Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit and Some Miscellaneous Pieces Part 3

In other words, conscience in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to consciousness, that is, to human consciousness.

Brutes may be and are scions, but those beings only who have an I, scire possunt hoc vel illud una c.u.m seipsis; that is, conscire vel scire aliquid mec.u.m, or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of knowing myself as acted upon by that something.

Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the first but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou. Much less could an I exist for us except as it exists during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be best understood by considering them as somnambulists.

This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest proof, namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this, again, is only possible by putting them in opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the one which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will.

I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act of constructing myself _I_, I take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will.

If, then, I MINUS the will be the THESIS, Thou, PLUS will, must be the ANt.i.tHESIS, but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness and the conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of all consciousness--a fortiori, the precondition of all experience--and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience.

Soon, however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are other impulses beside the dictates of conscience, that there are powers within us and without us ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are many things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected and utterly excluded, and many that can coexist with its supremacy only by being subjugated as beasts of burthen; and others again, as for instance the social tendernesses and affections, and the faculties and excitations of the intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The preservation of our loyalty and fealty under these trials, and against these rivals, const.i.tutes the second sense of faith; and we shall need but one more point of view to complete its full import. This is the consideration of what is presupposed in the human conscience. The answer is ready. As in the equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the twin const.i.tuents is to be taken as PLUS will, the other as MINUS will, so is it here; and it is obvious that the reason or SUPER-individual of each man, whereby he is a man, is the factor we are to take as MINUS will, and that the individual will or personalising principle of free agency ("arbitrement" is Milton's word) is the factor marked PLUS will; and again, that as the ident.i.ty or co-inherence of the absolute will and the reason, is the peculiar character of G.o.d, so is the SYNTHESIS of the individual will and the common reason, by the subordination of the former to the latter, the only possible likeness or image of the PROTHESIS or ident.i.ty, and therefore the required proper character of man. Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the ident.i.ty of the will and the reason, effected by the self- subordination of the will or self to the reason, as equal to or representing the will of G.o.d. But the personal will is a factor in other moral SYNTHESIS, for example, appet.i.te PLUS personal will = sensuality; l.u.s.t of power, PLUS personal will = ambition, and so on, equally as in the SYNTHESIS on which the conscience is grounded. Not this, therefore, but the other SYNTHESIS, must supply the specific character of the conscience, and we must enter into an a.n.a.lysis of reason. Such as the nature and objects of the reason are, such must be the functions and objects of the conscience. And the former we shall best learn by recapitulating those const.i.tuents of the total man which are either contrary to or disparate from the reason.

I. Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is appet.i.te, and the objects of appet.i.te the l.u.s.t of the flesh.

II. Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the senses, inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or fancy. Reason is supersensuous, and here its antagonist is the l.u.s.t of the eye.

III. Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, a.s.sociation, discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it.

Reason does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in s.p.a.ce, but it includes them eminenter. Thus the prime mover of the material universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to be, or to suffer, motion in itself.

Reason is not the faculty of the finite. But here I must premise the following. The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the confused impressions of sense to their essential forms--quant.i.ty, quality, relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the like; thus raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations into objects of reflection, and so makes experience possible. Without it, man's representative powers would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes; and it is therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes inclusively, called this likewise discourse, discuvsus discursio, from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but running, as it were, to and fro to abstract, generalise, and cla.s.sify. Now when this faculty is employed in the service of the pure reason, it brings out the necessary and universal truths contained in the infinite into distinct contemplation by the pure act of the sensuous imagination--that is, in the production of the forms of s.p.a.ce and time abstracted from all corporeity, and likewise of the inherent forms of the understanding itself abstractedly from the consideration of particulars, as in the case of geometry, numeral mathematics, universal logic, and pure metaphysics. The discursive faculty then becomes what our Shakespeare, with happy precision, calls "discourse of reason."

We will now take up our reasoning again from the words "motion in itself."

It is evident, then, that the reason as the irradiative power, and the representative of the infinite, judges the understanding as the faculty of the finite, and cannot without error be judged by it.

When this is attempted, or when the understanding in its SYNTHESIS with the personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to supersede the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the flesh ([Greek text]), or the wisdom of this world. The result is, that the reason is superfinite; and in this relation, its antagonist is the insubordinate understanding, or mind of the flesh.

IV. Reason, as one with the absolute will (IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LOGOS, AND THE LOGOS WAS WITH G.o.d, AND THE LOGOS WAS G.o.d), and therefore for man the certain representative of the will of G.o.d, is above the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III.

that it stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it stands in antagonism to all mere individual interests as so many selves, to the personal will as seeking its objects in the manifestation of itself for itself--sit pro ratione voluntas;-- whether this be realised with adjuncts, as in the l.u.s.t of the flesh, and in the l.u.s.t of the eye; or without adjuncts, as in the thirst and pride of power, despotism, egoistic ambition. The fourth antagonist, then, of reason, is the l.u.s.t of the will.

Corollary. Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous society is not only coexistent with, but virtually organised into, the mult.i.tude of which he is an integral part. His idem is modified by the alter. And there arise impulses and objects from this SYNTHESIS of the alter et idem, myself and my neighbour. This, again, is strictly a.n.a.logous to what takes place in the vital organisation of the individual man. The cerebral system of the nerves has its correspondent ANt.i.tHESIS in the abdominal system: but hence arises a SYNTHESIS of the two in the pectoral system as the intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once conductor and boundary.

In the latter, as objectised by the former, arise the emotions, the affections, and, in one word, the pa.s.sions, as distinguished from the cognitions and appet.i.tes. Now, the reason has been shown to be superindividual, generally, and therefore not less so when the form of an individualisation subsists in the alter than when it is confined to the idem; not less when the emotions have their conscious or believed object in another, than when their subject is the individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections, attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room--as we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher per medium commune with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the higher (namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the latter are indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your Heavenly Father who is invisible;--yet this holds good only so far as the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and cases may arise in which the Christ as the Logos, or Redemptive Reason, declares, HE THAT LOVES FATHER OR ANOTHER MORE THAN ME, IS NOT WORTHY OF ME; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason.

Here, then, reason appears as the love of G.o.d; and its antagonist is the attachment to individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or in compet.i.tion with, the love which is reason.

In these five paragraphs I have enumerated and explained the several powers or forces belonging or incidental to human nature, which in all matters of reason the man is bound either to subjugate or subordinate to reason. The application to faith follows of its own accord. The first or most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity: then fidelity under previous contract or particular moral obligation.

In this sense faith is fealty to a rightful superior: faith is the duty of a faithful subject to a rightful governor. Then it is allegiance in active service; fidelity to the liege lord under circ.u.mstances, and amid the temptations of usurpation, rebellion, and intestine discord. Next we seek for that rightful superior on our duties to whom all our duties to all other superiors, on our faithfulness to whom all our bounden relations to all other objects of fidelity, are founded. We must inquire after that duty in which all others find their several degrees and dignities, and from which they derive their obligative force. We are to find a superior, whose rights, including our duties, are presented to the mind in the very idea of that Supreme Being, whose sovereign prerogatives are predicates implied in the subjects, as the essential properties of a circle are co-a.s.sumed in the first a.s.sumption of a circle, consequently underived, unconditional, and as rationally unsusceptible, so probably prohibitive, of all further question. In this sense, then, faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral nature to G.o.d, in opposition to all usurpation, and in resistance to all temptation to the placing any other claim above or equal with our fidelity to G.o.d.

The will of G.o.d is the last ground and final aim of all our duties, and to that the whole man is to be harmonised by subordination, subjugation, or suppression alike in commission and omission. But the will of G.o.d, which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of G.o.d. This brings me to the last and fullest sense of faith, that is, the obedience of the individual will to the reason, in the l.u.s.t of the flesh as opposed to the supersensual; in the l.u.s.t of the eye as opposed to the supersensuous; in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the infinite; in the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] in contrariety to the spiritual truth; in the l.u.s.t of the personal will as opposed to the absolute and universal; and in the love of the creature, as far as it is opposed to the love which is one with the reason, namely, the love of G.o.d.

Thus, then, to conclude. Faith subsists in the SYNTHESIS of the Reason and the individual Will. By virtue of the latter therefore, it must be an energy, and, inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man, it must be exerted in each and all of his const.i.tuents or incidents, faculties and tendencies;--it must be a total, not a partial--a continuous, not a desultory or occasional--energy. And by virtue of the former, that is Reason, Faith must be a Light, a form of knowing, a beholding of truth. In the incomparable words of the Evangelist, therefore, FAITH MUST BE A LIGHT ORIGINATING IN THE LOGOS, OR THE SUBSTANTIAL REASON, WHICH IS CO-ETERNAL AND ONE WITH THE HOLY WILL, AND WHICH LIGHT IS AT THE SAME TIME THE LIFE OF MEN.

Now, as LIFE is here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual acts, in suffering, doing, and being, so is Faith the source and the sum, the energy and the principle of the fidelity of man to G.o.d, by the subordination of his human Will, in all provinces of his nature, to his Reason, as the sum of spiritual Truth, representing and manifesting the Will Divine.

NOTES ON THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.

PRAYER.

A man may pray night and day, and yet deceive himself; but no man can be a.s.sured of his sincerity who does not pray. Prayer is faith pa.s.sing into act; a union of the will and the intellect realising in an intellectual act. It is the whole man that prays. Less than this is wishing, or lip-work; a charm or a mummery. PRAY ALWAYS, says the apostle: that is, have the habit of prayer, turning your thoughts into acts by connecting them with the idea of the redeeming G.o.d, and even so reconverting your actions into thoughts.

THE SACRAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST.

The best preparation for taking this sacrament, better than any or all of the books or tracts composed for this end, is to read over and over again, and often on your knees--at all events with a kneeling and praying heart--the Gospel according to St. John, till your mind is familiarised to the contemplation of Christ, the Redeemer and Mediator of mankind, yea, of every creature, as the living and self- subsisting Word, the very truth of all true being, and the very being of all enduring truth; the reality, which is the substance and unity of all reality; THE LIGHT WHICH LIGHTETH EVERY MAN, so that what we call reason is itself a light from that light, lumen a luce, as the Latin more distinctly expresses this fact. But it is not merely light, but therein is life; and it is the life of Christ, the co- eternal Son of G.o.d, that is the only true life-giving light of men.

We are a.s.sured, and we believe, that Christ is G.o.d; G.o.d manifested in the flesh. As G.o.d, he must be present entire in every creature;-- (for how can G.o.d, or indeed any spirit, exist in parts?)--but he is said to dwell in the regenerate, to come to them who receive him by faith in his name, that is, in his power and influence; for this is the meaning of the word "name" in Scripture when applied to G.o.d or his Christ. Where true belief exists, Christ is not only present with or among us;--for so he is in every man, even the most wicked;-- but to us and for us. THAT WAS THE TRUE LIGHT, WHICH LIGHTETH EVERY MAN THAT COMETH INTO THE WORLD. HE WAS IN THE WORLD, AND THE WORLD WAS MADE BY HIM, AND THE WORLD KNEW HIM NOT. BUT AS MANY AS RECEIVED HIM, TO THEM GAVE HE POWER TO BECOME THE SONS OF G.o.d, EVEN TO THEM THAT BELIEVE IN HIS NAME; WHICH WERE BORN, NOT OF BLOOD, NOR OF THE WILL OF THE FLESH, NOR OF THE WILL OF MAN, BUT OF G.o.d. AND THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US. John i. 9-14. Again--WE WILL COME UNTO HIM, AND MAKE OUR ABODE WITH HIM. John xiv. 23. As truly and as really as your soul resides const.i.tutively in your living body, personally and substantially does Christ dwell in every regenerate man.

After this course of study, you may then take up and peruse sentence by sentence the communion service, the best of all comments on the Scriptures appertaining to this mystery. And this is the preparation which will prove, with G.o.d's grace, the surest preventive of, or antidote against, the freezing poison, the lethargising hemlock, of the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, according to whom the Eucharist is a mere practical metaphor, in which things are employed instead of articulated sounds for the exclusive purpose of recalling to our minds the historical fact of our Lord's crucifixion; in short--(the profaneness is with them, not with me)--just the same as when Protestants drink a gla.s.s of wine to the glorious memory of William III.! True it is that the remembrance is one end of the sacrament; but it is, DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME,--of all that Christ was and is, hath done and is still doing for fallen mankind, and, of course, of his crucifixion inclusively, but not of his crucifixion alone. 14 December, 1827.

COMPANION TO THE ALTAR.

First, then, that we may come to this heavenly feast holy, and adorned with the wedding garment, Matt. xxii. ii, we must search our hearts, and examine our consciences, not only till we see our sins, but until we hate them.

But what if a man, seeing his sin, earnestly desire to hate it?

Shall he not at the altar offer up at once his desire, and the yet lingering sin, and seek for strength? Is not this sacrament medicine as well as food? Is it an end only, and not likewise the means? Is it merely the triumphal feast; or is it not even more truly a blessed refreshment for and during the conflict?

This confession of sins must not be in general terms only, that we are sinners with the rest of mankind, but it must be a special declaration to G.o.d of all our most heinous sins in thought, word, and deed.

Luther was of a different judgment. He would have us feel and groan under our sinfulness and utter incapability of redeeming ourselves from the bondage, rather than hazard the pollution of our imaginations by a recapitulation and renewing of sins and their images in detail. Do not, he says, stand picking the flaws out one by one, but plunge into the river and drown them!--I venture to be of Luther's doctrine.

COMMUNION SERVICE.

In the first Exhortation, before the words "meritorious Cross and Pa.s.sion," I should propose to insert "his a.s.sumption of humanity, his incarnation, and." Likewise, a little lower down, after the word "sustenance," I would insert "as." For not in that sacrament exclusively, but in all the acts of a.s.similative faith, of which the Eucharist is a solemn, eminent, and representative instance, an instance and the symbol, Christ is our spiritual food and sustenance.

MARRIAGE SERVICE.

Marriage, simply as marriage, is not the means "for the procreation of children," but for the humanisation of the offspring procreated.

Therefore, in the Declaration at the beginning, after the words "procreation of children," I would insert, "and as the means of securing to the children procreated enduring care, and that they may be," &c.

COMMUNION OF THE SICK.

Third rubric at the end.

But if a man, either by reason of extremity of sickness, &c.

I think this rubric, in what I conceive to be its true meaning, a precious doctrine, as fully acquitting our Church of all Romish superst.i.tion, respecting the nature of the Eucharist, in relation to the whole scheme of man's redemption. But the latter part of it--"he doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the sacrament with his mouth"--seems to me very incautiously expressed, and scarcely to be reconciled with the Church's own definition of a sacrament in general. For in such a case, where is "the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace given?"

XI. SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

Epistle.--l Cor. xv. 1.

Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you.

Why should the obsolete, though faithful, Saxon translation of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] be retained? Why not "good tidings?" Why thus change a most appropriate and intelligible designation of the matter into a mere conventional name of a particular book?

Ib.

- how that Christ died for our sins.

But the meaning of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is, that Christ died through the sins, and for the sinners. He died through our sins, and we live through his righteousness.

Gospel--Luke xviii. 14.