Practically, the amount of confusion prevalent in the church of Corinth, arising from irregularities incident to the exercise of “tongues,” and to the undisciplined energies of a mixed congregation, appears to have almost rivalled the disorder in the theatre of Ephesus, when the whole city was filled with confusion, and some cried one thing, and some another; for the assembly was confused, and the most part knew not wherefore they were come together. So, when the whole church of Corinth were come together into one place, and all spoke with tongues, to outsiders that for the nonce stepped inside they must appear mad. All things were done indecorously and in most admired disorder. Now, St. Paul was for having all things done decently and in order. “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.” Order is Heaven’s first law. The same apostle is prompt to remind the Thessalonians that he behaved himself not disorderly among them; and this he did because he heard that there were some among them which walked disorderly—ἀτάκτως. The apostolic canon for both Corinth and Thessalonica, and all other churches, is, Πὰντα δὲ κατὰ τάξιν γινέσθω. Let them all walk by this same rule, and all mind this same thing.

As with the sect of Pythagoreans, virtue was defined to be a harmony, unity, and an endeavour to resemble the Deity,—so the whole life of man, they taught, should be an attempt to represent on earth the beauty and harmony displayed in the order of the universe. It was the doctrine of Pythagoras himself, that by action as well as by thought the individual as well as the state should represent in themselves “an image of the order and harmony by which the world was sustained and regulated.” But as Prior puts it, when he considers the heavens, the starry worlds of God’s ordaining, or ordering,—

Lord Lytton suggestively pictures to us one of his characters alone in the streets by night, striding noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method—“Man’s order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker’s order, remote, infinite, is so beyond man’s comprehension of what is order.” Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same idea in an address to the stars:—

So Wordsworth, addressing as it were a deified idea of Duty, pays this homage:—

Well may Hooker speculate on what would become of man, were Nature to intermit her course, and leave altogether, though but for a while, the observation of her own laws; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture—“See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of Nature is the stay of the whole world?” Again to quote from “The Mystery of Evil,” the same star-gazer speaking:—

“Of law,” says Hooker, at the close of his first book of Ecclesiastical Polity, with an eloquence which has ever been most admired by the most admirable masters of English prose,—“Of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” Considering when he wrote, what he wrote, and to what purpose and in what spirit he wrote, there seems to us a beautiful consistency in Richard Hooker’s deathbed meditations, as related in the familiar memoir by Izaak Walton. Found by his trustiest visitor, “deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to discourse,” and asked what was the subject of his present thoughts, he replied, “That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which, peace could not be in heaven; and oh, that it might be so on earth!”

There is not, affirms a modern divine, a corner of the world, nor a process of nature, nor a piece of God’s handiwork of any kind whatever, on which His love of order is not written with a plainness not to be mistaken. “System and method, law and order, symmetry and punctuality, are conspicuous everywhere; indicating at once the value attached to these things in the mind of God, and his dislike for their opposites—confusion, fitfulness, irregularity.” Nor is the Divine love of order a quality that ever leads to stiffness, formality, or monotony; for it is shown to be constantly associated with beauty, variety, and freedom.

M. Jules Simon interpolates into his argument for the vast preponderance of good over evil in the world, a casually expressed identification of good with order: “le bien, c’est-à-dire, l’ordre, car dans le monde le bien et l’ordre ne font qu’un.”

Readers familiar with the writings first and last of Mr. Carlyle, will readily call to mind many a terse utterance in vindication of the Divine authorship and Divine authority of order. Disorder he pronounces to be a thing which “veracious created Nature, even because it is not Chaos and a waste-whirling baseless Phantasm,” rejects and disowns. “Disorder, insane by the nature of it, is the hatefullest of things to man, who lives by sanity and by order.” “All Anarchy, all evil, all injustice, is, by the nature of it, ... suicidal, and cannot endure.” “Arrangement is indispensable to man; Arrangement, were it grounded only on that old primary evangel of Force, with Sceptre in the shape of Hammer!” Such sentences admit of almost infinite multiplication. “Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and so must itself soon die.” Hence this philosopher’s partiality for “heroes,” even of the least estimable type, provided they have will and force to replace confusion by order. Cortès is not among the specified Heroes of his special Hero-worship; but he deserves a place by reason of the preamble to that code of ordinances, as the conqueror of Mexico himself terms them, which he set forth in restraint of his army: the essential purport of this preamble being, that in all institutions, whether Divine or human (if the latter have any worth), order is the great law.

It was in support of the cause of social order that Luther took to exposing the dangers due to ignorant innovators, and strenuously declared that “God Himself constituted certain authorities to direct the world; for it is a great feature in His magnificent system, that there shall be order here below.” Doctor Martin may, in this respect, be called a man after our Hero-worshipper’s own heart; such another as the one of whom he wrote,—“Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care; here is the man that has declared war with it, that will never make peace with it. Man is the Missionary of Order; he is the servant, not of the Devil and of Chaos, but of God and the universe.” And Christian doctrine teaches that the order and beauty of the outward world are symbols of that inward order and symmetry, that peace and purity of heart, that universal harmony between God’s will and man’s will, which it is one great object of Christianity to establish.

says the Christian poet, who has, however, to deplore the disappointments of his quest. Of all orderly things that are beautiful in God’s eyes, it has been said, there can be none so beautiful as an orderly or holy soul. “Once in this world the sight presented itself in spotless beauty and brilliancy.” Everything there seen was in its place: reason, conscience, will, feeling, instinct, appetite, “all most beautifully arranged; each was in perfect health, and all were in thorough harmony with the will of God.” But that was God manifest in the flesh. Order incarnate. Without Him, in the material world, was not anything made that was made. Apart from Him, the moral world is without form and void, and darkness covers the face of its deep. Order, in fine, is the indispensable postulate of every given cosmos. In the words of Schiller—

Of the Church as a family, George Herbert, ever quaint in his devotion, sings or says—after a depreciation of his own unruly thoughts:

So Dryden traces to harmony this universal frame—a cosmos evolved from chaos, from a heap of jarring atoms that, at the Divine summons,—

Shaftesbury contends that the admiration and love of order, in whatever kind, is “naturally improving to the temper, advantageous to social affection, and highly assistant to virtue—which is itself no other than the love of order and beauty in society.” In the meanest subjects of the world, he goes on to say, the appearance of order gains upon the mind, and draws the affections towards it. “For ’tis impossible that such a Divine order should be contemplated without ecstasy and rapture; since in the common subjects of science, and the liberal arts, whatever is according to just harmony and proportion is so transporting to those who have any knowledge or practice in the kind.” In another place he elaborates the thesis, that whatever things have order, have unity of design, and concur in one, and are parts constituent of one whole—just as a symphony is a certain system of proportioned sounds. It is noteworthy that Pythagoras deduced his celebrated theory of the music of the spheres from his assumption that everything in the great arrangement (κόσμος) which he called the world must be harmoniously arranged (and that, accordingly, the planets were at the same relative distance as the divisions of the monochord, etc.) Divine as the philosophy of Plato is commonly esteemed, there are, on the other hand, occasional glimpses in it of what one of his commentators calls the “appalling doctrine” that God alternately governs and forsakes the world—the world when he forsakes it, suddenly changing its orbit, so that all things are in disorder, and mundane existence is totally disarranged: “only after some time do things settle down to a sort of order, though of a very imperfect kind.” Spinoza takes order to be a thing of the imagination, as also he does right and wrong, useful and hurtful—these being merely such, he argues, in relation to us. But this would not prevent him, from his stand-point, assenting to the ethical import of order—as expounded for instance by the Shakspearian Ulysses:

Order, writes Southey, is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the State. Diogenes held with the Dorian lawgivers, that order (κόσμος) is the basis of civil government. As the beams to a house, it has been said, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things. Balzac is treating of harmonie politique when he says that harmony is the poetry of order, and that “the peoples” have a keen need of order. The racy author of the “Biglow Papers” discourses in his shrewd, homely style, on the indispensableness (not that he uses such a word) of orderly established law:—

Mr. Carlyle, in his apology for Knox in the act of pulling down cathedrals—as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue—urges that he was precisely the reverse of that. Knox, he maintains, wanted no pulling down of stone edifices, but wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. “Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much on that.” Every such man, on Mr. Carlyle’s showing, is the born enemy of disorder—hates to be in it; but what then? “Smooth falsehood is not order; it is the general sum total of disorder. Order is truth—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it. Order and falsehood cannot subsist together.” And it is in treating of another of his heroes elect, that the same philosopher contends on behalf of such others of them as seem to have worked as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every great man, every genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of order, not of disorder—a seeming anarchist, yet to his whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. “His mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order.” Is not all work of man in this world, we are emphatically asked, a making of Order?

The Abbé Duval, writing to Mme. Récamier, as her spiritual counsellor, bids her engrave this elementary truth on her heart of hearts: “Gravez au-dedans de vous-même cette première vérité que la religion veut l’ordre avant tout.” Whatsoever doth make manifest is light, and it is light that reveals a cosmos where before, in the words of Thomson, a formless grey confusion covered all:—

That a scrupulous regard for order, in some sort, is nevertheless compatible with a very low standard of moral worth, is recognised and illustrated by poet Crabbe—prose-poet the good parson was, not quite in the accepted sense—in a series of pithy, if not pungent rhymes:—

Exceptions allowed for, as in every rule, yet is the rule sufficiently approved, that order is heaven’s first law. The poet of “The Angel in the House” in style, and spirit, and sentiment, how salient a contrast to Crabbe, utters the conceit (poeticè) in one of his tender preludes, that—

a conceit that allows of wide application, as do many of those of so suggestive a writer.

But to conclude. When the judicious Hooker—to call him by his conventional epithet—lay a-dying, he expressed his joy at the near prospect of entering a World of Order. The author of “The Book of the Church” emphasises the import of holy Richard’s “placid and profound contentment,” by reminding us that because he had been employed in ecclesiastical polemics, and because his life had been passed under the perpetual discomfort of domestic discord, the happiness of heaven must have seemed in Hooker’s estimation, to consist primarily in Order, as, indeed, in all human societies this is the first thing needful.