And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious—who are never weary of holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.
Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar with evil?
12.
“Thought and theory,” said Wordsworth, “must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”
Yes, and no. What we act has its consequences on earth. What we think, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old rhymester hath it:
| “He that good thinketh good may do, And God will help him there unto; For was never good work wrought, Without beginning of good thought.” |
The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the most expedient.
On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed the first impulse, O. G. said, “In good minds the first impulses are generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the negative—it is the vulgar side of every thing.”
On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion; for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the impulse to do good here becomes injury there, and we are forced to calculate results; we cannot trust to them.
I have not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of expediency, but have believed that out of the steady adherence to certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient must ensue, and I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one’s conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.
It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some cases to overcome evil. But it requires more—it needs bravery and self-reliance and surpassing faith—to act out the true inspirations of your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart.
Out of the attempt to harmonise our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry—or, it may be, religion.
F—— used the phrase “stung into heroism” as Shelley said, “cradled into poetry,” by wrong.
13.
Coleridge calls the personal existence of the Evil Principle, “a mere fiction, or, at best, an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the Evangelists.” And he says, that “the existence of a personal, intelligent, Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ. ‘Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?’—Amos, iii. 6. ‘I make peace and create evil.’—Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery of the abyss of God.”
Do our theologians go with him here? I think not: yet, as a theologian, Coleridge is constantly appealed to by Churchmen.
14.
“We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and rights—with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of men.”
“The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole human race.”—Thom’s Discourses on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians.
And this is the true Catholic spirit—the spirit and the teaching of Paul—in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit—the spirit and tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality within a creed, or use it to a purpose.
15.
Dr. Baillie once said that “all his observation of death-beds inclined him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world as unconscious as we came into it.” “In all my experience,” he added, “I have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary.”
Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of “one instance in fifty to the contrary” would invalidate the assumption that such was the law of nature (or “nature’s intention,” which, if it means any thing, means the same).
The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.
16.
Thoughts on a Sermon.
He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in “the religion of pain,” and “the deification of sorrow!” But is he therefore right? What has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the earnestness of conviction? that “pain is the life of God as shown forth in Christ;”—“that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to us.” This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other.