Biographia Literaria
exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously
appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun
is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen,
and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to
chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season, and thus converts
the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely
in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its
interception.”
“Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same
moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in
the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect
to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the
cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which
our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion.”
In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity
of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. “The testimony
of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and wonders,
with which Christ came) is one of the strong and stately pillars of the
church: but it is not the foundation!” Instead, therefore, of defending
myself, which I could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing
the same opinion, from the Fathers and the most eminent Protestant
Divines, from the Reformation to the Revolution, I shall merely state
what my belief is, concerning the true evidences of Christianity. 1.
Its consistency with right Reason, I consider as the outer court of the
temple--the common area, within which it stands. 2. The miracles, with
and through which the Religion was first revealed and attested, I regard
as the steps, the vestibule, and the portal of the temple. 3. The
sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of each believer of its exceeding
desirableness--the experience, that he needs something, joined with the
strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to
us in Christ are what he needs--this I hold to be the true foundation of
the spiritual edifice. With the strong a priori probability that flows
in from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man
can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it
is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions
of the Gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light: the terrors and
the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as
God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of
attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises
up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the
bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding
faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninteresting ally;--in a word,
it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments
and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the
completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity,
a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum
in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to every subject not
presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as long as we attempt to
master by the reflex acts of the Understanding what we can only know by
the act of becoming. Do the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether
I am of God. These four evidences I believe to have been and still to
be, for the world, for the whole Church, all necessary, all equally
necessary: but at present, and for the majority of Christians born in
Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to
be the most operative, not as superseding but as involving a glad
undoubting faith in the two former. Credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears
to me the dictate equally of Philosophy and Religion, even as I
believe Redemption to be the antecedent of Sanctification, and not its
consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as
modes of Action or as states of Being, Thus Holiness and Blessedness
are the same idea, now seen in relation to act and now to existence.
The ready belief which has been yielded to the slander of my “potential
infidelity,” I attribute in part to the openness with which I have
avowed my doubts, whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of
Benedict Spinoza lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent.
Be this as it may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of
philosophy, theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the
present students of theology in our established schools, a few passages
as thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the
Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page
of Spinoza’s Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine
magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus habet
potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur; atque adeo
ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet, potestatem
habet libidines coercendi; et quia humana potentia ad coercendos
affectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo beatitudine gaudet,
quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas libidines coercendi ex ipsa
beatitudine oritur.
With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that
I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know,
what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the
understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions and
actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one individual?
Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be his
speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance
certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a
sincere love of God, God can only know.--But this I have said, and shall
continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum of which I believe to
constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity, then Unitarianism
is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking theologically and
impersonally, i.e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism as schemes of
belief, without reference to individuals, who profess either the one or
the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as long as it
is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites cannot properly be
called by the same name. I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied
the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that two and two being
four, four and four must be eight.
alla broton
ton men keneophrones auchai
ex agathon ebalon;
ton d’ au katamemphthent’ agan
ischun oikeion paresphalen kalon,
cheiros elkon opisso, thumos atolmos eon.
This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence--and O! that
with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude!--the
unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having
earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against
the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of Christianity,
as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church, though not
discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link
follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the
ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own horizon;
and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the day softens
away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless,
steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye
views only the starry heaven which manifests itself alone: and the
outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth,
though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and
collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to
the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose
choral echo is the universe.
THEO, MONO, DOXA.
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1: The authority of Milton and Shakespeare may be usefully pointed out
to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton there
is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost we find
very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark holds
almost equally true of the Love’s Labour Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus
and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with the Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and
Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for the admission of double
epithets seems to be this: either that they should be already
denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-stricken,
self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in books only, is
hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words made one by mere
virtue of the printers hyphen. A language which, like the English,
is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for
compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself to
him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense, the
chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word.
Ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum, is the wise advice of
Caesar to the Roman Orators, and the precept applies with double force
to the writers in our own language. But it must not be forgotten,
that the same Caesar wrote a Treatise for the purpose of reforming
the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater accordance with the
principles of logic or universal grammar.]
[Footnote 2: See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and
Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.]
[Footnote 3: This is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of
criticism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the
same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N.B.--By
dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.]
[Footnote 4: The Christ’s Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether,
but for those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the
precincts of the school.]
[Footnote 5: I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young
tradesman:
“No more will I endure love’s pleasing pain,
Or round my heart’s leg tie his galling chain.”]
[Footnote 6: Cowper’s Task was published some time before the Sonnets
of Mr. Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years
afterwards. The vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem,
together with the sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably,
at that time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my
affections. The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful
religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature.
The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the
other flies to nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction
however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson
immeasurably below him; yet still I feel the latter to have been the
born poet.]
[Footnote 7: SONNET I
Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon
I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused
With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
That wept and glitter’d in the paly ray
And I did pause me on my lonely way
And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
O’er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
Breath’d in mine ear: “All this is very well,
But much of one thing, is for no thing good.”
Oh my poor heart’s inexplicable swell!
SONNET II