pocket land and water and fire and air and all fruits of these, for
property, and would like to have Aladdin’s lamp to compel darkness,
and iron-bound doors, and hostile armies, and lions and serpents to
serve them like footmen. And they wish the same service from the
spiritual faculties. A man has a rare mathematical talent, inviting
him to the beautiful secrets of geometry, and wishes to clap a patent
on it; or has the fancy and invention of a poet, and says, ‘I will
write a play that shall be repeated in London a hundred nights;’ or a
military genius, and instead of using that to defend his country, he
says, ‘I will fight the battle so as to give me place and political
consideration;’ or Canning or Thurlow has a genius of debate, and
says, ‘I will know how with this weapon to defend the cause that
will pay best and make me Chancellor or Foreign Secretary.’ But this
perversion is punished with instant loss of true wisdom and real power.
I find the survey of these cosmical powers a doctrine of consolation
in the dark hours of private or public fortune. It shows us the world
alive, guided, incorruptible; that its cannon cannot be stolen nor its
virtues misapplied. It shows us the long Providence, the safeguards
of rectitude. It animates exertion; it warns us out of that despair
into which Saxon men are prone to fall,--out of an idolatry of forms,
instead of working to simple ends, in the belief that Heaven always
succors us in working for these. This world belongs to the energetical.
It is a fagot of laws, and a true analysis of these laws, showing how
immortal and how self-protecting they are, would be a wholesome lesson
for every time and for this time. That band which ties them together
is unity, is universal good, saturating all with one being and aim,
so that each translates the other, is only the same spirit applied to
new departments. Things are saturated with the moral law. There is no
escape from it. Violets and grass preach it; rain and snow, wind and
tides, every change, every cause in Nature is nothing but a disguised
missionary.
All our political disasters grow as logically out of our attempts in
the past to do without justice, as the sinking of some part of your
house comes of defect in the foundation. One thing is plain; a certain
personal virtue is essential to freedom; and it begins to be doubtful
whether our corruption in this country has not gone a little over the
mark of safety, so that when canvassed we shall be found to be made up
of a majority of reckless self-seekers. The divine knowledge has ebbed
out of us and we do not know enough to be free.
I hope better of the state. Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.
A boy who knows that a bully lives round the corner which he must
pass on his daily way to school, is apt to take sinister views of
streets and of school-education. And a sensitive politician suffers
his ideas of the part New York or Pennsylvania or Ohio are to play in
the future of the Union, to be fashioned by the election of rogues in
some counties. But we must not gratify the rogues so deeply. There is a
speedy limit to profligate politics.
Fear disenchants life and the world. If I have not my own respect I am
an impostor, not entitled to other men’s, and had better creep into
my grave. I admire the sentiment of Thoreau, who said, “Nothing is so
much to be feared as fear; God himself likes atheism better.” For the
world is a battle-ground; every principle is a war-note, and the most
quiet and protected life is at any moment exposed to incidents which
test your firmness. The illusion that strikes me as the masterpiece in
that ring of illusions which our life is, is the timidity with which
we assert our moral sentiment. We are made of it, the world is built
by it, things endure as they share it; all beauty, all health, all
intelligence exist by it; yet we shrink to speak of it or to range
ourselves by its side. Nay, we presume strength of him or them who
deny it. Cities go against it; the college goes against it, the courts
snatch at any precedent, at any vicious form of law to rule it out;
legislatures listen with appetite to declamations against it, and vote
it down. Every new asserter of the right surprises us, like a man
joining the church, and we hardly dare believe he is in earnest.
What we do and suffer is in moments, but the cause of right for which
we labor never dies, works in long periods, can afford many checks,
gains by our defeats, and will know how to compensate our extremest
sacrifice. Wrath and petulance may have their short success, but they
quickly reach their brief date and decompose, whilst the massive might
of ideas is irresistible at last. Whence does the knowledge come?
Where is the source of power? The soul of God is poured into the world
through the thoughts of men. The world stands on ideas, and not on
iron or cotton; and the iron of iron, the fire of fire, the ether and
source of all the elements is moral force. As cloud on cloud, as snow
on snow, as the bird on the air, and the planet on space in its flight,
so do nations of men and their institutions rest on thoughts.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: Reprinted from the _North American Review_, No. 125,
1877.]
CHARACTER.
SHUN passion, fold the hands of thrift,
Sit still, and Truth is near;
Suddenly it will uplift
Your eyelids to the sphere:
Wait a little, you shall see
The portraiture of things to be.
FOR what need I of book or priest
Or Sibyl from the mummied East
When every star is Bethlehem Star,--
I count as many as there are
Cinquefoils or violets in the grass,
So many saints and saviours,
So many high behaviours.
CHARACTER.[6]
MORALS respects what men call goodness, that which all men agree to
honor as justice, truth-speaking, good-will and good works. Morals
respects the source or motive of this action. It is the science
of substances, not of shows. It is the _what_, and not the
_how_. It is that which all men profess to regard, and by their
real respect for which recommend themselves to each other.
There is this eternal advantage to morals, that, in the question
between truth and goodness, the moral cause of the world lies behind
all else in the mind. It was for good, it is to good, that all works.
Surely it is not to prove or show the truth of things,--that sounds a
little cold and scholastic,--no, it is for benefit, that all subsists.
As we say in our modern politics, catching at last the language of
morals, that the object of the State is the greatest good of the
greatest number,--so, the reason we must give for the existence of the
world is, that it is for the benefit of all being.
Morals implies freedom and will. The will constitutes the man. He has
his life in Nature, like a beast: but choice is born in him; here is he
that chooses; here is the Declaration of Independence, the July Fourth
of zoölogy and astronomy. He chooses,--as the rest of the creation does
not. But will, pure and perceiving, is not wilfulness. When a man,
through stubbornness, insists to do this or that, something absurd or
whimsical, only because he will, he is weak; he blows with his lips
against the tempest, he dams the incoming ocean with his cane. It were
an unspeakable calamity if any one should think he had the right to
impose a private will on others. That is the part of a striker, an
assassin. All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power but
the absence of power.
Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends. He is immoral
who is acting to any private end. He is moral,--we say it with Marcus
Aurelius and with Kant,--whose aim or motive may become a universal
rule, binding on all intelligent beings; and with Vauvenargues, “the
mercenary sacrifice of the public good to a private interest is the
eternal stamp of vice.”
All the virtues are special directions of this motive; justice is the
application of this good of the whole to the affairs of each one;
courage is contempt of danger in the determination to see this good of
the whole enacted; love is delight in the preference of that benefit
redounding to another over the securing of our own share; humility is
a sentiment of our insignificance when the benefit of the universe is
considered.
If from these external statements we seek to come a little nearer
to the fact, our first experiences in moral as in intellectual
nature force us to discriminate a universal mind, identical in all
men. Certain biases, talents, executive skills, are special to each
individual; but the high, contemplative, all-commanding vision,
the sense of Right and Wrong, is alike in all. Its attributes are
self-existence, eternity, intuition and command. It is the mind of the
mind. We belong to it, not it to us. It is in all men, and constitutes
them men. In bad men it is dormant, as health is in men entranced or
drunken; but, however inoperative, it exists underneath whatever vices
and errors. The extreme simplicity of this intuition embarrasses every
attempt at analysis. We can only mark, one by one, the perfections
which it combines in every act. It admits of no appeal, looks to no
superior essence. It is the reason of things.
The antagonist nature is the individual, formed into a finite body of
exact dimensions, with appetites which take from everybody else what
they appropriate to themselves, and would enlist the entire spiritual
faculty of the individual, if it were possible, in catering for them.
On the perpetual conflict between the dictate of this universal mind
and the wishes and interests of the individual, the moral discipline
of life is built. The one craves a private benefit, which the other
requires him to renounce out of respect to the absolute good. Every
hour puts the individual in a position where his wishes aim at
something which the sentiment of duty forbids him to seek. He that
speaks the truth executes no private function of an individual will,
but the world utters a sound by his lips. He who doth a just action
seeth therein nothing of his own, but an inconceivable nobleness
attaches to it, because it is a dictate of the general mind. We have
no idea of power so simple and so entire as this. It is the basis of
thought, it is the basis of being. Compare all that we call ourselves,
all our private and personal venture in the world, with this deep
of moral nature in which we lie, and our private good becomes an
impertinence, and we take part with hasty shame against ourselves:--
“High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised,--
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing,--
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence,--truths that wake
To perish never.”
The moral element invites man to great enlargements, to find his
satisfaction, not in particulars or events, but in the purpose and
tendency; not in bread, but in his right to his bread; not in much corn
or wool, but in its communication.
Not by adding, then, does the moral sentiment help us; no, but in quite
another manner. It puts us in place. It centres, it concentrates us.
It puts us at the heart of Nature, where we belong, in the cabinet of
science and of causes, there where all the wires terminate which hold
the world in magnetic unity, and so converts us into universal beings.
This wonderful sentiment, which endears itself as it is obeyed, seems
to be the fountain of intellect; for no talent gives the impression of
sanity, if wanting this; nay, it absorbs everything into itself. Truth,
Power, Goodness, Beauty, are its varied names,--faces of one substance,
the heart of all. Before it, what are persons, prophets, or seraphim
but its passing agents, momentary rays of its light?
The moral sentiment is alone omnipotent. There is no labor or sacrifice
to which it will not bring a man, and which it will not make easy. Thus
there is no man who will bargain to sell his life, say at the end of a
year, for a million or ten millions of gold dollars in hand, or for any
temporary pleasures, or for any rank, as of peer or prince; but many a
man who does not hesitate to lay down his life for the sake of a truth,
or in the cause of his country, or to save his son or his friend. And
under the action of this sentiment of the Right, his heart and mind
expand above himself, and above Nature.
Though Love repine, and Reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,--
“’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.”
Such is the difference of the action of the heart within and of the
senses without. One is enthusiasm, and the other more or less amounts
of horsepower.
Devout men, in the endeavor to express their convictions, have used
different images to suggest this latent force; as, the light, the seed,
the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the Dæmon, the still, small
voice, etc.,--all indicating its power and its latency. It is serenely
above all mediation. In all ages, to all men, it saith, _I am_;
and he who hears it feels the impiety of wandering from this revelation
to any record or to any rival. The poor Jews of the wilderness cried:
“Let not the Lord speak to us; let Moses speak to us.” But the simple
and sincere soul makes the contrary prayer: ‘Let no intruder come
between thee and me; deal THOU with me; let me know it is
thy will, and I ask no more.’ The excellence of Jesus, and of every
true teacher, is, that he affirms the Divinity in him and in us,--not
thrusts himself between it and us. It would instantly indispose us to
any person claiming to speak for the Author of Nature, the setting
forth any fact or law which we did not find in our consciousness. We
should say with Heraclitus: “Come into this smoky cabin; God is here
also: approve yourself to him.”
We affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command;
that it is the presence of the Eternal in each perishing man;
that it distances and degrades all statements of whatever saints,
heroes, poets, as obscure and confused stammerings before its silent
revelation. _They_ report the truth. _It_ is the truth.
When I think of Reason, of Truth, of Virtue, I cannot conceive them
as lodged in your soul and lodged in my soul, but that you and I
and all souls are lodged in that; and I may easily speak of that
adorable nature, there where only I behold it in my dim experiences,
in such terms as shall seem to the frivolous, who dare not fathom
their consciousness, as profane. How is a man a man? How can he exist
to weave relations of joy and virtue with other souls, but because
he is inviolable, anchored at the centre of Truth and Being? In the
ever-returning hour of reflection, he says: ‘I stand here glad at heart
of all the sympathies I can awaken and share, clothing myself with them
as with a garment of shelter and beauty, and yet knowing that it is not
in the power of all who surround me to take from me the smallest thread
I call mine. If all things are taken away, I have still all things in
my relation to the Eternal.’
We pretend not to define the way of its access to the private heart.
It passes understanding. There was a time when Christianity existed in
one child. But if the child had been killed by Herod, would the element
have been lost? God sends his message, if not by one, then quite as
well by another. When the Master of the Universe has ends to fulfill,
he impresses his will on the structure of minds.
The Divine Mind imparts itself to the single person: his whole duty is
to this rule and teaching. The aid which others give us is like that
of the mother to the child,--temporary, gestative, a short period of
lactation, a nurse’s or a governess’s care; but on his arrival at a
certain maturity, it ceases, and would be hurtful and ridiculous if
prolonged. Slowly the body comes to the use of its organs; slowly the
soul unfolds itself in the new man. It is partial at first, and honors
only some one or some few truths. In its companions it sees other
truths honored, and successively finds their foundation also in itself.
Then it cuts the cord, and no longer believes “because of thy saying,”
but because it has recognized them in itself.
The Divine Mind imparts itself to the single person: but it is also
true that men act powerfully on us. There are men who astonish and
delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men’s words I remember so
well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because
I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it
better. That is only to say, there is degree and gradation throughout
Nature; and the Deity does not break his firm laws in respect to
imparting truth, more than in imparting material heat and light. Men
appear from time to time who receive with more purity and fulness
these high communications. But it is only as fast as this hearing from
another is authorized by its consent with his own, that it is pure and
safe to each; and all receiving from abroad must be controlled by this
immense reservation.
It happens now and then, in the ages, that a soul is born which has
no weakness of self, which offers no impediment to the Divine Spirit,
which comes down into Nature as if only for the benefit of souls, and
all its thoughts are perceptions of things as they are, without any
infirmity of earth. Such souls are as the apparition of gods among men,
and simply by their presence pass judgment on them. Men are forced
by their own self-respect to give them a certain attention. Evil men
shrink and pay involuntary homage by hiding or apologizing for their
action.
When a man is born with a profound moral sentiment, preferring truth,
justice and the serving of all men to any honors or any gain, men
readily feel the superiority. They who deal with him are elevated
with joy and hope; he lights up the house or the landscape in which
he stands. His actions are poetic and miraculous in their eyes. In
his presence, or within his influence, every one believes in the
immortality of the soul. They feel that the invisible world sympathizes
with him. The Arabians delight in expressing the sympathy of the unseen
world with holy men.
When Omar prayed and loved,
Where Syrian waters roll,
Aloft the ninth heaven glowed and moved
To the tread of the jubilant soul.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a
mind that startled us by its large scope. I am in the habit of
thinking,--not, I hope, out of a partial experience, but confirmed by
what I notice in many lives,--that to every serious mind Providence
sends from time to time five or six or seven teachers who are of the
first importance to him in the lessons they have to impart. The highest
of these not so much give particular knowledge, as they elevate by
sentiment and by their habitual grandeur of view.
Great men serve us as insurrections do in bad governments. The world
would run into endless routine, and forms incrust forms, till the life
was gone. But the perpetual supply of new genius shocks us with thrills
of life, and recalls us to principles. Lucifer’s wager in the old drama
was, “There is no steadfast man on earth.” He is very rare. “A man
is already of consequence in the world when it is known that we can
implicitly rely on him.” See how one noble person dwarfs a whole nation
of underlings. This steadfastness we indicate when we praise character.
Character denotes habitual self-possession, habitual regard to interior
and constitutional motives, a balance not to be overset or easily
disturbed by outward events and opinion, and by implication points to
the source of right motive. We sometimes employ the word to express the
strong and consistent will of men of mixed motive, but, when used with
emphasis, it points to what no events can change, that is, a will built
on the reason of things. Such souls do not come in troops: oftenest
appear solitary, like a general without his command, because those who
can understand and uphold such appear rarely, not many, perhaps not
one, in a generation. And the memory and tradition of such a leader is
preserved in some strange way by those who only half understand him,
until a true disciple comes, who apprehends and interprets every word.
The sentiment never stops in pure vision, but will be enacted. It
affirms not only its truth, but its supremacy. It is not only insight,
as science, as fancy, as imagination is; or an entertainment, as
friendship and poetry are; but it is a sovereign rule: and the acts
which it suggests--as when it impels a man to go forth and impart
it to other men, or sets him on some asceticism or some practice of
self-examination to hold him to obedience, or some zeal to unite men
to abate some nuisance, or establish some reform or charity which it
commands--are the homage we render to this sentiment, as compared with
the lower regard we pay to other thoughts: and the private or social
practices we establish in its honor we call religion.
The sentiment, of course, is the judge and measure of every expression
of it,--measures Judaism, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, or whatever
philanthropy, or politics, or saint, or seer pretends to speak in its
name. The religions we call false were once true. They also were
affirmations of the conscience correcting the evil customs of their
times. The populace drag down the gods to their own level, and give
them their egotism; whilst in Nature is none at all, God keeping out
of sight, and known only as pure law, though resistless. Châteaubriand
said, with some irreverence of phrase, If God made man in his image,
man has paid him well back. “_Si Dieu a fait l’homme à son image,
l’homme l’a bien rendu._” Every nation is degraded by the goblins it
worships instead of this Deity. The Dionysia and Saturnalia of Greece
and Rome, the human sacrifice of the Druids, the Sradda of Hindoos,
the Purgatory, the Indulgences, and the Inquisition of Popery, the
vindictive mythology of Calvinism, are examples of this perversion.
Every particular instruction is speedily embodied in a ritual, is
accommodated to humble and gross minds, and corrupted. The moral
sentiment is the perpetual critic on these forms, thundering its
protest, sometimes in earnest and lofty rebuke; but sometimes also it
is the source, in natures less pure, of sneers and flippant jokes of
common people, who feel that the forms and dogmas are not true for
them, though they do not see where the error lies.
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
We use in our idlest poetry and discourse the words Jove, Neptune,
Mercury, as mere colors, and can hardly believe that they had to the
lively Greek the anxious meaning which, in our towns, is given and
received in churches when our religious names are used: and we read
with surprise the horror of Athens when, one morning, the statues of
Mercury in the temples were found broken, and the like consternation
was in the city as if, in Boston, all the Orthodox churches should be
burned in one night.
The greatest dominion will be to the deepest thought. The establishment
of Christianity in the world does not rest on any miracle but the
miracle of being the broadest and most humane doctrine. Christianity
was once a schism and protest against the impieties of the time, which
had originally been protests against earlier impieties, but had lost
their truth. Varnhagen von Ense, writing in Prussia in 1848, says: “The
Gospels belong to the most aggressive writings. No leaf thereof could
attain the liberty of being printed (in Berlin) to-day. What Mirabeaus,
Rousseaus, Diderots, Fichtes, Heines, and many another heretic, one can
detect therein!”