Part 31

"Prosperity," says Froude, in one of his essays, "is consistent with intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of human character,--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause,--these have no tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way, the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them. High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchedness of all kinds which forever prevail among mankind,--the short-comings in himself of which he becomes more conscious as he becomes really better,--these things, you may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being particularly happy." "I should rather say," he says in another essay, "that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry, the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well, under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born--this through the week, and at the end of it the Cotter's Saturday Night--the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together, and irradiated with a sacred presence. Happiness! such happiness as we human creatures are likely to know upon this world will be found there, if anywhere."

"On the Simplon," says a German traveler, "amid the desert of snow and mist, in the vicinity of a refuge, a boy and his little sister were journeying up the mountain by the side of our carriage. Both had on their backs little baskets filled with wood, which they had gathered in the lower mountains, where there is still some vegetation. The boy gave us some specimens of rock crystal and other stone, for which we gave him some small coins. The delight with which he cast stolen glances at his money, as he passed by our carriage, made upon me an indelible impression. Never before had I seen such a heavenly expression of felicity. I could not but reflect that God had placed all sources and capabilities for happiness in the human heart; and that, with respect to happiness, it is perfectly indifferent how and where one dwells."

"A man," says Cumberland, "who is gifted with worldly qualities and accommodations is armed with hands, as a ship with grappling-irons, ready to catch hold of, and make himself fast to everything he comes in contact with, and such a man, with all these properties of adhesion, has also the property, like the polypus, of a most miraculous and convenient indivisibility; cut off his hold--nay, cut him how you will, he is still a polypus, whole and entire. Men of this sort still work their way out of their obscurity like cockroaches out of the hold of a ship, and crawl into notice, nay, even into kings' palaces, as the frogs did into Pharaoh's; the happy faculty of noting times and seasons, and a lucky promptitude to avail themselves of moments with address and boldness, are alone such all-sufficient requisites, such marketable stores of worldly knowledge, that, although the minds of those who own them shall be, as to all the liberal sciences, a rasa tabula, yet knowing these things needful to be known, let their difficulties and distresses be what they may, though the storm of adversity threatens to overwhelm them, they are in a life-boat, buoyed up by corks, and cannot sink. These are the stray children turned loose upon the world, whom Fortune, in her charity, takes charge of, and for whose guidance in the by-ways and cross-roads of their pilgrimage she sets up fairy finger-posts, discoverable by those whose eyes are near the ground, but unperceived by such whose looks are raised above it."

"Genial manners are good," says Emerson, "and power of accommodation to any circumstance; but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness,--whether it be to make baskets, or broad-swords, or canals, or statues, or songs."

Wordsworth's man-servant, James, was brought up in a work-house, and at nine years of age was turned out of the house with two shillings in his pocket. When without a six-pence, he was picked up by a farmer, who took him into his service on condition that all his clothes should be burnt (they were so filthy); and he was to pay for his new clothes out of his wages of two pounds ten shillings per annum. Here he stayed as long as he was wanted. "I have been so lucky," said James, "that I was never out of a place a day in my life, for I was always taken into service immediately. I never got into a scrape, or was drunk in my life, for I never taste any liquor. So that I have often said, I consider myself as a favorite of fortune!" This is like Goldsmith's cripple in the park, who, remarking upon his appealing wretchedness, said, "'Tis not every man that can be born with a golden spoon in his mouth."

"Arrogance," said Goethe, "is natural to youth. A man believes, in his youth, that the world properly began with him, and that all exists for his sake. In the East, there was a man who, every morning, collected his people about him, and never would go to work till he had commanded the sun to arise. But he was wise enough not to speak his command till the sun of its own accord was ready to appear." "At the outset of life," says Hazlitt, "our imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in lamb's-wool, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls, and nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what has been!"

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparel'd in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it has been of yore; Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

"The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth."

"Why," asks Souvestre, "is there so much confidence at first, so much doubt at last? Has, then, the knowledge of life no other end but to make it unfit for happiness? Must we condemn ourselves to ignorance if we would preserve hope? Is the world, and is the individual man, intended, after all, to find rest only in an eternal childhood?"

"If the world does improve on the whole," said Goethe, "yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning." But, "'tis a great advantage of rank," said Pascal, "that a man at eighteen or twenty shall be allowed the same esteem and deference which another purchaseth by his merit at fifty. Here are thirty years gained at a stroke."

"The whole employment of men's lives," said the same thinker, "is to improve their fortunes; and yet the title by which they hold all, if traced to its origin, is no more than the pure fancy of the legislators: but their possession is still more precarious than their right, and at the mercy of a thousand accidents: nor are the treasures of the mind better insured; while a fall, or a fit of sickness, may bankrupt the ablest understanding.... Caesar was too old, in my opinion, to amuse himself with projecting the conquest of the world. Such an imagination was excusable in Alexander, a prince full of youth and fire, and not easy to be checked in his hopes. But Caesar ought to have been more grave."

"Knowledge has two extremities, which meet and touch each other," says Pascal, again. "The first of them is pure, natural ignorance, such as attends every man at his birth. The other is the perfection attained by great souls, who, having run through the circle of all that mankind can know, find at length that they know nothing, and are contented to return to that ignorance from which they set out. Ignorance that thus knows itself is a wise and learned ignorance."

"That is ever the difference," said Emerson, "between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual."

It has been said that the visitor, climbing the white roof of the Milan cathedral, and gazing on the forest of statues, "feels as though a flight of angels had alighted there and been struck to marble." "At the top of his mind," says Alger, "the devout scholar has a holy of holies, a little pantheon set round with altars and the images of the greatest men. Every day, putting on a priestly robe, he retires into this temple and passes before its shrines and shapes. Here he feels a thrill of awe; there he lays a burning aspiration; farther on he swings a censer of reverence. To one he lifts a look of love; at the feet of another he drops a grateful tear; and before another still, a flush of pride and joy suffuses him. They smile on him: sometimes they speak and wave their solemn hands. Always they look up to the Highest. Purified and hallowed, he gathers his soul together, and comes away from the worshipful intercourse, serious, serene, glad, and strong."

"Men," says St. Augustine, "travel far to climb high mountains, to observe the majesty of the ocean, to trace the sources of rivers, but they neglect themselves." "Admirable reasoning! admirable lesson!" exclaimed Petrarch, as he closed the Confessions upon the passage when on the summit of the Alps. "If," said he, "I have undergone so much labor in climbing this mountain that my body might be nearer to heaven, what ought I not to do in order that my soul may be received into those immortal regions?"

Hear this lofty strain of the old heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius: "Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live. If they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is better than to live as men do."

"As soon as a man," says Max Mueller, "becomes conscious of himself as distinct from all other things and persons, he at the same moment becomes conscious of a Higher Self, a higher power, without which he feels that neither he nor anything else would have any life or reality."

"To live, indeed," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope but an evidence in noble believers, 'tis all one to lie in St. Innocent's church-yard, as in the sands of Egypt; ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the moles of Adrianus."

"At the age of seventy-five," said Goethe, "one must, of course, think frequently of death. But this thought never gives me the least uneasiness, I am so fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to our earthly eyes to set in night, but is in reality gone to diffuse its light elsewhere."

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light thro' chinks that time has made; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home. Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view That stand upon the threshold of the new."

Amongst the poems of Mrs. Barbauld is a stanza on Life, written in extreme old age. Madame D'Arblay told the poet Rogers that she repeated it every night. Wordsworth once said to a visitor, "Repeat me that stanza by Mrs. Barbauld." His friend did so. Wordsworth made him repeat it again. And so he learned it by heart. He was at the time walking in his sitting-room at Rydal, with his hands behind him, and was heard to mutter to himself, "I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines."

"Life! we've been long together, Thro' pleasant and thro' cloudy weather: 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear, Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear: Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime Bid me good-morning."

XIII.

RELIGION.

"Ah!" sighed Shelley to Leigh Hunt, as the organ was playing in the cathedral at Pisa, "what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith."

"In the seventeenth century," said Dean Stanley, in one of his Lectures on the Church of Scotland, "the minister of the parish of Anworth was the famous Samuel Rutherford, the great religious oracle of the Covenanters and their adherents. It was, as all readers of his letters will remember, the spot which he most loved on earth. The very swallows and sparrows which found their nests in the church of Anworth were, when far away, the objects of his affectionate envy. Its hills and valleys were the witnesses of his ardent devotion when living; they still retain his memory with unshaken fidelity. It is one of the traditions thus cherished on the spot, that on a Saturday evening, at one of those family gatherings whence, in the language of the good Scottish poet,--

'Old Scotia's grandeur springs,'

when Rutherford was catechising his children and servants, that a stranger knocked at the door of the manse, and begged shelter for the night. The minister kindly received him, and asked him to take his place amongst the family and assist at their religious exercises. It so happened that the question in the catechism which came to the stranger's turn was that which asks, 'How many commandments are there?' He answered, 'Eleven.' 'Eleven!' exclaimed Rutherford; 'I am surprised that a man of your age and appearance should not know better. What do you mean?' And he answered, 'A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.' Rutherford was much impressed by the answer, and they retired to rest. The next morning he rose early to meditate on the services of the day. The old manse of Anworth stood--its place is still pointed out--in the corner of a field, under the hill-side, and thence a long, winding, wooded path, still called Rutherford's Walk, leads to the church. Through this glen he passed, and, as he threaded his way through the thicket, he heard amongst the trees the voice of the stranger at his morning devotions. The elevation of the sentiments and of the expressions convinced him that it was no common man. He accosted him, and the traveler confessed to him that he was no other than the great divine and scholar, Archbishop Usher, the Primate of the Church of Ireland, one of the best and most learned men of his age, who well fulfilled that new commandment in the love which he won and which he bore to others; one of the few links of Christian charity between the fierce contending factions of that time, devoted to King Charles I. in his life-time, and honored in his grave by the Protector Cromwell. He it was who, attracted by Rutherford's fame, had thus come in disguise to see him in the privacy of his own home. The stern Covenanter welcomed the stranger prelate; side by side they pursued their way along Rutherford's Walk to the little church, of which the ruins still remain; and in that small Presbyterian sanctuary, from Rutherford's rustic pulpit, the archbishop preached to the people of Anworth on the words which had so startled his host the evening before: 'A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.'"

In a legend which St. Jerome has recorded, and which, says the same writer, in his Essays on the Apostolic Age, is not the less impressive because so familiar to us, we see the aged Apostle (John) borne in the arms of his disciples into the Ephesian assembly, and there repeating over and over again the same saying, "Little children, love one another;" till, when asked why he said this and nothing else, he replied in those well-known words, fit indeed to be the farewell speech of the beloved disciple, "Because this is our Lord's command, and if you fulfill this, nothing else is needed."

"An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom for a season," says Emerson, "would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service. Love would put a new face on this weary old world, in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies and navies and lines of defense, would be superseded by this unarmed child." We do not believe, or we forget, that "the Holy Ghost came down, not in the shape of a vulture, but in the form of a dove."

Rogers' stories of children, of which he told many, were very pretty. The prettiest was of a little girl who was a great favorite of every one who knew her. "Why does everybody love you so much?" She answered, "I think it is because I love everybody so much."

"A strong argument," thought Poe, "for the religion of Christ is this--that offenses against charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made--not to understand--but to feel--as crime."

"Tell me, gentle traveler, who hast wandered through the world, and seen the sweetest roses blow, and brightest gliding rivers, of all thine eyes have seen, which is the fairest land?" "Child, shall I tell thee where nature is most blest and fair? It is where those we love abide. Though that space be small, ample is it above kingdoms; though it be a desert, through it runs the river of paradise, and there are the enchanted bowers."

"We ought," says the author of Ecce Homo, "to be just as tolerant of an imperfect creed as we are of an imperfect practice. Everything which can be urged in excuse for the latter may also be pleaded for the former. If the way to Christian action is beset by corrupt habits and misleading passions, the path to Christian truth is overgrown with prejudices, and strewn with fallen theories and rotting systems which hide it from our view. It is quite as hard to think rightly as to act rightly, or even to feel rightly. And as all allow that an error is a less culpable thing than a crime or a vicious passion, it is monstrous that it should be more severely punished; it is monstrous that Christ, who was called the friend of publicans and sinners, should be represented as the pitiless enemy of bewildered seekers of truth. How could men have been guilty of such an inconsistency? By speaking of what they do not understand. Men in general do not understand or appreciate the difficulty of finding truth. All men must act, and therefore all men learn in some degree how difficult it is to act rightly. The consequence is that all men can make excuse for those who fail to act rightly. But all men are not compelled to make an independent search for truth, and those who voluntarily undertake to do so are always few. To the world at large it seems quite easy to find truth, and inexcusable to miss it. And no wonder! For by finding truth they mean only learning by rote the maxims current among them." "Maxims and first principles," says Pascal, "are subject to revolutions; and we are to go to chronology for the epochs of right and wrong. A very humorsome justice this, which is bounded by a river or a mountain: orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other." "Let there," begs the Spanish President Castelar, "be no more accursed races on the earth. Let every one act according to his conscience, and communicate freely with his God. Let thought be only corrected by the contradiction of thought. Let error be an infirmity, and not a crime. Let us agree in acknowledging that opinions sometimes take possession of our understandings quite independent of our will or desire. Let us be so just as to be enabled to see even to what degree each race has contributed to the universal education of humanity."

"Every new idea," says a writer in The Quarterly Review, "creates an enthusiasm in the minds of those who have first grasped it, which renders them incapable of viewing it in its true proportions to the sum total of knowledge. It is in their eyes no new denizen of the world of facts, but a heaven-sent ruler of it, to which all previously recognized truths must be made to bow. As time goes on, truer views obtain. The new principle ceases to be regarded either as a pestilent delusion or as a key to all mysteries. Its application comes to be better defined and its value more reasonably appreciated, when both idolators and iconoclasts have passed away, and a new generation begins to take stock of its intellectual inheritance."

"The truth," said Goethe, "must be repeated over and over again, because error is repeatedly preached among us, not only by individuals, but by the masses. In periodicals and cyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere, in fact, error prevails, and is quite easy in the feeling that it has quite a majority on its side." "Public opinion, of which we hear so much," said a writer in Blackwood, long ago, "is never anything else than the reecho of the thought of a few great men half a century before. It takes that time for ideas to flow down from the elevated to the inferior level. The great never adopt, they only originate. Their chief efforts are always made in opposition to the prevailing opinions by which they are surrounded. Thence it is that a powerful mind is always uneasy when it is not in the minority on any subject which excites general attention." "If you discover a truth," says an unknown author, "you are persecuted by an infinite number of people who gain their living from the error you oppose, saying that this error itself is the truth, and that the greatest error is that which tends to destroy it." "There arose no small stir" at Ephesus on account of Paul's preaching. "For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen; whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth: moreover, ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying that they be no gods which are made with hands. So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at naught; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshipeth. And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians."