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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Froude's Essays in Literature and History, by 
+James Froude
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Froude's Essays in Literature and History
+       With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc
+
+Author: James Froude
+
+Commentator: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: April 28, 2006 [EBook #18276]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROUDE'S ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Madden
+
+
+
+
+
+Essays on History and Literature
+
+By James Anthony Froude
+
+London: J. M. Dent & Co.,
+1906
+____
+
+Contents
+
+Arnold's Poems (Westminster Review, 1854)
+
+Words about Oxford (Fraser's Magazine, 1850)
+
+England's Forgotten Worthies (Westminster Review, 1852)
+
+The Book of Job (Westminster Review, 1853)
+
+The Lives of the Saints (Eclectic Review, 1852)
+
+The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Fraser's Magazine, 1857)
+
+The Philosophy of Christianity (The Leader, 1851)
+
+A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties
+(Fraser's Magazine, 1863)
+
+Spinoza (Westminster Review, 1855)
+
+Reynard the Fox (Fraser's Magazine, 1852)
+
+The Commonplace Book of Richard Hilles (Fraser's Magazine, 1858)
+____
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+Froude had this merit--a merit he shared with Huxley alone of
+His contemporaries--that he imposed his convictions. He fought
+against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent
+animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet
+too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and
+aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was
+permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any
+one who may make a general survey of the last generation in letters.
+
+It was a period with a vice of its own which yet remains to be
+detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another
+fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the
+past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of
+these affected the Victorian era. It was pure--though tainted
+with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence
+in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this
+grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)
+that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the history
+of European letters was it so difficult for a man to say
+what he would and to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit
+(which was but one aspect of the admirable homogeneity of the
+nation) glued and immobilised all individual expression. One
+could float imprisoned as in a stream of thick substance: one
+could not swim against it.
+
+It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions to
+this truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions at
+all. A whole series of national defects were exposed and
+ridiculed in the literature as in the oratory of that day; but
+they were defects which the mass of men secretly delighted to
+hear denounced and of which each believed himself to be free.
+
+They loved to be told that they were of a gross taste in art,
+for they connected such a taste vaguely with high morals and
+with successful commerce. There was no surer way to a large
+sale than to start a revolution in appreciation every five years,
+and from Ruskin to Oscar Wilde a whole series of Prophets
+attained eminence and fortune by telling men how something new
+and as yet unknown was Beauty and something just past was to be
+rejected, and how they alone saw truth while the herd around them
+were blind. But no one showed us how to model, nor did any one
+remark that we alone of all Europe had preserved a school of
+water-colour.
+
+So in politics our blunders were a constant theme; but no one
+marked with citation, document, and proof the glaring progress
+of corruption, or that, for all our enthusiasm, we never once
+in that generation defended the oppressed against the oppressor.
+There was a vast if unrecognised conspiracy, by which whatever
+might have prevented those extreme evils from which we now suffer
+was destroyed as it appeared. Efforts at a thorough purge were
+dull, were libellous, were not of the "form" which the Universities
+and the public schools taught to be sacred. They were rejected as
+unreadable, or if printed, were unread. The results are with us to-day.
+
+In such a time Froude maintained an opposing force, which was
+not reforming nor constructive in any way, but which will obtain
+the attention of the future historian, simply because it was an
+opposition.
+
+It was an opposition of manner rather than of matter. The matter
+of it was common enough even in Froude's chief decade of power.
+The cause to which he gave allegiance was already winning when he
+proceeded to champion it, and many a better man, one or two greater
+men, were saying the same things as he; but they said such things
+in a fashion that suggested no violent effort nor any demand for
+resistance: it was the peculiar virtue of Froude that he touched
+nothing without the virile note of a challenge sounding throughout
+his prose. On this account, though he will convince our posterity
+even less than he does ourselves, the words of persuasion, the
+writings themselves will remain: for he chose the hardest wood in
+which to chisel, knowing the strength of his hand.
+
+What was it in him which gave him that strength, and
+which permitted him, in an age that would tolerate no formative
+grasp upon itself, to achieve a permanent fame? I will not
+reply to this question by pointing to the popularity
+of his History of England; the essays that follow will
+afford sufficient material to answer it. He produced the
+effect he did and remained in the eminence to which he
+had climbed, first because his manner of thought was rigid
+and of a hard edge; secondly, because he could use that
+steel tool of a brain in a fashion that was general; he could
+use it upon subjects and with a handling that was
+comprehensible to great masses of his fellow-countrymen.
+
+It is not certain that such a man with such interests would
+have made his voice heard in any other society. It is
+doubtful whether he will be translated with profit. His field
+was very small, the points of his attack might all be found
+contained in one suburban villa. But in our society his
+grip and his intensity did fall, and fall of choice, upon such
+matters as his contemporaries either debated or were ready
+to debate. He therefore did the considerable thing we
+know him to have done.
+
+I say that his mind was rigid and of a close fibre: it was
+a mind (to repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong
+graying-tool could be forged. Its blade would not be
+blunted: it could deal with its material. Of this character,
+which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the
+few essays before us preserve an ample evidence.
+
+Thus you will find throughout their pages the presence of
+that dogmatic assertion which invariably proceeds from such
+a mind, and coupled with such assertion is a continual
+consciousness that his dogmas are dogmas: that he is asserting
+unprovable things and laying down his axioms before he
+begins his process of reasoning.
+
+The contrary might be objected by some foreign observer,
+or by some one who had a larger acquaintance with European
+history than had he. I can imagine a French or an Irish
+critic pointing to a mass of assertion with no corresponding
+admission that it is assertion only: such a critic might quote
+even from these few pages phrase after phrase in which
+Froude poses as certain what are still largely matters of
+debate. Thus upon page 144 he takes it for granted that
+no miracles have been worked by contact with the bodies
+of saints. He takes it for granted on page 161 that the
+checking of monastic disorders, and the use of strong
+language in connection with them, was peculiar to the
+generation which saw at its close the dissolution of the
+monasteries. He takes it for granted on page 125 that what
+we call "manifestations" or what not,--spirit rappings,
+table-turnings, and the rest--are deceptions of the senses to
+which superstition alone would give credence.
+
+He ridicules (upon p. 128) the tradition of St. Patrick which
+all modern research has come to accept. He says downright
+(upon pp. 186-187) that the Ancient world did not inquire
+into the problem of evil. On p. 214 he will have it that the
+ordinary man rejects, "without hesitation," the interference
+of will with material causes. In other words, he asserts that
+the ordinary man is a fatalist--for Froude knew very well
+that between the fatalist and the believer in a possibility of
+miracle there is no conceivable position. He will have it (on
+p. 216) that a modern doctor always regards a "vision" as
+an hallucination. On p. 217 he denies by implication the
+stigmata of St. Francis--and so forth--one might multiply
+the instances indefinitely. All Froude's works are full of
+them, they are part and parcel of his method--but their
+number is to no purport. One example may stand for all,
+and their special value to our purpose is not that they are
+mere assertions, but that they are assertions which Froude
+must have known to be personal, disputable, and dogmatic.
+
+He knew very well that the vast majority of mankind
+accepted the virtue of relics, that intellects the equals of his
+own rejected that determinism to which he was bound, and
+that the Pagan world might be presented in a fashion very
+different from his own. And in that perpetual--often gratuitous
+--affirmation you have no sign of limitation in him but
+rather of eagerness for battle.
+
+It is an admirable fault or perhaps no fault at all, or if a
+fault an appendage to the most considerable virtue a writer
+of his day could have had: the virtue of courage.
+
+See how he thrusts when he comes to lay down the law,
+not upon what the narrow experience of readers understands
+and agrees with him about, but upon some matter which he
+knows them to have decided in a manner opposed to his own.
+See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the
+sentences in which he asserts that Christianity is Catholic
+or nothing:--
+
+". . . This was the body of death which philosophy detected
+but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now
+came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
+
+"The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are
+compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in
+the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics,
+has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was
+the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could
+be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from
+the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable,
+without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But
+the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless
+organization could begin again from a new original, no pure
+material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom
+God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the
+Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and
+around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a
+material body grew again of the substance of His mother,
+pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when
+it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things."
+
+Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity,
+where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of
+his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of
+Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and
+Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called
+a thing "worn and old" even in Luther's time (upon page 194),
+and he definitely prophesies a period when "our posterity"
+shall learn "to despise the miserable fabric which Luther
+stitched together out of its tatters."
+
+His judgments are short, violent, compressed. They are
+not the judgments of balance. They are final not as a goal
+reached is final, but as a death-wound delivered. He throws
+out sentences which all the world can see to be insufficient
+and thin, but whose sharpness is the sharpness of conviction
+and of a striving determination to achieve conviction in others
+---or if he fails in that, at least to leave an enemy smarting.
+Everywhere you have up and down his prose those short
+parentheses, those side sentences, which are strokes of offence.
+Thus on page 199, "We hear---or we used to hear when the
+High Church party were more formidable than they are," &c.;
+or again, on page 210, "The Bishop of Natal" (Colenso)
+has done such and such things, "coupled with certain
+arithmetical calculations far which he has a special aptitude."
+There are dozens of these in every book he wrote. They
+wounded, and were intended to wound.
+
+His intellect may therefore be compared, as I have compared
+it, to an instrument or a weapon of steel, to a chisel
+or a sword. It was hard, polished, keen, stronger than what
+it bit into, and of its nature enduring. This was the first of
+the characters that gave him his secure place in English
+letters.
+
+The second is his universality--the word is not over-exact,
+but I can find no other. I mean that Froude was the exact
+opposite of the sciolist and was even other than the student.
+He was kneaded right into his own time and his own people.
+The arena in which he fought was small, the ideas he combated
+were few. He was not universal as those are universal
+who appeal to any man in any country. But he was eager
+upon these problems which his contemporaries wrangled over.
+He was in tune with, even when he directly opposed, the
+class from which he sprang, the mass of well-to-do Protestant
+Englishmen of Queen Victoria's reign. Their furniture had
+nothing shocking for him nor their steel engravings. He
+took for granted their probity, their common sense, and their
+reading. He knew what they were thinking about and
+therefore all he did to praise or blame their convictions,
+to soothe or to exasperate them, told. He could see the
+target.
+
+Perpetually this looking at the world from the standpoint
+of the men around him makes him say things that irritate
+more particular and more acute minds than his own, but I
+will maintain that in his case the fault was a necessary fault
+and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the
+sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt"
+and the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures
+in Ireland" to the "incongruity of character" between these
+two imaginaries. He takes it for granted that "we are
+something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by
+an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must
+quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking
+of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful
+voices, and animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but
+partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come
+bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any
+copy of the Spectator picked up at random.
+
+These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of
+those great qualities which gave him his position.
+
+And side by side with such faults go an exceptional
+lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the
+succession of the paragraphs. A choice of subject suited to
+his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or
+bewildered it, a vividness of description wherewith to amuse
+and a directness of conclusion wherewith to arrest his readers
+--all these he had, beyond perhaps any of his contemporaries.
+
+Occasionally that brotherhood in him leads him to faults
+more serious. You get gross commonplace and utterly false
+commonplace, of which when he came back to them (if
+indeed he was a man who read his own works) he must
+have been ashamed:--
+
+"Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religious wars;
+and, at last, the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its
+altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.
+
+"Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions,
+natural and moral."
+
+Or again, of poor old Oxford:--
+
+"The increase of knowledge, and consequently of morality,
+is the great aim of such a noble establishment as this; and
+the rewards and honours dispensed there are bestowed in
+proportion to the industry and good conduct of those who
+receive them."
+
+But the interesting point about these very lapses is that
+they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either
+the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his
+argument. They may be compared to those undignified
+and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up
+in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic
+and wide man.
+
+While, however, one is in the mood of criticism it is not
+unjust to show what other lapses in him are connected
+with this common sympathy of his and this very comprehension
+of his class to which he owed his opportunity and
+his effect.
+
+Thus he is either so careless or so hurried as to use--
+much too commonly--words which have lost all vitality,
+and which are for the most part meaningless, but which go
+the rounds still like shining flat sixpences worn smooth.
+The word "practical" drops from his pen; he quotes "in a
+glass darkly," and speaks of "a picture of human life"; the
+walls of Oxford are "time-hallowed"; he enters a church
+and finds in it "a dim religious light"; a man of Froude's
+capacity has no right to find such a thing there. If he writes
+the word "sin" the word "shame" comes tripping after.
+It may be that he was a man readily caught by fatigue, or
+it may bet it is more probable, that he thought it small
+millinery to "travailler le verbe" At any rate the result
+as a whole hangs to his identity of spirit with the thousands
+for whom he wrote.
+
+To this character of universality attach also faults not only
+in his occasional choice of words but in his general style.
+
+The word "style" has been so grossly abused during the
+last thirty years that one mentions it with diffidence. Matthew
+Arnold well said that when people came to him and asked
+to be told how to write a good style he was unable to reply;
+for indeed it is not a thing to be taught. It is a by-product,
+though a necessary by-product, of good thinking. But when
+Matthew Arnold went on to say that there was no such thing
+as style except knowing clearly what you wanted to say, and
+saying it as clearly as you could, he was talking nonsense.
+There is such a thing as style. It is that combination of
+rhythm, lucidity, and emphasis, which certainly must not
+be consciously produced, but which if it arise naturally from
+a man's pen and from his method of thought makes all the
+difference between what is readable and what is not readable.
+If any one doubt this let him compare the French Bible
+with the English--both literal and lucid translations of the
+same original; or again let him contrast the prose phrases of
+Milton when he is dealing with the claims of the Church
+in the Middle Ages with those of Mr. Bryce in the same
+connection.
+
+Now I say that just as the excellences of Froude's prose
+proceeded from this universality of his so did the errors into
+which that prose fell, and it is remarkable that these errors
+are slips of detail. They proceed undoubtedly from rapid
+writing and from coupling his scholarship with a very general
+and ephemeral reading.
+
+A few examples drawn from these essays will prove what
+I mean. On the very first page, in the first line of the
+second paragraph we have the word "often" coming after the
+word "experience," instead of before it. He had written
+"experience," he desired to qualify it, and he did not go back
+to do what should always be done in plain English, and what
+indeed distinguishes plain English from almost every other
+language--to put the qualification before the thing qualified;
+a peculiarly English mark in this, that it presupposes one's
+having thought the whole thing out before writing it down.
+
+On page 3 we have exactly the same thing; "A legend
+not known unfortunately to general English readers." He
+means of course, "unfortunately not known," but as the
+sentence stands it reads as though he had meant to say,
+somewhat clumsily, that the method in which English readers
+knew the legend was not unfortunate.
+
+He is again careless in the matter of repetitions, both of
+the same word, and (what is a better test of ear) of rhymes
+within the sentence: we have in one place "which seemed to
+give a soul to those splendid donations to learning," and
+further on in the same page "a priority in mortality."
+
+On pages 34 and 35 you have "an intensely real conviction."
+You are then told that "the most lawless men did
+then really believe." Then that the American tribes were
+in the eyes of the colonists "real worshippers" of the Devil,
+and a few lines later we hear of "the real awfulness of the
+world."
+
+The position of the relative is often as slipshod as the
+position of the qualicative; thus you will find upon page 37
+that the pioneers "grayed out the channels, and at last paved
+them with their bones, through which the commerce and
+enterprise of England has flowed out of all the world." This
+sentence is quite deplorable; it has a singular verb after two
+nominatives, and is so framed that one might imagine the
+commerce and enterprise of our beloved country to have flown
+through those hollow interior channels, with which, I believe,
+our larger bones are provided, and in which is to be discovered
+that very excellent substance, marrow.
+
+It is singular that, while these obvious errors have excited
+so little comment, Froude should have been blamed so often
+and by such different authorities for weaknesses of the pen
+from which he did not suffer, or which, if he did suffer from
+them, at least he had in common with every other writer
+of our time and perhaps less than most.
+
+Thus, as an historian he has been accused of two faults
+which have been supposed by those who are ill acquainted
+with the history of letters to be correlative: a straining
+for effect and an inaccuracy of detail. There is not one of
+his contemporaries who less forced himself in description
+than Froude. Often in Green, very often in Freeman and
+always in Carlyle you feel that your author is deliberately
+exciting his mind and your own. Violent colours are chosen
+and peculiar emphasis--from this Froude was free. He was
+an historian.
+
+To the end Froude remained an historian, and an historian
+he was born. If we regret that his history was not general,
+and that he turned his powers upon such a restricted set of
+phenomena, still we must rejoice that there was once in
+modern England a man who could sum up the nature of
+a great movement. He lacked the power of integration.
+
+He was not an artist. But he possessed to an extraordinary
+degree the power of synthesis. He was a craftsman, as the
+modern jargon goes. There is not in the whole range of
+English literature as excellent a summary of the way in
+which the Divinity of our Lord fought its way into the
+leading brains of Europe, as appears upon page 192 of this
+book. It is as good as Boissier; there runs all through it
+knowledge, proportion, and something which, had he been
+granted a little more light, or been nurtured in an intellectual
+climate a little more sunny, would have been vision itself:--
+
+"The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work
+compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling
+difficulty, what could He be but God? Who but God could
+have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking
+world believed to be His coequal and co-eternal adversary?
+He was God. He was man also, for He was the second
+Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was
+virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the
+substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He
+showed in the nature of His person after His resurrection,
+what the material body would have been in all of us except
+for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its
+purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its
+likeness."
+
+There's a piece of historical prose which summarises,
+teaches, and stamps itself finally upon the mind! Froude
+saw that the Faith was the summit and the completion of
+Rome. Had he written us a summary of the fourth and
+fifth centuries--and had he written it just after reading some
+dull fellow on the other side--what books we should have
+had to show to the rival schools of the Continent!
+
+Consider the sharp and almost unique judgment passed
+upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of
+page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which
+he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate:
+which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact,
+and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself. It
+is prose in three dimensions.
+
+That pedantic charge of inaccuracy, with which I have
+already dealt in another place, in connection with another
+and perhaps a greater man, is not applicable to Froude. He
+was hasty, and in his historical work the result certainly was
+that he put down things upon insufficient evidence, or upon
+evidence but half read; but even in his historical work (which
+deals remember, with the most highly controversial part of
+English history) he is as accurate as anybody else, except
+perhaps Lingard. That the man was by nature accurate,
+well read and of a good memory, appears continually throughout
+this book, and the more widely one has read one's self,
+the more one appreciates this truth.
+
+For instance, there is often set down to Disraeli the remark
+that his religion was "the religion of all sensible men." and
+upon being asked what this religion might be, that Oriental
+is said to have replied, "All sensible men keep that to
+themselves." Now Disraeli could no more have made such a
+witticism than he could have flown through the air; his
+mind was far too extravagant for such pointed phrases.
+Froude quotes the story (page 205 of this book) but rightly
+ascribes it to Rogers, a very different man from Disraeli--
+an Englishman with a mastery of the English language.
+
+Look again at this remark upon page 20, "The happy allusion
+of Quevedo to the Tiber was not out of place here:--the
+fugitive is alone permanent.'" How many Englishmen know
+that Du Bellay's immortal sonnet was but a translation of
+Quevedo? You could drag all Oxford and Cambridge to-day
+and not find a single man who knew it.
+
+Note the care he has shown in quoting one of those hackneyed
+phrases which almost all the world misquotes, "Que
+mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre." Of a
+hundred times that you may see those words of Danton's
+written down, you will perhaps not see them once written
+down exactly as they were said.
+
+So it is throughout his work. Men still living in the
+Universities accuse him vaguely of inexactitude as they will
+accuse Jowett of ignorance, and these men, when one examines
+them closely, are found to be ignorant of the French
+language, to have read no philosophy between Aristotle and
+Hobbes, and to issue above their signatures such errors of
+plain dates and names as make one blush for English
+scholarship and be glad that no foreigner takes our historical
+school seriously.
+
+There is always left to any man who deals with the writings
+of Froude, a task impossible to complete but necessarily to be
+attempted. He put himself forward, in a set attitude, to
+combat and to destroy what he conceived to be--in the
+moment of his attack--the creed of his countrymen. He was
+so literary a man that he did this as much by accepting as by
+denying, as much by dating from Elizabeth all we are as by
+affirming unalterable material sequence and the falsity of
+every transcendental acceptation. His time smelt him out
+even when he flattered it most. Even when he wrote of the
+Revenge the England of his day--luckily for him--thought
+him an enemy.
+
+Upon the main discussion of his life it is impossible to
+pass a judgment, for the elements of that discussion are now
+destroyed; the universities no longer pretend to believe.
+And "free discussion" has become so free that the main
+doctrines he assailed are no longer presented or read without
+weariness in the class to which he appealed and from which
+he sprang.
+
+The sects, then, against which he set himself are dead:
+but upon a much larger question which is permanent, and
+which in a sort of groping way he sometimes handled,
+something should be said here, which I think has never been
+said before. He was perpetually upon the borderland of the
+Catholic Church.
+
+Between him and the Faith there stood no distance of space,
+but rather a high thin wall; the high thin wall of his own
+desperate conviction. If you will turn to page 209 of this
+book you will see it said of the denial of the Sacrament
+by the Reformers and of Ridley's dogma that it was bread
+only "the commonsense of the country was of the same
+opinion, and illusion was at an end." Froude knew that
+the illusion was not at an end. He probably knew (for we
+must continue to repeat that he was a most excellent historian)
+that the "commonsense of the country" was, by the time
+Ridley and the New English Church began denying the real
+presence, and turning that denial into a dogma, profoundly
+indifferent to all dogmas whatsoever. What "the common-sense
+of the country" wanted was to keep out swarthy men,
+chivalrous indeed but imperialists full of gold who owned
+nearly all the earth, but who, they were determined, should
+not own England.
+
+Froude was fond of such assertions, his book is full of them,
+and they are more than mere violence framed for combat;
+they are in their curious way definite expressions of the man's
+soul; for Froude was fond of that high thin wall, and liked
+to build it higher. He was a dogmatic rationalist--one
+hesitates to use a word which has been so portentously
+misused. Renan before dying came out with one of his last
+dogmas; it was to this effect, that there was not in the
+Universe an intelligent power higher than the human mind.
+Froude, had he lived in an atmosphere of perfectly free
+discussion as Renan did, would have heartily subscribed to that
+dogma.
+
+Why then do I say that he was perpetually on the borderland
+of the Catholic Church? Because when he leaves for a
+moment the phraseology and the material of his youth and of
+his neighbourhood, he is perpetually striking that note of
+interest, of wonder, and of intellectual freedom which is the
+note of Catholicism.
+
+Let any man who knows what Catholicism may be read
+carefully the Essay on the Dissolution of the Monasteries,
+and the Essay on the Philosophy of Christianity which succeeds
+it in this book, but which was written six years before.
+Let him remember that nothing Froude ever wrote was
+written without the desire to combat some enemy, and, having
+made allowance for that desire, let him decide whether one
+shock, one experience, one revelation would not have whirled
+him into the Church. He was, I think, like a man who has
+felt the hands of a woman and heard her voice, who knows
+them so thoroughly well that he can love, criticise, or despise
+according to his mood; but who has never seen her face.
+
+And he was especially near to the Church in this: that
+having discussed a truth he was compelled to fight for it and
+to wound actively in fighting, He was an agent, He did,
+He saw that the mass of stuff clinging round the mind
+of wealthy England was decaying, He turned with regret
+towards the healthy visions of Europe and called them
+illusions because they were not provable, and because all
+provable things showed a flee other than that of the creed
+and were true in another manner. He despised the cowardice
+--for it is cowardice--that pretends to intellectual conviction
+and to temporal evidence of the things of the soul. He saw
+and said, and he was right in saying, that the City of God is
+built upon things incredible.
+
+"Incredibilia nec crederim, nisi me compelleret ecclesiae auctoritas"
+
+H. BELLOC.
+
+____
+
+
+The following is a list of the published works of J. A. Froude.
+"Life of St. Neot" ("Lives of the English Saints," edited
+by J. H. Newman), 1844. "Shadows of the Clouds" (Tales),
+by Zeta (pseud.), 1847. "A Sermon (on 2 Cor. vii. 10) preached
+at St. Mary's Church on the Death of the Rev. George May
+Coleridge," 1847. Article on "Spinoza" (Oxford and Cambridge
+Review), 1847. "The Nemesis of Faith" (Tale), 1849.
+"England's Forgotten Worthies" (Westminster Review), 1852.
+"Book of Job" (Westminster Review), 1853. "Poems of
+Matthew Arnold" (Westminster Review), 1854. "Suggestions
+on the Best Means of Teaching English History"
+("Oxford Essays," &c.), 1855. "History of England," 12
+vols., 1856-1870 "The Influence of the Reformation on the
+Scottish Character," 1865. "Inaugural Address delivered to
+the University of St. Andrews, March 19, 1869," 1869. "Short
+Studies on Great Subjects," 1867, 2 vols., series 2-4, 1872-83
+(articles from Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, &c.).
+"The Cat's Pilgrimage," 1870 "Calvinism: Address at
+St. Andrews," 1871. "The English in Ireland," 3 vols.,
+1872-74. "Bunyan" ("English Men of Letters"), 1878. "Caesar:
+a Sketch," 1879. "Two Lectures on South Africa," 1880.
+"Thomas Carlyle" (a history of the first forty years of his
+life, &c.), 2 vols., 1882. "Luther: a Short Biography," 1883.
+"Thomas Carlyle" (a history of his life in London, 1834-80,
+2 vols., 1884. "Oceana," 1886. "The English in the West
+Indies," 1888. "Liberty and Property: an Address" [1888.]
+"The Two Chiefs of Dunboy," 1889. "Lord Beaconsfield"
+(a Biography), 1890. "The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon,"
+1891. "The Spanish Story of the Armada," 1892. "Life
+and Letters of Erasmus," 1894. "English Seamen in the
+Sixteenth Century," 1895. "Lectures on the Council of Trent,"
+1896. "My Relations with Carlyle," 1903.
+
+Edited--"Carlyle's Reminiscences," 1882. "Mrs. Carlyle's
+Letters," 1883.
+
+____
+
+ARNOLD'S POEMS
+
+Five years ago there appeared a small volume entitled
+"The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A." (The Strayed
+Reveller, and other Poems. By A. London: 1849) It
+was received we believe with general indifference. The
+public are seldom sanguine with new poets; the exceptions
+to the rule having been for the most part signal
+mistakes; while in the case of "A." the inequality of
+merit in his poems was so striking that even persons
+who were satisfied that qualities were displayed in them
+of the very highest kind, were yet unable to feel confidence
+in the future of an author so unusually incapable,
+as it appeared, of knowing when he was doing well and
+when he was failing.
+
+Young men of talent experience often certain musical
+sensations, which are related to poetry as the fancy of a
+boy for a pretty face is related to love; and the counterfeit
+while it lasts is so like the reality as to deceive not
+only themselves but even experienced lookers-on who
+are not on their guard against the phenomenon. Time
+in either case is requisite to test the quality both of the
+substance and of the feeling, and we desired some
+further evidence of A.'s powers before we could grant
+him his rank as a poet; or even feel assured that he
+could ultimately obtain it. There was passion, as in a
+little poem called "Stagyrus," deep and searching; there
+was unaffected natural feeling, expressed sweetly and
+musically; in "The Sick King of Bokhara," in several
+of the Sonnets and other fragmentary pieces, there was
+genuine insight into life and whatever is best and noblest
+in it;--but along with this, there was often an elaborate
+obscurity, one of the worst faults which poetry can have;
+and indications that the intellectual struggles which,
+like all young men in our times, he was passing through,
+were likely to issue in an indifferentism neither pleasing
+nor promising.
+
+The inequality in substance was not more remarkable
+than the inequality in the mechanical expression of it.
+"The Forsaken Merman" is perhaps as beautifully
+finished as anything of the kind in the English language.
+The story is exquisitely told, and word and metre so
+carefully chosen that the harmony of sound and meaning
+is perfect. The legend itself we believe is Norwegan.
+It is of a King of the Sea who had married an earthly
+maiden; and was at last deserted by her from some
+scruples of conscience. The original features of it are
+strictly preserved, and it is told indirectly by the old
+Sea King to his children in a wild, irregular melody, of
+which the following extract will convey but an imperfect
+idea. It is Easter time, and the mother has left her sea
+palace for the church on the hill side, with a promise to
+return--
+
+"She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.
+'Children, dear, was it yesterday?
+Children, dear, were we long alone?'
+'The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.
+Long prayers,' I said, 'in the world they say.
+Come' I said, 'and we rose through the surf in the bay.
+We went up the beach, by the sandy down,
+Where the sea-stocks bloom to the white-walled town,
+Through the narrow paved streets where all was still,
+To the little gray church on the windy hill.
+From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers;
+But we stood without in the cold blowing airs.
+
+We climbed on the graves, on the stones worn with
+rains,
+And we gazed up the aisle, through the small leaded
+panes.
+She sate by the pillar, we saw her clear.
+'Margaret! hist! come, quick, we are here!'
+'Dear heart,' I said, 'we are long alone.'
+'The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.'
+'But, ah, she gave me never a look,
+For her eyes were sealed to the holy book.
+Loud prays the priest, shut stands the door.
+Come away, children, call no more.
+Come away, come down, call no more.'
+Down, down, down,
+Down to the depths of the sea.
+She sits at her wheel in the humming town,
+Singing most joyfully.
+Hark what she sings: 'Oh, joy! oh, joy!
+For the humming street, and the child with its toy;
+For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;
+For the wheel where I spun,
+And the blessed light of the sun.'
+And so she sings her fill,
+Singing most joyfully,
+Till the shuttle falls from her hand,
+And the whizzing wheel stands still.
+She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,
+And over the sand at the sea,
+And her eyes are set in a stare,
+And anon there breaks a sigh,
+And anon there drops a tear,
+From a sorrow-clouded eye,
+And a heart sorrow-laden,
+A long, long sigh,
+For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden,
+And the gleam of her golden hair."
+
+Not less excellent, in a style wholly different, was A.'s
+treatment (and there was this high element of promise
+in A. that, with a given story to work upon, he was
+always successful) of the AEgyptian legend of Mycerinus,
+a legend not known unfortunately to general English
+readers, who are therefore unable to appreciate the skill
+displayed in dealing with it. We must make room for
+one extract, however, in explanation of which it is only
+necessary to say that Mycerinus, having learnt from the
+oracle that being too just a king for the purposes of the
+gods, who desired to afflict the AEgyptians, he was to
+die after six more years, made the six years into twelve
+by lighting his gardens all night with torches, and
+revelled out what remained to him of life. We can give
+no idea of the general conception of the poem, but as a
+mere piece of description this is very beautiful.
+
+"There by the river bank he wandered on,
+From palm grove on to palm grove, happy trees,
+Their smooth tops shining sunwards, and beneath
+Burying their unsunned stems in grass and flowers;
+Where in one dream the feverish time of youth
+Might fade in slumber, and the feet of joy
+Might wander all day long, and never tire:
+Here came the king, holding high feast at morn,
+Rose-crowned: and even when the sun went down,
+A hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,
+From tree to tree, all through the twinkling grove,
+Revealing all the tumult of the feast,
+Flushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine,
+While the deep burnished foliage overhead
+Splintered the silver arrows of the moon."
+
+Containing as it did poems of merit so high as these,
+it may seem strange that this volume should not have
+received a more ready recognition; for there is no
+excellence which the writer of the passages which we have
+quoted could hereafter attain, the promise of which
+would not be at once perceived in them. But the
+public are apt to judge of books of poetry by the rule
+of mechanism, and try them not by their strongest parts
+but by their weakest; and in the present instance (to
+mention nothing else) the stress of weight in the title
+which was given to the collection was laid upon what
+was by no means adequate to bearing it. Whatever be
+the merits of the "Strayed Reveller" as poetry, it is
+certainly not a poem in the sense which English people
+generally attach to the word, looking as they do not
+only for imaginative composition but for verse;--and
+as certainly if the following passage had been printed
+merely as prose, in a book which professed to be nothing
+else, no one would have suspected that it was composed
+of an agglutination of lines.
+
+"The gods are happy; they turn on all sides their shining
+eyes, and see below them earth and men. They see Tiresias
+sitting staff in hand on the warm grassy Asopus bank, his
+robe drawn over his old, sightless head, revolving inly the
+doom of Thebes. They see the Centaurs in the upper glens
+of Pelion, on the streams where the red-berried ashes fringe
+the clear brown shallow pools; with streaming flanks and
+heads reared proudly, snuffing the mountain wind. They
+see the Scythian on the wide steppe, unharnessing his
+wheeled house at noon; he tethers his beast down and
+makes his meal, mare's milk and bread baked on the
+embers; all around the boundless waving grass plains
+stretch, thick starred with saffron and the yellow hollyhock
+and flag-leaved isis flowers."
+
+No one will deny that this is fine imaginative painting,
+and as such poetical,--but it is the poetry of well
+written, elegant prose. Instead of the recurring sounds,
+whether of rhyme or similarly weighted syllables, which
+constitute the outward form of what we call verse, we
+have the careless grace of uneven, undulating sentences,
+flowing on with a rhythmic cadence indeed, but free
+from all constraint of metre or exactitude of form. It
+may be difficult, perhaps it is impossible, to fix the
+measure of license which a poet may allow himself
+in such matters, but it is at least certain that the
+greatest poets are those who have allowed themselves
+the fewest of such liberties: in art as in morals,
+and as in everything which man undertakes, true
+greatness is the most ready to recognize and most
+willing to obey those simple outward laws which have
+been sanctioned by the experience of mankind, and
+we suspect the originality which cannot move except
+on novel paths.
+
+This is but one of several reasons which explain the
+apathy of the public on A.'s first appearance. There
+was large promise, but the public require performance;
+and in poetry a single failure overweighs a hundred
+successes. It was possible that his mistakes were the
+mistakes of a man whose face was in the right direction
+--who was feeling his way, and who would ultimately
+find it; but only time could decide if this were so; and
+in the interval, the coldness of his reception would serve
+to test the nature of his faculty.
+
+So far we have spoken with reserve, for we have
+simply stated the feelings with which we regarded this
+little volume on first reading it; but the reserve is no
+longer necessary, and the misgivings which we experienced
+have not been justified. At the close of
+last year another volume was published, again of
+miscellaneous poems, which went beyond the most sanguine
+hopes of A.'s warmest admirers. As before with "The
+Strayed Revellers," so again with "Empedocles on
+AEtna," (Empedocles on AEtna, and other Poems. By A. London:
+1852) the piece de resistance was not the happiest selection.
+But of the remaining pieces, and of all those
+which he has more recently added, it is difficult to
+speak in too warm praise. In the unknown A., we are
+now to recognize a son of the late Master of Rugby, Dr.
+Arnold. Like a good knight, we suppose he thought it
+better to win his spurs before appearing in public with
+so honoured a name; but the associations which belong
+to it will suffer no alloy from him who now wears it.
+Not only is the advance in art remarkable, in greater
+clearness of effect, and in the mechanical handling of
+words, but far more in simplicity and healthfulness
+of moral feeling. There is no more obscurity, and no
+mysticism; and we see everywhere the working of a
+mind bent earnestly on cultivating whatever is highest
+and worthiest in itself; of a person who is endeavouring,
+without affectation, to follow the best things, to see
+clearly what is good, and right, and true, and to fasten
+his heart upon these. There is usually a period in the
+growth of poets in which, like coarser people, they
+mistake the voluptuous for the beautiful; but in Mr.
+Arnold there is no trace of any such tendency; pure,
+without effort, he feels no enjoyment and sees no beauty
+in the atmosphere of the common passions; and in
+nobleness of purpose, in a certain loftiness of mind
+singularly tempered with modesty, he continually reminds
+us of his father. There is an absence, perhaps,
+of colour; it is natural that it should be so in the
+earlier poems of a writer who proposes aims such as
+these to himself; his poetry is addressed to the
+intellectual, and not to the animal emotions; and to persons.
+of animal taste, the flavour will no doubt be oversimple;
+but it is true poetry--a true representation of
+true human feeling. It may not be immediately popular,
+but it will win its way in the long run, and has elements
+of endurance in it which enable it to wait without
+anxiety for recognition.
+
+Among the best of the new poems is "Tristram and
+Iseult." It is unlucky that so many of the subjects
+should be so unfamiliar to English readers, but it is
+their own fault if they do not know the "Mort d'Arthur."
+We must not calculate, however, on too much knowledge
+in such unpractical matters; and as the story is too
+long to tell in this place, we take an extract which will
+not require any. It is a picture of sleeping children as
+beautiful as Sir Francis Chantrey's.
+
+But they sleep in sheltered rest,
+Like helpless birds in the warm nest
+On the castle's southern side,
+Where feebly comes the mournful roar
+Of buffeting wind and surging tide,
+Through many a room and corridor.
+Full on the window the moon's ray
+Makes their chamber as bright as day.
+It shines upon the blank white walis,
+And on the snowy pillow falls.
+And on two angel heads doth play,
+Turn'd to each other: the eyes closed,
+The lashes on the cheek reposed.
+Round each sweet brow the cap close set
+Hardly lets peep the golden hair;
+Through the soft opened lips the air
+Scarcely moves the coverlet.
+One little wandering arm is thrown
+At random on the counterpane,
+And often the fingers close in haste,
+As if their baby owner chased
+The butterflies again.
+This stir they have and this alone,
+But else they are so still--
+Ah, you tired madcaps, you lie still;
+But were you at the window now,
+To look forth on the fairy sight
+Of your illumined haunts by night,
+To see the park glades where you play
+Far lovelier than they are by day,
+To see the sparkle on the eaves,
+And upon every giant bough
+Of those old oaks whose wan red leaves
+Are jewelled with bright drops of rain--
+How would your voices run again!
+And far beyond the sparkling trees,
+Of the castle park, one sees
+The bare heath spreading clear as day,
+Moor behind moor, far far away,
+Into the heart of Brittany.
+And here and there locked by the land
+Long inlets of smooth glittering sea,
+And many a stretch of watery sand,
+All shining in the white moonbeams;
+But you see fairer in your dreams."
+
+This is very beautiful; a beautiful description of one
+of the most beautiful objects in nature; but it is a
+description which could never have been composed except by
+a person whose mind was in tune with all innocent
+loveliness, and who found in the contemplation of such
+things not merely a passing emotion of pleasure but the
+deepest and most exquisite enjoyment.
+
+Besides "Tristram and Iseult," we select for especial
+mention out of this second volume, "A Farewell,"
+"Self-Dependence," "Morality "; two very highly-finished
+pieces called "The Youth of Nature," and "The Youth
+of Man," expressing two opposite states of feeling,
+which we all of us recognize, and yet which, as far as
+we know, have never before found their way into language;
+and "A Summer Night," a small meditative
+poem, containing one passage, which, although not
+perfect--for, if the metre had been more exact, the
+effect would, in our opinion, have been very much
+enhanced--is, nevertheless, the finest that Mr. Arnold
+has yet written.
+
+And I. I know not if to pray
+Still to be what I am, or yield and be
+Like all the other men I see.
+For most men in a brazen prison live,
+Where in the sun's hot eye,
+With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
+Their minds to some unmeaning taskwork give,
+Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall;
+And as, year after year,
+Fresh products of their barren labour fall
+From their tired hands, and rest
+Never yet comes more near,
+Gloom settles slowly down over their breast,
+And while they try to stem
+The waves of mournful thought by which they
+are prest,
+Death in their prison reaches them
+Unfreed, having seen nothing still unblest.
+
+And the rest, a few,
+Escape their prison, and depart
+On the wide ocean of life anew.
+There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart
+Listeth, will sail;
+Nor does he know how there prevail,
+Despotic on life's sea,
+Trade winds that cross it from eternity.
+Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
+By thwarting signs, and braves
+The freshening wind and blackening waves.
+And then the tempest strikes him, and between
+The lightning bursts is seen
+Only a driving wreck,
+And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
+With anguished face and flying hair,
+Grasping the rudder hard,
+Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
+Still standing for some false impossible shore.
+And sterner comes the roar
+Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom,
+Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom."
+
+In these lines, in powerful and highly-sustained
+metaphor, lies the full tragedy of modern life.
+
+"Is there no life but these alone,
+Madman or slave, must man be one?"
+
+We disguise the alternative under more fairly-sounding
+names, but we cannot escape the reality; and we know
+not, after all, whether there is deeper sadness in a
+broken Mirabeau or Byron, or in the contented prosperity
+of a people who once knew something of noble
+aspirations, but have submitted to learn from a practical
+age that the business of life is to make money, and the
+enjoyments of it what money can buy. A few are
+ignobly successful; the many fail, and are miserable;
+and the subtle anarchy of selfishness finds its issue in
+madness and revolution. But we need not open this
+painful subject. Mr. Arnold is concerned with the
+effect of the system on individual persons; with the
+appearance which it wears to young highly sensitive
+men on their entry upon the world, with the choice of
+a life before them; and it is happy for the world that
+such men are comparatively rare, or the mad sort would
+be more abundant than they are.
+
+We cannot but think it unfortunate that this poem,
+with several others of the highest merit, have been
+omitted in the last edition, while others find a place
+there, for which comparatively we care little. Uniformity
+of excellence has been sacrificed to uniformity
+of character, a subsidiary matter which in itself is of
+slight importance, and which the public would never
+quarrel for if they were treated with an ever pleasing
+variety. As it is, we have still to search three volumes
+for the best specimens of Mr. Arnold's powers, and
+opportunities are still left for illmatured critics to make
+extracts of an apparently inferior kind. There is a
+remedy for this, however, in the future, and the necessary
+sifting will no doubt get itself duly accomplished at
+last. In the meantime, before noticing the late edition,
+we have a few words to say about Empedocles, the
+ground of objection to which we cannot think Mr. Arnold
+adequately understands, although he has omitted it in
+his present edition, and has given us his reasons for
+doing so. Empedocles, as we all know, was a Sicilian
+philosopher, who, out of discontent with life, or from
+other cause, flung himself into the crater of Mount
+AEtna. A discontent of this kind, Mr. Arnold tells
+us, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance, is not
+a fit subject for poetry. The object of poetry is to
+please, and the spectacle of a man too weak to bear his
+trials, and breaking under them, cannot be anything but
+painful. The correctness of the portrait he defends;
+and the fault, as he thinks, is not in the treatment, but
+in the subject itself. Now it is true that as a rule poetry
+is better employed in exhibiting the conquest over
+temptations than the fall under them, and some escape
+of this kind for the feelings must be provided in
+tragedies, by the introduction of some powerful cause,
+either of temptation acting on the will or of an external
+force controlling the action, in order to explain and
+reconcile us to the catastrophe. A mere picture of
+imbecility is revolting simply; we cannot conceive ourselves
+acting in the same way under the same circumstances,
+and we can therefore feel neither sympathy with
+the actor nor interest in his fate. But we must be
+careful how we narrow our theories in such matters.
+In Werther we have an instance of the same trial, with
+the same issue as Mr. Arnold has described in Empedocles,
+and to say that Werther was a mistake, is to
+circumscribe the sphere of art by a definition which the
+public taste will refuse to recognize. Nor is it true, in
+spite of Schiller's authority, that "all art is dedicated to
+enjoyment." Tragedy has other objects, the katharsis
+or purifying of the emotions for instance, which, if we
+are to continue to use words in their ordinary sense, is
+something distinct from enjoyment, and not always reconcilable
+with it. Whatever will excite interest in a
+healthy, vigorous mind, that is a fair object of poetry,
+and there is a painful as well as a pleasant interest; it
+is an abuse of language to describe the sensations which
+we experience on reading "Philoctetes" or "Hamlet" as
+pleasant. They are not unmixedly painful, but surely
+not pleasant.
+
+It is not therefore the actual fate of Empedocles
+which fails to interest us, but we are unable to feel that
+Mr. Arnold's account of him is the true account. In
+the absence of authentic material, the artist who hopes
+to interest us in his fate must at least make the story
+probable as he tells it; consistent in itself, with causes
+clearly drawn out proportioned to the effects resulting
+from them. And this it cannot be said that Mr. Arnold
+has done. Powerful as is much of the language which
+he places in the mouth of Empedocles, he has failed
+to represent him as in a condition in which suicide
+is the natural result. His trials, his disgusts, as far
+as he exhibits them, are not more than man may
+naturally be supposed able to bear, while of the impulses
+of a more definite character there is no trace
+at all. But a more grave deficiency still is, that among
+all the motives introduced, there is not one to make the
+climb of AEtna necessary or intelligible. Empedocles
+on AEtna might have been Empedocles in his room
+at Catana, and a dagger or a cup of hemlock would
+have answered all purposes equally well with a plunge
+in the burning crater. If the tradition of Empedocles
+is a real story of a thing which really happened, we
+may feel sure that some peculiar feeling connected
+with the mountain itself, some mystical theory or local
+tradition, led such a man as he was to such a means of
+self-immolation.
+
+We turn from Empedocles, which perhaps it is scarcely
+fair to have criticised, to the first poem in the latest
+edition, "Sohrab and Rustum," (Poems. By Matthew Arnold.
+A New Edition, London: 1853.) a poem which alone would have
+settled the position which Mr. Arnold has a right to claim
+as a poet, and which is remarkable for
+its success in every point in which Empedocles appears
+deficient. The story comes down out of remote Persian
+antiquity; it is as old, perhaps it is older, than the tale
+of Troy; and, like all old stories which have survived
+the changes of so long a time, is in itself of singular
+interest. Rustum, the Hercules of the East, fell in
+with and loved a beautiful Tartar woman. He left her,
+and she saw him no more; but in time a child was
+born, who grew up with the princes of his mother's
+tribe, and became in early youth distinguished in all
+manly graces and noblenesses. Learning that he was the
+son of the great Rustum, his object is to find his father,
+and induce him, by some gallant action, to acknowledge
+and receive him. War breaks out between the Tartars
+and the Persians. The two armies come down upon
+the Oxus, and Sohrab having heard that Rustum had
+remained behind in the mountains, and was not present,
+challenges the Persian chief. Rustum, unknown to
+Sohrab, had in the meantime joined the army, and
+against a warrior of Sohrab's reputation, no one could
+be trusted to maintain the Persian cause except the old
+hero. So by a sad perversity of fate, and led to it by
+their very greatness, the father and the son meet in
+battle, and only recognize each other when Sohrab is
+lying mortally wounded. It is one of those terrible
+situations which only the very highest power of poetry
+can dwell upon successfully. If the right chord be not
+touched to the exactest nicety, if the shock of the
+incident in itself be not melted into pathos, and the
+nobleness of soul in the two sufferers be not made to
+rise above the cruel accident which crushes them, we
+cannot listen to the poet. The story overwhelms and
+absorbs us; we desire to be left alone with it and with
+our own feelings, and his words about it become officious
+and intrusive. Homer has furnished Mr. Arnold with
+his model, and has taught him the great lesson that the
+language on such occasions cannot be too simple and the
+style too little ornamented. Perhaps it may be thought
+that he has followed Homer's manner even too closely.
+No one who has read "Mycerinus" and the "Forsaken
+Metman" can doubt that Mr. Arnold can write richly
+if he pleases. It is a little startling, therefore, to find
+the opening of this poem simpler than one would make
+it, even if telling it in prose to a child. As in the
+"Iliad," the same words are repeated over and over
+again for the same idea, without variation or attempt
+at it; and although it may easily be that our taste is
+spoiled by the high seasoning of the modern style, the
+result is that it strikes the attention to an extent which
+would have been better avoided. A perfect style does
+not strike at all, and it is a matter in which the reader
+ought to be considered even more than the abstract
+right. We have soon, however, ceased to think of that;
+the peculiarity which we have mentioned is confined to
+the beginning, and the success of the treatment is best
+proved by our forgetfulness, as we read on, of art and
+artist language and manner, in the overpowering interest
+of the story as it is drawn out before us. Extracts will
+convey a poor idea of a poem in which the parts are so
+wholly subordinate to the effect of the whole, and yet,
+in spite of this disadvantage, we can justify at least
+partially to our readers the opinions which we have
+generally expressed.
+
+We will take the scene of the recognition, when
+Sohrab, lying wounded, and as yet ignorant of the name
+of his adversary, has declared himself Rustum's son.
+The father, at first incredulous and scornful, is led step
+by step, through the mention of old names and times,
+towards the anaguorisis, and after the most delicately
+traced alternations of feeling, all doubt is ended by the
+mark of the seal on Sohrab's arm which Rustum had
+given to his mother.
+
+"How say'st thou? [Sohrab says.] Is that sign the proper
+sign
+Of Rustum's son, or of some other man's?
+He spoke: but Rustum gazed, and gazed, and stood
+Speechless; and then he uttered one sharp cry,
+Oh, boy, thy father!"
+
+This is the first hint to Sohrab who has been his foe.
+
+"And his voice choked there,
+And then a dark cloud pass'd before his eyes,
+And his head swam, and he sank down to earth.
+But Sohrab crawled to where he lay, and cast
+His arms about his neck, and kiss'd his lips,
+And with fond faltering fingers stroked his cheeks,
+Trying to call him back to life: and life
+Came back to Rustum; and he op'd his eyes;
+And they stood wide with horrour: and he seized
+In both his hands the dust which lay around,
+And threw it on his face, and smirched his hair,
+His hair, and face, and beard, and glittering arms:
+And strong convulsive groanings shook his breast,
+And his sobs choked him, and he clutched his sword
+To draw it, and for ever let life out.
+But Sohrab saw his thought, and held his hand,
+And with a soothing voice he spoke, and said
+'Father, forbear, for I but meet to-day
+The doom that at my birth was written down
+In Heaven, and thou art Heaven's unconscious hand.
+Surely my heart cried out that it was thou,
+When first I saw thee; and thy heart spoke too,
+I know it; but Fate trod those promptings down
+Under its iron heel; Fate, Fate engaged
+The strife, and hurled me on my father's spear.
+But let us speak no more of this: I find
+My father: let me feel that I have found.
+Come, sit beside me on this sand, and take
+My head betwixt thy hands, and kiss my cheeks,
+And wash them with thy tears, and say "My son!"
+Quick: quick! for numbered are my sands of life,
+And swift; for like the lightning to this field
+I came, and like the wind I go away.
+Sudden and swift, and like a passing wind:
+But it was writ in Heaven that this should be.'
+So said he: and his voice released the heart
+Of Rustum; and his tears broke forth: he cast
+His arms round his son's neck, and wept aloud,
+And kiss'd him; and awe fell on both the hosts
+When they saw Rustum's grief; and Ruksh, the
+horse,
+With his head bowing to the ground and mane
+Sweeping the dust, came near, and in mute woe
+First to the one, then to the other mov'd
+His head, as if enquiring what their grief
+Might mean; and from his dark compassionate
+eyes
+The big warm tears roll'd down and caked the
+sand."
+
+As a picture of human life in Homer's manner, we
+cannot see why this passage, and indeed the whole poem,
+should not be thought as good as any one of the
+episodes in the "AEneid." We are not comparing Mr.
+Arnold with Virgil: for it is one thing to have written
+an epic and another to have written a small fragment;
+but as a working up of a single incident it may rank
+by the side of Nisus and Euryalus, and deeper chords
+of feeling are touched in it than Virgil has ever
+touched.
+
+And this leads us to Mr Arnold's preface, and to the
+account which he gives us of the object which he
+proposes to himself in poetry: and our notice of this
+must be brief, as our space is running to its conclusion.
+He tells us, in a manner most feelingly instructive,
+something of the difficulties which lie round a young
+poet of the present day who desires to follow his art to
+some genuine purpose; and what he says will remind
+readers of Wordsworth of Professor Wilson's beautiful
+letter to him on a very similar subject. Unhappily the
+question is not one of poetry merely, but of far wider
+significance. Not the poet only, but every one of us
+who cannot be satisfied to tread with the crowd along
+the broad road which leads--we used to know whither,
+but desires "to cultivate," as Mr. Arnold says, "what is
+best and noblest" in ourselves, are as sorely at a loss
+as he is with his art. To find the best models,--that
+indeed is the one thing for him and for us. But what
+are they and where? and the answer to the aesthetic
+difficulty lies as we believe in the solution of the moral
+one. To say this, however, is of infinitely little service
+for the practical direction of a living poet; and we are
+here advised (and for present purposes no doubt wisely)
+to fall back on the artists of classic antiquity. From
+them better than from the best of the moderns, the
+young poet will learn what art really is. He will learn
+that before beginning to sing it is necessary to have
+something to sing of, and that a poem is something else
+than a collection of sweet musical sentences strung
+together like beads or even jewels in a necklace. He
+will learn that the subject is greater than the manner;
+that the first is the one essential without a worthy
+choice of which nothing can prosper. Above all, he
+will learn that the restless craving after novelty, so
+characteristic of all modern writing, the craving after
+new plots, new stories, new ideas, is mere disease,
+and that the true original genius displays itself not in
+the fabrication of what has no existence, but in the
+strength and power with which facts of history, or
+stories existing so fixedly in the popular belief as to
+have acquired so to say the character of facts, shall be
+exhibited and delineated.
+
+But while we allow with Mr. Arnold that the theory
+will best be learnt from the ancients, we cannot allow,
+as he seems to desire us to allow, that the practice of it
+was confined to them, or recommend as he does the
+disproportionate study, still less the disproportionate
+imitation of them. All great artists at all times have followed
+the same method, for greatness is impossible without it.
+The Italian painters are never weary of the Holy
+Family. The matter of Dante's poem lay before him
+in the creed of the whole of Europe. Shakespeare has
+not invented the substance of any one of his plays.
+And the "weighty experience" and "composure of
+judgment" with which the study of the ancients no
+doubt does furnish "those who habitually practise it,"
+may be obtained we believe by the study of the thoughts
+of all great men of all ages; by the study of life in any
+age, so that our scope be broad enough.
+
+It is indeed idle nonsense to speak, as some critics
+speak, of the "present" as alone having claims upon
+the poet. Whatever is great, or good, or pathetic, or
+terrible, in any age past or present, belongs to him, and
+is within his proper province; but most especially, if he
+is wise, he will select his subjects out of those which
+time has sealed as permanently significant. It is not
+easy in our own age to distinguish what has the
+elements in it of enduring importance; and time is
+wiser than we. But why dwell with such apparent
+exclusiveness on classic antiquity, as if there was
+no antiquity except the classic, and as if time were
+divided into the eras of Greece and Rome and the
+nineteenth century? The Hellenic poet sang of the
+Hellenes, why should not the Teutonic poet sing of
+the Teutons?
+
+"Vixere fortes post Agamemnona."
+
+And grand as are Achilles and Clytemnestra, they are
+not grander than their parallels in the German epic
+Criemhilda and Von Tronje Hagen. We do not
+dream of prescribing to Mr. Arnold what subject he
+should choose. Let him choose what interests himself
+if he will interest his readers; and if he choose what is
+really human, let it come from what age it will, human
+hearts will answer to it. And yet it seems as if Teutonic
+tradition, Teutonic feeling, and Teutonic thought had
+the first claim on English and German poets. And
+those among them will deserve best of the modern
+world, and will receive the warmest welcome from it,
+who will follow Shakespeare in modelling into forms of
+beauty the inheritance which has come down to them
+of the actions of their own race. So most faithfully,
+if least directly, they will be treading in the steps
+of those great poets of Greece whom they desire to
+imitate. Homer and Sophocles did not look beyond
+their own traditions and their own beliefs; they
+found in these and these only their exclusive and
+abundant material. Have the Gothic annals suddenly
+become poor, and our own quarries become exhausted
+and worthless?
+
+____
+
+
+WORDS ABOUT OXFORD
+
+Many long years had passed since I visited Oxford,--
+some twenty-eight or more. I had friends among the
+resident members of that venerable domicile of learning.
+Pleasant had been the time that I had spent there, of
+which intervening years had not diminished the remembrance
+--perhaps heightened the tone of its colouring.
+On many accounts I regarded that beautiful city with
+affectionate veneration. There were more than local
+attractions to render it interesting. There were the
+recollections of those who ceased in the interval to be
+denizens of this world. These could not but breathe
+sadness over the noble edifices that recalled men,
+conversations, and convivialities which, however long
+departed, shadowed upon the mind its own inevitable
+destiny. Again were those venerable buildings before
+me in their architectural richness. There were tower,
+and roof, and gateway, in all their variety of outline,
+defined with the sharp light and shade peculiar to
+ecclesiastical architecture. There were tufted groves
+overshadowing the haunts of learning; and there, too,
+was old Magdalen, which used to greet our sight so
+pleasantly upon our approach to the city. I began
+to fancy I had leaped no gulf of time since, for the
+Cherwell ran on as of old. I felt that the happy allusion
+of Quevedo to the Tiber was not out of place here,
+"The fugitive is alone permanent." The same river ran
+on as it had run on before, but the cheerful faces that
+had been once reflected in its stream had passed away.
+I saw things once familiar as I saw them before; but
+"the fathers, where were they ?" I was in this respect
+like one awaked from the slumber of an age, who found
+himself a stranger in his own land.
+
+I walked through High Street. I entered All Souls'
+and came out quickly, for the quadrangle, or rather one
+glance round it, was sufficient to put "the past to pain."
+I went over the different sites, and even paced Christ
+Church meadows. But I could not deceive myself for
+a moment. There was an indescribable vacuum somewhere
+that indicated there was no mode of making the
+past the present. What had become of the pleasant
+faces, the cheerful voices, the animal spirits, which
+seemed in my eyes to give a soul to those splendid
+donations of our forefathers to learning in years gone
+by? That instinct--soul, spirit, whatever it be--which
+animates and vivifies everything, and without which the
+palace is not comparable to the hovel possessing it,--
+that instinct or spirit was absent for me, at least. At
+length I adjourned to the Star, somewhat moody, more
+than half wishing I had not entered the city. I ordered
+my solitary meal, and began ruminating, as we all do,
+over the thousandth-time told tale of human destiny by
+generation after generation. I am not sure I did not
+greet with sullen pleasure a heavy, dark, dense mass of
+cloud that at that moment canopied the city. The
+mind finds all kinds of congenialities grateful at such
+moments. Some drops of rain fell; then a shower,
+tolerably heavy. I could not go out again as I intended
+doing. I sat and sipped my wine, thinking of the fate
+of cities,--of Nineveh the renowned, of the marbles
+lately recovered from thence with the mysterious arrowheaded
+characters. I thought that some future Layard
+might exhume the cornices of the Oxford temples. The
+deaths of cities were as inevitable as those of men. I
+felt that my missing friends had only a priority in
+mortality, and that the law of the Supreme existed to
+be obeyed without man's questionings.
+
+But a sun-burst took place, the shower ceased, all
+became fresh and clear. I saw several gownsmen pass
+down the street, and I sallied forth again. Several who
+were in front of me, so full was I of old imaginings,
+I thought might be old friends whom I should recognize.
+How idle! I strolled to the Isis. It was all glitter and
+gaiety. The sun shone out warmly and covered the
+surface of the river with gold. Numerous skiffs of the
+university-men were alive on the water, realizing the
+lines,--
+
+"Some lightly o'er the current swim,
+Some show their gaily gilded trim
+Quick glancing to the sun."
+
+Here was the repetition of an old performance, but
+the actors were new. I too had once floated over that
+glittering water, or lain up by the bank in conversation,
+or reciting verses, or, perhaps, in that silent, dreamy
+vacancy, in which the mind ruminates or rests folded
+up within itself in the consciousness of its own immortality.
+
+Here I must place a word or two in regard to the
+censures cast upon this magnificent foundation of learning
+relative to the extravagances of young collegians.
+Let it be granted, as it is asserted by some, that there
+is too much exclusiveness, and that there are improvements
+to be recommended in some of the details of an
+organization so ancient. It may be true to a certain
+extent, for what under heaven is perfect? But a vast
+mass of good is to be brought to bear on the other
+hand. I cannot, therefore, agree in those censures
+which journalism has cast upon the officers of the
+university, as if they encouraged, or, at all events, did not
+control, the vicious extravagance of young men. I am
+expressing only an individual opinion, it is true; and
+this may be a reason why it may be undervalued, when
+the justice of a question is not the criterion by which
+it is judged. All that such a foundation can be expected
+to do is to render the advantages of learning
+as accessible as possible, upon reasonable terms, that
+genius, not wealth alone, may be able to avail itself of
+its advantages. If the present sum be too high, let its
+reduction be considered with a view to any practicable
+change. The pecuniary resources of the collegian it
+becomes no part of the duty of the university to control,
+beyond the demands necessary for the main object
+of instruction. As the circumstances of parents vary,
+so will the pecuniary allowance made to their offspring.
+It would be a task neither practicable nor justifiable
+for the university to regulate the outlay of the collegian,
+or, in fact, become the paymaster of his menus plaisirs.
+Only let such a task be imagined in its enormity of
+control, from the son of the nobleman with an allowance
+of a thousand a year to one of a hundred and
+fifty pounds. It is not in the college, but prior to the
+arrival there of the youth, that he should be instructed
+in the views his relations have in sending him, and be
+taught that he must not ape the outlay and show of
+those who have larger means. If a youth orders a
+dozen coats within a time for which one only would
+be found adequate, I do not see what his college has
+to do with it. Youths entering the navy and army
+are left in a much more extended field of temptation.
+No time-hallowed walls shelter them. No salutary
+college rules remind them of their moral duties, daily
+and almost hourly. They go up and down the world
+under their own guardianship, exposed to every sinister
+influence, and with inclinations only restrained by their
+own monitorship. The college discipline, even if it
+extend not beyond college duties, is a perpetual
+remembrancer of the high moral end for which the student is
+placed within its precincts. His only allurement to
+extravagance is the desire of vying with those who make
+a greater display than himself, or else it arises from,
+if possible, a less defensible motive, namely, that of
+becoming himself an object of emulation to others. It
+is not the duty of the college authorities to compensate
+by their watchfulness the effects of a weak understanding,
+or that lax principle, or the want of self-command,
+of which the neglect of the parent or guardian has
+been the cause. If the freshman is destitute of
+self-dependence and self-restraint he must suffer from
+the consequences. Not only in the navy and army is youth
+exposed to temptations very far beyond the collegian,
+but in the inns of court young men are left to take care
+of themselves, in the midst of a great capital, without
+any surveillance whatever. From these youths arise
+excellent men of business. Most assuredly under the
+surveillance of a college in smaller cities, and where
+many heads of expense are from the nature of their
+position wholly out of the question, it does seem singular
+that such complaints should arise. It is true,
+display is the vice of modern society among the old as
+well as the young, and in both cases most dishonest
+means are had recourse to sustain those appearances,
+which are all the world looks to. It is possible, therefore,
+that little efforts have been made to initiate youth,
+prior to entering the universities, in that path of
+self-denial and high-mindedness which are the safeguard
+from vicious prodigality. They bring with them the
+vices of their caste, whatever that caste may be. Youth
+is imitative, and seldom a clumsy copyist, of the faults
+of its elders, provided those faults are fashionable faults,
+however unprincipled. However this may be, I must
+protest against the universities being made answerable
+for these doings. Attempts have been made, and failed,
+in respect to manners and to credit; and have failed
+clearly because they were impracticable, and, more than
+that, better left alone. The university ought not to be
+answerable in such cases, any more than the benchers
+for the Temple students. It cannot be expected that
+the noble quadrangles of our colleges are to become
+something like poor-law prisons, and the regulations of
+the night be extended over the day. The very existence
+of the collegian, as such, implies something like
+freedom, both mental and bodily. Learning that is
+converted into a tyranny will never bring forth good
+fruit. It is the duty of parents and schoolmasters to
+impress upon the mind of youth that a seat of learning
+is the home of an easy frugality rather than of prodigal
+rivalry; that the university will only give degrees and
+honours where there is industry and good moral conduct.
+It is to be feared that youth, quitting the discipline
+of the school, looks upon the university as the
+place where he may indulge in his own wayward will,
+and be as idle and indolent as he please. If this be
+the case the university is not to blame for such lapses,
+but a bad prior apprehension of duty, and a defective,
+ill-directed education.
+
+It is impossible to read the biographies of some of
+our most celebrated men, and not to see that with
+means scanty enough they were enabled to keep their
+terms with honour, and in the end confer additional
+celebrity upon the noble foundations where they had
+studied. If such be the case, we have only the result
+of personal good or ill conduct to explain the whole of
+the affair. But enough on this subject.
+
+But it is not the venerable appearance of University
+College, hallowed by the associations of so many
+centuries in age, nor Queen's opposite, nor All Souls',
+nor any other of the colleges as mere buildings, that so
+connect them with our feelings. We must turn the
+mind from stone and wood to the humanity in connection
+with them. It is that which casts over them
+the "religious light," speaking so sadly and sweetly to
+the heart. In University College we see the glorious
+name of Alfred, and nearly a thousand years, with their
+perished annals, point to it as the witness of their
+departed successions. Who on seeing New College
+does not recall William of Wykeham? and then, what
+a roll of proud names own this renowned university
+for their Alma Mater. The very stones "prate of the
+whereabout" of things connected with the development
+of great minds, and while we look without fatigue at
+the gorgeous mass of buildings in this university, we
+feel we are contemplating what carries an intimate
+connexion, in object at least, with that all of man which
+marches in the track of eternity. It is not mere antiquity,
+therefore, on which our reverence for a great
+seminary of learning is founded. Priority of existence
+has no solid claims to our regard, except for that verde
+antique which covers it, as it covers all things past.
+good or indifferent; it is the connexion of the foundation
+with the history of man--with the names that, like
+the flowers called "immortals," bloom amid the wrecks
+and desolateness with which the flood of ages strew the
+rearway of humankind.
+
+Of late there has been small response to feelings
+such as these in the great world, for we have not been
+looking much toward what is above us, nor discriminating
+from meaner things those which approach to
+heroic natures. We must abandon Mammon, politics,
+and polemics, when we would approach the threshold
+of elevated meditation--when we dwell on the illustrious
+names of the past, and tread over the stones which they
+trod. I never wandered along the banks of the sedgy
+Cam, at that lone, twilight hour, when the dimness of
+external objects tends most to concentrate the faculties
+upon the immediate object of contemplation, but I
+have fancied the shades of Bacon, Milton, or Locke,
+to be near me, as the Indian fancies the shades of his
+fathers haunt the old hunting-grounds of his race. I
+know that these are heterodox feelings in the present
+day. I know that he who speaks of Homer or Milton,
+for example, is continually answered by the question,
+"Who reads them now?" The truth being, perhaps,
+that we are getting too far below them to relish their
+superior standard in sterling merit. But there are still
+in our universities, if not elsewhere, some who are
+content to be the last of the Goths in the estimation
+of the multitude, who cannot see the Isis, or Cherwell,
+or the reedy Cam, without feelings of which the crowd
+knows nothing; who can dream away an hour in the
+avenue of Christ Church, and almost conjure spirits
+from the depths of the grave to realize the pictures of
+imagination, which are there always invested with purity
+and holiness, so much do external things impress their
+character on our imaginings. This is the true poetry
+of life, neither found in the haunts of fashion, nor
+among the denizens of Cornhill or St. Giles'. The good
+and deep things of the mind, the search into the secrets
+of nature, the sublimest truth, the purest philosophy of
+which man has to boast, has proceeded from those who
+were inhabitants of such seats of learning. It is
+impossible to state the precise amount of assistance which
+genius and learning may derive from the ease and peace
+enjoyed in such a university. They are inestimable to
+the student from association, tranquillity, and convenience.
+The very "dim religious light" of college rooms
+are solicitations to reflection. Then there are the
+conveniences of first-rate professors, and access to the
+writings of the learned in all ages. Thus some who
+professed a distaste for a university life, have returned
+to it again, and made it the arena where they have conquered
+a lasting reputation--such, for example, was the
+case with Gray the poet.
+
+The increase of knowledge, and consequently of
+morality, is the great aim of such a noble establishment
+as this; and the rewards and honours dispensed there
+are bestowed in proportion to the industry and good
+conduct of those who receive them. If the offences of
+freshmen outside the walls be unvisited by the university
+from wariness in the offenders, or the impossibility of
+controlling them, they are certain to meet with a just
+estimation of their demerit here; and, as before noticed,
+this is perhaps the best mode of repressing them. The
+assistance derived by the industrious student from the
+university itself is invaluable. The very locality is an
+aid to progress. Where can there be places more
+favourable for thought than those noble buildings,
+ancient halls, and delightful walks? Everything invites
+to contemplation. Magdalen always seemed to me as
+if soliciting the student's presence in a peculiar manner.
+A favourite resort of mine, at certain times, was the road
+passing the Observatory, leading to Woodstock. But
+of all the college walks, those of Magdalen were the
+more impressive and attractive. It appeared to embody
+the whole of the noble city in its own personification,
+as a single word will sometimes express the pith of an
+entire sentence. The "Mighty Tom" in the olden
+time, even of Walter de Mapes, if its metal was then
+out of the ore, never sounded (then perhaps not nine)
+but the midnight hour, to that worthy archdeacon, with
+more of the character of its locality, than the visual
+aspect of Magdalen represents the beautiful city to one
+in its entirety. It seems a sort of metonymy; Maudlin
+put for Oxford. The walk is, after all, but a sober path,
+worthy by association with one of the walks of Eden.
+Yet it shows no gay foliage, nor "shade above shade
+a woody theatre," such as is seen on a mountain
+declivity. It is a simple shadowy walk--shadowy to
+richness, cool, tranquil, redolent of freshness. There
+the soul feels "private, inactive, calm, contemplative,"
+linked to things that were and are not. The mellow
+hue of time, not yet stricken by decay, clothes the
+buildings of this college, which, compared with other
+edifices more steeped in maturity of years, occupies,
+as it were, a middle term in existence.
+
+The variety of building in this city is amazing, and
+would occupy a very considerable time to study even
+imperfectly. At a little distance no place impresses the
+mind more justly with its own lofty pretensions. The
+towers, steeples, and domes, rising over the masses of
+foliage beneath, which conceal the bodies of the edifices,
+seen at the break of morning or at sunset, appear
+in great beauty. Bathed in light, although not the
+"alabaster tipped with golden spires" of the poet, for
+even the climate of Oxford is no exception to the
+defacement of nature's colouring, everywhere that coal
+smoke ascends; but the tout ensemble is truly poetical
+and magnificent.
+
+Oriel still, they say, maintains its precedency of
+teaching its students how to conduct themselves with a
+view to university honours, and to the world's respect.
+The preliminary examinations there have proved a
+touchstone of merit, and elevated Oriel College into
+something near the envy of every other in this country.
+Worthy Oriel, the star of Oxford. "I don't know how
+it is," said the Rev. C. C., walking down High Street one
+day, "but Oriel College is all I envy Oxford. It is the
+richest gem in the ephod of the high-priest (vice-chancellor)
+of this university. I should like to steal
+and transplant it to my Alma Mater among the fens."
+
+There was formerly a Welsh harper in Oxford, whom
+the collegians sometimes denominated King David.
+He was the first of the Cymri brotherhood I ever heard
+perform. Since that distant day I have often heard
+those minstrels in their native land, particularly in
+North Wales, at Bedd Gelert, Caernarvon, and other
+places, but I confess I never was so much struck as by
+this Oxford harper. He often played at the Angel,
+where the university men used to group round him, for
+he excited general admiration. His music was not of so
+plaintive a character as that in his own land, or else the
+scenery of the latter had some effect in saddening the
+music there through association--perhaps this difference
+was, after all, only in fancy.
+
+Christchurch, the noblest of the churches! How
+have I heard with delight its merry peal of bells, and the
+deep resonance of the "Mighty Tom," that sounds with
+no "friendly voice" the call home of the students still,
+I presume, as it did so many years ago! There is a
+long list of names, of no mean reputation, educated
+here, since the rapacious Henry VIII. seized the
+foundations, which had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey. The
+gratitude of posterity, never very strong, has in the
+present case preserved the remembrance of Wolsey,
+if I recollect aright, by a statue of the proud man in
+his cardinal's robes. The grove of trees belonging to
+Christchurch, and the scenery accompanying the entire
+buildings, are eminently impressive. Here, when divine
+service is celebrating, there is a peculiar propriety, or
+rather adaptation of the architecture to the feeling; the
+trees, and every accompaniment, are suitable to the end.
+There is religion or its sentiment addressing the mind
+here through every sense. All that can raise devotion
+in external appliances, combines in a wonderful manner;
+and when the sound of the organ is reverberated deeply
+along the vaulted roofs and walls, the effect was
+indescribably fine. Christchurch walk or meadow is an
+adjunct to this college, such as few places possess. I
+have trod it with those who will never tread it again. I
+have skimmed over its smooth shaven surface when life
+seemed a vista of unmeasured years. Its very beauty
+touches upon a melancholy chord, since it vibrates the
+sound of time passed away with those who lie in dust in
+distant climates, of whom memory alone is now the only
+record that they were and are not.
+
+I remember being told by an eminent, but aged
+doctor in divinity, who had been the better part of his
+life employed in the education of youth, that he had
+kept an account of the history of all his pupils as far as
+he could obtain it, and they were very numerous. From
+his own tuition--and there were some celebrated names
+amongst them--he traced them to the university, or to
+professions of a more active nature than a sojourn
+at the university would allow. To Oxford he had
+sent the larger number of his pupils. "And afterwards,
+doctor?" "Some came off nobly there: others
+I heard of in distant parts of the globe in their country's
+service: but it is the common tale with nearly all of
+them--they are dead." What hosts, I often thought,
+who had moved among, the deep shades of this university
+until it became entwined with their earliest affections
+--who had studied within those embattled walls until
+the sight of them became almost a part of his existence
+--what hosts of such have but served to swell the
+waters of oblivion, and press the associations of a
+common mortality upon the mind in the reflection on
+this very truism! The late Sir Egerton Brydges--a
+writer whose talents, though admitted, were never
+received as they merited to have been by the world,
+owing, perhaps, to an untoward disposition in other
+respects--was of opinion that the calmness and
+seclusion of a university were not best adapted for calling
+forth the efforts of genius; but that adversity and some
+struggling were necessary to bring out greatness of
+character. He thought that praise enervated the mind,
+and that to bear it required a much greater degree of
+fortitude than to withstand censure. The consequence
+of this would be, that the honours decreed in a
+university must be pernicious to youth. This cannot be
+conceded. Sir Egerton's notion may be just in relation to
+himself, or to one or two temperaments irregularly constituted;
+but a university exists not for the exceptions, but for the
+many. How numerous is the list of those who, but for the
+fostering care of Oxford or Cambridge, would have never been
+known as the ornament and delight of their fellow-men!
+How much more numerous is the list of those, whose abilities
+not rising beyond the circle of social usefulness have lived
+"obscure to fame," yet owe the pleasure they imparted
+to their friends, and the beguilement of many troubles
+inseparable from mortality, to the fruits of their university
+studies, and to a partial unrolling before them of that
+map of knowledge, which before those of loftier claims
+and some hold upon fame had been more amply displayed!
+In this view of the matter, the justness of
+which cannot be contested, the utility of such foundations
+is boundless. The effect upon the social body.--
+I do not speak of polemics, but of the sound instruction
+thus made available--cannot be estimated. In the midst
+of fluctuating systems of instruction, it is something to
+have a standard by which to test the measure of
+knowledge imparted to youth. If accused of being
+restricted in variety of knowledge, the perfection and
+mastery in what is taught must be conceded to Oxford
+and Cambridge. Perhaps there is too much reason to
+fear, that without these foundations we should speedily
+fall into a very superficial knowledge, indeed, of the
+classical languages of antiquity. This would be to
+exclude ourselves from an acquaintance with all past time,
+except in monkish fiction and the feudal barbarism of
+the Goths of the north.
+
+There are, I verily believe, or I should rather say
+there were, imbibed at the university so many attachments
+at one time to words in place of things, that the
+collegian in after life became liable to reproach upon
+this head. Pedants are bred everywhere out of literature,
+and the variety in verbiage once exhibited by some
+university men has been justly condemned. But while
+such word-worms were crawling here and there out of
+the porches of our colleges, giants in acquirement were
+striding over them in their petty convolutions. Their
+intertwinings attracted the attention of the mere gazer,
+who is always more stricken with any microcosmic
+object that comes casually in the way and is embraced
+at a glance, than with objects the magnitude of which
+demand repeated examinations. But all this while the
+great and glorious spring of knowledge was unpolluted.
+The reign of mere verbiage passed away; the benefits
+of the universities had never ceased to be imparted
+the whole time. The key to the better stores of
+knowledge was placed in the hands of every one who chose
+to avail himself of its advantages. The minds of the
+collegians were filled with an affection for the works of
+the writers of antiquity, which have been the guide,
+solace, and pleasure of the greatest and most accomplished
+men since the Christian era commenced. Studies
+will teach their own use in after life "by the wisdom
+that is about them and above them, won by observation,"
+as a great writer observes; but then there must be the
+studies.
+
+There seems of late years much less of that feeling
+for poetry than once existed; the same may be observed
+in respect to classical learning. Few now regard how
+perished nations lived and passed away,--how men
+thought, acted, and were moved, for example, in the
+time of Pericles or the Roman Augustus. What are
+they to us? What is blind Meonides to us, or that
+Roman who wrote odes so beautifully--who understood
+so well the philosophy of life and the poetry of life
+at the spring of Bardusia? In the past generation, a
+part of the adolescent being and of manhood extended
+a kindly feeling towards them. We hear no admiration
+of those immortal strains now. We must turn for
+them to our universities. People are getting shy of them,
+as rich men shirk poor friends. Are we in the declining
+state, that of "mechanical arts and merchandize,"
+to use Lord Bacon's phrase, and is our middle age of
+learning past? Even then, thank Heaven, we have our
+universities still, where we may, for a time at least,
+enter and converse with the spirits of the good, that
+"sit in the clouds and mock" the rest of the greedy
+world. They will last our time--glorious mementos of
+the anxiety of our forefathers for the preservation of
+learning; hallowed by grateful recollections, by time,
+renown, virtue, conquests over ignorance, imperishable
+gratitude, a proud roll of mighty names in their sons,
+and the prospect of continuing to be monuments of
+glory to unborn generations. Long may Oxford and
+Cambridge stand and brighten with years, though to
+some they may not, as they do to me, exhibit a title to
+the gratitude and admiration of Old England, to which
+it would be difficult to point out worthy rivals.
+
+____
+
+ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES
+
+The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent,
+the Planetary system, and the Infinite deep of
+the Heavens have now become common and familiar
+facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of
+our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism
+with our earliest breath of consciousness; it is all but
+impossible to throw back our imagination into the time
+when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind
+which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
+which God had sent down among mankind. Vast
+spiritual and material continents lay for the first time
+displayed, opening fields of thought and fields of
+enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
+routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on
+their own strength and their own power, unshackled
+to accomplish whatever they might dare. And although
+we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of
+that enormous force of heart and intellect which
+accompanied them (for they were as much the effect
+as the cause, and one reacted on the other), yet at
+any rate they afforded scope and room for the play
+of powers which, without such scope, let them have
+been as transcendent as they would, must have passed
+away unproductive and blighted.
+
+An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely
+real conviction of the divine and devilish forces by
+which the universe was guided and misguided, was
+the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
+Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did
+then really and truly believe in the actual personal
+presence of God or the devil in every accident, or scene,
+or action. They brought to the contemplation of the
+new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated
+with the spiritual convictions of the old era, which
+were not lost, but only infinitely expanded. The
+planets whose vastness they now learnt to recognize
+were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for
+good; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon;
+and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshippers
+of the real devil, and were assisted with the
+full power of his evil army.
+
+It is a form of thought which, however in a vague
+and general way we may continue to use its phraseology,
+has become, in its detailed application to life, utterly
+strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
+enlargement of our understanding when we read the
+decisions of grave law-courts in cases of supposed
+witchcraft; we smile complacently over Raleigh's story
+of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
+not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete
+and foolish superstition. The true conclusion is the
+opposite of the conclusion which we draw. That
+Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed,
+and could be what they were notwithstanding, is to
+us a proof that the injury which such mistakes can
+inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as they
+arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness
+and mystery of the world, and of the life of human
+souls upon it, they witness to the presence in such
+minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most perfect
+acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation
+moves can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur,
+the moral majesty, of some of Shakespeare's characters,
+so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can
+imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the
+genius of the poet who has outstripped nature in his
+creations; but we are misunderstanding the power
+and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness
+to it in any such sense; Shakespeare created, but only
+as the spirit of nature created around him, working
+in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he
+lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he
+saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he
+heard in the ordinary conversations in which he joined.
+At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and
+at a thousand un-named English firesides, he found
+the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos,
+his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer
+personal acquaintance which we can form with the
+English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
+satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more
+than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts.
+
+It was, therefore, with no little interest that we
+heard of the formation of a society which was to employ
+itself, as we understood, in republishing in accessible
+form some, if not all, of the invaluable records compiled
+or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
+else, have their appointed death-day; the souls
+of them, unless they be found worthy of a second birth
+in a new body, perish with the paper in which they
+lived, and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their
+own want of merit, but from our neglect of them, were
+expiring of old age. The five-volume quarto edition,
+published in 1811, so little people then cared for the
+exploits of their ancestors, was but of 270 copies;
+it was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries,
+or for the great libraries, where it could be
+consulted as a book of reference; and among a people,
+the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's
+name, the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never
+so much as occurred to them that general readers would
+ever come to care to have it within their reach.
+
+And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose
+Epic of the modern English nation. They contain the
+heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom
+the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
+Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of
+substantial facts, which rival them in interest and
+grandeur. What the old epics were to the royally or
+nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people.
+We have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to
+whom the heroism, like the dominion, of the world had
+in time past been confined. But, as it was in the days
+of the apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
+obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the divine
+mission, the spiritual authority over mankind, so, in
+the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the
+banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
+Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but
+what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out
+across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonizing,
+and grayed out the channels, and at last paved them
+with their bones, through which the commerce and
+enterprise of England has flowed out over all the
+world. We can conceive nothing, not the songs of
+Homer himself, which would be read, among us at
+least, with more enthusiastic interest than these plain
+massive tales; and a people's edition of them in these
+days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugene Sue
+circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the
+most blessed antidote which could be bestowed upon
+us. The heroes themselves were the men of the people
+--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes;
+and no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh,
+lent its polish or its varnish to set them off. In most
+cases the captain himself, or his clerk or servant, or
+some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
+chronicled the voyage which he had shared, and thus
+inorganically arose a collection of writings which, with
+all their simplicity, are for nothing more striking than
+for the high moral beauty, warmed with natural feeling,
+which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
+the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck.
+If he is distinguished in his profession, he is professional
+merely; or if he is more than that, he owes it not to
+his work as a sailor, but to independent domestic
+culture. With them their profession was the school
+of their nature, a high moral education which most
+brought out what was most nobly human in them; and
+the wonders of earth, and air, and sea, and sky, were a
+real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
+God speaking to them.
+
+That such hopes of what might be accomplished by
+the Hakluyt Society should in some measure be disappointed,
+is only what might naturally be anticipated
+of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
+expensive editions to the publisher, and historical
+societies, from a necessity which appears to encumber
+all corporate English action, rarely fail to do their work
+expensively and infelicitously; yet, after all allowances
+and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the
+mortification of having found but one volume in the
+series to be even tolerably edited, and that one to be
+edited by a gentleman to whom England is but an
+adopted country--Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's
+"Conquest of Guiana," with Sir Robert's sketch of
+Raleigh's history and character, form in everything but
+its cost a very model of an excellent volume. For
+every one of the rest we are obliged to say of them,
+that they have left little undone to paralyze whatever
+interest was reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their
+own volumes to the same obscurity to which time and
+accident were consigning the earlier editions. Very
+little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry
+of Hakiuyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of
+the most remarkable of the stories which were to be
+found in his collection. They began unfortunately
+with proposing to continue the work where he had
+left it, and produce narratives hitherto unpublished
+of other voyages of inferior interest, or not of English
+origin. Better thoughts appear to have occurred
+to them in the course of the work; but their evil
+destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get
+themselves executed. We opened one volume with
+eagerness, bearing the title of "Voyages to the Northwest,"
+in hope of finding our old friends Davis and
+Frobisher, and we found a vast unnecessary Editor's
+Preface; and instead of the voyages themselves, which
+with their picturesqueness and moral beauty shine
+among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of
+Hakluyt, an analysis and digest of their results,
+which Milton was called in to justify in an inappropriate
+quotation. It is much as if they had undertaken to
+edit "Bacon's Essays," and had retailed
+what they conceived to be the substance of them in
+their own language; strangely failing to see that the
+real value of the actions or the thought of remarkable
+men does not lie in the material result which can be
+gathered from them, but in the heart and soul of those
+who do or utter them. Consider what Homer's
+"Odyssey" would be, reduced into an analysis.
+
+The editor of the "Letters of Columbus" apologizes
+for the rudeness of their phraseology. Columbus, he
+tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the
+art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him.
+We are put on our guard, and warned not to be
+offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record
+of sufferings under which his great soul was staggering
+towards the end of its earthly calamities, where the
+inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out
+from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of
+which the highest literary pathos is poor and meaningless.
+
+And even in the subjects which they select they are
+pursued by the same curious fatality. Why is Drake
+to be best known, or to be only known, in his last
+voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to
+immortalize the failure? When Drake climbed the tree
+in Panama, and saw both oceans, and vowed that he
+would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
+upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head
+over the southernmost angle of the world; when he
+scored a furrow round the globe with his keel, and
+received the homage of the barbarians of the antipodes
+in the name of the Virgin Queen; he was another man
+from what he had become after twenty years of court
+life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting, and gold-hunting.
+There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we take it as
+the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his death,
+which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what
+he did.
+
+But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive
+than all these is the editor of Hawkins's "Voyage to
+the South Sea." The book is striking in itself; it is
+not one of the best, but it is very good; and as it is
+republished complete, if we read it through, carefully
+shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand,
+we shall then find in it the same beauty which breathes
+in the tone of all the writings of the period.
+
+It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which
+did no dishonour to him who sunk under it; and there
+is a melancholy dignity in the style in which Hawkins
+tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
+been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of
+winning back his lost laurels, he respects himself still
+for the heart with which he endured a shame which
+would have broken a smaller man. It would have
+required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to
+have abstained from marring the pages with puns of
+which Punch would be ashamed, and with the vulgar
+affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
+the nineteenth century condescends to criticize and
+approve of his half-barbarous precursor; but it must
+have been a defect in his heart, rather than in his
+understanding, which betrayed him into such an offence
+as this which follows. The war of freedom of the
+Araucan Indians is the most gallant episode in the
+history of the New World. The Spaniards themselves
+were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry before
+which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual
+attempts to crush them, they gave up a conflict which they
+never afterwards resumed; leaving the Araucans alone,
+of all the American races with which they came in
+contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from
+them. It is a subject for an epic poem, and whatever
+admiration is due to the heroism of a brave people
+whom no inequality of strength could appal and no
+defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to
+demand of us. The story of the war was well known in
+Europe: and Hawkins, in coasting the western shores of
+South America, fell in with them, and the finest passage
+in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of
+the war.
+
+"An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards,
+and for that he was of name, and known to have done
+his devoir against them, they cut off his hands, thereby
+intending to disenable him to fight any more against them.
+But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this injury,
+to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
+and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated
+and incited them to persevere in their accustomed
+valour and reputation, abasing the enemy and advancing
+his nation; condemning their contraries of cowardliness.
+and confirming it by the cruelty used with him and other
+his companions in their mishaps; showing them his arms
+without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet
+they had cut off, because they might be unable to sit on
+horseback: with force arguing that if they feared them not.
+they would not have used so great inhumanity--for fear
+produceth cruelty, the companion of cowardice. Thus
+encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs, and
+liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
+than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the
+commonwealth. Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and
+having loaden his two stumps with bundles of arrows, he
+succoured them who, in the succeeding battle, had their
+store wasted; and changing himself from place to place,
+animated and encouraged his countrymen with such comfortable
+persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
+that he did more good with his words and presence,
+without striking a stroke, than a great part of the army
+did with fighting to the utmost."
+
+It is an action which may take its place by the side
+of the myth of Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of
+that brother of the poet AEschylus, who, when the Persians
+were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till
+both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it
+with his teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in
+the splendid calendar of Athenian heroes. Captain
+Bethune, without call or need, making his notes merely,
+as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
+he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom
+of the page, that "it reminds him of the familiar
+lines,--
+
+"For Widdrington I needs must wail,
+As one in doleful dumps;
+For, when his legs were smitten off,
+He fought upon his stumps."
+
+It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the
+ballad of Chevy Chase. It is the most deformed stanza *
+of the modern deformed version which was composed
+in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration of
+the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for
+serious poetry, they have ceased to sound in any ear as
+other than a burlesque; the associations which they
+arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
+continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous
+doggerel.
+____
+* Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us
+too hard on Captain Bethune compare them.
+
+"For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
+That even he slayne sholde be;
+For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
+He knyied and fought on his knee."
+
+Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad,
+gives up this stanza as hopeless.
+____
+
+
+When to these offences of the Society we add, that
+in the long laboured appendices and introductions,
+which fill up valuable space, which increase the
+expense of the edition, and into reading which many
+readers are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing
+which assists the understanding of the stories which
+they are supposed to illustrate, when we have found what
+is most uncommon passed without notice, and what is
+most trite and familiar encumbered with comment: we
+have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
+volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave
+of them and go on with our own more grateful subject.
+
+Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that
+of the Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English
+constitution were limited in the highest degree, was,
+notwithstanding, more beloved by her subjects than
+any sovereign before or since. It was because,
+substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it
+was given to her to conduct the outgrowth of the
+national life through its crisis of change, and the weight
+of her great mind and her great place were thrown on
+the people's side. She was able to paralyze the dying
+efforts with which, if a Stuart had been on the throne,
+the representatives of an effete system might have made
+the struggle a deadly one; and the history of England
+is not the history of France, because the inflexible will
+of one person held the Reformation firm till it had
+rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not
+be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer
+able to furnish standing ground on which the English
+or any other nation could live a manly and a godly
+life. Feudalism, as a social organization, was not any
+more a system under which their energies could have
+scope to move. Thenceforward not the Catholic Church,
+but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel
+and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom
+men were to listen; and great actions were not to
+remain the privilege of the families of the Norman
+nobles, but were to be laid within the reach of the
+poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him to perform
+them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
+saw the change which had passed over the world. She
+saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The
+England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the Norman Baron,
+was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
+thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to
+plough the ocean with its navies, and sow its colonies
+over the globe; and the first thunder birth of these
+enormous forces and the flash of the earliest achievements of
+the new era roll and glitter through the forty years of the
+reign of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its
+history is written, will be seen to be among the most
+sublime phenomena which the earth as yet has witnessed.
+The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
+whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and
+Elizabeth's place was to recognize, to love, to foster,
+and to guide. The government originated nothing;
+at such a time it was neither necessary nor desirable
+that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises
+were on foot which promised ultimate good, but no
+immediate profit, we never fail to find among the lists
+of contributors the Queen's Majesty, Burleigh, Leicester,
+Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for Elizabeth
+could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
+distant voyages in the river, the Queen would go down
+in her barge and inspect. Frobisher, who was but a
+poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave her handkerchief
+to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he
+brings her home a narwhal's horn for a present. She
+honoured her people, and her people loved her; and
+the result was that, with no cost to the government,
+she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards,
+planting America with colonies, and exploring the most
+distant seas. Either for honour or for expectation of
+profit, or from that unconscious necessity by which a
+great people, like a great man, will do what is right, and
+must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to
+furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command
+one, laid their abilities together and went out to pioneer,
+and to conquer, and take possession, in the name of
+the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so remote
+but what some one or other was found ready to undertake
+an expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade;
+and let them go where they would, they were sure of
+Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters written by
+her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
+potentate of whom she had ever heard, to the Emperors
+of China, Japan, and India, the Grand Duke of Russia,
+the Grand Turk, the Persian Sofee, and other unheardof
+Asiatic and African princes; whatever was to be
+done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted
+when she could, and admired when she could not. The
+springs of great actions are always difficult to analyze--
+impossible to analyze perfectly--possible to analyze
+only very proximately, and the force by which a man
+throws a good action out of himself is invisible and
+mystical, like that which brings out the blossom and
+the fruit upon the tree. The motives which we find
+men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient
+to have prompted them to so large a daring. They did
+what they did from the great unrest in them which
+made them do it, and what it was may be best measured
+by the results, by the present England and America.
+Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the
+world, and in the position of England, to have furnished
+abundance of conscious motive, and to have stirred the
+drowsiest routinier statesman.
+
+Among material occasions for exertion, the population
+began to outgrow the employment, and there
+was a necessity for plantations to serve as an outlet.
+Men who, under happier circumstances, might have
+led decent lives, and done good service, were now
+driven by want to desperate courses--"witness," as
+Richard Hakluyt says, "twenty tall fellows hanged last
+Rochester assizes for small robberies;" and there is an
+admirable paper addressed to the Privy Council by
+Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing
+out the possible openings to be made in or through.
+such plantations for home produce and manufacture.
+
+Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile
+ambitions, however, lay a noble enthusiasm which
+in these dull days we can hardly, without an effort,
+realize. The life-and-death wrestle between the Reformation
+and the old religion had settled in the last quarter
+of the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle
+between England and Spain. France was disabled.
+All the help which Elizabeth could spare barely enabled
+the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism,
+if it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by
+the circumstances of the time the championship of the
+Reformed faith fell to the English sailors. The sword
+of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the
+legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting
+the gold ships on their passage; and, inspired by an
+enthusiasm like that which four centuries before had
+precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East, the
+same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our
+bays and rivers with pleasure yachts then fitted out
+armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic, and plunder
+and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could meet
+them.
+
+Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force
+and energy of the age was directed towards the sea.
+The wide excitement and the greatness of the interests
+at stake, raised even common men above themselves;
+and people who in ordinary times would have been no
+more than mere seamen, or mere money-making merchants,
+appear before us with a largeness and greatness
+of heart and mind in which their duties to God and
+their country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt
+to be paramount to every other.
+
+Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war
+ships in behalf of the Protestant faith; the cruisers of
+the Spanish main were full of generous eagerness for the
+conversion of the savage nations to Christianity; and
+what is even more surprising, sites for colonization were
+examined and scrutinized by such men in a lofty statesmanlike
+spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by
+them into the indirect effects of a wisely-extended
+commerce on every highest human interest.
+
+Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a
+further feeling, a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was
+spurring on the English, and one which must be well
+understood and well remembered, if men like Drake,
+and Hawkins, and Raleigh, are to be tolerably understood.
+One of the English Reviews, a short time ago,
+was much amused with a story of Drake having excommunicated
+a petty officer as a punishment for some
+moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in
+Drake, as a man, anything more than; a highly brave
+and successful buccaneer, whose pretences to religion
+might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit to the
+Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are
+regarded by superficial persons, who see only such outward
+circumstances of their history as correspond with
+their own impressions. The high nature of these men,
+and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise
+out and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves
+back into their times and teach our hearts to feel as
+they felt. We do not find in the language of the
+voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
+help at home, any of that weak watery talk of "protection
+of aborigines," which as soon as it is translated
+into fact becomes the most active policy for their
+destruction, soul and body. But the stories of the
+dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians,
+which were widely known in England, seem to have
+affected all classes of people, not with pious passive
+horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
+thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and
+down the pages of Hakluyt, who, with a view to make
+them known, translated Peter Martyr's letters; and
+each commonest sailor-boy who had heard them from
+his childhood among the tales of his father's fire-side,
+had longed to be a man, that he might go out and
+become the avenger of a gallant and suffering people.
+A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart;
+seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is
+given; and it was a point of honour, if of nothing more,
+among the English sailors, to do no discredit by their
+conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
+courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so
+conspicuous in their dealings with their European rivals, either
+failed to touch them in their dealings with uncultivated
+idolaters, or the high temper of the aristocracy was
+unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
+soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue,
+to charge upon their religion the grievous actions
+of men who called themselves the armed missionaries of
+Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and bishops
+were the loudest in the indignation with which they
+denounced them. But we are obliged to charge upon
+it that slow and subtle influence so inevitably exercised
+by any religion which is divorced from life, and converted
+into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or system,
+which could permit the same men to be extravagant in
+a sincere devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose
+entire lower nature, unsubdued and unaffected, was
+given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and sensuality.
+If religion does not make men more humane than they
+would be without it, it makes them fatally less so; and
+it is to be feared that the spirit of the pilgrim fathers,
+which had oscillated to the other extreme, and had
+again crystallized into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
+reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the
+Spaniards had set them their unworthy precedent. But
+the Elizabethan navigators, full without exception of
+large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty, bear
+names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime
+against the savages; and the name of England was as
+famous in the Indian seas as that of Spain was
+infamous. On the banks of the Oronooko there was
+remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who
+had come there from the great Queen beyond the seas;
+and Raleigh speaks the language of the heart of his
+country, when he urges the English statesmen to colonize
+Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving
+the white marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the
+Incas to the throne of Peru.
+
+"Who will not be persuaded," he says, "that now at length
+the great Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans,
+and lamentations, hath seen the tears and blood of so many
+millions of innocent men, women, and children, afflicted,
+robbed, reviled, branded with hot irons, roasted, dismembered,
+mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked, scalded with hot
+oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in sport,
+drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
+mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and
+purposeth to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to
+take the yoke of servitude from that distressed people, as
+free by nature as any Christian."
+
+Poor Raleigh! if peace and comfort in this world
+were of much importance to him, it was in an ill day
+that he provoked the revenge of Spain. The strength
+of England was needed at the moment at its own door;
+the Armada came, and there was no means of executing
+such an enterprise. And afterwards the throne of
+Elizabeth was filled by a Stuart, and Guiana was to be
+no scene of glory for Raleigh; but, as later historians
+are pleased to think, it was the grave of his reputation.
+
+But the hope burned clear in him through all the
+weary years of unjust imprisonment; and when he was
+a grey-headed old man, the base son of a bad mother
+used it to betray him. The success of his last enterprise
+was made the condition under which he was to be
+pardoned for a crime which he had not committed; and
+its success depended, as he knew, on its being kept
+secret from the Spaniards. James required of him on
+his allegiance a detail of what he proposed, giving him
+at the same time his word as a king that the secret should
+be safe with him, and the next day it was sweeping out
+of the port of London in the swiftest of the Spanish
+ships, with private orders to the Governor of St. Thomas
+to provoke a collision when Raleigh should arrive there,
+which should afterwards cost him his heart's blood.
+
+We modern readers may run rapidly over the series of
+epithets under which he has catalogued the Indian
+sufferings, hoping that they are exaggerated, seeing that
+they are horrible, and closing our eyes against them with
+swiftest haste; but it was not so when every epithet
+suggested a hundred familiar facts; and some of these (not
+resting on English prejudice, but on sad Spanish evidence,
+which is too full of shame and sorrow to be
+suspected) shall be given in this place, however old a
+story it may be thought; because, as we said above, it
+is impossible to understand the actions of these men,
+unless we are familiar with the feelings of which their
+hearts were full.
+
+The massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, terrible as
+they were, were not the occasion which stirred the
+deepest indignation. They had the excuse of what
+might be called, for want of a better word, necessity,
+and of the desperate position of small bands of men in
+the midst of enemies who might be counted by millions.
+And in De Soto, when he burnt his guides in Florida
+(it was his practice when there was danger of treachery,
+that those who were left alive might take warning); or
+in Vasco Nunnez, praying to the Virgin on the mountains
+of Darien, and going down from off them into the
+valleys to hunt the Indian caciques, and fling them alive
+to his bloodhounds; there was, at least, with all this
+fierceness and cruelty, a desperate courage which we
+cannot refuse to admire, and which mingles with and
+corrects our horror. It is the refinement of the Spaniards'
+cruelty in the settled and conquered provinces, excused
+by no danger and provoked by no resistance, the details
+of which witness to the infernal coolness with which it
+was perpetrated; and the great bearing of the Indians
+themselves under an oppression which they despaired of
+resisting, which raises the whole history to the rank of a
+world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler but weaker
+nature was crushed under a malignant force which was
+stronger and yet meaner than itself. Gold hunting
+and lust were the two passions for which the Spaniards
+cared; and the fate of the Indian women was only more
+dreadful than that of the men, who were ganged and
+chained to a labour in the mines which was only to cease
+with their lives, in a land where but a little before they
+had lived a free contented people, more innocent of
+crime than perhaps any people upon earth. If we can
+conceive what our own feelings would be, if, in the
+"development of the mammalia" some baser but more
+powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet,
+and we and our wives and children at our own happy
+firesides were degraded from our freedom, and became
+to them what the lower animals are to us, we can
+perhaps realize the feelings of the enslaved nations of
+Hispaniola.
+
+As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes
+urged, that men who do not deserve to be slaves will
+prefer death to the endurance of it; and that if they
+prize their liberty, it is always in their power to assert
+it in the old Roman fashion. Tried even by so hard a
+rule, the Indians vindicated their right, and before
+the close of the sixteenth century, the entire group of
+the Western Islands in the hands of the Spaniards,
+containing, when Columbus discovered them, many
+millions of inhabitants, were left literally desolate from
+suicide. Of the anecdotes of this terrible self-immolation,
+as they were then known in England, here are a
+few out of many.
+
+The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary
+method. A Yucaian cacique, who was forced with his
+old subjects to labour in the mines, at last "calling
+those miners into an house, to the number of ninety-
+five, he thus debateth with them:"--
+
+"'My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to
+live any longer under so cruel a servitude? Let us now go
+unto the perpetual seat of our ancestors, for we shall there
+have rest from these intolerable cares and grievances which
+we endure under the subjection of the unthankful. Go ye
+before, I will presently follow you.' Having so spoken, he
+held out whole handfuls of those leaves which take away life,
+prepared for the purpose, and giving every one part thereof,
+being kindled to suck up the fume; who obeyed his command,
+the king and his chief kinsmen reserving the last
+place for themselves."
+
+We speak of the crime of suicide, but few persons
+will see a crime in this sad and stately leave-taking of
+a life which it was no longer possible to bear with
+unbroken hearts. We do not envy the Indian, who,
+with Spaniards before him as an evidence of the fruits
+which their creed brought forth, deliberately exchanged
+for it the old religion of his country, which could sustain
+him in an action of such melancholy grandeur. But
+the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors
+with escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a
+story with matter in it for as rich a tragedy as OEdipus
+or Agamemnon; and in its stern and tremendous
+features, more nearly resembling them than any which
+were conceived even by Shakespeare.
+
+An officer named Orlando had taken the daughter
+of a Cuban cacique to be his mistress. She was with
+child by him, but, suspecting her of being engaged in
+some other intrigue, he had her fastened to two wooden
+spits, not intending to kill her, but to terrify her; and
+setting her before the fire, he ordered that she should
+be turned by the servants of the kitchen.
+
+
+"The maiden, stricken with fear through the cruelty
+thereof, and strange kind of torment, presently gave up the
+ghost. The cacique her father, understanding the matter,
+took thirty of his men and went to the house of the captain,
+who was then absent, and slew his wife, whom he had
+married after that wicked act committed, and the women
+who were companions of the wife, and her servants every
+one. Then shutting the door of the house, and putting fire
+under it, he burnt himself and all his companions that
+assisted him, together with the captain's dead family and
+goods."
+
+This is no fiction or poet's romance. It is a tale
+of wrath and revenge, which in sober dreadful truth
+enacted itself upon this earth, and remains among the
+eternal records of the doings of mankind upon it. As
+some relief to its most terrible features, we follow it with
+a story which has a touch in it of diabolical humour.
+
+The slave-owners finding their slaves escaping thus
+unprosperously out of their grasp, set themselves to
+find a remedy for so desperate a disease, and were
+swift to avail themselves of any weakness, mental or
+bodily, through which to retain them in life. One of
+these proprietors being informed that a number of his
+people intended to kill themselves on a certain day,
+at a particular spot, and knowing by experience that
+they were too likely to do it, presented himself there
+at the time which had been fixed upon, and telling
+the Indians when they arrived, that he knew their
+intention, and that it was vain for them to attempt to
+keep anything a secret from him, he ended with saying,
+that he had come there to kill himself with them; that
+as he had used them ill in this world, he might use
+them worse in the next; "with which he did dissuade
+them presently from their purpose." With what efficacy
+such believers in the immortality of the soul were likely
+to recommend either their faith or their God; rather,
+how terribly all the devotion and all the earnestness
+with which the poor priests who followed in the wake
+of the conquerors laboured to recommend it were
+shamed and paralyzed, they themselves too bitterly
+lament. It was idle to send out governor after governor
+with orders to stay such practices. They had but to
+arrive on the scenes to become infected with the same
+fever, or if any remnant of Castilian honour, or any
+faintest echoes of the faith which they professed, still
+flickered in a few of the best and noblest, they could
+but look on with folded hands in ineffectual mourning;
+they could do nothing without soldiers, and the soldiers
+were the worst offenders. Hispaniola became a mere
+desert; the gold was in the mines, and there were no
+poor slaves left remaining to extract it. One means
+which the Spaniards dared to employ to supply the
+vacancy, brought about an incident which in its piteous
+pathos exceeds any story we have ever heard. Crimes
+and criminals are swept away by time, nature finds an
+antidote for their poison, and they and their ill
+consequences alike are blotted out and perish. If we do
+not forgive them, at least we cease to hate them, as it
+grows more clear to us that they injured none so deeply
+as themselves. But the Theriodes kakia, the enormous
+wickedness by which humanity itself has been outraged
+and disgraced, we cannot forgive, we cannot cease to
+hate that; the years roll away, but the tints of it remain
+on the pages of history, deep and horrible as the day
+on which they were entered there.
+
+"When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion
+of the Yucaian islanders concerning the souls of their
+departed, which, after their sins purged in the cold northern
+mountains should pass into the south, to the intent that,
+leaving their own country of their own accord, they might
+suffer themselves to be brought to Hispaniola, they did
+persuade those poor wretches, that they came from those
+places where they should see their parents and children,
+and all their kindred and friends that were dead, and
+should enjoy all kinds of delights with the embracements
+and fruition of all beloved beings. And they, being infected
+and possessed with these crafty and subtle imaginations,
+singing and rejoicing left their country, and followed vain
+and idle hope. But when they saw that they were deceived,
+and neither met their parents nor any that they desired,
+but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and
+command, and to endure cruel and extreme labour, they
+either slew themselves, or, choosing to famish, gave up
+their fair spirits, being persuaded by no reason or violence
+to take food. So these miserable Yucaians came to their
+end."
+
+It was once more as it was in the days of the
+apostles. The New World was first offered to the
+holders of the old traditions. They were the husbandmen
+first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and
+desolation were the only fruits which they reared upon
+it. In their hands it was becoming a kingdom not of
+God, but of the devil, and a sentence of blight went
+out against them and against their works. How fatally
+it has worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America
+bear witness. We need not follow further the history
+of their dealings with the Indians. For their colonies,
+a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at
+Catholic colonization. Like shoots from an old decaying
+tree which no skill and no care can rear, they were
+planted, and for a while they might seem to grow; but
+their life was never more than a lingering death, a
+failure, which to a thinking person would outweigh in
+the arguments against Catholicism whole libraries of
+faultless calenas, and a consensus patrum unbroken
+through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
+Peter.
+
+There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes
+to explain it. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the
+faith of the large mass of earnest thinking capable
+persons; and to those who can best do the work, all
+work in this world sooner or later is committed.
+America was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted
+at home, they sought a place where they might
+worship God in their own way, without danger of
+stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as
+afterwards the English Puritans, early found their way
+there. The fate of a party of Coligny's people, who
+had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
+stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree,
+the wrath and fury with which the passions on both
+sides were boiling. A certain John Ribauk, with about
+400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
+quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several
+years, cultivating the soil, building villages, and on the
+best possible terms with the natives. Spain was at
+the time at peace with France; we are, therefore, to
+suppose that it was in pursuance of the great crusade,
+in which they might feel secure of the secret, if not
+the confessed, sympathy of the Guises, that a powerful
+Spanish fleet bore down upon this settlement. The
+French made no resistance, and they were seized and
+flayed alive, and their bodies hung out upon the trees,
+with an inscription suspended over them, "Not as
+Frenchmen, but as heretics." At Paris all was sweetness
+and silence. The settlement was tranquilly
+surrendered to the same men who had made it the
+scene of their atrocity; and two years later, 500 of
+the very Spaniards who had been most active in the
+murder were living there in peaceable possession, in
+two forts which their relation with the natives had
+obliged them to build. It was well that there were
+other Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the Court
+had not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies
+to do what was right without consulting it. A certain
+privateer named Dominique de Gourges, secretly armed
+and equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing across
+the Atlantic and in two days collecting a strong party
+of Indians, he came down suddenly upon the forts,
+and, taking them by storm, slew or afterwards hanged
+every man he found there, leaving their bodies on the
+trees on which they had hanged the Huguenots, with
+their own inscription reversed against them,--"Not as
+Spaniards, but as murderers." For which exploit, well
+deserving of all honest men's praise, Dominique de
+Gourges had to fly his country for his life; and, coming
+to England, was received with honourable welcome by
+Elizabeth.
+
+It was at such a time, and to take their part amidst
+such scenes as these, that the English navigators
+appeared along the shores of South America, as the armed
+soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers of
+humanity; as their enterprise was grand and lofty, so
+was the manner in which they bore themselves in all
+ways worthy of it. They were no nation of saints,
+in the modern sentimental sense of that word; they
+were prompt, stern men--more ready ever to strike
+an enemy than to parley with him; and, private
+adventurers as they all were, it was natural enough
+that private foolishness and private badness should be
+found among them as among other mortals. Every
+Englishman who had the means was at liberty to fit
+out a ship or ships, and if he could produce tolerable
+vouchers for himself, received at once a commission
+from the Court. The battles of England were fought
+by her children, at their own risk and cost, and they
+were at liberty to repay themselves the expense of their
+expeditions by plundering at the cost of the national
+enemy. Thus, of course, in a mixed world, there were
+found mixed marauding crews of scoundrels, who played
+the game which a century later was played with such
+effect by the pirates of Tortuga. But we have to
+remark, first, that such stories are singularly rare; and
+then, that the victims are never the Indians, never any
+but the Spaniards or the French, when the English were
+at war with them; and, on the whole, the conduct and
+character of the English sailors, considering what they
+were and the work which they were sent to do, present
+us all through that age with such a picture of gallantry,
+disinterestedness, and high heroic energy, as has never
+been overmatched; the more remarkable, as it was
+the fruit of no drill or discipline, no tradition, no
+system, no organized training, but was the free native
+growth of a noble virgin soil.
+
+Before starting on an expedition, it was usual for the
+crew and the officers to meet and arrange among themselves
+a series of articles of conduct, to which they
+bound themselves by a formal agreement, the entire
+body itself undertaking to see to their observance. It
+is quite possible that strong religious profession, and
+even sincere profession, might be accompanied, as it
+was in the Spaniards, with everything most detestable.
+It is not sufficient of itself to prove that their actions
+would correspond with it, but it is one among a number
+of evidences; and, coming, as they come before us,
+with hands clear of any blood but of fair and open
+enemies, their articles may pass at least as indications
+of what they were.
+
+Here we have a few instances:--
+
+Hawkins's ship's company was, as he himself informs
+us, an unusually loose one. Nevertheless, we find them
+"gathered together every morning and evening to serve
+God;" and a fire on board which only Hawkins's presence
+of mind prevented from destroying ship and crew
+together, was made use of by the men as an occasion to
+banish swearing out of the ship.
+
+"With a general consent of all our company, it was
+ordained that there should be a palmer or ferula which should
+be in the keeping of him who was taken with an oath; and
+that he who had the palmer should give to every one that
+he took swearing, a palmads with it and the femla; and
+whosoever at the time of evening or morning prayer was
+found to have the palmer, should have three blows given
+him by the captain or the master; and that he should still
+be bound to free himself by taking another, or else to run
+in danger of continuing the penalty, which, being executed
+a few days, reformed the vice, so that in three days together
+was not one oath heard to be sworn."
+
+The regulations for Luke Fox's voyage commenced
+thus:--
+
+"For as much as the good success and prosperity of every
+action doth consist in the due service and glorifying of God,
+knowing that not only our being and preservation, but the
+prosperity of all our actions and enterprises do immediately
+depend on His Almighty goodness and mercy; it is
+provided-
+
+"First, that all the company, as well officers as others,
+shall duly repair every day twice at the call of the bell to
+hear public prayers to be read, such as are authorized by the
+church, and that in a godly and devout manner, as good
+Christians ought.
+
+"Secondly, that no man shall swear by the name of God,
+or use any profane oath, or blaspheme His holy name."
+
+To symptoms such as these, we cannot but attach a
+very different value when they are the spontaneous growth
+of common minds, unstimulated by sense of propriety
+or rules of the service, or other official influence lay or
+ecclesiastic, from what we attach to the somewhat similar
+ceremonials in which, among persons whose position is
+conspicuous, important enterprises are now and then
+inaugurated.
+
+We have said as much as we intend to say of the
+treatment by the Spaniards of the Indian women. Sir
+Walter Raleigh is commonly represented by historians
+as rather defective, if he was remarkable at all, on the
+moral side of his character. Yet Raleigh can declare
+proudly, that all the time he was on the Oronooko,
+"neither by force nor other means had any of his men
+intercourse with any woman there;" and the narrator of
+the incidents of Raleigh's last voyage acquaints his
+correspondent "with some particulars touching the
+government of the fleet, which, although other men in
+their voyages doubtless in some measure observed, yet
+in all the great volumes which have been written
+touching voyages, there is no precedent of so godly
+severe and martial government, which not only in itself
+is laudable and worthy of imitation, but is also fit to be
+written and engraven on every man's soul that coveteth
+to do honour to his country."
+
+Once more, the modern theory of Drake is, as we
+said above, that he was a gentleman-like pirate on a
+large scale, who is indebted for the place which he fills
+in history to the indistinct ideas of right and wrong
+prevailing in the unenlightened age in which he lived.
+and who therefore demands all the toleration of our
+own enlarged humanity to allow him to remain there.
+Let us see how the following incident can be made to
+coincide with this hypothesis:--
+
+A few days after clearing the channel on his first great
+voyage, he fell in with a small Spanish ship, which he
+took for a prize. He committed the care of it to a
+certain Mr. Doughtie, a person much trusted by, and
+personally very dear to him, and this second vessel was
+to follow him as a tender.
+
+In dangerous expeditions into unknown seas, a second
+smaller ship was often indispensable to success; but
+many finely-intended enterprises were ruined by the
+cowardice of the officers to whom such ships were
+entrusted; who shrank as danger thickened, and again
+and again took advantage of darkness or heavy weather
+to make sail for England and forsake their commander.
+Hawkins twice suffered in this way; so did Sir Humfrey
+Gilbert; and, although Drake's own kind feeling for
+his old friend has prevented him from leaving an exact
+account of his offence, we gather from the scattered hints
+which are let fall, that he, too, was meditating a similar
+piece of treason. However, it may or may not have
+been thus. But when at Port St Julien, "our General,"
+says one of the crew,--
+
+"Began to inquire diligently of the actions of Mr. Thomas
+Doughtie, and found them not to be such as he looked for,
+but tending rather to contention or mutiny, or some other
+disorder, whereby, without redresse, the success of the
+voyage might greatly have been hazarded. Whereupon the
+company was called together and made acquainted with
+the particulars of the cause, which were found, partly by Mr.
+Doughtie's own confession, and partly by the evidence of
+the fact, to be true, which, when our General saw, although
+his private affection to Mr. Doughtie (as he then, in the
+presence of us all, sacredly protested) was great, yet the
+care which he had of the state of the voyage, of the
+expectation of Her Majesty, and of the honour of his country,
+did more touch him, as indeed it ought, than the private respect
+of one man; so that the cause being thoroughly heard, and
+all things done in good order as near as might be to the
+course of our law in England, it was concluded that Mr.
+Doughtie should receive punishment according to the
+quality of the offence. And he, seeing no remedy but
+patience for himself, desired before his death to receive the
+communion, which he did at the hands of Mr. Fletcher, our
+minister, and our General himself accompanied him in that
+holy action, which, being done, and the place of execution
+made ready, he, having embraced our General, and taken
+leave of all the company, with prayers for the Queen's
+Majesty and our realm, in quiet sort laid his head to the
+block, where he ended his life. This being done, our
+General made divers speeches to the whole company,
+persuading us to unity, obedience, love, and regard of our
+voyage, and for the better confirmation thereof, willed every
+man the next Sunday following to prepare himself to receive
+the communion, as Christian brethren and friends ought to
+do, which was done in very reverent sort, and so with good
+contentment every man went about his business."
+
+The simple majesty of this anecdote can gain nothing
+from any comment which we might offer upon it. The
+crew of a common English ship organizing, of their own
+free motion, on that wild shore, a judgment hall more
+grand and awful than any most elaborate law court,
+with its ermine and black cap, and robes of ceremony
+for mind as well as body, is not to be reconciled with
+the pirate theory, which we may as well henceforth put
+away from us.
+
+Of such stuff were the early English navigators; we
+are reaping the magnificent harvest of their great
+heroism; and we may see once more in their history
+and in what has arisen out of it, that on these deep
+moral foundations, and on none others, enduring
+prosperities, of what kind so-ever, politic or religious,
+material or spiritual, are alone in this divinely-governed
+world permitted to base themselves and grow. Whereever
+we find them they are still the same. In the courts
+of Japan or of China, fighting Spaniards in the Pacific,
+or prisoners among the Algerines, founding colonies
+which by and by were to grow into enormous transatlantic
+republics, or exploring in crazy pinnaces the
+fierce latitudes of the Polar seas, they are the same
+indomitable God-fearing men whose life was one great
+liturgy. "The ice was strong, but God was stronger,"
+says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and
+a day among the icebergs, not waiting for God to come
+down and split them, but toiling through the long hours,
+himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles
+and planks, with death glaring at them out of the ice
+rocks, and so saving themselves and it. Icebergs were
+strong, Spaniards were strong, and storms, and corsairs,
+and rocks, and reefs, which no chart had then noted--
+they were all strong, but God was stronger, and that was
+all which they cared to know.
+
+Out of the vast number it is difficult to make wise
+selections, but the attention floats loosely over
+generalities, and only individual men can seize it and hold
+it fast. We shall attempt to bring our readers face to
+face with some of these men; not, of course, to write
+their biographies, but to sketch the details of a few
+scenes, in the hope that they may tempt those under
+whose eyes they may fall to look for themselves to
+complete the perfect figure.
+
+Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once
+among the most important harbours in England, on a
+projecting angle of land which runs out into the river
+at the head of one of its most beautiful reaches, there
+has stood for some centuries the Manor House of
+Greenaway. The water runs deep all the way to it from
+the sea, and the largest vessels may ride with safety
+within a stone's throw of the windows. In the latter
+half of the sixteenth century there must have met, in
+the hall of this mansion, a party as remarkable as could
+have been found anywhere in England. Humfrey and
+Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter Raleigh,
+here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of
+Long Stream; in the summer evenings doubtless rowing
+down with the tide to the port, and wondering at the
+quaint figure-heads and carved prows of the ships which
+thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening, with
+hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth
+beyond the sunset; and here in later life, matured men,
+whose boyish dreams had become heroic action, they
+used again to meet in the intervals of quiet, and the
+rock is shown underneath the house where Raleigh
+smoked the first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of
+whom we shall presently speak more closely, could not
+fail to have made a fourth at these meetings. A sailor
+boy of Sandwich, the adjoining parish, John Davis,
+showed early a genius which could not have escaped
+the eye of such neighbours, and in the atmosphere of
+Greenaway he learned to be as noble as the Gilberts,
+and as tender and delicate as Raleigh. Of this party,
+for the present we confine ourselves to the host and
+owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted afterwards by Elizabeth.
+Led by the scenes of his childhood to the sea
+and to sea adventures, and afterwards, as his mind
+unfolded, to study his profession scientifically, we find
+him as soon as he was old enough to think for himself,
+or make others listen to him, "amending the great
+errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to
+make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one
+common bigness;" inventing instruments for taking
+observations, studying the form of the earth, and
+convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and
+studying the necessities of his country, and discovering
+the remedies for them in colonization and extended
+markets for home manufactures, and insisting with so
+much loudness on these important matters that they
+reached the all-attentive ears of Walsingham, and
+through Walsingham were conveyed to the Queen.
+Gilbert was examined before the Queen's Majesty and
+the Privy Council, the record of which examination he
+has himself left to us in a paper which he afterwards
+drew up, and strange enough reading it is. The most
+admirable conclusions stand side by side with the
+wildest conjectures; and invaluable practical discoveries,
+among imaginations at which all our love for him cannot
+hinder us from smiling; the whole of it from first to last
+saturated through and through with his inborn nobility
+of nature.
+
+Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove
+that the ocean runs round the three old continents, and
+America therefore is necessarily an island. The gulf
+stream which he had carefully observed, eked out
+by a theory of the primum mobile, is made to demonstrate
+a channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's
+Straits in the south, he believing, in common with
+almost every one of his day, that these straits were
+the only opening into the Pacific, the land to the
+south being unbroken to the Pole. He prophecies a
+market in the East for our manufactured linen and
+calicoes:--
+
+"The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth
+in Hester where the pomp is expressed of the great
+King of India, Ahasuerus, who matched the coloured
+clothes wherewith his houses and tents were apparelled,
+with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure."
+
+These and other such arguments were the best
+analysis which Sir Humfrey had to offer of the spirit
+which he felt to be working in him. We may think
+what we please of them. But we can have but one
+thought of the great grand words with which the
+memorial concludes, and they alone would explain the
+love which Elizabeth bore him:--
+
+"Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any
+laudable and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure
+or idleness we purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth,
+but the shame abideth for ever.
+
+"Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to
+live and die in this mind: that he is not worthy to live
+at all that, for fear or danger of death, shunneth his
+country's service and his own honour, seeing that death
+is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal, wherefore
+in this behalf routare vel lintere sperno."
+
+Two voyages which he undertook at his own cost,
+which shattered his fortune, and failed, as they naturally
+might, since inefficient help or mutiny of subordinates,
+or other disorders, are inevitable conditions under which
+more or less great men must be content to see their great
+thoughts mutilated by the feebleness of their instruments,
+did not dishearten him, and in June, 1583, a last
+fleet of five ships sailed from the port of Dartmouth,
+with commission from the Queen to discover and take
+possession from latitude 45^0 to 50^0 north--a voyage not
+a little noteworthy, there being planted in the course of
+it the first English colony west of the Atlantic. Elizabeth
+had a foreboding that she would never see him again.
+She sent him a jewel as a last token of her favour, and
+she desired Raleigh to have his picture taken before he
+went.
+
+The history of the voyage was written by a Mr.
+Edward Hayes, of Dartmouth, one of the principal
+actors in it, and as a composition it is more remarkable
+for fine writing than any very commendable thought in
+the author. But Sir Humfrey's nature shines through the
+infirmity of his chronicler; and in the end, indeed, Mr.
+Hayes himself is subdued into a better mind. He had
+lost money by the voyage, and we will hope his higher
+nature was only under a temporary eclipse. The fleet
+consisted (it is well to observe the ships and the size of
+them) of the Delight, 120 tons; the barque Raleigh, 200
+tons (this ship deserted off the Land's End); the Golden
+Hinde and the Swallow, 40 tons each; and the Squirrel,
+which was called the frigate, 10 tons. For the uninitiated
+in such matters, we may add, that if in a vessel
+the size of the last, a member of the Yacht Club would
+consider that he had earned a dub-room immortality if
+he had ventured a run in the depth of summer from
+Cowes to the Channel Islands.
+
+"We were in all," says Mr. Hayes, "260 men, among
+whom we had of every faculty good choice. Besides,
+for solace of our own people, and allurement of the savages,
+we were provided of music in good variety, not omitting
+the least toys, as morris dancers, hobby horses, and
+May-like conceits to delight the savage people."
+
+The expedition reached Newfoundland without accident.
+St. John's was taken possession of, and a colony
+left there, and Sir Humfrey then set out exploring along
+the American coast to the south; he himself doing all
+the work in his little 10-ton cutter, the service being too
+dangerous for the larger vessels to venture on. One of
+these had remained at St. John's. He was now accompanied
+only by the Delight and the Golden Hinde, and
+these two keeping as near the shore as they dared, he
+spent what remained of the summer, examining every
+creek and bay, marking the soundings, taking the bearings
+of the possible harbours, and risking his life, as
+every hour he was obliged to risk it in such a service, in
+thus leading, as it were, the forlorn hope in the conquest
+of the New World. How dangerous it was we shall
+presently see. It was towards the end of August.
+
+"The evening was fair and pleasant, yet not without
+token of storm to ensue, and most part of this Wednesday
+night, like the swan that singeth before her death, they in
+the Delight continued in sounding of drums and trumpets
+and fifes, also winding the cornets and haughtboys, and
+in the end of their jollity left with the battell and ringing
+of doleful knells."
+
+Two days after came the storm; the Delight struck
+upon a bank, and went down in sight of the other vessels,
+which were unable to render her any help. Sir Humfrey's
+papers, among other things, were all lost in her; at the
+time considered by him an irreparable misfortune. But
+it was little matter; he was never to need them. The
+Golden Hinde and the Squirrel were now left alone of the
+five ships. The provisions were running short, and the
+summer season was closing. Both crews were on short
+allowance; and with much difficulty Sir Humfrey was
+prevailed upon to be satisfied for the present with what
+he had done, and to lay off for England.
+
+"So upon Saturday, in the afternoon, the 31st of
+August, we changed our course, and returned back for
+England, at which very instant, even in winding about,
+there passed along between us and the land, which we
+now forsook, a very lion, to our seeming, in shape, hair,
+and colour; not swimming after the manner of a beast
+by moving of his feet, but rather sliding upon the water
+with his whole body, except his legs, in sight, neither yet
+diving under and again rising as the manner is of whales,
+porpoises, and other fish, but confidently showing himself
+without hiding, notwithstanding that we presented
+ourselves in open view and gesture to amaze him. Thus
+he passed along, turning his head to and fro, yawning
+and gaping wide, with ougly demonstration of long teeth
+and glaring eyes; and to bidde us farewell, coming fight
+against the Hinde, he sent forth a horrible voice, roaring
+and bellowing as doth a lion, which spectacle we all beheld
+so far as we were able to discern the same, as men prone
+to wonder at every strange thing. What opinion others
+had thereof, and chiefly the General himself, I forbear to
+deliver. But he took it for Bonum Omen, rejoicing that he
+was to war against such an enemy if it were the devil."
+
+We have no doubt that he did think it was the devil;
+men in those days believing really that evil was more
+than a principle or a necessary accident, and that in all
+their labour for God and for right, they must make their
+account to have to fight with the devil in his proper person.
+But if we are to call it superstition, and if this were
+no devil in the form of a roaring lion, but a mere great
+seal or sea-lion, it is a more innocent superstition to
+impersonate so real a power, and it requires a bolder
+heart to rise up against it and defy it in its living terror,
+than to sublimate it away into a philosophical principle,
+and to forget to battle with it in speculating on its origin
+and nature. But to follow the brave Sir Humfrey,
+whose work of fighting with the devil was now over, and
+who was passing to his reward. The 2nd of September
+the General came on board the Golden Hinde "to make
+merry with us." He greatly deplored the loss of his
+books and papers; and Mr. Hayes considered that the
+loss of manuscripts could not be so very distressing,
+and that there must have been something behind, certain
+gold ore, for instance, which had perished also--
+considerations not perhaps of particular value. He was
+full of confidence from what he had seen, and talked
+with all eagerness and warmth of the new expedition
+for the following spring. Apocryphal gold-mines still
+occupying the minds of Mr. Hayes and others, who were
+persuaded that Sir Humfrey was keeping to himself some
+such discovery which he had secretly made, and they
+tried hard to extract it from him. They could make
+nothing, however, of his odd ironical answers, and their
+sorrow at the catastrophe which followed is sadly blended
+with disappointment that such a secret should have
+perished. Sir Humfrey doubtless saw America with
+other eyes than theirs, and gold-mines richer than
+California in its huge rivers and savannahs.
+
+"Leaving the issue of this good hope (about the gold),"
+continues Mr. Hayes, "to God, who only knoweth the truth
+thereof, I will hasten to the end of this tragedy, which must
+be knit up in the person of our General, and as it was God's
+ordinance upon him, even so the vehement persuasion of
+his friends could nothing avail to divert him from his wilful
+resolution of going in his frigate; and when he was
+entreated by the captain, master, and others, his well-wishers
+in the Hinde, not to venture, this was his answer--'I will
+not forsake my little company going homewards, with whom
+I have passed so many storms and perils.'"
+
+Albeit, thinks the writer, who is unable to comprehend
+such high gallantry, there must have been something on
+his mind of what the world would say of him, "and it
+was rather rashness than advised resolution to prefer
+the wind of a vain report to the weight of his own life,"
+for the writing of which sentence we will trust the
+author, either in this world or the other, has before this
+done due penance and repented of it.
+
+Two-thirds of the way home they met foul weather
+and terrible seas, "breaking short and pyramid-wise."
+Men who had all their lives "occupied the sea" had
+never seen it more outrageous. "We had also upon
+our mainyard an apparition of a little fire by night,
+which seamen do call Castor and Pollux."
+
+"Monday, the ninth of September, in the afternoon, the
+frigate was near cast away oppressed by waves, but at that
+time recovered, and giving forth signs of joy, the General,
+sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried unto us in the
+Hinde so often as we did approach within hearing, 'We
+are as near to heaven by sea as by land,' reiterating the
+same speech, well beseeming a soldier resolute in Jesus
+Christ, as I can testify that he was. The same Monday
+night, about twelve of the clock, or not long after, the frigate
+being a-head of us in the Golden Hinde, suddenly her lights
+were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost the sight;
+and withal our watch cried, 'The General was cast away,'
+which was too true."
+
+So stirbt ein Held. It was a fine end for a mortal
+man. We will not call it sad or tragic, but heroic and
+sublime; and if our eyes water as we write it down,
+it is not with sorrow, but with joy and pride.
+
+"Thus faithfully," concludes Mr. Hayes (in some degree
+rising above himself), "I have related this story, wherein
+some spark of the knight's virtues, though he be
+extinguished, may happily appear; he remaining resolute to a
+purpose honest and godly as was this, to discover, possess,
+and reduce unto the service of God and Christian piety,
+those remote and heathen countries of America. Such is
+the infinite bounty of God, who from every evil deriveth good,
+that fruit may grow in time of our travelling in these
+North-Western lands (as has it not grown?), and the crosses,
+turmoils, and afflictions, both in the preparation and
+execution of the voyage, did correct the intemperate humours
+which before we noted to be in this gentleman, and made
+unsavoury and less delightful his other manifold virtues.
+
+"Thus as he was refined and made nearer unto the image
+of God, so it pleased the Divine will to resume him unto
+Himself, whither both his and every other high and noble
+mind have always aspired."
+
+Such was Sir Humfrey Gilbert; we know but little
+more of him, and we can only conjecture that he
+was still in the prime of his years when the Atlantic
+swallowed him. Like the gleam of a landscape lit
+suddenly for a moment by the lightning, these few
+scenes flash down to us across the centuries; but what
+a life must that have been of which this was the
+conclusion! He was one of a race which have ceased to
+be. We look round for them, and we can hardly
+believe that the same blood is flowing in our veins.
+Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps as they,
+but the high moral grace which made bravery and
+strength so beautiful is departed from us for ever.
+
+Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait
+painting; but we must find room for another of that
+Greenaway party whose nature was as fine as that of
+Gilbert, and who intellectually was more largely gifted.
+The latter was drowned in 1583. In 1585 John Davis
+left Dartmouth on his first voyage into the Polar seas;
+and twice subsequently he went again, venturing in
+small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the
+most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable
+for their success as for the daring with which they
+were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph is written on the
+map of the world, where his name still remains to
+commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is
+distinguished by a peculiar and exquisite sweetness of
+nature, which, from many little facts of his life, seems to
+have affected every one with whom he came in contact
+in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of
+Master Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him,
+without other hope or motion; and silver bullets were
+cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard rude natures of
+the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage
+which was not like that of a common man. He has
+written the account of one of his northern voyages
+himself; one of those, by the by, which the Hakluyt
+Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative
+beauty in it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is
+a true natural poetry, called out in him by the first sight
+of strange lands and things and people.
+
+To show what he was, we should have preferred, if
+possible, to have taken the story of his expedition into
+the South Seas, in which, under circumstances of singular
+difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under whom
+he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials, from famine,
+mutiny, and storm, ultimately saved himself and his
+ship, and such of the crew as had chosen to submit to
+his orders. But it is a long history, and will not admit
+of being mutilated. As an instance of the stuff of which
+it was composed, he ran back in the black night in a
+gale of wind through the Straits of Magellan, by a chart
+which he had made with the eye in passing up. His
+anchors were lost or broken; the cables were parted.
+He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for
+it but to run, and he carried her safe through along
+a channel often not three miles broad, sixty miles
+from end, and twisting like the reaches of a river.
+For the present, however, we are forced to content
+ourselves with a few sketches out of the north-west
+voyages. Here is one, for instance, which shows how
+an Englishman could deal with the Indians. Davis had
+landed at Gilbert's Sound, and gone up the country
+exploring. On his return, he found his crew loud in
+complaints of the thievish propensities of the natives,
+and urgent to have an example made of some of them.
+On the next occasion he fired a gun at them with blank
+cartridge; but their nature was still too strong for them.
+
+"Seeing iron," he says, "they could in no case forbear
+stealing; which, when I perceived, it did but minister
+to me occasion of laughter to see their simplicity, and I
+willed that they should not be hardly used, but that our
+company should be more diligent to keep their things,
+supposing it to be very hard in so short a time to make
+them know their evils."
+
+In his own way, however, he took an opportunity of
+administering a lesson to them of a more wholesome
+kind than could be given with gunpowder and bullets
+Like the rest of his countrymen, he believed the savage
+Indians in their idolatries to be worshippers of the devil.
+"They are witches," he says; "they have images in
+great store, and use many kinds of enchantments."
+And these enchantments they tried on one occasion to
+put in force against himself and his crew.
+
+"Being on shore on the 4th day of July, one of them
+made a long oration, and then kindled a fire, into which
+with many strange words and gestures he put divers things,
+which we supposed to be a sacrifice. Myself and certain
+of my company standing by, they desired us to go into
+the smoke. I desired them to go into the smoke, which
+they would by no means do. I then took one of them
+and thrust him into the smoke, and willed one of my
+company to tread out the fire, and spurn it into the sea,
+which was done to show them that we did contemn their
+sorceries."
+
+It is a very English story--exactly what a modern
+Englishman would do; only, perhaps, not believing that
+there was any real devil in the case, which makes a
+difference. However, real or not real, after seeing him
+patiently put up with such an injury, we will hope the
+poor Greenlander had less respect for the devil than
+formerly.
+
+Leaving Gilbert's Sound, Davis went on to the north-west,
+and in lat. 63^0 fell in with a barrier of ice, which
+he coasted for thirteen days without finding an opening.
+The very sight of an iceberg was new to all his crew;
+and the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer,
+becoming compassed with ice,--
+
+"The people began to fall sick and faint-hearted--
+whereupon, very orderly, with good discretion, they
+entreated me to regard the safety of mine own life, as well
+as the preservation of theirs; and that I should not,
+through overbouldness, leave their widows and fatherless
+children to give me bitter curses.
+
+"Whereupon, seeking counsel of God, it pleased His
+Divine Majesty to move my heart to prosecute that which
+I hope shall be to His glory, and to the contentation of
+every Christian mind."
+
+He had two vessels, one of some burthen, the other a
+pinnace of thirty tons. The result of the counsel which
+he had sought was, that he made over his own large
+vessel to such as wished to return, and himself "thinking
+it better to die with honour than to return with
+infamy," went on, with such volunteers as would follow
+him, in a poor leaky cutter, up the sea now called
+Davis's Straits, in commemoration of that adventure,
+4^0 north of the furthest known point, among storms and
+icebergs, by which the long days and twilight nights
+alone saved him from being destroyed, and, coasting
+back along the American shore, discovered Hudson's
+Straits, supposed then to be the long-desired entrance
+into the Pacific. This exploit drew the attention of
+Walsingham, and by him Davis was presented to
+Burleigh, "who was also pleased to show him great
+encouragement." If either these statesmen or Elizabeth
+had been twenty years younger, his name would have
+filled a larger space in history than a small corner of the
+map of the world; but if he was employed at all in the
+last years of the century, no vales sacer has been found
+to celebrate his work, and no clue is left to guide us.
+He disappears; a cloud falls over him. He is known
+to have commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas,
+and to have returned five times from India. But the
+details are all lost, and accident has only parted the
+clouds for a moment to show us the mournful setting
+with which he, too, went down upon the sea.
+
+In taking out Sir Edward Michellthorne to India, in
+1604, he fell in with a crew of Japanese, whose ship
+had been burnt, drifting at sea, without provisions, in
+a leaky junk. He supposed them to be pirates, but he
+did not choose to leave them to so wretched a death,
+and took them on board, and in a few hours, watching
+their opportunity, they murdered him.
+
+As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no
+difference; it was the chance of the sea, and the ill
+reward of a humane action--a melancholy end for such
+a man--like the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like
+on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor
+brawl or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men.
+They were cut off in the flower of their days, and few
+indeed of them laid their bones in the sepulchres of their
+fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen,
+and they did not ask the wages for which they had not
+laboured. Life with them was no summer holyday, but
+a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what their
+Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age--beautiful
+as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious
+summer. In the old man, nature has fulfilled her work;
+she loads him with her blessings; she fills him with
+the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+children and his children's children, she rocks him
+softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with
+blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful.
+It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is
+another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
+bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the
+cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows,
+this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish,
+before the victory is won; and--strange that it should
+be so--this is the highest life of man. Look back
+along the great names of history; there is none whose
+life has been other than this. They to whom it has
+been given to do the really highest work in this earth--
+whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian,
+warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings,
+slaves--one and all, their fate has been the same--the
+same bitter cup has been given to them to drink; and
+so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth
+century. Their life was a long battle, either with the
+elements or with men, and it was enough for them to
+fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when
+God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not
+complain, and why should we complain for them?
+Peaceful life was not what they desired, and an
+honourable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was
+the old Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the
+Theban poet lived again in them:--
+
+thanein d' oisin anagka
+ti ke tis ananumon geras en skoto
+kathemenos epsoi matan, apanton
+kalon ammoros
+
+"Seeing" in Gilbert's own brave words, "that death
+is inevitable, and the fame of virtue is immortal;
+wherefore in this behalf mutare vel timere sperno."
+
+In the conclusion of these light sketches we pass
+into an element different from that in which we have
+been lately dwelling. The scenes in which Gilbert and
+Davis played out their high natures were of the kind
+which we call peaceful, and the enemies with which
+they contended were principally the ice and the wind,
+and the stormy seas and the dangers of unknown and
+savage lands; we shall close amidst the roar of cannon,
+and the wrath and rage of battle. Hume, who alludes
+to the engagement which we are going to describe,
+speaks of it in a tone which shows that he looked at it
+as something portentous and prodigious; as a thing to
+wonder at--but scarcely as deserving the admiration
+which we pay to actions properly within the scope of
+humanity--and as if the energy which was displayed in
+it was like the unnatural strength of madness. He
+does not say this, but he appears to feel it; and he
+scarcely would have felt it, if he had cared more deeply
+to saturate himself with the temper of the age of which
+he was writing. At the time all England and all the
+world rang with the story. It struck a deeper terror,
+though it was but the action of a single ship, into the
+hearts of the Spanish people--it dealt a more deadly
+blow upon their fame and moral strength, than the
+destruction of the Armada itself; and in the direct
+results which arose from it, it was scarcely less
+disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems to us, if the most
+glorious actions which are set like jewels in the history
+of mankind are weighed one against the other in the
+balance, hardly will those 300 Spartans who in the
+summer morning sate "combing their long hair--for
+death" in the passes of Thermopylae, have earned a
+more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew
+of modern Englishmen.
+
+In August, 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six
+English line-of-battle ships, six victuallers, and two or
+three pinnaces, were lying at anchor under the Island
+of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with
+half their men disabled by sickness, they were unable
+to pursue the aggressive purpose on which they had been
+sent out. Several of the ships' crews were on shore:
+the ships themselves "all pestered and rommaging,"
+with everything out of order. In this condition they
+were surprised by a Spanish fleet consisting of 53
+men-of-war. Eleven out of the twelve English ships obeyed
+the signal of the Admiral, to cut or weigh their anchors
+and escape as they might. The twelfth, the Revenge,
+was unable for the moment to follow; of her crew of
+190, 90 being sick on shore, and, from the position
+of the ship, there was some delay and difficulty in
+getting them on board. The Revenge was commanded
+by Sir Richard Grenville, of Bideford, a man well
+known in the Spanish seas, and the terror of the Spanish
+sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic
+stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl
+Talbot or Coeur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores
+frightened children with the sound of his name. "He
+was of great revenues," they said, "of his own inheritance,
+but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to
+wars," and from his uncontrollable propensities for
+blood-eating, he had volunteered his services to the
+Queen; "of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John
+Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here,
+and who was with the Spanish fleet after the action)
+have been told by divers credible persons who stood
+and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four
+glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth
+and crush them in pieces and swallow them down."
+Such he was to the Spaniard. To the English he was a
+goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned his
+back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that
+remarkable time for his constancy and daring. In this
+surprise at Florez he was in no haste to fly. He first
+saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the
+ballast, and then, with no more than 100 men left him
+to fight and work the ship, he deliberately weighed,
+uncertain, as it seemed at first, what he intended to do.
+The Spanish fleet were by this time on his weather bow,
+and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's
+beautiful narrative and follow it in his words) "to cut
+his mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of
+the ship."
+
+"But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from the enemy,
+alledging that he would rather choose to die than to
+dishonour himself, his country, and her Majesty's ship,
+persuading his company that he would pass through their two
+squadrons in spite of them, and enforce those of Seville to
+give him way, which he performed upon diverse of the foremost,
+who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and fell
+under the lee of the Revenge. But the other course had
+been the better: and might right well have been answered in
+so great an impossibility of prevailing: notwithstanding, out
+of the greatness of his mind, he could not be persuaded."
+
+The wind was light; the San Philip, "a huge highcarged
+ship" of 1500 tons, came up to windward of
+him, and, taking the wind out of his sails, ran aboard
+him.
+
+"After the Revenge was entangled with the San Philip,
+four others boarded her, two on her larboard and two on
+her starboard. The fight thus beginning at three o'clock in
+the afternoon continued very terrible all that evening. But
+the great San Philip, having received the lower tier of the
+Revenge, shifted herself with all diligence from her sides,
+utterly misliking her first entertainment. The Spanish ships
+were filled with soldiers, in some 200, besides the mariners,
+in some 500, in others 800. In ours there were none at all,
+besides the mariners, but the servants of the commander
+and some few voluntary gentlemen only. After many interchanged
+vollies of great ordnance and small shot, the
+Spaniards deliberated to enter the Revenge, and made
+divers attempts, hoping to force her by the multitude of
+their armed soldiers and musketeers; but were still repulsed
+again and again, and at all times beaten back into their own
+ship or into the sea. In the beginning of the fight the
+George Noble, of London, having received some shot through
+her by the Armadas, fell under the lee of the Revenge, and
+asked Sir Richard what he would command him; but being
+one of the victuallers, and of small force, Sir Richard bade
+him save himself and leave him to his fortune."
+
+A little touch of gallantry, which we should be
+glad to remember with the honour due to the brave
+English heart who commanded the George Noble; but
+his name has passed away, and his action is an in
+memoriam, on which time has effaced the writing.
+All that August night the fight continued, the stars
+rolling over in their sad majesty, but unseen through the
+sulphur clouds which hung over the scene. Ship
+after ship of the Spaniards came on upon the Revenge,
+"so that never less than two mighty galleons were at
+her side and aboard her," washing up like waves upon a
+rock, and failing foiled and shattered back amidst the
+roar of the artillery. Before morning fifteen several
+armadas had assailed her, and all in vain; some had
+been sunk at her side; and the rest, "so ill approving
+of their entertainment, that at break of day they
+were far more willing to hearken to a composition, than
+hastily to make more assaults or entries." "But as the
+day increased so our men decreased, and as the light
+grew more and more, by so much the more grew our
+discomfort, for none appeared in sight but enemies,
+save one small ship called the Pilgrim, commanded
+by Jacob Whiddon, who hovered all night to see the
+success, but in the morning bearing with the Revenge
+was hunted like a hare among many ravenous hounds--
+but escaped."
+
+All the powder in the Revenge was now spent, all
+her pikes were broken, 40 out of her 100 men killed,
+and a great number of the rest wounded. Sir Richard,
+though badly hurt early in the battle, never forsook
+the deck till an hour before midnight; and was then
+shot through the body while his wounds were being
+dressed, and again in the head; and his surgeon was
+killed while attending on him. The masts were lying
+over the side, the rigging cut or broken, the upper
+works all shot in pieces, and the ship herself, unable to
+move, was settling slowly in the sea; the vast fleet of
+Spaniards lying round her in a ring like dogs round a
+dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last
+agony. Sir Richard seeing that it was past hope,
+having fought for fifteen hours, and "having by
+estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery through
+him," "commanded the master gunner, whom he knew
+to be a most resolute man, to split and sink the ship,
+that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory
+to the Spaniards; seeing in so many hours they were
+not able to take her, having had above fifteen hours
+time, above ten thousand men, and fifty-three men-of-war
+to perform it withal; and persuaded the company,
+or as many as he could induce, to yield themselves
+unto God and to the mercy of none else; but as they
+had, like valiant resolute men, repulsed so many
+enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of
+their nation by prolonging their own lives for a few
+hours or a few days."
+
+The gunner and a few others consented. But such
+daimonie arete was more than could be expected of
+ordinary seamen. They had dared do all which did
+become men, and they were not more than men, at
+least than men were then. Two Spanish ships had
+gone down, above 1500 men were killed, and the
+Spanish Admiral could not induce any one of the
+rest of his fleet to board the Revenge again,
+"doubting lest Sir Richard would have blown up himself
+and them knowing his dangerous disposition." Sir Richard
+lying disabled below, the captain finding the Spaniards
+as ready to entertain a composition as they could be
+to offer it, gained over the majority of the surviving
+crew; and the remainder then drawing back from
+the master gunner, they all, without further consulting
+their dying commander, surrendered on honourable
+terms. If unequal to the English in action, the
+Spaniards were at least as courteous in victory. It is
+due to them to say, that the conditions were faithfully
+observed. And "the ship being marvellous unsavourie,"
+Alonzo de Bacon, the Spanish Admiral, sent his boat
+to bring Sir Richard on board his own vessel.
+
+Sir Richard, whose life was fast ebbing away, replied,
+that "he might do with his body what he list, for that
+he esteemed it not; and as he was carried out of the
+ship he swooned, and reviving again, desired the company
+to pray for him."
+
+The Admiral used him with all humanity, "commending
+his valour and worthiness, being unto them a
+rare spectacle and a resolution seldom approved." The
+officers of the rest of the fleet, too, John Higgins tells
+us, crowded round to look at him, and a new fight
+had almost broken out between the Biscayans and the
+"Portugals," each claiming the honour of having boarded
+the Revenge.
+
+"In a few hours Sir Richard, feeling his end approaching,
+showed not any sign of faintness, but spake these words
+in Spanish, and said, 'Here die I, Richard Grenville, with
+a joyful and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life
+as a true soldier ought to do that hath fought for his
+country, queen, religion, and honour. Whereby my soul
+most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always
+leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true
+soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.'
+When he had finished these or other such like words,
+he gave up the ghost with great and stout courage, and
+no man could perceive any sign of heaviness in him."
+
+Such was the fight at Florez, in that August of 1591,
+without its equal in such of the annals of mankind as
+the thing which we call history has preserved to us;
+scarcely equalled by the most glorious fate which the
+imagination of Barrere could invent for the Vengeur;
+nor did it end without a sequel awful as itself.
+Sea battles have been often followed by storms, and
+without a miracle; but with a miracle, as the Spaniards
+and the English alike believed, or without one, as we
+moderns would prefer believing, "there ensued on this
+action a tempest so terrible as was never seen or heard
+the like before." A fleet of merchantmen joined the
+armada immediately after the battle, forming in all 140
+sail; and of these 140, only 32 ever saw Spanish harbour.
+The rest all foundered, or were lost on the Azores.
+The men-of-war had been so shattered by shot as to be
+unable to carry sail, and the Revenge herself, disdaining
+to survive her commander, or as if to complete his own
+last baffled purpose, like Samson, buried herself and
+her 200 prize crew under the rocks of St. Michael's.
+
+"And it my well be thought and presumed," says John
+Huyghen, "that it was no other than a just plague purposely
+sent upon the Spaniards; and that it might be truly said,
+the taking of the Revenge was justly revenged on them;
+and not by the might of force of man, but by the power
+of God. As some of them openly said in the Isle of
+Terceira, that they believed verily God would consume
+them, and that he took part with the Lutherans and heretics
+... saying further, that so soon as they had thrown
+the dead body of the Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Grenville
+overboard, they verily thought that as he had a devilish
+faith and religion, and therefore the devil loved him, so
+he presently sunk into the bottom of the sea and down
+into hell, where he raised up all the devils to the revenge
+of his death, and that they brought so great a storm and
+torments upon the Spaniards, because they only maintained
+the Catholic and Romish religion. Such and the like
+blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to utter."
+____
+
+
+THE BOOK OF JOB
+
+The question will one day be asked, how it has been
+that, in spite of the high pretensions of us English to a
+superior reverence for the Bible, we have done so little
+in comparison with our continental contemporaries
+towards arriving at a proper understanding of it? The
+books named below * form but a section of a long list
+which has appeared in the last few years on the Book of
+Job alone; and this book has not received any larger
+share of attention than the others, either of the Old or
+the New Testament. Whatever be the nature or the
+origin of these books, (and on this point there is much
+difference of opinion among the Germans as among
+ourselves,) they are all agreed, orthodox and unorthodox,
+that at least we should endeavour to understand them;
+and that no efforts can be too great, either of research
+or criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their
+meaning.
+____
+* I. Die poetischen Bucher des Alten Bundes. Erklart von
+Heinrich Ewald. Gottingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht.
+1836.
+2. Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuck zum Alten Testament.
+Zweite Lieferund. Hiob Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage,
+durchgesehen von Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.
+3. Quaestionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen. Von D.
+Hermannus Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.
+____
+
+We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily
+and indignantly, to so obvious a truism; but our own
+efforts in the same direction will not bear us out. The
+able men in England employ themselves in matters of a
+more practical character; and while we refuse to avail
+ourselves of what has been done elsewhere, no book,
+or books, which we produce on the interpretation of
+Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral
+reputation. The most important contribution to our
+knowledge on this subject which has been made in
+these recent years, is the translation of the "Library
+of the Fathers," by which it is about as rational to
+suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times
+can be superseded, as that the place of Herman and
+Dindoff could be supplied by an edition of the old
+scholiasts.
+
+It is, indeed, reasonable that, as long as we are
+persuaded that our English theory of the Bible, as a whole,
+is the right one, we should shrink from contact with
+investigations, which, however ingenious in themselves,
+are based on what we know to be a false foundation.
+But there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy
+would pass examination at Exeter Hail; and there are
+many subjects, such, for instance, as the present, on
+which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that
+cannot rationally give offence to any one. For the
+Book of Job, analytical criticism has only served to clear
+up the uncertainties which have hitherto always hung
+about it. It is now considered to be, beyond all doubt,
+a genuine Hebrew-original, completed by its writer
+almost in the form in which it now remains to us. The
+questions on the authenticity of the Prologue and
+Epilogue, which once were thought important, have given
+way before a more sound conception of the dramatic
+unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us
+contain merely an inquiry into its meaning, bringing, at
+the same time, all the resources of modern scholarship
+and historical and mythological research to bear upon
+the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult
+of all the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring
+in it, and many thoughts, not to be found elsewhere in
+the Bible. How difficult our translators found it may be
+seen by the number of words which they were obliged
+to insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which
+they have suggested in the margin. One instance of
+this, in passing, we will notice in this place--it will be
+familiar to everyone as the passage quoted at the opening
+of the English burial service, and adduced as one of
+the doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body: "I
+know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand
+at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my
+skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see
+God." So this passage stands in the ordinary version.
+But the words in italics have nothing answering to
+them in the original--they were all added by the
+translators to fill out their interpretation; and for in
+my flesh, they tell us themselves in the margin that we
+may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)
+"out of," or "without" my flesh. It is but to write
+out the verses omitting the conjectural additions, and
+making that one small, but vital correction, to see how
+frail a support is there for so large a conclusion; "I
+know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the
+latter... upon the earth; and after my skin...
+destroy this...; yet without my flesh I shall see
+God." If there is any doctrine of a resurrection here,
+it is a resurrection precisely not of the body, but of the
+spirit. And now let us only add that the word translated
+Redeemer is the technical expression for the
+"avenger of blood"; and that the second paragraph
+ought to be rendered--"and one to come after me (my
+next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)
+shall stand upon my dust," and we shall see how much
+was to be done towards the mere exegesis of the text.
+This is an extreme instance, and no one will question
+the general beauty and majesty of our translation; but
+there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered
+over the poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there
+were positively no means of understanding; and perhaps,
+too, there were mental tendencies in the translators
+themselves which prevented them from adequately
+apprehending even the drift and spirit of it. The form
+of the story was too stringent to allow such tendencies
+any latitude; but they appear, from time to time,
+sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these
+recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something
+of the nature of this extraordinary book--a
+book of which it is to say little to call it unequalled
+of its kind, and which will, one day, perhaps, when it
+is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering
+up alone, far away above all the poetry of the
+world. How it found its way into the Canon, smiting as
+it does through and through the most deeply-seated
+Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now;
+to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among
+the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the
+national greatness, when the minds of the people were
+hewn in a larger type than was to be found among
+the pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship,
+its date, and its history, are alike a mystery to
+us; it existed at the time when the Canon was composed;
+and this is all that we know beyond what we
+can gather out of the language and the contents of the
+poem itself.
+
+Before going further, however, we must make room
+for a few remarks of a very general kind. Let it have
+been written when it would, it marks a period in which
+the religious convictions of thinking men were passing
+through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it
+without having before us clearly something of the
+conditions which periods of such a kind always and
+necessarily exhibit.
+
+The history of religious speculation appears in extreme
+outline to have been of the following kind. We
+may conceive mankind to have been originally launched
+into the universe with no knowledge either of themselves
+or of the scene in which they were placed; with
+no actual knowledge, but distinguished from the rest
+of the creation by a faculty of gaining knowledge;
+and first unconsciously, and afterwards consciously and
+laboriously, to have commenced that long series of
+experience and observation which has accumulated in
+thousands of years to what we now see around us.
+Limited on all sides by conditions which they must
+have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding
+everywhere forces working, over which they had no
+control, the fear which they would naturally entertain
+of these invisible and mighty agents, assumed, under
+the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call
+inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous
+character of reverence and awe. The laws of the outer
+world, as they discovered them, they regarded as the
+decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal beings;
+and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked
+upon it not as knowledge of nature, but of God, or the
+gods. All early paganism appears, on careful examination,
+to have arisen out of a consecration of the first
+rudiments of physical or speculative science. The
+twelve labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun,
+of which Hercules is an old name, through the twelve
+signs. Chronos, or time, being measured by the apparent
+motion of the heavens, is figured as their child;
+Time, the universal parent, devours its own offspring,
+yet is again itself in the high faith of a human soul,
+conscious of its power and its endurance, supposed to
+be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or life; and so on
+through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and
+Egypt. They are no more than real insight into real
+phenomena, allegorized as time went on, elaborated by
+fancy, or idealized by imagination, but never losing
+their original character.
+
+Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive,
+self-developing, and, as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant;
+a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon as a new
+scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society;
+and the various nations found no difficulty in interchanging
+their divinities--a new god either representing
+a new power not hitherto discovered, or one with which
+they were already familiar under a new name. With
+such a power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had
+been nothing more in it than this, such a system might
+have gone on accommodating itself to the change of
+times, and keeping pace with the growth of human
+character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of
+nature was more clearly observed, and the identity of
+it throughout the known world, the separate powers
+were subordinating themselves to a single supreme
+king; and, as the poets had originally personified the
+elemental forces, the thinkers were reversing the earlier
+process, and discovering the law under the person.
+Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do
+for themselves they could not do for the multitude.
+Phoebus and Aphrodite had been made too human to
+be allegorized. Humanized, and yet, we may say,
+only half-humanized, retaining their purely physical
+nature, and without any proper moral attribute at
+all, these gods and goddesses remained, to the many,
+examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon
+as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was
+impossible to worship any more these idealized
+despisers of it. The human caprices and passions
+which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly
+revenged themselves. Paganism became a lie, and
+perished.
+
+In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other
+nations, but the Jews chiefly and principally) had been
+moving forward along a road wholly different. Breaking
+early away from the gods of nature, they advanced along
+the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the
+nations to study physics, philosophy, and art, they
+confined themselves to man and to human life. Their
+theology grew up round the knowledge of good and
+evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the
+world, who stood towards man in the relation of a ruler
+and a judge. Holding such a faith, to them the toleration
+of paganism was an impossibility; the laws of
+nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one;
+there was one law and one king; and the conditions
+under which He governed the world, as embodied in the
+Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as
+iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations
+of the will of an unalterable Being. So far there was
+little in common between this process and the other;
+but it was identical with it in this one important
+feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted
+of degrees; and the successive steps of it were only
+purchaseable by experience. The dispensation of the
+law, in the language of modern theology, was not the
+dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and evil
+disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend
+it. Thus, no system of law or articles of belief were or
+could be complete and exhaustive for all time. Experience
+accumulates; new facts are observed, new forces
+display themselves, and all such formulae must necessarily
+be from period to period broken up and moulded
+afresh. And yet the steps already gained are a treasure
+so sacred, so liable are they at all times to be attacked
+by those lower and baser elements in our nature which
+it is their business to hold in check, that the better pan
+of mankind have at all times practically regarded their
+creed as a sacred total to which nothing may be added,
+and from which nothing may be taken away; the suggestion
+of a new idea is resented as an encroachment,
+punished as an insidious piece of treason, and resisted
+by the combined forces of all common practical understandings,
+which know too well the value of what they
+have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods
+of religious transition, therefore, when the advance has
+been a real one, always have been violent, and probably
+will always continue to be so. They to whom the precious
+gift of fresh light has been given are called upon
+to exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it.
+They, and those who oppose them, have alike a sacred
+cause; and the fearful spectacle arises of earnest,
+vehement men, contending against each other as for their
+own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and
+martyrdoms, and religious wars; and, at last, the old
+faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the
+new rises out of the ashes.
+
+Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of
+religions, natural and moral; the first, indeed, being in
+no proper sense a religion at all, as we understand
+religion; and only assuming the character of it in the
+minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them
+beyond their time and country, and who, feeling the
+necessity of a real creed, with an effort and with
+indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under the
+systems which they found, emotions which had no
+proper place there.
+
+Of the transition periods which we have described
+as taking place under the religion which we call moral,
+the first known to us is marked at its opening by the
+appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision
+of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch
+to cover it.
+
+The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected
+with the moral government of the world is the
+general one, that on the whole, as things are constituted,
+good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are
+miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery,
+and lies very near the surface. As soon as men combine
+in society, they are forced to obey certain laws under
+which alone society is possible, and these laws, even in
+their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To
+a certain extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his
+private inclinations; and those who refuse to do so are
+punished, or are crushed. If society were perfect, the
+imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two
+sets of laws were identical; but perfection so far has
+been only in Utopia, and as far as we can judge by
+experience hitherto, they have approximated most
+nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of
+life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the
+modern distinctions between sins and crimes had no
+existence. All gross sins were offences against society,
+as it then was constituted, and, wherever it was possible,
+were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle
+advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take
+over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes,
+were only possible under the complications of more
+artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man
+by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily
+understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of
+things, it would, on the whole, be true to experience,
+that, judging merely by outward prosperity or the
+reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and
+punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is,
+as the administration of such rewards and punishments
+was left in the power of mankind. But theology could
+not content itself with general tendencies. Theological
+propositions then, as much as now, were held to be
+absolute, universal, admitting of no exceptions, and
+explaining every phenomenon. Superficial generalizations
+were construed into immutable decrees; the God
+of this world was just and righteous, and temporal
+prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by him
+immediately by his own will to his subjects, according
+to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards
+completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too,
+was found generating the same evils; the half truth
+rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only the
+consequence of ill actions which followed through
+themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of nature,
+earthquakes, storms, and pestilences, were the ministers
+of God's justice, and struck sinners only with
+discriminating accuracy. That the sun should shine alike
+on the evil and the good was a creed too high for the
+early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were
+no greater offenders than their neighbours. The
+conceptions of such men could not pass beyond the
+outward temporal consequence; and, if God's hand was not
+there it was nowhere. We might have expected that
+such a theory of things could not long resist the
+accumulated contradictions of experience; but the same
+experience shows also what a marvellous power is in us
+of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our
+cherished convictions; and when such convictions are
+consecrated into a creed which it is a sacred duty to
+believe, experience is but like water dropping upon a
+rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
+thousands of years. This theory was and is the central
+idea of the Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of
+which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Christians
+from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among
+ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and
+in spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose
+name we call ourselves, is still the instant interpreter
+for us of any unusual calamity, a potato blight, a famine,
+or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a moral faith,
+though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience
+of all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity
+itself.
+
+At what period in the world's history misgivings about
+it began to show themselves it is now impossible to
+say; it was at the close, probably, of the patriarchal
+period, when men who really thought must have found
+it palpably shaking under them. Indications of such
+misgivings are to be found in the Psalms, those especially
+passing under the name of Asaph; and all through
+Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of deepest and
+saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside,
+and forces himself back into his old position; and the
+scepticism of Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man
+who had gone wandering after enjoyment; searching
+after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures of
+intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony
+that, by such methods, no pleasures can be found which
+will endure; that he had squandered the power which
+might have been used for better things, and had only
+strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning
+to mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the
+misgivings of a noble nature. The writer's own personal
+happiness had been all for which he had cared; he had
+failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to
+fail, and the lights of heaven had been extinguished
+by the disappointment with which his own spirit was
+clouded.
+
+Utterly different from these, both in character and
+in the lesson which it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of
+unknown date, as we said, and unknown authorship, the
+language impregnated with strange idioms and strange
+allusions, unjewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with
+Judaism, it hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew
+literature, in it, but not of it, compelling the
+acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty, yet
+exerting no influence over the minds of the people,
+never alluded to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last
+the light which it had heralded rose up full over the
+world in Christianity.
+
+The conjectures which have been formed upon the
+date of it are so various, that they show of themselves
+on how slight a foundation the best of them must
+rest. The language is no guide, for although unquestionably
+of Hebrew origin, it bears no analogy to any of the
+other books in the Bible; while, of its external history,
+nothing is known at all, except that it was received into
+the Canon at the time of the great synagogue. Ewald
+decides, with some confidence, that it belongs to the
+great prophetic period, and that the writer was a
+contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority
+in these matters, and this opinion is the one which
+we believe is now commonly received among biblical
+scholars. In the absence of proof, however, (and the
+reasons which he brings forward are really no more than
+conjectures) these opposite considerations may be of
+moment. It is only natural that at first thought we
+should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to the
+time at which the poetry of the nation to which it
+belongs was generally at its best: but, on reflection,
+the time when the poetry of prophecy is the richest, is
+not likely to be favourable to compositions of another
+kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,
+dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel
+was filling round them into ruin, and their mission,
+glowing as they were with the ancient spirit, was to
+rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding
+themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra,
+despised and disregarded, their voices rise up singing
+the swan song of a dying people, now falling away in
+the wild wailing of despondency over the shameful and
+desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope
+that God will not leave them forever, and in his own
+time will take his chosen to himself again. But such a
+period is an ill-occasion for searching into the broad
+problems of human destiny; the present is all-important
+and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job
+could have arisen only out of an isolation of mind, and
+life, and interest, which we cannot conceive of as
+possible.
+
+The more it is studied, the more the conclusion
+forces itself upon us that, let the writer have lived when
+he would, in his struggle with the central falsehood of
+his own people's creed, he must have divorced himself
+from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he
+travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps
+all his matured life, in exile. Everything about the
+book speaks of a person who had broken free from
+the narrow littleness of "the peculiar people." The
+language, as we said, is full of strange words. The
+hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage, a
+Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,
+the customs, are of all varieties and places--Egypt,
+with its river and its pyramids, is there; the description
+of mining points to Phoenicia; the settled life in cities,
+the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the heat of
+the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
+Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people.
+No mention, or hint of mention, is there throughout
+the poem, of Jewish traditions or Jewish certainties.
+We look to find the three friends vindicate themselves,
+as they so well might have done, by appeals to the
+fertile annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the
+plain, to the plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai.
+But of all this there is not a word; they are passed by
+as if they had no existence; and instead of them, when
+witnesses are required for the power of God, we have
+strange un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic
+mythology, the old wars of the giants, the imprisoned
+Orion, the wounded dragon, "the sweet influences of
+the seven stars," and the glittering fragments of the
+sea-snake Rahab trailing across the northern sky.
+Again, God is not the God of Israel, but the father of
+mankind; we hear nothing of a chosen people, nothing
+of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar privileges;
+and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the
+prince of this world and the enemy of God, but the
+angel of judgment, the accusing spirit whose mission
+was to walk to and fro over the earth, and carry up to
+heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot
+believe that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem
+in the days of Josiah. In this book, if anywhere, we
+have the record of some aner polutropos who, like the
+old hero of Ithaca,
+
+pollon anthropon iden astea kai voon egno
+polla d' hog'en tonto tathen algea hon kata thumon,
+arnumenos psuchen
+
+but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all
+contrived as if to baffle curiosity, as if, in the very form
+of the poem, to teach us that it is no story of a single
+thing which happened once, but that it belongs to
+humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man,
+with Almighty God and the angels as the spectators
+of it.
+
+No reader can have failed to have been struck with
+the simplicity of the opening. Still, calm, and most
+majestic, it tells us everything which is necessary to be
+known in the fewest possible words. The history of
+Job was probably a tradition in the east; his name, like
+that of Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness,
+and his misfortunes the problem of philosophers. In
+keeping with the current belief, he is described as a
+model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man
+upon the earth, "and the same was the greatest man in
+all the east." So far, greatness and goodness had gone
+hand in hand together, as the popular theory required.
+The details of his character are brought out in the
+progress of the poem. He was "the father of the
+oppressed, and of those who had none to help them."
+When he sat as a judge in the market-places,
+"righteousness clothed him" there, and "his justice was
+a robe and a diadem." He "broke the jaws of the
+wicked and plucked the spoil out of his teeth;" and,
+humble in the midst of his power, he "did not despise
+the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when
+they contended with him," knowing (and amidst those
+old people where the multitude of mankind were
+regarded as the born slaves of the powerful, to be carved
+into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their
+master's pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)
+knowing "that He who had made him had made
+them," and one "had fashioned them both in the
+womb." Above all, he was the friend of the poor,
+"the blessing of him that was ready to perish came
+upon him," and he "made the widow's heart to sing
+for joy."
+
+Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the
+side of his unaffected piety, as it is described in the first
+chapter, we have a picture of the best man who could
+then be conceived; not a hard ascetic, living in haughty
+or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and
+blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom,
+that no room might be left for any possible Calvinistic
+falsehood, God himself bears the emphatic testimony,
+"that there was none like him upon the earth, a perfect
+and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil."
+If such a person as this, therefore, could be made
+miserable, necessarily the current belief of the Jews
+was false to the root; and tradition furnished the fact
+that he had been visited by every worst calamity.
+How was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand
+possible explanations, the poet introduces a single
+one. He admits us behind the veil which covers the
+ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel
+charging Job with an interested piety, and of being
+obedient because it was his policy. "Job does not
+serve God for nought," he says; "strip him of his
+splendour, and see if he will care for God then.
+Humble him into poverty and wretchedness, so only
+we shall know what is in his heart." The cause thus
+introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with
+its "rewards and punishments," immediately fostered
+selfishness; and the poem opens with a double action,
+on one side to try the question whether it is possible for
+man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which
+trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the
+progress of it with an anxious and fearful interest--on
+the other side, to bring out in contrast to the truth
+which we already know, the cruel falsehood of the
+popular faith, to show how, instead of leading men to
+mercy and affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their
+sympathies, and enhances the trials of the sufferer, by
+refinements which even Satan had not anticipated. The
+combination of evils, as blow falls on blow, suddenly,
+swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed
+visitation (as indeed it was;) if ever outward incidents
+might with justice be interpreted as the immediate
+action of Providence, those which fell on Job might be
+so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully from the
+fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his
+chosen friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and
+piety were then, without one glimpse of the true cause
+of his sufferings, see in them a judgment upon his secret
+sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even
+(such are the paralogisms of men of this description) a
+proof of their theory "that the prosperity of the wicked
+is but for a while;" and instead of the comfort and help
+which they might have brought him, and which in the
+end they were made to bring him, he is to them no
+more than a text for the enunciation of solemn falsehood.
+And even worse again, the sufferer himself had been
+educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught
+to see the hand of God in the outward dispensation;
+and feeling from the bottom of his heart, that he, in
+his own case, was a sure contradiction of what he had
+learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
+shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which
+Satan had devised were distanced far by those which
+had been created by human folly.
+
+The creed in which Job had believed was tried and
+found wanting, and, as it ever will be when the facts of
+experience come in contact with the inadequate formula,
+the true is found so mingled with the false, that they
+can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being
+swept away together.
+
+A studied respect is shown, however, to this orthodoxy;
+even while it is arraigned for judgment. It may be
+doubtful whether the writer purposely intended it. He
+probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for
+it the best which could be said, and to produce as its
+defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience
+he had known to believe and defend it. At any
+rate, he represents the three friends, not as a weaker
+person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate
+bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men,
+who, at the outset, at least, are animated only by the
+kindest feelings, and speak what they have to say with
+the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is
+vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the
+wild, natural outpouring of suffering. The friends, true
+to the eternal nature of man, are grave, solemn, and
+indignant, preaching their half truth, and mistaken only
+in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such
+persons would speak, and still do speak, in defending
+what they consider sacred truth, against the assaults
+of folly and scepticism. How beautiful is their first
+introduction:--
+
+"Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil
+which was come upon him, they came every one from his
+own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite,
+and Zophar the Naamathite, for they had made an appointment
+together to come to mourn with him and to comfort
+him. And when they lifted up their eyes afar off and knew
+him not, they lifted up their voices and wept, and they
+rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their
+heads towards heaven. So they sate down with him upon
+the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a
+word unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great."
+
+What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness!
+His wife had scoffed at his faith, bidding him leave
+"God and die." His acquaintance had turned from
+him. He "had called his servant, and he had given him
+no answer." Even the children in their unconscious
+cruelty had gathered round and mocked him, as he lay
+among the ashes. But "his friends sprinkle dust towards
+heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him seven
+days and seven nights upon the ground." That is, they
+were true hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men,
+and yet they with their religion, were to become the
+instruments of the most poignant sufferings, and the
+sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it
+was, and is, and will be,--of such materials is this human
+life of ours composed.
+
+And now, remembering the double action of the
+drama, the actual trial of Job, the result of which is
+uncertain, and the delusion of these men which is, at
+the outset, certain, let us go rapidly through the dialogue.
+Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.
+Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had
+been sent upon him, his wife, in Satan's own words, had
+tempted Job, to say, "Farewell to God," think no more
+of God or goodness, since this was all which came of it;
+and Job had told her, that she spoke as one of the
+foolish women. He "had received good at the hand of
+the Lord, and should he not receive evil?" But now,
+when real love and real affection appear, his heart melts
+in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts
+into a passionate regret that he had ever been born.
+In the agony of his sufferings, hope of better things had
+died away. He does not complain of injustice; as yet,
+and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he
+makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life
+given to him at all, if only for this? And sick in mind
+and sick in body, but one wish remains to him, that
+death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry from
+the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for
+such simplicity and singleness his friends could not give
+him credit; possessed beforehand with their idea, they
+see in his misery only a fatal witness against him; such
+calamities could not have befallen a man, the justice of
+God would not have permitted it, unless they had been
+deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and
+this wild passion was but impenitence and rebellion.
+
+Being as certain that they were right in this opinion
+as they were that God Himself existed, that they should
+speak what they felt was only natural and necessary;
+and their language at the outset is all which would be
+dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens,
+the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft,
+subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to
+spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme, to
+which his real love will allow him. All is general,
+impersonal, indirect, the rule of the world, the order of
+Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes
+his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the
+occasion which had produced them, and then passes
+off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious
+vision in which the infirmity of mortal nature had been
+revealed to him, the universal weakness which involved
+both the certainty that Job had shared in it, and the
+excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself:
+the blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the
+promise that all shall be well.
+
+This is the note on which each of the friends strikes
+successively, in the first of the three divisions into
+which the dialogue divides itself, but each with
+increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far from
+accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him,
+hurls it from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe
+(what the Calvinists make of it they have given us no
+means of knowing,) he will hear as little of the charges
+against mankind, as of charges against himself. He will
+not listen to the "corruption of humanity," because in
+the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows that
+it is not corrupt: he knows it, and we know it, the
+divine sentence upon him having been already passed.
+He will not acknowledge his sin, he cannot repent, for
+he knows not of what to repent. If he could have
+reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they
+would say. He knew all that as well as they: it was
+the old story which he had learnt, and could repeat, if
+necessary, as well as any one: and if it had been no
+more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself
+no more nearly than it touched his friends, he might
+have allowed for the tenacity of opinion in such matters,
+and listened to it and replied to it with equanimity.
+But as the proverb says, "it is ill-talking between a full
+man and a fasting:" and in him such equanimity would
+have been but Stoicism or the affectation of it, and
+unreal as the others' theories. Possessed with the
+certainty that he had not deserved what had befallen
+him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and
+unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he
+should assume it), that those who loved him would not
+have been hasty to believe evil of him, that he had
+been safe in speaking to them as he really felt, and that
+he might look to them for something warmer and more
+sympathizing than such dreary eloquence. So when the
+revelation comes upon him of what was passing in them,
+he attributes it (and now he is unjust to them) to a
+falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of under-
+standing. Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past
+him as a dismal mockery. They had been shocked
+(and how true again is this to nature) at his passionate
+cry for death. "Do ye reprove words?" he says,
+"and the speeches of one that is desperate, which
+are as wind?" It was but poor friendship and narrow
+wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for comfort,
+and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans
+in the desert for the water-streams, and "his brethren
+had dealt deceitfully with him," as the brooks, which
+in the cool winter roll in a full turbid stream; "what
+time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are
+consumed out of their place. The caravans of Tema
+looked for them, the companies of Sheba waited for
+them. They were confounded because they had hoped.
+They came thither and there was nothing." If for once
+these poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for
+once they could have believed that there might be
+"more things in heaven and earth" than were dreamt
+of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which
+they could not do, which the theologian proper never
+has done or will do. And thus whatever of calmness or
+endurance, Job alone, on his ash-heap, might have
+conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the
+strong gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart,
+he pours himself out in wild fitful music, so beautiful
+because so true, not answering them or their speeches,
+but now flinging them from him in scorn, now appealing
+to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now
+praying for death; now in perplexity doubting whether,
+in some mystic way which he cannot understand, he
+may not, perhaps after all, really have sinned, and
+praying to be shown it; and, then, staggering further into
+the darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the
+Power which has become so dreadful an enigma to him.
+"Thou inquirest after my iniquity, thou searchest after
+my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why
+didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that
+I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me.
+Cease, let me alone. It is but a little while that I have
+to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a little
+before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of
+darkness and the shadow of death." In what other
+poem in the world is there pathos so deep as this?
+With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job to
+be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words.
+He speaks not what he knows, but what he feels; and
+without fear the writer allows him to throw it out all
+genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring how nice ears
+might be offended, but contented to be true to the real
+emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs
+on to the end of the first answer to Zophar.
+
+But now with admirable fitness, as the contest goes
+forward, the relative position of the speakers begins to
+change. Hitherto Job only had been passionate; and
+his friends temperate and collected. Now, however,
+shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed wholly in
+the result of their homilies, they stray still further from
+the truth in an endeavour to strengthen their position,
+and, as a natural consequence, visibly grow angry. To
+them Job's vehement and desperate speeches are
+damning evidence of the truth of their suspicion. Impiety
+is added to his first sin, and they begin to see in him
+a rebel against God. At first they had been contented
+to speak generally; and much which they had urged
+was partially true: now they step forward to a direct
+application, and formally and personally accuse himself.
+Here their ground is positively false; and with
+delicate art it is they who are now growing passionate,
+and wounded self-love begins to show behind their zeal
+For God; while in contrast to them, as there is less
+and less truth in what they say, Job grows more and
+more collected. For a time it had seemed doubtful
+how he would endure his trial. The light of his faith
+was burning feebly and unsteadily; a little more and
+it seemed as if it might have utterly gone out; but at
+last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought
+personally home to him, the confidence in his own real
+innocence rises against them. He had before known
+that he was innocent, now he feels the strength which
+lies in it, as if God were beginning to reveal Himself
+within him, to prepare the way for the after outward
+manifestation of Himself.
+
+The friends, as before, repeat one another with but
+little difference; the sameness being of course
+intentional, as showing that they were not speaking for
+themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.
+Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow.
+Hear this Calvinist of the old world. "Thy own mouth
+condemneth thee, and thine own lips testify against thee.
+What is man that he should be clean, and he that is
+born of a woman that he should be righteous? Behold,
+he putteth no trust in his saints. Yea, the heavens are
+not clean in his sight; how much more abominable
+and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?"
+Strange, that after all these thousands of years, we
+should still persist in this degrading confession, as a
+thing which it is impious to deny, and impious to
+attempt to render otherwise, when scripture itself, in
+language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie. Job is
+innocent, perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness
+to it. It is Job who is found at last to have spoken
+truth, and the friends to have sinned in denying it.
+And he holds fast by his innocency, and with a generous
+confidence puts away the misgivings which had begun
+to cling to him. Among his complainings he had
+exclaimed, that God was remembering upon him the
+sins of his youth--not denying them--knowing well,
+that he, like others, had gone astray before he had
+learnt to control himself, but feeling that at least in an
+earthly father it is unjust to visit the faults of childhood
+on the matured man; feeling that he had long, long
+shaken them off from him, and they did not even
+impair the probity of his after life. But now these
+doubts, too, pass away in the brave certainty that God
+is not less just than man. As the denouncings grow
+louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to
+the Supreme Tribunal, calls on God to hear him and to
+try his cause--and, then, in the strength of this appeal
+his eye grows clearer still. His sickness is mortal: he
+has no hope in life, and death is near, but the intense
+feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him
+closer and closer. God may appear on earth for him;
+or if that be too bold a hope, and death finds him as he
+is--what is death, then? God will clear his memory
+in the place where he lived; his injuries will be righted
+over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of
+sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up,
+that he too, then, in another life, if not in this, when his
+skin is wasted off his bones, and the worms have done
+their work on the prison of his spirit, he, too, at last
+may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings heard.
+
+With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he
+turns back to the world again to look at it. Facts
+against which he had before closed his eyes he allows
+and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience
+is but the reflection of a law. You tell me, he seems to
+say, that the good are rewarded, and that the wicked
+are punished, that God is just, and that this is always
+so. Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way which
+you imagine. You have known me, you have known
+what my life has been; you see what I am, and it is no
+difficulty to you. You prefer believing that I, whom
+you call your friend, am a deceiver or a pretender,
+to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your
+hypothesis. You will not listen to my assurance, and
+you are angry with me because I will not lie against
+my own soul, and acknowledge sins which I have not
+committed. You appeal to the course of the world in
+proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you.
+Well, then, I accept your challenge. The world is not
+what you say. You have told me what you have seen
+of it. I will tell you what I have seen.
+
+"Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling
+taketh hold upon my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked
+become old, yea, and are mighty in power. Their seed
+is established in their sight with them, and their offspring
+before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither
+is the rod of God upon them. Their bull gendereth and
+faileth not; their cow calveth and casteth not her calf.
+They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their
+children dance. They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice
+at the sound of the organ. They spend their days in wealth,
+and in a moment go down into the grave. Therefore they
+say unto God, Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge
+of thy ways. What is the Almighty that we should
+serve him? and what profit should we have if we pray to
+him?"
+
+Will you quote the weary proverb? Will you say
+that "God layeth up his iniquity for his children?"
+(our translators have wholly lost the sense of this
+passage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge
+what he is steadfastly denying). Well, and what
+then? What will he care? "Will his own eye see
+his own fall? Will he drink the wrath of the
+Almighty? What are the fortunes of his house to
+him if the number of his own months is fulfilled?"
+One man is good and another wicked, one is happy
+and another is miserable. In the great indifference of
+nature they share alike in the common lot. "They
+lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them."
+Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was
+hurried away by his feelings to say all this; and that
+in his calmer moments he must have felt that it was
+untrue. It is a point on which we must decline
+accepting even Ewald's high authority. Even then
+in those old times it was beginning to be terribly true.
+Even then the current theory was obliged to bend to
+large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we
+see round us everywhere. It was true then, it is
+infinitely more true now, that what is called virtue in
+the common sense of the word, still more that nobleness,
+godliness, or heroism of character in any form
+whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man's
+prosperity, or even happiness. The thoroughly vicious
+man is no doubt wretched enough; but the worldly,
+prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses,
+which he understands how to gratify with tempered
+indulgence, with a conscience satisfied with the hack
+routine of what is called respectability, such a man
+feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness disturbs
+him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though
+he be the basest and most contemptible slave of his
+own selfishness. Providence will not interfere to punish
+him. Let him obey the laws under which prosperity
+is obtainable, and he will obtain it; let him never fear
+He will obtain it, be he base or noble. Nature is
+indifferent; the famine, and the earthquake, and the
+blight, or the accident, will not discriminate to strike
+him. He may insure himself against those in these
+days of ours: with the money perhaps which a better
+man would have given away, and he will have his
+reward. He need not doubt it.
+
+And again, it is not true, as optimists would persuade
+us, that such prosperity brings no real pleasure.
+A man with no high aspirations who thrives and makes
+money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy
+as such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction
+be the most blessed state for a man (and this certainly
+is the practical notion of happiness) he is the happiest
+of men. Nor are those idle phrases any truer, that
+the good man's goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine;
+that virtue is its own reward. &c. &c. If men truly
+virtuous care to be rewarded for it, their virtue is but
+a poor investment of their moral capital. Was Job
+so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the
+world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery
+of the theologian, alone in his forlorn nakedness, like
+some old dreary stump which the lightning has scathed,
+rotting away in the wind and the rain? Happy! if
+happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this
+world to seek for, those hitherto thought the noblest
+among us were the pitifullest and wretchedest. Surely
+it was no error in Job. It was that real insight which
+once was given to all the world in Christianity;
+however we have forgotten it now. He was learning to
+see that it was not in the possession of enjoyment,
+no, nor of happiness itself, that the difference lies
+between the good and the bad. True, it might be
+that God sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness
+in, gives it as what Aristotle calls an epigignomenon
+telos, but it is no part of the terms on which He admits
+us to His service, still less is it the end which we may
+propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness
+He gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel
+of nature to distribute among those who fulfil the laws
+upon which it depends. But to serve God and to
+love Him is higher and better than happiness, though
+it be with wounded feet, and bleeding brow, and hearts
+loaded with sorrow. Into this high faith Job is rising,
+treading his temptations under his feet, and finding
+in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he
+is passing further and ever further from his friends,
+soaring where their imaginations cannot follow him.
+To them he is a blasphemer whom they gaze at with
+awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning,
+on the strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered
+with a deliberate denial of it. Losing now all mastery
+over themselves, they pour out a torrent of mere
+extravagant invective and baseless falsehoods, which
+in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think
+of. They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate
+now to convert conjecture into certainty, and specify
+in detail the particular crimes which he must have
+committed. He ought to have committed them, and
+so he had; the old argument then as now.--"Is not
+thy wickedness great?" says Eliphaz. "Thou hast
+taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and
+stripped the naked of their clothing; thou hast not
+given water to the weary, and thou hast withholden
+bread from the hungry;" and so on through a series
+of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when
+words like these could make Job angry. Bildad follows
+them up with an attempt to frighten him by a picture
+of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming;
+but Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him
+in a spirit of loftiness which Bildad could not have
+approached; and then proudly and calmly rebukes
+them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high
+tranquil self-possession. "God forbid that I should
+justify you," he says; "till I die I will not remove my
+integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and
+will not let it go. My heart shall not reproach me
+so long as I live."
+
+So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing
+confidence, having insisted on their own position, and
+denounced their adversaries. A difficulty now rises,
+which, at first sight, appears insurmountable. As the
+chapters are at present printed, the entire of the
+twenty-seventh is assigned to Job, and the verses from the
+eleventh to the twenty-third are in direct contradiction
+to all which he has maintained before, are, in fact, a
+concession of having been wrong from the beginning.
+Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow
+the truth of Job's last and highest position, supposes
+that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an
+over precipitate passion had betrayed him into denying.
+For many reasons, principally because we are satisfied
+that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot
+think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large
+and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own
+general theory of the poem. Another solution of the
+difficulty is very simple, although, it is to be admitted,
+that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and
+Bildad have each spoken a third time; the symmetry
+of the general form requires that now Zophar should
+speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made by
+Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses
+in question belong to him. Any one who is accustomed
+to MSS. will understand easily how such a mistake,--
+if it be one,--might have arisen. Even in Shakespeare,
+the speeches in the early editions are, in many instances,
+wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong persons.
+It might have arisen from inadvertence; it might have
+arisen from the foolishness of some Jewish transcriber,
+who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book into harmony
+with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy.
+This view has the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity;
+another, however, has been suggested by Eichorn, who
+originally followed Kennicott, but discovered, as he
+supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which was equally
+satisfactory. He imagines the verses to be a summary
+by Job of his adversaries' opinions, as if he said--
+"Listen now; you know what the facts are as well as
+I, and yet you maintain this;" and then passed on with
+his indirect reply to it. It is possible that Eichorn
+may be right--at any rate, either he is right, or else
+Dr. Kennicott is. Certainly, Ewald is not. Taken as
+an account of Job's own conviction, the passage
+contradicts the burden of the whole poem. Passing it by,
+therefore, and going to what immediately follows, we
+arrive at what, in a human sense, is the final climax--
+Job's victory and triumph. He had appealed to God,
+and God had not appeared; he had doubted and fought
+against his doubts, and, at last, had crushed them down.
+He, too, had been taught to look for God in outward
+judgments; and when his own experience had shown
+him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had
+been leaning on a braised reed, and it had run into his
+hand, and pierced him. But as soon as in the speeches
+of his friends he saw it all laid down in its weakness and
+its false conclusions--when he saw the defenders of it
+wandering further and further from what he knew to
+be true, growing every moment, as if from a consciousness
+of the unsoundness of their standing ground, more
+violent, obstinate, and unreasonable, the scales fell more
+and more from his eyes--he had seen the fact that the
+wicked might prosper, and in learning to depend upon
+his innocency he had felt that the good man's support
+was there, if it was anywhere; and at last, with all his
+heart, was reconciled to it. The mystery of the outer
+world becomes deeper to him, but he does not any
+more try to understand it. The wisdom which can
+compass that, he knows, is not in man; though man
+search for it deeper and harder than the miner searches
+for the hidden treasures of the earth; and the wisdom
+which alone is possible to him, is resignation to
+God.
+
+"Where, he cries, shall wisdom be found, and where is
+the place of understanding. Man knoweth not the price
+thereof, neither is it found in the land of the living. The
+depth said, it is not with me; and the sea said, it is not in
+me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from
+the fowls of the air.* God understandeth the way thereof,
+and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands
+the mysteries of the world which He has made].
+And unto man He said, Behold the fear of the Lord,
+that is wisdom, and to depart from evil, that is understanding."
+____
+
+* An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the
+inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between
+heaven and earth.
+____
+
+Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over.
+There is no clearer or purer faith possible for man; and
+Job had achieved it. His evil had turned to good;
+and sorrow had severed for him the last links which
+bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could
+do without happiness, that it was no longer essential,
+and that he could live on, and still love God, and cling
+to Him. But he is not described as of preternatural, or
+at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all human
+tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still
+beautiful to him. He does not hate it, because he can
+renounce it; and now that the struggle is over, the
+battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed over in
+that magnificent song of victory, the note once more
+changes: he turns back to earth, to linger over those
+old departed days, with which the present is so hard a
+contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain of
+plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he
+throws himself on God, no longer in passionate
+expostulation, but in pleading humility.+ And then comes
+(perhaps, as Ewald says, it could not have come before)
+the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on
+Him had prayed that He might appear, that he might
+plead his cause with Him; and now He comes, and
+what will Job do? He comes not as the healing
+spirit in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first
+demanded, the outward God, the Almighty Creator of
+the universe, and clad in the terrors and the glory of it.
+Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with
+Him on His government. The poet, in gleaming lines,
+describes for an answer the universe as it then was
+known, the majesty and awfulness of it; and then asks
+whether it is this which he requires to have explained to
+him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting.
+The revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos
+on the modern Faust; but when he sinks
+crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart, struck down
+in his pride--for he had himself, partially at least,
+subdued his own presumption--but as a humble penitent,
+struggling to overcome his weakness. He abhors
+himself for his murmurs, and "repents in dust and
+ashes." It will have occurred to every one that the
+secret which has been revealed to the reader is not, after
+all, revealed to Job or to his friends, and for this plain
+reason: the burden of the drama is not that we do, but
+that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of the
+government of the world, that it is not for man to seek
+it, or for God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this
+one instance, admitted behind the scenes--for once, in
+this single case because it was necessary to meet the
+received theory by a positive fact, which contradicted it.
+But the explanation of one case need not be the explanation
+of another; our business is to do what we know
+to be right, and ask no questions. The veil which in the
+Egyptian legend lay before the face of Isis, is not to be
+raised; and we are not to seek to penetrate secrets
+which are not ours.
+____
+
++ The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and
+God's appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars
+not to be genuine. The most superficial reader will have been
+perplexed by the introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is
+made, either in the prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation,
+which adds nothing to the progress of the argument; proceeding
+evidently on the false hypothesis of the three friends, and
+betraying not the faintest conception of the real cause of Job's
+suffering. And the suspicions which such an anomaly would naturally
+suggest are now made certainties, by a fuller knowledge of the
+language, and the detection of a different hand. The interpolator
+has unconsciously confessed the feeling which allowed him to take
+so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old Jew theory, was
+unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction to it; and,
+missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's honour could
+still be vindicated in the old way. "His wrath was kindled" against
+the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job
+because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself "full
+of matter," and "ready to burst like new bottles," he could not
+contain himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the Theodice,
+such, we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in
+which he lived.
+____
+
+While, however, God does not condescend to justify
+His ways to man, He gives judgment on the past
+controversy. The self-constituted pleaders for Him, the
+acceptors of His person, were all wrong; and Job, the
+passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job, he
+had spoken the truth; he at least had spoken facts, and
+they had been defending a transient theory as an
+everlasting truth.
+
+"And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these
+words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, my
+wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two friends;
+for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my
+servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven
+bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and
+offer for yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job
+shall pray for you, and him will I accept. Lest I deal with
+you after your folly, for that ye have not spoken of me the
+thing which is right, like my servant Job."
+
+One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do, the
+cause of Job's sufferings, and that as soon as his trial
+was over, it was no longer operative, our sense of fitness
+could not be satisfied unless he were indemnified outwardly
+for his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated,
+and his integrity proved; and there is no reason why
+the general law should be interfered with, which makes
+good men happy; or why obvious calamities, obviously
+undeserved, should remain any more unremoved. Perhaps,
+too, a deeper lesson still lies below his restoration
+--something perhaps of this kind. Prosperity, enjoyment,
+happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name
+by which we designate that state in which life is to our
+own selves pleasant and delightful, as long as they are
+sought or prized as things essential, so far have a
+tendency to disennoble our nature, and are a sign that
+we are still in servitude and selfishness. Only when
+they lie outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or
+laid aside as God pleases, only then may such things
+be possessed with impunity. Job's heart in early times
+had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was
+purged clean, and they were restored because he had
+ceased to need them.
+
+Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the
+material of which it is woven we have not here been
+concerned, although it is so rich and pregnant, that we
+might with little difficulty construct out of it a
+complete picture of the world as then it was: its life,
+knowledge, arts, habits, superstitions, hopes, and fears.
+The subject is the problem of all mankind, and the
+composition embraces no less wide a range. But what we are
+here most interested upon, is the epoch which it marks
+in the progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle
+of a new experience with an established orthodox
+belief. True, for hundreds of years, perhaps for a
+thousand, the superstition against which it was directed
+continued; when Christ came it was still in its vitality.
+Nay, as we saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life,
+among us at this very day. But even those who
+retained their imperfect belief had received into their
+canon a book which treated it with contumely and
+scorn, so irresistible was the lofty majesty of truth.
+
+In days like these, when we hear so much of progress,
+it is worth while to ask ourselves, what advances
+we have made further in the same direction? and once
+more, at the risk of some repetition, let us look at the
+position in which this book leaves us. It had been
+assumed, that man if he lived a just and upright life,
+had a right to expect to be happy. Happiness, "his
+being's end and aim," was his legitimate and covenanted
+reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would
+be happy; and inasmuch as God was just, the man who
+was not happy had not deserved to be. There is no
+flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy
+can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is
+idle to talk of inward consolations. Job felt them, but
+they were not everything. They did not relieve the
+anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of
+his children, or his friends' unkindness, any the less
+painful to him.
+
+The poet, indeed, restores him in the book; but in
+life it need not have been so. He might have died upon
+his ash-heap as thousands of good men have died, and
+will die again in misery. Happiness, therefore, is not
+what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the
+best which we know, to seek that and do that; and if
+by "virtue its own reward" he meant that the good
+man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing more;
+then it is true and noble. But if virtue be valued,
+because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be
+found most enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is
+not noble any more, and it is turning the truth of God
+into a lie. Let us do right, and whether happiness come
+or unhappiness is no very mighty matter. If it come,
+life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter
+--bitter, not sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a
+theory alone is the government of this world intelligibly
+just. The well-being of our souls depends only on
+what we are, and nobleness of character is nothing
+else but steady love of good, and steady scorn of evil.
+The government of the world is a problem while the
+desire of selfish enjoyment survives, and when justice
+is not done according to such standard (which will not
+be till the day after doomsday, and not then), self-loving
+men will still ask, why? and find no answer. Only to
+those who have the heart to say, we can do without
+that, it is not what we ask or desire, is there no secret.
+Man will have what he deserves, and will find what is
+really best for him, exactly as he honestly seeks for it.
+Happiness may fly away, pleasure pall or cease to be
+obtainable, wealth decay, friends fail or prove unkind,
+and fame turn to infamy; but the power to serve God
+never fails, and the love of Him is never rejected.
+
+Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have
+known something of love--of that only pure love in
+which no self is left remaining. We have loved as
+children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have
+learnt to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love
+would that be which existed only with a prudent view
+to after-interests. Surely, there is a love which exults
+in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the
+privilege of suffering for what is good. Que mon nom
+soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre, said Danton;
+and those wild patriots who had trampled into scorn
+the faith in an immortal life in which they would be
+rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their
+graves as beds, for the dream of a people's liberty.
+Shall we, who would be thought reasonable men, love
+the living God with less heart than these poor men
+loved their phantom? Justice is done; the balance is
+not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we
+have not learnt to serve without looking to be paid
+for it.
+
+Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the
+Book of Job; a faith which has flashed up in all times
+and all lands, wherever noble men were to be found,
+and which passed in Christianity into the acknowledged
+creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol,
+the divine sufferer the great example, and mankind
+answered to the call, because the appeal was not to
+what was poor and selfish in them, but to whatever of
+best and bravest was in their nature. The law of
+reward and punishment was superseded by the law of love.
+Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love man; and that
+was not love--man knew it once--which was bought by
+the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us
+now. Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in
+the hands of a poor Paley, are found to mean no more
+than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened
+manner. And the same base tone has saturated not
+only our common feelings, but our Christian theologies
+and our Antichristian philosophies. A prudent regard
+to our future interests, an abstinence from present
+unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of
+greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with
+pain, this is called virtue now; and the belief that such
+beings as men can be influenced by any feelings nobler
+or better, is smiled at as the dream of enthusiasts
+whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed,
+he were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress
+lay resting on the feeling that a marriage with her would
+conduce to 'his own after comforts. That were a poor
+patriot who served his country for the hire which his
+country would give to him. And we should think but
+poorly of a son who thus addressed his earthly father:
+"Father, on whom my fortunes depend, teach me to
+do what pleases thee, that I, obeying thee in all things
+may obtain those good things which thou hast promised
+to give to thy obedient children." If any of us who have
+lived in so poor a faith venture, by-and-by, to put in
+our claims, Satan will be likely to say of us (with better
+reason than he did of Job) "Did they serve God for
+nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they
+will curse Him to His face." If Christianity had never
+borne itself more nobly than this, do we suppose that
+those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the fiery
+warsongs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are
+composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into
+crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let
+us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it.
+The Christians, like the stoics and the epicureans, would
+have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of an
+effete civilization, and would have passed off and been
+heard of no more. It was in another spirit that those
+first preachers of righteousness went out upon their
+warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened
+prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no
+promises in this world except of suffering as their great
+master had suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted
+worthy to suffer for His sake. And that crown of glory
+which they did believe to await them in a life beyond
+the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered
+in life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense
+which human thought or language can attach to the
+words; as little like it as the crown of love is like it,
+which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains
+his mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose
+themselves in Him.
+
+How all this nobleness ebbed away, and Christianity
+became what we know it, we are partially beginning to
+see. The living spirit organized for itself a body of
+perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real
+experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses current at the
+day for the solution of unexplained phenomena, became
+formulae and articles of faith; again, as before, the living
+and the dead were bound together, and the seeds of
+decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed
+polity. But there was another cause allied to this, and
+yet different from it, which, though a law of human
+nature itself, seems now-a-days altogether forgotten. In
+the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of
+material things, we are apt to believe that all our
+knowledge follows the same law, that it is merely generalized
+experience, that experience accumulates daily, and,
+therefore, that "progress of the species," in all senses, is an
+obvious and necessary fact. There is something which
+is true in this view mixed with a great deal which is
+false. Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical
+sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment
+to experiment, and each advance is secured and
+made good, and cannot again be lost; one generation
+takes up the general sum of experience where the last
+laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of
+adding, and leaves it with interest to the next. The
+successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing
+for the apprehension of them but an understanding
+ordinarily cultivated. Prejudices have to be encountered,
+but prejudices of opinion merely, not prejudices of
+conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which
+beset our progress in the science of morality, Here we
+enter upon conditions wholly different, conditions in
+which age differs from age, man differs from man, and
+even from himself, at different moments. We all have
+experienced times when, as we say, we should not know
+ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level;
+some, when we are lifted above it, and put on, as it were,
+a higher nature. At such intervals as these last,
+(unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence,) many
+things become clear to us, which before were hard
+sayings; propositions become alive which, usually, are
+but dry words. Our hearts seem purer, our motives
+loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge
+to ourselves. And, as man is unequal to himself, so
+is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The
+entire method of action, the theories of human life which
+in one area prevail universally, to the next are
+unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed
+mere baseness to the first, if the first could have
+anticipated them. One, we may suppose, holds some "greatest
+nobleness principle," the other some "greatest happiness
+principle;" and then their very systems of axioms
+will contradict one another; their general conceptions
+and their detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments,
+opinions, practices, will be in perpetual and endless
+contradiction. Our minds take shape from our hearts,
+and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own
+meaning, but submit to many readings, according to the
+power of eye which we bring with us.
+
+The want of a clear perception of so important a
+feature about us, leads to many singular contradictions.
+A believer in popular Protestantism, who is also a
+believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to
+regard mankind as growing every day in a more
+and more advantageous position with respect to the
+trials of life; and yet if he were asked whether it is
+easier for him to "save his soul" in the nineteenth
+century than it would have been in the first or second,
+or whether the said soul is necessarily better worth
+saving, he would be perplexed for an answer. There
+is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt like
+the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had "lived
+in the days of the fathers," if he had had their
+advantages, he would have found duty a much easier matter;
+and some of us in mature life have felt that, in old
+Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of
+Christianity, in the Crusades or at the Reformation,
+there was a contagious atmosphere of general nobleness,
+in which we should have been less troubled with the
+little feelings which cling about us now. At any rate,
+it is at these rare epochs only that real additions are
+made to our moral knowledge. At such times, new
+truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods
+longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an ennobling
+influence on mankind. Perhaps what is gained on
+these occasions is never entirely lost. The historical
+monuments of their effects are at least indestructible;
+and, when the spirit which gave them birth reappears,
+their dormant energy awakens again.
+
+But it seems from our present experience of what,
+in some at least of its modern forms, Christianity has
+been capable of becoming, that there is no doctrine in
+itself so pure, but what the poorer nature which is in
+us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own
+littleness. The once living spirit dries up into formulae,
+and formula whether of mass-sacrifice or vicarious
+righteousness, or "reward and punishment," are
+contrived ever so as to escape making over high demands
+on men. Some aim at dispensing with obedience
+altogether, and those which insist on obedience rest
+the obligations of it on the poorest of motives. So
+things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from
+all higher aspirations we are lowered down to the love
+of self after an enlightened manner; and then nothing
+remains but to fight the battle over again. The once
+beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a cruel
+and mischievous deception, and the whole question of
+life and its obligations must again be opened.
+
+It is now some three centuries since the last of such
+reopenings. If we ask ourselves how much during
+this time has been actually added to the sum of our
+knowledge in these matters, what--in all the thousands
+upon thousands of sermons and theologies, and philosophies
+with which Europe has been deluged--has been
+gained for mankind beyond what we have found in this
+very book of Job for instance; how far all this has
+advanced us in the "progress of humanity," it were
+hard, or rather it is easy to answer. How far we have
+fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness; but
+what moral question can be asked which admits now
+of a nobler solution than was offered two, perhaps three
+thousand years ago? The world has not been standing
+still, experience of man and life has increased, questions
+have multiplied on questions, while the answers of the
+established teachers to them have been growing every
+day more and more incredible. What other answers
+have there been? Of all the countless books which
+have appeared, there has been only one of enduring
+importance, in which an attempt is made to carry on
+the solution of the great problem. Job is given over
+into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes
+he does not fall. Taking the temptation of Job for his
+model, Goethe has similarly exposed his Faust to trial,
+and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero falls
+from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a
+seducer, a murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly
+his evil angel wherever he chooses to lead him; and
+yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits our sympathy.
+In spite of his weakness his heart is still true to his
+higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium
+of enjoyment, he always longs for something better, and
+he never can be brought to say of evil that it is good.
+And, therefore, after all, the devil is balked of his prey;
+in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he
+steeped himself remained to the last hateful to him,
+Faust is saved by the angels ... And this indeed,
+though Goethe has scarcely dealt with it satisfactorily,
+is a vast subject. It will be eagerly answered for the
+established belief, that such cases are its especial
+province. All men are sinners, and it possesses the
+blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless
+numbers of those characters so strangely mixed among
+us, in which the dark and the bright fibres cross like
+a meshwork; characters at one moment capable of
+acts of heroic nobleness, at another, hurried by
+temptation into actions which even common men may deplore,
+how many are there who have never availed themselves
+of the conditions of reconciliation as orthodoxy proffers
+them, and of such men what is to be said? It was
+said once of a sinner that to her "much was forgiven
+for she loved much." But this is language which
+theology has as little appropriated as the Jews could
+appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise
+the nobleness of the human heart. It has no balance
+in which to weigh the good against the evil; and when
+a great Burns, or a Mirabeau comes before it, it can
+but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and
+then, looking to the end, and finding its own terms
+not to have been complied with, it faintly mutters its
+anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and judge; and
+for the poor acts of struggling heroism, "Forasmuch as
+they were not done, &c., &c., it doubts not but they
+have the nature of sin." [See the Thirteenth Article.]
+
+Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe,
+but it cannot be said that he has resolved it; or at
+least that he has furnished others with a solution which
+may guide their judgment. In the writer of the Book
+of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which
+we bend as in the presence of a superior being. The
+orthodoxy against which he contended is not set aside
+or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only he sees
+more than it, and over it, and through it. But in
+Goethe, who needed it more, inasmuch as his problem
+was more delicate and difficult, the moral earnestness is
+not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel that in
+dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it;
+he looks on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely
+as more. Goethe's great powers are of another kind;
+and this particular question, though in appearance the
+primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary.
+In substance Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it
+is like Job, and describes rather the restlessness of a
+largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of
+the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge,
+pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them
+all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat,
+unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will
+probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy
+for it will scarcely be more clear under other circumstances
+than it is at present, and lies in the disposition
+of the heart, and not in any propositions which can
+be addressed to the understanding. For that other
+question how rightly to estimate a human being; what
+constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to
+distinguish, without either denying the good or making
+light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories.
+and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and
+injustice-that is a problem for us, for the solution of
+which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct,
+without any recognized guidance whatsoever.
+
+Nor is this the only problem which is in the same
+situation. There can scarcely be a more startling
+contrast between fact and theory, than the conditions under
+which practically positions of power and influence are
+distributed among us, the theory of human worth which
+the necessities of life oblige us to act upon and the
+theory which we believe that we believe. As we look
+around among our leading men, our statesmen, our
+legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of
+our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits
+the conduct of its best interests, profane and
+sacred, what do we see to be the principles which guide
+our selection? How entirely do they lie beside and
+beyond the negative tests? and how little respect do we
+pay to the breach of this or that commandment in comparison
+with ability? So wholly impossible is it to
+apply the received opinions on such matters to practice,
+to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls
+deadly sins, as really guilty of them, that it would
+almost seem we had fallen into a moral anarchy; that
+ability alone is what we regard, without any reference
+at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral
+disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of
+living men; it is worse than invidious to drag out of
+their graves men who have gone down into them with
+honour, to make a point for an argument. But we
+know, all of us, that among the best servants of our
+country, there have been, and there are many, whose
+lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative tests, and
+who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have
+repented of their sins according to recognized methods.
+
+Once more, among our daily or weekly confessions,
+which we are supposed to repeat as if we were all of us
+at all times in precisely the same moral condition, we
+are made to say that we have done those things which
+we ought not to have done, and to have left undone
+those things which we ought to have done. An earthly
+father to whom his children were day after day to
+make this acknowledgment would be apt to inquire
+whether they were trying to do better, whether at any
+rate they were endeavouring to learn; and if he were
+told that although they had made some faint attempts
+to understand the negative part of their duty, yet that
+of the positive part, of those things which they ought
+to do, they had no notions at all, and had no idea that
+they were under obligation to form any, he would come
+to rather strange conclusions about them. But really
+and truly, what practical notions of duty have we
+beyond that of abstaining from committing sins? Not
+to commit sin, we suppose, covers but a small part of
+what is expected of us. Through the entire tissue of
+our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop
+Butler tells us, for instance, that even of our time there
+is a portion which is ours, and a portion which is our
+neighbour's; and if we spend more of it on personal
+interests than our own share, we are stealing. This
+sounds strange doctrine; we prefer rather making vague
+acknowledgments, and shrink from pursuing them into
+detail. We say vaguely, that in all we do we should
+consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn
+us; for which among us cares to learn the way to do it.
+The devoir of a knight was understood in the courts of
+chivalry, the lives of heroic men, pagan and Christian,
+were once held up before the world as patterns
+of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are
+wanted more than ever, Protestantism unhappily stands
+with a drawn sword on the threshold of the inquiry,
+and tells us that it is impious. The law has been fulfilled
+for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness,
+and our business is to appropriate another's righteousness,
+and not, like Titans, to be scaling Heaven
+by profane efforts of our own. Protestants, we know
+very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a
+representation of their doctrines. But we know also,
+that unless men may feel a cheerful conviction that they
+can do right if they try, that they can purify themselves,
+can live noble and worthy lives, unless this is set before
+them as the thing which they are to do, and can succeed
+in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they
+know beforehand will end in failure, and if they may
+not live for God they will live for themselves.
+
+And all this while the whole complex frame of society
+is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the
+condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of
+it of its own free energy shall do what it ought. The
+penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible
+as those of sins committed; more terrible perhaps,
+because more palpable and sure. A lord of the land,
+or an employer of labour, supposes that he has no duty
+except to keep what he calls the commandments in his
+own person, to go to church, and to do what he will
+with his own,--and Irish famines follow, and trade
+strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look
+for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and
+there is but one remedy which will avail, that the thing
+which we call public opinion learn something of the
+meaning of human nobleness, and demand some approximation
+to it. As things are we have no idea of
+what a human being ought to be. After the first
+rudimental conditions we pass at once into meaningless
+generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our
+judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles;
+we respect money, we respect rank, we respect ability--
+character is as if it had no existence.
+
+In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore,
+in which so many of us at present are agreed to believe,
+which is, indeed, the common meeting point of
+all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is
+with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in
+so large a matter. Progress there is in knowledge;
+and science has enabled the number of human
+beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely
+multiplied. But this is but a small triumph
+if the ratio of the good and bad, the wise and the
+foolish, the full and the hungry remains unaffected.
+And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude
+out of our material splendour an advance of the race.
+One fruit only our mother earth offers up with pride
+to her maker--her human children made noble by their
+life upon her; and how wildly on such matters we now
+are wandering let this one instance serve to show. At
+the moment at which we write, a series of letters are
+appearing in the Times newspaper, letters evidently of
+a man of ability, and endorsed in large type by the
+authorities of Printing House Square, advocating the
+establishment of a free Greek state with its centre at
+Constantinople, on the ground that the Greek character
+has at last achieved the qualities essential for the
+formation of a great people, and that endued as it is with
+the practical commercial spirit, and taking everywhere
+rational views of life, there is no fear of a repetition
+from it of the follies of the age of Pericles. We should
+rather think there was not: and yet the writer speaks
+without any appearance of irony, and is saying what
+he obviously means.
+
+In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge
+of the outward world, and progress in material
+wealth. This last, for the present, creates, perhaps,
+more evils than it relieves; but suppose this difficulty
+solved, suppose the wealth distributed, and every
+peasant living like a peer--what then? If this is all,
+one noble soul outweighs the whole of it. Let us follow
+knowledge to the outer circle of the universe, the eye
+will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.
+Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as
+many aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being
+of mankind is not advanced a single step. Knowledge
+is power, and wealth is power; and harnessed, as in
+Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided
+by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the
+stars. But left to their own guidance, or reined by a
+fool's hand, they may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's
+end, and set a world on fire. One real service, and
+perhaps only one, knowledge alone and by itself will
+do for us--it can explode existing superstitions. Everything
+has its appointed time, superstition like the rest;
+and theologies, that they may not overlive the period
+in which they can be of advantage to mankind, are
+condemned, by the conditions of their being, to weave
+a body for themselves out of the ideas of the age
+of their birth; ideas which, by the advance of knowledge,
+are seen to be imperfect or false. We cannot
+any longer be told that there must be four inspired
+gospels--neither more nor less--because there are
+four winds and four elements. The chemists now
+count some sixty elements, ultimately, as some of
+them think, reducible into one; and the gospel, like
+the wind, may blow from every point under heaven.
+But effectual to destroy old superstitions, whether
+it is equally successful in preventing others from
+growing in their place, is less certain and obvious..
+In these days of table-turnings, mesmerisms, spirit-
+rappings, odyle fluids, and millenarian pamphlets selling
+80,000 copies among our best-educated classes, we
+must be allowed to doubt.
+
+Our one efficient political science hinges on selfinterest,
+and the uniform action of motives among the
+masses of mankind--of selfish motives reducible to
+system. Such philosophies and such sciences would
+but poorly explain the rise of Christianity, of
+Mahometanism, or of the Reformation. They belong to ages
+of comparative poverty of heart, when the desires of
+men are limited to material things; when men are
+contented to labour, and eat the fruit of their labour, and
+then lie down and die. While such symptoms remain
+among us, our faith in progress may remain unshaken;
+but it will be a faith which, as of old, is the substance
+of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
+____
+
+THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS
+
+If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors
+had been completed, it would have contained the
+histories of 25,000 saints. So many the catholic
+church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals; as
+men, who had not only done her honour by the
+eminence of their sanctity, but who had received while
+on earth an openly divine recognition of it in gifts of
+supernatural power. And this vast number is but a
+selection; the editors chose only out of the mass before
+them what was most noteworthy and trustworthy, and
+what was of catholic rather than of national interest.
+It is no more than a fraction of that singular mythology
+which for so many ages delighted the Christian world,
+which is still held in external reverence among the
+Romanists, and of which the modern historians,
+provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire
+absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish
+between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a
+reasonable word. Of the attempt in our own day to
+revive an interest in them we shall say little in this
+place. They have no form or beauty to give them
+attraction in themselves; and for their human interest,
+the broad atmosphere of the world suited ill with these
+delicate plants which had grown up under the shadow
+of the convent wall; they were exotics, not from
+another climate, but from another age; the breath of
+scorn fell on them, and having no root in the hearts
+and beliefs of men any more, but only in the
+sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank. And
+yet, in their place as historical phenomena they are as
+remarkable as any of the pagan mythologies; to the
+full as remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length
+and firmness of hold they once exercised on the
+conviction of mankind is to pass for anything in the
+estimate--and to ourselves they have a near and
+peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the
+catholic faith.
+
+Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from
+ridicule; their extravagancies, even the most grotesque
+of them, can be now seen to have their root in an idea,
+often a deep one, representing features of natural history
+or of metaphysical speculation--and we do not laugh
+at them any more. In their origin, they were the
+consecration of the first-fruits of knowledge; the
+expression of a real reverential belief. Then time did its
+work on them; knowledge grew and they could not
+grow; they became monstrous and mischievous, and
+were driven out by Christianity with scorn and indignation.
+But it is with human institutions, as it is with
+men themselves; we are tender with the dead when
+their power to hurt us has passed away; and as Paganism
+can never more be dangerous, we have been able to
+command a calmer attitude towards it, and to detect
+under its most repulsive features sufficient latent
+elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even
+in their darkest aberrations men are never wholly given
+over to falsehood and absurdity. When philosophy has
+done for mediaeval mythology what it has done for
+Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find in it at least
+as deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life,
+and we shall find also a moral element there which at
+their best they never had. The lives of the saints
+are always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful;
+yet, as Goethe observed, if without beauty they are
+always good.
+
+And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves
+on its magnitude. The Bollandists were restricted on
+many sides. They took only what was in Latin--while
+every country in Europe had its own home-growth in its
+own language--and thus many of the most characteristic
+of the lives are not to be found at all in their collection.
+And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed
+in all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of
+various shorter lives which had grown up in different
+localities out of popular tradition; so that many of their
+longer productions have an elaborate literary character,
+with an appearance of artifice which, till we know how
+they came into existence, might blind us to the vast
+width and variety of the traditionary sources from which
+they are drawn. In the twelfth century there were
+sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that in a
+country where every parish had its own special saint and
+special legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have
+contained (Mr. Gibbon says must have contained) at
+least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To severe
+criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St.
+Patrick, appears problematical. But at least there is
+the historical fact, about which admits of no mistake,
+that they did grow up in some way or other, that they
+were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read; that
+these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over
+the earth, wherever the catholic faith was preached,
+stories like these sprang out of the heart of the people,
+and grew and shadowed over the entire believing mind
+of the catholic world. Wherever church was founded,
+or soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of
+those who had died in the faith; wherever the sweet
+bells of convent or of monastery were heard in the
+evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and
+remembrance of God, there rested the memory of some
+apostle who had laid the first stone, there was the
+sepulchre of some martyr whose relics reposed beneath
+the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for
+his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent
+self-chosen austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer
+and penance, on which the angels were believed to have
+ascended and descended. It is not a phenomenon of
+an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the history
+of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers
+of the faith passed out from their homes by that quiet
+Galilean lake, to go to and fro over the earth, and
+did their mighty work, and at last disappeared and
+were not any more seen, these sacred legends began
+to grow. Those who had once known them, who had
+drawn from their lips the blessed message of light and
+life, one and all would gather together what fragments
+they could find of their stories. Rumours blew in from
+all the winds. They had been seen here, had been
+seen there, in the farthest corners of the earth, preaching,
+contending, suffering, prevailing. Affection did not
+stay to scrutinize. As when some member of a family
+among ourselves is absent in some far place from which
+sure news of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he
+has been in the army, on some dangerous expedition,
+or at sea, or anywhere where real or imaginary dangers
+stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us
+altogether--fallen perhaps in battle--and when the story
+of his end can be collected but fitfully from strangers
+who only knew his name, but had heard him nobly
+spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at; reports,
+the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference,
+are to love strong grounds of confidence, and "trifles
+light as air" establish themselves as certainties;--so,
+in those first Christian communities, travellers came
+through from east and west; legions on the march, or
+caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been
+in Rome and seen Peter disputing with Simon Magus;
+another in India, where he had heard St. Thomas
+preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him
+from the wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as
+he said, from a thorn tree, the seed of which St. Joseph
+had sown there, and which had grown to its full size in
+a single night, making merchandize of the precious
+relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the
+legends grew, and were treasured up, and loved, and
+trusted; and alas! all which we have been able to do
+with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow
+moral on the impostures and credulities of the early
+catholic. An atheist could not wish us to say more;
+if we can really believe that the Christian church was
+made over, in its very cradle to lies and to the father of
+lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to
+say, till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself
+with any faith which after such an admission we may
+profess to entertain. For as this spirit began in the
+first age in which the church began to have a history;
+so it continued so long as the church as an integral
+body retained its vitality; and only died out in the
+degeneracy which preceded, and which brought on the
+Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories
+held their place, and rang on from age to age, from
+century to century; as the new faith widened its
+boundaries and numbered ever more and more great
+names of men and women who had fought and died for
+it, so long their histories living in the hearts of those for
+whom they laboured, laid hold of them and filled them,
+and the devout imagination, possessed with what was
+often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out
+into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we
+try them by any historical canon, we have to say that
+quite endless untruths grew in this way to be believed
+among men; and not believed only, but held sacred,
+passionately and devotedly; not filling the history
+books only, not only serving to amuse and edify the
+refectory, or to furnish matter for meditation in the
+cell, but claiming days for themselves of special
+remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers,
+forming the spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of
+millions of human souls.
+
+From the hard barren standing ground of the fact
+idolater, what a strange sight must be that still mountain
+peak on the wild west Irish shore, where for more
+than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved chip
+of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the
+presence long ago there of the Irish apostle; and in the
+sharp crystals of the trap rock a path has been worn
+smooth by the bare feet and bleeding knees of the
+pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their
+painful way along it as they have done for a thousand
+years. Doubtless the "Lives of the Saints" are full of
+lies. Are then none in the Iliad? in the legends
+of AEneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of
+Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of
+the Cid or of Siegfried? We say nothing of the lies
+in these, but why? Oh, it will be said, but they are
+fictions, they were never supposed to be true. But
+they were supposed to be true, to the full as true as the
+Legenda Aurea. Oh then, they are poetry; and besides,
+they have nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is
+it; they have nothing to do with Christianity. It has
+grown such a solemn business with us, and we bring
+such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive
+to be at all naturally admissible such a light companion
+as the imagination. The distinction between secular
+and religious has been extended even to the faculties;
+and we cannot tolerate in others the fulness and freedom
+which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it has
+been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found
+themselves off the recognized ground of Romance and
+Paganism, and they failed to see the same principles
+at work, though at work with new materials. In the
+records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often
+insisted on that two kinds of truth run for ever side by
+side, or rather, crossing in and out with each other, form
+the warp and the woof of the coloured web which we
+call history. The one, the literal and external truths
+corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered
+laws of fact: the other, the truth of feeling and of
+thought, which embody themselves either in distorted
+pictures of the external, or in some entirely new creation;
+sometimes moulding and shaping real history, sometimes
+taking the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or
+popular legend; sometimes appearing as recognized
+fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It is
+useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and
+falsehood. We are stating a fact, not a theory, and if it
+makes truth and falsehood difficult to distinguish, that
+is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is only false, when
+it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction? but
+when it is--to law. To try it by its correspondence to
+the real is wretched pedantry; we create as nature
+creates, by the force which is in us, which refuses to
+be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are only false
+when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our
+inventions are fact, when we substitute truths of one kind
+for truths of another; when we substitute,--and again we
+must say when we intentionally substitute;--whenever
+persons, and whenever facts seize strongly hold of the
+imagination, (and of course when there is anything
+remarkable in them they must and will do so,) invention
+glides into the images as they form in us; it must, as it
+ever has, from the first legends of a cosmogony, to the
+written life of the great man who died last year or century,
+or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot relate
+facts as they are, they must first pass through ourselves,
+and we are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing
+in the transit. The great outlines alone lie around us
+as imperative and constraining; the detail we each fill
+up variously according to the turn of our sympathies,
+the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of
+things, and therefore it may be said that the only
+literally true history possible, is the history which mind
+has left of itself in all the changes through which it has
+passed.
+
+Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious
+as Surius, and Suetonius was most laborious
+and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus and Pliny;
+Suetonius gives us prodigies, when Surius has miracles,
+but that is all the difference; each follows the form of
+the supernatural which belonged to the genius of his
+age. Plutarch writes a life of Lycurgus with details of
+his childhood, and of the trials and vicissitudes of his
+age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as
+questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of
+England.
+
+No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes.
+Sympathies and antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice,
+and indifference is impossible. Love is blind,
+and so is every other passion; love believes eagerly what
+it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it
+dwells on what is beautiful, while dislike sees a tarnish
+on what is brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do
+we believe that all this is a disease of unenlightened
+times, and that in our strong sunlight only truth can
+get received: then let us contrast the portrait for
+instance of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free
+Trade Hall, at Manchester, at the county meeting, and
+in the Oxford Common Room. It is not so. Faithful
+and literal history is possible only to an impassive spirit;
+it is impossible to man, until perfect knowledge and
+perfect faith in God shall enable him to see and endure
+every fact in its reality; until perfect love shall kindle
+in him under its touch the one just emotion which
+is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.
+
+How far we are in these days from approximating
+to such a combination we need not here insist. Criticism
+in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems to have
+accomplished great intellectual triumphs: and in
+Germany and France and among ourselves we have our
+new schools of the philosophy of history; yet their real
+successes have hitherto only been destructive; when
+philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its
+own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work
+without a theory, and what is a theory but an imperfect
+generalization caught up by a predisposition? what
+is Comte's great division of the eras, but a theory, and
+facts but as day in his hands which he can mould to
+illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be,
+let his theory be what it will. Intellect can destroy but
+it cannot make alive again,--call in the creative faculties,
+call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have living
+figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which
+ever lived before. Alas, the high faith in which Love
+and Intellect can alone unite in their fulness, has not
+yet found utterance in modern historians.
+
+The greatest man who has as yet given himself to
+the recording of human affairs is, beyond question,
+Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a serene calmness
+of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling; he
+took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may
+have been Republican, but he has left no sign whether
+he was either: he appears to have sifted facts with
+scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn,
+his hatred, according only to individual merit, and these
+are rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of
+his portraits than expressed in words by himself. Yet
+such a power of seeing into things was only possible to
+him, because there was no party left with which he
+could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in
+Rome through which he could feel; the spirit of Rome,
+the spirit of life had gone away to seek other forms, and
+the world of Tacitus was a heap of decaying institutions;
+a stage where men and women, as they themselves were
+individually base or noble, played over their
+little parts. Life indeed was come into the world, was
+working in it, and silently shaping the old dead corpse
+into fresh and beautiful being; Tacitus alludes to it
+once only in one brief scornful chapter; and the most
+poorly gifted of those forlorn biographers whose
+unreasoning credulity was piling up the legends of St. Mary
+and the Apostles which now drive the ecclesiastical
+historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and
+faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among
+mankind, than the keenest and gravest intellect which
+ever set itself to contemplate them.
+
+And now having in some degree cleared the ground
+of difficulties, let us go back to the Lives of the Saints.
+If Bede tells us lies about St. Cuthbert, we will disbelieve
+his stories, but we will not call Bede a liar, even
+though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has
+set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the
+clearest evidence. We are driven to no such alternative;
+our canons of criticism are different from Bede's, and
+so are our notions of probability. Bede would expect
+a priori, and would therefore consider as sufficiently
+attested by a consent of popular tradition, what the
+oaths of living witnesses would fail to make credible to
+a modern English jury. We will call Bede a liar only
+if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert, as a
+picture of a life which he considered admirable and
+excellent, as one after which he was endeavouring to
+model his own, and which he held up as a pattern of
+imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it
+admirable at all, when he was making no effort at the
+austerities which he was lauding. The histories of the
+Saints are written as ideals of a Christian life; they
+have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and
+straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they
+are nothing. For fourteen centuries the religious mind
+of the catholic world threw them out as its form of
+hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of human
+life which each Christian within his own limits was
+endeavouring to realize. The first martyrs and
+confessors were to those poor monks what the first Dorian
+conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what
+Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were
+wherever Homer was sung or read; or in more modern
+times what Turpin was in the court of Charlemagne or
+the Knights of the Round Table in the halls of the
+Norman castles. This is what they were; and the
+result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As
+with the battle heroes too, the inspiration lies in the
+universal idea; the varieties of character (with here and
+there an exception) are slight and unimportant; as
+examples they were for universal human imitation.
+Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of
+chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain or Antony in
+the desert are equal models of patient austerity. The
+knights fight with giants, enchanters, robbers, unknightly
+nobles, or furious wild beasts; the Christians fight with
+the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight leaves
+the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint
+in quest of penance, and on the bare rocks or in
+desolate wildernesses subdues the devil in his flesh with
+prayers and sufferings, and so alien is it all to the whole
+thought and system of the modern Christian, that he
+either rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures,
+or receives them with disdainful wonder, as one
+more shameful form of superstition with which human
+nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.
+
+Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of
+monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that
+there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about
+it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not
+literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men
+did for many centuries lead the sort of life which they
+are said to have led. We have got a notion that the
+friars were a snug, comfortable set, after all; and the
+life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern
+university, where the old monks' language and affectation
+of unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist
+with as large a mass of bodily enjoyment as man's
+nature can well appropriate; and very likely this was
+the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen
+in the fifteenth century. It had begun to be, and it
+was a symptom of a very rapid disorder in them,
+promptly terminating in dissolution; but long, long ages
+lay behind the fifteenth century, in which wisely or
+foolishly these old monks and hermits did make themselves
+a very hard life of it; and the legend only exceeded
+the reality, in being a very slightly idealized
+portrait of it. We are not speaking of the miracles; that
+is a wholly different question. When men knew little
+of the order of nature, whatever came to pass without
+an obvious cause was at once set down to influences
+beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were
+witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad
+powers, of course the especial servants of God would
+not be left without graces to outmatch and overcome
+the devil. And there were many other reasons why the
+saints should work miracles. They had done so under
+the old dispensation, and there was no obvious reason
+why Christians should be worse off than Jews. And
+again, although it be true, in the modern phrase, which
+is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest
+natural is the highest supernatural, it is not everybody
+that is able to see that; natural facts permit us to be
+so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of
+commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express,
+there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But
+the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they
+so. Men did not become saints by working miracles,
+but they worked miracles because they had become
+saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives
+lay in the means which they had used to make themselves
+what they were: and as we said, in this part of
+the business there is unquestionable basis of truth--
+scarcely even exaggeration. We have documentary evidence,
+which has been passed through the sharp ordeal
+of party hatred, of the way some men (and those,
+men of vast mind and vast influence in their day, not
+mere ignorant fanatics,) conducted themselves, where
+myth has no room to enter. We know something of
+the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket, and other uneasy
+penances of his; and there was another poor monk,
+whose asceticism imagination could not easily outrun:
+that was he who, when the earth's mighty ones were
+banded together to crush him under their armed heels,
+spoke but one little word; and it fell among them like
+the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their hands
+against each other, and the armies melted away; and
+the proudest monarch of the earth lay at that monk's
+threshold three winter nights in the scanty clothing of
+penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or again,
+to take a fairer figure: there is a poem extant, the
+genuineness of which we believe has not been challenged,
+composed by Columbkill, commonly called St.
+Columba. He was a hermit in Aran, a rocky island in
+the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was
+summoned, we do not know how, but in a manner
+which appeared to him to be a divine call, to go away
+and be bishop of Iona. The poem is a "Farewell to
+Aran," which he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us
+see something of a hermit's life there. "Farewell," he
+begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), "a long
+farewell to thee, Aran of my heart. Paradise is with
+thee, the garden of God within the sound of thy bells.
+The angels love Aran. Each day an angel comes there
+to join in its services." And then he goes on to
+describe his "dear cell," and the holy happy hours
+which he had spent there, "with the wind whistling
+through the loose stones, and the sea spray hanging on
+his hair." Aran is no better than a wild rock. It is
+strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of
+the old hermitages; and at their best they could have
+been but such places as sheep would huddle under in
+a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet which would
+pierce through to them.
+
+Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there
+are silent witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same
+touching story. Whoever loiters among the ruins of a
+monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters,
+rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and
+wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of
+pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp
+keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual
+ooze: for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through
+which the cold and the wind find as free an access as
+the light. Such as they are, a well-kept dog would
+object to accept a night's lodging in them; and if they
+had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic tongues
+would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger
+perhaps supposes that they were the very dungeons of
+which he has heard such terrible things. He asks his
+guide, and his guide tells him they were the monks'
+dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that
+dripping roof above them, was the self-chosen home of
+those poor men. Through winter frost, through rain
+and storm, through summer sunshine, generation after
+generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at
+last lay down and died.
+
+It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and
+it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it
+would have been mischievous, to revive a devotional
+interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have
+produced but one more unreality in an age already too full
+of such. No one supposes we should have set to work
+to live as they lived; that any man, however earnest in
+his religion, would have gone looking for earth floors
+and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he
+could get anything better. Either we are wiser, or more
+humane, or more self-indulgent; at any rate we are
+something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an
+impassable gulf which this age or this epoch will not see
+bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists,
+however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected,
+and were endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in
+our educational system; a very serious blank indeed,
+and one which, somehow, we must contrive to get filled
+if the education of character is ever to be more than a
+name with us. To try and teach people how to live
+without giving them examples in which our rules are
+illustrated, is like teaching them to draw by the rules of
+perspective, and of light and shade, without designs to
+study them in; or to write verse by the laws of rhyme
+and metre without song or poem in which rhyme and
+metre are seen in their effects. It is a principle
+which we have forgotten, and it is one which the old
+Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they
+set out with saying to themselves "we must have
+examples, we must have ideals;" very likely they never
+thought about it at all; love for their holy men, and a
+thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and
+love unconsciously working gave them the best for
+which they could have wished. The boy at school at
+the monastery, the young monk disciplining himself as
+yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had
+devoted himself, the old halting on toward the close of
+his pilgrimage, all of them had before their eyes, in the
+legend of the patron saint, a personal realization of all
+they were trying after; leading them on, beckoning to
+them, and pointing, as they stumbled among their
+difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had
+left, as he had trod that hard path before them. It was
+as if the church was for ever saying to them:--"You
+have doubts and fears, and trials and temptations
+outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and
+feel the burden of your sin. Here was one who, like
+you, in this very spat, under the same sky, treading the
+same soil, among the same hills and woods and rocks
+and riven, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned
+like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did
+penance, and washed out his sins; he fought the fight,
+he vanquished the evil one, he triumphed, and now he
+reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same ground
+which yields you your food, once supplied him; he
+breathed and lived, and felt, and died here; and now,
+from his throne in the sky, he is still looking down
+lovingly on his children, making intercession for you
+that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by
+he may himself offer you at God's throne as his own."
+It is impossible to measure the influence which a
+personal reality of this kind must have exercised on the
+mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through
+a life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract
+excellences to strain after; all is distinct, personal,
+palpable. It is no dream. The saint's bones are
+under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features
+undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have
+been opened and the body seen without mark or taint
+of decay. Such things have been, and the emaciation
+of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily
+some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of,
+or preached upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in
+light in the long chapel windows; and in the summer
+matins his figure, lighted up in splendour, gleams down
+on them as they pray, or streams in mysterious shadowy
+tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft
+celestial glory, and shining as he shines in heaven.
+Alas, alas, where is it all gone?
+
+We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide
+question, what possibly may have been the meaning of
+so large a portion of the human race and so many
+centuries of Christianity having been surrendered and
+seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary
+asceticism. If right once, then it is right now; if now
+worthless, then it could never have been more than
+worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on
+it were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given
+for that which is not bread. We supposed ourselves
+challenged recently for our facts. Here is an enormous
+fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred
+over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of
+superstition, of the twilight of the understanding, of
+barbarism, and of nursery credulity; it is matter for the
+philosophy of history, if the philosophy has yet been
+born which can deal with it; one of the solid,
+experienced facts in the story of mankind which must be
+accepted and considered with that respectful deference
+which all facts claim of their several sciences, and
+which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing
+it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy,
+to love. We must remember that the men who wrote
+these stories, and who practised these austerities, were
+the same men who composed our liturgies, who built
+our churches and our cathedrals--and the gothic cathedral
+is, perhaps, on the whole, the most magnificent
+creation which the mind of man has as yet thrown out
+of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy
+of history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being
+certain progressive organizing laws in which the fretful
+lives of each of us are gathered into and subordinated in
+some larger unity. Thus age is linked on to age, as we
+are moving forward, with an horizon for ever expanding
+and advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of
+any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance,
+and definite forms of thought working through long
+historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast laws.
+--imply a distinct step in human progress; something
+previously unrealized is being lived out, and rooted into
+the heart of mankind. Nature never half does her
+work. She goes over it, and over it, to make assurance
+sure, and makes good her ground with wearying
+repetition. A single section of a short paper is but a
+small space to enter on so vast an enterprise, nevertheless,
+a few very general words shall be ventured as a
+suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may
+possibly have meant.
+
+First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to
+the world whatever form the spirit of the world assumes,
+the ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite;
+as one verges into one extreme the other will
+verge into the contrary. In those rough times the law
+was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong
+animal heart which guided it, were the excellences
+which the world rewarded, and monasticism, therefore,
+in its position of protest, would be the destruction and
+abnegation of the animal. The war hero in the
+battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis
+of the fleshly man, the saint in the desert of the
+spiritual. But this is slight, imperfect, and if true at all
+only partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not
+contradictories; they are the complements in the perfect
+character; and in the middle ages, as in all ages of
+genuine earnestness, interfused and penetrated each
+other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors;
+and those grand old figures which sleep cross-legged in
+the cathedral aisles were something higher than only
+one more form of the beast of prey. Monasticism
+represented something more positive than a protest against
+the world. We believe it to have been the realization
+of the infinite loveliness and beauty of personal purity.
+
+In the earlier civilization, the Greeks, however
+genuine their reverence for the gods, do not seem to
+have supposed any part of their duty to the gods to
+consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as
+was their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as
+beauty of form, with all their loftiness and their nobleness,
+with their ready love of moral excellence in some
+of its manifestations, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty
+and to home, they had little or no idea of what we
+mean by morality. With a few rare exceptions, pollution,
+too detestable to be even named among ourselves,
+was of familiar and daily occurrence among their
+greatest men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman;
+and was not supposed to be incompatible, and
+was not, in fact, incompatible with any of those especial
+excellences which we so admire in the Greeks.
+
+Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of
+the republic), there was a sufficiently austere morality.
+A public officer of state, whose business was to inquire
+into the private lives of the citizens, and to punish
+offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we
+have seen only once on this planet. There was never
+a people before, and there has been none since, with
+sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality
+is not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself.
+It is obedience to law, practised and valued, loved
+for what resulted from it, for the strength and rigid
+endurance which it gave, but not loved for itself. The
+Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and
+it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as
+the energy of the old spirit endured. But as soon as
+the energy grew slack, when the religion was no
+longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,
+and there was no more danger to face, and the world
+was at their feet, all was swept away as before a whirlwind;
+there was no loveliness in virtue to make it
+desired, and the Rome of the Censors presents, in its
+later age, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the
+coarsest animal desire, with means unlimited to gratify
+it. In Latin literature, as little as in the Greek, is
+there any sense of the beauty of purity. Moral essays
+on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the
+wise man whose passions and whose appetites are
+trained into obedience to reason. But this is no more
+than the philosophy of the old Roman life, which got
+itself expressed in words when men were tired of the
+reality; it involves no sense of sin. If sin could be
+indulged without weakening our self-command, or without
+hurting other people, Roman philosophy would have
+nothing to say against it.
+
+The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy;
+without speculating on the why, they felt that indulgence
+of animal passion did, in fact, pollute them,
+and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.
+Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces
+of the universe, giving the spirit to God, but declaring
+matter to be eternally and incurably evil; and looking
+forward to the time when the spirit should be emancipated
+from the body, as the beginning of, or as the
+return to, its proper existence, took no especial care
+what became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of
+flesh. If it sinned, sin was its element; it could
+not do other than sin; purity of conduct could not
+make the body clean, and no amount of bodily
+indulgence could shed a taint upon the spirit--a very
+comfortable doctrine, and one which, under various
+disguises, has appeared a good many times on the
+earth. But Christianity, shaking it all off, would
+present the body to God as a pure and holy sacrifice,
+as so much of the material world conquered from the
+appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode
+they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and
+scourgings, the penances and night-watchings; it was
+this which sent St. Anthony to the tombs and set
+Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,
+and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much
+as one corrupt thought.
+
+And they may have been absurd and extravagant;
+when the feeling is stronger than the judgment, men
+are very apt to be so. If, in the recoil from
+Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint
+thus purified had contracted supernatural virtue and
+could work miracles, they had not sufficiently attended
+to the facts, and so far are not unexceptionable witnesses
+to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and in
+virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage, we are lifted
+forward a mighty step which we can never again retrace.
+Personal purity is not the whole for which we have to
+care, it is but one feature in the ideal character of man.
+The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly
+all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us
+poor, mean, and emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is
+with science; generations of men have given themselves
+exclusively to single branches, which, when mastered,
+form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in
+life, so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years
+to make good a single step. Weary and tedious enough
+it seems when we cease to speak in large language, and
+remember the numbers of individual souls who have
+been at work at it; but who knows whereabouts we
+are in the duration of the race? Are we crawling out
+of the cradle, or are we tottering into the gave?
+In nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood?
+Who knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our
+steps when we have taken them, and thankfully to
+accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it is
+impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to
+any character which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth
+we require not greatness only, but goodness; and
+not that goodness only which begins and ends in conduct
+correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that
+keen pure feeling for it, which resides in a conscience
+as sensitive and susceptible as woman's modesty.
+
+So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this
+matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first
+furrow in the crust of a soil, which hitherto the
+historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.
+If they are conscientious enough not to trifle
+with the facts, as they look back on them from the
+easiness of modern Christianity which has ceased to
+demand any heavy effort of self-sacrifice, they either
+revile the superstition or pity the ignorance which made
+such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud
+in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders,
+they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of
+mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the
+papacy. For the inner life of all those millions of
+immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or
+bad success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross
+along their journey in this earth of ours, they set it by,
+pass it over, dismiss it out of history, with some poor
+common-place simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will
+not do. Mankind have not been so long on this planet
+altogether, that we can allow so large a chasm to be
+scooped out of their spiritual existence.
+
+We intended to leave our readers with something
+lighter than all this in the shape of literary criticism
+and a few specimen extracts; both of which must now,
+however, be necessarily brief--we are running out our
+space. Whoever is curious to study the lives of the
+saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than
+to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life
+when he can command an early one, for the genius in
+them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like riverwater,
+is most pure nearest to the fountain head. We
+are lucky in possessing several specimens of the mode
+of their growth in late and early lives of the same saints,
+and the process in all is similar. Out of the lives of
+St. Bride three are left; out of the sixty-six of
+St. Patrick, there are eight; the first of each belonging
+to the sixth century, the latest to the thirteenth. The
+first are in verse; they belong to a time when there
+was no one to write such things, and were popular in
+form and popular in their origin--the flow is easy, the
+style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to
+prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is
+ossified, and the exuberance of legendary creativeness
+we exchange for the hard dogmatic record of fact without
+reality, and fiction without grace. The marvellous
+in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the after
+miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of
+poets' metaphors for literal truth. There is often real,
+genial, human beauty in the old verse. The first two
+stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's Hymn are of high
+merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a
+translation:--
+
+"Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
+She floated on the waves of the world
+As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.
+
+Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
+In the far land of her captivity,
+Mourning for her child at home."
+
+What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning
+of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage.
+The poetical "Life of St. Patrick," too, is full of fine,
+wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a
+shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend,
+well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving
+a gigantic foot-print on a rock from which he
+sprang into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from
+some remarkable natural feature of the spot; but, as
+it is told here, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and
+it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the
+boy. But in the prose all is crystalline; the story
+is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a
+series of angelic visitations. And again, when Patrick
+is described, as the after apostle, raising the dead Celts
+to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force,
+and we have a long weary list of literal deaths and
+literal raisings. And so in many ways the freshness
+and individuality is lost with time. The larger saints
+swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits;
+chasms were supplied by an ever ready imagination;
+and, like the stock of good works laid up for
+general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready
+when any defect was to be supplied. So it was that,
+after the first impulse, the progressive fire of a saint
+rolled on like a snow-ball down a mountain-side, gathering
+up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,
+appropriate or inappropriate, sometimes real jewels of
+genuine old tradition, sometimes the debris of the old
+creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till
+at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in
+pieces on the Reformation.
+
+One more illustration--one which shall serve as evidence
+of what the really greatest, most vigorous, minds
+in the twelfth century could accept as possible or probable,
+and which they could relate (on what evidence we
+do not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember
+something of St. Artselm: both as a statesman and as
+a theologian, he was unquestionably the ablest man of
+his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which he
+tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint with
+thirty of his companions, was preaching within the
+frontiers of a lawless pagan prince; and, disregarding
+all orders to be quiet or to leave the country, continued
+to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the ears
+of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.
+Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers
+was sent, and the saint and his little band were decapitated.
+The scene of the execution was a wood, and the
+heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves
+and the wild birds.
+
+"But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in
+the church in the person of the holy Denis, was again
+wrought by divine providence to preserve the bodies of
+his saints from profanation. The trunk of Kieran rose
+from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and
+carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and
+afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of
+his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug
+graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried
+himself."
+
+It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming
+Anselm's authorship; and there is no reason why the
+authorship should not be his. Out of the heart come
+the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the
+intellect or the understanding. Men are not good or bad,
+noble or base--thank God for it!--as they judge well
+or ill of the probabilities of nature, but as they love
+God and hate the devil. And yet it is instructive.
+We have heard grave good men--men of intellect and
+influence--with all the advantages of modern science,
+learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm
+with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having
+fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of
+mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous)
+as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.
+
+"Mutato nomine de te
+Fabula narratur."
+
+We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and
+turn away and straightway forget what manner of men
+we are. The superstition of science scoffs at the
+superstition of faith.
+____
+
+THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES
+
+To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not
+difficult--it is impossible. Even what is passing in
+our presence we see but through a glass darkly. The
+mind as well as the eye adds something of its own,
+before an image, even of the clearest object, can be
+painted upon it,
+
+And in historical inquiries, the most instructed
+thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most
+illiterate. Those who know the most, approach least
+to agreement. The most careful investigations are
+diverging roads--the further men travel upon them, the
+greater the interval by which they are divided. In
+the eyes of David Hume, the history of the Saxon
+Princes is "the scuffling of kites and crows." Father
+Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate
+England by pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred
+confessors who were trained in her royal palaces for the
+Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm yawns
+between these two conceptions of the same era!
+Through what common term can the student pass from
+one into the other?
+
+Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The
+history of England scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay
+before the Revolution of the seventeenth century. To
+Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome
+from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr.
+Hallam's more temperate language softens, without
+concealing, a similar conclusion. These writers have all
+studied what they describe. Mr. Carlyle has studied the
+same subject with power at least equal to theirs, and to
+him the greatness of English character was waning with
+the dawn of English literature; the race of heroes was
+already failing. The era of action was yielding before
+the era of speech.
+
+All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated;
+we may have settled into some moderate via media,
+or have carved out our own ground on an original
+pattern; but if we are wise, the differences in other
+men's judgments will teach us to be diffident. The
+more distinctly we have made history bear witness
+in favour of our particular opinions, the more we
+have multiplied the chances against the truth of our
+own theory.
+
+Again, supposing that we have made a truce with
+"opinions," properly so called; supposing we have
+satisfied ourselves that it is idle to quarrel upon points
+on which good men differ, and that it is better to attend
+rather to what we certainly know; supposing that, either
+from superior wisdom, or from the conceit of superior
+wisdom, we have resolved that we will look for human
+perfection neither exclusively in the Old World nor
+exclusively in the New--neither among Catholics nor
+Protestants, among Whigs or Tories, heathens or
+Christians--that we have laid aside accidental differences
+and determined to recognize only moral distinctions, to
+love moral worth, and to hate moral evil, wherever we
+find them;--even supposing all this, we have not much
+improved our position--we cannot leap from our
+shadow.
+
+Eras, like individuals, differ from one another in
+the species of virtue which they encourage. In one
+age, we find the virtues of the warrior, in the next of
+the saint. The ascetic and the soldier in their turn
+disappear; an industrial era succeeds, bringing with it
+the virtues of common sense, of grace, and refinement.
+There is the virtue of energy and command, there is
+the virtue of humility and patient suffering. All these
+are different, and all are, or may be, of equal moral
+value; yet, from the constitution of our minds, we are
+so framed that we cannot equally appreciate all; we
+sympathize instinctively with the person who most
+have been especially cultivated. Further, if we leave
+out of sight these refinements, and content ourselves
+with the most popular conceptions of morality, there is
+this immeasurable difficulty--so great, yet so little
+considered,--that goodness is positive as well as negative,
+and consists in the active accomplishment of certain
+things which we are bound to do, as well as in the
+abstaining from things which we are bound not to do.
+And here the warp and woof vary in shade and pattern.
+Many a man, with the help of circumstances may pick
+his way clear through life, never having violated one
+prohibitive commandment, and yet at last be fit only
+for the place of the unprofitable servant--he may not
+have committed either sin or crime, yet never have felt
+the pulsation of a single unselfish emotion. Another,
+meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive
+nature into fault after fault, shall have been reckless,
+improvident, perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all
+for the kingdom of Heaven than the Pharisee--fitter,
+because against the catalogue of faults there could
+perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative
+generosity and self-forgetfulness--fitter, because to those
+who love much, much is forgiven. Fielding had no
+occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent coat, a traitor
+and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have
+coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of
+selfishness, afraid of offending the upper powers as he
+was afraid of offending Allworthy,--not from any love
+for what was good, but solely because it would be
+imprudent--because the pleasure to be gained was not
+worth the risk of consequences. Such a Blifil would
+have answered the novelist's purpose--he would still
+have been a worse man in the estimation of some of us
+than Tom Jones.
+
+So the truth is; but unfortunately it is only where
+accurate knowledge is stimulated by affection, that we
+are able to feel it. Persons who live beyond our own
+circle, and still more persons who have lived in another
+age, receive what is called justice, not charity; and
+justice is supposed to consist in due allotments of censure
+for each special act of misconduct, leaving merit
+unrecognized. There are many reasons for this harsh
+method of judging. We must decide of men by what
+we know, and it is easier to know faults than to know
+virtues. Faults are specific, easily described, easily
+appreciated, easily remembered. And again, there is,
+or may be, hypocrisy in virtue; but no one pretends to
+vice who is not vicious. The bad things which can be
+proved of a man we know to be genuine. He was a
+spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he fought
+a duel. These are blots positive, unless untrue, and
+when uncorrected tinge the whole character.
+
+This also is to be observed in historical criticism.
+All men feel a necessity of being on some terms with
+their conscience, at their own expense, or at another's.
+If they cannot part with their faults, they will at least
+call them by their right name when they meet with such
+faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of
+deeds of violence or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice
+of man to man, of great and extensive suffering, or any
+of those other misfortunes which the selfishness of men
+has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate the
+doers of such things, and the age which has permitted
+them to be done, with the full emphasis of virtuous
+indignation, while all the time they are themselves
+doing things which will be described, with no less
+justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous
+posterity.
+
+Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings
+of the poor in the days of serfdom and villanage;
+yet the records of the strikes of the last ten years, when
+told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less fertile
+in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under
+the Tudors and Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and
+the Irish plague of 1847, the last page of such horrors
+which has yet been turned over, is the most horrible
+of all We can conceive a description of England
+during the year which has just closed over us, true in
+all its details, containing no one statement which can
+be challenged, no single exaggeration which can be
+proved. And this description, if given without the
+correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why
+the Cities of the Plain were destroyed, and England
+was allowed to survive. The frauds of trusted men,
+high in power and high in supposed religion; the whole-sale
+poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food
+--nay, of almost everything exposed for sale--the cruel
+usage of women--children murdered for the burial fees
+--life and property insecure in open day in the open
+streets--splendour such as the world never saw before
+upon earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its
+walls--let all this be written down by an enemy, or
+let it be ascertained hereafter by the investigation of
+a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally
+have judged our forefathers, and few years will show
+darker in the English annals than the year which has
+so lately closed behind us. Yet we know, in the honesty
+of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be. Our
+future advocate, if we are so happy as to find one,
+may not be able to disprove a single article in the
+indictment--and yet we know that, as the world goes,
+he will be right if he marks the year with a white stroke
+--as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest
+was better than an average.
+
+Once more: our knowledge of any man is always
+inadequate--even of the unit which each of us calls
+himself; and the first condition under which we can
+know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something
+like ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter
+which shall open the secrets of his experience;
+and it often happens, even among our contemporaries,
+that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and
+the Italian may understand each other's speech, but
+the language of each other's ideas has still to be learnt.
+Our long failures in Ireland have risen from a radical
+incongruity of character which has divided the Celt
+from the Saxon. And again, in the same country,
+the Catholic will be a mystery to the Protestant, and the
+Protestant to the Catholic. Their intellects have been
+shaped in opposite moulds; they are like instruments
+which cannot be played in concert. In the same way,
+but in a far higher degree, we are divided from the
+generations which have preceded us in this planet--we
+try to comprehend a Pericles or a Caesar--an image rises
+before us which we seem to recognize as belonging to
+our common humanity. There is this feature which
+is familiar to us--and this--and this. We are full of
+hope; the lineaments, one by one, pass into clearness;
+when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a
+cloud--some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it
+utterly; the phantom which we have evoked dies away
+before our eyes, scornfully mocking our incapacity to
+master it.
+
+The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer
+to us than Greeks or Romans; and yet there is a large
+interval between the baron who fought at Barnet field,
+and his polished descendant at a modern levee. The
+scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment--the
+habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions--have utterly
+changed.
+
+In perusing modern histories, the present writer has
+been struck dumb with wonder at the facility with
+which men will fill in chasms in their information with
+conjecture; will guess at the motives which have
+prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all
+secrets of the past lay out on an open scroll before
+them. He is obliged to say for himself that, wherever
+he has been fortunate enough to discover authentic
+explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare
+indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his
+own or of any other modern writer, confirmed. The
+true motive has almost invariably been of a kind which
+no modern experience could have suggested.
+
+Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to
+an expression of opinion on a controverted question.
+They will serve, however, to indicate the limits within
+which the said opinion is supposed to be hazarded.
+And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical
+subject is the conclusion so clear that it can be
+enunciated in a definite form. The utmost which can
+be safely hazarded with history is to relate honestly
+ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial
+sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in
+which the story is arranged.
+
+Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time
+of their dissolution, were really in that condition of moral
+corruption which is laid to their charge in the Act of
+Parliament by which they were dissolved, is a point
+which it seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic,
+and indeed almost all English, writers who are not
+committed to an unfavourable opinion by the ultra-
+Protestantism of their doctrines--seem to have agreed
+of late years that the accusations, if not false, were
+enormously exaggerated. The dissolution, we are told,
+was a predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and
+when the reports and the letters of the visitors are
+quoted in justification of the Government, the discussion
+is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable
+witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious--
+in fact, as a suborned liar. Upon these terms the
+argument is easily disposed of; and if it were not that
+truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it would
+be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly
+dealt with. No evidence can affect convictions which
+have been arrived at without evidence--and why should
+we attempt a task which it is hopeless to accomplish?
+It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state
+of the surviving testimony from time to time, if it be
+only to sustain the links of the old traditions; and the
+present paper will contain one or two pictures of a
+peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those
+institutions, which have been lately met with chiefly
+among the unprinted Records. In anticipation of any
+possible charge of unfairness in judging from isolated
+instances, we disclaim simply all desire to judge--all
+wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained
+stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse
+enough to insist upon it, an open question whether
+the monasteries were more corrupt under Henry VIII.
+than they had been four hundred years earlier. The
+dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no
+reasonable person would desire that bodies of men
+should have been maintained for the only business of
+singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no
+longer believed. Our present desire is merely this--to
+satisfy ourselves whether the Government, in discharging
+a duty which could not be dispensed with, condescended
+to falsehood in seeking a vindication for
+themselves which they did not require; or whether
+they had cause really to believe the majority of the
+monastic bodies to be as they affirmed--whether, that
+is to say, there really were such cases either of flagrant
+immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and
+prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was
+pronounced against the system by the Parliament and
+the Privy Council.
+
+Secure in the supposed completeness with which
+Queen Mary's agents destroyed the Records of the
+visitation under her father, Roman-catholic writers have
+taken refuge in a disdainful denial; and the Anglicans,
+who for the most part (while contented to enjoy the
+fruits of the Reformation) detest the means by which
+it was brought about, have taken the same view.
+Bishop Latimer tells us that, when the Report of the
+visitors of the abbeys was read in the Commons
+House, there rose from all sides one long cry of "Down
+with them." But Bishop Latimer, in the opinion of
+High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we produce
+letters of the visitors themselves, we are told that
+they are the slanders prepared to justify a preconceived
+purpose of spoliation. No witness, it seems, will be
+admitted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless
+some enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess
+the crimes which made the Reformation necessary, the
+crimes themselves are to be regarded as unproved.
+This is a hard condition. We appeal to Wolsey.
+
+Wolsey commenced the suppression. Wolsey first
+made public the infamies which disgraced the Church;
+while, notwithstanding, he died the devoted servant of
+the Church. This evidence is surely admissible? But
+no: Wolsey, too, must be put out of court. Wolsey was
+a courtier and a timeserver. Wolsey was a tyrant's
+minion. Wolsey was--in short, we know not what
+Wolsey was--or what he was not. Who can put confidence
+in a charlatan? Behind the bulwarks of such
+objections, the champion of the abbeys may well believe
+himself secure.
+
+And yet, unreasonable though these demands may be,
+it happens, after all, that we are able partially to gratify
+them. It is strange that of all extant accusations
+against any one of the abbeys, the heaviest is from a
+quarter which even Lingard himself would scarcely call
+suspicious. No picture left us by Henry's visitors
+surpasses, even if it equals, a description of the condition
+of the Abbey of St. Albans, in the last quarter of
+the fifteenth century, drawn by Morton, Henry VII.'s
+Minister, Cardinal Archbishop, Legate of the Apostolic
+See, in a letter addressed by him to the Abbot of St.
+Albans himself.
+
+We must request our reader's special attention for
+the next two pages.
+
+In the year 1489, Pope Innocent VIII.--moved with
+the enormous stories which reached his ear of the
+corruption of the houses of religion in England--granted a
+commission to the Archbishop of Canterbury to make
+inquiries whether these stories were true, and to proceed
+to correct and reform as might seem good to him. The
+regular clergy were exempt from episcopal visitation,
+except under especial directions from Rome. The
+occasion had appeared so serious as to make extraordinary
+interference necessary.
+
+On the receipt of the Papal commission, Cardinal
+Morton, among other letters, wrote the following:--
+
+"John, by Divine permission. Archbishop of Canterbury,
+Primate of all England, Legate of the Apostolic
+See, to William, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Albans,
+greeting.
+
+"We have received certain letters under lead, the copies
+whereof we herewith send you, from our most holy Lord
+and Father in Christ, Innocent, by Divine Providence
+Pope, the eighth of that name. We therefore, John, the
+Archbishop, the visitor, reformer, inquisitor, and judge
+therein mentioned, in reverence for the Apostolic See,
+have taken upon ourselves the burden of enforcing the
+said commission; and have determined that we will
+proceed by, and according to, the full force, tenour, and
+effect of the same.
+
+"And it has come to our ears, being at once publicly
+notorious and brought before us upon the testimony of
+many witnesses worthy of credit, that you, the abbot
+afore-mentioned, have been of long time noted and
+diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of simony, of
+usury, of dilapidation and waste of the goods, revenues,
+and possessions of the said monastery, and of certain
+other enormous crimes and excesses hereafter written.
+In the rule, custody, and administration of the goods,
+spiritual and temporal, of the said monastery, you are
+so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that whereas the
+said monastery was of old times founded and endowed
+by the pious devotion of illustrious princes of famous
+memory, heretofore kings of this land, the most noble
+progenitors of our most serene Lord and King
+that now is, in order that true religion might flourish
+there, that the name of the Most High, in whose honour
+and glory it was instituted, might be duly celebrated
+there;
+
+"And whereas, in days heretofore the regular observance
+of the said rule was greatly regarded, and hospitality
+was diligently kept;
+
+"Nevertheless, for no little time, during which you
+have presided in the same monastery, you and certain
+of your fellow monks and brethren (whose blood, it is
+feared, through your neglect, a severe Judge will require
+at your hand) have relaxed the measure and form of
+religious life; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke of
+contemplation, and all regular observances; hospitality,
+alms, and those other offices of piety which of old time
+were exercised and ministered therein have decreased,
+and by your faults, your carelessness, your neglect and
+deed, do daily decrease more and more, and cease
+to be regarded--the pious vows of the founders are
+defrauded of their just intent; the antient rule of your
+order is deserted; and not a few of your fellow monks
+and brethren, as we most deeply grieve to learn, giving
+themselves over to a reprobate mind, laying aside the
+fear of God, do lead only a life of lasciviousness--nay,
+as is horrible to relate, be not afraid to defile the holy
+places, even the very churches of God, by infamous
+intercourse with nuns, &c.
+
+"You yourself, moreover, among other grave enormities
+and abominable crimes whereof you are guilty, and for
+which you are noted and diffamed, have, in the first
+place, admitted a certain married woman, named
+Elena Germyn, who has separated herself without just
+cause from her husband, and for some time past has
+lived in adultery with another man, to be a nun or sister
+in the house or Priory of Pray, lying, as you pretend,
+within your jurisdiction. You have next appointed the
+same woman to be prioress of the said house,
+notwithstanding that her said husband was living at the time,
+and is still alive. And finally, Father Thomas Sudbury,
+one of your brother monks, publicly, notoriously,
+and without interference or punishment from you, has
+associated, and still associates, with this woman as an
+adulterer with his harlot.
+
+"Moreover, divers other of your brethren and fellow
+monks have resorted, and do resort, continually to her
+and other women at the same place, as to a public
+brothel or receiving house, and have received no
+correction therefore.
+
+"Nor is Pray the only house into which you have
+introduced disorder. At the nunnery of Sapwell, which
+you also contend to be under your jurisdiction, you
+change the prioresses and superiors again and again at
+your own will and caprice. Here, as well as at Pray,
+you depose those who are good and religious; you
+promote to the highest dignities the worthless and the
+vicious. The duties of the order are cast aside, virtue
+is neglected; and by these means so much cost and
+extravagance has been caused, that to provide means for
+your indulgence you have introduced certain of your
+brethren to preside in their houses under the name
+of guardians, when in fact they are no guardians, but
+thieves and notorious villains; and with their help you
+have caused and permitted the goods of the same priories
+to be dispensed, or to speak more truly to be dissipated,
+in the above-described corruptions and other enormous
+and accursed offences. Those places once religious are
+rendered and reputed as it were profane and impious;
+and by your own and your creatures' conduct are so
+impoverished as to be reduced to the verge of ruin.
+
+"In like manner, also, you have dealt with certain other
+cells of monks, which you say are subject to you, even
+within the monastery of the glorious proto-martyr, Alban
+himself. You have dilapidated the common property;
+you have made away with the jewels; the copses, the
+woods, the underwood, almost all the oaks and other
+forest trees, to the value of eight thousand marks and
+more, you have made to be cut down without distinction,
+and they have by you been sold and alienated. The
+brethren of the abbey, some of whom, as is reported,
+are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect
+the service of God altogether. They live with harlots
+and mistresses publicly and continuously, within the
+precincts of the monastery and without. Some of them,
+who are covetous of honour and promotion, and desirous
+therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and
+made away with the chalices and other jewels of the
+church. They have even sacrilegiously extracted the
+precious stones from the very shrine of St. Alban; and
+you have not punished these men, but have rather
+knowingly supported and maintained them. If any of
+your brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be
+wise and virtuous, these you straightway depress and
+hold in hatred ... You ..."
+
+But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming
+document. It pursues its way through mire and filth
+to its most lame and impotent conclusion. After all
+this, the abbot was not deposed; he was invited merely
+to reconsider his doings, and if possible amend them.
+Such was Church discipline, even under an extraordinary
+commission from Rome. But the most incorrigible
+Anglican will scarcely question the truth of a picture
+drawn by such a hand; and it must be added that this
+one unexceptionable indictment lends at once assured
+credibility to the reports which were presented fifty
+years later, on the general visitation. There is no
+longer room for the presumptive objection that charges
+so revolting could not be true. We see that in their
+worst form they could be true, and the evidence of
+Legh and Leghton, of Rice and Bedyll, as it remains
+in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in detail,
+or else it must be accepted as correct. We cannot
+dream that Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was
+misled by false information. St. Albans was no obscure
+priory in a remote and thinly-peopled county. The
+Abbot of St. Albans was a peer of the realm, taking
+precedence of bishops, living in the full glare of notoriety,
+within a few miles of London. The archbishop had
+ample means of ascertaining the truth; and, we may be
+sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he
+left on record so tremendous an accusation. This story
+is true--as true as it is piteous. We will pause a
+moment over it before we pass from this, once more to
+ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will
+persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors
+than they had been in their origin, under the Saxons,
+or under the first Norman and Plantagenet kings. No,
+indeed, it was not so. The abbeys which towered in
+the midst of the English towns, the houses clustered at
+their feet like subjects round some majestic queen, were
+images indeed of the civil supremacy which the Church
+of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself; but they
+were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which
+had won the homage of grateful and admiring nations.
+
+The heavenly graces had once descended upon the
+monastic orders, making them ministers of mercy,
+patterns of celestial life, breathing witnesses of the
+power of the Spirit in renewing and sanctifying the
+heart. And then it was that art and wealth and genius
+poured out their treasures to raise fitting tabernacles for
+the dwelling of so divine a soul. Alike in the village
+and the city, amongst the unadorned walls and lowly
+roofs which closed in the humble dwellings of the laity,
+the majestic houses of the Father of mankind and of
+his especial servants rose up in sovereign beauty. And
+ever at the sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring out relief
+from a never-failing store to the poor and the suffering;
+ever within the sacred aisles the voices of holy men
+were pealing heavenwards in intercession for the sins of
+mankind; and such blessed influences were thought to
+exhale around those mysterious precincts, that even the
+poor outcasts of society--the debtor, the felon, and the
+outlaw--gathered round the walls as the sick men
+sought the shadow of the apostle, and lay there sheltered
+from the avenging hand, till their sins were washed from
+off their souls. The abbeys of the middle ages floated
+through the storms of war and conquest, like the ark
+upon the waves of the flood, in the midst of violence
+remaining inviolate, through the awful reverence which
+surrounded them. The abbeys, as Henry's visitors
+found them, were as little like what they once had been,
+as the living man in the pride of his growth is like the
+corpse which the earth makes haste to hide for ever.
+
+The official letters which reveal the condition into
+which the monastic establishments had degenerated, are
+chiefly in the Cotton Library, and a large number of
+them have been published by the Camden Society.
+Besides these, however, there are in the Rolls House
+many other documents which confirm and complete the
+statements of the writers of those letters. There is a
+part of what seems to have been a digest of the Black
+Book--an epitome of iniquities, under the title of the
+Compendium Compertorum. There are also reports
+from private persons, private entreaties for inquiry,
+depositions of monks in official examinations, and other
+similar papers, which, in many instances, are too offensive
+to be produced, and may rest in obscurity, unless
+contentious persons compel us to bring them forward.
+Some of these, however, throw curious light on the
+habits of the time, and on the collateral disorders which
+accompanied the more gross enormities. They show
+us, too, that although the dark tints predominate, the
+picture was not wholly black; that as just Lot was in
+the midst of Sodom, yet was unable by his single presence
+to save the guilty city from destruction, so in the
+latest era of monasticism, there were types yet lingering
+of an older and fairer age, who, nevertheless, were not
+delivered, like the patriarch, but perished most of them
+with the institution to which they belonged. The
+hideous exposure is not untinted with fairer lines; and
+we see traits here and there of true devotion, mistaken
+but heroic.
+
+Of these documents two specimens shall be given
+in this place, one of either kind; and both, so far as
+we know, new to modern history. The first is so
+singular, that we print it as it is found--a genuine
+antique, fished up, in perfect preservation, out of the
+wreck of the old world.
+
+About eight miles from Ludlow, in the county of
+Herefordshire, once stood the Abbey of Wigmore.
+There was Wigmore Castle, a stronghold of the Welsh
+Marches, now, we believe, a modern, well-conditioned
+mansion; and Wigmore Abbey, of which we do not
+hear that there are any remaining traces. Though now
+vanished, however, like so many of its kind, three
+hundred years ago the house was in vigorous existence;
+and when the stir commenced for an inquiry, the
+proceedings of the abbot of this place gave occasion to
+a memorial which stands in the Rolls collection as
+follows*:--
+____
+
+*Rolls House MS., Miscellaneous Papers, First Series. 356.
+____
+
+"Articles to be objected against John Smart, Abbot
+of the Monastery of Wigmore, in the county of Hereford,
+to be exhibited to the Right Honourable Lord Thomas
+Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal and Vicegerent to the
+King's Majesty.
+
+"1. The said abbot is to be accused of simony, as well
+for taking money for advocation and putations of benefices,
+as for giving of orders, or, more truly, selling
+them, and that to such persons which have been
+rejected elsewhere, and of little learning and light
+consideration.
+
+"2. The said abbot hath promoted to orders many
+scholars, when all other bishops did refrain to give any
+for certain good ordinances devised by the King's Majesty
+and his Council for the common weal of this realm.
+Then resorted to the said abbot, scholars out of all
+parts, whom he would promote to orders by sixty at a
+time, and sometimes more, and otherwhiles less. And
+sometimes the said abbot would give orders by night
+within his chamber; and otherwise in the church early
+in the morning, and now and then at a chapel out of
+the abbey. So that there be many unlearned and light
+priests made by the said abbot, and in the diocese of
+Llandaff, and in the places afore named--a thousand,
+as it is esteemed, by the space of this seven years he
+hath made priests, and received not so little money of
+them as a thousand pounds for their orders.
+
+"3. Item, that the said abbot now of late, when he
+could not be suffered to give general orders, weekly for
+the most part doth give orders by pretence of
+dispensation; and by that colour he promoteth them to orders
+by two and three, and takes much money of them,
+both for their orders and for to purchase their
+dispensations after the time he hath promoted them to
+their orders.
+
+"4. Item, the said abbot hath hurt and dismayed his
+tenants by putting them from their leases, and by
+enclosing their commons from them, and selling and utter
+wasting of the woods that were wont to relieve and
+succour them.
+
+"5. Item, the said abbot hath sold corradyes, to the
+damage of the said monastery.
+
+"6. Item, the said abbot hath alienate and sold the
+jewels and plate of the monastery, to the value of five
+hundred marks, to purchase of the Bishop of Rome his
+bulls to be a bishop, and to annex the said abbey to his
+bishopric, to that intent that he should not for his
+misdeeds be punished, or deprived from his said abbey.
+
+"7. Item, that the said abbot, long after that other
+bishops had renounced the Bishop of Rome, and professed
+them to the King's Majesty, did use, but more
+verily usurped, the office of a bishop by virtue of his
+first bulls purchased from Rome, till now of late, as it
+will appear by the date of his confirmation, if he have
+any.
+
+"8. Item, that he the said abbot hath lived viciously,
+and kept to concubines divers and many women that
+is openly known.
+
+"9. Item, that the said abbot doth yet continue his
+vicious living, as it is known, openly.
+
+"10. Item, that the said abbot hath spent and wasted
+much of the goods of the said monastery upon the
+foresaid women.
+
+"11. Item, that the said abbot is malicious and very
+wrathful, not regarding what he saith or doeth in his
+fury or anger.
+
+"12. Item, that one Richard Gyles bought of the abbot
+and convent of Wigmore a corradye, and a chamber for
+him and his wife for term of their lives; and when the
+said Richard Gyles was aged and was very weak, he
+disposed his goods, and made executors to execute his
+will. And when the said abbot now being perceived
+that the said Richard Gyles was rich, and had not
+bequested so much of his goods to him as he would have
+had, the said abbot then came to the chamber of the
+said Richard Gyles, and put out thence all his friends
+and kinsfolk that kept him in his sickness; and then
+the said abbot set his brother and other of his servants
+to keep the sick man; and the night next coming after
+the said Richard Gyles's coffer was broken, and thence
+taken all that was in the same, to the value of forty
+marks; and long after the said abbot confessed, before
+the executors of the said Richard Gyles, that it was his
+deed.
+
+"13. Item, that the said abbot, after he had taken
+away the goods of the said Richard Gyles, used daily
+to reprove and check the said Richard Gyles, and
+inquire of him where was more of his coin and money;
+and at the last the said abbot thought he lived too long,
+and made the sick man, after much sorry keeping, to
+be taken from his feather-bed, and laid upon a cold
+mattress, and kept his friends from him to his death.
+
+"15. Item, that the said abbot consented to the death
+and murdering of one John Tichhill, that was slain at
+his procuring, at the said monastery, by Sir Richard
+Cubley, canon and chaplain to the said abbot; which
+canon is and ever hath been since that time chief of
+the said abbot's council; and is supported to carry
+crossbowes, and to go whither he lusteth at any time,
+to fishing and hunting in the king's forests, parks, and
+chases; but little or nothing serving the quire, as other
+brethren do, neither corrected of the abbot for any
+trespass he doth commit.
+
+"16. Item, that the said abbot hath been perjured oft,
+as is to be proved, and is proved; and as it is supposed,
+did not make a true inventory of the goods, chattels,
+and jewels of his monastery to the King's Majesty and
+his council.
+
+"17. Item, that the said abbot hath infringed all the
+king's injunctions which were given him by Doctor
+Cave to observe and keep; and when he was denounced
+in pleno capilula to have broken the same, he would
+have put in prison the brother as did denounce him to
+have broken the same injunctions, save that he was let
+by the convent there.
+
+"18. Item, that the said abbot hath openly preached
+against the doctrine of Christ, saying he ought not to
+love his enemy, but as he loves the devil; and that he
+should love his enemy's soul, but not his body.
+
+"19. Item, that the said abbot hath taken but small
+regard to the good-living of his household.
+
+"20. Item, that the said abbot hath had and hath yet
+a special favour to misdoers and manquellers, thieves,
+deceivers of their neighbours, and by them [is] most
+ruled and counselled.
+
+"21. Item, that the said abbot hath granted leases of
+farms and advocations first to one man, and took his
+fine, and also hath granted the same lease to another
+man for more money; and then would make to the last
+taker a lease or writing, with an antedate of the first
+lease, which hath bred great dissension among gentlemen
+--as Master Blunt and Master Moysey, and other takers
+of such leases--and that often.
+
+"22. Item, the said abbot having the contrepaynes of
+leases in his keeping, hath, for money, raised out the
+number of years mentioned in the said leases, and writ
+a fresh number in the former taker's lease, and in the
+contrepayne thereof, to the intent to defraud the taker
+or buyer of the residue of such leases, of whom he hath
+received the money.
+
+"23. Item, the said abbot hath not, according to the
+foundation of his monastery, admitted freely tenants
+into certain alms-houses belonging to the said monastery;
+but of them he hath taken large fines, and some of
+them he hath put away that would not give him fines:
+whither poor, aged, and impotent people were wont to
+be freely admitted, and [to] receive the founder's alms
+that of the old customs [were] limited to the same--
+which alms is also diminished by the said abbot.
+
+"24. Item, that the said abbot did not deliver the
+bulls of his bishopric, that he purchased from Rome,
+to our sovereign lord the king's council till long after
+the time he had delivered and exhibited the bulls of
+his monastery to them.
+
+"25. Item, that the said abbot hath detained and yet
+doth detain servants' wages; and often when the said
+servants hath asked their wages, the said abbot hath
+put them into the stocks, and beat them.
+
+"26. Item, the said abbot, in times past, hath had a
+great devotion to ride to Llangarvan, in Wales, upon
+Lammas-day, to receive pardon there; and on the even
+he would visit one Mary Hawle, an old acquaintance
+of his, at the Welsh Poole; and on the morrow ride to
+the foresaid Llangarvan, to be confessed and absolved,
+and the same night return to company with the said
+Mary Hawle, at the Welsh Poole aforesaid, and Kateryn,
+the said Mary Hawle her first daughter, whom the said
+abbot long hath kept to concubine, and had children
+by her, that he lately married at Ludlow. And [there
+be] others that have been taken out of his chamber and
+put in the stocks within the said abbey, and others that
+have complained upon him to the king's council of the
+Marches of Wales; and the woman that dashed out
+his teeth, that he would have had by violence, I will not
+name now, nor other men's wives, lest it would offend
+your good lordship to read or hear the same.
+
+"27. Item, the said abbot doth daily embezzle, sell,
+and convey the goods, and chattels, and jewels of the
+said monastery, having no need so to do; for it is
+thought that he hath a thousand marks or two thousand
+lying by him that he hath gotten by selling of orders,
+and the jewels and plate of the monastery and corradyes;
+and it is to be feared that he will alienate all the rest,
+unless your good lordship speedily make redress and
+provision to let the same.
+
+"28. Item, the said abbot was accustomed yearly to
+preach at Leyntwarden on the Festival of the Nativity
+of the Virgin Mary, where and when the people were
+wont to offer to an image there, and to the same the
+said abbot in his sermons would exhort them and
+encourage them. But now the oblations be decayed,
+the abbot, espying the image then to have a cote of
+silver plate and gilt, hath taken away of his own
+authority the said image, and the plate turned to his
+own use; and left his preaching there, saying it is no
+manner profit to any man, and the plate that was
+about the said image was named to be worth forty
+pounds.
+
+"29. Item, the said abbot hath ever nourished enmity
+and discord among his brethren; and hath not
+encouraged them to learn the laws and the mystery of
+Christ. But he that least knew was most cherished
+by him; and he hath been highly displeased and [hath]
+disdained when his brothers would say that 'it is God's
+precept and doctrine that ye ought to prefer before your
+ceremonies and vain constitutions.' This saying was
+high disobedient, and should be grievously punished;
+when that lying, obloquy, flattery, ignorance, derision,
+contumely, discord, great swearing, drinking, hypocrisy,
+fraud, superstition, deceit, conspiracy to wrong their
+neighbour, and other of that kind, was had in special
+favour and regard. Laud and praise be to God that
+hath sent us the true knowledge. Honour and long
+prosperity to our sovereign lord, and his noble council
+that teaches to advance the same. Amen.
+
+"By John Lee, your faithful bedeman, and canon of
+the said monastery of Wigmore.
+
+"Postscript. My good lord, there is in the said abbey
+a cross of fine gold and precious stones, whereof one
+diamond was esteemed by Doctor Booth, Bishop of
+Hereford, worth a hundred marks. In that cross is
+enclosed a piece of wood, named to be of the cross
+that Christ died upon, and to the same hath been
+offering. And when it should be brought down to the
+church from the treasury, it was brought down with
+lights, and like reverence as should have been done
+to Christ Himself. I fear lest the abbot upon Sunday
+next, when he may enter the treasury, will take away
+the said cross and break it, or turn it to his own use,
+with many other precious jewels that be there.
+
+"All these articles afore written be true as to the
+substance and true meaning of them, though peradventure
+for haste and lack of counsel some words be
+set amiss or out of their place. That I will be ready
+to prove forasmuch as lies in me, when it shall like your
+honourable lordship to direct your commission to men
+(or any man) that will be indifferent and not corrupt
+to sit upon the same, at the said abbey, where the
+witnesses and proofs be most ready and the truth is
+best known, or at any other place where it shall be
+thought most convenient by your high discretion and
+authority."
+
+The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Premunire
+statutes, which forbade all purchases of bulls
+from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have been
+usually considered in the highest degree oppressive;
+and more particularly the public censure has fallen
+upon the last application of those statutes, when, on
+Wolsey's fall, the whole body of the clergy were laid
+under a premunire, and only obtained pardon on payment
+of a serious fine. Let no one regret that he has
+learnt to be tolerant to Roman Catholics as the nineteenth
+century knows them. But it is a spurious
+charity, which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to
+its opposite; and when philosophic historians indulge
+in loose invective against the statesmen of the Reformation,
+they show themselves unfit to be trusted with the
+custody of our national annals. The Acts of Parliament
+speak plainly of the enormous abuses which had
+grown up under these bulls. Yet even the emphatic
+language of the statutes scarcely prepares us to find an
+abbot able to purchase with jewels stolen from his own
+convent a faculty to confer holy orders, though he had
+never been consecrated bishop, and to make a thousand
+pounds by selling the exercise of his privileges. This
+is the most flagrant case which has fallen under the eyes
+of the present writer. Yet it is but a choice specimen
+out of many. He was taught to believe, like other
+modern students of history, that the papal dispensations
+for immorality, of which we read in Fox and other
+Protestant writers, were calumnies, but he has been
+forced against his will to perceive that the supposed
+calumnies were but the plain truth; he has found
+among the records--for one thing, a list of more than
+twenty clergy in one diocese who had obtained licences
+to keep concubines [Tanner MS. 105, Bodleian Library,
+Oxford]. After some experience, he advises
+all persons who are anxious to understand the English
+Reformation to place implicit confidence in the Statute
+Book. Every fresh record which is brought to light
+is a fresh evidence in its favour. In the fluctuations of
+the conflict there were parliaments, as there were
+princes, of opposing sentiments; and measures were
+passed, amended, repealed, or censured, as Protestants
+and Catholics came alternately into power. But whatever
+were the differences of opinion, the facts on either
+side which are stated in an Act of Parliament may be
+uniformly trusted. Even in the attainders for treason
+and heresy we admire the truthfulness of the details
+of the indictments, although we deplore the prejudice
+which at times could make a crime of virtue.
+
+We pass on to the next picture. Equal justice, or
+some attempt at it, was promised, and we shall perhaps
+part from the friends of the monasteries on better terms
+than they believe. At least, we shall add to our own
+history and to the Catholic martyrology a story of
+genuine interest.
+
+We have many accounts of the abbeys at the time
+of their actual dissolution. The resistance or acquiescence
+of superiors, the dismissals of the brethren, the
+sale of the property, the destruction of relics, &c., are
+all described. We know how the windows were taken
+out, how the glass appropriated, how the "melter"
+accompanied the visitors to run the lead upon the roofs,
+and the metal of the bells into portable forms. We
+see the pensioned regulars filing out reluctantly, or
+exulting in their deliverance, discharged from their vows,
+furnished each with his "secular apparel," and his purse
+of money, to begin the world as he might. These
+scenes have long been partially known, and they were
+rarely attended with anything remarkable. At the
+time of the suppression, the discipline of several years
+had broken down opposition, and prepared the way for
+the catastrophe. The end came at last, but as an issue
+which had been long foreseen.
+
+We have sought in vain, however, for a glimpse
+into the interior of the houses at the first intimation
+of what was coming--more especially when the great
+blow was struck which severed England from obedience
+to Rome, and asserted the independence of the Anglican
+Church. Then, virtually, the fate of the monasteries was
+decided. As soon as the supremacy was vested in the
+crown, inquiry into their condition could no longer be
+escaped or delayed; and then, through the length and
+breadth of the country, there must have been rare dismay.
+The account of the London Carthusians is indeed
+known to us, because they chose to die rather than
+yield submission where their consciences forbade them;
+and their isolated heroism has served to distinguish
+their memories. The Pope, as head of the Universal
+Church, claimed the power of absolving subjects from
+their allegiance to their king. He deposed Henry.
+He called on foreign princes to enforce his sentence;
+and, on pain of excommunication, commanded the
+native English to rise in rebellion. The king, in
+selfdefence, was compelled to require his subjects to
+disclaim all sympathy with these pretensions, and to
+recognize no higher authority, spiritual or secular,
+than himself within his own dominions. The regular
+clergy throughout the country were on the Pope's side,
+secretly or openly. The Charter-house monks, however,
+alone of all the order had the courage to declare their
+convictions, and to suffer for them. Of the rest, we
+only perceive that they at last submitted; and since
+there was no uncertainty as to their real feelings, we
+have been disposed to judge them hardly as cowards.
+Yet we who have never been tried, should perhaps be
+cautious in our censures. It is possible to hold an
+opinion quite honestly, and yet to hesitate about dying
+for it. We consider ourselves, at the present day,
+persuaded honestly of many things; yet which of them
+should we refuse to relinquish if the scaffold were the
+alternative, or at least seem to relinquish, under silent
+protest?
+
+And yet, in the details of the struggle at the
+Charterhouse, we see the forms of mental trial which must have
+repeated themselves among all bodies of the clergy
+wherever there was seriousness of conviction. If the
+majority of the monks were vicious and sensual, there
+was still a large minority labouring to be true to their
+vows; and when one entire convent was capable of
+sustained resistance, there must have been many where
+there was only just too little virtue for the emergency,
+where the conflict between interest and conscience was
+equally genuine, though it ended the other way. Scenes
+of bitter misery there must have been--of passionate
+emotion wrestling ineffectually with the iron resolution
+of the Government: and the faults of the Catholic party
+weigh so heavily against them in the course and progress
+of the Reformation, that we cannot willingly lose the
+few countervailing tints which soften the darkness of the
+case against them.
+
+Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys
+at this crisis, we have hitherto been left to our
+imagination. A stern and busy Administration had little leisure
+to preserve records of sentimental struggles which led to
+nothing. The Catholics did not care to keep alive the
+recollection of a conflict in which, even though with
+difficulty, the Church was defeated. A rare accident
+only could have brought down to us any fragment of a
+transaction which no one had an interest in remembering.
+That such an accident has really occurred, we
+may consider as unusually fortunate. The story in
+question concerns the abbey of Woburn, and is as
+follows:-
+
+At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there
+were representatives of both the factions which divided
+the country; perhaps we should say of three--the
+sincere Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants.
+These last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been
+frightened into silence, and with difficulty had been able
+to save themselves from extreme penalties. No sooner,
+however, had Wolsey fallen, and the battle commenced
+with the Papacy, than the tables turned, the persecuted
+became persecutors--or at least threw off their disguise,
+and were strengthened with the support of the large
+class who cared only to keep on the winning side. The
+mysteries of the faith came to be disputed at the
+public tables; the refectories rang with polemics; the
+sacred silence of the dormitories was broken for the first
+time by lawless speculation. The orthodox might have
+appealed to the Government: heresy was still forbidden
+by law, and if detected, was still punished by the stake.
+But the orthodox among the regular clergy adhered
+to the Pope as well as to the faith, and abhorred the
+sacrilege of the Parliament as deeply as the new opinions
+of the Reformers. Instead of calling in the help of the
+law, they muttered treason in secret; and the Reformers,
+confident in the necessities of the times, sent reports to
+London of their arguments and conversations. The
+authorities in the abbey were accused of disaffection;
+and a commission of inquiry was sent down towards the
+end of the spring of 1536, to investigate. The
+depositions taken on this occasion are still preserved; and
+with the help of them, we can leap over three centuries
+of time, and hear the last echoes of the old monastic
+life in Woburn Abbey dying away in discord.
+
+Where party feeling was running so high, there were
+of course passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy,
+the spread of Protestantism, the power of the Pope, the
+state of England--all were discussed; and the possibilities
+of the future, as each party painted it in the
+colours of his hopes. The brethren, we find, spoke
+their minds in plain language, sometimes condescending
+to a joke.
+
+Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior "on
+Candlemas-day last past (February 2, 1536), asked him
+whether he longed not to be at Rome where all his
+bulls were?" Brother Sherborne answered that "his
+bulls had made so many calves, that he had burned
+them. Whereunto the sub-prior said he thought there
+were more calves now than there were then."
+
+Then there were long and furious quarrels about "my
+Lord Privy Seal" (Cromwell), to one party the incarnation
+of Satan, to the other the delivering angel. Nor did
+matters mend when from the minister they passed to the
+master.
+
+Dan John Croxton being in "the shaving-house" one
+day with certain of the brethren having their tonsures
+looked to, and gossiping, as men do on such occasions,
+one "Friar Lawrence did say that the King was dead."
+Then said Croxton, "thanks be to God, his Grace is in
+good health, and I pray God so continue him;" and
+said further to the said Lawrence, "I advise thee to
+leave thy babbling." Croxton, it seems, had been among
+the suspected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him,
+"Croxton, it maketh no matter what thou sayest, for
+thou art one of the new world." Whereupon hotter still
+the conversation proceeded. "Thy babbling tongue,"
+Croxton said, "will turn us all to displeasure at length."
+"Then," quoth Lawrence, "neither thou nor yet any
+of us all shall do well as long as we forsake our head of
+the Church, the Pope." "By the mass!" quoth Croxton,
+"I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou in
+his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy Prince."
+Whereunto the said Lawrence answered, saying, "By the
+mass, thou liest! I was never sworn to forsake the Pope
+to be our head, and never will be." "Then," quoth
+Croxton, "thou shall be sworn spite of thine heart one
+day, or I will know why nay."
+
+These and similar wranglings may be taken as
+specimens of the daily conversation at Woburn, and we
+can perceive how an abbot with the best intentions
+would have found it difficult to keep the peace. There
+are instances of superiors in other houses throwing down
+their command in the midst of the crisis in flat despair,
+protesting that their subject brethren were no longer
+governable. Abbots who were inclined to the Reformation
+could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots
+could not manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots
+could not manage either the one or the other. It would
+have been well for the Abbot of Woburn--or well as far
+as this world is concerned--if he, like one of these, had
+acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his
+charge.
+
+His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and
+family, history is silent. We know only that he held his
+place when the storm rose against the Pope; that, like
+the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking
+the oath to the King, and submitting to the royal
+supremacy, but swearing under protest, as the phrase went,
+with the outward, and not with the inward man--in fact,
+perjuring himself. Though infirm, so far, however, he
+was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from
+the jealous eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could
+not conceal his tendencies. We have significant evidence
+of the espionage which was established, over all
+suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling
+details of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were
+reported to the Government.
+
+In the summer of 1534, orders came that the Pope's
+name should be rased out wherever it was mentioned
+in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name
+Robert Salford, deposed that "he was singing mass
+before the abbot at St. Thomas's altar within the
+monastery, at which time he rased out with his knife the
+said name out of the canon." The abbot told him to
+"take a pen and strike or cross him out." The saucy
+monk said those were not the orders. They were to
+rase him out. "Well, well," the abbot said, "it will
+come again one day." "Come again, will it?" was the
+answer. "If it do, then we will put him in again; but
+I trust I shall never see that day." The mild abbot
+could remonstrate, but could not any more command;
+and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were
+remembered against him for the ear of Cromwell.
+
+In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to
+preach against the Pope, and to expose his usurpation;
+but he could not bring himself to obey. He shrank
+from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the visitation,
+and then on other subjects, while in the prayer
+before the sermon he refused, as we find, to use the
+prescribed form. He only said, "You shall pray for
+the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls that be
+in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the King
+to be supreme head of the Church in neither of the
+said sermons, nor speak against the pretended authority
+of the Bishop of Rome."
+
+Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election,
+proposed to call a general council at Mantua, against
+which, by advice of Henry the Eighth, the Germans
+protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious
+English eyes were watching for a turning tide. "Hear
+you," said the abbot one day, "of the Pope's holiness
+and the congregation of bishops, abbots, and princes
+gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered
+for the reformation of the universal Church; and here
+now we have a book of the excuse of the Germans,
+by which we may know what heretics they be, for if
+they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be,
+they would never have refused to come to a general
+council."
+
+So matters went with the abbot for some months
+after he had sworn obedience to the King. Lulling his
+conscience with such opiates as the casuists could provide
+for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and
+laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to
+their true allegiance.
+
+In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over
+the scene, very different from the outward reaction for
+which he was looking: a better mind woke in the
+abbot; he learnt that in swearing what he did not
+mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had
+lied to Heaven and lied to man: that to save his
+miserable life he had perilled his soul. When the oath
+of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas
+More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse,
+mistaken, as we believe, in judgment, but true
+to their consciences, and disdaining evasion or subterfuge,
+chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die than
+to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on
+the great question of the justice or necessity of those
+executions; but the story of the so-called martyrdoms
+convulsed the Catholic world. The Pope shook upon
+his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood
+still; diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that
+the whole life of man seemed but a stage pageant, a
+thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at the revelation
+of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran
+through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room
+for generous emotion, and no pity was felt for these
+men by the English Protestants. The Protestants knew
+well that if these same sufferers could have had their
+way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by
+hecatombs; and as they had never experienced mercy,
+so they were in turn without mercy. But to the
+English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed,
+but who had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his
+death and the death of the rest acted as a glimpse of
+the judgment day. Their safety became their shame
+and terror: and in the radiant example before them of
+true faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their
+own disgrace. So it was with Father Forest, who had
+taught his penitents in confession that they might perjure
+themselves, and who now sought a cruel death in
+voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot
+of Glastonbury; so with others whose names should be
+more familiar to us than they are; and here in Woburn
+we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of Abbot
+Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom,
+but he did what he knew might drag his death upon
+him if disclosed to the Government, and surrounded by
+spies he could have had no hope of concealment.
+
+"At the time," deposed Robert Salford, "that the
+monks of the Charter-house, with other traitors, did
+suffer death, the abbot did call us into the Chapterhouse,
+and said these words:--'Brethren, this is a
+perilous time, such a scourge was never heard since
+Christ's passion. Ye hear how good men suffer the
+death. Brethren, this is undoubted for our offences.
+Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept the
+commandments of God, so long their enemies had no
+power over them, but God took vengeance of their
+enemies. But when they broke God's commandments,
+then they were subdued by their enemies, and so be we.
+Therefore let us be sorry for our offences. Undoubted
+He will take vengeance of our enemies; I mean those
+heretics that causeth so many good men to suffer thus.
+Alas, it is a piteous case that so much Christian blood
+should be shed. Therefore, good brethren, for the
+reverence of God, every one of you devoutly pray, and
+say this Psalm, "O God, the heathen are come into
+thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled,
+and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. The dead bodies
+of thy servants have they given to be meat to the fowls
+of the air, and the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of
+the field. Their blood have they shed like water on
+every side of Jerusalem, and there was no man to bury
+them. We are become an open scorn unto our enemies,
+a very scorn and derision unto them that are round
+about us. Oh, remember not our old sins, but have
+mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great
+misery. Help us, oh God of our salvation, for the glory
+of thy name. Oh, be merciful unto our sins for thy
+name's sake. Wherefore do the heathen say, Where is
+now their God?" Ye shall say this Psalm,' repeated
+the abbot, 'every Friday, after the litany, prostrate,
+when ye lie upon the high altar, and undoubtedly God
+will cease this extreme scourge.' And so," continues
+Salford, significantly, "the convent did say this aforesaid
+Psalm until there were certain that did murmur at
+the saying of it, and so it was left."
+
+The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but
+languid support; even his own familiar friends whom
+he trusted, those with whom he had walked in the
+house of God, had turned against him; the harsh air of
+the dawn of a new world choked him; what was there
+for him but to die. But his conscience still haunted
+him: while he lived he must fight on, and so, if
+possible, find pardon for his perjury. The blows in
+those years fell upon the Church thick and fast. In
+February, 1536, the Bill passed for the dissolution of
+the smaller monasteries; and now we find the sub-prior
+with the whole fraternity united to accuse him, so that
+the abbot had no one friend remaining.
+
+"He did again call us together," says the next deposition,
+"and lamentably mourning for the dissolving
+the said houses, he enjoined us to sing 'Salvator mundi,
+salva nos omnes,' every day after lauds; and we murmured
+at it, and were not content to sing it for such
+cause; and so we did omit it divers days, for which
+the abbot came unto the chapter, and did in manner
+rebuke us, and said we were bound to obey his
+commandment by our profession, and so did command us to
+sing it again with the versicle 'Let God arise, and let
+his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him
+flee before him.' Also he enjoined us at every mass
+that every priest did sing, to say the collect, 'Oh God,
+who despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart.'
+And he said if we did this with good and true devotion,
+God would so handle the matter, that it should be to
+the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as
+he showed unto the children of Israel. And surely,
+brethren, there will come to us a good man that will
+rectify these monasteries again that be now supprest,
+because 'God can of these stones raise up children to
+Abraham.'"
+
+"Of these stones," perhaps, but less easily of the stonyhearted
+monks, who with pitiless smiles watched the
+abbot's sorrow, which should soon bring him to his
+ruin.
+
+Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the
+abbot grew more lonely. Lonely and unsupported, he
+was unequal to the last effort of repentance, but he
+slowly strengthened himself for the trial. As Lent
+came on, the season brought with it a more special call
+to effort, which he did not fail to recognize. The
+conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. They
+preached against all which he most loved and valued,
+in language purposely coarse; and the mild sweetness
+of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly
+on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger
+portion of the spirit of his Master and theirs. Now,
+when the passions of those times have died away, and
+we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how
+touching is the following. There was one Sir William,
+curate of Woburn chapel, whose tongue, it seems,
+was rough beyond the rest. The abbot met him
+one day, and spoke to him. "Sir William," he said,
+"I hear tell ye be a great railer. I marvel that ye rail
+so. I pray you teach my cure the scripture of God, and
+that may be to edification. I pray you leave such railing.
+Ye call the pope a bear and a banson. Either he
+is a good man or an ill. Domino suo stat aut cadit.
+The office of a bishop is honourable. What edifying is
+this to rail? Let him alone."
+
+But they would not let him alone, nor would they
+let the abbot alone. He grew "somewhat acrased," they
+said, vexed with feelings of which they had no experience.
+He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline
+weighing upon him. The brethren went to see him in
+his room, Brother Dan Woburn among the rest, who
+said that he asked him how he did, and received for
+answer, "I would that I had died with the good men
+that died for holding with the pope. My conscience,
+my conscience doth grudge me every day for it." Life
+was fast losing its value for him. What was life to him
+or any man when bought with a sin against his soul?
+"If he be disposed to die, for that matter," the
+insolent Croxton said, "he may die as soon as he will."
+
+All Lent he fasted and prayed; and his illness grew
+upon him; and at length in Passion week he thought
+all was over, and that he was going away. On Passion
+Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they
+stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, "he
+exhorted them all to charity," he implored them "never
+to consent to go out of their monastery; and if it
+chanced them to be put from it, they should in no
+wise forsake their habit." After these words, "being in
+a great agony, he rose out of his bed, and cried out and
+said, 'I would to God, it would please him to take me
+out of this wretched world; and I would I had died
+with the good men that have suffered death heretofore,
+for they were quickly out of their pain.'" * Then, half
+wandering, he began to mutter to himself aloud the
+thoughts which had been working in him in his
+struggles; and quoting St. Bernard's words about the
+pope, he exclaimed, "Tu quis es. Primatu Abel,
+gubernatione Noah, auctoritate Moses, judicatu Samuel
+potestate Petrus, unctione Christus. Aliae ecclesiae
+habent super se pastores. Tu pastor pastorum es."
+____
+
+* Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the
+Carthusians.
+____
+
+Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental
+fiction begotten out of the brain of some ingenious
+novelist, but the record of the true words and sufferings
+of a genuine child of Adam, labouring in a trial too
+hard for him.
+
+He prayed to die, and in good time death was to
+come to him; but not, after all, in the sick bed, with
+his expiation but half completed. A year before, he
+had thrown down the cross, when it was offered him.
+He was to take it again; the very cross which he had
+refused. He recovered. He was brought before the
+council; with what result, there are no means of knowing.
+To admit the papal supremacy when officially
+questioned was high treason. Whether he was constant,
+and received some conditional pardon, or whether his
+heart again for the moment failed him--whichever he
+did--the records are silent. This only we ascertain of
+him: that he was not put to death under the statute of
+supremacy. But two years later, when the official list
+was presented to the parliament of those who had
+suffered for their share in "the Pilgrimage of Grace,"
+among the rest we find the name of Robert Hobbes,
+late Abbot of Woburn. To this solitary fact we can
+add nothing. The rebellion was put down, and in the
+punishment of the offenders there was unusual leniency;
+not more than thirty persons were executed, although
+forty thousand had been in arms. Those only were
+selected who had been most signally implicated. But
+they were all leaders in the movement; the men of
+highest rank, and therefore greatest guilt. They died
+for what they believed their duty; and the king and
+council did their duty in enforcing the laws against
+armed insurgents. He for whose cause each supposed
+themselves to be contending, has long since judged
+between them; and both parties perhaps now see all
+things with clearer eyes than was permitted to them
+on earth.
+
+We too can see more distinctly in a slight degree.
+At least we will not refuse the Abbot Hobbes some
+memorial, brief though it be. And although twelve
+generations of Russells--all loyal to the Protestant
+ascendancy--have swept Woburn clear of Catholic
+associations, they, too, in these later days, will not regret
+to see revived the authentic story of its last abbot.
+____
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+"We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful, for the
+Useful encourages itself."--GOETHE.
+
+A Moss rose-bud hiding her face among the leaves one
+hot summer morning, for fear the sun should injure her
+complexion, happened to let fall a glance towards her
+roots, and to see the bed in which she was growing.
+What a filthy place! she cried. What a home they
+have chosen for me! I, the most beautiful of flowers,
+fastened down into so detestable a neighbourhood! She
+threw her face into the air; thrust herself into the
+hands of the first passer-by who stopped to look at her,
+and escaped in triumph, as she thought, into the centre
+of a nosegay. But her triumph was short-lived: in a
+few hours she withered and died.
+
+I was reminded of this story when hearing a living
+thinker of some eminence once say that he considered
+Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually it
+was absurd, and practically an offence, over which he
+stumbled; and it would have been far better for mankind,
+he thought, if they could have kept clear of superstition,
+and followed on upon the track of the Grecian
+philosophy, so little do men care to understand the
+conditions which have made them what they are, and which
+has created for them that very wisdom in which they
+themselves are so contented. But it is strange, indeed, that
+a person who could deliberately adopt such a conclusion
+should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If
+a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little
+fishing village in Galilee, and spread through the whole
+civilized world; if men are so pitiably silly, that in an
+age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
+should have sunk under an absorption of fear and folly,
+should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of
+heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness
+there was among them; surely there were nothing better
+for a wise man than to make the best of his time, and
+to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering
+himself in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for
+mankind or for their opinions. For what better test of
+truth have we than the ablest men's acceptance of it;
+and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago deliberately
+accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what
+right have we to hope that with the same natures, the
+same passions, the same understandings, no better proof
+against deception, we, like they, are not entangled in
+what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
+ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber
+and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by
+the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement
+and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern
+sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to
+destroy an idol when another, or the same in another
+form takes immediate possession of the vacant pedestal?
+
+But it is not so. Ptolemy was not perfect, but
+Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at Ptolemy.
+Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor
+Ptolemy without the Chaldees; and as it is with the
+minor sciences, so far more is it with the science of
+sciences--the science of life, which has grown through
+all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of
+the errors of the past. We, with this glorious present
+which is opening on us, we shall never enter on it,
+we shall never understand it, till we have learnt to see
+in that past, not error but instalment of truth, hard
+fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic
+effort. The promised land is smiling before us, but
+we may not pass over into possession of it while the
+bones of our fathers who laboured through the
+wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the
+unclean birds; we must gather them and bury them,
+and sum up their labours, and inscribe the record of
+their actions on their tombs as an honourable epitaph.
+If Christianity really is passing away, if it has done its
+work, and if what is left of it is now holding us back
+from better things, it is not for our bitterness but for
+our affectionate acknowledgment, not for our heaping
+contempt on what it is, but for our reverent and patient
+examination of what it has been, that it will be content
+to bid us farewell, and give us God speed on our
+further journey.
+
+In the Natural History of Religions certain broad
+phenomena perpetually repeat themselves; they rise in
+the highest thought extant at the time of their origin;
+the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
+ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it.
+It grows through a long series of generations into the
+heart and habits of the people; and so long as no
+disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the idea at the
+centre of it survives; a healthy, vigorous, natural life
+shoots beautifully up out of it. But at last the idea
+becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit
+petrifies the spirit in the outside ceremonial, while quite
+new questions rise among the thinkers, and ideas enter
+into new and unexplained relations. The old formula
+will not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing;
+and habit and superstition cling to the past, and policy
+vindicates it, and statecraft upholds it forcibly as
+serviceable to order, till, from the combined action of folly,
+and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
+symbolism becomes at last no better than "a whited
+sepulchre full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness."
+So it is now. So it was in the era of the Caesars, out of
+which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in the form
+which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy,
+was the deliberate solution which the most powerful
+intellects of that day could offer of the questions which
+had grown out with the growth of mankind, and on
+which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.
+
+Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When
+Paganism rose men had not begun to reflect upon
+themselves, or the infirmities of their own nature. The
+bad man was a bad man--the coward a coward--the
+liar a liar--individually hateful and despicable. But in
+hating and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks
+were satisfied to have felt all that was necessary about
+them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came
+to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to inquire.
+There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist
+of the gods. There is the Erinnys as the avenger of
+monstrous villanies; a Tartarus where the darkest
+criminals suffer eternal tortures. But Tantalus and
+Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the
+small wickedness of common men offers no analogy.
+Moreover, these and other such stories are but curiously
+ornamented myths, representing physical phenomena.
+But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
+sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing
+religion. The study of man superseded the study of
+nature: a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal
+of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
+importance the intensity of which made every other
+question insignificant. How man could know the good
+and yet choose the evil; how God could be all pure and
+almighty, and yet evil have broken into his creation,
+these were the questions which thenceforth were the
+perplexity of every thinker. Whatever difficulty there
+might be in discovering how evil came to be, the leaders
+of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it--whether
+matter was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as
+Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally
+satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this
+world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent
+grossness of this impracticable substance. God would
+have everything perfect, but the nature of the element
+in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose.
+Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything
+which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and
+hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
+material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations
+crushed, its purity tainted by the passions and
+appetites of its companion, the fleshly lusts which waged
+perpetual war against it.
+
+Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the
+question was how to conquer it, or at least how to set
+free the spirit from its control.
+
+The Greek language and the Greek literature spread
+behind the march of Alexander: but as his generals
+could only make their conquests permanent by largely
+accepting the Eastern manner, so philosophy could only
+make good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised.
+
+The one pure and holy God whom Plato had painfully
+reasoned out for himself had existed from immemorial
+time in the traditions of the Jews, while the Persians
+who had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence
+of an independent evil being now had him to
+offer to the Greeks as their account of the difficulties
+which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of
+struggle, and many hundred thousand folios were the
+results of the remarkable fusion which followed. Out
+of these elements, united in various proportions, rose
+successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the Hellenists,
+the Therapeute, those strange Essene communists, with
+the innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics.
+Finally, the battle was limited to the two great rivals,
+under one or other of which the best of the remainder
+had ranged themselves m Manicheism and Catholic
+Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian, Catholicism
+in which the Jewish element most preponderated.
+It did not end till the close of the fifth century, and it
+ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
+victory which either side could claim. The Church
+has yet to acknowledge how large a portion of its
+enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the mediation
+of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let
+us trace something of the real bearings of this section
+of the world's oriental history, which to so many
+moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over
+words and straws.
+
+Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength
+of evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in matter, so
+far it was a conclusion which both Jew and Persian
+were ready to accept. The naked Aristotelic view of
+it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to
+the Hellenistic Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew
+forced him to look for a solution of the question which
+Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
+crept into matter. He could not allow that what God
+had created could be of its own nature imperfect. God
+made it very good; some other cause had broken in to
+spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced the
+independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt
+at Babylon, into a subordinate spirit; so now, not
+questioning the facts of disease, of death, of pain, of
+the infirmity of the flesh which the natural strength of
+the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them
+under the supposition that the first man had deliberately
+sinned, and by his sin had brought a curse upon the
+whole material earth, and upon all which was fashioned
+out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a
+garden of delight of its own free accord, loading itself
+with fruit and flower, and everything most exquisite
+and beautiful. No bird or beast of prey broke the
+eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
+In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by
+the kid, the lion browsed beside the ox, and the
+corporeal frame of man, knowing neither decay, nor death,
+nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
+pure as the pure immortal substance of the unfallen
+angels. But with the fatal apple all this fair scene
+passed away, and creation as it seemed was hopelessly
+and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no matter
+how--he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact:
+moral evil was brought into the world by the only
+creature who was capable of committing it. Sin entered
+in, and death by sin; death and disease, storm and
+pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned
+passions of the wild animals were let loose, and earth
+and air became full of carnage; worst of all, maws
+animal nature came out in gigantic strength, the carnal
+lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatred, rapine, and
+murder; and then the law, and with it, of course,
+breaches of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam
+was infected in the animal change which had passed
+over his person, and every child, therefore, thenceforth
+naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with
+the curse which he had incurred. Every material
+organization thenceforward contained in itself the
+elements of its own destruction, and the philosophic
+conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by
+theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who
+were infected by disease were said to be bound by
+Satan; madness was a "possession" by his spirit, and
+the whole creation from Adam till Christ groaned and
+travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in
+man still made itself felt; but it was a slave when it
+ought to command. It might will to obey the higher
+law, but the law in the members was over strong for it
+and bore it down. This was the body of death which
+philosophy detected but could not explain, and from
+which Christianity now came forward with its magnificent
+promise of deliverance.
+
+The carnal doctrine of the sacraments which they
+are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as
+fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the
+Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block
+to Protestants. It was the very essence of Christianity
+itself. Unless the body could be purified, the soul
+could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning,
+soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without
+his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the
+natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless
+organization could begin again from a new original, no
+pure material substance could exist at all. He, therefore,
+by whom God had first made the world, entered
+into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak)
+of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue
+of His creative energy, a material body grew again of
+the substance of his mother, pure of taint and clean as
+the first body of the first man when it passed out under
+His hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus
+wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore
+the lost power of mankind. He came to redeem man;
+and, therefore, he took a human body, and he kept it
+pure through a human life, till the time came when it
+could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died,
+and then appeared what was the nature of a material
+human body when freed from the limitations of sin.
+The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible
+that it should see corruption. It was real, for the
+disciples were allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and
+drank with them to assure their senses. But space had
+no power over it, nor any of the material obstacles
+which limit an ordinary power. He willed and his
+body obeyed. He was here, He was there. He was
+visible, He was invisible. He was in the midst of his
+disciples and they saw Him, and then He was gone,
+whither who could tell? At last He passed away to
+heaven; but while in heaven, He was still on earth.
+His body became the body of His Church on earth, not
+in metaphor, but in fact. His very material body, in
+which and by which the faithful would be saved. His
+flesh and blood were thenceforth to be their food.
+They were to eat it as they would eat ordinary meat.
+They were to take it into their system, a pure material
+substance, to leaven the old natural substance and
+assimilate it to itself. As they fed upon it it would
+grow into them, and it would become their own real
+body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of
+death, but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world,
+over which death had no power. Circumcision availed
+nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a new creature--this
+new creature, which the child first put on in baptism,
+being born again into Christ of water and the spirit.
+In the Eucharist he was fed and sustained and going
+on from strength to strength, and ever as the nature of
+his body changed, being able to render a more complete
+obedience, he would at last pass away to God through
+the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
+presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present
+with him; but because while life lasted some
+particles of the old Adam would necessarily cling to
+him, the Christian's mortal eye on earth cannot see
+Him. Hedged in by "his muddy vesture of decay,"
+his eyes, like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are
+holden, and only in faith he feels Him. But death,
+which till Christ had died had been the last victory of
+evil, in virtue of His submission to it, became its own
+destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted
+particles of the old substance, and there was nothing
+needed but that these should be washed away and the
+elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed
+in immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed
+of God.
+
+The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work
+compared to which the first creation appears but a
+trifling difficulty, what could He be but God? God
+Himself! Who but God could have wrested His prize
+from a power which half the thinking world believed to
+be His coequal and coeternal adversary. He was God.
+He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the
+second starting point of human growth. He was virgin
+born, that no original impurity might infect the substance
+which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He
+showed in the nature of His person, after His resurrection,
+what the material body would have been in all of
+us except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding
+on it in its purity, the bodies of each of us are
+transfigured after its likeness. Here was the secret of the
+spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.
+Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary
+fasts, the penitential scourgings, and life-long austerities
+which have been alternately the glory and the reproach
+of the mediaeval saints. They would overcome their
+animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work of death
+in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by
+the destruction of the flesh which lay as a veil between
+themselves and Him.
+
+And such, I believe, to have been the central idea of
+the beautiful creed which, for 1800 years, has tuned the
+heart and formed the mind of the noblest of mankind.
+From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time
+went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging
+its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the
+common detail of the common life of all of us. Like
+the seven lamps before the Throne of God, the seven
+mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments
+shed over us a never ceasing stream of blessed influence.
+First there are the priests, a holy order set
+apart and endowed with mysterious power, representing
+Christ and administering his gifts. Christ, in his
+twelfth year, was presented in the temple, and first
+entered on His father's business; and the baptized
+child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious
+of its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full
+knowledge of what it undertakes, and receives again
+sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to assist it forward on
+its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share its
+pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to
+consecrate the union. Marriage, which outside the
+church only serves to perpetuate the curse and bring
+fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made holy
+by His presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to
+represent His own mystic union with His church.
+
+Even saints cannot live without at times some spot
+adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe
+and move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants.
+Christ did penance forty days in the wilderness, not to
+subdue His own flesh, for that which was already perfect
+did not need subduing, but to give to penance a cleansing
+virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution.
+
+Christ consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us
+our baptismal robe of pure unsullied innocence. He
+strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us when
+we fall. He feeds us with the substance of His own
+most precious body. In the person of His minister he
+does all this for us, in virtue of that which in His own
+person he actually performed when a man living on
+this earth. Last of all, when all is drawing to its close
+with us, when life is past, when the work is done, and
+the dark gate is near, beyond which the garden of an
+eternal home is waiting to receive us, His tender care
+has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of
+death, but its appearance is still terrible; and He will
+not leave us without special help at our last need. He
+tried the agony of the moment; and He sweetens the
+cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
+grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made
+holy in His last anointing before his passion, and then
+all is over. We lie down and seem to decay--to decay
+--but not all. Our natural body decays, the last
+remains of which we have inherited from Adam, but
+the spiritual body, that glorified substance which has
+made our life, and is our real body as we are in Christ,
+that can never decay, but passes off into the kingdom
+which is prepared for it; that other world where there
+is no sin, and God is all in all! Such is the Philosophy
+of Christianity. It was worn and old when Luther
+found it. Our posterity will care less to respect Luther
+for rending it in pieces, when it has learnt to despise
+the miserable fabric which he stitched together out of
+its tatters.
+
+____
+
+
+PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES
+
+In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or inquiry,
+the judicious questioning of received opinions has been
+the sign of scientific vitality, the principle of scientific
+advancement, the very source and root of healthy progress
+and growth. If medicine had been regulated
+three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there
+had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every
+licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains
+and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions
+of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it
+is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people
+of this country would at present be found. Constitutions
+have changed with habits of life, and the treatment of
+disorders has changed to meet the new conditions.
+New diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor
+Butts had no cognizance; new continents have given
+us plants with medicinal virtues previously unknown;
+new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
+experience, have added a thousand remedies to those
+known to the age of the Tudors. If the College of
+Physicians had been organized into a board of orthodoxy.
+and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
+crime against society, which a law had been established
+to punish, the hundreds who die annually from preventible
+causes would have been thousands and tens of thousands.
+
+Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The
+accuracy of the present theory of the planetary move
+merits is tested daily and hourly by the most delicate
+experiments, and the legislature, if it so pleased, might
+enact the first principles of these movements into a
+statute, without danger of committing the law of
+England to falsehood. Yet, if the legislature were to
+venture on any such paternal procedure, in a few years
+gravitation itself would be called in question, and the
+whole science would wither under the fatal shadow.
+There are many phenomena still unexplained to give
+plausibility to scepticism; there are others more easily
+formularized for working purposes in the language of
+Ptolemy; and there would be reactionists who would
+invite us to return to the safe convictions of our
+forefathers. What the world has seen the world may
+see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
+were something to be ruled by authority, new Popes
+would imprison new Galileos; the knowledge already
+acquired would be strangled in the cords which were
+intended to keep it safe from harm, and deprived of
+the free air on which its life depends it would dwindle
+and die.
+
+A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr.
+Jellinger Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time,
+an elementary book on astronomy, came on something
+which he conceived to be a difficulty in the theory of
+lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
+plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are
+universally the opposite of the apparent motions. Mr.
+Symonds conceived that the moon could not revolve on
+its axis, because the same side of it was continually
+turned towards the earth; and if it were connected with
+the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would
+deprive it of power of rotation--the relative aspects of
+the two bodies would remain unchanged. He sent
+his views to the Times. He appealed to the common
+sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be
+on his side. The men of science were of course right;
+but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious, had been
+hitherto explained in language which the general reader
+could not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation
+cleared up the confusion: we do not recollect whether
+Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not; but most of us who
+had before received what the men of science told us
+with an unintelligent and languid assent, were
+set thinking for ourselves, and as a result of the
+discussion, exchanged a confused idea for a clear one.
+
+It was an excellent illustration of the true claims
+of authority and of the value of open inquiry. The
+ignorant man has not as good a right to his own opinion
+as the instructed man. The instructed man, however
+right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as
+axioms, and merely insist that they are true. The one
+asks a question, the other answers it, and all of us are
+the better for the business.
+
+Now let us suppose the same thing to have happened,
+when the only reply to a difficulty was an appeal to the
+Astronomer Royal, where the rotation of the moon was
+an article of salvation decreed by the law of the land,
+and where all persons admitted to hold office under the
+State were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer
+Royal--as it was, if we remember right, he was a little
+cross about it--would have brought an action against
+Mr. Symonds in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds
+would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of
+course, he would have been obstinate in his heresy;
+the world outside would have had an antecedent presumption
+that truth lay with the man who was making
+sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in
+the way of argument for what could not stand without
+the help of the law. Everybody could understand the
+difficulty; not everybody would have taken the trouble
+to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have
+been a Colenso, and a good many of us would have
+been convinced in our secret hearts that the moon as
+little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.
+
+As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to
+believe in its capacity for self-defence, so practically in
+every subject except one, errors are allowed free room
+to express themselves, and that liberty of opinion which
+is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of
+falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so
+evident that to argue in favour of it is almost absurd--
+might be expected to have been applied as a matter of
+course to the one subject on which mistake is supposed
+to be fatal, where to come to wrong conclusions is held
+to be a crime for which the Maker of the universe has
+neither pardon nor pity. Yet many reasons, not difficult
+to understand, have long continued to exclude
+theology from the region where free discussion is
+supposed to be applicable. That so many persons have a
+personal interest in the maintenance of particular views,
+would of itself be fatal to fair argument. Though they
+know themselves to be right, yet right is not enough for
+them unless there is might to support it, and those who
+talk most of faith show least that they possess it. But
+there are deeper and more subtle objections. The
+theologian requires absolute certainty, and there are no
+absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of
+science are never more than in a high degree probable;
+they are no more than the best explanations of phenomena
+which are attainable in the existing state of
+knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws
+only in courtesy. They are generalizations which are
+not considered likely to require modification, but which
+no one pretends to be in the nature of the cause
+exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become
+more complicated, and the data for the interpretation
+of them more inadequate, the explanations offered are
+put forward hypothetically, and are graduated by the
+nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is
+altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty
+increases with the mystery and obscurity of his matter;
+his convictions admit of no qualification; his truth is
+sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows what he
+believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he
+inquire, it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious
+doubt with him is sin. It is in vain to point out to him
+the thousand forms of opinions for each of which the
+same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant,
+crawling with bare knees over the flint points on Croagh
+Patrick, the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary,
+the Methodist in the spasmodic extasy of a revival, alike
+are conscious of emotions in themselves which correspond
+to their creed: the more passionate--or, as some would
+say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and
+more clear is the voice within. But these varieties are
+no embarrassment to the theologian. He finds no fault
+with the method which is identical in them all. Whatever
+the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
+satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under
+illusions of Satan.
+
+Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High
+Church party were more formidable than they are at
+present--much about "the right of private judgment."
+Why, the eloquent Protestant would say, should I pin
+my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a
+congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge
+than I am. I have a right to my own opinion. It
+sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is
+interfered with by a cause which, above all others,
+would have been expected to further it; but this in
+fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
+grounds of theological belief beyond the province of
+argument. No one talks of "a right of private judgment."
+in anything but religion; no one but a fool
+insists on his "right to his own opinion" with his
+lawyer or his doctor. Able men who have given their
+time to special subjects, are authorities upon it to be
+listened to with deference, and the ultimate authority
+at any given time is the collective general sense. Of the
+wisest men living in the department to which they
+belong. The utmost "right of private judgment" which
+anybody claims in such cases, is the choice of the
+physician to whom he will trust his body, or of
+counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his
+cause. The expression, as it is commonly used, implies
+a belief that in matters of religion, the criteria of truth
+are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere, and
+the efforts which have been made to bring the notion
+into harmony with common sense and common subjects,
+have not been very successful. The High Church
+party used to say, as a point against the Evangelicals,
+that either "the right of private judgment" meant
+nothing, or it meant that a man had a right to be in the
+wrong. "No," said a writer in the Edinburgh Review
+"it means only that if a man chooses to be in the wrong,
+no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
+has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the
+policeman may not force a way into his house and
+prevent him." The illustration fails of its purpose. In
+the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a
+wrong use of the thing; they meant merely that they
+had a right to their own opinions as against the Church.
+They did not indeed put forward their claim quite so
+nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious;
+but nobody ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman
+or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.
+
+But, secondly, society has a most absolute right to
+prevent all manner of evil--drunkenness, and the rest
+of it, if it can--only in doing so, society must not use
+means which would create a greater evil than it would
+remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing
+anything but most foul wrong to himself in getting
+drunk, society does him no wrong, but rather does him
+the greatest benefit if it can possibly keep him sober;
+and in the same way, as a false belief in serious
+matters is among the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive
+it out of a man, by the whip, if it cannot be managed by
+persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and affection,
+provided the belief really and truly is false, and you
+have a better to give him in the place of it. The
+question is not what to do, but merely "how to do it;"
+although Mr. Mill, in his love of "liberty," thinks
+otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say
+out his convictions in plain language, whatever they
+may be; and so far as he means that there should be no
+Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is perfectly just
+in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament
+to public opinion, when he lays down as a general
+principle that the free play of thought is unwholesomely
+interfered with by society, he would take away the sole
+protection which we possess from the inroads of any
+kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that
+he thinks a man better off with a false opinion of his
+own than with a right opinion inflicted upon him from
+without; while for our own part we should be grateful
+for tyranny or for anything else which would perform
+so useful an office for us.
+
+Public opinion may be unjust at particular times
+and on particular subjects; we believe it to be both
+unjust and unwise on the matter of which we are at
+present speaking: But on the whole, it is like the
+ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure; much
+in this world has to be taken for granted, and we cannot
+be for ever arguing over our first principles. If a man
+persists in talking of what he does not understand, he
+is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a
+decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy
+of him, and he is not invited again; if he profess himself
+a Buddhist, a Mahometan, it is assumed that he has not
+adopted those beliefs on serious conviction but
+rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not
+deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make
+themselves bores and nuisances; and the common sense
+of mankind inflicts wholesome inconveniences on those
+who carry their "right of private judgment" to any
+such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as
+that which operates so wholesomely in the Sciences.
+Mere folly is extinguished in contempt; objections
+reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are reasonably
+met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition
+to test their value, make their way into general reception.
+
+A further cause which has operated to prevent theology
+from obtaining the benefit of free discussion is the
+interpretation popularly placed upon the constitution of
+the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries of its
+existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be
+under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which
+miraculously controlled its decisions, and precluded the
+possibility of error. This theory broke down at the
+Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that
+theological truth was in some way different from other
+truth; and partly on grounds of public policy, partly
+because it was supposed to have succeeded to the obligations
+and the rights of the Papacy, the State took upon
+itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be
+taught to the people. The distractions created by
+divided opinions were then dangerous. Individuals did
+not hesitate to ascribe to themselves the infallibility
+which they denied to the Church. Everybody was
+intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat
+of an opponent whom his arguments had failed to
+convince. The State, while it made no pretensions
+to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in
+self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and
+to prevent the nation from tearing itself in pieces, a
+body of formulas was enacted, for the time broad and
+comprehensive, within which opinion might be allowed
+convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the
+border.
+
+It might have been thought that in abandoning for
+itself, and formally denying to the Church its pretensions
+to immunity from error, the State could not have
+intended to bind the conscience. When this or that
+law is passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he
+is not required to approve of the law as just. The
+Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine Articles, so far as
+they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are as
+much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to
+conduct; it is not easy to see why they should be
+more; it is not easy to see why they should have been
+supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their
+opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The
+judge is not forbidden to ameliorate the law which he
+administers. If in discharge of his duty he has to
+pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same time
+that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him
+of dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The
+soldier is asked no questions as to the legitimacy of the
+war on which he is sent to fight; nor need he throw
+up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad one.
+Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war
+was unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel
+uncertain what to do, and would seek some other
+profession rather than continue instruments of evil. But
+within limits, and in questions of detail, where the
+service is generally good and honourable, we leave
+opinion its free play, and exaggerated scrupulousness
+would be folly or something worse. Somehow or other,
+however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the
+clergyman. The idea of absolute inward belief has
+been substituted for that of obedience; and the man
+who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and accepts
+the Prayer-Book, does not merely undertake to use the
+services in the one, and abstain from contradicting to
+his congregation the doctrines contained in the other;
+but he is held to promise what no honest man, without
+presumption, can undertake to promise, that he will
+continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks
+when he makes his engagement.
+
+It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign,
+and retire into lay communion. We are not prepared
+to say that either the Convocation of 1562, or the
+Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew
+exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is
+quite clear that they did not contemplate the alternative
+of a clergyman's retirement. If they had, they would
+have provided means by which he could have abandoned
+his orders, and not have remained committed for life to
+a profession from which he could not escape. If the
+popular theory of subscription be true, and the Articles
+are articles of belief, a reasonable human being, when
+little more than a boy, pledges himself to a long series
+of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
+divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt,
+never to allow his mind to be shaken, whatever the
+weight of argument or evidence brought to bear upon
+him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man
+living has a right to promise to do. He is doing, on
+the authority of Parliament, precisely what the Church
+of Rome required him to do on the authority of a
+Council.
+
+If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects
+with which he has to deal, or unable to reconcile
+some new-discovered truth of science with the established
+formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he
+ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen
+and divines of the sixteenth century, which they themselves
+disowned, there is an instant cry to have him
+stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
+punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the
+means on which life and limb can be supported, while
+with ingenious tyranny he is forbidden to maintain
+himself by any other occupation.
+
+So far have we gone in this direction, that when
+the Essays and Reviews appeared, it was gravely said
+--and said by men who had no professional antipathy
+to them--that the writers had broken their faith.
+Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such
+subjects; clergymen were the hired exponents of the
+established opinions, and were committed to them in
+thought and word. It was one more anomaly where
+there were enough already. To say that the clergy,
+who are set apart to study a particular subject, are to
+be the only persons unpermitted to have an independent
+opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take
+no part in the amendment of the statute-book, that
+engineers must be silent upon mechanism, and if an
+improvement is wanted in the art of medicine, physicians
+may have nothing to say to it.
+
+These causes would perhaps have been insufficient
+to repress free inquiry, if there had been on the part
+of the really able men among us a determination to
+break the ice; in other words, if theology had preserved
+the same commanding interest for the more powerful
+minds with which it affected them three hundred years
+ago. But on the one hand, a sense, half serious, haft
+languid, of the hopelessness of the subject has produced
+an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there
+has been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion
+the minds of the uneducated or half-educated, to whom
+the established religion is simply an expression of the
+obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the
+details of which they think little, and are therefore
+unconscious of its difficulties, while in general it is the
+source of all that is best and noblest in their lives and
+actions.
+
+This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the
+force which it once possessed it possesses no longer.
+The uncertainty which once affected only the more
+instructed extends now to all classes of society. A
+superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by
+day, is undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving;
+and there is an unrest which will be satisfied only when
+the sources of it are probed to the core. The Church
+authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are
+pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the
+most serious grounds of perplexity as if they were
+puerile and trifling; while it is notorious that for a
+century past extremely able men have either not known
+what to say about them, or have not said what they
+thought. On the Continent the peculiar English view
+has scarcely a single educated defender. Even in
+England the laity keep their judgment in suspense,
+or remain warily silent.
+
+"What religion are you, Mr. Rogers?" said a lady once.
+
+"What religion, madam? I am of the religion of
+all sensible men."
+
+"And what is that?" she asked.
+
+"All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves."
+
+If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he
+would have said perhaps that when the opinions of
+those best able to judge are divided, the questions at
+issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are unable to
+give them special attention withhold their judgment,
+while those who are able, form their conclusions with
+diffidence and modesty. But theologians will not
+tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute assent, and will
+take nothing short of it; and they affect therefore to
+drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases
+them. The Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of
+punishment. The Archbishop of Canterbury refers us
+to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The
+objections of the present generation of "infidels," he
+says, are the same which have been refuted again and
+again, and are such as a child might answer. The
+young man just entering upon the possession of his
+intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief,
+and more anxious for truth than for success in life,
+finds when he looks into the matter that the Archbishop
+has altogether misrepresented it; that in fact,
+like other official persons, he had been using merely a
+stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no
+definite meaning. The words are repeated year after
+year, but the enemies refuse to be exorcised. They
+come and come again from Spinoza and Lessing to
+Strauss and Renan. The theologians have resolved no
+single difficulty; they convince no one who is not
+convinced already; and a Colenso coming fresh to the
+subject, with no more than a year's study, throws the
+Church of England into convulsions.
+
+If there were any real danger that Christianity would
+cease to be believed, it would be no more than a
+fulfilment of prophecy. The state in which the Son of
+Man would find the world at his coming he did not say
+would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever
+literally to come upon the earth, there are no present
+signs of it. The creed of eighteen centuries is not
+about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are the new
+lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons
+can look with comfort to exchanging one for the other.
+Christianity has abler advocates than its professed
+defenders, in those many quiet and humble men and
+women who in the light of it and the strength of it
+live holy, beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God
+that answer by fire is the God whom mankind will
+acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the Spirit
+continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in
+those graces which raise human creatures above
+themselves, and invest them with that beauty of holiness
+which only religion confers, thoughtful persons will
+remain convinced that with them in some form or other
+is the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on
+poison, or the soul on falsehood; and as the vital
+processes of health are too subtle for science to follow;
+as we choose our food, not by the most careful chemical
+analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the
+system; so when a particular belief is fruitful in
+nobleness of character, we need trouble ourselves very little
+with scientific demonstrations that it is false. The
+most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable
+from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic
+acid, we are told, is formed of the same elements,
+combined in the same proportions, as gum-arabic.
+
+What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus
+so positively, it is less easy to divine. Religion from
+the beginning of time has expanded and changed with
+the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets
+was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness
+of heart of the Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel
+set aside the Law; the creed of the early Church was
+not the creed of the middle ages, any more than the
+creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St.
+Bernard and Aquinas. Old things pass away, new
+things come in their place; and they in their turn grow
+old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many
+forms which Christianity has assumed in the world,
+holy men have lived and died, and have had the witness
+of the Spirit that they were not far from the truth. It
+may be that the faith which saves is the something held
+in common by all sincere Christians, and by those
+as well who should come from the east and the west,
+and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the children
+of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the
+true teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines;
+and theology, when insisting on the reception of its
+huge catena of formulas, may be binding a yoke upon
+our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able
+to bear.
+
+But it is not the object of this article to put forward
+either this or any other particular opinion. The writer
+is conscious only that he is passing fast towards the dark
+gate which soon will close behind him. He believes
+that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these
+things is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely
+diffident of his own power to find his way towards such
+a conviction, he is both ready and anxious to disclaim
+"all right of private judgment" in the matter. He wishes
+only to learn from those who are able to teach him.
+The learned prelates talk of the presumptuousness of
+human reason; they tell us that doubts arise from the
+consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate
+heart. The present writer, while he believes generally
+that reason, however inadequate, is the best faculty to
+which we have to trust, yet is most painfully conscious
+of the weakness of his own reason; and once let the
+real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared;
+let those who are most capable of forming a sound
+opinion, after reviewing the whole relations of science,
+history, and what is now received as revelation, tell us
+fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught they
+conceive to be adequately established, how much to be
+uncertain, and how much, if anything, to be mistaken;
+there is scarcely perhaps a single serious inquirer who
+would not submit with delight to a court which is the
+highest on earth.
+
+Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason
+is beyond its depth, that the wise and the unwise are on
+the same level of incapacity, and that we must accept
+what we find established, or we must believe nothing.
+We presume that this dilemma itself is a conclusion of
+reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our
+ultimate authority; and were the collective sense of
+mankind to declare Mr. Mansell right, we should submit
+to that opinion as readily as to another. But the
+collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He
+has been compared to a man sitting on the end of a
+plank and deliberately sawing off his seat. It seems
+never to have occurred to him that, if he is right, he has
+no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says
+to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied
+to Frith and Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that
+transubstantiation was unreasonable; Gardiner answered
+that there was the letter of Scripture of it, and that the
+human intellect was no measure of the power of God.
+Yet the Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell
+by his place in the Church of England seems to agree
+with them, that the human intellect was not so wholly
+incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was
+better than none; and they declared on grounds of mere
+reason, that Christ being in heaven and not on earth,
+'it was contrary to the truth for a natural body to be in
+two places at once.' The common sense of the country
+was of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an
+end.
+
+There have been "Aids to Faitti" produced lately, and
+"Replies to the Seven Essayists," "Answers to Colenso,"
+and much else of the kind. We regret to say that they
+have done little for us. The very life of our souls is at
+issue in the questions which have been raised, and we
+are fed with the professional commonplaces of the
+members of a close guild, men holding high office in
+the Church, or expecting to hold high office there; in
+either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence
+of the institution which they represent. We desire to
+know what those of the clergy think whose love of truth
+is unconnected with their prospects in life; we desire
+to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the
+historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and
+these are for the most part silent, or confess themselves
+modestly uncertain. The professional theologians alone
+are loud and confident; but they speak in the old angry
+tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.
+They do not meet the real difficulties; they
+mistake them, misrepresent them, claim victories over
+adversaries with whom they have never even crossed
+swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at
+which we can only smile. It has been the unhappy
+manner of their class from immemorial time; they call
+it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond all doubt that
+they were on God's side, as if serious inquiry after truth
+was something which they were entitled to resent. They
+treat intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather
+to be condemned and punished than considered and
+weighed, and rather stop their ears and run with one
+accord upon any one who disagrees with them than
+listen patiently to what he has to say.
+
+We do not propose to enter in detail upon the
+particular points which demand re-discussion. It is
+enough that the more exact habit of thought which
+science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of
+the value and nature of evidence, has notoriously made
+it necessary that the grounds should be reconsidered
+on which we are to believe that one country and one
+people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles
+different from those which we now find to prevail
+universally. One of many questions, however, shall
+be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue seems
+habitually to be evaded.
+
+Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity
+of the Pentateuch and the other historical books
+of the Old Testament. The Bishop of Natal has thrown
+out in a crude form the critical results of the inquiries
+of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical
+calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He
+supposes himself to have proved that the first five books
+of the Bible are a compilation of uncertain date, full of
+inconsistencies and impossibilities. The apologists have
+replied that the objections are not absolutely conclusive,
+that the events described in the book of Exodus might
+possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances,
+have actually taken place; and they then pass to the
+assumption that because a story is not necessarily false,
+therefore it is necessarily true. We have no intention of
+vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes
+his arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and
+Dr. M'Call may settle their differences between themselves.
+The question is at once wider and simpler than
+any which has been raised in that controversy. Were it
+proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
+written by Moses, that those and all the books of the 01d
+and New Testaments were really the work of the writers
+whose names they bear; were the Mosaic cosmogony in
+harmony with physical discoveries; and were the supposed
+inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
+existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should
+not have advanced a single step towards making good the
+claim put forward for the Bible, that it is absolutely and
+unexceptionably true in all its parts. The "genuineness
+and authenticity" argument is irrelevant and needless.
+The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of
+the Pentateuch proves nothing about its immunity from
+errors. If there are no mistakes in it, it was not the
+workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
+Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand
+of Moses was the instrument made use of. To the
+most excellent of contemporary histories, to histories
+written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
+we accord but a limited confidence. The highest
+intellectual competence, the most admitted truthfulness,
+immunity from prejudice, and the absence of temptation
+to mis-state the truth; these things may secure general
+credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and
+circumstantial exactness. Two historians, though with
+equal gifts and equal opportunities, never describe events
+in exactly the same way. Two witnesses in a court of
+law, while they agree in the main, invariably differ in
+some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate
+facts precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The
+different parts of a story strike different imaginations
+unequally; and the mind, as the circumstances pass
+through it, alters their proportions unconsciously, or
+shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to
+the most authentic work of a man has no resemblance
+to that universal acceptance which is demanded for
+the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is a
+difference in kind; and we desire to know on what
+ground this infallibility, which we do not question, but
+which is not proved, demands our belief. Very likely
+the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it is, there can be
+no moral obligation to accept the facts which it records:
+and though there may be intellectual error in denying
+them, there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better
+or worse authenticated; but all the proofs in the world
+of the genuineness and authenticity of the human handiwork
+cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It
+might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of
+Pericles, but no one would call it sinful. Men part with
+all sobriety of judgment when they come on ground of
+this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name
+of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found
+allusions there to the Israelites in Palestine, we were told
+that a triumphant answer had been found to the cavils
+of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired truth
+of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause
+are a sure way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine
+Oracles may be true, and may be inspired; but the
+discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them so.
+No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the
+prophesies of Isaiah and Ezekiel were the work of men
+who had no knowledge of Assyria or the Assyrian
+Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at
+Carthage some Punic inscription may be found
+confirming Livy's account of the battle of Cannae; but
+we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the
+inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument
+comes to that) in the inspiration of the whole Latin
+literature.
+
+We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is
+infallible; we desire only to be told on what evidence
+that great and awful fact concerning it properly rests.
+It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser
+than argument--as if it had been felt that nothing
+short of this literal and close inspiration could preserve
+the facts on which Christianity depends. The history
+of the early world is a history everywhere of marvels.
+The legendary literature of every nation upon earth
+tells the same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the
+appearances of the gods upon earth, and of their intercourse
+with men. The lives of the saints of the
+Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the
+present day, are a complete tissue of miracles
+resembling and rivalling those of the Gospels. Some of
+these stories are romantic and imaginative; some clear,
+literal, and prosaic: some rest on mere tradition; some
+on the sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are
+obvious fables; some are as well authenticated as facts
+of such a kind can be authenticated at all. The
+Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects
+them without inquiry--involves those for which there
+is good authority and those for which there is none
+or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and sweeping
+denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely,
+in the words of Hume, that men should deceive or
+be deceived, than that the laws of nature should be
+violated. At this moment we are beset with reports of
+conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted,
+of hands projected out of the world of shadows into
+this mortal life. An unusually able, accomplished
+person, accustomed to deal with common-sense facts, a
+celebrated political economist, and notorious for
+business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain
+mesmerist, who was my informant's intimate friend,
+had raised a dead girl to life. We should believe the
+people who tell us these things in any ordinary matter:
+they would be admitted in a court of justice as good
+witnesses in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a
+man on their word. The person just now alluded to is
+incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our experience of
+the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
+our experience of the capacities of human folly on the
+other is so large, that when they tell us these wonderful
+stories, most of us are contented to smile; we
+do not care so much as to turn out of our way to
+examine them.
+
+The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as
+from other histories we reject miracles without hesitation,
+so of those in the Bible we insist on the universal
+acceptance: the former are all false, the latter are all
+true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so
+sweeping as these, we cannot even suppose that we are
+being guided by what is called historical evidence.
+Were it admitted that as a whole the miracles of the
+Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the
+saints, we should be far removed still from any large
+inference, that in the one set there is no room for
+falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The writer or
+writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The
+books themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older
+writings which are lost; and the accounts of the great
+prophets of Israel are a counterpart, curiously like, of
+those of the mediaeval saints. In many instances the
+authors of the lives of these saints were their
+companions and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what
+we are told of Elijah or Elisha took place exactly as we
+read it? Why do we reject the account of St. Columba
+or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should
+not God give a power to the saint which he had given
+to the prophet? We can produce no reason from the
+nature of things, for we know not what the nature of
+things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the
+ministers of religion were allowed to prove their
+commission by working miracles, what right have we, on
+grounds either of history or philosophy, to draw a clear
+line at the death of St. John, to say that before that
+time all such stories were true, and after it all were
+false?
+
+There is no point on which Protestant controversialists
+evade the real question more habitually than on
+that of miracles. They accuse those who withhold that
+unreserved and absolute belief which they require for
+all which they accept themselves, of denying that
+miracles are possible. That they assume to be the
+position taken up by the objector, and proceed easily to
+argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
+course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow
+understanding into a measure of the possibilities of the
+universe; nor does any person with any pretensions to
+religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
+is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery
+of a sick friend, for the gift of any blessing, or the
+removal of any calamity, we expect that God will do
+something by an act of his personal will which otherwise
+would not have been done--that he will suspend
+the ordinary relations of natural cause and effect; and
+this is the very idea of a miracle. The thing we pray
+for may be given us, and no miracle may have taken
+place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and
+would have occurred whether we had prayed or not.
+But prayer itself in its very essence implies a belief in
+the possible intervention of a power which is above
+nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
+evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so
+strong that no room is left for mistake, exaggeration,
+or illusion, while more evidence is required to establish
+a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient for a
+common occurrence.
+
+It has been said recently by "A Layman," in a letter
+to Mr. Maurice, that the resurrection of our Lord is as
+well authenticated as the death of Julius Caesar. It is
+far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken in
+supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence
+that inward assurance of the Christian, which would
+make him rather die than disbelieve a truth so dear to
+him. But if the layman meant that there was as much
+proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in
+a court of justice, he could scarcely have considered
+what he was saying. Julius Caesar was killed in a
+public place, in the presence of friend and foe, in a
+remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The
+circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and
+were never denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord,
+however, seems purposely to have withheld such public
+proof of his resurrection as would have left no room for
+unbelief. He showed himself, "not to all the people"
+--not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have
+overwhelmed--but "to witnesses chosen before;" to
+the circle of his own friends. There is no evidence
+which a jury could admit that he was ever actually dead.
+So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,
+that Pilate, we are told, "marvelled." The subsequent
+appearances were strange, and scarcely intelligible.
+Those who saw him did not recognize him till he was
+made known to them in the breaking of bread. He
+was visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those
+who were most intimate with him for another person;
+nor do the accounts agree which are given by the
+different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern
+sense (except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and
+St. Thomas was rather rebuked than praised,) there
+was none, and could be none. The evidence offered
+was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those
+who satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a
+searching inquiry, but who gave their assent with the
+unhesitating confidence of love.
+
+St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an
+instance of the kind of testimony which then worked
+the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery fanatic on a
+mission of persecution, with the midday Syrian sun
+streaming down upon his head, was struck to the
+ground, and saw in a vision our Lord in the air. If
+such a thing were to occur at the present day, and if a
+modern physician were consulted about it, he would
+say without hesitation, that it was an effect of an
+over-heated brain, and that there was nothing in it
+extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by the
+appearance had been too strong for such an explanation
+to be satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred,
+especially if he was a man of St. Paul's intellectual
+stature, would have at once examined into the facts
+otherwise known, connected with the subject of what
+he had seen. St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved
+our Lord's resurrection, had disbelieved it fiercely and
+passionately; we should have expected that he would at
+once have sought for those who could best have told
+him the details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did
+nothing of the kind. He went for a year into Arabia,
+and when at last he returned to Jerusalem, he rather
+held aloof from those who had been our Lord's
+companions, and who had witnessed his ascension.
+He saw Peter, he saw James; "of the rest of the
+apostles saw he none." To him evidently the proof of
+the resurrection was the vision which he had himself
+seen. It was to that which he always referred when
+called on for a defence of his faith.
+
+Of evidence for the resurrection in the common
+sense of the word there may be enough to show that
+something extraordinary occurred; but not enough,
+unless we assume the fact to be true on far other
+grounds, to produce any absolute and unhesitating
+conviction; and inasmuch as the resurrection is the
+keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be something
+far different from that suspended judgment in which
+history alone would leave us.
+
+Human testimony, we repeat, under the most
+favourable circumstances imaginable, knows nothing of
+"absolute certainty;" and if historical facts are bound
+up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
+the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they
+rest, and must rest, either on the divine truth of
+Scripture, or on the divine witness in ourselves. On human
+evidence, the miracles of St. Teresa and St. Francis of
+Assisi are as well established as those of the New
+Testament.
+
+M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account
+of the Gospel story which, written as it is by a man of
+piety, intellect, and imagination, is spreading rapidly
+through the educated world. Carrying out the principles
+with which Protestants have swept modern
+history clear of miracles to their natural conclusions,
+he dismisses all that is miraculous from the life of our
+Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the original Galilean
+youth who lived, and taught, and died in Palestine
+eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of
+reviewing M. Renan. He will be read soon enough by
+many who would better consider their peace of mind
+by leaving him alone. For ourselves we are unable
+to see by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part
+of the narrative, he retains the rest; the imagination
+and the credulity which invent extraordinary incidents
+invent ordinary incidents also; and if the divine
+element in the life is legendary, the human may be
+legendary also. But there is one lucid passage in the
+introduction which we commend to the perusal of
+controversial theologians:--
+
+No miracle such as those of which early histories are full
+has taken place under conditions which science can accept.
+Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur
+only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed
+in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to
+believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before
+an assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality.
+Neither uneducated people, nor even men of the world,
+have the requisite capacity; great precautions are needed,
+and a long habit of scientific research. Have we not seen
+men of the world in our own time become the dupes of the
+most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain
+that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it
+not possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to
+examine into them in detail, would be found equally to
+contain an element of error? It is not in the name of this
+or that philosophy, it is in the name of an experience which
+never varies that we banish miracles from history. We do
+not say a miracle is impossible, we say only that no miracle
+has ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come
+forward to-morrow with pretensions serious enough to
+deserve examination. Let us suppose him to announce
+that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would be
+done? A committee would be appointed, composed of
+physiologists, physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed
+to exact investigation; a body would then be selected which
+the committee would assure itself was really dead; and a
+place would be chosen where the experiment was to take
+place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no
+opening for uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the
+restoration to life was effected, a probability would be
+arrived at which would be almost equal to certainty. An
+experiment, however, should always admit of being repeated.
+What a man has done once he should be able to do again,
+and in miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty.
+The performer would be requested to repeat the operation
+under other circumstances upon other bodies; and if he
+succeeded on every occasion, two points would be established:
+first, that there may be in this world such things as
+supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to
+perform them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular
+persons.
+
+But who does not perceive that no miracle was ever
+performed under such conditions as these?
+
+We have quoted this passage because it expresses
+with extreme precision and clearness the common-sense
+principle which we apply to all supernatural stories of
+our own time, which Protestant theologians employ
+against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which
+M. Renan is only carrying to its logical conclusions in
+applying to the history of our Lord, if the Gospels are
+tried by the mere tests of historical criticism. The
+Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions
+were never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in
+the presence of sceptics to establish scientific truths,
+When the adulterous generation sought after a sign,
+the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the
+presence of unbelief our Lord was not able to work
+miracles. But science has less respect for that
+undoubting and submissive willingness to believe; and it
+is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the truth
+of the New Testament on the principles of Paley, if
+with Professor Jowett "we interpret the Bible as any
+other book," the element of miracle which has
+evaporated from the entire surface of human history will
+not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels,
+and the facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like
+a snow-ball.
+
+Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain
+the credibility of miracles, and nothing could be more
+likely if revelation be a reality and not a dream than
+that the history containing it should be saved in its
+composition from the intermixture of human infirmity.
+This is the position in which instinct long ago taught
+Protestants to entrench themselves, and where alone
+they can hope to hold their ground: once established
+in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it
+could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in
+the Bible were certainly untrue.
+
+Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the
+subject. Those who believed Christianity would admit
+the assumption; those who disbelieved Christianity
+would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed
+to that plain and single issue, and the elaborate
+treatises upon external evidence would cease to bring
+discredit upon the cause by their feebleness. Unfortunately--
+and this is the true secret of our present distractions--it
+seems certain that in some way or other
+this belief in inspiration itself requires to be revised.
+We are compelled to examine more precisely what we
+mean by the word. The account of the creation of
+man and the world which is given in Genesis, and
+which is made by St. Paul the basis of his theology,
+has not yet been reconciled with facts which science
+knows to be true. Death was in the world before
+Adam's sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a
+distance which no ingenuity can torture the letter of
+Scripture into recognizing, men and women lived and
+died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve
+of Sacred History listened to the temptation of the
+snake. Neither has any such deluge as that from which,
+according to the received interpretation, the ark saved
+Noah, swept over the globe within the human period.
+We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
+the natural course of discovery: as the story of the
+creation was written in human language, so the details
+of it may have been adapted to the existing state of
+human knowledge. The Bible it is said was not intended
+to teach men science, but to teach them what
+was necessary for the moral training of their souls. It
+may be that this is true. Spiritual grace affects the
+moral character of men, but leaves their intellect
+unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
+to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be
+only infallible when it touches on truths necessary to
+salvation. But if it be so, there are many things in
+the Bible which must become as uncertain as its geology
+or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of
+the Jewish people. Let it be once established that there
+is room for error anywhere, and we have no security for
+secular history. The inspiration of the Bible is the
+foundation of our whole belief; and it is a grave matter
+if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
+much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot
+live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live
+bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as
+it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing. It may
+be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are in vain;
+that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld
+from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that
+the existing belief is undergoing a silent modification,
+like those to which the dispensations of religion have
+been successively subjected; or, again, it may be that to
+the creed as it is already established there is nothing to
+be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it.
+At this moment, however, the most vigorous minds
+appear least to see their way to a conclusion; and
+notwithstanding all the school and church building, the
+extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a
+general doubt is coming up like a thunderstorm against
+the wind, and blackening the sky. Those who cling
+most tenaciously to the faith in which they were
+educated yet confess themselves perplexed. They know
+what they believe; but why they believe it, or why they
+should require others to believe, they cannot tell or
+cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church
+and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history
+and the testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts
+of science and the contradictory facts which seem to
+be revealed, the minds of men are tossed to and fro,
+harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific
+investigation has placed us all towards accounts of
+supernatural occurrences. We thrust the subject aside;
+we take refuge in practical work; we believe perhaps
+that the situation is desperate and hopeless of
+improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But
+we cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of
+uncertainty will haunt the world like an uneasy ghost,
+till we take it by the throat like men.
+
+We return then to the point from which we set out.
+The time is past for repression. Despotism has done
+its work; but the day of despotism is gone, and the
+only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things
+will never right themselves if they are let alone. It
+is idle to say peace when there is no peace; and the
+concealed imposthume is more dangerous than an open
+wound. The law in this country has postponed our
+trial, but cannot save us from it; and the questions
+which have agitated the Continent are agitating us at
+last. The student who twenty years ago was contented
+with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican
+divines, now reads Ewald and Renan. The Church
+authorities still refuse to look their difficulties in the
+face: they prescribe for mental troubles the established
+doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous
+questions as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace
+in placid comfort. But it will not avail. Their
+pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for
+themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by
+them in their trial, and could not or would not; and
+the bitterness of those conflicts and the end of most of
+them in heart-broken uncertainty or careless indifference,
+is too notorious to all who care to know about
+such things.
+
+We cannot afford year after year to be distracted
+with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers.
+In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as
+Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather
+would never have been written, for the difficulties with
+which it deals would have been long ago met and disposed
+of. When questions rose in the early and middle
+ages of the Church, they were decided by councils of
+the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and
+compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived
+at which individuals could accept and act upon. At
+the beginning of the English Reformation, when
+Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and the
+old belief was merging in the new, the country was
+deliberately held in formal suspense. Protestants and
+Catholics were set to preach on alternate Sundays in
+the same pulpit; the subject was discussed freely in the
+ears of the people, and at last, when all had been said
+on both sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied
+the result in formulas. Councils will no longer answer
+the purpose; the clergy have no longer a superiority of
+intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates
+from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments
+of the English Church, would not present an
+edifying spectacle. Parliament may no longer meddle
+with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it
+forged three centuries ago. But better than Councils,
+better than sermons, better than Parliament, is that
+free discussion through a free press which is the best
+instrument for the discovery of truth, and the most
+effectual means for preserving it.
+
+We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the
+air, that the press is free, and that all men may and
+do write what they please. It is not so. Discussion
+is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but
+one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their
+means of living; it is not free so long as the expression
+of doubt is considered as a sin by public opinion and as
+a crime by the law. So far are we from free discussion
+that the world is not yet agreed that a free discussion
+is desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial
+intellect of the country will not throw itself into the
+question. The battle will continue to be fought by
+outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose which they
+cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national
+understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful
+and assured conviction, will not be heard.
+____
+
+
+SPINOZA
+
+Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate
+Lineamenta Alque Annotationes ad Traclatum Theologico
+Politicum. Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halae
+ad Salam. J. F. Lippert. 1852.
+
+This little volume is one evidence among many of the
+interest which continues to be felt by the German
+students in Spinoza. The actual merit of the book
+itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry
+with which they are gleaning among the libraries of
+Holland for any traces of him which they can recover;
+and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring
+that factitious importance which attaches to the
+most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness.
+Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but
+we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed.
+Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will much
+illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the
+better part of his life in working the language in which
+he expressed it clear of ambiguities; and such earlier
+draughts of his system as are supposed still to be extant
+in MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes
+himself to have discovered, contribute only obscurity
+to what is in no need of additional difficulty. Of
+Spinoza's private history, on the contrary, rich as it
+must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be
+extant somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence,
+we know only enough to feel how vast a
+chasm remains to be filled. It is not often that any
+man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as
+Spinoza lived; not for striking incidents or large events
+connected with it; but because (and no sympathy with
+his peculiar opinions disposes us to exaggerate his
+merit) he was one of the very best men whom these
+modern times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited,
+and thrown upon the world when a mere boy
+to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements
+which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward
+in the world; refusing pensions, legacies, money
+in many forms, he maintained himself with grinding
+glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had
+been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the
+best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which
+was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with
+which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the
+endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to
+his executors, in which he was described as M. Spinoza
+of "blessed memory."
+
+The account which remains of him we owe not to
+an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman, to whom his
+theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that
+the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a
+blemish in his character,--that except so far as his opinions
+were blameable, he had lived to all outward appearances free
+from fault. We desire, in what we are going to say of him,
+to avoid offensive collision with even popular prejudices,
+and still more with the earnest convictions
+of serious persons: our business is to relate
+what he was, and leave others to form their own conclusions.
+But one lesson there does seem to lie in such
+a life of such a man,--a lesson deeper than any which is
+to be found in his philosophy,--that wherever there is
+genuine and thorough love for good and goodness, no
+speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant
+as to forfeit those graces which are promised
+not to clearness of intellect, but to purity of heart. In
+Spinoza's own beautiful language,--"justitia et caritas
+unicum et certissimum verae fidei Catholicae signurn est,
+et veri Spiritus sancti fructus: et ubicumque haec reperiuntur,
+ibi Christus re verg est, et ubicumque haec
+desunt deest Christus. Solo namque Christi Spiritu duci
+possumus in amorem justitiae et caritatis." We may
+deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of
+thought preposterous and even pernicious, but we
+cannot refuse him the respect which is the right of
+all sincere and honourable men. We will say, indeed,
+as much as this, that wherever and on whatever
+questions good men are found ranged on opposite sides,
+one of three alternatives is always true:--either that
+the points of disagreement are purely speculative and
+of no moral importance, or that there is a misunderstanding
+of language, and the same thing is meant
+under difference of words, or else that the real truth is
+something different from what is held by any of the
+disputants, and that each is representing some important
+element which the other ignores or forgets. In either
+case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary,
+if we would understand what we disagree with, or would
+oppose it with success. Spinoza's influence over European
+thought is too great to be denied or set aside, and
+if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether, we
+cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or
+misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no
+one now living will deny in words, and which a century
+or two hence perhaps will begin to produce some effects
+upon the popular judgment.
+
+Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are
+able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy
+in the first and only logical form which as yet it has
+assumed. Whatever may have been the case with his
+disciples, in the author of this system there was no
+unwillingness to look closely at it, or follow it out
+to its conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits
+belong to Spinoza, at least he has done as
+much as with language can be done to make himself
+thoroughly understood--a merit in which it cannot be
+said that his followers have imitated him--Pantheism,
+as it is known in England, being a very synonym of
+vagueness and mysticism.
+
+The fact is, that both in friend and enemy alike,
+there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really
+was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
+claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little
+disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox
+Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist
+--which is still more extravagant; and even a man
+like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would
+have had something reasonable to say, could find no
+better name for him than a Colt trunkner Mann--a
+God intoxicated man; an expression which has been
+quoted by everybody who has since written upon the
+subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those
+laboriously pregnant sayings usually are. With due
+allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
+tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a
+Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can
+it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who
+carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years,
+deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last
+to the world in a form more severe than with such
+subjects had ever been so much as attempted? With
+him, as with all great men, there was no effort after
+sublime emotions. A plain, practical person, his object
+in philosophy was only to find a rule on which he
+could depend to govern his own actions and his
+own judgment: and his treatises contain no more
+than the conclusions at which he arrived in this purely
+personal search, and the grounds on which he rested
+them.
+
+We cannot do better than follow his own account of
+himself as he has given it in the opening of his
+unfinished Tract, "De Emendatione Intellectas." His
+language is very beautiful, but elaborate and full; and,
+as we have a long journey before us, we must be
+content to epitomize it.
+
+Looking round him on his entrance into life, and
+asking himself what was his place and business in it,
+he turned for examples to his fellow-men, and found
+little that he could venture to imitate. Whatever they
+professed, they all really guided themselves by their
+different notions of what they thought desirable; and
+these notions themselves resting on no more secure
+foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience, the
+experience of one not being the experience of another,
+men were all, so to say, rather playing experiments with
+life than living, and the larger portion of them miserably
+failing. Their mistakes arising, as it seemed to Spinoza,
+from inadequate knowledge, things which at one time
+looked desirable disappointing expectation when obtained,
+and the wiser course concealing itself often
+under an uninviting exterior, he desired to substitute
+certainty for conjecture, and endeavour to find, by
+some surer method, where the real good of man lay.
+All this may sound very Pagan, and perhaps it is so.
+We must remember that he had been brought up a
+Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews' communion;
+his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of
+life, with no creed or system lying between them and
+himself as the interpreter of it. Some true account of
+things, however, he thought it likely that there must
+be, and the question was, how to find it. Of all forms
+of human thought, but one, he reflected, would admit
+of the certainty which he required--the mathematical;
+and, therefore, if certain knowledge were attainable at
+all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or
+demonstrative method; by tracing from ideas clearly
+conceived the consequences which were formally involved
+in them. The question was, therefore, of these
+ideas, these verae ideae, as he calls them,--what were they,
+and how were they to be obtained: if they were to
+serve as the axioms of his system, they must, he felt,
+be self-evident truths, of which no proof was required;
+and the illustration which he gives of the character of
+such ideas is ingenious and Platonic.
+
+In order to produce any mechanical instrument, he
+says, we require others with which to manufacture it;
+and others again to manufacture those; and it would
+seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,
+and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature,
+however, has provided for the difficulty in creating of
+her own accord certain rude instruments, with the help
+of which we can make others better; and others again
+with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be
+with the mind, and there must be somewhere similar
+original instruments provided also as the first outfit of
+intellectual enterprise. To discover them, he examines
+the various senses in which men are said to know
+anything, and he finds that these senses resolve themselves
+into three, or, as he elsewhere divides it, four:--
+We know a thing,
+
+1.
+i. Ex mero auditu: because we have heard it from some
+person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to question.
+ii. Ab experientia vaga: from general experience: for instance,
+all facts or phenomena which come to us through our senses as
+phenomena, but of the causes of which we are ignorant.
+
+2. These two in Ethics are classed together.
+
+As we have correctly conceived the laws of such
+phenomena, and see them following in their sequence
+m the order of nature.
+
+3. Ex scientia intuitiva: which alone is absolutely clear
+and certain.
+
+To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required
+to find a fourth proportional which shall stand to the
+third of three numbers as the second does to the first.
+The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he multiplies the
+second into the third and divides by the first. He
+neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the
+number which he seeks, but he has learnt the fact that
+it is so, and he remembers it.
+
+A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in
+a variety of simple cases; he has discovered the rule by
+induction, but still does not understand it.
+
+A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically,
+as he has found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.
+
+A fourth with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3,
+sees for himself by simple intuitive force that 1:2 = 3:6.
+
+Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and
+fourth alone deserve to be called knowledge, the others
+being no more than opinions more or less justly
+founded. The last is the only real insight, although
+the third, being exact in its form, may be depended
+upon as a basis of certainty. Under this last, as
+Spinoza allows, nothing except the very simplest truths
+non nisi simplicissimae veritates can be perceived, but,
+such as they are, they are the foundation of all after
+science; and the true ideas, the verae ideae, which are
+apprehended by this faculty of intuition, are the
+primitive instruments with which nature has furnished us.
+If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he
+has none to give us. "Veritas," he says to his friends,
+in answer to their question, "veritas index sui est et
+falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit." These original
+truths are of such a kind that they cannot without
+absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites
+of them are contradictions in terms:--"Ut sciam me
+scire necessario debeo prius scire. Hinc pater quod
+certitudo nihil est praeter ipsam essentiam objectivam.
+...Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat
+habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem
+est ideas, ut omne tollatur dubium; hint sequitur quod
+vera non est methodus, signum veritatis quaerere post
+acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est
+via, et ipsa vetitas, aut essentiae objectivae rerum, aut
+ideae (omnia illa idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur."
+(De Emend. Intell.)
+
+The opinion of this Review on reasonings of such
+a kind has been too often expressed to require us now
+to say how insecure they appear to us. When we remember
+the thousand conflicting opinions, the truth
+of which their several advocates have as little doubted
+as they have doubted their own existence, we require
+some better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty;
+and Aristotle's less pretending canon promises a safer
+road. Ho pasi dokei, "what all men think," says Aristotle,
+touto einai phamen, "this we say is,"--"and if you will not
+have this to be a fair ground of conviction, you will
+scarcely find one which will serve you better." We are
+to see, however, what these idete are which Spinoza
+offers as self-evident. All will turn upon that; for, of
+course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce
+conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does,
+indeed, appear strange to us that Spinoza was not
+staggered as to the validity of his canon, when his
+friends, every one of them, so floundered and stumbled
+among what he regarded as his simplest propositions,
+requiring endless signa veritalis, and unable for a long
+time even to understand their meaning, far less to
+"recognize them as elementary certainties." Modern
+readers may, perhaps, be more fortunate. We produce
+at length the definitions and axioms of the first book
+of the "Ethica," and they may judge for themselves:--
+
+DEFINITIONS.
+
+1. By a thing which is causa sui, its own cause, I mean a
+thing the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a
+thing which cannot be conceived of except as existing.
+2. I call a thing finite, suo genere, when it can be
+circumscribed by another (or others) of the same nature, e.g.
+a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive
+another body larger than it; but body is not circumscribed
+by thought, nor thought by body.
+3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived
+of by itself; the conception of which, that is, does
+not involve the conception of anything else as the cause
+of it.
+4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of
+substance as constituting the essence of substance.
+5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is
+in something else, by and through which it is conceived.
+6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting
+of infinite attributes, each of which expresses His
+eternal and infinite essence.
+
+EXPLANATION.
+
+I say absolutely infinite, not infinite suo genere, for of
+what is infinite sua genere only, the attributes are not
+infinite but finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains
+in its own essence everything by which substance can be
+expressed and which involves no impossibility.
+
+7. That thing is "free" which exists by the sole necessity
+of its own nature, and is determined in its operation by
+itself only. That is "not free" which is called into existence
+by something else, and is determined in its operation
+according to a fixed and definite method.
+8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following
+necessarily and solely from the definition of the thing which
+is eternal.
+
+EXPLANATION.
+
+Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal
+verity, and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even
+though the duration be without beginning or end.
+
+So far the definitions; then follow the
+
+AXIOMS.
+
+1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in
+virtue of something else.
+2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of
+something else, we must conceive through and in itself.
+3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and
+if there be no given cause no effect can follow.
+4. Things which have nothing in common with each other
+cannot be understood through one another; i.e. the
+conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.
+5. To understand an effect implies that we understand
+the cause of it.
+6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its ideate.
+7. The essence of anything which can be conceived as
+non-existent does not involve existence.
+
+Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with
+which to start upon our enterprise of learning, the larger
+number of which, so far from being simple, must be
+absolutely without meaning to persons whose minds are
+undisciplined in metaphysical abstraction, and which
+become only intelligible propositions as we look back
+upon them after having become acquainted with the
+system which they are supposed to contain.
+
+Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such
+unlooked-for difficulties, the important question, after
+all, is not of their obscurity but of their truth. Many
+things in all the sciences are obscure to an unpractised
+understanding, which are true enough and clear
+enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and
+may be fairly laid as foundations of a scientific system,
+although rudimentary students must be contented to
+accept them upon faith. Of course it is entirely
+competent to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms
+which he intends to use just as he pleases, provided
+it be understood that any conclusions which he derives
+out of them apply only to the ideas so defined, and not
+to any supposed object existing which corresponds with
+them. Euclid defines his triangles and circles, and
+discovers that to figures so described certain properties
+previously unknown may be proved to belong; but as
+in nature there are no such things as triangles and
+circles exactly answering the definition, his conclusions,
+as applied to actually existing objects, are either not
+true at all or only proximately so. Whether it be
+possible to bridge over the gulf between existing things
+and the abstract conception of them, as Spinoza attempts
+to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal road to
+certainty if it be a practicable one, but we cannot say
+that we ever met any one who could say honestly
+Spinoza had convinced him; and power of demonstration,
+like all other powers, can be judged only
+by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction?
+If not, it is nothing. We need not detain
+our readers among these abstractions. The real power
+of Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary
+appreciation, or we should long ago have heard the last
+of it. Like all other systems which have attracted
+followers, it addresses itself not to the logical intellect
+but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside.
+We refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which
+it thrusts itself upon our reception, but regarding it
+as a whole, as an attempt to explain the nature of the
+world, of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves
+how far the attempt is successful. Some account of
+these things we know that there must be, and the
+curiosity which asks the question regards itself, of
+course, as competent in some degree to judge of the
+answer to it. Before proceeding, however, to regard
+this philosophy in the aspect in which it is really
+powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy
+of the method.
+
+The system is evolved in a series of theorems in
+severely demonstrative order out of the definitions and
+axioms which we have translated. To propositions 1--6
+we have nothing to object; they will not, probably,
+convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely
+abstract, and seem to follow (as far as we can speak
+of "following," in such subjects), by fair reasoning.
+"Substance is prior in nature to its affections."
+"Substances with different attributes have nothing in
+common," and therefore "one cannot be the cause of the
+other." "Things really distinct are distinguished by
+difference either of attribute or mode (there being
+nothing else by which they can be distinguished), and
+therefore, because things modally distinguished do not
+qua substance differ from one another, there cannot be
+more than one substance of the same attribute; and
+therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among
+what Spinoza calls notiones simplicissimas), since there
+cannot be two substances of the same attribute and
+substances of different attributes cannot be the cause
+one of the other, it follows that no substances can be
+produced by another substance."
+
+The existence of substance, he then concludes, is
+involved in the nature of the thing itself. Substance
+exists. It does and must. We ask, why? and we
+are answered, because there is nothing capable of
+producing it, and therefore it is self-caused; i.e. by
+the first definition the essence of it implies existence
+as part of the idea. It is astonishing that Spinoza
+should not have seen that he assumes the fact that
+substance does exist in order to prove that it must. If
+it cannot be produced and exists, then, of course, it
+exists in virtue of its own nature. But supposing it
+does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion, the proof
+falls to pieces, unless we fall back on the facts of
+experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that
+the thing which we call the world, and the personalities
+which we call ourselves, are a real substantial
+something. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration,
+he winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof,
+but never escaping the same vicious circle: substance
+exists because it exists, and the ultimate experience of
+existence, so far from being of that clear kind which
+can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all
+our sensations. What is existence? and what is that
+something which we say exists? Things--essences--
+existences; these are but the vague names with which
+faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional
+phenomena, disguise their incapacity. The world
+in the Hindoo legend rested upon the back of the
+tortoise. It was a step between the world and nothingness,
+and served to cheat the imagination with ideas
+of a fictitious resting-place.
+
+"If any one affirms," says Spinoza, "that he has a clear,
+distinct--that is to say, a true idea of substance, but that
+nevertheless he is uncertain whether any such substance
+exist, it is the same as if he were to affirm that he had a
+true idea, but yet was uncertain whether it was not false.
+Or if he says that substance can be created, it is like saying
+that a false idea can become a true idea--as absurd a thing
+as it is possible to conceive; and therefore the existence
+of substance, as well as the essence of it, must be
+acknowledged as an eternal verity."
+
+It is again the same story. He speaks of a clear idea
+of substance; but he has not proved that such an idea
+is within the compass of the mind. A man's own
+notion that he sees clearly, is no proof that he really
+sees clearly; and the distinctness of a definition in
+itself is no evidence that it corresponds adequately with
+the object of it. No doubt a man who professes to
+have an idea of substance as an existing thing, cannot
+doubt, as long as he has it, that substance so exists.
+It is merely to say that as long as a man is certain of
+this or that fact, he has no doubt of it. But neither
+his certainty nor Spinoza's will be of any use to a man
+who has no such idea, and who cannot recognize the
+lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at.
+
+From the self-existing substance it is a short step to
+the existence of God. After a few more propositions
+following one another with the same kind of coherence,
+we arrive successively at the conclusions that there is
+but one substance, that this substance being necessarily
+existent, it is also infinite, and that it is therefore
+identical with the Being who had been previously defined
+as the "Ens absolute perfectum," consisting of infinite
+"attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and
+infinite essence." Demonstrations of this kind were the
+characteristics of the period. Des Cartes had set the
+example of constructing them, and was followed by
+Cudworth, Clerke, Berkeley, and many others besides
+Spinoza. The inconclusiveness of their reasoning may
+perhaps be observed most readily in the strangely
+opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the
+nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless
+agreed, by the same method, to gather each out of their
+ideas. It is important, however, to examine it carefully,
+for it is the very key-stone of the Pantheistic system.
+As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something
+as follows:--God is an all-perfect Being,--perfection
+is the idea which we form of him: existence is
+a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The
+sophism we are told is only apparent; existence is
+part of the idea; it is as much involved in it, as the
+equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the
+circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle,
+and a non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable
+as a quadrilateral triangle. It is sometimes answered
+that in this way we may prove the existence of anything,
+--Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have
+but to define them as existing, and the proof is
+complete. But in this objection there is really nothing of
+weight; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely
+perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can
+conclude nothing. With greater justice, however, we
+may say, that of such terms as perfection and existence
+we know too little to speculate in this way. Existence
+may be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know
+nothing about the matter. Such arguments are but endless
+petilianes principii, like the self-devouring serpent
+resolving themselves into nothing. We wander round
+and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible
+point at which we can seize their meaning; but we
+are presented everywhere with the same impracticable
+surface, from which our grasp glides off ineffectual.
+
+The idea, however, lying at the bottom of the conviction,
+which obviously Spinoza felt upon the matter,
+is stated with sufficient distinctness in one of his letters.
+"Nothing is more clear," he writes to his pupil De
+Vries, "than that, on the one hand, everything which
+exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other;
+that the more reality, therefore, a being or thing has,
+the more attributes must be assigned to it;" "and
+conversely," (and this he calls his argumentum palmarium
+in proof of the existence of God,) "the more
+attributes I assign to a thing, the more I am forced to
+conceive it as existing." Arrange the argument how we
+please, we shall never get it into a form clearer than
+this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must
+exist (as if existence could admit of more or less); and
+therefore the all-perfect Being must exist absolutely.
+There is no flaw, we are told, in the reasoning; and if
+we are not convinced, it is solely from the confused
+habits of our own minds.
+
+It may seem to some persons that all arguments are
+good when on the right side, and that it is a gratuitous
+impertinence to quarrel with the proofs of a conclusion
+which it is so desirable that all should receive. As yet,
+however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the
+idea attached by Spinoza to the word perfection, and
+if we commit ourselves to this logic, it may lead us out
+to some unexpected consequences. Obviously all such
+reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men
+possess faculties capable of dealing with absolute ideas;
+that we can understand the nature of things external
+to ourselves as they really are in their absolute relation
+to one another, independent of our own conception.
+The question immediately before us is one which can
+never be determined. The truth which is to be proved
+is one which we already believe; and if, as we believe
+also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of
+our own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds
+of it can never adequately be analysed; we cannot say
+exactly what they are, and therefore we cannot say
+what they are not; whatever we receive intuitively, we
+receive without proof; and stated as a naked proposition,
+it must involve necessarily a petitio principii. We
+have a right, however, to object at once to an
+argument in which the conclusion is more obvious than the
+premises; and if it lead on to other consequences
+which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without
+difficulty or hesitation. We ourselves believe that God
+is, because we experience the control of a "power"
+which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach us
+so much of the nature of that power as our own
+relation to it requires us to know. God is the being to
+whom our obedience is due; and the perfections which
+we attribute to Him are those moral perfections which
+are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say,
+the perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to
+him, are without any moral character whatever; and
+for men to speak of the justice of God, he tells us, is
+but to see in Him a reflection of themselves: as if a
+triangle were to conceive of Him as eminenter triangularis,
+or a circle to give Him the property of circularity.
+
+Having arrived, however, at existence, we soon find
+ourselves among ideas, which at least are intelligible, if
+the character of them is as far removed as before from
+the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except
+substance, the attributes under which substance is ex
+expressed, and the modes or affections of those attributes.
+There is but one substance self-existent, eternal, necessary,
+and that is the absolutely Infinite all-perfect Being.
+Substance cannot produce substance; and, therefore,
+there is no such thing as creation, and everything which
+exists, is either an attribute of Him, or an affection of
+some attribute of Him, modified in this manner or in
+that. Beyond Him there is nothing, and nothing like
+Him or equal to Him; He therefore alone in Himself
+is absolutely free, uninfiuenced by anything, for nothing
+is except Himself; and from Him and from His supreme
+power, essence, intelligence (for all these words mean the
+same thing) all things have necessarily flowed, and will
+and must flow on for ever, in the same manner as from
+the nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and
+will follow from eternity to eternity, that the angles of it
+are equal to two right angles. It would seem as if the
+analogy were but an artificial play upon words, and that
+it was only metaphorically that in mathematical demonstration
+we speak of one thing as following from another.
+The properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are
+at all times, and the sequence is merely in the order in
+which they are successively known to ourselves. But
+according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence;
+and what we call the universe, and all the series of
+incidents upon it, are involved formally and mathematically
+in the definition of God.
+
+Each attribute is infinite suo genere; and it is time
+that we should know distinctly the meaning which
+Spinoza attaches to that important word. Out of the
+infinite number of the attributes of God two only are
+known to us--"extension," and "thought," or "mind."
+Duration, even though it be without beginning or end,
+is not an attribute; it is not even a real thing. It has
+no relation to being conceived mathematically, in the
+same way as it would be absurd to speak of circles or
+triangles as any older to-day than they were at the
+beginning of the world. These and everything of the
+same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, sub
+quadam specie aeternitatis. But extension, or substance
+extended, and thought, or substance perceiving, are real,
+absolute, and objective. We must not confound extension
+with body, for though body be a mode of extension,
+there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite
+because we cannot conceive it to be limited except
+by itself---or, in other words, to be limited at all. And
+as it is with extension, so it is with mind, which is also
+infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus there is no
+such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All
+things of which our faculties are cognizant under one or
+other of these attributes are produced from God, and in
+Him they have their being, and without Him they would
+cease to be.
+
+Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration in this
+strange logic, (and most admirably indeed is the form of
+the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it,) we learn that
+God is the only causa libera; that no other thing or
+being has any power of self-determination: all move by
+fixed laws of causation, motive upon motive, act upon
+act; there is no free will, and no contingency; and
+however necessary it may be for our incapacity to consider
+future things as in a sense contingent (see Tractat.
+Theol. Polit. cap. iv. sec. 4), this is but one of the
+thousand convenient deceptions which we are obliged
+to employ with ourselves. God is the causa immanens
+omnium; He is not a personal being existing apart from
+the universe; but Himself in His own reality, He is
+expressed in the universe, which is His living garment.
+Keeping to the philosophical language of the term,
+Spinoza preserves the distinction between natura
+nalurans and natura naturala. The first is being in
+itself, the attributes of substance as they are conceived
+simply and alone; the second is the infinite series of
+modifications which follow out of the properties of these
+attributes. And thus all which is, is what it is by an
+absolute necessity, and could not have been other than
+it is. God is free, because no causes external to
+Himself have power over Him; and as good men are
+most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no
+infringement on God's freedom to say that He must have
+acted as He has acted, but rather He is absolutely free
+because absolutely a law Himself to Himself.
+
+Here ends the first book of the Ethics, the book
+which contains, as we said, the nolianes simplicissimas,
+and the primary and rudimental deductions from them.
+his Dei naturam, Spinoza says in his lofty confidence,
+ejusque proprietates explicui. But as if conscious that
+his method will never convince, he concludes this portion
+of his subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain
+or apologize, but to show us clearly, in practical detail,
+the position into which he has led us. The root, we are
+told, of all philosophical errors, lies in our notion of final
+causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret
+God's action through our own; we speak of His intentions,
+as if he were a man; we assume that we are
+capable of measuring them, and finally erect ourselves,
+and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of
+all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the
+universe be what this philosophy has described it, the
+perfection which it assigns to God is extended to
+everything, and evil is of course impossible; there is no
+shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person
+and each thing is exactly what it has the power to be,
+and nothing more. But men imagining that all things
+exist on their account, and perceiving their own interests,
+bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously affected,
+have conceived these opposite influences to result from
+opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes
+to their advantage good, and whatever obstructs
+it evil. For our convenience we form generic conceptions
+of human excellence, as archetypes after which to
+strive, and such of us as approach nearest to such
+archetypes are supposed to be virtuous, and those who
+are most remote from them to be wicked. But such
+generic abstractions are but entia imaginationis, and
+have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing
+is what it has the means of being. There is no rebellion
+against Him, and no resistance of His will; in truth,
+therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing as a
+bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions
+are good or bad, not in themselves, but as compared
+with the nature of the agent; what we censure in men,
+we tolerate and even admire in animals, and as soon as
+we are aware of our mistake in assigning to the former
+a power of free volition, our notion of evil as a positive
+thing will cease to exist.
+
+"If I am asked," concludes Spinoza, "why then all mankind
+were not created by God, so as to be governed solely
+by reason? it was because, I reply, there was to Him no
+lack of matter to create all things from the highest to the
+lowest grade of perfection; or, to speak more properly,
+because the laws of His nature were ample enough to
+suffice for the production of all things which can be conceived
+by an Infinite Intelligence."
+
+It is possible that readers who have followed us so far
+will now turn away with no disposition to learn more
+philosophy which issues in such conclusions; and
+resentful perhaps that it should have been ever laid
+before them at all, in language so little expressive of
+aversion and displeasure. We must claim however, in
+Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for himself.
+His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we
+may think ourselves would be the moral effect of it if it
+were generally received, in his hands and in his heart it
+is worked into maxims of the purest and loftiest morality.
+And at least we are bound to remember that some
+account of this great mystery of evil there must be; and
+although familiarity with commonly-received explanations
+may disguise from us the difficulties with which they too,
+as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties
+none the less exist; the fact is the grand perplexity,
+and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories
+about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational,
+if our conscience did not forbid us to listen to it. The
+objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out
+in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg; and
+it will be seen from this with how little justice the denial
+of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to
+denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral
+distinctions between virtue and vice.
+
+"We speak," writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg,
+who had urged something of the kind, "we speak of this
+or that man having done a wrong thing, when we compare
+him with a general standard of humanity; but inasmuch
+as God neither perceives things in such abstract manner,
+nor forms to himself such kind of generic definitions, and
+since there is no more reality in anything than God has
+assigned to it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good
+exists only in respect of man's understanding, not in respect
+of God's."
+
+"If this be so," then replies Blyenburg, "bad men fulfil
+God's will as well as good."
+
+"It is true," Spinoza answers, "they fulfil it, yet not as the
+good nor as well as the good, nor are they to be compared
+with them. The better a thing or a person be, the more
+there is in him of God's spirit, and the more he expresses
+God's will; while the bad, being without that divine love
+which arises from the knowledge of God, and through which
+alone we are called (in respect of our understandings) his
+servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the artificer,
+--they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their
+service."
+
+Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical
+language the extreme doctrine of Grace: and St. Paul,
+if we interpret his real belief by the one passage so
+often quoted, in which he compares us to "clay in the
+hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour
+and another to dishonour," may be accused with justice
+of having held the same opinion. If Calvinism be
+pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes
+an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the
+philosophy of Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil
+a positive thing, and to assert that God has
+predetermined it,--to tell us that he has ordained what
+he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is
+incredible that we should be without power to obey
+him except through his free grace, and yet be held
+responsible for our failures when that grace has been
+withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher
+sacrilegious who has but systematized the faith which so
+many believe, and cleared it of its most hideous features.
+
+At all events, Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises
+no conclusions either from himself or from
+his readers. We believe that logic has no business with
+such questions; that the answer to them
+lies in the conscience and not in the intellect,--that
+it is practical merely, and not speculative. Spinoza
+thinks otherwise; and he is at least true to the
+guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him
+with instances of horrid crime, such as bring home
+to the heart the natural horror of it. He speaks of
+Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks if God can
+be called the cause of such an act as that.
+
+"God," replies Spinoza, calmly, "is the cause of all things
+which have reality. If you can show that evil, errors,
+crimes express any real things, I agree readily that God is
+the cause of them; but I conceive myself to have proved
+that what constitutes the essence of evil is not a real thing
+at all, and therefore that God cannot be the cause of it.
+Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it was a
+positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we
+do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the
+latter lay in his being without pity, without obedience,
+without natural affection,--none of which things express any
+positive essence, but the absence of it: and therefore God
+was not the cause of these, although he was the cause of
+the act and the intention.
+
+"But once for all," he adds, "this aspect of things will
+remain intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common
+notions of free will remain unimproved."
+
+And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these
+notions are as false as he supposes them, and we have
+no power to be anything but what we are, there neither
+is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and what we
+call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will
+of God, they will no more impair his moral attributes
+if we suppose him to have willed them, than the same
+actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the
+inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says,
+an infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life
+being more than none, the meanest active disposition
+something better than inertia, and the smallest exercise
+of reason better than mere ferocity. Moral evil need
+not disturb us, if--if we can be nothing but what we are,
+if we are but as clay.
+
+The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear
+as we proceed. We pause, however, to notice one
+difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which is best disposed
+of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the
+thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able
+to agree what it is, or whether properly it is anything),
+the words past, present, future do undoubtedly convey
+some definite idea with them: things will be which
+are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now
+if everything which exists be a necessary mathematical
+consequence from the nature or definition of the One
+Being, we cannot see how there can be any time but
+the present, or how past and future have room for a
+meaning. God is, and therefore all properties of him
+are, just as every property of a circle exists in it as
+soon as the circle exists. We may if we like, for
+convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and say,
+e.g. that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the
+rectangle under the parts of the one will equal that
+under the parts of the other. But we only mean in
+reality that these rectangles are equal; and the future
+relates only to our knowledge of the fact. Allowing,
+however, as much as we please, that the condition of
+England a hundred years hence lies already in embryo
+in existing causes, it is a paradox to say that such
+condition exists already in the sense in which the properties
+of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on
+the illustration.
+
+It is singular that he should not have noticed the
+difficulty; not that either it or the answer to it (which
+no doubt would have been ready enough) are likely to
+interest any person except metaphysicians, a class of
+thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.
+
+We proceed to more important matters--to Spinoza's
+detailed theory of Nature chiefly as exhibited in man
+and in man's mind, a theory which for its bold ingenuity
+is the most remarkable which on this dark subject has
+ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or
+not, is another question; yet undoubtedly it provides
+an answer for every difficulty; it accepts with equal
+welcome the extremes of materialism and of spiritualism:
+and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy
+that it will explain phenomena and reconcile difficulties,
+it is hard to account for the fact that a system
+which bears such a test so admirably, should nevertheless
+be so incredible as it is.
+
+Most people have heard of the "Harmonie Pre-etablie"
+of Leibnitz; it is borrowed without acknowledgment
+from Spinoza, and adapted to the Leibnitzian
+system. "Man," says Leibnitz, "is composed of mind
+and body; but what is mind and what is body, and
+what is the nature of their union? Substances so
+opposite in kind, it is impossible to suppose can affect
+one another; mind cannot act on matter, or matter upon
+mind; and the appearance of such mutual action of
+them on each other is an appearance only and a delusion."
+A delusion so general, however, required to be accounted
+for; and Leibnitz accounted for it by supposing that God
+in creating a world, composed of material and spiritual
+phenomena, ordained from the beginning that these
+several phenomena should proceed in parallel lines side
+by side in a constantly corresponding harmony. The sense
+of seeing results, it appears to us, from the formation of
+a picture upon the retina. The motion of the arm or
+the leg appears to result from an act of will; but in either
+case we mistake coincidence for causation. Between
+substances so wholly alien there can be no intercommunion;
+and we only suppose that the object seen
+produces the idea, and that the desire produces the
+movement, because the phenomena of matter and the
+phenomena of spirit are so contrived as to flow always
+in the same order and sequence. This hypothesis, as
+coming from Leibnitz, has been, if not accepted, at
+least listened to respectfully; because while taking it
+out of its proper place, he contrived to graft it upon
+Christianity; and succeeded, with a sort of speculative
+legerdemain, in making it appear to be in harmony with
+revealed religion. Disguised as a philosophy of Predestination,
+and connected with the Christian doctrine
+of Retribution, it steps forward with an air of unconscious
+innocence, as if interfering with nothing
+which Christians generally believe. And yet, leaving
+as it does no larger scope for liberty or responsibility
+than when in the hands of Spinoza,* Leibnitz, in our
+opinion, has only succeeded in making it infinitely more
+revolting. Spinoza could not regard the bad man as
+an object of Divine anger and a subject of retributory
+punishment. He was not a Christian, and made no
+pretension to be considered such; and it did not occur
+to him to regard the actions of a being which, both
+with Leibnitz and himself, is (to use his own expression)
+an automaton spirituale, as deserving a fiery indignation
+and everlasting vengeance.
+
+____
+
+* Since these words were written a book [Refutation lnedite
+de Spinoza. Par Leibnitz. Precedee d'une Memoire,
+par Foucher de Carell. Paris. 1854.] has appeared in Paris
+by an able disciple of Leibnitz, which, although it does not lead
+us to modify the opinion expressed in them, yet obliges us to give
+our reasons for speaking as we do. M. de Careil has discovered
+in the library at Hanover a MS. in the handwriting of Leibnitz,
+containing a series of remarks on the book of a certain John
+Wachter. It does not appear who this John Wachter was, nor
+by what accident he came to have so distinguished a critic. If we
+may judge by the extracts at present before us, he seems to have
+been an absurd and extravagant person, who had attempted to
+combine the theology of the Cabbala with the very little which
+he was able to understand of the philosophy of Spinoza; and, as
+far as he is concerned, neither his writings nor the reflections upon
+them are of interest to any human being. The extravagance of
+Spinoza's followers, however, furnished Leibnitz with an
+opportunity of noticing the points on which he most disapproved of
+Spinoza himself; and these few notices M. de Caroil has now
+for the first time published as "The Refutation of Spinoza. by
+Leibnitz." They are exceedingly brief and scanty; and the writer
+of them would assuredly have hesitated to describe an imperfect
+criticism by so ambitious a title. The modern editor, however,
+must be allowed the privilege of a worshipper, and we will not
+quarrel with him for an exaggerated estimate of what his master
+had accomplished. We are indebted to his enthusiasm for what
+is at least a curious discovery, and we will not qualify the gratitude
+which he has earned by industry and good will. At the same
+time, the notes themselves confirm the opinion which we have
+always entertained, that Leibnitz did not understand Spinoza.
+Leibnitz did not understand him, and the followers of Leibnitz
+do not understand him now. If he were no more than what he
+is described in the book before us.--if his metaphysics were
+"miserable," if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing
+more than a second-rate disciple of Descartes,--we can assure
+M. de Caroil that we should long ago have heard the last of him.
+
+There must be something else, something very different from
+this, to explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the
+fascination which his writings exerted over such minds as those
+of Lessing or of Goethe; and the fact of so enduring an influence is
+more than a sufficient answer to mere depreciating criticism. This.
+however, is not a point which there is any use in pressing. Our
+present business is to justify the two assertions which we have
+made. First, that Leibnitz conceived his "Theory of the Harmonic
+Pre-etablie" from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and,
+secondly, that this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as
+is that of Spinoza, and only differs from it in disguising its real
+character.
+
+First for the "Harmonic Pre-etablie." Spinoza's "Ethics"
+appeared in 1677; and we know that they were read by Leibnitz.
+In 1696, Leibnitz announced as a discovery of his own, a Theory
+of "The Communication of Substances," which he illustrates in
+the following manner:--
+
+"Vous ne comprenez pas, dites-vous, comment je pourrois prouver
+ce que j'ai ovance touchant la communication, ou l'harmonie de
+deux suhstances aussi differentes que l'ame et le corps? Il est
+vrai que je crois en avoir trouve le moyen; et voici comment je
+pretends vous satisfaire. Figurez-vous deux horologes ou montres
+qui s'accordent parfaitement. Or cela se pent faire de trots
+manieres. La 1^0 consiste dans une influence mutuelle. La 2^0 est
+d'y artocher un ouvrier hobile qui les redresse, et lea mette d'accord
+a tous moments. La 3^0 eat de fabriquer ces deux pendules avec taut
+d'art et de justesse, qu'on se puisse assurer de leur accord dana
+la suite. Menez maintenant l'ame et le corps a la place de ces
+deux pendules; leur accord pent arriver par l'une de ces trois
+manieres. La voye d'influence eat celle de la philosophic vulgaire;
+mais comme l'on ne sauroit concevoir des particules materielles
+qui putssent passer d'une de ces substances dana l'autre, il faut
+abandonner ce sentiment. La voye de l'assistance continuelle du
+Createur est celle du systeme des causes occasionnelles; mais je
+tiens que c'est fake intervenir Deus ex machina dans une chose
+naturelle et ordinaire, ou selon la raison il ne doit concourir, que
+de la maniere qu'il concourt a toutes les autres choses naturelles.
+Ainsi il ne reste que mon hypothese; c'est-a-dire que la voye de
+l'harmonie. Dieu a fait des le commencement chacune de ces
+deux substances de telle nature, qu'en ne suivant que ces propres
+loix qu'elle a recues avec son etre, elle s'accorde pourtant avec
+l'autre tout comme s'il y avoit une influence mutuelle, ou comme
+si Dieu y mettoit toujours la main au de-la de son coneours general.
+Apres cela je n'ai pas besoin de rien prouver a moins qu'on ne
+veuille exiger que je prouve que Dieu est assez habile pout se servir
+de cette artifice," &c.--leibnitz Opera, p. 133. Berlin edition,
+1840.
+
+Leibnitz, as we have said, attempts to reconcile his system with
+Christianity, and therefore, of course, this theory of the relation of
+mind and body wears a very different aspect under his treatment
+from what it wears under that of Spinoza. But Spinoza and
+Leibnitz both agree in this one peculiar conception in which they differ
+from all other philosophers before or after them--that mind and
+body have no direct communication with each other, and that the
+phenomena of them merely correspond. M. de Carell says they
+both borrowed it from Descartes; but that is impossible. Descartes
+held no such opinion, it was the precise point of disagreement at
+which Spinoza parted from him: and therefore, since in point of
+date Spinoza had the advantage of Leibnitz, and we know that
+Leibnitz was acquainted with his writings, we must either suppose
+that he was directly indebted to Spinoza for an obligation which
+he ought to have acknowledged, or else, which is extremely
+improbable, that having read Spinoza and forgotten him, he afterwards
+reoriginated for himself one of the most singular and peculiar
+notions which was ever offered to the belief of mankind.
+
+So much for the first point, which, after all, is but of little
+moment. It is more important to ascertain whether, in the hands
+of Leibnitz, this theory can be any better reconciled with what is
+commonly meant by religion; whether, that is, the ideas of
+obedience and disobedience, merit and demerit, judgment and retribution,
+have any proper place under it. Spinoza makes no pretension to
+anything of the kind, and openly declares that these ideas are
+ideas merely, and human mistakes. Leibnitz, in opposition to
+him, endeavours to re-establish them in the following manner. It
+is true he conceives that the system of the universe has been
+arranged and predetermined from the moment at which it was
+launched into being; from the moment at which God selected it,
+with all its details, as the best which could exist; but it is
+carried on by the action of individual creatures (monads as he calls
+them) which, though necessarily obeying the laws of their existence.
+yet obey them with a "character of spontaneity," which although
+"automata," are yet voluntary agents; and therefore, by the
+consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle themselves to moral
+praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere
+co-existence of these opposite qualifies in the
+monad man, he has proved that such qualities can coexist. In
+our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or of a
+quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters from
+which no philosophy can extricate itself. If man can incur guilt,
+their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act
+otherwise than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it
+appears to us; yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would
+not complain merely of a theory, and if our earthly life were all
+in all, and the grave remained the extreme horizon of our hopes
+and fears, the "Harmonic Pre-etablie," might be tolerated as
+credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful. It is when
+forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has no
+natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The
+world may be in the main good; while the good, from the
+unknown condition of its existence, may be impossible without some
+intermixture of evil; and although Leibnitz was at times staggered
+even himself by the misery and wickedness which he witnessed,
+and was driven to comfort himself with the reflection that this
+earth might be but one world in the midst of the universe, and
+perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity of stainless
+globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because it was
+imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark subject,
+when nothing better than conjecture was attainable.
+
+But as soon as we are told that the evil in these "automata"
+of mankind, being, as it is, a necessary condition of this world
+which God has called into being, is yet infinitely detestable to
+God; that the creatures who suffer under the accursed necessity
+of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's eyes, for doing
+what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be justly
+punished in everlasting fire; our hearts recoil against the paradox.
+
+No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found
+this belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the
+popular creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage
+of his system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the
+influence of Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant,
+has been so deep and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured
+for himself a mere admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza
+was not afraid to be consistent, even at the price of the world's
+reprobation, and refused to purchase the applause of his own age
+at the sacrifice of the singleness of his heart.
+____
+
+"Deus," according to Spinoza's definition, "est ens
+constans infinitis attributis quorum unumquodque aeternam et
+infinitam essentiam exprimit." Under each of these attributes
+infinita sequuntur, and everything which an infinite intelligence
+can conceive, and an infinite power can produce,--everything
+which follows as a possibility out of the divine nature,--all
+things which have been, and are, and will be,--find expression
+and actual existence, not under one attribute only,
+but under each and every attribute. Language is so
+ill adapted to such a system, that even to state
+it accurately is all but impossible, and analogies can
+only remotely suggest what such expressions mean.
+But it is as if it were said that the same thought might
+be expressed in an infinite variety of languages; and
+not in words only, but in action, in painting, in sculpture,
+in music, in any form of any kind which can be
+employed as a means of spiritual embodiment. Of all
+these infinite attributes two only, as we said, are known
+to us,--extension and thought. Material phenomena
+are phenomena of extension; and to every modification
+of extension an idea corresponds under the attribute of
+thought. Out of such a compound as this is formed
+man, composed of body and mind; two parallel and
+correspondent modifications eternally answering one
+another. And not man only, but all other beings and
+things are similarly formed and similarly animated;
+the anima or mind of each varying according to the
+complicity of the organism of its material counterpart.
+Although body does not think, nor affect the mind's
+power of thinking; and mind does not control body,
+nor communicate to it either motion or rest or any influence
+from itself, yet body with all its properties is the
+object or ideate of mind; whatsoever body does mind
+perceives, and the greater the energizing power of the
+first, the greater the perceiving power of the second.
+And this is not because they are adapted one to the
+other by some inconceivable preordinating power, but
+because mind and body are una et eatlent res, the one
+absolute being affected in one and the same manner,
+but expressed under several attributes; the modes and
+affections of each attribute having that being for their
+cause, as he exists under that attribute of which they
+are modes and no other; idea being caused by idea,
+and body affected by body; the image on the retina
+being produced by the object reflected upon it, the idea
+or image in our minds by the idea of that object, &c. &c.
+
+A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of
+thinking on these matters is so difficult to grasp, that
+one can hardly speak of it as being probable, or as
+being improbable. Probability extends only to what
+we can imagine as possible, and Spinoza's theory seems
+to lie beyond the range within which our judgment can
+exercise itself; in our own opinion, indeed, as we have
+already said, the entire subject is one with which we
+have no business; and the explanation of it, if it is
+ever to be explained to us, is reserved till we are in
+some other state of existence. We do not disbelieve
+Spinoza because what he suggests is in itself incredible.
+The chances may be millions to one against his being
+right, yet the real truth, if we knew it, would be probably
+at least as strange as his conception of it. But we are
+firmly convinced that of these questions, and all like
+them, practical answers only lie within the reach of
+human faculties; and that in all such "researches into
+the absolute" we are on the road which ends nowhere.
+
+Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin
+to this philosophy itself, there is one most obvious, viz.,
+that if the attributes of God be infinite, and each
+particular thing is expressed under them all, then mind
+and body express but an infinitesimal portion of the
+nature of each of ourselves; and this human nature
+exists (i.e., there exists corresponding modes of substance)
+in the whole infinity of the divine nature under
+attributes differing each from each, and all from mind
+and all from body. That this must be so, follows
+obviously from the definition of the Infinite Being, and
+the nature of the distinction between the two attributes
+which are known to us; and if this be so, why does
+not the mind perceive something of all these other
+attributes? The objection is well expressed by a
+correspondent (Letter 67):--"It follows from what you
+say," he writes to Spinoza, "that the modification which
+constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my
+body, although it be one and the same modification, yet
+must be expressed in an infinity of ways; one way by
+thought, a second way by extension, a third by some
+attribute unknown to me, and so on to infinity; the
+attributes being infinite in number, and the order and
+connection of modes being the same in them all; why,
+then, does the mind perceive the modes of but one
+attribute only?"
+
+Spinoza's answer is curious: unhappily a fragment
+of his letter only is extant, so that it is too brief to be
+satisfactory.
+
+"In reply to your difficulty," he says, "although each
+particular thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived
+in Infinite modes, the Infinite idea answering to all
+these cannot constitute one and the same mind of any
+single being, but must constitute Infinite minds. No
+one of all these Infinite ideas has any connection with
+another."
+
+He means, we suppose, that God's mind only perceives,
+or can perceive, things under their Infinite expression,
+and that the idea of each several mode, under
+whatever attribute, constitutes a separate mind.
+
+We do not know that we can add anything to this
+explanation; the difficulty lies in the audacious sweep
+of the speculation itself; we will however attempt an
+illustration, although we fear it will be to illustrate
+obscurum tier obscurius. Let A B C D be four out of
+the Infinite number of the Divine attributes. A the
+attribute of mind; B the attribute of extension; C and
+D other attributes, the nature of which is not known
+to us. Now A, as the attribute of mind, is that which
+perceives all which takes place under B C and D, but it
+is only as it exists in God that it forms the universal
+consciousness of an attributes at once. In its modifications
+it is combined separately with the modifications of
+each, constituting in combination with the modes of
+each attribute a separate being. As forming the mind
+of B, A perceives what takes place in B, but not what
+takes place in C or D. Combined with B, it forms the
+soul of the human body, and generally the soul of all
+modifications of extended substance; combined with C,
+it forms the soul of some other analogous being;
+combined with D, again of another; but the combinations
+are only in pairs, in which A is constant. A and B
+make one being, A and C another, A and D a third;
+but B will not combine with C, nor C with D; each
+attribute being, as it were, conscious only of itself.
+And therefore, although to those modifications of mind
+and extension which we call ourselves there are
+corresponding modifications under C and D, and generally
+under each of the Infinite attributes of God; each of
+ourselves being in a sense Infinite, nevertheless we
+neither have nor can have any knowledge of ourselves
+in this Infinite aspect; our actual consciousness
+being limited to the phenomena of sensible experience.
+
+English readers, however, are likely to care little for
+all this; they will look to the general theory, and judge
+of it as its aspect affects them. And first, perhaps,
+they will be tempted to throw aside as absurd the
+notion that their bodies go through the many operations
+which they experience them to do, undirected by
+their minds; it is a thing they may say at once
+preposterous and incredible. And no doubt on the first
+blush it sounds absurd, and yet, on second thoughts,
+it is less so than it seems; and though we could not
+persuade ourselves to believe it, absurd in the sense
+of having nothing to be said for it, it certainly is not.
+It is far easier, for instance, to imagine the human
+body capable by its own virtue, and by the laws of
+material organisation, of building a house, than of
+thinking; and yet men are allowed to say that the
+body thinks, without being regarded as candidates for
+a lunatic asylum. We see the seed shoot up into
+stem and leaf and throw out flowers; we observe it
+fulfilling processes of chemistry more subtle than were
+ever executed in Liebig's laboratory, and producing
+structures more cunning than man can imitate. The
+bird builds her nest, the spider shapes out its delicate
+web and stretches it in the path of his prey; directed
+not by calculating thought, as we conceive ourselves
+to be, but by some motive influence, our ignorance of
+the nature of which we disguise from ourselves, and
+call it instinct, but which we believe at least to be
+some property residing in the organisation; and we
+are not to suppose that the human body, the most
+complex of all material structures, has slighter powers
+in it than the bodies of a seed, a bird, or an insect.
+Let us listen to Spinoza himself:--
+
+"There can be no doubt," he says, "that this hypothesis
+is true, but unless I can prove it from experience, men
+will not, I fear, be induced even to reflect upon it calmly,
+so persuaded are they that it is by the mind only that their
+bodies are set in motion. And yet what body can or cannot
+do no one has yet determined; body, i.e., by the law of its
+own nature, and without assistance from mind. No one
+has so probed the human frame as to have detected all its
+functions and exhausted the list of them: and there are
+powers exhibited by animals far exceeding human sagacity;
+and again, feats are performed by somnambulists on which
+in the waking state the same persons would never venture
+--itself a proof that body is able to accomplish what mind
+can only admire. Men say that mind moves body, but how
+it moves it they cannot tell, or what degree of motion it can
+impart to it; so that, in fact, they do not know what they
+say, and are only confessing their own ignorance in specious
+language. They will answer me, that whether or not they
+understand how it can be, yet that they are assured by plain
+experience that unless mind could perceive, body would be
+altogether inactive; they know that it depends on the mind
+whether the tongue speak or not. But do they not equally
+experience that if their bodies are paralysed their minds
+cannot think? That if their bodies are asleep their minds
+are without power? That their minds are not at all times
+equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject,
+but depend on the state of their bodies? And as for
+experience proving that the members of the body can be
+controlled by the mind, I fear experience proves very much
+the reverse. But it is absurd, they rejoin, to attempt to
+explain from the mere laws of body such things as pictures,
+or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a
+church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however,
+that we do not vet know what body can or cannot do, or
+what would naturally follow from the structure of it; that
+we experience in the feats of somnambulists something
+which antecedently to that experience would have seemed
+incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds infinitely
+any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of
+things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it."
+
+We are not concerned to answer this reasoning,
+although if the matter were one the debating of which
+could be of any profit, it would undoubtedly have its
+weight, and would require to be patiently considered.
+Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity
+over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and
+in which we are trifling with what is inscrutable.
+
+Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by
+Spinoza himself, when he went on to gather out of his
+philosophy "that the mind of man being part of the
+Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind
+perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that
+God perceives it, not that he is Infinite, but as he is
+represented by the nature of this or that idea; and
+similarly, when we say that a man does this or that
+action, we say that God does it not qua he is Infinite,
+but qua he is expressed in that man's nature." "Here,"
+he says, "many readers will no doubt hesitate, and
+many difficulties will occur to them in the way of such
+a supposition." Undoubtedly there was reason enough
+to form, such an anticipation. As long as the Being
+whom he so freely names remains surrounded with the
+associations which in this country we bring with us out
+of our child years, not all the logic in the world would
+make us listen to language such as this. It is not so--
+we know it, and it is enough. We are well aware
+of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our ordinary
+theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if religion
+depended on speculative consistency, and not in
+obedience of life, to perplex and terrify us. What are
+we? what is anything? If it be not divine, what is it
+then? If created--out of what is it created? and how
+created--and why? These questions, and others far
+more momentous which we do not enter upon here,
+may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot
+any the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he
+alone consistently provides an answer; because, as we
+have said again and again, we do not care to have them
+answered at all. Conscience is the single tribunal to
+which we will be referred, and conscience declares
+imperatively that what he says is not true. But of
+all this it is painful to speak, and as far as possible we
+designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not Atheism, but the
+Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so
+remote from one another in their practical bearings;
+only let us remember that we are far indeed from the
+truth if we think that God to Spinoza was nothing else
+but that world which we experience. It is but one of
+infinite expressions of Him, a conception which makes
+us giddy in the effort to realize it.
+
+We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole
+matter in its bearings upon life and human duty. It
+was in the search after this last, that Spinoza, as we
+said, travelled over so strange a country, and we now
+expect his conclusions. To discover the true good
+of man, to direct his actions to such ends as will secure
+to him real and lasting felicity, and by a comparison of
+his powers with the objects offered to them, to ascertain
+how far they are capable of arriving at these objects,
+and by what means they can best be trained towards
+them--is the aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy.
+"Most people," he adds, "deride or vilify their nature;
+it is a better thing to endeavour to understand it; and
+however extravagant it may be thought in me to do so, I
+propose to analyse the properties of that nature as if it
+were a mathematical figure." Mind, being, as we have
+seen, nothing else than the idea corresponding to this
+or that affection of body; we are not, therefore, to
+think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an act.
+There is no general power called intellect, any more
+than there is any general abstract volition, but only hic
+et ille intellectus et haec et illa volitio, and again, by
+the word Mind, is understood not merely acts of will
+or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of
+sensation or emotion. The human body being composed
+of many small bodies, the mind is similarly composed
+of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind
+depends on the relation which the component portions
+maintain towards each other. This is obviously the
+case with body, and if we can translate metaphysics into
+common experience, it is equally the case with mind.
+There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect;
+a thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our
+mental composition; and evidently since one contradicts
+another, and each has a tendency to become dominant,
+it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their several
+activities, in their due and just subordination, that any
+unity of action or consistency of feeling is possible. After
+a masterly analysis of all these tendencies (the most
+complete by far which has ever been made by any moral
+philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the principles under
+which such unity and consistency can be obtained as the
+condition upon which a being so composed can look for
+any sort of happiness. And these principles, arrived at
+as they are by a route so different, are the same, and are
+proposed by Spinoza as being the same, as those of the
+Christian Religion.
+
+It might seem impossible in a system which binds
+together in so inexorable a sequence the relations of
+cause and effect, to make a place for the action of human
+self-control; but consideration will show, that however
+vast the difference between those who deny and those
+who affirm the liberty of the will (in the sense in which the
+expression is usually understood), it is not a difference
+which affects the conduct or alters the practical bearings
+of it. It is quite possible that conduct may be determined
+by laws; laws as absolute as those of matter;
+and yet that the one as well as the other may be brought
+under control by a proper understanding of those laws.
+Now, experience seems plainly to say, that while all our
+actions arise out of desire--that whatever we do, we do
+for the sake of something which we wish to be or to
+obtain--we are differently affected towards what is
+proposed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as
+we understand the nature of such object in itself and in
+its consequences. The better we know the better we
+act, and the fallacy of all common arguments against
+necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves
+no room for self-direction; whereas it merely insists
+in exact conformity with experience on the conditions
+under which self-determination is possible. Conduct,
+according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge.
+Let a man certainly know that there is poison in the
+cup of wine before him, and he will not drink it. By
+the law of cause and effect, his desire for the wine is
+overcome by the fear of the pain or the death which will
+follow; and so with everything which comes before him.
+Let the consequences of any action be clear, definite,
+and inevitable, and though Spinoza would not say that
+the knowledge of them will be absolutely sufficient to
+determine the conduct (because the clearest knowledge
+may be overborne by violent passion), yet it is the best
+which we have to trust to, and will do much if it cannot
+do all. On this hypothesis, after a diagnosis of the various
+tendencies of human nature, called commonly the
+passions and affections, he returns upon the nature of
+our ordinary knowledge to derive out of it the means for
+their control: all these tendencies of themselves seek
+their own objects--seek them blindly and immoderately;
+and all the mistakes, and all the unhappinesses
+of life, arise from the want of due understanding of these
+objects, and a just subordination of the desire for them.
+His analysis is remarkably clear; but it is too long for
+us to enter upon it; the important thing being the
+character of the control which is to be exerted. And to
+arrive at this, he employs a distinction of great practical
+utility, and which is peculiarly his own. Following his
+tripartite division of knowledge, he finds all kinds of
+it arrange themselves under one of two classes, and to
+be either adequate or inadequate. By adequate knowledge
+he means not necessarily what is exhaustive and
+complete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and
+unconfused: by inadequate, what we know merely as
+fact either derived from our own sensations, or from the
+authority of others; but of the connexion of which
+with other facts, of the causes, effects, or meaning of
+which we know nothing. We may have an adequate
+idea of a circle, though we are unacquainted with all the
+properties which belong to it; we conceive it distinctly
+as a figure generated by the rotation of a line, one end
+of which is stationary. Phenomena, on the other
+hand, however made known to us--phenomena of the
+senses, and phenomena of experience, as long as they
+remain phenomena merely, and unseen in any higher
+relation--we can never know except as inadequately.
+We cannot tell what outward things are, by coming in
+contact with certain features of them. We have a very
+imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and
+the sensations which we experience of various kinds
+rather indicate to us the nature of these bodies themselves
+than of the objects which affect them. Now it is
+obvious that the greater part of mankind act only upon
+knowledge of this latter kind. The amusements, even
+the active pursuits of most of us, remain wholly within
+the range of uncertainty; and, therefore, necessarily are
+full of hazard and precariousness: little or nothing issues
+as we expect; we look for pleasure and we find pain;
+we shun one pain and find a greater; and thus arises the
+ineffectual character which we so complain of in life--
+the disappointments, failures, mortifications which form
+the material of so much moral meditation on the vanity
+of the world. Much of all this is inevitable from the
+constitution of our nature. The mind is too infirm
+to be entirely occupied with higher knowledge. The
+conditions of life oblige us to act in many cases which
+cannot be understood by us except with the utmost
+inadequacy; and the resignation to the higher will which has
+determined all things in the wisest way, is imperfect in
+the best of us. Yet much is possible, if not all; and,
+although through a large tract of life "there comes one
+event to all, to the wise and to the unwise," "yet
+wisdom excelleth folly as far as light excelleth darkness."
+The phenomena of experience by inductive experiment,
+and just and careful consideration, arrange themselves
+under laws uniform in their operation, and furnishing a
+guide to the judgment; and over all things, although
+the interval must remain unexplored for ever, because
+what we would search into is Infinite, may be seen
+the beginning of all things, the absolute eternal God.
+"Mens humana," Spinoza continues, "quaedam agit,
+quaedam vero patitur." In so far as it is influenced by
+inadequate ideas, "eatenus patitur"--it is passive and
+in bondage, it is the sport of fortune and caprice: in so
+far as its ideas are adequate, "eatenus agit"--it is
+active, it is itself. While we are governed by outward
+temptations, by the casual pleasures, the fortunes or the
+misfortunes of life, we are but instruments, yielding
+ourselves to be acted upon as the animal is acted on by
+its appetites, or the inanimate matter by the laws which
+bind it--we are slaves--instruments, it may be, of some
+higher purpose in the order of nature, but in ourselves
+nothing; instruments which are employed for a special
+work, and which are consumed in effecting it. So far,
+on the contrary, as we know clearly what we do, as we
+understand what we are, and direct our conduct not by
+the passing emotion of the moment, but by a grave,
+clear, and constant knowledge of what is really good, so
+far we are said to act--we are ourselves the spring of
+our own activity--we desire the genuine well-being of
+our entire nature, and that we can always find, and it
+never disappoints us when found.
+
+All things desire life, seek for energy, and fuller and
+ampler being. The component parts of man, his various
+appetites and passions, are seeking for this while
+pursuing each its own immoderate indulgence; and it is the
+primary law of every single being that it so follows what
+will give it increased vitality. Whatever will contribute
+to such increase is the proper good of each; and the
+good of man as a united being is measured and
+determined by the effect of it upon his collective powers.
+The appetites gather power from their several objects of
+desire; but the power of the part is the weakness of
+the whole; and man as a collective person gathers life,
+being, and self-mastery only from the absolute good,--
+the source of all real good, and truth, and energy,--
+that is, God. The love of God is the extinction of all
+other loves and all other desires; to know God, as far
+as man can know him, is power, self-government, and
+peace. And this is virtue, and this is blessedness.
+Thus, by a formal process of demonstration, we are
+brought round to the old conclusions of theology; and
+Spinoza protests that it is no new doctrine which he is
+teaching, but that it is one which in various dialects
+has been believed from the beginning of the world.
+It is a necessary consequence of the simple propositions
+that happiness depends on the consistency and
+coherency of character, and that such coherency can only
+be given by the knowledge of the One Being, to know
+whom is to know all things adequately, and to love
+whom is to have conquered every other inclination.
+The more entirely our minds rest on Him, the more
+distinctly we regard all things in their relation to Him,
+the more we cease to be under the dominion of external
+things; we surrender ourselves consciously to do His will,
+and as living men and not as passive things we become the
+instruments of His power. When the true nature and
+true causes of our affections become clear to us, they
+have no more power to influence us. The more we
+understand, the less can feeling sway us; we know that
+all things are what they are, because they are so
+constituted that they could not be otherwise, and we cease
+to be angry with our brother, we cease to hate him; we
+shall not fret at disappointment, nor complain of fortune,
+because no such thing as fortune exists; and if we are
+disappointed it is better than if we had succeeded, not
+perhaps for ourselves, yet for the universe. We cannot
+fear, when nothing can befall us except what God,
+wills, and we shall not violently hope when the future,
+whatever it be, will be the best which is possible.
+Seeing all things in their place in the everlasting order,
+Past and Future will not affect us. The temptation of
+present pleasure will not overcome the certainty of
+future pain, for the pain will be as sure as the pleasure,
+and we shall see all things under a rule of adamant.
+The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea
+of contingency, and expect to escape the just issues of
+their actions: the wise man will know that each action
+brings with it its inevitable consequences, which even
+God cannot change without ceasing to be Himself.
+
+In such a manner, through all the conditions of
+life, Spinoza pursues the advantages which will accrue
+to man from the knowledge of God, God and man
+being what his philosophy has described them. It
+cannot be denied that it is most beautiful; although
+much of its beauty is perhaps due to associations which
+have arisen out of Christianity, and which in the
+system of pantheism have no proper abiding place.
+Retaining, indeed, all that is beautiful in Christianity,
+he even seems to have relieved himself of the more
+fearful features of the general creed. He acknowledges
+no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency
+at enmity with God; but sees in all things infinite
+gradations of beings, all in their way obedient, and all
+fulfilling the part allotted to them. Doubtless a pleasant
+exchange and a grateful deliverance, if only we
+could persuade ourselves that a hundred pages of
+judiciously arranged demonstrations could really and
+indeed have worked it for us. If we could indeed
+believe that we could have the year without its winter,
+day without night, sunlight without shadow. Evil is
+unhappily too real a thing to be so disposed of.
+
+Yet if we cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in
+its entire completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves
+to the beauty of his practical rule of life, or the
+disinterestedness and calm nobility which pervades it. He
+will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded.
+Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that
+is the exhaustive end of all human desire. "Beatitudo
+non est virtutis pretium, sed ipsa virtus. Nihil aliud
+est quam ipsa animi acquiescentia, quae ex Dei intuitiva
+cognitione oritur." And the same spirit of generosity
+exhibits itself in all his conclusions. The ordinary
+objects of desire, he says, are of such a kind that for
+one man to obtain them is for another to lose them;
+and this alone would suffice to prove that they are not
+what any man should labour after. But the fullness of
+God suffices for us all, and he who possesses this good
+desires only to communicate it to every one, and to
+make all mankind as happy as himself. And again:--
+"The wise man will not speak in society of his neighbour's
+faults, and sparingly of the infirmity of human
+nature; but he will speak largely of human virtue and
+human power, and of the means by which that nature
+can best be perfected, so to lead men to put away that
+fear and aversion with which they look on goodness,
+and learn with relieved hearts to love and desire it."
+And once more:--"He who loves God will not desire
+that God should love him in return with any partial or
+particular affection, for that is to desire that God for his
+sake should change his everlasting nature and become
+lower than himself."
+
+One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would
+seem in such a system to be necessarily wanting. Where
+individual action is resolved into the modified activity
+of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all evolving,
+the individuality of the personal man would at best
+appear but an evanescent and unreal shadow. Such
+individuality, however, as we now possess, whatever it
+be, might continue to exist in a future state as really as
+it exists in the present, and those to whom it belongs
+might be anxious naturally for its persistence. And yet
+it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the idea
+of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed
+into its elements, the soul corresponding to it must
+accompany it into an answering dissolution. And this,
+indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually affirms, when he
+denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness
+of what has befallen it in life, "nisi durante corpore."
+But Spinozism is a philosophy full of surprises; and our
+calculations of what must belong to it are perpetually
+baffled. The imagination, the memory, the senses,
+whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish
+necessarily and eternally; and the man who has been
+the slave of his inclinations, who has no knowledge of
+God, and no active possession of himself, having in life
+possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance
+of it with the dissolution of the body.
+
+Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the
+essence of the mind, united to the mind as the mind is
+united to the body, and thus there is in the soul
+something of an everlasting nature which cannot utterly
+perish. And here Spinoza, as he often does in many of
+his most solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the
+thread of his demonstrations, and appeals to the
+consciousness. In spite of our non-recollection of what
+passed before our birth, in spite of all difficulties from
+the dissolution of the body, "Nihilo minus," he says,
+"sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse. Nam mens
+non minus res illas sentit quas intelligendo concipit,
+quam quas in memoria habet. Mentis enim oculi quibus
+res videt observatque sunt ipsae demonstrationes."
+
+This perception, immediately revealed to the mind,
+falls into easy harmony with the rest of the system. As
+the mind is not a faculty, but an act or acts,--not a
+power of perception, but the perception itself,--in its
+high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical
+language which Coleridge has made popular and
+perhaps partially intelligible), the object and the subject
+become one; a difficult expression, but the meaning of
+which (as it bears on our present subject) may be
+something of this kind:--If knowledge be followed as it ought
+to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded
+in their relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge
+of particular outward things, of nature, or life, or
+history, becomes in fact, knowledge of God; and the
+more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more
+the mind is raised above what is perishable in the
+phenomena to the idea or law which lies beyond them.
+It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal, not upon
+the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting
+laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect
+union with them, it contracts in itself the character of
+the objects which possess it. Thus we are emancipated
+from the conditions of duration; we are liable even to
+death only quatenus patimur, as we are passive things
+and not active intelligences; and the more we possess
+such knowledge and are possessed by it, the more
+entirely the passive is superseded by the active--so that
+at last the human soul may "become of such a nature
+that the portion of it which will perish with the body in
+in comparison with that of it which shall endure, shall
+be insignificant and nullius momenti." (Eth v. 38.)
+
+
+Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the
+influence of which upon Europe, direct and indirect, it
+is not easy to over-estimate. The account of it is far
+from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's labours;
+his "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" was the forerunner
+of German historical criticism; the whole of which has
+been but the application of principles laid down in that
+remarkable work. But this was not a subject on which,
+upon the present occasion, it was desirable to enter, and
+we have designedly confined ourselves to the system
+which is most associated with the name of its author.
+It is this which has been really powerful, which has
+stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine
+themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the
+absolute Pantheism of Schelling and Hegel, in the
+Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and Schleiermacher.
+Passing into practical life it has formed the strong
+shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been
+able to unite with the theories of the most extreme
+materialism.
+
+It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been
+unmixedly good) at the bottom of that more reverent
+contemplation of nature which has caused the success of
+our modern landscape painting, which inspired
+Wordsworth's poetry, and which, if ever physical science is
+to become an instrument of intellectual education, must
+first be infused into the lessons of nature; the sense of
+that "something" interfused in the material world--
+
+"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+And the round ocean, and the living air,
+And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;--
+A motion and a spirit, which impels
+All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
+And rolls through all things."
+
+If we shrink from regarding the extended universe,
+with Spinoza, as an actual manifestation of Almighty
+God, we are unable to rest in the mere denial that it is
+this. We go on to ask what it is, and we are obliged to
+conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest
+being was once a thought in his mind; and in the study
+of what he has made we are really and truly studying
+a revelation of himself.
+
+It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on
+the moral side, that the point of main offence is lying;
+in that excuse for evil and for evil men which the
+necessitarian theory will furnish, disguise it in what
+fair-sounding words we will. So plain this is that
+common-sense people, and especially English people,
+cannot bring themselves even to consider the question
+without impatience, and turn disdainfully and angrily
+from a theory which confuses their plain instincts of right
+and wrong. Although, however, error on this side is
+infinitely less mischievous than on the other, no vehement
+error can exist in this world with impunity; and it does
+appear that in our common view of these matters we
+have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience,
+and have given the fatalist a vantage ground
+of real truth which we ought to have considered and
+allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter
+briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the
+necessities of life are our best philosophers if we will
+only listen honestly to what they say to us; and dislike
+the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which refuses to
+hear it.
+
+The popular belief is, that right and wrong lies before
+every man, and that he is free to choose between them,
+and the responsibility of choice rests with himself. The
+fatalist's belief is that every man's actions are
+determined by causes external and internal over which he
+has no power, leaving no room for any moral choice
+whatever. The first is contradicted by plain facts; the
+second by the instinct of conscience. Even Spinoza allows
+that for practical purposes we are obliged to regard the
+future as contingent, and ourselves as able to influence
+it; and it is incredible that both our inward convictions
+and our outward conduct should be built together upon
+a falsehood. But if, as Butler says, whatever be the
+speculative account of the matter, we are practically
+forced to regard ourselves as free, this is but half the
+truth, for it may be equally said that practically we are
+forced to regard each other as not free; and to make
+allowance, every moment, for influences for which we
+cannot hold each other personally responsible. If not,
+--if every person of sound mind (in the common
+acceptation of the term) be equally able at all times to
+act right if only he will,--why all the care which we
+take of children? why the pains to keep them from
+bad society? why do we so anxiously watch their
+disposition, to determine the education which will best
+answer to it? Why in cases of guilt do we vary our
+moral censure according to the opportunities of the
+offender? Why do we find excuses for youth, for
+inexperience, for violent natural passion, for bad
+education, bad example? Except that we feel that all these
+things do affect the culpability of the guilty person, and
+that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard them. But
+what we act upon in private life we cannot acknowledge
+in our general ethical theories, and while our conduct in
+detail is human and just, we have been contented to
+gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and
+coarse generalisations of political necessity. In the swift
+haste of social life we must indeed treat men as we find
+them. We have no time to make allowances; and
+the graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a
+mere impossibility. A thief is a thief in the law's eye
+though he has been trained from his cradle in the
+kennels of St. Giles's; and definite penalties must be
+attached to definite acts, the conditions of political life
+not admitting of any other method of dealing with them.
+But it is absurd to argue from such rude necessity that
+each act therefore, by whomsoever committed, is of specific
+culpability. The act is one thing, the moral guilt is
+another. And there are many cases in which, as Butler
+again allows, if we trace a sinner's history to the bottom,
+the guilt attributable to himself appears to vanish altogether.
+
+This is all plain matter of fact, and as long as we
+continue to deny or ignore it, there will be found men (not
+bad men, but men who love the truth as much as ourselves),
+who will see only what we neglect, and will
+insist upon it, and build their system upon it.
+
+And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those
+natural tendencies which each of us brings with him into
+the world,--which we did not make, and yet which
+almost as much determine what we are to be, as the
+properties of the seed determine the tree which shall
+grow from it. Men are self-willed, or violent, or
+obstinate, or weak, or generous, or affectionate; there is as
+large difference in their dispositions as in the features of
+their faces; and that by no original act of their own.
+Duties which are easy to one, another finds difficult or
+impossible. It is with morals as it is with art. Two
+children are taught to draw; one learns with ease, the
+other hardly or never. In vain the master will show
+him what to do. It seems so easy: it seems as if he
+had only to will and the thing would be done; but
+it is not so. Between the desire and the execution lies
+the incapable organ which only wearily, and after long
+labour, imperfectly accomplishes what is required of it.
+And the same, to a certain extent, unless we will deny
+the plainest facts of experience, holds true in moral
+actions. No wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust
+aside as these things are in the popular beliefs, as soon
+as they are recognized in their full reality they should
+be mistaken for the whole truth, and that the free-will
+theory be thrown aside as a chimera.
+
+It may be said, and it often is said, that all such
+reasonings are merely sophistical--that however we
+entangle ourselves in logic, we are conscious that we are
+free; we know--we are as sure as we are of our
+existence that we have power to act this way or that
+way, exactly as we choose. But this is less plain than
+it seems; and if we grant it, it proves less than it appears
+to prove. It may be true that we can act as we choose,
+but can we choose? Is not our choice determined for
+us? We cannot determine from the fact, because we
+always have chosen as soon as we act, and we cannot
+replace the conditions in such a way as to discover
+whether we could have chosen anything else. The
+stronger motive may have determined our volition
+without our perceiving it; and if we desire to prove
+our independence of motive, by showing that we can
+choose something different from that which we should
+naturally have chosen, we still cannot escape from the
+circle, this very desire becoming, as Mr. Hume observes,
+itself a motive. Again, consciousness of the possession
+of any power may easily be delusive; we can properly
+judge what our powers are only by what they have
+actually accomplished; we know what we have done,
+and we may infer from having done it, that our power
+was equal to what it achieved; but it is easy for us to
+overrate ourselves if we try to measure our abilities in
+themselves. A man who can leap five yards may think
+that he can leap six; yet he may try and fail. A man
+who can write prose may only learn that he cannot
+write poetry from the badness of the verses which he
+produces. To the appeal to consciousness of power
+there is always an answer:--that we may believe
+ourselves to possess it, but that experience proves that we
+may be deceived.
+
+There are, however, another set of feelings which
+cannot be set aside in this way, which do prove that, in
+some sense or other, in some degree or other, we are
+the authors of our own actions,--that there is a point
+fit which we begin to be responsible for them. It is
+one of the clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where
+two or more courses involving moral issues are before
+us, whether we have a consciousness of power to choose
+between them or not, we have a consciousness that
+we ought to choose between them; a sense of duty
+hoti dei touto prattein, as Aristotle expresses it, which
+we cannot shake off. Whatever this involves (and
+some measure of freedom it must involve or it is
+nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and refuses to yield
+before all the batteries of logic. It is not that of the
+two courses we know that one is in the long run the
+best, and the other more immediately tempting. We
+have a sense of obligation irrespective of consequence,
+the violation of which is followed again by a sense of
+self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will
+Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they
+are with the theory of powerlessness, are mere mistakes
+arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary
+facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous
+sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by
+habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by
+logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof
+that it is not a real power of perceiving real things,
+than blindness is a proof that sight is not a real power.
+The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not
+conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like
+those of seeing and hearing; and although, like the
+other senses, they may be mistaken sometimes in the
+accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence of
+such feelings at all proves that there is something
+which corresponds to them. If there be any such
+things as "true ideas," or clear distinct perceptions at
+all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and according
+to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what it
+involves. And it involves that somewhere or other the
+influence of causes ceases to operate, and that some
+degree of power there is in men of self-determination,
+by the amount of which, and not by their specific
+actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured.
+Speculative difficulties remain in abundance. It will
+be said in a case, e.g. of moral trial, that there may
+have been power; but was there power enough to resist
+the temptation? If there was, then it was resisted. If
+there was not, there was no responsibility. We must
+answer again from a practical instinct. We refuse to
+allow men to be considered all equally guilty who
+have committed the same faults; and we insist that
+their actions must be measured against their opportunities.
+But a similar conviction assures us that there is
+somewhere a point of freedom. Where that point is,
+where other influences terminate, and responsibility
+begins, will always be of intricate and often impossible
+solution. But if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to
+necessitarianism, and man is what he has been hitherto
+supposed to be--an exception in the order of nature,
+with a power not differing in degree but differing in
+kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all
+life, is a mystery; and as to dissect the body will not
+reveal the secret of animation, so with the actions of
+the moral man. The spiritual life, which alone gives
+them meaning and being, glides away before the logical
+dissecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work
+upon.
+____
+
+
+REYNARD THE FOX
+
+In a recent dissatisfied perusal of Mr. Macaulay's
+collected articles, we were especially offended by his
+curious and undesirable Essay on Machiavelli. Declining
+the various solutions which have been offered
+to explain how a man supposed to be so great could
+have lent his genius to the doctrine of "the Prince," he
+has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
+may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's
+character, but which, as an exposition of a universal
+ethical theory, is as detestable as what it is brought
+forward to explain ... We will not show Mr. Macaulay
+the disrespect of supposing that he has unsuccessfully
+attempted an elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that
+he may have been exercising his genius with a paradox,
+but the subject is not of the sort in which we can
+patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
+all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see
+the road with all plainness as it lies out before us; and
+clever men must be good enough to find something else
+to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our eyes
+with sophistry.
+
+In Mr. Macaulay's conception of human nature, the
+basenesses and the excellencies of mankind are no more
+than accidents of circumstance, the results of national
+feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
+treachery, and lying, and such other "natural defences
+of the weak against the strong," are in themselves
+neither good nor bad, except as thinking makes them
+so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
+will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable;
+they are to the full as compatible with the highest
+graces and most lofty features of the heart and intellect,
+as any of those opposite so called heroisms which we
+are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolize
+the name .... Cunning is the only resource of the
+feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning
+as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
+bearing of the strong? . . . That there may be no
+mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the
+nail home into the English understanding, he takes an
+illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
+characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern
+thought, the free and noble nature of the Moor is
+wrecked through a single infirmity, by a fiend in the
+human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's
+keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable
+as Othello's daring appears to us, and Othello himself
+little better than a fool and a savage .... It is but a
+change of scene, of climate, of the animal qualities of
+the frame, and evil has become a good, and good has
+become evil .... Now, our displeasure with Mr.
+Macaulay is, not that he has advanced a novel and
+mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in the
+finely-tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric, at
+Athens; and so long as such a phenomenon as a
+cultivated rogue remains possible among mankind, it
+will reappear in all languages and under any number
+of philosophical disguises .... Seldom or never,
+however, has it appeared with so little attempt at
+disguise. It has been left for questionable poets and
+novelists to idealize the rascal genus; philosophers
+have escaped into the ambiguities of general propositions,
+and we do not remember elsewhere to have
+met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
+two whole organic characters, with their vices and
+virtues in full life and bloom, side by side, asking
+himself which is best, and answering gravely that it
+is a matter of taste.
+
+Mr. Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors;
+he has shrunk from no conclusion, and
+looked directly into the very heart of the matter; he
+has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
+ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation
+quakes under it.
+
+For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right,
+and wrong is wrong? People in general accept it on
+authority; but authority itself must repose on some
+ulterior basis; and what is that? . . . Are we to say
+that in morals there is a system of primary axioms, out
+of which we develop our conclusions, and apply them,
+as they are needed, to life? It does not appear so.
+The analogy of morals is rather with art than with
+geometry. The grace of heaven gives us good men,
+and gives us beautiful creations; and we, perceiving by
+the instincts within ourselves that celestial presence in
+the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves
+the laws which make them what they are, not by comparing
+them with any antecedent theory, but by careful
+analysis of our own impressions, by asking ourselves
+what it is which we admire in them, and calling that
+good, and calling that beautiful.
+
+So, then, if admiration be the first fact, if the sense
+of it be the ultimate ground on which the after temple
+of morality, as a system, upraises itself, if we can be
+challenged here on our own ground, and fail to make
+it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a
+dream of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark
+for the sceptic's finger to point at with scorn.
+
+Bold and ably urged arguments against our own
+convictions, if they do not confuse us, will usually send
+us back over our ground to re-examine the strength of
+our positions: and if we are honest with ourselves, we
+shall very often find points of some uncertainty left
+unguarded, of which the show of the strength of our
+enemy will oblige us to see better to the defence ....
+It was not without some shame, and much uneasiness,
+that, while we were ourselves engaged in this process,
+full of indignation with Mr. Macaulay, we heard a
+clear voice ringing in our ear, "Who art thou that
+judgest another?" and warning us of the presence in
+our own heart of a sympathy, which we could not deny,
+with the sadly questionable hero of the German epic,
+Reynard the Fox. With our vulpine friend, we were
+on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed, we
+were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry
+could we justify ourselves, if not by the very same
+which we had just been so eagerly condemning? And
+our conscience whispered to us that we had been swift
+to detect a fault in another, because it was the very
+fault to which, in our own heart of hearts, we had a
+latent leaning.
+
+Was it so indeed, then? Was Reineke no better
+than Iago? Was the sole difference between them,
+that the vales sacer who had sung the exploits of
+Reineke loved the wicked rascal, and entangled us in
+loving him? It was a question to be asked .... And
+yet we had faith enough in the straightforwardness of
+our own sympathies to feel sure that it must admit of
+some sort of answer. And, indeed, we rapidly found
+an answer satisfactory enough to give us time to
+breathe, in remembering that Reineke, with all his
+roguery, has no malice in him .... It is not in his
+nature to hate; he could not do it if he tried. The
+characteristic of Iago is that deep motiveless malignity
+which rejoices in evil as its proper element, which loves
+evil as good men love virtue. In his calculations on
+the character of the Moor, he despises his
+unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him
+as a man because his nature is the perpetual opposite
+and perpetual reproach of his own .... Now Reineke
+would not have hurt a creature, not even Scharfenebbe,
+the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out,
+if he had not been hungry; and that gastros ananke,
+that craving of the stomach, makes a difference quite
+infinite. It is true that, like Iago, he rejoices in the
+exercise of his intellect; the sense of his power, and the
+scientific employment of his time are a real delight to
+him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its
+own sake; he is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the
+other animals venture to take liberties with him, he will
+repay them in their own coin, and get his quiet laugh
+at them at the same time; but the object generally for
+which he lives is the natural one of getting his bread
+for himself and his family; and, as the great moralist
+says, "It is better to be bad for something than for
+nothing." Badness generally is undesirable; but badness
+in its essence, which may be called heroic badness,
+is gratuitous.
+
+But this first thought served merely to give us a
+momentary relief from our alarm, and we determined
+we would sift the matter to the bottom, and no more
+expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage.
+We went again to the poem, with our eyes open, and
+our moral sense as keenly awake as a genuine wish to
+understand our feelings could make it. We determined
+that we would really know what we did feel and what
+we did not. We would not be lightly scared away from
+our friend, but neither would we any more allow our
+judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of
+his; he should have justice from us, he and his biographer,
+as far as it lay with us to discern justice and
+to render it.
+
+And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem
+little less than impossible that we could find any
+conceivable attribute illustrated in Reineke's proceedings
+which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of
+virtue, and not blush to read it there. What sin is
+there in the Decalogue in which he has not steeped
+himself to the lips? To the lips, shall we say? nay,
+over head and ears--rolling and rollicking in sin.
+Murder, and theft, and adultery, sacrilege, perjury,
+lying his very life is made of them. On he goes to
+the end, heaping crime on crime, and lie on lie, and
+at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so
+long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron
+grasp, there is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge,
+a battle ordeal, in which, by means we may not venture
+even to whisper, the villain prospers, and comes out
+glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing
+world; and, to crown it all, the poet tells us that under
+the disguise of the animal name and form the world
+of man is represented, and the true course of it; and
+the idea of the book is, that we who read it may learn
+therein to discern between good and evil, and choose
+the first and avoid the last. It seemed beyond the
+power of sophistry to whitewash Reineke, and the
+interest which still continued to cling to him in us seemed
+too nearly to resemble the unwisdom of the multitude,
+with whom success is the one virtue and failure the
+only crime.
+
+It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises
+were too transparent to endure a moment's reflection,
+yet that they were so gracefully worn that such
+moment's reflection was not to be come at without an
+effort. Our imagination following the costume did
+imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the
+human intellect, the ever ready prompt sagacity and
+presence of mind. We delighted in the satire on the
+foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own fellow
+mankind; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his
+humanity wherever it was his interest that we should
+forget it, and while we admired him as a man we
+judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it would
+have been possible if he had been described as an open
+acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have
+retained our regard for him. Something or other in
+us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug, or
+hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with
+our liking than most of us do in the case as it stands.
+It may be that the dress of the fox throws us off our
+guard, and lets out a secret or two which we commonly
+conceal even from ourselves. When we have to pass
+an opinion upon bad people, who at the same time are
+clever and attractive, we say rather what we think
+we ought to feel than our real sensations; while
+with Reineke, being but an animal, we forget to make
+ourselves up, and for once our genuine tastes show
+themselves freely .... Some degree of truth there
+undoubtedly is in this .... But making all allowance for
+it--making all and over allowance for the trick which is
+passed upon our senses, there still remained a feeling
+unresolved. The poem was not solely the apotheosis
+of a rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking an
+interest. And it was not a satire merely on the world,
+and on the men whom the world delight to honour;
+there was still something which really deserved to be
+liked in Reineke, and what it was we had as yet failed
+to discover.
+
+"Two are better than one," and we resolved in our
+difficulty to try what our friends might have to say
+about it; the appearance of the Wurtemburg animals
+at the Exhibition came fortunately apropos to our
+assistance: a few years ago it was rare to find a person
+who had read the Fox Epic; and still more, of course,
+to find one whose judgment would be worth taking
+about it; but now the charming figures of Reineke
+himself, and the Lion King, and Isegrim, and Bruin,
+and Bellyn, and Hintze, and Grimbart, had set all the
+world asking who and what they were, and the story
+began to get itself known. The old editions, which had
+long slept unbound in reams upon the shelves, began
+to descend and clothe themselves in green and crimson.
+Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round the households
+of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and
+now, at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see
+whether we are alone in our liking--whether others
+share in this strange sympathy, or whether it be some
+unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves.
+
+We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness,
+feeling our way first with fear and delicacy, as conscious
+of our own delinquency, to gather judgments which
+should be wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if
+it proved that we required correction, with whatever
+severity might be necessary. The result of which labour
+of ours was not a little surprising; we found that women
+invariably, with that clear moral instinct of theirs, at
+once utterly reprobated and detested our poor Reynard;
+detested the hero and detested the bard who sang of
+him with so much sympathy; while men we found
+almost invariably feeling just as we felt ourselves, only
+with this difference, that we saw no trace of uneasiness
+in them about the matter. It was no little comfort to us,
+moreover, to find that the exceptions were rather among
+the half-men, the would-be extremely good, but whose
+goodness was of that dead and passive kind which
+spoke to but a small elevation of thought or activity;
+while just in proportion as a man was strong, and real,
+and energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke.
+It was really most strange, one near friend of ours, a
+man who, as far as we knew (and we knew him well)
+had never done a wrong thing, when we ventured to
+hint something about roguery, replied, "You see, he was
+such a clever rogue, that he had a right." Another,
+whom we pressed more closely with that treacherous
+cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor
+Lampe, said, off-hand and with much impatience of
+such questioning, "Such fellows were made to be
+eaten." What could we do? It had come to this,--
+as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear
+child, no ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to
+express the vehemence of our affection, and borrowing
+language out of the opposites, we call him little rogue
+or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the
+analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke
+because of that transcendantly successful roguery.
+
+When we asked our friends how they came to feel
+as they did, they had little to say. They were not
+persons who could be suspected of any latent disposition
+towards evil doing, and yet though it appeared as if
+they were falling under the description of those
+unhappy ones who, if they did not such things themselves,
+yet "had pleasure in those who did them," they did not
+care to justify themselves. The fact was so: arche to
+hoti: it was a fact--what could we want more? Some
+few attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a
+satire. But this only moved the difficulty a single
+step; for the fact of the sympathy remained unimpaired,
+and if it was a satire we were ourselves the objects of it.
+Others urged what we said above, that the story was
+only of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not
+only had no souls, but scarcely even life in any
+original and sufficient sense, and therefore we need not
+trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it
+seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was
+fatal to the proposed escape. Either there was a man
+hiding under the fox's skin, or else, if real foxes have
+such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no honest
+doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience
+was not forgotten in the compounding of him, and he
+must be held answerable according to his knowledge.
+
+What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with
+his might and right? "The just thing in the long run
+is the strong thing." But Reineke had a long run out
+and came in winner. Does he only "seem to succeed?"
+Who does succeed, then, if he no more than
+seems? The vulpine intellect knows where the geese
+live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke's victims
+we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of
+goose; and as to geese metaphorical, at least the whole
+visible world lies down complacently at his feet. Nor
+does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on this very poem
+serve any better to help us--nay, it seems as if he feels
+uneasy in the neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so
+briefly he dismisses him. "Worldly prudence is the
+only virtue which is certain of its reward." Nay, but
+there is more in it than that: no worldly prudence
+would command the voices which have been given in to
+us for Reineke.
+
+Three only possibilities lay now before us: either we
+should, on searching, find something solid in this Fox's
+doings to justify success; or else the just thing was not
+always the strong thing; or it might be, that such very
+semblance of success was itself the most miserable
+failure; that the wicked man who was struck down and
+foiled, and foiled again, till he unlearnt his wickedness,
+or till he was disabled from any more attempting it, was
+blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph in
+wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the
+end, was the last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine
+vengeance. Hin' athanatos e adikos on--to go on with
+injustice through this world and through all eternity,
+uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by any
+untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in
+its true accursed form the miserable demon to which he
+has sold himself,--this, of all catastrophes which could
+befal an evil man, was the deepest, lowest, and most
+savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian
+moralists could reason out for himself,--under which
+third hypothesis many an uneasy misgiving would vanish
+away, and Mr. Carlyle's broad aphorism be accepted
+by us with thankfulness.
+
+It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have come to
+this--that if we wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma,
+no OEdipus was likely to rise and find it for us; and
+that if we wanted help, we must make it for ourselves.
+This only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for
+the unworthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest
+number of our own sex; and, comforted with the sense
+of good fellowship, we went boldly to work upon our
+consciousness; and the imperfect analysis which we
+succeeded in accomplishing, we here lay before you,
+whoever you may be, who have felt, as we have felt, a
+regard which was a moral disturbance to you, and which
+you will be pleased if we enable you to justify--
+
+Si quid novisti rectius istis,
+Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum.
+
+Following the clue which was thrust into our hand
+by the marked difference of the feelings of men upon
+the subject from those of women, we were at once
+satisfied that Reineke's goodness, if he had any, must lay
+rather in the active than the passive department of life.
+The negative obedience to prohibitory precepts, under
+which women are bound as well as men, as was already
+too clear, we were obliged to surrender as hopeless.
+But it seemed as if, with respect to men whose business
+is to do, and to labour, and to accomplish, this negative
+test was a seriously imperfect one; and it was quite as
+possible that a man who unhappily had broken many
+prohibitions might yet exhibit positive excellencies, as
+that he might walk through life picking his way with
+the utmost assiduity, risking nothing and doing nothing,
+not committing a single sin, but keeping his talent
+carefully wrapt up in a napkin, and get sent, in the end, to
+outer darkness for his pains, as an unprofitable servant;
+and this appeared the more important to us, as it was
+very little dwelt upon by religious or moral teachers;
+and at the end of six thousand years, the popular notion
+of virtue, as far as it could get itself expressed, had not
+risen beyond the mere abstinence from certain specific
+bad actions.
+
+The king of the beasts forgives Reineke on account
+of the substantial services which at various times he has
+rendered. His counsel was always the wisest, his hand
+the promptest in cases of difficulty; and all that
+dexterity, and politeness, and courtesy, and exquisite culture
+had not been learnt without an effort or without
+conquering many undesirable tendencies in himself. Men
+are not born with any art in its perfection, and he
+had made himself valuable by his own sagacity and
+exertion. Now, on the human stage, a man who has
+made himself valuable is certain to be valued.
+However we may pretend to estimate men according to the
+wrong things which they have done, or abstained from
+doing, we in fact follow the example of Nobel, the king
+of the beasts, and give them their places among us
+according to the serviceableness and capability which
+they display. We might mention not a few eminent
+public servants, whom the world delights to honour--
+ministers, statesmen, lawyers, men of science, artists,
+poets, soldiers, who, if they were tried by the negative
+test, would show but a poor figure; yet their value is
+too real to be dispensed with; and we tolerate
+unquestionable wrong to secure the services of eminent ability.
+The world really does, and it always has really done so
+from the beginning of the human history; and it is
+only indolence or cowardice which has left our ethical
+teaching halting so far behind the universal and
+necessary practice. Even questionable prima donnas, in
+virtue of their sweet voices, have their praises hymned
+in drawing-room and newspaper, and applause rolls over
+them, and gold and bouquets shower on them from lips
+and hands which, except for those said voices, would
+treat them to a ruder reward. In real fact, we take our
+places in this world not according to what we are not,
+but according to what we are. His Holiness Pope
+Clement, when his audience-room rang with furious
+outcries for justice on Benvenuto Cellini, who, as far
+as half-a-dozen murders could form a title, was as fair a
+candidate for the gallows as ever swung from that
+unlucky wood, replied, "All this is very well, gentlemen:
+these murders are bad things, we know that. But where
+am I to get another Benvenuto, if you hang this one
+for me?"
+
+Or, to take an acknowledged hero, one of the old
+Greek sort, the theme of the song of the greatest of
+human poets, whom it is less easy to refuse to admire
+than even our friend Reineke. Take Ulysses. It
+cannot be said that he kept his hands from taking what
+was not his, or his tongue from speaking what was not
+true; and if Frau Ermelyn had to complain (as indeed
+there was too much reason for her complaining) of
+certain infirmities in her good husband, Penelope, too,
+might have urged a thing or two, if she had known as
+much about the matter as we know, which the modern
+moralist would find it hard to excuse.
+
+After all is said, the capable man is the man to be
+admired. The man who tries and fails, what is the
+use of him? We are in this world to do something--
+not to fail in doing it. Of your bunglers--helpless,
+inefficient persons, "unfit alike for good or ill," who try
+one thing, and fail because they are not strong enough,
+and another, because they have not energy enough, and
+a third, because they have no talent--inconsistent,
+unstable, and therefore never to excel, what shall we
+say of them? what use is there in them? what hope is
+there of them? what can we wish for them? to mepot'
+einai pant' ariston. It were better for them they had
+never been born. To be able to do what a man tries
+to do, that is the first requisite; and given that, we
+may hope all things for him. "Hell is paved with
+good intentions," the proverb says; and the enormous
+proportion of bad successes in this life lie between the
+desire and the execution. Give us a man who is able
+to do what he settles that he desires to do, and we have
+the one thing indispensable. If he can succeed doing
+ill, much more he can succeed doing well. Show him
+better, and, at any rate, there is a chance that he will
+do better.
+
+We are not concerned here with Benvenuto or with
+Ulysses further than to show, through the position
+which we all consent to give them, that there is much
+unreality, against which we must be on our guard. And
+if we fling off an old friend, and take to affecting a
+hatred of him which we do not feel, we have scarcely
+gained by the exchange, even though originally our
+friendship may have been misplaced.
+
+Capability no one will deny to Reineke. That is
+the very differentia of him. An "animal capable" would
+be his sufficient definition. Here is another very
+genuinely valuable feature about him--his wonderful
+singleness of character. Lying, treacherous, cunning
+scoundrel as he is, there is a wholesome absence of
+humbug about him. Cheating all the world, he never
+cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is always
+a conscious hypocrite--a form of character, however
+paradoxical it may seem, a great deal more accessible
+than the other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke
+for the principles of his life, and if it suited his purpose
+to tell you, he could do so with the greatest exactness.
+There would be no discrepancy between the profession
+and the practice. He is most truly single-minded, and
+therefore stable in his ways, and therefore as the world
+goes, and in the world's sense, successful. Whether
+really successful is a question we do not care here to
+enter on; but only to say this--that of all unsuccessful
+men in every sense, either divine, or human, or devilish,
+there is none equal to old Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways
+--the fellow with one eye on Heaven and one on earth
+--who sincerely preaches one thing, and sincerely does
+another; and from the intensity of his unreality is
+unable either to see or feel the contradiction. Serving
+God with his lips, and with the half of his mind which
+is not bound up in the world; and serving the devil with
+his actions, and with the other half, he is substantially
+trying to cheat both God and the devil, and is, in fact,
+only cheating himself and his neighbours. This, of all
+characters upon the earth, appears to us to be the one
+of whom there is no hope at all--a character becoming,
+in these days, alarmingly abundant; and the abundance
+of which makes us find even in a Reineke an
+inexpressible relief.
+
+But what we most thoroughly value in him is his
+capacity. He can do what he sets to work to do. That
+blind instinct with which the world shouts and claps
+its hand for the successful man, is one of those latent
+forces in us which are truer than we know; it is the
+universal confessional to which Nature leads us, and, in
+her intolerance of disguise and hypocrisy, compels us
+to be our own accusers. Whoever can succeed in a
+given condition of society, can succeed only in virtue
+of fulfilling the terms which society exacts of him; and
+if he can fulfil them triumphantly, of course it rewards
+him and praises him. He is what the rest of the world
+would be, if their powers were equal to their desires.
+He has accomplished what they all are vaguely, and
+with imperfect consistency, struggling to accomplish;
+and the character of the conqueror--the means and
+appliances by which he has climbed up that great
+pinnacle on which he stands victorious, the observed of all
+observers, is no more than a very exact indicator of the
+amount of real virtue in the age, out of which he stands
+prominent.
+
+We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very
+virtuous age in which Reineke made himself a great
+man; but that was the fault of the age as much as the
+fault of him. His nature is to succeed wherever he is.
+If the age had required something else of him, then he
+would have been something else. Whatever it had said
+to him "do, and I will make you my hero," that
+Reineke would have done. No appetite makes a slave
+of him--no faculty refuses obedience to his will. His
+entire nature is under perfect organic control to the one
+supreme authority. And the one object for which he
+lives, and for which, let his lot have been cast in
+whatever century it might, he would always have lived, is
+to rise, to thrive, to prosper, and become great.
+
+The world as he found it said to him--Prey upon
+us, we are your oyster; let your wit open us. If you
+will only do it cleverly--if you will take care that we
+shall not close upon your fingers in the process, you
+may devour us at your pleasure, and we shall feel
+ourselves highly honoured. Can we wonder at a fox of
+Reineke's abilities taking such a world at its word?
+
+And let it not be supposed that society in this earth
+of ours is ever so viciously put together, is ever so totally
+without organic life, that a rogue, unredeemed by any
+merit, can prosper in it. There is no strength in
+rottenness; and when it comes to that, society dies and
+falls in pieces. Success, as it is called, even worldly
+success, is impossible, without some exercise of what is
+called moral virtue, without some portion of it,
+infinitesimally small, perhaps, but still some. Courage, for
+instance, steady self-confidence, self-trust, self-reliance--
+that only basis and foundation-stone on which a strong
+character can rear itself--do we not see this in Reineke.
+While he lives he lives for himself; but if it comes
+to dying, he can die like his betters; and his wit is not
+of that effervescent sort which will fly away at the sight
+of death and leave him panic-stricken. It is true there
+is a meaning to that word courage, which was perhaps
+not to be found in the dictionary in which Reineke
+studied. "I hope I am afraid of nothing, Trim," said
+my uncle Toby, "except doing a wrong thing." With
+Reineke there was no "except." His digestive powers
+shrank from no action, good or bad, which would serve
+his turn. Yet it required no slight measure of courage
+to treat his fellow-creatures with the steady disrespect
+with which Reineke treats them. To walk along
+among them, regardless of any interest but his own;
+out of mere wantonness to hook them up like so many
+cock-chafers, and spin them for his pleasure; not like
+Domitian, with an imperial army to hold them down
+during the operation, but with no other assistance but
+his own little body and large wit; it was something to
+venture upon. And a world which would submit to be
+so treated, what could he do but despise?
+
+To the animals utterly below ourselves, external to
+our own species, we hold ourselves bound by no law.
+
+We say to them, vos non vobis, without any uneasy
+misgivings. We rob the bees of their honey, the cattle
+of their lives, the horse and the ass of their liberty. We
+kill the wild animals that they may not interfere with
+our pleasures; and acknowledge ourselves bound to
+them by no terms except what are dictated by our own
+convenience. And why should Reineke have acknowledged
+an obligation any more than we, to creatures so
+utterly below himself? He was so clever, as our friend
+said, that he had a right. That he could treat them
+so, Mr. Carlyle would say, proves that he had a right.
+
+But it is a mistake to say he is without a conscience.
+No bold creature is ever totally without one. Even
+Iago shows some sort of conscience. Respecting nothing
+else in heaven or earth, he respects and even reverences
+his own intellect. After one of those sweet interviews
+with Roderigo, his, what we must call, conscience takes
+him to account for his company; and he pleads to it in
+his own justification--
+
+"For I mine own gained knowledge should profane
+Were I to waste myself with such a snipe
+But for my sport and profit."
+
+And Reineke, if we take the mass of his misdeeds,
+preyed chiefly, like our own Robin Hood, on rogues who
+were greater rogues than himself. If Bruin chose to
+steal Rusteviel's honey, if Hintze trespassed in the
+priest's granary, they were but taken in their own
+evildoings. And what is Isegim, the worst of Reineke's
+victims, but a great heavy, stupid, lawless brute?--fair
+type, we will suppose, of not a few Front-de-Boeufs and
+other so-called nobles of the poet's era, whose will to
+do mischief was happily limited by their obtuseness; or
+that French baron, Sir Gilbert de Retz, we believe, was
+his name, who, like Isegrim, had studied at the universities,
+and passed for learned, whose after-dinner pastime
+for many years, as it proved at last, was to cut children's
+throats for the pleasure of watching them die--we may
+well feel gratitude that a Reineke was provided to be
+the scourge of such monsters as they; and we have
+a thorough pure, exuberant satisfaction in seeing the
+intellect in that little weak body triumph over them and
+trample them down. This, indeed, this victory of
+intellect over brute force is one great secret of our
+pleasure in the poem, and goes far, in the Carlyle
+direction to satisfy us that, at any rate, it is not given to
+mere base physical strength to win in the battle of life,
+even in times when physical strength is apparently the
+only recognised power.
+
+We are insensibly failing from our self-assumed
+judicial office into that of advocacy; and sliding into
+what may be plausibly urged, rather than standing fast
+on what we can surely affirm. Yet there are cases
+when it is fitting for the judge to become the advocate
+of an undefended prisoner; and advocacy is only
+plausible when a few words of truth are mixed with
+what we say, like the few drops of wine which colour
+and faintly flavour the large draught of water. Such
+few grains or drops, whatever they may be, we must
+leave to the kindness of Reynard's friends to distil for
+him, while we continue a little longer in the same
+strain.
+
+After all it may be said, what is it in man's nature
+which is really admirable? It is idle for us to waste
+our labour in passing Reineke through the moral
+crucible unless we shall recognise the results when we
+obtain them; and in these moral sciences our analytical
+tests can only be obtained by a study of our own
+internal experience. If we desire to know what we
+admire in Reineke we must look for what we admire in
+ourselves. And what is that? Is it what on Sundays
+and on set occasions, and when we are mounted on our
+moral stilts, we are pleased to call goodness, probity
+obedience, humility? Is it? Is it really? Is it not
+rather the face and form which Nature made--the
+strength which is ours, we know not how--our talents,
+our rank, our possessions? It appears to us that we
+most value in ourselves and most admire in our neighbour
+not acquisitions, but gifts. A man does not praise
+himself for being good. If he praise himself he is
+not good. The first condition of goodness is forgetfulness
+of self; and where self has entered, under however
+plausible a form, the health is but skin-deep, and
+underneath there is corruption--and so through everything
+We value, we are vain of, proud of, or whatever you
+please to call it, not what we have done for ourselves, but
+what has been done for us--what has been given to us
+by the upper powers. We look up to high-born men,
+to wealthy men, to fortunate men, to clever men. Is it
+not so? Who do we choose for the county member,
+the magistrate, the officer, the minister? The good
+man we leave to the humble enjoyment of his goodness,
+and we look out for the able or the wealthy. And
+again of the wealthy, as if on every side to witness to
+the same universal law, the man who with no labour
+of his own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the
+world's esteem than his father who made it. We take
+rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree,
+and are therefore the farthest removed from the
+first who made the fortune and founded the family, we
+are the noblest. The nearer to the fountain the fouler
+the stream; and that first ancestor, who has soiled his
+fingers by labour, is no better than a parvenu.
+
+And as it is with what we value, so it is with what
+we blame. It is an old story, that there is no one who
+would not in his heart prefer being a knave to being a
+fool; and when we fail in a piece of attempted roguery,
+as Coleridge has wisely observed, though reasoning
+unwisely from it, we lay the blame not on our own
+moral nature, for which we are responsible, but on our
+intellectual, for which we are not responsible. We do
+not say what knaves, we say what fools, we have been;
+perplexing Coleridge, who regards it as a phenomenon
+of some deep moral disorder; whereas it is but one
+more evidence of the universal fact that gifts are the
+true and proper object of appreciation, and as we admire
+men for possessing gifts, so we blame them for
+their absence. The noble man is the gifted man; the
+ignoble is the ungifted; and therefore we have only to
+state a simple law in simple language to have a full
+solution of the enigma of Reineke. He has gifts
+enough: of that, at least, there can be no doubt;
+and if he lacks the gift to use them in the way
+which we call good, at least he uses them successfully.
+His victims are less gifted than he, and therefore less
+noble; and therefore he has a right to use them as he
+pleases.
+
+And after all, what are these victims? Among the
+heaviest charges which were urged against him was the
+killing and eating of that wretched Scharfenebbe--
+Sharp-beak--the crow's wife. It is well that there are two
+sides to every story. A poor weary fox, it seemed, was not
+to be allowed to enjoy a quiet sleep in the sunshine but
+what an unclean carrion bird must come down and take
+a peck at him. We can feel no sympathy with the
+outcries of the crow husband over the fate of the
+unfortunate Sharpbeak. Wofully, he says, he flew over
+the place where, a few moments before, in the glory
+of glossy plumage, a loving wife sate croaking out her
+passion for him, and found nothing--nothing but a
+little blood and a few torn feathers--all else clean gone
+and utterly abolished. Well, and if it was so, it was
+a blank prospect for him, but the earth was well rid
+of her: and for herself, it was a higher fate to be
+assimilated into the body of a Reineke than to remain
+in a miserable individuality to be a layer of carrion
+crows' eggs.
+
+And then for Bellyn, and for Bruin, and for Hintze,
+and the rest, who would needs be meddling with what
+was no concern of theirs, what is there in them to
+challenge either regret or pity. They made love
+their occupation.
+
+'Tis dangerous when the baser nature fails
+Between the pass and fell incensed points
+Of mighty opposites:
+They lie not near our conscience:
+
+Ah! if they were all .... But there is one misdeed,
+one which outweighs all others whatsoever--a crime
+which it is useless to palliate, let our other friend say
+what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It
+sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the
+actions of his life we are certain that he wished it
+undone--the death and eating of that poor foolish
+Lampe. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke. Lampe
+had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke
+under pretence of teaching him his lesson, had seized
+him, and tried to murder him; and though he provoked
+his fate by thrusting himself, after such a warning, into
+the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an uneasiness
+about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it
+necessary to make some sort of an excuse.
+
+Grimbart had been obliged to speak severely of the
+seriousness of the offence. "You see," he answers:--
+
+To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of
+business: one can not
+Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the
+cloister.
+When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our
+fingers.
+Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and
+that way,
+Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so
+jolly,
+Really I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved
+him.
+And then he was so stupid.
+
+But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy
+Reineke. His mind is evidently softened, and it is
+on that occasion that he pours out his pathetic
+lamentation over the sad condition of the world--so fluent,
+so musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with
+wide eyes, unable, till it had run to the length of a
+sermon, to collect himself. It is true that at last his
+office as ghostly confessor obliged him to put in a slight
+demurrer:--
+
+Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your
+neighbours;
+Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now
+to the purpose.
+
+But he sighs to think what a preacher Reineke would
+have made.
+
+And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs,
+and to the song in which his glory is enshrined--the
+Welt Bibel, Bible of this world, as Goethe called it, the
+most exquisite moral satire, as we will call it, which has
+ever been composed. It is not addressed to a passing
+mode of folly or of profligacy, but it touches the
+perennial nature of mankind, laying bare our own
+sympathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen and
+true an edge as when the living world of the old Swabian
+poet winced under its earliest utterance.
+
+Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which
+it gives may have its echo in a sigh, or may glide into
+it as excitement subsides into thought; and yet, for
+those who do not care to find matter there either
+for thought or sadness, may remain innocently as a
+laugh.
+
+Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for
+the bitterness of irony, the poem is, as the world itself,
+a book where each man will find what his nature
+enables him to see, which gives us back each our own
+image, and teaches us each the lesson which each of us
+desires to learn.
+
+____
+
+
+THE COMMONPLACE BOOK OF RICHARD HILLES
+
+In the Library at Balliol College, Oxford, there is a
+manuscript which, for want of a better name, I may call
+a Commonplace Book of an English gentleman who
+lived in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Its
+contents display, beyond any other single volume which
+I have met with, the mental furniture of an average-educated
+man of the time. There are stories in prose
+and verse, collections of proverbs, a dissertation on
+Horticulture, a dissertation on Farriery, a treatise of
+Confession, a Book of Education, a Book of Courtesy, a
+Book of "the Whole Duty" of Man; mercantile entries,
+discourses of arithmetic, recipes, prescriptions, marvels
+of science or pseudo-science, conundrums, tables of the
+assize of food; the laws respecting the sale of meat,
+bread, beer, wine, and other necessaries; while above
+and beyond all are a collection in various handwritten
+of ballads, songs, hymns, and didactic poems of a religious
+kind, some few of which have been met with elsewhere;
+but of the greater number of them no other copy, I
+believe, exists.
+
+The owner and compiler was a certain Richard Hilles.
+From the entries of the births and deaths of his children
+on a fly-leaf, I gather that in 1518 he lived at a place
+called Hillend, near King's Langley, in Hertfordshire.
+The year following he had removed to London, where
+he was apparently in business; and among his remarks
+on the management of vines and fruit trees in his
+"Discourse on Gardens," he mentions incidentally that he
+had been in Greece and on the coast of Asia Minor. A
+brief "Annual Register" is carried down as far as 1535,
+in which year he perhaps died. One of his latest entries
+is the execution of Bishop Fisher and of Sir Thomas
+More. Some other facts about him might perhaps be
+collected; but his personal history could add little to
+the interest of his book, which is its own sufficient
+recommendation. It will be evident, from the description
+which I have given, that as an antiquarian curiosity this
+manuscript is one of the most remarkable of its kind
+which survives.
+
+The public, who are willing to pay for the production
+of thousands of volumes annually, the value of which
+is inappreciable from its littleness, may perhaps not be
+unwilling to encourage, to the extent of the purchase of
+a small edition, the preservation in print of a relic which,
+even in the mere commonplace power of giving amusement,
+exceeds the majority of circulating novels: while
+readers whose appetites are more discriminating, and the
+students of the past, to whom the productions of their
+ancestors have a memorial value for themselves, may
+find their taste gratified at least with some fragments of
+genuine beauty equal to the best extant specimens of
+early English poetry.
+
+In the hope of contributing to such a result, I am
+going to offer to the readers of Fraser a few
+miscellaneous selections from different parts of the volume;
+and as in the original they are thrown together without
+order--the sacred side by side with the profane; the
+devotional, the humorous, and the practical reposing in
+placid juxtaposition--I shall not attempt to remedy a
+disorder which is itself so characteristic a feature.
+
+Let us commence, then, as a fitting grace before the
+banquet, with a song on the Nativity. The spirit which
+appears in many of the most beautiful pictures of
+mediaeval art is here found taking the form of words:--
+
+Can I not sing Ut Hoy,
+When the Jolly shepherd made so much joy.
+
+The shepherd upon a hill he sat,
+He had on him his tabard and his hat;
+His tar-box, his pipe, and his flat hat,
+His name was called Jolly, Jolly Wat,
+For he was a good herd's boy,
+Ut Hoy,
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+The shepherd upon a hill was laid,
+His dogge to his girdle was tied;
+He had not slept but a little brayd
+When Gloria in Excelsis to him was said.
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+The shepherd upon a hill he stood,
+Round about him his sheep they yode;
+He put his hand under his hood,
+He saw a star as red as blood,
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+Now Farewell, Matt, and also Will,
+For my love go ye all still
+Unto I come again you till,
+And evermore Will ring well thy bell;
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+Now I must go where Christ was born;
+Farewell! I come again to morn:
+Dog keep will my sheep from the corn,
+And warn well warrock when I blow my horn,
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+When Wat to Bethlehem come was,
+He swat: he had gone faster than a pace.
+He found Jesu in a simple place,
+Between an oxe and an asse;
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+Jesu! I offer to thee here my pipe,
+My skirt, my tar-box, and my scrip;
+Home to my fellows now will I skippe,
+And also look unto my shepe,
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+Now Farewell, myne own Herdsman Watt;
+Yea, for God, Lady, and even so I had;
+Lull well Jesu in thy lappe,
+And farewell, Joseph, with thy gown and cap;
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+Now may I well both hop and sing,
+For I have been at Christ's bearing;
+Home to my fellows now will I fling,
+Christ of Heaven to his bliss us bring.
+Ut Hoy!
+For in his pipe he made so much joy.
+
+Hilles was perhaps himself a poet, or so I gather
+from the phrase, "Quoth Richard Hilles," with which
+more than one piece of great merit terminates. He
+would scarcely have added his own name to the
+composition of another person. Elizabeth, queen of Henry
+VII., died in childbirth in February, 1502-3.
+
+The following "Lamentation," if not written by Hilles
+himself, was written in his life-time:--
+
+THE LAMENTATION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH
+
+Ye that put your trust and confidence
+In worldly riches and frail prosperity,
+That so live here as ye should never hence;
+Remember death, and look here upon me;
+Insample I think there may no better be:
+Yourself wot well that in my realm was I
+Your Queen but late; Lo, here I lie.
+Was I not born of worthy lineage:
+Was not my mother Queen, my father King;
+Was I not a king's fere in marriage;
+Had I not plenty of every pleasant thing?
+Merciful God! this is a strange reckoning;
+Riches, honour, wealth, and ancestry,
+Hath me forsaken; Lo, here I lie.
+
+If worship might have kept me I had not go;
+If wealth might have me served I needed not so;
+If money might have held I lacked none.
+But oh, good God, what vaileth all this year!
+When death cometh, thy mighty messenger
+Obey we must, there is no remedy;
+He hath me summoned--lo, here I lie.
+
+Yet was I lately promised otherwise
+This year to live in wealth and in delice,
+Lo, whereto cometh the blandishing promise?
+Oh, false astrology diminatrice
+Of Goddes secrets, making thee so wise!
+How true is for this year the prophecy;
+The year yet lasteth, and lo, here I lie.
+
+Oh, brittle wealth--aye full of bitterness,
+Thy singular pleasure aye doubled is with pain.
+Account my sorrow first, and my distress
+Sundry wise, and reckon thee again
+The joy that I have had, I dare not feign,
+For all my honour, endured yet have I
+More woe than wealth; Lo, here I lie.
+
+Where are our castles now, and our towers,
+Goodly Richmond, soon art thou gone from me;
+At Westminster, that goodly work of yours,
+Mine own dear lord, now shall I never see.
+Almighty God, vouchsafe to grant that ye,
+Ye and your children, well may edify,
+My place builded is; Lo, here I lie.
+
+Adieu, my true spouse, and my worthy lord;
+The faithful love that did us two combine
+In marriage and peaceable concord,
+Into your hands here do I clean resign,
+To be bestowed unto your children and mine;
+Erst were ye father, now must ye supply
+The mother's part also; Lo, here I lie.
+
+Farewell, my daughter, Lady Margaret,(1)
+God wot full sore it grieved hath my mind
+That ye should go where we should seldom
+meet;
+Now am I gone and have you left behind.
+Oh mortal folk! What be we weary blind!
+That we least fear full off it is full nigh,
+Fro you depart I first; Lo, here I lie.
+
+Farewell, madame, my Lordes worthy mother,(2)
+Comfort your son and be ye of good cheer.
+Take all in worth, for it will be none other.
+Farewell my daughter,(3) late the fere
+To Prince Arthur mine own child so dear,
+It booteth not for me to weep or cry,
+Pray for my soul, for now lo here I lie.
+
+Adieu, dear Harry, my lovely son, adieu,
+Our Lord increase your honour and your estate
+Adieu, my daughter Mary,(4) bright of hue,
+God made you virtuous, wise, and fortunate.
+Adieu sweetheart, my lady daughter Kate,(5)
+Thou shalt, good babe, such is thy destiny,
+Thy mother never know; Lo, here I lie.
+
+Oh Lady Cecil, Anne, and Catherine,
+Farewell my well-beloved sisters three;
+Oh Lady bright, dear sister mine;
+Lo here the end of worldly vanity;
+Lo well are you that earthly folly flee,
+And Heavenly things do love and magnify.
+Farewell and pray for me; Lo, here I lie.
+
+Adieu my lords and ladies all;
+Adieu my faithful servants every one;
+Adieu my commons, whom I never shall
+See in this world; Wherefore to thee alone,
+Immortal God, very three in one,
+I me commend--thy Infinite mercy
+Show to thy servant now; Lo, here I lie.
+____
+
+(1) Margaret of Scotland, Queen of James IV.
+(2) The Countess of Richmond.
+(3) Catherine of Aragon.
+(4) Queen of France, and afterwards Duchess of Suffolk
+(5) Died in childhood.
+____
+
+--
+
+Here lyeth the fresh flower of Plantagenet;
+Here lyeth the White Rose in the red set;
+Here lyeth the noble Queen Elizabeth;
+Here lyeth the Princess departed by death;
+Here lyeth the blood of our country Royal;
+Here lyeth the favour of England immortal:
+Here lyeth Edward the Fourth in picture;
+Here lyeth his daughter and pearle pure;
+Here lyeth the wife of Harry our true King;
+Here lyeth the heart, the joy, and the gold Ring;
+Here lyeth the lady so liberal and gracious;
+Here lyeth the pleasure of thy house;
+Here lyeth very love of man and child;
+Here lyeth ensample our minds to bild;
+Here lyeth all beauty--of living a mirrour;
+Here lyeth all very good manner and honour;
+God grant her now Heaven to increase;
+And our King Harry long life and peace.
+
+The note changes. We come next to a hunting song:--
+
+As I walked by a forest side
+I met with a forester; he bade me abide
+At a place where he me set--
+He bade me what time an hart I met
+That I should let slip and say go belt;
+With Hay go bett, Hay go belt, Hay go bett,
+Now we shall have game and sport enow.
+
+I had not stand there but a while,
+Yea, not the maintenance of a mile,
+But a great hart came running without any guile;
+With there he goeth--there he goeth--there he goeth;
+Now we shall have game and sport enow.
+
+I had no sooner my hounds let go
+But the hart was overthrow;
+Then every man began to blow,
+With trororo--trororo--trororo,
+Now we shall have game and sport enow.
+
+In honour of good ale we have many English
+ballads. Good wine, too, was not without a poet to sing
+its praises, the Scripture allusions and the large infusion
+of Latin pointing perhaps to the refectory of some genial
+monastery.
+
+A TREATISE OF WINE
+
+The best tree if ye take intent,
+Inter ligna fructifera,
+Is the vine tree by good argument,
+Dulcia ferens pondera.
+
+Saint Luke saith in his Gospel,
+Arbor fructu noscitur,
+The vine beareth wine as I you tell,
+Hinc aliis praeponitur.
+
+The first that planted the vineyard,
+Manet in coeli gaudio,
+His name was Noe, as I am learned,
+Genesis testimonio.
+
+God gave unto him knowledge and wit
+A quo procedunt omnia,
+First of the grape-wine for to get,
+Propter magna mysteria.
+
+Melchisedek made offering,
+Dando liquorem vineum,
+Full mightily sacrafying
+Altaris sacraficium.
+
+The first miracle that Jesus did,
+Erat in vino rubeo,
+In Cana of Galilee it betide,
+Testante Evangelio.
+
+He changed water into wine,
+Aquae rubescunt hydrim,
+And bade give it to Archetcline,
+Ut gustet tunc primarie.
+
+Like as the rose exceedeth all flowers,
+Inter cuncta florigera,
+So doth wine other liquours,
+Dans multa salutifera.
+
+David, the prophet, saith that wine
+Laetificat cor hominis,
+It maketh men merry if it be fine,
+Est ergo digni nominis.
+
+The malicoli fumosetive,
+Quae generat tristitiam,
+It causeth from the heart to rise
+Tollens omnem maestitiam.
+
+The first chapter specified,
+Libri ecclesiastici,
+That wine is music of cunning delight,
+Laetificat cor clerici.
+
+Sirs, if ye will see Boyce,
+De disciplina scholarium,
+There shall ye see without misse,
+Quod vinum acuit ingenium.
+
+First, when Ypocras should dispute,
+Cum viris sapientibus,
+Good wine before was his pursuit,
+Acumen praebens sensibus.
+
+It quickeneth a man's spirit and his mind,
+Audaciam dat liquentibus,
+If the wine be good and well fined,
+Prodest sobrie bibentibus.
+
+Good wine received moderately,
+Mox cerebrum laetificat,
+Natural heat it strengthens pardy,
+Omne membrum fortificat.
+
+Drunken also soberly,
+Digestionem uberans,
+Health it lengthens of the body,
+Naturam humanam prosperans.
+
+Good wine provokes a man to sweat,
+Et plena lavat viscera,
+It maketh men to eat their meat,
+Facitque corda prospera.
+
+It nourisheth age if it be good,
+Facit ut esset juvenis,
+It gendereth in him gentle blood,
+Nam venas purgat sanguinis.
+
+Sirs, by all these causes ye should think,
+Quae sunt rationabiles,
+That good wine should be best of all drink,
+Inter potus potabiles.
+
+Fill the cup well! Bellamye,
+Potum jam mihi ingere,
+I have said till my lips be dry,
+Vellem nunc vinum bibere.
+
+Wine drinkers all with great honour,
+Semper laudate Dominum,
+The which sendeth the good liquour,
+Propter salutem hominum.
+
+Plenty to all that love good-wine,
+Donet Deus largius,
+And bring them soon when they go hence,
+Ubi non sitlent amplius.
+
+
+The boar's-head catch may be added to this,
+similar Latin intermixtures.
+
+Caput apri refero,
+Resonans laudes Domino,
+
+The boar's head in hand I bring,
+With garlands gay and birds singing,
+I pray you all help me to sing
+Qui estis in convivio.
+
+The boar's head I understand,
+Is chief service in all this land,
+Wheresoever it may be found,
+Servitur cum sinapio.
+
+The boar's head, I dare well say,
+Anon after the Twelfth day.
+He taketh his leave and goeth away,
+Exivit tune de patria.
+
+Four of the following verses are on a tombstone, I
+believe in Melrose Abbey, and are well known. Few
+if any persons will have seen the poem of which they
+form a part. So far as I am aware no other copy
+survives [Since this was written I have learned
+that a version, with important differences has been
+printed for the Warton Club, from an MS. in the possession
+of Mr. Onusby Gore.]:--
+
+Vado mori Rex sum, quid honor quid gloria mundi,
+Est vita mors hominum regia--vado mori.
+Vado mori miles victo certamine belli,
+Mortem non didici vincere vado mori.
+Vado mori medicus, medicamine non relevandus,
+Quicquid agunt medici respuo vado mori.
+Vado mori logicus, aliis concludere novi,
+Concludit breviter mors in vado mori.
+
+Earth out of earth is worldly wrought;
+Earth hath gotten upon earth a dignity of nought;
+Earth upon earth has set all his thought,
+How that earth upon earth might be high brought.
+
+Earth upon earth would be a king,
+But how that earth shall to earth he thinketh no thing.
+When earth biddeth earth his rents home bring,
+Then shall earth from earth have a hard parting.
+
+Earth upon earth winneth castles and towers,
+Then saith earth unto earth this is all ours;
+But when earth upon earth has builded his bowers,
+Then shall earth upon earth suffer hard showers.
+
+Earth upon earth hath wealth upon mould;
+Earth goeth upon earth glittering all in gold,
+Like as he unto earth never turn should,
+And yet shall earth unto earth sooner than he would.
+Why that earth loveth earth wonder I think,
+Or why that earth will for earth sweat and swink.
+For when earth upon earth is brought within the brink,
+Then shall earth for earth suffer a foul stink,
+
+As earth upon earth were the worthies nine,
+And as earth upon earth in honour did shine;
+But earth list not to know how they should incline,
+And their gowns laid in the earth when death
+made his fine.
+
+As earth upon earth full worthy was Joshua,
+David, and worthy King Judas Maccabee,
+They were but earth none of them three;
+And so from earth unto earth they left their dignity.
+
+Alisander was but earth that all the world wan,
+And Hector upon earth was held a worthy man,
+And Julius Caesar, that the Empire first began;
+And now as earth within earth they lie pale and wan.
+
+Arthur was but earth for all his renown,
+No more was King Charles nor Godfrey of Boulogne;
+But how earth hath turned their noblenes upside down
+And thus earth goeth to earth by short conclusion.
+
+Whoso reckons also of William Conqueror,
+King Henry the First that was of knighthood flower,
+Earth hath closed them full straitly in his bower,--
+So the end of worthiness,--here is no more succour.
+
+Now ye that live upon earth, both young and old,
+Think how ye shall to earth, be ye never so bold;
+Ye be unsiker, whether it be in heat or cold,
+Like as your brethren did before, as I have told.
+
+Now ye folks that be here ye may not long endure,
+But that ye shall turn to earth I do you ensure;
+And if ye list of the truth to see a plain figure,
+Go to St. Paul's and see the portraiture.
+
+All is earth and shall to earth as it sheweth there,
+Therefore ere dreadful death with his dart you dare,
+And for to turn into earth no man shall it forbear,
+Wisely purvey you before, and thereof have no leaf.
+
+Now sith by death we shall all pass, it is to us certain,
+For of earth we come all, and to the earth shall turn
+again;
+Therefore to strive or grudge it were but vain,
+For all is earth and shall be earth--nothing more
+certain.
+
+Now earth upon earth consider thou may
+How earth cometh to earth naked alway,
+Why should earth upon earth go stout alway,
+Since earth out of earth shall pass in poor array?
+
+I counsel you upon earth that wickedly have wrought,
+That earth out of earth to bliss may be brought.
+
+--
+
+Of songs, nursery rhymes, and carols, there are very
+many, of which the next three are specimens:--
+
+Lulley, lulley, lulley, lulley,
+The falcon hath borne my mate away,
+He bare him up, he bare him down,
+He bare him into an orchard brown.
+Lulley, lulley, lulley, lulley,
+The falcon hath borne my mate away.
+
+In that orchard there was a hall,
+That was hanged with purple and pall,
+And in that hall there was a bed
+That was hanged with gold so red,
+Lulley, lulley, lulley, lulley.
+
+And in that bed there lyeth a knight,
+His wounds were bleeding day and night;
+By the bedside there kneeleth a may,
+And she weepeth both night and day,
+Lulley, lulley, lulley, lulley.
+
+And by the bed side there standeth a stone,
+Corpus Christi is written thereon.
+Lulley, lulley, lulley, lulley,
+The falcon hath borne my mate away.
+
+I have twelve oxen, and they be fair and brown,
+And they go a grazing down by the town,
+With haye, with howe, with hoye!
+Sawest thou not mine oxen, thou little pretty boy?
+
+I have twelve oxen, and they be fair and white,
+And they go a grazing down by the dyke,
+With haye, with howe, with hoye!
+Sawest thou not mine oxen, thou little pretty boy?
+
+I have twelve oxen, and they be fair and black,
+And they go a grazing down by the lake,
+With haye, with howe, with hoye!
+Sawest thou not mine oxen, thou little pretty boy?
+
+I have twelve oxen, and they be fair and red,
+And they go a grazing down by the mead,
+With haye, with howe, with hoye!
+Sawest thou not mine oxen, thou pretty little boy?
+
+--
+
+Make we merry in hall and bower
+This time was born our Saviour.
+
+In this time God hath sent
+His own Son to be present,
+To dwell with us in verament,
+God is our Saviour.
+
+In this time that is befal,
+A child was born in an ox stall,
+And after he died for us all,
+God is our Saviour.
+
+In this time an Angel bright
+Met three shepherds upon a night,
+He bade them go anon of right
+To God that is our Saviour.
+
+In this time now pray we
+To Him that died for us on tree,
+On us all to have pitee,
+God is our Saviour.
+
+--
+
+And how exquisitely graceful too is this:--
+
+There is a flower sprung of a tree,
+The root of it is called Jesse,
+A flower of price,--
+There is none such in Paradise.
+
+Of Lily white and Rose of Ryse,
+Of Primrose and of Flower-de-Lyse,
+Of all flowers in my devyce,
+The flower of Jesse beareth the prize,
+For most of all
+To help our souls both great and small.
+
+I praise the flower of good Jesse,
+Of all the flowers that ever shall be,
+Uphold the flower of good Jesse,
+And worship it for aye beautee;
+For best of all
+That ever was or ever be shall.
+
+Mr. Hilles was a good Catholic. Amidst a multitude
+of religious poems of a Catholic kind, there is not one
+which could be construed as implying a leaning towards
+the Reformers; while under a certain legend of St.
+Gregory some indignant Protestant of the next generation
+has written a passionate anathema calling it lies of
+the devil and other similar hard names. A private diary
+of such a person therefore, of the years in which England
+was separated from the Papacy, is of especial interest:--
+
+"1533. Stephen Peacock, haberdasher, mayor.
+"This year, the 29th day of May, the Mayor of
+London, with the aldermen in scarlet gowns, went in
+barges to Greenwich, with their banners, as they were
+wont to bring the Mayor to Westminister; and the
+bachelor's barge hanged with cloth of gold on the
+outside with banners and bells upon them in their
+manner, with a galley to wait upon her, and a foyst
+with a beast therein which shot many guns. And then
+they fetched Queen Anne up to the Tower of London;
+and in the way on land about Limehouse there shot
+many great chambers of guns, and two of the King's
+ships which lay by Limehouse shot many great guns,
+and at the Tower or she came on land was shot
+innumerable many guns.
+
+"And the 31st day of May, which was Whitsun even,
+she was conveyed in a chariot from the Tower of
+London to York-place, called Whitehall at Westminster;
+and at her departing from the Tower there
+was shot off guns which was innumerable to men's
+thinking; and in London divers pageants, that is to
+say,
+"One at Gracechurch;
+"One at Leadenhall;
+"One at the great Conduit;
+"One at the Standard;
+"The Crosse in Chepe new trimmed;
+"At the conduit at Paul's Gate;
+"At Paul's gate a branch of Roses;
+"Without at the east end of Paul's;
+"At the conduit in Fleet Street;
+"And she was accompanied, first Frenchmen in--
+coloured velvet and one white sleeve, and the horses
+trapped, and white crosses thereon; then rode gentlemen,
+then knights and lords in their degree, and there was two
+hats of maintenance, and many chariots, with lords and
+many gentlewomen on horseback following the chariots;
+and all the constables in London were in their best array,
+with white staves in their hands, to make room and to
+wait upon the Queen as far as -------; and there
+rode with her sixteen knights of the Bath; and on
+Whit-Sunday she was crowned at Westminster with
+great solemnity; and jousts at Westminster all the
+Whitsun holidays, and the feast was kept in Westminster
+Hall, and jousts afore York Place called Whitehall.
+
+"This year, in the beginning of September, Queen
+Anne was delivered of a woman child at Greenwich,
+which child was named Elizabeth.
+
+"Item, this year foreign butchers sold flesh at
+Leadenhall, for the butchers of the city of London
+denied to sell beef for a halfpenny the pound according
+to the Act of Parliament.
+
+"1534. Christopher Ascue, draper, mayor.
+"This year, the 23rd day of November, preached at
+Paul's Cross the Abbot of Hyde, and there stood on a
+scaffold all the sermon time the Holy Maid of Kent,
+called [Elizabeth] Barton, and two monks of Canterbury,
+and two Friars observant, and two priests and two laymen,
+and after the sermon went to the Tower. Also
+this year, on Palm Sunday even, which was the 28th
+day of March, was a great sudden tempest of wind, and
+broke open two windows at Whitehall at Westminster,
+and turned up the lead of the King's new Tennis Play
+at York Place, and broke off the tyles of three goldsmiths'
+houses in Lombard Street, and folded up the
+lead at Pewterers' Hall and cast it down into the yard,
+and blew down many tyles of houses in London, and
+trees about Shoreditch.
+
+"Item, the first day of April, which was tenebre
+Wednesday, Wolf and his wife, that killed the two
+Lombards in a boat upon Thames, were hanged upon
+two gibbets by the water-side between London Bridge
+and Westminster; and on the Monday in Easter
+week the woman was buried at the Crossed Friars in
+London.
+
+"Item, the 20th day of April, the parson of Aidmary
+(sic, but the real person was the priest of Aidington in
+Kent) Church, in London, was drawn on a hurdle from
+the Tower of London to the Tyburn and there hanged
+and headed. Item, two observant Freers drawn on a
+hurdle and both hanged and headed. Item, two monks
+of Canterbury, one was called Dr. Bocking, drawn on a
+hurdle and hanged and headed. Item, the Holy Maid
+of Kent was drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn and hanged
+and headed; and all the heads set upon London Brigge
+and on the gates of London. Item, the 11th day
+of July, the Lord Dacres of the north was conveyed
+from the Tower of London to Westminster to receive
+judgement for treason, but there he was quit by a quest
+of Lords. Item, all men, English and others being in
+England, were sworn to be true to the King and his
+heirs between Queen Anne and him begotten and for to
+be begotten. Item, the Lord Thomas Garrard, of
+Ireland, beheaded the Bishop of Dublin, called Doctor
+Alien, as he would come into England. Item, a general
+peace cried between the King of England and the
+Scottish King for their lifetime. Item, there was a
+great sudden storm in the Narrow Sea, and two ships
+of the Zealand fleet were lost, with cloth and men and
+all, for they sank in the sea.
+
+--
+
+"Sir John Champneys, mayor.
+"This year, in November, came over the high Admiral
+of France as ambassador from the French King, and he
+had great gifts and his costs provided for as long as he
+was m the Realm.
+"1535. Item, the fourth day of May, the Prior of the
+Charterhouse in London, and two other monks of the
+Charterhouse in other places, and the father of the Place
+at Sion, being in a grey habit, and a priest which was,
+as men said, the vicar of Thystillworth, were drawn
+all from the Tower of London to Tyburn and hanged
+and their bowels burnt, the heads cut off, and quartered,
+and the heads and quarters some set on London Brigge,
+and the rest upon all the gates of London and on the
+Charterhouse gate.
+
+"Also shortly after the King caused his own head
+to be knotted and cut short, and his hair was not
+half an inch long, and so were all the lords, and all
+knights, gentlemen, and serving men that came to the
+court.
+
+"Item, on Whitsun even was a great thunder in
+London. Item, the fourth day of June, a man and
+woman, born in Flanders, were burnt in Smithfield for
+heresy. Item, the 19th day of June, three monks of
+the order of the Charterhouse were drawn from the
+Tower to Tyburn, and there hanged and headed.
+Item, the 22nd day of June, the Bishop Rochester was
+beheaded at the Tower Hill, the head set on London
+Brigg and the body buried at Barking Churchyard.
+Item, the 6th day of July, Sir Thomas More, that
+sometime was Chancellor of England, was beheaded
+at Tower Hill, and his head set on the Brigg and the
+body buried in the Tower. Also this year the power
+and authority of the Pope was utterly made frustrate and
+of none effect within the Realm, and the King called
+Supreme Head under God of the Church of England;
+and that was read in the Church every Festival day;
+and the Pope's name was scraped out of every mass
+book and other books, and was called Bishop of Rome.
+
+"1535-6. Sir John Allen, mercer, mayor.
+"At the beginning of the time the sheriffs put away
+each of them six servants and six yeomen till they were
+compelled by the common counsel to take them again.
+
+"Item, the Kennell Rakers of London had horns to
+blow to give folks warning' to cast out their dust. Item,
+every man that had a well within his house to draw
+it three times in the week to wash the streets."
+
+--
+
+The murder committed by Wolf and his wife, which
+is mentioned in the Diary, created so much sensation
+that it was discussed in Parliament, and was made the
+subject of a statute. The extraordinary beauty of the
+woman was used as a decoy to entice the merchants into
+a boat where the husband was concealed. They were
+killed and thrown overboard, and the wife, acting much
+like Mrs. Manning, took the keys from the body of one
+of them, went to his house and rifled his strong box.
+The burial of her body, while her husband was left upon
+the gibbet, was occasioned by a circumstance too
+horrible to be mentioned.
+
+Next "follow parts of the statutes of England
+every craftsman victualler shall be ruled":--
+
+"MILLERS.
+
+"First, the assise of the miller is that he have no
+measure at his mill but it be assised and sealed according
+to the King's standard, and he to have of every
+bushel of wheat a quart for the grinding: also, if he
+fetch it, another quart for the fetching; and of every
+bushel of malt a pint for the grinding, and if he fetch it
+another pint for the fetching. Also, that he change nor
+water no man's corn to give him the worse for the
+better, nor that he have no hogs, geese, nor ducks, nor
+no manner poultry but three hens and a duck; and if
+he do the contrary to any of these points his fine is at
+every time three shillings and four pence, and if he will
+not beware by two warnings the third time to be judged
+to the pillory.
+
+"BAKERS.
+
+"Also, the assise of bakers is sixpence highing and
+sixpence lowing in the price of a quarter of wheat; for
+if he lack an ounce in the weight of a farthing loaf he to
+be amerced at 20d.; and if he lack an ounce and a
+half he to be amerced at 2s. 6d., in all bread so baken;
+and if he bake not after the assise of the statute he
+to be adjudged to the pillory.
+
+"BREWERS.
+
+"Also, the assise of brewers is 12 pence highing and
+12 pence lowing in the price of a quarter of malt, and
+evermore shilling to farthing; for when he buyeth a
+quarter malt for two shillings, then he shall sell a gallon
+of the best ale for two farthings, and so to make 48
+gallons of a quarter malt. When he buyeth a quarter
+malt for three shillings, the gallon three fathings; for
+four shillings, the gallon four farthings; and so forth to
+8 shillings, and no further. And that he set none ale
+a sale till he have sent for the ale taster, and as oft as
+he doth the contrary he to be merced at six pence; and
+that he sell none but by measure assised and sealed, and
+that he sell a quart ale upon his table for a farthing.
+And as oft as he doth the contrary to sell not after the
+price of malt, he to be amerced the first time: 2 pence,
+the second time 20 pence, the third time three and four
+pence; and if he will not beware by these warnings, the
+next time to be judged to the cucking stole, and the
+next time to the pillory.
+
+"AN ORDINANCE FOR BAKERS.
+
+"By the discretion and ordinance of our lord the
+King, weights and measures were made. It is to know
+that an English penny, which is called a round sterling
+and without clipping shall weigh 32 corns of wheat taken
+out of the middle of the ear, and twenty pence make an
+ounce, and twelve ounces make a pound, which is
+twenty shillings sterling; and eight pounds of wheat
+maketh a gallon of corn, and eight gallons make a
+London bushel, which is the eighth part of a quarter.
+
+"When the quarter of wheat is sold for a shilling,
+then the wastell, well boulted and clean, shall weigh six
+pounds sixteen shillings. The loaf of a quarter of the
+same corn and the same bultell shall weigh more than
+the said wastell two shillings. The symnell of a quarter
+shall weigh less than the said wastell two shillings,
+because that it is boyled and clean. The loaf of clean
+wheat of a quartern shall weigh a coket and a half, and
+the loaf of all corns of a quartern shall weigh two cokets;
+and it is understood that the baker so may get of every
+quarter of wheat as it is proved by the King's bakers
+four pence and the bran, and two loaves to furnage of
+the price of two pence; and three servants a penny
+farthing, and two grooms a farthing; in salt a farthing;
+in yeast a farthing, in candell and in wood three pence,
+in bultell allowed a farthing.
+
+"Two or four loaves are made to be sold for a penny:
+none other kind of bread to be made of great price, but
+only two or four loaves to a penny. There is no bread
+made to be sold of three quarterns nor of five quarterns;
+also, there shall be no bread made of corn the which
+shall be worse in breaking than it is without. It is to
+know that of old custom of the city of London, by
+authority of divers Parliaments affirmed for divers
+weights which the citizens of London suffer in the
+bakers which they have had and have been wont to
+have in every assise of bread, the setting of two pence
+in a quarter of wheat above all foreign bakers in the
+realm of England; so that in assise of wheat when a
+quarter wheat is sold for five shillings, then it shall be
+set to the bakers of London seven shillings for assise;
+and so of every other assise two shillings to the increase.
+
+"The assise of bread after that above contained truly
+may be holden after the selling of wheat; that is to say,
+of the best price, of the second price, and of the third,
+and as well wastell bread as other bread shall be weighed
+after, of what kind so ever it be, as it is above, by a
+mean price of wheat; and then the assise or the weight
+of bread, shall not be changed but by six pence increasing
+or distressing in the selling of a quarter of wheat.
+Also, the baker shall be amerced 2s. 6d., and his quartern
+bread may be proved faulty in weight; and if he
+pass the number he shall go to the pillory, and the
+judgment of the trespass shall not be forgiven for gold
+nor silver; and every baker must have his own mark on
+every manner bread; and after eight days bread should
+not be weighed: and if it be found that the quartern
+bread of the baker be faulty he shall be amerced 15d.,
+and unto the number of 2s. 6d. And it is to know that
+the baker ought not to go to the pillory, but if he pass
+the number of 2s. 6d. default quartern bread, and he
+shall not be merced, but if the default of bread
+pass 15d.
+
+"The rule set upon White Bakers and Brown Bakers,
+--The rule is that white bakers should inowe make and
+bake all manner of bread, and that they can make of
+wheat: that is for to say, white loaf bread, wastell buns,
+and all manner white bread that hath been used of old
+time; and they inowe make wheat bread sometimes
+called Crybill bread, and basket bread such as is sold in
+Cheep to poor people. But the white bread baker shall
+bake no horse bread of any assise, neither of his own
+neither of none other men's, to sell. The brown baker
+shall inowe make and bake wheat bread as it cometh
+ground from the mill, without any boulting of the same;
+also horse bread of clean beans and peason; and also
+bread called household bread, for the which they shall
+take for every bushel kneading bringing home 1 penny;
+but they shall bake no white bread of any assise, neither
+of their own, neither of none other men's, to sell. And
+what person of the said bakers offend in any of the
+articles above writ, shall as oft as he may be proved
+guilty pay 6s. 8d., half to the use of the Chamber of
+London, and the other half to the use of the master of
+the bakers.
+
+"THE ASSISE OF BREAD WITHIN LONDON.
+
+"Mem.--That the farthing loaf of all grains, and the
+farthing horse loaf, is of like weight.
+
+"Mem.--That the halfpenny white loaf of Stratford
+must weigh two ounces more than the halfpenny white
+loaf of London.
+
+"That the penny wheat loaf of Stratford must weigh
+six oz. more than the penny wheat loaf of London.
+
+"The halfpenny wheat loaf of Stratford must weigh
+three ounces more than the halfpenny wheat loaf of
+London.
+
+"Three halfpenny white loaves of Stratford must
+weigh as much as the penny wheat loaf.
+
+"The loaf of all grains: that is, the wheat loaf, must
+weigh as much as the penny wheat loaf and the half-penny
+white loaf.
+
+"The chete white loaf must weigh 12 oz.
+
+"The chete white brown loaf must weigh 18 oz."
+
+After so much solid matter, our repast shall be completed
+with something of a lighter kind. A list of
+"Divers good proverbs" is curious, as showing the long
+growth and long endurance of established maxims of
+practical wisdom. They are written in a distinct and
+singular hand, not to be traced elsewhere in prose or
+poetry:--
+
+When ye proffer the pigge open the poke.
+Whyle the grasse growyth the hors stervyth.
+Sone it sherpyth that thorne wyll be.
+It ys a sotyll mouse that slepyth in the cattys ear.
+Nede makyth the old wyffe to trotte.
+A byrde yn honde ys better than three yn the wode
+And hevyn fell we shall have meny larkys.
+A short hors ys sone curryed.
+Though peper be blek yt hath a gode smek.
+Of a rugged colte cumyth a gode hors.
+Fayre behestys makyth ffolys fayn.
+All thyngs hath a begynyng.
+Wepyn makyth pese dyvers tymes.
+Wynter etyth that somer getyth.
+He that ys warnyd beffore ys not begylyd.
+He that wyll not be warnyd by hys owne fader
+He shell be wamyd by hys step fader.
+Pryde goeth beffore and shame comyth after.
+Oftyn tymys provyth the fruyght aftore,
+The stok that hyt comyth off.
+Hyt ys a febyll tre thet fallyth at the fyrst strok.
+Hyt fallyth yn a day that fallyth not all the yere afore.
+Whyle the fote warmyth the shoe harmyth.
+A softe flyre makyth swete malte.
+When the stede ys stolen shyt the stabyll dore.
+Merry hondys makyth lyght werke.
+When thou hast well done hange up thy hachet.
+Yt ys not all gold that glowyth.
+Often tymys the arrow hyttyth the shoter.
+Yt ys comonly sayd that all men be not trew.
+That nature gevyth no man can tak away.
+Thys arrow comyth never owt of thyn ownne bow.
+Sone crokyth the tre that wyll be.
+When the hors walowyth some herys be loste.
+Thys day a man, to-morrow non.
+Seld sene sone forgotyn.
+When the bely ys ffull the bonys would have craft.
+Better yt ys to be unborn than untawght.
+He that no good can nor non wyll lern,
+Yf he never thryve, who shall hym werne?
+He that all covetyth often all lesyth.
+Never hope, herte wold breste.
+Hasty man lakkyth never woo.
+A gode begynnyng makyth a gode endyng.
+Better yt ys late than never.
+Poverte partyth felyshype.
+Brente honde flyre dredyth.
+Non sygheth so sore as the gloton that may no more.
+He may lyghtly swym that ys held up by the chyn.
+Clyme not to hye lest chypys fall yn thyn eie.
+An skabbyd shepe ynfectyth all the ffolde.
+All the keys hange not by one manys gyrdyll.
+Better yt ys to lese cloth than brede.
+He that hath nede must blowe at the cole.
+
+--
+
+Of all the treasures of the volume, the richest are
+perhaps the hymns and metrical prayers to the Virgin,
+of which there are great numbers and every variety.
+Some are in English, some in English and Latin. Here
+are three in different styles:--
+
+Mary mother, thee I pray.
+To be our help at Domys day;
+
+At Domys day when we shall rise,
+And come before the high Justice,
+And give account for our service,
+What helpeth then our clothing gay?
+
+When we shall come before his doom,
+What will us help there all and some?
+We shall stand as sorry grooms,
+Ycald in a full poor array.
+
+That ylke day without lesing,
+Many a man his hands shall wring.
+And repent him sore for his living,
+Then it is too late as I you say.
+
+Therefore I rede ye both day and night,
+Make ye ready to God Almight;
+For in this land is king nor knight,
+That wot when he shall wend away.
+
+That child that was born on Mary,
+He glads all this company,
+And for his love make we merry,
+That for us died on Good Friday.
+
+Mater ora filium,
+Ut post hoc exilium,
+Nobis donet gaudium
+Beatorum omnium.
+
+Faire maiden, who is this bairn
+That thou bearest in thine arm?
+Sir, it is a Kingis son,
+That in Heaven above doth wonne.
+Mater ora filium, etc.
+
+Man to Father he hath none,
+But himself God alone;
+Of a maiden he would be borne,
+To save mankind that was forlorn.
+Mater ora filium, etc.
+
+Three Kings brought him presents,
+Gold, myrrh, and frankinsense,
+To my Son full of might,
+King of Kings and lord of right,
+Mater ora filium, etc.
+
+Faire maiden, pray for us
+Unto thy Son, sweet Jesus,
+That he will send us of his grace
+In Heaven on high to have a place.
+Mater ora filium, etc.
+
+--
+
+Ave Maria, now say we so,
+Maid and mother were never no mo.
+
+Gaude Maria, Christis moder,
+Mary mild, of thee I mean,
+Thou bare my lord, thou bare my brother,
+Thou bare a lovely child and clean,
+Thou stoodest full styll withouten blyn
+When in thine ear that errand was done.
+The gracious Lord thee light within,
+Gabrielis nuntio.
+
+Gaude Maria, yglent with grace,
+When Jesus, thy Son, on thee was bore,
+Full nigh thy breast thou gave him brace,
+He sucked, he sighed, he wept full sore;
+Thou feedest the flower that never shall fade,
+With maiden's milk, and song thereto;
+Lulley, my sweet, I bare thee, babe,
+Cum pudoris lillio.
+
+Oh, Gaude Maria, thy mirth was away
+When Christ on cross thy Son did die
+Full dolefully on Good Friday,
+That many a mother's son it sye.
+His blood us brought from care and strife,
+His watery wounds us wisshe from woe.
+The third day from death to life
+Fulget resurrectio.
+
+Gaude Maria, thou birde so bright,
+Brighter than blossom that bloweth on hill,
+Joyful thou wert to see that sight,
+When the Apostles so smet (sic) of will,
+All and some did cry full shrill
+When the fairest of shape went you fro,
+From earth to Heaven he stayed full still,
+Motuque fertur proprio.
+
+Gaude Maria, thou rose of ryse,
+Maiden and mother, both gentle and free;
+Precious princess, peerless of price,
+Thy bower is next the Trinity;
+Thy Son as lawe asketh a fight,
+In body and soul thee took him to;
+Thou reigned in Heaven like as we find
+In coeli palacio.
+
+Now blessed birde, we pray thee abone,
+Before thy Son for us thou fall,
+And pray him as he was on the rood done,
+And for us drank aysell and gall,
+That we may wonne within that wall,
+Wherever is well withouten woe,
+And grant that grace unto us all
+In perenni gaudio.
+
+SEQUUNTUR MIRABILIA.
+
+Ad fadendum unumquemque hominum duo capita.
+
+Sume sulphur et argentum vivum, et pone ad lumen
+lampadis, et unusquisque putabit socium suum habere
+duo capita.
+
+Ut homo videatur habere duo capila equina.
+
+Accipe medullam equi, et ceram virgineam, et fac
+candelam, et accende.
+
+Ut omnia instrumenta in damo appareant serpentes.
+
+Recipe serpentem, et toque, et sume pinguedinem
+ejus, et fac candelam cum alia cera, et iliumina.
+
+Si vis facere lumen per vim animi.
+
+Accipe vermes qua lucent de nocte et pone in vase
+vitreo continente radium solis quousque fiet aqua, et
+tune pone illam in lampade, et lucet sicut candela, et
+probatum est.
+
+Ut homines ardere appareant.
+
+Recipe sanguinem leporis, et ceram virgineam, et fac
+candelam, et illumina.
+
+Item capiatis argentum vivum, et ponatis ipsum in
+aliquo vitro, et etiam aquam ardentem, et aquam vitae,
+et projiciatis tres vel quatuor guttas in igne--si fuerat
+aliqua mulier corrupta statim debet mingere et non aliter.
+
+"Gossips mine" has been printed from another manuscript
+by the Percy Society. To most readers of Fraser,
+however, it is likely to be new. I select it from the
+humorous poems as being capable (which most of
+them are not) of being printed without omissions. The
+necessary discretion, it will be seen, has been supplied
+by the author.
+
+How gossips mine, gossips mine,
+When shall we go to the wine.
+
+I shall tell you a good sport,
+How gossips gather them of a sort,
+Their sick bodies to comfort,
+When they meet in land or street.
+
+But I dare not for your displeasure,
+Tell of these matters half the substance;
+But yet somewhat of their governance,
+So far as I dare I will declare.
+
+Good gossip mine, where have ye been;
+It is so long sith I you seen.
+Where is the best wine, tell you me.
+Can ye aught tell? Yea, full well.
+
+I know a draught of merry go down,
+The best it is in all the town.
+But yet I would not for my gown,
+My husband wist. Ye may me trist.
+
+Call forth our gossips, bye-and-bye,
+Eleanour, Joan, and Margery,
+Margaret, Alice, and Cecily;
+For they will come, both all and some.
+
+And each of them will something bring,
+Goose or pig, or capon's wing,
+Pasties of pigeons, or some such thing.
+For we must eat some manner meat.
+
+Go before, between, and tween,
+Wisely that ye be not seen;
+For I must home and come again.
+To wit I wis where my husband is.
+
+A strype or two God might send me,
+If my husband might here see me.
+She is afeared, let her flee,
+Quoth Alice then,--I dread no men.
+
+Now be we in the tavern set,
+A draught of the best let him fet,
+To bring our husbands out of debt;
+For we will spend--till God more send.
+
+Each of them brought forth their dish,
+Some brought flesh and some brought fish,
+Quoth Margaret meke--now with a wish,
+I would Anne were here; she would make us
+cheer.
+
+How say ye, gossips, is the wine good ?
+That is it, quoth Eleanour, by the rood.
+It cheereth the heart and comforts the blood.
+Such jonkets among shall make us live long.
+
+Anne bade fill a pot of muscadell;
+For of all wines I love it well.
+Sweet wines keep my body in hell.
+If I had it not I should take great thought.
+
+How look ye, gossips, at the board's end.
+Not merry, gossips? God it amend,
+All shall be well, else God it defend,
+Be merry and glad, and sit not so sad.
+
+Would God I had done after your counsel;
+For my husband is so fell;
+He beateth me like the Devil in hell;
+And the more I cry the less mercy.
+
+Alice with a loud voice spake then:
+I wis, she said, little good he can,
+That beateth or striketh any woman,
+And specially his wife, God give him short life.
+
+Margaret meek said, so might I thrive;
+I know no man that is alive
+That give me two strokes, but he shall have five.
+I am not afeard though he have a beard.
+
+One cast down her shot, and went away.
+Gossip, quoth Eleanour, what did she pay?
+Not but a penny! So, therefore, I say
+She shall no more be of our lore.
+
+Such guests we may have enow,
+That will not for their shot allow.
+With whom came she? Gossip, with you?
+Nay, quoth Joan: I came alone.
+
+Now reckon our shot, and go we home,
+What cometh to each of us but threepence?
+Pardye, that is but a small expense
+For such a sort, and all but sport.
+
+Turn down the street when ye come out,
+And we will compass around about.
+Gossip, quoth Anne, what needeth that doubt,
+Your husbands be pleased when ye be eased.
+
+Whatsoever any man think,
+We come for naught but for good drink.
+Now let us go home and wink,
+For it may be seen where we have been.
+
+This is the thought that gossips take.
+Once in a week merry they will make,
+And all small drinks they will forsake;
+But wine of the best shall have no rest.
+
+Some be at the tavern thrice in the week,
+And so be some every day eke,
+Or else they will groan and make them seek,
+For things used will not be refused.
+
+We have thrown our net almost at random; yet there
+are few palates which will not have found something
+to please them among the specimens which we have
+brought together. Let us repeat our hope that the
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