Produced by Michael John Madden
THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH;
OR
A VISIT TO A RELIGIOUS SCEPTIC.
FIFTH EDITION.
BOSTON: CROSBY, NICHOLS AND COMPANY,
111 WASHINGTON STREET.
1854.
AMERICAN PREFACE.
The effect of the perusal of this book, and the estimate put
upon it by a reader, will depend upon his taking with him a
right view of its design. That design seems in the mind of
the writer to have been very definite and very restricted. If
he should be thought to have intended an answer to all the
elaborate objections from criticism and philosophy recently or
renewedly urged against faith in the Christian revelation,
and, still more, if the reader should suppose that the author
had aimed to remove all the difficulties in the way of
such a faith, he would equally insure his own disappointment,
and wrong the writer. The book comes forth anonymously, but it
is ascribed to Mr. Henry Rogers, some of whose very able
papers in the Edinburgh Review have been republished in two
octavo volumes in England, and one of whose articles, that on
"Reason and Faith," dealt with some of the topics which form
the subject-matter of this volume.
The author seems to have viewed with a keenly attentive and
anxious mind the generally unsettled state of opinion, equally
among the literary and some of the humbler classes in England,
concerning the terms and the sanction of a religious faith,
especially as the issue bears upon the contents and the
authority of the Bible. That he understands the state of things
in which he proposes himself as one who has a word to utter,
will be allowed by all candid judges, whatever criticism they
may pass upon the effectiveness of his own argument. There is
abundant evidence in this book of his large intimacy with
the freshest forms of speculation, as developed by the free
thought of our age. While he identifies these speculations with
the recent writers who have adopted them, he is not to be
understood as allowing that these writers have originated
any novel speculations, or excelled the sceptics of former
times in acuteness, or plausibility, or success in urging their
cause. He adopts the method of the Platonic dialogue, and
exhibits a dialectic skill in confounding by objections when
objections can be made to do service as arguments. His frank
admission that he leaves insurmountable objections and
unfathomable mysteries still involved in the theme, a portion
of whose range alone he traverses, should secure him from the
imputation of having attempted too much, or of boastfulness for
what he considers that he has accomplished.
The truculent notice of this book in the Westminster Review
for July is wholly unworthy of the reputation and the claims
of that journal. Probably a careful perusal of the book is an
essential condition for enlightening the mind of the writer,
and for rectifying his judgment, so far as information has
power to promote candor.
The Prospective Review for August, in an article on the work,
for the most part commendatory, though certainly without any
warmth of praise, makes the prominent stricture upon it to be,
a charge against the author of having evaded "the gravest, and
in one sense the only serious difficulty, with which the
evidences he supports have to contend." This difficulty is
defined to be in the question as to whether our four Gospels
are essentially and substantially documents from the pens of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, actual companions and
contemporaries of Him whose life and lessons are therein recorded.
The Reviewer professes to have satisfied his own mind
by an affirmative conclusion on this point. But regarding the
question as the very turning-point, the paramount and vital element
of the existing issue between faith and unbelief, and not finding
it to be dealt with in this volume, the Reviewer considers that
it is evaded. It might be urged in reply, that this question is not
to other minds of such paramount importance, and that its
affirmative answer would not be conclusive, as it would still
leave open other questions; such, for instance, as those which
enter into the theories of Paulus and other Rationalists, and
such as are not even excluded from the incidental adjuncts
of Strauss's mythical theory. It might also be urged, that,
allowing the question to be paramount in its relation to the
whole issue, it is one which is not so judiciously dealt with
in the discursiveness of dialogues after dinner, as in the
solitary study, with piles of huge tomes, lexicons, and
manuscripts that require a most deliberate examination.
But to leave the merits and the relative importance of this
question undebated, it might have been more generous in the
Reviewer to have confined his criticisms to a decision upon
what the author has endeavored to accomplish, instead of
impugning his judgment in the selection of the points on which
to employ his pen. How ever desirable it may be that we
should have in another form what Mr. Norton has presented
so thoroughly in his work on the Genuineness of the Gospels,
it is enough to answer to the Reviewer in the Prospective,
that the writer of this volume addressed himself to a different
course of argument, starting from other divergences of
opinion, philosophical rather than critical in their relations.
He certainly was free to select the method and the direction of
his argument, if he candidly represented the answering point
of view of those to whom he opposed himself.
Amid many episodes and interludes of fancy and narrative, it
will be found that the volume arrays its force of argument
against two of the assumptions alike of modern and of ancient
scepticism; namely, that a revelation from God to men through
the agency of a book is an unreasonable tenet of belief; and
that it is impossible that a miracle should occur, and
impossible that its occurrence should be authenticated. There
is a vigorous and logical power displayed in the discussion
of these two points. The discomfiture of those who urge these
assumptions does not of course convince all scepticism, or
substitute faith for it, but it is something to discomfit
such pleas, and to expose the fallacies which confuse the
minds of their advocates. The matters of debate are lofty,
and there is no levity in their treatment.
ADVERTISEMENT.
He who reads this book only superficially will
at once see that it is not all fiction; and he who
reads it more than superficially will as easily see
that it is not all fact. In what proportions it is
composed of either would probably require a very
acute critic accurately to determine. As the Editor
makes no pretensions to such acumen,--as
he can lay claim to only an imperfect knowledge
of the principal personage in the volume, and
never had any personal acquaintance with the singular
youth, some traits of whose character and
some glimpses of whose history are here given,
--he leaves the above question to the decision of
the reader. At the same time, it is of no consequence
in the world. The character and purport
of the volume are sufficiently disclosed in the
parting words of the Journalist. "It aspires,"
as is justly said, "to none of the appropriate
interest either of a novel or a biography." It might
have been very properly entitled "Theological Fragments."
March 31, 1852.
INTRODUCTION
A GENUINE SCEPTIC
A VERSATILE BELIEVER
PURITAN INFIDELITY
LORD HERBERT AND MODERN DEISM
SOME CURIOUS PARADOXES
PROBLEMS
A DIALOGUE SHOWING THAT "THAT MAY BE POSSIBLE WITH
MAN WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD"
SCEPTIC'S FAVORITE TOPICS
UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM
A SCEPTICS FIRST CATECHISM
SOME LIGHT ON THE MYSTERY
BELIEF AND FAITH
THE "VIA MEDIA" OF DEISM
A SCEPTIC'S SELECT PARTY
HOW IT WAS THAT INFIDELITY PREVENTED MY BECOMING AN
INFIDEL
SKIRMISHES
CHRISTIAN ETHICS
THE BLANK BIBLE
A DIALOGUE IN WHICH IT IS CONTENDED "THAT MIRACLES ARE
IMPOSSIBLE, BUT THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE IT"
THE ANALOGIES OF AN EXTERNAL REVELATION WITH THE LAWS
AND CONDITIONS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
ON A PREVAILING FALLACY
HISTORIC CREDIBILITY
A KNOTTY POINT
MEDICAL ANALOGIES
HISTORIC CRITICISM
THE "PAPAL AGGRESSION" PROVED TO BE IMPOSSIBLE
THE PARADISE OF FOOLS
A FUTURE LIFE
A VARIABLE QUANTITY
DISCUSSION OF THREE POINTS
THE LAST EVENING
THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH.
To E. B*****, Missionary in ------, South Pacific.
Wednesday, June 18, 1851.
My Dear Edward:--
You have more than once asked me to send you,
in your distant solitude, my impressions respecting the religious
distractions in which your native country has been of late years
involved. I have refused, partly, because it would take a volume
to give you any just notions on the subject; and partly, because
I am not quite sure that you would not be happier in ignorance.
Think, if you can, of your native land as in this respect what
it was when you left it, on your exile of Christian love,
some fifteen years ago.
I little thought I should ever have so mournful a motive to
depart in some degree from my resolution. I intended to leave
you to glean what you could of our religious condition from such
publications as might reach you. But I am now constrained to write
something about it. My dear brother, you will hear it with
a sad heart;--your nephew and mine, our only sister's
only child, has, in relation to religion at least, become
an absolute sceptic!
I well recollect the tenderness you felt for him, doubly endeared
by his own amiable dispositions and the remembrance of her whom
in so many points he resembled. What must be mine, who so long
stood to the orphan in the relations which his mother's love and
my own affection imposed upon me! It is hardly a figure to say I
felt for him as for a son. "Ah!" you will say as you glance at your
own children, "my bachelor brother cannot understand that even such
an affection is still a faint resemblance of parental love."
It may be so. I know that that love is sui generis; and as I have
often heard from those who are fathers, its depth and purity were
never realized till they became such. But neither, perhaps, can you
know how nearly such a love as I have felt for Harrington, committed
to me in death by one I loved so well,--beloved alike for her sake
and for his own,--the object of so much solicitude during his
childhood and youth,--I say you can hardly, perhaps, conceive how
near such an affection may approach that of a parent; how closely
such a graft upon a childless stock may resemble the incorporate
life of father and son.
You remember what hopes we both formed of his youth, from the
promise alike of his heart and of his intellect, How fondly we
predicted a career of future usefulness to others, and honor and
happiness to himself! You know how often I used to compare him,
for the silent ease with which he mastered difficult subjects,
and the versatility with which he turned his mind to the most
opposite pursuits, to the youthful Theaetetus, as described in
Plato's dialogue the movements of whose mind Theodorus compares
to the "noiseless flow of oil" from the flask.
He was just fourteen and a half when you left England; he is
now, therefore, nearly twenty-nine. He left me four years ago,
when he was just twenty-five,--about a year after the termination
of his college course, which you know was honorable to him, and
gratifying to me. He then went to spend a year, or a year and a
half, as he supposed, in Germany. His stay (he was not all the
time in Germany, however) was prolonged for more than three years.
In the letters which I received from him, and which gradually
became more rare and more brief, there was (without one symptom
of decay of personal affection) a certain air of gradually
increasing constraint, in relation to the subject which I knew
and felt to be all-important. Alas! my prophetic soul took it
aright; this constraint was the faint penumbra of a disastrous
eclipse indeed! He was not, as so many profess to be, convinced
by any particular book (as that of Strauss, for example) that
the history of Christianity is false; nay, he declares that he
is not convinced of that even now; he is a genuine sceptic, and
is the subject, he says, of invincible doubts. Those doubts have
extended at length to the whole field of theology, and are due
principally, as he himself has owned, to the spectacle of the
interminable controversies which (turn where he would) occupied
the mind of Germany. Even when he returned home he does not appear
to have finally abandoned the notion of the possibility of
constructing some religious system in the place of Christianity;--
this, as he affirms, is a later conviction formed upon him by
examining the systems of such men as have attempted the solution
of the problem. He declares the result wholly unsatisfactory; that,
sceptical as he was and is with regard to the truth of Christianity,
he is not even sceptical with regard to these theories; and he
declares that if 'the undoubtedly powerful minds which have
framed them have so signally failed in removing his doubts, and
affording him a rock to stand upon, he cannot prevail upon himself
to struggle further.
And so, instead of stopping at any of those miserable road-side
inns between Christianity and scepticism, through whose ragged
windows all the winds of heaven are blowing, and whose gaudy "signs"
assure us there is "good entertainment within for man and beast,"--
whereas it is only for the latter,--Harrington still travelled on in
hopes of finding some better shelter, and now, in the dark night,
and a night of tempest too, finds himself on the open heath. To
employ his own words, "he could not rest contented with one-sided
theories or inconsequential reasonings, and has pursued the
argument to its logical termination." He is ill at ease in mind,
I hear, and not in robust health; and I am just going to visit him.
I shall have some melancholy scenes with him; I feel that. Do you
remember, when we were in Switzerland together, how, as we wound
down the Susten and the Grimsel passes, with the perpendicular
cliffs some thousand feet above us, and a torrent as many feet
below, we used to shudder at the thought of two men, wrestling upon
that dizzy verge, and striving to throw each other over! I almost
imagine that I am about to engage in such a strife now, with the
additional horror that the contest is (as one may say) between
father and son. Nay, it is yet more terrible; for in such a contest
there, I almost feel as if I could be contented to employ only a
passive resistance. But I must here learn to school my heart and
mind to an active and desperate conflict. I fear lest I should do
more harm than good; and I am sure I shall if I suffer impatience
and irascibility to prevail. I shall, perhaps, also hear from those
lips which once addressed me only in the accents of respect and
kindness, language indicative of that alienation which is the
inevitable result of marked dissimilarity of sentiment and
character, and which, according to Aristotle's most just
description, will often dissolve the truest friendship, at all
events, extinguish (just as prolonged absence will) all its
vividness. So impossible is it for the full sympathies of the heart
to coexist with absolute antipathy of the intellect! Nay, I shall,
perhaps, have to listen to the language which I cannot but consider
as "impiety" and "blasphemy," and yet keep my temper.
I half feel, however, that I am doing him injustice in much of this;
and I will not "judge before the time." It cannot be that he will
ever cease to regard me with affection, though, perhaps, no longer
with reverence; and I am confident that not even scepticism can
chill the natural kindness of his disposition. I am persuaded
that, even as a sceptic, he is very different from most sceptics.
They cherish doubts; he will be impatient of them. Scepticism is,
with them, a welcome guest, and has entered their hearts by an open
door; I am sure that it must have stormed his, and entered it by a
breach.
"No," my heart whispers, "I shall still find you sincere, Harrington;
scorning to take any unfair advantage in argument, and impatient of
all sophistry, as I have ever found you. You will be fully aware of
the moral significance of the conclusion at which you have arrived,
--even that there is no conclusion to be arrived at; and you will be
miserable,--as all must be who have your power to comprehend it."
Accept this, my dear brother, as a truer delineation of my wanderer
than my first thoughts prompted. But then all this will only make it
the more sad to see him. Still it is a duty, and it must be done.
I have not the heart at present to give more than the briefest
answers to the queries which you so earnestly put to me. No doubt
you were startled to find, from the French papers that reached you
from Tahiti, and on no less authority than that of the "Apostolic
Letter of the Pope," and Cardinal Wiseman's "Pastoral," that this
enlightened country was once more, or was on the eve of becoming, a
"satellite" of Rome. Subsequent information, touching the course of
the almost unprecedented agitation which England has just passed
through, will serve to convince you, either that Pio Nono's
supplications to the Virgin and all the English saints, from
St. Dunstan downwards, have not been so successful as he flattered
himself that they would have been, or that the nation, if it be
about to embrace Romanism, has the oddest way of showing it. It
has acquired most completely the Jesuitical art of disguising
its real feelings; or, as the Anglicans would say, of practising
the doctrine of "reserve." To all appearance the country is more
indomitably Protestant than before.
Nor need you alarm yourself--as in truth you seem too much inclined
to do--about the machinations and triumphs of the Tractarian party.
Their insidious attempts are no doubt a graver evil than the
preposterous pretensions of Rome, to which indeed they gave their
only chance of success. The evil has been much abated, however by
those very assumptions; for it is no longer disguised. Tractarianism
is seen to be what many had proclaimed it,--the strict ally of Rome.
The hopes it inspired were the causes of the Pope's presumption and
of Wiseman's folly; and, by misleading them, it has, to a large
extent, undone the projects both of Rome and itself. But even before
the recent attempts, its successes were very partial.
The degree to which the infection tainted the clergy was no
criterion at all of the sympathy of the people. Too many of the
former were easily converted to a system which confirmed all their
ecclesiastical prejudices, and favored their sacerdotal pretensions;
which endowed every youngster upon whom the bishop laid hands
with "preternatural graces," and with the power of working
"spiritual miracles." But the people generally were in little
danger of being misled by these absurdities; and facts, even before
the recent outbreak, ought to have convinced the clergy, that, if
they thought proper to go to Rome, their flocks were by no means
prepared to follow them. Except among some fashionable folks here
and there,--young ladies to whom ennui, susceptible nerves, and a
sentimental imagination made any sort of excitement acceptable;
who turned their arks of embroidery and painting, and their love
of music, to "spiritual" uses, and displayed their piety and their
accomplishments at the same time,--except among these, I say, and
those amongst the more ignorant of our rural population whom such
people influenced, the Anglican movement could not boast of any
signal success. In the more densely peopled districts, and amongst
the middle classes especially, the failure of the thing was often
most ignominious. No sooner were the candles placed upon the
"altar" than the congregation began to thin; and by the time the
"obsolete" rubrics were all admirably observed, the priest
faultlessly arrayed, the service properly intoned, and the entire
"spiritual" machine set in motion, the people were apt to desert
the sacred edifice altogether. It was a pity, doubtless, that,
when such admirable completeness in the ecclesiastical, equipments
had been attained, it should be found that the machine would not
work; that just when the Church became perfect, it should fail for
so insignificant an accident as the want of a congregation. Yet so
it often was. The ecclesiastical play was an admirable rehearsal,
and nothing more. Not but what there are many priests who would
prefer a "full service," and an ample ceremonial in an empty
church, to the simple Gospel in a crowded one; like Handel, who
consoled himself with the vacant benches at one of his oratorios
by saying that "dey made de music sound de ner." And, in truth,
if we adopt to the full the "High Church" theory, perhaps it
cannot much matter whether the people be present or not; the opus
operatum of magic rites and spiritual conjuration may be equally
effectual. The Oxford tracts said ten years ago, "Before the
Reformation, the Church recognized the seven hours of prayer;
however these may have been practically neglected, or hidden
in an unknown tongue, there is no estimating what influence this
may have had on common people's minds secretly." Surely you must
agree that there is no estimating the efficacy of nobody's
hearing services which, if heard by any body, would have been
in an unknown tongue.
I repeat, that the people of England will never yield to Romanism,
--unless, indeed, it shall hereafter be as a reaction from
infidelity; just as infidelity is now spreading as a reaction from
the attempted restoration of Romanism. That England is not prepared
at present is sufficiently shown by the result of the recent
agitation. Could it terminate otherwise? Was it possible that
England, in the nineteenth century, could be brought to adopt the
superstitions of the Middle Age? If she could, she would have
deserved to be left to the consequences of her besotted folly. We
may say, as Milton said, in his day, to the attempted restoration
of superstitions which the Reformers had already cast off; "O, if
we freeze at noon, after their easy thaw, let us fear lest the sun
for ever hide himself, and turn his orient steps from our
ungrateful horizon justly condemned to be eternally benighted."
No, it is not from this quarter that England must look for the
chief dangers which menace religion, except, indeed, as these
dangers are the inevitable, the uniform result of every attempt
to revive the obsolete past. The principal peril is from a subtle
unbelief, which, in various forms, is sapping the religion of our
people, and which, if not checked, will by and by give the Romish
bishops a better title to be called bishops in partibus infidelium
than has always been the case. The attempt to make men believe
too much naturally provokes them to believe too little; and such
has been and will be the recoil from the movement towards Rome.
It is only one, however, of the causes of that widely diffused
infidelity which is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of our
day. Other and more potent causes are to be sought in the
philosophic tendencies of the age, and especially a sympathy, in
very many minds, with the worst features of Continental speculation.
"Infidelity!" you will say. "Do you mean such infidelity as
that of Collins and Bolingbroke, Chubb and Tindal?" Why, we have
plenty of those sorts too, and--worse; but the most charming
infidelity of the day, a bastard deism in fact, often assumes a
different form,--a form, you will be surprised to hear it, which
embodies (as many say) the essence of genuine Christianity! Yes;
be it known to you, that when you have ceased to believe all that
is specially characteristic of the New Testament,--its history,
its miracles, its peculiar doctrine--you may still be a genuine
Christian. Christianity is sublimed into an exquisite thing
called modern "spiritualism." The amount and quality of "faith"
are, indeed, pleasingly diversified when come to examine individual
professors thereof; but it always based upon the principle that
man is a light to himself; that his oracle is within; so clear
either to supersede the necessity--some say even possibility--of
all external revelation in any sense of that term; or, when such
revelation is in some sense allowed, to constitute man the absolute
arbiter how much or how little of it is worthy to be received.
This theory we all perceive, of course, cannot fail to recommend itself
by the well-known uniformity and distinctness of man's religious
notions and the reasonableness of his religious practices! We all
know there has never been any want of a revelation;--of which have
doubtless had full proof among the idolatrous barbarians you
foolishly went to enlighten and reclaim. I wish, however, you had
known it fifteen years ago; I might have had my brother with me
still. It is a pity that this internal revelation--the "absolute
religion," hidden, as Mr. Theodore Parker felicitously phrases it,
in all religions of all ages and nations, so strikingly avouched
by the entire history of world--should render itself suspicions
by little discrepancies in its own utterances among those who
believe in it. Yet so it is. Compared with the rest of the world,
few at the best can be got to believe in the sufficiency of the internal
light and the superfluity all external revelation; and yet hardly
two of the flock agree. It is the rarest little oracle! Apollo
himself might envy its adroitness in the utterance ambiguities.
One man says that the doctrine of "future life" is undoubtedly a
dictate of the "religious sentiment,"--one of the few universal
characteristics of all religion; another declares his "insight"
tells him nothing of the matter; one affirms that the supposed
chief "intuitions" of the "religious faculty"--belief in the
efficacy of prayer, the free will of man, and the immortality of
the soul--are at hopeless variance with intellect and logic; others
exclaim, and surely not without reason, that this casts upon our
faculties the opprobrium of irretrievable contradictions! As for those
"spiritualists"--and they are, perhaps, at present the greater
part--who profess, in some sense, to pay homage to the New Testament,
they are at infinite variance as to how much--whether 7 1/2, 30, or
50 per cent of its records--is to be received. Very few get so far
as the last. One man is resolved to be a Christian,--none more
so,--only he will reject all the peculiar doctrines and all the
supernatural narratives of the New Testament; another declares that
miracles are impossible and "incredible, per se"; a third thinks
they are neither the one nor the other, though it is
true that probably a comparatively small portion of those narrated in
the "book" are established by such evidence as to be worthy of credit.
Pray use your pleasure in the selection; and the more freely, as a
fourth is of opinion that, however true, they are really of little
consequence. While many extol in vague terms of admiration the deep
"spiritual insight" of the founders of Christianity, they do not trouble
themselves to explain how it is that this exquisite illumination left
them to concoct that huge mass of legendary follies and mystical
doctrines which constitute, according to the modern "spiritualism,"
the bulk of the records of the New Testament, and by which its authors
have managed to mislead the world; nor how we are to avoid regarding
them either as superstitious and fanatical fools or artful and
designing knaves, if nine tenths, or seven tenths, of what they record
is all to be rejected; nor, if it be affirmed that they never did
record it, but that somebody else has put these matters into their
mouths, how we can be sure that any thing whatever of the small
remainder ever came out of their mouths. All this, ever, is of the
less consequence, as these gentlemen descend to tell us how we are
to separate the "spiritual" gold which faintly streaks the huge mass
of impure ore of fable, legend, and mysticism. Each man, it seems
has his own particular spade and mattock in his "spiritual faculty";
so off with you to the diggings in these spiritual mines of Ophir. You
will say, Why not stay at home, and be content at once, with the
advocates of the absolute sufficiency of the internal oracle, listen to
its responses exclusively? Ask these men--for I am sure I do not know;
I only know that the results are very different--whether the
possessor of "insight" listens to its own rare voice, or puts on
spectacles and reads aloud from the New Testament. Generally, as I
say, these good folks are resolved that all that is supernatural
and specially inspired in sacred volume is to be rejected; and as
to the rest, which by the way might be conveniently published as
the "Spiritualists' Bible" (in two or three sheets, 48mo, say),
that would still require a careful winnowing; for, while one man
tells us that the Apostle Paul, in his intense appreciation of
the "spiritual element," made light even of the "resurrection of
Christ," and everywhere shows his superiority to the beggarly elements
of history, dogma, and ritual, another declares that he was so
enslaved by his Jewish prejudices and the trumpery he had picked up
at the feet of Gamaliel, that he knew but little or next to nothing
of the real mystery of the very Gospel he preached; that while he
proclaims that it is "revealed, after having been hidden from ages
generations," he himself manages to hide it afresh. This you will be
told is a perpetual process, going on even now; that as all the
"earlier prophets" were unconscious instruments of a purpose beyond
their immediate range of thought, so the Apostles themselves
similarly illustrated the shallowness of their range of thought;
that, in fact, the true significance of the Gospel lay beyond them,
and doubtless also, for the very same reasons, lies beyond us. In
other words, this class of spiritualists tell us that Christianity
is a "development," as the Papists also assert, and the New Testament
its first imperfect and rudimentary product; only, unhappily, as the
development, it seems, may be things so very different as Popery and
Infidelity, we are as far as ever from any criterion as to which, out
of the ten thousand possible developments, is the true; but it is a
matter of the less consequence, since it will, on such reasoning, be
always something future.
"Unhappy Paul!" you will say. Yes, it is no better with him than it
was in our youth some five-and-twenty years ago. Do you not remember
the astute old German Professor in his lecture-room introducing the
Apostle as examining with ever-increasing wonder the various
contradictory systems which the perverseness of exegesis had
extracted from his Epistles, and at length, as he saw one from which
every feature of Christianity had been erased, exclaiming in a
fright, "Was ist das?" But I will not detain you on the vagaries of
the new school of spiritualists. I shall hear enough of them, I have
no doubt, from Harrington; he will riot in their extravagances and
contradictions as a justification of his own scepticism. In very
truth their authors are fit for nothing else than to be recruiting
officers for undisguised infidelity; and this has been the consistent
termination with very many of their converts. Yet, many of them tell
us, after putting men on this inclined plane of smooth ice, that it
is the only place where they can be secure against tumbling into
infidelity, Atheism, Pantheism, Scepticism. Some of Oxford Tractarians
informed us, a little before Crossing the border, that their system
was the surest bulwark against Romanism; and in the same way is this
site "spiritualism", a safeguard against infidelity.
Between many of our modern "spiritualists" and Romanists there is a
parallelism of movement absolutely ludicrous. You may chance to hear
both claiming, with equal fervor, against "intellect" and "logic"
as totally incompetent to decide on "religion" or "spiritual" truth,
and in favor of a "faith" which disclaims all alliance with them. You
may chance hear them both insisting on an absolute submission to
an "infallible authority" other than the Bible; the one external,--that
is, the Pope; the other internal,--that is, "Spiritual Insight"; both
exacting absolute submission, the one to the outward oracle, the
Church, the other to the inward oracle, himself; both insisting that
the Bible is but the first imperfect product of genuine Christianity,
which is perfected by a "development," though as to the direction of
that development they certainly do not agree. Both, if I may judge by
some recent speculations, recoil from the Bible even more than they
do from one another; and both would get rid of it,--one by locking
it up, and the other tearing it to tatters. Thus receding in opposite
directions round the circle, they are found placed side by side at
the same extremity of a diameter, at the other extremity of which
is the--Bible. The resemblances, in some instances, are so striking,
that one is reminded of that little animal, the fresh-water polype,
whose external structure is so absolutely a mere prolongation of
the internal, that you may turn him inside out, and all the
functions of life go on just as well as before.
It is impossible to convey to you an adequate idea of the
bouleversement which has taken place in our religious relations,
--even in each man's little sphere. It is as if the religious
world were a masquerade, where you cease to feel surprise at
finding some familiar acquaintance disguised in the most
fantastical costume. There is our old friend W----, rigorously,
as you know, educated in his old father's Evangelical notions,
ready to be a confessor for the two wax candies, even though
unlighted, and to be a martyr for them if but lighted. His
cousin in the opposite direction has found even the most meagre
naturalism too much for him, and avows himself a Pantheist.
L----, the son, you remember, of an independent minister, is
ready to go nobly to death in defence of the prerogatives of
his "apostolic succession"; and has not the slightest doubts that
he can make out his spiritual genealogy, without a broken link,
from the first Bishop of Rome, downwards!--though, poor fellow,
it would puzzle him to say who was his great-grandfather.
E----, you are aware, has long since joined the Church of Rome,
and has disclosed such a bottomless abyss of "faith," that whole
cart-loads of mediaeval fables, abandoned even by Romanists (who,
by the way, stand fairly aghast at his insatiable appetite), have
not been able to fill it. All the saints in the Roman Hagiography
cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. On the other
hand, his brother has signalized himself by an equal facility of
stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till
at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze
of transparent "spiritualism," that it makes you both shiver and
blush to look at him. Your old acquaintance P----, true to his
youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who
has the "charity which believeth all, things," though certainly
not that which "bareth all things," goes about apologizing for all
religious systems, and finding truth in every thing;--our beloved
Harrington, on the other hand, bewildered by all this confusion,
finds truth--in nothing.
Yet you must not imagine that our religious maladies are at present
more than sporadic; or that the great bulk of our population are at
present affected by them: they still believe the Bible to be the
revealed Word God. Should these diseases ever become epidemic, they
will soon degenerate into a still worse type. Many apostles of
Atheism and Pantheism amongst our classes say (and perhaps truly),
that this modern "spiritualism" is but a transition state. In that
case, you will have to recall, with a deeper meaning, the song of
Byron, which you told me gave you such anguish, as you paced the deck
on the evening in which lost sight of Old England,--"My native land,
night!"
I have sometimes mournfully asked myself, whether the world may not
yet want a few experiments as to whether it cannot get on better
without Christianity and the Bible; but I hope England is not
destined be the laboratory.
I almost envy your happier lot I picture to myself your
unsophisticated folks, just reclaimed from the grossest barbarism
and idolatry, receiving the simple Gospel (as it ought to be
received) with grateful wonder, as Heaven's own method of making man
wise and happy; reverencing the Bible as what it is,--an infallible
guide through this world to a better; "a light shining in a dark
place." They listen with unquestioning simplicity to its disclosures,
which find an echo in their own hearts, and with a reverence which
is due to a volume which has transformed them from savages into men,
and from idolaters into Christians. They are not troubled with doubts
of its authenticity or its divinity; with talk of various readings and
discordant manuscripts; with subtle theories for proving that its
miracles are legends, or its history myths, or with any other of
the infinite vagaries of perverted learning. Neither are they
perplexed with the assurances of those who tell them that, though
divine, the Bible is, in fact, a most dangerous book, and who would
request them, in their new-born enlightenment, to be pleased to shut
their eyes, and to return to a religion of ceremony quite as absurd
and almost as cruel as the polytheism they have renounced. I imagine
you and your little flock in the Sabbath stillness of those mountains
and green valleys, of which you give me such pleasant descriptions,
exhibiting a specimen of a truly primitive Christianity; I imagine
that the peace within is as deep as the tranquillity without.
Yet I know it cannot be; for you and your flock are men,--and that
one word alone suffices to dissolve the charm. You and they have
cares, and worse than cares, which make you like all the rest of
the world; for guilt and sorrow are of no clime, and the "happy
valley" never existed except in the pages of Rasselas. You are,
doubtless, plagued by every now and then finding that some
half-reclaimed cannibal confesses that he has not quite got over
his gloating recollections of the delicacies of his diabolical
cuisine; or that fashionable converts turn with a yearning heart,
not to theatres and balls, but to the "dear remembrance" of the
splendors 'of tattoo and amocos; or that some unlucky wretch who
has not mastered the hideous passions of his old paganism has almost
battered out the brains of a fellow disciple in a sudden paroxysm
of anger; or that some timid soul is haunted with half-subdued
suspicions that some great goggle-eyed idol, with whose worship his
whole existence has been associated, is not, what St Paul declares
it is, absolutely "nothing in world." And then you vex your soul
about these things, and worry yourself with apprehensions lest "you
should have labored in vain and spent your strength for naught"; and
lastly, trouble yourself still more lest you should lose your temper
and your patience into the bargain.
Yes, your scenery is doubtless beautiful, as the sketches you have
sent me sufficiently show; especially that scene at the foot of the
mountain Moraii or Mauroi, for I cannot quite make out the pencil-marks.
But, beautiful as they are, they are not more so than those which greet
my eye even now from my study window. No, there is no fault to be
found with external nature; it is man only who spoils it all. I see
nothing in sun, moon, or stars, in mountain, forest, or stream, that
needs to be altered; we are the blot on this fair world, "O man,"
I am sometimes ready to exclaim, "what a--"; but I check myself,
for as Correggio whispered to himself exultingly, "I also am a painter,"
so I, though with very different feelings, say, "I also am a man."
Johnson said, that every man probably worse of himself than he certainly
knows of most other men; and so I am determined that misanthropy, if
is to be indulged at all, shall, like its opposite charity, "begin
at home."
Yet, now I think better of it, it shall not begin at all; for I
recollect that HE also was a "man," who was infinitely more; who has
penetrated even this cloudy shrine of clay with the effulgence of His
glory and so let me resolve that our common humanity shall be held
sacred for His sake, and pitied for its own. Thus ends my little,
transient fit of spleen, and may it ever end.
May we feel more and more, my dearest brother, the interior presence
of that "guest of guests," that Divine Impersonation of Truth,
Rectitude, and Love, whose image has had more power to soothe and
tranquillize, stimulate and fortify, the human heart, than all the
philosophies ever devised by man; who has not merely left us rules of
conduct, expressed with incomparable force and comprehensiveness,
and illustrated by images of unequalled pathos and beauty; who was
not merely (and yet, herein alone, how superior to all other masters)
the living type of His own glorious doctrine, and affects us as we gaze
upon Him with that transforming influence which the studious
contemplation of all excellence exerts by a necessary law of our
nature; but whose Life and Death include all motives which can enforce
His lessons on humanity;--motives all intensely animated by the
conviction that He is a Living Personality, in communion with our own
spirits, and attracted towards us by all the sympathies of a friendship
truly Divine; "who can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities,
though Himself without sin." May He become so familiar to our souls,
that no suggestions of evil from within, no incursion of evil from
without, shall be so swift and sudden that the thought of Him shall
not be at least as near to our spirits, intercept the treachery of
our infirm nature, and guard that throne which He alone deserves to
fill; till, at every turn and every posture of our earthly life, we
may realize a mental image of that countenance of divine compassion
bent upon us, and that voice of gentle instruction murmuring in our
ears its words of heavenly wisdom; till, whenever tempted to deviate
from the "narrow path," we may hear Him whispering, "Will ye also go
away?" when hated by the world,--"Ye know that it hated me before
it hated you"; when called to perform some difficult duty,--"If ye
love me, keep my commandments"; when disposed to make an idol of any
thing on earth,--"He that loveth father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me"; when in suffering and trial,--"Whom I love I rebuke
and chasten"; when our way is dark,--"What I do thou knowest not now,
but thou shalt know hereafter"; till, a word, as we hear His faintest
footsteps approaching our hearts, and His gentle signal there according
to His own beautiful image, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock,"
our souls may hasten to welcome the heavenly guest.
So may it ever be with you and me! And now I find the very thought
of these things has cured all my dark and turbulent feelings, as
indeed it ever does; and I can say before I go to rest, "O man, my
brother, I am at peace with thee!"
Ah! what an empire is His! How, even at the antipodes, will these
lines touch in your heart a chord responsive to that which vibrates
in mine! .... I go to Harrington in a few days, and as our
conversation (perhaps, alas! our controversies) will turn upon some
of the most momentous religious topics of the day, I shall keep
an exact journal--Boswellize, in fact--for you, as well as I can; and
how well some of my earlier days have practised my memory for this
humble office you know. I shall have a pleasure in this, not only
because you will be glad to hear all I can communicate respecting one
you love so well, but also because in this way, perhaps, I shall in
part fulfil your earnest request to let you know the state of
religion amongst us. You will expect, of course, to find only that
portion of our conversations reported which relates to these
subjects; but I anticipate, in discussing others, some compensation
for the misery which will, I fear, attend the discussion of these.
Thank your convert Outai for his present of his grim idol. It is
certainly "brass for gold," considering what I sent him; but do
not tell him so. If a man gives us his gods, what more can he do?
And yet, it seems, he may be the richer for the loss. Never was
a question more senseless than that of the idolatrous fool,--"Ye
have taken away my gods, and what else have I left?" His godship was
a little injured in his transit; but he was very perfect in
deformity before, and his ugliness could not, by any accident, be
improved. I have put him into a glass case with some stuffed birds, at
which he ogles, with his great eyes, in a manner not altogether divine.
His condition, therefore, is pretty nearly that to which prophecy has
doomed all his tribe; if not cast to the "moles and the bats," it is
to the owls and parrots. I cannot help looking at him sometimes with
a sort of respect as contrasted with his worshippers; for though they
have been fools enough to worship him, he has, at least, not been fool
enough to worship them. Yet even they are better than the Pantheist,
who must regard it and every thing else, himself included, as a
fragment of divinity. I fear that, if I could regard either the Pantheist
or myself as divine, nothing in the world could keep me from blasphemy
every day and all day long.
"Again!" you will say, "my brother; is not that old vein of bitterness
yet exhausted?" But be it known to you that that last sarcasm was
especially for my own behoof. She is a sly jade,--conscience; like
many other folks, she has a trick of expressing her rebukes in
general language; as thus: "What a contemptible set of creatures the
race of men are!"--hoping that some folks will practically take it to
heart. Sometimes I do; and sometimes, I suppose, like my fellows, I look
very grave, and approvingly say, "It is but too true," with the air of
one who philosophically assents to a proposition in which he is totally
uninterested; whereupon conscience becomes outrageous and--personal.
I can easily imagine what you tell me, that you hardly know the
difference between the missionaries of different denominations, and
are very much troubled to remember, at times, which is which. It
is a natural consequence of the relations in which you stand to
heathenism. I fancy the sight of men worshipping an idol with four
heads and twice as many hands must considerably abate impressions of
the importance some of the controversies nearer home. Do you remember
the passage in "Woodstock," in which our old favorite represents the
Episcopalian Rochecliffe and the Presbyterian Holdenough meeting
unexpectedly in prison, after many years of separation, during which
one had thought the other dead? How sincerely glad they were, and
how pleasantly they talked; when lo! an unhappy reference to the
"bishopric of Titus" gradually abated the fervor of their charity,
and inflamed that of their zeal, even till they at last separated in
mutual dudgeon, and sat glowering at each other in their distant
corners with looks in which the "Episcopalian" and "Presbyterian"
were much more evident than the "Christian";--and so they persevered
till the sudden summons to them and their fellow-prisoners, to
prepare for instant execution, dissolved as with a charm the anger
they had felt, and "Forgive me, O my brother," and "I have sinned
against thee, my brother," broke from their lips as they took what
they thought would be a last farewell.