Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1
Date: 2004-07-02T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English essays -- 19th century

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Title: Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1

Author: Thomas De Quincey

Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6123]
Most recently updated: April 9, 2013

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS — VOLUME 1 ***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the

Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS.

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY

AUTHOR OF

'CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER,' ETC. ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT

PROTESTANTISM

ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY

JUDAS ISCARIOT

ON HUME'S ARGUMENT AGAINST MIRACLES

CASUISTRY

GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS

ON CHRISTIANITY, AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT.

[1846.]

FORCES, which are illimitable in their compass of effect, are often, for the same reason, obscure and untraceable in the steps of their movement. Growth, for instance, animal or vegetable, what eye can arrest its eternal increments? The hour-hand of a watch, who can detect the separate fluxions of its advance? Judging by the past, and the change which is registered between that and the present, we know that it must be awake; judging by the immediate appearances, we should say that it was always asleep. Gravitation, again, that works without holiday for ever, and searches every corner of the universe, what intellect can follow it to its fountains? And yet, shyer than gravitation, less to be counted than the fluxions of sun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footsteps of Christianity amongst the political workings of man. Nothing, that the heart of man values, is so secret; nothing is so potent.

It is because Christianity works so secretly, that it works so potently; it is because Christianity burrows and hides itself, that it towers above the clouds; and hence partly it is that its working comes to be misapprehended, or even lost out of sight. It is dark to eyes touched with the films of human frailty: but it is 'dark with excessive bright.'[Footnote: 'Dark with excessive bright.' Paradise Lost. Book III.] Hence it has happened sometimes that minds of the highest order have entered into enmity with the Christian faith, have arraigned it as a curse to man, and have fought against it even upon Christian impulses, (impulses of benignity that could not have had a birth except in Christianity.) All comes from the labyrinthine intricacy in which the social action of Christianity involves itself to the eye of a contemporary. Simplicity the most absolute is reconcilable with intricacy the most elaborate. The weather—how simple would appear the laws of its oscillations, if we stood at their centre! and yet, because we do not, to this hour the weather is a mystery. Human health—how transparent is its economy under ordinary circumstances! abstinence and cleanliness, labor and rest, these simple laws, observed in just proportions, laws that may be engrossed upon a finger nail, are sufficient, on the whole, to maintain the equilibrium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectify the unfathomable watch-work? Even the simplicities of planetary motions do not escape distortion: nor is it easy to be convinced that the distortion is in the eye which beholds, not in the object beheld. Let a planet be wheeling with heavenly science, upon arches of divine geometry: suddenly, to us, it shall appear unaccountably retrograde; flying when none pursues; and unweaving its own work. Let this planet in its utmost elongations travel out of sight, and for us its course will become incoherent: because our sight is feeble, the beautiful curve of the planet shall be dislocated into segments, by a parenthesis of darkness; because our earth is in no true centre, the disorder of parallax shall trouble the laws of light; and, because we ourselves are wandering, the heavens shall seem fickle.

Exactly in the predicament of such a planet is Christianity: its motions are intermingled with other motions; crossed and thwarted, eclipsed and disguised, by counter-motions in man himself, and by disturbances that man cannot overrule. Upon lines that are direct, upon curves that are circuitous, Christianity is advancing for ever; but from our imperfect vision, or from our imperfect opportunities for applying even such a vision, we cannot trace it continuously. We lose it, we regain it; we see it doubtfully, we see it interruptedly; we see it in collision, we see it in combination; in collision with darkness that confounds, in combination with cross lights that perplex. And this in part is irremediable; so that no finite intellect will ever retrace the total curve upon which Christianity has moved, any more than eyes that are incarnate will ever see God.

But part of this difficulty in unweaving the maze, has its source in a misconception of the original machinery by which Christianity moved, and of the initial principle which constituted its differential power. In books, at least, I have observed one capital blunder upon the relations which Christianity bears to Paganism: and out of that one mistake, grows a liability to others, upon the possible relations of Christianity to the total drama of this world. I will endeavor to explain my views. And the reader, who takes any interest in the subject, will not need to fear that the explanation should prove tedious; for the mere want of space, will put me under a coercion to move rapidly over the ground; I cannot be diffuse; and, as regards quality, he will find in this paper little of what is scattered over the surface of books.

I begin with this question:—What do people mean in a Christian land by the word 'religion?' My purpose is not to propound any metaphysical problem; I wish only, in the plainest possible sense, to ask, and to have an answer, upon this one point—how much is understood by that obscure term,* 'religion,' when used by a Christian? Only I am punctilious upon one demand, viz., that the answer shall be comprehensive. We are apt in such cases to answer elliptically, omitting, because silently presuming as understood between us, whatever seems obvious. To prevent that, we will suppose the question to be proposed by an emissary from some remote planet,—who, knowing as yet absolutely nothing of us and our intellectual differences, must insist (as I insist) upon absolute precision, so that nothing essential shall be wanting, and nothing shall be redundant.

*[Footnote: 'That obscure term;'—i. e. not obscure as regards the use of the term, or its present value, but as regards its original genesis, or what in civil law is called the deductio. Under what angle, under what aspect, or relation, to the field which it concerns did the term religion originally come forward? The general field, overlooked by religion, is the ground which lies between the spirit of man and the supernatural world. At present, under the humblest conception of religion, the human spirit is supposed to be interested in such a field by the conscience and the nobler affections, But I suspect that originally these great faculties were absolutely excluded from the point of view. Probably the relation between spiritual terrors and man's power of propitiation, was the problem to which the word religion formed the answer. Religion meant apparently, in the infancies of the various idolatries, that latreia, or service of sycophantic fear, by which, as the most approved method of approach, man was able to conciliate the favor, or to buy off the malice of supernatural powers. In all Pagan nations, it is probable that religion would, an the whole, be a degrading influence; although I see, even for such nations, two cases, at the least, where the uses of a religion would be indispensable; viz. for the sanction of oaths, and as a channel for gratitude not pointing to a human object. If so, the answer is easy: religion was degrading: but heavier degradations would have arisen from irreligion. The noblest of all idolatrous peoples, viz. the Romans, have left deeply scored in their very use of their word religlo, their testimony to the degradation wrought by any religion that Paganism could yield. Rarely indeed is this word employed, by a Latin author, in speaking of an individual, without more or less of sneer. Reading that word, in a Latin book, we all try it and ring it, as a petty shopkeeper rings a half-crown, before we venture to receive it as offered in good faith and loyalty. Even the Greeks are nearly in the same άπορια, when they wish to speak of religiosity in a spirit of serious praise. Some circuitous form, commending the correctness of a man, περι τα θεια, in respect of divine things, becomes requisite; for all the direct terms, expressing the religious temper, are preoccupied by a taint of scorn. The word όσιος, means pious,—not as regards the gods, but as regards the dead; and even είσεβης, though not used sneeringly, is a world short of our word 'religious.' This condition of language we need not wonder at: the language of life must naturally receive, as in a mirror, the realities of life. Difficult it is to maintain a just equipoise in any moral habits, but in none so much as in habits of religious demeanor under a Pagan [that is, a degrading] religion. To be a coward, is base: to be a sycophant, is base: but to be a sycophant in the service of cowardice, is the perfection of baseness: and yet this was the brief analysis of a devotee amongst the ancient Romans. Now, considering that the word religion is originally Roman, [probably from the Etruscan,] it seems probable that it presented the idea of religion under some one of its bad aspects. Coleridge must quite have forgotten this Paganism of the word, when he suggested as a plausible idea, that originally it had presented religion under the aspect of a coercion or restraint. Morality having been viewed as the prime restraint or obligation resting upon man, then Coleridge thought that religion might have been viewed as a religatio, a reiterated restraint, or secondary obligation. This is ingenious, but it will not do. It is cracked in the ring. Perhaps as many as three objections might be mustered to such a derivation: but the last of the three is conclusive. The ancients never did view morality as a mode of obligation: I affirm this peremptorily; and with the more emphasis, because there are great consequences suspended upon that question.]

What, then, is religion? Decomposed into its elements, as they are found in Christianity, how many powers for acting on the heart of man, does, by possibility, this great agency include? According to my own view, four.[Footnote: there are six, in one sense, of religion: viz. 5_thly_, corresponding moral affections; 6_thly_, a suitable life. But this applies to religion as subjectively possessed by a man, not to religion as objectively contemplated. ] I will state them, and number them.

1st. A form of worship, a cultus.

2dly. An idea of God; and (pointing the analysis to Christianity in particular) an idea not purified merely from ancient pollutions, but recast and absolutely born again.

3dly. An idea of the relation which man occupies to God: and of this idea also, when Christianity is the religion concerned, it must be said, that it is so entirely remodelled, as in no respect to resemble any element in any other religion. Thus far we are reminded of the poet's expression, 'Pure religion breathing household laws;' that is, not teaching such laws, not formally prescribing a new economy of life, so much as inspiring it indirectly through a new atmosphere surrounding all objects with new attributes. But there is also in Christianity,

4thly. A doctrinal part, a part directly and explicitly occupied with teaching; and this divides into two great sections, α, A system of ethics so absolutely new as to be untranslatable[Footnote: This is not generally perceived. On the contrary, people are ready to say, 'Why, so far from it, the very earliest language in which the Gospels appeared, excepting only St. Matthew's, was the Greek.' Yes, reader; but what Greek? Had not the Greeks been, for a long time, colonizing Syria under princes of Grecian blood,—had not the Greek language (as a lingua Hellenistica) become steeped in Hebrew ideas,—no door of communication could have been opened between the new world of Christian feeling, and the old world so deaf to its music. Here, therefore, we may observe two preparations made secretly by Providence for receiving Christianity and clearing the road before it; first, the diffusion of the Greek language through the whole civilized world (ή οίχονμεγη) some time before Christ, by which means the Evangelists found wings, as it were, for flying abroad through the kingdoms of the earth; secondly, the Hebraizing of this language, by which means the Evangelists found a new material made plastic and obedient to these new ideas, which they had to build with, and which they had to build upon.] into either of the classical languages; and, β, A system of mysteries; as, for instance, the mystery of the Trinity, of the Divine Incarnation, of the Atonement, of the Resurrection, and others.

Here are great elements; and now let me ask, how many of these are found in the Heathen religion of Greece and Rome? This is an important question; it being my object to show that no religion but the Christian, and precisely through some one or two of its differential elements, could have been an organ of political movement.

Most divines who anywhere glance at this question, are here found in, what seems to me, the deepest of errors. Great theologians are they, and eminent philosophers, who have presumed that (as a matter of course) all religions, however false, are introductory to some scheme of morality, however imperfect. They grant you that the morality is oftentimes unsound; but still, they think that some morality there must have been, or else for what purpose was the religion? This I pronounce error.

All the moral theories of antiquity were utterly disjoined from religion. But this fallacy of a dogmatic or doctrinal part in Paganism is born out of Anachronism. It is the anachronism of unconsciously reflecting back upon the ancient religions of darkness, and as if essential to all religions, features that never were suspected as possible, until they had been revealed in Christianity.[Footnote: Once for all, to save the trouble of continual repetitions, understand Judaism to be commemorated jointly with Christianity; the dark root together with the golden fruitage; whenever the nature of the case does not presume a contradistinction of the one to the other.] Religion, in the eye of a Pagan, had no more relation to morals, than it had to ship-building or trigonometry. But, then, why was religion honored amongst Pagans? How did it ever arise? What was its object? Object! it had no object; if by this you mean ulterior object. Pagan religion arose in no motive, but in an impulse. Pagan religion aimed at no distant prize ahead: it fled from a danger immediately behind. The gods of the Pagans were wicked natures; but they were natures to be feared, and to be propitiated; for they were fierce, and they were moody, and (as regarded man who had no wings) they were powerful. Once accredited as facts, the Pagan gods could not be regarded as other than terrific facts; and thus it was, that in terror, blind terror, as against power in the hands of divine wickedness, arose the ancient religions of Paganism. Because the gods were wicked, man was religious; because Olympus was cruel, earth trembled; because the divine beings were the most lawless of Thugs, the human being became the most abject of sycophants.

Had the religions of Paganism arisen teleologically; that is, with a view to certain purposes, to certain final causes ahead; had they grown out of forward-looking views, contemplating, for instance, the furthering of civilization, or contemplating some interests in a world beyond the present, there would probably have arisen, concurrently, a section in all such religions, dedicated to positive instruction. There would have been a doctrinal part. There might have been interwoven with the ritual or worship, a system of economics, or a code of civil prudence, or a code of health, or a theory of morals, or even a secret revelation of mysterious relations between man and the Deity: all which existed in Judaism. But, as the case stood, this was impossible. The gods were mere odious facts, like scorpions or rattlesnakes, having no moral aspects whatever; public nuisances; and bearing no relation to man but that of capricious tyrants. First arising upon a basis of terror, these gods never subsequently enlarged that basis; nor sought to enlarge it. All antiquity contains no hint of a possibility that love could arise, as by any ray mingling with the sentiments in a human creature towards a Divine one; not even sycophants ever pretended to love the gods.

Under this original peculiarity of Paganism, there arose two consequences, which I will mark by the Greek letters α and β. The latter I will notice in its order, first calling the reader's attention to the consequence marked α, which is this:—In the full and profoundest sense of the word believe, the pagans could not be said to believe in any gods: but, in the ordinary sense, they did, and do, and must believe, in all gods. As this proposition will startle some readers, and is yet closely involved in the main truth which I am now pressing, viz. the meaning and effect of a simple cultus, as distinguished from a high doctrinal religion, let us seek an illustration from our Indian empire. The Christian missionaries from home, when first opening their views to Hindoos, describe themselves as laboring to prove that Christianity is a true religion, and as either asserting, or leaving it to be inferred, that, on that assumption, the Hindoo religion is a false one. But the poor Hindoo never dreamed of doubting that the Christian was a true religion; nor will he at all infer, from your religion being true, that his own must be false. Both are true, he thinks: all religions are true; all gods are true gods; and all are equally true. Neither can he understand what you mean by a false religion, or how a religion could be false; and he is perfectly right. Wherever religions consist only of a worship, as the Hindoo religion does, there can be no competition amongst them as to truth. That would be an absurdity, not less nor other than it would be for a Prussian to denounce the Austrian emperor, or an Austrian to denounce the Prussian king, as a false sovereign. False! How false? In what sense false? Surely not as non-existing. But at least, (the reader will reply,) if the religions contradict each other, one of them must be false. Yes; but that is impossible. Two religions cannot contradict each other, where both contain only a cultus: they could come into collision only by means of a doctrinal, or directly affirmative part, like those of Christianity and Mahometanism. But this part is what no idolatrous religion ever had, or will have. The reader must not understand me to mean that, merely as a compromise of courtesy, two professors of different idolatries would agree to recognise each other. Not at all. The truth of one does not imply the falsehood of the other. Both are true as facts: neither can be false, in any higher sense, because neither makes any pretence to truth doctrinal.

This distinction between a religion having merely a worship, and a religion having also a body of doctrinal truth, is familiar to the Mahometans; and they convey the distinction by a very appropriate expression. Those majestic religions, (as they esteem them,) which rise above the mere pomps and tympanies of ceremonial worship, they denominate 'religions of the book.' There are, of such religions, three, viz., Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism. The first builds upon the Law and the Prophets; or, perhaps, sufficiently upon the Pentateuch; the second upon the Gospel; the last upon the Koran. No other religion can be said to rest upon a book; or to need a book; or even to admit of a book. For we must not be duped by the case where a lawgiver attempts to connect his own human institutes with the venerable sanctions of a national religion, or the case where a learned antiquary unfolds historically the record of a vast mythology. Heaps of such cases, (both law and mythological records,) survive in the Sanscrit, and in other pagan languages. But these are books which build upon the religion, not books upon which the religion is built. If a religion consists only of a ceremonial worship, in that case there can be no opening for a book; because the forms and details publish themselves daily, in the celebration of the worship, and are traditionally preserved, from age to age, without dependence on a book. But, if a religion has a doctrine, this implies a revelation or message from Heaven, which cannot, in any other way, secure the transmission of this message to future generations, than by causing it to be registered in a book. A book, therefore, will be convertible with a doctrinal religion:—no book, no doctrine; and, again, no doctrine, no book.

Upon these principles, we may understand that second consequence (marked β) which has perplexed many men, viz., why it is that the Hindoos, in our own times; but, equally, why it is that the Greek and Roman idolaters of antiquity, never proselytized; no, nor could have viewed such an attempt as rational. Naturally, if a religion is doctrinal, any truth which it possesses, as a secret deposit consigned to its keeping by a revelation, must be equally valid for one man as for another, without regard to race or nation. For a doctrinal religion, therefore, to proselytize, is no more than a duty of consistent humanity. You, the professors of that religion, possess the medicinal fountains. You will not diminish your own share by imparting to others. What churlishness, if you should grudge to others a health which does not interfere with your own! Christians, therefore, Mahometans, and Jews originally, in proportion as they were sincere and conscientious, have always invited, or even forced, the unbelieving to their own faith: nothing but accidents of situation, local or political, have disturbed'this effort. But, on the other hand, for a mere 'cultus' to attempt conversions, is nonsense. An ancient Roman could have had no motive for bringing you over to the worship of Jupiter Capitolinus; nor you any motive for going. 'Surely, poor man,' he would have said, 'you have, some god of your own, who will be quite as good for your countrymen as Jupiter for mine. But, if you have not, really I am sorry for your case; and a very odd case it is: but I don't see how it could be improved by talking nonsense. You cannot beneficially, you cannot rationally, worship a tutelary Roman deity, unless in the character of a Roman; and a Roman you may become, legally and politically. Being such, you will participate in all advantages, if any there are, or our national religion; and, without needing a process of conversion, either in substance or in form. Ipso facto, and without any separate choice of your own, on becoming a Roman citizen, you become a party to the Roman worship.' For an idolatrous religion to proselytize, would, therefore, be not only useless but unintelligible.

Now, having explained that point, which is a great step towards the final object of my paper, viz., the investigation of the reason why Christianity is, which no pagan religion ever has been, an organ of political movement, I will go on to review rapidly those four constituents of a religion, as they are realized in Christianity, for the purpose of contrasting them with the false shadows, or even blank negations, of these constituents in pagan idolatries.

First, then, as to the CULTUS, or form of the national worship:—In our Christian ritual I recognise these separate acts; viz. A, an act of Praise; B, an act of Thanksgiving; C, an act of Confession; D, an act of Prayer. In A, we commemorate with adoration the general perfections of the Deity. There, all of us have an equal interest. In B, we commemorate with thankfulness those special qualities of the Deity, or those special manifestations of them, by which we, the individual worshippers, have recently benefited. In C, by upright confession, we deprecate. In D, we pray, or ask for the things which we need. Now, in the cultus of the ancient pagans, B and C (the second act and the third) were wanting altogether. No thanksgiving ever ascended, on his own account, from the lips of an individual; and the state thanksgiving for a triumph of the national armies, was but a mode of ostentatiously publishing the news. As to C, it is scarcely necessary to say that this was wanting, when I mention that penitential feelings were unknown amongst the ancients, and had no name; for pœnitentia[Footnote: In Greek, there is a word for repentance, but not until it had been rebaptized into a Christian use. Metanoia, however, is not that word: it is grossly to defeat the profound meaning of the New Testament, if John the Baptist is translated as though summoning the world to repentance; it was not that to which he summoned them.] means regret, not penitence; and me pœnitet hujus facti, means, 'I rue this act in its consequences,' not 'I repent of this act for its moral nature.' A and D, the first act and the last, appear to be present; but are so most imperfectly. When 'God is praised aright,' praised by means of such deeds or such attributes as express a divine nature, we recognise one great function of a national worship,—not otherwise. This, however, we must overlook and pardon, as being a fault essential to the religion: the poor creatures did the best they could to praise their god, lying under the curse of gods so thoroughly depraved. But in D, the case is different. Strictly speaking, the ancients never prayed; and it may be doubted whether D approaches so near to what we mean by prayer, as even by a mockery. You read of preces, of αραι, &c. and you are desirous to believe that pagan supplications were not always corrupt. It is too shocking to suppose, in thinking of nations idolatrous yet noble, that never any pure act of approach to the heavens took place on the part of man; that always the intercourse was corrupt; always doubly corrupt; that eternally the god was bought, and the votary was sold. Oh, weariness of man's spirit before that unresting mercenariness in high places, which neither, when his race clamored for justice, nor when it languished for pity, would listen without hire! How gladly would man turn away from his false rapacious divinities to the godlike human heart, that so often would yield pardon before it was asked, and for the thousandth time that would give without a bribe! In strict propriety, as my reader knows, the classical Latin word for a prayer is votum; it was a case of contract; of mercantile contract; of that contract which the Roman law expressed by the formula—Do ut des. Vainly you came before the altars with empty hands. "But my hands are pure." Pure, indeed! would reply the scoffing god, let me see what they contain. It was exactly what you daily read in morning papers, viz.:—that, in order to appear effectually before that Olympus in London, which rains rarities upon us poor abject creatures in the provinces, you must enclose 'an order on the Post-Office or a reference.' It is true that a man did not always register his votum, (the particular offering which he vowed on the condition of receiving what he asked,) at the moment of asking. Ajax, for instance, prays for light in the 'Iliad,' and he does not then and there give either an order or a reference. But you are much mistaken, if you fancy that even light was to be had gratis. It would be 'carried to account.' Ajax would be 'debited' with that 'advance.'

Yet, when it occurs to a man that, in this Do ut des, the general Do was either a temple or a sacrifice, naturally it occurs to ask what was a sacrifice? I am afraid that the dark murderous nature of the pagan gods is here made apparent. Modern readers, who have had no particular reason for reflecting on the nature and management of a sacrifice, totally misconceive it. They have a vague notion that the slaughtered animal was roasted, served up on the altars as a banquet to the gods; that these gods by some representative ceremony 'made believe' to eat it; and that finally, (as dishes that had now become hallowed to divine use,) the several joints were disposed of in some mysterious manner: burned, suppose, or buried under the altars, or committed to the secret keeping of rivers. Nothing of the sort: when a man made a sacrifice, the meaning was, that he gave a dinner. And not only was every sacrifice a dinner party, but every dinner party was a sacrifice. This was strictly so in the good old ferocious times of paganism, as may be seen in the Iliad: it was not said, 'Agamemnon has a dinner party to-day,' but 'Agamemnon sacrifices to Apollo.' Even in Rome, to the last days of paganism, it is probable that some slight memorial continued to connect the dinner party [cœna] with a divine sacrifice; and thence partly arose the sanctity of the hospitable board; but to the east of the Mediterranean the full ritual of a sacrifice must have been preserved in all banquets, long after it had faded to a form in the less superstitious West. This we may learn from that point of casuistry treated by St. Paul,—whether a Christian might lawfully eat of things offered to idols. The question was most urgent; because a Christian could not accept an invitation to dine with a Grecian fellow-citizen who still adhered to paganism, without eating things offered to idols;—the whole banquet was dedicated to an idol. If he would not take that, he must continue impransus. Consequently, the question virtually amounted to this: Were the Christians to separate themselves altogether from those whose interests were in so many ways entangled with their own, on the single consideration that these persons were heathens? To refuse their hospitalities, was to separate, and with a hostile expression of feeling. That would be to throw hindrances in the way of Christianity: the religion could not spread rapidly under such repulsive prejudices; and dangers, that it became un-Christian to provoke, would thus multiply against the infant faith. This being so, and as the gods were really the only parties invited who got nothing at all of the banquet, it becomes a question of some interest,—what did they get? They were merely mocked, if they had no compensatory interest in the dinner! For surely it was an inconceivable mode of honoring Jupiter, that you and I should eat a piece of roast beef, leaving to the god's share only the mockery of a Barmecide invitation, assigning him a chair which every body knew that he would never fill, and a plate which might as well have been filled with warm water? Jupiter got something, be assured; and what was it? This it was,—the luxury of inhaling the groans, the fleeting breath, the palpitations, the agonies, of the dying victim. This was the dark interest which the wretches of Olympus had in human invitations to dinner: and it is too certain, upon comparing facts and dates, that, when left to their own choice, the gods had a preference for man as the victim. All things concur to show, that precisely as you ascend above civilization, which continually increased the limitations upon the gods of Olympus, precisely as you go back to that gloomy state in which their true propensities had power to reveal themselves, was man the genuine victim for them, and the dying anguish of man the best 'nidor' that ascended from earthly banquets to their nostrils. Their stern eyes smiled darkly upon the throbbings of tortured flesh, as in Moloch's ears dwelt like music the sound of infants' wailings. Secondly, as to the birth of a new idea respecting the nature of God:—It may not have occurred to every reader, but none will perhaps object to it, when once suggested to his consideration, that—as is the god of any nation, such will be that nation. God, however falsely conceived of by man, even though splintered into fragments by Polytheism, or disfigured by the darkest mythologies, is still the greatest of all objects offered to human contemplation. Man, when thrown upon his own delusions, may have raised himself, or may have adopted from others, the very falsest of ideals, as the true image and reflection of what he calls god. In his lowest condition of darkness, terror may be the moulding principle for spiritual conceptions; power, the engrossing attribute which he ascribes to his deity; and this power may be hideously capricious, or associated with vindictive cruelty. It may even happen, that his standard of what is highest in the divinity should be capable of falling greatly below what an enlightened mind would figure to itself as lowest in man. A more shocking monument, indeed, there cannot be than this, of the infinity by which man may descend below his own capacities of grandeur: the gods, in some systems of religion, have been such and so monstrous by excesses of wickedness, as to insure, if annually one hour of periodical eclipse should have left them at the mercy of man, a general rush from their own worshippers for strangling them as mad dogs. Hypocrisy, the cringing of sycophants, and the credulities of fear, united to conceal this misotheism; but we may be sure that it was widely diffused through the sincerities of the human heart. An intense desire for kicking Jupiter, or for hanging him, if found convenient, must have lurked in the honorable Koman heart, before the sincerity of human nature could have extorted upon the Roman stage a public declaration,—that their supreme gods were capable of enormities which a poor, unpretending human creature [homuncio] would have disdained. Many times the ideal of the divine nature, as adopted by pagan races, fell under the contempt, not only of men superior to the national superstition, but of men partaking in that superstition. Yet, with all those drawbacks, an ideal was an ideal. The being set up for adoration as god, was such upon the whole to the worshipper; since, if there had been any higher mode of excellence conceivable for him, that higher mode would have virtually become his deity. It cannot be doubted, therefore, that the nature of the national divinities indicated the qualities which ranked highest in the national estimation; and that being contemplated continually in the spirit of veneration, these qualities must have worked an extensive conformity to their own standard. The mythology sanctioned by the ritual of public worship, the features of moral nature in the gods distributed through that mythology, and sometimes commemorated by gleams in that ritual, domineered over the popular heart, even in those cases where the religion had been a derivative religion, and not originally moulded by impulses breathing from the native disposition. So that, upon the whole, such as were the gods of a nation, such was the nation: given the particular idolatry, it became possible to decipher the character of the idolaters. Where Moloch was worshipped, the people would naturally be found cruel; where the Paphian Venus, it could not be expected that they should escape the taint of a voluptuous effeminacy.

Against this principle, there could have been no room for demur, were it not through that inveterate prejudice besieging the modern mind,—as though all religion, however false, implied some scheme of morals connected with it. However imperfectly discharged, one function even of the pagan priest (it is supposed) must have been—to guide, to counsel, to exhort, as a teacher of morals. And, had that been so, the practical precepts, and the moral commentary coming after even the grossest forms of worship, or the most revolting mythological legends, might have operated to neutralize their horrors, or even to allegorize them into better meanings. Lord Bacon, as a trial of skill, has attempted something of that sort in his 'Wisdom of the Ancients.' But all this is modern refinement, either in the spirit of playful ingenuity or of ignorance. I have said sufficiently that there was no doctrinal part in the religion of the pagans. There was a cultus, or ceremonial worship: that constituted the sum total of religion, in the idea of a pagan. There was a necessity, for the sake of guarding its traditional usages, and upholding and supporting its pomp, that official persons should preside in this cultus: that constituted the duty of the priest. Beyond this ritual of public worship, there was nothing at all; nothing to believe, nothing to understand. A set of legendary tales undoubtedly there was, connected with the mythologic history of each separate deity. But in what sense you understood these, or whether you were at all acquainted with them, was a matter of indifference to the priests; since many of these legends were variously related, and some had apparently been propagated in ridicule of the gods, rather than in their honor.

With Christianity a new scene was opened. In this religion the cultus, or form of worship, was not even the primary business, far less was it the exclusive business. The worship flowed as a direct consequence from the new idea exposed of the divine nature, and from the new idea of man's relations to this nature. Here were suddenly unmasked great doctrines, truths positive and directly avowed: whereas, in Pagan forms of religion, any notices which then were, or seemed to be, of circumstances surrounding the gods, related only to matters of fact or accident, such as that a particular god was the son or the nephew of some other god; a truth, if it were a truth, wholly impertinent to any interest of man.

As there are some important truths, dimly perceived or not at all, lurking in the idea of God,—an idea too vast to be navigable as yet by the human understanding, yet here and there to be coasted,—I wish at this point to direct the reader's attention upon a passage which he may happen to remember in Sir Isaac Newton: the passage occurs at the end of the 'Optics;' and the exact expressions I do not remember; but the sense is what I am going to state: Sir Isaac is speaking of God; and he takes occasion to say, that God is not good, but goodness; is not holy, but holiness; is not infinite, but infinity. This, I apprehend, will have struck many readers as merely a rhetorical bravura; sublime, perhaps, and fitted to exalt the feeling of awe connected with so unapproachable a mystery, but otherwise not throwing any new light upon the darkness of the idea as a problem before the intellect. Yet indirectly perhaps it does, when brought out into its latent sense by placing it in juxtaposition with paganism. If a philosophic theist, who is also a Christian, or who (not being a Christian,) has yet by his birth and breeding become saturated with Christian ideas and feelings,[Footnote: this case is far from uncommon; and undoubtedly, from having too much escaped observation, it has been the cause of much error. Poets I could mention, if it were not invidious to do so, who, whilst composing in a spirit of burning enmity to the Christian faith, yet rested for the very sting of their pathos upon ideas that but for Christianity could never have existed. Translators there have been, English, French, German, of Mahometan books, who have so colored the whole vein of thinking with sentiments peculiar to Christianity, as to draw from a reflecting reader the exclamation, 'If this can be indeed the product of Islamism, wherefore should Christianity exist?' If thoughts so divine can, indeed, belong to a false religion, what more could we gain from a true one?] attempts to realize the idea of supreme Deity, he becomes aware of a double and contradictory movement in his own mind whilst striving towards that result. He demands, in the first place, something in the highest degree generic; and yet again in the opposite direction, something in the highest degree individual; he demands on the one path, a vast ideality, and yet on the other, in union with a determinate personality. He must not surrender himself to the first impulse, else he is betrayed into a mere anima mundi; he must not surrender himself to the second, else he is betrayed into something merely human. This difficult antagonism, of what is most and what is least generic, must be maintained, otherwise the idea, the possible idea, of that august unveiling which takes place in the Judaico-Christian God, is absolutely in clouds. Now, this antagonism utterly collapses in paganism. And to a philosophic apprehension, this peculiarity of the heathen gods is more shocking and fearful than what at first sight had seemed most so. When a man pauses for the purpose of attentively reviewing the Pantheon of Greece and Rome, what strikes him at the first with most depth of impression and with most horror is, the wickedness of this Pantheon. And he observes with surprise, that this wickedness, which is at a furnace-heat in the superior gods, becomes fainter and paler as you descend. Amongst the semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the Nereids or Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The odor of corruption, the saeva mephitis, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased. And these gentle divinities, if too human and too beset with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed with ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel: they are tranquil as are the hills and the forests; passionless as are the seas and the fountains which they tenant. But, when he ascends to the dii majorum gentium, to those twelve gods of the supreme house, who may be called in respect of rank, the Paladins of the classical Pantheon, secret horror comes over him at the thought that demons, reflecting the worst aspects of brutal races, ever could have levied worship from his own. It is true they do so no longer as regards our planet. But what has been apparently may be. God made the Greeks and Romans of one blood with himself; he cannot deny that intellectually the Greeks—he cannot deny that morally the Romans—were amongst the foremost of human races; and he trembles in thinking that abominations, whose smoke ascended through so many ages to the supreme heavens, may, or might, so far as human resistance is concerned, again become the law for the noblest of his species. A deep feeling, it is true, exists latently in human beings of something perishable in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wickedness, according to a deep misgiving dispersed amongst men, must be tainted with corruption. There might seem consolation; but a man who reflects is not quite so sure of that. As a commonplace resounding in schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what is evil by nature or by origin must be transient. But that may be because evil in all human things is partial, is heterogeneous; evil mixed with good; and the two natures, by their mutual enmity, must enter into a collision, which may possibly guarantee the final destruction of the whole compound. Such a result may not threaten a nature that is purely and totally evil, that is homogeneously evil. Dark natures there may be, whose essence is evil, that may have an abiding root in the system of the universe not less awfully exempt from change than the mysterious foundations of God.

This is dreadful. Wickedness that is immeasurable, in connection with power that is superhuman, appals the imagination. Yet this is a combination that might easily have been conceived; and a wicked god still commands a mode of reverence. But that feature of the pagan pantheon, which I am contrasting with this, viz., that no pagan deity is an abstraction but a vile concrete, impresses myself with a subtler sense of horror; because it blends the hateful with a mode of the ludicrous. For the sake of explaining myself to the non-philosophic reader, I beg him to consider what is the sort of feeling with which he regards an ancient river-god, or the presiding nymph of a fountain. The impression which he receives is pretty much like that from the monumental figure of some allegoric being, such as Faith or Hope, Fame or Truth. He hardly believes that the most superstitious Grecian seriously believed in such a being as a distinct personality. He feels convinced that the sort of personal existence ascribed to such an abstraction, as well as the human shape, are merely modes of representing and drawing into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, and because they tend to one common purpose. Now, from such a symbolic god as this, let him pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character. Jupiter has nothing else. In Jupiter you read no incarnation of any abstract quality whatever: he represents nothing whatever in the metaphysics of the universe. Except for the accident of his power, he is merely a man. He has a character, that is, a tendency or determination to this quality or that, in excess; whereas a nature truly divine must be in equilibrio as to all qualities, and comprehend them all, in the way that a genus comprehends the subordinate species. He has even a personal history: he has passed through certain adventures, faced certain dangers, and survived hostilities that, at one time, were doubtful in their issue. No trace, in short, appears, in any Grecian god, of the generic. Whereas we, in our Christian ideas of God, unconsciously, and without thinking of Sir Isaac Newton, realize Sir Isaac's conceptions. We think of him as having a sort of allegoric generality, liberated from the bonds of the individual; and yet, also, as the most awful among natures, having a conscious personality. He is diffused through all things, present everywhere, and yet not the less present locally. He is at a distance unapproachable by finite creatures; and yet, without any contradiction, (as the profound St. Paul observes,) 'not very far' from every one of us. And I will venture to say, that many a poor old woman has, by virtue of her Christian inoculation, Sir Isaac's great idea lurking in her mind; as for instance, in relation to any of God's attributes; suppose holiness or happiness, she feels, (though analytically she could not explain,) that God is not holy or is not happy by way of participation, after the manner of other beings: that is, he does not draw happiness from a fountain separate and external to himself, and common to other creatures, he drawing more and they drawing less; but that he, himself is the fountain; that no other being can have the least proportion of either one or the other but by drawing from that fountain; that as to all other good gifts, that as to life itself, they are, in man, not on any separate tenure, not primarily, but derivatively, and only in so far as God enters into the nature of man; that 'we live and move' only so far and so long as the incomprehensible union takes place between the human spirit and the fontal abyss of the divine. In short, here, and here only, is found the outermost expansion, the centrifugal, of the TO catholic, united with the innermost centripetal of the personal consciousness. Had, therefore, the pagan gods been less detestable, neither impure nor malignant, they could not have won a salutary veneration—being so merely concrete individuals.

Next, it must have degraded the gods, (and have made them instruments of degradation for man,) that they were, one and all, incarnations; not, as even the Christian God is, for a transitory moment and for an eternal purpose; but essentially and by overruling necessity. The Greeks could not conceive of spirituality. Neither can we, metaphysically, assign the conditions of the spiritual; but, practically, we all feel and represent to our own minds the agencies of God, as liberated from bonds of space and time, of flesh and of resistance. This the Greeks could not feel, could not represent. And the only advantage which the gods enjoyed over the worm and the grub was, that they, (or at least the Paladins amongst them—the twelve supreme gods,) could pass, fluently, from one incarnation to another.

Thirdly. Out of that essential bondage to flesh arose a dreadful suspicion of something worse: in what relation did the pagan gods stand to the abominable phenomenon of death? It is not by uttering pompous flatteries of ever-living and ambrotos aei, &c., that a poet could intercept the searching jealousies of human penetration. These are merely oriental forms of compliment. And here, by the way, as elsewhere, we find Plato vehemently confuted: for it was the undue exaltation of the gods, and not their degradation, which must be ascribed to the frauds of poets. Tradition, and no poetic tradition, absolutely pointed to the grave of more gods than one. But waiving all that as liable to dispute, one thing we know, from the ancients themselves, as open to no question, that all the gods were born; were born infants; passed through the stages of helplessness and growth; from all which the inference was but too fatally obvious. Besides, there were grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers in the Pantheon: some of these were confessedly superannuated; nay, some had disappeared. Even men, who knew but little of Olympian records, knew this, at least, for certain, that more than one dynasty of gods had passed over the golden stage of Olympus, had made their exit, and were hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter of notoriety, also, that all these gods were and had been liable to the taint of sorrow for the death of their earthly children, (as the Homeric Jupiter for Sarpedon, Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for her blooming Rhesus;) all were liable to fear; all to physical pain; all to anxiety; all to the indefinite menaces of a danger not measurable.[Footnote: it must not be forgotten that all the superior gods passed through an infancy (as Jove, &c.) or even an adolescence, (as Bacchus,) or even a maturity, (as the majority of Olympus during the insurrection of the Titans,) surrounded by perils that required not strength only, but artifice, and even abject self-concealment to evade.] Looking backwards or looking forwards, the gods beheld enemies that attacked their existence, or modes of decay, (known and unknown,) which gnawed at their roots. All this I take the trouble to insist upon: not as though it could be worth any man's trouble, at this day, to expose (on its own account) the frailty of the Pantheon, but with a view to the closer estimate of the Divine idea amongst men; and by way of contrast to the power of that idea under Christianity: since I contend that, such as is the God of every people, such, in the corresponding features of character, will be that people. If the god (like Moloch) is fierce, the people will be cruel; if (like Typhon) a destroying energy, the people will be gloomy; if (like the Paphian Venus) libidinous, the people will be voluptuously effeminate. When the gods are perishable, man cannot have the grandeurs of his nature developed: when the shadow of death sits upon the highest of what man represents to himself as celestial, essential blight will sit for ever upon human aspirations. One thing only remains to be added on this subject: Why were not the ancients more profoundly afflicted by the treacherous gleams of mortality in their gods? How was it that they could forget, for a moment, a revelation so full of misery? Since not only the character of man partly depended upon the quality of his god, but also and a fortiori, his destiny upon the destiny of his god. But the reason of his indifference to the divine mortality was—because, at any rate, the pagan man's connection with the gods terminated at his own death. Even selfish men would reconcile themselves to an earthquake, which should swallow up all the world; and the most unreasonable man has professed his readiness, at all times, to die with a dying universe—mundo secum pereunte, mori.

But, thirdly, the gods being such, in what relation to them did man stand? It is a fact hidden from the mass of the ancients themselves, but sufficiently attested, that there was an ancient and secret enmity between the whole family of the gods and the human race. This is confessed by Herodotus as a persuasion spread through some of the nations amongst which he travelled: there was a sort of truce, indeed, between the parties; temples, with their religious services, and their votive offerings, recorded this truce. But below all these appearances lay deadly enmity, to be explained only by one who should know the mysterious history of both parties from the eldest times. It is extraordinary, however, that Herodotus should rely, for this account, upon the belief of distant nations, when the same belief was so deeply recorded amongst his own countrymen in the sublime story of Prometheus. Much[Footnote: not all: for part was due to the obstinate concealment from Jupiter, by Prometheus, of the danger which threatened his throne in a coming generation.] of the sufferings endured by Prometheus was on account of man, whom he had befriended; and, by befriending, had defeated the malignity of Jove. According to some, man was even created by Prometheus: but no accounts, until lying Platonic philophers arose, in far later times, represented man as created by Jupiter.

Now let us turn to Christianity; pursuing it through the functions which it exercises in common with Paganism, and also through those which it exercises separately and incommunicably.

I. As to the Idea of God,—how great was the chasm dividing the Hebrew God from all gods of idolatrous birth, and with what starry grandeur this revelation of Supreme deity must have wheeled upwards into the field of human contemplation, when first surmounting the steams of earth-born heathenism, I need not impress upon any Christian audience. To their knowledge little could be added. Yet to know is not always to feel: and without a correspondent depth of feeling, there is in moral cases no effectual knowledge. Not the understanding is sufficient upon such ground, but that which the Scriptures in their profound philosophy entitle the 'understanding heart.' And perhaps few readers will have adequately appreciated the prodigious change effected in the theatre of the human spirit, by the transition, sudden as the explosion of light, in the Hebrew cosmogony, when, from the caprice of a fleshly god, in one hour man mounted to a justice that knew no shadow of change; from cruelty, mounted to a love which was inexhaustible; from gleams of essential evil, to a holiness that could not be fathomed; from a power and a knowledge, under limitations so merely and obviously human,[Footnote: It is a natural thought, to any person who has not explored these recesses of human degradation, that surely the Pagans must have had it in their power to invest their gods with all conceivable perfections, quite as much as we that are not Pagans. The thing wanting to the Pagans, he will think, was the right: otherwise as regarded the power.] to the same agencies lying underneath creation, as a root below a plant. Not less awful in power was the transition from the limitations of space and time to ubiquity and eternity, from the familiar to the mysterious, from the incarnate to the spiritual. These enormous transitions were fitted to work changes of answering magnitude in the human spirit. The reader can hardly make any mistake as to this. He must concede the changes. What he will be likely to misconceive, unless he has reflected, is—the immensity of these changes. And another mistake, which he is even more likely to make, is this: he will imagine that a new idea, even though the idea of an object so vast as God, cannot become the ground of any revolution more than intellectual—cannot revolutionize the moral and active principles in man, consequently cannot lay the ground of any political movement. We shall see. But next, that is,—

II. Secondly, as to the idea of man's relation to God, this, were it capable of disjunction, would be even more of a revolutionary idea than the idea of God. But the one idea is enlinked with the other. In Paganism, as I have said, the higher you ascend towards the original fountains of the religion, the more you leave behind the frauds, forgeries, and treacheries of philosophy; so much the more clearly you descry the odious truth—that man stood in the relation of a superior to his gods, as respected all moral qualities of any value, but in the relation of an inferior as respected physical power. This was a position of the two parties fatal, by itself, to all grandeur of moral aspirations. Whatever was good or corrigibly bad, man saw associated with weakness; and power was sealed and guaranteed to absolute wickedness. The evil disposition in man to worship success, was strengthened by this mode of superiority in the gods. Merit was disjoined from prosperity. Even merit of a lower class, merit in things morally indifferent, was not so decidedly on the side of the gods as to reconcile man to the reasonableness of their yoke. They were compelled to acquiesce in a government which they did not regard as just. The gods were stronger, but not much; they had the unfair advantage of standing over the heads of men, and of wings for flight or for manoeuvring. Yet even so, it was clearly the opinion of Homer's age, that, in a fair fight, the gods might have been found liable to defeat. The gods again were generally beautiful: but not more so than the elite of mankind; else why did these gods, both male and female, continually persecute our race with their odious love? which love, be it observed, uniformly brought ruin upon its objects. Intellectually the gods were undoubtedly below men. They pretended to no great works in philosophy, in legislation, or in the fine arts, except only that, as to one of these arts, viz. poetry, a single god vaunted himself greatly in simple ages. But he attempted neither a tragedy nor an epic poem. Even in what he did attempt, it is worth while to follow his career. His literary fate was what might have been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation of his verses rapidly decayed. Wits arose in Athens, who laughed so furiously at his style and his metre, in the Delphic oracles, that at length some echoes of their scoffing began to reach Delphi; upon which the god and his inspired ministers became sulky, and finally took refuge in prose, as the only shelter they could think of from the caustic venom of Athenian malice.

These were the miserable relations of man to the Pagan gods. Every thing, which it is worth doing at all, man could do better. Now it is some feature of alleviation in a servile condition, if the lord appears by natural endowments superior to his slave; or at least it embitters the degradation of slavery, if he does not. Greatly, therefore, must human interests have suffered, had this jealous approximation of the two parties been the sole feature noticeable in the relations between them. But there was a worse. There was an original enmity between man and the Pantheon; not the sort of enmity which we Christians ascribe to our God; that is but a figure of speech: and even there is a derivative enmity; an enmity founded on something in man subsequent to his creation, and having a ransom annexed to it. But the enmity of the heathen gods was original—that is, to the very nature of man, and as though man had in some stage of his career been their rival; which indeed he was, if we adopt Milton's hypothesis of the gods as ruined angels, and of man as created to supply the vacancy thus arising in heaven.

Now, from this dreadful scheme of relations, between the human and divine, under Paganism, turn to the relations under Christianity. It is remarkable that even here, according to a doctrine current amongst many of the elder divines, man was naturally superior to the race of beings immediately ranking above him. Jeremy Taylor notices the obscure tradition, that the angelic order was, by original constitution, inferior to man; but this original precedency had been reversed for the present, by the fact that man, in his higher nature, was morally ruined, whereas the angelic race had not forfeited the perfection of their nature, though otherwise an inferior nature. Waiving a question so inscrutable as this, we know, at least, that no allegiance or homage is required from man towards this doubtfully superior race. And when man first finds himself called upon to pay tributes of this nature as to a being inimitably his superior, he is at the same moment taught by a revelation that this awful superior is the same who created him, and that in a sense more than figurative, he himself is the child of God. There stand the two relations, as declared in Paganism and in Christianity,—both probably true. In the former, man is the essential enemy of the gods, though sheltered by some conventional arrangement; in the latter, he is the son of God. In his own image God made him; and the very central principle of his religion is, that God for a great purpose assumed his own human nature; a mode of incarnation which could not be conceivable, unless through some divine principle common to the two natures, and forming the nexus between them.

With these materials it is, and others resembling these, that Christianity has carried forward the work of human progression. The ethics of Christianity it was,—new ethics and unintelligible, in a degree as yet but little understood, to the old pagan nations,—which furnished the rudder, or guidance, for a human revolution; but the mysteries of Christianity it was,—new Eleusinian shows, presenting God under a new form and aspect, presenting man under a new relation to God,—which furnished the oars and sails, the moving forces, for the advance of this revolution.

It was my intention to have shown how this great idea of man's relation to God, connected with the previous idea of God, had first caused the state of slavery to be regarded as an evil. Next, I proposed to show how charitable institutions, not one of which existed in pagan ages, hospitals, and asylums of all classes, had arisen under the same idea brooding over man from age to age. Thirdly, I should have attempted to show, that from the same mighty influence had grown up a social influence of woman, which did not exist in pagan ages, and will hereafter be applied to greater purposes. But, for want of room, I confine myself to saying a few words on war, and the mode in which it will be extinguished by Christianity.

WAR.—This is amongst the foremost of questions that concern human progress, and it is one which, of all great questions, (the question of slavery not excepted, nor even the question of the slave-trade,) has travelled forward the most rapidly into public favor. Thirty years ago, there was hardly a breath stirring against war, as the sole natural resource of national anger or national competition. Hardly did a wish rise, at intervals, in that direction, or even a protesting sigh, over the calamities of war. And if here and there a contemplative author uttered such a sigh, it was in the spirit of mere hopeless sorrow, that mourned over an evil apparently as inalienable from man as hunger, as death, as the frailty of human expectations. Cowper, about sixty years ago, had said,

'War is a game which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.'

But Cowper would not have said this, had he not been nearly related to the Whig house of Panshanger. Every Whig thought it a duty occasionally to look fiercely at kings, saying—'D—, who's afraid?' pretty much as a regular John Bull, in the lower classes, expresses his independence by defying the peerage,—'A lord! do you say? what care I for a lord? I value a lord no more than a button top;' whilst, in fact, he secretly reveres a lord as being usually amongst the most ancient of landed proprietors, and, secondly, amongst the richest. The scourge of kingship was what Cowper glanced at, rather than the scourge of war; and in any case the condition which he annexed to his suggestion of relief, is too remote to furnish much consolation for cynics like myself, or the reader. If war is to cease only when subjects become wise, we need not contract the scale of our cannon-founderies until the millennium. Sixty years ago, therefore, the abolition of war looked as unprosperous a speculation as Dr. Darwin's scheme for improving our British climate by hauling out all the icebergs from the polar basin in seasons when the wind sate fair for the tropics; by which means these wretched annoyers of our peace would soon find themselves in quarters too hot to hold them, and would disappear as rapidly as sugar-candy in children's mouths. Others, however, inclined rather to the Ancient Mariner's scheme, by shooting an albatross:—

'Twas right, said they, such birds to shoot,
That bring the frost and snow.'

Scarcely more hopeless than these crusades against frost, were any of the serious plans which had then been proposed for the extirpation of war. St. Pierre contributed 'son petite possible' to this desirable end, in the shape of an essay towards the idea of a perpetual peace; Kant, the great professor of Koenigsberg, subscribed to the same benevolent scheme his little essay under the same title; and others in England subscribed a guinea each to the fund for the suppression of war. These efforts, one and all, spent their fire as vainly as Darwin spent his wrath against the icebergs: the icebergs are as big and as cold as ever; and war is still, like a basking snake, ready to rear his horrid crest on the least rustling in the forests.

But in quarters more powerful than either purses of gold or scholastic reveries, there has, since the days of Kant and Cowper, begun to gather a menacing thundercloud against war. The nations, or at least the great leading nations, are beginning to set their faces against it. War, it is felt, comes under the denunciation of Christianity, by the havoc which it causes amongst those who bear God's image; of political economy, by its destruction of property and human labor; of rational logic, by the frequent absurdity of its pretexts. The wrong, which is put forth as the ostensible ground of the particular war, is oftentimes not of a nature to be redressed by war, or is even forgotten in the course of the war; and, secondly, the war prevents another course which might have redressed the wrong: viz., temperate negotiation, or neutral arbitration. These things were always true, and, indeed, heretofore more flagrantly true: but the difference, in favor of our own times, is, that they are now felt to be true. Formerly, the truths were seen, but not felt: they were inoperative truths, lifeless, and unvalued. Now, on the other hand, in England, America, France, societies are rising for making war upon war; and it is a striking proof of the progress made by such societies, that, some two years ago, a deputation from one of them being presented to King Louis Philippe, received from him—not the sort of vague answer which might have been expected, but a sincere one, expressed in very encouraging words.[Footnote: and rather presumptuous words, if the newspapers reported them correctly: for they went the length of promising, that he separately, as King of the French, would coerce Europe into peace. But, from the known good sense of the king, it is more probable that he promised his negative aid,—the aid of not personally concurring to any war which might otherwise be attractive to the French government. ] Ominous to himself this might have been thought by the superstitious, who should happen to recollect the sequel to a French king, of the very earliest movement in this direction: the great (but to this hour mysterious) design of Henry IV. in 1610, was supposed by many to be a plan of this very nature, for enforcing a general and permanent peace on Christendom, by means of an armed intervention; and no sooner had it partially transpired through traitorous evidence, or through angry suspicion, than his own assassination followed.

Shall I offend the reader by doubting, after all, whether war is not an evil still destined to survive through several centuries? Great progress has already been made. In the two leading nations of the earth, war can no longer be made with the levity which provoked Cowper's words two generations back. France is too ready to fight for mere bubbles of what she calls glory. But neither in France nor England could a war now be undertaken without a warrant from the popular voice. This is a great step in advance; but the final step for its extinction will be taken by a new and Christian code of international law. This cannot be consummated until Christian philosophy shall have traversed the earth, and reorganized the structure of society.

But, finally, and (as regards extent, though not as regards intensity of effect) far beyond all other political powers of Christianity, is the power, the demiurgic power of this religion over the kingdoms of human opinion. Did it ever strike the reader, that the Greeks and Romans, although so frantically republican, and, in some of their institutions, so democratic, yet, on the other hand, never developed the idea of representative government, either as applied to legislation or to administration? The elective principle was widely used amongst them. Nay, the nicer casuistries of this principle had been latterly discussed. The separate advantages of open or of secret voting, had been the subject of keen dispute in the political circles of Rome; and the art was well understood of disturbing the natural course of the public suffrage, by varying the modes of combining the voters under the different forms of the Comitia. Public authority and jurisdiction were created and modified by the elective principle; but never was this principle applied to the creation or direction of public opinion. The senate of Rome, for instance, like our own sovereign, represented the national majesty, and, to a certain degree, continued to do so for centuries after this majesty had received a more immediate representative in the person of the reigning Caesar. The senate, like our own sovereign, represented the grandeur of the nation, the hospitality of the nation to illustrious strangers, and the gratitude of the nation in the distribution of honors. For the senate continued to be the fountain of honors, even to Caesar himself: the titles of Germanicus, Britannicus, Dalmaticus, &c. (which may be viewed as peerages,) the privilege of precedency, the privilege of wearing a laurel diadem, &c. (which may be viewed as the Garter, Bath, Thistle,) all were honors conferred by the senate. But the senate, no more than our own sovereign ever represented, by any one act or function, the public opinion. How was this? Strange, indeed, that so mighty a secret as that of delegating public opinions to the custody of elect representatives, a secret which has changed the face of the world, should have been missed by nations applying so vast an energy to the whole theory of public administration. But the truth, however paradoxical, is, that in Greece and Rome no body of public opinions existed that could have furnished a standing ground for adverse parties, or that consequently could have required to be represented. In all the dissensions of Rome, from the secessions of the Plebs to the factions of the Gracchi, of Marius and Sylla, of Caesar and Pompey; in all the ςασεις of the Grecian republics,—the contest could no more be described as a contest of opinion, than could the feuds of our buccaneers in the seventeenth century, when parting company, or fighting for opposite principles of dividing the general booty. One faction has, another sought to have, a preponderant share of power: but these struggles never took the shape, even in pretence, of differences that moved through the conflict of principles. The case was always the simple one of power matched against power, faction against faction, usage against innovation. It was not that the patricians deluded themselves by any speculative views into the refusal of intermarriages with the plebeians: it was not as upon any opinion that they maintained the contest, (such as at this day divides ourselves from the French upon the question of opinion with regard to the social rank of literary men) but simply as upon a fact: they appealed to evidences not to speculations; to usage, not to argument. They were in possession, and fought against change, not as inconsistent with a theory, but as hostility to an interest. In the contest of Caesar with the oligarchic knavery of Cicero, Cato, and Pompey, no possible exercise of representative functions (had the people possessed them) could have been applied beneficially to the settlement of the question at issue. Law, and the abuses of law, good statutes and evil customs, had equally thrown the public power into a settlement fatal to the public welfare. Not any decay of public virtue, but increase of poverty amongst the inferior citizens, had thrown the suffrages, and consequently the honors and powers of the state, into the hands of some forty or fifty houses, rich enough to bribe, and bribing systematically. Caesar, undertaking to correct a state of disease which would else have convulsed the republic every third year by civil war, knew that no arguments could be available against a competition of mere interests. The remedy lay, not through opposition speeches in the senate, or from the rostra,—not through pamphlets or journals,—but through a course of intense cudgelling. This he happily accomplished; and by that means restored Rome for centuries,—not to the aspiring condition which she once held, but to an immunity from annual carnage, and in other respects to a condition of prosperity which, if less than during her popular state, was greater than any else attainable after that popular state had become impossible, from changes in the composition of society.

Here, and in all other critical periods of ancient republics, we shall find that opinions did not exist as the grounds of feud, nor could by any dexterity have been applied to the settlement of feuds. Whereas, on the other hand, with ourselves for centuries, and latterly with the French, no public contest has arisen, or does now exist, without fighting its way through every stage of advance by appeals to public opinion. If, for instance, an improved tone of public feeling calls for a gradual mitigation of army punishments, the quarrel becomes instantly an intellectual one: and much information is brought forward, which throws light upon human nature generally. But in Rome, such a discussion would have been stopped summarily, as interfering with the discretional power of the Praetorium. To take the vitis, or cane, from the hands of the centurion, was a perilous change; but, perilous or not, must be committed to the judgment of the particular imperator, or of his legatus. The executive business of the Roman exchequer, again, could not have been made the subject of public discussion; not only because no sufficient material for judgment could, under the want of a public press, have been gathered, except from the parties interested in all its abuses, but also because these parties (a faction amongst the equestrian order) could have effectually overthrown any counter-faction formed amongst parties not personally affected by the question. The Roman institution of clientela—which had outlived its early uses—does any body imagine that this was open to investigation? The influence of murderous riots would easily have been brought to bear upon it, but not the light of public opinion. Even if public opinion could have been evoked in those days, or trained to combined action, insuperable difficulties would have arisen in adjusting its force to the necessities of the Roman provinces and allies. Any arrangement that was practicable, would have obtained an influence for these parties, either dangerous to the supreme section of the empire, or else nugatory for each of themselves. It is a separate consideration, that through total defect of cheap instruments for communication, whether personally or in the way of thought, public opinion must always have moved in the dark: what I chiefly assert is, that the feuds bearing at all upon public interests, never did turn, or could have turned, upon any collution of opinions. And two things must strengthen the reader's conviction upon this point, viz. first, that no public meetings (such as with us carry on the weight of public business throughout the empire) were ever called in Rome; secondly, that in the regular and 'official' meetings of the people, no social interest was ever discussed, but only some political interest.

Now, on the other hand, amongst ourselves, every question, that is large enough to engage public interest, though it should begin as a mere comparison of strength with strength, almost immediately travels forward into a comparison of right with rights, or of duty with duty. A mere fiscal question of restraint upon importation from this or that particular quarter, passes into a question of colonial rights. Arrangements of convenience for the management of the pauper, or the debtor, or the criminal, or the war-captive, become the occasions of profound investigations into the rights of persons occupying those relations. Sanatory ordinances for the protection of public health; such as quarantine, fever hospitals, draining, vaccination, &c., connect themselves, in the earliest stages of their discussion, with the general consideration of the duties which the state owes to its subjects. If education is to be promoted by public counsels, every step of the inquiry applies itself to the consideration of the knowledge to be communicated, and of the limits within which any section of religious partisanship can be safely authorized to interfere. If coercion, beyond the warrant of the ordinary law, is to be applied as a remedy for local outrages, a tumult of opinions arises instantly, as to the original causes of the evil, as to the sufficiency of the subsisting laws to meet its pressure, and as to the modes of connecting enlarged powers in the magistrate with the minimum of offence to the general rights of the subject.

Everywhere, in short, some question of duty and responsibility arises to face us in any the smallest public interest that can become the subject of public opinion. Questions, in fact, that fall short of this dignity; questions that concern public convenience only, and do not wear any moral aspect, such as the bullion question, never do become subjects of public opinion. It cannot be said in which direction lies the bias of public opinion. In the very possibility of interesting the public judgment, is involved the certainty of wearing some relation to moral principles. Hence the ardor of our public disputes; for no man views, without concern, a great moral principle darkened by party motives, or placed in risk by accident: hence the dignity and benefit of our public disputes; hence, also, their ultimate relation to the Christian faith. We do not, indeed, in these days, as did our homely ancestors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cite texts of Scripture as themes for senatorial commentary or exegesis; but the virtual reference to scriptural principles is now a thousand times more frequent. The great principles of Christian morality are now so interwoven with our habits of thinking, that we appeal to them no longer as scriptural authorities, but as the natural suggestions of a sound judgment. For instance, in the case of any wrong offered to the Hindoo races, now so entirely dependent upon our wisdom and justice, we British [Footnote: It may be thought that, in the prosecution of Verres, the people of Rome acknowledged something of the same high responsibility. Not at all. The case came before Rome, not as a case of injury to a colonial child, whom the general mother was bound to protect and avenge; but as an appeal, by way of special petition, from Sicilian clients. It was no grand political movement, but simply judicial. Verres was an ill-used man and the victim of private intrigues. Or, whatever he might be, Rome certainly sate upon the cause, not in any character of maternal protectress, taking up voluntarily the support of the weak, but as a sheriff assessing damages in a case forced upon his court by the plaintiff.] immediately, by our solemnity of investigation, testify our sense of the deep responsibility to India with which our Indian supremacy has invested us. We make no mention of the Christian oracles. Yet where, then, have we learned this doctrine of far-stretching responsibility? In all pagan systems of morality, there is the vaguest and slightest appreciation of such relations as connect us with our colonies. But, from the profound philosophy of Scripture, we have learned that no relations whatever, not even those of property, can connect us with even a brute animal, but that we contract concurrent obligations of justice and mercy.

In this age, then, public interests move and prosper through conflicts of opinion. Secondly, as I have endeavored to show, public opinion cannot settle, powerfully, upon any question that is not essentially a moral question. And, thirdly, in all moral questions, we, of Christian nations, are compelled, by habit and training, as well as other causes, to derive our first principles, consciously or not, from the Scriptures. It is, therefore, through the doctrinality of our religion that we derive arms for all moral questions; and it is as moral questions that any political disputes much affect us, The daily conduct, therefore, of all great political interests, throws us unconsciously upon the first principles which we all derive from Christianity. And, in this respect, we are more advantageously placed, by a very noticeable distinction, than the professors of the two other doctrinal religions. The Koran having pirated many sentiments from the Jewish and the Christian systems, could not but offer some rudiments of moral judgment; yet, because so much of these rudiments is stolen, the whole is incoherent, and does not form a system of ethics. In Judaism, again, the special and insulated situation of the Jews has unavoidably impressed an exclusive bias upon its principles. In both codes the rules are often of restricted and narrow application. But, in the Christian Scriptures, the rules are so comprehensive and large as uniformly to furnish the major proposition of a syllogism; whilst the particular act under discussion, wearing, perhaps, some modern name, naturally is not directly mentioned: and to bring this, in the minor proposition, under the principle contained in the major, is a task left to the judgment of the inquirer in each particular case. Something is here intrusted to individual understanding; whereas in the Koran, from the circumstantiality of the rule, you are obliged mechanically to rest in the letter of the precept. The Christian Scriptures, therefore, not only teach, but train the mind to habits of self-teaching in all moral questions, by enforcing more or less of activity in applying the rule; that is, in subsuming the given case proposed under the scriptural principle.

Hence it is certain, and has been repeatedly illustrated, that whilst the Christian faith, in collision with others, would inevitably rouse to the most active fermentation of minds, the Mahometan (as also doctrinal but unsystematical) would have the same effect, in kind, but far feebler in degree; and an idolatrous religion would have no such effect at all. Agreeably to this scale, some years ago, a sect of reforming or fanatical Mahometans, in Bengal,[Footnote: At Baraset, if I remember rightly.] commenced a persecution of the surrounding Hindoos. At length, a reaction took place on the part of the idolaters, but in what temper? Bitter enough, and so far alarming as to call down a government interference with troops and artillery, but yet with no signs of religious retaliation. That was a principle of movement which the Hindoos could not understand: their retaliation was simply to the personal violence they had suffered. Such is the inertia of a mere cultus. And, in the other extreme, if we Christians, in our intercourse with both Hindoos and Mahometans, were not sternly reined up by the vigilance of the local governments, no long time would pass before all India would be incurably convulsed by disorganizing feuds.

PROTESTANTISM. [Footnote: A Vindication of Protestant Principles.
By Phileleutheros Anglicanus. London: Parker. 1847.]

[1847.]

The work whose substance and theme are thus briefly abstracted is, at this moment, making a noise in the world. It is ascribed by report to two bishops—not jointly, but alternatively—in the sense that, if one did not write the book, the other did. The Bishops of Oxford and St. David's, Wilberforce and Thirlwall, are the two pointed at by the popular finger; and, in some quarters, a third is suggested, viz., Stanley, Bishop of Norwich. The betting, however, is altogether in favor of Oxford. So runs the current of public gossip. But the public is a bad guesser, 'stiff in opinion' it is, and almost 'always in the wrong.' Now let me guess. When I had read for ten minutes, I offered a bet of seven to one (no takers) that the author's name began with H. Not out of any love for that amphibious letter; on the contrary, being myself what Professor Wilson calls a hedonist, or philosophical voluptuary, and murmuring, with good reason, if a rose leaf lies doubled below me, naturally I murmur at a letter that puts one to the expense of an aspiration, forcing into the lungs an extra charge of raw air on frosty mornings. But truth is truth, in spite of frosty air. And yet, upon further reading, doubts gathered upon my mind. The H. that I mean is an Englishman; now it happens that here and there a word, or some peculiarity in using a word, indicates, in this author, a Scotchman; for instance, the expletive 'just,' which so much infests Scotch phraseology, written or spoken, at page 1; elsewhere the word 'short-comings,' which, being horridly tabernacular, and such that no gentleman could allow himself to touch it without gloves, it is to be wished that our Scottish brethren would resign, together with 'backslidings,' to the use of field preachers. But worse, by a great deal, and not even intelligible in England, is the word thereafter, used as an adverb of time, i.e., as the correlative of hereafter. Thereafter, in pure vernacular English, bears a totally different sense. In 'Paradise Lost,' for instance, having heard the character of a particular angel, you are told that he spoke thereafter, i.e., spoke agreeably to that character. 'How a score of sheep, Master Shallow?' The answer is, 'Thereafter as they be.' Again, 'Thereafter as a man sows shall he reap.' The objections are overwhelming to the Scottish use of the word; first, because already in Scotland it is a barbarism transplanted from the filthy vocabulary of attorneys, locally called writers; secondly, because in England it is not even intelligible, and, what is worse still, sure to be mis-intelligible. And yet, after all, these exotic forms may be a mere blind. The writer is, perhaps, purposely leading us astray with his 'thereafters,' and his horrid 'short-comings.' Or, because London newspapers, and Acts of Parliament, are beginning to be more and more polluted with these barbarisms, he may even have caught them unconsciously.

And, on looking again at one case of 'thereafter,' viz. at page 79, it seems impossible to determine whether he uses it in the classical English sense, or in the sense of leguleian barbarism. This question of authorship, meantime, may seem to the reader of little moment. Far from it! The weightier part of the interest depends upon that very point. If the author really is a bishop, or supposing the public rumor so far correct as that he is a man of distinction in the English church, then, and by that simple fact, this book, or this pamphlet, interesting at any rate for itself, becomes separately interesting through its authorship, so as to be the most remarkable phenomenon of the day; and why? Because the most remarkable expression of a movement, accomplished and proceeding in a quarter that, if any on this earth, might be thought sacred from change. Oh, fearful are the motions of time, when suddenly lighted up to a retrospect of thirty years! Pathetic are the ruins of time in its slowest advance! Solemn are the prospects, so new and so incredible, which time unfolds at every turn of its wheeling flight! Is it come to this? Could any man, one generation back, have anticipated that an English dignitary, and speaking on a very delicate religious question, should deliberately appeal to a writer confessedly infidel, and proud of being an infidel, as a 'triumphant' settler of Christian scruples? But if the infidel is right, a point which I do not here discuss—but if the infidel is a man of genius, a point which I do not deny—was it not open to cite him, even though the citer were a bishop? Why, yes—uneasily one answers, yes; but still the case records a strange alteration, and still one could have wished to hear such a doctrine, which ascribes human infirmity (nay, human criminality) to every book of the Bible, uttered by anybody rather than by a father of the Church, and guaranteed by anybody rather than by an infidel, in triumph. A boy may fire his pistol unnoticed; but a sentinel, mounting guard in the dark, must remember the trepidation that will follow any shot from him, and the certainty that it will cause all the stations within hearing to get under arms immediately. Yet why, if this bold opinion does come from a prelate, he being but one man, should it carry so alarming a sound? Is the whole bench of bishops bound and compromised by the audacity of any one amongst its members? Certainly not. But yet such an act, though it should be that of a rash precursor, marks the universal change of position; there is ever some sympathy between the van and the rear of the same body at the same time; and the boldest could not have dared to go ahead so rashly, if the rearmost was not known to be pressing forward to his support, far more closely than thirty years ago he could have done. There have been, it is true, heterodox professors of divinity and free-thinking bishops before now. England can show a considerable list of such people—even Rome has a smaller list. Rome, that weeds all libraries, and is continually burning books, in effigy, by means of her vast Index Expurgatorius,[Footnote: A question of some interest arises upon the casuistical construction of this Index. We, that are not by name included, may we consider ourselves indirectly licensed? Silence, I should think, gives consent. And if it wasn't that the present Pope, being a horrid Radical, would be sure to blackball me as an honest Tory, I would send him a copy of my Opera Omnia, requesting his Holiness to say, by return of post, whether I ranked amongst the chaff winnowed by St. Peter's flail, or had his gracious permission to hold myself amongst the pure wheat gathered into the Vatican garner.] which index, continually, she is enlarging by successive supplements, needs also an Index Expurgatorius for the catalogue of her prelates. Weeds there are in the very flower-garden and conservatory of the church. Fathers of the church are no more to be relied on, as safe authorities, than we rascally lay authors, that notoriously will say anything. And it is a striking proof of this amongst our English bishops, that the very man who, in the last generation, most of all won the public esteem as the champion of the Bible against Tom Paine, was privately known amongst us connoisseurs in heresy (that are always prying into ugly secrets) to be the least orthodox thinker, one or other, amongst the whole brigade of fifteen thousand contemporary clerks who had subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles. Saving your presence, reader, his lordship was no better than a bigoted Socinian, which, in a petty diocese that he never visited, and amongst South Welshmen, that are all incorrigible Methodists, mattered little, but would have been awkward had he come to be Archbishop of York; and that he did not, turned upon the accident of a few weeks too soon, by which the Fates cut short the thread of the Whig ministry in 1807. Certainly, for a Romish or an English bishop to be a Socinian is un peu fort. But I contend that it is quite possible to be far less heretical, and yet dangerously bold; yes, upon the free and spacious latitudes, purposely left open by the English Thirty-nine Articles (ay, or by any Protestant Confession), to plant novelties not less startling to religious ears than Socinianism itself. Besides (which adds to the shock), the dignitary now before us, whether bishop or no bishop, does not write in the tone of a conscious heretic; or, like Archdeacon Blackburne[Footnote: He was the author of The Confessional, which at one time made a memorable ferment amongst all those who loved as sons, or who hated as nonconformists, the English Establishment. This was his most popular work, but he wrote many others in the same temper, that fill six or seven octavos.] of old, in a spirit of hostility to his own fellow-churchmen; but, on the contrary, in the tone of one relying upon support from his clerical brethren, he stands forward as expositor and champion of views now prevailing amongst the elite of the English Church. So construed, the book is, indeed, a most extraordinary one, and exposes a history that almost shocks one of the strides made in religious speculation. Opinions change slowly and stealthily. The steps of the changes are generally continuous; but sometimes it happens that the notice of such steps, the publication of such changes, is not continuous, that it comes upon us per saltum, and, consequently, with the stunning effect of an apparent treachery. Every thoughtful man raises his hands with an involuntary gesture of awe at the revolutions of so revolutionary an age, when thus summoned to the spectacle of an English prelate serving a piece of artillery against what once were fancied to be main outworks of religion, and at a station sometimes considerably in advance of any occupied by Voltaire.[Footnote: Let not the reader misunderstand me; I do not mean that the clerical writer now before us (bishop or not bishop) is more hostile to religion than Voltaire, or is hostile at all. On the contrary, he is, perhaps, profoundly religious, and he writes with neither levity nor insincerity. But this conscientious spirit, and this piety, do but the more call into relief the audacity of his free-thinking—do but the more forcibly illustrate the prodigious changes wrought by time, and by the contagion from secular revolutions, in the spirit of religious philosophy.]

It is this audacity of speculation, I apprehend, this etalage of bold results, rather than any success in their development, which has fixed the public attention. Development, indeed, applied to philosophic problems, or research applied to questions of erudition, was hardly possible within so small a compass as one hundred and seventeen pages, for that is the extent of the work, except as regards the notes, which amount to seventy-four pages more. Such brevity, on such a subject, is unseasonable, and almost culpable. On such a subject as the Philosophy of Protestantism—'satius erat silere, quam parcius, dicere.' Better were absolute silence, more respectful as regards the theme, less tantalizing as regards the reader, than a style of discussion so fragmentary and so rapid.

But, before we go farther, what are we to call this bold man? One must have some name for a man that one is reviewing; and, as he comes abroad incognito, it is difficult to see what name could have any propriety. Let me consider: there are three bishops in the field, Mr. H., and the Scotchman—that makes five. But every one of these, you say, is represented equally by the name in the title—Phileleutheros Anglicanus. True, but that's as long as a team of horses. If it had but Esquire at the end, it would measure against a Latin Hendecasyllable verse. I'm afraid that we must come at last to Phil. I've been seeking to avoid it, for it's painful to say 'Jack' or 'Dick' either to or of an ecclesiastical great gun. But if such big wigs will come abroad in disguise, and with names as long as Fielding's Hononchrononthononthologus, they must submit to be hustled by pickpockets and critics, and to have their names docked as well as profane authors.

Phil, then, be it—that's settled. Now, let us inquire what it is that Phil. has been saying, to cause such a sensation amongst the Gnostics. And, to begin at the beginning, what is Phil.'s capital object? Phil. shall state it himself—these are his opening words:—

'In the following pages we propose to vindicate the fundamental and inherent principles of Protestantism.'

Good; but what are the fundamental principles of Protestantism? 'They are,' says Phil., 'the sole sufficiency of Scripture,'[Footnote: This is much too elliptical a way of expressing the Protestant meaning. Sufficiency for what? 'Sufficiency for salvation' is the phrase of many, and I think elsewhere of Phil. But that is objectionable on more grounds than one; it is redundant, and it is aberrant from the true point contemplated. Sufficiency for itself, without alien helps, is the thing contemplated. The Greek autarkeia, self-sufficiency, or, because that phrase, in English, has received a deflexion towards a bad meaning, the word self- ufficingness might answer; sufficiency for the exposition of its own most secret meaning, out of fountains within itself; needing, therefore, neither the supplementary aids of tradition, on the one hand, nor the complementary aids on the other, (in the event of unprovided cases, or of dilemmas arising,) from the infallibility of a living expounder.] the right of private judgment in its interpretation, and the authority of individual conscience in matters of religion.' Errors of logic show themselves more often in a man's terminology, and his antithesis, and his subdivisions, than anywhere else. Phil. goes on to make this distinction, which brings out his imperfect conception. 'We,' says he (and, by the way, if Phil. is we, then it must he my duty to call him they), 'we do not propose to defend the varieties of doctrine held by the different communities of Protestants.' Why, no; that would be a sad task for the most skilful of funambulists or theological tumblers, seeing that many of these varieties stand related to each other as categorical affirmative and categorical negative: it's heavy work to make yes and no pull together in the same proposition. But this, fortunately for himself, Phil. declines. You are to understand that he will not undertake the defence of Protestantism in its doctrines, but only in its principles. That won't do; that antithesis is as hollow as a drum; and, if the objection were verbal only, I would not make it. But the contradistinction fails to convey the real meaning. It is not that he has falsely expressed his meaning, but that he has falsely developed that meaning to his own consciousness. Not the word only is wrong; but the wrong word is put forward for the sake of hiding the imperfect idea. What he calls principles might almost as well be called doctrines; and what he calls doctrines as well be called principles. Out of these terms, apart from the rectifications suggested by the context, no man could collect his drift, which is simply this. Protestantism, we must recollect, is not an absolute and self-dependent idea; it stands in relation to something antecedent, against which it protests, viz., Papal Rome. And under what phasis does it protest against Rome? Not against the Christianity of Rome, because every Protestant Church, though disapproving a great deal of that, disaproves also a great deal in its own sister churches of the protesting household; and because every Protestant Church holds a great deal of Christian truth, in common with Rome. But what furnishes the matter of protest is—the deduction of the title upon which Rome plants the right to be church at all. This deduction is so managed by Rome as to make herself, not merely a true church (which many Protestants grant), but the exclusive church. Now, what Phil. in effect undertakes to defend is not principles by preference to doctrines (for they are pretty nearly the same thing), but the question of title to teach at all, in preference to the question of what is the thing taught. There is the distinction, as I apprehend it. All these terms—'principle,' 'doctrine,' 'system,' 'theory,' 'hypothesis'—are used nearly always most licentiously, and as arbitrarily as a Newmarket jockey selects the colors for his riding-dress. It is true that one shadow of justification offers itself for Phil.'s distinction. All principles are doctrines, but all doctrines are not principles; which, then, in particular? Why, those properly are principles which contain the principia, the beginnings, or starting-points of evolution, out of which any system of truth is evolved. Now, it may seem that the very starting-point of our Protestant pretensions is, first of all, to argue our title or right to be a church sui juris; apparently we must begin by making good our locus standi, before we can be heard upon our doctrines. And upon this mode of approach, the pleadings about the title, or right to teach at all, taking precedency of the pleadings about the particular things taught, would be the principia, or beginning of the whole process, and so far would be entitled by preference to the name of principles. But such a mode of approach is merely an accident, and contingent upon our being engaged in a polemical discussion of Protestantism in relation to Popery. That, however, is a pure matter of choice; Protestantism may be discussed, 'as though Rome were not, in relation to its own absolute merits; and this treatment is the logical treatment, applying itself to what is permanent in the nature of the object; whereas the other treatment applies itself to what is casual and vanishing in the history (or the origin) of Protestantism. For, after all, it would be no great triumph to Protestantism that she should prove her birthright to revolve as a primary planet in the solar system; that she had the same original right as Rome to wheel about the great central orb, undegraded to the rank of satellite or secondary projection—if, in the meantime, telescopes should reveal the fact that she was pretty nearly a sandy desert. What a church teaches is true or not true, without reference to her independent right of teaching; and eventually, when the irritations of earthly feuds and political schisms shall be soothed by time, the philosophy of this whole question will take an inverse order. The credentials of a church will not be put in first, and the quality of her doctrine discussed as a secondary question. On the contrary, her credentials will be sought in her doctrine. The Protesting Church will say, I have the right to stand separate, because I stand; and from my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrinae. That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is even now valid with many; and, when it becomes universally current, then the principles, or great beginnings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the locus, or centre, where Phil. places them, to the very locus which he neglects.

There is another expression of Phil.'s (I am afraid Phil. is getting angry by this time) to which I object. He describes the doctrines held by all the separate Protestant churches as doctrines of Protestantism. I would not delay either Phil. or myself for the sake of a trifle; but an impossibility is not a trifle. If from orthodox Turkey you pass to heretic Persia, if from the rigor of the _Sonnees to the laxity of the Sheeahs, you could not, in explaining those schisms, go on to say, 'And these are the doctrines _of Islamism;' for they destroy each other. Both are supported by earthly powers; but one only could be supported by central Islamism. So of Calvinism and Arminianism; you cannot call them doctrines of Protestantism, as if growing out of some reconciling Protestant principles; one of the two, though not manifested to human eyes in its falsehood, must secretly be false; and a falsehood cannot be a doctrine of Protestantism. It is more accurate to say that the separate creeds of Turkey and Persia are _within Mahommedanism; such, viz., as that neither excludes a man from the name of Mussulman; and, again, that Calvinism and Arminianism are doctrines within the Protestant Church—as a church of general toleration for all religious doctrines not de-monstrably hostile to any cardinal truth of Christianity.

Phil., then, we all understand, is not going to traverse the vast field of Protestant opinions as they are distributed through our many sects; that would be endless; and he illustrates the mazy character of the wilderness over which these sects are wandering,

—'ubi passim Palantes error recto de tramite pellit,'

by the four cases of—1, the Calvinist; 2, the Newmanite; 3, the Romanist;[Footnote: What, amongst Protestant sects? Ay, even so. It's Phil.'s mistake, not mine. He will endeavor to doctor the case, by pleading that he was speaking universally of Christian error; but the position of the clause forbids this plea. Not only in relation to what immediately precedes, the passage must be supposed to contemplate Protestant error; but the immediate inference from it, viz., that 'the world may well be excused for doubting whether there is, after all, so much to be gained by that liberty of private judgment, which is the essential characteristic of Protestantism; whether it be not, after all, merely a liberty to fall into error,' nails Phil. to that construction—argues too strongly that it is an oversight of indolence. Phil. was sleeping for the moment, which is excusable enough towards the end of a book, but hardly in section I. P.S.—I have since observed (which not to have observed is excused, perhaps, by the too complex machinery of hooks and eyes between the text and the notes involving a double reference—first, to the section; second, to the particular clause of the section) that Phil. has not here committed an inadvertency; or, if he has, is determined to fight himself through his inadvertency, rather than break up his quaternion of cases. 'In speaking of Romanism as arising from a misapplication of Protestant principles; we refer, not to those who were born, but to those who have become members of the Church of Rome.' What is the name of those people? And where do they live? I have heard of many who think (and there are cases in which most of us, that meddle with philosophy, are apt to think) occasional principles of Protestantism available for the defence of certain Roman Catholic mysteries too indiscriminately assaulted by the Protestant zealot; but, with this exception, I am not aware of any parties professing to derive their Popish learnings from Protestantism; it is in spite of Protestantism, as seeming to them not strong enough, or through principles omitted by Protestantism, which therefore seems to them not careful enough or not impartial enough, that Protestants have lapsed to Popery. Protestants have certainly been known to become Papists, not through Popish arguments, but simply through their own Protestant books; yet never, that I heard of, through an affirmative process, as though any Protestant argument involved the rudiments of Popery, but by a negative process, as fancying the Protestant reasons, though lying in the right direction, not going far enough; or, again, though right partially, yet defective as a whole. Phil. therefore, seems to me absolutely caught in a sort of Furcae Caudinae, unless he has a dodge in reserve to puzzle us all. In a different point, I, that hold myself a doctor seraphicus, and also inexpugnabilis upon quillets of logic, justify Phil., whilst also I blame him. He defends himself rightly for distinguishing between the Romanist and Newmanite on the one hand, between the Calvinist and the Evangelican man on the other, though perhaps a young gentleman, commencing his studies on the Organon, will fancy that here he has Phil. in a trap, for these distinctions, he will say, do not entirely exclude to each other as they ought to do. The class calling itself Evangelical, for instance, may also be Calvinistic; the Newmanite is not, therefore, anti-Romanish. True, says Phil.; I am quite aware of it. But to be aware of an objection is not to answer it. The fact seems to be, that the actual combinations of life, not conforming to the truth of abstractions, compel us to seeming breaches of logic. It would be right practically to distinguish the Radical from the Whig; and yet it might shock Duns or Lombardus, the magister sententiarum, when he came to understand that partially the principles of Radicals and Whigs coincide. But, for all that, the logic which distinguishes them is right; and the apparent error must be sought in the fact, that all cases (political or religious) being cases of life, are concretes, which never conform to the exquisite truth of abstractions. Practically, the Radical is opposed to the Whig, though casually the two are in conjunction continually; for, as acting partisans, they work from different centres, and finally, for different results.] 4, the Evangelical enthusiast—as holding systems of doctrine, 'no one of which is capable of recommending itself to the favorable opinion of an impartial judge.' Impartial! but what Christian can be impartial? To be free from all bias, and to begin his review of sects in that temper, he must begin by being an infidel. Vainly a man endeavors to reserve in a state of neutrality any preconceptions that he may have formed for himself, or prepossessions that he may have inherited from 'mamma;' he cannot do it any more than he can dismiss his own shadow. And it is strange to contemplate the weakness of strong minds in fancying that they can. Calvin, whilst amiably engaged in hunting Servetus to death, and writing daily letters to his friends, in which he expresses his hope that the executive power would not think of burning the poor man, since really justice would be quite satisfied by cutting his head off, meets with some correspondents who conceive (idiots that they were!) even that little amputation not indispensable. But Calvin soon settles their scruples. You don't perceive, he tells them, what this man has been about. When a writer attacks Popery, it's very wrong in the Papists to cut his head off; and why? Because he has only been attacking error. But here lies the difference in this case; Servetus had been attacking the TRUTH. Do you see the distinction, my friends? Consider it, and I am sure you will be sensible that this quite alters the case. It is shocking, it is perfectly ridiculous, that the Bishop of Rome should touch a hair of any man's head for contradicting him; and why? Because, do you see? he is wrong. On the other hand, it is evidently agreeable to philosophy, that I, John Calvin, should shave off the hair, and, indeed, the head itself (as I heartily hope[Footnote: The reader may imagine that, in thus abstracting Calvin's epistolary sentiments, I am a little improving them. Certainly they would bear improvement, but that is not my business. What the reader sees here is but the result of bringing scattered passages into closer juxtaposition; whilst, as to the strongest (viz., the most sanguinary) sentiments here ascribed to him, it will be a sufficient evidence of my fidelity to the literal truth, if I cite three separate sentences. Writing to Farrel, he says, 'Spero capitale saltern fore judicium.' Sentence of the court, he hopes, will, at any rate, reach the life of Servetus. Die he must, and die he shall. But why should he die a cruel death? "Paenoe vero atrocitatem remitti cupio." To the same purpose, when writing to Sultzer, he expresses his satisfaction in being able to assure him that a principal civic officer of Geneva was, in this case, entirely upright, and animated by the most virtuous sentiments. Indeed! what an interesting character! and in what way now might this good man show thia beautiful tenderness of conscience? Why; by a fixed resolve that Servetus should not in any case escape the catastrophe which I, John Calvin, am longing for, ('ut saltem exitum, quem optamus, noa fugiat.') Finally, writing to the same Sultzer, he remarks that—when we see the Papists such avenging champions of their own superstitious fables as not to falter in shedding innocent blood, 'pudeat Christianos magistratus [as if the Roman Catholic magistrates were not Christians] in tuenda certa veritate nihil prorsus habere animi'—'Christian magistrates ought to be ashamed of themselves for manifesting no energy at all in the vindication of truth undeniable;' yet really since these magistrates had at that time the full design, which design not many days after they executed, of maintaining truth by fire and faggot, one does not see the call upon them for blushes so very deep as Calvin requires. Hands so crimson with blood might compensate the absence of crimson cheeks.] will be done in this present case) of any man presumptuous enough to contradict me; but then, why? For a reason that makes all the difference in the world, and which, one would think, idiocy itself could not overlook, viz., that I, John Calvin, am right—right, through three degrees of comparison—right, righter, or more right, rightest, or most right. Calvin fancied that he could demonstrate his own impartiality.

The self-sufficingness of the Bible, and the right of private judgment—here, then, are the two great charters in which Protestantism commences; these are the bulwarks behind which it intrenches itself against Rome. And it is remarkable that these two great preliminary laws, which soon diverge into fields so different, at the first are virtually one and the same law. The refusal of an oracle alien to the Bible, extrinsic to the Bible, and claiming the sole interpretation of the Bible; the refusal of an oracle that reduced the Bible to a hollow masque, underneath which fraudulently introducing itself any earthly voice could mimic a heavenly voice, was in effect to refuse the coercion of this false oracle over each man's conscientious judgment; to make the Bible independent of the Pope, was to make man independent of all religious controllers. The self-sufficingness of Scripture, its independency of any external interpreter, passed in one moment into the other great Protestant doctrine of Toleration. It was but the same triumphal monument under a new angle of sight, the golden and silver faces of the same heraldic shield. The very same act which denies the right of interpretation to a mysterious Papal phoenix, renewed from generation to generation, having the antiquity and the incomprehensible omniscience of the Simorg in Southey, transferred this right of mere necessity to the individuals of the whole human race. For where else could it have been lodged? Any attempt in any other direction was but to restore the Papal power in a new impersonation. Every man, therefore, suddenly obtained the right of interpreting the Bible for himself. But the word 'right' obtained a new sense. Every man has the right, under the Queen's Bench, of publishing an unlimited number of metaphysical systems; and, under favor of the same indulgent Bench, we all enjoy the unlimited right of laughing at him. But not the whole race of man has a right to coerce, in the exercise of his intellectual rights, the humblest of individuals. The rights of men are thus unspeakably elevated; for, being now freed from all anxiety, being sacred as merely legal rights, they suddenly rise into a new mode of responsibility as intellectual rights. As a Protestant, every mature man has the same dignified right over his own opinions and profession of faith that he has over his own hearth. But his hearth can rarely be abused; whereas his religious system, being a vast kingdom, opening by immeasurable gates upon worlds of light and worlds of darkness, now brings him within a new amenability—called upon to answer new impeachments, and to seek for new assistances. Formerly another was answerable for his belief; if that were wrong, it was no fault of his. Now he has new rights, but these have burthened him with new obligations. Now he is crowned with the glory and the palms of an intellectual creature, but he is alarmed by the certainty of corresponding struggles. Protestantism it is that has created him into this child and heir of liberty; Protestantism it is that has invested him with these unbounded privileges of private judgment, giving him in one moment the sublime powers of a Pope within his own conscience; but Protestantism it is that has introduced him to the most dreadful of responsibilities.

I repeat that the twin maxims, the columns of Hercules through which Protestantism entered the great sea of human activities, were originally but two aspects of one law: to deny the Papal control over men's conscience being to affirm man's self-control, was, therefore, to affirm man's universal right to toleration, which again implied a corresponding duty of toleration. Under this bi-fronted law, generated by Protestantism, but in its turn regulating Protestantism, Phil. undertakes to develope all the principles that belong to a Protestant church. The seasonableness of such an investigation—its critical application to an evil now spreading like a fever through Europe—he perceives fully, and in the following terms he expresses this perception:—

'That we stand on the brink of a great theological crisis, that the problem must soon be solved, how far orthodox Christianity is possible for those who are not behind their age in scholarship and science; this is a solemn fact, which may be ignored by the partisans of short-sighted bigotry, but which is felt by all, and confessed by most of those who are capable of appreciating its reality and importance. The deep Sibylline vaticinations of Coleridge's philosophical mind, the practical working of Arnold's religious sentimentalism, and the open acknowledgment of many divines who are living examples of the spirit of the age, have all, in different ways, foretold the advent of a Church of the Future.'

This is from the preface, p. ix., where the phrase, Church of the Future, points to the Prussian minister's (Bunsen's) Kirche der Zukunft; but in the body of the work, and not far from its close, (p. 114,) he recurs to this crisis, and more circumstantially.

Phil. embarrasses himself and his readers in this development of Protestant principles. His own view of the task before him requires that he should separate himself from the consideration of any particular church, and lay aside all partisanship—plausible or not plausible. It is his own overture that warrants us in expecting this. And yet, before we have travelled three measured inches, he is found entangling himself with Church of Englandism. Let me not be misunderstood, as though, borrowing a Bentham word, I were therefore a Jerry Benthamite: I, that may describe myself generally as Philo-Phil., am not less a son of the 'Reformed Anglican Church' than Phil. Consequently, it is not likely that, in any vindication of that church, simply as such, and separately for itself, I should be the man to find grounds of exception. Loving most of what Phil. loves, loving Phil. himself, and hating (I grieve to say), with a theological hatred, whatever Phil. hates, why should I demur at this particular point to a course of argument that travels in the line of my own partialities? And yet I do demur. Having been promised a philosophic defence of the principles concerned in the great European schism of the sixteenth century, suddenly we find ourselves collapsing from that altitude of speculation into a defence of one individual church. Nobody would complain of Phil. if, after having deduced philosophically the principles upon which all Protestant separation from Rome should revolve, he had gone forward to show, that in some one of the Protestant churches, more than in others, these principles had been asserted with peculiar strength, or carried through with special consistency, or associated pre-eminently with the other graces of a Christian church, such as a ritual more impressive to the heart of man, or a polity more symmetrical with the structure of English society. Once having unfolded from philosophic grounds the primary conditions of a pure scriptural church, Phil. might then, without blame, have turned sharp round upon us, saying, such being the conditions under which the great idea of a true Christian church must be constructed, I now go on to show that the Church of England has conformed to those conditions more faithfully than any other. But to entangle the pure outlines of the idealizing mind with the practical forms of any militant church, embarrassed (as we know all churches to have been) by preoccupations of judgment, derived from feuds too local and interests too political, moving too (as we know all churches to have moved) in a spirit of compromise, occasionally from mere necessities of position; this is in the result to injure the object of the writer doubly: first, as leaving an impression of partisanship the reader is mistrustful from the first, as against a judge that, in reality, is an advocate; second, without reference to the effect upon the reader, directly to Phil. it is injurious, by fettering the freedom of his speculations, or, if leaving their freedom undisturbed, by narrowing their compass.

And, if Phil., as to the general movement of his Protestant pleadings, modulates too little in the transcendental key, sometimes he does so too much. For instance, at p. 69, sec. 35, we find him half calling upon Protestantism to account for her belief in God; how then? Is this belief special to Protestants? Are Roman Catholics, are those of the Greek, the Armenian, and other Christian churches, atheistically given? We used to be told that there is no royal road to geometry. I don't know whether there is or not; but I am sure there is no Protestant by-road, no Reformation short-cut, to the demonstration of Deity. It is true that Phil. exonerates his philosophic scholar, when throwing himself in Protestant freedom upon pure intellectual aids, from the vain labor of such an effort. He consigns him, however philosophic, to the evidence of 'inevitable assumptions, upon axiomatic postulates, which the reflecting mind is compelled to accept, and which no more admit of doubt and cavil than of establishment by formal proof.' I am not sure whether I understand Phil. in this section. Apparently he is glancing at Kant. Kant was the first person, and perhaps the last, that ever undertook formally to demonstrate the indemonstrability of God. He showed that the three great arguments for the existence of the Deity were virtually one, inasmuch as the two weaker borrowed their value and vis apodeictica from the more rigorous metaphysical argument. The physico-theological argument he forced to back, as it were, into the cosmological, and that into the ontological. After this reluctant regressus of the three into one, shutting up like a spying-glass, which (with the iron hand of Hercules forcing Cerberus up to daylight) the stern man of Koenigsberg resolutely dragged to the front of the arena, nothing remained, now that he had this pet scholastic argument driven up into a corner, than to break its neck—which he did. Kant took the conceit out of all the three arguments; but, if this is what Phil. alludes to, he should have added, that these three, after all, were only the arguments of speculating or theoretic reason. To this faculty Kant peremptorily denied the power of demonstrating the Deity; but then that same apodeixis, which he had thus inexorably torn from reason under one manifestation, Kant himself restored to the reason in another (the praktische vernunft.) God he asserts to be a postulate of the human reason, as speaking through the conscience and will, not proved ostensively, but indirectly proved as being wanted indispensably, and presupposed in other necessities of our human nature. This, probably, is what Phil. means by his short-hand expression of 'axiomatic postulates.' But then it should not have been said that the case does not 'admit of formal proof,' since the proof is as 'formal' and rigorous by this new method of Kant as by the old obsolete methods of Sam. Clarke and the schoolmen.[Footnote: The method of Des Cartes was altogether separate and peculiar to himself; it is a mere conjuror's juggle; and yet, what is strange, like some other audacious sophisms, it is capable of being so stated as most of all to baffle the subtle dialectician; and Kant himself, though not cheated, was never so much perplexed in his life as in the effort to make its hollowness apparent.]

But it is not the too high or the too low—the two much or the too little—of what one might call by analogy the transcendental course, which I charge upon Phil. It is, that he is too desultory—too eclectic. And the secret purpose, which seems to me predominant throughout his work, is, not so much the defence of Protestantism, or even of the Anglican Church, as a report of the latest novelties that have found a roosting-place in the English Church, amongst the most temperate of those churchmen who keep pace with modern philosophy; in short, it is a selection from the classical doctrines of religion, exhibited under their newest revision; or, generally, it is an attempt to show, from what is going on amongst the most moving orders in the English Church, how far it is possible that strict orthodoxy should bend, on the one side, to new impulses, derived from an advancing philosophy, and yet, on the other side, should reconcile itself, both verbally and in spirit, with ancient standards. But if Phil. is eclectic, then I will be eclectic; if Phil. has a right to be desultory, then I have a right. Phil. is my leader. I can't, in reason, be expected to be better than he is. If I'm wrong, Phil. ought to set me a better example. And here, before this honorable audience of the public, I charge all my errors (whatever they may be, past or coming) upon Phil.'s misconduct.

Having thus established my patent of vagrancy, and my license for picking and choosing, I choose out these three articles to toy with:—first, Bibliolatry; second, Development applied to the Bible and Christianity; third, Philology, as the particular resource against false philosophy, relied on by Phil.

Bibliolatry.—We Protestants charge upon the Ponteficii, as the more learned of our fathers always called the Roman Catholics, Mariolatry; they pay undue honors, say we, to the Virgin. They in return charge upon us, Bibliolatry, or a superstitious allegiance—an idolatrous homage—to the words, syllables, and punctuation of the Bible. They, according to us, deify a woman; and we, according to them, deify an arrangement of printer's types. As to their error, we need not mind that: let us attend to our own. And to this extent it is evident at a glance that Bibliolatrists must be wrong, viz., because, as a pun vanishes on being translated into another language, even so would, and must melt away, like ice in a hot-house, a large majority of those conceits which every Christian nation is apt to ground upon the verbal text of the Scriptures in its own separate vernacular version. But once aware that much of their Bibliolatry depends upon ignorance of Hebrew and Greek, and often upon peculiarity of idiom or structures in their mother dialect, cautious people begin to suspect the whole. Here arises a very interesting, startling, and perplexing situation for all who venerate the Bible; one which must always have existed for prying, inquisitive people, but which has been incalculably sharpened for the apprehension of these days by the extraordinary advances made and making in Oriental and Greek philology. It is a situation of public scandal even to the deep reverencers of the Bible; but a situation of much more than scandal, of real grief, to the profound and sincere amongst religious people. On the one hand, viewing the Bible as the word of God, and not merely so in the sense of its containing most salutary counsels, but, in the highest sense, of its containing a revelation of the most awful secrets, they cannot for a moment listen to the pretence that the Bible has benefited by God's inspiration only as other good books may be said to have done. They are confident that, in a much higher sense, and in a sense incommunicable to other books, it is inspired. Yet, on the other hand, as they will not tell lies, or countenance lies, even in what seems the service of religion, they cannot hide from themselves that the materials of this imperishable book are perishable, frail, liable to crumble, and actually have crumbled to some extent, in various instances. There is, therefore, lying broadly before us, something like what Kant called an antinomy—a case where two laws equally binding on the mind are, or seem to be, in collision. Such cases occur in morals—cases which are carried out of the general rule, and the jurisdiction of that rule, by peculiar deflexions; and from the word case we derive the word casuistry, as a general science dealing with such anomalous cases. There is a casuistry, also, for the speculative understanding, as well as for the moral (which is the practical) understanding. And this question, as to the inspiration of the Bible, with its apparent conflict of forces, repelling it and yet affirming it, is one of its most perplexing and most momentous problems.

My own solution of the problem would reconcile all that is urged against an inspiration with all that the internal necessity of the case would plead in behalf of an inspiration. So would Phil.'s. His distinction, like mine, would substantially come down to this—that the grandeur and extent of religious truth is not of a nature to be affected by verbal changes such as can be made by time, or accident, or without treacherous design. It is like lightning, which could not be mutilated, or truncated, or polluted. But it may be well to rehearse a little more in detail, both Phil.'s view and my own. Let my principal go first; make way, I desire, for my leader: let Phil. have precedency, as, in all reason, it is my duty to see that he has.

Whilst rejecting altogether any inspiration as attaching to the separate words and phrases of the Scriptures, Phil. insists (sect. 25, p. 49) upon such an inspiration as attaching to the spiritual truths and doctrines delivered in these Scriptures. And he places this theory in a striking light, equally for what it affirms and for what it denies, by these two arguments—first (in affirmation of the real spiritual inspiration), that a series of more than thirty writers, speaking in succession along a vast line of time, and absolutely without means of concert, yet all combine unconsciously to one end—lock like parts of a great machine into one system—conspire to the unity of a very elaborate scheme, without being at all aware of what was to come after. Here, for instance, is one, living nearly one thousand six hundred years before the last in the series, who lays a foundation (in reference to man's ruin, to God's promises and plan for human restoration), which is built upon and carried forward by all, without exception, that follow. Here come a multitude that prepare each for his successor—that unconsciously integrate each other—that, finally, when reviewed, make up a total drama, of which each writer's separate share would have been utterly imperfect without corresponding parts that he could not have foreseen. At length all is finished. A profound piece of music, a vast oratorio, perfect and of elaborate unity, has resulted from a long succession of strains, each for itself fragmentary. On such a final creation resulting from such a distraction of parts, it is indispensable to suppose an overruling inspiration, in order at all to account for the final result of a most elaborate harmony. Besides, which would argue some inconceivable magic, if we did not assume a providential inspiration watching over the coherencies, tendencies, and intertessellations (to use a learned word) of the whole,—it happens that, in many instances, typical things are recorded—things ceremonial, that could have no meaning to the person recording—prospective words, that were reported and transmitted in a spirit of confiding faith, but that could have little meaning to the reporting parties for many hundreds of years. Briefly, a great mysterious word is spelt as it were by the whole sum of the scriptural books—every separate book forming a letter or syllable in that secret and that unfinished word, as it was for so many ages. This cooperation of ages, not able to communicate or concert arrangements with each other, is neither more nor less an argument of an overruling inspiration, than if the separation of the contributing parties were by space, and not by time. As if, for example, every island at the same moment were to send its contribution, without previous concert, to a sentence or chapter of a book; in which case the result, if full of meaning, much more if full of awful and profound meaning, could not be explained rationally without the assumption of a supernatural overruling of these unconscious co-operators to a common result. So far on behalf of inspiration. Yet, on the other hand, as an argument in denial of any blind mechanic inspiration cleaving to words and syllables, Phil. notices this consequence as resulting from such an assumption, viz., that if you adopt any one gospel, St. John's suppose, or any one narrative of a particular transaction, as inspired in this minute and pedantic sense, then for every other report, which, adhering to the spiritual value of the circumstances, and virtually the same, should differ in the least of the details, there would instantly arise a solemn degradation. All parts of Scripture, in fact, would thus be made active and operative in degrading each other.

Such is Phil.'s way of explaining ξεοπνευστια[Footnote: I must point out to Phil. an oversight of his as to this word at p. 45; he there describes the doctrine of theopneustia as being that of 'plenary and verbal inspiration,' But this he cannot mean, for obviously this word theopneustia comprehends equally the verbal inspiration which he is denouncing, and the inspiration of power or spiritual virtue which he is substituting. Neither Phil., nor any one of his school, is to be understood as rejecting theopneustia, but as rejecting that particular mode of theopneustia which appeals to the eye by mouldering symbols, in favor of that other mode which appeals to the heart by incorruptible radiations of inner truth.] (theopneustia), or divine prompting, so as to reconcile the doctrine affirming a virtual inspiration, an inspiration as to the truths revealed, with a peremptory denial of any inspiration at all, as to the mere verbal vehicle of those revelations. He is evidently as sincere in regard to the inspiration which he upholds as in regard to that which he denies. Phil. is honest, and Phil. is able. Now comes my turn. I rise to support my leader, and shall attempt to wrench this notion of a verbal inspiration from the hands of its champions by a reductio ad absurdum, viz., by showing the monstrous consequences to which it leads—which form of logic Phil. also has employed briefly in the last paragraph of last month's paper; but mine is different and more elaborate. Yet, first of all, let me frankly confess to the reader, that some people allege a point-blank assertion by Scripture itself of its own verbal inspiration; which assertion, if it really had any existence, would summarily put down all cavils of human dialectics. That makes it necessary to review this assertion. This famous passage of Scripture, this locus classicus, or prerogative text, pleaded for the verbatim et literatim inspiration of the Bible, is the following; and I will so exhibit its very words as that the reader, even if no Grecian, may understand the point in litigation. The passage is this: Πασα γραφη ξεοπιενστος χαί ώφελιμος, &c., taken from St. Paul, (2 Tim. iii. 16.) Let us construe it literally, expressing the Greek by Latin characters: Pasa graphe, all written lore (or every writing)—theopneustos, God-breathed, or, God-prompted—kai, and (or, also)—ophelimos, serviceable—pros, towards, didaskalian, doctrinal truth. Now this sentence, when thus rendered into English according to the rigor of the Grecian letter, wants something to complete its sense—it wants an is. There is a subject, as the logicians say, and there is a predicate (or, something affirmed of that subject), but there is no copula to connect them—we miss the is. This omission is common in Greek, but cannot be allowed in English. The is must be supplied; but where must it be supplied? That's the very question, for there is a choice between two places; and, according to the choice, will the word theopneustos become part of the subject, or part of the predicate; which will make a world of difference. Let us try it both ways:—

1. All writing inspired by God (i.e. being inspired by God, supposing it inspired, which makes theopneustos part of the subject) is also profitable for teaching, &c.

2. All writing is inspired by God, and profitable, &c. (which makes theopneustos part of the predicate.)

Now, in this last way of construing the text, which is the way adopted by our authorized version, one objection strikes everybody at a glance, viz., that St. Paul could not possibly mean to say of all writing, indiscriminately, that it was divinely inspired, this being so revoltingly opposed to the truth. It follows, therefore, that, on this way of interpolating the is, we must understand the Apostle to use the word graphe, writing, in a restricted sense, not for writing generally, but for sacred writing, or (as our English phrase runs) 'Holy Writ;' upon which will arise three separate demurs—first, one already stated by Phil., viz., that, when graphe is used in this sense, it is accompanied by the article; the phrase is either ήγραφη, 'the writing,' or else (as in St. Luke) άι γραφαι, 'the writings,' just as in English it is said, 'the Scripture,' or 'the Scriptures.' Secondly, that, according to the Greek usage, this would not be the natural place for introducing the is. Thirdly—which disarms the whole objection from this text, howsoever construed—that, after all, it leaves the dispute with the bibliolaters wholly untouched. We also, the anti-bibliolaters, say that all Scripture is inspired, though we may not therefore suppose the Apostle to be here insisting on that doctrine. But no matter whether he is or not, in relation to this dispute. Both parties are contending for the inspiration—so far they are agreed; the question between them arises upon quite another point, viz., as to the mode of that inspiration, whether incarnating its golden light in the corruptibilities of perishing syllables, or in the sanctities of indefeasible, word-transcending ideas. Now, upon that question, the apostolic words, torture them how you please, say nothing at all.

There is, then, no such dogma (or, to speak Germanice, no such macht-spruch) in behalf of verbal inspiration as has been ascribed to St. Paul, and I pass to my own argument against it. This argument turns upon the self-confounding tendency of the common form ascribed to ξεοπνευστια, or divine inspiration. When translated from its true and lofty sense of an inspiration—brooding, with outstretched wings, over the mighty abyss of secret truth—to the vulgar sense of an inspiration, burrowing, like a rabbit or a worm, in grammatical quillets and syllables, mark how it comes down to nothing at all; mark how a stream, pretending to derive itself from a heavenly fountain, is finally lost and confounded in a morass of human perplexities.

First of all, at starting, we have the inspiration (No. 1) to the original composers of the sacred books. That I grant, though distinguishing as to its nature.

Next, we want another inspiration (No. 2) for the countless translators of the Bible. Of what use is it to a German, to a Swiss, or to a Scotsman, that, three thousand years before the Reformation, the author of the Pentateuch was kept from erring by a divine restraint over his words, if the authors of this Reformation—Luther, suppose, Zwingle, John Knox—either making translations themselves, or relying upon translations made by others under no such verbal restraint, have been left free to bias his mind, pretty nearly as much as if the original Hebrew writer had been resigned to his own human discretion?

Thirdly, even if we adopt the inspiration No. 2, that will not avail us; because many different translators exist. Does the very earliest translation of the Law and the Prophets, viz., the Greek translation of the Septuagint, always agree verbally with the Hebrew? Or the Samaritan Pentateuch always with the Hebrew? Or do the earliest Latin versions of the entire Bible agree verbally with modern Latin versions? Jerome's Latin version, for instance, memorable as being that adopted by the Romish Church, and known under the name of the Vulgate, does it agree verbally with the Latin versions of the Bible or parts of the Bible made since the Reformation? In the English, again, if we begin with the translation still sleeping in MS., made five centuries ago, and passing from that to the first printed translation (which was, I think, Coverdale's, in 1535), if we thence travel down to our own day, so as to include all that have confined themselves to separate versions of some one book, or even of some one cardinal text, the versions that differ—and to the idolater of words all differences are important—may be described as countless. Here, then, on that doctrine of inspiration which ascribes so much to the power of verbal accuracy, we shall want a fourth inspiration, No. 4, for the guidance of each separate Christian applying himself to the Scriptures in his mother tongue; he will have to select not one (where is the one that has been uniformly correct?) but a multitude; else the same error will again rush in by torrents through the license of interpretation assumed by these many adverse translators.

Fourthly, as these differences of version arise often tinder the same reading of the original text; but as, in the meantime, there are many different readings, here a fifth source of possible error calls for a fifth inspiration overruling us to the proper choice amongst various readings. What may be called a 'textual' inspiration for selecting the right reading is requisite for the very same reason, neither more nor less, which supposes any verbal inspiration originally requisite for constituting a right reading. It matters not in which stage of the Bible's progress the error commences; first stage and last stage are all alike in the sight of God. There was, reader, as perhaps you know, about six score years ago, another Phil., not the same as this Phil. now before us (who would be quite vexed if you fancied him as old as all that comes to—oh dear, no! he's not near as old)—well, that earlier Phil. was Bentley, who wrote (under the name of Phileleutheros Lipsiansis) a pamphlet connected with this very subject, partly against an English infidel of that day. In that pamphlet, Phil. the first pauses to consider and value this very objection from textual variation to the validity of Scripture: for the infidel (as is usual with infidels) being no great scholar, had argued as though it were impossible to urge anything whatever for the word of God, since so vast a variety in the readings rendered it impossible to know what was the word of God. Bentley, though rather rough, from having too often to deal with shallow coxcombs, was really and unaffectedly a pious man. He was shocked at this argument, and set himself seriously to consider it. Now, as all the various readings were Greek, and as Bentley happened to be the first of Grecians, his deliberate review of this argument is entitled to great attention. There were, at that moment when Bentley spoke, something more (as I recollect) than ten thousand varieties of reading in the text of the New Testament; so many had been collected in the early part of Queen Anne's reign by Wetstein, the Dutchman, who was then at the head of the collators. Mill, the Englishman, was at that very time making further collations. How many he added, I cannot tell without consulting books—a thing which I very seldom do. But since that day, and long after Bentley and Mill were in their graves, Griesbach, the German, has risen to the top of the tree, by towering above them all in the accuracy of his collations. Yet, as the harvest comes before the gleanings, we may be sure that Wetstein's barn housed the very wealth of all this variety. Of this it was, then, that Bentley spoke. And what was it that he spoke? Why, he, the great scholar, pronounced, as with the authority of a Chancery decree, that the vast majority of various readings made no difference at all in the sense. In the sense, observe; but many things might make a difference in the sense which would still leave the doctrine undisturbed. For instance, in the passage about a camel going through the eye of a needle, it will make a difference in the sense, whether you read in the Greek word for camel the oriental animal of that name, or a ship's cable; but no difference at all arises in the spiritual doctrine. Or, illustrating the case out of Shakspeare, it makes no difference as to the result, whether you read in Hamlet 'to take arms against a sea of troubles,' or (as has been suggested), 'against a siege of troubles;' but it makes a difference as to the integrity of the image.[Footnote: 'Integrity of the metaphor.'—One of the best notes ever written by Warburton was in justification of the old reading, sea. It was true, that against a sea it would be idle to take arms. We, that have lived since Warburton's day, have learned by the solemn example of Mrs. Partington, (which, it is to be hoped, none of us will ever forget,) how useless, how vain it is to take up a mop against the Atlantic Ocean. Great is the mop, great is Mrs. Partington, but greater is the Atlantic. Yet, though all arms must be idle against the sea considered literally, and χατα την φαντασιαν under that image, Warburton contended justly that all images, much employed, evanesce into the ideas which they represent. A sea of troubles comes to mean only a multitude of troubles. No image of the sea is suggested; and arms, incongruous in relation to the literal sea, is not so in relation to a multitude; besides, that the image arms itself, evanesces for the same reason into resistance. For this one note, which I cite from boyish remembrance, I have always admired the subtlety of Warburton.] What has a sea to do with arms? What has a camel,[Footnote: Meantime, though using this case as an illustration, I believe that camel is, after all, the true translation; first, on account of the undoubted proverb in the East about the elephant going through the needle's eye; the relation is that of contrast as to magnitude; and the same relation holds as to the camel and the needle's eye; secondly, because the proper word for a cable, it has been alleged, is not 'cam_e_lus,' but 'cam_i_lus.'] the quadruped, to do with a needle? A prodigious minority, therefore, there is of such various readings as slightly affect the sense; but this minority becomes next to nothing, when we inquire for such as affect any doctrine. This was Bentley's opinion upon the possible disturbance offered to the Christian by various readings in the New Testament. You thought that the carelessness, or, at times, even the treachery of men, through so many centuries, must have ended in corrupting the original truth; yet, after all, you see the light burns as brightly and steadily as ever. We, now, that are not bibliolatrists, no more believe that, from the disturbance of a few words here or there, any evangelical truth can have suffered a wound or mutilation, than we believe that the burning of a wood, or even of a forest, which happens in our vast American possessions, sometimes from natural causes (lightning, or spontaneous combustion), sometimes from an Indian's carelessness, can seriously have injured botany. But for him, who conceives an inviolable sanctity to have settled upon each word and particle of the original record, there should have been strictly required an inspiration (No. 5) to prevent the possibility of various readings arising. It is too late, however, to pray for that; the various readings have arisen; here they are; and what's to be done now? The only resource for the bibliolatrist is—to invoke a new inspiration (No.4) for helping him out of his difficulty, by guiding his choice. We, anti-bibliolaters, are not so foolish as to believe that God having once sent a deep message of truth to man, would suffer it to lie at the mercy of a careless or a wicked copyist. Treasures so vast would not be left at the mercy of accidents so vile. Very little more than two hundred years ago, a London compositor, not wicked at all, but simply drunk, in printing Deuteronomy, left out the most critical of words; the seventh commandment he exhibited thus-'Thou shalt commit adultery;' in which form the sheet was struck off. And though in those days no practical mischief could arise from this singular erratum, which English Griesbachs will hardly enter upon the roll of various readings, yet, harmless as it was, it met with punishment. 'Scandalous!' said Laud, 'shocking! to tell men in the seventeenth century, as a biblical rule, that they positively must commit adultery!' The brother compositors of this drunken biblical reviser, being too honorable to betray the individual delinquent, the Star Chamber fined the whole 'chapel.' Now, the copyists of MSS. were as certain to be sometimes drunk as this compositor—famous by his act—utterly forgotten in his person—whose crime is remembered—the record of whose name has perished. We therefore hold, that it never was in the power, or placed within the discretion, of any copyist, whether writer or printer, to injure the sacred oracles. But the bibliolatrist cannot say that; because, if he does, then he is formally unsaying the very principle which is meant by bibliolatry. He therefore must require another supplementary inspiration, viz., No. 4, to direct him in his choice of the true reading amongst so many as continually offer themselves.[Footnote: [Footnote: I recollect no variation in the test of Scripture which makes any startling change, even to the amount of an eddy in its own circumjacent waters, except that famous passage about the three witnesses—'There are three that bare record in heaven,' &c. This has been denounced with perfect fury as an interpolation; and it is impossible to sum up the quart bottles of ink, black and blue, that have been shed in the dreadful skirmish. Person even, the all-accomplished Grecian, in his letters to Archdeacon Travis, took a conspicuous part in the controversy; his wish was, that men should think of him as a second Bentley tilting against Phalaris; and he stung like a hornet. To be a Cambridge man in those days was to be a hater of all Establishments in England; things and persons were hated alike. I hope the same thing may not be true at present. It may chance that on this subject Master Porson will get stung through his coffin, before he is many years deader. However, if this particular variation troubles the waters just around itself (for it would desolate a Popish village to withdraw its local saint), yet carrying one's eye from this Epistle to the whole domains of the New Testament—yet, looking away from that defrauded village to universal Christendom, we must exclaim—What does one miss? Surely Christendom is not disturbed because a village suffers wrong; the sea is not roused because an eddy in a corner is boiling; the doctrine of the Trinity is not in danger because Mr. Porson is in a passion.]

Fifthly, as all words cover ideas, and many a word covers a choice of ideas, and very many ideas split into a variety of modifications, we shall, even after a fourth inspiration has qualified us for selecting the true reading, still be at a loss how, upon this right reading, to fix the right acceptation. So there, at that fifth stage, in rushes the total deluge of human theological controversies. One church, or one sect, insists upon one sense; another, and another, 'to the end of time,' insists upon a different sense. Babel is upon us; and, to get rid of Babel, we shall need a fifth inspiration. No. 5 is clamorously called for.[Footnote: One does not wish to be tedious; or, if one has a gift in that way, naturally one does not wish to bestow it all upon a perfect stranger, as 'the reader' usually is, but to reserve a part for the fireside, and the use of one's most beloved friends; else I could torment the reader by a longer succession of numbers, and perhaps drive him to despair. But one more of the series, viz., No. 6, as a parting gage d' amitie, he must positively permit me to drop into his pocket. Supposing, then, that No. 5 were surmounted, and that, supernaturally, you knew the value to a hair's breadth, of every separate word (or, perhaps, composite phrase made up from a constellation of words)—ah, poor traveller in trackless forests, still you are lost again—for, oftentimes, and especially in St. Paul, the words may be known, their sense may be known, but their logical relation is still doubtful. The word X and the word Y are separately clear; but has Y the dependency of a consequence upon X, or no dependency at all? Is the clause which stands eleventh in the series a direct prolongation of that which stands tenth? or is the tenth wholly independent and insulated? or does it occupy the place of a parenthesis, so as to modify the ninth clause? People that have pracised composition as much, and with as vigilant an eye as myself, know also, by thousands of cases, how infinite is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought by the mere position of a word as despicable as the word even. A mote, that is itself invisible, shall darken the august faculty of sight in a human eye—the heavens shall be hidden by a wretched atom that dares not show itself—and the station of a syllable shall cloud the judgment of a council. Nay, even an ambiguous emphasis falling to the right-hand word, or the left-hand word, shall confound a system.] But we all know, each knows by his own experience, that No. 5 is not forthcoming; and, in the absence of that, what avail for us the others? 'Man overboard!' is the cry upon deck; but what avails it for the poor drowning creature that a rope being thrown to him is thoroughly secured at one end to the ship, if the other end floats wide of his grasp? We are in prison: we descend from our prison-roof, that seems high as the clouds, by knotting together all the prison bed-clothes, and all the aids from friends outside. But all is too short: after swarming down the line, in middle air, we find ourselves hanging: sixty feet of line are still wanting. To reascend—that is impossible: to drop boldly—alas! that is to die.

Meantime, what need of this eternal machinery, that eternally is breaking like ropes of sand? Or of this earth resting on an elephant, that rests on a tortoise, that, when all is done, must still consent to rest on the common atmosphere of God? These chains of inspiration are needless. The great ideas of the Bible protect themselves. The heavenly truths, by their own imperishableness, defeat the mortality of languages with which for a moment they are associated. Is the lightning enfeebled or dimmed, because for thousands of years it has blended with the tarnish of earth and the steams of earthly graves? Or light, which so long has travelled in the chambers of our sickly air, and searched the haunts of impurity—is that less pure than it was in the first chapter of Genesis? Or that more holy light of truth—the truth, suppose, written from his creation upon the tablets of man's heart—which truth never was imprisoned in any Hebrew or Greek, but has ranged for ever through courts and camps, deserts and cities, the original lesson of justice to man and piety to God—has that become tainted by intercourse with flesh? or has it become hard to decipher, because the very heart, that human heart where it is inscribed, is so often blotted with falsehoods? You are aware, perhaps, reader, that in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Asia Minor (and, indeed, elsewhere), through the very middle of the salt-sea billows, rise up, in shining columns, fountains of fresh water.[Footnote: See Mr. Yates's 'Annotations upon Fellowes's Researches in Anatolia,' as one authority for this singular phenomenon.] In the desert of the sea are found Arabian fountains of Ishmael and Isaac! Are these fountains poisoned for the poor victim of fever, because they have to travel through a contagion of waters not potable? Oh, no! They bound upwards like arrows, cleaving the seas above with as much projectile force as the glittering water-works of Versailles cleave the air, and rising as sweet to the lip as ever mountain torrent that comforted the hunted deer.

It is impossible to suppose that any truth, launched by God upon the agitations of things so unsettled as languages, can perish. The very frailty of languages is the strongest proof of this; because it is impossible to suppose that anything so great can have been committed to the fidelity of anything so treacherous. There is laughter in heaven when it is told of man, that he fancies his earthly jargons, which, to heavenly ears, must sound like the chucklings of poultry, equal to the task of hiding or distorting any light of revelation. Had words possessed any authority or restraint over scriptural truth, a much worse danger would have threatened it than any malice in the human will, suborning false copyists, or surreptitiously favoring depraved copies. Even a general conspiracy of the human race for such a purpose would avail against the Bible only as a general conspiracy to commit suicide might avail against the drama of God's providence. Either conspiracy would first become dangerous when first either became possible. But a real danger seems to lie in the insensible corruption going on for ever within all languages, by means of which they are eternally dying away from their own vital powers; and that is a danger which is travelling fast after all the wisdom and the wit, the eloquence and the poetry of this earth, like a mountainous wave, and will finally overtake them—their very vehicles being lost and confounded to human sensibilities. But such a wave will break harmlessly against scriptural truth; and not merely because that truth will for ever evade such a shock by its eternal transfer from language to language—from languages dying out to languages in vernal bloom—but also because, if it could not evade the shock, supreme truth would surmount it for a profounder reason. A danger analogous to this once existed in a different form. The languages into which the New Testament was first translated offered an apparent obstacle to the translation that seemed insurmountable. The Latin, for instance, did not present the spiritual words which such a translation demanded; and how should it, when the corresponding ideas had no existence amongst the Romans? Yet, if not spiritual, the language of Rome was intellectual; it was the language of a cultivated and noble race. But what shall be done if the New Testament wishes to drive a tunnel through a rude forest race, having an undeveloped language, and understanding nothing but war? Four centuries after Christ, the Gothic Bishop Ulphilas set about translating the Gospels for his countrymen. He had no words for expressing spiritual relations or spiritual operations. The new nomenclature of moral graces, humility, resignation, the spirit of forgiveness, &c., hitherto unrecognised for such amongst men, having first of all been shown in blossom, and distinguished from weeds, by Christian gardening, had to be reproduced in the Gothic language, with apparently no means whatever of effecting it. In this earliest of what we may call ancestral translations, (for the Goths were of our own blood,) and, therefore, by many degrees, this most interesting of translations, may be seen to this day, after fourteen centuries and upwards have passed, how the good bishop succeeded, to what extent he succeeded, and by what means. I shall take a separate opportunity for investigating that problem; but at present I will content myself with noticing a remarkable principle which applies to the case, and illustrating it by a remarkable anecdote. The principle is this—that in the grander parts of knowledge, which do not deal much with petty details, nearly all the building or constructive ideas (those ideas which build up the system of that particular knowledge) lie involved within each other; so that any one of the series, being awakened in the mind, is sufficient (given a multitude of minds) to lead backwards or forwards, analytically or synthetically, into many of the rest. That is the principle;[Footnote: I am afraid, on reviewing this passage, that the reader may still say, 'What is the principle?' I will add, therefore, the shortest explanation of my meaning. If into any Pagan language you had occasion to translate the word love, or purity, or penitence, &c., you could not do it. The Greek language itself, perhaps the finest (all things weighed and valued) that man has employed, could not do it. The scale was not so pitched as to make the transfer possible. It was to execute organ music on a guitar. And, hereafter, I will endeavor to show how scandalous an error has been committed on this subject, not by scholars only, but by religious philosophers. The relation of Christian ethics (which word ethics, however, is itself most insufficient) to natural or universal ethics is a field yet uncultured by a rational thought. The first word of sense has yet to be spoken. There lies the difficulty; and the principle which meets it is this, that what any one idea could never effect for itself (insulated, it must remain an unknown quality for ever), the total system of the ideas developed from its centre would effect for each separately. To know the part, you must first know the whole, or know it, at least, by some outline. The idea of purity, for instance, in its Christian altitude, would be utterly incomprehensible, and, besides, could not sustain itself for a moment if by any glimpse it were approached. But when a ruin was unfolded that had affected the human race, and many things heretofore unobserved, because uncombined, were gathered into a unity of evidence to that ruin, spread through innumerable channels, the great altitude would begin dimly to reveal itself by means of the mighty depth in correspondence. One deep calleth to another. One after one the powers lodged in the awful succession of uncoverings would react upon each other; and thus the feeblest language would be as capable of receiving and reflecting the system of truths (because the system is an arch that supports itself) as the richest and noblest; and for the same reason that makes geometry careless of language. The vilest jargon that ever was used by a shivering savage of Terra del Fuego is as capable of dealing with the sublime and eternal affections of space and quantity, with up and down, with more and less, with circle and radius, angle and tangent, as is the golden language of Athens.] and the story which illustrates it is this:—A great work of Apollonius, the sublime geometer, was supposed in part to have perished: seven of the eight books remained in the original Greek; but the eighth was missing. The Greek, after much search, was not recovered; but at length there was found (in the Bodleian, I think,) an Arabic translation of it. An English mathematician, Halley, knowing not one word of Arabic, determined (without waiting for that Arabic key) to pick the lock of this MS. And he did so. Through strength of preconception, derived equally from his knowledge of the general subject, and from his knowledge of this particular work in its earlier sections, using also to some extent the subtle art of the decipherer, [Footnote: An art which, in the preceding century, had been greatly improved by Wallis, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, the improver of analytic mathematics, and the great historian of algebra. Algebra it was that suggested to him his exquisite deciphering skill, and the parliamentary war it was that furnished him with a sufficient field of practice. The King's private cabinet of papers, all written in cipher, and captured in the royal coach on the decisive day of Naseby (June, 1645), was (I believe) deciphered by Wallis, proprio marte.] now become so powerful an instrument of analysis, he translated the whole Arabic MS. He printed it—he published it. He tore—he extorted the truth from the darkness of an unknown language—he would not suffer the Arabic to benefit by its own obscurity to the injury of mathematics. And the book remains a monument to this day, that a system of ideas, having internal coherency and interdependency, is vainly hidden under an unknown tongue; that it may be illuminated and restored chiefly through their own reciprocal involutions. The same principle applies, and a fortiori applies, to religious truth, as one which lies far deeper than geometry in the spirit of man, one to which the inner attestation is profounder, and to which the key-notes of Scripture (once awakened on the great organ of the heart) are sure to call up corresponding echoes. It is not in the power of language to arrest or to defeat this mode of truth; because, when once the fundamental base is furnished by revelation, the human heart itself is able to co-operate in developing the great harmonies of the system, without aid from language, and in defiance of language—without aid from human learning, and in defiance of human learning.

Finally, there is another security against the suppression or distortion of any great biblical truth by false readings, which I will state in the briefest terms. The reader is aware of the boyish sport sometimes called 'drake-stone;' a flattish stone is thrown by a little dexterity so as to graze the surface of a river, but so, also, as in grazing it to dip below the surface, to rise again from this dip, again to dip, again to ascend, and so on alternately, a plusieurs reprises. In the same way, with the same effect of alternate resurrections, all scriptural truths reverberate and diffuse themselves along the pages of the Bible; none is confined to one text, or to one mode of enunciation; all parts of the scheme are eternally chasing each other, like the parts of a fugue; they hide themselves in one chapter, only to restore themselves in another; they diverge, only to recombine; and under such a vast variety of expressions, that even in that way, supposing language to have powers over religious truth—which it never had, or can have—any abuse of such a power would be thoroughly neutralized. The case resembles the diffusion of vegetable seeds through the air and through the waters; draw a cordon sanitaire against dandelion or thistledown, and see if the armies of earth would suffice to interrupt this process of radiation, which yet is but the distribution of weeds. Suppose, for instance, the text about the three heavenly witnesses to have been eliminated finally as an interpolation. The first thought is—there goes to wreck a great doctrine! Not at all. That text occupied but a corner of the garden. The truth, and the secret implications of the truth, have escaped at a thousand points in vast arches above our heads, rising high above the garden wall, and have sown the earth with memorials of the mystery which they envelope.

The final inference is this—that scriptural truth is endowed with a self-conservative and a self-restorative virtue; it needs no long successions of verbal protection by inspiration; it is self-protected; first, internally, by the complex power which belongs to the Christian system of involving its own integrations, in the same way as a musical chord involves its own successions of sound, and its own resolutions; secondly, in an external and obvious way, it is protected by its prodigious iteration, and secret presupposed in all varieties of form. Consequently, as the peril connected with language is thus effectually barred, the call for any verbal inspiration (which, on separate grounds, is shown to be self-confounding) shows itself now, in a second form, to be a gratuitous delusion, since, in effect, it is a call for protection against a danger which cannot have any existence.

There is another variety of bibliolatry arising in a different way—not upon errors of language incident to human infirmity, but upon deliberate errors indispensable to divine purposes. The case is one which has been considered with far too little attention, else it could never have been thought strange that Christ should comply in things indifferent with popular errors. A few Words will put the reader in possession of my view. Speaking of the Bible, Phil. says, 'We admit that its separate parts are the work of frail and fallible human beings. We do not seek to build upon it systems of cosmogony, chronology, astronomy, and natural history. We know no reason of internal or external probability which should induce us to believe that such matters could ever have been the subjects of direct revelation.' Is that all? There is no reason, certainly, for expectations so foolish; but is there no adamantine reason against them? It is no business of the Bible, we are told, to teach science. Certainly not; but that is far too little. It is an obligation resting upon the Bible, if it is to be consistent with itself, that it should refuse to teach science; and, if the Bible ever had taught any one art, science, or process of life, capital doubts would have clouded our confidence in the authority of the book. By what caprice, it would have been asked, is a divine mission abandoned suddenly for a human mission? By what caprice is this one science taught, and others not? Or these two, suppose, and not all? But an objection, even deadlier, would have followed. It is clear as is the purpose of daylight, that the whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect. For this end they exist. To see God, therefore, descending into the arena of science, and contending, as it were, for his own prizes, by teaching science in the Bible, would be to see him intercepting from their self-evident destination, (viz., man's intellectual benefit,) his own problems by solving them himself. No spectacle could more dishonor the divine idea. The Bible must not teach anything that man can teach himself. Does the doctrine require a revelation?—then nobody but God can teach it. Does it require none?—then in whatever case God has qualified man to do a thing for himself, he has in that very qualification silently laid an injunction upon man to do it, by giving the power. But it is fancied that a divine teacher, without descending to the unworthy office of teaching science, might yet have kept his own language free from all collusion with human error. Hence, for instance, it was argued at one time, that any language in the Bible implying the earth to be stationary, and central to our system, could not not have been a compliance with the popular errors of the time, but must be taken to express the absolute truth. And so grew the anti-Galilean fanatics. Out of similar notions have risen the absurdities of a polemic Bible chronology, &c. [Footnote: The Bible cosmology stands upon another footing. That is not gathered from a casual expression, shaped to meet popular comprehension, but is delivered directly, formally, and elaborately, as a natural preface to the history of man and his habitation. Here, accordingly, there is no instance of accommodation to vulgar ignorance; and the persuasion gains ground continually that the order of succession in the phenomena of creation will be eventually confirmed by scientific geology, so far as this science may ever succeed in unlinking the steps of the process. Nothing, in fact, disturbs the grandeur and solemnity of the Mosaical cosmogony, except (as usual) the ruggedness of the bibliolater. He, finding the English word day employed in the measurement of the intervals, takes it for granted that this must mean a nychthemeron of twenty-four hours; imports, therefore, into the biblical text this conceit; fights for his own opinion, as for a revelation from heaven; and thus disfigures the great inaugural chapter of human history with this single feature of a fairy-tale, where everything else is told with the most majestic simplicity. But this word, which so ignorantly he presumes to be an ordinary human day, bears that meaning only in common historical transactions between man and man; but never once in the great prophetic writings, where God comes forward as himself the principal agent. It then means always a vast and mysterious duration—undetermined, even to this hour, in Daniel. The heptameron is not a week, but a shadowy adumbration of a week.] Meantime, if a man sets himself steadily to contemplate the consequences which must inevitably have followed any deviation from the usual erroneous phraseology, he will see the utter impossibility that a teacher (pleading a heavenly mission) could allow himself to deviate by one hair's breadth (and why should he wish to deviate?) from the ordinary language of the times. To have uttered one syllable for instance, that implied motion in the earth, would have issued into the following ruins:—First, it would have tainted the teacher with the suspicion of lunacy; and, secondly, would have placed him in this inextricable dilemma. On the one hand, to answer the questions prompted by his own perplexing language, would have opened upon him, as a necessity, one stage after another of scientific cross-examination, until his spiritual mission would have been forcibly swallowed up in the mission of natural philosopher; but, on the other hand, to pause resolutely at any one stage of this public examination, and to refuse all further advance, would be, in the popular opinion, to retreat as a baffled disputant from insane paradoxes which he had not been able to support. One step taken in that direction was fatal, whether the great envoy retreated from his own words to leave behind the impression that he was defeated as a rash speculator, or stood to these words, and thus fatally entangled himself in the inexhaustible succession of explanations and justifications. In either event the spiritual mission was at an end: it would have perished in shouts of derision, from which there could have been no retreat, and no retrieval of character. The greatest of astronomers, rather than seem ostentatious or unseasonably learned, will stoop to the popular phrase of the sun's rising, or the sun's motion in the ecliptic. But God, for a purpose commensurate with man's eternal welfare, is by these critics supposed incapable of the same petty abstinence.

The same line of argument applies to all the compliances of Christ with the Jewish prejudices (partly imported from the Euphrates) as to demonology, witchcraft, &c. By the way, in this last word, 'witchcraft,' and the too memorable histories connected with it, lies a perfect mine of bibliolatrous madness. As it illustrates the folly and the wickedness of the biliolaters, let us pause upon it.

The word witch, these bibliolaters take it for granted, must mean exactly what the original Hebrew means, or the Greek word chosen by the LXX.; so much, and neither more nor less. That is, from total ignorance of the machinery by which language moves, they fancy that every idea and word which exists, or has existed, for any nation, ancient or modern, must have a direct interchangeable equivalent in all other languages; and that, if the dictionaries do not show it, that must be because the dictionaries are bad. Will these worthy people have the goodness, then, to translate coquette into Hebrew, and post-office into Greek? The fact is, that all languages, and in the ratio of their development, offer ideas absolutely separate and exclusive to themselves. In the highly cultured languages of England, France, and Germany, are words, by thousands, which are strictly untranslatable. They may be approached, but cannot be reflected as from a mirror. To take an image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap; and this arises from the varying modes in which different nations combine ideas. The French word shall combine the elements, l, m, n, o—the nearest English word, perhaps, m, n, o, p. For instance, in all words applied to the nuances of manners, and generally to social differences, how prodigious is the wealth of the French language! How merely untranslatable for all Europe! I suppose, my bibliolater, you have not yet finished your Hebrew or Samaritan translation of coquette. Well, you shall be excused from that, if you will only translate it into English. You cannot: you are obliged to keep the French word; and yet you take for granted, without inquiry, that in the word 'witchcraft,' and in the word 'witch,' applied to the sorceress of Endor, our authorized English Bible of King James's day must be correct. And your wicked bibliolatrous ancestors proceeded on that idea throughout Christendom to murder harmless, friendless, and oftentimes crazy old women. Meantime the witch of Endor in no respect resembled our modern domestic witch.[Footnote: 'The domestic witch.'—It is the common notion that the superstition of the evil eye, so widely diffused in the Southern lands, and in some, not a slumbering, but a fiercely operative superstition, is unknown in England and other Northern latitudes. On the contrary, to my thinking, the regular old vulgar witch of England and Scotland was but an impersonatrix of the very same superstition. Virgil expresses this mode of sorcery to the letter, when his shepherd says—

'Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos?'

Precisely in that way it was that the British witch operated. She, by her eye, blighted the natural powers of growth and fertility. By the way, I ought to mention, as a case parallel to that of the Bible's recognising witchcraft, and of enlightened nations continuing to punish it, that St. Paul himself, in an equal degree, recognises the evil eye; that is, he uses the idea, (though certainly not meaning to accredit such an idea,) as one that briefly and energetically conveyed his meaning to those whom he was addressing. 'Oh, foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?' That is, literally, who has fascinated your senses by the evil eye? For the Greek is, tis umas ebaskanen? Now the word ebaskanen is a past tense of the verb baskaino, which was the technical term for the action of the evil eye. Without having written a treatise on the Æolic digamma, probably the reader is aware that F is V, and that, in many languages, B and V are interchangeable letters through thousands of words, as the Italian tavola, from the Latin tabula. Under that little process it was that the Greek baskaino transmigrated into the Latin fascino; so that St. Paul's word, in speaking to the Galatians, is the very game word as Virgil's, in speaking of the shepherd's flock as charmed by the evil eye.] There was as much difference as between a Roman Proconsul, surrounded with eagle-bearers, and a commercial Consul's clerk with a pen behind his ear. Apparently she was not so much a Medea as an Erichtho. (See the Pharsalia.) She was an Evocatrix, or female necromancer, evoking phantoms that stood in some unknown relation to dead men; and then by some artifice (it has been supposed) of ventriloquism,[Footnote: I am not referring to German infidels. Very pious commentators have connected her with the engastrimuthoi (εγγαστριμυθοι) or ventriloquists.] causing these phantoms to deliver oracular answers upon great political questions. Oh, that one had lived in the times of those New-England wretches that desolated whole districts and terrified vast provinces by their judicial murders of witches, under plea of a bibliolatrous warrant; until at last the fiery furnace, which they had heated for women and children, shot forth flames that, like those of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, seizing upon his very agents, began to reach some of the murderous judges and denouncers!

Yet, after all, are there not express directions in Scripture to exterminate witches from the land? Certainly; but that does not argue any scriptural recognition of witchcraft as a possible offence. An imaginary crime may imply a criminal intention that is not imaginary; but also, which much more directly concerns the interests of a state, a criminal purpose, that rests upon a pure delusion, may work by means that are felonious for ends that are fatal. At this moment, we English and the Spaniards have laws, and severe ones, against witchcraft, viz., in the West Indies, and indispensable it is that we should. The Obeah man from Africa can do no mischief to one of us. The proud and enlightened white man despises his arts; and for him, therefore, these arts have no existence, for they work only through strong preconceptions of their reality, and through trembling faith in their efficacy. But by that very agency they are all-sufficient for the ruin of the poor credulous negro; he is mastered by original faith, and has perished thousands of times under the knowledge that Obi had been set for him. Justly, therefore, do our colonial courts punish the Obeah sorcerer, who (though an impostor) is not the less a murderer. Now the Hebrew witchcraft was probably even worse; equally resting on delusions, nevertheless, equally it worked for unlawful ends, and (which chiefly made it an object of divine wrath) it worked through idolatrous agencies. It must, therefore, have kept up that connection with idolatry which it was the unceasing effort of the Hebrew polity to exterminate from the land. Consequently, the Hebrew commonwealth might, as consistently as our own, denounce and punish witchcraft without liability to the inference that it therefore recognised the pretensions of witches as real, in the sense of working their bad ends by the means which they alleged. Their magic was causatively of no virtue at all, but, being believed in, through this belief it became the occasional means of exciting the imagination of its victims; after which the consequences were the same as if the magic had acted physically according to its pretences. [Footnote: Does that argument not cover 'the New England wretches' so unreservedly denounced in a preceding paragraph?—ED.]

II. Development, as applicable to Christianity, is a doctrine of the very days that are passing over our heads, and due to Mr. Newman, originally the ablest son of Puseyism, but now a powerful architect of religious philosophy on his own account. I should have described him more briefly as a 'master-builder,' had my ear been able to endure a sentence ending with two consecutive trochees, and each of those trochees ending with the same syllable er. Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labors in the evasion of cacophon. Phil. has a general dislike to the Puseyites, though he is too learned to be ignorant, (as are often the Low-Church, or Evangelical, party in England,) that, in many of their supposed innovations, the Puseyites were really only restoring what the torpor of the eighteenth century had suffered to go into disuse. They were reforming the Church in the sense sometimes belonging to the particle re, viz., retroforming it, moulding it back into compliance with its original form and model. It is true that this effort for quickening the Church, and for adorning her exterior service, moved under the impulse of too undisguised a sympathy with Papal Rome. But there is no great reason to mind that in our age and our country. Protestant zealotry may be safely relied on in this island as a match for Popish bigotry. There will be no love lost between them—be assured of that—and justice will be done to both, though neither should do it to her rival; for philosophy, which has so long sought only amusement in either, is in these latter days of growing profundity applying herself steadily to the profound truths which dimly are descried lurking in both. It is these which Mr. Newman is likely to illuminate, and not the faded forms of an obsolete ceremonial that cannot now be restored effectually, were it even important that they should. Strange it is, however, that he should open his career by offering to Rome, as a mode of homage, this doctrine of development, which is the direct inversion of her own. Rome founds herself upon the idea, that to her, by tradition and exclusive privilege, was communicated, once for all, the whole truth from the beginning. Mr. Newman lays his corner-stone in the very opposite idea of a gradual development given to Christianity by the motion of time, by experience, by expanding occasions, and by the progress of civilization. Is Newmanism likely to prosper? Let me tell a little anecdote. Twenty years ago, roaming one day (as I had so often the honor to do) with our immortal Wordsworth, 1 took the liberty of telling him, at a point of our walk, where nobody could possibly overhear me, unless it were old Father Helvellyn, that I feared his theological principles were not quite so sound as his friends would wish. They wanted repairing a little. But, what was worse, I did not see how they could be repaired in the particular case which prompted my remark, for in that place, to repair, or in any respect to alter, was to destroy. It was a passage in the 'Excursion,' where the Solitary had described the baptismal rite as washing away the taint of original sin, and, in fact, working the effect which is called technically regeneration. In the 'Excursion' this view was advanced, not as the poet's separate opinion, but as the avowed doctrine of the English Church, to which Church Wordsworth and myself yielded gladly a filial reverence. But was this the doctrine of the English Church? That I doubted—not that I pretended to any sufficient means of valuing the preponderant opinion between two opinions in the Church; a process far more difficult than is imagined by historians, always so ready to tell us fluently what 'the nation' or 'the people' thought upon a particular question, (whilst, in fact, a whole life might be often spent vainly in collecting the popular opinion); but, judging by my own casual experience, I fancied that a considerable majority in the Church gave an interpretation to this Sacrament differing by much from that in the 'Excursion.' Wordsworth was startled and disturbed at hearing it whispered even before Helvellyn, who is old enough to keep a secret, that his divinity might possibly limp a little. I, on my part, was not sure that it did, but I feared so; and, as there was no chance that I should be murdered for speaking freely, (though the place was lonely, and the evening getting dusky,) I stood to my disagreeable communication with the courage of a martyr. The question between us being one of mere fact, (not what ought to be the doctrine, but what was the doctrine of our Church at that time,) there was no opening for any discussion; and, on Wordsworth's suggestion, it was agreed to refer the point to his learned brother, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, just then meditating a visit to his native lakes. That visit in a short time 'came off,' and then, without delay, our dispute 'came on' for judgment. I had no bets upon the issue—one can't bet with Wordsworth—and I don't know that I should have ventured to back myself in a case of that nature. However, I felt a slight anxiety on the subject, which was very soon and kindly removed by Dr. Wordsworth's deciding, 'sans phrase,' that I, the original mover of the strife, was wrong, wrong as wrong could be. To this decision I bowed at once, on a principle of courtesy. One ought always to presume a man right within his own profession even if privately one should think him wrong. But I could not think that of Dr. Wordsworth. He was a D.D.; he was head of Trinity College, which has my entire permission to hold its head up amongst twenty and more colleges, as the leading one in Cambridge, (provided it can obtain St. John's permission), 'and which,' says Phil., 'has done more than any other foundation in Europe for the enlightenment of the world, and for the overthrow of literary, philosophical, and religious superstitions,' I quarrel not with this bold assertion, remembering reverentially that Isaac Barrow, that Isaac Newton, that Richard Bentley belonged to Trinity, but I wish to understand it. The total pretensions of the College can be known only to its members; and therefore, Phil. should have explained himself more fully. He can do so, for Phil. is certainly a Trinity man. If the police are in search of him, they'll certainly hear of him at Trinity. Suddenly it strikes me as a dream, that Lord Bacon belonged to this College. Don't laugh at me, Phil., if I'm wrong, and still less (because then you'll laugh even more ferociously) if I happen to be right. Can one remember everything? Ah! the worlds of distracted facts that one ought to remember. Would to heaven that I remembered nothing at all, and had nothing to remember! This thing, however, I certainly do remember, that Milton was not of Trinity, nor Jeremy Taylor; so don't think to hoax me there, my parent! Dr. Wordsworth was, or had been, an examining chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. If Lambeth could be at fault on such a question, then it's of no use going to Newcastle for coals. Delphi, we all know, and Jupiter Ammon had vanished. What other court of appeal was known to man? So I submitted as cheerfully as if the learned Doctor, instead of kicking me out of court, had been handing me in. Yet, for all that, as I returned musing past Rydal Water, I could not help muttering to myself—Ay, now, what rebellious thought was it that I muttered? You fancy, reader, that perhaps I said, 'But yet, Doctor, in spite of your wig, I am in the right.' No; you're quite wrong; I said nothing of the sort. What I did mutter was this—'The prevailing doctrine of the Church must be what Dr. Wordsworth says, viz., that baptism is regeneration—he cannot be mistaken as to that—and I have been misled by the unfair proportion of Evangelical people, bishops, and others, whom accident has thrown in my way at Barley Wood (Hannah More's). These, doubtless, form a minority in the Church; and yet, from the strength of their opinions, from their being a moving party, as also from their being a growing party, I prophesy this issue, that many years will not pass before this very question, now slumbering, will rouse a feud within the English Church. There is a quarrel brewing. Such feuds, long after they are ripe for explosion, sometimes slumber on, until accident kindles them into flame.' That accident was furnished by the tracts of the Puseyites, and since then, according to the word which I spoke on Rydal Water, there has been open war raging upon this very point.

At present, with even more certainty, I prophesy that mere necessity, a necessity arising out of continual collisions with sceptical philosophy, will, in a few years, carry all churches enjoying a learned priesthood into the disputes connected with this doctrine of development. Phil., meantime, is no friend to that Newmanian doctrine; and in sect.31, p.66, he thus describes it:—'According to these writers' (viz., the writers 'who advocate the theory of development'), 'the progressive and gradual development of religious truth, which appears to us' (us, meaning, I suppose, the Old-mannians,) 'to have been terminated by the final revelation of the Gospel, has been going on ever since the foundation of the Church, is going on still, and must continue to advance. This theory presumes that the Bible does not contain a full and final exposition of a complete system of religion; that the Church has developed from the Scriptures true doctrines not explicitly contained therein,' &c. &c.

But, without meaning to undertake a defence of Mr. Newman (whose book I am as yet too slenderly acquainted with), may I be allowed, at this point, to intercept a fallacious view of that doctrine, as though essentially it proclaimed some imperfection in Christianity. The imperfection is in us, the Christians, not in Christianity. The impression given by Phil. to the hasty reader is, that, according to Newmanism, the Scriptures make a good beginning to which we ourselves are continually adding—a solid foundation, on which we ourselves build the superstructure. Not so. In the course of a day or a year, the sun passes through a vast variety of positions, aspects, and corresponding powers, in relation to ourselves. Daily and annually he is developed to us—he runs a cycle of development. Yet, after all, this practical result does not argue any change or imperfection, growth or decay, in the sun. This great orb is stationary as regards his place, and unchanging as regards his power. It is the subjective change in ourselves that projects itself into this endless succession of phantom changes in the object. Not otherwise on the scheme of development; the Christian theory and system are perfect from the beginning. In itself, Christianity changes not, neither waxing nor waning; but the motions of time and the evolutions of experience continually uncover new parts of its stationary disk. The orb grows, so far as practically we are speaking of our own benefit; but absolutely, as regards itself, the orb, eternally the same, has simply more or fewer of its digits exposed. Christianity, perfect from the beginning, had a curtain over much of its disk, which Time and Social Progress are continually withdrawing. This I say not as any deliberate judgment on development, but merely as a suspending, or ad interim idea, by way of barring too summary an interdict against the doctrine at this premature stage. Phil., however, hardens his face against Newman and all his works. Him and them he defies; and would consign, perhaps secretly, to the care of a well-known (not new, but) old gentleman, if only he had any faith in that old gentleman's existence. On that point, he is a fixed infidel, and quotes with applause the answer of Robinson, the once celebrated Baptist clergyman, who being asked if he believed in the devil, replied, 'Oh, no; I, for my part, believe in God—don't you?'

Phil., therefore, as we have seen, in effect, condemns development. But, at p. 33, when as yet he is not thinking of Mr. Newman, he says,' If knowledge is progressive, the development of Christian doctrine must be progressive likewise.' I do not see the must; but I see the Newmanian cloven foot. As to the must, knowledge is certainly progressive; but the development of the multiplication table is not therefore progressive, nor of anything else that is finished from the beginning. My reason, however, for quoting the sentence is, because here we suddenly detect Phil. in laying down the doctrine which in Mr. Newman he had regarded as heterodox. Phil. is taken red-hand, as the English law expresses it, crimson with, the blood of his offence; assuming, in fact, an original imperfection quoad the scire, though not quoad the esse; as to the 'exposition of the system,' though not as to the 'system' of Christianity. Mr. Newman, after all, asserts (I believe) only one mode of development as applicable to Christianity. Phil. having broke the ice, may now be willing to allow of two developments; whilst I, that am always for going to extremes, should be disposed to assert three, viz:—

First. The Philological development. And this is a point on which I, Philo-Phil. (or, as for brevity you may call me, Phil-Phil.) shall, without wishing to do so, vex Phil. It's shocking that one should vex the author of one's existence, which Phil. certainly is in relation to me, when considered as Phil-Phil. Still it is past all denial, that, to a certain extent, the Scriptures must benefit, like any other book, by an increasing accuracy and compass of learning in the exegesis applied to them. But if all the world denied this, Phil., my parent, is the man that cannot; since he it is that relies upon philological knowledge as the one resource of Christian philosophy in all circumstances of difficulty for any of its interests, positive or negative. Philology, according to Phil, is the sheet-anchor of Christianity. Already it is the author of a Christianity more in harmony with philosophy; and, as regards the future, Phil., it is that charges Philology with the whole service of divinity. Wherever anything, being right, needs to be defended—wherever anything, being amiss, needs to be improved—oh! what a life he will lead this poor Philology! Philology, with Phil., is the great benefactress for the past, and the sole trustee for the future. Here, therefore, Phil., is caught in a fix, habemus confitentem. He denounces development when dealing with the Newmanites; he relies on it when vaunting the functions of Philology; and the only evasion for him would be to distinguish about the modes of development, were it not that, by insinuation, he has apparently denied all modes.

Secondly. There is the Philosophic development, from the reaction upon the Bible of advancing knowledge. This is a mode of development continually going on, and reversing the steps of past human follies. In every age, man has imported his own crazes into the Bible, fancied that he saw them there, and then drawn sanctions to his wickedness or absurdity from what were nothing else than fictions of his own. Thus did the Papists draw a plenary justification of intolerance, or even of atrocious persecution, from the evangelical 'Compel them to come in!' The right of unlimited coercion was read in those words. People, again, that were democratically given, or had a fancy for treason, heard a trumpet of insurrection in the words 'To your tents, oh Israel!' But far beyond these in multitude were those that drew from the Bible the most extravagant claims for kings and rulers. 'Rebellion was as the sin of witchcraft.' This was a jewel of a text; it killed two birds with one stone. Broomsticks were proved out of it most clearly, and also the atrocity of representative government. What a little text to contain so much! Look into Algernon Sidney, or into Locke's controversy with Sir Eobert Filmer's 'Patriarcha,'[Footnote: I mention the book as the antagonist, and not the man, because (according to my impression) Sir Robert was dead when Locke was answering him.] or into any books of those days on political principles, and it will be found that Scripture was so used as to form an absolute bar against human progress. All public benefits were, in the strictest sense of the word, precarious, as depending upon prayers and entreaties to those who had an interest in refusing them. All improvements were elcemosynary; for the initial step in all cases belonged to the Crown. 'The right divine of kings to govern wrong' was in those days what many a man would have died for—what many a man did die for; and all in pure simplicity of heart—faithful to the Bible, but to the Bible of misinterpretation. They obeyed (often to their own ruin) an order which they had misread. Their sincerity, the disinterestedness of their folly, is evident; and in that degree is evident the opening for Scripture development. Nobody could better obey Scripture as they had understood it. Change in the obedience, there could be none for the better; it demanded only that there should be a change in the interpretation, and that change would be what is meant by a development of Scripture. Two centuries of enormous progress in the relations between subjects and rulers have altered the whole reading. 'How readest thou?' was the question of Christ himself; that is, in what meaning dost thou read the particular Scripture that applies to this case? All the texts and all the cases remain at this hour just as they were for our ancestors; and our reverence for these texts is as absolute as theirs; but we, applying lights of experience which they had not, construe these texts by a different logic. There now is development applied to the Bible in one of its many strata—that stratum which connects itself most with civil polity. Again, what a development have we made of Christian truth; how differently do we now read our Bibles in relation to the poor tenants of dungeons that once were thought, even by Christian nations, to have no rights at all!—in relation to 'all prisoners and captives;' and in relation to slaves! The New Testament had said nothing directly upon the question of slavery; nay, by the misreader it was rather supposed indirectly to countenance that institution. But mark—it is Mohammedanism, having little faith in its own laws, that dares not confide in its children for developing anything, but must tie them up for every contingency by the letter of a rule. Christianity—how differently does she proceed! She throws herself broadly upon the pervading spirit which burns within her morals. 'Let them alone,' she says of nations; 'leave them to themselves. I have put a new law into their hearts; and if it is really there, and really cherished, that law will tell them—will develop for them—what it is that they ought to do in every case as it arises, when once its consequences are comprehended.' No need, therefore, for the New Testament explicitly to forbid slavery; silently and implicitly it is forbidden in many passages of the New Testament, and it is at war with the spirit of all. Besides, the religion which trusts to formal and literal rules breaks down the very moment that a new case arises not described in the rules. Such a case is virtually unprovided for, if it does not answer to a circumstantial textual description; whereas every case is provided for, as soon as its tendencies and its moral relations are made known, by a religion that speaks through a spiritual organ to a spiritual apprehension in man. Accordingly, we find that, whenever a new mode of intoxication is introduced, not depending upon grapes, the most devout Mussulmans hold themselves absolved from the restraints of the Koran. And so it would have been with Christians, if the New Testament had laid down literal prohibitions of slavery, or of the slave traffic. Thousands of variations would have been developed by time which no letter of Scripture could have been comprehensive enough to reach. Were the domestic servants of Greece, the ξητες (thetes), within the description? Were the serfs and the ascripti glebae of feudal Europe to be accounted slaves? Or those amongst our own brothers and sisters, that within so short a period were born subterraneously,[Footnote: See, for some very interesting sketches of this Pariah population, the work (title I forget) of Mr. Bald, a Scottish engineer, well known and esteemed in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He may be relied on. What he tells against Scotland is violently against his own will, for he is intensely national, of which I will give the reader one instance that may make him smile. Much of the rich, unctuous coal, from Northumberland and Durham, gives a deep ruddy light, verging to a blood-red, and certainly is rather sullen, on a winter evening, to the eye. On the other hand, the Scottish coal or most of it, being far poorer as to heat, throws out a very beautiful and animated scarlet blaze; upon which hint, Mr. Bald, when patriotically distressed at not being able to deny the double power of the eastern English coal, suddenly revivifies his Scottish heart that had been chilled, perhaps, by the Scottish coals in his fire-grate, upon recurring to this picturesque difference in the two blazes—'Ah!' he says gratefully, 'that Newcastle blaze is well enough for a "gloomy" Englishman, but it wouldn't do at all for cheerful Scotland.'] in Scottish mines, or in the English collieries of Cumberland, and were supposed to be ascripti metallo, sold by nature to the mine, and indorsed upon its machinery for the whole term of their lives; in whom, therefore, it was a treason to see the light of upper day—would they, would these poor Scotch and English Pariahs, have stood within any scriptural privilege if the New Testament had legislated by name and letter for this class of douloi (slaves)? No attorney would have found them entitled to plead the benefit of the Bible statute. Endless are the variations of the conditions that new combinations of society would bring forward; endless would be the virtual restorations of slavery that would take place under a Mahometan literality; endless would be the defeats that such restorations must sustain under a Christianity relying on no letter, but on the spirit of God's commandments, and that will understand no equivocations with the secret admonitions of the heart. Meantime, this sort of development, it may be objected, is not a light that Scripture throws out upon human life so much as a light that human life and its development throw back upon Scripture. True; but then how was it possible that life and the human intellect should be carried forward to such developments? Solely through the training which both had received under the discipline of Christian truth. Christianity utters some truth widely applicable to society. This truth is caught up by some influential organ of social life—is expanded prodigiously by human experience, and, when travelling back as an illustrated or improved text to the Bible, is found to be made up, in all its details, of many human developments. Does that argue anything disparaging to Christianity, as though she contributed little and man contributed much? On the contrary, man would have contributed nothing at all but for that nucleus by which Christianity started and moulded the principle. To give one instance—Public charity, when did it commence?—who first thought of it? Who first noticed hunger and cold as awful realities afflicting poor women and innocent children? Who first made a public provision to meet these evils?—Constantine it was, the first Christian that sat upon a throne. Had, then, rich Pagans before his time no charity—no pity?—no money available for hopeless poverty? Not much—very little, I conceive; about so much as Shakspeare insinuates that there is of milk in a male tiger. Think, for instance, of that black-hearted reprobate, Cicero, the moralist. This moral knave, who wrote such beautiful Ethics, and was so wicked—who spoke so charmingly and acted so horribly—mentions, with a petrifying coolness, that he knew of desolate old women in Rome who passed three days in succession without tasting food. Did not the wretch, when thinking of this, leap up, and tumble down stairs in his anxiety to rush abroad and call a public meeting for considering so dreadful a case? Not he; the man continued to strut about his library, in a huge toga as big as the Times newspaper, singing out, 'Oh! fortunatam natam me Consule Romam!' and he mentioned the fact at all only for the sake of Natural Philosophers or of the curious in old women. Charity, even in that sense, had little existence—nay, as a duty, it had no place or rubric in human conceptions before Christianity, Thence came the first rudiments of all public relief to starving men and women; but the idea, the principle, was all that the Bible furnished, needed to furnish, or could furnish. The practical arrangements, the endless details for carrying out this Christian idea—these were furnished by man; and why not? This case illustrates only one amongst innumerable modes of development applicable to the Bible; and this power of development, in general, proves also one other thing of the last importance to prove, viz. the power of Christianity to work in co-operation with time and social progress; to work variably according to the endless variations of time and place; and that is the exact shibboleth of a true and spiritual religion—for, on reviewing the history of false religions, and inquiring what it was that ruined them, rarely is it found that any of them perished by external violence. Even the dreadful fury of the early Mahometan Sultans in India, before the house of Timour, failed to crush the monstrous idolatries of the Hindoos. All false religions have perished by their own hollowness, under that searching trial applied by social life and its changes, which awaits every mode of religion. One after another they have sunk away, as by palsy, from new aspects of society and new necessities of man which they were not able to face. Commencing in one condition of society, in one set of feelings, and in one system of ideas, they sank uniformly under any great change in these elements, to which they had no natural power of accommodation. A false religion furnished a key to one subordinate lock; but a religion that is true will prove a master-key for all locks alike. This transcendental principle, by which Christianity transfers herself so readily from climate to climate,[Footnote: Sagacious Mahometans have been often scandalized and troubled by the secret misgiving that, after all, their Prophet must have been an ignorant fellow. It is clear that the case of a cold climate had never occurred to him; and even a hot one had been conceived most narrowly. Many of the Bedouin Arabs complain of ablutions not adapted to their waterless condition. These evidences of oversight would have been fatal to Islamism, had Islamism produced a high civilization.] from century to century, from the simplicity of shepherds to the utmost refinement of philosophers, carries with it a necessity, corresponding to such infinite flexibility of endless development.

ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY.

[1852.]

Forty years ago (or, in all probability, a good deal more, for we have already completed thirty-seven years from Waterloo, and my remembrances upon this subject go back to a period lying much behind that great era), I used to be annoyed and irritated by the false interpretation given to the Greek word aion, and given necessarily, therefore, to the adjective aionios as its immediate derivative. It was not so much the falsehood of this interpretation, as the narrowness of that falsehood, which disturbed me. There was a glimmer of truth in it; and precisely that glimmer it was which led the way to a general and obstinate misconception of the meaning. The word is remarkably situated. It is a scriptural word, and it is also a Greek word; from which the inevitable inference is, that we must look for it only in the New Testament. Upon any question arising of deep, aboriginal, doctrinal truth, we have nothing to do with translations. Those are but secondary questions, archaeological and critical, upon which we have a right to consult the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known by the name of the Septuagint.

Suffer me to pause at this point for the sake of premising an explanation needful to the unlearned reader. As the reading public and the thinking public is every year outgrowing more and more notoriously the mere learned public, it becomes every year more and more the right of the former public to give the law preferably to the latter public, upon all points which concern its own separate interests. In past generations, no pains were taken to make explanations that were not called for by the learned public. All other readers were ignored. They formed a mob, for whom no provision was made. And that many difficulties should be left entirely unexplained for them, was superciliously assumed to be no fault at all. And yet any sensible man, let him be as supercilious as he may, must on consideration allow that amongst the crowd of unlearned or half-learned readers, who have had neither time nor opportunities for what is called 'erudition' or learned studies, there must always lurk a proportion of men that, by constitution of mind, and by the bounty of nature, are much better fitted for thinking, originally more philosophic, and are more capaciously endowed, than those who are, by accident of position, more learned. Such a natural superiority certainly takes precedency of a merely artificial superiority; and, therefore, it entitles those who possess it to a special consideration. Let there be an audience gathered about any book of ten thousand one hundred readers: it might be fair in these days to assume that ten thousand would be in a partial sense illiterate, and the remaining one hundred what would be rigorously classed as 'learned.' Now, on such a distribution of the readers, it would be a matter of certainty that the most powerful intellects would lie amongst the illiterate ten thousand, counting, probably, to fifteen to one as against those in the learned minority. The inference, therefore, would be, that, in all equity, the interest of the unlearned section claimed a priority of attention, not merely as the more numerous section, but also as, by a high probability, the more philosophic. And in proportion as this unlearned section widens and expands, which every year it does, in that proportion the obligation and cogency of this equity strengthens. An attention to the unlearned part of an audience, which fifteen years ago might have rested upon pure courtesy, now rests upon a basis of absolute justice. I make this preliminary explanation, in order to take away the appearance of caprice from such occasional pauses as I may make for the purpose of clearing up obscurities or difficulties. Formerly, in a case of that nature, the learned reader would have told me that I was not entitled to delay him by elucidations that in his case must be supposed to be superfluous: and in such a remonstrance there would once have been some equity. The illiterate section of the readers might then be fairly assumed as present only by accident; as no abiding part of the audience; but, like the general public in the gallery of the House of Commons, as present only by sufferance; and officially in any records of the house whatever, utterly ignored as existences. At present, half way on our pilgrimage through the nineteenth century, I reply to such a learned remonstrant—that it gives me pain to annoy him by superfluous explanations, but that, unhappily, this infliction of tedium upon him is inseparable from what has now become a duty to others. This being said, I now go on to inform the illiterate reader, that the earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures ever made was into Greek. It was undertaken on the encouragement of a learned prince, Ptolemy Philadelphus, by an association of Jewish emigrants in Alexandria. It was, as the event has shown in very many instances, an advantage of a rank rising to providential, that such a cosmopolitan version of the Hebrew sacred writings should have been made at a moment when a rare concurrence of circumstances happened to make it possible; such as, for example, a king both learned in his tastes and liberal in his principles of religious toleration; a language, viz., the Greek, which had already become, what for many centuries it continued to be, a common language of communication for the learned of the whole οικδμενη (i.e., in effect of the civilized world, viz., Greece, the shores of the Euxine, the whole of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and all the dependencies of Carthage, finally, and above all, Rome, then beginning to loom upon the western horizon), together with all the dependencies of Rome, and, briefly, every state and city that adorned the imperial islands of the Mediterranean, or that glittered like gems in that vast belt of land, roundly speaking, one thousand miles in average breadth, and in circuit running up to five thousand miles. One thousand multiplied into five times one thousand, or, otherwise expressed, a thousand thousand five times repeated, or otherwise a million five times repeated, briefly a territory measuring five millions of square miles, or forty-five times the surface of our two British islands—such was the boundless domain which this extraordinary act of Ptolemy suddenly threw open to the literature and spiritual revelation of a little obscure race, nestling in a little angle of Asia, scarcely visible as a fraction of Syria, buried in the broad shadows thrown out on one side by the great and ancient settlements on the Nile, and on the other by the vast empire that for thousands of years occupied the Tigris and the Euphrates. In the twinkling of an eye, at a sudden summons, as it were from the sounding of a trumpet, or the oriental call by a clapping of hands, gates are thrown open, which have an effect corresponding in grandeur to the effect that would arise from the opening of a ship canal across the Isthmus of Darien, viz., the introduction to each other—face to face—of two separate infinities. Such a canal would suddenly lay open to each other the two great oceans of our planet, the Atlantic and the Pacific; whilst the act of translating into Greek and from Hebrew, that is, transferring out of a mysterious cipher as little accessible as Sanscrit, and which never would be more accessible through any worldly attractions of alliance with power and civic grandeur or commerce, out of this darkness into the golden light of a language the most beautiful, the most honored amongst men, and the most widely diffused through a thousand years to come, had the immeasurable effect of throwing into the great crucible of human speculation, even then beginning to ferment, to boil, to overthrow—that mightiest of all elements for exalting the chemistry of philosophy—grand and, for the first time, adequate conceptions of the Deity. For, although it is true that, until Elias should come—that is, until Christianity should have applied its final revelation to the completion of this great idea-we could not possess it in its total effulgence, it is, however, certain that an immense advance was made, a prodigious usurpation across the realms of chaos, by the grand illuminations of the Hebrew discoveries. Too terrifically austere we must presume the Hebrew idea to have been: too undeniably it had not withdrawn the veil entirely which still rested upon the Divine countenance; so much is involved in the subsequent revelations of Christianity. But still the advance made in reading aright the divine lineaments had been enormous. God was now a holy spirit that could not tolerate impurity. He was the fountain of justice, and no longer disfigured by any mode of sympathy with human caprice or infirmity. And, if a frown too awful still rested upon his face, making the approach to him too fearful for harmonizing with that perfect freedom and that childlike love which God seeks in his worshippers, it was yet made evident that no step for conciliating his favor did or could lie through any but moral graces.

Three centuries after this great epoch of the publication (for such it was) secured so providentially to the Hebrew theology, two learned Jews—viz., Josephus and Philo Judaeus—had occasion to seek a cosmopolitan utterance for that burden of truth (or what they regarded as truth) which oppressed the spirit within them. Once again they found a deliverance from the very same freezing imprisonment in an unknown language, through the very same magical key, viz., the all-pervading language of Greece, which carried their communications to the four winds of heaven, and carried them precisely amongst the class of men, viz.—the enlightened and educated class—which pre-eminently, if not exclusively, their wish was to reach. About one generation after Christ it was, when the utter prostration, and, politically speaking, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation, threw these two learned Jews upon this recourse to the Greek language as their final resource, in a condition otherwise of absolute hopelessness. Pretty nearly three centuries before Christ it was (two hundred and eighty-four years, according to the common reckoning), when the first act of communication took place between the sealed-up literature of Palestine and the Greek catholic interpretation. Altogether, we may say that three hundred and twenty years, or somewhere about ten generations of men, divided these two memorable acts of intercommunication. Such a space of time allows a large range of influence and of silent, unconscious operation to the vast and potent ideas that brooded over this awful Hebrew literature. Too little weight has been allowed to the probable contagiousness, and to the preternatural shock, of such a new and strange philosophy, acting upon the jaded and exhausted intellect of the Grecian race. We must remember, that precisely this particular range of time was that in which the Greek systems of philosophy, having thoroughly completed their evolution, had suffered something of a collapse; and, having exhausted their creative energies, began to gratify the cravings for novelty by re modellings of old forms. It is remarkable, indeed, that this very city of Alexandria founded and matured this new principle of remodelling applied to poetry not less than to philosophy and criticism. And, considering the activity of this great commercial city and port, which was meant to act, and did act, as a centre of communication between the East and the West, it is probable that a far greater effect was produced by the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, in the way of preparing the mind of nations for the apprehension of Christianity, than has ever been distinctly recognised. The silent destruction of books in those centuries has robbed us of all means for tracing innumerable revolutions, that nevertheless, by the evidence of results, must have existed. Taken, however, with or without this additional result, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in their most important portions must be ranked amongst what are called `providential' events. Such a king—a king whose father had been a personal friend of Alexander, the mighty civilizing conqueror, and had shared in the liberalization connected with his vast revolutionary projects for extending a higher civilization over the globe, such a king, conversing with such a language, having advantages so absolutely unrivalled, and again this king and this language concurring with a treasure so supernatural of spiritual wisdom as the subject of their ministrations, and all three concurring with political events so auspicious—the founding of a new and mighty metropolis in Egypt, and the silent advance to supreme power amongst men of a new empire, martial beyond all precedent as regarded means, but not as regarded ends—working in all things towards the unity of civilization and the unity of law, so that any new impulse, as, for instance, impulse of a new religion, was destined to find new facilities for its own propagation, resembling electric conductors, under the unity of government and of law—concurrences like these, so many and so strange, justly impress upon this translation, the most memorable, because the most influential of all that have ever been accomplished, a character of grandeur that place it on the same level of interest as the building of the first or second temple at Jerusalem.

There is a Greek legend which openly ascribes to this translation all the characters of a miracle. But, as usually happens, this vulgarizing form of the miraculous is far less impressive than the plain history itself, unfolding its stages with the most unpretending historical fidelity. Even the Greek language, on which, as the natural language of the new Greek dynasty in Egypt, the duty of the translation devolved, enjoyed a double advantage: 1st, as being the only language then spoken upon earth that could diffuse a book over every part of the civilized earth; 2dly, as being a language of unparalleled power and compass for expressing and reproducing effectually all ideas, however alien and novel. Even the city, again, in which this translation was accomplished, had a double dowery of advantages towards such a labor, not only as enjoying a large literary society, and, in particular, a large Jewish society, together with unusual provision in the shape of libraries, on a scale probably at that time unprecedented, but also as having the most extensive machinery then known to human experience for publishing, that is, for transmitting to foreign capitals all books in the readiest and the cheapest fashion, by means of its prodigious shipping.

Having thus indicated to the unlearned reader the particular nature of that interest which invests this earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, viz., that in fact this translation was the earliest publication to the human race of a revelation which had previously been locked up in a language destined, as surely as the Welsh language or the Gaelic, to eternal obscurity amongst men, I go on to mention that the learned Jews selected for this weighty labor happened to be in number seventy-two; but, as the Jews systematically reject fractions in such cases (whence it is that always, in order to express the period of six weeks, they say forty days, and not, as strictly they should, forty-two days), popularly, the translators were called 'the seventy,' for which the Latin word is septuaginta. And thus in after ages the translators were usually indicated as 'The LXX,' or, if the work and not the workmen should be noticed, it was cited as The Septuagint. In fact, this earliest of Scriptural versions, viz., into Greek, is by much the most famous; or, if any other approaches it in notoriety, it is the Latin translation by St. Jerome, which, in this one point, enjoys even a superior importance, that in the Church of Rome it is the authorized translation. Evidently, in every church, it must be a matter of primary importance to assign the particular version to which that church appeals, and by which, in any controversy arising, that church consents to be governed. Now, the Jerome version fulfils this function for the Romish Church; and accordingly, in the sense of being published (vulgata), or publicly authorized by that church, it is commonly called The Vulgate.

But, in a large polemic question, unless, like the Romish church, we uphold a secondary inspiration as having secured a special privileged translation from the possibility of error, we cannot refuse an appeal to the Hebrew text for the Old Testament, or to the Greek text for the New. The word aeonios (αιωηιος), as purely Grecian, could not connect itself with the Old Testament, unless it were through the Septuagint translation into Greek. Now, with that version, in any case of controversy, none of us, Protestants alike or Roman Catholics, have anything whatever to do. Controversially, we can be concerned only with the original language of the Scriptures, with its actual verbal expressions textually produced. To be liable, therefore, to such a textual citation, any Greek word must belong to the New Testament. Because, though the word might happen to occur in the Septuagint, yet, since that is merely a translation, for any of us who occupy a controversial place, that is, who are bound by the responsibilities, or who claim the strict privileges of controversy, the Septuagint has no virtual existence. We should not be at liberty to allege the Septuagint as any authority, if it happened to countenance our own views; and, consequently, we could not be called on to recognise the Septuagint in any case where it should happen to be against us. I make this preliminary caveat, as not caring whether the word aeonios does or does not occur in the Septuagint. Either way, the reader understands that I disown the authority of that version as in any degree affecting myself. The word which, forty years ago, moved my disgust by its servile misinterpretation, was a word proper to the New Testament; and any sense which it may have received from an Alexandrian Jew in the third century before Christ, is no more relevant to any criticism that I am now going to suggest, than is the classical use of the word aeon (αιων) familiar to the learned in Sophocles or Euripides.

The reason which gives to this word aeonian what I do not scruple to call a dreadful importance, is the same reason, and no other, which prompted the dishonesty concerned in the ordinary interpretation of this word. The word happened to connect itself—but that was no practical concern of mine; me it had not biassed in the one direction, nor should it have biassed any just critic in the counter, direction—happened, I say, to connect itself with the ancient dispute upon the duration of future punishments. What was meant by the aeonian punishments in the next world? Was the proper sense of the word eternal, or was it not? I, for my part, meddled not, nor upon any consideration could have been tempted to meddle, with a speculation repellent alike by the horror and by the hopeless mystery which invest it. Secrets of the prison-house, so afflicting to contemplate steadily, and so hopeless of solution, there could be no proper motive for investigating, unless the investigation promised a great deal more than it could ever accomplish; and my own feeling as to all such problems is, that they vulgarize what, left to itself, would take its natural station amongst the freezing horrors that Shakspeare dismisses with so potent an expression of awe, in a well-known scene of 'Measure for Measure.' I reiterate my protest against being in any way decoyed into the controversy. Perhaps I may have a strong opinion upon the subject. But, anticipating the coarse discussions into which the slightest entertainment of such a question would be every moment approaching, once for all, out of reverential regard for the dignity of human nature, I beg permission to decline the controversy altogether.

But does this declinature involve any countenance to a certain argument which I began by rejecting as abominable? Most certainly not. That argument runs thus—that the ordinary construction of the term aeonian, as equivalent to everlasting, could not possibly be given up when associated with penal misery, because in that case, and by the very same act, the idea of eternity must be abandoned as applicable to the counter-bliss of Paradise. Torment and blessedness, it was argued, punishment and beatification, stood upon the same level; the same word it was, the word aeonian, which qualified the duration of either; and, if eternity in the most rigorous acceptation fell away from the one idea, it must equally fall away from the other. Well; be it so. But that would not settle the question. It might be very painful to renounce a long-cherished anticipation; but the necessity of doing so could not be received as a sufficient reason for adhering to the old unconditional use of the word aeonian. The argument is—that we must retain the old sense of eternal, because else we lose upon one scale what we had gained upon the other. But what then? would be the reasonable man's retort. We are not to accept or to reject a new construction (if otherwise the more colorable) of the word aeonian, simply because the consequences might seem such as upon the whole to displease us. We may gain nothing; for by the new interpretation our loss may balance our gain; and we may prefer the old arrangement. But how monstrous is all this! We are not summoned as to a choice of two different arrangements that may suit different tastes, but to a grave question as to what is the sense and operation of the word aeonian. Let the limitation of the word disturb our previous estimate of Paradise, grant that it so disturbs that estimate, not the less all such consequences leave the dispute exactly where it was; and if a balance of reason can be found for limiting the extent of the word aeonian, it will not be the less true because it may happen to disturb a crotchet of our own.

Meantime, all this speculation, first and last, is pure nonsense. Aeonian does not mean eternal; neither does it mean of limited duration; nor would the unsettling of aeonian in its old use, as applied to punishment, to torment, to misery, &c., carry with it any necessary unsettling of the idea in its application to the beatitudes of Paradise. Pause, reader; and thou, my favored and privileged reader, that boastest thyself to be unlearned, pause doubly whilst I communicate my views as to this remarkable word.

What is an aeon? In the use and acceptation of the Apocalypse, it is evidently this, viz., the duration or cycle of existence which belongs to any object, not individually for itself, but universally in right of its genus. Kant, for instance, in a little paper which I once translated, proposed and debated the question as to the age of our planet the Earth. What did he mean? Was he to be understood as asking whether the Earth were half a million, two millions, or three millions of years old? Not at all. The probabilities certainly lean, one and all, to the assignment of an antiquity greater by many thousands of times than that which we have most idly supposed ourselves to extract from Scripture, which assuredly never meant to approach a question so profoundly irrelevant to the great purposes of Scripture as any geological speculation whatsoever. But this was not within the field of Kant's inquiry. What he wished to know was simply the exact stage in the whole course of her development which the Earth at present occupies. Is she still in her infancy, for example, or in a stage corresponding to middle age, or in a stage approaching to superannuation? The idea of Kant presupposed a certain average duration as belonging to a planet of our particular system; and supposing this known, or discoverable, and that a certain assignable development belonged to a planet so circumstanced as ours, then in what particular stage of that development may we, the tenants of this respectable little planet Tellus, reasonably be conceived to stand?

Man, again, has a certain aeonian life; possibly ranging somewhere about the period of seventy years assigned in the Psalms. That is, in a state as highly improved as human infirmity and the errors of the earth herself, together with the diseases incident to our atmosphere, &c., could be supposed to allow, possibly the human race might average seventy years for each individual. This period would in that case represent the 'aeon' of the individual Tellurian; but the 'aeon' of the Tellurian RACE would probably amount to many millions of our earthly years; and it would remain an unfathomable mystery, deriving no light at all from the septuagenarian 'aeon' of the individual; though between the two aeons I have no doubt that some secret link of connection does and must subsist, however undiscoverable by human sagacity.

The crow, the deer, the eagle, &c., are all supposed to be long-lived. Some people have fancied that in their normal state they tended to a period of two[Footnote: I have heard the same normal duration ascribed to the tortoise, and one case became imperfectly known to myself personally. Somewhere I may have mentioned the case in print. These, at any rate, are the facts of the case: A lady (by birth a Cowper, of the whig family, and cousin to the poet Cowper; and, equally with him, related to Dr. Madan, bishop of Peterborough), in the early part of this century, mentioned to me that, in the palace at Peterborough, she had for years known as a pet of the household a venerable tortoise, who bore some inscription on his shell indicating that, from 1638 to 1643, he had belonged to Archbishop Laud, who (if I am not mistaken) held the bishopric of Peterborough before he was translated to London, and finally to Canterbury.] centuries. I myself know nothing certain for or against this belief; but, supposing the case to be as it is represented, then this would be the aeonian period of these animals, considered as individuals. Among trees, in like manner, the oak, the cedar, the yew, are notoriously of very slow growth, and their aeonian period is unusually long as regards the individual. What may be the aeon of the whole species is utterly unknown. Amongst birds, one species at least has become extinct in our own generation: its aeon was accomplished. So of all the fossil species in zoology, which Palaeontology has revealed. Nothing, in short, throughout universal nature, can for a moment be conceived to have been resigned to accident for its normal aeon. All periods and dates of this order belong to the certainties of nature, but also, at the same time, to the mysteries of Providence. Throughout the Prophets, we are uniformly taught that nothing is more below the grandeur of Heaven than to assign earthly dates in fixing either the revolutions or the duration of great events such as prophecy would condescend to notice. A day has a prophetic meaning, but what sort of day? A mysterious expression for a time which has no resemblance to a natural day—sometimes comprehending long successions of centuries, and altering its meaning according to the object concerned. 'A time,' and 'times,' or 'half a time'—'aeon_,' or 'aeons of aeons'—and other variations of this prophetic language (so full of dreadful meaning, but also of doubt and perplexity), are all significant. The peculiar grandeur of such expressions lies partly in the dimness of the approximation to any attempt at settling their limits, and still more in this, that the conventional character, and consequent meanness of ordinary human dates, are abandoned in the celestial chronologies. Hours and days, or lunations and months, have no true or philosophic relation to the origin, or duration, or periods of return belonging to great events, or revolutionary agencies, or vast national crimes; but the normal period and duration of all acts whatever, the time of their emergence, of their agency, or their reagency, fall into harmony with the secret proportions of a heavenly scale, when they belong by mere necessity of their own internal constitution to the vital though hidden motions that are at work in their own life and manifestation. Under the old and ordinary view of the apocalyptic aeon, which supposed it always to mean the same period of time—mysterious, indeed, and uncertain, as regards our knowledge, but fixed and rigorously certain in the secret counsels of God—it was presumed that this period, if it lost its character of infinity when applied to evil, to criminality, or to punishment, must lose it by a corresponding necessity equally when applied to happiness and the golden aspects of hope. But, on the contrary, every object whatsoever, every mode of existence, has its own separate and independent aeon. The most thoughtless person must be satisfied, on reflection, even apart from the express commentary upon this idea furnished by the Apocalypse, that every life and mode of being must have hidden within itself the secret why of its duration. It is impossible to believe of any duration whatever that it is determined capriciously. Always it rests upon some ground, ancient as light and darkness, though undiscoverable by man. This only is discoverable, as a general tendency, that the aeon, or generic period of evil, is constantly towards a fugitive duration. The aeon, it is alleged, must always express the same idea, whatever that may be; if it is less than eternity for the evil cases, then it must be less for the good ones. Doubtless the idea of an aeon is in one sense always uniform, always the same, viz., as a tenth or a twelfth is always the same. Arithmetic could not exist if any caprice or variation affected these ideas—a tenth is always hiore than an eleventh, always less than a ninth. But this uniformity of ratio and proportion does not hinder but that a tenth may now represent a guinea, and next moment represent a thousand guineas. The exact amount of the duration expressed by an aeon depends altogether upon the particular subject which yields the aeon. It is, as I have said, a radix; and, like an algebraic square-root or cube-root, though governed by the most rigorous laws of limitation, it must vary in obedience to the nature of the particular subject whose radix it forms.

Reader, I take my leave. I have been too loitering. I know it, and will make such efforts in future to cultivate the sternest brevity as nervous distress will allow. Meantime, as the upshot of my speculation, accept these three propositions:—

A. That man (which is in effect every man hitherto,) who allows himself to infer the eternity of evil from the counter eternity of good, builds upon the mistake of assigning a stationary and mechanic value to the idea of an aeon; whereas the very purpose of Scripture in using this word was to evade such a value. The word is always varying, for the very purpose of keeping it faithful to a spiritual identity. The period or duration of every object would be an essentially variable quantity, were it not mysteriously commensurate to the inner nature of that object as laid open to the eyes of God. And thus it happens, that everything in this world, possibly without a solitary exception has its own separate aeon: how many entities, so many aeons.

B. But if it be an excess of blindness which can overlook the aeonian differences amongst even neutral entities, much deeper is that blindness which overlooks the separate tendencies of things evil and things good. Naturally, all evil is fugitive and allied to death.

C. I separately, speaking for myself only, profoundly believe that the Scriptures ascribe absolute and metaphysical eternity to one sole Being, viz., to God; and derivatively to all others according to the interest which they can plead in God's favor. Having anchorage in God, innumerable entities may possibly be admitted to a participation in divine aeon. But what interest in the favor of God can belong to falsehood, to malignity, to impurity? To invest them with aeonian privileges, is in effect, and by its results, to distrust and to insult the Deity. Evil would not be evil, if it had that power of self-subsistence which is imputed to it in supposing its aeonian life to be co-eternal with that which crowns and glorifies the good.

JUDAS ISCARIOT.

[1852.]

Everything connected with our ordinary conceptions of this man, of his real purposes, and of his ultimate fate, apparently is erroneous. That neither any motive of his, nor any ruling impulse, was tainted with the vulgar treachery imputed to him, appears probable from the strength of his remorse. And this view of his case comes recommended by so much of internal plausibility, that in Germany it has long since shaped itself into the following well-known hypothesis:—Judas Iscariot, it is alleged, participated in the common delusion of the apostles as to that earthly kingdom which, under the sanction and auspices of Christ, they supposed to be waiting and ripening for the Jewish people. So far there was nothing in Judas to warrant any special wonder or any special blame. If he erred, so did the other apostles. But in one point Judas went further than his brethren, viz., in speculating upon the reasons of Christ for delaying the inauguration of this kingdom. All things were apparently ripe for it; all things pointed to it; the expectation and languishing desires of many Hebrew saints; the warning from signs; the prophetic alarms and kindling signals raised aloft by heralds like the Baptist; the fermentation of revolutionary doctrines all over Judea; the passionate impatience of the Roman yoke; the continual openings of new convulsions and new opportunities at the great centre of Rome; the insurrectionary temper of Jewish society, as indicated by the continual rise of robber leaders, that drew off multitudes into the neighboring deserts; and, universally, the unsettled mind of the Jewish nation. These explosive materials had long been accumulated; they needed only a kindling spark. Heavenly citations to war had long been felt in the insults and aggressions of paganism; there wanted only a leader. And such a leader, if he would but consent to assume that office, stood ready in the founder of Christianity. The supreme qualifications for leadership, as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, were evident to all parties in the Jewish community, and not merely to the religious body of his own immediate followers. These qualifications were published and expounded to the world in the facility with which everywhere he drew crowds about himself,[Footnote: As connected with these crowds, I have elsewhere noticed, many years ago, the secret reason which probably governed our Saviour in cultivating the character and functions of a hakim, or physician. Throughout the whole world of civilization at that era [ή οίχουμειη], whatever might be otherwise the varieties of the government, there was amongst the ruling authorities a great jealousy of mobs and popular gatherings. To a grand revolutionary teacher, no obstacle so fatal as this initial prejudice could have offered itself. Already, in the first place, a new and mysterious body of truth, having vast and illimitable relations to human duties and prospects, presented a field of indefinite alarm. That this truth should in the second place publish itself, not through books and written discourses, but orally, by word of mouth, and by personal communication between vast mobs and the divine teacher—already that, as furnishing a handle of influence to a mob-leader, justified a preliminary alarm. But then, thirdly, as furnishing a plea for bringing crowds together, such a mode of teaching must have crowned the suspicious presumptions against itself. One peril there was at any rate to begin with—the peril of a mob: that was certain. And, secondly, there was the doctrine taught: which doctrine was mysterious and uncertain; and in that uncertainty lay another peril. So that, equally through what was fixed and what was doubtful, there arose that 'fear of change' which by authentic warrant 'perplexes monarchs.'] in the extraordinary depth of impression which attended his teaching, and in the fear as well as hatred which possessed the Jewish rulers against him. Indeed, had it not been for the predominance of the Roman element in the government of Judea, it is pretty certain that Christ would have been crushed in an earlier stage in his career.

Believing, therefore, as Judas did, that Christ contemplated the establishment of a temporal kingdom—the restoration, in fact, of David's throne; believing, also, that all the conditions towards the realization of such a scheme met and centred in the person of Christ, when viewed in relation to the circumstances of the times; what was it that, upon any solution intelligible to Judas, neutralized so grand a scene of promise? Simply and obviously, to a man with the views of Judas, it was the character of Christ himself, sublimely over-gifted for purposes of speculation, but, like Shakspeare's great creation of Prince Hamlet, not commensurately endowed for the business of action and the sudden emergencies of life. Indecision and doubt (such was the interpretation of Judas) crept over the faculties of the Divine Man as often as he was summoned away from his own natural Sabbath of heavenly contemplation to the gross necessities of action. It became important, therefore, according to the views adopted by Judas, that his master should be precipitated into action by a force from without, and thrown into the centre of some popular movement, such as, once beginning to revolve, could not afterwards be suspended or checked. It is by no means improbable that this may have been the theory of Judas. Nor is it at all necessary to seek for the justification of such a theory, considered as a matter of prudential policy, in Jewish fanaticism. The Jews of thai day were distracted by internal schisms. Else, and with any benefit from national unity, the headlong rapture of Jewish zeal, when combined in vindication of their insulted temple and temple-worship, would have been equal to the effort of dislodging the Roman legionary force for the moment from the military possession of Palestine. After which, although the restoration of the Roman supremacy could not ultimately have been evaded, it is not at all certain that a compromise might not have been welcome at Rome, such as had, in fact, existed under Herod the Great and his father.[Footnote: It was a tradition which circulated at Rome down to the days of the Flavian family, that the indulgence conceded to Judea by the imperial policy from Augustus downwards, arose out of the following little diplomatic secret:—On the rise of the Parthian power, ambassadors had been sent to Antipater, the father of Herod, offering the Parthian alliance and support. At the same moment there happened to be at Jerusalem a Roman agent, having a mission from the Roman Government with exactly the same objects. The question was most solemnly debated, for it was obvious, that ultimately this question touched the salvation of the kindgom, since to accept an alliance with either empire, would be to insure the bitter hostility of the other. With that knowledge fully before his mind, Antipater made his definitive election for Rome. The case transpired at Rome—the debate, and the issue of the debate—and eventually proved worth a throne to the Herodian family; for the honor of Rome seemed to be concerned in supporting the man who, in this sort of judgment of Paris, had solemnly awarded the prize of superiority to the remoter potentate.] The radical power, in fact, would have been lodged in Rome; but with such external concessions to Jewish nationality as might have consulted the real interests of both parties. Administered under Jewish names, the land might have yielded a larger revenue than, as a refractory nest of insurgents, it ever did yield to the Roman exchequer; and, on the other hand, a ferocious bigotry, which was really sublime in its indomitable obstinacy, might have been humored without prejudice to the grandeur of the imperial claims. Even little Palmyra in later times was indulged to a greater extent without serious injury in any quarter, had it not been for the feminine arrogance that misinterpreted and abused that indulgence.

The miscalculation, in fact, of Judas Iscariot—supposing him really to have entertained the views ascribed to him—did not hinge at all upon political oversights, but upon a total spiritual blindness; in which blindness, however, he went no farther than at the time did probably most of his brethren. Upon them, quite as little as upon him, had as yet dawned the true grandeur of the Christian scheme. In this only he outran his brethren—that, sharing in their blindness, he greatly exceeded them in presumption. All alike had imputed to their Master views utterly irreconcilable with the grandeur of his new and heavenly religion. It was no religion at all which they as yet supposed to be the object of Christ's teaching, but a simple preparation for a pitiably vulgar scheme of earthly aggrandizement. But, whilst the other apostles had simply failed to comprehend their master, Judas had presumptuously assumed that he comprehended the purposes of Christ more fully than Christ himself. His object was audacious in a high degree, but (according to the theory which I am explaining) for that very reason not treacherous at all. The more that he was liable to the reproach of audacity, the less can he be suspected of perfidy. He supposed himself executing the very innermost purposes of Christ, but with an energy which it was the characteristic infirmity of Christ to want. His hope was, that, when at length actually arrested by the Jewish authorities, Christ would no longer vacillate; he would be forced into giving the signal to the populace of Jerusalem, who would then have risen unanimously, for the double purpose of placing Christ at the head of an insurrectionary movement, and of throwing off the Roman yoke. As regards the worldly prospects of this scheme, it is by no means improbable that Iscariot was right. It seems, indeed, altogether impossible that he, who (as the treasurer of the apostolic fraternity) had in all likelihood the most of worldly wisdom, and was best acquainted with the temper of the times, could have made any gross blunder as to the wishes and secret designs of the populace in Jerusalem.[Footnote: Judas, not less than the other apostles, had doubtless been originally chosen, upon the apparent ground of superior simplicity and unworldliness, or else of superior zeal in testifying his obedience to the wishes of his Master. But the other eleven were probably exposed to no special temptation: Judas, as the purse-bearer, was. His official duty must have brought him every day into minute and circumstantial communication with an important order of men, viz., petty shop-keepers. In all countries alike, these men fulfil a great political function. Beyond all others, they are brought into the most extensive connection with the largest stratum by far in the composition of society. They receive, and with dreadful fidelity they give back, all jacobinical impulses. They know thoroughly in what channels, under any call arising for action, these impulses are at any time moving. They are always kept up au courant of the interior councils and ultimate objects of the most national, and, in one sense, the most powerful body in the whole community. Consciousness, which such men always have, of deep incorruptible fidelity to their mother-land, and to her interests, however ill understood, ennobles their politics, even when otherwise base. They are corrupters in a service that never can be utterly corrupt. They have therefore a power to win attention from virtuous men; and, being known to speak a representative language, they would easily, in a land so agitated and unreconciled, so wild, stormy, and ignorant as Judea, kindle in stirring minds the most worldly contagions as to principle and purpose: on the one hand, kept through these men in vital sympathy with the restless politics of the insurrectionist populace—on the other, hearing a sublime philosophy that rested for its key-note upon the advent of vast revolutions among men—what wonder that Judas should connect his daily experience by an imaginary synthesis?] This populace, however, not being backed by any strong section of the aristocracy, having no confidence again in any of the learned bodies connected with the great service of their national temple, and having no leaders, were apparently dejected, and without unity. The probability, meantime, is, that some popular demonstration would have been made on behalf of Christ, had he himself offered it any encouragement. But we, who know the incompatibility of any such encouragement with the primary purpose of Christ's mission upon earth, know of necessity that Judas, and the populace on which he relied, must equally and simultaneously have found themselves undeceived for ever. In an instant of time one grand decisive word and gesture of Christ must have put an end peremptorily to all hopes of that kind. In that brief instant, enough was made known to Judas for final despair. Whether he had ever drunk profoundly enough from the cup of spiritual religion to understand the full meaning of Christ's refusal; whether he still adhered to his worldly interpretation of Christ's mission, and simply translated the refusal into a confession that all was lost, whilst in very fact all was on the brink of absolute and triumphant consummation, it is impossible for us, without documents or hints, to conjecture. Enough is apparent to show that, in reference to any hopes that could be consolatory for him, all was indeed lost. The kingdom of this world had melted away in a moment like a cloud; and it mattered little to him that a spiritual kingdom survived, and that intellectually he might suddenly become aware of it, if in his heart there were no spiritual organ by which he could appropriate the new and stunning revelation. Equally he might be swallowed up by despair in the case of retaining his old worldly delusions, and finding the ground of his old anticipations suddenly giving way below his feet, or again in the opposite case of suddenly correcting his own false constructions of Christ's mission, and apprehending a far higher purpose; but which purpose, in the very moment of becoming intelligible, rose into a region far beyond his own frail fleshly sympathies. He might read more truly—far more truly; but what of that, if the new truth were nothing to him? The despondency of Judas might be of two different qualities, more or less selfish; indeed, I would go so far as to say, selfish or altogether unselfish. And it is with a view to this question, and under a persuasion of a wrong done to Judas by gross mistranslation disturbing the Greek text, that I entered at all upon this little memorandum. Else what I have hitherto been attempting to explain (excepting only the part relating to the hakim, which is entirely my own suggestion) belongs to German writers. The whole construction of Iscariot's conduct, as arising, not out of perfidy, but out of his sincere belief that some quickening impulse was called for by a morbid feature in Christ's temperament—all this I believe was originally due to the Germans; and it is an important correction, for it must always be important to recall within the fold of Christian forgiveness any one who has long been sequestered from human charity, and has tenanted a Pariah grave. In the greatest and most memorable of earthly tragedies, Judas is a prominent figure. So long as the earth revolves, he cannot be forgotten. If, therefore, there is a doubt affecting his case, he is entitled to the benefit of that doubt; and if he has suffered to any extent—if simply to the extent of losing a palliation, or the shadow of a palliation—by means of a false translation from the Greek, we ought not to revise or mitigate his sentence merely, but to dismiss him from the bar. The Germans make it a question—in what spirit Iscariot lived? My question is—how he died? If he were a traitor at last, in that case he was virtually a traitor always. If he perpetrated treason in the last hours of his connection, with Christ, and even a mercenary treason, then he must have been dallying with the purpose of treason during all the hours of his apostleship. If, in reality, when selling his master for money, he meant to betray him, and regarded the money as the commensurate motive for betraying him, then his case will assume a very different aspect from that impressed upon it by the German construction of the circumstances.

The life of Judas, and the death of Judas, taken apart, or taken jointly, each separately upon independent grounds, or both together upon common grounds, are open to doubts and perplexities. And possibly the double perplexities, if fully before us, might turn out to be self-neutralized. Taking them jointly, we might ask—Were they, this life and this death, to be regarded as a common movement on behalf of a deep and heart-fretting Hebrew patriotism, which was not the less sincere, because it ran headlong into the unamiable form of rancorous rationality and inhuman bigotry? Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to illustrate the probable character of the death. The death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the received report, might do something to indicate retrospectively the character and tenor of that life. The life of Judas, under a German construction of it, as a spasmodic effort of vindictive patriotism and of rebellious ambition, noble by possibility, though erring and worldly-minded, when measured by a standard so exalted as that of Christianity, would infer (as its natural sequel) a death of fierce despair. Read under the ordinary construction as a life exposed to temptations that were petty, and frauds that were always mercenary, it could not reasonably be supposed to furnish any occasion for passions upon so great a scale as those which seem to have been concerned in the tragical end of Judas, whether the passions were those of remorse and penitential anguish, or of personal disappointment. Leaving, however, to the Germans, the task of conjecturally restering its faded lineaments to this mysterious record of a crime that never came before any human tribunal, my own purpose is narrower. I seek to recall and to recombine the elements, not of the Iscariot's life, nor of his particular offence, but simply of his death.

The reader is probably aware, that there has always been an obscurity, or even a perplexity, connected with the death of Iscariot. Two only out of the entire five documents, which record the rise and early history of Christianity, have circumstantially noticed this event. Mark, Luke, and John, leave it undescribed. St. Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles have bequeathed to us a picturesque account of it, which, to my own belief, has been thoroughly misunderstood; and, once being misunderstood, naturally enough has been interpreted as something fearfully preternatural. The crime, though great, of Iscariot has probably been much exaggerated. It was the crime of signal and earthly presumption, seeking not to thwart the purposes of Christ, or to betray them, but to promote them by means utterly at war with their central spirit. As far as can be judged, it was an attempt to forward the counsels of God by weapons borrowed from the armory of darkness. The crime being once misapprehended as a crime, without a name or a precedent, it was inevitable that the punishment, so far as it was expounded by the death of the criminal, should, in obedience to this first erroneous preconception, be translated into something preternatural. To a mode of guilt which seemed to have no parallel, it was reasonable enough that there should be apportioned a death which allowed of no medical explanation.[Footnote: In neutral points, having no relation to morals or religious philosophy, it is not concealed by the scriptural records themselves, that even inspired persons made grave mistakes. All the apostles, it is probable, or with the single exception of St. John, shared in the mistake about the second coming of Christ, as an event immediately to be looked for. With respect to diseases, again, it is evident that the apostles, in common with all Jews, were habitually disposed to read in them distinct manifestations of heavenly wrath. In blindness, for instance, or, again, in death from the fall of a tower, they read, as a matter of course, a plain expression of the divine displeasure pointed at an individual. That they should even pause so far as to make a doubt whether the individual or his parents were the object of this displeasure, arose only from the absolute coercion to so much reserve as this which was continually obtruding itself in the cases where innocent infants were the sufferers. This, in fact, was a prejudice inalienable from their Jewish training; and as it would unavoidably lead oftentimes to judgments not only false but also uncharitable, it received, on more occasions than one, a stern rebuke from Christ himself. In the same spirit, it is probable that the symptoms attending death were sometimes erroneously reported as preternatural, when, in fact, such as every hospital could match. The death of the first Herod was regarded by the early Christians universally as a judicial expression of God's wrath to the author of the massacre at Bethlehem, though in reality the symptoms were such as often occur in obstinate derangements of the nervous system. Indeed, as to many features, the malady of the French king, Charles IX., whose nervous system had been shattered by the horrors of the St. Bartholomew massacre, very nearly resembled it; with such differences as might be looked for between an old, ruined constitution, such as Herod's, and one so youthful as that of Charles. In the Acts of the Apostles, again, the grandson of Herod (Herod Agrippa) is evidently supposed to have died by a judicial and preternatural death, whereas apparently one part of his malady was the morbus pedicularis—cases of which I have myself circumstantially known in persons of all ranks; one, for instance, being that of a countess enormously rich, and the latest a female servant.]

This demur, moreover, of obscurity was not the only one raised against the death of Judas: there was a separate objection—that it was inconsistent with itself. He was represented, in the ordinary modern versions, as dying by a double death—viz., 1st, by a suicidal death: 'he went and hanged himself'—this is the brief account of his death given by St. Matthew; but, 2d, by a death not suicidal: in the Acts of the Apostles, we have a very different account of his death, not suggesting suicide at all, and otherwise describing it as mysteriously complex; that is, presenting us with various circumstances of the case, none of which, in the common vernacular versions (English and Continental), is at all intelligible. The elements in the case are three: that he 'fell down headlong;' that he 'burst asunder in the middle;' and that 'his bowels gushed out'—the first of these elements being unintelligible in the English expression of it, and the two others being purely and blankly impossible. These objections to the particular mode of that catastrophe which closed the career of Judas, had been felt pretty generally in the Christian church, and probably from the earliest times; and the more so on account of that deep obscurity which rested upon the nature of his offence. That a man, who had been solemnly elected into the small band of the apostles, should so far wander from his duty as to incur forfeiture of his great office—this was in itself sufficiently dreadful, and a shocking revival to the human imagination of that eldest amongst all traditions—a tradition descending to us from what date we know not, nor through what channel of original communication—the possibility that even into the heaven of heavens, and amongst the angelic hosts, rebellion against God, long before man and human frailty existed, should have crept by some way metaphysically inconceivable. What search could be sufficient, where even the eye of Christ had failed to detect any germ of evil? Still, though the crime of Judas had doubtless been profound,[Footnote: In measuring which, however, the reader must not allow himself to be too much biassed by the English phrase, 'son of perdition.' This, and the phrase which we translate 'damnation,' have been alike colored unavoidably by the particular intensity of the feeling associated with our English use of the words. Now, one great difficulty in translating is to find words that even as to mere logical elements correspond to the original text. Even that is often a trying problem. But to find also such words as shall graduate and adjust their depth of feeling to the scale of another language, and that language a dead language, is many times beyind all reach of human skill.] and evidently to me it had been the intention of the early church to throw a deep pall of mystery over its extent—charity, that unique charity which belongs to Christianity, as being the sole charity ever preached to men, which 'hopeth all things,' inclined through every age the hearts of musing readers to suspend their verdict where the Scriptures had themselves practised some reserve, and (were it only by the extreme perplexity of its final and revised expressions) had left an opening, if not almost an invitation, to doubt. The doubt was left by the primitive church where Scripture had left it. There was not any absolute necessity that this should ever be cleared up to man. But it was felt from the very first that some call was made upon the church to explain and to harmonize the apparently contradictory expressions used in what may be viewed as the official report of the one memorable domestic tragedy in the infant stage of the Christian history. Official I call it, as being in a manner countersigned by the whole confederate church, when proceeding to their first common act in filling up the vacancy consequent upon the transgression of Judas, whereas the account of St. Matthew pleaded no authority but his own. And domestic I call the tragedy, in prosecution of that beautiful image under which a father of our English church has called the twelve apostles, when celebrating the paschal feast, 'the family of Christ.'[Footnote: for the reader must not forget that the original meaning of the Latin word familia was the sum total of the famuli. Hence, whenever it is said in an ancient classic that such or such a man had a large family, or that he was kind to his family, or was loved by his family, always we are to understand not at all his wife and children, but the train and retinue of his domestic slaves. Now, the relation of the Apostles to their Master, and the awfulness of their dependency upon him, which represented a golden chain suspending the whole race of man to the heavens above, justified, in the first place, that form of expression which should indicate the humility and loyalty that is owned by servants to a lord; whilst, on the other hand, the tenderness involved in the relations expressed by the English word family, redressed what would else have been too austere in the idea, and recomposed the equilibrium between the two forces of reverential awe and of childlike love which are equally indispensable to the orbicular perfection of Christian duty.]

This early essay of the church to harmonize the difficult expressions employed in the Acts of the Apostles—an essay which, therefore, recognises at once the fact that these expressions really were likely to perplex the simple-hearted, and not merely such readers as systematically raised cavils—was brought forward in the earliest era of the church, and under the sanction of the very highest authority, viz., by one who sat at the feet of the beloved apostle; by one, therefore, who, if he had not seen Christ, had seen familiarly him in whom Christ most confided. But I will report the case in the words of that golden-mouthed rhetorician, that Chrysostom of the English Church, from whose lips all truth came mended, and who, in spite of Shakespeare himself, found it possible

'To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.
And add another perfume to the violet.'

The following is the account given by Jeremy Taylor of the whole history, in so far as it affects the Scripture report of what Judas did, and what finally he suffered:—'Two days before the passover, the Scribes and Pharisees called a council to contrive crafty ways [Footnote: Otherwise, it must naturally occur to every reader—What powers could Judas furnish towards the arrest of Jesus beyond what the authorities in Jerusalem already possessed? But the bishop suggests that the dilemma was this:—By day it was unsafe to seize him, such was the veneration of the populace for his person. If done at all, it must be done during the darkness. But, precisely during those hours, Christ withdrew into solitudes known only to his disciples. So that to corrupt one of these was the preliminary step to the discovery of that secret.] of destroying Jesus, they not daring to do it by open violence. Of which meeting, when Judas Iscariot had notice (for those assemblies were public and notorious) he ran from Bethany, and offered himself to betray his Master to them, if they would give him a considerable reward. They agreed for thirty pieces of silver.' In a case so memorable as this, nothing is or can be trivial; and even that curiosity is not unhallowed which has descended to inquire what sum, at that era of Jewish history, this expression might indicate. The bishop replies thus:—'Of what value each piece was, is uncertain; but their own nation hath given a rule, that, when a piece of silver is named in the Pentateuch, it signifies a sicle; if it be named in the Prophets, it signifies a pound; if in the other writings of the Old Testament, it signifies a talent.' For this, besides other less familiar authority, there is cited the well-known Arius Montanus, in the Syro-Chaldaic dictionary. It is, however, self-evident that any service open to Judas would have been preposterously overpaid by thirty talents, a sum which exceeded five thousand pounds sterling. And since this particular sum had originally rested on the authority of a prophet, cited by one of the evangelists,[Footnote: Viz., St. Matthew. Upon which the bishop notices the error which had crept into the prevailing text of Jeremias instead of Zecharias. But in the fourth century, some copies had already corrected this reading; which, besides, had a traditional excuse in the proverbial saying that the spirit of Jeremiah had settled and found a resting-place in Zecharias.] 'it is probable,' proceeds the bishop, 'that the price at which Judas sold his lord was thirty pounds weight of silver [that is, about ninety guineas sterling in English money]—a goodly price for the Saviour of the world to be prized at by his undiscerning and unworthy countrymen.' Where, however, the learned writer makes a slight oversight in logic, since it was not precisely Christ that was so valued—this prisoner as against the certain loss of this prisoner—but simply this particular mode of contending with the difficulty attached to his apprehension, so that, in the worst case, this opportunity lost might be replaced by other opportunities; and the price, therefore, was not calculated as it would have been under one solitary chance.

The bishop then proceeds with the rehearsal of all the circumstances connected with the pretended trial of Christ; and coming in the process of his narrative to the conduct of Judas on learning the dreadful turn which things were taking (conduct which surely argues that he had anticipated a most opposite catastrophe), he winds up the case of the Iscariot in the following passage—'When Judas heard that they had passed the final and decretory sentence of death upon his Lord, he, who thought not it would have gone so far, repented him to have been an instrument of so damnable a machination, and came and brought the silver which they gave him for hire, threw it in amongst them, and said, 'I have sinned in betraying the innocent blood.' But they, incurious of those hell-torments Judas felt within him, because their own fires burned not yet, dismissed him.' I pause for a moment to observe that, in the expression, 'repented him to have been an instrument,' the context shows the bishop intending to represent Judas as recoiling from the issue of his own acts, and from so damnable a machination, not because his better feelings were evoked, as the prospect of ruin to his Master drew near, and that he shrank from that same thing when taking a definite shape of fulfilment, which he had faced cheerfully when at a distance—not at all: the bishop's meaning is—that Judas recoiled from his own acts at the very instant when he began to understand their real consequences now solemnly opening upon his horror-stricken understanding. He had hoped, probably, much from the Roman interference; and the history itself shows that in this he had not been at all too sanguine. Justice has never yet been done to the conduct of Pilate. That man has little comprehended the style and manner of the New Testament who does not perceive the demoniac earnestness of Pilate to effect the liberation of Christ, or who fails to read the anxiety of the several evangelists to put on record his profound sympathy with the prisoner. The falsest word that ever yet was uttered upon any part of the New Testament, is that sneer of Lord Bacon's at 'jesting Pilate.' Pilate was in deadly earnest from first to last, and retired from his frantic effort on behalf of Christ, only when his own safety began to be seriously compromised. Do the thoughtless accusers of Pilate fancy that he was a Christian? If not, why, or on what principle, was he to ruin himself at Rome, in order to favor one he could not save at Jerusalem? How reasonably Judas had relied upon the Roman interference, is evident from what actually took place. Judas relied, secondly, upon the populace, and that this reliance also was well warranted, appears from repeated instances of the fear with which the Jewish rulers contemplated Christ. Why did they fear him at all? Simply, as he was backed by the people: had it not been for their support, Christ was no more an object of terror to them than his herald, the Baptist. But what I here insist on is (which else from some expressions the reader might fail to understand), that Jeremy Taylor nowhere makes the mistake of supposing Judas to have originally designed the ruin of his Master, and nowhere understands by his 'repentance' that he felt remorse on coming near to consequences which from a distance he had welcomed. He admits clearly that Judas was a traitor only in the sense of seeking his Master's aggrandizement by methods which placed him in revolt against that Master, methods which not only involved express and formal disobedience to that Master, but which ran into headlong hostility against the spirit of all that he came on earth to effect. It was the revolt, not of perfidious malignity, but of arrogant and carnal blindness. In respect to the gloomy termination of the Iscariot's career, and to the perplexing account of it given in the Acts of the Apostles, the bishop closes his account thus:—'And Judas went and hanged himself; and the judgment was made more notorious and eminent by an unusual accident at such deaths; for he so swelled, that he burst, and his bowels gushed out. But the Greek scholiast and some others report out of Papias, St. John's scholar, that Judas fell from the fig-tree, on which he hanged, before he was quite dead, and survived his attempt somewhile; being so sad a spectacle of deformity and pain, and a prodigious tumor, that his plague was deplorable and highly miserable; till at last he burst in the very substance of his trunk, as being extended beyond the possibilities [Footnote: Quaere, whether the true reading is not more probably 'p_a_ssibilities,' i.e., liabilities to suffering.] and capacities of nature.'

In this corrected version of Papias, we certainly gain an intelligible account of what otherwise is far from intelligible, viz., the falling headlong. But all the rest is a dismal heap of irrationalities; and the single ray of light which is obtained, viz., the suggestion of the fig-tree as an elevation, which explains the possibility of a headlong fall, is of itself an argument that some great disturbance must have happened to the text at this point, else how could so material a circumstance have silently dropped out of the narrative? There are passages in every separate book of the canon, into which accident, or the somnolence of copyists, has introduced errors seriously disturbing the sense and the coherence. Many of these have been rectified in the happiest manner by ingenious suggestions; and a considerable proportion of these suggestions has been since verified and approved by the discovery of new manuscripts, or the more accurate collation of old ones. In the present case, a much slighter change than might be supposed will suffice to elicit a new and perfect sense from the general outline of that text which still survives. First, as to the phrase 'fell headlong,' I do not understand it of any fall from a fig-tree, or from any tree whatever. This fig-tree I regard as a purely fanciful resource; and evidently an innovation to this extent ranks amongst those conjectural audacities which shock the discreet reader, as most unsatisfactory and licentious, because purely gratuitous, when they rest upon no traces that can be indicated as still lurking in the present text. Fell headlong may stand as at present: it needs no change, for it discloses a very good and sufficient sense, if we understand it figuratively as meaning that he came to utter and unmitigated ruin, that his wreck was total, for that, instead of dedicating himself to a life of penitential sorrow, such as would assuredly have conciliated the divine forgiveness, the unhappy criminal had rushed out of life by suicide. So far, at least, all is sound and coherent, and under no further obligations to change small or great, beyond the reading that, in a metaphorical sense, which, if read (as hitherto) in a literal sense, would require the very serious interpolation of an imaginary fig-tree.

What remains is equally simple: the change required involves as little violence, and the result from this change will appear equally natural. But a brief preliminary explanation is requisite, in order to place It advantageously before the reader. The ancients use the term bowels with a latitude unknown generally to modern literature, but especially to English literature. In the midst of the far profounder passion which distinguishes the English from all literatures on the modern European continent, it is singular that a fastidious decorum never sleeps for a moment. It might be imagined that this fastidiousness would be in the inverse ratio of the passion: but it is not so. In particular the French, certainly the literature which ranges at the lowest elevation upon the scale of passion, nevertheless is often homely, and even gross, in its recurrences to frank elementary nature. For a lady to describe herself as laughing a gorge deployee, a grossness which with us, equally on the stage or in real life, would be regarded with horror, amongst the French attracts no particular attention. Again, amidst the supposed refinements of French tragedy, and not observe the coarser tragedy of Corneille, but amidst the more feminine and polished tragedy of Racine, there is no recoil at all from saying of such or such a sentiment, 'Il me perce les entrailles'—it penetrates my bowels. The Greeks and Romans still more extensively use the several varieties of expression for the intestines, as a symbolic phraseology for the domestic and social affections. We English even, fastidious as we are, employ the term bowels as a natural symbolization for the affections of pity, mercy, or parental and brotherly affection. At least we do so in recurring to the simplicities of the scriptural style. But, amongst the Romans, the word viscera is so naturally representative of the household affections, that at length it becomes necessary to recall an English reader to the true meaning of this word. Through some physiological prejudice, it is true that the bowels have always been regarded as the seat of the more tender and sorrowing sympathies. But the viscera comprehended all the intestines, or (as the French term them) les entrailles. The heart even is a viscus; perhaps in a very large acceptation the brain might be regarded as a co-viscus with the heart. There is very slight ground for holding the brain to be the organ of thinking, or the heart of moral sensibilities, more than the stomach, or the bowels, or the intestines generally. But waive all this: the Romans designated the seat of the larger and nobler (i.e., the moral) sensibilities indifferently by these three terms: the pectus, the prœcordia, and the viscera; as to the cor, it seems to me that it denoted the heart in its grosser and more animal capacities: 'Molle meum levibus cor est violabile relis;' it was the seat of sexual passion; but nobler and more reflective sensibilities inhabited the pectus or prœcordia; and naturally out of these physiologic preconceptions arose corresponding expressions for wounded or ruined sensibilities. We English, for instance, insist on the disease of broken heart, which Sterne, in a well-known passage, postulates as a malady not at all less definite than phthisis, or podagra, though (as he says) not formally recognised in the bills of mortality. But it is evident that a theory which should represent the viscera as occupied by those functions of the moral sensibilities which we place in the central viscus of the heart, must, in following out that hypothesis, figure the case of these sensibilities when utterly ruined under corresponding images. Our 'broken heart' will therefore to them become ruptured viscera, or prœcordia that have burst. To burst in the middle, is simply to be shattered and ruined in the central organ of our sensibilities, which is the heart; and in saying that the viscera of Iscariot, or his middle, had burst and gushed out, the original reporter meant simply that his heart had broke. That was precisely his case. Out of pure anguish that the scheme which he meant for the sudden glorification of his Master, had recoiled (according to all worldly interpretation) in his utter ruin; that the sudden revolution, through a democratic movement, which was to raise himself and his brother apostles into Hebrew princes, had scattered them like sheep without a shepherd; and that superadded to this common burden of ruin he personally had to bear a separate load of conscious disobedience to God and insupportable responsibility; naturally enough out of all this he fell into fierce despair; his heart broke; and under that storm of affliction he hanged himself. Here, again, all clears itself up by the simple substitution of a figurative interpretation for one grossly physical. All contradiction disappears; not three deaths assault him, viz., suicide, and also a rupture of the intestines, and also an unintelligible effusion of the viscera; but simply suicide, and suicide as the result of that despondency which was figured under the natural idea of a broken heart. The incoherences are gone; the contradictions have vanished; and the gross physical absurdities, which under mistranslation had perplexed the reverential student, no longer disfigure the Scriptures.

Looking back to the foot-note on the oriental idea of the hakim, as a mask politically assumed by Christ and the evangelists, under the conviction of its indispensableness to the free propagation of Christian philosophy, I am induced, for the sake of detaining the reader's eye a little longer upon a matter so important in the history of Christianity, if only it may be regarded as true, to subjoin an extract from a little paper written by myself heretofore, but not published. I may add these two remarks, viz., first, that the attribution to St. Luke of this medical character, probably had its origin in the simple fact, that an assumption made by all the evangelists, and perhaps by all the apostles, had happened to attract more attention in him from merely local causes. One or two of the other apostles having pursued their labors of Propagandism under the avowed character of hakims, many others in the same region would escape special notice in that character, simply because, as men notoriously ready to plead it, they had not been challenged to do so by the authorities; whilst others, in regions where the government had not become familiar with the readiness to plead such a privilege as part of the apostolic policy, would be driven into the necessity of actually advancing the plea, and would thus (like St. Luke) obtain a traditionary claim to the medical title which in a latent sense had belonged to all, though all had not been reduced to the necessity of pleading it. Secondly, I would venture to suggest, that the Therapeutae, or healers, technically so called, who came forward in Egypt during the generation immediately succeeding to that of Christ, were neither more nor less than disguised apostles to Christianity, preaching the same doctrines essentially as Christ, and under the very same protecting character of hakims, but putting forward this character perhaps more prominently, or even retreating into it altogether, according to the increasing danger which everywhere awaited them from the hostile bigotry of expatriated Jews, as they gradually came to understand the true and anti-national views of those who called themselves Christians, or Nazarenes, or Galileans.

In short, abstracting altogether from the hatred to Christ, founded on eternal principles of the enmity between the worldly and the spiritual, and looking only to the political uneasiness amongst magistrates which accompanied the early footsteps of Christianity, one may illustrate it by the parallel feelings which in our own generation, amongst the Portuguese, for instance, have dogged the movements of free-masonry. We in England view this panic as irrational: and amongst ourselves it would be so; for British free-masonry conceals nothing worse than it professes. But, on the Continent, it became a mask for shrouding any or every system of anti-social doctrine, or, again, for playing into the hands of treason and conspiracy. There was always in the first place a reasonable fear of secret and perilous doctrines—Communism, for instance, under some modification, or rancorous Jacobinism. And secondly, suppose that for the present, or in the existing stage of the secret society, there really were no esoteric and mischievous doctrine propagated, there was at any rate the custom established of meeting together in secret, of corresponding by an alphabet of conventional signals, and of acting by an impenetrable organization, always applicable to evil purposes, even where it might not originally have been so applied. The machinery which binds together any secret society, as being always available for evil ends, must inevitably justify some uneasiness in all political authorities. And, under those circumstances, the public jealousy must have operated against the free movement of early Christianity: nothing could have disarmed it, except some counter-principle so managed, as to insure that freedom of public meetings which opened the sine qua non channel for the free propagation of religious truth. Such a counter-force was brought into play by Christ on that day when first he offered himself to Judea as a hakim, or popular physician. Under the shelter of that benign character, at one blow he overthrew an obstacle that would else infallibly have frozen the very element in which only any system of novel teaching could attempt to move. Most diseases were by the Jews invested with more or less of a supernatural character; and in no department of knowledge was the immediate illumination from above more signally presumed than in the treatment of diseases. A physician who was thus divinely guided in the practice of his art was a debtor to God and to his fellow-men for the adequate application of so heavenly a gift. And, if he could not honorably withdraw from the mission with which God had charged him, far less could politicians and magistrates under any allegation of public inconveniences presume to obstruct or to make of none effect the sublime mysteries of art and sagacity with which the providence of God had endowed an individual for the relief of suffering humanity; the hakim was a debtor to the whole body of his afflicted countrymen: but for that very reason he was also a creditor; a creditor entitled to draw upon the amplest funds of indulgence; and privileged to congregate his countrymen wherever he moved. Here opened suddenly a broad avenue to social intercourse, without which all communication for purposes of religious teaching would have been sealed against Christ. As a hakim, Christ obtained that unlimited freedom of intercourse with the populace, which, as a religious proselytizer, he never could have obtained. Here, therefore, and perhaps by the very earliest exemplification of the serpent's wisdom and foresight engrafting itself upon the holy purposes of dovelike benignity, Christ kept open for himself (and for his disciples in times to come) the freedom of public communication, and the license of public meetings. Once announcing himself, and attesting his own mission as a hakim, he could not be rejected or thwarted as a public oracle of truth and practical counsel to human weakness. This explains, what else would have been very obscure, the undue emphasis which Christ allowed men to place upon his sanatory miracles. His very name in Greek, viz., Ιησδς, presented him to men under the idea of the healer; but then, to all who comprehended his secret and ultimate functions, as a healer of unutterable and spiritual wounds. That usurpation, by which a very trivial function of Christ's public ministrations was allowed to disturb and sometimes to eclipse far grander pretensions, carried with it so far an erroneous impression. But then, on the other hand, seventy-fold it redeemed that error, by securing (which nothing else could have secured) the benefit of a perpetual passport to the religious missionary: since, once admitted as a medical counsellor, the missionary, the hakim, obtained an unlimited right of intercourse. If medical advice, why not religious advice? And subsequently, by the continuance of the same medical gifts to the apostles and their successors, all exercised the same powers, and benefited by the same privileges as hakims.

ON HUME'S ARGUMENT AGAINST MIRACLES.

[1839.]

Hume's argument against miracles is simply this:—Every possible event, however various in its degree of credibility, must, of necessity, be more credible when it rests upon a sufficient cause lying within the field of what is called nature, than when it does not: more credible when it obeys some mechanical cause, than when it transcends such a cause, and is miraculous.

Therefore, assume the resistance to credibility, in any preternatural occurrence, as equal to x, and the very ideal or possible value of human testimony as no more than x, in that case, under the most favorable circumstances conceivable, the argument for and against a miracle will be equal; or, expressing the human testimony by x, affected with the affirmative sign [+x]; and expressing the resistance to credibility on the other side of the equation, by x, affected with the negative sign [-x], the two values will, in algebraical language, destroy each other, and the result will be = 0.

But, inasmuch as this expresses the value of human testimony in its highest or ideal form, a form which is never realized in experience, the true result will be different,—there will always be a negative result= [-y]; much or little according to the circumstances, but always enough to turn the balance against believing a miracle.

'Or in other words,' said Hume, popularizing his argument, 'it will always be more credible that the reporter of a miracle should tell a falsehood, or should himself have been the dupe of appearances, than that a miracle should have actually occurred—that is, an infraction of those natural laws (any or all) which compose what we call experience. For, assume the utmost disinterestedness, veracity, and sound judgment in the witness, with the utmost advantage in the circumstances for giving full play to those qualities; even in such a case the value of affirmative testimony could, at the very utmost, be equal to the negative value on the other side the equation: and the result would be, to keep my faith suspended in equilibrio. But in any real case, ever likely to come before us, the result will be worse; for the affirmative testimony will be sure to fall in many ways below its ideal maximum; leaving, therefore, for the final result a considerable excess to the negative side of the equation.

SECTION II.

OF THE ARGUMENT AS AFFECTED BY THE COVERT LIMITATIONS UNDER WHICH IT IS PRESENTED.

Such is the Argument: and, as the first step towards investigating its sanity and its degree—its kind of force, and its quantity of force, we must direct our attention to the following fact, viz., that amongst three separate conditions under which a miracle (or any event whatever) might become known to us, Hume's argument is applied only to one. Assuming a miracle to happen (for the possibility of a miracle is of course left open throughout the discussion, since any argument against that would at once foreclose every question about its communicability),—then it might happen under three several sets of circumstances, in relation to our consciousness. 1st, It might happen in the presence of a single witness—that witness not being ourselves. This case let us call Alpha. 2dly, It might happen in the presence of many witnesses,—witnesses to a vast amount, but still (as before) ourselves not being amongst that multitude. This case let us call Beta. And 3dly, It might happen in our own presence, and fall within the direct light of our own consciousness. This case let us call Gamma.

Now these distinctions are important to the whole extent of the question. For the 2d case, which is the actual case of many miracles recorded in the New Testament, at once cuts away a large body of sources in which either error or deceit could lurk. Hume's argument supposes the reporter of the miracle to be a dupe, or the maker of dupes—himself deluded, or wishing to delude others. But, in the case of the thousands fed from a few loaves and small fishes, the chances of error, wilful or not wilful, are diminished in proportion to the number of observers; [Footnote: 'In proportion to the number of observers.'—Perhaps, however, on the part of Hume, some critical apologist will say—'Doubtless he was aware of that; but still the reporters of the miracle were few. No matter how many were present, the witnesses for us are but the Evangelists.' Yes, certainly, the Evangelists; and let us add, all those contemporaries to whom the Evangelists silently appealed. These make up the 'multitude' contemplated in the second case.] and Hume's inference as to the declension of the affirmative x, in relation to the negative x, no longer applies, or, if at all, with vastly diminished force. With respect to the 3d case, it cuts away the whole argument at once in its very radix. For Hume's argument applies to the communication of a miracle, and therefore to a case of testimony. But, wherever the miracle falls within direct personal cognizance, there it follows that no question can arise about the value of human testimony. The affirmative x, expressing the value of testimony, disappears altogether; and that side of the equation is possessed by a new quantity (viz., ourselves—our own consciousness) not at all concerned in Hume's argument.

Hence it results, that of three possible conditions under which a miracle may be supposed to offer itself to our knowledge, two are excluded from the view of Hume's argument.

SECTION III.

WHETHER THE SECOND OF THESE CONDITIONS IS NOT EXPRESSLY NOTICED BY HUME.

It may seem so. But in fact it is not. And (what is more to the purpose) we are not at liberty to consider it any accident that it is not. Hume had his reasons. Let us take all in proper order: 1st, that it seems so; 2dly, that in fact it is not so; and 3dly, that is no accident, but intentional.

1st. Hume seems to contemplate such a case, the case of a miracle witnessed and attested by a multitude of persons, in the following imaginary miracle which he proposes as a basis for reasoning. Queen Elizabeth, as every body will remember who has happened to read Lord Monmouth's Memoirs, died on the night between the last day of 1602 and the first day of 1603: this could not be forgotten by the reader, because, in fact, Lord M., who was one of Her Majesty's nearest relatives (being a younger son of her first cousin Lord Hunsdon), obtained his title and subsequent preferment as a reward for the furious ride he performed to Edinburgh (at that time at least 440 miles distant from London), without taking off his boots, in order to lay the earliest tidings of the great event at the feet of her successor. In reality, never did any death cause so much posting day and night over the high roads of Europe. And the same causes which made it so interesting has caused it to be the best dated event in modern history; that one which could least be shaken by any discordant evidence yet discoverable. Now, says Hume, imagine the case, that, in spite of all this chronological precision—this precision, and this notoriety of precision—Her Majesty's court physicians should have chosen to propagate a story of her resurrection. Imagine that these learned gentlemen should have issued a bulletin, declaring that Queen Elizabeth had been met in Greenwich Park, or at Nonsuch, on May-day of 1603, or in Westminster, two years after, by the Lord Chamberlain when detecting Guy Faux—let them even swear it before twenty justices of the peace; I for one, says Hume, am free to confess that I would not believe them. No, nor, to say the truth, would we; nor would we advise our readers to believe them.

2dly. Here, therefore, it would seem as if Hume were boldly pressing his principles to the very uttermost—that is, were challenging a miracle as untenable, though attested by a multitude. But, in fact, he is not. He only seems to do so; for, if no number of witnesses could avail anything in proof of a miracle, why does he timidly confine himself to the hypothesis of the queen's physicians only coming forward? Why not call in the whole Privy Council?—or the Lord Mayor and Common Council of London—the Sheriffs of Middlesex—and the Twelve Judges? As to the court physicians, though three or four nominally, virtually they are but one man. They have a common interest, and in two separate ways they are liable to a suspicion of collusion: first, because the same motives which act upon one probably act upon the rest. In this respect, they are under a common influence; secondly, because, if not the motives, at any rate the physicians themselves, act upon each other. In this respect, they are under a reciprocal influence. They are to be reasoned about as one individual.

3dly. As Hume could not possibly fail to see all this, we may be sure that his choice of witnesses was not accidental. In fact, his apparent carelessness is very discreet management. His object was, under the fiction of an independent multitude, to smuggle in a virtual unity; for his court physicians are no plural body in effect and virtue, but a mere pleonasm and a tautology.

And in good earnest, Hume had reason enough for his caution. How much or how little testimony would avail to establish a resurrection in any neutral [Footnote: By a neutral case is meant, 1st, one in which there is no previous reason from a great doctrine requiring such an event for its support, to expect a resurrection; 2dly, a case belonging to a period of time in which it is fully believed that miraculous agency has ceased.] case few people would be willing to pronounce off-hand, and, above all, on a fictitious case. Prudent men, in such circumstances, would act as the judges in our English courts, who are always displeased if it is attempted to elicit their opinions upon a point of law by a proposed fiction. And very reasonably; for in these fictitious cases all the little circumstances of reality are wanting, and the oblique relations to such circumstances, out of which it is that any sound opinion can be formed. We all know very well what Hume is after in this problem of a resurrection. And his case of Queen Elizabeth's resurrection being a perfectly fictitious case, we are at liberty to do any one of three different things:—either simply to refuse an answer; or, 2dly, to give such an answer as he looks for, viz., to agree with him in his disbelief under the supposed contingency; without, therefore, offering the slightest prejudice to any scriptural case of resurrection: i. e., we might go along with him in his premises, and yet balk him of his purpose; or, 3dly, we might even join issue with him, and peremptorily challenge his verdict upon his own fiction. For it is singular enough, that a modern mathematician of eminence (Mr. Babbage) has expressly considered this very imaginary question of a resurrection, and he pronounces the testimony of seven witnesses, competent and veracious, and presumed to have no bias, as sufficient to establish such a miracle. Strip Hume's case of the ambiguities already pointed out—suppose the physicians really separate and independent witnesses—not a corporation speaking by one organ—it will then become a mere question of degree between the philosopher and the mathematician—seven witnesses? or fifty? or a hundred? For though none of us (not Mr. Babbage, we may be sure) seriously believes in the possibility of a resurrection occurring in these days, as little can any of us believe in the possibility that seven witnesses, of honor and sagacity (but say seven hundred) could be found to attest such an event when not occurring.

But the useful result from all this is, that Mr. Hume is evidently aware of the case Beta, (of last Sect.) as a distinct case from Alpha or from Gamma, though he affects blindness: he is aware that a multitude of competent witnesses, no matter whether seven or seven hundred, is able to establish that which a single witness could not; in fact, that increasing the number of witnesses is able to compensate increasing incredibility in the subject of doubt; that even supposing this subject a resurrection from the dead, there may be assigned a quantity of evidence (x) greater than the resistance to the credibility. And he betrays the fact, that he has one eye open to his own Jesuitism by palming upon us an apparent multitude for a real one, thus drawing all the credit he can from the name of a multitude, and yet evading the force which he strictly knew to be lodged in the thing; seeking the reputation of the case Beta, but shrinking from its hostile force.

SECTION IV.

OF THE ARGUMENT AS AFFECTED BY A CLASSIFICATION OF MIRACLES.

Let us now inquire whether Hume's argument would be affected by the differences in miracles upon the most general distribution of their kinds.

Miracles may be classed generally as inner or outer.

I. The inner, or those which may be called miracles for the individual, are such as go on, or may go on, within the separate personal consciousness of each separate man. And it shows how forgetful people are of the very doctrines which they themselves profess as Christians, when we consider, on the one hand, that miracles, in this sense, are essential to Christianity, and yet, on the other hand, consider how often it is said that the age of miracles is past. Doubtless, in the sense of external miracles, all such agencies are past. But in the other sense, there are distinct classes of the supernatural agency, which we are now considering; and these three are held by many Christians; two by most Christians; and the third by all. They are
a.—Special Providences: which class it is that many philosophic Christians doubt or deny.

b.—Grace: both predisposing [by old theologians called prevenient] and effectual.

c.—Prayer considered as efficacious.

Of these three we repeat, that the two last are held by most Christians: and yet it is evident that both presume a supernatural agency. But this agency exists only where it is sought. And even where it does exist, from its very nature (as an interior experience for each separate consciousness) it is incommunicable. But that does not defeat its purpose. It is of its essence to be incommunicable. And, therefore, with relation to Hume's great argument, which was designed to point out a vast hiatus or inconsistency in the divine economy—'Here is a miraculous agency, perhaps, but it is incommunicable: it may exist, but it cannot manifest itself; which defect neutralizes it, and defeats the very purpose of its existence'—the answer is, that as respects these interior miracles, there is no such inconsistency. They are meant for the private forum of each man's consciousness: nor would it have met any human necessity to have made them communicable. The language of Scripture is, that he who wishes experimentally to know the changes that may be accomplished by prayer, must pray. In that way only, and not by communication of knowledge from another, could he understand it as a practical effect. And to understand it not practically, but only in a speculative way, could not meet any religious wish, but merely an irreligious curiosity.

As respects one great division of miraculous agency, it is clear, therefore, that Hume's argument does not apply. The arrow glances past: not so much missing its aim as taking a false one. The hiatus which it supposes, the insulation and incommunicability which it charges upon the miraculous as a capital oversight, was part of the design: such mysterious agencies were meant to be incommunicable, and for the same reason which shuts up each man's consciousness into a silent world of its own—separate and inaccessible to all other consciousnesses. If a communication is thrown open by such agencies between the separate spirit of each man and the supreme Spirit of the universe, then the end is accomplished: and it is part of that end to close this communication against all other cognizance. So far Hume is baffled. The supernatural agency is incommunicable: it ought to be so. That is its perfection.

II. But now, as respects the other great order of miracles—viz., the external, first of all, we may remark a very important subdivision: miracles, in this sense, subdivide into two most different orders—1st, Evidential miracles, which simply prove Christianity. 2d, Constituent miracles, which, in a partial sense, are Christianity. And, perhaps, it may turn out that Hume's objection, if applicable at all, is here applicable in a separate way and with a varying force.

The first class, the evidential miracles, are all those which were performed merely as evidences (whether simply as indications, or as absolute demonstrations) of the divine power which upheld Christianity. The second class, the constituent miracles, are those which constitute a part of Christianity. Two of these are absolutely indispensable to Christianity, and cannot be separated from it even in thought, viz., the miraculous birth of our Saviour, and his miraculous resurrection. The first is essential upon this ground—that unless Christ had united the two natures (divine and human) he could not have made the satisfaction required: not being human, then, indeed, he might have had power to go through the mysterious sufferings of the satisfaction: but how would that have applied to man? It would have been perfect, but how would it have been relevant? Not being divine, then indeed any satisfaction he could make would be relevant: but how would it have been perfect? The mysterious and supernatural birth, therefore, was essential, as a capacitation for the work to be performed; and, on the other hand, the mysterious death and consequences were essential, as the very work itself.

Now, therefore, having made this distinction, we may observe, that the first class of miracles was occasional and polemic: it was meant to meet a special hostility incident to the birth-struggles of a new religion, and a religion which, for the very reason that it was true, stood opposed to the spirit of the world; of a religion which, in its first stage, had to fight against a civil power in absolute possession of the civilized earth, and backed by seventy legions. This being settled, it follows, that if Hume's argument were applicable in its whole strength to the evidential miracles, no result of any importance could follow. It is clear that a Christianized earth never can want polemic miracles again; polemic miracles were wanted for a transitional state, but such a state cannot return. Polemic miracles were wanted for a state of conflict with a dominant idolatry, It was Christianity militant, and militant with childlike arms, against Paganism triumphant. But Christianity, in league with civilization, and resting on the powers of this earth allied with her own, never again can speak to idolatrous man except from a station of infinite superiority. If, therefore, these evidential miracles are incommunicable as respects their proofs to after generations, neither are they wanted.

Still it will be urged—Were not the miracles meant for purposes ulterior to the transitional state? Were they not meant equally for the polemic purpose of confuting hostility at the moment, and of propping the faith of Christians in all after ages? The growing opinion amongst reflecting Christians is, that they were not: that the evidential miracles accomplished their whole purpose in their own age. Something of supernatural agency, visibly displayed, was wanted for the first establishment of a new faith. But, once established, it was a false faith only that could need this external support. Christianity could not unroot itself now, though every trace of evidential miracle should have vanished. Being a true religion, once rooted in man's knowledge and man's heart, it is self-sustained; it never could be eradicated.

But, waiving that argument, it is evident, that whatever becomes of the evidential miracles, Christianity never can dispense with those transcendent miracles which we have called constituent,—those which do not so much demonstrate Christianity as are Christianity in a large integral section. Now as to the way in which Hume's argument could apply to these, we shall reserve what we have to say until a subsequent section. Meantime, with respect to the other class, the simply evidential miracles, it is plain, that if ever they should be called for again, then, as to them, Hume's argument will be evaded, or not, according to their purpose. If their function regards an individual, it will be no just objection to them that they are incommunicable. If it regards a multitude or a nation, then the same power which utters the miracle can avail for its manifestation before a multitude, as happened in the days of the New Testament, and then is realized the case Beta of Sect. II, And if it is still objected, that even in that case there could be no sufficient way of propagating the miracle, with its evidence, to other times or places, the answer must be,—

1st. That supposing the purpose merely polemic, that purpose is answered without such a propagation.

2dly. That, supposing the purpose, by possibility, an ulterior purpose, stretching into distant ages, even then our modern arts of civilization, printing, &c., give us advantages which place a remote age on a level with the present as to the force of evidence; and that even the defect of autopsy may be compensated by sufficient testimony of a multitude, it is evident that Hume himself felt, by his evasion in the case of the imaginary Elizabethan miracle proposed by himself.

RECAPITULATION.

Now let us recapitulate the steps we have made before going on to the rest.

We have drawn into notice [Sect. II.] the case Beta,—overlooked by Hume in his argument, but apparently not overlooked in his consciousness,—the case where a multitude of witnesses overrules the incommunicability attaching to a single witness.

2dly. We have drawn into notice the class of internal miracles,—miracles going on in the inner economy of every Christian's heart; for it is essential to a Christian to allow of prayer. He cannot be a Christian if he should condemn prayer; and prayer cannot hope to produce its object without a miracle. And to such miracles Hume's argument, the argument of incommunicability, is inapplicable. They do not seek to transplant themselves; every man's personal experience in this respect is meant for himself alone.

3dly. Even amongst miracles not internal, we have shown—that if one class (the merely evidential and polemic) are incommunicable, i.e. not capable of propagation to a remote age or place, they have sufficiently fulfilled their immediate purpose by their immediate effect. But such miracles are alien and accidental to Christianity. Christ himself reproved severely those who sought such signs, as a wicked, unbelieving generation; and afterwards he reproved, with a most pathetic reproach, that one of his own disciples who demanded such a sign. But besides these evidential miracles, we noticed also,

4thly. The constituent miracles of Christianity; upon which, as regarded Hume's argument, we reserved ourselves to the latter section: and to these we now address ourselves.

But first we premise this

Lemma:—That an á priori (or, as we shall show, an a posteriori) reason for believing a miracle, or for expecting a miracle, will greatly disturb the valuation of x (that is, the abstract resistance to credibility), as assumed in Hume's argument. This is the centre in which we are satisfied, lurks that πρωτον ψευδος which Hume himself suspected: and we add, that as a vast number of witnesses (according to a remark made in Sect. II.) will virtually operate as a reduction of the value allowed to x, until x may be made to vanish altogether,—so in the reverse order, any material reduction of value in x will virtually operate exactly as the multiplication of witnesses; and the case Alpha will be raised to the case Beta.

This Lemma being stated as a point of appeal in what follows, we proceed to

SECTION V.

ON HUME'S ARGUMENT, AS AFFECTED BY THE PURPOSE.

This topic is so impressive, and indeed awful, in its relation to Christianity, that we shall not violate its majesty by doing more than simply stating the case. All the known or imagined miracles that ever were recorded as flowing from any Pagan origin, were miracles—1, of ostentation; 2, of ambition and rivalship; 3, expressions of power; or, 4, were blind accidents. Not even in pretence were any of them more than that. First and last came the Christian miracles, on behalf of a moral purpose. The purpose was to change man's idea of his own nature; and to change his idea of God's nature. Many other purposes might be stated; but all were moral. Now to any other wielder of supernatural power, real or imaginary, it never had occurred by way of pretence even, that in working miracles he had a moral object. And here, indeed, comes in the argument of Christ with tremendous effect—that, whilst all other miracles might be liable to the suspicion of having been effected by alliance with darker agencies, his only (as sublime moral agencies for working the only revolution that ever was worked in man's nature) could not be liable to such a suspicion; since, if an evil spirit would lend himself to the propagation of good in its most transcendent form, in that case the kingdom of darkness would be 'divided against itself.'

Here, then, is an a posteriori reason, derived from the whole subsequent life and death of the miracle-worker, for diminishing the value of x according to the Lemma.

SECTION VI.

ON THE ARGUMENT OF HUME AS AFFECTED BY MATTERS OF FACT.

It is a very important axiom of the schoolmen in this case—that, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia, you can draw no inference from the possibility of a thing to its reality, but that, in the reverse order, ab esse ad posse, the inference is inevitable: if it is, or if it ever has been—then of necessity it can be. Hume himself would have admitted, that the proof of any one miracle, beyond all possibility of doubt, at once lowered the—x of his argument (i.e. the value of the resistance to our faith) so as to affect the whole force of that argument, as applying to all other miracles whatever having a rational and an adequate purpose. Now it happens that we have two cases of miracles which can be urged in this view: one a posteriori, derived from our historical experience, and the other a priori. We will take them separately.

1. The a priori miracle we call such—not (as the unphilosophic may suppose) because it occurred previously to our own period, or from any consideration of time whatever, but in the logical meaning, as having been derived from our reason in opposition to our experience. This order of miracle it is manifest that Hume overlooked altogether, because he says expressly that we have nothing to appeal to in this dispute except our human experience. But it happens that we have; and precisely where the possibilities of experience desert us. We know nothing through experience (whether physical or historical) of what preceded or accompanied the first introduction of man upon this earth. But in the absence of all experience, our reason informs us—that he must have been introduced by a supernatural agency. Thus far we are sure. For the sole alternative is one which would be equally mysterious, and besides, contradictory to the marks of change—of transition—and of perishableness in our planet itself,—viz. the hypothesis of an eternal unoriginated race: and that is more confounding to the human intellect than any miracle whatever: so that, even tried merely as one probability against another, the miracle would have the advantage. The miracle supposes a supersensual and transcendent cause. The opposite hypothesis supposes effects without any cause. In short, upon any hypothesis, we are driven to suppose—and compelled to suppose—a miraculous state as introductory to the earliest state of nature. The planet, indeed, might form itself by mechanical laws of motion, repulsion, attraction, and central forces. But man could not. Life could not. Organization, even animal organization, might perhaps be explained out of mechanical causes. But life could not. Life is itself a great miracle. Suppose the nostrils formed by mechanic agency; still the breath of life could not enter them without a supernatural force. And a fortiori, man, with his intellectual and moral capacities, could not arise upon this planet without a higher agency than any lodged in that nature which is the object of our present experience. This kind of miracle, as deduced by our reason, and not witnessed experimentally, or drawn from any past records, we call an _a priori miracle.

2. But there is another kind of miracle, which Hume ought not to have overlooked, but which he has, however, overlooked: he himself observes, very justly, that PROPHECY is a distinct species of the miraculous; and, no doubt, he neglected the Scriptural Prophecies, as supposing them all of doubtful interpretation, or believing with Porphyry, that such as are not doubtful, must have been posterior to the event which they point to. It happens, however, that there are some prophecies which cannot be evaded or 'refused,' some to which neither objection will apply. One, we will here cite, by way of example:—The prophecy of Isaiah, describing the desolation of Babylon, was delivered about seven centuries before Christ. A century or so after Christ, comes Porphyry, and insinuates, that all the prophecies alike might be comparatively recent forgeries! Well, for a moment suppose it: but, at least, they existed in the days of Porphyry. Now, it happens, that more than two centuries after Porphyry, we have good evidence, as to Babylon, that it had not yet reached the stage of utter desolation predicted by Isaiah. Four centuries after Christ, we learn from a Father of the Christian Church, who had good personal information as to its condition, that it was then become a solitude, but a solitude in good preservation as a royal park. The vast city had disppeared, and the murmur of myriads: but as yet there were no signs whatever of ruin or desolation. Not until our own nineteenth century was the picture of Isaiah seen in full realization—then lay the lion basking at noonday—then crawled the serpents from their holes; and at night the whole region echoed with the wild cries peculiar to arid wildernesses. The transformations, therefore, of Babylon, have been going on slowly through a vast number of centuries until the perfect accomplishment of Isaiah's picture. Perhaps they have travelled through a course of much more than two thousand years: and from the glimpses we gain of Babylon at intervals, we know for certain that Isaiah had been dead for many centuries before his vision could have even begun to realize itself. But then, says an objector, the final ruins of great empires and cities may be safely assumed on general grounds of observation. Hardly, however, if they happen to be seated in a region so fertile as Mesopotamia, and on a great river like the Euphrates. But allow this possibility—allow the natural disappearance of Babylon in a long course of centuries. In other cases the disappearance is gradual, and at length perfect. No traces can now be found of Carthage; none of Memphis; or, if you suppose something peculiar to Mesopotamia, no traces can be found of Nineveh, or on the other side of that region: none of other great cities—Roman, Parthian, Persian, Median, in that same region or adjacent regions. Babylon only is circumstantially described by Jewish prophecy as long surviving itself in a state of visible and audible desolation: and to Babylon only such a description applies. Other prophecies might be cited with the same result. But this is enough. And here is an a posteriori miracle.

Now, observe: these two orders of miracle, by their very nature, absolutely evade the argument of Hume. The incommunicability disappears altogether. The value of—x absolutely vanishes and becomes = 0. The human reason being immutable, suggests to every age, renews and regenerates for ever, the necessary inference of a miraculous state antecedent to the natural state. And, for the miracles of prophecy, these require no evidence and depend upon none: they carry their own evidence along with them; they utter their own testimonies, and they are continually reinforcing them; for, probably, every successive period of time reproduces fresh cases of prophecy completed. But even one, like that of Babylon, realizes the case of Beta (Sect. II.) in its most perfect form. History, which attests it, is the voice of every generation, checked and countersigned in effect by all the men who compose it.

SECTION VII.

OF THE ARGUMENT AS AFFECTED BY THE PARTICULAR WORKER OF THE MIRACLES.

This is the last 'moment,' to use the language of Mechanics, which we shall notice in this discussion. And here there is a remarkable petitio principii in Hume's management of his argument. He says, roundly, that it makes no difference at all if God were connected with the question as the author of the supposed miracles. And why? Because, says he, we know God only by experience—meaning as involved in nature—and, therefore, that in so far as miracles transcend our experience of nature, they transcend by implication our experience of God. But the very question under discussion is—whether God did, or did not, manifest himself to human experience in the miracles of the New Testament. But at all events, the idea of God in itself already includes the notion of a power to work miracles, whether that power were over exercised or not; and as Sir Isaac Newton thought that space might be the sensorium of God, so may we (and with much more philosophical propriety) affirm that the miraculous and the transcendent is the very nature of God. God being assumed, it is as easy to believe in a miracle issuing from him as in any operation according to the laws of nature (which, after all, is possibly in many points only the nature of our planet): it is as easy, because either mode of action is indifferent to him. Doubtless this argument, when addressed to an Atheist, loses its force; because he refuses to assume a God. But then, on the other hand, it must be remembered that Hume's argument itself does not stand on the footing of Atheism. He supposes it binding on a Theist. Now a Theist, in starting from the idea of God, grants, of necessity, the plenary power of miracles as greater and more awful than man could even comprehend. All he wants is a sufficient motive for such transcendent agencies; but this is supplied in excess (as regards what we have called the constituent miracles of Christianity) by the case of a religion that was to revolutionize the moral nature of man. The moral nature—the kingdom of the will—is esentially opposed to the kingdom of nature even by the confession of irreligious philosophers; and, therefore, being itself a supersensual field, it seems more reasonably adapted to agencies supernatural than such as are natural.

GENERAL RECAPITULATION.

In Hume's argument,—x, which expresses the resistance to credibility in a miracle, is valued as of necessity equal to the veiy maximum or ideal of human testimony; which, under the very best circumstances, might be equal to +x, in no case more, and in all known cases less. We, on the other hand, have endeavored to show—

1. That, because Hume contemplates only the case of a single witness, it will happen that the case Beta [of Sect. II.] where a multitude of witnesses exist, may greatly exceed +x; and with a sufficient multitude must exceed x.

2. That in the case of internal miracles—operations of divine agency within the mind and conscience of the individual—Hume's argument is necessarily set aside: the evidence, the +x, is perfect for the individual, and the miraculous agency is meant for him only.

3. That, in the case of one primary miracle, viz. the first organization of man on this planet, the evidence greatly transcends x: because here it is an evidence not derived from experience at all, but from the reflecting reason: and the miracle has the same advantage over facts of experience, that a mathematical truth has over the truths which rest on induction. It is the difference between must be and is—between the inevitable and the merely actual.

4. That, in the case of another order of miracles, viz. prophecies, Hume's argument is again overruled; because the +x in this case, the affirmative evidence, is not derived froms human testimony. Some prophecies are obscure; they may be fulfilled possibly without men's being aware of the fulfilment. But others, as that about the fate of Babylon—about the fate of the Arabs (the children of Ishmael)—about the fate of the Jews—are not of a nature to be misunderstood; and the evidence which attends them is not alien, but is intrinsic, and developed by themselves in successive stages from age to age.

5. That, because the primary miracle in No. 3, argues at least a power competent to the working of a miracle, for any after miracle we have only to seek a sufficient motive. Now, the objects of the Christian revelation were equal at the least to those of the original creation. In fact, Christianity may be considered as a second creation; and the justifying cause for the constituent miracles of Christianity is even to us as apparent as any which could have operated at the primary creation. The epigenesis was, at least, as grand an occasion as the genesis. Indeed, it is evident, for example, that Christianity itself could not have existed without the constituent miracle of the Resurrection; because without that there would have been no conquest over death. And here, as in No. 3, +x is derived—not from any experience, and therefore cannot be controlled by that sort of hostile experience which Hume's argument relies on; but is derived from the reason which transcends all experience.

CASUISTRY.

[1839.]

PART I.

It is remarkable, in the sense of being noticeable and interesting, but not in the sense of being surprising, that Casuistry has fallen into disrepute throughout all Protestant lands. This disrepute is a result partly due to the upright morality which usually follows in the train of the Protestant faith. So far it is honorable, and an evidence of superior illumination. But, in the excess to which it has been pushed, we may trace also a blind and somewhat bigoted reaction of the horror inspired by the abuses of the Popish Confessional. Unfortunately for the interests of scientific ethics, the first cultivators of casuistry had been those who kept in view the professional service of auricular confession. Their purpose was—to assist the reverend confessor in appraising the quality of doubtful actions, in order that he might properly adjust his scale of counsel, of warning, of reproof, and of penance. Some, therefore, in pure simplicity and conscientious discharge of the duty they had assumed, but others, from lubricity of morals or the irritations of curiosity, pushed their investigations into unhallowed paths of speculation. They held aloft a torch for exploring guilty recesses-of human life, which it is far better for us all to leave in their original darkness. Crimes that were often all but imaginary, extravagances of erring passion that would never have been known as possibilities to the young and the innocent, were thus published in their most odious details. At first, it is true, the decent draperies of a dead language were suspended before these abominations: but sooner or later some knave was found, on mercenary motives, to tear away this partial veil; and thus the vernacular literature of most nations in Southern Europe, was gradually polluted with revelations that had been originally made in the avowed service of religion. Indeed, there was one aspect of such books which proved even more extensively disgusting. Speculations pointed to monstrous offences, bore upon their very face and frontispiece the intimation that they related to cases rare and anomalous. But sometimes casuistry pressed into the most hallowed recesses of common domestic life. The delicacy of youthful wives, for example, was often not less grievously shocked than the manliness of husbands, by refinements of monkish subtlety applied to cases never meant for religious cognisance—but far better left to the decision of good feeling, of nature, and of pure household morality. Even this revolting use of casuistry, however, did less to injure its name and pretensions than a persuasion, pretty generally diffused, that the main purpose and drift of this science was a sort of hair-splitting process, by which doubts might be applied to the plainest duties of life, or questions raised on the extent of their obligations, for the single benefit of those who sought to evade them. A casuist was viewed, in short, as a kind of lawyer or special pleader in morals, such as those who, in London, are known as Old Bailey practitioners, called in to manage desperate cases—to suggest all available advantages—to raise doubts or distinctions where simple morality saw no room for either—and generally to teach the art, in nautical phrase, of sailing as near the wind as possible, without fear of absolutely foundering.

Meantime it is certain that casuistry, when soberly applied, is not only a beneficial as well as a very interesting study; but that, by whatever title, it is absolutely indispensable to the practical treatment of morals. We may reject the name; the thing we cannot reject. And accordingly the custom has been, in all English treatises on ethics, to introduce a good deal of casuistry under the idea of special illustration, but without any reference to casuistry as a formal branch of research. Indeed, as society grows complex, the uses of casuistry become more urgent. Even Cicero could not pursue his theme through such barren generalizations as entirely to evade all notice of special cases: and Paley has given the chief interest to his very loose investigations of morality, by scattering a selection of such cases over the whole field of his discussion.

The necessity of casuistry might, in fact, be deduced from the very origin, and genesis of the word. First came the general law or rule of action. This was like the major proposition of a syllogism. But next came a special instance or case, so stated as to indicate whether it did or did not fall under the general rule. This, again, was exactly the minor proposition in a syllogism. For example, in logic we say, as the major proposition in a syllogism, Man is mortal. This is the rule. And then 'subsuming' (such is the technical phrase—subsuming) Socrates under the rule by a minor proposition—viz. Socrates is a man—we are able mediately to connect him with the predicate of that rule, viz, ergo, Socrates is mortal.[Footnote: The ludicrous blunder of Reid (as first published by Lord Kames in his Sketches), and of countless others, through the last seventy or eighty years, in their critiques on the logic of Aristotle, has been to imagine that such illustrations of syllogism as these were meant for specimens of what syllogism could perform. What an elaborate machinery, it was said, for bringing out the merest self-evident truisms! But just as reasonably it might have been objected, when a mathematician illustrated the process of addition by saying 3+4=7, Behold what pompous nothings! These Aristotelian illustrations were purposely drawn from cases not open to dispute, and simply as exemplifications of the meaning: they were intentionally self-evident.] Precisely upon this model arose casuistry. A general rule, or major proposition, was laid down—suppose that he who killed any human being, except under the palliations X, Y, Z, was a murderer. Then in a minor proposition, the special case of the suicide was considered. It was affirmed, or it was denied, that his case fell under some one of the palliations assigned. And then, finally, accordingly to the negative or affirmative shape of this minor proposition, it was argued, in the conclusion, that the suicide was or was not, a murderer. Out of these cases, i.e. oblique deflexions from the universal rule (which is also the grammarian's sense of the word case) arose casuistry.

After morality has done its very utmost in clearing up the grounds upon which it rests its decisions—after it has multiplied its rules to any possible point of circumstantiality—there will always continue to arise cases without end, in the shifting combinations of human action, about which a question will remain whether they do or do not fall under any of these rules. And the best way for seeing this truth illustrated on a broad scale, the shortest way and the most decisive is—to point our attention to one striking fact, viz. that all law, as it exists in every civilized land, is nothing but casuistry. Simply because new cases are for ever arising to raise new doubts whether they do or do not fall under the rule of law, therefore it is that law is so inexhaustible. The law terminates a dispute for the present by a decision of a court, (which constitutes our 'common law,') or by an express act of the legislature, (which constitutes our 'statute law.') For a month or two matters flow on smoothly. But then comes a new case, not contemplated or not verbally provided for in the previous rule. It is varied by some feature of difference. The feature, it is suspected, makes no essential difference: substantially it may be the old case. Ay—but that is the very point to be decided. And so arises a fresh suit at law, and a fresh decision. For example, after many a decision and many a statute, (all arising out of cases supervening upon cases,) suppose that great subdivision of jurisprudence called the Bankrupt Laws to have been gradually matured. It has been settled, suppose, that he who exercises a trade, and no other whatsoever, shall be entitled to the benefit of the bankrupt laws. So far is fixed: and people vainly imagine that at length a station of rest is reached, and that in this direction at least, the onward march of law is barred. Not at all. Suddenly a schoolmaster becomes insolvent, and attempts to avail himself of privileges as a technical bankrupt. But then arises a resistance on the part of those who are interested in resisting: and the question is raised—Whether the calling of a schoolmaster can be legally considered a trade? This also is settled: it is solemnly determined that a schoolmaster is a tradesman. But next arises a case, in which, from peculiar variation of the circumstances, it is doubtful whether the teacher can technically be considered a schoolmaster. Suppose that case settled: a schoolmaster, sub-distinguished as an X Y schoolmaster, is adjudged to come within the meaning of the law. But scarcely is this sub-variety disposed of, than up rises some decomplex case, which is a sub-variety of this sub-variety: and so on for ever.

Hence, therefore, we may see the shortsightedness of Paley in quoting with approbation, and as if it implied a reproach, that the Mussulman religious code contains 'not less than seventy-five thousand traditional precepts.' True: but if this statement shows an excess of circumstantiality in the moral systems of Mussulmans, that result expresses a fact which Paley overlooks—viz. that their moral code is in reality their legal code. It is by aggregation of cases, by the everlasting depullulation of fresh sprouts and shoots from old boughs, that this enormous accumulation takes place; and, therefore, the apparent anomaly is exactly paralleled in our unmanageable superstructure of law, and in the French supplements to their code, which have already far overbuilt the code itself. If names were disregarded, we and the Mahometans are in the very same circumstances.

Casuistry, therefore, is the science of cases, or of those special varieties which are forever changing the face of actions as contemplated in general rules. The tendency of such variations is, in all states of complex civilization, to absolute infinity.[Footnote: We have noticed our own vast pile of law, and that of the French. But neither of us has yet reached the alarming amount of the Roman law, under which the very powers of social movement threatened to break down. Courts could not decide, advocates could not counsel, so interminable was becoming the task of investigation. This led to the great digest of Justinian. But, had Roman society advanced in wealth, extent, and social development, instead of retrograding, the same result would have returned in a worse shape. The same result now menaces England, and will soon menace her much more.] It is our present purpose to state a few of such cases, in order to fix attention upon the interest and the importance which surround them. No modern book of ethics can be worth notice, unless in so far as it selects and argues the more prominent of such cases, as they offer themselves in the economy of daily life. For we repeat—that the name, the word casuistry, may be evaded, but the thing cannot; nor is it evaded in our daily conversations.

I. The Case of the Jaffa Massacre,—No case in the whole compass of casuistry has been so much argued to and fro—none has been argued with so little profit; for, in fact, the main elements of the moral decision have been left out of view. Let us state the circumstances:—On the 11th of February, 1799, Napoleon, then and for seven months before in military possession of Egypt, began his march towards Syria. His object was to break the force of any Turkish invasion, by taking it in fractions. It had become notorious to every person in Egypt, that the Porte rejected the French pretence of having come for the purpose of quelling Mameluke rebellion—the absurdity of which, apart from its ludicrous Quixotism, was evident in the most practical way, viz. by the fact, that the whole revenues of Egypt were more than swallowed up by the pay and maintenance of the French army. What could the Mamelukes have done worse? Hence it had become certain that the Turks would send an expedition to Egypt; and Napoleon viewing the garrisons in Syria as the advanced guard of such an expedition, saw the best chance for general victory in meeting these troops beforehand, and destroying them in detail. About nineteen days brought him within view of the Syrian fields. On the last day of February he slept at the Arimathea of the Gospel. In a day or two after his army was before Jaffa, (the Joppa of the Crusaders,)—a weak place, but of some military interest,[Footnote: It is singular that some peculiar interest has always settled upon Jaffa, no matter who was the military leader of the time, or what the object of the struggle. From Julius Caesar, Joppa enjoyed some special privileges and immunities—about a century after, in the latter years of Nero, a most tragical catastrophe happened at Joppa to the Syrian pirates, by which the very same number perished as in the Napoleon massacre, viz. something about 4000. In the 200 years of the Crusades, Joppa revived again into military verdure. The fact is, that the shore of Syria is pre-eminently deficient in natural harbors, or facilities for harbors—those which exist have been formed by art and severe contest with the opposition of nature. Hence their extreme paucity, and hence their disproportionate importance in every possible war.] from the accident of being the very first fortified town to those entering Palestine from the side of Egypt. On the 4th of March this place was invested; on the 6th, barely forty-eight hours after, it was taken by storm. This fact is in itself important; because it puts an end to the pretence so often brought forward, that the French army had been irritated by a long resistance. Yet, supposing the fact to have been so, how often in the history of war must every reader have met with cases where honorable terms were granted to an enemy merely on account of his obstinate resistance? But then here, it is said, the resistance was wilfully pushed to the arbitration of a storm. Even that might be otherwise stated; but, suppose it true, a storm in military law confers some rights upon the assailants which else they would not have had—rights, however, which cease with the day of storming. Nobody denies that the French army might have massacred all whom they me't in arms at the time and during the agony of storming. But the question is, Whether a resistance of forty-eight hours could create the right, or in the least degree palliate the atrocity, of putting prisoners to death in cold blood? Four days after the storming, when all things had settled back into the quiet routine of ordinary life, men going about their affairs as usual, confidence restored, and, above all things, after the faith of a Christian army had been pledged to these prisoners that not a hair of their heads should be touched, the imagination is appalled by this wholesale butchery—even the apologists of Napoleon are shocked by the amount of murder, though justifying its principle. They admit that there were two divisions of the prisoners—one of fifteen hundred, the other of two thousand five hundred. Their combined amount is equal to a little army; in fact, just about that army with which we fought and won the battle of Maida in Calabria. They composed a force equal to about six English regiments of infantry on the common establishment. Every man of these four thousand soldiers, chiefly brave Albanians—every man of this little army was basely, brutally, in the very spirit of abject poltroonery, murdered—murdered as foully as the infants of Bethlehem; resistance being quite hopeless, not only because they had surrendered their arms, but also because, in reliance on Christian honor, they had quietly submitted to have their hands confined with ropes behind their backs. If this blood did not lie heavy on Napoleon's heart in his dying hours, it must have been because a conscience originally callous had been seared by the very number of his atrocities.

Now, having stated the case, let us review the casuistical apologies put forward. What was to be done with these prisoners? There lay the difficulty. Could they be retained according to the common usage with regard to prisoners? No; for there was a scarcity of provisions, barely sufficient for the French army itself. Could they be transported to Egypt by sea? No; for two English line-of-battle ships, the Theseus and the Tiger, were cruising in the offing, and watching the interjacent seas of Egypt and Syria. Could they be transported to Egypt by land? No; for it was not possible to spare a sufficient escort; besides, this plan would have included the separate difficulty as to food. Finally, then, as the sole resource left, could they be turned adrift? No; for this was but another mode of saying, 'Let us fight the matter over again; reinstate yourselves as our enemies; let us leave Jaffa re infectâ, and let all begin again de novo'—since, assuredly, say the French apologists, in a fortnight from that date, the prisoners would have been found swelling the ranks of those Turkish forces whom Napoleon had reason to expect in front.

Before we take one step in replying to these arguments, let us cite two parallel cases from history: they are interesting for themselves, and they show how other armies, not Christian, have treated the self-same difficulty in practice. The first shall be a leaf taken from the great book of Pagan experience; the second from Mahometan: and both were cases in which the parties called on to cut the knot had been irritated to madness by the parties lying at their disposal.

1. The Pagan Decision.—In that Jewish war of more than three years' duration, which terminated in the destruction of Jerusalem, two cities on the lake of Gennesaret were besieged by Vespasian. One of these was Tiberias: the other Tarichæ. Both had been defended with desperation; and from their peculiar situation upon water, and amongst profound precipices, the Roman battering apparatus had not been found applicable to their walls. Consequently the resistance and the loss to the Romans had been unexampled. At the latter siege Vespasian was present in person. Six thousand five hundred had perished of the enemy. A number of prisoners remained, amounting to about forty thousand. What was to be done with them? A great council was held, at which the commander-in-chief presided, assisted (as Napoleon) by his whole staff. Many of the officers were strongly for having the whole put to death: they used the very arguments of the French—'that, being people now destitute of habitations, they would infallibly urge any cities which received them into a war:' fighting, in fact, henceforward upon a double impulse—viz. the original one of insurrection, and a new one of revenge. Vespasian was sensible of all this; and he himself remarked, that, if they had any indulgence of flight conceded, they would assuredly use it against the authors of that indulgence. But still, as an answer to all objections, he insisted on the solitary fact, that he had pledged the Roman faith for the security of their lives; 'and to offer violence, after he had given them his right hand, was what he could not bear to think of.' Such are the simple words of Josephus. In the end, overpowered by his council, Vespasian made a sort of compromise. Twelve hundred, as persons who could not have faced the hardships of captivity and travel, he gave up to the sword. Six thousand select young men were transported as laborers into Greece, with a view to Nero's scheme, then in agitation, for cutting through the isthmus of Corinth; the main body, amounting to thirty thousand, were sold for slaves; and all the rest, who happened to be subjects of Agrippa, as a mark of courtesy to that prince, were placed at his disposal. Now, in this case, it will be alleged that perhaps the main feature of Napoleon's case was not realized, viz. the want of provisions. Every Roman soldier carried on his shoulders a load of seventeen days' provisions, expressly in preparation for such dilemmas; and Palestine was then rank with population gathered into towns. This objection will be noticed immediately: but, meantime, let it be remembered that the prisoners personally appeared before their conquerors in far worse circumstances than the garrison of Jaffa, except as to the one circumstance (in which both parties stood on equal ground) of having had their lives guaranteed. For the prisoners of Gennesaret were chiefly aliens and fugitives from justice, who had no national or local interest in the cities which they had tempted or forced into insurrection; they were clothed with no military character whatever; in short, they were pure vagrant incendiaries. And the populous condition of Palestine availed little towards the execution of Vespasian's sentence: nobody in that land would have bought such prisoners; nor, if they would, were there any means available, in the agitated state of the Jewish people, for maintaining their purchase. It would, therefore, be necessary to escort them to Caesarea, as the nearest Roman port for shipping them: thence perhaps to Alexandria, in order to benefit by the corn vessels: and from Alexandria the voyage to remoter places would be pursued at great cost and labor—all so many objections exactly corresponding to those of Napoleon, and yet all overruled by the single consideration of a Roman (viz. a Pagan) right hand pledged to the fulfilment of a promise. As to the twelve hundred old and helpless people massacred in cold blood, as regarded themselves it was a merciful doom, and one which many of the Jerusalem captives afterwards eagerly courted. But still it was a shocking case. It was felt to be so by many Romans themselves: Vespasian was overruled in that instance: and the horror which settled upon the mind of Titus, his eldest son, from that very case amongst others, made him tender of human life, and anxiously merciful, through the great tragedies which were now beginning to unrol themselves.

2. The Mahometan Decision.—The Emperor Charles V., at different periods, twice invaded the piratical states in the north of Africa. The last of these invasions, directed against Algiers, failed miserably, covering the Emperor with shame, and strewing both land and sea with the wrecks of his great armament. But six years before, he had conducted a most splendid and successful expedition against Tunis, then occupied by Heyradin Barbarossa, a valiant corsair and a prosperous usurper. Barbarossa had an irregular force of fifty thousand men; the Emperor had a veteran army, but not acclimatized, and not much above one half as numerous. Things tended, therefore, strongly to an equilibrium. Such were the circumstances—such was the position on each side: Barbarossa, with his usual adventurous courage, was drawing out of Tunis in order to fight the invader: precisely at that moment occurred the question of what should be done with the Christian slaves. A stronger case cannot be imagined: they were ten thousand fighting men; and the more horrible it seemed to murder so many defenceless people, the more dreadfully did the danger strike upon the imagination. It was their number which appalled the conscience of those who speculated on their murder; but precisely that it was, when pressed upon the recollection, which appalled the prudence of their Moorish masters. Barbarossa himself, familiar with bloody actions, never hesitated about the proper course: 'massacre without mercy' was his proposal. But his officers thought otherwise: they were brave men; 'and,' says Robertson, 'they all approved warmly of his intention to fight. But, inured as they were to scenes of bloodshed, the barbarity of his proposal filled them with horror; and Barbarossa, from the dread of irritating them, consented to spare the lives of the slaves.' Now, in this case, the penalty attached to mercy, in case it should turn out unhappily for those who so nobly determined to stand the risk, cannot be more tragically expressed, than by saying that it did turn out unhappily. We need not doubt that the merciful officers were otherwise rewarded; but for this world and the successes of this world the ruin was total. Barbarossa was defeated in the battle which ensued; flying pell-mell to Tunis with the wrecks of his army, he found these very ten thousand Christians in possession of the fort and town: they turned his own artillery upon himself: and his overthrow was sealed by that one act of mercy—so unwelcome from the very first to his own Napoleonish temper.

Thus we see how this very case of Jaffa had been Settled by Pagan and Mahometan casuists, where courage and generosity happened to be habitually prevalent. Now, turning back ta the pseudo-Christian army, let us very briefly review the arguments for them. First, there were no provisions. But how happened that? or how is it proved? Feeding the prisoners from the 6th to the 10th inclusively of March, proves that there was no instant want. And how was it, then, that Napoleon had run his calculations so narrowly! The prisoners were just 33 per cent, on the total French army, as originally detached from Cairo. Some had already perished of that army: and in a few weeks more, one half of that army had perished, or six thousand men, whose rations were hourly becoming disposable for the prisoners. Secondly, a most important point, resources must have been found in Jaffa.

But thirdly, if not, if Jaffa were so ill-provisioned, how had it ever dreamed of standing a siege? And knowing its condition, as Napoleon must have done from deserters and otherwise, how came he to adopt so needless a measure as that of storming the place? Three days must have compelled it to surrender upon any terms, if it could be really true that, after losing vast numbers of its population in the assault (for it was the bloodshed of the assault which originally suggested the interference of the aides-de-camp,) Jaffa was not able to allow half-rations even to a part of its garrison for a few weeks. What was it meant that the whole should have done, had Napoleon simply blockaded it? Through all these contradictions we see the truth looming as from behind a mist: it was not because provisions failed that Napoleon butchered four thousand young men in cold blood; it was because he wished to signalize his entrance into Palestine by a sanguinary act, such as might strike terror far and wide, resound through Syria as well as Egypt, and paralyze the nerves of his enemies. Fourthly, it is urged that, if he had turned the prisoners loose, they would have faced him again in his next battle. How so? Prisoners without arms? But then, perhaps, they could have retreated upon Acre, where it is known that Djezzar, the Turkish pacha, had a great magazine of arms. That might have been dangerous, if any such retreat had been open. But surely the French army, itself under orders for Acre, could at least have intercepted the Acre route from the prisoners. No other remained but that through the defiles of Naplous. In this direction, however, there was no want of men. Beyond the mountains cavalry only were in use: and the prisoners had no horses, nor habits of acting as cavalry. In the defiles it was riflemen who were wanted, and the prisoners had no rifles; besides that, the line of the French operations never came near to that route. Then, again, if provisions were so scarce, how were the unarmed prisoners to obtain them on the simple allegation that they had fought unsuccessfully against the French!

But, finally, one conclusive argument there is against this damnable atrocity of Napoleon's, which, in all future Lives of Napoleon, one may expect to see-noticed, viz., that if the circumstances of Palestine were such as to forbid the ordinary usages of war, if (which we are far from believing) want of provisions made it indispensable to murder prisoners in cold blood—in that case a Syrian war became impossible to a man of honor; and the guilt commences from a higher point than Jaffa. Already at Cairo, and in the elder stages of the expedition, planned in face of such afflicting necessities, we read the counsels of a murderer; of one rightly carrying such a style of warfare towards the ancient country of the assassins; of one not an apostate merely from Christian humanity, but from the lowest standard of soldierly honor. He and his friends abuse Sir Hudson Lowe as a jailer. But far better to be a jailer, and faithful to one's trust, than to be the cut-throat of unarmed men.

One consideration remains, which we reserve to the end; because it has been universally overlooked, and because it is conclusive against Napoleon, even on his own hypothesis of an absolute necessity. In Vespasian's case it does not appear that he had gained anything for himself, or for his army, by his promise of safety to the enemy: he had simply gratified his own feelings by holding out prospects of final escape. But Napoleon had absolutely seduced the four thousand men from a situation of power, from vantage-ground, by his treacherous promise. And when the French apologists plead—'If we had dismissed the prisoners we should soon have had to fight the battle over again'—they totally forget the state of the facts: they had not fought the battle at all: they had evaded the battle as to these prisoners: as many enemies as could have faced them de novo, so many had they bought off from fighting. Forty centuries of armed men, brave and despairing, and firing from windows, must have made prodigious havoc: and this havoc the French evaded by a trick, by a perfidy, perhaps unexampled in the annals of military men.

II. Piracy.-It is interesting to trace the revolutions of moral feeling. In the early stages of history we find piracy in high esteem. Thucydides tells us that ληστεια, or robbery, when conducted at sea, (i. e. robbery on non-Grecian people,) was held in the greatest honor by his countrymen in elder ages. And this, in fact, is the true station, this point of feeling for primitive man, from which we ought to view the robberies and larcenies of savages. Captain Cook, though a good and often a wise man, erred in this point. He took a plain Old Bailey view of the case; and very sincerely believed, (as all sea-captains ever have done,) that a savage must be a bad man, who would purloin anything that was not his. Yet it is evident that the poor child of uncultured nature, who saw strangers descending, as it were from the moon, upon his aboriginal forests and lawns, must have viewed them under the same angle as the Greeks of old. They were no part of any system to which he belonged; and why should he not plunder them? By force if he could: but, where that was out of the question, why should he not take the same credit for an undetected theft that the Spartan gloried in taking? To be detected was both shame and loss; but he was certainly entitled to any glory which might seem to settle upon success, not at all less than the more pretending citizen of Sparta. Besides all which, amongst us civilized men the rule obtains universally—that the state and duties of peace are to be presumed until war is proclaimed. Whereas, amongst rude nations, war is understood to be the rule—war, open or covert, until suspended by express contract. Bellum inter omnes is the natural state of things for all, except those who view themselves as brothers by natural affinity, by local neighborhood, by common descent, or who make themselves brothers by artificial contracts. Captain Cook, who overlooked all this, should have begun by arranging a solemn treaty with the savages amongst whom he meant to reside for any length of time. This would have prevented many an angry broil then, and since then: it would also have prevented his own tragical fate. Meantime the savage is calumniated and misrepresented, for want of being understood.

There is, however, amongst civilized nations a mode of piracy still tolerated, or which was tolerated in the last war, but is now ripe for extinction. It is that war of private men upon private men, which goes on under the name of privateering. Great changes have taken place in our modes of thinking within the last twenty-five years; and the greatest change of all lies in the thoughtful spirit which we now bring to the investigation of all public questions. We have no doubt at all that, when next a war arises at sea, the whole system of privateering will be condemned by the public voice. And the next step after that will be, to explode all war whatsoever, public or private, upon commerce. War will be conducted by belligerents and upon belligerents exclusively. To imagine the extinction of war itself, in the present stage of human advance, is, we fear, idle. Higher modes of civilization—an earth more universally colonized—the homo sapiens of Linnaeus more humanized, and other improvements must pave the way for that: but amongst the earliest of those improvements, will be the abolition of war carried into quarters where the spirit of war never ought to penetrate. Privateering will be abolished. War, on a national scale, is often ennobling, and one great instrument of pioneering for civilization; but war of private citizen upon his fellow, in another land, is always demoralizing.

III. Usury.—This ancient subject of casuistry we place next to piracy, for a significant reason: the two practices have both changed their public reputation as civilization has advanced, but inversely—they have interchanged characters. Piracy, beginning in honor, has ended in infamy: and at this moment it happens to be the sole offence against society in which all the accomplices, without pity or intercession, let them be ever so numerous, are punished capitally. Elsewhere, we decimate, or even centesimate: here, we are all children of Rhadamanthus. Usury, on the other hand, beginning in utter infamy, has travelled upwards into considerable esteem; and Mr. '10 per shent' stands a very fair chance of being pricked for sheriff next year; and, in one generation more, of passing for a great patriot. Charles Lamb complained that, by gradual changes, not on his part, but in the spirit of refinement, he found himself growing insensibly into 'an indecent character.' The same changes which carry some downwards, carry others up; and Shylock himself will soon be viewed as an eminent martyr or confessor for the truth as it is in the Alley. Seriously, however, there is nothing more remarkable in the history of casuistical ethics, than the utter revolution in human estimates of usury. In this one point the Hebrew legislator agreed with the Roman—Deuteronomy with the Twelve Tables. Cicero mentions that the elder Cato being questioned on various actions, and how he ranked them in his esteem, was at length asked, Quid fœnerari?—how did he rank usury? His indignant answer was, by a retorted question—Quid hominem occidere?—what do I think of murder? In this particular case, as in some others, we must allow that our worthy ancestors and forerunners upon this terraqueous planet were enormous blockheads. And their 'exquisite reason' for this opinion on usury, was quite worthy of Sir Andrew Aguecheek:—'money,' they argued, 'could not breed money: one guinea was neither father nor mother to another guinea: and where could be the justice of making a man pay for the use of a thing which that thing could never produce?' But, venerable blockheads, that argument applies to the case of him who locks up his borrowed guinea. Suppose him not to lock it up, but to buy a hen, and the hen to lay a dozen eggs; one of those eggs will be so much per cent.; and the thing borrowed has then produced its own foenus. A still greater inconsistency was this: Our ancestors would have rejoined—that many people did not borrow in order to produce, i. e. to use the money as capital, but in order to spend, i. e. to use it as income. In that case, at least, the borrowers must derive the foenus from some other fund than the thing borrowed: for, by the supposition, the thing borrowed has been spent. True; but on the same principle these ancestors ought to have forbidden every man to sell any article whatsoever to him who paid for it out of other funds than those produced by the article sold. Mere logical consistency required this: it happens, indeed, to be impossible: but that only argues their entire non-comprehension of their own doctrines.

The whole history of usury teems with instruction: 1st, comes the monstrous absurdity in which the proscription of usury anchored; 2d, the absolute compulsion and pressure of realities in forcing men into a timid abandonment of their own doctrines; 3d, the unconquerable power of sympathy, which humbled all minds to one level, and forced the strongest no less than the feeblest intellects into the same infatuation of stupidity. The casuistry of ancient moralists on this question, especially of the scholastic moralists, such as Suarrez, &c.—the oscillations by which they ultimately relaxed and tied up the law, just as their erring conscience, or the necessities of social life prevailed, would compose one of the interesting chapters in this science. But the Jewish relaxation is the most amusing: it coincides altogether with the theory of savages as to property, which we have already noticed under the head of Piracy. All men on earth, except Jews, were held to be fair subjects for usury; not as though usury were a just or humane thing: no—it was a belligerent act: but then all foreigners in the Jewish eye were enemies for the same reason that the elder Romans had a common term for an enemy and a stranger. And it is probable that many Jews at this day, in exercising usury, conceive themselves to be seriously making war, in a privateering fashion, upon Christendom, and practising reprisals on the Gentiles for ruined Jerusalem.

IV. Bishop Gibson's Chronicon Preciosum.—Many people are aware that this book is a record of prices, as far as they were recoverable, pursued through six centuries of English History. But they are not aware that this whole inquiry is simply the machinery for determining a casuistical question. The question was this:—An English College, but we cannot say in which of our universities, had been founded in the reign of Henry VI., and between 1440 and 1460—probably it might be King's College, Cambridge. Now, the statutes of this college make it imperative upon every candidate for a fellowship to swear that he does not possess an estate in land of inheritance, nor a perpetual pension amounting to five pounds per annum, It is certain, however, that the founder did not mean superstitiously so much gold or silver as made nominally the sum of five pounds, but so much as virtually represented the five pounds of Henry VI.'s time—so much as would buy the same quantity of ordinary comfort. Upon this, therefore, arose two questions for the casuist: (1.) What sum did substantially represent, in 1706, (the year of publishing the Chron. Preciosum,) that nominal £5 of 1440? (2.) Supposing this ascertained, might a man with safe conscience retain his fellowship by swearing that he had not £5 a-year, when perhaps he had £20, provided that £20 were proved to be less in efficacy than the £5 of the elder period? Verbally this was perjury: was it such in reality and to the conscience?

The Chronicle is not, as by its title the reader might suppose, a large folio: on the contrary, it is a small octavo of less than 200 pages. But it is exceedingly interesting, very ably reasoned, and as circumstantial in its illustrations as the good bishop's opportunities allowed him to make it. In one thing he was more liberal than Sir William Petty, Dr. Davenant, &c., or any elder economists of the preceding century; he would have statistics treated as a classical or scholar-like study; and he shows a most laudable curiosity in all the questions arising out of his main one. His answer to that is as follows: 1st, that £5 in Henry VI.'s time contained forty ounces of silver, whereas in Queen Anne's it contained only nineteen ounces and one-third; so that, in reality, the £5 of 1440, was, even as to weight of silver, rather more than £10 of 1706. 2d, as to the efficacy of £10 in Henry VI.'s reign: upon reviewing the main items of common household (and therefore of common academic) expenditure, and pursuing this review through bad years and good years, the bishop decides that it is about equal to £25 or £30 of Queen Anne's reign. Sir George Shuckburgh has since treated this casuistical problem more elaborately: but Bishop Gibson it was, who, in his Chronicon Preciosum, first broke the ice.

After this, he adds an ingenious question upon the apparently parallel case of a freeholder swearing himself worth 40s. per annum as a qualification for an electoral vote: ought not he to hold himself perjured in voting upon an estate often so much below the original 40s. contemplated by Parliament, for the very same reason that a collegian is not perjured in holding a fellowship, whilst, in fact, he may have four or five times the nominal sum privileged by the founder? The bishop says no; and he distinguishes the case thus: the college £5 must always mean a virtual £5—a £5 in efficacy, and not merely in name. But the freeholder's 40s. is not so restricted; and for the following reason—that this sum is constantly coming under the review of Parliament. It is clear, therefore, from the fact of not having altered it, that Parliament is satisfied with a merely nominal 40s., and sees no reason to alter it. True, it was a rule enacted by the Parliament of 1430; at which time 40s. was even in weight of silver equal to 80s. of 1706; and in virtue or power of purchasing equal to £12 at the least. The qualification of a freeholder is, therefore, much lower in Queen Anne's days than in those of Henry VI. But what of that? Parliament, it must be presumed, sees good reason why it should be lower. And at all events, till the law operates amiss, there can be no reason to alter it.

A case of the same kind with those argued by Bishop Gibson arose often in trials for larceny—we mean as to that enactment which fixed the minimum for a capital offence. This case is noticed by the bishop, and juries of late years often took the casuistry into their own hands. They were generally thought to act with no more than a proper humanity to the prisoner; but still people thought such juries incorrect. Whereas, if Bishop Gibson is right, who allows a man to swear positively that he has not £5 a-year, when nominally he has much more, such juries were even technically right. However, this point is now altered by Sir Robert Peel's reforms. But there are other cases, and especially those which arise not between different times but between different places, which will often require the same kind of casuistry as that which is so ably applied by the good and learned bishop.

V. Suicide.—It seems passing strange that the main argument upon which Pagan moralists relied in their unconditional condemnation of suicide, viz. the supposed analogy of our situation in life to that of a sentinel mounting guard, who cannot, without a capital offence, quit his station until called off by his commanding officer, is dismissed with contempt by a Christian moralist, viz. Paley. But a stranger thing still is—that the only man who ever wrote a book in palliation of suicide, should have been not only a Christian—not only an official minister and dignitary of a metropolitan Christian church—but also a scrupulously pious man. We allude, as the reader will suppose, to Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. His opinion is worthy of consideration. Not that we would willingly diminish, by one hair's weight, the reasons against suicide; but it is never well to rely upon ignorance or inconsideration for the defence of any principle whatever. Donne's notion was, (a notion, however, adopted in his earlier years,) that as we do not instantly pronounce a man a murderer upon hearing that he has killed a fellow-creature, but, according to the circumstances of the case, pronounce his act either murder, or manslaughter, or justifiable homicide; so by parity of reason, suicide is open to distinctions of the same or corresponding kinds; that there may be such a thing as self-homicide not less than self-murder—culpable self-homicide —justifiable self-homicide. Donne called his Essay by the Greek name Biathanatos,[Footnote: This word, however, which occurs nowhere that we remember, except in Lampridius, one of the Augustan historians, is here applied to Heliogabalus; and means, not the act of suicide, but a suicidal person. And possibly Donne, who was a good scholar, may so mean it to be understood in his title-page. Heliogabalus, says Lampridius, had been told by the Syrian priests that he should be Biathanatos, i. e. should commit suicide. He provided, therefore, ropes of purple and of gold intertwisted, that he might hang himself imperatorially. He provided golden swords, that he might run himself through as became Caesar. He had poisons inclosed in jewels, that he might drink his farewell heeltaps, if drink he must, in a princely style. Other modes of august death he had prepared. Unfortunately all were unavailing, for he was murdered and dragged through the common sewers by ropes, without either purple or gold in their base composition. The poor fellow has been sadly abused in history; but, after all, he was a mere boy, and as mad as a March hare.] meaning violent death. But a thing equally strange and a blasphemy almost unaccountable, is the fancy of a Prussian or Saxon baron, who wrote a book to prove that Christ committed suicide, for which he had no other argument than that, in fact, he had surrendered himself unresistingly into the hands of his enemies, and had in a manner caused his own death. This, however, describes the case of every martyr that ever was or can be. It is the very merit and grandeur of the martyr, that he proclaims the truth with his eyes open to the consequences of proclaiming it. Those consequences are connected with the truth, but not by a natural link: the connection is by means of false views, which it is the very business of the martyr to destroy. And, if a man founds my death upon an act which my conscience enjoys, even though I am aware and fully warned that he will found my death upon it, I am not, therefore, guilty of suicide. For, by the supposition, I was obliged to the act in question by the highest of all obligations, viz. moral obligation, which far transcends all physical obligation; so that, whatever excuse attaches to a physical necessity, attaches, a fortiori, to the moral necessity. The case is, therefore, precisely the same as if he had said,—'I will put you to death if the frost benumbs your feet.' The answer is—'I cannot help this effect of frost.' Far less can I help revealing a celestial truth. I have no power, no liberty, to forbear. And, in killing me, he punishes me for a mere necessity of my situation and my knowledge.

It is urged that brutes never commit suicide—except, indeed, the salamander, who has been suspected of loose principles in this point; and we ourselves know a man who constantly affirmed that a horse of his had committed suicide, by violently throwing himself from the summit of a precipice. 'But why,'—as we still asked him—'why should the horse have committed felony on himself? Were oats rising in the market?—or was he in love?—or vexed by politics?—or could a horse, and a young one rising four, be supposed to suffer from taedium vitae?' Meantime, as respects the general question of brute suicides, two points must be regarded,—1st, That brutes are cut off from the vast world of moral and imaginative sufferings entailed upon man; 2dly, That this very immunity presupposes another immunity—

'A cool suspense from pleasure and from pain,'

in the far coarser and less irritable animal organization which must be the basis of an insulated physical sensibility. Brutes can neither suffer from intellectual passions, nor, probably, from very complex derangements of the animal system; so that in them the motives to suicide, the temptations to suicide, are prodigiously diminished. Nor are they ever alive to 'the sublime attractions of the grave.' It is, however, a humiliating reflection, that, if any brutes can feel such aspirations, it must be those which are under the care of man. Doubtless the happiness of brutes is sometimes extended by man; but also, too palpably, their misery.

Why suicide is not noticed in the New Testament is a problem yet open to the profound investigator.

VI. Duelling.—No one case, in the vast volume of casuistry, is so difficult to treat with justice and reasonable adaptation to the spirit of modern times, as this of duelling. For, as to those who reason all upon one side, and never hearken in good faith to objections or difficulties, such people convince nobody but those who were already convinced before they began. At present, (1839,) society has for some years been taking a lurch to one side against duelling: but inevitably a reaction will succeed; for, after all, be it as much opposed as it may to Christianity, duelling performs such important functions in society as now constituted—we mean by the sense of instant personal accountability which it diffuses universally amongst gentlemen, and all who have much sensibility to the point of honor—that, for one life which it takes away as an occasional sacrifice, it saves myriads from outrage and affronts—millions from the anxiety attached to inferior bodily strength. However, it is no part of our present purpose to plead the cause of duelling, though pleaded it must be, more fairly than it ever has been, before any progress will be made in suppressing it.

But the point which we wish to notice at present, is the universal blunder about the Romans and Greeks. They, it is alleged, fought no duels; and occasion is thence taken to make very disadvantageous reflections upon us, the men of this Christian era, who, in defiance of our greater light, do fight duels. Lord Bacon himself is duped by this enormous blunder, and founds upon it a long speech in the Star-Chamber.

Now, in the first place, who does not see that, if the Pagans really were enabled by their religion to master their movements of personal anger and hatred, the inevitable inference will be to the disadvantage of Christianity. It would be a clear case. Christianity and Paganism have been separately tried as means of self-control; Christianity has flagrantly failed; Paganism succeeded universally; not having been found unequal to the task in any one known instance.

But this is not so. A profounder error never existed. No religious influence whatever restrained the Greek or the Roman from fighting a duel. It was purely a civic influence, and it was sustained by this remarkable usage—in itself a standing opprobrium to both Greek and Roman—viz. the unlimited license of tongue allowed to anger in the ancient assemblies and senates. This liberty of foul language operated in two ways: 1st, Being universal, it took away all ground for feeling the words of an antagonist as any personal insult; so he had rarely a motive for a duel. 2dly, the anger was thus less acute; yet, if it were acute, then this Billingsgate resource furnished an instantaneous vehicle for expectorating the wrath. Look, for example, at Cicero's orations against Mark Antony, or Catiline, or against Piso. This last person was a senator of the very highest rank, family, connections; yet, in the course of a few pages, does Cicero, a man of letters, polished to the extreme standard of Rome, address him by the elegant appellations of 'filth,' 'mud,' 'carrion,' (projectum cadaver.) How could Piso have complained? It would have been said-'Oh, there's an end of republican simplicity, if plain speaking is to be put down.' And then it would have been added invidiously—'Better men than ever stood in your shoes have borne worse language. Will you complain of what was tolerated by Africanus, by Paulus Aemilius, by Marius, by Sylla?' Who could reply to that? And why should Piso have even wished to call out his foul-mouthed antagonist? On the contrary, a far more genial revenge awaited him than any sword could have furnished. Pass but an hour, and you will hear Piso speaking—it will then be his turn—every dog has his day; and, though not quite so eloquent as his brilliant enemy, he is yet eloquent enough for the purposes of revenge—he is eloquent enough to call Cicero 'filth,' 'mud,' carrion.'

No: the reason of our modern duelling lies deeper than is supposed: it lies in the principle of honor—a direct product of chivalry—as that was in part a product of Christianity. The sense of honor did not exist in Pagan times. Natural equity, and the equity of civil laws—those were the two moral forces under which men acted. Honor applies to cases where both those forces are silent. And precisely because they had no such sense, and because their revenge emptied itself by the basest of all channels, viz. foul speaking and license of tongue, was it that the Greeks and Romans had no duelling. It was no glory to them that they had not, but the foulest blot on their moral grandeur.

How it was that Christianity was able, mediately, to generate the principle of honor, is a separate problem. But this is the true solution of that common casuistical question about duelling.

PART II.

—'Celebrare domestlca facta.'—HOR.

In a former notice of Casuistry, we touched on such cases only as were of public bearings, or such as (if private) were of rare occurrence and of a tragical standard. But ordinary life, in its most domestic paths, teems with cases of difficult decision; or if not always difficult in the decision of the abstract question at issue, difficult in the accommodation of that decision to immediate practice. A few of these more homely cases, intermixed with more public ones, we shall here select and review; for, according to a remark in our first paper, as social economy grows more elaborate, the demand grows more intense for such circumstantial morality. As man advances, casuistry advances. Principles are the same: but the abstraction of principles from accidents and circumstances becomes a work of more effort. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, has not one case; Cicero, three hundred years after, has a few; Paley, eighteen hundred years after Cicero, has many.

There is also something in place as well as in time—in the people as well as the century—which determines the amount of interest in casuistry. We once heard an eminent person delivering it as an opinion, derived from a good deal of personal experience—that of all European nations, the British was that which suffered most from remorse; and that, if internal struggles during temptation, or sufferings of mind after yielding to temptation, were of a nature to be measured upon a scale, or could express themselves sensibly to human knowledge, the annual report from Great Britain, its annual balance-sheet, by comparison with those from continental Europe, would show a large excess. At the time of hearing this remarkable opinion, we, the hearers, were young; and we had little other ground for assent or dissent, than such general impressions of national differences as we might happen to have gathered from the several literatures of Christian nations. These were of a nature to confirm the stranger's verdict; and it will not be denied that much of national character comes forward in literature: but these were not sufficient. Since then, we have had occasion to think closely on that question. We have had occasion to review the public records of Christendom; and beyond all doubt the public conscience, the international conscience, of a people, is the reverberation of its private conscience. History is but the converging into a focus of what is moving in the domestic life below; a set of great circles expressing and summing up, on the dial-plate, the motions of many little circles in the machinery within. Now History, what may be called the Comparative History of Modern Europe, countersigns the traveller's opinion.

'So, then,' says a foreigner, or an Englishman with foreign sympathies, 'the upshot and amount of this doctrine is, that England is more moral than other nations.' 'Well,' we answer, 'and what of that?' Observe, however, that the doctrine went no farther than as to conscientiousness; the principle out of which comes sorrow for all violation of duty; out of which comes a high standard of duty. Meantime both the 'sorrow' and the 'high standard' are very compatible with a lax performance. But suppose we had gone as far as the objector supposes, and had ascribed a moral superiority every way to England, what is there in that to shock probability? Whether the general probability from analogy, or the special probability from the circumstances of this particular case? We all know that there is no general improbability in supposing one nation, or one race, to outrun another. The modern Italians have excelled all nations in musical sensibility, and in genius for painting. They have produced far better music than all the rest of the world put together. And four of their great painters have not been approached hitherto by the painters of any nation. That facial structure, again, which is called the Caucasian, and which, through the ancient Greeks, has travelled westward to the nations of Christendom, and from them (chiefly ourselves) has become the Transatlantic face, is, past all disputing, the finest type of the human countenance divine on this planet. And most other nations, Asiatic or African, have hitherto put up with this insult; except, indeed, the Kalmuck Tartars, who are highly indignant at our European vanity in this matter; and some of them, says Bergmann, the German traveller, absolutely howl with rage, whilst others only laugh hysterically, at any man's having the insanity to prefer the Grecian features to the Kalmuck. Again, amongst the old pagan nations, the Romans seem to have had 'the call' for going ahead; and they fulfilled their destiny in spite of all that the rest of the world could do to prevent them. So that, far from it being an improbable or unreasonable assumption, superiority (of one kind or other) has been the indefeasible inheritance of this and that nation, at all periods of history.

Still less is the notion tenable of any special improbability applying to this particular pretension. For centuries has England enjoyed—1st, civil liberty; 2d, the Protestant faith. Now in those two advantages are laid the grounds, the very necessities, a priori, of a superior morality. But watch the inconsistency of men: ask one of these men who dispute this English pretension mordicus; ask him, or bid an Austrian serf ask him, what are the benefits of Protestantism, and what the benefits of liberty, that he should risk anything to obtain either. Hear how eloquently he insists upon their beneficial results, severally and jointly; and notice that he places foremost among those results a pure morality. Is he wrong? No: the man speaks bare truth. But what brute oblivion he manifests of his own doctrine, in taxing with arrogance any people for claiming one of those results in esse, which he himself could see so clearly in posse! Talk no more of freedom, or of a pure religion, as fountains of a moral pre-eminence, if those who have possessed them in combination for the longest space of time may not, without arrogance, claim the vanward place amongst the nations of Europe.

So far as to the presumptions, general or special; so far as to the probabilities, analogous or direct, in countenance of this British claim. Finally, when we come to the proofs, from fact and historical experience, we might appeal to a singular case in the records of our Exchequer; viz., that for much more than a century back, our Gazette and other public advertisers, have acknowledged a series of anonymous remittances from those who, at some time or other, had appropriated public money. We understand that no corresponding fact can be cited from foreign records. Now, this is a direct instance of that compunction which our travelled friend insisted on. But we choose rather to throw ourselves upon the general history of Great Britain, upon the spirit of her policy, domestic or foreign, and upon the universal principles of her public morality. Take the case of public debts, and the fulfilment of contracts to those who could not have compelled the fulfilment; we first set this precedent. All nations have now learned that honesty in such cases is eventually the best policy; but this they learned from our experience, and not till nearly all of them had tried the other policy. We it was, who, under the most trying circumstances of war, maintained the sanctity from taxation of all foreign investments in our funds. Our conduct with regard to slaves, whether in the case of slavery or of the slave-trade—how prudent it may always have been, we need not inquire; as to its moral principles, they went so far ahead of European standards, that we were neither comprehended nor believed. The perfection of romance was ascribed to us by all who did not reproach us with the perfection of Jesuitical knavery; by many our motto was supposed to be no longer the old one of 'divide et impera,' but 'annihila et appropria.' Finally, looking back to our dreadful conflicts with the three conquering despots of modern history, Philip II. of Spain, Louis XIV., and Napoleon, we may incontestably boast of having been single in maintaining the general equities of Europe by war upon a colossal scale, and by our councils in the general congresses of Christendom.

Such a review would amply justify the traveller's remarkable dictum upon the principle of remorse, and therefore of conscientiousness, as existing in greater strength amongst the people of Great Britain. In the same proportion we may assume, in such a people, a keener sensibility to moral distinctions; more attention to shades of difference in the modes of action; more anxiety as to the grounds of action. In the same proportion we may assume a growing and more direct regard to casuistry; which is precisely the part of ethics that will be continually expanding, and continually throwing up fresh doubts. Not as though a moral principle could ever be doubtful. But that the growing complexity of the circumstances will make it more and more difficult in judgment to detach the principle from the case; or, in practice, to determine the application of the principle to the facts. It will happen, therefore, as Mr. Coleridge used to say happened in all cases of importance, that extremes meet: for casuistical ethics will be most consulted by two classes the most opposite to each other—by those who seek excuses for evading their duties, and by those who seek a special fulness of light for fulfilling them.

CASE I.

HEALTH.

Strange it is, that moral treatises, when professing to lay open the great edifice of human duties, and to expose its very foundations, should not have begun with, nay, should not have noticed at all, those duties which a man owes to himself, and, foremost amongst them, the duty of cultivating his own health. For it is evident, that, from mere neglect of that one personal duty, with the very best intentions possible, all other duties whatever may become impossible; for good intentions exist in all stages of efficiency, from the fugitive impulse to the realizing self-determination. In this life, the elementary blessing is health. What! do we presume to place it before peace of mind? Far from it; but we speak of the genesis; of the succession in which all blessings descend; not as to time, but the order of dependency. All morality implies free agency: it presumes beyond all other conditions an agent who is in perfect possession of his own volitions. Now, it is certain that a man without health is not uniformly master of his own purposes. Often he cannot be said either to be in the path of duty or out of it; so incoherent are the actions of a man forced back continually from the objects of his intellect and choice upon some alien objects dictated by internal wretchedness. It is true that, by possibility, some derangements of the human system are not incompatible with happiness: and a celebrated German author of the last century, Von Hardenberg—better known by his assumed name of Novalis—maintained, that certain modes of ill health, or valetudinarianism, were pre-requisites towards certain modes of intellectual development. But the ill health to which he pointed could not have gone beyond a luxurious indisposition; nor the corresponding intellectual purposes have been other than narrow, fleeting, and anomalous. Inflammatory action, in its earlier stages, is sometimes connected with voluptuous sensations: so is the preternatural stimulation of the liver. But these states, as pleasurable states, are transitory. All fixed derangements of the health are doubly hostile to the moral energies: first, through the intellect, which they debilitate unconsciously in many ways; and next, both consciously and semi-consciously, through the will. The judgment is, perhaps, too clouded to fix upon a right purpose: the will too enfeebled to pursue it.

Two general remarks may be applied to all, interferences of the physical with the moral sanity; 1st, That it is not so much by absolute deductions of time that ill health operates upon the serviceableness of a man, as by its lingering effects upon his temper and his animal spirits. Many a man has not lost one hour of his life from illness, whose faculties of usefulness have been most seriously impaired through gloom, or untuned feelings; 3d, That it is not the direct and known risks to our health which act with the most fatal effects, but the semi-conscious condition, the atmosphere of circumstances, with which artificial life surrounds us. The great cities of Europe, perhaps London beyond all others, under the modern modes of life and business, create a vortex of preternatural tumult, a rush and frenzy of excitement, which is fatal to far more than are heard of as express victims to that system.

The late Lord Londonderry's nervous seizure was no solitary or rare case. So much we happen to know. We are well assured by medical men of great London practice, that the case is one of growing frequency. In Lord Londonderry it attracted notice for reasons of obvious personal interest, as well as its tragical catastrophe. But the complaint, though one of modern growth, is well known, and comes forward under a most determinate type as to symptoms, among the mercantile class. The original predisposition to it, lies permanently in the condition of London life, especially as it exists for public men. But the immediate existing cause, which fires the train always ready for explosion, is invariably some combination of perplexities, such as are continually gathering into dark clouds over the heads of great merchants; sometimes only teasing and molesting, sometimes menacing and alarming. These perplexities are generally moving in counteracting paths: some progressive, some retrograde. There lies a man's safety. But at times it will happen that all comes at once; and then comes a shock such as no brain already predisposed by a London life, is strong enough (but more truly let us say—coarse enough) to support.

Lord Londonderry's case was precisely of that order: he had been worried by a long session of Parliament, which adds the crowning irritation in the interruption of sleep. The nervous system, ploughed up by intense wear and tear, is denied the last resource of natural relief. In this crisis, already perilous, a new tempest was called in—of all the most terrific—the tempest of anxiety: and from what source? Anxiety from fear, is bad: from hope delayed, is bad: but worst of all is anxiety from responsibility, in cases where disease or weakness makes a man feel that he is unequal to the burden. The diplomatic interests of the country had been repeatedly confided to Lord Londonderry: he had justified that confidence: he had received affecting testimonies of the honor which belonged to such a situation. But a short time before his fatal seizure, in passing through Birmingham at a moment when all the gentlemen of the place were assembled, he had witnessed the whole assembly—no mob, but the collective good sense of the place—by one impulse standing bareheaded in his presence,—a tribute of disinterested homage which affected him powerfully, and which was well understood as offered to his foreign diplomacy. Under these circumstances could he bear to transfer or delegate the business of future negotiation? Could he suffer to lapse into other hands, as a derelict, the consummation of that task which thus far he had so prosperously conducted? Was it in human nature to do so? He felt the same hectic of human passion which Lord Nelson felt in the very gates of death, when some act of command was thoughtlessly suggested as belonging to his successor—'Not whilst I live, Hardy; not whilst I live.' Yet, in Lord Londonderry's case, it was necessary, if he would not transfer the trust, that he should rally his enegies instantly: for a new Congress was even then assembling. There was no delay open to him by the nature of the case: the call was —now, now, just as you are, my lord, with those shattered nerves and that agitated brain, take charge of interests the most complex in Christendom: to say the truth, of interests which are those of Christendom.

This struggle, between a nervous systm too grievously shaken, and the instant demand for energy seven times intensified, was too much for any generous nature. A ceremonial embassy might have been fulfilled by shattered nerves; but not this embassy. Anxiety supervening upon nervous derangement was bad; anxiety through responsibility was worse; but through a responsibility created by grateful confidence, it was an appeal through the very pangs of martyrdom. No brain could stand such a siege. Lord Londonderry's gave way; and he fell with the tears of the generous, even where they might happen to differ from him in politics.

Meantime, this case, belonging to a class generated by a London life, was in some quarters well understood even then; now, it is well known that, had different remedies been applied, or had the sufferer been able to stand up under his torture until the cycle of the symptoms had begun to come round, he might have been saved. The treatment is now well understood; but even then it was understood by some physicians; amongst others by that Dr. Willis who had attended George III. In several similar cases overpowering doses had been given of opium, or of brandy; and usually a day or two had carried off the oppression of the brain by a tremendous reaction.

In Birmingham and other towns, where the body of people called Quakers are accumulated, different forms of nervous derangement are developed; the secret principle of which turns not, as in these London cases, upon feelings too much called out by preternatural stimulation, but upon feelings too much repelled and driven in. Morbid suppression of deep sensibilities must lead to states of disease equally terrific and perhaps even less tractable; not so sudden and critical perhaps, but more settled and gloomy. We speak not of any physical sensibilities, but of those which are purely moral—sensibilities to poetic emotions, to ambition, to social gaiety. Accordingly it is amongst the young men and women of this body that the most afflicting cases under this type occur. Even for children, however, the systematic repression of all ebullient feeling, under the Quaker discipline, must be sometimes perilous; and would be more so, were it not for that marvellous flexibility with which nature adapts herself to all changes—whether imposed by climate or by situation—by inflictions of Providence or by human spirit of system.

These cases we point to as formidable mementos, monumenta sacra, of those sudden catastrophes which either ignorance of what concerns the health, or neglect in midst of knowledge, may produce. Any mode of life in London, or not in London, which trains the nerves to a state of permanent irritation, prepares a nidus for disease; and unhappily not for chronic disease only, but for disease of that kind which finishes the struggle almost before it is begun. In such a state of habitual training for morbid action, it may happen—and often has happened—that one and the same week sees the victim apparently well and in his grave.

These, indeed, are extreme cases: though still such as threaten many more than they actually strike; for, though uncommon, they grow out of very common habits. But even the ordinary cases of unhealthy action in the system, are sufficient to account for perhaps three-fourths of all the disquiet and bad temper which disfigure daily life. Not one man in every ten is perfectly clear of some disorder, more or less, in the digestive system—not one man in fifty enjoys the absolutely normal state of that organ; and upon that depends the daily cheerfulness, in the first place, and through that (as well as by more direct actions) the sanity of the judgment. To speak strictly, not one man in a hundred is perfectly sane even as to his mind. For, though the greater disturbances of the mind do not take place in more than one man of each thousand,[Footnote: in several nations that has been found to be the average proportion of the insane. But this calculation has never been made to include all the slighter cases. It is not impossible that at some periods the whole human race may have been partially insane.] the slighter shades that settle on the judgment, which daily bring up thoughts such as a man would gladly banish, which force him into moods of feeling irritating at the moment, and wearing to the animal spirits,—these derangements are universal.

From the greater alike and the lesser, no man can free himself but in the proportion of his available knowledge applied to his own animal system, and of the surrounding circumstances, as constantly acting on that system. Would we, then, desire that every man should interrupt his proper studies or pursuits for the sake of studying medicine? Not at all: nor is that requisite. The laws of health are as simple as the elements of arithmetic or geometry. It is required only that a man should open his eyes to perceive the three great forces which support health.

They are these: 1. The blood requires exercise: 2. The great central organ of the stomach requires adaptation of diet: 3. The nervous system requires regularity of sleep. In those three functions of sleep, diet, exercise, is contained the whole economy of health. All three of course act and react upon each other: and all three are wofully deranged by a London life—above all, by a parliamentary life. As to the first point, it is probable that any torpor, or even lentor in the blood, such as scarcely expresses itself sensibly through the pulse, renders that fluid less able to resist the first actions of disease. As to the second, a more complex subject, luckily we benefit not by our own brief experience exclusively; every man benefits practically by the traditional experience of ages, which constitutes the culinary experience in every land and every household. The inheritance of knowledge, which every generation receives, as to the salubrity of this or that article of diet, operates continually in preventing dishes from being brought to table. Each man's separate experience does something to arm him against the temptation when it is offered; and again, the traditional experience far oftener intercepts the temptation. As to the third head, sleep, this of all is the most immediately fitted by nature to the relief of the brain and its exquisite machinery of nerves:—it is the function of health most attended to in our navy; and of all it is the one most painfully ravaged by a London life.

Thus it would appear, that the three great laws of health, viz., motion, rest, and temperance, (by a more adequate expression, adaptation to the organ,) are, in a certain gross way, taught to every man by his personal experience. The difficulty is—as in so many other cases—not for the understanding, but for the will—not to know, but to execute.

Now here steps in Casuistry with two tremendous suggestions, sufficient to alarm any thoughtful man, and rouse him more effectually to the performance of his duty.

First, that under the same law (whatever that law may be) which makes suicide a crime, must the neglect of health be a crime? For thus stand the two accounts:—By suicide you have cut off a portion unknown from your life: years it may be, but possibly only days. By neglect of health you have cut off a portion unknown from your life: days it may be, but also by possibility years. So the practical result may be the same in either case; or, possibly, the least is suicide. 'Yes,' you reply, 'the practical results—but not the purpose—not the intention—ergo, not the crime.' Certainly not: in the one case the result arises from absolute predetermination, with the whole energies of the will; in the other it arises in spite of your will, (meaning your choice)—it arises out of human infirmity. But still the difference is as between choosing a crime for its own sake, and falling into it from strong temptation.

Secondly, that in every case of duty unfulfilled, or duty imperfectly fulfilled, in consequence of illness, languor, decaying spirits, &c., there is a high probability (under the age of sixty-five almost a certainty) that a part of the obstacle is due to self-neglect. No man that lives but loses some of his time from ill health, or at least from the incipient forms of ill health—bad spirits, or indisposition to exertion. Now, taking men even as they are, statistical societies have ascertained that, from the ages of twenty to sixty-five, ill health, such as to interrupt daily labor, averages from seven days to about fourteen per annum. In the best circumstances of climate, occupation, &c., one fifty-second part of the time perishes to the species—in the least favorable, two such parts. Consequently, in the forty-five years from twenty to sixty-five, not very far from a year perishes on an average to every man—to some as much more. A considerable part even of this loss is due to neglect or mismanagement of health. But this estimate records only the loss of time in a pecuniary sense; which loss, being powerfully restrained by self-interest, will be the least possible under the circumstances. The loss of energy, as applied to duties not connected with any self-interest, will be far more. In so far as that loss emanates from defect of spirits, or other modes of vital torpor, such as neglect of health has either caused or promoted, and care might have prevented, in so far the omission is charged to our own responsibility. Many men fancy that the slight injuries done by each single act of intemperance, are like the glomeration of moonbeams upon moonbeams—myriads will not amount to a positive value. Perhaps they are wrong; possibly every act—nay, every separate pulse or throb of intemperate sensation—is numbered in our own after actions; reproduces itself in some future perplexity; comes back in some reversionary shape that injures the freedom of action for all men, and makes good men afflicted. At all events, it is an undeniable fact, that many a case of difficulty, which in apology for ourselves we very truly plead to be insurmountable by our existing energies, has borrowed its sting from previous acts or omissions of our own; it might not have been insurmountable, had we better cherished our physical resources. For instance, of such a man it is said—he did not assist in repelling an injury from his friend or his native land. 'True,' says his apologist, 'but you would not require him to do so when he labors under paralysis?' 'No, certainly; but, perhaps, he might not have labored under paralysis had he uniformly taken care of his health.'[Footnote: With respect to the management of health, although it is undoubtedly true that like the 'primal charities,' in the language of Wordsworth, in proportion to its importance it shines alike for all, and is diffused universally—yet not the less, in every age, some very obstinate prejudices have prevailed to darken the truth. Thus Dryden authorizes the conceit, that medicine can never be useful or requisite, because—

'God never made his work for man to mend.'

To mend! No, glorious John, neither physician nor patient has any such presumptuous fancy; we take medicine to mend the injuries produced by our own folly. What the medicine mends is not God's work, but our own. The medicine is a plus certainly; but it is a plus applied to a minus of our own introducing. Even in these days of practical knowledge, errors prevail on the subject of health which are neither trivial nor of narrow operation. Universally, the true theory of digestion, as partially unfolded in Dr. Wilson Philip's experiments on rabbits, is so far mistaken, and even inverted—that Lord Byron, when seeking a diet of easy digestion, instead of resorting to animal food broiled and underdone, which all medical men know to be the most digestible food, took to a vegetable diet, which requires a stomach of extra power. The same error is seen in the common notion about the breakfast of ladies in Elizabeth's days, as if fit only for ploughmen; whereas it is our breakfasts of slops which require the powerful organs of digestion. The same error, again, is current in the notion that a weak watery diet is fit for a weak person. Such a person peculiarly requires solid food. It is also a common mistake to suppose that, because no absolute illness is caused by daily errors of diet, these errors are practically cancelled. Cowper the poet delivers the very just opinion—that all disorders of a function (as, suppose, the secretion of bile,) sooner or later, if not corrected, cease to be functional disorders, and become organic.]

Let not the reader suspect us of the Popish doctrine, that men are to enter hereafter into a separate reckoning for each separate act, or to stand at all upon their own merits. That reckoning, we Protestants believe, no man could stand; and that some other resource must be had than any personal merits of the individual. But still we should recollect that this doctrine, though providing a refuge for past offences, provides none for such offences as are committed deliberately, with a prospective view to the benefits of such a refuge. Offend we may, and we must: but then our offences must come out of mere infirmity—not because we calculate upon a large allowance being made to us, and say to ourselves, 'Let us take out our allowance.'

Casuistry, therefore, justly, and without infringing any truth of Christianity, urges the care of health as the basis of all moral action, because, in fact, of all perfectly voluntary action. Every impulse of bad health jars or untunes some string in the fine harp of human volition; and because a man cannot be a moral being but in the proportion of his free action, therefore it is clear that no man can be in a high sense moral, except in so far as through health he commands his bodily powers, and is not commanded by them.

CASE II.

LAWS OF HOSPITALITY IN COLLISION WITH CIVIC DUTIES.

Suppose the case, that taking shelter from a shower of rain in a stranger's house, you discover proofs of a connection with smugglers. Take this for one pole of such case, the trivial extreme; then for the other pole, the greater extreme, suppose the case, that, being hospitably entertained, and happening to pass the night in a stranger's house, you are so unfortunate as to detect unquestionable proofs of some dreadful crime, say murder, perpetrated in past times by one of the family. The principle at issue is the same in both cases: viz., the command resting upon the conscience to forget private consideration and personal feelings in the presence of any solemn duty; yet merely the difference of degree, and not any at all in the kind of duty, would lead pretty generally to a separate practical decision for the several cases. In the last of the two, whatever might be the pain to a person's feelings, he would feel himself to have no discretion or choice left. Reveal he must; not only, if otherwise revealed, he must come forward as a witness, but, if not revealed, he must denounce—he must lodge an information, and that instantly, else even in law, without question of morality, he makes himself a party to the crime—an accomplice after the act. That single consideration would with most men at once cut short all deliberation. And yet even in such a situation, there is a possible variety of the case that might alter its complexion. If the crime had been committed many years before, and under circumstances which precluded all fear that the same temptation or the same provocation should arise again, most reflecting people would think it the better course to leave the criminal to his conscience. Often in such denunciations it is certain that human impertinence, and the spirit which sustains the habit of gossip, and mere incontinence of secrets, and vulgar craving for being the author of a sensation, have far more often led to the publication of the offence, than any concern for the interests of morality.

On the other hand, with respect to the slighter extreme—viz. in a case where the offence is entirely created by the law, with no natural turpitude about it and besides (which is a strong argument in the case) enjoying no special facilities of escaping justice—no man in the circumstances supposed would have a reason for hesitating. The laws of hospitality are of everlasting obligation; they are equally binding on the host and on the guest. Coming under a man's roof for one moment, in the clear character of guest, creates an absolute sanctity in the consequent relations which connect the parties. That is the popular feeling. The king in the old ballads is always represented as feeling that it would be damnable to make a legal offence out of his own venison which he had eaten as a guest. There is a cleaving pollution, like that of the Syrian leprosy, in the act of abusing your privileges as a guest, or in any way profiting by your opportunities as a guest to the injury of your confiding host. Henry VII. though a prince, was no gentleman; and in the famous case of his dining with Lord Oxford, and saying at his departure, with reference to an infraction of his recent statute, 'My Lord, I thank you for my good cheer, but my attorney must speak with you;' Lord Oxford might have justly retorted, 'If he does, then posterity will speak pretty plainly with your Majesty;' for it was in the character of Lord Oxford's guest that he had learned the infraction of his law. Meantime, the general rule, and the rationale of the rule, in such cases, appears to be this: Whenever there is, or can be imagined, a sanctity in the obligations on one side, and only a benefit of expediency in the obligations upon the other, the latter must give way. For the detection of smuggling, (the particular offence supposed in the case stated,) society has an express and separate machinery maintained. If their activity droops, that is the business of government. In such a case, government is entitled to no aid from private citizens; on the express understanding that no aid must be expected, has so expensive an establishment been submitted to. Each individual refuses to participate in exposure of such offences, for the same reason that he refuses to keep the street clean even before his own door—he has already paid for having such work discharged by proxy.

CASE III.

GIVING CHARACTERS TO SERVANTS WHO HAVE MISCONDUCTED THEMSELVES.

No case so constantly arises to perplex the conscience in private life as this—which, in principle, is almost beyond solution. Sometimes, indeed, the coarse realities of law step in to cut that Gordian knot which no man can untie; for it is an actionable offence to give a character wilfully false. That little fact at once exorcises all aerial phantoms of the conscience. True: but this coarse machinery applies only to those cases in which the servant has been guilty in a way amenable to law. In any case short of that, no plaintiff would choose to face the risks of an action; nor could he sustain it; the defendant would always have a sufficient resource in the vagueness and large latitude allowed to opinion when estimating the qualities of a servant. Almost universally, therefore, the case comes back to the forum of conscience. Now in that forum how stands the pleading? Too certainly, we will suppose, that the servant has not satisfied your reasonable expectations. This truth you would have no difficulty in declaring; here, as much as anywhere else, you would feel it unworthy of your own integrity to equivocate—you open your writing-desk, and sit down to tell the mere truth in as few words as possible. But then steps in the consideration, that to do this without disguise or mitigation, is oftentimes to sign a warrant for the ruin of a fellow-creature—and that fellow-creature possibly penitent, in any case thrown upon your mercy. Who can stand this? In lower walks of life, it is true that mistresses often take servants without any certificate of character; but in higher grades this is notoriously uncommon, and in great cities dangerous. Besides, the candidate may happen to be a delicate girl, incapable of the hard labor incident to such a lower establishment. Here, then, is a case where conscience says into your left ear—Fiat justitia, ruat caelum—'Do your duty without looking to consequences.' Meantime, into the right ear conscience says, 'But mark, in that case possibly you consign this poor girl to prostitution.' Lord Nelson, as is well known, was once placed in a dilemma equally trying;[Footnote: On the first expedition against Copenhagen, (in 1801.) He was unfortunately second in command; his principal, a brave man in person, wanted moral courage—he could not face responsibility in a trying shape. And had he not been blessed with a disobedient second in command, he must have returned home re infecta.] on one side, an iron tongue sang out from the commander-in-chief—retreat; on the other, his own oracular heart sang to him—advance. How he decided is well known; and the words in which he proclaimed his decision ought to be emblazoned for ever as the noblest of all recorded repartees. Waiving his hand towards the Admiral's ship, he said to his own officers, who reported the signal of recall—'You may see it; I cannot; you know I am blind on that side.' Oh, venerable blindness! immortal blindness! None so deaf as those who will not hear; none so gloriously blind as those who will not see any danger or difficulty—who have a dark eye on that side, whilst they reserve another blazing like a meteor for honor and their country's interest. Most of us, we presume, in the case stated about the servant, hear but the whispering voice of conscience as regards the truth, and her thundering voice as regards the poor girl's interest. In doing this, however, we (and doubtless others) usually attempt to compromise the opposite suggestions of conscience by some such jesuitical device as this. We dwell pointedly upon those good qualities which the servant really possesses, and evade speaking of any others. But how, if minute, searching and circumstantial inquiries are made by way of letter? In that case, we affect to have noticed only such as we can answer with success, passing the dangerous ones as so many rocks, sub silentio. All this is not quite right, you think, reader. Why, no; so think we; but what alternative is allowed? 'Say, ye severest, what would ye have done?' In very truth, this is a dilemma for which Casuistry is not a match; unless, indeed, Casuistry as armed and equipped in the school of Ignatius Loyola. But that is with us reputed a piratical Casuistry. The whole estate of a servant lies in his capacity of serving; and often if you tell the truth, by one word you ruin this estate for ever. Meantime, a case very much of the same quality, and of even greater difficulty, is

CASE IV.

CRIMINAL PROSECUTION OF FRAUDULENT SERVANTS.

Any reader, who is not deeply read in the economy of English life, will have a most inadequate notion of the vast extent to which this case occurs. We are well assured, (for our information comes from quarters judicially conversant with the question,) that in no other channel of human life does there flow one-hundredth part of the forbearance and the lenity which are called into action by the relation between injured masters and their servants. We are informed that, were every third charge pursued effectually, half the courts in Europe would not suffice for the cases of criminality which emerge in London alone under this head. All England would, in the course of five revolving years, have passed under the torture of subpoena, as witnesses for the prosecution or the defence. This multiplication of cases arises from the coincidence of hourly opportunity with hourly temptation, both carried to the extreme verge of possibility, and generally falling in with youth in the offenders. These aggravations of the danger are three several palliations of the crime, and they have weight allowed to them by the indulgent feelings of masters in a corresponding degree; not one case out of six score that are discovered (while, perhaps, another six score go undiscovered) being ever prosecuted with rigor and effect.

In this universal laxity of temper lies an injury too serious to public morals; and the crime reproduces itself abundantly under an indulgence so Christian in its motive, but unfortunately operating with the full effect of genial culture. Masters, who have made themselves notorious by indiscriminate forgiveness, might be represented symbolically as gardeners watering and tending luxuriant crops of crime in hot-beds or forcing-houses. In London, many are the tradesmen, who, being reflective as well as benevolent, perceive that something is amiss in the whole system. In part the law has been to blame, stimulating false mercy by punishment disproportioned to the offence. But many a judicious master has seen cause to suspect his own lenity as more mischievously operative even than the law's hardness, and as an effeminate surrender to luxurious sensibilities. Those have not been the severest masters whose names are attached to fatal prosecutions: on the contrary, three out of four have been persons who looked forward to general consequences—having, therefore, been more than usually thoughtful, were, for that reason, likely to be more than usually humane. They did not suffer the less acutely, because their feelings ran counter to the course of what they believed to be their duty. Prosecutors often sleep with less tranquillity during the progress of a judicial proceeding than the objects of the prosecution. An English judge of the last century, celebrated for his uprightness, used to balance against that pity so much vaunted for the criminal, the duty of 'a pity to the country.' But private prosecutors of their own servants, often feel both modes of pity at the same moment.

For this difficulty a book of Casuistry might suggest a variety of resources, not so much adapted to a case of that nature already existing, as to the prevention of future cases. Every mode of trust or delegated duty would suggest its own separate improvements; but all improvements must fall under two genuine heads—first, the diminution of temptation, either by abridging the amount of trust reposed; or, where that is difficult, by shortening its duration, and multiplying the counterchecks: secondly, by the moderation of the punishment in the event of detection, as the sole means of reconciling the public conscience to the law, and diminishing the chances of impunity. There is a memorable proof of the rash extent to which the London tradesmen, at one time, carried their confidence in servants. So many clerks, or apprentices, were allowed to hold large balances of money in their hands through the intervals of their periodical settlings, that during the Parliamentary war multitudes were tempted, by that single cause, into absconding. They had always a refuge in the camps. And the loss sustained in this way was so heavy, when all payments were made in gold, that to this one evil suddenly assuming a shape of excess, is ascribed, by some writers, the first establishment of goldsmiths as bankers.[Footnote: Goldsmiths certainly acted in that capacity from an earlier period. But from this era, until the formation of the Bank of England in 1696, they entered more fully upon the functions of bankers, issuing notes which passed current in London.]

Two other weighty considerations attach to this head—1. The known fact that large breaches of trust, and embezzlements, are greatly on the increase, and have been since the memorable case of Mr. Fauntleroy. America is, and will be for ages, a city of refuge for this form of guilt. 2. That the great training of the conscience in all which regards pecuniary justice and fidelity to engagements, lies through the discipline and tyrocinium of the humbler ministerial offices—those of clerks, book-keepers, apprentices. The law acts through these offices, for the unconfirmed conscience, as leading-strings to an infant in its earliest efforts at walking. It forces to go right, until the choice may be supposed trained and fully developed. That is the great function of the law; a function which it will perform with more or less success, as it is more or less fitted to win the cordial support of masters.

CASE V.

VERACITY.

Here is a special 'title,' (to speak with the civil lawyers,) under that general claim put in for England with respect to a moral pre-eminence amongst the nations. Many are they who, in regions widely apart, have noticed with honor the English superiority in the article of veneration for truth. Not many years ago, two Englishmen, on their road overland to India, fell in with a royal cortege, and soon after with the prime minister and the crown prince of Persia. The prince honored them with an interview; both parties being on horseback, and the conversation therefore reduced to the points of nearest interest. Amongst these was the English character. Upon this the prince's remark was—that what had most impressed him with respect for England and her institutions was, the remarkable spirit of truth-speaking which distinguished her sons; as supposing her institutions to grow out of her sons, and her sons out of her institutions. And indeed well he might have this feeling by comparison with his own countrymen: Persians have no principles apparently on this point—all is impulse and accident of feeling. Thus the journal of the two Persian princes in London, as lately reported in the newspapers, is one tissue of falsehoods: not, most undoubtedly, from any purpose of deceiving, but from the overmastering habit (cherished by their whole training and experience) of repeating everything in a spirit of amplification, with a view to the wonder only of the hearer. The Persians are notoriously the Frenchmen of the East; the same gaiety, the same levity, the same want of depth both as to feeling and principle. The Turks are much nearer to the English: the same gravity of temperament, the same meditativeness, the same sternness of principle. Of all European nations, the French is that which least regards truth. The whole spirit of their private memoirs and their anecdotes illustrates this. To point an anecdote or a repartee, there is no extravagance of falsehood that the French will not endure. What nation but the French would have tolerated that monstrous fiction about La Fontaine, by way of illustrating his supposed absence of mind—viz. that, on meeting his own son in a friend's house, he expressed his admiration of the young man, and begged to know his name. The fact probably may have been that La Fontaine was not liable to any absence at all: apparently this 'distraction' was assumed as a means of making a poor sort of sport for his friends. Like many another man in such circumstances, he saw and entered into the fun which his own imaginary forgetfulness produced. But were it otherwise, who can believe so outrageous a self-forgetfulness as that which would darken his eyes to the very pictures of his own hearth? Were such a thing possible, were it even real, it would still be liable to the just objection of the critics—that, being marvelous in appearance, even as a fact it ought not to be brought forward for any purpose of wit, but only as a truth of physiology, or as a fact in the records of a surgeon. The 'incredulus odi' is too strong in such cases, and it adheres to three out of every four French anecdotes. The French taste is, indeed, anything but good in all that department of wit and humor. And the ground lies in their national want of veracity. To return to England—and having cited an Oriental witness to the English character on this point, let us now cite a most observing one in the West. Kant, in Konigsberg, was surrounded by Englishmen and by foreigners of all nations—foreign and English students, foreign and English merchants; and he pronounced the main characteristic feature of the English as a nation to lie in their severe reverence for truth. This from him was no slight praise; for such was the stress he laid upon veracity, that upon this one quality he planted the whole edifice of moral excellence. General integrity could not exist, he held, without veracity as its basis; nor that basis exist without superinducing general integrity.

This opinion, perhaps, many beside Kant will see cause to approve. For ourselves we can truly say—never did we know a human being, boy or girl, who began life as an habitual undervaluer of truth, that did not afterwards exhibit a character conformable to that beginning—such a character as, however superficially correct under the steadying hand of self-interest, was not in a lower key of moral feeling as well as of principle.

But out of this honorable regard to veracity in Immanuel Kant, branched out a principle in Casuistry which most people will pronounce monstrous. It has occasioned much disputing backwards and forwards. But as a practical principle of conduct, (for which Kant meant it,) inevitably it must be rejected—if for no other reason because it is at open war with the laws and jurisprudence of all Christian Europe. Kant's doctrine was this; and the illustrative case in which it is involved, let it be remembered, is his own:—So sacred a thing, said he, is truth—that if a murderer, pursuing another with an avowed purpose of killing him, were to ask of a third person by what road the fleeing party had fled, that person is bound to give him true information. And you are at liberty to suppose this third person a wife, a daughter, or under any conceivable obligations of love and duty to the fugitive. Now this is monstrous: and Kant himself, with all his parental fondness for the doctrine, would certainly have been recalled to sounder thoughts by these two considerations—

1_st_. That by all the codes of law received throughout Europe, he who acted upon Kant's principle would be held a particeps criminis—an accomplice before the fact.

2_d_. That, in reality, a just principle is lurking under Kant's error; but a principle translated from its proper ground. Not truth, individual or personal—not truth of mere facts, but truth doctrinal—the truth which teaches, the truth which changes men and nations—this is the truth concerned in Kant's meaning, had he explained his own meaning to himself more distinctly. With respect to that truth, wheresoever it lies, Kant's doctrine applies—that all men have a right to it; that perhaps you have no right to suppose of any race or nation that it is not prepared to receive it; and, at any rate, that no circumstances of expedience can justify you in keeping it back.

CASE VI.

THE CASE OF CHARLES I.

Many cases arise from the life and political difficulties of Charles I. But there is one so peculiarly pertinent to an essay which entertains the general question of Casuistry—its legitimacy, its value—that with this, although not properly a domestic case, or only such in a mixed sense, we shall conclude.

No person has been so much attacked for his scruples of conscience as this prince; and what seems odd enough, no person has been so much attacked for resorting to books of Casuistry, and for encouraging literary men to write books of Casuistry. Under his suggestion and sanction, Saunderson wrote his book on the obligation of an oath, (for which there was surely reason enough in days when the democratic tribunals were forcing men to swear to an et caetera;) and, by an impulse originally derived from him, Jeremy Taylor wrote afterwards his Ductor Dubitantium, Bishop Barlow wrote his Cases of Conscience, &c. &c.

For this dedication of his studies, Charles has been plentifully blamed in after times. He was seeking evasions for plain duties, say his enemies. He was arming himself for intrigue in the school of Machiavel. But now turn to his history, and ask in what way any man could have extricated himself from that labyrinth which invested his path but by Casuistry. Cases the most difficult are offered for his decision: peace for a distracted nation in 1647, on terms which seemed fatal to the monarchy; peace for the same nation under the prospect of war rising up again during the Isle of Wight treaty in 1648, but also under the certainty of destroying the Church of England. On the one side, by refusing, he seemed to disown his duties as the father of his people. On the other side, by yielding, he seemed to forget his coronation oath, and the ultimate interests of his people—to merge the future and the reversionary in the present and the fugitive. It was not within the possibilities that he could so act as not to offend one half of the nation. His dire calamity it was, that he must be hated, act how he would, and must be condemned by posterity. Did his enemies allow for the misery of this internal conflict? Milton, who never appears to more disadvantage than when he comes forward against his sovereign, is indignant that Charles should have a conscience, or plead a conscience, in a public matter. Henderson, the celebrated Scotch theologian, came post from Edinburgh to London (whence he went to Newcastle) expressly to combat the king's scruples. And he also (in his private letters) seems equally enraged as Milton, that Charles should pretend to any private conscience in a state question.

Now let us ask—what was it that originally drove Charles to books of Casuistry? It was the deep shock which he received, both in his affections and his conscience, from the death of Lord Strafford. Every body had then told him, even those who felt how much the law must be outraged to obtain a conviction of Lord Strafford, how many principles of justice must be shaken, and how sadly the royal word must suffer in its sanctity,—yet all had told him that it was expedient to sacrifice that nobleman. One man ought not to stand between the king and his alienated people. It was good for the common welfare that Lord Strafford should die. Charles was unconvinced. He was sure of the injustice; and perhaps he doubted even of the expedience. But his very virtues were armed against his peace. In all parts of his life self-distrust and diffidence had marked his character. What was he, a single person, to resist so many wise counsellors, and what in a representative sense was the nation ranged on the other side? He yielded: and it is not too much to say that he never had a happy day afterwards. The stirring period of his life succeeded—the period of war, camps, treaties. Much time was not allowed him for meditation. But there is abundant proof that such time as he had, always pointed his thoughts backwards to the afflicting case of Lord Stratford. This he often spoke of as the great blot—the ineffaceable transgression of his life. For this he mourned in penitential words yet on record. To this he traced back the calamity of his latter life. Lord Stratford's memorable words—'Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of princes,'—rang for ever in his ear. Lord Stafford's blood lay like a curse upon his throne.

Now, by what a pointed answer, drawn from this one case, might Charles have replied to the enemies we have noticed—to those, like so many historians since his day, who taxed him with studying Casuistry for the purposes of intrigue—to those, like Milton and Henderson, who taxed him with exercising his private conscience on public questions.

'I had studied no books of Casuistry,' he might have replied, 'when I made the sole capital blunder in a case of conscience, which the review of my life can show.

'I did not insist on my private conscience; woe is me that I did not: I yielded to what was called the public conscience in that one case which has proved the affliction of my life, and which, perhaps, it was that wrecked the national peace.'

A more plenary answer there cannot be to those who suppose that Casuistry is evaded by evading books of Casuistry. That dread forum of conscience will for ever exist as a tribunal of difficulty. The discussion must proceed on some principle or other, good or bad; and the only way for obtaining light is by clearing up the grounds of action, and applying the principles of moral judgment to such facts or circumstances as most frequently arise to perplex the understanding, or the affections, or the conscience.

GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS.[Footnote: By George Finlae]

[1844.]

What is called Philosophical History we believe to be yet in its infancy. It is the profound remark of Mr. Finlay—profound as we ourselves understand it, i. e., in relation to this philosophical treatment, 'That history will ever remain inexhaustible.' How inexhaustible? Are the facts of history inexhaustible? In regard to the ancient division of history with which he is there dealing, this would be in no sense true; and in any case it would be a lifeless truth. So entirely have the mere facts of Pagan history been disinterred, ransacked, sifted, that except by means of some chance medal that may be unearthed in the illiterate East (as of late towards Bokhara), or by means of some mysterious inscription, such as those which still mock the learned traveller in Persia, northwards near Hamadan (Ecbatana), and southwards at Persepolis, or those which distract him amongst the shadowy ruins of Yucatan (Uxmal, suppose, and Palenque),—once for all, barring these pure godsends, it is hardly 'in the dice' that any downright novelty of fact should remain in reversion for this nineteenth century. The merest possibility exists, that in Armenia, or in a Graeco-Russian monastery on Mount Athos, or in Pompeii, &c., some authors hitherto αιεχδοτοι may yet be concealed; and by a channel in that degree improbable, it is possible that certain new facts of history may still reach us. But else, and failing these cryptical or subterraneous currents of communication, for us the record is closed. History in that sense has come to an end, and sealed up as by the angel in the Apocalypse. What then? The facts so understood are but the dry bones of the mighty past. And the question arises here also, not less than in that sublimest of prophetic visions, 'Can these dry bones live?'. Not only can they live, but by an infinite variety of life. The same historic facts, viewed in different lights, or brought into connection with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are deciphered by keys everlastingly varied.

To us we repeat that oftentimes it seems as though the science of history were yet scarcely founded. There will be such a science, if at present there is not; and in one feature of its capacities it will resemble chemistry. What is so familiar to the perceptions of man as the common chemical agents of water, air, and the soil on which we tread? Yet each one of these elements is a mystery to this day; handled, used, tried, searched experimentally, in ten thousand ways—it is still unknown; fathomed by recent science down to a certain depth, it is still probably by its destiny unfathomable. Even to the end of days, it is pretty certain that the minutest particle of earth—that a dew-drop scarcely distinguishable as a separate object—that the slenderest filament of a plant will include within itself secrets inaccessible to man. And yet, compared with the mystery of man himself, these physical worlds of mystery are but as a radix of infinity. Chemistry is in this view mysterious and spinosistically sublime—that it is the science of the latent in all things, of all things as lurking in all. Within the lifeless flint, within the silent pyrites, slumbers an agony of potential combustion. Iron is imprisoned in blood. With cold water (as every child is now-a-days aware) you may lash a fluid into angry ebullitions of heat; with hot water, as with the rod of Amram's son, you may freeze a fluid down to the temperature of the Sarsar wind, provided only that you regulate the pressure of the air. The sultry and dissolving fluid shall bake into a solid, the petrific fluid shall melt into a liquid. Heat shall freeze, frost shall thaw; and wherefore? Simply because old things are brought together in new modes of combination. And in endless instances beside we see the same Panlike latency of forms and powers, which gives to the external world a capacity of self-transformation, and of polymorphosis absolutely inexhaustible.

But the same capacity belongs to the facts of history. And we do not mean merely that, from subjective differences in the minds reviewing them, such facts assume endless varieties of interpretation and estimate, but that objectively, from lights still increasing in the science of government and of social philosophy, all the primary facts of history become liable continually to new theories, to new combinations, and to new valuations of their moral relations. We have seen some kinds of marble, where the veinings happened to be unusually multiplied, in which human faces, figures, processions, or fragments of natural scenery seemed absolutely illimitable, under the endless variations or inversions of the order, according to which they might be combined and grouped. Something analogous takes effect in reviewing the remote parts of history. Rome, for instance, has been the object of historic pens for twenty centuries (dating from Polybius); and yet hardly so much as twenty years have elapsed since Niebuhr opened upon us almost a new revelation, by re-combining the same eternal facts, according to a different set of principles. The same thing may be said, though not with the same degree of emphasis, upon the Grecian researches of the late Ottfried Mueller. Egyptian history again, even at this moment, is seen stealing upon us through the dusky twilight in its first distinct lineaments. Before Young, Champollion, and the others who have followed on their traces in this field of history, all was outer darkness; and whatsoever we do know or shall know of Egyptian Thebes will now be recovered as if from the unswathing of a mummy. Not until a flight of three thousand years has left Thebes the Hekatompylos a dusky speck in the far distance, have we even begun to read her annals, or to understand her revolutions.

Another instance we have now before us of this new historic faculty for resuscitating the buried, and for calling back the breath to the frozen features of death, in Mr. Finlay's work upon the Greeks as related to the Roman empire. He presents us with old facts, but under the purpose of clothing them with a new life. He rehearses ancient stories, not with the humble ambition of better adorning them, of more perspicuously narrating, or even of more forcibly pointing their moral, but of extracting from them some new meaning, and thus forcing them to arrange themselves, under some latent connection, with other phenomena now first detected, as illustrations of some great principle or agency now first revealing its importance. Mr. Finlay's style of intellect is appropriate to such a task; for it is subtle and Machiavellian. But there is this difficulty in doing justice to the novelty, and at times we may say with truth to the profundity of his views, that they are by necessity thrown out in continued successions of details, are insulated, and, in one word, sporadic. This follows from the very nature of his work; for it is a perpetual commentary on the incidents of Grecian history, from the era of the Roman conquest to the commencement of what Mr. Finlay, in a peculiar sense, calls the Byzantine empire. These incidents have nowhere been systematically or continuously recorded; they come forward by casual flashes in the annals, perhaps, of some church historian, as they happen to connect themselves with his momentary theme; or they betray themselves in the embarrassments of the central government, whether at Rome or at Constantinople, when arguing at one time a pestilence, at another an insurrection, or an inroad of barbarians. It is not the fault of Mr. Finlay, but his great disadvantage, that the affairs of Greece have been thus discontinuously exhibited, and that its internal changes of condition have been never treated except obliquely, and by men aliud agentibus. The Grecian race had a primary importance on our planet; but the Grecian name, represented by Greece considered as a territory, or as the original seat of the Hellenic people, ceased to have much importance, in the eyes of historians, from the time when it became a conquered province; and it declined into absolute insignificance after the conquest of so many other provinces had degraded Hellas into an arithmetical unit, standing amongst a total amount of figures, so vast and so much more dazzling to the ordinary mind. Hence it was that in ancient times no complete history of Greece, through all her phases and stages, was ever attempted. The greatness of her later revolutions, simply as changes, would have attracted the historian; but, as changes associated with calamity and loss of power, they repelled his curiosity, and alienated his interest. It is the very necessity, therefore, of Mr. Finlay's position, when coming into such an inheritance, that he must splinter his philosophy into separate individual notices; for the records of history furnish no grounds for more. Spartam, quam nactus est, ornavit. But this does not remedy the difficulty for ourselves, in attempting to give a representative view of his philosophy. General abstractions he had no opportunity for presenting; consequently we have no opportunity for valuing; and, on the other hand, single cases selected from a succession of hundreds would not justify any representative criticism, more than the single brick, in the anecdote of Hierocles, would serve representatively to describe or to appraise the house.

Under this difficulty as to the possible for ourselves, and the just for Mr. Finlay, we shall adopt the following course. So far as the Greek people collected themselves in any splendid manner with the Roman empire, they did so with the eastern horn of that empire, and in point of time from the foundation of Constantinople as an eastern Rome, in the fourth century, to a period not fully agreed on; but for the moment we will say with Mr. Finlay, up to the early part of the eighth century. A reason given by Mr. Finlay for this latter date is—that about that time the Grecian blood, so widely diffused in Asia, and even in Africa, became finally detached by the progress of Mahometanism and Mahometan systems of power from all further concurrence or coalition with the views of the Byzantine Caesar. Constantinople was from that date thrown back more upon its own peculiar heritage and jurisdiction, of which the main resources for war and peace lay in Europe and (speaking by the narrowest terms) in Thrace. Henceforth, therefore, for the city and throne of Constantine, resuming its old Grecian name of Byzantium, there succeeded a theatre less diffusive, a population more concentrated, a character of action more determinate and jealous, a style of courtly ceremonial more elaborate as well as more haughtily repulsive, and universally a system of interests, as much more definite and selfish, as might naturally be looked for in a nation now everywhere surrounded by new thrones gloomy with malice, and swelling with the consciousness of youthful power. This new and final state of the eastern Rome Mr. Finlay denominates the Byzantine empire. Possibly this use of the term may be capable of justification: but more questions would arise in the discussion than Mr. Finlay has thought it of importance to notice. And for the present we shall take the word Byzantine in its most ordinary acceptation, as denoting the local empire founded by Constantine in Byzantium early in the fourth century, under the idea of a translation from the old western Rome, and overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in the year 1453. In the fortunes and main stages of this empire, what are the chief arresting phenomena, aspects, or relations, to the greatest of modern interests? We select by preference these:

I. First, this was the earliest among the kingdoms of our planet which connected itself with Christianity. In Armenia, there had been a previous state recognition of Christianity. But that was neither splendid nor distinct. Whereas the Byzantine Rome built avowedly upon Christianity as its own basis, and consecrated its own nativity by the sublime act of founding the first provision ever attempted for the poor, considered simply as poor (i.e. as objects of pity, not as instruments of ambition).

II. Secondly, as the great aegis of western Christendom, nay, the barrier which made it possible that any Christendom should ever exist, this Byzantine empire is entitled to a very different station in the enlightened gratitude of us Western Europeans from any which it has yet held. We do not scruple to say—that, by comparison with the services of the Byzantine people to Europe, no nation on record has ever stood in the same relation to any other single nation, much less to a whole family of nations, whether as regards the opportunity and means of conferring benefits, or as regards the astonishing perseverance in supporting the succession of these benefits, or as regards the ultimate event of these benefits. A great wrong has been done for ages; for we have all been accustomed to speak of the Byzantine empire with scorn, [Footnote: 'With scorn.'—This has arisen from two causes: one is the habit of regarding the whole Roman empire as in its 'decline' from so early a period as that of Commodus; agreeably to which conceit, it would naturally follow that, during its latter stages, the Eastern empire must have been absolutely in its dotage. If already declining in the second century, then, from the tenth to the fifteenth, it must have been paralytic and bed-ridden The other cause may be found in the accidental but reasonable hostility of the Byzantine court to the first Crusaders, as also in the disadvantageous comparison with respect to manly virtues between the simplicity of these western children, and the refined dissimulation of the Byzantines.] as chiefly known by its effeminacy; and the greater is the call for a fervent palinode.

III. Thirdly. In a reflex way, as the one great danger which overshadowed Europe for generations, and against which the Byzantine empire proved the capital bulwark, Mahometanism may rank as one of the Byzantine aspects or counterforces. And if there is any popular error applying to the history of that great convulsion, as a political effort for revolutionizing the world, some notice of it will find a natural place in connection with these present trains of speculation.

Let us, therefore, have permission to throw together a few remarks on these three subjects—1st, on the remarkable distinction by which the eldest of Christian rulers proclaimed and inaugurated the Christian basis of his empire; 2dly, on the true but forgotten relation of this great empire to our modern Christendom, under which idea we comprehend Europe and the whole continent of America; 3dly, on the false pretensions of Mahometanism, whether advanced by itself or by inconsiderate Christian speculators on its behalf. We shall thus obtain this advantage, that some sort of unity will be given to our own glances at Mr. Finlay's theme; and, at the same time, by gathering under these general heads any dispersed comments of Mr. Finlay, whether for confirmation of our own views, or for any purpose of objection to his, we shall give to those comments also that kind of unity, by means of a reference to a common purpose, which we could not have given them by citing each independently for itself.

I. First, then, as to that memorable act by which Constantinople (i. e. the Eastern empire) connected herself for ever with Christianity; viz. the recognition of pauperism as an element in the state entitled to the maternal guardianship of the state. In this new principle, introduced by Christianity, we behold a far-seeing or proleptic wisdom, making provision for evils before they had arisen; for it is certain that great expansions of pauperism did not exist in the ancient world. A pauper population is a disease peculiar to the modern or Christian world. Various causes latent in the social systems of the ancients prevented such developments of surplus people. But does not this argue a superiority in the social arrangements of these ancients? Not at all; they were atrociously worse. They evaded this one morbid affection by means of others far more injurious to the moral advance of man. The case was then everywhere as at this day it is in Persia. A Persian ambassador to London or Paris might boast that, in his native Iran, no such spectacles existed of hunger-bitten myriads as may be seen everywhere during seasons of distress in the crowded cities of Christian Europe. 'No,' would be the answer, 'most certainly not; but why? The reason is, that your accursed form of society and government intercepts such surplus people, does not suffer them to be born. What is the result? You ought, in Persia, to have three hundred millions of people; your vast territory is easily capacious of that number. You have—how many have you? Something less than eight millions.' Think of this, startled reader. But, if that be a good state of things, then any barbarous soldier who makes a wilderness, is entitled to call himself a great philosopher and public benefactor. This is to cure the headache by amputating the head. Now, the same principle of limitation to population a parte ante, though not in the same savage excess as in Mahometan Persia, operated upon Greece and Rome. The whole Pagan world escaped the evils of redundant population by vicious repressions of it beforehand. But under Christianity a new state of things was destined to take effect. Many protections and excitements to population were laid in the framework of this new religion, which, by its new code of rules and impulses, in so many ways extended the free-agency of human beings. Manufacturing industry was destined first to arise on any great scale under Christianity. Except in Tyre and Alexandria (see the Emperor Hadrian's account of this last), there was no town or district in the ancient world where the populace could be said properly to work. The rural laborers worked a little—not much;—and sailors worked a little;—nobody else worked at all. Even slaves had little more work distributed amongst each ten than now settles upon one. And in many other ways, by protecting the principle of life, as a mysterious sanctity, Christianity has favored the development of an excessive population. There it is that Christianity, being answerable for the mischief, is answerable for its redress. Therefore it is that, breeding the disease, Christianity breeds the cure. Extending the vast lines of poverty, Christianity it was that first laid down the principle of a relief for poverty. Constantine, the first Christian potentate, laid the first stone of the mighty overshadowing institution since reared in Christian lands to poverty, disease, orphanage, and mutilation. Christian instincts, moving and speaking through that Caesar, first carried out that great idea of Christianity. Six years was Christianity in building Constantinople, and in the seventh she rested from her labors, saying, 'Henceforward let the poor man have a haven of rest for ever; a rest from his work for one day in seven; a rest from his anxieties by a legal and fixed relief.' Being legal, it could not be open to disturbances of caprice in the giver; being fixed, it was not open to disturbances of miscalculation in the receiver. Now, first, when first Christianity was installed as a public organ of government (and first owned a distinct political responsibility), did it become the duty of a religion which assumed, as it were, the official tutelage of poverty, to proclaim and consecrate that function by some great memorial precedent. And, accordingly, in testimony of that obligation, the first Christian Caesar, on behalf of Christianity, founded the first system of relief for pauperism. It is true, that largesses from the public treasury, gratuitous coin, or corn sold at diminished rates, not to mention the sportulae or stated doles of private Roman nobles, had been distributed amongst the indigent citizens of Western Rome for centuries before Constantine; but all these had been the selfish bounties of factious ambition or intrigue.

To Christianity was reserved the inaugural act of public charity in the spirit of charity. We must remember that no charitable or beneficent institutions of any kind, grounded on disinterested kindness, existed amongst the Pagan Romans, and still less amongst the Pagan Greeks. Mr. Coleridge, in one of his lay sermons, advanced the novel doctrine—that in the Scripture is contained all genuine and profound statesmanship. Of course he must be understood to mean—in its capital principles; for, as to subordinate and executive rules for applying such principles, these, doubtless, are in part suggested by the local circumstances in each separate case. Now, amongst the political theories of the Bible is this—that pauperism is not an accident in the constitution of states, but an indefeasible necessity; or, in the scriptural words, that 'the poor shall never cease out of the land.' This theory or great canon of social philosophy, during many centuries, drew no especial attention from philosophers. It passed for a truism, bearing no particular emphasis or meaning beyond some general purpose of sanction to the impulses of charity. But there is good reason to believe, that it slumbered, and was meant to slumber, until Christianity arising and moving forwards should call it into a new life, as a principle suited to a new order of things. Accordingly, we have seen of late that this scriptural dictum—'The poor shall never cease out of the land'—has terminated its career as a truism (that is, as a truth, either obvious on one hand, or inert on the other), and has wakened into a polemic or controversial life. People arose who took upon them utterly to deny this scriptural doctrine. Peremptorily they challenged the assertion that poverty must always exist. The Bible said that it was an affection of human society which could not be exterminated; the economist of 1800 said that it was a foul disease, which must and should be exterminated. The scriptural philosophy said, that pauperism was inalienable from man's social condition in the same way that decay was inalienable from his flesh. 'I shall soon see that,' said the economist of 1800, 'for as sure as my name is M——, I will have this poverty put down by law within one generation, if there's a law to be had in the courts of Westminster.' The Scriptures have left word—that, if any man should come to the national banquet declaring himself unable to pay his contribution, that man should be accounted the guest of Christianity, and should be privileged to sit at the table in thankful remembrance of what Christianity had done for man. But Mr. M—— left word with all the servants, that, if any man should present himself under those circumstances, he was to be told, 'the table is full'—(his words, not ours); 'go away, good man.' Go away! Mr, M——? Where was he to go to? Whither? In what direction?—'Why, if you come to that,' said the man of 1800, 'to any ditch that he prefers: surely there's good choice of ditches for the most fastidious taste.' During twenty years, viz. from 1800 to 1820, this new philosophy, which substituted a ditch for a dinner, and a paving-stone for a loaf, prevailed and prospered. At one time it seemed likely enough to prove a snare to our own aristocracy—the noblest of all ages. But that peril was averted, and the further history of the case was this: By the year 1820, much discussion having passed to and fro, serious doubts had arisen in many quarters; scepticism had begun to arm itself against the sceptic; the economist of 1800 was no longer quite sure of his ground. He was now suspected of being fallible; and what seemed of worse augury, he was beginning himself to suspect as much. To one capital blunder he was obliged publicly to plead guilty. What it was, we shall have occasion to mention immediately. Meantime it was justly thought that, in a dispute loaded with such prodigious practical consequences, good sense and prudence demanded a more extended inquiry than had yet been instituted. Whether poverty would ever cease from the land, might be doubted by those who balanced their faith in Scripture against their faith in the man of 1800. But this at least could not be doubted—that as yet poverty had not ceased, nor indeed had made any sensible preparations for ceasing from any land in Europe. It was a clear case, therefore, that, howsoever Europe might please to dream upon the matter when pauperism should have reached that glorious euthanasy predicted by the alchemist of old and the economist of 1800, for the present she must deal actively with her own pauperism on some avowed plan and principle, good or evil—gentle or harsh. Accordingly, in the train of years between 1820 and 1830, inquiries were made of every separate state in Europe, what were those plans and principles. For it was justly said—'As one step towards judging rightly of our own system, now that it has been so clamorously challenged for a bad system, let us learn what it is that other nations think upon the subject, but above all what it is that they do.' The answers to our many inquiries varied considerably; and some amongst the most enlightened nations appear to have adopted the good old plan of laissez faire, giving nothing from any public fund to the pauper, but authorizing him to levy contributions on that gracious allegoric lady, Private Charity, wherever he could meet her taking the air with her babes. This reference appeared to be the main one in reply to any application of the pauper; and for all the rest they referred him generally to the 'ditch,' or to his own unlimited choice of ditches, according to the approved method of public benevolence published in 4to and in 8vo by the man of 1800. But there were other and humbler states in Europe, whose very pettiness has brought more fully within their vision the whole machinery and watchwork of pauperism, as it acted and reacted on the industrious poverty of the land, and on other interests, by means of the system adopted in relieving it. From these states came many interesting reports, all tending to some good purpose. But at last, and before the year 1830, amongst other results of more or less value, three capital points were established, not more decisive for the justification of the English system of administering national relief to paupers, and of all systems that reverenced the authority of Scripture, than they were for the overthrow of Mr. M——, the man of 1800. These three points are worthy of being used as buoys in mapping out the true channels, or indicating the breakers on this difficult line of navigation; and we now rehearse them. They may seem plain almost to obviousness; but it is enough that they involve all the disputed questions of the case.

First. That, in spite of the assurances from economists, no progress whatever had been made by England or by any state which lent any sanction to the hope of ever eradicating poverty from society.

Secondly. That, in absolute contradiction of the whole hypothesis relied on by M—- and his brethren, in its most fundamental doctrine, a legal provision for poverty did not act as a bounty on marriage. The experience of England, where the trial had been made on the largest scale, was decisive on this point; and the opposite experience of Ireland, under the opposite circumstances, was equally decisive. And this result had made itself so clear by 1820, that even M—- (as we have already noticed by anticipation) was compelled to publish a recantation as to this particular error, which in effect was a recantation of his entire theory.

Thirdly. That, according to the concurring experience of all the most enlightened states of Christendom, the public suffered least (not merely in molestation but in money), pauperism benefited most, and the growth of pauperism was retarded most, precisely as the provision for the poor had been legalized as to its obligation, and fixed as to its amount. Left to individual discretion, the burden was found to press most unequally; and, on the other hand, the evil itself of pauperism, whilst much less effectually relieved, nevertheless through the irregular action of this relief was much more powerfully stimulated.

Such is the abstract of our latest public warfare on this great question through a period of nearly fifty years. And the issue is this—starting from the contemptuous defiance of the scriptural doctrine upon the necessity of making provision for poverty as an indispensable element in civil communities, the economy of the age has lowered its tone by graduated descents, in each one successively of the four last decennia. The philosophy of the day as to this point at least is at length in coincidence with Scripture. And thus the very extensive researches of this nineteenth century, as to pauperism, have re-acted with the effect of a full justification upon Constantine's attempt to connect the foundation of his empire with that new theory of Christianity upon the imperishableness of poverty, and upon the duties corresponding to it.

Meantime, Mr. Finlay denies that Christianity had been raised by Constantine into the religion of the state; and others have denied that, in the extensive money privileges conceded to Constantinople, he contemplated any but political principles. As to the first point, we apprehend that Constantine will be found not so much to have shrunk back from fear of installing Christianity in the seat of supremacy, as to have diverged in policy from our modern methods of such an installation. Our belief is, that according to his notion of a state religion, he supposed himself to have conferred that distinction upon Christianity. With respect to the endowments and privileges of Constantinople, they were various; some lay in positive donations, others in immunities and exemptions; some again were designed to attract strangers, others to attract nobles from old Rome. But, with fuller opportunities for pursuing that discussion, we think it would be easy to show, that in more than one of his institutions and his decrees he had contemplated the special advantage of the poor as such; and that, next after the august distinction of having founded the first Christian throne, he had meant to challenge and fix the gaze of future ages upon this glorious pretension—that he first had executed the scriptural injunction to make a provision for the poor, as an order of society that by laws immutable should 'never cease out of the land.'

II. Let us advert to the value and functions of Constantinople as the tutelary genius of western or dawning Christianity.

The history of Constantinople, or more generally of the Eastern Roman empire, wears a peculiar interest to the children of Christendom; and for two separate reasons—first, as being the narrow isthmus or bridge which connects the two continents of ancient and modern history, and that is a philosophic interest; but secondly, which in the very highest degree is a practical interest, as the record of our earthly salvation from Mahometanism. On two horns was Europe assaulted by the Moslems; first, last, and through the largest tract of time, on the horn of Constantinople; there the contest raged for more than eight hundred years, and by the time that the mighty bulwark fell (1453), Vienna and other cities upon or near the Danube had found leisure for growing up; so that, if one range of Alps had slowly been surmounted, another had now slowly reared and embattled itself against the westward progress of the Crescent. On the western horn, in France, but by Germans, once for all Charles Martel had arrested the progress of the fanatical Moslem almost in a single battle; certainly a single generation saw the whole danger dispersed, inasmuch as within that space the Saracens were effectually forced back into their original Spanish lair. This demonstrates pretty forcibly the difference of the Mahometan resources as applied to the western and the eastern struggle. To throw the whole weight of that difference, a difference in the result as between eight centuries and thirty years, upon the mere difference of energy in German and Byzantine forces, as though the first did, by a rapturous fervor, in a few revolutions of summer what the other had protracted through nearly a millennium, is a representation which defeats itself by its own extravagance. To prove too much is more dangerous than to prove too little. The fact is, that vast armies and mighty nations were continually disposable for the war upon the city of Constantine; nations had time to arise in juvenile vigor, to grow old and superannuated, to melt away, and totally to disappear, in that long struggle on the Hellespont and Propontis. It was a struggle which might often intermit and slumber; armistices there might be, truces, or unproclaimed suspensions of war out of mutual exhaustion, but peace there could not be, because any resting from the duty of hatred towards those who reciprocally seemed to lay the foundations of their creed in a dishonoring of God, was impossible to aspiring human nature. Malice and mutual hatred, we repeat, became a duty in those circumstances. Why had they begun to fight? Personal feuds there had been none between the parties. For the early caliphs did not conquer Syria and other vast provinces of the Roman empire, because they had a quarrel with the Caesars who represented Christendom; but, on the contrary, they had a quarrel with the Caesars because they had conquered Syria, or, at the most, the conquest and the feud (if not always lying in that exact succession as cause and effect) were joint effects from a common cause, which cause was imperishable as death, or the ocean, and as deep as are the fountains of animal life. Could the ocean be altered by a sea-fight? Or the atmosphere be tainted for ever by an earthquake? As little could any single reign or its events affect the feud of the Moslem and the Christian; a feud which could not cease unless God could change, or unless man (becoming careless of spiritual things) should sink to the level of a brute.

These are considerations of great importance in weighing the value of the Eastern Empire. If the cause and interest of Islamism, as against Christianity, were undying—then we may be assured that the Moorish infidels of Spain did not reiterate their trans-Pyrenean expeditions after one generation—simply because they could not. But we know that on the south-eastern horn of Europe they could, upon the plain argument that for many centuries they did. Over and above this, we are of opinion that the Saracens were unequal to the sort of hardships bred by cold climates; and there lay another repulsion for Saracens from France, &c., and not merely the Carlovingian sword. We children of Christendom show our innate superiority to the children of the Orient upon this scale or tariff of acclimatizing powers. We travel as wheat travels through all reasonable ranges of temperature; they, like rice, can migrate only to warm latitudes. They cannot support our cold, but we can support the countervailing hardships of their heat. This cause alone would have weatherbound the Mussulmans for ever within the Pyrenean cloisters. Mussulmans in cold latitudes look as blue and as absurd as sailors on horseback. Apart from which cause, we see that the fine old Visigothic races in Spain found them full employment up to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, which reign first created a kingdom of Spain; in that reign the whole fabric of their power thawed away, and was confounded with forgotten things. Columbus, according to a local tradition, was personally present at some of the latter campaigns in Grenada: he saw the last of them. So that the discovery of America may be used as a convertible date with that of extinction for the Saracen power in western Europe. True that the overthrow of Constantinople had forerun this event by nearly half a century. But then we insist upon the different proportions of the struggle. Whilst in Spain a province had fought against a province, all Asia militant had fought against the eastern Roman empire. Amongst the many races whom dimly we decry in those shadowy hosts, tilting for ages in the vast plains of Angora, are seen latterly pressing on to the van, two mighty powers, the children of Persia and the Ottoman family of the Turks. Upon these nations, both now rapidly decaying, the faith of Mahomet has ever leaned as upon her eldest sons; and these powers the Byzantine Cæsars had to face in every phasis of their energy, as it revolved from perfect barbarism, through semi-barbarism, to that crude form of civilization which Mahometans can support. And through all these transmigrations of their power we must remember that they were under a martial training and discipline, never suffered to become effeminate. One set of warriors after another did, it is true, become effeminate in Persia: but upon that advantage opening, always another set stepped in from Torkistan or from the Imaus. The nation, the individuals melted away; the Moslem armies were immortal.

Here, therefore, it is, and standing at this point of our review, that we complain of Mr. Finlay's too facile compliance with historians far beneath himself. He has a fine understanding: oftentimes his commentaries on the past are ebullient with subtlety; and his fault strikes us as lying even in the excess of his sagacity applying itself too often to a basis of facts, quite insufficient for supporting the superincumbent weight of his speculations. But in this instance he surrenders himself too readily to the ordinary current of history. How would he like it, if he happened to be a Turk himself, finding his nation thus implicitly undervalued? For clearly, in undervaluing the Byzantine resistance, he does undervalue the Mahometan assault. Advantages of local situation cannot eternally make good the deficiencies of man. If the Byzantines (being as weak as historians would represent them) yet for ages resisted the whole impetus of Mahometan Asia, then it follows, either that the Crescent was correspondingly weak, or that, not being weak, she must have found the Cross pretty strong. The facit of history does not here correspond with the numerical items.

Nothing has ever surprised us more, we will frankly own, than this coincidence of authors in treating the Byzantine empire as feeble and crazy. On the contrary, to us it is clear that some secret and preternatural strength it must have had, lurking where the eye of man did not in those days penetrate, or by what miracle did it undertake our universal Christian cause, fight for us all, keep the waters open from freezing us up, and through nine centuries prevent the ice of Mahometanism from closing over our heads for ever? Yet does Mr. Finlay (p. 424) describe this empire as laboring, in A. D. 623, equally with Persia, under 'internal weakness,' and as 'equally incapable of offering any popular or national resistance to an active or enterprising enemy.' In this Mr. Finlay does but agree with other able writers; but he and they should have recollected, that hardly had that very year 623 departed, even yet the knell of its last hour was sounding upon the winds, when this effeminate empire had occasion to show that she could clothe herself with consuming terrors, as a belligerent both defensive and aggressive. In the absence of her great emperor, and of the main imperial forces, the golden capital herself, by her own resources, routed and persecuted into wrecks a Persian army that had come down upon her by stealth and a fraudulent circuit. Even at that same period, she advanced into Persia more than a thousand miles from her own metropolis in Europe, under the blazing ensigns of the cross, kicked the crown of Persia to and fro like a tennis-ball, upset the throne of Artaxerxes, countersigned haughtily the elevation of a new Basileus more friendly to herself, and then recrossed the Tigris homewards, after having torn forcibly out of the heart and palpitating entrails of Persia, whatever trophies that idolatrous empire had formerly wrested from herself. These were not the acts of an effeminate kingdom. In the language of Wordsworth we may say—

'All power was giv'n her in the dreadful trance;
Infidel kings she wither'd like a flame.'

Indeed, no image that we remember can do justice to the first of these acts, except that Spanish legend of the Cid, which assures us that, long after the death of the mighty cavalier, when the children of those Moors who had fled from his face whilst living, were insulting the marble statue above his grave, suddenly the statue raised its right arm, stretched out its marble lance, and drifted the heathen dogs like snow. The mere sanctity of the Christian champion's sepulchre was its own protection; and so we must suppose, that, when the Persian hosts came by surprise upon Constantinople—her natural protector being absent by three months' march—simply the golden statues of the mighty Caesars, half rising on their thrones, must have caused that sudden panic which dissipated the danger. Hardly fifty years later, Mr. Finlay well knows that Constantinople again stood an assault—not from a Persian hourrah, or tempestuous surprise, but from a vast expedition, armaments by land and sea, fitted out elaborately in the early noontide of Mahometan vigor—and that assault, also, in the presence of the caliph and the crescent, was gloriously discomfited. Now if, in the moment of triumph, some voice in the innumerable crowd had cried out, 'How long shall this great Christian breakwater, against which are shattered into surge and foam all the mountainous billows of idolators and misbelievers, stand up on behalf of infant Christendom?' and if from the clouds some trumpet of prophecy had replied, 'Even yet for eight hundred years!' could any man have persuaded himself that such a fortress against such antogonists—such a monument against a millennium of fury—was to be classed amongst the weak things of this earth? This oriental Rome, it is true, equally with Persia, was liable to sudden inroads and incursions. But the difference was this—Persia was strongly protected in all ages by the wilderness on her main western frontier; if this were passed, and a hand-to-hand conflict succeeded, where light cavalry or fugitive archers could be of little value, the essential weakness of the Persian empire then betrayed itself. Her sovereign was assassinated, and peace was obtained from the condescension of the invader. But the enemies of Constantinople, Goths, Avars, Bulgarians, or even Persians, were strong only by their weakness. Being contemptible, they were neglected; being chased, they made no stand; and thus only they escaped. They entered like thieves by means of darkness, and escaped like sheep by means of dispersion. But, if caught, they were annihilated. No; we resume our thesis; we close this head by reiterating our correction of history; we re-affirm our position—that in Eastern Rome lay the salvation of Western and Central Europe; in Constantinople and the Propontis lay the sine qua non condition of any future Christendom. Emperor and people must have done their duty; the result, the vast extent of generations surmounted, furnish the triumphant argument. Finally, indeed, they fell, king and people, shepherd and flock; but by that time their mission was fulfilled. And doubtless, as the noble Palaeologus lay on heaps of carnage, with his noble people, as life was ebbing away, a voice from heaven sounded in his ears the great words of the Hebrew prophet, 'Behold! YOUR WORK IS DONE; your warfare is accomplished.'

III. Such, then, being the unmerited disparagement of the Byzantine government, and so great the ingratitude of later Christendom to that sheltering power under which themselves enjoyed the leisure of a thousand years for knitting and expanding into strong nations; on the other hand, what is to be thought of the Saracen revolutionists? Everywhere it has passed for a lawful postulate, that the Saracen conquests prevailed, half by the feebleness of the Roman government at Constantinople, and half by the preternatural energy infused into the Arabs by their false prophet and legislator. In either of its faces, this theory is falsified by a steady review of facts. With regard to the Saracens, Mr. Finlay thinks as we do, and argues that they prevailed through the local, or sometimes the casual, weakness of their immediate enemies, and rarely through any strength of their own. We must remember one fatal weakness of the Imperial administration in those days, not due to men or to principles, but entirely to nature and the slow growth of scientific improvements—viz.: the difficulties of locomotion. As respected Syria, Egypt, Cyrenaica, and so on to the most western provinces of Africa, the Saracens had advantages for moving rapidly which the Caesar had not. But is not a water movement speedier than a land movement, which for an army never has much exceeded fourteen miles a-day? Certainly it is; but in this case there were two desperate defects in the imperial control over that water service. To use a fleet, you must have a fleet; but their whole naval interest had been starved by the intolerable costs of the Persian war. Immense had been the expenses of Heraclius, and annually decaying had been his Asiatic revenues. Secondly, the original position of the Arabs had been better than that of the emperor, in every stage of the warfare which so suddenly arose. In Arabia they stood nearest to Syria, in Syria nearest to Egypt, in Egypt nearest to Cyrenaica. What reason had there been for expecting a martial legislator at that moment in Arabia, who should fuse and sternly combine her distracted tribes? What blame, therefore, to Heraclius, that Syria—the first object of assault, being also by much the weakest part of the empire, and immediately after the close of a desolating war—should in four campaigns be found indefensible? We must remember the unexampled abruptness of the Arabian revolution. The year sixteen hundred and twenty-two, by its very name of Hegira, does not record a triumph but a humiliation. In that year, therefore, and at the very moment when Heraclius was entering upon his long Persian struggle, Mahomet was yet prostrate, and his destiny was doubtful. Eleven years after, viz. in six hundred and thirty-three, the prophet was dead and gone; but his first successor was already in Syria as a conqueror. Such had been the velocity of events. The Persian war had then been finished by three years, but the exhaustion of the empire had perhaps, at that moment, reached its maximum. We are satisfied, that ten years' repose from this extreme state of collapse would have shown us another result. Even as it was, and caught at this enormous disadvantage, Heraclius taught the robbers to tremble, and would have exterminated them, if not baffled by two irremediable calamities, neither of them due to any act or neglect of his own. The first lay in the treason of his lieutenants. The governors of Damascus, of Aleppo, of Emesa, of Bostra, of Kinnisrin, all proved traitors. The root of this evil lay, probably, in the disorders following the Persian invasion, which had made it the perilous interest of the emperor to appoint great officers from amongst those who had a local influence. Such persons it might have been ruinous too suddenly to set aside, as, in the event, it proved ruinous to employ them. A dilemma of this kind, offering but a choice of evils, belonged to the nature of any Persian war; and that particular war was bequeathed to Heraclius by the management of his predecesors. But the second calamity was even more fatal; it lay in the composition of the Syrian population, and its original want of vital cohesion. For no purpose could this population be united: they formed a rope of sand. There was the distraction of religion (Jacobites, Nestorians, &c.); there was the distraction of races—slaves and masters, conquered and conquerors, modern intruders mixed, but not blended with, aboriginal mountaineers. Property became the one principle of choice between the two governments. Where was protection to be had for that? Barbarous as were the Arabs, they saw their present advantage. Often it would happen from the position of the armies, that they could, whilst the emperor could not, guarantee the instant security of land or of personal treasures; the Arabs could also promise, sometimes, a total immunity from taxes, very often a diminished scale of taxation, always a remission of arrears; none of which demands could be listened to by the emperor, partly on account of the public necessities, partly from jealousy of establishing operative precedents. For religion, again, protection was more easily obtained in that day from the Arab, who made war on Christianity, than from the Byzantine emperor, who was its champion. What were the different sects and subdivisions of Christianity to the barbarian? Monophysite, Monothelite, Eutychian, or Jacobite, all were to him as the scholastic disputes of noble and intellectual Europe to the camps of gypsies. The Arab felt himself to be the depository of one sublime truth, the unity of God. His mission, therefore, was principally against idolaters. Yet even to them his policy was to sell toleration for tribute. Clearly, as Mr. Finlay hints, this was merely a provisional moderation, meant to be laid aside when sufficient power was obtained; and it was laid aside, in after ages, by many a wretch like Timor or Nadir Shah. Religion, therefore, and property once secured, what more had the Syrians to seek? And if to these advantages for the Saracens we add the fact, that a considerable Arab population was dispersed through Syria, who became so many emissaries, spies, and decoys for their countrymen, it does great honor to the emperor, that through so many campaigns he should at all have maintained his ground, which at last he resigned only under the despondency caused by almost universal treachery.

The Saracens, therefore, had no great merit even in their earliest exploits; and the impetus of their movement forwards, that principle of proselytism which carried them so strongly 'ahead' through a few generations, was very soon brought to a stop. Mr. Finlay, in our mind, does right to class these barbarians as 'socially and politically little better than the Gothic, Hunnish, and Avar monarchies.' But, on consideration, the Gothic monarchy embosomed the germs of a noble civilization; whereas the Saracens have never propagated great principles of any kind, nor attained even a momentary grandeur in their institutions, except where coalescing with a higher or more ancient civilization.

Meantime, ascending from the earliest Mahometans to their prophet, what are we to think of him? Was Mahomet a great man? We think not. The case was thus: the Arabian tribes had long stood ready, like dogs held in a leash, for a start after distant game. It was not Mahomet who gave them that impulse. But next, what was it that had hindered the Arab tribes from obeying the impulse? Simply this, that they were always in feud with each other; so that their expeditions, beginning in. harmony, were sure to break up in anger on the road. What they needed was, some one grand compressing and unifying principle, such as the Roman found in the destinies of his city. True; but this, you say, they found in the sublime principle that God was one, and had appointed them to be the scourges of all who denied it. Their mission was to cleanse the earth from Polytheism; and, as ambassadors from God, to tell the nations—'Ye shall have no other Gods but me.' That was grand; and that surely they had from Mahomet? Perhaps so; but where did he get it? He stole it from the Jewish Scriptures, and from the Scriptures no less than from the traditions of the Christians. Assuredly, then, the first projecting impetus was not impressed upon Islamism by Mahomet. This lay in a revealed truth; and by Mahomet it was furtively translated to his own use from those oracles which held it in keeping. But possibly, if not the principle of motion, yet at least the steady conservation of this motion was secured to Islamism by Mahomet. Granting (you will say) that the launch of this religion might be due to an alien inspiration, yet still the steady movement onwards of this religion through some centuries, might be due exclusively to the code of laws bequeathed by Mahomet in the Koran. And this has been the opinion of many European scholars. They fancy that Mahomet, however worldly and sensual as the founder of a pretended revelation, was wise in the wisdom of this world; and that, if ridiculous as a prophet, he was worthy of veneration as a statesman. He legislated well and presciently, they imagine, for the interests of a remote posterity. Now, upon that question let us hear Mr. Finlay. He, when commenting upon the steady resistance offered to the Saracens by the African Christians of the seventh and eighth centuries—a resistance which terminated disastrously for both sides—the poor Christians being exterminated, and the Moslem invaders being robbed of an indigenous working population, naturally inquires what it was that led to so tragical a result. The Christian natives of these provinces were, in a political condition, little favorable to belligerent efforts; and there cannot be much doubt, that, with any wisdom or any forbearance on the part of the intruders, both parties might soon have settled down into a pacific compromise of their feuds. Instead of this, the cimeter was invoked and worshipped as the sole possible arbitrator; and truce there was none until the silence of desolation brooded over those once fertile fields. How savage was the fanaticism, and how blind the worldly wisdom, which could have co-operated to such a result! The cause must have lain in the unaccommodating nature of the Mahometan institutions, in the bigotry of the Mahometan leaders, and in the defect of expansive views on the part of their legislator. He had not provided even for other elimates than that of his own sweltering sty in the Hedjas, or for manners more polished, or for institutions more philosophic, than those of his own sunbaked Ishmaelites. 'The construction of the political government of the Saracen empire'—says Mr. Finlay (p. 462-3)—'was imperfect, and shows that Mahomet had neither contemplated extensive foreign conquests, nor devoted the energies of his powerful mind to the consideration of the questions of administration which would arise out of the difficult task of ruling a numerous and wealthy population, possessed of property, but deprived of equal rights.' He then shows how the whole power of the state settled into the hands of a chief priest—systematically irresponsible. When, therefore, that momentary state of responsibility had passed away, which was created (like the state of martial law) 'by national feelings, military companionship, and exalted enthusiasm,' the administration of the caliphs became 'far more oppressive than that of the Roman empire.' It is in fact an insult to the majestic Romans, if we should place them seriously in the balance with savages like the Saracens. The Romans were essentially the leaders of civilization, according to the possibilities then existing; for their earliest usages and social forms involved a high civilization, whilst promising a higher: whereas all Moslem nations have described a petty arch of national civility—soon reaching its apex, and rapidly barbarizing backwards. This fatal gravitation towards decay and decomposition in Mahometan institutions, which, at this day, exhibits to the gaze of mankind one uniform spectacle of Mahometan ruins, all the great Moslem nations being already in a Strulbrug state, and held erect only by the colossal support of Christian powers, could not, as a reversionary evil, have been healed by the Arabian prophet. His own religious principles would have prevented that, for they offer a permanent bounty on sensuality; so that every man who serves a Mahometan state faithfully and brilliantly at twenty-five, is incapacitated at thirty-five for any further service, by the very nature of the rewards which he receives from the state. Within a very few years, every public servant is usually emasculated by that unlimited voluptuousness which equally the Moslem princes and the common Prophet of all Moslems countenance as the proper object of human pursuit. Here is the mortal ulcer of Islamism, which can never cleanse itself from death and the odor of death. A political ulcer would or might have found restoration for itself; but this ulcer is higher and deeper:—it lies in the religion, which is incapable of reform: it is an ulcer reaching as high as the paradise which Islamism promises, and deep as the hell which it creates. We repeat, that Mahomet could not effectually have neutralized a poison which he himself had introduced into the circulation and life-blood of his Moslem economy. The false prophet was forced to reap as he had sown. But an evil which is certain, may be retarded; and ravages which tend finally to confusion, may be limited for many generations. Now, in the case of the African provincials which we have noticed, we see an original incapacity of Islamism, even in its palmy condition, for amalgamating with any superior culture. And the specific action of Mahometan ism in the African case, as contrasted with the Roman economy which it supplanted, is thus exhibited by Mr. Finlay in a most instructive passage, where every negation on the Mahometan side is made to suggest the countervailing usage positively on the side of the Romans. O children of Romulus! how noble do you appear when thus fiercely contrasted with the wild boars who desolated your vineyards! 'No local magistrates elected by the people, and no parish priests connected by their feelings and interests both with their superiors and inferiors, bound society together by common ties; and no system of legal administration, independent of the military and financial authorities, preserved the property of the people from the rapacity of the government.'

Such, we are to understand, was not the Mahometan system; such had been the system of Rome. 'Socially and politically,' proceeds the passage, 'the Saracen empire was little better than the Gothic, Hunnish, and Avar monarchies; and that it proved more durable, with almost equal oppression, is to be attributed to the powerful enthusiasm of Mahomet's religion, which tempered for some time its avarice and tyranny.' The same sentiment is repeated still more emphatically at p. 468—' The political policy of the Saracens was of itself utterly barbarous; and it only caught a passing gleam of justice from the religious feeling of their prophet's doctrines.'

Thus far, therefore, it appears that Mahometanism is not much indebted to its too famous founder; it owes to him a principle, viz. the unity of God, which, merely through a capital blunder, it fancies peculiar to itself. Nothing but the grossest ignorance in Mahomet, nothing but the grossest non-acquaintance with Greek authors on the part of the Arabs, could have created or sustained the delusion current amongst that illiterate people—that it was themselves only who rejected Polytheism. Had but one amongst the personal enemies of Mahomet been acquainted with Greek, there was an end of the new religion in the first moon of its existence. Once open the eyes of the Arabs to the fact, that Christians had anticipated them in this great truth of the divine unity, and Mahometanism could only have ranked as a subdivision of Christianity. Mahomet would have ranked only as a Christian heresiarch or schismatic; such as Nestorius or Marcian at one time, such as Arius or Pelagius at another. In his character of theologian, therefore, Mahomet was simply the most memorable of blunderers, supported in his blunders by the most unlettered of nations. In his other character of legislator, we have seen that already the earliest stages of Mahometan experience exposed decisively his ruinous imbecility. Where a rude tribe offered no resistance to his system, for the simple reason that their barbarism suggested no motive for resistance, it could be no honor to prevail. And where, on the other hand, a higher civilization had furnished strong points of repulsion to his system, it appears plainly that this pretended apostle of social improvements had devised or hinted no readier mode of conciliation than by putting to the sword all dissentients. He starts as a theological reformer, with a fancied defiance to the world which was no defiance at all, being exactly what Christians had believed for six centuries, and Jews for six-and-twenty. He starts as a political reformer, with a fancied conciliation to the world, which was no conciliation at all, but was sure to provoke imperishable hostility wheresoever it had any effect at all.

We have thus reviewed some of the more splendid aspects connected with Mr. Finlay's theme; but that theme, in its entire compass, is worthy of a far more extended investigation than our own limits will allow, or than the historical curiosity of the world (misdirected here as in so many other cases) has hitherto demanded. The Greek race, suffering a long occultation under the blaze of the Roman empire, into which for a time it had been absorbed, but again emerging from this blaze, and reassuming a distinct Greek agency and influence, offers a subject great by its own inherent attractions, and separately interesting by the unaccountable neglect which it has suffered. To have overlooked this subject, is one amongst the capital oversights of Gibbon. To have rescued it from utter oblivion, and to have traced an outline for its better illumination, is the peculiar merit of Mr. Finlay. His greatest fault is—to have been careless or slovenly in the niceties of classical and philological precision. His greatest praise, and a very great one indeed, is—to have thrown the light of an original philosophic sagacity upon a neglected province of history, indispensable to the arrondissement of Pagan archaeology.

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Table of Contents

- THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS.

- IN TWO VOLUMES.

- CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

- ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT

- ON CHRISTIANITY, AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT.

- ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY.

- JUDAS ISCARIOT.

- ON HUME'S ARGUMENT AGAINST MIRACLES.

- SECTION II.

- SECTION III.

- SECTION IV.

- SECTION V.

- SECTION VI.

- SECTION VII.

- CASUISTRY.

- PART I.

- PART II.

- CASE I.

- CASE II.

- CASE III.

- CASE IV.

- CASE V.

- CASE VI.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE