All-radiant region! would that thou wert free!Free 'mid thine Alpine realm of cloud and pine,Free 'mid the rich vales of thine Apennine,Free to the Adrian and the Tyrrhene Sea!God with a two-fold freedom franchise thee!Freedom from alien bonds, so often thine,Freedom from Gentile hopes—death-fires that shineO'er the foul grave of pagan liberty,With pagan empire side by side interred;Then round the fixed throne of their Roman sireThy sister states should hang, a pleiad choir,With saintly beam unblunted and unblurred,A splendor to the Christian splendor clinging,A lyre star-strung, ever the "new song" singing!Aubrey De Vere.
All-radiant region! would that thou wert free!Free 'mid thine Alpine realm of cloud and pine,Free 'mid the rich vales of thine Apennine,Free to the Adrian and the Tyrrhene Sea!God with a two-fold freedom franchise thee!Freedom from alien bonds, so often thine,Freedom from Gentile hopes—death-fires that shineO'er the foul grave of pagan liberty,With pagan empire side by side interred;Then round the fixed throne of their Roman sireThy sister states should hang, a pleiad choir,With saintly beam unblunted and unblurred,A splendor to the Christian splendor clinging,A lyre star-strung, ever the "new song" singing!Aubrey De Vere.
All-radiant region! would that thou wert free!Free 'mid thine Alpine realm of cloud and pine,Free 'mid the rich vales of thine Apennine,Free to the Adrian and the Tyrrhene Sea!God with a two-fold freedom franchise thee!Freedom from alien bonds, so often thine,Freedom from Gentile hopes—death-fires that shineO'er the foul grave of pagan liberty,With pagan empire side by side interred;Then round the fixed throne of their Roman sireThy sister states should hang, a pleiad choir,With saintly beam unblunted and unblurred,A splendor to the Christian splendor clinging,A lyre star-strung, ever the "new song" singing!
Aubrey De Vere.
BY W. MAZIERE BRADY, D.D., AN IRISH PROTESTANT CLERGYMAN.
Few persons expected that the passing of Mr. Gladstone's disestablishment bill would have immediately introduced a golden age into Ireland. The leading promoters of that measure never regarded it as one which was final and complete; but rather as a necessary prelude to certain reconstructive measures more powerful and important than itself. The abolition of the ascendency of an alien church did not restore—and did not affect to restore—to the Catholic Church its ancient status and endowments. The attempt would be entirely vain to regather thedisjecta membraof the great body of Irish church temporalities long since dispersed and broken up by successive spoliations and alienations. The property dealt with by the recent legislation is but a small fraction of what once belonged to the Irish Church. Restitution, unhappily, is often impossible to the statesman. He may build up an edifice upon ruins, and create new empires out of revolutions. But he can no more give back to outraged nationalities their unsullied honor, or to plundered kingdoms their squandered treasures, than he can restore to those fallen from purity their virgin crown or reëndow criminals with a conscience void of offence and free from sear of guilt. And therefore the removal of the alien church led to no replacement of the old Catholic Church in the position vacatedby its Protestant rival; but merely paved the way for the introduction of constructive measures upon the nature of which will depend the future, not of Ireland merely, but of the British empire. Amidst these constructive measures the statesman will not reckon any provisions for the maintenance or aggrandisement of the Catholic Church in Ireland. A church which withstood calamity and survived the loss of its possessions, and flourished under three hundred years of bitter persecution, may safely be left to itself. State patronage, in any extended form, might corrupt, but could not strengthen, Irish Catholicism. Catholics in many countries are beginning to feel that freedom of action and development is of far greater value than endowments to the church. In Ireland, Catholics have long since perceived and acknowledged that liberty—not the enervating influence of court favor—is the true bulwark of Catholic worship.
Legislators have, in fact, no occasion to take into their consideration the Irish Catholic Church, except in so far as its power and interests intermingle with the educational and other social and political problems which demand deep and impartial inquiry. Whoever examines, without prejudice or passion, the actual position of Ireland as an integral part of the British empire must confess that Ireland forms at this time, more than at any other, the cardinal point of English policy. Gibraltar was once the key to the Mediterranean and to political supremacy in Europe. Ireland is to England another Gibraltar, on whose rock British power must be either consolidated or riven. The Ireland of 1870 is rapidly entering on a new phase of existence, which is none the less worthy of the statesman's study because it is the result of causes altogether beyond his control. Ireland is no longer an island lying within a few hours' sail of the English navy, inhabited by men whose interests may be disposed of without reference to the wishes of any save the inhabitants of Great Britain. The people of Ireland are by no means confined within the territorial limits of that country. The Irish nation has two homes. The one is in Ireland, the other is in America. Misgovernment sent half Ireland into exile, and those exiles have prospered and multiplied to an extent far exceeding any known examples of similar transmigrations. But although there are two homes, there is but one nation of Irishmen. Five millions of men occupy Irish soil, but far more than twice five millions of Irishmen dwelling in foreign lands not only claim but exercise an ever-increasing influence on Irish politics. Some few among the ultra-conservative statesmen of England—and among them one no less distinguished than the great chief of the late Tory administration—looked with eyes of cruel satisfaction on the exodus which wiser men regarded with awe as a hemorrhage draining away the life-blood of their kingdom. The famine was to these bigoted men a God-gift, which swept off what they flippantly termed a superabundant population. Emigration was, in their eyes, a more tedious and costly process for the decimation of Irish Catholics. Protestants, belonging chiefly to the dominant and richer class, were in proportion to their numbers less exposed than Catholics to the severity of the famine and the necessity of expatriation. Famine and emigration, if only Providence would prolong and intensify their action, would alter—so they thought—the numerical proportions between Catholics and Protestants make Ireland a Protestant country and render the church establishment less anomalous. Let a fewmore years pass—so argued these reasoners—and instead of having to legislate for a Catholic, discontented, Ireland, over-populated and half-pauperized, we shall have to deal with one comparatively Protestant, which will be prosperous, happy, and loyal to the British crown. It is recorded of an English statesman that he once expressed a wish—in jest, no doubt—that Ireland were for an hour submerged in the Atlantic, that it might rise again stripped of its inhabitants, a fresh field for the importation of English Protestant colonists. The folly of wishing for either a flood or a famine to repair the defects of English legislation for Ireland, is now as apparent as the cruelty. Even though the island of Ireland were reduced to such atabula rasaas some bigots would desire, England must take into account the thousands and millions of Irishmen in various lands who constitute part of the Irish nation, and who think, plan, and pray for the happiness of their traditional fatherland. And fortunately for the interests of England, no less than of Ireland, a policy has of late been adopted by the leaders of the great liberal party which professes to deal with Catholic Ireland, not as with a venomous thing to be guarded against, kept down, and, if possible, crushed, but as a country to be tenderly regarded, carefully cherished, and legislated for with a view to the contentment and preservation of its Catholic people. The policy of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and the party of which they are now the recognized chiefs, is at present but partially developed, yet has already produced good fruits. Righteousness exalteth a nation, and England has risen immensely in the opinion of wise and good men in Europe and America by that great though tardy—the greater, perhaps, because so tardy—act of righteousness, namely, the abolition of an English Protestant church establishment for Irish Catholics. The sympathies of all honest men in every quarter of the globe are with the English government in its endeavor to stay the tide of Irish emigration, and retain Irishmen upon their native soil as contented occupiers and owners of farms. But admiration and sympathy are not the only rewards which England may reap by steadily following out the policy begun by Mr. Gladstone. The integrity of the British empire may be shown to depend upon the continued development of the principles which carried the Irish church bill of 1869 and introduced an Irish land bill in 1870. If it be too presumptuous to attempt to forecast a triumphant progress for those principles, it will yet be not wholly profitless to denote the perils and obstructions which beset the way.
The disturbances and outrages which in Ireland preceded and followed the passing of the disestablishment bill, were the natural result of the violent harangues uttered by the fanatic debaters of the Church Defence Association, many of whom announced to their excited auditors that the land bill of Mr. Gladstone would confiscate the property of Protestant land-owners in Ireland. The evil passions of men thus deceived into a belief that a wrong was intended not only to their church but to their lands, found vent not merely in hard words and cruel threats, but in merciless deeds. Some Protestant landlords withheld the accustomed local charitable contributions which, as owners of property, they had hitherto given to various institutions. Others issued notices of ejection against their tenants, and these attempted ejections produced—as capricious injustice is certain to do—ill-will and resistance. Outrages, even assassinations, occurred.But such offences against public order may be expected to cease when the causes of them are removed. Time will allay the heat of bygone party conflicts. Agrarian outrages will, if the land bill be good for any thing, occur as rarely in Ireland as in America. Industrious laborers will, it is to be hoped, find it easy to rent or purchase small holdings on which they may expend their toil, and in which they may invest their savings without fear of their being appropriated to the use of felonious landlords by means of notices to quit. It is when the excitement of the land and church questions shall have yielded to the pressure of other momentous questions, that the real danger will threaten the onward march of those principles which, in the opinion of many, can alone safely guide the mutual relations between England and Ireland. The education question will be a highly perilous one. If the liberal party put forward a scheme for compulsory, or secular, or sectarian education, which shall, on whatever pretext, either nominally or practically, tend to withdraw the education of Catholic children from the immediate control of the priests, the result will be disappointment and disaster. Free education, in the sense of an education independent of religion, has great charms in the eyes of English and Irish liberals. Some Catholics are inclined to favor any scheme which would place a superior system of secular instruction within the reach of the great bulk of the poorer and middle class, even though it should not provide for that religious training which is a characteristic of a strictly Catholic education. But the Catholic clergy of Ireland, to a man, and those members of Parliament who represent Irish Catholic constituencies, will give strenuous and effectual opposition to undenominational or secular education under its open guise, although they may prove unable to resist the employment, in a modified shape, of the principle which they regard as pernicious. It will be much to the advantage of Great Britain if the education of Catholics in England, as well as in Ireland, be made thoroughly Catholic. The vast, and in many respects admirable system of national education in Ireland, which, twenty or thirty years ago, was favorably regarded by very many of the Irish Catholic bishops and clergy, has long since been declared unsatisfactory by the Catholic hierarchy. The elementary national schools are now merely tolerated. The national model schools are loudly denounced. The national system aimed at giving to all children a combined secular instruction and at affording opportunities for separate religious instruction. The priest and the parson were invited to become joint patrons of schools. The board of education were to supply school-rooms, teachers, books, and requisites for a secular instruction in which all the pupils were to share. The ministers of various denominations were to supply, either personally or by deputy, a religious teaching to their respective pupils. Thus an hour or more was to be set apart for religious teaching. During that hour the Catholic children were to be taught the Catholic religion by the priest, or by one of the masters under the priest's direction, and the Protestant children were similarly to be taught the principles of Protestantism in another room by the parson, or by one of the teachers under his control. It was supposed that all ministers of religion would join in carrying out a system which thus provided for the general education of the poor, without interfering with the conscientious discharge of that part of the ministerial duty of clergymen which relates tothe religious teaching of the young. The idea of instructing Catholic and Protestant children together and bringing them up in habits of mutual affection and esteem, was specious and captivating. Who could withhold his quota of aid toward realizing the prospect thus held out of future generations of educated Irishmen of various creeds, each respecting the religious principles of the others while strong in his own, and all loyal to the impartial government of the British crown? Yet, at its very outset, the clergy and bishops of the Protestant establishment held aloof from the national board. They refused any partnership with Catholic priests in the management of schools, and declared that their consciences would not permit them to consent to support a system which set limits to the free use of the holy Scriptures during secular instruction. In vain was it shown that in Protestant universities, colleges, and higher schools, nay, that in the very order for divine service according to the ritual of the establishment, a limit was actually set to the use of the holy Scriptures by the appointment of fixed times and places for the study and reading and exposition of the sacred word. In vain was it demonstrated that neither insult nor disparagement was intended by regulations which might be looked on as scarcely different from those which prevented a lecturer in mathematics from giving his class a dissertation upon Isaiah, and denied a clergyman of the establishment the privilege of interpolating his reading of the litany with a chapter from the Apocalypse. The establishment clergy, with a few notable exceptions, asserted it as their right and duty to use the Scriptures at all times in their schools, and declared it to be a sin to consent to suspend, even during the hours of combined secular instruction, their office of teachers of divine truth. By adopting this course they lost whatever claim to public estimation they might otherwise have had as helpers of education, and hastened, undoubtedly, the fall of their establishment. It has lately, through the publication of Archbishop Whately's biography by his daughter and of the journals of Mr. Senior, been fully disclosed that a desire for proselytism, although in his lifetime he publicly professed the contrary, was at the bottom of that able prelate's energetic support of the national system. The religious and moral teaching of the books used for combined secular instruction had, so argued Whately in private, a strong tendency to implant truths which must lead to the reception of Protestantism. Give free scope, so reasoned the archbishop, to the national system, and, although the priests may not perceive their danger, Ireland must cease to be a Catholic country. When publicly advocating the national system, Whately's language was, of course, far different. Then he maintained stoutly that the books were thoroughly impartial, he repudiated with affected loathing any dishonorable desire to make converts to Protestantism, and he professed the most scrupulous respect for the consciences of those who differed from him in religion. The posthumous publication of Whately's real sentiments—destructive as that publication is of much of his reputation, and especially of his character for straightforwardness—forms a valuable vindication, not merely of the behaviour of those more honest commissioners of education whose refusal to adopt the Whately tactics led to Whately's retirement from the board, but also of the conduct of the Catholic bishops and clergy who have found it necessary emphatically to demand a radical change in the systemof national instruction so far as Catholics are concerned.
It is, however, for the interests of Protestantism and of Great Britain, as well as of Catholicism, that the education of Catholics should be carried on more perfectly in accord with the desires of the Catholic people. The principle of religious neutrality in education has been tried in Ireland, and found wanting. It has not resulted in bringing into the same school-rooms the young of various creeds, and educating them in mutual love. Three or four Protestants may be found in the same school with a hundred Catholics; or three or four Catholics may attend a school frequented by a hundred Protestants. But nowhere in Ireland is it possible to find a school where one half of the pupils are Protestants and the other half Catholics, or where the Protestant clergyman and the Catholic priest, as joint patrons, superintend their respective classes. It is true, indeed, that proselytism is discouraged by the rules of the board, and that no favor is shown to one denomination more than to another. But with all this endeavor after impartiality by its administrators, the system inflicts a serious wound upon Catholicity. The authority of the board is substituted for that of the Catholic Church. The national school teacher, when in training for his office, learns his duties from men of various religious denominations, who are not permitted, even were they desirous, to impart a devotional color to what they teach. The virtues must be commended on moral, not on religious grounds. Patriotism may take root in ignorance; for no book of Irish history is to be found in the list of Irish national school books. When the trained teacher is set over a school, he still regards himself as dependent upon the board which is his paymaster. Catholic teachers may, and sometimes do, hold opinions different from those of the priest, and even upon occasions refuse to carry out the priest's directions in the matter of religious teaching. The influence of the priest upon his flock is weakened by that very separation between secular and religious instruction which is the basis of the system of national education. Protestantism may flourish under the impartiality, neutrality, and secularization of education at which the originators of that system aimed; but Catholicism must inevitably become deteriorated.
It was in past years the almost universal belief of Protestant governments, that an Irish Catholic, in proportion as he ceased to be loyal to his spiritual, would advance in loyalty toward his temporal sovereign. Toleration was offered, even under Elizabeth and James, to Catholics who would abjure the spiritual supremacy of the pope. In modern times the same spirit of distrust shows itself in the endeavor, on the part of some Protestant statesmen, to offer to Catholics educational and other advantages upon conditions inconsistent with Catholic practices. Those greatly err who thus fancy that Great Britain will gain—either politically or religiously—by the undermining of the influence of the Catholic priesthood, or by leavening the education of Catholics with the spirit of secularization. The Irish Catholic may be taught to unlearn his faith, to neglect confession, and disobey the injunctions of his priest; but no one will say that thereby he becomes, necessarily, either a better Christian or a better subject to his sovereign. Such a one may, or may not, become a Protestant or an infidel. When the influence of the priest is weakened or destroyed, the Irish Catholic becomes an easy victim to those whoteach disloyalty and rebellion. But his lapse into treason should be ascribed to the fact not of his being a Catholic, but of his being a bad one. No good Catholic who values the sacraments, and respects the precepts of his church, could possibly join the treasonable brotherhoods denounced by the Catholic priest from the altar, by the bishops in pastorals, and by the pope himself. There are, however, too many Irish Catholics whose obedience to their church is partial, or but nominal. Perhaps these men first learnt in Irish national schools the lesson that religion, like every thing else, has its appointed time and place; that Catholic devotion forms no indispensable portion of secular studies, and that priestly intervention in affairs not strictly religious is intrusive and impertinent. The want of a truly Catholic training in early life doubtless has led many an adult Catholic to hold that a priest out-steps the proper sphere of his office, when he cautions his flock against revolutionary excesses.
If misdirected and uncatholic teaching occasions many Irish Catholics to become rebels in thought if not in deed, their education has advanced and is advancing in another point, so as to render their treason more dangerous. Irishmen in former years were prompt to seize occasions for the overthrow of British rule, but lacked certain qualities requisite for permanent success. They seemed incapable, for any length of time, of combined action and resolution in the field or the cabinet. They carried into battle the dissensions and jealousies of their divided council-chambers. Brilliant displays of military valor served only to mark more distinctly the fatal effects of indecision and insubordination. Victory itself was often the prelude to that demoralization of forces which is the worst consequence of defeat. But now the Irish are swiftly learning to acquire those qualities of organization and self-government which will render their revolts more formidable and disastrous to England than hitherto they have proved. Irishmen have shown themselves in American campaigns not soldiers merely, but generals, and not merely skilful tacticians in handling masses of troops before the enemy, but also able organizers, clever in moulding and disciplining untrained materials into effective battalions. Habits of promptitude, self-control, and self-reliance belong to the Irish-American in perhaps even a higher degree than to the Anglo-Saxon. The number is rapidly increasing of Irishmen who, having acquired those habits in America, repair to Ireland and communicate them in some degree to their brethren at home. The peasantry of Ireland—already familiarized with trans-Atlantic ideas of independence and republicanism—are apt to become Americanized. Their sympathies are with the United States rather than with England. If war broke out between Great Britain and the States, no one doubts but that the first American army flung upon Irish shores would find Ireland one vast recruiting field, and that swarms of soldiers of Irish descent would fly from distant lands to Ireland to lend their aid in rendering it, throughout its length and breadth, a garrison impregnable to British attacks. And no one doubts but that England—even though eventually victorious by land and sea—would depart from such a conflict crippled in half her strength. Ireland, alienated irrevocably, would be to England like a paralyzed limb to the combatant, both a sign and a source of weakness. At no very distant period from the termination of such a war, Ireland would virtually become an American outpost,and would cease to be an integral part of Great Britain. Without Ireland to rely upon, England could scarcely be expected to maintain a position as a first-class power in the event of war among European nations. Mercenary troops might, indeed, for a time supply the want of Irish soldiers and sailors. But the nation which has to hire foreign troops to fight its battles is already in decay.
It is possible, however, that Ireland, instead of becoming the occasion of ruin and dismemberment to the British empire, may prove its mainstay and the bond of its integrity. If Ireland shall become prosperous and contented under the changed policy of England, if its population shall increase under prosperity, and if its nationality shall be recognized and fostered—then no combination of European foes, unaided by America, can hope to prevail against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But why should America withhold her hand, when opportunity shall have presented itself for dealing a blow in repayment of old wrongs aggravated by recent disputes? France may demand the armed assistance of the States, whose existence as an independent government she so powerfully helped to create. He reads ill the face of nations who fails to perceive that the great body of Americans desire to see the pride of England humbled, and that they are treasuring up their wrath against the day of wrath. The native-born Americans are moved by the transmitted rancor of past injustice. Those of Irish and Catholic descent have the wrongs of Ireland and of the Catholic Church to avenge. All the traditions of faith and patriotism are now arrayed against England, and the influence of the Irish and Catholic population of the States is sufficient to decide the political action of Congress in the eventuality of the reasonableness of war with Great Britain becoming a subject for discussion. Yet the Irish and Catholic element in the American population might, under circumstances to be created by English policy, prove the means of restraining from an almost fratricidal contest the two great empires. Ireland may become so linked to England that any blow struck against England would equally harm Ireland. An enlightened legislation concerning the soil of Ireland may lead to the break-up of absentee landlordism, and substitute tens of thousands of owners and occupiers in place of the few hundred feudal proprietors who now exact rack-rents from an impoverished tenantry. The multiplication of resident working farm-owners may afford remunerative and permanent occupation to numerous agricultural laborers for whom there now offers only an intermittent and precarious employment. The agricultural prosperity of Ireland is a powerful bond of union with England, the nearest and best market for Irish produce. Another bond of union may be found in the grant of legislative independence, or such a modification of the present parliamentary system as may place the disposal of purely Irish interests in the hands of Irish representatives, satisfy the just desires of the patriotic, and leave no room for sentimental grievances to fester into international feuds. The Catholic religion, subjected to no disabilities in either kingdom, and overshadowed by no hostile establishment—for Englishmen themselves in a few years will remove their present church establishment in the interests of their church and of Protestantism—will form another tie between the countries. English Catholics have always been loyal to the British government. Irish Catholics may become just asloyal. Education may render the rough Irish laborers, who frequent the centres of English commerce and manufacture, as loyal as the most loyal in England, and a valuable counterpoise to the ultra-democratic semi-infidels who form the dangerous mobs of London, Liverpool, and other vast trading and industrial cities. And if the social and political interests of Catholic Irishmen and of Catholics in England become recognized as identical with those of English Protestants, then the union between Great Britain and Ireland will be completely consolidated, and the Irish party in America will have neither excuse nor opportunity for joining any other party which may desire, disregarding the welfare of Ireland, to inflict a wound upon Great Britain. On the contrary, the Irish and Catholic element in the States will be both able and willing to throw its effective influence into the scale upon the side of peace and good-will, whenever the differences between the cabinets of London and Washington demand settlement. Ireland will thus indirectly become the mediator between the contending empires—the arbiter to reconcile the angry parent and the aggrieved son. But Ireland, to be enabled to act this part, must be cherished as Irish and Catholic, with its nationality unimpaired and its faith untrammelled. And if the political interests of Great Britain shall be served by the flourishing condition of Irish Catholicism, the religious interests of Protestant England will not necessarily be damaged. Nay, it may prove an advantage to Protestantism to be brought upon equal terms into close and harmonious relations with the fervent faith of the Catholic Church, which nowhere appears to greater advantage than in Ireland. Rationalism and scepticism are on the increase in Great Britain and elsewhere, and will prove far more dangerous neighbors than the Church of Rome to the Church of England. Infidelity is an enemy against whom both would do well, if not to unite their strength, at least to direct their separate attacks. As rivals in opposing vice and unbelief, they may learn to respect each other, and, alas! have before them a field only too ample for their most vigorous exertions.
Sweet name of Mary, name of names save One—And that, my Queen, so wedded unto thineOur hearts hear both in either, and enshrineInstinctively the Mother with the Son—The lisping child's new accent has begun,Heaven-taught, with thee; first-fervent happy youthMakes thee the watchword of its maiden truth;Repentant age the hope of the undone.To me, known late but timely, thou hast beenThe noon-day freshness of a wooded height;A vale of soothing waters; the delightOf fadeless verdure in a desert scene;And when, ere long, my day shall set serene,Be Hesper[35]to an eve without a night.B. D. H.
Sweet name of Mary, name of names save One—And that, my Queen, so wedded unto thineOur hearts hear both in either, and enshrineInstinctively the Mother with the Son—The lisping child's new accent has begun,Heaven-taught, with thee; first-fervent happy youthMakes thee the watchword of its maiden truth;Repentant age the hope of the undone.To me, known late but timely, thou hast beenThe noon-day freshness of a wooded height;A vale of soothing waters; the delightOf fadeless verdure in a desert scene;And when, ere long, my day shall set serene,Be Hesper[35]to an eve without a night.B. D. H.
Sweet name of Mary, name of names save One—And that, my Queen, so wedded unto thineOur hearts hear both in either, and enshrineInstinctively the Mother with the Son—The lisping child's new accent has begun,Heaven-taught, with thee; first-fervent happy youthMakes thee the watchword of its maiden truth;Repentant age the hope of the undone.To me, known late but timely, thou hast beenThe noon-day freshness of a wooded height;A vale of soothing waters; the delightOf fadeless verdure in a desert scene;And when, ere long, my day shall set serene,Be Hesper[35]to an eve without a night.
B. D. H.
Mr. Emerson's literary reputation is established, and placed beyond the reach of criticism. No living writer surpasses him in his mastery of pure and classic English, or equals him in the exquisite delicacy and finish of his chiselled sentences, or the metallic ring of his style. It is only as a thinker and teacher that we can venture any inquiry into his merits; and as such we cannot suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by his oracular manner, nor by the apparent originality either of his views or his expressions.
Mr. Emerson has had a swarm both of admirers and of detractors. With many he is a philosopher and sage, almost a god; while with others he is regarded as an unintelligible mystic, babbling nonsense just fitted to captivate beardless young men and silly maidens with pretty curls, who constituted years ago the great body of his hearers and worshippers. We rank ourselves in neither class, though we regard him as no ordinary man, and as one of the deepest thinkers, as well as one of the first poets, of our country. We know him as a polished gentleman, a genial companion, and a warm-hearted friend, whose kindness does not pass over individuals and waste itself in a vague philanthropy. So much, at least, we can say of the man, and from former personal acquaintance as well as from the study of his writings.
Mr. Emerson is no theorist, and is rather of a practical than of a speculative turn of mind. What he has sought all his life, and perhaps is still seeking, is the real, the universal, and the permanent in the events of life and the objects of experience. The son of a Protestant minister, brought up in a Protestant community, and himself for some years a Protestant minister, he early learned that the real, the universal, and permanent are not to be found in Protestantism; and assuming that Protestantism, in some or all its forms, is the truest exponent of the Christian religion, he very naturally came to the conclusion that they are not to be found in Christianity. He saw that Protestantism is narrow, hollow, unreal, a sham, a humbug, and, ignorant of the Catholic Church and her teaching, he considered that she must have less of reality, be even more of a sham or humbug, than Protestantism itself. He passed then naturally to the conclusion that all pretensions to a supernaturally revealed religion are founded only in ignorance or craft, and rejected all of all religions, except what may be found in them that accords with the soul or the natural reason of all men. This may be gathered from his brief essay, entitledNature, first published in 1836. We quote a few paragraphs from the introduction:
"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and a philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs?... The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship."Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order ofthings has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, To what end is nature?"All science has one aim, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are deemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained, but inexplicable—as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex." (Vol. i. pp. 5, 6.)
"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and a philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs?... The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship.
"Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order ofthings has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, To what end is nature?
"All science has one aim, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are deemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained, but inexplicable—as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex." (Vol. i. pp. 5, 6.)
These extracts give us the key to Mr. Emerson's thought, which runs through all his writings, whether in prose or poetry; though more fully mastered and better defined in his later productions, essays, and lectures, than it was in his earliest production from which we have quoted. In studying these volumes, we are convinced that what the writer is after is reality, of which this outward, visible universe, both as a whole and in all its parts, symbolizes. He seeks life, not death; the living present, not the corpse of the past. Under this visible world, its various and ever-varying phenomena, lies the real world, one, identical, universal, and immutable, which it copies, mimics, or symbolizes. He agrees with Plato that the real thing is in the methexis, not in the mimesis; that is, in the idea, not in the individual and the sensible, the variable and the perishable. He wants unity and catholicity, and the science that does not attain to them is no real science at all. But as the mimesis, in his language the hieroglyphic, copies or imitates the methexic, we can, by studying it, arrive at the methexic, the reality copied or imitated.
We do not pretend to understand Plato throughout, nor to reconcile him always with himself; but as far as we do understand him, the reality, what must be known in order to have real science, is the idea, and it is only by ideas that real science is attained. Ideas are, then, both the object and the medium of knowledge. As the medium of knowledge, the idea may be regarded as the image it impresses on the mimetic, or the individual and the sensible, as the seal on the wax. This image or impression is an exactfac-simileof the idea as object. Hence by studying it we arrive at the exact knowledge of the idea, or what is real, invariable, universal, and permanent in the object we would know. The lower copies and reveals the next higher, and thus we may rise, step by step, from the lowest to the highest, to "the first good and the first fair," to the good, the beautiful, or Being that is being in itself. Thus is it in science. But the soul has two wings on which it soars to the empyrean, intelligence and love. The lowest form or stage of love is that of the sexes, a love of the senses only; but this lowest love symbolizes a higher or ideal love, rising stage by stage to the pure ideal, or the love of absolute beauty, the beautiful in itself, the love to which the sage aspires, and the only love in which he can rest or find repose.
We do not say that Mr. Emerson follows Plato in all respects; for he occasionally deviates from him, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse; but no one not tolerably well versed in the Platonic philosophy can understand him. In his two essays on Plato, in his second volume, he calls him the Philosopher, and asserts that all who talk philosophytalk Plato. He also maintains that Plato represented all the ages that went before him, possessed all the science of his contemporaries, and that none who have come after him have been able to add any thing new to what he taught. He includes Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism in Plato, who is far broader and more comprehensive than them all. Plato of all men born of woman stood nearest the truth of things, and in his intellectual and moral doctrines surpassed all who went before or have come after him.
We find many things in Plato that we like, and we entirely agree with him that the ideal is real; but we do not agree with Mr. Emerson, that nothing in science has been added to the Platonic doctrine. We think Aristotle made an important addition in his doctrine of entelechia; Leibnitz, in his definition of substance, making it avis activa, and thus exploding the notion of passive or inert substances; and finally, Gioberti, by his doctrine of creation as a doctrine, or rather principle, of science. Plato had no conception of the creative act asserted by Moses in the first verse ofGenesis. Plato never rose above the conception of the production of existences by way of formation, or the operation of the plastic force on a preëxisting and often intractable matter. He never conceived of the creation of existences from nothing by the sole energy or power of the creator. He held to the eternal existence of spirit and matter, and we owe to him principally the dualism and antagonism that have originated the false asceticism which many attribute to Christian teaching; but which Christianity rejects, as is evident from its doctrine of the Incarnation and that of the resurrection of the flesh. Gioberti has shown, as the writer thinks, that creation is no less a scientific principle than a Christian dogma. He has shown that the creative act is the nexus between being and existences, and that it enters as the copula into theprimum philosophicum, without which there could be no human mind, and consequently no human science. There are various other instances we might adduce in which people talk very good sense, even profound philosophical and theological truth, and yet do not talk Plato. We hardly think Mr. Emerson himself will accept all the moral doctrines of Plato's Republic, especially those relating to marriage and the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes; for Plato goes a little beyond what our free-lovers have as yet proposed.
Aristotle gives us, undoubtedly, a philosophy, such as it is, and a philosophy that enters largely into modern modes of thought and expression; but we can hardly say as much of Plato. He has profound thoughts, no doubt, and many glimpses of a high—if you will, the highest order of truth; but only when he avowedly follows tradition, and speaks according to the wisdom of the ancients. He seems to us to give us a method rather than a philosophy, and very little of our modern philosophical language is derived from him. Several of the Greek fathers, and St. Augustine among the Latins, incline to Platonism; but none of them, so far as we are acquainted with them, followed him throughout. The mediæval doctors, though not ignorant of Plato, almost without an exception prefer Aristotle. The revival of Platonism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought with it a revival of heathenism; and Plato has since been held in much higher esteem with the heterodox and makers of fanciful systems than with the orthodox and simple believers. We trace his influence in what the romancers call chivalry,which is of pagan origin, though some people are ill-informed enough to accredit it to the church; and we trace to his doctrine of love, so attractive to many writers not in other respects without merit, the modern babble about "the heart," the confusion of charity with philanthropy, and the immoral doctrines of free love, which strike at Christian marriage and the Christian family. The "heart," in the language of the Holy Scriptures, means the affections of the will, and the love they enjoin as the fulfilment of the law and the bond of perfection is charity, a supernatural virtue, in which both the will and the understanding are operative, not a simple, natural sentiment, or affection of the sensibility, or the love of the beautiful, and dependent on the imagination.
Mr. Emerson is right enough in making the sensible copy or imitate the intelligible, what there is true in Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences; but wrong in making the mimetic purely phenomenal, unreal, a mere sense-show. The mimetic, the mimesis, by which Plato means the individual and the sensible, the variable and the transitory, is not the only real, nor the highest real, as sensists and materialists hold; but is as real in its order and degree as the methexic or ideal. Hence, St. Thomas is able to maintain that the sensible species, or accidents, as he calls them, can subsist without their subject, or, as we would say, the sensible body without the intelligible body; and therefore, that the doctrine of transubstantiation involves no contradiction; for it is not pretended that the sensible body undergoes any change, or that the sensible body of our Lord is present in the blessed eucharist. So St. Augustine distinguishes the visible—the sensible—body and the spiritual—intelligible—body, and holds both to be real. The individual is as real as the species—thesocratitas, in the language of the schoolmen, as thehumanitas—for neither is possible without the other. The sort of idealism, as it is called, that resolves the individual into the species, or the sensible into the intelligible, and thus denies the external world, is as unphilosophical as the opposite doctrine, that resolves the species into the individual and the intelligible into the sensible. Even Plato, the supposed father of idealism, does not make the mimesis absolutely unreal. For, to say nothing of the preëxistent matter, the image, picture, which is the exact copy of its ideal prototype, is a real image, picture, or copy.
But Mr. Emerson, if he recognizes the methexis at all, either confounds it with real and necessary being, or makes it purely phenomenal, and therefore unreal, as distinguished from real and necessary being. Methexis is a Greek word, and means, etymologically and as used by Plato, participation. Plato's doctrine is, that all inferior existences exist by participation of the higher, through the medium of what he calls the plastic soul, whence the Demiourgos of the Gnostics. His error was in making the plastic soul instead of the creative act of God the medium of the participation. Still, Plato made it the participation of ideas or the ideal, and, in the last analysis, of Him who is being in himself. Hence, he made a distinction, if not the proper distinction, between the methexis and God, or being by participation and the absolute underived being, or being in itself.
Mr. Emerson recognizes no real participation, and either excludes the methexis or identifies it with God, or absolute being. He thus reduces the categories, as does Cousin, to being and phenomenon, or, in the only barbarism in language he permits himself,theME—le moi—and theNOT ME—le non moi—the root-error, so to speak, of Fichte. He takes himself as the central force, and holds it to be the reality expressed in theNOT ME. TheNOT MEbeing purely phenomenal, only theMEis real. By theMEhe, of course, does not mean his own personality, but the reality which underlies and expresses itself in it. The absoluteIch, or ego, of Fichte is identical in all men, is the real man, the "one man," as Mr. Emerson says; and this "one man" is the reality, the being, the substance, the force of the whole phenomenal universe. There is, then, no methexis imitated, copied, or mimicked by the mimesis, or the individual and sensible universe. The mimesis copies not a participated or created intelligible, but, however it may be diversified by degrees, it copies directly God himself, the one real being and only substance of all things. If we regard ourselves as phenomenal, we are unreal, and therefore nothing; if as real, as substantive, as force, we do not participate,mediantethe creative act, of real being, but are identically it, or identical with it; which makes the author not only a pantheist, but a more unmitigated pantheist than Plato himself.
Neither Plato nor Mr. Emerson recognizes any causative force in the mimesis. Plato recognizes causative force only in ideas, though he concedes a power of resistance to the preëxistent matter, and finds in its intractableness the cause of evil; Mr. Emerson recognizes causative or productive force only in the absolute, and therefore denies the existence of second causes, as he does all distinction between first cause and final cause; which is the very essence of pantheism, which Gioberti rightly terms the "supreme sophism."
We have used the Greek termsmethexisandmimesisafter Plato, as Gioberti has done in his posthumous works, but not precisely in Gioberti's sense. Gioberti identifies the methexis with the plastic soul asserted by Plato, and revived by old Ralph Cudworth, an Anglican divine of the seventeenth century; but though we make the methexis causative in the order of second causes, we do not make it productive of the mimesis. It means what are called genera and species; but even in the order of second causes, genera are generative or productive only as specificated, and species only as individualized. God must have created the genus specificated and the species individualized before either could be active or productive as second cause. The genus does not and cannot exist without specification, nor the species without individualization, any more than the individual can exist without the species, or the species without the genus. For instance, man is the species, according to the schoolmen, the genus is animal, thedifferentiais reason, and hence man is defined a rational animal. But the genus animal, though necessary to its existence, cannot generate the species man, any more than it could have generated itself. The species can exist only as immediately individuated by the first cause, and hence the pretence of some scientists—more properly sciolists,—that new species are formed either by development or by natural selection, is simply absurd, as has been well shown by the Duke of Argyll. God creates the species as well as the genera; and it is fairly inferred from the Scriptures that he creates all things in their genera and species "after their kind." Furthermore, if God had not created the human species individualized in Adam, male and female, there could have been no men by natural generation, any morethan if there had been no human species at all.
This, as we understand it, excludes alike the plastic soul of the Platonists and the Demiourgos of the Gnostics, and teaches that the mimesis is as directly created by God himself as the methexis. Mr. Emerson, indeed, uses neither of these Platonic terms, though if he had, he would, with his knowledge of the Christian doctrine of creation, have detected the error of Plato, and most likely have escaped his own. The termmethexis—participation—excludes the old error that God generates the universe, which is rather favored by the terms genera and species. We use the termmimesisbecause it serves to us to express the fact that the lower copies or imitates the higher, and therefore the doctrine of St. Thomas, that "Deus est similitudo rerum omnium," or that God is himself the type or model after which the universe is created, and which each and every existence in its own order and degree strives to copy or represent. The error of Plato is, that he makes the methexis an emanation rather than a creature, and the plastic power that produces the mimesis; the error of Mr. Emerson, as we view the matter, is, that he makes the mimetic purely phenomenal, therefore unreal, sinks it in the methexic, and the methexis itself in God, as the one only being or substance, thenatura naturansof Spinoza.
With Plato, the mimesis is the product of the methexic, but is itself passive, and the sooner the soul is emancipated from it the better; though what is the soul in his system of ideas we understand not. With Mr. Emerson, it is neither active nor passive, for it is purely phenomenal, therefore nothing. With us it is real, and, like all real existences, it is active, and is not a simple image or copy of the methexic or the ideal, but is in its order and degree avis activa, and copies or imitates actively the divine type or theidea exemplarisin the divine mind, after which it is created.
Mr. Emerson says, in the introduction to his essay onNature, "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of nature and soul." But all activity is in the soul, and what is distinguishable from the soul is purely phenomenal, and, if we may take his essay on theOver-soul, not republished in these volumes, is but the soul's own projection of itself. The soul alone is active, productive, and it is myself, my own ego; not indeed in its personal limitations and feebleness, but in its absoluteness, as the absolute or impersonalIchof Fichte, and identically God, who is the great, the absoluteI am.
The error is obvious. It consists in the denial or in the overlooking of the fact that God creates substances, and that every substance is, as Leibnitz defines it, a force, avis activa, acting always from its own centre outward. Whatever actually exists is active, and there is and can be no passivity in nature. Hence, Aristotle and the schoolmen after him call God, who is being and being in its plenitude,actus purissimus, or most pure act, in whom there are no possibilities to be actualized. Mr. Emerson errs in his first principles, in not recognizing the fact that God creates substances, and that every substance is an activity, therefore causative eitherad intraorad extra, and that every created substance is causative in the order of second causes. What we maintain in opposition both to him and Plato is, that these created substances are at once methexic and mimetic in their activity.
It were an easy task to show that whatever errors there may be, or may be supposed to be, in Mr. Emerson'sworks grow out of the two fundamental errors we have indicated—the identification of soul, freed from its personal limitations, as in Adam, John, and Richard, with God, or the real being, substance, force, or activity, and the assumption that whatever is distinguishable from God is purely phenomenal, an apparition, a sense-show, a mere bubble on the surface of the ocean of being, as we pointed out in our comments on the proceedings of the Free Religionists, in the magazine for last November, and to which we beg leave to refer our readers.
Yet, though we have known Mr. Emerson personally ever since 1836, have held more than one conversation with him, listened to several courses of lectures from him, and read and even studied the greater part, if not all of his works, as they issued from the press, we must confess that, in reperusing them preparatory to writing this brief notice, we have been struck, as we never were before, with the depth and breadth of his thought, as well as with the singular force and beauty of his expression. We appreciate him much higher both as a thinker and as an observer, and we give him credit for a depth of feeling, an honesty of purpose, an earnest seeking after truth, we had not previously awarded him in so great a degree, either publicly or privately. We are also struck with his near approach to the truth as we are taught it. He seems to us to come as near to the truth as one can who is so unhappy as to miss it.
We regard it as Mr. Emerson's great misfortune, that his early Protestant training led him to regard the Catholic question asres adjucata, and to take Protestantism, in some one or all of its forms, as the truest and best exponent of Christianity. Protestantism is narrow, superficial, unintellectual, vague, indefinite, sectarian, and it was easy for a mind like his to pierce through its hollow pretensions, to discover its unspiritual character, its want of life, its formality, and its emptiness. It was not difficult to comprehend that it was only a dead corse, and a mutilated corse at that. The Christian mysteries it professed to retain, as it held them, were lifeless dogmas, with no practical bearing on life, and no reason in the world for believing them. Such a system, having no relation with the living and moving world, and no reason in the nature or constitution of things, could not satisfy a living and thinking man, in downright earnest for a truth at least as broad and as living as his own soul. It was too little, too insignificant, toomesquine, too much of a dead and putrefying body to satisfy either his intellect or his heart. If that is the true exponent of Christianity, and the most enlightened portion of mankind say it is, why shall I belie my own understanding, my own better nature, by professing to believe and reverence it? No; let me be a man, be true to myself, to my own reason and instincts, not a miserable time-server or a contemptible hypocrite.
If Mr. Emerson had not been led to regard the Catholic question as closed, except to the dwellers among tombs, and to the ignorant and superstitious, and had studied the church with half the diligence he has Plato, Mohammed, or Swedenborg, it is possible that he would have found in Christianity the life and truth, the reality, unity, and catholicity he has so long and so earnestly sought elsewhere and found not. Certain it is, that whatever affirmative truth he holds is held and taught by the church in its proper place, its realrelations, and in its integrity. The church does not live in the past nor dwell only among tombs; she is an ever-present and ever-living church, and presents to us not a dead historical Christ, but the ever-living and ever-present Christ, as really and truly present to us as he was to the disciples and apostles with whom he conversed when he went about in Judea doing good, without having where to lay his head, and not more veiled from our sight now than he was then from theirs. Does she not hold the sublime mystery of the Real Presence, which, if an individual fact, is also a universal principle?
The Christian system, if we may so speak, is not an after-thought in creation, or something superinduced on the Creator's works. It has its ground and reason in the very constitution of things. All the mysteries taught or dogmas enjoined by the church are universal principles; they are truly catholic, the very principles according to which the universe, visible or invisible, is constructed, and not one of them can be denied without denying a first principle of life and of science. Mr. Emerson says, in a passage we have quoted, "All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature," and seems to concede that it has not yet succeeded in finding it. The church goes beyond even the aim of science, and gives, at least professes to give, not a theory of truth, but the truth itself; she is not a method, but that to which the true method leads. She is the body of Him who is "the way, the truth, and the life;" she gives us, not as the philosophers, her views of the truth, but the truth itself, in its reality, its unity, its integrity, its universality, its immutability. At least such is her profession; for the faith she teaches is the substance—hypostasis—of the things to be hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen—substantia sperandarum, argumentum non apparentium.
Such being her profession, made long before Protestantism was born, and continued to be made since with no stammering tongue or abatement of confidence, the pretence that judgment has gone against her is unfounded. Many have condemned her, as the Jewish Sanhedrim condemned our Lord, and called on the Roman Procurator to execute judgment against him; but she has no more staid condemned than he staid confined in the new tomb hewn from the rock in which his body was laid, and far more are they who admit her professions among the enlightened and civilized than they who deny them. No man has a right to be regarded as a philosopher or sage who has not at least thoroughly examined her titles, and made up his mind with a full knowledge of the cause.
In the Catholic Church we have found the real presence, and unity, and catholicity which we sought long and earnestly, and could find nowhere else, and which Mr. Emerson, after a still longer and equally earnest search, has not found at all. He looks not beyond nature, and nature is not catholic, universal, or the whole. It is not one, but manifold and variable. It cannot tell its origin, medium, or end. With all the light Mr. Emerson has derived from nature, or from nature and soul united, there is infinite darkness behind, infinite darkness before, and infinite darkness all around him. He says, "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic of those inquiries he would put." Suppose it is so, what avail is that to him who has lost or never had the key to the hieroglyph? Knows he to interpret the hieroglyph in which the solution is concealed? Can he read the riddle of the sphinx? He has tried his hand at it in his poem of theSphinx, and has only been able to answer that
"Each answer is a lie."
It avails us little to be told where the solution is, if we are not told what it is, or if only told that every solution is false as soon as told. Hear him; to man he says,