A much more solemn, significant and prophetic meaning than the common one may be secured to the famous passage in St. Matthew—'And thou shalt call His nameJesus.' This injunction wears the most impressive character belonging to heavenly adjuration, when it is thus confided to the care and custody of a special angel, and in the very hour of inauguration, and amongst the very birth-throes of Christianity. For in two separate modes the attention is secretly pointed and solicited to the grand serpentine artifice, which met and confronted the almost insurmountable difficulty besetting Christianity on its very threshold: First, by the record of the earlytherapeuticmiracles, since in that way only, viz., by a science of healing, which the philosopher equally with the populace recognised as resting upon inspiration from God, could the magistrate and civil authority have been steadily propitiated; secondly, by the very verbal suggestion couched in the nameJesus, orHealer.At the most critical of moments an angel reveals himself, for the purpose of saying 'Thou shalt call His name Jesus'—and why Jesus? Because, says the angel, 'He shall heal or cleanse His people from sin as from a bodily disease.' Thus, in one and the same moment is suggested prospectively to the early Christian, who is looking forward in search of some adequate protection against the civil magistrate, and theoretically and retrospectively is suggested to the Christian of our own philosophizing days, that admirable resource of what by a shorthand expression I will callHakimism.TheHakim, theJesus, theHealer, comes from God. Mobsmust not be tolerated. But neither must the deep therapeutic inspirations of God be made of none effect, or narrowed in their applications. And thus in one moment was the panic from disease armed against the panic from insurgent mobs; the privileged Hakim was marshalled against the privileged magistrate; and the deep superstition, which saw, and not unreasonably, a demon raging in a lawless mob, saw also a demon not less blind or cruel in the pestilence that walked in darkness. And, as one magnet creates other magnets, so also the Hakim, once privileged, could secretly privilege others. And the physical Hakim could by no test or shibboleth be prevented from silently introducing the spiritual Hakim. And thus, whilst thrones and councils were tumultuating in panic, behold! suddenly the Christian soldier was revealed amongst them as an armed man.
'Écrasez l'infâme,' I also say: and who is he? It would be mere insanity to suppose that it could beanyteacher of moral truths. Even I, who so much despise Socrates, could not reasonably call himl'infâme.
But who, then, isl'infâme? It is he who, finding in those great ideas which I have noticed as revelations from God, and which throw open to the startled heart the heaven of heavens, in the purity, the holiness, the peace which passeth all understanding, finding no argument of divinity, then afterwardsdoesfind it in the little tricks of legerdemain, in conjuring, in præstigia. But here, though perhaps roused a little to see the baseness of relying on these miracles, and also in the rear a far worse argument against them, he still feels uncomfortable at such words applied to things which Christ did. Christcould not make, nor wished to make, that great which was inherently mean; that relevant, which was originally irrelevant. If He did things in themselves mean, it was because He suited Himself to mean minds, incapable of higher views; wretches such as exist amongst us of modern days by millions, on whom all His Divine words were thrown away, wretches deaf and blind and besotted, to whom it was said in vain: 'He that looketh upon a woman,' and what follows, creating by a rod of divinity in man's heart a far superior ideal of the moral; who heard with indifference His 'Bless those who persecute you;' yes, listened unmoved to His 'Suffer little children to come unto Me;' who heard with anger His 'In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;' who abhorred His great doctrine that the counsels of God were not read in the events of things[31]; who slighted as trivial that prayer which a wise man might study with profit for a thousand years; beasts, wretches, that turned away deaf and blind, even as their sons turn away, from these arguments of a truth far transcending all that yet had come amongst men; but whilst trampling with their brutal hoofs upon such flowers of Paradise, turned in stupid wonderment to some mere legerdemain or jugglery.
The Truth.—But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had been a blank not filled by anything, not by any smoke or dusky tarnish of suspicion, not filled by so much as any shadowy outline or vague phantom of possibility,therewas now seen rising, 'like Teneriffe or Atlas'—say rather, by symbolizingthe greatest of human interests by the greatest of human visual objects, like the snowy peaks of the Himalaya, peaks that by men's feelings are referred to the heavens rather than to the earth; to the beings 'whose dwelling is no thick flesh,' rather than to men who have in no age succeeded in scaling them; and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but dread crashes of sound—again to fade or vanish, the colossal form, never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[32]Where there had been nothing, a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for man, called The Truth. Why was it calledTheTruth? How could such an idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, asὁποητηςwas sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement of dissimulation a man was called by the title ofThe Orator, his own favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses oftheimply a momentary annihilation of the competitors, as though in comparison of the ideal exemplification these minor and approximating forms had no existence—or at least, notquoad hunc locum—as 'the mountain in Sicily' would rightly indicate Etna), on the same artificial principle they may imagine rhetoricians to have denominated (or if not, to have had it intheir power to denominate) some one department of truth which they wished to favour asthetruth. But this conventional denomination would not avail, and for two reasons: First, that rival modes of truth (physics against mathematics, rhetoric against music) would contest the title, and no such denomination would have a basis of any but a sort of courtesy or vicarious harmonious reality from the very first. Secondly, that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form, division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic divines. Out of this idea the truth grew, next (supposex) anotherMartyrdom.
The difference between all human doctrines and this is as between a marble statue and a quick thing. The statue may be better, and it may be of better material; it may be of ivory, of marble, and amongst marbles known to the ancient sculptors of several different kinds the most prized; of silver gilt, of hollow gold, of massy gold, and in all degrees of skill; but still one condition applies to all—whatever the material, whoever the artist, the statue is inanimate, the breath of life is not within its nostrils. Motion, spontaneity, action and antagonist action, the subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth, pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty—notone of these divine gifts does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great philosopher meets with the labouring man; both meet with the little innocent child. All have the same undervaluation of the statue. And if any man values it preposterously, it will be neither a great philosopher, nor a labouring man with horny fists, nor a little innocent and natural child. It will be some crazy simpleton, who dignifies himself as a man of taste, aselegans formarum spectator, as one having a judicious eye for the distinctions of form. But now, suddenly, let one of the meanest of these statues begin to stir and shiver with the mystery of life, let it be announced that something 'quick' is in the form, let the creeping of life, the suffusion of sensibility, the awful sense of responsibility and accountability ripen themselves, what a shock—what a panic! What an interest—how profound—would diffuse itself in every channel. Such is the ethics of God as contrasted with the ethics of Greek philosophers. The only great thing ever done by Greece or by Greek philosophers was the ethics. Yet, after all, these were but integrations of the natural ethics implanted in each man's heart. Integrations they were, but rearrangements—redevelopments from some common source.
It is remarkable that the Scriptures, valuing clearness and fencing against misunderstandings above all things, never suspend—there is noεποχηin the scriptural style of the early books. And, therefore, when I first came toa text, 'If when,' I was thunderstruck, and I found that this belongs to the more cultivated age of Hebrew literature.
'And the swine because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you' (Deut. xiv. 8). Now the obvious meaning is,primâ facie, that the ground of its uncleanness was its dividing the hoof. Whereas, so far from this, to divide the hoof is a ground of cleanness. It is a fact, asine quâ non—that is, a negative condition of cleanness; but not, therefore, taken singly the affirmative or efficient cause of cleanness. It must in addition to this chew the cud—it must ruminate. Which, again, was but asine quâ non—that is, a negative condition, indispensable, indeed; whose absence could not be tolerated in any case, but whose presence did not therefore, and as a matter of course, avail anything. For the reverse case occurred in the camel, hare, and rabbit. Theydochew the cud, the absence of which habit caused the swine to be rejected, but then they 'divide not the hoof.' Accordingly they were equally rejected as food with the swine.
We see the great Jewish lawgiver looking forward to cases which actually occurred nearly five hundred years after, as demanding a king, and again looking still farther to cases eight hundred and a thousand years after—their disobedience and rebellion to God. Now, many will think that it must have been an easy thing for any people, when swerving from their law, and especially in that one great fundamental article of idolatry as the Jews so continually did, and so naturally when the case is examined, to always have an easy retreat: theplagues and curses denounced would begin to unfold themselves, and then what more easy than to relinquish the idolatrous rites or customs, resuming with their old rituals to God their old privileges? But this was doubly impossible. First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of God slept often for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions. The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could not recover the stationfrom which they swerved. They that had now realized thecasus fœderis, the case in which they had covenanted themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.
In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.
If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a general fire—that word by which sadness is spread over the face of things, but also infinite grandeur—then may I rightlylay this as one chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.
The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating to that which shrinks up to a point—and observe, I do not mean that being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes as a real thing—when this happens, having no subjective existence at all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge; fancying,e.g., like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road out of the wood in which they were then entangled.
It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature, which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly Boeckh—εν γενει—which does not mean that Godsandmen are the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread through thousands of years.
It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet, 'Qu'ont gagné les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290). Now howshouldthat case have been tried thoroughly before the printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospelwasso tried. True, but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new proof of its reality.
An Analogy.—1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews, probably, when rebuked for wickedness,replied, 'What! are we not the peculiar people of God? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the people of God—the chosen people—implied a license to do wrong, and had a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.
2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to repentance. It is odious to think of, this making God the abettor and encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because God has said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety; though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they—such is their thought—are encouraged to sin by the assurance that repentance will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.
Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this meansreal penitence;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we meanreal penitence.' 'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath, and protest against it as no privilege at all.
The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled in her skirts.
Idolatry.—It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's (Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols—utterly wide of any real imperfection, but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship Apollo,i.e., a god to be in some sense false—belonging to a system connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.
I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere archæologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the dimensions of Nineveh, how shouldthatmake him a true prophet? Or supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them, they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.
The sun stands still.I am persuaded that this means no such incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a relation to a particular valley: that the sun could havestood still in Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made known to the central sanctity of that God whose miraculous interposition had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which subsequently created its sanctity did not occur till more than four centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But Shiloh existed, and Horeb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs. And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle, would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people never reflect on theτοpositive of their reading? If theydid, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event, as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters (through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was expressed by saying that the day lingered, arresteditself by a burthen of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was thefinal-causeday.
The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or comment, or—which, in fact, is the meaning—any impulse or bias to the reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz., the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception. Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses, already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.
Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of Araunah?[33]Of that mystery, of thatlocal circumscription—in what sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts—yet mark me so far, Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years. Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended. Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptred potentate for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752b. c.complete the period. But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost. The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next think of the temptation tomythus.And, finally, of God's plan unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire; 2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with the purposesnowbecame necessary to God in order to remedyabnormousshifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of the language of Scripture, I see the same illustration. Sir William Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish fit[34]as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praisesthe language of Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no dishonour if we say of God that, in the sense meant by Sir William Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In the schemata, because in the original ideas, God says indeed what man cannot, for these are peculiar to God; but who before myself has shown what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we have the same identically. And when a language labours under an infirmity, as all do, not God Himself could surmount it! He is compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His answers God is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), God is thwarted and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language—I know its secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high abstractions—far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.
The power lies in the spirit—the animating principle; and verily such a power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness, goodness,and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in reaching manex-abundantibusin so transcendent a way that mere excess of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered, uncorrupted, through the violent assaults of idolatries all round, and the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,[35]down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses—there was the labour hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men treating such a case as a simpleoriginalproblem as to God. But far otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power to receive, to sustain, to comprehend—not in the Divine power to radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act, and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is illustrated by prayer; for, while we think it odd that somany prayers of good men for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and remains wholly uninfluenced by it).
These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against which they had been warned—in believing that they only were concerned in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently substituting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of favour with God, but only a means of favour.
What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why God did not sooner accomplish the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such as would not havebeen(objectivelywould not have been, but still less could itsubjectivelyhave been) for the conception of man that dreadfulmystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first sight shocking to say of God that He cannot do this and this, but it is not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compass our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to theabsolute, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure—even one sole attribute of God, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and body.
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Sir Robert Walpole, as to patriots, was like a man who has originally, from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts, which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circumstances, he does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a class of appearances that, after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his courage and his wrath and his denial—than his challenge of the lurking patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He assaults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades—horrible mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this fact should have given me warning—should have exposed the frauds. But no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side shouldstart a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert him.
Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed, in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.
'He took his stand upon the truth'—said by me of Sir Robert Peel—might seem to argue a lower use of 'thetruth,' but in fact it is as happens to the articletheitself: you saytheguard, speaking of a coach;thekey, speaking of a trunk or watch,i.e.,theas by usage appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of the particular perplexity.
The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the Ostrogoths—the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.
Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is theprincipalin the concern—he makes the trunk, whereas the author, quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.
Case of Casuistry.—Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by a country.Ergothe inference that prudence would be, always if in Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position?
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Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed rule, of verbally uttering thanks to God for every chastisement, and who say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and God seeing my heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so as not to mock God with his lips, give thanks simply on anà prioriprinciple, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness.
I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he will never again see such a person (i.e., by being removed by death) is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn, despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new chances and openings is lodged in every man far downbelow the sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left possible for him to commit suicide.
Justice.—You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test is, what will hedofor it? Suppose a man to propose rewards exclusively to those who assisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have equally seen that many didnotassist, even refused to do so. But X perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for truth and justice by exposing the undeserving.
It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc. But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the dispute, 'Is he wrong as apoet?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as ageometrician?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is capable of decision.
Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirationsworking together with time.
Instead of being any compliment it is the mostprofound insult, the idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it is villainous insensibility to the written.
Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and the more angel she.
I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.
Upon trying to imprint upon my memory that at such a period the Argives ceased to be called Pelasgi, and were henceforward called Danai, I felt how impracticable (and doubtless in their degree injurious, for though an infinitesimal injury only as regards any single actdoubtless, yet,per se, by tendency doubtless all blank efforts of the memory unsupported by the understanding are bad), must be any violent efforts of the memory not falling in with a previous preparedness.
Music.—I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than anything merely intellectual ever could.
It is remarkable (as proving to me the delibility of caste) that the Sudras of Central India, during its vast confusions under the Mahrattas have endeavoured to pass themselves for descendants of the Kshatriyas (or warrior caste) by assuming the sacred thread, also assumed by the Rajpoots, and also by some of the Sikhs.
I never see a vast crowd of faces—at theatres, races, reviews—but one thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to die. Strange it is that this multitude of people, so many of them intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without forethought or sense of the realities of life.
Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well with other things.
This is curious:
Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure,When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure,When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
This offends nobody, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:
When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,Self-murderis an honourable way—
When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,Self-murderis an honourable way—
though the same essentially, this shocks all men.
I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which in my youth I fled.
TheArrow Ketch, six guns, is recorded in theEdinburgh Advertiserfor June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'
Anecdotes fromEdinburgh Advertiser, for June and May. The dog of a boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow passed away, leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a stepmother's wrath.
To note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting plagues or typhus fever,want of granaries or mendacious violence destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating, moves.