IV. SCEPTICS' RELIGION. Under this department, sceptical objections, and systems or principles advocated as hostile to Christianity, are dispassionately considered. PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF AN ENQUIRER. A JOURNEY-AN INTERRUPTION BY THE READER-ROGER AS CRITIC And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy All thinking things, all objects of all thought, THE next morning saw Roger travelling on horseback along the great road, which leads towards Königsberg. The night had carried away the storm across the hills-leading it sobbing off in the distance-as a mother a riotous child. The sun looked bravely out and cheered the beaten barley, and made canal and river shine out again, along all their winding length, while here and there a roof or spire in Dantzic would glitter as though sheathed in silver. The mist and dewy gossamer that floated above the fields, and the countless drops that lay upon them,-two little worlds of waters above and beneath the narrow firmament of air that stretched between,-were blending into one, and drawing away together into the upper sky. There the vapours were taken up into the clouds and carried in them about the heavens, as in ships, till the time was come for another shower, and then they would disembark, and come down upon upon the earth once more, as rain. This is the life of the wondrous family of rains and snows, of mists and exhalations, they are the angels of the fields, which lie below, like Jacob in his dream, and watch them ascending and descending by the stairway of the sunshine. The sky-lark rose towards the clouds, and its music streamed down behind it, as the incense from a censer swung high into the air. The fresh odours of the morning, the breeze, the brightness, all united to fill the mind of Roger with that inexpressible exhilaration which the young, the happy, and the healthful feel when they are journeying alone with Nature. The sense of rushing gladness rendered slow motion intolerable; he urged his horse to a gallop, and dashed on by wood and field, and farm and farmer's wain, possessed by that hurrying boisterous joy, which is perhaps the more powerful in its impulse, as it has no clearly defined cause or object. Only when he remembered that a day's journey was before him did he slacken his speed into a walk. Proceeding thus leisurely, he drew three letters out of his pocket; the first, the epistle of last night, from Louise, at Königsberg; the second, one which had arrived enclosed within that, from Dr. Heinrichs, a Professor at the University there, under whose roof Louise was residing; and the third, a scrap from Ahlfeld, thrust into his hand that morning by a servant girl, as he was mounting his horse. As to the first of these, what is to be done? Is it justifiable to look over his shoulder and make public those words he reads with such delight for the fourth or fifth time already? If so, and that barrier is broken down, another wall of circumvallation stops us—the character of this Periodical. Are these pages—the favourite resort of the intelligent and the thoughtful-to become a receptacle for love-letters? Reader. "Now you may as well let us have it.” Writer. "My dear Sir, or Madam," as the case may be, "think a moment. This Magazine is a young warrior doing battle in the cause of Logic-with what consistency, then, could casque and breastplate be put off, and sword and shield laid by-for the silken service of the heart?" Reader. "But you cannot deny that you are writing a story, and there is a certain faith you are bound to keep with the public. Every one expects to be told something more without loss of time about Louise, and you have not informed us yet of so much as the colour of her eyes and hair." Writer. "All in good time. Besides I strenuously deny your insinuation-that I am writing a story. How dare you make it? How do you know what injury such an imputation might not inflict on the writer, whoever he, she, or it may be? Perhaps a Reverend, or a very Reverend, or a Professor, or a Divinity student may be on the eve of losing caste for ever should the secret get abroad. A story, indeed! We indignantly repel the charge. This is an argument-no story; an argument with certain characters and incidents which drop in as illustrations,— but true, from first to last, to its expressed purpose of examining and exposing scepticism." Reader. "Very well. Call it what you like, only get on." The second letter was from the Königsberg Professor of Natural History. It ran as follows: MY DEAR SIR, A letter from the seat of the Beast. They pretend to be willing to relinquish all claim. Come over and hold a council of war. That man is a fool, and worse, who goes through life acting on the conviction that his fellow-creatures are scoundrels. He is sure to repine too much -to cut his fingers with his own edge tools, and smart for his bad opinion of humanity.. But then, is one class of men an exception to this rule. With them, always understand the opposite intention to the one alleged. Be sure, when they speak peace, they mean war; when they pretend to be resigned, that they are secretly rubbing their hands with glee at having gained their object. I have not alarmed Louise by any hint of the danger that may threaten her. Yours, PAUL HEINRICHS. Roger mused over these words. The more he thought on them, the deeper grew his conviction of their wisdom, and the greater, accordingly, his anxiety. He found some consolation in the thought that three days would bring him to Königsberg, and that he had not to charge himself with any remissness in starting on the summons given. The third paper from Ahlfeld contained only a single line.-"God must be incomprehensible, not to humiliate, but to establish science." Here was a text to develope, a suggestion of no little depth to be sounded. It brightened and enlarged before the mind of Roger, as he meditated, into a glorious compass of meaning. "Yes," he thought-" on this very principle of the identity of knowing and being, if we could comprehend God, and yet were not God, the inconsistency would paralyze philosophy at the outset. To assert the comprehensibility of God, would, in apparently removing one difficulty, make all enquiry besides futile; there would be no principle to develope into law, no basis on which to construct a system. Contradiction in the conditioned is equivalent to impossibility. Contradiction in the absolute is not impossibility, but mystery. Ahlfeld was very fond of enigmatical oracular utterances, and this sentence, sent to Roger as a continuation of the conversation of the past night, was quite a specimen of his manner in these things. A favourite book with him, was the "symbols" of Pythagoras, and the commentaries of Hierocles on the Golden Verses. There lies a great truth in the sentence, but in his attempt to explain it to himself, Roger was ere long lost again in perplexity. Perhaps allowance should be made for a young metaphysician, in love, and riding through a pleasant country, when so many writers on these subjects, seated at their desks, drawing down their blinds, and retiring into themselves, have written only countless pages of vague and wordy unintelligibility. His thoughts went and came, now diverted by some object as he passed; now with Louise; and, presently again, caught and struggling in some intellectual entanglement. He felt deeply thankful to a German poet whose lines would haunt and hum about him, circling round and round among his ideas-one of those refrains of internal melody that sometimes pursue the mind for two or three days. The verses at any other season he might have overlooked, as containing very little true poetry. But affection had opened his heart to a perception of the poetry of feeling. Before, he had been the exclusive devotee of what may be called the poetry of the fancy. He had sought out everywhere richness of diction and of imagery; but now he was alive to the more insinuating charm of sentiment, gracefully and musically expressed, indebted alone for all its impressiveness to its own simple depth of truth. The song that kept thus rising in his heart and VOL. I. N 2 breaking by snatches from his lips, was one adapted for some fanciful impassioned man, resting by brook or under tree, in the hazy heat of the noontide summer time. "I'll rest me, under the branches here, and hear the birds sing that I love so dearly. How your song goes to my heart, sweet birds; what know ye of our love, sweet birds, so far off as this? I'll rest me close by the brooklet here, where the spring-flowers breathe that I love so dearly; who could have sent ye here, sweet flowers? Love gifts are ye from her, sweet flowers-so far off as this?” "Ah," thought Roger, "there speaks the true poet, and I should not have discerned him once. The heart teaches the taste. How true to nature is the feeling that fills the heart of the singer when he utters these words, and it seems to him as though the birds were all singing of his love; but then reality breaks in for a moment, and he asks, who can have taught them that secret lesson? The flowers so speak to him of her, that they seem to owe their place to her hand, and to breathe as memorials of her who is far away. The inner life of all nature is Love." A true critique. A prior sense of the delicate beauty of this order of poetry he could not have expressed had he been reviewer-general of bards and martinet of parts to some great critical organ of the day, whose office it is to station the natives of Parnassu, in their order of merit, which is consulted by the public, as the army list by soldiers. This little song is not yet done with. The imagination, which puts a life for the heart into inanimate, or into animate nature, can also place one there for the understanding. Hence the birth of what is the germ of pantheism in so many minds, in very different lands and times. Tradition need not hand it down. Men do not wait for philosophy to support it by sophistry, or to dignify it by a system. It is an error into which the untutored mind will fall of itself. The first false step is to remove God far away, and to worship certain representatives. The sun and moon, and the host of heaven, are hailed as ambassadors. Soon, to the perverted fancy of the worshippers, the servants are as the master,-the representatives play the god-they are called gods. Deity is attributed to the powers of nature. They are personified. Presidents of processes and of principles, people an imaginary Olympus. The same thought extended, underlay all the visible with a divine life. The two extremes of ancient philosophy were pantheistic. The first and the last of its endeavours were thus alike. It began with the attempt to refine and elevate the popular superstition,-to rationalize mythology and to moralize legendary marvel. Pythagoras, in the attempt to exhibit fully the infinity of God, failed to give him personality. He was a pantheist. The same attempt with which philosophy set out, was repeated at its close. It started in its youth from the lap of religion -it ran a brave and brilliant career of its own, throughout its manhood, but its childhood and its old age were similar; it returned to the point from which it set out, and became religious again in its declining years. Then, again, it was pantheistic. Hear Apuleius: Jove is the first of all things-Jove the last. Power masculine and maiden evermore, The soul of all things. Jove is strong-armed fire; This return of philosophy to a shelter under the sanction of religion was the virtual surrender of its high office. Reason in philosophy must accomplish all, be equal to every occasion, or philosophy gives place to theosophy. When the Neoplatonists said "we have an inner light, a special revelation," it is quite clear that they had been making assumptions which their logic could not sustain, and which they were fain to authenticate by the claim of inspiration. Modern pantheism has only improved upon the old in as far as it has borrowed from the Bible. But the lofty morality which pantheists have taken from the gospel, appears in most incongruous contrast with the remainder of their system. As, in some fisher's hut, in the midst of poverty and dirt, the gorgeous silks and rich brocades of some shipwrecked Indiaman may be seen put to the grotesque uses of ignorance;-so, to employ a similitude of Homeric length,-do the spoils of the gospel morality appear among the dimness and the cobwebs of German speculation. Pantheism lowers man as greatly on the one side, as it professes to exalt him on the other. Its affirmation is-all is God, and God is all. Therefore, man is a part of God. But his individuality is only temporary. In a pantheistic system to be sinful and to be finite, are almost interchangeable terms. The state of separate personality is one of imperfection. Sin with the Hegelian is inadequate development. The development of man's nature, which at the same time is the development of the divine, is the return of the individual into the universal, the absorption of the temporary contraries of present existence in the highest unity of them all. This principle is fatal to any faith in human responsibility. Man may live as he list. The only compensation (as Emerson tries to prove in his Essay on the subject) is the retribution in time. After death the drop is lost in the ocean, and personal existence is no more. Human beings are in the system of the pantheist like the drops thrown up by a fountain, which presently fall into the main body of the water, are lost in it, while at the same time, new ones are being continually thrown out. Now a learned philosopher, a man of culture, and moral principle, may not come to much harm in practice by the elaboration of principles of this sort. But let them be announced in a popular form-that is, without cautious qualifications and nice distinctions, and the mischief is incalculable. It is in vain for the sage to speak to the crowd, as it were from his parlor window, and to say-" Be moral. Love one another." The morality of the Bible is useless without the facts of the Bible and the sanction of the Bible. What the needy world requires is not merely good advice, but a message and an influence from God, which shall convey the motive and the power elsewhere sought in vain. The mass of those who receive á popularized pantheism as the Bible of the people will embrace it as a * Primus cunctorum est et Jupiter ultimus idem. Jupiter et mas est ut que idem nympha perennis. Spiritus est cunctis: vali dusque est Jupiter igris; Jupiter est pela gi radix: est lunaque solque.-De Mundo. |