^m'§ c^ ^--^V^- REESE LIBRARY ■^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Received ^^l^ijiu^^^-';' i^8 p Accessions No.^/^^^^^"^ Shelf No. c ^u •3s> Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding frem IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/christianitylogiOOjameriGh CHRISTIANITY LOeiC OF CREATION BY HENRY JAMES AUTHOR OF ' THE CHURCH OF CHRIST NOT AN ECCLE8IASTIC1SM," ETC. Felix qui potait reTlirirTTiij^lllillrtiiTT fausas, Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari." Virgil. JSEW YORK D. APPLETON & CO., 346 and 348 BROADWAY 1857 J4 LONDON : PEIKTED BY MITCHELL AND SON, WAEDOUR ST., OXFORD ST. PREFACE. The following Letters were actually written to a friend in London, and are published at his sugges- tion. They are themselves but a preface to a larger discourse upon the same theme, which the writer hopes some day to accomplish. Christianity was the revelation of an utterly unsuspected life of God within the strictest limits of human nature ; . and, like all true revelation of spiritual things, was an inverse form of its own interior substance. For this is the distinction between revelation, properly so called, and information, that the one constitutes an inverted image of the truth, the other a direct image; or that the one is symbolic and speaks mainly to the soul, while the other is purely sta- tistical and addresses chiefly the senses. Hence it is that revelation has always shielded and fos- tered human freedom, while mere information is sure to crush it. None of the sects exhibit so servile a temper as those who pretend to the most authoritative information about spiritual things. Look at the Swedenborgians, for example. And Mediumshipj as it is called, is growing to be the aspiration and profession of thousands, who are P^ rior Divinity, tired of waiting for its true and perfect expression in a beautiful life of man, scientifically redeemed from want and ignorance, or elevated into the universal fellowship of his kind, sought once more to bring itself to human recognition, by inflat- ing the old and deceased symbols. 164 WHY CREATION INVOLVES I beg your pointed attention to the observation, for unless you clearly apprehend the truth I am now enforcing, you will infallibly miss in my judgment the whole distinctive scope of the new economy. The spontaneous life, as I have just said in the preceding note, is one which interiorates object to subject. That is to say, it is a life which neces- sarily brings the object of all my action, the object of all my aspiration, the object of all my worship, within the conditions of my own nature. In short, it is a life which exacts the essential humanity of God, which requires that the Deity I aspire to unite myself more and more intimately with, should be an infinite or perfect man, in all the length and breadth, height and depth, of that much misunderstood word. Now such being the true life of man, it must always have existed in a shape proportionate to his consciousness of him- self. That is, it must have always existed either in a negative or positive form, either as germ or flower, either as e^^ or chick. But it does not even yet exist in this latter state. We have not yet attained to our true human consciousness. Individuals here and there dimly discern the Di- vine seed in them, but the mass of mankind seem utterly destitute of spiritual quickening. Priest- ridden and police-ridden, amidst all God's over- whelming bounties they nourish only the furtive courage of mice, and under the kindling sunshine A DIVINE INCARNATION 165 of truth contentedly maintain the darkened intel- ligence of owls and bats. It follows, then, that our true life must have hitherto existed only in a germinal or rudimentary form, only in the form of an egg, as it were, out of which in the fulness of time should be hatched the consummate vital reality. And this germ of the perfect life — this rudimental embodiment of it — this sheltering and succulent egg, so to speak — has always been fur- nished by what we call revelation, or simply religion, or still more simply the Church as dis- tinguished from the State. Some purely spi- ritual revelation of the Divine name in the in- dividual soul, and failing that, some merely ritual and symbolic attestation of it, appears to have been as much a preliminary necessity of our perfected consciousness, as the egg is a preli- minary necessity of the chicken, which is for a long time unconsciously housed within its frail transparent walls. I say a " necessity,^' and this necessity will be obvious to you when you consider the true scope and meaning of our perfected life, when you con- sider what is inseparably implied in it. The form of the Divine or perfect life in man, is that of spontaneity or freedom, because it is a life which is developed exclusively from vnthin to without, and never from without to within. This is the distinctively human form of life, at all times and under all circumstances, whether man knows it or 166 WHY CREATION INVOLVES whether he is ignorant of it, and it invariably brings forth fruit precisely apposite to such know- ledge or such ignorance. But man's first con- sciousness is natural, and afterwards spiritual: that is to say, he feels his common or associated existence before he feels his individual or private one. Of course therefore both these forms of con- sciousness, both his natural and spiritual form, must reflect the true law of his life, which is free- dom or spontaneity. His natural selfhood, his common or associated existence, no less than his individual or private one, must in its own manner reflect the human form of life, must image the great controlling law of freedom or spontaneity. Otherwise his unity of consciousness, his sense of personal identity, would lapse, inasmuch as there could be no basis of continuity between his na- tural and spiritual existence. In short, the true and Divine life of man, the life of spontaneity, must shape his natural development as well as his spiritual one into conformity with itself: that is to say, must subject the mind of man in nature to a strictly historic evolution, to such an evolu- tion as makes its highest spiritual or individual culture to be nothing more than the strict efflor- escence of natural or universal germs. Such is the idea of History. It means efflorescence. It means the continuity of an identical germ through root and branch, through stalk and leaf, to fruit : the procession of life from a hidden or invisible A DIVINE INCARNATION 167 seed to a gorgeous and kingly flower fit to illus- trate the sunlight. In fine, it means the growth of selfhood. But you have enough now to think of 'till the next Letter. Yours truly. 168 WHY CREATION INVOLVES LETTER XIX, Paris, Jan. 20^, 1857. My dear W., You complain of my last Letter as insuificient. It could not very well be otherwise, seeing that I had not bargained to send you a volume of well- digested metaphysics, but only a friendly and suggestive Letter. Let me endeavour now to resume the same theme in a form somewhat more expansive. You know that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred (and this is speaking with exemplary moderation) envisage creation as a question of time and space — as, at most, a series of sensible facts or incidents, like the American Revolution — and as essentially involving therefore no considera- tions beyond the ordinary collation and discrimi- nation of evidence. The mass of people believe that creation took place "once upon a time,'' somewhere in Asia probably, and was complete on the instant by an exertion of physical energy on the part of the Creator. They suppose that some A DIVINE INCARNATION 169 six thousand years ago, more or less, man was effectively created, and that his entire subsequent history consequently has been little better than a vigorous and unaccountable kicking up of his heels in his Creator's face. The abject childish- ness of this conception fails to strike them, only because the application of reason to sacred sub- jects has been so effectually discouraged by the clergy, that our popular intellectual stomach has grown indurated and ostrich-like, — stowing away all manner of innutritions corkscrews, jack-knives, and rusty nails, which may be presented to it by its lawful pun^eyors, as if they were so much reasonable and delectable Christian diet. Indeed, if you commit yourself to the orthodox conception of the Divine name, you have no right to denounce such a diet as unreasonable. A faith full of re- volting difficulties is a logical necessity of the orthodox conscience. It prefers such a faith to one from which all rational contradiction has been studiously eliminated. For, having no strictly hu- man conception of God, having only the personal conception which allows Him to be (at least in all practical regards) a supremely wilful arbitrary and disorderly being, intent upon forcing all things into his allegiance and crushing what cannot be so forced, the orthodox worshipper can of course conceive no homage half so propitiatory toward this terrible power, can contrive no flattery half so subtle, as that which lies in pain and anguish I 170 WHY CREATION INVOLVES of body and mind voluntarily incurred for its sake. Regarded from any such point of view, creation incontinently tumbles into a rational absurdity or contradiction, driving us to infidelity and atheism as to a plain intellectual obligation, as to the only bed capable of refreshing the weary harassed soul. For, as Swedenborg declares, so long as we regard creation as a mere physical event, or as a pheno- menon of space and time, we fail to discern it altogether : and what we altogether fail to discern by the understanding, we certainly cannot admit to be true. The truth is indeed exactly opposite. Creation is never a mere physical performance on the part of God, or an event in time and space, else hounds and hares, cats and rats, spiders and flies were as authentic creatures of God as man himself. On the contrary, it is a purely spiritual process, falling wholly within the sphere of con- sciousness, that is within the realm of affection and thought ; or what is the same thing, depending for its truth upon the evolution of the human form, which is the sole spiritual form known to the universe. It is not possible for God to create, or give being to, hounds and hares, cats and rats, spiders and flies, because these things are utterly devoid of spiritual consciousness. They are strictly animal forms, in which the feminine or individual element is completely controlled by the masculine or universal one; and God cannot possibly dwell A DIVINE INCARNATION 171 in^ or give being to, forms so remote from His own image, so incapable of free or spontaneous action. To suppose Him inhabiting such forms would be, analogically, to deny His strict objectivity to the universal consciousness, and affirm in lieu thereof His strict subjectivity : would be, in plain English, equivalent to denying that all things were subject to God, by making God subject to all things. He creates only man, who is above all things a spi- ritual form, a form of spontaneity or freedom exactly proportionate as we have seen to the Divine form, because in him the individual or feminine element is internal and superior, while the uni- versal or masculine one is external and inferior. Only in such a form may God '^ dwell," to use Swedenborg^s phrase, " as in Himself." He truly vivifies only the virgin selfhood, the selfhood which has been released from the bondage of the finite, or from all physical and social compression, and obeys the sole voice of attraction, the inspiration of what we call ideas, meaning thereby infinite or supersensuous good. When my individuality tran- scends its wonted physical and moral anchorage, when it soars away from the servile earth of neces- sity and duty into the clear majestic heavens of spontaneity or freedom, it then obeys its essential spirituality, it then becomes feelingly immortal, I then feel the interior and inseparable Divinity of my source, and for the first time taste the rap- ture of deathless conjunction with infinite goodness, i2 172 WHY CREA.TION INVOLVES truth and power. What does the hare know of this experience ? or the cat, or the spider ? Simply nothing: because they are all alike spiritually incompetent, being all alike void of spiritual con- sciousness, all alike incapable of transcending the natural plane, and allying themselves with infini- tude. I am capable as man of postponing appear- ances to realities, or of preferring an infinite good to a finite one. I am capable of hating father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, lover and friend, home and country, in pursuit of an interior ideal object, or whenever these base actualities claim to separate me from that infinite Divine reality which is the inmost life of my life, the inextinguishable bliss of all my being. But the hound will never know a superior inspiration to that which his nature devolves upon him, as it devolved equally upon all his forefathers ; nor the spider ever conceive any bliss comparable with that of fly-catching, which has descended to it from a lineage so bloodstained and immemorial, as to make your ruddiest English pedigrees look pale and cheap and modern in the comparison.* * No English nobleman can possibly be as thoroughbred as the rat which burrows in his own ancestral walls ; because, let him do what he will traditionally to paralyze the human or spiritual force in him, his bare natural form perpetually prevents his lapsing into animality, by itself allying him with God, so forbid- ding him to remain the mere child of his father. The nobleman of to-day, whatever be his private vices, is vastly nearer the hu- man type than the nobleman of five centuries ago, simply because A DIVINE INCARNATION 173 So far then from looking at creation as a Divine improvisation, as at best a mere initiatory incident of history, we are bound to turn the tables and look upon history itself as a mere initiatory incident of creation. If you posit creation as a physical event, as an event of time and space ; if you reduce it in short to the dimensions of nature ; it is still most incomplete, and all our past history with its lively disputes of Atheist and Deist, of believer and sceptic, is but the flagrant witness of this incompleteness. Who can imagine scepticism ex- isting in the presence of a really Divine creation ? In view of a creature visibly vivified by infinite Love, who can conceive of belief as driven to suspend itself upon a laborious balance of proba- bilities ? Our historic experience in fact is nothing his very nature itself is progressive, while the animal nature is not. For man's natural form being itself spiritual, is incessantly created, vivified, quickened, inhabited by the Divine, and hence is essen- tially progressive. On the other hand the rat of to-day exhibits not a whit of natural advance upon his antediluvian progenitor, nor ever will, simply because he is a rat, and therefore divinely uninhabited or uncreated and consequently unprogressive. Spi- ritually or interiorly viewed, the whole pretension of an hereditary aristocracy is to auimalize the human soul, or dissociate man from his divine original, by making him a creature of bloods: than which there can be no profounder blasphemy. This is the secret of those apparently dying throes with which all Christendom is now politi- cally agape and aghast. We are at a crisis in the life of humanity, one of those periods in which man is providentially summoned to shed his old skin, and put on a new one, more pliant to the behests of his inward and essential freedom. 174 WHY CREATION INVOLVES but our gradual approximation to human conscious- nesSj and to the consequent consciousness of our- selves as Divinely created. It marks nothing but the endless interval which separates the highest animal form from the lowest human one. We have indeed no business to look upon human history as an accident, as a something supervening upon our creation, as a direction impressed upon us by some power extraneous to our nature. On the contrary it is a most strict incident of our creation, being nothing more nor less than the ceaseless eflPort of our essential Divinity to give itself ade- quate formal utterance or embodiment. God is essential man, and human history is but the gra- dual adaptation of this superb spiritual truth to the natural imagination of the race. All its sacredest incidents accordingly, far from denoting any out- side interference with our nature, are the strict outgrowth and efflorescense of august interior powers. Thus what we call a Divine revelation, what we call religion, or the Church, is never an arbitrary external imposition upon the human mind, but on the contrary is always a normal though fruitless effort of our interior Divinity worthily to assert itself in the plane of the senses, or to attain to scientific recognition. It is in every case the Divine or spontaneous life of man seeking to secure itself a representative or figurative pro- jection, so long as it is denied a living or conscious one. In short, history, strictly speaking, is our A DIVINE INCARNATION 175 process of formation. It is the untiring effort which the creative Love makes to bring us up to the human form, to develope in us spontaneous life, to endow us with a selfhood adequate to image its own perfection, and therefore adequate to its own indwelling : and all its successive stages mark only so many successful crises of that effort. Let us then boldly reverse our point of view. Let us cease to regard creation as an historical incident, as an event in time and space, by learn- ing to regard history itself, or all the events of time and space, as mere incidents of creation. History, I repeat, means nothing else than the evolution of that distinctive human form which belongs to us as veritable creatures of God, as beings vivified by a really infinite breath, by a really perfect power. It is the gradual vindication of a Divine natural humanity. It is in a word our needful natural formation in the Divine image. The fundamental import of Christianity, the funda- mental import of all authentic Divine revelation, is, that we need to undergo a natural formation in the Divine image in order to our spiritual crea- tion; that our spiritual or individual creation by God really exacts for its own permanent basis our natural regeneration. The religious idea, separated from the caricatures of superstition, implies, that it is incumbent upon the Divine bounty to give us natural selfhood quite as much as spiritual selfhood ; that unless we first bear a common or associated 176 WHY CREATION INVOLVES likeness to the Divine, we shall be destitute of a private or individual likeness. The ground of this exaction lies no doubt in the great law so often cited already, that God creates only subjective or spiritual existence : but you will not be prepared to do justice to this law, or accurately to compre- hend its bearings, so long as you cherish vague and obscure conceptions of what is meant by creating. Let us manfully free ourselves of the stifling traditional nonsense on this subject, and then we shall perfectly understand why we require to be naturally as well as spiritually fashioned in the Divine image, or what is the same thing, why a Divinely-given natural form is an indispensable preliminary basis to our Divinely-given spiritual being. And, understanding this, we shall have an infallible clue to the religious history of the race, which is the veritable history of the human mind, and be able clearly to conceive why that history intimately involves the doctrine of a Divine revela- tion or incarnation. Let me beg of you then distinctly to remember that I use the word create with strict scientific accuracy, as always meaning giving being. To create a thing means to give it inward or substan- tial being ; he who creates a thing himself consti- tutes the substance of that thing: so that the relation between Creator and creature is invariably the relation of object and subject, of internal and external. Creating or giving being is an exactly A DIVINE INCARNATION 177 inverse process to that of making or giving form. When I say that God creates me, I suppose myself already formed or existing; I take my existence for granted, or as inseparalily implied in my pro- position. Existence is an absolute and indisputable fact, and unless we had this preliminary basis of sensible experience, we should be utterly void of supersensuous experience of every sort, whether belief, or hope, or aspiration. Accordingly in alleging my creation by God I do not refer to any mere fact of existence, to any sensible operation of God, but wholly to a spiritual and invisible opera- tion; one which utterly transcends the realm of time and space, because it falls altogether within that of affection and thought. In other words, in alleging my creation, I do not project myself back in imagination to some period more or less remote, when an exertion of voluntary energy on God's part resulted in my physical genesis or formation — resulted in giving me existence. Far from it. I take my physical formation or existence pro confesso, as an indispensable platform of the creation which I allege. For I say that God creates me, and obviously by me I mean my human form, my phenomenal existence, my conscious per- sonality. It would be absurd of course to allege any abstract creative energy on God's part, to say for example that He creates what has no existence, or what is unconscious and invisible : because, as we have already seen, that would be only saying i3 178 WHY CREATION INVOLVES in a round about way that He creates nothing, or that He is no creator. We can never conceive of , creation except as proceeding on the basis of some existing selfhood, as involving some subsidiary- sphere of formation, as predicable in short of certain conscious or visible existences. By saying that they are created existences, we do not mean to allege any physical fact whatever concerning them, but on the contrary a purely metaphysical fact, which is, that their being is not identical with their visible form or existence, or, what is the same thing, that they as subjects involve a far profounder objectivity than that of nature. And by saying that God creates them, we mean that He who is infinite Love and wisdom constitutes their spiritual and invisible being : that He stands to them in the eternal relation of inward genetic source or object, and they to Him in the eternal relation of outward derivative stream or subject. You may doubtless ejaculate a ready Amen to all this, by way of inducing me to resume my initial proposition, which is : that God creates only spiri- tual forms, gives being only to subjective existence : but I feel so cordially disposed to disabuse your excellent understanding of certain sensuous falla- cies and prejudices engendered by the Old Theo- logy, that I cannot forbear to solicit your indul- gent attention a few moments longer. I want you perfectly to comprehend both what is included in, and what is excluded from, the rational or scien- tific conception of creation. A DIVINE INCARNATION 179 Let me distinctly say then, that the technical infidel is completely justified in denying creation, so long as you represent it as implying an outward exertion of Divine power, as meaning a physical operation of God. The letter of revelation no doubt represents creation in this guise, that is, as a simple projection in time and space, as a strictly impromptu proceeding on God's part, involving nothing more than a new determination of His will, and the consequent utterance of an authori- tative fiat. But all this is a purely symbolic or pictorial statement of the truth, without the slightest value as history. If indeed you view it as literal history, it becomes at once downright puerility and nonsense, since it represents God as creating mere natural existence, or as being simply what is termed " the author of nature,^' which is totally to degrade His name, and render it the inevitable butt of the flimsiest sentimental devo- tion, the tattered target of the mildest Unitarian archery. Natural existence is absolute existence, being that in which substance and form are identi- cal. Nature means the identity of substance and form, of being and seeming. The stone for ex- ample, the tree, the horse, is exactly what it seems to your eye. Its being is a pure seeming, is wholly phenomenal, as the philosophers say. There is no spiritual stone, nor horse, nor tree, lying back of and animating the apparent one. The sensible form before you perfectly embodies its own being 180 WHY CREATION INVOLVES or substance, so that every stone, tree, and horse of the specific family in question will repeat the same monotonous story over again till time and space shall be no more. You canH imagine a stone or tree, or horse, out of relation to time and space, that is as having any purely subjective or spiritual existence by virtue of its inward commerce with infinite goodness and truth. You can only con- ceive of them as natural existences, thus as essen- tially finite and perishable. Observe then that natural existence is purely phenomenal existence, being destitute of internal or individual being and hence out of all immediate relation to God. Yet this is the prevalent conception of creation, the only conception tolerated by the carnal or super- stitious mind. And what is very melancholy, the clergy as a body do their best to confirm and aggravate our natural hallucinations on this and every subject. They are wont, as a general thing, to attribute to God the dreariest and most tedious existence imaginable, by diffusing His infinitude over the wilderness of space, and trickling His eternity through the endless succession of minutes which make up time; and then they represent Him as suddenly resolving to variegate this barren infinitude — to diversify this monotonous eternity — by summoning into life certain absolute or phy- sical forms, which shall henceforth be and exist by virtue of that momentary fiat. In short the eccle- siastical intellect all the world over has the invete- A DIVINE INCARNATION 181 rate habit of confounding being with form, creating with making, reality with semblance. It supposes that every thing really is which appears to be : or that things have being by virtue of their form. If for instance you should consult the Pope of Rome or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they would never betray the slightest distrust of their official existence being a Divine reality. They have not the least suspicion that the higher powers are blessedly ignorant of all the conventional dignities of the earth; they have never imagined that all those distinctions, official and personal, which make up so often our best knowledge, and give many an empty head among us the reputation of wisdom, are sheer vacancy to the celestial mind, raying out darkness, not light ; and if you should hint your own suspicion of the truth, they would cordially unite in proclaiming you an infidel, and bid you begone as a tiresome revolutionary bore.* * I feel no positive admiration for the revolutionary forces which are now enthroned in France, and only waiting to be efFectually enthroned over the rest of the European continent ; because I see that they are mere Providential tools employed to work out far diviner ends than they themselves dream of. But when one reflects upon the crowned imbecilities which actually rule over men, sacerdotally and secularly : when one considers the fearful distance which separates the conventionally upper classes from the lower j their utter aloofness from the common loves, the common wants, the common hopes of man ; their luxurious self- indulgence ; their unrighteous social privileges, and the inevitable pride and arrogance engendered by such privileges; their stolid opposition to popular elevation ; their hardened indifference to the 182 WHY CREATION INVOLVES But there is no need of troubling Pope or Archbishop with these inquiries, especially as they have already trouble enough on their hands, I dare say. Suppose the question put to you, John Doe, and to me, Richard Roe: "if the visible selfhood we are each of us born to, be indeed the vital reality which it seems to us to be :" we should unhesitatingly answer, Yes. You have an un- disturbed conviction that you are personally known to God, that your luxuriant locks, your dark eyes, your tint embrowned by sun and air, are perfectly familiar to the Divine eye. And I for my part have never questioned that the Divine mind was as cognizant of my visible limitations (short sta- ture, obese figure, fair complexion, flaxen wig, and so forth) as I myself am. Yet this is a sheer mistake. Swedenborg, who had a great eye for realities as discriminated from mere appearances, voice of God's great minister, science; their flippant contempt of every force but brute force, and their inveterate estimate of humanity as an essentially brute existence, never to be regulated from within, or Divinely, but only from without, or diabolically: then Louis Napoleon, Mazzini, and all the rest, become irresisti- bly precious and sweet to my heart, even as terriers and weasels are precious to the agriculturist long vexed by predatory and fugacious vermin, even as the advent of death's angel is sweet to the soul long imprisoned in a diseased and suffering body. In fact one respects the Revolution very much as one respects Death. It is not in itself a Divine presence any more than the rotten and odious regime which it has displaced ; but it constitutes the only door which our double-dyed stupidity and unbelief will ever leave open to the entrance of the Divine kingdom on earth. K' "^^'SITYl) A DIVINE INCARNATION 183 could never find a vestige "of the old familiar faces" beyond the grave. The phenomenal self- hood was fatally transfixed and dissipated by the first contact of trans-sepulchral light. He knew many persons of a very conspicuous conventional make, heroes and saints, statesmen and clergymen, abounding in learning and piety ; but when he saw them illumined by celestial light, he frequently found them full of rapacity cruelty and excess of all sorts, and degraded to the most menial positions. And so, on the other hand, he not unfrequently found persons, who on earth and to their own consciousness were destitute of every claim to sanc- tity, who lived in affluence and luxury, who fre- quented theatres, who loved jocose conversation, who had in short no properly ascetic fibre in their composition — mere unbaptized Turks and Pagans very often in fact — enjoying an intimate commerce with the angels, and heartily allied with all Divine perfection. All this (and very much more) is true, I say, simply because "the phenomenal is never the real, because what appears never is. The sensible world is purely formal, not essential : it is, and ever will be, the realm of shadow, not of substance; of seeming, not of being. It is not the theatre of the Divine creation, but of the Divine formation exclusively, being, to use Swedenborg^s phrase, a sphere of eff'ects not of ends. In short. Nature is a purely experimental world, and experience is 184 WHY CREATION INVOLVES a first-rate mother, but a most incompetent father. Experience incarnates our wisdom, or gives it outward body : it does not vitalize it or give it inward and rational soul as well. In all procrea- tive action the father is generative, the mother simply prolific or productive : the former gives life or soul, the latter existence or body : the one is creative, the other formative. And this diversity of function is but an image of the universal spi- ritual truth, that experience (or our natural me- mory) serves only as a ground or matrix, only as a warm mother-earth, in which to inseminate cer- tain formal traditions, which are the mere husks of truth, inherited from the past, while God alone (or Infinite Love within the soul) constitutes the stainless overarching heavens by whose genial beams these rude and lifeless husks become quick- ened into every form of living wisdom. We know that every seed must die in order to bring forth fruit. All food must be dissolved before it can be assimilated, before it can make flesh. Now these natural facts are but the shadows of spiritual things. All the literal dogmas we receive into the me- mory, which is the mental stomach, are of no more promise in a spiritual point of view, than so many stones taken into the natural stomach would be in a hygienic point of view. They give us hope of spiritual increase only in so far as they undergo intellectual levigation or maceration, only in so far as they become converted into that rich A DIVINE INCARNATION 185 rational chyme and chyle whose white depths nourish and embosom the immortal pillars of the soul."^ Understand then that Nature is the realm, not of wisdom, but of that experience which is the indispensable soil of wisdom. It is the sphere not of soul, but of that needful preliminary bodily organization without which the soul itself would never come to consciousness. God cannot directly create natural things therefore, because these things, being fixed or absolute, forbid that interior expansion, that perfect individual freedom, which is the inseparable heritage of His creatures, and which alone conjoins them with Him. The horse, * This is what makes mere professional religionists so tiresome. For having not merely the ordinary human but also a distinctly private or personal end in the maintenance of our traditional creeds, they sedulously guard them from all intellectual fecunda- tion, from all rational trituration and fermentation^ and hence perpetually suggest to the imagination the painful similitude of people in a colic. They present the same contrast to our ordinary unconscious and placid acquaintance, that the shop of a seedsman and florist presents to a blooming and beautiful garden. In the professional religionist, the memory is sure to grow plethoric at the expense of the reason, just as we often see a man cultivating a portentous abdomen to the serious neglect and discredit of his brain : and intercourse is never at its just human pitch, until it is above all things rational. When our intercourse is one of cant, being vitalized only by the memory ; when, in other words, my friend and I meet only to parade and compare our mutual wealth in current orthodox coin, the image we project upon the spiritual sense is that of two foolish persons diligently rubbing theur sto- machs together, or belching in each other's face, in order to inflame a reciprocal good understanding. 186 WHY CREATION INVOLVES the lily, and the diamond, are beautiful natural existences, but how impossible to fancy them in any relation to God, simply because though they have each a marked natural individuality, they are yet all alike destitute of spiritual or real indivi- duality : in other words, because, though they are all subjects of a beautiful existence, they are none of them subjects of life. This explanation ended, I am now ready to resume my initial proposition, which was, that God creates only subjective or spiritual forms. This follows, almost obviously, from the definition of creating; for as creating always means, when properly used, the giving being to things, so con- sequently God can only create or give being to things which are in themselves destitute of being, having at best but a subjective semblance or ap- pearance thereof. He cannot possibly give being to what already has being, since this would be contradictory, but only to what appears, only to what seems to be, that is, to subjective or spiritual existences. I repeat, then, that by the strict ne- cessity of the case, God creates only subjective spiritual forms, in which He resides as in Himself, so and not otherwise communicating life. Now the condition of subjective or spiritual ex- istence is, that it be vitalized from within, or what is the same thing, that the object it obeys, the ideal it serves, reside strictly within the limits of its own nature. Natural existence is the opposite A DIVINE INCARNATION 187 of this. What the philosophers term " objective " existence^ meaning by that word whatsoever sen- sibly exists, as mineral, vegetable, and animal, is always vitalized from without, that is to say, its objective element is strictly exterior to its sub- jective one. The mineral exists for the vegetable, the vegetable for the animal, and the animal for man. In short, natural existence is servile exist- ence, finding its proper object or ideal out of the bounds of its own nature. Of course this pecu- liarity puts the merely natural form of life out of all immediate contiguity to the Divine, by leaving it destitute of internality, of private or spiritual individuality. The horse, for example, who obeys an ideal essentially aloof from his own nature, whose deity in a word is man, is by that fact de- nuded of spiritual consciousness, of what we call selfhood or character, and hence remains essen- tially unprogressive or incommensurate with God. He has abundance of physical life, of selfhood or character derived from his natural progenitors, but he has no Divinely -vivified individuality athirst for the fountains of a better life. No sweet radiant Eve grows up in the unconscious depths of his bosom, becoming evermore bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, and leading him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that through the disease and death thus revealed he may rise to the experience of immortal peace and joy. He knows, no doubt, the natural love of the sex, or 188 WHY CREATION INVOLVES recognizes the partner his nature provides him : but he has no glimpse of the ravishing amplitude of bliss which is spiritually locked up in the con- jugal symbol, and which makes the wife as con- tradistinguished from the woman, an exquisite shadow of all that is most intimate, ennobling, and enduring in the ineffable commerce of the Divine and human natures. This experience, I repeat, is denied the animal, because the animal form is vitalized from without, because its objec- tive element is strictly exterior to its subjective element, or in other words, because the ideal it promotes, the object it serves, the deity it obeys, is human and not animal, that is to say, does not fall within the grasp of its own nature. But the exact reverse obtains with regard to man. The human form is vitalized from within exclusively. The objective element in all human activity will be seen on a fair analysis to lie strictly within the subjective one. The ideal which I pro- pose to myself as man, the object I seek to pro- mote in every form of action, in short, the Deity I worship, is always of an intensely human quality, invariably puts on the lineaments of ray own nature, and hence my life of necessity becomes evermore beautiful and free, abhorring nothing so much as servility. In a word, man's existence is purely subjective or spiritual, compelling even the infinite Divine perfection into his own natural dimensions before it can win his honest and hearty A DIVINE INCARNATION 189 acknowledgment. What is the inmost meaning and confession of all evil but this ? To the inner or instructed sense evil is only the running away of the fish with the line which binds him to his captor, and is but a surer argument of the skill which is bound eventually to bring him to land. Lying, fraud, adultery, murder, covetousness, are only so many temporary diffractions of the pure and stedfast Divine ray operated by our intellectual opacity and indocility ; are only so many incessant and stupid crucifixions, wrought by our infatuated carnality and self-conceit upon that Divine and long-suffering Love which underlies and animates our nature. The horse is destitute of morality because, being a purely outward or natural exist- ence, he must for ever remain incapacitated for that spiritual or subjective freedom of which mo- rality is but the shadow. Morality implies a rela- tion of independence, in so far forth as it is pre- dicable, on the part of the subject towards his nature. But the horse is the abject slave of his nature. Every existence indeed below the human exhibits the complete identity of being and seem- ing, of substance and form, of soul and body. You, on the contrary, as man heartily repugn such identity. You feel so sure of nothing as that your being will always transcend your richest ex- perience of it, or what is the same thing, that your amplest actual must ever fall hopelessly short of your feeblest possible. The real horse is always 190 WHY CREATION INVOLVES the visible horse, and no lily has being but that which actually blows in the garden, and fills the worshipping air with its dazzling sheen. But the opulence of man is such, the opulence of God^s true creature, that what is visible of him always confesses itself nothing, however glorious, while what is relatively invisible claims to be the only reality. Thus the visible man is never the real one. The man that veritably is never shews him- self except by proxy. The true friend must ever despair of disclosing the passionate depths of his friendship, and the genuine lover strives always in vain to interpret himself worthily to his mistress' sense. Though he heap Pelion upon Ossa in the fond effort to storm the flaming heavens of his love, and compress them into appreciable measures, they for ever mock his aching embrace, for ever falling back into the impalpable abysses of the infinite. Such, I say, is the normal state of man. This is his state, when, being emancipated from physical and social thraldom, he stands erect in true human proportions. He is then a purely spiritual or subjective form, made conscious of himself no doubt by the background or basis of his physical and social organization, but utterly incapable of identifying himself with that organi- zation. He instinctively feels himself to be supe- rior to his circumstances, to be dearer to the heart of God than all that calls itself nature and society put together, and in the robust confidence of that A DIVINE INCARNATION 191 intimacy seeks evermore to bring both nature and society into his own unlimited subjection. And manifestly all this is true of our human instinct and experience,, only because the human form alone is divinely vivified, only because God does literally create us or give us inward being, while He does not do so to cabbages and horses. He gives them outward being, which is natural exist- ence, and which leaves them destitute of all private individuality, of all spiritual lift above the dead level of sense. But He gives us inward being, which is spiritual existence, and which fills us with a private individuality so pronounced and expansive as eventually to precipitate Nature, much as we drop our garments from about us at night, or rather to transmute her from an all- enveloping and absorbing egg into the very texture and substance of the new consciousness, into the very pith and marrow of the new and diviner manhood. Of course then the Divine creation rightly view- ed, stamps Nature with a deeper significance than she herself is at all aware of. While to her own consciousness she seems absolute and final, she is nevertheless but the seminary or seed-place of the soul, the mere husk and tally, so to speak, of those august interior forces which are for ever shaping the spiritual universe (or the mind of man) into harmony with all Divine perfection. Nature is in short but the perishable body of the imperishable 192 WHY CREATION INVOLVES mind of the race, and we fail to see her in this intrinsically subordinate plight, only because we habitually estimate her by the light which she herself supplies, or what is the same thing, because our reason, in place of being served by sense, is actually controlled by it. Revelation itself is bound of course to conform its utterances to this natural necessity; is bound to respect the limits of the sensuous understanding in man, under penalty of forfeiting its true character and becoming degraded into mere information. That is to say, the Divine and eternal truth can never reveal itself to sense except in a symbolic manner, because if it should attempt to assert itself as a fixed or absolute quan- tity, the human mind would have no chance to grow, being thus authoritatively robbed of its freedom. In other words, the letter of a Divine revelation avouches its authenticity only in so far as it embodies spiritual or universal truth. The general vague impression on this subject no doubt is very different. It is popularly conceived that revelation is not a symbolic unveiling of truth, addressed only to the spiritual understanding of man, but a literal unveiling of it, addressed to his senses. It is sensuously supposed to be a direct and unaccommodated communication on the part of the creator to the creature, leaving the latter no option but to obey. Thus all the gospel facts, so far from being viewed as the normal natural out- growth and expression of certain Divine operations A DIVINE IXCARNATION 193 within the universal soul of man, are supposed to have a purely absolute genesis which discharges them of all strictly human or scientific validity. But this is the mere dotage and delirium of sense. The eternal splendour of the Christian facts lies on the contrary. just here, that what seems personal and limitary about them is precisely what adapts them to mask universal truth, or to symbolize the relations of all mankind to God. They have in truth nothing arbitrary about them, but are one with the highest reason, being the outgrowth not of private causes but of universal ones, of causes which are as wide as the universe of being. I hold (perhaps more strenuously than you can at present imagine) that Christ was conceived of the holy Ghost, that he was born of a virgin, that he lived a life of helpless humiliation and infamy in the eyes of the most reputable persons of his age and nation, while at the same time he became inwardly united with the Divine spirit to such a degree as at length to grow exanimate on his finite or maternal side, and find his literal flesh and blood becoming vivified by the infinite Love. But then I cannot conceive of these things being literally true save on one condition, which is, that nature be not the absolute and independent existence she seem«; that she be in fact the mere shadow or image of profounder realities, projected upon the field of the sensuous understanding. For if nature be a direct creation of God, if she be an existence fixed by 194 WHY CREATION INVOLVES the actual creative fiaty then the pretensions of the Christian revelation are to the last degree absurd : because the Divine creation once actually posited, must ever after prove incapable of amendment, or find itself beyond the need of any officious tinker- ing. This needs no argument. But if nature be nothing more than the common or ultimate bond and covering of the spiritual world, which is the universal mind of man, just as the skin is the common or ultimate bond and covering of all the diversified kingdoms of the body : why then of course we may regard all natural phenomena only as so many graduated effects from interior spiritual causes, precisely as we regard a blush upon the skin, or a sudden pallor, as an evidence of height- ened or depressed vital action. And so doubtless day and night, the succession of the seasons, birth and death, growth and decay, the subordination of mineral to vegetable, of vegetable to animal, and of all to man, are so many natural types, are so many ultimate symbols, of a vast and bene- ficent spiritual order which is inwardly shaping the universal soul of man, and which will eventu- ally bring about the perfect reciprocal fusion or unity of each with all and all with each. But how to divine this recondite knowledge ! Nature has as little consciousness of man, as the waters have of the sun and stars which irradiate their darkened and tumultuous bosom. Nature herself therefore is incapable of blabbing the secret with A DIVINE INCARNATION 195 which she is fraught^ or of proving a revelation of Divine mysteries to the soul, because she is utterly- unconscious and incredulous of Divinity. She has no more comprehension of the being she images, than the looking glass has of the human substance whose various phenomenality it reflects. She is a pure surface whose depth or soul is man. No doubt she will faithfully lend herself to the reflec- tion and illustration of his intimate worth, in so far as his own intelligence learns to demand that service of her. But she has no independent power of origination or suggestion. She feels no fore- warning of the lustrous use she fulfils, until his advancing self-knowledge imposes it on her. She has no clearly articulate speech which she does not catch up from his commanding accents. In short she knows herself truly only as the echo of his majestic personality, and shrinks from nothing so much as the pretension to lisp even a syllable of original Divine revelation. Revelation descends exclusively from the human consciousness, or from the soul of man to his senses, because man alone being the true creature of God is alone competent to reveal Him. In short the true theatre of reve- lation is not our mere natural or animal conscious- ness, but our historic or veritably human con- sciousness. It demands for its proper platform not merely that humble field of relations which man is under to his own body, and which consti- tutes what we call his existence, being all compre- k2 196 WHY CREATION INVOLVES hended in the fixed quantity denominated Nature : but also and above all that superb field of relations which he is under to his own soul, or to God, and which constitutes what we properly term his life, being all comprehended in that great unfixed quan- tity which we denominate History. Only one more letter, and I shall have done. Yours truly, A DIVINE INCARNATIOX 197 LETTER XX. Paris, Feb. Ist, 1857. My dear W., I DO not know how it strikes your intelligence, but it appears to me that I have to some extent indicated in my last Letter the true ground of the difficulty men have in rationally conceiving of the Divine Incarnation. Let us recaU for a few mo- ments what has gone before, in order that we may the more clearly take the final step. We have seen that Christianity abolishes the Pagan conception of Deity, which represents God as an essentially arbitrary, insane, or inhuman, force, — capable at will of any amount of deviltry and destruction, — by revealing Him henceforth as a glorified natural man, as a rightful and perma- nent denizen of human nature. In other words, the service which Christ rendered humanity — a service to which there has been, and, in the nature of things, can be, nothing similar or second — consists in this : that He furnished by His life of unparalleled self-denial a perfect natural embodi- 198 WHY CREATION INVOLVES ment to the Divine Love : that He shut up the infinite and hitherto inconceivable Divine within the dimensions of the humblest of human bosoms ; constraining it thenceforth to know no other ac- tivity but that which is supplied by the intelligible forms of human nature, that is to say, compelling it to run henceforth eternally in the familiar mould of our natural passions and appetites. Let there be no obscurity upon my meaning. I say that what Jesus Christ did to entitle Him to our eter- nal and spontaneous homage, was that He, by His unflinching denial, even unto death, of the popular religion of His nation (a religion which, as to its fondy was fed by every infernal influence, and as to its form, by every celestial one), He, for the first time brought the infinite creative love into perfect harmony with the individual bosom of man — into complete and unobstructed rapport with the finite human form — so that Deity might once for all experimentally know how it felt to be husband and father, lover and friend, ruler and teacher, patriot and citizen, under that base natural inspiration merely ; and so knowing, for ever vivify and re- deem those finite ties, by the communication of His own infinite substance. I, for example, am a husband and father, am a lover and friend, am a patriot and citizen, and in all these characters ex- hibit a much less arbitrary aspect than I should have done had I lived in the centuries which pre- ceded Christ. Why? Simply because in those A DIVINE INCARNATION 199 centuries, as Swedenborg shews, the Divine access to man in nature took place by angelic mediation exclusively ; and this mediation, being perpetually obstructed and enfeebled by the antagonism of the hells, the consequence was, that every natural tie of man was practically fast becoming a channel of unmixed selfishness and tyranny. We have already seen that the angelic form is incompetent by itself to vindicate the infinitude of the creative power, because it owns no good more decisive than that which flows firom the incessant elimination of evil. The angel is an imperfect creature of God, is an incomplete style of man, because he involves a diabolic antipodes. In other words, the heavens are impure in God's sighty and He charges His angels with folly, because they are not spontane- ously good, but only voluntarily so ; that is to say, because they are good only by the denial of their nature, never by its concurrence. Accordingly the angel must always have proved a most inadequate point of contact between the infinite and finite. The Divine Love must have always felt itself hope- lessly straitened in its approximation to the human bosom, by the exigencies of a mediation which never contemplated the reconciliation or co-ordina- tion of self-love with brotherly love, but only its forcible extrusion and suppression. The whole problem of creation may be sum- marily formulated thus : the natural man (or man in a state of nature simply, without historic ex- 200 WHY CREATION INVOLVES perience) is a form of supreme self-love, and thus presents an exactly opposite aspect to the Divine Love which is incapable of selfish regards : of course then creation must remain an eternal impossibility unless some middle term can be projected capable of reconciling or fusing these inveterate opposites. Now, I say that the angel could not pretend to furnish this requisite middle term, 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 subjugating such lust to the inspirations of universal love, the requisite basis of union was at last found, and infinite Wisdom com- passed at length a direct and adequate access to the most finite of intelligences. In Christ unfal- teringly renouncing His own sacred writings, in so far as they were literal, personal, and Jewish, and accepting them only in their spiritual, universal, or humanitary scope : in His cheerfully submitting to life-long obloquy for this unprecedented manli- ness ; to the scorn envenomed by disappointment of all that was most decent, devout, and respectable in His nation ; to the daily derision of that large class in every community, who, not being devout themselves, yet hope to commend their sneaking souls to heaven^s favour by blindly doing the dirty A DIVINE INCARNATION 201 work of the devout, and hastening brutally to finish what these are sometimes fearful even to begin ; to the contempt of His own brethren and neighbours; to the constant misconception and unbelief of His own avowed, and forward, and foolish disciples ; finally, to death itself — a death from which no element of ferocious cruelty was absent, which, on the contrary, all hell found a truly religious joy in promoting : in this sublime and steadfast soul, I say, the marriage of the Divine and Human was at last perfectly consum- mated, so that thenceforth the infinite and eternal expansion of our nature became, not merely possi- ble, but most strictly inevitable. Accordingly, ever since that period, husband and father, lover and friend, patriot and citizen, priest and king, have been gradually assuming more human dimen- sions, 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 pa- tient and unswerving human love. Now what I shewed in my last Letter was, that we deny, or misapprehend this Christian revelation, only because we have the folly to regard space and time as substantial things, as veritably Divine k3 202 WHY CREATION INVOLVES ideas, and to look upon nature consequently rather as the primary than as the intensely ultimate and subordinate field of the Divine operation. Nature is in truth but the basement or culinary story of the Divine edifice; and when we make her pri- mary, or allow her to dominate the house, we of course degrade the drawing and bed-room floors, filling them with sounds and odours fatal to every cultivated sense. Theology and philosophy have done little hitherto but fill the world with this odious din and stench of cookery. Obstinately regarding nature as the final rather than the me- diate sphere of the Divine operation, as the real or substantial world instead of the purely formal and phenomenal one, they incessantly drown our rational intelligence in the mire of sense, whence we have now actually no more lively theologic tendency extant than Unitarianism, nor any more lively philosophic one than Pantheism ; from both of which the scientific intellect, heedful of its own sanity, is bound heartily to recoil, even if the alternative should be downright scepticism and atheism."^ The new theology and philosophy re- * Confiding in the fallacious dogmatism of sense (that old ser- pent whose speech is far too subtle and insinuating to be suspected prior to experience), our theologians and philosophers regard being and seeming, truth and fact, reason and experience, as identical, and hence vainly rummage the phenomenal world for an original glimpse of those lustrous Divine footsteps which fall wholly within the soul of man, and of which nature herself is at best but the distant re- verberation. Nature is but the echo of the soul, and images A DIVINE INCARNATION 203 verse the spell. They teach us that creation is primarily spiritual and only derivatively natural, thus that the science of nature is rightly compre- hended in the higher science of man. *'Yes/^ they say, ^^ cookery is a strict necessity of things, and claims its proper acknowledgment: but it should never be exalted into an end of life. Its sole end is to nourish and prepare the body for the uses of the soul. So also what we call spiritual regeneration is an actual necessity of things, but it is a necessity which belongs wholly to the na- tural plane of experience. The sotd, coerced by the appearances of things, demands it : instructed by realities, disavows it.^' As long as I am in- structed in spiritual things only by sense or appear- ances, I deem myself an absolute person in God's sight, and look upon all His dealings towards me nothing therefore of the Divine creation and providence which is not primarily impressed by the soul. Your delicious English landscape, for example, palpitating with its rich subserviency to every human need, reflects a far more evangelical lesson in these respects than the hideous jungles of Asia, or our own unsubdued forests and indolent savannas ; because the humanized English man has first taught it so to do. Abstract this comfortable Chris- tian English soul, who believes in nothing more soundly than a deity favourable to good cheer, prolific of everlasting cakes and ale, and your peaceful English landscape would have been by this time as ruthless and unchristian as that of Switzerland, which for the most part suggests no thoughts of Divinity but as of some huge, frowning, thunderous, overshadowing, overbearing power, eternally allied with pride and self-will, and essentially untouched by all those blissful human sympathies and charities whose inse- parable root is humility. 204 WHY CREA.TION INVOLVES as having a most special intention, which is an ab- solute conversion of me from evil to good. But the reality of the case is, that God never acts upon us individually, save by acting at the same time universally, and consequently that what I regard as a change of nature in me, is in reality a separa- tion of spiritual spheres taking place in the uni- verse of the human mind, by which its external principle (self-love, or hell) becomes precipitated, and its internal principle (which is brotherly-love, or heaven) elevated, that so the mind of man in nature may be at length effectually harmonized with all Divine perfection.* I feel in myself, for example, a great horror on account of some sin, real or imaginary, which I have committed ; I humble myself before God by whatsoever pe- nitential methods my traditional conscience pre- scribes, having no shadow of suspicion all the while that God is not literally feeling very angry with me, and even extremely dubious whether or not He will pardon me. Such are the crude and abject data of my natural experience. But here- upon come the theologian and philosopher, not to give me intellectual elevation out of this super- stitious lore, but actually to confirm all its teach- ing, telling me that my experience is an exact * Of course it is only when self-love claims the primacy of neighbourly love or charity, that it is contrary to Divine order. When it spontaneously defers to the latter, as it does in the scien- tific sentiment of human society or fellowship, nothing can be half so orderly and beneficent, and we cannot have too much of it. A DIVINE INCARNATION 205 measure of the real and eternal intercourse between God and the soul. They affirm that He is in truth very much offended with me, just as my still grovelling intelligence proclaims Him to be ; that I have in fact committed a grievous sin against Him, and that I only follow the obvious dictates of prudence in aiming to propitiate Him by every customary usage of self-abasement. Such is the help they give my reason, utterly immersing it in sense. It is as if my cook, in a moment of revo- lutionary frenzy, should transport his batterie de cuisine into my drawing-room, and insist upon henceforth preparing my dinner under my proper nose. For it is really most untrue that God has ever felt, or ever can feel, an emotion of personal approbation or personal disapprobation towards any human being. All this is the mere abject gossip of the kitchen, the mere idle bavardise of cooks and scullions theorizing in their dim sub- terranean way upon the great solar mystery of life. It is, I say, untrue, because the only conceivable basis of such an emotion to the creative mind would be the creature's independence, and this basis is utterly wanting, being swallowed up in his sheer and ceaseless dependence. Thus, in order that man really do anything either praiseworthy or blameworthy in the Divine sight — in order, in other words, that God Himself should charge us with any of the good or evil which we with ob- durate stupidity are for ever charging upon our- 206 WHY CREATIOxV INVOLVES selves — it would be necessary for Him first to for- get His creative relation to us, and begin to look upon us as essentially underived and independent existences; which is absurd. I perfectly admit that the truth, as reflected in fact, seems directly otherwise. It actually does, and must, seem to the sensuous understanding — the intelligence con- trolled by sense — that man is an absolute selfhood, that is to say, that his affections and thoughts, far from being an influx from spiritual association, originate in himself exclusively, and hence leave him properly chargeable with all the good and evil issuing from such afifections and thoughts. The senses confined to the seeming, cannot help bedevilling in this way our nascent scientific intel- lect. They recognize only what appears to them, having no glimpse, however faint, of internal realities ; and hence they cannot but teach to every one who seeks instruction at their hands, that the actual is the only real, that the spiritual sphere, if any such sphere exist, is only another natural, governed by the same laws, and reproducing the same phenomena. Thus they insinuate that our physical finiteness — our visible insularity in time and space — is a real and eternal truth. They teach me that I am in all real or spiritual respects pre- cisely what I am in natural or seeming ones, that is to say, an utterly disconnected being, regarded by God not as inseparably interwoven and united with my kind, but as distinctly disunited with all A DIVINE INCARNATION 207 other existence, and governed by Him on strictly private and special methods. Hence it falls out that the dull and sombre walls of our ecclesiastical Zion, and the less sombre but flippant courts of our received philosophy, enclose a far more organized hostility to spiritual Chris- tianity than you will find in conventionally dis- reputable quarters. The scientific mind, like Pi- late, "finds no evil'' in the new Divine spirit which is quickening the nations like life from the dead : on the contrary, it dimly feels that the new spirit is full of blessing for itself, and stands ready to ask of it, '^What is truth?" But the soi- disant "regenerate'' mind, we who think we see — we who are not, like the vulgar herd, " accursed, because they know not the law," but are in fact sanctified by such knowledge, and actually rule the world by its prestige — we feel our unrighteous sway menaced by this tender and loving spirit, and do, as the Jew did of old, everything we can to ensure its endless triumph, by stupidly trying to stifle and crush it. What the Jew did to Christ in the flesh, was only a type, inexpressibly faint, of what we Christians are daily doing to him in the spirit. The Jew had never any power to harm Jesus but by patronizing him. Had he done this^ had he espoused the Christian teaching and tem- per, Christ would have been bound indefinitely to remain the mere Jew He was born, and there is no saying accordingly how long Judaism might 208 WHY CREATION INVOLVlTS have perpetuated itself, no longer indeed as a hurtful, but now as a beneficent, yoke upon the nations, nor consequently how long the Gentile mind might have failed to attain to the scientific sentiment of human equality, which yet is the exclusive basis of the Divine creation. So now, the only hindrance which our existing authorities in Church and State could offer to the new ideas, would be to patronize them, to lend them the furtherance of their adoption : for then the com- mon mind of Christendom, which is very docile to good influences, would be so full of admiration and gratitude towards these old established and now undeniable stewards of God, that a new and worse idolatry, a new and more benumbing servi- tude of the human mind, would be sure to ensue, and a third advent of the Christ behoove to take place, in order to strike off the fetters forged by the preceding one. The new wine of Protes- tantism and Democracy — the spirit of an ever- advancing humanity — would seek in that case to confine itself evermore within the old established bottles of Church and State, within the purely symbolic dimensions of priest and king, and by dint of so seeking would be infallibly sure to turn vapid and lifeless, to tumble finally, in fact, into the condition of mere disreputable swipes, only fit to be poured out upon the ground, a scorn and avoidance to men and animals. This, in literal verity, is the fatal sign about A DIVINE INCARNATION 209 European Christendom, that it has inherited in Christianity a soul altogether disproportionate to its meagre and inexpansive body. Protestantism is the actual limit of the Church's elasticity, — one strain more, and it snaps into Mormonism or other downright deviltry, which reasonable people will some day be forced to sweep bodily from the earth : and the State can go no further than De- mocracy without going into visible extinction. In fact, all astute priests and politicians have per- ceived for years past that Protestantism and De- mocracy are not so much expansions of the old symbolic institutions of Church and State, as actual disorganizations of them. They mark the old age of those institutions, their decline into the vale of years, preparatory to their final exit from the historic scene. Hence that prevalent move- ment of unbelief and despair among our upper classes in Church and State, which christens itself Conservatism, and which consists in seeking refuge from the onward Providence that governs the world, by flinging oneself into the arms of the stolidest civil and ecclesiastical despotisms, or in calling upon the mountains and rocks to crush one, by way of shielding one's eyes from the entrance of unwelcome light. How utterly ab- surd then to suppose our existing Christendom formally competent to embody the Divine spirit in humanity ! This spirit seeks the infinite expan- sion of human nature, seeks to lift the beggar 210 WHY CREATION INVOLVES from the dunghill and to set him among princes, simply because he is man, simply because he is a living form or image of God, and hence capable of an immortal conjunction with God. God is blessedly indifferent to the interests of every priesthood and every government under the sun, because He stands in an infinitely nearer attitude to man than these priesthoods and governments can any way conceive of as possible. They have not the slightest conception of God as the Lord, or of a Divine natural humanity, but on the con- trary, maintain, under Christian names, the most inveterately Pagan conceptions of the Divine cha- racter. Take, for example, any reigning Pope or Emperor, and chase the Divine image through all the windings of his official heart down to its fundamental quality, and you will find it turn out some sheer personal will, some strenuous physical existence, reeling with the possession of mere wan- ton power, and odious from the exercise of every jealous revengeful and malignant disposition. It is high time that all the world confess themselves atheists with respect to this orthodox deity. It is high time that every disciple of Christ seize this obscene and skulking god of the nations by the beard with one hand, and with the other smite him between the eyes till he fall down and die. The famous M. Proudhon, who snaps his whip louder than any contemporary Frenchman, very much shocked his hypocritical generation a little A DIVINE INCARNATION 211 while since by crying haro upon this Gentile con- ception of God, or exclaiming against Deity thus viewed as the true curse of human existence. Proudhon's critics, who themselves are fond- of snapping their whips in the loudest possible way, seem to have been disheartened by the tremendous eclat of his performance, and are accordingly doing what they can ever since to diminish it, by repre- senting it as a mere insincerity on Proudhon^s part — as a mere annonce to the travelling public that here at last was a postillion capable of taking them the shortest possible route to kingdom-come, provided they would only commit themselves to his audacious guidance. I do not personally enjoy the pleasure of M. Proudhon^s acquaintance, but I cannot help feeling very serious misgivings as to the truth of this criticism. His judgment strikes me as on the whole a very Christian one. I sup- pose that Proudhon would be as much disconcerted to be called a Christian as those modest people of whom we read in the Lord^s similitude of the kingdom of heaven, as replying to his beaming smile of recognition for services rendered, " But when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee ; or thirsty, and gave thee drink ?^' Nevertheless I regard Proudhon as at bottom, if not a-top — in heart, if not in head — an excellent Christian. His intellect has doubtless been sophisticated to some extent by the dense and blinding obscurity which has traditionally settled down upon the moral problem ; 212 WHY CREATION INVOLVES but he is obviously a man of the manliest make in heart, and I do not see how any clear-sighted reader of the four gospels, which turn all subse- quent revolutionary literature into child's play, can feel justified in denouncing him. Of course I mean the unadulterate gospels, not that bleached and emasculate substitute which, under the name of " evangelical religion," does its weekly best to defame and deface God's image in our souls, through the length and breadth of established Church and State. Evangelical religion as it is called, quasi lucus a non lucendo, quasi mons a non movendo, is such a religion as is fitly piped by the east wind — a religion which cuts across the nerves of the soul like a knife, which chills all the best sympathies of the heart, and ends by freezing its followers stiff in the shallows of their own selfish- ness. It is of course not of this conventional gospel that I speak, but of the unperverted gospel of Christ, when I say that every intelligent reader will be slow to condemn Proudhon, because throughout his unskilful books he will yet not fail to discern an unmistakeable flavour of that an- cient and incomparable vintage. Clearly, if Chris- tianity makes any distinct pretension, it is to have utterly exhausted natural religion; and natural religion is the only thing with which the scientific intellect of man has any quarrel. Science revolts at the idea of there being any essential limitation of the human faculties, which nevertheless would A DIVINE INCARNATION 213 be inevitable if their \4tal source could be proved to lay outside of human nature, or inhered as natural religion affirms it to inhere, in a being generically distinct from humanity, and spatially separable from all its individual forms. Science utterly revolts from the conception of a physical or material Deity — a Deity cognizable to sense — and triumphantly careers through the universe of space, to chase from the human mind every ves- tige of so baleful and disheartening a conception. But it is solely to Christianity that science owes this emancipation. Christianity eternally explodes the naturalistic conception of Deity as a being essentially disproportionate to man, and therefore inaccessible to human intelligence, by identifying Him with conventionally the meanest and hum- blest of men, with a man who was so genuinely humble and insignificant as actually to feel no personality apart from the interests of universal truth and justice, who had not spirit enough to be angry at the grossest of personal insults, or to re- sent the cruellest of personal wrongs ; but, on the^ contrary, habitually and patiently endured degra- dations which any rustic English pedagogue at the present day would be parochially disowned for submitting to for a moment, and which would drive the most sonorous of your English bishops to doubt the Divine existence, if he were even so much as threatened with them. Yet He, adorable man of men, bore unflinchingly on, nor ever 214 WHY CREATION INVOLVES ceased to eat the bitter bread of humiliation, until He had made his despised and suflPering form the adequate and ample temple of God, and so for ever wedded the infinite Divine perfection to the most familiar motions and appetites of our or- dinary human nature. Jesus vindicated his pro- phetic designation as above all men ^' a man of sorrows j^ because in the historic position to which he found himself born, he was exposed on the one side to the unmeasured influx of the Divine Love, and on the other to the equally unmeasured influx of every loathsome and hellish lust of personal aggrandizement. The literal form of Christ's pre- tension was profoundly diabolic. View his personal pretension as literally true and just, as having an absolute basis, and you can imagine no more flagrant dishonour to the Divine name. To sup- pose that the universal Father of mankind 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 ambition. And yet this was that literal form of the Jewish hope to which Christ was born. The innocent babe opened his eyes upon mother and father, brother and sister, neighbour and friend, ruler and priest, stupidly agape at the marvels which heralded his birth, and no doubt as his A DIVINE INCARNATION 215 intelligence dawned he lent a naturally compla- cent 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 be- come an unmitigated devil. I find no trace of any man in history being subject to the tempta- tions 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 pro- found reverence for infinite goodness and truth drove him to renounce the religion of his fathers, simply because that religion contemplated as its issue his own supreme aggrandizement ; and whose profound love to man drove him to renounce every obligation of patriotism, simply because these ob- ligations were plainly coincident with the supremest and subtlest inspirations of his own self-love. No doubt many a man has renounced his traditional creed because it associated him with the obloquy and contempt of his nation, or stood in the way of his personal ambition ; and so no doubt many a man has abjured his country, because it dis- claimed 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 216 WHY CREATION INVOLVES 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 discredited his paternal gods simply because they were bent upon doing him unlimited honour ; and shrank from kindred and countrymen, only because they were intent upon rendering him unparalleled gratitude and bene- diction. What a mere obscenity every great name in history confesses itself beside this spotless Ju- dean youth, who in the thickest night of time, — pnhelped by priest or ruler, by friend or neigh- bour, 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 hungry rabble of harlots and outcasts who furnished His inglo- rious retinue, and still further drew upon Him the ferocious scorn of all that was devout, and honourable and powerful in His nation, — yet let in eternal daylight upon the soul, by steadfastly expanding in his private spirit to the dimensions of universal humanity, so bringing, for the first time in history, the finite human bosom into per- fect 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 con- ception of Deity to be in the comparison a mere A. DIVINE INCARNATION 217 odious stench in the nostrils, against which I here indite my exuberant and eternal protest. I shall always cherish the most hearty and cheerful atheism towards every deity hut him who has illustrated my own nature with such resplendent power, as to make me feel that man henceforth is the only name of honour, and that any God out of the strictest human proportions, any God with essentially disproportionate aims and ends to man, is an unmixed superfluity and nuisance. In short, I worship the Lord alone, the God-MAN, that peer- less and perfect soul whose unswerving innocence and sweetness gathered up the infinite forces of Deity as wheat is gathered up in a sheaf, and for ever linked them with the natural life of man, with every commonest lineament of human nature, so that we are not only authorized henceforth to view the human spirit as inwardly refined from all grossness, which is pride or selfishness, and in- stinct with universal love and humility, but also to regard the human body itself as the only visible shrine of God, as the destined temple of all lus- trous health and beauty, the native home of every chaste, and generous, and magnanimous afiection. I take it that every man of sense and feeling will infallibly join in this ennobling worship. I take it that all atheism and scepticism are inwardly fragrant with this devout incense, that to the lov- ing and knowing heart of God they have never been anything else than a negative but most sin- 218 WHY CREATION INVOLVES cere form of the vital worship I here avow. It is, indeed, obvious that Proudhon's manly revolt con- templates only that old Pagan conception of the Godhead which Christianity exhausts, but which nominally Christian priests and kings, for their own private unloving ends, still continue diligently to exploit. Against this lurid power — half-peda- gogue, half-policeman, but wholly imbecile in both aspects — I, too, raise my gleeful fist, I lift my scornful foot, I invoke the self-respect of my chil- dren, I arouse their generous indignation, I in- struct their nascent philanthropy ; because I know that he spiritually departed this life long centuries ago, and that it is only his grim unburied corpse which still poisons the popular air. But now, although I say all this ex animOy do not, I beseech you, regard me as echoing, in any measure, the tedious cant of orthodoxy. If I heartily detest anything it is our existing Christian Judaism (the exact antitype of what the four gospels describe to us in type), with its wrangling regiments of spiritual old-clothesmen diligently di- viding the empty garments of Truth among them- selves, and hawking the dislocated fragments about as if they were the immortal substance itself. As I have already said, the letter of Christianity con- stitutes only the seeming or phenomenal aspect of Divine Truth, the semblance which it puts on to a sensuous intelligence, an intelligence not inwardly enlightened. It gives us very much the same un- A DIVINE INCARNATION 219 worthy impression of the Divine Truth as a child would form of its father's tenderness who should see that tenderness only in negative exercise, that is, incessantly employed in restraining its natural evils, correcting its fallacious judgments, in short, educating and disciplining it into true human pro- portions out of its native wilfulness and conceit. In a word, the letter of truth is ipso facto bound to prove a purely negative and symbolic utterance of its substance or spirit. This obligation flows from the great law which makes the natural, in all cases, an inverse expression of the spiritual, or renders the body the bounded home and continent of the boundless soul. My inmost soul, or life, is the infinite God, is perfect goodness and wisdom : but manifestly, unless I had some natural limita- tions, some finite continent (so to speak) separat- ing me from you and every other body, I should never appropriate this soul, or life, should never be able to feel it and name it mCj my self, should be destitute, in a word, of conscious existence. But now this bodily or finite me, which seems the most incontestable of facts, is nevertheless the exact inversion and denial of the infinite truth. It is the imprisonment of the infinite love and wisdom in the purely specious shackles of space and time. The spiritual truth is, that there is but one life, God, and that He alone lives in us : but this would be death to feel, though it is life to believe it ; because if we sensibly felt, as well as rationally l2 220 WHY CREATION INVOLVES believed^ that God alone lived, it is obvious that we ourselves should become instantly converted into stocks and stones, into the breathless images of unbreathing men. His superb mercy, above all things, provides therefore that we shall never feel this truth to all eternity, that however we may reflectively think and believe in the premises, it shall yet always sensibly seem to us that life is disunited, is infinitely various, and that we are its absolute proprietors. In short, the Divine Provi- dence perpetually endows us with selfhood, per- petually ensures that we shall feel the finite me to be the most indisputable of realities. But now, if He left us there, mere creatures of sense : if He did not go on to educate us out of our purely physical consciousness by the inspirations of con- science, by developing in us the most passionate social relations, so linking us with parent and friend, lover and neighbour, fellow-countryman and fellow-man, till at last our existence became widened to the dimensions of universal humanity, we should never discern the spiritual truth of the case, but remain under the dominion of mere natural appearances, the victims of the silliest pride and self-complacency, to the end of the chapter. Now the letter of Revelation bears a precisely analogous relation to its spirit. It furnishes a purely negative index to its own substantial con- tents, because it is addressed to an unspiritual in- telligence, and hence is bound to mask itself in A DIVINE INCARNATION 221 such coarse features as shall be sure to conciliate, or at all events not revolt, that intelligence. But if we hereupon stupidly insist upon confounding letter and spirit, if we insist upon the former not as a purely representative or symbolic, but as a direct and adequate expression of the latter, we shall completely miss the true scope of all Divine revelation, and remain mere spiritual embryos and abortions to all eternity. Spiritual substance, as Swedenborg shews, has nothing in common with time, space, and person. The literal Christian facts in his view constitute neither more nor less than a revelation, within the sphere of sense, of a life in man which profoundly subtends his senses, but which yet could never come to consciousness in him save in the very same way that all super- sensuous ideas come to consciousness, that is, by means of some sensible revelation or imagery, serving as a mould to give them development. All mankind, for example, have the idea of God as the infinitude or perfection of character, of per- sonality. But we could never recognize character or personality in God or man without the mould which our moral experience supplies to that per- ception. My moral experience tells me that justice is good and injustice is evil, that he who injures his neighbour is an evil man, and he who refrains from- injuring him a good man. Now these moral judgments serve simply as a mould or body to our spiritual perceptions, and being as such mould or 222 WHY CREATION INVOLVES body the exact inversion of what is moulded or embodied in them, they have obviously no more right to control our spiritual perceptions than an egg has to control the chicken^ than the foundation of a house has to control the superstructure, than the kitchen has to control the drawing-room, than the stream has to control the fountain.* But they are, as I have said, an invaluable and indispensable basis and servant of those perceptions. My moral judgments serve, in fact, as a rude but genial mother-earth for the outgrowth of my spiritual in- * For example, if we should pronounce a man spiritually good simply because he was morally good, or spiritually evil simply because he was morally evil, we should be guilty of gross ab- surdity, because, in reality, no human being has the slightest un- derived moral power, and it is only underived power whose activity confers responsibility. I have no power to injure my neighbour which is not derived to me from hell, or evil association, nor any power to refrain from injuring him which is not derived to me from heaven, or good association ; and I am not spiritually charge- able, therefore, with either my moral good or evil, but only natu- rally chargeable with it. They are both alike a mere natural inheritance, the legacy of my past ancestry. No matter how dili- gently soever I may work this inheritance, I can do no more at best than associate myself with heaven or hell. I may have all the moral virtue that has ever inflamed human pride, and I shall not be one whit nearer the fountain of life. I may have all the moral infirmity that has ever quickened human despair, and I shall be no whit more remote from it. For that life surrounds human nature, as the waters surround the earth, bathing equally both its con- trasted poles ; and we might, with precisely the same propriety, deny to the ocean its measured tides, its alternate ebb and flow, as to the Divine life in humanity its perpetual sportive interchange and conjugation of brotherly love and self-love. A DIVINE INCARNATION telligence. Unless I first felt in myself a moral personality, constituted of the exact equilibrium of good and evil, or heaven and hell, I should lack the fundamental germ of that subsequent spiritual conception of myself, which presents the subjection of evil to good, and of both to the Divine. My true life is a spontaneous one, a life of taste or at- traction, a life of freedom, growing out of a com- plete reconciliation of self-love with brotherly love, the true man never seeking his own ends but by assiduously promoting those of universal man. But clearly I should never be able to grasp or even discern this perfect life, save by the contrast of a previous unreal or enslaved one. If I were not first delivered over by conscience to the experience of death in myself as finitely organized, as vivified by nature and custom, I could never have realized, nor even aspired to realize, that perfect life or righteousness which inheres in myself as Di^dnely organized, as vivified by infinite love and wisdom. Thus, as I say, my moral experience serves no higher end than to incarnate, or give body to, my spiritual life. In short, the moral man, good and evil, is but the inversion or shadow — is but the rude decaying germ or egg — is but the perishable natural body — of the imperishable spiritual man, who is Divinely or immaculately good, good with- out the slightest antagonism of evil. Now, I repeat, that the letter of Revelation ob- serves precisely this same servile relation towards 224 WHY CREATION INVOLVES its proper spiritual substance. The letter is but the perishable husk of the imperishable spirit. The literal dogma, for example, of Christ^s divinity, is wholly unintelligible in heaven^ because^ as Swedenborg shews, heavenly thought is never de- termined to person, but only to the things repre- sented by person. In short, the spiritual contents of the dogma alone are apprehended in heaven, and these are that human nature itself is Divinely vivified, is the adequate and ample abode of per- fect love and wisdom. The literal dogma is the needful e^g (so to speak), is the indispensable pre- liminary basis of our subsequent scientific acknow- ledgment of the exclusive Divinity of our natural origin. Had we not been taught, traditionally, to regard this most humble and abject partaker of our nature as Divine, as perfectly united with infinite power and goodness, spite of his total destitution of whatsoever men are wont to admire in character and manners, of everything that gets itself eulogized, for example, in our great flaunting and mendacious newspapers, our present scientific assurance that human nature itself is Divinely quickened, could never have even germinated. The Christian truth is the sole ground of the dif- ference between the scientific mind of the race and the unscientific mind, between the public con- science, for example, of Christendom and that of Mahommedanism. Take away the traditional Christian dogma from our annals, and the long A DIVINE INCARNATION 225 expansion it has lent to the human faculties, and science would still be groping in the sublimated mud of alchemy and astrology, or perhaps gravely discussing, along with the theologian and philo- sopher, the momentous question, whether or not God was identical with the contents of a certain sanctified bread-basket. Remember, then, that the literal dogma is in every case only a needful platform of the super- sensuous truth, bearing a directly inverse relation to its spirit, such as your image in a mirror bears to yourself, or the outside of a glove to its inside. Thus the Divine incarnation, spiritually viewed, is a universal truth, having no more validity to one man's experience than to another's. This tran- scendent truth was indeed completely revealed in the Christ, but you would not confound the ex- ternal revelation of a truth with its interior sub- stance, any more than you would confound a negative with its positive, body with soul, or your transient shadow in the looking-glass with your living self. In fact, you are inexorably forbidden to do so, as we have already seen, by the circum- stance that the letter of revelation, in virtue of the baseness of the intelligence to which it is addressed, has never any pretension to be worthy of its spiri- tual contents, except as the body is worthy of the soul, the shadow of its substance, the servant of his master, that is by negatively reflecting it. If the servant were a positive reflection of his lord, l3 226 WHY CREATION INVOLVES the shadow a positive reflection of its substance, the body a positive reflection of the soul, there would be no such thing as choosing between ser- vant and lord, between shadow and substance, between body and soul. In short, we should live in a highly ridiculous world, in which all the needs of the human understanding had been wan- tonly violated. Analogically, then, the letter of revelation, by virtue of the limited intelligence to which it is addressed, is bound to obscure and falsify, to some extent, its own spiritual contents, just as the squint eyes, the crooked back, or in- verted feet I have inherited from my past ancestry, obscure my spiritual form, my substantial con- tents, or as your image in a glass being addressed to your bodily, not your mental eye, falsifies your proper self-consciousness, turning what your men- tal eye pronounces your right-hand into your left, and so forth. It will not do, therefore, whatever the bare face of revelation declares, spiritually to assert a limitary incarnation of Deity, such an in- carnation as not only apparently but really restricts Him to specific times, places, and persons. Be- cause, if we do thus, we shall infallibly stifle the true scientific and spiritual conception which in- cessantly postulates His infinitude, that is. His complete exemption from these finite bonds. Let us fully accept then the literal Christian dogma, but only as the indispensable basis of that sovereign spiritual verity, which lifts the Divine A DIVINE INCARNATION 227 incarnation out of the realm of mere sensuous appearances — out of the limitations imposed by our natural stupidity — into a strictly universal truth, or one which is illustrated in every indi- vidual bosom of the race. The spiritual substance embodied in the literal Christian verity, is, that God vivifies man naturally no less than spiritually. It imports — no longer that this, that, and the other person becomes conjoined with God by his proper spiritual fermentation and ripening, but — that human nature itself, by its own distinctive process of fermentation and ripening denominated history, becomes henceforth eternally conjoined with the same Divine perfection. In fact, the Christian truth implies that all our private re- generative experiences have been only so many faint and feeble primituB of this grand public operation of God, only so many timid and star- veling rills of this affluent Divine fountain in the very bosom of the race itself. This is the exact meaning of history, a process of spiritual fermen- tation and refining within the public or associated consciousness of man, or what is the same thing, the regeneration of our very nature. It means the development of a selfhood in man adequate to image the creative infinitude, and therefore scien- tifically fit to avouch the Divine creation. It means the gradual coming to consciousness on the part of the race, of its intimate and eternal alli- ance with all divine power and beauty ; in short. 228 WHY CREATION INVOLVES the evolution of a Divine natural manhood. Thus, as every true biography vindicates its claim to be written, only by relating how some private person, from being the abject offspring of his parents, became by God^s inward nourishment a living soul or selfhood, capable of rising eternally away from his earthly nest, and forgetting on occasion every rudimental natural tie : so all veri- table history busies itself with relating how that public person whom we denominate human nature becomes lifted by God's secret and ceaseless in- spiration out of the abject mud of space and time, out of its purely mineral, vegetable, and animal anchorage, into the conscious fellowship of infinite goodness, and the consequent eternal supremacy of all inferior natures. Man has both a common or public personality and a private one : there is both a mind of the race and an individual mind : and the perfected scope of the Divine Providence or the consummation of human history, is the due CO-ORDINATION OF THESE DIVERGENT ELEMENTS, the interior or superior place accruing by every title to the individual or feminine element. But it is notorious that man has never intelligently seconded the divine purpose herein. On the con- trary he has always done his most pompous best to resist it. His most accredited theologies and philosophies have diligently taught him, by sen- sual instigation, that Eve was essentially subject to Adam, that is, that the private or individual A DIVINE INCARNATION ^29 force in man was rightfully secondary and servile to the common or public force : and hence it is . the invariable lot of these theologies and philoso- phies to find themselves disowned by the advance of history, which is the growth of man^s scientific insight. History quietly antiquates and paralyzes every creed, sacred or secular, which defames the human soul by representing it as freely alienating itself from God : because the sole beatific function of history is to prove such alienation impossible, save under conditions of servitude, when the mind is a prey to the tyranny of ignorance and superstition. The march of history incessantly vindicates the rightful primacy of the aff'ections, or what is the same thing, incessantly quickens the spontaneous force in us, by depressing our voluntary or moral force.* The moral life of man is a phenomenon of our scientific immaturity. It grows out of our appropriating to ourselves the good or the evil we do, instead of ascribing it exclusively to the here- ditary influx of good and evil spirits, and hence feeling no more responsibility for it, no more sense of merit or demerit in regard to it, than we should feel in regard to a fair or muddy com- plexion, to a sunny or sombre natural disposition. So long as we continue stupidly to munch this pestilent fruit, it is of course inevitable that we find ourselves excluded from the Tree of Life. I say "of course," because manifestly all the * See Appendix D. 230 WHY CREATION INVOLVES while we go on to appropriate this strictly influent good and evil, we cannot help attributing to our- selves a purely simplistic or difierential selfhood, so remaining utterly blind to the great scientific truth of our unitary or composite existence : and, coming before God in that miserly plight, in that lean and penurious condition, the voice of the Divine mercy towards us is bound to shroud itself in tones of despair, only faintly relieved by dis- tant hope. For God sees us only in the intensest unity with our kind, only in indissoluble solidarity with every other individual of the race ; and con- sequently, whilst we view ourselves as indepen- dently constituted, as related to Him by our own absolute merit or demerit, irrespectively of our connexion with the race, we must necessarily be full either of egotistic pride or equally egotistic despair, and in both cases alike can hardly help proving an extremely unsatisfactory spectacle to Him. What should we think of an eye or a hand that deemed itself related to the light and air by itself, and independently of its connexion with the body ? Why, obviously, that it was diseased and ready to perish. Well, the infinite wisdom makes precisely that judgment of us, when we fancy ourselves righteous or unrighteous in our own right, and apart from our unity with our kind. There is no pretension more insufi^erably arrogant in the Divine sight than that of any merely individual ability to keep the Divine law. A DIVINE INCARNATION 231 I am persuaded that I never cut a more con- temptible figure in the Divine estimation, than •when I suppose myself capable of refraining from stealing my neighbour's purse, or seducing my neighbour's wife, by some private force of my own, and independently of angelic association, or of the help I derive from my connexion with the race. And I presume on the other hand that there is no attitude of mind more intrinsically respect- able in the Divine sight, more cordially delightful to the Divine mind, than that which should exhibit the thief or adulterer totally indifferent to the unrighteousness which is conventionally charged upon his private character, while he calmly referred all the evil of his conduct to the wholly unscien- tific aspect of our social relations, to the shock- ingly imperfect way in which the sentiment of human equality or fellowship is yet organized in institutions. God hates nothing on earth but kings and priests : that is to say, never the veri- table human persons that are hereditarily or tra- ditionally swaddled in those effete offices, but the offices or institutions themselves so named : be- cause they are the only things which now obstruct the Divine kingdom upon earth, by hindering the scientific organization of human fellowship. And whatsoever hinders that. His perfect love to man- kind bids Him hate, bids Him hand over to speedy and remorseless destruction. I am for my own part neither a thief nor an adulterer, but I could 232 WHY CREATION INVOLVES almost long to be both one and the other after the most flagrant type, that thus I might fling back with exquisite scorn the imputation of unrighte- ousness wherewith society would seek in that case to cover me — or rather^ that thus I might drink in with keener relish the profound conviction which all history, which all science, brings home to me, namely, that in my real, my spiritual, private, and God-given self I am wholly incapable of evil either in affection, thought, or action, and that it is therefore only in my quasi, my conven- tional, public, and man-given self, that I ever find myself incurring such liability. Thus I would never seek to hide, but rather to make conspicuous, all the iniquity charged upon me : only I would in- sist upon its being an iniquity which attached to me, not as disconnected with other men, but as intimately blent and bound up with priest and king, with teacher and ruler, with every devout and honourable person in short, who is officially interested in maintaining the existing infirm or- ganization of human society or fellowship."^ But I can no longer affbrd these digressions, which after all are no digressions, except to a hur- ried observation. My space warns me to come rapidly to a close. I have just said that the pro- gress of history in depressing the moral vigour of the race, operates an incessant elevation of its spontaneous force. This result ensues by virtue * See Appendix E. A DIVINE INCARNATION 233 of the same law which in the physical sphere limits the menstrual flux by the phenomena of conception and gestation. For morality is exactly the same phenomenon in the spiritual sphere, or the life of the race, which menstruation is in the natural sphere, or the life of woman, that is to say, it is a process of elimination or purification; and it operates precisely the same uses, that is to say, it abates the natural pride and vigour of the heart, and so disposes it to conceive and bring forth spiritual fruit.^ The end of conscience is to pu- * Recent physiological researches go to shew that the men- strual flux signalizes the spontaneous maturation of the ovum and its consequent separation from the ovary and descent into the uterus, for the purpose of impregnation. At all events, it seems to be clearly established, that conception ordinarily takes place just before or just after menstruation, and is very rare at other times ; so that we may fairly infer a very close connexion between the two. But the science of correspondences^ which is the only Divine science, because it is the science of the very sciences them- selves — turning the sandy wilderness of disconnected facts which they present to us into the unity of a blooming garden — dissipates all doubt as to the function of menstruation, by turning it into a strict analogon and ultimate of that great spiritual ordeal of puri- fication which we denominate conscience. The aim of menstru-a- tion is purification, is such a vastation of the native grossness of the body, as disposes it to conception and prolification. Conse- quently, until menstruation begins, conception is impossible, and it is equally impossible after menstruation has ceased. Then, again, woman alone menstruates, because she is a natural form or representation of the selfhood in man, or of that thing which is eventually to ally him with God by redeeming him from animality : and it is only the selfhood as still unconscious of its function and beguiled by the senses, or the fallacious shows of things, that con- 234 WHY CREATION INVOLVES rify, and so prepare the soul for immortal conjunc- tion with God : and purification means that gra- dual depletion of the natural selfhood or proprium which constitutes all that is valuable in our historic experience. I know very well that morality is not popularly supposed to play this subordinate part in human affairs. Every consistent churchman and statesman will revolt at my assigning it this strictly ministerial office, this purely solvent or transitional efficacy. It constitutes in fact the still invincible strength of hell on earth, that morality is every- where looked upon as having a properly magiste- rial authority, as furnishing the indisputable Di- vine breath of our spiritual life. You might with equal propriety look upon physics as furnishing not merely the outward condition — the necessary platform or base — of our moral life, but its inward science seeks to purify. The mere Adamic or animal life is inno- cent enough in all the range of its passions and appetites, and consequently invites no purgation. It is only the Divinely -given selfhood of man, which, owing to its ignorance and inexperience of its true source is for a long time unworthily duped by the senses, and so subjected to the Adamic or bodily rule, that de- mands chastisement. Hence it is that woman alone, being the true analogon of this selfhood, menstruates, and so becomes phy- sically qualified for maternity. If you wish any light upon the physiological question here adverted to, you may consult a careful and conscientious work of M. Pouchet, entitled Theorie de V Ovulation Spontanee, and a little book of Raciborski on the same subject, which I have also read with interest, but whose title I do not now recall. The supplement to Baly's translation of Mutter's Physiology furnishes a good abstract of all the literature of the topic. A DIVINE INCARNATION 235 substance also. The wrong done to truth in either case is precisely the same. In fact the peacock who parades his lustrous plumage to captivate our admiration, is only a sensible type of that subtler foppery, of that more harmful pharisaism, which confounds moral distinctions with spiritual, or supposes a man divinely vivified not by what unites him with other men, but only by what separates him from them. Hell has no profounder root than this.* The entire diabolic nisus in humanity * Hell is nothing but the gradual sloughing-off or separation in the angelic mind of self-love from charity, which separation is necessitated so long as the Divine life in nature is practically in- choate. The Divine naturajl man of course comprehends in his own person both heaven and hell, and reconciles them equally to the Divine good: or if a difference be insisted on, he makes the latter even more tributary than the former to that good. But until that achievement becomes so far consummated in interior realms of creation as to be avouched to our natural consciousness by the plenary diffusion of the Holy Spirit, the promised Comforter, which is the truly scientific spirit of human fellowship or equality, heaven and hell remain at war, and the angel grows an angel only by the spiritual elimination and precipitation of what in him is hereditarily diabolic. Thus angelic existence confesses itself un- divine by ail the bulk of those various hells, which it voids upon the universe in the process of asserting itself. The hells are only so much incomparable Divine force spiritually disowned by the angel, turned to waste by his sheer incapacity freely to image God, that is, to do good spontaneously. Indeed the heavens had long ere now been swamped and stifled in their own proper ordure, had not the Divine Wisdom known how to utilize the lowest hells (even as the skilful husbandman knows how to utilize his festering heaps of manure), by transforming them into the substance of a new and more glorious manhood. 336 WHY CREATION INVOLVES dates indeed from this grossly fallacious estimate of truth. It is the infirmity of the unscientific mind, of the understanding enlightened only by sense to confound nature with spirit, fact with truth : to mistake the actual for the real or seem- ing for being. Thus, inasmuch as I sensibly ap- pear to be an absolute existence, or to have a self- hood utterly distinct from and independent of angel and devil, my unpractised reason is inconti- nently beguiled to conclude that such is really the case, and hastens to confirm the shallow fallacy by zealously affiliating to my spiritual self all the good and evil which hereditarily influence my nature : so filling me in spirit with an odious self- conceit or an equally odious self-distrust, which both alike engender hell in me, because they both alike exclude that bosom-peace which makes the immortal substance of every bliss known to heaven. Hell has no root but human pride, and the earth by which that root thrives would be instantly dis- solved, were we manfully to cease " eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil :'' that is, cease attributing to ourselves the moral traits which flow solely from our hereditary connexion with heaven and hell, by appropriating those superior spiritual qualities which come to us from God alone, and which presuppose the complete reconciliation of hell with heaven. At all events such has been the undeniable drift of history. That great institution which we call the Church, has had no other aim. A DIVINE INCARNATION 237 from the beginning of history, than to depress the moral consciousness of man, or shame him out of pride and boastfulness, by exalting his sesthetic consciousness, or making him feel that he is what he is, not by virtue of any difference between him and other men, but only by virtue of his intense unity with them. Religion, revelation, has had no diviner office than to convince mankind that their highest virtue, morally regarded, all that virtue which exalts one man above another in social estimation, and so enacts the reign of hell on earth, is filthy rags in God's sight; because, when men are once persuaded of this, they will gladly accept the righteousness which is revealed to them from God out of heaven, and which needs no inauguration but that which is afforded it by the scientific recognition of the great truth of human society or fellowship. Of course all that is sentimental in you will howl at this assertion, as feeling the very breath of its nostrils invaded : for sentimentalism enjoys a purely outward and osculatory dalliance with truth, and if deeper rela- tions be insisted on, nothing is left it but to go forth with the most sentimental of the apostles and hang itself. But I speak advisedly after years of patient inquiry, and no amount of clamour can affect my conviction that the truth I here allege constitutes the adamantine basis of creation. Yours truly, APPENDIX. 138. I quote here a few pages from a previous book of mine now out of print, entitled Lectures and Miscellanies : — " When I speak of the influence of ghostly communi- cations upon ' weak-minded persons/ I mean persons who, like myself, have been educated in sheerly erroneous views of individual responsibility. After my religious life dawned, my day was turned into hideous and unre- lieved night by tacit ghostly visitations. I not merely repented myself, as one of my theological teachers deemed it incumbent on me, of Adam's transgression, but every dubious transaction I had been engaged in from my youth up, no matter how insignificant soever, crept forth from its oblivious slime to paralyze my soul with threats of God's judgment. So paltry an incident of my youth as the throwing snow-balls, and that effectually too, at a younger brother in order to prevent his following me at play, had power, I recollect, to keep me awake all night, bedewing my pillow with tears, and beseeching God to grant me forgiveness. By dint of indefatigable prayer 240 APPENDIX and other ritual observance, I managed indeed to stave off actual despair from the beginning ; and juster views of the divine character obtained from the New Testament, gradually illumined my very dense understanding, and gave me comparative peace. But I had no satisfactory glimpse of the source of all the infernal jugglery I had undergone till I learned from Swedenborg, that it proceeds from certain gbostly busy-bodies intent upon reducing the human mind to their subjection, and availing them- selves for this purpose of every sensuous and fallacious idea we entertain of God, and of every disagreeable memory we retain of our own conduct. " I call this information * satisfactory,' because it ac- corded with my own observation. The suffering I under- went confessed itself an infliction, an imposition. I writhed under it as you have seen a beast writhe under a burden too heavy for him to lift, yet not quite heavy enougli to crush him out of life. For I could not accept the imputation borne in upon me, that I was really chargeable with the guilt of any of these remembered iniquities. I of course did not deny an external or in- strumental connexion with them ; I did not deny that my hand had incurred defilement, but with my total heart and mind I resisted any closer affiliation. In refer- ence, for example, to the trivial incident above specified, even w^hile weeping scalding tears over its remembrance, I could not but be conscious of a present tenderness toward the imaginary sufferer, so cordial and so profuse as totally to acquit my inner or vital self of any compli- city in the premises. Hence I had little doubt that the fact might be as Swedenborg alleged, and that I had been all along nourishing, by means of certain falsities APPENDIX 241 iu my intellect, a brood of ghostly loafers who had at last very nearly turned me out of house and home. " It is not uncommon to hear the canting remark, that the world would be better oflF if men had a little more of the suffering in question. I have no objection to every man understanding the evil of his doings. On the con- trary, I wish that every one might clearly discern his habitual iniquities, because until this discernment takes place, we shall not be in haste to put them away from us. But we shall never be able truly to confess them with the heart, so long as we believe ourselves the source of them — so long as we believe in our individual responsibility for them. The first step toward my acknowledging the evil of my doings, is my perception of its being a foreign influx or importation. If I view it as indigenous, of course I cannot deem it evil, for you would not have the same soil which brings forth the fruit condemn it also, would you ? No man is wiser than himself. How there- fore can you expect any one to acknowledge an evil in his conduct, unless you tacitly attribute to him an inward or essential superiority to that evil ? If the evil come strictly from himself or within, if it do not proceed merely from defective culture, but grow out of the very substance of his individuality, then you simply insult him by asking him to repent it, or turn away from it. Would you ask a crab-apple stock to produce peaches, or a bramble-bush to bring forth grapes ? Why then stultify yourself by expecting the peaceable fruits of righteous- ness from those whom at the same time you teach to regard themselves as the sources of their sin ? " I do not read that John the Baptist, who was reck- oned a pattern revivalist, ever taught people to get up a M 242 APPENDIX spiritual fidget, by way of qualifying themselves for the acknowledgment of the coming divine man. I read that he simply told each man to repent him of, or forsake, the evils incident to his proper vocation, the manifest patent evils which all men recognized and suffered from, and so stand prepared to do the will of the coming teacher. The attempt to fasten the authorship or responsibility of these offences upon the individual soul, and to establish the subject's metaphysical property in them, he left to the bloodhound sagacity of our modern theologians. It may be very grand and lofty in these perfunctory gentlemen to discourse upon the depth of human depravity, and so forth, but I have no hesitation in saying that the man who would really aggravate the self-condemnation of another, or intensify instead of moderate his conviction of personal defilement, no matter on what pretext soever of benevo- lence, is either himself grossly inexperienced in this homd category of suffering, or else, may boast a heart harder than the nether mill-stone. He may have had what he calls troubles of conscience, but they have simply been got up for an occasion, got up with a view to his passing muster with his sect, or boasting an orthodox religious experience. An immense deal of this spiritual dilettan- tism exists in the world. The mere outside foppery we see in Broadway is as the fragrance of fresh hay in com- parison with it. " No one can object to another kindly pointing out any of his discernible evils of life, because every man feels it due to his manhood to rid it of all impediment. But clearly this is a very different thing from the endeavour to afiix guilt to the soul. I know nothing so profoundly diabolic as this endeavour, whencesoever it may be ex- APPENDIX 243 erted, from the pulpit or the closet, and for whatsoever ends, whether conventionally sacred or profane. To aim at making a poor wretch feel, that while simply obeying some dictate of nature, or perhaps some prompting of wounded passion, he has mortally affronted the very source of his life — that he even has it in his poicer to affront it — is a wickedness beside which, it appears to me, most of our burglaries and murders seem common- place and tender. It is spiritual murder, murder not of the mere perishing body, but of the imperishable soul. And the man who is guilty of it, should be put to the penalty of silence for the remainder of his days, or at least until he proves himself better instructed. He very probably has a bosom full of parental tenderness, even while he is making so deadly an assaidt upon you in the name of his God, and would sooner renounce his own life than cherish a vindictive temper towards his depen- dent offspring. In which case of course, he is vastly more worshipful than the fetish he serves. " But you say that this man does not leave you hope- less, that even while charging guilt upon you, he points you to the all-sufficient remedy for it. Alas ! this apo- logy proceeds upon the notion that a man's relation to God is merely physical or external, and that consequently provided he escapes a literal scourging from the divine hand, his aspirations are satisfied. Let every one speak for himself here. For my part, I am free to say, that I should be far more profoundly horrified by the idea of my capacity to offend God — even though I should 7iever actually do it — than I should be by a fear of all the literal scourgings possible to be inflicted upon me, by all the self-styled deities of the universe. A deity who has M 2 244 APPENDIX it either in his hand or his heart, to inflict a wound upon any form of sensitive existence, is a deity of decidedly puerile and disreputable pattern. He is no deity for cultivated men and women. A deity whose prestige is chiefly muscular, arising from his imagined ability to inflict sufl'ering, may still serve the needs of the Bushman, or the Choctaw, or our own rowdies : but to those in whom God's life has dawned however faintly, and whose souls accordingly are evermore consecrated to beauty, he is an unmitigated abomination. For a person of this quality knows no outward relations to God, no such rela- tions as are contemplated or provided for by your mere pugilistic deity. God is his inmost life, without whom in fact he does not live : God is his vital selfhood, with- out whom indeed he is not himself : to talk therefore of enmity between him and God, is to talk of dividing him asunder, is to talk of separating his form from, his sub- stance, his existence from his being. " I distrust accordingly these ghostly busy-bodies, who address our outward ear with gossip of the other world. They first arrest our attention by talk of those we have loved : they gradually inflame our ascetic ambition, our ambition after spiritual distinction : and finally, having got a secure hold, who knows through what pools of voluntai-y filth and degradation they may drag us ? I of course believe that spiritual help is incessantly enjoyed by man, but then it is a help directed exclusively to his affections and thoughts, not to his timorous and servile senses. The spiritual succour which comes in the way of quickening my intellect and affections, I am grateful for. It does not degrade me. It aggrandizes me, and makes my life more free. But that which comes in the form of APPENDIX 245 outward and personal dictation, is an insult to my man- hood, and in so far as it is tolerated, undermines it. It makes my will servile to a foreign inspiration, discharges my soul of its inherent divinity, and finally leaves me a dismal wi-eck, high and dry on the sands of superstition. It reduces me in fact below the level of the brute, for the brute has a certain reflected or colonial manhood, which disqualifies him for the tacit endurance of oppression. I am not speaking of impossibilities. We have all heard of tender and devout persons, who having through some foolish asceticism, or other accidental cause, come under the influence of this attenuated despotism, have at last got back to their own firesides, so spent with sufi^ering, so lacerated to the very core, as to be fit — when not aroused to an indignant and manly reaction— only for the soothing shelter of the grave. "On the whole I am led to regard these so-called * spirits' rather as so many vermin revealing themselves in the tumble-down walls of our old theological hostelry, than as any very saintly and sweet persons, whose ac- quaintance it were edifying or even comfortable to make. I hope their pale activity — their bloodless and ghastly vivacity — may do indirect good by promoting a general disgust for the abject personal gossip which they deal out to us, and which has so long furnished the staple spiritual commodity of the old theology. But I vehe- mently discredit the prospect of any positive good. Man's true good never comes from without him, but only from the depths of divinity within him, and whatever tends to divert his attention from this truth, and fix it on Ma- hommedan paradises, and salvation through electricity, claims his most vindictive anathema. Above all, a spi- 246 APPENDIX ritual life which feels itself depleted by the diligent prose- cution of the natural one, which is actually interested to invade the latter, and persuade good sound flesh and blood to barter its savoury cakes and ale for trite and faded sentimentalities, is a life which every reasonable person may safely scout as unworthy his aspiration. " The mere personal gossip these ghostly gents remit to us, proves of what a flimsy and gossamer quality they themselves are, and how feeble a grasp they have yet achieved of life. I am told that a communication was lately received from Tom Paine and Ethan Allen, saying that they were boarding at a hotel kept by John Bunyan, and I can readily fancy the shaking of sides, and the rich asthmatic wheeze, wherewith that communication was launched by the inveterate wags who projected it. But we are also told very seriously, that the apostle Paul and other distinguished persons, have each a chosen medium in our neighbourhood, on whom to dump his particular wisdom, and so establish a depot for that commodity. And I learn besides that Dr. Franklin, Dr. Channing, and several other well-behaved persons, are turning out mere incontinent busy-bodies, and instead of attending to their own affairs, have actually turned round again in the endeavour to instruct and regulate a world, which had previously seen fit to discharge them. Was ever any pretension more intrinsically disorderly and immodest ! The apostle Paul, in the estimation of all scholars, was a man of great sense and modesty. And the doctors Pranklin and Channing were also conspicuous for both traits. Now is it credible for a moment that these great men are turned into such hopeless peacocks by the mere event of death, as to fancy that either of them is capable APPENDIX 247 of exerting the least influence upon human destiny, or the destiny of the least individual ? Credat Judoeiis, non ego. Far easier is it for me to believe, that certain spectral Slenders and Shallows have been donning the dress of these good men, as found folded up and ticketed on the shelves of somebody's reverential memory, and vainly trying in that guise to ape also the illustrious manners which once sanctified it. *' I am persuaded that this entire hobgoblin demon- stration owes its existence to the superstitious and semi- Pagan conceptions of spiritual existence which overmn society, and which are diligently nurtured by the old theology. The old theology represents the spiritual world as remote from the natural one in space. It supposes that when men die, they actually traverse space, actually go somewhere, and bring up either at a certain fixed locale within the realm of sense, constituting heaven, or at another fixed locale constituting hell. Books even are written to suggest the probable latitude of these places, whether within or without our solar system, and so forth. But this is clearly puerile. The spiritual world does not fall within time and space. Time and space simply ex- press two most general laws or methods by which the sensuous understanding, or the intelligence enlightened only by the senses, apprehends spiritual existence, or gathers knowledge. Thus, man, being a creature of infinite love and wisdom, is spiritually, or in his most intimate self, a form of affection and intellect. But in- tellect and afi^ection are purely subjective existences : they are not things, visible to sense : they are forms of life. Hence unless some plane exist, in which these forms may be mirrored, and in which at the same time, man's 248 APPENDIX faculty may be organized to discern them, he must for ever remain unconscious of himself, devoid of conscious life. He must in fact remain for ever blent with Deity, or infinitude, and therefore dead to all that stupendous epic of passion, intellect, and action, which constitutes his present history, and which is based exclusively upon his finite natural experience. " For nature furnishes this necessary plane, and its two universal laws, the one named time, serving sharply to discriminate to our perception event from event, and the other named space, serving sharply to discriminate to our perception form from form, supply us with the fixed alphabet of all knowledge. Accordingly whatsoever is in space and time, whatsoever falls within the realm of sense and fills the page of history, is purely phenomenal. It is not being, but only the appearance of being to a limited intelligence, an intelligence limited by the senses. Hence the sacredest incidents of history are not essential facts of humanity, but representative facts, — facts which merely symbolize infinite and eternal verities, or verities which utterly disclaim space and time. My true being, the being of every man, is God, or infinite goodness and truth. Now infinite goodness and tmth, though they reveal themselves to a finite appreciation under the forms of time and space, under sensible forms, yet are not themselves sensible forms, but spiritual forms, which quite transcend time and space. Consequently my being, my essential selfhood, is always independent of space and time, and when I die therefore or become invisible to sense, the event is purely circumferential and does not affect my central quality. That remains as immutable as God, because it is God, and is consequently in no danger APPENDIX 249 of being compromised by any event of my outward or sensible experience. All these events do but image, or bring to my own consciousness, the wonders of divinity which are shut up within me and in all men. And the event of death itself is only more signal than other events, because it makes this thrilling imagery more near and miraculous, by opening my consciousness to an inner field of being, in which time and space are no longer fixed but pliant to the affections of the individual, or in which every outward event and every outward form are visibly bom of the subject's private selfhood, and not as here of his common nature." ^.— p. 142. The creative and eternal Word to man runs thus : " Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat, hut of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou %haU not eat^ BECAUSE IN THE DAY THOU EATEST THEREOF THOU SHALT SURELY DIE." Philosophers have long sought to demonstrate the reality of human freedom as evinced in the phenomena of our moral consciousness, but they have only succeeded in demonstrating the unhappy muddle Philosophy herself amounts to, so long as she super- ciliously disdains the guiding light of revelation, and seeks to interpret nature by the servile light which nature herself supplies. Our moral freedom is in truth only a semblance, not a reality. We seem to act freely, or of ourselves, when we steal or refrain from stealing, when we commit adultery or refrain from it : and man's judg- M 3 250 APPENDIX merit accordingly, which is limited to appearances, asks no further warrant to render us in either case blame-or- praise-worthy. But, as Swedenborg proves on every page of his remarkable writings, we really never do act in freedom or of ourselves under these circumstances. He shews by the most luminous exposition of spiritual laws that we never steal or commit adultery, however free the act ^eem. to our foolish selves, but by the overwhelm- ing tyranny of hell ; and that we never refrain from doing these things except by virtue of the Lord's power constraining us to do so in spite of our natural tendencies. V(efeel this power to be in ourselves, that is to be freely exerted, only because we do not sensibly discern the fields of spiritual existence from which alone it inflows, and our senses have hitherto ruled our reason in place of serving it. No man since the world has stood has ever had power to draw a physical or moral breath, inde- pendently of those celestial and infernal companies with which all his past ancestry interiorly but unconsciously associates him. Of course therefore the Divine Love is incapable of ascribing any one's physical and moral merit or demerit to the person himself, because it would be absurdly false to do so. On the contrary, it seeks with endless pains to prevent the man himself from doing this by the organization of conscience as an unfaltering ministry of death. Our most accredited theologies and philosophies have always alike misapprehended the scope of this relentless ministry. They suppose that conscience was originally intended as a ministry of life or righte- ousness, and that Adam accordingly enjoyed its favour- able testimony jn Paradise before he had eaten of the tree of knowledge, that is, before he had learned to appro- APPENDIX 251 priate good and evil to himself. But of what possible use could the approbation of conscience be to a being who was still ignorant of the difference between good and evil ? The transparent contradiction involved in the as- sumption sufficiently demonstrates its absurdity to the reason ; but the literal text of revelation demonstrates it also to the very senses, by shewing us that conscience first dawned in Adam after selfhood (Eve) had been deve- loped in him, and he had been led by it to eat of the tree of knowledge, that is, to appropriate his influent good and evil to himself. Adam symbolizes the immature condition of the mind, the merely seeming and constitutional side of man, the life of instinct which we derive from nature, and which through the decease operated in us by conscience, we ulti- mately lay aside in order to the assumption of our true and spontaneous life derived directly from God. Hence — what is perfectly consistent, if you regard the spiritual purport of the narrative, but perfectly absurd if you regard only its letter — the most pregnant service which Eve (representing the divinely endowed selfhood) renders Adam, is to throw him instantly out of Paradise, by unmuzzling within him the relentless jaws of conscience. Do you ask me what I mean by Eve, as the symbol of our divinely quickened selfhood? I will tell you. Adam, as we have seen, represents our finite or constitutional existence^ that which flows from our connection with the race. It seems to be a most real existence, while in truth it is a purely reflected one, the subject being nothing but what he is made by the spiritual world, being in fact as destitute of real selfhood or freedom as if he were only dove or rabbit and not man. The dove or rabbit remains 252 APPENDIX spiritually unquickened, devoid of true individuality, be- cause it is a purely animal forra, that is, a form in which the universal element dominates the individual one. It is, in other words, and ever remains, an unshrinking subject of its nature, and hence incapable of " eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil," that is, of ap- propriating good and evil to itself. It has no conscious- ness of a selfhood underived from its nature, and is con- sequently utterly incapable both of moral experience, and of that lustrous life of conjunction with God in which such experience, when left unperverted, infallibly merges. But Adam, the beautiful symbol of our nascent humanity, of our still instinctual and pre-moral beginnings, is lifted above animality by his human form, that form being the only one in which the universal element serves the indi- vidual one, and which therefore fitly images God. Hence, though he is but a mdimental and seeming man, he is bound at once to vindicate his essential divinity, by exhi- biting, in however rude and purely negative a form, the real and distinctive life which animates humanity. The distinction of man from all lower existences is, that he is in strictest truth the child of God, that Infinite Love and Wisdom constitute his veritable and exclusive parentage, and Infinite Love and Wisdom are utterly inconsistent with selfishness or with littleness of any description. Hence in Christ, who is the perfected and fully conscious Divine Man, we see his merely finite and quad or consti- tutional life, his purely Adamic selfhood, incessantly deposed in order to his glorification, in order to his con- summate union with God. In Adam consequently, who is but the prophetic or typical and unconscious divine man, we must expect to see death installed as the very APPENDIX 253 foM et principium vita, as the very fountain and spring of human life ; we must expect to see despair enthroned as the fertile and abounding womb of man's distinctive hope. In short, we must demand from Adam, as the symbol of our rudimental and initiatory manhood, a purely negative and mortuary experience ; that is to say, we must expect to see him divorced from his merely seeming and dramatic existence, by falling under the dominion of conscience or the moral law. By Eve, then, or our divinely vivified selfhood, is meant the power which is incessantly communicated to man of separating himself from his mere animal condi- tions, of elevating himself out of the realm of law into that of life, or of subjecting nature and society to the needs of his individuality. In short. Eve signifies the power in man of spiritually appropriating good and evil to himself, the faculty of spiritual consciousness. Let the animal do as he will, he is but the abject vassal of his nature, and therefore destitute of personality or cha- racter, destitute of spiritual consciousness. The animal is only naturally, never spiritually, good or evil. The dove is naturally good as contrasted with the vulture, the tiger is naturally evil as contrasted with the sheep, but you would never think of deeming the dove spiritually good or the tiger spiritually evil as contrasted with any other animal, especially as contrasted with any other dove or tiger. Why ? Because spiritual good and evil is in- dividual good and evil, that is, it implies in the subject a spiritual individuality uncontrolled by his nature. The animals have no such individuality, and hence are igno- rant of moral distinctions, are unworthy of individual praise or blame. They have a purely natural individuality, 254 APPENDIX and hence are incapable of eating of the tree of know- ledge of good and evil, or of viewing themselves as spi- ritually responsible for their influent good and evil. Of man alone is it lawful to predicate moral distinctions, because he alone is capable of appropriating his influent good and evil to himself in place of charging it upon his nature. He alone is capable of an alternate individual expansion and collapse, which imless the Divine Mercy overruled them to his endless benefit, would breed only the most disastrous consequences. He is capable at one moment of a spiritual conceit and pride which plunges him gaily into hell, at the next of a spiritual despair which shuts him sorrowfully out of heaven. For ex- ample, if moral good prevail in my natural disposition, if I pass my life in visiting prisons, building hospitals, feeding the poor, scattering tracts, circulating the Bible, forwarding every conventionally righteous enterprize, while maintaining at the same time an irreproachable private and social deportment, I shall He infallibly certain — unless the Divine Love expose me to incessant secret or spiritual shipwreck, to the most withering internal humiliation and disaster — to appropriate this good to myself, and so turn out a monster of spiritual pride, a being too inflated even for hell to tolerate. Or if moral evil preponderate in my natural character, if on all occa- sions of temptation I succumb, and convict myself of lying, theft, adultery, and what not, I shall be sure in these circumstances — unless the Divine Love visit me with incessant outward success and prosperity — to shut myself up in a despair too obdurate even for the warmest love of heaven to penetrate it. These experiences, mourn- ful as they seem when too nan-owly viewed, nevertheless APPENDIX 255 attest the grandeur of human nature. They are possible to us only because our distinctively human life dates from God, and is therefore a spontaneous life, a life whose principle of action falls exclusively within the subject, and renders him therefore eternally free. Of course this life presupposes the complete reconciliation of self-love with brotherly love, presupposes the scientific inaugura- tion of human society, human fellowship, human equality, and these issues again presuppose a conflict of these two forces, suppose, that is, a previous stage of human ex- perience in which self-love is at war with brotherly love, or hell antagonizes heaven in lieu of promoting it. Now so long as this infantile state of things endures, so long as self-love and brotherly love, or hell and heaven, are kept unreconciled by the immaturity of the scientific un- derstanding in man, we each of us, by virtue of the solidarity that binds us to the race, feel this conflict in our own bosoms as if it originated there, or belonged to ourselves, instead of being a veritable influx from the entire spiritual world, or the universal mind of man. We have not the least suspicion that the conflict is not our own private affair, is not a legitimate feature of our divinely given individuality, and accordingly as one or the other principle prevails in our life, we contentedly write ourselves down good or evil in the Divine sight, turning out wretched Pharisees in the former case, and despised publicans and harlots in the latter. We have not the slightest conception of our true and spontaneous life, nor consequently of the miraculous exhibitions of Divine wealth and power with which it is fraught. We have no idea that that life is so divinely majestic and perfect as to involve in itself the complete reconciliation of hell and 256 APPENDIX heaven, the intensest harmony of self-love and brotherly love, of the external and internal man. Not knowing this, we inevitably suppose that our spiritual experience belongs to our isolated private bosoms, qualifying us in- dividually in the sight of God ; and we therefore go on to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil with a stupid gusto that of necessity disallows the true conscious- ness of God in our souls, and turns His inward voice of love and mercy into one of implacable condemnation and death. a— p. 159. "The inclination to unite the man to herself IS constant and perpetual with the wife, but inconstant and alternate with the man. The reason of this is, because love cannot do otherwise than love and unite itself, in order that it may be loved in return, this being its very essence and life ; and women are born loves; whereas men, with whom they unite themselves in order that they may be loved in return, are receptions. Moreover love is continually efficient; being like heat, flame, and Are, which perish if their effi- ciency is checked. Hence the inclination to unite the man to herself is constant and perpetual with the wife : but a similar inclination does not operate with the man towards the wife, because the man is not love, but only a recipient of love ; and as a state of reception is absent or present according to intruding cares, and to the varying presence or absence of heat in the mind, as derived from APPENDIX 257 various causes, and also according to the increase and decrease of the bodily powers, which do not return regu- larly and at stated periods, it follows, that the inclination to conjunction is inconstant and alternate with men. "Conjunction is inspired into the man from THE "WIFE according TO HER LOVE, AND IS RECEIVED BY THE MAN ACCORDING TO HIS WISDOM. That loVC and consequent conjunction is inspired into the man by the wife, is at this day concealed from the men ; yea, it is universally denied by them ; because wives insinuate that the men alone love, and that they themselves receive ; or that the men are loves, and themselves obediences : they rejoice also in heart when the men believe it to be so. There are several reasons why they endeavour to persuade the men of this, which are all grounded in their prudence and circumspection. The reason why men receive from their wives the inspiration or insinuation of love, is, be- cause nothing of conjugial love, or even of the love of the sex, is with the men, but only with wives and females. That this is the case, has been clearly shewn me in the spiritual world. I was once engaged in conversation there on this subject ; and the men, in consequence of a persuasion infused from their wives, insisted that they loved and not the wives ; but that the wives received love from them. In order to settle the dispute respecting this arcanum, all the females, married and unmarried, were withdrawn from the men, and at the same time the sphere of the love of the sex was removed with them. On the removal of this sphere the men were reduced to a very unusual state, such as they had never before perceived, at which they greatly complained. Then, while they were in this state, the females were brought to them, and the 258 APPENDIX wives to the husbands ; and both the wives and the other females addressed them in the tenderest and most engag- ing manner ; but they were cold to their tenderness, and turned away, and said one to another, " What is all this ? what is a female?" And when some of the women said that they were their wives, they replied, '*What is a wife ? we do not know you." But when the wives began to be grieved at this absolutely cold indifference of the men, and some of them to shed tears, the sphere of the love of the female sex, and the conjugial sphere, which had for a time been withdrawn from the men, was re- stored ; and then the men instantly returned into their former state, the lovers of marriage into their state, and the lovers of the sex into theirs. Thus the men were convinced, that nothing of conjugial love, or even of the love of the sex, resides with them, but only with the wives and females. Nevertheless, the wives afterwards, from their prudence, induced the men to believe that love resides with the men, and that some small spark of it may pass from them into the wives." — Conjugial Love, n. 160, 161. D.— p. 229. It is of this historically avouched decline of moral power in humanity that my admired friend Carlyle complains in so many exquisite pages of mingled pathos and invective. Carlyle has apparently not the slightest conception of the new and perfect manhood which is dawning, and cherishes every vestige of the old forceful and fanatic type in that sort, as Old Mortality cherished the isidi\x\^hicjacets upon APPENDIX 259 the tombstones of the martyrs. Carlyle's heroes no doubt were a good style of men in their day, but their day was strictly in order to ours, which, bemoan it as you will, is an incomparably brighter one for humanity than the earth has ever before known. What should we say of a gardener who went on cultivating the gnarled and sturdy trunk of a vine, long after it had yielded all the fruit it was capable of? Precisely the same must we think of Carlyle, whose infatuation consists, not in the desire reverently to bury the past, but to revive it in con- ditions which would be obviously and utterly fatal to its continued existence for a moment. The truth is, Carlyle is an accomplished artist, who hangs one's house with historic portraits and tableaux of an incomparable lustre ; but as to the scope of history itself — as to what men call the philosophy of history, meaning thereby the great human soul which gives it the unity of a man, and which is fast coming to superb and perfect consciousness by it — he is so exquisitely blind as to be even scornfully vitupera- tive. It would make your ears tingle to hear the thun- derous mirth with which on occasion he belabours the scientific conception of human destiny, to hear the great guns of riotous laughter which he lets off in broadsides upon the poor innocent soul who fancies that a science of history is strictly possible — he who will abide no other ideal for man than that of proving an eternal bruiser. I cannot help, much as I esteem Carlyle, recognizing here the essentially Bamum conception of manhood, never unconscious youthful grace and symmetry, but everywhere gigantic overgrowth contrasted by dwarfish undergrowth. The Bamum type of godhead is strictly proportionate : nowhere the benignant power which gives life to all things 260 APPENDIX by sedulously concealing itself and shunning recognition ; but some egregious posture-master, who on a set day plants himself in the centre of space and dramatically conjures all things out of nothing in a way to astonish Eobert Houdin himself, and all whom he astonishes. But let Carlyle pipe what melodious notes he pleases (and surely I shall be the last to grow weary of listening), science is bent upon utterly sapping our reverence for the great historic names, simply because this greatness all proceeds upon the implication of will or moral force, and science traces all will, all morality, to the devil, that is, to the servile side of human nature. Morality in fact is only the Divine method of taming the devil, or schooling him to the hearty allegiance of man. Moral life is born of an enforced subjection of the affections to the intellect, of the individual sentiment to the common one ; whilst the Divine or spontaneous life is born of a cordial mar- riage between the affections ^nd the intellect, between the sentiment of individuality and that of community. Hence it is, that so long as the moral regime endures, so long as men continue to eat of the accursed fruit *' of the tree of knowledge of good and evil," or foolishly appropriate to themselves what science declares to be exclusively from angelic and infernal association, so long the Divine voice in their souls must prove a ministry of death, and jea- lously obstruct the way of the tree of life. Carlyle's Caesars, Mahomets, Cromwells, Napoleons, were above all things men of a defective spiritual fibre ; in other words, their natural vigour is so much beyond the sane average, that they either obdurately resist this Divine voice alto- gether, or else dexterously pervert it to the authentication of their fanatical self-conceit, in which case Providence APPENDIX 261 kindly adopts and tickets them as so many hardy and consummate policemen, fit to dragoon humanity into a temporary semblance of order. But the idea of confound- ing for a moment any policeman, much more any eccle- siastic, with a man, with God's finished work! — surely this is unworthy of Carlyle, and leaves his genius — not indeed his rhetorical, but his real genius — far below that of many men who will never make half his noise. Hea- ven knows that no one would quarrel with hero worship as a feature of human history, as a passing manifestation of the immortal cultus for which the human heart is pri- marily constructed. What one quarrels with is to see a grave sincere soul like Carlyle pining for the restoration of that sort of thing, helplessly incapable of extracting its majestic human meaning for it once for all, and so bidding it a jolly good-bye for ever. He seems at mo- ments to have a glimpse of their being something symbolic in hero-worship, and yet he neglects the first law of symbolic hermeneutics, which is, that the symbol occupy a lower plane than the thing symbolized : for he evidently regards hero-worship in the past as prophetic only of con- tinued hero-worship in the future : that is, he makes the symbol symbolize itself. But all this is absurd. The symbol always stands for something it cannot comprehend, something which cannot be transacted in the same region with itself. Thus viewed, hero-worship does not mean any such inconsequence as that stupid people are for ever going to gaze open-mouthed on clever Divine corporals and lieutenants occasionally raised up to further Providen- tial ends : it means that human nature itself is to become so transfigured by its divine head, as that every man, by virtue merely of his human form, will be a conspicuous 262 APPENDIX temple of Deity, and that homage consequently which we now render to the creature be turned into a cordial and joyous tribute only to manifested Deity. U.—ip. 232. I do not complain of course that the inseparable dis- tinction of good and evil is made too much of. No man, not an idiot, can ever fail to abhor lying, theft, adultery, and murder, as features of human conduct, nor conse- quently to applaud the habitual and scrupulous abnegation of these things; because our spiritual existence is con- ditioned upon that bipolarity, just as our physical exist- ence is conditioned upon the bipolarity of pleasure and pain ; and to suppose one indifferent therefore to moral distinctions is to suppose him spiritually non-existent, just as to suppose one indifferent to the distinction of pleasure and pain is to suppose him physically non- existent. In both spheres alike these things are the mere constitutional conditions of our existence, and what I quarrel with consequently is that they should not be left in that intensely subordinate plight, but become exalted by our foolish theologians and philosophers into the very sources also of our life. My animal consciousness is con- stituted by my susceptibility to pleasure and pain, or my relations to outlying nature ; and this consciousness would for ever immerse me as it does the horse or the tiger, and prevent my rise to the human level, were it not for con- science acquainting me with a superior pleasure and a profounder pain, and so rescuing me from its grasp. APPENDIX But if I hereupon insist upon identifying myself with these new conditions of existence, if I insist upon con- founding my proper life in this new sphere with the mere organization which serves to develope it or give it mani- festation, I shall practically incur the same mistake as the man who makes freedom to mean no diviner thing than emancipation from fetters, and shall remain, under my moral tutelage, even more hopelessly remote from true communion with God than I had been before as a simple animal. The animal existence is never diabolic. The human is invariably so during its transition from instinct to spontaneity, or while truth in the intellect instead of good in the heart rules the conduct. "The reason of man," says Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia^ 1949 and 1950, "is made up of good in the heart and truth in the understanding. Good is the interior celestial element and constitutes the very soul or life of the reason : truth is the exterior spiritual element and is what receives life from that interior good. Rational truth uninspired by good is symbolized by Ishmael : it fights against all, and all fight against it. Rational good never fights, howso- ever it is assailed, because it is meek and gentle, patient and accommodating, all its attributes being those of love and mercy : and although it does not fight, yet it con- quers all, never thinking of combat nor boasting of vic- tory. It acts thus because it is divine, and is safe of itself: for no evil can assault good, nor even subsist in the same region. If it feel even the approach of good, evil spontaneously recedes and retires. And what is true of good, is true in a measure, also, of truth enlivened by good, because such truth is only good in form. But truth separate from good, or unvivified by it, which is 264 APPENDIX represented by Ishmael, is of a different quality. It thinks and devises scarcely anything but combats, its ruling affection being to conquer, and when it conquers it boasts of its prowess. A man of this sort, though he be in the most orthodox truth of faith, if he be not at the same time animated by charity, is morose, impatient, querulous towards all the world, viewing every body else as in error, zealously rebuking, chastising, correcting; he is without pity, nor does he endeavour tenderly to bend the affections and thoughts of others to what he conceives to be right, [but on the contrary seeks to coerce them into his own way of thinking :] for he regards everything from the point of view of truth, nothing from the point of view of good." And yet this fine-hearted and deep-thoughted old man is of course pronounced insane by every theologic or philosophic noodle in the land. ERRATA. p. 32, 1. 13 from bottom, insert a colon after hriowledge. p. 85, last line, for uncreated, read unformed. p. 86, 1. 12 from top, strike out the second and. p. 124, 1. 16 from top, for is, read are. MitcheU and Son, Printers, Wardour Street (W.) ^H TTT».TTTn?T>OT'-rx/ r>- .^^^^k-iXTTA TTHTJ AUV TURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT >HB^ 202 Main Library AN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 2 3 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405 lonth loans may be recharged by bringing books to Circulation D Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date DUE AS STAMPED BELOW UOA lH TERUdRAKT L\Jf stanforo iTf-Di inn ARY LO AM 4TERUuKAKi Lv-/ RM NO. DD 6, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKEL BERKELEY, CA 94720 Jit4*U<^ J 3 UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA UBRARY / *