LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA
SAN DIEGO
RELIGIO POET^E
ETC.
RELIGIO POE7JE
ETC.
BY
COVENTRY! PATMORE
NEW EDITION
PREFACE
" SOME of these Essays have already appeared
in the Fortnightly Review or elsewhere."
In the original issue the author had noted
that "thoughts had sometimes been repeated,
almost in the same words." In the rearrange-
ment here adopted no attempt has been made
to obviate this repetition, which may be even
more conspicuous than in the original order;
but, "as these thoughts are mostly unfamiliar
and significant, readers will be none the worse
for encountering them twice or even thrice."
Shortly before his death, Mr. Patmore had
suggested a rearrangement for a new issue,
vi PREFACE
which has been adopted and completed for this
edition. A few corrections and omissions have
also been made, the greater number of which
were either marked or sanctioned by the author
himself. The alterations not actually his own
are few and of small importance.
Some obvious mistakes in matters of fact,
and some errors of punctuation, have been
corrected; here and there a word has been trans-
posed where the original order was imperfect;
and one or two passages which seemed to have
been written for an immediate purpose rather
than for more permanent effect have been
omitted.
CONTENTS
ESSAY PAGE
I. RELIGIO POETM i
II. THE PRECURSOR 10
III. THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION . . 18
IV. ATTENTION 31
V. CHRISTIANITY AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 38
VI. "A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE" 46
VII. THE Bow SET IN THE CLOUD . . 51
VIII. CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS" . . 57
IX. SIMPLICITY 64
X. ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS OF PURITY 68
XI. CONSCIENCE 73
XII. REAL APPREHENSION . . -77
XIII. SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS . . 85
XIV. POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES . . 96
XV. IMAGINATION 102
via RELIGIO POETVE, ETC.
BSSAY PAGE
XVI. THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS . . 108
XVII. A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK . . "3
XVIII. THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, OPINION,
AND INEQUALITY . . . .121
XIX. LOVE AND POETRY . . . .139
XX. THE WEAKER VESSEL .... 147
XXI. DIEU ET MA DAME .... 159
I
RELIGIO POET.E
No one, probably, has ever found his life per-
manently affected by any truth whereof he has
been unable to obtain a real apprehension^ which,
as I have elsewhere shown, is quite -a different
thing from real comprehension. Intellectual assent
to truths of faith, founded on what the reason
regards as sufficient authority for, at least, experi-
mental assent, must, of course, precede real
apprehension of them, as also must action, in a
sort experimental, on faith of truths so assented
to ; but such faith and action have little effective
life, and are likely soon to cease, or to become
mere formalities, unless they produce some degree
of vital knowledge or perception. I do not see
what is to become of popular Religion, parodied
and discredited as Christianity is by the " Reli-
gions" of Atheists, Moralists, Formalists, Philan-
B
2 RELIGIO
thropists, Scientists, and Sentimentalists, unless
there can be infused into it some increased long-
ing and capacity for real apprehension.
Coleridge, at one time, proposed to write a
" Religio Poetae," with the view, I suppose, of
correcting the imperceptive character of modern
faith. The Poet is, par excellence, the perceiver,
nothing having any interest for him, unless he
can, as it were, see and touch it with the spiritual
senses, with which he is pre-eminently endowed.
The Saints, indeed, seem, for the most part, to
have had these senses greatly developed by their
holiness and their habitual suppression of the
corporeal senses. But, as a rule, they do not
speak, perhaps from the fear of being too implicitly
believed ; or, if they do, they are careful
" To make Truth look as near a lie
As can comport with her divinity,"
in order to adapt it to the public capacity. But
the Poet has this advantage, that none, save the
few whose ears are opened to the teaching which
would be ridiculed or profaned to their own de-
struction by the many, will think that he is in
earnest, or that his flights into regions of percep-
tion, in which they can perceive nothing, are other
than flights of fancy. He occupies a quite
peculiar position somewhere between that of a
RELIGIO POET^: . 3
Saint and that of Balaam's Ass. His intellect
seems capable of a sort of independent sanctifica-
tion, while his moral constitution usually enables
him to prophesy without a Prophet's responsi-
bilities. The Saint dreads lest he should receive
praise of men for the holiness through which he
has acquired his knowledge ; the Poet understands
very well that no one will or ought to think the
better of his righteousness for his being a seer.
The Poet, again, is not more singular for the
delicacy of his spiritual insight, which enables him
to see celestial beauty and substantial reality
where all is blank to most others, than for the
surprising range and alertness of vision, whereby
he detects, in external nature, those likenesses and
echoes by which spiritual realities can alone be
rendered credible and more or less apparent, or
subject to " real apprehension," in persons of
inferior perceptive powers. Such likenesses,
when chosen by the imagination, not the fancy,
of the true Poet, are real words the only real
words ; for " that which is unseen is known by
that which is seen," and natural similitudes often
contain and are truly the visible ultimate* of the
unseen. " God," says Goethe, " is manifested in
ultimates," a doctrine destined to produce some
amazing developments of Christianity, which is
yet in its infancy, though it seems, as it has
4 RELIGIO
always seemed to contemporaries, to be in its
decay. The Poet, again, has, like Newton, a
special calculus a. doctrine of infinite series,
whereby he attains to unveil the infinite and
express it in credible terms of the finite, showing
it, if not as actually apprehensible, yet as possibly,
and even certainly so, to orders of intellect which
are probably only a continuation and development
of our own. Of this calculus Dante has abund-
antly made use, and those passages in his Poems
which we read with the most passionate delight
and real apprehension are precisely those in which
the argument rises from natural experience to the
dizziest heights of spiritual probability. For
neither in this, nor in any other Poet of like rank,
is there any solution of _ continuity between the
lowest and the highest, any more than there is in
the progress of the seed from its first germination
through its various transformations in seed-leaf,
stem, flower, and fruit. It is still nature, but more
mature nature nature developed by successive and
intelligible degrees of growth and glory, the first
of these degrees being, even in this life, quite
familiar to those who know the truth of Words-
worth's saying
" By grace divine,
Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine."
Again, the Poet always treats spiritual realities
RELIGIO POET^E 5
as the concrete and very credible things they
truly are. He has no slipshod notions about the
immeasurable .and " infinite." He knows, as
Plato knew, that God Himself is most falsely
described as infinite. God is the synthesis, as
Proclus declares in his treatise on the Fables of
Homer, of "Infinite" and "Boundary," and is
excellently intelligible, though for ever unutter-
able, by those who love Him.
Another vast advantage in the Poet's mode of
teaching is that it is, even in its indignant denials
of negation, necessarily and always, as far as he
is a Poet, affirmative and positive. " Let your
communication be, Yea, Yea, and Nay, Nay, for
whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil."
He gives the world to eat only of the Tree of Life,
reality ; and will not so much as touch the Tree
of Knowledge, as the writer of Genesis ironically
calls the Tree of Learning that leads to denial of
knowledge. He is the very reverse of a "scientist."
He is all vision and no thought, whereas the other
is all thought and no vision. But " Where there
is no vision the People perish"; and of thought
without vision it may be truly said, " Dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life," and " dust thou
art and to dust shalt thou return." The Poet
could not do other than he does. All realities will
sing, but nothing else will. Judge then how much
6 RELIGIO POET.E
reality there is, in the modern teaching of religion,
by the songs of its prophets ! Where in these
songs is the flavour of reality, " the sweetness of
the lips that increaseth learning " ?
There is a kind of perception in a state of solu-
tion which must not be overlooked or depreciated.
It is the substance of most of the finest lyric poetry,
and of the religion of nearly all religious people,
especially in these days. But this fire-mist is a
very inferior form of perceptive knowledge. There
is none of it in Dante. It is the " Infinite " with-
out the " Bound," and is not sufficiently concrete
to be very serviceable or communicable, being
mainly unintelligent heat, though that heat may
be holy. For effective teaching there must be the
disc of really apprehended dogma ; rays diversely
reflected and refracted from clouded sources will
not do. The soul dares not believe its own mar-
vellous guesses and instincts, unless it can fall back
upon definite dogma for confirmation and justifica-
tion, nor can the corollaries of dogma, which are
often of far more personal weight than dogma
itself, be inferred without a definite premise.
I suppose I need not say that by Poets I do
not, in this argument, mean only or chiefly those
who have written in verse. During most of the
centuries which have elapsed since the beginning
of Christianity the highest imaginative as well as
RELIGIO POET^: 7
intellectual powers of mankind have been wholly
absorbed by theology and theological psychology ;
and I may say, without fear of contradiction from
those who are at all well read in the works of St.
Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, St.
Francis of Sales, St. John of the Cross, and a
score of others like them, that the amount of
substantial poetry, of imaginative insight into the
noblest and loveliest reality to be found in their
writings, is ten times greater than is to be found
in all the poets of the past two thousand years put
together. The vastness of the mass hinders our
appreciation of its substance and altitude. Aquinas
is to Dante as the Tableland of Thibet is to the
Peak of Teneriffe ; and the first is not less essen-
tially a poet, in the sense of a Seer, because his
language is even more austere and without orna-
ment, than that of the latter. It is true that the
outward form of poetry is an inestimable aid to
the convincing and persuasive power of poetical
realities ; but there is a poetic region the most
poetical of all which is incapable of taking the
form of poetry. Its realities take away the breath
which would, if it could, go forth in song ; and
there is such a boundless wilderness of equally
inspiring subject to choose from that choice be-
comes impossible, and the tongue of love and joy
is paralysed.
8 RELIGIO POETVE
To conclude, I think that it must be manifest
to fitly qualified observers, that religion, which to
timid onlookers appears to be on a fair way to total
extinction, is actually, both by tendency from within
and compulsion from without through heresies
and denials of all that cannot be " realised " in
the initial stage of a new development, of which
the note will be real apprehension, whereby Chris-
tianity will acquire such a power of appeal to the
" pure among the Gentiles," i.e. our natural feel-
ings and instincts, as will cause it to appear almost
like a New Dispensation, though it will truly be no
more than the fulfilment of the express promises of
Christ and His Apostles to the world, promises
which in every age have been fulfilled to thousands
and thousands of individuals who have so learned
" the King's secret " as to have become the con-
verts of intelligible joy. Or would it be too vast
a hope that such a development may truly assume
the proportions and character of a New Dispensa-
tion, the Dispensation of the Holy Spirit, the
Spirit of Life and perceived Reality, continuing
and fulfilling the Dispensation of Christ, as His
did that of the Father the " Persona," or aspect
of the Holy Trinity in the worship of the Israel-
ites ? a Dispensation under which millions instead
of thousands should awake to those facts of life of
which Christ said, " I have many things to say to
RELIGIO POET.E 9
you, but you cannot bear them yet ; but when the
Holy Spirit shall come, He shall teach you the
things I have told you." Under the first dispensa-
tion men were the servants of God ; under the
second, His sons : " Sons now we are of God,
but what we shall be hath not yet appeared."
What if, under a third, " the voice of the Bride
and the Bridegroom shall be heard again in our
streets " ? Our Lord, by an intervention which
He declared to be premature, converted water into
the wine of the Marriage Feast. He did so for
hundreds, before the time of His manifestation in
the flesh ; He has done so for thousands who
" have lived to see His coming " since. What if
His fuller coming to the whole Church should be
a like revelation, even in this life, for every one
who so " seeks first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness," that " all these things shall be
added to him " ?
II
THE PRECURSOR
ST. AUGUSTINE, in answer to some one who
objected that there were several interpretations of
a passage in Scripture besides that which the
Saint had offered, replied : " The more interpreta-
tions the better." The words of Scripture and of
the ancient mythologies and profoundest Poets
may, indeed, be credited with containing and in-
tending all the truths which they can be made to
carry, and I do not mean to controvert any other
account of the significance of the peculiar, mys-
terious, and, in the letter, unaccountable place
held by St. John the Baptist in relation to the
gospel of Divine Love, when I point out that
the relation of Natural Love to Divine Love is
represented by him with a consistent aptness and
an amount of detail which can scarcely have been
accidental.
In the first place he is represented not as
THE PRECURSOR II
simply a Prophet, but as the ''Precursor" of Christ,
as Natural Love is the Precursor of the Divine.
" The natural first, and afterwards the spiritual."
St. Bernard says : " The love of God has its first
root in the most secret of the human affections."
The love between God and the soul is constantly
declared to be, in its highest perfection, the love
that subsists between Bridegroom and Bride (" thy
Maker is thy Husband," etc., etc.), and our only
means of understanding and attaining to these
supernatural relations are the meditation and
contemplation of their types in nature. "The
unseen is known by that which is seen." " No
greater than He was born of woman," i. e. nature ;
but " the least in the Kingdom of Heaven," /.<?.
Divine Love, " is greater than he " ; and, as the
latter increases, he must decrease. His baptism
was necessary even to Christ as the representative
of Christians, for none can receive effectually
Christ's baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit with-
out the previous baptism of the purifying water of
natural love, water itself always signifying, in the
parabolic vocabulary of all primitive religions, the
life of the external senses, or nature. Food of
locusts, -wild honey, and clothing of camel's hair are
also interpreted, by those who are most learned
in that mystical vocabulary which everybody
acknowledges to have been largely in use by the
12 THE PRECURSOR
writers of the Scriptures as well as by those of all
the great mythologies, and without which a great
part of Scripture is hopelessly unintelligible, as
significant of life in natural good, of which the
highest is natural love. " Honey," writes one of
the most deeply learned in this vocabulary,
" signifies natural good." " Locusts," says the
same writer, "signify nutriment in the extreme
natural," and camel's hair and a leathern girdle
"denote what is natural," skin and hair being
those things which are most external. St. John
the Baptist is spoken of by the Church as the
"strong man "and the "standard-bearer," being
the mightiest of human powers and their leader.
He alone of all natural men is " sanctified from
his mother's womb " and originally holy : " sole
mortal thing of worth immortal." He " came to
bear testimony to the light " of that Love which
is the fulfilment of the prophecy of natural love.
Herod, the world, was friendly to him, who never-
theless rebuked the Tetrarch for his violation of
a law of natural love, and the Saint was sacrificed
by him to an impure passion and the allurements
of a dancing girl ; which is the usual fate of pure
natural love, "sanctified from the womb," when
brought into conflict with the sensuality which
apes and profanes it. " Let the Church," says
the Service of the Saint's Day, "rejoice in the
THE PRECURSOR 13
nativity of blessed John the Baptist, by whom she
came to the knowledge of the Author of her re-
generation." " Behold," says the same Service,
" I have given thee to be the light of the Gentiles"
i.e. the interpreter of the faculties and desires
of the natural man. In virtue of his peculiar
mission the Baptist compares and measures him-
self with Christ as no other ever did : " He must
increase, I must decrease " ; "He cometh, the
latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to un-
loose ;" I am not the Christ, that most holy love,
for whom ye, who have not yet seen Him, take
me, but only the one pure mortal voice " crying
in the desert " of the world, and prophesying of
Him ; " I ought to be baptized by Thee, and
comest Thou to me ?" " He was not the true
light, but was to give testimony of the light."
" After me there cometh a man who is preferred
before me," etc.
Jesus, being baptized by John, the heavens
were opened to him, and a voice from heaven
said : " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am
well pleased ;" i.e. by the baptism of natural love,
the heavens are sensibly opened to him who is
already the Son of God, and Christ, as the repre-
sentative of Christians, is declared then most
pleasing to the Father when He has donned and
assumed to Himself the naturallife of love. Con-
14 THE PRECURSOR
earning the Baptist, our Lord afterwards says :
" What went ye out to see ? A prophet ? Yea, I
tell you, and more than a prophet. For this is
he of whom it is written, Behold I send my Angel
before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before
thee," "and if you will receive it, he is Elias
that is to come. He that hath ears, let him hear."
Our Lord says of John : " If I bear witness of
myself, my witness is not true " (that is, the
Divine Love cannot effectually witness directly of
itself), " there is another " (natural love) " that
beareth witness of me. He was a burning and a
shining light, and you were willing for a time to
rejoice in him." John is "the friend of the Bride-
groom, who standeth and heareth Him, and
rejoiceth with joy because of the Bridegroom's
voice. This my joy is therefore fulfilled." John,
though naturally nearer to Jesus than any other
man " born of woman " (nature) " knew him not "
but by the coming of the Holy Spirit, i.e. divine
inspiration. So natural love, though so pure an
image of the divine, knows not the divine until
this is supernaturally revealed to it.
What seems to be thus obscurely shown forth
as a parable in the life of the Precursor is, how-
ever, plainly affirmed by other parts of Scripture
and by the doctrine of the Church concerning the
significance of natural love. It is distinctly de-
THE PRECURSOR 15
clared to be a " great Sacrament," or fact having
a symbolic value of the highest consequence, as
representative of the final and essentially nuptial
relationship of Christ and the Church, of which
every member is a church in little, with Our Lord
for her head, as man is the head of woman, and
God the Head of Christ. It is remarkable that,
in a time when general reverence for religion is
greatly diminishing, a true but altogether unen-
lightened reverence for the holy mystery of natural
love should be sensibly increasing among us ; and
we may, perhaps, hail this circumstance as the pre-
cursor of a new development of Christianity which
shall exert a hitherto unknown power over men,
as being based upon and explanatory of their
universal instincts and longings, which the sym-
bol is, by as universal consent, wholly incapable
of satisfying. And, besides the interest of the
feelings, the intellect of man, which is now bent
upon examining everything, must find, in the other-
wise inexplicable phenomena of natural love, a
satisfaction in the prospect of finding its key in
another mystery which is, at least, much less in-
scrutable and does not involve any of the anom-
alies and absurdities of that passion, when it is
regarded as an end having no further end. Every
one who has loved and reflected on love for an
instant, knows very well that what is vulgarly re-
16 THE PRECURSOR
garded as the end of that passion, is, as the
Church steadfastly maintains, no more than its
accident. The flower is not for the seed, but the
seed for the flower. And yet what is that flower,
if it be not the rising bud of another flower, flashed
for a moment of eternal moment before our eyes,
and at once withdrawn, lest we should misunder-
stand the prophecy, and take it for our final good ?
If it be other than a symbol, that is, as Coleridge
defines a symbol to be, a part taken to represent
the whole, then love, which the heart of every lover
knows to be the supreme sanity, must be con-
demned by the intellect as the supreme insanity ;
and its " extravagances," which, from the Church's
point of view, are in the highest representative
order, must be looked upon as those of a maniac
who takes a green "goose for a goddess and him-
self for a god. But all this becomes clear when
the parties to love are regarded as priest and
priestess to one another of the divine womanhood
and the divine manhood which are inherent in
original Deity. They are but ministers to each
other of the "great sacrament" of that glory
"which the Son had with the Father before the
beginning of the world " ; and the co-existence of
the greatest defects, short of an absolute defect of
manhood and womanhood, with a claim to the
.greatest reverence and devotion, has its exact
THE PRECURSOR if
analogue in the nature and claims of priesthood,
as being the vehicle and only the vehicle of the
Divine in sacramental administrations.
I should far exceed the space to which I have
desired to limit myself were I to exhaust the say-
ings of the Scripture and the services of the Church
which bear upon this interpretation of the Pre-
cursorship of John. Let me, however, point out
that the great painters of the Renaissance, from
Botticelli and earlier downwards men who show,
to those who have eyes to see, the most ardent
interest in the hidden meanings of scriptural say-
ings and events, seem to have discerned and in-
tended to convey the substance of what I have
now said, by their frequent associations of the two
Johns, John the Baptist and John " the Divine"
as companions and co-worshippers of the Child
Jesus, their synthesis, "God made Man of the
Woman," to whose maternal bosom he eternally
clings.
THE realities discerned by faith are susceptible of
infinite corroboration, for "God is infinitely visible
and infinitely credible," and, since the knowledge
of God is the one end of life, the sum of human
wisdom consists in the accumulation of such cor-
roborations. Now any fresh and original testi-
mony is thus corroborative. It is the nature of
man to believe the more because another believes,
and to derive additional knowledge from another's
mode of knowing. But how shall such testimony
be conveyed, without betraying knowledge which
often cannot be attempted to be spoken without
profanation by and peril to the ignorant, except in
enigmas which are clear to those who know, but
hopelessly dark to those who do not ? Accord-
ingly we find that the teaching of every great
religion, the Jewish and Christian perhaps above
all, when it once leaves the preparatory stage of
THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 19
natural religion and morals and formal dogma,
becomes mainly enigmatical and mythical. It is
quite right that popular teaching should be limited,
as it is, to the preparatory stage and to the en-
forcement of it by Divine sanction, threats, and
general promises ; for the house of God must be
built, the soul must know the direction in which
to look for light, and must be formed gradually
into sincere desire of and constant endeavour for
perfection, before God can inhabit it, and baptize
it with that fire without which the baptism of
water lies dormant as a grain of wheat in an
Egyptian tomb. It is at this point that real
religion, which is self-evident ', begins, and at this
point occurs that great change in the mode of the
soul's progress which is well known to Catholic
psychologists. Up to this point the progression
is from truth to good ; afterwards from good to
truth, its rule then becoming " prove all things ;
hold fast " (not " that which is true," but) " that
which is good " ; the substance becomes the guide
to the form, whereas, before, the form was the
guide to the substance ; and at this point the
Church begins to teach the soul, chiefly by en-
igmas, how she may best understand the in-
structions and reciprocate the complacencies of
that Divine Lover of whom she is henceforward
the intimate companion and the living abode.
20 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
The fact of the existence of these enigmas lies
patent to the dullest. The vision of Ezechiel
(which no one was permitted to read before he
was thirty years of age), Seir and Paran, in
which God was, but the people knew it not ; the
myth given in the Breviary on the day of the
" apparition of St. Michael " ; the great serpent,
Leviathan ; the King of Egypt become King of
Israel ; the almost identical myth of Proteus, the
sea-beast, also called " Cetes, King of Egypt : ' ;
the birth of Aphrodite ; the mystery of Perse-
phone, whose true name it was not lawful to utter,
concerning which ^schylus says : " Happy is he
who comprehends it, for over him Hades shall
have no power " ; and a thousand other such
things are manifest " riddles," and were manifestly
meant for such. Moreover, they are, for the
most part, such elaborate riddles that the key
which unlocks any one of them, the thought which
fills up all the manifold vacuities of external sense,
must be the key and the thought.
Of most such enigmas Proclus says, in his treatise
on the Fables of Homer, that they are unfit for
the reading of youth, to whom they are absurd,
or scandalous, or worse ; but that they are the
proper food of age when purged by discipline
from obscuring and uncontrolled passions, the
co -existence of which with the knowledge of
THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 21
Divine secrets would involve that conjunction of
perceived good with its denial by actual evil,
which is more irremediably fatal to the soul than
any amount of unmixed impurity. The senseless
and often repulsive external word of these enigmas
is as the black " veil of Moab," which God hangs
before the sanctuaries of His brightest glory ;
and as the foul expirations of the serpent of Cos,
which repelled all but him who was pure and
bold enough in faith to kiss the death-breathing
lips, and so convert them into those of a goddess,
exhaling celestial perfumes.
Her whole system of language and rites proves
either that the Church, who can speak her mind
plainly enough when there is occasion for plain-
ness, wantonly and habitually indulges in the folly
of delivering a large part of her message in a
language that few can understand, or that there
is a body of knowledge which ought not to be
and cannot be effectually communicated to all ;
and that, in her reticence, she is but obeying the
command : " Tell not the vision to any man till
Christ be risen " in him.
It would, no doubt, be of great use to many if the
meaning of a few of the principal of the symbolic
words common to all great religions were made a
part of religious instruction ; though it is wonderful
how, by a sort of instinct, some of these keys are
22 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
discerned and read by the simplest and least
instructed of those who, among their low sur-
roundings and labours, lead pure and meditative
lives. I have heard some of our "savages,"
haunters of " Little Bethels," " Sions," and " Car-
mels," use the obscurest imagery of Scripture
with an evident grasp of significance which many
a Bishop might have envied. Such acquaintance
with the vocabulary of symbols would not unveil
anything which ought to remain veiled, while
the ordinary reader and unenlightened enthusiast
would be saved by it from the absurdities and
scruples and often pernicious extravagances into
which he now falls through his literal adoption of
words which to sensible persons are manifestly
parabolic ; and the student of deeper capacity
would be provided with the clues without which
he cannot read even "the letter of the enigmas of
life.
To readers of the early Christian writers, the
interpretation of many of these words must be
familiar. The names of the four chief points of
the compass, water, fire, cloud, thunder, lightning,
nation, generation, father, mother, son, daughter,
rich, poor, tree, stone, fish, mountains, birds, rod,
flower, leaf, etc., etc., have fixed significances
without the knowledge of which thousands of
passages of Scripture, even those not involving
THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 23
any enigmatic meaning, cannot be understood.
What, without such knowledge, can be made of
passages, among innumerable others, like this :
"The coming of the Son of Man is as the lightning
which shineth from the east unto the west ; for
where the body is there shall the eagles be
gathered together " ? Or how, without such means
of interpretation, can some of the direct injunctions
of Our Lord, even in what is vulgarly supposed
to be the plain speaking of the Sermon on the
Mount, be obeyed ? Of some of these injunctions,
St. Augustine, rejecting the literal sense, says, in
one of his sermons : " You may do these things
if you can, but I cannot." From what torments
might the poor simpleton of a modern pietist be
saved by remembering that Our Lord " spake not
without a parable " !
This mode of expressing realities by things
having some resemblance to them, carried to the
highest and fully conventionalised in the Egyptian
hieroglyphic writing, was, no doubt, the origin of
the similar language of Scripture, the early Church,
and the mythologists, and must have been readily
intelligible by the learned and those mysta to whom
their learning was gradually imparted. A still
earlier mode of what may be called real speech
may be found in those first roots of language
which William Barnes and other philologists have
24 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
shown to constitute a system of phonetic imagery
of sounds having a subtle correspondence to
things. And the language of the poetry the
only real speech of all nations and times, has
largely consisted of a mixture of phonetic and
objective imagery.
There is, besides, the more spacious imagery
of parable proper, of which the external word is
a consistent story, fictive or actually historic. Of
this kind it may be well to point out that the
Church, in her services, authorises the belief that
many of the simplest incidents, even in the New
Testament, have parabolic meanings of far higher
value than the historic, which meanings we are
sometimes called upon, in the prayers that, in the
Breviary, etc., follow the recitals, to beg that "we
may be made worthy to understand." Indeed,
nothing can account for the emphasis and repeti-
tion with which some, extremely trivial, incidents
are related in the New Testament, without attri-
buting to the writers either the extreme of silliness
and irrelevance, or a wisdom of which few of us
are worthy to lift the veil.-
Let it be remarked that symbolic and more or
less enigmatic language and rites have a high
value, even when they are not intended to conceal
truth from those to whom its expression would be
premature. They compel, in the recipient of their
THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 25
teaching, a state of active co-operation, a volun-
tary excitement of the mind, greatly more favour-
able to the abiding effect of moral truths and
impressions than is the state of merely passive
attention. This mode of reception includes the
act of reflection, without which no knowledge
ever becomes our own. And here let it be said
that, so far are the originators and doctors of the
great religions of the world and its greatest poets
from having adopted an unnatural method of
teaching, that it is the very method of Nature,
whose book, from beginning to end, is nothing
but a series of symbols, enigmas, parables, and
rites, only to be interpreted by the "discerning
intellect of man " actively and laboriously em-
ployed.
The rites, customs, architecture, ornaments, and
vestures of the Church are stores of more or less
enigmatic teaching, and not one can be destroyed
or altered without risk of some unknown loss.
What have we not lost, what loss have we not to
fear in the future, from the vandalism of " good
taste." How " natural," for example, it would
be that King Humbert, if ever he thinks fit to
assume possession of St. Peter's and the Vatican,
should regard the erection of an Egyptian obelisk
in the forecourt of a Renaissance church as a
monstrous solecism in art, and so abolish one of
26 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
the boldest and most impressive symbols ever
devised to teach man that the " Lion of the Tribe
of Judah" (with this title the obelisk is inscribed)
"came out of Egypt," that the "great Serpent
Pharaoh, King of Egypt " (or Nature) " is become
Christ" by his assumption of the body which,
without Him, is Egypt.
The Breviary, the Missal, the " Little Office,"
and other service books of the Church, are in-
exhaustible storehouses of such teaching, their
leading method being the immediate apposition
of passages from Scripture and the Fathers and
prayers and ejaculations which, at first sight, have
no related meaning, but in which the existence of
a common meaning, which is the true one, is
suggested, and may be discovered by those who
have the key.
Besides the forms and offices of general use in
the Church, there are, and have been, local rites,
which it may have been, and may still be, expedi-
ent to suppress in favour of a wider unifonnity ;
but of these there ought to be kept the most
careful record. The dance before the altar, which
still, I believe, is performed during Mass in some
churches of Spain ; the presentation, in other
" local rites," to the officiating priest of the bread
by a maiden and of the wine by a youth ; and the
like " customs " are all acted words of more or
THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 27
less significance, and are sometimes more inter-
pretative of the Church's doctrine than any written
speech.
Of course, the enlightened students of the
magazines will laugh at the notion that there is
any knowledge which can or ought, for their own
sakes, to be concealed from them. I must con-
tent myself with the perhaps irrelevant remark
that those who have hitherto been reputed the
wisest have, in all ages, used and recommended
such reticence, and would have understood and
commended Aristotle when, in reply to Alexander's
complaint that, in a certain book, the philosopher
had published " secrets," he said : " They are
published and not published, for none will learn
from my book anything but that which he already
knows." And I will add that neither in ancient
nor in modern times has there been a poet, worthy
of that sacred name, who would not have been
horrified had he fancied that the full meaning of
some of his sayings could be discerned by more
than ten in ten thousand of his readers.
The denial by Mr. Grote and his followers that
there is any parabolic or enigmatic meaning in the
ancient mythologies is a most astounding proof of
how men, of common sense in most things, will
persistently deny, in the face of what ought to be
absolutely convincing evidence to the contrary,
28 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
that there may be anything to be understood in
that which they cannot understand. It must be
conceded, of course, that the teaching, if teaching
be intended, in the Greek myths, is most unsys-
tematic, and that the successive additions and
modifications of the Homeric mythology, intro-
duced by the Hesiodic and Orphic schools, brought
in much confusion of names and attributes ; but
what is this against the presumption of a generally
intelligent character in a mass of stories which,
if it does not consist mainly of riddles, is as
amazing, in its alternative character of incongruous
nonsense, as the most enthusiastic neo-Platonist
would have it to be in the character of a store-
house of psychological observation, a Summa
Theologies of the great religion of which Scire
teipsum was the first injunction, as it is, indeed,
of Christianity. That Lord Bacon, and many
others before and after him, should have given,
as Taylor the Platonist says, "frigid and trifling
interpretations " of the Greek myths, is surely no
excuse to Mr. Grote and others for maintaining
that a riddle, which is on the very face of it a
riddle, has no answer.
On the other hand, what rational mind can see
anything irrational in the belief that, to a race
ardently believing in the Divine and in the
capacity of man for Divine communications, every
THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION 29
god and goddess represented a particular aspect
of divinity towards the soul ; and the soul, in
each of its moods, activities, and capacities, some
goddess or mistress of the gods ; and that the
adventures of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and
heroes should often be parables of the pheno-
mena of interior experience, experience too pure
and subtle for common acquisition, and too sacred
to be exposed to vulgar curiosity ? And who are
the best authorities upon the question, whether
such significance was intended or not ? Shall we
follow Mr. Grote and the modern " scientists,"
with their " congenital incapacity " for spiritual
realities, or ^Eschylus and a hundred others before
him, who averred that these stories were life-giving
mysteries, and the law-givers of their time who
decreed the punishment of death against those
who should explain them to the multitude ?
The charge so often brought against the Church
of having drawn upon these sources of illustration
ought to constitute one of her highest claims to
the admiration of a " liberal " age ; for it amounts
to this, that she alone has dared to recognise
truth as canonical, wheresoever it may be dis-
covered, and that she has not hesitated to
appropriate the gold and silver vessels of her
enemies, when they, of all others, were found
fittest to contain the corresponding goods of
30 THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
spiritual perception and truths deducible from
her faith. Nay, was not the Vine itself " brought
out of Egypt," which, " when it had taken root,
filled the land " of her former captives, and vivified
with the inebriation of natural and intelligible
hope the faith that would otherwise have been
too spiritual for man ? The Church does not
dwell so often and emphatically on the coming of
Christ "out of Egypt" for no reason. The
designers of the first Cathedral of Christendom
were not guilty of a ridiculous solecism when
they placed an Egyptian obelisk at its entrance,
or of utter vacuity of meaning when they inscribed
it with the title, "The Lion of the Tribe of
Judah."
IV
ATTENTION
ATTENTION to realities, rather than the fear of
God, is " the beginning of wisdom " ; but it seems
to be the last effort of which the minds, even of
cultivated people, are at present capable. No
good and excellent thing requiring the least act of
sustained attention to reality has any chance of
recognition among us ; original insight is dead,
and men can see only the things which others, in
less hasty times, have seen before them, and even
these they can scarcely be said to see with their
own eyes. Were the Divine Comedy to appear
for the first time now, it would never be heard of,
except in the small-type notices of the literary
papers in which the young man who criticises
poetry because he has not learned to do anything
else would hasten to avail himself of so rare an
opportunity of being funny. The faculty of atten-
tion to a line of scientific reasoning is common
32 ATTENTION
enough. It is the capacity for looking steadily at
realities worthy of being reasoned about which is
wanting. Through this impotence of attention,
psychology has come to be a science the first axiom
of which is that there is no soul, a denial which
seems commonly to be owing, not so much to the
vicious interest of corrupt passions, as to physical
impatience of the attitude of attention demanded
for the contemplation of human realities. Even
the meats and wines of the epicure's table cannot
be enjoyed without the habit of attention ; hence
the epicure's table is no more. Wealthy givers of
dinners now trust, with scarcely any danger of dis-
credit, to their guests' swallowing with applause
whatever dainties are set before them, provided
the consequent headache or colic is not immedi-
ately referable to its cause.
Much less will the nectar and ambrosia of the
natural affections, for example, yield their flavours
to the palate " studious to eat and not to taste."
Through want of attention, more often, perhaps,
than through inveterate vice, how many tread into
the mud, with the foolish hoof of their lusts, the
very flowers after which they are for ever in frantic
search ; and almost all men now bewail the im-
possibility of attaining the poor dolls which they
dignify by the name of their " ideals," when
Nature, " if we do but open and intend the eye,"
ATTENTION 33
is always actually excelling every imagination of
beauty ; and realities, far lovelier than any
" ideal," stand about us, willing to be wooed and
longing to be won.
At least once in a lifetime, and by some hitherto
unexplained awakening of full attention for a little
while, what man but has seen a woman, and what
woman a man, before whom all their previous
" ideals " have paled ; and if, by subsequent near-
ness, they get within the eyes' focus and the vision
is dimmed, that is the fault of the eyes, and no
discredit to the reality of the thing seen, as is
proved by the way in which death restores the
focus, and with it the vision. Attention, however,
as multitudes have confessed with fruitless tears,
would have adapted the focus of the eye to the
nearness of the object, and made it more, not less,
lovely by closer inspection.
Through inattention to their own true desires
and capacities, men walk, as in a dream, among
the trees of the Hesperides, hung with fruit the
least savour of which includes the summed sweet-
ness of all the flesh-pots of Egypt, yet so far
surpasses it as, once tasted, to supersede for ever
the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the
pride of life ; but they do not dream of plucking
them. The letter of Scripture is like the walls of
a furnace, unsightly, and made of clay, but, to
D
34 ATTENTION
those who attend, full of chinks and crevices
through which glows the white heat of a life
whose mysteries of felicity it is " unlawful to
utter " ; but religious people are in too great a
hurry of spirit to see anything but the clay walls,
and they lead mean and miserable existences
while loudly professing the faith which " hath the
promise of this life also."
The hour or half-hour of daily " meditation," or
attention to his own business, which used to be
the practice of every good man, is now unheard of
unless it be in Monasteries. The best among us,
wholly unconscious that men can advance the
world's improvement only by attending to their
own, are busy about everything but that which
concerns themselves, and after their dusty and
profitless day's work they go, as Coleridge says,
to the Divine Muses for a-musement. Hence,
among many other unprecedented phenomena of
our day, there is an almost complete lack of men
of letters. We have only newspaper, magazine,
and booksellers' hacks ; clever enough, indeed,
but without insight, character, or any care for,
or desire to propagate, a knowledge of the true
realities and delights of life.
Yet how vast are the rewards of a habit of atten-
tion, and how joyful an answer can the few who
still practise it give to Wordsworth's question :
ATTENTION 35
" Paradise and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic main why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was ?
For the discerning intellect of man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day."
The habit, however, of such attention to realities
as I am speaking of, is not to be formed without
pain in those who have it not, unless they are
possessed of mind and conscience, and something
of the spirit of the child, that
" Mighty Prophet, Seer blest,
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find."
The soul which wants these qualifications, and has
long dwelt easily and pleasantly and, perhaps,
without external offence in unrealities, finds itself,
when it endeavours to face reality, filled with an
anguish of impatience, and rushes to and fro in
the prison of its customs like a caged wild beast.
There are thousands, however, who are not
altogether so disqualified ; and these, if they
only looked, would " see in part and know in
part" those eternal entities which, if not so seen
and known now, will never be seen and known.
36 ATTENTION
" Blessed," cries the Substantial Wisdom, " is he
who explains me " ; adding, in words of piercing
but disregarded sweetness of invitation : " Delicice
mecz esse cum filiis hominum" With her, as with
a mortal mistress, the one unpardonable crime is
want of " attention."
It is not to be supposed, however, that the
celestial secrets with which she rewards her stead-
fast votaries are to be attained, even by such as
are naturally not disqualified, without considerable
sacrifice of meaner goods. In the eyes of fools
there is no such foolishness as the knowledge of
things of which they know and can know nothing ;
and from such he who attends faithfully to his
own true business will probably have much to
suffer ; for they will not be content with despising
him for his infatuations, but they will hate him
and do him what harm they can. He will also
have to sequester himself from many natural and
innocent interests and pleasures, in order to have
time for the great learning, which is usually of
slow acquisition, and the result of patient listening
and of the hardly acquired habit of suspending
active thought, which is the greatest of all enemies
to attention; for " good thoughts are the free
children of God, and do not come by thinking."
He will also have to suffer from ordinarily good
and well-intentioned people the charge of narrow-
ATTENTION 37
ness of benevolence as well as of intellect ; for he
will have no time or energy to spare for seeking
oilt and serving other objects of charity, seeing
that the knowledge of his own supreme needs
will be increased by every day's addition to his
immense but incommunicable treasure ; incom-
municable, indeed, now, but, as he learns from the
Church, an addition to the everlasting treasure of
all who are united with him in the " Body of
Christ." Not that he will really be inoperative in
the time being for good to others ; for the mere
life, however retired, of one in habitual communion
with Wisdom, breathes forth a sphere of wisdom
which extends far beyond its definable bounds ;
and, as for the "narrowness" with which he is
charged, he may answer that the power of cleaving
is in proportion to the narrowness of the edge and
the weight at its back ; and that the least of his
words or actions may be of more effect in the
world than the life's labour of any of the herd of
good people who are " busied about much serving,"
instead of sitting attentive at the feet of Truth.
CHRISTIANITY AN EXPERIMENTAL
SCIENCE
CHRISTIANITY is an experimental science, and the
best answer to one who questions, If it be true, is,
Try it. But one difference between this and other
experimental sciences is, that the necessary course
of experiment is almost always, in the beginning
at least, extremely difficult, painful, and repugnant
to nature. Another is, that the result, though,
provided this course be conducted with full sin-
cerity and patience, sure to be absolutely convinc-
ing to the experimentalist, will not be wholly
communicable or convincing to anybody else. It
will give, indeed, to the person who has attained
it, certain characteristics of manner, speech, and
action which will strongly tend to impress any
honest man that the experiment may be worth
trying on his own behalf; but that is all.
The experiments and conclusions of the natural
AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 39
sciences can be discerned and judged by the
natural senses, which all men have in common,
and which have no interest in being blind to the
facts of nature. But the spiritual senses, except
in the exceedingly rare cases of some men of
genius, in whom they appear to exist independently
of the moral perfection which is their commonly
indispensable condition, have scarcely any life in
the great mass of men, who live, often virtuously,
or at least decorously, contented with knowing
and enjoying only in their natural shadows those
realities which are devoutly and substantially
discerned by that higher order of perception which
is usually the ultimate reward of so " doing God's
commandments " that we may " know of the
doctrine."
The multitude, Catholic and otherwise, who
are, as Sir Thomas Browne says, " incapable of
perfectness," have branded this science with the
name of " mysticism." Cardinal Wiseman, accept-
ing the name, defines " mysticism " as being " the
science of love." What wonder if experimental
knowledge in this science should be scarcely at
all accessible to the vast majority of souls, in
whom the seed of love has never yet passed be-
yond its rudimentary and apparently opposite
state of fear, and who really regard the very
notion of personal love to God and delight in
40 CHRISTIANITY
communion with Him as a sort of irreverence,
which, in them, indeed, it would be ! There is,
in fact, no Church but one which, as a rule,
ventures even to propose this kind of love as the
end and crown of its teaching. St. Evremond
says that the most characteristic difference be-
tween that Church and all others is that, while
the one makes it the ambition of the soul to
please Him, the others seek only to avoid dis-
pleasing Him ; love being the principle in the
one case, fear in the other. The " science of
love " is, indeed, " mysticism " to the many who
fancy its experiences incommunicable as the
odour of a violet to those who have never smelt
one to be those of idiosyncratical enthusiasm or
infatuation ; but, among " mystics " themselves,
the terms of this science are common property.
Deep calleth unto deep a prophecy which is not
of "private interpretation," but one which has a
language as clear as is that of the sciences of the
dust, and as strict a consensus of orthodoxy. A
St. Catherine of Genoa and a St. John of the
Cross know each what the other is saying, though,
to a Huxley or a Morley, it is but a hooting of
owls.
There are infinite degrees of this experimental
knowledge, from that first sensible " touch " of
God's love, which usually accompanies the first
AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 41
sincere intention of perfection for His sake, to
that of the Saints who have united themselves to
God by a series of agonising initiations of self-
sacrifice, and by years of actual and habitual
perfection of obedience in the smallest as well as
the greatest things ; and, further still, to the
knowledge of the angels, whose purification and
consequent capacity goes on increasing for ever.
But the very first sincere experiment, and its per-
ceptible result, though they may be followed by
years and years of relapse and seeming failure,
are generally final. The man who has made the
experiment has seen God ; and that is an event
which he will never be able altogether to forget
or deny, a positive fact which, for reality and self-
evidence, stands alone in his experience, and which
no amount of negative evidence will be able, even
for a moment, to obscure.
For this first experiment of faith, a belief in a
personal God and in His right to command and
judge us, is the only dogmatic ground which is
required, and this ground almost every form of
religion affords ; and that " touch " of love which,
as the Church says, " supersedes all the sacra-
ments," is given to each one, who, with all his
heart, even for an hour, submits himself to the
guidance of the " Light which lighteth every man
who cometh into the world." If his memory
42 CHRISTIANITY
clings, with however poor a fidelity, to that first kiss
of God, that baptism of fire which is the tacit know-
ledge of the Incarnation for is it not God made
one with his body, i.e. his senses ? that initiating
perception that God is will lead him into further
actual illumination in proportion to his fidelity and
to the amount of Catholic dogma which his par-
ticular Church may be capable of teaching for
fidelity does not discover dogma, but only enables
the faithful, in proportion to their faith, to confirm it
with absolute personal assurance. False dogmas
cannot be believed with this experimental cer-
tainty because they do not represent realities ;
therefore such dogmas will not be believed by any
one who has seen God, in such a way as finally to
hinder the saving power of the true teaching.
Thus, in Churches and sects which teach dogmas
in themselves subversive of all morality and right
belief in God's nature and government, we find
individuals so deeply rooted in the fundamental
orthodoxy of love, that, . while daily professing
with their mouths the immoral and pernicious
doctrines of their sect, they so deny these doctrines
in their hearts and lives, that the only harm a
very great one indeed which befalls them from
this position, is the impossibility of adequately
developing their own nature. Each great Catholic
dogma is the key, and the only key, to some
AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 43
great mystery, or series of mysteries, in humanity ;
and, this dogma wanting, the humanity of the
individual is so far deprived of the means of
eternal development ; which must be initiated in
this life, if at all. But, in any case, provided
he has attained " to lay his just hand on that
golden key which opes the palace of eternity," by
absolute fidelity to his best light, the truths^ which
he has adopted by faith, become " res visa et
cognita" in a sense of which Lord Bacon did not
dream ; for Lord Bacon's " philosophy," as philo-
sophy, was even baser than his political career,
and it did not deal with " things," which are the
objects of Wisdom, but with phenomena, which are
only hints and corroborations of realities dis-
covered by that which is philosophy indeed.
A duck-pond, however, must not be expected to
grow salmon or pike, and the offspring of the
conventicle will always remain narrow in the pos-
sibilities of experimental knowledge as compared
with those who have been fed in the larger waters
which occasionally bring forth a Hooker or a
Keble, as again these are when compared with the
ocean-brood of Austins, Bernards, and Theresas.
But, wherever the elementary dogmas of Chris-
tianity are taught, there the man who is perfectly
sincere and faithful is in the possibility of an
infinitely precious experimental knowledge ; and
44 CHRISTIANITY
that knowledge, however limited (and the know-
ledge even of the angels is limited), will fit him
for his destined place in the communion of Saints,
and may raise him far higher in God's favour than
other Saints who may have discerned and loved a
wider truth, truly, indeed, but with less intensity.
Such men are Christ's beloved "poor" (not the
world's " poor," who are quite as proud, vicious,
luxurious, and covetous of this world's goods as
the world's " rich "), and, though they have been
fed only with crumbs from the table of those who
sit at feasts of the fullest orthodoxy, such crumbs
will nourish in them a life which the merely " wise
and learned " in the letter of divine truth can
never know.
To such a man the Incarnation becomes, not
the central dogma of his faith, but the central fact
of his experience ; for it is going on perceptibly
in himself; the Trinity becomes the only and self-
evident explanation of mysteries which are daily
wrought in his own complex nature, the result of
ih&fiat: "Let us make man in our own image;'
and he finds in his soul and body the answer to
the prayer, " Let me so behold Thy presence in
righteousness, that I may wake up after Thy like-
ness and be satisfied with it." Like Teiresias, he
has seen the unveiled wisdom, and thenceforth
can see nothing else ; his guide is thenceforward,
AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 45
not formal laws or truths which can be uttered,
but the golden rod of a supreme good, which
leads him infallibly (and most sensibly) by glow-
ing into greater felicity so long as he is in the right
path, and by fading, more or less, as he is in
danger of error. Like Teiresias, again, on the
mountain heights of contemplation persevered in
through years and years, he strikes, from time to
time, with his golden staff upon interwoven mys-
teries of nature, and finds in them the revelation
of undreamt-of secrets of his own being ; and he
finally becomes, not so much an adorer as an
actual participator in the nature and felicity of
that Divinity which alone " has fruition in Him-
self," and " who became man that men might
become gods."
VI
"A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING
TONGUE "
IN things of the spirit we can only " know in part
and see in part" and "as in a glass darkly."
Hence, in writing concerning these things, the
aphoristic manner always has been and always
will be found the most proper and fructifying.
In spiritual philosophy the blessing of systematic
perfection has ever been paid for by the curse of
barrenness ; for between the facts of the science
of the soul there is often no visible continuity and
sometimes an appearance of contradiction ; and
in such cases we have to be contented with the
simple perception and affirmation that they are.
Again, such facts, in proportion to their import-
ance, are simple and self-evident ; and, in propor-
tion to their simplicity and self-evidence, they are,
as Aristotle says, apart from the domain of the
reasoning faculty, and therefore unintelligible and
A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE 47
incredible to those who have acquired the habit
of relying, not upon reason, but upon reasoning,
for proof. Nothing can be more express than the
way in which this is over and over again asserted
and implied by Our Lord and His Apostles.
" None can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the
Holy Ghost," that is, by the spirit of direct vision.
" I tell you these things, not because ye know
them not, but because ye know them." "The
Holy Ghost shall teach you whatsoever I shall
have said unto you," etc.
Dogmatic truth is the key and the soul of man
is the lock ; the proof of the key is in its opening
of the lock ; and, if it does that, all other evidence
of its authenticity is superfluous, and all attempts
to disprove it are absurd in the eyes of a sensible
person. That only a very small proportion of the
human race should be capable of at once receiving
self-evident truth 'is quite natural. The key is not
less the key because it will not open a lock of
which the wards are filled with stones and rusted
by disuse or destroyed by sin. " Authority "
comes in here. When a man "speaking with
authority," that is, with the indescribable air and
character which is an unmistakable claim to
being listened to, affirms things beyond all
ordinary experience and credibility, and adds that
it is only by " doing the commandments " that we
48 A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE
can " know of the doctrine," a sincere and busi-
nesslike mind will at least consider the experiment
of that moral perfection, to which such wonderful
things are promised, worth trying ; and, if he tries
with full integrity of purpose and persistence, all
persons who have reached that perfection assure
us that he will not fail to attain to that direct
vision to which truths, received on "authority" as
" dogmas," gradually become discernible as facts^
" infinitely visible and credible " (as St. Augustine
says of God) and of incomparable personal interest
to himself. The infinite visibility and credibility
of such facts imply a counterpart of infinite
invisibility and incredibility. "The angels them-
selves desire to look into these things " and to
fathom them fully, but in vain. The higher they
soar in the light of vision the more manifestly
incomplete and " unsystematic " is their theology ;
and their knowledge becomes more and more
merely and absolutely " nuptial knowledge," that
is, the knowledge of fruition, for which there is no
intelligible word nor " reason."
When the soul has passed the " purgative "
stage of obedience to law, and has attained the
" unitive " condition, in which all fidelity is habitual
and comparatively easy, she becomes capable, for
the first time, of real " insight," and knowledge
ceases to be acceptance of " dogma " so much as
A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE 49
personal communion. She exclaims, " The Lord
hath fashioned me and laid his hand upon me " ;
but she adds, " Such knowledge is too excellent
for me ; I cannot attain unto it " ; and the utter-
ances whereby she endeavours to draw others to
her wisdom are interjections, doxologies, parables,
and aphorisms, which have no connecting unity
but that of a common heat and light.
Another reason for the inadequacy of expression
in the science of the soul is the " unlawfulness "
of speech concerning some of its most essential
facts. St. Paul, in his vision, says he saw things
which it was, not impossible, but " unlawful " to
utter. Again, the spectators of the Transfiguration
were commanded not to tell the Vision to any man
until Christ should be risen, that is, until Christ
should be risen in their auditor, it being lawful
to speak of the mysteries revealed in that Vision
only to those who already know. Again, the
Bridegroom of the soul loves to reserve to Him-
self the office of her instructor in His secrets ; and
the more she has learned the less will she be
willing to speak. " My secret to me," is the
reply of the Saints to inquirers concerning their
peculiar knowledge. " Night," says the Soul, " is
the light of my pleasures," and she refuses by
speech to obscure them with the darkness of day.
Furthermore, her confession of such knowledge
E
50 A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE
involves incurring the praise of man for having
corresponded with peculiar fidelity to the graces
of God ; and she abhors the praises of any but
Him, whose assurance that He " greatly desires
her beauty" makes all lesser laudation profane
and disgusting.
Besides the pride and modesty of the pure soul,
there is yet another reason why those who know
most speak least. There comes a time to those
who follow perfection, in which all possible forms
of beauty are, as it were, discerned at once ; it is
not beautiful things, but Beauty itself which is
perceived ; and in the light of this faint aurora
of the great and unspeakable vision, all particular
forms of beauty, such as quicken the tongue of
Art, fail to arrest interest and attention and to
excite the desire of communicating them to others.
A sculptor who could see, at one moment, all the
possible forms of beauty which might be wrought
from his block of marble would be quite unanxious
and unable to develop any one of them.
VII
THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD
IT may be a matter of surprise to many that I,
professing to be an orthodox Christian, should
frequently use language which seems to assume
that some knowledge of Christian mysteries has
been enjoyed by individuals in all times and places;
that the light which lighteth every man who
cometh into the world shone, more or less
obscurely, before the days of Him who came to
bring light into the world ; but this is a belief and
a conviction which is growing more and more
general with the growing light which the con-
templations of Saints and Doctors have cast upon
Catholic doctrine ; and it need present no great
difficulty to the mind, however scrupulous to
keep within safe limits of faith, if it be borne in
remembrance that the Incarnation was an act
done in eternity as well as time ; that the Lamb,
the " I am before Abraham was," was " slain
52 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD
from the beginning " ; and that, if we look from
the point of view of eternity, we may see that
effects of that act, apparently retrospective, were
not really so ; but that the Bread and Wine, with-
out which " there is no life in us," may have been
received from the hand of an invisible Melchise-
dech by many who, in time, have longed to see the
Day of the Lord, and have done their best, by heroic
purity and self-humiliation, to merit the Vision,
and have thus attained to that love which, as St.
Augustine says, " supersedes all the sacraments."
Nor do glimpses of the heavenly vision seem
to have been absolutely denied to any race
of men. The general " darkness that compre-
hendeth it not " seems occasionally to have
been lifted among races whose night is by
most good people presumed to be total. The
religious rites of " savage " nations sometimes
startle those who know the meaning of the rites
of the Church by a strange identity of signifi-
cance. God's mercy is over all His works, and
He does not refuse to such babes and sucklings
some effectual hints of that knowledge which
is especially promised to babes and sucklings,
and denied to the wise and learned. Finally,
let me note that the anthropomorphic character,
which so universally marks the religion of the
simple and is so great a scandal to the " wise,"
THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 53
may be regarded as a remote confession of
the Incarnation, a saving instinct of the fact
that a God who is not a man is, for man, no
God.
The mystery of triple Personality in one Being,
the acknowledgment of which is the prime con-
dition of a real apprehension of God, may be
best approached by the human mind under the
analogue of difference of sex in one entity ; as
it was by Plato and by much earlier Greek Philo-
sophers, and, more or less obscurely, by the " wise
ancients " of India and Egypt, and, for the first
time, quite clearly shadowed forth by the Scriptures
and the Church ; Nature herself adding her
crowning witness, without which men are in-
capable of effectually grasping any spiritual truths.
" In the beginning " (i.e. before men had lost
their original knowledge of God and His Image
in Man) " there were," says Plato, " three sexes."
The saying, " God is a beautiful Youth and a
Divine nymph" is attributed to Orpheus. By
the Church the Second Person is represented as
the "glory" of the "Father," who is Christ's
" Head," as Man is the glory of his Head, Christ,
and Woman the glory of Man, who is her head.
The individual Man, the homo, is the Image of
God in so far as he is a substantial reflection of
the Love, the Truth, and the Life, which last is
54 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD
the " embrace " of Truth and Love, as the Holy
Spirit is said by the Church to be the " embrace "
of the First Person and the Second. And nature
goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity
in animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and
material atom owing its being to the synthesis or
" embrace " of the two opposed forces of expansion
and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a
single entity but in virtue of its being thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis, and in humanity and
natural life this takes the form of sex, the mascu-
line, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, for-
gotten sex spoken of by Plato, which is not the
absence of the life of sex, but its fulfilment and
power, as the electric fire is the fulfilment and
power of positive and negative in their " embrace."
Man (homo), according to the writer of Genesis,
originally contained the woman, and was in his
individual self the synthesis ; and the separation
into distinct bodies has been regarded by some
theologians as a consequence of the fall, from
which the regenerated will recover in that state
in which there is no giving or receiving in mar-
riage, man (homo) himself being a marriage and
" as the angels in heaven," a change which is
already foreshadowed in the " Brides of Christ "
by that which is their most sensible characteristic,
namely, a marked increase of the feminine nature,
THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD 55
which is passive, humble, receptive, sensitive, and
responsive ; this increase, however, so far from
being at the expense of the masculine character,
that this latter is exalted into fuller strength,
invincible courage, and greater wisdom to com-
mand all that is below him, especially his own
feminine nature whose rebellions, in his natural
condition, are the cause of all his disasters.
" Receive thy glory " (womanhood " the glory
of the man ") " with joy," says St. Paul to those
who had newly seen the unveiled wisdom ; and,
in the wonderful parable of Teiresias, that change
or rather discovery in his own nature was the first
effect of the same vision, which blinded him, as
it does any one who has beheld it, to all other
objects of sight. This three-coloured Iris (the
" Messenger of Juno," the Divine womanhood),
is also the " Bow set in the cloud " of the renewed
nature, for a promise that it shall never again be
overwhelmed and destroyed by the deluge of the
disordered senses.
According to Christian theology, it was the
Second Person, the " glory " of God the Father,
who took on actual womanhood or "body" in the
body of the Blessed Virgin, and who imparts the
same to all who partake of the same body in the
Holy Sacrament ; and accordingly it is said by
St. Augustine, that " Christ is the Bride as well
56 THE BOW SET IN THE CLOUD
as the Bridegroom, for He is the Body " ; and St.
John of the Cross says that, in the last heights of
contemplation, man attains to contemplate Him as
the Bride, an attainment corresponding to the
second change of Teiresias after his seven years
of meditation on the first.
VIII
CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS"
MANY people doubt whether Christianity has done
much, or even anything, for the " progress " of the
human race as a race ; and there is more to be
said in defence of such doubt than most good
people suppose. Indeed, the expression of this
doubt is very widely regarded as shocking and
irreligious, and as condemnatory of Christianity
altogether. It is considered to be equivalent to
an assertion that Christianity has hitherto proved
a "failure." But some who do not consider that
Christianity has proved a failure, do, nevertheless,
hold that it is open to question whether the race,
as a race, has been much affected by it, and
whether the external and visible evil and good
which have come of it do not pretty nearly balance
one another.
As to the question of the real failure or success
of Christianity, that must be settled by considering
58 CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS "
the purpose of its Founder. Did He come into
the world, live and die for " the greatest happiness
of the greatest number," as that is commonly
understood, and as it constitutes the end of civil
government ? Was it His main purpose, or any
part of His purpose, that everybody should have
plenty to eat and drink, comfortable houses, and
not too much to do ? If so, Communism must be
allowed to have more to say for itself, on religious
grounds, than most good Christians would like to
admit. Did He expect or prophesy any great and
general amelioration of the world, material or even
moral, from His coming ? If not, then it cannot
be said that Christianity has failed because these
and other like things have not come of it. In
these days all truth is shocking ; and it is to be
feared that the majority of good people may feel
shocked by the denial, even in His own words,
that such ends had anything more than an acci-
dental part in His purpose or expectation. He
and His Apostles did not prophesy that the world
would get better and happier for His life, death,
and teaching ; but rather that it would become
intolerably worse. He foretells that the world
will continue to persecute such as dare to be
greatly good, and that it will consider that it does
God service in killing them. He tells us that
the poor will be always with us, and does not
CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS" 59
hint disapproval of the institution even of slavery,
though He counsels the slave to be content with
his status. His mission is most clearly declared
to be wholly individual and wholly unconcerned
with the temporal good of the individual, except
in so far as "faith hath the promise of this life
also" ; and moreover, what is yet more "shocking"
to modern sensibilities, He very clearly declared
that, though He lived and died to give all a chance,
the number of individuals to be actually benefited
by His having done so would be few ; so that it
was practically for these few only that He lived
and died. That may be very shocking ; but they
are His words, and not mine, and those who do
not like them should have a special edition of the
New Testament revised for their own use, from
which all disagreeable references to the many
called and few chosen, the narrow way which few
find, the broad road generally taken, and the end it
leads to, etc., etc., should be excised. It is not to
be denied that our Lord's doctrine must be in the
highest degree unpleasant to all who will consider
what it really is, and who have not the courage
either to reject it or adopt it in a whole-hearted
manner.
But has Christianity failed in doing that which
alone it professed to do ? It has not improved and
has not professed to improve bad or even indiffer-
60 CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS "
ently good people who form the mass of mankind,
but it does profess to do great things when it is
received in " a good and honest heart," that is, in
the heart according to Hamlet's estimate of
about one in ten thousand. The question, then, of
failure or success narrows itself to this : Has
Christianity done great things, infinitely great
things ; and has it all along been doing, and is it
now doing, such things, for the very small propor-
tion of mankind with which it professes to be
effectually concerned ? Professor Huxley says
frankly, No. It emasculates and vitiates human
character ; and he exemplifies his position by the
example of the Saints of the order of St. Francis.
It is well to have such a good, bold statement of
opinion. Here is no shilly-shallying, and we now
know that there are some persons, of strong com-
mon sense, who think that Christianity is a failure,
as having failed to carry out its professions. Few
persons who are in their right wits would choose
to seek a fencing-match with Professor Huxley.
They might be altogether in the right, and yet, as
Sir Thomas Browne says, they might come off
second best in the conflict. In any case, it is not
at present my affair. It is enough for me to point
out that it is conceivable that there are sciences,
even "experimental" sciences, in which Professor
Huxley has not yet qualified himself to be con-
CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS " 61
sidered as an expert. Christianity professes to
be such a science, a strictly experimental science,
only differing, in this character, from chemistry',
inasmuch as the experiments and their conditions
can, in the one case, be easily fulfilled and judged by
the senses which are common to all men ; whereas,
in the other, they are professedly to be fulfilled and
judged of by few. Here, again, come in those un-
pleasant assertions of the founders of Christianity :
" None can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the
Holy Ghost " ; " Do my commandments and ye
shall know of the doctrine," etc., etc. i.e. the
experiment is professedly to be made only with
great difficulty and self-denial, and its results can
be judged solely by a spirit or sense which is only
attainable, or which is, at least, only attained,
by a few.
The conclusion is this, then, that even if Chris-
tianity as I do not assert has not sensibly
affected "progress," or has affected it as much for
the worse in some directions as for the better in
others, and has not even done much individual
good in more than a very small proportion even
of those who call themselves Christians, it has
only not done what it never professed to do. But
has it done what it actually professed to do ?
That is a question of which the affirmative might
be difficult of absolute and generally intelligible
62 CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS"
-proof, but of which the negative must, I apprehend,
be considered absurd even by the great majority
of those who have never dreamed of qualifying
themselves to become final judges of such matters.
There are many passages in Scripture which
will readily occur to every reader as being on the
surface in contradiction to this limitation by our
Lord's own words of the primary purpose of
Christianity ; but those who know how orphaned
and widowed of truth even the best of us are, and
how the destitution we may discover in ourselves
is greater than that we can know of in any others,
will discern, with the earlier and deeper interpreters
of the words of our Lord and His Apostles, that
there are two ways of reading their exhortations
to help the poor and the declaration that to visit
the orphan and the widow is " pure religion and
undefiled " ; and they will understand that neigh-
bourly service, which is usually (but not always)
an inseparable accidental duty of Christian life, is
very far indeed from being of primary consequence,
though the rendering or not rendering of it where
there is no knowledge of a nobler service may
seriously affect the shallow heavens and the shallow
hells of the feebly good and the feebly wicked.
Let not such as these exalt themselves against the
great Masters of the experimental science of Life,
one of whom St. Theresa, if I remember rightly
CHRISTIANITY AND " PROGRESS " 63
declares that more good is done by one minute
of reciprocal contemplative communion of love
with God than by the founding of fifty hospitals
or of fifty churches. "The elect soul," says
another great experimentalist, St. Francis of Sales,
"is a beautiful and beloved lady, of whom God
demands not the indignity of service, but desires
only her society and her person."
IX
SIMPLICITY
THERE are three simplicities ; that of the child,
" On whom those truths do rest which we are toil-
ing all our lives to find " ; the simplicity of genius ;
and the simplicity of wisdom. " The single eye,
which makes the body full of light " in modern
phrase, the synthetical faculty and habit is the
essential character of all simplicity, and it is never
separated from a certain innocence and naivete ;
and quiescence or perfection of conscience appear
to be its conditions. The paradisaical, or syn-
thetic, vision in the child is conditioned by the
innocence of ignorance and its inevitable freedom
from the habit of analysis ; the mind of the child
goes forth into particulars with a congenital dis-
cernment of the living unity of which the child
itself is, as yet, a part ; and it continues so to go
forth until it falls into some disorder of will or
understanding or both, which is separation from
SIMPLICITY 65
that unity, and extinction of "the single eye."
Genius consists wholly in the possession of the
divine faculty of synthetic or unitive apprehension,
in maturer years, and in company with conscious-
ness or the power of reflection. This possession
is so exceedingly rare, whole nations and genera-
tions having existed without producing a single
noticeable instance of it, that it must be regarded,
not as the natural culmination of humanity, but as
a splendid and fortunate anomaly, or departure
from the law of the race. In some few of the
very few, indeed, it seems to have been in natural
order, the simplicity and purity of childhood hav-
ing been retained and developed through life, until
it has become the simplicity of wisdom ; but no
one who has made himself acquainted with the
lives of men of genius can fail to have observed
that a concomitant of their wonderful privilege has
usually been a certain dislocation and startling
disproportion in faculty and character. Simplicity
or naivete, as Lessing remarks, has invariably
more or less characterised them and their work ;
but, in most instances they seem, if one may say
so, to have had no moral right to this singular
grace, and even sometimes to have preserved or
attained it by bold denial or by mere oblivion of
its natural conditions an oblivion not unfre-
quently amounting to moral insanity. It has, in
F
66 SIMPLICITY
such cases, been like the precious gum, or profuse
flush of flower, which comes of disease in the tree.
The three constituent parts of man, the intellect,
will, and perception, in such cases, do not act
together, as they do in healthy persons, but the
exorbitancy of perception seems to be the result
of a lethargy of intellect and will which leaves the
whole energy of life to go forth into perception,
as it does in the child through like conditions,
conditions which in the child, however, are the
right order of its being. The past century, which
has been so extraordinarily productive of men of
genius, has produced a more than usual propor-
tion of those in whom genius has been the con-
comitant of mental and moral defect and disorder.
The works of such men are marked by exceeding
inequality, deserts of dulness as in Coleridge, or
of mere imbecility as in Blake, occasionally and
suddenly blossoming as the rose, or the inter-
mittent flush of beauty and fictitious health in the
face of one dying of decline.
There is another kind of simplicity, which is
endowed, like the others, with the synthetic eye,
and which is the only kind that is of much abiding
value to its possessor ; namely, the simplicity of
wisdom. This is rarely found except in persons of
advanced years. The simplicity of age is the
blossom of which that of childhood is the bud and
SIMPLICITY 67
almost always failing promise. Its great condition
is innocence, which has been retained through, or
recovered during, the struggles and temptations of
manhood ; and, as the innocence of knowledge is
far nobler than that of infantine ignorance, so its
reward, the unitive vision, has an immeasurably
wider field. Such men, at seventy, see again the
daisy as they saw it when they were seven ; but a
universe of realities, unknown in childhood, is dis-
cerned by them as a single flower of which each
particular reality is a petal ; and the life-long
unconscious analysis, which has been to other men
corruption, has only provided them with a vaster
prospect of the elemental integrity, and an inex-
haustible source of joy, which, like that of the
" young-eyed cherubim," is too grave for smiles.
X
ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS
OF PURITY
FEW persons who are not scholars have any
knowledge of the difference which there is be-
tween ancient and modern ideas of purity, and
few moralists have considered or admitted how very
largely the comparison, if fairly made, must tell
in favour of the ancients, who may be reckoned,
in this matter, to have ceased about the time of
the Reformation. As it was impurity which first
brought fig-leaves into fashion, so the wonderful
and altogether unprecedented addiction to that
fashion, during the past three hundred years, may
be taken as a fair measure of what puritanism has
done, during that period, for us, and is still doing,
still doing, for, within the last few years, the
actual fig-leaf has invaded the Vatican itself;
and even there we are no longer allowed to
contemplate " the human form divine," unpro-
IDEAS OF PURITY 69
faned by reminders of the niceness of nasty
thinkers.
If we go back to those first ages of Christianity
which modern good people, who know nothing
about them, regard with such reverence we shall
find that the greatest and purest of the " Fathers
of the Church " were in the practice of addressing
their flocks with an outspokenness which is not
surpassed even by the ancient expounders of the
Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries, or, for that
matter, by the Bible itself. St. Augustine, for
example, in the City of God and elsewhere,
says things fit to throw decent people into convul-
sions ; and nowhere, in ancient Christian writings,
do we find ignorance regarded as even a part,
much less the whole, of innocence : witness the
words of Her, who is the model of innocence to
all ages, in her answer, at thirteen years of age,
to the message of Gabriel.
Strange to say, this modern notion of purity is
not limited to those Churches which owe their
origin to the Reformation. Their spirit has so
deeply infected the Mother Church that, though her
abstract doctrine remains the same as it was, she
practically enforces the negative idea as jealously as
it is enforced among good Protestants, or even
more jealously, so that the ancient idea of positive
purity, as a sacred fire which consumes and turns
70 ANCIENT AND MODERN
into its own substance all that is adverse to it, is
now replaced by the conception that it is of the
nature of stored snow, which must be kept arti-
ficially dark and cool, lest it disappear for ever.
*' Why, papa, I thought that marriage was rather
a wicked sacrament ! " said a young lady, who had
been brought up at one of the best convent schools
in England, the other day to her father, when he
happened to be praising that institution. And in
the great English Catholic Colleges for boys, the
wonderful phenomenon may now be seen of two or
three hundred lads and young men whose minds,
with regard to the relations of the sexes, are exactly
in the same condition as those of the girls, and whose
only idea of marriage gathered from the shyness
with which the whole subject is avoided by all
about them is, that it is " rather a wicked sacra-
ment." The prolongation of the innocence of
ignorance into advanced youth would probably
be unmixed gain were it not that knowledge, being
left to come by accident, is almost sure to become
poisoned in the moment of acquisition. It is of
little use calling the legitimate connexion of the
sexes a " great sacrament," if no pains are taken
to identify the knowledge of that connexion with
the knowledge of what is meant by a sacrament,
this latter knowledge being the ground of the
immense difference between the pagan and Christian
IPEAS OF PURITY 71
views of marriage, and if the essential sanctity of
chastity, married or unmarried, is left to be dis-
covered only by the obscuration of the conscience
in its loss. The whole sphere of the doctrines of
the early Church, like that of all the great mytho-
logies, revolved about mysteries which the modern
Churches, in practice, absolutely ignore, but which
nature, however improved by grace, absolutely
refuses to ignore. The result is a practical
Manicheism, which is as serious in its effects upon
morals as it is treasonous to the truth. The pro-
digious evils of unchastity prove sufficiently that
chastity is no merely negative good. Corruptio
optimi pessima. But where is the safeguard of
purity if its corruption is imagined to be the cor-
ruption, not of the " best," but of some shadowy
and negative state ? To avoid this immeasurable
evil there should be prudent and bold plain-speak-
ing on fitting occasions.
Plain-speaking does not vitiate. Even coarse-
ness is health compared with those suppressed forms
of the disease of impurity which come of our modern
undivine silences.
A young man or woman must be hopelessly
corrupt who would be injured by the freest reading
of the Bible, or Shakespeare. The most pure and
exalted love-poem that was ever written, Spenser's
Epithalamion on his own marriage, is also one of
72 IDEAS OF PURITY
the most " nude " ; and all art-students " from
the life " know that it is ingenious dress far more
than the absence of dress that has dangerous
attractions.
The boldest confession of the doctrine of the
Incarnation, with all its corollaries, has been the
father of that splendid virtue which was but dimly
foreshown in pre-Christian ideas of purity. Where-
ever this doctrine has been denied or hesitatingly
taught, it is a fact of simple experience that chastity
has suffered with it. For what considerations can
ordinary morals or the widest suggestions of worldly
expediency substitute for those with which the New
Testament abounds ? " Bear and glorify God in
your bodies " ; " Shall I take the members of Christ
and make them the members of a harlot ? " " God
for the body, and the body for God," etc.
XI
CONSCIENCE
THE twofold constitution of man which, the more
it is reflected upon, becomes the more manifest
and wonderful, and seems more and more to
approach the reality of a double personality in
one being the duality which the old theologians
and philosophers recognised in speaking of man's
nature as composed of a rational and of a sensi-
tive, or of a male and female soul is in nothing
more obvious to persons who really consider their
own business than in the phenomena of conscience.
In every person who has a right to be called a
person, as distinguished from an animal, there are
two distinct consciences : the rational or male
conscience, that commands him to act according
to certain fixed laws which he knows or believes to
be just and right ; and the sensitive or female
conscience, which persuades, indeed, to apparent
good, but which, in default of habitual subordina-
74 CONSCIENCE
tion to the virile conscience, does more harm in
the world, although it is a sort of virtue, than is
done by any vice. It is full of scruples about
small things, and is often indifferent to great.
Its chief care is for things present and external.
To sympathise with and alleviate present and
physical or emotional suffering and evils often
simply fanciful, and to forgive things which ought
not to be forgiven, is the extent of its " charity " ;
and its character, in all but highly disciplined and
robust minds, is to be in almost continual conflict
with the rational conscience. So that the struggles
of a really good man are not so much against evil,
which, known to be such, does not attract him, as
against the inexpedient good which his inferior
conscience is perpetually recommending to him
with the most confusing plausibility, and which, if
it be not listened to, cries out against him with
lamentations and reproaches, often hard to dis-
tinguish from the voice of his own proper guide.
It is so especially when, as is mostly the case, this
female objurgator charges- him with refusing to
make sacrifices which are not only uncalled for,
but would be injurious to his own true welfare and
that of others, if they were made. This conflict
caused the Apostle to cry out, " The whole crea-
tion groaneth together until now, waiting for the
manifestation of the sons of God, to wit the re-
CONSCIENCE 75
demption of the body" the "body," the "woman,"
and the sensitive " soul " being synonyms to his
mind as to that of all ancient philosophers. The
sons of God i.e. the true and faithful however
perfect in will and deed, cannot be " manifested "
while they are thus in opposition to their sensitive
life, which should be their helpmate and " glory "
instead of their troublesome adversary and accuser.
In some exceedingly small proportion of good
people this glowing female conscience has been so
persistently resisted and ordered by severe and
undeviating obedience to " cold " and purely
rational dictates, that such persons are not only
no longer troubled by the insubordination and
contradictions of the sensitive nature, but they
find themselves often suddenly and unexpectedly
in more or less complete harmony and co-opera-
tion with her. She has submitted ; and the true
life, which had been hitherto arduous and full of
trouble, is thenceforward full of the joy as well as
the power of the Divine Spirit, she having become
his "glory," as she was before his accuser and
shame, and the means instead of the hinderer of
his "manifestation " as a "son of God."
It must be repeated, however, that the inferior
conscience is not a vice, but a virtue without suffi-
cient light ; and that it is far more likely to call
for unnecessary labour and sacrifice and to suggest
76 CONSCIENCE
false and harassing scruples than to invite to ease
and self-indulgence. The false conscience, by
which the mass of men justify to themselves their
persistence in ignorance and self-seeking, or brace
themselves to the difficult pursuit of unjust ends
without regard to law, is a very different thing.
It should be remembered that even the truest
conscience is not an illuminating power, though
illumination is sure to follow obedience to it. - It
is a commanding voice, that bids all and compels
some to follow their best attainable light ; which
being done, there is no sin, though there may be
great and temporarily terrible error in such obedi-
ence. So much for the individual conscience.
Let it be added that when a whole nation comes
to be mainly guided by the female or sensitive
conscience, so far as it has any conscience at all,
then great disaster is not far off.
XII
REAL APPREHENSION
" MAN," says Dr. Newman, " is not a reasoning
animal ; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating,
acting animal." To see rightly is the first of
human qualities ; right feeling and right acting are
usually its consequences. There are two ways of
seeing : one is to comprehend, which is to see all
round a thing, or to embrace it ; one is to appre-
hend, which is to see it in part, or to take hold of
it. A thing may be really taken hold of which is
much too big for embracing. Real apprehension
implies reality in that which is apprehended. You
cannot " take hold " of that which is nothing. The
notional grasp which some people seen to have of
clouds and mares' nests is a totally different thing
from real apprehension ; though what this difference
is could scarcely be made clear to those who have
no experience of the latter. A man may not be
able to convey to another his real apprehension of
78 REAL APPREHENSION
a thing ; but there will be something in his general
character and way of discoursing which will con-
vince you, if you too are a man acquainted with
realities, that he has truly got hold of what he
professes to have got hold of, and you will be wary
of denying what he affirms. The man of real
apprehensions, or the truly sensible man, has no
opinions. Many things may be dubious to him ;
but if he is compelled to act without knowledge,
he does so promptly, being prompt to discern
which of the doubtful ways before him is the least
questionable, on the ground of such evidence as he
has. As to what he sees to be true or right, he
does not argue with the person who differs from
him upon a vital point, but only avoids his com-
pany, or, if he be of an irascible temperament,
feels inclined to knock him down. Of course there
are some people who see things which do not exist ;
but this is lunacy, and beyond the scope of these
remarks. Real apprehension is emphatically the
quality which constitutes "good sense." Common
good sense has a real apprehension of innumerable
things which those who add to good sense learning
and reflection may comprehend ; but there is much
that must for ever remain matter only of real
apprehension to the best seers ; that is to say,
everything in which the infinite has a part, i.e.
all religion, all virtue as distinguished from tem-
REAL APPREHENSION 79
porary expediency, the grounds of all true art, etc.
A man may have an immense acquaintance with
facts ; he may have all history and the whole circle
of the sciences on the tip of his tongue ; he may be
the author of a classical system of logic, or may
have so cunningly elaborated a false theory of
nature as to puzzle and infuriate the wisest of men :
and yet may not really apprehend any part of the
truth of life which is properly human knowledge.
At the present time it is by politics chiefly that the
difference between the two great classes of men is
made apparent. For the first time in English his-
tory, party limitations coincide almost exactly with
the limitations which separate silly from sensible
men. If you talk with a sincere Gladstonian
and, wonderful to say, there are still many such
you will soon find that he has no real apprehension
of anything. He only feebly and foolishly opines.
It is not to be concluded from what has been
said that the possession of the apprehending faculty
in any way supersedes the good of learning. The
power of really apprehending is nothing in the
absence of realities to be apprehended. In the
great field of ordinary social relationships and
duties the subject-matter of such apprehension is
largely supplied by individual experience, and the
exercise by most men of that faculty is in the main
limited to these ; so that the praise of " good
8o REAL APPREHENSION
sense " has acquired a much narrower signification
than it ought to bear. Genius is nothing but
great good sense, or real apprehension, exercised
upon objects more or less out of common sight :
and the chief ingredient of even the highest and
most heroic sanctity is the same apprehension
taking hold upon spiritual truths and applying them
to the conduct of the interior as well as the exterior
life. Men with great strength of real apprehension
are easily capable of things which inferior charac-
ters regard as great self-sacrifices. To such men
such things are no more sacrifice than in an
ordinary man it would be to exchange a ton of
lead for a pound of gold. " Their hearts do not
forget the things their eyes have seen ;" and
persons like General Gordon or Sir Thomas More
would stare if you called anything they did or
suffered by the name of sacrifice.
You cannot read the writings of Newman,
Hooker, Pascal and St.. Augustine, without being
strongly impressed with the presumption that they
have a real apprehension of the things they profess
to believe ; and, since they do not justify in any
other way the theory that they are lunatics, a
right-minded reader is disposed to think that what
they have thus seen exists, and that his not
having seen such things does not materially
diminish that probability.
REAL APPREHENSION Si
And here it may be well to recur to the text of
these remarks : " Man is not a reasoning animal ;
he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting
animal." All men properly so called but a good
many who walk upright on two legs cannot
properly be so called are seeing, feeling, and
acting animals ; but very few men, indeed, have as
ye,t attained to be contemplating animals, though
the act of contemplation exercised upon the highest
objects is, according to all great philosophers, even
pagan, the act for which Man is created and in which
his final perfection and felicity are attained. The
act of real apprehension, as it is exerted by ordinary
men, and even for the most part by men of extra-
ordinary vigour of intellectual vision, is momentary,
however permanent may be its effect upon their
principles and lives. Men of vigorous apprehen-
sion look at the heavens of truth, as it were,
through a powerful telescope, and see instantly as
realities many living lights which are quite invisible
to the common eye. But contemplation a faculty
rare in all times, but wellnigh unheard of in ours
is like the photographic plate which finds stars that
no telescope can discover, by simply setting its
passively expectant gaze in certain indicated direc-
tions so long and steadily that telescopically in-
visible bodies become apparent by accumulation
of impression. Such men are prophets and
G
82 REAL APPREHENSION
apostles, whether canonical or not. It is by the
instrumentality of such men that religions are
established and upheld ; and the term " verifiable
religion " is a piece of mere nineteenth -century
cant, when applied to the examination of dogma
by such as have probably never had the remotest
apprehension of any spiritual reality. Certain
facts of history relating to religion may or may not
be capable of " verification " to the multitude ;
but the dogmas which are the substance of a
religion can be really apprehended assuming
them to be real and apprehensible only by the
exceedingly few to whom the highest powers of
contemplation, which are usually the accompani-
ments of equally extraordinary virtues, are ac-
corded. The mass of mankind must receive and
hold these things as they daily receive and hold a
thousand other things laws, customs, traditions,
the grounds of common moralities, etc. by faith ;
their real apprehension in such matters extending
for the most part only to the discernment of the
reasonableness of so receiving and holding them.
Now this faculty and habit of really apprehend-
ing things, even in its lower and not uncommon
degree, is an immeasurable advantage ; but it has
its drawback. Those who possess it are singularly
capable of committing the unpardonable sin, the
sin against knowledge. " Father, forgive them.
REAL APPREHENSION 83
for they know not what they do" is a petition
which He who spoke these words could not have
offered for deeds or denials in clear opposition to
what a man knows to be true and good. " My
name is in him and He will not pardon." All men
agree in calling the spirit of truth which is the
spirit by which truth is really apprehended holy ;
and to deny this spirit in deliberate action may,
without any appeal to Christian doctrine, be
proved to be unpardonable by the way such
action is known to influence a man's character. A
single act of such denial, if it be in some great
and vital matter, often seems to destroy the soul.
History affords more than one example of a
statesman who has begun life with an eagle eye for
truth, a strong and tender love of honour, and
everything that makes a man among men. At
some crisis of temptation he chooses personal
ambition before some clearly apprehended duty of
patriotism ; and his whole nature seems thence-
forward changed : he drops like a scorched fly
from the flame
Then takes his doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and despised, from fall to fall.
But the least practical denial of real apprehension
of the truth is, to such as have ever had a con-
science and have observed themselves, demon-
84 REAL APPREHENSION
strably unpardonable, inasmuch as it destroys a
portion of the capacity of the soul. " The
remnant " may, indeed, " become a great nation,"
but it will be still and for ever a remnant of what
it would have been, had it preserved the integrity
of its fidelity.
If we knew the secrets of the lives of those
alas ! innumerable who seem to have no real
apprehension of anything, none of the light which,
it is said, lighteth every man that cometh into the
world, it would probably be found that they have
not been born without, but have forfeited, their
noblest human heritage by repeated practical
denials of the things which they have seen.
XIII
SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS
I
THE intellect, the understanding or discursive
reason, and the memory, it need scarcely be said,
are three distinct faculties ; yet in their exercise
and the character they acquire for their possessors,
they are apt to be confused, and that not without
damage to the public and private interests of those
who make the mistake. Intellect, though it is
constantly spoken of as synonymous with under-
standing, is really an incomparably rarer quality,
the difference being that which subsists between
" genius " and " talent " ; and to ignorant persons a
ready and well-stored memory, which is consistent
with the almost total defect of either of the nobler
faculties, is often regarded as a combination of both.
The intellect is the faculty of the " seer." It
discerns truth as a living thing ; and, according
as it is in less or greater power, it discerns with a
86 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS
more or less far-seeing glance the relationships of
principles to each other, and of facts, circumstances,
and the realities of nature to principles, without any-
thing that can be properly called ratiocination. It
cannot be cultivated, as the understanding and
memory can be and need to be ; and it cannot in the
ordinary course of things be injured, except by one
means namely, dishonesty, that is, habitual denial
by the will, for the sake of interested or vicious
motives, of its own perceptions. Genius and high
moral not necessarily physical courage are there-
fore found to be constant companions. Indeed, it
is difficult to say how far an absolute moral courage
in acknowledging intuitions may not be of the very
nature of genius : and whether it might not be
described as a sort of interior sanctity which dares
to see and confess to itself that it sees, though its
vision should place it in a minority of one. Every,
body feels that genius is, in a sort, infallible.
That it is so, is indeed an "identical proposition."
So far as a man is not infallible in what he pro-
fesses to see, he is not a man of genius that is,
he is not a seer. It is by no figure of speech that
genius is called inspiration. Dr. Newman some-
where observes that St. Augustine and some of
the primitive teachers of the Church wandered at
will through all the mazes of theology with an
intuitive orthodoxy of genius.
SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 87
Although this faculty of direct vision is very
rare in comparison with those of ordinary ratio-
cination and memory, it is not nearly so rare as
is supposed by such as measure genius by its
manifestations in philosophy, science, art, or states-
manship. For one seer who has the accomplish-
ments and opportunities whereby his faculty can
be turned to public account, there are scores and
hundreds who possess and exercise for their private
use their extraordinary perceptive powers. To
whom has it not happened, at one time or other,
to witness the instantaneous shattering of some
splendid edifice of reasoning and memory by the
brief Socratic interrogation of some ignoramus
who could see ?
No mortal intellect or genius is other than very
partial, and, even in that partial character, im-
perfect. Absolute genius would be nothing more
nor less than the sight of all things at once in
their relationship and origin ; but the most im-
perfect genius has an infinite value not only
because it is actual sight of truth, but also and
still more because it is a peculiar mode of seeing,
a reflection of truth coloured but not obscured by
the individual character, which in each man of
genius is entirely unique. This unique character
is, in its expression, what is called " style " the
sure mark of genius, though the world at large is
88 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS
unable to distinguish " style " from manner, or even
from mannerism. Incomparably the highest and
fortunately the least uncommon form of genius is
wisdom in the conduct of life ; for this form involves
in a far greater degree than any other the constant
exercise of that courage which is inseparable from
genius. The saint is simply a person who has so
strong and clear a sight of the truth which concerns
him individually, and such courage to confess his
vision, that he is always ready to become a " con-
fessor " under any extremity of persecution.
True statesmanship is another form of wisdom
in the conduct of life ; and this is perhaps the
rarest of all forms in which genius manifests itself,
because it requires a combination of inferior faculties
and opportunities which is almost as rare as genius.
Poetry is the only near rival of true statesmanship
in this respect. The immensely wider and more
various range of vision which the great poet exer-
cises when compared with other artists, together
with the necessity for the combined working of
many lesser faculties and laboriously acquired
accomplishments, has always made of the poet the
ideal "genius" in the world's esteem. The separate
insights into the significance of form, colour, and
sound, upon which the arts of the sculptor, painter,
and musician are founded, must be included in the
vision of the poet of the first rank.
SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 89
What is called " common sense " is much more
nearly allied to genius, or true intellect, either
than talent, which is the outcome of the discursive
reason, or than learning, which is that of memory.
Compared with the sunlight by which the purer
intellect sees, common sense is the light of a
foggy day, which is good enough to see near
objects and to avoid mischief by. Science is
generally considered to be the outcome solely of
the observation of facts and the discursive reason ;
but in men like Kepler, Newton, and Faraday
there is no lack of " the vision and the faculty
divine." The discovery of gravitation by the fall
of an apple was pure vision ; and it is doubtful
whether there was ever a Smith's Prizeman who
had not a touch of a higher faculty than that
which gropes step by step from premisses to
conclusions.
A ghastly semblance of genius is often retained
by such persons as once had it, but have ruined it
by denying it in action and by endeavouring to
prostitute it to selfish or vicious interests. Their
judicial blindness is the reverse of that which was
inflicted upon Tiresias for daring to gaze upon
unveiled wisdom. He could no longer see the
world ; they can no longer see the heavens. But
their original genius takes the perverted form of an
intuitive craft in pursuing their ends which is no
90 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS
less amazing, and which, in statesmen especially,
is commonly mistaken by the people for the holy
faculty which has been quenched.
To be a man of talent a man must be able to
think ; to be a man of genius he must be able not
to think, and especially to abstain from the crazy
wool-gathering which is ordinarily regarded as
thought. "The harvest of a quiet eye," and the
learning of the ear which listens in a silence even of
thought, are the wealth of the pure intellect. And
the fainter and the more remote the whispers which
are heard in such silence, the more precious and
potential are they likely to be. It is no condemna-
tion of the thought of Hegel that he is reported
to have replied to some question as to the mean-
ing of a passage in his writings, that " he knew
what it meant when he wrote it." This thought,
too subtle or too simple for expression and memory,
might, if held down and compelled to manifest
itself more explicitly, have moved mankind.
Genius is a great disturber. It is always a new
thing, and demands of old things that they shall
make a place for it, which cannot be done without
more or less inconvenient rearrangements ; and
as it seems to threaten even worse trouble than
it is finally found to give, it is generally hated and
resisted on its first appearance. Moreover, to
the eye which is not congenial, the fresh manifesta-
SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 91
tion of genius in almost any kind has something
in it alarming and revolting ; and it is welcomed
with an " Ugh, ugh ! the horrid thing ! It's alive ! "
A man of genius who is also a man of sense will
never complain of such a reception from his
fellows. Their opposition is even respectable
from their point of view and with their faculties
of beholding.
II
Genius, like sanctity, is commonly more or less
foolish in the eyes of the world. Its riches are
" the riches of secret places " ; and they so much
exceed, in its esteem, those that are considered
riches by the common sense of men, that its
neglect of the ordinary goods of life often amounts
to real imprudence imprudence even from its
own point of view, whereby it is bound to avoid
hindrances to its free life and exercise. The
follies, however, of a Blake or a Hartley Coleridge
are venial when compared with those of the
thoughtful and prudent fool the fool in respect
of great things, as the other is in respect of small.
Who can measure the harm that may be done to
the world by a thoughtful and earnest fool one
who starts from data which he is too dull to verify,
and who multiplies his mistakes in proportion to
92 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS
the perspicuity and extent of his deductions ? The
man of " talent " who is merely such, is not a very
common phenomenon for " talent " is in great
part the product of culture, which " genius," or
the power of seeing, is not. Most persons of
talent still possess a share of that obscure kind of
genius called common sense, which keeps them
from taking up with false principles and following
them into wild conclusions. We need, however,
only recall some famous figures in the present
and past generation in order to be assured that
immense talent is consistent with an almost com-
plete deficiency of real insight. When the discur-
sive understanding is in great force and has at its
command abundant stores of external information,
we behold a power that may work the ruin of
empires amid applauding peoples, though it can
never build them up. The natural and exact
sciences are the proper fields for the exertions of
such a faculty.
Stupid persons fancy they derogate from the
supremacy of the pure intellect or genius by
observing that it is always associated with a vivid
imagination, which they regard as a faculty for
seeing things as they are not. Shelley made a
mistake in a totally different direction when he
declared that the imagination is the power by
which spiritual things are discerned ; whereas the
SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 93
truth is that intellect is the power by which such
things are discerned, and imagination is that by
which they are expressed. Sensible things alone
can be expressed fully and directly by sensible
terms. Symbols and parables, and metaphors
which are parables on a small scale are the only
means of adequately conveying, or rather hinting,
supersensual knowledge. " He spake not without
a parable." Hebrew, Greek, Indian, and Egyp-
tian religions all spoke in parables ; and poets
deal in images and parables simply because there
is no other vehicle for what they have to say.
" The things which are unseen may be known by
the things which are seen," that is, by way of
symbol and parable. Imagination, though it is
not, as Shelley says it is, the power of spiritual
insight, is its invariable concomitant ; and even
that dull kinsman of genius, common sense, would
feel sadly hampered in its endeavours to convey
its perceptions to the minds of others, were it
wholly without the faculty of speaking in parables.
It has often been noted that men of genius have
bad memories, and that persons having extraordi-
nary memories, like Cardinal Mezzofanti, have little
else. The truth is that there are two quite distinct
kinds of memory : the memory for external facts
and words, apart from their significance ; and the
memory for spiritual facts and principles. The
94 SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS
man of genius, who may have no special reason
for cultivating the lower kind of memory, may
even find it rather a hindrance than a help. His
prayer is, " Let not my heart forget the things
mine eyes have seen." So long as his heart
retains the significance of the facts he has seen
and the words he has heard, he is willing to let
the words and the facts go, as a man casts away
the shells after he has eaten the oysters. The
" well-informed" person commonly differs from the
man of genius in this : that he carries about with
him all the shells of all the oysters he has ever
eaten, and that his soul has grown thin under the
burthen.
A commonplace about men of genius is, that
they usually have religious dispositions. It would
be strange were it otherwise, seeing that genius is
nothing but the power of discerning the things of
the spirit. The first principle of the most recent
form of " psychology " is, indeed, that there is no
soul ; but that man must have little genius who
would not say " Amen " to St. Bernard's epigram,
" He must have little spirit who thinks that a spirit
is nothing."
After what has just been said, it seems para-
doxical to be obliged to admit that the sins to
which men of genius are usually most subject are
those of sense. From pride, and its offspring
SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 95
envy, hatred, and malice, which play so terrible a
part in the affairs of most men, they are compara-
tively exempt. That they should often be more
subject than others to be misled by the ease and
pleasure of the senses, may be because the senses
of men of genius are more subtly permeated by the
spirit, of which they are the ultimate life, than are
those of the world at large, and are thereby ren-
dered more acute and less sordidly wicked. This
may be said, I hope, without in any way condon-
ing error.
Men of genius, who are therewithal men of
cultivated talents and great stores of appropriate
information, are the only safe legislators and
governors of empires ; not only because theirs
alone is the sufficiency of sound and far-seeing
wisdom, but because they are far less likely than
other men to be misled by personal motives and
weak fears. But such men, unhappily, are the
last to come to the front in states of ultra-popular
government ; and in such states they have accord-
ingly to suffer that last misery (as by one of the
greatest philosophers it has been called), the
misery of being governed by worse men than
themselves.
XIV
POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES
IF we take stock of the world's actual achieve-
ments intellectual, moral, and artistic in the six
thousand years during which we know anything
about it, it is impossible not to be struck with the
extreme smallness of the sum of the acquisitions
and attainments of the human race as compared
with its desires and apparent possibilities. If
those desires and possibilities had in no instances
been fulfilled, the entire absence of attainment
would have been less startling than is its actual
paucity. It would not have been nearly so
wonderful if none had reached the high table-
lands of excellence in any department of human
activity as it is that those heights have been
reached by some and by so few. And the marvel
of this paucity becomes yet further increased when
it is considered that it is not only all that man-
kind has done, but in all likelihood nearly as
POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 97
much as it could have done had it tried ever so
hard. For it is a peculiarity of the very highest
work in every kind, that it is not the result of
painful labour, but that it is easier to do it than
not to do it, when it can be done at all. So that
humanity must not be allowed to cover its enor-
mous shortcomings with an " I could an I would."
How many philosophers has philosophy produced ?
If Aristotle be the type, where is the other speci-
men of the species ? How many statesmen have
there been whose faculties and characters, nearly
inspected, do not provoke the exclamation, " With
how little wisdom the world is governed ! " In
how many Christians has Christianity flowered as
in the souls of St. John and St. Francis ? Greek
architecture and Greek sculpture mean little more
than the Parthenon and its friezes. What survives
of Greek poetry will scarcely fill one bookshelf,
and English poetry, which forms the greater part
of the rest of the poetry of the human race, would
rest easily on three. The building of the Middle
Ages is nothing but the repetition of one inspira-
tion, which would remain transmitted to us almost
in its entirety were the Cathedral of Freiburg
the only specimen left to us. A single gallery
of the Vatican would provide wall -room suffi-
cient for all the paintings of the world that
are able to fill with satisfying peace the eye
98 POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES
which has been educated by Botticelli, Luini,
and Raphael. An ordinary life affords abundant
leisure to take in all that two hundred generations
of mankind have so done as to fill the craving for
what all men feel to be alone satisfyingly human.
That is to say, one man in twenty millions or so
has been able, during some often very small
proportion of his life, to be and to do that which
all men, when they behold such being and doing,
feel to be their natural though utterly unattainable
prerogative. Thousands and thousands climb, with
praiseworthy struggles and integrity of purpose and
with shouts of " Excelsior ! ", the minor peaks of
life ; while two or three in a generation are seen
walking with easy breath about those great and
tranquil table-lands for which all of us, on behold-
ing them, feel that we were born. It is not that,
in a world of inequalities, some two or three in a
generation must naturally stand higher than all
the rest, as only one among many competitors can
be Senior Wrangler. That fuller excellence is a
region, and not a pinnacle ; and those who reach
it are all upon a great and facile equality, their
altitude being simply that of right and unhindered
human faculty.
Every individual of the human race is, in this
regard, an image of the race itself. Only for a
few hours, perhaps, of the million which is about
POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 99
the sum of the longest lifetime, has each one
easily and unaccountably found himself to be
living indeed. Some accident, some passing
occasion which has called upon him to be more
than himself, some glimpse of grace in nature or
in woman, some lucky disaster even, or some mere
wayward tide of existence, has caused the black
walls of his prison-house to vanish ; and he has
breathed in a realm of vision, generosity, and
gracious peace, " too transient for delight and too
divine." These prophetic moments one in a
million pass ; but, unless he has despised and
denied them, they leave him capable, more or
less, of understanding prophecy ; and he knows
that in him also there is a potentiality, realisable
perhaps under other than present conditions, of
becoming one in that great society in which such
states of life appear to be not momentary crises
but habits. The wider and the deeper his personal
experience of beauty and felicity, the more readily
will a man confess that life contains scarcely any-
thing for fruition but abundance for hope ; and
the better he is acquainted with that which has
been best done and said in all ages, the less he
will be inclined to believe that the world is mak-
ing any advances towards the realisation of the
promise which every age repeats. An enigma for
which science has no key is the certain fact, that
too POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES
if the world be not a prophecy of good things
which it shows no likelihood of providing, then
it is all nothing but a purposeless and badly
conceived tragedy, upon which the sooner the
black curtain drops the better. For if the world
be not such a prophecy, then the best of men
are of all men the most miserable ; to these is
given beyond others the " transitory gleam " which
shows the dulness of their ordinary life for the
lingering death it really is ; but, knowing little or
nothing of life as it is known to such, the stupid
and "the wicked have no bonds in their death,"
and can feel only the comparatively tolerable evils
of external and accidental adversity.
There never was a time in which the " higher
life," "high art," etc., were less known than in the
present, when every goose is gabbling about them.
The proof is in the way these names are constantly
associated with that of "progress"; whereas pro-
gress, as respects the realities, is, if it exists at
all, most certainly a progress backwards. The
rejoicings of Lord Macaulay and his like over the
recent advances of mankind are exactly those of
a prosperous shopman over the increase of his
business ; and the hallelujahs of science are
mainly over the elaboration of mighty means for
petty ends and of theories which explain away
God and exhibit all that past ages have called
POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 101
wisdom as folly. It is too absurd ! Yet we must
not allow the present eclipse of the electric lights
of true learning by the flaring tar -barrels of
jubilant ignorance to discourage us in the belief
that there is, on the whole, no cessation of the
work for which the world goes on. The conscience
of mankind, though occasionally confused and
obscured, will always cry "Amen" to the great
word of St. Augustine, " What ought to be must
be " ; and the rare achievements of genius and
sanctity and the few and far-between glimpses of
the life that is indeed life, which are accorded to
all, will continue to be accepted as " the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
XV
IMAGINATION
THERE are things which can never be more than
approximately defined, and which, even when so
defined, are to be rightly understood only in pro-
portion to the degrees in which they are possessed
by those who would attempt to comprehend them.
Such are, for example, " imagination " and
" genius " ; which, being faculties that are pos-
sessed in a very low degree by nearly all and in a
very high degree by extremely few, are matters of
the most general interest and the most variable
apprehension. That such faculties should, how-
ever, as far as possible, be understood is of great
practical importance to all persons ; inasmuch as
it greatly concerns all to know something of the
signs, sanctions, and claims of those powers by
which they are inevitably more or less ruled
externally and internally.
It is nothing against a definition of an entity
IMAGINATION 103
which cannot be fully defined, to say that such
definition is "new." It was objected against an
interpretation by St. Augustine of some Old
Testament history or parable, that other authori-
ties had given other interpretations. " The more
interpretations the better," was the saint's reply.
In such cases various definitions and interpretations
are merely apprehensions of various sides of a
matter not wholly to be embraced or comprehended
by any single definition or interpretation. In
recent times genius and imagination have come to
be widely regarded as one and the same thing.
They are not so, however, though they are per-
haps indissolubly connected. The most peculiar
and characteristic mark of genius is insight into
subjects which are dark to ordinary vision and for
which ordinary language has no adequate expres-
sion. Imagination is rather the language of
genius : the power which traverses at a single
glance the whole external universe, and seizes
on the likenesses and images, and their combina-
tions, which are best able to embody ideas and
feelings otherwise inexpressible ; so that the
" things which are unseen are known by the things
which are seen." Imagination, in its higher
developments, is so quick and subtle a power
that the most delicate analysis can scarcely follow
its shortest flights. Coleridge said that it would
104 IMAGINATION
take a whole volume to analyse the -effect of a
certain passage of only a few syllables in length.
In dealing with such a work as The Tempest
criticism is absolutely helpless, and its noblest
function is to declare its own helplessness by
directing attention to beauty beyond beauty which
defies analysis. The Tempest, like all very great
works of art, is the shortest and simplest, and
indeed the only possible expression of its "idea."
The idea is the product of genius proper ; the
expression is the work of imagination. There are
cases, however, in which it is hard to distinguish
at all between these inseparable qualities. The
initiation of a scientific theory seems often to have
been due to the action of the imagination working
independently of any peculiar direct insight ; the
analogy -discovering faculty that is, the imagi-
nation finding a law for a whole sphere of
unexplained phenomena in the likeness of such
phenomena to others of a different sphere of which
the law is known. Hence the real discoverers of
such theories are scarcely ever those who have
obtained the credit of them ; for nothing is usually
more abhorrent to men of extraordinary imagination
than " fact-grinding." Such men, after having
flung out their discoveries to the contempt or
neglect of their contemporaries, leave the future
proof of them to mental mechanics : religiously
IMAGINATION 105
avoiding such work themselves, lest, as Goethe said
of himself, they should find themselves imprisoned
in "the charnel-house of science." Genius and
imagination of a very high kind are not at all
uncommon in children under twelve years of
age, especially when their education has been
"neglected." The writer can guarantee the fol-
lowing facts from personal witness : A clever
child of seven, who could not read, and had
certainly never heard of the Newtonian theory of
gravitation, said to his mother suddenly, "What
makes this ball drop when I leave hold of it ?
Oh, I know : the ground pulls it." Another child,
a year or two older, lay stretched on a gravel path,
staring intently on the pebbles. " They are alive,"
he cried, in the writer's hearing ; " they are
always wanting to burst, but something draws
them in." This infantine rediscovery of the
doctrine of the coinherence of attraction and re-
pulsion in matter seems to have been an effort of
direct insight. The repetition of the Newtonian
apple revelation seems rather to have been the
work of the imagination, tracking likeness in
difference ; but to discern such likeness is, again,
an effort of direct insight, and justifies Aristotle's
saying that this power of finding similitude in
things diverse is a proof of the highest human
faculty. The poet's eye glances from heaven to
106 IMAGINATION
earth, from earth to heaven ; and his faculty of
discerning likeness in difference enables him to
express the unknown in the terms of the known, so
as to confer upon the former a sensible credibility,
and to give the latter a truly sacramental dignity.
The soul contains world upon world of the most real
of realities of which it has no consciousness until
it is awakened to their existence by some parable
or metaphor, some strain of rhythm or music, some
combination of form or colour, some scene of
beauty or sublimity, which suddenly expresses the
inexpressible by a lower likeness. The vulgar
cynic, blessing when he only means to bray,
declares that love between the sexes is " all ima-
gination." What can be truer ? What baser
thing is there than such love, when it is not of
imagination all compact ? or what more nearly
divine, when it is ? Why ? Because the imagina-
tion deals with the spiritual realities to which the
material realities correspond, and of which they
are only, as it were, the ultimate and sensible
expressions. And here it may be noted, by the
way, that Nature supplies the ultimate analogue
of every divine mystery with some vulgar use or
circumstance, in order, as it would seem, to enable
the stupid and the gross to deny the divine without
actual blasphemy.
Profligacy and " fact - grinding " destroy the
IMAGINATION 107
imagination by habitually dwelling in ultimate
expressions while denying or forgetting the primary
realities of which they are properly only the
vessels. Purity ends by finding a goddess where
impurity concludes by confessing carrion. Which
of these is the reality let each man judge according
to his taste. " Fact -grinding" which Darwin
confessed and lamented had destroyed his imagi-
nation and caused him to " nauseate Shakespeare "
commonly ends in destroying the religious
faculty, as profligacy destroys the faculty of love ;
for neither love nor religion can survive without
imagination, which Shelley, in one of his prefaces,
identifying genius with imagination, declares to be
the power of discerning spiritual facts. Those who
have no imagination regard it as all one with
" fancy," which is only a playful mockery of
imagination, bringing together things in which
there is nothing but an accidental similarity in
externals.
IN art, as in higher matters, " strait is the gate,
and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and
few there be that find it ; " and the initial cause of
failure in many who seem to have faculties which
should ensure success, is not so much the difficulty
of the road which leads to it as want of humility
in confessing its narrowness. Each man is by birth
a unique individuality, which the circumstances of
his life will increase and develop continually, if he
be content to do his duty in the station, intellectual
and otherwise, to which it has pleased God to call
him, without falling below its obligations or assum-
ing others which have not been laid upon him.
The low but still priceless degree of genius which
consists in individuality in manners, and which
renders the possessor of it powerfully though im-
perceptibly edifying in all companies, is open to all,
though few are sufficiently simple and honest and
THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS 109
unambitious to attain to it by turning neither to
the right hand nor the left in pursuit of their
particular good of life.
" Originality," whether in manners, action, or
art, consists simply in a man's being upon his own
line ; in his advancing with a single mind towards
his unique apprehension of good ; and in his doing
so in harmony with the universal laws which secure
to all men the liberty of doing as he is doing,
without hindrance from his or any other's indi-
viduality. Unless " originality " thus works in
submission to and harmony with general law, it
loses its nature. In morals it becomes sin or
insanity, in manners and in art oddity and eccen-
tricity, which are in reality the extreme opposites
and travesties of originality. As in religion it is
said that " no man can know whether he is worthy
of love," so in art and ordinary life no man can
know whether he is original. If through habitual
fidelity to his idea of good he has attained to
originality, he will be the last person in the world
to know it. If he thinks he is original, he is
probably not so ; and if he is commonly praised
for originality, he may hardly hope to attain to
any such distinction. Originality never expresses
itself in harsh and obtrusive singularities. A
society of persons of true originality in manners
would be like an oak-tree, the leaves of which all
i io THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS
look alike until they are carefully compared, when
it is found that they are all different. In art, the
sphere of extraordinary originalities, there is the
same absence of strongly pronounced distinctions,
and therefore the same withdrawal from the re-
cognition of the vulgar, who look for originality
in antics, oddities, crudities, and incessant viola-
tions of the universal laws which true originality
religiously observes ; its very function consisting,
as it does, in upholding those laws and illus-
trating them and making them unprecedentedly
attractive by its own peculiar emphases and modu-
lations.
The individuality or " genius " of a man, which
results from fidelity in life and art to his " ruling
love," is almost necessarily narrow. Shakespeare
is the only artist that ever lived whose genius has
even approached to universality. His range is so
great that ordinary readers, if, like Mr. Frederic
Harrison, they had the courage to speak their
impressions, would with him condemn the greater
part of the poet's work as " rubbish " that is, as
having no counterpart in the " positivism " of their
actual or imaginative experience. Every play of
Shakespeare is a new vision not only a new as-
pect of his vision, as is the case with the different
works of nearly all other artists, even the greatest.
Narrowness, indeed, so far from being opposed
THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS in
to greatness in art, is often its condition. Dante
and Wordsworth are proofs that greatness of genius
consists in seeing clearly rather than much ; and
%vell it would have been both for poets and for
readers had the former always or even generally
understood the economy of moving always on their
own lines. Nothing has so much injured modern
art as the artist's ambition to show off his "breadth" ;
and many an immortal lyric or idyll has been lost
because the lyric or idyllic poet has chosen to
forsake his line for the production of exceedingly
mortal epics or tragedies. The modern custom
of exhibiting all the works of a single painter at
a time affords proof which every one will under-
stand of what has been said. Who, with an eye
for each painter's true quality, can have gone
over the collections in recent years of the pictures
of Reynolds, Rossetti, Blake, Holman Hunt, and
others, without a feeling of surprise, and some
perhaps irrational disappointment, at the discovery
for the first time of the artist's limitations ? Each
had painted the same vision over and over again !
There was no harm in that. The mistake was in
bringing together the replicas which should have
adorned "palace chambers far apart." But poets,
whose " works " are always collectively exhibited,
should beware how they betray the inevitable fact
of the narrowness of genius. Not only should they
112 THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS
never leave their own line for another which is not
their own, but they should be equally careful not
to go over it again when they have once got to the
end of it.
XVII
A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK
DESPOTISM, which is not government, but anarchy
speaking with one voice, whether it be the mandate
of an irresponsible emperor or that of a multitude,
is the " natural " death of all nationalities. They
may die by other means, but this is the end they
come to if left to themselves. When this end is
reached, the corrupt body may, for a time, preserve
a semblance of its old identity ; but it is no longer
a nation : it is merely a localisation of " man's
shameful swarm," in which the individual has no
help from the infinitely greater and nobler vitality
of which he was a living member to erect himself
above himself, and to breathe the generous breath,
and feel himself in all his acts a partaker of the
deceased giant's superhuman vigour. The incid-
ence of the misery is not only upon those compara-
tively few who may be conscious of its cause. The
malaria of the universal marsh stupefies the brain
I
114 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK
and deadens the heart of the very ploughman who
turns its sod, and he is hourly the worse for want
of the healthy breeze and invigorating prospect of
the ancient hills, which he himself was, perhaps,
among the most eager to level. Though he knew
it not, he was every day sensibly the better for
being the member of a great nation.
" He felt the giant's heat,
Albeit he simply called it his,
Flush in his common labour with delight,
And not a village maiden's kiss
But was for this
More sweet,
And not a sorrow but did lightlier sigh,
And for its private self less greet,
The while that other so majestic self stood by."
If he does not feel the loss of his corporate life,
but is content to struggle, stink, and sting with the
rest of the swarm into which the national body has
been resolved by corruption, so much the worse
for him. His insensibility is the perfection of his
misery. To others, not so lost, there may be
hope, though not in this stage of being. None
who has ever lived through the final change, or
who, being in the foul morass of resulting
" equality," has been able to discern what national
life means, can find in private fortune wife,
children, friends, money any compensation for
A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK 115
the great life of which his veins are empty. He
knows that there is no proximate hope, no possi-
bility of improvement in such a state of things.
He knows that it is absurd to expect anything
from " education " of the mass. True education
cannot exist under either kind of despotism.
National life is the beginning and end of individual
culture, as far as this world is concerned. The
acquisition of knowledge by an unorganised or
enslaved multitude, which must always be, in the
main, self-seeking and unjust, is merely the
acquisition of subtler and baser means for the
advancement of individual covetousness and the
indulgence of individual vices. Such education
is but " a jewel in a swine's snout." Fools may
fill the air with sentimental or hypocritical
" aspirations " for the good of the community ; but
no community exists where no excellence has the
power of asserting itself politically and more or
less in spite of the ignorance and malice of those
whom it would serve. Such " aspirations " are
but the iridescent colours on the stagnant pool ;
putrid splendours which have no existence in the
chronic and salutary storm of national life.
Nor is there any hope from without. A com-
paratively savage people has often been impreg-
nated with the germ of national being by the
military invasion of a civilisation still in the vigour
Ii6 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK
of growth ; but there is no instance of a civilisa-
tion which has thus lapsed into anarchy having
been regenerated by any such means, though its
stagnated life may have been perpetuated, as in
the case of China, by an external tyranny more
powerful than any of the shifting forms of des-
potism which it develops, if left to itself, from
within. Nor is there any light, even in the far
future, unless for him who has a fulness of that
cosmopolitan benevolence which is so often the
boast of the simpleton or the political hypocrite,
but, happily, so seldom the possession of the
natural man. He knows that no soil has ever
yet been found to bear two crops of national life,
though the corruption of one has often been
found, after many generations of consummated
decay, to be very useful dung for the nourishment
of other and far removed fields. But this con-
sideration does not bring him within measurable
distance of practical political consolation.
The frantic ambition of one bad man, and the
cowardice of half a dozen others, who would have
been honest had it not appeared too personally
inconvenient, and the apathy of that large portion
of the community which has been sane in judg-
ment but insane in sloth, have brought the final
evil upon us fifty or a hundred years sooner than
it need have come. But come it must have done
A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK n?
sooner or later, since the powers of evil have
invariably, in worldly matters, proved too strong
in the long run for those of good ; and such as
cannot bear this truth, but require that abiding
temporal good should come of their good works,
had better go into monasteries. Considering what
men are, the wonder is, not that all great nation-
alities should have come to a shameful end, but
that their ordinary duration of life should have
been a thousand years. How any of them should
have lasted a hundred must seem a miracle to
those who fail to take into account the agency of
the two guardian angels of national life, religion
and war religion which keeps alive the humility
and generosity of reasonable submission to law
and the spirit of self-sacrifice for corporate life;
and war, which silences for a time the envy and
hatred of the evil and ignorant for moral and
circumstantial superiorities, and compels them to
trust their established leaders on pain of prompt
annihilation.
Even our great " liberal " prophet, Mr. Herbert
Spencer, is compelled, in spite of himself, to
prophesy with terror of what he rightly calls " the
coming slavery," the despotism, not of a single
irresponsible tyrant, who must content himself
with doing good or evil in so general a way that
the sense of private compulsion or injury would
n8 A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK
weigh little on each individual, but the paltry
and prying despotism of the vestry the more
"virtuous" the more paltry and prying perse-
cuting each individual by the intrusion of its
myriad-handed, shifting, ignorant, and irresistible
tyranny into the regulation of our labour, our
household, and our very victuals, and, however
" pure " in its abstract intention, necessarily cor-
rupt in its application by its agents, since men, as
a rule, are corrupt. Indications are not wanting
of the sort of " government " we are committed
to, unless the coming war shall leave us in the
grip of a less irksome tyranny. It will be a
despotism which will have to be mitigated by
continual " tips," as the other kind has had to
be by occasional assassination. Neither the voter
nor the inspector yet know their power and oppor-
tunities ; but they soon will. We shall have to
" square " the district surveyor once or twice a
year, lest imaginary drains become a greater
terror than real typhoid ; we shall have to smoke
our pipes secretly and with a sense of sin, lest the
moral supervisor of the parish should decline our
offer of half-a-crown for holding his nose during
his weekly examination of our bedrooms and
closets ; the good Churchman will have to receive
Communion under the "species" of ginger-ale -
as some advanced congregations have already
A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK n 9
proposed unless the parson can elude the church-
warden with white port, or otherwise persuade
him ; and, every now and then, all this will be
changed, and we shall have to tip our policemen
and inspectors for looking over our infractions of
popular moralities of a newer pattern. Our con-
dition will very much resemble Swedenborg's hell,
in which everybody is incessantly engaged in the
endeavour to make everybody else virtuous ; and
the only compensating comforts to the sane will
be that, though wine and tobacco, those natural
stimulants to good impulses and fruitful medita-
tions, may be denied him, he may find abundant
time and opportunity, in the cessation of all
external interests of a moral and intellectual
nature, for improving his own character, which,
perhaps, is, after all, the only way in which a man
can be sure of improving the world's ; and, further-
more, he will no longer be discomposed by the
prospect of "national disaster," since there can
be no national disaster where there is no nation,
however freely the gutters may run with blood.
Private disaster, in such an infernal millennium,
will be a trifle.
Under such conditions, secret societies of dis-
contented and hopeless minorities will abound.
Dynamite will often shake the nerves of smug
content, and enrage the People beyond bounds at
120 A " PESSIMIST " OUTLOOK
such revolt against its infallible decrees. But
none of these societies will be so hateful as the
secret and inevitable aristocracy of the remnant
that refuses to give interior assent to the divinity
of the Brummagem Baal. Its members will ac-
quire means of association and methods of forbid-
ding intrusion which will infuriate the rest, who,
in their turn, will invent tests for the discovery, in
order to the punishment, of these " enemies of
mankind," as the Dutch traders in Japan did, in
inviting all persons of doubtful character to
trample on the crucifix.
I have called these glances at the near future
" pessimist," because that is the word now
generally applied to all such forecasts as are
made by those who do not ignore or pervert
patent facts. " Optimists," as far as I can gather,
are those who hope all things from " local option."
XVIII
THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY
SOME learned men have maintained that we can
know nothing. The truth is better stated by St.
Paul : " If a man thinks that he knows anything,
he knows nothing as he ought," that is nothing
other than imperfectly. It is the more difficult to
deal systematically with this matter, because we
want, in our tongue, words of such relative mean-
ing as scire, cognoscere, intelligere^ etc. I propose
only to run together a few such observations as
simple good sense can make, and accept, and
find use for.
A great and increasing proportion of persons
would, if you asked them, maintain that all con-
victions are merely opinions. But it is not so.
A fool may opine absolutely that a wise man is a
fool, but the wise man knows that the fool is one.
The same or opposite conclusions, political or
122 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
otherwise, may be arrived at by two persons from
a view of the same facts, and each may be equally
confident ; but the conclusions of one may be
knowledge, and those of the other opinion. The
reality of the difference is indicated by the difference
of the feelings which commonly subsist between
those who opine and those who know. Those
who opine hate those who know, and who speak
as those who know. They think it an assumption
of superiority, whereas it is only its reality, and
cannot but appear more or less in its manner of
expression. Those who know, are contemptuous
or indifferent only towards such as impudently
or ignorantly opine. The consequence is that the
knowledge which is wisdom is nowhere as an
acknowledged force and factor in worldly affairs,
and is able to assert itself only sub rasa, or by
accident, or by the more or less underhand
management of folly and ignorance.
What most people call " deep and earnest con-
victions" on political and social topics are generally
muddle-headed medleys of knowledge of fact and
opinion. They know that such and such a thing
is an evil, and they opine that they see a way to
amend it ; and if wiser people point out to them
that the evil would not be so amended, or that
greater evils would accrue from the attempt, they
only feel that their " convictions " are affronted
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 123
and opposed by cold-blooded calculations. This
kind of opinion is often as confident as actual
knowledge. When Carlyle said that it was im-
possible to believe a lie, he can only have meant
that it was impossible to believe it with that
highest kind of certitude which consists in intel-
lectual perception. Probably no one could believe
a lie with that degree of faith which would enable
him to suffer deliberate martyrdom for it. Pro-
testant and Catholic martyrs have usually been
sufferers for one and the same faith, or, at least,
parts of the same faith, in which parts they have
considered the whole to be involved. Very few,
if any, have ever carried the courage of mere
" opinions " to the stake.
There can be no absolute certitude about the
impressions of the senses or the inferences drawn
from them. There can be about moral and
spiritual things. The knave may sincerely opine
that it is best for his interests to lie and cheat ;
but the honest man knows that he is a being
whose interests are above all external contin-
gencies, and that under certain circumstances it
would be madness to behave otherwise than in a
way which would be directly opposed to every
argument and persuasion of the senses. It is
only the mind of the most highly " scientific "
constitution that will have its confidence in know-
124 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
ledge of this kind tried by considerations of its
moral and intellectual obligations to Hottentots
and Australian aborigines. " We can live in
houses without being architects " ; and we can
know, without knowing or caring to know how
we came by our knowledge. The house of the
gods has lasted intact since Abraham and Hesiod,
and shows no sign yet of tumbling about our ears.
The faculty of knowing, as differing from that of
opining, seems, as might be expected from what
has been said, to have as much to do with the
character of the will as with that of the mind. To
be honest, Shakespeare tells us, is to be one in
ten thousand ; and to discern intellectually, or to
know, is a part, and a very great part, of honesty.
A man may have learned a dozen languages, and
have the whole circle of the sciences at his ringers'
ends, and may know nothing worthy of being
called knowledge ; indeed, there is nothing which
seems to be a greater hindrance to the acquisition
of living knowledge than an engrossing devotion
to the acquisition of words, facts, logical methods,
and natural laws. It requires little learning to
make a wise or truly knowing man, but much
learning may not impossibly spoil one.
Mr. Matthew Arnold has said that a thorough
classical education has often the same effects on a
man's character as a grave experience. The
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 125
reason is that it is a grave experience, a long
series of small exercises of honesty, patience, and
self-sacrifice, the sum of which is equal to a great
and soul -sobering calamity. The author of the
Imitation notes a kindred fact when he says, " No
man can know anything till he is tried.". Not
only is the discipline of such an education, which,
in its early stage at least, has much in it that is
repugnant and compulsory, fitted to qualify the
character for the reception of true knowledge, but
it conveys also, in an eminent degree, the matter
of true knowledge. Without any disrespect to
Professor Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and Pro-
fessor Max M tiller, we may affirm that the man
who knew Plato, Homer, and ^Eschylus rightly,
and knew little else, would know far more than
he who knew all that these great scientists could
teach, and knew nothing else.
The man who knows, often finds himself at
great disadvantage in the presence of fact-gatherers
and persons who opine. His attitude is necessarily
affirmative, and often, to the great scandal and
contempt of his adversaries, simply affirmative.
It does not enter into his calculations to have
to defend actively a position which he sees to be
impregnable ; and when he leaves his proper occu
pation of " climbing trees in the Hesperides " to
wield his club against those who know of no such
126 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
trees, he is like a Hercules fighting mosquitoes.
They cannot even see his club, and the conflict
generally ends, as did that between the Lady and
Comus with an angry and wholly unconvincing
assertion of incompetence.
Fain would I something say, yet to what end ?
Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend
The sublime notion and high mystery
That must be utter'd to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of virginity.
And thou art worthy that thou should'st not know
More happiness than is thy present lot.
Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric.
That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence ;
Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
Wordsworth, in a still greater passion, calls his
scientific adversary " a fingering slave." Of course
this sort of thing tends to make the relations of
the parties unpleasant ; and in the eyes of the
world the man of immense " information " and
convinced ignorance goes off with the laurels.
Metaphysics for the most part are justly open
to the objection that they attempt to explain things
which Aristotle declares to be too simple to be
intelligible things which we cannot see with
definiteness, not because they are beyond the
focus of the mind's eye, but because they are too
much within it. The metaphysician Hegel says
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 127
that the sense of honour arises from our conscious-
ness of infinite personal value. This may not be
wholly satisfactory, but it is helpful ; it is a part
of the truth. But what do physicists make of
such things as honour and chastity ? They cer-
tainly endeavour to explain such ideas and feelings
as they do everything else, but their explanations
necessarily discredit these and all other things
which profess to have " infinite value," and which
wise men know to have infinite value.
The knowledge which can be made common to
all, is a foundation upon which a certain increasing
school, finding popular "opinion" too sandy, is
endeavouring to build up a new state of things,
religious, moral, political, and social. This kind
of " positivism," which claims for its sanction the
common, that is to say, the lowest experience of
mankind, is and always has been the religion of
the vulgar, to whatever class they belong. The
growth of an unconscious and undogmatic posi-
tivism among the people at large is perhaps the
most notable fact of the time. It shows itself not
only in an increasing impatience of the notion that
there is any reality which cannot be seen and felt,
but in an intolerance even of any experience which
is not, or cannot immediately be made, the ex-
perience of all. As boards and committees pro-
verbially have to work on the level of the least
128 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
wise of their members, so the ideal perfection of
this positivism would be government by the insight
of the greatest dunderhead, since his experiences
and perceptions alone would be sufficiently com-
municable to have the character of universality.
Under such ideal conditions, every reality that
makes life human would be completely eliminated.
A man who should be detected in secretly enter-
taining principles of abstract honour, or trying to
form his life upon the pattern of a beauty unknown
to the arch-dunderhead, would fare as it fared in
Athens with the man who dared to crown his
house with a pediment ; and vestries, consisting
of the prophets of commonplace and popular
experience, would vote everything in painting
and poetry to be " bosh " which should be more
esoteric in character than Frith's "Railway
Station " or Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy.
Science has already come very generally to
mean, not that which may be known, but only
such knowledge as every animal with faculties a
little above those of an ant or a beaver can be
induced to admit. Incommunicable knowledge,
or knowledge which can be communicated at
present only to a portion perhaps a small portion
of mankind, is already affirmed to be no know-
ledge at all. A man who knows and acts up to
his knowledge that it is better to suffer or inflict
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 129
any extremity of temporal evil, than to lie or
cheat, though he may not be able to give any
universally intelligible account of his knowledge,
is already beginning to be looked upon as a prig
or a fanatic ; and chastity is already widely
declared to be one of the " dead virtues," and
marriage only legalised fornication, because " the
sublime notion and high mystery that must be
uttered to unfold the sage and serious doctrine "
of purity must be taken, if taken at all by the
many, upon trust.
The pure and simple ideal of life founded upon
facts of universal experience is, however, too base
ever to be perfectly attained in this world. There
will always be a lingering suspicion with many
that some have powers of discernment and an
experience which are not granted to all ; there
will always be hidden heretics who will believe
that there are realities which cannot be seen or
touched by the natural eye or hand, or even by
the rational perception of the many ; and the
present downward tendency may perhaps be
checked, or at least delayed, by recalling to the
minds of men that, as yet, we are all living
more or less by faith in the better knowledge
of the few, and by reminding them of that abyss
towards which a new step is taken whenever any
item of that knowledge is denied in order to
K
J30 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
widen the foundations of the throne of popular
experience.
The religion of universal experience must of
course begin, as the dogmatic positivist insists, in
the denial of God, or, what is exactly equivalent,
in the assertion that, if God exists, He is altogether
unknowable and removed from the practical in-
terests of life. Now, let it be remembered that
for a man to deny that God can be known is quite
a different thing from his not being able to affirm,
from positive knowledge, the reverse. A very
small minority of mankind, but a minority which
includes almost all who have attained the highest
peaks of heroic virtue and many who have been
no less eminent for power of intellect and practical
wisdom, have declared that, to them at least, God
is knowable, communicable with, and personally
discernible with a certainty which exceeds all other
certainties ; and they have further affirmed that
this knowledge comes and can only come from a
man's putting himself en rapport with the Divinity
by an, in the beginning, more or less experimental
faith, and by a conformity to the dictates of the
highest conscience, so perfect as to involve, for a
considerable period at least, laborious and painful
self-denial. Now it would be placing oneself upon
a level with such assertors of the highest know-
ledge to say that one knows that these declarations
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 131
are true, however strong the presumption of their
truth may appear ; but it is simply vulgar and
brutal impudence for any one to assert posi-
tively that they are untruths or illusions, merely
because his own experience or that of his pot-
companions contains nothing which gives the least
clue to their meaning. The reductio ad absurdum
becomes complete when the same argument is
carried into regions of more extended experience.
A drunken bargeman has exactly the same right
to deny the reality of the asserted experiences of a
Petrarch or a Wordsworth as these would have to
deny those of the saint or the apostle ; and to
descend a few steps farther, the amateur of
abominable delights and the violator of natural
relationships would justly, upon the widest experi-
mental grounds, claim exemption from a condem-
nation chiefly founded upon an obscure perception
and an intuitive horror of which he for his part
had no experience.
Popular positivism will, however, always stop
short of the length to which the doctrines of its
prophets would lead it, and will, from time to time,
be beaten back into the paths of the positivism of
the nobler few on which all virtue and religion are
founded, by finding itself in contact with the
tremendous paradox, that the most universally
beneficial and admired fruits of civilisation are and
132 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
always have been gathered from trees of which the
roots are wholly out of common view. The heroes
themselves of the people will always refute popular
experience better than any philosopher can. Though
a Gladstone may dazzle them for a day by invest-
ing with a fatuous glamour the principles and
platitudes with which the vulgar are familiar, it is
to a Gordon, with inimitable courage and honour,
the obvious outcome of unintelligible thoughts and
experiences, that they will look with abiding
reverence and an elevating instinct that such
men habitually move about in worlds by them
unrealised.
The immense and unalterable inequalities in the
knowing faculties of man are the source and in
part the justification* of that social inequality which
roughly and very partially reflects them. Many
otherwise amiable and conservative thinkers have,
however, made the mistake of conceding that such
inequality is, abstractedly considered, an evil,
though a hopelessly incurable one. Conservative
teaching would be much more effective than it is
were it more frequently occupied with proving
that such inequality is no evil, but a very great
good for all parties.
Dr. Johnson, who sometimes let fall, in off-hand
talk, sayings of such depth, simplicity, and signifi-
cance that we must go back to the philosophers of
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 133
antiquity to find the like of them, once remarked
that " inequality is the source of all delight." This
saying, which must seem surprising to most
modern ears, is absolutely true and even demon-
strable.
All delight not all pleasure, which is quite a
different thing will be found, when thoroughly
examined, to consist in the rendering and receiv-
ing of love and the services of love. Hence the
great and fortunately inextinguishable fountains of
delight in the relationships of man and woman
and of parents and children. It is true that a low
and inorganic form of national polity may, to some
extent, suppress even these pure springs of felicity ;
but, so long as there are women and children in
the world, it can never become quite joyless. The
doctrines of liberty, fraternity, and equality are
known instinctively only by very bad children; and
most women, when once they have been in love,
repudiate such teaching indignantly, under what-
ever polity they may have been born.
Between unequals sweet is equal love ;
and the fact is that there is no love, and therefore
no sweetness, which is not thus conditioned ;
and the greater the inequality the greater the
sweetness. Hence the doctrine that infinite felicity
can arise only from the mutual love of beings
134 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE,
infinitely unequal that is, of the creator and the
creature. Inequality, far from implying any dis-
honour on either side of the mutual compact of
love, is the source of honour to both. Hooker,
writing of marriage, says : " It is no small honour
to a man that a creature so like himself should be
subjected to him " ; and we all know that the
honour to woman which the chivalry of the middle
ages made an abiding constituent of civilisation,
was founded upon Catholic views of her subjection,
and the obligation to give special honour, as of
right, to the weaker vessel. Look also at the
relations which usually subsist between an heredi-
tary gentleman and his hereditary unequals and
dependants, and compare them with the ordinary
fraternal relations between a Radical master-
tradesman and his workmen. The intercourse
between the gentleman and his hind or labourer
is free, cheerful, and exhilarating, because there
is commonly in it the only equality worth regard-
ing, that of goodwill ; whereas the commands of
the sugar -boiler or the screw -maker to their
brothers are probably given with a frown and
received with a scowl. Social inequality, since it
arises from unalterable nature and inevitable
chance, is irritating only when it is not recognised.
The American plutocrat may be forced to travel
for a week in the company of a hodman, because
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 135
American theories discountenance first and third
class carriages ; but catch him speaking to him !
Whereas an English duke, if by chance thrown
into the companionship of an honest countryman,
would be on the best of terms with him before an
hour was over, and the good understanding be-
tween the two would be made all the easier should
the latter have on his distinguishing smock-frock.
The genuine Tory is the most accessible of persons,
the genuine Radical the least so. The one takes
things as they are and must be, the other views
them as they are not and cannot be, and, kicking
against imaginary evils, often pays the penalty of
finding himself firmly saddled with the realities.
" One can live in a house without being an
architect," and it is not at all necessary that the
common people should understand the English
constitution in order to feel that their lives are
the sweeter and nobler because they are members
of its living organism. Not a ploughboy or a
milkmaid but would feel, without in the least
knowing why, that a light had passed from their
lives with the disappearance of social inequalities,
and the consequent loss of their dignity as integral
parts of a somewhat that was greater than them-
selves.
The other day, walking in a country lane, I saw
what appeared at a little distance to be a dying
'36
animal. On a closer view it proved to be the
carcase of a sheep which had in great measure
been actually transformed into a mass of the soft,
white, malodorous grubs known to anglers by the
name of gentles. The struggles of these creatures
to get at the food which they concealed produced
a strong and regular pulsation throughout the
whole mass, and gave it a ghastly semblance of
breathing. The ordered state of England, accord-
ing to its ideal, which for many generations has
been more or less realised, compared with the
sort of democracy to which we are fast drifting
and have wellnigh attained, is much like the
animal in which myriads of individual organs,
nerves, veins, tissues, and cells formed subordi-
nated parts of one living thing, compared with
this pulsating mass of grubs, each one of which
had no thought but of its just share of carrion.
Democracy is only a continually shifting aris-
tocracy of money, impudence, animal energy, and
cunning, in which the best grub gets the best of
the carrion ; and the level to which it tends to
bring all things is not a mountain tableland, as
its promoters would have their victims think, but
the unwholesome platitude of the fen and the
morass, of which black envy would enjoy the
malaria so long as all others shared in it. What-
ever may be the pretences set forth by the lead-
OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 137
ing advocates of such a state of things among us,
it is manifest enough that black envy is the principal
motive with many of them, who hate the beauty
of the ordered life to be ruling stars of which they
cannot attain, just as certain others are said to
" hate the happy light from which they fell." They
hate hereditary honours, chiefly because they pro-
duce hereditary honour and create a standard of
truth and courage for which even the basest are
the better in so far as they are shamed by it. Do
the United States, some may ask, justify this con-
demnation ? They are but a poor approach to
the idea of democracy which seems now about to
be realised among us : but they have already gone
a long way towards extinguishing that last glory
of, and now best substitute for, a generally extinct
religion a sense of honour among the people.
" Why, what a dern'd fool you must be !" exclaimed
a New York shopkeeper to a friend of mine, who
had received a dollar too much in changing a
note, and returned it. If there is a shopkeeper
in England who would think such a thing, there
is certainly not one who would dare to say it.
Nor, in losing sight of the sense of " infinite
personal value," which is the source of honour and
the growth of a long-enduring recognition of in-
evitable inequalities, have the Americans preserved
delight. Dr. Johnson's saying finds a remarkable
138 THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, ETC.
comment in the observation of a recent American
traveller : " In the United States there is every-
where comfort, but no joy."
To conclude, it is quite possible to change the
forms of social inequality, but to do away with the
fact is of all things the most impossible. It is the
trick or ignorance of the demagogue to charge
existing inequalities with the evils and injustices
in which they began, and with which they were
attended for a long time afterwards. When con-
quest or revolution establishes the ever-inevitable
political and social inequalities in new forms, it
takes many generations of misery and turmoil to
introduce into them the moral equality which
renders them not only tolerable, but the source of
true freedom and happiness.
XIX
LOVE AND POETRY
EVERY man and woman who has not denied or
falsified nature knows, or at any rate feels, that
love, though the least " serious," is the most
significant of all things. The wise do not talk
much about this knowlege, for fear of exposing
its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the
profligate and unbelieving, and because its light,
though, and for the reason that, it exceeds all
other, is deficient in definition. But they see that
to this momentary transfiguration of life all that is
best in them looks forward or looks back, and that
it is for this the race exists, and not this for the
race the seed for the flower, not the flower for
the seed. All religions have sanctified this love,
and have found in it their one word for and image
of their fondest and highest hopes ; and the
Catholic has exalted it into a " great Sacrament,"
holding that, with Transubstantiation which it
140 LOVE AND POETRY
resembles it is unreasonable only because it is
above reason. "The love which is the best
ground of marriage," writes also the Protestant
and "judicious" Hooker, "is that which is least
able to render a reason for itself." Indeed, the
extreme unreasonableness of this passion, which
gives cause for so much blaspheming to the
foolish, is one of its surest sanctions and a main
cause of its inexhaustible interest and power ; for
who but a " scientist " values greatly or is greatly
moved by anything he can understand that
which can be comprehended being necessarily less
than we are ourselves ?
In this matter the true poet must always be a
mystic altogether to the vulgar, and more or
less to all who have not attained to his peculiar
knowledge. For what" is a mystery but that
which one does not know ? The common handi-
crafts used to be called mysteries ; and their
professors were mystics to outsiders exactly in
the sense that poets or theologians, with sure, but
to them uncommunicated and perhaps incom-
municable, knowledge, are mystics to the many.
The poet simply knows more than they do ;
but it flatters their malignant vanity to call him
names which they mean to be opprobrious, though
they are not, because he is not such a spiritual
pauper as themselves. But poets are mystics,
LOVE AND POETRY 141
not only by virtue of knowledge which the greater
part of mankind does not possess, but also because
they deal with knowledge against which the ac-
cusation of dunces who know the differential
calculus is etymologically true namely, that it
is absurd. Love is eternally absurd, for that
which is the root of all things must itself be
without root. Aristotle says that things are
unintelligible to man in proportion as they are
simple ; and another says, in speaking of the
mysteries of love, that the angels themselves
desire in vain to look into these things.
In the hands of the poet, mystery does not hide
knowledge, but reveals it as by its proper medium.
Parables and symbols are the only possible modes
of expressing realities which are clear to percep-
tion though dark to the understanding. "With-
out a parable he spake not " who always spake
of primary realities. Every spiritual reality fades
into something else, and none can tell the point
at which it fades. The only perfectly definite
things in the universe are the conceptions of a
fool, who would deny the sun he lives by if he
could not see its disc. Natural sciences are definite,
because they deal with laws which are not realities
but conditions of realities. The greatest and per-
haps the only real use of natural science is to supply
similes and parables for poets and theologians.
142 LOVE AND POETRY
But if the realities of love were not in themselves
dark to the understanding, it would be necessary
to darken them not only lest they should be
profaned, but also because, as St. Bernard says,
" The more the realities of heaven are clothed
with obscurity, the more they delight and attract,
and nothing so much heightens longing as such
tender refusal." "Night," says the inspirer of
St. Bernard, " is the light of my pleasures."
Love is rooted deeper in the earth than any
other passion ; and for that cause its head, like
that of the Tree Igdrasil, soars higher into heaven.
The heights demand and justify the depths, as
giving them substance and credibility. " That He
hath ascended what is it but because He first
also descended into the lower parts of the earth ? "
Love "reconciles the -highest with the lowest,
ordering all things strongly and sweetly from end
to end." St. Bernard says that " divine love "
(religion) " has its first root in the most secret of
the human affections." This affection is the only
key to the inner sanctuaries of that faith which
declares, "Thy Maker is thy Husband;" the
only clue by which searchers of the " secret of
the King," in the otherwise inscrutable writings of
prophet and apostle, discover, as Keble writes,
w the loving hint that meets the longing guess,"
which looks to the future for the satisfying and
LOVE AND POETRY 143
abiding reality, the passage of whose moment-
ary shadow forms the supreme glory of our
mortality.
The whole of after-life depends very much upon
how life's transient transfiguration in youth by
love is subsequently regarded ; and the greatest
of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his
readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of
nature as well as religion, " Let not my heart
forget the things mine eyes have seen." The
greatest perversion of the poet's function is to
falsify the memory of that transfiguration of the
senses and to make light of its sacramental
character. This character is instantly recognised
by the unvitiated heart and apprehension of every
youth and maiden ; but it is very easily forgotten
and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld
by priests and poets. Poets are naturally its
prophets all the more powerful because, like the
prophets of old, they are wholly independent of
the priests, and are often the first to discover and
rebuke the lifelessness into which that order is
always tending to fall. If society is to survive its
apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly
by guarding and increasing the purity of the
sources in which society begins. The world is
finding out, as it has often done before, and more
or less forgotten, that it cannot do without religion.
144 LOVE AND POETRY
Love is the first thing to wither under its loss.
What love does in transfiguring life, that religion
does in transfiguring love : as any one may see
who compares one state or time with another.
Love is sure to be something less than human if
it is not something more ; and the so-called ex-
travagances of the youthful heart, which always
claims a character for divinity in its emotions,
fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, re-
action, if those claims are not justified to the
understanding by the faith which declares man
and woman to be priest and priestess to each
other of relations inherent in Divinity itself, and
proclaimed in the words " Let us make man in
our own image " and " male and female created he
them." Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of
love to the higher feelings unless the parties to
them are conscious and true lovers always are
that, for the season at least, they justify the words
" I have said, Ye are gods." Nuptial love bears
the clearest marks of being nothing other than the
rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. "Its
felicity consists in a perpetual conversion of phase
from desire to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to
desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance
in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved ;
and it is agitated in all its changes by fear, with-
out which love cannot long exist as emotion."
LOVE AND POETRY 145
Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy,
and perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded
as a "great sacrament." It is the inculcation of
this significance which has made love between
man and woman what it is now at least to the
idea and aspirations of all good minds. It is
time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced
more clearly. Love being much more respected
and religion much less than of old, the danger of
profanation is not so great as it was when religion
was revered and love despised. The most char-
acteristic virtue of woman, or at least the most
alluring of her weaknesses her not caring for
masculine truth and worth unless they woo her
with a smile or a touch or some such flattery of
her senses is the prevailing vice of most men,
especially in these times. This general effeminacy
is the poet's great opportunity. It is his pontifical
privilege to feel the truth ; and his function is to
bridge the gulf between severe verity and its
natural enemy, feminine sentiment, by speech
which, without any sacrifice of the former, is
" simple, sensuous, and passionate." He insinu-
ates in nerve-convincing music the truths which
the mass of mankind must feel before they believe.
He leads them by their affections to things above
their affections, making Urania acceptable to
them by her prsenomen Venus. He is the apostle
L
146 LOVE AND POETRY
of the Gentiles, and conveys to them, without any
flavour of cant or exclusiveness, the graces which
the chosen people have too often denied or
disgraced in their eyes.
XX
THE WEAKER VESSEL
IT is "of faith " that the woman's claim to the
honour of man lies in the fact of her being the
"weaker vessel." It would be of no use to prove
what every Christian man and woman is bound to
believe, and what is, indeed, obvious to the senses
of any sane man and woman whatever. But a
few words of random comment on the text may,
by adding to faith knowledge, make man and
woman woman especially more thankful than
before for those conditions which constitute the
chief felicity of her life and his, and which it is
one of the chief triumphs of progress to render
ever more and more manifest. The happiest
result of the " higher education " of woman can-
not fail to consist in the rendering of her weak-
ness more and more daintily conspicuous. How
much sweeter to dry the tears that flow because
one cannot accede to some demonstrable fallacy
148 THE WEAKER VESSEL
in her theory of variable stars, than to kiss her
into conformity as to the dinner-hour or the fitness
or unfitness of such-or-such a person to be asked
to a picnic ! How much more dulcet the dultis
Amaryllidis ira when Amaryllis knows Sophocles
and Hegel by heart, than when her accomplish-
ments extend only to a moderate proficiency in
French and the pianoforte ! It is a great con-
solation to reflect that, among all the bewildering
changes to which the world is subject, the char-
acter of woman cannot be altered ; and that, so
long as she abstains from absolute outrages against
nature such as divided skirts, free-thinking, tri-
cycles, and Radicalism neither Greek, nor conic
sections, nor political economy, nor cigarettes, nor
athletics can ever really do other than enhance
the charm of that sweet unreasonableness which
humbles the gods to the dust and compels them
to adore the lace below the last hem of her bro-
cade ! It is owing to this ineradicable perfection
that time cannot change nor custom stale her in-
finite variety.
A French writer has complained that there are
not more than about twenty-five species of woman.
Had not his senses been Frenchified, he would
have perceived that every woman is a species in
herself nay, many species. The aspects of
reason are finite, but those of unreason infinite ;
THE WEAKER VESSEL 149
and, so long as one woman is left in the world,
no poet can want a perfectly unspoilt subject, and
one which can never be fathomed. Some poet
has, with much vraisemblance, represented Jove
as creating woman in order that there might be
at least one thing in the universe that should have
for him the zest of unintelligibility which nothing
but weakness and unreason could supply. The
human creature, however, is incapable of the ab-
solutely incomprehensible ; therefore it has been
providentially devised that no man should be
without some touch of womanhood, and no
woman without some manhood. Were it other-
wise, they would be wholly uninteresting to one
another, and could no more mix than oil and
water. This reciprocal tincture of each other's
sex produces that mixture of inscrutability and
comprehensibility in the well-constituted and well-
matched man and woman, and that endless mis-
understanding, mitigated by obscure insight, which,
if not the original cause of love, is the source of
that perpetual agitation of the feelings which in-
definitely increases love, and without which love,
if it did not die, would at least go to sleep. " Fax
agitando magis ardescit."
Most of the failures in marriage come of the
man's not having manhood enough to assert the
prerogatives which it is the woman's more or less
ISO THE WEAKER VESSEL
secret delight to acknowledge. She knows her
place, but does not know how to keep it unless he
knows it also ; and many an otherwise amiable
woman grows restless and irritable under the in-
supportable doubt as to whether she has got her
master. In order to put the question to the test,
she does things she knows he is bound to resist or
resent, in the hope of being put down with a high
hand and perhaps a bad word or two since even
the mildest corporal chastisement has gone out
with the heroic days of such lovers as Siegfried
and Kriemhild.
Friendship and love differ mainly in this : that,
whereas the felicity of friendship consists in a
mutual interchange of benefits, intellectual and
otherwise, that of love is in giving on one part
and receiving on the 'other, with a reciprocal per-
ception of how sweet it is to the endower to endow
and the receiver to receive. This relation involves,
as ancient philosophers and theologians have ob-
served, a certain opulence on the one side and a
corresponding destitution on the other a destitu-
tion which, however, is the greatest opulence in
the eyes of the former as being the necessary con-
dition of his proper delight, which is to endow.
The myth of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid
is representative of the most perfect nuptial re-
lationship.
THE WEAKER VESSEL 151
All joy worth the name is in equal love between
unequals ; and the inmost delight of giving honour
lies in its being of voluntary favour, and that of
receiving it in the perception that the rendering
of it is an infatuation of love on the part of the
giver. Desert cares as little for honour as it is in
the habit of receiving it. The vanity of a woman
need not derogate from that sense of comparative
nothingness which is to herself the sweetest part
of the offering of her affection. Indeed, her vanity
may be based upon this sense of her smallness,
as knowing that this is the source of her at-
tractiveness. A woman without the vanity which
delights in her power of attracting would be by
that very fact without power to attract ; for she
would want the power to receive that which the
man delights to give namely, that tender cor-
roboration and consummation of her sense of her
own sweetness, which every lover imagines that
he of all men is alone able to confer upon her.
As to the unreason of woman, there is a positive
character about it which elevates it from defect
into a sort of sacred mystery. " Perhaps," says
Thomas Hardy, the greatest living authority on
the subject, " in no minor point does woman
astonish her helpmate more than in the strange
power she possesses of believing cajoleries that
she knows to be false, except, indeed, in that of
S2 THE WEAKER VESSEL
being utterly sceptical on strictures which she
knows to be true." Philip van Artevelde says
with perfect truth as to the fact, but with a most
erroneous implied inference " How little flatter-
ing is a woman's love !" They understand little
of love who do not see how great a part is played
in it by mirth and paradox, and how the surprise
of finding oneself loved the more for a kiss or a
compliment makes up abundantly for the dis-
appointment of discovering that the greatest merits
or self-sacrifice do not count for much in com-
parison.
When the Father of Gods and men presented
the newly created woman to the Council of Olym-
pus, we know that she was greeted with peals of
laughter ; and to this day there is nothing that a
woman of well-balanced mind hates more in a man
than his taking her too much au grand serieux.
It has been the practice of the Catholic Church
not to define a dogma, nor to promulgate it as a
necessary part of faith, until it has come to be
widely denied ; and that Church to which all truly
sensible persons, be they Catholic or otherwise,
belong, is ever careful to abstain from formulating
doctrines so long as they continue to constitute
portions of the implicit and active belief of man-
kind in general. Words tend to obscure and
blunt the edge of truth, which is better felt than
THE WEAKER VESSEL 153
spoken ; but when it is no longer generally felt,
and is widely spoken against, then there is no help
for it but to hurl anathemas against its deniers.
Now it is high time that it should be plainly
declared that there are few more damnable heresies
than the doctrine of the equality of man and woman.
It strikes at the root of the material and spiritual
prosperity and felicity of both, and vitiates the
whole life of society in its source. From time to
time in the world's past history, the inferiority
and consequent subordination of woman have been
denied by some fanatic or insignificant sect of
fanatics, and the cudgels have been taken up for
man by some busybody in his premature dread of
the " monstrous regiment of women " ; but the
consensus of the world has until lately been dead
against the notion. Every man Jack would have
listened with a cheery laugh at the setting up of a
claim of equality on the part of his dame 'Jill ; and
Aristotle, Bacon, and St. Thomas Aquinas would
have regarded with silent wonder the idea of rais-
ing to an equal rank with her lord the placens
uxor whom the Angelical Doctor declares to be
" scarcely a reasonable creature." Here and
there, indeed, a " poet sage " has glorified the
woman in terms that, taken literally, are violently
heterodox ; but everybody knew what he meant
in thus making a divinity of her whose very ex-
154 THE WEAKER VESSEL
cellence consists in her being decidedly a little
lower than the angels those transmitters of the
divinity of which she is only the last reflector.
Lovers, also, have in all ages practised a playful
idolatry ; and if they are beginning now to drop
the language of hyperbole, it is because they are
liable now to be believed. The ideal position of
woman towards man, according to the doctrine of
the Church which, in this instance at least, is
verifiable by all who have the power of psycho-
logical observation is that of his reflection or
"glory." She is the sensible glory or praise of
his spiritual wisdom, as the rising cloud of incense
is that of the invisible sunshine, which, passing
through the painted window, becomes manifest in
all its rainbow hues only when it strikes upon the
otherwise colourless vapour. The world which
sometimes fancies that it is being extremely
cynical when it is only expressing emphatically
some Christian and philosophical verity ex-
presses this fact when it says that the virtue of
woman is the noblest invention of man. She has
not the strength for, or indeed the knowledge of,
true virtue and grace of character, unless she is
helped to that knowledge and strength by the
man.
" He for God only, she for God in him."
She only really loves and desires to become what
THE WEAKER VESSEL 155
he loves and desires her to be ; and beauty, being
visible or reflected goodness, can exist in woman
only when and in proportion as the man is
strong, good, and wise. When man becomes
womanish, and ceases to be the transmitter of the
heavenly light of wisdom, she is all abroad, she
does not know what to do with herself, and begins
to chatter or scream about her rights ; but, in this
state, she has seldom understanding enough to
discern that her true right is to be well governed
by right reason, and, instead of pouring con-
tempt on her degraded companion for his
spiritual impotence, she tries all sorts of hope-
less tricks the most hopeless of all being
that of endeavouring to become manly in order
the better to attract him who has become
womanish.
To maintain that man and woman are equals
in intelligent action is just as absurd as it would
be to maintain that the hand that throws a ball
and the wall that casts it back are equal. The
woman has an exquisite perception and power
of admiring all the man can be or do. She
is the "glory" of his prowess and nobility in
war, statesmanship, arts, invention, and manners ;
and she is able to fulfil this, her necessary
and delightful function, just because she is
herself nothing in battle, policy, poetry, discovery,
156 THE WEAKER VESSEL
or original intellectual or moral force of any
kind.
The true happiness and dignity of woman are
to be sought, not in her exaltation to the level of
man, but in a full appreciation of her inferiority
and in the voluntary honour which every manly
nature instinctively pays to the weaker vessel. In
the infinite distance between God and man, theo-
logians find the secret of the infinite felicity of
divine love ; and the incomparable happiness of
love between the sexes is similarly founded upon
their inequality. The playfulness which is the
very dainty and " bouquet " of love, comes of the
fact that in the mutual worship of lovers there is
always a tacit understanding of something of a
King Cophetua and Beggar- Maid relationship.
No right-minded woman would care a straw for
her lover's adoration if she did not know that he
knew that after all he was the true divinity.
There is a mystic craving in the great to be-
come the love-captive of the small, while the small
has a corresponding thirst for the enthralment of
the great.
" 'Tis but in such captivity
The boundless heavens know what they be."
The central prophecy in the Old Testament is
that "A man shall be compassed by a woman.'
THE WEAKER VESSEL J 57
This wonder, which is applied by the Prophet to
higher things, is also the secret of human love
and its marvellous order. The infinite circum-
scribed by the finite, the great by the small, is
the insoluble paradox which teases human affection
with inexhaustible delight, as it is the thought
which kindles and keeps alive the devotion of the
Saint.
When this order ceases to exist, and with it the
life and delight of love, it is wholly the man's
fault. A woman will consent to be small only
when the man is great ; but then she sets no
bounds to her sweet self-humiliation, and by be-
coming the slave of his reason she reduces him to
a like captivity to her desires. The widely ex-
tended impatience of women under the present
condition of things is nothing but an unconscious
protest against the diminished manliness of men.
When a large proportion of our male population
are thrilled with effeminate pain if an injury is
done to the skin of a cat or of an Irish rebel, but
feel no indignation or anguish at the violation of
every sound principle and the deadening of every
sentiment that ennobles life, women feel that the
external conditions of true womanhood have dis-
appeared ; and it is not to be wondered at if
many of them, unclothed, as it were, of the senti-
ment of surrounding manhood, should, in their
158 THE WEAKER VESSEL
ignorant discomfort and despair, make as un-
sightly a spectacle of themselves as does the animal
called a hermit-crab when, by some chance, it is
ejected, bare, comfortless, and unprotected, from
the shell of its adoption.
XXI
DIEU ET MA DAME
WOMAN is the last and lowest of all spiritual
creatures ; made " a little lower than the angels "
to be " crowned with the glory and honour "
of being the final and visible reflection of the
beauty of God, which in itself no eye shall ever
otherwise see ; for " the beatific vision," as St.
Bernard says, " is not a thing that is seen, but a
substance which is sucked, as through a nipple."
The Blessed Virgin, " the holiest and humblest
of creatures," crowned with the glory and honour
of bearing God in her womb, is the one woman
in whom womanhood has been perfected, and in
whom the whole of womanhood has been more or
less reconstituted and glorified.
But though woman has thus been glorified by an
inconceivably higher circumstance of honour than
man, and has been made and declared to be not only
" Regina Mundi " but " Regina Cceli," man, in the
160 DIEU ET MA DAME
order of being, is and will for ever be above her. He,
as man, seems to be, in some sort, the last of the
angelic order, being not only a reflection but also
a transmitter and messenger of the Divine original
Fatherhood, represented to the Blessed Virgin
herself in St. Joseph. Theology teaches that a
characteristic of all the angelic orders is the
capacity of assuming a double aspect. They can
turn their gaze directly upon God, a state which
St. Thomas Aquinas describes as the " Morning
Joy," or they can turn to God in his creature,,
which is said to be the " Evening Joy." The
Father alone looks for ever downward, and the
woman alone for ever upward, " her angel always
beholding the face" of the original divinity; and,
in whatever order an angelic substance may stand,
all orders below and above are, as it were, trans-
parent, the vision of each ending, in one direction,
in the Father, and, in the other, in the Woman,
that opaque surface in which the rays of Deity
end, and from which they are reflected in all the
multiplied splendours which they have gathered by
being transmitted through the prismatic and
refractive spheres that intervene. In this dupli-
cate order, each angelic entity represents and
contains the Divine Fatherhood for the entity next
.below, and the womanhood, its "glory" for that
next above ; a fact which Milton seems to have
DIEU ET MA DAME 161
discerned, without the aid of Catholic theology,
when he wrote
" Spirits at will
Can either sex assume ; "
and which every " Bride of Christ " who is also a
pure and ardent Lover discerns, when his eyes
are first opened, as by a deific flash, to the feminine
splendour, and he feels that " Dieu et ma
Dame " is no irreverent or hyperbolic legend for
his double but not divided worship. The ideal
womanhood, which only one woman has realised
fully, but which every woman seems to be capable
of more or less representing to some man, for at
least one moment in his life, is the photo-
sphere of God, the light and joy of the universe,
" Regina Mundi," as the glory of nature, and
" Regina Cceli " when she shall have become
nature glorified.
Man, then, as soon as he is made by grace a
participator of angelic and celestial powers, stands
between God and woman, and, as he pleases and
when he pleases, can take aspect as Bride to
Christ or bridegroom to woman, the Priestess
of the Divine Truth or Beauty to him, as he is
Priest of the Divine Love or Power to her.
To render this, the central fact of life, con-
ceivable and credible to such as have not attained
M
162 DIEU ET MA DAME
to knowledge, those who know have remarked
certain analogies, say rather identities of Divine
and human love, of which, from reading and
hearing whereof I have kept no exact notes, I
will give a few examples.
The doctrine of election, which is such that it
can be neither accepted nor denied by the under-
standing, has its lively image in " the way of a
man with a maid," which, also, Solomon himself
confessed that he could not understand. The
man sees many maids, often of much more
apparent beauty and merit than the one he
chooses ; and, in his choice of her, there is no
compulsion. He may feel attracted by some-
what in her, but he is not in love with her,
until by an act of will, he abandons his will,
and assumes, by a "distinct act of election, a
state of mind towards her from which thence-
forward he is unable to withdraw himself, whereby
it becomes her manifest fault if she does not
" make her election sure " by offering no such
violence to love as must inevitably cause divorce.
Again, the Divine Lover, like a wise mortal
lover, knows well that, however favourably the
Soul may be disposed to Him, by His great-
ness, power, wealth, goodness, and abundant bene-
volence to her, He must desire her, and give her
some sensible proof by smile, touch, or caress, which
DIEU ET MA DAME 163
shall say to her heart, as the God of David says
to the chosen, " Rex concupiscet decorem tuum."
Again, God's strength, like man's, is perfected
in weakness. When the Soul has entered upon
her third and crowning stage of perfection and
union, His divine weakness for her gives Him far
more influence over her will than would be
obtained by any display of His power and other
attributes. As with a mortal lover, there is, as
some one has said, an appearance of infatuation
in the love of God for the elect soul. Though
just and beneficent to others, He has nothing but
boundless indulgence for her. " If she loves,"
says Saint Augustine, " she may do as she likes."
He will forgive her, almost without asking, all
faults short of wilful and persistent infidelity, and,
since she herself hates them, He even loves her
the more for them. What ardent lover but
knows that the present faults and shortcomings of
the beloved are condiments and excitations of the
appetite of love, impediments in the current of his
passion which only render its self-willed and self-
rejoicing force more sensible and triumphant ?
And past corruptions that are really past and no
longer active are so far from hindering love that
they act as manure in which the seed of Divine
Love and the seed almost divine of a pure and
fervid mortal affection flourish wonderfully, many
164 DIEU ET MA DAME
a Magdalen, the just envy of many who were
always pure, having been formed into a spouse,
" more innocent than any maid," by the inveterate
and purifying ardour of either love.
Again, as with a mortal lover, God does not
require any service of external "charity," etc.,
from His beloved. Indeed, He complains, as He
did to Martha, of all attempts to please Him
otherwise than by giving Him her society and her
person in contemplation. " All," says St. Francis
of Sales, " must serve her " (the elect Soul), " but
she must serve none, not even her Divine Lover,
of whom she is not a servant but a spouse." He
reproves in her the kind of humility which He
requires of others, in whom He has not yet inspired
that perfection of intention which in her He regards
as attainment. He "also requires in her, as a
mortal lover does, that amount of " vanity," as
the world calls it, which sees and rejoices in her
own beauty ; for it is only her knowledge of her
own loveliness in His eyes which makes His love
credible to her, and it is only her belief in His
love which enables her to give that perfect re-
sponse of feeling which is love's fruition, and
causes her beauty to brighten more and more in
the joy of His flatteries, making her " sweet to
herself who is so sweet to Him."
Again, in either love, the one party retains a
DIEU ET MA DAME 165
power of absolute command, which he never uses,
while the other has an equal force of persuasion,
of which she avails herself abundantly. She
delights in calling herself his slave ; he delights in
being hers, and in boasting himself a " servant of
servants."
A mysterious longing for corporeal and spiritual
captivity to the beloved animates either kind of
love if, indeed, they be not really one in kind.
In love, the woman, who is " the body," desires
to be utterly captive to the man's will, and he, in
return, to be utterly captive to her body. His
soul lives in and is moved blissfully by every turn
of her head and motion of her limbs. He already
is carried hither and thither in all her movements,
although he is not yet numerically one flesh with
her ; but this is much more so with the Divine
Lover, who actually enjoys that distinctness in
identity to which the mortal lover only and for
ever in vain aspires, namely, to be "man com-
passed by a woman," as Isaiah says, speaking of that
Incarnation which is effected more or less in each
of the elect, as in Jesus Himself perfectly. These
two captivities constitute one freedom, and every
look and gesture of the beloved is a sacrament
and a common joy. As I have said elsewhere
"'Tis but in such captivity
The heavens themselves know what they be."
166 DIJEU ET MA DAME
Another remarkable point in this divine analogy
is the reciprocal desire of the great for the small
and the small for the great. An ordinary man
requires in his mistress abilities corresponding to
his own, and he who cannot love much commonly
demands from her a great power of love for him.
A great man has a wilful and somewhat amused
delight (" Olli subridens") in binding himself in
wedlock to one who, indeed, implicitly believes in
his greatness, but who is really nothing but a
little, ignorant Love, who gives all her mite and
understands only caresses. To a great man and
to a God a little love is a great thing. As the
greatest of souls is infinitely little to God, it follows
that this peculiar source of felicity in extremes is,
in the divine marriage, unfathomable and inex-
haustible.
Another phenomenon common to both kinds
of love is the longing almost the first that arises
in every true lover's bosom to die for the sake
of the beloved. " I have longed for this hour,"
said Our Lord. But none, save God, can die and
yet live for her.
Again, between lovers, things which, under
ordinary relationships, are only " counsels of per-
fection," become obligatory duties ; the least inat-
tention is almost a mortal offence, raising a cloud
of separation which nothing but bitter penance
DIEU ET MA DAME 167
and greater devotion than ever can dissipate ;
so that the spouse of God may well suspect the
reality of her position, if her life, in this world, is
not fuller of sorrows than of smiles, and if her
failures have not rendered her perfection sensibly
greater this week than it was last.
Again, in human as in divine love, " a part is
greater than the whole," and either love finds its
fruition in sacraments or symbols, which are parts
representing the whole. Even in the presence
of the beloved, the lover will choose to fix his soul
upon a ribbon or a lock of hair, intensifying his
apprehension of a too numerous and overwhelm-
ing beauty by thus focusing it on one point.
Another of the many paradoxes common to both
loves is, that they can see best in the dark.
" Night is the light of my pleasures."
Again, since, in this life, the wedlock of God
and the soul is, at best, only in its first stage or
betrothal, its felicities, to the soul at least, are, as
with the betrothed maiden, defective, full of unin-
telligible and impatient desires, and daily mingled
with the almost intolerable miseries of temporary
separation, which seems eternal ; for, while it
lasts, she cannot see her own beauty, which exists
for her only in the light of His countenance.
When thus He withdraws from her, she becomes
in her own eyes vile, unmeaning, and unlovely as
168 DIEU ET MA DAME
the sheath of a lost sword, or the cast skin of a
serpent, and it is impossible at such times to give
a sensible belief to the certainty that she will,
ere long, be again alive with His life and splendid
with the reflection of His complacency.
Another most notable analogy of love is the
revelation, completion, and explanation of herself
which the lover in either case brings to the be-
loved. She is as the fragment of a "puzzle-
picture," until she encounters the destined
complement of her being, and the key to her
unintelligible dreams. They then suddenly be-
come such realities as make all other realities
dreams. She dares not believe or accept the
wonders of her position until she discerns that
acceptance of them is imposed on her by duty and
faith. Then she can no more doubt that, through
all the range of her constitution, she is the blissful
reciprocal of him whom she adores, than she could
doubt of her own existence, which, indeed, with-
out him, would now be no existence. In him is the
only possible satisfaction of her rational, voluntary,
and sensitive life, and she attains to fathomless
content in the extremes of reverence for and in-
timacy with him.
But this is perhaps the greatest and itost in-
scrutable of all the mysteries -common to either
kind of love there is, in its felicity, the coexist-
DIEU ET MA DAME 169
ence of a celestial and exceedingly virginal pride
with an insatiable appetite for its surrender and
sacrifice. Theologians say that the essential of
the Sacrifice of the Altar is the infinite humiliation
suffered by the Second Person of the Holy Trinity
in becoming flesh in the moment of transubstan-
tiation ; and has not this humiliation its analogue
in the case of the Virgin when she allows her love
and beauty, thitherto nothing but spiritual splen-
dour and ethereal freedom, to become the ally and
thrall of the body ^
The last of the innumerable analogies, or rather
identities, which I shall here notice is the indis-
solubility of union, when it has reached its final
stage. So long as love in the soul is only in the
initial state of light, or assent to and admiration
of what is most excellent, the light may be quenched
by other lights, less pure and bright, but nearer ;
when, again, the light descends into the will, this
may not be able to bear the strain of a love that
calls for continual fidelity of correspondence ; but
when it reaches the sensible affections and has
been crowned in mutual and ineffable compla-
cencies, there is no longer any practical danger of
separation. The Soul feels assured that, above
and apart from the great security she enjoys in
the fact that all temptation has been cut up at the
roots by her possession of a sensible and abiding
170 DIEU ET MA DAME
felicity which makes all others insipid, and which
enables her to say, with full sincerity, " Whom
have I in Heaven but Thee, and what on earth in
comparison with Thee," her Lord also has entered
into new relations with her, and she is relieved of
obligations, while He has assumed them. He
wants nothing of her now which she does not
delight to give ; whereas He has taken on Him
the marital duty of seeing that all temptation
which could endanger her is kept at a distance ;
He is bound to cherish and comfort, and behave,
not with justice, but with tender indulgence to His
own flesh ; and, in case of any occasional weakness
of obedience on her part, to show Himself the
loving Master that she loves Him to be, by
compelling her sensitive disinclination to such
external duties as may remain. He has now
made her " holy " or " separate " to Himself, and
" He will not suffer His Holy One to see cor-
ruption." His mercies are now " the sure mercies
of David," and though she acknowledges that there
is still a hypothetical possibility of divorce should
she fall, as it is practically incredible that she now
can, a possibility that causes her to " rejoice with
trembling," yet, 'on the whole, she is "sure that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principal-
ities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
DIEU ET MA DAME 171
creature," shall be able to separate her from her
Love.
This parallel appears to fail in one point ; I mean,
the extreme jealousy on the part of the Divine Lover
of the Soul, when once she has entered upon this
relationship to Him, and the entire absence of
jealousy on her part. Sleep and accidental and
external duty do not separate her from Him, but
the least waking thought, feeling, word, or act,
which has not Him, directly or indirectly, for its
object, does. When God makes Himself as wine
to the Beloved, like the fabled Bacchus, the one
thing He resents is inattention, and when she has
fallen into this offence, she has to recover her
favour with Him by tears and prayers. She, how-
ever, is not only content but delighted to think
that there are many whom He loves as well as or
better than He loves her. I attribute this fact to
her instinctive perception that her beauty is
unique ("there is none like her, none"), and that
no other can ever be to Him what she is, though
millions may be a great deal more. Moreover,
by virtue of the supernatural elevation of her
intellect in her intimacies with Him, she is enabled
to discern that He has the power of absolutely
forgetting all others when she is in His presence,
and that He is, at such times, wholly hers ; a
concrete fact which the philosophers express in
172 DIEU ET MA DAME
the abstract, when they affirm that " God is a
circle whose centre is everywhere and circumfer-
ence nowhere."
Perhaps but I am not sure, for I do not know
the mind of women or that of the Saints well
enough to judge the parallel also fails in this,
that, in the higher relationship, the soul is always
more or less troubled by the incredibility of so
much bliss and honour, and, in the presence of
the only reality of life, a reality as natural as it is
spiritual, she perpetually sighs
' ' Ah, me, I do not dream,
Yet all this does some heathen fable seem ! "
With these exceptioas, if exceptions they be,
there is, indeed, no vital characteristic of a
perfectly ordered love in the natural sphere,
which has not its likeness and full development
in the Divine ; nor can even the natural perfection
of love be attained, without habitual reference to
the spiritual. Wordsworth says :
" By grace divine,
Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine,"
and a man can only love a woman with full felicity
by understanding and obeying Christ's injunction
that he should love her as He loves the Church,
DIEU ET MA DAME 173
which every lover of God is in little, "The
woman for the man," " the man by the woman,"
and "God all in all" in both: for Milton's
rule,
" He for God only, she for God in him,"
is not a wholly adequate statement of the relation-
ship of man and woman, though it is as near a
statement as a Socinian could be expected to
arrive at. The woman is " homo " as well as the
man, though one element, the male, is suppressed
and quiescent in her, as the other, the female, is
in him ; and thus he becomes the Priest and
representative to her of the original Fatherhood,
while she is made to him the Priestess and repre-
sentative of that original Beauty which is "the
express image and glory of the Father." each
being equally, though not alike, a manifestation
of the Divine to the other.
Love, with this commentary on it written in the
hearts of lovers, becomes as much brighter, purer,
and more ardent than the love which is without
it as the electric light is brighter, purer, and more
ardent than a torch of tar ; and so far is it from
being true, as the foolish might imagine, that
something of the natural delight of love must be
lost in this its exaltation, that everything which is
truly in Nature's order gains immensely by the
I 7 4 DIEU ET MA
supernatural heat and light which illuminate and
purge the exceeding obscurity of the phenomena
of the uninformed natural passion.
Should any believing reader object that such
thoughts as I have suggested to him imply an
irreverent idea of the intimacies of God with His
elect, I beg him to remember that in receiving
the Blessed Sacrament with the faith which the
Church demands, he affirms and acts a familiarity
which is greater than any other that can be
conceived. 1
If any one perseveres in the path of perfection,
these points of likeness between Divine and human
love will become res cognita et visa; and he will
see that the phenomena of the human relationship
of love are such because they are the realities of
the Divine. For all properly human instincts are
no other than the lineaments of God ; and man
(homo) is an image and likeness of God, most
especially in those mysteries which let all remark
well are quite as inscrutable in their secondary,
or human, as in their primary manifestation,
" the surest foundation of marriage-love being," as
Hooker says, " that of which we are least able to
render a reason."
1 For more of these analogies the reader may consult
the verses called " De Natura Deorum," in the Unknown
Eros.
DIEU ET MA DAME 175
Let none who have as yet had no experience
of these things, though they may have been doing
their very best, despair. We must usually feed
for many years upon divine things before God
gives us the taste of our food ; and even when we
have done all, we may not find ourselves among
the blessed number of those who are called to the
Counsels of Perfection and the fruition of God in
this life.
THE END
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