Part 6 (1/2)
2. Verse 3.--The fining pot is for silver, the furnace for gold, but the Lord tries the heart.
(Notice the increasing strength of trial for the more precious thing: only the melting-pot for the silver--the fierce furnace for the gold--but the Fire of the Lord for the heart.)
3. Verse 4.--A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips.
(That means, for _you_, that, intending to live by usury and swindling, you read Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Stuart Mill, and other such political economists.)
4. Verse 5.--Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker.
(Mocketh,--by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less than his misfortune,--England's favorite theory now-a-days.)
5. Verse 12.--Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly.
(Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling the pa.s.sengers over London Bridge, ”mostly fools,”--on the ground that men are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under, as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader will please observe that the essential function of modern education is to develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at his forge and plow,--and those tutors teach him his true value, indulge him in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up to London,--give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear,--and it is fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand over London Bridge.)
6. Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly to ask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system of compet.i.tive examination:--
Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it?
(You know perfectly well it isn't the wisdom you want, but the ”station in life,”--and the money!)
7. Lastly, Verse 7.--Wisdom is before him that hath understanding, but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.
”And in the beginnings of it”! Solomon would have written, had he lived in our day; but we will be content with the ends at present.
No scientific people, as I told you at first, have taken any notice of the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-night given you register. But, from the constant arrangements of the universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil, and to end--in nothing.
And I have here a volume,[C] before quoted, by a very foolish and very lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter gives us,--founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs,'--the latest scientific views concerning the order of creation. ”We have spoken already about a medium pervading s.p.a.ce”--this is the Scientific G.o.d, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that the purest in heart cannot see--nor the softest in heart feel--this s.p.a.cious Deity--a _Medium_, pervading s.p.a.ce--”the office of which”
(italics all mine) ”appears to be to _degrade_ and ultimately _extinguish_, all differential motion. It has been well pointed out by Thomson, that, looked at _in this light_, the universe is a system that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process of degradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as a candle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it as having been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as a candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert ma.s.s, _and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty, will have utterly gone away_.”
Do you wish me to congratulate you on this extremely cheerful result of telescopic and microscopic observation, and so at once close my lecture? or may I venture yet to trespa.s.s on your time by stating to you any of the more comfortable views held by persons who did not regard the universe in what my author humorously calls ”this _light_”?
In the peculiarly characteristic notice with which the 'Daily News'
honored my last week's lecture, that courteous journal charged me, in the metaphorical term now cla.s.sical on Exchange, with ”hedging,”
to conceal my own opinions. The charge was not prudently chosen, since, of all men now obtaining any portion of popular regard, I am pretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least either for hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It is certainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on my sleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but the essential reason for my not telling you my own opinions on this matter is--that I do not consider them of material consequence to you.
It _might_ possibly be of some advantage for you to know what--were he now living, Orpheus would have thought, or aeschylus, or a Daniel come to judgment, or John the Baptist, or John the Son of Thunder; but what either you, or I, or any other Jack or Tom of us all, think,--even if we knew what to think,--is of extremely small moment either to the G.o.ds, the clouds, or ourselves.
Of myself, however, if you care to hear it, I will tell you thus much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now, no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or _could_ have been written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was founded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of nature, all spring and summer long; and on the then demonstrable fact that over a great portion of the world's surface the air and the earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man as closely as a school-boy's primer is to his labor, and as gloriously as a lover's mistress is to his eyes.
That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round: fragments, indeed, of what existed still exist, and hours of what is past still return; but month by month the darkness gains upon the day, and the ashes of the Antipodes glare through the night.[D]
What consolation, or what courage, through plague, danger, or darkness, you can find in the conviction that you are nothing more than brute beasts driven by brute forces, your other tutors can tell you--not I: but _this_ I can tell you--and with the authority of all the masters of thought since time was time,--that, while by no manner of vivisection you can learn what a _Beast_ is, by only looking into your own hearts you may know what a _Man_ is,--and know that his only true happiness is to live in Hope of something to be won by him, in Reverence of something to be wors.h.i.+ped by him, and in Love of something to be cherished by him, and cherished--forever.