The will to the deed, the inward principle to the outward act, is as the kernel to the shell; but yet, in the first place, the shell is necessary for the kernel, and that by which it is commonly known; and, in the next place, as the shell comes first, and the kernel grows gradually and hardens within it, so is it with the moral principle in man. Legality precedes morality in every individual, even as the Jewish dispensation preceded the Christian in the education of the world at large.
When may the will be taken for the deed? Then when the will is the obedience of the whole man; when the will is in fact the deed, that is, all the deed in our power. In every other case, it is bending the bow without shooting the arrow. The bird of Paradise gleams on the lofty branch, and the man takes aim, and draws the tough yew into a crescent with might and main, and lo! there is never an arrow on the string.
The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers, under whatever strength of sympathy, or desire to prolong happy thoughts in others for their sake or your own only as sympathizing with theirs, it may originate. All sympathy, not consistent with acknowledged virtue, is but disguised selfishness.
The pre-eminence of truth over falsehood, even when occasioned
by that truth, is as a gentle fountain breathing from forth its
air-let into the snow piled over and around it, which it turns
into its own substance, and flows with greater murmur; and though
it be again arrested, still it is but for a time, it awaits
only the change of the wind to awake and roll onwards its ever
increasing stream:
I semplici pastori
Sul Vesolo nevoso,
Fatti curvi e canuti,
D'alto stupor son muti,
Mirando al fonte ombroso
Il Po con pochi umori;
Poscia udendo gl' onori
Dell'urna angusta e stretta,
Che'l Adda, che'l Tesino
Soverchia il suo cammino,
Che ampio al mar s'affretta,
Che si spuma, e si suona,
Che gli si dà corona!
(Chiabrera, Rime, xxviii.)
A man may look at glass, or through it, or both. Let all earthly things be unto thee as glass to see heaven through! Religious ceremonies should be pure glass, not dyed in the gorgeous crimsons and purple blues and greens of the drapery of saints and saintesses.
Many a star, which we behold as single, the astronomer resolves into two, each, perhaps, the centre of a separate system. Oft are the flowers of the bind-weed mistaken for the growth of the plant, which it chokes with its intertwine. And many are the unsuspected double stars, and frequent are the parasite weeds, which the philosopher detects in the received opinions of men: so strong is the tendency of the imagination to identify what it has long consociated. Things that have habitually, though, perhaps, accidentally and arbitrarily, been thought of in connection with each other, we are prone to regard as inseparable. The fatal brand is cast into the fire, and therefore Meleager must consume in the flames. To these conjunctions of custom and association (the associative power of the mind which holds the mid place between memory and sense,) we may best apply Sir Thomas Brown's remark, that many things coagulate on commixture, the separate natures of which promise no concretion.
To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive-wreath.
Centries, or wooden frames, are put under the arches of a bridge, to remain no longer than till the latter are consolidated. Even so pleasures are the devil's scaffolding to build a habit upon; that formed and steady, the pleasures are sent for fire-wood, and the hell begins in this life.
Virtue makes us not worthy, but only worthier, of happiness. Existence itself gives a claim to joy. Virtue and happiness are incommensurate quantities. How much virtue must I have, before I have paid off the old debt of my happiness in infancy and childhood! O! We all outrun the constable with heaven's justice! We have to earn the earth, before we can think of earning heaven.
We were indeed,
Greek (transliterated): panta konis, kai panta gel_ws, kai panta to maeden
if we did not feel that we were so.
There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy, which must sadden, or at least soften, every reflecting observer.
A lie accidentally useful to the cause of an oppressed truth: Thus was the tongue of a dog made medicinal to a feeble and sickly Lazarus.
In Roman Catholic states, where science has forced its way, and some light must follow, the devil himself cunningly sets up a shop for common sense at the sign of the Infidel.
"It is possible," says Jeremy Taylor, "for a man to bring himself to believe any thing he hath a mind to." But what is this belief? Analyse it into its constituents; is it more than certain passions or feelings converging into the sensation of positiveness as their focus, and then associated with certain sounds or images? Nemo enim, says Augustin, huic evidentiae contradicet, nisi quem plus defensare delectat, quod sentit, quam, quid sentiendum sit, invenire.
Lovely and pure no bird of Paradise, to feed on dew and flower-fragrance, and never to alight on earth, till shot by death with pointless shaft; but a rose, to fix its roots in the genial earth, thence to suck up nutriment and bloom strong and healthy, not to droop and fade amid sunshine and zephyrs on a soilless rock! Her marriage was no meagre prose comment on the glowing and gorgeous poetry of her wooing; nor did the surly over-browing rock of reality ever cast the dusky shadow of this earth on the soft moonlight of her love's first phantasies.
The torch of love may be blown out wholly, but not that of
Hymen. Whom the flame and its cheering light and genial warmth no
longer bless, him the smoke stifles; for the spark is
inextinguishable, save by death:
nigro circumvelatus amictu Mæret Hymen, fumantque atræ sine lumine tædæ.
Youth beholds happiness gleaming in the prospect. Age looks back on the happiness of youth; and instead of hopes, seeks its enjoyment in the recollections of hope.
The giant shadows sleeping amid the wan yellow light of the December morning, looked like wrecks and scattered ruins of the long, long night.
Next to the inspired Scriptures, yea, and as the vibration of that once struck hour remaining on the air, stands Leighton's Commentary on the first Epistle of Peter.
"O! that God," says Carey in his Journal in Hindostan, "would make the Gospel successful among them! That would undoubtedly make them honest men, and I fear nothing else ever will." Now this is a fact, spite of infidels and psilosophizing Christians, a fact. A perfect explanation of it would require and would show the psychology of faith, the difference between the whole soul's modifying an action, and an action enforced by modifications of the soul amid prudential motives or favouring impulses. Let me here remind myself of the absolute necessity of having my whole faculties awake and imaginative, in order to illustrate this and similar truths; otherwise my writings will be no other than pages of algebra.
What now thou do'st, or art about to do,
Will help to give thee peace, or make thee rue;
When hov'ring o'er the line this hand will tell
The last dread moment 'twill be heaven or hell.
When wav'ring o'er the dot, this hand shall tell
The moment that secures thee heaven or hell!
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. An awful text! Now because vengeance is most wisely and lovingly forbidden to us, hence we have by degrees, under false generalizations and puny sensibilities, taken up the notion that vengeance is no where. In short, the abuse of figurative interpretation is endless; instead of being applied, as it ought to be, to those things which are the most comprehensible, that is, sensuous, and which therefore are the parts likely to be figurative, because such language is a condescension to our weakness, it is applied to rot away the very pillars, yea, to fret away and dissolve the very corner stones of the temple of religion. O, holy Paul! O, beloved John! full of light and love, whose books are full of intuitions, as those of Paul are books of energies, the one uttering to sympathizing angels what the other toils to convey to weak-sighted yet docile men: O Luther! Calvin! Fox, with Penn and Barclay! O Zinzendorf! and ye too, whose outward garments only have been singed and dishonoured in the heathenish furnace of Roman apostacy, Francis of Sales, Fenelon; yea, even Aquinas and Scotus! With what astoundment would ye, if ye were alive with your merely human perfections, listen to the creed of our, so called, rational religionists! Rational! They, who in the very outset deny all reason, and leave us nothing but degrees to distinguish us from brutes; a greater degree of memory, dearly purchased by the greater solicitudes of fear which convert that memory into foresight. O! place before your eyes the island of Britain in the reign of Alfred, its unpierced woods, its wide morasses and dreary heaths, its blood-stained and desolated shores, its untaught and scanty population; behold the monarch listening now to Bede, and now to John Erigena; and then see the same realm, a mighty empire, full of motion, full of books, where the cotter's son, twelve years old, has read more than archbishops of yore, and possesses the opportunity of reading more than our Alfred himself; and then finally behold this mighty nation, its rulers and its wise men listening to Paley and to Malthus! It is mournful, mournful.
How strange and sad is the laxity with which men in these days suffer the most inconsistent opinions to lie jumbled lazily together in their minds, holding the antimoralism of Paley and the hypophysics of Locke, and yet gravely, and with a mock faith, talking of God as a pure spirit, of passing out of time into eternity, of a peace which passes all understanding, of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and God above all, and so forth! Blank contradictions! What are these men's minds but a huge lumber-room of bully, that is, of incompatible notions brought together by a feeling without a sense of connection?
Consider the state of a rich man perfectly Adam
Smithed, yet with a naturally good heart; then suppose
him suddenly convinced, vitally convinced, of the truth of the
blessed system of hope and confidence in reason and humanity!
Contrast his new and old views and reflections, the feelings with
which he would begin to receive his rents, and to contemplate his
increase of power by wealth, the study to relieve the labour of
man from all mere annoy and disgust, the preclusion in his own
mind of all cooling down from the experience of individual
ingratitude, and his conviction that the true cause of all his
disappointments was, that his plans were too narrow, too short,
too selfish!
Wenn das Elend viel ist auf der Erde, so beruhet der grund davon, nach Abzug des theils ertraglichen, theils verbesserlichen, theils eingebildeten Uebels der Naturwelt, ganz allein in den moralischen Handlungen der Menschen 1
The unselfishness of self-love in the hopes and fears of
religion consists; first, in the previous necessity
of a moral energy, in order so far to subjugate the sensual,
which is indeed and properly the selfish, part of our nature, as
to believe in a state after death, on the grounds of the
Christian religion: secondly, in the abstract and, as
it were, unindividual nature of the idea, self, or soul, when
conceived apart from our present living body and the world of the
senses. In my religious meditations of hope and fear, the
reflection that this course of action will purchase heaven for
me, for my soul, involves a thought of and for all men who pursue
the same course. In worldly blessings, such as those promised in
the Old Law, each man might make up to himself his own favourite
scheme of happiness. "I will be strictly just, and observe all
the laws and ceremonies of my religion, that God may grant me
such a woman for my wife, or wealth and honour, with which I will
purchase such and such an estate," &c. But the reward of heaven
admits no day-dreams; its hopes and its fears are too vast to
endure an outline. "I will endeavour to abstain from vice, and
force myself to do such and such acts of duty, in order that I
may make myself capable of that freedom of moral being, without
which heaven would be no heaven to me." Now this very thought
tends to annihilate self. For what is a self not distinguished
from any other self, but like an individual circle in geometry,
uncoloured, and the representative of all other circles. The
circle is differenced, indeed, from a triangle or square; so is a
virtuous soul from a vicious soul, a soul in bliss from a soul in
misery, but no wise distinguished from other souls under the same
predicament. That selfishness which includes, of necessity, the
selves of all my fellow-creatures, is assuredly a social and
generous principle. I speak, as before observed, of the objective
or reflex self; for as to the subjective self, it is merely
synonymous with consciousness, and obtains equally whether I
think of me or of him; in both cases it is I thinking.
Still, however, I freely admit that there neither is, nor can be,
any such self-oblivion in these hopes and fears when practically
reflected on, as often takes place in love and acts of loving
kindness, and the habit of which constitutes a sweet and loving
nature. And this leads me to the third, and most important
reflection, namely, that the soul's infinite capacity of pain and
of joy, through an infinite duration, does really, on the most
high-flying notions of love and justice, make my own soul and the
most anxious care for the character of its future fate, an object
of emphatic duty. What can be the object of human virtue but the
happiness of sentient, still more of moral, beings? But an
infinite duration of faculties, infinite in progression, even of
one soul, is so vast, so boundless an idea, that we are unable to
distinguish it from the idea of the whole race of mankind. If to
seek the temporal welfare of all mankind be disinterested virtue,
much more must the eternal welfare of my own soul be so;
for the temporal welfare of all mankind is included within a
finite space and finite number, and my imagination makes it easy
by sympathies and visions of outward resemblance; but myself in
eternity, as the object of my contemplation, differs unimaginably
from my present self. Do but try to think of yourself in eternal
misery! you will find that you are stricken with horror for
it, even as for a third person; conceive it in hazard thereof,
and you will feel commiseration for it, and pray for it with an
anguish of sympathy very different from the outcry of an
immediate self-suffering.
Blessed be God! that which makes us capable of vicious
self-interestedness, capacitates us also for disinterestedness.
That I am capable of preferring a smaller advantage of my own to
a far greater good of another man, this, the power of
comparing the notions of "him and me" objectively, enables me
likewise to prefer at least furnishes the condition of my
preferring a greater good of another to a lesser good of my
own; nay, a pleasure of his, or external advantage, to an
equal one of my own. And thus too, that I am capable of loving my
neighbour as myself, empowers me to love myself as my neighbour,
not only as much, but in the same way and with the very
same feeling.
This is the great privilege of pure religion. By diverting
self-love to our self under those relations, in which alone it is
worthy of our anxiety, it annihilates self, as a notion of
diversity. Extremes meet. These reflections supply a forcible,
and, I believe, quite new argument against the purgatory, both of
the Romanists, and of the modern Millennarians, and final
Salvationists. Their motives do, indeed, destroy the essence of
virtue.
The doctors of self-love are misled by a wrong use of the words,
"We love ourselves!" Now this is impossible for a finite
and created being in the absolute meaning of self; and in its
secondary and figurative meaning, self signifies only a less
degree of distance, a narrowness of moral view, and a
determination of value by measurement. Hence the body is in this
sense our self, because the sensations have been habitually
appropriated to it in too great a proportion; but this is not a
necessity of our nature. There is a state possible even in this
life, in which we may truly say, "My self loves," freely
constituting its secondary or objective love in what it wills to
love, commands what it wills, and wills what it commands. The
difference between self-love, and self that loves, consists in
the objects of the former as given to it according to the law of
the senses, while the latter determines the objects according to
the law in the spirit. The first loves because it must; the
second, because it ought; and the result of the first is not in
any objective, imaginable, comprehensible, action, but in that
action by which it abandoned its power of true agency, and willed
its own fall. This is, indeed, a mystery. How can it be
otherwise? For if the will be unconditional, it must be
inexplicable, the understanding of a thing being an insight into
its conditions and causes. But whatever is in the will is the
will, and must therefore be equally inexplicable.
In a word, the difference of an unselfish from a selfish love,
even in this life, consists in this, that the latter depends on
our transferring our present passion or appetite, or rather on
our dilating and stretching it out in imagination, as the
covetous man does; while in the former we carry ourselves
forward under a very different state from the present, as the
young man, who restrains his appetites in respect of his future
self as a tranquil and healthy old man. This last requires as
great an effort of disinterestedness as, if not a greater than,
to give up a present enjoyment to another person who is present
to us. The alienation from distance in time and from diversity of
circumstance, is greater in the one case than in the other. And
let it be remembered, that a Christian may exert all the virtues
and virtuous charities of humanity in any state; yea, in the
pangs of a wounded conscience, he may feel for the future periods
of his own lost spirit, just as Adam for all his posterity.
O magical, sympathetic, anima! principium hylarchicum!
rationes spermaticae! [Greek: logoi poiaetikoi!] O formidable
words! And O man! thou marvellous beast-angel! thou ambitious
beggar! How pompously dost thou trick out thy very ignorance with
such glorious disguises, that thou mayest seem to hide it in
order only to worship it!
A man may be, perhaps, exclusively a poet, a poet most exquisite in his kind, though the kind must needs be of inferior worth; I say, may be; for I cannot recollect any one instance in which I have a right to suppose it. But, surely, to have an exclusive pleasure in poetry, not being yourself a poet; to turn away from all effort, and to dwell wholly on the images of another's vision, is an unworthy and effeminate thing. A jeweller may devote his whole time to jewels unblamed; but the mere amateur, who grounds his taste on no chemical or geological idea, cannot claim the same exemption from despect. How shall he fully enjoy Wordsworth, who has never meditated on the truths which Wordsworth has wedded to immortal verse?
It is well ordered by nature, that the amiable and estimable have a fainter perception of their own qualities than their friends have; otherwise they would love themselves. And though they may fear flattery, yet if not justified in suspecting intentional deceit, they cannot but love and esteem those who love and esteem them, only as lovely and estimable, and give them proof of their having done well, where they have meant to do well.
"All reasoners ought to be perfectly dispassionate, and ready to allow all the force of the arguments, they are to confute. But more especially those, who are to argue in behalf of Christianity, ought carefully to preserve the spirit of it in their manner of expressing themselves. I have so much honour for the Christian clergy, that I had much rather hear them railed at, than hear them rail; and I must say, that I am often grievously offended with the generality of them for their method of treating all who differ from them in opinion."
(Mrs. Chapone.)
The smooth words used by all factions, and their wide influence, may be exemplified in all the extreme systems, as for instance in the patriarchal government of Filmer. Take it in one relation, and it imports love, tender anxiety, longer experience, and superior wisdom, bordering on revelation, especially to Jews and Christians, who are in the life-long habit of attaching to patriarchs an intimacy with the Supreme Being. Take it on the other side, and it imports, that a whole people are to be treated and governed as children by a man not so old as very many, not older than very many, and in all probability not wiser than the many, and by his very situation precluded from the same experience.
The most hateful form of self-conceit is the callous form, when it boasts and swells up on the score of its own ignorance, as implying exemption from a folly. "We profess not to understand;" "We are so unhappy as to be quite in the dark as to the meaning of this writer;" "All this may be very fine, but we are not ashamed to confess that to us it is quite unintelligible:" then quote a passage without the context, and appeal to the PUBLIC, whether they understand it or not! Wretches! Such books were not written for your public. If it be a work on inward religion, appeal to the inwardly religious, and ask them! If it be of true love and its anguish and its yearnings, appeal to the true lover! What have the public to do with this?
He was like a cork, flexible, floating, full of pores and openings, and yet he could neither return nor transmit the waters of Helicon, much less the light of Apollo. The poet, by his side, was like a diamond, transmitting to all around, yet retaining for himself alone, the rays of the god of day.
An upright shoe may fit both feet; but never saw I a glove that would fit both hands. It is a man for a mean or mechanic office, that can be employed equally well under either of two opposite parties.
Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life.
Love, however sudden, as when we fall in love at first sight,
(which is, perhaps, always the case of love in its highest
sense,) is yet an act of the will, and that too one of its
primary, and therefore ineffable acts. This is most important;
for if it be not true, either love itself is all a romantic
hum, a mere connection of desire with a form appropriated
to excite and gratify it, or the mere repetition of a daydream;
or if it be granted that love has a real, distinct, and
excellent being, I know not how we could attach blame and
immorality to inconstancy, when confined to the affections and a
sense of preference. Either, therefore, we must brutalize our
notions with Pope:
Lust, thro' some certain strainers well refin'd,
Is gentle love and charms all woman-kind:
The well-spring of all sensible communion is the natural
delight and need, which undepraved man hath to transfuse from
himself into others, and to receive from others into himself,
those things, wherein the excellency of his kind doth most
consist; and the eminence of love or marriage communion is, that
this mutual transfusion can take place more perfectly and totally
in this, than in any other mode.
Prefer person before money, good-temper with good sense before
person; and let all, wealth, easy temper, strong understanding
and beauty, be as nothing to thee, unless accompanied by virtue
in principle and in habit.
Suppose competence, health, and honesty; then a happy marriage
depends on four things:
1. An understanding proportionate to thine, that is, a
recipiency at least of thine:
2. natural sensibility and lively sympathy in
general:
3. steadiness in attaching and retaining sensibility to
its proper objects in its proper proportions:
4. mutual liking; including person and all the thousand
obscure sympathies that determine conjugal liking, that is, love
and desire to A. rather than to B.
This seems very obvious and almost trivial: and yet all unhappy
marriages arise from the not honestly putting, and sincerely
answering each of these four questions: any one of them
negatived, marriage is imperfect, and in hazard of
discontent.
In the most similar and nearest points there is a difference, but for the most part there is an absolute contrast, between Hobbes and Spinosa. Thus Hobbes makes a state of war the natural state of man from the essential and ever continuing nature of man, as not a moral, but only a frightenable, being: Spinosa makes the same state a necessity of man out of society, because he must then be an undeveloped man, and his moral being dormant; and so on through the whole.
Whatever act is necessary to an end, and ascertained to be
necessary and proportionate both to the end and the agent, takes
its nature from that end. This premised, the proposition is
innocent that ends may justify means. Remember, however, the
important distinction: Unius facti diversi fines esse
possunt: unius actionis non possunt.
I have somewhere read this remark: Omne meritum est
voluntarium, aut voluntate originis, aut origine voluntatis.
Quaintly as this is expressed, it is well worth consideration,
and gives the true meaning of Baxter's famous saying, "Hell
is paved with good intentions."
On this calm morning of the l3th of November, 1809, it occurs to me, that it is by a negation and voluntary act of no thinking that we think of earth, air, water, &c. as dead. It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness, that we should be brought to this negative state, and that this state should pass into custom; but it is likewise necessary that at times we should awake and step forward; and this is effected by those extenders of our consciousness sorrow, sickness, poetry, and religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just when we are not forced to go on, and then adopt a permission of our feelings for a precept of our reason.
Heaven bestows light and influence on this lower world, which reflects the blessed rays, though it cannot recompense them. So man may make a return to God, but no requital.
Fair criticism on young prodigies and Rosciuses in verse, or
on the stage, is arraigned,
...as the envious sneaping frost
That bites the first-born infants of the spring.