THE hunger and thirst of the body are pictures of the desires and longings of the soul. The eating and drinking which appease them are counterparts, respectively, of the solacing of the affections with what they love, and of the acquisition of knowledge by the understanding. Mutatis mutandis, all the governing principles, requirements, and activities of the soul and the body with regard to nourishment, are the same. They similarly famish under privation of food, and improve upon generous diet; hunger, which has done so much for man as a physical affection, has scarcely done less as a spiritual one. Figuratively, or in acknowledgment of the correspondence, we speak of feeding our hopes, thirsting for knowledge, listening with avidity, imbibing information. When we acquire that information, we digest' it,we ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.' How beautiful are the allusions of the poets! My heart is thirsty for that noble pledge !-Julius Cæsar iv. 3. In Ion, the pestilence-stricken, dying mother (fearing to communicate the infection), forbears to give a last embrace to her little child, Stifling the mighty hunger of the heart. [Enl. Series.-No. 15, vol. ii.] N What pathos, again, in the unhappy Lady Constance,— O Lord, my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! The hunger of the heart' is not merely the longing for that which is beloved, but far away, or denied to it; it is that beautiful fervency of the affections which makes them yearn for something to call their own, something that shall be the secret joy and solace of their life. Of its very nature, the heart must and will have something to love and be kind to; it cannot live without; it never was intended to; whence if precluded from that which it knows of and longs for, but cannot secure, it will half-unconsciously pet even a dog or a bird. In Scripture, the native land and home of all true poetical expression, eating' denotes the reception in our souls of the love of God; drinking' the reception of his wisdom; these being the Divine elements by which our spiritual nature is invigorated and sustained, and the gift of which was representatively expressed in the miracles of feeding the hungry. It is because all things come of the Divine Love and Wisdom, and because physical things universally are images of spiritual ones, that the bodies of all living things require both food and drink, and are constructed of solids and liquids, and that no vital function ever does or can take place except through their combined instrumentality. Agreeably, thirst is used in the inspired volume to express desire for truth; hunger to express aspiration after love. Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, come and eat, yea, come buy wine and milk without money and without price!' Of this present life it is said, 'Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness;' and in the Apocalypse, of the multitudes of heaven, that they never more hunger nor thirst,' which means that in the Better Land is plenitude of wisdom and delight. Bread, the staff of life, is so often spoken of in the Word of God, because the representative of heavenly good, or Divine love, and because there is not a single condition of life in which we can dispense with that good, although we may not receive it consciously. A man who will not eat must needs die in a little time. Correspondingly, the spiritual life soon becomes extinct, or reduced to its lowest ebb, if the means which can alone support it be not used. Hence we are instructed to pray without ceasing, Give us this day our daily bread." Ashur, says the promise, 6 which all may realize, 'shall always have bread.' Elsewhere Jehovah is described as pouring out his spirit on the earth, and saying, 'I will *Eat,' as applied to drinking, is similarly used by Homer,-'eat the fat sheep and excellent sweet wine.'-(Il. xii. 319.) give water to those which are athirst.' Water is the emblem of truth, as bread is of good. Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst.' Perceiving the correspondence, in the inmost of our minds, we speak of truth, even colloquially, as flowing from a fountain, also as a sea, and an ocean. 'I seem to myself,' said Sir Isaac Newton, to have been picking up a few shells upon the beach, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.' Religious or theological truths universally represent themselves in secular things. As the religious life needs the divine flesh and blood,' which except ye eat, ye can have no life in you,' so does the life of temporal intelligence and emotion need its own appropriate aliments, 'the food for the mind' so often talked of, and which true Benevolence always remembers to provide, by establishing the means of Education. To urge this latter principle would be no more than to dilate upon one of the oldest texts of common-sense; but it is not superfluous to observe that were the simple rules of common-sense which those who have it are so zealous in enforcing upon the body, as zealously enforced upon man's moral and intellectual nature, they would prove the best practical philosophy. That food for the mind,' moreover, must be nutritive and wholesome. The stalwart and florid components of a masculine lifehood demand the materials of vitalization, not those which conserve squalor. The intellect, as well as the body, demands strong, regular, solid aliment. If the human mind,' continues one of the most eloquent preachers of modern times, 'grow dwarfish and enfeebled, it is, ordinarily, because left to deal with common-place facts, and never summoned to the effort of taking the span and altitude of broad and lofty disclosures. The understanding will gradually bring itself down to the dimensions of the matters with which alone it is familiarized, till, having long been accustomed to contract its powers, it shall lose, wellnigh, the ability to expand them.'* Mental culture is thus, essentially, mental nourishment. We cannot expect to enjoy strength of mind,' 'vigour of mind,' 'intellectual power,' or by whatever other name the manly energy of the soul may be designated, unless we furnish it with food such as it can turn into swift, red blood. Neither can we expect to see these things if by training we do not teach the soul how to be hungry, which is to be done by demanding of it constant, tasking exercise. The laws of the body are those of the mind. Exercise and excitement strengthen and ener gize;-though both may be carried to an extreme, and then be hurtful by exhausting;-indolence and habits of insensitiveness contract, and debilitate, and at length kill. As a man may always judge of his 6 physical state of health by the quality of appetite with which he sits down to his meals, so may he of his spiritual health by the interest he feels in wisdom. Men who realize and thoroughly enjoy their animal life, do so by virtue of their good Appetite, and by the legitimate satisfaction of it;—they who live the higher life of the intellect, do so by virtue of their Curiosity, which is the appetite of the understanding. No man is truly happy who has not a large curiosity as to the beauties and riches of the world in which we dwell; tempered, nevertheless, with prudence as to the time, and method, and extent of his gratifications. Of all the evils man is subject to, assuredly not the least is incuriousness;—perhaps it should be classed among the greatest. Certainly there is no evil more abounding. How many listen to philosophy, if they can be said to listen at all, only with polite aversion, as though the speaker were discoursing in an unknown tongue; how many are the minds whose appetite is altogether vitiated and depraved, which is tantamount to being lost, turning away from all really substantial food as if it were so much poison. It needs not that a man be uneducated to be incurious. It is not so much of Education commonly so called, that curiosity comes; but of quickening the mind with life to educate itself. The customary endeavour to instil a large amount of mere dry, unvitalizing knowledge tends to repress curiosity rather than to excite it. Grammars and lexicons, whether of language or of any other form of knowledge, serve oftener to kill than to make alive. Lessons, as such, or in the sense of parrot-knowledge, are only mind-slaughter.' If it be desired to promote a good appetite, whether of mind or body, it is not to be done by confinement and gorging, which soon destroy it utterly; the body must be taken into the playgrounds of nature, and the mind be inspired through the imagination, upon which curiosity itself depends. A child's imagination can hardly be too much encouraged, provided always that it be guided to some resting-place, where it can repose awhile, and in due time, onwards again, but always with an interval. To excite a child's imagination, sets all its best feelings in motion; mere facts are as useless to it as they are dreary; they die upon a child's heart, like rotten leaves.* Education, in the popular acceptation of the word, might often be dispensed with to advantage if Inspiration could be communicated in place of it. To that genial stimulus of the best energies of the soul into work on their own behalf, which it is the mark and proud office of a great nature unconsciously to 6 * See the excellent remarks on this subject in Harriet Martineau's Home Education, chapter xxii.; also the article Civilization' in Blackwood for January, 1855, p. 26 and onwards. 6 communicate,-that stimulus of which all who have stood in the presence of such natures, have been rapturously sensible; and which they look back upon as the Aurora of their spiritual day,-to that alone should the sacred name of Education be applied. It was his power of inspiring that gave such wonderful success to the late truly eminent Professor Stuart, of Andover. Many a man of celebrity has been heard to say, 'I first learned to think under the inspiration of Mr. Stuart; he first taught me how to use my mind; his first words were an epoch in my history.' Stuart proved more perhaps than any other man has ever done, that the excellence of a teacher does not consist in lodging his own ideas safely in the remembrance of his pupils, but in arousing their individual powers to independent action, in giving them vitality, hope, fervour, courage, in dispelling their drowsiness, and spurring them onward to self-improvement.* It is to such men and their influence that Plato alludes so eloquently. Inspired by the Muses, they communicate the sacred fire to others, who again pass it on to other minds, and so form whole circles of divine enthusiasts.' Longinus also, in that beautiful passage where he speaks of those who, though of themselves they little feel the power of Phœbus, swell with the inspiring force of those great and exalted spirits.' The notion that we must be taught everything is false and destructive. It is better to be taught very little, provided that a noble curiosity be excited, and then the object of education is virtually accomplished. The most extended course of teaching, conducted by the best-informed masters, often fails to take the anticipated effect; it is by that which we acquire for ourselves that we are really elevated, and it is that alone which lifts us above other men. What the world calls 'great men' owe their nobility mainly to their self-culture. Great minds, moreover, it will almost always be found, are such as have had this invaluable sentiment of curiosity early awakened and judiciously fostered. The avowed principle of education with the mother and first intellectual guide of Sir William Jones was to 'excite his curiosity.' With curiosity for its dominant force, the mind becomes open and prepared for everything, and although on many points it may long remain uninformed, it is capable, at a moment's notice, of receiving information. It is the inquiring boy who usually becomes the philosophic man, and the philosopher thus engendered who is most likely to ripen into the priest,'—the highest (and seldomest) development of human nature. What the Boy admires, The Youth endeavours, and the Man acquires. * See the memoir of this eminent man in Kitto's Journal of Sacred Literature for January, 1853, to which we are indebted for the above. |