Volume 1 — XXIV. BREVIA: SHORT ESSAYS (IN CONNECTION WITH EACH OTHER.)

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1.—Paganism and Christianity—the Ideas of Duty and Holiness.

The Pagan God could have perfect peace with his votary, and yet could have no tendency to draw that votary to himself. Not so with the God of Christianity, who cannot give His peace without drawing like a vortex to Himself, who cannot draw into His own vortex without finding His peace fulfilled.

'An age when lustre too intense.'—I am much mistaken if Mr. Wordsworth is not deeply wrong here. Wrong he is beyond a doubt as to the fact; for there could have been no virtual intensity of lustre (unless merely as a tinsel toy) when it was contradicted by everything in the manners, habits, and situations of the Pagan Gods—they who were content to play in the coarsest manner the part of gay young bloods, sowing their wild oats, and with a recklessness of consequences to their female partners never by possibility rivalled by men. I believe and affirm that lustre the most dazzling and blinding would not have any ennobling effect except as received into a matrix of previous unearthly and holy type.

As to Bacchus being eternally young, the ancients had no idea or power to frame the idea of eternity. Their eternity was a limitary thing. And this I say not empirically, but à priori, on the ground that without the idea of holiness and unfleshliness, eternity cannot rise buoyant from the ground, cannot sustain itself. But waive this, and what becomes of the other things? If he were characteristically distinguished as young, then, by a mere rebound of the logic, the others were not so honoured, else where is the special privilege of Bacchus?

'And she shall sing there as in the days of her youth' (Hosea ii. 15).—The case of pathos, a person coming back to places, recalling the days of youth after a long woe, is quite unknown to the ancients—nay, the maternal affection itself, though used inevitably, is never consciously reviewed as an object of beauty.

Duties arise everywhere, but—do not mistake—not under their sublime form as duties. I claim the honour to have first exposed a fallacy too common: duties never did, never will, arise save under Christianity, since without it the sense of a morality lightened by religious motive, aspiring to holiness, not only of act, but of motive, had not before it even arisen. It is the pressure of society, its mere needs and palpable claims, which first calls forth duties, but not as duties; rather as the casting of parts in a scenical arrangement. A duty, under the low conception to which at first it conforms, is a rôle, no more; it is strictly what we mean when we talk of a part. The sense of conscience strictly is not touched under any preceding system of religion. It is the daughter of Christianity. How little did Wordsworth seize the fact in his Ode: 'Stern Daughter of the Voice of God' is not enough; the voice of God is the conscience; and neither has been developed except by Christianity.

The conscience of a pagan was a conscience pointing to detection: it pointed only to the needs of society, and caused fear, shame, anxiety, only on the principles of sympathy; that is, from the impossibility of releasing himself from a dependence on the reciprocal feelings—the rebound, the dependence on the resentments of others.

Morals.—Even ordinary morals could have little practical weight with the ancients: witness the Roman juries and Roman trials. Had there been any sense of justice predominant, could Cicero have hoped to prevail by such defences as that of Milo and fifty-six others, where the argument is merely fanciful—such a Hein-gespinst as might be applauded with 'very good!' 'bravo!' in any mock trial like that silly one devised by Dean Swift.

The slowness and obtuseness of the Romans to pathos appears à priori in their amphitheatre, and its tendency to put out the theatre; secondly, à posteriori, in the fact that their theatre was put out; and also, à posteriori, in the coarseness of their sensibilities to real distresses unless costumed and made sensible as well as intelligible. The grossness of this demand, which proceeded even so far as pinching to elicit a cry, is beyond easy credit to men of their time.

The narrow range of the Greek intellect, always revolving through seven or eight centuries about a few memorable examples—from the Life of Themistocles to Zeno or Demosthenes.

The Grecian glories of every kind seem sociable and affable, courting sympathy. The Jewish seem malignantly αυταρκεις.

But just as Paganism respected only rights of action, possession, etc., Christianity respects a far higher scale of claims, viz., as to the wounds to feelings, to deep injury, though not grounded in anything measurable or expoundable by external results. Man! you have said that which you were too proud and obstinate to unsay, which has lacerated some heart for thirty years that had perhaps secretly and faithfully served you and yours. Christianity lays hold on that as a point of conscience, if not of honour, to make amends, if in no other way, by remorse.

As to the tears of Œdipus in the crises. I am compelled to believe that Sophocles erred as regarded nature; for in cases so transcendent as this Greek nature and English nature could not differ. In the great agony on Mount Œta, Hercules points the pity of his son Hyllus to the extremity of torment besieging him on the humiliating evidence of the tears which they extorted from him. 'Pity me,' says he, 'that weep with sobs like a girl: a thing that no one could have charged upon the man' (pointing to himself); 'but ever without a groan I followed out to the end my calamities.' Now, on the contrary, on the words of the oracle, that beckoned away with impatient sounds Œdipus from his dear sublime Antigone, Œdipus is made to weep.

But this is impossible. Always the tears arose, and will arise, on the relaxation of the torment and in the rear of silent anguish on its sudden suspense, amidst a continued headlong movement; and also, in looking back, tears, unless checked, might easily arise. But never during the torment: on the rack there are no tears shed, and those who suffered on the scaffold never yet shed tears, unless it may have been at some oblique glance at things collateral to their suffering, as suppose a sudden glimpse of a child's face which they had loved in life.

Is not every αιων of civilization an inheritance from a previous state not so high? Thus, e.g., the Romans, with so little of Christian restraint, would have perished by reaction of their own vices, but for certain prejudices and follies about trade, manufacture, etc., and but for oil on their persons to prevent contagion. Now, this oil had been, I think, a secret bequeathed from some older and higher civilization long since passed away. We have it not, but neither have we so much needed it. Soon, however, we shall restore the secret by science more perfect.

Was Christianity meant to narrow or to widen the road to future happiness? If I were translated to some other planet, I should say:

1. No; for it raised a far higher standard—ergo, made the realization of this far more difficult.

2. Yes; for it introduced a new machinery for realizing this standard: (first) Christ's atonement, (second) grace.

But, according to some bigots (as Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne), as cited by Coleridge, Christianity first opened any road at all. Yet, surely they forget that, if simply to come too early was the fatal bar to their claims in the case, Abraham, the father of the faithful, could not benefit.

Yesterday, Thursday, October 21 (1843), I think, or the day before, I first perceived that the first great proof of Christianity is the proof of Judaism, and the proof of that lies in the Jehovah. What merely natural man capable of devising a God for himself such as the Jewish?

Of all eradications of this doctrine (of human progress), the most difficult is that connected with the outward shows—in air, in colouring, in form, in grouping of the great elements composing the furniture of the heavens and the earth. It is most difficult, even when confining one's attention to the modern case, and neglecting the comparison with the ancient, at all to assign the analysis of those steps by which to us Christians (but never before) the sea and the sky and the clouds and the many inter-modifications of these, A, B, C, D, and again the many interactions of the whole, the sun (S.), the moon (M.), the noon (N. S.)—the breathless, silent noon—the gay afternoon—the solemn glory of sunset—the dove-like glimpse of Paradise in the tender light of early dawn—by which these obtain a power utterly unknown, undreamed of, unintelligible to a Pagan. If we had spoken to Plato—to Cicero—of the deep pathos in a sunset, would he—would either—have gone along with us? The foolish reader thinks, Why, perhaps not, not altogether as to the quantity—the degree of emotion. Doubtless, it is undeniable that we moderns have far more sensibility to the phenomena and visual glories of this world which we inhabit. And it is possible that, reflecting on the singularity of this characteristic badge worn by modern civilization, he may go so far as to suspect that Christianity has had something to do with it. But, on seeking to complete the chain which connects them, he finds himself quite unable to recover the principal link.

Now, it will prove, after all, even for myself who have exposed and revealed these new ligatures by which Christianity connects man with awful interests in the world, a most insurmountable task to assign the total nidus in which this new power resides, or the total phenomenology through which that passes to and fro. Generally it seems to stand thus: God reveals Himself to us more or less dimly in vast numbers of processes; for example, in those of vegetation, animal growth, crystallization, etc. These impress us not primarily, but secondarily on reflection, after considering the enormity of changes worked annually, and working even at the moment we speak. Then, again, other arrangements throw us more powerfully upon the moral qualities of God; e.g., we see the fence, the shell, the covering, varied in ten million ways, by which in buds and blossoms He insures the ultimate protection of the fruit. What protection, analogous to this, has He established for animals; or, taking up the question in the ideal case, for man, the supreme of His creatures? We perceive that He has relied upon love, upon love strengthened to the adamantine force of insanity or delirium, by the mere aspect of utter, utter helplessness in the human infant. It is not by power, by means visibly developed, that this result is secured, but by means spiritual and 'transcendental' in the highest degree.

The baseness and incorrigible ignobility of the Oriental mind is seen in the radical inability to appreciate justice when brought into collision with the royal privileges of rulers that represent the nation. Not only, for example, do Turks, etc., think it an essential function of royalty to cut off heads, but they think it essential to the consummation of this function that the sacrifice should rest upon caprice known and avowed. To suppose it wicked as a mere process of executing the laws would rob it of all its grandeur. It would stand for nothing. Nay, even if the power were conceded, and the sovereign should abstain from using it of his own free will and choice, this would not satisfy the wretched Turk. Blood, lawless blood—a horrid Moloch, surmounting a grim company of torturers and executioners, and on the other side revelling in a thousand unconsenting women—this hideous image of brutal power and unvarnished lust is clearly indispensable to the Turk as incarnating the representative grandeur of his nation. With this ideal ever present to the Asiatic and Mohammedan mind, no wonder that even their religion needs the aid of the sword and bloodshed to secure conversion.

In the Spectator is mentioned, as an Eastern apologue, that a vizier who (like Chaucer's Canace) had learned the language of birds used it with political effect to his sovereign. The sultan had demanded to know what a certain reverend owl was speechifying about to another owl distantly related to him. The vizier listened, and reported that the liberal old owl was making a settlement upon his daughter, in case his friend's son should marry her, of a dozen ruined villages. Loyally long life to our noble sultan! I shall, my dear friend, always have a ruined village at your service against a rainy day, so long as our present ruler reigns and desolates.

Obliviscor jam injurias tuas, Clodia.—This is about the most barefaced use of the rhetorical trick—viz., to affect not to do, to pass over whilst actually doing all the while—that anywhere I have met with.—'Pro Cælio,' p. 234 [p. 35, Volgraff's edition].

Evaserint and comprehenderint.—Suppose they had rushed out, and suppose they had seized Licinus. So I read—not issent.—Ibid., p. 236 [Ibid., p. 44].

Velim vel potius quid nolim dicere.—Aristotle's case of throwing overboard your own property. He vult dicere, else he could not mean, yet nonvult, for he is shocked at saying such things of Clodia.—Ibid., p. 242 [Ibid., p. 49].

2.—MORAL AND PRACTICAL.

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Morality.—That Paley's principle does not apply to the higher morality of Christianity is evident from this: when I seek to bring before myself some ordinary form of wickedness that all men offend by, I think, perhaps, of their ingratitude. The man born to £400 a year thinks nothing of it, compares himself only with those above his own standard, and sees rather a ground of discontent in his £400 as not being £4,000 than any ground of deep thankfulness. Now, this being so odious a form of immorality, should—by Paley—terminate in excessive evil. On the contrary, it is the principle, the very dissatisfaction which God uses for keeping the world moving (how villainous the form—these 'ings'!).

All faith in the great majority is, and ought to be, implicit. That is, your faith is not unrolled—not separately applied to each individual doctrine—but is applied to some individual man, and on him you rely. What he says, you say; what he believes, you believe. Now, he believes all these doctrines, and you implicitly through him. But what I chiefly say as the object of this note is, that the bulk of men must believe by an implicit faith. Ergo, decry it not.

You delude yourself, Christian theorist, with the idea of offences that else would unfit you for heaven being washed out by repentance. But hearken a moment. Figure the case of those innumerable people that, having no temptation, small or great, to commit murder, would have committed it cheerfully for half-a-crown; that, having no opening or possibility for committing adultery, would have committed it in case they had. Now, of these people, having no possibility of repentance (for how repent of what they have not done?), and yet ripe to excess for the guilt, what will you say? Shall they perish because they might have been guilty? Shall they not perish because the potential guilt was not, by pure accident, accomplished in esse?

Here is a mistake to be guarded against. If you ask why such a man, though by nature gross or even Swift-like in his love of dirty ideas, yet, because a gentleman and moving in corresponding society, does not indulge in such brutalities, the answer is that he abstains through the modifications of the sympathies. A low man in low society would not be doubtful of its reception; but he, by the anticipations of sympathy (a form that should be introduced as technically as Kant's anticipations of perception), feels it would be ill or gloomily received. Well now, I, when saying that a man is altered by sympathy so as to think that, through means of this power, which otherwise he would not think, shall be interpreted of such a case as that above. But wait; there is a distinction: the man does not think differently, he only acts as if he thought differently. The case I contemplate is far otherwise; it is where a man feels a lively contempt or admiration in consequence of seeing or hearing such feelings powerfully expressed by a multitude, or, at least, by others which else he would not have felt. Vulgar people would sit for hours in the presence of people the most refined, totally unaware of their superiority, for the same reason that most people (if assenting to the praise of the Lord's Prayer) would do so hyper-critically, because its real and chief beauties are negative.

Not only is it false that my understanding is no measure or rule for another man, but of necessity it is so, and every step I take towards truth for myself is a step made on behalf of every other man.

We doubt if the world in the sense of a synthesis of action—the procession and carrying out of ends and purposes—could consist with the αντι-world (in a religious sense). Men who divide all into pious people and next to devils see in such a state of evil the natural tendency (as in all other monstrous evils—which this must be if an evil at all) to correction and redress. But now assume a man, sober, honourable, cheerful, healthy, active, occupied all day long in toilsome duties (or what he believes duties) for ends not selfish; this man has never had a thought of death, hell, etc., and looking abroad on those who dwell in such contemplations, he regards them sincerely, not unkindly or with contempt; partially he respects them, but he looks on them as under a monstrous delusion, in a fever, in a panic, as in a case of broken equilibrium. Now he is right. And, moreover, secondly, two other feelings or suspicions come on, (1) of hypocrisy, (2) of the violation of inner shame in publishing the most awful private feelings.

The Tendency of a Good Fortune inherited.—I know not that any man has reason to wish a sufficient patrimonial estate for his son. Much to have something so as to start with an advantage. But the natural consequence of having a full fortune is to become idle and vapid. For, on asking what a young man has that he can employ himself upon, the answer would be, 'Oh! why, those pursuits which presuppose solitude.' At once you feel this to be hollow nonsense. Not one man in ten thousand has powers to turn solitude into a blessing. They care not, e.g., for geometry; and the cause is chiefly that they have been ill taught in geometry; and the effect is that geometry must and will languish, if treated as a mere amateur pursuit. So of any other. Secondly, yet of Englishmen I must say that beyond all nations a man so situated does not, in fact, become idle. He it is, and his class, that discharge the public business of each county or district. Thirdly: And in the view, were there no other, one sees at once the use of fox-hunting, let it be as boisterous as you please. Is it not better to be boisterous than gossip-ridden, eaves-dropping, seeking aliment for the spirits in the petty scandal of the neighbourhood?

'He' (The Times) 'declares that the poorest artisan has a greater stake than they' ('the Landed Interest') 'in the prosperity of the country, and is, consequently, more likely to give sound advice. His exposition of the intimate connection existing between the welfare of the poor workman and the welfare of the country is both just and admirable. But he manifestly underrates the corresponding relations of the landowners, and wholly omits to show, even if the artisan's state were the greatest, how his opinions are likely to be most valuable. To suppose that a man is necessarily the best judge in whatever concerns him most is a sad non-sequitur; for if self-interest ensured wisdom, no one would ever go wrong in anything. Every man would be his own minister, and every invalid would be his own best physician. The wounded limbs of the community are the best judges of the pain they suffer; but it is the wise heads of the community that best can apply a remedy that best can cure the wound without causing it to break out in another quarter. Poverty is blind; but the upper classes "education has enlightened, and habit made foreseeing."'

We live in times great from the events and little from the character of the actors. Every month summons us to the spectacle of some new perfidy in the leaders of parties and the most conspicuous public servants; and the profligacy which we charge upon the statesmen of the seventeenth century has revolved in full measure upon our own days.

Justifications of Novels.—The two following justifications of novels occur to me. Firstly, that if some dreadful crisis awaited a ship of passengers at the line—where equally the danger was mysterious and multiform, the safety mysterious and multiform—how monstrous if a man should say to a lady, 'What are you reading?' 'Oh, I'm reading about our dreadful crisis, now so near'; and he should answer, 'Oh, nonsense! read something to improve your mind; read about Alexander the Great, about Spurius Ahala, about Caius Gracchus, or, if you please, Tiberius.' But just such nonsense it is, when people ridicule reading romances in which the great event of the fiction is the real great event of a female life.

There are others, you say—she loses a child. Yes, that's a great event. But that arises out of this vast equinoctial event.

Secondly, as all things are predisposed to the natures which must be surrounded by them, so we may see that the element of social evolution of character, manners, caprices, etc., has been adapted to the vast mass of human minds. It is a mean element, you say. The revelations of Albert Smith, Dickens, etc., are essentially mean, vulgar, plebeian, not only in an aristocratic sense, but also in a philosophical sense. True, but the minds that are to live and move in it are also mean, essentially mean. Nothing grand in them? Yes, doubtless in the veriest grub as to capacity, but the capacity is undeveloped.

Ergo, as to the intrigue or fable, and as to the conduct or evolution of this fable—novels must be the chief natural resource of woman.

Moral Certainty.—As that a child of two years (or under) is not party to a plot. Now, this would allow a shade of doubt—a child so old might cry out or give notice.

This monstrous representation that the great war with France (1803-15) had for its object to prevent Napoleon from sitting on the throne of France—which recently, in contempt of all truth and common-sense, I have so repeatedly seen advanced—throws a man profoundly on the question of what was the object of that war. Surely, in so far as we are concerned, the matter was settled at Amiens in the very first year of the century. December, 1799, Napoleon had been suffered by the unsteady public opinion of France—abhorring a master, and yet sensible that for the chief conscious necessity of France, viz., a developer of her latent martial powers, she must look for a master or else have her powers squandered—to mount the consular throne. He lived, he could live, only by victorious war. Most perilous was the prospect for England. In the path which not Napoleon, but France, was now preparing to tread, and which was the path of Napoleon no otherwise than that he was the tool of France, was that servitor who must gratify her grand infirmity or else be rapidly extinguished himself, unhappily for herself, England was the main counter-champion. The course of honour left to England was too fatally the course of resistance. Resistance to what? To Napoleon personally? Not at all; but to Napoleon as pledged by his destiny to the prosecution of a French conquering policy. That personally England had no hostility to Napoleon is settled by the fact that she had at Amiens cheerfully conceded the superior power. Under what title? would have been the most childish of demurs. That by act she never conceded the title of emperor was the mere natural diplomatic result of never having once been at peace with Napoleon under that title. Else it was a point of entire indifference. Granting the consulship, she had granted all that could be asked. And what she opposed was the determined war course of Napoleon and the schemes of ultra-Polish partition to which Napoleon had privately tempted her under circumstances of no such sense as existed and still exist for Russia. This policy, as soon as exposed, and not before bitter insults to herself, England resisted. And therefore it is that at this day we live. But as to Napoleon, as apart from the policy of Napoleon, no childishness can be wilder.

At some unlucky moment when the Crown commanded unusual resources, the De Quinceys met with the fate ascribed, perhaps fabulously, to some small heavenly bodies (asteroids or what, I do not precisely know): on some dark day, by mistake perhaps, they exploded, and scattered their ruins all over the central provinces of England, where chiefly had lain their territorial influence. Especially in the counties of Leicester, Lincoln and Rutland were found fragments of the vast landed estates held by these potentates when Earls of Winchester.

The hatred of truth at first dawning—that instinct which makes you revolt from the pure beams which search the foul depths and abysses of error—is well illustrated by the action of the atmospheric currents, when blowing through an open window upon smoke. What do you see? Sometimes the impression is strong upon your ocular belief that the window is driving the smoke in. You can hardly be convinced of the contrary—scarcely when five or seven minutes has absolutely rarefied the smoke so much that a book-lettering previously invisible has become even legible. And at last, when the fact, the result, the experience, has corrected the contradictory theory of the eye, you begin to suspect, without any aid from science, that there were two currents, one of which comes round in a curve ☽ and effects the exit for the other which the window had driven in; just as in the Straits of Gibraltar there is manifestly an upper current setting one way, which you therefore conjecture to argue a lower current setting the other, and thus redressing the equilibrium. Here the smoke corresponds to bits of chip or any loose suspended body in the Gibraltar current. What answers to the current of water is the air, and if the equilibrium is kept up, the re-entrant current balances your retiring current, and the latter carries out the smoke entangled in itself. By the objection, say, of a child, there ought to be a re-entrant column of smoke, which there is not. For the air drives the smoke of the fire up the chimney, and of its own contribution the air has no smoke to give.

Or the Augean stable may image it. Doubtless when the first disturbance took place in the abominable mess, those acting would be apt to question for a moment whether it had not been more advisable to leave it alone.

Moralists say, 'Nobody will attack you, or hate you, or blame you for your virtues.' What falsehood! Not as virtues, it may be in their eyes, but virtues, nevertheless. Connect with Kant the error of supposing ætas parentum, etc., to be the doctrine of sin.

Not for what you have done, but for what you are—not because in life you did forsake a wife and children—did endure to eat and drink and lie softly yourself whilst those who should have been as your heart-drops were starving: not because you did that so much is forgiven you, but because you were capable of that, therefore you are incapable of heaven.

Immodesty.—The greatest mistake occurs to me now (Wednesday, April 17th, '44). A girl who should have been unhappily conscious of voluptuous hours, her you would call modest in case of her passing with downcast looks. But why, then, is she not so? That girl is immodest who reconciles to herself such things, and yet assumes the look of innocence.

About Women.—A man brings his own idle preconceptions, and fancies that he has learned them from his experience.

Far more to be feared than any depth of serious love, however absorbing and apparently foolish, is that vicious condition in which trifling takes the place of all serious love, when women are viewed only as dolls, and addressed with an odious leer of affected knowingness as 'my dear,' wink, etc. Now to this tends the false condition of women when called 'the ladies.' On the other hand, what an awful elevation arises when each views in the other a creature capable of the same noble duties—she no less than he a creature of lofty aspirations; she by the same right a daughter of God as he a son of God; she bearing her eyes erect to the heavens no less than he!

Low Degree.—We see often that this takes place very strongly and decidedly with regard to men, notoriously pleasant men and remarkably good-natured, which shows at once in what road the thing travels. And if such a nature should be combined with what Butler thinks virtue, it might be doubtful to which of the two the tribute of kind attentions were paid; but now seeing the true case, we know how to interpret this hypothetical case of Butler's accordingly.

'Visit the sins of the fathers,' etc. This people pretend to think monstrous. Yet what else in effect happens and must happen to Jews inheriting by filial obedience and natural sympathy all that anti-Christian hostility which prevailed in the age succeeding to that of Christ? What evil—of suffering, of penalties now or in reserve may be attached to this spirit of hostility—follows the children through all generations!

Case of Timoleon, whose killing of his brother might afterwards be read into X Y Z or into X a b according to his conduct (either into murder or patriotism), is a good illustration of synthesis.

To illustrate Cicero's argument in 'Pro Cælio' as to the frequency of men wild and dissipated in youth becoming eminent citizens, one might adduce this case from the word Themistocles in the Index to the Græci Rhetorici. But I see or I fancy cause to notice this passage for the following cause: it contains only nine words, four in the first comma, five in the last, and of these nine four are taken up in noting the time το πρωτον το τελεν; ergo, five words record the remarkable revolution from one state to another, and the character of each state.

Two cases of young men's dissipation—1. Horace's record of his father's advice: 'Concessa,' etc.; 2. Cicero's 'Pro Cælio.'

What Crotchets in every Direction!—1. The Germans, or, let me speak more correctly, some of the Germans (and doubtless full of Hoch beer or strong drink), found out some thirty years ago that there were only three men of genius in the records of our planet. And who were they? (1) Homer; (2) Shakespeare; (3) Goethe. So that absolutely Milton was shut out from the constellation. Even he wanted a ticket, though Master Sorrows-of-Werther had one. The porter, it seems, fancied he had no marriage garment, a mistake which a mob might correct, saying, 'No marriage garment! then, damme, he shall have this fellow's' (viz., Goethe's). The trinity, according to these vagabonds, was complete without Milton, as the Roman pomp was full to the eye of the sycophant without the bust of Brutus.

2. Macaulay fancied there were only two men of genius in the reign of Charles II., viz., Milton and the tinker Bunyan.

3. Coleridge (p. 237, 'Table-Talk') fancied there were only two men of genius in his own generation: W. W. and Sir Humphrey Davy.

Jeremy Taylor having mentioned two religious men, St. Paul the Hermit and Sulpitius, as having atoned for some supposed foolish garrulities, the one by a three years' silence, the other by a lifelong silence, goes on to express his dissatisfaction with a mode of rabiosa silentia so memorable as this.

Yet it is certain in silence there is wisdom, and there may be deep religion. And indeed it is certain, great knowledge, if it be without vanity, is the most severe bridle of the tongue. For so I have heard that all the noises and prating of the pool, the croaking of frogs and toads, is hushed and appeased upon the instant of bringing upon them the light of a candle or torch. Every beam of reason and ray of knowledge checks the dissoluteness of the tongue. 'Ut quisque contemplissimus est, ita solutissimæ linguæ est,' said Seneca.

The silence must be καιριος, not sullen and ill-natured; 'nam sic etiam tacuisse nocet'?—of all things in the world a prating religion and much talk in holy things does most profane the mysteriousness of it, and dismantles its regard, and makes cheap its reverence and takes off fear and awfulness, and makes it loose and garish, and like the laughters of drunkenness.

Public Morality.—It ought not to be left to a man's interest merely to protect the animals in his power. Dogs are no longer worked in the way they were, although the change must have arbitrarily robbed many poor men of half bread. But in a case as valuable as that of the horse, it has been known that a man has incurred the total ruin of a series of horses against even his own gain or self-interest. There ought to be a custos veteranorum, a keeper and protector of the poor brutes who are brought within the pale of social use and service. The difficulty, you say! Legislation has met and dealt effectively with far more complicated and minute matters than that. For, after all, consider how few of the brute creation on any wide and permanent scale are brought into the scheme of human life. Some birds as food, some fishes as ditto; beeves as food and sometimes as appliers of strength; horses in both characters. These with elephants and camels, mules, asses, goats, dogs, and sheep, cats and rabbits, gold-fishes and singing-birds, really compose the whole of our animal equipage harnessed to the car of human life.

3.—On Words And Style.

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There are a number of words which, unlocked from their absurd imprisonment, would become extensively useful. We should say, for instance, 'condign honours,' 'condign treatment' (treatment appropriate to the merits), thus at once realizing two rational purposes, viz., giving a useful function to a word, which at present has none, and also providing an intelligible expression for an idea which otherwise is left without means of uttering itself except through a ponderous circumlocution. Precisely in the same circumstances of idle and absurd sequestration stands the term polemic. At present, according to the popular usage, this word has some fantastic inalienable connection with controversial theology. There cannot be a more childish chimera. No doubt there is a polemic side or aspect of theology; but so there is of all knowledge; so there is of every science. The radical and characteristic idea concerned in this term polemic is found in our own Parliamentary distinction of the good speaker, as contrasted with the good debater. The good speaker is he who unfolds the whole of a question in its affirmative aspects, who presents these aspects in their just proportions, and according to their orderly and symmetrical deductions from each other. But the good debater is he who faces the negative aspects of the question, who meets sudden objections, has an answer for any momentary summons of doubt or difficulty, dissipates seeming inconsistencies, and reconciles the geometrical smoothness of à priori abstractions with the coarse angularities of practical experience. The great work of Ricardo is of necessity, and almost in every page, polemic; whilst very often the particular objections or difficulties, to which it replies, are not indicated at all, being spread through entire systems, and assumed as precognita that are familiar to the learned student.

Writing to scholastic persons, I should be ashamed to explain, but hoping that I write to many also of the non-scholastic, and even of the unlearned, I rejoice to explain the proper sense of the word implicit. As the word condign, so capable of an extended sense, is yet constantly restricted to one miserable association, viz., that with the word punishment (for we never say, as we might say, 'condign rewards'), so also the word implicit is in English always associated with the word faith. People say that Papists have an implicit faith in their priests. What they mean is this: If a piece of arras, or a carpet, is folded up, then it is implicit according to the original Latin word; if it is unfolded and displayed, then it is explicit. Therefore, when a poor illiterate man (suppose a bog-trotter of Mayo or Galway) says to his priest (as in effect always he does say), 'Sir, I cannot comprehend all this doctrine; bless you, I have not the thousandth part of the learning for it, so it is impossible that I should directly believe it. But your reverence believes it, the thing is wrapt up (implicit) in you, and I believe it on that account.' Here the priest believes explicitly: he believes implicitly.

Modern.—Is it not shameful that to this hour even literary men of credit and repute cannot for the life of them interpret this line from 'As You Like It'—

A man as well read as Mr. Theodore Hook, and many a hundred beside, have seriously understood it to mean 'Full of old proverbs, the traditionary wisdom of nations, and of illustrative examples drawn from modern experience.' Nonsense! The meaning is, 'Full of old maxims and proverbs, and of trivial attempts at argument.' That is, tediously redundant in rules derived from the treasury of popular proverbs,' and in feeble attempts at connecting these general rules with the special case before him. The superannuated old magistrate sets out with a proverb, as for instance this, that the mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing. That proverb forms his major proposition. In his minor proposition he goes on to argue that the trespass charged upon the particular prisoner before him was very little bigger than a midge's wing. And then in his conclusion triumphantly he infers, Ergo, the prisoner at the bar is the mother of mischief. But says the constable, 'Please, your worship, the prisoner is a man, a hulking clodhopper, some six or seven feet high, with a strong black beard.' 'Well, that makes no odds,' rejoins his worship; 'then he's the father of mischief. Clerk, make out his mittimus.'

The word 'instance' (from the scholastic instantia) never meant example in Shakespeare's age. The word 'modern' never once in Shakespeare means what it means to us in these days. Even the monkish Latin word 'modernus' fluctuated in meaning, and did not always imply recens, neotericus; but in Shakespeare never. What does it mean in Shakespeare? Once and for ever it means trivial, inconsiderable. Dr. Johnson had too much feeling not to perceive that the word 'modern' had this value in Shakespeare's acceptation; practically, he felt that it availed for that sense, but theoretically he could not make out the why. It means that, said the Doctor; but feebly and querulously, like one sick of the pip, he added, 'Yet I don't know why.' Don't you? Now, we do. The fact is, Dr. Johnson was in a fit of the dismals at that time; he had recently committed a debauch of tea, having exceeded his usual allowance by seventy-five cups, so that naturally he had a 'curmurring' in the stomach. Else he could not have failed to see what we are now going to explain with a wet finger. Everybody is aware that to be material is the very opposite of being trivial. What is 'material' in a chain of evidence, or in an argument, can never be trifling. Now, therefore, if you can find a word that will flatly contradict this word material, then you have a capital term for expressing what is trivial. Well, you find in the word immaterial all that you are seeking. 'It is quite immaterial' will suit Mr. Touts's purpose just as well as 'It is really of no consequence, of no consequence in the world.' To say in a law court that the objection is immaterial is otherwise to say that it is trivial. Here, then, is the first step: to contradict the idea of material is effectually to express the idea of trivial. Let us now see if we can find any other contradiction to the idea of material, for one antithesis to that idea will express as well as any other antithesis the counterpole of the trivial. Now, clearly the substance of a thing, the material out of which it is made, is oftentimes of great importance by comparison with its shape, fashion, or mode. It is of value in your eyes to know whether your family plate is in substance of gold or of silver; but whether such a vessel is round or square, ornamented with a wreath of acanthus or ivy, supported by tigers or by fawns, may be a trivial consideration, or even worse; for the fashion of your plate, after it has once become obsolete, may count against you for so much loss as something that will cost a good deal of money to alter. Here, then, is another contradiction to the material, and therefore another expression for the trivial: matter, as against vacancy or the privation of matter, yields the antithesis of material or immaterial, substantial and unsubstantial; matter, as against form, yields the antithesis of substance and shape, or otherwise of material and modal—what is matter and what is the mere modification of matter, its variation by means of ornament or shape.

The word 'modern' is therefore in Shakespeare uniformly to be pronounced with the long o, as in the words modal, modish, and never with the short o of mŏderate, mŏdest, or our present word mŏdern. And the law under which Shakespeare uses the word is this: whatsoever is so trivial as to fall into the relation of a mere shape or fleeting mode to a permanent substance, that with Shakespeare is modish, or (according to his form) modern.[29] Thus, a weak, trivial argument (or instantia, the scholastic term for an argument not latent merely, or merely having the office of sustaining a truth, but urged as an objection, having the polemic office of contradicting an opponent) is in Shakespeare's idiom, when viewed as against a substantial argument, a modern argument.

Again, when Cleopatra, defending herself against the perfidy of her steward, wishes to impress upon Octavius that any articles which she may have kept back from the inventory of her personal chattels are but trifles, she expresses this by saying that they are but

i.e., such as we bestow, at welcoming or at parting, upon the slightest acquaintances. The whole stress of the logic lies upon the epithet modern—for simply as friends, had they been substantial friends, they might have levied any amount from the royal lady's bounty; kingdoms would have been slight gifts in her eyes, and that would soon have been objected to by her conqueror. But her argument is, that the people to whom such gifts would be commensurate are mere modish friends, persons known to us on terms of bare civility, people with whom we exchange salutations in the street, or occasional calls, what now we call acquaintances, for whom in Shakespeare's time there was no distinguishing expression.

Another case we remember at this moment in 'All's Well that Ends Well.' It occurs in Act II., at the very opening of scene iii.; the particular edition, the only one we can command at the moment, is an obscure one published by Scott, Webster and Geary, Charterhouse Square, 1840, and we mention it thus circumstantially because the passage is falsely punctuated; and we have little doubt that in all other editions, whether with or without the false punctuation, the syntax is generally misapprehended. In reality, the false punctuation has itself grown out of the false apprehension of the syntax, and not vice versâ. Thus the words stand literatim et punctuatim: 'They say, miracles are past: and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things, supernatural and causeless.' The comma ought to have been placed after 'familiar,' the sense being this—and we have amongst us sceptical and irreligious people to represent as trivial and of daily occurrence things which in reality are supernatural and causeless (that is, not lying amongst the succession of physical causes and effects, but sent as miracles by the immediate agency of God). According to the true sense, things supernatural and causeless must be understood as the subject, of which modern and familiar is the predicate.

Mr. Grindon fancies that frog is derived from the syllable τραχ of βατραχος. This will cause some people to smile, and recall Menage's pleasantry about Alfana, the man of Orlando; It is true that frog at first sight seems to have no letter in common except the snarling letter (litera canina). But this is not so; the a and the o, the s and the k, are perhaps essentially the same. And even in the case where, positively and literally, not a single letter is identical, it is odd, but undeniable, that the two words may be nearly allied as mother and child. One instance is notorious, but it is worth citing for a purpose of instructive inference. 'Journal,' as a French word, or, if you please, as an English word—whence came that? Unquestionably and demonstrably from the Latin word dies, in which, however, visibly there is not one letter the same as any one of the seven that are in journal. Yet mark the rapidity of the transition. Dies (a day) has for its derivative adjective daily the word diurnus. Now, the old Roman pronunciation of diu was exactly the same as gio, both being pronounced as our English jorn. Here, in a moment, we see the whole—giorno, a day, was not derived directly from dies, but secondarily through diurnus. Then followed giornal, for a diary, or register of a day, and from that to French, as also, of course, the English journal. But the moral is, that when to the eye no letter is the same, may it not be so to the ear? Already the di of dies anticipates and enfolds the giorno.

Mr. Grindon justly remarks upon the tendency, in many instances, of the German ss to reappear in English forms as t. Thus heiss (hot), fuss (foot), etc. These are Mr. Grindon's own examples, and a striking confirmation occurs in the old English hight, used for he was called, and again for the participle called, and again, in the 'Met. Romanus,' for I was called: 'Lorde, he saide, I highth Segramour.' Now, the German is heissen (to be called). And this is a tendency hidden in many long ages: as, for instance, in Greek, every person must remember the transition of ττ and σσ as in θαττω, θασσω.

On Pronunciation and Spelling.—If we are to surrender the old vernacular sound of the e in certain situations to a ridiculous criticism of the eye, and in defiance of the protests rising up clamorously from every quarter of old English scholarship, let us at least know to what we surrender. What letter is to usurp the vacant seat? What letter? retorts the purist—why, an e, to be sure. An e? And do you call that an e? Do you pronounce 'ten' as if it were written 'tun', or 'men' as if written 'mun'? The 'Der' in Derby, supposing it tolerable at all to alter its present legitimate sound, ought, then, to be pronounced as the 'Der' in the Irish name Derry, not as 'Dur'; and the 'Ber' in Berkeley not as 'Bur,' but as the 'Ber' in Beryl. But the whole conceit has its origin in pure ignorance of English archæology, and in the windiest of all vanities, viz., the attempt to harmonize the spelling and the pronunciation of languages.

Naturally, it fills one with contempt for these 'Derby' purists to find that their own object, the very purpose they are blindly and unconsciously aiming at, has been so little studied or steadily contemplated by them in anything approaching to its whole extent. Why, upon the principle which they silently and virtually set up, though carrying it out so contradictorily (driving out an a on the plea that it is not an e, only to end by substituting, and without being aware, the still remoter letter u), the consequence must be that the whole language would go to wreck. Nine names out of every ten would need tinkering. 'London,' for instance, no more receives the normal sound of the o in either of its syllables than does the e in 'Derby.' The normal sound of the o is that heard in 'song,' 'romp,' 'homage,' 'drop.' Nevertheless, the sound given to the o in 'London,' 'Cromwell,' etc., which strictly is the short sound of u in 'lubber,' 'butter,' etc., is a secondary sound of o in particular combinations, though not emphatically its proper sound. The very same defence applies to the e in 'Berkeley,' etc. It is the legitimate sound of the English e in that particular combination, viz., when preceding an r, though not its normal sound. But think of the wild havoc that would be made of other more complex anomalies, if these purists looked an inch in advance. Glocester or Gloucester, Worcester, Cirencester, Pontefract, etc. What elaborate and monstrous pronunciations would they affix to these names? The whole land would cease to recognise itself. And that the purists should never have contemplated these veritable results, this it is which seals and rivets one's contempt for them.

Now, if such harmony were at all desirable (whereas, on the contrary, we should thus be carrying ruin into the traditions and obliteration into the ethnological links of languages, industriously, in fact, throwing up insuperable obstacles in the path of historical researches), it would be far better, instead of adjusting the pronunciation to the imaginary value of the spelling, inversely to adjust the spelling to the known and established pronunciation, as a certain class of lunatics amongst ourselves, viz., the phonetic gang, have for some time been doing systematically.

Here, therefore, I hope is one fixed point. Here there is anchorage. The usage is the rule, at any rate; and the law of analogy takes effect only where that cannot be decisively ascertained.

The Latin Word 'Felix.'—The Romans appear to me to have had no term for happy, which argues that they had not the idea. Felix is tainted with the idea of success, and is thus palpably referred to life as a competition, which for Romans every distinguished life was. In fact, apart from his city the Roman was nothing. Too poor to have a villa or any mode of retirement, it is clear that the very idea of Roman life supposes for the vast majority a necessity of thick crowded intercourse, without the possibility of solitude. I, for my peculiar constitution of mind, to whom solitude has in all periods of life been more of a necessity almost than air, view with special horror the life of a Roman or Athenian. All the morning he had to attend a factious hustings or a court—assemblies deliberative or judicial. Here only he was somebody, and yet, however, somebody through others. Combining with one leader and many underlings like himself, he also became a power; but in himself and for himself, after all, he was consciously nothing. When Cicero speaks of his nunquam minus Solus quam cum solus, he is announcing what he feels to be, and knows will be, accepted as a very extraordinary fact. For even in rure it is evident that friends made it a duty of friendship to seek out and relieve their rusticating friends.

On the Distinction between 'Rhetorica utens' and 'Rhetorica docens'.—It was a perplexity, familiar to the experience of the Schoolmen, that oftentimes one does not know whether to understand by the term logic the act and process of reasoning involved and latent in any series of connected propositions, or this same act and process formally abstracting itself as an art and system of reasoning. For instance, if you should happen to say, 'Dr. Isaac Watts, the English Nonconformist, was a good man, and a clever man; but alas! for his logic, what can his best friend say for it? The most charitable opinion must pronounce it at the best so, so'—in such a case, what is it that you would be understood to speak of? Would it be the general quality of the Doctor's reasoning, the style and character of his philosophical method, or would it be the particular little book known as 'The Doctor: his Logic,' price 5s., bound in calf, and which you might be very shy of touching with a pair of tongs, for fear of dimming their steel polish, so long as your wife's eye was upon your motions? The same ambiguity affects many other cases. For instance, if you heard a man say, 'The rhetoric of Cicero is not fitted to challenge much interest,' you might naturally understand it of the particular style and rhetorical colouring—which was taxed with being florid; nay, Rhodian; nay, even Asiatic—that characterizes that great orator's compositions; or, again, the context might so restrain the word as to force it into meaning the particular system or theory of rhetoric addressed to Herennius, a system which (being traditionally ascribed to Cicero) is usually printed amongst his works. Here, and in scores of similar cases, lies often a trap for the understanding; but the Schoolmen evaded this trap by distinguishing between 'Rhetorica utens,' and 'Rhetorica docens,' between the rhetoric that laid down or delivered didactically the elements of oratorical persuasion as an art to be learned, and rhetoric, on the other hand, as a creative energy that wielded these elements by the mouth of Pericles in the year 440 b. c., or by the mouth of Demosthenes, 340 b. c.; between rhetoric the scholastic art and rhetoric the heaven-born power; between the rhetoric of Aristotle that illuminated the solitary student, and the rhetoric of Demosthenes that ran along in rolling thunders to the footstool of Artaxerxes' throne. Oh, these dear spindle-shanked Schoolmen! they were people, respected reader, not to be sneezed at. What signifies having spindle-shanks?

Synonyms.—A representative and a delegate, according to Burke, are identical; but there is the same difference as between a person who on his own results of judgment manages the interests of X, and a person merely reporting the voice of X. Probably there never was a case which so sharply illustrated the liability of goodish practical understanding to miss, to fail in seeing, an object lying right before the eyes; and that is more wonderful in cases where the object is not one of multitude, but exists almost in a state of insulation. At the coroner's inquest on a young woman who died from tight-lacing, acting, it was said, in combination with a very full meal of animal food, to throw the heart out of position, Mr. Wakely pronounced English or British people all distorted in the spine, whereas Continental people were all right. Continental! How unlimited an idea! Why, it meant nothing; it defines nothing, limits nothing, excludes nothing. Who or what is Continental? Apparently it means anyone out of 240 millions not being one of the 27 millions in the Britannides. Every man escapes an insane folly who happens to breathe an air E. (N. E., S. E., N. N. E., S. S. E., etc.) of the Britannides. Vanity, the inevitable wish to improve, or rather to avail, one's self of a natural means offered for deepening and marking out the natural outline of the shape, i.e., of the sexual characteristics, has no effect, dies out, the instant that a family is one of those who have the privilege of basking anywhere 2,000 miles E. or 2,000 miles N. and S.!

A whistling to a horse: Poppysme (vide Whistling, Lat. Dict.); but poppysme is a patting, a clapping, on the back, neck, or, doubtless, wherever the animal is sensible of praise.

'Takest away.' This beautiful expression, though exquisitely treated by position—

is yet originally borrowed by Mr. W. from the Litany: 'O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world.'

In style to explain the true character of note-writing—how compressed and unrambling and direct it ought to be, and illustrate by the villainous twaddle of many Shakespearian notes.

Syllogism.—In the Edin. Advertiser for Friday, January 25, 1856, a passage occurs taken from Le Nord (or Journal du Nord), or some paper whose accurate title I do not know, understood to be Russian in its leanings, which makes a most absurd and ignorant use of this word. The Allies are represented as addressing an argument to Russia, amounting, I think, to this, viz.: that, in order to test her sincerity, would it not be well for Russia at once to cede such insulated points of territory as were valuable to Russia or suspicious to the Allies simply as furnishing means for invasion of Turkey? And this argument is called a syllogism.

'Laid in wait for him.'—This false phrase occurs in some article (a Crimea article, I suppose) in the same Advertiser of January 25. And I much doubt whether any ordinary ear would reconcile itself to lay in wait (as a past tense) even when instructed in its propriety.

Those Scotticisms are worst which are nonsensical, as e.g.:

Timeous and dubiety are bad, simply as not authorized by any but local usage. A word used only in Provence or amongst the Pyrenees could not be employed by a classical French writer, except under a caveat and for a special purpose.

Plenty, used under the absurd misleading of its terminal 'y' as an adjective. Alongst, remember of; able for, the worse of liquor, to call for, to go the length of, as applied to a distance; 'I don't think it,' instead of 'I don't think so.'

In the Lady's Newspaper for Saturday, May 8, 1852 (No. 280), occurs the very worst case of exaggerated and incredible mixed silliness and vulgarity connected with the use of assist for help at the dinner-table that I have met with. It occurs in the review of a book entitled 'The Illustrated London Cookery Book,' by Frederick Bishop. Mr. Bishop, it seems, had 'enjoyed the office of cuisinier at the Palace, and among some of our first nobility.' He has, by the way, an introductory 'Philosophy of Cookery.' Two cases occur of this matchless absurdity:

1. An ideal carver is described: he, after carving, 'is as cool and collected as ever, and assists the portions he has carved with as much grace as he displayed in carving the fowl.'

2. Further on, when contrasting, not the carvers, but the things to be carved, coming to 'Neck of Veal,' he says of the carver: 'Should the vertebræ have not been jointed by the butcher, you would find yourself in the position of the ungraceful carver, being compelled to exercise a degree of strength which should never be suffered to appear, very possibly, too, assisting gravy in a manner not contemplated by the person unfortunate enough to receive it.'

Genteel is the vulgarest and most plebeian of all known words. Accordingly (and strange it is that the educated users of this word should not perceive that fact), aristocratic people—people in the most undoubted élite of society as to rank or connections—utterly ignore the word. They are aware of its existence in English dictionaries; they know that it slumbers in those vast repositories; they even apprehend your meaning in a vague way when you employ it as an epithet for assigning the pretensions of an individual or a family. Generally it is understood to imply that the party so described is in a position to make morning calls, to leave cards, to be presentable for anything to the contrary apparent in manners, style of conversation, etc. But these and other suggestions still leave a vast area unmapped of blank charts in which the soundings are still doubtful.

The word 'genteel' is so eminently vulgar apparently for this reason, that it presents a non-vulgar distinction under a gross and vulgar conception of that distinction. The true and central notion, on which the word revolves, is elevating; but, by a false abstraction of its elements, it is degraded. And yet in parts of this island where the progress of refinement is torpid, and the field of vision is both narrow and unchanging in all that regards the nuances of manners, I have remarked that the word 'genteel' maintains its old advantageous acceptation; and as a proof of this, eminent and even revolutionary thinkers born and bred in such provincial twilight, use the word as if untainted and hardly aware that it is flyblown.

Among ourselves it is certain that a peculiar style of gossip, of babble, and of miniature intriguing, invests the atmosphere of little 'townishness,' such as often entangles the more thoughtful and dignified of the residents in troublesome efforts at passive resistance or active counter-action. In dealing with this matter, Mr. Wordsworth instanced Northampton and Nottingham; but a broader difference could hardly be than between these towns. And just as 'genteel' remains the vulgarest of all words, so the words 'simple' and 'simplicity,' amongst all known words, offer the most complex and least simple of ideas.

Having made this deprecation on behalf of my own criminality in using such a word as 'genteel,' I go on to say that whilst Northampton was (and is, I believe) of all towns the most genteel, Nottingham for more than two centuries has been the most insurrectionary and in a scarlet excess democratic. Nottingham, in fact, has always resembled the Alexandria of ancient days; whilst Northampton could not be other than aristocratic as the centre of a county more thickly gemmed by the ancestral seats of our nobility than any beside in the island. Norwich, again, though a seat of manufacturing industry, has always been modified considerably by a literary body of residents.

'Mein alter Herr' (von Stein) 'pflegte dann wohl scherzend zu sagen: Ich müsse von irgend eine Hexe meinen Altem als ein Wechselbalg in's Nest gelegt seyn; ich gehöre offenbar einem Stamm amerikanischer wilden an, und habe noch die Hühnerhundnase zum Auswittern des verschiedenen Blutes.' Arndt, speaking of his power to detect at sight (when seen at a distance) Russians, English, etc., says that Von Stein replied thus in his surprise. But I have cited the passage as one which amply illustrates the suspensive form of sentence in the German always indicated by a colon (:), thus: 'zu sagen: Ich müsse'—to say that I must have been (p. 164).

The active sense of fearful, viz., that which causes and communicates terror—not that which receives terror—was undoubtedly in Shakespeare's age, but especially amongst poets, the preponderant sense. Accordingly I am of opinion that even in neutral cases, such as are open indifferently to either sense, viz., that which affrights, or that which is itself affrighted, the bias in Shakespeare's interpretation of the feeling lay towards the former movement. For instance, in one of his sonnets:

the true construction I believe to be—not this: Oh, though deriving terror from the circumstances surrounding thee, suffering terror from the entourage of considerations pursuing thee; but this: Oh, thought impressing and creating terror, etc. A 'fearful' agent in Shakespeare's use is not one that shrinks in alarm from the act, but an agent that causes others to shrink; not panic-struck, but panic-striking.

Miss Edgeworth, let me remark, commits trespasses on language that are really past excusing. In one place she says that a man 'had a contemptible opinion' of some other man's understanding. Such a blunder is not of that class which usage sanctions, and an accuracy not much short of pedantry would be argued in noticing: it is at once illiterate and vulgar in the very last degree. I mean that it is common amongst vulgar people, and them only. It ranks, for instance, with the common formula of 'I am agreeable, if you prefer it.'

Style is the disentangling of thoughts or ideas reciprocally involved in each other.

4.—Theological and Religious.

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Religion under any of its aspects, revealing or consoling—religion in connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when self-evoked by a person of earnest nature, not imposed from without by the necessities of monastic life, not caught as a contagion from the example of friends that surround you, argues some 'vast volcanic agency' moving at subterraneous depths below the ordinary working mind of daily life, and entitled by its own intrinsic grandeur to ennoble the curiosity (else a petty passion) which may put questions as to its origin. In any case of religion arising, as a spontaneous birth, in the midst of alien forces, it is inevitable to ask for its why and its whence. Religion considered as a sentiment of devotion, as a yearning after some dedication to an immeasurable principle of that noblest temple among all temples—'the upright heart and pure,' or religion, again, as the apprehension of some mighty synthesis amongst truths dimly perceived heretofore amidst separating clouds, but now brought into strict indissoluble connection, proclaims a revolution so great that it is otherwise not to be accounted for than as the breaking out of a germ of the supernatural in man as a seed from a hitherto barren soil.

Sin is that secret word, that dark aporréton of the human race, undiscoverable except by express revelation, which having once been laid in the great things of God as a germinal principle, has since blossomed into a vast growth of sublime ideas known only to those nations who have lived under the moulding of Scriptural truth—and comprehending all functions of the Infinite operatively familiar to man. Yes, I affirm that there is no form through which the Infinite reveals itself in a sense comprehensible by man and adequate to man; that there is no sublime agency which compresses the human mind from infancy so as to mingle with the moments of its growth, positively none but has been in its whole origin—in every part—and exclusively developed out of that tremendous mystery which lurks under the name of sin.

Yes, I affirm that even in its dreams every Christian child is invested by an atmosphere of sublimity unknown to the greatest of Pagan philosophers: that golden rays reach it by two functions of the Infinite; and that these, in common with those emanations of the Infinite that do not settle upon the mind until mature years, are all projections—derivations or counterpositions—from the obscure idea of sin; could not have existed under any previous condition; and for a Pagan mind would not have been intelligible.

Sin.—It is not only that the Infinite arises as part of the entire system resting on sin, but specifically from sin apart from its counterforces or reactions, viz., from sin as a thing, and the only thing originally shadowy and in a terrific sense mysterious.

Stench.—I believe that under Burke's commentary, this idea would become a high test of the doctrine of the Infinite. He pronounces it sublime, or sublime in cases of intensity. Now, first of all, the intense state of everything or anything is but a mode of power, that idea or element or moment of greatness under a varied form. Here, then, is nothing proper or separately peculiar to stench: it is not stench as stench, but stench as a mode or form of sensation, capable therefore of intensification. It is but a case under what we may suppose a general Kantian rule—that every sensation runs through all gradations, from the lowest or most obscure and nascent to the highest. Secondly, however, pass over to the contemplation of stench as stench: then I affirm—that as simply expounding the decay, and altering or spoiling tendency or state of all things—simply as a register of imperfection, and of one which does not (as ruins to the eye) ever put on a pleasing transitional aspect, it is merely disagreeable, but also at the same time mean. For the imperfection is merely transitional and fleeting, not absolute. First, midst and last, it is or can be grand when it reverts or comes round upon its mediating point, or point of reaction.

The arrangement of my Infinite must be thus: After having expounded the idea of holiness which I must show to be now potent, proceed to show that the Pagan Gods did not realize and did not meet this idea; that then came the exposure of the Pagan Gods and the conscious presence of a new force among mankind, which opened up the idea of the Infinite, through the awakening perception of holiness.

I believe that in every mode of existence, which probably is always by an incarnation, the system of flesh is made to yield the organs that express the alliance of man with the Infinite. Thus the idea of mystery, αποροητα, finds its organ of expression in the sensualities of the human race. Again, the crime, whatever it were, and the eternal pollution is expressed in these same organs. Also, the prolongation of the race so as to find another system is secured by the same organs.

Generally, that is, for a million against a unit, the awful mystery by which the fearful powers of death, and sorrow, and pain, and sin are locked into parts of a whole; so as, in fact, to be repetitions, reaffirmations of each other under a different phase—this is nothing, does not exist. Death sinks to a mere collective term—a category—a word of convenience for purposes of arrangement. You depress your hands, and, behold! the system disappears; you raise them, it reappears. This is nothing—a cipher, a shadow. Clap your hands like an Arabian girl, and all comes back. Unstop your ears, and a roar as of St. Lawrence enters: stop your ears, and it is muffled. To and fro; it is and it is not—is not and is. Ah, mighty heaven, that such a mockery should cover the whole vision of life! It is and it is not; and on to the day of your death you will still have to learn what is the truth.

The eternal now through the dreadful loom is the overflowing future poured back into the capacious reservoir of the past. All the active element lies in that infinitesimal now. The future is not except by relation; the past is not at all, and the present but a sign of a nexus between the two.

God's words require periods, so His counsels. He cannot precipitate them any more than a man in a state of happiness can commit suicide. Doubtless it is undeniable that a man may arm his hand with a sword: and that his flesh will be found penetrable to the sword, happy or not. But this apparent physical power has no existence, no value for a creature having a double nature: the moral nature not only indisposes him to use his power, but really creates a far greater antagonist power.

This God—too great to be contemplated steadily by the loftiest of human eyes; too approachable and condescending to be shunned by the meanest in affliction: realizing thus in another form that reconcilement of extremes, which St. Paul observed: far from all created beings, yet also very near.

'A conviction that they needed a Saviour was growing amongst men.' How? In what sense? Saviour from what? You can't be saved from nothing. There must be a danger, an evil threatening, before even in fancy you can think of a deliverer. Now, what evil was there existing to a Pagan? Sin? Monstrous! No such idea ever dawned upon the Pagan intellect. Death? Yes; but that was inalienable from his nature. Pain and disease? Yes; but these were perhaps inalienable also. Mitigated they might be, but it must be by human science, and the progress of knowledge. Grief? Yes; but this was inalienable from life. Mitigated it might be, but by superior philosophy. From what, then, was a Saviour to save? If nothing to save from, how any Saviour? But here arises as the awful of awfuls to me, the deep, deep exposure of the insufficient knowledge and sense of what is peculiar to Christianity. To imagine some sense of impurity, etc., leading to a wish for a Saviour in a Pagan, is to defraud Christianity of all its grandeur. If Paganism could develop the want, it is not at all clear that Paganism did not develop the remedy. Heavens! how deplorable a blindness! But did not a Pagan lady feel the insufficiency of earthly things for happiness? No; because any feeling tending in that direction would be to her, as to all around her, simply a diseased feeling, whether from dyspepsia or hypochondria, and one, whether diseased or not, worthless for practical purposes. It would have to be a Christian lady, if something far beyond, something infinite, were not connected with it, depending on it. But if this were by you ascribed to the Pagan lady, then that is in other words to make her a Christian lady already.

Exhibition of a Roman Dialogue on Sin.—What! says the ignorant and unreflecting modern Christian. Do you mean to tell me that a Roman, however buried in worldly objects, would not be startled at hearing of a Saviour? Now, hearken.

Roman. Saviour! What do you mean? Saviour for what? In good faith, my friend, you labour under some misconception. I am used to rely on myself for all the saving that I need. And, generally speaking, if you except the sea, and those cursed north-east winds, I know of no particular danger.

Christian. Oh, my friend, you totally mistake the matter. I mean saving from sin.

Roman. Saving from a fault, that is—well, what sort of a fault? Or, how should a man, that you say is no longer on earth, save me from any fault? Is it a book to warn me of faults that He has left?

Christian. Why, yes. Not that He wrote Himself; but He talked, and His followers have recorded His views. But still you are quite in the dark. Not faults, but the fountain of all faults, that is what He will save you from.

Roman. But how? I can understand that by illuminating my judgment in general He might succeed in making me more prudent.

Christian. 'Judgment,' 'prudent'—these words show how wide by a whole hemisphere you are of the truth. It is your will that He applies His correction to.

Roman. 'Will!' why I've none but peaceable and lawful designs, I assure you. Oh! I begin to see. You think me a partner with those pirates that we just spoke to.

Christian. Not at all, my friend. I speak not of designs or intentions. What I mean is, the source of all desires—what I would call your wills, your whole moral nature.

Roman (bridling). Ahem! I hope Roman nature is quite as little in need of improvement as any other. There are the Cretans; they held up their heads. Accordingly they had their fire institutions, and that true institution against bribery and luxury, and all such stuff. They fancied themselves impregnable. Why, bless you! even Marcus Tullius, that was a prosing kind of man and rather peevish about such things, could not keep in the truth. 'Why, Cato, my boy,' says he, 'you talk.' And to hear you, bribery and luxury would not leave one a stick to fight for. Why, now, these same Cretans—lord! we took the conceit out of them in twenty-five minutes. No more time, I assure you, did it cost three of our cohorts to settle the whole lot of them.

Christian. My friend, you are more and more in the dark. What I mean is not present in your senses, but a disease.

Roman. Oh, a disease! that's another thing. But where?

Christian. Why, it affects the brain and the heart.

Roman. Well, now, one at a time. Take the brain—we have a disease, and we treat it with white hellebore. There may be a better way. But answer me this. If you are generally affected, what right have you to bring, as you are supposing, a diseased brain to a sound one? We Romans are all sound—sound as a bell.

Then Christian goes on to the history of the fall. But the whole would be self-baffled and construed away from want of sin as the antithesis of holiness.

Why St. Paul and the Athenians did not come to an Understanding.—So, again, if you think that St. Paul had a chance with the Athenians. If he had, it would tax his divine benevolence to see that he forbore to pursue it. This attempt shows that he was under a misconception. He fancied a possibility of preaching a pure religion. What followed? He was, he must have been defeated. That is, practically, else why did he not persist? But his confutation was the factual confutation of experience. It was no go. That he found too surely. But why? I am sure that he never found out. Enough that he felt—that under a strong instinct he misgave—a deep, deep gulf between him and them, so that neither could he make a way to their sense, nor they, except conjecturally, to his. For, just review the case. What was the ευαγγελιον, the good tidings, which he announced to man? What burthen of hope? What revelation of a mystery of hope arising out of a deeper mystery of despair? He announced a deliverer. Deliverer! from what? Answer that—from what? Why, from evil, you say. Evil! of what kind? Why, you retort, did not the Pagans admit that man was lying under evil? Not at all; nothing of the kind. But you are sure you have heard of such things? Very likely. And now you are forced back upon your arguments you remember specially that evil as to its origin was a favourite speculation of theirs. Evil, in its most comprehensive designation, whence is it? How came it? Now, mark, even to that extent, viz., the extent indicated by this problem, the ancients had no conception of evil corresponding to, no, nor dimly approaching to, a correspondence with ours. They had no ineffable standard of purity; how, then, any function of impurity? They had no ineffable doctrine of pain or suffering answering to a far more realized state of perception, and, therefore, unimaginably more exquisite; how, then, could they raise a question on the nature or fountains of such pains? They executed no synthesis, and could execute none upon the calamities of life; they never said in ordinary talk that this was a world of sorrow, either apostrophizing a newborn child, or a world of disappointment, bemoaning a mature victim; neither as in the anguish of meditative reflection, nor in the prudence of extenuating apology. The grand sanctus which arises from human sensibility, Perish empires and the crowns of kings, etc., first arose in connection with Christianity.[30] Life was a good life; man was a prosperous being. Hope for men was his natural air; despondency the element of his own self-created folly. Neither could it be otherwise. For, besides that, it would be too immeasurable a draught of woe to say in one breath that this only was the crux or affirmation of man's fate, and yet that this also was wretched per se; not accidentally made wretched by imprudence, but essentially and irrevocably so by necessity of its nature. Besides all this, which has a lurking dependency upon man's calculations of what is safe, he sees that this mode of thinking would leave him nothing; yet even that extreme consequence would not check some honest or sincere or desperate minds from uttering their convictions that life really was this desperate game—much to lose and nothing in the best case to win. So far there would have been a dangerous gravitation at all times to the sad conclusion of Paganism. But, meanwhile, this dangerous gravitation was too dangerous, and Providence has deeply counteracted it by principles laid down in human nature. I affirm that where the ideas of man, where the possible infinities are not developed, then also the exorbitant on the other field is strongly pulled up. No ideals of evil can take place except under ideals of happiness that passeth all understanding. No synthesis can ever be executed, that is, no annumeration of A, B, C into a common total, viewed as elements tending to a common unity, unless previously this unity has been preconceived, because the elements are not elements, viz., original constituents of a representative whole (a series tending to a summation), unless that which is constituted—that whole—is previously given in idea. Since A and B and C could not be viewed as tending to a unity, having no existence except through them, unless previously that unity had existed for the regulation and eduction of its component elements. And this unity in the case of misery never could have been given unless far higher functions than any which could endure Paganism, or which Paganism could endure. Until the sad element of a diseased will is introduced, until the affecting notion is developed of a fountain in man himself welling up the misery for ever, no idea of misery could arise. Suffering is limited and transitory. What pain is permanent in man? Even the deepest laceration of the human heart, that which is inflicted by the loss of those who were the pulses of our hearts, is soothed (if never wholly healed) by time. One agency of time would avail for this effect were there no other. The features of the individual whom we mourn grow dimmer and dimmer as time advances; and, pari passu, the features of places and collateral objects and associated persons from whom reverberated these afflicting reminiscences of the lost object.

I return: Deliverer from what? From suffering or misery. But that was not acknowledged, nor could have been, we could see no misery as a hypothesis except in these two modes: First, as a radication in man by means of something else, some third thing. Secondly, as a synthesis—as a gathering under a principle which must act prior to the gathering in order to provoke it. (The synthesis must be rendered possible and challenged by the à priori unity which otherwise constitutes that unity.) As a metaphysical possibility evil was recognised through its unfathomable nature. But this was because such a nature already presupposed a God's nature, realizing his own ends, stepped in with effect. For the highest form—the normal or transcendent form—of virtue to a Pagan, was in the character of citizen. Indeed, the one sole or affirmative form of virtue lay in this sole function, viz., of public, of patriotic virtue. Since here only it was possible to introduce an additional good to the world. All other virtue, as of justice between individual and individual, did but redress a previous error, sometimes of the man himself, sometimes of social arrangement, sometimes of accident. It was a plus which balanced and compensated a pre-existing minus—an action in regressu, which came back with prevailing power upon an action in progressu. But to be a patriot was to fulfil a call of the supererogatory heart—a great nisus of sympathy with the one sole infinite, the sole practical infinite that man pre-Christian ever could generate for his contemplation. Now, therefore, it followed that the idea of virtue here only found its realization. Virtue, in fact, was not derivatively or consequentially connected with patriotism, it was immanent; not transitively associated by any links whatever, but immanently intertwisted, indwelling in the idea. Therefore it happened that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing, trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That would have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim virtue and vice mere bubbles and chimeras. He who really thinks so even we reasonably suspect of practical indifference unless when we believe him to speak as a misanthrope.

The question suppose to commence as to the divine mission of Christ. And the feeble understanding is sure to think this will be proved best by proving the subject of this doubt to have been a miracle-working power. And of all miracles, to have mastered (not merely escaped or evaded) death will be in his opinion the greatest. So that if Christ could be proved to have absolutely conquered death, i.e., to have submitted to death, but only to recoil from his power and overthrow it, to have died and subsequently to have risen again, will, à fortiori, prove Him to have been sent of God.

Not so. All and every basis of credibility must be laid in the moral nature, where the thing to be believed is important, i.e., moral. And I therefore open with this remark absolutely zermalmende to the common intellect: That from a holy faith you may infer a power of resurrection, but not from a power of resurrection fifty times repeated can we infer a holy faith. What in the last result is the thing to be proved? Why, a holy revelation, not of knowledge, but of things practical; of agenda, not scienda. It is essential that this holy should also be new, original, revelatum. Because, else, the divinest things which are connata and have been common to all men, point to no certain author. They belong to the dark foundations of our being, and cannot challenge a trust, faith, or expectation as suspended upon any particular individual man whatever.

Here, then, arises the πρωτοντοκινον. Thick darkness sits on every man's mind as to Christ's revelation. He fancies that it amounts to this: 'Do what is good. Do your duty. Be good.' And with this vague notion of the doctrine, natural is it that he should think it as old as the hills. The first step to a saner view is, to understand—if a man has sense enough to reach so high—that the subtlest discoveries ever made by man, all put together, do not make one wave of that Atlantic as to novelty and originality which lies in the moral scheme of Christianity. I do not mean in the total scheme of Christianity, redemption, etc. No, but in the ethics.

All ethics that ever Greece refined or Rome illustrated, was, and could be, only the same universal system of social ethics—ethics proper and exclusive to man and man inter se, with no glimpse of any upward relationship.

Now Christianity looks upward for the first time. This in the first place. Secondly, out of that upward look Christianity looks secondarily down again, and reacts even upon the social ethics in the most tremendous way.

For my Book on the Relations of Christianity to Man.—S. T. C. cites Jeremy Taylor, etc., for horrible passages on the gloomy state of the chances for virtuous Pagans. S. T. C. in a more liberal generation is shocked; and of course in his readers as in himself secretly, he professes more liberal ideas. Aye, but how is he entitled to these ideas? For, on further consideration, it is not Cicero only, or Epictetus only, that would suffer under this law of Christianity viewed in its reagency, but also Abraham, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hezekiah. Because, how could they benefit by a Redeemer not yet revealed—nay, by a Redeemer not even existing? For it is not the second person in the Trinity—not He separately and abstractedly—that is the Redeemer, but that second person incarnated. St. Paul apparently wished to smuggle this tremendous question into a fraudulent solution, by mixing up Abraham (with others pre-Christian and Christian) into the long array of those whose Faith had saved them. But faith in whom? General faith in God is not the thing, it is faith in Jesus Christ; and we are solemnly told in many shapes that no other name was given on earth through which men could be delivered. Indeed, if not, how is the Messiah of such exclusive and paramount importance to man? The Messiah was as yet (viz., in Abraham's time) a prophecy—a dim, prophetic outline of one who should be revealed. But if Abraham and many others could do without Him, if this was a dispensable idea, how was it in any case, first or last, indispensable? Besides, recur to the theory of Christianity. Most undeniably it was this, that neither of the two elements interested in man could save him; not God; He might have power, but His purity revolted. Power (or doubtfully so), but no will. Not man—for he, having the will, had no power. God was too holy; manhood too unholy. Man's gifts, applicable, but insufficient. God's sufficient, but inapplicable. Then came the compromise. How if man could be engrafted upon God? Thus only, and by such a synthesis, could the ineffable qualities of God be so co-ordinated with those of man.

Suppose even that a verbal inspiration could have been secured—secured, observe, against gradual changes in language and against the reactionary corruption of concurrent versions, which it would be impossible to guarantee as also enjoying such an inspiration (since, in that case, what barrier would divide mine or anybody's wilfully false translations from that pretending to authority? I repeat what? None is conceivable, since what could you have beyond the assurance of the translator, even which could only guarantee his intentions)—here is a cause of misinterpretation amounting to ruin, viz., after being read for centuries as if practically meant for our guidance, such and such a chapter (e.g., Jael and Sisera), long proscribed by the noble as a record of abominable perfidy, has at length been justified on the ground that it was never meant for anything else. Thus we might get rid of David, etc., were it not that for his flexible obedience to the clerus he has been pronounced the man after God's own heart.

Is it not dreadful that at the very vestibule of any attempt to execute the pretended law of God and its sentences to hell we are interrupted by one case in every three as exceptional? Of the deaths, one in three are of children under five. Add to these surely very many up to twelve or thirteen, and many up to eighteen or twenty, then you have a law which suspends itself for one case in every two.

Note in the argument drawn from perishableness of language. Not only (which I have noted) is any language, ergo the original, Chaldæan, Greek, etc., perishable even for those who use it, but also the vast openings to error which all languages open to translators form a separate source of error in translators, viz.:

1. The old one on my list that for them the guidance of inspiration has ceased, else, if not, you must set up an inspiration separately to translators, since, if you say—No, not at all, why, which then?

2. The uncertainty of a foreign language even in a day contemporary with the original writer, and therefore over and above what arises from lapse of time and gradual alterations.

On Human Progress.—Oftentimes it strikes us all that this is so insensible as to elude observation the very nicest. Five years add nothing, we fancy. Now invert your glass. In 1642 Englishmen are fighting for great abstract principles. In 1460-83 (i.e., 100 + 17 + 42 years before, or 159 years) they are fighting for persons, for rival candidates. In 1460 they could not have conceived more than an Esquimaux can entertain a question about the constitution of lyric poetry, or the differential principles of English and Greek tragedy, the barest approximation to questions that in 1642 are grounds of furious quarrel, of bloody quarrel, of extermination. Now then, looking forward, you would see from year to year little if any growth; but inverting your glass, looking back from the station of 1642 to 1460, you see a progress that if subdivided amongst all the 159 years would give to each x/0 as its quota, i.e. infinity. In fact, it is like the progression from nothing to something. It is—creation.

All the body of the Christian world would fly out in a rage if you should say that Christianity required of you many things that were easy, but one thing that was not. Yet this is undoubtedly true; it requires you to believe, and even in the case where you know what it is to believe, and so far are free from perplexity, you have it not in your own power to ensure (though you can influence greatly) your own power to believe. But also great doubt for many (and for all that are not somewhat metaphysical) attends the knowledge of what is believing.

As to my mother's fancy that Sir W. Jones had found in the East proofs of Christianity, having gone out an infidel.

To do her justice, never once after she had adopted a theory of Christianity did she inquire or feel anxious about its proof. But to review the folly of this idea.

1. That Christianity there where it reigned and was meant to reign should be insufficient in its proofs; but that in a far distant land, lurking in some hole or corner, there should be proofs of its truth, just precisely where these proofs were not wanted. And again, that these should be reserved for one scholar rambling into a solitary path, where in a moral sense nobody could follow him (for it is nobody—this or that oriental scholar). And we are sure that his proof was not of that order to shine by its own light, else it would have resounded through England.

2. That for many hundreds of years Christianity should have been received, generation after generation should have lived under its vital action, upon no sufficient argument, and suddenly such an argument should turn up as a reward to a man in a country not Christian for being more incredulous than his neighbours; how impossible!

That fraudulent argument which affects to view the hardships of an adventurous life and its perils as capable of one sole impression—that of repulsion—and secondly as the sole circumstances about such adventures, injures from the moment when it is perceived: not

1. The writer only; no matter for him, worthless liar, how much he sinks in the opinion of his readers: but

2. The Apostles. Now see the injury of falsehood. Suddenly it snaps, and with a great reaction causes a jar to the whole system, which in ordinary minds it is never likely to recover. The reason it is not oftener perceived is that people read such books in a somnolent, inactive state of mind, one-tenth coming to a subject on which they have already made up their minds, and open to no fresh impressions, the other nine-tenths caring not one straw about the matter, as reading it in an age of irreflectiveness and purely through an act of obedience to their superiors, else not only does this hypocritical attempt to varnish give way all at once, and suddenly (with an occasion ever after of doubt, and causing a reflection to any self-sufficient man, suddenly coming to perceive that he has been cheated, and with some justification for jealousy thenceforwards to the maker up of a case), but also it robs the Apostles of the human grace they really possessed. For if we suppose them armed against all temptations, snares, seductions, by a supernatural system of endowments, this is but the case of an angel—nay, not of an angel, for it is probable that when an angel incarnated himself, or one of the Pagan deities, who was obliged first to incarnate himself before he could act amongst men, or so much as be seen by men, he was bound by all the defects of man, i.e., he could choose only an ideal, so far ideal as to elude the worst effects from vice, intemperance, etc. The angel who wrestled with Jacob probably did his best; he was a stout fellow, but so was the patriarch. The very condition of incarnation, and this because the mere external form already includes limitations (as of a fish, not to fly; of a man, not to fly, etc.) probably includes as a necessity, not as a choice, the adoption of all evils connected with the nature assumed. Even the Son of God, once incarnated, was not exempted from any evil of flesh; He grew, passed through the peculiar infirmities of every stage up to mature life; would have grown old, infirm, weak, had He lived longer; was liable to death, the worst of all human evils, and was not, we may be sure, exempted from any one fleshly desire with regard to sex, or enemies, or companions, but because that divine principle, which also is in man, yes, in every man the foulest and basest—this light which the darkness comprehended not, and which in some is early extinguished, but in all fights fitfully with the winds and storms of this human atmosphere, in Him was raised to a lustre unspeakable by His pure and holy will.