APHORISM VII.

Leighton and Coleridge.

The proper and natural Effect, and in the absence of all disturbing or intercepting forces, the certain and sensible accompaniment of Peace, (or Reconcilement) with God, is our own inward Peace, a calm and quiet temper of mind. And where there is a consciousness of earnestly desiring, and of having sincerely striven after the former, the latter may be considered as a Sense of its presence. In this case, I say, and for a soul watchful, and under the discipline of the Gospel, the Peace with a man's self may be the medium or organ through which the assurance of his Peace with God is conveyed. We will not therefore condemn this mode of speaking, though we dare not greatly recommend it. Be it, that there is, truly and in sobriety of speech, enough of just analogy in the subjects meant, to make this use of the words, if less than proper, yet something more than metaphorical; still we must be cautious not to transfer to the Object the defects or the deficiency of the Organ, which must needs partake of the imperfections of the imperfect beings to whom it belongs. Not without the co-assurance of other senses and of the same sense in other men, dare we affirm that what our eye beholds, is verily there to be beholden. Much less may we conclude negatively, and from the inadequacy, or the suspension, or from any other affection of sight infer the non-existence, or departure, or changes of the thing itself. The chameleon darkens in the shade of him who bends over it to ascertain its colours. In like manner, but with yet greater caution, ought we to think respecting a tranquil habit of inward life, considered as a spiritual sense, as the medial Organ in and by which our Peace with God, and the lively Working of his Grace on our Spirit, are perceived by us. This Peace which we have with God in Christ, is inviolable; but because the sense and persuasion of it may be interrupted, the soul that is truly at peace with God may for a time be disquieted in itself, through weakness of faith, or the strength of temptation, or the darkness of desertion, losing sight of that grace, that love and light of God's countenance, on which its tranquillity and joy depend. Thou didst hide thy face, saith David, and I was troubled.[49] But when these eclipses are over, the soul is revived with new consolation, as the face of the earth is renewed and made to smile with the return of the sun in the spring; and this ought always to uphold Christians in the saddest times, namely, that the grace and love of God towards them depend not on their sense, nor upon anything in them, but is still in itself, incapable of the smallest alteration.

A holy heart that gladly entertains grace, shall find that it and peace cannot dwell asunder; while an ungodly man may sleep to death in the lethargy of carnal presumption and impenitency; but a true, lively, solid peace, he cannot have. There is no peace to the wicked, saith my God. Isa. lvii. 21.

APHORISM VIII.

Worldly Hopes.

Leighton.

Worldly hopes are not living, but lying hopes; they die often before us, and we live to bury them, and see our own folly and infelicity in trusting to them; but at the utmost, they die with us when we die, and can accompany us no further. But the lively Hope, which is the Christian's Portion, answers expectation to the full, and much beyond it, and deceives no way but in that happy way of far exceeding it.

A living hope, living in death itself! The world dares say no more for its device, than Dum spiro spero: but the children of God can add, by virtue of this living hope, Dum exspiro spero.

APHORISM IX.

The Worldling's Fear.

Leighton.

It is a fearful thing when a man and all his hopes die together. Thus saith Solomon of the wicked, Prov. xi. 7.—When he dieth, then die his hopes; (many of them before, but at the utmost then, all of them;) but the righteous hath hope in his death, Prov. xiv. 32.[50]

APHORISM X.

Worldly Mirth.

Leighton and Coleridge.

As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to a heavy heart, Prov. xxv. 20. Worldly mirth is so far from curing spiritual grief, that even worldly grief, where it is great and takes deep root, is not allayed but increased by it. A man who is full of inward heaviness, the more he is encompassed about with mirth, it exasperates and enrages his grief the more; like ineffectual weak physic, which removes not the humour, but stirs it and makes it more unquiet. But spiritual joy is seasonable for all estates: in prosperity, it is pertinent to crown and sanctify all other enjoyments, with this which so far surpasses them; and in distress, it is the only Nepenthe, the cordial of fainting spirits: so, Psal. iv. 7. He hath put joy into my heart. This mirth makes way for itself, which other mirth cannot do. These songs are sweetest in the night of distress.

There is something exquisitely beautiful and touching in the first of these similes: and the second, though less pleasing to the imagination, has the charm of propriety, and expresses the transition with equal force and liveliness. A grief of recent birth is a sick infant that must have its medicine administered in its milk, and sad thoughts are the sorrowful heart's natural food. This is a complaint that is not to be cured by opposites, which for the most part only reverse the symptoms while they exasperate the disease—or like a rock in the mid-channel of a river swoln by a sudden rain-flush from the mountains, which only detains the excess of waters from their proper outlet, and makes them foam, roar, and eddy. The soul in her desolation hugs the sorrow close to her, as her sole remaining garment: and this must be drawn off so gradually, and the garment to be put in its stead so gradually slipt on and feel so like the former, that the sufferer shall be sensible of the change only by the refreshment.—The true Spirit of Consolation is well content to detain the tear in the eye, and finds a surer pledge of its success, in the smile of Resignation that dawns through that, than in the liveliest shows of a forced and alien exhilaration.

APHORISM XI.

Plotinus thanked God, that his soul was not tied to an immortal body.

APHORISM XII.

Leighton and Coleridge.

What a full Confession do we make of our dissatisfaction with the Objects of our bodily senses, that in our attempts to express what we conceive the Best of Beings, and the Greatest of Felicities to be, we describe by the exact Contraries of all, that we experience here—the one as Infinite, Incomprehensible, Immutable, &c., the other as incorruptible, undefiled, and that passeth not away. At all events, this Coincidence, say rather, Identity of Attributes, is sufficient to apprize us, that to be inheritors of bliss we must become the children of God.

This remark of Leighton's is ingenious and startling. Another, and more fruitful, perhaps more solid inference from the fact would be, that there is something in the human mind which makes it know (as soon as it is sufficiently awakened to reflect on its own thoughts and notices), that in all finite Quantity there is an Infinite, in all measures of Time an Eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance, the true and abiding reality of the former; and that as we truly are, only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess (that is, enjoy) our Being or any other real Good, but by living in the sense of his holy presence.

A life of wickedness is a life of lies; and an evil being, or the being of evil, the last and darkest mystery.

APHORISM XIII.

The Wisest Use of the Imagination.

Leighton.

It is not altogether unprofitable; yea, it is great wisdom in Christians to be arming themselves against such temptations as may befal them hereafter, though they have not as yet met with them; to labour to overcome them beforehand, to suppose the hardest things that may be incident to them, and to put on the strongest resolutions they can attain unto. Yet all that is but an imaginary effort; and therefore there is no assurance that the victory is any more than imaginary too, till it come to action, and then, they that have spoken and thought very confidently, may prove but (as one said of the Athenians) fortes in tabula, patient and courageous in picture or fancy; and, notwithstanding all their arms, and dexterity in handling them by way of exercise, may be foully defeated when they are to fight in earnest.

APHORISM XIV.

The Language of Scripture.

The Word of God speaks to men, and therefore it speaks the language of the Children of Men. This just and pregnant thought was suggested to Leighton by Gen. xxii. 12. The same text has led me to unfold and expand the remark.—On moral subjects, the Scriptures speak in the language of the affections which they excite in us; on sensible objects, neither metaphysically, as they are known by superior intelligences; nor theoretically, as they would be seen by us were we placed in the sun; but as they are represented by our human senses in our present relative position. Lastly, from no vain, or worse than vain, ambition of seeming to walk on the sea of Mystery in my way to Truth, but in the hope of removing a difficulty that presses heavily on the minds of many who in heart and desire are believers, and which long pressed on my own mind, I venture to add: that on spiritual things, and allusively to the mysterious union or conspiration of the Divine with the Human in the Spirits of the Just, spoken of in Romans viii. 27, the word of God attributes the language of the Spirit sanctified to the Holy One, the Sanctifier.

Now the Spirit in Man (that is, the Will) knows its own State in and by its Acts alone: even as in geometrical reasoning the Mind knows its constructive faculty in the act of constructing, and contemplates the act in the product (that is, the mental figure or diagram) which is inseparable from the act and co-instaneous.

Let the reader join these two positions: first, that the Divine Spirit acting in the Human Will is described as one with the Will so filled and actuated: secondly, that our actions are the means, by which alone the Will becomes assured of its own state; and he will understand, though he may not perhaps adopt my suggestion, that the verse, in which God speaking of himself, says to Abraham, Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thy only son, from me[51] —may be more than merely figurative. An accommodation I grant; but in the thing expressed, and not altogether in the Expressions. In arguing with infidels, or with the weak in faith, it is a part of religious Prudence, no less than of religious Morality, to avoid whatever looks like an evasion. To retain the literal sense, wherever the harmony of Scripture permits, and reason does not forbid, is ever the honester, and, nine times in ten, the more rational and pregnant interpretation. The contrary plan is an easy and approved way of getting rid of a difficulty; but nine times in ten a bad way of solving it. But alas! there have been too many Commentators who are content not to understand a text themselves, if only they can make the reader believe that they do.

Of the figures of speech in the sacred volume, that are only figures of speech, the one of most frequent occurrence is that which describes an effect by the name of its most usual and best known cause: the passages, for instance, in which grief, fury, repentance, &c., are attributed to the Deity.—But these are far enough from justifying the (I had almost said, dishonest) fashion of metaphorical glosses, in as well as out of the Church; and which our fashionable divines have carried to such an extent, as in the doctrinal part of their creed, to leave little else but metaphors. But the reader who wishes to find this latter subject, and that of the Aphorism, treated more at large, is referred to Mr. Southey's 'Omniana,' Vol. II. p. 7-12; and to the Note in p. 62-67, of the author's second 'Lay-Sermon.'[52]

APHORISM XV.

The Christian no Stoic.

Leighton and Coleridge.

Seek not altogether to dry up the stream of Sorrow, but to bound it, and keep it within its banks. Religion doth not destroy the life of nature, but adds to it a life more excellent; yea, it doth not only permit, but requires some feeling of afflictions. Instead of patience, there is in some men an affected pride of spirit suitable only to the doctrine of the Stoics as it is usually taken. They strive not to feel at all the afflictions that are on them; but where there is no feeling at all, there can be no patience.

Of the sects of ancient philosophy the Stoic is, perhaps, the nearest to Christianity. Yet even to this sect Christianity is fundamentally opposite. For the Stoic attaches the highest honour (or rather, attaches honour solely) to the person that acts virtuously in spite of his feelings, or who has raised himself above the conflict by their extinction; while Christianity instructs us to place small reliance on a virtue that does not begin by bringing the Feelings to a conformity with the commands of the Conscience. Its especial aim, its characteristic operation, is to moralize the affections. The Feelings, that oppose a right act, must be wrong feelings. The act, indeed, whatever the agent's feelings might be, Christianity would command; and under certain circumstances would both command and commend it—commend it, as a healthful symptom in a sick patient; and command it, as one of the ways and means of changing the feelings, or displacing them by calling up the opposite.

Corollaries To Aphorism XV.

I. The more consciousness in our Thoughts and Words, and the less in our Impulses and general Actions, the better and more healthful the state both of head and heart. As the flowers from an orange tree in its time of blossoming, that burgeon forth, expand, fall and are momently replaced, such is the sequence of hourly and momently charities in a pure and gracious soul. The modern fiction which depictures the son of Cytherea with a bandage round his eyes, is not without a spiritual meaning. There is a sweet and holy blindness in Christian Love, even as there is a blindness of Life, yea and of Genius too, in the moment of productive Energy.

II. Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient Energy of the living Principle, the Law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous Acts and Duties, in which the strongest and best balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where Humility, no less than Prudence, prescribes Deliberation. We find a similitude of this, I had almost said a remote analogy, in organized bodies. The lowest class of animals or protozoa, the polypi for instance, have neither brain nor nerves. Their motive powers are all from without. The sun, light, the warmth, the air are their nerves and brain. As life ascends, nerves appear; but still only as the conductors of an external influence; next are seen the knots or ganglions, as so many foci of instinctive agency, that imperfectly imitate the yet wanting centre.—And now the promise and token of a true Individuality are disclosed; both the reservoir of Sensibility and the imitative power that actuates the organs of Motion (the muscles) with the net-work of conductors, are all taken inward and appropriated; the Spontaneous rises into the Voluntary, and finally after various steps and a long ascent, the Material and Animal Means and Conditions are prepared for the manifestations of a Free Will, having its Law within itself and its motive in the Law—and thus bound to originate its own Acts, not only without, but even against, alien Stimulants. That in our present state we have only the Dawning of this inward Sun (the perfect Law of Liberty) will sufficiently limit and qualify the preceding position if only it have been allowed to produce its twofold consequence—the excitement of Hope and the repression of Vanity.[53]

APHORISM XVI.

Leighton.

As excessive eating or drinking both makes the body sickly and lazy, fit for nothing but sleep, and besots the mind, as it clogs up with crudities the way through which the spirits should pass,[54] bemiring them, and making them move heavily, as a coach in a deep way; thus doth all immoderate use of the world and its delights wrong the soul in its spiritual condition, makes it sickly and feeble, full of spiritual distempers and inactivity, benumbs the graces of the Spirit, and fills the soul with sleepy vapours, makes it grow secure and heavy in spiritual exercises, and obstructs the way and motion of the Spirit of God, in the soul. Therefore, if you would be spiritual, healthful, and vigorous, and enjoy much of the consolations of Heaven, be sparing and sober in those of the earth, and what you abate of the one, shall be certainly made up in the other.

APHORISM XVII.

Inconsistency.

Leighton and Coleridge.

It is a most unseemly and unpleasant thing, to see a man's life full of ups and downs, one step like a Christian, and another like a worldling; it cannot choose but both pain himself and mar the edification of others.

The same sentiment, only with a special application to the maxims and measures of our Cabinet and Statesmen, has been finely expressed by a sage Poet of the preceding generation, in lines which, no generation will find inapplicable or superannuated.

APHORISM XVII. CONTINUED.

The Ordinary Motive to Inconsistency.

Leighton.

What though the polite man count thy fashion a little odd and too precise, it is because he knows nothing above that model of goodness which he hath set himself, and therefore approves of nothing beyond it: he knows not God, and therefore doth not discern and esteem what is most like Him. When courtiers come down into the country, the common home-bred people possibly think their habit strange; but they care not for that, it is the fashion at court. What need, then, that Christians should be so tender-foreheaded, as to be put out of countenance because the world looks on holiness as a singularity? It is the only fashion in the highest court, yea, of the King of Kings himself.

APHORISM XVIII.

Superficial Reconciliations, and Self-deceit in Forgiving.

Leighton.

When, after variances, men are brought to an agreement, they are much subject to this, rather to cover their remaining malices with superficial verbal forgiveness, than to dislodge them, and free the heart of them. This is a poor self-deceit. As the philosopher said to him, who being ashamed that he was espied by him in a tavern in the outer room, withdrew himself to the inner, he called after him, "That is not the way out, the more you go that way, you will be the further in!" So when hatreds are upon admonition not thrown out, but retire inward to hide themselves, they grow deeper and stronger than before; and those constrained semblances of reconcilement are but a false healing, do but skin the wound over, and therefore it usually breaks forth worse again.

APHORISM XIX.

Of the Worth and the Duties of the Preacher.

Leighton.

The stream of custom and our profession bring us to the Preaching of the Word, and we sit out our hour under the sound; but how few consider and prize it as the great ordinance of God for the salvation of souls, the beginner and the sustainer of the Divine life of grace within us! And certainly, until we have these thoughts of it, and seek to feel it thus ourselves, although we hear it most frequently, and let slip no occasion, yea, hear it with attention and some present delight, yet still we miss the right use of it, and turn it from its true end, while we take it not as that ingrafted word which is able to save our souls (James i. 21).

Thus ought they who preach to speak the word; to endeavour their utmost to accommodate it to this end, that sinners may be converted, begotten again, and believers nourished and strengthened in their spiritual life; to regard no lower end, but aim steadily at that mark. Their hearts and tongues ought to be set on fire with holy zeal for God and love to souls, kindled by the Holy Ghost, that came down on the apostles in the shape of fiery tongues.

And those that hear, should remember this as the end of their hearing, that they may receive spiritual life and strength by the word. For though it seems a poor despicable business, that a frail sinful man like yourselves should speak a few words in your hearing, yet, look upon it as the way wherein God communicates happiness to those who believe, and works that believing unto happiness, alters the whole frame of the soul, and makes a new creation, as it begets it again to the inheritance of glory. Consider it thus, which is its true notion; and then, what can be so precious?

APHORISM XX.

Leighton.

The difference is great in our natural life, in some persons especially; that they who in infancy were so feeble, and wrapped up as others in swaddling clothes, yet, afterwards come to excel in wisdom and in the knowledge of sciences, or to be commanders of great armies, or to be kings: but the distance is far greater and more admirable, betwixt the small beginnings of grace, and our after perfection, that fulness of knowledge that we look for, and that crown of immortality which all they are born to who are born of God.

But as in the faces or actions of some children, characters and presages of their after-greatness have appeared (as a singular beauty in Moses's face, as they write of him, and as Cyrus was made king among the shepherds' children with whom he was brought up, &c.) so also, certainly, in these children of God, there be some characters and evidences that they are born for Heaven by their new birth. That holiness and meekness, that patience and faith which shine in the actions and sufferings of the saints, are characters of their Father's image, and show their high original, and foretell their glory to come; such a glory as doth not only surpass the world's thoughts, but the thoughts of the children of God themselves. 1 John iii. 2.

Comment.

On an Intermediate State, or State of Transition from Morality to Spiritual Religion.

This Aphorism would, it may seem, have been placed more fitly in the Chapter following. In placing it here, I have been determined by the following convictions: 1. Every state, and consequently that which we have described as the state of Religious Morality, which is not progressive, is dead, or retrograde. 2. As a pledge of this progression, or, at least, as the form in which the propulsive tendency shows itself, there are certain Hopes, Aspirations, Yearnings, that, with more or less of consciousness, rise and stir in the Heart of true Morality as naturally as the sap in the full-formed stem of a rose flows towards the bud, within which the flower is maturing. 3. No one, whose own experience authorizes him to confirm the truth of this statement, can have been conversant with the volumes of religious biography, can have perused (for instance) the lives of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Wishart, Sir Thomas More, Bernard Gilpin, Bishop Bedel, or of Egede, Swartz, and the missionaries of the frozen world, without an occasional conviction, that these men lived under extraordinary influences, which in each instance and in all ages of the Christian æra bear the same characters, and both in the accompaniments and the results evidently refer to a common origin. And what can this be? is the question that must needs force itself on the mind in the first moment of reflection on a phenomenon so interesting and apparently so anomalous. The answer is as necessarily contained in one or the other of two assumptions. These influences are either the Product of Delusion (insania amabilis, and the re-action of disordered nerves), or they argue the existence of a relation to some real agency, distinct from what is experienced or acknowledged by the world at large, for which as not merely natural on the one hand, and yet not assumed to be miraculous[55] on the other, we have no apter name than spiritual. Now if neither analogy justifies nor the moral feelings permit the former assumption, and we decide therefore in favour of the reality of a State other and higher than the mere Moral Man, whose Religion[56] consists in Morality, has attained under these convictions, can the existence of a transitional state appear other than probable? or that these very convictions, when accompanied by correspondent dispositions and stirrings of the heart, are among the marks and indications of such a state? And thinking it not unlikely that among the readers of this volume, there may be found some Individuals, whose inward state, though disquieted by doubts and oftener still perhaps by blank misgivings, may, nevertheless, betoken the commencement of a Transition from a not irreligious Morality to a Spiritual Religion, with a view to their interests I placed this Aphorism under the present head.

APHORISM XXI.

Leighton.

The most approved teachers of wisdom, in a human way, have required of their scholars, that to the end their minds might be capable of it, they should be purified from vice and wickedness. And it was Socrates' custom, when any one asked him a question, seeking to be informed by him, before he would answer them, he asked them concerning their own qualities and course of life.

APHORISM XXII.

Knowledge not the ultimate End of Religious Pursuits.

Leighton and Coleridge.

The Hearing and Reading of the Word, under which I comprise theological studies generally, are alike defective when pursued without increase of Knowledge, and when pursued chiefly for increase of Knowledge. To seek no more than a present delight, that evanisheth with the sound of the words that die in the air, is not to desire the Word as meat, but as music, as God tells the prophet Ezekiel of his people, Ezek. xxxiii. 32. And lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well upon an instrument; for they hear thy words, and they do them not. To desire the word for the increase of knowledge, although this is necessary and commendable, and, being rightly qualified, is a part of spiritual accretion, yet, take it as going no further, it is not the true end of the Word. Nor is the venting of that knowledge in speech and frequent discourse of the Word and the divine truths that are in it; which, where it is governed with Christian prudence, is not to be despised, but commended; yet, certainly, the highest knowledge, and the most frequent and skilful speaking of the Word, severed from the growth here mentioned, misses the true end of the Word. If any one's head or tongue should grow apace, and all the rest stand at a stay, it would certainly make him a monster; and they are no other, who are knowing and discoursing Christians, and grow daily in that respect, but not at all in holiness of heart, and life, which is the proper growth of the children of God. Apposite to their case is Epictetus's comparison of the sheep; they return not what they eat in grass, but in wool.

APHORISM XXIII.

The sum of Church History.

Leighton.

In times of peace, the Church may dilate more, and build as it were into breadth, but in times of trouble, it arises more in height; it is then built upwards; as in cities where men are straitened, they build usually higher than in the country.

APHORISM XXIV.

Worthy to be framed and hung up in the Library of every Theological Student.

Leighton and Coleridge.

When there is a great deal of smoke, and no clear flame, it argues much moisture in the matter, yet it witnesseth certainly that there is fire there; and therefore dubious questioning is a much better evidence, than that senseless deadness which most take for believing. Men that know nothing in sciences, have no doubts. He never truly believed, who was not made first sensible and convinced of unbelief.

Never be afraid to doubt, if only you have the disposition to believe, and doubt in order that you may end in believing the Truth. I will venture to add in my own name and from my own conviction the following:

APHORISM XXV.

He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

APHORISM XXVI.

The Absence of Disputes, and a general Aversion to Religious Controversies, no proof of True Unanimity.

Leighton and Coleridge.

The boasted peaceableness about questions of Faith too often proceeds from a superficial temper, and not seldom from a supercilious disdain of whatever has no marketable use or value, and from indifference to religion itself. Toleration is a herb of spontaneous growth in the Soil of Indifference; but the weed has none of the virtues of the medicinal plant, reared by Humility in the Garden of Zeal. Those, who regard religions as matters of taste, may consistently include all religious differences in the old adage, De gustibus non est disputandum. And many there be among these of Gallio's temper, who care for none of these things, and who account all questions in religion, as he did, but matter of words and names. And by this all religions may agree together. But that were not a natural union produced by the active heat of the spirit, but a confusion rather, arising from the want of it; not a knitting together, but a freezing together, as cold congregates all bodies, how heterogeneous soever, sticks, stones, and water; but heat makes first a separation of different things, and then unites those that are of the same nature.

Much of our common union of minds, I fear, proceeds from no other than the afore-mentioned causes, want of knowledge, and want of affection to religion. You that boast you live conformably to the appointments of the Church, and that no one hears of your noise, we may thank the ignorance of your minds for that kind of quietness.

The preceding extract is particularly entitled to our serious reflections, as in a tenfold degree more applicable to the present times than to the age in which it was written. We all know, that Lovers are apt to take offence and wrangle on occasions that perhaps are but trifles, and which assuredly would appear such to those who regard Love itself as folly. These quarrels may, indeed, be no proof of wisdom; but still, in the imperfect state of our nature the entire absence of the same, and this too on far more serious provocations, would excite a strong suspicion of a comparative indifference in the parties who can love so coolly where they profess to love so well. I shall believe our present religious tolerancy to proceed from the abundance of our charity and good sense, when I see proofs that we are equally cool and forbearing as litigants and political partizans.

APHORISM XXVII.

The Influence of Worldly Views (or what are called a Man's Prospects in Life), the Bane of the Christian Ministry.

Leighton

It is a base, poor thing for a man to seek himself; far below that royal dignity that is here put upon Christians, and that priesthood joined with it. Under the Law, those who were squint-eyed were incapable of the priesthood: truly, this squinting toward our own interest, the looking aside to that, in God's affairs especially, so deforms the face of the soul, that it makes it altogether unworthy the honour of this spiritual priesthood. Oh! this is a large task, an infinite task. The several creatures bear their part in this; the sun says somewhat, and moon and stars, yea, the lowest have some share in it; the very plants and herbs of the field speak of God; and yet, the very highest and best, yea all of them together, the whole concert of Heaven and earth, cannot show forth all His praise to the full. No, it is but a part, the smallest part of that glory, which they can reach.

APHORISM XXVIII.

Despise none: Despair of none.

Leighton.

The Jews would not willingly tread upon the smallest piece of paper in their way, but took it up; for possibly, said they, the name of God may be on it. Though there was a little superstition in this, yet truly there is nothing but good religion in it, if we apply it to men. Trample not on any; there may be some work of grace there, that thou knowest not of. The name of God may be written upon that soul thou treadest on; it may be a soul that Christ thought so much of, as to give His precious blood for it; therefore despise it not.

APHORISM XXIX.

Men of Least Merit most apt to be Contemptuous, Because most Ignorant and most Overweening of Themselves.

Leighton.

Too many take the ready course to deceive themselves; for they look with both eyes on the failings and defects of others, and scarcely give their good qualities half an eye, while on the contrary, in themselves, they study to the full their own advantages, and their weaknesses and defects, (as one says), they skip over, as children do their hard words in their lesson, that are troublesome to read; and making this uneven parallel, what wonder if the result be a gross mistake of themselves!

APHORISM XXX.

Vanity may strut in rags, and Humility be arrayed in purple and fine linen.

Leighton.

It is not impossible that there may be in some an affected pride in the meanness of apparel, and in others, under either neat or rich attire, a very humble unaffected mind: using it upon some of the afore-mentioned engagements, or such like, and yet the heart not at all upon it. Magnus qui fictilibus ubitur tanquam argento, nec ille minor qui argento tanquam fictilibus, says Seneca: Great is he who enjoys his earthenware as if it were plate, and not less great is the man to whom all his plate is no more than earthenware.

APHORISM XXXI.

Of the Detraction among Religious Professors.

Leighton and Coleridge.

They who have attained to a self-pleasing pitch of civility or formal religion, have usually that point of presumption with it, that they make their own size the model and rule to examine all by. What is below it, they condemn indeed as profane; but what is beyond it, they account needless and affected preciseness; and therefore are as ready as others to let fly invectives or bitter taunts against it, which are the keen and poisoned shafts of the tongue, and a persecution that shall be called to a strict account.

The slanders, perchance, may not be altogether forged or untrue; they may be the implements, not the inventions, of Malice. But they do not on this account escape the guilt of detraction. Rather, it is characteristic of the evil spirit in question, to work by the advantage of real faults; but these stretched and aggravated to the utmost. It is not expressible how deep a wound a tongue sharpened to this work will give, with no noise and a very little word. This is the true white gunpowder, which the dreaming Projectors of silent Mischiefs and insensible Poisons sought for in the Laboratories of Art and Nature, in a World of Good; but which was to be found, in its most destructive form, in "the World of Evil, the Tongue."

APHORISM XXXII.

The Remedy.

Leighton.

All true remedy must begin at the heart; otherwise it will be but a mountebank cure, a false imagined conquest. The weights and wheels are there, and the clock strikes according to their motion. Even he that speaks contrary to what is within him, guilefully contrary to his inward conviction and knowledge, yet speaks conformably to what is within him in the temper and frame of his heart, which is double, a heart and a heart, as the Psalmist hath it: Psalm xii. 2.

APHORISM XXXIII.

Leighton and Coleridge.

It is an argument of a candid ingenuous mind, to delight in the good name and commendations of others; to pass by their defects, and take notice of their virtues; and to speak and hear of those willingly, and not endure either to speak or hear of the other; for in this indeed you may be little less guilty than the evil speaker, in taking pleasure in it, though you speak it not. He that willingly drinks in tales and calumnies, will, from the delight he hath in evil hearing, slide insensibly into the humour of evil speaking. It is strange how most persons dispense with themselves in this point, and that in scarcely any societies shall we find a hatred of this ill, but rather some tokens of taking pleasure in it; and until a Christian sets himself to an inward watchfulness over his heart, not suffering in it any thought that is uncharitable, or vain self-esteem, upon the sight of others' frailties, he will still be subject to somewhat of this, in the tongue or ear at least. So, then, as for the evil of guile in the tongue, a sincere heart, truth in the inward parts, powerfully redresses it; therefore it is expressed, Psal. xv. 2, That speaketh the truth from his heart; thence it flows. Seek much after this, to speak nothing with God, nor men, but what is the sense of a single unfeigned heart. O sweet truth! excellent but rare sincerity! he that loves that truth within, and who is himself at once the truth and the life, He alone can work it there! Seek it of him.

It is characteristic of the Roman dignity and sobriety, that, in the Latin, to favour with the tongue (favere lingua) means to be silent. We say, Hold your tongue! as if it were an injunction, that could not be carried into effect but by manual force, or the pincers of the Forefinger and Thumb! And verily—I blush to say it—it is not Women and Frenchmen only that would rather have their tongues bitten than bitted, and feel their souls in a strait-waistcoat, when they are obliged to remain silent.

APHORISM XXXIV.

On the Passion for New and Striking Thoughts.

Leighton.

In conversation seek not so much either to vent thy knowledge, or to increase it, as to know more spiritually and effectually what thou dost know. And in this way those mean despised truths, that everyone thinks he is sufficiently seen in, will have a new sweetness and use in them, which thou didst not so well perceive before (for these flowers cannot be sucked dry), and in this humble sincere way thou shalt grow in grace and in knowledge too.

APHORISM XXXV.

The Radical Difference between the Good Man and the Vicious Man.

Leighton and Coleridge.

The godly man hates the evil he possibly by temptation hath been drawn to do, and loves the good he is frustrated of, and, having intended, hath not attained to do. The sinner, who hath his denomination from sin as his course, hates the good which sometimes he is forced to do, and loves that sin which many times he does not, either wanting occasion and means, so that he cannot do it, or through the check of an enlightened conscience possibly dares not do; and though so bound up from the act, as a dog in a chain, yet the habit, the natural inclination and desire in him, is still the same, the strength of his affection is carried to sin. So in the weakest sincere Christian, there is that predominant sincerity and desire of holy walking, according to which he is called a righteous person, the Lord is pleased to give him that name, and account him so, being upright in heart, though often failing.

Leighton adds, "There is a Righteousness of a higher strain." I do not ask the reader's full assent to this position: I do not suppose him as yet prepared to yield it. But thus much he will readily admit, that here, if any where, we are to seek the fine Line which, like stripes of Light in Light, distinguishes, not divides, the summit of religious Morality from Spiritual Religion.

"A Righteousness" (Leighton continues) "that is not in him, but upon him. He is clothed with it." This, reader! is the controverted Doctrine, so warmly asserted and so bitterly decried under the name of "imputed righteousness." Our learned Archbishop, you see, adopts it; and it is on this account principally, that by many of our leading Churchmen his orthodoxy has been more than questioned, and his name put in the list of proscribed divines, as a Calvinist. That Leighton attached a definite sense to the words above quoted, it would be uncandid to doubt; and the general spirit of his writings leads me to presume that it was compatible with the eternal distinction between things and persons, and therefore opposed to modern Calvinism. But what it was, I have not (I own) been able to discover. The sense, however, in which I think he might have received this doctrine, and in which I avow myself a believer in it, I shall have an opportunity of showing in another place. My present object is to open out the road by the removal of prejudices, so far at least as to throw some disturbing doubts on the secure taking-for-granted, that the peculiar Tenets of the Christian Faith asserted in the articles and homilies of our National Church are in contradiction to the common sense of mankind. And with this view, (and not in the arrogant expectation or wish, that a mere ipse dixit should be received for argument) I here avow my conviction, that the doctrine of imputed Righteousness, rightly and scripturally interpreted, is so far from being either irrational or immoral, that Reason itself prescribes the idea in order to give a meaning and an ultimate object to Morality; and that the Moral Law in the Conscience demands its reception in order to give reality and substantive existence to the idea presented by the Reason.

APHORISM XXXVI.

Leighton.

Your blessedness is not,—no, believe it, it is not where most of you seek it, in things below you. How can that be? It must be a higher good to make you happy.

Comment.

Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixure, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche, that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the Irritability, the proper seat of Instinct, while yet the nascent Sensibility is subordinated thereto—most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive Understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities, of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious Week, the teeming Work-days of the Creator: as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian of the Generations of the Heaven and the Earth, in the days that the Lord God made the Earth and the Heavens.[57] And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving, still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home-building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and above all the manifoldly intelligent[58] ant tribes, with their Commonwealths and Confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husbandfolk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honeyed leaf, and the virgin sisters, with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity—and not say to himself, Behold the Shadow of approaching Humanity, the Sun rising from behind, in the kindling Morn of Creation! Thus all lower Natures find their highest Good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as Substances that appear as Shadows are preferable to Shadows mistaken for Substance! No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for any thing below your proper Humanity, you seek a happy Life in the region of Death. Well saith the moral poet—