many of the congregation stood round the door. I remarked
among them a number of soldiers and most miserable-looking women. All
made way for me with true national courtesy, and I entered at the moment
the priest was finishing mass, and about to begin his sermon. There was
no pulpit, and he stood on the step of the altar; a fine-looking man,
with a bright face, a sonorous voice, and a _very_ strong Irish accent.
His text was from Matt. v. 43, 44.
He began by explaining what Christ really meant by the words "Love thy
neighbour." Then drew a picture in contrast of hatred and dissension,
commencing with dissension in families, between kindred, and between
husband and wife. Then made a most touching appeal in behalf of children
brought up in an atmosphere of contention where no love is. "God help
them! God pity them! small chance for them of being either good or
happy! for their young hearts are saddened and soured with strife, and
they eat their bread in bitterness!"
Then he preached patience to the wives, indulgence to the husbands, and
denounced scolds and quarrelsome women in a manner that seemed to glance
at recent events: "When ye are found in the streets vilifying and
slandering one another, ay, and fighting and tearing each other's hair,
do ye think ye're women? no, ye're not! ye're devils incarnate, and
ye'll go where the devils will be fit companions for ye!" &c. (Here some
women near me, with long black hair streaming down, fell upon their
knees, sobbing with contrition.) He then went on, in the same strain of
homely eloquence, to the evils of political and religious hatred, and
quoted the text, "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live
peaceably with all men." "I'm a Catholic," he went on, "and I believe in
the truth of my own religion above all others. I'm convinced, by long
study and observation, it's the best that is; but what then? Do ye think
I hate my neighbour because he thinks differently? Do ye think I _mane_
to force my religion down other people's throats? If I were to preach
such uncharity to ye, my people, you wouldn't listen to me, ye oughtn't
to listen to me. Did Jesus Christ force His religion down other people's
throats? Not He! He endured all, He was kind to all, even to the wicked
Jews that afterwards crucified Him." "If you say you can't love your
neighbour because he's your enemy, and has injured you, what does that
mane? '_ye can't! ye can't!_' as if that excuse will serve God? hav'n't
ye done more and worse against Him? and didn't He send His only Son into
the world to redeem ye? My good people, you're all sprung from one
stock, all sons of Adam, all related to one another. When God created
Eve, mightn't He have made her out of any thing, a stock or a stone, or
out of nothing at all, at all? but He took one of Adam's ribs and
moulded her out of that, and gave her to him, just to show that we're
all from one original, all related together, men and women, Catholics
and Protestants, Jews and Turks and Christians; all bone of one bone,
and flesh of one flesh!" He then insisted and demonstrated that all the
miseries of life, all the sorrows and mistakes of men, women, and
children; and, in particular, all the disasters of Ireland, the bankrupt
landlords, the religious dissensions, the fights domestic and political,
the rich without thought for the poor, and the poor without food or
work, all arose from nothing but the want of love. "Down on your knees,"
he exclaimed, "and ask God's mercy and pardon; and as ye hope to find
it, ask pardon one of another for every angry word ye have spoken, for
every uncharitable thought that has come into your minds; and if any man
or woman have aught against his neighbour, no matter what, let it be
plucked out of his heart before he laves this place, let it be forgotten
at the door of this chapel. Let me, your pastor, have no more rason to
be ashamed of you; as if I were set over wild bastes, instead of
Christian men and women!"
After more in this fervid strain, which I cannot recollect, he gave his
blessing in the same earnest heartfelt manner. I never saw a
congregation more attentive, more reverent, and apparently more touched
and edified. (1848.)
[Illustration]
II.
_From another Roman Catholic Sermon, delivered in the private chapel of
a Nobleman._
This Discourse was preached on the festival of St. John the Baptist, and
was a summary of his doctrine, life, and character. The text was taken
from St. Luke, iii. 9. to 14.; in which St. John answers the question of
the people, "what shall we do then?" by a brief exposition of their
several duties.
"What is most remarkable in all this," said the priest, "is truly that
there is nothing very remarkable in it. The Baptist required from his
hearers very simple and very familiar duties,--such as he was not the
first to preach, such as had been recognised as duties by all religions;
and do you think that those who were neither Jews nor Christians were
therefore left without any religion? No! never did God leave any of his
creatures without religion; they could not utter the words _right_,
_wrong_,--_beautiful_, _hateful_, without recognising a religion written
by God on their hearts from the beginning--a religion which existed
before the preaching of John, before the coming of Christ, and of which
the appearance of John and the doctrine and sacrifice of Christ, were
but the fulfilment. For Christ came to _fulfil_ the law, not to destroy
it. Do you ask what law? Not the law of Moses, but the universal law of
God's moral truth written in our hearts. It is, my friends, a folly to
talk of _natural_ religion as of something different from _revealed_
religion.
"The great proof of the truth of John's mission lies in its
comprehensiveness: men and women, artisans and soldiers, the rich and
the poor, the young and the old, gathered to him in the wilderness; and
he included all in his teaching, for he was sent to all; and the best
proof of the truth of his teaching lies in its harmony with that law
already written in the heart and the conscience of men. When Christ came
afterwards, he preached a doctrine more sublime, with a more
authoritative voice; but here, also, the best proof we have of the truth
of that divine teaching lies in this--that he had prepared from the
beginning the heart and the conscience of man to harmonise with it."
This was a very curious sermon; quiet, elegant, and learned, with a good
deal of sacred and profane history introduced in illustration, which I
am sorry I cannot remember in detail. It made, however, no appeal to
feeling or to practice; and after listening to it, we all went in to
luncheon and discussed our newspapers.
[Illustration]
III.
_Fragments of a Sermon (Anglican Church)._
Text, Luke iv., from the 14th to the 18th, but more especially the 18th
verse. This sermon was extempore.
The preacher began by observing, that our Lord's sermon at Nazareth
established the second of two principles. By his sermon from the Mount,
in which he had addressed the multitude in the open air, under the vault
of the blue heaven alone, he has left to us the principle that all
places are fitted for the service of God, and that all places may be
sanctified by the preaching of his truth. While, by his sermon in the
Synagogue (that which is recorded by St. Luke in this passage), he has
established the principle, that it is right to set apart a place to
assemble together in worship and to listen to instruction; and it is
observable that on this occasion our Saviour taught in the synagogue,
where there was no sacrifice, no ministry of the priests, as in the
Temple; but where a portion of the law and the prophets might be read by
any man; and any man, even a stranger (as he was himself), might be
called upon to expound.
Then reading impressively the whole of the narrative down to the 32nd
verse, the preacher closed the sacred volume, and went on to this
effect:--
"There are two orders of evil in the world--Sin and Crime. Of the second,
the world takes strict cognisance; of the first, it takes comparatively
little; yet _that_ is worse in the eyes of God. There are two orders of
temptation: the temptation which assails our lower nature--our appetites;
the temptation which assails our higher nature--our intellect. The
_first_, leading to sin in the body, is punished in the body,--the
consequence being pain, disease, death. The _second_, leading to sins of
the soul, as pride chiefly, uncharitableness, selfish sacrifice of
others to our own interests or purposes,--is punished in the soul--in the
Hell of the Spirit."
(All this part of his discourse very beautiful, earnest, eloquent; but I
regretted that he did not follow out the distinction he began with
between _sin_ and _crime_, and the views and deductions, religious and
moral, which that distinction leads to.)
He continued to this effect: "Christ said that it was a part of his
mission to heal the broken-hearted. What is meant by the phrase 'a
broken heart?'" He illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife
of Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart; "and our Saviour himself
died on the cross heart-broken by sorrow rather than by physical
torture."--
(I lost something here because I was questioning and doubting within
myself, for I have always had the thought that Christ must have been
_glad_ to die.)
He went on:--"To heal the broken-hearted is to say to those who are beset
by the remembrance and the misery of sin, 'My brother, the past is
past--think not of it to thy perdition; arise and sin no more.'" (All
this, and more to the same purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became
all soul--subdued to listen.) "There are two ways of meeting the pressure
of misery and heart-break: first, by trusting to time" (then followed a
quotation from Schiller's "Wallenstein," in reference to grief, which
sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the pulpit, "Was verschmerzte
nicht der Mensch?"--what cannot man grieve down?); "secondly, by defiance
and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to endure. But Christ taught
a different way from either--by _submission_--by the complete surrender of
our whole being to the will of God.
"The next part of Christ's mission was to preach deliverance to the
captives." (Then followed a most eloquent and beautiful exposition of
Christian freedom--of who were free; and who were not free, but properly
spiritual captives.) "To be content within limitations is freedom; to
desire beyond those limitations is bondage. The bird which is content
within her cage is free; the bird which can fly from tree to tree, yet
desires to soar like the eagle,--the eagle which can ascend to the
mountain peak yet desires to reach the height of that sun on which his
eye is fixed,--these are in bondage. The man who is not content within
his sphere of duties and powers, but feels his faculties, his position,
his profession; a perpetual trammel,--_he_ is spiritually in bondage. The
only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content within its external
limitations, and yet elevated spiritually far above them by the inward
powers and impulses which lift it up to God."
[Illustration]
IV.
_Recollections of another Church of England Sermon preached extempore._
The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42.: "The Queen of the South shall
rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it," &c.
The preacher began by drawing that distinction between knowledge and
wisdom which so many comprehend and allow, and so few apply. He then
described the two parties in the great question of popular education.
Those who would base all human progress on secular instruction, on
knowledge in contradistinction to ignorance, as on light opposed to
darkness;--and the mistake of those who, taking the contrary extreme,
denounce all secular instruction imparted to the poor as dangerous, or
contemn it as useless. The error of those who sneer at the triumph of
intellect he termed a species of idiocy; and the error of those who do
not see the insufficiency of knowledge, blind presumption. Then he
contrasted worldly wisdom and spiritual; with a flow of gorgeous
eloquence he enlarged on the picture of worldly wisdom as exhibited in
the character of Solomon, and of intellect, and admiration for
intellect, in the character of the Queen of Sheba. "In what consisted
the wisdom of Solomon? He made, as the sacred history assures us, three
thousand proverbs, mostly prudential maxims relating to conduct in life;
the use and abuse of riches; prosperity and adversity. His acquirements
in natural philosophy seem to have been confined to the appearances of
material and visible things; the herbs and trees, the beasts and birds,
the creeping things and fishes. His political wisdom consisted in
increasing his wealth, his dominions, and the number of his subjects and
cities. On his temple he lavished all that art had then accomplished,
and on his own house a world of riches in gold, and silver, and precious
things: but all was done for his own glory--nothing for the improvement
or the happiness of his people, who were ground down by taxes, suffered
in the midst of all his magnificence, and remained ignorant in spite of
all his knowledge. Witness the wars, tyrannies, miseries, delusions, and
idolatries which followed after his death."
"But the Queen of Sheba came not from the uttermost parts of the earth
to view the magnificence and wonder at the greatness of the King, she
came to hear his wisdom. She came not to ask anything from him, but to
prove him with hard questions. No idea of worldly gain, or selfish
ambition was in her thoughts; she paid even for the pleasure of hearing
his wise sayings by rare and costly gifts."
"Knowledge is power; but he who worships knowledge not for its own sake,
but for the power it brings, worships power. Knowledge is riches; but he
who worships knowledge for the sake of all it bestows, worships riches.
The Queen of Sheba worshipped knowledge solely for its own sake; and the
truths which she sought from the lips of Solomon she sought for truth's
sake. She gave, all she could give, in return, the spicy products of her
own land, treasures of pure gold, and blessings warm from her heart. The
man who makes a voyage to the antipodes only to behold the constellation
of the Southern Cross, the man who sails to the North to see how the
magnet trembles and varies, these love knowledge for its own sake, and
are impelled by the same enthusiasm as the Queen of Sheba." He went on
to analyse the character of Solomon, and did not treat him, I thought,
with much reverence either as sage or prophet. He remarked that, "of the
thousand songs of Solomon one only survives, and that both in this song
and in his proverbs his meaning has often been mistaken; it is supposed
to be spiritual, and is interpreted symbolically, when in fact the
plain, obvious, material significance is the true one."
He continued to this effect,--but with a power of language and
illustration which I cannot render. "We see in Solomon's own description
of his dominion, his glory, his wealth, his fame, what his boasted
wisdom achieved; what it could, and what it could not do for him. What
was the end of all his magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of
his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety? of his ships, and
his commerce, and his chariots, and his horses, and his fame which
reached to the ends of the earth? All--as it is related--ended in
feebleness, in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in sensualism,
idolatry, and dotage! The whole 'Book of Ecclesiastes,' fine as it is,
presents a picture of selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of
the Jews! the King of those that know! (_Il maestro di color chi
sanno._) Solomon is a type of worldly wisdom, of desire of knowledge for
the sake of all that knowledge can give. We imitate him when we would
base the happiness of a people on knowledge. When we have commanded the
sun to be our painter, and the lightning to run on our errands, what
reward have we? Not the increase of happiness, nor the increase of
goodness; nor--what is next to both--our faith in both."
"It would seem profane to contrast Solomon and Christ had not our
Saviour himself placed that contrast distinctly before us. He
consecrated the comparison by applying it--'Behold a greater than Solomon
is here.' In quoting these words we do not presume to bring into
comparison the two _natures_, but the two intellects--the two aspects of
truth. Solomon described the external world; Christ taught the moral
law. Solomon illustrated the aspects of nature; Christ helped the
aspirations of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying that 'in
much wisdom there is much grief;' and Christ preached to us the lowly
wisdom which can consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of
our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The two majesties--the two
kings--how different! Not till we are old, and have suffered, and have
laid our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable distance
between the teaching of Christ and the teaching of Solomon!"
Then returning to the Queen of Sheba, he treated the character as the
type of the intellectual woman. He contrasted her rather favourably with
Solomon. He described with picturesque felicity, her long and toilsome
journey to see, to admire, the man whose wisdom had made him
renowned;--the mixture of enthusiasm and humility which prompted her
desire to learn, to prove the truth of what rumour had conveyed to her,
to commune with him of all that was in her heart. And she returned to
her own country rich in wise sayings. But did the final result of all
this glory and knowledge reach her there? and did it shake her faith in
him she had bowed to as the wisest of kings and men?
He then contrasted the character of the Queen of Sheba with that of
Mary, the mother of our Lord, that feminine type of holiness, of
tenderness, of long-suffering; of sinless purity in womanhood, wifehood,
and motherhood: and rising to more than usual eloquence and power, he
prophesied the regeneration of all human communities through the social
elevation, the intellect, the purity, and the devotion of Woman.
[Illustration]
V.
_From a Sermon (apparently extempore) by a Dissenting Minister._
The ascetics of the old times seem to have had a belief that all sin was
in the body; that the spirit belonged to God, and the body to his
adversary the devil; and that to contemn, ill-treat, and degrade by
every means this frame of ours, so wonderfully, so fearfully, so
exquisitely made, was to please the Being who made it; and who, for
gracious ends, no doubt, rendered it capable of such admirable
development of strength and beauty. Miserable mistake!
To some, this body is as a prison from which we are to rejoice to escape
by any permitted means: to others, it is as a palace to be luxuriously
kept up and decorated within and without. But what says Paul (Cor. vi.
19.),--"Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which
is in you, which ye have from God, and which is not your own?"
Surely not less than a temple is that form which the Divine Redeemer
took upon him, and deigned, for a season, to inhabit; which he
consecrated by his life, sanctified by his death, glorified by his
transfiguration, hallowed and beautified by his resurrection!
It is because they do not recognise _this_ body as a temple, built up by
God's intelligence, as a fitting sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, and
_this_ life equally with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that
men fall into such opposite extremes of sin:--the spiritual sin which
contemns the body, and the sensual sin which misuses it.
[Illustration]
VI.
When I was at Boston I made the acquaintance of Father Taylor, the
founder of the Sailors' Home in that city. He was considered as the
apostle of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as the
enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it is not of his virtues or
his labours that I wish to speak. He struck me in another way, _as a
poet_; he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty he had never
learned to read, and his reading afterwards was confined to such books
as aided him in his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the last,
but his mind was teeming with spontaneous imagery, allusion, metaphor.
One might almost say of him,
"He could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope!"
These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality, and
sometimes an oddity that was quite startling, and they were generally,
but not always, borrowed from his former profession--that of a sailor.
One day we met him in the street. He told us in a melancholy voice that
he had been burying a child, and alluded almost with emotion to the
great number of infants he had buried lately. Then after a pause,
striking his stick on the ground and looking upwards, he added, "There
must be something wrong somewhere! there's a storm brewing, when the
doves are all flying aloft!"
One evening in conversation with me, he compared the English and the
Americans to Jacob's vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew
over it and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,--"but it is
still the same vine, nourished from the same root!"
On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a
long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had
died or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the
midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears
were startled by such a sentence as this,--"Grant, O Lord! that this rod
of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of
their souls!"
Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be
near the bereaved father "when his aged heart went forth from his bosom
to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!" Praying for others
of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching
forth his arms, "O save them! O guard them! thou angel of the deep!"
On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral
principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, "Go heat your ovens
with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle in
your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach
you to swim!"
He was preaching against violence and cruelty:--"Don't talk to me," said
he, "of the savages! a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage
of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun's heat, groping in the
sun's light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!"
In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down
the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen,
and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on
each side; he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On
one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and
other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, "I don't mean
_you_ before me here," looking at the sailors; "I believe you are wicked
enough, but honest fellows in some sort, for you profess less, not more,
than you practise; but I mean to touch _starboard_ and _larboard_
there!" stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and
looking at us on either side till we quailed.
He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the
father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope
of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and
missing when his ship returned to port.
Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a
mariner, steering into port through a narrow dangerous channel, "false
lights here, rocks there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on
the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of
his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings
out from the wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm,
and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his
jacket." Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true
sailor-like look of defiant jollity;--changed in a moment to an
expression of horror as he added, "See! See! she drifts to destruction!"
One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of
Redemption. He began with an eloquent description of a terrific storm at
sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a
vessel is seen labouring in distress and driving on a lee shore. The
masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm
unshipped, they spring a leak! the vessel begins to fill, the water
gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper, _deeper! deeper!_ He bent over
the pulpit repeating the last words again and again; his voice became
low and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed up at him with
their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget.
Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into
space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, "A life boat! a
life boat!" Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had
sprung to their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep
impressive tone, and extending his arms, "_Christ is that life boat!_"
[Illustration]
VII.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE.
"It is true, that science has not made Nature as expressive of God in
the first instance, or to the beginner in religion, as it was in earlier
times. Science reveals a rigid, immutable order; and this to common
minds looks much like self-subsistence, and does not manifest
intelligence, which is full of life, variety, and progressive operation.
Men, in the days of their ignorance, saw an immediate Divinity
accomplishing an immediate purpose, or expressing an immediate feeling,
in every sudden, striking change of nature--in a storm, the flight of a
bird, &c.; and Nature, thus interpreted, became the sign of a present,
deeply interested Deity. Science undoubtedly brings vast aids, but it is
to _prepared_ minds, to those who have begun in another school. The
greatest aid it yields consists in the revelation it makes of the
Infinite. It aids us not so much by showing us marks of design in this
or that particular thing as by showing the _Infinite_ in the _finite_.
Science does this office when it unfolds to us the unity of the
universe, which thus becomes the sign, the efflux of one unbounded
intelligence, when it reveals to us in every work of Nature infinite
connections, the influences of all-pervading laws--when it shows us in
each created thing unfathomable, unsearchable depths, to which our
intelligence is altogether unequal. Thus Nature explored by science is a
witness of the Infinite. It is also a witness to the same truth by its
beauty; for what is so undefined, so mysterious as beauty?"--_Dr.
Channing._
[Illustration]