to reproach myself with; and therefore answered steadily, that it was
not for me to judge the degree of blame which attached to his present
state of mind, which I trusted was only transient; that the argument
from sincerity was itself only one of the probable things of which we
had been speaking; that, so subtle are the operations of the human mind,
so mysterious the play of the passions and affections, the reason and
conscience, so intimate the connection amongst all our powers and
faculties, that it is one of the most difficult things to be able to
say, with truth, that we are perfectly sincere; that I did not see
any difficulty in believing that there is many a man who, without
hesitation and without any conscious hypocrisy, would avow his
sincerity, who, upon being suffered to look into his own mind through
a moral solar microscope, would see there all sorts of misshapen
monsters, and turn away from the spectacle with disgust and horror;
that such a microscope (to speak in figure) might one day be applied
by that Power to whom only the human heart is fully known. I added,
however, that, if I knew more of his mental history for some years
past, (into which my affection-should never induce me impertinently
to pry,) I might, perhaps, in some measure, account for his scepticism;
that I could even conceive cases of minds so "encompassed with
infirmity," or so dependent on states of health, as to render such a
state involuntary, and therefore to take them out of the sphere of
our argument. But, apart from some such causes, I plainly told him I
could not permit myself to believe that religious scepticism could be
free from heavy blame, if only on the ground that such as feel it do
not act consistently with its maxims in other cases, where the
evidence is of the same dubious nature, or rather is much more dubious.
The parallel case would be, (if we could find it,) of a man whose
interest urgently required him to act one way or the other, and who,
instead of acting accordingly, sat down in absolute inaction, on the
score that he did not know what course to pursue. That indecision
would be always blamable. "Ah!" said I, "those cool heads and skilful
hands which pilot the little bark of their worldly fortunes amidst
such dangerous rocks and breakers, under such dark and stormy skies,
what can they say, if asked why they gave up all thought of religion
on the score of doubt, when its hopes are at least as high as those of
the schemes of earthly success, and its claims at least as strong as
those of present duty? What will they be able to say?
"O Harrington!" I continued, in some such words as these, "supposing
the draught of our present condition not to be such as I have sketched;
that the sceptical view of the gloom in which we are placed is the true
one, and that the Christian's is false; which, nevertheless, is likely
to be not merely the happier, but the nobler being,--he who sits down
in querulous repining or slothful inactivity, as the result of doubt,
or he who, buoyant with faith and hope, encounters the gloom, and,
while longing for the dawn, is confident that it will come? But if
that sketch be a true one,--if the trial of which I have spoken be
necessary for you and for all, to develop and discipline those qualities
which alone will elicit and mature an Immortal Virtue, and secure to us
at last the privilege of indefectible 'children of God,'--then with
what feelings will you hear the Great Master say, 'In every other case
but this, you acted on the principles and maxims by which I taught
you (not obscurely) that I summoned you to act in this case also:
doubts and difficulties were necessary to you as to all, and I
exacted of you no more than were necessary ultimately to secure for
you an eternal exemption from them. But because you could not have
that certainty which the very necessity of the case excluded, you
declined the trial, and have accounted yourself unworthy of eternal
life!' Ah! how different if you could hear him say, 'It was indeed a
temptation; amidst numberless blessings denied to others, I yet
gave you, too, your trial;--the questionable talent of an inquisitive
intellect, and leisure to use or abuse it. Tempted to absolute doubt,
you would not succumb to it; you would not be so inconsistent here
as to relinquish those maxims on which I compelled you to act in
every other case in life, nor deny to ME the confidence which you
granted to every common friend! Warned by the very misery which was
sent to caution you that in that direction lay death, you struggled
against the incursions of your subtle foes, and you overcame. Welcome,
child of clay! welcome to that world in which there is no more NIGHT!'"
We had been talking on till long past midnight; and the lamp suddenly
warned us that its light was just expiring. Harrington took off the
shade, and was about to light a candle by the dying flame, when it
went out. "It matters not," he said, "I have the means of kindling a
light close at hand." "Let it alone," said I, rising, and gently laying
my hand on his arm, and speaking in a low voice, but with much
earnestness; "this darkness is an emblem of our present life. You
cannot see me, but you hear my voice and feel the touch of my hand. For
any thing you know, I may be seized with a sudden fit of insanity. I may
be about to stab you in this darkness; such things have been. You have
lost, with the light, more than half the indications of affection which
that would disclose. But you trust to the probable; your pulse does not
beat any the quicker, nor do your nerves tremble. You may have similar,
nay, how much stronger proofs (if you will) of the confidence with which
you may trust God, and Him, the compassionate One, "whom he hath sent,"
in spite of all the gloom in which this life is involved. That certainty
for which you have just now asked will only be granted when the darkness
is passed away; and then you will 'rejoice in the light of his
countenance.' And, further," I continued, "there is yet one thing which
I wish to say to you; and I feel as if I could say it better in this
darkness; for I will not venture to say that I should not manifest more
feeling than is consistent in a hard-hearted metaphysician. Yes! it
is on the side of feeling that I would also address you. You will say,
feeling is not argument? No; but is man all reason? I firmly believe,
indeed, that man is not called upon to do any thing for which his
reason does not tell him that he has sufficient evidence; but a part
of that very evidence is often the dictate of feeling; and genuine
reason will listen to the heart, as not always, nor perhaps more
frequently than otherwise, a suspicious pleader. If, as Pascal says
so truly, it sometimes has its reasons which the reason cannot
comprehend, it has also its reasons which the reason thoroughly
understands.
"You were early an orphan; you do not remember your mother; but I do;
ah, how well! I saw her the last time she ever saw you. You were
brought to her bedside when she was in the full possession of all
her faculties, and deeply conscious that she had not many hours to
live. She looked at you as you were held in your nurse's arms, smiling
upon her with to me an agonizing unconsciousness of your approaching
orphanage. She gazed upon you with that intense look of inexpressible
affection which only maternal love, sharpened by death, can give; she
looked long and earnestly, but spoke not one syllable. As you were at
length taken from the room, she followed you with her eyes till the
door closed, and then it seemed as if the light of this world had been
quenched in them for ever. 'I charge you,' she said at length, 'let
me see him again.' I made a motion as if to recall the attendant
'Not here,' she added, laying her hand gently on my arm, and I
understood her but too well. You know whether I have in any degree
fulfilled my trust. But is it possible that I can think of an utter
failure, and not be more than troubled? And if Christianity be true,
and if I am so happy as to obtain admission to that 'blessed country
into which an enemy never entered, and from which a friend never went
away,' and she whom I loved so well should ask me why you come
not,--that she had tarried for you long,--must I say that you will
never come? that her child had wandered from the fold of the Good
Shepherd, and had gone I knew not whither? that I sought him in the
lonely glens and mountains, but found him not? I hardly know, but I
almost think--such was the love she had for you--that such reply
would shade that radiant face even amidst the glories of Paradise.
And now--let all this be a dream--suppose that not simply by your
own fault you will never see that mother more, but that from the sad
truth of your no truth--you never can; that the 'Vale, vale, in
aeternum, vale,' is all that you can say to her: yet I say this,--that
to live only in the hope of the possibility of fulfilling the better
wishes of such a friend, and rejoining her for ever in (if you will)
the fabulous 'islands of the blest,' would not only make you a happier,
but even a nobler, being than your present mood can ever make you.
My FABULOUS is better than your TRUE."
I felt that he was not unmoved. I was myself moved too much to allow
me to stay any longer, and saying that I could find my way very well
to my chamber in the dark, where I had the means of kindling a light,
I softly closed the door and left him.
____
As I was to leave very early in the morning, I had told Harrington
that I should depart for the neighboring town (whither his servant
was to drive me) without disturbing him. But I could not tear myself
away, after the singular close of our interview on the last evening,
without a more express farewell. I tapped at his chamber door, but,
receiving no reply, gently entered. He was resting in unquiet slumber.
A table, lamp, and books, by his bedside, bore witness to his
perseverance in that pernicious habit which he had early formed! I
gently drew back one of the curtains, and let in the light of the
summer morning on his pallid, but most speaking features, and gazed
on them with a sad and foreboding feeling. I recalled those days
when I used nightly to visit the slumbers of the little orphan, and
trace in his features the image of his mother. He was not aroused by
my entrance; most likely he had sunk to slumber at a late hour.
Presently he began to talk in his sleep, which was almost a constant
habit in his younger days, and which I used to consider one of the
symptoms of that intense cerebral activity by which he was
distinguished. On the present occasion I thought I could interpret
the fitful and fleeting images which were chasing each other by the
laws of association through his mind. "But how shall I know that
these thing which I call real, are different from the phenomena
of sleep which I call real?" Alas! thought I, the ruling passion
is strong in sleep, as in waking moments! How I dread lest it should
be strong "in death" itself, of which this sleep is the image! After
a pause, an expression of deepest sadness crept over the features,
and he murmured, with a slight alteration, two lines from Coleridge's
translation of that glorious scene in which Wallenstein looks forth
into the windy night in search of his "star," and thinks of that
brighter light of his life which had been just extinguished.
Harrington used to say, that he preferred the translation of that
scene even to the magnificent original itself. These lines, (now a
little varied,) I had often heard him quote with delight:--
"Methinks
If I but saw her, 't would be well with me;
She was the star of my nativity."
Was he, by the magic of dream-land, transported back to childhood? Was
he as an orphan child thinking of his mother, the image of whose dying
hours I had so recently called up before him? Or was it the
recollection of a still brighter and more recently extinguished "star,"
which thus troubled his wandering fancy?--There was another pause, and
again the fitful breeze of association awakened the sad and plaintive
melody of the AEolian lyre; but I could not distinguish the words.
Presently the scene again changed; and he suddenly said, "Beautiful
shadow! if thou art a shadow,--thou hast said, Come to me all ye
that are weary,--and surely if ever man was weary--To whom can I
go--" It was with intense feeling that I watched for something more;
but to my disappointment, (I may almost call it anguish,) he continued
silent. I could not find it in my heart to rouse him, and, softly
leaving the chamber, departed for home.
____
October 31. The young Sceptic has since gone where doubts are solved
for ever; but I am not without hope, that in his last hours he was
able to finish the sentence which his dream-left incomplete. "To
whom can I go, but unto Thee? THOU ONLY HAST THE WORDS OF ETERNAL LIFE."
For me, I have nothing more to live for here. In a few weeks I gladly
go to join my brother in his distant exile;--and for Thee, my Country,
"Peace be within thy dwellings, and prosperity within thy palaces!"
And that it may be so, may that Christianity, which, all imperfectly
as it has been exemplified, has yet been thy Palladium and thy Glory,
be ever and increasingly dear to thee!
____
December 27. I have resolved that the fragments which originally
constituted this journal shall not be destroyed. I have employed the
interval since the last date in adapting and disguising them
for publication. How far an embroidery of fiction has been necessary
in attaining this object, is a matter of no consequence to any one;
since the book aspires to none of the appropriate attractions of
either a novel or a history. No doubt a much stronger interest, of
a certain kind, might have been secured by a free employment of
fictitious embellishment, or even by a more liberal indulgence in
biographical details. But I have been content, for a special object,
to do what some tell us is to be done with the Bible,--to separate,
from the mass of incident which might have varied or adorned the
narrative the exclusively "Religious Element." If the discussions
in the preceding pages shall in any instance convince the youthful
reader of the precarious nature of those modern book-revelations
which are somewhat inconsistently given us in books which tell us
that all book-revelations of religious truth are superfluous or
even impossible; if they shall convince him how easily an impartial
doubter can retort with interest the deistical arguments against
Christianity, or how little merely insoluble objections can avail
against any thing; if they shall convince him that the differences
with which the assailants of the Bible taunt its advocates are
neither so numerous nor half so appalling as those which divide
its enemies; or, lastly, if they shall, par avarice, in any degree
protect those who, like Harrington D----, are being made, or are
in danger of being made, sceptical as to all religious truth, by the
religious distractions of the present day,--I shall be well content
to bear the charge of having spoiled a Fiction, or even of having
mutilated a Biography.
F.B.
THE END.