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Edward C.M.Tower
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STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
STUDIES OF THE SOUL
BY
J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
("J. B.")
Third Edition.
London :
JAME5 CLARKE & CO., 13 & M. FLEET STREET.
1901.
Contents.
CHAPTER F10K
I. On Growing a Soul 1
II. The Soul's Eeceptiveness 10
III. Personality 18
IV. The Chemistry of Souls 27
V. Deposits from the Unseen 34
VI. The Soul's "I Will" 42
VIL Our Twofold Life 51
VIII. The Soul's Music 60
IX. The Greater Egoism 69
X. Life's Inevitableness 78
XL Our Unpublished Self 87
XII. Impedimenta ... ... ... ... ... 95
XIIL Of Well-Dressed Souls 104
XIV. The Soul's Colloquies 113
XV. In Search of One's Self 121
XVI. Our Possible Self 129
XVII. Negative Capability 137
XVIII. Imagination in Eeligion 146
XIX. Morality and the Clock 154
XX. The Religiously Ungif ted 161
XXL Fog in Theology 170
XXIL Temperament in Theology 177
XXIIL On Accepting Ourselves 187
XXIV. Life's Unknown Quantities 194
XX V. The Soul and Public Opinion . . 201
89
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAQK
XXVI. Our Best and Worst 208
XXVII. Survivals 216
XXVIII. The World's Silences 225
XXIX. The Soul's Pathfinders 234
XXX. The Soul and Heredity 243
XXXI. The Soul and Pleasure 249
XXX1L Spiritual Amalgams 257
XXXIII. On Being Two-Faced 266
XXXIV. The Soul in Preaching 274
XXXV. The Soul's Holidays 281
XXXVI. When the Soul Lets Go 288
XXXVn. The Soul and Death 295
STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
xxv rv>
I.
On Growing a Soul.
IN the very first glimpses we get, in history's
earliest dawn, of articulate speaking man, we
find him pondering precisely the questions
which to-day agitate him in his central depth.
He asked then as he is asking now, What is
the soul, whence came it, what does it stand
for? And nothing is more remarkable than
the practical unanimity of the world's answer to
this world-question. Looked at historically,
modern materialism is a mere insignificant
eddy on the surface of an overwhelming
current of contrary opinion. India answers
back to ancient Egypt, and the deepest thought
of Europe to the teaching of Galilee, with a
result which may be summed up in one
formula the world is the expression of Spirit,
STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
and exists for the further development of it.
In other words, the world exists in order to
grow souls. No other theory fits the facts or
satisfies the human conscience. Apart from
this outlook, life's sufferings and failures would
lead us to the feeling expressed in the picture
which Lowell saw in Belgium, where an angel
arrests the arm of the Almighty, put forth for
the creative act: "If about to make such a
world," the canvas seems to say, " stay Thine
hand ! "
But when we speak of growing a soul, we
must define with a little more closeness what
we mean. And to do so we pass by a multitude
of questions on this subject with which the
earlier philosophers busied themselves. Augus-
tine, be it said, in his "De Anima," is
admirable reading here, not only for his own
profound suggestions, but for the conspectus
he gives of the opinions of the early world.
Has the world itself a soul ; is the soul of man
a direct emanation from God, or does one soul
generate another; is the soul of the same
essence as the Deity, or something inferior; is
ON GROWING A SOUL. 3
it, as the Platonists aver, placed in a body in
this world as a punishment for sins committed
in another sphere ? On these, and a multitude
of similar points, the old thinkers have said
about as much as there is to be said, and
after all leave the question very much where
it was.
But the expressions "the world-soul" and
" the human soul " open up some questions of a
different order from those propounded by the
Platonist, and which are worthy of all our
attention. We may, for instance, affirm and
in doing so we are linking modern science and
the historical consciousness with the very
earliest thinking that the world, in the sense
of collective humanity, is actually growing
a soul. Of the immense process of the ages
this is the chief and fore-ordained result. What
lies behind and explains that process is a ques-
tion on which the latest European idealism and
the oldest Hindu philosophy are significantly at
one. When Schelling declares that the external
world is an expression of the same life that is
writ in our consciousness, that the Universal
STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
Spirit comes to the knowledge of itself in man ;
that the outer world is God's thought shown to
our eyes, while the inner world is God's thought
become conscious of itself ; he is simply echoing
what had been uttered thousands of years
before on the banks of the Ganges, where the
relation of man to nature, and of the Eternal
Spirit to both were put into the great formula,
thou art that. 39
We are on different ground when, from the
metaphysics of the world-soul we come to its
natural history. That history has been epito-
mised in the saying of another German thinker :
" God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal,
and wakes in the man." The awakening has
been a slow process. To trace the movement
towards conscious thought through the ages of
geologic time, through the faint suggestions of
it in the vegetable and lowest animal life,
through the foreshadowings of reason and of
ethics in the prehuman races; to track its
upward way into the human form itself as it
showed on this planet through the dim, for-
gotten paleolithic and neolithic eras, is to pass
ON GEOWING A SOUL.
through abysses of duration beyond the power
of arithmetic to compute. All we know is, and
truly this is a marvellous thing, that as soon as
we meet man in the earliest dawn of history we
find him in full possession of his soul. Says
Boseawen, speaking of the Egyptian Book of
the Dead and of the Chaldsean tablets : " Six
thousand years ago man, in Egypt and Chaldeea,
stands before us pure in his tastes, lofty in his
ideals, and, above all, keenly conscious of the
relationship which existed between himself and
his God. ... It is no dread, but the
grateful love of a child to his father, of friend
to friend, that meets us in the oldest books of
the world." The common world-consciousness,
which has reached this height when it is first
introduced to us, has been growing ever since.
Mighty revelations have been vouchsafed it ;
stupendous experiences of trial and suffering
have wrought upon it ; continuously have its
horizons widened ; and these processes are still
going on. To what height of evolution this
world-soul will reach; whether, as Drummond
held, life on this planet will go no higher than
6 STUDIES o# THE SOUL.
its present human expression; or whether, as
Nietzsche taught, the present consciousness of
the actual man is only a preparation for that
of " the over man " yet to come, it is not for us
here to discuss.
For, after all, our main business in this planet
is to study, not so much the growing of the
world-soul, as the growing of our own. Socrates
was describing the greatest work a man could
give himself to when, in his Apology, he de-
clared: "For I do nothing but go about per-
suading you all, old and young alike, not to take
thought for your persons, or your properties,
but first and chiefly to care about the greatest
improvement of the soul." It needs to be as
seriously and as categorically taught to the
inhabitants of these islands to-day as it was to
the Athenians in the time of Socrates, that,
apart from any questions of Church dogma or
of future life, no human pursuit, no hunt after
wealth, fame, or pleasure is comparable in
interest or in value with the growing of a soul.
By the soul here we mean something deeper
than the machine that ticks in the brain, that
ON GKOWINO A SOUL.
calculates and memorises, that learns the tricks
in trade or diplomacy, and cleverly practises
them. A developed man finds in him a streak
of something beneath that, a something that
relates him to the infinite, which feels and
suffers, which wills, and is the seat of moral
judgment. Everybody recognises this as part
of himself, but few indeed realise what may be
made of it. To a generation which does not
read the world's deepest books it is difficult to
give an idea of what the human soul has really
grown to in those who have given it a chance.
The literature of this subject is the lives of the
great saints, and amongst them perhaps espe-
cially the great mystics. Here we learn the
possibilities of a grown-up soul; the annihila-
tion in it of the lower desires, and the full set
of its determination upon the highest things;
its power of vision, by which it has an appre-
hension of God which nothing can shake, and a
sense of the spiritual world that makes it
grandly indifferent to the conditions of the
earthly lot; its power of influence, such that
through commonest words and acts thrill mys-
8 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
terious forces that shake and inspire the hearts
of men; and its power of enjoyment, drawn
from sources which the world cannot dry up,
and which reaches at times an intensity that
transcends the limits of expression. Unless the
world's best men and women have been its
greatest liars, these experiences have, in differ-
ing degrees, been common to them all.
It is impossible for us here to particularise as
to the method by which these results have been
obtained. Our readers probably know the main
lines of it as well as we do. What we want to
emphasize is that the route is open to us all.
We can each grow a soul if we are willing to
pay the price. Assuredly it is worth it, for this
is really the one and the only victorious life.
Failure is, in the long run, written on every
other, and by whatever standard a man judges.
One could cite a thousand facts in proof, but
this one should be enough the growth of the
soul is the one pursuit which makes life, to its
very last day, full of interest. He who follows
it knows nothing of the despair of Anacreon in
his old age, or of the wail of Mimnermus over
ON GROWING A SOUL.
his lost youth ; ' ' when once the appointed time
of youth is past it is better to die forthwith
than to live." It can survive strength, health,
fortune, friends, for by a Divine alchemy it can
turn the loss of them all into the aliment of its
ever-growing power.
The world is full to-day of the cry of the
educationist. It is well to remember that
nothing we can teach is comparable in its
importance to this. To show to our children
that they are on this planet to grow their own
soul and the world's soul ; that this is the solu-
tion of the world's riddle ; that the explanation
of what sorrow and loss may await them is all
found here ; and not only to teach this, but by
the conditions in which we rear them, to make
the learning of it both natural and universally
possible, will be to enrich the coming genera-
tions infinitely more than by aught else with
which our wealth or our love can endow them.
II.
The Soul's Receptiveness.
A MAN who, from the standpoint of modern
research, tries to form for himself some
coherent idea of religion, is conscious of a
curious dissatisfaction when he turns to the
creeds and formularies which profess to give an
account of it. What they contain is, he finds,
in parts surprising enough, but his chief
surprise is at what they leave out. The first
thing which his mental habit teaches him to
ask for in such a study is a biology of the
spiritual life which shall give a scientific
account of its phenomena. He sees himself
surrounded by facts and forces belonging to this
realm, and he inquires for the laws of them.
But for knowledge of this sort he searches the
formularies in vain. The theologians have been
busy in an entirely different field. He must
make his own way here as best he can. An
illustration of his difficulty is suggested by the
THE Soui/s ^ECEPTIVENESS. 11
title we have chosen for this chapter. Studying
religion at the beginning, as he finds it in him-
self and his neighbour, one of the first things
he runs up against is a great law of receptivity.
The doctrinal authorities have, it is true, in
their own way something to say on this subject,
but the topic is grievously in want of resetting.
Let us look here a little at how the facts stand.
Receptivity is a branch of the wider law of
relativity. What things are in themselves is
nothing. It is what they are in relation to us
that counts. We know nothing of substance
except in its relations. Hydrogen is a new
thing when it touches oxygen. Light as it falls
upon the hand or the forehead brings no revela-
tion of itself. It is when it touches the human
retina that its wide world of possibilities is
opened. A Paderewsld drops his fingers upon
a block of wood and there is no response.
The same touch on the keys of a piano thrills
the air with melody. In all these spheres the
same thing has happened. It is the wedding
of an outside impact to an inner power of
response.
12 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
When we turn more definitely to human life
we realise how its development from stage to
stage is throughout a development of its power
of response. The universe knocks at our door
and enters in proportion as we open it. Light,
electricity, form, colour, sound have been here
from the beginning, waiting for recognition.
Through measureless ages and from lowliest
origins human life has been working up to a
perception of these things, until now the mind,
simply by its power to receive, has become as it
were a universe in itself. Man creates none of
these forces, invents none of these laws. They
were there before he came. But by appro-
priating the forces and conforming to the laws
he becomes mighty with their might, and
beautiful with their beauty. There appears
absolutely no limit to this process. So far as
one can see it will go on until the whole
stupendous total of cosmic force will be open
to our disposal.
This is the human receptivity and its pros-
pect on one side. The question now comes
whether similar affirmations may be made
THE SOUL'S RECEPTIVENESS. 13
about the side of it which we term the spiritual.
When we say that the forces we know as light
or heat are constant and their law unchanging,
may we speak in similar terms of a light,
vibrating through a subtler ether, by which the
mind sees truth, and of an inner warmth which
kindles the soul to love ? Is there here also a
constant and limitless supply available ; are the
laws here ascertainable ; and may the soul
grow indefinitely by their appropriation ?
The moment we ask the question we find
ourselves thrown back upon what seems a
fundamental difference. The Cosmic forces
may be conceived of as impersonal. Spiritual
force, on the other hand, imperatively demands
a person. It only exists as an expression and
outflow of personality. We may use the warmth
of fire or the speed of electricity without con-
necting them in our minds with character or
will. But the soul's affections can only be
stirred by character. Magnetism cannot create
love. It takes a soul to touch a soul. To some
minds the direct sense of personality in the
spiritual world, as compared with what they
14 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
think they find in the natural world, makes it
impossible to argue from one to the other. In
this we are dealing, they say, with matter and
force ; in that, with a personal God. The two
spheres cannot be treated as the same. But
science and philosophy in their latest forms are
both making it increasingly difficult to hold this
view. Both are asking whether Cosmic force,
in the final analysis, is not as clear an ex-
pression of will as is spiritual love. A coherent
view of the universe demands conscious spirit as
much behind gravitation as behind affection.
Natural laws are beginning to be realised as
God's habits in that sphere. Their permanence
means the permanence of His character. And
His law of love may be spoken of in the same
terms as His laws of light or heat, because they
are both the efflux of the same nature.
But if the law of receptivity in the spiritual
world is on all fours with what we see in the
natural world, some great consequences follow.
With this conception in our mind we are
delivered at once and for ever from the idea of
caprice or favouritism in religion. The same
THE SOUL'S KECEPTIVENESS. 15
sun shines upon peasant and upon prince, and
each may enjoy the treasure as he may. Spiritual
power is simply the capacity to receive. Limit-
less force lies at each soul's threshold, waiting
to make it mighty. Religious genius is simply
a superior power of appropriation. The Incarna-
tion was the illustration on the sublimest scale
of the spiritual receptiveness of humanity. It
was "The Eternal Life in the life of Jesus."
And none so clearly as He has witnessed to
this truth. In His declaration that He could
" of His own self do nothing/' He spoke not
merely of Himself. He was affirming for all
time the law of spiritual power.
In studying the operation of this law
amongst men generally we find, in reference to
it, one broad line of distinction. There are the
many who receive their spiritual force mediately,
and the few who may be said to obtain it direct
from the Unseen. The mass follow leaders and
derive from the human. It is in the seeing
power of the prophet and teacher that they
behold truth, by his sense of the "world
to come" that they are brought under
16 STUDIES OP THE SOTTL.
its power. Ever at their head are the elect
souls, dowered with the higher sensitiveness,
whose commerce with the Divine is direct
and immediate. By whatever name they are
called poet, prophet, philosopher, mystic
they lead men, knowing that they them-
selves are being led, and by a sure hand.
In every creed and by every race this law
has been recognised. The Eomans were not the
most gifted race spiritually, but Cicero's Nemo
vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit
was a good confession on this point. He realised
that the truly great man everywhere was so by
the Divine breath that was in him.
From all this emerges the question how we
may each develop our spiritual receptiveness.
There is none more important, for, so far as one
can see, it is for this end that humanity exists,
and by this road that it will travel to its highest
consummation. The rules are not for us to give.
They are already laid down. The Christ law of
love, purity, and humility is the way, and there
is no other plain, simple living, the conscien-
tious culture of every power in us, the daily
THE SOUL'S RECEPTIVENESS. 17
commerce with the Invisible, association with
the nobler souls, the giving up ever of the
lower for the higher. Travelling along this
road we realise, as years go on, a sense of per-
petual enlargement of life. The surface is
broadening upon which the Divine breath plays.
The inner retina becomes more sensitive to the
light, from beyond the stars, that falls upon it.
And ever, as we progress, we know that all we
have is not a self -creation but rather a recep
tion. We say with Madame Guyon :
I love Thee, Lord, but all the love is Thine,
For by Thy life I live.
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be
Emptied, and lost, and swallowed up in Thee.
m.
Personality.
THE more one thinks of it the more plainly it
appears that in all regions of thought
religious, scientific, artistic, literary the ques-
tion of questions, the pivot on which every-
thing turns, is that of personality. What we
mean by it, what importance we attach to it,
colours our every idea on every subject. And
yet, strange to say, there is no other topic in
modern thinking about which there seems to be
such dire confusion. It is not only that the
man in the street, whose philosophical educa-
tion may be supposed to be meagre, has the
vaguest notions on the matter, but the experts
and the authorities are at hopeless loggerheads
upon it. On the one hand, the school of
scientific materialism has persistently belittled
personality. It claims, for one thing, to have
cleared the universe of an enormous number of
its presupposed inhabitants. The fauns, satyrs,
PERSONALITY. 19
sprites, fairies, guardian angels, and what not,
which in the earlier pagan, and, in a different
form, in later Christian times, peopled earth
and sky, have given place to its reign of
natural law. More than that, it has striven to
depersonalise, in a sense, humanity itself. It
dethrones the individual and puts the whole
emphasis of value on the race. Man's
immortality, it says, is only a racial
immortality. The future life of the individual
is simply the life he transmits to his children,
and the ideas, the influence and the example he
leaves behind him. As to his own separate
self, the body and mind stuff of which he is
composed is entirely disintegrated at death, to
reappear in a thousand different forms of
matter, force and sensibility in the endless
dance of the worlds. And it adds a finishing
touch to this world philosophy by denying that
the First Cause of the universe can be in any
sense considered as a Person.
It is a curious set-off to this view of things
to find another body of non-Christian thinkers
taking exactly the opposite attitude to per-
20 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
sonality. The extreme Monistic school makes
the individual ego everything and the universe
outside nothing. The outer world has no other
reality than as the unknown cause of cerebral
sensation. The calculations of astronomers as
to the immensities of space as between star and
star are a mere delusion. The one fact at the
bottom of them is a series of minute alterations
in the grey matter of the astronomer's brain.
Each individual ego is its own kingdom, its own
law, its own God.
As compared with these extremes on both
sides it may be worth while to note the
tendency of what we may call the more sober
type of both religious and philosophical think-
ing during recent years. It is safe to say that
the greatest result of the newer studies in
history and in the phenomena of the human
spirit, is the rehabilitation of the doctrine of
personality. Those studies have placed it in
some new lights, and have deduced from it
some new consequences.
First of all, while observation of the material
world has led scientists in the direction of law
PERSONALITY. 21
and necessity, the study of history and
psychology, that is of man himself, has
resulted in a more and more emphatic verdict
for free will, for personality, for the individual.
Carlyle's " Hero Worship " is one of the forms
of this verdict. Its doctrine of great men as
the real creators of history is one which no
number of Buckles, with their food and climate
theories of human life, will ever be able to
upset. There is, we venture to say, no
historical problem which, carefully looked at,
does not show the personal equation as its
Alpha and Omega. Take for instance the
question of Protestantism. How did the world
come by it ? It may be said that the Protestant
doctrines, so far as they were true, existed
independently of Luther. They were in the
Bible, and in the nature of things. But why,
then, did the world pay no heed to them till
Luther came ? What would have happened if
the study of the Bible and of the " nature of
things " had had the same effect upon him as,
say, upon Erasmus? Without fathoming the
question ap to what extent the doctrine made
22 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
him, or he made the doctrine, it remains that
what, at a critical period, went on in the
depths of this single personality created
Protestantism as we know it. And every other
historical evolution in its final analysis tells
the same tale.
But the question of personality as related to
religious feliought takes us a long way further
back than Protestantism. It touches the root
of religion in its doctrine of God. Negative
philosophy has denied personality to the
Absolute as being a limitation of it, and
consequently a self-contradiction. As a matter
of fact there is no philosophy of the Absolute
which does not abound in what seem self-
contradictions. Sir William Hamilton's illus-
trations of some of them should be sufficient to
make logic, in this dim and awful realm, more
modestly distrustful of its powers. What we
can be sure about, if there is certainty
anywhere, is our own consciousness and its
affirmations. What are these ? For one thing,
consciousness finds in itself an intelligence, a
sense of beauty, of righteousness and of love,
PERSONALITY.
of which it argues there must have been a
cause. The Cause or Creator of righteousness
and love must possess them. But we cannot
imagine a possessor of them as not being a
person. And so consciousness, fairly interro-
gated, recognises in the first cause what we
include in Personality, though there may be
infinitely more in it than that. Victor Hugo
puts all this into one happy phrase, " The All
would not be the All unless it contained a
Personality. That personality is God."
And as personality lies at the beginning of
the religious idea, so we meet it at every stage
of its evolution. It has been the fashion to
mock at the anthropomorphism of the Bible.
To say that God made man in His own image,
the critics aver, is the reversal of the true order.
The proper way of putting it is that it is man
that makes God after his image. It may turn
out that the latter proposition is true, because
of the prior truth of the former. The reproach
against revealed religion, that it is anthro-
pomorphic, we are beginning to find is no
reproach at all. We are discovering that
24 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
neither religion nor philosophy can get on
without a doctrine of incarnation. Nature
through all her processes is seen labouring to
produce personality as her final end. And the
human personality which is her highest result
is found to be, in different stages, a Divine in-
carnation. Man thinks by means of an eternal
reason at the basis of his thought ; he approves
or coiidems himself by an eternal righteousness
mysteriously linked to and doubling his own
consciousness. And what, in sum, is New
Testament Christianity, but the affirmation
that this process has had, in the fulness of
time, a culmination in the emergence to the
light of a complete personality, in whom was
exhibited all of God that could be contained
and manifested in one human form ?
And as in its doctrine of G-od and of Christ,
so in its doctrine of spiritual life, primitive
Christianity recognises to the full the supremacy
of personality. Its teaching is that the life of
the soul is quickened and maintained, not so
much by doctrine or sacrament or ceremony, as
by the impartation of its Founder's own self.
PERSONALITY. 25
Christianity is to be propagated by the Spirit
of Christ, mediated and handed on by those
who have felt its indwelling power. The law
is an ultimate one, and is proved by the history
of every section of the Church. Whether we
read of a Catholic Vianney, of a Presbyterian
Baxter, of a Baptist Bunyan, or a Methodist
Wesley, their power as persuaders and winners
of souls came, not from the particular " ism "
they preached, but from the personality, the
spirit that was in them, dominated as it was
by a higher Personality behind.
The same law is writ large all over literature.
The personal is the one thing that interests.
Doctrine and dogma, whether theologic, social,
or economic, left to its naked self, will moulder
on the back shelves of libraries. To be power-
ful it must be incarnated. Create a living cha-
racter who holds the doctrines and he will
preach them to millions. The Baptist creed
of ff Pilgrim's Progress " can hardly be called
attractive to the mass. As talked by Christian
and Hopeful it is the property of the world.
Scotch Presbyterianism " in the aibstract " is
STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
held commonly by outsiders to be a dry subject.
Translated into the life of a Jeanie Deans, or
into the characters and opinions of the worthies
of Drumtochty, its flavour is appreciated by
every palate. Art tells the same story. The
pictures that live are those where the colours
have been mixed in the artists own life-blood.
Surely the lesson of all this is plain, and it
is dead against the materialists. Into whatever
region of thought we stray whether theology,
philosophy, history, literature, or art we find
the universe spelling out one word as its final
meaning. It exists for persons. The personal
life is the ultimate life, the personal interest
the ultimate interest. The law which is writ
everywhere on this side the grave we may well
believe is the law beyond it, and becomes thus
the charter of our personal existence after
death.
IV.
The Chemistry of Souls.
HUMAN nature is an article in which, all the
world deals. Every husband and wife, every
father and mother of children, every trader,
every public instructor is daily handling this,
the subtlest, most powerful, and in some aspects
most dangerous bundle of forces known on the
planet, and taking the risks. What amazes one
is the light-heartedness with which people con-
duct their experiments. Most men before med-
dling with dynamite would take care to learn
something of its properties. They take human
nature much more easily. It is a whole maga-
zine of explosives, yet they deal with it often
upon the crudest off-hand observations, without
in many cases troubling to inquire whether
there are any ascertainable laws governing the
operation of its materials. Yet it is upon a
proper knowledge of them that the whole art
of happy and prosperous living depends.
28 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
In attempting, as we do here, to turn a side-
light from science upon one of these laws of
character, we are, we know, upon debatable
ground. Professor Drummond has been sharply
taken to task in some quarters for venturing to
speak of natural law in the spiritual world, as
though the idea led straight to materialism.
He was here, however, in the line of a succes-
sion of thinkers from the earliest ages who have
traced a correspondency between the two realms
of the inner and the outer in the midst of which
we stand. And as man and nature are studied
more thoroughly the more does the impression
grow upon us that an essential Monism is the
law of the universe; in other words, that the
pulsations of the human spirit are an answer to
the pulse which throbs through the outer world.
The one illustration of this which we offer here
has some large speculative outlooks, as well as
practical suggestions for daily life.
Nothing, perhaps, in experimental science so
strikes the imagination as the chemical feat of
obtaining out of two separate elements a new
product which bears no resemblance., either in its
THE CHEMISTRY OF SOULS. 29
appearance or its properties, to its progenitors.
When the combining equivalents of chlorine
and sodium are brought together, and we see
these two elements disappear, and a third some-
thing, what we know as common salt, take their
place, we seem to be brought to the very origin
of things, and to be watching an act of creation.
The outer world, organic and inorganic, is full
of this. Its history is that of perpetual trans-
formation, in which, under the action of chemi-
cal affinities, matter is ever changing its shape,
dropping old powers and qualities, and taking
on new. The question we now ask is, whether
a, precisely similar law is not discernible in the
inner life; whether, in short, there is not a
chemistry of the soul, with its law of combining
proportions, and consequent disappearances and
transformations. If so, it is of the last import-
ance to us all that we should know something
about it.
First, as to the fact. When we study men,
whether the celebrities we read of in biographies,
or the ordinary specimens we meet in the street,
we find the phenomena of their life resolving
30 STUDIES OP THB SOUL.
themselves substantially into two things first,
the sum of their original qualities, and second,
the currents of external influence to which
those qualities have been successively subjected.
An Ignatius Loyola up to well on in his early
manhood shows the characteristics and leads
the career of a Spanish gallant of the period.
Then comes, first, a cannon-ball which breaks
his leg at the siege of Pampeluna, and next the
opening of a book of " Lives of the Saints," to
while away the period of his invalidism. The
play of the new influence upon the old qualities
produces, as result, the wondrous life of the
Father of Jesuitism. The Kingswood colliers,
to whom John Wesley preached, were origin-
ally, like their fathers before them, hard-
working and hard-drinking fellows, whose idea
of enjoyment lay largely in horseplay and coarse
brutalities. When upon these characters was
poured the magnetic stream of spiritual influence
which the Methodist leader had at command,
the resultant was in many cases a type of life
and feeling so new that the possessors of it
were scarcely recognisable, either to themselves
THE CHEMISTRY OP SOULS. 31
or their neighbours. The Spanish knight of
the sixteenth century and the Kingswood
colliers of the eighteenth may be taken as
examples of what meets us everywhere in
history and contemporary life. A man's
original qualities, struck upon by some influ-
ence from without, unthought of and unsought
by himself, may combine with this new element
to produce a human result as different from
the first as water is different from either the
hydrogen or the oxygen out of whose union it
has been formed.
Viewed in this light a man's actual life
appears to be only one out of a thousand might-
have-beens. No human, and we surely may
also say no Divine judgment of it would be
adequate which did not take into account the
character of the forces which have played
upon the stock of inward quality with which it
began. The consideration will be enough in
a thoughtful mind to stay a too-confident
dogmatism as to human destiny, and to incline
to Madame de Stael's opinion that " if we knew
all we should forgive all,"
82 STUDIES or THE SOTJL.
The topic has, however, a bearing on things
nearer home than speculations of this kind.
The sum of domestic happiness would, for
instance, be enormously increased if men and
women would take the trouble to study the
subject of soul chemistry in its relation to home
life. Many a household is the scene of per-
petual storm because a wife has not yet learned,
by a thousand experiences, that to bring to bear
a given tone and temper on her husband is as
certain to produce an explosion as would be the
application of a match to a barrel of gunpowder.
That she has an influence at command which,
when turned upon his nature, will produce a
very different result is evident from the fact
that he once fell in love with her. To know the
characters we are in daily contact with, and the
influence which draws out their best and re-
presses their worst, is to have mastered the
chemistry of domestic bliss. This is a branch
of science in which all makers of homes ought
to be compelled to take their diploma.
Christianity in its history, its doctrines and
its daily spiritual work at once assumes and
THE CHEMISTRY OF SOULS.
proves the operation of such a chemistry of
souls as we have been discussing. Its whole
appeal is based on the possibility of a new
human product being obtained from the com-
bination of original qualities with a special
influence. Man may become a new creature by
union with a spiritual power which waits to
combine with him. This is in essence the
Christian G-ospel^ and it is as scientific as it is
inspiring. Churches become centres of irre-
sistible power, and homes the scenes of sunny
brightness^ when the men and women com-
posing them recognise as a truth and realise as
an experience that they were made with a yiew
to an actual union with Grod 5 a combination of
His nature with their own, out of which a new
and higher form of life is to emerge.
V.
Deposits from the Unseen.
THAT we stand in the midst of two worlds, the
visible and the invisible, is, with varying
degrees of intensity, recognised by every one.
What, however, is not so evident is the relation
between the two. To the mass of men the
material universe represents the solid, substan-
tial actuality of things, the invisible looming
behind it as a vague, shadowy something,
dimly appreciated, and almost unreal. But
this is the hugest of blunders, and one which
must be straightway got rid of if we would set
ourselves right with life. What, after a little
patient thinking, becomes clear up to the point
of certainty is that everywhere the seen is the
offspring of the unseen, that the visible is, so to
say, a secretion or deposit of the invisible, that
matter is the handmaid and plaything of
thought; that, in a word, the one primordial
DEPOSITS FROM THE UNSEEN. 35
and universal reality is spirit. We propose
here, in a few scattered observations, first to try
and make this plain, and then to see what con-
sequences it seems to carry.
To begin with what is close at hand, it is
remarkable how, in the commonest things, we
have to recognise the reign of the invisible.
We walk through a city and observe its
buildings. What are they? So much stone
and lime, iron and timber ? If that were all
they would not be buildings, but rubbish heaps.
Their principal ingredient is not matter, but
thought. These structures are, in fact,
embodied ideas. The inner life of the capi-
talist, the architect, the contractor, the
artist who constructed and embellished them ;
their desire, their will, their education and
taste are here visualised. The wood and stone
are penetrated throughout with mind, and tell
the story of it to all who can see and hear.
But some of these buildings have more to say
than that. Here is a house which has been
lived in for years and generations. The owner
of it was born there, as were his fathers before
36 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
him. The visible part of it might be scheduled
as so many tons of second-hand building
material. Is it this, though, which of itself
makes the place dear to him ; which, when he
returns to it from far pilgriming in the world,
causes his heart to throb and his eye to
moisten? The house is what it is to him
because it is rich with deposits of the unseen.
It is saturated with the inner life of those
whom he loved and are gone, of those whom he
loves and who remain. The dead matter has
become beautiful and sacred from its alliance
and interpenetration with soul.
This secretion from the invisible is manifest,
moreover, not only on matter which has been
directly handled by man ; it is patent every-
where. Nature in her virgin wildernesses is
saturated with it. Our sense of scenery, for
instance, is almost entirely a spiritual creation.
It is because some beautiful mind has been laid
upon it that it has become beautiful for us.
Sometimes, indeed, the action is reversed, and
Nature appeals directly to us without an inter-
mediary. But the striking thing here is that
DEPOSITS FEOM THE UNSEED. 37
the impression still is one of a soul con-
versing with our soul out of the heart of the
material. Have we not all felt at times what
William Watson in his lines on e Autumn ' so
finely expresses !
And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees,
Their ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet ;
O Past and Future in sad bridal met,
O Yoice of everything that perishes
And Soul of all regret.
The sentiment here is simply true to the fact.
In such a scene nature seems full of a thought
which answers to our own.
But we are as yet only on the threshold of
the topic. The next step brings a whole uni-
verse upon our hands. For what we have said
about a separate building or a separate scene in
nature applies with equal force when we con-
template the entire system of things. What,
after all, is the whole material universe but a
mass of petrified thoughts ! The mere fact
that we can give any rational account of the
world argues, when we think the matter out, a
reason immanent in it which answers to our
own. Every piece of its matter, related as it is
38 STUDIES OF THE
to time and space, to cause and effect,, to simi-
larity and dissimilarity, to genera and species,
to statics and dynamics, to chemical, biological,
and infinite other affinities, is by these very
facts seen to be penetrated through and through
with logic, with reason, with will, in a word
with spirit. It does not require the facts
adduced and the line of argument followed
in that finely conceived work, "The Unseen
Universe," valuable as they are in themselves,
to convince us that the material world is a
deposit from the invisible. A true philosophy,
starting from any piece of chalk picked up on
the highway, and dealing thoroughly with the
categories contained in it, will arrive inevitably
at the same conclusion. It is not poetry, nor
sentiment, nor the religious instinct only which
declare the material world to be the vesture of
an Eternal Mind. The dry necessities of logic
leave no other conclusion open.
That every commonest thing we handle brings
us thus into the immediate presence of the
world's Q-overning Thought and Will should
be enough in itself to save our life from
DEPOSITS FROM THE UNSEEN. 89
triviality. And closely related to this thought
is another which may well help that conclusion.
Every particle of matter,, we have urged, is full
of deposits from the unseen. But nowhere are
these deposits so manifest as in our own
personality. We know how the invisible things
of a man's character write themselves upon
his feature ; how out of a life devoted to high
purposes there come subtle beauties of form
and expression which advertise the nobleness
within ; and how, on the other hand, the
inward corruption of an ignoble soul puts
its disfiguring mark on eye and brow and
lip, and distorts every facial line. This is
one of nature's broad hints which only a fool
will neglect. Our inward experiences are
none of them simply gone through and then
done with. The joy or pain of this moment,
the mind's thought, the will's "yes" or
" no " leave, each, behind them a deposit of
effect which will work endlessly and in a
thousand forms. Eastern philosophy has a
doctrine on this subject which the German
Ulriei, in his theory of the spiritual body, has
40 STUDIES OF THE Soul.
in some degree adopted. That character creates
environment ; that the spirit's clothing in a
future state will have been woven for it by
its thought and deed in this, seems, indeed,
the result to which all the facts of the case
lead us.
We have here, in fact, the doctrine of heaven
and hell, towards which the most earnest
thinkers of both East and West have instinc-
tively gravitated. The outward state repre-
sented by these terms, men of all creeds are
beginning to feel must be a creation of the in-
ward character; in other words, is a deposit
from the invisible. The place fits the state.
It is curious to see the practical agreement
between schools of thought the most widely
separated. Let us, for instance, put side by
side utterances on this subject by that most
sceptical of poets, Persian Omar Khayyam, and
that most fervent of Catholic believers, St.
Catherine of Genoa. Says the poet :
I sent my soul through the Invisible
Some letter of the after life to spell,
And after many days my soul returned
And said, " Behold myself am heaven and hell."
DEPOSITS FEOM THE UNSEEN. 41
On her side the Catholic saint avers that " if a
soul dying in mortal sin did not find hell, which
is the proper place for her state, she would be
in greater suffering than she feels in that place,
and it is this which causes the soul's im-
petuosity to precipitate herself into it." Both
sides here, it must be said, express themselves
with sufficient crudeness, but a solid truth
gleams in each. Taken together, they give us
the kernel of what is to be known on this
theme. The future state, according to all the
analogies of the spiritual life, as we find them
in the Scriptures and in experience, will be a
projection, on a vaster scale, of the law which
works around us now and which we have been
trying here to illustrate, namely, that the inner
creates the outer, that, to repeat once more our
formula, environment is "a deposit of the
Unseen."
VI.
The Soul's "I Will."
" I HAVE spent forty years," said Dr. Johnson,
in one of his bitter moments, " in making futile
resolutions." And for a man who, after again
and again solemnly vowing to himself to riee
at six in the morning, was more often than not
in bed at midday, the self-reproach does not
seem undeserved. But most of us who have
spent many years in the world are in a similar
plight. The new Eecord Office, large as it is,
would hardly provide house-room for the
number of our unfulfilled resolves. They form
part of that possible life which we have not
lived, the memory of which haunts us at times
so unpleasantly.
It is altogether a curious feature in human
life this business of saying " I will." The
gainsayer could easily argue against it as an
absurdity. It is, he might urge, the egotism
THE SOUL'S "I WILL." 43
of the present moment which arrogates to itself
the function of legislating for all future
moments. It is man conspiring against his
own liberty. Why should one's future be
spent in obeying one's past ? Was that earlier
moment of resolving superior to this one
which I am now come to that this should be
bond-slave of that?
The wise man will take note of all this,, but
he will still go on making resolves. He has
to pay for them, but then he has to pay for
most things worth having. That the process
involves the mortgaging of his future is part
of the price for getting something done. If the
S I will " of yesterday had no authority over
to-day he might feel gloriously independent, but
he would make no headway. The chariot would
be without driving power. To protest in the
interests of freedom is, he knows, entirely
futile. The utmost freedom accorded him in
this world is a liberty to choose his masters and
his forms of obedience. He is obeying his
own volition or that of someone else all the
time. To refuse is to fall into subjection to
44 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
that worse bondage of the whim of the
moment, with a resulting character sufficiently
suggested by the epitaph on Louis XV,
Ci-git Louis, ce pauvre roi ;
On dit qu'il fat bon, mais a' quoi ?
The history of man's "I will" is often, we
began by saying, one of failure. Looking over
its whole extent, however, what we are struck
by is not so much the failures in it as the
stupendous successes. The story of free volition
as exercised on this planet, from its beginnings
in the dim appetencies of the amoeba to the
self-conscious determinations of the hero and
the saint, is the magnificent epic of spiritual
evolution. The result is already amazing. A
great volition, judged by natural standards, is
a miracle. No known law of physics wil]
measure it. We have accurate instruments for
gauging the ordinary world forces. We can
estimate them in volts, or in surface pressures,
or in foot-tons. But where are our instruments
for expressing the impact on the world of
the "I will" of a Csesar, of a Columbus,
of a Paul ? In the viewless realm of a great
THE SOUL'S "I WILL." 45
man's consciousness ; in the moment when he
says to himself " the die is cast," whether it be
to explore an unknown sea, or to found an
order, or to evangelise a continent, there is
evolved, we know not how, a force compared
with which Niagara is a toy. The wonder of
a volition of this kind is that it never ex-
hausts itself. The range and the results of
it grow constantly with the revolving years.
There is no motor known on this planet com-
parable for a moment in sheer power to the
one hidden away in the recesses of man's own
spirit.
The natural history of the great volitions
by which the world has been changed would
be infinitely interesting had we only the mate-
rials for it. We should find in most cases
a kind of Divine necessity closing in upon the
mind, and making it feel that the path entered
was the inevitable one. Something of the
instinct which sends the swallow 011 its voyage
through the air draws the hero to his task.
He feels with Haydn, when, in his German-
English, he spoke of the mighty chorus in his
46 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
Creation, " Not from me, but from above it all
has come." Not that a man reaches a great
purpose at a bound, or has one thrust into him,
as it were, ready-made. " Nature does not
take leaps " inside a man's mind any more than
in the outside world. The final resolve is
attained through all manner of circuitous
routes and of preliminary essays. Often a man
turns into his fated road without knowing it.
Luther had not the faintest idea of breaking
with Rome when he opposed Tetzel. The
initial volition covers only the smallest of
curves from the beaten track. The rest comes
by continuing to follow it.
Most interesting, too, is it to note the way
in which Nature, when she has brought her
protege to the determination which marks a
new departure, works to keep him in it. The
new leader speedily finds himself surrounded
by comrades and followers. His solitary
volition finds an echo in other minds, and
the response heartens him. The fresh path,
by its novelty, even by its perils, fascinates.
The sense of being committed to a course
THE SOUL'S "I WILL." 47
comes also as a grand determinant. The
pathfinder's whole manhood, his pride, his
fighting instinct, his staying power, are roused
and engaged in the task of seeing the thing
through. Nature seeins here, in fact, to be
straining every nerve to guard and develop the
fresh "variation," and so bring about the
furtherance of life. The new departure will,
if it occur in the theological or ecclesiastical
department, be banned probably as heresy or
schism. The higher biology has a different
way of looking at it.
A department of the subject which we can
only here glance at is the " I will " by which
a man governs not only himself but his fellows.
The man of strong volition rarely exercises it
on himself alone. " Follow my leader " is a
game as old as man, and almost the only one of
which the majority of the race are capable.
Human equality is a doctrine which Nature
scoffs at. To find his master is the average
man's greatest piece of good fortune. For the
leader who opens a road for his weaker brother
across the trackless waste, who stands as a
48 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
shelter for him over against the naked, appall-
ing Infinite, is the greatest of benefactors, and
men gather swiftly where such an one is to be
found. He can make almost his own terms.
A Bernard may emigrate to the empty wilder-
ness of Clairvaux and knights and nobles press
on his steps ; a George Fox cuts convention to
its roots, but disciples throng to him ; a Wesley
draws up a severe and minute code of conduct,
and multitudes take it ready-made at his word.
If only the great leaders in religion had been
content with this power! It is the deepest
blot upon Augustine that he taught Christen-
dom to impose its "I will" by other than
spiritual means. Well had it been for him and
the after ages could he only have remembered
the great word of another African Father, and
have said with Tertullian, " Sed nee religionis
est cogere religionem, quse sponte suscipi debeat,
non vi : it is no part of religion to compel
religion, whose essential it is that it be accepted
freely and not through force."
In our day the detestable mediaeval applica-
tion of the text, "Compel them to come in,"
THE SOUL'S "I WILL."
49
has happily ceased. We no longer " compel "
to orthodoxy by fire and sword. The terrorism,
however, of those petty " scruples," of which
Dr. Johnson truly said " They made many
miserable, but never made any good," is not
yet over. The Sunday of Euskin's boyhood,
whose rigour, he tells us, cast its shadow over
him as early as Friday, has relaxed its gloom.
But there are still numbers of family circles
where the determination of the head to
enforce the narrowest ideas and practices by
the iron hand of authority is creating in young
hearts a sense of passionate rebellion and a
hatred of the very name of religion. Of all the
enemies in Christ's household none have been
so dangerous as the people who have sought to
drive instead of to draw, to worry instead of to
win.
A man may, as we here see, make terrible
mistakes in the exercise of his will power.
But the greatest mistake, after all, will be to
fail to cultivate it, or to pursue a course which
destroys its first strength. He who by animal
indulgence, by slavery to evil habit, has lost
<
50 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
the inner impetus which makes his " I will " a
power upon himself and others, has sunk out
of the category of manhood. The last thing we
should venture to do is to break word with
ourselves. That is to open a leak in the
vessel which contains our inmost essence of
life. For when all is said, the power to form
a clear, strong, self-conscious determination,
and, against whatever strain of opposition, to
quietly abide in it, is the special sign of
man's royalty, the mark by which he is recog-
nised as akin with the Divine.
vn.
Our Twofold Life.
THE average man is being hard pressed just
now on his spiritual side. The old arguments
with which he used to fight his inbred material-
ism seem breaking down. He is less easy than
he used to be about his footing in the invisible,
and more inclined despairingly to accept that
view of things which regards death as, in
Horace's words, the
Ultima liiiea rerum.
It is pathetic to witness the eagerness with
which, in quest of some light on his problem,
he turns to this quarter and to that to occult-
ism may be, or to the dicta of a self-styled
Infallible Church, or even to the expected literal
fulfilment of symbolic Apocalypses. As of old,
he seeketh a sign and no sign is given him.
And for a good reason. If he will only consider,
he will find that he himself is the sign. Why
52 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
search for miracles when he is the miracle?
He has only to study the plain, obvious facts
of his own nature to see a clear way to the
invisible. That study will begin with the
natural. But it will assuredly land him in the
supernatural. We propose here to glance along
two lines of fact about our lives, very different
from each other, but both pointing one way,
and landing us at the same inevitable conclu-
sion.
Each of us is conscious of a twofold life, one
which we live in common with our neighbours,
and another which we live all alone to ourselves.
Let us, to begin with, see what is contained in
the first, the common life. An immense part
of us belongs to what may be called the general
consciousness. Our own feelings and thoughts
form a drop in an ocean of similar thought and
feeling which is heaving and surging through
the world around us. Language is only possible
on the supposition of a community of ideas, of
which its vocables are the signs. A Handel
chorus, a Beethoven sonata, are the souls of
music in one individuality calling to the same
OUR TWOFOLD LIFE. 53
soul in a million others. A great orator or a
great musician, in perfect command of an
audience, brings this spiritual unity to perhaps
its most striking expression. Under the im-
passioned appeal or the moving, mighty
harmony, a thousand separate men and
women, gathered promiscuously and knowing
nothing of each other, have ceased to be
individuals. They are blended for the time
into a huge common consciousness, which
laughs and cries, exults or despairs, as one
single soul. It is in the exaltation of such a
moment that we realise the full force of
Goethe's saying, that " only mankind together
is the true man, and the individual can only be
joyous and happy when he feels himself in the
whole."
But this ( ' feeling oneself in the whole "
implies something further, which will come out
more clearly, perhaps, when we study it in
relation to a special department of the common
inner life that, namely, of intelligence, know-
ledge, the perception of truth. If a thoughtful
man asks himself why he believes that truth
54 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
will certainly conquer error, he falls back for
an answer to his belief in the existence of a
verifying faculty, common to the race, which
slowly but irresistibly separates the true from
the false. "The human race," says Lamen-
nais, "advances towards the truth infallibly
by the evolution of its universal reason." This
"universal reason" may for the moment be
described as the common agreement of human-
ity about the universe in which it is placed.
It interrogates that universe, and obtains in the
end answers in which all minds agree. In
other words, it finds the universe intelligible.
Turn that proposition round, and it means that
the common mind in us, as it studies the world,
is really studying a mind outside us. If the
universe were not rational that is, the expres-
sion of a mind, and a mind, too, which works
on the lines of our own nothing is more certain
than that we could come to no possible agree-
ment about it. Man's growing perception of
truth is, then, in reality his growing perception
of one central, underlying, and eternal mind, in
whom all truth inheres. What he digs out of
OUR TWOFOLD LlFtf.
the world with his investigator spade are really
the thoughts of a Thinker who was there before
him. The gaze outward of the common reason
is, as the higher philosophy everywhere is
recognising, a look upon God.
But this inference from the common mental
life comes not only as the result of the gaze
outward, but also of the gaze inward. We
have described the "Universal Season" of
humanity as its common agreement about the
universe. But no one who has studied the
growth of civilisation, what has been happily
termed "the education of the human race,"
will regard that as a complete definition. The
slowly but steadily broadening light which that
marvellous movement shows, the unceasing
uplift it reveals in knowledge and morals, is
felt to be a work, not by man, but a work in
man. The separate jets of light, to which in
history we give human names, are fed from
one fountain. The common uplift is the effort
of one spiritual energy which is the ground-
work of every soul, and which for ever seeks
to realise itself in man as its organ. Amiel,
STUDIES OF THE SOUL*
whose inind was a battle-ground on which
was fought out the whole conflict of modern
thought, could not, with all his waverings,
escape from this. " I realise," says he, " with
intensity, that man in all that he does that
is great and noble is only the organ of some-
thing or some one higher than himself."
Human reason in its look outward and its
look inward is alike face to face with God.
But the common consciousness, vast as is
the range of its significance, is after all only
a part of each soul's life. There is another
part which also carries its inference. The
mystery of our solidarity is not more wonder-
ful than the mystery of our loneliness. In
studying this part of the theme we seem to
have almost to unsay the other part. We
have spoken, for instance, of language as an
expression of the common consciousness. But
as a real interpreter of the soul how far does
it go? When a man tells me he is glad
or that he is in pain, what kind of an insight
has that given me as to his actual interior?
The words seem to lift for a moment the
OUR TWOFOLD LIFE. 57
curtain at the window of his personality. But
they do not open the door. The new photo-
graphy may reveal our neighbour's skeleton.
It will give us no picture of his real self. We
are, indeed, to each other, even to our
intimates, a kind of Australia, with a few
settlements and points of contact and commerce
upon the coast, but having a vast interior
within, all unexplored and unknown. We talk
of the union between mother and child. But
when the child lies racked with pain and the
mother would give anything to lessen the
suffering by sharing it, not one pang of it
reaches her. Between her and it is a great
gulf fixed which she may not pass over. Truly
has it been said, " There are thoughts which
have no confidant, sorrows which are not
shared. We dream alone, suffer alone, die
alone."
Is this, we may well ask, a chance arrange-
ment? For what end has been reared the
impassable wall which bars off our inmost
life from the nearest and dearest of our kind ?
Is it meant as a prison, or as an insulator;
STUDIES 6# THE SOUL.
to shut us off only from something, or to
preserve something to us ? Let the thoughtful
man again turn in upon himself and question
his consciousness for answer. He will find
that it is precisely his isolation from man that
has driven him upon the infinite; that the
sphere of things in which he has no commu-
nication with his fellow is that where he
constantly hears a voice, a ad feels an impact
which is not from man. His unreached self
is not a prison but a sanctuary. A speech is
heard there. It is the intercourse between
man and a Spirit that witnesses with his.
Along two plain roads then, trodden of us all,
we come out upon the same conclusion. The
facts of our life in common and of our life
alone, the one by an intellectual, the other by
a moral compulsion, alike force us upon God,
and make Him inevitable. And if this be so ;
if the logic of life compels us to admit it as
penetrated within and without by a mind,
" by whose thought we think, by whose
knowledge we know, and in whose light
we see," indwelt by One who is not only
OUR TWOFOLD LIFE. 59
Thought but Love, whose heart in its outflow
upon us is the source of our noblest affection
our spiritual inheritance, spite of all
appearances to the contrary, stands secure.
The changes that may come over the form
and expression of our religious faith are but
the outworking of an evolution, whose guid-
ing thought and purpose have that Mind
and Heart for their source, and from whose
eternal power and eternal love none shall ever
separate us.
VIII.
The Soul's Music.
A GREAT musician is an interpreter-in-chief
of the mind's inner world. There is nothing
which, properly considered, leads us deeper
than does music into the heart of things;
nothing which brings to us more convincing
evidence that man belongs to a spiritual
order and is related intimately and irrevocably
to a world unseen. When we think of what
music contains and what it suggests we do
not wonder that Plato, the great prophet of
the ideal, should have put it so high as an
element of education and as an inspirer of
virtue. If we want to know what God
is and what His relations are to the
human soul we have, in this great realm of
ordered harmony, what might be described
almost as a distinct revelation ready to our
hand.
We speak of instruments and of players
THE SOUL'S Music. 61
upon them. But a study of the elementary
facts of music soon shows us that the primal
musical instrument is the human soul. Our
consciousness is a keyboard incessantly played
upon by an unseen performer. Let us see how
matters stand. The process of producing music
may be described as a process of disengaging
spirit from matter. On one side, metals, woods,
wires, strings are subdued from their rough-
ness and wrought to fineness. On the other
side, human hands, eyes, ears, breath are
trained to co-operate with these elements in a
certain way. The result is that sounds are
produced, notes higher and lower, united in a
combination which is called harmony, and
which creates a certain sensation in the mind.
Inquiring yet further, we discover that these
sounds are obtained by vibrations, whose
numbers and relations to each other are
strictly calculable, can be expressed, indeed,
in terms of logarithms. Music, then, is under
law. It is founded on abstruse calculations.
Man did not make these laws. He finxis them
there, ready-made and waiting for him. They
62 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
have an unseen author who is evidently a cal-
culator, a mathematician.
But this is only the beginning. When we
study music we find that a mind full of ideas
has been there before us, laying out principles
which man's feebler intelligence spells out bit
by bit. What we next discover is that not
only has there been here a pre-existent intellect,
but an intense aesthetic feeling. In other
words, the revelation is not only of a Person
who is a mathematician, but of a Person who
has the soul of a musician. See what the facts
are. One of the first is that the soul finds in
musical sounds, arranged as we have seen by a
mathematical mind, a mysterious language
addressed to itself, which it intuitively under-
stands and to which it immediately responds.
What is that power of the soul which, when
some great organ thunders, takes the mighty
play of vibrations and turns it to range upon
range of sublime emotion ? What is there at
the back of a minor key that it makes the soul
feel as though it were losing paradise over
again, or behind the upward swell of a
THE SOUL'S Music. 63
lujah Chorus that when we hear it we feel as
did Handel in composing it, as though we also
" did see heaven opened, and the holy angels
and the great God Himself"? How comes
this leap of inner feeling in recognition of
what, in terms of matter, is only a series of
aerial vibrations ? Why should men in common,
varying only in the degree of their culture,
realise within themselves laughter, weeping,
storm, calm, despair, rapture, heaven, hell as
the sounds smite the ear ? What mystery is
this that the mind greets music as an acquaint-
ance whom it has known of old, permitting it,
with the privilege of a familiar, to enter its
most secret recesses, to unlock all its doors, and
to move it as a spirit conversing with spirit ?
One does not wonder that brooding over such
problems men have listened to the Platonic
solution that the soul greets music as an old
acquaintance because it is an old acquaintance ;
that the human soul is old, ages old, coming
into this world from a higher sphere where it
knew these things, so that when it meets them
now it knows them again and can translate
64 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
their speech. For ourselves we prefer a simpler
and a more Christian answer. It is that man,
as the Bible has it, is made in the image of
God. The human faculties are, in their way,
a replica of the Divine ones. Man is musical
because, in an infinite way, God is musical.
The emotion which is got out of music is an
emotion which He has put into it. The great
composers are not inventors or creators. They
are mediators, interpreters of the music in God.
What they do is to discover His laws of it, to
fill themselves with that side of His mind, and
then to come down and report what they have
seen and heard. It is thus that, as our capacity
expands, we get to know more and more of
what, on the aesthetic side, God thinks and
feels.
But there is more than this. We have before
observed how harmony, through its dependence
on mathematics, is related to the pure reason.
Perhaps after all the distinction we draw
between these spheres is a sharper one than
what really exists. God's music has probably a
far wider range than our conception of it,
THE SOUL'S Music. 65
there may after all be something in what
lamblichus, the Neo-platonist, says about " the
sublime symphonies of the world, the universal
harmony and consonance of the spheres, and
the stars that are moved through them, and
which produce a fuller and more intense melody
than anything effected by mortal sounds." As
man goes on learning he will probably discover
how music is entwined into the very essences of
things. He may realise that beauty is actually
a form of harmony, and that Keats is speaking
the language of science as well as of poetry
when he sings :
Oh what a wild and harmonised tune
My spirit struck from aD the beautiful !
Love, too, may prove to be such a co-
ordinated pulsation of kindred souls as trans-
lated into another form would be music. And
when we remember how musical harmony, in
its higher forms, is full of the spirit of
discipline and obedience ; how its perfection
depends absolutely on the proper relation of
weaker and dependent notes to the stronger and
dominant ones ; how one cannot do without the
5
66 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
other, and that other in its proper place ; we
begin to realise the Divine idea of the world's
perfect music when all its conditions, its play
of interests, its animal passions, intellectual
conceptions, spiritual emotions shall work easily
into each other under recognised law, and unite
in harmony to one great end. Our age is not
the time for this concert. It is a time of
tuning the instruments and of learning the
notes. But the score is already written, and
the great Artist moves steadily, if slowly, to the
final result.
Closely related to this side of the theme is
the thought of that inner harmony which the
mind enjoys without the aid of instruments.
It is, with high-toned natures, a not uncommon
experience that when they have risen to a
spiritual height, by an act of self-sacrifice, by
an inner reaction from sorrow, by the brooding
over them of the Divine Spirit, it has seemed as
though unspeakable melodies swept over the
soul. They have bent like Saint Cecilia,
listening to more than mortal music. The
mind, too, has a rare faculty of treasuring up in
THE SOUL'S Music. 67
its memory-rooms what it has heard from harp
and organ, and then of reproducing it sub-
tilised, doubly distilled down to its essence,
realising thus to itself a finer, more ethereal
note than has ever struck upon the tympanum.
Beethoven, when he became stone-deaf, was,
perhaps, not entirely to be pitied. His ear was
closed to the world's harsh discords, while his
mind continued the creator and the audience-
chamber of sublimest harmonies.
To fill a nation with music is assuredly one
of the highest means of developing its soul.
Its enjoyment is one of the highest forms of
consciousness, and the road it opens leads
straight to the spiritual and the eternal. Some
day we may reach Plato's ideal and make it ona
of the leading elements of education. We may
even come to Fourier's programme, and have
all the more irksome and monotonous tasks of
life made cheerful by noble strains. Music
should be made, too, a department of theology.
The more men work along this line and think
along it, the more apparent will it become that
the highest musical realisation requires that
STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
the whole being be disciplined, attuned, and
brought into vibrant sympathy with the nature
of the Eternal Musician, who created Beauty
and Harmony that they might be the expression
and the adornment of Holiness.
IX.
The Greater Egoism.
FEW subjects have caused more singular con-
fusions of thought than that of Egoism. The
term, as generally used, is in bad odour. Das
verdammte Ich, as Goethe puts it, is every-
where held up as something to be got rid of.
The egoist is, by the rough and ready judg-
ment of the man in the street, denounced
as a prig and a nuisance. In religion the
annihilation of self is declared to be the only
way to spiritual perfection. And in the field
of economics, an aggressive school of thinkers
regards the development of Collectivism and
the suppression of Individualism as the only
way of salvation for the State.
On the other hand, there are judgments,
representing at once popular feeling and the
verdicts of highest authority, which point
quite the other way. History, religion, art,
looked at in one way, appear to pronounce for
70 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
Egoism as the latest and highest fruit of
time. It seems, for one thing, to be the cul-
mination of ethics. In primitive times man's
morality was not individual, but tribal. It
was the nation, the State, that was responsible,
not the individual. The idea of the separate
soul realising its own worth in the sight of
heaven, and working out a destiny which was
regarded as of infinite interest there, represents
a far later and far higher point in man's
spiritual evolution. "What shall it profit a
man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul," is a pronouncement of the most
absolute religious Egoism.
And the noblest art and literature affirm the
same principle. What we feel in a great picture
or a great book is the suffusion of the one and
the other by the soul the individuality, the
idiosyncrasy, we may even say, of their creator.
Tha/fc sense of life, of the universe, in painter or
poet, which separates him from everybody else
his Egoism, in fact is what makes him
interesting to us. Similarly in social develop-
ment. On the value of Egoism here the
THE GREATER EGOISM. 71
following passage from M. Leon Bourgeois 5
" Solidarite " may be taken as representing the
best economic thought of the day: "In the
history of societies, as in that of species, the
struggle for individual development is the
first condition of all progress. The free
exercise of the personal faculties can alone give
the initial movement. Finally, the more the
liberty of each individual grows, the more the
social activity may, and ought, to grow in its
turn."
In presence of these seeming contradictions
it is time to seek, on this subject, for some
common principle which may reconcile them.
It is evident that there is a good and bad
Egoism, and what we want is to be able to
distinguish between the two.
To begin with, the highest teaching in all
spheres invites us to Egoism, in so far as it
means the attainment of a full self-realisation.
That we were not meant to be lost in the mass
is proved by the way we are made. It is not
for nothing that our separate self has been so
absolutely walled off from other existences, its
72 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
secret kept impenetrable from the outside,
while within it mysteriously constructs its
universe from the thousand shadow images of
it which dance on the wall of its conscious-
ness. Individuality is writ large on the human
threshold. Of this wondrous inner world we
are put separately in possession, and told to
make of it what we can. The "self " is to
grow into as big, as powerful, as rich a self as
it is in it to become.
It is at this point that the lines between
the good and bad Egoism begin to diverge.
We reach the true through a great deal of
what is inferior. In our spiritual education it
is wonderful how tenderly, how at times almost
playfully, we are dealt with. A young man, for
instance, begins commonly with an Egoism
which consists in the belief in a ( e self " which
is little denned and scarcely understood. He
has not yet measured his own nature, or the
world with which by-and-by it will try a fall.
Older men, who have had their wrestle with
destiny and found their limits, smile at the
tyro's self-confidence; yet not unkindly, for
THE GREATER EGOISM. 73
they know it is Nature's way of getting the
best out of him. Who, after all, will believe
in him if he does not believe a little in
himself ?
But sooner or later, if our neophyte be true
to all that is moving and speaking in him, the
problem of " self " will assume a new phase.
The word, he finds, spells something deeper
than he had dreamed of. The " I " he works
for and seeks to satisfy becomes more exacting.
His innermost self he discovers is not a stomach,
nor an animal passion. As he more narrowly
observes it he finds it expanding to the illimit-
able. His nature is, he sees, resting on Another
Nature, which forms its essential ground and
substance. It dawns on him that this deepest
" I " is a rill from an infinite ocean, a spark
from a sun.
It is here that, in religion, the reconciliation
comes of what seemed a contradiction. A man
becomes, in the Christian sense, spiritually alive
by finding, and at the same time losing, him-
self. A greater conception has absorbed the
less. What he seeks to please is an " I," which
74 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
is, indeed, himself, but which also spells God.
He builds the structure of his individuality, but
according to a pattern shown him in the Mount.
Human nature draws towards its ideal height
in proportion as this process approaches com-
pleteness. "When we read of a Madame Guy on
with her earthly joys sapped by the persecutions
of a tyrannous husband and of an intolerable
mother-in-law, by the death of her children,
and by the loss of her early beauty through the
ravages of small-pox, and yet, from her anchor-
age in the Divine, triumphing over all, and
preserving the treasure of an unbreakable peace,
we get an inspiring insight into the possibilities
of human nature when it has found its base.
From this standpoint we can also see very
clearly how a bad egoism comes about and in
what it consists. By what, in some, seems a
kind of arrested development, and in others a
deliberate cutting of the line of communication,
a man's nature may be shut off from its natural
inflow from God and outflow towards its fellows,
and the self left as a purely animal and falsely
centred one. To such a nature everything
THE GREATER EGOISM. 75
appears in wrong relation, and life's whole
business will, in consequence, be fatally
bungled. It exhibits at every point an egoism
which offends and disgusts. The desire to
excel becomes the wish to outshine one's neigh-
bour instead of the noble ambition to do one's
best in order to be most helpful to all. Power
will be used for a personal gratification which
reaches no one outside.
Gaunt famine never shall approach the throne,
Though Ireland starve great George weighs twenty
stone.
What egoists of this sort weigh in history is
another matter. We repeat, the only permis-
sible egoism is the one in which the ego to
which we appeal is at once our deepest self and
more than ourself .
That this conception is the true one is shown
by the way it works out. We have spoken of
art and literature. We demand individualism
here, but it must be that greater egoism which
is correctly related to the eternal truth and
beauty. Without this, what we get is not art
but eccentricity. " I am moved/' said Socrates,
76 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
"by a certain divine and spiritual influence."
And so indeed is every man who has aught of
real value to offer to his fellows. The principle
works also with equal certainty in its applica-
tion to social development. Communal perfec-
tion can only be reached through individual
perfection, for we gain the one in the other.
The hero who sacrifices himself for his country
is impelled to this by the sense of what he owes
to his personal ideal of a citizen. When, at the
wreck of the Birlcenhead, the five hundred
officers and men on board, after saving the
women and children, themselves went down,
drawn up in line on deck, as calmly as if on
parade, the sublime act was the triumph of the
individual. Had the standard been lower of
what the British soldier felt that he owed to
himself it would have been impossible.
And this greater egoism will survive death.
It is an inextinguishable faith of the soul, when
self-realised and ennobled by contact with its
Source, that it will preserve its separate being
beyond the tomb. What has been developed
in it by its long struggle and travail is, it
THE GREATER EGOISM. 77
feels, something worth keeping, and it will be
kept.
Dust to dust : but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the sama
Life's Inevitableness.
THERE is a marvellous life apologue in that
sentence recorded as having, on a memorable
occasion, been addressed to an apostle : " When
thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself and
walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when
thou shalt be old . . . another shall gird
thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest
not." It is always so. At the beginning we
walk by ourselves ; later, we have a sense of
being carried. In youth we are conscious of
our inward vitality, of the power of our self-
determination. We refuse to accept things as
we find them. We propose to reform the
world, to cut our mark deep in it. As the
years creep on, what we become aware of is not
so much our powers as our limitations. The
world is big, and we are little. Life reveals
itself as the valley of Rasselas, with freedom of
roaming up to a certain point, but where the
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 79
traveller comes always in the end upon moun-
tain barriers which he may not cross. With a
growing intensity we realise that
To tunes we did not call, onr being must keep chime.
Our later thought becomes oppressed with the
sense of life's inevitableness. What is true of
the individual here seems true of races. The
older civilisations become smitten with Fatal-
ism. It is the younger ones who exult in the
sense of liberty. Asia groans under existence
as though it were a burden. Europe, youthful
in comparison, throbs with energy and the
sense of what it can do.
Whether young or old, the study of our
limits is, however, well worth while. As we
pursue it our pride, if we have any, should get
some knock-down blows. In the order of our
coming Nature has treated us cavalierly, as
though we were of small account. Our spoon-
ful of existence has been served out to us, so
much and no more, and no questions asked as
to how we liked it. Such points as to whether
we should wake in the nineteenth century or in
80 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
the Old Stone period, in Mars or this planet;
whether we should be man or woman, prince,
poet, or wood -cutter, and a thousand other
things deemed by us important, were deter-
mined without the smallest reference to the
opinions of the speck of vitality inside us which
we caU "I."
Think of the fatalism stamped on a man's
features, wrought into the fibre of his brain !
What are the spiritual chances of a bull neck,
holding a narrow forehead, a sullen eye, and
sensual mouth, as compared with those
of a head every lina of which suggests
the artist or the saint? Made as they were
could a Beethoven help being a musician, or a
Beecher an orator? And could this wretch
with the criminally-built skull, as Dean Swift
said, "not born but damned into the world,"
take any other road but the one that leads to
prison or the scaffold? Men worry at these
questions till their brains reel and they deny
morality and religion. They cry with the
Persian poet :
Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 81
Beset the road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with predestined evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin.
There is another side to all this, to which we
shall return.
But more may yet be said first on this sense
of life's inevitable ness. Nowhere is it, to a
careful eye, more discernible than where, per-
haps, we should least expect to find it in the
inner workings of our own mind. When, dazed
and dwarfed by the immensity of the outer uni-
verse, we retreat to the refuge of our inner self,
we find even here a sharp rebuff to our import-
ance. We discover that we are not masters
even in our own house. The inward economy
of thinking and feeling which we call ourselves
is, we find, to a large extent strange to us and
independent of us. What power have we over
our own sensations ? We cannot create sensa-
tion. We can only experience it. That a given
set of circumstances should produce a given
result of pleasure or pain is an arrangement
entirely outside our own will. We accept it,
we perhaps wonder at it. What we cannot do
6
82 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
is either to explain it or alter it. It gives
one an eerie, haunted feeling to realise that
within us, yet not of us, there is this unseen
agent who arranges for us all the phases of our
consciousness, leaving the taste of them simply
for our part in the business. This strange
registering apparatus, which we did not create
and do not regulate, is ready for every conceiv-
able event that may happen to us. If it were
announced to us that to-morrow we were to be
married or to be hanged, to be made a million-
aire or a pauper, a certain preordained sensation
would be the result. But what precisely it
would be, either in its flavour, its intensity, or
its duration, is beyond both our will and our
power of prediction. We are, indeed, the spec-
tator of the greater part of our inner life rather
than its agent or producer.
But where life's inevitableness strikes on us
with most effect is perhaps in its relation to
time. There is something fantastic in the
play of our feelings about a coming event as
compared with the onward movement of our
life towards it, The event inay be a consum-
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 83
mation we desire intensely, or a catastrophe we
dread unspeakably. We would give everything
to hasten or retard it. We can do neither the
one nor the other. The clock ticks. The days
come and the nights. We are swept on to the
great experience to realise it, in nine cases out
of ten, as neither so good as we had hoped nor
so bad as we had feared and wake to find it a
thing behind us, done with, dimming rapidly to
our sight as the current bears us forward. We
grasp some sweet delight, and say with Faust :
Verweile doch, du bist so schon.
But to linger is precisely what it will not do.
The millionaire may build palaces and command
the markets. Where he is powerless is to hold
a joy in his hand long enough to stamp it with
the seal of possession. His acres are solid
ground, but he who owns them is a shadow that
fleeth.
The One remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows flee ;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments. Die
If thou would'st be with that which thou dost seel:.
84 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
But this is, after all, a one-sided picture, and
to leave it so would be to tell one of those half
truths which are a whole falsehood. For the
whole truth is not fatalism. Life would be
robbed both of its interest and of its import-
ance if it were. What gives to it its infinite
zest is the delicate balance of humanity between
limitation and freedom. And what is of im-
mense significance here is that these two op-
posites are not fixed quantities. Man's history
discloses an ever-growing freedom with an ever-
lessening limitation. His story is that of the
evolution of free spirit, with a corresponding
increase of mastery over the outward. Palaeo-
lithic man had little enough freedom. For
ages he bent before powers he did not under-
stand. His will was not good enough to build
a canoe. That of his descendants can chain
the lightning and cut through mountains. The
Easselas valley has been steadily widening.
This constant increment of man's spiritual
faculty, of his self-determining power, as dis-
closed by history, is in itself the refutation of
the fatalist theory. With the waxing of his
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 85
personality man is less and less bound by the
chain of circumstance and more enabled to use
it instead as the instrument of his will.
But there is more. We spoke awhile ago
of the fatalism of feature and of brain fibre.
Closer investigation reveals that this has
its limits, and that it is controlled by some-
thing mightier. It is not true that a man's
features and his cerebral fibre determine
the quality of his soul. It would be nearer the
mark to say that the soul secretes the brain and
forms the features. There is a power dormant
behind the lowest brain which, once awakened,
will light up the intelligence and refine the
face. Nothing is more striking than the trans-
formations of this kind wrought on gutter
children when brought under higher influences.
The very physical texture is kneaded by an
inner force, and its shape and contents
changed. This power is strong enough to
break the iron chain of heredity. It will
make a champion of temperance out of a
drunkard's child. Until we hare gauged the
possibilities of spiritual influence, and of the
86 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
soul's response to it, it is idle to talk of char-
acter as determined finally by the shape of the
skull. We had much better put the horse
before the cart, and ask what shapes the skull.
The discussion of our subject from these two
sides of will and circumstance shows, then, that
the one is gaining on the other, while both
are subject to a power greater than either.
Human life is limited at every point, but the
limitations are constantly falling back, while
freedom wins ever- widening areas. Yet it
remains that at his best and highest man is a
child, learning elementary lessons of the infinite
whole, led along a path marked out for him by
another mind than his own. For such a being,
in such a position, the only sane attitude is that
of awe, reverence, and submission. With this
may well be mingled a deep and solid joy that
he is permitted to take part, however humble,
in the elaboration of a scheme so immense, to
be a co-worker towards ends, so far beyond his
utmost powers to conceive.
Our wills are ours, we know not why,
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
XI.
Our Unpublished Self.
ONE of the most difficult and oft-debated topics
in modern politics is the representation of
minorities. The generally accepted doctrine is
that while the majority is to rule, the minority
should have fullest liberty to make its voice
heard and its influence felt. Ingenious schemes
have been devised to secure the rights of the
minority at the ballot-box, and a modern Eoyal
Commission would hardly be complete without
its " minority report." There is, however, an
existing and deeply interesting system of
government in which the minority, while active
and powerful, may be said to be unrepresented.
It is that which is found in "the viewless realm"
of the soul. Plato's idea of human nature,
as representing in its varieties the differing
forms of a republic, has ever been a popular
one, and comes, perhaps, as near the truth as
can be expected from analogies of this kind.
STUDIES OF THE &OUL.
Our inward life certainly resembles a
democracy in this that its vote is scarcely ever
a unanimous one. The decisions come to on
the myriad questions brought before it are ihe
result of a conflict of passions and of interests,
of moral and intellectual considerations, in
which always some part of our complex
consciousness has got the worst of it and has
gone under. The peculiarity of the position is
that the minority here, while often so formid-
able as to be within an ace of determining the
situation, is not allowed to issue any report.
The side which wins announces itself at once
in decision, speech, or act, and is taken by the
outside world as representing the man. The
fact is that only a portion of him has been here
published, and that often by no means the best
or most interesting portion.
It is true that in a healthy nature the best in
the long run does generally come to the top.
The life of what we call a good man, one who
in the main has been dominated and directed
by his noblest part, may be compared, as to its
inner and its outer features, with the crust of
OUR UNPUBLISHED SELF.
the earth as related to its interior. The speech,
action, and general career which we know and
admire are the flowers, fruits, and fair scenery
of a surface beneath which beyond our ken
volcanic fires have raged. We know the
surface. The man himself knows the interior,
and is modest accordingly.
There is, however, another direction, less
immediately connected with a man's moral
evolution, where this rule does not so generally
obtain. In the sphere of opinion, and especially
of religious opinion, it would be one of the
most interesting things imaginable if we could
get at the " minority vote " as delivered in the
interior self of recognised leaders and
champions of the different sides. When, for
instance, in periods of transition, some doughty
fighter for the orthodoxy of the time
vehemently maintains its assailed positions, and
solemnly denounces the adversary, the multi-
tude who are carried away by his words would
be very differently affected if a certain part of
the orator could make itself heard by them as
well as it is by himself. Often has it been
90 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
and life presents few more pitiful tragedies
that the man's reason, his verifying faculty,
when at its clearest, has pronounced inwardly
for the enemy. What finds its way to his lips
is the voice of his earlier thought-habits, of his
prejudices, his interests, and of his fears.
That was the plight of multitudes of
religious teachers at the time of the Reforma-
tion. The bold words of Mutiaiius Rufus went
home to many an uneasy conscience when
he told his fellow clerics of the sixteenth
century that " by faith we mean not the
conformity of what we say with fact, but an
opinion about Divine things founded on
credulity, and persuasion which seeks after
profit." A hard time indeed was it for honest
men who had not only to find their own way,
but who were looked to to lead others, and who
realised that
'Tis an awkward thing to play with souls,
And matter enough to save one's own.
The Protestant was better off than the Catholic,
as having at least opened a way out of conven-
tion towards the living fact. But there was a
OUB UNPUBLISHED SELF. 01
minority vote inside him also which harassed
him terribly. We read now and are heartened
by the brave words of a Luthf3r and a
Melancthon. It is, perhaps, as well that we
have not had also to read all their thoughts.
One has a curious sensation in remembering
that as late as 1535, when the Eeformation
seemed immovably established, the German
Eeformers, bewildered and disheartened, were
entertaining overtures for a reconciliation with
Rome, the non-success of which appeared, so
far as one can see, to have resulted from
political rather than from religious causes.
Orthodoxy, in those days, tried to see its way
by the light of the fires in which it burned its
adversaries. But the burnings were, on its
side, often an affair not so much of belief as of
make-believe.
Who lights the fagot?
Not the full faith, but the lurking doubt.
The nineteenth century does not light fagots
by way of settling its religious difficulties. But
in the present crisis of faith, in which questions
even more fundamental than those which
92 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
agitated the time of Luther are in men's minds,
the " lurking doubt " still plays its curious and
sinister part in the procedures of orthodoxy.
Furious denunciations of opponents come from
lips behind which lies a mind three-parts
convinced of the opponent's position. The
loud discharge of artillery is often not so much
a declaration of strength as the firing in despair
of the last round of ammunition before hoisting
the flag of surrender.
The study of man's (f unspoken half " would,
however, if only it could be accurately pursued,
bring singular results in other directions than
this. Closely allied to what has just been said,
but with its shade of difference, is, for instance,
the question of the " published selves " of the
moral preachers and teachers who have been
with mankind from the beginning as compared
with their unpublished everyday working senti-
ments. Carlyle has described Seneca as " the
father of all such as wear shovel hats." On
the one hand proclaiming the maxims of a high
philosophy of virtue and self-abnegation, and,
on the other, endeavouring to stand well with
OUR UNPUBLISHED SELF. S3
Nero, and to get from him the goodliest
possible share of houses, lands, and suchlike
conveniences, the Roman philosopher seemed to
his later brother sage of Chelsea a beautiful
example of the well-placed professional ex-
horter whose theme is the salvation of the
soul, but whose inward self is bent upon
gaining the whole world. Lucian, a century
later, has drawn a vivid picture of the swarm of
adventurers who overspread the Empire, and
who gained large sums by orations in praise of
virtue which they spent in the practice of secret
debauchery. The picture is dolefully similar to
that presented by our own monkish orders at
the suppression of the monasteries. These men
stood outwardly for chastity, poverty, and self-
abnegation. Two-thirds of their whole number
were proved by irrefragable evidence to be
living habitually in the practice of unnarneable
vice. Our modern clerical and other exponents
of ideal moralities have travelled, happily, a
long way from such conditions, but the gap
between the "published self" of the average
mortal put in trust with transcendental life-
9i STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
schemes and his inward work-a-day sentiments
will continue, we fear, still to furnish material
for the satirist and the cynic.
It is not always, however, that the un-
published is the worst of us. France was
defined by Madame de Stael as " a country
where the desire to produce an effect by one's
sentiments is stronger than the sentiments
themselves.' 5 In these islands, at least, the
reverse of this is quite as often the truth. The
misery of innumerable lives is that they will
not or cannot let the best in them come to
view. The pathetic lament of Carlyle over his
dead wife : " Ah ! if only I had five minutes
with her, if only to assure her that I loved her
through all that ! " represents a tragedy which
is continually being repeated. The way to
avoid it is to let our love for those around us,
to whom the expression of it will be as summer
sunshine, cease to be part of " our unpublished
self."
XII.
Impedimenta.
THE Bomans, from whom we get the word
impedimenta, used it mainly of the baggage
train of an army. A campaign cannot be
waged without a commissariat. But the long
file of waggons, bearing victuals, tents and a
thousand odds and ends, which follows the
troops, is a hindrance as well as a help. It
enormously complicates the military position,
and its successful management is a sure test
of generalship. There are times when the
baggage has to be reduced to a minimum, and
pinches when it is dispensed with altogether.
Frederick the Great won Eossbach by his
miraculous marching, on the lightest possible
equipment. The useless luxury with which he
had encumbered his army helped, on the other
hand, to lose Vittoria to Joseph Buonaparte, as
it has lost many another battle and many
another general,
96 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
What is true of armies and campaigns is
most suggestively true of human affairs. Life
is largely a question of impedimenta. The
circumstances, environments, qualities, defects
with which we are all daily in contact, form
material which is at once help and hindrance.
Wisdom consists to a large extent in knowing
how to use the baggage-waggons rumbling in
our rear, that hamper and yet feed us.
As we look back on the long road humanity
has travelled, what, perhaps, strikes us first is
the immense weight of encumbrances it has
carried. We wonder that, dragging such a load,
it has made any progress at all. If we consider
man as a spiritual being, and his end the attain-
ment of moral perfection, the long list of his
animal instincts, his rapacities, his inbred
savagery, seem only a baffling and hopeless
hindrance. But it is not so. What we now
call the lower qualities were, in man's pre-
moral stage, the motor power which carried
him along. He wanted them in his fight with
nature and with wild beasts would in fact
hardly have survived without them. And
IMPEDIMENTA. 97
history shows how steadily he drops them when
he reaches the stage where they hamper only
and do not help. It has in its day been a
fashionable materialistic argument that
human morality is essentially stationary.
Nothing could be more ridiculously false.
The Eome of the Caesars had travelled a long
long way beyond the earliest primitive ideas of
justice and social duty, but what is the moral
distance between ourselves and that Eome
between us and a civilisation which could, as in
the Servile war, cause crosses to be erected
from the imperial city to Capua and crucify ten
thousand slaves together upon them? One
need not, indeed, to measure the moral move-
ment, take nearly so long a period as this. It
is only a century and a-half since Walpole's
time. But what chance would a man have to-
day of becoming Prime Minister, far less of
enjoying twenty years of uninterrupted power,
if, possessed though he might be of all the
Georgian Premier's splendid abilities and of
all his solid strength, he dared to practise
his public corruption and his private de
7
98 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
baucheries? When we study what man has
come out of, the load he has carried, and
the milestones he has already passed, the
boundless moral optimism of the New Testa-
ment its Gospel of ultimate perfection
becomes strictly scientific.
Narrowing our point of view, we find a
striking illustration of the way in which
hindrances become helps in man's family life.
The best chapters in Professor Drummond's
"Ascent of Man" are those in which he
describes the evolution of the father and the
evolution of the mother. The human child,
helpless and dependent for a longer period than
any other earthly creature, entailed a heavy
burden of care and watchfulness on primitive
man and woman. It was that burden, as Dr.
Drummond so admirably shows, which proved
the moral making of them. Out of it came
altruism, devotion, sacrifice, father and mother,
love, the foundations, in fact of the higher
human life. The same story is, in another way,
reproduced in the domestic histories of to-day.
When a man marries he unquestionably in-
IMPEDIMENTA. 99
creases his burdens. Harassed paterfamilias,
in pessimistic mood, is apt to ask himself
why he exchanged the simplicity and ease of
bachelorhood for this complex of cares and
of expenditures. He could have raced for
wealth or scholarship or distinction with so
much better chances without this handicap !
May be. Some men and women are better
without marrying, just as some expeditions
are better without baggage. But the main
body will not make progress that way. The
majority of us grow to what there is in us of
genuine value to the world largely through the
difficulties at which we kick. A man will put
his back into the uplift when it is for wife and
bairns. To know them happy through his
exertions will be a healthier reward than
wealth or fame. His family life is Nature's
way of coaxing the best out of him.
Still further narrowing the view, we may see
every day, in the individual lives around us,
how a man's impedimenta help while hindering.
The seeming disadvantages are part of the
machinery of progress. It is notorious how
100 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
often plain - featured women marry, while
better favoured ones are left in the lurch. Is
the secret that beauty is apt to be too self-
satisfied, while plainness seeks to offer an
equivalent for outward lack in inner quality?
It was said of Madame de Stael, who was the
reverse of a beauty, that she could bring any
man to her feet in a quarter of an hour by the
charm of her manner and of her converse. If
all women had from the beginning been beauties
man would probably have fared much worse
than he has.
As suggestive, too, as it is touching, is it to
see how the impedimenta of disease and pain
have played their part in the forward movement.
It does not, we know, adequately explain their
presence in the world to say they have helped
to humanise people, but that is the fact, never-
theless. The poor deformed child has made the
father's heart bigger. The loss of her baby
has dowered the stricken woman with a mother-
hood felt in a thousand homes. It may be that
in the end humanity, thanks to science and a
higher knowledge of the laws of life, will out-
IMPEDIMENTA. 101
grow its diseases. We look for the state when
" there shall be no more pain." But man would
never have come to his full moral stature with-
out it.
In man's purely intellectual progress, too, it
is interesting to observe the part played by his
impedimenta. We enter the world of thought
dragging behind us a long train of inherited
preconceptions. They are very valuable in their
way, and to cut loose from them would be for
most of us a very perilous operation. Mr.
Balfour, in his " Foundations of Belief," has,
perhaps, exaggerated the role of authority in
mental affairs, but his striking picture has un-
doubted truth in it. The past has stained
every window through which light streams into
the mind, and we cannot, if we would, see
things apart from its colouring. A Descartes,
in his quest for truth, imagines he has thought
himself away from every possible prejudice and
prepossession, and that his Cogito ergo sum
represents an absolutely primal conception.
We know how much he was mistaken. We
cannot drop the past if we would, and no
102 STUDIES 0* THE SouL.
healthy rnind will try. What we can do is to
clarify our view of it and of our relation to it.
In that way we shall rid our baggage-waggons
of some loads of shells and husks, carrying
their contents in smaller compass and in subli-
mated form.
The men who show us how to do this are the
prophets of their age. They generally go them-
selves in light marching order. They have an
easily solvable relation to the world's respecta-
bilities, conventions and worldly considerations.
When Chrysostom replied to the threat of the
Emperor, that he could not take from him his
goods because his treasure was in heaven, nor
exile him because his fatherland was above, he
showed the relation of a genuine prophet to his
impedimenta. Modern fashionable ecclesiastic-
ism has lost this powerful gift of detachment.
An Anglican Bishop carries too much baggage
for such campaigns. A seat in the Lords, a
palace and great revenues, a luxurious table,
and the smiles of duchesses, have proved for
centuries entirely effective against any episcopal
inclination for plunging. Since Attcrbury, no
IMPEDIMENTA. 108
occupant of an English see has really risked his
place for principle.
Let us sum up. A man's baggage train
forms an indispensable part of his equipment
for this world, and on his management of it
depends much of his inner and outer success.
It is the part of wisdom to learn what amongst
this luggage is only a hindrance, and to dis-
pense with it. The leaders, in winning their
battles for humanity, have often, in heroic
faith, to cut themselves off from their base, and
dash on without visible supplies. And we all,
in that great race, disclosed to us in the Gospel,
for life's highest prize, must needs " lay aside
every weight," and that greatest and heaviest
of impediments " the sin that doth so easily
beset us,"
xm.
Of Well -Dressed Souls.
SINCE the day when. Adam and Eve discovered
their lamentable lack of clothing, the subject
of dress has been of perennial interest to the
human race. It has, as every student knows,
bulked enormously in literature. Carlyle in his
" Sartor Kesartus," while illuminating, has by
no means exhausted the topic. He was not
the first, as he will certainly not be the last,
Clothes Philosopher. His successors of the
present day even are legion. Woman is inquir-
ing whether man has any prescriptive right to
a monopoly of the bifurcated garment, while
the accomplished editor of Aglaia lectures
humanity in general on the lack of artistic
first principles displayed in the covering and
adornment of both sexes. What we have here
to say, however, concerns an aspect of the great
dress question somewhat outside the profes-
sional purview of the Parisian modiste or the
OF WELL-DRESSED SOULS. 105
Bond Street tailor. The article of attire we
propose to discuss was worn by humanity before
it sewed fig-leaves together. Our bodies,
strictly speaking, are an underclothing. They
are the dress of the soul. To say this is, we
know, to repeat what has been a commonplace
from Socrates downwards, to go no farther
back; but the theme it suggests is not even
yet entirely exhausted of applications. It will,
indeed, we predict, draw more and more atten-
tion to itself, for it is crammed with science,
with ethic, and with religion.
When Kingsley says that the soul secretes
the body as a crustacean secretes its shell,
he is setting in the framework of a scientific
terminology the ancient mysticism which de-
clared the soul's priority over the body in
time, as well as its supremacy in quality
and function. Nowhere, however, has the
idea been better or more tersely expressed
than in our own Spenser where he says :
Of soul the bodie forme doth take
For soul is forme and doth the body make.
It is obvious, however, that this view, fascinat-
106 STUDIES OF THE SouL.
ing to the poet and the spiritual thinker, of the
soul building the body, must be taken with
some large reservations. Life is a little too
complex to permit of being summed up in
epigrammatic definitions. To ignore the influ-
ence of external conditions, such as food,
climate, and outside circumstances generally,
not only upon bodily structure, but upon
feature and expression, would be to go to an
extreme as great in one direction as that of
Buckle in the opposite, when he declares it
would be enough for him to know the climatic
and food conditions of a people to predict its
character and history. What it is safe, and at
the same time sufficient, for our purpose to
allege here is, that the soul or interior spiritual
life of a man, working under the limitations of
his outer environment, is incessantly weaving
itself into the structure of his body, suffusing
it with its own subtle essence, until the glance
of the eye, the lines of the mouth, the set and
expression of the features, nay, the very
carriage and gait reveal to the experienced eye
the character of the inhabitant within. The
OF WELL-DRESSED SOTTLS. 107
saintly soul clothes itself here in its robes of
white ; sensuous men, like Ulysses 5 companions
under the power of the sorceress, take on the
swinish likeness ; while Cain, in everj^ age and
nation, carries his brand.
It is this fact which, for one thing, makes
the study of faces and of portraits so fascinat-
ing. We feel that here we are looking at souls.
To Schiller's saying, Verwandte sind sich alle
starken Seelen, we may add that not only are all
great souls related, but that their physical
features reveal the family likeness. Who that
has looked at a portrait of St. Teresa, for
instance, could find any difficulty in fitting
those features to the "Treatise on Prayer";
or in believing her when, speaking of herself as
persecuted, she says, "My soul is then so
mistress of itself that it seems that it is in its
kingdom, and has everything under its feet " ?
In this view a man's own face should be to
himself a book of judgment, in which the laws
of the universe are legibly writing down his
sentence. There is surely no work on the evi-
dences of religion more potent or more con-
108 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
vincing than the book of the human counten-
ance. He that runs may read here of a moral
Lawgiver behind the scenes who says that the
way of the spirit is the way of life, while the
way of the flesh is the way of rottenness and
death. Man begins his inward career, to use a
sentence of Amiel, c ' as a tamer of wild beasts,
and these wild beasts are his passions. To cut
their claws, to muzzle them, to tame them, to
make of them domestic animals and servants,
foaming at times but submissive, that is per-
sonal education." A glance at his mirror in
mid or later life should reveal to a man whether
all this has been done or is doing, or whether,
on the contrary, the menagerie has overpowered
the keeper.
The looking-glass, the use of which has been
mainly under the ban of moralists as minister-
ing to vanity and self -consciousness, is indeed
in a way the sternest of monitors. When a
man finds reflected in it a wavering, uncertain
eye, and a face development, the accentuation
of which is all in the lower features, he will be
indeed blind and deaf if he cannot recognise
OP WELL-DRESSED SOULS. 109
there his perishing soul's signal of distress. It
is time for him then to go on his knees, to
make vows, to choose anew his companions and
his haunts, to forswear his appetites, to
Clasp his teeth,
And not undo 'em
To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em.
There is a curious modern travesty of our
doctrine, eminently characteristic of the time,
which, in a discussion of this sort, ought not to pass
quite without notice. The fact that the thoughts
and emotions which constitute our inner life
influence in a most important way the features
and general appearance, is in this system fully
admitted. But the emphasis of its application
is laid not upon the culture of the soul, but
upon that of the body. With the people who
hold it the business of life is to look handsome,
blooming, and young for the longest possible
period. To this ideal anything in the way of
inward stress and strain, of mental wear and
tear, of soul wrestlings such as precede the
hero's deed or the prophet's utterance, would
be regarded as fatally inimical, and be accord-
110 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
ingly eschewed. The art of life with such is to
avoid all violent emotions and the occasions of
them. Let the people who want it go after
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too
hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the
sky,
and get scarred and dinted all over in the
struggle. The dilettanti followers of the newer
doctrine will be quite contented if, without any
experience of this sort, by a sedulous guarding
of themselves from, exhausting drains upon
their sympathy, or shocks to their equanimity,
they can achieve the success of being taken for
thirty when they have reached fifty. Verily
these have their reward. Their soul gets a
dress exactly suitable to its quality and
capacity. It is pretty and, one may see,
ornamental. When, however, one contrasts
its meaningless simper with the majesty
suggestive of infinite possibilities, which looks
from the eyes and suffuses the features of the
greater natures to whom the body has at best
been an instrument, and ofttimes been felt as a
OF WELL-DKESSED SOULS. Ill
prison, one realises that the spiritual system of
the universe, while " it suffers fools gladly/'
permitting them even to thrive in their own
way, uses them nevertheless as pitifullest of
illustrations of its own eternal law.
There is one aspect of this theme which
we can here only hint at, but which has
produced some profound speculations among
both Eastern and Western thinkers. We mean
the relation of it to a future life. Ulrici's
doctrine that we are, during our earthly pro-
bation, by the action of our will, our moral
decisions, and the processes which go to the
making of character, building up within us a
spiritual body, whose presence reveals itself in
imperfect ways while we are yet in the flesh,
but which will be the fully-developed organ of
the soul after death, runs on lines very similar
to Oriental teachings on this subject, which
have been reproduced in modern Theosophy.
There is something to be said for it, and it
may be that revelations are yet in store for
humanity along this line of things as the result
of future investigations.
112 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
Apart from speculation, however, and resting
on the basis of what we know, there is evidence
enough surely, even in this narrow by - path of
investigation, to satisfy discerning souls as to
what is life's true end. Man is essentially a
spirit. When that is realised, and the soul
within him is allowed to seek its proper goal,
it will develop into glorious beauty and propor-
tion, and, as it grows, weave for itself a
garment worthy its God-like origin and nature.
The true soul will be a well-dressed soul. The
body will reveal the mind, and be impregnated
with its Divine essence.
What is left for us save in the growth
Of soul to rise up far past both,
From the gift looking to the Giver
And from the cistern to the river,
And from the finite to infinity,
And from man's dust to God's Divinity I
XIV.
The Soul's Colloquies.
A MAN'S chief occupation in this world might
be said to be that of conversing with himself.
During fifty or sixty years, if he has lived so
long, he has been carrying on this interminable
colloquy, to which he returns immediately after
every interruption from outside. His talk with
himself is entirely different in character from
any he has with his most intimate friend. If it
could be given to the world it would reveal him
in some new and unexpected phases. Those
who know him most would probably be startled
to find from it how much better and how much
worse he is than they thought him.
The talk, be it remembered, is not a mere
soliloquy, but a veritable conversation, in which
quite a number of different voices take part.
For the speakers under a man's waistcoat are
more numerous even than appear in that
notable description in the " Autocrat" of the
114 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
multiple individuals that make up a man. By
turns we have, in this interior conclave, the
upper man haranguing the lower, the animal
man coaxing the spiritual, the calculating
faculty throwing cold water on the sensibilities.
At another time the talk is reminiscent; we
hear fifty chatting pleasantly with its former
self of twenty, comparing notes on the experi-
ences of thirty years ago. Even in sleep the
circle is not broken. In our dreams the " sub-
jective soul," if we may accept Mr. Hudson's
ingenious theory, has its innings, and gives to
us its own peculiar version of the universe.
Deepest element of all in this marvellous con-
verse is the ground tone, speaking through the
conscience and through the reason, at times
compelling with its sweetness, at times startling
with its thunders, of that " Over-soul " in which
all individual souls abide, and to which, as
Fichte says, " Every separate mind is related as
are the branches to the vine."
As a man has no chance throughout his life
of quitting his own society, it seems reasonable
tfcat he should endeavour, as one of his
THE SOUL'S COLLOQUIES. 115
concerns, to make it agreeable. This single
consideration should be sufficient, one would
think, to create in everybody a thirst for
culture. The truly educated mind lives in a
different world from that of the vulgar. When
a man has made acquaintance with the best
thinking of ancient and modern times, of his
own and other literatures, he has something to
talk about with himself. Moltke was said to
be "silent in seven languages." He probably
found such excellent fellowship in his own brain
as to indispose him to seek an inferior article
outside. To the intellectually well-furnished
man there is indeed no such thing as solitude.
His inner world is thronged with life. He gets
away from the crowd that he may understand
it. This explains partly the love of solitude of
the great saints. A Cuthbert, scholar and
apostle, spends months at a time shut up on his
lonely Fame island and is happy there. One
wonders what some modern men would do alone
on an island! People rush to what they call
society because they have nothing and nobody
in themselves worth speaking to.
J16 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
But to find oneself good society requires
something more than parts and culture. A
man cannot, for instance, be entirely at ease if
some authority within has unmistakably written
him down a rogue. That does happen some-
times, and a not inconsiderable part of some
men's speech with themselves consists of appeals
against this verdict and endeavours to get the
case retried at a more lenient court. It would
be a mistake, however, to imagine that wrong-
doers are always on bad terms with their moral
sense. As a matter of fact, that faculty is
often the least developed in them, and so the
easiest to be hoodwinked. It is curious to see
how clever men will address arguments to their
conscience which would be rejected in a moment
if addressed to their intellect. Eousseau, one of
the acutest thinkers in Europe, its censor
morum, the creator, in " Emile," of its ideal of
education, could content himself, as his personal
contribution to morals, with having children by a
woman to whom he was not married, with throw-
ing them, naked on the world, to be brought up
by public charity, and then calmly avowing the
THE SOUL'S COLLOQTTIES. 117
fact in the language of a man on the best of
terms with himself, in his published Confes-
sions ! From Ireland, to cite an instance nearer
home, it is just over three centuries ago that
Lord Essex, a well-disposed and religiously-
minded English nobleman, sent an account to
his sovereign, Elizabeth, of a bit of work done
by his troops. At his orders they went to
Eathlin Island, off Giant's Causeway, where six
hundred Irish women and children had been
sent for refuge, and there slaughtered every one
of them, unarmed and defenceless as they were,
in cold blood. He did the deed, this good Pro-
testant Englishman, and then wrote about it,
in a quite calm and equable frame of mind.
All the atrocities, be it remembered, have not
been done by the Turks. Truly the records
of the forum conscientice contain some queer
verdicts.
There are, however, other than strictly
ethical questions involved in a man's talks
with himself. Some of the most interesting of
these conversations, if they could be reported,
would be those carried on by a creative mind
118 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
while in the process of creation. We know
very little of what really goes on here, and the man
himself could not help us much. Genius is at
an entire loss to explain its own products. A
whole Philosophy of the Unconscious is needed
to understand what really happens . The painter,
the poet, the inventor, is haunted awhile by a
vague idea, and calls on his mind to elucidate
it. His mind, so far as it is conscious, makes
no response. But all the time the unconscious
part of it is, in some mysterious manner, at
work, until at last, and suddenly, there emerges
from the brain's unknown depths an idea, a
creation, as new and surprising to the thinker
himself as it will be by-and-by to the outside
world. The work which makes a man famous
is not the work he sets out to do. He stumbles
on that in a way he cannot explain. When
Gibbon took to history he had no idea of
writing the "Decline and Fall." It was the
history of Switzerland, then of Charles V., then
of Florence, that successively filled his mind.
Through what a debris of unfulfilled projects
did he finally argue his way to the Roman
THE SOUL'S COLLOQUIES. 119
Empire and so to immortality! And that is
the story of all great creations.
It is curious to note the difference between
a man's talk with himself when young
and that of his riper years. The youth is
as yet nothing to the world, but he is every-
thing to himself. He has not yet tried a fall
with circumstance, and so puts no limit to his
possibilities. One should look kindly on this
self-conceit, for is it not, after all, Nature's
effort to get the best out of her children ? If
a man has not some belief in himself to begin
with he is indeed badly off. The lesson of his
limitations will be rubbed into him soon
enough, and with relentless thoroughness.
Meanwhile the rush of youth, in its eager
self-confidence to conquer the world, is a goodly
thing. It is like the initial velocity of a cannon-
ball, the force of which determines its range.
When Disraeli, failing in his first speech in
the House, says, " A day will come when you
will hear me"; when Cobden, early in his
public career, on being told that a given project
was impossible, replies, " Then if that is all we
120 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
had better set about it at oiicc," we recognise in
this glorious optimism of the young one of
Nature's great conquering forces. The talks
of old age with itself have another signifi-
cance. They deal not so much with the future
as with the past. The possibility of their
being enjoyable and satisfying is one of the
high rewards of a true life. It argues a certain
,ort of career behind it when one can say, with
Fontenelle, that " old age is the most agreeable
period of life, in which our passions are
calmed, our duties fulfilled, our ambitions
satisfied." On the other hand, we cannot
imagine a worse fate than to be shut up in
the later years, to the voices from a vicious and
futile past. The ghosts of a man's evil deeds
make sorry table companions. Their talk is
horrible, and he cannot get away from it.
XV.
In Search of One's Self
IN the detective stories which have such vogue
in the present day the interest lies in the
hunt which one man is making after some
other man. There is, however, in human life
a chase frequently going on in which the
complications are vastly subtler, and the
psychological interest far deeper than any-
thing which the Sherlock Holmes order
of fiction presents. It is the hunt of man
after himself. And what we mean by this
has nothing to do with the metaphysical puzzle
so amusingly presented in "The Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table," in which every one
of us is proved to be half-a-dozen different
people ; nor yet with that simpler distinction
of the personality from the bodily life which
Socrates suggests when, in "The Phsedo," in
answer to Crito's question, "How shall we
bury you ? " he says, " in any way you like ; but
122 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
you must first get hold of me, and take care
that I do not run away from you." The topic
to be dealt with here has a more immediate
and urgent bearing than these upon practical
life. Briefly stated, it is contained in the fact
that there are, in the lives of most men, periods
of consciousness in which they realise them-
selves as at their fullest and highest ; when the
possibilities in them of feeling and of faculty
are at their greatest expansion ; moments when
they can say, "this is my best and truest
self"; and in the further fact that this
consciousness is retained by few through any
lengthened period without interruption. With
multitudes there are wide intervening gaps of
life, through which the soul wearily trudges,
in search of its lost power, its lost feeling. The
spectacle they present is one than which the
world offers none more pathetic, none more
widely suggestive.
It is possible that some reading so far will
say, that in thus stating the theme we are
giving it a too restricted range. For, they
may urge, does not the deepest significance in
IN SEARCH OF ONE'S SELF. 123
the search for one's self lie in the fact that
what we here seek we never really find? In
a sense that is true. When Goethe says that
in youth " our wishes are presentiments of the
capabilities which lie within us and the
harbingers of that which we shall be after-
wards in a condition to perform," he is only
giving half of the fact. The other half is that
a good part of the self which the youth dreams
of and seeks to realise will never be reached by
him, and for the reason that it forms part of
that human idea which is in the race, and
which it will take ages for it, as a race, to
grow up to.
Eestricting ourselves however, of purpose,
to that self which a man does actually realise
and is continually losing, let us see what the
theme in that aspect of it, has to offer in the
way of practical suggestion. On the side to
begin with, of his intellectual possibilities, a
man has at times the strangest lapses from his
true self. We are not speaking here of those
caused by the irremediable ravages of disease
and old age; such, for instance, as brought
124 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
Newton into a condition in wh;^h he could not
understand his own " Principia." For men in
their prime are only occasionally themselves.
Whatever we mean by inspiration as related
to prophets and apostles, the poet, the orator
and the singer of to-day know what they mean
by it, and that its presence or absence, both
of which they are continually experiencing 1 ,
makes all the difference to the quality of their
work. In the fc Buch der Lieder " Heine has
an exquisite lyric of an awkward, listless and
solitary wight, who suddenly becomes trans-
figured into nobleness and strength by the
approach of his lady love. When she dis-
appears he sinks back again to his old propor-
tions. It is an allegory of the poet's personality
before and after the visit of his muse. The
men who in every age have thrilled their
fellows, have always been conscions that in
their best efforts they were not so much the
originators, as the channels of a force flowing
through them, they knew not whence.
But whatever be the undiscovered mystery at
the back of prophetic, artistic or poetic creation,
IN SEAECH OP ONE'S SELF. 125
what is certain is that, as a condition of it, a
man must cultivate as best he can both his
bodily and mental health. The preacher or
writer who finds his true vision gone and
morbid hypochondriasms taking its place had
better cease utterance and take to digging.
Old Tauler, the famous mediseval preacher, who
was silent for two years and then began again
with a new flow of power, is an excellent pre-
cedent for temporarily worn-out pulpits. Let the
exhausted prophet be silent, and resolutely dig,
until at length he once more disinters his buried
self. It is wonderful, after a season in which
we have endured this loss, in what odd corners
we find again our treasure. Many an Alpine
tourist, who, with shattered nerve and a
drained vitality, has wandered listlessly through
the noblest scenery, at length with unspeak-
able joy has caught a glimpse of something
compared with which the grandeurs of a Jung-
frau, or a Matterhorn, are as naught. It is the
view of his real self, dawning again upon his
Consciousness, with the old vigours and the old
enthusiasms. That is the finest prospect in
126 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
the world, though not mentioned, we believe,
in either Murray or Baedeker.
In this search for one's self, on its in-
tellectual and creative side, there is another
point worth noting. In the formation of every
true artist, poet, writer or preacher a preliminary
process, of varying lengths, is commonly gone
through before the man is in a condition to
offer anything really serviceable to the world.
It is that of imitation. The neophyte in every
sphere delights in forming himself upon some
model or other. In its way, this is not a bad
sort of apprenticeship to begin with. But
mediocrities not only begin here, but here they
end. The man, however, who has a genuine
message for his fellows will arrive some day at
the consciousness that his mind is a medium
through which the light of the universe, as it
streams in, is refracted at a special angle of its
own, and that his work is to paint, sing, write,
or speak of things as they appear in that dis-
tinctive light. It is this personal equation,
this touch of individuality, whether it appear
in a sunset by Turoer, a movement by
IN SEATJCH OP ONE'S SELF. 127
thoven, an essay by Charles Lamb, or a sermon
by Phillips Brooks, that gives the production
its charm. Each soul God creates has its own
flavour, and we want to taste that flavour.
When the young worker has learned precisely
what he is as distinguished from others, and
gives us that, in whatever limited quantity, or
sphere of operation, he becomes valuable.
When he has found himself, he will find his
world.
We can touch only in the briefest possible
way that part of the subject where the
soundings are deepest. On their moral and
spiritual side men go often in search of a
lost self, and it is here that the pursuit takes
on its strangest and most tragic forms. On
the best and most religious natures the march
of the years inflicts some sense of loss. The
rapture and ecstasy of the religious feeling
which in earlier years, at some sweet strain
or moving utterance, or untraced breath of
the Spirit, made highest heaven in the soul,
is, with many, a faculty which becomes in a
measure blunted by time. But when, as is the
123 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
case with true hearts, this blossom and bloom
of the religious life have been succeeded by the
fruit of a strong endurance, of an unfailing
sense of duty, of a rooted faith, and an ever
widening sympathy, the gain is greater than
the loss. The tragedy is not here. It is when
men who, in their youth, have looked on God
and His world through the eyes of purity, who
have known what it was to feel the passion for
righteousness, and the supreme gladness of
being counted worthy to fight on the side of
whatsoever is good, and who in some fatal hour
have slipped away from all this, and then from
the bottom of the precipice where the best in
them went to wreck, gaze back to the far off
inaccessible heights of that paradise they lost
here it is we have what may truly be called the
tragedy of a soul. The man who has gazed
into the depths of that experience will never
scoff at the doctrine of a Redemption and a
Redeemer.
XYI.
Our Possible Self.
IT was a favourite dictum of Schopenhauer
that man can never be happy from the simple
fact that, while he is of necessity some one
thing, he has in him the idea and the desire of
being a thousand other things. What a world,
in which poverty is haunted with the thought
of the riches it would so enjoy; where de-
crepitude muses on the youth and strength
that lie out of its reach ; where the linen-
draper's assistant, chained to his counter, is
tormented with the aspirations of a poet ; where
the dweller in the cold and misty North yearns
for those lands of the sun of which he reads,
but may never see ! Certainly when one holds
a brief for Pessimism there is no difficulty in
making out a case. Whether it is a good
one is another question. For ourselves we do
not believe in the conclusion to which facts of
this order are supposed to point. Of this
130 STUDIES OP THE SOTJL.
more anon. Meanwhile, the study of that
part of us which belongs, so far, only to
the possible and the unrealised, has, apart
from theories, some peculiar interests of its
own.
It is, indeed, a strange and portentous
position this of ours in the world, with com-
monly one role in life to play, and a thousand
in our repertoire unused. Every individual of
us feels in him the germs of all that
humanity has done and been. Fortune has
made us a governess or a Custom House
clerk. We should be quite at home as a
duchess or a millionaire. The working facul-
ties which gain our bread-and-butter form
only a small part of our potential equipment.
We are the raw material of the artist, the
poet, the orator, the statesman, though we
shall probably never be known by those names.
Three parts of us seem to lie idle. We work
the surface ores, believing all the while that
rich lodes lie beneath that are never got at.
Modern tendencies, too, bind upon us our
limitations more closely than ever. It is an
OUR POSSIBLE SELF. 181
age of specialisation, in which a man gains
his living by making, not a pin, but the head
of a pin. The feat of being absolutely first
in half-a-dozen different things, accomplished
by a Michael Angelo and a Da Vinci, become
less and less possible, not merely from the
rarity of faculties of this order, but from the
immensely increased range of the subjects
themselves. The hills of knowledge which
our fathers climbed in succession, have swollen
to great peaks, each of which takes a lifetime
to ascend.
It is, in this connection, curious, and in a way
pathetic, to note the efforts which people often
make to escape their one appropriate role.
Nothing is commoner than for men of dis-
tinction to think lightly of the faculty in
which their true strength lies, and to seek for
glory in parts where they are really weak.
Goethe was prouder of his botanical re-
searches and his theory of colours than of
"Faust." Sir Walter Scott thought little
of being the author of "Waverley," and
much of being a Scottish laird. The world
132 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
was wiser than these wise men. It found out
speedily, what they never did all their lives,
that theories of colours and Scottish lairds
were dirt cheap, while a Faust and a Waverley
were jewels of price.
The reflection that might seem to follow
from this, that time spent in pursuits which do
not call out our highest faculty is, therefore,
time wasted, would, however, be far from cor-
rect. While the thing we can do best should
be our life business, we owe it to our weaker
self to work it for all it is worth if only to
make it stronger. Besides, our highest faculty
needs the repose it gets when we are using the
lower. And is it not true that much of the
enjoyment of life issues from pursuits in which
we have no chance of pre-eminence ? Professor
Max Muller has just been surprising the world
with his poetical and musical reminiscences.
How poor comparatively would life have been to
him without music and poetry ! Yet the world
will never remember him as musician or as poet.
Moreover, by luring us on to the pursuit of
hings in which we shall ourselves never excel,
OUR POSSIBLE SELF. 133
nature often prepares for the son or grandson
who will shine in them. The obscure horn-
player of a strolling orchestra in this way gives
us a Eossini; an old organist of Eisenach,
mediocre himself, makes possible a Sebastian
Bach ; Margaret Ogilvie, nourishing in humble
fashion her love of literature, has for son a
J. M. Barrie, who adorns it. Sometimes, too,
it happens that the by-pursuits of a good man,
nine-tenths of which are of little importance
outside his own life, secure a great reward in
the fortune of the remaining tenth. Next to
the duties of his sacred vocation there was to
Bishop Ken nothing, perhaps, quite so absorb-
ing as poetry. One wonders how many hours
of that noble life were spent in the writing of
his "Edmund," his " Hymnotheo," his
" Da morel and Dorilla ? " Who nowadays
reads them? Was, then, the time wasted?
Before we say so we have to remember that this
sub-faculty of his, working so often to small
result, produced in a happy moment the Morn-
ing and the Evening Hymn, compositions which
have made his name immortal, and have become
134 STUDIES o# THE SouL.
an integral part of the worship of the English-
speaking race.
It is time now, perhaps, to come back to the
consideration of our possible, or, perhaps, rather
our conceivable life as related to our actual, in
its bearing on happiness and well-being. Are
we, after all, shut up to Schopenhauer's conclu-
sion that the power of imagining himself a
thousand other things than what he is makes
not for a man's weal, but for his woe ? Let the
man who professes to believe this ask himself
whether he would really prefer to do without an
imagination ? Aspiration and desire bring un-
doubtedly their pains, but then they are
growing pains, and entirely healthy. The
yearning after the unattained is the motor
power of humanity, forcing it onward to the
fulfilment of its high destiny. The unrealised
in human thought is a sure prophecy of what is
yet to be. The word of Goethe, which seems,
perhaps, too sanguine for the individual, at
least in this life, is not too much for humanity
as a whole. " Our wishes are presentiments of
the capabilities that lie within us, and harbin-
OUR PossifcLU SELF. 135
gers of that which we shall be in a condition to
perform."
Apart from this, the dream side of life,, the
side of its unrealised imaginings, has, with
healthy natures, an enormous balance of
pleasure over pain. That a weaver can
conceive of himself as a duke, without any
chance of being one, is assuredly the reverse of
a hardship. The hardship would come in if he
were condemned to be a weaver all over, with
no power of looking beyond his loom. There
are men, indeed, who do little else but dream,
and they enjoy life as well as most. They get
often more out of their imaginary roles than the
people who really play them. Mr. Casaubon
never wrote his great book, but the thought of
it was his daily meat and drink. The barber
who dreamed every night that he was a king
had very likely a better time of it than his
majesty.
This power of enjoying life possibilities
which we are never likely to realise, whether it
come to us by gift of temperament or by
spiritual grace, is assuredly a great possession.
136 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
Not less is the faculty of contemplating without
bitterness the departure into dreamland of what
once was actual. To gain that is the problem
of old age. History records on this point some
of its most melancholy failures. What a wail
is that of the old Greek Mimnermus : " When
once the appointed time of youth is past it is
better to die forthwith than to live ! " How
wholesome compared with such a whine is the
word of Marcus Aurelius : " Your way is, there-
fore, to manage this minute [of life] wisely, to
part with it cheerfully; and like a ripe nut,
when you drop out of the husk, be sure to
speak well of the season and make your
acknowledgments to the tree that bore you ! "
That is good, but Christianity gives us some*
thing better. For it deepens in us, as time
streams on, the feeling, not only that the life
we have had here has been essentially good, a
boon for which to be thankful, but that its
unrealised possibilities are prophecies of a
higher condition beyond, where they shall have
undreamed-of fulfilment3.
XVII.
Negative Capability.
WE borrow the phrase from Keats, who used it
to express what seemed to him an important
condition of literary achievement. He was,
perhaps, himself the most striking example of
what he meant. He produced his wonderful
results by an extraordinary feat of detachment.
In a period of depression and disillusionment,
when the miserable outcome of the French
Revolution had destroyed, in some of the finest
spirits, almost all hope for humanity, Keats
found a way of escape by quietly turning his
back on all the problems which confounded
his contemporaries, and satisfying himself
with an ideal world, summoned from the past,
and filled with images of immortal beauty.
He eluded the hard facts which weighed on
other thinkers by the " negative capability "
of ignoring them. He did his work by shut-
ting his eyes to a reality that looked so hope-
138 STUDIES OF THE SouL.
loss, and creating in its place a sunnier realm
of his own.
It would not do, in literature or in any other
pursuit, for every one to exercise the same
capacity in the same degree. Since Keats's
time the real has indeed asserted itself again
with a vengeance. Nevertheless, it remains
that in all spheres his "negative capability,"
the faculty of not seeing and not feeling on
occasion, forms an indispensable feature of a
life equipment. The cultivation of it is, to an
extent which we perhaps have scarcely been
accustomed to recognise, necessary both to high
achievement and to real enjoyment. Illustra-
tions of this may be found in some widely
differing directions.
It is to be observed at the outset that there
is a negative capability produced by training,
and another which is native and inborn. The
latter may seem at first sight a pure limitation,
but it plays a role of the highest importance in
the field of affairs. Nature gets an immense
deal out of men by their sheer ignorance and
want of perception. There are some things
KEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 189
they do blindfold, or they would never do them
at all. Eudyard Kipling gives a good example
of what we mean in that wonderful achievement
of Thomas Atkins, " The Taking of Lungtung-
pen." Mulvaney, commenting on the exploit,
says : " 'Tis the bhoys the raw bhoys that
don't know fwhat a bullut manes, an' wud'nt
care av they did that dhu the work. . . . Wud
fifty seasoned sodgers have taken Lungtungpen
in the dhark that way ? No ! They'd know
the risk av fever and chill. Let alone the
shootin'. . . . But the three - year - olds
know little an' care less ; an' where there's no
fear, there's no danger." Precisely. The
world is full of Lungtungpens, which Nature
sets her recruits to capture. Older birds would
not do here. They see too much. Their culti-
vated appreciation of consequences forms a real
incapacity for some things which have to be
done if the world is to be kept moving.
In regions of things sufficiently remote from
the British soldier and his doings we may see
precisely the same principle at work. There
%re, for instance, in the moral and religious
140 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
sphere examples of tho way in which a sheer
ignorance of what we now regard as eminently
well worth knowing, has helped in realising
wonderful spiritual results. Take the case of
the asceticism, the monkish austerities of the
medieval Church. When we read of Bernard,
in his novitiate and afterwards, carrying through
a process of starving, of vigil, of flagellation,
which absolutely ruined his health and reduced
him do all his after work under the conditions
of a deplorable invalidism, we wonder at his
folly. The pity of it ! That a man, longing to
serve his God and his fellows, should begin by
crippling in this way all his powers of serving !
But there is another side to the matter. The
man who, to the immeasurable benefit of Christ-
endom, wielded over it for a whole generation
an almost absolute authority, to whom kings,
popes, and emperors turned as to an oracle,
gained this authority by virtue of a saintship
which, with the ideas of that age, would cer-
tainly not have been ascribed to him apart from
his self-imposed rigours. What a picture of
power, in its most divine and beneficent form,
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 141
is that which one of his biographers draws for
us in this sentence: "The man on whom the
eyes of the Church had long been fixed, on
whose forehead beamed the halo of sanctity,
and who at Rome as well as in France, was
venerated as the oracle of God and the tutelary
spirit of the age; the presence of that man
could not be dispensed with." With our
modern ideas of the cult of the body he would
certainly not have wrecked his constitution for
a religious idea. No. And he would not have
been the Bernard who made popes, preached a
crusade, ruled the spirit of princes, and inspired
the world.
While in the region of Church history one is
tempted to clench the principle we are illus-
trating by citing an exactly opposite instance.
Again it is a Frenchman. If it was one-sided
ness which, in the twelfth century, made
Bernard, it was the lack of it which, in the
nineteenth, ruined Lamennais. Was there
ever a greater inward and outward tragedy
than that represented by the simple successive
publication, on the part of the same man, of
142 STUDIES OF THE SOTJL.
two books ? In the " Essai sur PIndifference "
Lamennais offered an argument for Catholicism
and Infallibility, which was felt to have re-
habilitated the Eoman system, and which
brought Pope and Cardinals to the feet of its
splendidly gifted author. The highest ecclesi-
astical honours were within his reach if only
he could keep steadily looking one way. But
that was exactly what he was incapable of
doing. The other side would assert itself,
looming ever bigger and bigger, fascinating his
gaze until it had mastered him, and we get
finally in the " Paroles " the utterances of the
religious revolutionary who has shaken from
him the system of which he had been counted
the invincible defender. His ecclesiastical
career was ruined because he had not the
power, the " negative capability," of shutting
one eye.
"We have left ourselves only a short
space for the discussion of what is,
perhaps, the most important side of this
topic, the negative capability which is the
result of practice and discipline. Some of the
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 143
best results of life come from the cultivated
power of not seeing and of not feeling. In
mental matters, for instance, every student
knows that half the battle of successful
thinking lies in his faculty of abstraction. He
must become blind and deaf to a hundred
things that assail his attention before he can
make headway with the one thing he would
investigate.
Important in the intellectual, this faculty
becomes absolutely indispensable in the social
and domestic spheres. Where husbands and
wives remain lovers through life, their conjugal
good fortune owes much to a cultivated and
happy blindness on both sides. There are
faults in plenty for the seeing, but they look
the other way. Peace between mistress and
servants depends also largely on the faculty
the former possesses of shutting her eyes, or,
at least, of winking hard on occasion. Worthy
to be praised, to be compared indeed with
the wise woman of the Proverbs, is she who,
loving cleanliness, does nevertheless not upset
the peace of a houseful of people because a
144 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
speck of dust, yea, peradventure six specks,
have been found in the wrong place.
A like negative capability is invaluable in
our general social intercourse. There is
amongst English people a curious shyness and
reserve in regard to strangers the feeling that
led an acute foreign observer to remark that
not only is England an island but every
Englishman is an island and this, if not taken
at its true estimate, leads to the strangest mis-
understandings. The man who makes headway
socially amongst us is he who ignores the
surface frost and makes straight for the warmth
that lies below. The outstanding illustration
of this is Boswell. We do not propose him as
an example, but it is certain we owe the
immortal biography to the happy insensibility
of its author to the mental kicks and cuffs with
which his acquaintance with Johnson com-
menced. He had faith, the strange little man,
that the great heart under the bear's skin could
be won if he only tried long enough, and faith
had its full reward. If we win friendship by
being a little blind we keep it, too, on the same
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 145
terms. The secret of happiness in human
relations is the steady cult of the good points in
our loved ones and the systematised atrophy, in
relation to them, of our critical powers. It is
only in our Divine relationships that we can
turn the fullest gaze upon the Object of our
love and be content.
Imagination in Religion.
WE shall have got rid of a good many of our
inward confusions when we have settled two
questions first, the part which imagination
has played in the building up of our religious
ideas, and secondly, the part which it ought to
play. That imagination, the power of imaging,
what the Germans call Einbildungsfcraft, or the
picturing faculty, has been and is an enor-
mously potent factor in religion goes without
saying. Our religious vocabulary, to begin
with, consists almost entirely of images. It is
a set of concepts borrowed from the region of
the material and the visible to set forth the
invisible and the spiritual. These at the best
are but rough instruments for getting at truth.
It does not require the arguments of a Kant
or a Ritschl to make us realise the shakiness of
the ground we are on. wtyen we take tjiese
IMAGINATION IN KELIGION. 147
images as at all adequately or accurately
representing the real and innermost fact of
things. But our difficulties are enormously
increased when we come to the actual content
of religion as it has been handed down to us,
and are confronted with the question, What of
this represents history and reality, and what of
it is picture and dream?
In this matter the East and the West have
a very heavy and complicated account to settle
with each other. Our religion has come to
us from the East, and we are now slowly
beginning to understand that the Eastern
religious imagination has been very much like
the Eastern jungle in the prodigal fecundity
and wildly fantastic character of its growths
and has to be dealt with by us accordingly.
Before going further, however, let us guard
against being misunderstood. It must not for
a moment be supposed that we are running a
tilt against imagination in religion, as though
it were an element that needed to be
eliminated, or indeed that could be dispensed
with. The most cursory glance round is sufE-
148 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
cient to show how essential it is, and must ever
be, to man's spiritual developement. In China
Confucius endeavoured to do without it, and
leaving the unseen world out of account, to
build up a religious system from plain, worka-
day moral maxims. But even amongst that
most matter-of-fact people the imagination
demanded its rights, and to-day the average
Chinaman is at once Confucianist, Taouist and
Buddhist, the first system giving him his
morals, and the two last his views of the
unseen powers.
Amongst ourselves, with the cultured as
well as the uncultured, the imagination is
amongst the most hard-worked of the religious
faculties. No one can successfully teach chil-
dren without a constant appeal to it. Adults
are in this matter but children of a larger
growth. The most powerful preachers are
the men of high imagination who can at
the same time play most effectively on this
faculty in their hearers. Massillon, making the
courtiers of Louis XIV. leap to their feet under
the idea that the judgment day was actually
IMAGINATION IN RELIGION. 149
upon them; and William Dawson, the Method-
ist preacher, turning the eyes of his audience
to the door, where they expected to see the
prodigal son whom he had pictured, coming in
on his way from the far country, are types of
the men who have been most successful in
winning their fellows to the religious life. We
all of us know that the "Pilgrim's Progress"
is not history; that Doubting Castle and the
Delectable Mountains are nowhere on the map ;
that Mr. Greatheart and Old Honest are
children of a dreamer's brain. But learned and
ignorant alike have recognised here religious
teaching of the first order, a teaching which,
under the forms of the imagination, offers
truths which feed the inmost life of the soul.
It is not, then, in the use of the imagination
in religion taken by itself, that the West of
to-day has found its difficulty in settling its
account with the East. Where the crux comes
in has been in the boundless luxuriance of the
Oriental fancy, coupled with, to us, an exas-
perating neglect to discriminate between its
own dompiu and that of historical and scientific
150 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
fact. We have no difficulty with " Pilgrim's
Progress," because we know where to look for
the truth that is in it, and what to put down to
imagination. It has not been so with the Bible
and Christianity.
The West has suffered, and is still suffering,
incredible mental confusions and miseries from
having made the mistake of taking the Oriental
Bunyans and Miltons literally. It is, for in-
stance, only just dawning upon us that the
Bible story of Creation is not history, but, as
Professor Ryle puts it, the Hebrew version of
one of the primitive legends common to the
Semitic race. When people hear the Com-
mandments recited in church numbers of them
believe that the preamble, " And God spake all
these words saying," represents an actual
articulate utterance made to Moses from the
Unseen. It is hard for them to understand
that man, including, of course, woman, has had
all the talking on this planet, and that the
universe, which does everything, says nothing.
And where historical fact is dealt with in the
Bible it is extremely difficult for the popular
IN RELIGION.
mind, educated as it has been, to comprehend
that in the majority of instances what is offered
us is fact plus the Oriental imagination. The
problem of the Christian origins is, for instance,
to those who have really faced it, enormously
complicated by the remembrance that for thirty
years after Christ's death, so far as we can
trace, no written record of His life or teachings
existed. When the great Life did get at last
into ink and upon paper it was under the influ-
ence of ideas and thought-forms which the
unfortunate Western mind, with its canons of
historical composition, has to do what it can
with.
One of the ways in which the East has most
effectually puzzled the West has been in its
symbolism. No more singular fate has ever
overtaken imaginative compositions than that
which has caused such works as the Book of
Daniel and the Apocalypse to be regarded by
multitudes as authoritative statements of a
world-history which is yet to be made. The
remedy we should prescribe for notions of this
kind is to read the whole of the literature of
152 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
which these books are specimens. No one is in
a position to arrive at a sane appreciation of
Daniel and Revelation who does not know such
works as the Apocalypse of Baruch, the Assump-
tion of Moses, the Book of Enoch, and the
other examples of this school. Here we may
match vials, trumpets, seals, and many-headed
beasts with the vine of a thousand branches,
the twelve floods, and the eagle with twelve
wings and three heads. After reading them all
we shall probably realise that a symbolism
which suited the mental methods of a period
that has passed away is only of minor signifi-
cance to us, and that it is elsewhere than in
their numbers and in their imagery that Daniel
and the Apocalypse contain a message for our
time.
But if the creative and visualising faculty by
its reckless and unguarded use in former times
has brought so much of confusion into religion,
it is to the same faculty, disciplined and scien-
tifically directed, that we shall have to look
largely for the remedy. It is the untrained
imagination which, in the childhood of the
IMAGINATION IN EKLIGION. 153
race, has mingled fact and truth with myth
and legend. It will be the modern historic imag-
ination that, realising to itself the exact mental
conditions under which this early work was done,
will know how to disengage the essence from
the form, and the substratum of fact from the
fancies that have been made to overlie it.
Eaised by culture to its proper power and
true function, the imagination will, then, still
stand as one of the essential elements and
prime forces of the inner life. Having purified
the history of religion and rectified its attitude
towards the universe, it will have in the new
conditions freer play than ever for its sublime
and spiritualising energy. History it will still
find to be full of inspiration and of revelation,
and the universe full of God. It will, with
clarified vision, behold the kingdom of heaven
coming amongst men ; will see that the earth is
saturated with spirit ; and will give its assured
affirmative to Milton's prophetic surmise :
What if earth
: hut the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to the other like ?
XIX.
Morality and the Clock.
THE man who invented the first timekeeper
has never been canonised, and most likely his
life was not saintly. For all that he was a
great ethical authority. His influence upon
morals has been immense. His advent marked
the rise of a whole department of " virtues
and their contrary ^vices." The people who
lived before his day had an easy-going relation
to the hours which would be regarded as
scandalous now. We have been caught and
tamed, and our master is the clock. This
pontiff of bronze has reduced us, body, soul
and spirit, to a subjection which is almost abject.
Modern religious life, for instance, is under its
absolute control. The reach of its finger to a
point on the dial tells the Church when its
worship is to begin. As peremptory is its
intimation to officiating clergy when to end.
MORALITY AND THE CLOCK. 155
Christendom, divided on a thousand points, is
united on this, that its ministry shall obey the
clock. That they are too high, or too low, or
too broad is as dust in the balance compared
with the offence of being too long.
This religious domination of the timepiece
is not confined either to Sundays and church
service. It is the central element of not a few
notable schemes for the religious conduct of
life. Monasticism is expressly modelled upon
it. The High Church William Law, in his
" Serious Call to a Devout Life," tells his
readers what to do when the clock strikes nine
and eleven, and three and six. Wesley, a some-
time follower of Law, earned for himself and
his little circle at Oxford the name Methodists
for a similar scheme, the title flung at them in
derision being originally that of a Eoman
philosophical sect who lived by rule and line.
Every religious body, in fact, has had ita
devout men and women whose endeavour to
make the best of life, in the spiritual sense, has
taken the form of a daily programme which
assigns its occupation to each hour.
156 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
The commercial world, whose ethical code,
generally speaking, is not too strictly modelled
on that of the Church, is one with it in the
recognition of the clock. As the Decalogue in
the New Testament is summed up in two
comprehensive principles, so, in the opinion of
many, the code of commerce lies in the two
aphorisms " time is money " and { e punctuality
is the soul of business." The modern employe
has his whole life ruled by a mechanical deity,
placed high in front of warehouse or factory,
whose brazen finger dividing the minutes, and
deep tongue tolling the hours, tell him when
he shall work and rest, when he shall eat and
drink, when he shall sleep and wake.
The rule of the clock is undoubtedly absolute
in modern life. Is it beneficent as well ? If
we give an affirmative reply, it has to be at
least with some reserves. That the noting of
the hours, in awakening a sense of their value,
has been an enormous factor in human progress
can hardly be denied. The clock awoke
humanity to realise that time was pace
philosopher Kant an objective fact, and that
MORALITY AND THE CLOCK. 157
at the same time it was a gold-mine. Since the
discovery, the human output from it has been,
it must be admitted, by no means contemptible.
From counting the hours men have come to
squeeze them, and to make their palpitating
minutes yield, as they fly, ever more varied
forms of activity, ever more complex phases of
consciousness. The West, in learning this
lesson, has outstripped the drowsy East, and
made (( better fifty years of Europe than a
cycle of Cathay."
The system, however, has its drawbacks. It
has not been proved yet that the final end of
the soul was that it may keep time to the swing
of the pendulum. The moralist, watching the
operation, in different departments of life, of
the clock system of morals finds himself inclined
to ask whether it will not result in turning men
into machines, and in extinguishing their role
as creators. It seems, for one thing, to leave
no place for the dreamer. Schiller, when he
wrote his poem on the partition of the earth,
in which he complains that the priest, the
soldier an<} the trader bad taken their shares
158 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
and left nothing for the poet, was feeling the
stress of this system. All the dreamers, in
fact, have felt it. It was under this duress
that Thoreau wrote: "I cannot easily buy a
blank book to write thoughts in; they are
commonly ruled for dollars and cents." And
his further sentiment, " If I sell both my fore-
noons and my afternoons to society, as most
appear to do, I am sure that for me there
would be nothing left worth living for," was
regarded by his punctual timekeeping fellow-
citizens as the utterance of an impracticable
idler. Yet some of us think that one Thoreau
was worth fifty punctual makers of dollars and
cents.
The clock morality is, in fact, dangerous in so
far as it makes men think that activity and
regularity are enough of themselves to save
their souls alive. There are models of both
these virtues who, by the time they are half
through, may be said to have no souls left to
save. The busy bourgeoisie of Athens got rid of
Socrates because they felt there was no room
amongst them for a man whose boast was " fpr
MOEALITY AND THE CLOCK. 150
I do nothing but go about persuading you all,
old and young alike, not to take thought for
your persons and properties, but first and chiefly
to care about the greatest improvement of the
soul." Such a sentiment was altogether in-
tolerable to the clock morality.
The rule of thumb system is excellent for
supplying the world with its calico and its book-
keeping. But its great spiritual inheritance did
not come to it that way. The clock regime could
never produce a Midsummer Night's Dream. It
could never have founded the Christian Church.
The greatest enrichments of humanity have
reached it by methods entirely independent of
the method of " so much output per hour."
The name cut deepest in human history is that
f One who lived some thirty years in absolute
obscurity, whose public life was compressed into
a number of months, and whose published
utterances can be read in an hour or so.
Neither that life, nor the death in which it
culminated, can by any ingenuity be used as an
illustration of the clock method of to-day. Yet
in that life and deatli tjie worJ(J finds still the
160 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
fount of energy which keeps its spiritual self
alive.
The sum of all this is that the timepiece,
though an excellent helper in morals, is hardly
fitted to be their sole arbiter. Over a large
area of life it rules with a really beneficent
sway. There could be no greater blunder than
to attempt to bring under it the remainder.
In business and in religion activity and regu-
larity are excellent things, but they are not the
whole, nor even the highest. There is some-
thing better than performance, and that is
character. There is something more impor-
tant than quantity of output, and that is
quality. It may indeed be well worth con-
sidering whether the rule of the clock might
not be with profit relaxed in many directions
where it now reigns, and whether the cease-
less rush to capture the minutes and the
hours, which is the note to-day of our
Western world, is after all the surest way of
realising that " Licht, Liebe, Leben," which
Herder had placed on his tomb as the ex-
pression of the highest human ideal,
XX.
The Religiously Unsifted.
THE phrase "religious disabilities " is to
English ears one of familiar and somewhat
ugly import. Its ordinary associations are with
bygone Test and Corporation Acts, with exclu-
sion of non-Anglicans from the Universities,
and other sordid features of our sectarian
strife. There is, however, a class of religious
disabilities of quite a different order, and which
merit more attention than they have hitherto
had. These relate not to the strife of parties
so much as to men's own nature and environ-
ment. They are disabilities not of law but of
brain and heart. Types of men are around us
who, as compared with their fellows, can perhaps
best be described as the religiously ungifted.
They lack a sense of things in this direction
just as others lack the feeling for music or
art. This fact has been strangely misinter-
H
162 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
preted, and has led to the gravest mistakes
about human nature. It has been seized on
by sectarians as the mark between elect and
non-elect, as showing the dividing line between
nature and grace. The blunder was, perhaps,
excusable in earlier times, but we can now take
a saner estimate of matters. The wider survey
of to-day shows us that the distinction in this
respect between man and man, instead of mark-
ing a gulf between them, is a proof of their
essential solidarity. Its proper lesson lies in
a deepening of sympathy arising from a sense
of mutual dependence.
Before coming to this, however, it may here
be noted that there is a wide sense in which
our whole race is, as compared with what the
future may have in store, at present religiously
ungifted. The difference between the high
prophetic natures of the world and the dullards
who live by their lowest instincts may not be
greater than that between what man spiritually
is now and what lie will hereafter become. Our
present senses and perceptions are so many
windows through which we look out upon and
THE RELIGIOUSLY UNGIPTED. 163
interpret the universe. Who knows that hu-
manity as it develops will not open out new
ones, affording entirely fresh views? The
world's history so far has been that of the
steady inflow of spirit, lifting the organisms
through which it works to ever higher levels,
and attuning them to finer perceptions. There
is no evidence that this process has ceased or
will cease. If evolution has brought us from
" the ape and tiger " stage to where we are,
why may it not bring us to a position where
our footing in the spiritual world shall be as
sure, and our outlook as wide, as now the one
is uncertain and the other limited ?
A conviction of this sort seems specially
appropriate to a time like our own. Our age,
as compared with some others, may be itself
described as a religiously ungifted one. The
cultivated man of to-day is
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
Multitudes of earnest thinkers are in
the state described by dough's melancholy
lines :
164 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
Eat, drink and die, for we are souls bereaved :
Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless that had most believed.
If, indeed, one were to take the current
literatures of France, Germany, Italy and
Scandinavia as indicating the opinion on this
subject of the most educated classes of the
modern world, one would say that religion, in
the old sense, had almost died out of cultivated
Europe. The condition is, however, we are
firmly convinced, one of temporary eclipse only,
and not of extinction. Religion is not dead,
but hibernating as preparatory to a new meta-
morphosis. Our race is on the way, through
a somewhat bleak transition stage, to a higher
altitude and a more advanced spiritual develop-
ment, where the secret yearnings of the soul,
at present so feebly supported by reason, shall
find as clear a scientific sanction as they will
a full inward realisation.
Coming now to the more individual aspects
of the topic, we note first that men are gifted
in the most varying degrees with the faculty of
religious perception. There are people born
THE BELKHOITSLY UNGIFTED. 165
with the . prophetic instinct. From childhood
they dream dreams and see visions. They
have a sense for the unseen as distinct and
special as had Newton for mathematics and
Mozart for music. Their nature inwardly
and instinctively thrills to everything relating
to the ideal, the mystic, the suprasensuous.
Connected with this faculty of perception there
is usually an exquisite susceptibility to re-
ligious feeling. A strain of music, a function
of worship, an eloquent appeal, a view from a
mountain height, will produce in such a mind
an inner rapture which cannot be expressed in
words. It seems natural to think of characters
of this kind as specially the beloved of heaven.
Let us make no mistake. As a matter of fact
our seer is usually a very defective personage,
and if the world were peopled exclusively with
his type it would be very much poorer than it
is. The seer's neighbour, who is nothing if not
practical, who is designing bridges or inventing
locomotives, while the other is questioning his
soul, is the prophet's necessary counterpoise
and makeweight.
166 STUDIES 0* THE SOUL.
To put one of these up and the other down
on the scale of moral worth ; to declare that
the ideality of the one is religion, and the
homely practicality of the other a kind of
worldliness, is a blunder which the world has
in past times made often enough, but which.
is hardly now excusable. Who has not known
the man of extreme devotional susceptibility,
of fluent and impressive religious utterance, who
has been as weak in other important points of
character as he is strong in these ! Such are
as a rule kept going in the world, and helped
to bear a useful part in it, by the presence at
their side of men who cannot put two words
together, whose minds are bare of religious
imagination, but who cordially appreciate in
others what they do not themselves possess, and
who make up the lack in the idealist temperament
by solid qualities of another kind. It is by this
distribution of the common spiritual heritage
over different individualities, each possessing
a part of the whole, and finding in his
neighbour that which is necessary to his own
completeness, that men realise their essential
THE RELIGIOUSLY UXGIFTED. 167
oneness, as belonging each ttf the other, and
all to God.
It must not be overlooked that a man's
spiritual gifts lie in his environment as well as
in himself. We become, as Kant has taught
us, only properly aware of ourselves by the
impact upon us of the outside world. And one
may well deplore here the case of those
religiously ungifted, who never in their history-
have had the inspiration of contact with a
great spiritual personality, or whose career
has led them away from the accustomed
sources of religious life. Our Anglo-Saxon race,
wandering from its home to every corner of the
world, has fared strangely in this matter.
Ruling in the East over subject races, and
struggling in the far West and in the Southern
seas against primitive nature, it has on these
missions, with a singular spiritual recklessness,
begun by shutting itself off from its old moral
conditions. The nabob of a century ago was
commonly reported as dropping his religion at
the Cape, to pick it up again on his return
journey. The early Calif ornian and Australian
168 STUDIES or THE SOUL.
mining camps observed Sunday by orgies of
whisky and cards. But in the Anglo-Saxon the
spiritual, however at times it may seem to go
under, invariably re-asserts itself. The Anglo-
Indian of to-day is a reputable and church-
going character, and San Francisco is now one
of the best steepled, of cities. The story,
indeed, of what has been done, amid the wildest
communities, to re-awaken in men a feeling
after their lost spiritual inheritance, makes it
practically certain that well-directed effort will
have results equally successful with the most
neglected classes at home or abroad. As the
^Eolian harp vibrates to the wind, so does the
heart of man everywhere to the true message
of God.
A word, perhaps, in closing is needed to
secure that some of the foregoing is not mis-
understood. What has been said of the differ-
ences in men's natural religious capacity must
not be taken as implying that, in our view, such
differences are matters purely of temperament,
lying apart from a man's own will and moral
striving. As a matter of fact they are, at every
THE KELIGIOTJSLY UNGIFTED. 169
point^ allied to character. On the one hand, a
man of rich inner faculty may, by indifference,
by moral obliquity, by breaking with the con-
ditions of its health and growth, starve or destroy
it. On the other hand, a nature which for years
has shown no religious aptitude will, by the
simple process of placing itself in the spiritual
current, and by yielding to the central demands
of the Divine life, discover in itself new and ever-
growing potencies of emotion and delight. It
is for each man, in fact, to sedulously cultivate
his own weak side. Let the idealist take
constant lessons in the practical, and reverence
the masters in that sphere. And let him whose
faculty is mainly in the region of the seen
and the solid understand that above all this
stretches a realm impalpable but most real,
the kingdom of the Spirit, man's true home,
whence come to him his highest glory, and
his purest joy.
XXI.
Fog in Theology.
DESPITE the broadening light, heavy mist still
hangs over portions of the theological field.
In no corner of it is the fog denser than that
where lie the questions relating to knowledge
and revelation. Examples are continually
occurring of experienced theologians entering
this region to flounder hopelessly in its opaque
atmosphere, involving themselves and their
followers in dire confusions and contradictions.
The time has surely arrived when it is proper
to ask whether this fog is natural and inevi-
table, or whether it may not be an artificial
production, capable of being dissipated, to the
great advantage of all concerned.
Dropping metaphor, and coming to the plain
facts of the case, what we find is that religious
thinkers of various sects and schools agree
to regard the doctrines of the Bible as having
FOG IN THEOLOGY. 171
reached man "by a special route, a fact which
is supposed to invest them with a peculiar
authority. We have, accordingly, < ' the truths
of revelation " spoken of as something distinct
from so-called secular knowledge, and as
occupying consequently a higher plane. These
specially-revealed truths are, we are told, found
only in the Bible, and they constitute it the
"Word of God, to which the reason must bow.
At this point comes in, for Protestants at
least, contradiction number one. For while on
this theory the reason is subordinated to the
Scriptures, it is by reason alone that the all-
important question as to what is and what is
not the Bible has, for them, been decided. The
Catholic evades the difficulty by asserting the
inspiration and infallibility of the Church
Councils which determined the Scripture canon.
But this resource is not open to the Protestant.
If he speaks of a providential guidance of the
mind of the fourth century in this matter, he
must accept what follows. For the Divine
guidance here accorded to the fourth century
cannot with any consistency be refused to the
172 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
intellectual movement of the nineteenth. But
this admission knocks the first great hole into
the theory of a special source for Biblical truth.
For it means that we cannot admit Divine
inspiration as belonging to one period of
human history, without admitting it for all
periods.
But we may approach the subject from
another standpoint. It is constantly argued
that, if the doctrine of a special inspiration of
the Scriptures be abandoned, their authority
will be lowered. This is another way of saying
that a theory of special inspiration is a real
buttress to truth. Fortunately, we are able to
put this to a simple test. The secular sciences
have attained to their present position without
any support whatever of this kind. The doc-
trines on astronomy, geology, biology, and the
multitude of other subjects which have entered
into the consciousness of the civilised world of
to-day have no theory of inspiration to back
them. Have they suffered from the want of it ?
On the contrary, the singular fact is, that
while theology, with its inspiration theory, has
FOG IN THEOLOGY. 173
suffered a prodigious decline in influence in
modern times, the authority of the sciences is
at its maximum, and is regarded everywhere
as resting on unshakeable foundations. The
" Special Source" theory of Scriptural truth
certainly does not appear to come out well from
the point of view of utility.
The same test will also, happily, avail in
another direction. The cry is constantly heard
that if, in the study of the Scriptures and of
spiritual truth generally, we make the reason
our guide and criterion we expose ourselves to
endless confusions. What refuge have we from
the endless vagaries of the human mind, from
the dreams of visionaries, and the rash asser-
tions of the ignorant ? If the Bible is a mixture
of truth and error, who shall finally show us
what to accept and what to reject ? How may
we decide amid the claims of warring teachers
and systems? Surely it is enough to say in
answer that precisely the same difficulties lie
against the authority of the reason in the
sciences to which we have alluded. They, as
well as religion, have had to struggle against
174 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
every form of ignorance, of delusion, of contra-
dictory opinion. What has, in face of this,
secured their advance toward truth and
authority? Nothing but the ever-broadening,
ever-clarifying consciousness of the race;
nothing but the constant action of the common
verifying faculty, by which error is in the long
run discovered to be error, and is quietly
relegated to its place.
But we are told the special source of Scrip-
tural truth, as distinguished from other know-
ledge, is shown by the testimony of the prophets
and apostles, who were its organs. They speak
of a Divine action upon their mind, of the truth
they uttered coming to them as a " Word of the
Lord." In this we believe they spoke truly.
Only, they were not alone. When there flashed
upon the minds of a Copernicus, of a Kepler,
of a Newton, the truths concerning the
universe of which they were made the organs
to mankind, the conviction was not less clear
that what they had seen was, too, a part of
the Divine Order, an unveiling of the Divine
mind.
FOG IN THEOLOGY. 175
It is time, indeed, that our religious vision
took a wider survey. What we plead for is not
a levelling down but a levelling up of faith.
We need to grasp the all-unifying, all-clarify-
ing idea that knowledge of every kind is
nothing less than an impartation to the human
consciousness of a portion of that Eternal
Reason which is the ground and source of all
being. What is the guarantee that any opinion
we may hold is true ? The answer is in its
agreement with facts, as witnessed to by the
highest consciousness of the race. The fact that
this common consciousness tends in its findings
evermore to unity is one of the surest proofs we
have that the individual mind derives from, and
rests upon, One Universal Mind, in which all
truth inheres, and that human progress and
enlightenment mean simply the inflowing upon
man to an ever-increasing degree of its radi-
ance. The reception of this light is revelation,
of which the truth in the Scriptures is one
part as the truth of science is another. There
is no room for specialising here, #nd there is
no need for it. When theology understands
176 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
this, there will be no more building on the
boggy acre of Dualism, on which so many
rickety structures have hitherto been reared;
and religious truth, resting on the same basis
as that of science, will receive the same
universal acceptance.
XXII.
Temperament in Theology.
THE death of Francis W. Newman will to a
multitude of minds inevitably recall the vivid
contrast between two closely-related careers.
The possibilities of divergence in modern
theological thinking could hardly be more
strikingly illustrated than in the life of the
brilliant Theist who has just passed away, as
compared with that of his greater brother who
died a Eoman Cardinal. Born of the same
parents, brought up under, and profoundly
responsive to, the same Evangelical faith, alike
equipped with the highest intellectual powers,
unworldly both to the degree of asceticism,
these two earnest spirits in their quest for truth
arrive, one at the negation of all the distinc-
tively Christian creeds, and the other at the
conviction that "the creed is the ingrafted
word which is able to save our souls," and that
13
178 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
" a publisher of heresy should be treated as if
he were embodied evil."
This tremendous and, one might say, almost
tragic theological antithesis of the two
Newmans sets the mind in motion along a good
many trails. One of them especially seems
worth following for the results it may yield in
the inter esting, if somewhat obscure, province
of thought through which it leads. It is
evident that positions so different, arrived at
by two men so nearly related, and each so pure
and so hiprh-minded, could not be the result of
the working of pure rationality. On mathe-
matical subjects they were at one. That they
were so at variance in theology shows that in
this region another element than reasoning had
come into play. What happened in these two
instances has been happening over the whole
field. The positions arrived at by theologians,
the systems they create or support, will never
be understood by us until we have gone behind
them, and have investigated their actual pro-
ducing causes. And we shall not be long at
work before discovering that pure reasoning
TEMPERAMENT IN THEOLOGY. 179
has had only a minor part to play in them.
We are specially dealing with theology here;
but the fact is that over vast regions of human
thought the really controlling power is not
evidence, or any logical process relating to it ;
it is temperament.
In developing their systems men act as trees
act in building up their structure. The oak,
by its "oak instinct/' seeks the outside
elements in air, soil and sunlight, which are
appropriate to it, and then turns them into its
own likeness. The thousand things repugnant
to it, or which its assimilatory power does not
reach, it leaves alone. In like manner a
leading mind, according to its secret affinities,
selects out of the infinite array of outside
phenomena the things which most strike it and
best suit it. It arranges and co-ordinates these
materials very much as we see the tree doing.
What in the one becomes trunk and branches,
becomes in the other an articulated intellectual
system. It is full of reasonings, but the
reasonings did not make it. They were the
retinue and camp followers of the primal
180 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
instinct. Schleiermachers pectus est quod
theologum facit is true in a wider sense than he
intended it. Deep down in the inmost feeling,
in that " philosophy of the unconscious," which
waits yet to be explored, lies buried the real
secret of our theologies.
And this secret of temperament, which
compels our reasonings, which creates for each
of us in a way a separate universe, and which
has really made the creeds, differs so widely in
different men. Of few, indeed, can it be said,
as Tennyson sang of himself and his friend :
But thou and I are one in kind
As moulded like in Nature's mint ;
And hill and wood and field did print
The same sweet forms in either mind.
What men see depends on the instrument
within as much as on the object without, and
at present we have no means of bringing the
mental object-glasses to a common focus.
What is patent to the mystical faculty is
invisible to the critical, and vice versa. You
cannot yoke a Swedenborg with a Voltaire.
As if to give an object-lesson for all time in
IN THEOLOGY. l8l
this subjective character of all theologies, we
have its most vivid illustration in the very
foundation documents of Christianity. A Paul,
a John, a James, standing alike in the centre
of the Christian movement, in vital and first-
hand relation with its transcendent facts and
forces, give us each their system of it, and each
is an absolutely different one. Christianity is
one thing to Paul, another to John, and yet
another to James. It is life and power and
infinite uplift to each of them, but their
separate conception of it as a system introduces
us to three distinct thought-worlds.
The same phenomenon has been repeating
itself throughout the history of Christianity.
Augustine had the same Christian material
to go upon as Origen. Very different was
the affair they made of it. There seems to.
be no common denominator between the order
of minds, such as that of a Scotus of Erigina
and a Zwingli, who both saw nothing in
the Eucharist but a commemoration, and that
of a Radbertus or a Manning, who found
transubstantiation writ large in the New
182 STUDIES OF *HE
Testament. How are we to relatively estimate
the mental workings of a Calvin and a
Rabelais ? Both are Frenchmen ; they are
contemporary ecclesiastics, furnished with all
the learning of their time. The same religious
facts are within the purview of each. But
one emerges with the ee Institutes " as his
rendering of the account, the other with Panta-
gruel and the Thelema motto of ' e Fais ce que
voudras."
To suppose that the Church has escaped as
to its conclusions from this temperamental
factor by its device of General Councils is to
any one who has studied their history a vain
imagination. The Great Councils have in
every instance been examples, not of a com-
munity of minds, but of the predominant
influence of some one. Nicsea was the reflec-
tion of Athanasius ; to understand the Triden-
tine conclusions we need to study the mental
history of the Jesuit Lainez, who swayed the
assembly irresistibly by his oratory; the last
Vatican Council was the triumph of our own
Manning. Equally vain is it to expect that
TEMPERAMENT IN THEOLOGY. 183
the development of the scientific spirit is going
all at once to eliminate the variations in
theology arising from the personal factor. A
sufficient evidence that this is not the case is
furnished by the later developments of the
Eitschlian school. That school is now begin-
ing to discover that KitschTs quarrel with
German Pietism was the result of a primal
repugnance, instinctive rather than rational,
and that this subjective feeling has seriously
limited his view in some important directions.
One of the most distinguished of his followers,
Harnack, has, in a recent German review,
expressed this feeling with much plainness.
But it is time to ask what all this amounts
to. In the first place, let it be remembered
that while human reason, in the strict sense,
has played a comparatively subordinate part
in the world's doctrinal movement, this does
not imply that the movement has been an
irrational one. Because those who thought
themselves architects turn out to be only
day labourers, it does not follow there has
been no architect. The signs are becoming
184 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
more apparent that the different systems,
the result of the varying mentalities that
forged them, while not the truth, as their
authors fondly imagined, are all being made
to serve as means for getting at it. The
mystic and the rationalist, the minds in-
ductive and the minds deductive, have been
tunnelling through the same mountain, and
the work of each will count in the final
result.
And despite the difficulties in the way of
it, the prospect lies open of an ultimate agree-
ment, in the domain even of the human reason,
on the great questions of the spiritual life.
There is already an area, small yet growing,
of ascertained fact and scientific inference in
this region in which the best minds are prac-
tically agreed. There is no reason to suppose
that this area will not continue to extend.
Such a unanimity will be indeed the last
result of time ; but it is coming, and is worth
waiting and working for.
Meantime the wise man will use the systems
as his helpers while never allowing them to
TEMPERAMENT IN THEOLOGY. 185
become his masteis. They have all in them
valuable material, which he will appropriate
for his own building purposes. He will realise
that he lives spiritually, not by them, but by
what is behind and beneath them. Life is
one thing, the theory of it another. A man
may be perfectly healthy with a hopelessly
wrong doctrine of nutrition, or without any
doctrine at all. New Testament Christianity,
offering him on the part of its most prominent
leaders three or four separate theories, and
showing the Christ living in and ennobling
them all, gives him an all sufficing lesson as
to the relative value of theory and fact. He
will strive ever for a coherent system, but will
realise that the root of the matter lies not
there, but in the Eternal Life in him which
the theory seeks to express.
Our little systems have their day,
The have their day and cease to bo ;
They are but broken lights from TLco,
And Thou, Lord, art more than thcv.
XXIII.
On Accepting Ourselves.
THE end of the year is, in our modern civilisa-
tion, a season of general stocktaking. While
the counting-house overhauls its goods and
strikes balances, the pulpit, following the
fashion, invites men to reckon with their inner
selves. The spiritual exercise to which people
are thus exhorted is apt, with some natures,
to lead to results other than those contem-
plated by the preacher. Men have nowadays a
new fashion of dealing with their shortcom-
ings. Instead of taking them as a reason for
contrition and amendment, they make them a
ground of expostulation with Providence.
Heredity and the nature of things are the
sinners, and not they. The tables are turned,
and people at least, some of them are much
more occupied in criticising heaven than in
accepting its verdict upon themselves. This
ON ACCEPTING OURSELVES. 187
modern discontent shows itself in two direc-
tions. With some it is a refusal to accept the
common human lot. With others it is a revolt
against their individual share in it.
Of course the general impeachment of human
life, as in itself an evil and not a good, now
fashionable in certain circles is not a special
birth of this age. We find it scattered over all
the ages. The Greeks, whose view of life is
strangely considered by some writers as
having been so much sunnier than the Chris-
tian, summed it up in that cheerful line of
Sophocles, which declares that " the best of all
lots is never ip be born at all." Omar Khay-
yam, too, in the eleventh century, could nutter
it with the most cynical of our modern pessi-
mists, with his idea of existence as
One moment in annihilation's waste,
One moment, of the well of life to taste.
In our own day this wail over life in general
has been largely the outcome of scientific
materialism. But not entirely. A gloomy
theology has had not inconsiderably to do with
it. It was this which, grafted on to a morbid
188 STUDIES OP THE Soul.
temperament,, led John Foster to say that he
could never view the growth of population with
any other feeling than regret, and which wrung
from Professor Henry Rogers the avowal:
" For my part, I should not grieve if the
whole race of manhood died in its fourth year.
As far as I can see I do not know it would be a
thing much to be lamented." A pretty system
of the universe, surely, which could lead up to
such a conclusion ! We suspect, however, that
talk of this kind, whether it come from philo-
sophers, poets, or theologians, is generally the
outcome, not so much of arguments or systems
as of a mood. It is humanity in a bilious fit,
where the patient needs to be dealt with, not
so much by controversy as by a return to
primitive laws of health.
YvHiat we have specially in view in this
chapter, however, is not so much the state of
mind which rails at the common lot, as that
which refuses to be reconciled to its own.
There are, it has been said, two kinds of pride
one which lives by an exaggerated estimate
of oneself, and the other which refuses to let a
ON ACCEPTING OURSELVES. 189
man contentedly accept himself. The last is
infinitely the more interesting. The study of
its working brings us so close to the pathos and
the tragedy of life. Men let slip their own
birthright while they are staring enviously at
their neighbour's. By a perverse ingenuity
they persist in placing their ideal outside their
own possibilities. Here is a man physically
weak, but compensated by a strain of rare
inner faculty which multitudes envy. He
despises it and himself in his yearning after
the to him unreachable. He would pitch
away his scholarship and creative power to-
morrow for the power of climbing an Alp, or of
winning the Diamond Sculls, and moans
because he has not the chance. In another
man this self -disgust is born of comparison.
The good in him is killed by the better in the
next man. He hears Eubenstein, and vows he
will never touch a piano again. He sees
"Little Billee" do that sketch of Trilby's
foot on the wall, and in despair drives his fist
through his own canvas. The men who have
the greatest difficulty in accepting themselves
190 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
are not the dunces and the dead failures.
They are the clever people who by a hair's
breadth have missed being first. To know
they are gifted beyond the common, and that
yet, for want of some omitted pinch of salt in
their composition a lack it may be of physical
staying power, or from a bar sinister in their
connections, or an unlucky circumstance in
their history the other man has gained what
they once felt sure of ; this it is which makes
their martyrdom.
There is, so far as we know, only one thing
that, amid these temptations to the other view,
can reconcile ourselves to ourselves. This is
the primitive faith that our lot is an ordained
lot, given us to make the best of. Say, if we
will, after the modern fashion, that our life in-
heritance in its elements of body, mind, and
circumstance is just what our ancestors have
made it ; that its limitations, its thinness of
soil, its heavy encumbrances are due to their
mismanagement. If we are healthy-minded we
shall see in all this simply a reason for more
careful farming on our own part. If we can
ON ACCEPTING OURSELVES. 191
thereby pay off some of the liabilities and hand
down the estate to our successors in better con-
dition than we found it, that will be something.
But there is more than this. The faith that
accepts our lot, whatever it be, as ordained, will
also see in it the battle-ground on which is to
be fought out the great fight for our own
personality, for our enduring spiritual self. On
this point we could not do better for modern
Pessimism, be it scientific, philosophic, or
religious, than to recommend to it the steady
reading of a thinker too little known in
England, the German Eothe. To get well into
the mind his conception of the universe, as
having for its one end the development of
spiritual personality by the conflict in all worlds
of free will with circumstance, a view in which
difficulties, sorrows, pains are regarded as
factors in the process, and heaven and the
angelic hierarchy as some of its achieved
results, is to sweep as with a keen north wind
the fogs out of our brain, and to set us cheer-
fully to work.
It is, too, a faith of this kind which enables
192 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
\
us, not only to accept ourselves, but also the
man who has beaten us in the race. We learn
to rejoice in his greater gifts and success as
enriching that common life of which we are
privileged to partake. Here comes in that deep
saying of Goethe : " If during our life-time we
see that performed by others to which we our-
selves felt an earlier call, but had been obliged
to give up, with much besides, then the beauti-
ful f eeling enters the mind, that only mankind
together is the true man, and that the
individual can only be joyous and happy when
he has the courage to feel himself in the
whole."
The doctrine, then, is, that we are to accept
ourselves as being, after all, something which
God meant, a possibility or a bundle of possibili-
ties out of which, with His help, we may
create a result which will enrich the sum total
of existence. Into the process our weakness
and pain, as well as our strength and joy, our
disappointment and defeat, as well as our
rapture and victory, come as needful elements.
But the self which we thus accept will never be
Os ACCEPTING OUKSELVES. 193
a finality. It will be always a "becoming."
While planting our ideal in the region of
the possible we shall continually see
" Amplius " written across the attempts we
make to realise it. We may not reach the
goal we seek, but it will at least have drawn us
a long way upward, besides giving us a habit of
climbing which will very likely serve in the
next world as well as this.
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it ;
This nigh man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That has the world here ; should lie need the next P
Let the world mind him.
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed,
Seeking, shall find Him.
XXIV.
Life's Unknown Quantities.
has, in one of his essays, a striking
passage in which he speaks of the way in
which the machinery of society adapts itself
almost automatically to the varying fortunes
of the individual. A man in the heat of
passion commits some crime which, in his
earlier years, would have seemed to him
impossible. When he comes to himself it
appears incredible that he should have done
such a thing. He finds, however, society, with
its police, its magistrates, its dock, its criminal
procedure, calmly and methodically dealing
with this phase of his career as though it had
been waiting for it through all his years. It is
a somewhat gruesome reflection, but there is an
idea underlying it which may be carried
further. The varied apparatus of civilisation,
and its startling relation to us under certain
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 195
contingencies, suggests an even more complex
structure and its relations that, namely, of
our own organism and inner consciousness. It
would be a bewildering calculation to endeavour
to total up the sum of all the phases and
shades of thought and feeling passed through
by a fully-developed modern man in the course
of a lifetime. But the calculation would, after
all, be simple when compared with another
that of the experiences which, through that life-
time, have been possible to such a nature, but
into which it has never entered. There is some-
thing eerie in the thought of the pictures which
our inner machinery is prepared to throw at any
moment upon the screen of our consciousness,
but which will never come there. The precise
sensation realised by a person when threatened
by a terrible catastrophe, such as death by
burning or by murder; or that, on the other
hand, felt on the news of the coming to us of a
great fortune, is what few among us will ever
know. None the less the registering apparatus
for the production of that sensation is all ready
within us, and would, on occasion, produce it
196 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
there with infallible accuracy. Poets have
often chosen psychological themes as the sub-
ject of their muse. They have written on
Hope, on Memory, on Imagination. There is
clearly a field open for another great poem
the Unrealised Possibilities of Consciousness.
But the subject of life's unknown quantities
is not exhausted by this class of consideration.
Another side of it emerges when we come to
study, not simply the existing capabilities
which are never called into action, but the
possible further development of the capacities
themselves. We are ridiculously ignorant,
most of us, about our own powers. There are
stops in our organ which we have never tried,
and which perhaps contain our finest tones.
Sir William Hamilton's story of the servant-
girl who, in the delirium of fever, repeated the
Psalms of David in Hebrew, from having over-
heard her clerical master daily read them
aloud a feat quite impossible while in health
and in her ordinary mental condition shows
the latent capacities of an untrained memory
when raised a little above its normal state.
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 197
What is true of the memory is, we may sup-
pose, equally true of all our powers. E volu-
tion suggests that every faculty we possess is as
yet in a rudimentary condition. Some of those
destined in the future to play the most
important roles in the human drama are
hardly as yet above the horizon. The faculty
of second sight, for instance, so abundantly
testified to as existing amongst the Celtic
races ; and the mysterious powers, baffling com-
pletely our Western science, shown by Eastern
yogi, we may well believe are part of our
common heritage, if we knew only where to
find and how to train them. It is curious to
reflect what a revolution might come in our
view of the universe by the development in us
of a new organ of perception. A fresh window
let in to the wall of our consciousness might
make our knowledge of the spiritual world as
certain as that of the planetary system, and
cause Agnosticism, Pessimism, and Materialism
to be tenable only in Bedlam. And no sound
Evolutionist will say that such an organic
development is impossible. The outside uni-
198 STUDIES or THE SOUL.
verse contains innumerable unknown quantities ;
and that man has, in his microcosm, the
elements which answer to them all, may be far
more than a poetic conceit. What Goethe
said of the Divine immanence has its meaning
also for man
Dim ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen
Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen.
The unknown about ourselves presents itself
also very vividly when we consider our daily
changing relation to environment. We do not
need to have read Kant to discover that our
consciousness from moment to moment is a
compound of the action of our internal percep-
tive organs and of the play upon them of the
external world. How far the variations in the
second of the conditions is capable of influenc-
ing our subjective states is what none of us is
sure about. Glycerine by itself seems the most
innocent of substances, but one of its combina-
tions forms the must terrific of explosives. In
like manner natures that for years have seemed
to themselves and to their neighbours born to
simplicity and to quietness have, by combination
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 199
with new circumstances or new personalities,
developed into tremendous forces of revolution
or of crime. The devout gentleman-farmer of
Huntingdon never in his earlier years imagined
that he would one day make the name of Crom-
well so feared, hated, and admired. Had not
his uncle, the reigning Pontiff, insisted on his
joining as a young man, and against his own
will, the Papal Court at Borne, Alexander VI.
would probably have led a peaceful and unnoted
career, instead of making the name of Borgia
the symbol for everything execrable in cruelty,
hypocrisy, and vice. Of humbler men the same
is true. As Ruskin says : ' ( The virtues of the
inhabitants of many country districts are
apparent, not real ; it is only the monotony of
circumstances and the absence of temptation
which prevent the exhibition of passions not
less real because often dormant." Considera-
tions of this kind may well bring charity into
our judgments of others, and destroy overween-
ing confidence in our estimate of ourselves.
The result of the study of the unknown quanti-
ties in our own character, and in the environ-
200 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
mentis to which it has yet to relate itself, should
make us realise, as each new day begins, our
absolute dependence for spiritual upholding and
progress on Him whose knowledge is perfect,
and whose promised grace is adequate to our
utmost need.
XXV,
The Soul and Public Opinion.
IT is a singular fact, of which history is,
nevertheless, fertile in illustrations, that
prisons are apt to get as their occupants two
classes of people, the best and the worst.
The reason for this, namely, that these have
alike set themselves against the recognised
public opinion of their country, is very sugges-
tive as to the nature of this said public opinion,
its power, its limitations, and the true relation
of right-minded persons towards it as a rule
of conduct.
When a thoughtful man asks himself what
is the standard by which his daily life is regu-
lated he finds himself at every turn of his
investigations confronted by this seemingly
omnipresent and almost omnipotent force. The
laws of the land and its established institutions,
which limit his action in so many directions, are
202 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
what may be called crystallised public opinion.
They are walls built of thoughts, the intellectual
and moral life of past generations which have
passed from the fluid into the solid state. The
religious forces that operate upon him are
another form of public opinion,, showing itself
again in its solid and fluid varieties. The
written Scriptures, the Church organisations,
customs, and usages are the religious thought
and feeling of former ages, at their origin flow-
ing and spontaneous, now preserved by the
fact of their having become congealed.
But the solidified public opinion of the past,
both in the religious and the secular life,
whether regarded as laws and codes or as
Scripture and Church, are, we are daily
conscious, supplemented in the control of
human action by a force which is even mightier,
the thought and feeling, namely, of the living
present, which is not fixed but fluid, and which
is welling up ever fresh from the hiddeir
fountains that feed the common human con-
sciousness. That this fluid form of publifc
opinion is stronger than the fixed is shown bj
THE SOUL AND PCTBLIC OPINION. 203
the fact that in the region of laws and public
institutions it is incessantly modifying, destroy-
ing, and renewing ; while in religion it gives
quite new interpretations of its written authori-
ties, revises its opinion of their value, and
obtains outlooks independent of their direct
sugggestion.
Erom this it would seem to follow that fluid
public opinion, in the sense, that is, of the
existing common consciousness of an age, were
the ultimate standard both for the determination
of truth and the judgment of character. Look-
ing further, however, we are confronted by
some disturbing considerations which seems to
prevent our settling down in this conclusion.
We find, for instance, that public opinion in
the past has been full of errors in ideas and
of defects in morals. We shudder at the
views and practices sanctioned by the public
opinion of Carthage as depicted by Flaubert in
"Salammbo." In our own day, we of the
West are equally far from the conclusions of
the public opinion of those Indian hill tribes
described by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his
204 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
Ethics, who regard murder and stealing as a
necessary element in the education and out-
fit of a virtuous character. Are, then, morals
an affair of latitude and of date, settled by rote
and voice of the majority in a given place and
time ? We know to the contrary. Not more
certain are we that Galileo was right in his
contention about the earth and the sun, though
in a minority of one, than we are certain that
the ethical ideas of the Carthaginians and of
the Indian hill tribes aforesaid represent moral
inferiority and falsity.
What, then, is the ultimate standard of truth
and conduct, and what is the relation to it of
public opinion? The line of thought we have
been following leads, we think, straight to the
answer. The standard is an Eternal Truth and
an Eternal Righteousness existent and inherent
in the universe, towards which the evolution of
the human mind and human character is a
constant approximation. In other terms, man
is in the presence of a slow but continuous pro-
cess of unveiling or revelation of this truth and
right. That he has continually blundered both
THE SOUL AND PUBLIC OPINION. 205
in his mental and moral appreciations means
that he nearly always begins by misconstruing
the lesson set before him. But he ends by
mastering it, and by knowing he has done so.
The current opinion of an age, both in
science, ethics, and religion, represents then,
not the standard itself, but the degree to which
the ultimate truth, as it lies in the Divine mind,
has been apprehended, and acquiesced in by it.
And here lies the explanation of the anomaly
we mentioned at the beginning, of the ranks of
those condemned by existent public opinion,
numbering in them representatives at once of the
worst and of the best of mankind. The man who
defies public opinion may do so because he is
a rogue or because he is a prophet. The three
crosses at Jerusalem, on which hung two
thieves, and in their midst a Christ, is of this
antithesis the eternal illustration. The male-
factors were punished because they were be-
hind the ethical level of the public consciousness,
the Christ because He was beyond it.
The history of the onward movement of
society continually offers the same spectacle.
206 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
When Pastor Hopkins, of Newport, U.S.,
rose one morning in his pulpit and to his
congregation, made up largely of men whose
pecuniary interests were in the slave trade,
delivered a testimony, the first of its kind in
America, which, he said, had been laid on his
conscience to proclaim, to the effect that slavery
was un-Christian and iniquitous, he was exhibit-
ing the whole rationale of the Divine educa-
tion of humanity. For years he had kept step
with the rank and file of his people. He had
shared the public opinion of his time and place.
He saw what his countrymen saw. Then there
fell upon him the ray of a new dawn, and, like
Abraham of old, the sharer in a like experience,
he must go forth, following it, not knowing
whither he went.
We get here our answer to the question as
to the true relation of the individual to the
public opinion of his day. It is well for him
to keep up with it, for it is, on a multitude of
points, the product of successive revelations of
unspeakable value. The average maa will not
get beyond it will, in fact, need its esprit de
THE SOUL AND PUBLIC OPINION. 207
corps to maintain himself at the height it has
reached. But the deeper spirits whom God
has chosen as prophets and leaders must ever
hold themselves open to the further unfolding
of His unceasing revelation, and in obedience
thereto to break rank and move on, as fore-
runners of the new and higher order.
XXVI.
Our Best and Worst.
THE study of mankind is, under any circum-
stances, a sufficiently confusing business. But
it becomes doubly so when we take into ac-
count not only what people have actually done
in lif e, but what they might have done. For it
is very seldom, we imagine, that the best or the
worst in us gets either revealed or struck into
action. The man of exceptional moral solidity,
who has passed through his career without any
apparent catastrophe, has to admit to himself that
if certain moods and inclinations that have pos-
sessed him at times had coincided with an easily
possible set of external circumstances, the con-
junction might, for all he can see, have made
him a lecher or a thief. Happily, and he
may add providentially, the subjective con-
dition and the outer opportunity did not get
linked together, and he escaped.
OUR BEST AND WORST. 209
But exactly the same may be said of the
possible good in him. When we read of men
in a colliery accident flinging themselves away
in an heroic attempt at rescue ; or of the five
hundred English infantry who, with their
officers, stood on the deck of the doomed
BirJcenhead, while the women and children
were rescued, and then calmly, as if they
were on parade, and without a man breaking
the rank, went down with the foundering
ship, our heart leaps at the moral grandeur
of it. Yet there are thousands of men about
who, if they had been at that pit mouth or
at that sliipwreck, would have done exactly
as these did, but whose present record is of
getting drunk with considerable persistency,
and of occasionally beating their wives.
Dickens's hero in " The Tale of Two Cities,"
who after being long considered by himself
and his friends as a ne'er do weel, laid down
his life at the guillotine to save his friend,
is a man you may pick up in the next street.
There is a Divine act in him also if it only
got its chance,
U
210 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
It is, indeed, the gradual dawn upon the
modern mind of the truth that a man is not
so much a fact as a possibility, "an eternal
becoming/' that is altering our whole way of
judging him, both religiously and for prac-
tical ends. When, for instance, we remember
out of what moral origins Sydney, Melbourne,
and San Francisco have reached their pre-
sent height of civilisation, we cannot in
our national appraisements set down our least
hopeful classes as a mere bad debt. They
are rather so much locked-up capital which
it is for society to discover how profitably
to employ ; a store of energy at present mis-
directed, which we have to find out how to
turn on to the social and iiidus trial mill-
wheels.
Looking at the subject in its personal aspect,
we are struck by the difference in the way men
take both the best and the worst in themselves.
The mass of people offer only their average for
outside consumption. Their self-revelations
have a limit, both in the upper and the lower
ranges. The chief significance of most auto<
OUH BEST AND WORST. 21 1
biographies lies in what is left unsaid. The
exceptions to this and there have been some
extraordinary ones serve to prove the rule.
The candour of the man who tells us every-
thing seems unnatural, and even revolting.
When Rousseau calmly informs us in the
" Confessions " that he, the man who wrote
"Emile," with its lofty precepts on child
training, handed over his own children, all
of them illegitimate, to the fate of enfants
trouves, the fate, that is, of paupers deserted
of their parents, we feel that a man of his pre-
tensions in showing himself capable, first of
such a deed as this, and then of declaring it
to the world, was only excusable and even
explainable on the supposition of his latest
continental biographer that he was mad. We
have a like sensation in reading the memoirs
of that most astonishing of mortals, Benvenuto
Cellini. To find him on one page, as in his
description of his imprisonment in the Castle
of St. Angelo, setting forth his pious aspira-
tions, his unswerving faith in God, his delight
in the study of tjie Scriptures, and his visions
212 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
of heaven, and on another, with equal minute-
ness and apparently equal satisfaction, telling
the story of his murders, and of his astounding
debaucheries, is to confound all our notions of
sane humanity.
These men, without reserves and without
remorse, were monstrosities. The average
mortal, at least among the Western races,
has a curious reticence about both the good
and the bad in him; the reticence being, on
the whole, perhaps greater about the former
than the latter. An English schoolboy would
rather be caught stealing apples than saying
his prayers; while his father would sooner
face a battery than imitate the Mussulman
who, at midday, dropped on his knees in Hyde
Park with his face to the East. The plain-
looking City man, who for twenty years has
talked politics and the news of the day with
his fellow-passenger on the way to town, has
never during that period given him a hint that
he is a mystic, a spiritual wrestler who has
discovered, with Omar Khayyam, that
Myself am heaven and hell.
Gun BEST AND WORST. 213
Another of the singularities of this subject is
the apparently incommensurable difference be-
tween the quality of the best and worst in differ-
ent men. What common measure, for instance,
is there which will enable us to scientifically
determine the relative demerit of the worst in
a Carlyle and the worst in a Newman ? What
ratio is there between the bearishness of the
philosopher which made him, to his mother's
and his wife's cost, " gey ill to live wi'," and
the narrowness of sympathy in the theologian
which permitted him to declare that " a pub-
lisher of heresy should be treated as if he were
embodied evil," and to speak of the sudden
death of Arius as a declaration of Divine Pro-
vidence against his system? Here are two
great men at their worst, and yet, after
thousands of years devoted to the study of
morals, the world has absolutely no means of
appraising the relative quality of their bad-
ness. Our planet has plainly a good deal of
schooling to go through yet before it can call
itself educated.
As to the ultimate prospects of our best and
214 STUDIES o# THE SOUL.
worst, the Christian evolutionist has no doubt.
It may be that in the past man's history has
been mainly zoological, a history that is of his
animal appetites and instincts, and that it is
only beginning to be a human history. But
the process of humanising and spiritualising
is going on and will go on.
The feeling of each one of us that we have a
Cain and Abel within, and that our business
here is to reverse the Scripture story and to
make our Abel kill our Cain, is in itself a kind
of revelation and an element of immense hope
about the future. There are, it has been
said, two kinds of pride one which makes us
approve ourselves, and another which makes
it impossible to accept ourselves. This last,
indeed, might be better named. It is a Divine
instinct, a grace, which arms us for the work
of self-reclamation. Every man needs to be
an Evangelisation Society whose operations
begin with himself. He will find there plenty
of scope. That some men have a vastly
harder fight here than others is unquestion-
able. When Newman, to mention him again,
OUR BEST AND WOK ST. 215
says he was never troubled with the impulses
of sexual passion after twenty-five, what a
mighty simplification was this of a man's
moral problem ! To read, on the other hand,
of Chateaubriand, that the brilliant author of
the " Genie du Christianisme " had, as his inti-
mates knew, " an obscene Chateaubriand within
him," which at times broke out, is to find our-
selves nearer the condition of a good many
other men of genius who have been the world's
spiritual teacher?.
The problem here is puzzling and painful;
but all the light which converges on the
modern consciousness from science, history,
philosophy, and revelation makes it ever
clearer that in this great fight, waged in the
individual and the race, between flesh and
spirit, between good and evil, it is spirit and
good that will triumph. The human move-
ment is toward the kingdom of God.
And as I saw the sin and death, even so
See I the need yet transiency of Loth ;
The good and glory consummated thence.
XSVIL
Survivals.
LIFE possesses few things more interesting or
mere revealing than its survivals. They have
such a story to tell. The skilled eye can
read in them a whole history of the past as
well as a prophecy of the future. In his
evolution upward man carries with him all
kinds of quaint material belonging to life's
lower stages. Each one of us, in the con-
tents both of body and mind, is a museum
of prehistoric time. We not only date from
an immemorial past, but we have brought it
with us. Drummond, in his " Ascent of Man,"
has made the unscientific reader familiar with
the startling revelations of our physical frame ;
of tell-tale marks on limb and organ and
feature which show the way we have worked
upwards from the level of the
Dragons of the prime
"Who tare each other in their slime.
SURVIVALS. 217
to where we now are. And the way in which
embryology confirms this story is, we suppose,
known more or less to most of us.
It is, however, in the region of the inner
man, of his thought and feeling, that we
come upon the most significant of life's sur-
vivals. Take, to begin with, those of race
and heredity. One hardly wonders at the
grip the doctrine of metempsychosis has
had upon men when we remember how, as
a race, we are haunted by the ghosts of
earlier times. We can never get rid of our
ancestors, and they have a habit of cropping
up in the most unexpected and sometimes
most disagreeable ways. Into a family full
of pieties and respectabilities will be born a
son of primitive and barbarous instincts, in
whom the bewildered parents can trace no
resemblance to themselves. The resemblance
is indeed not to them, but to a disreputa-
ble ancestor of five generations ago, whose
qualities have slumbered in the blood of
their line from then till now. Our fight
to-day is not only with the difficulties of
STUDIES OF THE SouL.
the present, but with these spirits of the
past.
Man's religious history is full of the element
of survival. All the great world faiths are
rich in relics of earlier forms. The Jewish
accounts of the Creation, the Flood and the
Fall are, as every Sunday scholar now knows,
directly related to Assyrian and Babylonian
legends. In like manner Christianity has
taken over all manner of relics of ruder faiths.
Christmas was a pagan festival of the winter
solstice, and has become Christian by adop-
tion. The advice given by Pope Gregory to
Augustine in his dealing with the heathen
English, not to abolish their festivals or their
temples, but to turn them to Catholic uses,
has been followed to such an extent through-
out Christendom that the archaeologist finds
everywhere in local religious usages a kind
of baptized paganism. Mohammedanism ex-
hibits the same law. It is full of remains
of the earlier Arabic cult which Mohammed
superseded. The most singular illustration
of this is perhaps the worship paid to the
SURVIVALS. 219
Kaaba, or black stone of Mecca, held to
have fallen from heaven. The religious ob-
servance paid to it is in strange contradic-
tion to the Mohammedan prohibition of idols.
As a matter of fact, the prophet found
the cult of the stone too ancient and
too deeply rooted to permit of its being
ignored or destroyed. Like a good business
man, therefore, he appropriated its religious
vogue as part of the assets of the new
faith.
So far we have been dealing with the sub-
ject on its purely matter-of-fact and historical
side. There is an aspect of it, however, which
permits of another kind of treatment. It is
the survivals in our personal life which come
closest home to us. And out of the infinite
variety of them there are some specially
worthy of selection for the light they filled
on character and destiny.
The most obvious of our personal survivals
is the one contained in memory the mar-
vellous faculty which makes our past a
present, and permits UE to repeat our life
220 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
to ourselves a thousand times over. Nothing
perhaps so vividly exhibits our earthly career
as a progress from the natural to the spiritual
as the operation of memory. For in its pro-
cesses we see the raw material of experience,
the rough products of the consciousness in
its contact with the world, subtilised,
etherealised, made into possessions of pure
spirit which are held by it for ever. The
value of this form of our life lies in the
fact that it is, to so unique an extent, under
the mind's own control. Our daily contact
with the world is an encounter forced upon
us whether we will or no. Its incidents and
experiences are our fate, which we cannot
avoid and must make the best of. But in
the survival life of memory we can pick
I and choose. And we wonder that people do
not value higher than they seem to, this
glorious boon permitted to mortals of being
able, in the midst of monotonous tasks, to
call back at will their days of joy, to repro-
duce the merry jest, the glorious mountain
climb, the moment of unexpected success.
SURVIVALS. 221
the feast of kindred minds, the supremo
heights of feeling which have made up life's
best hours.
Another of the great personal survivals is
that which belongs to the region of feeling,
and which is illustrated specially in religion
and love. In religion that which counts is
not so much what we start with as what
survives. A man of fifty who has thought
his way through the problems of an age
like our own, lives in a mental region
startlingly different from that of his youth.
A whole world of ideas has dropped away.
He looks over a new heaven and a new
earth. Yet, if his life has been pure and
his intent honest, his religious feeling will
have come out of the hurly-burly no whit
damaged and in its essence scarcely changed.
If difference there be it is that his faith is
more essentially childlike. All the motives
to trust, to sacrifice, to service, and to love
have strengthened with the wider horizon
and the deepened experience. From what
he has learned of fatherhood he understands,
222 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
as he never could in the earlier years, what
it is to be a child.
The same principle holds in love. The test
of it is its survivals; The earlier period,
with its passional attraction and its tumult
of the senses, offers a judgment more or
less confused. It is when, with husband
and wife, this phase of the relationship has
been passed through and discounted, that
one can discern whether or no the root of
the matter is in them. For a true union
is another illustration of the divinely ordered
progress of life from the natural to the
spiritual. And it is in its later stages that
we discern whether the flower has produced
the fruit. A relationship such as that be-
tween Mr. Holt Hutton and the wife whose
shattered frame he through long years tended
with such devotion is one in which through
the veil of the flesh we see shining the
divinest things.
We said a moment ago that it takes
maturity to understand what it is to be
8. child. The remark is suggestive of onp
SURVIVALS. 223
of the happiest of life survivals, that of
the boy in the man. Where it exists we
have the miracle of perpetual youth. The
boyhood of the old fellows who under-
stand this secret, who can at sixty "laugh
the heart's laugh," to whom a country walk,
a schoolboy's face and talk, a game of
cricket (played by deputy), stir all the by-
gone enthusiasms, has a distinct advantage
over the boyhood that is only in its teens.
The grown-up boys have the youthful feel-
ing and, what the other youngsters are not
so conscious of, a proper sense of its delight-
fulness. Here, again, we discern the upward,
the etherealising movement of the truly
human life. What was given it at the
beginning in the rough experimental form
it retains later as a spiritual essence. The
boyhood of the boy is animal. That of the
man has a touch from another sphere.
j The whole of this topic hangs together,
and its evidence points one way. In man's
physical frame, in his religious faiths, in
fyis social relationships, in his innermost
224 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
feelings we discover marks of lowliest origin,
but of an ever upward movement. And
the depth of the beginning is in startling
contrast to the height of the consummation.
The progress of humanity is from nothing
to the infinite. Out of the material it
fabricates the spiritual. And the perman-
ence of this last is of all life's survivals
the greatest. Said his friends to Socrates
before he drank the hemlock, "How shall
we bury you?" "As you please/' was the
reply, "but first be sure that you have me."
To the old Greek thinker was it clear, as
on higher evidence it has become yet more
clear to us, that the inner wealth of the
soul, the spoil of its struggle in this world
of sense, will be life's great survival after
its last grim fight with death.
xxvm.
The World's Silences.
THERE is a whole psychology of silence. The
gamut of emotions drawn up by Fontenelle, the
thirty-seven states of mind described by the
Buddhists, might be stated in terms of silence
almost as well as in those of speech. Every
human relationship, from that of entirest
harmony down to the last extremities of
estrangement, can be expressed by silence. It
may mean the highest bliss or the direst
wretchedness, life's comedy or its tragedy. And
man encounters not only the human silences.
Stamping themselves at times even more
vividly on the soul, forming by turns its conso-
lation, its terror, its baffling mystery, are those
of nature and the Infinite, The topic alto-
gether offers to the analyst far more material
than we can here deal with. Suffice it to
touch one or two of its salient points.
If
b'i< 'lifES OF THE SOUL.
Nothing appeals more powerfully to the
imagination than the great silences of nature.
This overcrowded planet has some lonely
places still. Our own thought in this connec-
tion goes back to an unfrequented pass in the
Orisons, climbed alone in the depth of winter,
where, high above all trace of life, shut in on
every side by walls of snow and rock, the blue
sky above seeming, to the eye turned to it from
the dazzling white beneath, an awful ebon
black, the beating of the heart was the one
thing audible, and the sensation that of being
at the bottom of a crater in the moon. Such
experiences help us to picture what the
silence must be in places like the far depths of
the Antarctic circle, where for countless
centuries there has been no voice, no human
footfall, no movement of life, nothing but
A wind that shrills all night
In a waste land where no man comes,
Or hath come since the making of the world.
We need not, however, go so far afield for
the world's possibilities of silence. Who of us
has not, in lonely watches of the night, come,
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 227
by our own homestead, upon a hush of things,
intense, mysterious, as though Nature were
listening for some whisper to her from the
Infinite !
Creation sleeps : 'tis as tlie general pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause,
An aTvful pause prophetic of her doom.
Nowhere, so far as our reading goes, has the
awe of such a time and the soul's response to it
been more vividly portrayed than in Isaac
Taylor's essay on " A Country Hide in a Dark
Night." Whoso wants a masterpiece of
observant imagination, and to be led to the
very centre of the secret of stillness, cannot do
better than open the works of this acute thinker
and prose-poet too little read in these days
at that page of them.
Meantime we may come here from nature's
to some of the human silences. These are, as
we have said, of all kinds and orders of signifi-
cance. There is one observation, however, of
which they are alike susceptible. Extreme
emotions of all kinds are silent. Joy, terror,
astonishment, rage, when carried to an extrein-
228 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
ity, are without voice. Just as the external
vibrations which produce sound when carried
beyond a certain velocity go beyond the recog-
nition of the ear, so the soul's internal vibra-
tion, however caused, may reach extremes
which transcend speech. These, however, are
abnormal, and for the most part momentary
conditions. More fruitful is the study of the
silences which obtain in ordinary life.
Pleasant to think of, for instance, is the
silence of perfect sympathy. This is the test
of intimacy. A fellowship is only complete
when the partners in it find themselves entirely
at ease without the necessity of a word. We
are a long way from this condition when, as
often happens, we talk and talk simply because
we realise that a pause would be awkward on
both sides. The picture of Carlyle and his
mother sitting at opposite sides of the fireplace,
each smoking a long churchwarden, in absolute
content, but without a word passing, illustrates
precisely what we mean. We get here, perhaps,
a foretaste of a stage of being when souls will
communicate without the cucabrous apparatus
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 229
of language. Under present conditions even
the degree is marvellous to which sympathetic
natures can influence each other without words.
There are souls which, in silence, seem to give
off of their very essence and to interpenetrate
others with it. It is as though the harmony
within communicated a rhythmic pulsation
which played on responsive natures like spirit
music. A volume lies in the sentence in the
life of Lord Lawrence which says that he felt
uneasy if his wife left the room. Happy man !
To possess as one's own this benediction of a
presence that can bless without a word is to be
rich indeed. If the sympathetic natures could
all find each other what high bridals would
there be !
But as there is a silence from perfect sym-
pathy, so is there one, equally interesting,
though not so pleasant to contemplate, from
imperfect sympathy. Of this species, indeed,
there are all varieties and shades. There is
that, for instance, which falls at times upon
the advanced thinker when in certain circles.
He is, perhaps, brusquely asked for his position
230 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
on some question in religion or theology, and
he finds himself unable to state it. He cannot
properly interpret himself. His interlocutor,
he feels, is not in a position to judge the
evidence. He has not passed through the
experiences, the studies, the thought processes
which have led to his own standpoint. He is
entirely clear about the matter himself, but his
words, which mean one thing to him, but
would mean something else to this less prepared
mind, would certainly introduce confusion
there. He is compelled to a policy of reserve.
If he speaks at all it will be, as with a
greater Teacher before him, in parables, keep-
ing his fullest thought for those who can
receive it.
What an inward history lies behind these
silences, if one could only get at it ! One
wonders what passed through the mind of
Tauler when for the space of two years he, the
great preacher and spiritual leader, found him-
self dumb in the midst of his people. What a
deeper tragedy, too, that of a Eoger Bacon,
endowed with one of the greatest intellects that
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 231
Europe has ever produced, yet, perforce, keep-
ing his lips sealed because his message to the
monkish horde around him spelled only heresy,
blasphemy and insanity ! On a smaller scale
crucifixions of this kind are going on all around
us. Into a family, every other member of
which is rudely materialistic, is born a high
sensitive nature, unworldly, filled with ideals,
throbbing with intense response to the spiritual.
That nature can never speak of its deepest
where it is. And the pitifullest thing of all is
when one sees such spirits, despairing of being
understood, saying with Amiel, "I cannot be
in the right all alone," and so trying to rid
themselves of the shame of their singularity
by a move downward to the common level.
It is the worst of treasons. Less heinous
were it to deliver one's country to the
enemy than to repudiate the best that is in
ourselves.
We can only hint in closing at what is the
deepest side of our theme. We mean the
awful to some natures almost maddening
silence of the universe toward our human
232 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
questioning. The picture in " Tancred " of
the hero, a nineteenth century Englishman,
journeying to Mount Sinai and prostrating
himself on its bald summit, crying for a new
revelation, is a pathetic if overdrawn illustra-
tion of the soul's ceaseless desire for some
authentic utterance to it from Heaven. That
desire has built churches, created legends,
formed religions. Man has endless stories of
heavenly communications, yet when we our-
selves look up and listen, how complete and
baffling is the silence ! Science explodes the
legends and declares that no articulate voice,
except that of man himself, has been ever heard
on this planet. The worlds revolve around us,
the stars glitter in their abysmal depths, but 110
word comes to us from them. What then?
Has faith lost its foothold ? In no wise. What
all this amounts to is simply the reaffirmation,
in other terms, of our deepest doctrine, that of
Incarnation. The voice that speaks to man
comes ever through man. The entrance of the
Divine into our life is always via our own
thought and intuition. That the great truths
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 233
on which we build rose first and shaped them-
selves in the human consciousness detracts no
whit from their divinity. It points to their
source while indicating the way they have
travelled.
XXIX.
The Soul's Pathfinders.
A CHARMING book, written a generation ago by
a well-known American divine, entitled, " The
Rifle, Axe, and Saddlebags," depicts in vivid
fashion the life of the backwoods preacher of
an earlier time. He had to be an expert as
much in handling a rifle as a text, to know not
only how to preach sermons but to swim rivers,
and to be as thoroughly at home in dealing
with a grizzly as with a convert. It was a
great race of religious frontiermen, this gener-
ation of simple-minded, sinewy-bodied, devout-
souled, singing, praying, rejoicing evangelists
of prairie and of backwood, worthy of the
Church's lasting and loving remembrance. But
they, and such as they, form only a portion of
the heroic band who, as ive review the story of
the world's religious progress, occupy the
position which our title designates. For the
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 225
pathfinder is of many types and of varying
tasks. He has immense diversities, combined
with elements that are common. The charac-
teristic that unites him to the rest of his
special genius is that he is, in his own line,
always a frontierman, a border fighter, a
spiritual Uhlan, ever in advance of the slower
moving main body.
The presence throughout history of the path-
finder is, indeed, when we think of it, an
impressive lesson on the destiny at once of
religion and of the human race. Every gener-
ation tells the same story. It is of a constantly
widening territory, both of action and of
thought; of the mass of men, wearied in the
struggle by which the new region has been
secured, anxious to settle down in it, and to
rest awhile that they may enjoy it ; and then
of the call from the elect spirits, ever in
advance, to strike tents and move on again to
the further realms which they have descried.
The drowsy mass, waked thus untimely from
their slumbers, badger and bully their
disturbers, cull them bad names and otherwise
236 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
ill-treat them. But they end by getting up
and staggering on in their wake. Wonderful
pilgrimage of humanity, which is never
permitted to cease, and which is carrying it on
towards a knowledge, a power and a perfectness
which seem without end !
The lonely pathfinder who marks out the
track is, as we have said, of various kinds. In
the directly religious sphere of which we are
now treating we see him by turns as evangelist,
as administrator, as mystic, as pure thinker.
As thus named these seem very different men.
But there is a strong family likeness among
them. For one thing, they alike realise that
in the deepest sense they are " alone, yet not
alone." They have appeared in the world to
express or put into action a new thought. Yet
they know that this thought is in no sense
peculiar to their individuality. It is a birth of
the age, inevitable, necessary. It existed
before as an electricity diffused. In them it
has come to a spark, and men recognise the
spark as a flash from heaven. . They here
illustrate what Lamonnais has so finely said :
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 237
that "thought, in its rise and progress, is a
necessary thing. It comes from God. Not the
thought of each individual, but the universal
thought which goes on from stage to stage,
and which is a kind of progressive revelation."
The function* of the frontierinan here is to
mediate that revelation.
When men have once grasped the new
thought, it appears so simple that after
generations wonder there could have been any
fuss about accepting it. The people who
wonder should reflect on the difference be-
tween making a road and travelling along it.
The idea which dawned upon John Wesley,
and which made him the religious pathfinder of
the eighteenth century, that as people did not
come to the Church, the Church must come to
the people, appears a very obvious one to us.
But so great a man as Bishop Butler could not
see it, and denounced Wesley as a bad Church-
man for putting it into practice.
This gift, indeed, of seeing first the necessary
thing, in the domain either of thought or
action, is one which the possessor has to pay
238 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
dearly enough for. For one thing his lot is to
be lonely, and that as much when he has
followers as when he is without them. For the
follower is not a companion. By the very fact
of following he shows the difference between
himself and the leader. The worthy Metho-
dist who scrupulously observes the ecclesiastical
routine of his Church is doing exactly the
opposite of what Wesley did himself. Wesley
was an originator, while this man is an imi-
tator. The leader broke Church rules to gain
higher ends. The follower is encased within
his rule as an end in itself. The rank and file
can march gaily enough, for there are foot-
prints on the road they take. The pathfinder,
meanwhile, on whom, their gaze is trustingly
fixed, moves solitarily on his untrod road,
devoid himself of all such help, with his eye
searching the awful night for the guidance of
its far-off stars. It was a dim consciousness of
what this business meant, which, when that
prime frontierman of these later ages, Martin
Luther, walked up the imperial audience hall at
Worms, made the doughty warrior, George of
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 239
Frondsberg, say, as he touched him on the
shoulder with his gauntlet: "Little monk,
little monk, thou hast a fight before thee which
we whose trade is war never faced the like of."
The hardy swordsman was right. The peers of
"the little monk " in that hour were not such
as he. They were George Fox, cutting out his
suit of leather, and announcing the kingdom of
the Spirit; Benedict, sending out his first
colony from Monte Casino; Abraham, going
out " not knowing whither he went."
But the pathfinders, if they have their
special sorrows, have at the same time their
special consolations. One of these is the clear
sense of their call to speak or act as they do.
" Ich Jcann nicht anders " is not Luther's word
only, but that of all his class. To the voice of
contemporary opinion which condemns them
they find opposed a more imperious opinion
within them, which they dare not disobey
because they know it is higher. Opposition,
indeed, only heartens them. It is the clash of
the tournament which is to prove them true
knights. They ,feel about it, as did St.
240 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
Teresa, one of their number, who, speaking of
her persecutions, said, "My soul is then so
mistress of itself that it seems that it is in its
kingdom and has everything under its feet."
And the voice within which compels them
has a wondrous way of compelling others.
That "demonstration of the Spirit" of which
an illustrious member of this company spoke
as accompanying his words is characteristic of
their utterance. For their speech lays bare that
Universal Reason which is the basis of their
soul's life, and which men know to be Divine.
One thinks here of Francis of Assisi when
before the College of Cardinals, forgetting the
address which, under the advice of a friend,
he had prepared for the occasion, and instead,
as an old biographer chronicles, " falling
back on his inspiration," with the result that
the august audience was overwhelmed with the
feeling that here before them was a man of
God with a message from God.
A topic like this branches in all directions
if one had space to follow the trails. There is,
for instance, the curious way in which men,
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 241
who gave little attention to religion as
generally conceived, have proved to be never-
theless eminent religious pathfinders. George
Stephenson had as little to do as most men
with theology. But his railway locomotive, in
making the evangelist free, on easy terms, of
the whole world, and bringing into the range
of possibility such a gathering as the Chicago
Parliament of Eeligions, has enlarged the
religious frontier more than the united labours
of shiploads of D.D.s. Darwin, too, has not
been known as a constructive theologian. But
there is no theological system of to-day which
is not full of his thought. The two kingdoms,
indeed, of matter and spirit intersect at every
point, and a man cannot do good honest work
in the one without making important contribu-
tions to the other.
A study like this should be sufficient to show
how the idea of standing still in any depart-
ment of the Church's life has, by the very
nature of things, been rendered impossible. To
enter into its good land of truth and privilege,
to possess and enjoy it, to cultivate it, and
16
242 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
gather its richest harvests is that to which
we are plainly invited. What is forbidden is
to build a wall round it with the inscription,
"Thus far, and no farther." Which is only
another way of saying that the soul is placed
in an infinite universe, and that its destiny
there is to expand to infinity.
XX K.
The Soul and Heredity.
THE extent to which the religious thinking of
the day is being influenced by science is shown,
amongst other things, by the attention bestowed
by religious as well as by scientific teachers on
the subject of heredity as related to character.
The age-long controversies between fatalism
and free-will have in our day reappeared under
new aspects. The predestination of an Augus-
tine and an Edwards, founded upon metaphysi-
cal and theological grounds, has been trans-
formed into the doctrine of a Galton, a
Lombroso, and a Weismann, which fixes the
destiny of the human subject by the inherited
character of the germ-cell from which he has
sprung. It is true that on crucial points of the
problem the experts are still at open war. Mr.
Herbert Spencer and Professor Weismann are
at loggerheads as to whether acquired niodinca-
244 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
tions are or are not transmissible by inheritance.
Biologists are divided into those who declare
life in all its developments to be merely a form
of motion and of chemical affinities, and the
large number represented by such masters of
research as the physiologist Bunge, who hold
that in vitality there inhere a force and a
mystery which nothing discoverable in the
inorganic world can explain.
Spite of these differences, however, it is
undeniable that the trend of a large volume
of modern scientific thought has been in the
direction of determinism. A man's character,
it is held, is the outcome of his past ancestry,
as inevitably as the Alpine torrent is a resul-
tant of the glacier above. In the words of Mr.
Galton, in his work on "Hereditary Genius/'
"a man's natural abilities (and, he would add,
character) are derived by inheritance under
exactly tne same limitations as are the form and
physical features of the whole organic world."
The results of this widely prevalent view of
things crop out in various directions, and with
curious effect. One of them is the return of
THE SOUL AND HEREDITY. 245
many speculative thinkers to the notion of
Plato in his " Kepublic," that the true way of
improving the human race is by a scientifically-
directed system of breeding. We apply this
method, it is argued, with immediate and strik-
ing results in dealing with dogs, cattle and
horses. In the direction where the results
would be the most imposing, namely, with man
himself, we neglect it entirely. Society will
only put itself on the pathway leading to the
highest physical, mental and ethical excellence
when it recognises the necessity of regulations
in the interests of the whole organism, by
which bad, weak, diseased and socially deficient
members are weeded out, or at least prevented
from reproducing their kind, and the race con-
tinued by the proper mixture of the essentially
fit. Another indication of the present mental
temper on this subject is the manner in which
fatalism as to character is practically taken for
granted in much current literature and current
life. Ibsen is most frequently quoted as the
dramatic exponent of this view. But he is not
alone. When Dodo, in Mr. Benson's popular
246 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
book, justifies all her procedures on the ground
that she is what she was made, and that she was
not consulted in the making,, she speaks as a
type, figuring largely, not only in the creations
of novelists, but in the living world of to-day.
Adam shifted his responsibility on to the
shoulders of his wife. His descendants are
shifting it back on their progenitors, himself
included. It is an easy-going theory, and to
many people simplifies things a good deal.
At this point we may ask what religion has
to say on these subjects. To begin with, it is
to be noted that the Bible is full of the doctrine
of heredity. Whatever view we may take of the
Fall, it holds as a declaration of the unbroken
sequence in cause and effect between the latest
generations and the earliest. The Old Testa-
ment doctrine, that the sins of the fathers are
visited upoi> the children to the third and
fourth generation, is to the same effect. But
the Bible, while admitting and affirming the
solidarity of the race and the large extent to
which a man's destiny is shaped for him before
his birth, is at direct issue with the materialistic
THE SOUL AND HEREDITY. 247
fatalism which would rid the individual of moral
responsibility. In its story of Jacob and Esau,
where two children, bom of the same parents
and brought up in the same tent, exhibit in
their lives the widest divergencies of character,
it reduces to its proper proportions the notion
that we are going to perfect the race and remove
all ethical difficulties by a scientifically selected
parentage. The weight of that story lies in the
fact that it is absolutely true to human experi-
ence. Children differ from their parents con-
tinually in a manner that baffles the mechanical
theory of transmission.
What religion, in fact, contends for is that
the human ego, within a certain limited area
an area conditioned by the facts of heredity
and the existing environment is a fount of
creative power. Surrounded by competing and
often opposing currents of influence, which beat
upon it from both the material and the spiritual
world, it has the faculty of choosing which of
these it shall yield itself to. The immense
changes that come over men as the result of
the differing influences under which from time
248 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
to time they place themselves, show that our
characters are not ready-made and irreversible,
but are every day in the making. The view of
life, in fact, which accords most closely with
Scripture, with the facts of experience, and
with our deepest moral intuitions, is that with
regards it as an inheritance which we are to
deal with as we will. We have not made the
inheritance. It comes down to us from the far
past, carrying with it all manner of burdens,
limitations, mortgages and what not, the result
of the good or bad stewardship of those who
held it before us. For these limitations we are
not answerable. What we are responsible for
is, when once in possession, to do the best with
what there is. That the estate may have been
impoverished by a spendthrift ancestor does not
absolve us from the obligation of personal
thrift. The more does that lie upon us, in
order to improve what is left and hand it on
in improved conditions to the next heir.
And the man who seeks to do this will find in
Christ's Gospel a store of vital energy which
will make him master of his fate.
XXXI.
The Soul and Pleasure.
ON a theme which has furnished matter for
the published moralisings of 3,000 years it
would be the height of impertinence to attempt
to say anything new. We hasten, indeed, at
the outset, to disclaim any such intention.
There is, however, an excuse for discussing
pleasure, arising out of one curious circum-
stance. That is, that while the human race
appears to have been in conference about it
ever since it attained the status, to use Homer's
phrase, of articulate speaking men, nothing, as
yet, seems to have been settled. We cannot
to-day define pleasure, or describe it, or state
its relation to philosophy, or to ethics, or to
theology, without finding ourselves, whatever
our theory may be, in every sentence flatly
contradicted by considerable thinkers of our
own or other times.
250 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
But the topic, though we can promise
nothing towards its settlement, remains an
excellent one to play round and to explore.
Skirting even the smallest portion of its coast
line, we find ourselves at every moment light-
ing upon something fresh. Anon our skiff is
caught in the whirlpool, where two conflicting
intellectual seas meet, while again our eye is
following the receding lines of inlets which run
up into and lose themselves amid the central
mysteries of existence.
Taking one or two of these stray glimpses,
let us look for a moment, to begin with, at the
relation of pleasure to pain. The idea that
pleasure, as we know it, is necessarily connec-
ted with pain, pain being, if not a producing
cause, at any rate a necessary condition of it,
is as old as the earlier Greek philosophy, but
it has been worked a good deal by some modern
thinkers. It serves, for one thing, as an illus-
tration of the Hegelian theory of opposites,
pain being necessary to the idea of pleasure as
that of inner is to outer and upper to under.
It is certain when we examine into our own
THE Soui AND PLEASURE. 251
consciousness that the two are found to be
very close, if not inseparable companions. Tho
pleasure of drinking is hardly realisable apart
from thirst. The joy of victory, whether over
material obstacles or living opponents, seems
strictly proportioned to the difficulties pre-
viously encountered. The enjoyment of a
hungry and belated party on finding themselves
at some hospitable refuge in possession of food,
warmth, and rest, has the previous hardship and
fatigue as one of its most distinctly tasted
ingredients. Wherever the investigation is
carried the results will be similar. The theory
seems to make havoc of some conventional
notions about heaven. On the other hand it
should certainly put us more in love with our
difficulties upon earth.
In the " Philebus " of Plato there is a hint
worth following as to the relation of pleasure
to the intellect and the moral nature. Taking
an illustration from material substances, it is
pointed out how, in mixtures and compounds of
liquids and other things, everything depends on
the proportion with which we combine the in-
252 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
gradients. We spoil our sauce or salad by
adding too much or too little of this or that
element. Modern chemistry, with its law of
combining proportions, could make the illus-
tration much more exact and telling. What
the idea suggests is whether, in order to a
perfectly pleasurable realisation, there may not
be required as scientifically correct a combina-
tion of the elements of intellect, conscience, will,
and passional force as, say, in chemistry, there is
needed the combining of so much oxygen and
so much hydrogen in order to produce water.
The hint might perhaps have been most appro-
priately dealt with by the author of " Natural
Law in the Spiritual World."
The relation of pleasure to intellect raises a
question within the four corners of which the
youthful orators of debating societies might
find ample room to expatiate namely, whether
intellectual development can be at all depended
on as a restraint upon passional excess. Most
people would be inclined to say "yes," but
the holder of the opposite theory would find
abundant material to support his contention.
THE SOUL AND PLEASURE. 258
Commencing with natural history, he might
first of all affirm that man, the most intellec-
tual of the animal kingdom, is the one member
of it who physically indulges himself beyond
and contrary to nature's dictates. Coming to
history proper, he could point to scenes and
periods of the world's highest mental activity,
such as that of Athens under Pericles, Italy
in the Renaissance, and the France of the
Encyclopaedists, as exhibiting the most un-
measured profligacy. Passing from fact to
reason, it would be easy for him to show a score
of ways in which intellectual force may act as
a reinforcement, instead of a restraint to the
passions. Is it libertinism, the mere animal
sensations themselves, that constitutes the
chief force of the temptation? Is it not rather
the play upon them of the intellectual powers,
the memory of past scenes idealised by the
imagination, the suggestions in the vast litera-
ture of the subject of all ages and languages
which scholarship puts within the reach of the
intellectual man ? The intellect may, of course,
be made the most powerful ally of the moral
254 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
principle, but the connection does not by any
means appear to be a necessary one. The
Socratic doctrine which identified them was
assuredly in this instance quite wide of the
mark. Like the mercenary troops of the
Middle Ages, the intellect seems capable of
fighting on either side for a consideration.
There is, indeed, no more impressive argument
for the Christian doctrine of grace than the
one which comes from a consideration of this
kind.
There remains on the subject of pleasure,
however, a question which some perhaps will
think should have come at the beginning of
the discussion, but which, whether standing
at the beginning or end of it, will remain, we
fear, an unsolved problem. What, after all,
is pleasure, and wherein does it consist ? We
study half-a-dozen persons seeking it in
different ways. One is reading a novel, a
second is journeying through noble scenery,
a third is engaged on a problem in chess or
mathematics, a fourth is eating or drinking,
or satisfying some other animal appetite. If
THE SOUL AND PLEASURE. 255
we examine the consciousness of the actual
moment in the case of any one of these, we
shall find that in each case the mind is not
resting in that moment, as though satisfied in
it, but pressing out of it towards something
beyond. What is more, the something beyond
is never reached. The novel reader hurries
on from page to page, as though expecting,
when the plot is fully unravelled and the
story told, that some desirable end will have
been gained. But the end gained is vacuity
a sense of being flung back by the last
sentence upon one's own empty self. In like
manner men rush through the differing phases
of a form of animal sensation, as though the
consummation could furnish the prize. What
they find there is, again, a dead wall, against
which the baffled consciousness helplessly dashes
itself; and so through every other pursuit.
In this view of it life, even at its highest
moments, seems one vast and perpetual
anticipation. It may be none the worse for
that. May we not take this wonderful law
a.s the surest and most plainly written of the
256 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
prophecies concerning man's relation to a
future and higher state of being ? It is when
contemplating this side of things that we feel
the weight of Plato's argument that what the
human soul, shut up in its mortal prison house,
deals with in the present life is only the
outward show of the actual, and that for the
Reality which will satisfy it we must wait. In
that pathetic struggle of Greek philosophy
with the problem of life and its result we
may surely recognise a preparatio evangelica
a Divinely-ordered introduction to the kingdom
and teaching of Jesus.
xxxn.
Spiritual Amalgams.
IT is a hopeful feature in modern religious
thought that, on so many of the problems
which puzzled and hopelessly confused former
generations, we are at last beginning fairly to
see our way. It is quite possible, indeed, that
our generation, decried so often as sceptical
and decadent, may turn out to be, in the view
of posterity, an era of spiritual revelation.
Some new clues are certainly in our hands, and
they promise to act on old world difficulties as
effectively as did Kepler's laws on the puzzle of
planetary motion. It is with one of these clues
that we propose here to deal.
The scientific study of religious history,
characteristic of our time, has revealed what
may be termed a primary law of spiritual
evolution. We here come at last to understand
that the Divine Life, which is the essence of
17
258 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
religion, is never in its human manifestation
found in a pure and absolute form, but ever
in combination with something outside of and
inferior to itself. And this by a kind of
necessity. God as the Absolute can, in the
nature of things, only come into contact with
man by a self limitation. It is the failure to
recognise the character and range of this
limitation that has hitherto covered the region
of theology with pitfalls. The history of
revelation is the history always of an amalgam
of heaven and earth. When viewed in the
light of this generalisation, a hundred of the
difficulties concerning it which before oppressed
the critical intellect fall away.
Let us see how our law works in relation to
Christianity. The Gospel is given us, first,
in the history of Christ, and second, in that
of His Church. In our ideas of both we get
hopelessly astray if we forget our principle of
spiritual amalgam. In Christ, to begin with,
we have a revelation of the Absolute in the
limited. In Him, as the Church all along has
joyfully confessed, we see God, In that life
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 25'J
is the clearest revelation of the Divine
vouchsafed to man. As Fichte has said,
"Jesus of Nazareth is in a wholly peculiar
manner, attributable to no one but Him, the
only begotten and first-born Son of God."
But in its anxiety to affirm this side of the
truth about Christ, theology in the past has
been perpetually overlooking another. Not
content with the facts as it found them, it has
clumsily endeavoured to divinise Christ by a
process of dehumanising Him. It has put Him
out of historical relation, and clothed Him with
a pseudo omnipotence and omniscience. A
good specimen of its method here is the com-
mentary of Ephrem Syrus on Christ's expressed
ignorance of the future : " Christ, though He
knew the moment of His second advent, yet,
that they might not ask Him any more about
it, said, ' I know it not.' ' And even with pro-
minent modern teachers it has been quite a
favourite point to argue Christ's absolute and
miraculous independence of the prepossessions
and ideas of His generation. All this rests
both on false history and false philosophy. As
260 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
to the history, any candid reader cannot help
seeing that Jesus, so far from being indepen-
dent of His time and people, was full of the
spirit of both. His whole thought and language
were coloured by the Messianic and apocalyptic
Judaism in which He had been brought up.
And a true philosophy shows us that unless a
complete departure was to be made from the
whole Divine education of humanity, this was
the only thing that could happen. All God's
revelations to man are through the human. If
God was to come to man in a man, it must be
at some one time and through some one race.
The Divine Life must amalgamate itself with
the conditions of that time and race. It must
think through its thought, and drop its seed of
eternity into the soil of its specific racial aspira-
tions. And that is exactly what we have in
the Christ of the New Testament. Completely
a child of His time, He teaches in its thought
forms, and reveals in its human conditions, a
Truth and a Life that are beyond time.
This principle of spiritual amalgam has an
equally signal illustration in the history of the
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 261
Church, and half the blunders of theology have
come from the failure to recognise it. The
Catholic idea that the Church in its creeds is in
possession of a Divinely revealed, and therefore
absolute, authoritative, and unchangeable pre-
sentation of Christian truths, could never have
gained vogue had the law we are discussing
been earlier understood. What we see in
Church history is the Divine element of Chris-
tianity continually allying itself, as by a pro-
cess of chemical attraction, with the different
intellectual ideas of the varying races and ages
through which its stream flowed. Thus in the
first age Christian belief was Judaic and
Messianic. The early believers had in them
the same soul of the Gospel that we have, but
the body which clothed it was a congeries of
apocalyptic ideas which we could not enter into
if we tried our hardest. Later we have this
same essence encountering, on its intellectual
side, the world of Greek philosophy, and form-
in^ a new amalgam, the result of which appears
in the so-called Catholic creeds. It is one of
the strangest things to find people looking to
STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
these creeds as the very palladium of Chris-
tianity when, as a matter of fact, their form
.and a good deal of their substance is not
Christian at all, but pagan. The terms used in
them, their vocabulary of essence, substance,
hypostasis, and so on have nothing to do with
Galilee. They were forged in Greek workshops,
They had Plato and Aristotle to their father
and not Christ.
It would be easy to multiply 'Jiese examples
and to show how, from the beginning of the
Gospel until now, the same process has been
going on. In every successive age its Divine
principle has been humbling itself to, and
making what it could of, the human tenement
prepared for it. And always, we may observe,
the movement is towards a better body, to-
wards a more adequate expression of itself.
When one form has worn itself out it is cast
off or remodelled. The sixteenth century saw
the process on a great scale, but the Protest-
antism then created was far from a finality.
The Bibliolatry on which, in its struggle with
Roman Church authority, it fell back, and
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 2G'J
which in the seventeenth century culmin-
ated in the monstrous doctrine of Quenstedt
that every line, word, and syllable of the
Scriptures was directly dictated by the Spirit,
the writers being passive instruments, a
doctrine which, it has been wittily said,
makes Balaam's ass the fittest of all the
chosen media of revelation, was a bodily
form which the ever-growing spirit has
already burst through and laid aside. Essen-
tial Christianity, which may be denned as
the revelation of the true relation between
man and God and man and man, with the
power to create it, is again seeking new gar-
ments of thought, speech, and action. It is
combining to-day with political economy and
social science. Are we told that these are
foreign to the Gospel? They are assuredly
not more foreign than the philosophies which
an Athanasius and an Augustine brought into
the Church. And the amalgam they will
produce will, we predict, be a good deal
more Christian than the Athanasian Creed.
But this is only one side of the topic. \Vlmt
264 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
we set out mainly to deal with, and which must
ROW be left to a few concluding sentences,
is its personal and individual aspect. The
spiritual amalgams which take place in our
own nature are as interesting as those seen
on the broader scale of history. The first
result of these processes is that there are as
many Christianities as there are Christians.
For with each man the seed drops into the
special soil of his education, his temperament,
capacity, and primitive instincts, and the result
is always something unique and separate.
There is in every one a twofold reaction of
Christianity upon his original character, and
of his original character upon Christianity. In
the endlessly varying thought- worlds thus pro-
duced Nature provides against the hide-bound
stupidity which seeks, in the name of religion,
to hammer all skulls into one shape. She
allows men to repeat the same formularies, but
takes care they none of them mean the same
things.
So far we have spoken of spiritual amalgams
entirely from one point of view. We ha,va
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 265
studied the subject from above downwards.
The thought throughout has been that of the
Divine combining with what is inferior and
human. But there is another and beautiful
side of the topic which, in closing, we would
fain leave in the minds of our readers. The
action of the Christian spirit upon a nature
that honestly receives it will work out in the
endeavour, on its side, to link every function
of the lower life with the higher and heavenly.
The animal part of him will, under this influ-
ence, never be left to act alone. Eating and
drinking are brought under spiritual law, made
occasions for gracious courtesies, at times be-
come lifted to the height of a sacrament.
Sexual desire, which, left to itself, turns men
into swine like Ulysses* companions, in this
higher union is the source of endless chivalries.
o
In a word, a man keeps to the height of his
true self only by virtue of that spiritual amal-
gam which we term the soul's union with God.
XXXIII.
On Being Two- Faced.
THE term two-faced is heard not infrequently
at tea-tables and other resorts where reputa-
tions are discussed. As ordinarily understood,
it represents the reverse of a compliment. The
verdict it carries, though not exactly in the
same category with that of being a drunkard or
a thief, is nevertheless one of the last which a
self-respecting person would care to have pro-
nounced against himself. The offence implied
does not land a man in prison, but, if proved, it
sends him often to the immediate neighbour-
hood of Coventry. And the general feeling is
that the punishment is just. But what is it to
be two-faced ? The severity of the condemna-
tion attached to the charge renders it the more
important that it should never be brought un-
justly. As a matter of fact there are few terms
of social reprobation used more ignorantly or
ON BEING TWO-FACED. 267
more recklessly. The man who flings it at his
neighbour does so, in many cases, simply be-
cause he has failed to understand a nature of
wider compass than his own, or the exigency of
circumstances of which he has no experience.
Nowhere perhaps in that great region of the
unwritten social code, whose judgments make so
much of our happiness and our misery, is the
need of discrimination greater or the average
supply of it less.
It is, for instance, a by no means uncommon
occurrence for a man to be called two-faced
when, as a matter of fact, he has simply
endeavoured to be polite. Is it our duty always
to tell people exactly what we think of them ?
There are, it is true, some distinguished ex-
amples of doing so. Archbishop Bancroft, on a
certain occasion, described his opponents as
"d d liars." Perhaps this interpretation of
the line which his fellow nonjuring prelate Kt-n
had just been writing in the morning hymn,
In all thy converse be sincere,
compelled him to this, no doubt, rigidly accurate
268 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
transcript of his feeling. But it certainly
sounds odd from an Archbishop of Canterbury,
There are abundant precedents, too, for roundly
calling a man a fool when you think him one,
Robert Hall, on being taxed by a young
preacher with using the obnoxious expression
about him, replied, "Did I say that? Well,
sir, I thought it." And Swift, after a sojourn
in Leicester, is reported as taking occasion,
shortly after, to publicly express his opinion of
the inhabitants as " a parcel of wretched fools."
It is not given to everybody, however, to think
aloud in this fashion, and it is quite as well for
the peace of society that the general rule is the
i other way. But the man who would be ashamed
! to hurt the feelings of an intellectual or moral
inferior by a wounding word has no business to
be charged with insincerity if, afterwards, and
when an occasion requires it, he gives his actual
\ opinion. The charge will nevertheless very
often be made. Where, in a case of this sort,
it \7ould really lie is when we offer compliments
and profess attachments which we know are not
real. There is an enormous amount of social
ON BEING TWO-FACED. 269
sinning of this kind which it behoves decent
people to repent of and renounce. Our good
opinion, if it is to be of value to others, should
never be paid over till it has been earned.
Uttered lavishly, and from the mere desire to
please, it becomes of no worth to others, while
it leaves the stain of untruth upon ourselves.
Men not infrequently come under the charge
of being two-faced as the result simply of the
richness and variety of their endowments.
They are possessed of faculties which people
of narrower range are unable to recognise as
compatible with what they call "a consistent
character." A man like the late Bishop
Wilberforce, prodigally opulent of nature,
having contact with life at a thousand points,
and who would be discussing on the same day,
with different individuals, and with a seemingly
equal enthusiasm, sport, or art, or politics, or
experimental religion, was certain in some
circles to come under a charge of this sort. It
was absurdly unjust. A man may be myriad-
sided, yet perfectly sincere. With such, while
the internal economy has a multitude of
270 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
departments, unity is preserved by a Head
Office whose word is law in them. all.
History furnishes us with characters, how-
ever, which, in this matter of singlenes'* of
mind or its reverse, are not quite so easy of
decipherment. What, for instance, are we to
say of a Beiivenuto Cellini, .expressing himself
on one page of his journal in terms of religious
esctasy, and in another detailing with gusto the
murder of an enemy, or the enjoyment of dis-
gusting orgies? What of our own Sir John
Hawkins, stealing slaves from Africa to carry
for sale to the Spanish plantations, and
saying of his escape from a storm while on this
precious business, " but God did not suffer his
elect to perish " ? It would be wrong to call
this insincerity in either the Catholic or the
Puritan. Cellini is as whole-hearted in his
-eligion as in his murders. The examples are
not of two-facedness so much as of a condition
of society in which the proper relation of ethics
to religion was not recognised. Far removed
as is such conduct from our own moral ideals
it is, in relation to the point we are discuss-
ON BEING TWO-FACED. 271
ing, not in the same category with that of the
French priests who, at the time of the Revolu-
tion, came forward and declared they had all
along been professing a belief which they
inwardly derided. Our Benvenuto was at worst
an honest sort of scoundrel, and that is more
I
than could be said of these Gallican renegades.
The mention of belief brings us to a side of
our topic which we can do no more here than
barely hint at its relation to religious teach-
ing and teachers. The man in the street is
often in these days heard to object to the
pulpit, that it does not say all it thinks. The
parson, he avers, in matters of orthodoxy and
heterodoxy, holds one language to the people
and another to his intimates over a cigar after
dinner. This, he says, is being two-faced. It
may, or may not be. The Catholic doctrine cf
reserve in religious teaching appeals, up to a
certain point, to common sense. No respon-
sible teacher thinks it his duty to tell his pupils
all he knows. Parents do not with their cliil-
dren. Christ held one language to the populace
and another to the disciples. And these, too,
272 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
were told that He had many things to say
which they could not at present bear. The
religious teacher of to-day has to work by the
same law. His function is not simply to pro-
claim facts but to help, as far as he can, a num-
ber of moral natures in various circumstances
and stages of growth. His position makes him, in
an important sense, a mediator between the old
and the new. A large part of his work is to
regulate and soften the impact of new and un-
accustomed truths upon untrained minds ; to
canalise, as it were, the rush of fresh ideas and
prevent them from becoming a destroying flood.
The man who fails to recognise all this, who
cannot see the proportion of things, who takes
no pains to secure that the weaker members of
the flock have always solid footing under their
feet, is no true spiritual guide.
It has to be remembered, however, that this
doctrine of reserve has its limits. The true
teacher will rightly discuss the " how " and the
" when " for stating what to some are new or
unwelcome truths. But, when he has himself
found these truths, he is bound to be loyal to
Oar BEINQ TWO-FACED. 273
them. To declare a doctrine which he believes
to be false, or to permanently hide the one he
holds to be true, is no business for an honest
man. We may disagree entirely with the
grounds which led Kenan to renounce orthodox
Christianity. But when he had reached per-
sonal conviction on this point he did the only
thing possible to honour in giving up the
priesthood. Luther's " Ich kann nicht anders "
is the cry of every true soul at such crises. The
impulse which comes upon such to declare, as
by a Divine necessity, and in scorn of conse-
quence, the things they see and feel to be true
are the world's guarantee of progress from
darkness to light.
is
xxxrv.
The Soul in Preaching.
IN the outside world the progress of civilisa-
tion has been largely a process of discovering
sources of power which previously had lain
concealed from human attention. Coiled one
within another lie Nature's subtle forces, by
successively tapping which man indefinitely
extends his empire. He has supplemented
muscular force by steam, and steam by elec-
tricity, and may be on the way to harnessing
yet mightier energies to his car. The question
arises whether there may not be anything
analogous to this order of things in the life
sphere of the Church; whether the Christian
worker of every order, but the Christian
preacher especially, may not find in the inner
world of his* own nature a similar series of
powers, some nearer the surface others deeper
down, the discovery and right use of which may
THE SOUL IN PREACHING. 275
augment enormously the general output of his
influence.
In such a study the outermost circle of
energy is, of course, the physical, the intimate
relation of which to spiritual result is even yet
far from being fully appreciated. It is worth
remembering that the most soul-moving utter-
ance of a Whitefield or a Fenelon would have
had its effects immediately annihilated by the
introduction of a little carbonic acid gas to the
room where they were speaking. Nature will,
in fact, never permit us to overlook the connec-
tion of the physical with the psychical. Physi-
cal energy is not spiritual energy, any more
than grass is beef ; but there will not be one
without the other. The point is vital both for
those preparing for the pulpit and for those
actually engaged in its work. The college
authorities who do not secure a bodily as well
as a mental training for their students, and the
preachers who in their daily habits as to \vuii: .
rest, exercise and sleep, deliberately break the
laws of health, are openly sinning against the
Church by putting in their own and in its waj
276 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
a direct obstacle to the evolution of spiritual
power.
Immediately beneath the physical comes the
sphere of purely intellectual force, the import-
ance of which as a pulpit equipment is now so
universally recognised that it would be super-
fluous to dwell largely upon it. Suffice it to
say that a very cursory examination of history
reveals the fact that the men who have written
their names most broadly on its page as religi-
ous powers whether an Augustine in one age,
a Luther in another, or a Wesley in a third
have been characters in whom a profound
mystic apprehension of the spiritual world has
been united with a disciplined brain, absorbent
of the best learning of the time. St. Paul, the
most intellectual of the Apostles, is the one
whose influence survives. The people who
quote his saying, "that the wisdom of this
world is foolishness with G-od," as an argument
for unlearned enthusiasm in the pulpit, forget
that the expression by one of the greatest
minds of his own or any age of his own
intellectual humility is one thing, and the easy
THE SOUL IN PREACHING. 277
self-confidence which elevates mental vacuity
into a transcendental grace another and very
different thing. In the Church as much as out-
side it knowledge is power, and, other things
being equal, leadership will inevitably go to
the pulpit which knows most and sees
furthest.
Of these " other things " there remain, how-
ever, to be noted two of such vital importance
that their absence makes even the most
brilliant mental capacity of little avail. Of the
concentric circles of force which we are describ-
ing these two stand still nearer to the centre.
The first of them is the thing so difficult to
define, but of potency so immense, which we
call character. A good illustration of what we
mean is afforded by Froude's remark about the
relative influence of Whately and of John
Henry Newman when they were contemporaries
in the Oriel Common Eoom. Whately, he
says, required to bring to their minds the
clearest intellectual demonstration before he
could lead them, whereas they were moved by
anything Newman said from the mere fact that
278 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
it was lie who said it. It is the possession of
this precise power of producing a distinct
moral and spiritual effect by the saying of
things which, in the lips of another, would be
without point or significance, that makes a true
pulpit a force so entirely unique. The Abbe
Vianney producing an indescribable emotion
amongst a cultured audience by the simple
words, " I want you, my dear children, to love
God. He is so good," represents a problem in
the sphere of influence which every preacher
may well study. Power of this kind gathers
about the utterances of men who are known to
be of blameless character, of absolute honesty
of speech and act,, who dwell in the region of
realities, who would sacrifice their dearest
interests for the cause of truth, and who spare
not themselves in the service of their God and
of their fellow. A Church rich in such men
might try a fall with any power on earth, and
not be anxious about the result.
This last species of influence fades by an
almost unrecognisable gradation into another,
still more difficult to speak of, but which may
THE SOUL IN PREACIMV:. 27'.'
fairly claim to be the most central of all. We
mean that arising from the Christian preacher's
direct relation to the spiritual world. The
apostolic terminology furnishes us with its pre-
cise description when it speaks of a preaching
" in demonstration of the spirit and of power."
There has been an enormous amount of mys-
tical writing and speaking on the question of
how to secure this suggested reinforcement of
one's own faculty by a power coming to it from
without. Men have worked themselves into a
frenzy of excitement to obtain what they call
"a baptism of the spirit." There is surely
room for some clearer thinking on this subject.
In the scientific world men do not talk of
getting by a merely emotional process such a
thing as, say, "a baptism of electricity." If
they want to clothe themselves with any force
outside themselves, they do so by first studying
the laws of that force, obeying them, and
organically relating themselves to them. And
in this way and in no other will men, in the
sphere of religious work and testimony., secure
that mighty augmentation of power which the
STUDIES otf THE SOUL.
New Testament speaks of as coming directly
from the spiritual sphere. It will simply be by
studying and obeying the laws of that spiritual
realm, and by organically relating oneself to
them. Men live and work at present largely in
the outer circles of power, obtaining results
which accord with this position. In proportion
as by purer living and higher thinking, and by
a more exact obedience to what of truth and
right they know they come into closer relation
with the innermost spheres will their power
upon both Church and world augment by leaps
and bounds.
XXXV.
The Soul's Holidays.
THE annual summer holiday may be said to
have definitely established itself as an integral
part of modern life. To leave one's ordinary
pursuits and one's ordinary haunts for a certain
number of weeks in August or September has,
with a vast mass of the toiling community,
become as fixed a habit as that of breakfasting
or of wearing clothes. With these classes the
year has two great divisions : the eleven months
more or less of "the daily grind," and the
much-cherished remaining fraction devoted to
seaside, moor, or mountain. The arrangement,
on the whole, works fairly well, and answers in
a rough and ready fashion to a felt physical and
mental need. We are most of us in harness.
It may be all very well for a Thoreau to recom-
mend us to "as long as possible live uncom-
mitted ; it makes little difference whether you
282 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
are committed to a farm or a county gaol."
Unfortunately, we are not all Concord philoso-
phers, and the mass of us find the being " com-
mitted to a farm," or its equivalent, the only
apparent means of escaping the other, and to
most of us distinctly less desirable, alternative.
But the annual break from the harness finds us
quite ready for it when it comes, and the year's
total output of activity is, in the vast majority
of cases, the better, in respect both of quantity
and quality, for that brief release.
It is, however, worth while to point out that
holidays may very easily be overrated in their
relation either to the enjoyment or the general
furtherance of life. It would indeed be a pes-
simistic view which should regard the main
body of the year's experiences as a dull, un-
relieved mass, through which the thin streak of
vacation time shone as the only line of light.
Nature, happily, has taken care that we shall
not fall into that mistake. In her constitution,
both of the human mind and of external cir-
cumstance, she has provided a holiday system
of her own, which, while it takes the conven-
THE SOTTI/S HOLIDAYS. 283
tional one into account, is by no means depen-
dent on it. The soul has its holidays, and the
times of them have no necessary relation to
August or September.
The foremost association of a holiday is that
of pleasure. But what, in the final analysis,
is pleasure ? Plato saw in pleasure an escape
from pain, the satisfaction of a want, the want
itself being pain. Aristotle regards pleasure as
the concomitant or expression of perfect
energy, and Kant comes very near to this in
defining it as the feeling of the furtherance of
life. Whatever view of the matter we may
take, one result of the analysis will be the dis-
covery that the moments of our soul's keenest
satisfaction, its highest sense of " la joie de
vivre" belong to its periods of toil, its times
of stress and strain, rather than to those of
careless ease. It is in the putting forth
of its whole self that consciousness satisfies
its own deepest want. "VVe feel most free
when we are most alive, and we are most alive
in the positions which call our every faculty
into play. Every healthy nature knows this,
284 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
and consents to rest only that it may toil the
more.
When we come from principles to the actual
experience of life, it is an exhilarating study to
note the gloriously free way in which the soul
takes its holidays. It scorns conventions and
attires itself for highest festivities under cir-
cumstances which set the calculations of
Humdrum at defiance. One of the last places
in the world to be regarded as a holiday resort
was surely the noisome den at Bedford in which
Bunyan was confined. But there was rarest
holiday-making within. Not in king's palace,
nor amid the noblest scenery of our isles, was
there such exaltation of soul, such vision of
beauty, such sense of life and freedom as filled
the soul of the lonely prisoner as there rose
before him in his dungeon the successive scenes
of that great conception which was to make
him immortal. To stand on the Delectable
Mountains was better than to climb the
Jungfrau. Greatheart, Christian and Faithful
formed finer society than the wits of the coffee-
houses. To have looked through the gates of
THE SOUL'S HOLIDAYS. 285
the New Jerusalem made cheap the splendours
of Paris or Borne.
It is doubtful whether in the present day we
have anybody who could take holiday in prison
in such a fashion as that. The vision faculty
is being crushed out under the pressure of
materialism. We feel the bitter earnest of
Hazlitt's jest : " In the days of Jacob there was
a ladder between heaven and earth, but now
the heavens have gone further off and are
become astronomical." Spite, however, of
changed conceptions of the universe and their
reaction on theology, it remains that for the
soul the surest way to freedom and to holiday
exultance is through religion. We have become
doubtful of many things, but it is not a matter
of doubt that faith and love can create a para-
dise. It is not legend, but sober history, which
Lecky is giving us when he says : " There has
probably never existed upon earth a community
whose members were bound to one another by a
deeper or purer affection than the Christians
in the days of the persecution." Persecution
was no more intrinsically pleasant in those days
28(5 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
fclian now, but amid that circle of hunted people
there was, we may depend upon it, more
pleasure than is found in grouse shooting.
They had found the secret of loving, and where
love is, the soul ever makes holiday. To this
even the sceptical and sad-hearted Amiel bears
witness when he says : " Celui qui ne demande
a la vie que 1'amelioration de son etre, que le
perfectionnement moral dans le sens du con-
tentement interieur et de la soumission
religieuse, est moins expose que personne a
manquer la vie."
It would be easy to multiply examples of the
way in which Nature gives holiday times to the
soul under the strangest outward conditions.
Thackeray is exactly true to life when, in
"Esmond," he sketches a poor merchant
trembling on the edge of bankruptcy who has
sleepless nights, in which he thinks of suicide,
but who, when the crash has come and he has
lost all, finds he can now sleep comfortably,
After desperate strivings to keep his foothold,
he has finally slipped and rolled to the bottom,
to find that it is not such a bad place after all.
THE SOUL'S HOLIDAYS. 287
The experience is typical and should be en-
couraging. When we come back from vacation
time to resume the familiar task awaiting us, it
is refreshing to think that in the midst of the
most pressing urgencies and of circumstances
the least promising to which it may introduce
us, there are reserved for us there holiday
seasons which the soul will register as the
of ail.
XXXVI.
When the Soul Lets Go.
THE process of letting-go is sometimes a
hazardous one, calling for all the nerve and
judgment there may be on hand. To com-
mit oneself to a glissade in the High Alps
without being quite sure what is at the
farther end, or to drop from the end of
a rope slung over a vessel's side to a
boat riding below on a high-running sea,
with the consciousness that if you miss
the elect moment the said boat will be
yards away, and you amongst the fishes,
are experiences in this line which, when
gone through for the first time, leave a
mark in the memory. People who have
lived, in any wide sense of the word, are
sure sooner or later to come upon dead
drops of faith of this kind. Moments arrive
when we have to leave the known for tha
WHEN THE SOUL LETS Go. 289
unknown, to commit ourselves to an untried
principle, to make our fate depend upon the
action of a law which we have hitherto taken
on hearsay.
Letting-go is a business both of the ex-
terior and the interior of life, and in both
forms an essential feature of human progress.
History is made by the men who accomplish
it successfully. When the world is ready
for a fresh departure, its struggling con-
sciousness becomes incarnate in some one
individual, who drops away from the old
moorings, carrying its fortunes in his hands.
The act, whenever and on whatever scale
accomplished, offers a psychological moment
which one would like to know more about.
It is a pity the men who perform it have
been, many of them, so reticent. The pioneer
who first trusted himself to the sea and the
man who swallowed the first oyster would
have made splendid " copy " if only they
had thought of getting themselves inter-
viewed. M. Andre*e, if he comes back in his
balloon from the Pole, will, no doubt, bo
19
200 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
sufficiently talked about, but the man who
really " let-go " in that region of things is
forgotten. Not one in a thousand remembers
the name of Pilatre des Rosiers. Yet when
this man seated himself in the newly-invented
Montgolfier and, first of mortals to make the
venture, rose from the solid earth to the
immeasurable spaces of the upper air, he
opened a fresh chapter in the history of
he race. In him, man was taking posses-
sion of a new kingdom, destined some
day to be as familiar to him as to the
birds.
Letting-go is a process which people under-
go quite apart, often, from their own choice
It is one to which, for their good, Nature is
perpetually compelling her unwilling children.
We have known a youth take his first header
under a threat, on refusal, of being pitched
neck and crop into the stream by his com-
panions. The experience could hardly be
called agreeable, but it made him a swimmer.
On the broader scale this is continually hap-
pening. The Unseen Power behind history
WHEN THE SOUL LETS Go. 291
forces man time and again to the edge of the
solid ground, compelling him to the leap
which threatens destruction, and which he
takes cursing his fate. He is astonished
afterwards to find how he has fallen on his
feet. Wholly harsh and unrelenting seemed
the pressure of circumstance which, in 1620,
pushed the Pilgrims of the Mayflower into
that uncomfortable bark and to that most
-bodeful voyage. Could they have seen the
issues their hearts had been lighter.
To let-go successfully requires some condi-
tions. The time must be ripe, and the prin-
ciple to which we commit ourselves trust-
worthy. Birds fly, but a young one who
struggles out of the nest too soon will fall
and get killed. A man may let-go only to
be smashed into bits at the precipice bottom.
When we are not sure of our parachute it is
much better to stop in the balloon. In the
region of social and spiritual, as well as of
material experiments, the way is marked by
lettings-go which were catastrophes, as well
.as by those which were successes. The gains
292 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
come when men strike upon some new law
the defeats when they try to ignore or to get
rid of an old one. Thoreau's attempt to
desocialise himself was brave, and the record
of his experiences makes delightful reading.
But in the name of being natural it was
really an attack on nature, and we know
the result. The rebel who had rhapsodised
on independence ended by quietly coming back
to his fellows. Founder's phalanstery system,,
built on the opposite theory, that one could
so combine the play of the unrestricted human
passions as to produce a happy and progres-
sive society, was equally a kicking against some
ascertained moral and spiritual laws, and paid
the penalty of all such recalcitrance.
It is in the sphere of the inner and spiritual
life that the principle of letting-go receives
some of its most momentous applications. As
in other departments, so here we find the
human story one first of crawling on all
fours, then of endeavours after the upright
position, assisted by clutches at whatever
offers itself as a support, until at last the
WHEN THE SOUL LETS Go. 293
pupil stands and walks alone. In no other
direction, however, is there such a tendency
to reversion. Nowhere so much as here do
men, after learning the use of their feet, so
easily get frightened back into the crawling
posture. Centuries before the Christian era
it was given to an inspired Jew to tell hia
contemporaries what Matthew Arnold retold
to our ears, that true religion is essentially
conduct. But Micah's magnificent deliverance,
" What doth the Lord require of thee but to
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God," represented a stage
in the use, in religion, of one's own limbs,
which his countrymen at large were long
ieagues away from. Christ found the Jewish
nation in His day still going on crutches, and
the habit, spite of His own life and teaching,
in the religious world yet remains the fashion.
A Paul may, with his doctrine of faith, knock
away the loved implements from under Gala-
tian armpits, but as soon as his back is turned
the old hobbling recommences.
To-day, over three-fourths of Christendom,
294 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
the religion which saves is held to consist
primarily in submission to Church authority
and the acceptance of old-world creeds. The
crutch ecclesiastical is still de rigueur. To*
walk without it is considered as socially
indecent. The nullius addictus jurare in verba
magistri habit is shocking impertinence. Spite,.
however, of clerical reactions and all other
appearances to the contrary, men will in the
end get to their feet in these matters, and the
crutch be finally relegated to the museum
of antiquities. The religion which consists
simply in heart-whole loyalty to truth and
to the highest standard of living is already
in sight. The time will come when it is in
full possession.
xxxvii.
The Soul and Death.
DEATH is at once the most familiar and the
most unfamiliar of human facts. We are all
agreed that we must die, but the world has
been quarrelling from the very beginning as
to what dying really means. Whole races
who have lived and passed away in the belief
that death meant extinction have had for
next-door neighbours peoples entirely filled
with the thought of an existence beyond.
Warburton's "Divine Legation" was based
on the supposition that the Israelites under
Moses had no idea of a future life. But long
before the Exodus, some six thousand years
ago in fact, their neighbours the Egyptians,
as their "Book of the Dead" testifies, were
basing their whole theory of life on the con-
ception of a world to come. In the near East
we listen to an Omar Khayyam expressing in
296 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
exquisite but infinitely mournful strains his
creed that the destiny of a man is to taste one
draught of life's waters on the way to annihila-
tion, and that
One thing is certain and the rest is lies,
The flower that once is blown for ever dies ;
while further East and furthur back in time
the Indian Bhagavad Gita is replying thus to
the doctrine of extinction :
These bodies that enclose the everlasting soul
inscrutable
Immortal, have an end; but he who thinks the soul
can be destroyed,
And he who deems it a destroyer, are alike mis-
taken; it
Kills not and is not killed ; it is not born nor doth
it ever die.
Interesting, however, and, in a way, impor-
tant as are these past ideas, our chief concern
here is with the opinion of to-day, and, above
all, with the grounds of it. The views on this
subject of a not inconsiderable portion of
modern society are, it must be said, frankly
negative. Numbers of cultivated men in both
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 297
hemispheres hold, in their secret mind, that
this life is all, or at least that the odds are
enormously against there being any other. It
is easy to see how this has come about. The
decline in authority of the traditional theology
has left the mind open to the tremendous
assault of the senses, and the average man
sees nothing to rebut it. The evidence of
appearances looks so entirely unanswerable.
The mind, we see, grows with the growth of
the body, matures as the body matures, decays
as the body decays ; why should we not, then,
say it dies when the body dies ? Life gives ue
overwhelming evidence of the dependence of
each of the two partners on the other. An
injury to the brain will produce an entire
change in the mental and moral life of the
subject of it. What, then, more reasonable
than to suppose that if the brain is not merely
injured, but destroyed, the inner consciousness
will be destroyed also? The extent to which
men have succumbed to this argument is patent
in the whole literature of modern Europe. A
typical illustration of the tone it has produced,
298 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
more, perhaps, on the Continent than here, is
in the finish of one of Pierre Loti's stories, in
which he describes the end of his hero, a
French soldier in Algeria. Cut off from his
comrades, he is surrounded by Arabs, who
thrust their spears into him, and leave him
to die alone. With a minute and terrible
realism we have described for us the soldier's
every successive sensation on his way to death.
There come to him pictures of home, memories
of old friends, frenzies of thirst and fever, a
roaring in the ears, flashings and whirlings in
the eyes of light and colour, and then for end
a body left to be gnawed by vultures, and a
naked skull rolled over and over by the winds
of the desert.
There are, with most of us, moods when a
presentation of this kind, taken with our own
observations in the spheres of disease and of
mortality, have an almost overwhelming effect.
This particular mood has, indeed, lain heavily
upon Europe during more than a generation.
But there are signs that it is passing away.
And the curious thing is that the cure is
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 299
coming from the very quarter out of which
came the disease. For it is the science, the
material observation, which appeared at first
to rivet on man the chains of death, that is
now forging the instruments of his deliverance.
First of all, it has shown us the fallacy of
appearances. The premises on which the
old materialistic arguments were based are
being shattered by more extended observation.
Matter, the partner of spirit, is showing in
such entirely new lights as to make us recast
all our conceptions about it. Whatever death
does to spirit it does not destroy matter. It
changes it, that is all. And if all death can
do to one, and the inferior partner in the
human compact, is to alter its form, what
natural or logical ground, men are beginning
to ask, is there for supposing that it can do
more with its associate, the spirit ? As to the
argument arising from the deterioration of
mental powers consequent on physical decay,
that need frighten us no more than it fright-
ened Socrates. It amounts only to this, that
the mind as player is hampered by a worn-out
300 STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
instrument. To say that a Beethoven cannot
extract perfect music from a used-up piano ia
surely not to prove that our Beethoven will never
get another piano. On this whole side of the
question it is certainly not going too far to
say that modern science, in demonstrating the
continuity of force, has made it more difficult
than ever to believe that the highest kind of
force as yet manifested on this planet, namely,
that of the human spirit, should be the one
exception to the law. If we can turn heat into
motion, and motion into electricity, and elec-
tricity into light, but can by no process reduce
them to nothingness, what is there in the
nature of things, or in human experience, to
lead us to the conclusion that character or
soul-force will meet with a worse fate? The
broad hint of science here is that, like its mate
the body, the spirit may be transmuted but will
not be destroyed.
It is at first startling, but afterwards in-
finitely reassuring, to learn that in the scheme
of evolution death is not a necessity, but simply
one of Nature's devices for the furtherance of
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 30)
life. The investigations of a Maupas and a
Weismann yield as a result that the lowest
organisms are practically immortal. It was
in the endeavour after a higher and more
complicated structure that death entered.
What is more, in his study of the germ-
plasm, which, as distinguished from the cells
which are perishable, persists and is potentially
immortal, Weismann maintains that under
favourable conditions it seems capable of
surrounding itself with a new body. We-
are only at the beginning of these studies,
but the perspective they open is immense.
They show us life, instead of being lorded
over by death, pressing it into its service to
help build up its structures and complete its
developments. Instead of being the dread
tyrant before which all must bow, death is-
shown to be life's day labourer, whose entrance
on the scene can be discerned, and whose
departure, when his work is done, may be
predicted.
It may be said that what science here offers
does not, after all, amount to much. It would
-302 STUDIES OP THE SOUL.
not if it stood alone. But it comes as reinforce-
ment to an immense and growing body of con-
siderations arising from another source. Man's
strongest hope for immortality rests, after all,
upon his moral and spiritual intuitions, and
upon his moral and spiritual history. He dwells
in a visible universe which he can prove has
come out of an unseen one, to which it will
eventually return. He has already multiform
relations with that Unseen, and is continually
enlarging them. The highest thinkers every-
where recognise the spirit world as the most real
and the most mighty. Spirit everywhere per-
vades matter and everywhere rules it. And
this permanent force, amid a world of change,
man realises as abiding not only in the
Universe on which he looks, but in his own
deepest self. The Eternal within him claims
kinship with the Eternal without him. His de-
sires here are facts in the making. His yearn-
ing for immortality is the unborn in him groping
lor the light to which it is destined : it is the
inland stream calling, as it runs, to the ocean
whence it came and towards which it hastes.
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 803
It may be that man, this side death, will
never reach its ultimate secret, or gain physical
demonstration of what is beyond. In this very
lack, this withholding, of what he thirsts for
may, however, lie the very demonstration itself,
though its appeal be to another sense. For
the message of the New Testament, which,
when all is said, remains the highest authority
on this subject, is that man's preparation for
his spiritual inheritance is to be, right through,
by the education of faith. That the landscape
is darkened around him, his prospect barred by
impenetrable veils, his straining ear met by the
appalling silence, may have this for the reason
that in no other way than by " believing
where we cannot prove" could the soul gain
that special development which is needed for
its highest energy and for its full preparation
for the realm beyond.
LONDOHt
W. EPEAIOHT AND SONS,
PRESS OPINIONS.
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and, as we hold, of the to-morrow that comes next."
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an insight of extraordinary range and freshness, a breadth
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21
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