Well, say it be! Yet why of summer boast,
Before the birds have natural cause to sing?
Why should we joy in an abortive birth?
At Christmas I no more desire a rose,
Than wish a snow in May's new budding shows;
But like of each thing that in reason grows.
Love's Labours Lost. 1
The small number of surnames, and those Christian names and patronymics, not derived from trades, &c. is one mark of a country either not yet, or only recently, unfeudalized. Hence in Scotland the Mackintoshes, Macaulays, and so on. But the most remarkable show of this I ever saw, is the list of subscribers to Owen's Welch Dictionary. In letter D. there are 31 names, 21 of which are Davis or Davies, and the other three are not Welchmen. In E. there are 30; 16 Evans; 6 Edwards; 1 Edmonds; I Egan, and the remainder Ellis. In G. two-thirds are Griffiths. In H. all are Hughes and Howell. In I. there are 66; all Jonesses. In L. 3 or 4 Lewises; 1 Lewellyn; all the rest Lloyds. M. four-fifths Morgans. O. entirely Owen. R. all Roberts or Richards. T. all Thomases. V. all Vaughans; and W. 64 names, 56 of them Williams.
The real value of melody in a language is considerable as
subadditive; but when not jutting out into consciousness under
the friction of comparison, the absence or inferiority of it is,
as privative of pleasure, of little consequence. For example,
when I read Voss's translation of the Georgics, I am, as
it were, reading the original poem, until something particularly
well expressed occasions me to revert to the Latin; and then I
find the superiority, or at least the powers, of the German in
all other respects, but am made feelingly alive, at the same
time, to its unsmooth mixture of the vocal and the organic, the
fluid and the substance, of language. The fluid seems to have
been poured in on the corpuscles all at once, and the whole has,
therefore, curdled, and collected itself into a lumpy soup full
of knots of curds inisled by interjacent whey at irregular
distances, and the curd lumpets of various sizes.
It is always a question how far the apparent defects of a
language arise from itself or from the false taste of the nation
speaking it. Is the practical inferiority of the English to the
Italian in the power of passing from grave to light subjects, in
the manner of Ariosto, the fault of the language itself?
Wieland in his Oberon, broke successfully through equal
difficulties. It is grievous to think how much less careful the
English have been to preserve than to acquire. Why have we lost,
or all but lost, the ver or for as a prefix,
fordone, forwearied, &c.; and the zer or
to,-zerreissen, to rend, &c. Jugend,
Jüngling: youth, youngling; why is that
last word now lost to common use, and confined to sheep and other
animals?
[Greek: En to phronein maedhen aedistos bios.]
(Sophocles)
It surely is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.
Harberous, that is, harbourous, is the old version of
St. Paul's philoxenos, and a beautiful word it is.
Kosmis should be rendered a gentleman in dress and
address, in appearance and demeanour, a man of the world in an
innocent sense. The Latin mundus has the same double force
in it; only that to the rude early Romans, to have a clean pair
of hands and a clean dress, was to be drest; just as we say to
boys, "Put on your clean clothes!"
The different meanings attached to the same word or phrase in
different sentences, will, of course, be accompanied with a
different feeling in the mind; this will affect the
pronunciation, and hence arises a new word. We should vainly try
to produce the same feeling in our minds by and he as by
who; for the different use of the latter, and its feeling
having now coalesced. Yet who is properly the same word
and pronunciation, as ho with the digammate prefix, and as
qui kai ho.
There are two sides to every question. If thou hast genius and poverty to thy lot, dwell on the foolish, perplexing, imprudent, dangerous, and even immoral, conduct of promise-breach in small things, of want of punctuality, of procrastination in all its shapes and disguises. Force men to reverence the dignity of thy moral strength in and for itself, seeking no excuses or palliations from fortune, or sickness, or a too full mind that, in opulence of conception, overrated its powers of application. But if thy fate should be different, shouldest thou possess competence, health and ease of mind, and then be thyself called upon to judge such faults in another so gifted, O! then, upon the other view of the question, say, Am I in ease and comfort, and dare I wonder that he, poor fellow, acted so and so? Dare I accuse him? Ought I not to shadow forth to myself that, glad and luxuriating in a short escape from anxiety, his mind over-promised for itself; that, want combating with his eager desire to produce things worthy of fame, he dreamed of the nobler, when he should have been producing the meaner, and so had the meaner obtruded on his moral being, when the nobler was making full way on his intellectual? Think of the manifoldness of his accumulated petty calls! Think, in short, on all that should be like a voice from heaven to warn thyself against this and this, and call it all up for pity and for palliation; and then draw the balance. Take him in his whole, his head, his heart, his wishes, his innocence of all selfish crime, and a hundred years hence, what will be the result? The good, were it but a single volume that made truth more visible, and goodness more lovely, and pleasure at once more akin to virtue and, self-doubled, more pleasurable! and the evil, while he lived, it injured none but himself; and where is it now? in his grave. Follow it not thither.
The mighty kingdoms angelical, like the thin clouds at dawn, receiving and hailing the first radiance, and singing and sounding forth their blessedness, increase the rising joy in the heart of God, spread wide and utter forth the joy arisen, and in innumerable finite glories interpret all they can of infinite bliss.
A phaenomenon in no connection with any other phaenomenon, as
its immediate cause, is a miracle; and what is believed to have
been such, is miraculous for the person so believing When it is
strange and surprising, that is, with out any analogy in our
former experience it is called a miracle. The kind defines
the thing: the circumstances the word.
To stretch out my arm is a miracle, unless the materialists
should be more cunning than they have proved themselves hitherto.
To reanimate a dead man by an act of the will, no intermediate
agency employed, not only is, but is called, a miracle. A
scripture miracle, therefore, must be so defined, as to express,
not only its miracular essence, but likewise the condition of its
appearing miraculous; add therefore to the preceding, the words
praeter omnem prior em experientiam.
It might be defined likewise an effect, not having its cause in
any thing congenerous. That thought calls up thought is no more
miraculous than that a billiard ball moves a billiard ball; but
that a billiard ball should excite a thought, that is, be
perceived, is a miracle, and, were it strange, would be called
such. For take the converse, that a thought should call up a
billiard ball! Yet where is the difference, but that the one is a
common experience, the other never yet experienced?
It is not strictly accurate to affirm, that every thing would
appear a miracle, if we were wholly uninfluenced by custom, and
saw things as they are: for then the very ground of all
miracles would probably vanish, namely, the heterogeneity of
spirit and matter. For the quid ulterius? of wonder, we
should have the ne plus ultra of adoration.
Again the word miracle has an objective, a subjective, and
a popular meaning; as objective, the essence of a
miracle consists in the heterogeneity of the consequent and its
causative antecedent; as subjective, in the
assumption of the heterogeneity. Add the wonder and surprise
excited, when the consequent is out of the course of experience,
and we know the popular sense and ordinary use of the word.
It is an important thought, that death, judged of by corporeal
analogies, certainly implies discerption or dissolution of parts;
but pain and pleasure do not; nay, they seem inconceivable except
under the idea of concentration. Therefore the influence of the
body on the soul will not prove the common destiny of both. I
feel myself not the slave of nature (nature used here as the
mundus sensibilis) in the sense in which animals are. Not
only my thoughts and affections extend to objects trans-natural,
as truth, virtue, God; not only do my powers extend vastly beyond
all those, which I could have derived from the instruments and
organs, with which nature has furnished me; but I can do what
nature per se cannot. I ingraft, I raise heavy bodies
above the clouds, and guide my course over ocean and through air.
I alone am lord of fire and light; other creatures are but their
alms-folk, and of all the so called elements, water, earth, air,
and all their compounds (to speak in the ever-enduring language
of the senses, to which nothing can be revealed, but as compact,
or fluid, or aerial), I not merely subserve myself of them, but I
employ them. Ergo, there is in me, or rather I am, a
præter-natural, that is, a super-sensuous thing: but what
is not nature, why should it perish with nature? why lose the
faculty of vision, because my spectacles are broken?
Now to this it will be objected, and very forcibly too;
that the soul or self is acted upon by nature through the body,
and water or caloric, diffused through or collected in the brain,
will derange the faculties of the soul by deranging the
organization of the brain; the sword cannot touch the soul; but
by rending the flesh, it will rend the feelings. Therefore the
violence of nature may, in destroying the body, mediately destroy
the soul! It is to this objection that my first sentence applies;
and is an important, and, I believe, a new and the only
satisfactory reply I have ever heard.
The one great and binding ground of the belief of God and a
hereafter, is the law of conscience: but as the aptitudes, and
beauty, and grandeur, of the world, are a sweet and beneficent
inducement to this belief, a constant fuel to our faith, so here
we seek these arguments, not as dissatisfied with the one main
ground, not as of little faith, but because, believing it
to be, it is natural we should expect to find traces of it, and
as a noble way of employing and developing, and enlarging the
faculties of the soul, and this, not by way of motive, but of
assimilation, producing virtue.
2d April, 1811.
It is the mark of a noble nature to be more shocked with the unjust condemnation of a bad man than of a virtuous one; as in the instance of Strafford. For in such cases the love of justice, and the hatred of the contrary, are felt more nakedly, and constitute a strong passion per se, not only unaided by, but in conquest of, the softer self-repaying sympathies. A wise foresight too inspires jealousy, that so may principles be most easily overthrown. This is the virtue of a wise man, which a mob never possesses, even as a mob never, perhaps, has the malignant finis ultimus, which is the vice of a man.
Amongst the great truths are these:
I. That religion has no speculative dogmas; that all is
practical, all appealing to the will, and therefore all
imperative. I am the Lord thy God: Thou shall have none other
gods but me.
II. That, therefore, miracles are not the proofs, but the
necessary results, of revelation. They are not the key of the
arch and roof of evidence, though they may be a compacting stone
in it, which gives while it receives strength. Hence, to make the
intellectual faith a fair analogon or unison of the vital faith,
it ought to be stamped in the mind by all the evidences duly
co-ordinated, and not designed by single pen-strokes, beginning
either here or there.
III. That, according to No. I., Christ is not described
primarily and characteristically as a teacher, but as a doer; a
light indeed, but an effective light, the sun which causes what
it shows, as well as shows what it first causes.
IV. That a certain degree of morality is presupposed in
the reception of Christianity; it is the substratum of the
moral interest which substantiates the evidence of miracles. The
instance of a profligate suddenly converted, if properly sifted,
will be found but an apparent exception.
V. That the being of a God, and the immortality of man,
are every where assumed by Christ.
VI. That Socinianism is not a religion, but a theory, and
that, too, a very pernicious, or a very unsatisfactory, theory.
Pernicious, for it excludes all our deep and awful ideas of
the perfect holiness of God, his justice and his mercy, and
thereby makes the voice of conscience a delusion, as having no
correspondent in the character of the legislator; regarding God
as merely a good-natured pleasure-giver, so happiness be
produced, indifferent as to the means: Unsatisfactory, for
it promises forgiveness without any solution of the difficulty of
the compatibility of this with the justice of God; in no way
explains the fallen condition of man, nor offers any means for
his regeneration. "If you will be good, you will be happy," it
says: that may be, but my will is weak; I sink in the
struggle.
VII. That Socinianism never did and never can subsist as
a general religion. For
1. It neither states the disease, on account of which the human being hungers for revelation, nor prepares any remedy in general, nor ministers any hope to the individual.
2. In order to make itself endurable on scriptural grounds, it must so weaken the texts and authority of scripture, as to leave in scripture no binding ground of proof of any thing.
3. Take a pious Jew, one of the Maccabees, and compare his faith and its grounds with Priestley's; and then, for what did Christ come?
Is it not probable from what is found in the writings of Cyril, Eusebius, Cyprian, Marcellus of Ancyra and others, that our present Apostles' Creed is not the very Symbolum Fidei, which was not to be written, but was always repeated at baptism? For this latter certainly contained the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Logos; and, therefore, it seems likely that the present Apostles' creed was an introductory, and, as it were, alphabetical, creed for young catechumens in their first elementation. Is it to be believed that the Symbolum Fidei contained nothing but the mere history of Jesus, without any of the peculiar doctrines, or that, if it did not contain something more, the great and vehement defenders of the Trinity would speak of it so magnificently as they do, even preferring its authority to that of the scriptures? Besides, does not Austin positively say that our present Apostles' creed was gathered out of the scriptures? Whereas the Symbolum Fidei was elder than the Gospels, and probably contained only the three doctrines of the Trinity, the Redemption, and the Unity of the Church. May it not have happened, when baptism was administered so early, and at last even to infants, that the old Symbolum Fidei became gradually inusitatum, as being appropriated to adult proselytes from Judaism or Paganism? This seems to me even more than probable; for in proportion to the majority of born over converted Christians must the creed of instruction have been more frequent than that of doctrinal profession.
There is in Abbt's Essays an attempt to determine the
true sense of this phrase, at least to unfold
(auseinandersetzen) what is meant and felt by it. I was
much pleased with the remarks, I remember, and with the
counterposition of Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandisori. Might
not Luther and Calvin serve? But it is made less noticeable in
these last by its co-existence with, and sometimes real, more
often apparent, subordination to fixed conscious principles, and
is thus less naturally characteristic. Parson Adams contrasted
with Dr. Harrison in Fielding's Amelia would do. Then
there is the suppression of the good heart and the substitution
of principles or motives for the good heart, as in Laud, and the
whole race of conscientious persecutors. Such principles
constitute the virtues of the Inquisition. A good heart contrasts
with the Pharisaic righteousness. This last contemplation of the
Pharisees, the dogmatists, and the rigorists in toto
genere, serves to reconcile me to the fewness of the men who
act on fixed principles. For unless there exist intellectual
power to determine aright what are the principia jam fixa et
formata, and unless there be the wisdom of love preceding the
love of wisdom, and unless to this be added a graciousness of
nature, a loving kindness, these rigorists are but bigots
often to errors, and active, yea, remorseless in preventing or
staying the rise and progress of truth. And even when bigotted
adherents to true principles, yet they render truth unamiable,
and forbid little children to come thereunto. As human nature now
is, it is well, perhaps, that the number should be few, seeing
that of the few, the greater part are pre-maturities.
The number of those who act from good hearted impulses, a kindly
and cheerful mood, and the play of minute sympathies, continuous
in their discontinuity, like the sand-thread of the hour-glass,
and from their minuteness and transiency not calculated to
stiffen or inflate the individual, and thus remaining
unendangered by egotism, and its unhandsome vizard contempt, is
far larger: and though these temperamental pro-virtues
will too often fail, and are not built to stand the storms of
strong temptation; yet on the whole they carry on the benignant
scheme of social nature, like the other instincts that rule the
animal creation. But of all the most numerous are the men, who
have ever more their own dearliest beloved self, as the only or
main goal or butt of their endeavours straight and steady before
their eyes, and whose whole inner world turns on the great axis
of self-interest. These form the majority, if not of mankind, yet
of those by whom the business of life is carried on; and most
expedient it is, that so it should be; nor can we imagine any
thing better contrived for the advantage of society. For these
are the most industrious, orderly, and circumspect portion of
society, and the actions governed by this principle with the
results, are the only materials on which either the statesman, or
individuals can safely calculate.
There is, indeed, another sort, (a class they can scarcely be
called), who are below self-interest; who live under the mastery
of their senses and appetites; and whose selfishness is an animal
instinct, a goad a tergo, not an attraction, a re
prospecta, or (so to speak) from a projected self. In fact,
such individuals cannot so properly be said to have a self, as to
be machines for the self of nature: and are as little capable of
loving themselves as of loving their neighbours. Such there are.
Nay, (if we were to count only without weighing) the aggregate of
such persons might possibly form a larger number than the class
preceding. But they may safely be taken up into the latter, for
the main ends of society, as being or sure to become its
materials and tools. Their folly is the stuff in which the sound
sense of the worldly-wise is at once manifested and remunerated;
their idleness of thought, with the passions, appetites, likings
and fancies, which are its natural growth, though weeds, give
direction and employment to the industry of the other. The
accidents of inheritance by birth, of accumulation of property in
partial masses, are thus counteracted, and the aneurisms in
the circulating system prevented or rendered fewer and less
obstinate, whilst animal want, the sure general result of
idleness and its accompanying vices, tames at length the selfish
host, into the laborious slaves and mechanic implements of the
self-interested. Thus, without public spirit, nay, by the
predominance of the opposite quality, the latter are the public
benefactors: and, giving steadfastness and compactness to the
whole, lay in the ground of the canvass, on which minds of finer
texture may impress beauty and harmony.
Lastly, there is in the heart of all men a working principle,
call it ambition, or vanity, or desire of distinction, the
inseparable adjunct of our individuality and personal nature, and
flowing from the same source as language the instinct and
necessity in each man of declaring his particular existence, and
thus of singling or singularizing himself. In some this principle
is far stronger than in others, while in others its comparative
dimness may pass for its non-existence. But in thoughts at least,
and secret fancies there is in all men (idiocy of course
excepted) a wish to remain the same and yet to be something else,
and something more, or to exhibit what they are, or imagine they
might be, somewhere else and to other spectators. Now, though
this desire of distinction, when it is disproportionate to the
powers and qualities by which the individual is indeed
distinguished, or when it is the governing passion, or taken as
the rule of conduct, is but a "knavish sprite," yet as an
attendant and subaltern spirit, it has its good purposes and
beneficial effects: and is not seldom
sent with broom before, To sweep the dust behind the door.
I. MIRACLES as precluding the contrary evidence
of no miracles.
II. The material of Christianity, its existence and
history.
III. The doctrines of Christianity, and the
correspondence of human nature to those doctrines,
illustrated,
1st, historically as the actual production of a new world, and the dependence of the fate of the planet upon it;
2nd, individually from its appeal for its truth to an asserted fact, which, whether it be real or not, every man possessing reason has an equal power of ascertaining within himself; namely, a will which has more or less lost its freedom, though not the consciousness that it ought to be and may become free; the conviction that this cannot be achieved without the operation of a principle connatural with itself; the evident rationality of an entire confidence in that principle, being the condition and means of its operation; the experience in his own nature of the truth of the process described by Scripture as far as he can place himself within the process, aided by the confident assurances of others as to the effects experienced by them, and which he is striving to arrive at. All these form a practical Christian. Add, however, a gradual opening out of the intellect to more and more clear perceptions of the strict coincidence of the doctrines of Christianity, with the truths evolved by the mind, from reflections on its own nature. To such a man one main test of the objectivity, the entity, the objective truth of his faith, is its accompaniment by an increase of insight into the moral beauty and necessity of the process which it comprises, and the dependence of that proof on the causes asserted. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of that belief. The Christian, to whom, after a long profession of Christianity, the mysteries remain as much mysteries as before, is in the same state as a schoolboy with regard to his arithmetic to whom the _facit_ at the end of the examples in his cyphering book is the whole ground for his assuming that such and such figures amount to so and so.
3rd. In the above I include the increasing discoveries in the correspondence of the history, the doctrines and the promises of Christianity, with the past, present, and probable future of human nature; and in this state a fair comparison of the religion as a divine philosophy, with all other religions which have pretended to revelations and all other systems of philosophy; both with regard to the totality of its truth and its identification with the manifest march of affairs.
Nov. 3, 1816.
I. I believe that I am a free-agent, inasmuch as, and so
far as, I have a will, which renders me justly responsible for my
actions, omissive as well as commissive. Likewise that I possess
reason, or a law of right and wrong, which, uniting with my sense
of moral responsibility, constitutes the voice of conscience.
II. Hence it becomes my absolute duty to believe, and I
do believe, that there is a God, that is, a Being, in whom
supreme reason and a most holy will are one with an infinite
power; and that all holy will is coincident with the will of God,
and therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by His
omnipotence; having, if such similitude be not unlawful,
such a relation to the goodness of the Almighty, as a perfect
time-piece will have to the sun.
Corollary.
The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me of his existence, and shadowing out to me his perfections. But as all language presupposes in the intelligent hearer or reader those primary notions, which it symbolizes; as well as the power of making those combinations of these primary notions, which it represents and excites us to combine, even so I believe, that the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is called forth into distinct consciousness principally by the conscience, and auxiliarly by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation. It is, therefore, evident to my reason, that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demonstration, and that Scripture has so represented it. For it commands us to believe in one God. I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods but me. Now all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, and is apodictic or demonstrative only as far as it is compulsory on the mind, volentem, nolentem