The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century Part 6

2. Verse 3.--The fining pot is for silver, the furnace for gold, but the Lord tries the heart.

(Notice the increasing strength of trial for the more precious thing: only the melting-pot for the silver--the fierce furnace for the gold--but the Fire of the Lord for the heart.)

3. Verse 4.--A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips.

(That means, for _you_, that, intending to live by usury and swindling, you read Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Stuart Mill, and other such political economists.)

4. Verse 5.--Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker.

(Mocketh,--by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less than his misfortune,--England's favorite theory now-a-days.)

5. Verse 12.--Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly.

(Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling the pa.s.sengers over London Bridge, "mostly fools,"--on the ground that men are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under, as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader will please observe that the essential function of modern education is to develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at his forge and plow,--and those tutors teach him his true value, indulge him in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up to London,--give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear,--and it is fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand over London Bridge.)

6. Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly to ask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system of compet.i.tive examination:--

Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it?

(You know perfectly well it isn't the wisdom you want, but the "station in life,"--and the money!)

7. Lastly, Verse 7.--Wisdom is before him that hath understanding, but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.

"And in the beginnings of it"! Solomon would have written, had he lived in our day; but we will be content with the ends at present.

No scientific people, as I told you at first, have taken any notice of the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-night given you register. But, from the constant arrangements of the universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil, and to end--in nothing.

And I have here a volume,[C] before quoted, by a very foolish and very lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter gives us,--founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs,'--the latest scientific views concerning the order of creation. "We have spoken already about a medium pervading s.p.a.ce"--this is the Scientific G.o.d, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that the purest in heart cannot see--nor the softest in heart feel--this s.p.a.cious Deity--a _Medium_, pervading s.p.a.ce--"the office of which"

(italics all mine) "appears to be to _degrade_ and ultimately _extinguish_, all differential motion. It has been well pointed out by Thomson, that, looked at _in this light_, the universe is a system that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process of degradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as a candle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it as having been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as a candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert ma.s.s, _and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty, will have utterly gone away_."

Do you wish me to congratulate you on this extremely cheerful result of telescopic and microscopic observation, and so at once close my lecture? or may I venture yet to trespa.s.s on your time by stating to you any of the more comfortable views held by persons who did not regard the universe in what my author humorously calls "this _light_"?

In the peculiarly characteristic notice with which the 'Daily News'

honored my last week's lecture, that courteous journal charged me, in the metaphorical term now cla.s.sical on Exchange, with "hedging,"

to conceal my own opinions. The charge was not prudently chosen, since, of all men now obtaining any portion of popular regard, I am pretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least either for hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It is certainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on my sleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but the essential reason for my not telling you my own opinions on this matter is--that I do not consider them of material consequence to you.

It _might_ possibly be of some advantage for you to know what--were he now living, Orpheus would have thought, or aeschylus, or a Daniel come to judgment, or John the Baptist, or John the Son of Thunder; but what either you, or I, or any other Jack or Tom of us all, think,--even if we knew what to think,--is of extremely small moment either to the G.o.ds, the clouds, or ourselves.

Of myself, however, if you care to hear it, I will tell you thus much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now, no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or _could_ have been written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was founded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of nature, all spring and summer long; and on the then demonstrable fact that over a great portion of the world's surface the air and the earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man as closely as a school-boy's primer is to his labor, and as gloriously as a lover's mistress is to his eyes.

That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round: fragments, indeed, of what existed still exist, and hours of what is past still return; but month by month the darkness gains upon the day, and the ashes of the Antipodes glare through the night.[D]

What consolation, or what courage, through plague, danger, or darkness, you can find in the conviction that you are nothing more than brute beasts driven by brute forces, your other tutors can tell you--not I: but _this_ I can tell you--and with the authority of all the masters of thought since time was time,--that, while by no manner of vivisection you can learn what a _Beast_ is, by only looking into your own hearts you may know what a _Man_ is,--and know that his only true happiness is to live in Hope of something to be won by him, in Reverence of something to be worshiped by him, and in Love of something to be cherished by him, and cherished--forever.

Having these instincts, his only rational conclusion is that the objects which can fulfill them may be by his effort gained, and by his faith discerned; and his only earthly wisdom is to accept the united testimony of the men who have sought these things in the way they were commanded. Of whom no single one has ever said that his obedience or his faith had been vain, or found himself cast out from the choir of the living souls, whether here, or departed, for whom the song was written:--

G.o.d be merciful unto us, and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us; That Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all nations.

Oh let the nations rejoice and sing for joy, for Thou shalt judge the people righteously and govern the nations upon earth.

_Then_ shall the earth yield her increase, and G.o.d, even our own G.o.d, shall bless us.

G.o.d shall bless us, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him.

[Footnote A: With all who died in Faith, not having received the Promises, nor--according to your modern teachers--ever to receive.]

[Footnote B: Hence to the end the text is that read in termination of the lecture on its second delivery, only with an added word or two of comment on Proverbs xvii.]

[Footnote C: 'The Conservation of Energy.' King and Co., 1873.]

[Footnote D: Written under the impression that the lurid and prolonged sunsets of last autumn had been proved to be connected with the flight of volcanic ashes. This has been since, I hear, disproved again. Whatever their cause, those sunsets were, in the sense in which I myself use the word, altogether 'unnatural' and terrific: but they have no connection with the far more fearful, because protracted and increasing, power of the Plague-wind. The letter from White's 'History of Selborne,' quoted by the Rev. W. R.

Andrews in his letter to the 'Times,' (dated January 8th) seems to describe aspects of the sky like these of 1883, just a hundred years before, in 1783: and also some of the circ.u.mstances noted, especially the variation of the wind to all quarters without alteration in the air, correspond with the character of the plague-wind; but the fog of 1783 made the sun dark, with iron-colored rays--not pale, with blanching rays. I subjoin Mr.

Andrews' letter, extremely valuable in its collation of the records of simultaneous volcanic phenomena; praying the reader also to observe the instantaneous acknowledgment, by the true 'Naturalist,'

of horror in the violation of beneficent natural law.

"THE RECENT SUNSETS AND VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS.

"SIR,--It may, perhaps, be interesting at the present time, when so much attention has been given to the late brilliant sunsets and sunrises, to be reminded that almost identically the same appearances were observed just a hundred years ago.

Gilbert White writes in the year 1783, in his 109th letter, published in his 'Natural History of Selborne':--

'The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze or smoky fog that prevailed for many weeks in this island and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23d to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun at noon looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a ferruginous light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and blood-colored at rising and setting. The country people began to look with a superst.i.tious awe at the red lowering aspect of the sun; and, indeed, there was reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive, for all the while Calabria and part of the Isle of Sicily were torn and convulsed with earthquakes, and about that juncture a volcano sprang out of the sea on the coast of Norway.'

Other writers also mention volcanic disturbances in this same year, 1783. We are told by Lyell and Geikie, that there were great volcanic eruptions in and near Iceland. A submarine volcano burst forth in the sea, thirty miles southwest of Iceland, which ejected so much pumice that the ocean was covered with this substance, to the distance of 150 miles, and ships were considerably impeded in their course; and a new island was formed, from which fire and smoke and pumice were emitted.

Besides this submarine eruption, the volcano Skaptar-Jokull, on the mainland, on June 11th, 1783, threw out a torrent of lava, so immense as to surpa.s.s in magnitude the bulk of Mont Blanc, and ejected so vast an amount of fine dust, that the atmosphere over Iceland continued loaded with it for months afterwards. It fell in such quant.i.ties over parts of Caithness--a distance of 600 miles--as to destroy the crops, and that year is still spoken of by the inhabitants as the year of 'the ashie.'

These particulars are gathered from the text-books of Lyell and Geikie.

I am not aware whether the coincidence in time of the Icelandic eruptions, and of the peculiar appearance of the sun, described by Gilbert White, has yet been noticed; but this coincidence may very well be taken as some little evidence towards explaining the connection between the recent beautiful sunsets and the tremendous volcanic explosion of the Isle of Krakatoa in August last.

W. R. ANDREWS, F. G. S.

Teffont Ewyas Rectory, Salisbury, January 8th."]]