________________________________________________
_ Religion under any of its aspects, revealing or consoling--religion in connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when _self_-evoked by a person of earnest nature, not imposed from without by the necessities of monastic life, not caught as a contagion from the example of friends that surround you, argues some 'vast volcanic agency' moving at subterraneous depths below the ordinary working mind of daily life, and entitled by its own intrinsic grandeur to ennoble the curiosity (else a petty passion) which may put questions as to its origin. In any case of religion arising, as a spontaneous birth, in the midst of alien forces, it is inevitable to ask for its _why_ and its _whence_. Religion considered as a sentiment of devotion, as a yearning after some dedication to an immeasurable principle of that noblest temple among all temples--'the upright heart and pure,' or religion, again, as the apprehension of some mighty synthesis amongst truths dimly perceived heretofore amidst separating clouds, but now brought into strict indissoluble connection, proclaims a revolution so great that it is otherwise not to be accounted for than as the breaking out of a germ of the supernatural in man as a seed from a hitherto barren soil.
Sin is that secret word, that dark _aporreton_ of the human race, undiscoverable except by express revelation, which having once been laid in the great things of God as a germinal principle, has since blossomed into a vast growth of sublime ideas known only to those nations who have lived under the moulding of Scriptural truth--and comprehending _all_ functions of the Infinite operatively familiar to man. Yes, I affirm that there is no form through which the Infinite reveals itself in a sense comprehensible by man and adequate to man; that there is no sublime agency which _compresses_ the human mind from infancy so as to mingle with the moments of its growth, positively none but has been in its whole origin--in every part--and exclusively developed out of that tremendous mystery which lurks under the name of sin.
Yes, I affirm that even in its dreams every Christian child is invested by an atmosphere of sublimity unknown to the greatest of Pagan philosophers: that golden rays reach it by two functions of the Infinite; and that these, in common with those emanations of the Infinite that do not settle upon the mind until mature years, are all projections--derivations or counterpositions--from the obscure idea of sin; could not have existed under any previous condition; and for a Pagan mind would not have been intelligible.
_Sin._--It is not only that the Infinite arises as part of the entire system resting on sin, but specifically from sin apart from its counterforces or reactions, viz., from sin as a thing, and the only thing originally shadowy and in a terrific sense mysterious.
_Stench._--I believe that under Burke's commentary, this idea would become a high test of the doctrine of the Infinite. He pronounces it sublime, or sublime in cases of intensity. Now, first of all, the intense state of everything or anything is but a mode of power, that idea or element or moment of greatness under a varied form. Here, then, is nothing _proper_ or separately peculiar to stench: it is not stench _as_ stench, but stench as a mode or form of sensation, capable therefore of intensification. It is but a case under what we may suppose a general Kantian rule--that every sensation runs through all gradations, from the lowest or most obscure and nascent to the highest. Secondly, however, pass over to the contemplation of stench _as_ stench: then I affirm--that as simply expounding the decay, and altering or spoiling tendency or state of all things--simply as a register of imperfection, and of one which does not (as ruins to the eye) ever put on a pleasing transitional aspect, it is merely disagreeable, but also at the same time mean. For the imperfection is merely transitional and fleeting, not absolute. First, midst and last, it is or can be grand when it reverts or comes round upon its mediating point, or point of reaction.
The arrangement of my Infinite must be thus: After having expounded the idea of holiness which I must show to be now potent, proceed to show that the Pagan Gods did not realize and did not meet this idea; that then came the exposure of the Pagan Gods and the conscious presence of a new force among mankind, which opened up the idea of the Infinite, through the awakening perception of holiness.
I believe that in every mode of existence, which probably is always by an incarnation, the system of flesh is made to yield the organs that express the alliance of man with the Infinite. Thus the idea of mystery, [Greek: aporreta], finds its organ of expression in the sensualities of the human race. Again, the crime, whatever it were, and the eternal pollution is expressed in these same organs. Also, the prolongation of the race so as to find another system is secured by the same organs.
Generally, that is, for a million against a unit, the awful mystery by which the fearful powers of death, and sorrow, and pain, and sin are locked into parts of a whole; so as, in fact, to be repetitions, reaffirmations of each other under a different phase--this is nothing, does not exist. Death sinks to a mere collective term--a category--a word of convenience for purposes of arrangement. You depress your hands, and, behold! the system disappears; you raise them, it reappears. This is nothing--a cipher, a shadow. Clap your hands like an Arabian girl, and all comes back. Unstop your ears, and a roar as of St. Lawrence enters: stop your ears, and it is muffled. To and fro; it is and it is not--is not and is. Ah, mighty heaven, that such a mockery should cover the whole vision of life! It is and it is not; and on to the day of your death you will still have to learn what is the truth.
The eternal now through the dreadful loom is the overflowing future poured back into the capacious reservoir of the past. All the active element lies in that infinitesimal _now_. The future is not except by relation; the past is not at all, and the present but a sign of a nexus between the two.
God's words require periods, so His counsels. He cannot precipitate them any more than a man in a state of happiness _can_ commit suicide. Doubtless it is undeniable that a man may arm his hand with a sword: and that his flesh will be found penetrable to the sword, happy or not. But this apparent physical power has no existence, no value for a creature having a double nature: the moral nature not only indisposes him to use his power, but really creates a far greater antagonist power.
This God--too great to be contemplated steadily by the loftiest of human eyes; too approachable and condescending to be shunned by the meanest in affliction: realizing thus in another form that reconcilement of extremes, which St. Paul observed: far from all created beings, yet also very near.
'A conviction that they needed a Saviour was growing amongst men.' How? In what sense? Saviour from what? You can't be saved from nothing. There must be a danger, an evil threatening, before even in fancy you can think of a deliverer. Now, what evil was there existing to a Pagan? Sin? Monstrous! No such idea ever dawned upon the Pagan intellect. Death? Yes; but that was inalienable from his nature. Pain and disease? Yes; but these were perhaps inalienable also. Mitigated they might be, but it must be by human science, and the progress of knowledge. Grief? Yes; but this was inalienable from life. Mitigated it might be, but by superior philosophy. From what, then, was a Saviour to save? If nothing to save from, how any Saviour? But here arises as the awful of awfuls to me, the deep, deep exposure of the insufficient knowledge and sense of what is peculiar to Christianity. To imagine some sense of impurity, etc., leading to a wish for a Saviour in a Pagan, is to defraud Christianity of all its grandeur. If Paganism could develop the want, it is not at all clear that Paganism did not develop the remedy. Heavens! how deplorable a blindness! But did not a Pagan lady feel the insufficiency of earthly things for happiness? No; because any feeling tending in that direction would be to her, as to all around her, simply a diseased feeling, whether from dyspepsia or hypochondria, and one, whether diseased or not, worthless for practical purposes. It would have to be a Christian lady, if something far beyond, something infinite, were not connected with it, depending on it. But if this were by you ascribed to the Pagan lady, then _that_ is in other words to make her a Christian lady already.
_Exhibition of a Roman Dialogue on Sin._--What! says the ignorant and unreflecting modern Christian. Do you mean to tell me that a Roman, however buried in worldly objects, would not be startled at hearing of a Saviour? Now, hearken.
ROMAN. Saviour! What do you mean? Saviour for what? In good faith, my friend, you labour under some misconception. I am used to rely on myself for all the saving that I need. And, generally speaking, if you except the sea, and those cursed north-east winds, I know of no particular danger.
CHRISTIAN. Oh, my friend, you totally mistake the matter. I mean saving from sin.
ROMAN. Saving from a fault, that is--well, what sort of a fault? Or, how should a man, that you say is no longer on earth, save me from any fault? Is it a book to warn me of faults that He has left?
CHRISTIAN. Why, yes. Not that He wrote Himself; but He talked, and His followers have recorded His views. But still you are quite in the dark. Not faults, but the fountain of all faults, that is what He will save you from.
ROMAN. But how? I can understand that by illuminating my judgment in general He might succeed in making me more prudent.
CHRISTIAN. 'Judgment,' 'prudent'--these words show how wide by a whole hemisphere you are of the truth. It is your will that He applies His correction to.
ROMAN. 'Will!' why I've none but peaceable and lawful designs, I assure you. Oh! I begin to see. You think me a partner with those pirates that we just spoke to.
CHRISTIAN. Not at all, my friend. I speak not of designs or intentions. What I mean is, the source of all desires--what I would call your wills, your whole moral nature.
ROMAN (_bridling_). Ahem! I hope Roman nature is quite as little in need of improvement as any other. There are the Cretans; they held up their heads. Accordingly they had their fire institutions, and that true institution against bribery and luxury, and all such stuff. They fancied themselves impregnable. Why, bless you! even Marcus Tullius, that was a prosing kind of man and rather peevish about such things, could not keep in the truth. 'Why, Cato, my boy,' says he, 'you talk.' And to hear you, bribery and luxury would not leave one a stick to fight for. Why, now, these same Cretans--lord! we took the conceit out of them in twenty-five minutes. No more time, I assure you, did it cost three of our cohorts to settle the whole lot of them.
CHRISTIAN. My friend, you are more and more in the dark. What I mean is not present in your senses, but a disease.
ROMAN. Oh, a disease! that's another thing. But where?
CHRISTIAN. Why, it affects the brain and the heart.
ROMAN. Well, now, one at a time. Take the brain--we have a disease, and we treat it with white hellebore. There may be a better way. But answer me this. If you are generally affected, what right have you to bring, as you are supposing, a diseased brain to a sound one? We Romans are all sound--sound as a bell.
Then Christian goes on to the history of the fall. But the whole would be self-baffled and construed away from want of sin as the antithesis of holiness.
_Why St. Paul and the Athenians did not come to an Understanding._--So, again, if you think that St. Paul had a chance with the Athenians. If he had, it would tax his divine benevolence to see that he forbore to pursue it. This attempt shows that he was under a misconception. He fancied a possibility of preaching a pure religion. What followed? He was, he must have been defeated. That is, practically, else why did he not persist? But his confutation was the factual confutation of experience. It was no go. That he found too surely. But why? I am sure that he never found out. Enough that he felt--that under a strong instinct he misgave--a deep, deep gulf between him and them, so that neither could he make a way to their sense, nor they, except conjecturally, to his. For, just review the case. What was the [Greek: euangelion], the good tidings, which he announced to man? What burthen of hope? What revelation of a mystery of hope arising out of a deeper mystery of despair? He announced a deliverer. Deliverer! from what? Answer that--from what? Why, from evil, you say. Evil! of what kind? Why, you retort, did not the Pagans admit that man was lying under evil? Not at all; nothing of the kind. But you are sure you have heard of such things? Very likely. And now you are forced back upon your arguments you remember specially that evil as to its origin was a favourite speculation of theirs. Evil, in its most comprehensive designation, whence is it? How came it? Now, mark, even to that extent, viz., the extent indicated by this problem, the ancients had no conception of evil corresponding to, no, nor dimly approaching to, a correspondence with ours. They had no ineffable standard of purity; how, then, any function of impurity? They had no ineffable doctrine of pain or suffering answering to a far more realized state of perception, and, therefore, unimaginably more exquisite; how, then, could they raise a question on the nature or fountains of such pains? They executed no synthesis, and could execute none upon the calamities of life; they never said in ordinary talk that this was a world of sorrow, either apostrophizing a newborn child, or a world of disappointment, bemoaning a mature victim; neither as in the anguish of meditative reflection, nor in the prudence of extenuating apology. The grand _sanctus_ which arises from human sensibility, Perish empires and the crowns of kings, etc., first arose in connection with Christianity.[2] Life was a good life; man was a prosperous being. Hope for men was his natural air; despondency the element of his own self-created folly. Neither could it be otherwise. For, besides that, it would be too immeasurable a draught of woe to say in one breath that this only was the crux or affirmation of man's fate, and yet that this also was wretched _per se_; not accidentally made wretched by imprudence, but essentially and irrevocably so by necessity of its nature. Besides all this, which has a lurking dependency upon man's calculations of what is safe, he sees that this mode of thinking would leave him nothing; yet even that extreme consequence would not check some honest or sincere or desperate minds from uttering their convictions that life really _was_ this desperate game--much to lose and nothing in the best case to win. So far there would have been a dangerous gravitation at all times to the sad conclusion of Paganism. But, meanwhile, this dangerous gravitation was too dangerous, and Providence has deeply counteracted it by principles laid down in human nature. I affirm that where the ideas of man, where the possible infinities are not developed, then also the exorbitant on the other field is strongly pulled up. No ideals of evil can take place except under ideals of happiness that passeth all understanding. No synthesis can ever be executed, that is, no annumeration of A, B, C into a common total, viewed as elements tending to a common unity, unless previously this unity has been preconceived, because the elements are not elements, viz., original constituents of a representative whole (a series tending to a summation), unless that which is constituted--that whole--is previously given in idea. Since A and B and C could not be viewed as tending to a unity, having no existence except through them, unless previously that unity had existed for the regulation and eduction of its component elements. And this unity in the case of misery never could have been given unless far higher functions than any which could endure Paganism, or which Paganism could endure. Until the sad element of a diseased will is introduced, until the affecting notion is developed of a fountain in man himself welling up the misery for ever, no idea of misery could arise. Suffering is limited and transitory. What pain is permanent in man? Even the deepest laceration of the human heart, that which is inflicted by the loss of those who were the pulses of our hearts, is soothed (if never wholly healed) by time. One agency of time would avail for this effect were there no other. The features of the individual whom we mourn grow dimmer and dimmer as time advances; and, _pari passu_, the features of places and collateral objects and associated persons from whom reverberated these afflicting reminiscences of the lost object.
[FOOTNOTE 2: I deny that there is or could have been one truant fluttering murmur of the heart against the reality of glory. And partly for these reasons: 1st, That, _hoc abstracto_, defrauding man of this, you leave him miserably bare--bare of everything. So that really and sincerely the very wisest men may be seen clinging convulsively, and clutching with their dying hands the belief that glory, that posthumous fame (which for profound ends of providence has been endowed with a subtle power of fraud such as no man can thoroughly look through; for those who, like myself, despise it most completely, cannot by any art bring forward a _rationale_, a theory of its hollowness that will give plenary satisfaction except to those who are already satisfied). Thus Cicero, feeling that if this were nothing, then had all his life been a skirmish, one continued skirmish for shadows and nonentities; a feeling of blank desolation, too startling--too humiliating to be faced. But (2ndly), the unsearchable hypocrisy of man, that hypocrisy which even to himself is but dimly descried, that latent hypocrisy which always does, and most profitably, possess every avenue of every man's thoughts, hence a man who should openly have avowed a doctrine that glory was a bubble, besides that, instead of being prompted to this on a principle which so far raised him above other men, must have been prompted by a principle that sank him to the level of the brutes, viz., acquiescing in total ventrine improvidence, imprescience, and selfish ease (if ease, a Pagan must have it _cum dignitate_), but above all he must have made proclamation that in his opinion all disinterested virtue was a chimera, since all the quadrifarious virtue of the scholastic ethics was founded either on personal self-sufficiency, on justice, moderation, etc., etc., or on direct personal and exclusive self-interest as regarded health and the elements of pleasure.]
I return: Deliverer from what? From suffering or misery. But that was not acknowledged, nor could have been, we could see no misery as a hypothesis except in these two modes: First, as a radication in man by means of something else, some third thing. Secondly, as a synthesis--as a gathering under a principle which must act prior to the gathering in order to provoke it. (The synthesis must be rendered possible and challenged by the _a priori_ unity which otherwise constitutes that unity.) As a metaphysical possibility evil was recognised through its unfathomable nature. But this was because such a nature already presupposed a God's nature, realizing his own ends, stepped in with effect. For the highest form--the normal or transcendent form--of virtue to a Pagan, was in the character of citizen. Indeed, the one sole or affirmative form of virtue lay in this sole function, viz., of public, of patriotic virtue. Since here only it was possible to introduce an _additional_ good to the world. All other virtue, as of justice between individual and individual, did but redress a previous error, sometimes of the man himself, sometimes of social arrangement, sometimes of accident. It was a _plus_ which balanced and compensated a pre-existing _minus_--an action _in regressu_, which came back with prevailing power upon an action _in progressu_. But to be a patriot was to fulfil a call of the supererogatory heart--a great nisus of sympathy with the one sole infinite, the sole practical infinite that man pre-Christian ever could generate for his contemplation. Now, therefore, it followed that the idea of virtue here only found its realization. Virtue, in fact, was not derivatively or consequentially connected with patriotism, it was _immanent_; not transitively associated by any links whatever, but immanently intertwisted, indwelling in the idea. Therefore it happened that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing, trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That would have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim virtue and vice mere bubbles and chimeras. He who really thinks so even we reasonably suspect of _practical_ indifference unless when we believe him to speak as a misanthrope.
The question suppose to commence as to the divine mission of Christ. And the feeble understanding is sure to think this will be proved best by proving the subject of this doubt to have been a miracle-working power. And of all miracles, to have mastered (not merely escaped or evaded) death will be in his opinion the greatest. So that if Christ could be proved to have absolutely conquered death, _i.e._, to have submitted to death, but only to recoil from his power and overthrow it, to have died and subsequently to have risen again, will, _a fortiori_, prove Him to have been sent of God.
Not so. All and every basis of credibility must be laid in the _moral_ nature, where the thing to be believed is important, _i.e._, moral. And I therefore open with this remark absolutely _zermalmende_ to the common intellect: That from a holy faith you may infer a power of resurrection, but not from a power of resurrection fifty times repeated can we infer a holy faith. What in the last result is the thing to be proved? Why, a holy revelation, not of knowledge, but of things practical; of agenda, not scienda. It is essential that this holy should also be _new_, _original_, _revelatum_. Because, else, the divinest things which are _connata_ and have been common to all men, point to no certain author. They belong to the dark foundations of our being, and cannot challenge a trust, faith, or expectation as suspended upon any particular individual man whatever.
Here, then, arises the [Greek: protontokinon]. Thick darkness sits on every man's mind as to Christ's revelation. He fancies that it amounts to this: 'Do what is good. Do your duty. Be good.' And with this vague notion of the doctrine, natural is it that he should think it as old as the hills. The first step to a saner view is, to understand--if a man has sense enough to reach so high--that the subtlest discoveries ever made by man, all put together, do not make one wave of that Atlantic as to novelty and originality which lies in the moral scheme of Christianity. I do not mean in the total scheme of Christianity, redemption, etc. No, but in the ethics.
All ethics that ever Greece refined or Rome illustrated, was, and could be, only the same universal system of social ethics--ethics proper and exclusive to man and man _inter se_, with no glimpse of any upward relationship.
Now Christianity looks upward for the first time. This in the first place. Secondly, out of that upward look Christianity looks secondarily down again, and reacts even upon the social ethics in the most tremendous way.
_For my Book on the Relations of Christianity to Man._--S. T. C. cites Jeremy Taylor, etc., for horrible passages on the gloomy state of the chances for virtuous Pagans. S. T. C. in a more liberal generation is shocked; and of course in his readers as in himself secretly, he professes more liberal ideas. Aye, but how is he entitled to these ideas? For, on further consideration, it is not Cicero only, or Epictetus only, that would suffer under this law of Christianity viewed in its reagency, but also Abraham, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hezekiah. Because, how could they benefit by a Redeemer not yet revealed--nay, by a Redeemer not even existing? For it is not the second person in the Trinity--not He separately and abstractedly--that is the Redeemer, but that second person incarnated. St. Paul apparently wished to smuggle this tremendous question into a fraudulent solution, by mixing up Abraham (with others pre-Christian and Christian) into the long array of those whose _Faith_ had saved them. But faith in whom? General faith in God is not the thing, it is faith in Jesus Christ; and we are solemnly told in many shapes that no other name was given on earth through which men could be delivered. Indeed, if not, how is the Messiah of such exclusive and paramount importance to man? The Messiah was as yet (viz., in Abraham's time) a prophecy--a dim, prophetic outline of one who _should_ be revealed. But if Abraham and many others could do without Him, if this was a dispensable idea, how was it in any case, first or last, indispensable? Besides, recur to the theory of Christianity. Most undeniably it was this, that neither of the two elements interested in man could save him; not God; He might have power, but His purity revolted. Power (or doubtfully so), but no will. Not man--for he, having the will, had no power. God was too holy; manhood too _un_holy. Man's gifts, applicable, but insufficient. God's sufficient, but inapplicable. Then came the compromise. How if man could be engrafted upon God? Thus only, and by such a synthesis, could the ineffable qualities of God be so co-ordinated with those of man.
Suppose even that a verbal inspiration could have been secured--secured, observe, against _gradual_ changes in language and against the reactionary corruption of concurrent versions, which it would be impossible to guarantee as also enjoying such an inspiration (since, in that case, _what_ barrier would divide mine or anybody's wilfully false translations from that pretending to authority? I repeat _what_? None is conceivable, since what could you have beyond the assurance of the translator, even which could only guarantee his intentions)--here is a cause of misinterpretation amounting to ruin, viz., after being read for centuries as if practically meant for our guidance, such and such a chapter (_e.g._, Jael and Sisera), long proscribed by the noble as a record of abominable perfidy, has at length been justified on the ground that it was never meant for anything else. Thus we might get rid of David, etc., were it not that for his flexible obedience to the _clerus_ he has been pronounced the man after God's own heart.
Is it not dreadful that at the very vestibule of any attempt to execute the pretended law of God and its sentences to hell we are interrupted by one case in every three as exceptional? Of the deaths, one in three are of children under five. Add to these surely _very_ many up to twelve or thirteen, and _many_ up to eighteen or twenty, then you have a law which suspends itself for one case in every two.
_Note in the argument drawn from perishableness of language._ Not only (which I have noted) is any language, _ergo_ the original, Chaldaean, Greek, etc., perishable even for those who use it, but also the vast openings to error which all languages open to translators form a separate source of error in translators, viz.:
1. The old one on my list that for them the guidance of inspiration has ceased, else, if not, you must set up an inspiration separately to translators, since, if you say--No, not at all, why, which then?
2. The uncertainty of a foreign language even in a day contemporary with the original writer, and therefore over and above what arises from lapse of time and gradual alterations.
_On Human Progress._--Oftentimes it strikes us all that this is so insensible as to elude observation the very nicest. Five years add nothing, we fancy. Now invert your glass. In 1642 Englishmen are fighting for great abstract principles. In 1460-83 (_i.e._, 100 + 17 + 42 years before, or 159 years) they are fighting for persons, for rival candidates. In 1460 they could not have conceived more than an Esquimaux can entertain a question about the constitution of lyric poetry, or the differential principles of English and Greek tragedy, the barest approximation to questions that in 1642 are grounds of furious quarrel, of bloody quarrel, of extermination. Now then, looking forward, you would see from year to year little if any growth; but inverting your glass, looking back from the station of 1642 to 1460, you see a progress that if subdivided amongst all the 159 years would give to each _x_/0 as its quota, _i.e._ infinity. In fact, it is like the progression from nothing to something. It is--creation.
All the body of the Christian world would fly out in a rage if you should say that Christianity required of you many things that were easy, but one thing that was _not_. Yet this is undoubtedly true; it requires you to _believe_, and even in the case where you know what it is to believe, and so far are free from perplexity, you have it not in your own power to ensure (though you can influence greatly) your own power to believe. But also great doubt for many (and for all that are not somewhat metaphysical) attends the knowledge of what is believing.
As to my mother's fancy that Sir W. Jones had found in the East proofs of Christianity, having gone out an infidel.
To do her justice, never once after she had adopted a theory of Christianity did she inquire or feel anxious about its proof. But to review the folly of this idea.
1. That Christianity there where it reigned and was meant to reign should be insufficient in its proofs; but that in a far distant land, lurking in some hole or corner, there should be proofs of its truth, just precisely where these proofs were not wanted. And again, that these should be reserved for one scholar rambling into a solitary path, where in a moral sense _nobody_ could follow him (for it _is_ nobody--this or that oriental scholar). And we are sure that his proof was not of that order to shine by its own light, else it would have resounded through England.
2. That for many hundreds of years Christianity should have been received, generation after generation should have lived under its vital action, upon no sufficient argument, and suddenly such an argument should turn up as a reward to a man in a country not Christian for being more incredulous than his neighbours; how impossible!
That fraudulent argument which affects to view the hardships of an adventurous life and its perils as capable of one sole impression--that of repulsion--and secondly as the sole circumstances about such adventures, injures from the moment when it is perceived: not
1. The writer only; no matter for him, worthless liar, how much he sinks in the opinion of his readers: but
2. The Apostles. Now see the injury of falsehood. Suddenly it snaps, and with a great reaction causes a jar to the whole system, which in ordinary minds it is never likely to recover. The reason it is not oftener perceived is that people read such books in a somnolent, inactive state of mind, one-tenth coming to a subject on which they have already made up their minds, and open to no fresh impressions, the other nine-tenths caring not one straw about the matter, as reading it in an age of irreflectiveness and purely through an act of obedience to their superiors, else not only does this hypocritical attempt to varnish give way all at once, and suddenly (with an occasion ever after of doubt, and causing a reflection to any self-sufficient man, suddenly coming to perceive that he has been cheated, and with some justification for jealousy thenceforwards to the maker up of a case), but also it robs the Apostles of the human grace they really possessed. For if we suppose them armed against all temptations, snares, seductions, by a supernatural system of endowments, this is but the case of an angel--nay, not of an angel, for it is probable that when an angel incarnated himself, or one of the Pagan deities, who was obliged first to incarnate himself before he could act amongst men, or so much as be seen by men, he was bound by all the defects of man, _i.e._, he could choose only an ideal, so far ideal as to elude the worst effects from vice, intemperance, etc. The angel who wrestled with Jacob probably did his best; he was a stout fellow, but so was the patriarch. The very condition of incarnation, and this because the mere external form already includes limitations (as of a fish, not to fly; of a man, not to fly, etc.) probably includes as a _necessity_, not as a choice, the adoption of all evils connected with the nature assumed. Even the Son of God, once incarnated, was not exempted from any evil of flesh; He grew, passed through the peculiar infirmities of every stage up to mature life; would have grown old, infirm, weak, had He lived longer; was liable to death, the worst of all human evils, and was not, we may be sure, exempted from any one fleshly desire with regard to sex, or enemies, or companions, but because that divine principle, which also _is in man_, yes, in every man the foulest and basest--this light which the darkness comprehended not, and which in some is early extinguished, but in _all_ fights fitfully with the winds and storms of this human atmosphere, in Him was raised to a lustre unspeakable by His pure and holy will.
If the Apostles were more celestially armed in any other sense than as we are all armed from above by calling forth our better natures, if in any other sense than as sorrow arms us by purifying our natures, as sorrowful reflection, as meditation and earnest endeavours to resist our angry instincts (which, on the contrary, how often do men _obey_ under the vile pretence of being put by conscience on a painful duty), then, I say, what were the Apostles to us? Why should we admire them? How can we make them models of imitation? It is like that case of Anarcharsis the Scythian.
It does certainly incense a Christian to think that stupid Mahommedans should impute to us such _childish_ idolatries as that of God having a son and heir--just as though we were barbarous enough to believe that God was liable to old age--that the time was coming, however distant, when somebody would say to him, 'Come, Sir,' or 'Come, my Lord, really you are not what you were. It's time you gave yourself some ease ([Greek: euphemi], time, indeed, that you resigned the powers to which you are unequal), and let a younger man take the reins.' None but a filthy barbarian could carry forward his thoughts so little as not to see that this son in due time would find himself in the same predicament.
Now mark how Christian lands would enforce this doctrine of unity by horrid coercions. They hang, drown, burn, crucify those who deny it. So that, be assured you are planting your corner-stone on the most windy of delusions. You yourselves do not ascribe any merit to Mahommed separate from that of revealing the unity of God. Consequently, if that is a shaken craze arising from mere inability on his part, a little, a very little information would have cut up by the very roots the whole peculiarity of Islam. For if a wise man could have assembled these conceited Arabians and told them: Great thieves, you fancy yourselves to have shot far ahead of the Christians as to the point of unity, and if you had I would grant that you had made a prodigious advance. But you are deceiving quarrellers. It is all a word--mere smoke, that blinds you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error: these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the most absolute sense one.
The most shockingly searching, influential, and permanent blunder that ever has affected the mind of man has been the fancy that a religion includes a creed as to its [Greek: aporrheta], and a morality; in short, that it was doctrinal by necessity, enactory, and (which has been the practical part of the blunder) therefore exclusive, because:
1. With our notion of a religion as essentially doctrinal, the very first axiom about it is, that being true itself it makes all others false. Whereas, the capital distinction of the Pagan was--that given, supposing to be assumed, 10,000 religions--all must be true simultaneously, all equally. When a religion includes any distinct propositions offered to the understanding (that is, I think, resting upon a principle or tendency to a consequence by way of differencing from facts which also are for the understanding, but then barely to contemplate not with a power of reacting on the understanding, for every principle introduces into the mind that which may become a modification, a restraint; whereas, a fact restrains nothing in the way of thought unless it includes a principle), it would rise continually in its exclusive power according to the number of those propositions. At first it might exclude all but ten, eight, seven, and so on; finally, as integrated it would exclude all.
2. If you ask on what principle a Pagan believed his religion, the question to him was almost amusing and laughable. I will illustrate the case. A man meets you who inquires in a hurried, suppose even in an agitated way, whether you met a tall man, blind of one eye, dressed in such a coloured dress, etc. Now, does it ever occur to you that the inquirer is lying? Lying! Wherefore should he lie? Or again, if you say that your house stands under a hill, that three out of four chimneys smoke, and that you must indeed try some of the inventions for remedying this annoyance, would any man in his senses think of speculating on the possibility that all this should be a romance? Or, to come nearer in the kind of fact, if a man represented his family fortune as having been bequeathed by a maiden aunt in the last generation, would any man say otherwise than that doubtless the man knew his own benefactors and relatives best? On this same principle, when Christ was mentioned as the divinity adored by a certain part of the Jews who were by way of distinction called Christians, why should a Roman object? What motive could he have for denying the existence or the divine existence of Christ? Even the idea of dissent or schism, some Jews worshipping, some protesting, would not much puzzle him. Something like it had occurred in Pagan lands. Neptune and Athene had contended for Attica. And under the slight inquiry which he would ever make, or listen to when made by others, he might wonder at the rancour displayed by the protesting party, but he would take it for granted that a divinity of some local section had been unduly pushed into pre-eminence over a more strictly epichorial divinity. He would go off with this notion, that whereas, the elder Jews insisted on paying vows, etc., to a God called Jehovah, a section sought to transfer that allegiance to a divinity called Christ. If he were further pressed on the subject, he would fancy that very possibly, as had been thought, found or imagined in the case of Syrian deities or Egyptian, etc., that perhaps Christ might correspond to Apollo, as Astarte to Diana, Neptune of Latium to the Poseidon of Greece. But if not, that would cause no scruple at all. Thus far it was by possibility a mere affair of verbal difference. But suppose it ascertained that in no point of the symbols surrounding the worship of Christ, or the conception of His person, He could be identified with any previously-known Pagan God--that would only introduce Him into the matricula of Gods as a positive novelty. Nor would it have startled a Roman to hear that in India or any country large enough there should be a separate Pantheon of many thousand deities, _plus_ some other Pantheon of divinities corresponding to their own. For Syria--but still more in one section of Syrian Palestine--this would surprise him _quoad_ the degree, not _quoad_ the principle. The Jew had a separate or peculiar God, why not? No nation could exist without Gods: the very separate existence of a people, trivial as it might be in power and wealth, argued a tutelary God, but, of course, proportioned to the destinies at least (and in part to the present size) of the country. Thus far no difficulties at all. But the morality! Aye, but that would never be accounted a part of religion. As well confound a science with religion. Aye, but the [Greek: aporrheta]. These would be viewed as the rites of Adonis, or of Ceres; you could not warn him from his preconception that these concerned only Jews. Where, therefore, lodged the offence? Why here, as personalities--for such merely were all religions--the God must be measured by his nation. So some Romans proposed to introduce Christ into the Roman Pantheon. But what first exploded as a civil offence was the demand of supremacy and the inconceivable principle set up of incompatibility. This was mere folly.
A much more solemn, significant and prophetic meaning than the common one may be secured to the famous passage in St. Matthew--'And thou shalt call His name _Jesus_.' This injunction wears the most impressive character belonging to heavenly adjuration, when it is thus confided to the care and custody of a special angel, and in the very hour of inauguration, and amongst the very birth-throes of Christianity. For in two separate modes the attention is secretly pointed and solicited to the grand serpentine artifice, which met and confronted the almost insurmountable difficulty besetting Christianity on its very threshold: First, by the record of the early _therapeutic_ miracles, since in that way only, viz., by a science of healing, which the philosopher equally with the populace recognised as resting upon inspiration from God, could the magistrate and civil authority have been steadily propitiated; secondly, by the very verbal suggestion couched in the name _Jesus_, or _Healer_. At the most critical of moments an angel reveals himself, for the purpose of saying '_Thou shalt call His name Jesus_'--and why Jesus? Because, says the angel, 'He shall heal or cleanse His people from sin as from a bodily disease.' Thus, in one and the same moment is suggested prospectively to the early Christian, who is looking forward in search of some adequate protection against the civil magistrate, and theoretically and retrospectively is suggested to the Christian of our own philosophizing days, that admirable resource of what by a shorthand expression I will call _Hakimism_. The _Hakim_, the _Jesus_, the _Healer_, comes from God. Mobs must not be tolerated. But neither must the deep therapeutic inspirations of God be made of none effect, or narrowed in their applications. And thus in one moment was the panic from disease armed against the panic from insurgent mobs; the privileged Hakim was marshalled against the privileged magistrate; and the deep superstition, which saw, and not unreasonably, a demon raging in a lawless mob, saw also a demon not less blind or cruel in the pestilence that walked in darkness. And, as one magnet creates other magnets, so also the Hakim, once privileged, could secretly privilege others. And the physical Hakim could by no test or shibboleth be prevented from silently introducing the spiritual Hakim. And thus, whilst thrones and councils were tumultuating in panic, behold! suddenly the Christian soldier was revealed amongst them as an armed man.
'_Ecrasez l'infame_,' I also say: and who is he? It would be mere insanity to suppose that it could be _any_ teacher of moral truths. Even I, who so much despise Socrates, could not reasonably call him _l'infame_.
But who, then, is _l'infame_? It is he who, finding in those great ideas which I have noticed as revelations from God, and which throw open to the startled heart the heaven of heavens, in the purity, the holiness, the peace which passeth all understanding, finding no argument of divinity, then afterwards _does_ find it in the little tricks of legerdemain, in conjuring, in praestigia. But here, though perhaps roused a little to see the baseness of relying on these miracles, and also in the rear a far worse argument against them, he still feels uncomfortable at such words applied to things which Christ did. Christ could not make, nor wished to make, that great which was inherently mean; that relevant, which was originally irrelevant. If He did things in themselves mean, it was because He suited Himself to mean minds, incapable of higher views; wretches such as exist amongst us of modern days by millions, on whom all His Divine words were thrown away, wretches deaf and blind and besotted, to whom it was said in vain: 'He that looketh upon a woman,' and what follows, creating by a rod of divinity in man's heart a far superior ideal of the moral; who heard with indifference His 'Bless those who persecute you;' yes, listened unmoved to His 'Suffer little children to come unto Me;' who heard with anger His 'In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;' who abhorred His great doctrine that the counsels of God were not read in the events of things[3]; who slighted as trivial that prayer which a wise man might study with profit for a thousand years; beasts, wretches, that turned away deaf and blind, even as their sons turn away, from these arguments of a truth far transcending all that yet had come amongst men; but whilst trampling with their brutal hoofs upon such flowers of Paradise, turned in stupid wonderment to some mere legerdemain or jugglery.
[Footnote 3: The tower of Siloam.]
_The Truth._--But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had been a blank not filled by anything, not by any smoke or dusky tarnish of suspicion, not filled by so much as any shadowy outline or vague phantom of possibility, _there_ was now seen rising, 'like Teneriffe or Atlas'--say rather, by symbolizing the greatest of human interests by the greatest of human visual objects, like the snowy peaks of the Himalaya, peaks that by men's feelings are referred to the heavens rather than to the earth; to the beings 'whose dwelling is no thick flesh,' rather than to men who have in no age succeeded in scaling them; and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but dread crashes of sound--again to fade or vanish, the colossal form, never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[4] Where there had been nothing, a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for man, called The Truth. Why was it called _The_ Truth? How could such an idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as [Greek: hopoetes] was sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement of dissimulation a man was called by the title of _The Orator_, his own favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses of _the_ imply a momentary annihilation of the competitors, as though in comparison of the ideal exemplification these minor and approximating forms had no existence--or at least, not _quoad hunc locum_--as 'the mountain in Sicily' would rightly indicate Etna), on the same artificial principle they may imagine rhetoricians to have denominated (or if not, to have had it in their power to denominate) some one department of truth which they wished to favour as _the_ truth. But this conventional denomination would not avail, and for two reasons: First, that rival modes of truth (physics against mathematics, rhetoric against music) would contest the title, and no such denomination would have a basis of any but a sort of courtesy or vicarious harmonious reality from the very first. Secondly, that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form, division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic divines. Out of this idea the truth grew, next (suppose _x_) another _Martyrdom_.
[Footnote 4: Every definition is a syllogism. Now, because the minor proposition is constantly false, this does not affect the case; each man is right to fill up the minor with his own view, and essentially they do not disagree with each other.
A (the subject of def.)is _x_. The Truth is the sum of Christianity
But C is _x_. But my Baptist view is the sum of Christianity.
_Ergo_ C is A. _Ergo_ my Baptist view is the Truth.]
The difference between all human doctrines and this is as between a marble statue and a quick thing. The statue may be better, and it may be of better material; it may be of ivory, of marble, and amongst marbles known to the ancient sculptors of several different kinds the most prized; of silver gilt, of hollow gold, of massy gold, and in all degrees of skill; but still one condition applies to all--whatever the material, whoever the artist, the statue is inanimate, the breath of life is not within its nostrils. Motion, spontaneity, action and antagonist action, the subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth, pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty--not one of these divine gifts does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great philosopher meets with the labouring man; both meet with the little innocent child. All have the same undervaluation of the statue. And if any man values it preposterously, it will be neither a great philosopher, nor a labouring man with horny fists, nor a little innocent and natural child. It will be some crazy simpleton, who dignifies himself as a man of taste, as _elegans formarum spectator_, as one having a judicious eye for the distinctions of form. But now, suddenly, let one of the meanest of these statues begin to stir and shiver with the mystery of life, let it be announced that something 'quick' is in the form, let the creeping of life, the suffusion of sensibility, the awful sense of responsibility and accountability ripen themselves, what a shock--what a panic! What an interest--how profound--would diffuse itself in every channel. Such is the ethics of God as contrasted with the ethics of Greek philosophers. The only great thing ever done by Greece or by Greek philosophers was the ethics. Yet, after all, these were but integrations of the natural ethics implanted in each man's heart. Integrations they were, but rearrangements--redevelopments from some common source.
It is remarkable that the Scriptures, valuing clearness and fencing against misunderstandings above all things, never suspend--there is no [Greek: epoche] in the scriptural style of the early books. And, therefore, when I first came to a text, 'If when,' I was thunderstruck, and I found that this belongs to the more cultivated age of Hebrew literature.
'_And the swine because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you_' (Deut. xiv. 8). Now the obvious meaning is, _prima facie_, that the ground of its uncleanness was its dividing the hoof. Whereas, so far from this, to divide the hoof is a ground of cleanness. It is a fact, a _sine qua non_--that is, a negative condition of cleanness; but not, therefore, taken singly the affirmative or efficient cause of cleanness. It must in addition to this chew the cud--it must ruminate. Which, again, was but a _sine qua non_--that is, a negative condition, indispensable, indeed; whose absence could not be tolerated in any case, but whose presence did not therefore, and as a matter of course, avail anything. For the reverse case occurred in the camel, hare, and rabbit. They _do_ chew the cud, the absence of which habit caused the swine to be rejected, but then they 'divide not the hoof.' Accordingly they were equally rejected as food with the swine.
We see the great Jewish lawgiver looking forward to cases which actually occurred nearly five hundred years after, as demanding a king, and again looking still farther to cases eight hundred and a thousand years after--their disobedience and rebellion to God. Now, many will think that it must have been an easy thing for any people, when swerving from their law, and especially in that one great fundamental article of idolatry as the Jews so continually did, and so naturally when the case is examined, to always have an easy retreat: the plagues and curses denounced would begin to unfold themselves, and then what more easy than to relinquish the idolatrous rites or customs, resuming with their old rituals to God their old privileges? But this was doubly impossible. First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of God slept often for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions. The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could not recover the station from which they swerved. They that had now realized the _casus foederis_, the case in which they had covenanted themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.
In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.
If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a general fire--that word by which sadness is spread over the face of things, but also infinite grandeur--then may I rightly lay this as one chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.
The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating to that which shrinks up to a point--and observe, I do not mean that being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes as a real thing--when this happens, having no subjective existence at all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge; fancying, _e.g._, like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road out of the wood in which they were then entangled.
It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature, which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly Boeckh--[Greek: en genei]--which does not mean that Gods _and_ men are the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread through thousands of years.
It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet, 'Qu'ont gagne les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290). Now how _should_ that case have been tried thoroughly before the printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospel _was_ so tried. True, but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new proof of its reality.
_An Analogy._--1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews, probably, when rebuked for wickedness, replied, 'What! are we not the peculiar people of God? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the people of God--the chosen people--implied a license to do wrong, and had a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.
2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to repentance. It is odious to think of, this making God the abettor and encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because God has said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety; though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they--such is their thought--are encouraged to sin by the assurance that repentance will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.
Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this means _real penitence_;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we mean _real penitence_.' 'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath, and protest against it as no privilege at all.
The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled in her skirts.
_Idolatry._--It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's (Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols--utterly wide of any real imperfection, but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship Apollo, _i.e._, a god to be in some sense false--belonging to a system connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.
I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere archaeologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the dimensions of Nineveh, how should _that_ make him a true prophet? Or supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them, they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.
_The sun stands still._ I am persuaded that this means no such incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a relation to a particular valley: that the sun could have stood still in Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made known to the central sanctity of that God whose miraculous interposition had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which subsequently created its sanctity did not occur till more than four centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But Shiloh existed, and Horeb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs. And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle, would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people never reflect on the [Greek: to] positive of their reading? If they _did_, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event, as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters (through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the _final-cause_ day.
The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or comment, or--which, in fact, is the meaning--any impulse or bias to the reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz., the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception. Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses, already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.
Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of Araunah?[5] Of that mystery, of that local circumscription--in what sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts--yet mark me so far, Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years. Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended. Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptered potentate for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752 B. C. complete the period. But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost. The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next think of the temptation to _mythus_. And, finally, of God's plan unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire; 2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with the purposes _now_ became necessary to God in order to remedy _abnormous_ shifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of the language of Scripture, I see the same illustration. Sir William Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish fit[6] as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praises the language of Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no dishonour if we say of God that, in the sense meant by Sir William Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In the schemata, because in the original ideas, God says indeed what man cannot, for these are peculiar to God; but who before myself has shown what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we have the same identically. And when a language labours under an infirmity, as all do, not God Himself could surmount it! He is compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His answers God is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), God is thwarted and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language--I know its secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high abstractions--far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.
[Footnote 5: It seems that Herod made changes so vast--certainly in the surmounting works, and _also_ probably in one place as to the foundations, that it could not be called the same Temple with that of the Captivity, except under an abuse of ideas as to matter and form, of which all nations have furnished illustrations, from the ship _Argo_ to that of old Drake, from Sir John Cutler's stockings to the Highlander's (or Irishman's) musket.]
[Footnote 6: Just as if a man spending his life to show the folly of Methodism should burst into maudlin tears at sight of John Wesley, and say, 'Oh, if all men, my dear brothers, were but Methodists!']
The power lies in the spirit--the animating principle; and verily such a power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness, goodness, and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in reaching man _ex-abundantibus_ in so transcendent a way that mere excess of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered, uncorrupted, through the violent assaults of idolatries all round, and the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,[7] down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses--there was the labour hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men treating such a case as a simple _original_ problem as to God. But far otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power to receive, to sustain, to comprehend--not in the Divine power to radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act, and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is illustrated by prayer; for, while we think it odd that so many prayers of good men for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and remains wholly uninfluenced by it).
[Footnote 7: How so? If the Jews were naturally infidels, why did God select them? But, first, they might have, and they certainly had, other balancing qualities; secondly, in the sense here meant, all men are infidels; and we ourselves, by the very nature of one object which I will indicate, are pretty generally infidels in the same sense as they. Look at our evidences; look at the sort of means by which we often attempt to gain proselytes among the heathen and at home. Fouler infidelities there are not. Special pleading, working for a verdict, etc., etc.]
These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against which they had been warned--in believing that they only were concerned in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently substituting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of favour with God, but only a means of favour.
What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why God did not sooner accomplish the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such as would not have _been_ (_objectively_ would not have been, but still less could it _subjectively_ have been) for the conception of man that dreadful mystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first sight shocking to say of God that He cannot do this and this, but it is not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compass our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the _absolute_, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure--even one sole attribute of God, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and body. _
Read next: 5. Political, Etc
Read previous: 3. On Words And Style
Table of content of Brevia: Short Essays (in Connection With Each Other)
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
