1838.] Our Pocket Companions. This all-pervading, this all-conscious soul, Which travels nature, flies from star to star, Magnificent! If intellect be, indeed, doomed utterly to perish, why may not we ask God, in that deep despair which, in that case, must inevitably flow from the consciousness of those powers with which he has at once blessed and cursed us-why that intellect, whose final doom is death, and that final doom within a moment, finds no thought that can satisfy it but that of Life, and no idea in which its flight can be lost but that of Eternity? If this earth were at once the soul's cradle and her tomb, why should that cradle have been hung amidst the stars, and that tomb illumined by their eternal light? If, indeed, a child of the clay, was not this earth, with all its plains, forests, mountains, and seas, capacious enough for the dreams of that creature whose course was finally to be extinguished in the darkness of its bosom? What had the soul to do with planets, and suns, and spheres, "and all the dread magnificence of heaven?" Was the soul framed merely that it might for a few years rejoice in the beauty of the stars, as in that of the flowers beneath our feet? And ought we to be grateful for those transitory glimpses of the heavens, as for the fading splendour of the earth? But the heavens are not an idle show, hung out for the gaze of that idle dreamer Man. They are the work of the Eternal God, and he has given us power therein to read and to understand his glory. It is not our eyes only that are dazzled by the face of heaven our souls can comprehend the laws by which that face is overspread by its celestial smiles. The dwellingplace of our spirits is already in the 593 heavens. Well are we entitled to To a piece of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul perishable as the telescope through which it looks into the gates of heaven? "Oh! star-eyed science, hast thou wandered there To waft us home-the message of despair ?" No; there is no despair in the gracious light of heaven. As we travel through those orbs, we feel, indeed, that we have no power, but we feel that we have mighty knowledge. We can create nothing, but we can dimly understand all. It belongs to God only to create, but it is given to man to know-and that knowledge is itself an assurance of immortality. "Is it in words to paint you? O ye fallen! Fallen from the wings of reason and of hope; Erect in stature, prone in appetite; Patrons of pleasure, posting into pain; Lovers of argument, averse to sense; Boasters of liberty, fast bound in chains; Lords of the wide creation, and the shame; More senseless than th' irrationals you scorn; More base than those you rule; than those you pity, Far more undone! O ye most infamous Of beings, from superior dignity; Deepest in wo, from means of boundless bliss! Ye cursed by blessings infinite; because Most highly favour'd, most profoundly lost! From the full flood of evidence against you? His mounting mind made long abode in heaven. To send the soul, on curious travel bent, Through all the provinces of human thought: In each recess of space and time, at home; : Renounce M. Evremont! Ay, and many a Deistical writer of higher repute now in the world. But how came they by the truths they did know? Not by the work of their own unassisted faculties for they lived in a Christian country; they had already been embued with many high and holy beliefs, of which their souls -had they willed it could never have got rid and to the very last the light which they, in their pride, believed to have emanated from the inner shrine-the penetralia of Philosophy-came from the temples of the liv ing "Poor sons of a day," told the angels fell-so by pride man, after his miserable fall, strove to lift up his helpless being from the dust; and, though trailing himself, soul and body, along the soiling earth, and glorying in his own corruption, sought to eternize here his very sins by naming the stars of heaven after heroes, conquerors, murderers, violators of the mandates of the Maker whom they had forgotten, or whose attributes they had debased by their own foul imagina tions. They believed themselves, in the delusion of their own idolatries, to be "Lords of the world and Demigods of Fame," while they were the slaves of their own sins and their own sinful Deities. Should we have been wiser in our generation than they, but for the Bible? If in moral speculation we hear but little too little-of the confession of what it owes to the Christian religion-in all the Philosophy, nevertheless, that is pure and of good report, we see that "the it." In all philosophic enquiry there day-spring from on high has visited is, perhaps, a tendency to the soul's exaltation of itself-which the spirit and genius of Christianity subdues. It is not sufficient to say, that a natural sense of our own infirmities will do so for seldom indeed have Deists been lowly-minded. They have talked proudly of humility. Compare their moral meditations with those of our great divines. Their thoughts and feelings are of the "earth earthy;" but when we listen to those others, we feel that their lore has been God-given. "It is as if an angel shook his wings." Thus has Christianity glorified Philosophy; its celestial purity is now the air in which intellect breathes. In the liberty and equality of that religion, the soul of the highest Philosopher dare not offend that of the huinblest peasant. Nay, it sometimes stands rebuked before it-and the lowly dweller in the hut, or the shieling on the mountain side, or in the forest, could abash the proudest son of Science, by pointing to the sermon of our Saviour on the Mount-and saying, "I see my duties to man and God here!" The religious establishments of Christianity, therefore, have done more not only to support the life of virtue, but to show all its springs and sources, than all the works of all the moral Philosophers who have ever expounded its princip les or its practice. We have been thinking of Night the Fourth-the Christian Triumph. But in Night the Sixth, and Night the Seventh-the Infidel reclaimed-Young flies on a high and steady wing through the whole argument "that vindicates the ways of God to man;" and shows prodigious power in his elucidations of the great truth, from the constitution of our Conscience and our pas sions. Conscience! Speak not of weak and fantastic fears-of abject superstitions-and of all that wild brood of dreams that have for ages been laws to whole nations. Though we might speak of them-and without violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear testimony to the truth. But think of the calm, purified, enlightened, and elevated conscience of the highest natures from which objectless fear has been excluded-and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man when conscience tells him that he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere selfish terror-it is not the dread of punishment only that appals him-for on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the conciousness of offence that is unendurable-not the fear of consequent suffering; it is the degradation of sin that his soul deploresit is the guilt which he would expiate, if possible, in torments; it is the united sense of wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and remorse, that renders a moment's pang of the conscience more terrible to the good thanyears of any other punishment-and it thus is the power of the human soul to render its whole life miserable by its very love of that virtue which it has fatally violated, This is a passion which the soul could not suffer unless it were immortal. Reason, so powerful in the highest minds, would escape from the vain delusion; but it is in the highest minds where reason is most subjected to this awful power-they would seek reconcilement with offended Heaven by the loss of all the happiness that earth ever yielded and would rejoice to pour out their heart's-blood if it could wipe away from the conscience the stain of one deep transgression! These are not the high-wrought and delusive states of mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's sons-and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of the wise and virtuous without the obliteration from the tablets of memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded. These feelings, then, are all intimately connected with the conviction which man has of his being an accountable creature. We believe that all his moral actions proceed from good or evil motives-and that there is a great moral law which he recognises to rule over all natural llfe. That this law this judgment," says Plato, in language should be violated with impunity-or resembling the sublimity of Scripture, that its violation, however wicked, in his Laws, "let no man hope to be should yet subject him to no greater able to escape-for though you should evils that such as we see befalling the descend into the very depth of the bad in this world, is a belief which no earth, or filee on high to the extremities mind can fully embrace-while to the of the heavens, yet should you never general sense of mankind it has ever escape the just judgment of the appeared contradictory to all the sug- Gods." gestions of moral feeling and all the reasoning of intelligence. "From Let us recite a sublime adjurationand then to our heather bed. "By Silenee, death's peculiar attribute; By Night, and all of awful night presents The goddess brings!) By these her irembling fires, Perhaps, too, aid thee, when revered awhile, Through which, at different periods, she shall pass, And purging off some dross at every sphere: By the world's kings, and kingdoms, most renown'd, Sad presage to vain boasters, now in bloom; By the long 1 st of swift mortality, From ADAM downwards to this evening knell, Which midnight waves in fancy's startled eye, And shocks her with a hundred centuries, Round death's black banner throng'd in human thought! HISTORICAL COINCIDENCES. OUR March Number* contained actions of the time;-a belief which some remarks upon the supposed ele- is leading us away from all the true vation of this age above all which have sources of wisdom, which has left us preceded it,-in purity of public mo- without any moral standard to which rals,-in scientific views of govern- public measures can be referred, and ment,—in the application of practical has taught each man to shape his conwisdom to national occasions,-in the duct, not by his own conscience and perception of, and the inclination to his own judgment, but according to pursue, those courses which really tend the will of what he conceives to be the to the common welfare. We noticed people. Lord John Russell's expression of binding by the fetters of the 17th century the talent and merit of the present enlightened age." We also quoted a more lively exposition, which must be here in part repeated, of the same doctrine. 66 "The science of government is an experimental seience, and therefore it is,like all other experimental sciences, a progressive science. Lord Melbourne said, in 1831, that having always opposed Parliamentary Reform, he then supported that measure in obedience to the popular demand for it. Can Popery itself enjoin any thing more slavish! "Mankind are entitled, or rather bound" (see Mackintosh, Eth. Philos. p. 91), "to form and utter their own opinions, and most of all on the most deeply interesting subjects." Such unlimited de.. Society, we believe is ference for opinion and popular usage constantly advancing in knowledge. would justify conformity to the worst The tail is now where the head was practices of the most wicked nations some generations ago. But the head and upon earth. We are daily told that tail still keep their distance. The absolute position of the parties has power and responsibility should go tobeen altered; but the relative position gether; and as remains unchanged. It is delightful to think, that in due time the last of those who now straggle in the rear of the great march will occupy the place now occupied by the advanced guard."-Edinburgh Review, vol. lvi., p. 285. "The publicity which has of late been given to Parliamentary proceedings, has raised the standard of morality among public men."-Ibid. vol. lviii., p. 129. We now proceed to furnish some additional proofs, that such opinions can only be assented to with very great modifications. In the real improvements of our own days we place our chief glory and delight; and if the current notion of our universal superiority were but a harmless fancy, we should not whisper a doubt of its reality. But we regard it as a mischievous delusion, strongest in reference to those very matters in which we are least improved; forming the very groundwork of our daily legislation, and of the most important trans no statesman should attempt to govern by violence, and against the wish of the nation, so no statesman should retain power (if power it may be called) which he is obliged to employ in a manner unsatisfactory to his own mind. To what end have man's faculties been bestowed, if he is to throw off all personal responsibility, and to be moved only by extraneous influences? But it is said that we may safely give up our own convictions, and fol low the pure current of opinion of the nineteenth century. Now, in thinking of the ignorance and immorality of the last age, and of the passions by which its public men were actuated, we are too apt to forget that the next century may recognise the same moral features in ourselves. Men are still beset with temptation, and not yet steeled against it. Periods may be divided and classified by historians; but nations do not rapidly change, and their existence has a certain continuity which bridges over these ima * See vol. 43. p. 360. A striking illustration of the truth of our remark (p. 364) on the conduct of the Opposition during the late war, will be found in a speech of Lord Grey's in 1810, at p. 419 of the same vol. VOL. XLIV. 51 |