where does all virtue and vice go to? And this brings one straight to the question of madness, on which I fully agree with you. I said so in print, long ago, in a sermon on Ahab at Ramoth Gilead, which you will find in my first set of National Sermons. And I have seen cases myself which I could attribute to nothing else. I cannot but believe that a peculiar kind of epilepsy of which I have had two cases among the poor of my parish, and some of the horrible phenomena of puerperal mania, are 'the unclean spirit' of the New Testament. I am perfectly certain that the accesses of mingled pride, rage, suspicion, and hatred of everybody and everything, accompanied by the most unspeakable sense of loneliness. and darkness' (St. John's metaphor, for it is the only one), which were common to me in youth, and are now, by God's grace, very rare (though I am just as capable of them as ever, when I am at unawares and give place to the devil by harsh judgments or bitter words) were and are nothing less than temporary possession by a devil. I am sure that the way in which those fits pass off in a few minutes, as soon as I get ashamed of myself, is not to be explained by 'habit,' either physical or moral (though moral habits' I don't believe in), but by the actual intervention of an unseen personage, I believe our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, driving away that devil. I had once a temporary madman here among our cottagers, who in his first fit tore off his clothes and ran away into the woods naked. (I suspect that desire of nakedness to be the blind effort to be merely himself, and to escape from the sense of oppression caused by some thing or being, over and above self, i.e. from possession.) In that fit I did not see him, it was before I came here. In his second he turned melancholy mad, walked up and down in silence, and when he spoke, declared that the devil had hold of him, and would not let him sleep. The doctor luckily believed in demoniacal Letters to Mr. Bullar 7 possession, and came to me, saying, 'I can't cure this man's mind by making his liver act. You must make his liver act by curing his mind.' I went to the patient and agreed with him fully, that the devil was in him; and I said, 'I will tell you why he is in you; because, my dear man, you have been a thief, and a cheat, and a liar' (as all the world knew), ' and have sold yourself to the father of lies. But if you will pray to God to forgive you (and then I set forth those precious promises in Christ, which the Record thinks I don't believe), and will lead a new and honest life, you may snap your fingers at the devil.' And after awhile the man got well, and has had no return for seven years. I did that in the face of the troublesome fact, that his son (and a great rogue too) was subject to melancholy madness also, and that his sister was evidently cracked - her madness being causeless jealousy. That looked like a 'constitutional' defect in the family blood; but I thought the man must know his own business best, and took him at his word, and on the same plan I had very fair success with his son also. But enough." TO JOHN BULLAR, ESQ. - March 12, 1856.- "Your letters are very pleasant; but they weigh me down with the thought of how little one knows and after all how little man knows. I have craved after knowledge—I have not found it. I have with Solomon given my heart to know madness and folly, yet acquainting myself with wisdom, and can only say with the Faust of the Old World,' 'Cast thy bread on the waters and thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven and also to eight, for thou knowest not what evil shall be on the earth. Hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. As for wisdom, it is vanity, and much study is a weariness to the flesh, and of making many books there is no end.' Knowing? Knowest thou how the bones grow in the womb of her that is with child?' or why the little Diatomaceæ split into separate cells when their time is come? Everywhere, skin deep below our boasted science, we are brought up short by mystery impalpable, and by the adamantine gates of transcendental forces and incomprehensible laws-gates of which the Lord, who is both God and Man, alone holds the key, and alone can break the seal and if He has not broken them for Himself, He has not broken them for us. I, too, have tormented my soul with metaphysics and thought about thinking, and I know no more than at first, and from Locke to Kant and Hegel, I believe nobody knows. What are we each of us but—an infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry'? "Is it likely to be less so, then, with theologies and ecclesiastical systems? It was not so with St. Paul, certainly, even granting him to have been (what he never asserted himself to be) infallible. He has no ecclesiastical system. The facts of church arrangement in his time, as far as he mentions them, are utterly different from anything which has been seen in Christendom for more than a thousand years. 'God hath set some in the church, first apostles, prophets, evangelists, workers of miracles, helps, &c.' What does all that mean? Nobody knows, but each tries to squeeze out of it a word or two, which will fit their little theory, Popish or Protestant. Those prophesyings, unknown tongues, interpretations, all that mysterious machinery, which he speaks of in 1 Cor. xiv. as an integral part of assembled worship and as a peculiar proof of God's presence, and the influence of His spirit- what have we like that? What even was it? Nobody knows. In one place he seems to look down on it, almost as a form of hysteria Letters to Mr. Bullar 9 in another to exalt it as the very power of God. I can't understand it, and I know nobody who does. "While as for doctrine - he says himself that he only knows in part, and prophesies in part-sees through a glass darkly that his knowledge is but as that of a child, speaking and understanding as a child, and that all the knowledge he has shall vanish away, just as the tongues will fail and the prophecies cease, and that all which will endure will be charity, real, active love; that the intellectual element, and its outward manifestations, of system and worship and perhaps dogma, are temporary, and the moral-spiritual one the only permanent eternal thing of which he has hold. And yet I am asked to build up out of St. Paul's writings a complete. system of theology and anthropology tout rond' without a flaw, or a point for doubt - And when I turn to St. James I find him contradicting St. Paul so flatly in words, as to exercise all the ingenuity of commentators to make the two agree (as no doubt they do) in fundamental doctrine. And when I turn to St. John, I find an entirely new aspect of the truth; and in his first chapter an assertion that it was 'to those who believed on Him that He gave power to become the children of God' in the face of St. Paul's appeal to the very heathen poets that all men are the offspring of God. And in Galatians iv. that the difference between the heathen and the Christian, or perhaps between the human race before and after Christ, is that the one is God's child under tutors and governors, and the other God's fullgrown and conscious son who has received the violeσía, which is not adoption vioroinois, but the mere putting on the toga virilis. How am I to reconcile them? I know not. And now perhaps you have been thinking me little better than a skeptic, yet I am not. Some things I see clearly, and hold with desperate clutch. A Father in Heaven for all, a Son of God incarnate for all (That incarnation is the one fact which is to me worth all, because it makes all others possible and rational, and without it I should go mad), and a Spirit of the Father and the Son (I attach infinite importance to that double procession-the Holy Spirit of the Greek Church is to me nothing and no-sense), who works to will and to do of His own good pleasurein whom? In every human being in whom there is one spark of active good, the least desire to do right, or to be of use the fountain of all good on earth. Beyond that I see little, save that Right is divine and all conquering - Wrong utterly infernal, and yet weak, foolish, a mere bullying phantom, which would flee at each brave blow, had we courage to strike at it in God's name. "But, as for speculations as to what man's soul or unseen element is, and what happens to it when he dies, theories of Elysium and Tartarus, and of the future of this planet and its inhabitants, I leave them to those who see no miracles in every blade of grass, no unfathomable mysteries in every animalcule, and to whom Scripture is an easy book, of which they have mastered every word, by the convenient process of ignoring threefourths of it. . . . Yes, Mr. Bullar, you complain that the Church of England is fallen to a low ebb. She is no lower (I think her a great deal higher) than any other Christian denomination. She will be higher as long as she keeps her Articles, which bind men to none of the popular superstitions, but are so cautious, wide, and liberal, that I could almost believe them to have come down from heaven. But as soon as a generation of Bishops arises (either High or Low) who persist in demanding of candidates for ordination the popular creed, making those Articles mean that creed, and nothing else, then God help us; for the day of the Lord will be at hand, and will be revealed in flaming |