Note 20 — THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

'Blasphemy.'—If the reader can refer to my papers on Fiction in the 'Nineteenth Century,' he will find this word carefully defined in its Scriptural, and evermore necessary, meaning,—'Harmful speaking'—not against God only, but against man, and against all the good works and purposes of Nature. The word is accurately opposed to 'Euphemy,' the right or well-speaking of God and His world; and the two modes of speech are those which going out of the mouth sanctify or defile the man.

Going out of the mouth, that is to say, deliberately and of purpose. A French postilion's 'Sacr-r-ré'—loud, with the low 'Nom de Dieu' following between his teeth, is not blasphemy, unless against his horse;—but Mr. Thackeray's close of his Waterloo chapter in 'Vanity Fair,' "And all the night long Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face dead with a bullet through his heart," is blasphemy of the most fatal and subtle kind.

And the universal instinct of blasphemy in the modern vulgar scientific mind is above all manifested in its love of what is ugly, and natural inthrallment by the abominable;—so that it is ten to one if, in the description of a new bird, you learn much more of it than the enumerated species of vermin that stick to its feathers; and in the natural history museum of Oxford, humanity has been hitherto taught, not by portraits of great men, but by the skulls of cretins.

But the deliberate blasphemy of science, the assertion of its own virtue and dignity against the always implied, and often asserted, vileness of all men and—Gods,—heretofore, is the most wonderful phenomenon, so far as I can read or perceive, that hitherto has arisen in the always marvelous course of the world's mental history.

Take, for brief general type, the following 92d paragraph of the 'Forms of Water':—

"But while we thus acknowledge our limits, there is also reason for wonder at the extent to which Science has mastered the system of nature. From age to age and from generation to generation, fact has been added to fact and law to law, the true method and order of the Universe being thereby more and more revealed. In doing this, Science has encountered and overthrown various forms of superstition and deceit, of credulity and imposture. But the world continually produces weak persons and wicked persons, and as long as they continue to exist side by side, as they do in this our day, very debasing beliefs will also continue to infest the world."

The debasing beliefs meant being simply those of Homer, David, and St. John[A]—as against a modern French gamin's. And what the results of the intended education of English gamins of every degree in that new higher theology will be, England is I suppose by this time beginning to discern.

In the last 'Fors'[B] which I have written, on education of a safer kind, still possible, one practical point is insisted on chiefly,—that learning by heart, and repetition with perfect accent and cultivated voice, should be made quite principal branches of school discipline up to the time of going to the university.

And of writings to be learned by heart, among other passages of indisputable philosophy and perfect poetry, I include certain chapters of the—now for the most part forgotten—wisdom of Solomon; and of these, there is one selected portion which I should recommend not only school-boys and girls, but persons of every age, if they don't know it, to learn forthwith, as the shortest summary of Solomon's wisdom;—namely, the seventeenth chapter of Proverbs, which being only twenty-eight verses long, may be fastened in the dullest memory at the rate of a verse a day in the shortest month of the year. Out of the twenty-eight verses, I will read you seven, for example of their tenor,—the last of the seven I will with your good leave dwell somewhat upon. You have heard the verses often before, but probably without remembering that they are all in this concentrated chapter.

Verse 1.—Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than a house full of good eating, with strife. (Remember, in reading this verse, that though England has chosen the strife, and set every man's hand against his neighbor, her house is not yet so full of good eating as she expected, even though she gets half of her victuals from America.)

Verse 3.—The fining pot is for silver, the furnace for gold, but the Lord tries the heart. (Notice the increasing strength of trial for the more precious thing: only the melting-pot for the silver—the fierce furnace for the gold—but the Fire of the Lord for the heart.)

Verse 4.—A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips. (That means, for you, that, intending to live by usury and swindling, you read Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Stuart Mill, and other such political economists.)

Verse 5.—Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker. (Mocketh,—by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less than his misfortune,—England's favorite theory now-a-days.)

Verse 12.—Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly. (Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling the passengers over London Bridge, "mostly fools,"—on the ground that men are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under, as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader will please observe that the essential function of modern education is to develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at his forge and plow,—and those tutors teach him his true value, indulge him in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up to London,—give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear,—and it is fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand over London Bridge.)

Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly to ask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system of competitive examination:— Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it? (You know perfectly well it isn't the wisdom you want, but the "station in life,"—and the money!)

Lastly, Verse 7.—Wisdom is before him that hath understanding, but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. "And in the beginnings of it"! Solomon would have written, had he lived in our day; but we will be content with the ends at present. No scientific people, as I told you at first, have taken any notice of the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-night given you register. But, from the constant arrangements of the universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil, and to end—in nothing.

And I have here a volume,[C] before quoted, by a very foolish and very lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter gives us,—founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs,'—the latest scientific views concerning the order of creation. "We have spoken already about a medium pervading space"—this is the Scientific God, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that the purest in heart cannot see—nor the softest in heart feel—this spacious Deity—a Medium, pervading space—"the office of which" (italics all mine) "appears to be to degrade and ultimately extinguish, all differential motion. It has been well pointed out by Thomson, that, looked at in this light, the universe is a system that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process of degradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as a candle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it as having been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as a candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert mass, and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty, will have utterly gone away."

Do you wish me to congratulate you on this extremely cheerful result of telescopic and microscopic observation, and so at once close my lecture? or may I venture yet to trespass on your time by stating to you any of the more comfortable views held by persons who did not regard the universe in what my author humorously calls "this light"?

In the peculiarly characteristic notice with which the 'Daily News' honored my last week's lecture, that courteous journal charged me, in the metaphorical term now classical on Exchange, with "hedging," to conceal my own opinions. The charge was not prudently chosen, since, of all men now obtaining any portion of popular regard, I am pretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least either for hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It is certainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on my sleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but the essential reason for my not telling you my own opinions on this matter is—that I do not consider them of material consequence to you.

It might possibly be of some advantage for you to know what—were he now living, Orpheus would have thought, or Æschylus, or a Daniel come to judgment, or John the Baptist, or John the Son of Thunder; but what either you, or I, or any other Jack or Tom of us all, think,—even if we knew what to think,—is of extremely small moment either to the Gods, the clouds, or ourselves.

Of myself, however, if you care to hear it, I will tell you thus much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now, no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or could have been written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was founded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of nature, all spring and summer long; and on the then demonstrable fact that over a great portion of the world's surface the air and the earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man as closely as a school-boy's primer is to his labor, and as gloriously as a lover's mistress is to his eyes.

That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round: fragments, indeed, of what existed still exist, and hours of what is past still return; but month by month the darkness gains upon the day, and the ashes of the Antipodes glare through the night.[D]

What consolation, or what courage, through plague, danger, or darkness, you can find in the conviction that you are nothing more than brute beasts driven by brute forces, your other tutors can tell you—not I: but this I can tell you—and with the authority of all the masters of thought since time was time,—that, while by no manner of vivisection you can learn what a Beast is, by only looking into your own hearts you may know what a Man is,—and know that his only true happiness is to live in Hope of something to be won by him, in Reverence of something to be worshiped by him, and in Love of something to be cherished by him, and cherished—forever.

Having these instincts, his only rational conclusion is that the objects which can fulfill them may be by his effort gained, and by his faith discerned; and his only earthly wisdom is to accept the united testimony of the men who have sought these things in the way they were commanded. Of whom no single one has ever said that his obedience or his faith had been vain, or found himself cast out from the choir of the living souls, whether here, or departed, for whom the song was written:—