and he quotes the rest of the famous passage in "Measure for Measure,"
adding for himself: "Put us anywhere, but only let us live; and we could
feel with Lear, when he says to Cordelia,--
Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage."
Then, too, there come to us the tender and overpowering moments
when we can no longer put up with being separated from beloved
objects, who tore at the grain of our life when they went away
elsewhere, with portions of it clinging to them. We must have them
again. Shall life be stabbed and no justice compensate these
sickening drippings of the soul in her secret faintness? The old
familiar faces have registered in our hearts a contempt for graves
and burials. Not so cheaply can we be taken in, when the lost life
lies quick in memory still, and cries against the insults which
mortality wreaks on love.
Is not this an exclamation of temperament?
John Weiss was essentially a poet. His pages are saturated with poetry.
His very arguments are expressed in poetic imagery. To take two or three
examples:
One who rides from South-west Harbor to Bar Harbor in Mt. Desert
will see a grove in which the pines stand so close that all the
branches have withered two-thirds of the way up the trunks, and are
nothing but dead sticks, broken and dangling. But every tree bears
close, each to each, its evergreen crown; and they seem to make a
floor for the day to walk on. This pavement for the feet of heaven,
more precious than the fancied one of the New Jerusalem, stretches
all round the world, above the thickets of our spiny egotism, where
people run up into the only coherence upon which it is safe for
Deity to tread.
Or this about the poet's inspired hour:
Through flat and unprofitable moments, a poet is waiting for the
next consent of his imagination. The bed of every gift, that lately
sparkled or thundered as the freshet of the hills sent its
surprises down, lies empty, waiting for the master passion to open
the sluice when it hears the steps of coming waves. The poet's
nature strains against the dumb gates of his body and his mood.
With power and longing he hears them open, and is brim full again
with the rhythm that collects from the whole face of Nature,--the
hillside, the ravine, the drifting cloud, the vapors just arrived
from the ocean, the drops that flowers nod with to flavor the
stream, the human smiles that colonize both banks of it. All
passions, all delights hurry to possess his thought, crowd into the
precincts of his person, pain him with the tumult in which they
offer him obedience, remind him of his last joy in their
companionship, and will not let him go till he ennobles them by
bursting into expression. Relief flows down with every perfect
word; the congested soul bleeds into the lyric and the canto; the
poet's burden becomes light-hearted, and the supreme moment of his
travail, when it breaks in showers of his emotion, cools and
comforts him; he must die or express himself. All the blood in the
earth's arteries is running through his heart; all the stars in the
sky are set in his brain's dome. This light and life must be
discharged into a word, and the poet restored to health and peace
again.
Or the following rhapsody about health:
What a religious ecstasy is health! Its free step claims every
meadow that is glad with flowers; its bubbling spirits fill the cup
of wide horizons and drip down their brims; its thankfulness is the
prayer that takes possession of the sun by day and the stars by
night. Every dancing member of the body whirls off the soul to
tread the measures of great feelings, and God hears people saying:
"How precious also are thy thoughts, how great is the sum of them!
When I awake, I am still with thee." Yes,--when I awake, but not
before; not while the brain is saturated with nervous blood, till
it falls into comatose doctrines, and goes maundering with its
attack of mediatorial piety and grace; not while a stomach depraved
by fried food, apothecary's drugs, and iron-clad pastry (that
target impenetrable by digestion) supplies the constitution with
its vale of tears, ruin of mankind, and better luck hereafter. When
all my veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of my eyes
the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore; when the
roaming gifts come home from Nature to turn the brain into a hive
of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of
the earth beneath and the heavens above,--then I am the subject of
a Revival of Religion.
Or these passages about music, of which he was always a devoted lover,
a passionate admirer, an excellent critic. My first extract is used to
illustrate the doctrine of evolution, and suggests Browning's poem of
"Abt Vogler." It should be said, by the way, that Weiss was a great
student of Browning, whose lines in "Paracelsus," prophetic of the
evolution doctrine, was often on his lips. He even understood
"Sordello."
The divine composer, summoning instrument after instrument into his
harmony, climbed with his theme from those which offered but a
single note to those that exhaust the complexity of thought and
feeling, to combine them into expression, kindling through hints,
phrases, sudden concords, mustering consents of many wills,
releases of each one's felicity into comradeship, till the sweet
tumult becomes his champion, and bursts into an acclaim of a whole
world. "I ought--so then I will." The toppling instruments concur,
become the wave that touches that high moment, lifts the whole
deep, and holds it there.
When perfect music drives its golden scythe-chariot up the fine
nerves, across the bridge of association, through the stern
portcullis of care, and alights in the heart of man, there is
adoration, whether he faints with excess of recognition of one long
absent, and lies prostrate in the arms of rhythm, feeling that he
is not worthy it should come under his roof, or whether he mounts
the seat and grasps the thrilling reins; God's unity is riding
through his distraction, brought by that team of all the
instruments which shake their manes across the pavement of his
bosom, and strike out the sparks of longing.
In calling Mr. Weiss essentially a poet, I am far from implying that
he was not a thinker. Perhaps he was more subtle and more brilliant a
thinker for being also a poet--that is, for seeing truth through the
medium of the imagination, for following the path of analogy. At any
rate, his being a poet did not in the least interfere with the acuteness
or the precision of his thinking, as any one can see who reads his
chapters--those, for example, which compose the volume entitled
"American Religion." I had marked for citation so many passages that it
would be necessary to quote half the book to illustrate my thesis. When
I first knew him, he was a strict Transcendentalist. Dr. Orestes
Brownson, no mean judge on such matters, spoke of him as the most
promising philosophical mind in the country. To a native talent for
metaphysics, his early studies at Heidelberg probably contributed
congenial training. His knowledge of German philosophy may well have
been stimulated and matured by his residence in that centre of active
thought; while his intimacy, on his return, with the keenest intellects
in this country may well have sharpened his original predilection for
abstract speculation. However this may have been, the tendency of his
genius was decidedly toward metaphysical problems and the interpretation
of the human consciousness. This he erected as a barrier against
materialism; and this he probed with a depth and a fearlessness which
were truly extraordinary, and would have been remarkable in any disciple
of the school to which he belonged. No one that I can think of was so
fine, so profound, so analytical. His volume on "American Religion" was
full of nice discriminations; so was his volume on the "Immortal Life";
so were his articles and lectures. His "Life of Theodore Parker"
abounded in curious learning as well as in vigorous thinking. He could
follow, step by step, the great leader of reformatory ideas, and went
far beyond him in subtlety and accuracy of mental delineation. He could
not rest in sentiment, must have demonstration, and never stopped till
he reached the ultimate ground of truth as he regarded it. Ideas, when
he found them, were usually, not always, expressed in symbolical forms.
His alert fancy detected likenesses that would have been concealed from
common eyes; and often the splendor of the exposition hid the keenness
of the logical temper, as a sword wreathed with roses lies unperceived.
But the tempered steel was there and they who examined closely felt its
edge.
He was a man of undaunted courage, being an idealist who lived out of
the world, and a living soul animated by overwhelming convictions, which
he was anxious to convey to others as of immense importance. He
believed, with all his heart, in the doctrines he had arrived at, and,
like a soldier in battle, was unconscious of the danger he incurred or
of the wounds he received, being unaware of his own daring or fortitude.
He was an anti-slavery man from the beginning. At a large meeting held
in Waltham in 1845, to protest against the admission of Texas as a slave
State, Mr. Weiss, then a minister at Watertown, Mass., delivered a
speech in which he said: "Our Northern apathy heated the iron, forged
the manacles, and built the pillory," declared that man was more than
constitutions (borrowing a phrase from James Russell Lowell), and that
Christ was greater than Hancock and Adams. To his unflinching devotion
to free thought in religion, he owed something of his unpopularity with
the masses of the people, who were orthodox in opinion, though his
failure to touch the general mind was probably due to other causes. The
class of disbelievers was pretty large in his day and very
self-asserting. Boldness never fails to attract; and brilliancy, if it
be on the plane of ordinary vision, draws the eyes of the multitude, who
are on the watch for a sensation.
The chief trouble was that his brilliancy was not on the plane of
ordinary vision, but was recondite, ingenious, fanciful. He was too
learned, too fond of allusions--literary, scientific, historical,--too
swift in his mental processes. His addresses were delivered to an
audience of his friends, not to a miscellaneous company. They were of
the nature of soliloquies spoken out of his own mind, instead of being
speeches intended to meet the needs of others. His lectures and sermons
were not easy to follow, even if the listener was more than usually
cultivated. Shall it be added that his sincerity of speech, running into
brusqueness, startled a good many? He was theological and philosophical,
and he could not keep his hands off when what he considered as errors in
theology or philosophy came into view. His wit was sharper than he
thought, while the laugh it raised was frequently overbalanced by the
sting it left behind in some breasts. It was too often a "wicked wit,"
barbed and poisoned, which one must be in league with to enjoy. They who
were in sympathy with the speaker were delighted with it, but they who
were not went off aggrieved. No doubt this attested the earnestness of
the man, who scorned to cloak his convictions; but it wounded the
self-love of such as were in search of pleasure or instruction, and
interfered with his general acceptableness. A broad, genial,
good-natured, truculent style of ventilating even heresies may not be
repulsive to people of a conventional, believing turn; in fact, it is
not, as we know. But the thrusts of a rapier, especially when
unexpected, are not forgiven. Mr. Weiss drew larger audiences as a
preacher on religious themes than he did as a lecturer on secular
subjects, where one hardly knew what to look for, because he was known
to be outspoken and capable of introducing heresies on the platform.
Then he was in all respects unconventional. His spontaneous exuberance
of animal spirits, which led him to roll on the grass, join in
frolicsome games, play all sorts of antics, indulge in jokes, mimicry,
boisterous mirthfulness, was inconsistent with the staid, proper
demeanor required by social usage. How he kept himself within limits as
he did was a surprise to his friends. Ordinary natures can form no
conception of the weight such a man must have put upon his temperament
to press it down to the level of common experience. Temptations to which
he was liable every day do not visit average minds in their whole
lifetime, and cannot by such minds be comprehended. The stiff, upright,
careful old man cannot understand the jocund pliability of the boy, who,
nevertheless, simply expends the superfluity of his natural vigor, and
relieves his excess of nervous excitability. On thinking it all over,
remembering his appetite for life, his joy in existence, his nervous
exhilaration, his love of beauty, his passionate ardor of temperament, I
am surprised that he preserved, as he did, so much dignity and soberness
of character. I have seen him in his wildest mood, yet I never saw him
thrown off his balance. With as much brilliancy as Sydney Smith, he had,
as Sydney Smith had not, a breadth of knowledge, a depth of feeling, a
soaring energy of soul that kept him above vulgar seductions, and did
for him, in a nobler way, what ambition, love of place, conventional
associations did for the famous Englishman.
The difficulty was that he was too far removed from the common ground
of sympathy. He could not endure routine, or behave as other people
behaved, and as it was generally fancied he should. If Sydney Smith's
jocularity interfered with his promotion, how much more did he have to
contend with who to the jocularity added an enthusiastic devotion to
heresy, a partiality for metaphysical speculation, and a poetic glow
that removed him from ordinary comprehension! With an unworldliness
worthy of all praise, but fatal to the provision of daily bread, he left
the ministry, a fixed income, a confirmed social position, ample leisure
for study and for literary pursuits, and launched forth on the uncertain
career of lecturer. He was not the first who failed in attempting to
harness Pegasus to a cart, in the hope of making him useful in mundane
ways. Neither discharged his full function. The cart would not run
smoothly, and the steed was not happy. The old profession has this
advantage: that to all practical purposes, the wagon goes over the
celestial pavement where there is no mud nor clangor, and Pegasus can
seem to be harnessed to a chariot of the sun.
Weiss simply disappeared from view. His books were scattered; his
lectures and sermons were worked over and over, the best of them being
published in his several volumes. A few relics of the author remain in
the hands of his widow, who is grateful for any recognition of his
genius, any help to diffuse his writings, and tribute to his memory.
They who knew him can never forget him. Perhaps the very vividness of
their recollection makes them indifferent to the possession of visible
memorials of their friend.
Samuel Johnson should be known as the apostle of individualism. The
apostle I say, for this with him was a religion, and the preaching of
individualism was a gospel message. He would not belong to any church,
or subscribe to any creed, or connect himself with any sect, or be a
member of any organization whatever, however wide or elastic, however
consonant with convictions that he held, with beliefs that he
entertained, with purposes that he cherished, with plans that were dear
to him. He never joined the "Anti-Slavery Society," though he was an
Abolitionist; or the "Free Religious Association," though its aims were
essentially his own, and he spoke on its platform. He made it a
principle to act alone, herein being a true disciple of Emerson, whose
mission was to individual minds. He wrote a long letter to me on the
occasion of establishing the "Free Religious Association," of which I
wished him to become a member, that recalls the letter written by Mr.
Emerson in reply to George Ripley when asked to join the community of
Brook Farm, and whereof the following is an extract:
My feeling is that the community is not good for me, that it has
little to offer me which with resolution I cannot procure for
myself.... It seems to me a circuitous and operose way of relieving
myself to put upon your community the emancipation which I ought to
take on myself. I must assume my own vows.... I ought to say that I
do not put much trust in any arrangements or combinations, only in
the spirit which dictates them. Is that benevolent and divine, they
will answer their end. Is there any alloy in that, it will
certainly appear in the result.... Nor can I insist with any heat
on new methods when I am at work in my study on any literary
composition.... The result of our secretest attempts will certainly
have as much renown as shall be due to it.
Johnson ended by discarding the church entirely. In 1881 he wrote:
For my part, every day I live the name _Christian_ seems less and
less to express my thought and tendency. I suspect it will be so
with the Free-thinking world generally.
In a sermon, "Living by Faith," he says:
There is no irony so great as to call this "flight out of nature"
and the creeds that come of it, "faith." The purity of heart that
really sees God will have a mighty idealization of humanity at the
very basis of its creed, and act on it in all its treatment of the
vicious, the morally incapable and diseased. It is time Christendom
was on the search for it.
In the paper on "Transcendentalism," he says:
Christianity inherited the monarchical idea of a God separate from
man, and a contempt for natural law and human faculty which
crippled its faith in the spiritual and moral ideal. It became more
and more a materialism of miracle, Bible, church. Even its essay to
realize immanent Deity yielded a more or less exclusive,
mediatorial God-man; and it treated personality as the mere
consequence of one prescriptive, historical force, just as
philosophical materialism treats it as mere product of sensations.
Mr. Johnson abhorred the monarchical principle. It was his endeavor to
track it from its origin, through all its forms of institution,
ceremonial, dogma, symbol, from the earliest times to the latest,
through the whole East to the farthest West. This was the burden of his
studies in Oriental religions, the sum of his criticism, the aim of his
public teaching. He was profoundly, intensely, absorbingly religious,
but the form of his religion was not "Christian" in any recognized
sense, Romanist, Protestant, or Unitarian. The most radical thought did
not altogether please him. His was a worship of Law, Order, Cause,
Harmony, impersonal, living, natural; a recognition of mind as the
supreme power in the universe; a cosmic, eternal, absolute faith in
intellectual principles as the substance and soul of the world. God was,
to him, a spiritual being, alive, vital, flowing in every mode.
All power of growth and service depends, know it or not as we may,
on an ideal faith in somewhat all-sufficient, unerring, infinitely
wise and tender, inseparable from the inmost of life, bent on our
good as we are not, set against our failures as we cannot be. It
means that there can in fact be no philosophy of life, no law of
good, no belief in duty, no aspiration, but must have such
in-dwelling perfection, as being alone reliable to guarantee its
word. This only is my God; infinite ground of all finite being;
essence of reason and good.... When you see a function of memory,
or a law of perfection, let your natural piety recognize it as wise
and just and good and fair. Be loyal to the moral authority that
affirms it ought to be, and somehow must be. Let your _soul_ bring
in the leap of your mind to grasp it. Then, if you cannot see God
in perfect, absolute essence, you will know the Infinite and
Eternal in their relation to real and positive existence; feel
their freedom in your own; know their inseparableness from every
movement of your spiritual being.... The love we feel, the truth we
pursue, the honor we cherish, the moral beauty we revere, blend in
with the eternity of the principles they flow from, and then, glad
as in the baptism of a harvest morning, expanding towards human
need and the universal life of man, our souls walk free, breathing
immortal air. That is God,--not an object but an experience. Words
are but symbols, they do not define. We say "Him," "It" were as
well, if thereby we mean life, wisdom, love.... Must we bind our
communion with the just, the good, the true, the humanly adequate
and becoming to some personal life, some special body of social
circumstances, some individual's work in human progress and upon
human idealism? How should that be, when the principles into which
the moral sense flowers out in its maturity as spiritual liberty,
essentially involve a freely advancing ideal at every new stage
revealing more of God, whom nothing but such universal energy can
adequately reveal?... If then, we cannot see the eternal substance
and life of the universe, it is not because Deity is too far, but
because it is too near. We can measure a statue or a star, and look
round and beyond it; but the Life, Light, Liberty, Love, Peace,
whereby we live and know, and are helpful and calm and free, which
measures and surrounds and even animates us, is itself the very
mystery of our being, and known only as felt and lived. God stands
in all ideal thought, conviction, aim, which ever reach into the
infinite; and thence, as if an angel should stand in the sun, come
attractions that draw forth the divine capabilities within us, as
the sun the life and beauty of the earth. God is the inmost motive,
the common path, the infinite import of all work we respect, honor,
purely rejoice in, and fulfil; of art, science, philosophy,
intercourse,--whatsoever function befits the soul and the day.
These quotations, which might be multiplied indefinitely, in fact,
which it is difficult not to multiply, are probably enough to satisfy
any who really wish to know that here was a truly religious man, a
really devout man, the possessor of a living faith; one who held fast to
more Deity than the multitude cherished, and welcomed him in a much more
cordial, comprehensive, natural manner; one who fairly drenched the
world and man with a divine spirit, but who was all the more spiritual
on this account, as a man attests his vigor by his ability to lay aside
his crutches, and put the medicine-chest, bottles, and boxes on the
shelf, to walk in cold weather without an overcoat, or lie naked on the
ice and melt it through.
Of course, the only justification of a pretension of this kind is the
actual vitality necessary for such a feat, the sanity demanded by one
who would stand or go alone. In Samuel Johnson's case there was no
question of this. Spiritually, he was a whole man, self-poised,
self-contained, strong, clear, alert, a hero and a saint. His
conversation, his bearing, conduct, entire attitude and manner indicated
the most jubilant faith. He never faltered in his confidence, never
wavered in his conviction, never abated a jot of hope that in the order
of Providence all good things would come. There was something staggering
to the ordinary mind, in his assurance of the divine wisdom and love.
There was something altogether admirable in the elevation of his
character above the trials and vexations that are incident to the human
lot, and that seemed heaped upon him. For his own was not a smooth or
fortunate life, as men estimate felicity. His health was far from
satisfactory. He was not rich or famous or popular or sought after. He
lived a life of labor, in some respects, of denial and sacrifice. Not
until after his death was the full amount of his renunciation apparent
even to those who thought they knew him well.
He was a Transcendentalist--that is to say, he believed in the intuitive
powers of the mind; he was sure that all primary truths, such ideas as
those of unity, universe, law, cause, substance, will, duty, obligation,
permanence, were perceived directly, and are not to be accounted for by
any data of observation or inference, but must be ascribed at once to an
organic or constitutional relation of the mind with truth.
That the name "Transcendentalism" was given, a century ago, to a
method in philosophy opposed to the theory of Locke--that all
knowledge comes from the senses,--is more widely known than the
fact that what this method affirmed or involved is of profound
import for all generations. It emphasized Mind as a formative force
behind all definable contents or acts of consciousness--as that
which makes it possible to speak of anything as _known_. It
recognized, as primal condition of knowing, the transmutation of
sense-impressions by original laws of mind, whose constructive
power is not to be explained or measured by the data of sensation;
just as they use the eye or ear to transform unknown spatial
notions into the obviously human conceptions which we call color
and sound. All this the Lockian system overlooked--a very serious
omission, as regards both science and common-sense.
And again, in the same article--that on "Transcendentalism," first
printed in the _Radical Review_ for November, 1877, and afterwards
included in the volume of "Lectures, Sermons, and Essays":
What we conceive these schools to have misprized is the living
substance and function of mind itself, conscious of its own energy,
productive of its own processes, active even in receiving, giving
its own construction to its incomes from the unknown through sense,
thus involved in those very contents of time and space which, as
historical antecedents, _appear_ to create it; mind is obviously
the exponent of forces more spontaneous and original than any
special product of its own experience. Behind all these products
must be that substance in and through which they are produced.
And again, for we cannot be too explicit on this point:
It is certain that knowledge involves not only a sense of union
with the nature of that which we know, but a real participation of
the knowing faculty therein. When, therefore, I have learned to
conceive truths, principles, ideas, or aims which transcend
life-times and own no physical limits to their endurance, the
aforesaid law of mind associates me with their immortal nature. And
this is the indubitable perception or intuition of permanent mind
which no experience of impermanence can nullify and no Nirvana
excludes.
It will be observed that Mr. Johnson does not make himself answerable
for specific articles of belief on God or immortality, but confines his
faith to the persuasion of indwelling mind, sovereign, eternal,
imperial. "Immortality," he says, "is immeasurable chance for all. In
its light, all strong, blameless, heroic lives--divine plants by the
wayside--tell for the nature they express. God has made no blunder in
our spiritual constitution. Power is in faith." This intense belief in
the soul, in all the native capacities of our spiritual constitution, in
the supremacy of organic feelings, ideas, expectations over merely
private desires, this burning confidence in divinely implanted
instincts, this absolute certainty that every promise made by God will
be fulfilled, explains the tone of exulting hope in which he writes to
bereaved friends.
I wish I could tell you how firmly I believe that feelings like
these (that the absent one cannot be dead), so often treated as
illusion, are _true_, are of God's own tender giving; that in them
is the very heart of his teaching through the mystery that we call
death. Our affections are _forbidden by their maker_ to doubt their
own immortality.... Immortal years, beside which our little lives
are but an hour--what possibilities of full satisfaction they open!
And we sit in patience, knowing that they must bring us back our
holiest possessions--those which have ever stood under the shield
of our noblest love and conscience and so are under God's blessing
forever.
How far such a declaration as this comports with the demand for general
immortality made in behalf of those who are conscious of no noble love,
who have attained to no conscience, and have no holy possessions, we are
not told. Perhaps Mr. Johnson would seize on the faintest intimations of
mind as evidencing the presence of moral being, as Mr. Weiss does. But
he did not dwell on that side of the problem. Plainly he ascribed little
value to mere personality, viewed abstractly and apart from its
spiritual development. He wrote to those whom he knew and loved, to
remarkable people.
Yet it would not be fair to conclude that immortality was denied to the
basest. If immortality is "opportunity," a "chance for all," it is for
those who can profit by it or enjoy it. If any are debarred, the cause
must be their own incompetence. They simply decease. There is no torment
in store for them; no hell is possible.
Samuel Johnson was an enthusiastic evolutionist, but of mind itself, not
of matter as ripening into mind. The ordinary conception of
evolution,--that the higher came from the lower,--was exceedingly
repugnant to him. Every kind of materialism he abhorred as illogical and
irrational. The theories of Comte,--that "mind is cerebration;" of
Haeckel,--that it is a "function of brain and nerve;" of Strauss,--that
"one's self is his body;" of Taine,--that a man is "a series of
sensations," were to him as absurd, in science or philosophy, as they
were fatal to aspiration and progress.
The crude definition of evolution as production of the highest by
inherent force of the lowest is here supplanted by one which
recognizes material parentage as itself involving, even in its
lowest stages, the entire cosmic _consensus_, of whose unknown
force mind is the highest known exponent.
He is alluding to Tyndall's statement that mind is evolved from the
universe as a whole, not from inorganic matter. For himself, he says:
Ideas were not demonstrated, are not demonstrable. No data of
observation can express their universal meaning.... What else can
we say of ideas than that they are wondrous intimacies of the soul
with the Infinite and Eternal, its contacts with universal forces,
its prophetic ventures and master steps beyond any past!... The
grand words, "I ought" refuse to be explained by dissolving the
notion of right into individual calculation of consequences, or by
expounding the sense of duty as the cumulative product of observed
relation of succession.... How explain as a "greater happiness
principle," or an inherited product of observed consequences, that
sovereign and eternal law of mind whose imperial edict lifts all
calculations and measures into functions of an infinite meaning?
And how vain to accredit or ascribe to revelation, institution, or
redemption, this necessary allegiance to the law of our being,
which is liberty and loyalty in one?
This is absolute enough. It is plain that to this writer the notion of
extracting intellect from form is ridiculous.
At the same time the method of evolution is the one adopted by the
supreme Mind in its endeavor to awaken in man religious ideas. The
exposition of the original faiths--Indian, Chinese, Persian--is a long
and eloquent argument for this thesis. All criticism, all thinking, all
analysis, all study of history, all investigation of phenomena, point in
this direction. This is the rule of creation; this is the solution of
the problem of the universe. The successive degrees of this divine
ascent, he maintains, are distinctly traceable in the records left for
our reading. The threads are fine, of course, but what have we eyes for?
It is not necessary that everybody should see them, and the few who can
are amply rewarded for the trouble they take in putting their fingers
upon the very lines of the heavenly procedure. His peculiar strain of
genius admirably qualified him for this delicate task. It was serious,
critical, earnest, and aspiring. At one period of his life he was a
mystic, wholly absorbed in God, and he always had that tendency towards
the more passionate forms of idealism which led him to mystical
speculations. The search for God was ever the animating purpose of his
endeavor. The law of the blessed life was never absent from his thought.
He, all the time, lived by faith, and was naturally disposed to see the
gain in all losses. His mind had that penetrating quality which loved to
follow hidden trails, and appreciated the subtlest kinds of influence.
In a striking passage he speaks of the
great mystery in these influences which thoughtless people little
dream of, and which common-sense, so called, cares nothing about.
In the wonderful manner in which, through books, the spirits of
other men, long since dead, enter into and inspire ours; in the
eloquent language of eye and lip which without words, merely by
expression, conveys deepest feelings; in the presence in our souls
of strange presentiments, intuitions of higher knowledge than
science or learning can give, voices which seem the presence of
other spirits in ours, which make us feel often that death, so far
from removing our dear friends from us, brings them nearer to our
souls so that they _cannot_ be lost;--in all these wonderful ways
we see dimly the unveiling of holy mysteries which the future is to
fully open to us, mysteries which we can even now, in our sublimer
and holier secret moments, feel trying to disclose themselves to
us.
This was written in a letter to his sister, on the occasion of a visit
to the menagerie to see Herr Driesbach, the horse-tamer. A man who could
spring into the empyrean from such ground may be trusted to behold Deity
where others behold nothing but dirt; and they who submit to his
guidance are pretty certain to come out full believers in the spiritual
powers.
Johnson absolutely subordinated dogma to practice, holding fast to the
idea involved in the declaration that he who doeth the will shall know
the doctrine. He began with the ethics of the individual, the family,
the social circle, seeing every principle incarnated there. How faithful
he was in all domestic relations the world will never know, for there
are details that cannot be divulged. But in all public affairs his
constancy was perfect. Dr. Furness of Philadelphia used to say that the
anti-slavery struggle in this country taught him more about the
essential nature of the Gospel than he had learned in any other way.
Samuel Johnson had the same conviction. In a private letter written in
1857 he says:
Everything in this crisis of American growth centres in the great
conflict about this gigantic sin of slavery. That is the
battle-field on which the questions are all to be fought out, of
moral and spiritual and intellectual Freedom against the Absolutism
of sect and party; of Love against Mammon; of Conscience against
the State; of Man against Majorities; of Truth against Policy; of
God against the Devil. It is really astonishing how everything that
happens with us works directly into this fermenting conflict.
They who remember his addresses during the war will not need any
confirmation of this announcement, and they who heard or have read his
sermon on the character and services of Charles Sumner will have the
fullest assurance of the cordial appreciation with which every phase of
the struggle was entered into.
But though so ardent a follower of the doctrine that ideas lead the
world, Johnson was not induced to go all lengths with the
sentimentalists. While warmly espousing the cause of the workingman his
papers on "Labor Reform" show how keenly critical he could be of
measures proposed for his benefit. No one will accuse him of
indifference to the claims of woman, but he spoke of "Woman's
Opportunity" rather than of "Woman's Rights"; is inclined to think that
it is not true that she is left out of political life from the present
wish to do her injustice; that "on the whole, the feeling, if it were
analyzed, would be found to be rather that of defending her right of
exemption, relieving her from tasks she does not desire.... Among
intelligent men at least, actual delay to wipe out the anomaly of the
voting rule is not so much owing to a spirit of domination or contempt
as is too apt to be assumed, as it is to a respect for what woman has
made of the functions she has hitherto filled, and the belief that she
holds herself entitled to be left free to work through them alone." He
has nothing to say regarding the superiority of woman's nature; ventures
no definition of her sphere; is not unconscious of feminine infirmities;
doubts the efficacy of the ballot; confesses that the level of womanhood
would be, at least temporarily, depressed by the larger area of
practical diffusion; is by no means certain that women would necessarily
act for their own good, and is deeply persuaded of the inferiority of
outward to inward influence. This is the one thing he is sure of; this
and the principle that "liberty knows--like faith and charity--neither
male nor female." In the war between Russia and Turkey he took the part
of Turkey, not only because he respected the rights of individual genius
and resented invasion, but for the reason that he distrusted the
civilizing tendencies of Russia, and thought the interests of Europe
might be trusted to the Ottoman as confidently as to the Russian. In a
discourse entitled "A Ministry in Free Religion," delivered on the
occasion of his resigning the relation of pastor to the "Free Church at
Lynn," June 26, 1870, he said:
The pulpit has no function more essential than an independent
criticism of well-meaning people in the light of larger justice and
remoter consequences than most popular measures recognize. The
truest service is, perhaps, to help correct the blunders and the
intolerances of blind good-will and narrow zeal for a good cause;
to speak in the interest of an idea where popular or organized
impulse threatens to swamp its higher morality in passionate
instincts and absolute masterships, to maintain that freedom of
private judgment which cannot be outraged, even in the best moral
intent, without mischievous reaction on the good cause itself.
In this connection he speaks of temperance, the amelioration of the
condition of the "perishing" or "dangerous" classes, the various schemes
for benefiting the laboring men, plans for adjusting the relations of
labor and capital, arrangements for diffusing the profits of
production,--causes which he had at heart, but which should be discussed
in view of the principle of individual freedom, which must be upheld at
all hazards. He was a close reasoner as well as a warm feeler, and would
not allow his sympathies to get the upper hand of his ideas. He hoped
for the best; he had faith in the highest; he anticipated the brightest;
but he tried to see things as they were. He was a student, not a
sentimentalist, and while he was ready to follow the most advanced in
the direction of spiritual progress, he was not prepared to take for
granted issues that still hung in the balance of debate, or to prejudge
questions that had not been answered, and could not be as yet.
Such moderation and patience are not common with reformers, and few are
independent enough to confess misgivings which are more familiar to
their opponents than to their friends. Candor like this shows a genuine
unconsciousness of fear, a sincere love of truth, an earnest
postponement of personal tastes, ambitions, and connections to the
axioms of universal wisdom and goodness; a loyalty to conviction that is
very rare, that never can exist among the indifferent, because they do
not care, and which is usually put aside by those who _do_ care as an
impediment if not as a snare. In courage of this noble kind, Johnson
excelled all men I ever knew, for they who had it, as some did, had not
his genius, and were spared the necessity of curbing ardor by so much as
their temperament was more passive and their eagerness less importunate.
Of course of the lower sort,--the courage to bear pain, loss, the
misunderstanding of the vulgar, to face danger, to encounter peril, none
who knew him can question his possession. In fact, he did not seem to
suffer at all, so jocund was he, so much in the habit of keeping his
deprivations from the outside world; even his intimates could but
suspect his sorrows of heart.
Samuel Johnson was an extraordinary person to look at. He had large
dark eyes; black, straight, long hair; an Oriental complexion, sallow,
olive-colored; an impetuous manner; a beaming expression. His voice was
rich, deep, musical; his gait eager, rapid, swinging; his style of
address glowing; his aspect in public speech that of one inspired. He
was fond of natural beauty, of art, literature, music; full of fun,
witty, mirthful, social. He was attractive to young people, delightful
in conversation, ready to enter into innocent amusements. His eye for
scenery was fine and quick, his interest in practical science sincere
and hearty, his concern for whatever advanced humanity cordial, and his
freshness of spirit increased if anything with years.