Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

As one of his commentators reminds us, Augustine, Origen, Jerome, Eusebius, Clement, do not hesitate to affirm that Christ Himself revealed His own high prerogatives to the most spiritual of Grecian philosophers. Others imply that there are principles involved in his depth of view which Plato himself never completely sounded; that "by a kind of inspiration he may have caught truths which were too vast for his own intelligence, or for any intelligence belonging to his position and period in the history of metaphysical inquiry." Zwinglius has been reproached for his enthusiasm in behalf of the great men of antiquity; but, pleads one apologist, Merle d'Aubigné, if he honoured them so highly, it was because he thought he beheld in them "the influence of the Holy Spirit." God's agency, far from being confined in ancient times within the limits of Palestine, had extended, in his opinion, over the whole world: Spiritus ille cœlestis non solum Palestinam vel creaverat vel fovebat, sed mundum universum. "Plato too," he said, "drank at the Divine source."1

Luther might have taken particular exception to particular expressions of his fellow Reformers; but Luther too had "broad church" views of inspiration, in certain phases of its apparent influence. On being once asked what was the difference between Samson and Julius Cæsar, or any other celebrated general, endowed at once with vigour of body and vigour of mind, Luther indeed defined the distinction to lie in the gift to the former of the Holy Ghost. But, he added, in his Table-talk," The strength and the grandeur of soul of the heathen was also an inspiration and work of God," though not of the kind which sanctifies. He would probably have concurred ex animo in such a use as De Quincey makes of the term, in a passage descriptive of what that eloquent writer

1 Canon Kingsley, in his Alexandrian romance, makes one of his NeoPlatonists advert to the philosopher's idea of the righteous man as a crucified one. "We both," says Raphael to Hypatia, "and old Bishop Clement too, and Augustine himself, would agree that Plato, in speaking those strange words, spoke not of himself, but by the Spirit of God."Hypatia, chap. xxvii.

considered the most memorable and effective charge recorded in military annals, by that "sublime regiment," the 23rd Dragoons, at Talavera, when they closed in and went down upon the enemy "with such divinity of fervour (I use the word divinity by design: the inspiration of God must have prompted this movement to those whom even then He was calling to His presence)." More complacently perhaps would Dr. Martin have approved the use of the term in quite another application, namely, by Dickens, to a gentle, timid, ministering spirit among the poor, herself one of them, but "inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?"

Consult the acutest poets and speakers-the suggestion occurs in a sermon by Dr. South-" and they will confess that their quickest and most admired conceptions were such as darted into their minds like sudden flashes of lightning, they knew not how nor whence "; and not by any certain consequence or dependence of one thought upon another, as in matters of reasoning. The reader of James Watt's narrative of his great discovery is struck by the fact that the principle itself seemed to "flash" upon him at a particular time and place,1 with a spontaneity which has been called remarkable as a natural phenomenon, and which in other ages, says one of his biographers, would have been ascribed to supernatural agency. The system of anatomy which has made so memorable the name of Oken is, in Sir Humphry Davy's phrase, the consequence of a "flash of anticipation" which glanced through the naturalist's mind when he picked up, in a chance walk, the skull of a deer, bleached by the weather, and exclaimed, “It is a vertebral column!"

1 One Sunday afternoon, while taking a walk on "when about half way between the Herd's House and that part of the road the idea occurred to me," etc. reminiscences in 1817.

99 66

Glasgow Green, Arn's Well," at These were Watt's

BOUND FOR THE LAND OF DARKNESS.

JOB X. 21, 22.

HOUGH his soul was weary of his life, Job would fain be

THO

spared, to take comfort a little, and recover his strength, before he went hence, to be no more seen. Went hence; and went whither? "Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death; a land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness." If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! How stumble then the feet on the dark mountains!

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ;

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot:

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling-'t is too horrible."

Is it not, asks F. W. Robertson, true, that to the mass of men, to the larger part of a given congregation, there is no one point in all eternity on which the eye can fix distinctly and rest gladly,—nothing beyond the grave, except a dark space into which they must plunge alone? Currer Bell forcibly describes the state of mind of a child, into whose head there enters one tranquil summer evening, yet by force of association and for the first time, a serious contemplation of death as a possibly proximate thing: "How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying! This world is pleasant; it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have to go who knows where?" And then her mind makes its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell; and recoils, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, sees all around an unfathomed gulf: it feels the point where it stands—the present; all the rest is formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shudders at the thought of tottering and plunging amid that chaos. The condition of our life has been said to be, that we stand on

L

a narrow strip of the shore, waiting till the tide, which has washed away hundreds of millions of our fellows, shall wash away us also into a country of which there are no charts, and from which there is no return. "What little we know about that unseen world comes to this-that it contains extremes of good and evil, awful and mysterious beyond all human expression or conception, and that those tremendous possibilities are connected with our conduct here." No wonder a Claudio, in Measure for Measure, is aghast at the prospect that so immediately confronts him. No wonder a Donatello, in Transformation, shrinks "from the battlemented wall with a face of horror,” and exclaims,1 to his companion, "Ah, no! I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!—and, beyond its verge, nothing but the chilly dark!" No wonder a Gabriel Varney, though carefully provided with the means of self-slaughter, shrinks with abject affright from the death by course of justice which suddenly overtakes him: that morbid excitability of fancy which had led him to strange delight in horror, now serves but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliest shapes, familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel, and see but the rat and the worm, and the loathsome agencies of corruption. It is not the despair

1 His companion, Kenyon, has asked him whether he has never felt, on a precipice, or height, an impulse to fling himself down headlong. Byron describes, indeed may be said to analyse, the sensation, in a passage pertinent to our subject:

"And there's a courage which grows out of fear,
Perhaps of all most desperate, which will dare
The worst to know it :-when the mountains rear
Their peaks beneath your human feet, and there
You look down o'er the precipice, and drear
The gulf of rock yawns,-you can't gaze a minute
Without an awful wish to plunge within it.

'T is true, you don't-but pale, and struck with terror,
Retire: but look into your past impression,

And you will find, though shuddering at the mirror
Of your own thoughts, in all their self-confession,

The lurking bias, be it truth or error,

To the unknown; a secret prepossession,

To plunge with all your fears-but where? You know not,
And that's the reason why you do—or do not."

of conscience that seizes him, it is the abject clinging to life ; not the remorse of the soul, but the gross physical terror. His dread would scarcely extend from the first to the second of the two lines from Simeon Metaphrastes, as Englished by Mrs. Browning in her Greek Christian Poets

"Help me! Death is bitter, all hearts comprehend;

But I fear beyond it-end beyond the end."

When the aged sorceress, in the Last Days of Pompeii, pleads hard with the Egyptian for a renewed lease of life, “Tell me, I pray thee," says Arbaces, "wherefore thou wishest to live? What sweets dost thou discover in existence ?" "It is not life that is sweet, but death that is awful," replies the hag. As with the wavering wistful listener to the Two Voices, who, tempted to suicide, but knowing not the universe, fears but to slide from bad to worse, and lest, in seeking to undo one riddle, and to find the true, he knit a hundred others new:

"Or that this anguish fleeting hence,
Unmanacled from bonds of sense,
Be fixed and frozen to permanence:

For I go, weak from suffering here;
Naked I go, and void of cheer:

What is it that I may not fear?"

Or as with Mr. Lytton's Wanderer musing on

"What hopes in other worlds may hide;

What griefs yet unexplored in this :

How fares the spirit within the wide

Waste tract of that abyss

Which scares the heart (since all we know

Of life is conscious sorrow)

Lest novel life be novel woe

In death's undawned to-morrow."

It is, as with Hamlet, “the dread of something after death," the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, that puzzles the will; and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.

For who-to apply the words of Milton's desperate rather

« НазадПродовжити »