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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;
n
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
ing ideally of what is so massively, yet summarily,
given, we get a Christ who proves himself to our
feeling as much by what is not said, but left to our
faith to supply, as by what is told in so great brevity
and boldness of confidence. The story is told as if it
were believed, and had power to make itself be
lieved. I will not say that every great character
must be shown as the " Word made flesh " required
to be. More of circumstance is permissible in the
inferior characters, and consistent with a due respect.
Yet even a great, good man, may be sadly weakened
OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 95
by over-remembrance. His moral value depends on
his getting far enough, into oblivion to be strongly
remembered. Not even the sun is half as bright in
clear, full day, as when he burns a passage through
his clouds, proving his effulgence by the obscuration
he has overcome, and the close, black setting in
which he is envisaged. Nothing is sufficiently
revealed which does not refuse to be hid, and has
force to burst into knowledge through oblivion
through clouds, through falsifications of enmity and
prejudice. On the other hand, nothing is so little
known as that which is lugged into knowledge.
Passing hence to other points more promiscuously
related to the general subject, it may further in
crease our g ood opinion of the moral uses of oblivion,
that it sometimes proves and magnifies its conse
quence by not coming soon enough, or not ex
punging names and characters that only perpetuate
their evil in being remembered. What we call the
aristocracies of the world are generally grounded in
such. I take no part here as against social and
political distinctions, because they offend the prin
ciple of equality. I speak of aristocracy as a purely
moral affair, where its real demerit is commonly
overlooked by assailants. Few persons appear, in
fact, to make any just observation of the stupendous
96 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
immorality in which these high conventionalisms
have their beginning. Orders might exist in a
world not under evil, but orders of caste are based
in evil itself, and commonly show it by their origin.
Thus how many noble families in England take
their beginning from some castled robber, some
wild chieftain or pirate ravaging the seas^ any kind
of man that was the terror and principal thief of his
|
time, eight hundred or a thousand years ago. Bar
barians, men of lust, high wassailers drinking out
of the skulls of their victims, freebooters winning
a crest by the pillage of a province anything is
good enough that is bad enough to get a name.
And the misery here is that family ambition gets
the start of oblivion, and is able, against the laws
of Providence, to embalm its founder in the honours
of wickedness ; which honours of wickedness, having
won it a crest, it is very likely to emulate and
perpetuate. Hence the generally unmoral or de
moralising power of aristocracy ; abjuring, at the
beginning, the principles of God and the brother
hood of man, and assuming to be ennobled by wrong.
Usurpation is better to it than right, because it gets
more play of will in daring insult to right, and
asserting its pre-eminence by the self-elation of its
manners. There are, I know, many virtuous and
really good men in the noble ranks of the world ;
OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 97
men who are morally ennobled by their worth and
modesty ; which signifies a great deal more, and
puts them back consentingly into the acknowledged
brotherhood of their race. Allowing such exceptions,
it is not to be denied, as a matter of history, that the
very worst, most hideous, most disgusting crimes
ever committed in human society, have been per
petrated under the instigations and within the
honoured circles of nobility. The wrongs by which
these chieftain classes trampled the happiness, and
mocked the rights of the inferior orders, in the
former ages, make a most sad and revolting chapter
of history. Could the broom of oblivion, ordained
for wickedness, have only swept away clean the dates
and recollections out of which such monsters grew,
how great the moral and social benefit that would
have followed! Exactly this, most happily, is done
for us. We have abundance, doubtless, of noble and
even royal blood, sprinkled through our American
families, but we do not know it or care for it. All
such airy notions of quality, and absurdities of date-
worship, are fenced away from us by walls of obli
vion. We have and want no footing but the common
brotherhood of man. All the more hopeful and
brighter in new possibility, is the great moral future
before us. Owning God s appointed brotherhood,
what shall follow but that we, at last, be grounded
H
98 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
filially in his principles ? "We shall thug achieve a
new and better form of society, because oblivion has
come to our help, as it has not hitherto, save par
tially, to the more ancient civilisations of Europe.
Meantime it will be seen that in another depart
ment of life, somewhat related, the law that keeps
opinion flexible and free has never failed of its
ofiice. I speak here of the part which God himself
is always maintaining, in the expurgation of history,
against what may be called the over- conservative,
anti-moral tendencies of many. There is a good
and much- wan ted conservatism, viz., that which
can bravely withstand precipitate measures, and
subversive and wild innovations, sanctifying, in
conviction, what conviction has sanctified ; but there
is also a bad, unmoral, sometimes almost immoral
conservatism, which is very different. A certain
class of men, without courage, or imagination, or
high moral convictions, are never able to see that
anything can be in respect save what is now re
spectable, and contrive to be always fawning about
the idols already set up, with sophistries and cold
servilities of argument, that amount to a worship
nothing better than hypocrisy. To consider what is
wanted, or is true, or in real candour obligatory, is
not in them ; but they are emulous of selectness or
high associations, and think it safer and more skilful
OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 99
to coast along the past, and not strike out where the
needle only of responsibility can guide them. These
timid Chinese souls are going always to save a
Celestial Empire, not to make one ; and the danger
was that they would get so stunted in courage and
imagination, that nothing would be left to carry on
the grand progressions of morality nothing left
but a hopelessly effete and lapsed condition, under
the tyranny of the past. No greater misfortune to
character could befall the world. It was a great
problem, therefore, how to keep off this tyrannizing
power, and hold the race in courage, forethought,
self-determination, and that free advance in truth
which is necessary to a great future in character.
And here is the meaning, herein lies the value,
of that vast, wide- sweeping, almost undiscriminating
oblivion that God has let in as a gulf-stream to sweep
the past away. Plainly enough He is no conservative
in the style of what is commonly called conservatism.
He is always letting things come into the world that
He will not let stay in it. Almost everything done
here is done for transition, not for stationary fixture.
He is always saying, not to old men only, but also
to old fact, " Pack and be gone, that new fact may
come in, finding room and fresh air." He will not
let us keep ourselves on hand over-largely, lest, if
we remember too much of our past, we get stalled
ioo MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
under it, and die before life is ended. A great
many things appear to be swept away and lost that we
should suppose might be saved, and here and there
something is saved that we should think might
as well be forgot. We wonder especially that some
very bad names are stuck in immortality, as flies in
amber, and preserved only we may note that, as it
is without much advantage either to the amber or
the flies, but with real advantage to science in both,
to have their date and story so registered, so it was
necessary that some bad names, such as the Nim-
rods, and Ahithophels, and Neros, and Borgias
might furnish, should stay for long-remembered
ages, and allow us to get courage in the discovery,
that our own bad men are no new product of our
degenerate times, but were even preceded by worse.
Be this as it may, we do have it fixed as an impres
sion, and it is an impression that deeply concerns
our moral benefit, that nothing has, or ought to have,
any sure chance against the broom of oblivion, save
what belongs to principle. And even principles
will require a great winnowing out of men, and
require to be many times winnowed and redeveloped
themselves, before they are settled into their true
interpretations, and forms, and places. A great
many things, we thus perceive, are not to be con
served, but to pass ; and we are never to be worried,
OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 101
or thrown out of courage, because even what is
good appears to be going ; for if the good is making
room for what is better, and the admirable for what
is more to be admired, what reason have we for
regret ? Above all, let there be no timid and heart
less emulation of past things, taking refuge under
them from the bold responsibilities of the pre
sent. Let the passing pass, and the great moral
ideas keep their ferment agoing, and new life fresh
ening in the world. So much of gospel is there in
the dreadfully negative, world- empty ing work of
oblivion.
And this same lesson accrues, in another way of
benefit, to the mitigation of another and less tract
able kind of mischief. A certain class of souls that
were narrow in quantity, and hot in conviction,
were likely to get stalled in bigotry, becoming, in
this manner, only haters and extirpators, in the
name of duty and religion. If there were some
way of becoming thieves on principle, it would
scarcely be worse. For the bigot, sacred as may be
his pretensions, and earnest as he appears to be in
the uncomfortable heat of his devotion, is never
theless, in almost every case, a morally sinister
and evil-minded person uncandid, unreasonable,
jealous, sometimes treacherous, often sensual, always
cruel all the worse and more thoroughly detest-
102 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
able, that lie finds how to marry so much of passion
with so much of what he thinks to be conviction.
And yet he holds nothing as if it were true, but
everything as if it were false ; that is by his will
made fierce by his passion. Now this kind of
character was going to be one of the greatest dis
honours and pests of a moral system and of moral
society. Medicines for such were therefore wanted,
and what better could there be than this grand nar
cotic of oblivion, that buries, in unwaking sleep, so
many idols, and so many bloody and fierce cham
pions, that all may be forgot together? If contend
ing earnestly, as they say, for the faith, they really
had faith, and not merely contention, it would be
well ; but they make a most sad figure when we look
upon them, burning down their life so often to a
cinder, without even a spark of that fire that is
kindled by God s love in the breast. If such men
had the world to themselves, they would make a
hell- state in society, more pitiless and fierce, and
further off from heaven s principle, than a good
many prison wards where felons congregate. How
much easier, too, is it for souls under evil to become
extirpators, than brothers in candour and sacrifice
it will not even cost the necessity of a conver
sion. How mild and beautiful a ministry for them
is God s deep gulf, down which they are dropping
OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 103
into silence and out of remembrance ! A world to
make the bigot more absurd than this, I think could
not well be contrived.
I must not omit to mention, last of all, the very
important change produced in the moral temper of
our world under evil, by so many desolations and
blank spaces in its historic map and annals. "We
move, and are largely moved, in the moral life, as
in masses that is, by cities, by nations, by empires
for what we think and feel in such high airs of
consequence and confidence, when we are bodied in
some great realm or people our pride, conceit of
power, ambition, untamable will passes into our
moral temper as individuals, and casts the habit, to
a great extent, of our character itself. Therefore
as we have free license to do as we will, by states, or
empires, or churches, it becomes necessary to put
these in ward, and temper them by needful correc
tions. And when we let our thought run over so
many mere bird-tracks of oblivion etched on the
map of history, what a picture do we see, and what
sad tokens of remembrance, nearly expired, do we
there recall ! The great North African Church,
stretching along the whole south coast of the
Mediterranean where is it, by what single vestige
is it discovered ? And where is the world-famous
Church of Alexandria ? where the great Syrian,
io 4 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
centred at Antiocli? and the Church of Asia
Minor, centred at Ephesus ? If we call over the
roll of the great cities, Thebes stands mute in stone,
speaking no more. Great Carthage is almost as
difficult to find as the body of Hannibal. Tyre has
forgotten her merchants of old. Palmyra was dis
covered in the eighteenth century ; Babylon and
Nineveh have just been dug up. The cities of the
Aztecs are overgrown rock-formations, where forests
luxuriate as naturally as they do on the world s
geological strata. If we speak of temples and
monuments, the stones of the Incas remain, but the
Titans that piled them are gone. The pyramid-
temple of Cholula remains, but nobody can tell
how it was used. The great mountain heaps of
Egypt lift their tops as high as ever, but the stern
old victor, Oblivion, has pressed in between the
monuments and the monarchs they were to com
memorate, thrusting these away out of remem
brance, and leaving those to be mere piles of stones.
And so it is of the empires ; all the great empires of
the East and South, and also of our own, falsely
called neic, West. Some of them we can locate,
some of them we can trace by their marks, but
cannot even guess their names.
What pride was there now in all these cities,
temples, monuments, and empires, and what figure
OF OBLIVION, OR DEAD HISTORY. 105
were they to make in the immortal ages of the
future ! But how humble, and cheap, and almost
foolish they look ! And this same power of oblivion
has us all in hand in the same manner, to do with
us just as it will, and what traces of our name and
fame are to be left, I do not know. What we built,
whither we marched, where we fought, and whom
we conquered, and the great leaders we honoured
with triumph we really do not like to think that
oblivion will carry all these away ; perhaps it will
not for a very long time, but there is a very long
time coming, which may be so long that nobody will
name any more these proud things, or even know
what people lived here. Or we may imagine, with
out being very absurd, that Philadelphia will some
time be dug over to find the marbles of Washington.
It may take a million of years to bring such things
to pass, but our great teacher, Oblivion, is long-
breathed, and will not have his lesson soon ended.
And how very weak and small does our high public
figure appear in the presence of such examples from
the past ! We slink back into ourselves, instructed
and humbled. It is not so proud a thing to figure
out our little day here as we sometimes try to
imagine. The contact now of any great prin
ciple which is everlasting, or of God, who is
the soul s Eternal Rock and Friend how grand a
io6 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
thing it is, compared with any such pompous and
puffy airs in the trivialities of empire and victory !
" So foolish was I and ignorant, I was as a beast
before thee. Nevertheless, I am continually with
theel"
V.
OF PHYSICAL PAIN.
|E recoil instinctively from pain as a matter
of experience, and only somewliat less
from it as a subject. As it is a hard, un-
genial fact, so it is a kind of surd to us, unreducible
by thought, and generally unattractive. If we take
it, too, in the larger view, as including the pains of
animals, our first look stumbles us, and we naturally
enough prefer to leave it under the chloroform of
silence. The physiologists and physicians are
obliged, of course, to give it their attention. A
matter so pungently real, and filling so large a place
in the physical economy, must be abundantly in
vestigated. The nerve-tracks by which it comes
and goes, and the disorders it reports in this or that
part of the body, must be studied, and all the patho
logic symptoms and therapeutic possibilities must be
io8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
sought out. But here the inquiry ends, unless we
include the fact that theologians find something to
say of the origin of pain, and the penal offices it
fills in supplying the necessary sanctions of divine
government. But the really great question, that
which overtops all others the question of moral
benefit to the subjects, and to the world generally
is passed by, as far as I can discover, in almost total
inattention. One little book I hear of, in a foreign
tongue, that, judging from the title, may be an
attempt of the question ; but apart from this, I find
scarcely a trace of thought or inquiry on the sub
ject. A fact the more remarkable, that we are
attempting so eagerly and treating so profusely
almost every kind of subject, whether practical or
merely curious. Is it because this question of uses
is too pungently moral? or is the disinclination
toward it created by the fact, that, taken largely,
as including the general economy of pain, the
question is felt to be wholly mysterious and
really impossible? I cannot pretend that I suffer
no such feeling myself; but I find it in my field,
and therefore will not shrink from it. That I can
bring it to a full solution I have really no con
fidence ; I only hope to suggest some practical
aspects of the points involved that may be useful,
and, to a certain extent, satisfactory.
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. I09
Entering this field, about the first thing we meet
is the reminder of those remarkable words of the
apostle when he says "The whole creation groaneth.
and travaileth in pain together until now." He
uses words of largest import, and as if outreaching
the sense of his time, shows, not the living world
only, but the whole creation groaning the rocks
themselves groaning before the animals, and the
animals sinking into rock in groans, before man
comes to his groaning life, as the superior occupant ;
all travailing, as it were, productively, and travail
ing together ; not merely now, but "until now"
even from the first incipiency of chaos or nebular
condensation, down through all progressive dates of
order, and disorder, and providential history, and re
demptive suffering, till this present hour. The world,
in short, symbolizes pain even from the first ; begins
to be a habitation of pain as soon as it has any kind
of inhabitant ; becomes a habitation for the pains of
intelligence when intelligence arrives, and continues
to be as long as it stays.
In this very impressive fore-glimpse of the sub
ject, two points are suggested that we set our nega
tive upon, before raising the question of use. (1.)
That a world so pierced and threaded by pain is
not made by God immediately for himself, or to
gratify his own tastes and dispositions. Mere pain
no MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
is barren and valueless taken by itself He can find
no revenue in it. He can value it only as it is
valuable to his subjects ; and it has no value to
them, save as they have wants of character that can
be faithfully met by such rugged kind of discipline.
(2.) That the condition of pain is not a result pos
terior in date to the fall, or sin of mankind no
miracle of retribution, by which, as the world is
blasted and stuck with thorns, human bodies are
also pricked with torments. The pains of animals,
existing before, as in symbol and also in fact, may
have been dependent, as in reason, on the superior
race that were to come and the sin they would com
mit, and in that sense doubtless were posterior ; for
how often do we see that things are prior in time which
are post in reason ! This indeed is the very highest
distinction of high counsel, that it prepares a future
and deals with it before it arrives which prior
dealing is just as truly post in order, as if it were
post in time. And then, if it should be expressly
described as having followed in time, and as being
a result of causation, or miraculous sentence, a very
great truth would be affirmed in perhaps the best
and only feasible manner ; for the prior dealing is
really caused by the future condition it was pre
paring to meet. Thus if truly the whole creation
was groaning, in all orders and degrees, from the
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 1 1 1
rocks upward, before the arrival of the occupant
and his sin, prefiguring and symbolizing the great,
sad history to come, and preparing fit environment
for it, what so true method of telling his story as
to show him unparadising his paradise, and pro
voking against himself, or creating for himself, the
many thousand pangs inserted beforehand for his
discipline ? If I build a house in July for the winter
to come, the winter will be shaping that house
before the day of cold arrives. If there were no
winter to come, it would be a different house. Even
so a world that is made for evil will be such as evil
requires it to be, and one of the best descriptions,
nay, the only feasible description of it that could
be given to a rude age, would be that which tells
how it was new stamped by evil and configured
retributively to it. All this with the better truth
and propriety, that our sorrows and pains exist only
as in germs at the first, and are never actually de
veloped in experience, till it is done by the sin itself
and the retributive action of causes upon it.
But these are points which have only a casual
relation to the main subject viz., the question of
use. Assuming here that pain is for man, the ques
tion is, How ? in what offices and uses ? And here
we cut off, at the beginning, three or four several
answers, that plainly are not sufficient.
ii2 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
1. It is nothing to say, or show, that being made
sensitive to pain in certain organs and parts of the
body, we are by that means secured against other
bodily pains and damages more fatal. Thus the
eye, it may be said, is offended by any disagreeable
sensation, and so closed up against the fumes of
acid, or clouds of lime-dust, in which it is enveloped.
En the same way, the fingers are plaited at their
ends with a texture of fine- woven nerve, that makes
them exceedingly sensitive in the matter of touch,
and even the whole skin is so inlaid with nerve
as to be a covering of sensibility wrapped about the
body ; and thus it goes into the world with a self-
conserving instinct on the outlook, which notifies it
of danger, and keeps it from fatal damage. Other
wise we might tear ourselves against every thorn or
briar, and might even hold our limbs in the fire till
they were burnt off; for the more inward parts of the
body are comparatively in apprehensive, and would
never take care of themselves. But it does not
follow that actual pain is for the conservation of
the body the facts referred to are not large enough
to support any so broad conclusion. The showing
is not, in the first place, that pain keeps the body
safe, but only that sensitiveness to pain, appre-
hensiveness working preventively, in the organs
of sense and the skin, keeps it alive, so far, to
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 1 1 3
dangers that may invade the surfaces ; next, that
all the principal and worst pains we suffer are not
of the apprehensive and cautionary parts, but of the
inward parts, and are such as have been produced
by some kind of lesion or disorder no mere noti-
fiers of harm, but harm itself pains of the flesh,
and bones, and marrow ; pains of the head, and feet,
and teeth, and lungs, and liver ; neuralgic torments,
combustions of fever-heat, chills of ague, rheuma
tisms, gouts, horrors. These are the pains, not the
sentinels to keep off pain ; and these stay by, and
ache, and burn, and lengthen out the groans of their
victims, and do not spare. Doubtless the sentinels
referred to are doing beneficent service, but what
beneficent use have these the long, appalling,
dreary catalogue ?
2. It is no sufficient or complete account of pain
to say that it serves economic uses, or the main
tenance of economic functions, in the body ; closing
up valves, stopping secretions, gathering up ulcera-
tions that will work off and separate disorders that
might otherwise be fatal ; contracting the muscles
in spasmodic throes, for the mechanical detrusion
of stone, or gravel, or the violent ejection of poisons.
All such pains are nature s labour, it may be said,
the conatus by which it struggles to clear and
restore itself. How is it then with pains that
i
ii 4 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
expel nothing and rectify nothing ? pains of the
head and the bones, which expel neither brains nor
marrow, pains of the heart which commonly create
worse pains till death ensues ? pains of pleurisy
that end in suffocation ? all pains that kill and
work no benefit which is the natural and frequent
result? Is it any better for a broken tooth or
broken limb, that it aches ? Besides, if we imagine
some conatus of the body, in such cases, striving to
clear, or to heal itself, is it not found that chloro
form, stopping the pain, allows the supposed conatus
still to go on, just as before ? Of what use then is
the pain ? Again :
3. It is nothing to say, that pain is wanted to
set off and make duly appreciable the advantages of
exemption from pain. Dr. Paley, recurring once
and again to this kind of argument, appears to have
more satisfaction in it than it deserves. Not even
the comforters of Job could have offered him more
dismal consolation than to show him how kindly
God was putting his plague upon him, that he
might know the very great blessedness of being
clear of it. And yet we are told by this very
eminent teacher, that " pain has the power of shed
ding a satisfaction over intervals of ease which few
enjoyments exceed. * * A man resting from the
stone, or the gout, is, for the time, in possession
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. x IS
of feelings which undisturbed health cannot impart.
I am far from being sure that a man is not
a gainer by suffering a moderate interruption of
bodily ease for a couple of hours out of the four-and-
twenty." A very " moderate interruption" it must
certainly be. We are not fond of learning how
to be happy by being made miserable. The true
question is, why God does not make us happy by
happiness? Doubtless it is a fact, that light and
shade, and lines of contrast, do instruct our appre
hensions of things, and make us more keenly appre
ciative. In this manner, evidently, God could make
us value immensely a very little and short respite
from pain ; but that single minute s respite will be
no sufficient compensation for a dreadful campaign
of suffering continued through whole years. Or if we
speak of the goodness put in evidence, it would take
but a very little goodness with a sufficient quan
tity of pain to be even infinitely good. Meantime
the real question is, why we suffer any pain at all ?
4. It cannot be said, as being any sufficient
account of pain, that it belongs inherently to animal
natures. Thus it is conceivable that friction per
tains inherently to mechanism, by a necessary law,
and so it may be imagined that pain belongs to
all sentient beings because they are sentient that
the ancient, extinct races of geology were in this
n6 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
manner subject to death, and that all animate
races now existing suffer pain and die in the same
manner. Pain, it may also be said, belongs to them
all, as being temporary natures ; in that fact liable
to pain and death, as they are to exhaustion, or the
decrepitude which must needs attend the expiration
of their term. I think it must be admitted, that
all pain can be thus accounted for on the ground
of absolute necessity, if only we consent to lose, or
give up, the &4i>b ^ a Gtad. ; for the argument is
good only when it is taken atheistically. Thus
if animal bodies are self- existent, or products of
faith, or chance, that may as easily be true of pain ;
for the necessity of which they are born may be as
good to account for their suffering. But if we
begin at the belief in God infinitely good, infi
nitely wise and powerful such a Being can make
animals certainly that are under no necessity,
either of dying or suffering. He cannot, it is
true, do anything which is impossible, anything
in the sphere of the unconditional, which is inhe
rently beyond power. But that is not true of
any animal nature ; it belongs to the world of con
trivance and conditionality, not to the world of
necessity. The question therefore is, how a God,
creating animals and men, can allow them to be
subject to pain ? And it is no answer to say that
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 1 1 7
they must be. If there be no God, then it may be
so ; if there is, then why and how can it be ?
So far we obtain no real solution of pain at all,
and there is no solution plainly to be obtained, that
does not go above the consideration of mere phy
sical necessities and uses. It exists for uses purely
moral, and we get no shadow of reason for it, till we
ascend to the higher plane of moral ideas and the
scheme of religious discipline by which God under
takes their enforcement. And here we meet con
siderations like these :
1. There is a pain which belongs to the mind
itself, in the consciousness of evil, which would almost
necessarily prick through into the body, and which
really needs, in the way of moral advantage, to be
interpreted to the mind by the body. And this is
the very idea of penalty or pain [p&na], that it is a
bad mind stung with moral pain, which pain is
answered, interpreted, made more pungently just, by
the pains of a disordered body. We all agree that
moral wrong, or sin, begets, and must beget, a pain
of the mind which we call remorse, and that so the
mind has a kind of moral government in its own
nature. But there is apt to be a limit in this very
subtle kind of trouble ; it begins ere long to blunt
the sensibility, and work a state of moral apathy.
Besides, there is a wondrous power of sophistry in
n8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
evil, by which it covers itself over with pretexts,
and puts on even the semblances of good. Hence
there was a clear necessity that souls in evil should
be pierced and pinned through by arguments in the
feeling, which cannot be turned by any kind of
sophistry, or glozed by any lapse into habitual
stupor. What is wanted is, that some sharp, in
eradicable torment shall prick into sensibility, and
keep just conviction alive. And exactly this will be
done by physical pain, which no mental apathies or
sophistries can evade. Almost every kind of evil,
too, runs to sensuality, and drugs the soul in that
manner, and what can better expel the narcotic
fumes of the body, than pangs that are always shoot
ing in their twinges to keep it alive, and be inter
preters of guilt, just where again it might very soon
be smothered ?
All physical pain is so far penal ; penal, that is, not
in the sense that the pains of the body exactly match
the guilt of the mind, or exactly match the par
ticular comparative deserts of persons. Some persons
really want more pain than others, and some very
good persons will utilize a vastly greater amount
than others less deserving can. The pains all come,
be they many or few, in the lines of justice, only they
do not here, in our present wicked state, conform
exactly to the measures, or keep the proportions of
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 1 19
justice. Generally it is not a matter of so much im
portance that we have them in ourselves, in some
given degree, as that we have them in the world.
Some persons will be more beneficially affected by
seeing what others suffer, than they would in suffer
ing as much themselves ; indeed they may even
suffer more pun gently themselves, that they have
their natural sympathies so tenderly pained. The
great thing is that pain is in the world by God s
right sentence upon it, and we know, as certainly as
we do the goodness of God, that it is the interpreter
of wrong God s moral sentence felt, beheld, every
where present, the frown of his abhorrence to wrong,
the pungent witness of our guiltiness.
2. Pain is a matter of great consequence in the
fact that it gives a moral look and capacity of moral
impression to the world, of which it would otherwise
be totally vacant- a similar impression also of the
benignity of God. If we had the world only for a
garden or a landscape, if it meant nothing but what
it is in production, or the delectation of the senses
a place of good feeding, and health, and jocund life
it would be God s pasture only, not his kingdom.
Moral ideas would not even be suggested by it.
But the simply finding pain in it puts us on a wholly
different construction, both of it and of life. Now
there appears to be something serious on hand.
1 20 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
The severity bears a look of principle and law, and
the unsparing rigours, hedging us about, tell of a
divine purpose and authority that respect high
reasons, and are able to be immovably faithful in
their vindication. In this manner pain changes the
whole import and expression of our moral sphere.
Every pain strikes in, touching the quick of our
remorse, and giving it practical sanction. We
cannot look about on such a spectacle of groaning,
writhing members as the world exhibits, and think
of it as being any way reconcilable with God s per
fect fatherhood, without perceiving that there is a
moral frame about the picture, that it means eternal
government and responsibility to God.
Having so great an effect on the world, it also has,
we have already intimated, a correspondent effect on
the attitude and even the accepted idea of God. As
the world is, so also is God ; for the world is but the
shadow of God. But the impressions we obtain of
God are varied by the fact of pain, principally as
respects his goodness. If there were no mixtures of
pain in our human experience, we should have no
possible conception of severity in his goodness, but
should think of it as being a disposition simply to
gratify, and keep in terms of comfort or pleasure.
But the stern, fixed element of pain if this be
good, then it is in goodness to be firm, unsparing,
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 1 2 1
experimentally and dreadfully sovereign. Such
goodness, shooting in such pangs, and searching a
way by them into all inmost secrets of evil, is how
very different from that unmoral goodness that is
only concerned to please. How fearfully earnest,
and pure, and holy, must it be, to have such abhor-
rences witnessed by such pains. These pains, too,
must be somehow the result of retributive causes
we cannot think otherwise and our feeling under
goes a change that answers exactly to the moral
effectiveness given to public law by decisive, faith
fully executed punishments. What the State is doing
in such terrible emphasis, mustering its judicial
wrath up even to the pitch of capital execution,
must, we feel, express the opinion it has of law, and
the moral sacredness of law. Doubtless the murderer
could be kept safe without being hurled out of life ;
others could be measurably deterred, at least, by a
milder punishment ; and yet the question of death-
sentences is not ended; for the main thing to be
secured is moral impression, impression for law, and
only some tremendous shock, it may be, can suffi
ciently do it. The mere deterring of crime is
nothing, as compared with something done to make
crime felt, or, what is nowise different, to make felt
the sacredness of law as a power that shelters the
world. And what shall do it but to sometimes see
122 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
society forgetting all softness, and resolutely set on
doing only damage, the last extreme of damage?
So in this article of pain, God s rectoral goodness
works by damage. Pains are his silent thunder
bolts, shooting in the sense He has of law, and they
are expected to consecrate law in men s feeling the
more powerfully, that his tenderly benignant nature
breaks into such damage in them just damage it is
true, yet real, purposed damage. What an opinion
of wrong and of law does He thus imprint on our
feeling, by his seemingly strange work in the pains !
Still we call Him good, and have only the more
tremendously deep sense of his goodness, that we
f nd Him good enough to sharpen these pungent
woes of damage in our bodies. It is eternal tender
ness, iron- clad for the right.
3. It is another and very important moral effect of
pain, that it softens the temperament, or temper, of
souls under evil, and puts them in a different key.
Thus it will be seen, that, in all cases of long-con
tinued and very severe suffering, there is a look of
gentled, perhaps we should say, broken, feeling.
The gait is softer, the motions less abrupt, and there
is a lingering moan we fancy in the voice, and a
certain dewy tremor of tear in the eye. It is as if
the man s wilfulness had been fined, or at least
. . , ,
partly broken. He mav be a personal stranger, yet
OF PH YSICAL PAIN. 1 23
we see by all his demonstrations that he has come
out of the fire, and is tempered to the sway of
many things he cannot resist. Thus it is that a
great many of the best and holiest examples of
piety are such as have been fhie4 and finished in the
crucible of suffering. Or, if we speak of the race at
large, how very often, and how far, are they tem
pered to the sway of duty by the fact, or conscious
ness, that they have not been and cannot be superior
to pain ! Had we all been trained in a condition of
perfect immunity from it, how intractable and wild
in comparison should we be ! even like those millen
nial monsters of will and lust that lived before the
flood. They had great advantages over us, no doubt,
in their healthiness and the immense titanic vigour
of their constitutions, but ten times as many pains
with one-tenth as many years, would have been a
far better endowment. Have we not a little more
to say of the respectability of good health, than the
soberest and deepest observation will justify ? Good
. .
health in evil is not specially respectable, and we see
by the multitudes of pains God puts upon us, that
his opinion of it is abundantly qualified.
4. It appears to have been necessary for the best
efiect of pain, that it should be a liability of the
whole mundane system, and be, in that manner, a
kind of general sacrament for the world. It might
124 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
have been confined to human beings, and to them
who have become old enough to be responsible, and
to be responsible in just such a degree as matches
their sin ; but no such limitation is observed. It is
put upon the harmless, unoffending age of infancy.
It is the lot of all animate creatures without ex
ception, for whatever lives must die, and whatever
dies must be subject to pain. Many vegetable
growths give tokens of sensibility, which supposes
a liability to pain and if they all, as a class, are
exempt, they compose about the only class of sub
stances that are wholly clear of the sad implication ;
for the very rocks of the world, as already suggested,
are monuments of buried pain, themselves also
racked and contorted, as if meant to be lithograph
types of the general anguish. The meaning is
plainly enough, that pain shall set up its flag on
the world, and by some mysterious right claim
ownership.
Now, it is of this that we are specially ready to
complain. If only the guilty were required to
suffer, we could justify it, but why should this bad
liability be laid upon the poor animals, who have
done no wrong to make it just ? "We are not satisfied,
we sometimes say, and cannot make it seem worthy
of a good being. A great many strike out straight
way into atheism, for they say that, in this pain of
i
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 125
animals, it is proved beyond dispute that no prin
ciple of right, or of just moral distribution, governs
the world only fateful chance, or, what is more
exact in this case, fateful mischance casts the die for
pain. Moral government is out of the question, for
what can a moral governor be doing in such plain
violation of right ? The argument here is a large
one, that cannot be exhausted in our present re
stricted limits ; but three points duly observed will
not only clear the bad impeachment, but reveal the
fact of a grand, far-reaching positive benefit, with
out which the moral uses of the world would even be
incomplete.
First observe that a great part of the suffering of
animals, just that pait which most offends our feel
ing, is caused by th3 abuse and cruelty of man, and
that there is no more reason to accuse the right of
Providence in allowing man to injure the animals,
than there is in allowing him to injure and cruelly
torment his fellow-man. By the supposition he is to
act morally, and then if, using that liberty, he will
do wrong, somebody animals, or men, or both
must suffer the wrong done. The very scheme of
morality and responsible action, implies a power to
create suffering, and just so far a liability to suffer.
Only in one of two ways, therefore, could this
liability of animals to suffer be avoided ; either man
126 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
must have no moral liberty, or else lie must have no
animals. In the former case he would not be a
man morally capable of character ; in the latter he
would not be a man bodily capable of life ; for it is
a matter of doubt whether he could even live with
out their fertilizing and co-operative aid.
Next observe that animals are things, and not in
any such relation to God as to have a moral right
against pain. They have no moral ideas, and cannot
be morally wounded. It is only we that are morally
wounded when they are cruelly treated what they
suffer is only so much of physical subtraction from
their comfort. In this view nothing more appears
to be required, in respect to their existence, than
that they should have some fit benefit, or advantage
in it. If they are made to suffer some pain, wholly
irrespective of their own desert, it must not be
forgotten that, morally speaking, they have no
desert, and are nowise conscious of any. They are
so far furniture only, and furniture is not in court
for the redress of its abuses. Besides, if they
are sometimes abused, how much oftener are they
provided for, laboured for, and served by whole
months of drudgery ! no herd or flock ever suffering
for its owner a thousandth part of what he suffers
for them. They have their pains and distresses too,
apart from all abuse ; and if they have them still,
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 1 2 7
under the solidarity principle that links their for
tunes with his, is it not that he may let forth his
sympathies more tenderly toward them, and give
them as great benefit as he receives at their cost ?
And if he finds them fellow-partners with him,
suffering innocently with him in his lot, they will
less need comfort than he, and will only show, by
their clinging still to life, that they have comfort
enough, in having it valuable as it is.
Thirdly, the fact that making all the world
follow the fortunes of man, and, in some sense, go
down with him and groan with him in his evil,
is a fact that carries with it an immense power
of moral benefit. No matter if the pains are
initiated long ages before his arrival, still they
are just as truly for him and from him as if they
had come after, and had come of being simply
horror-smitten with him by his wrong. He is
finally to have the general lordship, and a vast,
all-ruling sympathy fills and configures the world
to his fortunes ; so that what he is to be and want
in himself, he shall see in the creatures that have
sad company with him. The poor animals, looking
up to him in their sorrow, are to say, " We are with
you, only we ask some tender recognition of our
suffering for you." And what can have a more
subduing effect on his feeling than to see the mute
128 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
creation groaning with him types of pain filling
all tiers and orders of substance up to the stars, and
holding forth their mirror to his pity ? This grand
sacrament of pain is ever with him, saying, " This
is my body that you have broken." I do not say
that we are putting the matter always in this
form. It may even seem to have more of fancy
in it than of fact. I only mean to say that the
world is so tempered to us, when we think not of it,
bearing a look of sympathy, suffering common dis
aster and judgment with us, provoking tenderness
by its broken fortunes and forlorn appeals. How
much better it is for us than a world all bright and
smiling and painless would be, it will be difficult for
us even to conceive.
I have spoken thus largely of the pains of animals,
because the impeachment of Providence on account
of them is so very common, and so very unjust.
They are even a necessary part of God s moral
economy, as we can easily see. Only it remains to
be added that, when all cruelty to animals is done
away, and we learn to have them in due care and
tenderness, yielding them true sympathy, as par
takers in our sad fortunes, they will yield us lessons
of benefit more and more touching, and closer to
the fineness of a genuinely perfected character.
The pains of infancy have their uses and solutions
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 1 2 9
in much the same manner. These we can see are
even physiologically derived to them by inheritance,
and it is not to be doubted that immense moral bene
fits will accrue to them for ever after, from the pains
they suffered in their innocence here, whether for a
longer or a shorter time. And how powerful is
their mute appeal to natural affection, when looking
up in their moments of distress, they seem to ask
imploringly " Who is it ? whence and why does
it come ? " The pitying mother had perhaps never
any such thought as that her own liabilities include
both her and her child, and yet the pang that comes
back from her child has a moral vigour somehow in
it that she feels in tenderly remorseful, persuasively
bitter compunction.
5. It is a very important use of pain, that it
prepares some of the highest possibilities and most
fruitful occasions of character. It never misses
observation that pain is the pungent educator of
that sturdiest and most sublime virtue, fortitude.
Danger is the educator of courage, and pain of this
other twin principle, not inferior ; and between
them both God finds motive enough to justify much
terrible severity of schooling. To bear, and dare
these two great lessons are among the chief moral
uses of life; and, if He could not give them, He
would think it better for us and a more true honour
1 30 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
that we be excused from living altogether. If we
could neither be martyrs, nor heroes, the highest
inspirations would be needless, and nothing would
be left us but to earn the common rewards of duty
by common drudgeries in it.
Sympathy, also, and all the virtues fitly called
graces, that keep it company, and all the works by
which it ministers, begin at the fact of pain. Even
animals will rush to one of their kind who is howling
for some terror, or moaning for some present distress.
And this natural kind of sympathy, based in mere
instinct, becomes charity in the higher plane of
Christian feeling and sacrifice. Therefore, when
Christ came into the world, the world s pains first
of all took hold of Him. At that point his sacrifice
began, and there all sacrifice begins. God might
reveal his bounty by bounty bestowed, and so far
might reveal his love ; but there would not be much
meaning in the love, if it did not come to pain and
minister in sacrifice to it. Nay, it can be worthily
and fitly revealed only as it comes through pain,
and bears the burden of pain. And it will not
even be revealed by that, save when it bears the
inflictions of wrong, for the benefit of wrong- doers
and enemies themselves. Pain, therefore, is the
possibility of all that lies in sacrifice, because it is
the possibility of disinterested sympathy, and so of
W JX
<wv>
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 131
all self-sacrifice. JSV) world that God has made
ought ever to want redemption ; but if it does, there
ought to be and must be a vast comprehension of
pain let down upon it. It need not crucify, but it
will, and since it will, the love that bears so much
of enemies will best reach it. And so there is
launched upon us, in Christ s descent to the world,
his miracles of healing, his words of comfort to
creatures in sorrow, his suffering of death at the
hands of his enemies all included in the one word
"sacrifice"- the full outbeaming fact of the love
of God. And in the same manner, under the same
conditions, we ourselves are to be fashioned and
perfected in the graces of the divine love, by the
burdens we bear and the sacrifices we support,
whether for other men s pains, or the pains they
inflict upon us.
The very comforting conclusion to which we are
brought by these inquiries is, that pain, which seems
to be no truth, and as far as teaching is concerned,
quite meaningless to thought, is yet no barren evil.
It is wholly mute, felt only in some hidden centre
of flesh or bone, giving no lectures, forming no argu
ments or propositions, pointing no definite reproofs,
and yet there is nothing in all our experience that
changes so many aspects of things, and is so grandly
productive, so fertile in good. After all, there is
1 32 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
no unreason which it does not somehow contrive to
correct, no right argument which it does not uphold,
no lesson which it does not find how to give, no
temper which it does not incline to the truth. It
is God s mute prophet in the body, giving there its
mighty, silent oracles to the soul. We sometimes
shudder at the extremities of agony we see, and
ask how it is possible for a good Being to sharpen
such pangs in a creature bearing his image, but the
true solution is that He is good enough to do it, and
not spare, faithful enough to work out his problem
of character, by such painful kind of surgery. If
we shudder still before Him, it is the tremendous
benignity and sovereign fertility of his working
that we shudder at. Far better is it and worthier,
to confide and acquiesce ; for He is only the higher
in good that He can be appallingly good.
The great practical matter, the point whither we
are come, and where we may sit down, is, that find
ing how to suffer well is a thing to be much studied
and faithfully learned. Passivity is not the true
lesson ; for a bulrush bowing to the wind could
take that lesson as well ; neither is it to brace up
all our force in a tough strain of stoical energy,
refusing to feel ; but it is to set our whole activity
quietly, manfully, down upon the having well
learned what our fiery teacher will show us. To
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 133
wade through months of pain, to spin out years
of weariness and storm, can be done triumphantly
only by such as can resolutely welcome the disci
pline their nature wants. And the man or woman
who has learned to suffer well has gotten the highest
of mortal victories. Great works are often romantic
because of their magnitude, and the fleshly nature
itself, kindled with enthusiasm, bears up the under
taker and keeps his vigour good ; but in the long-
drawn months or years of inevitable pain, where
there is no castle without to be carried as by storm,
but only a dull blind nature to be fertilised within
there to hold a placid mind, and to keep firm
grapple with the agony, is to be equal to a great occa
sion, as few men ever can be. And if God, by any
severity of discipline, can bring us up to this pitcJi
of heroical suffering, He will have made as much of
our human nature as it is capable of becoming.
It will be permitted, in closing this essay, to
suggest that our natural theologians, in their argu
ment from nature for the goodness of God, com
monly, if not always, fall into a large mistake.
Their plan or prescribed sphere of argument very
nearly compels it. The problem is to prove the
required fact out of nature itself, and without going
above the range of her mere physical appointments.
They are shut down thus below the range of moral
134 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
ideas, and away from all ends of moral and religious
discipline. Whether so understanding their pro
blem or not, they do, in fact, endeavour to make
out a goodness that consists in providing means of
happiness, comforts, bounties, delectations, pleasures,
feedings for waste, lubrications for friction, sleep for
exhaustion, healings for wounds, and the like. Phy
sical arrangements for physical ends, compose the
staple of their argument. How little they can
make of pain in this manner is evident. They can
show that there are sentinels in our bodies to keep
us away from pain, doing it by smaller twinges of
pain. They can show, perhaps, that we have a
great deal more pleasure than pain, and so make
out a balance for the Divine goodness ; as if it stood
in casting a balance between what He gives and
what He fails to give. They can challenge any one
to show, on the contrary, that any single thing is
made to create pain, or any single member to ache,
no matter what pains or aches may actually come.
Be all this as it may, there is abundance of pain
which omnipotence might certainly avert. Besides,
it is damage, indivertibly sent, coming visibly by no
mistake, and comprehending all sentient creatures
from the highest to the lowest. The whole creation
is put groaning and travailing together in it. Taking
the world then as a machine contrived for happy
OF PHYSICAL PAIN. 135
sensation, or for mere economic uses, it is plainly a
most absurd failure ; no machine invented by man
was ever kept in use under such, failure. To say
that such broad seas of suffering, rolling over the
world, are mischances not preventable., is about as sore
an impeachment of the Divine capacity, as it could be
of the Divine intention to say that they are meant
with no concern beyond the damage created.
Besides, if the argument for goodness were made
out thus in terms of mere physical computation, it
would only show that God is concerned to have us
fare well or happily, in the plane of physical expe
rience. He would be good as being in good nature,
or, at most, as being morally engaged to keep us in
comfort. But this is not the goodness of God, or
any but a very faint approximation. There is truly
but one kind of moral goodness, and it is the same
in all moral beings, the created and the uncreated.
But in every grade of being, it will require acts
and works, and demonstrations according to its rank,
or quality, or office. Moral goodness in mere sub
jects will be summed up in obedience or duty. But
as certainly as it rules in God, it will make Him a
Ruler, even as He is elected to be by his own ever
lasting super- eminence and capacity. And so, in
Him, it will be rectoral goodness. And then, as
acts of damage by us to wrong- doers would be sin,
136 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
so they may even be required of Him, because He
is in government, as we are not. If He cannot
minister pain therefore, He cannot rule, and cannot
be good enough to fill his supreme office. But if
He can, if with all paternities, all tenderest, most
personal love in his feeling, He still can be so faith
ful in rule as to bend himself to the instigations of
pain, passing his own nature through a kind of
Gethsemane of revulsion to do it, that in Him is
Bectoral Goodness nothing short of which is
really divine. The kind of goodness therefore
attempted so generally by our natural theologians
would not be the goodness of God, and He would
not be set in godship by it. To be good for Him,
is to be rectorally good; that is, to be capable of
majesty, capable of wielding and ministering pain,
and faithful enough to do it. And so it is that
by this fact of pain, we arrive at the only sufficient
discovery of the goodness of God. He could not
be more tenderly close to us, or more adorably
great, than He is in this most earnest way of
fidelity. Probably every physical pain we suffer
\/L is to Him a moral pain, that would to us be mani
fold heavier. Let us have some proof then of his
goodness that makes Him good enough to bear the
sword and be God, good enough to rule in the grand
fidelities of pain.
t^n^^^ \K^V : \\Aw- 1^
^ -XA,A^ fiJ/yU/ { ;. j^JvYt/^
VI,
OF PHYSICAL DANGEB,
[T must strike almost any person, at times,
as a thing paradoxically strange, that in
the realm of God, a Being confessedly
good above all measure and degree, there should
be a feeling of insecurity or apprehensiveness so
nearly universal ; as if unknown dangers were
lurking for us everywhere, and perils waiting for
the spring. Had any man his house full of guests,
accepted each in trust by his hospitality, and were
they all the while in visible concern for their safety
haunted by strange noises in the night, flitting
about the halls, whispering and gesticulating at the
doors of their chambers, setting watches in the
corridors and stairways, sometimes breaking into
panic and rushing out into the street, talking
always in a manner of concern when together,
138 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
and when they go abroad telling everywhere the
dreadful apprehensions they live in he would
certainly take it as a sore affront or cruel impeach
ment. And yet there is no phase of mortal senti
ment in the world so prevalent, or so nearly
universal, as that apprehensiveness which we name
by the word danger. "We are all upon the watch
for it, ready to catch the least intimation of it,
ready sometimes to be rushed into any wildest panic
to escape it ; a condition of things, we may see at a
glance, in which it is clear that God has us in dis
cipline and not in hospitality. Enough, too, that
the discipline is salutary, however little compli
mentary to himself. All the more impressive,
too, is his fidelity, that He has even made an
institute of danger, and set it in the very cast of
his mundane economy. Let us see if we can dis
cover the benefit He intends for us in it.
There is nothing so indubitably real as danger,
and yet there is nothing more difficult if we attempt
to define it. Thus, if it is evil actually coming or to
come, then it is fact ; and if it is evil not coining,
as in fact, then there is no danger of its coming ; so
that fact or no fact is the whole matter, and the
danger is nothing. No, it is not the whole : we
may be ignorant enough to be concerned lest the
evil thought of may be coming, when we do not
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 139
know that it actually is or actually is not, and our
unlmowingness will itself keep us in the sense of
danger. Strictly speaking, danger is subjective
only ; save that we certainly know there are causes
at work in great power, a little way back of our
ignorance, that make our apprehensive feeling
rational. And it is these apprehensive torments
of unknowingness that we call danger. God is
doing facts and we are thinking dangers ; and his
facts, considering that we can know so little what
they are to be, suffice to keep us, and are meant to
keep us, in a mood of apprehensiveness all the
while conversant with danger.
Consider a moment how this feeling of danger is
instigated, or by how many factors working together
it is kept in wakeful sensibility. (1.) We are in
wrong, and therefore tempered apprehensively,
looking every way after some evil to come, such as
we consciously deserve. A sound is in our ears
when there is no sound; we flee when no man
pursueth. (2.) We are ignorant, and ignorance
under evil is even more apprehensive than know
ledge, raising more ghosts often than there are facts
of retribution. (f3.) There are terrible powers working
with terrible energy about us ; and we know that
when they overtake us, or we fall in their way,
they will not spare. They work by laws, and laws
140 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
we understand will never be adjourned or moved
aside for our accommodation. They are lictors all
of retribution ; and the danger is not that they will
possibly, or by some mischance, fall in our way, but
that they are actually on our track, and will cer
tainly overtake us shortly. And furthermore, (4.)
There are grounds of distrust and concern secreted
everywhere, so to speak, in the world s bosom, on
purpose apparently to keep us to our caution, and
forbid our possible security mirages in the air,
poisons in woods and flowers, green-covered
morasses and quicksand bottoms that will drop
us down out of sight, if we trust a foot on
them ; atmospheric breathings of ague, mias
matic infections and hidden death-plagues burden
ing the night ; horses that have death in their
heels, tigers ravening in the wood, roaring lions
that frighten us by their noise, and lions more
terrible because they are silent, roaring not at
all. We are the more fearful, too, sometimes,
that we may not get time to fear ; as when some
lightning- stroke may get beforehand with us, or
when some earthquake shudder only one may
topple down our house or city upon us. Or, what
is more appalling than either lightning or earth
quake, a few drops too many of blood may rush
upon our brain, or the heart may burst and send
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 141
no blood at all. Three-quarters of the life-and-
death processes, going on by the hundred in our
bodies, are steered, or separated, only by films a
little more tender and thinner than gauze. Every
thing in us and about us is arranged to keep us in
a danger- element, and make us somehow alive and
apprehensive to evil. And it is not weakness that
is appealed to, but it is reason all the rational
capacities we possess. If it is in one view an
appeal to ignorance, what higher, better, wiser
function has reason than the making due account
and the keeping due care of ignorance requiring
it, in fact, of ignorance to be apprehensive, just
because it cannot see ?
Reverting at this point to our supposed case of
hospitality, we see at once how far off such a suppo
sition may be. It is not as guests that we are being
entertained and kept ; we are not accepted as in
trust at all, not sheltered and castled by our Re
sponsible Host, not expected to be inapprehensive
and secure ; but, on the contrary, it is clearly his
fixed design to put us into life as an element of
danger, and keep us, doubtless for some moral pur
pose, in a condition of unrest and more or less
painful concern. What that moral purpose may
be we need not be greatly at loss to discover.
1. There is no better way to put us on the care of
1 42 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
ourselves morally, than to make the physical care of
our body and life the first lesson of our experience.
And this is done most effectively by the crowding of
all sorts of perils about us, from our childhood on
ward. In the moral life there is no government
but self-government, no conservation but self- con
servation. Things are governed and conserved by
their laws ; but men, moral agents, are conservable
not by moral laws, but only by their own free choice
under such laws, in a way of obedience. And the
peril here is great not in respect of the laws, but
in respect of the choices. Every thought, inclining,
predisposition, all ends desired, motivities played
with, parleys and parliaments held in the soul s
chambers, make up an element of danger. All the
more beautiful is it that God begins, at the earliest
possible moment, to put us on keeping due care of
ourselves. He sets us down among physical dangers,
where our first puttings forth are to be for our safety.
The first thing learned by the child is that Nature
goes her own way by herself, and does not consider
or pity or spare. There is no motherly concern for
him, he finds, in the fire, none in the water, none
in the hard floor. After a few scorches and phy
sical mishaps, he becomes apprehensive and takes
his body into such care as the danger-lesson has
taught him balancing himself cautiously as he
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 143
tottles on his feet ; standing off from the fire, as
if the fire might be coming forth after him ; scan
ning with timorous circumspection the look and
approach of the animals, lest perchance they mean
some injury. And then as the life-lesson begins,
so it goes on afterward. Made acquainted with
danger by his first experiences, danger goes with
him and keeps him faithful company. He stands
in some kind of jeopardy every hour. Perils of
all sorts and sizes lurk for him in things most
common ; the pestilence walketh in darkness when
he sleeps ; in business and travel, fire and water
and wind serve him with appalling threats ; in his
medicine there may be death, in his food ingre
dients more fatal than gunpowder. And so, brew
ing always in his danger- element, from childhood
onward, he learns to be, in his very habit, a prudent,
foreseeing creature; and being thus inducted into
the care of himself, as respects the life and life-
interests of his body, it is also to be seen whether
he will take up, in like faithful caution, a right self-
care of his moral and responsible nature.
To see the benefit and profoundly wise purpose of
God in such a scheme of experience, we have only
to suppose that our life had been set on a footing of
perfect, inviolable security ; that every power of
nature had been cushioned, so to speak, so as never
144 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
to give a blow ; that the fires had been softened
by infusions of dew, and the snows by mixtures of
wool ; that the lightnings had brought their con
ductors with them, and the thunders sung their
explosions on JEolian harps : in a word, that no
living man ever scented the possibility of danger, or
even conceived what it is. How totally unprepared
is he thus for anything which can be called respon
sibility ! He does not even know what a critical
thing is, much less how to take care of himself in a
matter as critical as duty, under a peril as moment
ous as the retributions of immortal wrong. What
care has he for any of God s commandments, when
no single touch of disaster has ever wakened a feel
ing of concern for anything in his bosom ? What
signifies responsibility, when he knows only self-
indulgence and security ; when simply to be dandled
in the world-mother lap has been the whole matter
of his experience ? What can he think of caution,
or precaution as against any kind of evil, when as
yet no pang or sting or blow has ever come nigh
enough to startle apprehension ? He would go to
sea as quietly in a leaky vessel as in a sound one,
eat poison as unconcernedly as food, risk a tempest
as he would a breeze, and fire as quietly as chloro
form. A creature thus trained has plainly no one
qualification for the exercise of that really sublime
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 145
self- care, that belongs to a morally perilous and
responsible state. He will have no more concern for
his conduct than he has for his breathing, and will
let one have its way as unconcernedly as the other.
He is never attent to anything ; for it is only a life
steering itself through dangers, and educated by
them, that gets wakened to the stringently prac
tical, manly state of attention. And what is this
habit of attention but a first condition of all right
keeping and conduct in the moral, as it is of all
sound culture and development in the intellectual,
life ? But we go a stage deeper into this economy
of danger
2. When we consider the fit relation it has to
beings in a state of wrong and disobedience already
begun. I speak here not so much of government,
or of what is necessary to its maintenance the re
tributive sanctions, or penal enforcements apart from
which all law is only advice but I prefer to set
the point suggested directly before those instinctive
sentiments of order and fitness that bear sway in the
moral judgments of the race. Saying nothing of
law thus, or of what is needed to maintain it, we do
yet, as by some inborn sentiment of justice, require
the state of wrong to be a state of disturbance.
We pronounce it a thing unfit and monstrous for
peace to be joined to evil, and we forbid the banns.
L
146 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
Nothing satisfies us but to have evil-doing linked
to evil expectancy and fear. When sin mounts
the chariot, we require that danger shall have
a seat with it; nay, that, as often as it will, it
shall drive. We assume, as by a kind of universal
instinct, that wrong of every sort shall have fear
and jeopardy for its element ; and if we supposed
we had gods lurking anywhere, that could have
it for their art to give quiet to wrong, we should
sooner pluck down their images than pay them
worship.
Furthermore, it is a consideration more impres
sive still, that wrong itself maintains the same
opinion demanding for itself all which it can most
bitterly fear, invoking, so to speak, the evils it
deserves, challenging unknown terrors, and feeling
itself quite unsphered, when it is not in its element
of danger. Sometimes bad men, or great criminals,
get hardened, as we speak, and seem to be quite
clear of all misgivings : but we only mean by this
that they have become apathetic to danger, not that
they have discovered the non-existence of it. Even
such would deem it a thing most horrible, if they
were assured that wrong has no more anything to
fear. And if there were declared to be a God on
high, dispensing equally to evil and to good, and as
much concerned to shelter one as the other, they
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. i 47
would recoil from his worship even as from sacrifice
to Ahriman or Siva.
So fixed so unalterably, universally fixed are
we in the opinion, that a had world, occupied by
souls under evil, must be haunted everywhere by
danger, and cannot be dissociated from it. There is
no misconjunction so absurd as that of safety and
wrong, because it is a moral misconjunction, show
ing our mortal state itself to be out of joint, even
down to its lowest foundations ; a jargon, a chaos,
held by no fixed principles, settled by no terms of
order. God s world is a world out of character,
all government apart, and as there is no quality
of fitness in it, so there is nothing good to come
of it. Most vain it will be to look for any kind of
moral uses in it ; for it could not be more clear that
moral ideas themselves have nothing to do with it.
J3ut this appeal to universal judgment in the
race cannot, after all, be held as apart from govern
ment, or from what is necessary to the fit mainte
nance of government. We believe in government
as universally as in anything else, and in penal
sanctions as the due enforcements of government.
And a great part of the abhorrence we feel, as of
something monstrous in the state of misconjunction
that marries wrong to safety, is due to the implied
want of government. Our feeling is that right is
148 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
mocked by the loss of its defences. What worse
thing or more dreadful can be said of any civil state
or body politic, than that evil-doers are at peace in
it, having never anything to fear ? Is this govern
ment, we say, that is keeping all crime fearless ?
which permits the robber to show us our money in
his purse, and laugh at us ? which guarantees the
murderer, when he stalks defiantly by and before
the wife and children of his victim ? Immunity in
crime what can be more horrible? We require
instead that it shall be found either suffering or
flying. If the fangs of punishment are not actually
fastened upon it, then it must be only that the dogs
of justice in pursuit have not yet overtaken it.
And so of all government. If God has any govern
ment, it will be right for Him to make all crime
unsafe. That feeling of misconj unction, of which I
have been speaking as a universal sentiment, is after
all more than a sentiment ; the offence we suffer in it
is not sesthetical merely, but profoundly practical,
requiring penalties to be as strong as sins, and as
universally present. It is nothing, in short, but
our fixed opinion that God ought to govern his
world, and that, if He does, dangers will be frown
ing in it as many as the wrongs to be redressed.
Speculate as we may, we have none of us any
practical difficulty, after all, with penalties and
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 149
penal terrors in God s realm. We should only be
revolted if there were none. It would be as if
eternal mockery and misconj unction had taken
away, not government only, but the distinctions of
conduct and character.
3. It is a point still further in advance, that
nothing done for the recovery of minds under evil can
have any chance of success, which does not weaken
their confidence by impressions of insecurity and
tokens of danger. It is not enough that, being in
evil, fears spring up in prophetic menace from within.
To obtain due point and emphasis, that menace
wants to be seconded by appalling correspondences
of fact without. If the conscience, violated by
wrong, utters sentence against itself, there needs
to be also a kind of conscience without in things
o
visible a remorse frowning in the sky, and driving
its black tempests across in crashing thunder and
hail ; throes of wrath shuddering underground and
bursting up in flame. The world itself, in short,
needs to be a bad conscience physically represented.
If there be immutable law for the right, it must,
when trampled, be immutable law as an avenger ;
powers ordained for comfort and blessing must be
working disaster ; perils must look out from behind
objects of beauty; sleep must be scared by shapes
of terror flitting across the brain. All the soul s
150 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
remorseful judgments require to be seconded and set
home by the executive preparations of justice. Who
will care to be delivered from evil when he sees, in
fact, no fiery and bad portent, and no terror of mis
giving is felt in his confidence ?
But this we shall be told is fear, and what place
for fear can there be amon^r the motives to o-0-od ?
O O
Is it true reformation to be afraid ? Is it obedience
to be driven a-field in duty by the dogs of terror ?
Do we call it homage to God that we give Him up
our self-possession, to serve Him as in panic or com
pulsion ? It takes but a very little of this cheap
sort of argument to raise a considerable show of
philosophy for the point of question or denial made ;
though, if it were a single degree weaker, and more
flashy, it would even miss the repute of sophistry.
Probably the casuists most forward in it will resolve
all virtue by the law of self-interest ; and what is
ffear but a consideration of self-interest? Or they
will be such as T^H^: for a general and complete ex
purgation of character in the future life, by long ages
of pain there to be endured ; and what again is fear
but the foreshadow, or fore- sentiment, of pain ? and
how does pain appear to be a motive at all worthier
and nobler than fear ? Just this, in fact, is the
principal office of pain, or suffering, as one of our
terms of discipline, that it prepares to apprehensive-
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 151
ness, so to the avoidance of wrong. Pride might
be willing to shake off fear, but it cannot shake off
pain ; and that once entered opens the sense of
danger, never again to be shut. The sense of pain
initiates the sense of danger, and so, by a kind of
Caesarean way, the birth of souls into good is made
possible. The true conception to be held is simply
this : that the argument of fear, or danger, or felt
insecurity, is only a preparatory or first- stage argu
ment, never a proximate or properly integral argu
ment for duty. It simply enforces consideration
where there is none, and then consideration is to
bring on choice and settle it in new dispositions, by
other and higher motivities ; to bring up truth and
love and beauty, and God as their all- containing
spring, that they may have their captivating power
in their own excellence, and be embraced in ever
lasting homage for what they are possible never to
be really embraced for anything else.
And why should there be any so great jealousy of
fear as a check to heedlessness and bad living, and
as a cautionary motive to the consideration of duty ?
Is it weak to be alive and thoroughly attent to evils
about our path ? Who is more distinctively wise
than the man who can be cautious enough to foresee
dangers, provide a way of safety through them, and
maintain, as it were, in this great sea of perils, a
152 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
firmly-balanced prudence ? Who, in fact, do we all
agree to consider more incurably doltish and thick
headed than the man who cannot see any thunder
bolt of danger before it strikes him, and then cannot
see it afterward because it has struck him ? "What
is fear, in this view, but one of the best functions of
intelligence ? And when we take note of the fact
that every human being is organized for the appre
hension of danger and pain, the whole skin woven
through with nerves of sensibility, to keep it ap
prised of damage from exposures to fire and frost
and violence ; the eye made quick to apprehend and
shut its gates against every sort of invasion; the
very fingers -ends reticulated with nerves of touch,
to make them sensitive to the approaches of pain
when, I say, we note this tempering of the whole
body to a mood of precaution, or of quickened sensi
bility to danger, shall we take it as the Creator s
plan to make us weak, organize us into weakness,
humble us to a pitiful dejected way of living under
the sway of fear ? Exactly contrary to this, He is
making us quick to fear, that He may put us on our
intelligence ; train us to a nobler and more capable
prudence ; lift us into a wisdom more completely
sovereign over the bad liabilities that beset us.
And then, if we ask what is the verdict of con
sciousness in a right life thus initiated or enforced,
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 153
we shall not find the subject humiliated by the
reference he has had to prudential motives, or
the beginnings he has made under instigations of
peril. The prudentials he began with are now for
the most part left behind, and their temporary uses
are so far ended, and he is only the more exalted in
his consciousness that, beginning at a point of mere
self-interest, where and wherewithal it was only
possible to begin, he is now rising out of his danger-
element into personal majesty above himself
conquering and casting out, and even forgetting,
his fear, in that glorious liberty that springs from
the supreme love of the good for its own sake. All
these lower moods of the mind, therefore appre-
hensiveness, fear, danger, concern have moral uses
to serve of the highest consequence and dignity,
and the world is wisely ordered to keep them in
their proper activity.
4. There are yet two points to be named where
the institute of danger fulfils uses more direct or
immediate, in training all character up moral as
natural, and natural as moral to its highest culmi
nations of honour and respect. I refer to the two
attributes of personal power and personal courage
unfolded by it, or by means of it.
About the highest exhibition of power obtained
or obtainable by man, is discovered in the command
154 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
or sovereign mind-grapple he learns how to main
tain over causes infinitely above him, as respects
their physical efficiency. He is not only not cowed
before the tremendous forces of the creation of God,
but he steals their secret, and by means of it he
actually takes them into service. And in doing it
he is often moved by the stimulation of danger,
going directly into the chambers where the danger
lurks, and working in close precinct with it. His
most striking contrivances, combinations, tools,
machines, operations, discoveries, are ways found
out by his intelligence for keeping at bay, or
reducing to subserviency, forces that would other
wise crush him. As he must go mining under
ground, in halls that are filled with combustible,
explosive gas, he learns by a little experiment how
to fence about his light with a fine wire- gauze,
when he has a safety-lamp that commands the gas
to be harmless; and walking there underground,
through the valley of the shadow of death, with it
in hand, he fears no evil. Beset by a dreadful
plague, that breathes infection round him year by
year, carrying off a third part of the world s chil
dren, he learns to steal a poison from one of his
domesticated animals, and, vaccinated with a touch
of this, he goes, and lets them go, directly into the
bad exposure, doing it as securely as if the plague-
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 155
infection were wholly at his bidding. The wild,
half-demoniacal terrors of alchemy attract his search
instead of repelling it, and chemistry is the result.
The sea is a terrible devouring element, and the
mariner goes coasting cautiously along the frightful
shores for long ages, fearing not only the rocks and
winds, but vastly more that he shall wander into
unknown regions, and be never able to find where
he is, or by what course to reach his home. By and
by it is discovered, by explorative genius groping
far away among the stars, that by angle and dis
tance and calculated tables and observations, the
random ship that was can find her place, at almost
any time, within a mile, and set her course with
reliable precision for any country or harbour on the
globe. The sea again he finds a yawning gulf
between him and the world ; he searches it out with
his mind as the fishes cannot with their fins, maps
the still bottom, draws his wire along it, and then
sits down to think and talk serenely through three
thousand miles of wave and storm. Still more
sublime, because vastly more complex, is that won
derful combination of study and experience by
which human society learns to organize itself in
law and government, so as to keep in safe control
those worst infestations of danger that are created
by social wrong and passion. The problem is, how
156 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
to distribute selfishness and set bad power in balance,
so as to keep it safe in the maintenance of order and
justice. A very cheap, small thing it is to make
out navigation tables, even though we go to the stars
for our data ; but to make out safe navigations for
society, and steer the ark of liberty through the
perilous seas of wrong and passion this, alas ! is
an art that comes more slowly ; and yet it comes !
We shall have it by-aiid-by, the world over. And
yet all these and other puttings forth of skill and
adaptive discovery, in the nature-field of our life,
are only types of that vastly higher and more
qualified intelligence by which we are to get the
worlds of spirit and religion into our command, and
bring the powers of the world to come into our
service. In its highest view, the great problem of
religion, it is true, is not safety, but righteousness
how to be right with God ; how a soul in evil
may come up out of evil into God s acceptance and
friendship, as being co-ordinate with Him in cha
racter. And yet the first impulse to this is the felt
insecurity of evil, set home and seconded by all the
perils of time. From that humble beginning the
soul is to get spring, and then, by its divine explo
rations of study, and faith, and sacrifice, it is to
climb up into God s eternity, appropriating all the
grandest truths and powers and celestial naviga-
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 1 5 7
tions of his realms. Nowhere does he engineer so
loftily and ascend to such a grade of intelligence
as here. We have almost no conception of intelli
gence, what it can contrive, and seize, and com
mand, till we follow it up hither into this diviner
field. Think what we may of fear, and danger,
and the weakness of all such initiations of motive,
they do in fact prepare us to exactly that which is
the crown of intelligence, and without which it has
no crown.
It only remains to speak now of the courage-
principle, rising, as it does, out of the world s perils
and dangers, and made sovereign, as to fear, by the
ascendancy it conquers above them. Great courage
that which makes a hero is, by general consent,
one of the grandest and most eminent distinctions
possible to man. Indeed, we are so eager to find
heroes, and pay them a voluntary homage, that we
sometimes overleap all terms of merit, and take up
what are only mock examples. We commonly take
our heroes from the fields of war, doing it clearly in
the opinion that such kind of greatness may be fitly
measured by the dangers encountered. And so far
we are right if only the commander whom we
have taken for our hero was a leader, who himself
was led by the inspiration of a great and worthy
cause. But these are not the only heroes. Just as
158 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
dangers fill the world, so all men, and women too,
are called to act in some heroic part, and the plan of
life itself is to make heroes, according to the nerve
and resolute faith by which the fight of life s trial is
maintained. The mere infant learning to walk is
taking a first lesson of courage, and how much the
getting heart for such terrible adventure costs him
you will see from the delight he shows in his vic
tory. The boy that dares to be singular is finding
how to be about as great a hero as if he were the
leader of a battle. The man that makes a great
investment, or opens a new trade on the other side
of the world, wants great nerve, steadied by a firm
confidence of right judgment, such as many wild-
brained, accidental leaders in war never knew. All
the great inventors, such as "Watt, Fulton, Ark-
wright, and Bessemer, have to fight pitched battles
against poverty, conspiracy, and only half success,
and finally prevail because they are too great heroes
to be mastered. Whether Wellington was more
of a hero than the man last named is really doubtful.
From certain discoveries in iron, he took the hint
of a new possible art that has made him the Tubal
Cain of his age. His partial failures, and the .con
sequent loss of confidence he suffered, the beauty of
his new combinations, and the stake he made so
heroically to retrieve his loss, have made his name
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 159
one of the grandest names of our time. It is as if
he had turned all the railroads of this and all
coming ages into steel, and built in steel a network
arch of triumph that spans the circles of the world.
So in all the engagements of life, the expeditions,
adventures, travels, trades, and toils, there is some
kind of peril to be mastered, some terrible risk or
danger to be met, which none but a most real hero
will have mettle enough to attempt ; and then as a
result he becomes a man as much manlier, as he had
more to fear and more to conquer.
And what kind of opinion does God indicate
concerning man, when He sets him down here in
death s shadow, and hemming him about with
everything to be feared, charges him to get the
sovereignty of all, by his wakeful prudence and
his steadfast courage ? It was here, as it would
seem, that Job, considering the storms and perils
invading him on every side, fell into so great maze
and bewilderment. What kind of creature does
my God think me to be, that He hedges me about
with so many terrors, and sets me contending with
such wild seas ? Am I something more than a
man, or is it more to be a man than I have thought
it to be ? " Am I a sea, or a whale, that Thou settest
a watch over me? Thou scarest me with dreams.
Thou terrifiest me through visions. What is man
160 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
that Thou shouldst magnify him, and that Thou
shouldst set Thine heart upon him, and that Thou
shouldst visit him every morning and try him every
moment ? "
Surely a creature, nursed in such wild perils, must
be designed for some heroic standing and degree.
It may not be necessary to suppose that he is either
a sea or a whale ; enough that he is a man ; call
him, if you please, a weak, frail creature ; the more
sublime is it that a creature so frail can find how
to master powers so unequal, and assert himself in
sovereignty over such dangers. Whoever has seen
a storm on the ocean has been made to feel this
truth, and probably in a manner that even seemed
to be a discovery. The water flies into mist, like
dust upon a dusty road, filling the air and hiding
the fore-ship from the sight; the ropes groan to
the tempest with a deep shuddering sound ; wave
musters after wave, tossing the huge frame as a
plaything or a bubble, driving it up through
summits, and down through cataracts, sending it
over with a lift, and down with a shove and a shout
who shall say whither ? Ah ! man, what now
is man ? A reed, a straw, a helpless, powerless
creature, drifting where God s tempest wills, ready
to sink as a fly, into just what gulf will open, there
to be no more. But he looks again, notes the com-
OF PHYSICAL DANGER. 161
mander at his post, watching the symptoms of the
storm and the working of the ship. He is a slight-
made, very diminished creature, a man ; to the
smallest of these waves he is nothing. But he has
stuck a few chips together, and balanced a bit of
wire on its centre to guide him, and he is out here
on this howling waste, a thousand miles from the
land, careering through the waves, and holding on
his way, as securely as if they were loaned to
his service. And this, indeed, is man a creafure
deeper than this sea, and more sovereign, rising
out of frailty into grandeur, and creating the
sublimity that before was only possible by the
conquest of his perils. So God tries him every
moment, and so he is magnified. Having nothing
to fear, and no rough perils to conquer, how con
temptible in comparison the figure to which he
would be left !
By this time it must be sufficiently clear that our
human world would be an amazingly stupid place,
and life itself a wretchedly profitless experience, if
there were no dangers in it. We should fall into
wrong as it were by dozing ; or if we say nothing
of wrong, we should do the right idly and without
heart, as if it were not fit to be done. We should
not be timid, because we have nothing to fear ; and
as little should we be brave, because we have nothing
M
162 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
to conquer. We should never be unfolded in that
power and courage which are the real sublimities
of character, but we should live in a low, mean key,
and die of mediocrity and dulness. Our tempests
would be lullabies ; our rivers ropy and slow ; our
lightnings heat lightnings only ; and death, throw
ing by his scythe, would come in gloves with nar
cotic vials. And then, being what we must, our
heaven, if we are to have any, would be a society
composed of dull, insignificant people.
VII.
OF THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY.
it appears to be a first principle in
morality that every man shall be respon
sible for himself, it would really seem
that we ought also to be started every man by
himself; that is, separate and sole, a strictly indi
vidual nature, common with no other, implicated
in no social liabilities that touch the character.
And yet we have our very being, as a personality,
inwoven with other personalities, and sometimes
half consolidated with them. We exist by race, in
families, under laws of inheritance, circulating deri
vative blood, and bearing qualities bred in and in,
which as nearly amount to moral character as they
well can, without our being answerable for them.
And then, again, we are herded afterward, in
schools, and guilds, and states, and churches ; where
1 64 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
we are taken by the common motives, breathe the
common atmosphere, and receive a common head
ship, under the leaders and more forward minds
that express because they represent, and represent
because they express, the common life. And the
result is that we get the stamp of our school, or
sect, or general body upon us, so visible, so legibly
written, as to be distinguishable even by a stranger.
The young Quaker, for example, dropping off his
drab and his grammar, and even his morality, will
certainly reveal the type of his connection to any
one at all conversant with it.
In so many ways we discover the largely compre
hensive, far-reaching fact of our solidarity; a fact
which has never been overlooked, but which, for
the want of any better term of designation, we are
learning of late more and more familiarly to speak
of, under this rather dry French name, or epithet.
Our theology has long been conversant with ideas
closely related under the phrases, "federal headship,"
" original sin," "covenant of works," "imputed sin,"
"sinning in Adam," and the like. Some of these are
scriptural expressions subjected to a dogmatical con
struction, and some of them are terms of merely
theologic invention ; but whatever else may be said,
or understood, whether in or out of the Scripture use,
they all recognise the one general fact of a solidarity
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 165
in human life, such as extends, in one way or
another, to the liabilities of character. Sometimes
the Scriptures speak of " going with a multitude to
do evil," as if the multitude were a flood in which
all the particular units are drifting ; sometimes they
speak of judgments descending on "the third and
fourth generation" of wicked men, as if the law of
a common retribution included all.
Now it is by these conditions of solidarity that we
are most often balked in our notions of individuality,
and the responsibility of individual men for their
conduct. "We remember the idolatrous religions of
the world, and it does not escape our notice that
whole peoples are configured by them to each other,
in common ways of falsehood, lust, and cruelty.
Suicide, or self-martyrdom, is even held to be an act
of pagan saintship. In at least one such pagan tribe,
murder is executed under the bonds of religion. And,
apart from all religious configurations of character,
how often are children trained up in human families
to dexterity in crime sent forth in the morning,
for example, to steal, and returning at night to feed
on the light-finger revenue of their day when, if
they have not stolen quantities enough, they must be
punished for their want of success! Wrong is the
very matrix, in a sense, in which thousands of hap
less children are formed. There is, in fact, no vice or
1 66 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
crime in the world, which is not drunk in often from
the element in which human beings live, almost as
naturally as a sponge receives the waters of the sea.
The dreadful disadvantage thus incurred, under the
solidarity principle, troubles immensely all our
notions of morality or responsible obligation. We
cannot refuse to make some large allowance of
charity for such examples, and we are sometimes
tempted even to go the length of justification. "Under
such enormous disadvantages," we say, " who coiild
be worthier or better ? If there is any stone to be
cast, let some other do it ; we cannot."
Here, then, is our problem, and it must be admitted
to be a really dark one. What are the uses or advan
tages to be gained at so great cost? By what con
ceivable advantage can disadvantages so immense be
morally compensated ? In preparing our answer to
this question, three preliminaries of great importance
are easily settled :
1. That something closely akin to a condition of
solidarity, or common liability, appears to be in
volved in the existence of moral obligation itself.
Such obligation supposes the fact of society, for it is
only in social relations that opportunities of right
and wrong are created. And then, having such
opportunities provided, as moral liberty or freedom
of choice is given, there is just so far a liberty given
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 167
to be bad, carry a bad influence, create a poisonous
atmosphere, perpetrate frauds and deeds of violence,
so to infect or shake the whole frame of society, as
also all the members may be doing by a like abuse of
liberty ; and then society itself, being contaminated,
will be, in turn, a contaminating power of necessity.
The whole stress of solidarity in it will now be set
for evil. All which could no way be prevented,
without either taking us out of society, or never
putting us into it ; in which case we must have a
completely sole existence which is the same as to
say that we shall have no moral sphere at all. As
regards the solidarity plan, there was in fact no
choice ; for, not existing under such a condition, we
could have no other field of responsible action.
Our right of morality would be just like a marital
right and duty in a world where all are men.
2. It is equally plain that we could not exist in
a way of reproduction, or in terms of family rela
tionship, without being involved in derivative con
sequences and liabilities. Fatherhood and mother
hood must carry down effects on childhood, by a law
of necessary causation. We encounter, at this
point, a grand fact of solidarity, at the foundation
or first inception of life. We must either be
created outright, every man by himself, full-grown
probably and without distinction of sex, or else we
1 68 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
must be one race in the constituent liabilities of
solidarity hooked together, in our generations, by
a law of derivative life. And so, inherent qualities
and tendencies must pass by organic participation.
Assuming this fact, which is incontrovertible, we
have it then as a question, whether a scheme of
existence without childhood, without fatherhood or
motherhood, without natural affection of any kind,
without any right of training, or counsel, or
authority, or any element of family life, sanctified
or unsanctified by religion whether such a scheme
of existence would have any moral advantages over
the reproductive, family state by which our life is
initiated ? We judge not unlikely, in our haste, that
it would ; but there could not be a greater mistake.
We must "be created, in that case, in the full
maturity of our powers; but we should have no
particle of experience to begin with, no judgments
formed by experience. Our full-grown passions
would be schooled by no habit of self-control. Our
will would be green as infancy, and yet in full
volume as to power. Our curiosity to know the
unknown would inevitably put us on just the bad
experiment of Adam, and every one would try it for
himself. Meantime we should have entered on a
loveless life, which is, so far, worse even than our
fall nobody caring for us, and we for nobody for
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 169
we have, in such a case, no ties of natural affection.
It would be wonderful, too, if we were not set
upon by every sort of robbery and wrong from the
comers that arrived before us, only to get our com
pensation, by like robberies and wrongs upon those
who come after, when our turn of hazing arrives.
Having no constituent solidarity, our sole state
would be the state of Ishmael. We should be
obliged to create artificial bonds of defence by con
spiracy ; and our conspiracies, gotten up without
friendship, would be solidarities in selfishness
bonds themselves of oppression the most un
mitigated, devilish type of woe that can well be
conceived. The freeness of character in good would
be vastly more abridged than now, and the common
liabilities of wrong immensely increased. Existing
in this manner as solitary magnitudes, our sole-
ness would only bring us into a state of moral
oppression hostile to all benefit, and in fact quite
unendurable. After all, our solidarity, that brings
so many kinds of moral detriment upon us, and of
which we so often complain, throwing all the charges
of our misdoing upon it, is a far more genial and
beneficent condition than any more solitary or
separately begun estate we are able to conceive.
3. It is another very important preliminary,
never to be hid or forgotten, when speaking on this
170 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
subject, that no human being is so far dominated by
the moral disadvantages of his bad connection, or
the bad example in which he has been trained, as to
be wholly unconscious of wrong, or clear of blame,
on account of it. There are two kinds or degrees
of wrong ; one which violates the everlasting, ideal
principle of right, and a second which only violates
certain specific rules or maxims of conduct which
are conceived to be executory of the principle. No
moral being can reject the principle, or consciously
be out of the principle, without blame. No condi
tion of solidarity can excuse him from this blame ;
for the principle of right-doing is in all men, passing
through all solidarities, the same in all, whatever be
their religions or customs. They would not be men
without this great, fixed law of duty in them, even
as the animals themselves are not. But it is not
so in respect to the particular preceptive rules of
conduct which are gotten up to interpret and apply
this law. They may vary largely in different nations
and ages, being more developed in one, more crude
and wild in another ; demanding here what is for
bidden there, and begetting, under one solidarity, a
practice which is abhorrently wrong under another.
Here in this department of specific action, there
will be great diversities, and no one is likely to
blame himself, when the practice he maintains coin-
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 171
cides with the practice of his time, or people, or
family. Therefore we are to make, in this field of
preceptive rule and practice, a very large allowance
for what to us is very false and low ; never judging
others, differently associated and trained, as we
would judge ourselves. They may even be justified
in that which to us would brins: the bitterest self-
3
condemnation. We only know that they never are
justified in doing or meaning anything wrong, as
related to eternal principle. Thus it may be that
the Spartan children, trained to theft by public
law itself, had never a feeling of compunction in
their lives concerning that practice ; and yet, being
consciously out of principle, and wrong in the grand
moral aim of their life, they would carry along so
much, at least, of condemnation in all their conduct,
and would have no more claim to be justified by us,
than they have reason to justify themselves.
We teach ourselves, in this manner, to give full
scope to the solidarities of feeling and practice in
which men are trained ; condemning them never,
save as they violate their convictions, but perfectly
assured of this, that they never do, in fact, quite
justify themselves; because they go into all their
conduct with a sentence of self-condemnation upon
them, for the conscious alienation of their life from
what should be its reigning principle. And so much
172 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
is there in this, that we should be much nearer the
truth if we judged them to be guilty, in all their
deviations from our own standards of practice, than
we should in a clean acquittal of all wrong because
they have not been trained in our standards ; for
there is one standard everlasting, which, as being
simply men, they do have revealed in their
hearts, and by which they are consciously con
demned. The question of wrong, or sin, is never
ended, as a certain class of writers in our time very
flippantly assume, when they find one people or
tribe maintaining a standard exactly contrary to
the standard of another; for there is a higher, all-
inclusive, absolute standard, and it may be that,
none of us are justified by that. In this standard
all our judgments touch bottom, and by this every
thing is to be squared ; and if we have precepts less
inclusive and more superficial, it is better to make
of them only what is to be made.
Having settled these preliminaries, we come out
in the conviction that our debate is not ended, and
that, after all due allowance made for the solidarities
of our existence, there is yet abundant room for the
belief that they belong to the best-appointed moral
condition possible, and have moral uses in which our
advantage is deeply concerned. What these uses
are we are now to inquire.
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 173
1. It will of course be conceded that, where
there is a solidarity or common life in good, that
good will have a more complete and more easily
controlling sway. The hard thing we complain of
is, that evil gets a power so nearly absolute in this
manner. Of course it will be admitted that good
obtains a similar advantage. The state of solidarity
works either way, and the design appears to be to
bring it more and more completely on the side of
good ; for a progress in truth, and character, and all
forms of good, appears to be expected : so that,
finally, grand consolidations and massings of society
will be gathering heavier momentum and a more
and more beneficent sway over the conduct and life
of individuals. Good men will then be born by
nations a nation in a day.
The beneficent powers thus garnered up in the
solidarity principle, we have never yet seen ; and
we take up very hastily the impression that it is
a kind of organic law of advantage given only to
wrong and evil. But suppose we take, for example,
that fearfully depressing and disabling power, which
is exerted against individual industry and character
by a bad or oppressive government. It is a public
despotism, massing the might of a nation against
private worth and success. Let now such private
worth and success, consolidated in some people by
174 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
intelligence and religion, so far get the start of
despotism, here or there, as to organize for itself
institutions that give full hope and liberty and scope
to every man and child, what will now be seen more
certainly than that every sort of despotism in the
world will be yielding itself slowly to the new ex
ample ; growing beneficent, fostering intelligence,
liberating the press and religion; so that finally,
private worth and character, instead of being sup
pressed, will be called forth and created in all the
old, exhausted nations by the governments that
seemed before to be their inevitable hindrance?
Here, then, we have one people, constructing, at
last, a grand solidarity of righteousness in govern
ment, more or less nearly universal. And so this
one people gets a hold, through the solidarities of
civil order all over the world, whereby it changes
and raises up into character and new-sprung life
all other peoples all over the world ; making even
the kings to be their nursing fathers and the queens
their nursing mothers, in all noblest principle and
most vigorous intelligence. And then, when it has
come to this, how very difficult will it be for any
government ever to become bad or oppressive again ;
for every throne or state is looked upon by every
other, and cannot willingly lose its respect !
Take another example of a different type. We
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 175
speak, and so does the Scripture, of a lapsed condi
tion that is brought on the race by inheritance ; for,
as certain as evil is upon any former generation,
some damage must accrue, on physiological prin
ciples, to every subsequent generation. Without
being made responsible, then, for what we have
not done ourselves, we are involved in the common
damage of a common liability, and go down as a
race in the strict solidarity of our connection. We
might also go down, every man for himself, in a
state of sole existence we probably should but
the disorder we suffer by inheritance puts us in a
state of common disadvantage, where evil gets the
ascendancy prior even to our consent. We some
times complain of this, and imagine that no fair
chance at all is given us. But suppose this same
law of physiological connection to be finally rectified
and purified in the progress of time, all Christian
parentages becoming the spring thus of a graciously
rectified and purified germinal life in their children
and it must as certainly be so as that there is
any transmission of quality at all and then these
two results will follow : First, that the new soli
darity in good, thus consummated, will be at once
more prosperous and more healthy, being clear of
the poisons of vice and of all habits of excess, and
will thus overpopulate and virtually live down the
176 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
more corrupted families ; secondly, that every such
family will become a rectified stock, transmitting
seeds of uprightness that will propagate, much as
they themselves are propagated, even to the end
of the world. In these two modes, the great soli
darity principle, which we think of only as our
disadvantage and the spring of our moral disaster,
is to become itself the propagator finally of righte
ous life for the whole race. We now think, and
are wont often to say, that being down, as a race,
under evil, there is not much really to come of our
truly forlorn world, but loss and a vastly prepon
derant undoing ; but we do not consider that our
experiment is barely begun ; that we are yet to
go on as all our vast incipiencies and the foregone
geologic eras prophesy existing so long, in popula
tions so vastly increased, and raised so high in
quality, that the ages, looking back, will see us
to be very nearly contemporary with Adam, and
will think of the race as a grand providential
success, fruitful only in good and triumphant only
in blessing !
2. Where a bad power gets advantage and a more
dominating sway by massing itself in family connec
tions, and guilds, and castes, and whole nationalities,
it is almost certain to finally weaken itself by the
very solidarities that began to give it strength. It
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 177
acts, at first, with a fearfully propelling power ; and
then it begins to react, letting itself down, as it
were, by exhaustion. Aristocracies flourish in this
manner, obtaining, for a time, greater and still
greater eminence, as the splendours and pomps they
display are raised in the scale of magnificence ;
captivating, as by a spell of admiration, vast multi
tudes of retainers ; but the pride and gilded viru
lence of their contemptuous habit begins at length
to make them felt as an oppression ; they sink in
dignity as their frequent profligacy compels; the
admirations they raised fall away and are sickened
by impatience, till at last the tremendous reac
tion of their pompous lie breaks it utterly down,
and the sublime truths of universal manhood and
brotherhood are erected into higher sway and a
more beneficent solidarity. Fashion goes through
a similar course ; nothing is so captivating and all-
compelling as a rising fashion, and nothing so
weak and wind-broken as a mode that begins to
have the symptoms of wane. And the more nearly
any fashion approaches to licentiousness of manners
and conduct, the more sure is the reaction to be
hastened, and the fools most ambitious to be for
ward in it, to slink away humbled and mortified
by it. The power of domination wielded by a
corrupt party will seem for a long time to grow
N
178 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
by the appetite that feeds it, and what is called the
discipline of the party will very nearly submerge
all liberties of character and opinion in the indi
vidual members. But whether it be seen or not,
such kind of growth is only organizing a monster,
and that monster, like another of old time, will by-
and-by devour his own children. His bad power
will culminate, in other words, in such disorders,
and distractions, and oppressions, within itself, as
will rend its own combinations, and hurl it off the
stage as an outlaw no more to be endured. The
grandest, most appalling solidarity the world has
ever seen is the Church of Rome ; but it has passed
the crisis of its majesty, and is sloping downward
into a state of dejection that is fast growing pitiful.
And when it breaks, as break it must, what a lesson
for good will it have given by its amazing assump
tions and the dismal inanities of superstition it has
finally worn out in the world ! We spoke just
now of another kind of solidarity in the organic
propagations of the race. It propagates in one
view, as we saw, evil itself, even as it propagates
the existences that are its subjects. In that view,
it seems to be only a law of moral disadvantage
inserted into the human populations. But this bad
solidarity, though it may never be wholly extirpated
by its reactions, is yet working powerfully always
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 179
by reaction. We speak of it and think of it as
our bond of death, the common desolator of our
good possibilities and hopes, that which baffles
our best personal endeavours and mocks all the
dearest prospects of human society. The important
thing to be noted is, that our common state of evil
evil as in terms of blood and kindred creates
in this manner a salutary and very intense preju
dice against it. Seeing its foul touch everywhere,
and consciously struggling with its dreadful bond
age within, we picture it as a destroyer with a
grudge of animosity; we virtually detest its bad
dominion, whether it is cast out in us or not. If
we knew the state of evil only as our own bad
choice, apart from all bad kinship and contamina
tion of blood, we might even try to hold a good
opinion of it ; we certainly should not help our
selves into a bad opinion of it, as now, by the in
stigation of our flagrant fellow- sympathy against
it. On the whole, it will be found that all bad
solidarities, while doing much to the moral disad
vantage of the race, are yet under a doom of
reaction, by which they will finally assist the
complete reign of truth and righteousness.
3. The condition of solidarity compels even those
who are dominated by it to see what hideous evils
and wrongs are in it, by the woes they bring on
i So MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
society and the persons closest to them in their
human relationships, when its bad instigations are
upon them. Take the example, near at hand, of
our own late rebellion. Considering the numbers
implicated, and the atrocity of the purpose at
tempted, there was never before so great a crime.
We had a government that was the noblest fabric
of liberty and public reason ever constructed, looked
upon with new-born hope by the weary, time-worn
civilisations all over the world. It was cloven down
by revolt, and a conspiracy vast enough to make an
empire by itself proclaimed its end. "War only
could restore it, and it must be war upon a most
gigantic scale. By its armed millions trailing over
broad spaces of territory, occupied by millions
before resting in peace ; by its hundreds of battles,
great and small, strewing these spaces with dead ;
by cities, and even whole States swept clean, as by
a tempest of fire ; by families, in almost every
neighbourhood, mourning the loss of their manliest
fathers, and sons of noblest promise ; by four lono-
years of terror and distraction that kept even the
air tremulous with apprehension at so great cost
the victory of right is won. And yet the solidarity
in wrong was a body too vast to be cooled in a day.
But few, alas! of all the agitators and forward
leaders of the rebellion none of all the people
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 181
concerned in it but the poor victims who were
forced into it against their loyalty appear to have
become truly sensible, as yet, of the enormity of the
crime. They still smoke and smoulder in the pride
of their defeat, defiant, for the most part, of control,
relieving their impotence by the violent epithets
they heap on the friends of order, and claiming
even the right, as before all rights were forfeited,
to make their own terms of pacification ! All which
we duly understand when we speak the word slavery
it is the solidarity of wrong in human slavery ;
that which overawed dissent, and hunted the friends
of order into the ranks to die ; that which, having
organized a vast savage empire, in the domineering-
instincts of absolutism, cannot be suddenly tem
pered to order and reason. But there is just now
a token of relenting here and there, and the time
is not far off when all this rage shall utterly die.
The bond of wrath is broken, slavery is gone, the
slave country for the present is a ruin, the sublime
masterhood is poor, and the immense burdens it has
hung as an incubus on the productive industry of
many generations, it must now itself assist to bear.
Is any one ignorant as to what must be the issue ?
It can be none but this : that they are going, as
reflection gets more opportunity, to look on these
terrible woes of rebellion as witnesses against the
1 82 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
stupendous solidarity of sin, in their slaveholding
manners and society. The walls they see here and
there grimed with smoke and scarred with shot ; the
breastworks and redoubts overgrown with bushes;
the sad stories repeated, and faces looked upon of
orphans now grown up, and widows grey with age,
whose loyal protectors they tore away and sent off
to their armies, never to return ; yes, and the faces
they meet of contemporaries whom they knew
standing fast by their country in the wild, mad
hour, suffering scorn and confiscation for its sake
all these tokens are going to be witnesses, more
piercing as life advances ; and the whole bad history
of the time is going, before they die, and for all
generations to come, to be a standing revelation of
the terrible virulence of this institution, this over
grown solidarity of wrong, such as no testimonies
or confessions of individual men could produce.
And what is to be specially noted further is that
the Union masters, those who were so totally over
borne by the current, and suffered such bitter cost
for their fidelity, will themselves have gotten from
the wild, mad violence that took away their liberty,
a feeling of responsibility for the common sin of
slavery, such as they could never have felt, under
any most pungent appeals of private conviction.
Here, then, is a vast solidarity in wrong, probably
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 183
unmatched before in the history of the world, and
it is going to result in a felt conviction of the
wrong, that is not exceptional, but common to all.
Indeed, when there was a fast proclaimed by the
Confederacy in revolt, it is not difficult to believe
that the solitary men of union went deeper into it,
and felt more humbled by their ill desert in the
common sin of the time, than any of their neigh
bours most forward in the rebellion.
Take a different kind of example. A once profli
gate and vicious father has a child spotted with
incapacity in his organization idiot, or deformed,
or subject to pain, and perhaps distorted by it.
Under the laws of blood and kindred that child is
his, and " this," he is obliged to say, " is my stamp
put upon it." He may be a man practically restored
to ways of virtue ; and, if so, it will only cost him
conflicts the more dreadful, that he is obliged to
look thus on the face of his sin, still and always
before him, in a shape so appalling. Meantime, if
his child has sense enough to know why he is so
badly misshapen, or whence he draws his morbid,
misbegotten temperament, it will yet never occur
to him that he is no subject of accountability,
because the poison of his fatherhood is in him. Or
we may take a case where the law of the house,
after birth, becomes the poison. A robber who
1 84 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
murdered his victim is brought forth to the scaffold,
where he is to suffer the extreme penalty of the
law. And there is a poor, lorn creature there, who
is called and calls herself his mother. She never
inculcated in her son a single right principle. She
taught him to steal, sent him forth to it every
morning, flogged him at night when he returned
without booty, and so, as we should say, made him
exactly what he is, we might even think of her
as being herself the criminal, which in some true
sense she certainly is. And if she has any capa
bility of compunction left, it will now, if ever, be
seen, and will be as pungently moved as it can
be. And yet we shall see that the son, brought
up in such an atmosphere of crime, whipped into
crime, learning how to live only by the fruit of
crime, will distinctly show, and frankly confess, that
he is rightly made responsible for his actions. How
far short, indeed, any such bad solidarity may be
from submerging individual responsibility, we are
sometimes given to see, when a son or a daughter
grows up as a flower of virtue, in the filthiest, most
poisonous atmosphere, more fixedly abhorring every
sort of baseness, for the proximity to it in which the
early childhood was passed.
Once more, it is only by the resolute, upheaving
power of individuals against the crushing weight
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 185
of bad or opposing solidarities that a really massive
and overmastering virtue is prepared. A great
character supposes great victories, won by invin
cible courage. It is not, of course, to be supposed
that God has raised up these frowning solidarities
about us, and arrayed them against us, merely for
our good. As far as they are in wrong, they create
themselves, and then it is given us, every one, to
have his advantage in the power we get by con
fronting them. And so the great leaders, agitators,
and champions of civil liberty, bursting their way
through the bonds of despotism ; the reformers
of wrong and vicious custom ; the restorers of holy
truth, long disfigured by the dogmas of false science ;
the heroic believers, who, for Christ s sake, have
been cast out in their youth by the fierce, ungodly
will of their fathers ; the martyrs who have carried
their bodies into the fire to bear witness against
persecutors in power all such we look upon as the
true men, because they pay so great a price for
their birthright. The solidarities they found against
them ; but they had their principle, and in that,
single handed, they were the majority. The respec
tabilities stood mountain high in their path, but
they had the courage to pass over. They had soul
enough in the right to confront multitudes, and
dignities, and sanctities, and all kinds of powers
1 86 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
and times. Having something true to be thought,
they could think it ; something right to be done,
they could do it. They could be unpopular ; and
when they had great principles to wrestle for, they
expected to be. In this manner, being never at all
wilful, they yet came to have a tremendous will
meek, gentle, immovable ; able to look quietly down
over numbers and names, and all dictations of bad
solidarity, moving, as it were, in calculable force
and certainty against them. And this it is that
makes the sublimity of a character morally great.
How it can ever become massive and solid enough,
when it has no such heavy bulk of resistance to
move, we are scarcely able to imagine.
Thus if a time should finally come, as we have
shown reason to expect, when the solidarities will
themselves be converted to the other side, beginning
to work through all the laws of inheritance and
society, for the propagation of good, as they have
done for the propagation of evil, then, as duty will
have so much less to resist and overcome, it must
take on a character having as much less vigour. It
will be fashioned more by yielding, and less by the
overcoming of resistance, and will have a smooth,
gentle, innocent way, forming a character more like
that of children translated early, and having only
to bloom in the soft airs of Paradise, never to fight.
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 187
Such kind of character will have a true beauty, but
there will be nothing grandly heroic in it. The
heroes of the world came earlier, and we may well
count it one of our particular privileges and honours
to live in these heroic ages, when virtue gets due
bulk and brawn by its victories.
On the whole, I think it will be seen, as the result
and proper conclusion of this discussion, how very
little weight and significance there is in the assump
tion, so pompously and frequently thrust upon us,
that wrong is but a word, and no real matter for
which we are answerable. The doctrine propounded
in high airs of philosophy is, that we are all going
on by development, and that the virtues and crimes,
the saints and felons, are all, in fact, equally good ;
products all of circumstance, inheritance, and social
instigation. If such teachings were less shallow, they
would be atrocious. Weak souls, emulous of strength,
often hope to conquer the repute of it by audacity
a very cheap form of vigour to which they ought
certainly to be equal. Nobody, in fact, believes,
speculate as he may, that circumstance or society
does everything in us, and we nothing. Good and
evil are, in our idea, the most absolute opposites ;
and there is no bridge, or place, or space for a
bridge between them, more than between a straight
line and a crooked. When we do wrong, no matter
i88 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
under what inducement, it is not because we are
fools that remorse takes hold of us, but because we
are men. When we suffer wrong, we spurn the
philosopher at hand who will save us from the
feeling of blame, by what he can tell us of develop
ment that is, of society, circumstance, family origin,
family training ; we think there was something also
in the bad will of the wrong- doer, and we hold him
responsible to justice. We do not abjure punish
ments, because we believe in society ; we have a
place for punishments, just because society exists,
wanting their defence ; for we see that single souls
have power to face all society, and seize upon it as
their prey. Who, meantime, are more unsparing
and fierce in their denunciations than our philan
thropizing philosophers, when they undertake to be
reformers ? Is there nothing blamable in what they
so bitterly denounce ? Doubtless, all due allowances
are to be made in our moral condemnations, for the
bad solidarities in which wrong-doers have been
trained not for those only which have put their
stamp of ignominy on the weak and the low, but as
readily for those which are inbred in men of con
dition. Slaveholding for example who has been
swayed and fashioned by a power more absolute
than the solidarities of slavery; bred as a tyrant,
trained up to a domineering habit, even in child-
THE CONDITION OF SOLIDARITY. 189
hood ; wonted in cruelty ; stimulated in passion ; fed
on the spoils of right ? There was never a form of
society more imperiously toned, as respects the
liberties of duty and the possibilities of character.
All men are to have their allowance, and yet as
certainly to have, in wrong, their condemnation.
Nor let any one think it hard that he himself ib
required to stem so many opposing tides and storms,
in maintaining the struggles of duty ; rather let him
take it bravely as his opportunity.
VIII.
OE NOJS T -INTEECOUESE BETWEEN
WOBLDS.
[HE - creation of God is one, having all its
parts in such relation that they make
up a whole which excludes the possible
notion of plurality. This oneness also is the type
in matter, of a complete, universal society preparing
in its populations. As God has but one creation, so
He has but one society, and He is doing everything
to compact and perfect that society ; drawing it to
everlasting accord, in one kind of morality, under
one set of principles, resulting in one kind of
character, and a common beatitude with himself.
And yet there seem to be fences of separation here
and there, that, in working such a state of complete
unity, would not be expected. As far as we know,
there is no intercourse allowed, or made possible,
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 191
between the populations of the stars, but they go
their rounds of revolution, as completely separated
as if they were always to be as many societies,
separated by as many gulfs of incommunicable
distance. Sometimes we are not altogether patient
of this non-intercourse. We want to know these
populations; and it is not mere curiosity, but the
sense of a fellow-nature and feeling, that puts us
reaching after them. Who are these brethren of
the stars? In what fortunes do they have their
lot ? What stature and figure have they ? What
kind of history do they make ? Have they stood
clear of evil, or are they down under it, and
struggling up through it and out of it, in much
weariness and sorrow, even as we are ? Our heart,
which has no sense of distances, yearns after them
and beckons them; yet there they hang, as far
away as if we cared not for them and there is no
bridge !
This walling apart we discover also in other
matters closer at hand, where we should not look
for it ; as if it were designed to separate, or hold
apart, large families and nations of people that
belong to the general brotherhood of the race. Vast
wilds and almost continental forests, great deserts,
and immense oceans of water, separate and hold
apart how many of the chief populations of the
192 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
world. And yet, perhaps, we can distinguish reasons
of beneficence here, that will, in part, explain the
separations we discover elsewhere ; showing how
they do, in fact, conduce to the growth, and right,
final development of the one, complete society.
These wild forests, and deserts, and oceans, are, in
one view, circumvallations of so many peoples, living
apart thus in their fortresses. Were their habitable
parts swung up side by side with each other, and
separated only by imaginary lines, they would all be
marching everywhere, and safe against the chances
of defeat, or sudden irruption, nowhere. In a bad
world populations are hostile, and fences and defences
are wanted to keep them safe. They are better
prepared for society, that, for the present, they are
kept apart. In the particular instance also of the
sea, setting nations apart by spaces of water that
are in fact highways of commerce and beneficent
community in trade, may we not see typified and
illustrated the general fact, that all separations of
peoples and worlds, are separations for society, and
not against it ? Had the populations of the stars
free travel and swift, passing at will and telegraphi
cally through all distances, the very sky might have
been scarcely better than a battle-ground, and the
zodiac itself kept red by the fights of armies. If
these populations are all in evil, the spaces between
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 193
them, whether grateful to our human curiosity or
not, are probably not wider than they should be.
By these suggestions, which are confessedly sug
gestions of ignorance to a great extent, I hope to
get some little advantage, in the introduction of a
particular subject that is more pressing; namely,
the condition of absolute non-intercourse, that
appears to be ordained between departed souls and
their friends whom they have left behind. We
very frequently express our wonder at this, and
sometimes we complain of it. Could these departed
come back and make report, how much would they
tell us that we need above all to know ! How
easily, too, could it be done; and who would be
disadvantaged, or damaged by it ? And what short
work would be made of all our most trouble
some doubts concerning immortality and God, and
God s great future! Now, we should know, we
think, and no more only guess, or believe. What
appetite also would our returning brothers give us
for the celestial things; telling what they have
seen of them, what kind of greetings met them
when they arrived, and what ravishments took hold
of them, in the wonderful scenes and societies into
which they entered ! We do not speak with any
such desire of the return of our bad friends or ac
quaintances, and testify no such regret that they are
o
194 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
not allowed to come and report their story ; though
perhaps we might look for as good profit in that.
Perhaps we recoil from that unpleasant kind of
intercourse, making tacitly a selection that will
bring us none but the righteous and well- con
ditioned. Perhaps we forget for the time, that the
departed are possibly not all in such condition, as
regards felicity, that we can receive them and hear
the report of their experience with pleasure.
Let me not be understood, however, to assume
that the departed of this world never do, in fact,
return. Two or three such cases of righteous men
returning to the world, besides the case of Lazarus
and others raised from the dead, are reported in the
Scriptures. If, as many suppose, the bad spirits
concerned in the demoniacal possessions are the
spirits of bad men, working still in craft and malig
nity, and doing still their mischiefs, then it would
seem that these are, at least so far, to be taken as
cases of return ; only they do not come in the bodily
form, to be personally known and spoken with.
Many persons in our day believe that by a certain
art of necromancy, in what are called mediums, or
magnetic clairvoyants, the dead are recalled very
much at will, making responses to questions that are
put to them, and giving their advice in real oracles.
I know nothing of this, save that such as were very
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 195
intelligent, cultivated men when alive, give very
unintelligent and crude answers now, and also that,
when their oracles prove false, it is given as excuse,
that bad or dishonest spirits coming back will of
course deceive, and are therefore to be trusted with
caution. Swedenborg thought he had commerce
with spirits good spirits, of course and had a
theory about our relations to the spirit-world that
took away all sorts of distance, but distance of
character. Doubtless it has occurred to almost every
thoughtful person, that our affinities put us in im
mediate company, possibly, with all like affinities
good or bad, and that so we get helps in good, or
demonizing powers in evil, from the invisible access
to us of departed spirits. I shall recur to this
matter in a way more positive hereafter, and there
fore dismiss it for the present.
Still it is practically true that our departed do not
come back in such visible, external way as we ap
pear to mean when we speak of it, and that they
are so far kept in a relation of practical non-inter
course. This is the loss, if it be a loss, that we
deplore in our complaint. And the fact Christ him
self appears to recognise, denying most expressly
that we suffer any loss on account of it. Thus, when
the rich man of his parable makes request that a
messenger may be sent back to warn his brothers,
196 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
the reply is, for substance, It will do no good, they
will not believe the messenger " If they hear not
Moses and the prophets, neither will they be per
suaded though one rose from the dead." I believe
there is a general feeling that Christ exaggerates
a little in this answer of Lazarus ; that we should,
nevertheless, be really persuaded, and that Christ
only means to put in the best defence He can for the
existing fact of non-intercourse, as He finds it in
our actual experience arguing rather from the fact
than toward it. Indeed, it seems to us all a thing
perfectly obvious, that the question of immortality
could be settled easily, by just letting witnesses
come back and tell their story; so easily, that it
sometimes wakens a feeling of suspicion lest there
may be something hollow in the faith of immor
tality; else why should an evidence, so much wanted
and so reasonably demanded, be withheld ? These
friends of ours and of God would certainly come
back if they were still alive, even though it might
cost them much revulsion of feeling to mix again,
so far, with scenes of guiltiness and characters un
congenial. Costing them much sacrifice, they would
do it the more gladly for that reason. Why, then,
is this gate of eternity so fast barred ? Why are
these dead so dumb showing no token or sign ?
Has that nothingness we dread overtaken them?
NONINTER CO URSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 1 9 7
Most of us think otherwise, and yet how often are
we made to think just this !
Now the first thing, as we open this question for
study, is to form a more full and exact conception
of what is implied in the kind of intercourse we
ask. We are in no condition to judge rightly, if
we do not follow out the subject far enough and
carefully enough, to see the very uncomfortable
things which may possibly belong to such a mode
of intercourse, or which are, in fact, included in it.
The supposition is, that the departed are to come
back in body and voice, to communicate with us
through sight and hearing. It is not their silent
ghost we ask; for then what evidence could we
have that anything better than a strange illusion
has befallen us ? "When they come, it must also be,
either because they are sent by selection, or because
they are particularly sought by us, or because they
are free to come and go at their own will. Probably
enough all three suppositions will concur. The
latter, not including the others, appears to be the
general thought which occupies our demand ; for
it is not a few sporadic cases of return that we
ask so few and far apart that all evidence brought
us will be rumour and hearsay but we want them
to come freely, and come to us and to everybody
that wants light, so that we may have witnesses
198 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
always at hand. In this manner, they are to be
somewhat common among us not sufficiently com
mon to be included as fixed residents in our society ;
but so far common as to create no special surprise.
And it does not appear to be often considered that
our required evidence will be incomplete unless the
bad souls also come back ; for they have had an
experience as truly as the good, and it is an ex
perience which it greatly concerns us possibly to
know. The good, not being in that experience, will
know nothing specially concerning it; and their
story, being wholly beatific in its colour, will put us
in a feeling that everything is beatific there, unless
some adequate representation of the bad experience
is also given. But if these bad souls are to come
back, they may come as deceivers possibly, and not
as faithful witnesses, and it will be impossible for
us to guess whether their report is true or false.
What their behaviour, too, will be, is a question
that looks ominous and difficult. Who shall answer
for them that they will keep the peace ? What
conspiracies may they not concoct ? What revo
lutions and tumults may they not stir up ? In times
of public war, what advantage will they have in the
spy service ? In the intrigues of diplomacy, they
may easily become the chief intriguers. When
they meet the good spirits returned, as they some-
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 199
times will, being all in body and so made visible, it
is not quite certain that they will not sometimes be
moved with so hot a feeling of hostility as to attack
them with violence. And what forbids the suppo
sition that we, grown familiar thus with the other
world s people, as we certainly should be in a little
while, may not sometimes be so badly annoyed by
the interruptions and the unwelcome advice of the
departed good, and so easily exasperated against
them by the hostile instigations of the bad, as to set
ourselves upon them in a real persecution even as
we persecuted Christ, who himself came down from
heaven, and proved himself by his miracles, as no
departed brother of our race ever could or can?
But suppose we consent to take up with a half
representation of the other world, and let the bad
departed remain wholly shut away, a great many
other perplexities will be involved, such as more
than counterbalance the chances of benefit. A cer
tain man, of reputed worth and piety, died yester
day, and we ask the departed brother, who returns
this morning, and who knows him well, if he has
seen him ? He replies, with a sad look, that he has ;
that he has come out badly on the other side, where
it is discovered that he gained his late case at law,
against the estate of a poor widow and her children,
by perjury. The dispossession required by the
2oc MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
verdict is to be executed to-morrow, and what shall
be done ? Will the court execute an order against
the discovery thus made? Can the case be re
opened ? Probably not, for no such thing is known
to the law, as hitherto administered. But if such
discoveries were really coming out every day, the
law would be different. Every court must have
its right to revise, and even to revise the public
records, when such new evidences come back in
the report of God s messengers. So if we ask
whether the court, in the case supposed, will cite
the departed man to appear and testify, perhaps
it will not; but if such reappearances of the de
parted were grown common, common law would
require it. And if the departed citizen who is cited
to appear and testify, should refuse, in a case where
both mercy and justice so plainly require it, he
would even be accessory to wrong. In this way, as
the departed are to be largely mixed with the living,
so they must be mixed with all the proceedings of
law, civil and criminal. And what the result will
be, in such a mixture of worlds, it is not easy to
guess. It is very certain that no man will be hung
for a crime, when twenty messengers from the other
world come testifying that he is innocent ; as cer
tain that no public record can stand, w~hen as many
messengers from the unseen world testify that it is
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 201
a forgery, and that the forger was discovered there
a hundred years ago and put to his reward. All
public records, in fact, will have to be corrected by
the records of eternity.
Meantime, what a state of confusion will come
down upon all the schools and teachers and books of
theology, when departed men come back to report
the facts, discoveries, and principles accepted in the
better world ! All the authoritative doctrines,
elaborated with so great care and study, will have
to be revised some to be modified, some to be
corrected, some to be expurgated, some to be abated
and denounced. The new witnesses will not be
fanatics or revolutionists ; but there is a way of
wisdom, in their tranquil utterance, all the more
impressive, that they tell how largely they have
been themselves corrected, and how they have
learned to put everything in a colour so different.
Probably some of the doctors will be wholly unable
to believe their testimony, or will insist on their
being impostors, and not the departed whose names
they have taken. Neither can we forget how ver}
soon the feeling of awe must be taken off by such
conditions of familiarity, and how liable the two
kinds of teachers one from this world and the
other from above might be to fall into a public
wrangle for their opinions. Probably not even
202 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
Luther, coining back as rectified, would be ortho
dox. The teachers returned will of course be more
capable ; but the teachers we have of our own will
be enough more positive and logical, to hold a con
siderable chance of preponderance.
Every department, in short, of life, and every sort
of transaction, will be somehow changed and put in
disorder. Sometimes the departed, nowise dimi
nished in their affections and the sense of what is due
to family engagements, might intrude on new connec
tions formed, in very unwelcome and appalling visits.
Sometimes a godly saint might be recalled and found
present, as the only true mourner, weeping over the
heartlessness and hollow parade of his own funeral.
Now, it will be objected, I presume, by some, that
I am able to raise this look of maladjustment only
by supposing an over-physical or literal return of
the departed. What, then, is really meant, we again
ask, by those who so often complain or testify their
wonder that no state of intercourse with the dead is
permitted ? Do they simply want a flitting, cursi-
tating, ghostly appearance, such as we name by the
word apparition ? some phantasm which is here and
there and nowhere ; which vanishes as soon as it is
seen, and cannot be found, and which nobody can be
quite certain that he has seen at all ? How many
such uncertified, practically unbelieved appearings
NON2NTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 203
do we hear of every day ! JN~o, they want something
to make evidence not some apparition that requires
more evidence a man from the dead solid enough
to certify himself, real enough to be distinguished
by his voice, arid staying long enough to be no
figure of the fancy. They also want such visitations
to be more or less common, that all may have the
profit, and the strangeness of them may not shock
or discourage the faith they are expected to help.
And then, how far off are we from the very same
over-real and literal conception I have been drawing
out? The forbidding pictures and conjunctions I
have sketched are clearly seen to be no extravaganza
gotten up by overdrawing the matter in question.
Exactly such reappearances are, in fact, wanted, and
to be just as nearly common as I have represented.
We may not so understand it, but this is the exact
purport of our desire this and nothing else.
It begins, in this manner, to be evident that the
condition of non-intercourse between the departed
world and the living, so much regretted by many, is
not as undesirable as they assume it to be. If the
fences that part the two worlds were taken down,
and a state of free intercourse permitted, about every
thing in the present order of life and society would
be subverted. This, if only the good were allowed
to return ; and all the more certainly, if the bad also
204 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
were coming abroad, to be at large among us. I
think, too, that we shall be the better satisfied with
our present state of non-intercourse, if, as I now
propose, we set ourselves to a deliberate consideration
of the moral uses and benefits resulting from it.
And here it will be seen, at a glance, that our
state of non- intercourse, so-called, makes a full
period at the closing point of life, giving it a look
of finality that is both impressive and salutary. If
we thought our dying friends would be coming back
to us to-morrow, to speak more impressively than
to-day, because they will know more and testify
from a point more advanced, we should not catch
their last words to be concluded by them, for they
are really not last other and better we expect to
follow. So if we were coming back ourselves, to
make up our deficiencies of duty to our friends, how
easily and securely should we postpone all our most
important, most responsible obligations ! But when
we remember as now, that " the night cometh, when
no man can work," the charge that our Master con
nects with that most cogent argument "work
while it is day" practically means "to-day," allow
ing no postponement of the duties of to-day
It would also be a very great moral damage to
us to have the grand realities of religion made as
familiar as they would be if departed souls were
NONINTERCO URSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 205
allowed to be returning frequently, in visible form,
to mingle with us. Such familiarity would breed
contempt, just where a little more distance and
withdrawment would give power. There is a
foolish and presumptuous side in our human nature
that makes too great familiarity dangerous. Not
even Jehovah would be God to his people, if He
allowed them to see more than just the back of
his retiring form. For this reason, doubtless, it
is that the gate of the other world opens only
that way, and never backward. The sanctity of
that dread world is both more dread and more
inviting, because it is kept unknown, or practi
cally unreported to us.
"We are kept in this manner also from that kind
of dissipation which is so easily begotten by an
obtrusive and shallow curiosity. In this kind
of curiosity, we forget both our errand and our
measure. Could we question thus departed souls
as often as we please, and of such historic figure
as we please to select, there would be no end to
our questions, and no beginning to our moral
benefit. We should be like those people who are
going so often to the seers and sittings of necro-
inancy, exulting much in the fine proofs they get
of their immortality by so many witnesses, yet
believing only just as much less as they are more
206 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
astounded by the revelations religiously addled,
and counting it the same thing as religion. If
we could have departed souls returning thus at
call or without, to be familiarly questioned, the
simple curiosity gendered would be enough of itself
to frustrate all the most sober purposes of life. In
a spirit so frivolous, or a mood so light-headed,
the motives of duty get no power. It is as if the
soul were amusing itself in experiments on the un
known leap and what comes after, and so much
delighted with the revelation obtained, as to look
no more for profit, than it would in the breath
ing of a gas, Nothing is worse than to get the
matters of duty and religion into the sphere of
gossip. All the worse, if the dread gates of eternity
are opened thus, chiefly for the sake of gossip,
and the righteous dead let forth to be the chief
gossipers ; telling stories for the curious, indulging
them in talk and free report, and making up a
gospel which is only gossip, nothing more.
It would also give us an immense opportunity for
ambition if this free intercourse with the departed
were allowed us. If it were given us to make our
own selection, we might never call for any but
some very distinguished personage. We might
desire, not so much the saints as the high saints,
such as made a name by their figure in this life.
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 207
Intercourse with God s little ones might not please
our vanity, and the result would be that the great
and celebrated personages would be hurried and
worried, and set trooping day and night, to answer
the calls of all most beggarly, insignificant people,
while the little ones who pack God s family
really the great to Him, and for us the most com
petent teachers, because most truly on the level of
our experience would not be summoned once in
a thousand years. And if they should come to us
of their own accord supposing all to come in this
manner and not by our selection I fear that some
of us might be mortified, and that sometimes the
uncelebrated souls would encounter incivility enough
from us to send them back to their places. "While
if one of us should have a spontaneous visit from
some great personage Washington, Luther, Paul,
Moses, for example it would inflate our ambition,
I fear, to such a pitch, as to quite overset the
balance of our dignity. In our present temper,
neither class of souls, the great or lowly, could hope
to bring us any spiritual gift.
Again, it is a very great argument, as respects
the subject in question, that we get all the best,
most valid, most effective conceptions of things from
the things themselves, and not from what rumour
or tradition reveals, or from what talkers can tell
208 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
us. "We learn about nature, for example, by going
directly to nature herself, putting our ear to her
voices, observing her changes with our eyes. We
do not look for genii to come forth out of nature
and show us how she began and by what laws she
works ; we do not implicitly trust even travellers,
when they report opinions or convictions instead
of phenomena and fact. "We expect to know the
things not from their mere talk about them, but
from the things themselves, challenged by investi
gation, tested carefully by experiment. In the same
way God will not have so many of those departed
come back as travellers abroad, to be reporters and
talkers of knowledge for us ; for He wants to have
us go directly to the subjects of duty all subjects
of a moral and spiritual nature and learn what
they are from themselves. Too much report and
talk would ruin us, we should never know any
thing at first hand, if we were all the while ob
truded upon by revelations of message and story.
Eeal conviction goes before talk, and is grounded
in the soul s own thinking of subjects and ques
tions themselves. Eeal faith is not something
talked into us, but a most inward perception of
that which is inwardly revealed. Eeal principle
comes, not after society and social communication,
but goes before them rather, certifying immortality
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 209
and heaven and future society for itself. I think
we know more of the grand world-future before us
from Paul s handlings of the great truths in his
written epistles, contriving how to get them based
in thought and verified by it, than we should from
the reports he might give us of his experience, in
case he should return. The very excitement he
would raise by his testimonies might render us less
capable of understanding what is in the subjects
themselves. Indeed, there probably could not be
a greater hindrance to the sober and rationally
solid convictions of duty and religion, than to have
all the glorified spirits of the upper world crowding
about us in verbal talk and testimony.
It is also another and very great consideration, as
regards the moral uses of non-intercourse established
between worlds, that it shuts away the lighter, less
capable modes of benefit, with a view to put us
more completely in the power of such as have
greater competency. There is, for example, no
really competent revelator for a soul but God him
self, and this is exactly the revelation that He
undertakes to give. Saints coming back could only
report what they have seen ; but God, by his all-
present Spirit, is able to be a presence of truth
itself in the secret chambers of the mind; to blazon
himself and his counsel and his feeling and all that
210 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
belongs to his eternity in the inner sense itself.
To let the soul get occupied, therefore, with much
talk, and heated by the very dear society of so
many glorious strange- comers, would be to inflict
upon it a very great loss. To be still with God and
only hear Him whisper signifies a great deal more.
Such kind of knowledge is not talked into the
soul, but thought into it. There is no clatter in
it drowning the sense, but it is born from within,
out of God s deep silence. That silence, therefore,
is kept for us, undisturbed by voices and oracular
spirits, who might rather confound than teach by
their too friendly interruptions. It is not denied,
in this manner, that we really want all that we
regret the not having in our state of non-inter
course with the departed ; it is only assumed that
God himself can be, and will be, a more sufficiently,
deeply informing power. They could only exter
nalise something in words : He can work convic
tions, knowledges, presentiments, that shall be in
ward states. Living in our sensuous habit, we
perhaps think otherwise, and therefore wish that
spirits from the other world might come and talk
with us ; but the very reason why they do not is
that, having the eternal Father himself with us,
their stories in our ears would be only a feeble
impertinence.
NONINTER CO URSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 2 1 1
Still, it will be imagined perhaps that the one
great subject of immortality would be set in evi
dence by the report of departed spirits, as it could
not by any divine impressions or informing reveal-
ments within. This exactly is the claim put for
ward so often by our necromantic gospellers. Before,
they could not, as they tell us, believe anything
about this matter of immortality ; they lived in
the dark, and could only think of death as a lapse
into nothingness. Now they know that there is
a future state ; friends whom they loved have come
back to them and told them all about their new
experience. Thank God, they are sure of something
now beyond this life, and the condition they are
in borders, they will say, on ravishment itself.
Now, the simple answer to be made here is, that
the continent they have discovered is a real conti
nent, only not more real than it would be if it had
been sooner discovered, in God s more genuine, less
superficial way. Have they not some reason still
to doubt the necromantic oracles ; and is not the
very close approach they have made to jugglery
a rather uncomfortable source of evidence for a
truth so serious and sublime ? Suppose, instead,
they had simply let their vast religious nature open
itself to God s full movement within, and that so
they had become conscious of God himself, knowing
212 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
and receiving Him by his immediate revelation.
What is that consciousness of God but an implied
consciousness of immortality ? And which is better,
the soul itself awakened inwardly to the sense of
its own inborn eternity, or the soul put on think
ing itself immortal by the verbal message of friends
who are now beyond the gulf spelling out their
reports, by such tokens perhaps as will make up an
evidence without much help of dignity ? It is
certainly most strange that men will go so far, and
even, strain their faculty under such prodigious
tricks of charlatanism, to make out the confidence
of immortality, when it is even natural to them
as their breath, and would never be doubted for
a moment, if they could consent to simply be as in
God apart from whom, as the complement and
divine light of their spirit, they have no more real
possibility of being, than a day without the sun.
Having eyes to see the houses on the other side
of the river, is it incredible that such houses exist,
till the occupants themselves come over and tell us
that they do ?
Our argument is here summed up in the fact
that God himself is teacher enough, a teacher indis
pensable and really more effective, when interrup
tions of talk and irruptions of talkers from the
unseen world are shut away. And yet there is
NONINTER CO URSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 2 1 3
a certain ground of reason, I must also concede,
for the desire we have to receive sensible visitations,
and visitors appearing to the senses, from the un
seen world. As neglecters of God we live in the
senses, and get stalled in the senses ; so that finally
our chief inlets appear to be there, and we scarcely
make out the reality of anything which does not
meet us in some visible shape or audible accent.
Christ, therefore, came to be incarnate among us,
and to be that revelation of God in the flesh
that is required by the shutting up of our higher
modes of perception. He comes down from above,
just as we are wishing often that our departed
friends might come, wondering in much sadness
that they do not. He brings all knowledge of the
world unseen with Him, and even the glory that
He had with the Father before the world was. He
knows more about the great future than all the
dead that have ever died, and, what is more, He
understands exactly what we most want to know,
and He can tell it so as to put more real evidence
into it, than their whole cloud of witnesses testify
ing together. He is visible as we can wish Him
to be, audible as visible ; nay, He is so completely
one with us in our human society, that we count
Him a man, and think we have the table of his
human genealogy. By this act God means to
214 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
comfort us, in just that sensuous want, which puts
us on complaining of the non-intercourse act that
fences us in. And the design is to recall us by
a visitation that shall enter Him back, and enter
his unseen kingdom back, into souls, by the sense
thus awakened. But not even He must stay too
long. Three short years were the limit of his
public appearing, and He declared himself that it
was expedient, or practically best for Him to go
away, and let the Comforter, or unseen Father, come
into his place and be his own immediate witness.
If, then, it would not do for Him to stay longer,
if it would rather put us under the senses and sen
suous evidences, than help us up through them,
how much greater damage will it do us to have
departed friends rushing back upon us, displacing
Him by their multitude, and the merely curious
matters of their personal story, and holding us back
from God s eternal teaching, by the hum of so
many voices filling the air about us ! If we want
the visible, as to a certain very limited extent we
do, are these multitudes going to add anything to
Christ ? Is He not a witness more significant than
they all? Is He not as truly from their unseen
world ? Is there not more light in Him and more
future than they have ever seen ? And when they
come to thrust themselves in between us and Him,
NONINTERCOURSE BETWEEN WORLDS. 215
what are they but a hindrance to our benefit in
Him ? The very thing we want in them is given
us in Him, in a form so simple and pure and
grandly concentrated, that their petty figures come
upon the stage only to confound our attention and
tempt the weakness of our curiosity. Procul, procul,
este !
We discover in this manner that we do not have
our state of non-intercourse established because no
such intercourse with the unseen world could be
allowed, but because we have it already provided,
in a way so impressive, that we cannot afford to
be taken off from it, or to have our attention
divided. The next best thing, if there were no
Christ in the world, might be to have the good
souls flocking back as birds of passage ; but it would
not do for them, in such a case, to stay for a single
half week, for the tumult of mind they would
raise must very shortly make it expedient for them
to go away, and leave us more to our God-instructed
thoughts, and the deep- set ineradicable convictions
of our religious mind.
I will only add in closing, to prevent misunder
standing, that our desire to know the good con
dition of our friends, and to have the sense of their
company for its own sake, is a natural desire, and
seems to be graciously provided for. I have spoken
216 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
already of the revelations or open states of access,
that are possibly implied in congenial affinities.
This open state in us appears to be that opening
of heaven of which Christ speaks, declaring that
the angels of God shall be distinguished ascending
and descending through it. It is the nature of
every mind set open by good, to have the commerce
and felt presence of all the good. They will not
come to the senses, or speak with us by their voices,
but there will be a sense of their company unseen,
and their friendly help. They will be nigh in
sacred power, as a kind of good possession, proving
their friendship and flavouring the mind with their
peace. In this manner we are permitted a most
real society with them, such as comforts our ex-
ternal separation, and takes away the pangs of our
unreasonable sorrow. Anything more, or different
from this, it is very clear would rather work our
detriment than our benefit.
IX.
OF WINTEB.
|T is most remarkable that we have, in
our winter, a whole season of the year
that bears a look of unbenignity. We
cannot say or think that God is cold here to
his children, but no reverence can hide it from
us, in these winter months of the year, that his
physical treatment is fearfully chill and severe.
A pitiless stern aspect rests upon the world.
The forests stand brown and bare. There is no
song in their tops; they only roar and crackle
to the blast in their frozen branches. Lake and
river bellow to the winds afar, as if monsters shut
under by the freezing, were tearing to be free.
The world s body is not dressed, but shrouded
rather, looking all the colder that we see it in a
laying out of white, unflushed by mortal sympathy.
2i8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
God s tenderness appears to be quite shut away,
or shut in, by his cold. The animals stand crouch
ing in their yards, or under copse or wall, holding
their heads low to the storm, as if missing God s
pity in it. The little child whom Christ would
have taken up so fondly in his arms, gets stalled
in the snows, and when his hands are freezing,
screams imploringly for help, but help is nowhere,
and God s unpitying cold goes on to freeze him, as
remorselessly as if he were a man. The traveller
is overtaken at night on the prairie, by a howling,
wildly driving storm ; all trace of a road is gone ;
his point of direction is lost, and he drives still
on, still round and round, passing more than once
quite near the light which his wife has set in her
window. She is praying that God will spare him;
he himself is praying that God will spare him for
her dear sake and his children s ; but it is as if the
prayers themselves were falling under the snow
two days afterward he and his exhausted team are
found upright and stiff in a snow- bed miles away.
Physically speaking, this is the picture of God s
winter. Does it represent Him ? Certainly it does
in some true sense, though not in any such general
and complete sense as to yield a just conception
of Him. Many of God s doings and appointments
do not represent his feeling or disposition, but they
OF WINTER. 219
only represent the more truly his counsel, his
purpose, his ends of discipline, his modes of
compelling industry, begetting reflection, setting
fast habits of attention, consolidating attributes of
strength that are wanted to compose a manly cha
racter. In this manner we shall see that God is
represented rather by the moral uses of winter,
than by winter itself. Turning our thoughts in
this direction then, we shall find enough to satisfy
us ; nay, we shall see the benignity of God un
folded here, if not more tenderly, yet more con
vincingly, than in any of the softer seasons of the
year.
Some persons have thought that God would have
shown his goodness more perfectly, if He had
planned to omit the winter altogether. Thus, if
He had made the world a cylinder instead of a
sphere, setting its axis in the same line, He would
have given us a perfectly equal season, they say,
up to the very ends of the cylinder, throughout
the year. To urge the inconvenience in such a
case, of an endwise attraction, balancing itself at
the centre, and growing stronger each way from
the centre, is probably unnecessary. But if all
the waters and the atmosphere must be sliding
down toward the mid-circle or equator, if the
people farther north arid south must be living
220 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
thus on a stairway, and climbing it with, heavier
lift, as they approach the ends, there to find them
selves on a mountain 4,000 miles high, these and
the other consequent inconveniences breathing
without air, and cooking without fire, and culti
vating growths without ever a possibility of rain
might be many times greater than to have a winter.
Nine-tenths of the cylinder would be a desert. The
less we amuse ourselves by such kind of sugges
tions, and the more steadily we set ourselves to
look after the moral benefits designed for us in the
ordinance of winter as it is, the better satisfaction
shall we obtain.
First of all, then, we need to observe that it may
be a very great point for us to have some whole
season, or considerable department of our life, so
ordered as to show that God s beneficence is not
always concerned, of course, in the promotion of
physical ends. The supreme utilities with us are
physical, and we look to see God planning every
thing to serve the ends we value, viz., physical ends
in that proving his beneficence. Even Dr. Paley
himself, who ought to make some principal account
of ends and uses more religious, falls into the way
of the general world- worship, contriving always
to show how this or that fulfils some end or use
within the compass of nature itself; as when beasts
OF WINTER. 221
of prey or venom are shown to have their use,
not morally, but in keeping down the over-multi
plication of beasts. Raising this kind of argument,
we should have it on hand to show the beneficence
of winter, by the mere physical ends and uses it
serves, and that might not be easy. Do animals
and children grow faster because of the cold ? Do
we make up our supplies more easily, for having
a whole third part of the year given up to con
sumption, while producing nothing ? Is the pasture
more sufficient, for lying dead under the snow a
full third part of the year ? Are the roads more
advantageous that they are made impassable ?
the rivers and lakes that they are put under em
bargo by ice ? Are the rocks and trees that are
rifted by frost made any the better for it ? Is the
landscape improved by stripping it ? Do the howl
ing storms of winter cherish anything fruitful or
kill anything noxious ? The remarkable thing here,
in this matter of winter, is that, as far as we can
see, almost no single end of our mere physical life
is at all advanced by it. It is as if God took us
off here into a field, where nothing is done for
physical ends, to show us on how large a scale
He builds, and governs, and works, for ends that
are superior, and even such as lie beyond the world
itself. He does it more or less, sometimes here
222 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
and sometimes there, in the other seasons of the
year; but here He does it, as it were by system,
on the largest scale possible ; calling us to observe
that He has other, higher ends, beyond all terms
of mere physical beneficence. It may be that we
do not consciously take up any such conclusion,
by a distinct intellectual recognition. But we are
thrown, practically, into a state of moral impression
that corresponds. Our God is not a summer God
only, but a winter God, ruling with stout emphasis,
and caring visibly less for all mere comfort, than
for the grand prerogatives and rigours of principle.
The immense moral benefit of such impressions
cannot easily be over-estimated. It does not show
us all God s contrivances in the creation, tapering
off into some mere physical use, but it shows Him
dropping out of sight, and, as it were, forgetting
all physical uses, for whole months in the year, to
bring on the other, higher uses that relate more
especially to character and worlds beyond the
world.
It has not escaped the notice of physicians and
physiologists, that winter effects a marked change
in our bodily habit and temperament. The diseases
are generally of a different type, and health itself
is a different experience. In summer the senses
are more awake, and the body has free communi-
OF WINTER. 223
cation with nature through every gate and pore
of the skin. In the winter these gates are closed,
and the vital force retreats to its cell, to fan the
fires and sustain the internal heat, by extra exertion
there. We fold our cloak instinctively about us,
and ask to be separated from nature by walls that
are impervious. It is impossible that so great a
change should not powerfully affect the tone and
temperament of the mind a fact which many
have not failed to observe. We have thus a
summer mind and a winter mind. The distinction
is not as wide as between the state of sleep and
the waking state. Neither is it any way analogous,
and yet it is not less real. The mind works differ
ently and has different proclivities in the winter.
It is less given up to sensation it is even fighting
off sensation a great part of the time. Passion
is moderated and keyed more closely in the terms
of order and reason. The delectations and delicate
pleasures of summer life are farther off, and as
much less desired. In a perpetual summer life,
as in the tropics, they all but macerate the soul s
capacities ; but where there is a good interspersing
of winter habit, a more rugged and more distinctly
moral temperament is induced. The mind has a
closer affinity with moral subjects, thinks responsi
bility with more of traverse and high understanding,
224 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
and puts itself down upon all great questions of
religion, with more of appetite and a steadier
mastership.
The contrast observable here between summer and
winter life, in respect to the habit or capacity of
reflection, is specially remarkable. Self-indulgence,
luxury, and a free bathing of sensation in the world s
temperatures and odours make soft motive for us in
the summer, and lull us in a softening element. We
seek the out-door shade and open air, and the motion
of our being is outward, away from its own centre.
The songs of the morning are music in our ear. The
air is laden with incense. Scenes of beauty open to
the eye, and we fill ourselves all day with images
of freshness and life. All which is of the highest
use it is even necessary to the furniture of the
mind. But it requires a time of reflection afterward,
to enable us to realise the moral benefits prepared.
After the mind has received the summer into its
storehouse, then it wants the winter, as a time
wherein to review and con over its stores. Then let
the summer wane, and the autumnal frost begin to
whiten the plain. Let the songs be hushed, the
verdure fall off, and the scented air breathe only
cold. Let the snows spread their blanket over the
dead world, and the wintry blasts howl vengefully
and wild. Now the senses lose their objects, and the
OF WINTER. 22$
man, not as being moved inwardly, but frost-nipped
rather without, gathers in his mind to reflection.
And there he finds gathered in also all the images
of the creation, himself among them, present also to
himself. Their meanings, monitions, suggestions,
and the matter-forms of thought there is in them,
throng in to his aid. He hears the whispers of his
conscience, and thinks of other worlds. Every
prospect without forbidding and desolate, and the
in-door fire more attractive in his evenings than
any walk abroad, he is shut up, in a sense, even
wontedly, to his chamber, and to thoughts that relate
to his own being and well-being. If he ever cogently
and closely thinks, it will probably be now. If he
is ever seriously bent to the very highest concern
ments of his nature, he is likely to be so now. There
is more of tone in his moral perceptions than at other
times. Truth is seen more clearly, and his soul
rings like a bell under its touch, because he is
undiverted by things without, and thought is single
in its action.
Now, it is well understood that the mind never
attains to great intellectual strength without first
forming a habit of reflection. And the same is
necessary to a vigorous pronouncement of the moral
man the conscience, the spiritual emotions, and the
religious aspirations. Hence the well-known super-
Q
226 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
ficiality and the great intellectual and moral dearth
of the tropical climates. Having no winter, they
/ have no capacity of deep, well-invigorated reflection,
and no firm condensation of thoughtful temperament.
Their moral nature especially wants the true frigorific
tension of a well- wintered life and experience. For
it is often observed, partly because the habit is more
reflective, and partly for other reasons, that men have
a stronger sense of principles in winter, than at any
other time. They see them invested with a certain
rigour and severity, like the season itself. Or,
perhaps, without making any such comparison, they
do, by a certain force of association, behold them, as
they do the trunks of the forest, standing in their
pure anatomy, curtained by no garniture of leave s,
and stretching their bare, stiff limbs to the sky.
Hence the contrast between tropical consciences,
| / which are out-door, self-indulgent, unpronouncing
consciences, and those which have been trained in
the more rugged and severe climes of the North.
Who that understands the moral efficacy of climates
would undertake to form a Scotch people, or New
England people, as to the sense of principles, in
either Central America or Jamaica ?
In the same way, we are made more conscious of
our moral and religious wants in the winter, than we
are in the softer, balmier seasons. If we can judge
OF WINTER. 22?
from the feeding of the swine on the ripened
products of the year, the parable of the prodigal
son is a winter parable in its date. He came also
to himself, and began to be in want, because it was
a time of short allowance. The intimation therefore
is, that the sense of guilt and hunger, in the moral
nature, is the needed precondition of all highest
spiritual good; and when but in the winter shall
this necessary sense of want be wakened? Let
everything about the man be an image of the dearth
and coldness of a cold heart. Surround him with
winter as a counterpart to the winter of the mind.
Cut him off from the diversions and half-satisfactions
of his summer pleasures, take away the sceneries and
prospects that relieve the tedium of an empty heart.
Shut him up to himself, leaving no resource, save
what he finds in himself. And then, if ever, he will
be likely to feel the stir of those sublime, everlasting
wants, that put all moral natures reaching after
God. In this matter, it is not the question simply,
what a cold, blank soul may be put on thinking, by
the experiences and sceneries of winter. We have a
great many gospellings that do not come to thought, I
or work by thought at all, but only by the states
or impressions they beget in ways more immediate ;
even as hymns do not take our head by their mere
creed matter, but play themselves straightway into
228 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
sentiments. And so it is that God s great ordinance
of snow the blank of it, the white of it, and the
cold, and the readiness to be dissolved and pass away
is just that power on human feeling most pro
foundly adapted to the fit movement of the soul s
immortal want. It is a kind of scenery felt to be
both congenial and chill ; answering faithfully to the
dreary chill of hunger that pinches the bosom within.
Analogous to this effect of winter, and closely
related, is the fact that we are more capable of
realising invisible sceneries and worlds in the winter,
than at any other time. God is more vividly imaged
to the mind, we cannot but admit, in the sceneries,
and showers, and dews of summer. It appears to
be intimated also, that our paradise will have tropical
attractions, yielding twelve manner of fruits a fruit
every month but the time to realise these invisible
things of God and his paradise, is when a pall is
thrown over things visible that have a resemblance.
Thus it would be very unskilful if any one, having
it for his problem how to produce the most vivid
impression of the beauties of paradise the river
clear as crystal, the golden sands, the trees of life
blooming fast by the river were to choose the time
when spring is bursting into leaf and flower, and
the odours are floating, and the music warbling on
the air. In that case he will only raise an impres-
OF WINTER. 229
sion that the good world s delectations are about on
a par with our present, which does not after all
appear to be very superlatively blessed ; whereas,
if he should rather choose the dreary and bleak
winter, when the creation is desolate and bare, he
would call on our imaginations to paint the picture,
and be sure that they would make it blessed above
all fact as superlatively blessed as it need be. It
must also be remembered that the invisible things
o
of religion will be just as much more real in the
winter, as the want of them is more impressively
felt ; as much more real as their principles are more
distinctly apprehended ; as much more real as the
power of thought is more separated from the dis
tractions of the senses.
It is also another very grand moral advantage of
winter, that the will of man, or the voluntary power
of his nature, becomes more erect, more vigorously
attent and determinate, under that kind of experience.
One of the most remarkable distinctions of the men
of tropical climates, is that they seem to have no
will ; that is, no such steadiness and persistent grasp
of will, as amounts to a capacity of high resolve and
determinate action. They bask, they float, they are
delicate and sensitive, but far too inefficient commonly
for any decisive kind of action. The nearest approach
they make to it is in their gustiness and the tempest-
230 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
rage of their passion ; but here the very thing most
wanting is a will that has force enough to master
their impulse, and steady their self-government. To
breast oppositions, stem currents, fight causes, resolve
on changes or amendments, rise above misfortunes,
seems impossible. How many tropically-nurtured
martyrs have we ever heard of? And we need not
quit our zone to learn the reason. Who of us does
not observe that, in the heat of summer he is languid,
faint, averse to resolution ? We even call the summer
the languid season. We also speak of the bracing
winter, by which we mean that we have nerve to do,
determine, plan, withstand, endure in a word, that
we have now a new instalment of will, and so o
practical energy. Now, therefore, is the time when
we shall be girded to the closest mental attention,
and shall most distinctly comprehend our own moral
state and want. And what we discover we shall set
ourselves in firmest resolution to do ; to mend our
defects, renounce our sins, revolutionise our habits,
take up our crosses, enter into new duties and hopes,
and pluck up courage, in God s help, to begin a new
and a better life. All this we may do in the summer,
it is true ; but we are far more likely to do it in the
winter, or in the neighbouring season of spring,
when the tonic force of one is passing into the soften
ing genialities of the other.
OF WINTER. 231
We shall also discover, what will be more im
pressive to many, that winter has a practical effect,
in a large way, on the economic and social con
ditions of life, that is in the highest degree bene
ficial to character. Winter is not commonly
productive, but is rather a time of expenditure.
And in this way it impels, by the most stringent
motive possible, to habits of industry and provi
dence, which are the acknowledged conservators
and securities of character. A few of the trades
find their harvest-time in the winter, but, for the
greater part of society, summer is the productive
season. And they do well if they do not consume
in the winter all which their summer produces. As
production falls off or diminishes, expenditure is,
by the same causes, enlarged. The comfort of the
house is to be maintained by artificial heat, which
makes a large expense. The body requires heavier,
more expensive clothing. It also requires a larger
quantity of more substantial food to sustain its
internal heat. Meantime the herds of domestic
animals are kept in life through the winter by
generous supplies, which it has cost many acres of
land and whole months of labour to provide. In
come is nowhere ; out- go is the general law. And
then, when the spring and summer return, the
same winter stock is to be provided over again
2 3 2 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
for the inevitable expenditure. Everything is hung
on providence, and the man who will not provide
cannot live. He must bow himself to industry, and
then what he creates he must store, and keep in
careful husbandry. And so, by the very drill of
life, he is trained to a cautionary, fore-looking
habit. He is no such man as he would be, if
nature were pouring out her bounties to him all
the year. And as he provides for the winter, care
fully gathering and storing what will stock his
comfort, it will be strange, if his very habit does
not sometimes set him on forecasting the wants and
necessities of a life beyond life. And then, having
gotten this also provided, he will have it in his heart
to borrow a larger lesson from the winter. He will
be no more churlish, or barren of gratitude, in so
much of expenditure ; but seeing that God gives for
expenditure, and that, in this, all his gifts have their
value, he will set his fireside comforts in contrast
with the bleak and dreary desolations around him,
and will thank God, with a full and tender heart,
for the supplies of his year. His industry, making
suit to God as to the soil and the seasons, and his
temperate life- care in the provisioning of his wants,
are in one view a drill, in another a hymn. We
might think that the people of a tropical climate
would, of course, be more religiously bent, and more
OF WINTER. 233
grateful. And yet they are likely to even forget
what gratitude means. They receive their blessings
as a thing of course, and being occupied always
with receiving, and having no separate time of use
and expenditure, their blind selfish habit runs them
by all remembrance even of the giver. Nature
pours out her flood upon them, and they receive
it as they receive the air, without any sense of its
value, or the bounty which it signifies.
The moral benefit of winter is also great, super
eminently great, in the contributions it makes to
home-life, and the fine moral serenities of a close
family state. Home is a northern word, not found ]/
in the languages of the tropical nations. Living
out of doors, reclining under shades, or strolling
here and there at any time of day or night for the
whole year, families are less regularly gathered into
a home circle, or anything which can be called
domestic proximity. They take the habit of the
herds, in part, and their passions are as much
loosened as their domestic ties. It is only at the
hearth where the winter fire is kindled, and the
family is gathered into close companionship, that
fatherhood and motherhood, and the other tender
relationships, become bonds of unity and consciously
felt concern. A whole half-year spent at the hearth
mornings there begun with prayer, long evenings
234 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
enlivened by mutual society and common studies,
books opening their treasures, games their diver
sions this it is that condenses a home. Nothing
can buy it, or bring it to pass, without help of
winter as the prime condition. A " Cotter s Satur
day Night " in the tropics ! who can imagine it ?
Winter then, we are to see, is that best educator,
in whose school spring all the thousand nameless
influences that guard the life, strengthen its prin
ciples, and save its affections from vagrancy and
dissipation. There is no moral influence, not imme
diately religious, that is so essential to virtue and
religion, as this most untropical institution that we
call a home.
Thus far we have been occupied in tracing certain
particular results of character operated by winter
climates. I wish it were possible, taking a different
way, to sketch the many impressive scenes or occa
sions of winter, that are working always, perhaps
unobserved, results not less important. As I can
name only two or three, notice, for one, the almost
religious impression of the winter storms. The
tropical storms, such as the hurricane of our southern
seas, and the cyclone of the eastern, are far more
violent so violent or furious as to be simply ter
rible, and to leave no moral impression at all. But
our winter storm gathers up its force more thought-
OF WINTER. 235
fully, as if moving only great instigations ; driving
steadily on, with a roar that is, at once, the voice
of power and of cold. We imagine certain rigours
of eternal majesty in the sound, hearing it with
only the deeper, more considerate awe, that we
apprehend no damage or danger from it. The
driven snow-dust fills the air and whitens on the
window-panes, so that seeing nothing without, we
can only sit by our fire and hear the commotion ;
save that we feel the jar of it also now and then,
when the gusty shocks of broadside pressure bunt
upon the house. Waking in the night, when the
storm is at its highest pitch of emphasis, we medi
tate composedly, yet how distinctly, God, who saith
to the snow, " Be thou on the earth," and by such
voice of majesty executes his word. The storm
is only such as we have seen many times, and
are likely again to see more than once before the
spring arrives, and therefore we think less of it
than we should. And, yet, if we recall our im
pressions, we perceive that under this same winter-
piece, performed by God s aerial orchestra, we have
had our soul in vibration, as never under any com
binations of art, and instrument, and voice, that
have won the greatest applause. It had no rhythm,
it was not a movement of time and harmony, but
it was a grand chromatic of the creation, that wo
236 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
felt all through, heaving out our soul in tremulous
commotion before God. It is impossible that such
experiences should not have a powerfully predis
posing effect in our capacities for religion.
Consider also the moral value of winter as a time
for charity. In the summer, God pours out his
bounty so freely that even the idle and improvident
will scarcely miss their needed supply. Not even
the invalid will often suffer. In the winter He
withholds, that we may so far take his place, and
seek out the beneficiaries, and dispense the bene
factions of Providence, for Him. To prepare a
way of suffering, in order to prepare occasions for
charity, would, of course, be a harsh and very
unequal method of beneficence. If that were all,
it would only be a sacrifice of one class, to promote
the virtues of another. But where there is much
idleness and vice, there ought to be much suffering,
and it appears to be even a fault of the tropics that
they do not bring suffering enough. It would be
much better, as far as we can judge, if the profli
gate and worthless were more severely handled;
for the examples of retribution would be more
impressive, and the cogent forms of misery would
furnish appeals of charity, sufficiently strong and
frequent to make it one of the common humanities.
In this respect the winter climates have a great
OF WINTER. 237
advantage. They have the further advantage that
the conditions of hunger and cold authenticate
themselves. If there is no fire, the lack can be
seen. If there is no sufficient covering, the fact
is not difficult to be distinguished. The poor
child found in rags, asking bread, and saying by
his piteous, crouching look, " AYho can stand before
his cold?" wants no certificate. In the howling
cold of the night, sheltered in our warm, com
fortably-tempered chamber, we have reason enough
to be thinking of the poor, uncovered, shivering
creatures not far off, and we can certainly find them
to-morrow. Some of us, it may be, do not much
value these tender humanities and really divine
ministries. We dispatch them sometimes gruffly,
it may be, and without the tenderness, and yet the
moral benefit we all receive is greater than we can
estimate all the greater, of course, when we learn
to claim our privilege in such offices of mercy and
true brotherhood.
I will name one other occasion, or contingency of
winter, that sometimes takes a wonderfully strong
hold of our religious instinct, and often produces
effects more decisive than we trace ourselves. I
speak of our winter funerals. To bury a friend in
winter is a kind of trial that connects strange inward
commotions of feeling which it is difficult to master.
238 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
We have cleared away the snow and hewn a passage
down through the solid pavement of the frost, and
there, in that inhospitable place, we come to bury our
departed; be it child, or wife, or mother, or much
loved friend. Our heart shudders, in convulsive
chill, at the forlorn last offices we are come to per
form. "While our feeling is protesting, the solemnity,
so called, goes on, and before we have gotten our
own consent, the "tribute of respect" is ended.
The frozen chips of earth, loosened again by blows,
are piled on the loved one s rest, and we turn to go.
" Will it storm to-night ? The wind, alas ! is howl
ing even now in the trees, and the sleeting is
already begun. God, it shall not be ! We were
going to be fools, we see, but now the spell is broken.
Our departed is not in that hole, and we scorn to say
our farewell over it ! Let the snows fall heavy, if
they will, and the winds rage pitiless and wild above,
ours it shall be to thank thee, Father, Lord of the
warmer clime, that our dead one lives with thee."
Practically almost nothing will more surely compel
a faith in immortality, even if one chances to be
unbelieving, than to bury a friend in the winter.
And, as a matter of fact, it is not in the fresh, out-
bursting life of the spring, or in any softer season
of the year, that we think of immortality with
half the tension that we do at the winter funerals.
OF WINTER. 239
We ask it instinctively, as we do a fire for the
cold.
We have it then, for our conclusion, that if we
have some physical reason to complain of our harsh
and rugged climate, morally speaking it stands well.
Regarding only personal and moral vigour, and
the supreme interests of character, it is a climate
thoroughly respectable, and is not a whit too severe.
Many think it a great misfortune that our excellent
fathers did not push their way farther south, at their
landing, and seek out a softer and more genial clime.
There is no greater folly, as facts most conclusively
show. If there be any people on earth who have
reason to accuse their climate, it is they who enjoy a
perennial season of growth and verdure, and a soft
and sunny sky throughout the year. There it is
that mind also is soft, enervated by ease and luxury.
There it is that eternity offers beauty and bloom to
minds that cannot be moved by their attraction, and
virtue her stern requirements to souls too much
relaxed by habits of ease and passion, to be girded
by sentiments of high responsibility. After all, the
best favours of God are those which take on shapes
of rigour and necessity, and prepare the strongest
hunger in us for the good of a world invisible.
The advantages of the body are poor and mean
compared with the advantages of character and
240 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
religion. Understanding thus our want, we shall
thank God most for the frosts, and the snows, and
the sleet, and the bleak winds, and the raw dank
seasons interspacing the cold. We shall be like the
trees coated in gems of ice and glittering in thank
fulness before Him. For the winter of the body is,
in some very true sense, the summer of the mind.
What softer clime then shall the sons of New Eng-
land envy wading to their temples on the hills
through wintry snows, gathered at their firesides in
domestic mutualities and pleasures, trained to close
economy and patient industry by the even balance of
growth and expenditure, rugged in their virtues as
in their experience of hardship, firm in their con
science, clear in their religious convictions, and
knowing how to gild the rigours of time with
glories of future expectation. Who, again we ask,
of all that bask in the warmth of skies more genial,
have they to envy ?
It is most remarkable, too, and a fair subject of
congratulation, that the Christian sense of winter, if
we should not rather say the Christian providence of
times, makes an election of seasons that so nearly
corresponds with the choice, or good fortune, of our
fathers ; for the great church days most consecrated
by observances of religion are days in winter, and of
early spring such as the festivals of the Nativity,
OF WINTER. 241
and of Easter, and the forty days of Lent, with
others that might be named. Whether the institu
tion of Lent is fixed in its particular season, because
that is a time when mind is more congenially
tempered for the higher meditations and severer
exercises of religion, some perhaps may question,
but any one can see that a Lent in July and August
would have much less chance of the intended benefit.
We may also observe, that the time selected coin
cides, as nearly as may be, with the season of the
year most commonly distinguished by what, in other
modes of church order not observing Lent, are
rather unhappily called revivals of religion. And
it turns out in both modes alike, and for reasons
that are really the same, that the winter becomes, in
some practical and special sense, the harvest time of
religion. It is so, not as many cavillers will say,
because the Christian people have done up their
business, and made their money, and, having nothing
else to do, are going to do up their religion ; but it
is because the tonic force of winter gives a pos
sibility of thought and mental tension, specially
needed for the most resolute and really most earnest
exercises of devotion. It is also a considerable
advantage that we love proximity in winter, and
covet more easily the warmth of assemblies and of
high social impulse. And since the Spirit of God
242 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
has it as a law of divine wisdom, to work most
powerfully in seasons that best work with Him, what
should we expect but that his widest movements of
grace, whether called by one name or another, will
be revealed in the times of winter ?
It follows, we must also observe, that we all
have a gift of personal advantage in the winter
that we cannot afford to lose. Now is the time
to meditate all our most serious concerns of life
anew. If the main question is still unsettled, or
unattended to, there is no other so good time for
a duty that requires so much of concentration. If
we have grown slack in our principles, now is the
time to set them up and be ourselves set up in
their company. If the fascinations of time have
stolen us away from the invisible good, now is the
time to set our gaze more steadfastly on it, when
the good that is visible is frosted, and hid under
snows from the sight. Now is the time to be
rational and strong, to revise our mistakes, shake
off our self-indulgences, prepare our charities,
justify our friendships, shed a sacred influence
over our families, set ourselves to the service of
our country and our God, by whatever cost of
sacrifice. Doing this, as we may, it will not much
concern us, I think, if our flight should also be in
tne winter.
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY AND
DISGUSTFUL.
>D S thought is beauty ; and as He creates
in the form of his thought, his creation
must, we infer, represent his beauty. The
argument goes further ; for as God s mind is all-
beautiful or infinite in beauty, so the world must be
an infinitely beautiful world. And yet it visibly is
not, but a great way from it. If we take up the
opinion that it is, by no inference but only by reve
rence, still we cannot stop our eyes by reverence;
and the moment we open them, we see as distinctly
as we see anything, that perfect beauty is not here.
No matter if we recoil from such a conclusion, as
one that takes away the possible proof of God s exist
ence, then that possible proof must go ; for there is
nothing more certainly discovered, than that we
244 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
have immense disfigurements, and objects and airs
intensely disgustful in the world s composition.
And, what is more, these uncomely or revolting
elements in the picture are not incorporated by
accident, or oversight, or some precedent necessity,
but, as far as we can see, by deliberate purpose and
plan. No animal, for example, is created by any
thing less than a sovereign act ; therefore, when we
encounter buzzards and many beasts of prey, who
neither relish, nor will eat anything which is not
flavoured and thoroughly cooked by decomposition,
this is their nature, we infer, the original instinct of
their kind, and was just as truly created in them as
their anatomy. These are facts which no possible
gloss can hide, and they are thick sown among the
sceneries, the odours and flowers, and all the bloom
ing beauties of the world. What shall we make of
them ? A very difficult and immensely significant
question.
A different verdict is, I know, quite commonly
accepted. A great many religious writers volunteer
it as a point of reverence, without any thought of
being critically responsible for it, and a great many
poets and professed expounders of nature also speak
as if it were a point to be taken by admission, that
the works of God are in God s beauty and exclude
the possible right of qualification. They are so cap-
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY. 245
tivated by what they call nature, and luxuriate with
such fondness in the poetical fervours kindled in
their fancy, by what they call its beauty, that they
often disrelish and recoil from the revealed religion of
the Scriptures, however beautifully or magnificently
revealed, preferring to indulge what they conceive
to be a religion more tasteful viz., the admiration
of Gfod as discovered in the natural objects around
them. And yet, even such, without raising at all
the question how far they are consistent in it, will
be plying their criticism every hour, on the defec
tive sceneries, and the unsightly, disproportioned
shapes of nature, showing that not even their super
latively tasteful religion is tasteful enough to satisfy
their own ideals. They quite agree with us still,
that no bog, or swamp, or heath, or desert, or dead
plain, or stagnant water, no slimy reptile, or carrion
bird, is a beautiful object. They plainly do not
think a howling wilderness at all comparable in
beauty to a cultivated landscape ; allowing without
scruple, that nature from the hand of God requires
to be retouched and finished by the hand of man.
And whatever field of nature they find so drenched
with water, or parched with drought, or pinched
with cold, that no industry or art of man can im
prove it, they conceive to be unsightly, irredeem
able waste. They have also what they call "foul
246 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
clays " and " nasty weather ; " and when they are
able to say " it is a perfect day," they mean that it
is an exceptional, uncommon, superlative day.
So far, we all agree, however much or little we
have to say of the perfect beauty of nature. We
discover disproportions and blemishes, we are
annoyed by things distasteful, we suffer many dis
gusts. And we go so far in this involuntary criti
cism, that when we come to the human form itself,
which is the noblest and choicest of all, we find no
single member of the race that perfectly fulfils our
ideas of beauty not even our utmost conceit can
look in the glass, without thinking of some feature
that might be greatly improved. And we are even
accustomed to assume, without scruple, that con
sidering height, proportion of parts, perfection of
single members, complexion, gait, posture, expres
sion, no man or woman ever existed, in whom the
practised eye could discover no blemish no excess,
or defect, or false conjunction. Hence it is steadily
assumed as a first maxim of art, that the perfect
beauty is not, but is to be, created. We do not say
that all are deformed, and yet with the single quali
fication, "more or less," it would hardly be an
extravagance. Some limb is awry, some member
too long or too short, some feature too sharp or too
clumsy. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that, con-
OF THINGS UNSIGHTL Y. 247
ceiving man, as we do, to be created in the image of
God, we meet so very few persons, in the inter
course of life, that awaken at all our sense of
beauty. We have, in fact, a way of saying that a
person is common, as denoting an unattractive, badly
moulded figure and look.
I have been careful, it will be observed, in the
making up of this picture, to give it in its softest,
least exaggerated form. My object has not been to
frame an impeachment of nature, but a respectful
and suitably delicate representation rather. It
would be easy to draw up specifications of scenes,
and facts, and processes, that would make a
hideously disagreeable, or even revolting picture,
but the taste of one who should do it would pro
bably suffer the principal infliction itself. It
would be as when a Jumbo occupies whole years
of industry in moulding a circumstantial and
minutely particular representation of the horrible
and disgusting charnel made by the plague in the
streets of Florence. It was bad enough that such a
scene must be, as an event of Providence, but a
great deal worse that any kind of art should labour
at the picture, and work up the hideous details, by
which it may be formally perpetuated. I prefer to
take the milder, mildest possible conception of the
uncomely and disgustful matters in the field of
248 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
nature; for we shall have enough to do, in that
case, to make out an account of them sufficiently
agreeable to satisfy us.
Proceeding now in this endeavour, it will be
necessary
I. To dispose of certain solutions, or pretended
solutions, which are either not permissible, or do
not reach the mark.
Thus it may be imagined that God does not like
to be imprisoned in his own beauty, but prefers
sometimes to assert his liberty, in creating things
unshapely and wild ; even as some human artist,
who could easily conceive more beautiful things,
chooses the less beautiful, with a view to certain
humorous and grotesque effects, or to certain moral
effects that depend on acts of mercy to the lame, or
leprous, or the outcast poor. But the point to be
first noted here is that the artist is studying, never
theless, in his choice, what will help him to com
mand effects most beautiful in the particular field or
subject chosen. How far the dignity of God permits
the supposition that He indulges the grotesque and
dramatic by-play of sentiment in this way, need not
here be discussed, for it is only a very small part of
the unsightly and hideous deformities of nature that
can, by any possibility, be classed in that manner.
They are too disgustful and repulsive, too dread-
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY. 249
fully serious, to be thought of as contributions for
dramatic sentiment of any kind. Besides, the dis
gustful and hideous points of nature are not given
pictorially, but really. If the artist were not paint
ing lepers or lunatics, but creating them, we should
have a very different impression of his work. JSTo
advantage, in short, is to be gotten by this kind of
argument.
As little can it be said that there is no defect or
blemish in nature, but only in our own standards, or
ideals of beauty. What then are standards and
ideals but just what they are made to be, save that
evil must be allowed to have wrought some corrup
tion of our judgments and perceptions under them ?
The same is to be said of all our perceptions. "We
have as good reason to confide in our judgments of
what is beautiful, or unbeautiful, or disgusting, as
we have to confide in our judgments of perspective
and colour. And we know as well what is out of
shape, or hideous, or disgustful, as we do that the
sky is blue, or that snow is white, or that righteous
ness is right. If we cannot trust our intuitive per
ceptions, there is nothing more for us to say. For
aught that appears, disgusting odours are as good as
perfumes, and deformities are the essence of beauty.
As little can it be imagined that our distastes and
condemnatory judgments are due to the lowness and
250 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
perversity of our criticism ; that we find blemishes
because it pleases our conceit to find them ; that we
meet disgusting objects, because we are fastidious
enough to be disgusted by what is inherently
beautiful ; that we take a low-minded pleasure in
gloating on deformities, and are too hasty or short
sighted to pierce the matters blamed deeply enough
to apprehend their real merit and dignity. Un
doubtedly there is a possibility of just this perverse
and nauseously absurd way of criticism. But when it
is considered that all most rhapsodical admirers of
nature, as well as all most rigid devotees of science,
agree in the opinion that fault and blemish, and
defect of colour, and loathsomeness of look, are
largely infused among the objects and scenes of
nature, it will be as improbable as it can be, that
all our disgusts are due to the distempers of our
criticism.
Neither can it be said, with any sufficient show of
evidence, that the uncomely and distorted forms of
nature were never created, but have resulted, since
the creation, from uses that produced the distortion ;
that the giraffe, for example, has lifted his shoulders
and spun out his enormous length of neck, by the
habit of browsing on tree-tops; or that the elephant,
having the enormous weight of his head to support,
at the end of a neck proportionately long, became
OF THINGS UNSIGHTL Y. 25!
weary of the burden, and gradually drew in his neck,
till it was shortened; pushing out meantime the
length of his mouthpiece, till it became a proboscis
long enough to reach the ground and gather his sup
plies of food. We have a strangely disfigured race
of fishes, comprising the halibut, the plaice, and the
flounder. They swim flat-wise on their side, having
their back-bone on one margin, and their belly on
the other, and their head so far twisted out of place,
that a single eye stands up prominent and bold on
the top, and the other eye is a little, nearly extinct
organ, underneath. These creatures take their prey,
it is said, by churning up the mud on the bottom of
the ocean and letting it settle upon them for dis
guise, while they lie in perfect stillness under their
thin cloak, waiting for some fish to be discovered
by their beetling eye, swimming directly over them.
Then darting up their twisted mouth upon him, they
have him for their prey. Now the question springs,
at this point, whether these strangely distorted and
deformed creatures were made as they are, or
whether they have twisted themselves out of all
symmetric figure by their practice ? If there is some
special cunning given them for this practice, then
they were so far made for it, and for all the dis
figurements they incur from it. And if it is not so,
and as good cunning is given to all the other fishes
252 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
of prey, why has no other family of fishes learned to
set their trap in the same way? On the whole,
yery little can be made of this kind of argument ;
and, partly for the reason that only a few of the
malformations we meet have anything to do with
such physiological practices. The jungles, the
swamps, the deserts, the putrid lakes, are malformed
plainly by creation, and fill a very much larger
chapter.
But it will be said, and often is said, that the
deformities and disgusts of nature are all intended
as reliefs, to set off the ornamentations and beauties.
As there must be discords in music, light and shade
in pictures, so there must be contrasts, in order to
make up any really perfect landscape, or perfectly-
composed beauty in things not pertaining to land
scape. This is really the most plausible account
that can be given of the disfigured and distasteful
things in nature. But there is no solid merit of
reason in the solution, as we can easily see. Does
any artist ever execute one corner of his picture
badly, in order to bring out the beauty of his work
in the other ? What painter ever put a swamp or
a desert in his picture, to heighten the pleasing
effect of it ? Such a thing may have been done, as
all absurd things can be, but I happen never to
have seen the instance. A reedy lake, or wide-
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY. 253
spread shallow, such as the musk-rat populations
love to inhabit who ever undertook to set off his
landscape by putting it in the foreground, or
middle- ground, or anywhere else ? What sculptor
ever thought to make a leg or an arm more beau
tiful, by setting a deformed one with it, as we often
see in the juxtapositions of nature ? The need of
contrasts in setting off the charms of things beau
tiful, is itself a false assumption. Such contrasts
are commonly painful. A park and a swamp, a
group made up of hags and graces, gambols of life
and decays of death all such misconj unctions are
offensive. Light and shade are a wholly different
matter, operating not by contrast, but by the magic
power of the sun, playing out, in both alike, the
forms and colours of the scene it is painting. Things
unlike, as rock and water, complement each other,
not by contrast, but by joint contributions of beauty.
Meantime all the unbeautiful stuff the world con
tains has abundance of contrasts in it; only it
happens that they are so devoid of expression, as to
be simply wearisome because of their commonness.
Whole regions are too common to raise any thought
of a landscape. Farms and localities are common.
Multitudes of faces, abundantly unlike, are yet
so meagre, and dry, and dreary, that we call them
common, and let them go. But it cannot be imagined
254 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
that these commonnesses help, as terms of contrast,
to garnish any larger whole. They only whet our
appetite for something better by starving us in what
they are.
Dismissing, then, all attempts to solve the deformi
ties and disgustful things of nature, on the footing
of mere natural criticism, we come
II. To what is really the chief point of their
significance ; the moral uses they are fitted and
appointed to serve.
And the first of these I name is the broad, every
where-visible token of retribution they show im
printed on the world. I do not undertake to
say, that all these unsightly and disgustful things
are deformities actually caused by the fact of
wrong or transgression, appearing for the first
time after it. The world was originally made,
no doubt, for the occupant, to serve such uses
as his moral training would require ; and if it
was preluding his bad history long before he
came, the disgustful tokens were none the less truly
fruits of his wrong than if they had appeared only
afterward, as the literal effects of it. The medicines a
traveller carries with him, when going into regions
infested with plague, are none the less truly dictated
by the plague than if they had been chosen after the
symptoms appeared. And if any one should think
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY. 255
that such a way of regarding the world s deformi
ties and disgusts might dimmish or quite take away
the impression of any retributive meaning in them,
that impression will be cogently affirmed by seeing,
every day, new-sprung deformities and disgusts
every way correspondent, that are visibly penal
reactions and retributive consequences of vicious
conduct. When a once robust, handsomely formed,
nobly commanding person, has it for his lot as a
father, to look on a family of feeble, half- sized,
chronically diseased, pitifully deformed children, it
is only necessary to speak the word "licentiousness,"
and we see at a glance by what kind of mill retri
bution is at work to make one class of deformi
ties. Who that compares the unwieldy and
coarse obesity of a gormandizer, and the swinish
configurations of his face and mouth, with the fine
elastic play of his figure and features before his
habit was established, fails to see how surely retri
bution fits a beastly appetite with a beastly figure ?
We suffer no revulsion more painful than to look
on the stupid unmeaningness and bloat and blear of
a thoroughly besotted drinker, and it hardly seems
a possibility that a lump so disgusting can have
been made, even by retribution itself, out of a
person as finely moulded, in a look of expression as
attractive, as he is remembered to have worn but a
256 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
very few years ago. And so it is in the whole moral
department of life, where retribution is casting
forms and figures, so to speak, for every sort of sin.
If a man has no principles, and thinks only of
appearances, the affectations he lives in will print
themselves on his face, and make it an embodied lie.
If one lives in cunning only, the foxy character
creeps into his eye and motions, and we almost
think the man is changing species. Hate, jealousy,
petulance, miserhood, envy, every sort of obliquity
has its own disfigurement. By so many mills, kept
running day and night, retribution is at work, to
manufacture deformities and disgusts. And this we
see so often, growing so familiar with the story, that
it becomes a general habit with us, to look on the
disfigurements and disgusts of the world as being
somehow connected with wrong and its penal
causations.
ISTow the immense value of this impression cannot
be over estimated. It connects all evil with its fit
tokens of expression. The races all march down
their way carrying their own dishonoured flags.
The families have their own disfigurements and
scars. There is no concealment ; everything is out
in visible shape, and is going to be. We could
never have any just opinion of moral retribution
as inexorably connected with moral conduct, unless
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY. 257
tliese galleries, down which we go, were hung with
just so many unsightly figures and objects of dis
gust. Sin will get fit discipline here only as it
occupies the house it builds, looking on the forms
it paints, and catching in the air the scent of its
own low practice. "When we con over, indeed, the
malformations and disfigured shapes that are crowd
ing about us here in such multitude, and confronting
in such libellous airs the beauty of the Creator, we
seem, at times, to have somehow missed our world ;
and yet there is all the beauty here there can be,
and all there ought to be, unless there can be more
of worth and less of wrong. If the house we live in
humiliates our feeling, it does not sink us below the
scale of our merit.
A second moral advantage of the unbeautiful and
often disgustful things of the world is closely related,
and yet radically different; I speak of the repre
sentational office they are designed to fill. We fall
into a great mistake when we assume that nature
and natural objects must represent the thoughts only
and resources of the Creator. It may have been,
nay, certainly was his purpose in them, that man
should be represented to himself; or, what is the
same thing, supplied with images to express his
sentiments and thoughts. Language is a first neces
sary of existence, and every one who knows what
6
258 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
language is, finds it bedded in physical types and
images naturally significant, and prepared before
hand even before they are vocally named to
express by their figurative power, mental thoughts
and ideas. And these being vocally named, no
matter by what sound, become words that recall so
many figures, and carry so many different kinds of
expression. The physical heaven is height, purity,
and order, and so the figure heaven signifies the
state of the blessed. Ground is the prostrate, under
foot element, a figure thus to signify humility
[humus]. Integers are wholes, hence integrity. All
the words we get for the uses of mind and the
expression of moral ideas, are figures brought up
thus out of nature, and made to be the staple of our
language. And this is possible simply because
the objects of nature are relationally, or repre-
sentationally, made ; contrived, that is, to represent
our thoughts and help us figure ourselves to our
selves and to one another.
At this point we strike the question, What if there
were no base, unbeautiful or disgustful things, in
the world ; what if every image were an image of
God s beauty unmarred, every object cast in the
moulds of idral order and unblemished life ? Of
course there is no language now to represent or
figure wrong, bad character, vice, moral obliquity,
OF THINGS UNSIGHTL Y. 259
or corruption ; all because there is no representa-
tional matter, out of which figures to carry a bad
impression can be drawn. Our language is good
enough for all but the moral uses of our life, but
here it is utterly wanting. And what benefit can
we get in living, when we cannot think, distinguish,
express, or interpret, any single working of our
disorder ? The very thing now wanted, above every
thing else, is a good supply of disfigurements, distor
tions, uncomely shapes, loathsomenesses, objects of
aversion and disgust. Just all that differs the world
now from what it would be representing only God,
is required for our sakes, to be the timber of a
language that will serve our morally misshapen life,
and permit us to think and talk of our condition as
our truest good requires. Only so can we get such
terms as these vile, unclean, corrupt, polluted,
rotten, lame, distorted, crabbed, venomous, distempered,
revolting, loathsome, depraved, and five hundred
others of the same class, all based in figures of
deformity and disgust supplied by the unbeautiful
things of nature. And any one can see that with
out these forms of language all the moral uses of life
must fail. We should be scarcely more completely
out of our element, if we were installed in some third
heaven where we could not get bread for our bodies.
Thirdly, it is a great moral advantage of the un-
260 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
sightly things, that they put us endeavouring after
improvements. Nature we say is rough and wild,
valuable mainly as a good possibility given for the
production of something better. And so, without
scruple, we fall to work in ways of culture and
amendment, to improve what the Creator s hand has
left us. We expect to make finer growths, fewer
points of deformity, and far better, more attractive
sceneries. It is well. The very effort puts our
thought climbing in all directions. Our aspira
tions, personal, moral, spiritual, are all put strug
gling up into a better key. We sigh for beauty
more often, and wonder whither it has fled. It
happens, too, not seldom, that our moral nature
recoils accusingly upon itself when trying thus to
improve the sterile sceneries, or the slow, cold
fields we cultivate. It is also a fact most remark
able at this point, that while we are put down so
very close upon deformity, and have so much really
disgustful stuff crowded in upon us, we are yet
allowed to create the very most perfect things we
can conceive to enlarge and new-pencil the
flowers, to enrich and vary and make generous all
the naturally niggard fruits, to build houses that
are palaces of beauty and forms of geometrically per
fect thought never before entered into landscape, to
set fountains in play and cascades spilling from the
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY. 261
rocks, to cover up, in short, by the garnishes of art,
all the uncomely and coarse defects of nature. God
has no jealousy of us in these things. He loves to
put us trying to create some kind of beauty ; for He
knows that, in doing it, we must think it, which we
cannot do without running out our thought, in all
directions, fast and far far enough to cross over
the boundaries of our great moral and responsible
life, and the possible sceneries to be unfolded there.
And so the very ambition we have to create and im
prove, and finish up a more attractive state, is a
kind of physical endeavour that carries some most
excellent effects.
A fourth moral advantage of the misshapen crea
tures and disgustful objects of the world is one not
often suggested, and yet immensely significant,
considered as belonging integrally to a completely
furnished moral state ; viz., the keeping under and
due regulation of the fastidious spirit. All bad
minds and all partly good are exposed to this kind
of peril, and if it were not for the rough practical
encounters we have with so many disgusts and so
many coarse, unsightly things, mixing, in one way
or another, with our very experience itself, we can
hardly imagine to what pitch the vice would grow.
As it is even now, under so many strong correctives
constantly applied, it is a vice most widely preva-
262 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
lent, and destructive as widely to the finest genero
sities and highest possibilities of character. It is
not the sin of little minds only playing with affecta
tions of quality, but it creeps into large, high
natures, to make them little; for, when it has gotten
firm hold even of such, they are not likely to be
worth much afterward, as respects any of the heroic
and beneficent virtues. Their prodigious delicacy
eats up their sympathies, and so far unspheres them
as to put them out of range, in all great works at
tempted for society. They cannot dress a wound, or
visit a hospital. The barefooted child asking bread
in the street, ought to make a more presentable
appearance. What right had a beggar last night
to come and die at their gate? They would like to
copy the Master in doing charities to the poor, but
the bad air and the squalid appearances repel them.
They would have more pleasure in the communion
if it were more select. They do not like to be
accosted as a brother, lest a little more relationship
may be claimed than they are ready to allow. They
apprehend some lack of delicacy in attempts to
rescue a certain fallen portion of society. They are
also greatly scandalized by demonstrations of piety
that go beyond the conventional forms. And how
can they be expected to get benefit from prayers and
addresses that mistake their grammar? This weak,
OF THINGS UNSIGHTL Y. 263
unreasoning, very unpractical vice creeps every
where, and no specification can exhaust the forms of
mischief it assumes. It is the vice of not doing, or
rather of not quite liking anything proposed to be
done. We cannot too much honour the beneficence
of God, in the disgusts and disagreeable, distasteful-
looking things by which He is all the while crowd
ing us, if possible, out of our fastidiousness and the
foolishness of our unpractical delicacy. Were it not
for this, it is doubtful whether Christ himself could
ever have gotten hold of personal respect enough to
make good his evidences. Why should He do so
many unrespectable things ? Why did He give out
his sympathies so freely to so many disgusting crea
tures ? How could He make that very disagreeable
speech at the grave of Lazarus ? Nothing saves us
from this mean-minded, foolish kind of criticism,
but the fact that our every scheme of life is a drill
to keep us off from it. And yet even now there is
more great living, and grandly toned beneficence
killed by this contemptible delicacy, than there is by
the rough, hard fights of war. We do not com
monly think of it as having any particular moral
significance, and yet it poisons human brotherhood
more perversely, in ways more wide of reason, than
any other kind of sin. Indeed, if Christianity
squarely confronts any particular point in the moral
264 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
configuration of the world, it is exactly here. It
comes into the world, we may almost say, as a good
angel, to look after the disgusts of it, the lunatic
ravings, the blind eyes, the halting limbs, the lepro
sies and sores, the publicans and harlots, and their
much dishonoured sorrows. This is the true moral
beauty, and to this God is training us, by all the
revulsions through which we are made to pass.
And so we are brought out, last of all, at the very
point which makes the only sufficient and true con
clusion of our subject viz., the fact that what we
call God s beauty, is not anywise dishonoured by the
deformities and disgusts of nature, but is, after all,
only perfectly and effectively expressed by means of
them. When He gives away mere physical beauty,
for a good and necessary end, his moral beauty is
only displayed in that kind of sacrifice. To have
his own works marred and scarred, stamped with
ignominy, configured to the disgusts and obliquities
of evil, was a most costly condescension, fitly to be
called a sacrifice ; for it was impossible that so great
mental beauty should not cling to its own perfect
forms, and long to look on the unsullied faces of its
children thinking regretfully of them even as He
did of his Son, when He sighed : " His visage was
so marred more than any man, and his form more
than the sons of men." Call it, therefore, sacrifice
OF THINGS UNSIGHTLY. 265
- even the creation itself the sacrifice before the
sacrifice ; for how much real beauty, dear to God, is
sunk in the grotesque and forbidding forms created !
True, we call it still a beautiful world, though it is
plainly enough a great way off from that farther
off to God than it can be to us.
What, then, shall we say is God dishonoured,
or at all less honourable, that we find Him presiding
over so many uncouth shapes, and creatures so in
fected with airs of disgust ? By no means. Exactly
contrary to this, his most real, his gloriously sublime
beauty could never have been seen, except under
just these conditions. Just because it was so great a
thing for the Creator to give up the beauty of
things, and subject his whole vast product to adverse
criticism to let all the deformities, all the com
monnesses, all the disgusts be installed in it by
this very sacrifice in things is his ineffable moral
beauty revealed. At this point comes out the true
glory of his fatherhood. He is willing to let even
his great work fall with us, and take on the shows
of our dishonours ; for He means to have our moral
ideas unfolded by them, and also to be with us and
assist our struggles upward out of them. By so
many abnegations and paternal condescensions is He
proving out his greatness and beauty upon us.
And the result is that, after we have begun, as in
266 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
this essay, to lay our criticism on the unsightly
facts of the world, drawing our own conclusion that
there is probably about as much blemish as beauty
in things, we are brought round, at the close, to
make our discovery, that God s real beauty viz.,
that which is chiefest and highest above all, his
moral beauty is, after all, about us and upon us,
and if we speak of blemish or stain, is practically
infinite. So that our unbeautiful world is yet both
symbol and pledge of God s infinite beauty. He
suffers no subtraction thus, in the blemished things
of his creation, but is raised in all highest majesty
and greatness by them ; let forth, we may even say,
into the full-orbed moral effulgence of his character.
How important, also, this may be in its moral
effect upon us will be readily seen. We inhabit,
thus, a world where moral beauty is the chief
beauty, I believe, too, that we commonly feel it
to be so, apart from any such refinements as may
seem to have been attempted in this essay. We
do not see the exact amount of beauty here that we
think we have a right to look for, and yet there
comes upon us somehow, apart from all fine-spun
distinctions, an impression that our nobly great and
Perfect Friend is with us, and that still the infinite
beauty of good is in Him. He hangs about us like
a moral vision, certified to our feelings in spite of,
OF THINGS UNSIGHTL Y. 267
or even by, just all the deformities of the world.
And this vision, or impression, always welcome, is
printing itself more and more deeply on us, every
hour, by our scarcely conscious, yet fixed habit of
reverence. We get accustomed, in this way, to
thinking of moral beauty as the only sovereign
distinction. And it is exactly this impression that
we want ; so that we may have our own great
struggle consummated in it. All the moral uses
of life, therefore, come to their point in this in
learning how to let go captivating things for such
as are solid, in making sacrifices of things innocent
for things beneficent, in ceasing to please ourselves
that we may work out the fruit of our principles.
There is yet derivable from this whole subject, as
now presented, a very simple inference in regard to
the future that is too significant to be suppressed.
When the present life is ended, and the grand con
summation of its uses complete, the reasons that
require so much of deformity and loathsomeness in
the world will be discontinued, and the new state
entered upon will be garnished, doubtless, by new
forms and images that are without blemish perfect
in purity and beauty. Then, for the first time, will
it be seen how largely the faces and sceneries and
objects of our present world were marred by defect
and disproportion. The dreary commonness of all
268 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
these things will be a discovery ; for the beauty of
the new world will be so complete, we may believe,
as to exclude even the lack of interest and expres
sion, retouching all faces and forms in such manner
as their perfect idealization requires.
In the same way it also follows that, going into
a second state of probation hereafter, which many
assume to be an authorised expectation, we must of
course encounter there all the unbeautiful things,
deformities, and loathsomenesses we encounter here,
and probably as much worse and more frequent, as
the key we start upon there is lower, by the whole
unprofiting of a misspent life. All the reasons that
require unsightly and disgustful things will still
hold good, requiring the second state of trial also,
to be insphered representationally by such kind of
images and disfigurements as will most exactly
tally with the qualities and characters insphered.
Whether such a prospect is more agreeable than
none at all, some persons will not readily decide.
XI.
OF PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE.
|S certainly as God exists, maintaining
a complete and perfect government over
the world, all events have some definite
use or meaning, which is the reason of their exist
ence. They take place, not merely ~by causes but
for causes; that is, for ends of intelligence and
goodness always for moral ends ; for if we some
times speak of physical ends in the Divine govern
ment, there will ever be some last end still beyond,
wherein God has respect to the discipline of souls ;
that is, to character. That anything physical can
be a last end with God is quite unsupposable. At
the same time, while plagues and pestilences are
not more truly appointed for given ends or uses
than other events, the place they fill in the grand
economy of human existence is too important to
2 yo MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
allow the belief that they occur for any reasons
but such as are of the greatest moment.
The figure they make in written history is not
prominent, I know, when compared with the figure
made by the wars of the race ; and yet I am by no
means certain that their effects on the race have
been either less destructive to life, or, in a social
and moral point of view, less important. The
history of war is the history of exploit and passion,
full of dramatic energy, and abounding in examples
of heroic valour and scenes of tragic suffering. But
pestilence is death without a history. It shows us
men melting away in silence before the breath of an
invisible destroyer. It is carnage without heroism.
There is no leadership, no counsel, no exploit or
victory. Death and burial, and death too fast for
burial, cities pale with fear, streets where the dying
pile upon the unburied dead, nations thinning away,
helpless and panic-struck, beseeching heaven to
spare, and offering hecatombs of children to appease
their gods these and such-like are the material of
pestilence. It is too painful for history. History
shuns it, only raising a monument here and there,
in some brief paragraph or section, just to per
petuate the memory of so great weakness, fear, and
spiritual dispossession. But we must not think
that, because the plagues and pestilences fill no
OF PL A G UE AND PESTILENCE. 2 7 1
large spaces in written history, their effects and
consequences are only trivial. They represent the
silence of God, which is more operative sometimes,
moving on a vaster scale, and causing, it may be,
greater desolations than the noisiest thunders and
bloodiest commotions of human strife and battle.
The rule of Providence is in them ; and Providence
does not require a history to give it name and
effect ; still it goes on, from age to age, doing its
will upon all peoples and empires, working out, by
silent campaigns of causes, results that, for scope
and central depth of meaning, have a comparatively
unmeasured and measureless consequence.
To merely recapitulate the great plagues or pesti
lences that have swept over the world, within the
period of definite history, would be quite impossible
in such an essay as this. I will only instance a
few, just to raise a degree of impression, where
commonly almost no impression appears to exist.
Thus, in A.D. 170, a terrible pestilence ravaged all
Europe. In Rome alone, when at its height, it was
estimated that the deaths were at least 10,000 a day.
Again, the whole Roman Empire, from Egypt to
Scotland, was swept over, in the same manner, by
a pestilence that raged between A.D. 250 and 262.
Gibbon says it was calculated that half the human
race perished in that single pestilence. Passing
272 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
over a great number of intervening plagues, another
general pestilence was coursing back and forth,
through Europe and the world, for a period of fifty-
eight years, between A.D. 542 and A.D. 600, limited
to no climate, no season of the year, no mode of
communication, but coming and going at pleasure,
with little respect either to means or remedies.
Some cities were even left without an inhabitant.
Passing over whole centuries again, that were
marked by destructive plagues, we descend to the
period between A.D. 1345 and 1350, when we trace
a terrible pestilence, sometimes called the black
death, extending from Eastern China to Ireland.
In many cities, nine out of ten of the inhabitants
perished. Some were entirely depopulated. In
London, 50,000 of the dead were buried in one
graveyard. Yenice lost 100,000 inhabitants, Lubec
90,000, Florence the same number. During the
three years of the disease in Spain, it is affirmed
that two- thirds of the people perished. Another
general plague desolated Europe in 1665-7 ; JSTaples
losing 240,000 out of 290,000 inhabitants, Genoa
80,000 out of 94,000. In London, 68,000 perished
by the same disease, and the other great cities of
Europe were visited scarcely less severely. Again,
a terrible pestilence broke out and continued to
rage between A.D. 1702 and 1711, which visited all
OF PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE. 273
Europe, and extended also to this country. Now,
consider that, in this little calendar, I have named
only a few of the great and general plagues on
record; that, meantime, a certain regular band of
contagious diseases, which seem to be inexhaustible
and immortal, such as yellow fever, scarlet fever,
small-pox, and the like, are marching ever round
the world on their mission of death ; and then,
besides, that peculiar and strange outbreaks of
malignant epidemic have meantime been desolating
one or another part of the world and you begin
to conceive what rank must be assigned to pesti
lences, in the grand economy of human existence.
If, in the empire of China alone, twenty-five
millions of people were carried off by a single one
of the plagues to which I have referred a number
greater, by many times, than perished in all the
wars of Napoleon if, by another, it is found that
even the world itself is half depopulated, it cannot
be that God has not some end of the highest con
sequence to serve, by an instrumentality so tremen
dous. What, then, we ask, are the supposable ends
and uses of God in the appointment of a discipline
so appalling? I answer
1. That they undoubtedly serve important uses
as regards moral and social advancement, by the
effects wrought in the physical economy of the race.
T
274 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
Sin, running constantly down into ways of vice and
depravity, produces a certain virus, or poison, in
the physical stock of families. This morbid quality,
or virus, accumulating for several generations, and
working both a moral and physical debility in the
subjects, continually aggravated by filthy habits of
life and low supplies of food, it becomes necessary
that some desolating disease be developed, which
will purge the race of so much low or diseased blood,
and prevent the infection from extending further.
Accordingly, it is observed that all plagues and
pestilences begin, as fermentations of death, in the
lowest forms of society and character, and generally
in the most degraded nations of the world. And
so, notwithstanding sin working ever as a poison of
death in the world, God manages, by occasional
plagues or pestilences, breaking out just where and
when they are wanted, to keep good the physical
stock of the race, raising it even to a higher pitch
of cultivation and of spiritual capacity, from one
age to another. And without this kind of agency,
exerted by occasional plagues or pestilent diseases,
there is reason to fear that the stock of the race
would become fatally infected and poisoned through
out ; and so, human society, instead of rising, might
be ever descending to a feebler type of manhood
and a meaner capacity of character.
OF PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE. 275
2. Great pestilences appear to be needed in order
to sustain the reality or keep alive in the race
efficient impressions of God. For it is humiliating,
that the proof of God which most avails with man
kind is not that which is offered to our intelligence,
but that which meets our conscience and our fears.
It is so, partly because we are under so great intel
lectual and moral blindness so unreflecting and
careless of things invisible ; principally because we
do not seem really to be met, if I may use that
figure, by those gifts of undeserved favour and
blessing which are dispensed in connection with a
plan of redemptive mercy. Indeed, there are certain
incidental defects, if I may so call them, in any such
plan of mercy, which could hardly be avoided, and
which render it liable, so far, to the encouragement
of atheism. For, in order to be impressed by the
sense of God in the events of life, we must feel a
conviction that they have a meaning and a relation
to ends of high significance. But this we shall not
feel unless they seem exactly to meet something in
our own desert, or want, or character. Accordingly
it will be found, that men who have no sense of
God, or of final causes, in the common events and
mercies of life because mercies meet no conscious
feeling of desert in transgression or who even
deride the suggestion that God has any definite end
276 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
or use in such events, will immediately give in to
tlie contrary conviction, when some terrible visita
tion of calamity appears. All because there is a
certain correspondence felt between such tremendous
judgments and their own convictions of desert. Now
the religious instinct is moved. This, they will cry,
is God ; the just anger of God or the gods. The
sacrifices are multiplied, the solemn processions are
made, the fasts are proclaimed, and when the de
stroyer rages fiercely, they will rush into the temples,
in panic-stricken crowds, tearing their hair, falling
on their faces, and beseeching God or the gods, in
distressful outcries, to turn away their anger.
Every great pestilence is in this view a much-
needed apostle of religion. And if such visitations
did not occur, at intervals, there is reason to suspect
that a plan of mercy would of itself encourage
atheism, or obliterate the sense of moral government
by reason of the fact, that a perpetual run of
undeserved mercies would bring no sense of fitness,
therefore none of a God distributing events by laws
of fitness. It is necessary, therefore, that God
should open, now and then, the gates of terror, and
march out on the guilty fears of the race. Then,
how real is God ! how true and just are his judg
ments ! how sober a thing is life ! how momentous
an interest is religion !
OF PL A G UE AND PESTILENCE. 2 7 7
3. It is another use of great pestilences, that they
yield us a conviction so intense of the moral debility
and degradation of sin. In the exploits of war you
might even forget, sometimes, that men are not
gods themselves, by reason of the magnanimous
spirit displayed and the heroic scenes transacted.
But when you see them under a pestilence, they
appear to be the tamest and most unmagnanimous
of beings.
Though it is well understood, at such times, that
certain indulgences, whether of vice or vicious appe
tite, are connected with danger, still, as if to prove
the intense sensuality of their nature, how many
will steal on after appetite, cheated of all reasonable
self-control and discretion, till the fatal limit is
passed ! And then, the moment any symptom of the
disease is felt, they will give way to a tempest of
fear, which overturns all equanimity and offers them
to the death, half dead already. There will be noble
examples of charity and manly courage in such
scenes; but oftener, and especially if the pesti
lence becomes exceedingly violent and fatal, it will
be aggravated and rendered tenfold more fatal by
a gratuitous panic, in which spirit, confidence, and
self-possession, are all quite taken away. And if
the disease rages a great length of time, it will
generally be seen, too, that selfishness, in its pure
2;3 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
meanness and degradation, is about the only residuum
of character left. The well will flee from the sick
and dying friend from friend. The dead will be
left unburied; children will desert their dying
parents ; fathers and mothers flee, in consternation
and superstitious horror, from their children ; and
it will seem that everything has given way that
belongs to the dignity of the human creature, leav
ing only a herd of sheep in the forms of men,
without the innocence that makes even that spirit
less animal respectable.
There is sometimes revealed a stage of depravity
beyond even this, when, through a protracted
despair of life, the state of panic has passed into,
that of horror and wildness. Such was the plague
of Athens, as described by Thucydides. The people of
Attica had been driven into the city, and there they
were besieged by their enemies. The plague fell
among them under the siege, and they began to die
with continually increasing frequency, till, at last,
burial was forgotten or impossible. The dead were
piled in circles about the fountains, where they
crept to slake their insupportable thirst. Panic
soon changed into horror, the people grew wild and
desperate, all the bonds of feelings and duty gave
way. Brutal crimes and licentious pleasures, jus
tified by sneers at the impotence of the gods, and
OF PL A G UE AND PESTILENCE. 2 7 9
by the argument that nothing better was left,
became the spirit of society itself, and the city
appeared to be rather a city of fiends than of men.
And so it will always be found, though not always
in the same degree, that man or the human race
never appear to be so weak, unrespectable, and
base, as when some dreadful pestilence displays the
true, unrestrained view of their character. Is it no
purpose of God, in the permission of plague and
pestilence, to give us a revelation so painfully in
structive, and so mortifying to our self-respect ?
4. While the less instructed and more paganized
souls are likely to be affected in the manner just
described, it will be quite otherwise with such as
have been trained to juster impressions of God.
These will be thinking rather of the great ends of
beneficent discipline, for which their chastisement
is sent, and are likely so to be more softened by it.
They will not forthwith break loose in some outcry
of superstition, at such times, in the manner of
certain Christian preachers, testifying of God s
judgments now come, in the sense that God s judg
ments have their meaning only in destructions ; but
they will be thinking of a terribly good meaning
in them, which ought to bow them in repentances.
Thus, when it was given to David to choose between
famine, captivity, and pestilence, he made choice of
2 8o MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
the latter, because it was better to fall into the
Lands of the Lord, and not into the hands of men.
Famine is generally from man, or by man s fault.
Captivity is from man. But the pestilence that
walketh in darkness, or cometh in mystery, is God s
messenger, and represents the hand of the Lord
that very strong, sometimes awful, always good
hand. No people can by any sort of inquest, trace
its birth or lay open its causes. But they can all
say that it cometh out from God, and bowing under
it with unquestioning homage and trust, they are
likely to be corrected and won by his appalling
discipline, as they would not be by a more unbroken
flow of his favours. When such judgments of his.
are abroad in the lands, they will, at least some of
them, learn righteousness.
True, it may be said that men die at other times,
and that, if no pestilence came, we all should die.
But when we only fall away one by one, in regular
order, then it is in our habitual atheism to say that
there is a cause for this, and not see any longer
that it is for a cause. It is the ordinary way of
things, we say; it is the law of nature that lives
should reach their limit. But when some giant
death marches round through cities and kingdoms,
and over lakes and rivers, mowing down whole
populations before their time, we think of something
OF PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE. 281
back of nature, and higher. We are admonished
of God, and there falls upon us a sobered feeling
that even passes into a character, and becomes
fixed in the deepest associations of our life. Thus
whoever, at this far-off day, thinks of the plague
of Athens or of London, thinks of God as a tremen
dous being, and of man as chaff before Him. On
aesthetic principles, God is a different being to the
world because of his judgments mysterious, fearful,
sovereign, and, in goodness, awfully good. We are
set in a different temperament before Him and his
truth to be more modest and sober, more teach
able, more readily convinced, less captious in our
doubts as we are less bold in feeling.
5. It is a most important use of great pestilences
that they enforce, with an energy so terrible, the
conviction of the unity of the race, and especially
that they compel the higher and more privileged
ranks of mankind to own their oneness of life with
the humbler and more degraded or even savage
classes. It is a most remarkable fact that, as the
Asiatic cholera, so called, took its birth in the
remote East, among a most degraded and decayed
family of the race, so all the great pestilences of
history black death, glandular plague, small-pox,
and other like visitations of God that have extended
over the world had their rise in China, Egypt,
282 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
Africa, or among some other people of the globe,
run down by heathenism and its vices. Here, among
the ruins of sin, where the race has been reduced in
quality, by a long course of physical and moral
corruption by savage passions, by indolence, filth,
falsehood, oppression, fear, and licentiousness just
here, I say, when we are beginning to doubt whether
a type of humanity so low can be properly called
human, there is generated the virus of some death
that is to desolate the whole world. First, we hear
of it in the distance of a half circumference of the
globe ; then that it is marching on through kingdom
after kingdom, till, finally, it reaches the highest
points of civilisation, filling cities and palaces with
death and terror. It returns too, probably, again
and again, in its circuit of woe, as if it were sent
of God to unpeople the world.
And so the highest ranks of character and culti
vation are seen to be one family with barbarians
and savages ; dying like sheep from one age to
another, under the ignoble diseases they generate.
We cannot escape the dark fraternity of woe in
which they claim us, for there is no other and
separate world to which we can retire. We are
shut up with them to breathe the miasma of their
sins, and die with such kind of deaths as they may
propagate.
OF PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE. 283
Thus, also, we ought to die. It is right. For
if we visit them not in the brotherhood of light
and love, to raise them up into newness of life, then
let them visit us, by a fixed law of social unity,
and pour the virus of their degradation upon us,
in cholera, black death, or plague in whatsoever
form God may appoint. This terrible brotherhood,
this oneness of organic order and fate signified by
the word humanity ! what an appeal does it make
to us for the gospelling of these barbarous and
decayed nations ! It is China, Asia, Egypt, Africa
one dark region or another sending out its
messenger of pestilence to assert the old affinities
of blood, and lay the awful demands of brother
hood and mercy at our door ! When we deny
the fraternity claimed, and our children, fathers,
brothers, and wives die for it in our houses, we
follow them out to their graves, confessing by our
tears that our community of life with the diseased
nations of sin is, alas ! too fearfully proved. And
so each plague and giant death that stalks across
the world, is really sent forth as a tremendous
call for mercy and light wanted in some dark realm
far away. One speaks for China, another for middle
Asia, another for Africa, or the islands of the Indian
Archipelago ; and so they will continue to speak,
until their terrible call is heard and the plagues
284 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
of their degraded life are healed. Meanwhile it
is also to be noticed that, when any kind of plague
or malignant disease, passing round its deadly
circuit, makes a beginning in any given nation or
city, the first notice had of it will almost always
be among the lowest and most depressed ranks of
the people. If there be any spot, or community,
or corner, where vice has its orgies, and where,
under want and filth and sin, the wretched, half-
diseased members of society congregate ; if living
in such a way for generations has brought down
even the native tone of the stock and produced
a people gangrened, so to speak, in the birth ; just
there the new plague, whatever it be, will be
attracted, and they will receive it as tinder receives
the fire. And there it will gradually spread and
rise in its range, till habits of temperance and
virtue cease to have any power against it. As it
was in the plague of Athens, which appeared first
among the sailors congregated in the Pireus, so it
has been with almost every plague, in its first
appearance, at any place or in any city.
And thus, again, we have it brought yet closer to
us, that we live in the real brotherhood of all cor
ruption, and no pitch of rank or wall of caste can
separate us from its woes. When it takes a pesti
lence and has nursed it into power, it is for us ! As
OF PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE. 285
fashions go downward, diseases and plagues go up
ward ; one simply preparing shapes for the body,
but the other, by a more awful prerogative, the
disease by which, under fashion or without, it shall
die. What an argument, again, is this, requiring
us to become the guardians and ministers of love
to the children of want and degradation around
us. For if we do not raise them up out of vice
and dejection by the Christian means we apply,
they will bring in woes and deaths upon our
children, the infection of which ages cannot ex
pend or expel.
Once more : there is a great moral benefit to
accrue from the dispensation of plague and pesti
lence, in the evidence, thence to be revealed, of
the remarkable sanative power of Christianity. If
we had no seats of vice, no degraded and abject
classes, run down by idleness, want, uncleanly and
vicious habit, the propagations of plague would
almost certainly come to their limit in a very short
time. JSTo such plague, for example, as the Asiatic
cholera, has ever been able to get any strong hold,
or rage with any great violence, among the New
England people. They have such habits of in
dustry, a condition of life so plentiful and healthful,
so much of physical tone, and so little withal of
that superstition which is the soul of aU panic, that
286 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
the infections of pestilence meet a barrier, wlien
they arrive, that is very nearly impassable. Besides,
it is a fact most remarkable, that the virus of no
desolating plague is known ever to have originated
among a Christian people. In the propagations
of causes, all evil runs from bad to worse by a
fixed law, and there is no self-remedial function
in mere nature that will ever stay the process.
Things will go on, as in a disordered machine, the
very motion of which aggravates the disorder, till
it is finally quite thrashed to pieces and brought to
a stand. And in much the same way the pesti
lences of the world appear to generate the virus
of their death in what may be called the last run,
or the lowest run, of their disordered causes. When
some people is fairly rotted down by low living,
or filthy and base habit, they generate, finally, a
plague-infection that poisons the world. Hence
there appear to be no Christian plagues, because
no Christian people can ever sink to a type of
moral and physical dejection low enough to breed
them. They will have too much of character, con
dition, good keeping, courage superior to panic
too much antidote, in a word, to allow the dis
tilling of any such poison. Is it idle to suggest,
or foolish to believe that Christianity, as a grace
of remedy in the world, has a supernatural touch,
OF PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE. 287
that sends a qualifying counter- shock through the
bad causes of nature, and prevents the plague-
mischief being fully concocted ? Is there no heal
ing virtue going out of the hem of its garment,
which is entered, supernaturally, into the run of
the bad causes, to divert, or turn them off, from
their otherwise natural consummation ?
However this may be, Christianity, as a matter
of fact, is seen to hold a position of antagonism
to plague and pestilence, that gives it a remark
able supereminence above all the false religions of
heathenism. It has antiseptic properties, which
prove both its origin and its value. We see what
it can do in the fact that plague, the lowest fer
mentation of sin, is averted, or at least decisively
counteracted by it. So much of health, or healing,
goes with the reconciliation or regenerated harmony
it proposes to work in the mind. By such tokens
it puts us in courage to believe that all worst forms
of debility and moral degradation will finally be
removed, and a new type of energy and power
developed in the race. Seeing what our gospel
can do, as against plague and pestilence, we are
strengthened, in fact, by plague and pestilence, as
we could not be by its more indefinite ministries
and helps in the ordinary forms of disease. We
anticipate under it a day of health and robust life,
288 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
in which great things will be done and higher
inspirations of genius revealed. Population mil
be multiplied and grow dense without danger,
society will receive more impulse, and all the con
ditions of existence will be raised. Toward this
grand consummation our gospel is piloting all the
poor diseased nations. What it has done, and is
seen to be doing, is the token, as well as proof,
that the healing it has undertaken it will be able
also to perform. The sublime picture of prophecy
it will so fulfil, becoming a river of life, covered
on the banks with trees of life, whose leaves are
the healing of the nations. The great plagues
and pestilences are ended and gone. Ministers of
wrath, as being ministers of good, they are wanted
no more, and there is no more curse.
XII.
OF INSANITY.
jHE subject of insanity is by no means
fresh or inviting. But since the fact
itself is the darkest of all dark things
in the catalogue of the world s suffering allotments,
I do not feel at liberty to decline it. Enough is
said of it, but not all that most needs to be said.
The topic is in the hospitals and the courts ex
pounded and re-expounded handled pathologi
cally, therapeutically, statistically, philanthropically,
and, so far, exhaustively. All the natural phases
and conditions appear to be fully explored. And yet
there is a particular point in the higher relations
of the subject which I do not remember ever to
have seen referred to. I mean the strong anti-
moral look it seems to carry ; presenting facts
that, as far as they go, appear to be almost un-
reducible to the supposition of a moral purpose,
u
2 9 o MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
or even to cloud the more general confidence of
a moral government concerned in the rougher
allotments of life. I do riot feel obliged, of
course, to surrender to this kind of impression. I
even hope to throw some partial light upon the
question, such as I believe the case permits. The
frowning anti-moral aspects it presents are these :
1. That it is not as distinctly retributive on
the subjects as we should naturally expect, where
there is a treatment so terribly severe ; being often
hereditary, often a calamity befalling the most
saintly persons, invading often the most amiable
dispositions, and not seldom associating impressions
of some wild possession by evil spirits, of whose
presence and agency we scarce know what to make.
2. That it puts a full stop always to the uses
of the moral life, causing the subject to exist in
a way that cuts off the benefits of existence, and
forbidding him thenceforward any possibility of
improvement, in that which was the principal and
almost only errand of his mission as a human
creature. He cannot even do such a thing as duty,
of which, perhaps, he sometimes fondly talks.
3. Almost nothing can be learned by others from
his vagaries. Being out of the moral life, there
is no moral lesson to be drawn from his discourse
or his action.
OF INSANITY. 291
4. Where there is a recovery and even complete
restoration, the whole space covered by the inter
regnum of the insanity is a blank ; so that he can
get back nothing to remember from it, but can only
start again, at the point where his reason left him.
He has lost so much, grown old by just so many
months or years, and gets no compensation. Pro
bably h<j has lost what stood him in much higher
consequence, the confidence of his nature in itself;
for returning now to himself, he returns to a self
that has been shattered, always to be weakened
and oppressed by misgivings that discourage the
assurances, if they do not unsettle the equilibrium,
of his moral character itself.
5. Where there is no recovery, the life was prac
tically ended from the day when the empire of
reason was broken ; after that he passes just so many
years of time as one of the dead unburied ; talking,
suffering, wrestling with his enemy, yet practically
dead ; getting nothing of life for himself, and com
municating nothing to others, save the cares and
claims of pity he lays upon them.
In all these points, the moral possibilities of the
subject appear to be sadly crippled, and we do not
see, at once, the uses by which so great a loss may
be compensated. I recollect no other case in the
whole contour of our human experience, where
292 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
a suspicion can be so naturally taken up, that
the moral ends of life are forgot. If chance, or
fate, or what some call nature, were the supreme
arbiter in events, we might look to see just such
gaps of rule without reason or a true moral end ;
but that a supreme intelligence, disposing all things
in the interest of character, should so often break
down even the chances and capacities of character,
is a perplexing discovery. What, then, shall we
say? Is it so, or is it not? Can we bring the
question to a point that affords some partial relief to
our perplexity? Almost all dark things in our
human allotments are cleared by a careful explana
tion of their moral ends and offices. The daylight
of the world is in its adjustments for character.
Whether it be so here, in this ill-looking subject,
we are now to inquire.
And, first of all, we shall find, recurring to that
point, and scanning it more closely, that cases of
insanity are much more frequently retributive than
our very tender pity at first allowed us to perceive.
Three great vices, one or all, carry this dreadful
penalty, in examples that are numerous and easily
to be traced. (1) The vice of intemperate drink,
which maddens first the body, and then, as by
necessary consequence, the mind ; producing either
delirium or idiocy, or a state of uncontrollable
OF INSANITY. 293
exasperation. (2) The vice of general and excessive
over- eating, breeding disorder and finally distress
in all the digestive functions, and producing states
of grim depression, hypochondriac torments and
nervous horrors, that drive more patients to the
hospital than even the vice of drink all very
correct, blameless people, as we say, whose misfor
tune we pity, but can nowise explain. Few persons
conceive the amount of constitutional and mental
wreck produced by this habitual overloading of
nature, restrained by no terms of prudence and self-
observation. And, when the catastrophe comes, the
wonder is that a nature so robust has crumbled into
madness without any assignable cause ! (3) The
vice of over-doing. We call it sometimes our Ameri
can vice. The nature is put under a heavy pressure
of instigation, and driven up to the limits of possi
bility, year upon year ; spelled by no relaxations,
freshened by no play of society, and scarcely per
mitted the necessary respite of sleep. Life goes on
like a storm that never lulls, and the powers are
so relentlessly driven, that they are seldom gathered
up into consciousness and self-recollection. The
brain itself b3comes a driving engine, that never
slacks the whirl of its impulsions. It is as if the
man were all momentum and nothing else. What
wonder then is it, if the powers never gathered up,
294 MORAL USES Of DARK THINGS.
the brain always whirling, the momentum no longer
possible to be stopped, hurl aside, finally, the
mastery of self-government by which they have
never been really mastered, and the whole mental
incontinence flies to wild insanity ? Whether the
wreck is partly physical or not, at first, is a matter
of no consequence. The result we deplore as
calamity, and the cause we call imprudence. It is
vice, it is crime ; no such rank abuse of nature is
possible without crime, and the eternal laws of
retribution forbid that any man be so long drunk
with excess, and escape the consummation of a state
of madness.
Besides these three more general and widely-sown,
vices, and the crops of insanities they propagate, we
have abundance of smaller ones doing what they
can to extend the harvest. Thus, how many live
on affectations and contrived seemings of principle
and character, till they lose the distinctions of
reality, and are landed in complete insanity ! Ex
cesses and fierce tempests of passion how often do
they burn out the natural colligations of reason,
leaving only fumes and vagaries, and frenzied exas
perations ! What is avarice but a vice that runs to
miserhood ? and what is that but insanity? Impure
habits rot the brain of how many victims ? Idleness
unyokes all the judgment. ?, lets fly all the vagrant
OF INSANITY. 295
uncollected powers, and finally, as age advances,
breeds a state of nonentity that cannot hold opinions,
or a hare-brained, addled state that opinions cannot
hold. Rash adventures pitch how many headlong
down the gulf of insanity ! Conceit is next thing
to insanity at the beginning, and is how very often
identical with it at the close ! Glancing over these
and a hundred other sporadic vices of character that
could be named, we see how many causes making
suit to retribution against the continuance of reason.
Though we were at first so ready to conclude that
insanities are not, or almost never, retributive, we
distinctly perceive that they are so in a very large
proportion of the examples. It is even difficult to
believe that a good many cases of religious insanity
are not connected with some kind of mal-practice,
or perhaps with some moodiness of temper, that is
really perverse ; though they are many times due,
no doubt, to causes previously at work in the nature
itself, possibly to such as are, in a sense, hereditary.
Diseases in general are commonly supposed to have
their root in moral causes and their bad implica
tions ; in that sense to be the common heritage of
the race. Thus certain particular diseases, such as
deafness, blindness, consumption, are supposed to be
hereditary in certain particular families ; and many
have as little difficulty in saying that the same is
296 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
true of insanity. It may be so in appearance ; but
that any death of faculty, so immeasurably deep and
horrible to think of, is let down upon a human
creature by mere physical derivation, and without
any blame in himself, is too shocking to be allowed,
without some partial and collateral explanation that
will ease the severity of the statement. Such things
must be left to the future ; and it must suffice, for
the present, that we distinguish so clearly, on so
wide a scale, the retributive connection of our
insanities with our self-abusing crimes and vices.
On the whole it is even a fair subject of wonder,
that so large a portion of mankind, driven by so
many excesses, tossed by so many tempests of un-.
reason, sunk so deep in wrong, eaten by so many
acrid humours, battered by so many abuses of
faculty, get through life without being hopelessly
insane. No kind of machine was ever kept running
for so long a time in a state of general disorder,
without being thrashed into wreck by its own
motions.
Consider, secondly, the moral intent, and what
must be the ultimate moral effects, of this clearly
discoverable connection between the insanities of the
world and its self-abusing practices. Calling it a
" clearly discoverable connection/ as in many cases
it most certainly is, the remarkable thing appears
OF INSANITY. 297
to be that it is so very generally undiscovered.
Unless we have put our minds to the question, we
have scarcely taken up any impression of the fact ;
and very few persons, who have occasionally noted
examples of the kind, have any conception at all of
the tremendous reactions by which the wrongs and
excesses of men are battering and tearing asunder
the integrity of their rational nature.
Therefore, some may ask, what moral benefit can
there be in a kind of retribution, or retributive
action, that almost nobody observes ? To which it
is a good and sufficient answer, that a great many
kinds of moral benefit, and such as are of the very
highest consequence, come late, and require long
and heavy discipline to start the sense and beget
the want of them. We have heard how many
thousand lectures on the uses of ventilation, and the
necessities of wholesome air! They began late,
after millions had died for the want of it ; and yet,
even now, what multitudes have no conception that
air is anything! Probably a thousand years are
wanted still to get the world apprised of the fact
that breathing requires something to breathe !
Lessons that come by self-observation and reflection,
come still later and more slowly. How many
thousand years of dyspepsia did it take to get the
sense of it fixedly enough to find a word for it ?
298 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
a word it was to be that is itself borrowed, in its
composition, from a language already dead. And
now that we have it, how many suffering invalids
that have the genuine matter of it in their bodies
nay, in their minds beside do we hear every
day thanking God that they still have an excellent
appetite left them ! Everybody knows that a ship
works heavily having too much cargo ; but our poor
life- function has to groan long ages for excess of
cargo, before anybody guesses what the groaning is
for. So when minds wade deep in troubles, won
dering why there must be so many troublesome and
perverse people, the discovery comes, how late, that
what they suffer is all of themselves and their
miserably oppressed bodies; and to many it will
never come at all! Probably enough, some of
David s enemies were not in Saul s camp, nor in his
own court, nor even in his bad son Absalom ; but
in his own tired, overworked, unsleeping brain.
Others, again, are overhung, whole months and
years, with a dreadfully oppressive gloom financial,
political, or religious never at all to know that
this gloom is in their liver, and that in black dis
couragement from their self-indulgence. All these
and a thousand such like pathologic matters, are
abundantly described, or expounded, and we have a
good right to know them. We do have a little
OF INSANITY. 299
more sense of them than the more ancient people
had, and, probably enough, the people of the hun
dredth generation after us will get to be so well
aware of what their moods and moodinesses mean,
as to rectify, or skilfully keep away, all such kinds
of torment. And so, the late-coming lessons insanity
is to bring, will finally come, dispensing their in
tended moral benefit.
There are, then, be it observed, two great depart
ments of the moral life ; one of which includes the
wrongs men do against each other, and a second
that includes the wrongs they do against them
selves. The former kind press into recognition at
once, and awaken prompt sensibility, because the
subjects of the wrongs cry out themselves, de
manding redress, and making the very air tingle
with their complaint. But the wrongs men do
against themselves start no outcry, the wrong-doer
is the victim, and the victim calls for no arraign
ment or redress. Probably the wrongs men do
against themselves are twentyfold, or possibly even
a thousandfold greater in amount of damage than
the wrongs they do against each other ; and yet they
very seldom think of them as being any wrong
at all. They very generally are not conscious of
them ; and when they are, they think of them as
being only indiscretions, imprudences, excesses such
300 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
as they have a good right to indulge, since they
injure nobody but themselves; and which, there
fore, they only regret or chastise a little with their
tongue, but do not really blame as morally crimi
nal. Now, the other class of crimes we cannot
miss the sense of, because they come back to be
seen, or heard from, without our asking ; but these
latter come only by reflection, and men, as we
have just been saying, are exceedingly slow to
reflect. They see what is about them and before
their eyes, but how to turn their soul- eye back
on themselves, and see what they are to themselves,
or against themselves, is almost never done till a
certain reflective habit is formed, and commonly
not, to any but a very small extent, till a reflective
habit gets possession of society itself.
We have, then, here, in this fearful woe of in
sanity, a great retributive law that is waiting and
working for the time when a more reflective habit
shall arrive. And then it is going to fasten men s
minds to the crimes they commit against them
selves, making them felt as crimes in their real
turpitude. And when it is clone, a vast major
department of the moral life will be voiced for
command, in a complete set of moral convictions
hitherto scarcely recognised. Now, for the first
time, self-government, temperance of feeling and
OF INSANITY. 301
action, a genuine right keeping of life, and a
religiously close ordering of it that suffers no
excess or abuse of faculty, will beget a more sound
state of body and mind, and prepare a higher form
of virtue, that is health itself. In the other de
partment of the moral life, public justice and the
bad repute of all wrong-doing are the argument
for duty. Here the argument is the tremendous
institute of insanity, visiting the silent wrongs men
do against themselves, with its inevitable, terribly
avenging penalties. In this second stage, and
broader form of virtue, it will be understood as
a first principle that, if we are to keep our reason,
our reason must keep us. We shall consider well
our faculties, what they are for, what they want,
what they can do and bear, and what they cannot ;
and we shall have a conscience that will cover the
whole ground of our actions toward ourselves ;
withholding us from all excesses of overdoing and
self-indulgence as from suicide itself. Temperance,
sobriety of feeling and passion, self- regulation at
all points, will take the rank of duties, and their
violation will be considered as great a crime against
God, as frauds and deeds of blood against our
fellow-men. And this conviction will strengthen
our practical morality all round, enlarge our practi
cal wisdom, rectify our spasmodic over-doing, raise
302 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
our family stock itself in vigour, and settle us in a
manly and rational way of happiness. The serenities
will be many and the insanities few, and whatever
belongs to character will have a way of firmness far
aloof from all the nervous horrors.
Again, thirdly, it is one of the great moral uses
of insanity that we are so powerfully admonished
by it never to surrender our self-keeping to any
kind of impulse or dominating sway, outside of
our own personality or self-active liberty. For
it is a great and radical distinction of moral na
tures, that they are to steer themselves by their
own helm, and be responsible for what they may
thus become mere animals and things having no
such high prerogative, and no capacity to be, dif
ferent from what they are made to be, under the
sway of causes not in themselves. Just here, ac
cordingly, we discover a principal reason for that
proneness to insanity, which is the infirmity of
men in distinction from the animals. It is that,
as being in evil or sin, they so far and frequently
surrender themselves to impulsions or enchant
ments outside of their own responsible self-keep
ing. The power that was given them to gather up
their nature in due self-colligation, and centralise
it in the supreme domination of reason, is weakened,
and they fly asunder, so to speak, in a scattering,
OF INSANITY. 303
unkept habit, that approaches, and finally be
comes, insanity. They fall under a kind of posses
sion, and are just so far dispossessed of themselves.
In their zeal to get possession of money, money
gets possession of them, driving them on past all
bounds of reason, as if it were a demon. Instead
of possessing their business, their business possesses
them, shoving them on to all utmost over- doing,
and finally to madness. Society possesses them,
and so completely dominates in their habit, that
any coming short of its conventionalisms or fashions
goads them to distraction ; their own self-- keeping
force is so far taken away, that their judgments
themselves are reduced to a kind of insanity. They
get possessed by other men in the same manner ;
one by some other that he thinks a hero or a
genius ; one by the name and successes of a great
operator in the market ; one by the fascinating airs
and gaieties of a libertine; one by a charlatan or
a quack ; and another by a false prophet. Every soul
in evil is under some kind of bad instigation or pos
session, that comes upon him as a gale of impulsion,
swaying his objects and actions, and so far abating
in him the sovereign keeping of his own right reason.
How far we are subject, in this manner, to the
possession of foul spirits, and how far they are
concerned in cases of insanity, it may be difficult
30 4 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
to say. Anything is a possession that dispossesses
the man of himself, from whatever world it comes.
In this respect, the supposition of a possession by
evil spirits is only an extension of the bad liability
we incur under the other kinds of possession just
named. We know that there are bad spirits, and
it may be that they are no way separable from asso
ciation with us, save by the fences of character.
It does not follow that every sinister influence
they communicate will make the subject insane,
any more than that the other kinds of bad inspi
ration from the world and society will do it. Per
haps the foul possession will reach the state of
complete insanity, only when it has been harboured
long enough to get the soul decentralised, as we
see in the other cases of excess and self-abuse re
ferred to. On this subject of possession by evil
spirits we have little or no direct knowledge of
our own, but we have these three kinds of evi
dence that go a certain way, and are perhaps suffi
cient. (1) The Scripture account of demons and
their expulsion, where, however, the language of
description appears, in one or two cases, to indicate
the impression that they are only cases of disease.
Still, the Scripture cases are so many and so drama
tically given, and there is, withal, a reason so pro
found, just now, for a state of commotion among
OF INSANITY. 305
all powers of darkness, that they can hardly be
reduced to any such construction. (2) The fact
that so many cases of insanity, coming to our
knowledge, have a demoniacal air and manner;
the subjects talking as demons, calling themselves
demons, and acting in a style of frenzy so un-
humanly foul and malign. (3) The professed dis
coveries of magnetism, where one will is believed
to subject another to its absolute sway, even across
wide spaces of distance ; and especially the reve
lations of necromancy, where one being, called a
medium, offers himself to be played upon by what
ever spirit, foul or fair, will come to possess him
for its oracle which oracle, it is admitted, will
often be the utterance of a lying instigation. I
know nothing of these matters save by report ; I
only perceive that they are making the world
familiar with demoniacal possessions now, exactly
answering to those of the Scriptures, only under
a different name. Instead of being laid, the bad
spirits are now evoked ; for the medium is a
person offered to be possessed, and if the pre
tences are true, actually getting possessed all
the parties engaged running down morally, as
their habit of deference to the bad invisible powers
weakens their moral and responsible self-hood,
till finally they are landed, one after another,
x
306 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
in a morally dejected profligacy which is real in
sanity.
"We are brought out, thus, in the conclusion, that
every human creature is in the way to insanity
who allows himself to be possessed by any kind
of impulsion, outside of his own responsible self-
keeping. The weakening of the moral nature puts
the very bond in jeopardy that is to hold the mind
together, and keep it in the order of reason. Any
kind of possession has this danger, this hideous
form of peril, connected with it. And when the
insanity is fully completed in a state of total dis
possession, an equally complete and even terrific
warning is given, to every man who will maintain
his reason, that he beware of any least surrender
which displaces the moral sovereignty of the soul,
in the government of its own ways and actions.
The great institute of insanity is partly designed,
no doubt, to yield this kind of moral benefit. It
may be that the very cases of insanity that we
are wont to call hereditary are so only in the
sense that it is a family weakness to be overdriven,
or possessed by engagements and objects that might
be well enough shaken off, but are finally allowed to
break the mind s integrity.
Fourthly, a due observation of the distinction
between the state of sanity and that of insanity
OF INSANITY. 307
raises a conception of the beauty and dignity of
the moral nature which ought to be impressive,
and to yield the highest practical benefit. In
this distinction we perceive what a human creature
becomes how wild, and weak, and helmless
when the capacity of responsible action is sus
pended. Before, he was in government, having
thought, and memory, and will, and passion, all
bound up in terms of personal unity and self-acting
responsibility. Now, he is a sad-looking wreck, an
object of forlornest pity, not because the faculties
thus named are gone, but because the moral sove
reignty, or supreme moral nature, that held them
in right order, is fallen off its throne. They are
nearly the same men that they were before, only
minus in that supremely great something, which
puts them in obligation, or makes them capable
of it. This one summit faculty gone, how different
are they become ! We define their insanity itself,
by saying that they are not any longer responsible,
or capable of being responsible, for their actions ;
paying thus a tribute how grand to the supreme
dignity of the moral nature ! We sometimes state
the definition of their loss in a different manner,
by saying that they have lost their reason. But
we mean by this, if we understand ourselves, their
moral reason. They understand causes, and do
3 o8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
vets of causation correctly. They frame proposi
tions that connect subject and predicate, in as good
logic as ever. They reason correctly in the sense
of drawing conclusions out of premises. But they
fail, it is said, in the right perception of premises ;
which term " right perception " means such kind
of perception as co-ordinates things in the scale
of right, and holds them in their fit signification,
as related to the practical working of the moral
life. What Kant calls the Practical Reason, by
which he means very nearly the same thing as the
moral sense, or morally sensing power of things
and actions, is dislodged or broken.
And we can see at a glance why it ought to
be this power, this moral nature, that goes in the
breakage of insanity. For whatever be its imme
diate cause in a particular case, it comes, in the
large view, as one of the damages of evil, and evil
is evil as having the total stress of its wars against
the moral nature. We have on hand thus all the
activities, or active functions and faculties, working
in full play ; only the supreme moral self-dominion
is gone, the power that colligates all the other
faculties in terms of order and responsible action.
Without this we are maniacs ; with it, men. And
what a lesson of respect and homage do we thus
receive for our simple moral nature super- eminent,
OF INSANITY. 309
balanced in the poles of law, self-regulative, regula
tive toward all order and perfection, that which
makes a man a man ! Sometimes we do not like
to hear of this moral nature, we have low bad
thoughts concerning it, a prejudice or even a kind
of animosity against it, and prefer to see men go
by other parts and powers that overtop, we think,
this kind of magistracy. And yet, when we come
to the using of a man who is out of his responsi
bility, we can do nothing with him, make nothing
of him, hope nothing for him ; he is a gas, a
chimney smoke in the wind, a combustible blazing
in the fire, and no more. Or, if we gather up all
his fine faculties and parts, and go into careful
computation of their value, we find them to be
worth just nothing ; and, if we still may use the
personal pronoun of the poor bereft one, it will
be only to say that he is become just nothing. If
the world had no sun, we still might call it world,
but it would be exceedingly difficult to find what
it is. The moral nature is in like manner the
sun of the soul, the gravitating centre and light,
and orbit-marking rule of all beside. All which
we are given to see in convincing and most sad
evidence, by these terrible, perhaps, we add, in
scrutable insanities, that pluck the supreme orb, the
moral nature, out of the soul s sky.
3io MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
It may be that we do not consciously think all
this when we fall upon a case of insanity, and yet
we have it tacitly or implicitly in us. We miss
that glorious something in the unhappy subject,
which is a most dear something to us all. We
turn away from God and duty still, it may be, and
yet we feel that we carry a very great morally
divine something with us, which it is a nearly total
loss to lose. We have seen a fellow-nature broken
down, despoiled of all capacity, by the loss of that
benignant sovereignty, whose appointed office it is
to conserve the soul s unity and order. Repel
ling this benignant sovereignty, which holds such
orderly command, arid keeps the mind conserved
and centralised in such high consciousness before
its throne, what do we but waive the rule of the
keeper, and challenge a like discontinuance of
reason ? This kind of moral debate is silently
raised how often in us all, when we go through
the wards of a hospital, or encounter the maniac
who was once our friend.
We come now, lastly, to a whole chapter of uses
that are doubtless intended for us, in this most
terrible of all providential appointments, and which
must, to a certain extent, accrue from it ; though
remaining to be more and more largely discovered
in the future advancements and more complete
OF INSANITY. 311
developments of human character. These frequent
exhibitions of insanity appear to be quite indis
pensable, as revelations carried to their extremity,
of something that is working more latently and
gently in us all. We are not all insane, but we
are in a kind of incipiency that must be recognised,
if we are to exactly understand ourselves. We
are not in perfect equilibrium, and cannot be, in
evil, any more than the eye that has sand in it.
Evil is against nature, and nature must accordingly
receive a shock of at least incipient derangement
from it. In this manner it results of necessity, not
that we are insane, but short of perfect sanity,
practically unsane. We do not understand the
world and the working of the world s mind, save
as we see it out of perfect balance and working
more or less disorderly. We do, in fact, complain
that it is unregulated, or out of complete regu
lation which is so far a state of unsanity
and we ought to have it as a much more fixed
opinion, and more constantly remembered fact,
than we do. We cannot manage ourselves rightly,
or act our part rightly toward the world, if we
do not recognise the general unsanity in this
manner.
Here, then, is the very great lesson we are to
receive from so many examples of wreck and mental
3 i2 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
catastrophe, holding it in constant recollection, both
in our management of ourselves, and our judgment
of others. And there is no end to the uses to be
made of it, for it covers the whole ground of our
moral conduct, in all the infinitely diversified par
ticulars that make up a wise and beautiful life.
On the other hand, there is no end to the mis
chiefs, and miseries, and disfigurements, any one
will suffer, who goes into life acting on a different
assumption; viz., the assumption of his infallible,
right- seeing sanity.
Thus we need, every one of us, to know that
we live in moods and phases, working eccentri
cally, sometimes more unhinged and sometimes
less ; sometimes in better nature and sometimes
irritable ; sometimes more disposed to jealousy ;
sometimes more to conceit. Nothing looks fresh
after a sleepless night ; nothing true after an over-
heavy dinner. A touch of dyspepsia makes the
soul barren and everything else barren to it even
the finest poem it turns to a desert. Any mood
of gloom, in the same manner, hangs a pall over
the sun, and even the very bones will sometimes
seem to be in that mood as truly as the eyes.
Opinion is sometimes bilious, sensibility morbid
and sore, and passion, tempest- sprung, goes wild
in all sorts of rampages. At one time we can
OF INSANITY. 313
be captious toward a friend, at another generous
toward an enemy, at another about equally indif
ferent to both. Now a wise man is one who under
stands himself well enough to make due allowance
for such unsane moods and varieties, never con
cluding that a thing is thus or thus, because just
now it bears that look ; waiting often to see what
a sleep, or a walk, or a cool revision, or perhaps
a considerable turn of repentance, will do. He
does not slash upon a subject, or a man, from the
point of a just now rising temper. He maintains
a noble candour, by waiting sometimes for a gentler
spirit, and a better sense of truth. He is never
intolerant of other men s judgments, because he is
a little distrustful of his own. He restrains the dis
likes of prejudice, because he has a prejudice against
his dislikes. His resentments are softened by his
condemnations of himself. His depressions do not
crush him, because he has sometimes seen the sun,
and believes it may appear again. He revises his
opinions readily, because he has a right, he thinks,
to better opinions, if he can find them. He holds
fast sound opinions, lest his moodiness in change
should take all truth away. And if his unsane
thinking appears to be toppling him down the
gulfs of scepticism, he recovers himself by just
raising the question, whether a more sane way of
314 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
thinking might not think differently. A man who
is duly aware thus of his own distempered faculty,
makes a life how different from one who acts as if
he were infallible, and had nothing to do but just to
let himself be pronounced! There is, in fact, no
possibility of conducting a life successfully on in
that manner. If there be any truth that vitally
concerns the morally right self-keeping and beauty
of character, it is that which allows and makes
room for the distempers of a practically unsane
state ; one that puts action by the side of correction,
and keeps it in wisdom by keeping it in regulative
company. Just to act out our unsanity is to make
our life a muddle of incongruous, half- discerning
states without either dignity or rest. There is no
true serenity that does not come in the train of a
wise, self-governing modesty.
For the same general reasons we need, in main
taining a right treatment of the world, to under
stand the condition of unsanity in which it also lies.
Our friends must not be infallible ; our enemies
must be allowed their just palliations ; our charities
must not only cover a multitude of sins, but a
great many weaknesses and blots beside. The mere
crotchets of some men are to have as much respect
as the over-wise judgments of others. Proud airs
are to be had in compassion, commonly, as revela-
OF INSANITY. 315
tions of disease, or lack in the function of self-
understanding.
Opinions are to have a certain allowance or liberty
of error, because they are human. Motives are to
be tenderly judged, because many thorns of evil are
festering under them. There is not a bad thing
felt or done, in all the wrongs of the world, that
is not to be viewed under standingly, as being the
wickedness of a creature partly weak and broken.
And there is no best, greatest, noblest thing ever
done, that is not partly to be more admired and
partly less, because it is a deed that only some
great inspiration could shape in the moulds of mortal
infirmity. We cannot, in short, level one of our
judgments or actions towards the world, so as to
give it a perfectly right and skilful treatment, with
out being duly aware of its unsane condition.
Many, too, of the great moral questions are im
possible to be answered rightly, when this fact is
ignored. If we talk of development as the great
want of man or society, it will be the development,
if that is all, of unsanity, and toward unsanity. No
development can help anything which does not
have corrective causes, whether discipline or gospel,
working with it. Family order is family disorder,
where nothing is attempted or allowed, but the
simple growing of childhood. It were better not to
316 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
be grown at all, unless there is some power to shape
the growth that works correctively, by laws im
pressed and authority maintained. Public educa
tion is no handmaid of order and law, unless order
and law are the handmaid of education. Moral
weakness and distemper can be supplemented only
by moral strength and the all-tempering sway of
duty. If we talk of progress, or a law of progress,
whether in society or character, there is no law of
progress, in mere living or continuance, when it is
operated and moulded by no guiding forces. Such
mere continuance can do nothing better than to run
the unsanity of nature down upon a savage state,
which is, in fact, a kind of insanity bred in and in,
and become incurable. Majorities are no reliable
cure of public ills, unless the public ills are, some
how, gotten out of the majorities. Great gales of
impulse, that move whole nations, are not great
inspirations or embodied wisdoms, as the immense
numbers joined might seem to indicate, the Cru
sades, for example, the French Revolution, the
Southern Confederacy, but they are great heats of
unsanity rushing to their ultimation in frenzy.
Insanity, we thus perceive, has an immense, far-
reaching moral use, considered as an extreme of
dispossession that puts us duly in mind of our
general distemper. We see it coming on by degrees,
OF INSANITY. 317
and culminating, here and there, in a complete over
throw of the moral nature. Then we consider what
it was that was coming on by degrees, and discover
the same kind of incipiencies and bad liabilities
working in us all. So we understand ourselves, and
what kind of keeping is necessary for us. We now
make allowances for our moods, and the discoloura
tion of our judgments. We steady our conduct of
life by the laws of good manners, and keep it in
right order, by recognising the moodiness and gusti-
ness of our impulses. And so we meet the world as
it is, do our duties to it in candour and charity, and
are hurried away by no romantic expectations that
promise a paradise without some rectifying light
and discipline to make it possible. We act from the
moral nature in ourselves toward a moral nature in
the world, looking for no remedy of the common
distemper, save in that complete re-establishment of
the moral nature, which is health and sanity for all.
And this work of re- establishment, we know, is
possible only in that grace of religion which is come
into the world, "to heal all that have need of
healing." There is, in fact, no sufficiently real
antagonism for insanity or unsanity, but that which
is the divinely qualified antagonism of sin. Let the
weary, heavy laden, sorely possessed mind of the
world turn itself to Christ, and it shall find rest.
3 i8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
And when we come to this, when as a race we drink
at this fountain, " the spirit of a sound mind," we
shall, for the first time, discover how far off we have
been from sanity, and how beautiful a thing true,
perfect sanity may be.
XIII.
OE THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS.
is a difficulty encountered by the Paley-
ising or Bridgewater school of theo
logians, that what they gain by their
argument from, design, they sometimes appear to
lose by the discredit they bring on the ends for
which designs are made. Thus, if we take it for a
fact, that the whole creation is a framework of
design, every object, and creature, and member,
being nicety adapted to its uses, then it follows of
necessity, that all beaks and talons, all claws and
cuspidal teeth, all fangs and stings and bags of
venom, are adapted to their particular uses as accu
rately and studiously as anything else is seen to
be ; and then again it follows that as some creative
builder is shown to exist by so many tokens of
design, the apparent badness of the design indicates
320 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
a malign power in him, working just as evidently
for ends not good. Various devices are planned, it
is true, for turning the argument, but, as far as I
have seen, with very little show of success. If, then,
it be as great a matter to discover the goodness of
God, as to discover God ; if indeed we make no dis
covery of God at all when we trace Him in designs
that are related to ends either bad or doubtfully
good, there ought certainly to be some explication of
the difficulties referred to that is more satisfactory.
Thus it is put forward by Kirby, that "all
organized beings have a natural tendency to increase
and multiply," and that Providence " sets necessary
bounds to their increase, by letting them loose upon
each other." " In our first view of nature," he says,
" we are struck by a scene which seems to be one of
universal conflict man constantly engaged in a
struggle with his fellow-man, laying waste the earth,
and slaughtering its inhabitants ; his subjects of the
animal kingdom following the example of their
master, and pitilessly destroying each other." And
the solution which he thinks sufficient is, that, " un
less the tendency to multiply had been met by some
such check, animated beings would be perpetually
encroaching upon each other, and would finally
perish for want of sufficient food." And why not as
well let them perish in that way, as by devouring
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 321
each other ? What comfort is it to the lamb that
a lion has eaten him up, and prevented the over-
multiplication of sheep by the larger multiplication
of lions ? Is it not also the precise point of objec
tion here, that such kind of arguments look for the
increase of just those creatures that are worthless
and destructive, and a limitation of increase in the
harmless and useful ? Besides, how easy was it for
the Creator to keep down the over-population of the
animal races, by making them less fruitful, or short
ening the time of their life !
In another connection, when speaking of animals
"particularly injurious to man/ Kirby suggests
that they have their object in "his punishment."
And this, he thinks, may be true, more particularly
of " those personal pests, that not only attempt to
derive their nutriment from him by occasionally
sucking his blood, as the flea, the horse-fly, and
others, but of those which make a settlement within
him, infesting him with a double torment." But
almost every kind of animal, as truly as man, suffers
by injury from some other, and has in fact its pests
without and pests within, after the same manner.
Are we then to say that every such animal is under
going punishment? Afar more general fact may
indeed be true, viz., that the whole creation, animals
and men together, is groaning in the common
Y
322 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
liabilities and corporate reactions of evil ; which, if
we call it punishment, is not a private dealing in
terms of personal justice, but only a shock of general
disorder in the world itself.
At still another point, Mr. Kirby contrives to get
a semblance of comfort in the supposition, that the
tormenting insects are blood-letters, which prevent
the cattle from overfeeding by their annoyance, and
so promote their health ; also that man is compen
sated here, as regards the torment he experiences,
" by the care of the wise Physician, who prescribes
the painful operation, and furnishes his chirurgical
operators with the necessary knives and lancets."
But, unhappily, the amount of blood taken by such
infestations is too small to support the argument,
and the amount of poison or pain dispensed too
large to allow us any thought or care whether
some drops of blood are gone or not. If we could
be let off with the blood-letting, taken without the
poison, we should scarcely want any such chirurgical
analogy for our comfort.
In still another place, Mr. Kirby launches a dif
ferent suggestion, in which he appears to have a
more theologic satisfaction ; observing, with regard
to " this constant scene of destruction, this never-
intermitted war of one part of the creation upon
another, that the sacrifice of a part maintains the
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 323
health and life of the whole, and the great doctrine
of vicarious suffering forms an article of physical
science. Thus does the animal kingdom, in some
sort, preach the gospel of Christ." The capitals
in which this last clause is put do not appear to be
wanted; for the meaning it conveys is sufficiently
horrible, I think, without additional emphasis. That
there is a really answering relation between a
bullock eaten by a grizzly and the death of the
cross, is simply revolting. As little will a sparrow
killed by a hawk be conceived to have died for the
hawk, or a child for a viper that bit him, or a man
for the gorilla that clubbed him in the wood. Such
attempts at Christian argument are doubtless well
meant, but they are, to say the least, very unfor
tunate.
Dr. Paley himself handles the argument here with
better effect. Admitting distinctly, at the outset,
that " venomous animals and animals preying upon
one another " are constructed with organs that must
be referred to design, and obliged also to allow that
"we cannot avoid the difficulty, by saying that the
effect was not intended," he only imagines that oui
trouble is created by our ignorance, and that, having
so many and preponderant cases of beneficent
design discovered to us, we are required to have it
as "a reasonable presumption," that the goodness
3 2 4 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
of his purpose would sufficiently appear, if we under
stood his purpose more deeply. And exactly this
we shall by-and-by see to be true, only we shall
find the truth outside of all mere physical ends and
reasons. Not satisfied, however, with this merely
excusing way of vindication, he goes on to specify
something which may "extenuate the difficulty:"
(1) that the venomous creatures, for example, have
their venom faculty only as a good to themselves,
because it is the power by which they subdue their
prey, and so are able to feed their bodies which is
as far as possible from being true of whole tribes of
venomous insects, like the gnat or mosquito, taking
the sleeper off his defence, humming first their
poisonous note in his ear, to vex the quiet of his
rest, and then having sucked their fill with his
blood, leaving the poisonous toll of their blessing
in the wound for compensation ; the very complaint
against them being, not that they kill, not that they
get their living, but that they bestow their venom
gratis, and with no conceivable reason ; (2) that
such kinds of venomous creatures and beasts of prey
do not, after all, kill as many people as we think,
and much oftener kill other animals and not men
a very small comfort, if we cannot know that their
venom does no killing at all but for good ; (3) that
the venomous species vipers and rattlesnakes, for
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 325
example stand guard, so to speak, for " whole
tribes " that have a similar look and no venom a
very far-fetched argument, to say the least, which
does not even show that the protected tribes are not
themselves more terribly harassed by the venom of
their protectors, than by the other enemies these
are supposed to intimidate, or affect with shyness;
(4) that it is our fault, in which we are to blame
ourselves, that we crowd after and annoy the
venomous creatures, and do not let them have the
dens and dry places where they belong, unmolested
a much better argument, if they did not crowd
after us, into our cities, arid houses, and chambers.
Having exhausted this line of argument with little
apparent success, he finally subsides into the same
field, where Mr. Kirby is but a follower, showing
how it was necessary, in order to keep the world
full, that all creatures should be over-fecund in their
increase, and then, when the spaces are stocked, to
have such thinning off provided for, that all popu
lations will be graduated by their supplies, and the
contracted or expanded limits of their field. Thus
he imagines " that immense forests in North
America would be lost to sensitive existence, if it
were not for gnats, and that vast plains in Siberia
would be lifeless without mice." But the great
difficulty is to see what interest eternal bene-
326 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
volence has, whether in the population of gnats or
of mice how there should be any complaint of a
lack of "sensitive existence," because there is a lack
of gnats in the forests, if only there is enough of
them in the populated regions ; or why we should
be much concerned for the plains of Siberia, because
of the want of mice, as long as the cities and towns
are so far from being "lifeless" on that account.
However this may be, it is really a considerable
impeachment of Providence, to say that God can no
other way limit the superfecundity of his creatures,
than by giving them venom to poison, and claws to
tear each other. God is conditioned only by what
is absolute or unconditional; but venom-bags and
claws do not belong to the absolute.
There is plainly no solution for this difficulty which
stops short in the mere physical economy, consider
ing only ends and uses that pertain to mechanical
and bodily conditions. Nobody ever saw far enough
into God s designs to justify Him, who did not see far
enough to distinguish what ends his designs are for ;
Y viz., the moral ends and uses of existence. This
frame of things was never understood, and never
will be, without going back of things ; it is mere
jargon otherwise, confusion, absurdity, poison, tor
ment, anything and everything but rationality and
goodness. Here, then, is our question viz., whether
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 327
any sufficient account of venom, and destructiveness
in the animal infestations is to be discovered in the
moral wants and uses of existence ? And here we
are met by the discovery
1. That a great part of the evils of life are on us
purposely, and not by accident, or by any kind of
fatality or pantheistic necessity. Many of us would
like to imagine that our pests, and poisons, and
various kinds of torments are at least not designed ;
that however they may come, they are only myste
rious ; or that, if they must be allowed to be in some
sense from God, the Universal Creator, it must in
reverence be held, that He did not mean to have them
as annoying and deadly as we find them to be. Then
let any one dissect a talon, or a claw, or a carnivo
rous jaw, and decide whether there is any con
trivance here for tearing and devouring flesh ; and
whether any preparation for scenting is deliberately
contrived, in the outspread nervous texture of the
nostril. Whence came that terrible vice in the
mouth of a shark, and whose invention is it ? That
viper fang, both sharp and hollow, laid down flat
upon the jaw when there is no occasion for it, bub
hung with pulleys of muscle to throw it up when
attack is to be made, allowing it now, in the bite,
to be pressed directly down upon a bag of liquid
venom deposited just under its roots whose inven-
328 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
tion is this ? Is it not plainly a deliberate con
trivance, as truly, visibly deliberate as any injecting
or ejecting engine in the world ? And how many
venomous creatures are there spiders, ants, ticks,
scorpions, serpents, flies, mosquitoes, centipedes, that
have their bags of poison made ready, as the fearful
artillery of their otherwise contemptible life ! Let
no one imagine that such kind of artillery is not
meant ; there is no other that is gotten up with a
machinery more skilful, or with better ammunition.
All that may be done with such tools is plainly
meant to be done. Whatever else may be true,
God has created venom, and we must not scruple to
say it. If we have any conception of goodness that
forbids this kind of possibility in God, then our God
plainly enough does not exist, or the God that does
exist is not He. The really existent God, as we can
see with our eyes, is such a being as can use con
trivance in adjusting the due apparatus, both of prey
and of poison. And we need not scruple to confess
a degree of satisfaction in this kind of discovery,
showing that goodness is no such innocent, mawkishly
insipid character, no such mollusc softness swimming
in God s bosom as many affect to suppose ; that it
has resolve, purpose, thunder in it, able to contrive
hard things, when hard are wanted. No other
impression is at all equal to the moral training for
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 329
which we are sent hither. If we could not see dis
tinctly that God is able to plan for suffering, and
prepare the machinery to produce it, what we call
his goodness would only be a weak, emasculated
virtue, which, if we should praise it, would not long
keep our respect. One of the very first and most
necessary conditions of a right moral government in
souls, is vigour ; a will that is visibly asserting itself
everywhere in acts of sovereignty that do not ask
our consent. It is better for us even to be shocked
sometimes, than never to be impressed. Mere safe
keeping is not rugged enough to answer the moral
uses of our life. Elemental forces, grinding hard
about us and upon us, are necessary to the due
unfolding of our moral and religious ideas, and it is
in just these severities of discipline that we afterward
discover the deepest counsels of beneficence, and the
highest culminations of eternal goodness itself.
2. We here perceive that not only dangerous and
fierce animals are wanted as the necessary furniture
of our discipline, but a large supply of annoyances,
irritants, and disgusting infestations. We laugh at
these creatures 4 many times, and try to amuse our
selves at their expense, and it might not be desirable
to take them more seriously, but it is a very serious
matter, nevertheless, that we have them to laugh at.
Indeed it is even a fair subject of doubt whether we
330 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
get as much real discipline, after all, from all the
beasts of prey together, as we do from any single
one of a half dozen tribes of pests that infest the
world ants, mosquitoes, wood- flies, jiggers, and the
like. A part of their value is that they annoy us
enough to keep us awake, and if they sometimes keep
us awake when we are really demanding sleep, it is
not altogether ill. Unmolested sleep might settle us
at length into lethargy. We want irritants to stir
us up and nettle us into vivacity, as truly as we do
the lull of music and breeze to quiet us. Besides,
we are always trying to get the world into a law of
happiness, as if that were the main errand here, or
as if God made it and must needs take it to be the
law of his will. How often do we say this, and
sometimes we even set our speculation upon it, to
show that so it must be. It was very important,
therefore, to keep us off this ground, and worry and
sting us away from it. And to this end doubtless it
is that God lets in upon us, on our face, and hands,
and whole bodily skin, such numberless troops of
hostile infestation. They come with bite, and creep
ing feet, and slimy touch, and sting, and stinging-
voice. They break no bones, they stir in general no
fear, they seem to have no errand that could not as
well be dispensed with. And yet, they do bring
irritations, annoyances, disgusts upon us, that have
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 331
a considerable significance, and ought to have, must
have, a considerable use. Not all the elephants, and
tigers, and hyenas, and crocodiles of the world, have
a thousandth part of the power exerted by these on
our feeling and temperament. And it is a great
thing they do, when they only keep us off the folly of
conceiving that God is principally concerned with us
here to make us happy. Therefore He shows us that
He is not, by instrumentations most unremorseful,
most deliberately contrived ; leaving us nothing less
or different to believe, than that He is shaping us to
good, moral good, let the happiness and all the fine
computations of pleasures fare as they may. But
these are things by the way ; the grand determining
reason for the existence of these creatures and the
divine contrivance in them, is to be found, I have no
doubt
3. In the fact that, in order to our highest moral
benefit, there is a fixed necessity that we have a
world so prepared in its furniture, as to be a repre
sentation of man to himself. It would be impossible
to carry on our moral training, if we could not be
insphered in conditions that reflect, express, and
continually raise in us the idea of what we are. It
is not enough that what may be known of God,
should be clearly seen in things that are made ; other
great purposes of existence can be secured only as we
332 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
have images and a language to mirror the nature,
and state, and moral quality of our action. The
world must be a dictionary where objects are sup
plied, that may serve as bases of words inherently
significant of what is in us to be signified. And it
is here that Swedenborg comes in with his doctrine
whence derived I really do not know of corre
spondences. Nothing is more certain, however he
came by his doctrine, than that all moral terms of
language suppose pre-existing terms of correspond
ence in the world s objects, that fitly represent or
express the moral ideas and facts of our personality.
It is also remarkable that all most expressive words
and images, in this department of speech, are derived
from animals ; which, again, he says, were not created
as we know them, but " exist from man." By which
I suppose him to mean, that while they exist, in a
sense, from God s appointment, they take their evil
type, whatever it be, from the evil in man. A
similar thought appears to be labouring in the story
of the curse reported in Genesis ; viz., that in some
sense there is a general unmaking of the world by
transgression, in which it changes type and falls
with the fall of the occupant. So far, accordingly,
it will be from man, bearing the expressional stamp
of man ; and it makes no difference whether it is
changed after such a fall and by it, or adapted to it
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 333
by anticipation. Be this matter as it may, all the
animal types especially the bats, and owls, and un
clean birds of night ; the tigers, wolves, foxes, alli
gators ; all the serpents, and venomous creatures,
and base vermin, with all the disgusting or annoying
infestations of insect life are appointed to serve
grand purposes of benefit in the moral training of
souls. Their destructive, poisonous, and loathsome
nature, carrying all nicest, most deliberative marks
of design, is good because it is evil ; that is, because
it expresses so faithfully what most needs to be
expressed, in these four particulars : (1) the ferocity
of our sin ; (2) the venom principle there is in it ;
(3) the immense disturbing power it obtains, even
under the limitations of our human insignificance ;
and (4) the interior efficacy it has in its working.
These four factors let us consider more deliberatively,
and each by itself.
First, then, nothing is more certain than that evil,
as a law of selfishness, begets rapacity, violence, and
even a certain ferocity in wrong, which wants re
minders set on every side, and a world packed full
of images to show the picture of it ; and then that
these same images should pack the languages with
words, to be the coins of interchange, description,
observation, accusation, reflective thought, concern
ing it. The moral uses of life would fail if the out-
334 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
ward state were not made answerable and largely
analogous to the state within. Hell in the bosom
could not see or know itself in a paradise. If prey
is the element within, it must be duly objecti vised in
the element without. To say that animals are orga
nized for prey, and made creatures of prey, just to
keep down over-multiplication, is to fool ourselves in
a very slim pretext of physical adaptation, and miss
altogether the grand, symbolically stupendous en
gineering of Grod for our moral and immortal benefit.
Indeed, the only good point there is in that physical
solution is, that the tribes thinned away are the least
harmful and most useful, and the tribes of extermi
nation that remain precisely those which are most,
utterly worthless and piratical ; for there seems to
be some use in that, when taken as a revelation of
the terrible devastations of wrong, extirpating inno
cence always, and emptying the world of righteous
ness. Still there is not much in this ; for it will be
seen that, in the long run, the more harmless and
useful animals, having a domestic value, will obtain
defenders, and will over-live and over-multiply their
destroyers, and will even stock the world after they
are extinct. However this may be, the general pur
pose of God in these creatures of prey is plain as it
well can be. They are given to be our kinsmen, the
cousins-german of our sin. They are the moral fur-
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 335
niture of a world in selfishness and evil. There is a
kind of bad litany in them, howling congenially
with all wrong feeling and doing. They not only
kill and devour savagely, by sting, and fang, and
beak, and claw, but some of the least of them march
out mannishly in columns and fight pitched battles,
lasting for whole days ; and they even take on airs
of high civility, by reducing fellow tribes to a con
dition of regular slavery ; where, as they were heroes
in fight, they become lords in mastership and exac
tion. Sometimes they work by satire, as in the case
of the ants here referred to ; sometimes by terror, by
spitefulness, by cunning stealthiness and tricks of
decoy, by immense deglutitions, by any and all sorts
of animal habits that connect with prey ferocities,
voracities, and disgusts that make it symbolic of evil.
In this way they give us profitable company, and
keep us at home in surroundings morally adapted to
the omnivorous habit of our sin no very honour
able calling for them, but an excellently useful and
even morally indispensable one for us.
I proposed also to speak, secondly, of the venom
principle incorporated in a great many animals, and
especially of the moral analogy it fills in relationship
with evil. The number of animals that have the
gift of poison, and have bags of poison carefully
prepared, in connection with a hollow sting, or bill,
336 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
or fang, or claw, for the injection of it, is larger than
many appear to know. Sometimes the object is to
repel, or disable an attack, and is only defensive.
Sometimes it is to incapacitate and prostrate the
animal that is to be taken as prey, whe.re it classes
with all other contrivances for the capture of supplies.
But there are cases where the venom appears to be
dispensed gratis, just because it belongs to a venom
ous nature to put forth that kind of power. What
can the venomous spider, or the venomous ant, Sol-
puga, mean, but simply mischief, when, creeping
over a man by night, he vaccinates him with a
mortal poison ? The mosquito comes, we know, to
get his supply of blood, and so we may not object;
for if he is to exist, he must live. But the strange
thing is that he pays for the blood he gets with
the poison he leaves. His victim was asleep, we may
suppose, and there was no resistance. All that he
wanted he took, but he must needs distil a poison
before he goes ; without any pretext of self-defence,
or of doing it to capture supplies, but sometimes
even waking his victim by it, after he has gotten his
fill. It is as if the very bill of the animal exuded
poison by the simple instigation of pleasure itself.
Other infestations of the forest and the chamber
impart their venom in a similar way, when, appa
rently, they have nothing to gain by it. What, then,
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 337
does it mean, that infusions of venom have so large
a place in the very contrivance of so many animal
natures ? The natural theologians give us no plausi
ble, or even tolerable answer. Their whole scheme
of argument from design is at fault in this matter,
and must be, till they ascend above the mere phy
sical ends of contrivance, and behold those moral
ends which are the sovereign, all- controlling reasons
of God, in what He creates or designs.
The fearful truth, never to be hid or lost sight of,
though indignantly repelled by many, is that the
state of wrong or sin in mankind goes beyond
selfishness and the rapacious instincts of prey, and
does sometimes become a venomous principle, doing
evil because it is evil, perpetrating mischief because
it is mischief, and havoc because it has that kind of
power. More commonly, the crimes committed
arson, robbery, rape, murder are such as gain, or
some hope of advantage, instigates. Indeed, we
seldom encounter examples where wrong is done
for the mere sake of wrong ; though now and then
we do meet even such. Our poor freedinen of the
South, for example, hunted, whipped, hung upon
trees, burned up in their huts by night what have
they done, what are they going to attempt, that
such barbarous severities are put upon them ? The
simple answer is, that men who are fiends will
z
338 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
fulfil the definition, doing deeds of havoc, or of
torment, for the enjoyment of it ! Fearful is the
truth that such beings can exist, appalling is the
fact that they do. Even so madly inspired by evil
is it possible for man to be. These hapless creatures,
lately slaves, are free by no offence of their own.
The hares of the wood are scarcely less capable of
harm than they. No, their crime is that they have
been injured; for as Tacitus, with true insight,
declares, "Whom a man hath injured him he hates."
Dear sport is it, therefore, to set them flying into
the bush ; music itself to hear them howl and beg
under a limb ! This element of mischief for the
sake of mischief, not often displayed in as flagrant
examples, still enters largely into human conduct.
"We have not made up the full inventory of evil,
when we have simply shown what selfishness will
do for selfish ends. Evil has a demonizing power,
not working always by calculation, but sometimes
by a spell, and becoming thus ; by its own bad in
spiration, an end to itself. So far there is nothing
in nature to represent it, or be its analogy. The
revenge of elephants, the cunning stealth of foxes,
the prey of wolves and tigers, the blood-hunger oi ?
leeches not all the powers of damage and destruc
tion wielded by all the animals, can at all represent
this kind of evil-doing. Only venom can sufficiently
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 339
do it ; and without the venom-bags, and bills, and
fangs, and stings, and claws, the moral furniture of
the world would not be complete. Evil for evil s
sake, disinterested evil, is the fearful possibility and
fact that must have signs and a language provided.
In this office all the venomous animals do service,
and more especially such as do not use their func
tions for self-defence, or the conquest of supplies,
but distil their poison gratis or without reason.
Again, thirdly, it was necessary to a true under
standing of our responsibility in evil-doing, that the
plea of insignificance be taken away from us,
which appears to be done most effectively by the
fact, that we are made to suffer so great torment
or damage, often, by creatures of prey or venom
that are exceedingly small. We are perfectly
defenceless against them in a great many cases,
because they are small. A single mosquito will
defy and torture a man all night, when if it were
a horse or an elephant, he would very shortly have
him in control. A single jigger, scarcely visible
to the eye, will hide himself under the skin and
have a populous city there, before there is even a
thought of such occupancy. The land-leeches of
the woods of Ceylon will scent a man before he
arrives, and, hurrying toward him, will dart their
thread-like bodies through his clothing, pinning it
340 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
to his skin, so that when he comes out, fifty heads will
be pumping at his blood. Sometimes the diminutive
creatures come in armies, and there is no conquer
ing host of men whose march is half as destructive,
or half as difficult to resist. The weevil, the fly,
the caterpillar, the army-worm, the locust, the
military hornet, that " drove out the Amorites be
fore Israel/ who can withstand? When the latter
loom up as a cloud on the plains of Syria, they fill
the company of travellers with greater consterna
tion than a water- spout, and set them flying madly
every way, if only the torture permits, otherwise
they lie down with their animals and die. It is
even reported that Papor, king of Persia, was
compelled by a cloud of gnats to raise the siege of
Nisibij ; where the very point of contest lay be
tween the gnats on one side, and his elephants on
the other, and the latter were put to rout, with his
whole army, just because the insect creatures had
too great advantage over creatures in such mark
for bulkiness and indefensible majesty. In all
which examples we discover, that the most fearful,
most perfectly irresistible enemies we encounter are
the smallest, the mere living specks of the creation.
They come in greatest power, be it as one or as
many, and we are most appalled by them, because
we are least capable of defence against them. In
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 341
this manner they invert all our notions of size, and
make diminutiveness a terror. So that when we
shrink away from all terrors of responsibility, be
cause we are practically dwarfed and sunk out of
sight before the oppressive weight and magnitude
of God, we have a mental correction already pre
pared, in the fact that size has come to signify so
little as regards real power and consequence. There
is no size, either in agents or actions, that has con
sequence. If we die for the bite of an ant, it signi
fies as much as that we die for the bite of a tiger.
Doubtless God is a very great being, and it may
seem that we can do little against his immensity,
but all the more does it signify that we can sting
the immense sensibility of his goodness. It is the
moral significance of actions that creates their true
guiltiness, not their size, or report, or show, or
linear sphere of dimensional effect. The ingrati
tude, the falsity, the venom, the poison, the mon
strous filthiness and corruption these are the
offence ; and the measure is quality of meaning, not
any bulk of movement or physical effect. We are
not too small, however diminutive, to do great
injuries to God, and move revulsions in his pure
feeling that are only the more prodigious offence,
because they wound sensibilities essentially infinite
and infinitely tender.
342 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
I proposed also, fourthly, to speak of these destruc
tive and venomous animals considered as types of
the interior working of evil. We might easily get
occupied with wrong as a merely exterior affair
the annoyance, misrule, destructiveness, oppressive
ness, and the numberless inconveniences and desola
tions of it. Almost everybody is so far against
wrong, and many are stirred up by the dreadful
miseries of it, to become reformers against it. The
danger was that we might always be looking out
wardly to find it, and not realising at all the deep,
all-penetrating, thoroughgoing infection of it
humanity pricked through with evil infestations and
disorders might, perchance, not be at all conceived.
What then does it signify, that we are not only beset
with so many external infestations and infections,
but are so commonly attacked within by hideous
creatures that undertake to be co-inhabitants with
us? It is no pleasant subject, but the naturalists
are obliged in mere science to make out at least
twenty species of these pestiferous creatures, that
inwardly inhabit and are peculiar to man ; even as
the cattle to the pastures, or the fishes to the sea.
They fix on any organ of the body, too, according to
their kind, from the brain downward, and many of
them have such power that life is finally sure to be
discomfited by them. A symbol so impressive can-
OF THE ANIMAL INFESTATIONS. 343
not but impress, and will even more deeply impress,
when the revelations of science are more familiarly
known. We do, in fact, have this impression largely
verified in us, before such revelations arrive ; we
believe that powers of death are lurking everywhere
in us, as that we are wrong in fact all through. The
infection, we say, is deep, and mortality has the
touch of everything that lives which touch is
internal. That which is within defileth. The
immense value of all such impressions, recognising
evil as infesting life at the core, is greater than we
often imagine. We sometimes call it corruption,
imagining in the very word a kind of venomous
action ; all which is figure of course, representing
the tremendous body- and- soul- dissolving infestations
of evil working inwardly. Life has been so con
trived, that we cannot well miss the idea, however
much or little we know of the verminous infestations
referred to, as therapeutically discovered and scienti
fically taught.
On the whole, I think it will be seen that the
destructive and venomous animals of the world have
a good reason for their existence. If there is any
thing dark in their existence, it is not solved in the
very shallow philosophy that supposes their intro
duction for mere physical ends. There is no solution
massive enough, and grand enough, to meet the
344 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
real scope of the problem, save that they are all
the outfit and furniture of a moral system, and the
uses such a system is ordained to serve. They
belong to the revelation and fit discipline of evil,
being symbols, physical analogies, such as draw
their type from man, and not from the beauty and
goodness of God. What he is they become for his
sake ; for in him, as a creature going into wrong,
they all received their law and came forth, in their
time, to work with him in the sad but really wild
nnd terribly sublime history of his life.
XIY,
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUE.
JHEN we speak, as Americans, of dis
tinctions of colour, or distinctions of
races marked by colour, we are medi
tating probably the existence, in particular, of the
African or black race, arid the possible reasons
for their existence. Our attention is specially
centred on them, because their existence heretofore
as bondmen among us has been at so great cost,
having shaken nearly to its fall the Republic itself;
also because, being now emancipated by the fortunes
of war, they bring us a most difficult problem, viz.,
what to do for them, or by what kind of recom-
position to prepare them a condition of hope and
righteously protected liberty ? Their condition, we
are obliged to perceive, is a condition of immense
disadvantage. How much of respect they might
346 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
command by their own natural force and character,
it is not easy to say ; but the stigma we have our
selves put upon them by our wrong this, if nothing
else has thrown a crushing weight of disrespect
upon them, such as makes it far more difficult for
them to hold a self-asserting position among us.
When considering, too, by what means we can help
their depressed condition, we are greatly discouraged
by the fact, that their former masters will endure
them in a condition of power, however qualified,
only with difficulty, and are likely to break out,
almost any day, in bloody conspiracy against them ;
also by the fact that so many of our own race
will be making prey of them ; and again by
the fact that large numbers of them have already
caught the poison of vices that will make them
a prey to themselves. They become, in this way,
a kind of mystery of unhopefulness ; so that we
cannot pass a little coloured child in the street,
and especially one that is neatly dressed and has a
look of careful motherhood, without sighing inwardly
and sometimes with a moistening eye " Poor
hapless one, what place or good possibility is there
in the world for you ? Growing up, you grow into
what ; for what can you be ? Scarcely have you a
right to be, or become, anything ! "
Perhaps we carry our pity too far ; perhaps our
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 347
want of respect for the race, partly caused by our
own abuse of them, does not see as much that is
hopeful in them as there really is. They discover
often a remarkable talent ; and there are certainly
individuals among them, who have power to make
a character and carve out a way of success. There
have been such examples discovered among the
Indian races ; but the difficulty has ever been with
them to get such hold of the race, as a whole, that
they could be put forward in culture and saved from
extinction. It may not be so here ; it probably
would not, if their friends in the white race could
have them to themselves, separated from the plunder
and poison of their enemies. But that again is
impossible. They must take their places with us,
and maintain a footing for themselves in our society;
and if we cannot help them, and shelter them, by
such protection here as will enable them to maintain
it, they must inevitably go under.
They are far more hopeful subjects of culture and
civilisation, in certain of their qualities and points
of character, than the Indians. Their humanities
are immensely large in comparison. They can have
a sense of home. They are too genial for the dry
revenge and prowling wolfishness of Indian life.
They have worldfuls of music in their sentiment,
and close to this a most wonderfully inspirational
343 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
capacity for religion ; and these, in one view, are
about the highest capabilities of man. All the
higher, that they are connected here with a remark
able capacity or power to seize on the second sense
or figure-power of facts and symbols, which is the
distinctive mark of all true poetic faculty, and was
never more conspicuous in the untrained habit and
imagination of any people in the world. Such n
race may never be distinguished in the matter of
invention, or provisional and productive enterprise ;
but who can say that they will not have a sufficiently
grand work to do in the world s last days, when
whole races of fresh-born prophets and singers may
be wanted to bear up the world to its last level of
inspired elevation and free rhythmic play? The
Jewish race, let us not forget, is also a generally
disrespected race ; and that, in great part, just be
cause the sordid qualities that belong to their habit
are forced upon them, and bred in and in, by the long
ages of cruelty and oppression they have suffered
under Christian power ; and yet we are obliged
to admit, that they are among the most talented,
if not the very most, of all the races of mankind.
In such kind of suggestions we make our sallies
after hope ; and still we are obliged somehow to fall
back under discouragement and a seeming overcast
of doom, regarding the future of this hitherto
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 349
ill-starred African race. It is as if their colour
was tlie stamp of night on their history, both
past and future. They are in a case that per
plexes beneficence, and discourages the expecta
tion of friendly statesmanship ; and we are put
here to the question, how it was and why, that
Providence allowed them to be entered into our
more advanced society ? a condition so unhope
ful, so nearly impossible to them, and so perplex
ing and full of oppressive concern to us. Getting
no satisfactory answer, in this matter of historic
providence, we go farther and begin to arraign
the fact of their creation ; asking why God
should have put a race in existence encumbered
with such disadvantages? Their dark faces veil
a darker mystery; and the more we are drawn
to them by their free good nature, and the warm
humanities we learn often to admire in their friend
ship, the more heavily are we oppressed by the very
hard lot so mysteriously put upon them, in the
unfavoured type of their race.
Is it possible then this is our question either
to instance or to imagine any reasons of benefi
cence that will practically account for their mis
fortune, or make us less disposed to question the
divine goodness in their creation ? I think it is,
and that if we carefully attend to the real condi-
350 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
tions of the problem, we shall discover such benefits
secured by the distinctions of colour and type here
in question, as will greatly diminish our perplexities,
and make the coloured race themselves more nearly
content with their lot. In this view I put forward
1. What is certainly a matter of great moral
significance for humanity at large the very certain
fact, that, under this distinction of races, we arrive
at a very different, vastly more cogent, impression
of the under-soul, the man, the everlasting, divinely
moral personality, such as we should never develop
under conditions of strict homogeneity. If the
various stocks and families of the world w T ere copies
visible one of another, and each of all, the im--
mortal, spiritual nature, the real man, would be
swamped to a great degree under the reigning
similarities. The external duplications would oc
cupy us, or take us away from those inward
explorations which great external distinctions
would provoke. These distinctions put us on a
way of abstraction, by which we cast off this
and that, and all the more impressive unlike-
n esses of the external nature, till we come down,
by our process of exclusion, to the grand common
property or somewhat, that refuses to be taken
away ; and this we say is the stockman, that
which, being duly housed, gets also its due ex-
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COL OUR. 351
ercise under all the particular colours and types
that are given it. As a result of this abstrac-
tional process, we learn to look upon the proper
ties excluded as having only a lighter and more
secondary consequence ; while the unreducible dia
mond of the moral nature, that which forms absolute
ideas, and receives their immutable stamp in its
character, proving in that manner its plainly god
like affinities that we say is the man, the ever
lasting man, the same as to kind, under all colours
and aspects and configurations.
It is not pretended that we all consciously reason
in this manner, for we do not. Most of us probably
were never conscious of any such process in our
lives. I only say that, without being aware of it, we
get our impression largely of the common timber
included in our moral word, man, in this manner.
We have seen or heard of very different kinds of
peoples; and throwing off the accidents of difference,
we strike directly in upon the core, and say : These
are the real humanities. We have them, too, in this
manner, with a wonderful distinctness, such as we
could not arrive at without some purchase of anta
gonism or point of reaction physiologically given,
to set us in upon the true discovery. The distinc
tions of colour and race will sometimes strike us, for
the moment, with such force that we seem to be
352 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
stunned or confounded, and so, for so long a time,
the sense of a common unity is quite driven out of
us ; but our next thought strikes through the case
ment of colour and body into the men, and the word
has a ring of eternity and true moral significance,
more distinctly pronounced than we could ever get
for it under any one given type and colour.
Certain low-minded scorners of the African race,
who are willing to insult them by any most cruel
caricature of their physical type, and would even
delight, if possible, to put them outside of humanity,
compare them, under mock pretensions of science,
with the African gorillas and chimpanzees, as if
separated from them only by slight shades of differ
ence. Suppose, then, it should be discovered that
these mere animal creatures of the forest, such as we
have supposed them to be, still have endowments of
humanity like these : They are capable of home.
They do not simply love their children till they are
grown up to maturity and then shake them off like
the animals and forget them ; but continue to live
with them till they die ; and want them nigh, even
to the third and fourth generation. They do not
work by instinct, like bees and beavers, but use new
methods and contrive new arts. They discover laws
in things, and have beginnings of science. They
frame political organizations, and maintain distribu-
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 353
tions of justice. They have the same absolute ideas
of truth, and right, and love, that men have. Hairy
and wild creatures to look at, they have, neverthe
less, a remarkable capacity for music ; and their
music has power to move the deepest, finest human
sentiment. They have the gift of language, not only
recollecting certain mere names to go at their call,
as many animals do, but they take the interior,
second sense of words, and the spiritual meanings or
expressions of figures and images ; which proves
their intelligence [intus lego ] and puts them clean
over into the humanly intelligent class. Nay, they
can do more: they can improvise ballads that
have a mysteriously wild, weird power, and even
excite a certain wonder in the literary classes of the
world. They are, furthermore plainly and even
superlatively religious, capable of high inspirations,
and abounding in examples of practical beatitude and
seership. What now shall we say of these quadru-
man people ? We encounter no little disadvantage
in the fact that we know them to be, physically
speaking, animals, and nothing else. But no matter
for that, if only we can hold our supposition firmly
enough to make due account of the mind-tokens and
spiritual capabilities discovered in them. Call them,
after that, by what name we please they still are
men. They are not physiologically descended from
A A
354 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
the stock of Adam. But, if they were, it would not
make them a whit more certainly human. By all
the moral attributes they reveal, we even hear them
say, with invincible self-affirmation, " We also are
men." And by just as much closer as they draw
themselves to us, do they shove themselves farther
off from the animals. They have come over to us,
where the African race have always been, by force
of the same high attributes; and the chasm that
separates them now from all animals is on the other
side, wide and deep as the unfathomable abyss
between time and eternity. And the grand result
is, that they sink all inferior distinctions of anatomy
and colour, and make us feel, as never before, how-
real and solid, how essentially everlasting, that moral
nature, that sublime under- soul is, that we name
when we call ourselves men. The moral advantage
derived to us, in this manner, from the distributions
of colour and physical type in humanity, is great
beyond our possible estimation ; accruing to the
benefit of laws, and liberties, and morals, and religion,
by methods too numerous for computation. We
think humanity more adequately because of it. Our
genus man is not based in similarities of shape and
colour, but far deeper down, upon the hard-pan of
an everlasting common property, which no classifica
tions of shape and colour can as decisively express.
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COL O UR. 3 5 5
2. It is another and partly distinct matter, that
these diversities of race and colour, exactly contrary
to what is commonly assumed, are preparations of
God for the outruling of slavery, and its final ex
purgation from the world, proved to be such by
experiment. Such distinctions of physiology do
undoubtedly connect with a. condition of weakness
and low culture, that exposes, at first, to the wrong
of slavery ; but they begin, at the same time, to
beget, and more and more intensify, the sense of
kinship as a moral affair, till finally the slavery dies
out under that which, taken as mere natural in
feriority, was the principal facility and temptation to
it. The remarkable thing about all our modern agi
tations against slavery is, that the question has been
drawing closer and still closer down upon the last
point, where, in fact, everything hinges, and where,
as the debate is carried, the result will be final there
will never again be, as there never again can be, any
re-institution of slavery, because the question is now
settled, or is soon to be, on the base of a moral kinship.
First we had slaveries of all races, more commonly
such as were homogeneous. The early Romans
captured and reduced to slavery the very peoples
closest about the city. And these enslavements of
races, in the same type, colour, and culture, were the
most cruelly severe the world has seen, and gave
356 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
way soonest, partly for that reason, to considerations
of public humanity. The argument came out now
and then, and could not be suppressed, that such
persons were too close akin, too visibly of one stock,
which made the enslavement a shocking violation,
as visibly, of nature. But the modern slavery is
based more entirely on dissimilarities of stock, and
grades of form and colour assumed to be physically
inferior. The discovery is made that here is a race
or races purposely made for slavery, and that slavery
is the best possible condition for them. At this
point the issue has been joined, and the argument
for liberty has been that real human kinship is not a
matter of the skin, or the hair, or the physical
anatomy ; but is of just that which we have seen to
be more impressively developed, under and by means
of such animal distinctions ; viz., the fact of a grand
common property in our moral nature, by which, as
being men, we are made everlastingly congener to
each other. The question ceases, in this manner, to
be a question of mere natural sentiment, and becomes
a question of relationship purely moral. On one
side the effort is to insist on physical inferiorities;
on the other, to make out the proof, by that very
means, of a common under- soul, in which all are
members of a universal, everlasting brotherhood.
And just here it is that the question is being carried
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 357
against slavery for ever. It is no more a question
of power against weakness ; no more a question of
the cuticle or the hair; but a question of moral
right in one, assuming, as by force, to buy and con
trol the moral right of another. "We are learning
to say : " No, it is impossible ; " and that is the end
of slavery for ever.
Some persons have insisted much of late, and are
even pressing the argument now, as against coloured
suffrage,, that the African race are not of the same
original stock with us, but are one of several dis
tinctly created families, in the manner suggested by
Prof. Agassiz, and by him positively asserted, both
on grounds of science and of Scripture evidence.
Our common belief has been different, and is not
given up, viz. : that conditions of climate, and social
disadvantage, have set this particular race, originally
one with us, gravitating downward towards a less
capable and more nearly animalised habit ; and that
so they have passed into their present type of form
and colour. We have taken, heretofore, what the
Scripture says of our common sonship " in Adam,"
and of our being made " of one blood to dwell on all
the face of the earth/* as a literal declaration of our
natural kinship and common derivation. Besides, it
appears to us not a whit less credible, that the
African race, put browning and baking under
358 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
tropical suns for whole thousands of years, should
have undergone so great a change, than that our
American stock itself has been differed so widely, in
its physiology, from the English, in but two centu
ries and a half. Our whole temperament is changed,
our muscle is more wiry and capable of endurance,
our brain is larger, our features sharper, our whole
action more subtle and mercurial, and our mark dis-
tinguishably higher in the tables of longevity in
short, we are no more the same people. Not even
the French stock are more visibly distinct from the
English than we. Still we are far less concerned
about this doctrine of another, distinctly African,
stock, than we are about the very offensive and
morally bad uses made of it. It may seem to us
that they have a considerable advantage, as regards
mere feeling, in the physical kinship we have allowed
them. And yet, if they are to be taken as a race so
fatally humbled by deterioration, it may put them
in a case that is really far less hopeful, than to re
gard them as an original race, not yet raised by
culture to their true pitch of power and possible
eminence. If I were of the race, I should certainly
prefer the latter. For, in this latter view, they lose
nothing of their rank as men. To be "of one blood"
with us signifies little by itself nothing but a mere
natural kinship about as much as that calves may
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 359
bleat responsively, in the sense of their fellow nature
among cattle ; but to have the common under-soul,
and common properties of kinship with God, and be
another original stock by our side, and as such con
gener with us, in all the moral affinities of our interior
manhood this is the really grand footing most of
all to be desired. By what kind of rebuke then
may we more fitly chastise the coarse, low-minded
insolence of men, who fling it as a taunt upon the
African race, that they are of another stock, than
simply to ask, whether possibly it is not God s plan
to finish this race last, and set them on the summit,
when their day shall come, as the topstone of all
righteous peace and most inspired religion ?
Recurring now, in the light of these suggestions,
to the historic phases and facts of slavery in the
past ages, we see more under standingly what has
been going on. As a good type of the more ancient
slavery, that which had no respect to race, we see
the great Roman empire scouring the vast circuit
of the nations in expeditions of conquest, from
Britain round to Babylon, and from the Baltic round
to the Great Desert, taking thousands and thousands
of captives, and setting them off in trails, from every
point of compass, toward Italy. Sold a dozen times
over on their way, and having as many fortunes
made out of them, they were poured in upon the
360 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
Italian cities and farms to work and die. Some of
the great landholders bought as many as twenty
thousand of them, and had a complete power of life
and death allowed them by the public laws. If any
master was killed, all his slaves, within a given
distance, were put to death. Many of the slaves
were persons of rank and high personal accomplish
ments. And, what is above all sad to think of, the
hardest, most unpitying severities of service fell to
the lot of women. The vast bread-supply of all
families and cities was ground by mills that were
operated by women ; and at this terrible wrench of
toil, the fair daughters of Corinth, and the wild
maidens of Thrace, and the stately matrons of
Carthage, were all compelled to serve. Mercy
appeared to be a thing forgot. There was no
sensibility thought of or expected. A slave must
be a slave, and there was no place for tenderness,
be his kind or country what it would. How per
fectly bereft of human pity for these captives the
highest, most approved virtue of their owners could
be, we may see distinctly, looking into their bosom
as through an open window, when the horrid old
virtue-dragon, Cato, censor-general of the morals
of his time, gives written advice to the farmers to
have it as a law of economy and economy to him
was virtue " to sell worn-out iron implements, old
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 361
slaves, sick slaves, and other odds and ends that
have no further use on the farm ! " There was no
debate of right in this kind of slavery for a long
time. Nations were natural enemies, and slavery
was the natural punishment of enemies.
At length a new chapter was opened by the impor
tation of negro slaves from Egypt. And these were
very much sought after, because the public feeling
was getting drugged by so great severities, and the
critical task of managing so many great people.
The new Africans were bought as household toys
and ornaments, "valued for their complexion, and
considered luxuries." Finally, after some ages have
passed away, the modern slavery emerges in just this
form. It takes possession of the African race, and
thinks it no crime to appropriate their labour,
because they are so very inferior, that having a
master is having their natural privilege. They are
not going to be captives, every way as respectable
as their masters ; but they are going to be things
procured by commerce, and convenient, every way,
to be so used done up in a different colour, which
is to be the police-mark of their ownership. But the
Christian sense of the world begins to look into this
matter of colour, and it comes out more and more
distinctly, that, under it, there are moral personal
ities, brothers of an everlasting, divine brotherhood,
362 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
creatures of thought, and speech, and music, and
vision, and having all most inborn rights of such.
And so, by going down a stage, where colour will
cover it, slavery draws the argument down to just
that point where it is itself going to be weakest, and
most certainly doomed to give way. In this manner
it is now, in our own day, close upon its end ; and it
will soon be gone, never more to be seen. Farewell
to it ; for with it goes the rankest poison of private
virtue, the worst blight of society, the most fatal
incapacity sin has begotten for public law and
liberty. From this point onward the world may
breathe more freely !
3. It is a great thing, as regards the moral training
of life and society, that distinctions of colour and
race help us to arrive at just conceptions of human
equality. We begin, as already suggested, in a way
of abstraction, casting off the inequalities that visibly
inhere in one stock compared with another. So far
there is no equality. Brought down thus upon the
inner properties of manhood, we are met by the
discovery that individuals of the same race are
certainly not equal, whether in quantity of being
or capacity of doing. Single persons, again, of
a race that is inferior, will sometimes have a larger,
more capable nature, than others of a superior race.
So far, we find no base on which to build a scheme
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 363
of duty that makes everybody the exact equal of
everybody. On the contrary, a great part of the
duties of life are based, and must be, in the fact that
men are unequal ; some inferior, some superior ;
some elected to power and leadership, and some to
homage and trust. Everything here will depend on
how much of personal quantity and soul-force
different men may have for their endowment ; hew
much reason, conscience, love, will, vision, music,
science, and worship, they have room for ; and then
it will be seen what precedences they are to yield,
what deferences to pay, or what patronages to
assume, what forward conditions to support. Thus
far, the true beauty of life will consist in a due
observance of inequalities ; every man consenting
to be himself, and let everybody else be himself too,
in his own true measure. But, carrying our abstrac
tion one degree farther, we do at last arrive at a
stage of true unquestionable equality. Excluding
all distinctions of type and appearance, and all
diversities of quantity and force, we have left us an
exact sameness of species. That is, we are all men,
all moral natures, so completely akin to each other,
that truth to one is truth to another, right principle
to one right principle to another ; God, and love, and
worship, and joy, the same to all. So that here an
almost new code of duties dawns on our discover v,
364 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
assisted, in a marked degree, by the antagonisms of
colour, and the strange counter- en visagements that
make sameness of kind so conspicuous. In this new
code of equalities, our ripest, finest moral culture is
to be perfected ; and many have a large, long lesson
here to learn, who do not yet imagine it. For there
is a whole high tier of virtues opened here, that are
really the most delicate of all, and have the finest
mould of dignity. They are such as take note of,
and observe, what belongs to sameness of kind ;
virtues that we class under the words deference,
consideration, and the like. They are such kind
of acts as pay respect to man in that he is man;
reflections, so to speak, of the respect a man has to
himself. Consideration is a word that covers a whole
class of virtues that, in beauty of soul, exceed all
others. In that beauty it says : " This is a man ;
thus much I must observe in that he is a man. I
must not wound his respect, must not violate his
feeling. As he is a being in my own nature, I must
do honour to him in that nature, as my fellow ; I
must do him true man- help for his manhood s sake."
And how beautiful is the opportunity given for this
late- growing kind of excellence, in the distinctions
of race so often trampled by coarse insult and
brawling words of contempt !
When we come to assert our bill of rights in the
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 365
State rights that, in our American doctrine of
liberty, are supposed to be included in the principle
that we are " created equal," we are to base our
civil equality just where we do our moral. We are
equal, and have equal rights, simply in the fact that
we are all men, having all a right to be treated as
men, and one as truly as another. If one is lame,
another poor, another untaught, another varied by
the colour of his skin or the crisp of his hair, yet
they are all men, and the law must do no disrespect
to the equal and sublime right which inheres in their
manhood. If the question be whether, as men, they
have inherently the right of suffrage, the true
answer is No ; that right belongs to nobody as of
course. A government may be every way legitimate
which acknowledges no such right whatever may
be asserted by reformers and constitution-mongers
to the contrary notwithstanding. But as the world
advances, this prerogative of suffrage will be naturally
extended ; for, as the world is capable of it, and will
be more capable of benefit because of it, a wider
concession of it may be rightly demanded. And
then, if it is conceded, it must be done equally or
impartially. If it is conditioned by sex, or age, or
property, or ability to read, then it must be so con
ditioned for all. But if colour is made the condition,
then manhood is not, and equality is so far denied.
366 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
Such law is but a name for oppression, whether it
be a law of Connecticut or of South Carolina. It
may be difficult to establish, in certain parts of our
Union, a basis of right so impartial; it may even
cost us scenes of blood; but we have learned to
bleed for our principles, and the duties we owe
to our sublime future may help us, if we must, to
do more of it.
4. It belongs to the genius of Christianity to prove
itself by remarkable inversions of order, which it
may well do here. It never moves in the same lines
with policy, or statecraft; considering by what
combinations it may obtain weight, or by what
wisely projected wars it may extend its dominion;
neither in the same lines with philosophy, where the
uncultured multitude are of no account, and the
school is to win its success by the number and high
intellectual distinctions of its pupils; but it begins
with low-grade men, descending itself into their
low grade of life. It begins at Nazareth, and is,
morally speaking, born there, and Nazareth is the
name of a mean provincial town that carries igno
miny in the sound. It takes for its first disciples
a company of Galileans, and these, unlettered fisher
men. And from that day to this, it has been a
gospel specially preached to the poor, and has raised
great movements in the world by heaving continually
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 367
upward; seldom by taking hold of powers at the
summit of society, and working downward. And
the reason for this very singular inversion of order
is not that God prefers to let nobody have the com
pliment of his work but Himself, or that He is set
in wilfulness and jealous self-assertion against the
great and forward men who might move on his
cause more rapidly. No, the real fact is that nobody
can be duly taken hold of by the gospel but the
meek or humble. The wise, and prudent, and great,
know too much, and are too full of their prodigious
over- wisdoms, to really believe ; only the babes of
poverty and obscurity can do that, so as to verily
come into the gospel as it is. Paul was accepted as
a man of learning, it is true, but he was so com
pletely humbled by the hand of God upon him, as
to "be truly schooled into his place. Constantine also
was allowed, as a king, to come into the fold, and
it was a really dark dispensation ; for the fold had
a very heavy load to bear, when he put his kingcraft
down upon them and their gospel. Accordingly, it
is one of the most remarkable facts of our Christian
history, that it has been always exalting them of
low degree, and setting them in advance of the lofty
and the proud. It has been the kingdom of the weak,
and has thrown itself up into power by the tremen
dous underlift of its humble, once dejected people.
368 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
For a truly observing, richly experienced Christian,
therefore, it will be difficult, I think, not to anticipate
another great turn of Christian history, to be some
time accomplished by another more sublime inversion
of order than has ever yet been seen; I refer, of
course, to the possible consummation of our gospel
by the uplifting and spiritual new birth of the
African race. In their present low state of culture
they do not bear a hopeful look; but in certain points
of quality and temperament that are most peculiar
in them, they seem, to be contrived and made ready
for some such grand final chapter of inversion.
They are now the true ]S T azarenes and Galileans of
the world they are humble enough, and they know
how to believe. It has been the great defect of what
are called the western nations, that they speculate
overmuch, and strangle the gospel, or make it small,
by trying to think it in their own small heads.
They receive the inspirations of it cautiously, of
course, and only partially. But these Africans are
constitutionally inspirable, and when they get far
enough advanced in culture to be carried evenly,
without excess, or undue heats of frenzy, and the
clatter of our speculation is so far spent as to allow
silence in heaven for a space, what may be more
properly expected than a grand, prophesying testi
mony by these Africans, heard at the top of the
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 369
world ? Their gentle, friendly nature, tempered by
the necessary culture, will make them popular, as
their history makes them cosmopolitan, and the long-
affliction of their history will prepare them, not
unlikely, to a kind of cosmopolitan precedence, thaj
moves no jealousy. Besides, the contempt of their
person is now gone by; for how certainly is every
worst complexion or worst texture of skin fined
toward quality, by character and culture ; and how
easily, by variations how evanescent, are the lubber-
lines of a wild, rude nature put flowing into grace
and fair proportion, when the plastic hand of
Christian beauty lays its touch upon them ! Call
them black, they will yet be written "black but
comely ; " and our races most advanced in form will,
it may be, have no gift of beauty more unqualified.
When the believing throngs are gathered in, there
fore, from the East and the West, and the North
and the South, to sit down together in the kingdom,
even as Christ has given us to expect, what is more
easy to believe than that our long ago despised
African brothers, now despised no longer, will
reveal the meaning of their late-maturing, last-day
gifts, their capacities of vision, and music, and song,
and will let us hear the harps they carried in their
bosom strike into play in the customary inspirations
of religion? Their -word of the Lord," breaking
B B
370 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
into the old literature, will be like the prophet s
word to the bones, and, for aught we know, will be
darting along the wires of the world bulletins of
trade and diplomacy all still as the freshest, new
est news of the kingdom.
This appears, it may be, quite extravagant ex
travagant enough to be weak but we have it to
say, that it is the genius of Christianity to work
these grand inversions, and that we have, in this
very singular people, just the qualities and seed-
gifts which long ages of culture and piety may lift
into a precedence of so great beauty. It is not said
or expected with confidence, that so great honours are
to be won by the race, or find their realisation here
in this country. They take their places here under
great disadvantages, and their friends, doing all they
can for them, will suffer many misgivings. "What
shall save them from their enemies? what from,
themselves ? Perhaps they were allowed to be
brought hither, that they might obtain conceptions
of society and government for Africa ; perhaps to
open a way into the English tongue and its books,
and so into the possibility of creating an Anglicised
Africa. However it may be with them here, Africa,
we suppose, will continue in its own sable colour,
and be covered in the course of ages with new and
populous commonwealths. The nations that come
OF DISTINCTIONS OF COLOUR. 371
first into history do not, of course, rise highest. The
Babylonians, and Egyptians, and Persians, had their
day early ; the Syrians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and
Romans, came after, also to die. Then came along
much later, the German, Anglo-Saxon, Gallic races,
all to reach a higher mark of power and civilisation.
Perhaps the Africans will come up late enongh to
be last, rising into great inspirations as their fore
runners have into great wealth, and science, and
heroism. The European nations are not likely to
settle Africa, because of the climate Africa must
belong to the Africans. And it is right proper for
them, if they may, to make it a last, new sphere of
righteousness and peace ; the best and most nearly
divine it has been given to the world to see.
XT.
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE.
[T is difficult to maintain as much sympathy
as, perhaps, we ought, for that class of
people who are always bewailing the
mutability of earthly conditions. For the dark
things they encounter so complainingly have their
darkness mainly in the blind self- sympathy that has
shut away the manlier functions of intelligence.
Indeed, we could hardly speak with patience of
persons in this mood of affliction, were it not that
sometimes very great and sudden changes do occur
that are stunning surprises to everybody, and even
throw the mind of the sufferer off its balance for a
time, by the tremendous shock they give it. What
these may say, when the tempest is on them, and
before the whirl of their brain is settled, will, of
course, be pardoned. Still, generally, it is not such
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 373
that are most apt to complain, or cannot manage to
receive the shock in silence, but it is the drooping,
low-tempered, half-manly souls, that think they have
a right to be afflicted, because the world refuses to
keep such gait as they would have it. They find
themselves at sea, though but a little way off the
shore, and begin, before encountering any specially
rough weather, to make a point of being sea-sick
because of the element. Their difficulty is that they
give way to their temperament, and let it keep them
moping, or moaning, when a little more counsel
taken of thought and reason would steady their
vigour, and keep them erect. They would no more
pine over their changes, and have it, as the lament
able poetry of their life, to repeat
" Naught may endure but mutability,"
but they would rather like the whirl of their vehicle,
and even laugh at an occasional jolt in the passage.
Of course they will be tried as we all are ; bright
promises will fade, friends will betray them, fortune
will vanish, health will break, a great many troubles
will overtake them, and a great many annoyances
invade their peace ; but if they have only some just
opinion of life, and of what is wanting in it, they
will never take the mood of self-sympathy or dejec
tion, as if some very strange thing had befallen them.
374 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
They will even keep their feet the more stiffly
because of their changes.
Now, the fatal omission of those who take the
more dejected key, and are much in complaint
respecting life s changes, is, that they have never
made discovery and due account of the fact, that
what we call mutability, apart from the fickleness
of evil, is nothing but the law of motion, or muta
tion, as included in the necessary progress of motion.
In other words, God has made us not simply to be,
but to move, and by such motion get a way of transit
through the course of discipline we want. And then,
as the discipline comes, chapter after chapter, some
times heavy, almost never such as we should choose
for ourselves, it is to be our comfort, and a very
considerable satisfaction besides, that we are on the
move whither God sends us, and getting just the
benefit He means to give us. In one view nothing
is secure and abiding, just because nothing is made
to be stationary. The present is transitory, the
future uncertain, but not because God chooses, for
some inscrutable reason, to put us sighing over the
mutabilities. The question was between having
something done here, and having nothing done ;
between having events coming out in progressions,
and having neither events nor progressions ; between
giving us some benefit in life, and setting us up as
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 375
pasteboard men in a painted world, to find no use
or real meaning in it. What is much better than
that, and exactly contrary, God has ordained motion
for us, transit, and, what is but another name for the
same thing, grand mutations, that are all to be our
lessons. If, then, life, as we say, is a river, tliK
creation itself is a flood ; if nothing really is to us
but events or turnings out changes that are always
ending, never ended ; if in this flood we live, and
with it are borne along to the ocean ; if the worlds
cannot stop rolling above us, or the winds settle
round us ; if our body is itself a river of circulation,
flowing away and replacing itself every year ; if one
generation goeth and another cometh, all battling
their way forward, wearing and worn, till their work
is done ; and then, if all this outward transition is
but shaping and writing out a soul-history corre
spondent, changing the sky of the mind within, and
setting it onward feeling, fancy, hope, will, all the
myrmidon powers that play the phases of experience
through doings and comings to pass, that are seas
of mutabilities within, but are steadily shaping, and
meant to shape, a character ; if this, I say, is the
motion God ordains, what better can we do than to
bravely consent to it, and take the mutabilities, one
and all, save the mutabilities of evil, in glad, strong
welcome ?
376 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
ISTo one fails to observe the general going on of
the creation the seasons, day and night, the moons,
the tides, the breathings, the heart-beats, the soul
itself not able to cease thinking when it sleeps
even as if the universal order were a clock, running
to keep time ; but it is not seen as distinctly as it
might be, that innumerable, ever-progressing muta
bilities are involved in it. Not a thing can be
to-day where it was yesterday ; the past is vanish
ing, the future is coming, and it cannot be that
many things we value and cling to will not, in one
way or another, go by even as we go ourselves.
Property, friends, expectations, foundations every
thing we value is in transit ; and if it does not
wholly go by at some particular minute, it will
change colour, fall into new relations, and be so far
modified that we can hardly think it the same. In
this general economy of motion it is impossible that
the changes should not sometimes take us off our
feet, or crowd us to the wall ; and it will be none
the worse, or anything to put us whimpering or
complaining, if they do. New chapters are wanted,
and if the last new chapter is different from the one
preceding, it will probably be all the better that it
is. To be thrust out of fortune, or thrust into mis
fortune, is no so prodigious calamity, save where
the man is weak ; and then the misfortune is pro-
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 377
bably just the tiling that is needed to put a little
strength into his weakness. But if he gets heart
sick easily, and sinks into the condoling and com
plaining mood, he cannot be said to be unmanned
by it, for, in fact, he only was not manned before.
I wish it were also possible for these afflicted
people, who are so easily disturbed and made anxious
by the little mutations or seeming losses of their
life, to see how intolerable their condition would be
if they were, in fact, glued fast in a motionless
position, and compelled to simply stay. After a
while they would begin to sigh for some kind of
relief from the tedium of their immobility. Only
let there be some stir, they would say; let this
dreary monotony take in something to give a sense
of change. What we call fortune gets to be a bore,
if it brings no changes, but merely keeps up for us
the stale rounds of comfort the dress, the house,
the furniture ; the same table, and tax-bill, and
grocer s bill ; the same coach and the same driver,
and the same dull- looking, stereotyped faces, called
our friends. "We want something to change colour.
It would even be a relief to lose something; to
be less fully supplied, and get a new motive for
economy ; no matter if it be a little more anxious
economy, or more nearly pinched with want. To
have only made a bad indorsement, and lost one s
378 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
means by it, is better, a great deal, than to have
the fixity of a stone. To get no sense of motion, no
stage of transit, is inexpressibly wearisome. And
it will not do to be delicate as to the kind of transit
we are to have. If it is not pleasant or agreeable,
it is not half as unpleasant or disagreeable as none
at all would be. Even passing out of a good and
losing it, is better than to be a petrifaction in it, or
to have it petrified about us. What kind of time
would plants have, in the most splendid herbarium
in the world, if only a very little sense and vitality
were left in them, when so booked ?
But a great many of the mutabilities we com
plain of, it will be remembered, are occasioned by
the wrongs that rob, or sting, or betray us. Even
so, and we have it as a right, of course, to be dis
satisfied with the wrong-doers, and deeply feel the
injury we suffer from them. The insecurities, insta
bilities, and dark adversities of life, are largely due
to perfidies and frauds in this manner. Simply to
lose confidence in a friend is enough, sometimes,
to change the whole cast of our condition the
revelation discovered takes away our expectation,
eclipses the bright point of life, and changes the
very colour of the world. And we shall not feel it
the less when it strips us of our property, breaks
our credit, or invents insidious attacks on our good
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 379
name. Still, even here, the mere changes we suffer,
apart from their causes, ought not to be any so great
part of our affliction. The changes may be only
great moral advantages to us, pushing us on to
higher points of character than we could otherwise
reach. As men judge, the being stripped of one s
property is a very great and sore calamity ; and yet
how many have been really created by it, in all that
constitutes their noblest manhood ! how many fami
lies that were going to be only pampered and
softened by the condition of ease it gave them,
girded to a manly habit and a grand overmastering
energy, which gives them a significance to them
selves otherwise never to be attained ! If they had
been thus stripped by lightning, and not by human
wrong, the change itself would have been the same,
and perhaps they will get a very great additional
advantage when it has been done by wrong, in the
fact that it gives them a more wary apprehension of
what may be looked for in mankind, and sets them
in a closer way of exactness themselves, as regards
the keeping of their integrity. An over-implicit or
over-facile trust in men is a very great practical
weakness, and many can afford to be cured of it at
almost any cost. It begets, in fact, a moral weak
ness, that offers itself to be preyed on by every sort
of cunning or bad association. All evil is perfidy at
380 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
bottom, and we cannot be too soon aware that some
kind of perfidy is always likely to be working in it.
All the worse sign is it for us, when defrauded or
betrayed by wrong, to shut our eyes, instead of
letting them be opened, and fall to moaning over
the sad uncertainties and mutabilities of earthly
things. All such dreary sentimentalising is weak
ness. How much better to remember that, if we
have been troubled and thrown out of condition by
others, we have not been by any fault of honour
and truth, or any sort of vice, in ourselves. In that
noble consciousness it ought to be much that we can
firmly rest.
Thus far we deal with only the minor and sub
ordinate conditions of the subject, such as lie more
nearly in the common field of thought and obser
vation concerning it; the principal matter still
remains.
What we have been saying of motion, transition,
progression, and shifting discipline of experience,
needed for the consolidation of character, is true,
and the moral uses of the instabilities or muta
bilities of time are sufficiently evident, even if we
look no further. But there is another kind of use,
or class of uses, which is deeper and more nearly
fundamental, growing out of the relations of these
mutable conditions, to a future condition both
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 381
immutable and immortal. We are put to sea, we
shall find, in the mutable, that we may reach the
immutable, which is only a true version of the
immortal. There is a very close connection, as will
thus appear, between the dark and lowering insta
bilities we so much complain of, and so resolutely
fight against, and the idea discovered of our immor
tality ; between it also and the practical bent of our
life in that direction.
1. These mutabilities give us the idea, and so the
accepted and established fact, of immortality. Let
us see if we can trace the manner of the process.
Nothing is more commonly observed than the
immense eagerness of mankind to get away from
the mutations, or above the mutabilities, of their
mortal condition. Not less observable is the
unregulated sensibility by which the less resolute,
less firmly tempered souls are so piteously dis
tressed, when their seeming foundations begin to be
shaken or shattered by some kind of disaster. And
the true explanation is, that every moral nature has
belongings to a state that is really above mutation ;
so that when it casts off the bond, or forgets the
grand affinities that should fasten it there, it is
turned to look after some kind of anchorage in the
mutable that will answer its want. Hence the
panic we suffer in our losses ; hence the indefati-
382 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
gable industries and the prodigiously strenuous
works that engage us. The zest, the passion, the
infatuation, we may almost say, of our endeavour is,
to so far get above causes, or get the command of
causes, as to fix or fasten our own future. And the
pitch of tension to which we are often raised in this
endeavour is even frightful- as if the strain of it
must sometime snap the cords of life itself. And
then we make up our account of the fact, by saying
that man pursues the mortal with the zeal of a
nature immortal. In which we are right, only we
do not perceive, as distinctly as we might, that this
fact of immortality is a fact that gets both its
evidence and enforcement at the precise point of
antagonism between the mutable and the immu
table. The real first question is not immortality, as
we commonly assume, but immutability ; for the
sense of our everduringness comes through no
speculation about the matter of dateless continuance,
but through what germinations we have in us, and
what experiences we get, of the immutable. It is
morally and not speculatively pronounced in us.
As a mere opinion, or intellectually discovered fact,
it is nothing. No argument of that kind ever
made the smallest approach to proving it. But the
grand mutation element in which we live is con
tinually heaving us upon it, and compelling us to
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 383
have it as in fact, whether we have it as in opinion
or not. We have no thought of immortality, it may
be, but only of something to be gotten out of the
mutable that shall be as good as immutable ; some
provisioning of a perfectly sure state, such as no
mischances and changes can overset or shake. In
these prodigious throes of endeavour that keep the
world astir, we are scorning the mutabilities and
pressing toward the changeless. Our effort is
absurd, as being in the plane of mere temporalities,
but it proves our want of the immutable, and so
our immortal capacity. Having a nature packed
full of possibilities and fore-reaching affinities
for a morally immutable condition, we are thus
tremendously moved by aspirations toward it after
it is lost. Seeing everything in transit about us,
we still go on to build the untransitory in it,
moaning feebly when it seems to be sliding from
under us, or striving, in all hugest endeavour, to
fasten a foundation that cannot slide. And the
result is that our mutabilities, of which we so
often complain, are proving always the sublimity
of their uses, by crowding us toward the immu
table state we do not even dare to think of, and the
immortal state we think of, but can only faintly
believe.
We exist here in a double connection : first, with
384 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
the transitory on one side, and, secondly, with the
untransitory on the other ; and we fare, as many
other creatures do that are made for two distinct
elements, coming into distress in one element, the
moment they lose connection with the other. The
sponge, for example, gets its food and life from the
fluid, ever- moving waters of the sea ; but it must be
also fastened to some rock that does not move, and
gives firm anchorage to it in the waters. And then,
if by any mischance it is detached from its hold, it
floats away, driven loosely by the unstable element,
and is actually drowned by the very waters that
were to give it feeding and maintain its growth.
The bird has wings connecting it with the air, and
feet on which it takes the ground for rest, or settles
in firm hold on its perch for the sleep of the night.
But if it wanders too far seaward on its fickle
elements, or is driven wildly out by the tempest,
it gets bewildered, and settles weary and heart- sick
on the deck of some ship espied from afar, sub
mitting to be taken by the hands. Trees get their
feeding largely from the air and the light, in which
their foliage so receptively spreads itself, and their
limbs so gracefully play. But they must have their
roots also taking firm hold of the ground, by these
to be localised and kept erect and steady in the
storms. And when the changing season tinges
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 385
tliem in sad colours above, and finally strips them
bare, they so far seem to even die; only holding
fast their clinch upon the frozen earth with their
numbed, icy fingers even as a diver holds his
breath in the water till the summer light and
heat return to quicken their life. By these and
other like feeble analogies we conceive the double
state of man, connected on one side with infinite
mutabilities in things, and on the other with im
mutable ideas and truths and God ; so that if he
undertakes to get on apart from these latter, to be
fed on the transitory, established in the ficklenesses,
or to get firm footing in the cloudland weather and
storm, he must do what neither sponge, nor bird,
nor tree was ever able make the transitory con
stant, and the mutable as good and sure as the
immovable.
But we must have a closer and more critical
inspection of this matter. Immutability is a
character that is commonly reserved for God, as
being his exclusive right or possibility ; and there
may even seem to be some want of reverence in the
supposition, that it can at all belong to man, as a
human attainment. That depends entirely on the
question whether God s immutability is grounded
in his quantities, or in his principles. If it is
grounded in his quantities, like his omniscience or
c c
3 86 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
omnipotence, and belongs in that way to his infinite
magnitudes, then, of course, it is impossible for any
creature. If it is grounded in his principles, if it is
a moral and no mere natural attribute, then it may
belong as well to any creature who can be esta
blished in the same principles ; the very object of
his training, too, may be to get him thus esta
blished. And when this is done, when he is gotten
for ever above temptation, clear of mental swervings
or mutations, he is morally immutable. His integ
rity is perfect never, till it becomes immutability.
Meantime, it will be difficult to find how God s
mere quantities should make him immutable with
out principles, or a state of moral fixity in them ;
quite as difficult to find how the same fixity in the
same principles should fail to make his creature
immutable, for mere defect of quantity.
It less easily occurs to us to think of immuta
bility, as a character belonging to man, that he is
visibly and consciously so far off, and so confusedly
mixed with all the mutations of time. He is
temptable in his best condition, so far mutable, and
it is well if he does not show it by a good deal of
sadly mutable practice. And yet it should not be
incredible, that he may have found his bearing in
principles that do not change, in Gfod who is for ever
as to-day, and so far has gotten the sure presenti-
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 387
ment and germ of a perfectly unchanging character,
finally to be consummated.
I think it likely, too, that the proposing of any
such ideal for man s attainment, will be scarcely
welcome to many. They will think of the immu
table state as a kind of imprisonment, or stale mono
tony, where liberties are gone by, progressions
ended, varieties excluded. When the mutations
are all over, what will be left them, but to simply
be falling into just that state we have described of
insupportable tedium, that will make any kind of
motion, or change, a relief? "Whereas the supposed
imprisonment will only be a state of fixity in
principles, which principles will be themselves
guaranties of unchanging liberty and progression,
instigators of all highest action, fountains of all
grandest mutations and varieties not evil, laws of
eternally right motion. Nothing is excluded but
the bad motions and double-minded caprices of a
nature, warping and warped, swerving and swerved,
under evil. Evil excluded and gone, immutability
is everywhere.
Let us see, then, from the inventory of man s
gifts, by what furniture and outfit he is equipped,
for any such transcendent character. First, we
have the fact, that certain great moral ideas, which
are immutable and eternal, belong inherently to his
3 8S MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
moral nature itself, and assert their standard autho
rity in it. To be a man is to think them, and not
I/ to think them is to be merely an animal ; all men
do in fact think them exactly alike. And when
they bind, they bind us all alike. They are neces
sary and absolute. They cannot be less or different;
rejected they stand, violated they are whole. In
their own nature immutable, they assume the right
to govern all mind, and whatever mind receives
them so far passes out of the mutable.
Take, for example, the truth-principle, the neces
sary, everlasting, ideal distinction between the true
and the false. It can as little be debated, in a way
of opinion, as the idea of space : it is absolute. If
now any moral being accept this truth-principle, to
live for the truth and by it, he becomes a principled
man as regards all truth, in distinction from an
unprincipled, or non-principled man. He is not
settled, of course, in the knowledge of all particular
truths. He may err a long time in opinions, or
matters of fact, but being in the truth -principle,
sworn to seek, and serve, and live and die for, the
truth, he is polarised in that principle, and will
settle his vibrations closer and closer, in all his
discriminations, determinations, and faiths. Being
fixed in the principle of truth-seeking, he is just so
far a true man; whereas there are multitudes of
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 389
men, it may be, holding vastly more true judgments
and opinions and fewer errors than he, who are yet
only governed by the market, or the school, or tho
church, and are really not true men at all, because
there is no immutable first principle in them of
devotion to the truth for truth s sake. They are
clocks set by all other clocks, and not dials set for
the sun.
Exactly the same thing holds, in exactly the same
manner, as respects the absolute, necessary, ideal
distinction of right and wrong. And the truly
right man is not he that does prevailingly right
things, according to the nws or common law moral
of society, but he that takes the principle of right-
doing to follow it implicitly, at any cost, and even
when it puts him against society itself. All the
repentances, sacrifices, and martyrdoms begin here,
at the point of immutable right ; but there are
thousands of men who will be offended, when they
are not allowed to be properly righteous, who never
took the ordeal of right principle, to stand or fall
with it, in their lives. All the right doings in
which they please themselves are deferences to
custom in the mutable, never to the all-dominating
sovereignty of right itself immutable, everlasting
right. This whole side of their moral nature, where
its affinities are to prove their sublimity, by con-
390 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
ducting them inward, where God s own immuta
bility rests, is ignored. They are virtuous men as
far as the whiffling element of what the world calls
virtue makes them so, but the everlastingness of
absolute right they know nothing of.
The same is true as regards the more strictly reli
gious, inborn relations of the soul with God. When
it turns itself to God, it is not as when it came to
its own moral ideas simply, but it comes to a being
other than itself, before and over against itself.
It is being trusting itself to being, finite being to
infinite being, in that also to be complemented and,
as it were, infinited with it. Whereupon, as God
is himself a nature supreme above all force pr
change by force, it gets the sense of touching
bottom in the changeless. ISTo man really believes
in God, as in practical trust, in distinction from
only believing some prepositional matter concerning
Him, without having God verified to him as by con
sciousness substance in substance and then he
will as certainly be fixed in the sense of his own
ever-duringness ; which ever-duringness is not the
opinion, reasoned or gotten up, of his own immor
tality, but the sense, in fact, of being down upon,
in, and of the immutable.
We perceive, in this manner, that the immutable
is not as far off from our human nature as we com-
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 391
monly think; that our moral ideas and religious
affinities stock us, so to speak, for the attainment,
and that just here all our convictions of immorta
lity get their spring. Immortality is nothing but
the fact translated of immutable morality. "We are
so bound up with eternal ideas and God, that we
have the fact of immortality by moral impres
sion. Feeding, or prepared to feed, on the eternal
and immutable, feeling it stir within us evermore,
we need not ask for it, or go after it to fetch it by
wise argumentations; we have its certifying touch
already felt in our consciousness. Besides, these
mutabilities in which our lives are mixed are turn
ing us ever about, and driving us on, and crowding
us in, where, in trying to get hold of the changeless,
the changeless, in a higher key, gets hold of us.
And we so begin to think our immortality as a fact
of the understanding, because it is already upon us
in power, in moral impressions back of the under
standing. What we last and least imagine, the
candidacy of our moral nature for the immutable,
becomes an awakened sense of it, which sense
emerges, and takes form in thought or opinion, as
a mentally discovered fact of immortality. Hence
it is that we so readily believe it as a truth when we
make so poor a figure in maintaining it. We
reason it from the immateriality of the soul; or
392 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
from the great powers of mind, so scantily de
veloped in this life ; or from our unwillingness to
cease and be no more ; or from any worst, or best,
of fifty other kinds of premise; but the short
account of the matter is, that nature is beforehand
with us, commanding us, so to speak, into immor
tality; commanding us, that is, into and by ever
lasting, absolute principles, even the same which
anchor God s immutability itself; and, what is
more, commanding us home to God s own infinite
nature, there to be complemented in his ever-
during sufficiency. Nature scorns, in this manner,
all the speculative arguments, and puts it on us,
going directly by both theologians and sceptics, to
know our immortality, as we know the face of duty,
or of God. What they teach, or reason, is a matter
of comparatively small consequence, because the
fact is already out, asking neither help nor consent
from them. We pass now
2. To the more advanced position or use already
suggested, viz., the fact that our instabilities, or
mutable conditions, not only discover to us our inhe
rently immortal nature, but so work upon us as to
bend us practically toward the immortal state, as the
only sufficiently wise end or satisfactory consumma
tion of our life.
We are set on thus, practically, toward the condi-
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 393
tlon of immutability, by two kinds of impulse from
the mutable state, a negative and a positive acting
concurrently. In the negative we have it discovered
to us, that there is and can be no such reliable basis
of expectation as we try for in things, and before
coming into principles. Nothing short of immuta
bility, whether we so think or not, really meets our
Rant, and this we strike nowhere, save in the ever
lasting principles of duty, and the divine anticipa
tions of religion. Whether it was possible to give a
more reliable, and less fluctuating, billowy character
to mere things, I do not know ; but if it was, I think
we can see that we profoundly want just all the tran
sitional, unsteady elements we have. There plainly
must not only be motion, or transit, but there must
be surprises, incalculable somersets, infinite unrelia
bilities all that we include in our weakest sighs oi
surrender, and stoutest wars of defiance, to the fickle
ness of fortune else we shall be only losing all the
benefits of living, by rooting ourselves down into
the crevices of things, as trees in the clefts of the
rocks, thinking so to get firm enough foothold in
time.
Hence the almost visibly contrived instabilities of
the world ; as if it were God s purpose to let every
good of time shake us out of its lap. Reputation
what is it but a phantom that we are more likely to
394 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
be anxious for, than to have by a secure title?
Friends are not angels, and too often prove that
they are more wisely suspected than trusted. Money
where shall we place it ? The safe is not safe
enough. The bank is scarcely better. The public
securities are most insecure in the keeping. Short
notes have wings that are long enough to fly away.
Stocks are sometimes only wings without a body.
Mortgages must be clear of liens going before, and
fires and collapses of value coming after. Executors,
guardians, agents, who can tell what breaches of
trust they are concocting ? So that no kind of foot
ing, or property, or benefit of condition obtained, is
sufficiently clear of risk to be entirely reliable. Un
looked-for mischances will come, and a dozen mis
chances coming together will put their victim in a
strait he never expected to see. Or suppose a man
too firmly grounded in his wealth to be disturbed by
any such combination of mischances, he is yet sub
ject to other kinds of mischances, that will make his
life more baseless and frail, than any mere collapse
in property. A profligate son, a daughter badly
married, a wife hopelessly insane, secreted in a hos
pital to die any one, or all these together, show
him how completely subject he still is to the muta
bilities of time. Or, it may be that he only suffers
that most common of mortal disasters, the loss of his
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 395
health, and when that goes, how incontinently vanish
the delights of the senses, the joys of motion, the
zests of enterprise ; and from that point onward the
poor man, laden with so heavy spoils of fortune, is
like a mule dragging in deep sands and getting no
foothold. There is also a grand mischance, or king
of mischances, whose shadow, riding by, we often
think we see, and the touch of whose fell finger, we
know, sends us quickly away. Our very world-
element, in short, is fickleness, and if we try to
make it firm by the firm hold we put on it, straws
are only straws, though we clutch them ever so
tightly.
There is very little use in sentimentalising, or
moping in sad complaints, over these fugacious,
baseless things in which we have our experience.
They are all very soberly meant, very deliberately
planned for us. If God could have made things
stand more securely, as we are apt to believe, He
certainly has not done it, and has not for the wisest
and best reasons. We could not plainly be trained
for immortality in a time- element that is itself as
good and reliable as immortality. It must not be as
good and reliable, else we shall contrive to stay in
it. If we are to let go of it and rise to something
higher, we must see it to be hollow, treacherous,
uncertain, unreliable, insufficient, and then we are
396 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
so far clear of it, or even exclusively thrust forward
by it.
But this mutable element is more than negatively
good, as regards the choice of ends that belong to
the immortal state ; it works negatively that it may
work positively, and exert a really introductive
power. The changes we are passing, hour by hour,
are all before the open gate of principle, showing us
in, raising also wants to draw us in. Wants are
wonderfully perceptive ; and the royal base- work of
immutable order and rest, prepared in their nature
itself, many will never find, till their ponderous
wants, somehow developed, settle them down upon
it. Hence also the mutabilities. God puts us at sea.
in them, that we may get tired of them. It is not
altogether ill to be at sea. The fire-gleams of the
night, the mirages of the day, the sea-storm voice
deepest of all voices the sceneries of the weather,
the pomps of the waves, make up a world by them
selves ; but the painful thing is, and it is more and
more felt, and grows more and more wearisome, that
there is no fixity, nothing but change, the very feet
grow sick of it, aching, if but for a single hour, to
get the touch of some foundation. The plays of
change that, for a time, were interesting, grow dull
and stale, and dreary, and the wonder is, at last,
that so many fine things came to pass in the begin-
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 397
ning of the voyage, and none at all now. Finally,
if the voyage is a long one, or the ship gets disabled,
the simple word shore comes to have a kind of para
dise in it. When shall it be seen ? Shall it ever be
seen ? Why not put ourselves to the oars and try
for it ? Just so it is that men get weary and sick
in the mutabilities. And it does not make much
difference, whether they suffer losses, or get on by
successes ; for they have about the same sense of
insecurity or unsteadiness in one that they have in the
other, and get sick and hungry in about the same
degree. Only there are some who will never get
away from things far enough to embrace principles,
till some final sweep of calamity strips all things
away; never come unto God, till, by some great
storm, they are virtually wrecked 011 Him. Then for
the first time, when they touch Him, so to speak,
with their feet, and rest on Him, do they begin to
know what a coming to land it is to trust Him. All
true-born souls are brought ashore in this manner,
on the continental principles of duty and religion.
What we call the world -element, unsteady and
mutable as the sea, is no finality for them, but
they are put in it, as a merely transitional chapter,
to be inducted, and pressed inward, and down
ward, upon real foundations the immutable, the
immortal.
398 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
It is also a very great positive benefit, in this
schooling of the mutable state, that it gives us the
fact of immortality, not as a speculation, but as a
grand, overtowering moral impression. We take it
up because everlasting principles are heaving in us.
Our sense of God contains it, and gives it a wide,
warm bosom. Let a human creature reason out
some wise conclusion of the head in this matter, and
project his mole-eye sight far enough into words to
fetch eternities out of them, and then, having got
his wise opinion set in the conclusion that he is
certainly immortal, let him put himself to the use
of it, and see how much, or little rather, it will
mean. It will be such a flickering light, such
a feeble and cold moonshine out of eternity, as
to engage no earnest feeling, carry no strong
impulse. These speculated notions of immortality
are, in fact, often a hinderance and no help.
Whereas the immortality that has come out through
the gate of immutable mortality, that which has
thundered in the soul s moral ideas and affinities
for God, that which, coming before all speculation,
has raised the plane of the man, and made him
a superior creature, will have a glorious, almost
glorifying power. It has a positive moral mean
ing, next akin to the sense of immutability itself,
though probably never so conceived, and the soul
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 399
hastens longing toward it, as its continental Rest
and Home.
Besides, this morally felt immortality will be
always waking to consciousness those moral wants
and convictions that are closest to the standards of
duty and religion. There is no exactly fit relation
between mere world- sickness and a morally right
life. It might about as well be expected that a man
will make that kind of choice because he is work-
sick or weary. There must be some moral quality
in the want developed, else it has no relation to such
a result. But this moral quality will here seldom
be wanting. There is such close company in souls
between the want of stability and the principles
that are to make it, that w 7 hoever gets weary and
sick of the mutabilities can, with difficulty, exclude
some pungent reflections on the neglect of those
principles. It is possible, I grant, for a man to be
crushed in his expectations, stripped by losses,
broken down by defeats, or, in a career of general
success, to be utterly disgusted with the chaffy look
of his gains, and yet to encounter no reflections on
the moral significance of what he suffers. But there
will be few such cases > and it will at least sometimes
be seen that men who are at the highest strain of
their powers, and fighting in stoutest throes of en
deavour, to conquer a reliable footing for their life,
400 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
just there discover, and by that very means, the
practical nonsense and wrong of their wild instiga
tions ; that they are straining after foundations
where there are none, and neglecting them where
they are this, too, because they are principles of
duty and religion ; such as have a right, in their
own divine order, to be first accepted and acted
from, and be themselves the footing of the life.
Thoughts of this kind are never far off from the
man who is delving, heart-sick and wearily, among
the mutabilities, and he will not always be in a mood
to repel them. He is far more likely to say, " I
have been a fool and a prodigal. I forsook my
Father evil was the day arid now I will arise
and go to my Father." ]STo man ever really em
braces a principle that has been deserted without
some contrition felt for the desertion of it. And
there is a wonderful fitness in the incertitudes and
circumgyrations of our mortal affairs, to bring us
round, where the eternal love and order have their
rest, with wills effectually tamed by self-discovery.
They are a kind of sermon that all men hear at
times, and they have it as their peculiar advantage,
that they preach conviction out, so to speak, instead
of preaching it in, and do it by a kind of power that
wakens no jealousy.
On the whole it will be seen, that what we call
OF THE MUTABILITIES OF LIFE. 401
the baselessness of the world, and speak of with so
little respect, is a really grand institution, adjusted
for our moral benefit. If the light whifflings of its
changes, the heavy and grim overturnings, the
everywhere unsteady footings, put us all at sea,
there is yet a continent hard by principles im
mutable, and immutability in principles. Human
nature nowhere looks so great, capable of a footing
so divinely solid and strong, as in precisely these
contrived environments of change pressing, all
together, landward, and drawing us on, by their
ceaseless mutations toward a base that is changeless.
//
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XYI.
OF THE SEA.
|AD it been given us to compose or settle
the proportions of the world, there is
probably no particular in which we
should have differed the scheme of it more widely
from the present, or now existing scheme, than in
not allowing any so great amount of surface to be
covered with water. It would not even occur to us
that so many, vast, outspreading seas and oceans
unfruitful, inhospitable, next to impassable could
have any fit place or use. Is it not a world for man
to inhabit ? and is he not a creature wanting chiefly
land a soil to cultivate, a firm foundation to build
upon, a steady footing of reaction for his works?
Allowing a large supply for his economic uses, who
can imagine that only oceans of waters will suffice ?
And what can he do with waters that are only brine P
OF THE SEA. 403
covering four-fifths, or nine- tenths of the world?
Having it on hand to raise the best conditioned and
most numerous possible herd of men, we should
always be contriving how to enlarge the pasture.
Instead of these immense water- deserts we should be
laying out for as many and productive acres of land
as possible. We should make the globe itself a good
round ball of meadow and ploughland. The levia
thans would have to make room for the reapers, and
if we could find how to keep the ground in good and
safe drainage without seas, we should allow but one
great floor of continent wrapping about the world ;
which floor should be carpeted, in close order, with
great flourishing empires.
This would be our wisdom God s how different !
By Him these great oceans are excavated, and the
habitable parts are islanded in narrow strips between
them. It is as if He were planning vast regions of
waste, that He may stint the fruitfulness, and set
a bound to the populousness of his realms. The
natural philosopher and man of science will doubtless
have another account to give; showing how the
physical uses the comforts, supplies, and populative
capabilities of the world depend on having just so
large a portion of the land submerged. The sea, as
he will represent, tempers the climate of the land,
making the heat less intense, and the cold less
4C4 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
rigorous. It supplies, too, the rains that water the
land, and make it fruitful ; furnishing also immense
stores of provisions from its own pastures. All which
may he true ; though it does not follow that the same
results could not have been accomplished in some
other way. Mere physical uses or ends are never
the final causes of things, and it will be difficult to
imagine that, if God had been planning for the
particular uses here specified viz., how to provide
the largest and best supplies for a great population
He could not have widened vastly the spaces of
land, and made them tenfold more productive. We
recollect here that God s last ends are always moral
ends, and we seem, therefore, to see that, in this
vast overspreading of seas, He is preparing the
world, not so much for a physical, as for a moral
habitation. And He seems, in this view, to be rather
preferring to limit, than to extend the populations
provided for ; lest our school of virtue may be too
large and too easily kept in supply, for the intended
moral benefit. So He makes small the globe by
reductions of the existing spaces, narrowing down
our field, not by the seas alone, but by rigours of
frost, and deserts of sand, and mountains of rock ;
as if meaning to bring us into compass or compres
sion, and set us in a discipline of toil and hardship
for the due unfolding of our personal force, and the
OF THE SEA. 405
right establishing of our character. His funda
mental assumption appears to be that, to such a
being as man, virtue can be only a conquest.
Prepared by considerations like these, we are now
ready for the more deliberate inquiry, what are the
moral uses of the sea, or in what respects does it
appear to have been appointed for the moral benefit
of the world ? And I think it will appear, as we
prosecute this inquiry, that the ordinance of the sea
is so thoroughly interwoven with all that is of the
highest interest to man the progress of society, art,
government, science, and religion; in a word, all
that is included in moral advancement that, with
out the sea, the world could hardly be considered a
fit habitation for his use.
One great problem of God, in building a school
for man, was, how to distribute the school ; for it is
manifest that no one government, or society, could
fill and occupy the whole domain certainly not,
without producing indefinite confusion, and sacrificing
many of the most powerful stimulants to energy and
advancement. Neither could it be done without
exalting the throne or governing power to such a
pitch of eminence as would probably command the
religious homage of mankind, and make it the head
of a universal Lamaism. But if the world is to be
distributed into nations, or kingdoms which are
406 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
likely to be always jealous of each other, and some
times hostile they need to be separated by natural
barriers, such as will prevent strife by inclosing
them within definite boundaries, and when they are
in actual strife, will fortify them against destruction
one from the other. This is effected, in part, by
interposing mountains and rivers, but more effec
tually, and on a larger scale, by spreading seas and
oceans between them. For there is, in fact, no
maxim of the poets, often cited, more utterly
destitute of foundation, or more unjust to Provi
dence, than Cowper s well-meant lines :
" Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations, who had else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one ; "
for mountains are the well-defined boundaries, rather,
and pacificators of nations. Oceans and great bodies
of water have the still further advantage, that they
can be passed more easily for purposes of convenience
than for those of destruction. Indeed, it is impossible
for whole nations to pour their military hordes across
them, as across a mere geographical line. Nature
is here the grand distributor and fortifier of nations.
She draws her circle of waters, not around some
castle or fortified citadel of art, but around whole
nations themselves. Then it is within these fortified
circles of nature, that nations are to unfold their
OF THE SEA. 407
power, and have their advancement. Such was
Greece, cut off from all the world by boundaries of
rock and water, which no Xerxes with his invading
army could effectually pass ; * having, at the same
time, enough of strife and struggle within to keep
her on the alert, and waken all her powers to
vigorous exercise. Such is England now. England,
for so many ages past the foremost light of Europe,
the bulwark of law, the great temple of religion,
could never have been what it is, or anything but
the skirt of some nation, comparatively undis
tinguished, had not the Almighty drawn his circle
of waters around it, and girded it with strength, to
be the right hand of his power. It is the boundaries
of nations, too, that give them locality, and settle
those historic associations which are the conscious
life of society, and the source of all great and high
emotions ; otherwise they fly to perpetual vagrancy
and dissipation there is no settlement, no sense of
place or compression, and, as nothing takes root,
nothing grows. Thus the ancient Scythian, roaming
over the vast levels of the North, is succeeded by
the modern Tartar both equally wild and uncul
tivated, the father of three thousand years ago, and
the son of to-day.
Again it will be found that the oceans and seas
have sometimes contributed, beyond all power of
408 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
estimation, to the moral and social advancement of
the race, by separating one part of the world even
from the knowledge of another, and preserving it
for discovery and occupation at an advanced period
of history. Had the territory of the United States
been conjoined to the eastern shore of Asia, or the
western of Europe, or had there been no oceans
interposed to break the continuous circle of land,
it is obvious that the old and worn-out forms of
civilisation would have wanted a spur to reform and
improvement that is now supplied. When, at length,
the new world was discovered, then were the race
called out, as it were, to begin again. The trammels
of ancient society and custom, which no mere human
power could burst, were burst by the fiat of Provi
dence, and man went forth to try his fortunes once
more, carrying with him all the advantages of a
previous experience. We set up here no invidious
claim of precedence. We acknowledge our rawness
and obscurity, in comparison with the splendour and
high refinement of more ancient nations. We only
claim it as our good fortune that we are a new nation,
peopled by men of a new world, who had new prin
ciples to be tested, for the common benefit of man
kind. As such the eye of the world is upon us, and
has been for many years. The great thought of our
institutions the happiness and elevation of the
OF THE SEA. 409
individual man is gradually and silently working
its way into all the old fabrics of legitimacy in
Christendom, and compelling the homage of power
in all its high places. Whatever motion there has
been in European affairs for the last half century
all the mitigations of law, the dynasties subverted,
the constitutions conceded, the enlarged liberty of
conscience and the press, popular education, every
thing that goes to make society beneficent has
been instigated, more or less directly, by the great
idea that is embodied and represented in the institu
tions of the United States. This same great idea,
the well-being and character of the individual man,
has been, brought forth, too, to offer itself to the
world, at just the right time. Without it, we may
well doubt whether the institutions of Europe had
not come to their limit, beyond which they had not,
in themselves, any power of advancement. Had it
come earlier, Europe was not ready for it. The
immense advantage that is thus to accrue to man
kind, as regards the great interests of truth, society,
and religious virtue, from the fact that our western
hemisphere was kept hidden for so many ages beyond
an impassable ocean, to be opened, in due time, for
the planting and propagation of new ideas, otherwise
destined to perish, no mind can estimate. Nor is
this process of planting yet exhausted. There are
410 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
islands in the southern oceans larger than England,
that are yet to become seats of power and of empire,
and possibly to shine as lights of Antarctic history,
eclipsing those of the North ; or, if not eclipsing,
giving to all the northern climes, both of the eastern
and western worlds, the experiment of new principles
needful to their progress and happiness.
But it is another and yet more impressive view of
the moral utility of seas and oceans, that, while they
have a disconnecting power operating in the ways
first specified, they have at the same time a connect
ing power, bringing all regions and climes into
correspondence and commercial interchange. Forti
fied by oceans and seas against injury from eaqh
other, they are yet united by the same for purposes
of mutual benefit. Were there no seas, were the
globe covered by a continuous sheet of land, how
different the history of the past from what it has
been ! how different the moral and intellectual state
of human society from what it now is ! There being
no medium of commerce, save that of land travel, no
intercourse could exist between nations remote from
each other. They would know each other only by
a kind of tradition, as now we know the past.
Tradition, too, in its long and uncertain transit
across the longitude of the world, would clothe itself
in fable, and we, instead of being made to feel the
OF THE SEA. 411
common brotherhood of man as now, should probably
be fast in the belief that the opposite hemisphere of
the world is peopled by giants, centaurs, anthro
pophagi, and such-like fabulous monsters. There
would, of course, be no commerce, except between
nations that are adjacent; and society, being life
without motion or stimulus, would rot itself down
into irredeemable bigotry and decrepitude. God
would not have it so. On the ocean, which is the
broad public highway of the Almighty, nations pass
and repass, visit and revisit each other, and those
which are remote as freely as those which are near.
And it is this fluid element that gives fluidity and
progress to the institutions and opinions of the race.
It is only in the great inland regions of the world,
as in Central Africa and Asia, that bigotry and
inveterate custom have their seat. In these vast
regions that never saw the sea, regions remote from
the visits of commerce and the moving world, men
have lived from age to age without progress, or the
idea of progress, crushed under their despotisms,
held fast in the chains of indomitable superstition,
rooted down like their trees, and motionless as their
mountains. In the meantime, the shores and islands
of the world have felt the pulse of human society,
and yielded themselves to progress. It ^ is, in a
word, this fluid sea, on whose bosom the free winds
412 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
of heaven are wafting the world s commerce, which
represents all mobility and progress in the human
state. Without this interposed, the rock-based con
tinents themselves were not more fixed than the
habits and opinions of mankind. On the other hand,
we observe that the prejudices of men who live upon
and by the waters are never invincible. They admit
of change, somewhat by habit and association, as
their element changes, and they shift their sail to
the winds. It was never a Babylon, or a Timbuctoo,
or any city of the inland regions, that was forward
to change and improvement. But it was a Tyre,
queen of the sea ; a Carthage, sending out her ships
beyond the Pillars of Hercules to Britain and the
Northern Isles; an Athens, an Alexandria these
were the seats of art, and thought, and learning, and
liberal improvement of every sort. So, too, it was
the Italian commercial cities that broke up the dark
ages, and gave the modern nations that impulse
which set them forward in their career of art and
social refinement, and, remotely speaking, of liberty.
The spirit of commerce, too, is the spirit of peace,
its interest the interest of peace, and peace is the
element of all moral progress, as war is the element
of all barbarism and desolation. Every ship that
sails the ocean is a pledge for peace to the extent of
its value; every sail a more appropriate symbol
OF THE SEA. 413
of peace than the olive-branch itself. Commerce,
too, has at length changed the relative position of
nations. Once upon a footing of barbarism, they
are now placed on a footing of friendship and
civilisation. In the most splendid days of Athens,
piracy was a trade, not a crime ; for it was the
opinion that nations were naturally hostile, and
will, of course, prey upon each other. But now, at
length, commerce has created for itself a great
system of international and commercial law, which,
to a certain extent, makes one empire of all the
nations, maintaining the rights of person and pro
perty, when abroad upon the ocean, or in other
lands, as carefully and efficiently as if there were
but one nation or people on the globe. Search the
history of man, from the beginning till now, you
will find among all the arts, inventions, and insti
tutions of the race, no one so beneficent, none that
reveals so broad a stride of progress, as this. And
it promises yet to go on, extending its sway, till it
has given rules to all the conduct of nations, pro
vided redress for all injuries, and thus la wed out for
ever all war from the earth.
The nations engaged in commerce will, of course,
be most rapidly improved, and become the most
forward nations. In perpetual intercourse with
each other, they will ever be adopting the inven-
4 i4 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
tions, copying the good institutions, and rectifying
the opinions, one of another ; for the man of com
merce is never a bigot. He goes to buy, in other
nations, commodities that are wanted in his own.
He is therefore in the habit of valuing what is
valuable in other countries, and so, proportionally,
are the people or nation that consumes the com
modities of other countries. And so much is there
in this, that the government, the literature, nay,
even the religion, of every civilised nation, must
receive a modifying influence from all the nations
with whom it maintains an active commerce. In
opinions, literature, arts, laws nay, in everything
they must gradually approximate, till they
coalesce, at last, in one and the same catholic
standard of value and excellence. Commerce is
itself catholic, and it seems to be the sublime pur
pose of God, in its appointment, to make everything
else so, that as all are of one blood, so, at last, they
shall be one conscious brotherhood.
In the meantime the nations most forward in art
and civilisation are approaching, by the almost
omnipresent commerce they maintain, all the rude
and barbarous nations of the world, carrying with
them, wherever they go, all the tokens of pre
cedence by which these nations may be most im
pressed with a sense of their backwardness, and set
OF THE SEA. 415
forward in a career of improvement. They need
only be visited by the ships, or especially the steam-
vessels of European commerce, to see that they are
in their childhood, and there must remain, except
as they adopt the science and the institutions of
European nations. What, consequently, do we
behold? Not the wilds of Northern Russia only,
not the islands only of the sea becoming emulous
of European laws and arts and manners ; but the
throne of Siam inquiring after the methods and
truths of the West ; all British India studying
English, in a sense more real than the study of
words ; Muscat sending over to examine and copy
our arts ; both branches of the Mohammedan em
pire receiving freely, and carefully protecting
Christian travellers, and adopting, as fast as they
can, the European modes of war and customs of
society; China, shaken with the rough hand of
civilised war, and moved with a far deeper respect
by the approaches of Christian trade and justice,
accepting a Western republican to be her general
ambassador, and seek out for her once celestial
empire the advantages of an acknowledged relation
ship with all the more forward nations. All this
by the power of commerce. They feel our shadow
cast on their weakness, and their hearts sink within
them, as if they had seen a people taller than they.
4i 6 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
For the same reason, too, the false gods are trem
bling in their seats the world over, and all the
strongholds of spiritual delusion shaking to the
fall. The sails of commerce are the wings of truth.
Wherever it goes and where does it not? the
power of science, and all that belongs to cultivated
manhood, is felt. The universal air becomes filled
with new ideas, and man looks out from the prison
of darkness in which he has been lying chained
and blinded, sees a dawn arising on the world, and
feels the morning-breath of truth and liberty.
What we have said, in this general way, of human
advancement, as connected with the uses of the sea,
involves religious advancement, both as regards
knowledge and character. All the advancement,
too, of which we have spoken, is, in one view, the
work of Christianity ; for this it is which has given
to Christendom its precedence. And it is precisely
the office of the Christian faith that it shall thus
elevate and bless mankind ; bless them, not in their
devotions only, not in their sacraments, or in
passing to other worlds, but in everything that
constitutes their mortal life in society, art, science,
wealth, government all that adorns, elevates, for
tifies, and purifies their society. We also perceive
that the very tone of Christian piety itself, espe
cially where it is not tempered, as in the United
OF THE SEA. 417
States, by the presence and toleration of all varieties
of faith and worship, needs to be modulated and
softened by the influence of a general intercourse
with mankind ; for such is the narrowness of man,
that even the love of Christ itself is in perpetual
danger of dwindling to a bigot prejudice in the
soul ; mistaking its mere forms for substance ;
becoming less generous in its breadth, the more
intense it is in degree; and even measuring out
the judgment of the world by the thimble in
which its own volume and dimensions are cast.
The Church can never attain to its proper power
and beauty till it has become thoroughly catholic in
its spirit; a result which is to be continually
favoured and assisted by the influence of a catholic
commerce. In this manner we anticipate a day
for man, when commerce itself shall become reli
gious, and religion commercial; when the holy
and the useful shall be blended in a common life
of brotherhood and duty, comprising all the
human kindred of the globe.
The oceans and their commerce have indeed no
Christian power in themselves, but they make a con
tribution to religion of inestimable value in what
they do to prepare a way for the Christian power.
They quell the prejudices of the nations, and shame
away all confidence in their gods and institutions,
E E
4 i 8 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
and then the Church of God, as the ground is
cleared, or being cleared, comes in to fill the chasm
that is made, by offering a better faith. "What,
then, do we see, but that the ocean is becoming the
pathway of the Lord ? He goes forth among the
nations, and their courage dies before Him ! The
islands give up first, the continents must follow !
One thing is always sure, either commerce must
fold up its sails, and the ocean dry up in its bed
(which few will expect), or else every form of
idolatry and barbarous worship must cease from
the world. This I say apart from all the Christian
efforts and instrumentalities supplied by missions;
for these are as yet insignificant, compared with
those mighty workings of Providence whose path
is in the sea. But if these precede, those must
follow. As man is a religious being, God will never
undertake to rob him of a false religion without
giving him a better. Neither can any Christian
mind contemplate the rapid and powerful changes
which, in our day, have been wrought in the prac
tical position of the heathen nations, without be
lieving that some great design of Providence is on
foot, that promises the universal spread of the
Christian faith and the spiritual redemption of all
the races of mankind. " Lift up thine eyes round
about and see, they all gather themselves together,
OF THE SEA. 419
they come unto thee ! The abundance of the sea
shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the
Gentiles shall come unto thee ! "
The sea has yet another kind of moral and reli-
o-ious use. which is more direct and immediate.
O
The liquid acres of the deep, tossing themselves
evermore to the winds, and rolling their mighty
anthem round the world, may be even the most
valuable and productive acres God has made. Great
emotions and devout affections are better fruits than
corn, more precious luxuries than wine or oil. And
God has built the world with a visible aim to exer
cise his creatures with whatever is lofty in concep
tion, holy in feeling, and filial in purpose towards
Himself. All the trials and storms of the land have
this same object. To make the soul great, He gives
us great dangers to meet, great obstacles to conquer.
Deserts, famines, pestilences walking in darkness,
regions of cold and wintry snow, hail and tempest
none of these are, in his view, elements of waste
and destruction, because they go to fructify the
moral man. As related to the moral kingdom of
God, they are engines of truth, purity, strength,
and all that is great and holy in character. The sea
is a productive clement of the same class. It is
even a great moral educator ; and the world, for so
many ages patiently enduring, bravely daring, and
420 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
kept steadily contriving to get the mastery of it,
becomes, at last, step by step and slowly, another
world ; having all courage, and force, and manly
science, compacted and close-knit by the stern
motherhood of the sea. Meantime, how many here
have bowed, who never bowed before, to the tre
mendous sovereignty of God ! How many prayers,
otherwise silent, have gone up, to fill the sky and
circle the world, from wives and mothers, imploring
his protecting presence with husbands and sons
they have trusted to the deep ? It is of the greatest
consequence, too, that such a being as God should
have images prepared to express Him, and set Him
before the mind of man in all the grandeur of his
attributes. These He has provided in the heavens
and the sea, which are the two great images of his
vastness and power; the one, remote, addressing
itself to cultivated reason and science; the other
nigh, to mere sense, and physically efficient, a liquid
symbol of the infinitude of God. It is remarkable,
too, how many of the best and most powerful images
of God in the Scripture are borrowed from the sea.
" Canst thou by searching find out God ? The
measure thereof is longer than the earth and
broader than the sea." "Thy judgments are a
great deep." " Which alone spreadeth out the
heavens and treadeth upon the waves of the sea."
OF THE SEA. 421
" Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great
waters." "The waters saw thee, Lord, the
waters saw Thee ; they were afraid, the depths also
were troubled ! " Every kind of vastness immen
sity, infinity, eternity, mystery, omnipotence has
its type in the sea, and there is as much more of
God in the world, for man to see and feel, as the
sea can express, and as much more of worship and
piety as there is of God.
The sea, then, as we now clearly perceive, is not
waste land ; no other part of God s territory is more
productive. Not too soon, then, did He arrest the
subsiding waters of the new creation ; for He was
contriving, we perceive, not the physical abundance,
but the moral benefit and blessing of the world.
He did not make the seas too large. He laid them
where they should be. He swept their boundaries
with his finger in the right place. The floods are
mighty, but the Lord is mightier ; they lift up
their voice, but not too high, to lift the courage
and exalt the mastery of man. They have been
always, and are more and more visibly to be, the
general clearing-house of the trade of the world.
They are highways laid for the running to and fro
of the great last day of knowledge, and of universal
brotherhood complete. No more leviathan only,
but God s swift truth, " maketh the deep to boil,
422 MORAL USES OF DARK THINGS.
and the sea like a pot of ointment." No more a
symbol only, it is also the medium, between so many
coasts, of God s universal beneficence. He saw, in
the beginning, that it was good, and now we see it
also ; and all kindred and people that dwell upon
its shores, and hear it lift up its voice, respond to
the anthem it raises to its Author.
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