■ U-l 'Wt ''''^«!/0JllV3-J0 < :inSANr,fl£r,. IL„. w„,. ALIFO/i>^ >. 5 --- r ^- cJj' wv ■•^ WORKS BY HENRY JAMES. THE SECRET OF SWEDENBORG, being an Eluci- dation of his Doctrine of the Divine-Natural Humanity. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1869. Price $2.50. SOCIETY THE REDEEMED FORM OF MAN AND EARNEST OF GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE IN HUMAN NATURE, affirmed in Letters to a Friend. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1879 Price $2.00. H.B.M9Lalliin Si THE LITERARY REMAINS OF THE LATE HENRY JAMES lEtjftEtf fet'tfj an intr0tiuctt0n By WILLIAM JAMES BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 0)t Ribet^ilie ptejiji Cambtibse Copyright, 1884, By William James. All rights reserved. B JXL7 CONTENTS. PAGE Introduction 7 Immortal Life: an Autobiographic Sketch . . . . 121 Preface 123 Autobiography 145 Chap. I. My earliest Recollections 145 II. Conflict between my Moral and my Spiritual Life 158 III. Same General Subject 178 Spiritual Creation 193 Chap. I. The Indigestible Newspaper 195 II. Our Sentiment of Otherness to God .... 207 III. Otherness to God unscientific 215 IV. Error of Modern Pharisaism 221 V. Nature a Hostile Element in Creation . . . 230 VI. Grandeur of Creative Name 239 VII. The Road we are travelling 254 VIII. A Conscience of Sin 264 IX. The Office of Miracle 275 X. Mr. Emerson . 293 XL Swedenborg and Science 303 XII. Science in Relation to the Intellect .... 329 XIII. Adam and Eve 346 XIV. Swedenborg and his Followers 368 XV. Incarnation 3S7 Some Personal Recollections of Carlyle 421 Bibliography 469 li8S?;27 INTRODUCTION. THE longer of the works that follow was left by its author almost finished, and, as far as it goes, in completed form, — the proofs having been corrected and the electrotype plates made, under his own direction, during the last year of his life. The autobiographic fragment dates from an earlier period. He had often been urged by members of his family to express his religious philosophy under the form of a personal evolution of opinion. But egotistic analysis was less to his taste than enunciation of objective results; so that, although he sat down to the autobiographic task a good many times, it was at long intervals ; and the work, "Society the Redeemed Form of Man," as well as the one now first published, were both written after the Autobiography was begun. The Stephen Dewhurst, whose confessions it is sup- posed to be, is an entirely fictitious personage. The few items of personal and geographic fact he gives have been rectified in foot-notes, so as to be 8 INTRODUCTION. true of Mr. James rather than of his imaginary mouthpiece. The fragments were set up in t}^pe as fast as written, and the proofs preserved and much revised. A good deal of manuscript has been interpolated. The editor has used some discretion in the printing of this, some passages being diffuse. Probably no one will read what is here printed without a deep regret that the work should not have extended over later years of the author's life. To atone for the loss, I have tried to weave into the quotations later to be made in this Introduction all the autobiographic passages and references that are found scattered through his other works. It is judged best to publish, for the present at any rate, none of the manuscript lectures or other fragments left by Mr. James. And of his contribu- tions to periodical literature, only one, the article on Carlyle, sees the light again in this volume. Exception was made in favor of that article, be- cause of its exceptional " popularity " at the time of its original publication. It has seemed to me not only a filial but a phi- losophic duty, in giving these posthumous pages to the world, to prefix to them some such account of their author's ideas as might awaken, in readers hitherto strangers to his writings, the desire to INTRODUCTION. 9 become acquainted with them. I wish a less un- worthy hand than mine were there to do the work. As it is, I must screen my own inadequacy under the language of the original, and let my father speak, as far as possible, for himself. It would indeed be foolish to seek to paraphrase anything once directly said by him. The matter would be sure to suffer; for, from the very outset of his iterary career, we find him in the effortless pos- session of that style with which the reader will soon become acquainted, and which, to its great dignity of cadence and full and homely vocabu- lary, united a sort of inward palpitating human quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scorn- ful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English masters, rather than that of an American of to-day. With all the richness of style, the ideas are sin- gularly unvaried and few. Probably few authors have so devoted their entire lives to the monoto- nous elaboration of one single bundle of truths. Whenever the eye falls upon one of Mr. James's pages, — whether it be a letter to a newspaper or to a friend, whether it be his earliest or his latest book, — we seem to find him saying again and again the same thing; telling us what the true relation is between mankind and its Creator. What he had to say on this point was the burden I o INTROD UCTIO.V. of his whole life, and its only burden. When he had said it once, he was disgusted with the insuffi- ciency of the formulation (he always hated the sight of his old books), and set himself to work to say it again. But he never analyzed his terms or his data beyond a certain point, and made very few fundamentally new discriminations; so the result of all these successive re-editings was rep- etition and amplification and enrichment, rather than reconstruction. The student of any one of his works knows, consequently, all that is essential in the rest. I must say, however, that the later formulations are philosophically, if not always rhetorically, the best. In " Society the Redeemed Form of Man," which was composed while the lingering effects of an apoplectic stroke had not passed away, there are passages unsurpassed in any former writing. And in the work herewith pub- lished, although most of it was written when my father's general mental powers were visibly altered by a decay of strength that ended with his death, I doubt if his earlier readers will discover any signs of intellectual decrepitude. His truths were his life ; they were the companions of his death- bed ; and when all else had ebbed away, his grasp of them was still vigorous and sure. As aforesaid, they were truths theological. This is anything but a theological age, as we all know ; INTRODUCTION. 1 1 and so far as it permits itself to be theological at all, it is growing more and more to 'distrust all systems that aim at abstract metaphysics in dogma, or pretend to rigor in their terms. The conven- tional and traditional acquiescence we find in the older dogmatic formularies is confined to those who are intellectually hardly vitalized enough either to apprehend or discuss a novel and rival creed ; whilst those of us who have intellectual vitality are either apt to be full of bias against theism in any form, or if we are theistic at all, it is in such a tentative and supplicating sort of way that the sight of a robust and dogmatizing theologian sends a shiver through our bones. A man like my fa- ther, lighting on such a time, is wholly out of his element and atmosphere, and is soon left stranded high and dry. His effectiveness as a missionary is null ; and it is wonderful if his voice, crying in the wilderness and getting no echo, do not soon die away for sheer discouragement. That my fa- ther should not have been discouraged, but should have remained serene and active to the last, is a proof both of the stoutness of his heart and of the consolations of his creed. How many un- known persons may have received help and sug- gestion from his writings it is impossible to say. Of out-and-out disciples he had very few who ever named themselves. Few as they were, his cor- 12 INTRODUCTION. ■respondence with them was perhaps his principal solace and recreation. I have often tried to imagine what sort of a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely theological age, with the best minds about him fermenting with the mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories and counter-theories, and strenuous rea- sonings and contentions, about God's relations to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, fur- thered by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by passionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have devel- oped his resources in many ways which, as it was, he never tried ; and he would have played a prom- inent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in the struggles of his time, for he was a religious pro- phet and genius, if ever prophet and genius there were. He published an intensely positive, radical, and fresh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our connection with him. And noth- ing shows better the altogether lifeless and unintel- lectual character of the professional theism of our time, than the fact that this view, this conception, so vigorously thrown down, should not have stirred the faintest tremulation on its stagnant pool. The centre of his whole view of things is this intense conception of God as a creator. Grant it, INTR OD UC TION. 1 3 accept it without criticism, and the rest follows. He nowhere attempts by metaphysical or empirical arguments to make the existence of God plausible ; he simply assumes it as something that must be confessed. As has been well said in a recent little work,i " Mr. James looks at creation instinctively from the creative side ; and this has a tendency to put him at a remove from his readers. The usual problem is, — given the creation, to find the crea- tor. To Mr. James it is, — given the creator, to find the creation. God is ; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are w^? " To sceptics of theism in any possible form, this fundamental postulate may naturally prove a bar- rier. But it is difficult to see why it should be an obstacle to professedly Christian students. They also confess God's existence ; and the way in which Mr. James took it ati grand sirieux, and the issues he read in it, ought, one would suppose, to speak to them with some accent of reality. Like any early Jewish prophet, like the Luther described in a recent work of genius,^ he went back so far and so deep as to find the religious sentiment in its purest and most unsophisticated form. He lived and breathed as one who knew he had not made 1 Philosophy of Henry James : A Digest. By J. A. Kellogg. New York, John W. Lovell Company, 1883. 2 J. Milsand : Luther at le Serf-Arbitre. Paris, Fischbacher, 1884. Passim. 1 4 INTRO D UC TION. himself, but was the work of a power that let him live from one moment to the next, and could do with him what it pleased. His intellect reacted on his sense of the presence of this power, so as to form a system of the most radical and self-consis- tent, as well as of the most simple, kind. I will es- say to give the reader a preliminary notion- of what its main elements and outlines were, and then try to build up a more adequate representation of it by means of quotations from the author's own pen. It had many and diverse affinities. It was opti- mistic in one sense, pessimistic in another. Pan- theistic, idealistic, hegelian, are epithets that very naturally arise on the reader's lips to describe it; and yet some part there is of the connotation of each of these epithets that made my father vio- lently refuse to submit to their imposition. The ordinary empirical ethics of evolutionary natural- ism can find a perfect /tot self-centred, that his life is not his own INTRODUCTION. 95 ** If the Church could have sincerely felt to be true what she always formally professed, — namely, that God was the sole real and active life of our nature, — she might perhaps have put herself at the head of human affairs, and victoriously led man's forlorn hope against the sullen and sodden personally, but belongs to him in strict community with his neigh- bor : thus that he and his neighbor are both alike dependent, at every moment, for every breath of life they draw, upon one and the same merciful and impartial source. In other words, a man loves his neighbor as himself only by virtue of his first loving God above himself, or supremely. And the only way this supreme love be- comes developed or educated in him, is through his moral experi- ence, or his obedience to law. Whenever, and so long as, man is tempted to commit false or malicious speaking, theft, adultery, murder, or covetousness, and yet abstains from doing it out of a sincere inward regard for the Divine name, his self-love, so far as it is harmful, is spiritually slain, and the Divine love infallibly replaces it. These formal vices express the whole substantial evil known to the human heart ; and when man, therefore, in the exercise of a felt freedom and rationality, deposes them or any of them from their habitual control over his action, — not because they conflict with his outward welfare, or expose him to the contempt of men, but simply because they wound his inward reverence for the Divine name, — he becomes spiritually regen- erate or new-born. Falsehood, theft, adulterv, murder, and covetousness are, in other words, only signs or symbols of a deeper and altogether latent spiritual evil fatally separating man from God, — the evil of a supreme self-love. Grave as these evils unquestionably are in themselves, or absolutely, they have yet only a superficial moral quality; that is, grow out of men's still unreconciled or inharmonic relations inter se, or their frank insubjection to the social sentiment, and do not by any means necessarily imply any permanent spiritual or individual estrangement between them and God." — Society the Redeemed Form of Man, pp. 268-270. 96 INTRODUCTION. Deity that everywhere affects of right to bestride the world. " The sincere, uncommitted mass of men are spiritually and intellectually incompetent to recog- nize any * slough of despond ' half so fatal or frightful to them as that of deism, which is the conception of God as a power essentially outside of man, and therefore both inimical and hateful to him. Deism is out and out the only doctrine that has power logically to fill the human heart with despair towards God, /;/ making ina^i s person a reality. But this vile deistic doctrine is the very most cherished doctrine of the Church itself, with- out which indeed to inspire it, it would be ready to confess itself a mere lunatic organization, with- out further business upon the earth. And there is no chance, consequently, of the Church's again leading the human mind, in ministering to men's higher interests, unless she at once renounces the very doctrine by which she lives, and returns ex animo to the early faith which was once literally her only possession, — namely, that God, the only true God, the only God worthy to inspire the devotion of the human heart, is not any God of the nations, or foreign supernatural, deity at all, but is all simply the Lord ; that is, QioA-man figura- tively made known to us in the Christ, — thus a most domestic deity, partaker of our own nature introduction: 97 to the very brim, making the very grave a farce by virtue of it, essential source and purveyor in fact of this nature, and constant spiritual redeemer of it from the defilement and limitation imposed upon it by our own most absurd and dishonest personality. " But it is idle, and worse than idle, to expect any revival of the Church, The Bible would have to be written over again, before that stale mother of harlots could ever presume again to put on the dew of her infancy, and aspire to head human hope in its patient, ever enduring battle against deistic oppression and tyranny. The Church is absolutely identified with the deistic name and fame throughout history, so that no honest human cause, nor any sincere zeal for humanity, has ever been ecclesiastically born or ecclesiastically pro- pagated. The visible Church is altogether dead in fact, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every- thing. Unknown to, and even unfelt by, itself con- sequently, it has providentially been replaced by a new and subtler, because living or invisible, Church, which will neither itself be, nor of itself breed, any hindrance to human hope and aspiration." ^ The treacherous part played by " professional religion " is thus described : — 1 The New Church Independent, August, l88i, pp. 373, 374. 7 5>8 INTRODUCTION. " The only danger to the spirit of religion comes from the effort of the soul to assume and cherish a devout i"^/y"-consciousness ; or so to abound in a religious sense, as to incur the imputation of religi- osity or superstition. This is the inalienable vice of professional religion, the only sincere fruit it is capable of bringing forth. The evil spirit which religion is primarily intended to exorcise in us is the spirit of selfhood, based upon a most inade- quate apprehension of its strictly provisional uses to our spiritual nurture. The gradual conquest or slaying of this unholy spirit of self in man is the sole function which religion proposes to itself dur- ing his natural life ; and without taxing our co- operation too severely, it yet gives us enough to do before its benignant mission is fully wrought out. Such being the invariable office of the religious instinct, professional religion steps in to simulate its sway ; and with an air all the while of even cant- ing deference, proceeds to build again the things which were destroyed, by reorganizing man's self- hood on a more specious or consecrated basis, and so authenticating all its unslain lusts in a way of devotion to the conventicle, at least, if not to the open, undisguised world. " Professional religion thus stamps itself the devil's subtlest device for keeping the human soul in bondage. Religion says death — inward or spir- INTR OD UC TION. 99 itual death — to the selfliood in man. Professional religion says : ' Nay, not death, above all not in- ward or spiritual — because this would be living — death, and obviously the selfhood must live in order to be vivified of God. By no means, there- fore, let us say an inward or living death to self- hood, but an outward or quasi death, professionally or ritnally enacted, and so operating a change of base for the selfhood. Selfhood doubtless has been hitherto based upon a most unrighteous enmity on the part of the world to God, and has of itself shared the enmity. Let man then only acknowledge, professionally or ritually, this wicked enmity of the world to God, and he may keep his selfhood unimpaired and unchallenged, to expand and flourish in secula secnloj'iim.' " Professional religion, I repeat, is the devil's mas- terpiece for ensnaring silly, selfish men. The ugly beast has two heads : one called Ritualism, intended to devour a finer and fastidious style of men, — men of sentiment and decorum, cherishing scrupulously moderate views of the difference between man and God ; the other called Revivalism, with a great red mouth intended to gobble up a coarser sort of men, — men for the most part of a fierce carnality, of ungovernable appetite and passion, susceptible at best only of the most selfish hopes and the most selfish fears towards God. I must say, we lOO INTRODUCTIONS are not greatly devastated here in Boston — though occasionally vexed — by either head of the beast ; on the contrary, it is amusing enough to observe how afraid the great beast himself is of being pecked to pieces on our streets by a little indige- nous bantam-cock which calls itself Radicalism, and which struts and crows and scratches gravel in a manner so bumptious and peremptory, that I defy any ordinary barnyard chanticleer to imi- tate it." 1 Even the possession of the Bible has been una- vailing to us, since its official interpreters have reversed its spiritual sense : — ** The letter of Revelation has doubtless proved inestimably advantageous to our civilization ; but the most orderly citizenship is as remote from spon- taneous or spiritual manhood as baked apples are from ripe ones. Compared with heathen nations, we are indeed as baked apples to green ; but I do not see that apples plucked green from the tree and assiduously cooked, as we have been, are near so likely to ripen in the long run as those which are still left hanging upon the boughs, exposed to God's unstinted sun and air. We manage to main- tain our egregious self-complacency unperturbed, by vehemently compassionating the heathen, and 1 Society the Redeemed Form of Man, p. 42. INTRODUCTION. I o I sending out missionaries to convert them to our foolish ecclesiastical habits, — precisely as if a baked apple should grudge its fellows their natural ripening, and beg them also to come and sputter their indignant life away under the burning summer of the oven, under the blackening autumn of the bake-pan. In fact, the heathen, I suspect, find it difficult to regard us yet even as baked fruit. Our ungenerous overbearing and polluting intercourse with them fits them rather to regard us only as very rotten fruit. Whether baked or rotten, how- ever, we are in either case, so far as our ecclesias- tical and political manners are concerned, past the chance of any inward or spiritual ripening. So far as our ecclesiastical conscience is concerned espe- cially, there does not seem one drop of honest native unsophisticated juice left in us. If there were, could we be so content year in and year out to see our clergy, heterodox and orthodox, alternately cuff and clout God's sacred word, — which is inwardly all alive and leaping with spiritual or universal meaning, — as if it were some puny brat of man's begetting, some sickly old-wives' tale, some vapid and senile tradition, destitute even of a fabulous grace and tenderness ? " ^ As one of the appendices to " Substance and Shadow," Mr. James gives us an apologue and its ^ Substance and Shadow, p. 503. 102 INTRODUCTION. moral, — both of them too good sense and too. good Hterature not to be copied here : — " I knew a gentleman some years ago of exem- plary religiosity and politeness, but of a seasoned inward duplicity, who failed in business, as was supposed, fraudulently. He was in the habit of meeting one of the largest of his creditors every Sunday on his way to church, where his own voice was always among the most melodious to confess any amount of abstract sins and iniquities; and he never failed to raise his hat from his head as he passed, and testify by every demonstrative flourish how much he would still do for the bare forms of friendship, when its life or substance was fled. The creditor was long impatient, but at last grew frantic under this remorseless courtesy, and stop- ping his debtor one day, told him that he would cheerfully abandon to him the ten thousand dollars he had robbed him of, provided he would forego the exhibition of so much nauseous politeness. ' Sir,' replied the imperturbable scamp, ' I would not forego the expression of my duty to you, when we meet, for twice ten thousand dollars ! ' This is very much our case religiously; whereas, if we would only give over our eternal grimacing and posturing, only leave off our affable but odious ducking and bowing to our great creditor, long enough to see, INTR on UC TION. 1 03 the real truth of the case, and frankly acknowledge bankruptcy utter and fraudulent, nothing could be so hopeful. The supreme powers are infinitely above reckoning with us for our shortcomings, if we would only have the manliness to confess spir- itual insolvency, and not seek any longer to hide it from their eyes and our own under these trans- parent monkey-shines of a mock devotion, under this perpetual promise to pay which never comes to maturity, but gets renewed from Sunday to Sun- day in seada secidoriirn. God does not need our labored civility, and must long ere this have sick- ened of our vapid doffing of the hat to him as we pass. He seeks our solid advantage, not our ridi- culous patronage. He desires our living, not our professional, humility ; and he desires it only for our sakes, not his own. He would fashion us into the similitude of his perfect love, only that we might enjoy the unspeakable delights of his sympathetic fellowship. If he once saw us to be thus spontaneously disposed towards him, thus genuinely quahfied for the immortal participation of his power and blessedness, he would I am sure be more than content never to get a genuflexion from us again while the world lasted, nor hear another of our dreary litanies while sheep bleat and calves bellow, "i • Substance and Shadow, p. 520. 104 INTRODUCTION. On the principle of corniptio optimonim pessima, it was natural that if the churches in general should in Mr. James's eyes have sold themselves to the devil, the arch-sinners in this respect should be the Swedenborgian congregations, who, if any, might be expected to know better. He accord- ingly never fails to lash them with his heartiest invective, — with what degree of justice or injus- tice, it is beyond my power to say. In the larger work in the present volume they have a chapter devoted to themselves. And here is a shorter extract, which will show the writer in his best denunciatory vein : — " The Swedenborgian sect assumes to be the New Jerusalem, which is the figurative name used in the Apocalypse to denote God's perfected spiritual work in human nature ; and under this tremendous designation it is content to employ itself in doing — what? why, in pouring new wine into old bot- tles, with such a preternatural solicitude for the tenacity of the bottles as necessitates an altogether comical indifference to the quality of the wine. New wine cannot safely go into old bottles but upon one condition, which is that the wine had previously become swipes, or was originally very small beer. In fact, the Swedenborgian sect, viewed as to its essential aims, though of course not as to introduction: 105 its professed ones, is only on the part of its movers a strike for higher wages, — that is, for higher eccle- siastical consideration than the older sects enjoy at the popular hands. And like all strikes, it will probably succumb at last to the immense stores of fat (or popular respect) traditionally accumu- lated under the ribs of the old organizations, and enabling them to hybernate through any stress of cold weather merely by sucking their thumbs, or without assimilating any new material. No doubt the insurgents impoverish the older sects to the extent of their own bulk; but they do not sub- stantially affect them in popular regard, because the people, as a rule, care little for truth, but much for the good that animates it ; very little for dog- mas, but very much for that undeniably human substance which underlies all dogmas, and makes them savory, whether technically sound or un- sound. And here the new sect is at a striking disadvantage with all its more ancient competitors ; for these are getting ashamed of their old narrow- ness, and are gradually expanding into some show of sympathy with human want. The sect of the soi-disant New Jerusalem, on the other hand, deliberately empties itself of all interest in the hallowed struggle which society is everywhere making for her very existence against established injustice and sanctified imposture, in order to con- 1 06 INTR OD UC TION. centrate its energy and prudence upon the washing and dressing, upon the larding and stuffing, upon the embalming and perfuming, of its own invinci- bly squalid little corpus. This Pharisaic spirit, the spirit of separatism or sect, is the identical spirit of hell ; and to attempt compassing any consideration for oneself at the Divine hands by making oneself to differ from other people, or claiming a higher di- vine sanctity than they enjoy, is to encounter the only sure damnation. . . . Let the reader, what- ever else he may fairly or foolishly conclude against Swedenborg, acquit him point-blank of countenan- cing this abject ecclesiastical drivel." ^ Thus did the sentiment of God's impartial in- dwelling in all humanity harden Mr. James's heart against all places where the " foolish babble of individual moralism " is preached, and make him unforgiving to whatever bore the name of Church. In setting forth his philosophy up to this point, I have made no reference to Christianity at all. Yet a Christian he was, and a most devout one, after his own fashion, — an abject Christian, as a clergyman in Boston called him at the time of his death. I confess, though, that I am myself unable to see any radical and essential necessity for the mission of Christ in his scheme of the ' Secret of Swedenborg, p. 209. INTRODUCTION. 10/ universe. A " fall " there is, and a redemption ; but with his view of the solidarity of man, we are all redeemers of the total order so far as we open ourselves each in his little measure to the spirit of God. Our state reverberates through the whole spiritual world, and helps the construction of that " society " which is the race's redeemed form. All the accounts he gives of Christ do but represent him in this function, in which in lesser degree all may share. I cannot help thinking that if my father had been born outside the pale of Christendom, he might perfectly well have brought together all the other elements of his system, much as it stands now, yet laid comparatively little stress on Christ. Still, the point is an obscure one, and I will let the author speak for himself. He speaks of Christ in a great many places, — always with the following tenor : — " To suppose that the universal Father of man- kind cared for the Jew one jot more than for the Gentile, and that he cared for one Jew also more than for another, actually intending to give both the former and the latter an endless earthly dominion, was manifestly to blacken the Divine character, and pervert it to the inflammation of every diabolic am- bition. And yet this was that literal form of the Jewish hope to which Christ was born. The inno- I08 INTRODUCTION. cent babe opened his eyes upon mother and father, brother and sister, neighbor and friend, ruler and priest, stupidly agape at the marvels which her- alded his birth ; ^ and no doubt, as his inteUigence 1 A word about Mr. James's attitude towards Biblical criticism is here not out of place. With the education he had, and with the tenacity of his feelings, it was quite impossible he should ever have ceased to regard the Scriptures as inspired books. And yet the atmosphere of Aiifkldning in which he lived forbade him to keep unaltered that simple mode of regarding these wri- tings which had satisfied his youth. He finally drifted into a state of mind on the subject which was neither credulous nor ration- alistic, and not easy for another person to defend. There is a chapter ad hoc in the work to which this is an introduction ; and this quotation will meanwhile stop the gap : — " I confess for my part that I should as soon think of spitting upon my mother's grave, or offering any other offence to her stain- less memory, as of questioning any of the Gospel facts. And this, not because I regard them as literally or absolutely true, — for the whole realm of fact is as far beneath that of truth as earth is be- neath heaven, — but simply because they furnish the indispensable WORD, or master-key, to our interpretation of God's majestic revelation of himself in human nature. When, accordingly, I am asked whether I believe in the literal facts of Christ's birth from a virgin, his resurrection from death, his ascension into heaven, and so forth, I feel constrained to reply that I neither believe in them nor disbelieve, because the sphere of fact is the sphere of men's knowledge exclusively, and therefore invites neither belief nor disbelief; but that I have a most profound, even a heartfelt conviction of the truth which they, and they alone, re- veal, — namely, the truth of God's essentially hutnan perfection, and, as implied in that, the amazing truth of His natural or adventitious manhood; which conviction keeps me blessedly indifferent to, and utterly unvexed by, the cheap and frivolous scepticism with which so many of our learned modern pundits assail them. I have not the least reverence nor even respect for the facts in question, INTRODUCTION. IO9 dawned, he lent a naturally complacent ear to the promises of personal advancement and glory they showered upon him. He sucked in the subtlest spiritual poison with every swallow of his mother's milk; and his very religion bound him, so far as human probabilities went, to become an unmiti- gated devil. I find no trace of any man in history being subject to the temptations that beset this truest of men. I find no trace of any other man who felt himself called upon by the tenderest human love to loathe and disavow the proud and yearning bosom that bore him. I find no other man in history whose profound reverence for infi- nite goodness and truth drove him to renounce the religion of his fathers, simply because that religion contemplated as its issue his own supreme aggran- dizement; and whose profound love to man drove him to renounce every obligation of patriotism, simply because these obligations were plainly co- incident with the supremest and subtlest inspira- tions of his own self-love. No doubt many a man has renounced his traditional creed because it as- sociated him with the obloquy and contempt of his nation, or stood in the way of his personal save as basing or ultimating this grand creative or spiritual truth ; and while the truth stands to my apprehension, I shall be serenely obdurate to the learned reasonings of any of my contemporaries in regard to the facts, whether pro or con." — Society the Redeetned Form of Man, p. 293. IIO INTRODUCTION. ambition ; and so no doubt many a man has ab- jured his country, because it disclaimed his title and ability to rule. In short, a thousand men can be found every day who do both of these things from the instinct of self-love. But the eternal peculiarity of the Christian fact is, that Christ did them utterly without the aid of that tremendous lever, actually while it was undermining his force, and subjecting him to ceaseless death. He dis- credited his paternal gods simply because they were bent upon doing him unlimited honor; and shrank from kindred and countrymen, only because they were intent upon rendering him unparalleled gratitude and benediction. What a mere obscenity every great name in history confesses itself beside this spotless Judean youth, who in the thickest night of time, — unhelped by priest or ruler, by friend or neighbor, by father or mother, by brother or sister; helped, in fact, if we may so consider it, only by the dim expectant sympathy of that hun- gry rabble of harlots and outcasts who furnished his inglorious retinue, and still further drew upon him the ferocious scorn of all that was devout and honorable and powerful in his nation, — yet let in eternal daylight upon the soul, by steadfastly ex- panding in his private spirit to the dimensions of universal humanity, so bringing, for the first time in history, the finite human bosom into perfect INTRODUCTION. I 1 1 experimental accord with the infinite Divine love. For my part, I am free to declare that I find the conception of any Divinity superior to this radiant human form inexpressibly treasonable to my own manhood. In fact, I do not hesitate to say that I find the orthodox and popular conception of Deity to be in the comparison a mere odious stench in the nostrils, against which I here indite my exuber- ant and eternal protest. I shall always cherish the most hearty and cheerful atheism towards every deity but him who has illustrated my own nature with such resplendent power as to make me feel that Man henceforth is the only name of honor, and that any God out of the strictest human pro- portions, any God with essentially disproportionate aims and ends to man, is an unmixed superfluity and nuisance." ^ 1 Christianity the Logic of Creation, p. 217. The Angel, Mr. James says in another place, could not do the work Christ did, — the work of reconciling man's self-love with God's pure love, — " because his entire vitality proceeds not upon the reconciliation of self-love with higher loves, but upon its forcible expulsion, and even, if that were possible, its extinction. But in the bosom of Jesus, exposed through the letter of his national hope to the boundless influx of every selfish lust, and yet persistently subju- gating such lust to the inspirations of universal love, the requisite basis of union was at last found ; and infinite Wisdom compassed at length a direct and adequate access to the most finite of intelli- gences. ... In his sublime and steadfast soul, I say, the mar- riage of the Divine and Human was at last perfectly consummated ; so that thenceforth the infinite and eternal expansion of our nature 112 INTRODUCTION. The reader ought now to be able to judge for himself whether the works of Henry James deserve further study on his part. For myself, nothing could be so agreeable as to believe that this un- pretending introduction might lead a larger public to open the writings of which it treats. Although their author, as will have been noted, gives such ample credit to Swedenborg as the source of his opinions, I have all along spoken of him as an ori- ginal thinker, whose philosophy was underived. Many disciples of Swedenborg, wielding high au- thority, say there is no warrant in the master's pages for Mr. James's views. It is certain, to say the very least, that Mr. James has given to the various ele- ments in Swedenborg's teaching an extremely dif- ferent accentuation and perspective relation to each other, from anything other readers have been able to find. In Swedenborg, as in other writers, much must count for slag, and the question " what is tecame not merely possible, but most strictly inevitable. Accor- dingly, ever since that period, husband and father, lover and friend, patriot and citizen, priest and king, have been gradually assuming more human dimensions, have been gradually putting on glorified lineaments ; or, what is the same thing, the univer- sal heart of man has been learning to despise and disown all absolute sanctities, — not merely our threadbare human sanctities, sacerdotal and regal, conjugal and paternal, but also every the most renowned Divine sanctity itself, whose bosom is not the abode of the widest, tenderest, most patient and unswerving hu- man love." — Christianity the Logic oj Creation, p. 200. INTRODUCTION. II3 the real Swedenborg," will naturally be solved by- different students in different ways. Such being the case, and I being personally entitled to no opinion, I have thought it best to ignore the name of Swedenborg altogether in the previous pages; not meaning by this to prejudge the question, or attribute to my father an originality he would have disclaimed, but wishing merely to keep the expo- sition as short and uncomplicated as I could. A word of comment after so much exposition may not be out of place. Common-sense theism, the popular religion of our European race, has, through all its apparent variations, remained es- sentially faithful to pluralism, one might almost say to polytheism. Neither Judaism nor Chris- tianity could tend to alter this result, or make us generally see the world in any other light than as a collection of beings which, however they might have arisen, are now severally and substan- tively there, and the important thing about whom is their practical relations with each other. God, the Devil, Christ, the Saints, and we, are some of these beings. Whatever monistic and pantheistic metaphysics may have crept into the history of Christianity has been confined to epochs, sects, and individuals. For the great mass of men, the practical fact of pluralism has been a sufficient 8 114 INTRODUCTION. basis for the religious life, and the ultra-phe- nomenal unity has been nothing more than a lip- formula. And naive as in the eyes of metaphysics such a view may seem, finite and short of vision and lacking dignity from the intellectual point of view, no philosopher, however subtle, can afford to treat it with disdain ; unless, perhaps, he be ready to say that the spirit of Europe is all wrong, and that of Asia right. God, treated as a principle among others, — prinms hiter pares, — has warmth and blood and personality; is a concrete being whom it does not take a scholar to love and make sacrifi- ces and die for, as history shows. Being almost like a personage in a drama, the lightning of dramatic interest can play from him and about him, and rivet human regard. The " One and Only Being," however, the Uni- versal Substance, the Soul and Spirit of Things, the First Principle of monistic metaphysics, call it by names as theological and reverential as we will, always seems, it must be confessed, a pale, ab- stract, and impersonal conception compared with that of the eternal living God, worshipped by the incalculable majority of our race. Such a monis- tic principle never can be worshipped by a majority of our race until the race's mental constitution chanjie. INTR OD UCTION. 1 1 5 Now, the great peculiarity of Mr. James's con- ception of God is, that it is monistic enough to satisfy the philosopher, and yet warm and living and dramatic enough to speak to the heart of the common pluralistic man. This double character seems to make of this conception an entirely fresh and original contribution to religious thought. I call it monistic enough to satisfy the metaphysi- cian, for although Mr. James's system is anything but a bald monism, yet it makes of God the one and only active principle ; and that is practically all that monism demands. Our experience makes us, it is true, acquainted with an other of God, in our own selfhood ; but for Mr. James, that other, that selfhood, has no positive existence, being really naught, a provisional phantom-soul breathed by God's love into mere logical negation. And that a monism, thus mitigated, can speak to the common heart, a perusal of those pages in which Mr. James portrays creation on God's part as an infinite passion of self-surrender to his opposite, will convince any reader. Anthropomorphism and metaphysics seem for the first time in these pages to go harmoniously hand in hand. The same sun that lights up the frozen summits of abstraction, lights up life's teeming plain, — and no chasm, but an open highway lies between. The extraordinary power and richness of this Il6 INTRODUCTION. conception of the Deity ought, one would say, to make Mr. James's writings indispensable to students of religious thought. Within their com- pass, each old element receives a fresh expression, each old issue a startling turn. It is hard to be- lieve, that, when they are better known, they will not come to be counted among the few truly original theological works which our language owns. So that even those who think that no theo- logical thought can be coticlusive w\\\, for this rea- son, perhaps, not refuse to them a lasting place in literature. Their most serious enemy will be the philoso- phic pluralist. The naif practical pluralism of popular religion ought, as I have said, to have no quarrel with the monism they teach. There is however a pluralism hardened by reflection, and deliberate ; a pluralism which, in face of the old mystery of the One and the Many, has vainly sought peace in identification, and ended by tak- ing sides against the One. It seems to me that the deepest of all philosophic differences is that between this pluralism and all forms of monism whatever. Apart from analytic and intellectual arguments, pluralism is a view to which we all practically incline when in the full and successful exercise of our moral energy. The life we then feel tingling through us vouches sufficiently for INTRODUCTION. II7 itself, and nothing tempts us to refer it to a higher source. Being, as we are, ja match for whatever evils actually confront us, we rather prefer to think of them as endowed with reality, and as being absolutely alien, but, we hope, subjugable powers. Of the day of our possible impotency we take no thought; and we care not to make such a synthesis of our weakness and our strength, and of the good and evil fortunes of the world, as will reduce them all to fractions, with a common denominator, of some less fluctuating Unity, enclosing some less partial and more certain form of Good. The feel- ing of action, in short, makes us turn a deaf ear to the thought of being ; and this deafness and insen- sibility may be said to form an integral part of what in popular phrase is known as " healthy- mindedness." Any absolute moralism must needs be such a healthy- minded pluralism; and in a pluralistic philosophy the healthy-minded moral- ist will always feel himself at home. But healthy-mindedness is not the whole of life ; and the morbid view, as one by contrast may call it, asks for a philosophy very different from that of absolute moralism. To suggest personal will and effort to one " all sicklied o'er " with the sense of weakness, of helpless failure, and of fear, is to suggest the most horrible of things to him. What he craves is to be consoled in his very im- Il8 INTRODUCTION. potence, to feel that the Powers of the Universe recognize and secure him, all passive and failing as he is. Well, we are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our mo- rality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that v^&W-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas ! are not. This well- being is the object of the religious demand, — a demand so penetrating and unassuageable that no consciousness of such occasional and outward well-doing as befalls the human lot can ever give it satisfaction. On the other hand, to satisfy the religious demand is to deny the demands of the moralist. The latter wishes to feel the empirical goods and evils, on the recognition of which his activity proceeds, to be real goods and evils, with their distinction absolutely preserved. So that of religion and moralism, the morbid and the healthy view, it may be said that what is meat to the one is the other's poison. Any absolute moralism is a pluralism; any absolute religion is a monism. It shows the depth of Mr. James's religious insight that he first and last and always made moralism the target of his hottest attack, and pitted religion INTRODUCTION. 1 19 and it against each other as enemies, of whom one must die utterly, if the other is to Hve in genuine form. The accord of moraUsm and rehgion is superficial, their discord radical. Only the deep- est thinkers on both sides see that one must go. Popular opinion gets over the difficulty by com- promise and contradiction, and the shifting, ac- cording to its convenience, of its point of view. Such inconsistency cannot be called a solution of the matter, though it practically seems to work with most men well enough. Must not the more radical ways of thinking, after all, appeal to the same umpire of practice for corroboration of their more consistent views? Is the religious tendency or the moralistic tendency on the whole the most serviceable to man's life, taking the latter in the largest way? By their fruits ye shall know them. Solvitur ambulando ; for the decision we must per- haps await the day of judgment. Meanwhile, the battle is about us, and we are its combatants, stead- fast or vacillating, as the case may be. It will be a hot fight indeed if the friends of philosophic moralism should bring to the service of their ideal, so different from that of my father, a spirit even remotely resembling the life-long devotion of his faithful heart. W. J. immortal Life: ILLUSTRATED IN A BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCH OF THE LATE STEPHEN DEWHURST. EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, By henry JAMES. PREFACE. It is now a goodly number of years since I was a student of the Theological Seminary at , and there made the acquaintance of the author of the following Memoir. We belonged to the same class, lodged in the same house, had chanced to inherit some family friendships in common, were of similar intellectual tastes, and above all suffered, as we thought, both alike an ardent thirst of Divine truth. Here obviously were sufficient grounds for a close intimacy during our Seminary course ; and I may accordingly say, that, save in vacations, scarcely a day passed over our heads without a friendly en- counter and comparison of ideas and observations. Not only, as I have said, were we both of us su- premely interested as we conceived in the pursuit of truth, but we were also both of us somewhat dis- affected both by temperament and culture to ritual or ceremonial views of it. And this circumstance could hardly fail, in an atmosphere so unpropitious to men's unascetic or spiritual aspirations as that of the Seminary naturally was, to throw us upon each 124 PREFACE. Other's support and countenance, and lead us in- deed sedulously to cultivate each other's sym- pathetic regard. It costs me nothing to admit that my friend, both intellectually and morally, was of a more ro- bust make than me. Indeed, he contrasted sig- nally with the entire mass of student life in the Seminary, by the almost total destitution which his religious character exhibited of the dramatic ele- ment, — that element of unconscious hypocrisy which Christ stigmatized in the religious zealots of his day, and which indeed seems to be inseparable from the religious profession. The ordinary theo- logical student, especially, has a fatal professional conscience from the start, which vitiates his intellec- tual integrity. He is personally mortgaged to an institution — that of the pulpit — which is reputed sacred, and is all the more potent in its influence upon his natural freedom on that account ; so that even the free sphere of his manners is almost sure to lose whatever frank spontaneous flavor it may by inheritance once have had, and become simply servile to convention. My friend was an exception to the rule. His reverence for the Divine name was so tender and hallowed as to render him to a very great extent indifferent to the distinction so loudly emphasized throughout the Seminary between the church and the world. I was led very early in our PREFACE. 125 intercourse to observe, that, however justly sensi- tive his intellect was to every consideration grow- ing out of the distinction between good and evil in men's actual conduct, he was yet practically in- sensible to the pretension of a distinctively moral righteousness in them as the ground of their reli- gious hope. The disproportion between finite and infinite seemed in fact so overwhelming to his imagination, as to make it impossible to him to deem any man in himself vitally nearer to God than any other man. I had been at first somewhat astonished, not to say disconcerted, by this cosmopolitan ease and afifability on the part of my friend in all the range of his religious conscience ; but they grew erelong extremely soothing and educative to me. I had been so impoverished intellectually upon the ordi- nary diet of the churches, made up of the most lit- eral and abject husks of Christian doctrine, that I had as yet almost no suspicion of the spiritual or interior contents of Revelation, and was in fact as far as any heathen could well be from recogniz- ing the truth of God's NATURAL HUMANITY, or identifying the honor of his name with the rever- ence of universal man. To be sure, the Christian letter set God before me first as a crucified and then as a glorified natural man ; and in so doing spiritually affirmed him to be a working force of 126 PREFACE. infinite love, wisdom, and power within the very narrowest precincts of the human form. But who is ever intellectually encouraged or even allowed by the Church to universalize the Christian truth, and invest it with strictly humanitary dimensions? Thus Christ had always been as much of an idol to my imagination under the Church's tuition, as if he had been literally hewn out of stone ; and at my best I was a mere deist under the profession of the Christian name, as liable accordingly as any mere deist to the most sensuous imaginations and reason- ings about Divine things. In short, I had not the remotest glimmer of an apprehension as yet that God's providence in the earth was a strictly crea- tive one, but on the contrary supposed that phase of its operation to have been exhausted long ages ago, and to have given place to one essentially critical or discriminative, as ordaining certain per- sons to honor and others to dishonor. Familiar intercourse with my friend gradually enlarged the horizon of my faith also, and per- manently freed me from this narrow and sensuous way of looking at religious truth. I am liable, I know, to exaggerate the impression his intellect then made upon me, and to give my early reminis- cences a hue borrowed from a later day of knowl- edge. I shall be guarded therefore in what I say, and put down nothing which I am sure was not PREFACE. 127 either overtly expressed or perfectly implied in all our intercourse. I am very sure, for example, that what first piqued my scientific curiosity about him was the difficulty I had to discover, as I have already said, where his secular consciousness left off and his religious consciousness began. All his discourse betrayed such an unconscious, or at all events unaffected, habit of spiritualizing secular things and secularizing sacred things, that I was erelong forced to conclude that for his needs at all events the outward or figurative antagonism of " the church " and " the world " had more than fulfilled its intellectual uses, whatever these may have been ; and that any attempt on the part of the Church to perpetuate and especially to exag- gerate such antagonism would infallibly expose it to permanent divine ignominy. The orbit of the divine administration had been so aggrandized to my friend's intelligence by his perceiving its ends to be primarily universal and only derivatively particular, that he seemed indeed a man in whom our crude traditional faith had become to an in- definite extent refined into spiritual perception. This, indeed, was the source of the potent charm which he exerted upon my imagination, — namely, that all his words were inwardly or livingly au- thenticated, and so bore the manifest impress of the Holy Ghost. I suppose — indeed, I very well 128 PREFACE. know — that to many others at the same time his spirit appeared very z^wholy; but I could not long doubt for my part that his soul had been touched by a fire more sacred than was ever kindled upon a mundane altar. It is hardly necessary to say, after what has gone before, that my friend was little addicted to routine. He seldom took his seat at table, I recol- lect, before grace had been said, and he commonly rose from his meals before the rest of us, as if to avoid its gratuitous repetition. He had no tech- nically religious conversation, never initiating nor indeed encouraging any discourse voluntarily at- tuned to the divine honor ; yet he never let fall a word which was not instinct with the love of God and an unfeigned reverence of mankind. I have never known a person whose affection and thought were more unselfish than his, or more largely mo- tived upon purely objective considerations. I have often reflected with astonishment since, that one so young should have been so thoroughly vastated in the providence of God of our ordinarily rank and florid pride of moralism. Our classmates were unaffectedly bewildered by this peculiarity, as affording so little purchase either to their per- sonal approbation or their personal reprobation of its subject. I did not know how exactly to charac- terize the peculiarity at the time ; but I see now, PREFACE. 129 looking back, that what distinguished him from us all was his social quality, — the frank, cordial rec- ognition he always evinced of that vital fellowship or equality between man universal and man indi- vidual which is the spiritual fulfilment or glorifi- cation of conscience, and ends by compelling angel and devil into its equal subservience. I do not know that my friend was at this time so self-possessed intellectually, as I am fain here to picture him. I do not know that the creative infinitude had at this period stamped itself upon his intellect with such commanding evidence as to invest the entire moral history of mankind with a purely educative or representative worth, and turn great heaven and hell themselves into a mere pro- visional or symbolic stay, as it were, of that awful and unrecognized truth. But I have been in the habit of recalling so many things he used to say, which seem to my imagination flushed with an in- ward or living sense of the creative presence in Nature, that I can hardly help ascribing to him, even at this early date, a conscious intellection of the truth of God's natural humanity. I think it very probable, however, that I do put a breadth and depth of intellectual significance into these re- membered facts greater than they bore at the time even to his own mind ; and I throw myself upon the reader's indulgence accordingly, assuring him 9 130 PREFACE. that if it be so, I am anticipating my friend's spir- itual growth by a very few months in any case, so rapid was its progress. I remember the fright he once gave a somewhat starched and complacent " brother," by disavowing anything which might be called anxiety about his own proper destiny at the Divine hands. "No such question," he said, " any longer occupies me, as whether I specifically am to be damned or saved; for I am convinced of a breadth in the Divine administration more than equal to either emergency; that is, amply sufficient to keep me from undue depression in the former contingency, and from undue elation in the latter. In fact, the only question to my heart and mind is that of the race's salvation, for this is the only question identified with the truth of the Divine name, as that name is revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The controversy between Jesus and his nation was, whether the Divine love was veritably infinite or finite ; whether it embraced all mankind, or restricted itself to the blessing of a particular people ; whether its aims, in short, were broadly secular or strictly religious. At least I so appre- hend the controversy, and I confess it would pos- sess very little interest to me if I thought it admitted of any narrower statement ; if I thought, as you do for example, that it turned upon the question PREFACE. 131 whether or not the righteousness which quahfies men for ' the kingdom of heaven' is the same with that which attracts our civic and religious hom- age. You easily perceive, then, that so long as I hold these views of the gospel revelation concern- ing God, my own personal salvation would afford a wretched solace to my wounded faith in him if I thought any other human being capable of seri- ously prejudicing himself at the Divine hands by anything he could possibly do. In short, if God. as the gospel demonstrates, be the redeemer and saviour of the race, it is all I want to know to keep my faith in him from ever becoming obscured by any conceivable issue of my personal freedom. No thoughtful person can doubt that our freedom and rationality serve only to mask the infinite Divine presence in our nature, and constitute a special guarantee therefore on his part that he will never be found dealing with us in an arbitrary or irrational manner. As long as I cherish this confidence accordingly, I should be a downright numskull to quarrel with that bipolar aspect of my nature on which my personal consciousness, and all the spiritual hopes and aspirations it engen- ders are nevertheless rigidly conditioned. If I value freedom and rationality as constituting the veritable Divine shekinah upon the earth, I must accept every conceivable issue they involve ; for it 132 PREFACE. is childish to pretend to love a law, and yet hate its practical operation. For my part, at all events, I am incapable of applauding the principles of the Divine administration in the gross, and reprobating them in detail. But this is neither here nor there. What I would have you observe is simply this, — that I perceive a grandeur in the Christian reve- lation of the Divine name which, by teaching me that its aims are rigidly providential as guarding and guiding the freedom of man ab intra, and never ab- solute as determining any conceivable issue of that freedom ab extra, releases me from all selfish hopes and fears towards God, and gives me instead un- feigned intellectual peace. I am quite as free as you can be to admit how infinitely unworthy I am — and every other man no less — of this sublime knowledge ; but so long as it stands unchallenged to my interior conviction, you yourself can hardly fail to perceive that my love of good and my aver- sion to evil must soon lose all they possess of a moral or voluntary quality, and put on strictly spiritual, or living and spontaneous, lineaments." It used to be replied to my friend on these occa- sions, not without heat: "What upon earth then are you here for, in this school of tJie prophets, if it be not to qualify yourself to win men from the slavery of evil to the voluntary service of good? And will it edify your hearers, think you, to learn PREFACE. 133 from your lips, or infer from your demeanor, that God has no personal complacency in the good man, and no personal aversion to the evil man ; and that so far, therefore, as their outward fortunes are concerned, or their personal chances at the Divine hand, they might as well be in hell as in heaven?" I need not say that I always listened to these pungent questionings of my friend with very great interest; for, although I deeply felt his personal magnetism, my own intellect was as yet very far from any clear or comprehensive grasp of the truths which constituted the manifest strength of his. As well as I can recall the force of his re- plies, it was substantially as follows : — " I should be sorry so to compromise the Divine majesty even in thought, as to imagine it capable of associating me or you or any one else in the re- sponsibility which it and it alone challenges with respect to every man's spiritual fortunes. But if I really felt myself legitimately associated in any such responsibility, I certainly could conceive no other or better way of influencing men than by making manifest to their consciences the truth whereby I myself spiritually live, — which truth is the universality of God's providence or king- dom. You yourselves know quite as well as I, — at 134 PREFACE. least you have the same occasion to know, — that the mass of our ecclesiastical population are of a low order of mind spiritually; being much more moved by dread of God than by love to him, much more solicitous for his personal favor than sensi- tive to the honor of his name or the interests of impersonal goodness and truth. What, then, in this state of things, would you yourselves have me do? Would you not expect me frankly to confront this spiritual degradation of theirs, and so force them upon its ultimate acknowledgment, by persis- tently protesting in my own person against the un- worthy hopes and fears they indulge towards God ? Or would you rather that I lend a hand to perpet- uate this spiritual insanity in them, by inflaming their existing unbelief of the Divine name? "Understand me fully. What interests me in human kind is not its capacity to enjoy and suffer, for this capacity is signally limited in all of us ; but its capacity to know God, and regulate its life upon that knowledge, for here we are all of us alike really unlimited. For example, it would give me no pain to learn at any time that any particular acquaintance of my own now deceased was in hell, as men say, nor any pleasure to learn that he was in heaven ; because I have not a grain of belief in any hell or heaven as being objectively constituted, or as having any existence apart from its particular PREFACE. 135 subjects. No good man, — that is to say, no man who is inwardly cultivated out of that supreme love of self and the world which alone constitutes hell and makes its restraints appreciable, — can ever ' go to hell,' as we say. And no evil man, — that is to say, no man who is habitually indifferent to that supreme love of God or the neighbor which alone constitutes heaven and makes its free- dom enjoyable, — can ever ' go to heaven,' as we say. And as long as the good man is free to choose his own society, and the evil man free to choose his, I have no fear that either will be ever tempted to exchange outward conditions with the other. I have no fear, in other words, that either will fancy himself out of heaven. I cannot imagine a hell for any man which is not made such by its organic opposition to his subjective tendencies ; nor a heaven which is not made such by its organic agreement with those tendencies. And it seems to me therefore sheerly preposterous to talk of heaven and hell as if they were objectively consti- tuted, or had the least reality apart from their proper subjects. A self-constituted heaven and hell, — that is to say, a heaven and hell, which are such in themselves or absolutely, and out of relation to each other, — are a contradictory and therefore impossible conception. For two absolutes destroy each other. An absolute heaven would exclude 136 PREFACE. the conception of anything opposed to itself; and an absolute hell would do the same thing. "Of three things, then, one. Either (i) heaven and hell, which, being strictly relative each to the other, confess themselves both alike subjectively or phenomenally constituted, and therefore repugn all objective reality; or (2) an absolute heaven, which being constituted irrationally, or without re- gard to its subjects, disowns any proper subjects, and hence offers no attraction to a rational imagi- nation; or (3) an absolute hell, which being in like manner constituted out of all relation to any proper subjects, offers no repulsion to a rational imagina- tion. Of these three conceptions, I repeat, you are logically bound to choose one. But obviously the second and third alternatives are not to be enter- tained for a moment, as they stultify themselves ; and the first alone remains to be accepted. " But if heaven and hell are thus demonstrably void of objective reality, as being reciprocally con- stituted by each other's subjective antagonism, do you not yourself think that it is about time to give over talking about them? Would it not be better, think you, to begin talking to the world of that long-neglected third interest, — the interest of the divine kingdom, of God's promised reign of right- eousness or justice in the earth, to whose evolution heaven and hell are purely incidental, and from PREFACE. 137 which they both alike derive all their human or philosophic consequence?" This masculine insight of my friend into the philosophy of the gospel, so often coming to the surface in our little seminary collisions, was, I re- peat, exceedingly impressive to my imagination. It could hardly help giving me an immense per- sonal interest in him, and inflaming my curiosity to penetrate the secrets of his intellectual history. I could not long escape the conviction that his intellectual life had flowered out of a far deeper spiritual root than mine, and betrayed a very excep- tional moral experience. There was at all times a certain reserve in his communications with me ; but now and then an air of constraint and even of anguish marked his attitude towards truth, which seemed to me to indicate the presence of some try- ing and bitter moral conflict within. As our inti- macy grew, I sometimes hazarded a deferential inquiry as to the incidents of his personal history. But although his replies were always courteously conceived, I felt for a long time that they were intended to baffle curiosity and keep me to the surface of his experience, or what it had in com- mon with my own. I think, however, that before the end of our career in the seminary my friend had begun to put a, higher estimate upon my sym- 138 PREFACE. pathy, inasmuch as I saw many signs of a gradual breaking down of his customary reserve. I pre- sume, accordingly, that- if the tides of our life had continued to flow together a little longer, he would have ended by taking me into his frankest confi- dence. But as it turned out, we had both of us come to entertain some very fatal doubts as to the received theories in relation to the constitution of the Church, — our ecclesiastical guides holding, for example, that the Church was essentially a visible institution, defined and constituted mainly by the possession and ministry of the sacraments ; while we maintained that it was an actual life of God himself in human nature, and not to be cogitated, therefore, apart from the interests of universal jus- tice in the earth ; and this disagreement separated us so much from the ordinary life of the seminary, that we concluded erelong, my friend and I, to withdraw from it; he to return to his home in Maryland, I to mine in New York. Our intimacy did not actually cease with this event, though it never again flourished. We com- municated with each other by letter for a year or two, in respect chiefly to the new and brilliant points of harmony developed between our nascent views of truth and the gospel record ; or else the new points of oppugnancy which these views con- tinually presented to the ecclesiastical conception PREFACE. 139 of the Church universally, and the frivolous style of life or tone of manhood engendered by that conception. But after a while our correspondence languished, and finally fell away altogether before new intimacies on both sides, and the access of more tender cares. My friend married, and I mar- ried ; each being content, I presume, thenceforth to hand the other's memory over to the hallowed guardianship of his wife's diligent ear. He had inherited a small patrimony, but as we neither of us contemplated a life of idleness, so he on this inevitable breaking up of his studies got a situation of trust in the Treasury Department at Washing- ton, which his ability and probity qualified him to fill with advantage to the country, and which he continued to hold up to the time of his death. Having business in Washington once or twice dur- ing the war, I made it a point to revive our ancient friendship. His constitution had been signally robust, but he had lost his wife and his only son a year or two before, and I could easily see that he was now devoting himself with forced activity to the increased labors thrown upon him in common with all the Government servants by our unex- ampled war. I warned him to seek relaxation in time, or ere it should begin to go hard with his remaining years. He listened to my counsels pa- tiently; but one day when I had seen reason to 140 PREFACE. renew them with increased emphasis, he said to me, by way as I supposed at the moment of diverting my attention and his own from the subject, that in case of my fears verifying themselves the result might prove somewhat calamitous to me, as he had made me the legatee of a manuscript which threw some light upon his inward history, and which, as there was now no one of his blood remaining to take exception to its frankness, he thought he might properly give the public the benefit of. I took the pleasant menace in good part, putting no serious faith in it however, nor indeed scarcely thinking of it again till about a year ago, when I received an unexpected summons from my friend to repair, if I would, to Washington, and receive his dying farewell. I found him in fact dying, of no acute agony, but rather of a chronic malady resulting from a fever which he had contracted at the close of the war, and which had been at length fatally determined by the weight of his official labors and cares. His mind retained all its vivacity, and we had a great deal of conversation immensely interesting to me I am sure, if not to both of us. It was in the very first of our interviews after my arrival that he took occasion, when referring to our old contention for the truth in days gone by, and to the intimate way in which I had then become associated with his PREFACE, 141 mental history, to revert to the intimation he had once given me of having imposed upon my friend- ship a certain obligation with respect to his liter- ary remains. He told me that without in the least affecting to suppose that his intellectual experience would arrest the attention of the reading public, he yet conceived that it had many points of interest to scholars and serious men of letters, such especi- ally as were concerned with religious ideas and the problems of philosophy. He had accord- ingly busied himself, in intervals of official duty, with recalling the facts of his mental career, and putting them together in a shape so connected as to save me any great labor in preparing them for the press. He counted upon my sympathy with him in the things of the intellect to engage me cheerfully in the task ; and he thought that as he was now so fast getting beyond the reach of men's favor and of their frown, he might without im- modesty make his first appeal to their attention. " I will not affect to conceal," he said, " that the manuscript I have confided to you takes its readers out of the shallows of ordinary biography whether religious or secular, and inducts them into some- what unfrequented paths of thought. But I count none the less upon your generous friendship to da me justice. You have been a faithful friend to my mortal person ; be now a friend to my immortal 142 PREFACE. one, — that is, to the ideas which I have endeav- ored to embody in my autobiographic sketch, and which will soon be converted into the sole fixed earth and sole contingent heaven of my future con- sciousness. Give them to the public with such care at least as shall leave none of their proper force abated. The great day of doom is upon us, and how few of us suspect it ! We go on eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, just as stupidly as if the days of our existing order were still unnumbered ; and if any perspicacious person be startled into a word of timely admonition, our smirking Philistines of the press are down upon him with such a noisy tapping and rattling of Vol- taire's old snuff-box, and such a frenzied beating and dusting of John Mill's cast-off breeches, as fairly to bury his decent voice. It is this unsus- pected access of a new and radical divine order in human life, which accounts for the decrepitude of all our traditional faiths. Science is bound to chase divinity out of the objective realm of life, the realm of sensible knowledge ; and if religion cannot reproduce it in the subjective sphere, the realm of natural consciousness, it must go unac- knowledged. But I claim for my own part to know God no longer by tradition, much less of course by sense, — both of which pretensions would be absurd in this day of universal scientific fustigation PREFACE. 143 and fumigation, — but by natural consciousness, or within the compass precisely of what my own life has in common with that of all other men, and in contradistinction to mineral, vegetable, and ani- mal life. And I have thought that to indicate the method of this knowledge, be it ever so feebly done, would be to deserve well of my kind." What more remains to be said? I stayed with my friend until his honored head resigned itself to the dust; saw the rites of sepulture decently per- formed over his cast-off robe of flesh ; ordered a memorial slab for his grave, bearing this inscription: HERE LIE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF STEPHEN DEWHURST; a faithful, intrepid SOLDIER OF THE CROSS, TO WHOM HOWEVER THE CROSS TYPI- FIED NOTHING BUT THE NORMAL DISTINCTIVE FORM OF GOD'S LIFE IN THE SOUL OF UNIVER- SAL MAN, — and then returned home to read and ponder his bequest. He had given it, I discovered, the form of a series of letters addressed to me. It was too much trouble to attempt recasting its form, and I have concluded to publish it just as it came from his hand, with the exception of dividing it into chapters instead of letters. This will prove no inconvenience to the reader, if he will always bear in mind that what he is reading is substantially a letter. I have no remark to make upon the 144 PREFACE. character of the work, save that I found it replete with interest to my own mind, and hastened to give it to the printer. The reader has it now in his own hands, and will not be slow, as I conceive, to judge it upon its merits. If my friend's executors, who tell me that they have not had time to examine his remaining manuscripts perfectly, should find anything in them fitted to throw light upon the principles or the incidents of the autobiographic sketch he has here attempted, they will at once communicate the new matter to me, and I will add it, if it seem advisable, to a later edition of the book. But I think the contingency in question very unlikely at the least, and so dismiss myself at once from the reader's further attention. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. CHAPTER I. MV EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS. T WILL not attempt to state the year in which I was born,^ because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my biographic consciousness is that of my having been carried out into the streets one night, in the arms of my negro nurse, to witness a grand illumination in honor of the treaty of peace then just signed with Great Britain. From this circumstance I infer of course that I was born before the year 1815, but it gives me no warrant to say just how long before. The net fact is that my historic consciousness, or my earliest self-recognition, dates from this muni- cipal illumination in honor of peace. So far, how- ever, as my share in that spectacle is concerned, I am free to say it was a failure. That is, the only impression left by the illumination upon my imagi- 1 June 2, 181 1. 10 146 AUTOBIOGRATHY. nation was the contrast of the awful dark of the sky with the feeble glitter of the streets ; as if the ani- mus of the display had been, not to eclipse the darkness, but to make it visible. You, of course, may put what interpretation you choose upon the incident, but it seems to me rather emblematic of the intellect, that its earliest sensible founda- tions should thus be laid in " a horror of great darkness." My father ^ was a successful merchant, who early in life had forsaken his native Somerset County,^ with its watery horizons, to settle in Baltimore ; ° where on the strength of a good primary educa- tion, in which I was glad to observe some knowl- edge of Latin had mingled, he got employment as a clerk in a considerable mercantile house, and by his general intelligence and business sagacity ere- long laid the foundations of a prosperous career. When I was very young I do not remember to have had much intellectual contact with my father save at family prayers and at meals, for he was always occupied during the day with business; and even in the frank domestic intercourse of the evening, when he was fond of hearing his children read to him, and would frequently exercise them in their studies, I cannot recollect that he ever 1 William James. ^ County Cavan, Ireland. 3 Albany, N. Y. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. I47 questioned me about my out-of-door occupations, or about my companions, or showed any extreme solicitude about my standing in school. He was certainly a very easy parent, and I might have been left to regard him perhaps as a rather indiffer- ent one, if it had not been for a severe illness which befell me from a gun-shot wound in my arm, and which confined me for a long time to the house, when his tenderness to me showed itself so assidu- ous and indeed extreme as to give me an exalted sense of his affection.^ My wound had been very severe, being followed by a morbid process in the bone which ever and anon called for some sharp surgery; and on these occasions I remember — for the use of anaesthetics was still wholly undreamt of — his sympathy with my sufferings was so ex- cessive that my mother had the greatest possible difficulty in imposing due prudence upon his ex- pression of it. My mother 2 was a good wife and mother, nothing else, — save, to be sure, a kindly friend and neigh- bor. The tradition of the house, indeed, was a very charitable one. I remember that my father was in the habit of having a great quantity of beef 1 At the age of thirteen, Mr. James had his right leg so severely burned while playing the then not usual game of fire-ball that he was confined to his bed for two years, and two thigh amputations had to be performed. ^ Catharine Barber. 1 48 A UTOBIOGRAPHY. and pork and potatoes laid by in the beginning of winter for the needy poor, the distribution of which my mother regulated ; and no sooner was the origi- nal stock exhausted than the supply was renewed with ungrudging hand. My mother, I repeat, was maternity itself in form ; and I remember, as a touching evidence of this, that I have frequently seen her during my protracted illness, when I had been greatly reduced and required the most watch- ful nursing, come to my bedside fast asleep with her candle in her hand, and go through the forms of covering my shoulders, adjusting my pillows, and so forth, just as carefully as if she were awake. The only other thing I have to remark about her is, that she was the most democratic person by tem- perament I ever knew. Her father,^ who spent the evening of his days in our family, was a farmer of great respectability and considerable substance. He had borne arms in the Revolutionary War, was very fond of historic reading, had a tenacious memory, and used to exercise it upon his grand- children at times to their sufficient ennui. I never felt any affectionate leaning to him. Two of his brothers had served throughout the war in the army, — one of them, Colonel F. B.,^ having been a distinguished and very efficient officer 1 John Barber, of (then) Montgomery, Orange Co., N. Y. (near Newburgh). 2 Francis Barber. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 49 in various engagements, and a trusted friend of Washington; the other, Major W. B.,^ who, if my memory serve me, was an aid of General Lafayette. These of course are never ungrati- fying facts to the carnal mind ; and when ac- cordingly we children used to ask our mother for tales about her uncles, she gave us to be sure what she had to give with good-will, but I could very well see that for some reason or other she never was able to put herself in our precise point of view in reference to them. She seemed some- way ashamed, as well as I could gather, of having had distinguished relations. And then I remember I used to feel surprised to see how much satisfac- tion she could take in chatting with her respectable sewing-women, and how she gravitated as a general thing into relations of the frankest sympathy with every one conventionally beneath her. I should say, indeed, looking back, that she felt a tacit quarrel with the fortunes of her life in that they had sought to make her a flower or a shrub, when she herself would so willingly have remained mere lowly grass. But I must say one word of my mother's mother, whose memory I cherish much more than that of my grandfather. She came to us at times in win- ter, and as long as she lived we spent a month of 1 William Barber. 150 A UTOBIO GRAPHY. every summer with her in the country, where I deUghted to drive the empty ox-cart far afield to bring in a load of fragrant hay, or gather apples for the cider-press, refreshing myself the while with a well-selected apricot or two. She was of a grave, thoughtful aspect, but she had a most viva- cious love of children, and a very exceptional gift of interesting them in conversation, which greatly endeared her society to me. It was not till I had grown up, and she herself was among the blessed, that I discovered she had undergone a great deal of mental suffering, and dimly associated this fact somehow with the great conscience she had always made of us children. She had been from youth a very religious person, without a shadow of scep- ticism or indifference in her mental temperament; but as" life matured and her heart became mellowed under its discipline, she fell to doubting whether the dogmatic traditions in which she had been bred effectively represented Divine truth. And the conflict grew so active erelong between this quick- ened allegiance of her heart to God, and the merely habitual deference her intellect was under to men's opinions, as to allow her afterwards no fixed rest this side of the grave. In her most depressed con- dition, however, she maintained an equable front before the world, fulfilled all her duties to her fam- ily and her neighborhood, and yielded at last to AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 151 death, as I afterwards learned, in smiling confidence of a speedy resolution of all her doubts. I never failed to contrast the soft flexibility and sweetness of her demeanor with the stoicism of my grand- father's character, and early noted the signal dif- ference between the rich spontaneous favor we children enjoyed at her hands, and the purely vol- untary or polite attentions we received from him. Nor could I doubt when in after years my own hour of tribulation sounded, and I too felt my first immortal longing " to bathe myself in innocency," that this dear old lady had found in the ignorance and innocence of the grandchildren whom she loved to hug to her bosom a truer gospel balm, a far more soothing and satisfactory echo of Divine knowledge, than she had ever caught from the logic of John Calvin. I have nothing to say of my brothers and sisters, who were seven ^ in number, except that our rela- tions proved always cordially affectionate ; so much so, indeed, that I cannot now recall any instance of serious envy or jealousy between us. The law of the house, within the limits of religious decency, was freedom itself, and the parental will or wisdom had very seldom to be appealed to to settle our ^ My grandfather married three times, and had in all eleven children. The seven of whom my father speaks were his ffitm brothers and sisters, born of the third marriage. — Ed. 152 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. trivial discords. I should think indeed that our domestic intercourse had been on the whole most innocent as well as happy, were it not for a certain lack of oxygen which is indeed incidental to the family atmosphere, and which I may characterize as the lack of any ideal of action but that of self- preservation. It is the curse of the worldly mind, as of the civic or political state of man to which it affords a material basis ; it is the curse of the re- ligious mind, as of the ecclesiastical forms to which it furnishes a spiritual base, — that they both alike constitute their own ideal, or practically ignore any ulterior Divine end. I say it is their curse, because they thus conflict with the principles of universal justice, or God's providential order in the earth, which rigidly enjoins that each particular thing exist for all, and that all things i7i general exist for each. Our family at all events perfectly illustrated this common vice of contented isola- tion. Like all the other families of the land it gave no sign of a spontaneous religious culture, or of affections touched to the dimensions of uni- versal man. In fact, religious truth at that day, as it seems to me, was at the very lowest ebb of formal remorseless dogmatism it has ever reached, and offered nothing whatever to conciliate the enmity of unwilling hearts. When I remember the clergy who used to frequent my father's house, A UTOBIOGRAPHY. 153 which offered the freest hospitality to any number of the cloth, and recall the tone of the religious world generally with which I was familiar, I find my memory is charged with absolutely no incident either of manners or conversation which would ever lead me to suppose that religion was any- thing more in its votaries than a higher prudence, or that there was anything whatever in the Divine character as revealed in the gospel of Christ to inflame in common minds an enthusiam of devo- tion, or beget anything like a passionate ardor of self-abasement. Thus the entire strain of the Orthodox faith of the period was at fault, and restricted the motions of the divine life in us to the working out at most of a conventionally virtuous and pious repute. It was eminently respectable to belong to the church, and there were few insatiate worldlings, I suspect, who did not count upon giving in a prudent adhe- sion to it at the last. We children of the church had been traditionally taught to contemplate God as a strictly j-z^/^matural being, bigger personally than all the world ; and not only therefore out of all sympathy with our pigmy infirmities, but exceedingly jealous of the hypocritical homage we paid to his contemptuous forbearance. This dramatic homage, however, being of an altogether negative complexion, was exceedingly trying to us. 154 ^ U TO BIO GRA PHY. Notoriously our Orthodox Protestant faith, how- ever denominated, is not intellectually a cheerful one, though it is not so inwardly demoralizing doubtless as the Catholic teaching; but it makes absolutely no ecclesiastical provision in the way of spectacle for engaging the affections of child- hood. The innocent carnal delights of children are ignored by the church save at Christmas ; and as Christmas comes but once a year, we poor little ones were practically shut up for all our spiri- tual limbering, or training in the divine life^ to the influence of our ordinary paralytic Sunday routine. That is, we were taught not to play, not to dance nor to sing, not to read story-books, not to con over our school-lessons for Monday even ; not to whistle, not to ride the pony, nor to take a walk in the country, nor a swim in the river; nor, in short, to do anything which nature specially craved. How my particular heels ached for exercise, and all my senses pined to be free, it is not worth while to recount; suffice it to say, that although I know my parents were not so Sabbatarian as many, I cannot flatter myself that our household sanctity ever presented a pleasant aspect to the angels. Nothing is so hard for a child as not-to-do ; that is, to keep his hands and feet and tongue in enforced inactivity. It is a cruel wrong to put such an obli- gation upon him, while his reflective faculties are A UTOBIO GRA PHY. 1 5 5 Still undeveloped, and his senses urge him to unre- stricted action. I am persuaded, for my part at all events, that the number of things I was conven- tionally bound not-to-do at that tender age, has made Sunday to my imagination ever since the most oppressive or least gracious and hallowed day of the week; and I should not wonder if the re- pression it riveted upon my youthful freedom had had much to do with the habitual unamiableness and irritability I discover in myself My boyish Sundays however had one slight al- leviation. The church to which I was born occu- pied one extremity of a block, and sided upon a public street. Our family pew was a large square one, and embraced in part a window which gave upon the street, and whose movable blinds with their cords and tassels gave much quiet entertain- ment to my restless fingers. It was my delight to get to church early, in order to secure a certain corner of the pew which commanded the sidewalk on both sides of the street, and so furnished me many pregnant topics of speculation. Two huge chains indeed extended across the street at either extremity of the church, debarring vehicles from passing. But pedestrians enjoyed their liberty unimpeded, and took on a certain halo to my im- agination from the independent air with which they used it. Sometimes a person would saunter 156 A UTOBIOGRAPHY. past in modish costume, puffing a cigar, and gayly switching ever and anon the legs of his resonant well-starched trousers ; and though I secretly en- vied him his power to convert the sacred day into a festivity, I could not but indulge some doubts as to where that comfortable state of mind tended. Most of my dramatis personce in fact wore an air of careless ease or idleness, as if they had risen from a good night's sleep to a late breakfast, and were now disposing themselves for a genuine holiday of delights. I was doubtless not untouched inwardly by the gospel flavor and relish of the spectacle, but of course it presented to my legal or carnal apprehension of spiritual things a far more peril- ous method of sanctifying the day, than that offered by men's voluntary denial of all their spontaneous instincts, of all their aesthetic culture. I may say, however, that one vision was pretty constant, and left no pharisaic pang behind it. Opposite the sacred edifice stood the dwelling- house and office of Mr. O r, a Justice of the Peace ; and every Sunday morning, just as the ser- mon was getting well under way, Mr. O r's housemaid would appear upon the threshold with her crumb-cloth in hand, and proceed very leis- urely to shake it over the side of the steps, glanc- ing the while, as well as I could observe, with critical appreciation at the well-dressed people who A UTOBIOGRAPHY. 157 passed by. She would do her work as I have said in a very leisurely way, leaving the cloth, for ex- ample, hanging upon the balustrade of the steps while she would go into the house, and then re- turning again and again to shake it, as if she loved the task, and could not help lingering over it. Perhaps her mistress might have estimated the performance differently, but fortunately she was in church ; and I at all events was unfeignedly ob- liged to the shapely maid for giving my senses so much innocent occupation when their need was sorest. Her pleasant image has always remained a fixture of my memory; and if I shall ever be able to identify her in the populous world to which we are hastening, be assured I will not let the oppor- tunity slip of telling her how much I owe her for the fresh, breezy, natural life she used to impart to those otherwise lifeless, stagnant, most unnatural Sunday mornings. CHAP'iER II. CONFLICT BETWEEN MY MORAL AND MY SPIRITUAL LIFE. THE aim of all formal religious worship, as it stood impressed upon my youthful imagina- tion, was to save the soul of the worshipper from a certain liability to Divine wrath which he had incurred as the inheritor of a fallen nature, and from which he could only get relief through the merits of Christ imputed to him, and apprehended by faith. I had been traditionally taught, and I traditionally took for granted, that all souls had originally forfeited the creative good-will in the person of Adam, their attorney or representative, even if they should never have aggravated that catastrophe subsequently in their own persons ; so that practically every man of woman born comes into the world charged with a weight of Divine obstruction or limitation utterly hopeless and crushing, unless relieved by actual faith in the atoning blood of Christ. I ought not to say that I actually believed this puerile and disgusting caricature of the gospel, for one believes only with the heart, and my heart at all events inmostly AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 59 loathed this dogmatic fouling of the creative name, even while it passively endured its authoritative imposition. I accepted it in short only as an Or- thodox tradition, — just as all the world does, — commended to my unquestioning faith by the pre- vious acceptance of those I loved and honored. And so accepting it, its inevitable effect was, I may say, perpetually to inflame a self-love and love of the world in me which needed everything but inflaming. My boyish animal spirits, or my excessive en- joyment of life, allowed me no doubt very little time for reflection ; yet it was very seldom that I lay down at night without a present thought of God, and some little effort of recoil upon myself. My days bowled themselves out one after an- other, like waves upon the shore, and as a general thing deafened me by their clamor to any inward voice ; but the dark silent night usually led in the spectral eye of God, and set me to wondering and pondering evermore how I should effectually baffle its gaze. Now I cannot conceive any less whole- some or innocent occupation for the childish mind than to keep a debtor and creditor account with God ; for the effect of such discipline is either to make the child insufferably conceited, or else to harden him in indifference to the Divine name. The parent, or whoso occupies the parent's place, l6o AUTOBIOGRAPHY. should be the only authorized medium of the , Divine communion with the child ; and if the parent repugn this function, he is by so much disqualified as parent. Men have their instructed reason and their experience to guide them in Di- vine things, and guard them from false teaching; but nothing can be so fatal to the tender awe and reverence which should always sanctify the Divine name to the youthful mind and heart, as to put the child in a bargaining or huckstering attitude towards God, as was done by the current religious teaching of my early days. I was habitually led by my teachers to conceive that at best a chronic apathy existed on God's part towards me, superin- duced by Christ's work upon the active enmity he had formerly felt towards us ; and the only reason why this teaching did not leave my mind in a sim- ilarly apathetic condition towards him was, as I have since become persuaded, that it always met in my soul, and was practically paralyzed by, a profounder Divine instinct which affirmed his stainless and ineffable love. I should never indeed have felt my intellectual tranquillity so much as jostled by the insane superstition in question, if it had not been that my headlong eagerness in the pursuit of pleasure plunged me incessantly into perturbations and disturbances of conscience, which had the effect often to convert God's chronic apathy AUTOBIOGRAPHY. l6l or indifference into a sentiment of acute personal hostility. Whenever this experience occurred, I was down in the dust of self-abasement, and then tried every way I possibly could to transact with God — on the basis of course of his revealed clemency in Christ — by the most profuse ac- knowledgments of indebtedness, and the most pro- fuse promises of future payment. Obviously I could not be expected at that early age to enter- tain problems which my elders themselves were unable to solve. Thus I never stopped to ask my- self how a being whose clemency to the sinner wears so flatly commercial an aspect, — being the fruit of an actual purchase, of a most literal and cogent quid pro quo duly in hand paid, — could ever hope to awaken any spiritual love or confi- dence in the human breast, or ever pretend conse- quently to challenge permanent Divine honor. In short, I was incapable as a child of accepting any theologic dogma as true, and received it simply on the authority of the Church ; and whenever accord- ingly I had pungently violated conscience in any manner, I was only too happy to betake myself to the feet of Christ, to plead his healing and gra- cious words, and pray that my offences also might be blotted out in his atoning blood. But I must guard against giving you a false im- pression in respect to these devotional exercises II 1 62 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. of my childhood. I have always in looking back been struck with the fact, and used at first to be somewhat disconcerted by it, that my conscience, even in my earliest years, never charged itself with merely literal or ritual defilement ; that is to say, with offences which did not contain an element of active or spiritual malignity to somebody else. For example, there was a shoemaker's shop in our neighborhood, at which the family were sup- plied with shoes. The business was conducted by two brothers who had recently inherited it of their father, and who were themselves uncommonly bright, intelligent, and personable young men. From the circumstance that all the principal fami- lies of the neighborhood were customers of the shop, the boys of these families in going there to be fitted, or to give orders, frequently encountered each other, and at last got to making it an habitual rendezvous. There were two apartments belonging to the shop, — one small, giving upon the street, which contained all the stock of the concern, and where customers were received ; the other, in which the young men worked at their trade and where we boys were wont to congregate, much larger, in the rear, and descending towards a garden. I was in the habit of taking with me a pocket full of apples or other fruit from home, on my visits to the shop, for the delectation of its occupants, AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 63 several of the other lads doing the same; and I frequently carried them books, especially novels, which they were fond of reading, and their judg- ments of which seemed to me very intelligent. The truth is, that we chits were rather proud to crony with these young men, who were so much older than ourselves, and had so much more knowledge of the world ; and if their influence over us had been really educative, almost any be- neficial results might have been anticipated. I do not know exactly how it came about, but one step probably led to another, until at last we found our- selves providing them an actual feast, some of us supplying edibles and other potables from our own larders and cellars. I used, I recollect, to take eggs in any number from the ample, uncounted, and unguarded stores at home, cakes, fruits, and whatever else it was handy to carry; and I do not know to what lengths our mutual emulation in these hospitable of^ces might not have pushed us, when it was brought to a sudden stop. Among the urchins engaged in these foraging exploits were two sons of the governor of the State, who was a widower, and whose household affairs were consequently not so well looked after as they might have been. By the connivance of their father's butler, these young gentlemen were in the habit of storing certain dainties in their own room 1 64 ^ UTOBIO GRAPH V. at the top of the house, whence they could be con- veniently transported to the shop at their leisure without attracting observation. But the governor unfortunately saw fit to re-marry soon after our drama opened, and his new wife took such good order in the house, that my young friends were forced thereafter to accomplish their ends by pro- founder strategy. And so it happened that their step-mother, sitting one warm summer evening at her open but unilluminated chamber-window to enjoy the breeze, suddenly became aware of a dark object defining itself upon the void between her face and the stars, but in much too close prox- imity to the former to be agreeable, and naturally put forth her hand to determine the law of its pro- jection. It proved to be a bottle of Madeira, whose age was duly authenticated by cobwebs and weather-stains ; and from the apparatus of stout twine connected with it there seemed to be no reasonable doubt that some able engineering was at the bottom of the phenomenon. Search was made, and the engineers discovered. And to make a long story short, this discovery did not fail of course to propagate a salutary rumor of itself, and eke a tremor, to the wonted scene of our fes- tivities, begetting on the part of the habitues of the place a much more discreet conduct for the future. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 65 But this is not by any means the only or the chief immorality that distinguished my boyish days. My father, for example, habitually kept a quantity of loose silver in a drawer of his dressing- table, with a view I suppose to his own and my mother's convenience in paying house-bills. It more than covered the bottom of the drawer, and though I never essayed to count it, I should judge it usually amounted to a sum of eight or ten dol- lars, perhaps double that sum, in Spanish six- pences, shillings, and quarters. The drawer was seldom locked, and even when locked usually had the key remaining in the lock, so that it ofifered no practical obstacle to the curiosity of servants and children. Our servants I suppose were very hon- est, as I do not recollect to have ever heard any of them suspected of interfering with the glittering treasure, nor indeed do I know that they were at all aware of its exposed existence. From my earli- est days I remember that I myself cherished the greatest practical reverence for the sacred deposit, and seldom went near it except at the bidding of my mother occasionally, to replenish her purse against the frequent domestic demands made upon it, or the exaction of my own weekly stipend. My youthful imagination, to be sure, was often im- pressed on these occasions with the apparently inexhaustible resources provided by this small 1 66 A U TO BIO CRAPHY. drawer against human want, but my necessities at that early day were not so pronounced as to sug- gest any thought of actual cupidity. But as I grew in years, and approached the very mundane age of seven or eight, the nascent pleasures of the palate began to alternate to my consciousness with those of my muscular activity, — such as marbles, kite-flying, and ball-playing; and I was gradually led in concert with my companions to frequent a very tempting confectioner's-shop in my neighbor- hood, kept by a colored woman, with whom my credit was very good, and to whom accordingly, whenever my slender store of pocket money was exhausted, I did not hesitate to run in debt to the amount of five, ten, or twenty cents. This trivial debt it was, however, which, growing at length somewhat embarrassing in amount, furnished the beginning of my moral, self-conscious, or distinc- tively human experience. It did this all simply in making me for the first time think with an immense, though still timorous sigh of relief, of my father's magical drawer. Thus my country's proverbial taste for confectionery furnished my particular introduction to " the tree of knowledge of good and evil." This tragical tree, which man is forbidden to eat of under pain of finding his pleasant paradisiacal existence shad- owed by death, symbolizes his dawning spiritual AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 6/ life, which ahvays to his own perception begins in literal or subjectiv^e darkness and evil. For what after all is spiritual life in sum? It is the heartfelt discovery by man that God his creator is alone good, and that he himself, the creature, is by ne- cessary contrast evil. But this life in man, being divine and immortal, is bound to avouch its proper grandeur, by thoroughly subjugating evil or death to itself; that is, absorbing it in its own infinitude. Hence it is that man, constitutionally requiring the most intimate handling of evil, or the intensest spiritual familiarity with it, actually finds himself provisionally identified with that principle, and so far furthered consequently on his way to immortal life. The sentiment of relief which I felt at the re- membrance of this well-stocked drawer, remained a sentiment for a considerable time however before it precipitated itself in actual form. I enjoyed in thought the possibility of relief a long time before I dared to convert it into an actuality. The temp- tation to do this was absolutely my first experience of spiritual daybreak, my first glimpse of its dis- tinctively moral or death-giving principle. Until then, spiritual existence had been unknown to me save by the hearing of the ear. That is to say, it was mere intellectual gibberish to me. Our ex- perience of the spiritual world dates in truth only l68 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. from our first unaffected shiver at guilt. Our youthful innocence, like every other divine-natural endowment of humanity, dwells in us in altogether latent or unconscious form, and we never truly recognize it until we have forever forfeited it to the exigencies of a more spiritual and living inno- cence. It is sure, for example, never to come to direct consciousness in us until we are seriously tempted to do some conventionally opprobrious thing, and have incontinently yielded to the temp- tation ; after that, looking back at ourselves to see what change has befallen us, we become aware of our loss, and immediately, like the inapprehensive spiritual noodles we are, we bend all our energies to recover this fugacious innocence, and become henceforth its conscious guardians ! — as if man were ever capable by consciousness of embracing anything good ! As if the human conscience were ever open to anything else but evil in some of its myriad-fold modulations ! I doubtless relieved myself of debt, then, by two or three times borrowing freely from my father's drawer, without any thought of ever making resti- tution. But it is idle to pretend that my action in any of these cases was spiritually criminal. It was clandestine of course, as it could hardly help being if it were destined ever to take place at all, and was indeed every way reprehensible when judged A U TO BIO GRAPH Y. 1 69 from the established family routine or order. I had no idea at the time, of course, that the act was not sinful, for no one existed within my knowledge capable of giving me that idea. But though I should have felt excessively ashamed of myself, doubtless, if my parents had ever discovered or even suspected my clandestine operations, yet when my religious conscience became quickened and I had learned to charge myself with sin against God, I practically never found that acts of this sort very heavily burdened my penitential memory. I did not fail, I presume, to ventilate them occasionally in my daily litany, but I am sure they never any of them gave me a sense of spiritual defilement, nor ever cost me consequently a pang of godly sorrow. The reason why they did not spiritually degrade me in my own esteem was, I suppose, that they were at worst offences committed against my parents ; and no child as it seems to me with the heart of a child, or who has not been utterly moral- ized out of his natural innocency and turned into a precocious prig, can help secretly feeling a prop- erty in his parents so absolute or unconditional as to make him a priori sure, do what he will, of pre- serving their affection. It would not have seemed so in ancient days, I grant. The parental bond was then predominantly paternal, whereas of late years it is becoming predominantly maternal. At that 170 A UTOBIO GRA PHY. period it was very nearly altogether authoritative and even tyrannous with respect to the child ; while in our own day it is fast growing to be one of the utmost relaxation, indulgence, and even servility. My father was weakly, nay painfully, sensitive to his children's claims upon his sympathy; and I myself, when I became a father in my turn, felt that I could freely sacrifice property and life to save my children from unhappiness. In fact, the family sentiment has become within the last hundred years so refined of its original gross literality, so shorn of its absolute consequence, by being prac- tically considered as a rudiment to the larger social sentiment, that no intelligent conscientious parent now thinks of himself as primary in that relation, but cheerfully subordinates himself to the welfare of his children. What sensible parent now thinks it a good thing to repress the natural instincts of childhood, and not rather diligently to utilize them as so many divinely endowed educational forces? No doubt much honest misgiving is felt and much honest alarm expressed as to the effect of these new ideas upon the future of our existing civiliza- tion. But these alarms and misgivings beset those, only who are intellectually indifferent to the truth of man's social destiny. For my own part, I de- light to witness this outward demoralization of the parental bond, because I see in it the pregnant A UTOBIOGRA PHY. 1 J I evidence of a growing spiritualization of human life, or an expanding social consciousness among men, which will erelong exalt them out of the mire and slime of their frivolous and obscene private personality, into a chaste and dignified natural manhood. This social conscience of manhood is becoming so pronounced and irresistible that al- most no one who deserves the name of parent but feels the tie that binds him to his child outgrowing its old moral or obligatory limitations, and putting on free, spiritual, or spontaneous lineaments. In- deed, the multitude of devout minds in either sex is perpetually enlarging who sincerely feel them- selves unfit to bear, to rear, and above all to edu- cate and discipline, children without the enlight- ened aid and furtherance of all mankind. And it is only the silliest, most selfish and arrogant of men that can afford to make light of this very significant fact. But to resume. What I want particularly to impress upon your understanding is that my reli- gious conscience in its early beginnings practically disowned a moral or outward genesis, and took on a free, inward, or spiritual evolution. Not any literal thing I did, so much as the temper of mind with which it was done, had power to humble me before God or degrade me in my own conceit. What filled my breast with acute contrition, amount- 172 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. ing at times to anguish, was never any technical offence which I had committed against estabhshed decorum, but ahvays some wanton ungenerous word or deed by which I had wounded the vital self-respect of another, or imposed upon him gra- tuitous personal suffering. Things of this sort arrayed me to my own consciousness in flagrant hostility to God, and I never could contemplate them without feeling the deepest sense of sin. I sometimes wantonly mocked the sister who was nearest me in age, and now and then violently repelled the overtures of a younger brother who aspired to associate himself with me in my sports and pastimes. But when I remembered these things upon my bed, the terrors of hell encom- passed me, and I was fairly heartbroken with a dread of being estranged from God and all good men. Even now I cannot recur to these instances of youthful depravity in me without a pungent feehng of self-abasement, without a meltingly ten- der recognition of the Divine magnanimity. I was very susceptible of gratitude, moreover, and this furnished another spur to my religious conscience. For although I abounded in youthful cupidity of every sort, I never got the satisfaction of my wishes without a sensible religious thankfulness. Espe- cially rife was this sentiment whenever I had had a marked escape from fatal calamity. For I was AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 73 an ardent angler and gunner from my earliest remembrance, and in my eagerness for sport used to expose myself to accidents so grave as to keep my parents in perpetual dread of my being brought home some day disabled or dead. I distinctly remember how frequently on these occasions, feel- ing what a narrow escape I had had from rock or river, I was wont to be visited by the most remorse- ful sense of my own headlong folly, and > the most adoring grateful sentiment of the Divine long- suffering. To sum up all in a word : my religious conscience, as Avell as I can recall it, was from infancy an in- tensely living one, acknowledging no ritual bonds, and admitting only quasi spiritual, that is natural, satisfactions. There was of course a certain estab- lished order in the house as to coming and going, as to sleeping and waking, as to meal-times and morning prayers, as to study hours and play hours, and so forth. I certainly never exhibited any wil- ful disrespect for this order, but doubtless I felt no absolute respect for it, and even violated it egre- giously whenever my occasions demanded. But at the same time nothing could be more painful to me than to find that I had wounded my father's or mother's feelings, or disappointed any specific confidence they had reposed in me. And I acutely bemoaned my evil lot whenever I came into chance 1 74 ^ UTOBIO GRAPH Y. personal collision with my brothers or sisters. In short, I am satisfied that if there had been the least spiritual Divine leaven discernible within the com- pass of the family bond; if there had been the least recognizable subordination in it to any objec- tive or public and universal ends, — I should have been very sensitive to the fact, and responsive to the influences it exerted. But there was nothing of the sort. Our family righteousness had as little felt relation to the public life of the world, as little connection with the common hopes and fears of mankind, as the number and form of the rooms we inhabited ; and we contentedly lived the same life of stagnant isolation from the race which the great mass of our modern families live, its surface never dimpled by anything but the duties and courtesies we owed to our private friends and acquaintances. The truth is, that the family tie, — the tie of recip- rocal ownership which binds together parent and child, brother and sister, — was when it existed in its integrity a purely legal, formal, typical tie, intended merely to represent or symbolize to men's imag- ination the universal family, or household of faith, eventually to appear upon the earth. But it never had the least suspicion of its own spiritual mission. It was bound in fact in the interest of self-preserva- tion to ignore this its vital representative function, to regard itself as its own end, and coerce its chil- AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 75 dren consequently into an allegiance often very det- rimental to their future spiritual manhood. For any refining or humanizing influence accordingly which the family is to exert upon its members, we must look exclusively to the future of the insti- tution, when it will be glorified for the first time into a natural or universal bond. It is a denial of order to demand of the subterranean germ what we expect of the full corn in the ear. If for example the family as it once existed had ever been con- scious of its strictly representative virtue ; if it had for a moment recognized that spiritual Divine end of blessing to universal man which alone inwardly consecrated it, — it would have inconti- nently shrivelled up in its own esteem, and ceased thereupon to propagate itself; so defeating its own end. For the only spiritual Divine end which has ever sanctified the family institution and shaped its issues, is the evolution of a free society or fel- lowship among men ; inasmuch as the family is literally the seminary of the race, or constitutes the sole Divine seed out of which the social con- sciousness of man ultimately flowers. Thus the only true Divine life or order practicable within the family precinct, the only sentiment truly spir- itual appropriate to the isolated family as such, would have been fatal to its existence, as it would have taken from it its proper pride of life ; for it 176 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. would have consisted in each of its members freely disoivning all the rest in the faith of a strictly uni- tary spiritttal paternity or being to all men, and a strictly universal natural maternity or existence. We seem in fact only now becoming qualified to realize the spiritual worth of the family considered as a representative economy. For unquestionably we do as a people constitutionally reject — in the symbols of priest and king — the only two hitherto sacred pillars upon which the ark of man's salva- tion has rested, or which have based his public and private righteousness ; and it is very clear that we could not have rejected the symbol unless the substance had first come empowering us so to do. That is to say, we as a people are without any proper political and religious life or consciousness which is not exclusively generated by the social spirit in humanity, or the truth of an approaching marriage between the public and private, the uni- versal and the particular interests of the race ; so that our future welfare, spiritual and material, stands frankly committed to the energies of that untried spirit. Happy they who in this twilight of ever- deepening spiritual unbelief within the compass of the old symbolic Church, and hence of ever-widen- ing moral earthquake, confusion, and desolation within the compass of the old symbolic State, in- telligently recognize the serene immaculate divinity A UTOBIOGRAPHY. I 'J'J of the social spirit, feel their souls stayed upon the sheer impregnable truth of human society, human fellowship, human equality, on earth and in heaven ! For they cannot fail to discern in the gathering " clouds of heaven," or the thickening obscuration which to so many despairing eyes is befalling the once bright earth of human hope, the radiant chariot-wheels of the long-looked-for Son of Man, bringing freedom, peace, and unity to all the realm of God's dominion. But these persons will be the promptest to perceive, and the most eager to con- fess, that the family bond with us, as it has always been restricted to rigidly literal dimensions, and never been allowed the faintest spiritual signifi- cance, so it must henceforth depend for its con- sideration wholly and solely upon the measure in which it freely lends itself to reproduce and em- body the distinctively social instincts and aspira- tions of the race. 12 CHAPTER III. SAME GENERAL SUBJECT. ^CONSIDERING the state of things I have been ^^ depicting as incident to my boyish experi- ence of the family, the church, and the world, you will hardly be surprised to hear me express my conviction that the influences — domestic, eccle- siastical, and secular — to which I was subjected, exerted a most unhappy bearing upon my intellec- tual development. They could not fail to do so in stimulating in me as they did a morbid doctrinal conscience. The great worth of one's childhood to his future manhood consists in its being a storehouse of in- nocent natural emotions and affections, based upon ignorance, which offer themselves as an admirable Divine mould or anchorage to the subsequent de- velopment of his spiritual life or freedom. Ac- cordingly in so far as you inconsiderately shorten this period of infantile mnocence and ignorance :n the child, you weaken his chances of a future manly character. I am sure that my own experi- ence proves this truth. I am sure that the early AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 79 development of my moral sense was every way fatal to my natural innocence, the innocence essential to a free evolution of one's spiritual character, and put me in an attitude of incessant exaction — in fact, of the most unhandsome mendicancy and hig- gling — towards my creative source. The thought of God in every childish mind is one of the utmost awe and reverence, arising from the tradition or rumor of his incomparable perfection ; and the only legitimate effect of the thought, accordingly, when it is left unsophisticate, is to lower his tone of self-sufficiency, and implant in his bosom the germs of a j(?«^/ consciousness, — that is, of a ten- der, equal regard for other people. But when the child has been assiduously taught, as I was, that an essential conflict of interests exists between man and his Maker, then his natural awe of the Divine name practically comes in only to aggravate his acquired sense of danger in that direction, and thus preternaturally inflame all his most selfish and sinister cupidities. Our native appreciation of ourselves or what belongs to us is sufficiently high at its lowest estate ; but you have only to dis- pute or put in peril any recognized interest of man, and you instantly enhance his appreciation of it a hundred-fold. Our selfhood, or propritim, is all we have got to dike out the inflowing tides of the spiritual world, l80 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. or serve as a barricade against the otherwise over- whelming influence of heaven and hell. My body isolates me from the world, or separates between me and the outward or finite ; but I should be lit- erally stifled in my own inward genesis, actually suffocated in my creative substance, were it not for this sentiment of selfhood, — the sentiment of a life within so much nearer and dearer to me than that of the world, so much more intimately and exquisitely my own than the life of the world is, as spiritually to guarantee me even against God or the infinite. The world gives me sensible constitution or existence, and if consequently you put yourself between me and the world, you doubt- less inflict a sensible but not necessarily a vital injury upon me. But my selfhood, or proprium, is all I know of spiritual life or inward immortal being, is all I am able consciously to realize of God himself, in short ; and whenever therefore you impinge upon that, — as when you assail my vital self-respect, when you expose me to gratuitous contumely or contempt, when you in any manner suppress or coerce my personal freedom to your own profit, — you put yourself as it were between me and God, at all events between me and all I thus far spiritually or livingly know of God ; you darken my life's sun at its very centre, and reduce me to the torpor of death. You fill my interiors A UTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 8 1 in short with an unspeakable anguish, and a re- sentment that knows no bounds ; that will stickle at absolutely nothing to give me relief from your intolerable invasion. Now, I had been thoroughly disciplined as a child in the Christian doctrine. My juvenile faith as enforced upon me at home, at church, and at Sunday-school, amounted substantially to this: that a profound natural enmity existed from the beginning between man and God, which however Christ had finally allayed, and that I ought there- fore gratefully to submit myself to the law of Christ. I never had a misgiving about my abso- lute duty in the premises, but practically the thing was impossible. For this law of Christ, as it was authoritatively interpreted to my imagination, re- volted instead of conciliating my allegiance, inas- much as it put me at internecine odds with my own nature, or obliged me to maintain an ascetic instead of a spontaneous relation to it. If there be any pretension more absurd philosophically than another, it is that any person or anything can act contrarily to their own nature. And if there be any pretension more immoral practically than another, it is that any person or thing ought to act in that manner. No higher obhgation is incum- bent upon any man in respect to the demands either of honesty or honor, than to act according 1 82 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. to his nature ; and if his action prove to be vicious or disorderly, we may be sure that his nature is still imperfectly developed, or is not allowed fair play. Of course I never actually framed the thought to myself that Christ's law as interpreted by the church was essentially burdensome, nor should I have dared to confess it, if my intellect had been ripe enough to suggest such a thing; but I instinctively felt it to be so, simply because it represented Christ as sequestrating to himself henceforth that personal allegiance on our part which is the due exclusively of our nature. For this according to the church is precisely what Christ does. All men have forfeited their natural title to God's favor ; Christ pays the forfeit in his proper person, and so confiscates to himself ever after the debt which men once owed exclusively to their nature. This doubtless was the reason — at least I can imagine none other so potent — why I began very early to discover disorderly tendencies, or prove rebellious to religious restraints. I cannot imagine anything more damaging to the infant mind than to desecrate its natural delights, or impose upon it an ascetic regimen. For nature is eternal in all her subjects, and when the child's natural instincts are violently suppressed or driven inwards by some overpowering outward authority, a moral feverish- AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 83 ness is sure to result, which would finally exhaust or consume every possibility of his future manhood, if nature did not incontinently put him to seeking a clandestine satisfaction of her will. I felt this impulse very strongly ; I doubt whether ever any one more so. I had always had the keenest savor and relish of whatsoever came to me by nature's frank inspiration or free gift. The common ore of existence perpetually converted itself into the gold of life in the glowing fire of my animal spirits. I lived in every fibre of my body. The dawn always found me on my feet ; and I can still vividly recall the divine rapture which filled my blood as I pur- sued under the magical light of morning the sports of the river, the wood, or the field. And here was a law which frowned — nay, scowled — upon that jocund unconscious existence; which drew a pall over the lovely outlying world of sense, and gave me to feel that I pursued its pleasures only at the imminent risk of immortal loss. Just conceive the horror of leading the tender mind of childhood to believe that the Divine being could under any cir- cumstance grudge it its natural delights ; could care, for example, for the holiness of any stupid day of the seven in comparison with the holiness of its innocent mind and body ! Herod's politic slaughter of the innocents were mercy itself beside this wanton outrage to nature. 1 84 A UTOBIOGRAPHY. This, accordingly, is the offence I charge upon my early religious training, — that it prematurely forced my manhood, or gave it a hot-bed develop- ment, by imposing upon my credulous mind "the fiction of a natural estrangement between me and God. My sense of individuality, my feeling of myself as a power endowed with the mastery of my own actions, was prematurely vitalized by my be- ing taught to conceive myself capable of a direct — that is, of a personal or moral — commerce with the most High. I do not mean of course that my individuality was perfectly hatched, so to say, while I was thus subject to parental authority; but only that it was altogether unduly stimulated or quick- ened, by my having been led at that very tender age to deem myself capable of maintaining good and evil relations with God. It is amazing to me how little sensitive people are to the blasphemy of this pretension, whether in the child or the man. That the stream should reproduce in its own sin- uous self the life of the fountain, and rejoice in it the while as its own life, — nothing can be better or more orderly. But that the stream should pretend actually to revert to the creative source whence all its life and motion are instantly derived, and affect to deplore the tortuous career which alone gives it phenomenal identity, as an absolute defect of na- ture or wrong done to the parent fount, — can any- AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 85 thing be imagined more flagrantly audacious and impudent, if it were not first of all so supremely stupid? But be this abstractly as you please, my own experience profoundly avouches its concrete truth. The thought of God as a power foreign to my nature, and with interests therefore hostile to my own, would have wilted my manhood in its cradle, would have made a thoughtful, anxious, and weary little slave of me before I had entered upon my teens, if it had not been for Nature's indomitable uprightness. It aroused a reflective self-conscious- ness in me when I ought by natural right to have been wholly immersed in my senses, and known nothing but the innocent pleasures and salutary pains they impart. I doubt whether any lad had ever just so thorough and pervading a belief in God's existence as an outside and contrarious force to humanity, as I had. The conviction of his supernatural being and attributes was burnt into me as with a red-hot iron, and I am sure no childish sinews were ever more strained than mine were in wrestling with the subtle terror of his name. This insane terror pervaded my conscious- ness more or less. It turned every hour of unal- lowed pleasure I enjoyed into an actual boon WTung from his forbearance ; made me loath at night to lose myself in sleep, lest his dread hand 1 86 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. should clip my thread of life without time for a parting sob of penitence, and grovel at morning dawn with an abject slavish gratitude that the sweet sights and sounds of Nature and of man were still around me. The terror was all but over- powering; yet not quite that, because it called out a juvenile strategy in me which gave me as it were a wqw pi'opriwn, or at all events enabled me bel et bien to hold my own. That is to say, Nature itself came to my aid when all outward resources proved treacherous, and enabled me to find in conventionally illicit relations with my kind a gos- pel succor and refreshment which my lawful ties were all too poor to allow. There was nothing very dreadful to be sure in these relations, and I only bring myself to allude to them by way of illustrating the gradual fading out or loss of stamina which the isolated family tie is undergoing in this country, and indeed every- where, in obedience to the growing access of the social sentiment. Man is destined to experience the broadest conceivable unity with his kind, — a unity regulated by the principle of spontaneous taste or attraction exclusively ; and it is only our puerile civic r/gime, with its divisions of rich and poor, high and low, wise and ignorant, free and bond, which keeps him from freely realizing this destiny : or rather let us say that it is the debas- AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 87 ing influence which this civic regime exerts upon the heart and mind of men, that keeps them as yet strangers even in thought to their divine destiny. Now, the isolated family bond is the nucleus or citadel of this provisional civic economy; and practically, therefore, the interest of the isolated family is the chief obstacle still presented to the full evolution of human nature. Accordingly, even in infancy the family subject feels an instinct of opposition to domestic rule. Even as a child he feels the family bond irksome, and finds his most precious enjoyments and friendships outside the home precinct. I do not say that the family in this country consciously antagonizes the social spirit in humanity, or is at all aware, indeed, of that deeper instinct of race-unity which is beginning to assert itself. For the family with us is not an institution, as it is and always has been in Europe, but only a transmitted prejudice, having no public prestige in any case but what it derives from the private worth of its members. Still, it is a very rancorous and deep-rooted prejudice, and specu- latively operates every sort of vexatjpus hindrance to the spread of the social spirit. The " rich " family looks down upon the " poor " family, the "cultivated" family upon the "uncultivated" one, — the consequence being that this old conven- tion which we have inherited from our European 1 88 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. ancestry still profoundly colors our practical ethics, and blights every effort and aspiration towards race-harmony. I have no desire, either, to intimate that I myself suffered from any particularly stringent administra- tion of the family bond. My intercourse with my parents was almost wholly destitute of a moral or voluntary hue. Whether it was that the children of the family were exceptionally void in their per- sonal relations of malignity or not, I do not know ; but, strive as I may, I cannot remember any- thing but a most infrequent exhibition of authority towards us on my father's part. And as to my mother, who was all anxiety and painstaking over our material interests, she made her own personal welfare or dignity of so little account in her ha- bitual dealings with us as to constitute herself for the most part a law only to our affections. I presume, however, that our childish intercourse with one another was unusually affectionate, since it incessantly gave birth to relations of the most frankly humoristic quality, which would have been repugnant to any tie of a mere dutiful regard. Nevertheless, I was never so happy at home as away from it. And even within the walls of home my happiest moments were those spent in the stable talking horse-talk with Asher Foot, the family coachman ; in the wood-house talking AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 89 pigeons, chickens, and rabbits with Francis Piles, the out-door servant; in the kitchen, in the even- ings, hearing Dinah Foot the cook, and Peter Woods the waiter, discourse of rheumatism, metho- dism, and miracle, with a picturesque good faith, superstition, and suavity that made the parlor converse seem insipid; or, finally, in the bed- rooms teasing the good-natured chambermaids till their rage died out in convulsions of impotent laughter, and they threatened the next time they caught me to kiss me till my cheeks burnt crim- son. These were my purest household delights, because they were free or imprescriptible ; that is, did not appeal to my living heart through the medium of my prudential understanding. But sweet as these " stolen waters " were, they were not near so refreshing as those I enjoyed outside the house. For obviously my relation to the house- hold servants, however democratic my youthful tendencies might be, could not be one of true fellowship, because the inequality of our positions prevented its ever being perfectly spontaneous. I was indebted for my earliest practical initia- tion into a freer sentiment to the friendly intimacy I chanced to contract with my neighbors the shoe-makers, whom I have described in a former chapter. Unfortunately, these plausible young men had really no more moral elevation than if 1 90 A UTOBIO GRAPHY. they openly cultivated some form of dubious in- dustry; and they were willing, I think, to take advantage of our boyish frankness and generosity to an extent which, on the whole, rendered their acquaintance very harmful to us. I cannot in the least justify them, but on the contrary hand their memory over to the unfaltering Nemesis which waits upon wronged innocence. But at the same time I must say that their friendship for awhile most beneficially housed my expanding conscious- ness, or served to give it an outward and objective direction. They had, to begin with, such an im- mense force of animal spirits as magnetized one out of all self-distrust or timidity, barely to be with them. And then they were so utterly void of all religious sensibility or perturbation that my mental sinews relaxed at once into comparative ease and freedom, so that the force of nature within me then felt, I may say, its first authentica- tion. They gave me, for example, my earliest rel- ish of living art and art criticism. There was no theatre at that time in the city, but its place was held by an amateur Thespian company, whose ex- hibition they assiduously attended ; and the delight they manifested in the drama, and the impassioned criticism they indulged in upon its acting, made me long for the day when I too should enter upon the romance of life. They were also great admirers A U TO BIO GRAPHY. 1 9 1 of the triumphs of eloquence, and I used to bring collections of speeches from our own library to read to them by the hour. It was a huge pleasure to be able to compel their rapt attention to some eloquent defence of liberty or appeal to patriot- ism which I had become familiar with in my school or home reading. There was an old work- man in the shop, an uncle of the principals, who sacrificed occasionally to Bacchus, and whose eyes used to drip very freely when I read Robert Emmet's famous speech, or the plea of the pris- oner's counsel at the trial scene in *' The Heart of Midlothian." He even went so far in his enthusi- asm as to predict for the reader a distinguished career at the bar; but apparently prophecy was not my friend's strong point. Note. — The Autobiography was interrupted by Mr. James at this point, and never finished. — Ed. ^pixitml Creation: NECESSARY IMPLICATION OF NATURE IN IT. AN ESSAY TOWARDS ASCERTAINING THE J?dLE OF EVIL IN DIVINE HOUSEKEEPING. 13 SPIRITUAL CREATION. CHAPTER I. THE INDIGESTIBLE NEWSPAPER. I AM distressed at the aspect of our newspapers ; not chiefly because they are so full of horrors, but because they indicate so helpless if not so indifferent an attitude of the public mind in regard to our growing vice and crime. Wickedness in the most revolting forms appears to be holding its saturnalia among us ; and yet our clergy, our lawyers, our doctors, our literary men, in short our moralists as a class, are all the while sleeping soundly, and no one apparently is on the alert but that very nimble John the Baptist, our modern newspaper reporter. What is the inference? Are men losing their old disgust of vice and crime? I, for one, do not believe it. I am persuaded, on the contrary, that the distaste of everything that wars against the soul's health or degrades the body was never so cordial, so implacable, nor above all so diffused as it is now. How do we account then for 196 THE OPTIMISM OF GOOD MEAT. the indolent, imbecile, laisser-aller attitude which our leading men in church and state — oiir*^ scribes and pharisees" — are content to maintain with re- spect to the rank and festering outbirths of our modern civilization? There would be little or no difficulty in account- ing for it provided one could reasonably look upon these men as ideal good men, men of really humane lives, having an inbred disgust, a natural or spon- taneous distate, of evil in all its forms. For such men doubtless are content to separate themselves personally from all contact with evil-doers, even to the extent of refusing to take an active part in bringing them to judgment, or chasing them down to imprisonment and death. Indeed it is the wont of refined or regenerate natures to observe the same optimistic attitude towards our current civic degradation which educated men exhibit in regard to the exercise of the elective franchise, in view of the fraud or at best the violence and contention which one is liable on occasion to encounter at the polls. The action of these latter, though it is greatly complained of, is not at all illogical from their own point of view, which is that of a tacit scepticism in regard to popular government. That is to say, these men know very well at heart, how- ever little they may be disposed openly to profess the truth, that no government is destined for per- THE OPTIMISM OF GOOD MEiV. \()J manence which depends for its functioning upon party organization, and the envenomed trickery and falsity which such organization is sure to en- gender. And they do not at heart, therefore, very much mind your impassioned criticism. They will go forth sometimes to please a friend, or to protest against some passing political turpitude of excep- tional dimensions by recording their vote in favor of an unpopular candidate ; but they have gener- ally a great aversion to party politics. In fact our government is emphatically a popular government, the only truly popular government under the sun ; and that is the true excuse it offers for the appar- ently infirm practical working it exhibits in com- parison with aristocratic governments. If it were instituted and administered in the interest of a class, every voter no doubt would be eager to do his duty. But it was instituted in the interest of the unclassed or oppressed, in defence of the victim of established civic and religious privilege wherever he might be found ; to lift his children from the dunghill and seat them beside the princes of the earth. And as soon as these ends have been accomplished it will shrivel up and disappear. Now we have all of us an intellectual instinct of this truth, sapping the patriotic sentiment in us at its base in the interest of a broader humanitary consciousness. We secretly feel, all of us, some- iqS the inveteracy of their faith. what that God Almighty is working out by hook and by crook His own stupendous will of right- eousness through our pedantic and frivolous max- ims of government, and will be sure in the end to overturn by means of them that mass of unjust and decrepit legislation which defiles our statute-books, as being no longer congruous with men's living conscience. And how can any one so persuaded sincerely feel that it is of any vital moment to, human progress, whether he specifically votes or. neglects to vote? But this is only an illustration. What I adduce it for is to say, that if men who have a sincere faith in the beneficent progress of legislation entertain so devout a conviction of the iiecessaiy working of our civic machinery as not to feel themselves or their ow^n personal action at all indispensable to it, much more do men of an enlightened humanitary faith feel secure that the, destiny of human society is not going to be com-, promised, but rather promoted, by our existing civic disorder. In fact nothing could be more fatal in the estimation of these men to the race's destiny, or the coming of God's long-promised, reign of righteousness upon the earth, than such an improved working of our civic machinery as would tend to reconcile men to the existing order, — an, order which is guaranteed only by the force of, 4RE OUR MORALISTS GOOD MEN? 1 99 numbers, and hence does almost nothing to soothe or conciliate, but everything to irritate and inflame, the fallacious sentiment of selfhood or freedom in the human bosom. But we have been hitherto reasoning upon a false basis ; for notoriously our civic and ecclesias- tical leaders do not in the least report themselves to the popular sense as ideal good men, or men of an enlightened humanitary conscience ; and we may therefore dismiss that solution of our problem at once. They call themselves " conservatives," which means that they are content at heart with our existing civic order, notwithstanding its odious incidental inhumanity, or approve of such changes only as will leave that order essentially unimpaired. Why should these men, then, being of the confess- edly conservative type they are or believing as they do in the essential righteousness of a government of force, exhibit so much practical insensibility to the loathsome vice and crime by which that gov- ernment is becoming effectually undermined, and indeed menaced with speedy downfall ? It is that they inherit intellectually a fatal delu- sion on this whole subject. The reason why they are content to forbear any active effort for the sup- pression of the hideous evils which disfigure our Christian civilization, is that they do not believe the divine providence to be at all properly impli- 200 THEIR EGREGIOUS UNWISDOM. cated in these evils. And the ground of their un- belief is undoubtedly a notion they cherish that God in endowing men with selfhood, or felt free- dom, practically divests himself to that extent of his proper infinitude, or so far forth releases to them his proper being, constituting them each an independent centre of action, and reserving to himself only the vulgar and arbitrary right subse- quently to reward those who obey his revealed will, and punish those who disobey. Their idea is, in other words, that moral agency is absolute free agency, whereas it is at most only qjiasi free ; and hence they conceive that in creating men moral the divine being perforce absolves them to that extent from his dependence, and so renders them unconditionally responsible for the fruit of their activity. This is the only way in which, on con- servative principles, to justify the divine provi- dence in respect to the phenomena of our moral history ; for if man were not to all the extent of his moral constitution exempt, as our conserva- tives hold, from the divine control, his false wit- ness, his theft, his adultery, and murder would, in their opinion, refer themselves not to himself but to his maker. Here then is the answer to the question just propounded, namely, why men of so-called con- servative instincts remain practically optimistic or MAN IS NOT BY CREATION MORAL. 20I indifferent with respect to the spread of vice and crime. They take for granted that man is a moral being, not by the exigency of his natural constitu- tion merely, but by the necessity of his spiritual creation. They suppose him to be invested by an absolute divine fiat with the power of determining his own relation to good and evil ; and hence they conceive that to quarrel with our existing morality — to the extent, if need be, of wishing that the entire voluntary activity of the human mind might become obliterated from the record of memory — is seriously to affront the divine providence, and provoke signal judgments at its hands. Such, and no other that I am able to see, is the exact intellect- ual pretext upon which our easy-going conserva- tism reconciles itself to the actual course of history, and persistently awaits with folded arms and stolid brow the revolutionary crisis to which that history is blindly galloping on. I, for my own part, renounce root and branch the conservative logic. That is to say, I both deny with heart and understanding that man is by crea- tion moral, and cherish with heart and understand- ing the most revolutionary hopes and aspirations with respect to our existing moralistic regimen. I wish it to be distinctly noted, moreover, that the discrepancy between us is not merely scientific, hav- ing regard only to the surface of action, but strictly 202 FALLACIES OF CONSERVATISM. philosophic, as reaching to and renewing the very substance of the mind. The conservative idea, for example, is that our selfhood or felt freedom con- stitutes our true life, our inseparable being, the sole veritable life or being we derive from God ; whereas I maintain on the contrary that it does no such thing: that it constitutes at most our finite or conscious existence, — that is, the mere quasi life, the mere phenomenal or apparitional being we derive from an altogether unconscious natural community or fellowship which we are under with respect to our kind. In short, the conservative notion is that our natural selfhood or felt freedom is given us not as a means but as an end ; that it is not a mere constitutional method of the divine administration under cover of which He works out the most exalted and adorable spiritual ends — ends of a really infijiite love and wisdom — but is itself the veritable end of creation. Hence they never suspect that the divine administration of the world is inward or spiritual, but suppose on the contrary that our public no less than our private conscience is regulated upon strictly outward or moral princi- ples. Their idea in fact is, not that the private conscience of man burdened with ignorance and in- firmity is a mere providential stepping-stone to the evolution of an enlightened and permanent public conscience, but that it is intrinsically superior to ITS STERILE AXD INHUMAN LOGIC. 203 his public conscience ; so that any man who con- scientiously maintains in opposition to the revealed light of his own time the truth, for example, of tran- substantiation, or the truth of Christ's vicarious sac- rifice for sin, and the right perhaps of the civil magistrate to bind men to his unconditional alle- giance, merits men's praise rather than their blame. To say all in a word : our conservatives regard force, not freedom, as the true principle of God's government in this world whatever it may be in the other; and hence have no hesitation in char- acterizing our existing order, which is vitalized by force or the rule of a majority, as divine. Of course, then, they feel no sensibility to vice and crime in their spiritual aspect, or as they inwardly affect their subject, but only in their moral aspect, or as they outwardly affect other people. And the law being presumably quite competent to deal with vice and crime in this their purely objective as- pect, they feel themselves exempt from all legiti- mate personal responsibility on that behalf. I repeat that there is no apparent flaw in the conservative logic. If the existing order of human life is divine, then force is the only cognizable principle of the divine administration, since this order is guaranteed only by force, or disdains the sanction of human spontaneity. And if we admit force to be the principle of God's government over 204 ITS STERILE A AD INHUMAN LOGIC. men, then manifestly his government must lay its account with perpetually provoking the antagonism of human freedom : since freedom and force are wholly irreconcilable factors wherever the former does not command and the latter serve ; and human freedom, whenever it is forced either into covert or open antagonism with established order, at once and of necessity interprets itself either into vice or crime. Law consequently as the symbol of order and the enemy of our unrestrained freedom is the pole-star of the conservative imagination, and re- spect for it as established the sum of all human duty. The conservative's respect for law is so great that he entertains comparatively no respect for any higher or spiritual interest of human life which the law may incidentally violate ; so that let vice and crime flourish to any extent they please, the criminal or vicious subject not only forfeits by his conduct every claim which as a human being he might have to the compassionate or sympathetic regard of his fellows, but invokes a more and ever more stringent and blind application of legal pen- alties. Thus our addled conservatism complacently stumbles on, only too happy to make the heartless fetish it worships under the name of God the pliant vicar of its own crass inhumanity, and never dreams of the dread abyss which must erelong ingulf both itself and its idol forever out of human sight. ITS PHILOSOPHICAL FATUITY. 20$ I have let my pen run on to this extent un- checked, by way of making plain to the reader's mind what I conceive to be the chief existing obstacle to our indefinite intellectual progress ; namely, the incubus of conservative prejudice. For however consistent the conservative logic may be when viewed in the light of its own fundamental axiom, which is that of the divinity of force, the ax- iom itself is profoundly vicious. Viewed by the light of our own day, the sole veritable rule of the divine kingdom, whether on earth or in heaven, is freedom, not force ; and there is no possible antag- onism, but only the fullest harmony, between the divine and human natures ; for in truth the nature of man is literally divine, and it is only his person which has ever had any valid right to esteem itself undivine. I am saying nothing absolutely novel when I say this ; for the conservative himself is willing to admit — what indeed is necessary to the idea of creation — that the creator is essentially infinite^ as being able spiritually to exist or go forth in created form, that is, in the natural lineaments of his creature. How is it conceivable, then, on the conservative's own admission, that the creator, constituting as he does not only the spiritual being or substance of the creature but also his identical natural existence or form as well, should ever feel any such antagonism on the creature's part to 206 IS MA A' FINITE BY CREATION? himself as to call for any other regimen on his own part towards the creature than that of patient, unswerving, unlimited subjection to the latter's will? By the very necessity of the case of course, or ex vi terminonim, the creature must prove in himself utterly aliejt to — that is, other than — the creator, since otherwise creation must collapse out and out; and the only question consequently to be considered is, whether this inevitable alien- ation or otherness which characterizes the relation of creature to creator is a truth of consciousness or a fact of sense. CHAPTER II. OUR SENTIMENT OF OTHERNESS TO GOD. NOW I do not hesitate to avow my conviction that the sentiment in question is altogether a truth of consciousness, and not the least a fact of sense, save in so far as consciousness involves sense, and puts what interpretation it pleases upon it. Please understand me. What I say is very sim- ple in form, but it needs, doubtless, a little explica- tion in substance. I say that the sentiment which men have of their natural otherness to God arising from their birth in space and time, is a strictly subjective illusion of the mind with no particle of objective reality in it. That men commonly judge otherwise we know. They conceive that nothing can be more objectively sure and demonstrable than that they themselves are not God, are indeed most otJier than God. For identifying themselves with space and time (or their sensible organization) which apparently isolates them from universal man, 208 SUBJECTIVE NOT OBJECTIVE. they can reasonably come to no other conclusion. But I confess the conclusion is abhorrent to me in the abstract, or when applied to universal man, be- cause I have no particle of belief in its premises. I do not believe that universal man is at all iden- tical with time and space limitations (or bodily organization) ; and I deny, therefore, that bodily or space and time limitations are competent to alienate him from God, or give him a conscious otherness to God, as they give us finite men. Man universal in fact is without body, save in us particular, shadowy, figurative men, his body being spiritual, or having divine and infinite dimensions. He is what is technically known in Christian litera- ture as the Lord, or divine-NATURAL man, who is forever freed from sensible limitations, and per- fectly at one with divine love and wisdom and power. I hope my reader won't insist upon my proving these things. I frankly admit that I can- not. For to make a thing probable (that is, prova- ble) the thing must already be an inference from science, or sensibly enforced knowledge ; and what we are speaking of here — namely, universal man- hood — transcends the sphere of science, which deals only with specific or phenomenal manhood, and certainly falls without the sphere of sense, which utterly denies universals. But I have no doubt that if I were only able to do justice to the great MEN'S BODIES NOT THEMSELVES. 209' theme as it exists to my own mind, my readers would not be slow to confess agreement with me. If, then, in truth men's bodies are not themselves, how will it be apt to fare with this unhandsome and malignant feeling of otherness which they nat- urally cherish towards God? For our sense of alienation — or otherness — to God is based upon a presumption that our bodies are identical with ourselves ; and inasmuch as our bodies are what limit or finite us, we infer, reasonably enough, that we ourselves are by nature palpably other than, and antagonistic to, God's infinitude. Take away this presumption, then, and the reasoning engen- dered by it falls at once to the ground. I do not mean to say, of course, that we in that case should begin to consider ourselves personally identical with God ; for to be a conscious person is to be ,f^^-centred, and to be God is to be not only with- out selfhood, but identical with universal life or being. Thus to lose the sense of personal other- ness to God is by no means equivalent to feeling ontseM personally allied with God, — above all, per- sonally united Wxth. him. On the contrary, spiritual nearness to God implies infinite personal remote- ness from him, since God avouches himself to be universal life or being, which is flagrantly incom- patible either with the fact or the sentiment of per- sonality. In short, pantheism is in no sense to 14 2IO WHAT, BY THE WAY, IS NATURE? be considered the legitimate doctrinal outcome of spiritual creation, or God's omnipotence ; for pan- theism asserts the identity of God and nature, while spiritual creation is the doctrine (and dis- covery in fact) of nature's fierce and untamable " otherness " to God, of its restless and ruthless oppugnancy to the divine name. What, by the way, is nature? Popularly used, the " nature " of a thing means what the thing is in itself, or apart from everything else. Philosophi- cally defined, it is the principle of identity in exist- ence, forever differentiating creature from creator by stamping the one finite, subjective, conscious, the other infinite, objective, unconscious. It is, in short, the principle of tincrcation which is logically involved in all created existence ; for man's spirit- ual creation is by no means the very silly thing it is sometimes reported to be when it is character- ized as the making him out of nothing. On the contrary, spiritual creation is his plenary redemption out of the death and hell he is in by nature. The creative esse is infinite or omnipotent love. But there could be no love (either finite or infinite) shown in making a man out of nothing. A man cannot possibly recognize himself as being made out of nothing, and can only conceive himself as made (whenever he is made at all) out of some- thing, and that something moreover exquisitely MANHOOD IS REGENERATION. 211 Ugly. For example, how do we speak to a man sunk in vice, and appealing to us for help? " No," we say, " make a man of yourself first : be a man, or become a man ; then we shall gladly do all you want. But there is no use in doing anything at all for you until this r^-formation is achieved ; quite as little use, in fact, as it would be to an architect to build his house upon a quicksand." Thus common-sense unmistakably teaches us that manhood means what is opposite to .f^^-indul- gence ; that is, means the absence of bestiality, the cessation of voluntary beggary, or the vile habit one is sometimes tempted to drift into of de- pending upon his friends and neighbors for main- tenance. It teaches us, in short, that no man becomes a man otherwise than by the foregoing of evil ; that is, the renunciation of self. Now, if common-sense teaches us thus much about manhood, — namely, that it means J^^cleans- ing, means the laying aside of whatever evil at- taches to us by natural birth, by our own moral or personal delinquency, or what not, — then we have an infallible guide as to what is meant in our spir- itual genesis by God's creating man in his own image. The meaning is : that God creates man, or gives him being, in no other way than by spiritu- ally releasing him or redeeming him from all the evil wrapped up in his nature. The greatest con- 212 NO MAN NATURALLY GOOD. ceivable amount of evil is involved in man's nature, because in the first place his nature or essential quality is infinitely low and contemptible in his own eyes, being that of a creature — that is to say, of one whose life or being is really not in himself, but in another than himself; and because, in the second place, this life or being of his (by virtue of its ex- pressing or originating in infinite love) though not really in himself is yet apparently in himself and not in another. In short, the nature of the creature is extremely deceptive, being on its surface a gigan- tic equivoque or quibble ; for it makes the creator practically nought in it, and the creature himself practically everything. Thus Adam is bad enough in all conscience considered as a spiritual exploit of creative power ; for he has no phenomenal life even, no sentiment of natural selfhood or person- ality which may redeem him from the brutes, by constitutionally enlivening him to his own con- sciousness, or making him to his own eyes appear to be. But Adam complicated with Eve — that is, endowed with natural selfhood, or the knowledge of good and evil — is an infinitely worse exploit, were not this natural selfhood or phenomenal life of his going to be more than justified in the final winding up of things, by God's most intimate and unstinted spiritual indwelling in it. Bear firmly in mind that nature has no positive NATURE MERE UNCREATION OR NOT-BEING. 21-^ function in spiritual creation. It is merely a nega- tive principle, or principle of uncreation, implied in everything that phenomenally exists, in order to hint what a heinous spiritual quality the creature would own if he should actually exist otherwise than phenomenally, or in himself, and apart from his creator : so setting off to the creature's imagi- nation (or enhancing to the utmost his conception of) the creative omnipotence manifested in endow- ing him with spotless and immortal being. Nature is always to be logically taken for granted in spirit- ual creation, as giving the creature subjective iden- tity, or conscious distinction from the creator ; but this logical virtue is all the merit it possesses or ever will possess. Especially it must not be thought to be itself created. For the whole and sole func- tion of nature being to constitute that suppositi- tious realm oi uncreation, or ;/c?/-being, out of which man is logically held to be delivered by his crea- tion, the thought of it as itself created would have no other effect than to stultify this its constitu- tional function. Thus to look upon nature as created would be logically equivalent to robbing the creature of his constitutional background or propritim, because it would make any such back- ground or proprium plainly superfluous. In short, it would be to turn creation into child's play, mak- ing it the most essentially inert, sentimental, and 21 d, HENCE IS NEITHER CREATIVE NOR CREATED. absurd thing conceivable. If man's nature — which is his sole potential source of death, so con- stituting his whole v&n\.3h\e propriiiin — be created, that is, converted into life, it must of course utterly fail to attest any longer the quality of the creature in himself as a subjective antagonist or " other " of deity. For in that case his nature would no longer be his own nature (wrought out to his own expe- rience from chaos and ancient night, and inefface- ably stamped with his own signature), but some nondescript nature arbitrarily conferred upon him by his maker. Above all let it be noted, that the creature's legitimate boast would be, in case his nature were created, to present in himself a direct or personal image of his creator, which could only be a breathless, dead, mechanical image ; for a spiritual or living image of a spiritual or living original can never be a direct or personal copy of it, but must always in the very nature of things (or out of regard to its own identification as an image) preserve a most inverse or indirect relation to its original. In short, we may rely upon it that a spiritual creation which should attempt to pass off the creature as directly — that is, personally — agreeable to the creator, would confess itself the grossest botch, the most monstrous caricature, of creation conceivable. CHAPTER III. OTHERNESS TO GOD UNSCIENTIFIC. T ET the sentiment go then as a dictate of con- sciousness. It is fallacious enough even at that valuation. But it would be simply intolerable if we should put a graver estimate upon it by allow- ing it to pass muster as a scientific fact, or daUnn of sense. For sense is the realm of the fixed or absolute in knowledge, supplying the scientific in- stinct in humanity with that firm unshakable basis which it both imperatively needs and irresistibly craves. If consequently our feeling of otherness to God, or alienation from him, were given in sense, it would fall within the cognizance of science ; that is, it would claim objectivity, and so forfeit its title to subjective appreciation exclusively. For con- science has no pretension to adjudicate in outward or objective things, which are the things of science. Its sole legitimate business is with the human sub- jectivity, whose judgments it stamps vicious and vain. In other words, it is never a witness of what is true in regard to all men, but only in regard to 2l6 CONSCIENCE A LIVING DEATH. ' particular persons ; namely, that these persons are invariably finite or dead, being consciously made up, not of spiritual or affirmative substance, but of a balance between good and evil, or heaven and hell. It has absolutely no place save in application to the finite, contingent, moral, empirical man ; the man who is what he is, not by force of his spon- taneous manhood, but simply by virtue of his vol- untary relations to other men, — its highest function being to stigmatize this man in his own esteem, or keep him spiritually feeling how small a claim he possesses in his own right to the divine compla- cency. It may be called a tacit negative witness to the finite bosom — the bosom fed upon the con- flict of good and evil — of that immaculate life of God which is shut up in his own nature ; that is, in universal man, in contrast with whose infinite grace and loveliness all finite or personal righteousness is unclean and contemptible. Thus to the moral aspirant after righteousness or peace with God conscience is a sentence of living death. And hence it constitutes in the mind that entertains it the veritable dawn of that miraculous spiritual world, or world of true being, which every man is destined to enter only through moral suicide, or inward death to self in all its forms, and a conse- quent spiritual new-birth. It is commonly conceived by our modern most THE LAW AND ITS SPIRIT. 21 y respectable "scribes and pharisees," that conscience or the moral law has no other object than to pro- nounce our self-love criminal when it goes to excess, and to visit accordingly with intense divine odium the false-witness, the thief, the adulterer, the mur- derer, who illustrates that excess. It is true enough that the moral law does actually stigmatize men's overt fraud, duplicity, and violence with the utmost emphasis. But rely upon it that this is only with a view to set them upon observing the hidden incite- ments to these things, which are incomparably more dangerous and fatal. For once that a man is tempted to do overt injustice to his neighbor, he is tempted fifty times to do him secret injus- tice in the way of maligning his good name, or coveting his property or life. And any law which induces a habit of introspection in regard to these meannesses, is incalculably precious. But the moral law in point of fact does not exist save as a literal or formal denunciation of men's natural bad man- ners with respect to each other. And literal or formal existence is one thing: the substantial life or being of such existence, which is the end or ob- ject it acknowledges, is quite another thing. There is all the distance between them that there is be- tween earth and heaven, or flesh and spirit. The object of conscience or the moral law, for example, cannot be identical with the law itself; that is to 2l8 LETTER AND SPIRIT OF LEGALITY, say, with its own literal or subjective form: since object and subject are hopelessly antagonistic, object being always spiritual, and subject inva- riably natural. Thus the object of conscience, the end out of which it grows and which it expresses, is something palpably different from its bodily let- ter, or its material subjectivity, which is a mere denunciation of man's brutality to man. You can get nothing else out of conscience or the moral law in its subjective aspect than this. It is nothing but a denunciation of men's infamous inhumanity to each other when they follow the mere light of nature. Consequently when men ask the meaning of the law, the spiritual end or object that it illustrates, it will not do to answer that its object is to condemn man's natural selfishness ; for this is mere stupid and nonsensical iteration. This condemnation is what the law in its literal or subjective aspect al- ready stands for to the inquirer ; and when he asks you the spiritual meaning of such condemnation (as whether it is simply and diabolically personal, or whether it is instinct with God's magnificent mercy) he is not at all content with your foolishly pointing him for a reply to the thing he is ask- ing you about. Least of all will the inquirer be disposed to put up with the answer of our respectable " scribes and GOD'S ANIMUS TOWARDS EVIL-DOERS. 219 pharisees." Their answer to those who ask this question — to those who ask what is the animus of the law in thus stigmatizing men's natural greed — is, that it is to express God's holy abhorrence of evil-doers. This answer is indefensible from any point of view, being logically subversive both of law and gospel. For, however excusable it may be to say in passing that God hates evil doing, it is yet, considering our total and exclusive spiritual dependence on him, shocking blasphemy to say that he hates evil-doers also. Hatred to evil in the abstract, if that be spiritually true, is bad enough in one's creator. But hatred to evil in concrete personal form is infinitely worse, being nothing short of devilish, unless one chances to be injured by it : which is a liability that cannot possibly at- tach to God, since he alone creates men good and evil, and evil men therefore by the hypothesis of creation derive all their latent and patent force in the long run to do evil from him. Surely one would scruple to attribute devilish qualities to God, seeing that he needs them not. And if one wanted to honor God, and not dishonor him, it were infinitely pref- erable to think of him as stopping by his omnipo- tent might man's earliest inclinations to e\nl, instead of wilfully hating the creatures he has made for doing what they cannot help doing, being appar- ently the very thing they were born to do. No, the 220 HIS ATTITUDE NOWAY SINISTER. only logical answer you can make to these ques- tioners is to say, that the spiritual purpose of the law is no way to make the character of the law- giver odious and detestable, but simply to drive men to j^^-examination, in order that they may learn betimes to avert themselves from personal pride, or pride of character, which is the only thing that can ever spiritually separate them from their kind, and so forever prevent their inwardly making the acquaintance of their creator and maker. CHAPTER IV. ERROR OF MODERN PHARISAISM. THE fundamental error of our modern pharisa- ism consists in holding that the evil which pertains to human life is distinctively moral, not spiritual ; thus that it characterizes men in their re- lations to each other, instead of characterizing all men in their relation to God. Our stolid rulers in church and state allege (and our whole Christian civilization proceeds upon this shallow allegation) that God is spiritually incensed with men because they bear false witness against each other or commit some similar act of frank atrocity. It is impossible to do greater spiritual wrong to the Divine name than to perpetuate this superannuated calumny. Indeed if one is intent to know why so many culti- vated men at this day are found to doubt and dis- credit God's perfect name, he will not be surprised to learn that it is because they never hear that name asserted by the Christian church save in associa- tion with this or some kindred calumny. No idea is so essentially preposterous or unfounded as that 222 GOD HAS NO PERSONAL QUARREL WITH MEN. God almighty has any personal quarrel with men, or is capable of finding fault with their moral con- duct, however evil it be. It would be absurd for any one to credit this imputation who reflects that the outward universe on its face (which comes, as men think, directly from God's hand) is full of forms which, though they are not nominally forms of deceit and fraud and adultery and murder, are yet substantially so, and still are not only not ex- posed to God's contempt and displeasure, but are daily filled by him with the utmost vigor, grace, and beauty. If I were base enough or irreverent enough to fear any treacherous treatment to myself personally at the hands of almighty God, I should certainly confront him some fair day with a whole menagerie of fierce robust animals, or of alert pois- onous reptiles, or of death-bearing plants and min- erals, asking him or his attorney to explain why all this crowd of futile things, which are practically so immoral as never to have felt a blush of shame, are yet able to preserve their innocence in his sight unimpaired, while I a model man perchance, at all events incomparably above them both in my nature and breeding, feel myself chock-full of guilt, or what is the same thing, of the most poignant self- condemnation, towards him? But I am not really so mad as to attempt measuring myself with the most high, and I will therefore restrict myself to HAS NO FERSOiVAL LIKES OR DISLIKES. 223 protesting, afresh and always, against the existing Pharisaism which maintains both impHcitly and ex- phcitly that the great God almighty himself is so much of a person (or prig) as actually to hate men because they illustrate the nature he gives them by doing evil to each other's person and property. I hope, however, that none of my readers will so far misconceive me as to imagine that because I deny God's personal dislike to evil men I am at all disposed to affirm his personal liking for them. It would be a great gain to human thought, if, in speaking of God's liking and disliking, we could rid ourselves of the notion that either of them were personal ; that is, moral or voluntary. Because to think of God as actuated (save in a figurative sense) by personal motives towards his creatures — or what we in our infirm speech call will — is really to give him an essentially outside position to them, which can never in thought become transmuted into a creative relation. Such a blunder as this would involve great injustice to the sovereign truth of things, which is that God the omnipotent creator of men sees no difference of merit and demerit be- tween them, and views the differences which they themselves laboriously construct and cherish as so much rubbish. But surely no one is stupid enough to need my assurance that God is the stanch un- shrinking friend of good morals in his creatures, 224 ADAM'S DISOBEDIENCE FORTUNATE. because these things illustrate and avouch his es- sential humanity or justice. I for my part am only concerned to relieve his holy name of the imputa- tion which the orthodox church puts upon it, of being nothing more than an infinitely small mor- alist, intent upon forever separating men into good and evil, or heaven and hell, in place of eternally effacing these odious phenomenal differences in the superb and deathless unity of his own natural humanity. — A curious contradiction prevails, by the way, between our orthodox traditions of creation, and the bibUcal revelations of that fact. It seems to be agreed among ecclesiastics that the original breach between man and God took place when Adam, who was still a denizen of the garden of Eden, disobeyed God in eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Now to constitute Adam disobedient in this particular, it must be that God had previously forbidden him to eat of the tree. But in point of fact God is never repre- sented as forbidding him to eat of the tree of knowl- edge. He is only represented as making death contingent upon his eating of it ; and death is a purely empirical thing, which man never can un- derstand but through his own experience of it. Thus God is never represented as saying to his clownish creature : " You must absolutely not eat IT MADE EXPERIENCE POSSIBLE. 225 of this accursed tree ; " all he is represented as saying to him is : " You shall assuredly not eat of it witJioiit dyingT Adam consequently did not disobey God in nibbhng at the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But he came thus into the knowl- edge of a finite good, a good limited by evil ; a good accordingly which he was never intended to find life in, but only infinite perplexity and death ; a good in short which was identical with himself , and therefore brought him to self-consciousness as an essentially finite being, profoundly alien to God. Adam could only have disobeyed God, or violated a divine commandment, provided the command- ment were absolute or unconditional, which the Eden ordinance was far from being. God's com- mands are never absolute or unconditional, because they are addressed to free subjects, — subjects who are destined to be good or evil just as they them- selves please. The only death Adam, as a creat- ture of infinite good, consequently was ever liable to, consisted in his actual experience of this moral freedom, or capacity of self-guidance. He and his descendants have really done nothing from that day to this but fulfil God's law and exemplify it, in proving to so many men's heartfelt content spiritually how utterly damnable a thing it is to be guided by oneself — that is, to lead a wretched moral and rational life — except under constant 15 226 MORALITY A VICIOUS STATE. hope and expectation of soon finding an infinitely- better guide. Morality even in its highest possible evolution is no way near to spirituality, but all the more remote from it, because it is based upon the truth of selfliood which is only an apparent truth, while spiritual life claims as a basis the sole truth of omnipotent or creative being. Instead of being a thing to be proud of, instead of being a thing for man to be spiritually honored and advantaged by, as our foolish churchmen and statesmen report it to be, morality is in itself, though man is still little conscious of the fact, a truly vicious state — a state indeed of spiritual death, out of which there is no resurrection possible for him save by the con- scious recognition of God's omnipotence, which sheds such an unwonted light into the mind as constantly converts all that men naturally call life into death, and all that they naturally call death into life. If any evidence were wanted of the infinite su- periority which the biblical revelation of creation presents to the conceptions of men on the subject, whether sacred or secular, whether traditional or scientific, it is to be found in the fact that revelation makes creation spiritual or living, while our ecclesi- astics and men of science always conceive of it as literal or dead. Ecclesiastics and men of science conceive that men are altogether sufficiently ere- CONSTITUTION NOT CREATION. 22/ ated when they are naturally born. But natural constitution is not spiritual creation, by a long odds. It is proof, no doubt, to our heavy wit that some- thing has been created : but what, we do not know. We sometimes fancy that the creative energy is conspicuous in endowing the temperament of gen- ius, and producing such persons as Shakspeare, Newton, and Franklin. Of course the Shakspea- rian style of man could scarcely appear except upon a background of ordinary men. So all men find themselves somehow created, either as leading or secondary products of creative skill. Now reve- lation makes exceedingly light of Shakspeare. It takes, indeed, no account of the difference between remarkable men and the vulgar commonalty, but sweeps them all both great and small from the floor of God almighty's workshop, very much as a carpenter sweeps the shavings which encumber his work out of his way, and consigns them to oblivion. For it represents no man as really created, who is unredeemed from his natural selfhood, or unclothed with a regenerate personality. Our emulative Shakspeares, Newtons, and Franklins may doubt- less find this law hard, and refuse in fact to be cre- ated on such preposterous terms. Nevertheless such is the law of creation which revelation disclo- ses, whatever men of genius may think of it ; and it is decidedly wiser at the start to try to understand 228 ^^O GOD BUT THE ALMIGHTY. it before proceeding to reject it. I am persuaded for my own part that there is nothing really hard in the anivms of the law, but, on the contrary, every thing that is amiable and blessed ; and if I fail to show it, I hope my reader will attribute the fault to my intellectual inertness, and not at all to the law itself In the first place revelation starts with God — not any ridiculous Tom, Dick, or Harry of a God, such as our churches abound in the worship of, but the great God ALMIGHTY; that is, the only God whose name is recognized, or whose power is felt, in earth or heaven. And then it proceeds to tell us in what an orderly and omnipotent manner he creates the spiritual world, culminating in the unity of man male and female, and avouching itself fault- lessly good in the divine sight. But now in the second place, I cannot to be sure affirm that revelation says in so many literal words that the idea of creation spiritually involves tJie actual incarnation of the creator in his creature s nature ; but certainly that is the impression it leaves upon my mind, and fairly interpreted must, I think, leave upon every mind. For after describing this creation (which is only visible or intelligible to the divine mind) the narrative plainly gives us to un- derstand that our empirical or finite manhood was not at all embraced in it, — in other words, is not HIS INCARNATION IN THE CREATURE. 229 spiritually created: as indeed how could it be? For after all, our finite empirical manhood is noth- ing but our instinctive ir/y-consciousness ; and how self-consciousness can be created (that is, have be- ing communicated to it by another) I am not able to conceive, except at the expense of imagining creation to be an infinitely profligate work. The realm of experience with us, which is the realm of our finite manhood, is nothing, I repeat, but that inveterate consciousness which we entertain of our- selves as naturally constituted, and which therefore we inevitably mistake for the life communicated to us by the creator. The mistake, though not un- reasonable superficially, is very profound, holding all the possibilities of heaven and hell in its bosom, and through them all the possibilities of immortal life. In short our creator has nothing to do with our self-consciousness, save spiritually to keep us from being swamped in its endless illusions. It is a wholly uncreated and fallacious quantity, and therefore has not the least reason to make itself heard in any debate about the creative process, which it is fatally hindered from understanding except through its own voluntary death. CHAPTER V. NATURE A HOSTILE ELEMENT IN CREATION. NOTHING can be plainer to me, after what has gone before, than that spiritual creation involves in the creature a hostile element, which is his nature, or sjibjective quality as created — a ser- vile, constitutional, fallacious element, which makes and keeps the creature in himself permanently dis- tinct from the creator, in order that out of himself or beyond the bounds of that impertinence, he may be perfectly one with his creator. Now this hostile natural element in the creature, this subjective, fallacious, contingent element, which is only intended to give him consciousness, or con- stitutional projection from his creator, is, as we have seen, no way real. It remains in itself forever uncreated, though he himself is created out of it. Otherwise there would be nothing to hinder his creation turning out practically an abject, disgust- ing pantheism. Creation would infallibly have proved a cruel, remorseless, all-devouring panthe- ism if it were not for the evil principle in the creature, the principle of natural selfliood, which OUT OF IT COME DEATH AND HELL. 23 1 utterly saves him (whatsoever else it does) from the danger of being swallowed up in his creator. Remember that the nature of the creature is not to be subjectively, or in Jiiviself. This limitation inheres in his nature as a creature, for creature- ship, so long as it persists, necessarily determines his being away from himself, and identifies it with another than himself As the nature of God the creator is to be both universally and individually, so the nature of man the creature, differentiating him from his creator, is not to be in himself y either indi- vidually or universally, but only in God. Such is the necessary quality of creatureship. And inas- much as that which in itself is void of being or substance is a fortiori void also of existence or form in itself, so the nature of the creature in de- nying him his own inward substance especially denies him his own outward form. We may con- clude, then, without hesitation, that the nature of the creature, or his spiritual quality as created, is neither to be nor to exist in himself, but only in- wardly to appear, or become self-conscious. Now in the eyes of all refined or cultivated men this natural self-consciousness of ours, though it is to its subject a seeming life, is yet in reality a most living death. In fact it is death and hell combined. Experienced persons have al- ways, in past history, recognized it as death. It 232 PROF. CLIFFORD'S LIMITATION. is only within the last century that it has taken on more sombre colors, and made itself indistin- guishable also from hell, as these growing thou- sands attest who every year take refuge from it in suicide. The late eminent and estimable Professor Clifford became even scientifically convinced that our self-consciousness was a sheer imposture, and did his best to warn his readers that it had no sure promise within it either of present or future exist- ence. He would doubtless have deserved better at their hands could he have persuaded them that this same fallacious and seductive selfhood in their bosom had been the only thing after all that ever had had power seriously to degrade them, or make them fall below their nature, by deadening them to heavenly influences, or standing obdurately between them and the creative omnipotence. But Profes- sor Clifford's animus was no way to revive men's religious faith by making it more intelligent, but rather to destroy it altogether by depriving it of ne:ce:ssa.r y pabulum ; and I will not be so absurd, accordingly, as to find fault with a man for not having done what plainly he had no will to do. But one hates to see a man come so near the truth and miss it after all. Deck it out as we may, self-consciousness remains for man the only evil under the sun, when it satis- DEATH THE TRUE FRUIT OF GOD'S LAW. 233 fies him, or affects as now to constitute God's most sacred and jealous precinct in liim. The hopeless thing about it just now, in fact, is that it is all that man believes in as public law or justice, and does not hesitate to summon all the dread artillery of heaven and hell to avenge its farcical quarrels. But God's law was never intended to subserve the interests of man's natural self-consciousness. It was designed exclusively to promote the interests of that regenerate consciousness which is built upon this natural one as a house is built upon its foundation, and which only tolerates the sentiment of self in man so far as that sentiment subjects itself to the higher sentiment of the neighbor. Men totally mistake the spirit of God's law who suppose it was intended to minister righteousness and peace to the skulking or unannounced spirit- ual knaves who reverently observe it with that hope. Death utter and unmitigated is the only boon it imparts to its sincere votaries. They who have spiritually obeyed it throughout history have always found it, to their surprise and consternation, bristling all over with a subtle death or damnation which baffles all hope of life by it. They learn that the distinctive purpose of every so-called divine law is never to flatter a man's self-righteous estimate of his own ritual and sentimental per- formances, but indefatigably to scourge him out of 234 CI/J?/ST'S EXCLUSIVE CREDIT WITH MEN'. all reliance upon such discipline. It spiritually justifies every man who sincerely disregards him- self, and spiritually condemns every man who sincerely seeks himself. God's law in truth is spiritually only another name for men's common- sense, and their most familiar common-sense at that, by which they daily live. For our daily most familiar common-sense teaches us that every man is eternally righteous whose spirit is humble, mak- ing the neighbor and not himself the rule of his action, and every man eternally depraved or dam- nable whose spirit is that of self-seeking. Such, in short, is the vital spirit of God's law by which it is forever separated from man's law, that it makes death and not life, hell and not heaven, the invari- able guerdon of obedience to its votary. It is ludicrous to see the pains our bewildered divines take to dispute the praise which some of the sceptical sort are wont to bestow upon Socrates and Confucius for understanding the literal drift of the Ten Commandments quite as well as Christ. What is gained by this dispute? What would be gained even if we could make Christ out the most expert prattler in legal lore men had ever known ? Absolutely nothing. Christ's unique credit with men will always be that he utterly despised the pow- er of any Ten Commandments, however Divinely authenticated, to make men righteous, or reconcile DEATH THE INWARD CLEANSING OF MAN. 235 them to God : not of course because the command- ments themselves are any way faulty, but because man himself, the self-prompted and self-conceited subject of them, must needs baffle the good-will even of almighty God, until he is spiritually new- born or regenerate. And he taught his disci- ples the same contempt for the law as a justifying economy. The only knowledge Jesus Christ ever claimed as at all peculiar to him (and this is altogether peculiar, leaving him not only without a rival among men, but without a second) was, that God's law given to any people could only be a min- istry of death to its subjects, inasmuch as it was not literal but spiritual, and therefore took no note of the utmost personal differences among them, but commanded all men without exception who would spiritually win its approval to qualify tJicniselves, as he did, by dying to it, and to every literal and fallacious lust engendered of it. This thoroughly manly doctrine of the Christ in respect to the law as offering a practicable means of righteousness to men, would afford a very short shrift to our existing civilization, considered as a practical antipodes of it. Of course one can have no quarrel with civili- zation in the letter, so long as it merely means the maintenance of good literal relations among men while as yet they are wholly unworthy to be called men. But it is hard not to quarrel with the drowsy. 236 SWEDENBORGS ARCANA CELESTIA. ineffectual old thing in its spirit. For citizenship — which is the only boon that civilization offers wherewith to pay off or assuage man's immortal longings — is surely nothing but a very base, unworthy counterfeit of spiritual manhood. The essence, for example, of spiritual manhood is a feeling of intense human unity. And how does civilization contrive to clothe this intense senti- ment? Notoriously by giving it outward or legally constrained form. But manhood instinctively rejects such clothing. It will have simply nothing to do with outward or legally enforced form. Why ? Because manhood — and it enjoys a monopoly of this distinction — is born from within, not from without ; that is to say, is always inspired, never imposed. Its only proper expression or clothing therefore is freedom, not force ; is spontaneity, not'will ; is goodness, not truth. Swedenborg in those most lovely books of his (the loveliest books, it seems to me, ever writ- ten) called " Celestial Secrets," gives a ravishingly beautiful picture of man's heavenly or married state. Indeed he does this in all his books, which for that reason, and more I am sure than all other books combined, breathe the inmost, most innocent, and tender breath of our divine-NATURAL man- hood. I strongly recommend any pitiable forlorn reader of my own, who feels the need of a new THEIR INCOMPARABLE INTELLECTUAL VALUE.21'] and more vigorous intellect to supply the place of the feeble one he is being rapidly sweated out of under the rude agnostic pressure of the times, dili- gently to save up his pennies till he finds himself able to buy one or more of these incomparable books. For though I have now not looked into them for many years, they yet have made — every page of them — such a deathless impression on my heart and mind, that I am sure any serious reader will be infinitely obliged to me for putting him in the way to discover for himself what price- less living truths have always lain sepulchred under the rubbish of his now lapsed and good-for-nothing ecclesiastical traditions. In case, then, the reader heeds my recommendation, I shall well know how to sympathize with his delight and adoring wonder in learning, inter alia, that the highest manhood in the heavens is so purely spontaneous — that is, so little voluntary, so little self-conscious, so altogether impersonal or universal — as not to permit any angelic spirit to feel the least personal shrinking from the most palpably evil spirits, who however keep themselves at their own agreeable distance by their acute distaste of the unconscious love which the angels exhale. At all events, it is such a re- freshment to me to believe that our spiritual man- hood is the fragrant opposite of our disgusting moral or earthly manhood (which feeds itself fat 238 THEIR INCOMPARABLE INTELLECTUAL VALUE. upon nastiness, and seeks to control vice and crime by the pertinacious use of their own most direful weapons, namely, the dungeon and the scaffold), that I cannot help supposing it will be so to every one else, and therefore never fail to recommend to other persons (somewhat indiscreetly perhaps) the books in which the lesson of the difference is most egregiously asserted. CHAPTER VI. GRANDEUR OF CREATIVE NAME. ONE brief question more, and then I think we shall begin fully to understand the road we are going. What precise peculiarity is it in spiritual creation that makes this implication of nature so indispen- sable to it? In other words, what grandeur does it avouch in the creative name that it is not afraid to make evil or hell the constitutional stuff of the creature's consciousness? The peculiar grandeur thus announced is that the creator's name is omnipotent, or essentially mi- raculous. That is to say, it works unconditionally, supplying itself both the optis and the matcries of creation ; both the conscious personality and the unconscious nature of the creature, both his natu- ral identity and his spiritual individuality, both his phenomenal subjectivity and his real objectivity. It is needless to say that ws cannot work without conditions of all sorts ; for this is equivalent to say- ing that our power is not creative in the least, but 240 IT GIVES US IMMORTAL BEING. simply formative. We have indeed the power to make things, or give them outward and dead form. But we have no power to create things, or give them inward and hving being, as God does. He gives all things — the foulest and most venomous — inward being or living substance, because he himself is inward being or living substance. And we give the things we make outward or lifeless form, because we, being creatures, are ourselves outward or lifeless form, nothing more. The infi- nite and eternal distance between God and our- selves hinges upon the truth that creation is spiritual, direct, living, not natural, indirect, dead; which is the same as saying that the creator is inva- riably subject with respect to us, and we invaria- bly object with respect to him. How should he be as he is the very breath of my nostrils, how should he be as he is the endless joy of my heart, if his omnipotence did not ever and anon turn the tables upon my natural conceit and ignorance, and show him to be true invariable subject of my infamy, and myself true invariable object of Jiis infinite care and tenderness? This comes of his being unchangeably creative with respect to us, and of our being unchangeably formative with respect to him. In other words, the creator is of necessity inward being or substance to his creature ; and the creature is of like necessity outward existence or LITTLENESS OF CREATED NAME. 24 1 form to the creator. For Inward being or substance (which is infinite and creative) cannot of course be its own outward existence or form, because this would make it to exist outside of itself, outside of its own infinitude. It cannot pretend to exist outside of itself, or attain in any way to sensible recognition, save in relative, contingent, or natural form, which in itself is a mere semblance or shadow of existence, however it may seem to itself to be endowed with a real plethora of it. It is unquestionably stupid in the creature ever to affect to be anything more than outward form or existence to the creator; but it is obvious that he knows no better, and his fault therefore is infi- nitely excusable. Indeed his ignorance upon the subject of spiritual existence is as dense as mid- night, and he is even naive enough, with Kant, to deem himself /^^V own inward being or substance. No wonder, then, he should find it impossible to come of himself to the humbling conviction — though in that conviction alone is immortal life — that he himself (all told) is really as creature the mere "other" or alternate of his creator, serving but to mask or obscure the omnipotence of his principal. Surely this inveterate stolidity on the creature's part does n't derive from the adorable example the creator sets him. For the creator is so perfectly content with his own unostentatious position and 16 242 IT GIVES US MERE FORM OR APPEARANCE. function, and so little disposed to encroach upon the role of the creature, that he apparently aban- dons the outward and sensible universe to the lat- ter's prudence, and will not move a step in redeem- ing it from chaos without the creature's initiative, or at least his full and hearty concurrence. Now power of this unconditional sort — w'hich not only exacts no favorable conditions for itself, but works out its will through the most adverse conditions — is what men mean by omnipotence, or power essentially miraculous. Miraculous power is not, as it is vulgarly thought to be, a power to violate the order of the senses, or undo men's re- spect for fact. If miracle were this, it would be of course downright absurdity. It is a power to en- liven the senses, and make the most ordinary facts of experience attest the omnipotent force which, although latent, is alone active in our nature, as well as attest the sovereign humanity of this force. This at least is what the Christian miracles mean to me. From the beginning of them in Cana of Gali- lee, where at the nuptial feast Christ converted the water into wine (by way of hinting to men's senses that marriage was wholly a living or spiritual tie between the sexes — a fruit indeed of the highest possible spiritual culture or regeneration — and no mere carnal and disgusting civic or voluntary compact between a man and woman to come to- MEANING OF CHRIST S MIRACLES. 243 gether to breed carnal and disgusting offspring), down to that magnificent one which ended the se- ries ; namely, his showing himself alive after death, — they all directly address men's senses as the only real, objective, and unconscious force in them, to the denial of their subjective, phenomenal, or conscious force. Just, in fact, as Christ's dogmatic precepts seem always intended to shock the preju- dices of the conventionally devout and righteous among his hearers, and inspire the enthusiasm of the conventionally reprobate class, so I confess his miracles always seem to me intended to paralyze and put an end to this dismal and deathful life of routine (or personal observance) under which all but the most frivolous of men are languishing and ready to perish, by flashing the conviction home upon us that we have an endless divine innocence, peace, and power stored up for us in God's NATU- RAL humanity, if we would only consent to con- fide for a moment in that most holy and universal reality, and look away for a like moment from our own petty, pharisaic, most histrionic, and meretri- cious selves. Now if it be true that nature, as I have said, is only the principle of identity in* the creature, giv- ing him a strictly universal subjectivity, or making him the measure of all things, then it is perfectly clear that it is also wholly inimical to that inward 244 NATURE IGNORES PERSONALITY. individuality, or spiritual distinction, which man is so apt to claim for himself among his fellows or equals. Nature says in effect that man has no more title to personal consciousness in himself — to inward individuality or difference from other men — than horses and dogs have: thus arraying him in perpetual conflict with himself, or making war the sole legitimate fruit of his consciousness. To be sure it may be said that nature is undefined or universal, and being therefore unconscious or impersonal in herself must be expected to ignore personality in her offspring, not discerning the im- mense spiritual uses it lends itself to in the crea- tive economy. But I don't see, I confess, what is gained by this, save a clearer insight into the nega- tive function of nature. Whatever nature may be defined to be, she is certainly none the less the sole law or limit of man's constitutional possibil- ities, none the less the sole measure of what he is and always must be in himself. She is the exclu- sive rule or basis of what he deems his person- ality. He has no constitutional existence apart from his nature; and if his nature says, accord- ingly, that he has no individual right in himself to exist, or to exist in distinction from other men, I do not see why the judgment is not at once final. That nature does practically say this there can SHE STAMPS MAN UNIVERSAL. 245 be no doubt. She is the clearest possible affir- mation of man's universality as against the preten- sions of the mineral, vegetable, and animal types of existence ; and if she affirms his legitimate universality so far as they are concerned, she un- questionably denies to that extent his legitimate individuality. One cannot be by nature universal and particular, or public and private, both, short of being infinite or creative, which man surely is not. And if his nature stamps him universal alone, we must evidently seek the explanation of his private or particular manhood elsewhere than in his na- ture. His nature (or essential quality as created^ leaves him destitute of life or being /// himself, pro- nounces him absolute possessor of nothing, and consequently makes his pretension to individual subjectivity, or conscious distinction from his fel- lows, preposterous in the extreme. The meaning of nature, in fact, is downright community to all who derive from it — community, and not society. And how any one, therefore, by her inspiration can insist upon being a person — that is, upon holding himself liable for his actions — I am at a total loss to divine upon any other hypothesis than that na- ture, after all is said and done, is but a MASK of the creative infinitude or omnipotence, behind which the creator allows himself to fool his ignorant and conceited rabble of creatures to the very top 246 NATURE IMPALPABLE TO SENSE. of their bent, in order the more surely to compass their final and perfect redemption from it. This hypothesis is by no means difficult to main- tain, as it doubtless would be if nature had the least sensible existence, or ever revealed itself to us as a thing. But nature is profoundly incapable of such 2i faux pas. She never assumes in her own right to be more than logically cognizable. We ourselves sometimes identify her with all tilings, or the material realm. But this generalization on our part is full surely allowable, as we only mean by it that nothing exists save upon a natural or universal basis, and have no thought of attributing to nature herself a particular embodiment. Nature is said to be what exists everywhere in general, and yet nowhere in especial. Surely if she be taken for all that appears to our senses, she cannot herself be ajtytking that so appears, for this would involve contradiction. In fact, she is merely the genera- tive, constitutional, subjective, or maternal princi- ple which we by defect of understanding insist upon bringing into things in order not to account for any thing absolutely, but to account for its appearance to us. She has accordingly a purely logical or metaphysical reality with reference to everything embraced in the sphere of sense or the world of space and time. Every mineral, every vegetable, and every animal in the universe falls hHE EXISTS ONLY TO THOUGHT. 247 within the realm of physics ; that is, claims to be real by no right of nature, but only by virtue of its appearing to sense. But yet nature herself, though we insist upon her being the indubitable parent of all the physical reality we know, has not a particle of physical reality, but is merely taken for granted by us as the producing cause of things. Her ex- istence, I repeat, is wholly metaphysical or unreal, having no guarantee but our logic. The brutes do not in the least recognize nature, because in the first place she does not fall under the senses, and because in the second they have no guiding and governing word connecting their understanding spiritually with God. For nature is simply the first syllabling of that uncreated word which con- ditions all created existence to thought; and as a word does not and cannot exist save to thought, we instinctively restrict nature to a purely logical reality. She may be called, in fine, the literal, mystical, infantile form of that almighty and ador- able creative word by which all things whether on earth or in heaven are spiritually made. Noth- ing is clearer than that what we call physics, or the finite, appears to God only through us ; that is, through his identification with otir nature — which being undefined or universal represents both infinite and finite, and gives therefore its only proper and adequate divine subject the mastery of both 248 IS OUR SOLE DIVINE PROPEDEUTICS. realms, or a perfect knowledge of good and evil. Hence, too, we perceive the importance of the creative word, which as the expression or instru- ment of this perfect knowledge on God's part must exercise a supreme influence in moulding our hearts and understandings to itself. And when at last we get to acknowledge this creative word in its essen- tially divine-human quality, nothing will be easier to us than to see that this divine-human essence of it practically depends altogether upon its strict naturality, or, to use a phrase of Swedenborg, its truth in iiltimates : meaning by that pregnant phrase that our spiritual creation altogether con- sists in the creator spiritually incarnating himself in our worthless nature and livingly identifying himself with its absurd phantasmagoria of mineral, vegetable, and animal existence ; and that without this stupendous incarnation therefore, or living in- carceration, on the creator's part, we should none of us have ever had a chance either of universal redemption or of particular salvation out of our own natural and most idiotic selves, I think we are fairly entitled now, from all that has gone before, to conclude that our natural his- tory is the only means offered us of ever recog- nizing the creative omnipotence. We have no conception of power at all but as the overcoming of resistance. And when things resist our will, SOLE MEDIUM OF INFINITUDE TO US. 249 accordingly, we rate our own power as great or small by our ability or inability to overcome the ob- stacles they present to us. Now we of course are never called upon to exercise our power in over- coming nature (for all our particular power comes to us from God througJi our natitre), but only in overcoming certain specific things of nature in which her subordination to us is still incom- plete. But by the hypothesis of spiritual creation, the only resistance which it encounters is that of the creature's nature — there being no ability in the creature himself to resist the divine will but what he derives from his nature. For example : man's nature as a creature (having no life in himself) is plainly not to be and not even to exist, but only and at most to appear to himself to be and to exist. Thus his nature involves a profound fallacy, and he can never realize spiritual being at God's hands accordingly, save in being delivered from its bond- age. Surely no fallacy is so profound and fun- damental as that which leads a creature to suppose himself his own being and his own existence, when the bare fact of his creation makes him void in himself of everything but the appearance of these things. Here, for instance, is a young man who the other day fell violently in love with a young woman, and all the world could n't persuade him against the inspiration of his nature that his very being 250 NATURE A VERITABLE LUSUS DEI. and existence did n't lie in the absolute possession of her. My reader and I, however, know from long experience and observation in this behalf that his persuasion is not half so likely to reflect the real as the apparent truth of things ; and that this in- fatuated young man, accordingly, if he only obtain possession of the lady, will erelong discover that his being and existence are elsewhere. Unques- tionably, however, spiritual creation, in involving the verification of the creature's nature, does subject him to these hideous fallacies on every hand ; so that the creative power in giving the creature being would find itself thoroughly baffled by the natural obduracy of its creature unless it were really om- nipotent, or thoroughly qualified to redeem him from his nature, and give him most real and ever- lasting life in place of it. Now this qualification of the creator (spiritually centred in his redemptive power over the creature) is precisely what we call his infinitude or omnipo- tence ; enabling him first of all to constitute the creature naturally (that is, in the interest of his ut- most conceivable spiritual oppugnancy to God), in order that he may afterwards make this natural op- pugnancy of the creature to himself the sure pledge and guarantee of the creature's immortal life. Thus nature on the whole is a mere hisiis dei, or pleasant condescension of God, in reference to our NATURE A VERITABLE LUSUS DEI. 25 I appalling spiritual poverty. It may be called, in fact, a pure superstition of our infatuated ignorance and incapacity in all true divine knowledge. For example ; we do not and cannot know God di- rectly, that is naturally, because to know him is to lead a life in heartfelt harmony with his perfec- tion ; and what heartfelt harmony can exist be- tween us and God so long as our nature is still undeveloped, and we remain bound meanwhile to conceive ourselves to be of an entirely other nature than his? It is of course dismally absurd to expect a mere creature of creative power ever to feel itself in hearty agreement with its creator so long as the relation endures unbroken. The re* lation indeed is meant to be broken. It is totally inapposite to the creature's needs, considered as a final relation ; for it leaves the creature a spiritual sot or idiot, inasmuch as it makes no provision for the development of his selfliood, or subjective identity. The relation of creature and creator be- tween man and God, considered as a permanent one, is a flagrant denial of God's spiritual human- ity, which incessantly tends to equalize creature with creator ; and a fortiori therefore it defeats the truth of God's naticral humanity, which shows his highest glory to lie in his spiritually vivifying the created nature, and making man's lowest lusts eventually to praise him. And it is even 252 AN INVERSE FORM OF GOD. more dismally absurd — if that be possible — to suppose that so long as the creative or absolute conception of the relation between God and man endures, or refuses to merge in the natural rela- tion of parent to child, we shall ever come to know God as he craves to be known, that is, spirit- ually or livingly. But though we cannot know God inwardly or by direct knowledge, we may yet, in a certain fashion of accommodation on his part, come to know him outwardly or by indirect reflected knowledge, provi- ded only that he himself be good enough, and wise enough, and powerful enough to vivify our nature, and make that a true vehicle to us of i-^^-knowl- edge. For the knowledge of oneself that one gets by nature is nothing else than an inverted or indi- rect knoivlcdge of God; and the person, accordingly, who best knows how to take the conceit out of this natural knowledge by frankly confessing himself evil or a sinner, has a knowledge of God profound enough to qualify him spiritually for immortal life. For the only life which even divine omnipotence has spiritually to bestow upon man its creature is plainly an immortal life in cordial, unaffected sym- pathy with its OAvn perfection ; and as plainly im- mortal life cannot literally avouch or express itself within our purely negative experience, save in the lineaments of a mortal natural life pretending THIS FORM FITS IT TO REVEAL HIM. 253 to be our own true life, and yet showing itself ut- terly faithless to us whenever we are foolish enough to trust it. Thus even if our signal incompe- tency to know God directly, and find immortal life in the knowledge, be undeniable, he can yet supply us with a qtiasi, supposititious, or seeming life, which, because based upon our fundamental natural instinct (which is that of selfhood), shall be unmistakably our own life, and shall afford us at all events a sure and ample knowledge of what we ourselves are by nature or uncreation : and so finally suggest (unless it be sacerdotally tampered with and falsified) a pregnant hope and expecta- tion in our bosoms of what we may one day be- come at his own omnipotent and perfectly unselfish redemptive hands. This qtiasi natural life of ours, in short, in giving us a knowledge of our own mor- tality will also furnish us by contrast with an in- fallible revelation of the creative name or quality. And this revelation, growing ever more and more luminous in the light of the ages, will yet prove divinely sufficient to disperse and consume what- ever low-minded fears and shallow, besotted preju- dices we may have indulged towards him. CHAPTER VII. THE ROAD WE ARE TRAVELLING. I THINK we may now, at length, fairly appre- hend the road we are travelling. At all events we clearly see thus much — that nature is necessa- rily implied in man, although we may not as yet, perhaps, discern the infinite or creative love and wisdom which that implication stands for. There is no danger, however, that we shall fail to discern these things in the end, for this is what spiritual creation amounts to, namely: tJie actual viarriage coviiminion of creator and creature — a marriage which would be wholly impossible on the latter's part, had he not been endowed by God's spiritual incarnation in his nature with that natural projec- tion from his creator, or that fallacious self-con- sciousness, under which we all of us more or less still groan and suffer the torments of hell. But at present we must content ourselves with doing justice to the incidental topic, and endeavor to understand the necessary involution of nature in man. • NATURE SOLE BASIS OF CONSCIOUS LIFE. 255 I have made it seem abundantly clear, to my own mind at least, that the creative power in man must, in spite of its alleged omnipotence, have proved perfectly worthless or nugatory, unless it had found itself first of all practically able to endow its crea- ture with selfhood, or quasi freedom. Now this selfhood or quasi freedom in man, owning as it does a strictly natural maternity, proves that na- ture is necessarily involved in spiritual creation. The creature is absolutely void of life in himself, or real life; so essentially void of it, that even if almighty power had ever tried to endow him with it, it must have ignominiously failed. But although it is impossible even for almighty power to give its creature life in himself (that is, real life) I have shown that it may succeed in endowing him with natural or phenomenal life, provided it is first of all able spiritually to incarnate itself in his nature, and so let his nature bear all the expense of his reality. In that case the creature will feel that though his life is not, and cannot be, in himself as individually viewed, it is yet none the less in him- self as universally viewed. For it is undeniable that man's consciousness, under the light and truth of the incarnation, is made to start from the most exiguous individual dimensions possible, and yet before it has done growing to show a capacity of attaining to an indefinite or boundless universality. 2^6 PROVES A PRACTICAL REVELATION OF COD. Besides, if the creator is thus able spiritually to quicken the creature's nature, then undoubtedly the creature's nature will not only turn out a basis of phenomenal subjectivity to him, which is compara- tively unimportant, but will also constitute in the progress of its historic evolution a veritable focus of trustworthy divine knowledge to him, which may have the happiest effect in conciliating and modi- fying his intellectual prejudices. Thus his nature, divinely verified, will not only furnish him with a seeming or fallacious life to supply the place of that which he lacks in himself, but it will also fur- nish his nascent intelligence with a sort of negative measure of the divine being — a sort of inverse revelation of creative life — and so in time effectu- ally quicken his aspirations after real or living spir- itual knowledge. Nature itself, as literally viewed, is of course of no account as furnishing a divine revelation. For nature itself, literally viewed, is merely the inward or essential quality of the creature reproduced and represented to him in outward or sensible symbols ; and to suppose such a literally dead thing as this lisping a true word of authentic divine revelationj, would be excessively childish. No, it is only na- ture as spiritually or livingly viewed, that is, as verified by what we call history — meaning by that the public, universal, unconscious, creative force DOUBLE ASPECT OF THE NATURE. 257 in humanity — that ever claims to be apocalyptic with regard to God, and is alone fit to be accepted as a veritable symbol of spiritual knowledge. But if this be true, then nature will be found to present herself to us in a double aspect — one outward or apparent, addressed to our senses ; the other real or inward, addressed to our regenerate heart and understanding. Her first aspect is masculine and perishable, being that which she puts on in Adam, the simply natural man tinder law to God, because he is made the dust of the ground. Her second as- pect is feminine and imperishable, being that which she puts on in Eve, or woman, who is not simply natural like Adam, but divinely-Vi-aXnx'sX, because she, unlike him, is built up not of earthly dust, but of the purest and most deathless human affection. Adam, we are told in the Hebrew Genesis, was formed or made by God " dust of the ground^' than which we can conceive nothing on earth more vicious and irritating. And being thus inhumanly formed, the breath of life — God's inward or spirit- ual life, mind you — is outwardly breathed into his nostrils, so that he becomes at best a human animal. *' And the lord God took the man " thus mechani- cally extemporized, " and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress and keep it; and he commanded the man saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat except the tree of finite knowl- 17 258 NATURE IMBECILE WITHOUT SELFHOOD. edge, called the knowledge of good and evil : for the day thou eatest of that tree thou shalt infalli- bly die. And the lord God said, It is not good for the man to be alone," — he is so imbecile and un- intelligent; " I will make him a suitable or enliv- ening help-meet. And out of the ground " — the ground of which Adam was the dust — " the lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them in review before Adam to see how he would appreciate them, and according to his appreciation, such was their qual- ity," — for they were all of them mere visible types of his own nature. So Adam gave name or quality to all lower existences than himself, but he found no fitting mate for himself among them. "And the lord God" — still intent upon giving him such a mate — " caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and while he was unconscious took from him a rib," — which apparently was the nearest approximation he possessed to a heart, — " and of this bony sub- stance built up a woman, and brought her to the man who said. This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh ; she shall be called woman (Isha), because she is taken out of man (Ish). There- fore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." I remember that dear old Dr. Miller used to say ROOTED IN MAN IT FLOWERS IN WOMAN. 259 to his pupils in ecclesiastical history: "Young gentlemen, we are bound to conceive David to have been a good man on the strength of his being called a man after God's own heart. But the least we can say hereupon is that he was a strange good man ! " I think, however, that we have much more reason to say, that if the Adam of Genesis is to be taken as a specimen of what almighty power can effect in human nature, then we are bound to con- sider him a very strange or inadequate specimen. For evidently there is no touch of nature or self- moved existence about him. He has neither heart nor understanding but what is divinely furnished him in Eve, or woman ; so that we are perfectly jus- tified in supposing that human nature dates from her, while only the human person, in all its intrinsic vanity and emptiness as the product of the nature, stands identified with him. In short, the simple and obvious fact on the face of the narrative is, that this dust-made Adam was nothing but a divine rudiment or preparation for the natural man, char- acterized as yet not by the possession of selfhood, but only by a dumb and blind yearning after it. He was prepared to sacrifice everything he knew to it, and cleave to it as to his true life for good and evil. But he had, as yet, no misgiving of the revolution marriage would effect in his outward paradise, by awakening his heart or vivifying his 2.60 WOMAN- THE HEART OF OUR NATURE. inward afifections. Indeed, his relation to his bride was still so brutally innocent or inhuman that he had not even wit enough to see that they were both naked, nor consequently to blush at the discovery, as any one more advanced in conventional man- hood, or the distinction between good and evil, would doubtless have done. In short, he is nothing so far hit the incarnate lust of selfhood, which self- hood he yet never realizes in his own proper form, but only in that of woman divinely inspired ; be- cause he, loving her as himself, would still appar- ently or consciously love another than himself, and so preserve some natural imagery or correspond- ence of the creative love ; while woman herself — devoting herself to him exclusively as his faithful drudge, and serving him utterly without a thought of intellectual rivalry, or, indeed, any conception of personal independence — will be sure eventually to shape and train his carnal savage instincts into a qjiasi love and acknowledgment of God in her. It will be, I repeat, but a quasi love after all ; but a quasi love is the only love befitting an unreal or merely conscious person. Eve accordingly is not slow to accept the interior guidance and guardian- ship of her uncouth mate ; and, what is more to the purpose, she has miraculously kept that guidance and guardianship unimpaired (through all the vicissitudes of death and hell which his own nature THE HEART AS AN ORGANIC SYMBOL. 26 1 and history have since so freely showered upon his experience), by first of all assiduously nursing him out of the mere brutal physical consciousness he was in when she met him, into a moral and ra- tional consciousness, — and then convincing him that even this moral and rational consciousness of his to which she has brought him, is itself after all but a dim fallacious semblance of the spiritual, or infinite and eternal, manhood which she has yet to reveal to him. We all of us know how incomparable the function of the heart is in the animal organization, finding its own life simply in giving life to all the other organs. It never asks anything for itself alone, but instantly turns it over to the use of the dependent organization. Its energy is so miraculous to our eyes that it never claims a moment's rest, day or night, during all these years of dismal servitude to our organic life, and it is so ineffably modest that it is no matter how inordinately the greedier or more selfish organs pull upon its resources, it has never the least complaint to make of their exac- tions. Now the heart only symbolizes woman's virtually commanding attitude towards man in the conjugal relation. It is indeed a perfect symbol of her supreme yet thankless worth in the evolution of man's spiritual destiny. This destiny depends of course upon a divine authentication of his nature, 262 MAJV'S NATURE XO WAY ABSOLUTE. because his nature is what alone identifies him to his own consciousness. But his nature is no way absolute. It is not an existing or objective thing. It does not exist out of consciousness, and is there- fore purely subjective, symbolizing or standing for its subject's spiritual ignorance and incompetency in divine things. It is not the nature of any pri- vate or particular man (though every such man claims it), but only of the public or universal man. Now how shall this nature of man out of private become public, out of particular become universal, out of subjective become objective, out o^ personal in fact become wholly impersonal and indefinite, save through the marvellous mediation of woman as the wife, who, patiently submitting herself to man's lordly, implacable, lascivious will (as if it were her only recognized law in life), has gradually out of such submission built up the family, the tribe, the city, the nation, and every larger or more universal form of human unity, until now at last her helpless nursling has become developed into THE PEOPLE, and only awaits its own coming into social or divine- natural _/<7r;«, in order to see what it has always stu- pidly recognized as nature become spiritually glori- fied into almighty God. It is the constant recogni- tion of this divine worth in woman that makes man love, adore, and worship her with all his heart and mind. Not the conscious individual woman, or the WOMAN'S DIVINE WORTH. 263 conventional fine lady, mind you — save in so far as these aspire to forget themselves, and become sin- cerely one or identical with unconscious or univer- sal womanhood. In that case, of course, every woman — no matter, to begin with, if she is even as handsome as Cleopatra — will be sure to inspire in man a love of the sex so infinitely chaste, as in- stantly to interpret itself into the supreme and au- thentic bliss of true or eternal marriage. CHAPTER VIII. A CONSCIENCE OF SIN. I AM sincerely sorry that my habit is so invet- erate to wander from the point I am discus- sing. I think, however, that I am not entirely without excuse just now, inasmuch as my very sub- ject by its fundamental breadth, or depth and com- prehensiveness, invites and even necessitates more or less indulgence of the habit. At the opening of my last chapter I asseverated, for the hundredth time I doubt not, that nature is a middle term be- tween man and God, or finite and infinite, addressed to making us conscious of all the evil embraced in the lower nature, and all the good embraced in the higher. I say distinctly, all the evil embraced in the lower nature, and all the good embraced in the higher nature. For in himself , or personally, man is just as little evil as God is. And God in himself, or personally, is just as little good as man is. For spiritually, or really, both God and man are alike destitute of selfhood or personality, God having absolutely no subjective existence but in man his ATTACHES ONLY TO MAN. 26$ creature, simply because man has absolutely no objective being but in God his creator. They find their life, in other words, not at ail in themselves, but wholly in their spiritual relation to each other ; this relation being infinitely good in the one case, because it is purely creative or cosmical ; and in- definitely evil in the other, because it is simply and obdurately personal or selfish, leading to interne- cine discord, strife, and violence. Remember, then, as stoutly as you please, that the only evil under the sun is undefined or univer- sal evil. That is to say, it pertains to no person and no thing in particular, but only to the nature or essential quality of persons and things, because persons and things alone have the presumption to be the arrest or finite determinatio7i of existence. Of course the evil that pertains to things is entirely unconscious, and therefore may be left out of the account altogether, as having no spiritual truth. The only spiritual evil in fact is that which attaches to man, and is known under the distinctive name of sin, because it is the only evil which belongs to a conscious or personal subject, that is, one who feels his life to be /« himself. This alone is the funda- mental evil of created life, that it is by nature in- veterately y^^-conscious, and therefore spiritually hostile or limitary to the almighty, which neces- sarily gives its evil a spiritual character; that is, 266 SIN IS EVIL APPROPRIATED. fills its subject out with an intimate conscience of sin or j-^^condemnation. We may say according- ly that the sole and total function of evil in the di- vine administration — especially under its spiritual aspect — has been subtly to undermine and de- stroy this finite consciousness in men, and dispose them instead to the spiritual acknowledgment of almighty God. The spiritual recognition of the almighty is of course impossible so long as one believes in himself, or feels that his life inheres in himself. Such a man cannot possibly feel any true peace or repose in the divine name, although we occasionally hear of some scrub Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, or Methodist parson boldly pretend- ing to be familiar with it ; for the poor creature is always logically bound to drag his own unsavory corpse about with him, which obligation steadily restricts him to believing that the name of the al- mighty is only to be found hallowed outside of his own special spiritual precinct or parish. But if evil be a strictly universal quantity, and therefore innocent as attaching to no special thing or person, how is the creative design in man prac- tically furthered by allowing it to become individ- ualized in him, and so converted into sin? My old friend Mr. Emerson used to kick very much at this, and conceived a great dislike to Swedenborg's doctrine of spiritual regeneration as based upon SWEDENBORG AND EMERSON. 267 the acknowledgment of evil as sin. He was never tired of protesting his conviction that the acknowl- edgment of evil as evil was greatly to be preferred. I used always to tell him that this judgment on his part arose from the signally different estimate Swedenborg and he framed of creation — Sweden- borg regarding it as a living or spiritual thing, he as an exclusively natural or dead thing; Sweden- borg, in fact, regarding nature as nothing in itself, he on the contrary looking upon it as comparatively everything in itself. " You are both very remarka- ble seers, no doubt; yet I cannot but think that he has the advantage in being a spiritual seer, while you remain a natural one." In fact, this was my friend's inveterate limitation in philosophy, that he never raised his eyes above the basement story of crea- tion, but was content to remain an obdurate natur- alist till the end of his intellectual days. The feebleness of the naturalist point of view inheres in this, that nature falls entirely within consciousness and does not directly connect with God therefore. It connects with him only as the appanage of man his creature ; that is, only as he is creatively acknowl- edged under the name of the lord or God-man, giving his creature no mere piddling and pedantic natural life, but literally his own spiritual life which is infinite and eternal. And Mr, Emerson had no spiritual insight into creative order, because he had 268 THE ONE A SPIRITUALIST, no adequate doctrine of consciousness. He re- garded the judgments of consciousness as final, and would as soon have jumped into the Merrimac as seriously have supposed that the divine kingdom on earth was vastly more indebted for its furtherance to sinners than to saints. He took a downright literal view of the reality of men's moral differences, and I have even heard him tell with infinite gusto of some virtuous youth in college with him, who had such a gross faculty of moral effusion as actu- ally to suppress all naughty conversation among his companions by his bare presence — which made me wonder what a pitch of spiritual idiocy this moral peacock, if left to himself, would be sure eventually to attain to. Only we are none of us left to ourselves, nor can be, fortunately. But gossip about Mr. Emerson is no answer to my question, which ran thus : How does it promote the welfare of the divine kingdom on earth, to allow serious-minded men to feel all their days a conscience of sin, — that is, a sense of poignant j^^-condemnation and self-abhorrence towards God? The entire intellectual pith and the exqui- site virulence of " a conscience of sin " consists in its being a sentiment of .y^^-condemnation towards God, who is traditionally held to be the outside and voluntary author of human life. It usually pivots upon some moral obliquity on the THE OTHER A LITERALIST. 269 creature's part, such as false-witness, fraud, adul- tery or murder ; but it is no way moral in its origin, boasting a much deeper root. It seems to hav^e a moral origin only because the creature as yet ap- prehends himself as altogether outwardly or phy- sically constituted, and has not the least idea of himself as being spiritually created. If he had ever looked upon himself in this latter point of view, he would have infallibly acknowledged God's spiritual omnipotence ; and if he had once acknowl- edged God's spiritual omnipotence, he would never have looked upon his physical constitution as at- taching to himself, but only to God in him. It would in fact never again come into his mind. For a man can never be spiritually tempted to think of himself as any way important to his own life, except while he is spiritually ignorant of God's creative omnipotence. The higher conception practically exhausts the lower one ; and the lower, in its turn, fatally obscures the higher one. But I will try to give a satisfactory answer to my question. God's kingdom among men consists, in the first place, in a sincere intellectual conviction on their part that he is essentially omnipotent or almighty. And yet, in the second place, this conviction is so flagrantly incompatible with another profound conviction which men entertain — namely, that of 270 THE ILLUSION OF SELFHOOD. their natural dignity — that it is plain the establish- ment of the divine kingdom on earth will only take ^.place in so far as men can be induced practically to give over esteeming their natural selfhood so highly, and consent to count it thenceforth as il- lusory. Men habitually live under the illusion that their natural selfhood is something divinely sacred, and no illusion is more profoundly inveterate in the long run than this. It seems bred, for example, in the marrow of my bones that God will be angry with me if I show any voluntary or even chance disrespect to this selfliood in others. And I feel equally sure of his lively approbation whenever I force myself to forego any habitually selfish exac- tion on my own part towards my fellows. Thus on its literal side the moral law seems expressly adapted to foster this illusion ; and obviously all the conquests of civilization have been spiritually engineered or energized by it. And yet to my own mind it is an illusion so deep and deadly that I am free to say it explains, better than anything I know, the almost despairing chances which men feel of the advent of God's spiritual kingdom in our nature. Of course I have no idea that almighty God has the least complaint to make of men on the score of their practical morality. All I mean to allege is tVJ/V IS DUTY ALWAYS VOLUNTARY? 2J\ that their practical morality presents a very absurd basis for their living intercourse with God, since it is always spiritually enforced by the sentiment of duty or legal obedience, which, though on its face a denial of self, is yet at bottom a particularly vigor- ous assertion of it. For why is duty never done freely or spontaneously? Why is it always done voluntarily or from self-compulsion? It is because in doing our duty to God or our fellow-men we feel ourselv^es to be secretly inimical to them, and hope that in this onerous ritual way our confessed enmity may at length be forgiven by them. Thus the morally good man — the man who owns no higher sentiment than duty, or legal obedience — was unsparingly characterized in olden time by one who apparently knew him through and through, as a whited sepulchre, outwardly fair to inejt's sight, but iiiwardly filled with dead men's bones and all corruption. This judgment, doubtless, will avouch itself true till the end of the world. For surely no man need voluntarily compel himself to goodness, unless his secret heart be at enmity with it. And what sort of a basis is supplied for spiritual or liv- ing intercourse between God and man by a state of things which leaves the heart, or true selfhood, out, and limits itself to placating man's mere outer and prudential self? Obviously no sort at all. God almighty is the most humble or lowly being 272 THE MYSTERY OF SELFHOOD. conceivable, utterly destitute of conscious life or selfhood, and having absolutely no acquaintance with it, save in the person of his worthless creature man. How man comes to have something which his maker has not — m.mQ\y, natural selfhood — is explained by the fact that selfliood expresses man's nature, or essential quality, as created, giving him identity to his own consciousness, and so forever separating him from God. If he had it not, the creature would be undistinguishable from his crea- tor; so that God's spiritual creation is absolutely conditioned upon it. Selfhood is not, of course, the morally evil thing in the divine estimation which it is in ours, because it has no moral exist- ence to him to begin with, being a sheer hallucina- tion of our native pride and arrogance. Neither can it be considered a spiritually evil thing in the divine sight, save when indulged to excess, or bar- ring out the inflow of his own tender pity and mercy to man. For, as I have just said, God is man's most humble servant, seeking incessantly to build him up spiritually by allaying his natural pride of character and lust of dominion. And the only way he has to effect this end, is by patiently undergoing death in the created nature, in order to allow himself to rise again from that death in man's new or redeemed nature. For example : when I voluntarily abandon myself to my naturally selfish WITHOUT IT, NO CONSCIENCE OF SIN. 2^2, tendencies, God spiritually dies in me, and under- goes resuscitation only in so far as I can be brought to feel a conscience of sin towards him, or acknowl- edge myself to be totally unworthy of his goodness. The gravamen of the spiritual experience called conscience, is that I feel wjj/i-^^livingly implicated in the evils I do, and no longer attempt to slur them over as mere casual and natural evil deeds. Of course God is not distressed at any man's natural evils, any more than he is distressed at the rise and fall of the tides ; for a man's natural evils are purely subjective, qualifying him to his own consciousness, not at all to the divine sight. But he is distressed at a conceited goose of a man pretending to be a recipient of life, and yet habitually acting as if his nature were his highest or only law. And he takes very good care accordingly to wither up what every such man regards as his vitals, by making him willing to give his nature the go-by, and see Jiiniself henceforth as a sinner, actually dependent for life upon the divine mercy. Undoubtedly it would be a great mistake to infer that I mean, when I say that the creator dies in us, to allege that his death is any way like ours, in- volving his natural selfhood or subjectivity. For God has no natural selfliood or subjectivity save in his creature man. His being is purely objective, consisting in the delight he has in communicating i8 274 CREATION A COMMUNICATION OF LIFE. life to Others. I use this word deliberately. For the life he gives to others is his own life, not theirs — he being willing to enjoy it in common with them. He first of all creates them, or gives them being, by spiritually abandoning himself to them. And then inasmuch as the effect of this generosity is only to infiame their nature, and endow them with a fal- lacious selfhood, or subjectivity, he subsequently redeems them from the dominion of their nature, and then at last saves them (with what they cannot help feeling to be an eternal salvation) by bring- ing them into social or unitary form and order. The death he undergoes is vastly more real, conse- quently, than the trivial thing known to us by that name. It is a death to the intimate and infinite delight he has in imparting life to others — his own life ; and it compels him therefore to fashion an un- real or phenomenal life for them out of their nature which may bring them into apparent harmony with himself But the harmony is only apparent after all, and must therefore, as it seems to me, subject those who are satisfied with it to grave though unconscious spiritual limitation. However, this is neither here nor there with reference to our pre- sent discussion, and we may safely leave it as it stands. CHAPTER IX. THE OFFICE OF MIRACLE. OUPPOSE now, that, after what has gone before, we answered the question I have proposed somewhat in manner following : — The interests of the divine kingdom on earth will be best promoted by men looking upon them- selves as acutely implicated in their natural evils, ajid confessing tJicmselvcs sinners tJierefore before God ; because God (inasmuch as he is a strictly objective being, having absolutely no subjectivity but in his creatures) is literally obliged to depend upon men's free or unforced activity for everything he wants done on earth, especially for those things which manifest his spirit. How would this please my reader? I confess it seems to me not at all amiss as a satisfactory solu- tion to our question. The reason why I say that God is without self- hood (having no subjectivity save in us his crea- tures) is of course that he is spiritually incarnate in our nature. He has, so to speak, no nature of 2/6 A MEMORIAL OF GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE. his own, being perfectly identified with ours. In order that God should claim to be nature as well as spirit, it would be necessary that there should be many gods — at least more than one — both alike, or all alike, claiming equality with each other ; for nature always means what is common to particulars. But this would .be absurd, because God is one or infinite, giving spiritual being to all existence. His contact with nature accordingly is only through us, which makes it eternally impossible that he should ever appear in nature, or make himself visible to men, save in some representative form. Miracle fur- nishes the chief attestation of the divine presence in nature. In sacred Scripture it stands as a perpetual reminder and corrective of the ecclesiastical untruth that the world of nature is the realm of creation, or can ever be dragooned into confessing herself so. It is a standing protest of the intellect against mix- ing up or confounding such incongruous things as the life of nature and spiritual or divinely created Hfe. The order of nature going from mineral to veg- etable, vegetable to animal, and animal to man, is and will always remain perfectly reputable, because it is the very order of human thought while as yet in its first dewy innocency — the innocency of ignor- ance — and accepts without scruple therefore the traditional dogma of creation. But as man grows riper and richer in the experience of life, he learns NATURE UNFIT TO BE MAN'S HOME. 277 to reason about this traditional dogma, and hesi- tates any longer to accept it, save in so far as it becomes spiritually qualified to his apprehension, or claims to be preternaturally sanctioned. His rising spiritual instinct of the divine name necessi- tates this scrupulosity on his part. For his grow- ing consciousness or self-knowledge teaches him reverentially to separate God from himself, or assign him infinite and ineffable qualities — qualities at least wholly unlike those belonging to finite nature, and which eternally forbid his taking pleasure in it. Nature is merely a picture or image — livingly or spiritually addressed by God to man's intelligence — of his own nascent spiritual thought, which always proceeds in its efforts to find an adequate creative source by a strict method of elimination; that is, by gradually living down, or rejecting one thing after another, mineral, vegetable, and animal, which it at first thinks vital to itself, and then at last by living down, or rejecting its own very self — when for the first time it spiritually finds God, or feels itself truly created, that is, admitted to God's eter- nal sonship. Nature accordingly can never be or become to man his spiritual habitat — that is, the true home of his soul — because it never discloses the living or infinite God to him, but only God in- carnate and incarcerate in his own nature. The moment nature attempts to babble of spiritual or 278 EMANCIPATES THE MIND FROM NATURE. infinite things, she either stops at once appalled at her own temerity, or else falls into a mere idiotic stutter, like that of our blatant Joseph Cook, Par- son Moody, or any other of the noisy imps whose providential mission seems to be to make the pulpit forever odious and disgusting to cultivated men. The only thing that still reconciles the devout world to the pulpit is that it disposes men to slumber ; and nothing could be less conducive to the permanence of the institution than this senile affectation on its part to be galvanic and lively. Miracle, then, is the standing symbol to men's intellect of their spiritual creation, or their having a being in God transcending the laws of time and space, and noway complicated with the puny order of nature, or her stifling ritual of cause and effect. Its purpose has always been in truth to keep the intellect free of nature's palsying routine, and make men disdain to measure themselves spiritually by her trite and superficial order, which in fact is merely the order (faintly imaged) of their own im- mortal emancipation from natural trammels. All praise therefore to Mr. Darwin, Mr. Huxley, and other scientifically qualified persons, for telling us that they discover no trace of creative power in nature ; that the truth of such power, accordingly, must be sought elsewhere than in her common- place trivial precincts, which are of no use any SCIENCE JUSTIFIES MIRACLE. 279 longer but to furnish material for tedious scientific class-books, or to inspire misty, sentimental poets with an elaborately feeble and yet pretentious twit- tering. For these scientific men have thoroughly displaced the church in men's estimation. They are ministering to what is now men's highest or divine- natural life — just as the church itself when it was a living thing in the earth, and not as now a mere dead mummery existing only in its own profession, ministered to men's spiritual life. For as formerly the church represented the gospel of God's love to man, or proclaimed God's deathless mercy to the chief of sinners — that is, even to the most saintly specimens of human kind, and so freed men's con- science of subjection to law either human or divine — exactly so science, literally representing God's natural humanity, still further authenticates the spiritual divine mercy to men. For, chasing the divine power out of nature quite as remorselessly or reverently as miracle ever ventured to do, it vir- tually limits his abode henceforth to the soul and mind of man, and teaches man in his researches after deity to look no longer outward but inward, and find the only God adapted to his worship in every tie of natural affection and every thought of natural respect that freely binds him in holiness and sweetness to his fellow-man. The only thing about which one is ever disposed 280 MEN OF SCIENCE SPIRITUALLY DULL. to quarrel with men of science, is their insane as- piration to make nature account for itself to the intellect. They look upon the world of space and time, or nature and history, as possessing a grim objective reality of its own, in strict independence of its relation to the human mind ; and they flatter themselves that if they could once get hold of this reality all doubt and debate about things would cease. But this world has no such outward and objective reality of its own, or apart from a human subject. Its only reality lies in its faithfully sym- bolizing, or picturing to men's intelligence, spiritual or living realities which are infinite and eternal in the heavens. It is absurd, therefore, for any one to pretend understanding nature and history who does not approach them from some previous doctrinal standpoint such as the church embodied in pre- scientific ages. The church has always dogmati- cally affirmed the superiority of man to nature, although church members in their individual capa- city have not been eager practically to maintain the doctrine. The church, however, has always indefatigably maintained this by teaching man to consider himself God's trne creatnir, and to regard ■mineral, vegetable, and animal merely as providen- tially involved in his existence. Its doctrine of cre- ation to be sure has been unspeakably childish and absurd to the intellect, but it has always kept men THEIR FUNDAMENTAL ERROR. 28 1 in memory of the word at least. It has never min- istered to them the spiritual comfort which is in the word, because it was itself wholly ignorant of that comfort, looking upon creation as a mere v^ol- untary or outward act of God by which he multi- plied men's bodies indefinitely. Of course this is not creation, but a disgusting caricature of it. Never- theless the church kept this ridiculous letter of the truth before men's eyes until such time as the spir- itual conception of it was ready to dawn upon the intellect. Certainly it is no wonder that scientific men hav- ing only the ecclesiastical view of creation, reject it altogether. No man whose intellect is not bound in the base fetters of tradition can tolerate it a moment; for it reduces God to the level of an inventor, and makes his activity that of a fussy and contemptible artist at best. But it is all the difference between a dead and living intellect, that the one limits itself to rejecting falsity while the other aspires also to acknowledge the spiritual truth which has been so long buried under that falsity. Hence it is that scientific men regard science as the final achievement of the human mind, and not its bare initiament ; and look upon every advance they make in scientific doctrine, accordingly, as an advance towards the true, and not towards the simply probable. No one 282 THEIR FUNDAMENTAL ERROR. can doubt that Mr. Huxley or Mr. Haeckel be- lieves in Evolution as a something objectively wrought in nature, and not as a mere subjective product of the mind seeking unconsciously to formulate a doctrine of nature in strict correspon- dence with man spiritually regarded. But there is no such thing possible in nature as absolute objec- tivity. Nature is objective only with respect to man, whose finite or infirm intelligence alone sub- jectively qualifies it, or calls it his. And to con- sider it absolutely objective, as the man of science must necessarily do when he seeks to collect philo- sophic doctrine from it, or to make it explain its own secrets, is even riotously absurd. Nature in fact is nothing but a symbol of universal man, and its entire symbolic purport to his intellect will have been wrought out as soon as he learns this tremen- dous lesson from it — namely, to regard human life as primarily 7iniversal, and only secondarily and subordinately/^r/z'^/Zi^r or private. Mr. Huxley may perhaps object that he thinks evolution took place only as nature takes place; for nature is evolution. But this is precisely what I complain of, that nature should be thought ever to have " takeji place." I do not see how any man who reverences the intellect can suppose that there ever was a space where nature was not, or a time when she was not. And if there never was a space NATURE NEVER "TOOK PLACE." 283 wiiere nature was not, nor a time when she was not, it is palpably absurd to say that nature ever " took place." She furnishes our whole and sole idea of " taking place," and without her to begin with we should never have had the dimmest perception of space and time, for the all-sufficient reason that no such tilings could have ever appeared to exist. She is the sole embodiment of our ideas of space and time, adapting herself to our finite necessities as the mother alone can, and helping us to feel and to think as if she were the whole substance of our phenomenal or conscious freedom, as she veritably is indeed. To use a word of Swedenborg, nature is the ultimate of creative order ; and this word will be best explained by citing his idea of creation, which is vastly more prolific intellectually than the merely naturalistic idea of it now so universal among churchmen and church-bred sceptics. " By " creation," he says, "is meant what is divine from "within to without, or from first to last; for every- " thing divinely created begins in God, and pro- " ceeds in an orderly way even to the ultimate issue ; " thus, through the heavens into the world, and " there rests as in its ultimate. For tl^e ultimate " of divine order is /;/ the nature of the world." No churchman assuredly would say that to be created implies being divine from beginning to end, or from first to last. Not he, indeed ! The 284 NATURE ULTIMA TES CREATIVE ORDER. one idea of churchmen is, that to be created im- pHes to be undivine from stem to stern ; and they have no more idea of a creative order in things, miraculously economizing them or leaving none of them out, than an Australasian savage would have of the architectonic order that blazes away in the Dom church of Cologne. Well, what does Swe- denborg mean by the ultimate of creative order, and by cosmical nature constituting it? He means something sufficiently simple, depend upon it; per- haps too simple for the gross, exaggerated tastes of the day. He means that thing in creative order which provides for the creature's identity against the interest even of his God-given individuality. For inasmuch as the creator gives exclusive being to the creature, the creature would be spiritually swallowed up in the creator unless the latter should consent to exist or go forth in the created nature, and so endow the creature with natural identity. This natural identity of the creature, which consti- tutes him to his own consciousness, and gives him body, is his indefeasible propriuni, and is included in creation as its ultimate ; that is, as the thing on which the spiritual creation is altogether condi- tioned. Here accordingly in the very heart of crea- tion is secured the fullest conceivable provision for the creature's identity. Let the creature be good or evil then just as he pleases, neither his good nor NO EXISTENCE OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 2S5 his evil will ever serve to characterize him spiritu- ally, but only, and at most, naturally ; his good at the best (simply, I suppose, because it is his) hav- ing no power to lay hold upon the divine good, or to ally him with the infinite ; and his evil at the worst being powerless to separate him (except subjec- tively) from God, while objectively it furnishes a most overpowering argument for the divine com- passion towards him. I have not forgotten to elucidate (rationally) the answer to my question with which this chapter opens. In fact I have only been preparing to elu- cidate it, in this preliminary statement which I have sought to give of the office of miracle. For if the office of miracle in sacred writ be to represent the divine presence and power in our nature, it cer- tainly represents it as dealing with the nature in a thoroughly masterful way, as if the nature were its own primarily, and only secondarily or subordi- nately ours. Miracle is usually characterized as a display of super-natural power, whereas in truth it is strictly a display of divine power within the nature — thus of what Swedenborg calls divine-natural power. Correctly speaking there is no such thing as supernatural power, because there is practically no such thing as supernatural existence. The di- vine being is essentially creative : that is to say, God by the necessity of his own perfection imparts 286 COD EXISTS ONLY IN HUMAN NATURE. life to all his creatures. But if so, he is obliged first of all to reduce himself subjectively to the creature's natural dimensions, in order that he may afterwards objectively succeed in elevating the crea- ture to himself — that is, to his own spiritual dxraen- sions. For the creature, inasmuch as he is created, has and can have no being in himself. He is and exists only naturally — that is, by virtue of what he has in common with his fellows. It is this natural community which the creature is under as created, that constitutes his essential limitation ; in other words, it is that solely which gives him identity, and so separates him to his own consciousness from the creator. Thus the creature has at best in himself only a quasi or seeming reality. His re- ality is wholly in his relations to his fellows ; that is, in his nature^ which is only a mask of creative power. But we must understand at the same time that the creature has not the least insight into his own natural limitations. It never occurs to him to im- agine that he is without life in himself. On the contrary, he feels himself to be full of life. He is so rich in sensation alone, that he would laugh at you for saying that sensation was not life. He is sure for his part that life consists in sensation, and that to augment its volume or realize all its possible variety is fully to enjoy life. To be sure this per- HUMAN NATURE NOT FINITE. 28/ suasion of his is all nonsense ; but what are you going to do about it? As long as he can confide in nature's fixity, he remains perfectly established in himself; and all you can say in derogation of that habit he calls metaphysics, which he somehow feels he has a right to despise, though it is the only pos- sible ground of the faint little trivialities he acknowl- edges as constituting himself Your only chance, accordingly, of spiritually helping him lies in your being able to disturb his faith in the fixity of nature. Do this, and you hopelessly unsettle his belief in himself, for he himself is only what his nature makes him. Now you cannot shake a man's faith in the fixity of nature except by showing him that nature is un- created ; that is, that it is not a finite thing involved in man's finite consciousness, but a strictly unde- fined or universal life of God in man. I call it a life of God in man ; but spiritually viewed it is prac- tically a death of God in man, since the incarnation of God's infinitude in a foreign nature must be spir- itually equivalent to death in himself If then the nature only belongs to us at second hand, while it really belongs at first hand to God almighty in us, it would be absurd to deem it absolutely fixed. It is fixed only to our very limited sensible observa- tion ; but it is wholly unfixed to scientific observa- tion, which is that of the race. Now in the absence 288 WHAT Mil? A CLE DOES FOR US. of race testimony to this efifect in the early history of humanity (that is, in the destitution of all intel- lectual power on man's part to apprehend the truth upon the subject) miracle offers itself as a substi- tute or stop-gap, affirming the creator's omnipo- tence in nature. This is what miracle does for us. It teaches us to acknowledge an almighty power in nature ; and if there be an almighty power in na- ture, then nature is not finite except to our infirm apprehension of it. And if nature be really not finite save to our limited observation, then the finiteness which it apparently confers upon us dis- appears at once, and we have no available refuge henceforth for our unsheltered heads but a trem- bling faith in the almighty being whom it an- nounces. Now unquestionably to be whisked about in this miraculous way from one's conviction of his natural finiteness (and from all the security it is felt to en- gender in human life), and to feel one's self hence- forth made a mere contingency of God's omnipo- tence in nature, does somewhat spiritualize the mind, but in a very direful and distressing manner. That is to say, it exposes human life to the influx of heaven and hell, or gives it for the first time its ability to recognize the existence of a supersensu- ous good and evil in humanity. This no doubt is much to do. But after all it is a plainly negative IT DISPOSES US TO BELIEVE IN GOD. 28g work, unsettling man's natural finiteness indeed, but in no wise establishing his spiritual infinitude or perfection. On the contrary, as by the hypoth- esis of creation there are but two beings in the uni- verse — creator and creature — good and evil have got to be distributed between these two ; which leaves the creature no choice but to identify him- self with evil spiritually, in identifying God alone with spiritual good. And the identification of one's self with spiritual evil, or sin, must be a purely pro- visional effect of God's indwelling in humanity never intended for permanence, or even to endure long, because such a pronounced contrast between creator and creature could not be long acknowl- edged among men without tumbling into an organ- ized hypocrisy, like that which at present prevails in the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. Miracle then, in spite of its sensational worth, is a mere operation of God's providence in human affairs, disposing men to the recognition of his om- nipotent name. When once this living recognition takes place — that is, when men cease to acknowledge it with the traditional memory alone, and confess it with the life — then the divine kingdom becomes established on the earth, and men no longer see as now two divided beings in the universe, creator and creature, but the creator alone, whose omnipo- tence is an all-sufficient guarantee for the existence 19 290 AND THIS IS ALL IT DOES. of the creature. In other words, nature disappears as a necessity of the divine administration, and God is all in all. I say that miracle at best only disposes men to the acknowledgment of the omnip- otent name. At best, it only keeps their servile minds from being swamped in their senses, by de- monstrating the existence of a supersensuous power in nature. But it convinces no one of this magnifi- cent truth. Neither does it persuade any one of it, and it drops erelong into a mere sectarian shib- boleth, enforcing new degradations upon the mind. Thus, what good have any of the Christian miracles ever done to the human mind save in arresting men's thought here and there, and disposing it to the acknowledgment of a divine-human power op- erative in nature? For the most part they have not done thus much even. So far from disposing the low-minded men among us who most devoutly cherish the Christian tradition to acknowledge the operation of a ^\vm&-lmman power in nature, they make them utterly indifferent to such acknowledg- ment; or, if anything, dispose them to disavow and frown upon those who unfeignedly make it. In fact, the acknowledgment at this day of the Chris- tian tradition at all seems wofully out of place save as a literal index and confirmation of universal or humanitary truth. It is the one thing that stands in the way of human progress ; for they who make it SYMPATHY WITH A CONFESSION OF SIN. 29 1 and live by it enjoy all the wealth of the world, and it is needless to say that where the world's wealth abides there also will abide the world's material — but not its spiritual — power. The only remedy for this state of things to those who have none of the world's wealth or power or science, and still in heart acknowledge God's natural humanity, is to grow in the faith of his spiritual omnipotence, well knowing that the world's wealth and power and sci- ence are all a monstrous sham or false appearance in the interest of the creature's natural identity, and are of no account whatever in determining a man's spiritual individuality. Every man of this spiritual make will be sure to sympathize profoundly with the confession of sin inculcated upon the early church. For though he has no call himself to repeat or reproduce the con- fession, he has no manner of doubt that this was the only way in which a living acknowledgment of God's almightiness could then be effected. It is only in these latter days — that is, only since the last judgment described by Swedenborg as taking place upon the church in the spiritual world — that men are beginning to rise above the necessity of those formal ritualities, because they are now fully able to realize with the intellect the great truth of God's omnipotence, the greatest and most benig- nant truth man's intellect will ever be summoned 292 SYMPA THY WITH A CONFESSION OF SIN. to know. And every one who is beginning to do this however faintly feels that had it been his lot to live in the days of the early church, he could never have expressed the sincere or living hom- age of his heart towards God in any other way than by making a confession of sin. CHAPTER X. MR. EMERSON. AT all events, if we are still to go on cherish- ing any such luxury as a private conscience towards God, I greatly prefer for my own part that it should be an evil conscience. Conscience was always intended as a rebuke and never as an exhil- aration to the private citizen ; and so let it flourish till the end of our wearisome civilization. There are many signs, however, that this end is near. My recently deceased friend Mr. Emerson, for exam- ple, was all his days an arch traitor to our existing civilized regimen, inasmuch as he unconsciously managed to set aside its fundamental principle in doing without conscience, which was the entire secret of his very exceptional interest to men's speculation. He betrayed it to be sure without being at all aware of what he was doing ; but this was really all that he distinctively did to my obser- vation. His nature had always been so innocent, so unaffectedly innocent, that when in later life he began to cultivate a club consciousness, and to sip. 294 ILLUSTRATES GOD'S NATURAL HUMANITY. a glass of wine or smoke a cigar, I felt very much outraged by it. I felt very much as if some re- nowned Boston belle had suddenly collapsed and undertaken to sell newspapers at a street corner. "Why, Emerson, is this j/ou doing such things?" I exclaimed. " What profanation ! Do throw the unclean things behind your back!" But, no; he was actually proud of his accomplishments ! This came from his never knowing (intellectually) what he stood for in the evolution of New Eng- land life. He was lineally descended to begin with, from a half-score of comatose New England clergy- men, in whose behalf probably the religious instinct had been used up. Or, what to their experience had been religion, became in that of their descendant /t/e. The actual truth, at any rate, was that he never felt a movement of the life of conscience from the day of his birth till that of his death. I could never see any signs of such a life in him. I remember, to be sure, that he had a great gift of friendship, and that he was very plucky in behalf of his friends when- ever they felt themselves assailed — as plucky as a woman. For instance, whenever Wendell Phillips ventilated his not untimely wit at the expense of our club-house politicians, Emerson, hearing his friends among these latter complain, grew indignant, and for several days you would hear nothing from his lips but excessive eulogies of Mr. Garrison, which A SIiVLESS CREATURE, 295 sounded like nothing else in the world but revilings of Mr. Phillips. But, bless your heart ! there was not a bit of conscience in a bushel of such experi- ences, but only wounded friendship, which is a totally different and much lower thing. The infallible mark of conscience is that it is always a subjective judgment couched in some such language as this : " God be merciful to me a sinner ! " and never an objective judgment such as this : God damn Wendell Phillips, or some, other of my friends ! This latter judgment is always an outbreak of ungovernable temper on our part, and was never known to reach the ear of God save in this guise : God BLESS W. P. or aiiy other friend implicated ! Now Emerson was seriously incapable of a subjective judgment upon himself; he did not know the inward difference between good and evil, so far as he was himself concerned. No doubt he perfectly comprehended the outward or moral difference between these things ; but I insist up- on it that he never so much as dreamed of any inward or spiritual difference between them. For this difference is vitally seen only when oneself seems unchangeably evil to his own sight, and one's neigh- bor unchangeably good in the comparison. How could Emerson ever have known this difference? I am satisfied that he never in his life had felt a temptation to bear false-witness against his neigh- 296 COULD GIVE NO ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF. bor, to steal, to commit adultery, or to murder ; how then should he have ever experienced what is tech- nically called a conviction of sin? — that is, a con- viction of himself as evil before God, and all other men as good. One gets a conviction of the evil that attaches to the natural selfhood in man in no other way than — as I can myself attest — by this grow- ing acquaintance with his own moral infirmity, and the consequent gradual decline of his self-respect. For I myself had known all these temptations — in forms of course more or less modified — by the time I was fourteen or fifteen years old ; so that by the time I had got to be twenty-five or thirty (which was the date of my first acquaintance with Emerson) I was saturated with a sense of spiritual evil — no man ever more so possibly, since I felt thoroughly j^^-condemned before God. Good heavens ! how soothed and comforted I was by the innocent lovely look of my new acquaintance, by his tender courtesy, his generous laudatory appreciation of my crude literary ventures ! and how I used to lock myself up with him in his bed-room, swearing that before the door was opened I would arrive at the se- cret of his immense superiority to the common herd of literary men ! I might just as well have locked myself up with a handful of diamonds, so far as any capacity of self-cognizance existed in him. I found in fact, before I had been with him a week, that HE WAS CONTENT SIMPLY TO LIVE. 297 the immense superiority I ascribed to him was al- together personal or practical — by no means intel- lectual ; that it came to him by birth or genius like a woman's beauty or charm of manners ; that no other account was to be given of it in truth than that Emerson himself was an unsexed woman, a veritable fruit of almighty power in the sphere of our nature. This after a while grew to be a great discovery to me ; but I was always more or less provoked to think that Emerson himself should take no intel- lectual stock in it. On the whole I may say that at first I was greatly disappointed in him, because his intellect never kept the promise which his lovely face and manners held out to me. He was to my senses a literal divine presence in the house with me ; and we cannot recognize literal divine pres- ences in our houses without feeling sure that they will be able to say something of critical importance to one's intellect. It turned out that any average old dame in a horse-car would have satisfied my intellectual rapacity just as well as Emerson. My standing intellectual embarrassment for years had been to get at the bottom of the difference between law and gospel in humanity — between the head and the heart of things — between the great God almighty, in short, and the intensely wooden and ridiculous gods of the nations. Emerson, I dis- 298 MILDL Y LA UGHED A T THE NE W BIR TH. covered immediately, had never been the least of an expert in this sort of knowledge ; and though his immense personal fascination always kept up, he at once lost all intellectual prestige to my regard. I even thought that I had never seen a man more profoundly devoid of spiritual understanding, 'This prejudice grew, of course, out of my having inher- ited an altogether narrow ecclesiastical notion of what spiritual understanding was, I supposed it consisted unmistakably in some doctrinal lore con- cerning man's regeneration, to which, however, my new friend was plainly and signally incompetent. Emerson, in fact, derided this doctrine, smiling be- nignly whenever it was mentioned. I could make neither head nor tail of him according to men's ordinary standards — the only thing that I was sure of being that he, like Christ, was somehow di- vinely begotten. He seemed to me unmistakably virgin-born whenever I looked at him, and reminded me of nothing so much as of those persons dear to Christ's heart who should come after him profes- sing no allegiance to him — having never heard his name pronounced, and yet perfectly fulfilling his will. He never seemed for a moment to antag- onize the church of his own consent, but only out of condescension to his interlocutor's weakness. In fact he was to all appearance entirely ignorant of the church's existence until you recalled it to his HE HAD NO CONSCIENCE. 299 imagination ; and even then I never knew anything so implacably and uniformly mild as his judgments of it were. He had apparently lived all his life in a world where it was only subterraneously known ; and, try as you would, you could never persuade him that any the least living power attached to it. The same profound incredulity characterized him in re- gard to the State ; and it was only in his enfeebled later years that he ever lent himself to the idea of society as its destined divine form. I am not sure indeed that the lending was ever very serious. But he was always greedy, with all a Yankee's greedi- ness, after facts, and would at least appear to listen to you with earnest respect and sympathy when- ever you plead for society as the redeemed form of our nature. In short he was, as I have said before, funda- mentally treacherous to civilization, without being at all aware himself of the fact. He himself, I venture to say, was peculiarly unaware of the fact. He appeared to me utterly unconscious of himself as either good or evil. He had no conscience, in fact, and lived by perception, which is an altogether lower or less spiritual faculty. The more univer- salized a man is by genius or natural birth, the less is he spiritually individualized, making up in breadth of endowment what he lacks in depth. This was re- markably the case with Emerson. In his books or 300 ABSOLUTELY WITHOUT PERSONALITY. public capacity he was constantly electrifying you by sayings full of divine inspiration. In his talk or private capacity he was one of the least remun- erative men I ever encountered. No man could look at him speaking (or when he was silent either, for that matter) without having a vision of the divinest beauty. But when you went to him to hold discourse about the wondrous phenomenon, you found hii!i absolutely destitute of reflective power. He had apparently no private personality ; and if any visitor thought he discerned traces of such a thing, you may take for granted that the visitor himself was a man of large imaginative re- sources. He was nothing else than a show-figure of almighty power in our nature ; and that he was destitute of all the apparatus of humbuggery that goes to eke out more or less the private pretension in humanity, only completed and confirmed the extraordinary fascination that belonged to him. He was full of living inspiration to me whenever I saw him ; and yet I could find in him no trivial sign of the selfhood which I found in other men. He was like a vestal virgin, indeed, always in min- istry upon the altar; but the vestal virgin had doubtless a prosaic side also, which related her to commonplace people. Now Emerson was so far unlike the virgin : he had no prosaic side relating him to ordinary people. Judge Hoar and Mr. HIS INFANTILE INNOCENCE. 3OI John Forbes constituted his spontaneous poHtical conscience; and his domestic one (equally spon- taneous) was supplied by loving members of his own family — so that he only connected with the race at second-hand, and found all the material business of life such as voting and the payment of taxes transacted for him with marvellous lack of friction. Incontestably the main thing about him, how- ever, as I have already said, was that he uncon- sciously brought you face to face with the infinite in humanity. When I looked upon myself, or upon the ordinary rabble of ecclesiastics and poli- ticians, everything in us seemed ridiculously un- divine. When I looked upon Emerson, these same undivine things were what gave him his manifest divine charm. The reason was that in him every- thing seemed innocent by the transparent absence of selfhood, and in us everything seemed foul and false by its preternatural activity. The difference bet^veen us was made by innocence altogether. I never thought it was a real or spiritual difference, but only a natural or apparent one. But such as it was, it gave me my first living impression of the great God almighty who alone is at work in hu- man affairs, avouching his awful and adorable spir- itual infinitude only through the death and hell wrapped up in our finite experience. This was 302 THE HOLINESS OF INNOCENCE. Emerson's incontestable virtue to every one who appreciated him, that he recognized no God out- side of himself and his interlocutor, and recognized him there only as the liason between the two, tak- ing care that all their intercourse should be holy with a holiness undreamed of before by man or angel. For it is not a holiness taught by books or the example of tiresome, diseased, self-con- scious saints, but simply by one's own redeemed flesh and blood. In short, the only holiness which Emerson recognized, and for which he consistently lived, was innocence. And innocence — glory be to God's spiritual incarnation in our nature ! — has no other root in us than our unconscious flesh and bones. That is to say, it attaches only to what is definitively universal or natural in our experience, and hence appropriates itself to individuals only in so far as they learn to denude themselves of per- sonality or self-consciousness ; which reminds one of Christ's mystical saying : He tJiat findeth his life {in himself) shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. CHAPTER XI. SWEDENBORG AND SCIENCE. IT must be admitted that Swedenborg's books in a surface aspect are impracticable to mod- ern scientific thought, chiefly from the stress they lay upon creation as a spiritual or living work of God subordinating nature to itself, but in part also from a certain misconception which science herself is under in regard to her own historic function. Scientific thought revolts at the idea of spiritual or living creation, because such creation implies the essential relativity of nature to human intelli- gence. For science is wont to affirm nature's absoluteness, and is indisposed to hear of its being subordinated to anything in man. I grant that nature is absolute with respect to the senses, for the senses are the creature of nature, being actu- ally unvivified without it. But I deny that nature has any rational absoluteness, for the simple rea- son that any such pretension would at once un- settle all man's spiritual history, or efface the truth of his supersensuous experiences. Science, how- 304 SCIENCE DENIES MIRACLE. ever, makes the senses the uhimate criterion of truth, allowing nothing to pass muster which is not fundamentally conformable to sensible expe- rience. Thus it denies the possibility of miracle, because " miracle contravenes natural order as avouched by sense!' These premises, for scientific ones, seem to me extremely loose. I know of no natural order avouched by sense, because I do not know of a single natural existence so avouched. A natural order surely can take place only among natural existences. If the senses then avouch no existence, how shall they avouch the order which pertains to it? The senses avouch only and at most natural fact, and they are densely blind as to any natural order implied in the fact. The senses do not even see nature, which is nothing but a most general term for all existence ; and the senses have notoriously no generalizing power, all their skill being exerted and exhausted in the discernment of specific or particular things. For the discernment of any order applicable to these things, especially of any order so grand and uni- versal that it is worthy to be called natural, we must look not to the senses therefore but to the reason. The senses confine themselves to giving us facts; and it is the exclusive office of reason to tell us of the relations which exist among those facts. For reason has no more regard for facts SWEDENBORG TAKES IT FOR GRANTED. 3O5 than sense has for order; and if there should not be a sensible plane of existence therefore below the rational plane, to provide the facts of nature, reason would be wholly at a loss to avouch any natural order. It would be like a man of enor- mous appetite starving for want of bread and water. However, as Swedenborg's books do on their face take miracle for granted, and especially set up no stupid little quarrel with it, it is the judg- ment of science that every person who respects the books in this their obvious or surface aspect is liable to the imputation of superstition. It is not worth any one's while at the present day to cavil at this judgment. At least I do not feel it to be worth my while. For though I hold that the progress of the human mind in the past has been contingent upon men believing that miracle was not only possible, but was the characteristic form of God's action in human affairs, I yet have no idea that this belief craves any longer the wit- ness of any historic fact or event to keep it in countenance, since science itself affords it ample and conclusive though unconscious justification. Doubtless, in early days, when Christianity was young as a literal doctrine upon earth, it very much promoted the spread of it to believe that its founder was an altogether exceptional person, 306 THE DIFFERENCE UNIMPORTANT. infinitely removed from the conditions of our or- dinary peccant humanity; because the idea the wisest men then entertained of God was so purely inhuman, or deistic, as frankly to preclude any direct approximation between the two orders of being, and suspend our historic progress conse- quently upon the presumed mediation of some nondescript third person. Accordingly, that Christ was born of a virgin, and that he rose bodily from his grave three days after death, bearing with him his proper flesh and bones in his ascent to the skies, was an actual necessity to the best religious culture of the time ; because men were not then free to think spiritually or livingly of God, and hence were unable to recognize any revelation of the divine name in the earth, which did not clothe itself in this figurative or symbolic costume. But I am far enough from imagining any such necessity to be a demand of our present religious culture. Indeed, the most truly reverential thought of the day revolts from supposing that it would further the interests of spiritual Christianity — that is, Christianity regarded no longer as a mere doc- trine, but as a life — to go on cherishing the worn- out traditional beliefs which signalized its doctrinal promulgation. On the contrary, enlightened men everywhere are beginning to feel reasonably sure that nothing is so prejudicial to the vital influence LEGENDARY PERSON OF CHRIST. 307 of Christianity — nothing so hostile to its infinite divine genius — as men's continuing to hold to this legendary personality of the Christ as having any longer a particle of divine truth or significance. For what is the recognized scope or spirit of the Christian revelation of God's name? Unques- tionably, love to the humatt race, good will to all mankind, and not to any special exceptional people or persons of that kind. But what a gro- tesque sort of love to mankind would it argue in God, to find him shutting up all the blessedness designed for universal man to the bosom of the mystical person who did nothing but reveal it,^ and making all other men depend upon their vol- untary attitude toward this same legendary person, whether they themselves should have any part in the promised salvation or not ! Do I err, then, 1 And even that so very dimly that there can be no doubt that the Christian revelation of God's life in man never began to vin- dicate itself against the dense inveterate stupidity of the church until within the last century- — all its previous activity for nearly two thousand years having been required practically to harmonize men's outward or moral relations to one another, or prevent them actually cutting each other's throats, while it inaugurated that quasi universal or natural order in the earth which is called civili- zation, and which itself was needed figuratively to base the eternal spiritual revelation. In point of fact, the Christian revelation, though it literally took place two thousand years ago, has only just now succeeded in getting itself suspected of being a revelation of man's spiritual life to himself, or of being a gospel_/?rj/ to his soul, and only afterwards to his body. 308 NEEDFUL DIVORCE OF LETTER AND SPIRIT. in saying that the bare persistence of this stohd traditional prejudice in regard to the person of Christ — let alone that spiritual revival and exten- sion of it, which the more impudent and aggressive of our fanatics are striving to bring about — is to the last degree hurtful to Christianity regarded as a divine spirit or life in men, by convincing every thoughtful, dispassionate man, that, however the religion as a letter may have thriven in respect to other and feebler faiths, it is spiritually on the same base level with them all? In fact it seems to me that nothing can much longer save the divine-human spirit or life of the Christian truth from the utter blight and mildew of its letter, but the suing out of a resolute and speedy divorce d vinculo mati'iinonii between them. For aught I care, then, science may quarrel with the Christian church a outrance ; for the church by this time is a mere cadaver in the earth, solic- iting nothing from intelligent, humane persons but sepulture out of human sight, and a tender grave requiem at best. But I insist that it has no ghost of a quarrel with Swedenborg, whose manly, ro- bust, most veracious books rang out the death- knell of ecclesiasticism long before science, in anything like her present bumpkin and bellicose aspect, at least, had come to self-consciousness. The only limitation I will allow any one without GENESIS OF HUMOR. 309 protest to charge against Swedenborg as a writer, is that he is too preternaturally serious to give his critical faculties fair play. He was unfortu- nately of a most devout temperament or mental habit, inclining him to an over-indulgent esti- mate of the merely pious element in the church — that element of false show or deceptive appear- ance which is usually denominated Pharisaism. To say all in a word, Swedenborg's intellect was singularly deficient in /minor — a faculty which best expresses the distinctive difference betsveen the old and new intellect, because its tendency is evermore to identify God with the universal or unconscious element in humanity, and so give rise to a far more genuine, tender, and affectionate style of piety, or expression of religious rever- ence, than the world has yet known. Humor admits of no specific definition, but may be de- scribed generically as the change wrought in the human mind by a growing conviction among men of the essential hiinibiiggcry that underlies and is the private religious pretension in humanity, min- gled more or less with a kindly compassionate feeling which they have to each other as having been, all, thoroughly duped and victimized by it in the past. However, define or describe it as we may, there can be no doubt that what we call humor finds its main nutriment in the histrionic 310 CHURCH A XD THEATRE. or self-righteous tendencies of men — those ten- dencies which lead us to covet great things for ourselves, such as acknowledged eminence in the religious life, or corresponding respectability in the secular life. It is very edifying, but at the same time strictly natural, that the church, which has always been the focus or hot-bed of these pious and respectable pretences among men — sacrificing, indeed, all interior goodness and truth of character to them — should have always hated the theatre with signal hatred, because the thea- tre, and especially of late, has always done God's kingdom essential though unconscious service in exposing these pious and respectable pretenders (hypocrites, Christ named them) to well-deserved infamy. But however all this may be, what I insist upon is, that humor, which is at present the new or divinely vitalized form of the intellect among men, would have little or no subsistence left to it, if human life should ever grow sick of its piddling, subjective, or purely ecclesiastical and civic aims, and become utterly merged and lost in aesthetic or grandly objective and humanitary ones. I feel that Swedenborg is above criticism in all he says dogmatically of God's spiritual attributes, or the essential perfections which belong to him. But at the same time I see that he was not and SWEDENBORG DISTANCES HIMSELF. 31I could not be half so well acquainted practically as we, his own readers, are at this day with God's natural infinitude, or existential perfection — that infinitude or perfection which characterizes him, not in himself, but in the lord, or his revealed relation to his creatures. At least we may be sure that Swedenborg could have known nothing liv- ingly or at first-hand of God's natural humanity, but only doctrinally, through his exceptional inter- course with angelic spirits. For scarcely had this infinite and glorified humanity become spiritually avouched in its own kingdom, or the natural sphere of the human mind, before the brave old man died, or forever disappeared from mortal sight among the angels. And it is obvious to a glance that the angels were even worse-placed than he himself had been to discern the living divine truth of the nat- ural sphere ; since now by Ids removal from nature they were deprived of all knowledge of natural fact, save in conjunction with which divine truth does not exist. It is doubtless for this reason that Swedenborg's books, utterly priceless as they are to me consid- ered as vehicles of refined celestial and spiritual information, yet practically lack atmosphere to my appreciation ; are destitute of that exquisitely di- vine and exhilarating natural aroma which all dis- course relating to these high themes ought in this 312 HIS BOOKS LACK NATURAL ATMOSPHERE. day to leave behind it. Thus it is, that whether I read of heaven and its orderly peaceful vicissi- tudes, or of hell and its insane delights, and feel the whilst my moral sense amply satisfied, I must say that to my aesthetic sense, which is the organ of the spontaneous or divine-natural life in me, the result is very much the same in either case, being always very dull and prosaic, with the poetic ele- ment very nearly eliminated. I am sure to feel, in both cases alike, this deadly atmospheric ex- haustion or deoxidization, this absence of a divine- natiiral glow on the obvious face of things ; and I cry out at once to angel and devil with infinite gusto and good-will, "■ A plague o' both your houses, if these are all the boasted spiritual world has got to offer us ! " In short, a fatal stagnation seems to my intelligence to brood over both hemispheres of the spiritual world equally, as if the chill of night were fast settling down upon them forever; the stagnation being only feebly diversified by occasional "glorifications" in heaven, or occasional penal " demonstrations " in hell. While as to any breath of the life we are beginning faintly to realize here — as to any breath of a distinctively /?/(^//c DIVINE-NATURAL life or consciousness of men, coming to absorb or blot out henceforth their ob- scene, unwholesome, and ahommahle private life or consciousness, with all the petty partisan heavens SOME SILL Y PRIVA TE HOPES. 3 1 3 and hells bred of such life or consciousness — ever rippling the atmosphere of these infatuated spiritual people, I catch no faintest echo of such a thing. Thus I have been gradually led to cherish the hope that I myself in heart, or on my spiritual side, am thoroughly weaned from all desire to enact infuturo the role either of angel or devil ; for I confess that I have long since confided in God's great mercy that I too shall eventually be found both in heart and mind so broadly human or universal as to be unfit to add a feather's weight to either scale of that old, always inorganic, and now most prepos- terous and extinct spiritual conflict between heaven and hell, or good and evil. I do not hesitate to say that this conflict has now become preposterous ; because, since the Last Judgment in the spiritual world, hell has plainly got the upper hand in human aff"airs. Evil in fact is now so palpably en- throned both in church and state, that infidelity to public and private trusts is fast becoming the rule with men, and fidelity the exception ; while the conjugal and family spheres of life, which used in some measure to preserve and reflect the traditions of man's inward or spiritual life, do little now but obediently reverberate this rising diabolic inspir- ation, to the great profit and delectation of our leading newspapers. In fact I am only too content to be and remain 314 SOME SILLY PRIVATE HOPES. what God's creative and redemptive providence is sure to make me ; and, serene in that abiding sen- timent, I cannot but feel myself inwardly absolved alike from private hope and private fear. The truth of God's natural humanity is the truth of the creator s actual bond fide incarnation in his creature's nature ; and if my very nature henceforth allies me thus spiritually with God, I may both safely disregard the contingent conjunction with him promised me by the skies, and cheerfully despise the contingent separation from him threat- ened me by the abysses. For a man's selfhood is infallibly derived to him through his nature, being in the long run its veracious exponent and expres- sion. Whatever therefore be the revealed destiny of my race or nature, such I doubt not will be, in its proper proportionate measure, my own spiritual destiny. And I accordingly find myself — insig- nificant mite that I always in soul feel myself to be — continually uplifted by an almighty arm above every sphere of perturbation, into one of eternal innocence and peace. But I am digressing; perhaps not altogether so, either. I had no purpose in beginning but to affirm that what wc call nature, or the external world, is a literal echo or repercussion of the spir- itual world — the world of heaven and hell ; and is therefore itself spiritually uncreated, forms no NATURE A DIVINE BLOTTER. 315 proper portion indeed of God's spiritual creation, so long at least as we do not consent to accept natural echoes for spiritual realities. God's spirit- ual creation, and he has no other, stops at man — mind and heart, male and female ; and the physical universe, absurdly as we overestimate it, is nothing after all but a divine blotter, or sphere of waste, appended to his true or spiritual creation, in the interest and for the comfort of us, its naturally thick-headed denizens. We require just such a fixed and fallacious cosmical scheme as this in order to give us cumulative experience, or to enable us to learn by failure and suffering what spiritual dolts we invariably are in our individual right, and so be led at last to seek God's salvation by studiously allying ourselves in unity with our kind. Nature has thus to our thought no absolute value beyond that of a divinely-constructed looking-glass, in- tended to reflect the creature such as he is in him- self, and thus negatively to attest his creator's perfection ; and all its demands upon us, conse- quently, are summed up in the one great command to make its relative value, which is the value we set upon it, harmonize as soon as possible with this, its absolute value, as a looking-glass. Let me, however, do no manner of injustice to Swedenborg. I am persuaded — indeed it is evi- dent on the face of all his books — that no one 3l6 SWEDENBORCS LIMITATIONS. felt more keenly than he, on the side of his intel- lect, the spiritual degradation at which the formal or visible church had arrived ; but I do not think that he felt zvitJi his heart how greatly the spiritual effect that he recognized had been owing to the prevalence of this hideous conventional piety in the church, or the spread of a fierce self-righteous temper. No one has better exposed, incidentally , the blasphemy of a man, or set of men, cultivat- ing a title to their creator's favor. Still, had he written at this day, I cannot but think that the incidental cause would have swelled into the prin- cipal one. That is to say, he did the work he was given to do toward the church dryly and du- tifully, in excellent fashion moreover, level to the humblest capacity, so that his books are actually austere and grim with all the requisite truth on the subject. All I say is, that he did not do his work htiinoronsly, as identifying himself and his own fortunes with the wretched moribund culprit he was criticising, or as feeling that intimate and infinite divine GOOD which is merely masked, and never really hurt or perverted, by all our evil. As to feeling that he himself indeed, and all his own most devout, respectable friends and cronies were just as deep in the mire of self-righteousness as any one else ; as to feeling, in other words, that selfhood or self-righteousness is the inveter- SCIEA'CE'S QUARREL WITH HIM. 317 ate disease of the created nature, its ineradicable peaclium or conscious flower, being what alone fits it to be, by contrast, a suitable revelation of the creator's spiritual infinitude or perfection, so blending all men in each other's loving regard, by removing from each the special responsibility he is under for his common nature — this was hugely impracticable to Swedenborg, I doubt not, for the simple reason that the race-sentiment (that living and quickening divine presence in us which makes us feel humanity to be venerable or respectable only as a public force, and altogether ridiculous or contemptible as a private one) was not then sufficiently pronounced in the earth to shatter the old devout credos, and the empty in- dolent formularies in fashion along with them, which had so long smothered it, or rendered it practically inoperative. But this, after all, is only my own fantastic pri- vate quarrel with Swedenborg, not at all science's grave and public one. I have had the weakness sometimes to fancy that his style would be very much bettered in itself, and hence react favor- ably upon the spread of his books, if in writing them he could have availed himself of the freer spirit that has been bred of God's recent provi- dences in human affairs. And yet, since writing the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, I 3l8 SCIENCE'S QUARREL WITH HIM. am afraid I have done injustice to Swedenborg, remembering his matchless characterizations of the selfhood in man. At all events, it seems the mere wantonness of criticism to demand of a writer that he be what it is plainly impossible he should have been. This, however, is not the fault of the criticism which science makes of Swedenborg. Her criticism is not at all wanton or personal, and consequently is much less summarily to be dealt with. What science alleges against Swedenborg is, that he discredits the fixed order of nature, not only by failing to seize every opportunity to in- terpose a protest against miracle as a violation of that order, but by apparently taking for granted in all his books the abstract credibility of mira- cle; thus plainly attributing to God {if indeed the order of natiLre be divinely fixed — and who has ever doubted it?) a contradictory or irregular mode of action. Obviously this is no light cavil against the author, to be dismissed with a sneer, but a serious, well-weighed imputation upon his scientific integrity or completeness. It demands accordingly a dispassionate consideration from every one who prizes Swedenborg's importance to philosophy, and wishes well to the prosperity of the extraordinary literature which illustrates that importance — a literature in my opinion so very NATURE ONLY A SHADOW. 319 remarkable as to turn all the current most res- pectable literature of the world into comparative rubbish. What weight, then, in the light of his own professed principles is due to the charge which science brings against Swedenborg? No weight at all that I can see, since it runs utterly counter to Swedenborg's intellectual principles that na- ture should claim in itself a fixed order. He in fact is the only scientific man I know whose intel- ligence is large enough to permit him to deny that nature is essentially a fixed quantity. To be sure he does not make the denial scientifically, or in a way of induction from particulars, for this would be manifestly absurd ; but the denial is none the less valid on that account. He even makes it implicitly, indeed, rather than explicitly, which is very much more significant ; for a man's conscious opinions are of small account to the intellect compared with the unconscious logic which determines them. Now if, with Sweden- borg, we admit creation to be spiritual or living, we can see at a glance that nature has, and can have, no reality save as imagery or shadow. It is nothing more and nothing less than the image or shadow of the creative life in man. It is not the creative life itself by any means, for that is spiritual or infinite. It is all simply the lifeless 320' NA TURE ONL Y A ' SHADOW. shadow, the senile, obsequious image of the spir- itual creation, which is man ; who being created, — that is, having in himself no underived being — requires nature to authenticate him, as it were, to himself, to give him self-consciousness, which is quasi or constitutional projection from the infi- nite. And whoever heard of a shadow being substance save to the senses? I beg the reader not to let the point here made slip from his mind as unimportant; for it is important enough to signalize the exact difference between the intellect, or common-sense, of men and the mind of science. Or, to avoid ambiguity, let me say that it expresses the eternal difference between the religious and the scientific intellect — that is, the intellect that is moored to infinite being as a basis for its hopes and aspirations — and the intellect that, as a basis for its more lim- ited hopes and aspirations, is moored to finite ex- istence. For what characteristically distinguishes the two intellects is, that one has a substantial basis, the other but a shadowy one. We are all familiar with the constitution of shad- ows or images. When we look, for example, in the glass, and see our own visages obediently reproduced there, we know that that effect is an optical illusion generated by the rays of light that go from our features, impinging upon an opaque GENESIS OF SHADOWS. 32 1 substance, and finding themselves thus reflected back to us. The image or shadow thus produced is no substantial or objective thing, evidently; because if it were it would report itself to all our senses impartially. Now what has no objective reality (or is not first a tiling to our senses) must be a fortiori destitute of subjective personality or consciousness ; and if it be confessedly without either of these characteristic marks of existence, it must necessarily acknowledge itself a mere vis- ual illusion, incidental to our finite intelligence, and finding its sole raison d'etre in the uses it subserves to that imperfect intelligence. Such undeniably is the genesis of shadows or images — in short, of what we distinguish as tmreal exist- ence by calling it phenomenal. They have in themselves no objective being, or are not so much as things, to begin with ; and consequently they are without subjective existence, or conscious per- sonality. And what in itself is destitute of both sense and consciousness is obviously not em- braced in natura rernm, and indicates the supreme subserviency of nature to a higher power. Of course I do not mean to say that Swedenborg is foolish enough to ascribe to nature the same unreality we ascribe to the shadow. For he him- self admits that nature is most real to sense, being in fact the only reality known to it. But I do 322 NATURE A SHADOW TO SPIRIT. mean to say that Swedenborg, though he by no means ascribes the same unreality to nature which men ascribe to shadows or images, yet ascribes an every way corresponding unreality to it; that is, a rational unreality. As the shadow is unreal to the senses, or to thought derived from the senses, so nature is unreal to spiritual thought. The shadow or image, mind you, is not unreal to sense as shadow or image, but only as thing or substance. Just so, nature is never unreal to spir- itual thought as apparent or phenomenal substance to existence — that is, as furnishing a logical base or background of unity to all the particulars em- braced in it — but only as furnishing ///«/ inward relation of life or being to existence, which natural or unregenerate thought cannot help ascribing to it. In short, just as the shadow or image sensibly appeals for its reality to some foreign and superior intelligence, so to spiritual or regenerate thought nature cheerfully acknowledges her own reality to be divinely human — that is, to be solely consti- tuted by the conjoint presence in it of infinite and finite. Thus nature, in Swedenborg's estimation, is a fixed or absolute order only to the childish su- perficial judgment of sense. Winter and summer, seed-time and harvest, night and day, decay and growth, pain and pleasure, — these things, with A TRUE REVELATION OF GOD. 323 very large incidental variations even at that, con- stitute to Swedenborg that fixed or constant order of the senses, which alone deserves the name of nat- tiral or universal order, because it alone through all the comprehensive range of its dominion makes and keeps sense rigidly nutritive and ministerial to the mind of man, which is God's true life in him. Outside of this order of the senses, conse- quently, neither God nor man exists, nor do they show either of them the least sign of a desire to exist. But within it, what infinite divine humili- ation to every form of human want ! Within it, what indefinite responsive human expansion to every form of divine perfectness ! But, good heavens ! science does not pretend, any more than Swedenborg, that the senses, however truly and sharply they define, or even of themselves consti- tute, our natural or universal existence, have any claim to constitute also our spiritual being, or our inmost individual life — does she? Because if science does this, she pronounces herself pitiably idiotic with reference to the intellect ; and this so far as science is concerned should end the con- troversy. Not, however, so far as Swedenborg is con- cerned. It is due to the intrepid soul of the man, and to his bold, free intelligence, to declare that he at least has no such pinched conception of 324 NATURAL ORDER NOT A FINALITY. cosmical order as would lead him to suppose, with science, that it is literally or materially constituted, being essentially uncomplicated with mind as its sole source. This is the view of science, and it is an unspeakably shallow and superstitious one. Swedenborg's implicit idea on the contrary is (I am not sure but that it is also his explicit one, which, however, is vastly less important) that the world's order in fact is the realized mind of the world — what we call mind being order in sub- jective or spiritually acute form, and what we call order being mind in objective or sensibly chronic form ; sense itself being the miraculous divine grasp or clutch which holds object and subject in most living solution, and yet keeps them both so exquisitely distinct as to make their intercourse an apt expressive emblem of the infinite and eternal tie between creator and creature. The charge accordingly which science brings against Sweden- borg, of discrediting natural order, can be true only when natural order offers itself as a goal to the mind instead of a vehicle, or when it would make itself the chosen mistress of the mind in- stead of its paid handmaiden ; and then it should be discredited. Natural order, according to Swe- denborg, was never intended for a finality to the mind, but at most as a spur or discipline to its advanced spiritual growth. Of course, then, he SWEDENBORG SCIENTIFICALLY SPOTLESS. 325 not only actually and invariably discredits it as such finality, but he would doubtless deride it with endless scoffing and contempt if it had ever come to him (as it does to so many of our mod- ern scientific men) affecting to control or coerce human thought in the efforts it makes spiritually to span the gulf which to that infirm thought separates between infinite and finite — and beside which, I might go on to say, science, in the de- voted indefatigable person of Mr. Herbert Spen- cer, insists upon eternally standing, to roll up the whites of wan ineffectual eyes to a blind unwit- ting heaven. It is plain to see, then, that on his own princi- ples, which I confess seem to me indisputably those of the intellect, Swedenborg stands at least fully acquitted of doing any injustice to nature's order. But I go further than this. I insist that very much larger justice is due to Swedenborg than is supplied by this mere negative verdict of not-prove7i. For I maintain that, tried on Ids own principles, he stands not merely acquitted of any delinquency to science, but fully avouched as the only writer in the long annals of the mind who has done adequate justice to nature's order in showing it to be in itself plainly miraculous, as revealing the direct creative presence and power of God — so making a permanent bridge between 326 A MAN OF IRREPROACHABLE MODESTY. science and philosophy, or reconcihng sense with reason in the precise focus and stalking-ground of their contrariety. I know very well that I shall seem, in the esti- mation of many small partisans, to be endowing Swedenborg with immense intellectual prestige by thus insisting upon his incomparable services to the mind in furnishing it with an adequate doc- trine of nature. But, poor old man ! I do not think it ever occurred to him to attribute the endless intellectual worth of his books to himself; and I am very sure that I for my part am in no danger of doing so. It is in my opinion distinction enough for Swedenborg that he was a devout, modest scholar, who in the midst of unexampled experiences — experiences which must surely have addled the light, insincere brains of almost any of our ecclesiastical or literary showmen — never lost his head, but went the even tenor of his way without once looking to right or left to solicit the empty verdict of men's stupid wonder or applause. To personal ambition indeed in all its forms he was spiritually dead. The consequence is that no one who is intelligently familiar with his remark- able books ever feels his admiration toward the author in the least degree quickened. He is filled very often with surprise and delight and even adoration at the transcendent truths which are HIS EGOTISM UNNOTICEABLE. 327 strewn along his pages as thickly as stars along the milky way ; but no one, I venture to say, ever feels even a momentary temptation to magnify the author. Why? Because in the light of these transcendent truths all men, good and evil, rich and poor, wise and ignorant alike, sink into such insignificance that one willingly forgets the stupid conventional differences which our vulgar mislead- ing daylight breeds between them ; and the di- vine or infinite name alone remains to praise. In fact I defy any one who has the least intellectual proclivity to this extraordinary literature, to read it with any thought of the author, save that, while his veracious genius amply qualified him to do justice to his spiritual chances so far as they were matters of outward observation, or fell within the range of eye and ear, it left him utterly without any sympathetic insight, or direct living intuition, of the distinctively divine and glorified humanity which the truths in question are designed to bring about in this ordinary realm of nature; so that practically he remains always the uninspired, often the mere tedious or prosy, annalist of immense changes occurring in the spiritual world, of which he himself did not discern the philosophic origin, and to which he could not assign therefore a legitimate scientific issue. I have now vindicated Swedenbors: from the 328 VINDICA TION FROM SCIENTIFIC RE PR OA CH. scientific reproach he is sure to incur in making creation wholly spiritual or living, so reducing nature to a purely incidental position and impor- tance. In the beginning of this chapter, however, I said that the hostility of science to this idea of creation is owing in part to the somewhat exag- gerated estimate she puts upon her own historic place and function. I shall say what is needful to be said on this point in another chapter. CHAPTER XII. SCIENCE IN RELATION TO THE INTELLECT. IN descanting in the last chapter upon the unfa- vorable judgment which men of science form of Swedenborg's writings, I attempted to show that it was due in chief to the place which the miraculous element held in them. But I also said that it was due hi part to the somewhat exagger- ated estimate scientific men entertain of the role of science in our mental history. Let me now explain this latter proposition. Science is conceived of, by all her professed partisans, as furnishing final and positive body to the mind, while theology and metaphysics supply it at best with a mere tentative organization. And as Swedenborg exactly reverses this process of mental growth, making philosophy and science both strictly ancillary to religion, merely scien- tific men conceive a prejudice against him, which can only be adequately met by proving his analy- sis of the facts of the case to be on the whole greatly more competent than their own. On 33 O SCIENCE A REFLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE. what ground, then, is Swedenborg plainly justifi- able in assuming the relative inferiority of men's scientific intelligence? On the ground of its being a purely reflective or reverberatory intelligence, not a direct or living one. I call the scientific intelligence in men reflect- ive, that is, reverberatory, because it systematically discards the witness of man's inward or living consciousness in formulating its inductions, and depends altogether upon outward or sensible ob- servation. Thus it is not a free, but rather a servile intelligence, acknowledging in outward fact the authority that belongs only to inward and in- visible truth — so leaving out what is characteristi- cally human or individual in men, namely, freedom, and staying itself instead only upon what is organic or universal, namely, force. In contrast, indeed, with the living intellect in men, or what may be called their intuitive knowledge, science thus han- dicapped is like a runner at the Olympian games, who, instead of presenting himself for the con- test stripped, alert, and energetic, should choose to appear with a peddler's pack on his back ut- terly disqualifying him for running at all. Nay, more : science's pack, unlike the peddler's, is not self-limited, but always goes on toilsomely rolling up. For science docs not care to harmonize men's particular experiences except with the view of A HIERARCHY IN KNOWLEDGE. 331 attaining to a universal result; and as there nec- essarily never can be a universal result to men's particular experience and observation (for other- wise sense would swallow up consciousness, or force exclude freedom), but only an approxi- mately universal one, so the best scientific culture can never yield a knowledge which is absolutely true or certain, as affording a divine sabbath of rest to the mind, but only a knowledge which at most is probable — that is to say, provable to experts. All this is doubtless true, but it is by no means all the truth we want to know, in order to do perfect justice to our original question regarding science and her relation to the intellect. For example : it is very important to ask whence the necessity for this hierarchy of knowledges in man, whereby one style of knowledge (called con- science, and sometimes faith or perception) is invariably ranked higher as being relatively in- ward, direct, or living; and another style (called science) as being relatively outward, reflective, or dead, is invariably ranked lower. If we at all succeed in answering this incidental question properly, I have no doubt we shall be able to find a perfectly satisfactory solution to our main inquiry. The necessity for this hierarchical order of 332 THE REASON WHY. knowledges, or for this divided mind, in man inheres then all simply in his being the creature of an infinite creator. Now what is it to be the creature of infinitude or omnipotence? It is to possess one's being only in what is most alien, other, or opposite to one's self; even although truth and fact seem violently sundered by the experience. Of course the creature is by nature ignorant of his creator's spiritual perfection. That is, he can never know his creator by direct con- tact with him, because the relation between them is so intimate and ineffable as utterly to elude sense by falling within it; and truth which has not at least some foundation in sense is fairly incomprehensible to faith or reason : and being thus naturally ignorant of his creator, it can never possibly occur to him what the method of spir- itual creation is. For my own part I do not see how he can even do so much indeed as rec- ognize the bare truth of spiritual creation, let alone the method of it ; and it is perfectly incon- testable as a general thing that he feels every obligation of truth in the premises fulfilled when he has once acknowledged a material creation. For he thinks, and cannot help thinking, that he himself is and exists in space and time ; and at- tributing thus these wretched conditions of finite existence directly to his creator, he is fain to sup- CREA TION GOD IN O UR FLESH AND BONES. 333 pose (and even makes a merit of so doing) that he himself and all men are after all a most dreary, stupid, pedantic, uninspired, and uninspiring Jian- diwork of God, instead of being an absolute or literal reproduction of his love and wisdom, a veritable sincere coinage of his blood and brains. And so long as he contents himself with this faint, distant, and drivelling echo of gospel truth, he cannot help remaining blind to the eternal truth itself, which is all summed up in two words : SPIRITUAL INCARNATION. According to the gospel of Jesus Christ, creation is neither possible nor conceivable but as a spiritual divine incarnation in the created natJirc ; that is to say, as a most living, hearty, and spontaneous indwelling or im- prisonment of God in the literal, abject, and familiar clay of our flesh and bones. And how shall any one whose nose has been diligently rubbed for long centuries by priest and king in this deadly, most disgusting slime of things called space and time, ever lift himself so far upright as even to dream that his own down-trodden iden- tical manhood has been all the while divinely owned and authenticated, and is henceforth to be regarded, so to speak, as naturally flushed with infinitude, and the inmost innocence that belongs to infinitude? Very well, then. If man be in essence created — ■ 334 OUJ^ IDENTITY THE MAIN INTEREST. that is to say, if his being inhere in what is in- finitely alien or other to himself — then of course the interests of his identity must prove the first care of his creator, just as the first care of the ar- chitect in building a house is to provide it a suit- able foundation. If the house be not insured a good foundation by the skill of its architect, it must soon fall to pieces, and had better never have been built. So if the creature's formal identity, which is his constitutional difference or projection from God, were left insecure by creation ; if it were not in fact guaranteed by the whole force of God's distinctive genius, which is all-might or infin- itude — creation must obviously prove unseaworthy, and spring aleak ; in which case its entire divine substance and freightage of love and wisdom would confess itself miserably squandered, to say the least. Indeed the creature's subjective interests — the in- terests of his natural identity, of his constitutional difference or antagonism with his creator — arc the only real care or preoccupation that the creator experiences in creation. On its objective side, or in the end, creation is doubtless secure enough, for God's spiritual omnipotence guarantees it; but on its moral or subjective side it is totally insecure, since God cannot possibly control man but in real or spiritual freedom, and cannot possibly say there- fore, before the issues of his mere qtiasi, or moral CREATION NO HOLIDAY WORK. 335 and educative, freedom determine themselves in any particular case, whether the subject of it will stand well or ill affected to his great spiritual pur- pose in humanity, which is its deathless or spon- taneous conjunction with infinitude. In fact the moral or subjective development of the race is the one sole thing that makes the cross a normal and culminating symbol of our spiritual creation, and justifies it to our reason. Our moral history is the only thing that goes to prove the eternal spiritual worth of creation, as lying in the infinite cost of it to God. Creation can never be an insincere holi- day performance to the heart of God. Its inward or spiritual meaning being redemption — the ac- tual and eternal redemption of the creature from his very nature as a creature, in order to his invest- iture with plenary divine good — how can any man short of idiocy, who is familiar with the rank, in- clement obduracy of his own heart to goodness, and the sneaking, skulking, fatal tendency of his understanding to compromise with truth, fail to ac- knowledge the fact I allege? Creation would be, I do not hesitate to say, a perfectly profligate and unprincipled work of God, unless it were thus in- wardly and humanly consecrated; unless it were wholly in order to a greatly more sincere and costly work of redemption, which should practically prove the creator's heart infinitely unlike the creature's 33^ THE MIRACLE OF NATURE. selfish one, and by that fact alone stamp the creator infinitely worthy of the creature's homage. To say all in a word : man's creation does not consist at all in giving him spiritual being or substance — for being or substance, inasmuch as it is infinite, can- not be transferred from hand to hand — but only in endowing him with NATURAL (that is to say, impersonal) form, which is the only form fit to house infinite substance. For when this form is once divinely constituted by the creature freely renouncing his subjectivity, or, what is the same thing, acknowledging it to be purely phenomenal, then first the creature becomes invested with true or divine-natural selfhood — selfhood that renders him at once both really subjective and really ob- jective to God. And being thus at last formally united with, and yet formally differentiated from, the creator, the latter's infinite and eternal being determines itself to him with the same passionate love or delight wherewith the husband betakes him- self to his bride, or the mother opens her bosom to her child. Let us then feel ourselves free to conclude that the total peculiarity of the creative nisns or eff"ort — the very thing which stamps it essentially mirac- ulous, or qualifies it as infinite — is, that it is supremely intent upon giving its creature inexpug- nable natural existence; because such existence PERSONAL IMMORTALITY INCONCEIVABLE. 337 alone furnishes the creature an adequate basis for his subsequent experience of spiritual life. Om- nipotence itself would not suffice to give you or me personal immortality. No such thing as per- sonal immortality is possible or conceivable within the resources of infinite love and wisdom ; for per- sonal immortality means a spiritual life of 07ie s own, and nothing can be so essentially repugnant to spiritual life as the pretension to an individual ownership of it. If any one thing accordingly is clearer to me than another, it is this ; namely, that if any man in heaven or earth or hell really possess his own spirit — that is, possess it in a way so absolute or unconditional that it willingly reflects and attests Jiis own distinctive worth and not the coninion wortJi of his kind — it can only be because we have hitherto mistaken the divine name or quality in attributing to it infinitude, and that it is after all in very truth a flagrant and flagitious respecter of persons, unfit any longer to claim or enjoy the homage of just men, and entitled only to their undying contempt. If this seem a hard saying to the reader, let me try to commend it to him by means of an illustration. Suppose then, my reader, that you are a famous statuary like Michael Angelo, and that like him you have a subtile power to impress your genius on the docile, obedient marble. In that case your 338 ARTISTIC GENIUS NOT CREATIVE. work will certainly betray no lack of individuality. Whatever technical defects it may have, or faults of mechanical handling, it will never fail to be instinct with your own genius, and consequently will never want that expressive force which artists call distinction., or individuality; so that almost no one familiar with your genius, or power of ar- tistic expression, will fail to recognize the work as characteristic. Now your admirers would flatter you egregiously, if they should call your genius creative. They might to be sure do so in a loose, figurative way, but nothing could be so absurd if meant seriously. Artistic power is in reality the precise opposite of infinite power, and no more pregnant contrast can be imagined, for example, than between it and the power displayed in spiritual creation. It is true we talk of God as the supreme artist, thinking thereby to do him honor. But however polite and even patronizing our intention may be, we do wretchedly scant justice to the object of it, whose characteristic action, as creative, is necessarily one of passion, humiliation, or suffer- ing; while that of the artist is exclusively one of action, joy, or spontaneous delight. The artist in his work rejoices in difficulties actually overcome ; the creator, in his, passively submits himself to the existence of evils which can never be over- come even by infinite power, and from which at CREATOR'S GENIUS NOT ARTISTIC. 339 most he can only give his creatures a conscious release. And though it may be said doubtless that this abasement of himself to evil on the part of the creator is more than offset by the joy of thus delivering his creature from it, still the joy of the creator is never artistic joy. Notoriously the de- light of the artist is to impress his own distinctive genius on his work, to reproduce himself in it as much as may be, to stamp it with the lustre of his own commanding individuality ; and the acknowl- edged merit of the work is to heighten the artist's renown, and reflect his important little bow-wow to future ages. But all this would be sadly ?/;z-divine work. In fact the case with our most inartistic, or self- ishly inexpert and imbecile, creator cannot well be more antagonistic to this. For what, spirit- ually, is the divine object in creating? It is to take himself eternally out of his creatures sight, or effectually disappear in the work of his hands. Fortunately for us, since otherwise we must have missed our only chance of creation, he has no semblance of private selfhood, or of interests pe- culiar to himself. In fact he has no interests but those of his creature, nor even any the slightest breath of existence save in us his creatures ; so that it is simply impossible to any one, not pre- viously infatuated with self-conceit, to put himself 340 COD'S WORK IN HUMAN NATURE. in a moral relation to him, — a relation of personal merit or demerit. Palpably, therefore, since cre- ation has got to become naturally constituted, or identified in its own proper lineaments, before it can thus serve to reflect or propagate the creative name, so consequently the creative name can only aggrandize itself spiritually by aggrandizing the nature of its creature, or endowing it with its own previously unknown and unimaginable attributes, which are those of life or infinitude. VVe may say accordingly that what the creator character- istically does, unlike the artist, is diligently to diminish himself to the level of the created na-, ture, in order thereby that the creature may be- come elevated to the level of the divine nature; diligently to efface every suggestion of himself in his work, whereby he could be imagined to have any interests at variance with those of his crea- ture, indeed any being or life apart from him. In short, to tell the whole story in a word, the cre- ator is no way bent, as we stupidly imagine him to be, on making his creature noble, virtuous, es- timable — for such things, even if they could be out- wardly imported into the creature, would always be ludicrously inapposite to his derived, reflected, and most beggarly existence — but on utterly scourging every shadow of pretension to such things out of him, by endowing him with natural OUR LACK OF PRIVATE WORTH TO GOD. 34 1 selfhood or identity ; which is the express antidote or prophylactic to spiritual individuaHty or char- acter, inasmuch as it implies in its subject the utmost possible destitution of spiritual or living qualities, in expressing the utmost possible fellow- ship, equality, or community between him and his kind. Our natural identity then — what we call our selfhood, or community with our kind, as alone consciously separating us from God, or the in- finite — is the highest obligation of our creator to us, because without it, to begin with, we our- selves should be forever incapable of spiritual reaction to our creator, and creation consequently fail ab incepto. But now do I really mean to allege that this immense divine boon, proceeding straight out of the divine heart to us, and so fraught with incalculable spiritual issues to our nature, is yet inevitably fatal to our private respectability in God's sight? I confess I mean just this, nothing more and nothing less ; and I should be well con- tent if my voice were loud enough to sound it intelligibly in the ear of every man of woman born. I do not see how God can feel the least enthusiasm for us his imbecile spiritual creatures, any more than the architect feels for the bricks and mortar that enter into the plan of his house. I do not see how he can take the least pleasure in 342 ART A DIFFICULT MISTRESS. US who boast ourselves his creatures ; how he can feel any love or respect for us ; how he can cher- ish any hope or expectation from us. I do not see, in fact, how he can bring himself to feel any emotion toward such worthless and unscrupulous pretenders to life but extreme compassion. To be sure we call the statue a creature of the artist's hand. Very well, then : I ask you if you think the artist is liable to the least illusion in regard to his statue, and like Pygmalion regards it as worthy of his respect and tenderness? As- suredly not, you will reply. Those who them- selves have no plastic power may thus unduly prize the artist's work. But the artist, if he be an artist, and not a mere born traitor to art, is never satisfied with his performance. Doubtless his self-love and self-esteem may be very much fostered by our outside and ignorant appreciation of his power; but rest assured that his statue attracts no homage from him to itself In itself it is not existent to his consciousness, being to him not so much as a thing even authenticated and owned by the honest nature of things. What- ever exists in natiird rerum exists of course nat- urally, and hence really as a thing. But what exists in the realm of art is not real, as having an honest or inward substance behind it, but only idealy as being the mere echo or outcome of som.e ART A DIFFICULT MISTRESS. 343 empty personal afflatus — at most, of some in- substantial personal aspiration — on the artist's part. Thus the statue is not even a thing, but only and at best the appearance of a thing, cunningly wrought out of nature's substances, but wholly destitute itself of natural soul or substance, be- cause its maker — or, as we foolishly say, its crea- tor — has no soul or substance of his own to impart to it, being himself a lifeless creature still unre- deemed to his own consciousness from death. And hence I maintain that it is impossible for the artist, Pygmalion-like, to be so infatuated with self-conceit as really even to dream of endowing his statue with attributes of which he himself has as yet no perception. But now if all this be true of the artist — that he is incapable of any properly spiritual joy in his work because he sees it to be an insubstantial thing at best, a mere shadow or image of his own shadowy power, of his own unreal self — much more is it true of men's omnipotent spiritual creator, that he is incapable of any the least over-estimate in regard to the work of his hands. For though his creature is very different in nature or kind from that of the artist, it is spiritually, or in itself, not a whit superior to that, save in so far as con- sciousness, or seeming life, may be reckoned better 344 NATURE A MASK OF CREATIVE POWER. than no life, being in fact an unmistakable pre- sage or harbinger of it. Apart from this falla- cious consciousness, which in truth is only a living death, man, looked at spiritually or in him- self, is an infinitely less real existence than the statue. For the statue is separated from its maker — and so far accordingly is every whit as real as he — by the marble which gives it ma- ternity; but our great benign mother, nature, which also seems to separate us absolutely from our maker, is only a seeming after all, because "we intellectually or spiritually have always been densely idiotic, or have not become in-born as yet to our divine-natural manhood, which infal- libly teaches us that nature has always been, is now, and forever will be, nothing but a shallow transparent mask of infinite substance, and has accordingly no intrinsic power to separate us from God (save to our own fluffy j^-^-consciousness), but only to conjoin us in immortal spiritual nup- tials with him through our race or kind. We may conclude, then, that inasmuch as sense is the ultimate or base of all divine knov/ledge, and inasmuch, moreover, as this knowledge is of its own nature indirect and negative, so the whole field of sense or visible existence requires to be subjected to a discipline which shall say, and say infallibly, what in our knowledge belongs to the SCIENCE A HANDMAID TO THE INTELLECT. 345 race (or is universal, public, permanent) and what belongs to the person (or is particular, private, transient), separating the latter from the former as remorselessly as the chaff is separated from the wheat. Now this discipline is furnished by science, which has relation exclusively to the knowledge borne in upon us through sense, that is, our outward or reflected knowledge. And science, limiting herself thus to what is outward or objec- tive in knowledge, confesses herself but a hand- maiden to the intellect, which is the sphere of man's direct, living, inward, intuitive knowledge, and faithfully enacts the role of a handmaiden towards it, in always seconding its affirmation of an exclusively divine or infinite power in nature by the allegation of an exclusively universal or natural power in man. Which finishes my thesis, in proving that science, in spite of all partisan- ship, is not a leading but a most wholesomely subordinate power of the mind. CHAPTER XIII. ADAM AND EVE. "\TATURE, or the visible world, is the lifeless -^ ^ image, the servile obsequious shadow, of the lord, or God-man, Maxinius Homo (Perfect Man) as Swedenborg names him — at once son of God and son of man, begotten of no carnal seed, and born of no carnal womb ; on the contrary, con- ceived of the holy spirit, and brought forth in the fulness of time of the impeccable, impersonal, Divinely owned, eternally viRGiN-womb of human nature or humanity, rescued from its temporary phenomenal dimensions, stripped of all private limitations, restored to its essential and universal unity as the mother of existence, and invested with all Divine infinitude. Surely neither any Jewish nor any Gentile maiden could affect to fulfil so uni- versal, so divine a maternity (however she might historically prefigure it), unless she were already a victim to an exaggerated and fanatical self- conceit. What I have just said of nature, or the visible CONTRAST OF NATURE AND HISTORY. ZA7 universe, is perfectly reasonable, provided we look upon it as enlivejied and illumined by history, which alone redeems nature from chaos, and makes it a veritable cosmos. Nature without history to spir- itualize it is mere body without soul, death without life, form or appearance without substance or real- ity to back it and fill it out. It is envisaged to us in our symbolic Genesis as Adam without Eve, a purely unintelligent and unintelligible quantity, fit only to give name (or quality) to vegetables and animals. And as Adam and Eve between them exactly symbolize the contrasted fortunes of nature and history — of life or being, and existence — we shall do well perhaps to pause awhile upon the familiar theme, and ponder its profound compre- hensive wisdom. Adam is the rudest, crudest, spiritually least modified — that is, most tiniversal — form of human nature, representing the base, earthly, material, centrifugal, identifying force in creation which is known as selfhood, and which, as producing divi- sion or disunion among those whom God creates one, is soon recognized as that essentially evil, dia- bolic, or simply waste force in humanity, which God and all good men are most insanely thought to be bent — not on utilizing — but on extirpating. Eve, on the other hand, celestial counterpart of this vulgar deciduous Adam, unlike him is fash- 34S NATURE AND HISTORY CONTRASTED. ioned out of no earthly mould, but out of his most intimate human substance, as yet wholly unknown to, and un-divined by, his own shallow conscious- ness ; being, as Swedenborg interprets her, his "vivified selfhood" — that is to say, his regenerate, Divine-wdXuvdX, or individualizing soul, the dew of God's ceaseless, soft, caressing presence in human nature, full of indulgent clemency and tenderness towards the dull, somnolent, inapprehensive, un- conscious clod with whom she is associated, and whom yet she is to educate and inspire by exqui- site ineffable divine arts into the lordship of the universe, or marriage sympathy and union with the universal heart of man. Accordingly the very first service that Eve is reported as attempting towards Adam, is to leaven his sodden sensuous clay with a wholesome and timely recognition of the subtle death which ani- mates and is his conscious life. Our progenitor — innocent earthling that he is ! — has as yet no idea of life but to live in a garden richly stored to supply and gratify every sense ; and death of course can only mean to him the loss of this happy sen- suous life. So that when he hears a divine voice telling him that he may eat freely, or at his own pleasure, of all the trees of the garden, while there is one tree, called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which he cannot eat of freely — that is, at ADAM'S FIRST LESSON. 349 the impulse of his carnal appetite, but only at the instance of his soul, or the Lord's life within him, that is, with sincere j^^-loathing, contrition, and suf- fering — the voice has evidently an altogether hid- den meaning, only to be afterward revealed by Eve ; for until Eve comes he is demonstrably soulless, remaining a mere unsocial animal consciousness, or " alone" as the sacred text phrases it. But when Eve arrives, and discovers with the finer instinct of the soul (that is, his covert divine nature) that the fruit of this metaphysical tree is not only good for food and agreeable to the sense, but altogether de- sirable to make one wise like God (for God, in the infancy or inexperience of the human soul, is inevitably conceived of under personal conditions, or as the most finite of beings), she forthwith gives her docile nursling his first lesson in true manhood, by determining him to eat of it though death and hell be in the eating. Now the entire purpose of this subtle transcend- ent story (which in a few careless strokes paints the tenderest divine dawn of our distinctively human life and all its stupendous, unimaginable historic issues) has been, as I conceive, to bottle up the secret of man's spiritual creation from his own knowledge, until such time as in the foresight and providence of God man, enlightened by the in- stinct of his natural or race freedom, might him- 350 MAN'S FREE-WILL self be safely intrusted with it, to apply it to the great universal ends of human life, and no longer to the vain, fantastic interests and issues of a dis- eased and exorbitant personal consciousness. I repeat what I have said, " the instinct of his natural or race freedom ; " for this instinct is the only valid claim which any man has to private or personal freedom. My reader, doubtless, has often been tired to death of hearing this question of man's private freedom discussed and debated — *' freedom of the will " as it is called — without either disputant being able to decide whether the freedom in question be absolute, arguing the crea- ture to be independent, or simply a freedom con- ditioned upon reason. Some of the disputants contend that a qualified freedom is not and can- not be real freedom ; while others hold that an absolute or unconditioned freedom is far too real, amounting in fact to license, which is freedom with its back broken, and its head consequently trailing in the dust. But all alike agree, it is clear, that the freedom demanded for man is bound to be a very real one, inasmuch as an unreal freedom would manifestly defeat the needs of his existing morality. Morality is everywhere thouglit to be absolute in the requisitions it makes upon its subjects ; and an absolute morality to be entitled to any respect ought to exact in its votaries a complete subser- IS NOT A BSOL UTE. 351 vience to itself, or freedom from outside responsi- bility. So that the partisans of a qualified freedom, a freedom qualified by rationality, hold their own at this day more by devout feeling than by logic. But the controversy, it is fair to say, is no longer purely scholastic as it was in old times, for popular passion has become enlisted in it and is fast ren- dering it ominously practical — to such an extent, indeed, that I doubt not if universal suffrage could some way be appealed to to settle it, it would soon be solved in the interest of those who hold to a self-determining or strictly atheistic power in the will. The popular mind indeed — to judge of it by the very unhandsome popular lingo of many of those who profess to speak for it — looks upon human freedom as substantially a diabolic posses- sion ; that is, " as a right or power in every man to do as he damn pleases," so long as the prison and the scaffold do not say him nay — the ''damn'' here being evidently used to signalize the transition- point where will becomes transmuted into wilful- ness, and forfeits its old aristocratic cleanliness to get down and wallow in democratic mud. But the whole tiresome controversy, settle it as we choose, is philosophically preposterous, being logically void ab initio. There is not and cannot be a fibre of real or essential freedom in man,* be- cause he is essentially and immutably a creature, 352 CREATIVE EXISTENCE NOT ABSOLUTE. deriving all his living or bei}ig power from another than himself every moment, and a fortiori of course all his faculty of affection, thought, and action. The capital mistake accordingly which our philos- ophers make in point of philosophy — and which our popular leaders make no less, who have them- selves been philosophically misled by the former — is that they have never been willing to accept a quasi or seeming freedom both as the only one congruous with the conditions of a creature, and the only one at all in the power of the creator to bestow. For the creator of man is obviously the least absolute of beings, as even this phenomenal freedom which he is restricted to bestowing upon his creature testifies. That is to say, he has no absolute existence of his own to confer upon his creature, because his own existence is altogether conditioned upon that of his creature; and if he have no absolute existence to bestow, he has d fortiori no absolute power or freedom. Creator exists by creature alone, as creature at first is by creator alone. There is consequently no existence so essentially burdensome — so per- petually degraded and tarnished — as that of the creator, complicated as it necessarily is imth all our natural infirmity ; and nothing short of his own infinitude or omnipotence accounts for his not succumbing every moment to the dismal, invet- GOD HAS NO ARBITRARY POWER. 533 erate weight of that infirmity. The demonstrative powerlessness of Jesus Christ in the hands of his enemies was a most feeble because generahzed type of this truth ; and if we could only forbear our cringing, sickening, and idolatrous adulation of his futile person long enough to catch the divine spirit he was of, we should probably soon find out that we ourselves are spiritually the very head and front of the devout rabble that everywhere and at all times inexorably thirsts for his blood. It is true, no doubt, that we are in the habit of imputing a good degree of freedom or power " to do as they please " to a certain loathsome and disreputable mob or vermin of persons among our- selves. But even in the happiest individual exam- ples of this insane and fraudulent freedom, it is seen to be hopelessly abridged — rendered nought, indeed — by the determined opposition of all man- kind to it, allowing it no manner of practical tol- erance. At any rate, however, no such will-power or freedom belongs to God most high. He of all beings is the least free, has the least power, to act arbitrarily, or follow his own caprice : in the first place, because his love being creative or life- giving, is so essentially free of subjective bias — is, in other words, so infinitely objective — as logi- cally to identify him not with himself, but exclu- sively with his creature ; and in the second place, 23 354 SUCH POWER UNDIVINE OR DIABOLIC. because this absence of self-love in him, this desti~ tution of subjective consciousness, makes humility the very quintessence of his genius, nature, or spiritual quality, and so stamps wilfulness or self- assertion sheerly diabolic, that is, essentially iin- divine.^ And if the creative will simply because it 1 A biographer of the late Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher relates of nim that, being interrupted in one of his lectures upon atheism by a pupil who wanted to know how he would have him meet a man who professed polytheism, or too much deity, he replied to the inquirer with great warmth : " Say to the man that it is all the worse for him if there be more than one deity ; for if one deity is able to play the devil with our persons, making them bear insuf- ferable torments, a multitude of deities will be sure to add tenfold, if that be possible, to his anguish." I don't pretend to remember or reproduce the exact literal phraseology of this brutal theological counsel, but I am at least true to its spirit. Now Dr. B. was con- fessedly a rank and florid sectarian religionist ; so that you may see from this anecdote that not only the venerable defunct himself, but the whole ecclesiastical squad he stands for, not in words, but in deed and in truth, spiritually acknowledge and worship in God the supreme devil of the universe. The whirlwind, it seems to me, would be kindly and considerate in comparison with this profligate New England theology. I don't ascribe the least of its profligacy to Dr. Beecher personally, of course, nor to any of his sectarian adjuncts or allies, who all doubtless in their chance jjersonal rela- tions are estimable men enough. But no conventional respect which is otherwise due to the trumpery persons who are in love with the base letter of our religion, and endeavor to fasten it upon men's unwilling necks, should blind us for a moment to the utterly juiceless, inclement, and inhuman quality of that letter. Person- ally, of course, one man is just as amiable and innocent in God's sight as another ; but the divine being must be so cordially sick and tired by this time of our heartless, unscrupulous theologians, that any frankly unsanctified or vagabond aspirant for his favor can hardly help being infinitely sweet to him in the contrast. MEANING OF ADAMIC MYTH. 355 is spiritually creative, and therefore naturally con- stitutive of others, is not absolutely free, but on the contrary invariably conditions itself upon the crea- ture's power of reaction toward it, why, then, man- ifestly the pretence of any such freedom in man is to the last degree preposterous and illusory. Now, it is this great truth which the Adamic myth seems expressly designed to vindicate. For surely, if our great federal head and representative, when placed in the garden of Eden, had any lim- itary conscience toward God, it stood in these remarkable words : Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat ; for in the day thou eatest thereof tJiou shalt surely die. And yet Eve, his divinely invented and commissioned helpmeet, could evidently do him no such ready and signal service as to cause him incontinently to drain this intimate divine cup of death to the dregs ! Now what is the philosophic meaning of this mystical and pregnant divine romance? Any one with half an eye can see, in the first place, that the death poor Adam encountered from his love to Eve was not in the least physical, save in so far as it implied a change in his experience, by which outward pleasure, the pleasures of sense, become altogether secondary and subservient to inward and more refined delights. In short, it was an altogether living or inward death that Adam 356 ADAM'S FALL A SPLRLTUAL RISE. incurred, a death in his own throbbing bosom ; death to the longer predominance in his nature of its mere passive sensual instincts, which are far too exclusively animal (or paradisiac and voluptuous) to characterize God's true spiritual creature and fellow. And then again, in the second place, any one with half an eye can see, by putting together the two symbolic facts I have cited from the scripture narration, that "Adam's fall," as it is called, was not that stupid lapse from the divine favor which it is vulgarly reputed to have been, but an actual rise to the normal human level out of sheer unrelieved brutality. The " normal human level" becomes fully constituted whenever and wherever a man's outward life freely or spontaneously yields to his inward one ; that is, whenever self-love in his bosom spontaneously gives priority to charity or neighborly love. Adam, of course, is not repre- sented as at all constituting this divine style of manhood. But he is at least represented as pro- spectively compassing that destiny for himself or his descendants by following Eve's happy example in eating of the tree ; for Eve herself had eaten of it with manifest impunity, thus symbolically re- nouncing every outside paradisiac pleasure, every mere pleasure of sense, which stood in the way of his deeper, more intimate delight in a close, indis- SENSE THE TRUE MIRACLE. 257 soluble union with her who was the very hfe or soul of his existence. We certainly may, if we like, continue to vote this manly act of Adam dis- astrous ; for our beggarly, blind understanding in divine things, informed by an utterly dead church, continues, and always will continue, animal like, to judge of spiritual realities by sight and smell, or methods of sense. But to the deathless, immortal part of man (here personated by Eve, getting her first taste of the innocent, enlivening fascinations of sense, personated by t/ie ser-pait) it is anything but disastrous. It is an every way upward step indeed, pregnant with beatific consequences. For the soul, you must remember, attains to consciousness of its distinctive life or freedom, not by shirking the puny death which sense entails upon all its sub- jects, but by frankly accepting it as the condition of one's participation in a higher divine life. And accordingly every son of Adam — every one at least who is happy enough to feel the inspiration of a soul, or daughter of Eve, within him — wel- comes this puny, silly death, which inwardly is his proper consciousness, as his inevitable and uncon- scious resurrection to life. For sense furnishes that miraculous, ever-living, impersonal plane of tdtimates, or contact of extremes (so largely in- sisted upon by Swedenborg as the philosophic turning-point of creation), in which men attain to 358 CONSCIOUSNESS AN INLET TO ALL DUPERY. seeming or fallacious freedom, to natural or quasi selfhood, and so present a basis on which all the possibilities of God's infinitude or omnipotence in their spiritual creation easily and untiringly rest and pivot. It is just here, accordingly, in this enchanted, miraculous realm of sense — wholly infinite or wholly finite, as you happen to view it from above or from below — that our witless theologians and philosophers pick up their crazy doctrine of human freedom as a power in every man to do as lie wills, without deference to any other will, without defer- ence indeed to anything but the unforeclosed mortgage which those two disgusting institutions, namely, the diuigeon and the scaffold, now hold upon his action by virtue of their being the sole hereditary buttress and sanction of our existing unclean civilization. For if God be a priori able to afford men such quasi or simulated projection from himself as amounts to conscious life in them — that is, to natural selfhood or identity — they themselves are at liberty to be duped by this divine conp de main as much as they please, provided finally they do not deny his superior liberty to confer upon men — nfider cover of this specious natural idoitity — what miraculous spiritual indi- viduality he will. Here, moreover — though Eve herself, doubt- EVE FIRST IN TRANSGRESSION. 359 less, as some dull literalist has remarked and many a duller one has repeated after him, was " first in transgression " — let us frankly consider what the poor woman's " transgression " really amounted to after all. It amounts to just this, nothing more : the awakening of an innocent, inexperienced heart and mind to self-consciousness, through the opera- tion of a fitting motive, namely, the recognition of his soul, or spiritual nature ; for this is what Eve signifies in reference to Adam. But this is a " trans- gression " which every parent in the land is guilty of every day toward his own children, without ever having half so good an excuse as Eve had. For that adventurous mother, when she persuaded her imbecile, prosaic, unadventurous spouse out of dawning, passionate, soul-love to her, into flat re- bellion against God, considered as the power of an outward life in men, was really or spiritually acting in the interests of the lord, or universal man, and of his exclusive kingdom on earth. The concep- tion of God as an outside power in human life, sus- taining good and evil relations to man, is inevitable to the infancy of the intellect, when the heart is in abeyance to the head, and the head itself in abey- ance to sense. But this conception of God as an outside power in nature and man, when it is dog- matically confirmed by men's intelligence, becomes an absolute hell to the human conscience, and is 3 60 CHRIS T FUXC TIONALL Y REPRESENTA TIVE. indeed the only hell which the gospel aims to de- liver men from. Every one, accordingly, who feels the spirit of Christ in his members will wage inter- necine war with it. The conflict of good and evil is far too dire a burden for any individual shoulders to bear; and though Christ bore it, and bore it all alone so far as any finite help was concerned, yet we must always remember that Christ was, fjinc- tionally, a purely representative person, not a real one, and that everything he said or did, conse- quently, in the days of his flesh, was said or done in behalf of a strictly representative kingdom of God on earth, not in the least a real kingdom. I am as free as any one could possibly desire me to be to admit that Christ was very much more than a real person (since a real person exists only to consciousness) ; still I hold that he was at least not that, for we cannot really believe in any per- sonal subject of our nature being spiritually — that is, super-naturaWy — conceived and begotten. If indeed he /lad been a real and not a purely repre- sentative person, he would have been totally dis- qualified for the messiahship ; which was to bring to its close a wholly figurative and temporary king- dom of God on the earth — a kingdom based upon persons — and so inaugurate a substantial or eter- nal kingdom based upon infinite or impersonal goodness and truth. For in the first place if he ADAM'S HISTORIC CHANGES. 361 had been a real person, then in the conflict which took place between him and his people, the God of his fathers would have been bound in honor to sustain him personally against the Jews, instead of allowing him to fall a victim to their cruel rage. And in the second place, had he been a real per- son, he would have been totally unfit to found in his blood that true, everlasting, substantial king- dom of God wherein alone dwelleth righteousness ; for this kingdom is utterly without respect of per- sons, every one included in it being baptized in mnoceiice — that is, having washed himself white in the blood of the lamb, from the defiling taint of personality, whether good or evil. But I am getting away from Adam, whose change from a horticultural consciousnesss to an agricul- tural one I meant only to describe as altogether due, not by any means to any absurd change on God's part toward him, but to a strictly consti- tutional incident of his experience, which was the discovery that he had a soul, and was bound to love and honor and obey it at whatever cost to his outward prosperity, even though God himself, con- sidered as an outward power, should menace him with death for so doing. For the soul of man (which is nothing but his invisible, intangible, spir- itual relations to his race) will always make death the proper meed of the finite consciousness, as -362 THE RACE THE REAL MAN. existing by the hallucination of an outward or ab- solute good and evil in life ; and it bids every one committed to the maddening anxieties and per- plexities of such a consciousness to consent ever after to renounce his easy-going paradise, and be content to live laborious days. But the race-stom- ach (of which the soul is the solitary witness or organ) is not so squeamish as the individual one ; for the race-stomach enfolds or comprehends in its own indefinite, indiscriminate unity all our petty personal stomachs, good and evil alike (there being no good but God which is infinite or impersonal), and therefore turns our finite or personal good in- to unmixed evil. In other words, the race alone is real man, and invariably sets the tune, therefore, for us paltry, personal, or phenomenal men to march to. And consequently we turn out good or evil persons — that is to say, even phenomenally good or evil men — just as we consent or refuse to keep step with the race's music. It is nothing less than farcical to think of finding the ground of morality outside the necessities of human nature or the race — for example, in some faticied absolute will of God, considered as acting irrespectively of our race or nature. This is to make God a wretched, contemptible pedant or pettifog- ger, unworthy of any refined or purified homage. If God knows any warfare or difference of good TEST OF DIVINE NAME. 363 and evil in his own proper bosom — if he recog- nizes any evil either private or public which is not reflected to his sympathetic, compassionate eye exclusively from the groaning, infirm, imperfect consciousness of his creatures — then clearly he is not the infinite God I have been taught to acknowl- edge him, nor will I evermore be found, so long as I retain my reason, wasting the sincere incense of my worship upon his hollow deceitful altars. Indeed, if God have any proper life of his own, unshared by and incommunicable to his crea- tures — if he be at all a person, in short, with time and space dimensions at all different from my own, and a possible consciousness of dispropor- tion therefore to the meanest creature he has made — then I with all my heart withhold my hom- age from him as a false and sanguinary pretender to his holy and adorable name, and name him instead, with a full purpose of insult and outrage, after some popular deity — some abominable, las- civious, and blood-stained deity of the nations, such as Beelzebub or Juggernaut, In short, my reader, if human nature, the human race, mankind, or humanity, be not spiritually the only true name of God, exhausting the conception, then I at least do not know the true name of God, and certainly shall never care to know it. For in that case no man of woman born could ever spiritually discern 364 TEST OF DIVINE NAME. any difference between good and evil; and you and I might habitually — by way of keeping our- selves in the existing fashion — take away any man's good name, rob him of his livelihood, defile his wife's affection for him, or deprive him even of life at our sovereign pleasure, and without the least compromise to our loathsome and hideous persons before God, considered himself as an outside per- son to humanity. And now I think you will have no difficulty in understanding what I mean when I say, that good (or heaven) is what it immutably is, and evil (or hell) what it immutably is, simply because the human race, or human nature, is prop- erly itself that actual spiritual outcome or product of creative omnipotence or infinitude which we ourselves — ghastly dwarfs and unlovely carica- tures of humanity that we are ! — have all these dismal centuries been vainly and insanely pretend- ing to be. Heaven, remember, is simply the harvested spir- itual product of our natural or associated life on the earth, of our unitary or race consciousness, as hell is its unharvested or waste product. They do not either of them in any degree express the real or spiritual and individual life of men, for no such life as this has ever been known to men, nor ever will be known, so long as they believe in the ab- soluteness of nature, and the consequent rightful HEAVEN AND HELL INCONVERTIBLE. 365 regime of civilization — though to be sure our poor debauched church and our weak decrepit state have ahvays Hved and thriven by making men beheve that bottomless fiction. That it is a fiction is am- ply clear to the readers of Swedenborg's books, which invariably paint angel and devil, or heaven and hell, as exactly the same in objective regards, and only differenced in subjective regards by the lord, as he phrases it; meaning thereby not any stupid person, but the interests of God's spiritual kingdom on earth. Now, as I understand Sweden- borg, heaven is inconvertibly heaven — that is to say, a divinely beautiful, benignant, and powerful spiritual man — only because the persons who com- pose it are used to acknowledge God only in natural or associated human form, and not in any ideal spir- itual or personal form which they might sensuously think more consonant with his perfection, and hence love one another with cordial or unaffected religious truth; and hell, on the other hand, is inconvertibly what it is — namely, a divided, dis- torted, disunited, and therefore an unwholesome, unsightly, and powerless, spiritual man — only because its subjects spiritually acknowledge God, not in universal human form, but each in his own or some other distinctive person, and therefore hate one another with a hearty religious hatred. In fact, heaven and hell in Swedenborg's mas- 266 THEIR VITAL INTEREST OVER. terly handling of them (and I surely need not say to any one acquainted with his books that his esti- mate of these things, fresh, original, fearless, guile- less as it is to the utmost most audacious bounds of veracity, turns every similar exploit of human wit into silly child's play, or puling, nauseating sentimental guess-work) are both alike nothing but logical, ordinary, and inevitable spiritual inci- dents of our natural or race evolution ; ^ which, as it has two inconvertible factors, creator and crea- ture, God and man, infinite and finite, good and evil, free and bond, exacts to itself a double or divided development — one (heaven) tending «/- wardzxidi appropriate to the major factor, the other (hell) tending downward and appropriate to the minor factor, but both bound perfectly to coalesce in that final unitary display of omnipotent good- ness and wisdom known as human SOCIETY, or the Lord's KINGDOM UPON EARTH. Heaven and hell accordingly have no legitimate interest to us hence- ' I may say, moreover, most benignant incidents of it ; for if it can be reasonably shown (as Swedenborg has done) that the un- regenerate or evil and hellish element in our nature, even when out of divine order, or when not spontaneously subject to the regenerate element, is yet not only no less vigorous than the latter, but on the contrary much more vigorous, sagacious, and produc- tive of eminent earthly uses, what bounds can our imagination set to the hopes that arc bred of it, when at last it shall be reduced to everlasting order in the Divine-natural humanity, or God's coming social kingdom in the earth ! SWEDENBORG DESTROYS THEIR PRESTIGE. 367 forth in our capacity as individual men, save as enabling us to account for certain very striking differences of hereditary temperament in us. Neither could they have claimed any such living interest to us in the past, if we had not stupidly attributed to nature an absolute or independent reality. If we, seeing in nature what in truth it is, a mere intellectual basis for the revelation of God's spiritual creation in man, had been in the habit of attributing to it a purely human quality, or an implicit subserviency to man, we should of course never have made it spiritually antagonistic to God's infinitude, nor exacted therefore the ex- istence of a spiritual and supposititious heaven and hell, in order to adjust the balance between crea- tor and creature which only our own stupidity had disturbed. Swedenborg has so unconsciously but so effectually riddled heaven and hell both alike of all subjective human worth, by showing God's power to be alone operative in the quasi freedom of the one sphere and the quasi order of the other, as to leave them without the least objective signifi- cance any longer to the human mind. They have become now a complete superstition to the philo- sophic thought of men, and as to any legitimate bearing they exert upon the interests of men's prac- tical life, they are little better than a nuisance. CHAPTER XIV. SWEDENBORG AA'D HIS FOLLOWERS. *' I ^HE little sect of Swedenborgians, as they -^ name themselves, put such a fantastic esti- mate upon the letter of truth — provided only that that letter has once been held sacred — as fairly to revolt every one of the least spiritual understand- ing. They have the air to me, for example, of carrying about with them between their shoulders a huge wen instead of a head, superstitiously la- belled in great capital letters, SANCTITY OF THE WORD ; and this preposterous legend hopelessly stultifies their intelligence by crowding it out of all relation to the only veritable divine sanctity now extant, which is that enshrined in our own flesh and bones, or men's actual nature. As if a "word" could be any longer memorable or sacred to God which so remorselessly defeated its own purpose ! If there were nothing else to do it, their own ex- perience of life ought to have taught them (with- out any help from Swedenborg) that the most sacred letter of truth should be assiduously elim- TRUTH AX INVERSE WITNESS TO GOOD. 369 inated or put out of sight whenever we have to deal with the spirit of it, which is GOOD. For ex- ample : if I am in charity or neighborly love, much more if I am in the love of universal man, the race man, it would be unspeakably tiresome to me to be perpetually reminded by some " dumb dog" of a literalist of the persistent claims of the letter on my regard, and to be told by him that I must give diligent heed still to abstain from false witness and theft and adultery and murder, — as if my life irre- vocably belonged to this sphere of legality ! to this most loathsome mud of things ! Or as if the only sure way to make a man a false witness, a thief, an adulterer, and a murderer were not to restrict his freedom to that extent ! It is everywhere in fact most burdensome to a living man (that is, a man ensouled iji good by his heart coming to take prac- tical priority of his head) to be pastured on truth even the most sacred ; for truth at the very best is but a negative or inverse witness of good, and to every one who is spiritually enlivened by good fur- nishes a most tedious and provoking reminder of it. I doubt not, if the patient be persistently treated to the perfume of this disgusting reminiscence, that his life ere long will go out in spiritual coma and asphyxia. I take the greatest pleasure in signalizing this difference in man's intellectual relations to truth, 370 GENIUS OF OLD WORLD AND NEW. because the difference, as it seems to me, indi- cates and grows out of a very marked contrariety in the European and American genius. The gen- ius of Europe prompts men to take for granted that man's providential destiny is to reahze a heav- enly Hfe out of nature, or in the skies. It may strike the reader as absurd to say that the gen- ius of Europe inspires this supposition in men, when he reflects that almost the whole of intel- lectual Europe now renounces the ecclesiastical conception of human destiny. Still it cannot be denied that the European intellect has always been identified with the church tradition on this subject, and that we have derived our feebler ecclesiastical life from it exclusively. The genius of the New World, on the other hand, persuades one that men's providential destiny is to achieve immortal life only through a plenary redemption of their com- mon nature, divinely freed from the limitations and obstructions which their own frivolous personal- ities impose upon it, and not at all through any private or particular regeneration which they may be personally privileged to undergo. Inspired with this hope, I myself would not give a fig to be invested with all the best regenerate life of men from Adam's day down to our own. Thus it is a man's intellectual nativity which determines him to be either churchman and statesman, or else a man. HOW IT SIGNALIZES ITSELF. 371 I do not mean, of course, to contrast the actual personal manhood of these latitudes with the ac- tual personal manhood of Europe, for no doubt the interests of the actual leave us little ground of boasting on either side. All I mean to say is, that the interests of men's future or potential manhood are better provided for under these spiritual skies than under European ones, because there is ac- tually no belief here in the church as a mediator between man and God, nor consequently in the state (its product) as a fixture of human destiny. And we know very well that the whole purpose of God in human history has been to get rid of mediators between him and his creature, by in- ducing the latter to cherish a decided respect for himself as the product of omnipotence. A good- humored regard no doubt is entertained here for church and state, on the ground of their past ser- vices to humanity ; but I do not think it is a serious regard, or anything approaching to reverence. Now this difference of genius between the Old World and the New, which puts us in such very different practical relation to the letter of sacred writ, renders it inevitable that we should entertain a most unequal respect on the one hand for spirits and angels as involved in that letter, or consti- tuting its machinery, and for men on the other as constituting no part of such machinery, because 3/2 IT EXALTS MEN AND DEPRESSES ANGELS. they are the very end to which it is all addressed. Spirits and angels, as we learn from Swedenborg, are only a part (a vital part, as I have said, but still only a part) of God's literal economy, considered as being a revelation of God within nature. We must either consent to have a most embroiled notion of men and angels as they are severally pictured by Swedenborg, or else we must consent to draw this sharp distinction between them — namely, that good spirits or angels are but the spiritualized or purified portion of the church on earth, and thus essentially involved in the letter of the word as its interior factor, while men are the very end for wJiich both church and world, both letter and spirit, both good spirit or angel and evil spirit or devil, themselves exist. Before Christ appeared in flesh to put away God's typical or figurative kingdom in our na- ture and introduce the real one, good spirits or angels constituted the only divine- nattcral humanity that then was, and furnished at any rate an ap- proximate, if still most unworthy, basis to the only real and consummate revelation of that humanity which was afterwards to take place in man's natu- ral form. We may conclude, then, that the sole excuse for angelic existence — much more for in- fernal existence — is to be found in an imperfect development of human nature. That is to say, if BAD LOOKOUT FOR ANGELS AS SUCH. Z7Z human nature could have been an objective, abso- lute, out and out gift of God to men, — if it were not necessarily a strict communication to them on the basis of their own finite experience, — spirits and angels would never have existed, but man alone ; and consequently the world would never have needed any formal revelation of the divine name, much less any formal church (e/c/fXT^crm) to embody it; for then human society, which is the inseparable form of human nature, would have presented in its own proper person an every way substantial and, indeed, eternal vindication of that name. But human nature, as every thoughtful man knows, is not an absolute or simplistic gift of God ; it is anything and everything but that, in fact. Strictly speaking, it is nothing else but the method or means of God's spiritual creation, — a method or means so infallible that it presents crea- tor and creature, infinite and finite, good and evil, true and false, in such complete fusion that we cannot possibly see either element disengaged from the other (except logically) until the nature shall work itself out to finished form in society, which will finally do the amplest and most exact justice to both elements in identifying the creator with the natural, universal, or public force in humanity, the creature with its spiritual individual or private force. 374 THEY ARE A MERE MECHAXISM OF COD. Until men have come into finished social form, then, which announces the glorified state of their nature, they can communicate with God only in an outward way, of course, or on the basis of a temporary revelation. Now angelic existence (and, as incidental to that, infernal existence) is essential to the mechanism of this outward reve- lation, or furnishes it transiently its inward, in- visible ground, having no other philosophic end than to insure it competent superficial or scientific form. Thus the whole human or philosophic in- terest of angels and spirits to our minds lies in their being a part of God's revelation of himself in our nature. They are the soul, so to speak, of that great apocalyptic record which God makes of himself in our natural history, and of which the church on earth has always been the abject, lifeless body, but nothing more, with absolutely no locus standi or rational footing outside of this transient providential necessity. Let us clearly understand, then, that angel and spirit — and even this not in themselves, but only in that miraculous individual form into which, tJirotigh their free contrariety to the hells, they are logically constrained (that is, constrained by the divine logos, wisdom, or word forever inherent and formative in our nature) — are but a half-way house or stepping-stone to God's real achievement in our flesh and blood, or lowest IMBECILITY OF SWEDENBORGIANS. 375 animal personalities ; are but a clean-swept upper story or fragrant bed-room floor in that house of mystical revelation to which the church on earth has served as needful but unhandsome basement story, as grimy, unclean, but inevitable kitchen floor, so to speak; and to look for any substan- tive meaning in them apart from such mystical use, or not rigidly incidental and subordinate to the interests of revelation, is flagrantly to disuse one's understanding in reading Swedenborg, and rely upon one's parrot-like memory. Nothing by the way can be more dreary or dis- mal as an intellectual entertainment than to read good, modest, old Swedenborg with a servile mind, or with one's thought attuned to a sort of obliga- tory faith in him, as if he personally were invested with a delegated divine authority to men's intelli- gence. To look upon Swedenborg in this prepos- terous way must work such sensible degradation to the rational faculties that it is no wonder the Swedenborgian sect is able to worry so little re- spectable human meaning out of him as to make him fall dead practically upon the public sense. To impose any such superstition upon myself would be a miserable bondage to me ; and I am certain I should ere long resent it so much as unqualifiedly to renounce all care for the author or his books. It is needless to say to any out- 3/6 NO GROUND FOR IT IN THEIR MASTER. side or unmercenary reader of Swedenborg that there is in his books no particle of justification for this hbellous misuse of him, and that it comes altogether of a slavish habit of mind engendered among men by their superstitious belief in a fixed or finite spiritual world existing somewhere ift some outlandish limbo, which is nevertheless intrinsically superior to and independent of this soHd natural world. There is no ground in Swedenborg's books for this absurd spiritual world. He apparently made the acquaintance of no spiritual world which does not inhere as fixedly and firmly in our fa- miliar natural world as men's organic brains and viscera inhere in their outward bodies. And how- ever much his Swedenborgian followers may blush at such a statement, I have not the least idea that Swedenborg himself ever put any other than a most modest estimate upon the purely subject- ive information he brings them from the spiritual world, and never dreamed that their frivolous minds were going to be stayed in any amount of such gossip from going on to realize the object- ive and honest divine-natural life which, according to this very gossip even, is latent in their own flesh and bones. My reader and I may be greatly interested in the study of physiology ; but clearly neither this study nor any other kind of study can ever constitute our intellectual ideal, which must HE CONTEMNED THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. ZJJ always be simply to live, or realize in our own persons, the fullest life of our kind. At any rate, Swedenborg does all he can to liberate the mind from such a night-mare view of spiritual existence. It almost leaps at the eyes from the very face of his books that he encount- ered no such stuck-up or cut-and-dried specimen of a spiritual world as is in vogue among Sweden- borgians. Neither his hells nor his heavens have the least of finished objective or humanitary fla- vor, but both alike betray the marvellous Provi- dence that guides the world, still aux prises with the insane pretension of a strictly natural or private selfhood in man, and seeking perfectly to over- come it in the interests of our common nature it- self His spiritual world is in fact a purely subjec- tive world, made up of good subjects on the one side and evil subjects on the other, with no point of contact or transition between them ; both alike and equally subjects of law, — only one an inward subject, the other an outward one, but with no claim either of them to real or inherent dignity, that is, to natural or spontaneous manhood, any more than if they had been conscious stocks and stones. If Swedenborg takes vastly greater pains to attest one fact than another, it is the fact that the angels owe all their spiritual advantage over devils to the circumstance of their acting upon the 378 ANGEL AND DEVIL SUBSIDIARY TO MAN. • idea that their natural force, or force of selfhood, was only a seeming force in them, not a real one, while their rivals maintained the opposite and most illusory notion of its being a real force. And such a world, so intensely because inwardly fi- nite, would of course, if it were considered as a finality of the divine power, prove instantly fatal to the truth of its infinitude. Accordingly this puny spiritual world (made up of heaven and hell) which Swedenborg reports to our inteUigence will no doubt continue for an indefinite period to en- gage men's attention in the way of illustration, but it cannot possibly have any interest for them in itself. His own fearless and unabashed dealing with heaven and hell as strictly spiritual, or infra human and natural, modes of the divine existence in his creatures, equally remote from spontaneity, has reduced them to mere intellectual common- place, to a mere fossil or palaeontological signifi- cance ; and although they may still be able to offer a refuge to one's wayward or diseased subjective fancies, I am persuaded that they have effectually fallen out of the living mind of men as objective existences, or as a home for honest and enlarged human thought. For myself I may say that I have an unaffected respect and sympathy for angels and devils, so long as I can perceive them to be of this purely illustrative use and efficacy to the mind; GOD HIMSELF THE HEAD-NATURAL/ST. 3/9 that is, so long as they wear a strictly ancillary aspect to humanity. But when, through their ser- vile disloyal attorneys in the church and the world, they assume to be lifted above the lot of human nature, and claim a commanding instead of a sub- servient position towards men in the flesh, I feel like sending the whole infatuated raft of them — principals and attorneys both alike — a thousand feet high in air. They are all of them mere viscera of humanity, — a downright implication or involu- tion of our tiresome, dishonest, unwholesome per- sofis, — and do nothing of themselves or in se to explicate or evolve the perfected divine or social form of our nature, any more than my reader's or my bodily viscera do to explain our particular per- sonalities, which are our several relations to church and state. In short, the distinction, once fully avouched and accredited on earth, between the spiritual world as occupying a nearer relation to God and the natural world as occupying a more remote relation, is now pretty effectually " played out," as the children say, and a reverse or even revolutionary distinction is fast obtaining. It seems to be pretty generally ad- mitted at the present time — at least in this country — that the natural world either is or ought to be of nearer interest to God than ten thousand spir- itual worlds; for it is God's own objective world, so 380 SPIRIT AND ANGEL DYING OUT. to speak, — that is, the only world in which his love and wisdom are definitively married, or made one, in his power or man's spontaneous life. So that if men should only eat and drink and sleep, provided they do these things in a divine-natural or aesthetic way — a way which shows them perfectly cured of their gross personal aims, or inherited proclivities to self-love — they will be infinitely more acceptable to the heart of God than the angels have ever been, even though these latter have always signalized their conformity to him by diligently renouncing falsehood and theft and adultery and murder. For the angels, as Swedenborg shows us, have been always kept from these gross evils only by the ab- solute constraint of divine pozver, working agaitist their private inclinations ; whereas under the di- vme-7iatural administration, or the evolution of a race-righteousness in men, we learn to abhor all iniquity and uncleanness of our very selves, — that is, spontaneously. A vis medicatrix natures which angels have never felt the force of, and never will, except through the reflex operation of the divine- natural life, is fast coming into play with men in the flesh, relieving them of their chronic egotism, of their unrecognized selfishness, as infallibly as a healthy body now throws off a fever, or as men change a garment which is soiled by use or accident. SWEDENBORG A NATURAL HISTORIAN. 381 I heartily thank Swedenborg then, and shall always recognize him as a strictly providential man, for his most instructive and entertaining visa et audita, gathered fresh or at first hand among the angels ; certainly not because I set the least value upon these egregious experiences as a final possession of the human mind, but because I see very clearly that if he or some other equally qual- ified scientific intelligence had not done us this inestimable service of giving the spiritual world an eternal quietits as to any just claim it has to lord it over the natural world, and reducing it to the due subserviency of the latter, we should still be theo- logically a prey to the most harmful and odious superstition. Besides, had it not been for this most timely and unexpected exposure of the spir- itual world, and its insolent baseless pretensions, we should have long lacked a necessary and indeed vital part of our natural history, — that which re- lates us to our deceased ancestral cronies, and which now, by keeping up the sentiment of an always living continuity with them, makes the idea of a race-unity among men inevitable. I do not know where, outside of Swedenborg's bulky and inar- tistic memorabilia, to find any authentic data for our distinctively natural history, as that history has always been patiently symbolizing itself to our stolid intelligence in the ever-growing enlarge- 382 WHAT IS NATURAL HISTORY? merit and conversion of the once sacred and divine Church into the famihar and secular human State. This is the only history capable of greatly interest- ing the philosophic mind, for it is not written in brief pedantic and partisan books, spun out of pedantic and partisan brains, but in great world- wide pictures of honest human want slowly strug- gling out of its rudiments in mere animal use and wont, through the blind hard tutelage of moral and rational ideas, into divine fellowship and rec- ognition. What men are wont to call history is merely particidar history, — for example, the in- fluence and achievement of particular persons in particular times and places, or the influence and achievement of particular countries more advanced in civilization upon other countries less advanced. But this tiresome conception of history, as dealing with men's moral or subjective fortunes, falls com- pletely witJiin the conception of our great objective or race history, and forfeits all its interest the mo- ment the latter is recognized by the mind. It is mere personal or unreal history, having only a subjective or seeming truth at most, although it is not seldom very dramatic, and instinct oftentimes with reflected human or philosophic lustre. It is as if a physician should take to portraying the action of a morbid lungs or liver or heart upon the subject's bodily organism, by way of conveying a IT IS NOT PRIMARILY MATERIAL. 3S3 lively negative picture of the body in health. But this is exactly what I do not mean by our race-evo- lution. Our natural history is not at all a history of men's petty and warring subjectivities within the dimensions of the race ; it is a history of the human race itself, attaining to objective divine in- nocence, emerging out of all the defilement heaped upon it by men's deciduous and illusory subjectiv- ities, and standing erect and clear and free at last in the panoply of God's perfection. For as soon as men's divine-natural or race-personality an- nounces itself in consciousness, their fallacious private personalities, which have so long made wan- ton havoc on earth with God's goodness and truth, wither and die out like frost-touched leaves in au- tumn, or stars at dawn, seeking resurrection only in the spiritual or subjective world. In short, our natural history is — all simply — the growth of the human mind itself into free spontaneous sympa- thy with God's infinitude, which (finally) is man's spiritual creation. Thus our natural history must never be con- founded with our material history, or our advanc- ing prosperity in space and time. Our natural his- tory will produce no doubt, when it is completed, very signal effects upon our material prosperity; for we shall then have omnipotence harnessed to our street cars, and applying itself to every detail 384 CHILDISH HALLUCINATIONS. of our housekeeping. It is prophesied indeed, in figurative New-Testament language, that we shall then be able to handle serpents and drink deadly poisons with impunity. But even then it will never endure to be identified with any such improved methods of material well-being. I remember very well what Swedenborg reports as the highest style of celestial life interpreting itself into a refined sen- sitivity; but then he always pictures this refined sensitivity as due to the operation of inward or spiritual causes, never to the operation of outward or natural causes. One has the witness of this fact in his own experience. I seem to myself to have long passed the allotted period of man's life, but at any rate I am sure that the fixed illusions of my youth could never be again revived even by divine power. There is sweet Fanny Brown, my sister's friend, who used to make the blood course through my veins like a race-horse, and whose footsteps I used to pursue with actual adoring kisses; there is sweet Agnes Lamb, Ellen Elliot, Fanny Rockwell, Julia Casey, and Ellen Duer, who all of them had power to divinize my life for a brief moment, to res- cue it from the idolatry of the multiplication table. Am I insane enough to suppose that if any or all of these well-worshipped but long since deceased maidens were able now to resuscitate themselves in their early bloom and freshness before my very eyes, ELDERLY REFLECTIONS THEREUPON. 385 they would quicken my sluggish blood even to a moderate trot or canter? Was it ever really life I used to worship in these tenderly sacred persons? No, it was always death, which is at best but the divinely vivified shadow or semblance or image of life, that I perpetually felt in love with their exqui- site illusory forms. And now that I am old I never grow tired of whispering to myself, If this unques- tionable realm of death — which after all is only a shadow of the creative life in us — exerts such energy over man's senses and reason, how infi- nitely energetic must be the hold of that life it- self upon us when encountered in substance ! In other words. If the sphere of God's mere play, or illusion, in creation be so habitually overwhelming to our imagination, how utterly beyond conception must be the transforming virtue of almighty power or reality upon us ! Why, even God himself, as men naturally conceive of him, is the most mon- strous illusion. For conceived under the attributes of space and time, nothing can be so hideous and revolting as the thought of God's existence. Hence it is that the blessed gospel of Christ makes it a primary obligation of God to his creatures thor- oughly to revolutionize their nature or kind, by establishing on the earth a human or living and spiritual conception of him. It is needless to say that this is an obligation with which the newest 2"; 386 AND so FORTH. born Swedenborgian convert is quite as little in sympathy, as any of the grosser, or more sportive and puerile, sectarian patrons of the divine name. CHAPTER XV. INCARNATION. I HAVE briefly shown in a former chapter that the sensible universe comes from God's spirit- ual incarnation in human nature, and is itself the ultimate — that is, the outmost, lowest, or most con- crete — form of such incarnation, being, in fact, its eternal anchorage to consciousness. Incarnation is the sole truth or method of spirit- ual creation, insomuch as it is absolutely necessary to account for that vivification of the creature's na- ture in which alone spiritual creation consists. In other words, nothing but it explains the creature's natural identity, which is the indispensable basis of his subsequent spiritual individuality, or new birth from the skies. Spiritual creation consists wholly in a divine quickening of the creature's nature, with- out which immovable underpinning it would never come to light. The real life of the creature, which is an uncreated life, is always of course in the crea- tor. But his real Hfe is very far from being his only life. His unreal life, which he esteems as 3^8 INCARNATION DEFINED. vastly more important than the real one, is in truth only a seeming life, but it is a life in himself, which the other is not. It is his constitutional life, giving him natural identity, or separating him from the creator by all the breadth of consciousness ; and he feels himself so wholly domesticated in it that his real life cannot help looking very foreign and dis- tant. Now even this apparent or phenomenal life of the creature — which seems to be altogether his own as making him naturally exist or giving him a sense of selfhood — would yet be wholly lacking to his experience were it not for a divine quickening of his nature. For his nature as a creature stamps him eternally void of life in himself, so that God's omnipotence exerted to that end would be unable to endow his creature with selfhood except by first vivifying his nature. What I mean, then, by incarnation is this : that God or the Lord, meaning by that term God-man — for I am not a bit of a deist, properly so-called, and cannot for the life of me imagine the existence of a God outside of our nature, having other than essentially human attributes — is the sole sub- stance or reality of everything embraced in the sensible universe, from its central sun to the plane- tary earths that encircle it, and from these again to the tiniest mineral, vegetable, and animal forms that enliven their surface. Nothing is exempt WHAT HUMAN NATURE IS. 389 from the operation of this law but the field of self- consciousness, which not being a thing, or object of sense, but on the contrary a sphere of meta- physical illusion in the creature, can have of course no corresponding reality in the creator. Self-con- sciousness is the only possible sphere of evil in the universe, and is therefore excluded from creation altogether, being gradually absorbed and super- seded by unitary or race-consciousness. But is mineral, vegetable, and animal nature human nzX.ViXQ.'f Unquestionably; only it is human nature with God left out. God enters human na- ture only through the individual conscience, con- fessing itself evil and false. There is no other way of his becoming incarnate in it, and so lifting us to the plenary enjoyment of his own life. The crea- tor of man is not incarnate in mineral, vegetable, or animal, but only in man, for otherwise obviously man would have been barred out of creation ; and hence these lower natures may be a very good ex- pression or exhibition of what human nature is in itself, though a very poor exhibit of what it is as glorified by the divine indwelling. Mineral, vege- table, and animal are organized and therefore more or less tmivasal forms of consciousness, the lowest or mineral being the most universal, and the high- est or animal being the least universal. But in genius they are all alike universal. The mineral is 390 HUMAN NA TURE THE ONL Y NA TURE. SO wholly universal indeed, — that is, shows the tendency which all universality has to individuality, in so comparatively feeble a degree, — that it seems to our unspiritual vision to be utterly unconscious, that is, even insensible or dead, and hence serves as a very good base or background to vegetable and animal, which are much more highly individu- alized forms of universal consciousness. Because these forms have so universal a genius, we never think of attributing ill-desert to them, however in- juriously related they may be to human life, but hold them under all circumstances to be morally innocent, as free in fact from actual turpitude as the babe unborn. There is but one nature, then, and that is human nature, so named from God's true creature, man ; for mineral, vegetable, and animal are God's crea- tures only as involved in man, and without him could have no possible cattsa existendi. They are an outward or sensible manifestation to man of his own inward divinely quickened nature, of which otherwise he would be obdurately unconscious. I called them a moment since the ancJiorage of our human nature; and this is just what they are, — a safe and fast anchorage of human nature within the realm of sense, where alone it is accessible to our science. For being in itself a strictly metaphysical existence, it would always remain invisible to us. MAN ALONE SELF-CONSCIOUS. 39 1 and hence incogitable, unless it projected itself to our acquaintance in these mineral, vegetable, and animal types. It cannot surprise us that our na- ture should introduce itself outwardly to our ac- quaintance in these typical forms, for all these forms are most strictly incidental to the human form, as involved in its maintenance, nourishment, and education. They are types or images of hu- man nature, not subjects of it, and they typify it truly only when they are viewed, not specifically, but in their generic relations to other genera, giving and receiving modification from each other; and to man their head, as the only proper subject of human nature. Man is the only proper subject of human nature, because he alone is a j^^-conscious form, as having his universe circumferential to him instead of central. Self-consciousness is essen- tially subjective in form, because it finds its proper object (namely, the universe of its kind) outside of it And such an inverted relation between ob- ject and subject, creator and creature, fountain and stream, parent and child, cannot help proving a bondage to the subject element, so long as it en- dures; that is, until the subject becomes divinely redeemed from his nature, or spiritually new-born, by finding his object a life within him, and no longer a law without him. The creative spirit accordingly dwells in mineral, vegetable, and ani- 392 NATURE ONE AND UNIVERSAL. mal only as a spirit of use to the higher human form. But he dwells only in the human form as in himself, — that is, as a spirit of life infinite and eter- nal; because the human form is a j'^Z/'-conscious one, and therefore presents that antagonism of inward death in the creature which alone admits, and solicits, and craves in fact, the inflow of crea- tive or immortal life. Any one can see then, at a glance, how impor- tant it is to the intellect to remember that Nature in all her forms is strictly one and universal; and that being thus in herself one and universal, she cannot help irresistibly tending to produce in her proper subject, man, an individuality which also shall be one and universal, — that \?,, social. This irresistible tendency in nature is derived to it of course from its paternal source, which is God-man ; and it will not be placated until it achieves a per- fect fellowship or society of each man in the uni- versal orb of earths with all other men, and of all men reciprocally with each, — that so at last the creative infinitude or omnipotence may be seen indwelling in its creature as in its very SELF. May be seen, I say. For this is all that nature and history do, — make manifest to the mind of their subject the things that pertain to his invisible and otherwise incogitable being. Nature is not the least the sphere of being, nor yet of existence. OFFICE OF NATURE AND HISTORY. 393 but simply that of appearance. This is the most that she does for us, — makes tis phenomenal to onr- selves, in order that we may see what absolute dev- ils we should be if our being, as we pretend, were in ourselves or in our own keeping, and not solely in God most high. Creation does not consist, as we are apt to think, in giving us natural being or substance, but in giving us natural form ; and nature and history have no purpose or meaning but as serving to base this form, by pointing out to our intelligence that it is essentially one and universal, — that is to say, social. Nature and his- tory do but reveal to us in the things that are made the spiritual things that are unmade, being eternal in the heavens ; and if we continue to at- tribute anything more to them than this simply apocalyptic or pedagogic significance, we not only subject ourselves to endless intellectual embarrass- ment, but we condemn our own lives to perpetual unreality. In truth we condemn our selves to per- petual unreality, which is living or spiritual uncrea- tion. For nothing but this shallow and persistent identification of nature with spirit, of what is phe- nomenon with what is reality, of what in life is simply historical, reflective, dead with what is origi- nal, spontaneous, living, leaves us the actual prey, or actual sport, in fact, which we still unfortunately are to the spiritual world, — the divided world of 394 INCARNATION RESTATED. heaven and hell, — so cutting us off from God's di- rect or immediate influence upon the soul. What I mean by incarnation is now, I hope, somewhat clear. I mean by it no mere personal or exceptional fact of experience either in nature or history, but a fact which is rigidly coextensive with nature and history both, — making the former a phenomenally fixed existence identical with law or order, the latter a phenomenally contingent life identical with human freedom or progress ; the one binding man in conscious unity with his brother, the other by means of that unity lifting him into conscious unity and amity with all divine perfec- tion. Thus incarnation is a fact of rigidly uni- versal dimensions, and no way of individual ones, except the individual prefer his race's welfare to his own, and inwardly (if need be, outAvardly also) die to sdf-\o\^ through a supreme love to God's love, which is infinite and has nothing in com- mon with self-love. It means that God spiritually quickens, organizes, and maintains this wondrous realm of nature as an nncrring system of uses, with a view thereby to develop, support, and fix the phenomenally subjective or constitutional life of man, — so, and not otherwise, incarnating himself in our natural flesh and bones. If any reader can trace these natural flesh and bones of ours to any other and his/her mother-source than that fur- HUMAN NATURE DISTINGUISHED. 395 nished by our own mineral, vegetable, and animal ancestry, then of course I will modify my state- ments, and candidly own that the incarnation takes place there ; but if he cannot, I shall abide in my present faith. We have no obvious nature, but a mineral, vege- table and animal one. All that is properly called nature in us, as opposed to person, is nourished upon these three rich motherly breasts, and knows no sweeter and lovelier finite parentage. Why nevertheless we distinguish our nature as human, and exclude animal, vegetable, and mineral from it, is easily enough explicable. It is because, that, al- though they present with one accord to our eyes the outward correspondence of human nature, and are therefore objectively or hi abstracto denomi- nated nature by us, still the nature they thus sen- sibly stand for or represent is wholly foreign to them, and wholly unrecognized by them, for the simple reason that they have no inward subjectiv- ity commensurate with its miraculous objectivity. There is no mineral, nor vegetable, nor animal na- ture, but only successive mineral, vegetable, and animal types of human nature; and though we for our own convenience are in the habit of calling these things by the abstract name of nature, still we should all of us be profoundly sorry to admit that they really constitute our nature, because 396 NATURE HAS NO PROPRIUM. that would be equivalent to admitting that human nature is without a subject, and hence destitute of life. The mineral, the vegetable, and the animal have no natural propriiim or subjectivity of their own, because they are destitute of any inward or spiritual life : the mineral has an outward life in the uses it subserves to vegetable existence ; and the vegetable in like manner in the uses it sub- serves to animal existence, as the animal in the uses it in its turn subserves to man. But observe that all this outward objectivity to which they give an unfaltering allegiance implies no inward or sub- jective freedom on their part. The mineral is wholly unconscious of the vegetable, the vegetable of the animal, and the animal of man. The animal no doubt recognizes man, but with an outward or sensible recognition only, not a conscious or in- ward one ; that is, recognizes the specific man as his care-taker or friend. I doubt if he ever recog- nizes the generic or universal man as his proper friend and benefactor. Indeed I have no doubt on this subject, as my familiarity with dogs has long since taught mc to discriminate between the hom- age which the animal pays his master or owner, and the contemptuous indifference (if nothing worse than that) which he feels toward all the rest of human kind. The mineral, vegetable, and animal nature or A SPIRITUAL NATURE DEFINED. 397 quality then, as derived from their function, is purely representative, reflective, dead, as designed to bear witness to a nature which is not their own, but which at the same time comes to the con- sciousness of its proper subject only by their out- w^ard or sensibly objective attestation to it. If their nature were not representative but real, — that is, if it had any other reality than the wholly outward and superficial one given it by sense, — it would be a spiritual or living nature. But a spiritual or liv- ing nature is one in which object and subject are not only equal, but are hierarchically related to each other, — object being necessarily interior to subject, subject of necessity exterior to object. But clearly no such nature as this is possible either to mineral, vegetable, or animal, since they all alike serve or obey an outward object exclusively, — one which is so outward indeed as to be the nature of an alien being, and which consequently leaves themselves devoid of all inward subjectivity what- ever. Thus animals, minerals, and vegetables have no one element of a true or living nature, neither the inwardly objective element, nor the outwardly subjective one; and consequently they confess themselves with united voices mere exaggerated and unconscious types, images, semblances, of hu- man nature, and refer their whole vital reality ex- clusively to it. Humanity is in truth the only 398 THE ECCLESIASTICAL MISCONCEPTION. authentic nature under the sun, and accordingly- alone involves a history. For in hunian nature object and subject, infinite and finite, creator and creature, are not only blent equally and in perfect hierarchic order, but the objective and infinite creative factor in it lends such inspiration to its finite subjective or created factor as that man, the proper subject of the nature, will never rest until he attains to immortal unity with God. I have now done only scant justice to my theme ; but I ought before leaving the theme to protest against the ecclesiastical misconception of incar- nation which has long been current in the world, and still is current wherever the dead letter of Christian doctrine prevails over its life-giving spirit. It is commonly thought by sticklers for orthodoxy, whatever be the name they wear, — Catholic or Protestant, Presbyterian or Episcopal, Baptist or Methodist, — and whether they call themselves old church or new chtirch, that God incarnates him- self not in our nature by any means, but only in a certain exceptional person of that nature, by whom he is forever removed from all community with us, its conventional persons, and even allowed to be benignant to us only in so far as is consistent with this mediatorial operation. I certainly should be very sorry to throw any doubts upon the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as an au- THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION. 399 thentic revelation of a truth never before dreamed of by the human mind, — namely, that God himself is the sole veritable mother-substance of human nature, and therefore the sole real subject of our unreal or phenomenal subjectivity. But revelation does not constitute truth. It only and at most bears witness to it, by revealing it, — that is, by un- veiling it, or removing a dense obscuration which it encounters in the natural mind of men. Thus the Christian revelation finds men ignorant of the highest truth, — that of their natural relation to God, which dominates all their possible spiritual relations with him ; and it accordingly unveils these true natural relations by removing the masses of erroneous tradition with which man's absurd pride and jealousy had overlaid it. The chief of these traditions — that which mothered all the rest — was that God had originally made men of different races or natures, and that he had given his law to some of these by way of expressing his supreme complacency in them, and vindicat- ing their superior righteousness. Jesus distinctly taught therefore, in opposition to this, that God had made of one blood all the dwellers on the earth ; and that the purpose of the divine law as commit- ted to the keeping of the Jewish nation was not to signalize either the Jew's natural or cultivated conformity to God over the Gentile, but simply to 400 WHAT WE OWE TO IT. emphasize and carry home to the conscience of every man instructed by the law a conviction of his own immeasurable barbarity and unright- eousness. Jesus taught, in fact, by himself and his apostles, that there was no such thing possi- ble as a private, literal, or distinctive righteousness among men, — the sole intention of the law of the Ten Commandments being to convince the right- eous man that he grieved God in spirit tenfold more by his absurd pretension to obey it than the sinner had ever done by his frankest indifference to it. Of course, with this unworldly doctrine in regard to the law, Christ owed it to his own per- sonal identification with the Jew to give his life in attestation of it. It is perfectly true, then, that if Christ had not fulfilled his mission to God's earthly kingdom by dying a victim to it, God's spiritual kingdom in human nature had never been founded. But it is equally true that if God had not been at all events spiritually incarnate in outward nature before Christ existed, Christ could never have imagined himself introducing a spiritual or living kingdom of God on earth ; for in that case he could have had no ground for his intuition of the unity of the divine and human natures, upon which truth the event in question is obviously altogether contin- gent. And without a deep intuition of this sort he FALLACY OF HYSTERON PROTERON. 401 could never have seen his way clear to renounce his Jewish prejudices, and consign the whole race of man as he did, Gentile and Jew quite equally, to the uncovenanted mercy of God. Immortal praise, honor, and blessing, then, be to the name of Jesus Christ, who first discovered and practically avouched in his proper person the unity of God and man, — the strict logical interdependence of creature upon creator and of creator upon creature, or the indissolubly correlated existence of infinite and finite ! For no similar service remains to be done by man to man. The best we can now do is to abstain from misapplying what he has done. But this is a very different thing from alleging that God's spiritual incarnation in humanity is due to Christ's historic or phenomenal personality, — which is an eminent example of what logicians call the {diWdiCy o{ hysteron pj-ote7'on, or putting the cart before the horse. If any such idea could be enter- tained, it would prove beyond dispute that God had not from eternity been an infinite spirit or life within universal man, but a mere unrecognized person outside of humanity, who is henceforth to be identified with this other exceptional person that revealed him, and thus by him to be forever sequestrated from contact and communion with the race of man. If God were literally as well as figuratively incarnate in the exclusive person of 26 402 WHAT CREATION AIMS AT.- Christ, then one of two absurdities is true, — either that God is shorn of his spiritual infinitude by such incarnation, since to be person is to be essentially finite and differential from all others persons ; or that he is not spiritually incarnate in our nature, because person is the antagonist conception to nature : the one being subject, the other object; the one being finite, the other indefinite ; one being flesh, the other spirit ; one being all that is evil, the other all that is good. Both of these issues are very bad, but I think the latter is incomparably the worse, for while the former robs God of his formal good name, the latter deprives him of every substantial claim he puts forth to our regard either as creator, re- deemer, or saviour. Any one, as it seems to me, can easily under- stand why creation should exact so miraculous a method as the incarnation of the creator in his creature's nature, if he will first of all inquire what the precise and perfect result is which creation, considered as the acting out of the creative omnipo- tence or infinitude, aims at. The result of creation, in so far as I am able to deduce it from the crea- tive perfection, is to impart life or being to the creature, — that is to say, the creator's own life or being, nothing less ; for we can of course ac- knowledge no life or being but his, unless indeed we should be content to abandon the hypothesis NON-EXISTENCE INCONCEIVABLE. 403 of creation altogether as a philosophic explication of existence. But obviously spiritual life or being — that is, the creator's own life or being — cannot be imparted to the creature unless the creature exist to receive it. And yet how can the creature exist unless he be created? Of course he cannot really exist while uncreated, or out of spiritual fellowship with God ; for if such a thing were possible, it would falsify the truth of his creation, or prove that he is at bottom something else than a creature. What then is the alternative or opposite logical concep- tion of real existence ? Is it the non-existence now so much talked of ? Assuredly not, for this non-existence is too bald or literal to be thought of or even recognized as a cogitable thing by the mind. Non-existence in a literal sense is no existence ; and what our question desiderates in the way of answer to it is plainly not no existence, but some existence different from real existence, which yet to the subject of it seeins identical with it. Existence of every sort, and therefore non-existence, must be thought of by us under the category of object or subject ; but literal non-existence is neither subjective nor objective, and hence is inconceivable by the human mind. It might prove a very gpod logical alternate to the abstract conception of existence, if any such 404 THE ALTERNATE OF REAL EXISTENCE. abstract conception were possible. But abstract existence itself is inconceivable, and hence admits no logical opposite or alternate. Existence is es- sentially concrete, relative, formal, requiring there- fore a formal, relative, concrete alternate ; so that no literal or absolute non-existence, even if it were conceivable, would appositely answer to it. Plainly, then, the only logical alternate (or dep- uty) of real existence being some other sort of existence than real, literal non-existence, being existence of no sort either real or unreal, at once puts itself out of court as such alternate. Literal non-existence accordingly turns out an absurd or contradictory conception. It is a mere stupid, wil- ful, ineffectual ;;zzi'-conception of existence in any sort and every sort ; and its only logical force is to convict those who doctrinally formulate it as the destiny, that is the end or final cause, of exist- ence itself whether particular or universal, of being profoundly incompetent intellectually to discuss the questions they have in hand. Their fatuity on the present question is just as great as if they should make the alternate conception of a house, not a shed or a barn, but a vacant piece of ground. Thought is possible to the thinker only as a mental relation between himself (as subject) and the external world (as object). Thus existence IMPLICATION OF NON-EXISTENCE. 405 conceived in thought is necessarily never simple or absolute, but always composite or relative. Non- existence, accordingly, literally conceived, is an im- possibility to the human mind, because it vacates the very conditions upon which thought itself is possible. If such conception were any way pos- sible, it would leave the subject unrelated to or unimpregnated by any object, and hence himself non-existent ; for in every case the subject exists from or is energized by the object. For when I think non-existence, I of necessity think it in rela- tion to myself or some other actual existence ; and this inevitable implication of subjective existence in my conception of objective non-existence at once defeats the conception or deprives it of ob- jectivity, leaving it a mere logical caput mortuum, or verbal quibble. The conception thus logically handicapped can only mean, that some existing person or thing has disappeared frotn the field of viy actual knowledge. It does not logically mean — unless I who employ it am an uncommon goose — that the person or thing in question has disap- peared from existence absolutely or altogether, but only from existence as actually known to me. It may be — certainly no one can a priori gainsay the possibility of it — that men and things, whenever they die out of my horizon, die absolutely, existing no longer to their own or any other's sense or per- 406 SPECIAL AND GENERAL EXISTENCE. ception. But in that event the laws or hmits of our a posteriori knowledge unqualifiedly forbid us to affirm the catastrophe. And what the laws or limits of our understanding prevent us knowing, modesty should prevent our exalting into an arti- cle of faith, or even commending it to others as expedient to be believed. Here is another consideration worth thinking of. Every particular subject of existence, whether per- son or thing, exists only by virtue of its inclusion in some more common or general form of exist- ence, — which fact has led men to conclude, not only that a rigid solidarity obtains between partic- ular or private and common or public existence, but also that particular existences are unreal or phenomenal with respect to the general existence in which they are embraced, and this alone real or substantial with respect to those. Now if any particular person (say, for example. Professor Clifford) and any particular thing (say, a horse) are essentially or by their very nature unreal or phenomenal existences, having in se no dignity but that of shadows, it is hard to see how either of them can ever logically pretend to literal or abso- lute non-existence. They have no claim as yet to literal or absolute existence, but only to seeming or phenomenal existence ; much less have they any inherent claim to being, — and how a thing or WHAT EXISTENCE IMPLIES. 407 person confessedly void, to start with, both of ex- istence and being, can ever attain to the reaHty of non-existence, I cannot for the life of me imagine. As Professor Clifford, certainly, he cannot attain to it, for Professor Clifford is a personal subject of existence ; much less can it be attained to as horse, for the horse is an impersonal or real object of existence, — and our professional non-existence, in professing to ignore all existence, of course d for- tiori ignores all the relations which existence is under to itself What claim, then, have they to «(7«-existence who as yet have not drawn their ini- tial breath of existence? Literal or scientific non- existence means a cessation of existence to existing subjects, real and personal. But if these subjects have never existed, but only have appeared (to themselves) to exist, how shall non-existence touch them? Will it be under the form of their appearing (to themselves) not to exist, as before they existed only under the form of appearing (to themselves) to exist? He alone can be said really to exist who is spiritually created, — that is, en- dowed with divine life or being ; and this no man again can be said to be endowed with, who is not in relations of strict spiritual society, fellowship, or equality with all other men. And non-existence predicated of such a man can only mean — when it does not mean the merest scientific bankuin or 408 FINITE EXISTENCE PHENOMENAL. bravado — NIRVANA ; that is, his laying aside his finite conditions, and his assumption of divine- natural life. Literal, absolute, objective non-existence can never be attributed to a creature, because a crea- ture ex vi terminoriim has no real or objective ex- istence, but only a phenomenal or seeming and subjective one in relation to his creator. In short, before either person or thing can ever begin ab- solutely not to exist (that is, to disown existence altogether both objective and subjective), they must first have had some objective existence of their own to dis-o\NX\. But no person or thing has ever had an objective existence of tJieir own since the world has stood, simply because they ARE person and thing, — that is to say, purely phenomenal sub- ject and object. And how shall phenomena (that is, semblances or shadows of reality) ever be able to dis-own a reality which they plainly never ozvned, but were always and at best a mere projection or reflection of? No person or thing consequently can ever be postulated in thought as coming into a condition in which they shall neither be thought of as subject related to object, nor as object re- lated to subject. For if any person or thing be found relating himself or itself either objectively or subjectively to other existence, he or it must be an existing subject or object, and in cither case ABSTRACT EXISTENCE INCONCEIVABLE. 409 alike must freely disclaim literal non-existence, cheerfully dismissing every such claim as the pre- rogative of deity alone.^ Literal non-existence, then, we may fairly con- clude is not the logical alternate or opposite con- ception to real existence. To a spiritual or phi- losophic regard the two conceptions are not only not alternate, but they are in fact strictly identical. Here allow me to remind the reader that there is no such thing conceivable, nor any such thing pos- sible in rerum iiatiird, as abstract or absolute ex- istence; and consequently no such utter absurdity is conceivable by the mind as that of abstract or absolute «^«-existence. Existence itself is always concrete and relative, embracing only persons and things, and hence is comprehensively known to us either 2& personal or real. Accordingly non-exist- ence, as servilely shadowing this previous concep- tion of existence, must be altogether concrete and relative, being always the non-existence of certain persons and things we have known or heard of. What we characterize as real or physical existence ^ Literal or absolute nonexistence (which is merely non-exist- ence to sense) can be alleged only of the creator, whose infinitude or perfection disqualifies him to exist save IN others created from himself. And he exists in these with such ineffable good will, with such unswerving tenderness and magnanimity, as never to obtrude himself upon observation ; so that no profoundest numskull of us all has literally ever dreamed of suspecting the real or spiritual truth of creation. 4IO PHYSICAL AND PERSONAL EXISTENCE. (so distinguishing it from personal or metaphysic existence) is invariably tiling, being inversely re- lated to person either as mineral, vegetable, or ani- mal, and falls under the dominion of sense. And what we call personal existence (so distinguishing it from real) is invariably man, and falls under the empire of consciousness. If, then, all the existence we know or can conceive of is shut up to persons and things, and is thus either strictly personal or else real, there can be no non-existence answering to it which is not also rigidly personal or else real, and refuses therefore to be considered as an abstract state either of human or brute life. Accordingly, nothing can be more stupidly idle and childish than to talk of non-existence as a pos- sibility of man's general or abstract experience. In truth non-existence, — nirvana as it was called in early Hindu devotion, — in any true or spiritual sense of the word, is too subtile and refined a conception for the unregenerate mind of man. Men have never been able accordingly to accom- plish the intellectual conception of it, save under the gross material imagery of phenomenal or un- real existence ; and it has taken the whole of men's actual history to make even this feeble ap- proximation to the truth. Men often wonder — I myself doubtless have often done so — what good the church has done on earth, seeing that the force ■ RELATIONSHIP OF CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 411 of evil in all these centuries is no way abated, but in Christian countries (at all events) if not quanti- tatively augmented at least qualitatively intensified and rendered more pervasive. It has done human life no spiritual good it must be allowed ; nor good of any kind, beyond serving as a literal remem- brancer of the divine name in the earth. But I think no one can read Swedenborg attentively with- out persuading himself that the church has been all unconsciously to itself a necessary precursor to man's scientific intellect. Parent and child never know their own relation to each other save from outside testimony ; and I do not know whether the partisan of the church or the partisan of science would be loudest in the denial of the providential relationship I have alleged between them. But it exists all the same ; and any one familiar with Swe- denborg's disclosure of the regenerate life and the arduous way it comes about in men's bosoms, will hardly doubt, I think, that the present advanced attitude of the scientific mind in regard to the sheer phenomenality of existence is a natural out- birth of men's heavenly experience. Cut off from the church by the church's obstinate impenitent attitude in reference to divine ideas, and especially by its utter indifference to the truth of human fel- lowship or equality, the influx of heaven has long been exclusively into the mind of science ; and 412 NATURAL AND SPIRITUAL EXISTENCE. the marvellous activity of that mind in the sphere of discovery and invention, contrasted with the utter paralysis of the church-mind except in the sphere of cant and histrionic piety, attests as nothing else can the alert and joyful operation of the divine spirit in human affairs. Having now, I trust, in some sort disposed of this bugbear of non-existence, as a plainly absurd or superstitious conception of the mind, I may now return to my initial proposition, which ran thus : Spiritual life or being — that is to say, the creator's own life or being — cannot be communicated to the creature, unless the creature himself formally exist to receive it. By the hypothesis of creation the creature is bound to be in himself exactly other than — or opposite to — the creator. But how can anything which in itself is other than or opposite to the creator exist if it be not created? It cannot really or spiritually exist, of course, because that would be to exist in itself ; and we cannot imagine a thing which in itself is opposite to God really or spiritually existing in God's uni- verse; for the divine name or quality is one, and knows no variableness nor shadow of turning. But though the creature cannot exist really or spiritu- ally before he is created, there is nothing to hinder his existing actually or naturally before that event, THE FICTION OF EXTERNAL NATURE. 413 provided always that his creator possess infinitude, or be omnipotent, — that is, possess the power to vivify the creature's nature, or essential quality, to the creature's own eyes, to such an extent as to make it appear as if it actually were, when in very truth, or spiritually, it is not and cannot possibly be. To say the same thing in more familiar words : the creature cannot possibly exist in him- self until he is spiritually created, — that is, regener- ated ; but, to use Swedenborg's well-worn phrase, he can perfectly well " exist as in himself," if only God have power spiritually to vivify his nature, or essential quality, — so making it and him actually appear to be, when in reality they neither of them have in themselves, nor ever can have, the least pretension either to being or existence. It is abundantly clear to every one who reads Swedenborg with understanding (or, what is the same thing, without ecclesiastical goggles), that nature has no particle of life or being in itself, but is a mere effect of spiritual causes lying deep within the mind of man, which give it to his senses the semblance or similitude of being and existing in itself or absolutely. Foremost and deepest among these spiritual causes, of course, is the crea- ture's dense and bottomless ignorance of his crea- tor's spiritual perfection, infinitude, or omnipotence. Taught at first exclusively by his senses, and having 414 DEFINITION OF ''THE WORD." therefore no experimental knowledge of any exist- ence which is not finite (as conditioned in space and time), he is forced willy-nilly to measure his creator by that insane misleading standard, and practically make God in his own image, — that is, conceive of him as the most finite of beings, in making him the literal ALL of space and time. Accordingly the earliest and latest lesson of men's historic consciousness is to unlearn its natural prejudice concerning God ; to disabuse itself of the impression which nature makes upon it as a direct and not an inverse manifestation of creative power, and come to look upon her fixed immuta- ble order consequently — educative and nutritive as that order undoubtedly is to the finite carnal mind in us — as a signally fallacious evidence of the perfect, adorable name. The method which the creative Providence uses to accomplish this necessary redemption of its con- scious creature from the superstitions incident to his nativity is a purely metaphysical method, and is furnished by what is called, in old symbolic or sacred speech, the Word (of God), which we familiarly but most imperfectly appreciate as con- stituting the substance of our technical or formal Revelation, Religion, Regeneration. This mystical, redemptive, or regenerative Word is the sole crea- tive substance of the human mind, and its sole " THE WORD'S " UL TIM A TION. 4 1 5 regulative form. The marvel of it is, that it is both death and life, spiritual death and natural life, — being at once the deadest, most finite letter of existence, and its living, leaping, infinite spirit. It is first altogether physical or material in form, carnal, negative, prohibitory, deadly, and death- bearing; then altogether ;«r/«-physical or quasi- spiritual, psychical, positive, inspiring, living (in short), and life-giving. Its fullest possible literal expression is what we term the Moral Law con- tained in the Ten Commandments, which to the unemancipated or ritual and ceremonial conscience is always tJie holy of holies. From the bosom of this fixed, dark, bitter, malignant, unyielding earth of legality it soars away, or becomes spiritually glorified, into the free lustrous heaven of human society, fellowship, or equality, shaped and eter- nally shaping itself to image the splendors of the creative infinitude, as these splendors become re- produced through every lurid lineament and feature of the created consciousness. For the creature's native imperfection, which is the ground of consciousness in him, and constitutes his spirit- iial identity as a creature, is the sole conceivable measure and guarantee of his creator's perfection ; and the only chance therefore which the latter has ot spiritually vindicating itself, or being glorified, in the eyes of its creature, is to show itself capable 41 6 FALLACY OF LDEALISM. of bringing life out of death, and converting man's utter and sordid natural want into the pledge and argument of his abounding, deathless, spiritual fellowship with itself. We men, all of us, are naturally prone to con- sider subjective existence — existence in space and time — identical with life or being. This prevalent misconception of the great creative truth of exist- ence — which is honest enough in vulgar minds, for it is the plain dictate of the senses — is yet fatal to philosophy, being what alone keeps it forever grovelling in the primal mud of things. For if subjective or conscious existence be once formally accepted by the mind as universal substance or being, then of course, inasmuch as existence logi- cally conditions tJioiight, nothing can be easier for the sciolist in philosophy than to jump to the iden- tity of thought and being, — thereby converting this dread, august universe into a wheezing, gasp- ing, asthmatic parody of creation, termed Idealism, which infallibly reduces the intellect pastured upon it to the abortive activity of a squirrel in its cage. But subjective or conscious existence — existence conditioned in space and time — is really not iden- tical with life or being, and can never be made to seem so except by first confounding it with thought (which is a mere reflection of it) and not with feelincf or sensation. For life or being: is first EXISTENCE AN IMAGE OF WHAT? 4IJ essentially infinite, as having no spiritual limita- tion (limitation ab intra) ^ and then absolute, as having no natural limitation (limitation ab extra) ; while existence is essentially ^«zV^, as being limited on its spiritual side, or from within, and co7itingent or relative, as being limited on its natural side, or from without. And life or being, which is essen- tially unlimited both spiritually and naturally, both inwardly and outwardly, is necessarily impersonal or void of selfhood, being merely the force, creative and constitutive, that underlies and is all existence ; while finite existence on the other hand, being simply nothing in itself, — that is, having in itself neither spiritual substance nor natural form, — is of necessity nothing else than personal or dramatic ; is in fact personality itself, that is, the merest sem- blance, figment, or shadow of reality. Now what I want to bring about by all this pre- liminary suppling of my reader's thought, is an intelligent answer to this question: If subjective or conscious existence (existence in space and time) be not identical with life or being; if, as we have seen, it be a mere imagery or reflection of life or being, — then, pray, of what precise life or being is it such abject imagery or reflection? We know very well, to begin with, that it cannot be an image of the creative life, since the created life alone is adequate to image that; and we equally 27 41 8 WHOSE IMAGE IS NATURE? well know that it cannot be an image of the created life, for, by the hypothesis upon which the question proceeds, the created life is still unaccomplished actually, is still unrealized by the conscious crea- ture. Besides, we must never forget the implied logic of creation, which practically associates crea- tor and creature indissolubly together, so that we can never, save in thought, see the one without seeing the other, — the latter being by the former exclusively, the former existiitg exclusively by the latter. Whose image, then, is nature, after all? [The Manuscript stops at this point. — Ed.] SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 'T^HOMAS CARLYLE is incontestably dead at last, by the acknowledgment of all newspa- pers. I had, however, the pleasure of an intimate intercourse with him when he was an infinitely deader man than he is now, or ever will be again, I am persuaded, in the remotest seciilum secidorum. I undoubtedly felt myself at the time every whit as dead (spiritually) as he was; and, to tell the truth, I never found him averse to admit my right of insight in regard to myself But I could never bring him, much as he continually inspired me so to do, to face the philosophic possibility of this proposition in regard to himself On the contrary, he invariably snorted at the bare presentation of the theme, and fled away from it, with his free, re- sentful heels high in air, like a spirited horse alarmed at the apparition of a wheelbarrow. However, in spite of our fundamental difference about this burly life which now is, — one insisting 422 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. upon death as the properer name for it, the other bent upon maintaining every popular illusion con- cerning it, — we had for long years what always appeared to me a very friendly intercourse ; and I can never show myself sufficiently grateful to his kindly, hospitable manes for the many hours of unalloyed entertainment his ungrudging fireside afforded me. I should like to reproduce from my notebook some of the recollections and observa- tions with which those sunny hours impressed me and so amuse, if I can, the readers of " The Atlan- tic." These reminiscences were written many years ago, when the occurrences to which they relate were fresh in my memory; and they are exact, I need not say, almost to the letter. They will tend, I hope and am sure, to enhance the great personal prestige Carlyle enjoyed during life ; for I cherish the most affectionate esteem for his memory, and could freely say or do nothing to wound that senti- ment in any honest human breast. At the same time, I cannot doubt that the proper effect of much that I have to say will be to lower the esti- mation many persons have formed of Carlyle as a man of ideas. And this I should not be sorry for. Ideas are too divinely important to derive any consequence from the persons who maintain them ; they are images or revelations, in intellec- tual form, of divine or infinite good, and there- RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 423 fore reflect upon men all the sanctity they possess, without receiving a particle from them. This esti- mate of Carlyle, as a man of ideas, always struck me as unfounded in point of fact. I think his admirers, at least his distant admirers, generally mistook the claim he made upon attention. They were apt to regard him as eminently a man of thought ; whereas his intellect, as it seemed to me, except where his prejudices were involved, had not got beyond the stage of instinct. They insist- ed upon finding him a philosopher; but he was only and consummately a man of genius. They had the fatuity to deem him a great teacher ; but he never avouched himself to be anything else than a great critic. I intend no disparagement of Carlyle's moral qualities, in saying that he was almost sure finally to disappoint one's admiration. I m.erely mean to say that he was without that breadth of humani- tary sympathy v/hich one likes to find in distin- guished men ; that he was deficient in spiritual as opposed to moral force. He was a man of great simplicity and sincerity in his personal manners ai]d habits, and exhibited even an engaging sen- sibility to the claims of one's physical fellowship. But he was wholly impenetrable to the solicita- tions both of your heart and your understanding. I think he felt a helpless dread and distrust of you 424 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. instantly that he found you had any positive hope in God or practical love to man. His own intel- lectual life consisted so much in bemoaning the vices of his race, or drew such inspiration from de- spair, that he could not help regarding a man with contempt the instant he found him reconciled to the course of history. Pity is the highest style of intercourse he allowed himself with his kind. He compassionated all his friends in the measure of his affection for them. " Poor John Sterling," he used always to say ; " poor John Mill, poor Fred- eric Maurice, poor Neuberg, poor Arthur Helps, poor little Browning, poor little Lewes," and so on ; as if the temple of his friendship were a hospital, and all its inmates scrofulous or paralytic. You wondered how any mere mortal got legitimately endowed with a commiseration so divine for the inferior race of man ; and the explanation that forced itself upon you was that he enjoyed an inward power and beatitude so redundant as nat- urally to seek relief in these copious outward showers of compassionate benediction. Espe- cially did Carlyle conceive that no one could be actively interested in the progress of the species without being intellectually off his balance, and in need of tenderness from all his friends. His own sympathy went out freely to cases of individual suffering, and he believed that there was an im- RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 425 mense amount of specific divine mercy practicable to us. That is to say, he felt keenly whatever appealed to his senses, and willingly patronized a fitful, because that is a picturesque. Providence in the earth. He sympathized with the starving Spitalfield weaver; and would have resented the inhumanity of the slave's condition as sharply as any one, if he had had visual contact with it, and were not incited, by the subtle freemasonry that unites aristocratic pretension in literature with the same pretension in politics, to falsify his human instincts. I remember the pleasure he took in the promise that Indian corn might be found able to supplant the diseased potato in Ireland ; and he would doubtless have admitted ether and chloro- form to be exquisitely ordained ministers of the Divine love. But as to any sympathy with human nature itself and its inexorable wants, or any belief in a breadth of the Divine mercy commensurate with those wants, I could never discern a flavor of either in him. He scoffed with hearty scorn at the contented imbecility of Church and State with respect to social problems, but his own indiffer- ence to these things, save in so far as they were available to picturesque palaver, was infinitely more indolent and contented. He would have been the last man formally to deny the Divine ex- istence and providence ; but that these truths had 426 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. any human virtue, any living efficacy to redeem us out of material and spiritual penury, I do not think he ever dreamt of such a thing. That our knowledge of God was essentially expansive ; that revelation contemplated its own spiritual enlargement and fulfilment in the current facts of human history, in the growth and enlargement of the human mind itself, — so that Thomas Carlyle, if only he had not been quite so stubborn and conceited, might have proved himself far better and not far worse posted in the principles of the Divine administration than even Plato was, and so have freed himself from the dismal necessity he was all his life under to ransack the graves of the dead, in order to find some spangle, still untar- nished, of God's reputed presence in our nature, — all this he took every opportunity to assure you was the saddest bosh. " Poor John Mill," he ex- claimed one night, — " poor John Mill is writing away there in the Edinburgh Review about what he calls the Philosophy of History ! As if any man could ever know the road he is going, when once he gets astride of such a distracted steed as that ! " But to my note-book. " I happened to be in Carlyle's library, the other day, when a parcel was handed in which con- tained two books, a present from some American admirer. One of the books proved to be a work RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 427 of singular intellectual interest, as I afterwards discovered, entitled ' Lectures on the Natural His- tory of Man,' by Alexander Kinmont, of Cin- cinnati ; the other a book of Poems. Carlyle read Mr. Kinmont's titlepage, and exclaimed : * The natural history of man, forsooth ! And from Cincinnati too, of all places on this earth ! We had a right, perhaps, to expect some light from that quarter in regard to the natural his- tory of the hog ; and I can't but think that if the well-disposed Mr. Kinmont would set himself to study that unperverted mystery he would em- ploy his powers far more profitably to the world. I am sure he would employ them far less weari- somely to me. There ! ' he continued, handing me the book, ' I freely make over to you all my right of insight into the natural history of man as that history dwells in the portentous brain of Mr. Alexander Kinmont, of Cincinnati, being more than content to wait myself till he condescend to the more intelligible animal.' And then opening to the blank leaf of the volume of Poems, and without more ado, he said, ' Permit me to write my friend Mrs. So-and-So's name here, who per- haps may get some refreshment from the poems of her countryman ; for, decidedly, I shall not.' When I suggested to him that he himself did noth- ing all his days but philosophize in his own way, — 428 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. that is, from the artist point of view, or ground of mere feeling, — and that his prose habitually decked itself out in the most sensuous garniture of poetry, he affected the air of M. Jourdain, in Moliere, and protested, half fun, half earnest, that he was incapable of a philosophic purpose or poetic emotion." Carlyle had very much of the narrowness, intel- lectual and moral, which one might expect to find in a descendant of the old Covenanting stock, bred to believe in God as essentially inhuman, and in man, accordingly, as exposed to a great deal of divine treachery and vindictiveness, which were liable to come rattling about his devoted ears the moment his back was tnrned. I have no idea, of course, that this grim ancestral faith dwelt in Car- lyle in any acute, but only in chronic, form. He did not actively acknowledge it ; but it was latent in all his intellectual and moral personality, and made itself felt in that cynical, mocking humor and those bursts of tragic pathos which set off all his abstract views of life and destiny. But a gen- uine pity for man as sinner and sufferer underlay all his concrete judgments ; and no thought of un- kindness ever entered his bosom except for peo- ple who believed in God's undiminished presence and power in human affairs, and were therefore full of hope in our social future. A moral re- RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 429 former like Louis Blanc or Robert Dale Owen, a political reformer like Mr. Cobden or Mr. Bright, or a dietetic reformer like the late Mr. Greaves or our own Mr. Alcott, was sure to provoke his most acrid intellectual antipathy. Moral force was the deity of Carlyle's unscrupu- lous worship, — the force of unprincipled, irre- sponsible will ; and he was ready to glorify every historic vagabond, such as Danton or Mirabeau, in whom that quality reigned supreme. He hated Robespierre because he was inferior in moral or personal force to his rivals, being himself a victim to ideas, — or, as Carlyle phrased it, to formulas. Picturesqueness in man and Nature was the one key to his intellectual favor; and it made little difference to his artist eye whether the man were spiritually angel or demon. Besides, one never practically surmounts his own idea of the Divine name; and Carlyle, inheriting and cherishing for its picturesque capabilities this rude Covenanting conception, which makes God a being of the most aggravated moral dimensions, of a wholly super- human egotism or sensibility to his own conse- quence, of course found Mahomet, William the Conqueror, John Knox, Frederic the Second of Prussia, Goethe, men after God's own heart, and coolly told you that no man in history was ever unsuccessful who deserved to be otherwise. 430 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. Too much cannot be said of Carlyle in personal respects. He was a man of even a genial practi- cal morality, and unexceptionable good neighbor, friend, and citizen. But in all larger or human regards he was a literalist of the most unqualified pattern, incapable of uttering an inspiring or even a soothing word in behalf of any struggling mani- festation of human hope. It is true, he abused every recognized guide of the political world with such hearty good-will that many persons claimed him at once as an intelligent herald of the new or spiritual divine advent in human nature. But the claim was absurdly unfounded. He was an ama- teur prophet exclusively, — a prophet " on his own hook," or in the interest of his own irritable cuticle, — without a glimmer of sympathy with the distinctively public want, or a gleam of insight into its approaching divine relief; a harlequin in the guise of Jeremiah, who fed you with laughter in place of tears, and put the old prophetic sin- cerity out of countenance by his broad, persistent winks at the by-standers over the foot-lights. My note-book has this record : — " I heard Carlyle, last night, maintain his habit- ual thesis against Mr. Tennyson, in the presence of Mr. Moxon and one or two other persons. Carlyle rode a very high horse indeed, being in- spired to mount and lavishly ply the spur by Mr. RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 431 Tennyson, for whom he has the hveliest regard ; and it was not long before William the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell were trotted out of their mouldy cerements, to affront Sir Robert Peel and the Irish viceroy, whose name escapes me. * Noth- ing,* Carlyle over and over again said and sung, — * nothing will ever pry England out of the slough she is in, but to stop looking at Manchester as heaven's gate, and free-trade as the everlasting God's law man is bound to keep holy. The human stomach, I admit, is a memorable neces- sity, which will not allow itself, moreover, to be long neglected ; and political economy no doubt has its own right to be heard among all our multi- farious jargons. But I tell you the stomach is not the supreme necessity our potato-evangelists make it, nor is political economy any tolerable substitute for the eternal veracities. To think of our head men believin' the stomach to be the man, and legisla- tin' for the stomach, and compellin' this old Eng- land into the downright vassalage of the stomach ! Such men as these, forsooth, to rule England, — the England once ruled by Oliver Cromwell ! No wonder the impudent knave O'Connell takes them by the beard, shakes his big fist in their faces, does his own dirty will, in fact, with England, altogether ! Oh, for a day of Duke William again ! ' " In vain his fellow Arcadian protested that 432 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. England was no longer the England of Duke William, nor even of Oliver Cromwell, but a to- tally new England, with self-consciousness all new and unlike theirs ; Carlyle only chanted or canted the more lustily his inevitable ding-dong, ' Oh, for a day of Duke William again ! ' " Tired out at last, the long-suffering poet cried, * I suppose you would like your Duke William back, to cut off some twelve hundred Cambridge- shire gentlemen's legs, and leave their owners squat upon the ground, that they might n't be able any longer to bear arms against him ! ' ' Ah ! ' shrieked out the remorseless bagpipes, in a perfect colic of delight to find its supreme blast thus unwarily invoked, — * ah ! that ivas no doubt a very sad thing for the duke to do; but somehow he con- ceived he had a right to do it, — and upon the whole he had ! ' ' Let me tell your returning hero one thing, then,' replied his practical-minded friend, * and that is that he had better steer clear of my precincts, or he will feel my knife in his guts very soon.' " It was in fact this indignant and unaffected prose of the distinguished poet which alone em- balmed the insincere colloquy to my remembrance, or set its colors, so to speak. Carlyle was, in truth, a hardened declaimer. He talked in a way vastly to tickle his auditors. RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 433 and his enjoyment of their amusement was lively- enough to sap his own intellectual integrity. Art- ist like, he precipitated himself upon the pictur- esque in character and manners wherever he found it, and he did not care a jot what incidental interest his precipitancy lacerated. He was used to harp so successfully on one string, — the importance to men of doing, — and the mere artistic effects he produced so infatuated him, that the whole thing tumbled ofif at last into a sheer insincerity, and he no longer saw any difference between doing well and doing ill. He who best denounced a canting age became himself its most signal illustration, since even his denunciation of the vice succumbed to the prevalent usage, and announced itself at length a shameless cant. Of course I have no intention to represent this state of things as a conscious one on Carlyle's part. On the contrary, it was a wholly unconscious one, betokening such a complete absorption of his fac- ulties in the talking function as to render him un- affectedly indifferent to the practical action which such talk, when sincere, ought always to contem- plate. I recur again to my note-book. " I was diverted last evening by an account Car- lyle gave of a conversation he had had with Lord John Manners and some other of the dilettanti 28 434 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. aristocratic reformers, who had been led by his books to suppose that he had some practical no- tion, at all events some honest desire, of reform, and therefore called upon him to take counsel. Carlyle had evidently been well pleased by a visit so deferential from such distinguished swells ; but so far was he from feeling the least reflective sym- pathy with the motive of it, that he regarded the whole affair as ministering properly to the broad- est fun. 'They asked me,' he said, 'with counte- nances of much interrogation, what it was, just, that I would have them to do. I told them that I had no manner of counsel to bestow upon them ; that I did n't know how they lived at all up there in their grand houses, nor what manner of tools they had to work with. All I knew was, I told them, that they must be doing something erelong, or they would find themselves on the broad road to the devil.' And he laughed as if he would rend the roof " He also spoke of a call he had just received from the new rector of the parish in which he lived. He had got some previous intimation of the rec- tor's dutiful design ; so that when he came, Carlyle met him at the door, hat on head and cane in hand, ready for a walk. He apologized to the somewhat flustered visitor for not asking him in, but the fact was his health was so poor that a RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 435 walk in the afternoon had become a necessity for him. 'Would the reverend gentleman be going towards the city, perhaps? Yes? Ah, then we can confer as we walk.' Of course the reverend gentleman's animus in proffering the visit had been to feel his doughty parishioner's pulse, and ascertain once for all how it beat towards religion as by law established. And equally, of course, Carlyle had not the least intention of assisting at any such preposterous auscultation. The hopeful pair had no sooner begun their trudge, accord- ingly, than Carlyle proceeded to dismount his antagonist's dainty guns by a brisk discharge from his own ruder batteries. * I have heard of your settlement in the parish,' he said, 'with great pleasure, and my friends give me great hope that you have a clear outlook at the very serious work that lies before you here. The butcher up there at the corner of Sloane Street was a great thorn, I am told, in the side of your predecessor, and is prepared, no doubt, to give you as much trouble as he can consistently with the constitution of the vestry and his own evangelical principles ; and the dissenters are notoriously a forward, lively folk in the parish. But it is my firm belief that if these turbulent people could once be brought to know some one who really believed for himself the eternal veracities, and did n't merely tell them 436 RRCOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. of some one else who in old time was thought to have believed them, they would all be reduced to speedy silence. Our sanguinary evangehcal friend at the corner, yonder, would betake himself hope- lessly to his muttons, and dissent have no leg left to run upon. It is much, no doubt, to have a decent ceremonial of worship, and an educated, polite sort of person to administer it. But the main want of the world, as I gather, just now, and of this parish especially, which is that part of the world with which I am altogether best acquainted, is to discover some who really knows God other- wise than by hearsay, and can tell us what divine work is actually to be done here and now in Lon- don streets, and not of a totally different work which behooved to be done two thousand years ago in old Judsea. I have much hope that you are just the man we look for, and I give you my word that you will strike dissent dumb if such really be the case. What? Your road carries you now in another direction? Farewell, then! I am glad to find that we are capable of so good an understanding with each other.' " Carlyle was full of glee in recounting this ex- ploit, and his laugh like the roar of a mountain brook when the snow melts in spring. And it is funny, no doubt, to fancy how hopelessly asquint the rector's intellectual vision was bound to be- RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 437 come as he pursued his solitary walk homeward. But, after all, there is nothing higher than fun in either of these experiences. It is capital fun, I admit, and I enjoyed Carlyle's enjoyment of it in this light as much as anybody could, I only allow myself to characterize it thus strictly in order to show that Carlyle is not at all prima- rily the man of humanitary ideas and sympathies which many people fancy him to be. Of course he has a perfect right to be what he is, and no one has a keener appreciation of him in that real light than I have. I only insist that he has no manner of right to be reported to us in a false light, as we shall thereby lose the lesson which legitimately accrues to us from his immense per- sonality. Lord John Manners is a sincere senti- mentalist, who really believes that by reviving old English sports, and putting new vigor into existing Christmas, May-day, and other festivities, and in- augurating generally a sort of systematic, voluntary humility on the part of the aristocracy towards the dependent classes, revolution may be indefi- nitely staved off, and England saved from the terrors of a speedy " ki»ngdom come." And Car- lyle, if ideas were really uppermost with him, would have treated his visitors' weaknesses ten- derly, and shown them, by reference to certain well-established principles of human nature, — the 438 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. indomitable instinct of freedom, for example, — • how very disproportionate their remedy was to the formidable disease in hand. As it was, he sent them away unblessed, and, so far as he could effect such a result, disheartened. The easily baffled rector, too, clearly ought not, on the hypothesis of Carlyle being the en- lightened person his admirers think him, to have so alarmed Carlyle by his approach as to ravish him from his study, and make him descend to the level of the street, in order to secure the advan- tage of his adversary, in case there should be need of a retreat. Were he a man of true sympathy with human want, and of earnest thought as to the best way of appeasing it, as his admirers believe him to be, how frankly would he have met the rector's friendly, harmless overture, and said to him : " Yes, my friend, come to me as often as you will, and let us reason together of righteousness and temperance and judgment to come; for I, as well as you, have hope in God that he will show himself adequate, in ways we little dream of, to our sore public and private need, and would gladly communicate thereupon with any like hope- ful man," I was not in the least surprised at Carlyle's puerile gabble in Macmillan's Magazine about the American Iliad ; for he always felt himself quali- RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 439 fied a priori to crack and pick any philosophic nut extant ; to discuss and determine the toughest providential problem conceivable, without a taking of testimony or investigation of any sort, but by sheer force of genius or aesthetic instinct. One might often have felt tempted to use a more sum- mary word, so much do the effects of the two things in certain circumstances resemble each other. But I conceive it would have been very unjust to Carlyle. He was not constitutionally arrogant; he was a man of real modesty; he was even, I think, constitutionally diffident. He was a man, in short, whom you could summer and winter with, without ever having your self-respect wan- tonly affronted as it habitually is by mere con- ventional men and women. He was, to be sure, a very sturdy son of earth, and capable at times of exhibiting the most helpless natural infirmity. But he would never ignore nor slight your human fellowship because your life or opinions exposed you to the reproach of the vain, the frivolous, the self-seeking. He would of course curse your gods ever and anon in a manful way, and scoff without mercy at your tenderest intellectual hopes and aspirations ; but upon yourself personally, all the while, — especially if you should drink strong tea and pass sleepless nights, or suffer from tobac- co, or be menaced with insanity, or have a gnaw- 440 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. ing cancer under your jacket, — he would have bestowed the finest of his wheat. He might not easily have forgiven you if you used a vegetable diet, especially if you did so on principle; and he would surely have gnashed his teeth upon you if you should have claimed any scientific knowledge or philosophic insight into the social problem, — the problem of man's coming destiny upon the earth. But within these limits you would have felt how truly human was the tie that bound you to this roaring, riotous, most benighted, yet not unbenig- nant brother. Leave England, above all, alone; let her stumble on from one slough of despond to another, so that he might have the endless serene delight of walloping her chief " niggers," — Peel, Palmerston, Russell, Brougham, and the rest, — and he would dwell forever in friendly content with you. But only hint your belief that these imbecile statesmen were the true statesmen for the time, the only men capable, in virtue of that very imbe- cility, of truly coworking with the Providence that governs the world, and is guiding it full surely to a haven of final peace and blessedness, and he would fairly deluge you with the vitriol of his wrath. No ; all that can be said for Carlyle on this score is, that, having an immense eye for color, an immense genius for scenic effect, he seized with avidity upon every crazy, time-stained. RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 44- dishonored rag of personality that still fluttered in the breeze of history, and lent itself to his magi- cal tissues ; and he did not like that any one should attempt to dispute his finery with him. The habit was tyrannous, no doubt, but no harm, and only amusement, could have come of it; least of all would it have pushed him to his melancholy " latter-day " drivel, had it not been for the heartless people who hang, for their own private ends, upon the skirts of every pronounced man of genius, and do their best, by stimulating his vanity, to make him feel himself a god. I again have recourse to my note-book. " I happened to be at Mr. Carlyle's a Sunday or two since, when a large company was present, and the talk fell upon repudiation, which Jefferson Davis and Mississippi legislation are bringing into note. Among others a New Yorker was present, to whom his friends give the title of General, for no other reason that I can discover but to signify that he is nothing in particular, — an agreeable- mannered man, however, with something of that new-born innocence of belief and expectation in his demeanor and countenance which Englishmen find it so hard to do justice to in Americans; and he was apparently defending, when I went in, our general repute for honesty from the newspaper odium which is beginning to menace it. Mr. 442 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. Henry Woodman, — I will call him, — from Mas- sachusetts, was also present ; an amiable, excellent man, full of knowledge and belief in a certain way, who in former times was a Unitarian clergyman in good standing, but having made what seemed to him a notable discovery, namely, that there is no personal devil, — none, at least, who is over six feet in height, and who therefore is not essen- tially amenable to police discipline, — he forth- with snaps his fingers at the faded terror, drops his profession, and betakes himself to agriculture, for which he has a passion. He overflows with good feeling, and is so tickled with the discovery he has made of old Nick's long imposture, that he never makes an acquaintance without instantly telling him of it, nor ever keeps one without in- stantly, in season and out of season, reminding him of it. He had saturated Carlyle's outward ear with the intelligence, but to no inward profit. For Carlyle's working conception of the Deity involves so much of diabolism that the decease and sepulture of a thousand legitimate old bogies, authentically chronicled in ' The Times,' would hardly enliven his sombre imagination ; and he entertains a friendly contempt and compassion, accordingly, for the emancipated Mr. Woodman, which are always touching to me to witness. The evening in question my attention was suddenly RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 443 arrested by Carlyle saying somewhat loudly to General that we were all on our way to the devil in America, and that unless we turned a short corner we should infallibly bring up in that peril- ous company. Mr. Woodman was talking, at the moment, with his hostess, of whom he is a deserved favorite, at the other extremity of the room; but he would have heard the name of his vanished adversary had it been pronounced in a whisper. The grateful sound no sooner reached his ear, accordingly, than he averted himself from his companion, and cried out, delighted, ' What devil do you speak of, Mr. Carlyle ? ' ' What devil, do you ask?' Carlyle fairly roared back in reply. 'What devil, do you ask, Mr. Woodman? The devil, Mr. Woodman, that has been known in these parts from the beginning, and is not likely soon to become unknown, — the father of all liars, swindlers^ and repiidiators, Mr. Woodman ! The devil that in this Old World boasts a very numer- ous though unconscious progeny, and in your New World, Mr. Woodman, seems, from all ac- counts, to be producing a still more numerous and still more unconscious Oii e ! That is just the devil I mean, Mr. Woodman; and woe be to you and yours the day you vote liivi lifeless ! ' " Mr. Woodman was discouraged, and at once reverted to his quiet colloquy with his softer com- 444 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. panion, while the rei.st of us profited by the exhila- rating breeze he had so suddenly conjured up. ' Speaking of the evil one,' General hastened to say, ' I have been visiting to-day subterranean London, its sewers, and so forth,' — and the con- versation soon fell into its ordinary undulations. But earnest as Carlyle's reply to his friend un- doubtedly sounded, any listener would have very much mistaken the truth of the case if he had supposed that it meant anything more than his hopeless, helpless, and consequently irritable way of contemplating social facts and tendencies. Car- lyle does not believe, of course, in the literal per- sonality of the devil near so much as Mr. Wood- man does ; that is, he believes in it so little as to disdain the trouble of denying it. But he has a profound faith that there is at the head of affairs some very peremptory person or other, who will infallibly have his own will in the end, or override all other wills ; and he is able, consequently, to variegate his conversation and writing with lurid lights that seem most orthodox and pious to inno- cent imaginations, and would make the ghost of John Knox roll up the whites of his eyes in grate- ful astonishment. Whatever be Carlyle's interest in any question of life or destiny, he talks so well and writes so well that it can hardly escape being all swallowed up in talk or writing; and he would RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 445 regard you as a bore of the largest calibre if, talk- ing in the same sense with him, you yet did not confine yourself to talk, but went on to organize your ideas in some appropriate action." You would say, remembering certain passages in Carlyle's books, — notably his " Past and Present" and his pamphlet on Chartism, — that he had a very lively sympathy with reform and a profound senti- ment of human fellowship. He did, indeed, dally with the divine ideas long enough to suck them dry of their rhetorical juices, but then dropped them, to lavish contempt on them ever after when anybody else should chance to pick them up and cherish them, not for their rhetorical uses, but their absolute truth. He had no belief in society as a living, organizing force in history, but only as an empirical necessity of the race. He had no conception of human brotherhood or equality as the profoundest truth of science, disclosing a hell in the bosom wherever it is not allowed to reveal a heaven, but only as an emotional or sentimental experience of happily endowed natures. On the contrary, he used to laugh and fling out his scorn- ful heels at the bare suggestion of such a thing, much as a tropical savage would laugh and fling out his heels at the suggestion of frozen rivers. He looked at the good and evil in our nature as final or absolute quantities, and saw no way, con- 446 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. sequently, of ever utilizing the evil element. He saw no possible way of dealing with weak races but by reducing them to slavery; no way of deal- ing successfully with evil men but by applying lynch law to them, and crushing them out of existence. In short he had not the least concep- tion of history as a divine drama, designed to edu- cate man into self-knowledge and the knowledge of God ; and consequently could never meet you on any ground of objective truth, but only on that of your subjective whim or caprice. It was this in- tellectual incapacity he was under to esteem truth for its own sake, or value it except for the per- sonal prestige it confers, that made him so impo- tent to help a struggling brother on to daylight, and fixed him in so intense and irritable a literary j^^-consciousness. Again to my note-book. " I went to see Carlyle last night to get permis- sion to bring a friend — J. McK. — to see him the next day, who had it much at heart to thank him for the aid and comfort his books had given him, years ago, away out on the shores of Lake Erie. Would he treat the friend kindly, in case I brought him ; or would he altogether pulverize him, as he had crewhile pulverized a certain person we both wotted of ? Nay, nay ; he would be all Chat Chesterfield himself could desire of polite anc^ RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 447 affable ! Well, then, what would be the most aus- picious hour? When would the inward man be most unpuckered? — for I should really be sorry to see my friend go home with his ardent thirst of worship all unslaked. * Ask Jane,' was the reply. ' What she appoints, I will give my diligence to conform to.' Mrs. Carlyle, who sat upon the sofa beside us, obligingly entered into my anxieties, and said, ' You shall bring your friend to-morrow, after dinner, or between two and three o'clock ; for I often observe that is a very placid hour with the creature, and I think we may reckon upon a great success if we will just avail ourselves of it.' Accordingly, we did not fail to be in the little Chelsea parlor this afternoon, at the hour ap- pointed, my friend and I, — not without a certain prophetic tremor, I can assure you, on my part, for his raised expectations. As we entered the room Carlyle stood upon a chair, with his back to us, vainly trying, to all appearance, to close his inside window-shutters. He did not at all desist on our entrance, but cried out, * Is that you, J., and have you brought your friend McK. with you? I don't know whether he is at all related to my friend, Sandy McK., of Glasgow. If he is, he can't be related to a worthier man.' By this time he had reduced his refractory window-shutter to order, and descended from his perch to take a 448 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. first look at his guest. My friend of course made a neat little salutatory expressive of his intellectual obligations, and the need he felt to make some sort of avowal of them, before he again set his face westward. ' I don't believe a word of it ! ' said Carlyle, as my friend gracefully perorated. ' I don't believe a word of it ! I don't believe that I ever helped any man. I don't believe that any man ever helped another. It is indeed unspeaka- bly folly to conceive such a thing. The only man I ever found — and him I didn't find — who seemed to me sincere in such a thought was a ship captain, some time ago, who wrote to me to say, without giving me name or address, that he had called his vessel the Thomas Carlyle, because he had got some good, he fancied, from my books. I thought it behooved me to look the man up, so I traversed the London docks from end to end, asking of the sailors ever and anon if they knew any vessel in those parts bearin' the portentous name of Thomas Carlyle; but it was all in vain, and I returnee home persuaded that, whatever else might betide me, I should probably never see under this sun the extraordinary individual who had named his vessel the Thomas Carlyle.' You may easily im- gine the sudden pallor that came over my friend's ruddy devotion. It was not that Carlyle intended out of pure wantonness to mock the admiration RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 449 he lives to conciliate. It was only that he chanced at that moment to feel the ghastly disproportion which existed betAveen his real aims and those lent him by the generous faith of his disciples; and instead of doing penance by himself for the diversity, he preferred to make the devotee pay his share of the penalty." Carlyle used to strike me as a man of genius or consummate executive faculty, and not prima- rily of sympathy or understanding. Every one is familiar with this discrimination. We all know some one or other who is a genius in his way, or has a power of doing certain things as no one else can do them, and as arrests our great admiration. And yet, as likely as not, this person so marvel- lously endowed, is a somewhat uncomfortable per- son apart from his particular line of action. Very possibly, and even probably, he is domineering and irritable to the pitch of insanity in his per- sonal intercourse with others, and his judgments are apt to be purely whimsical, or reflect his own imperious will. We admire the genius in his own sphere of work or production, and feel a divine force in him that moves the world. But at the same time we are persuaded that there is some- thing in us, not half so resplendent as genius, which is yet a vast deal better; and that is spiri- tual character, or a cultivated deference to the 29 450 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. humblest forms of goodness and truth. At best, genius is only a spiritual temperament in man, and therefore, though it serves as an excellent basis for spiritual character, should yet never be confounded with it. The genius is God's spoiled child upon earth; woe be unto him, if he look upon that indulgence as consecrating him for the skies as well ! Character, or spiritual manhood, is not created, but only communicated. It is not our birthright, but is only brought about with our own zealous privity, or solicitous concurrence in some sort. It is honestly wrought out of the most literal conformity to the principles of uni- versal justice. It puts up with no histrionic piety, tramples under foot the cheap humility of the prayer-book and the pew, and insists upon the just thing at the just moment, under pain of eter- nal damnation, — which means, an abandonment to the endless illusions of self-love. Hence it is, that, while the genius cuts such a lustrous figure in the eyes of men, and wins oftentimes so loud a renown, we yet know many a nameless person whom we value more than a raft of genii, because we confide without stint in their living truth, their infinite rectitude of heart and understanding. We like the genius, or whatsoever makes life glorious, powerful, divine, on Sundays or holidays ; but we prefer the ordinary, unconscious, unostentatious RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 45 I stuff which alone keeps it sweet and human on all other days. It always appeared to me that Carlyle valued truth and good as a painter does his pigments, — not for what they are in themselves, but for the effects they lend themselves to in the sphere of production. Indeed, he always exhibited a con- tempt, so characteristic as to be comical, for every one whose zeal for truth or good led him to ques- tion existing institutions with a view to any prac- tical reform. He himself was wont to question established institutions and dogmas with the ut- most license of scepticism, but he obviously meant nothing beyond the production of a cer- tain literary surprise, or the enjoyment of his own aesthetic power. Nothing maddened him so much as to be mistaken for a reformer, really intent upon the interests of God's righteousness upon the earth, which are the interests of universal jus- tice. This is what made him hate Americans, and call us a nation of bores, — that we took him at his word, and reckoned upon him as a sincere well-wisher to his species. He hated us, because a secret instinct told him that our exuberant faith in him would never be justified by closer knowl- edge ; for no one loves the man who forces him upon a premature recognition of himself. I recall the uproarious mirth with which he and Mrs. 452 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. Carlyle used to recount the incidents of a visit they had received from a young New England woman, and describe the earnest, devout homage her cred- ulous soul had rendered him. It was her first visit abroad, and she supposed — poor thing! — that these famous European writers and talkers, who so dominated her fancy at a distance, really meant all they said, were as innocent and lovely in their lives as in their books ; and she no sooner crossed Carlyle's threshold, accordingly, than her heart offered its fragrance to him as liberally as the flower opens to the sun. And Carlyle, the inveterate comedian, instead of being humbled to the dust by the revelation which such simplicity suddenly flashed upon his own eyes of his essen- tially dramatic genius and exploits, was irritated, vexed, and outraged by it as by a covert insult. His own undevout soul had never risen to the contemplation of himself as the priest of a really infinite sanctity ; and when this clear-eyed barba- rian, looking past him to the substance which informed him, made him feel himself for the mo- ment the transparent mask or unconscious actor he was, his self-consciousness took the alarm. She sat, the breathless, silly little maid, between him and Mrs. Carlyle, holding a hand of each, and feeling the while her anticipations of Paradise on earth so met in this foolish encounter that she RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 453 could not speak, but barely looked the pious rap- ture which filled her soul. One more extract from my note-book, and I shall have done with it, for it is getting to be time to close my paper. I mentioned a while since the name of O'Connell, and apropos of this name I should like to cite a reminiscence which sets Car- lyle in a touchingly amiable spiritual light. "Sunday before last I found myself seated at Carlyle's with Mr, Woodman and an aid-de-camp of Lord Castlereagh, who had just returned from India, and was entertaining Mrs. Carlyle with any amount of anecdotes about the picturesque people he left behind him. To us enter Dr. John Carlyle and a certain Mr. , a great burly Englishman, who has the faculty (according to an aside of Mrs. Carlyle, dexterously slipped in for my informa- tion) of always exciting Carlyle to frenzy by talk about O'Connell, of whom he is a thick-and-thin admirer. The weather topic and the health in- quiry on both sides were soon quietly disposed of; but immediately after, Mrs. Carlyle nudged my elbow, and whispered in a tone of dread, ' Now for the deluge ! ' For she had heard the nasty din of politics commencing, and too well antici- pated the fierce and merciless melee that was about to ensue. It speedily announced itself, hot and heavy; and for an hour poor breathless Mr. 454 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. Woodman and myself, together with the awe- struck aid-de-camp, taking refuge under the skirts of outraged Mrs. Carlyle, assisted at a lit de justice such as we had none of us ever before imagined. At last tea was served, to our very great relief But, no ! the conflict was quite unexhausted, ap- parently, and went on with ever new alacrity, under the inspiration of the grateful souchong. Mrs. Carlyle had placed me at her left hand, with belligerent or bellowing Mr. Bull next to me ; and as her tea-table chanced to be inadequate to the number of her guests we were all constrained to sit in very close proximity. Soon after our amiable and estimable hostess had officiated at the tea-tray, I felt her foot crossing mine to reach the feet of my infuriated neighbor and implore peace ! She successfully reached them, and suc- ceeded fully, also, in bringing about her end, with- out any thanks to him, however. For the ruffian had no sooner felt the gentle, appealing pressure of her foot, than he turned from Carlyle to meet her tender appeal with undisguised savagery. 'Why don't you,' he fiercely screamed, — ' why don't you, Mrs. Carlyle, touch your husband's toe? I am sure he is greatly more to blame than I am ! ' The whole company immediately broke forth in a burst of uncontrollable glee at this extraordinary specimen of manners, Carlyle himself taking the RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 455 lead ; and his amiable convive^ seeing, I suppose, the mortifying spectacle he had made of himself, was content to ' sing small ' for the remainder of the evening. " Anyhow, I heard nothing distressing while I remained. But happening to have made an ap- pointment with Mrs. Carlyle for the next day, I went down to Chelsea in the morning, and found my friend seated with her stocking-basket beside her, diligently mending the gitdemaii's hose. I asked her if any dead had been left on the battle- field the night before, and she replied, 'Yes; I never saw Carlyle more near to death than he is this dismal Monday morning ! I must first tell you that he has been a long time in the habit of going to Mr. 's in Street, for a Sunday dinner, protesting that, though his friends have no acquaintance with books or literary people, he never pays them a Sunday visit without feeling himself renovated against all the soil of the week, and never comes away without being baptized anew in unconsciousness. Now, yesterday he had gone to this friend's to dine, and when he re- turned, about three or four o'clock, he said to me, " Jane, I am henceforth a regenerate man, and eschew evil from this hour as the snake does its skin ! " This he said with conviction and earnest purpose, as if that lovely family had inoculated 456 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. him with the blessed life ! What a scathing sense of weakness, then, besets the poor man this morn- ing ! Such a contrast between the placid noon of yesterday and the horrid, hideous night ! ' " To my inquiry whether anything had further occurred of disagreeable after I had left, Mrs. Car- lyle replied, * Everything went on swimmingly till about eleven o'clock, when it pleased your unfor- tunate countryman, Mr. Woodman, to renew the war-whoop by saying, " Let us return a moment to O'Connell." If the talk was frightful before you left, what did it now become? Altogether un- bearable; and when about twelve o'clock John Carlyle got up to go, taking his friend along with him, Carlyle, lighting his candle to see the com- pany to the door, stretched out his hand to his late antagonist, with the frank remark, " Let by- gones be bygones ! " The latter scorned to take it, saying, " Never again shall I set foot in this house ! " I knew how cruelly Carlyle would feel this rebuff, and scarcely dared to glance at him as he came upstairs after lighting his guests out; but when I did look, there he stood at the door of the room, holding the candle above his head, and laughing with bitter, remorseful laughter, as he repeated the words of the morning: Jane, I am henceforth a regenerate man, and eschew evil from this hour as the snake does its skin ! ' " RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 4$? Alas, poor Yorick! The main intellectual disqualification, then, of Carlyle, in my opinion, was the absoluteness with which he asserted the moral principle in the hu- man bosom, or the finality which his grim imagi- nation lent to the conflict of good and evil in men's experience. He never had the least idea, that I could discover, of the true or intellectually educative nature of this conflict, as being purely ministerial to a new and final evolution of Jmman nature itself into permanent harmony with God's spiritual perfection. He never expressed a sus- picion, in intercourse with me, — on the contrary, he always denounced my fervent conviction on the subject as so much fervent nonsense, — that out of this conflict would one day emerge a posi- tive or faultless life of man, which would other- wise have been impracticable; just as out of the conflict of alkali and acid emerges a neutral salt which would otherwise be invisible. On the con- trary, he always expressed himself to the effect that the conflict was absolutely valid in itself ; that it constituted its own end, having no other result than to insure to good men the final domin- ion of evil men, and so array heaven and hell in mere chronic or fossil antagonism. The truth is, he had no idea but of a carnal or literal rectitude in human nature, — a rectitude secured by an 458 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. unflinching inward submission to some command- ing ojitward or personal authority. The law, not the gospel, was for him the true bond of inter- course between God and man, and between man and man as well. That is to say, he believed in our moral instincts, not as constituting the mere carnal body or rude husk of our spiritual manhood, but its inmost kernel or soul ; and hence he habi- tually browsed upon " the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," as if it had been divinely com- mended to us for that purpose, or been always regarded as the undisputed tree of life, not of death. He was mother Eve's own darling can- tankerous Thomas, in short, the child of her dreariest, most melancholy old age ; and he used to bury his worn, dejected face in her pe- nurious lap, in a way so determined as forever to shut out all sight of God's new and better creation. Of course this is only saying in other words that Carlyle was without any sense of a tiniversal providence in human affairs. He supposed that God Almighty literally saw with our eyes, and had therefore the same sympathy for strong men that we ourselves have, and the same disregard for feeble men. And he conceived that the world was governed upon the obvious plan of giving strong men sway, and hustling weak men out of RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 459 sight. In the teeth of all the prophets who have ever prophesied, he held that the race is always to the swift, the battle always to the strong. Long before Mr. Darwin had thought of applying the principle of natural selection to the animal king- dom, Carlyle, not in words but in fact, had ap- plied it to the spiritual kingdom, proclaiming as fundamental axioms of the divine administration, " Might makes right, and devil take the hindmost." He thought the divine activity in the world ex- ceptional, not normal, occasional, not constant; that God worked one day out of seven, and rested the remaining six ; thus, that he had a much nearer relation to holiday persons like Plato or Shakspeare or Goethe than he has to every- day people like the negro, the prison convict, the street-walker. In this shallow way the great mys- tery oi godliness, which the angels desire to look into, became to his eyes as flat as any pancake ; Deity himself being an incomparable athlete, or having an enormous weight of selfhood, so that all his legitimate children are born to rule. Ruler of men, this was Carlyle's most rustical ideal of human greatness. Rule on the one hand, obedi- ence on the other, this was his most provincial ideal of human society or fellowship, and he never dreamt of any profounder key to the inter- pretation of our earthly destiny. The strong man 460 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. to grow ever more strong, the feeble man to grow ever more feeble, until he is finally extinguished, — that was his very pedantic and puerile conception of the rest that remains to the people of God. The glorification of force, ability, genius, " that is the one condition," he always said, " in my poor opinion, of any much-talked-of millennial felicity for this poor planet, — the only thing which will ever rescue it from being the devil's churchyard and miserable donkey pasture it now for the most part turns out to be." The divine hieroglyphics of human nature are never going to be deciphered in this sensuous, childish way. The divine gait is not lop-sided. As his special glory is to bring good 07U of evil, one can easily see that he has never had a thought of exalting one style of man outwardly or per- sonally above another style, but only of reducing both styles to a just humility. " The tree of knowl- edge of good and evil " is a tree which belongs ex- clusively to the garden of our immature, sensuous, or scientific intelligence, and it will not bear trans- plantation to a subtler spiritual soil. Our moral ex- perience has always been, in purpose, intellectually educative. It is adapted, in literal or outward form, to our rude and crude or nascent scientific intelli- gence, and as intended to afford us, in the absence of any positive conceptions of infinitude, at least a RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 461 negative spiritual conception, that so we might learn betimes a modest or humble conceit of ourselves. Now, Carlyle's precise intellectual weakness was that he never had a glimpse of any distinctively divine ends in human nat?ire, but only in the more or less conflicting persons of that nature; and hence he was even childishly unable to justify the advance of the social sentiment in humanity, — the sanest, deepest, most reconciling sentiment ever known to man's bosom. To escape Carlyle's fatuity, then, and avoid the just reproach which he is fated to incur in the future, we must give up our hero-worship, or sentimental reverence for great men, and put ourselves in the frankest prac- tical harmony with the Providence that governs the world. Nor is this half so difficult a task as our leading lazy-bones in Church and State would have us believe. Our leaders should be called our misleaders, in fact, so often do they betray us as to the principles of Divine administration. The world is not administered, as Carlyle and Louis Napoleon would have us fancy, upon the princi- ple of making everything bend to the will of the strongest. On the contrary, the true will of the Strongest is, and always has been, to efface him- self before every the meanest creature he has made, and his profoundest joy, not to have His 'swn way, but to give way to every such creature, 462 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. provided, first of all, there be nothing in that way injurious to the common weal. In fact, the one principle of Divine administration in human affairs, as we learn from Christianity, is to disregard high things, and mind only low things; to cortemn whatsoever is highly esteemed among men, and exalt or utilize whatsoever they despise and reject Henry Carey has been long and vainly showing us that a proper economy of the world's waste is all we need to inaugurate in the material sphere the long-promised millennium. And Liebig pub- lished, not many years ago, what he calls a legacy to his fellows, in which he proves, first, that Euro- pean agriculture is fast becoming so fruitless by the exhaustion of soils, that, unless some remedy be provided, Europe must soon go into hopeless physical decrepitude; and, secondly, that men have the amplest remedy against this contingency in their own hands, by simply economizing the sew- age of large towns, and restoring to the land the mineral wealth their food robs it of. Only think of this ! Europe actually depends for her mate- rial salvation upon a divine redemption mercifully stored up for her in substances which her most pious churchmen and wisest statesmen have al- ways disdained as an unmitigated nuisance ! If any one thing be more abhorrent than another to our dainty sensual pride; if one thing more than RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 463 another has been permitted to fill our selfish, stu- pid life with disgust and disease, — it is this waste material of the world, which we, in our insanity, would gladly hurry into the abyss of oblivion ! And yet in God's munificent wisdom this self-same odious waste teems with incomparably greater ren- ovation to human society than all the gold, silver, and precious stones ever dug from earth to mad- den human lust and enslave human weakness ! Now, what is the philosophic lesson of this surprising scientific gospel? When science thus teaches us, beyond all possibility of cavil, that the abject waste and offscouring of the planet, which we ourselves are too fastidious even to name, is fuller of God's redeeming virtue, of his intimate presence, than all its pomp of living loveliness, than all its vivid garniture of mineral, vegetable, and animal beauty, what philosophic bearing does the lesson exert? It is the very gospel of Christ, mind you, reduced to the level of sense, or turned into a scientific verity. What, then, is its urgent message to men's spiritual un- derstanding? Evidently this, and nothing else; namely, that human life is now so full of want, so full of sorrow, so full of vice, — that human intercour*:'^ is now so full of fraud, rapacity, and violence, only because the truth of human so- ciety, human fellowship, human equality, which 464 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE:. alone reveals the infinitude of God's love, enjoys as yet so stinted a recognition, while race con- tinues to war with race, and sect with sect. So- ciety has as yet achieved only a typical or provi- sional existence, by no means a real or final one. Every clergyman is the professional fellow or equal of every other; every lawyer or physician enjoys the equal countenance of his professional brethren, — but no man is yet sacred to his brother man by virtue of his manhood simply, but only by virtue of some conventional or accidental ad- vantage. The vast majority of our Christian population are supposed to be properly excluded from an equal public consideration with their more fortunate compeers, by the fact of their poverty or enforced subjection to natural want, and the personal limitations which such want im- poses; while outside of Christendom the entire mass of mankind is shut out of our respect and sympathy, if not exposed to the incursions of our ravenous cupidity, because they do not profess the exact faith we profess, nor practise the literal max- ims we practise. Thus, the righteousness of the letter prevails everywhere over that of the spirit, everywhere betrays and condemns our divinest natural manhood to dishonor and death ; the inevi- table consequence being, that God's living energy in our nature, disdaining as it does anything but a RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 465 universal operation, is shut up to the narrowest, most personal and penurious dimensions, — is as- sociated, in fact, with the meanest, most meagre bosoms of the race; while the great mass of men, in whose hearts and brains its infinite splen- dors lie seething and tumultuous for an outlet, are cast out of our Christian fellowship, are dis- honored and reviled, as so much worthless rubbish or noisome excrement. It is quite time then, in my opinion, that we should cease minding Carlyle's rococo airs and affectations ; his antiquated strut and heroics, re- minding us now of John Knox and now of Don Quixote ; his owlish, qbscene hootings at the end- less divine day which is breaking over all the earth of our regenerate nature. We have no need that he or any other literary desperado should en- lighten us as to the principles of God's adminis- tration, for we have a more sure word of prophecy in our own hearts, — a ray of the light which illu- mines every man who comes into the world, and. is ample, if we follow it, to scatter every cloud that rests upon the course of history. We are all of us parents, potentially or actually, and although we represent the infinite paternity most imper- fectly, we do nevertheless represent it. And how do we administer our families? Do we bestow our chief solicitude upon those of our children 466 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. who need it least, or upon those who need it most ; upon those who are most up to the world's re- morseless demands upon them, or those who fall short of those demands? I need not wait for an answer. All our base, egotistic pride may go to the former, but we reserve all our care and tender- ness for those whom an unkind nature, as we say, consigns to comparative indigence and ignominy. Now, God has absolutely no pride and no ego- tism, being infinitely inferior to us in both those respects. But then, for that very reason, he is infinitely our superior in point of love or tender- ness. I do not believe that the tenderness we bestow upon our prodigals is worthy to be named in the same day with that which he bestows upon his. I do not believe, for my part, that he ever lifts a finger, or casts a glance, to bless those of his offspring who resemble him, or are in sym- pathy with his perfection, — for such persons need no blessing, are themselves already their own best blessing, — but reserves all his care and tenderness for the unblessed and disorderly, for the unthank- ful and the evil, for those who are disaffected to his righteousness, and make a mock of his peace. I doubt not, if a celestial visitor should come to us to-morrow in the flesh, we should engage the best rooms for him at the Parker House; RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. 467 supply his table with the fat of the land ; place a coach-and-four at his beck, whisk him off to the State House; introduce him to ail the notabil- ities, ecclesiastic, political, scholastic, financial ; give him a public dinner, a box at the opera, the most conspicuous pew in church ; in short, do everything our stupidity could invent to per- suade him, at all events, that we regarded him as an arrival from the most uncelestial corner of the universe. Well, we have in truth at this time, and all the time, no celestial visitant in the flesh among us, but a divine resident in the spirit, whom the heaven of heavens is all unmeet to contain, and who yet dwells — awaiting there his eventual glo- rious resurrection — a patient, despised, discred' ited, spiritual form in every fibre of that starved and maddened and polluted flesh and blood which feeds our prisons and fattens our hospitals, and which we have yet the sagacity to regard as the indispensable base of our unclean and inhuman civilization. And it is my fixed conviction, that unless we speedily consent to recognize his hu- miliated form in that loathsome sepulchre, and give emancipation to it there, first of all, by bring- ing this waste life, this corrupt and outcast force of Christendom, into complete social recognition, or clothing it with the equal garments of praise and 468 RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLYLE. salvation that hide our own spiritual nakedness, we shall utterly miss our historic justification, and baffle the majestic Providence which is striving through us to inaugurate a free, unforced, and permanent order of human life. BIBLIOGRAPHY. A list of Mr. James's published works is here appended : What Constitutes the State: A Lecture delivered before the Young Men's Association of Albany. New York : 1846. pp. 59. Tracts for the New Times. No. I. Letter to a Sweden- borgian. New York : 1847. pp.24. MoRALisM and Christianity; or, Man's Experience and Destiny. In three Lectures. New York: Redfield, 1850. Sm. 8vo. pp. 184. Lectures and Miscellanies. New York : Redfield, 1852. Sm. 8vo. pp. 442. The Nature of Evil, considered in a letter to the Rev. Edward Beecher, D.D. author of "The Conflict of Ages." New York: Appleton, 1855. i2nio. pp. 348. The Church of Christ not an Ecclesiasticism : A Letter of Remonstrance to a member of the soi-disant New Church. Second Edition. London: W. White, 1856. Sm. 8vo. pp.156. [The first edition seems to have been published in pamphlet form in New York a short time previous.] Christianity the Logic of Creation. London : Wm. White, 1857. Sm. Bvo. pp.264. (New York : Appleton, 1857.) The Social Significance of our Institutions : An Oration delivered by request of the citizens at Newport, R. I., July 4, 1861. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861. 8vo. pamphlet, pp. 47. Substance and Shadow; or, Morality and Religion in THEIR Relation to Life : An Essay on the Physics of Crea- tion. Boston : Ticknor and Fields, 1863. 8vo. pp.539. (Sec- ond Edition, 1866.) 470 BIBLIOGRAPHY. The Secret of Swedenborg : Being an elucidation of his doc- trine of the Divine Natural Humanity. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1869. 8vo. pp. XV, 243. Society the Redeemed Form of Man, and the Earnest of God's Omnipotence in Human Nature: Affirmed in Let- ters to a Friend. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, & Co., 1879. 8vo. pp. 485. Of magazine articles he is the author of — Woman and the Woman's Movement. Putnam's Monthly Magazine, March, 1853. Review of the Works of Sir Wm. Hamilton. Putnam's Magazine, Nov. 1853. Swedenborg's Ontology. North American Review, July, 1867. Is Marriage Holy.' Atlantic Monthly, March, 1870. (Reprint as pamphlet, London, 1870.) The Logic of Marriage and Murder. Atlantic Monthly, June, 1870. Spiritualism, Old and New. Atlantic Monthly, March, 1872. Modern Diabolism. Atlantic Monthly, August, 1873. Personal Reminiscences of Carlyle. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1881. To these may be added a series of six letters addressed to Mr. F. E. Abbot, and published in the " Index," as follows : — Deliverance, not Perfection, the Aim of Religion, Jan. 20, 1876. The Reconciliation of Man Individual with Man Uni- versal, Feb. 3, 1876. Society versus Selfhood, Feb. 17, 1876. Spiritual Creation, March 23, 1876. Knowledge and Science contrasted, April 13, 1876. The Philosophy of the Heart, May 18, 1876. Also a series of contributions, eighteen in number, to the " New Church Independent," of Chicago, extending BIBLIOGRAPHY. 47 1 from Jjly, 1879, to August, 1881. Many of these letters are reprinted verbatim, forming chapters of the Essay entitled " Spiritual Creation," in the present volume. Mr. James was also a frequent contributor to the " Harbinger " and the " Spirit of the Age," in New York, during the not very long hfe of those weekly journals of progress. The " New York Tribune " afterwards printed a good many articles and letters from him ; and later in his life he wTote an occasional book-review for the "Nation," the " North American," or the " Atlantic." It seems un- necessary to make reference to these ephemeral contribu- tions in detail. Exception may perhaps be made for a review of Stirling's " Secret of Hegel," in the " North American" for January, 1866, and for one of Bushnell's " Vicarious Sacrifice," in the same review for April of the same year. ijus Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. REC'D 12 MAR 231985 iii-'- iJO>^ :j0m-7,'68(JI895sl) — C-120 .y-^ uy^ INI lllll III ||| |l 11 {I III III {l||i{ 58 00616 5939 JNYSOV-^"^ ^JiuaNv-^ov^" uNiVii^^- '■mm^)^. \^ O.F-fAllFn,-:-, "j;^]. /iaaAiNaj^v^ UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 733 181 2 A5V/?^ -vVlF ILVIVt '^<'. Oa ^ ^' ^m #"' 30w-' --rv ^ ^ f n QL^ i AHvaaim ^WE•UNIVE: tf ' ■■ I .J 3 1158 00616 5939 '^-TjiaONVSOV"^^ %a3AINlld> t ■