The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey Volume I Part 14

First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the trespa.s.s. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour G.o.d not less than they would trivialize the people. G.o.d they would offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of G.o.d slept often for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions.

The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could not recover the station from which they swerved. They that had now realized the _casus foederis_, the case in which they had covenanted themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.

In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all subst.i.tution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the ground, had been met for a thousand years by G.o.d's servants.

If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which G.o.d subtly introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a general fire--that word by which sadness is spread over the face of things, but also infinite grandeur--then may I rightly lay this as one chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.

The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating to that which shrinks up to a point--and observe, I do not mean that being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes as a real thing--when this happens, having no subjective existence at all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge; fancying, _e.g._, like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road out of the wood in which they were then entangled.

It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature, which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly Boeckh--[Greek: en genei]--which does not mean that G.o.ds _and_ men are the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread through thousands of years.

It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet, 'Qu'ont gagne les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290).

Now how _should_ that case have been tried thoroughly before the printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospel _was_ so tried. True, but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new proof of its reality.

_An a.n.a.logy._--1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews, probably, when rebuked for wickedness, replied, 'What! are we not the peculiar people of G.o.d? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the people of G.o.d--the chosen people--implied a license to do wrong, and had a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.

2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to repentance. It is odious to think of, this making G.o.d the abettor and encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because G.o.d has said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety; though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they--such is their thought--are encouraged to sin by the a.s.surance that repentance will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.

Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this means _real penitence_;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we mean _real penitence_.'

'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath, and protest against it as no privilege at all.

The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled in her skirts.

_Idolatry._--It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's (Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols--utterly wide of any real imperfection, but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship Apollo, _i.e._, a G.o.d to be in some sense false--belonging to a system connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.

I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere archaeologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the dimensions of Nineveh, how should _that_ make him a true prophet? Or supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them, they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.

_The sun stands still._ I am persuaded that this means no such incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a relation to a particular valley: that the sun could have stood still in Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made known to the central sanct.i.ty of that G.o.d whose miraculous interposition had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which subsequently created its sanct.i.ty did not occur till more than four centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But Shiloh existed, and h.o.r.eb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs.

And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle, would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people never reflect on the [Greek: to] positive of their reading? If they _did_, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event, as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of this Jewish Waterloo in which G.o.d established possessions for His people and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters (through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For remember this: Would not G.o.d have changed Pharaoh's heart, so intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the _final-cause_ day.

The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or comment, or--which, in fact, is the meaning--any impulse or bias to the reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz., the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception.

Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses, already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.

Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of Araunah?[33] Of that mystery, of that local circ.u.mscription--in what sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts--yet mark me so far, Rome by an augury of wicked G.o.ds stretched to a period of 1,200 years.

Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended.

Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptered potentate for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752 B. C. complete the period.

But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost.

The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next think of the temptation to _mythus_. And, finally, of G.o.d's plan unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire; 2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with the purposes _now_ became necessary to G.o.d in order to remedy _abnormous_ shifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of the language of Scripture, I see the same ill.u.s.tration. Sir William Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish fit[34] as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praises the language of Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no dishonour if we say of G.o.d that, in the sense meant by Sir William Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In the schemata, because in the original ideas, G.o.d says indeed what man cannot, for these are peculiar to G.o.d; but who before myself has shown what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we have the same identically. And when a language labours under an infirmity, as all do, not G.o.d Himself could surmount it! He is compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His answers G.o.d is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), G.o.d is thwarted and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language--I know its secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high abstractions--far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.

The power lies in the spirit--the animating principle; and verily such a power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness, goodness, and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in reaching man _ex-abundantibus_ in so transcendent a way that mere excess of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered, uncorrupted, through the violent a.s.saults of idolatries all round, and the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,[35]

down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses--there was the labour hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men treating such a case as a simple _original_ problem as to G.o.d. But far otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power to receive, to sustain, to comprehend--not in the Divine power to radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act, and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is ill.u.s.trated by prayer; for, while we think it odd that so many prayers of good men for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and remains wholly uninfluenced by it).

These ideas of G.o.d have life only by their own inherent power: yet what risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against which they had been warned--in believing that they only were concerned in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently subst.i.tuting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of favour with G.o.d, but only a means of favour.

What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why G.o.d did not sooner accomplish the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such as would not have _been_ (_objectively_ would not have been, but still less could it _subjectively_ have been) for the conception of man that dreadful mystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first sight shocking to say of G.o.d that He cannot do this and this, but it is not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compa.s.s our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the _absolute_, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure--even one sole attribute of G.o.d, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and body.

5.--Political, etc.

Sir Robert Walpole, as to patriots, was like a man who has originally, from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts, which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circ.u.mstances, he does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a cla.s.s of appearances that, after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his courage and his wrath and his denial--than his challenge of the lurking patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He a.s.saults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades--horrible mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this fact should have given me warning--should have exposed the frauds. But no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side should start a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert him.

Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed, in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.

'He took his stand upon the truth'--said by me of Sir Robert Peel--might seem to argue a lower use of '_the_ truth,' but in fact it is as happens to the article _the_ itself: you say _the_ guard, speaking of a coach; _the_ key, speaking of a trunk or watch, _i.e._, _the_ as by usage appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of the particular perplexity.

The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the Ostrogoths--the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.

Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is the _princ.i.p.al_ in the concern--he makes the trunk, whereas the author, quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.

_Case of Casuistry._--Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by a country. _Ergo_ the inference that prudence would be, always if in Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position?

6.--Personal Confessions, etc.

Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed rule, of verbally uttering thanks to G.o.d for every chastis.e.m.e.nt, and who say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and G.o.d seeing my heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so as not to mock G.o.d with his lips, give thanks simply on an _a priori_ principle, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness.

I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he will never again see such a person (_i.e._, by being removed by death) is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn, despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new chances and openings is lodged in every man far down below the sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left possible for him to commit suicide.

_Justice._--You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test is, what will he _do_ for it? Suppose a man to propose rewards exclusively to those who a.s.sisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have equally seen that many did _not_ a.s.sist, even refused to do so. But X perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for truth and justice by exposing the undeserving.

It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc.

But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the dispute, 'Is he wrong as a _poet_?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as a _geometrician_?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is capable of decision.

Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirations _working together with time_.

Instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it is villainous insensibility to the written.