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MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS

MORAL USES OF DARK
THINGS

BY HORACE B USHNELL, D.D.

AUTHOR OF " NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL."

STRAHAN AND COMPANY, 56, LUDGATE HILL
SAMPSON LOW, SON, & MARSTON, 188, FLEET STREET

1869

1869

LONDON :

PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO.,
CITY BOAD.

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ADVERTISEMENT.

T would have been easy to construct a
treatise on the general subject presented
in these essays, and there was a con
siderable temptation to do it, in the fact that our
treatises of Natural Theology are so commonly at
fault, in tracing what they call their " argument
from design" assuming that Physical Uses are
the decisive tests, or objects, of all the contrivance
to be looked for in God s works. Whereas they
are resolvable, in far the greater part, by no
such tests, but only by their Moral Uses, which
are, in fact, the last ends of God in everything,
including even his Physical Uses themselves.
Still the defect here specified will as easily be
corrected by these essays, on so many promiscuous

vi ADVERTISEMENT.

topics, as by a regular treatise, and they have
the advantage of being each a subject by itself.
And, to secure this advantage, they are thrown
together in a manner as neglectful of system as
possible. They do not make a book to be read
in course, but a book to be taken up as the moods
of the mind, and the rising of this or that question,
may prepare an affinity for them. For there is
scarcely a year that passes without somehow re
calling every one of these topics, or topics closely
related, in a manner that prepares to new interest,
or awakens fresh curiosity.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. Of Night and Sleep 1

II. Of Want and "Waste 27

III. Of Bad Government 55

IV. Of Oblivion, or Dead History 80

V. Of Physical Pain 107

VI. Of Physical Danger 137

VII. Of the Condition of Solidarity 163

VIII. Of Non-Intercourse between Worlds 190

IX. Of Winter 217

X. Of Things Unsightly and Disgustful 243

XI. Of Plague and Pestilence 20 9

XII. Of Insanity 289

XIII. Of the Animal Infestations 319

XIV. Of Distinctions of Colour 345

XV. Of the Mutabilities of Life 372

XVI. Of the Sea . , 402

I.

OE NIGHT AND SLEEP.

ERRATA.

Page 8, lines 5, 6, for " the more artificially got everything may
be, to make up the desired show," read "the more artificially
got up everything may be, to make the desired show."

Page 12, line 7, for " for the feeling," read " for feeling."

Page 36, line 1, insert " 1." before "Of."

Page 41, line 14, for " Bring him in," read " Set him under."

Page 59, line 3 from bottom, insert " is " after " it."

Page 64, line 17, for "contrivance," read "connivance."

Page 116, line 13, for " faith," read " fate."

Page 122, line 2 from bottom, for " fined," read " tempered down."

Page 123, line 5, for " fined," read "tried."

Page 134, line 16, for " He," read " God."

Page loO, line 8 from bottom, for " work," read " look."

Page 340, line 14, for "Papor," read "Sapor."

Page 350, line 2 from bottom, for "stockman," read "stock man."

Page 375, line 6, for "the," read "and."

(tact;

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I.

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP.

f.N proposing these essays on the moral uses
of things, particularly the dark things of
the world, I assume the reality of final
causes without argument. Our pantheistic litera
ture, and many of our late philosophers, it is well
known, disallow final causes altogether, treating
them, in fact, with disrespect, as being only feeble
and fond conceits that have amused the fancy
of religious people heretofore, but are now to
be dismissed. I do not write for such. But
what we all see with our eyes I think I have some
right to assume, namely, that this whole frame of
being is bedded in Mind. Matter itself is not more
evident than the mind that shapes it, fills it, and
holds it in training for its uses. Philosophy itself,
call it positive or by any other name, is possible

2 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

only in the fact that the world is cognate with mind
and cast in the moulds of intelligence. And then, as
it belongs inherently to mind that it must have its
ends, the All-Present Mind must have reference to
ends, and the whole system of causes must at bottom
be, exactly as we see it to be, a system of final causes.
That the philosophers discard them ought, accord
ingly, to cost us no concern, for they have a won-
drously copious ability to assert themselves ; which
they have kept on doing, and will, rolling in their
tidal sweep of conviction from every point of time,
and all structural things, and organic workings of the
creation. Speculation can as well keep out the sea.
The dark things of which I am to speak are such,
in general, as have some relation more or less per
ceptible to, or connection with Moral Evil, which is,
in fact, the night- side of the creation. All the
enigmas and lowering difficulties we meet are
shadows from this ; for it is to meet the conditions
and prepare the discipline of this, that so many
rough, unseemly kinds of furniture are required.
Pursuing the logical method, I ought, therefore, to
begin with an introductory chapter on moral evil
itself, or, at least, on the uses of that probational
training of liberty that involves so great peril, and
the certainty of such unspeakable disaster. But I
prefer, on the whole, not to observe the logical

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 3

method, lest, by seeming to be engaged in the heavy
work of a treatise, I make all the subjects heavy
and dry in proportion. They have each an interest
more fresh and peculiar when taken by itself. I
propose to call them up, therefore, in a perfectly mis
cellaneous way, taking the lighter and less trouble
some, and the darker and more difficult those
which lie in nature and its appointments, those
which lie in the fortunes of individual and social
experience, and those which relate to the scheme
of Providence without regard to order, and as
mere convenience may direct. In this way I pro
pose, for the present essay, a subject not generally
felt to be at all dark or difficult, and only just over
the line, when it is more closely and thoughtfully
considered ; namely, Night and Sleep.

I put the two together because they are so closely
related, one being a fact of external nature, pro
vided for in the astronomic appointments of na
ture, the other being a corresponding appointment
of our psychological system itself, only somewhat
more absolute than the other. For, within the
polar circles, the astronomic night is continuous for
six long months, while the psychological necessities
of sleep maintain their period unchanged, and the
human populations are obliged to seize a night
about once in twenty-four hours, when no such night

4 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

is provided by the diurnal revolutions. In which we
see that our human body and mind have a night
appointment in them, more unvarying and fixed
than the planetary night itself. So that if we raise
the question whether our psychologic nature is timed
by the planetary order, or the planetary order timed
to fit our psychologic nature, we are thrown upon
the latter supposition by the fact that our sleep has
reasons more absolute and more inherent than the
reasons even of the astronomic order itself. Still
the night we have without, and the night we in
herently want, are really coincident, in all the more
habitable parts of the earth.

But if the question be, why it is, either that
any such institution of night is appointed, or any
such want as sleep prescribed, we encounter some
difficulty. As regards the former, it is no suffi
cient answer to say that the revolution of the
earth, turning it away just half the time from the
sun, creates a night by astronomic necessity; for
the astronomic system might, perhaps, have been
differently organized, or so as to maintain a per
petual day ; every habitable orb, for example,
having for its sun a vast concave orb shining per
petually round it, and creating neither night, nor
shadow, nor region of polar cold. As regards the
latter, too, the want of rest and sleep, it does not

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 5

appear that our body and mind might not both
have been so organized as to be capable of perpetual
action, without either exhaustion or weariness. And
since we are put here, not for rest but for action, by
that only winning the required character, and be
coming what is given us to be, why are we not made
capable of sleepless activity ? If our errand here
is the trial and training of our liberty, we are
neither being tried nor trained, when our very
liberty itself is sunk in a state of unconsciousness.
Such a state wants relativity, we might say, to the
errand on which we are sent, and the time thus
occupied is lost time. And when the creation puts
out its lights and commands us away into a state of
oblivion, what is that oblivion but a state in which
we are to drop, and even forget, our errand ?

Besides, there will appear to many to be some
thing fearful and forbidding in the expression of
darkness. Children are commonly afraid of the
dark, and even Holy Scripture makes the state of
" outer darkness " an image of all that is most
terrible in God s retributions. And what shall we
say of that mental and bodily state in which the
senses are shut up, and reason itself gone out, and
nothing left of a nature so high in dignity but a
mere palpitating clod? What do we say of one
who habitually drowns his higher nature in a

6 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

similar condition of stupefaction by the excesses of
intemperance ? And if this be a crime, as it is by
the general consent of mankind, is it not remarkable
that half the world s population is, all the while,
laid prostrate and senseless, by a soporific planned
for, in the economy both of heaven and of their own
bodies ?

Besides, night is itself the opportunity of crime,
and we even speak of crimes in a general way as
being deeds of darkness :

" Oh, treacherous night !
Thou lendest thy ready veil to every treason,
And teeming mischiefs thrive beneath thy shade."

Incendiaries, thieves, robbers, assassins, go to their
deeds under shelter of the night, and even prefer a
specially dark night. Adulteries are stolen pleasures
of the night. It is in the night that great con
spiracies are hatched. Where crimes are committed
by day, the absconding is commonly by night. And
there is still another reason for this crowding of
crime into the dark hours, in the fact that the world
is then asleep, and the particular victims selected
will then be locked in a state of unconsciousness
inobservant as in death itself, and passive to what
ever wrong will make them its prey. Since the
world, then, is made, as we know it to be, for the
trial of creatures who will be in wrong, why is it

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 7

made to cover wrong-doing a full half of the time,
and furnish it an opportunity so convenient ? Or, if
we must be creatures of sleep, why is it that the law
of sleep is not made absolute upon all, so that the
bad shall be taken into custody by it, as the innocent
and good are made defenceless by it ? for then the
nights could settle down upon the world as times of
truce for all wrong-doing. When, too, we create a
special police for the night, what is the implication,
but that we impeach the care of Providence by pro
posing to supply one of its considerable defects
ourselves ? As if it belonged to us to assume the
defence of innocence, now that Providence has taken
away its shield !

Is there not, also, another deed of darkness, not
commonly so named, but thought of with eminent
respect, and which, partly for that reason, is,
morally speaking, more harmful? I refer to the
untimely shows and bewildering dissipations of
what is called fashionable society. It is very true
that we do not want the whole twelve hours for
sleep. And the evening, after the great works
of the day are finished, is a time favourable above
all others to the genuine pleasures of society. But
this is not the way of those who rule the mode and
claim the chief honours of society. It is not the
faces and voices of friends, or the lively cheer of

8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

intellectual and social play, that meets their idea ;
they are commonly incapable of any so fine sort of
pleasure. They do not so much care to be freshened,

as to be in figure. Naturalness they despise, and

t4/%{-
the more artificially got everything may be, to make

up the desired show, tne better. Their time must
be taken against nature ; for society, they think,
would be a tame affair, submitted to the appoint
ments of astronomy. And what so fit time, or time
so finely exclusive, is there, as when the common
world is stilled in sleep ? By the brilliancy of their
lights, and by figures floating in dress and glittering
in gems, can they not make a show more dazzling
than day? Entertainment is the same thing as
expense, and a crowd they call society. Their time
begins just where the evening ends, and the throng
disperses for sleep when sleep might better end.
The young men and women of sixty for, in this
high tier of fashion, it is not permissible to be old
are too bitterly fagged and jaded to sleep, and the
really young have their heads too full of excitement.
Sleep, at least, is long in coming, and comes more as
a fever than as a refreshment. At length, when the
dew is dried up and every bird is wearied with its
song, the young frivolity, be it man or woman,
rises to begin another day. The brain is sore ; the
day is dull or only enlivened by fretfulness. There

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 9

is no relish for either business or study, and no ca
pacity for it ; and where the dissipation is frequent,
no habit of order and right industry can survive.
Life will become as trivial as it is artificial.

What substitute would have been sought, if no
such opportunity of night had been given, we can
not pretend to say ; but this we sufficiently know,
that no kind of substitute could produce a more
widespread, practically immense demoralisation, in
the same high circles of life. It changes, in fact,
the general cast of society. There is, besides, no
mode of character so heartless and false and cruel,
as that of high fashion, or so totally opposite to all
the noblest, best ends of living.

Going on from this point, now, to speak of the
moral uses of night and sleep, we have it, first of all,
to say, as regards the bad opportunities they give,
that such opportunities are not bad, but are only
made so by the abuses of wrong; for what best
thing is there which wrong may not abuse ? The
very system of moral liberty supposes that wrong is
going to have, or at least make, its opportunities.
And since we are all in wrong as being under
evil, how shall we be made to understand more
impressively what is in all wrong, than when we
and society are its victims ? We are put in moral
society, in fact, to act and be acted upon as in terms

io MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

of duty existing alone, no terms of duty would be
given and a great part of the benefit is to be, that
we get revelations of wrong, and become so revolted
by it as to be turned away from it. And what
revelations can be more effective than to see it steal
ing upon innocence in deeds of midnight robbery
and murder, showing how cruel and cowardly and
detestably mean it is ; or to see it crowding society
out of heaven s times, and turning it into a pageant
of the night, as remote as possible from the sobrie
ties of reason, and the sweet simplicity of virtue ?

Consider, next, how differently tempered a realm
of bad minds becomes, under the ordinance of night
and sleep, from what they otherwise would be.
Always fresh and strong, incapable of exhaustion as
the spring of a watch, moral ideas would seldom get
near enough to be felt. Evil is proud, stiffening itself
always against the restrictions of God, and trying to
be God itself. Therefore only a little modicum of
capacity is given it, which runs out in a single day.
After twelve or sixteen hours, the man that rose in
the morning, full of might, as if a young eternity
were in him, begins to flag, his nervous energy is
spent, his limbs are heavy, his motions want spirit
and precision. If he tries, for some particular
reason, to hold on over whole days, his hands grow
weaker, his eyelids more heavy, till, at length, he

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 1 1

is obliged to resign himself to his fate, and drops,
a merely unconscious lump, on the couch of the
sleeper. Every day this lesson of frailty is given
him. The grass that is cut down by the mower s
scythe does not sooner wither and dry up than the
strength of the mower himself. We take our very
capacity thus in little loans of only a few hours, and
when the time has gone, we fall back into God s
bosom again to be recruited. Were it not for this
wise and morally beautiful arrangement, we might
be as stiff in wrong as so many evil angels.

Having only this short run of power, we are
humbled to a softer key. We do not feel or act as
we should, if we could rush on our way and have
our sin as a law of ceaseless momentum, for the
whole period of our life. For we are like an engine
that is started off on the track by itself; the fuel
and water will soon be exhausted, and then it must
stop. But, if it could go on without fuel or water, it
would even whirl itself across a continent and pitch
itself into the sea. So, if, being loose in evil, we
could rush interminably on, never to be spent or
recruited by sleep, our bad momentum would itself
drive us on, till we are hurried by the goal of life
itself. We should be hard in our self-will beyond
conception ; our very ambitions and purposes would
fly, bullet- wise, at their mark ; consideration, con-

12 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

ciliation, candour, patience, would all be driven out
of the world by the remorseless persistency of our
habit. Happily it is not so. We are stopped every
few hours and brought to nothingness. Perhaps we
do not say that we are made little, but, what is far
better, we practically are so to ourselves, whether we
think it or not ; for-^e feeling is often truer than
thought, and takes the type of fact when thought
does not. We are not bad gods, or demons in our
impetuosity, but men, men that go to sleep as
children do and must. Being spaced off in this
manner by stoppages, we consent to limits. We are
softened and gentled in feeling, more perhaps than
we would like to be. It is difficult not to be some
times tender. Reason will sometimes get a chance
to speak, and sometimes even preaching will meet a
fair possibility. The tremendous passion for gain,
and, speaking more inclusively, all that belongs to
the world-spirit, and the spell it works in minds
under evil, is broken every few hours by the counter-
spell of sleep, and so the infatuation is restricted.
So that, having this appointment in it, we can see
that God has prepared even the world itself to be
a corrector of worldliness. Even the astronomic
revolutions He sets running as a mill against it. He
buries the world in darkness that we may not see it.
He takes the soul off into a world of unconscious-

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 13

ness and dream to break up its bad enchantment.
He palsies the hand to make it let go, palsies even
the brain to stifle its infatuations. Were it not for
this, I verily believe that what we call the world
would get to be a kind of demoniacal possession.

In the same way all the various malignities of
evil passion are either extirpated or greatly softened.
After some years, prejudices begin to be tired of
being slept over. Jealousies rankle as long as they
stay, but they get tired of staying, when we do not
stay with them, but go to sleep over them. We can
not hate an enemy save intermittently, but have to
begin again every morning which we have less and
less appetite for, and finally come to like that morn
ing best which does not begin at all. Were it not
for this arrangement, our malignities might burn us
up. But the taking away of our consciousness is a
kind of compulsory Sabbath, or truce of God. No
hatred burns in the unconscious man. No revenge
or jealousy lowers on his face in that soft hour of
oblivion. If he went to bed heated by an ugly con
versation, if he was severe and bitter in his judg
ments, if all charities were scorched away by his
fierce denunciations, he will rise in the morning cool
and sweet as the morning, and the gentle cheer of
his voice will show that he is clear of his bad mood,
and likes to have it known. A man must be next to

14 MORAL USES Of DARK THINGS.

a devil who wakes angry. After his unconscious
Sabbath, he begins another day, and every day is
Monday. How beautifully thus are we drawn, by
this kind economy of sleep, to the exercise of all
good dispositions ! The acrid and sour ingredients
of evil, the grudges, the wounds of feeling, the
hypochondriac suspicions, the black torments of
misanthropy, the morose fault-findings, are so far
tempered and sweetened by God s gentle discipline
of sleep, that we probably do not even conceive how
demoniacally bitter they would be, if no such kind
interruptions broke their spell.

It is also a great thing for us, as regards the
interest and right ordering of life, that we are made
into chapters in this manner, and are not left to that
tedious kind of way which we sometimes find in a
book that goes on to its end without headings of
transition, or resting-places of cessation. We go
by dates and days, and a year is three hundred
and sixty-five chapters of life. By these dates we
remember ourselves, and without them could scarcely
remember ourselves at all. Time itself would only
be whisked away, as the trees are when we are
whirled through a forest. And so we should have
as little note of the present as memory of the past.
It is not so when we come to the end of a day and
stop. In one view it is a complete chapter, and we

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 15

ourselves are substantially ended with it. Then,
having passed away into the nowhere of sleep, we
come out new-born in the morning other and yet
the same to begin another more advanced chapter.
The waking-point is different from the point where
we vanished ; and it is one of the pleasant things we
think of, that to-day is going to be different from
yesterday. If we really thought it was going to
be the same day over again, we should be mortally
sick of it in advance. No, we are going to do some
thing, set on something, have or obtain something,
in advance of what belonged to yesterday. And
why not something better, best of all, wisest and
holiest ? We do not always ask that question, but
the fresh life of our new morning has at least some
better affinity in it, as tho flowers that have blos
somed in the night are more fragrant than the old
ones that have, all, the smell of yesterday in them.
Not every morning is God s morning thus in the
soul ; but how much closer is that holier dawn to
feeling, and easier to be conceived, for the new-born
life that has opened so many chapters of morning
experience. As one day of the year is certain to be
Christmas, there ought to be some day in such a
calendar of days when Christ is born to the soul a
sublime Anno Domini, at which all after-dates begin.
Sleep also greatly enlarges our mental experience,

1 6 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

giving us a different sense of ourselves and our
immortal capabilities. I make nothing of the argu
ment from sleep and a return to consciousness in
waking, for the fact of a resurrection and a future
life. The faith of immortality depends on a sense
of it begotten, not on an argument for it concluded.
And here is the office of sleep, that it wakens the
sense, while it does not furnish the argument. It is
just that kind of experience that makes us, I might
almost say, completely other than, and different from,
ourselves. If our life were a continuous waking state,
fifty or seventy years long, having light and day to
correspond, it might be difficult to say what we
should be, but we certainly should not be what we
are. Our sleep is not only a great mystery tb
philosophers, but a practical mystery to all men,
even such as never had a thought of it. We are
carried by it into a new world, as distinct from that
of our waking hours as if our spirit were translated.
The body is alive only as a vegetable lives ; the
senses are closed, the soul itself is unconscious,
displaying yet its incapacity to cease from action.
The thoughts fly as swiftly as when we are awake,
and sometimes a great deal farther and higher ; we
remember, imagine, hope, fear, hurrying on through
this and unknown worlds, creating scenes of glory
and pain, shuddering in perils, exulting in deliver-

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 17

ances, all unreal, yet for the time reality itself.
The immortal element strives on, incapable of ces
sation, determined never to cease ; displaying its
inherent, essential, self- asserting eternity. And so
we become, as it were, a different self, that we
may know the self we are; for if we make as
little of our dreams or sleep- thoughts as we may,
they do, at least, show us the fearfully sublime
activity of our nature, that must still act, when we
have no longer any will to action. What a dis
covery is it thus to a child, when first he begins to
reach after the distinction of a dream ! He has
been somewhere, he knows not where ; he has seen
strange people, he knows not who : only the vanish
ing smiles and dimples playing on his face told more
of the paradise he was in, hearing their sweet voices
and looking on their beautiful faces, than he can
even begin to stammer about when he wakes. If he
was unwell or overcharged with food, he has pro
bably fared differently ; bad creatures have chased
him, strange monsters have made strange noises,
ogres have taken him in their teeth. Startled out
of sleep, he clings in a tremor to his mother, and
when she shows him that there is nobody in the
room, that it was only a thought in his head, a
dream, what is a dream ? At that question he is
working visibly for days, till the dream ceases more

c

1 8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

and more to be a fearful creature, and he begins to
imagine that a dream is a kind of nobody or nothing
that came out of himself. What a mystery is he
thus beginning to be to himself! And just so are we
all passing out, so to speak, into this other -world
elate and returning, as many times as we have seen
days, yet knowing nothing of it still, save that we
get no understanding at all by our visits. Perhaps
we are so dull as never to have had a question about
the mystery. No matter, we are none the less
altered by it. This double nature, capable of a
double existence, is not the same it would be if we
made no such excursions into unimagined states and
worlds. It is great, greater than we can even think,
and reaches farther than we can definitely know.
Sleep is a spiritualizer, thus, in the constitution of
nature itself. By it the capacity of other modes
of existence is made familiar. Saying nothing of
the faith of immortality, we get a sense in it
of ourselves that very nearly contains that faith.
It is scarcely possible, in this view, to overrate
the importance of it in the moral training of
souls.

Meantime, night as much enlarges the knowledge
we get of the world as sleep the knowledge we get
of ourselves. Perpetual sunlight and day would
have kept us in a very small circle of discovery ;

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 19

for, as the veil of unconsciousness drawn over the
soul in sleep reveals the depths of our spiritual
nature to itself, and makes it a mystery of vastness
and immortal grandeur, so the night of the sphere
reveals innumerable other spheres, and peoples the
sky with worlds of glory otherwise undiscovered.
At this point of possibility all the discoveries of
astronomic science begin. And the infinitude of
God s realm begins at this point to be felt, apart
from all science. We are no more shut in, or
cornered, in a small triangle of knowledge, where
sun and moon and earth are the mere stone
boundaries of the All ; but we go out to look upon,
or apprehend, or rather to be apprehended by, a real
universe, in God s own measures. And this we do
as truly before science begins as after. Enough
that we are made to think a real everywhere. We
may fall into no speculations about the population
or non-population of these realms ; still the sky will
mean something like " heaven/ or heaven some
thing like that, and the word "celestial" will get
a place in all languages for powers divine, and
creatures of a supramundane quality. Our moral
nature will be raised in order, too, by the sense of its
religious affinity with other beings and worlds.
This, too, by means of the night "night unto
night showeth forth knowledge."

20 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

" In her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness
I learned the language of another world."

Sometimes we shall be oppressed, no doubt, by
tliis dread immensity of worlds, and fall back into
impressions of our insignificance that quite disable
us. But it will be a salutary oppressiveness; for
the immensity felt is but the type of God, and the
sublime purity and order it displays make it only a
type the more attractive that it represents our ideals,
when the distractions and deformities we meet here
below represent only the moral disorder and con
scious guilt of our practice. We get an idea thus
of God which very nearly asserts itself, and are
brought to conceive a glorious unknown society to
whom we are somehow related. All the conditions
of our moral existence are enlarged and exalted.
And this we say, be it observed, not in the sense
that we have got arguments to be so used, but in the
sense that, being constituted as we are, we are taken
by these inevitable impressions, and have them more
or less distinctly felt in their practical reality. As
tenants of a star-world, we are not the same beings
we should be in a world of mere sunlight.

We have still a different kind of benefit in the
fact that night and sleep bring us times of revision
or moral reflection, such as greatly promote the best

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 21

uses of existence. To live in a perpetual day, and
have what we call the hours of business ceaseless
even as the flow of rivers, would leave us no room
for reflection. We should be like seas in the trade-
winds, never getting still enough to reflect anything.
Our soul would be blind to itself by reason of the
perpetual seeing of our eyes. God, therefore, draws
a curtain over his light, checks the busy hours of
work and the turmoil of trade, and recalls us to moods
of silence and meditative though tfulness in the depths
of our own spirit. Many of us, I know, are sadly
indisposed to this, and, in one view, wretchedly in
capable of it. Yet, when their day is ended, even such
will naturally fall into a different mood. If the day
has not gone well, and they are much wearied by its
engagements, it will be difficult sometimes not to
meet the question, who they are that they should
be wrestling in such struggles ? It is quite natural,
too, for them, going over the day, to ask what, after
all, it amounts to ? And then it will be strange if
they do not sometimes go a little further, and ask
whither they are going, on what point moving, in
such a life ? Deeper and more serious natures, even
though sadly imbued with guilt, will be turned
almost of course to some kind of review. Another
day is gone, its works are ended. Ambition has spent
the fever of another day. Pleasure has exhausted

22 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

her charms. Idleness itself is weary. And now,
as the world grows still and excitement dies away,
the mind calls off its activity and turns it in
ward on itself. It hears no call of God, perhaps,
and thinks of doing nothing as a duty. But a
pause has come, and something it must think of,
for it .cannot stand still. Detained by nothing
now on hand, it travels far, and makes a large
review. It takes in, as it were by snatches, other
worlds. It touches the springs of its own immortal
wants, and they answer quick and heavily. What
ever wrong has been committed stalks into the mind
with an appalling tread. If Grod is a subject un
welcome, and guilt another even more unwelcome,
the moral nature has so great advantage now, and,
withal, so great sensibility, that the door of the
soul is held open to things not welcome. All those
highest and most piercing truths that most deeply
concern the great problem of life will often come
nigh to thoughtful men in the dusk of their evenings
and their hours of retirement to rest. The night is
the judgment bar of the day. About all the reflec
tion there is in the world is due, if not directly to
the night, to the habit prepared and fashioned by it-
We sometimes wake, too, in the dead of night,
and it must be a very hard man that can read these
night-thoughts which are not poems, without being

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 23

stirred by convictions more or less appalling. The
man is still on his pillow, the world is still even to
sublimity, the eyes are shut, or at least see nothing
if they are open. Perhaps it is some crime that has
murdered sleep, and perhaps not. Great thoughts,
and wonderfully distinct, crowd in, stirring great
convictions all the more welcome to the good man,
to the bad how terrible ! " Thou hast visited me in
the night," says David, " thou hast tried me."
And again, "My reins instruct me in the night-
season." What lessons of wisdom have every man s
reins given him in the depths of the night ! What
revelations of thought have come into his mind !
things how high, how close to other worlds !
reproofs how piercing, in authority how nearly
divine !

In all these specifications, it will be seen that I am
not looking after any kind of argument for the
truths of religion, or the vindication of God, but
showing simply how we are attempered, practically,
to the best things ; that also, perhaps, without
knowing it. Night and sleep are not a contrivance
to furnish us with thoughts or notions, afterward
to be applied to the moral uses of life, but are
fomentations rather directly applied, producing, in
that manner, modulations of feeling and mitiga
tions of temper, such as quite undemonize our bad

24 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

affinities. They do it also, it remains to say, in
yet another way, still closer to the purposes of
religion. It has been a great question with many,
whether it is possible to make out any proof of the
goodness of God from the mere light of nature ?
But it matters little whether we can or not, if only
we are somehow made to feel that goodness, as we
most certainly are, prior to all questions of argu
ment or opinion. And I think it is done more
effectually by the institution of sleep than by
anything else. Sleep is the perfectly passive side
of our existence, and best prepares us to the sense
of whatever is to be got by mere receptivity. In
the day we protect ourselves, or at least imagine we
do. In the night we cannot so much as think of
doing it. We are switched off from all self-care,
and our very mind runs in grooves not laid by
us. Having spent our loan of capacity, we fall back
into God s arms to be refitted by Him. We sleep
in his bosom, even as a child in the bosom of its
mother. And this falling asleep, in one view
compulsory, has yet, in another, a strange kind of
faith in it, in which we consent to drop off the
verge of consciousness and be no more ourselves.
The gulf we drop into is deep and wild, but we go
down trustfully, and there we rest. And this we
do every day, coming out as often new created for

OF NIGHT AND SLEEP. 25

life s purposes. If we are not religious enough to
say, "God giveth his beloved sleep," we do, at least,
feel ourselves refreshed by some wondrous benignity
somewhere, in which we have trusted. Neither does
calling that benignity Fate at all satisfy us. There
is dear good-will in it somewhere, which, if we
should name, is God. And we have this feeling of
Unknown Benignity the more certainly, that we
gave ourselves to it in wrong and conscious ill-
desert, which itself comports not with fate, and as
little with any feeling but that of some divine
goodness.

Besides, we are observers here as well as subjects
of experience. We look on a good man s sleep, and
there is nothing so beautiful. It is Luther, who
has worn out his powers in some great fight for
God; or it is Washington, half deserted by his
country when bearing its burdens, and now, for
getting all, he has fallen back into God s arms, to
forget also himself. There he lies uncaring, and
receiving back, from God s gentle fomentations, the
powers that shall furnish another great to-morrow.
Standing at the open door of his chamber, and look
ing on his deep, still sleep, it is as if the eternal,
ever-faithful Goodness had him now to Himself !
And yet more touching and closer to the tenderness
of mercy is the very bad man s sleep. He has

26 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

drunk the cup of guilty pleasure dry. His tongue
is weary of blasphemy. His deed of crime, perhaps
of blood, is done, and the chapter of his day is
ended. Having spent the power God gave him for
good in a violation of his throne, he goes remorse
fully to his bed, and there forgets even his remorse.
But God does not forget him, or toss him out of the
world, but he rests encircled by the goodness of
God, nourished by his patience, to be refitted for
to-morrow. Probably he will do just what he has
done before, but he shall have his opportunity of
good, though many times forfeited ; for it is a great
part of God s purpose in sleep to renew abused
powers ; else how many would never sleep again !
Therefore, who of us can look on a world buried in
sleep, a guilty, ungrateful world, broadly sunk
in evil, and do it without some deeply affecting,
overwhelming sense of the goodness of God ? I say
not that all men have it as a thought or opinion,
they do not ; but they do have it, which is far
better, as a feeling, that some unknown benignity
inspheres them, call it by whatever name. In this
feeling, too, all the most practical uses of life are
concentred and made convergent on the bending
of the soul to God, in ways of reverence and
religion.

II.

OF WANT AND WASTE.

[Y want, I mean a state of short supply;
by waste, a creative lavishment of things
that are not utilized, and perhaps never
can be. Both meet us together at every turn, as
light and shade in the same picture, and they so
far belong together, that I shall not feel myself at
liberty to part them, any further than it may be
necessary, to give them a sufficiently distinct con
sideration.

Considering that God is a being of infinite bounty
in his dispositions, as He is of infinite fulness in his
resources, we should say beforehand that He can
never institute a condition of short supply. Pro
portion, too, is a great and almost principal law of
his realm, planet yearning after planet, and atom
after atom, quantities of matter and motion after

28 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

other quantities of matter and motion, regulated
by exact ratios of distance all the masses of
the astronomic universe, all the atomic elements of
universal chemistry feeding each other, so to speak,
in supplies that exactly meet their quantities of
hunger. And yet, when we descend, or rather
ascend, to man, we are met by the remarkable dis
covery that, for some reason, he is put under an
ordinance of want, or short supply. He wants
clothing for his body, as no one of all the beasts
wants it ; but it is given to the beasts and denied to
him, except as he prepares it for himself. He wants
a house for shelter ; the squirrels have their trees,
and the wolves their dens, but the face of the world
offers no house made ready for him. He wants food
and must have it; the ravens are fed, but the
Father s bounty prepares him neither table nor
bread. He wants tools wherewith to help himself;
but the iron lies under the hills, and he must
dig it out ; and then he must find how to reduce
it ; and then how to make steel of it ; and then
how to fashion it; and finally, how to temper it,
before it is ready for use. He has also other kinds
of wants. His ear wants music, and his eye wants
beauty, and his mind wants knowledge, and his
heart wants worlds-full of friends, and his imao-i-
native ideals transcend all facts; but though he

OF WANT AND WASTE. 29

aches and writhes in so many deep kinds of hunger,
he only catches here and there a glimpse of what
his longings struggle after. His very life, in short,
appears to be a fixed ordinance of want. We see
him set down upon the world, and a thousand cries
break out in his hungry nature, which there is no
thing ready to supply. His being holds no concord
visibly with his condition, and there is no way for
him to live, except as he conquers to himself means
and instruments of living, which his Maker has
not seen fit to create. He has given instincts or
scenting powers to the young lions, by which they
seek their meat ; but from man He has withholden
even these. So very stringent, so deliberately
meant, is the state of want in which he is placed.
It is even as if God really had not enough to make
up our needed supply.

And yet He makes an amount of waste in the
outfit of his realm that is almost infinite. What
immense burdens of weeds, and grasses, and woods,
has He put growing in the remote wilds of nature !
With how many choicest and most brilliant flowers
does He garnish his solitudes, and how unsparingly
does He load his gales with perfumes, to be swept
across his deserts of sand and his water-deserts that
we call seas ! And then these deserts of both kinds
are themselves called wastes ; and rightly, because

30 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

they occupy spaces that might have been covered
with good land. Whole regions of the globe are
waste by excess of frost ; others by excess of rain ;
and others by excess of dryness and heat. The seas,
though waste to us, are vast pasture-grounds of life
to the watery herds nourished in their prolific
bosom, and they rush through its foaming acres in
every clime, in such bulk and number as would feed
the whole human race, and suffer no diminution.
But they die in their depths when their day is over,
and are strewed as waste food in the waters. Car
goes of pearls are hid in the sea never to be gathered.
Mountain-weights of gold are sunk, in gravity,
down to the earth s centre, or, at least, below where
any shaft can reach them. God has cabinets of
diamonds and other precious gems, that He keeps
in his caverns for his own particular inspection,
never to be seen by men. We are learning just
now also that the forces of the world are much more
precious in his eye than the gems ; that He lets no
force be lost or wasted ; that what was forest ages
ago, and a ledge of coal last month, and a steam-
power yesterday, is water and diffusive gas and heat
to-day; and thus, going through her rounds of
correlation, nature keeps herself exactly good, squan
dering no mite of her original force. And there
fore it is all the more strange that such immense

OF WANT AND WASTE. 31

quantities of forces are kept in play from age to age,
that never were and never can be utilised. Thus,
if we could husband and apply the whole tide- swing
force of the sea, it would suffice to keep more wheels
in action than will ever exist in fifty such worlds as
this. In the Gulf Stream alone, there is a greater
amount of mill-force than in all the rivers and
waterfalls of the planet. We offer it as a great
proof of God s beneficence that He has made such
provision for our culinary, heating, and steam-pro
ducing fires, in the immense coal formations of the
globe ; but if all the forests and oil and coal mea
sures we have on hand were burned up in a single
day, they would not make as much heat, probably,
as the great central fires underground are making,
day by day and age after age, and will make even
for a thousand millenniums. And all this vast
expenditure, as far as we can see, is waste, producing
nothing, save here and there an earthquake. Even
if the fuels were all spent, as many anticipate they
will be, we could not get help enough from these
hidden fires, by any method now known, to save our
selves from freezing. Only a mile or two of perpen
dicular distance there would then be between us and
supplies of heat sufficient to answer all our purposes ;
but how to come at the fires we could not find. They
are surplus fires, kept burning in their inaccessible

32 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

caverns, and shut up there, as consecrated waste, for
all time.

Now these two great elements of want and waste
will be seen to produce, and were probably msant to
produce, impressions of a moral nature that could
not be produced by either, or even by both acting
separately. One of them, standing by itself and
taken as an indication of God, would make us think
of Him as being straitened by too close a feeling of
economy, able to give us never what we need, but
only what we can possibly make sufficient by much
study and weariness of the flesh ; the other as being-
all profusion, caring more to pour it abroad than He
does even to serve a possible use by it ; as ready to
garnish a solitude or a cavern, as to feed a starving
invalid or child ; doing it, in fact, when many inva
lids and children starve before Him. But these two
characters, taken separately, are neither of them
true. The just conception is that He is such a being
as can fitly combine the two, as the wisest and most
completely beneficent sovereignty may require ; can
stint us for our sakes when not for his own ; and
then, again, can be lavish in things reducible to no
use, that we may not suppose Him to have stinted us
because He is short, either in his resources or his
dispositions. In this manner He can put us always
on our industry, without casting any reflection on

OF WANT AND WASTE. 33

his bounty. In these cross lights, therefore, of want
and waste He is always being discovered, and our
impressions of Him correspond. We could not
understand Him worthily in a state of merely short
supply. As little worthily if He could not limit his
profusion, to put us in such ways of training as will
best meet the wants of our character, and best pro
mote the good design He means to execute in us.

There is a peculiar felicity and strange cogency
also in the impression made upon us of our ill desert
in evil, by the joint action of these two factors an
impression that is even a kind of first condition of
our moral benefit. How many, for example, that
are shivering without fuel in the cold winter months
are put thinking of the vast, heavy- grown trunks
there may be falling down for age, in climes per
petually warmed by the sun, and rotting away on
the ground ! Monkeys are chattering and leaping
in animated glee through the branches that would
yield them a fire, how greatly needed, for their
comfort. Others are short of food or dying for
hunger, who remember the squirrels that are sport
ing with nuts, or the panthers and bears glutting
themselves with food, for want of which they starve.
We suffer no want the supply of which is not some
where perishing as waste. The sea is full of food,
the solitudes of the world are clothed in beauty and

D

34 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

vocal with music, all splendour and beauty and
profusion fill the earth ; still the riches are sooner
wasted than allowed to come to us. And so we are
compelled to say who does not say it ? " Mani
festly God is bountiful, and yet He pinches me. I
find it in my nature to love and desire profusion,
this is the paradise of my fancy and almost the
practical need of my want ; and yet, as if He had
some thought against me, God puts me down here
low, in short supply. What does it signify? Must
I draw some lesson hence against myself?"

Pursuing thoughts like these, it will be difficult
to avoid the impression of some moral defect or
spiritual alienation that requires a stringently close
discipline. A sacrament of conviction occupies {he
whole scheme of life. Whether we speculate or not
upon the contrast between our wants and the exube
rant waste of Providence, we are set in a different
mental attitude, and kept under the dominion of
impressions above all salutary to us. We see the
profusion round us, and, if we do not reason from
it, we feel what must somehow be implied in
it. A sense of estrangement breaks in, as it were,
through our eyes. We accuse our poverty, and that
in turn accuses us. The outward profusion makes
us feel our spiritual wants, and the more we feel
our spiritual wants, the more closely are we brought

OF WANT AND WASTE. 35

to the prodigal s resolve, when he says, " I will
arise and go to my father." Notice, also, how these
two feelings of want and waste concur in the pro
digal s story. "He began to be in want," and he
said, " My father has bread enough and to spare "
more than enough, bread that is even waste ; and
between these two points or poles it is that his bad
conviction works. And so it is with us all; we
commonly get our sense of wrong, as a moral state
of alienation, more or less distinctly from the con
joined feeling of our own close poverty and God s
infinite bounty. Were we set down here in short
supply, and everything about us made to bear the
same close, stinted look the sun shining econo
mically, the rains only dewing the ground, the
nights revealing only a star or two, the forest lands
growing only sprigs and copse, and the sea pro
ducing only a few small fish, afraid both of man
and of each other the niggard aspect of such a
state would rather put us on justifying ourselves,
and would be as far as possible from begetting any
tenderness of conviction toward God.

But there are uses both of want and waste that
depend more especially on their separate action,
and the impressions they produce in their own
particular spheres. We make our survey next of
these.

56 MORAL USES Of DARK THINGS.

Of such as belong to Want, or the state of Short
Supply. And here we encounter at once the fact
that we are put on creating something, at the very
outset of our life. We must do it, or die ; which is
the same as to say that we must consent so far to be
creative, like our Creator himself. He stopped short
in his own work, leaving our supplies unfinished,
and requiring us to go on and finish them ourselves
to plant, and cultivate, and build, and spin, till
the furniture of our comfort is complete. God could
have made harvests as easily as seeds, and bread
ready-baked as easily as harvests, and houses as
easily as timber, or bricks as clay, or cloth as easily
as wool, and coats as cloth ; but He preferred to call
us into creation with Him, as if He would put mean
ing enough into our existence, to give it dignity
somewhat like his own. For what dignity is there
in the fact, as we look abroad on the scenery of the
world, that all which differs the landscape in beauty
from mere wild forest, the meadows, and rich fields,
and gardens, and flocks, and roads, and bridges, and
churches, and monuments, and towns, and cities, is
not God s particular work, but man s ! God set him
to the task, and he has done it, forming what is
grander than the things themselves, a creative habit
like his Maker s.

And there is 1 the greater use and dignity in this,

OF WANT AND WASTE. 37

that everything moral, even up to the joy of moral
perfection, is, and is meant to be, creative. True
moral joy is not infused into souls, but comes up
out of hidden wells in their own positive goodness.
Their beatific state is nothing but the consummation
of a creative force working in the springs of their
character. It is a state of power, and its joy is the
birth of power. Passively received, it could not be.
It is the mounting up of a soul, in the faith of God s
nearness to it, into Grod s principles, aims, and
emotions. Were it a state of mere passive recep
tivity, there would be no growth or development in
it. A pampered weakness and glorified idleness
would be the whole account of it.

Hence the necessity of some such arrangement
as would gird us to creative action, in a way of
getting our supplies. Were there a perfect harmony
and equilibrium between man s nature and the
world every want met by supply, every desire of
his heart gratified as it rises it were only a fit
completion of the plan to case him in a shell and
glue him to some rock, where the floods of bounty
sweeping by shall bring him his nutriment. No,
he could not be man as belonging to the testacea.
Conflict only and battle can effectively muster his
powers. He does not sufficiently exist if he is not
made to fight for his existence. If he is not made

38 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

creative, then lie is but half created. Real life must
have some heroic force in it, else it only breathes,
but does not live. Sons of ease and luxury, who
are never to have a wish ungratified, or the move
ment of a finger required, are put down as born in
the family register, but they are only half-born
as yet, and are not likely to be more, till they are
put to the strain by wants and impediments, which
they could better afford to buy than to have been
without them. Sometimes a prodigious volunteer
ambition may fulfil, in part, the same uses ; but we
commonly expect to see the effectives and great
spirits and geniuses of the world struggling up out
of obscurity and want and heavy throes of soul-
birth, and taking their places as conquerors. They
are men of victory, not of fortune. And therefore
doubtless it was that, to give man a start, God threw
him out of his equilibrium at the beginning, incor
porating in him wants, the supply of which he is to
get, only as he wrings it from his crude possibilities
by strenuous exertion. Possibilities, not supplies,
ure given him, and it rests with him to convert his
possibilities into supplies. Want is to be the dry-
nurse of his powers, teaching him to think, contrive,
resolve, and, putting means to their ends, create for
himself. Hunger, meantime, gnaws at him, the
eat scorches him, the rains drench him, the snows

OF WANT AND WASTE. 39

drive into his bosom, all the pitiless elements fall to
work at him, and he takes up his fight to keep
them at bay. At one point of victory he gets
courage for another. Every success sharpens his
invention, sets him to a firmer tension of resolve,
and lifts him to a manlier confidence, and the first
grand problem in his training, the development
of his creative force, is effectually resolved. He
is no more a mere being, but he is a practical
being, whose internal possibilities are become more
wonderfully full, than the crude and meagre possi
bilities given him for the outward furniture of his
life.

Consider, next, the moral significance of our state
of short supply in the fact that so healthful and
regular an impulse is imparted by it to habits of
industry. Industry is the natural teacher and
guardian of virtue, and the world is contrived to
be its proper schooling-place. It proposes that we
may obtain a well-endowed future here, just as holy
obedience will do it hereafter only in a lower
plane of endeavour. Its industries are to be sys
tematic, sober, and steady. Its cares are to be
thoughtful. It will have us get on by constancy
and the frugal saving of our gains ; just as every
highest saint will get his victories by the tender
economy that saves his little advances. It holds

40 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

the mind to a provident foreseeing habit, and con
centrates the otherwise vagrant expectations and
visionary dreams that pay their court to accident
or fortune. Its pleasures are such as flow from
the sight of its rewards and the enjoyment of its
comforts. It consents withal to let go self-indul
gence, and bear the toils of patience. It is, in fact,
a kind of natural piety ; coming to the great powers
of nature the seasons, the soil, the mechanical and
chemical laws of the world and there making
application, as a Christian applies in prayer to his
God, suing thence by labour the supplies and bene
fits it wants. It wrestles with nature as Jacob
wrestled with the angel. It prays with Agur,
" Feed me with food convenient for me." Its
very toil is liturgical, without even a chance of for
mality. By how thin a veil is it separated thus from
God! Let it only bring its suit one degree closer,
piercing the veil, and it becomes even holy piety
itself. So closely to his bosom does God manage
to bring us, under the teaching and discipline of a
short supply. Not to admire the sublime teaching
of want, viewed in this connection, will be difficult
for any reflective person. Possibly here and there
a man might go into some kind of action, bodily
and mental, from a state of complete gratification or
full supply. He might bound over the fields like

OF WANT AND WASTE. 41

the deer, in mere redundancy of life ; he might pile
up edifices just to see how they would look, having
no other use for them ; and if then, having grazed
to the full in what is to him the great man-pasture,
called the world every sense delighted, every
appetite cloyed he shall betake himself to his
bowers, and there, as the soft breezes fan his
temples, let his busy fancy rove, creating images
at random, and swimming in the glories of his
poetic dreams ; this would be activity, but activity,
alas ! without an object a busy caprice, a strenuous
idleness. Manifestly, such kind of activity would
be a wretched preparation for anything moral or
holy. Bring him in want, gird him to labour, see /&</
him wipe the sweat from his brow as he toils to get
his bread, and we find him in how good a school,
learning how brave a lesson a lesson, too, that he
wants much more than he does bread. Call it the
curse : I will not stop to argue the question whether
that curse was a miracle of blight added after man s
defection, or a possibility inserted by anticipation,
and developed by the terrible reactions of his sin
itself; enough to know that, like all God s curses, it ^
is a curse for benefit, which if we do not like it, will
none the less faithfully stay by us. And who is there,
what living man, that has any the least capacity of
reflection, who has not discovered that good necessities

42 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

are the grandest wealth of existence ? To be cornered
and pressed and edged on practically into the best
ways and noblest endeavours, turned away from evil
and made strong in good, corrected, lifted, amplified,
and held fast in the way to be glorified what man
will not thank God for such good necessities more
devoutly than for life itself ?

It is also another very important use of want that
it prepares a basis for what is called the menm and
tuum of property ; which is, in fact, a kind of first
condition as regards the moral training of our life.
Here it is that we learn what it is to be just and
what to be unjust. Here it is that fraud and
violence and falsity stir us to such faithful rigour
and decisiveness in our moral condemnations. Mere
principles would not signify much to us ; they
would even seem to be a great way off, if they did
not touch us in something which vividly concerns us.
We take part here for truth, and justice, and right,
and faith, and exact honour, because there is property
at stake ; and who is indifferent to property ? Our
courts, too, and public records, and all our immense
toil in the perfecting of the civil state as a defender
of society, are but a part of the grand moral struggle
that centres in the holding, and use, and transmission
of property. Every principle we assert is moral;
every right we vindicate is based in moral ideas.

OF WANT AND WASTE. 43

But it is not perceived by all that God s insti
tute of want is at the bottom of property, and so of
all the moral discipline it brings with it. If we
had every comfort and gratification ready for use ;
if our food were bending to us from the trees ; if
<rold and diamonds were a full half the common dirt

O

and gravel ; if temples, railroads, and cities full of
merchandise, were bursting up everywhere out of
the ground of their own accord ; there would, in
such a case, be no chance of the existence of pro
perty. What we call property is created by the
incorporation of labour, which gets a right, of
course, to have what it has created, or by some kind
of improvement modified.

But there can be no labour where there is no
want. "Who will put himself on toil to make up a
supply that is made up already ? And what care
have we to say, " This is mine/ when we are more
likely to throw it away than we are to have it
taken from us ? The whole fabric of society, as
a moral affair, falls to pieces, and is lost, as far
as the rights of property, and trade, and titles,
and justice are concerned. We are only put to
pasture in the world, with a certainty of being
satisfied and surfeited, and cloyed by our abun
dance.

We shall also discover that many other of the

44 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

principal preparations for our moral training are
discontinued, in like manner, by the simple removing
of want. The family, for example, is bound together
chiefly by this tie. Husband and wife are knit by
this tie, more stringent and often more enduring
than love. Children want everything, coming into
life, as it were, in a type of universal want. Here,
too, is the meaning of that intensely moral word
home. If there were a home everywhere, then there
were no home. If there were supplies everywhere,
then the common labours and rough hardships
which bind families together the property, the
expected harvests, the hoped-for income all the
sweet bonds of care and common enjoyment are
superseded. Let the children go into the fields as
the young animals do, and they shall find enough.
All the tender relations of care, and love, and
government, in this best school of virtue are gone,
and society has become a herd.

Again, it will be seen that the manifold distinc
tions and relations of mutual dependence, which
constitute a basis for reciprocal duties and charities,
are mostly due to the ordinance of short supply.
For if the same unbounded gifts were poured out
to us all, and every man could freely take his full
supply, there would be no acquisition, and by con
sequence no property; all distinctions but such as

OF WANT AND WASTE. 45

are immediately personal would be unknown, and
society would so far be dissolved. As it is now,
everybody wants almost everybody. Labour seeks
capital, and capital seeks labour. The poor look
after employment, the rich look after service. The
weak want friends and protectors, the strong w 7 ant
clients and dependents. Leaders must have followers,
else they cannot lead ; followers must have leaders,
else they must hew out their way for themselves.
And then it is to be seen, through all these diversi
fied relations of dependency, what is in every man s
heart and "principle, and what kind of passion will
rule his conduct. Pride, arrogance, ambition, op
pression, cruelty, avarice, envy, discontent, ingrati
tude, treachery every man s evil, whatsoever it
be will be charactered as in definite sun-picture,
and held up before him ; and whatever is loathsome,
disgusting, revolting in wrong, will be discovered to
society, in and by society. And so, on the other
hand, provision is made through society, set off by
want in so many relations of dependence, for the
discovery of whatever is beautiful in so many kinds
of virtue protection, favour, encouragement, ex
ample, patience toward the weak, forbearance toward
weak enemies ; answered by fidelity, truth, unstinted
respect, unenvying homage to position. The im
mense power given to moral ideas by this light and

46 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

shade of social distinctions and degrees can hardly
be over-estimated.

In this category, too, of social distinctions pre
pared by want, it is that provision is made, as it
were of set purpose, for charity. It was never
God s intention, in our state of short supply, that
any should suffer lack. Had there been no place
left among men for sacred charity, that would itself
be the sorest lack of all. Who is more truly blessed
than he that, being full, loves to impart his fulness
to such as are in want ? And when the suffering
invalid, or child of sorrow, finds a large, free heart
of brotherhood open to his want, is he not as truly
blessed, though in a humbler key ? This dear,
divine charity, we can easily see, would have no
place in the world, if there were no want in it.
God makes room for it by his ordinance of want,
giving it in charge thereby, to all that conquer
a state of abundance, to make up what necessities
are unsupplied ; doing them great respect in leaving
so many wants to be made up by them ; which, if
they do, He takes them, as it were, into honourable,
high partnership with himself, saying, " Ye did it
unto me."

But there is a more general and absolute kind of
benefit in our state of want that remains to be
named last of all, namely, the benefit of limitation

OF WANT AND WASTE. 47

itself. It is the sin of all sin that it refuses limita
tion will not accept the limitations even of law.
And then, since no limitation of law can be carried
by mere force, what shall God do, with so great
hope of benefit, as to put us under limitations,
closely related, that can be so carried with pro
priety ? Besides, if He had given us full scope in our
passions and pleasures, as He must in a state of
boundless supply, it is impossible to guess into what
depths of license and wild debauchery we should
have been plunged. Appetites unrestricted, self-
government broken, no labour, boundless gratifica
tion poured into the bosom of idleness, passions
chastened by no sober necessities a single thought
suffices to show us, that want itself is now the
greatest want. Let this come and be a cage of iron
about us, since we cannot be kept in heaven s order
without a cage. If the bars press closely upon us
and we writhe, much writhing will do us good,
especially if our writhing takes the form of work
and self- regulative economy; for the industry we
practise is really a sort of obedience that we pay to
limitation; and then, as the limitation accepted is
nearest in resemblance to the restrictions of law, the
obedience practised is next thing, in a sense, to that
holy obedience which is typified in it. Or, if our
state of want galls our pride and sometimes worries

48 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

it quite down, if it checks our presumption, tames
our passion, makes us little and poor and weak,
what are we doing but trying to make a god of this
world, and what is more necessary or fit, than to
starve our god and bring leanness into his wor
shippers ? And it is none the worse if our state of
want is more than disregarded in this manner
inflamed, exasperated, and made conscious. "It is
a miserable state of mind/ says Lord Bacon, " and
yet it is commonly the case of kings, to have few
things to desire and many things to fear." We
should all be so far kings, if our supply were full ;
and, having few things to desire, we should be
insipid and dry as most kings probably are to them
selves. Great wants, a consciousness of want gaping
wide as the sea, is but the yearning of a nature felt
to be as great, and crying after God, who alone can
be the possible complement of its desires; which
want itself is even a kind of luxury, and poor indeed
are they that have it not. It still remains to speak
more briefly

2. Of the uses of Waste. When we see that God
pours out of his abundance, in creative lavishments
that never can be turned to any practical use by us,
we are taken quite away from the conceit that some
thing worthy of Him is to be found, only when we

OF WANT AND WASTE. 49

discover in his works adaptations to our physical
want or convenience. It has been a great study of
science for many years past to discover such points
of adaptation, and so great progress has been made
that many are ready to assume the fact of nature s
universal adaptation to our human uses in the
bodily conditions. Doubtless nature is adapted
somehow to our uses, but not, of course, to
our physical uses. Some things will be the better
adapted to our mental and moral uses, that they
are not adapted to our physical, and because
they are not. Everything created must be
somehow the expression of God, and all that is
in God is adapted certainly to our best uses in
thought and duty and character. But if we
could reduce both Him and his work to a mere
contriving of physical and mechanical adapta
tions for our comfort, we should make Him out a
scheme of morality in about the lowest figure of
utility that ever was or can be imagined. And to
save us apparently from so great folly and falsity,
He has made a very large part of his creation for
waste, as far as any mere physical uses are con
cerned all the polar regions, all the inaccessible
summits of the mountains, all the deserts, all the
immense depths of the seas, and what is more, and
some thousands of miles deeper, all the tremendous

E

50 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

steam-gulfs and fire-seas boiling at the world s core
indeed, there is nothing in God s whole creation
adapted to our physical use, and nothing that ever
can be, save in the globe s mere bark or peel. In
that superficial and very thin covering, too, a very
great part shows no trace of adaptation, and is,
besides, interlarded with agues and miasmas, and all
sorts of mineral and vegetable poisons. So carefully
has God excluded the possibility of a mere Bridge-
water treatise religion He will not have it assumed
that the chief end of God is adaptation to man.
He gives us all the productive means we want, and
makes the world correspond with us up to just that
point where it had best correspond with himself,
representing not so much his contrivance as the
spontaneous outpouring of his illimitable quantities
and exhaustless forces of creatorship. For it was a
matter of as great consequence to us to see his
exuberance as his contrivance, and his creation was
to be the more grandly adapted to us, that it tran
scended so far all petty possibilities of physical use,
and revealed, on so vast a scale, the waste He could
afford to spread about Him, as the type of his own
divine splendour and profusion.

We look abroad thus over the vast unutilised
quantities of his realm, and perceive at once that He
is measuring his work not by us, but by himself

OF WANT AND WASTE. 51

rather ; and it comes into mind : " The Lord hath
made all things for himself." We behold the
realms of air and earth and sea peopled with
joyous life ; as if to say that He has pleasure in
adaptations made for other creatures as truly as for
man insects and mere animated atoms able with
out exhaustion to set their instincts, and make up
their instrumentations, in the nicest forms of fit
ness ; creatures that will live and die unvalued by
us, and, therefore, have no value save to Him. Hi
care of them is perfect, though it be the care of
waste, and reveals, in just that fact, his really divine
capacity. And if it be something to us that the air
is adapted to our breathing and blood, the earth to
our feet, the water to our thirst, far more does it
signify that there are so many myriads of creatures,
folded by God s care, who exist only for his private
eye breathing, leaping, flying, and filling his
realm with their gambols, and yet living only as
before Him.

By this same exuberance of care expended on the
wild races of life it was that the sacred poet s mind
was so deeply impressed, when he sang his Bridge-
water treatise in this high strain, reciting God s
care of the beasts "planting the cedars of
Lebanon, where the birds make their nests : as for
the stork, the fir-trees are her house. The high hills

52 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

are a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for
the conies. The young lions roar after their prey,
and seek their meat from God. Lord, how mani
fold are thy works ! in wisdom hast thou made them
all ; the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great
and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumer
able, both small and great beasts. These wait all
upon thee, and thou givest them their meat in due
season." Wherefore his conclusion is what other
could he think of ? " The glory of the Lord shall
endure for ever ; the Lord shall rejoice in his
works." For beholding God thus, in works of
multitudinous life which are waste to us, having no
relation to our physical uses, they have even the
sublimer use that they represent the fertile father
hood of God ; and yet another use, in teaching us
not to assume that we are measures of the world s
contents, not to put ourselves to any airs of loftiness,
as if the world were made for our convenience. It
is made for us mainly in the sense that, being waste
for us, it is expression for God. We are tenants
here of a large house, emmets, I may say, in a vast
cathedral, which if it do not yield us all the sup
plies we want, yet bears the signatures of loftier,
holier uses that exceed our petty measure and pro
portion. And yet the temple, vast as it is, is not
too vast for our feeling, and full as it is of things

OF WANT AND WASTE. 53

existing only for God, it is even the more appro
priate and better adapted to us, because they repre
sent his glory.

I will only add, in conclusion, what appears to be
quite evident, and was doubtless meant to be, in this
matter of waste, that use or utility is not any cer
tain law of morality or religious conduct. That box
of ointment that was going to be spent for nothing
how plausible was the appeal to use, recounting
the pennies it would have sold for, and the nice
things it would have bought for the poor ! Only
it was Judas, and not Christ, that was forward in
the argument. Christ was willing to have it all
spent as a tribute of pious luxury on his own head,
and even praised the woman besides, as He almost
never praised any one of his disciples. " To what
purpose is this waste?" For the very same pur
pose, we are to answer, that some things are best
which do not meet a bodily want, and because they
do not ; best because they are waste ; even as nine-
teen-twentieths of God s creation is waste. Much
He does for our comfort and happiness ; a great deal
more to raise an opinion of his resources, and the
glorious wealth of his fatherhood. To beget or
express a sentiment is a matter of as great conse
quence to Him as to serve a convenience. He
neither holds nor would teach, that charity goes

54 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

by a law of economy, or that virtue tallies with,
utility. He breaks away, himself, from all utili
tarian standards, and pours himself out in his own
measures. So there is to be a certain lavishment
and waste in what we call our piety. We are to
have our secret testimonies, offer our hidden sacri
fices, do our alms, which only God shall know;
delight to spend, for love s sake, more than we need;
pour out bounties that never can be utilised, save by
some feeling or faith enriched. Ornament, perfume,
colour, proportion, expense, majesty, any kind of
waste that is not ambitious, and only expresses the
heart, as the woman s ointment expresses hers,
stands well in the terms of duty. God is no philan
thropist, and does not train us to be, save in that
high sense that He can sometimes allow even our
human want to be stringent, when He lavishes
bounty on the sea or sprinkles the dust with gold.

III.

OE BAD GOVEBNMENT.

IT is one of the complaints of Job, that
" the earth is given into the hand of the
wicked; which, if it is less generally
true now than it was in his day, still continues
to be a standing complaint of the world. The
deplorable fact, the moan of history, as we all
know, is bad men in power, and still bad men in
power. We follow down the train of nations and
peoples, and distinguish everywhere the groanings
of this sorrow. The flies that buzz and flutter in
the tyrant spider s web are an image too faithfully
true of our miserably weak humanity, wriggling,
age upon age, in the toils of abused power. What
unspeakable sufferings crowd the dismal story !
Order is the pretext for all worst and most cruel dis
order. Ideas of right and liberty make their appear-

56 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

ance late, and then as crimes. Industry is trampled,
property and titles violated, families broken by
exile, weakness stripped of shelter, and crime of
redress. Virtue itself is crushed and duty per
secuted. Woes of taxation, woes of plunder and
lust, under cover of public authority ; woes of bleed
ing for conquest, and bleeding under conquest
whole nations and peoples dragged into the march
to die, leaving other nations depopulated and bare,
where their desolating march has swept there is
no end, in short, to the distractions, poverties,
starvations, bereavements, and bitter pangs of
wrong, which are being laid, in all ages, on the
world, by the cruelties of wickedness in power.
When we say these things, crowding our large
impeachment into a few short sentences, we seem to
be rather making a declamation than a sober state
ment of it ; but if we could summon up the facts
and scenes, and set them forth specifically in full
historic array, they would take an air of verity so
dreadful, as to make us even shudder at the possible
endurance of the world.

Why then is it, and how, that power is generally
found in the hands of wicked men ? It is not always
so ; as we see when a Cyrus, a Cimon, a Regulus,
an Alfred, a Washington, or a Lincoln, holds the
reins of empire. Sometimes a real usurper like

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 57

Cromwell, seizes the condition of power, to wield it
only for the vindication of right and liberty. And
when just men like these are allowed to show the
immense beneficence of power, in the blessings con
ferred on their times, and the up -looking comfort
and strength produced, in a few short years, by
their righteous administration, we only wonder the
more that such examples could not be more frequent;
asking again, less patiently than before, Why is it
that so many bad men are allowed to stalk over the
world in baleful prerogative, crushing out again and
again, one after another, the rights of merit, and the
promises and possibilities of public civilisation ?

Must we therefore doubt that God is good ? or
that He organizes law and public rule for the protec
tion of right, and the advancement of all best ends
in society ? Perhaps it may be true, as we often
hear, that bad empire is better than no empire at
all ; and Providence, it may be thought, is justified
by the preponderant benefits of law, however
wickedly administered, as compared with the un
speakable miseries of general anarchy. But why
should it be necessary to make out our vindications
of Providence in this low scale of computation ? If
authority and empire are so much wanted that the
benefits a little predominate even when wickedly
administered, how much better and more invaluable

58 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

are they when they are held by just men, faithfully
serving their times ? And just so much worthier is
it of Providence never sufficiently honoured save
when it provides the best to have good men always
in power. And we seem to have an almost impera
tive reason why it should be so, in the fact that we
are even put in moral obligation to "the powers that
be," on the express ground that they are "the
ordinance " of God himself. All the more strange
is it, therefore, that bad powers are declared to rule
thus in God s right, and that we are further required
on holy principle to obey them. So, at least, we
reason why not well ?

And yet not well, as we shall abundantly see,
when we look the problem through more carefully ,
and bring out the points of a true and sufficient
solution. They are such as these :

1. Bad men are never in power because they are
preferred and selected by Providence ; but they are
set in power by the laws of inheritance, or they win
their election to power by wicked and corrupt arts,
or they seize on the condition of power by unscru
pulous acts of usurpation. Such laws of inheritance,
too, are created not immediately by God, but by
human society rather, and are only providential in
the sense that God allows society, in a merely per
missive way, to establish its own customs and prece-

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 59

dents ; preferring, as a matter of benefit to society,
to let it have a qualified agency in its own govern
ment, instead of ruling it by absolute dictation him
self. Besides, it is by no requisition of Providence
that the ruler promoted by inheritance is a bad man.
He could be a true, just man, such as God is ever
prompting and helping him to be. Exactly the
same thing is to be said when a bad man mounts
into power, as a trust conferred by election. Society
made the laws of election ; society made the choice.
Providence did not prefer his election, but only pre
ferred to have the people elect for themselves, and
do it wisely ; only meaning to have them get instruc
tion enough, when they do it unwisely, to rectify
their judgments and give them a conviction, more
profoundly impressed, of the necessary requisites of
justice and character. Not even a usurper need be
a bad man, or make any bad use of power. When
his act of usurpation is instigated only by the public
woes of his time, which woes cry to God for redress,
he fulfils a call of duty, and is, in fact, the more
sublimely right, that he dares to seize a power which
feebler souls would not. Had Washington failed,
history might question whether he was not a usurper,
as it quilo commonly a^ivcd that Cromwell, God s
true champion, was. But the bad usurper, the
Nimrod of his time, is not put in his place by God,

60 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

and is not wanted there ; only God consents, for the
peace of society, that powers usurped by wrong shall
be taken as powers de facto and obeyed, till they are
broken by their own excesses, or some counter
revolution is organized with a rational chance of
success. It is not therefore true that God puts any
bad man in power, or, in any proper or true sense,
prefers to have him in power. His plan is simply to
let society and man come into this field, and learn
sufficient wisdom in it to prefer and elevate only the
just.

2. It will perhaps be imagined, that if God does
not set the bad in power himself, He could, at least,
prevent their coming into power, and save the world
in that manner from all the public miseries inven
toried in history. In a certain coarse, physical
sense, He could ; that is, managing the world by
omnipotent force, He has force enough to do it. But
He does not govern the world by force. He has
consented to govern it through its liberty ; that is,
by counsel, influence, secret motivities, and provi
dential corrections, just far enough off, or far enough
back, to allow no finger s weight of force on the
prerogatives of liberty. In this way God has con
sented, because it was best, to have men generate
and man their own institutions. In this finer,
higher sense, therefore, it is no irreverence to God

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 61

to say, that He could not prevent the obtaining of
power by wicked men ; for we only mean that, for
good and sufficient reasons, He has consented not to
interfere by force in holding them back, and that,
as will be seen at once, puts his omnipotence out
of the question.

Besides, there is a great deal more implied in
preventing their attainment of power than may at
first be apparent. No mere holding down or repres
sion of their lustful energies will be sufficient, save
as there is an immense uplifting of society also into
character, and law, and courage for the right. No
bad man seizes the condition of power without help.
And here, in fact, is the principal difficulty that
society itself is so low and weak and wicked, as to
offer itself to the prey, under any most crafty,
unscrupulous leader. And there is, in fact, no way
of preventing his attainment of power, save as he
is hemmed about by stouter souls in the panoply of
stouter principles. Where there is a mean, dejected,
fawning spirit, the bad man need not be much of a
hero in getting power ; he will, in fact, be lifted
into it.

It takes very little force to mount above weakness,
ignorance, and low servility ; it would even require
a very considerable power of self-control not to
usurp, by their instigation, some right of precedence.

62 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

What wonder, in fact, is it that men have been
deified and set up as idols of religious worship,
where souls are only abjects to themselves ; where
the low-born feeling is dazed by airs of pride and
circumstance, and the feeble admirations and base
sycophancies of sin have taken away, not only the
manliness, but the proper energy of selfishness?
Thus comes also caste, a classification of orders that
is set on a footing even of religious conviction ; not
that the upper rank has put down the lower, any
more than the lower has lifted and sanctified the
upper. Had the lower continued to be men, the
upper could never have become gods. They made a
bid for degradation themselves, and took it by divine
right, because it was in them already. Much the
sume is true of fashion. Some tyrant, or some
favourite of some vicious court, or it may be only a
court exquisite, or court harlot, has been able, by a
certain splendid audacity, to set the mode ; and then
how tamely, nay, how eagerly, submits the world !
running to put on its badges of humiliation, ashamed
to be without them, and even fearing not to be as ab
ject as the law of abjectness requires. Terrible power,
this tyrant of the mode! Rather say, sad, awful
weakness, this subserviency, nay, pride of subser
viency, in the race. And how many things does it
include opinions, associations, duties, a,nd even the

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 63

choice of a religion itself ! How few can dare to be
singular even in these ! It requires, in fact, less
nerve to fight a battle than to resist a fashion.

We help bad men into power in other ways less
feeble and as much more greedy. The usurper
makes no stride by himself, but he has his retainers
and conspirators about him waiting for the spoil.
Thus, if he is to be elected to power, he will have
his file-leaders, and voters, and vote-buyers about
him, even as the eagles are gathered to their prey.
Or, perhaps, they will have banded themselves
together, and set him up to be promoted by their
vote, not for his sake, but their own ; in the name
of precedence making him their tool. And the
greediest, wildest despotism in the world is the power
that is wielded as a tool. A political party will
often be more sure of its ascendancy, as it is more
desperate in character held together as a many-
headed tyranny, for whole generations, by the
cohesiveness of wrong, and a liberty that is free to
sell the muniments of order and right. Conquerors
do not harness the people to their chariot unhelped ;
but the people themselves want, some of them, a hero,
and some of them a chance to be heard of themselves,
and a great many more to see the brave sight of an
army ; so they march to the standard with cheers
only dragging after them, by compulsion, such as

64 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

will not go for the spoil or the glory. Slavery
might seem to be mere force, instigated and helped
by nothing but the lust of gain. And yet this
ownership of men was only bought of another
ownership that was gotten by capture, and that
capture again was bid for by the weakness of the
captives, waiting, as it were, to be seized. And so
poor Africa groans under the heel of slavery, simply
because Africa herself is breeding and hunting her
children, to endow this awful tyrant power of
slavery, the worst and most wicked, in some respects,
the world has ever seen.

Glancing about thus in every direction, we dis
cover some kind of bad power mounting into as
cendancy. What men can, they seize usurpation
is the devil, so to speak, of all high possibility. But,
generally, there is a vast complex contrivance with
them in society itself. They are instigated, set on,
thrust forward, lifted up, by the weakness, the
foolish subserviency, the mean servility, the greedi
ness, and rampant passion of the world. So that, if
we require it of God to prevent the attainment of
power by bad men, He can do it only by preventing
society at large from being just what it is exactly
what He has been doing, in all ages, from the first
day until now ; only it is not yet done, and, in fact,

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 65

can be done, only by the slowest and tardiest re
generation possible.

3. It will sometimes occur to us that if God may
not prevent the raising of bad men to conditions of
power, He might well enough restrain them in their
abuses of power ; hedging them about by his provi
dence, humbling them by his providential judgments,
inventing checks and counter-checks, making the
love of popularity restrain the greediness of plunder,
setting a balance between sensuality and ambition,
holding back from manifold wrongs by the dread
of wide- spread conspiracies, making the temptation
of a name an argument for great public beneficence,
wielding the dread of other powers as a motive for
the highest possible advancement of wealth and
character and art, in the people of the tyrant power
to be maintained. Even masters might be set to the
cultivation of all best powers, whether of body or
mind, in their slaves, by the consideration of higher
honour and higher profit to themselves, in the use
of their faculties. All such counter-balancings and
restrainings of motive by opposing motive, are, in
fact, employed to a certain extent, and are always
at work under Providence ; but they only moderate,
never effectually stop the rage of bad power. To a
certain extent, we come into this field ourselves,

F

66 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

having it as one of our own great points of wisdom
in the adjustment of political institutions, to make
up what we call " a system of checks and balances ; "
and some of our most theoretic statesmen appear to
imagine that it can be done, with such perfect nicety
of perception, as to make everything keep traverse,
no matter how bad the magistrates or the people.
This most preposterous conceit, which undertakes to
make bad society good enough for good government,
has never been attempted by the supreme govern
ment of the world. And if possibly God could
execute such a feat of skill, He would certainly
deem the trick more mischievous than ingenious.
What could be a greater subversion of moral dis
tinctions, than to have bad men as beneficent, as
much beloved, as profoundly honoured, as the good
and the just? If wicked sovereigns, having no
regard in principle for righteousness, would yet, for
policy s sake, be always faithful to the right ; if
they would sanctify justice, not because it is just,
but because justice is salutary ; if they would assert
the right of the poor, because the poor may yet bo
rich, though despising now their brotherhood ; if,
for any and all such false motives, they would
rightly moderate the uses of power, and win it thus
for their distinction in history, that they did well
and grandly served their people, when caring for no

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 67

principle, and living in no terms of moral order,
they would be the very greatest curse to society
that society has ever seen greater, happily, than
ever has been or ever will be seen. Wrong in the
attitudes and honours of right ! profligacy whole
some ! pride as good as principle ! passion trust
worthy ! selfishness beneficent ! Such kinds of cha
racter, if we had them, would very nearly overset
the distinctions of virtue, and would be, in fact, the
greatest conceivable calamity to the race. We are
brought on thus :

4. To that which appears to be the grand all-
determining reason of Providence in the elevation
of bad men to conditions of power; namely, the
very important, quite indispensable uses they may
serve, by their wrongs in that condition, as related
to the better and more effective development of
moral ideas. It is simply letting society and man
be what they are, to show what they are. For, in
raising a world out of evil, a very considerable and
first problem is, to reveal it to itself, or set it in the
best conditions to make such a revelation. The
revelation of God is one thing, but a prior and
equally necessary thing is that man should make a
revelation of himself ; that is, a revelation of what
is evil and demands a cure. For evil, as a purely
spiritual matter, hid in the heart, is not so very

68 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

obvious, and is all the less so that we are so much
accustomed to it, and so necessarily blunted by it.
Hence it becomes a great and forward problem in
the world s economy, how to get evil most effectually
revealed to itself. And it is done, as we shall see,
in three principal modes or degrees ; namely, in
what we are and do to inferiors, what we do as
between equals, and what we do in conditions of
power that give authority.

Thus if one is hard upon the poor, harsh to
children, cruel to animals, he makes, or may, a very
great discovery of himself; such as simply sitting
down to muse, or think within himself, it would even
be impossible to make. What is in him is brought
forth by his acts, and distinctly mirrored in them.
The same is true of his conduct among equals. If
he is unjust, passionate, severe, revengeful, jealous,
dishonest, and supremely selfish, he is in just that
scale of society, or social relationship, that brings
him out to himself. Simply existing, with so much
evil in him, would give him no such impressions ;
but the friction of his life among equals, in neigh
bourhood and family, in trade and travel, in society
and opinion, keeps him all the while astir, and lets
him forth in continual self-discovery. He cannot
slink away out of sight into the obscurity and occult
meanness of his own self-containing silence, but he

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 69

is obliged to feel his torment, and reveal his malady,
both to himself and to others.

But the full, sufficient, supremely impressive reve
lation is never made save in the condition of autho
rity, and it appears to be one of the great ends of
civil society to prepare and bring forth to the general
sense of mankind this revelation. The fact is recoff-

o

nised that government is wanted, and must somehow
or other be had, and then society as it is the weak,
the wicked, the foolish, the strong, all mixed up
together, and brewed historically as a caldron
heated by much lire is to throw up leaders, chiefs,
princes, magistrates, constitutions, here in one form
and here in another, and what man can do for him
self, in getting up protections and protectors, is to
be seen. And a very considerable part of his benefit
is to be gotten by his failures. Evil is scarcely to
be known as evil, till it takes the condition of autho
rity. We do not understand it till we see what kind
of god it will make, and by what sort of rule it will
manage its empire. So it results, that bad men get
their ascendancy, because there is badness in the
world ; and then they rule the world as tormentors
and tyrants, because they must needs act out the
evil that is in them. In this very simple statement
we have the short account of how large a part of
the world s bitterest woes ! This one word oppression,

70 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

what a history has it ! in the tears and groans and
robberies and captivities and shackled bodies and
desolate homes of mankind; in so many peoples
moaning to each other, age upon age, the outcast lot
of merit, and the cruel persecution of religion ; in
so many times of dejection when society loses hope
and possibility under the humiliations of defeat, the
prostrations of industry, the disabilities of debt, the
violated honour of contracts and treaties repre
senting, all, the madness of power. The feeling
brought forth in this manner, and kept in painful
tension, under almost all experiences of power, is
the feeling of wrong, bitter oppression and abuse,
mockery of right and reason, and the cry goes up
audible or silent to God " O Lord ! how long, how
long?"

What now is this but a conviction impressed, or
revelation made, of some dreadfully malign principle
in our humanity ? It cannot bear elevation. Power
makes a demon of it. And yet we go on trying to
make society safe, and organize some kind of power
that will save us from the abuses of power a task
that is, alas, how difficult ! But this one grand fact
or issue is at least made sure, and it is of greater
moral consequence than success itself would be;
namely, that in all our nations and families that
class above the grade of barbarism, we are kept in

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 71

continual stress, or strain, to conquer a condition of
right and safe protection. Hence all the struggles,
agitations, and great revolutions for liberty, from
the times of the Greeks downward. Almost every
people have had in turn their Draco, their Pisis-
tratus, and their thirty tyrants more or less, and the
struggle has been going on, everywhere, in every
age, to heave off the burdens of oppression and
pluck down the oppressors, and conquer, if possible,
some state of law and liberty ; for what we mean
by liberty is not release from law, but a state of
security and sheltered equity under it. Such liberty
how dear to man ! made dear, by what ages of trial
and sorrow under the loss of it ! The very idea of
such liberty is moral, and the grand struggle of the
ages to gain it is a struggle after moral ideas and
the sublime, divine equities of law. And just here
all the merit of God s plan, as regards the permission
of power in the hands of wicked men, will be found
to hinge ; namely, on the fact, that evil is not only
revealed in its baleful presence and agency, but the
peoples and ages are put heaving against it, and
struggling after deliverance from it. We do not
commonly think of it this tossing of men s souls
after liberty as being moral at all ; we call it
political ; but the contest, if we can but see it, hangs
entirely on such moral ideas of right and beneficence

72 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

as are staple matters in gospel itself. Our very
struggle against the domination of evil doers puts
us so far in respect of right, and begets a kind of
salutary prejudice in us against evil. Even if we
never pray for this holy boon of equity and right
which power has robbed us of, we do, at least, long
heavily, strive earnestly, suffer manfully, and fight
in life s peril to regain it. What we call society,
kept heaving in this kind of struggle, becomes in
tensely moral, and all we do for it is done to make
our life endurable, by the re- establishment of just
such muniments of right as we have ourselves cast
off. As far as we go, we are fighting ourselves up
into redemption. Kot that every man who is earnest
for liberty, is trying how to become a saint, but that,
in a certain general way, the drift and striving of
society is toward conditions of right and equity, such
as faithfully accord, when deeply sounded, with all
the highest and divinest principles of duty. And
how great a point is this to be gained in a world
under evil !

We do not always turn ourselves about in pious
reflections, it is true, on what we are doing in these
matters do not imagine perhaps that we are get
ting human evil revealed by these woes of wrong
and oppression ; still less that when we are rioting
and wrestling for liberty, we are drawing toward

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 73

everlasting principles of right and divine reason ;
probably still less, that we are uncovering, in all,
the glory of God and God s true magistracy. Here
is power that wants no checks and balances to keep
it safe ; here is due shelter for the weak ; here is
equity for the proud and the violent themselves ; here
is justice never perverted, and law never misapplied.
All this exactly is what we are striving after, and
yet we do not see it ; what has our great struggle
with bad power to do with God? We have no
thought in it of being at all religious. Just so, it
is probably true ; and still I am obliged to believe
that religious ideas are brought as much closer to
us, as we are brought closer to them, and God as
much closer to our feeling as religious ideas are more
closely bound up with our successes. What is the
great political reformer and champion of his people
doing, under so many abuses of power, but contend
ing for terms of right and banefit? What is he
maintaining but that government is for the benefit
of the governed? based, in this manner, in the
supreme law of beneficence. What then is he
doing but affirming and glorifying God s " powers ?"
And what is more likely, more necessary, in fact,
than that he and the people that follow him will be
drawn sometimes to think of God more appro vino-ly,
and with a softer feeling. They want beneficence

74 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

how bitterly do the poor creatures ache for it ! and
here it is, full-orbed and ideally perfect. It is quite
impossible that nations, struggling thus after deliver
ance from iniquitous power, and the establishment
of righteous liberty, should not more easily be drawn
to God and religion. They may for the time be less
religiously reverent, they may rather seem to have
their affinities with all kinds of unbelief, but their
real bent even then is better than it seems; they
only disbelieve what power has so fearfully abused ;
but God as He is, when fitly seen, will be more easily
loved as the world s Great Friend and Keeper.

We discover also, what accords with this, that all
our modern advances in the department of govern
ment and public liberty are attended by another
kind of advance which is moral, and exactly keeps
pace with them. Our constitutions, our limitations
of monarchy, our abatements of priestly despotism,
our vindication of free thought and opinion, our new
created parliaments, our emancipations, our world-
free commerce under world- wide guarantees of law
while we are asserting in all these forms the supreme
right of society to be ruled for its own good, there
begins to be a deference paid almost everywhere to
the principle of beneficence itself. We assert the
brotherhood of man ; we take part in feeling with
weakness and dejection the world over; we educate

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 75

our own peoples and try to evangelize others ; we
think we begin to see how party can be organized
and held fast in right, instead of being wild force
only, organized by the cohesiveness of plunder.
Moral ideas are set up in public arguments, incor
porated in the documents of thrones, and also begin
to have an acknowledged place in statesmanship.
Not only do magistrates by election, but the most
absolute princes, admit the strictly moral tenure of
their rule, and their obligation to rule only for the
good of their people. The change, in one view, is a
result of Christianity, beginning, at last, to win its
true place in society. In another view it is due to
the immense struggles of our modern nations after
liberty ; instigated originally by the oppressions and
the unendurable wrongs of wickedness in power.
Both concur, one as a power moving down upon
society from without, the other as a power bursting
up out of society instructed by its woes.

It requires to be added, for the complete develop
ment of this subject, that political society makes no
real and permanent gain when it makes a conquest
for liberty, save as that gain is utilised and set fast
in the department of moral ideas and principles.
We have just passed through a great public contest,
for example, not with our thirty tyrants, but our
thirty or three hundred thousand tyrants of slaverv,

76 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

to induce and bring to the ground the malign power
they were asserting above our laws and institutions.
They had been educated to be tyrants, and could not
be republicans. There was never any possibility
that a leadership trained by slavery should not
make a magistracy contemning right and the re
straints of law. They now lie prostrate, and their
many-headed tyranny is broken; and yet there is
nothing done for true liberty in them by merely
forced emancipation of their slaves. Give them
power, and it will be bad power still, until the gain
is utilised and made fast in their moral feelings and
opinions. They can never be republicans till they
get into the divine principle of law, as the guardian
of liberty. If the tyrannical passion of mastership
is in their hearts, if the slavery stays by morally,
though broken physically, they cannot be citizens in
any true republic.

Let them have the condition of power, and it
would be bad power, still impossible, as ever, to be
kept in terms of allegiance. There have been a
great many overthrows of bad power in the world,
but not one of them has ever been a gain to liberty,
save as there has been some moral gain accomplished,
to sanctify and set in place the principles of right
and beneficence. How many republics have the
French people had proclaimed during this present

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 77

century ! Have they gained their liberty ? Just as
much of it as they have gained in moral convictions,
principles, ideas of right, and duty. If they should
only gain a little more, they might bear the liberty
of the press, and perhaps Napoleon could bear it too.
So if we proclaim the republic, as against slavery,
ten times in a century, we shall only gain upon the
slavery as far as God s free principles goodness
and true brotherhood are incorporated, by our ten
campaigns against it ; and it makes a very great
difference, be it observed, whether it is they cam
paigning for liberty themselves, or we campaigning
for it in them.

It remains, in conclusion, to suggest what appears
to be a very important deduction, as regards the
moral uses of abused power, that it would be a very
great misfortune to any people who are loose and
low in their moral ideas, to have a smooth and
equitable government kept up among them for a
great length of time. If, by some mischance, some
power of right tradition, or a kind temperament in
a royal stock, some adjustment of checks and balances,
some distribution of public functions in the depart
ments of legislation, of justice, and of executive
administration if in any such way the government
should keep itself in wholesome respect to right,
when the people are growing selfish, and dastardly,

78 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

and cruel, and sensual, and false-hearted, and knavish
in trade, what is there, in the cast of their history,
to make them any better? Manifestly nothing.
What they want is bad government, and a good long
time of it ; and what they want they will have,
though it may come late. They must have a call
for courage, else they will never get it, and they
must groan bitterly, before they can raise that cry
for liberty that rallies courage. The only good
medicine for their selfishness will be found in their
public sacrifices. Much blood-letting will be needed
to get their meanness out of them. If they are
cruel and treacherous for the two things commonly
go together they will get a softer, truer magna
nimity in the heroics of liberty. Their time may
not come along just as we imagine, but it will come.
Let us not imagine that it will not come to us,
because we have a government written out. Men
are not controlled by the wrappings of paper. If
we come to want a usurper, and make a bid for one
by our moral degeneracy, our sycophancy, our
violence, and reckless passion, we shall have him.
A thoroughly wicked majority is enough to make
as much wickedness in power as we can find how to
master. There is, in fact, no tyranny so dreadful
as that tyranny by the million, which is organized
by a corrupt party. It is not, of course, smooth

OF BAD GOVERNMENT. 79

sailing that we have to do in future, as many are
ready to assume. As we have had to groan for our
deliverance, so may also our children. Better is it
for them, if they require it. Have we not ourselves
gotten benefit out of our sacrifices ? Do we not feel
strengthened mightily in our principles? Do we
not seem to have had a new, grandly moral sense
of them opened in our hearts? In that sense,
maintained by whatever means, let the republic
stand

IV.
OF OBLIVION, OE DEAD HISTOEY.

F there be anything worth living for, in
the case of a man or a people, most of
us would be ready, by a kind of natural
inference, to conclude that there must be so much
that is worth being remembered. In this infer
ence, too, we are helped by the filial reverence
that binds us to the men or ages that have gone
before us, and by the almost invincible instinct of
historic curiosity itself; allowing us never to rest
without knowing something of the strange world-
field behind us, and the seeds out of which we have
come. We have it also as a maxim, that we differ as
men from the brutes, chiefly in our capacity to profit
by example, and we even go so far in this matter,
as to think that we make out real philosophies
of history. And yet of all that we call history

OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 81

that is, human history the greater part is dead,
utterly gone out and lost. The rocks of the world
have registered the story of creatures far inferior.
Even the birds have printed their tracks, and the
rain-drops spattered their marks on the pages of
the register ; but of man s great history, so much
later begun, and so much deeper in its meaning,
only the dimmest and most scanty vestiges remain,
to represent whole thousands of years. What
thoughts wrestled in those dim centuries ; what
songs were sung; what structures reared; what
names figured ; what peoples tramped across the
fields of time in their marches and wars all these
are gulfed in oblivion, and practically to us are not.
Descending to what are nominally called first eras,
we begin to gather up traditions, and vestiges, and
scanty and dry records, that have a certain historic
look, but not much of history. And the history is
scarcely more real when we come to the times of
definite and formal narrative ; only a few forward
names and events, and figures, are put moving as
shadows in the story, but what the vast populations
have been doing, what they have felt, and been, is
dead; not only not recited in the past tense of gram
mar, but having no longer any tense at all. Not even
the recent past is preserved accurately enough to be
really known. Who ever fails to note the miscon-

82 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

ceptions, or only half conceptions of a written story,
having lived in the time, and been a part of the
transaction, himself ? And how many that read this
essay, after all they may have heard of their own
grandfather and the facts and incidents of his life,
will be able to feel that they truly possess the man?
Probably there is a kind of mythic air in so many
stories and traditions, such as seem to be shadows
only of his life and person nothing more, and
scarcely so much as that.

Now it will be obvious to any one at a glance,
that God has not made any such thing as a com
plete remembrance of past ages possible. He writes
oblivion against all but a few names and things, and
empties the world to give freer space for what is to
come. No tongue could recite the whole vast story
if it were known, the world could not contain the
books if it were written, and no mind reading the
story could give it possible harbour. Besides, there
are things in the past which no tradition can accu
rately carry and no words represent. Who that
will untwist the subtle motives of action can do it
far enough to make out anything better than a
tolerable fiction ? Who can paint a great soul s
passion as that passion, looked upon, painted itself ?
To come down to things more humble, yet by no
means less significant, by what words can any one

OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 83

find how to set forth, a gait or a voice ? And yet,
if I could simply see the back of Cato jogging out
a-field, or hear one sentence spoken by Caesar s
voice, it really seems to me I should get a better
knowledge of either, from that single token, than I t/
have gotten yet from all other sources. So very
impotent are words to reproduce, or keep in im
pression the facts and men of history. We have a
way of speaking, in which we congratulate ourselves
on the score of a distinction between what are called
the unhistoric and historic ages. The unhistoric,
we fancy, make no history, because they have no
written language. But having such a gift, with
paper to receive the record of it, and types to
multiply that record, and libraries to keep it, and,
back of all, a body of learned scribes, who are skilled
in writing history as one of the elegant arts, we
conclude that now tlie historic age has come. We
do not perceive, that, in just this manner, we are
going to over-write history, and write so much of
it that we shall have really none. If we had the
whole world s history written out in such detail of
art, we could not even now make anything of it
the historic shelf of our library would girdle the
world. What, then, will our written history be
to us, after it has gotten fifty millions of years into
its record ? for we must not forget that the age we

84 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

live in is but the world s early morning. Calling
it the historic age, then, what are we doing in it
but writing- in oblivion, as the unhistoric age took
it without writing at all ?

By a simple glance in this direction, we perceive
that God, for some reason, scrutable or inscrutable,
has determined to let large tracts of past events
be always passing into oblivion ; and though it
disappoints, to a certain extent, that filial instinct
which unites us to the past, and puts us on the
search to find, if possible, who are gone before us
and what they have done, I think we shall discover
uses enough, and those which are sufficiently bene
ficent, to comfort us in the loss.

And, first of all, it will be seen that we do not
lose our benefit in the past ages, because we lose the
remembrance of their acts and persons. Do the
vegetable growths repine or sicken because they
cannot remember the growths of the previous cen
turies ? Is it not enough that the very soil that
feeds them is fertilized by the waste of so many
generations mouldering in it? The principal and
best fruits of the past ages come down to us, even
when their names do not. If they wrought out
great inventions, these will live without a history.
If they unfolded great principles of society and
duty, great principles do not die. If they brought

OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTOR Y. 85

their nation forward into power and a better civi
lisation, the advances made are none the less real
that their authors are forgotten. Their family spirit
passed into their family, and passes down with it.
Their manners and maxims and ideas flavoured
their children ; then, after them, their children s
children ; and so more truly live, than they would
in a book. About everything valuable in a good
and great past is garnered in oblivion ; not to be
lost, but to be kept and made fruitful. For it is
not true that we have our advantage in the past
ages mainly in what we draw from their example,
or gather from the mistakes of their experience.
We have our benefit in what they transmit, not
in what we go after and seek to copy. And passing
into causes, they transmit about everything they
are; and, to a great extent, their corrections for
what they are not ; producing emendations probably
in us, that are better than they could find how to
make in themselves.

But we do not really strike the stern moral key
of Providence in this general sentence of oblivion
passed upon the race, till we make full account of
the fact that the major part of our human history is
bad in the matter of it. This, to some, will seem
uncharitable, or unduly severe : but if they feel it
necessary to be offended, they have only to run over

86 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

the general bill of written history, and see what
makes the staple matter of the record, to perceive
how faithfully the stricture holds. Very few good
men, and very few really great deeds figure in the
record. Great wrongs, oppressions, usurpations,
enmities, desolations of unholy war, persecutions
of righteousness and truth, are the chief headings
of the chapters. The eminent characters are, for the
most part, eminently bad, or even abominably wicked.
And when the staple matter of the story is less
revolting, it is generally not because there is a better
mind or motive, but only because an immense cloak
of hypocrisy is habitually drawn over actions, to
make them less disgusting, and more decent-looking
than they really are. Nothing prodigiously bad is
done by many, simply because of the mean, dastardly,
selfish spirit which dares not heartily do the evil it
thinks. In this view, as I conceive, the major part
of man s history is bad better, therefore, to be
forgotten than to be remembered ; pitch it down
under all-merciful oblivion, and let both sight and
smell of it be gone for ever. We want a clean
atmosphere, and there is no way to give it, but to let
the reeking filth and poison pass off. Even if we did
not copy so many bad things cramming our memory,
it would cost us incredible damage simply to be
meeting and taking the look, every moment, of these

OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 87

bad images, whether we copy them or not. We
could not be familiar with such types of evil, with
out being fouled by them, and, therefore, God has
mercifully ordained a limbo into which they may be
gathered and sunk out of sight. Who could be less
than a reprobate, having all the monster villanies
of the past ages crowded into his memory, and com
pelling him to have their touch upon his feeling day
and night ? But as God has ordered the world, He
is all the while making it morally habitable by suc
cessive purgations. He permits us to breathe safely
in permitting us to know almost nothing of the bad
past. And the institution of written history does
not very much vary our condition. Who of us does
not remember instances of very bad and very bril
liant men, who were the common talk of their times,
but are now less and less frequently mentioned, and
will shortly be quite forgot ? Good men are not so
easily forgotten ; partly because they are more rare ;
partly because they take hold of respect, which is
firmer and more fixed than memory ; and partly
because their good is closer to the principle of im
mortality, imbibing life therefrom. Hence they stay
longer, lingering as benignant stars in the sky,
while the bad and wicked are mercifully doomed to
make blank spaces for them, and contribute what of
benefit they can by their absence. " The name of

88 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

the wicked shall rot " this is their gospel ; which,
if it be wholly negative, is so far grandly salutary.

Consider, also, in this connection, how certainly
we create a better past, when the real and frequently
bad past dies, or is lost. And for this very purpose
it would seem that God has set everything sliding
away into oblivion. He means it for our moral
benefit ; so that when the actual past is faded away,
we may retouch it, or create another, by an idealizing
process of our own. We know that other genera
tions have lived before us, and also that we had
ancestors, and though we hunt after traditions, and
keep family registers, we really know very little
more. But we think we know, because we imagine;
for our busy imagination begins half unwittingly to
fill up our blank spaces with paternities and mater
nities, and, in fact, with whole populations and ages,
such as we can think ideally, and probably a great
deal better than the real fatherhoods and mother
hoods whos3 places they occupy. So we get rid of a
bad past by oblivion, and set up a good, or at least
better one, for ourselves ; such as will not harm us
to think of, or shame us to remember. And this
imaginary fatherhood and people of the past what
reverence do we pay them, in which reverence to be
profoundly profited and blessed ? What better can
a great and worthy filial feeling do than to create

OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 89

and sanctify a great and worthy past ? And then,
when it is so created and sanctified, what will it
more certainly do than to make itself more filial in
return, and morally better every way ? We do not
commonly state the matter in this form. We know
the very names of our grandfather and grandmother,
and likewise, it may be, even of theirs. So we think
we have them, in merely having their names.
Doubtless, it is something to have their names,
because we may so easily put our own feeling and
desire into them ; and if we have beside some few
scant vestiges of knowledge, these also are dear ;
but more commonly the names and vestiges we body
into men and women have little body, or meaning,
or merit, to attract our reverence or support our
praise, save as we ourselves give it. And, in just
this manner, we have it as one of our delightful
occupations to be creating our own grandfathers
and grandmothers ; and, in fact, the general past we
seek to revere. And it is a most excellent oppor
tunity ; for these ideal men and women are whole
some to think of, and the more we honour them the
more they do for us.

In this manner we get the advantages of a
tolerably good world behind us just such a world
as we certainly could not have, but for that ordi
nance of supreme oblivion that makes room for it.

90 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

It is a very great thing for us morally that we shape
so many ideals, for we escape, in doing it, the
awfully foul tyranny of facts; and our ideals are just
as much more real than the facts, as they are better
and closer to the wants of character. Therefore
doubtless it is, that so great liberty is given us in
the creating of our own past. We escape thus into
another and generally better realm, where the air is
more free and the attractions more pure. We have
ideal personages with us, and, what signifies much
for us, they are at least as good as we most natu
rally try to think. And they have the greater
power and value to us, that they seem to loom up
into quality and magnitude out of the unknown,
whence we ourselves have evoked them. We see
them fringed about with mystery thus, calling them
"reverend fathers of mankind." "Whatever is
unknown/ says the proverb, " we take for some
thing great." Oblivion itself is a great magnifier,
raising the names we idealize and idolize into
sublimity, by the haze of unknown merit through
which it permits us to see them. And the gods of
the mythologies appear to have been created largely,
thus, out of the unknown reverend fathers idealized
only their sanctities were rubbed off shortly, or
denied, by the gross actualities of practical use.
How far this idealizing method or law is taken

OF OBLIVION. OR DEAD HISTORY. 91

advantage of, in a way of supplementing real history,
and giving the greater power and value to a few
bold touches of narrative than a full circumstantial
record could possibly have, may not be at once de
cided. But we all recognise it as the wondrous
felicity of certain characters that we know so little
about them, and yet seem to know so much, and that
of a type so impressive. We say that we wish it
were possible to know more, which is very nearly
equivalent, not unlikely, if we could see it, to
wishing that we knew less. For if their full story
were written, so as to answer all inquiries, and
bring all circumstances into light, the additions
made would rather stale and flatten the great cha
racter than raise it ; for one must be a singularly
perfect man to be lifted in majesty by picking up
the crumbs and saving the small items of his story.
What greater injury, in general, can befall a cha
racter, than to have its story made up in such nice
precision as exactly to meet the little curiosities of
little minds ? To be so perfectly known argues a
sad want of merit, and, if the perfect story is but
fiction, amounts to almost a scandal. If Hamlet
were known as perfectly, or exhaustively, as some of
the critics will show when they make out his story,
he would not be Hamlet longer. If Joan of Arc,
not flitting into history and out again, had come

92 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

abroad duly certificated, with the facts of her bio
graphy regularly made up, and all her supposed
visitations, revelations, debates, bosom struggles,
and motives accurately detailed, she would only
seem to have been a case for the hospital, and
would, in fact, have been sent to the hospital
before she reached the field. She struck, she won
the post of leadership as in God s mission, because
she spoke out of mystery, and took the faith of her
time by the spell she wrought in its imagination.
And she wins a place with us in the same manner,
compelling us to supplement her almost unknown
story, by the faiths and admirations challenged
by the wondrous, seemingly divine, force of her
action. And therefore it is, I conceive, that when
God would paint, or have painted, some highest,
grandest miracle of character, setting it forth in a
way to have its greatest power of impression, He
makes large use of oblivion, brushing out and away
all the trivialities and petty cumberings of the story.
Let the blank spaces be large enough to give
imagination play, and, for this, let as much be
forgotten as can be ; and save the few grand strokes
that are to be the determining lines of the picture,
let the story be so scantily told that we shall often
wonder, and sometimes even sigh, that we have so
little of it. Only so could a real gospel be written.

OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 93

What we call our Gospel is so written, and no such
life as that of a Christ could be otherwise given
to the world. A full-written, circumstantial bio
graphy would be a mortal suffocation of his power.
There was no way but to let oblivion compose a
good part of the story. And if we cannot imagine
oblivion to be inspired, we can perceive it to be one
of the grandest of all evidences of inspiration in the
writers, that they could not stoop to over- write and
muddle their story, by letting their foolish admira
tions pack it full of detail. How very natural would
it have been to write a particular account of the
infancy of Jesus, and of the whole thirty years pre
ceding his ministry, telling how He grew, and
looked, and acted, and what the people thought of
Him, calling it perhaps Yol. I. of his biography !
How often have we regretted this missing picture,
and longed to have had it supplied with how
much real wisdom we can probably see in that
foolish Gospel of the Infancy which undertook after
ward to supply it ! How easily could it have been
given by any one of the Evangelists ! And yet their
whole account of the infancy is made up in a few
brief sentences. John, the apostle, had Mary, the
mother, with him, we know not how many years,
and she told the story over, how tenderly, how
many times ! He was getting old, too, when he

94 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.

wrote his Gospel, and old men are proverbially
garrulous ; and yet he says not one word of the
infancy, or gives any faintest allusion to Mary s
conversations. No ; he has something great to
record here, and something which can be fitly
honoured only in a few bold strokes of narrative,
such as will even make the story idealize itself more
vividly than words can describe it. Why should he
pile it with cargoes of circumstance, when the world
itself could not contain the books, and Christ him
self would be written out of his divinity, by an
itemizing Gospel that proposes to enhance his re
cord? On this principle all the Gospels were written.
The wonder is, that so much is let go for oblivion
when so much could be easily told. And the result
is that, being put in this manner to the supplement