Part 25 (1/2)

_1810_

O dare I accuse My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, Or call my destiny n.i.g.g.ard! O no! no!

It is her largeness, and her overflow, Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!

S. T. C.

[Sidenote: A PIOUS ASPIRATION]

My own faculties, cloudy as they may be, will be a sufficient direction to me in plain daylight, but my friend's wish shall be the pillar of fire to guide me darkling in my nightly march through the wilderness.

[Sidenote: THOUGHT AND ATTENTION]

Thought and attention are very different things. I never expected the former, (viz., _selbst-thatige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war_) from the readers of _The Friend_. I did expect the latter, and was disappointed. Jan. 3, 1810.

This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a subst.i.tute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is, transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [_that_ I saw long ago] but it requires only _attention,_ not _thought_ or self-production.

[Sidenote: LAW AND GOSPEL]

”The man who squares his conscience by the law” was, formerly, a phrase for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes in everything--the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, _at all_ times, the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion, the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank.

Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of the higher half of the middle cla.s.ses of society in Great Britain.

[Sidenote: CATHOLIC REUNION]

”Hence (_i.e._, from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit.”--MILTON'S _Review of Church Government_, vol. i. p. 2.

It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church, whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by proud _humility_, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in objecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly office and character of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but, finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the c.o.c.k (perhaps Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral, not an intellectual act.

[Sidenote: THE IDEAL MARRIAGE]

On some delightful day in early spring some of my countrymen hallow the anniversary of their marriage, and with love and fear go over the reckoning of the past and the unknown future. The wife tells with half-renewed modesty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and cherished in the courting-time; the man looks with a tear full in his eye and blesses the hour when for the first time (and oh! let it be the last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved being--”Thou art mine and I am thine, and henceforward I s.h.i.+eld and shelter [thee] against the world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and though abandoned by all men, we two will abide together in love and duty.”

In the holy eloquent solitude where the very stars that twinkle seem to be a _voice_ that suits the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless and yet for the _ear_ not the _eye_ of the soul, when the winged soul pa.s.ses over vale and mountain, sinks into glens, and then climbs with the cloud, and pa.s.ses from cloud to cloud, and thence from sun to sun--never is she alone. Always one, the dearest, accompanies and even when he melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at the same moment into union with the beloved.

[Sidenote: A SUPERFLUOUS ENt.i.tY]

That our religious faiths, by the instincts which lead us to metaphysical investigation, are founded in a practical necessity, not a mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and systematic conjecture, is evinced by the interest which all men take in the questions of future existence, and the being of G.o.d; while even among those who are speculative by profession a few phantasts only have troubled themselves with the questions of pre-existence, or with attempts to demonstrate the _posse_ and _esse_ of a devil. But in the latter case more is involved.

Concerning pre-existence men in general have neither care nor belief; but a devil is taken for granted, and, if we might trust words, with the same faith as a Deity--”He neither believes G.o.d or devil.” And yet, while we are delighted in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of asking a simple question concerning the other. This, too, originates in a practical source. The Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties concerning origination, but a truth which spreads light and joy and hope and cert.i.tude through all things--while a devil _is_ a mere solution of an enigma, an a.s.sumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered (and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern with it.

[Sidenote: PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUTH AND MATURITY]

The _great change_--that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly!