Decoration.
Recollections of another Church of England Sermon preached extempore.
The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42.: “The Queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it,” &c.
Thepreacher began by drawing that distinction between knowledge and wisdom which so many comprehend and allow, and so few apply. He then described the two parties in the great question of popular education. Those who would base all human progress on secular instruction, on knowledge in contradistinction to ignorance, as on light opposed to darkness;—and the mistake of those who, taking the contrary extreme, denounce all secular instruction imparted to the poor as dangerous, or contemn it as useless. The error of those who sneer at the triumphof intellect he termed a species of idiocy; and the error of those who do not see the insufficiency of knowledge, blind presumption. Then he contrasted worldly wisdom and spiritual; with a flow of gorgeous eloquence he enlarged on the picture of worldly wisdom as exhibited in the character of Solomon, and of intellect, and admiration for intellect, in the character of the Queen of Sheba. “In what consisted the wisdom of Solomon? He made, as the sacred history assures us, three thousand proverbs, mostly prudential maxims relating to conduct in life; the use and abuse of riches; prosperity and adversity. His acquirements in natural philosophy seem to have been confined to the appearances of material and visible things; the herbs and trees, the beasts and birds, the creeping things and fishes. His political wisdom consisted in increasing his wealth, his dominions, and the number of his subjects and cities. On his temple he lavished all that art had then accomplished, and on his own house a world of riches in gold, and silver, and precious things: but all was done for his own glory—nothing for the improvement or the happiness of his people, who were ground down by taxes, suffered in the midst of all his magnificence, and remained ignorant in spite of all his knowledge. Witness the wars, tyrannies, miseries, delusions, and idolatries which followed after his death.”
“But the Queen of Sheba came not from the uttermost parts of the earth to view the magnificence and wonder at the greatness of the King, she came to hear his wisdom. She came not to ask anything from him, but to prove him with hard questions. No idea of worldly gain, or selfish ambition was in her thoughts; she paid even for the pleasure of hearing his wise sayings by rare and costly gifts.”
“Knowledge is power; but he who worships knowledge not for its own sake, but for the power it brings, worships power. Knowledge is riches; but he who worships knowledge for the sake of all it bestows, worships riches. The Queen of Sheba worshipped knowledge solely for its own sake; and the truths which she sought from the lips of Solomon she sought for truth’s sake. She gave, all she could give, in return, the spicy products of her own land, treasures of pure gold, and blessings warm from her heart. The man who makes a voyage to the antipodes only to behold the constellation of the Southern Cross, the man who sails to the North to see how the magnet trembles and varies, these love knowledge for its own sake, and are impelled by the same enthusiasm as the Queen of Sheba.” He went on to analyse the character of Solomon, and did not treat him, I thought, with much reverence either as sage or prophet. He remarked that, “of the thousand songs of Solomon one only survives, and that bothin this song and in his proverbs his meaning has often been mistaken; it is supposed to be spiritual, and is interpreted symbolically, when in fact the plain, obvious, material significance is the true one.”
He continued to this effect,—but with a power of language and illustration which I cannot render. “We see in Solomon’s own description of his dominion, his glory, his wealth, his fame, what his boasted wisdom achieved; what it could, and what it could not do for him. What was the end of all his magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety? of his ships, and his commerce, and his chariots, and his horses, and his fame which reached to the ends of the earth? All—as it is related—ended in feebleness, in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in sensualism, idolatry, and dotage! The whole ‘Book of Ecclesiastes,’ fine as it is, presents a picture of selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of the Jews! the King of those that know! (Il maestro di color chi sanno.) Solomon is a type of worldly wisdom, of desire of knowledge for the sake of all that knowledge can give. We imitate him when we would base the happiness of a people on knowledge. When we have commanded the sun to be our painter, and the lightning to run on our errands, what reward have we? Not the increase of happiness,nor the increase of goodness; nor—what is next to both—our faith in both.”
“It would seem profane to contrast Solomon and Christ had not our Saviour himself placed that contrast distinctly before us. He consecrated the comparison by applying it—‘Behold a greater than Solomon is here.’ In quoting these words we do not presume to bring into comparison the twonatures, but the two intellects—the two aspects of truth. Solomon described the external world; Christ taught the moral law. Solomon illustrated the aspects of nature; Christ helped the aspirations of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying that ‘in much wisdom there is much grief;’ and Christ preached to us the lowly wisdom which can consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The two majesties—the two kings—how different! Not till we are old, and have suffered, and have laid our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable distance between the teaching of Christ and the teaching of Solomon!”
Then returning to the Queen of Sheba, he treated the character as the type of the intellectual woman. He contrasted her rather favourably with Solomon. He described with picturesque felicity, her long and toilsome journey to see, to admire, the man whose wisdom had made him renowned;—the mixture ofenthusiasm and humility which prompted her desire to learn, to prove the truth of what rumour had conveyed to her, to commune with him of all that was in her heart. And she returned to her own country rich in wise sayings. But did the final result of all this glory and knowledge reach her there? and did it shake her faith in him she had bowed to as the wisest of kings and men?
He then contrasted the character of the Queen of Sheba with that of Mary, the mother of our Lord, that feminine type of holiness, of tenderness, of long-suffering; of sinless purity in womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood: and rising to more than usual eloquence and power, he prophesied the regeneration of all human communities through the social elevation, the intellect, the purity, and the devotion of Woman.
Decoration.
Theascetics of the old times seem to have had a belief that all sin was in the body; that the spirit belonged to God, and the body to his adversary the devil; and that to contemn, ill-treat, and degrade by every means this frame of ours, so wonderfully, so fearfully, so exquisitely made, was to please the Being who made it; and who, for gracious ends, no doubt, rendered it capable of such admirable development of strength and beauty. Miserable mistake!
To some, this body is as a prison from which we are to rejoice to escape by any permitted means: to others, it is as a palace to be luxuriously kept up and decorated within and without. But what says Paul (Cor. vi. 19.),—“Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God, and which is not your own?”
Surely not less than a temple is that form which the Divine Redeemer took upon him, and deigned, for a season, to inhabit; which he consecrated by his life, sanctified by his death, glorified by his transfiguration, hallowed and beautified by his resurrection!
It is because they do not recognisethisbody as a temple, built up by God’s intelligence, as a fitting sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, andthislife equally with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that men fall into such opposite extremes of sin:—the spiritual sin which contemns the body, and the sensual sin which misuses it.
Decoration.
WhenI was at Boston I made the acquaintance of Father Taylor, the founder of the Sailors’ Home in that city. He was considered as the apostle of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as the enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it is not of his virtues or his labours that I wish to speak. He struck me in another way,as a poet; he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty he had never learned to read, and his reading afterwards was confined to such books as aided him in his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the last, but his mind was teeming with spontaneousimagery, allusion, metaphor. One might almost say of him,
“He could not opeHis mouth, but out there flew a trope!”
“He could not opeHis mouth, but out there flew a trope!”
These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality, and sometimes an oddity that was quite startling, and they were generally, but not always, borrowed from his former profession—that of a sailor.
One day we met him in the street. He told us in a melancholy voice that he had been burying a child, and alluded almost with emotion to the great number of infants he had buried lately. Then after a pause, striking his stick on the ground and looking upwards, he added, “There must be something wrong somewhere! there’s a storm brewing, when the doves are all flying aloft!”
One evening in conversation with me, he compared the English and the Americans to Jacob’s vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew over it and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,—“but it is still the same vine, nourished from the same root!”
On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had diedor been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears were startled by such a sentence as this,—“Grant, O Lord! that this rod of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of their souls!”
Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be near the bereaved father “when his aged heart went forth from his bosom to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!” Praying for others of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms, “O save them! O guard them! thou angel of the deep!”
On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, “Go heat your ovens with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle in your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach you to swim!”
He was preaching against violence and cruelty:—“Don’t talk to me,” said he, “of the savages! a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun’s heat, groping in the sun’s light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!”
In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen, and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on each side; he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, “I don’t meanyoubefore me here,” looking at the sailors; “I believe you are wicked enough, but honest fellows in some sort, for you profess less, not more, than you practise; but I mean to touchstarboardandlarboardthere!” stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and looking at us on either side till we quailed.
He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and missing when his ship returned to port.
Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a mariner, steering into port through a narrow dangerous channel, “false lights here, rocks there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings out from thewheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm, and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket.” Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true sailor-like look of defiant jollity;—changed in a moment to an expression of horror as he added, “See! See! she drifts to destruction!”
One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of Redemption. He began with an eloquent description of a terrific storm at sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a vessel is seen labouring in distress and driving on a lee shore. The masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm unshipped, they spring a leak! the vessel begins to fill, the water gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper,deeper! deeper!He bent over the pulpit repeating the last words again and again; his voice became low and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed up at him with their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget. Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, “A life boat! a life boat!” Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had sprung to their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep impressive tone, and extending his arms, “Christ is that life boat!”
Decoration.
“It is true, that science has not made Nature as expressive of God in the first instance, or to the beginner in religion, as it was in earlier times. Science reveals a rigid, immutable order; and this to common minds looks much like self-subsistence, and does not manifest intelligence, which is full of life, variety, and progressive operation. Men, in the days of their ignorance, saw an immediate Divinity accomplishing an immediate purpose, or expressing an immediate feeling, in every sudden, striking change of nature—in a storm, the flight of a bird, &c.; and Nature, thus interpreted, became the sign of a present, deeply interested Deity. Science undoubtedly brings vast aids, but it is topreparedminds, to those who have begun in another school. The greatest aid it yields consists in the revelation it makes of the Infinite. It aids us not so much by showing us marks of design in this or that particular thing as by showing theInfinitein thefinite. Science does this office when it unfolds to us the unity of the universe,which thus becomes the sign, the efflux of one unbounded intelligence, when it reveals to us in every work of Nature infinite connections, the influences of all-pervading laws—when it shows us in each created thing unfathomable, unsearchable depths, to which our intelligence is altogether unequal. Thus Nature explored by science is a witness of the Infinite. It is also a witness to the same truth by its beauty; for what is so undefined, so mysterious as beauty?”—Dr. Channing.
Decoration.
Decoration.
Decoration.
“Agreatadvantage is derived from the occasional practice of reading together, for each person selects different beauties and starts different objections: while the same passage perhaps awakens in each mind a different train of associated ideas, or raises different images for the purposes of illustration.”—Francis Horner.
“C’estainsi que je poursuis la communication de quelque esprit fameux, non afin qu’il m’enseigne mais afin que je le connaisse, et que le connaissant, s’il le faut, je l’imite.”—Montaigne.
Decoration.
Isatup till half-past two this morning reading Dr. Arnold’s “Life and Letters,” and have my soul full of him to-day.
On the whole I cannot say that the perusal of this admirable book has changed any notion in my mind, or added greatly to my stock of ideas. There was no height of inspiration, or eloquence, or power, to which I lookedup; no profound depth of thought or feeling into which I lookeddown; nonewlights; nonewguides; no absolutelynewaspects of things human or spiritual.
On the other hand, I never read a book of the kind with a more harmonious sense of pleasure andapprobation,—if the word be not from me presumptuous. While I read page after page, the mind which was unfolded before me seemed to me a brother’s mind—the spirit, a kindred spirit. It was the improved, the elevated, the enlarged, the enriched, the every-way superior reflection of my own intelligence, but it was certainlythat. I felt it sofrom beginning to end. Exactly the reverse was the feeling with which I laid down the Life and Letters of Southey. I was instructed, amused, interested; I profited and admired; but with themanSouthey I had no sympathies: my mind stood off from his; the poetical intellect attracted, the material of the character repelled me. I liked the embroidery, but the texture was disagreeable, repugnant. Now with regard to Dr. Arnold, my entire sympathy with the character, with thematerialof the character, did not extend to all its manifestations. I liked the texture better than the embroidery;—perhaps, because of my feminine organisation.
Nor did my admiration of the intellect extend to the acceptance ofallthe opinions which emanated from it; perhaps because from the manner these were enunciated, or merely touched upon (in letters chiefly), I did not comprehend clearly the reasoning on which they may have been founded. Perhaps, if I had done so, I must have respected them more, perhaps have been convinced by them; so large, so candid, so rich in knowledge, and apparently so logical, was the mind which admitted them.
And yet this excellent, admirable man, seems to havefearedGod, in the common-place sense of the word fear. He considered the Jews as out of the pale of equality; he was against their political emancipation from a hatred of Judaism. He subscribed to theAthanasian Creed, which stuck even in George the Third’s orthodox throat. He believed in what Coleridge could not admit, in the existence of the spirit of evil as a person. He had an idea that the Churchof Godmay be destroyed by an Antichrist; he speaks of such a consummation as possible, as probable, as impending; as if any institution really from God could be destroyed by an adverse power!—and he thought that a lawyer could not be a Christian.
Certainpassages filled me with astonishment as coming from a churchman, particularly what he says of the sacraments (vol. ii. pp. 75. 113.); and in another place, where he speaks of “thepestilentdistinction between clergy and laity;” and where he says, “I hold that one form of Church government is exactly as much according to Christ’s will as another.” And in another place he speaks of the Anglican Church (with reference to Henry VIII. as its father, and Elizabeth as its foster-mother), as “the child of regal and aristocratical selfishness and unprincipled tyranny, who has never dared to speak boldly to the great, but has contented herself with lecturing the poor;” but he forgot at the moment the trial of the bishops in James’s time, and their noble stand against regal authority.
Withregard to conservatism (vol. ii. pp. 19. 62.), he seems to mean—as I understand the whole passage,—that it is a goodinstinctbut a badprinciple. Yet as a principle is it, as he says, “always wrong?” Though as the adversary of progress, it must be always wrong, yet as the adversary of change itmaybe sometimes right.
Heremarks that most of those who are above sectarianism are in general indifferent to Christianity, while almost all who profess to value Christianity seem, when they are brought to the test, to care only for their own sect. “Now,” he adds, “it is manifest to me, that all our education must be Christian, and not be sectarian.” Yet the whole aim of education up to this time has been, in this country, eminently sectarian, and every statesman who has attempted to place it on a broader basis has been either wrecked or stranded.
“All sects,” he says in another place, “have had among them marks of Christ’s Catholic Church in the graces of his Spirit and the confession of his name,” and he seems to wish that some one would compile a book showing side by side what professors of all sects have done for the good of Christ’s Church,—themartyrdoms, the missionary labours of Catholics, Protestants, Arians, &c.; “a grand field,” he calls it,—and so it were; but it lies fallow up to this time.
“Thephilosophy of medicine, I imagine, is at zero; our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less happy.” In another place (vol. ii. p. 72.), he says, “yet I honour medicine as the most beneficent of all professions.”
Hesays (vol. ii. p. 42.), “Narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness, because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral nature.” “Thus, a man may have one or more virtues, such as are according to his favourite ideas, in great perfection; and still be nothing, because these ideas are his idols, and, worshipping them with all his heart, there is a portion of his heart, more or less considerable, left without its proper object, guide, and nourishment; and so this portion is left to the dominion of evil,” &c.
(One might askhow, if a man worship these ideas withallhis heart, a portion could be left? but the sense is so excellent, I cannot quarrel with a slight inaccuracy in the expression. I never quite understoodbefore why it is difficult to subscribe to the truth of the phrase “He is a good but a narrow-minded man,” butfeltthe incompatibility.)
Hesays “the wordusefulimplies the idea of good robbed of its nobleness.” Is this true? theusefulis thegoodapplied to practical purposes; it need not, therefore, be less noble. The nobleness lies in the spirit in which it is so applied.
Benthamism(whatisit?), Puritanism, Judaism, how he hates them! I suppose, because hefearsGod andfearsfor the Church of God. Hatred of all kinds seems to originate in fear.
What he says of conscience, very remarkable!
“Menget embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience: but a compass may be out of order as well as a conscience; and you can trace the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former. The needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction; still the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure guide,” &c.; and then he adds, “he who believes hisconscience to be God’s law, by obeying it obeys God.”
I think there would be much to say about all this passage relating to conscience, nor am I sure that I quite understand it. Derangement of the intellect is madness; is not derangement of the conscience also madness? might it not be induced, as we bring on a morbid state of the other faculties, by over use and abuse? by giving it more than its due share of power in the commonwealth of the mind? It should preside, not tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty cramping despotism. A healthy courageous conscience gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair play; and having once settled the order of government with a strong hand, is not always meddling though always watchful.
Then again, how is conscience “God’s law?” Conscience is not the law, but the interpreter of the law; it does not teach the difference between right and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe to be right, and smites us when wethinkwe have been wrong. How is it that many have done wrong, and every day do wrong for conscience’ sake?—and does that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of God, as well as in those of John Huss?1
“Prayer,”he says, “and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two great safeguards of spiritual life—its more than food and raiment.”
True; but there is something higher than this fed and clothed spiritual life; something more difficult, yet less conscious.
Inallusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that the power of contemplation becomes diseased and perverted when it is the main employment of life. But to the same great intellect he does beautiful justice in another passage. “Coleridge seemed to me to love truth really, and, therefore, truth presented herself to him, not negatively, as she does to many minds, who can see that the objections against her are unfounded, and therefore that she is to be received; but she filled him, as it were, heart and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her ardently; and that seems to me to be true wisdom.”
Veryfine is a passage wherein he speaks against meeting what is wrong and bad with negatives, with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and the false to be false, without substituting for either the positively good and true.
Hecontrasts as the two forms of the present danger to the Church and to society, the prevalent epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal spirit of priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that the Church of God may be “utterly destroyed”(?), or, he asks, “must we look forward for centuries to come to the mere alternations of infidelity and superstition, scepticism, and Newmanism?” It is very curious to see two such men as Arnold and Carlyle both overwhelmed with a terror of the magnitude of the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are oppressed with the anticipation of evil as with a sense of personal calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in the temperaments of these two extraordinary men;—large conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and small hope: there was great mutual sympathy and admiration.
Veryadmirable what he says in favour of comprehensive reading, against exclusive reading in one line of study. He says, “Preserve proportion in your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and depend upon it a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one; as far as it goes the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class of writers only, gets views which are almostsure to be perverted, and which are not onlynarrow but false.”
Decoration.
Allhis descriptions of natural scenery and beauty show his intense sensibility to them, but nowhere is there a trace of the love or the comprehension of art, as the reflection from the mind of man of the nature and the beauty he so loved. Thus, after dwelling on a scene of exquisite natural beauty, he says, “Much more beautiful, because made truly after God’s own image, are the forms and colours of kind, and wise, and holy thoughts, words, and actions;” that is to say—although he knew not or made not the application—Art, in the high sense of the word, for that is the embodying in beautiful hues and forms, what is kind, wise, and holy; in one word—good. In fact, he says himself, art, physical science, and natural history, were not included within the reach of his mind; the first for want of taste, the second for want of time, and the third for want of inclination.
Hesays, “The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery, that I darenot approach it.” This is very striking from such a man. How deep, consciously or unconsciously, does this feeling lie in many minds!
Bayle had already termed the acts, motives, and feelings of the lower order of animals, “un des plus profonds abîmes sur quoi notre raison peut s’exerciser.”
There is nothing, as I have sometimes thought, in which men so blindly sin as in their appreciation and treatment of the whole lower order of creatures. It is affirmed that love and mercy towards animals are not inculcated by any direct precept of Christianity, but surely they are included in its spirit; yet it has been remarked that cruelty towards animals is far more common in Western Christendom than in the East. With the Mahometan and Brahminical races humanity to animals, and the sacredness of life in all its forms, is much more of a religious principle than among ourselves.
Bacon, in his “Advancement of Learning,” does not think it beneath his philosophy to point out as a part of human morals, and a condition of human improvement, justice and mercy to the lower animals—“the extension of a noble and excellent principle of compassion to the creatures subject to man.” “The Turks,” he says, “though a cruel and sanguinary nation both in descent and discipline, give alms to brutes, and suffer them not to be tortured.”
It should seem as if the primitive Christians, by laying so much stress upon a future life in contradistinction to this life, and placing the lower creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the same time out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid the foundation for this utter disregard of animals in the light of our fellow creatures. The definition of virtue among the early Christians was the same as Paley’s—that it was good performed for the sake of ensuring everlasting happiness—which of course excluded all the so-called brute creatures. Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much enduring, we know them to be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future, because they have no selfish calculated aim, these are not virtues; yet if we say “avicioushorse,” why not say avirtuoushorse?
The following passage, bearing curiously enough on the most abstruse part of the question, I found in Hallam’s Literature of the Middle Ages:—“Few,” he says, “at present, who believe in the immateriality of the human soul, would deny the same to an elephant; but it must be owned that the discoveries of zoology have pushed this to consequences which some might not readily adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a little our prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit this, or be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary fibre. Brutes have been as slowly emancipated inphilosophy as some classes of mankind have been in civil polity; their souls, we see, were almost universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century, even by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery. Even within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any kind of reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions by the vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better of our humble companions; and, as usual in similar cases, the preponderant bias seems rather too much of a levelling character.”
When natural philosophers speak of “the higher reason and more limited instincts of man,” as compared with animals, do they mean savage man or cultivated man? In the savage man the instincts have a power, a range, a certitude, like those of animals. As the mental faculties become expanded and refined the instincts become subordinate. In tame animals are the instincts as strong as in wild animals? Can we not, by a process of training, substitute an entirely different set of motives and habits?
Why, in managing animals, do men in general make brutes of themselves to address what is mostbrutein the lower creature, as if it had not been demonstrated that in using our higher faculties, our reason and benevolence, we develop sympatheticallyhigher powers inthem, and in subduing them through what is best within us, raise them and bring them nearer to ourselves?
In general the more we can gather of facts, the nearer we are to the elucidation of theoretic truth. But with regard to animals, the multiplication of facts only increases our difficulties and puts us to confusion.
“Can we otherwise explain animal instincts than by supposing that the Deity himself is virtually the active and present moving principle within them? If we deny themsoul, we must admit that they have some spirit direct from God, what we callunerringinstinct, which holds the place of it.” This is the opinion which Newton adopts. Then are we to infer that the reason of man removes him further from God than the animals, since we cannot offend God in our instincts, only in our reason? and that the superiority of the human animal lies in the power of sinning? Terrible power! terrible privilege! out of which we deduce the law of progress and the necessity for a future life.
The following passage bearing on the subject is from Bentham:—
“The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognisedthat the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of theos sacrum, are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, ‘can they reason?’ nor ‘can they speak?’ but ‘can they suffer?’”
I do not remember ever to have heard the kind and just treatment of animals enforced upon Christian principles or made the subject of a sermon.
Decoration.
Once, when I was at Vienna, there was a dread of hydrophobia, and orders were given to massacre all the dogs which were found unclaimedor uncollared in the city or suburbs. Men were employed for this purpose, and they generally carried a short heavy stick, which they flung at the poor proscribed animal with such certain aim as either to kill or maim it mortally at one blow. It happened one day that, close to the edge of the river, near the Ferdinand’s-Brücke, one of these men flung his stick at a wretched dog, but with such bad aim that it fell into the river. The poor animal, following his instinct or his teaching, immediately plunged in, redeemed the stick, and laid it down at the feet of its owner, who, snatching it up, dashed out the creature’s brains.
I wonder what the Athenians would have done to such a man? they who banished the judge of the Areopagus because he flung away the bird which had sought shelter in his bosom?
Decoration.
Ireturnto Dr. Arnold. He laments the neglect of our cathedrals and the absurd confusion in so many men’s minds “between what is reallyPopery, and what is but wisdom and beauty adopted by the Roman Catholics and neglected by us.”
Hesays, “Then, only, can opportunities of evil be taken from us, when we lose also all opportunity of doing or becoming good.” An obvious, even common place thought, well and tersely expressed. The inextricable co-relation and apparent antagonism of good and evil were never more strongly put.
Thedefeat of Varus by the Germans, and the defeat of the moors by Charles Martel, he ranked as the two most important battles in the history of the world. I see why. The first, because it decided whether the north of Europe was to be completely Latinised; the second, because it decided whether all Europe was to be completely Mahomedanised.
“Howcan he who labours hard for his daily bread—hardly and with doubtful success—be made wise and good, and therefore how can he be made happy? This question undoubtedly the Church was meant to solve; for Christ’s kingdom was to undo the evil of Adam’s sin; but the Churchhas not solved it nor attempted to do so, and no one else has gone about it rightly. How shall the poor man find time to be educated?”
This question, which “the Church has not yet solved,” men have now set their wits to solve for themselves.
Whenin Italy he writes:—“It is almost awful to look at the beauty which surrounds me and then think of moral evil. It seems as if heaven and hell, instead of being separated by a great gulf from us and from each other, were close at hand and on each other’s confines.”
“Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as is my delight in external beauty!”
A prayer I echo, Amen! if by thesensehe mean the abhorrence of it; otherwise, to be perpetually haunted with the perception of moral evil were dreadful; yet, on the other hand, I am half ashamed sometimes of a conscious shrinking within myself from the sense of moral evil, merely as I should shrink from external filth and deformity, as hateful to perception and recollection, rather than as hateful to God and subversive of goodness.
Hereis a very striking passage. He says, “A great school is very trying; it never can present images of rest and peace; and when the spring and activity of youth are altogether unsanctified by anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish, amongst the poor, whatever of sin exists there is sure also to be enough of suffering: poverty, sickness, and old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But, with boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but plenty, health, and youth; and these are really awful to behold, when one must feel that they are unblessed. On the other hand, few things are more beautiful than when one does see all holy and noble thoughts and principles, not the forced growth of pain, or infirmity, or privation, but springing up as by God’s immediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh and beautiful; full of so much hope for this world as well as for heaven.”
To this testimony of a schoolmaster let us add the testimony of a schoolboy. De Quincey thus describes in himself the transition from boyhood to manhood: “Then first and suddenly were brought powerfully before me the change which was worked in the aspects of society by the presence of woman; woman, pure, thoughtful, noble, coming before me as Pandora crowned with perfections. Right over against thisennobling spectacle, with equal suddenness, I placed the odious spectacle of schoolboy society—no matter in what region of the earth,—schoolboy society, so frivolous in the matter of its disputes, often so brutal in the manner; so childish and yet so remote from simplicity; so foolishly careless, and yet so revoltingly selfish; dedicated ostensibly to learning, and yet beyond any section of human beings so conspicuously ignorant.”
There is a reverse to this picture, as I hope and believe. If I have met with those who looked back on their school-days with horror, as having first contaminated them with “evil communication,” I have met with others whose remembrances were all of sunshine, of early friendships, of joyous sports.
Nor do I think that a large school composed wholly of girls is in any respect better. In the low languid tone of mind, the petulant tempers, the small spitefulnesses, the cowardly concealments, the compressed or ill-directed energies, the precocious vanities and affectations, many such congregations ofFemmeletteswould form a worthy pendant to the picture of boyish turbulence and vulgarity drawn by De Quincey.
I am convinced from my own recollections, and from all I have learned from experienced teachers in large schools, that one of the most fatal mistakes in the training of children has been the too early separationof the sexes. I say,has been, because I find that everywhere this most dangerous prejudice has been giving way before the light of truth and a more general acquaintance with that primal law of nature, which ought to teach us that the more we can assimilate on a large scale the public to the domestic training, the better for all. There exists still, the impression—in the higher classes especially—that in early education, the mixture of the two sexes would tend to make the girls masculine and the boys effeminate, but experience shows us that it is all the other way. Boys learn a manly and protecting tenderness, and the girls become at once more feminine and more truthful. Where this association has begun early enough, that is, before five years old, and has been continued till about ten or twelve, it has uniformly worked well; on this point the evidence is unanimous and decisive. So long ago as 1812, Francis Horner, in describing a school he visited at Enmore, near Bridgewater, speaks with approbation of the boys and the girls standing up together in the same class: it is the first mention, I find, of this innovation on the old collegiate, or charity-school plan,—itself a continuation of the monkish discipline. He says, “I liked much the placing the boys and girls together at an early age; it gave the boys a new spur to emulation.” When I have seen a class of girls stand up together, therehas been a sort of empty tittering, a vacancy in the faces, an inertness, which made it, as I thought, very up-hill work for the teacher; so when it was a class of boys, there has been often a sluggishness—a tendency to ruffian tricks—requiring perpetual effort on the part of the master. In teaching a class of boys and girls, accustomed to stand up together, there is little or nothing of this. They are brighter, readier, better behaved; there is a kind of mutual influence working for good; and if there be emulation, it is not mingled with envy or jealousy. Mischief, such as might be apprehended, is in this case far less likely to arise than where boys and girls, habitually separated from infancy, are first thrown together, just at the age when the feelings are first awakened and the association has all the excitement of novelty. A very intelligent schoolmaster assured me that he had had more trouble with a class of fifty boys, than with a school of three hundred boys and girls together (in the midst of whom I found him); and that there were no inconveniences resulting which a wise and careful and efficient superintendence could not control. “There is,” said he, “not only more emulation, more quickness of brain, but altogether a superior healthiness of tone, body and mind, where the boys and girls are trained together till about ten years old; and it extends into their after life:—I should say because it is in accordance with the lawsof God in forming us with mutual sympathies, moral and intellectual, and mutual dependence for help from the very beginning of life.”
What is curious enough, I find many people—fathers, mothers, teachers,—who are agreed that in the schools for the lower classes, the two sexes may be safely and advantageously associated, yet have a sort of horror of the idea of such an innovation in schools for the higher classes. One would like to know the reason for such a distinction, instead of being encountered, as is usual, by a sneer or a vile innuendo.