' LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
^
SELECTED PROSE WORKS OF SHELLEY
SELECTED PROSE WORKS OF SHELLEY
WITH FOREWORD BY
HENRY S. SALT
[issued for the rationalist press ASSOCIATION', LIMITED
London :
WATTS & CO.
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C 1915
FOREWORD
In any selection that may be made from the prose works of Shelley with the object of illustrating the development of his thought, a marked inequality will be found in the value, literary and intellectual, of the essays included in the book ; thus, in the case of the present volume, the first thing that will strike the reader's notice is the disparity between such a juvenile effort as "The Necessity of Atheism " and so finished and stately a piece of writing as "A Defence of Poetry." A few years, in a life such as Shelley's, represent a great advance.
One feature, however, all the prose essays have in common ; they are valuable as throwing light, as fur- nishing an autheiitic commentary, on the meaning of the poems. For Shelley's poetry — whatever opinion, real or pretended, Matthew Arnold may have expressed to the contrary — is of much more importance than his prose, as being the supreme vehicle of his thought ; and it is certain that not only the beauty of his verse, but the significance of the message embodied in it, will be more fully realised as time goes on. For this reason the prose writings also will be studied with increasing
966
viii FOREWORD
Refutation of Deism," published in 1814, was that there is no middle course between accepting revealed religion and disbelieving in the existence of a deity — another way of stating the necessity of atheism.
Shelley resembled Blake in the contrast of feeling with which he regarded the Christian religion and its founder. For the human character of Christ he could feel the deepest veneration, as may be seen not only from the *' Essay on Christianity," but from the "Letter to Lord Ellenborough " (1812), and also from the notes to "Hellas " and passages in that poem and in " Prometheus Unbound " ; but he held that the spirit of established Christianity was wholly out of harmony with that of Christ, and that a similarity to Christ was one of the qualities most detested by the modern Christian. The dogmas of the Christian faith were always repudiated by him, and there is no warrant whatever in his writings for the strange pretension that, had he lived longer, his objections to Christianity might in some way have been overcome.
Apart from its inherent interest, the "Essay en Christianity," albeit fragmentary in parts, is the most- important of all Shelley's prose writings next to "A Defence of Poetry " ; and in view of its maturity of style, and the great beauty of some of its passages, it may be conjectured that it was written at a date con- siderably later than that usually assigned to it, viz. the year 1815.
Shelley's highest mark as a prose writer was attained in his "Defence of Poetry," written in Italy in 1821, almost at the close of his life, when his powers were at their full. If the early essays and pamphlets are
FOREWORD ix
remarkable rather for vigour and logical force than for real insight and feeling, and if their literary style was affected, perhaps unavoidably, by the polemical nature of the subjects with which they dealt, no such faults can be alleged against "A Defence of Poetry," where the train of thought is as profound as the language is majestic. The essay is a worthy vindication not only of poetry in general, but of the function of the poet- prophet, the class of singer to which Shelley himself so unmistakably belongs.
In conclusion, it may be said that Shelley's prose, if not great in itself, is the prose of a great poet, for which reason it possesses an interest that is not likely to fail. It is the key to the right understanding of his intellect, as his poetry is the highest expression of his genius.
Henry S. Salt.
CONTENTS
PAOK
FOREWORD ....... V
THE NECESSITY OF ATIlElhiM .... 1
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGII . . 15
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 32
A DEFENCE OF POETRY ... .75
ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND
THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS . .119
ON LIFE 129
ON A FUTURE STATE . . . . .136
ESSAY ON CHRISTIANITY 143
SELECTED PROSE WORKS OF SHELLEY
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
[Note. — The Necessity of Atheism was published by Shelley in 1811. In 1813 he printed a revised and expanded version of it as one of the notes to his poem Qioev Mab. The revised and expanded version is the one here reprinted. A type facsimile of the original edition was issued by tlie R.F.A. in 1906.]
THERE IS NO GOD
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pei*vading Spirit coeternal with the universe remains unshaken.
A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition is the only secure way of attaining truth, on the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant : our knowledge of the exist- ence of a Deity is a subject of such importance that it cannot be too minutely investigated ; in consequence of this conviction we proceed briefly and impartially to examine the proofs which have been adduced. It is necessary first to consider the nature of belief.
When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives
2 THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief. Many obstacles frequently prevent this perception from being immediate; these the mind at- tempts to remove in order that the perception may be distinct. The mind is active in the investigation in order to perfect the state of perception of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive : the investigation being confused with the perception has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active in belief, — that belief is an act of volition, — in consequence of which it may be regu- lated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief ; of which, in its nature, it is incapable : it is equally incapable of merit.
Belief, then, is a passion, the strength of which, like every other passion, is in precise proportion to the degrees of excitement.
The degrees of excitement are three.
The senses are the sources of all knowledge to the mind ; consequently their evidence claims the strongest assent.
The decision of the mind, founded upon our own experience, derived from these sources, claims the next degree.
The experience of others, which addresses itself to the former one, occupies the lowest degree.
(A graduated scale, on which should be marked the capabilities of propositions to approach to the test of the senses, would be a just barometer of the belief which ought to be attached to them.)
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM 3
Consequently no testimony can be admitted which is contrary to reason ; reason is founded on tlie evidence of our senses.
Every proof may be referred to one of these three divisions : it is to be considered what arguments we receive from each of them, which should convince us of the existence of a Deity.
1st, The evidence of the senses. If the Deity should appear to us, if he should convince our senses of his existence, this revelation would necessarily command belief. Those to whom the Deity has thus appeared have the strongest possible conviction of his existence. But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility.
2d, Reason. It is urged that man knows that what- ever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity : he also knov/s that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reason- ing is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created : until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causa- tion is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a case where two propositions are diametric- ally opposite, the mind believes that which is least incomprehensible ; — it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it : if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an allevia- tion to increase the intolerabihty of the burthen?
4 THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
The other argument, which is founded on a man's knowledge of his own existence, stands thus. A man knows not only that he now is, but that once he was not ; consequently there must have been a cause. But our idea of causation is alone derivable from the constant conjunction of objects and the consequent inference of one from the other ; and, reasoning experimentally, we can only infer from effects causes exactly adequate to those effects. But there certainly is a generative power which is effected by certain instru- ments : we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments ; nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration : we admit that the generative power is incomprehensible ; but to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible.
3d, Testimony. It is required that testimony should not be contrary to reason. The testimony that the Deity convinces the senses of men of his existence can only be admitted by us if our mind considers it less probable that these men should have been deceived than that the Deity should have appeared to them. Our reason can never admit the testimony of men, who not only declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles, but that the Deity was irrational ; for he commanded that he should be believed, he proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for disbelief. We can only command voluntary actions ; belief is not an act of volition ; the mind is even passive, or involun- tarily active ; from this it is evident that we have no sufficient testimony, or rather that testimony is insuffi-
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM 5
cient to prove the being of a God. It has been before shown that it cannot be deduced from reason. They alone, then, who have been convinced by the evidence of the senses can believe it.
Hence it is evident that, having no proofs from either of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God : it is also evident that, as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief ; and that they only are reprehensible who neglect to remove the false medium through which their mind views any subject of discussion. Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.
God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof : the onus probandi rests on the theist. Sir Isaac Newton says : Hypotheses non fingo, quicquid cnim ex phaenomenis Jion deducitur hypothesis vo- canda est, et hypothesis vel metaphysicae, vel physicae, vel qualitatum occultarum, seu mechanicac, in philoso- phia locum non habcnt. To all proofs of the existence of a creative God apply this valuable rule. We see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers : we merely know their effects ; we are in a state of ignor- ance with respect to their essences and causes. These Newton calls the phenomena of things ; but the pride of philosophy is unwilling to admit its ignorance of their causes. From the phenomena, which are the objects of our senses, we attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent this general name, to conceal our ignorance of B
6 THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
causes and essences. The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton ; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical con- ceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. Words have been used by sophists for the same purposes, from the occult qualities of the peripatetics to the effluvium of Boyle and the crinities or nebulae of Herschel. God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible ; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate. Even his worshippers allow that it is impossible to form any idea of him : they exclaim with the French poet,
Pour dire ce qu^il est, il faut etre lui-meme.
Lord Bacon says that atheism leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety, laws, reputation, and every- thing that can serve to conduct him to virtue; but superstition destroys all these, and erects itself into a tyranny over the understandings of men : hence atheism never disturbs the government, but renders man more clear-sighted, since he sees nothing beyond the boun- daries of the present life. — Bacon's Moral Essays.
La premiere theologie de I'homme lui fit d'abord craindre et adorer les elements meme, des objets materiels et grossiers ; il rendit ensuite ses hommages a des agents presidant aux elements, a des genies infe- rieurs, a des heros, ou a des hommes doues de grandes qualites. A force de reflechir il crut simplifier les choses en soumettant la nature entiere a un seul agent, a un
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM 7
esprit, a une ame universelle, qui mettait cette nature et ses parties en mouvement. En remontant de causes en causes, les mortels ont fini par ne rien voir ; et c'est dans cette obscurite qu'ils ont place leur Dieu ; c'est dans cet abime tenebreux que leur imagination inquiete travaille toujours a se fabriquer des chimeres, qui les affligeront jusqu'a ce que la connaissance de la nature les detrompe des fantomes qu'ils ont toujours si vainement adores.
Si nous voulons nous rendre compte de nos idees sur la Divinite, nous serons obliges de convenir que, par le mot DieUf les hommes n'ont jamais pu designer que la cause la plus cachee, la plus eloignee, la plus inconnue des effets qu'ils voyaient : ils ne font usage de ce mot, que lorsque le jeu des causes naturelles et connues cesse d'etre visible pour eux ; des qu'ils perdent le fil de ces causes, ou des que leur esprit ne peut plus en suivre la chaine, ils tranclient leur difficulte, et terminent leurs recherches en appellant Dieu la derniere des causes, c'est-a-dire celle qui est au-dela de toutes les causes qu'ils connaissent ; ainsi ils ne font qu'assigner une denomina- tion vague a une cause ignoree, a laquelle leur paresse ou les bornes de leurs connaissances les forcent de s'arreter. Toutes les fois qu'on nous dit que Dieu est I'auteur de quelque phenomene, cela signifie qu'on ignore comment un tel phenomene a pu s'operer par le secours des forces ou des causes que nous connaissons dans la nature. C'est ainsi que le commun des hommes, dont I'ignorance est le partage, attribue a la Divinite non seulement les effets inusites qui les frappent, mais encore les evene- mens les plus simples, dont les causes sont les plus faciles a connaitre pour quiconque a pu les mediter. En
8 THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
un mot, Phomme a toujours respecte les causes incon- nues des effets surprenans, que son ignorance l*empe- chait de demeler. Ce fut sur les debris de la nature que les hommes eleverent le colosse imaginaire de la Divinite.
Si 1 'ignorance de la nature donna la naissance aux dieux, la connaissance de la nature est faite pour les detruire. A mesure que I'homme s'instruit, ses forces et ses ressources augmentent avec ses lumieres ; les sciences, les arts conservateurs, I'industrie, lui four- nissent des secours; I'experience le rassure ou lui pro- cure des moyens de resister aux efforts de bien des causes qui cessent de I'alarmer des qu'il les a connues. En un mot, ses terreurs se dissipent dans la meme proportion que son esprit s'eclaire. L'homme instruit cesse d'etre superstitieux.
Ce n'est jamais que sur parole que des peuples entiers adorent le Dieu de leurs peres et de leurs pretres : I'autorite, la confiance, la soumission, et I'habitude leur tiennent lieu de conviction et de preuves ; ils se pro- stement et prient, parce que leurs peres leur ont appris a se prosterner et prier : mais pourquoi ceux-ci se sont- ils mis a genoux? C'est que dans les temps eloignes leurs legislateurs et leurs guides leur en ont fait un devoir. "Adorez et croyez," ont-ils dit, "des dieux que vous ne pouvez comprendre ; rapportez-vous-en a notre sagesse profonde; nous en savons plus que vous sur la divinite." Mais pourquoi m'en rapporterais-je a vous? C'est que Dieu le veut ainsi, c'est que Dieu vous punira si vous osez resister. Mais ce Dieu n'est- il done pas la chose en question ? Cependant les hommes se sont toujours payes de ce cercle vicieux ; la paresse
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM 9
de Icur esprit leur fit trouver plus court de s'en rap- porter au jugement des autres. Toutes les notions reli^ieuses sont fondees uniquement sur I'autorite ; toutes les religions du monde defendent I'examen et ne veulent pas que Pon raisonne ; c*est I'autorit^ qui veut qu*on croie en Dieu ; ce Dieu n'est lui-meme fonde que sur I'autorite de quelques hommes qui pretendent le connaitre, et venir de sa part pour Tannoncer h la terre. Un Dieu fait par les hommes a sans doute besoin des hommes pour se faire connaitre aux hommes.
Ne serait-ce done que pour des pretres, des inspires, des metaphysiciens que serait reservee la conviction de I'existence d'un Dieu, que I'on dit neanmoins si neccs- saire a tout le genre humain? Mais trouvons-nous de I'harmonie entre les opinions theologiques des differens inspires, ou des penseurs repandus sur la terre? Ceux meme qui font profession d 'adorer le meme Dieu, sont- ils d'accord sur son compte? Sont-ils contents des preuves que leurs collegues apportent de son existence? Souscrivent-ils unanimement aux idees qu'ils presentent sur sa nature, sur sa conduite, sur la fa^on d'entendre ses pretendus oracles? Est-il une contree sur la terre on la science de Dieu se soit reellement perf ectionnee ? A-t-elle pris quelque part la consistance et runiformite que nous voyons prendre aux connaissances humaines, aux arts les plus f utiles, aux metiers les plus meprises? Ces mots d^esprit, dHmmaterialite, de crcatioUf de pre- destination^ de frrdce ; cette foule de distinctions subtiles dont la theologie s'est partout remplie dans quelques pays, ces inventions si ingenieuses, imaginees par des penseurs qui se sont succedes depuis tant de siecles, n'ont fait, helas ! qu'embrouiller les choses, et jamais
10 THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
la science la plus necessaire aux hommes n'a jusqu'ici pu acquerir la moindre fixite. Depuis des milliers d'annees ces reveurs oisifs se sont perpetuellement relayes pour mediter la Divinite, pour deviner ses voies cachees, pour inventer des hypotheses propres a develop- per cette enigme importante. Leur peu de succes n'a point decourage la vanite theologique; toujours on a parle de Dieu : on s'est egorge pour lui, et cet etre sublime demeure toujours le plus ignore et le plus discute.
Les hommes auraient ete trop heureux, si, se bornant aux objets visibles qui les inter essent, ils eussent employe a perfectionner leurs sciences reelles, leurs lois, leur morale, leur education, la moitie des efforts qu'ils ont mis dans leurs recherches sur la Divinite. Ils auraient ete bien plus sages encore, et plus fortunes, s'ils eussent pu consentir a laisser leurs guides desoeuvres se que- reller entre eux, et sonder des profondeurs capables de les etourdir, sans se meler de leurs disputes in- sensees. Mais il est de I'essence de I'ignorance d'at- tacher de I'importance a ce qu'elle ne comprend pas. La vanite humaine fait que I'esprit se roidit contre des difficultes. Plus un objet se derobe a ncs yeux, plus nous faisons d 'efforts pour le saisir, parce que des-lors il aiguillonne notre orgueil, il excite notre curiosite, il nous parait interessant. En combattant pour son Dieu chacun ne combattit en effet que pour les interets de sa propre vanite, qui de toutes les pas- sions produites par la mal-organisation de la societe est la plus prompte a s'alarmer, et la plus propre a produire de tres grandes folies.
Si ecartant pour un moment les idevS facheuses que
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM 11
la theologie nous donne d'un Dieu capricieux, dont les decrets partiaux et despotiques decident du sort des humains, nous ne voulons fixer nos yeux que sur la bonte pretendue, que tous les hommes, meme en trem- blant devant ce Dieu, s'accordent a lui donner ; si nous lui supposons le projet qu'on lui prete de n'avoir travaille que pour sa propre gloire, d'exiger les hommages des etres intelligens ; de ne chercher dans ses oeuvres que le bien-etre du genre humain : comment concilier ces vues et ces dispositions avec I'ignorance vraiment in- vincible dans laquelle ce Dieu, si glorieux et si bon, laisse la plupart des hommes sur son compte? Si Dieu veut etre connu, cheri, remercie, que ne se montre-t-il sous des traits favorables a tous ces etres intelligens dont il veut etre aime et adore? Pourquoi ne point se manifester a toute la terre d'une fagon non equivoque, bien plus capable de nous convaincre que ces revela- tions particulieres qui semblent accuser la Divinite d'une partialite facheuse pour quelques-unes de ses creatures? Le tout-puissant n'aurait-il done pas des moyens plus convainquans de se montrer aux hommes que ces meta- morphoses ridicules, ces incarnations pretendues, qui nous sont attestees par des ecrivains si peu d'accord entre eux dans les recits qu'ils en font? Au lieu de tant de miracles, inventes pour prouver la mission divine de tant de legislateurs reveres par les differens peuples du monde, le souverain des esprits ne pouvait-il pas convaincre tout d'un coup I'esprit humain des choses qu'il a voulu lui faire connaitre? Au lieu de suspendre un soleil dans la voute du firmament ; au lieu de repandre sans ordre les etoiles et les constellations qui remplissent I'espace, n'eut-il pas ete plus conforme aux vues d'un
12 THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
Dieu si jaloux de sa gloire et si bien-intentionne pour I'homme d'ecrire, d'une fagon non sujette a dispute, son nom, ses attributs, ses volontes permanentes en carac- teres ineffa9ables, et lisibles egalement pour tous les habitants de la terre? Personne alors n'aurait pu douter de I'existence d'un Dieu, de ses volontes claires, de ses intentions visibles. Sous les yeux de ce Dieu si terrible, personne n'aurait eu I'audace de violer ses ordonnances; nul mortel n'eut ose se mettre dans le cas d'attirer sa colere : enfin nul homme n'eut eu le front d'en imposer en son nom, ou d'interpreter ses volontes suivant ses propres fantaisies.
En ejflpet, quand meme on admettrait I'existence du Dieu theologique et la realite des attributs si discordans qu'on lui donne, I'on n'en pent rien conclure, pour autoriser la conduite ou les cultes qu'on prescrit de lui rendre. La theologie est vraiment le tonneau des Dana'ides. A force de qualites contradictoires et d'as- sertions hasardees, elle a, pour ainsi dire, tellement garrotte son Dieu qu'elle I'a mis dans I'impossibilite d'agir. S'il est infiniment bon, quelle raison aurions- nous de le craindre? S'il est infiniment sage, de quoi nous inquieter sur notre sort? S'il salt tout, pourquoi I'avertir de nos besoins, et le fatiguer de nos prieres? S'il est partout, pourquoi lui elever des temples? S'il est maitre de tout, pourquoi lui faire des sacrifices et des offrandes? S'il est juste, comment croire qu'il punisse des creatures qu'il a rempli de faiblesses? Si la grace fait tout en elles, quelle raison aurait-il de les recom- penser? S'il est tout-puissant, comment I'offenser, com- ment lui resister? S'il est raisonnable, comment se mettrait-il en colere centre des aveugles, a qui il a
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM 13
laissc la liberie de deraisonner ? S'il est immuable, de quel droit pretendrions-nous faire changer ses de- crets? S'il est inconcevable, pourquoi nous en occuper? S'IL A PARLE, POURQUOI L'UNIVERS N'EST- IL PAS CONVAINCU? Si la connaissance d'un Dieu est la plus necessaire, pourquoi u'est-elle pas la plus evidente et la plus claire? — Systeme de la Nature. London, 1781.
The enlightened and benevolent Pliny thus publicly professes himself an atheist : — Quapropter effigiem Dei formamque quaerere imbecillitatis humanae reor. Quis- quis est Deus (si modo est alius) et quacunque in parte, totus est sensus, totus est visus, totus auditus, totus animae, totus animi, totus sui. . . . Imperfectae vero in homine naturae praecipua solatia ne deum quidem posse omnia. Namque nee sibi potest mortem con- sciscere, si velit, quod homini dedit optimum in tantis vitae poenis : nee mortales aeternitate donare, aut revo- care def unctos ; nee facere ut qui vixit non vixerit, qui honores gessit non gesserit, nullumque habere in prae- teritum ius, praeterquam oblivionis, atque (ut facetis quoque argumentis societas haec cum deo copuletur) ut bis dena viginti non sint, et multa similiter efficere non posse. — Per quae declaratur baud dubie naturae poten- tiam id quoque esse quod Deum vocamus. — Plin. Nat. Hist. cap. de Deo.
The consistent Newtonian is necessarily an atheist. See Sir W. Drummond's Academical Questions f chap, iii. — Sir W. seems to consider the atheism to which it leads as a sufficient presumption of the falsehood of the system of gravitation ; but surely it is more consistent
U THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM
with the good faith of philosophy to admit a deduc- tion from facts than an hypothesis incapable of proof, although it might militate with the obstinate pre- conceptions of the mob. Had this author, instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have been more suited to the modesty of the sceptic and the toleration of the philosopher.
Omnia enim per Dei potentiam facta sunt : imo quia naturae potentia nulla est nisi ipsa Dei potentia. Certum est nos eatenus Dei potentiam non intelligere, quatenus causas naturales ignoramus; adeoque stulte ad eandem Dei potentiam recurritur, quando rei alicuius causani naturalem, sive est, ipsam Dei potentiam ignoramus. — Spinoza, Tract. Theologico-Pol. chap. i. p. 14.
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
[Note. — The occasion which called forth this Open Letter was the sentence of eighteen months' imprisonment and one hour in the pillory passed by Lord EUenborough on Daniel Isaac Eaton in May 1812 for publishing Part III. of Paine's Age of Eeason.]
ADVERTISEMENT
/ have waited impatiently for these last four months, in the hopes that some pen, fitter for the important task, would have spared me the perilous pleasure of becoming the champion of an innocent man. — This may serve as an excuse for delay, to those who think that I have let pass the aptest opportunity, but it is not to be supposed that in four short months the public indignation, raised by Mr. Eaton s unmerited suffering, can have subsided.
LETTER
My Lord,
As the station to which you have been called by your country is important, so much the more a\v£ul is your responsibility, so much the more does it become you to watch lest you inadvertently punish the virtuous and reward the vicious.
You preside over a court which is instituted for the suppression of crime, and to whose authority the people submit on no other conditions than that its decrees should be conformable to justice.
15
16 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
If it should be demonstrated that a judge had con- demned an innocent man, the bare existence of laws in conformity to which the accused is punished, would but little extenuate his offence. The inquisitor when he burns an obstinate heretic may set up a similar plea, yet few are sufficiently blinded by intolerance to ac- knowledge its validity. It will less avail such a judge to assert the policy of punishing one who has committed no crime. Policy and moraUty ought to be deemed synonymous in a court of justice, and he whose conduct has been regulated by the latter principle, is not justly amenable to any penal law for a supposed violation of the former. It is true, my Lord, laws exist which suffice to screen you from the animadversions of any constituted power, in consequence of the unmerited sen- tence which you have passed upon Mr. Eaton ; but there are no laws which screen you from the reproof of a nation's disgust, none which ward off the just judgment of posterity, if that posterity will deign to recollect you.
By what right do you punish Mr. Eaton? What but antiquated precedents, gathered from times of priestly and tyrannical domination, can be adduced in palliation of an outrage so insulting to humanity and justice? Whom has he injured? What crime has he committed? Wherefore may he not walk abroad like other men and follow his accustomed pursuits? What end is proposed in confining this man, charged with the commission of no dishonourable action? Wherefore did his aggressor avail himself of popular prejudice, and return no answer but one of common place contempt to a defence of plain and simple sincerity? Lastly, when the prejudices of the jury, as Christians, were strongly and unfairly in-
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 17
flamed ^ against this injured man as a Deist, wherefore did not you, my Lord, check such unconstitutional pleading, and desire the jury to pronounce the accused imiocent or criminal ^ without reference to the particular faith which he professed?
In the name of justice, what answer is there to these questions? The answer which Heathen Athens made to Socrates, is the same with which Christian England must attempt to silence the advocates of this injured man — ''He has questioned established opinions." — Alas ! the crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven. Implicit faith and fearless inquiry have in all ages been irreconcilable enemies. Unrestrained philosophy has in every age opposed itself to the reveries of credulity and fanaticism. — The truths of astronomy demonstrated by Newton have superseded astrology ; since the modern discoveries in chemistry the philosopher's stone has no longer been deemed attainable. Miracles of every kind have become rare,, in proportion to the hidden principles which those who study nature have developed. That which is false will ultimately be controverted by its own falsehood. That which is true needs but publicity to be acknowledged. It is ever a proof that the falsehood of a proposition is felt by those who use power and coercion, not reasoning and persuasion, to procure its admission. — Falsehood skulks in holes and corners, "it lets I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage," ^ except
^ See the Attorney Oeneral's speech.
' By Mr, Fox's bill (1791) Juries are, in eases of libel, judges both of the law and the fact. ' Shakespeare.
18 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
when it has power, and then, as it was a coward, it is a tyrant; but the eagle-eye of truth darts through the undazzling sunbeam of the immutable and just, gathering thence wherewith to vivify and illuminate a universe !
Wherefore, I repeat, is Mr. Eaton punished? — Be- cause he is a Deist? — And what are you, my Lord? — A Christian. Ha then! the mask is fallen off; you persecute him because his faith differs from yours. You copy the persecutors of Christianity in j^our actions, and are an additional proof that your religion is as bloody, barbarous, and intolerant as theirs. — If some deistical Bigot in power (supposing such a char- acter for the sake of illustration) should in dark and barbarous ages have enacted a statute making the profession of Christianity criminal, if you my Lord w^ere a Christian bookseller, and Mr. Eaton a judge, those arguments which you consider adequate to justify your- self for the sentence which you have passed must likewise suffice, in this suppositionary case to justify Mr. Eaton, in sentencing you to Newgate and the pillory for being a Christian. Whence is any right derived but that which power confers for persecution ?\ Do you think to convert Mr. Eaton to your religion Xry embittering his existence? You might force him by torture to profess your tenets, but he could not believe them, except you should make them credible, which perhaps exceeds your power. Do you think to please the God you worship by this exhibition of your zeal? If so, the Demon to whom some nations oifer human hecatombs is less barbarous than the Deity of civilised society.
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 19
You consider iiian as an accountable being — but he can only be accountable for those actions whicli are influenced by his will.
Belief and disbelief are utterly distinct from and unconnected with volition. They are the apprehension of the agreement or disagreement of the ideas which compose any proposition. Belief is an involuntary operation of the mind, and, like other passions, its intensity is precisely proportionate to the degrees of excitement. Volition is essential to merit or demerit. How then can merit or demerit be attached to what is distinct from that faculty of the mind whose presence is essential to their being? 1 am aware that religion is founded on the voluntariness of belief, as it makes it a subject of reward and punishment ; but before we extinguish the steady ray of reason and common sense, it is fit that we should discover, which we cannot do without their assistance, whether or no there be any other which may suffice to guide us through the labyrinth of life.
If the law "de heretico comburendo " has not been formally repealed, I conceive that, from the promise held out by your Lordship's zeal, we need not despair of beholding the flames of persecution rekindled in Smithfield. Even now the lash that drove Descartes and Voltaire from their native country, the chains which bound Galileo, the flames which burned Vanini, again resound : — And where? in a nation that pre- sumptuously calls itself the sanctuary of freedom. Under a government which, whilst it infringes the very right of thought and speech, boasts of permitting the liberty of the press ; in a civilised and enlightened
20 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
country, a man is pilloried and imprisoned because he is a Deist, and no one raises his voice in the indigna- tion of outraged humanity. Does the Christian God, whom his followers eulogise as the Deity of humiUty and peace ; he, the regenerator of the world, the meek reformer, authorise one man to rise against another, and because lictors are at his beck, to chain and torture him as an Infidel?
When the Apostles went abroad to convert the nations, were they enjoined to stab and poison all who disbelieved the divinity of Christ's mission ; assuredly, they would have been no more justifiable in this case than he is at present who puts into execution the law which inflicts pillory and imprisonment on the Deist.
Has not Mr. Eaton an equal right to call your Lord- ship an Infidel, as you have to imprison him for pro- mulgating a different doctrine from that which you profess? — What do I say ! — Has he not even a stronger plea? — The word Infidel can only mean any thing when applied to a person who professes that which he disbelieves. The test of truth is an undivided reliance on its inclusive powers; — the test of conscious false- hood is the variety of the forms under which it presents itself, and its tendency towards employing whatever coercive means may be within its command, in order to procure the admission of what is unsusceptible of support from reason or persuasion. A dispassionate observer would feel himself more powerfully interested in favour of a man, who depending on the truth of his opinions, simply stated his reasons for entertaining them, than in that of his aggressor, who daringly avowing his unwillingness to answer them by argument.
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 21
proceeded to repress the activity and breali the spirit of their promulgator, by that torture and imprisonment whose infliction he could command.
I hesitate not to affirm that tiie opinions which Mr. Eaton sustained, when underfroing that mockery of a trial at which your Lordship presided, appear to me more true and good than those of his accuser; — but were they false as the visions of a Calvinist, it still would be the duty of those who love liberty and virtue, to raise their voice indignantly against a reviving system of per- secution, against the coercively repressing any opinion, which, if false, needs but the opposition of truth which, if true, in spite of force, must ultimately prevail.
Mr. Eaton asserted that the scriptures were, from beginning to end, a fable and imposture,^ that the Apostles were liars and deceivers. He denied the miracles, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. — He did so, and the Attorney General denied the pro- positions which he asserted, and asserted those which he denied. What singular conclusion is deducible from this fact? None, but that the Attorney General and Mr. Eaton sustained two opposite opinions. The Attorney General puts some obsolete and tyrannical laws in force against Mr. Eaton, because he publishes a book tending to prove that certain supernatural events, which are supposed to have taken place eighteen cen- turies ago, in a remote corner of the world, did not actually take place. But how are the truth or falsehood of the facts in dispute relevant to the merit or demerit attachable to the advocates of the two opinions? No man is accountable for his belief, because no man is ^ See the Attorney General's speech. C
22 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
capable of directing it. Mr. Eaton is therefore totally blameless. What are we to think of the justice of a sentence, which punishes an individual against whom it is not even attempted to attach the slightest stain of criminality ?
It is asserted that Mr. Eaton's opinions are calculated to subvert morality — How? What moral truth is spoken of with irreverence or ridicule in the book which he published? Morality, or the duty of a man and a citizen, is founded on the relations which arise from the association of human beings, and which vary with the circumstances produced by the different states of this association. — This duty in similar situations must be precisely the same in all ages and nations. — The opinion contrary to this has arisen from a supposition that the will of God is the source or criterion of morality : it is plain that the utmost exertion of Omnipotence could not cause that to be virtuous which actually is vicious. An all-powerful Demon might, indubitably, annex punishments to virtue and rewards to vice, but could not by these means effect the slightest change in their abstract and immutable natures. — Omnipotence could vary, by a providential interposition, the relations of human society ; — in this latter case, what before was virtuous would become vicious, according to the neces- sary and natural result of the alteration ; but the abstract natures of the opposite principles would have sustained not the slightest change ; for instance, the punishment with which society restrains the robber, the assassin, and the ravisher is just, laudable, and requisite. We admire and respect the institutions which curb those who would defeat the ends for which society was estab-
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 23
lished ; — but, should a precisely similar coercion be exercised against one who merely expressed his disbelief of a system admitted by those entrusted with tiie execu- tive power, using at the same time no metliods of pro- mulgation but those atlorded by reason, certainly this coercion would be eminently inhuman and immoral ; and the supposition that any revelation from an unknown power avails to palliate a persecution so senseless, un- provoked, and indefensible, is at once to destroy the barrier which reason places between vice and virtue, and leave to unprincipled fanaticism a plea whereby it may excuse every act of frenzy, which its own wild passions, not the inspirations of the Deity, have engendered.
Moral qualities are such as only a human being can possess. To attribute them to the Spirit of the Universe, or to suppose that it is capable of altering them, is to degrade God into man, and to annex to this incompre- hensible being qualities incompatible with any possible definition of his nature. It may here be objected — Ought not the Creator to possess the perfections of the creature? No. To attribute to God the moral qualities of man, is to suppose him susceptible of passions which, arising out of corporeal organisation, it is plain that a pure spirit cannot possess. A bear is not perfect except he is rough, a tyger is not perfect if he be not voracious, an elephant is not perfect if otherwise than docile. How deep an argument must that not be which proves that the Deity is as rough as a bear, as voracious as a tyger, and as docile as an elephant ! But even suppose with the vulgar, that God is a venerable old man, seated on a throne of clouds, his breast the theatre of various passions, analogous to those of humanity, his will
24 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
changeable and uncertain as that of an earthly king, — still goodness and justice are qualities seldom nominally denied him, and it will be admitted that he disapproves of any action incompatible with these qualities. Per- secution for opinion is unjust. With what consistency, then, can the worshippers of a Deity whose benevolence they boast, embitter the existence of their fellow being, because his ideas of that Deity are different from those which they entertain. — Alas ! there is no consistency in those persecutors who worship a benevolent Deity ; those v/ho worship a Demon would alone act consonantly to these principles, by imprisoning and torturing in his name.
Persecution is the only name applicable to punishment inflicted on an individual in consequence of his opinions. — What end is persecution designed to answer? Can it convince him whom it injures? Can it prove to the people the falsehood of his opinions? It may make him a hypocrite, and them cowards, but bad means can promote no good end. The unprejudiced mind looks with suspicion on a doctrine that needs the sustaining hand of power.
Socrates v/as poisoned because he dared to combat the degrading superstitions in which his countrymen were educated. Not long after his death, Athens recognised the injustice of his sentence ; his accuser Melitus was condemned, and Socrates became a demigod.
Jesus Christ was crucified because he attempted to supersede the ritual of Moses with regulations more moral and humane — his very judge made public acknowledgment of his innocence, but a bigoted and ignorant mob demanded the deed of horror. — Barabbas
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 25
the murderer and traitor was released. The meek reformer Jesus was immolated to the sanguinary Deity of the Jews. Time rolled on, time changed tlie situa tions, and with them, the opinions of men.
The vulgar, ever in extremes, hecame persuaded that the crucifixion of Jesus was a supernatural event, and testimonies of miracles, so frequent in unenliglitened ages, were not wanting to prove that he was something divine. This belief, rolling through the lapse of ages, acquired force and extent, until the divinity of Jesus became a dogma, which to dispute was death, which to doubt was infamy.
Christianity is now the established religion; he who attempts to disprove it, must behold murderers and traitors take precedence of him in public opinion, though, if his genius be equal to Iiis courage, and assisted by a peculiar coalition of circumstances, future ages may exalt him to a divinity, and persecute others in his name, as he was persecuted in the name of his predecessor, in the homage of the world.
The same means that have supported every other '^ popular belief, have supported Christianity. War, ^ imprisonment, murder, and falsehood ; deeds of un- exampled and mcomparable atrocity have made it what it is. We derive from our ancestors a belief thus fostered and supported. — W^e quarrel, persecute, and hate for its maintenance. — Does not analogy favour the opinion that, as like other systems it has arisen and augmented, so like them it will decay and perish ; that, as violence and falsehood, not reasoning and persuasion, have procured its admission among mankind ; so, when enthusiasm has subsided, and time, that infallible con- ^
26 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
troverter of false opinions, has involved its pretended evidences in the darkness of antiquity, it will become obsolete, and that men will then laugh as heartily at grace, faith, redemption, and original sin, as they now do at the metamorphoses of Jupiter, the miracles of Romish saints, the efficacy of witchcraft, and the appearance of departed spirits.
Had the Christian religion commenced and continued by the mere force of reasoning and persuasion, by its self-evident excellence and fitness, the preceding analogy would be inadmissible. Vv^e should never speculate upon the future obsoleteness of a system perfectly con- formable to nature and reason. It would endure so long as they endured, it would be a truth as indisputable as the light of the sun, the criminality of murder, and other facts, physical and moral, which, depending on our organisation, and relative situations, must remain ac- knowledged so long as man is man. — It is an incon- trovertible fact, the consideration of which ought to repress the hasty conclusions of credulity, or moderate its obstinacy in maintaining them, that, had the Jews not been a barbarous and fanatical race of men, had even the resolution of Pontius Pilate been equal to his candour, the Christian religion never could have prevailed, it could not even have existed. Man ! the very existence of w^hose most cherished opinions de- pends from a thread so feeble, arises out of a source so equivocal, learn at least humility ; own at least that it is possible for thyself also to have been seduced by education and circumstances into the admission of tenets destitute of rational proof, and the truth of which has not yet been satisfactorily demonstrated. Acknowledge
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 27
at least that the falsehood of thy brother's opinions is no sufficient reason for liis meriting thy hatred. — What! beeause a fellow being disputes the reasonableness of thy faith, wilt thou punish liim with torture and im- I)risonnient? If persecution for reUgious opinions were admitted by the moralist, how wide a door would not be opened by which convulsionists of every kind might make inroads on the peace of society ! How many deeds of barbarism and blood would not receive a sanction ! — But I will demand, if that man is not ratlier entitled to the respect than the discountenance of society, who, b}' disputing a received doctrine, either proves its falsehood and inutility, thereby aiming at the abolition of what is false and useless, or giving to its adherents an opportunity of estabhshing its excellence and truth. — Surely this can be no crime. Surely the individual who devotes his time to fearless and unre- stricted inquiry into the grand questions arising out of our moral nature, ought rather to receive the patronage, than encounter the vengeance, of an enlightened legis- J lature. I would have you to know, my Lord, that -» fetters of iron cannot bind or subdue the soul of virtue. From the damps and solitude of its dungeon it ascends free and undaunted, whither thine, from the pompous seat of judgment, dare not soar. I do not warn you to beware lest your profession as a Christian, should make you forget that you are a man ; — but I warn you against festinatingthat period, which, under the present coercive system, is too rapidly maturing, when the seats of jus- tice shall be the seats of venality and slavishness, and the cells of Newgate become the abode of all that is honourable and true.
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28 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
I mean not to compare Mr. Eaton with Socrates or Jesus ; he is a man of blameless and respectable character, he is a citizen unimpeached with crime; if, therefore, his rights as a citizen and a man have been infringed, they have been infringed by illegal and im- moral violence. But I will assert that, should a second Jesus arise among men ; should such a one as Socrates again enUghten the earth, lengthened imprisonment and infamous punishment (according to the regimen of per- secution revived by your Lordship) would effect, what hemlock and the cross have heretofore effected, and the stain on the national character, like that on Athens and Judea, would remain indelible, but by the destruction of the history in which it is recorded. When the Christian Religion shall have faded from the earth, when its memory like that of Polytheism now shall remain, but remain only as the subject of ridicule and wonder, indignant posterity would attach im- mortal infamy to such an outrage; like the murder of Socrates, it would secure the execration of every age.
The horrible and wide-wasting enormities which gleam like comets through the darkness of gothic and super- stitious ages, are regarded by the moralist as no more than the necessary effects of known causes ; but, when an enlightened age and nation signalises itself by a deed, becoming none but barbarians and fanatics, Philo- ^A sophy itself is even induced to doubt whether human nature will ever emerge from the pettishness and im- becility of its childhood. The system of persecution at whose new birth, you, my Lord, are one of the presiding midwives, is not more impotent and wicked than incon-
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 29
sis tent. The press is loaded with what are called (ironically, I should conceive) proofs of the Christian Religion : these books are replete with invective and calumny against Infidels, they presuppose that he who rejects Christianity must be utterly divested of reason and feeling. They advance the most unsupported asser- tions, and take as first principles the most revolting dogmas. The inferences drawn from these assumed premises are imposingly logical and correct ; but if a foundation is weak, no architect is needed to foretell the instability of the superstructure. — If the truth of Chris- tianity is not disputable, for what purpose are these books written? If they are sufficient to prove it, what further need of controversy? // God has spoken, zchy is not the universe convinced ? If the Christian Religion needs deeper learning, more painful investigation, to establish its genuineness, wherefore attempt to accom- plish that by force, which the human mind can alone effect with satisfaction to itself? If, lastly, its truth cannot be demonstrated, wherefore impotently attempt to snatch from God the government of his creation, and impiously assert that the Spirit of Benevolence has left that knowledge most essential to the well being of man, the only one which, since its promulgation, has been the subject of unceasing cavil, the cause of irreconcileable hatred? — Either the Christian Religion is true, or it is not. If true, it comes from God, and its authenticity can admit of doubt and dispute no further than its Omnipotent Author is willing to allow ; — if true, it admits of rational proof, and is capable of being placed equally beyond controversy, as the principles which have been established concerning matter and mind, by Locke
30 A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH
and Newton ; and in proportion to the usefulness of the fact in dispute, so must it be supposed that a benevolent being is anxious to procure the diffusion of its knowledge on the earth. — If false, surely no enlightened legislature would punish the reasoner, who opposes a system so much the more fatal and pernicious as it is extensively admitted ; so much the more productive of absurd and ruinous consequences, as it is entwined by education, with the prejudices and affections of the human heart, in the shape of a popular belief.
Let us suppose that some half-witted philosopher should assert that the earth was the centre of the universe, or that ideas could enter the human mind independently of sensation or reflection. This man would assert what is demonstrably incorrect ; — he would promulgate a false opinion. Yet, would he therefore deserve pillory and imprisonment ? By no means ; probably few would discharge more correctly the duties of a citizen and a man. I admit that the case above stated is not precisely in point. The thinking part of the community has not received as indisputable the truth of Christianity, as they have that of the New- tonian system. A very large portion of society, and that powerfully and extensively connected, derives its sole emolument from the belief of Christianity, as a popular faith.
To torture and imprison the asserter of a dogma, however ridiculous and false, is highly barbarous and impolitic : — How, then, does not the cruelty of persecu- tion become aggravated when it is directed against the opposer of an opinion yet under dispute, and which men of unrivalled acquirements, penetrating genius, and
A LETTER TO LORD ELLENBOROUGH 31
stainless \irtue, have spent, and at last sacrificed, their lives in combating.
The time is rapidly approaching, I hope, that you, my Lord, may live to behold its arrival, when the Mahometan, the Jew, the Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist, will live together in one community, equally sharing the benefits which arise from its association, and united in the bonds of charity and brotherly love. — My Lord, you have condenmed an innocent man — no crime was imputed to him — and you sentenced him to torture and imprisonment. I have not addressed this letter to you with the hopes of convincing you that you have acted wrong. The most unprincipled and bar- barous of men are not unprepared with sophisms, to prove that they would have acted in no other manner, and to show that vice is virtue. But I raise my solitary voice, to express my disapprobation, so far as it goes, of the cruel and unjust sentence you, passed upon Mr. Eaton, to assert, so far as I am capable of influencing, those rights of humanity, which you have wantonly and unlawfully infringed.
My Lord,
Yours, &c.
A REFUTATION OF DEISM
EUSEBES AND THEOSOPHUS EUSEBES
O Theosophus, I have long regretted and observed the strange infatuation which has blinded your under- standing. It is not without acute uneasiness that I have beheld the progress of your audacious scepticism trample on the most venerable institutions of our fore- fathers, until it has rejected the salvation which the only begotten Son of God deigned to proffer in person to a guilty and unbelieving world. To this excess, then, has the pride of the human understanding at length arrived? To measure itself with Omniscience! To scan the intentions of Inscrutability !
You can have reflected but superficially on this awful and important subject. The love of paradox, an affecta- tion of singularity, or the pride of reason has seduced you to the barren and gloomy paths of infideUty. Surely you have hardened yourself against the truth with a spirit of coldness and cavil.
Have you been wholly inattentive to the accumulated evidence which the Deity has been pleased to attach to the revelation of his will ? The ancient books in which the advent of the Messiah was predicted, the miracles by which its truth has been so conspicuously confirmed, the martyrs who have undergone every variety of tor- ment in attestation of its veracity ? You seem to require
32
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 33
mathematical demonstration in a case which admits of no more than strong moral probability. Surely the merit of tliat faith which we are required to repose in our Redeemer would be thus entirely done away. W'liere is the (hfficulty of accordin<T credit to that which is perfectly plain and evident? How is he entitled to a recompense who believes what he cannot disbelieve?
When there is satisfactory evidence that the witnesses of the Christian miracles passed their lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings, and consented severally to be racked, burned, and strangled, in testimony of the truth of their account, will it be asserted that they were actuated by a disinterested desire of deceiving otiiers? That they were hypocrites for no end but to teach the purest doctrine that ever enlightened the world, and martyrs without any prospect of emolument or fame? The sophist, who gravely advances an opinion thus absurd, certainly sins with gratuitous and indefensible pertinacity.
The history of Christianity is itself the most indis- putable proof of those miracles by which its origin was sanctioned to the world. It is itself one great miracle. A few humble men established it in the face of an oppos- ing universe. In less than fifty years an astonishing multitude was converted, as Suetonius,^ Pliny, ^ Tacitus,^ and Lucian attest; and shortly afterwards thousands
^ Judeei, iuipulsore Clircslo, tnrbantcs, facile comprimuntur. — Suet, in Tib.
Affect i suppl id is Christiani, (jemis hominum snjyerstilionis nova et nialefirsR. — Id. in Neronc.
* Multi omnia xtatis ntriusqiu sej^2cs ctiam ; nequc cnim civifcUes tanlum, sed vices etiam et agroa supcrstitionis istius contagio pcrva- gata rst. — PI in. Epist.
^ Tacit. Annal L. xv. Sect. xlv.
34 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
who had boldly overturned the altars, slain the priests and burned the temples of Paganism, were loud in demanding the recompense of martyrdom from the hands of the infuriated heathens. Not until three cen- turies after the coming of the Messiah did his holy religion incorporate itself with the institutions of the Roman Empire, and derive support from the visible arm of fleshly strength. Thus long without any assistance but that of its Omnipotent author, Christianity pre- vailed in defiance of incredible persecutions, and drew fresh vigour from circumstances the most desperate and unpromising. By what process of sophistry can a rational being persuade himself to reject a religion, the original propagation of which is an event wholly un- paralleled in the sphere of human experience?
The morality of the Christian religion is as original and sublime, as its miracles and mysteries are unlike all other portents. A patient acquiescence in injuries and violence ; a passive submission to the will of sovereigns ; a disregard of those ties by which the feelings of humanity have ever been bound to this unimportant world ; humility and faith, are doctrines neither similar nor comparable to those of any other system.^ Friend- ship, patriotism, and magnanimity ; the heart that is quick in sensibility, the hand that is inflexible in execu- tion; genius, learning and courage, are qualities which have engaged the admiration of mankind, but which we are taught by Christianity to consider as splendid and delusive vices.
I know not why a Theist should feel himself more
^ See the Internal Evidence of Christianity ; see also Paley's Evidences, Vol. ii. p. 27.
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 35
inclined to distrust the historians of Jesus Christ than those of Alexander the Great. What do the tidings of redemption contain which render tliem peculiarl}' obnoxious to discredit ? It will not be disputed that a revelation of the Divine will is a benefit to mankind.* It will not be asserted that even under the Christian revelation, we have too clear a solution of the vast enigma of the Universe, too satisfactory a justification of the attributes of God. When we call to mind the profound ignorance in which, with the exception of the Jews, the philosophers of antiquity were plunged ; when we recollect that men, eminent for dazzling talents and fallacious virtues, Epicurus, Democritus, Pliny, Lucre- tius,' Euripides, and innumerable others, dared publicly to avow their faith in Atheism with impunity, and that tlie Theists, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras and Plato, vainly endeavoured by that human reason, which is truly in- commensurate to so vast a purpose, to estabhsh among philosophers the belief in one Almighty God, the creator and preserver of the world ; when we recollect that the multitude were grossly and ridiculously idolatrous, and that the magistrates, if not Atheists, regarded the being of a God in the light of an abstruse and uninteresting speculation ; ^ when we add to these considerations a
^ Paley's Evidcticcs, Vol. i. p. 3.
* Plin. Nat. Hist. cap. de Deo., Euripides, Bellerophon, Frag. XXV.
Ilunc igitur terrorem animi, imebrasque necessc est
Non radii solis, neque lucida tela diei
Discutient, snl naturse, species ratioquc :
Principium hinc cicjus nobis exordia sumet,
NULLAM REM NIIIILO GIGNI DIVINITUS UNQUAM.
Luc. tie Rer. Nat. Lib. 1 [vv. 147-151]. ' See Cicero de Natura Deorum.
36 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
remembrance of the wars and the oppressions, which about the time of the advent of the Messiah, desolated the human race, is it not more credible that the Deity actually interposed to check the rapid progress of human deterioration, than that he permitted a specious and pestilent imposture to seduce mankind into the labyrinth of a deadlier superstition? Surely the Deity has not created man immortal, and left him for ever in ignor- ance of his glorious destination. If the Christian reli- gion is false, I see not upon what foundation our belief in a moral governor of the universe, or our hopes of immortality can rest.
Thus then the plain reason of the case, and the suffrage of the civilised world, conspire with the more indisputable suggestions of faith, to render impregnable that system which has been so vainly and so wantonly assailed. Suppose, however, it were admitted that the conclusions of human reason and the lessons of worldly virtue should be found, in the detail, incongruous with Divine Revelation ; by the dictates of which would it become us to abide? Not by that which errs when- ever it is employed, but by that which is incapable of error : not by the ephemeral systems of vain philo- sophy, but by the word of God, which shall endure for ever.
Reflect, O Theosophus, that if the religion you reject be true, you are justly excluded from the benefits which result from a belief in its efficiency to salvation. Be not regardless, therefore, I entreat you, of the curses so emphatically heaped upon infidels by the inspired organs of the will of God : the fire which is never quenched, the worm that never dies. I dare not think that the
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 37
God in whom I trust for salvation, would terrify his creatures with menaces of punishment which he does not intend to inflict. The in^^ratitude of incredulity is, perhaps, the only sin to which the Almighty cannot extend his mercy without compromising his justice. How can the human heart endure, without despair, the mere conception of so tremendous an alternative? Return, I entreat you, to that tower of strength wiiicli securely overlooks the chaos of the conflicting opinions of men. Return to that God who is your creator and preserver, by whom alone .vou are defended from the ceaseless wiles of your eternal enemy. Are human in- stitutions so faultless that the principle upon which they are founded may strive with the voice of God? Know that faith is superior to reason, in as much as the crea- ture is surpassed by the Creator ; and that whensoever they are incompatible, the suggestions of the latter, not those of the former, are to be questioned.
Permit me to exhibit in their genuine deformity the errors which are seducing you to destruction. State to me with candour the train of sophisms by which the evil spirit has deluded your understanding. Confess the secret motives of your disbelief ; suffer me to administer a remedy to your intellectual disease. I fear not the contagion of such revolting sentiments : I fear only lest patience should desert me before you have finished the detail of your presumptuous credulity.
Theosophus
I AM not only prepared to confess, but to vindicate my sentiments. I cannot refrain, however, from pre-
D
88 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
mising, that in this controversy I labour under a disad- vantage from which you are exempt. You believe that incredulity is immoral, and regard him as an object of suspicion and distrust whose creed is incongruous with your own. But truth is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. I can no more conceive that a man who perceives the disagreement of any ideas should be persuaded of their agreement, than that he should overcome a physical impossibility. The reasonableness or the folly of the articles of our creed is therefore no legitimate object of merit or demerit; our opinions depend not on the will, but on the understanding.
If I am in error (and the wisest of us may not presume to deem himself secure from all illusion) that error is the consequence of the prejudices by which I am prevented, of the ignorance by which I am incapacitated from form- ing a correct estimation of the subject. Remove those prejudices, dispel that ignorance, make truth apparent, and fear not the obstacles that remain to be encountered. But do not repeat to me those terrible and frequent curses, by whose intolerance and cruelty I have so often been disgusted in the perusal of your sacred books. Do not tell me that the All-Merciful will punish me for the conclusions of that reason by which he has thought fit to distinguish me from the beasts that perish. Above all, refrain from urging considerations drawn from reason, to degrade that which you are thereby compelled to acknowledge as the ultimate arbiter of the dispute. Answer my objections as I engage to answer your asser- tions, point by point, word by word.
You believe that the only and ever-present God begot a Son whom he sent to reform the world, and to pro-
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 39
pitiate its sins ; you believe that a book, called the Bible, contains a true account of this event, together with an infinity of miracles and prophecies which preceded it from the creation of the world. Your opinion tliat tliese circumstances really liappened appears to me, from some considerations which 1 will proceed to state, destitute of rational foundation.
To expose all the inconsistency, inunorality and false pretensions which i perceive in tlie Bible, demands a minuteness of criticism at least as voluminous as itself. I shall confine myself, therefore, to the confronting of your tenets with those primitive and general principles which are the basis of all moral reasoning.
In creating the Universe, God certainly proposed to himself tiie happiness of his creatures. It is just, there- fore, to conclude that he left no means unemployed, which did not involve an impossibility, to accomplish this design, in fixing a residence for this image of his own Majesty, he was doubtless careful that every occa- sion of detriment, every opportunity of evil, should be removed. He was aware of the extent of his powers, he foresaw the consequences of his conduct, and doubt- less modelled his being consentaneously with the world of whicli he was to be the inhabitant, and the circum- stances which were destined to surround him.
The account given by the Bible has but a faint con- cordance with the surmises of reason concerning this event.
According to this book, God created Satan, who, in- stigated by the impulses of his nature, contended with the Omnipotent for the throne of Heaven. After a contest for the empire, in which God was victorious,
40 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
Satan was thrust into a pit of burning sulphur. On man's creation, God placed within his reach a tree whose fruit he forbade him to taste, on pain of death ; permit- ting Satan, at the same time, to employ all his artifice to persuade this innocent and wondering creature to transgress the fatal prohibition.
The first man yielded to this temptation; and to satisfy Divine Justice the whole of his posterity must have been eternally burned in hell, if God had not sent his only Son on earth, to save those few whose salvation had been foreseen and determined before the creation of the world.
God is here represented as creating man with certain passions and powers, surrounding him with certain cir- cumstances, and then condemning him to everlasting torments because he acted as Omniscience had foreseen, and was such as Omnipotence had made him. For to assert that the Creator is the author of all good, and the creature the author of all evil, is to assert that one man makes a straight line and a crooked one, and that another makes the incongruity.^
Barbarous and uncivilised nations have uniformly adored, under various names, a God of which themselves were the model : revengeful, blood-thirsty, grovelUng and capricious. The idol of a savage is a demon that delights in carnage. The steam of slaughter, the dis- sonance of groans, the flames of a desolated land, are the offerings which he deems acceptable, and his innumer- able votaries throughout the world have made it a point of duty to worship him to his taste. ^ The Phenicians, the Druids and the Mexicans have immolated hundreds 1 Hobbes. * See Preface to Le Bon Sens.
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at the shrines of their divinity, and the high and lioly name of God has been in all ages the watchword of the most unsparing massacres, the sanction of the most atrocious perfidies.
But I appeal to your candour, O Eusebes, if there exist a record of such grovelhng absurdities and enormi- ties so atrocious, a picture of the Deity so characteristic of a demon as that which the sacred writings of the Jews contain. I demand of you, whetlier as a con- scientious Theist you can reconcile the conduct which is attributed to the God of the Jews with your conceptions of the purity and benevolence of the divine nature.
The loathsome and minute obscenities to which the inspired writers perpetually descend, the filthy observ- ances which God is described as personally instituting,^ the total disregard of truth and contempt of the first principles of morality, manifested on the most public occasions by the chosen favourites of Heaven, might corrupt, were they not so flagitious as to disgust.
When the chief of this obscure and brutal horde of assassins asserts that the God of the Universe was en- closed in a box of shittim wood,^ " two feet long and three feet wide," ^ and brought home in a new cart, I smile at the impertinence of so shallow an imposture. But it is blasphemy of a more hideous and unexampled nature to maintain that the Almighty God expressly commanded Moses to invade an unoffending nation ;
* See Hosea, chap, i., chap. ix. Ezekiel, chap, iv., chap, xvi., chap, xxiii. Heyne, speaking of the opinions entertained of the Jews by ancient poets and philosophers, says : — Mcminit quidem ftuperstifioiivi Judaicee Boratius, veritm ut earn risu ewploderet. — Jleyn. ad. Virg. Poll, in A rg.
• 1 Sam. V. 8. • Wordsworth's Lyrical' Ballads.
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and, on account of the difference of their worship, utterly to destroy every human being it contained, to murder every infant and unarmed man in cold blood, to massacre the captives, to rip up the matrons, and to retain the maidens alone for concubinage and viola- tion.^ At the very time that philosophers of the most
^ Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord's side ? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them. Thus saifh the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did accord- ing to the word of Moses : and there fell of the people on that day twenty-three thousand men. — Exod. xxxii. 26
And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord com- manded Moses ; and they slew all the males. And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods. And they burned all their huts wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire. And Moses, and Eleazar the priest and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp. And Moses was [wroth] with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle. And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the 2comen alive ? behold, tliese caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying unth him. But all the women-children, that have not knoion a man by lying with him, KEEP ALIVE FOR YOURSELVES. — Num. xxxi. 7-18.
And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon, king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children of every city. — Deut. iii. 6.
And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword. — Joshua.
So Joshua fought against Debir, and utterly destroyed all the souls that were therein : he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel com- manded.— Joshua X.
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enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a t,vrant, was the man after God's own heart? A wretch, at the thought of whose unparalleled enormities the sternest soul must sicken in dismay ! An unnatural monster, who sawed his fellow beings in sunder, harrowed them to fragments under harrows of iron, chopped them to pieces with axes, and burned them in brick-kilns, because they bowed before a different, and less bloody idol than his own. It is surely no perverse conclusion of an in- fatuated understanding that the God of the Jews is not the benevolent author of this beautiful world.
The conduct of the Deity in the promulgation of the Gospel, appears not to the eye of reason more com- patible with his immutability and omnipotence than the history of his actions under the law accords with his benevolence.
You assert that the human race merited eternal repro- bation because their common father had transgressed the divine command, and that the crucifixion of the Son of God was the only sacrifice or sufficient efficacy to satisfy eternal justice. But it is no less inconsistent with justice and subversive of morality that millions should be responsible for a crime which they had no share in committing, than that, if they had really com-
And David gathered all the people together, and went to Rabbah, and took it. And he brought forth the people therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and made them pass ihraugh the hrickkiln ; this did he also unto all the children of Amnion.— 2 Sara. xii. 29.
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mitted it, the crucifixion of an innocent being could absolve them from moral turpitude. Ferretne ulla civitas latorem istiusmodi legis, ut condemnaretur filiuSf aut nepos, si pater aut avus deliquisset? Certainly this is a mode of legislation peculiar to a state of savageness and anarchy ; this is the irrefragable logic of tyranny and imposture.
The supposition that God has ever supernaturally revealed his will to man at any other period than the original creation of the human race, necessarily involves a compromise of his benevolence. It assumes that he withheld from mankind a benefit which it was in his power to confer. That he suffered his creatures to remain in ignorance of truths essential to their happiness and salvation. That during the lapse of innumerable ages, every individual of the human race had perished without redemption, from an universal stain which the Deity at length descended in person to erase. That the good and wise of all ages, involved in one common fate with the ignorant and wicked, have been tarn ted by in- voluntary and inevitable error which torments infinite in duration may not avail to expiate.
In vain will you assure me with amiable inconsistency that the mercy of God will be extended to the virtuous, and that the vicious will alone be punished. The foun- dation of the Christian Religion is manifestly compro- mised by a concession of this nature. A subterfuge thus palpable plainly annihilates the necessity of the incarnation of God for the redemption of the human race, and represents the descent of the Messiah as a gratuitous display of Deity, solely adapted to perplex, to terrify and to embroil mankind.
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It is sufficiently evident that an omniscient being never conceived the design of reforming the world by Christianity. Omniscience would surely have foreseen the inefficacy of that system, which experience demon- strates not only to have been utterly impotent in restraining, but to have been most active in exhaling the malevolent propensities of men. During the period which elapsed between the removal of the seat of empire to Constantinople in S28, and its capture by the Turks in 1453, what salutary influence did Christianity exercise upon that world which it was intended to enlighten? Never before was Europe the theatre of such ceaseless and sanguinary wars ; never were the people so brutal- ised by ignorance and debased by slavery.
I will admit that one prediction of Jesus Christ has been indisputably fulfilled. / come not to bring peace upon earthy but a sword. Christianity indeed has equalled Judaism in the atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its desolation. Eleven millions of men, women, and children, have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated, and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God.
In vain will you tell me that these terrible effects flow not from Christianity, but from the abuse of it. No such excuse will avail to palliate the enormities of a religion pretended to be divine. A limited intelligence is only so far responsible for the effects of its agency as it foresaw, or might have foreseen them ; but Omni- science is manifestly chargeable with all the consequen- ces of its conduct. Christianity itself declares that the
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worth of the tree is to be determined by the quality of its fruit. The extermination of infidels; the mutual persecutions of hostile sects; the midnight massacres and slow burning of thousands, because their creed con- tained either more or less than the orthodox standard, of which Christianity has been the immediate occasion ; and the invariable opposition which philosophy has ever encountered from the spirit of revealed religion, plainly show that a very slight portion of sagacity was sufficient to have estimated at its true value the advantages of that belief to which some Theists are unaccountably attached.
You lay great stress upon the originality of the Chris- tian system of morals. If this claim be just, either your religion must be false, or the Deity has willed that opposite modes of conduct should be pursued by man- kind at different times, under the same circumstances ; which is absurd.
The doctrine of acquiescing in the most insolent des- potism ; of praying for and loving our enemies ; of faith and humility, appears to fix the perfection of the human character in that abjectness and credulity which priests and tyrants of all ages have found sufficiently convenient for their purposes. It is evident that a whole nation of Christians (could such an anomaly maintain itself a day) would become, like cattle, the property of the first occu- pier. It is evident that ten highwaymen would suffice to subjugate the world if it were composed of slaves who dared not to resist oppression.
The apathy to love and friendship, recommended by your creed, would, if attainable, not be less pernicious. This enthusiasm of anti-social misanthropy, if it were an
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actual rule of conduct, and not the speculation of a few interested persons, would speedily annihilate the human race. A total abstinence from sexual intercourse is not perhaps enjoined, but is strenuously recommended,^ and was actually practised to a frightful extent by the primi- tive Christians."
The penalties inflicted by that monster Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, on the pleasures of un- Ucensed love, are so iniquitously severe, that no modem legislator could have affixed them to the most atrocious crimes.^ This cold-blooded and hypocritical ruffian cut his son's throat, strangled his wife, murdered his father- in-law and his brother-in-law, and maintained at his court a set of blood-thirsty and bigoted Christian Priests, one of whom was sufficient to excite the one half of the world to massacre the other.
I am willing to admit that some few axioms of morality, M'hich Christianity has borrowed from the philosophers of Greece and India, dictate, in an uncon- nected state, rules of conduct worthy of regard ; but the purest and most elevated lessons of morality must remain nugatory, the most probable inducements to virtue must fail of their effect, so long as the slightest weight is attached to that dogma which is the vital essence of revealed religion.
Belief is set up as the criterion of merit or demerit ; a man is to be judged not by the purity of his intentions
^ Now concerning the things whereof 3'e wrote to me ; it is good for a man not to touch a woman.
I say, therefore, to the unmarried and widows, it is £jood for tliem if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry ; it is better to marry tlian burn. — 1 Cor. vii.
' See (Jibhon's Decline and Fall, Vol. ii. p. 210.
=» I])id., Vol. ii. p. 260.
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but by the orthodoxy of his creed ; an assent to certain propositions, is to outweigh in the balance of Chris- tianity the most generous and elevated virtue.
But the intensity of belief, like that of every other passion, is precisely proportioned to the degrees of ex- citement. A graduated scale, on which should be marked the capabilities of propositions to approach to the test of the senses, would be a just measure of the belief which ought to be attached to them : and but for the influence of prejudice or ignorance this invariably is the measure of belief. That is believed which is apprehended to be true, nor can the mind by any exer- tion avoid attaching credit to an opinion attended with overwhelming evidence. Belief is not an act of volition, nor can it be regulated by the mind : it is manifestly incapable therefore of either merit or criminality. The system which assumes a false criterion of moral virtue, must be as pernicious as it is absurd. Above all, it cannot be divine, as it is impossible that the Creator of the human mind should be ignorant of its primary powers.
The degree of evidence afforded by miracles and prophecies in favour of the Christian Religion is lastly to be considered.
Evidence of a more imposing and irresistible nature is required in proportion to the remoteness of any event from the sphere of our experience. Every case of miracles is a contest of opposite improbabilities, whether it is more contrary to experience that a miracle should be true, or that the story on which it is supported should be false : whether the immutable laws of this harmonious world should have undergone violation, or
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 49
that some obscure Greeks and Jews should have con- sj)ired to fabricate a tale of wonder.
Tlie actual aj)i)earance of a departed spirit would be a circumstance truly unusual and portentous ; but the accumulated testimony of twelve old women that a spirit had appeared is neither unprecedented nor miraculous.
It seems less credible that the God whose immensity is uncircumscribed by space, should have committed adultery with a carpenter's wife, than that some bold knaves or insane dupes had deceived the credulous multitude.^ We have perpetual and mournful experi- ence of the latter : the former is yet under dispute. History affords us innumerable examples of the possi- bihty of the one : Philosophy has in all ages protested against the probability of the other.
Every superstition can produce its dupes, its miracles, and its mysteries; each is prepared to justify its peculiar tenets by an equal assemblage of portents, prophecies and martyrdoms.
Prophecies, however circumstantial, are liable to the same objection as direct miracles : it is more agreeable to experience that the historical evidence of the pre- diction really having preceded the event pretended to be foretold should be false, or that a lucky conjuncture of events should have justified the conjecture of the prophet, than that God should communicate to a man the discernment of future events.^ I defy you to pro- duce more than one instance of prophecy in the Bible, wherein the inspired writer speaks so as to be under-
^ See Paley's Evidericcs, Vol. i. chap. 1.
* See tlie Controversy of Bishop Watson and Thomas Paine. — Paine's Criticism on the xixth chapter of Isaiah.
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stood, wherein his prediction has not been so unintelh- gible and obscure as to have been itself the subject of controversy among Christians.
That one prediction which I except is certainly most explicit and circumstantial. It is the only one of this nature which the Bible contains. Jesus himself liere predicts his own arrival in the clouds to consummate a period of supernatural desolation, before the generation which he addressed should pass away.^ Eighteen hundred years have past, and no such event is pretended to have happened. This single plain prophecy, thus conspicuously false, may serve as a criterion of those which are more vague and indirect, and which apply in an hundred senses to an hundred things.
Either the pretended predictions in the Bible were meant to be understood, or they were not. If they were, why is there any dispute concerning them : if they were not, wherefore were they written at all? But the God of Christianity spoke to mankind in parables, that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.
The Gospels contain internal evidence that they were
not written by eye-witnesses of the event which they
pretend to record. The Gospel of St. Matthew was
1 Immediately after the tribulation of these days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the lieavens shall be shaken : and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven : and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and the}^ shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angel with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds from one end of heaven to the othei. Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, until all these things be fulfilled.— Msitt. xxiv.
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plainly not written until some time after the taking of Jerusalem, that is, at least forty years after the execu- tion of Jesus Christ : for he makes Jesus say that upon you may come all the rifrlitcoiis blood shed upon the earthy from the blood of rit^htcous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias xchorii ye slew between the altar and the temple.^ Now Zacharias, son of Bara- chias, was assassinated between the altar and the temple by a faction of zealots, during the siege of Jerusalem.^ You assert that the design of the instances of super- natural interposition which the Gospel records was to convince mankind that Jesus Christ was truly the expected Redeemer. But it is as impossible that any human sophistry should frustrate the manifestation of Omnipotence, as that Omniscience should fail to select the most efficient means of accomplishing its design. Eighteen centuries have passed and the tenth part of the human race have a blind and mechanical belief in that Redeemer, witliout a complete reliance on the merits of whom, their lot is fixed in everlasting misery : surely if the Christian system be thus dreadfully impor- tant its Omnipotent author would have rendered it incapable of those abuses from which it has never been exempt, and to which it is subject in common with all human institutions, he would not have left it a matter of ceaseless cavil or complete indifference to the immense majority of mankind. Surely some more con- spicuous evidences of its authenticity would have been afforded than driving out devils, drowning pigs, curing blind men, animating a dead body, and turning water into wine. Some theatre worthier of tlie transcendent * See Matt, xxiii. 35. ' Josephus.
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event, than Judea, would have been chosen, some his- torians more adapted by their accompUshments and their genius to record the incarnation of the immutable God. The humane society restores drowned persons; every empiric can cure every disease; drowning pigs is no very difficult matter, and driving out devils was far from being an original or an unusual occupation in Judea. Do not recite these stale absurdities as proofs of the Divine origin of Christianity.
If the Almighty has spoken, would not the Universe have been convinced ? If he had judged the knowledge of his will to have been more important than any other science to mankind, would he not have rendered it more evident and more clear?
Now, O Eusebes, have I enumerated the general grounds of my disbelief of the Christian Religion. — I could have collated its Sacred Writings with the Brah- minical record of the early ages of the world, and identified its institutions with the antient worship of the Sun. I might have entered into an elaborate com- parison of the innumerable discordances which exist between the inspired historians of the same event. Enough however has been said to vindicate me from the charge of groundless and infatuated scepticism. I trust therefore to your candour for the consideration, and to your logic for the refutation, of my arguments.
Eusebes
I WILL not dissemble, O Theosophus, the difficulty of solving your general objections to Christianity, on the grounds of human reason. I did not assist at the councils of the Almighty when he determined to extend
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his mercy to mankind, nor can I venture to affirm that it exceeded the limits of his power to have afforded a more conspicuous or universal manifestation of his will.
But this is a difficulty which attends Christianity in common with the belief in the being and attributes of God. This whole scheme of things might have been, according to our partial conceptions, infinitely more admirable and perfect. Poisons, earthquakes, disease, war, famine and venomous serpents ; slavery and per- secution are the consequences of certain causes, which according to human judgment might well have been dispensed with in arranging the economy of the globe.
Is this the reasoning which the Theist will choose to employ ? Will he impose limitations on that Deity whom he professes to regard with so profound a venera- tion? Will he place his God between the horns of a logical dilemma which shall restrict the fulness either of his powder or his bounty?
Certainly he will prefer to resign his objections to Christianity, than pursue the reasoning upon which they are found, to the dreadful conclusions of cold and dreary Atheism.
I confess that Christianity appears not unattended with difficulty to the understanding which approaches it with a determination to judge its mysteries by reason. I will even confess that the discourse, which you have just delivered, ought to unsettle any candid mind engaged in a similar attempt. The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.
But if I succeed in convincing you that reason con-
E
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ducts to conclusions destructive of morality, happiness, and the hope of futurity, and inconsistent with the very existence of human society, I trust that you will no longer confide in a director so dangerous and faithless.
I require you to declare, O Theosophus, whether you would embrace Christianity or Atheism, if no other systems of belief shall be found to stand the touchstone of inquiry.
Theosophus
I DO not hesitate to prefer the Christian system, or indeed any system of religion, however rude and gross, to Atheism. Here we truly sympathise; nor do I blame, however I may feel inclined to pity, the man who in his zeal to escape this gloomy faith, should plunge into the most abject superstition.
The Atheist is a monster among men. Inducements, which are omnipotent over the conduct of others, are impotent for him. His private judgment is his criterion of right and wrong. He dreads no judge but his own conscience, he fears no hell but the loss of his self- esteem. He is not to be restrained by punishments, for death is divested of its terror, and whatever enters into his heart to conceive, that will he not scruple to execute. Iste non timet omiiia provideyitejyi et cogi- tantem, et animadvertentemf et omnia ad se pertinere putanteniy curiosum et plenum, negotii Deum.
This dark and terrible doctrine was surely the abor- tion of some blind speculator's brain ; some strange and hideous perversion of intellect, some portentous distor- tion of reason. There can surely be no metaphysician sufficiently bigoted to his own system to look upon this
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 55
harmonious Avorld, and dispute tiie necessity of intelli- gence ; to contemplate the design and deny the de- signer ; to enjoy the spectacle of this beautiful Universe and not feel himself instinctively persuaded to gratitude and adoration. W'liat arguments of the slightest plausi- bility can be adduced to support a doctrine rejected alike by the instinct of the savage and the reason of the sage?
I readily engage, ^vith you, to reject reason as a faith- less guide, if 3'ou can demonstrate that it conducts to Atheism. So little, however, do I mistrust the dictates of reason, concerning a supreme Being, that I promise, in the event of your success, to subscribe the wildest and most monstrous creed which you can devise. I will call credulity, faith ; reason, impiety ; the dictates of the understanding shall be the temptations of the Devil, and the wildest dreams of the imagination, the infallible inspirations of Grace.
EUSEBES
Let me request you then to state, concisely, the grounds of your belief in the being of a God. In my reply I shall endeavour to controvert your reasoning, and shall hold myself acquitted by my zeal for the Christian religion, of the blasphemies which I must utter in the progress of my discourse.
Theosophus
I WILL readily state the grounds of my belief in the i)eing of a God. You can only have remained ignorant of the obvious proofs of this important truth, from a superstitious reliance upon the evidence afforded by a
56 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
revealed religion. The reasoning lies within an ex- tremely narrow compass ; quicquid enim nos vel meliores vel beatiores facturum est, aut in aperto, out in proximo posuit natura.
From every design we justly infer a designer. If we examine the structure of a watch, we shall readily con- fess the existence of a watch-maker. No work of man could possibly have existed from all eternity. From the contemplation of any product of human art, we con- clude that there was an artificer who arranged its several parts. In like manner, from the marks of design and contrivance exhibited in the Universe, we are necessitated to infer a designer, a contriver. If the parts of the Universe have been designed, contrived, and adapted, the existence of a God is manifest.
But design is sufficiently apparent. The wonderful adaptation of substances which act to those which are acted upon ; of the eye to light, and of light to the eye ; of the ear to sound, and of sound to the ear ; of every object of sensation to the sense which it impresses prove that neither blind chance, nor undistinguishing neces- sity has brought them into being. The adaptation of certain animals to certain climates, the relation borne to each other by animals and vegetables, and by different tribes of animals ; the relation, lastly, between man and the circumstances of his external situation are so many demonstrations of Deity.
All is order, design, and harmony, so far as we can descry the tendency of things, and every new enlarge- ment of our views, every new display of the material world, affords a new illustration of the power, the wisdom and the benevolence of God.
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The existence of God lias never been the topic of popular dispute. There is a tendency to devotion, a thirst tor reliance on supernatural aid inherent in the human mind. Scarcely any people, however barbarous, have been discovered, who do not acknowledfje with reverence and awe the supernatural causes of the natural effects which they experience. They worship, it is true, the vilest and most inanimate substances, but they firmly confide in the holiness and power of these sym- bols, and thus own their connexion with what they can neither see nor perceive.
If there is motion in the Universe, there is a God.^ The power of beginning motion is no less an attribute of mind than sensation or thought. Wherever motion exists it is evident that mind has operated. The pheno- mena of the Universe indicate the agency of powers which cannot belong to inert matter.
Every thing which begins to exist must have a cause : every combination, conspiring to an end, implies in- telligence.
EUSEBES
Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred. The matter in controversy is the existence of design in the I'niverse, and it is not permitted to assume the contested premises and thence infer the matter in dispute. Insidiously to employ the words contrivance, design, and adaptation before these circumstances are made apparent in the Universe, thence justly inferring a contriver, is a popular sophism against which it be- hoves us to be watchful.
^ See DugalJ Stewart's Outlines of Moral Philosophy and Paley's Natural Th^ologij.
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To assert that motion is an attribute of mind, that matter is inert, that every combination is the result of intelligence is also an assumption of the matter in dispute.
Why do we admit design in any machine of human contrivance? Simply because innumerable instances of machines having been contrived by human art are present to our mind, because we are acquainted with persons who could construct such machines ; but if, having no previous knowledge of any artificial contri- vance, we had accidentally found a watch upon the ground, we should have been justified in concluding that it was a thing of Nature, that it was a combination of matter with whose cause we were unacquainted, and that any attempt to account for the origin of its existence would be equally presumptuous and unsatisfactory.
The analogy which you attempt to establish between the contrivances of human art, and the various exis- tences of the Universe, is inadmissible. We attribute these effects to human intelligence, because we know beforehand that human intelligence is capable of pro- ducing them. Take away this knowledge, and the grounds of our reasoning will be destroyed. Our entire ignorance, therefore, of the Divine Nature leaves this analogy defective in its most essential point of comparison.
What consideration remains to be urged in support of the creation of the Universe by a supreme Being ? Its admirable fitness for the production of certain effects, that wonderful consent of all its parts, that universal harmony by whose changeless laws innumerable systems of worlds perform their stated revolutions, and the blood
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 59
is driven tlirou«jh the veins of the minutest animalcule that sports in the corruption of an insect's lymph : on this account did the Universe require an intelligent Creator, because it exists producing invariable effects, and inasmuch as it is admirably organised for the pro- duction of these effects, so the more did it require a creative intelligence.
Thus have we arrived at the substance of your asser- tion, "That whatever exists, producing certain effects, stands in need of a Creator, and the more conspicuous is its fitness for the production of these effects, the more certain will be our conclusion that it would not have existed from eternity, but must have derived its origin from an intelligent creator."
In what respect then do these arguments apply to the Universe, and not apply to God? From the fitness of the Universe to its end you infer the necessity of an intelligent Creator. But if the fitness of the Universe, to produce certain effects, be thus conspicuous and evident, how much more exquisite fitness to his end must exist in the Author of this Universe? If we find great difficulty from its admirable arrangement in con- ceiving that tlie I niverse has existed from all eternity, and to resolve this difficulty suppose a Creator, how much more clearly must we perceive the necessity of this very Creator's creation whose perfections compre- hend an arrangement far more accurate and just.
The belief of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing, is a direct consequence of the premises which you have stated. The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that
60 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
there are [an] infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd. It is impossible indeed to prescribe limits to learned error, when Philosophy relinquishes experience and feeUng for speculation.
Until it is clearly proved that the Universe was created, we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. In a case where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is less incomprehensible : it is easier to suppose that the Universe has existed from all eternity, than to conceive an eternal being capable of creating it. If the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burthen?
A man knows, not only that he now is, but that there was a time when he did not exist ; consequently there must have been a cause. But we can only infer, from effects, causes exactly adequate to those effects. There certainly is a generative power which is effected by par- ticular instruments ; we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments, nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration. We admit that the genera- tive power is incomprehensible, but to suppose that the same effects are produced by an eternal Omnipotent and Omniscient Being, leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible.
We can only infer from effects causes exactly adequate to those effects. An infinite number of effects demand an infinite number of causes, nor is the philosopher justified in supposing a greater connexion or unity in the latter, than is perceptible in the former. The same energy cannot be at once the cause of the serpent and the sheep; of the blight by which the harvest is
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 61
destroyed, and the sunshine by which it is matured ; of the ferocious propensities by which man becomes a victim to himself, and of tlie accurate jud<^ment by whicli his institutions are improved. The spirit of our accurate and exact philosophy is outraged by conclusions which contradict each other so f^laringly.
The greatest, equally with the smallest motions of the Universe, are subjected to tlie rigid necessity of inevit- able laws. These laws are the unknown causes of the known effects perceivable in the Universe. Their effects are the boundaries of our knowledge, their names the expressions of our ignorance. To suppose some existence beyond, or above them, is to invent a second and superfluous hypothesis to account for what has already been accounted for by the laws of motion and the properties of matter. I admit that the nature of these laws is incomprehensible, but the hypothesis of a Deity adds a gratuitous difficulty, which so far from alleviating those which it is adduced to explain, requires new hypothesis for the elucidation of its own inherent contradictions.
The laws of attraction and repulsion, desire and aver- sion, suffice to account for every phenomenon of the moral and physical world. A precise knowledge of the properties of any object, is alone requisite to determine its manner of action. Let the mathematician be ac- quainted with the weight and volume of a cannon ball, together with the degree of velocitj' and inclination with which it is impelled, and he will accurately de- lineate the course it must describe, and determine the force with which it will strike an object at a given distance. Let the influencing motive, present to the
62 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
mind of any person be given, and the knowledge of his consequent conduct will result. Let the bulk and velocity of a comet be discovered, and the astronomer, by the accurate estimation of the equal and contrary actions of the centripetal and centrifugal forces, will justly predict the period of its return.
The anomalous motions of the heavenly bodies, their unequal velocities and frequent aberrations, are corrected by that gravitation by which they are caused. The illus- trious Laplace has shown that the approach of the Moon to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, is only a seculai- equation of a very long period, which has its maximum and minimum. The sj^stem of the Universe then is upheld solely by physical powers. The necessity of matter is the ruler of the world. It is vain philosophy which supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things. Hypotheses non fingo: quicquid enim ex phsenomenis non deducituTf hypothesis vocanda est; et hypotheses vel metaphysicxy vel physicscj vel qualitatum occultaruin, seu mechanicae, in philosophid locum non habent.
You assert that the construction of the animal machine, the fitness of certain animals to certain situa- tions, the connexion between the organs of perception and that which is perceived ; the relation between every- thing which exists, and that which tends to preserve it in its existence, imply design. It is manifest that if the eye could not see, nor the stomach digest, the human frame could not preserve its present mode of existence. It is equally certain, however, that the elements of its composition, if they did not exist in one form, must exist in another ; and that the combina-
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 63
tions wliich they would form, must so long as they endured, derive support for their peculiar mode of being from their fitness to the circumstances of their situation.
It by no means follows, that because a being exists, performing certain functions, he was fitted by another being to the performance of these functions. So rash a conclusion would conduct, as I have before shown, to an absurdity ; and it becomes infinitely more unwarrant- able from the consideration that the known laws of matter and motion, suffice to unravel, even in the present imperfect state of moral and physical science, the majority of those difficulties which the hypothesis of a Deity was invented to explain.
Doubtless no disposition of inert matter, or matter deprived of qualities, could ever have composed an animal, a tree, or even a stone. But matter deprived of qualities, is an abstraction, concerning which it is impossible to form an idea. Matter, such as we behold it, is not inert. It is infinitely active and subtile. Light, electricity, and magnetism are fluids not sur- passed by thought itself in tenuity and activity : like thought they are sometimes the cause and sometimes the effect of motion ; and, distinct as they are from every other class of substances with which we are acquainted, seem to possess equal claims with thought to the un- meaning distinction of immateriality.
The laws of motion and the properties of matter suffice to account for every phenomenon, or combination of phenomena exhibited in the Universe. That certain animals exist in certain climates, results from the con- sentaneity of their frames to the circumstances of their
64 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
situation : let these circumstances be altered to a suffi- cient degree, and the elements of their composition must exist in some new combination no less resulting than the former from those inevitable laws by which the Universe is governed.
It is the necessary consequence of the organisation of man, that his stomach should digest his food : it in- evitably results also from his gluttonous and unnatural appetite for the flesh of animals that his frame be diseased and his vigour impaired ; but in neither of these cases is adaptation of means to end to be per- ceived. Unnatural diet, and the habits consequent upon its use are the means, and every complication of frightful disease is the end, but to assert that these means were adapted to this end by the Creator of the world, or that human caprice can avail to traverse the precau- tions of Omnipotence, is absurd. These are the con- sequences of the properties of organised matter ; and it is a strange perversion of the understanding to argue that a certain sheep was created to be butchered and devoured by a certain individual of the human species, when the conformation of the latter, as is manifest to the most superficial student of comparative anatomy, classes him with those animals Mho feed on fruits and vegetables.^
^ See Cuvier Le9on s d'Anat. Comp. torn. iii. pp. 169, 373, 448, 465, 480. Rees' Cyclopsedia, Art. Man.
OvK aideiaOe rovs Tj/xepovs KapTvovs al/j-arL kul <pov<f ^xiyvvovris ; aWa. Zpaiiovras ayplovs KoAerre kol irapSdXeis Koi Kfovras, avroi Se IJnai<pou€7T€ €15 u}/j.6TriTa KaTa\nr6uT€s e/cfiVois ouSeV. 'EksIuois fiey yap 6 (p6vos Tpo(pT], v/jllv Se u\pou iariv.
"Otl yap OVK (cttlu avQpdoirui Kara (pvcriu rh capKocpayfilv, irpwroy fxfu anh twv (TWjxaTwv Zr\\ovTai rr^s KaTa(rK€vr)s. OuSevi yap iciK€ rh aydpwTTOv (Twfia tSjv 4it\ crapicocpayia. ycy oy6Tuy, oi) ypvirSri/js
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 65
The means by whicli the existence of an animal is sustained, requires a desifrner in no frrcater degree than the existence itself of the animal. If it exists, there must be means to support its existence. In a world where onute mutatur jiihil intcrit, no organised being can exist witliout a continual separation of that sub- stance which is incessantly exhausted, nor can this separation take j^lace otherwise than b}^ the invariable laws which result from the relations of matter. We are incapacitated onl}- by our ignorance from referring every phenomenon, however unusual, minute or com- plex, to the laws of motion and the properties of matter ; and it is an egregious offence against the first principles of reason to suppose an immaterial creator of the world, in quo oninia moventur sed sine jnutud passione : which is equally a superfluous hypothesis in the meciianicai philosophy of Newton, and a useless excrescence on the inductive logic of Bacon.
What then is this harmony, this order which you maintain to have required for its establishment, what it needs not for its maintenance, the agency of a super- natural intelligence? Inasmuch as the order visible in
Xfi^ovs, ovK o^uTTjs uvuxos, OX) TpaxvTT}^ oB6yT(i}U trp6a'€<TTiv, oh Koi\ias fvToy'ia koI Trv^VjiaTOS 6epiJ.6TTis, rp(\pai Kal KarepyaaarrQai Zwclt)] tJ ;3apu koX KpewZ^s. 'AAA' avr66iv r\ (pvais rrj \ei6rTjTi T'Jov oh6vTO}V, K'A rfj (rfMiKp6rT]Ti Tov ar6ixaros, Koi rrj ixa\aK6TT]ri TT\s y\c!j<T(Tr)S, Koi rrj irphs irtxl/iv afx&XvTrjri tov irviVfiaros, i^6/j.viTat tV (TapKOipayiav. Ei St K^yeis, Tr€(puKfuai (reavrhv i-nl roiavTj]v iZ'jihr]v, '6 0ov\ei (payflv, irpwros avrhs air6KTeivoy dAA' avrbs, 5ia aeauTov, fi^ XP'H'^'^H-^^'^^ KoiriSi, jUTjSe Tvjj.TT6.vcf Tiv\ ^UTj^e ireAeVft" a\Aa, ws KvKoi Kal &pKToi, koI \(6vTes uvtSi ws icrdiovcri (pnyeuovcriv, &,uf\e S-qy/JLUTi fiovy, 1j crwfiaTi avv, fj 6.pva fj Kaywoy Siap^rj^oy, /col (pdye TToo sire ft cDi/ €Tj ^uyTOS ws ^Kflva.
UKovT. iTfpl l,apKO<pay. Aoy. 0.
66 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
the Universe requires one cause, so does the disorder whose operation is not less clearly apparent, demand another. Order and disorder are no more than modifica- tions of our own perceptions of the relations which subsist between ourselves and external objects, and if we are justified in inferring the operation of a benevolent power from the advantages attendant on the former, the evils of the latter bear equal testimony to the activity of a malignant principle, no less pertinacious in inducing evil out of good, than the other is unremitting in procuring good from evil.
If we permit our imagination to traverse the obscure regions of possibility, we may doubtless imagine, accord- ing to the complexion of our minds, that disorder may have a relative tendency to unmingled good, or order be relatively replete with exquisite and subtile evil. To neither of these conclusions, which are equally presump- tuous and unfounded, will it become the philosopher to assent. Order and disorder are expressions denoting our perceptions of what is injurious or beneficial to ourselves, or to the beings in whose welfare we are compelled to sympathise by the similarity of their conformation to our own.^
A beautiful antelope panting under the fangs of a tiger, a defenceless ox, groaning beneath the butcher's axe, is a spectacle which instantly awakens compassion in a virtuous and unvitiated breast. Many there are, however, sufficiently hardened to the rebukes of justice and the precepts of humanity, as to regard the deliberate butchery of thousands of their species, as a theme of exultation and a source of honour, and to consider any 1 See Godwin's Political Justice, Vol. i. p. 449.
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 67
failure in these remorseless enterprises as a defect in the system of things. The criteria of order and dis- order are as various as those beings from whose ojjinions and feelings they result.
Populous cities are destroyed by earthquakes, and desolated by pestilence. Ambition is everywhere devot- ing its millions to incalculable calamity. Superstition, in a thousand shapes, is employed in brutalising and degrading the human species, and fitting it to endure without a murmur the oppression of its innumerable tyrants. All this is abstractedly neither good nor evil, because good and evil are words employed to designate that peculiar state of our own perceptions, resulting from the encounter of any object calculated to produce pleasure or pain. Exclude the idea of relation, and the words good and evil are deprived of import.
Earthquakes are injurious to the cities which they destroy, beneficial to those whose commerce was injured by their prosperity, and indifferent to others which are too remote to be affected by their influence. Famine is good to the corn-merchant, evil to the poor, and in- different to those whose fortunes can at all times com- mand a superfluity. Ambition is evil to the restless bosom it inhabits, to the innumerable victims who are dragged by its ruthless thirst for infamy, to expire in every variety of anguish, to the inhabitants of the country it depopulates, and to the human race whose improvement it retards ; it is indifferent with regard to the system of the Universe, and is good only to the vultures and the jackals that track the conqueror's career, and to the worms who feast in security on the
68 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
desolation of his progress. It is manifest tliat we cannot reason with respect to the universal system from that which only exists in relation to our own perceptions.
You allege some considerations in favour of a Deity from the universality of a belief in his existence.
The superstitions of the savage, and the religion of civilised Europe appear to you to conspire to prove a first cause. I maintain that it is from the evidence of revelation alone that this belief derives the slightest countenance.
That credulity should be gross in proportion to the ignorance of the mind which it enslaves, is in strict consistency with the principles of human nature. The idiot, the child, and the savage, agree in attributing their ovra passions and propensities ^ to the inanimate substances by which they are either benefited or injured. The former become Gods and the latter Demons ; hence prayers and sacrifices, by the means of which the rude Theologian imagines that he may confirm the benevo- lence of the one, or mitigate the malignity of the other. He has averted the wrath of a powerful enemy by supplications and submission ; he has secured the assist- ance of his neighbour by offerings ; he has felt his own anger subside before the entreaties of a vanquished foe, and has cherished gratitude for the kindness of another. Therefore does he believe that the elements will listen to his vows. He is capable of love and hatred towards his fellow beings, and is variously impelled by those principles to benefit or injure them. The source of his error is sufficiently obvious. When the winds, the ^ See Southey's Histoiy of Brazil, p. 255.
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 60
waves and the atmosphere, act in siicii a niamier as to thwart or forward his designs, he attributes to them the same ])roi)ensities of whose existence within liimself he is conscious when lie is instigated by benefits to kind- ness, or by injuries to revenge. The bigot of tlie woods can form no conception of beings possessed of proi)erties differing from his own : it requires, indeed, a mind considerably tinctured with science, and enlarged by cultivation to contemplate itself, not as the centre and model of the I inverse, but as one of the infinitely various multitude of beings of which it is actually composed.
There is no attribute of God which is not either borrowed from the passions and powers of the human mind, or which is not a negation. Omniscience, Omni- potence, Omnipresence, Infinity, Immutability, Incom- prehensibility, and Immateriality, are all words which designate properties and powers peculiar to organised beings, with the addition of negations, by which the idea of limitation is excluded.^
That the frequency of a belief in God (for it is not universal) should be any argument in its favour, none to whom the innumerable mistakes of men are familiar, will assert. It is among men of genius and science that Atheism alone is found, but among these alone is cherished an hostility to those errors, with which the illiterate and vulgar are infected.
How small is the proportion of those who really be- lieve in God, to the thousands who are prevented by their occupations from ever bestowing a serious thought
^ See Lc Si/stemc dc la Nature: this book is one of tlio most eloquent vindications of Atheism. F
70 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
upon the subject, and the millions who worship butter- flies, bones, feathers, monkeys, calabashes and serpents. The word God, like other abstractions, signifies the agreement of certain propositions, rather than the presence of any idea. If we found our belief in the existence of God on the universal consent of mankind, we are duped by the most palpable of sophisms. The word God cannot mean at the same time an ape, a snake, a bone, a calabash, a Trinity, and a Unity. Nor can that belief be accounted universal against which men of powerful intellect and spotless virtue have in every age protested. Non pudet igitur physicum, id est specula- toreni venatoremque naturse, ex anhnis consuetudiiic imhutis petere testimonium veritatis?
Hume has shown, to the satisfaction of all philoso- phers, that the only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. We denominate that phenomenon the cause of another which we observe with the fewest exceptions to precede its occurrence. Hence it would be inadmissible to de- duce the being of a God from the existence of the Universe ; even if this mode of reasoning did not conduct to the monstrous conclusion of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminentl}'^ requiring a Creator than its predecessor.
If Power ^ be an attribute of existing substance, substance could not have derived its origin from power. One thing cannot be at the same time the cause and the eflFect of another. — The word power expresses the
^ For a profound disquisition on this subject, see Sir William Drummond's Academical Q2cestio7is, chap. i. p. 1.
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 71
capability of any tiling to be or act. 'I'he human mind never hesitates to annex the idea of power to any object of its experience. To deny that power is the attribute of beinfj, is to deny that being can be. If power be an attribute of substance, the hypothesis of a God is a superfluous and unwarrantable assumption.
Intelligence is that attribute of the Deity, which >on hold to be most apparent in the Universe. Intelligence is only known to us as a mode of animal being. We cannot conceive intelligence distinct from sensation a.id perception, which are attributes to organised bodies. To assert that God is intelligent, is to assert that he has ideas ; and Locke has proved that ideas result from sensation. Sensation can exist only in an organised bod}', an organised body is necessarily limited both in extent and operation. The God of the rational Theo- Sophies is a vast and wise animal.
You have laid it down as a maxim that the power of beginning motion is an attribute of mind as much as thought and sensation.
Mind cannot create, it can only perceive. Mind is the recipient of impressions made on the organs of sense, and without the action of external objects we should not only be deprived of all knowledge of the existence of mind, but totally incapable of the knowledge of any thing. It is evident, therefore, that mind deserves to be considered as the effect, rather than the cause of motion. The ideas which suggest themselves too are prompted by the circumstances of our situation, these are the elements of thought, and from the various combinations of these our feelings, opinions, and volitions inevitably result.
72 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
That which is infinite necessarily includes that which is finite. The distinction therefore between the Universe, and that by which the Universe is upheld, is manifestly erroneous. To devise the word God, that you may express a certain portion of the universal system, can answer no good purpose in philosophy : In the language of reason, the words God and Universe are synonj'^mous. Omnia enim per Dei potentiam facta sunt, imoy quia naturce potentia nulla est nisi ipsa Dei potentia, artem est nos eatenus Dei potentiam non in- telligere quatenus causas naturales ignoramus: adeoque stulte ad eandam Dei potentiam recurritur, quando rei alicujus, causam naturalem, hoc est, ipsam Dei poten- tiam ignoramus.^
Thus from the principles of that reason to which you so rashly appealed as the ultimate arbiter of our dis- pute, have I shown that the popular arguments in favour of the being of a God are totally destitute of colour. I have shown the absurdity of attributing intelligence to the cause of those effects which we perceive in the Universe, and the fallacy which lurks in the argument from design. I have showTi that order is no more than a peculiar manner of contemplating the operation of necessary agents, that mind is the effect, not the cause of motion, that power is the attribute, not the origin of Being. I have proved that we can have no evidence of the existence of a God from the principles of reason.
You will have observed, from the zeal with which I have urged arguments so revolting to my genuine senti- ments, and conducted to a conclusion in direct contra- ' Spinosa. Tract. Theologico. -Pol. chap. i. p. 14.
A REFUTATION OF DEISM 73
diction lo that faith which every pood man must eternally preserve, how Httle I am inclined to sympathise witli those of my rehgion wiio have pretended to prove the existence of God by the unassisted light of reason. I confess that the necessity of a revelation has been compromised by treacherous friends to Christianity, who have maintained that tlie sublime m.vsteries of the being of a God and the immortality of the soul are discover- able from other sources than itself.
I have proved that on tlie principles of that philo- sophy to which Epicurus, Lord Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Hume were addicted, the existence of God is a chimera.
The Christian religion then, alone, affords indisput- able assurance that the world was created b}^ the power, and is preserved by the Providence of an Almighty God, who, in justice has appointed a future life for the punishment of the vicious and the remuneration of the virtuous.
Now, O Theosophus, I call upon you to decide be- tween Atheism and Christianity^; to declare whether you will pursue your principles to the destruction of the bonds of civilised society, or wear the easy yoke of that religion which proclaims ''peace upon earth, goodwill to all men."
Theosophus
I AM not prepared at present, I confess, to reply clearly to your unexpected arguments. I assure j'ou that no considerations, however specious, should seduce me to deny the existence of my Creator.
74 A REFUTATION OF DEISM
I am willing to promise that if, after mature delibera- tion, the arguments which you have advanced in favour of Atheism should appear incontrovertible, I will endea- vour to adopt so much of the Christian scheme as is consistent with my persuasion of tlie goodness, unity, and majesty of God.
A DEFENCE OF POETRY
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thougiit to another, however produced; and the latter, ns mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the i)iin- ciple of its own integrity. The one is the to ttouii/, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its object those forms which are common to universal nature and exist- ence itself ; the other is the to Xoyi^etr, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known ; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differ- ences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ** the 75
76 A DEFENCE OF POETRY
expression of the imagination :" and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an JEolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in a lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds and motions thus excited to the impres- sions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound ; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions ; and every inflexion of tone and gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it ; it will be the reflected image of that impression ; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the ^\ind has died away, so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner ; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects and his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes
A DEFENCE OF POETRY 77
the object of the passions and pleasures of man ; an addilii)nal class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expression ; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist ; the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed ; and equality, diversity, unity, con- trast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social ; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented b}^ them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it pro- ceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considera- tions which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhytlmi or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the coinbinalions of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a
78 A DEFENCE OF POETRY
certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other : the sense of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results : but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances where the predomi- nance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Ihose in whom it exists to excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word ; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from the community. Their language is vitally metaphorical ; that is, it marks the before un- apprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until words, which represent them, be- come, through time, signs for portions or classes of thought, instead of pictures of integral thoughts ; and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganised, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human inter- course. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world ; " ^ — and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the store- ^ Dc Augment. Scient. cap. 1. lib. iii.
A DEFENCE OF POETRY 79
house of axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry ; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation subsisting, first be- tween existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem : the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of lan- guage and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting ; they are the institutors of laws i:nd the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets : a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be proi)hets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the
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form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events : such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one ; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry ; and the choruses of ^schylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradisoy would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid cita- tion. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.
Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry ; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is sus- ceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagina- tion, and has relation to thoughts alone ; but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art, have
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relations among each otlicr, whicli limit and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror wliich reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the li^ht of which both are mediums of com- munication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as the hiero- glyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term ; as two per- formers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religion, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense ; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the word poetrj^ within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language ; for the popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thouglits have relation both be- tween each other and towards that which they repre- sent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thought. Hence the
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language of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it M ere not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation ; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower — and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in tlie language of poetical minds, together witli its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as includes much action : but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification. Tiie dis- tinction between poets and prose-writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet — the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the harmony of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action,
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aiul he loibore to invent any regular plan of rliythni which Nvouhl include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of liis style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of liis periods, but witli little success. Bacon was a poet.^ His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the autliors of revolutions in o{)inion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil t!ie permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth ; but as their periods are harn-ionious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements of verse ; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have em- ployed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of per- ceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.
A j)oem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause, and effect ; the other is the crea- tion of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, ^ See the Filu/n Laby r i ,ithi , and tl\e K-ssay on Doath particularly.
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which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of e\ents which can never again recur ; the otlier is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history ; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful : poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions ; a single word even may be a spark of inex- tinguishable thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livj'^, were poets ; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of Livy, re- strained them from developing this faculty in its highest degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.
Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to estimate its effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure : all spirits upon which it falls open themselves to receive the
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wisdom whicli is mingled with its delight. In the infancy of the world, neitiier poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry : for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness ; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame ; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers : it must be em- l)annelled by time from the selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds ; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece ; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilisation has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character ; nor can Me doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses : the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to their depths in these immortal creations : the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovelv impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected, that
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these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they are by no means to be considered as edifying patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age ; and Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his con- temporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient armour or modern uniform around his body ; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions Mill express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour ; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and pro- poses examples of civil and domestic life : nor is it for
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\vant of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combina- tions of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it re- presents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in tlie minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love ; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must |;ut himself in the place of another and of manj^ others ; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with tiioughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimi- lating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in
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his poetical creations, which participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in the participation of the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the dramatic and Ij^'ical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty ; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and we maj^ add, the forms of civil life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was de- formed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern Europe ; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty and virtue, been developed ; never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we records and frag- ments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, and
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in lan<juage, wliich lias rendered tliis epoeh memorable above all others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events : poetry is ever found to coexist with w hatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established to distinguish between the cause and the effect.
It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to produce a common effect in the representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power ; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage few only of the elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are em- ployed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious
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institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in King Lear, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour of King Lear against the (Edipus Tyrannus or the Agamemnon, or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected ; unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. King Lear, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world ; in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of the philo- sophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious Autos, has attempted to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic repre- sentations neglected by Shakespeare ; such as the estab- lishing a relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing ; but he omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a
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distorted superstition for the living impersonations ot* the truth of human passions.
But I digress. — 'I'he connexion of scenic exhibitions with the improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally recognised : in other words, the presence or absence of poetry, in its most perfect and universal form, has been found to be con- nected with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in its constitution ends : I appeal to the history of manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their con- ception the capacity of that by which they are con- ceived, the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror and sorrow ; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of tliis high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life : even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being repre- sented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable
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agencies of nature ; error is thus divested of its wilful- ness ; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In the drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred ; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathises with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces of anti- quity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the. very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths ; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison's " Cato " is a specimen of the one ; and would it were not super- fluous to cite examples of the other ! To such purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimagina- tive in a singular degree ; they affect sentiment and
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passion, a\ Iiicli, divested of iniafrination, are other names for eapriee and appetite. Tlie period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Mil- ton stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loves its ideal univer- sality : wit succeeds to humour ; we laugh from self-com- placency and triumph, instead of pleasure ; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merri- ment ; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting : it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence ; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Macchiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable
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of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense : all language, institution and form require not only to be produced but to be sustained : the office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predomi- nance first of the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the extinction or sus- pension of the creative faculty in Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious ; like the odour of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness ; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonising spirit of its own which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles : the former, especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. The superiority in these to succeeding writers consists in the presence of
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those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence of those which are connected with the external : their incomparable perfection con- sists in a liarmony of the union of all. It is not what the erotic poets have, but what tliey have not, in which their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as con- nected with the corruption of their age. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure ; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footstei^s of Astrrca, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving : it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. It will r-iadily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The
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sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as frag- ments and isolated portions : those who are more finely organised, or born in a happier age, may recognise them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient Rome ; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from creating in measured language, sculp- ture, music, or architecture, anything which might bear a particular relation to their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are as a mist of light wliich conceal from us the
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intense and exceedin.ir truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of thr Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions ; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus ; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of tlie victorious Gauls ; the refusal of the republic to make j^eace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calcu- lation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea ; the consequence was empire, and the reward everlasting fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent rate sacro. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony.
At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the circle of its evolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but
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that there were found poets among the authors of the
Christian and chivalric systems of manners and rehgion,
who created forms of opinion and action never before
conceived ; which, copied into the imaginations of men,
became as generals to the bewildered armies of their
thoughts. It is foreign to the present purpose to touch
upon the evil produced by these systems : except that
we protest, on the ground of the principles already
established, that no portion of it can be attributed to
the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David,
Solomon, and Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon
the mind of Jesus and his disciples. The scattered
fragments preserved to us by the biographers of this
extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly
distorted. At a certain period after the prevalence of
a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated
by him, the three forms into which Plato had distributed
the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis,
and became the object of the worship of the civilised
world. Here it is to be confessed that "Light seems
to thicken," and
*'The crow makes wing to the rooky wood, Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, And night's black agents to their preys do rouse." ^
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet un- wearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the ^ Macbeth, act iii, scene 2.
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music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless aiid invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus, and the mytho- logy and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the darkness and the convul- sions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of des- potism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfibh : their own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others : but fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, characterised a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those events are most entitled to our a[)probation wiiich could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves. The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the mode in w Inch the materials
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of pleasure and of power, produced by the common skill and labour of human beings, ought to be distributed among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehend- ing at once the past, the present, and the future con- dition of man. Jesus divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporat- ing into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. I^ove became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers ; so that earth became peopled by the
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inhabitants of a diviner world. Tlie familiar appear- ance and proceedings of life became wonderful and lieavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And ;is this creation itself is i)oetry, so its creators were poets ; and language was the in- strument of their art : *' Galeotto f u il libro, e chi lo scrisse.*' The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors, pre- ceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enclianted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate : it v.cre superfluous to explain how the gentleness and elevation of mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nitova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of senti- ment and language : it is the idealised history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedi- cated to love. His apotheosis to Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the *' Divina Commedia," in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a per- petual hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of
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the renovated world ; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Cal- deron, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human kind is distributed, has become less misunderstood ; and if the error which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognised in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world- The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealised, are merely the mask and the mantle in v.hich these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and dis- guised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Ripha?us, whom Virgil calls jiistissimus unus, in Paradise, and observing a most poetical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief
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popular support. Nothing: can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in *' Paradise Lost." It is a mistake to suppose that he coukl ever have been intended for the popular per- sonification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the ex- tremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil ; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant ; although redeemed by much that emiobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceive<l to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall bf judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superior- ity of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colours upon a single palette, and arranged them in the composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth, that is, according to the laws of that principle by which a scries of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and
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Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form ; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet : that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it : developing itself in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world ; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied ; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes are sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Smyrnaeus, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the iEneid, still less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen.
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion of the civilised world ; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the
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first reli.uious performer, and Liitlier surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the bold- ness of his censures, of papal usurpation. Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe ; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning ; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the be- nighted world. His very words are instinct witli spirit ; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought ; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with llie waters of wisdom and delight ; and after one person and one age has exhausted all of its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever develoj^ed, tlie source of an unforeseen and an unconceived dehght.
The age inmiediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was characterised by a revival of painting, sculj^ture, and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of Eng- lish literature is based upon the materials of Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of poetry and its influence on society.
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Be it enough to have pointed out the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon their own and all succeeding times.
But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine, as the grounds of this distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces. There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal, and permanent ; the other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the means of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest value, so long as they confine their administra- tion of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature
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within the limits due to the superior ones. But Nvhile the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines, labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. They have exem- plified the saying, ''To him that hath, more shall be given ; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken awaj^." The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer ; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Chary bdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense ; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the con- stitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approxima- tion to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on tliis princii)le ; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, " It is better to go to the house
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of mourning than to the house of mirth." Not that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The deUght of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.
The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utiUty. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or poetical philoso- phers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,^ and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two ; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed ; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born ; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated ; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us ; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had
^ Although Rousseaii has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.
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been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.
We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice ; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry, in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, govern- ment, and political economy, or at least what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let "/ dare not wait upon / would, like the poor cat in the adage.'' We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know ; we want the generous impulse to act that wliich we imagine, we want the poetry of life : our calculations have outrun conception ; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultiva- tion of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, projwrtioiially circumscribed those of the internal world ; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree dispro- portioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining
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labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of man- kind? From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold ; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order, which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the in- ternal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldj'- for that which animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge ; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought ; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things ; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the tex- ture of the elements wliich compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy
A DEFENCE OF ' POETRY 1 1 1
and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship — what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit ; what were our consolations on this side of the grave — and w hat were our asi)irations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, " i will compose poetr}^." The greatest poet even cannc! say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness ; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic cither of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results ; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original con- ceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest potts of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are jiroduced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces between tlieir sugges- tions, by the intertexture of conventional expressions ; a necessity only imposed by the limitedncss of the poetical faculty itself : for Milton conceived the Paradise I-X)st
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as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the muse having "dictated " to him the "unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso. Com- positions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. The instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pic- torial arts : a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation, is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression : so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own ; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are ex- perienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination ; and the state of mind produced by tliem is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions ;
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aiid whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organisation, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world ; a word, a trait in the rej^resentation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in tliose who have ever experienced those emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal ail that is best and most beautiful in the world ; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in lan- guage or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide — abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness ; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed ; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union, under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its pres- ence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarna- tion of the spirit which it breathes : its secret alchemy turns to i»otable gold the poisonous waters which How from death through life ; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
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All things exist as they are perceived ; at least in relation to the percipient.
"The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or with- draws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitant of a world to which the familiar w^orld is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which w^e perceive, and to imagine that wliich we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true word of Tasso : Non merila nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he ought person- ally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inas- much as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible : the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate
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of men : and the exceptions, as Ihey regard tliose who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confirm rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge and executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives oc those who are ''there sitting where we dare not soar," are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Bacon was a speculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance ; if their sins '' were as scarlet, they are now white as snow : " they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been con- fused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets ; consider how little is, as it appears — or appears, as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birtli and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when
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mental effects are experienced insusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately organised than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe the circum- stances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the pas- sions purely evil, have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind, by a con- sideration of the subject itself, instead of observing the formality of a polemical reply ; but if the view which they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel with
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certain versifiers ; I, like them, confess myself unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and MiEvius undoubtedly are, as they ever Nvere, insufferable persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements and principles : and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is called poetr}^ in a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.
The second part will have for its object an applica- tion of these principles to the present state of the cul- tivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealise the modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic development of v, hich has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted cn\y which would under- value contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond compari- son any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most un- failing herald, companion, and follower of the awaken- ing of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accunmlation of the po\^er of communicating and I
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receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respect- ing man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely aston- ished at its manifestations ; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration ; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present ; the words which express what they understand not ; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire ; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE
ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF
THE ATHENIANS
A FRAGMENT
The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself, or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilised man, the most memorable in the liistory of the world. V\ hat was the combination of moral and political circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progress during that period in literature and the arts ; — why that i)rogress, so rapid and so sus- tained, so soon received a check, and became retrograde —are problems left to the wonder and conjecture of posterity. The wrecks and fragment-s of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language — a type of the under- standings of which it was the creation and the image — in variety, in simplicity, in Hexibilily, and in cojjious- ness, excels every other language of the western world. Their sculptures are such as we, in our presumption, assume to be the models of ideal truth and beauty, and
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to which no artist of modern times can produce forms in any degree comparable. Their paintings, according to Pliny and Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony ; and some even were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, like tender music or tragic poetry, the most overwhelming emotions. We are accustomed to con- ceive the painters of the sixteenth century, as those who have brought their art to the highest perfection, probably because none of the ancient paintings have been preserved. For all the inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connexion between each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal jwwer, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual, or of society ; and the paintings of that period would probably bear the same relation as is con- fessedly borne by the sculptures to all succeeding ones. Of their music we know little ; but the effects which it is said to have produced, whether they be attributed to the skill of the composer, or the sensibility of his audience, are far more powerful than any which we experience from the music of our own times ; and if, indeed, the melody of their compositions were more tender and delicate, and inspiring, than the melodies of some modern European nations, their superiority in this art must have been something wonderful, and wholly beyond conception.
Their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not so disproportionate a rank, in the comparison. Per- haps Shakespeare, from the variety and comprehension of his genius, is to be considered, on the whole, as the greatest individual mind, of which we have specimens remaining. Perhaps Dante created imaginations of
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greater loveliness and energy than any that are to be found in the ancient literature of Greece. Perhaps notiiing has been discovered in t!ie fragments of tlie Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime and chivalric sensibility of Petrarch. — But, as a poet, Homer must be acknowledged to excel Shakespeare in the truth, the harmony, the sustained grandeur, the satisfying com- pleteness of his images, their exact fitness to the illus- tration, and to that to which they belong. Nor could Dante, deficient in conduct, plan, nature, variet}'^, and temperance, have been brought into comparison with these men, but for those fortunate isles, laden with golden fruit, which alone could tempt any one to ( mbark in the misty ocean of his dark and extravagant fiction.
But, omitting the comparison of individual minds, which can afford no general inference, how superior was the spirit and system of their poetry to that of any other period ! So that, had any other genius equal in other respects to the greatest that ever enlightened the world, arisen in that age, he would have been superior to all, from this circumstance alone — that his conceptions would have assumed a more harmonious and perfect form. For it is worthy of observation, that whatever the poets of that age produced is as harmonious and perfect as possible. If a drama, for instance, were the composition of a person of inferior talent, it was still homogeneous and free from inequalities ; it was a whole, consistent with itself. The compositions of great minds bore throughout the sustained stamp of their greatness. In the poetry of succeeding ages the expectations are often exalted on Icarian wings, and fall, too much
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disappointed to give a memory and a name to the oblivious pool in which they fell.
In physical know^ledge Aristotle and Theophrastus had already — no doubt assisted by the labours of those of their predecessors whom they criticise — made advances v>'orthy of the maturity of science. The astonishing invention of geometry, that series of discoveries which have enabled man to command the elements and fore- see future events, before the subjects of his ignorant wonder, and which have opened as it were the doors of the mysteries of nature, had already been brought to great perfection. Metaphysics, the science of man's inti- mate nature, and logic, or the grammar and elementary principles of that science, received from the latter philo- sophers of the Periclean age a firm basis. All our more exact philosophy is built upon the labours of these great men, and many of the words which we employ in metaphysical distinctions were invented by them to give accuracy and system to their reasonings. The science of morals, or the voluntary conduct of men in relation to themselves or others, dates from this epoch. How inexpressibly bolder and more pure were the doctrines of those great men, in comparison with the timid maxims which prevail in the writings of the most esteemed modern moralists! They were such as Phocion, and Epaminondas, and Timoleon, who formed themselves on their influence, were to the wretched heroes of our own age.
Their political and religious institutions are more difficult to bring into comparison with those of other times. A summary idea may be formed of the worth of any political and religious system, by observing the
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comparative (le^^ree of happiness and of intellect j)ro- duced under its influence. And whilst many institutions ;uid opinions, wliich in ancient Greece were obstacles to the improvement of the human race, have been abolished among modern nations, how many pernicious supersti- tions and new contrivances of misrule, and unheard-of complications of public mischief, have not been invented among them by the ever-watchful spirit of avarice and tyranny !
The modern nations of the civilised world owe the pro<Tress which they have made — as well in those physical sciences in which they have already excelled their masters, as in the moral and intellectual inquiries, in which, with all the advantage of the experience of the latter, it can scarcely be said that they have yet equalled them — to what is called the revival of learnin.ir : that is, the study of the writers of the age which preceded and immediately followed the government of Pericles, or of subsequent writers, who were, so to speak, the rivers flowing from those immortal fountains. And though there seems to be a principle in the modern world, which, should circumstances analogous to those which modelled the intellectual resources of the age to which we refer, into so harmonious a proportion, again arise, would arrest and perpetuate them, and consign their results to a more equal, extensive, and lasting improvement of the condition of man — though justice and the true meaning of human society are, if not more accurately, more generally understood ; though perhaps men know more, and therefore are more, as a mass, yet this principle has never been called into action, and requires indeed a universal and an almost ai)palling
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change in the system of existing things. The study of modern history is the study of kings, financiers, states- men, and priests. The history of ancient Greece is the study of legislators, philosophers, and poets ; it is the history of men, compared with the history of titles. What the Greeks were, was a reality, not a promise. And what we are and hope to be, is derived, as it were, from the influence and inspiration of these glorious generations.
Whatever tends to afford a further illustration of the manners and opinions of those to whom we owe so much, and who were perhaps, on the whole, the most perfect specimens of humanity of whom we have authentic record, were infinitely valuable. Let us see their errors, their weaknesses, their daily actions, their familiar conversation, and catch the tone of their society. When we discover how far the most admirable community ever framed was removed from that perfec- tion to which human society is impelled by some active power within each bosom to aspire, how great ought to be our hopes, how resolute our struggles! For the Greeks of the Periclean age were widely different from us. It is to be lamented that no modern writer has hitherto dared to show them precisely as they were. Barthelemi cannot be denied the praise of industry and system ; but he never forgets that he is a Christian and a Frenchman. Wieland, in his delightful novels, makes indeed a very tolerable Pagan, but cherishes too many political prejudices, and refrains from diminishing the interest of his romances by painting sentiments in which no European of modern times can possibly sympathise. There is no book which shows the Greeks precisely as
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they were ; they seem all written for children, with the caution that no practice or sentiment, highly incon- sistent with our present manners, should be mentioned, lest tliose manners should receive outrage and violation. But there are many to whom the Greek language is inaccessible, who ought not to be excluded by this prudery from possessing an exact and comprehensive conception of the history of man ; for there is no knowledge concerning what man has been and ma}' be, from partaking of which a person can depart, without becoming in some