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 VOLUME VIII.
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 CHRISTIANITY, PAGANISM, AND 
 SUPERSTITION. 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 
 
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 CONTENTS. 
 
 MM 
 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT . 1 
 
 THE ESSENES 52 
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES . 138 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THK ESSENES .... 199 
 
 JUDAS ISCARIOT ...... . 223 
 
 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE TO MERELY HUMAN 
 
 SCIENCE ... 262 
 
 ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY 271 
 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT AGAINST MIRACLRB . . 291 
 
 PROTESTANTISM . 317 
 
 SECESSION FROM THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND . . 407 
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES . 465 
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION 533 
 
 SORTILEGE ON BEHALF OF THE GLASGOW ATHENAEUM . 589 
 NOTE* . , ,611
 
 ESSAYS ON CHRISTIANITY, PAGANISM, AND 
 SUPERSTITION, 
 
 ON CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 
 
 FOKCES, which are illimitable in their compass of 
 effect, are often, for the same reason, obscure and un- 
 traceable in the steps of their movement. Growth, 
 for instance, animal or vegetable, what eye can arrest 
 its eternal increments ? The hour-hand of a svatch, 
 who can detect the separate fluxions of its advance ? 
 Judging by the past, and the change which is registered 
 between that and the present, we know that it must 
 be awake ; judging by the immediate appearances, v?e 
 should say that it was always asleep. Gravitation, 
 again, that works without holiday forever, and searches 
 every corner of the universe, what intellect can follow 
 It to its fountains? And yet, shyer than gravitation, 
 less to be counted than the fluxions of sun-dials, 
 Btealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footsteps 
 ^f Christianity amongst the political workings of man. 
 Nothing, that the heart of man values, is so secret ; 
 aothing is so potent. 
 1
 
 2 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 It is because Christianity works so secretly, that it 
 works so potently ; it is because Christianity burrows 
 and hides itself, that it towers above the clouds ; and 
 hence partly it is that its working comes to be misap- 
 prehended, or even lost out of sight. It is dark to 
 eyes touched with the films of human frailty: but it is 
 " dark with excessive bright."* Hence it has happened 
 sometimes that minds of the highest order have entered 
 into enmity with the Christian faith, have arraigned it 
 as a curse to man, and have fought against it even 
 upon Christian impulses (impulses of benignity that 
 could not have had a birth except in Christianity). 
 All comes from the labyrinthine intricacy in which the 
 social action of Christianity involves itself to the eye 
 of a contemporary. Simplicity the most absolute is 
 reconcilable with intricacy the most elaborate. The 
 weather how simple would appear the laws of its 
 oscillations, if we stood at their centre ! and yet, be- 
 cause we do not, to this hour the weather is a mystery. 
 Human health how transparent is its economy under 
 ordinary circumstances ! abstinence and cleanliness, 
 labor and rest, these simple laws, observed in just 
 proportions, laws that may be engrossed upon a finger 
 nail, are sufficient, on the whole, to maintain the equi- 
 librium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that 
 equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science often- 
 times deep enough to rectify the unfathomable watch- 
 work ? Even the simplicities of planetary motions do 
 not escape distortion : nor is it easy to be convinced 
 *hut the distortion is in the eye which beholds, not in 
 
 " Dark with excessive bright." Paradise Lost. Book III.
 
 OJP POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 8 
 
 the object beheld. Let a planet be wheeling with * 
 aeavenly science, upon arches of divine geometry : 
 suddenly, to us, it shall appear unaccountably retro- 
 grade ; flying when none pursues ; and unweaving its 
 own work. Let this planet in its utmost elongations 
 travel out of sight, and for us its course will become 
 incoherent : because our sight is feeble, the beautiful 
 curve of the planet shall be dislocated into segments, 
 oy a parenthesis of darkness ; because our earth is in 
 no true centre, the disorder of parallax shall trouble 
 the laws of light ; and, because we ourselves are 
 wandering, the heavens shall seem fickle. 
 
 Exactly in the predicament of such a planet is 
 Christianity : its motions are intermingled with other 
 motions ; crossed and thwarted, eclipsed and disguised, 
 by counter-motions in man himself, and by disturb- 
 ances that man cannot overrule. Upon lines that are 
 direct, upon curves that are circuitous, Christianity is 
 advancing forever ; but from our imperfect vision, or 
 from our imperfect opportunities for applying even 
 such a vision, we cannot trace it continuously. We 
 lose it, we, regain it ; we see it doubtfully, we see it 
 interruptedly ; we see it in collision, we see it in com- 
 bination ; in collision with darkness that conftninds, 
 in combination with cross lights that perplex. And 
 this in part is irremediable ; so that no finite intellect 
 will ever retrace the total curve upon which Christi- 
 anity has moved, any more than eyes that are incar- 
 late will ever see God. 
 
 But part of this difficulty in unweaving the ma/e 
 nas its source in a misconception of the original 
 machinery by which Christianity moved, and of the
 
 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN OBGAN 
 
 Initial principle wnich constituted its differential power 
 In books, at least, I have observed one capital blundei 
 upon tbe relations wbich Christianity bears to Pagan- 
 ism : and out of that one mistake, grows a liability to 
 others, upon the possible relations of Christianity to 
 the total drama of this world. I will endeavor to ex- 
 plain my views. And the reader, who takes any in- 
 terest in the subject, will not need to fear that the 
 explanation should prove tedious ; for the mere want 
 of space, will put me under a coercion to move rapidly 
 over the ground ; I cannot be diffuse ; and, as regards 
 quality, he will find in this paper little of what is scat- 
 tered over the surface of books. 
 
 I begin with this question : What do people mean 
 in a Christian land by the word "religion?" My 
 purpose is not to propound any metaphysical prob- 
 lem ; I wish only, in the plainest possible sense, to 
 ask, and to have an answer, upon this one point 
 how much is understood by that obscure term,* " re- 
 
 * That obscure term; " i. e., not obscure as regards the use 
 of the term, or its present > alue, but as regards its original 
 genesis, or what in civil law is called the deductio. Under what 
 angle, under what aspect, or relation, to the field which it con- 
 cerns, did the term religion originally come forward ? The gen- 
 eral field, overlooked by religion, is the ground which lies between 
 the spirit of man and the supernatural world. At present, under 
 the humblest conception of religion, the human spirit is supposed 
 to be interested in such a field by the conscience and the nobler 
 affections. But I suspect that originally these great faculties 
 were absolutely excluded from the point of view. Probably the 
 relation between spiritual terrors and man's power of propitia- 
 tion, was the problem to which the word eligion formed the 
 Answer. Religion meant apparently, in the infancies of the v- 
 riou idolatries, that latreia, or service of sycophantic fear, bj
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 5 
 
 ligion," when used by a Christian ? Only I am punc- 
 tilious upon one demand, viz., that the answer shall be 
 
 which, as the most approved method of approach, man was ablo 
 to conciliate the favor, or to buy off the malice of supernatural 
 powers. In all Pagan nations, it is probable that religion would, 
 on the whole, be a degrading influence; although I see, even foi 
 6uch nations, two cases, at the least, where the uses of a religion 
 would be indispensable; viz., for the sanction of oaths, and as a 
 chAnnel for gratitude not pointing to a human object. If so, tha 
 answer is easy; religion was degrading : but heavier degradations 
 would have arisen from irreligion. The noblest of all idolatrous 
 peoples, viz., the Romans, have left deeply scored in their very 
 use of their word religio, their testimony to the degradation 
 wrought by any religion that Paganism could yield. Rarely in- 
 deed is this word employed, by a Latin author, in speaking of an 
 individual, without more or less of sneer. Reading that word, 
 in a Latin book, we all try it and ring it, as a petty shopkeeper 
 rings a half-crown, before we venture to receive it as offered in 
 good faith and loyalty. Even the Greeks are nearly in the same 
 anoQta, when they wish to speak of religiosity in a spirit of 
 serious praise. Some circuitous form, commending the correct- 
 ness of a man, ntQt ra 6eta, in respect of divine things, becomes 
 requisite; for all the direct terms, expressing the religious tem- 
 per, are preoccupied by a taint of scorn. The word 6010$, means 
 pious, not as regards the gods, but as regards the dead; and 
 even evaeptjc, though not used sneeringly, is a world short of our 
 word "religious." This condition of language we need not 
 wonder at : the language of life must naturally receive, as in a 
 mirror, the realities of life. Difficult it is to maintaiE a just 
 equipoise in any moral habits, but in none so much as in habits 
 of religious demeanor under a Pagan [that is, a degrading] 
 religion. To be a coward, is base : to be a sycophant, is base : 
 but to be a sycophant in the service of cowardice, is the perfection 
 of baseness : and yet this was the b"ief ana'ysis of a devotee 
 amongst the ancient Romans. Now, considering that the word 
 rtlifficn is originally Roman [probably from the Etruscan], it 
 teems probable that it presented the idea of religion under some
 
 b ON CHRISTIANITY A3 AN ORGAN 
 
 comprehensive. We are apt in such cases to answei 
 elliptically, omitting, because silently presuming as 
 understood between us, whatever seems obvious. To 
 prevent that, we will suppose the question to be pro- 
 posed by an emissary from some remote planet, 
 wbo, knowing as yet absolutely nothing of us and OUT 
 intellectual differences, must insist (as I insist) upon 
 absolute precision, so that nothing essential shall be 
 wanting, and nothing shall be redundant. 
 
 What, then, is religion ? Decomposed into its ele- 
 ments, as they are found in Christianity, how many 
 powers for acting on the heart of man, does, by possi- 
 bility, this great agency include ? According to my 
 own view, four.* I will state them, and number 
 them. 
 
 1st. A form of worship, a cultus. 
 
 2dly. An idea of God ; and (pointing the analysis to 
 
 one of its bad aspects. Coleridge must quite have forgotten this 
 Paganism of the word, when he suggested as a plausible idea, 
 that originally it had presented religion under the aspect of a 
 coercion or restraint. Morality having been viewed as the prime 
 restraint or obligation resting upon man, then Coleridge thought 
 Jiat religion might have been viewed us a religatio, a reiterated 
 restraint, or secondary obligation. This is ingenious, but it will 
 not do. It is cracked in the ring. Perhaps as many as three 
 objections might be mustered to such a derivation : but the last 
 of the three is conclusive. The ancients never did view morality 
 as a mode of obligation : I affirm this peremptorily ; and with the 
 more emphasis, because there are great consequences suspended 
 upon that question. 
 
 * " Four : " there are six, in one sense, of religion: viz. 5thly, 
 torresponding moral affections; Gthly, a suitable life. But this 
 Applies to religion as subjectively possessed by a man, not t 
 religion as objectively contemplated
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 7 
 
 Christianity in particular) an idea not purified merely 
 from ancient pollutions, but recast and absolutely born 
 igain. 
 
 3dly. An idea of the relation which man occupies 
 to God : and of this idea also, when Christianity is tbe 
 religion concerned, it must be said, that it is so entirely 
 remodelled, as in no respect to resemble any element 
 in any other religion. Thus far we are reminded oi 
 the poet's expression, " Pure religion breathing house- 
 hold laws; " that is, not teaching such laws, not for- 
 mally prescribing a new economy of life, so much as 
 inspiring it indirectly through a new atmosphere sur- 
 rounding all objects with new attributes. But there is 
 also in Christianity, 
 
 4thly. A doctrinal part, a part directly and explicitly 
 occupied with teaching ; and this divides into two 
 great sections : a, A system of ethics so absolutely new 
 as to be untranslatable* into either of the classical 
 
 *" Untranslatable." This is not generally perceived. On 
 contrary, people are ready to say, " Why, so far from it, the 
 very earliest language in which the Gospels appeared, excepting 
 only St. Matthew's, was the Greek." Yes, reader ; but what 
 Greek ? Had not the Greeks been, for a long time, colonizing 
 Syria under princes of Grecian blood, had not the Greek lan- 
 guage (as a lingua Hellenistic a) become steeped in Hebrew 
 ideas, no door of communication could have been opened be 
 tween the new world of Christian feeling, and the old world so 
 deaf to its music. Here, therefore, we may observe two prepa- 
 rations made secretly by Providence for receiving Christianity 
 \nd clearing the road before it first, the diffusion of the Greek 
 mnguage through the whole civilized wjrld (>i olxovutv^) some- 
 time before Christ, by which means the Evangelists found wings, 
 is it were, for flying abroad through the kingdoms of the earth; 
 neconjly, the Hebraizing of this language, by which means th
 
 8 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 languages ; and, ft, A system of mysteries ; as, foi 
 instance, the mystery of the Trinity, of the Divine 
 Incarnation, of the Atonement, of the Resurrection, 
 and others. 
 
 Here are great elements ; and now let me ask, ho\v 
 many of these are found in the Heathen religion of 
 Greece and Rome ? This is an important question ; 
 it being my object to show that no religion but the 
 Christian, and precisely through some one or two of 
 its differential elements, could have been an organ of 
 political movement. 
 
 Most divines who anywhere glance at this question, 
 are here found in, what seems to me, the deepest of 
 errors. Great theologians are they, and eminent phi- 
 losophers, who have presumed that (as a matter of 
 course) all religions, however false, are introductory to 
 some scheme of morality, however imperfect. They 
 grant you that the morality is oftentimes unsound ; 
 but still, they think that some morality there must have 
 been, or else for what purpose was the religion ? This 
 I pronounce error. 
 
 All the moral theories of antiquity were utterly dis- 
 joined from religion. But this fallacy of a dogmatic 
 or doctrinal part in Paganism is born out of Anachron- 
 ism. It is the anachronism of unconsciously reflecting 
 back upon the ancient religions of darkness, and as if 
 essential to all religions, features that never were 
 suspected as possible, until they had been revealed in 
 
 Evangelists found a new material made plastic and obedient to 
 Aese new ideas, which they had to build with, and which thoy 
 kad to build upon.
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 9 
 
 Christianity.* Religion, in the eye of a Pagan, nad no 
 more relation to morals, than it had to ship-building or 
 trigonometry. But, then, why was religion honored 
 amongst Pagans ? How did it ever arise ? What was 
 its object? Object! it had no object ; if by this you 
 mean ulterior object. Pagan religion arose in no 
 motive, but in an impulse. Pagan religion aimed at 
 no distant prize ahead : it fled from a danger immedi- 
 ately behind. The gods of the Pagans were wicked 
 natures ; but they were natures to be Beared, and to be 
 propitiated ; for they were fierce, and they were 
 moody, and (as regarded man who had no wings) they 
 were powerful. Once accredited as facts, the Pagan 
 gods could not be regarded as other than terrific facts ; 
 and thus it was, that in terror, blind terror, as against 
 power in the hands of divine wickedness, arose the 
 ancient religions of Paganism. Because the gods were 
 wicked, man was religious ; because Olympus was 
 cruel, earth trembled ; because the divine beings were 
 the most lawless of Thugs, the human being became 
 the most abject of sycophants. 
 
 Had the religions of Paganism arisen ideologically 
 that is, with a view to certain purposes, to certain final 
 causes ahead ; had they grown out ofybryjarrf-looking 
 views, contemplating, for instance, the furthering of 
 civilization, or contemplating some interests in a world 
 beyond the present, there would probably have arisen, 
 
 * " In Christianity." Once for all, to save the trouble of 
 continual repetitions, understand Judaism to be commemorated 
 Jointly with Christianity; the dark root together with the golden 
 fruitage; whenever tne nature of the case does not presume a 
 lontradistinction of the one to the other.
 
 10 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 concurrently, a section in all such religions, dedicated 
 to positive instruction. There would have been a 
 doctrinal part. There might have been interwoven 
 with the ritual or worship, a system of economics, or a 
 code of civil prudence, or a code of health, or a theory 
 of morals, or even a secret revelation of mysterious 
 relations between man and the Deity : all which 
 existed in Judaism. But, as the case stood, this was 
 impossible. The gods were mere odious facts, like 
 scorpions or rattlesnakes, having no moral aspects 
 whatever ; public nuisances ; and bearing no relation 
 to man but that of capricious tyrants. First arising 
 upon a basis of terror, these gods never subsequently 
 enlarged that basis ; nor sought to enlarge it. All 
 antiquity contains no hint of a possibility that love 
 could arise, as by any ray mingling with the senti- 
 ments in a human creature towards a Divine one ; 
 not even sycophants ever pretended to love the gods. 
 
 Under this original peculiarity of Paganism, there 
 arose two consequences, which I will mark by the 
 Greek letters a and /?. The latter I will notice in its 
 order, first calling the reader's attention to the conse- 
 quence marked a, which is this : in the full and 
 profoundest sense of the word believe, the Pagans 
 could not be said to believe in any gods : but, in the 
 ordinary sense, they did, and do, and must believe, in 
 all gods. As this proposition will startle some readers, 
 and is yet closely involved in the main truth which * 
 am now pressing, viz. the meaning and effect of a 
 simple cultus, as distinguished from a high doctrinal 
 religion, let us seek an illustration from our Indian 
 empire. The Christian missionaries from home, when
 
 OP POLITICAL MOVEMENT. H 
 
 first opening their views to Hindoos, describe them- 
 selves as laboring to prove that Christianity :'s a true 
 religion, and as either asserting, or leaving it to be 
 inferred, that, on that assumption, the Hindoo religion 
 is a false one. But the poor Hindoo never dreamed 
 of doubting that the Christian was a true religion ; nor 
 will he at all infer, from your religion being true, that 
 his own must be false. Both are true, he thinks : all 
 religions are true ; all gods are true gods ; and all are 
 equally true. Neither can he understand what you 
 mean by a false religion, or how a religion could be 
 false ; and he is perfectly right. Wherever religions 
 consist only of a worship, as the Hindoo religion does, 
 there can be no competition amongst them as to truth. 
 That would be an absurdity, not less nor other than it 
 would be for a Prussian to denounce the Austrian 
 emperor, or an Austrian to denounce the Prussian 
 king, as a false sovereign. False ! How false ? In 
 what sense false ? Surely not as non-existing. But 
 at least (the reader will reply), if the religions con- 
 tradict each other, one of them must be false. Yes ; 
 but that is impossible. Two religions cannot contradict 
 each other, where both contain only a cultus : they 
 could come into collision only by means of a doctrinal, 
 or directly affirmative part, like those of Christianity 
 and Mahometanism. But this part is what no idolatrous 
 religion ever had, or will have. The reader must not 
 understand me to mean that, merely as a compromise 
 of courtesy, two professors of different idolatries would 
 agree to recognize each other. Not at all. The truth 
 of one does not imply the falsehood of the other 
 Both are true as facts : neither can be false, in any
 
 12 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 higher sense, because neither makes any pretence to 
 truth doctrinal. 
 
 This distinction between a religion having merely a 
 worship, and a religion having also a body of doctrinal 
 truth, is familiar to the Mahometans ; and they convey 
 the distinction by a very appropriate expression. Those 
 majestic religions (as they esteem them), which rise 
 above the mere pomps and tympanies of ceremonial 
 worship, they denominate " religions of the look." 
 There are, of such religions, three, viz., Judaism, 
 Christianity, and Islamism. The first builds upon the 
 Law and the Prophets, or perhaps sufficiently upon 
 the Pentateuch ; the second upon the Gospel ; the last 
 upon the Koran. No other religion can be said to rest 
 upon a book ; or -to need a book ; or even to admit of 
 a book. For we must not be duped by the case where 
 a lawgiver attempts to connect his own human institutes 
 with the venerable sanctions of a national religion, or 
 the case where a learned antiquary unfolds historically 
 the record of a vast mythology. Heaps of such cases 
 (both law and mythological records) survive in the 
 Sanscrit, and in other Pagan languages. But these are 
 books which build upon the religion, not books upon 
 which the religion is built. If a religion consists only 
 of a ceremonial worship, in that case there can be no 
 tpening for a book ; because the forms and details 
 publish themselves daily, in the celebration of the 
 worship, and are traditionally preserved, from age to 
 age. without dependence on a book. But, if a religion 
 has a doctrine, this implies a revelation or message 
 h'om Heaven, which cannot, in any other way, secure 
 the transmission of this message to future generations
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 13 
 
 Lhan by causing it to be registered in a book. A 
 book, therefore, will be convertible with a doctrinal 
 religion : no book, no doctrine ; and, again, no doc- 
 trine, no book. 
 
 Upon these principles, we may understand that 
 second consequence (marked |3) which has perplexed 
 many men viz., why it is that the Hindoos, in our 
 own times, but, equally, why it is that the Greek and 
 Roman idolaters of antiquity, never proselytized ; no, 
 nor could have viewed such an attempt as rational. 
 Naturally, if a religion is doctrinal, any truth which it 
 possesses, as a secret deposit consigned to its keeping 
 by a revelation, must be equally valid for one man as 
 for another, without regard to race or nation. For a 
 doctrinal religion, therefore, to proselytize, is no more 
 than a duty of consistent humanity. You, the profes- 
 sors of that religion, possess the medicinal fountains. 
 You will not diminish your own share by imparting to 
 others. What churlishness, if you should grudge to 
 others a health which does not interfere with your own ! 
 Christians, therefore, Mahometans, and Jews originally, 
 in proportion as they were sincere and conscientious, 
 have always invited, or even forced, the unbelieving to 
 their own faith : nothing but accidents of situation, 
 local or political, have disturbed this effort. But, on 
 the other hand, for a mere " cultus " to attempt conver- 
 sions, is nonsense. An ancient Roman could have had 
 no motive for bringing you over to the worship of 
 Jupiter Capitolinus ; nor you any motive for going. 
 " Surely, poor man," he would hava said, " you have 
 ome god of your own, who will be quite as good for 
 your countrymen as Jupiter for mine. But, if you
 
 14 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN OKGAN 
 
 aave not, really I am sorry for your case ; aud a 
 very odd case it is ; but I don't see how it could be 
 improved by talking nonsense. You cannot bene- 
 ficially, you cannot rationally, worship a tutelary 
 Roman deity, unless in the character of a Roman ; 
 and a Roman you may become, legally and politically. 
 Being such, you will participate in all advantages, il 
 any there are, of our national religion ; and, without 
 needing a process of conversion, either in substance or 
 in form. Ipso facto, and without any separate choice 
 of your own, on becoming a Roman citizen, you be- 
 come a party to the Roman worship." For an idola- 
 trous religion to proselytize, would, therefore, be not 
 only useless, but unintelligible. 
 
 Now, having explained that point, which is a great 
 step towards the final object of my paper, viz., the 
 investigation of the reason why Christianity is, which 
 no Pagan religion ever has been, an organ of political 
 movement, I will go on to review rapidly those four 
 constituents of a religion, as they are realized in 
 Christianity, for the purpose of contrasting them with 
 the false shadows, or even blank negations, of these, 
 constituents in Pagan idolatries. 
 
 First, then, as to the CTTLTDS, or form of the national 
 worship : In our Christian ritual I recognize these 
 separate acts ; viz., A, an act of Praise ; B, an act of 
 Thanksgiving ; C, an act of Confession ; D, an act oi 
 Prayer. In A, we commemorate with adoration the 
 general perfections of the Deity. There, all of us 
 have an equal interest. In B, we commemorate witt 
 thankfulness those special qualities of the Deity, or 
 'hose special manifestations of them, by which we, the
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 15 
 
 individual worshippers, have recently benefited. In C, 
 by upright confession, we deprecate. In D, we pray, 
 or ask for the things which we need. Now, in the 
 cullus of the ancient Pagans, B and C (the second act 
 and the third) were wanting altogether. No thanks- 
 giving ever ascended, on his own account, from the 
 lips of an individual ; and the state thanksgiving for a 
 triumph of the national armies, was but a mode of 
 ostentatiously publishing the news. As to C, it is 
 scarcely necessary to say that this was wanting, when 
 I mention that penitential feelings were unknown 
 amongst the ancients, and had no name ; for pceniten- 
 tia* means regret, not penitence ; and me pcenitet hujus 
 facti, means, " I rue this act in its consequences," 
 not " I repent of this act for its moral nature." A 
 and D, the first act and the last, appear to be present ; 
 but are so most imperfectly. When " God is praised 
 aright," praised by means of such deeds or such 
 attributes as express a divine nature, we recognize one 
 great function of a national worship, not otherwise. 
 This, however, we must overlook and pardon, as 
 being a fault essential to the religion : the poor crea- 
 tures did the best they could to praise their god, lying 
 under the curse of gods so thoroughly depraved. But 
 in D, the case is different. Strictly speaking, the 
 indents never prayed ; and it may be doubted whether 
 
 * In Greek, there is a word for repentance, but not until it 
 had been rebaptized into a Christian use. Metanoia, however, is 
 not that word: it is grossly to defeat the profound meaning of 
 the New Testament, if John the Baptist is translated as though 
 ummoning the world to repentance ; it was not that to which 
 he summoned them.
 
 16 ON CHBISTIANITY AS AN OKQAN 
 
 D approaches so near to what we mean by prayer, aa 
 even by a mockery. You read of preces, of OQCU, &c., 
 and you are desirous to believe that pagan supplica- 
 tions were not always corrupt. It is too shocking to 
 suppose, in thinking of nations idolatrous yet noble, 
 that never any pure act of approach to the heavens 
 took place on the part of man ; that always the inter- 
 course was corrupt ; always doubly corrupt ; that 
 eternally the god was bought, and the votary was 
 sold. Oh weariness of man's spirit before that un- 
 resting mercenariness in high places, which neither, 
 when his race clamored for justice, nor when it lan- 
 guished for pity, would listen without hire ! How 
 gladly would man turn away from his false rapacious 
 divinities to the godlike human heart, that so often 
 would yield pardon before it was asked, and for the 
 thousandth time that would give without a bribe ! In 
 strict propriety, as my reader knows, the classical 
 Latin word for a prayer is votum ; it was a case of 
 contract, of mercantile contract ; of that contract 
 which the Roman law expressed by the formula Do 
 ut des. Vainly you came before the altars with empty 
 hands. " But my hands are pure." Pure, indeed ! 
 would reply the scoffing god ; let me see what they 
 contain. It was exactly what you daily read in morn- 
 ing papers, viz., that, in order to appear effectually 
 before that Olympus in London, which rains rarities 
 upon us poor abject creatures in the provinces, you 
 must enclose " an order on the Post-office or a refer- 
 ence." It is true that a man did not always registei 
 his votum (the particular offering which he vowed on 
 *te condition of receiving what he asked), at the
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 17 
 
 moment of asking. Ajax, for instance, prays for light 
 in the Iliad, and he does not then and there give 
 either an order or a reference. But you are much 
 mistaken, if you fancy that even light was to be had 
 gratis. It would be " carried to account." Ajax 
 would be " debited " with that " advance." 
 
 Yet, when it occurs to a man that, in this Do ut ties, 
 the general Do was either a temple or a sacrifice, 
 naturally it occurs to ask what was a sacrifice ? I am 
 afraid that the dark, murderous nature of the Pagan 
 gods is here made apparent. Modern readers, who 
 have had no particular reason for reflecting on the 
 nature and management of a sacrifice, totally miscon- 
 ceive it. They have a vague notion that the slaugh- 
 tered animal was roasted, served up on the altars as a 
 banquet to the gods ; that these gods by some repre- 
 sentative ceremony " made believe " to eat it ; and that 
 finally (as dishes that had now become hallowed to 
 divine use), the several joints were disposed of in some 
 mysterious manner : burned, suppose, or buried under 
 the altars, or committed to the secret keeping of rivers. 
 Nothing of the sort : when a man made a sacrifice, the 
 meaning was, that he gave a dinner. And not only 
 was every sacrifice a dinner party, but every dinner 
 party was a sacrifice. This was strictly so in the good 
 old ferocious times of Paganism, as may be seen in the 
 Iliad : it was not said, " Agamemnon has a dinner 
 party to-day," but " Agamemnon sacrifices tc Apollo." 
 Even in Rome, to the last days of Paganism, it is 
 probable that some slight memorial continued to con- 
 nect the dinner party [cosna] with a divine sacrifice ; 
 and thence partly arose the sanctity of the hospitable
 
 18 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 ooai d ; but to the east of the Mediterranean the full 
 ritual of a sacrifice must have been preserved in all 
 banquets, long after it had faded to a form in the less 
 superstitious West. This we may learn from that 
 point of casuistry treated by St. Paul, whether a 
 Christian might lawfully eat of things offered to idols. 
 The question was most urgent ; because a Christian 
 could not accept an invitation to dine with a Grecian 
 fellow-citizen who still adhered to Paganism, without 
 eating things offered to idols ; the whole banquet 
 was dedicated to an idol. If he would not take that, 
 he must continue impransus. Consequently, the ques- 
 tion virtually amounted to this : were the Christians 
 to separate themselves altogether from those whose in- 
 terests were in so many ways entangled with their 
 own, on the single consideration that these persons 
 were heathens ? To refuse their hospitalities, was to 
 separate, and with a hostile expression of feeling. 
 That would be to throw hindrances in the way of 
 Christianity: the religion could not spread rapidly 
 under such repulsive prejudices ; and dangers, that it 
 became un- Christian to provoke, would thus multiply 
 against the infant faith. This being so, and as the 
 gods were really the only parties invited who got 
 nothing at all of the banquet, it becomes a question of 
 some interest, what did they get ? They were 
 merely mocked, if they had no compensatory interest 
 in the dinner ! For surely it was an inconceivable 
 mode of honoring Jupiter, that you and I should eat a 
 piece of roast beef, leaving to the god's share only the 
 mockery of a Barmecide invitation, assigning him a 
 '.hail vrhich every body knew that he would never fill
 
 OP POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 19 
 
 nd a plate which might as well have been tilled with 
 warm water ? Jupiter got something, be assured ; and 
 what was it ? This it was, the luxury of inhaling 
 the groans, the fleeting breath, the palpitations, the 
 agonies, of the dying victim. This was the dark 
 interest which the wretches of Olympus had in human 
 invitations to dinner : and it is too certain, upon com- 
 paring facts and dates, that, when left to their own 
 choice, the gods had a preference for man as the 
 victim. All things concur to show, that precisely as 
 you ascend above civilization, which continually in- 
 creased the limitations upon the gods of Olympus, 
 precisely as you go back to that gloomy state in which 
 their true propensities had power to reveal themselves, 
 was man the genuine victim for them, and the dying 
 anguish of man the best " nidor" that ascended from 
 earthly banquets to their nostrils. Their stern eyes 
 smiled darkly upon the throbbings of tortured flesh, as 
 in Moloch's ears dwelt like music the sound of infants' 
 wailings. 
 
 Secondly, as to the birth of a new idea respecting 
 the nature of God : It may not have occurred to 
 every reader, but none will perhaps object to it, when 
 once suggested to his consideration, that, as is the 
 od of any nation, such will be that nation. God, 
 however falsely conceived of by man, even though 
 splintered into fragments by Polytheism, or disfigured 
 by the darkest mythologies, is still the greatest of all 
 objscts offered to human contemplation. Man, when 
 thrown upon his own delusions, may have raised him- 
 lelf, or may have adopted from others, the very falsest 
 )f ideals, as the true image and reflection of what he
 
 20 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN OKOAN 
 
 calls god. In his lowest condition of darkness, terror 
 may be the moulding principle for spiritual conceptions ; 
 power, the engrossing attribute which he ascribes to 
 his deity ; and this power may be hideously capricious, 
 or associated with vindictive cruelty. It may even 
 happen, that his standard of what is highest in the 
 divinity should be capable of falling greatly below 
 what an enlightened mind would figure to itself as 
 lowest in man. A more shocking monument, indeed, 
 there cannot be than this, of the infinity by which man 
 may descend below his own capacities of grandeur : 
 the gods, in some systems of religion, have been such 
 and so monstrous by excess of wickedness, as to 
 insure, if annually one hour of periodical eclipse 
 should have left them at the mercy of man, a general 
 rush from their own worshippers for strangling them 
 as mad dogs. Hypocrisy, the cringing of sycophants, 
 and the credulities of fear, united to conceal this 
 misptheism ; but we may be sure that was widely 
 diffused through the sincerities of the human heart. 
 An intense desire for kicking Jupiter, or for hanging 
 him, if found convenient, must have lurked in the 
 honorable Roman heart, before the sincerity of humao 
 nature could have extorted upon the Roman stage a 
 public declaration, that their supreme gods were 
 capable of enormities which a poor, unpretending 
 human creature [homuncio] would have disdained. 
 Many times the ideal of the divine nature, as adopted 
 by Pagan races, fell under the contempt, not only of 
 men superior to the national superstition, but of men 
 partaking in that superstition. Yet, with all those 
 drawbacks, an ideal was an ideal. This being set up
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 21 
 
 for adoration, as god, was such upon the whole to the 
 worshipper ; since, if there had been any higher mode 
 of excellence conceivable for him, that higher mode 
 would have virtually become his deity. It cannot be 
 doubted, therefore, that the nature of the national 
 divinities indicated the qualities which ranked highest 
 in the national estimation ; and that being contemplated 
 continually in the spirit of veneration, these qualities 
 must have worked an extensive conformity to their 
 own standard. The mythology sanctioned by the 
 ritual of public worship, the features of moral nature 
 in the gods distributed through that mythology, and 
 sometimes commemorated by gleams in that ritual, 
 domineered over the popular heart, even in those casea 
 where the religion had been a derivative religion, and 
 not originally moulded by impulses breathing from 
 the native disposition. So that, upon the whole, such 
 as were the gods of a nation, such was the nation : 
 given the particular idolatry, it became possible to 
 decipher the character of the idolaters. Where Moloch 
 was worshipped, the people would naturally be found 
 cruel ; where the Paphian Venus, it could not be ex- 
 pected that they should escape the taint of a voluptu- 
 ous effeminacy. 
 
 Against this principle, there could have been no 
 room for demur, were it not through that inveterate 
 prejudice besieging the modern mind, as though all 
 religion, however false, implied some scheme ol morals 
 connected with it. However imperfectly discharged, 
 ne function even of the Pagan oriest (it is supposed) 
 must have been, to guide, to counsel, to exhort, as a 
 teacher of morals. And, had that been so, the prac-
 
 22 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 tical precepts, and the moral commentary coming after 
 even the grossest forms of worship, or the most revolt- 
 ing mythological legends, might have operated to 
 neutralize their horrors, or even to allegorize them 
 into better meanings. Lord Bacon, as a trial of skill, 
 has attempted something of that sort in his Wisdom 
 of the Ancients. But all this is modern refinement, 
 either in the spirit of playful ingenuity or of ignorance. 
 I have said sufficiently that there was no doctrinal part 
 in the religion of the Pagans. There was a cultus, or 
 ceremonial worship : that constituted the sum total of 
 religion, in the idea of a Pagan. There was a neces- 
 sity, for the sake of guarding its traditional usages, 
 and upholding and supporting its pomp, that official 
 persons preside in this cullus : that constituted the 
 duty of the priest. Beyond this ritual of public 
 worship, there was nothing at all ; nothing to believe, 
 nothing to understand. A set of legendary tales un- 
 doubtedly there was, connected with the mythologic 
 history of each separate deity. But in what sense you 
 understood these, or whether you were at all acquaint- 
 ed with them, was a matter of indifference to the 
 priests; since many of these legends were variously 
 related, and some had apparently been propagated in 
 ridicule of the gods, rather than in their honor. 
 
 With Christianity a new scene was opened. In thii 
 religion the cultus, or form of worship, was not even 
 the primary business, far less was it the exclusive 
 business. The worship flowed as a direct consequence 
 from the new idea exposed of the divine nature, anr" 
 from the new idea of man's relations to this nature 
 Here were suddenly unmasked great doctrines, truth*
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 23 
 
 ositire and directly avowed : whereas, in Pagan forms 
 of religion, any notices which then were, or seemed to 
 be, of circumstances surrounding the gods, related only 
 ro matters of fact or accident, such as that a particular 
 god was the son or the nephew of some other god ; a 
 truth, if it were a truth, wholly impertinent to any 
 nterest of man. 
 
 As there are some important truths, dimly perceived 
 3r not at all, lurking in the idea of God, an idea too 
 vast to be navigable as yet by the human understanding, 
 yet here and there to be coasted, I wish at this point 
 to direct the reader's attention upon a passage which 
 he may happen to remember in Sir Isaac Newton : the 
 passage occurs at the end of the Optics ; and the 
 exact expressions I do not remember ; but the sense 
 is what I am going to state : Sir Isaac is speaking of 
 God ; and he takes occasion to say, that God is not 
 good, but goodness ; is not holy, but holiness ; is not 
 infinite, but infinity. This, I apprehend, will have 
 struck many readers as merely a rhetorical bravura ; 
 sublime, perhaps, and fitted to exalt the feeling of 
 *we connected with so unapproachable a mystery, but 
 otherwise not throwing any new light upon the dark- 
 ness of the idea as a problem before the intellect. Yet 
 indirectly perhaps it does, when brought out into its 
 latei t sense by placing it in juxtaposition with Pagan- 
 ism. If a philosophic theist, who is also a Christian, 
 01 who (not being a Christiap), has yet by his birth 
 and breeding become saturated with Christian ideas 
 and feelings,* attempts to realize the idea of supreme 
 
 * " J\bt being a Christian , has yet become saturated with 
 Chiittian ideas:" This case is far from uncommon; and
 
 84 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 Deity, he becomes aware of a double and contradictory 
 movement in his own mind whilst striving towards 
 that result. He demands, in the first place, something 
 in the highest degree generic ; and yet again in the 
 opposite direction, something in the highest degree 
 individual ; he demands on the one path, a vast ideal- 
 ity, and yet on the other, in union with a determinate 
 personality. He must not surrender himself to the 
 first impulse, else he is betrayed into a mere anitna 
 mundi ; he must not surrender himself to the second, 
 else he is betrayed into something merely human. 
 This difficult antagonism, of what is most and what ia 
 least generic, must be maintained, otherwise the idea, 
 the possible idea, of that august unveiling which takea 
 place in the Judaico- Christian God, is absolutely in 
 clouds. Now, this antagonism utterly collapses in 
 Paganism. And to a philosophic apprehension, this 
 peculiarity of the heathen gods is more shocking and 
 fearful than what at first sight had seemed most so. 
 When a man pauses for the purpose of attentively 
 reviewing the Pantheon of Greece and Rome, what 
 
 undoubtedly, from having too much escaped observation, it has 
 been the cause of much error. Poets I could mention, if it 
 were not invidious to do so, who, whilst composing in a spirit of 
 burning enmity to the Christian faith, yet rested for the very 
 Bting of their pathos upon ideas that but for Christianity could 
 never have existed. Translators there have been, English, 
 French, German, of Mahometan books, who have so colored the 
 whole vein of thinking with 'sentiments peculiar to Christianity, 
 as to draw from a reflecting reader the exclamation, " If this 
 tan be indeed the product of Islamism, wherefore should Chris- 
 tianity exist ? " If thoughts so divine can, indeed, belong to 
 false religion, what more can we gather from a true one ?
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 25 
 
 itrikes him at the first with most depth of impression 
 and with most horror is, the wickedness of this Pan- 
 theon. And he observes with surprise, that this wick- 
 edness, which is at a furnace-heat in the superior gods, 
 becomes fainter and paler as you descend. Amongst 
 tt.e semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the 
 Nereids or Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The 
 odor of corruption, the sava mephitis, has by this time 
 exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased. 
 And these gentle divinities, if too human and too beset 
 with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed with 
 ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel : they are tranquil 
 as are the hills and the forests ; passionless as are the 
 seas and the fountains which they tenant. But, when 
 he ascends to the dii majorum gentium, to those twelve 
 gods of the supreme house, who may be called 'in re- 
 pect of rank, the Paladins of the classical Pantheon, 
 secret horror comes over him at the thought that de- 
 mons, reflecting the worst aspects of brutal races, ever 
 could have levied worship from his own. It is true 
 they do so no longer as regards our planet. But what 
 has been apparently may be. God made the Greeks 
 and Romans of one blood with himself; he cannot 
 deny that intellectually the Greeks he cannot deny 
 that morally the Romans were amongst the foremost 
 % f human races ; and he trembles in thinking that 
 abominations, whose smoke ascended through so many 
 ages to the supreme heavens, may, or might, so far as 
 human resistance is concerned, again become the law 
 for the noblest of his species. A deep feeling, it is 
 true, exists latently in human beings of something 
 perishable in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wicked-
 
 56 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 Bess, according to a deep misgiving dispersed amongst 
 men, must be tainted with corruption. There might 
 Bccm consolation ; but a man who reflects is not quite 
 so sure of that. As a commonplace resounding in 
 schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what 
 is evil by nature or by origin must be transient. But 
 that may be because evil in all human things is partial, 
 is heterogeneous ; evil mixed with good ; and the two 
 natures, by their mutual enmity, must enter into a 
 collision, which may possibly guarantee the final de- 
 struction of the whole compound. Such a result may 
 uot threaten a nature that is purely and totally evil, 
 that is homogeneously evil. Dark natures there may 
 be, whose essence is evil, that may have an abiding 
 root in the system of the universe not less awfully 
 exempt from change than the mysterious foundations 
 of God. 
 
 This is dreadful. Wickedness that is immeasurable, 
 .n connection with power that is superhuman, appals 
 the imagination. Yet this is a combination that might 
 easily have been conceived ; and a wicked god still 
 commands a mode of reverence. But that feature of 
 the Pagan Pantheon, which I am contrasting with this, 
 viz., that no Pagan deity is an abstraction, but a vile 
 concrete, impresses myself with a subtler sense of 
 horror ; because it blends the hateful with a mode of 
 the ludicrous. For the sake of explaining myself to 
 the nm-philosophic reader, I beg him to consider what 
 is the sort of feeling with which he regards an ancient 
 river-god, or the presiding nymph of a fountain. The 
 impression which he receives is pretty much like tha 
 from the monumental figure of some allegoric being
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 27 
 
 Mich as Faith or Hope, Fame or Truth. He hardly 
 believes that the most superstitious Grecian seriously 
 believed in such a being as a distinct personality. He 
 feels convinced that the sort of personal existence 
 ascribed to such an abstraction, as well as the human 
 shape, are merely modes of representing and drawing 
 into unity a variety of phenomena and agencies that 
 seem one, by means of their unintermitting continuity, 
 and because they tend to one common purpose. Now, 
 from such a symbolic god as this, let him pass to Jupi- 
 ter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a 
 revolting individuality. He sees before him the op- 
 posite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of 
 a concrete character. Jupiter has nothing else. In 
 Jupiter you read no incarnation of any abstract quality 
 whatever : he represents nothing whatever in the meta- 
 physics of the universe. Except for the accident of 
 his power, he is merely a man. He has a character, 
 that is, a tendency or determination to this quality or 
 that, in excess ; whereas a nature truly divine must be 
 in equilibria as to all qualities, and comprehend them 
 all, in the way that a genus comprehends the subordi- 
 nate species. He has even a personal history ; he 
 Has passed through certain adventures, faced certain 
 dangers, and survived hostilities that, at one time, 
 were doubtful in their issue. No trace, in short, ap- 
 pears, in any Grecian god, of the generic. Whereas 
 we, in our Christian ideas of God, unconsciously, and 
 without thinking of Sir Isaac Newton, realize Sir 
 Isaac's conceptions. We think of him as having a 
 ort of allegoric generality, liberated from the bonds 
 f the individual ; and yet, also, as the most awful
 
 28 ON CHBISTIANITY AS AN OKQAJT 
 
 among natures, having a conscious personality. He is 
 diffused through all things, present everywhere, and 
 yet not the less present locally. He is at a distance, 
 'inapproachable by finite creatures ; and yet, without 
 any contradiction (as the profound St. Paul observes) 
 " not very far " from every one of us. And I wjl 
 venture to say, that many a poor old woman has, b) 
 virtue of her Christian inoculation, Sir Isaac's great 
 idea lurking in her mind ; as for instance, in relation 
 to any of God's attributes ; suppose holiness or happi- 
 ness, she feels (though analytically she could not ex- 
 plain) that God is not holy, or is not happy by way of 
 participation, after the manner of other beings that 
 is, He does not draw happiness from a fountain separate 
 and external to Himself, and common to other creatures, 
 He drawing more and they drawing less ; but that He 
 Himself is the Fountain ; that no other being can have 
 the least proportion of either one or the other, but by 
 drawing from that Fountain ; that as to all other good 
 gifts, that as to life itself, they are, in man, not on any 
 separate tenure, not primarily, but derivatively, and 
 only in so far as God enters into the nature of man ; 
 that " we live and move " only so far and so long a? 
 the incomprehensible union takes place between tho 
 auman spirit and the fontal abyss of the Divine. In 
 ghort, here, and here only, is found the outermost ex- 
 pansion, the centrifugal, of the TO catholic, united 
 with the innermost centripetal of the personal con- 
 sciousness. Had, therefore, the Pagan gods been less 
 detestable, neither impure nor malignant, they could 
 not have won a salutary veneration being so mer ely 
 concrete individuals.
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 29 
 
 Next, it must have degraded the gods (and have 
 made them instruments of degradation for man), that 
 they were, one and all. incarnations ; not, as even the 
 Christian God is, for a transitory moment and for an 
 eternal purpose ; but essentially and by overruling ne- 
 cessity. The Greeks could not conceive of spirituality. 
 Neither can we, metaphysically, assign the conditions 
 of the spiritual ; but practically, we all feel and repre- 
 sent to our own minds the agencies of God, as liberated 
 from bonds of space and time, of flesh and of resist- 
 ance. This the Greeks could not feel, could not repre- 
 sent. And the only advantage which the gods enjoyed 
 over the worm and the grub was, that they (or at 
 least the Paladins amongst them the twelve supreme 
 gods) could pass, fluently, from one incarnation to 
 another. 
 
 Thirdly. Out of that essential bondage to flesh arose 
 a dreadful suspicion of something worse : in what re- 
 lation did the Pagan gods stand to the abominable 
 phenomenon of death ? It is not by uttering pompous 
 flatteries of ever-living and a^Qorog asi, &c., that a 
 poet could intercept the searching jealousies of human 
 penetration. These are merely oriental forms of com- 
 pliment. And here, by the way, as elsewhere, we find 
 Plato vehemently confuted ; for it was the undue ex- 
 altation of the gods, and not their degradation, which 
 must be ascribed to the frauds of poets. Tradition, 
 and no poetic tradition, absolutely pointed to the grave 
 >f more gods than one. But waiving all that as liable 
 to dispute, one thing we know, from the ancients them- 
 jelves, as open to no question, tha* all the gods wero 
 lorn , were born infants; passed through the stages
 
 30 ON CHEISTIANITY AS AN ORGAH 
 
 of helplessness and growth ; from all which the infer- 
 ence was but too fatally obvious. Besides, there were 
 grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers in the Pan- 
 theon : some of these were confessedly superannuated" ; 
 uay, some had disappeared. Even men, who knew but 
 little of Olympian records, knew this, at least, for cer- 
 tain, that more than one dynasty of gods had passed 
 over the golden stage of Olympus, had made their exit, 
 iiid were hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter 
 of notoriety, also, that all these gods were and had 
 been liable to the taint of sorrow for the death of their 
 earthly children (as the Homeric Jupiter for Sarpedon, 
 Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for her 
 blooming Rhesus) ; all were liable to fear ; all to phys- 
 ical pain ; all to anxiety ; all to the indefinite menaces 
 of a danger* not measurable. Looking backwards or 
 looking forwards, the gods beheld enemies that attacked 
 their existence, or modes of decay (known and un- 
 known), which gnawed at their roots. All this I take 
 the trouble to insist upon : not as though it could be 
 worth any man's trouble, at this day, to expose (on its 
 own account) the frailty of the Pantheon, but with a 
 view to the closer estimate of the Divine idea amongst 
 .wen ; and by way of contrast to the power of that 
 idea under Christianity : since I contend that, such as 
 is the God of every people, such, in the corresponding 
 
 * "Danger not measurable : " It must not be forgotten, that 
 11 the superior gods passed through an infancy (as Jove, &c.), 
 r even an adolescence (as Bacchus), or even a maturity (as 
 the majority of Olympus during the insurrection of the Titans) 
 jurrounded by perils that required not strength only, but ar'J 
 4ce, and even abject self-concealment to evade.
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 31 
 
 features of character, will be that people. If tl:e gou 
 (like Moloch.) is fierce, the people will be cruel ; il 
 (like Typhon) a destroying energy, the people will be 
 gloomy ; if (like the Paphian Venus) libidinous, the 
 people will be voluptuously effeminate. When the 
 gods are perishable, man cannot have the grandeurs o 
 his nature developed ; when the shadow of death site 
 upon the highest of "what man represents to himself afl 
 celestial, essential blight will sit forever upon human 
 aspirations. One thing only remains to be added on 
 this subject : Why were not the ancients more pro- 
 foundly afflicted by the treacherous gleaois of mortality 
 in their gods ? How was it that they could forget, for 
 a moment, a revelation so full of misery ? Since not 
 only the character of man partly depended upon the 
 quality of his god, but also, and a fortiori, his destiny 
 upon the destiny of his god. But the reason of his 
 indifference to the divine mortality was because, at 
 my rate, the Pagan man's connection with the gods 
 verminated at his own death. Even selfish men would 
 reconcile themselves to an earthquake, which should 
 swallow up all the world ; and the most unreasonable 
 man has professed his readiness, at all times, to die 
 with a dying universe mundo secum pereunte, mori. 
 But, thirdly, the gods being such, in what relation 
 to them did man stand? It is a fact hidden from th 
 mass of the ancients themselves, but sufficiently at 
 tested, that there was an ancient and secret enmity 
 between the whole family of the gods and the human 
 race. This is confessed by Herodotus as a persuasion 
 spread through %ome of the nations amongst which he 
 travelled : there was a sort of trace, indeed, betweon
 
 "- ON CHBISTIANITY AS AN 
 
 the parties ; temples, with their religious services, and 
 their votive offerings, recorded this truce. But below 
 all these appearances lay deadly enmity, to be explained 
 only by one who should know the mysterious his- 
 tory of both parties from the eldest times. It is ex- 
 traordinary, however, that Herodotus should rely, for 
 his account, upon the belief of distant nations, when 
 the same belief was so deeply recorded amongst his 
 own countrymen in the sublime story of Prometheus. 
 Much* of the sufferings endured by Prometheus was 
 on account of man, whom he had befriended ; and, by 
 befriending, had defeated the malignity of Jove. Ac- 
 cording to some, man was even created by Prometheus : 
 but no accounts, until lying Platonic philosophers 
 arose, in far later times, represent man as created by 
 Jupiter. 
 
 Now let us turn to Christianity ; pursuing it through 
 the functions which it exercises in common with Pa- 
 ganism, and also through those which it exercises 
 separately and incommunicably. 
 
 I. As to the Idea of God. How great was the 
 chasm dividing the Hebrew God from all gods of 
 idolatrous birth, and with what starry grandeur this 
 revelation of Supreme deity must have wheeled up- 
 wards into the field of human contemplation, wher 
 first surmounting the steams of earth-born heathenism, 
 I need not impress upon any Christian audience. To 
 *heir knowledge little could be added. Yet to know is 
 not always to feel; and without a correspondent depth 
 
 * " Much", not all: for part was due to the obstinate con 
 jealment from Jupiter, by Prometheus, of the danger whicb 
 threatened his throne in a coming generation.
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 33 
 
 of fee-ling, there is in moral cases no effectual knowl- 
 edge. Not the understanding is sufficient upon such 
 ground, but that which the Scriptures in their pro 
 found philosophy entitle the " understanding heart." 
 And perhaps few readers will have adequately appre- 
 ciated the prodigious change effected in the theatre of 
 the human spirit, * by the transition, sudden as tne 
 explosion of light, in the Hebrew cosmogony, when, 
 from the caprice of a fleshly god, in one hour man 
 mounted to a justice that knew no shadow of change; 
 from cruelty, mounted to a love which was inexhaus- 
 tible ; from gleams of essential evil, to a holiness that 
 could not be fathomed ; from a power and a knowledge, 
 under limitations so merely and obviously * human, to 
 the same agencies lying underneath creation, as a root 
 below a plant. Not less awful in power was the 
 transition from the limitations of space and time to 
 ubiquity and eternity, from the familiar to the myste- 
 rious, from the incarnate to the spiritual. These 
 enormous transitions were fitted to work changes of 
 answering magnitude in the human spirit. The reader 
 can hardly make any mistake as to this. He must 
 concede the changes. What he will be likely to 
 misconceive, unless he has reflected, is the immen- 
 tity of these changes. And another mistake, which 
 
 * " So merely and obviously human:"" It is a natural 
 ..nought, to any person who has not explored these recesses of 
 human degradation, that surely the Pagans must have had it in 
 ;heir power to invest their gods with all conceivable perfections, 
 ^uite as much as we that are not Pagans. The thing wanting to 
 he Paans, he will think, was the right : otherwise as regarded 
 l ie p er. 
 
 3
 
 34 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 be is even more likely to make, is this : he will 
 imagine that a new idea, even though the idea of an 
 object so vast as God, cannot become the ground of 
 any revolution more than intellectual cannot revo- 
 lutionize the moral and active principles in man, 
 consequently cannot lay the ground of any political 
 movement. We shall see. But next, that is, 
 II. Secondly, as to the idea of man's relation to 
 God. This, were it capable of disjunction, would be 
 even more of a revolutionary idea than the idea of 
 God. But the one idea is enlinked with the other. 
 In Paganism, as I have said, the higher you ascend 
 towards the original fountains of the religion, the 
 more you leave behind the frauds, forgeries, and 
 treacheries of philosophy ; so much the more clearly 
 you descry the odious truth that man stood in the 
 relation of a superior to his gods, as respected all 
 moral qualities of any value, but in the relation of an 
 inferior as respected physical power. This was a 
 position of the two parties fatal, by itself, to all gran- 
 deur of moral aspirations. Whatever was good or 
 corrigibly bad, man saw associated with weakness ; 
 and power was sealed and guaranteed to absolute 
 wickedness. The evil disposition in man to worship 
 success, was strengthened by this mode of superiority 
 in the gods. Merit was disjoined from prosperity. 
 Even merit of a lower class, merit in things morally 
 ndifferent, was not so decidedly on the side of the 
 gods as to reconcile man to the reasonableness of theii 
 yoke. They were compelled to acquiesce in a go^ 
 ernment which they did not regard as just. The godf 
 vere stronger, but not much ; they had the unfab
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 35 
 
 advantage of standing over the heads of men, and of 
 wings for flight or for manoBuvring. Yet even so, it 
 was clearly the opinion of Homer's age, that, in a fair 
 fight, the gods might have been found liable to defeat. 
 The gods, again, were generally beautiful : but not 
 more BO than the elite of mankind ; else why did 
 these gods, both male and female, continually per- 
 secute our race with their odious love ? which lo\3, 
 be it observed, uniformly brought ruin upon its ob- 
 jects. Intellectually the gods were undoubtedly be- 
 low men. They pretended to no great works in 
 philosophy, in legislation, or in the fine arts, except 
 only that, as to one of these arts, viz., poetry, a single 
 god vaunted himself greatly in simple ages. But he 
 attempted neither a tragedy nor an epic poem. Even 
 in what he did attempt, it is worth while to follow 
 his career. His literary fate was what might have 
 been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation' 
 of his verses rapidly decayed. Wits arose in Athens, 
 who laughed so furiously at his style and his metre, 
 in the Delphic oracles, that at length some echoes of 
 their scoffing began to reach Delphi ; upon which the 
 god and his inspired ministers became sulky, and 
 finally took refuge in prose, as the only shelter they 
 could think of from the caustic venom of Athenian 
 malice. 
 
 These were the miserable relations of man to the 
 Pagan gods. Everything, which it is worth doing at 
 all, man could do better. Now it is some feature of 
 alleviation in a servile condition, if the lord appears 
 by natural endowments suoerior to his slave ; 01 at 
 'east it embitters the degradation of slavery, if he
 
 36 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 does not. Greatly, therefore, must human interests 
 have suffered, had this jealous approximation of the 
 two parties been the sole feature noticeable in the 
 relations between them. But there was a worse. 
 There was an original enmity between man and the 
 Pantheon ; not the sort of enmity which we Christian! 
 ascribe to our God ; that is but a figure of speech : 
 and even there is a derivative enmity ; an enmity 
 founded on something in man subsequent to his crea- 
 tion, and having a ransom annexed to it. But the 
 enmity of the heathen gods was original that is, to 
 the very nature of man, and as though man had in 
 some stage of his career been their rival ; which in- 
 deed he was, if we adopt Milton's hypothesis of the 
 gods as ruined angels, and of man as created to supply 
 the vacancy thus arising in heaven. 
 
 Now, from this dreadful scheme of relations, be- 
 tween the human and divine, under Paganism, turn 
 to the relations under Christianity. It is remarkable 
 that even here, according to a doctrine current amongst 
 many of the elder divines, man was naturally superior 
 to the race of beings immediately ranking above him. 
 Jeremy Taylor notices the obscure tradition, that the 
 ingelic order was, by original constitution, inferior to 
 man ; but this original precedency had been reversed 
 for the present, by the fact that man, in his highei 
 nature, was morally ruined, whereas the angelic race 
 had not forfeited the perfection of their nature, though 
 otherwise an inferior nature. Waiving a question so 
 inscrutable as this, we know, at least, that no alle- 
 giance or homage is required from man towards this 
 doubtfully superior race. And when man first findi
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 37 
 
 himself called upon to pay tributes of his nature as to 
 a being inimitably his superior, he is at the same 
 moment taught by a revelation that this awful superior 
 is the same who created him, and that in a sense 
 more than figurative, he himself is the child of God. 
 There stand the two relations, as declared in Pagan- 
 ism and in Christianity, both probably true. In 
 the former, man is the essential enemy of the gods, 
 though sheltered by some conventional arrangement ; 
 in the latter, he is the son of God. In his own image 
 God made him ; and the very central principle of his 
 religion is, that God for a great purpose assumed his 
 own human nature ; a mode of incarnation which 
 could not be conceivable, unless through some divine 
 principle common to the two natures, and forming the 
 nexus between them. 
 
 With these materials it is, and others resembling 
 these, that Christianity has carried forward the work 
 of human progression. The ethics of Christianity it 
 was, new ethics and unintelligible, in a degree as 
 yet but little understood, to the old Pagan nations, 
 which furnished the rudder, or guidance, for a human 
 revolution ; but the mysteries of Christianity it was, 
 new Eleusinian shows, presenting God under a new 
 form and aspect, presenting man under a new relation 
 to God, which furnished the oars and sails, the mov- 
 ing forces, for the advance of this revolution. 
 
 It was my intention to have shown how this great 
 idea of man's relation to God, connected with the pre- 
 vious idea of God, had first caused the state of slavery 
 to be regarded as an evil. Next, I proposed to show 
 jow charitable institutions, not one of which existed
 
 38 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 in Pagan ages, hospitals, and asylums of all classes, 
 had arisen under the same idea brooding over man 
 from age to age. Thirdly, I should have attempted to 
 show, that from the same mighty influence had growr 
 up a social influence of woman, which did not exi?t in 
 Pagan ages, and will hereafter be applied to greate". 
 purposes. But, for want of room, I confine myself to 
 saying a few words on war, and the mode in which if 
 will be extinguished by Christianity. 
 
 WAR. This is amongst the foremost of questions 
 that concern human progress, and it is one which, of 
 all great questions (the question of slavery not ex- 
 cepted, nor even the question of the slave-/rarfe), has 
 travelled forward the most rapidly into public favor. 
 Thirty years ago, there was hardly a breath stirring 
 against war, as the sole natural resource of national 
 anger or national competition. Hardly did a wish 
 rise, at intervals, in that direction, or even a protesting 
 sigh, over the calamities of war. And if here and 
 there a contemplative author uttered such a sigh, it 
 was in the spirit of mere hopeless sorrow, that 
 mourned over an evil apparently as inalienable from 
 man as hunger, as death, as the frailty of human 
 expectations. Cowper, about sixty years ago, had 
 said, 
 
 " War is a game which, were their subjects wise, 
 Kings would not play at." 
 
 But Cowper would not have said this, had he not 
 l.een nearly related to the Whig house of Panshanger 
 Every Whig thought it a duty occasionally to look 
 fiercely at kings saying " D , who's afraid ? '
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 39 
 
 pretty much as a regular John Bull, in the lower 
 classes, expresses his independence by defying the 
 peerage. "A lord ! do you say ? what care I for a 
 lord ? I value a lord no more than a button top ; " 
 whilst, in fact, he secretly reveres a lord as being 
 usually amongst the most ancient of landed proprie- 
 tors, and, secondly, amongst the richest. The scourgs 
 of kingship was what Cowper glanced at, rather 
 than the scourge of war ; and in any case the condi- 
 tion which he annexed to his suggestion of relief, 
 is too remote to furnish much consolation for cynics 
 like myself, or the reader. If war is to cease only 
 when subjects become wise, we need not contract the 
 sale of our cannon-foundries until the millennium. 
 Sixty years ago, therefore, the abolition of war looked 
 as unprosperous a speculation as Dr. Darwin's scheme 
 for improving our British climate by hauling out all 
 the icebergs from the polar basin in seasons when the 
 wind sate fair for the tropics ; by which means these 
 wretched annoyers of our peace would soon find them- 
 selves in quarters too hot to hold them, and would 
 disappear as rapidly as sugar-candy in children's 
 mouths. Others, however, inclined rather to the 
 Ancient Mariner's scheme, by shooting an albatross : 
 
 " 'Twas right, said they, such birds to shoot, 
 That bring the frost and snow." 
 
 Scarcely more hopeless than these crusades against 
 frost, were any of the serious plans which had then 
 leen proposed for the extirpation of war. St. Pierre 
 lontributed " son petit possible " to this desirable end, 
 41 the shape of an essay Cowards the idea of a perpet-
 
 40 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 ual peace ; Kant, the great professor of Koenigsberg, 
 subscribed to the same benevolent scheme his little 
 essay under the same title ; and others in England sub- 
 scribed a guinea each to the fund for the suppression 
 of war. These efforts, one and all, spent their fire as 
 vainly as Darwin spent his wrath against the icebergs : 
 the icebergs are as big and as cold as ever ; and war 
 is still, like a basking snake, ready to rear his horrid 
 crest on the least rustling in the forests. 
 
 But in quarters more powerful than either purses of 
 gold or scholastic reveries, there has, since the days of 
 Kant and Cowper, begun to gather a menacing thun- 
 der-cloud against war. The nations, or at least the 
 great leading nations, are beginning to set their faces 
 against it. War, it is felt, comes under the denuncia- 
 tion of Christianity, by the havoc which it causes 
 amongst those who bear God's image ; of political 
 economy, by its destruction of property and human 
 labor; of rational logic, by the frequent absurdity of 
 its pretexts. The wrong, which is put forth as the 
 ostensible ground of the particular war, is oftentimes 
 not of a nature to be redressed by war, or is even for- 
 gotten in the course of the war; and, secondly, the 
 war prevents another course which might have re- 
 dressed the wrong viz., temperate negotiation, or 
 neutral arbitration. These things were always true, 
 and, indeed, heretofore more flagrantly true : but the 
 difference, in favor of our own times, is, that they 
 are now felt to be true. Formerly, the truths were 
 leen, but not felt : they were inoperative truths, life- 
 less, and unvalued. Now, on the other hand, in Eng- 
 land, America, France, societies are rising for making
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 41 
 
 war upon war ; and it is a striking proof of the pro- 
 gress made toy such societies, that, some two years ago, 
 a deputation from one of them being presented to 
 King Louis Philippe, received from him not the sort 
 of vague answer which might have been expected, bul 
 a sincere one, expressed in very encouraging words.* 
 Ominous to himself this might have been thought by 
 the superstitious, who should happen to recollect the 
 sequel to a French king, of the very earliest movement 
 in this direction : the great (but to this hour mysteri- 
 ous) design of Henry IV., in 1610, was supposed by 
 many to be a plan of this very nature, for enforcing a 
 general and permanent peace on Christendom, by 
 means of an armed intervention ; and no sooner had 
 it partially transpired through traitorous evidence, 01 
 through angry suspicion, than his own assassination 
 followed. 
 
 Shall I offend the reader by doubting, after all, 
 whether war is not an evil still destined to survive 
 through several centuries? Great progress has already 
 been made. In the two leading nations of the earth, 
 war can no longer be made with the levity which pro- 
 voked Cowper's words two generations back. France 
 Is too ready to fight for mere bubbles of what she calls 
 glory. But neither in France nor England could a 
 
 * " Encouraging words : " and rather presumptuous words, if 
 the newspapers reported them correctly : for they went the 
 length of promising, that he separately, as King of the French, 
 would coerce Europe into peace. But, from the known good 
 nse of the king, it is more probal.e that he promised his net/- 
 itive aid, the aid of not personally concurring to any war 
 Irhich might otherwise be attractive to the French government
 
 42 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 war now b undertaken without a warrant from the 
 popular voice. This is a great step in advance ; but 
 the final step for its extinction will be taken by a new 
 and Christian code of international law. This cannot 
 be consummated until Christian philosophy shall have 
 traversed the earth, and reorganized the structure of 
 society. 
 
 But, finally, and (as regards extent, though not as 
 regards intensity of effect) far beyond all other politi- 
 cal powers of Christianity, is the power, the demiurgic 
 powei of this religion over the kingdoms of human 
 opinion. Did it ever strike the reader, that the Greeks 
 and Romans, although so frantically republican, and, 
 in some of their institutions, so democratic, yet, on the 
 other hand, never developed the idea of representative 
 government, either as applied to legislation or to ad- 
 ministration ? The elective principle was widely used 
 amongst them. Nay, the nicer casuistries of this prin- 
 ciple had been latterly discussed. The separate ad- 
 vantages of open or of secret voting, had been the 
 subject of keen dispute in the political circles of 
 Rome ; and the art was well understood of disturbing 
 the natural course of the public suffrage, by varying 
 the modes of combining the voters under the different 
 forms of the Comitia. Public authority and jurisdiction 
 were created and modified by the elective principle ; 
 but never was this principle applied to the creation or 
 lirection of public opinion. The senate of Rome, for 
 instance, like our own sovereign, represented the 
 national majesty, and, to a certain degree, continued 
 o do so for centuries after this majesty had received 
 ft more immediate representative in the person of tht
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 43 
 
 feigning Caesar. The senate, like our own sovereign, 
 represented the grandeur of the nation, the hospitality 
 of the nation to illustrious strangers, and the gratitude 
 of the nation in the distribution of honors. For the 
 senate continued to be the fountain of honors, even to 
 Caesar himself: the titles of Germanicus, Britannicus, 
 Dalmaticus, dsc. (which may be viewed as peerages), 
 the privilege of precedency, the privilege of wearing a 
 laurel diadem, &c. (which may be viewed as the Gar- 
 ter, Bath, Thistle), all were honors conferred by the 
 senate. But the senate, no more than our own sove- 
 reign, ever represented, by any one act or function, the 
 public opinion. How was this ? Strange, indeed, that 
 so mighty a secret as that of delegating public opinions 
 to the custody of elect representatives, a secret which 
 has changed the face of the world, should have been 
 missed by nations applying so vast an energy to the 
 whole theory of public administration. But the truth, 
 however paradoxical, is, that in Greece and Rome no 
 body of public opinions existed that could have fur- 
 nished a standing ground for adverse parties, or that 
 consequently could have required to be represented. 
 In all the dissensions of Rome, from the secessions of 
 the Plebs to the factions of the Gracchi, of Marius and 
 Sylla, of Caesar and Pompey , in all the guaeig of the 
 Grecian republics, the contest could no more be de- 
 scribed as a contest of opinion, than could the feuds 
 of our buccaneers in the seventeenth century, when 
 parting company, or fighting for opposite principles of 
 dividing the general booty. One faction has, another 
 sought to have, a preponderant share of power : but 
 these struggles never took the shape, even in pretence,
 
 14 OK CHRISTIANITY AS AN OKGAJ* 
 
 of differences that moved through the conflict of prin- 
 ciples. The case was always the simple one of powet 
 matched against power, faction against faction, usage 
 against innovation. It was not that the patricians 
 deluded themselves by any speculative views into the 
 efusal of intermarriages with the plebeians : it was not 
 as upon any opinion that they maintained the contest 
 (sucn as at this day divides ourselves from the French 
 upon the question of opinion with regard to the socia! 
 rank of literary men), but simply as upon a fact : they 
 appealed to evidences, not to speculations ; to usage, 
 not to argument. They were in possession, and fought 
 against change, not as inconsistent with a theory, but 
 as hostility to an interest. In the contest of Caesar 
 with the oligarchic knavery of Cicero, Cato, and Pom- 
 pey, no possible exercise of representative functions 
 fhad the people possessed them) could have been ap- 
 lied beneficially to the settlement of the question at 
 issue. Law, and the abuses of law, good statutes and 
 evil customs, had equally thrown the public power 
 into a settlement fatal to the public welfare. Not any 
 decay of public virtue, but increase of poverty amongst 
 the inferior citizens, had thrown the suffrages, and 
 consequently the honors and powers of the state, into 
 the hands of some forty or fifty houses, rich enough to 
 bribe, and bribing systematically. Caesar, undertaking 
 to correct a state of disease which would else have 
 convulsed the republic every third year by civil war, 
 knew thai no arguments could be available against a 
 competition of mere interests. The remedy lay. not 
 through opposition speeches in the senate, or from the 
 tostra, not through pamphlets or journals, bu
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 45 
 
 through a course of intense cudgelling. This he hap- 
 pily accomplished ; and hy that means restored Rome 
 for centuries, not to the aspiring condition which 
 she once held, but to an immunity from annual car- 
 nage, and in other respects to a condition of prosperity 
 which, if less than during her popular state, was greater 
 than any else attainable after that popular state had 
 become impossible, from changes in the composition 
 of SDciety. 
 
 Here, and in all other critical periods of ancient 
 republics, we shall find that opinions did not exist as 
 the grounds of feud, nor could by any dexterity have 
 been applied to the settlement of feuds. Whereas, on 
 the other hand, with ourselves for centuries, and 
 latterly with the French, no public contest has arisen. 
 or does now exist, without fighting its way through 
 every stage of advance by appeals to public opinion. 
 If, for instance, an improved tone of public feeling 
 calls for a gradual mitigation of army punishments, 
 the quarrel becomes instantly an intellectual one : and 
 much information is brought forward, which throw.', 
 light upon human nature generally. But in Rome, 
 such a discussion would have been stopped summarily, 
 as interfering with the discretional power of the 
 Praetorium. To take the vitis, or cane, from the 
 hands of the centurion, was a perilous change; but, 
 perilous or not. must be committed to the judgment 
 !)f the particular imperator, or of his legatus. The 
 executive business of the Roman exchequer, again, 
 jould not have been made the subject of public dis- 
 cussion ; not only because no sufficient material for 
 xidgment could, under the want of a public press,
 
 46 ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN 
 
 have been gathered, except from the parties interested 
 in all its abuses, but also because these parties (a 
 faction amongst the equestrian order) could have 
 effectually overthrown any counter-faction formed 
 amongst parties not personally affected by the ques- 
 tion. The Roman institution of clientela which had 
 outlived its early uses, does any body imagine that 
 this was open to investigation ? The influence of 
 murderous riots would easily have been brought to 
 bear upon it, but not the light of public opinion. 
 Even if public opinion could have been evoked iu 
 those days, or trained to combined action, insuperable 
 difficulties would have arisen in adjusting its force to 
 the necessities of the Roman provinces and allies. 
 Any arrangement that was practicable, would have ob- 
 tained an influence for these parties, either dangerous 
 to the supreme section of the empire, or else nugatory 
 for each of themselves. It is a separate consideration, 
 that through total defect of cheap instruments for 
 communication, whether personally or in the way of 
 thought, public opinion must always have moved in 
 the dark : what I chiefly assert is, that the feuds 
 bearing at all upon public interests, never did turr, or 
 could have turned, upon any collation of opinions. 
 And two things must strengthen the reader's convic- 
 tion upon this point, viz., first, that no public meetings 
 (such as with us carry on the weight of public business 
 throughout the empire) were ever called in Rome ; 
 secondly, that in the regular and " official " meetings 
 of the people, no social interest was ever discussed 
 but only some political interest. 
 
 Now, or the other hand, amongst ourselves, eve z~j
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 47 
 
 question, that is large enough to engage public inter- 
 est, though it should begin as a mere comparison of 
 strength with strength, almost immediately travels 
 forward into a comparison of right with rights, or of 
 duty with duty. A mere fiscal question of restraint 
 upon importation from this or that particular quarter, 
 passes into a question of colonial rights. Arrange- 
 ments of convenience for the management of the 
 pauper, or the debtor, or the criminal, or the war- 
 captive, become the occasions of profound investiga- 
 tions into the rights of persons occupying those 
 relations. Sanatory ordinances for the protection of 
 public health, such as quarantine, fever hospitals, 
 draining, vaccination, &c., connect themselves, in the 
 earliest stages of their discussion, with the general 
 consideration of the duties which the state owes to its 
 subjects. If education is to be promoted by public 
 counsels, every step of the inquiry applies itself to 
 the consideration of the knowledge to be commu- 
 nicated, and of the limits within which any section 
 of religious partisanship can be safely authorized to 
 interfere. If coercion, beyond the warrant of the 
 ordinary law, is to be applied as a remedy for local 
 outrages, a tumult of opinions arises instantly, as to 
 the original causes of the evil, as to the sufficiency of 
 the subsisting laws to meet its pressure, and as to the 
 modes of connecting enlarged powers in the magistrate 
 with the minimum of offence to the general rights of 
 the subject. 
 
 Everywhere, in short, some question of duty and 
 responsibility arises to face us in any the smallest 
 public interest that can become the subject of public
 
 48 ON CHRISTIANITY A3 AN ORGAN 
 
 opinion. Questions, in fact, that fall short of this 
 dignity ; questions that concern public convenience 
 only, and do not wear any moral aspect, such as the 
 bullion question, never do become subjects of public 
 opinion. It cannot be said in which direction lies 
 the bias of public opinion. In the very possibility 01 
 interesting the public judgment, is involved the cer- 
 tainty of wearing some relation to moral principles. 
 Hence the ardor of our public disputes ; for no man 
 views without concern a great moral principle dark- 
 ened by party motives, or placed in risk by accident : 
 hence the dignity and benefit of our public disputes ; 
 hence, also, their ultimate relation to the Christian 
 faith. We do not, indeed, in these days, as did oui 
 homely ancestors in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries, cite texts of Scripture as themes for sena- 
 torial commentary or exegesis; but the virtual refer- 
 ence to Scriptural principles is now a thousand times 
 more frequent. The great principles of Christian 
 morality are now so interwoven with our habits of 
 thinking, that we appeal to them no longer as Scrip- 
 tural authorities, but as the natural suggestions of a 
 sound judgment. For instance, in the case of any 
 wrong offered to the Hindoo races, now so entirely 
 dependent upon our wisdom and justice, we British* 
 
 * "We British:" It may be thought that, in the prosecu- 
 tion of Verres, the people of Rome acknowledged something of 
 the same high responsibility. Not at all. The case came before 
 Uome, not as a case of injury to a colonial child, whom the gen- 
 al mother was bound to protect and avenge; but as an appeal 
 t>y way of special petition, from Sicilian clients. It was no 
 jvand political movement, out simply judicial. Verres was aa
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 49 
 
 immediately, by our solemnity of investigation, testify 
 our sense of the deep responsibility to India with 
 which our Indian supremacy has invested us. We 
 make no mention of the Christian oracles. Yet where, 
 then, have we learned this doctrine of far-stretching 
 responsibility ? In all Pagan systems of morality, 
 there is the vaguest and slightest appreciation of such 
 relations as connect us with our colonies. But, from 
 the profound philosophy of Scripture, we have learned 
 that no relations whatever, not even those of property, 
 can connect us with even a brute animal, but that we 
 contract concurrent obligations of justice and mercy. 
 
 In this age, then, public interests move and prosper 
 through conflicts of opinion. Secondly, as I have 
 endeavored to show, public opinion cannot settle, 
 powerfully, upon any question that is not essentially a 
 moral question. And, thirdly, in all moral questions, 
 we, of Christian nations, are compelled, by habit and 
 training, as well as other causes, to derive our first 
 principles, consciously or not, from the Scriptures. It 
 is, therefore, through the doclrinality of our religion 
 that we derive arms for all moral questions ; and it is 
 as moral questions that any political disputes much 
 affect us. The daily conduct, therefore, of all great 
 political interests, throws us unconsciously upon the 
 first principles which we all derive from Christianity, 
 And, in this respect, we are more advantageously 
 
 ill-used man, and the victim of private intrigues. Or, whatever 
 he might be, Rome certainly sate upon the cause, not in any 
 "character of maternal protectress, taking up voluntarily the 
 support of the weak , but as a sheriff assessing damages in a case 
 forced upon his court by the plaintiff 
 4
 
 &0 ON CHRISTIANITT AS AN OKGAN 
 
 placed, by a very noticeable distinction, than the 
 professors of the t\\ o other doctrinal religions. The 
 Koran having pirated many sentiments from the Jew- 
 ish and the Christian systems, could not but offer 
 some rudiments of moral judgment ; yet, because so 
 much of these rudiments is stolen, the whole is inco- 
 herent, and does not form a system of ethics. In 
 Judaism, again, the special and insulated situation of 
 the Jews has unavoidably impressed an exclusive bias 
 upon its principles. In both codes the rules are often 
 of restricted and narrow application. But, in the 
 Christian Scriptures, the rules are so comprehensive 
 and large as uniformly to furnish the major proposi- 
 tion of a syllogism ; whilst the particular act under 
 discussion, wearing perhaps some modern name, 
 naturally is not directly mentioned : and to bring 
 this, in the minor proposition, under the principle 
 contained in the major, is a task left to the judgment 
 of the inquirer in each particular case. Something is 
 here intrusted to individual understanding ; whereas 
 in the Koran, from the circumstantiality of the rule, 
 you are obliged mechanically to rest in the letter of 
 the precept. The Christian Scriptures, therefore, not 
 inly teach, but train the mind to habits of se//"-teaching 
 in all moral questions, by enforcing more or less of 
 activity in applying the rule ; that is, in subsuming *he 
 given case proposed under the scriptural principle. 
 
 Hence it is certain, and has been repeatedly illua- 
 
 "rated, that whilst the Christian faith, in collision with 
 
 thers, would inevitably rouse to the most active fer- 
 
 nentation of minds, the Mahometan (as also doctrina. 
 
 t>ut unsystematical) <vould have the same effect ii
 
 OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. 51 
 
 Kind, but far feebler in degree ; and an idolatrous re- 
 ligion would have no such effect at all. Agreeably to 
 this scale, some years ago, a sect of reforming or 
 fanatical Mahometans, in Bengal,* commenced a per- 
 secution of the surrounding Hindoos. At length, a 
 reaction took place on the part of the idolaters ; b:ifc 
 in what temper ? Bitter enough, and so far alarming 
 as to call down a government interference with troops 
 and artillery, but yet with no signs of religious retali- 
 ation. That was a principle of movement which the 
 Hindoos could not understand : their retaliation waa 
 simply to the personal violence they had suffered. 
 Such is the inertia of a mere cultus. And, in the other 
 extreme, if we Christians, in our intercourse with both 
 Hindoos and Mahometans, were not sternly reined up 
 by the vigilance of the local governments, no long 
 time would pass before all India would be incurably 
 convulsed by disorganizing feuds. 
 
 * At Baraset, f I remember rightly.
 
 THE ESSENES. 
 
 SOME time ago, we published a little essay, that 
 light easily be expanded into a very large volume ; 
 tad ultimately into a perfectly new philosophy of Ro- 
 mn history, in proof that Rome was self-barbarized 
 barbarized ab intra, and not by foreign enemies. The 
 evidences of this, 1st, in the death of her literature, 
 and, 2d, in the instant oblivion which swallowed up 
 all public transactions, are so obvious as to challenge 
 notice from the most inattentive reader. For instance, 
 as respects this latter tendency, what case can be more 
 striking, than the fact that Trebellius Pollio, expressly 
 dedicating himself to such researches, and having the 
 state documents at his service, cannot trace, by so 
 nuch as the merest outline, the biography of some 
 great officers who had worn the purple as rebels, 
 though actually personal friends of his own grand- 
 father ? So nearly connected as they were with his 
 own age and his own family, yet had they utterly 
 perished for want of literary memorials ! A third 
 indication of barbarism, in the growing brutality of the 
 nny and the Emperor, is of a nature to impress many 
 readers even more powerfully, and especially by con- 
 trast with the spirit of Roman warfare in its republicea
 
 THE ESSEXES. 53 
 
 period. Always it had been an insolent and haughty 
 warfare ; but, upon strong motives of policy, sparing 
 in bloodshed. ' Whereas, latterly, the ideal of a Ro- 
 man general was approaching continually nearer to 
 the odious standard of a cdboceer amongst the Ashan- 
 tees. Listen to the father of his people (Gallienus) 
 issuing his paternal commands for the massacre, in 
 cold blood, of a whole district not foreign but do- 
 mestic after the offence had become almost obsolete : 
 ' Non satisfacies mihi, si tantum armatos occideris 
 quos et fors belli interimere potuisset. Perimendus 
 est omnis sexus virilis : ' and, lest even this sweeping 
 warrant should seem liable to any merciful distinctions, 
 he adds circumstantially ' Si est senes atque impu- 
 beres sine mea reprehensione occidi possent' And 
 thus the bloody mandate winds up : ' Occidendus est 
 quicunque male voluit, occidendus est quicunque male 
 dixit contra me : Lacera, occide, concide.' Was ever 
 such a rabid tiger found, except amongst the Hyder 
 Alis or Nadir Shahs of half-civilized or decivilized 
 tribes ? Yet another and a very favorite emperor out- 
 herods even this butcher, by boasting of the sabring 
 which he had let loose amongst crowds of helpless 
 women. 
 
 The fourth feature of the Roman barbarism upon 
 which we insisted, viz., the growing passion for trivial 
 anecdotage in slight of all nobler delineations, may be 
 traced, in common with all the other features, to the de- 
 cay of a public mind and a common connecting interest, 
 amongst the different members of that vast imperial 
 body. This was a necessity arising out of the merely 
 personal tenure by which the throne was held. Com- 
 >etition for dignities, ambition under any form, could
 
 54 THE ESSENES. 
 
 not exist with safety under circumstances wtich imme- 
 diately attracted a blighting jealousy from the highest 
 quarter. Where hereditary succession was no fixed 
 principle of state no principle which all men were 
 leagued to maintain every man, in his own defence, 
 might be made an object of anxiety in proportion to 
 his public merit. Not conspiring, he might still be 
 placed at the head of a conspiracy. There was no 
 oath of allegiance taken to the emperor's family, but 
 only to the emperor personally. But if it was thus 
 dangerous for a man to offer himself as a participator 
 in state honors ; on the other hand, it was impossible 
 for a people to feel any living sympathy with a public 
 grandeur in which they could not safely attempt to 
 participate. Simply to be a member of this vast body 
 was no distinction at all : honor could not attach to 
 what was universal. One path only lay open to per- 
 sonal distinction ; and that being haunted along ita 
 whole extent by increasing danger, naturally bred the 
 murderous spirit of retaliation or pre-occupation. It 
 is besides certain, that the very change wrought in the 
 nature of warlike rewards and honors, contributed to 
 cherish a spirit of atrocity amongst the officers. Tri- 
 umphs had been granted of old for conquests ; and 
 these were generally obtained much more by intellec- 
 tual qualities than by any display of qualities merely 
 or rudely martial. Triumphs were now forbidden fruit 
 to any officer less than Augustan. And this one 
 change, had there been no other, sufficed to throw the 
 ifforts of military men into a direction more humble, 
 more directly personal and more brutal. It became 
 dangerous to be too conspicuously victorious. Then 1 
 yet remains a letter, amongst the few surviving from
 
 THE ESSENES. 55 
 
 that unlettered period, which whispers a thrilling cau- 
 tion to a great officer, not to be too meritorious : ' Dig- 
 nus eras triumpho,' says the letter, ' si antiqua tempora 
 extarent.' But what of that ? What signified merit 
 that was to cost a man his head ? And the letter goes 
 on to add this gloomy warning ' Memor cujusdam 
 ominis, cautius velim vincas.' The warning was thrown 
 away; the man (Regillianus) persisted in these im- 
 prudent victories ; he was too meritorious ; he grew 
 dangerous ; and he perished. Such examples forced 
 upon the officers a less suspicious and a more brutal 
 ambition ; the laurels of a conqueror marked a man 
 out for a possible competitor, no matter through whose 
 ambition his own in assuming the purple, or that 
 of others in throwing it by force around him. The 
 differences of guilt could not be allowed for where they 
 made no difference in the result. But the laurels of a 
 butcher created no jealousy, whilst they sufficed for 
 establishing a camp reputation. And thus the danger 
 of a higher ambition threw a weight of encouragement 
 into the lower and more brutal. 
 
 So powerful, indeed, was this tendency so head- 
 long this gravitation to the brutal that unless a new 
 force, moving in an opposite direction, had begun to 
 rise in the political heavens, the Roman empire would 
 have become an organized engine of barbarism bar- 
 barous and making barbarous. This fact gives one 
 additional motive to the study of Christian antiquities, 
 which on so many other motives interest and perplex 
 ,ur curiosity. About the time of Dioclesian, the weight 
 of Christianity was making itself felt in high places. 
 There is a memorable scene between that emperoi 
 nd a Pagan priest rr presenting an oracle, (that is
 
 56 THE ESSENES. 
 
 speaking on behalf of the Pagan interests,) full forty 
 years before the legal establishment of Christianity, 
 which shows how insensibly the Christian faith had 
 crept onwards within the fifty or sixty years previous 
 Such hints, such ' momenta,' such stages in the subtle 
 progress of Christianity, should be carefully noted, 
 searched, probed, improved. And it is partly because 
 too little anxiety of research has been applied in this 
 direction, that every student of ecclesiastical history 
 mourns over the dire sterility of its primitive fields- 
 For the first three or four centuries we know next to 
 nothing of the course by which Christianity moved, 
 and the events through which its agency was developed. 
 That it prospered, we know ; but how it prospered, 
 (meaning not through what transcendent cause, but 
 by what circumstantial steps and gradations,) is pain- 
 fully mysterious. And for much of this darkness, we 
 must confess that it is now past all human power of 
 illumination. Nay, perhaps it belongs to the very 
 sanctity of a struggle, in which powers more than hu- 
 man were working concurrently with man, that it should 
 be lost, (like much of our earliest antediluvian history,) 
 in a mysterious gloom ; and for the same reason viz., 
 that when man stands too near the super-sensual world, 
 and is too palpably co-agent with schemes of Provi- 
 dence, there would arise, upon the total review of the 
 whole plan and execution, were it all circumstantially 
 laid below our eyes, too compulsory an evidence of a 
 supernatural agency. It is not meant that men should 
 be forced into believing : free agencies must be left 
 ^0 the human belief, both in adopting and rejecting, 
 else it would cease to be a moral thing, or to possess a 
 moral value. Those who were contemporary to these
 
 THE ESSENES. 57 
 
 great agencies, saw only in part ; the fractionary mode 
 of their perceptions intercepted this compulsion from 
 them. But as to us who look back upon the whole, 
 it would perhaps have been impossible to secure the 
 same immunity from compulsion, the same integrity 
 of the free, unbiased choice, unless by darkening the 
 miraculous agencies, obliterating many facts, and dis- 
 turbing their relations. In such a way the equality 
 is maintained between generation and generation ; no 
 age is unduly favored, none penuriously depressed. 
 Each has its separate advantages, each its peculiar 
 difficulties. The worst has not so little light as to have 
 a plea for infidelity. The best has not so much as to 
 overpower the freedom of election a freedom which 
 is indispensable to all moral value, whether in doing or 
 in suffering, in believing or denying. 
 
 Meantime, though this obscurity of primitive Chris- 
 tianity is past denying, and possibly, for the reason 
 just given, not without an a priori purpose and mean- 
 ing, we nevertheless maintain that something may yet 
 be done to relieve it. We need not fear to press into 
 the farthest recesses of Christian antiquity, under any 
 notion that we are prying into forbidden secrets, or 
 carrying a torch into shades consecrated to mystery. 
 For wherever it is not meant that we should raise the 
 veil, there we shall carry our torch in vain. Precisely 
 as our researches are fortunate, they authenticate them- 
 selves as privileged : and in such a chase all success 
 justifies itself. 
 
 No scholar not even the wariest has ever read 
 with adequate care those records which we still pos- 
 sess, Greek or Latin, of primitive Christianity. He 
 iioald approach this subject with a vexatious scrutiny
 
 58 THE ESSENES. 
 
 He should lie in ambush for discovener , as we did in 
 reading Josephus. 
 
 Let us examine his chapter on the Essenes, and 
 open the very logic of the case, its very outermost 
 outline, in these two sentences : A thing there u in 
 Josephus, which ought not to be there ; this thing we 
 will call Epsilon, (E.) A thing there is which ought 
 o be in Josephus, but which is not ; this thing we call 
 CM, (X.) 
 
 The Epsilon, wnich ought not to be there, but is 
 what is that ? It is the pretended philosophical sect 
 amongst the Jews, to which Josephus gives the name 
 of Essenes ; this ought not to be in Josephus, nor any 
 where else, for certain we are that no such sect ever 
 existed. 
 
 The Chi, which ought by every obligation obliga- 
 tions of reason, passion, interest, common sense to 
 have been more broadly and emphatically present in 
 the Judaean history of Josephus' period than in any 
 other period whatever, but unaccountably is omitted 
 what is that ? It is, reader, neither more nor less than 
 the new-born brotherhood of Christians. The whole 
 monstrosity of this omission will not be apparent to 
 the reader, until his attention be pointed closely to 
 the chronological position of Joseph his longitude as 
 respects the great meridian of the Christian era. 
 
 The period of Josephus' connection with Palestine, 
 running abreast, (as it were,) with that very genera- 
 tion succeeding to Christ with that very Epichristian 
 age which dated from the crucifixion, and terminated 
 in the destruction of Jerusalem how, by what possi- 
 bility, did he escape all knowledge of the Chrif tiani 
 is a body of men that should naturally have chai-
 
 THE ESSENES. 59 
 
 lenged notice from the very stocks and stones of their 
 birthplace ; the very echo of whose footsteps ought to 
 have sunk upon the ear with the awe that belongs to 
 spiritual phenomena ? There were circumstances of 
 distinction in the very closeness of the confederation 
 that connected the early Christians, which ought to 
 have made them interesting. But, waiving all that, 
 what a supernatural awe must naturally have attended 
 the persons of those who laid the corner-stone of their 
 faith in an event so affecting and so appalling as the 
 Resurrection ! The Chi, therefore, that should be in 
 Josephus, but is not, how can we suggest any ap- 
 proximation to a solution of this mystery any clue 
 towards it any hint of a clue ? 
 
 True it is, that an interpolated passage, found in all 
 the printed editions of Josephus, makes him take a 
 special and respectful notice of our Saviour. But this 
 passage has long been given up as a forgery by all 
 scholars. And in another essay on the Epichristian 
 era, which we shall have occasion to write, some facts 
 will be laid before the reader exposing a deeper folly 
 in this forgery than is apparent at first sight. 
 
 True it is, that Whiston makes the astounding dis- 
 covery that Josephus was himself an Ebionite Chris- 
 tian. Josephus a Christian ! In the instance before 
 us, were it possible that he had been a Christian, in 
 that case ihe wonder is many times greater, that he 
 should have omitted all notice of the whole body as a 
 fraternity acting together with a harmony unprece- 
 dented amongst their distracted countrymen of that 
 age ; and, secondly, as a fraternity to whom was 
 assigned a certain political aspect by their enemies 
 The civil and external relations of this new party be
 
 BO THE ESSENES. 
 
 could not but have noticed, had he even omitted 1. .j 
 religious doctrines which bound them together intvf- 
 nally, as doctrines too remote from Roman compre- 
 hension. In reality, so far from being a Christian, we 
 shall show that Josephus was not even a Jew, in any 
 conscientious or religious sense. He had never taken 
 the first step in the direction of Christianity : but was, 
 is many other Jews were in that age, essentially a 
 Pagan ; as little impressed with the true nature of the 
 God whom his country worshipped, with His ineffable 
 purity and holiness, as any idolatrous Athenian what- 
 soever. 
 
 The wonder, therefore, subsists, and rftvolves upon 
 us with the more violence, after Whis ton's efforts to 
 extinguish it how it could have happened that a 
 writer, who passed his infancy, youth, manhood, in 
 the midst of a growing sect so transcendently inter- 
 esting to every philosophic mind, and pre-eminently so 
 interesting to a Jew, should have left behind him, in a 
 compass of eight hundred and fifty-four pages, double 
 columns, each column having sixty-five lines, (or a 
 double ordinary octavo page,) much of it relating to 
 his own times, not one paragraph, line, or fragment 
 of a line, by which it can be known that he ever 
 beard of such a body as the Christians. 
 
 And to our mind, for reasons which we shall pres- 
 ently show, it is equally wonderful that he sh.iuld 
 talk of the Essenes, under the idea of a known, 
 stationary, original sect amongst the Jews, as that he 
 should not talk of the Christians ; equally wonderful 
 that he should remember the imaginary as that he 
 should forget the real. There is not one difficulty 
 but two difficulties; and what \ve need is, not on 
 tolution but two solutions.
 
 THE ESSENES, 61 
 
 If, in an ancient palace, re-opened after it had been 
 h\it up for centuries, you were to find a hundred 
 golden shafts or pillars, for which nobody could sug- 
 gest a place or a use ; and if, in some other quarter 
 of the palace, far remote, you were afterwards to find 
 a hundred golden sockets fixed in the floor first of 
 all, pillars which nobody could apply to any purpose, 
 or refer to any place ; secondly, sockets which nobody 
 could fill ; probably even ' wicked Will Whiston ' 
 might be capable of a glimmering suspicion that the 
 hundred golden shafts belonged to the hundred golden 
 sockets. And if, upon applying the shafts to the 
 sockets, it should turn out that each several shaft 
 screwed into its own peculiar socket, why, in such a 
 case, not ' Whiston, Ditton, & Co.' could resist the 
 evidence, that each enigma had brought a key to the 
 other ; and that by means of two mysteries there had 
 ceased even to be one mystery. 
 
 Now, then, first of all, before stating our objections 
 to the Essenes as any permanent or known sect 
 amongst the Jews, let us review as rapidly as possible 
 the -mty-n features by which Joseph characterizes these 
 supposed Essenes ; and in a brief comment point out 
 their conformity to what we know of the primitive 
 Christians. That done, let us endeavor to explain all 
 the remaining difficulties of the case. The words of 
 Tosephus we take from Whiston' s translation ; having 
 in fact, at this moment, no other copy withiu reach. 
 But we do this unwillingly : for Whiston was a pool 
 Grecian; and, what is worse, he knew very little 
 about English. 
 
 ' The third sect ' (i. e. third in relation to the 
 
 Pharisees, who are ranked as the first, and the Sad-
 
 62 THE ESSENE8. 
 
 iucees, who are ranked as the second 1 ) ' are called 
 Essenes. These last are Jews by birth, and seem to 
 nave a greater affection for one another than the other 
 sects hare.' 
 
 We need not point out the strong conformity in this 
 point to the distinguishing features of the new-born 
 Christians, as they would be likely to impress the eye 
 of a stranger. There was obviously a double reason 
 for a stricter cohesion amongst the Christians inter- 
 nally, than could by possibility belong to any other 
 sect 1st, in the essential tendency of the whole 
 Christian faith to a far more intense love than the 
 world could comprehend, as well as in the express 
 charge to love one another ; 2dly, in the strong com- 
 pressing power of external affliction, and of persecu- 
 tion too certainly anticipated. The little flock, turned 
 out to face a wide world of storms, naturally drew 
 close together. Over and above the indefeasible hos- 
 tility of the world to a spiritual morality, there was 
 the bigotry of Judaicial superstition on the one hand, 
 and the bigotry of Paganism on the other. All this 
 would move in mass against nascent Christianity, so 
 soon as that moved ; and well, therefore, might the 
 instincts of the early Christians instruct them to act ID 
 the very closest concert and communion. 
 
 'These men are despisers of riches, and so very 
 communicative, as raises our admiration. Nor ia 
 there any one to be found among them who hath 
 more than another ; every one's possessions are inter- 
 mingled with every other's possessions, and so there 
 is, as it were, one ratrimony among all the brethren.' 
 
 In this account of the ' communicativeness,' as to 
 temporal wealth, of the third sect, it is hardly necs-
 
 THE ESSENES. 63 
 
 iary that we should point out the mirror which it holds 
 up to the habits of the very first Christians in Jerusa- 
 lem, as we see them recorded in the Acts of tho 
 Apostles. This, the primary record of Christian his- 
 tory, (for even the disciples were not in any full sense 
 Christians until after the resurrection and the Divine 
 afflatus,) is echoed afterwards in various stages of 
 primitive Christianity. But all these subsequent acts 
 and monuments of early Christian faith were derived 
 by imitation and by sympathy from the Apostolic 
 precedent in Jerusalem; as that again was derived 
 from the * common purse ' carried by the Twelve 
 Disciples. 
 
 * They have no certain city, but many of them 
 dwell in every city; and if any of their sect come 
 from other places, what they find lies open for them 
 just as if it were their own : and they go in to such 
 as they never knew before, as if they had been ever 
 BO long acquainted with them.' 
 
 All Christian antiquity illustrates and bears witness 
 to this, as a regular and avowed Christian habit. To 
 this habit points St. Paul's expression of ' given to 
 hospitality ; ' and many passages in all the apostoli- 
 cal writings. Like other practices, however, that had 
 been firmly established from the beginning, it is rathej 
 alluded to, and indirectly taken for granted and as- 
 sumed, than prescribed ; expressly to teach or enjoin 
 it was as little necessary, or indeed open to a teacher, 
 as with us it would be open to recommend marriage. 
 What Christian could be imagined capable of neglect- 
 Ing such an institution ? 
 
 'For which reason they carry nothing with them 
 when they travel into remote parts.'
 
 34 THE ESSENES. 
 
 This dates itself from Christ's own directions 
 (St. Luke, x. 3, 4,) * Go your way. Carry neither 
 purse, nor scrip, nor shoes.' And, doubtless, many 
 other of the primitive practices amongst the Christians 
 were not adopted without a special command from 
 Christ, traditionally retained by the Church whilst 
 standing in the same civil circumstances, though net 
 committed to writing amongst the great press of mat- 
 ter circumscribing the choice of the Evangelists. 
 
 * As for their piety towards God, it is very extraor- 
 dinary : for before sun-rising they speak not a word 
 about profane matters, but put up certain prayers 
 which they have received from their forefathers.' 
 
 This practice of antelucan worship, possibly having 
 reference to the ineffable mystery of the resurrection, 
 (all the Evangelists agreeing in the awful circum- 
 stance that it was very early in the morning, and one 
 even saying, ' whilst it was yet dark,') a symbolic 
 pathos which appeals to the very depths of human 
 passion as if the world of sleep and the anarchy of 
 dreams figured to our apprehension the dark worlds 
 of sin and death it happens remarkably enough that 
 we find confirmed and countersigned by the testimony 
 of the first open antagonist to our Christian faith. 
 Pliny, in that report to Trajan so universally known to 
 tvery class of readers, and so rank with everlasting 
 dishonor to his own sense and equity, notices this point 
 in the ritual of primitive Christianity. * However/ 
 says he, 'they assured me that the amount of theii 
 fault, or of their error, was this, that they were 
 wont, on a stated day, to meet together before it waa 
 ight, and to sing a hymn to Christ,' &c. The date of 
 Pliny's letter is about forty years after the siege of
 
 THE ESSEXES. 6t5 
 
 Jerusalem; about seventy-seven, therefore, after the 
 crucifixion, when Joseph would be just seventy- two 
 years old. But we may be sure, from collateral 
 records, and from the entire uniformity of early 
 Christianity, that a much longer lapse of time would 
 have made no change in this respect. 
 
 * They neglect wedlock ; but they do not absolutely 
 deny the fitness of marriage.' 
 
 This is a very noticeable article in his account of 
 the Essenes, and powerfully illustrates the sort of 
 acquaintance which Josephus had gained with their 
 faith and usages. In the first place, as to the doctrine 
 itself, it tallies remarkably with the leanings of St, 
 Paul. He allows of marriage, overruled by his own 
 moral prudence. But evidently his bias was the other 
 way. And the allowance is notoriously a concession 
 to the necessities which experience had taught him, 
 and by way of preventing greater evils : but an evil, 
 on the whole, it is clear that he regarded it. And 
 naturally it was so in relation to that highest mode of 
 spiritual life which the apostles contemplated as a 
 fixed ideal. Moreover, we know that the apostles fell 
 into some errors which must have affected their views 
 in these respects. For a time at least they thought 
 the end of the world close at hand : who could think 
 otherwise that had witnessed the awful thing which 
 they had witnessed, or had drunk out of the same 
 spiritual cup ? Under such impressions, they reasona- 
 bly pitched the key of Christian practice higher than 
 else they would have done. So far as to the doctrine 
 nere ascribed to the Essenes. But it is observable, 
 that in this place Josephus admits that these Essenes 
 did tolerate marriage. Now, in his earlier notioe of 
 5
 
 36 THE ESSENES. 
 
 the same people, he had denied this. What do we 
 infer from that? Why, that he came to his knowl- 
 edge of the Essenes by degrees ; and as would b< 
 likely to happen with regard to a sect sequestrating 
 themselves, and locking up their doctrines as secrets : 
 which description exactly applies to the earliest Chris- 
 tians. The instinct of self-preservation obliged them 
 to retreat from notoriety. Their tenets could not be 
 learned easily ; they were gathered slowly, indirectly, 
 by fragments. This accounts for the fact that people 
 standing outside, like Josephus or Philo Judaeus, got 
 only casual glimpses of the truth, and such as were 
 continually shifting. Hence at different periods Jose- 
 phus contradicts himself. But if he had been speaking 
 of a sect as notorious as the Pharisees or Sadducees, 
 no such error, and no such alteration of views, could 
 have happened. 
 
 ' They are eminent for fidelity, and are the minis- 
 ters of peace.' 
 
 We suppose that it cannot be necessary to remind 
 any reader of such characteristic Christian doctrines 
 as ' Blessed are the peace-makers,' &c. ; still less 
 irf the transcendent demand made by Christianity for 
 singleness of heart, uprightness, and entire conscien- 
 tiousness ; without which all pretences to Christian 
 truth are regarded as mere hollow mockeries. Here, 
 therefore, again we read the features, too plainly for 
 any mistake, of pure Christianity. But let the readei 
 observe keenly, had there been this pretended sect of 
 Essenes teaching all this lofty and spiritual morality, 
 it would have been a fair inference to ask what more 
 or better had been taught by Christ ? in which case 
 there might still have remained the great redemptions.
 
 THE ESSENES. 67 
 
 ind mediatorial functions for Christ ; but, as to his 
 iivine morality, it would have been forestalled. Suc-h 
 wrould have been the inference ; and it is an inference 
 which really has been drawn from this romance of the 
 Essenes adopted as true history. 
 
 * Whatsoever they say is firmer than an oath ; but 
 Bwearing is avoided by them ; and they esteem it 
 worse than perjury.' 
 
 We presume that nobody can fail to recognize in 
 this great scrupulosity the memorable command of 
 Christ, delivered in such unexampled majesty of lan- 
 guage, ' Swear not at all : neither by heaven, for it 
 is God's throne ; nor by the earth, for it is His foot- 
 stool,' <fec. This was said in condemnation of a 
 practice universal amongst the Jews ; and if any man 
 can believe that a visionary sect, of whom no man 
 ever heard except through two writers, both lying 
 under the same very natural mistake, could have come 
 by blind accidents into such an inheritance of spiritual 
 truth as is here described by Josephus, that man will 
 find nothing beyond his credulity. For he presumes 
 
 revelation far beyond all the wisdom of the Pagan 
 world to have been attained by some unknown Jewish 
 philosopher, so little regarded by his followers that 
 they have not even preserved his name from oblivion. 
 
 Amongst the initiatory and probationary vows which 
 these sectarians are required to take, is this ' That 
 to will ever show fidelity to all men, and especially to 
 tkosf in authority, because no one obtains the govern- 
 tnent wilhout God's assistance.' Here, again, we see 
 * memorable precept of St. Paul and the apostles gen- 
 erally the same precepf, and built on the very same 
 reason, viz. that rulers are of God's appointment.
 
 DO THJE .BSSENES. 
 
 * They are long-lived also : insomuch, that many of 
 them live above a hundred years, by means of tha 
 simplicity of their diet.' 
 
 Here we are reminded of St. John the Evangelist : 
 whilst others, no doubt, would have attained the same 
 age, had they not been cut off by martyrdom. 
 
 In many other points of their interior discipline, 
 their white robes, their meals, their silence and grav- 
 ity, we see in this account of the Essenes a mere echo 
 of the primitive economy established among the first 
 Christians, as we find it noticed up and down the apos- 
 tolical constitutions. 
 
 It is remarkable that Josephus notices, as belonging 
 to the sect of the Essenes, the order of ' angels ' of 
 messengers. Now, everybody must remember thif 
 order of officers as a Christian institution noticed in 
 the Apocalypse. 
 
 Finally, in all that is said of the contempt which the 
 Essenes showed for pain and death ; and that ' al- 
 though tortured and distorted, burnt and torn to pieces, 
 yet could they not be made to flatter their tormentors, 
 or to shed a tear, but that they smiled in their very 
 torments,' &c., we see the regular habit of Christian 
 martyrs through the first three centuries. We see that 
 principle established amongst them so early as that 
 first examination of Pliny's : for he is so well aware 
 now useless it would be to seek for any discoveries by 
 torture applied to the Christian men, that he resorts 
 instantly to the torture of female servants. The 
 secrecy, again, as to their opinions, is another point 
 common to the supposed Essenes and the Christians. 
 Why the Essenes, as an orthodox Jewish sect, shoul^ 
 Viave practised any secrecy, Josephus would have found
 
 THE ESSENES. 69 
 
 It hard to say ; out the Christian reasons will appear 
 decisive to any man who reflects. 
 
 But first of all, let us recur to the argument wo 
 have just employed, and summon you to a review of 
 the New Testament. Christ, during his ministry in 
 Palestine, is brought as if by special arrangement into 
 contact with all known orders of men, Scribes and 
 Doctors, Pharisees and Sadducees, Herodians and fol- 
 lowers of the Baptist, Roman officers, insolent with 
 authority, tax-gatherers, the Pariahs of the land, Gali- 
 leans, the most undervalued of the Jews, Samaritans, 
 hostile to the very name of Jew, rich men clothed in 
 purple, and poor men fishing for their daily bread, the 
 happy and those that sate in darkness, wedding parties 
 and funeral parties, solitudes amongst hills or sea- 
 shores, and multitudes that could not be counted, 
 mighty cities and hamlets the most obscure, golden 
 sanhedrims, and the glorious temple, where he spoke 
 to myriads of the worshippers, and solitary corners, 
 where he stood in conference with a single contrite 
 heart. Were the subject or the person different, one 
 might ascribe a dramatic purpose and a scenical art 
 to the vast variety of the circumstances and situations 
 in which Christ is introduced. And yet, whilst all 
 other sorts and orders of men converse with him, 
 never do we hear of any interview between him and 
 >lhe Essenes. Suppose one Evangelist to have over- 
 looked such a scene, another would not. In part, the 
 very source of the dramatic variety in the New Tes- 
 tament scenes, must be looked for in the total want of 
 Collusion amongst the Evangelists. Each throwing 
 aimself back upon overmastering remembrances, all- 
 to his heart, had no more need to consult a
 
 70 T1IE ESSENES. 
 
 fellow-witness, than a man needs, in rehearsing the 
 circumstances of a final parting with a wife or a child, 
 to seek collateral vouchers for his facts. Thence it 
 was in part left to themselves, unmodified by each 
 other, that they attained so much variety in the midet 
 of so much inevitable sameness. One man was im- 
 pressed by one case, a second by another. And thus, 
 it must have happened amongst four, that at least one 
 would have noticed the Essenes. But no one of the 
 four gospels alludes to them. The Acts of the Apos- 
 tles, again, whether by a fifth author or not, is a fifth 
 body of remembrances, a fifth act of the memory 
 applied to the followers of Christ. Yet neither does 
 this notice them. The Apocalypse of St. John, re- 
 viewing the new church for a still longer period, and 
 noticing all the great outstanding features of the state 
 militant, then unrolling for Christianity, says not one 
 word about them. St. Peter, St. James, utterly over- 
 look them. Lastly, which weighs more than all the 
 rest, St. Paul, the learned and philosophic apostle, 
 bred up in all the learning of the most orthodox 
 amongst the Jews, gives no sign that he had ever 
 ueard of such people. In short, to sum up all in one 
 sentence, the very word Essene and Essenes is not 
 found in the New Testament. 
 
 Now, is it for one moment to be credited that a 
 body of men so truly spiritual in the eternals of their 
 creed, whatever might be the temporals of their prac- 
 tice, should have won no word of praise from Christ 
 for that by which they so far exceeded other sects 
 no -tford of reproach for that by which they migh 1 . 
 happen to fall short of their own profession no word 
 sf admonition, founded on the comparison between
 
 THE ESSENES. 71 
 
 their good and their bad their heavenly and earthly? 
 Or, if that had been supposable, can we believe that 
 Christ's enemies, so eager as they showed themselves 
 to turn even the Baptist into a handle of reproach 
 fcgainst the new teacher, would have lost the over- 
 whelming argument derived from the Essenes ? ' A 
 new command I give unto you.' * Not at all,' they 
 \* ould have retorted ' Not at all new. Everything 
 spiritual in your ethics has been anticipated by the 
 Essenes.' It would have been alleged, that the func- 
 tion of Redeemer for Israel was to be judged and tried 
 by the event. The only instant touchstone for the 
 pretensions of Christ lay in the divine character of his 
 morality, and the spirituality of that worship which he 
 taught. Miracles were or were not from God, accord- 
 ing to purposes to which they ministered. That moral 
 doctrine and that worship were those purposes. By 
 these only they could try the soundness of all beside ; 
 and if these had been forestalled by the Essenes, what 
 remained for any new teacher or new founder of a 
 religion ? In fact, were the palpable lies of this Jew- 
 traitor built on anything but delusions misinterpreted 
 by his own ignorant heart, there would be more in that 
 one tale of his about the Essenes to undermine Chris- 
 tianity, than in all the batteries of all the infidels to 
 overthrow it. No infidel can argue away the spirit- 
 uality of the Christian religion : attacks upon miracles 
 ieave that unaffected. But he, who (confessing the 
 gpirituality) derives it from some elder and unknown 
 ource, at one step evades what he could not master. 
 He overthrows without opposition, and enters the cit- 
 idel through ruins caused by internal explosion. 
 What then is to be thougnt ? If this deathlike
 
 72 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 silence of all the evangelists, and all the apoatles, 
 makes it a mere impossibility to suppose the existenca 
 of such a sect as the Essenes in the time of Christ, 
 did such a sect arise afterwards, viz. in the Epichris- 
 tian generation ? Or, if not, how and by what steps 
 came up the romance we have been considering ? 
 Was there any substance in the tale ? Or, if positively 
 none, how came the fiction ? Was it a conscious lie ? 
 Was it a mistake ? Was it an exaggeration ? 
 
 Now, our idea is as follows : What do we suppose 
 the early Christians to have been called ? By what 
 name were they known amongst themselves and 
 amongst others ? Christians 1 Not at all. When it 
 is said ' The disciples were first called Christians at 
 Antioch,' we are satisfied that the meaning is not 
 this name, now general, was first used at Antioch ; but 
 that, whereas we followers of Christ generally call one 
 another, and are called by a particular name X, in 
 Antioch, that name was not used ; but from the very 
 beginning they were called by another name, viz., 
 Christians. At all events, since this name Christian 
 was confessedly used at Antioch before it was used 
 anywhere else, there must have been another name 
 elsewhere for the same people. What was that name ? 
 It was ' The Brethren,' [of afaiyoi ,-] and at times, by 
 way of variety, to prevent the awkwardness of too 
 monotonously repeating the same word, perhaps it was 
 ' The Faithful,' [of rcigot.] The name Christians trav- 
 elled, we are convinced, not immediately amongst 
 themselves, brit slowly amongst their enemies. It was 
 a name of reproach ; and the meaning was ' We 
 Pagans are all worshippers of gods, such as they are ; 
 tut this sect worships a man, and that man a male*
 
 THE ESSENES. 73 
 
 factor.' For, though Christ should properly have been 
 known by his name, which was Jesus, yet, because his 
 crime, in the opinion of the Jews, lay in the office he 
 had assumed in having made himself the Christos, 
 the anointed of God, therefore it happened that he was 
 published amongst the Roman world by that name : 
 his offence, his ' titulus ' on the cross, (the king, or the 
 anointed,) was made his Roman name. Accordingly 
 Tacitus, speaking of some insurgents in Judea, says 
 * that they mutinied under the excitement of Christ, 
 (not Jesus,) their original ringleader,' (impulsore 
 Chresto.} And no doubt it had become a scoffing 
 name, until the Christians disarmed the scoff of its 
 sting by assuming it themselves ; as was done in the 
 case of ' the Beggars ' in the Netherlands, and ' the 
 Methodists ' in England. 
 
 Well : meantime, what name did the Christians bear 
 in their very birthplace ? Were they called ' The 
 Brethren ' there ? No. And why not ? Simply be- 
 cause it had become too dangerous a name. To be 
 bold, to affront all reasonable danger, was their instinct 
 and their duty ; but not to tempt utter extinction or 
 utter reduction to imbecility. We read amiss, if we 
 imagine that the fiery persecution, which raged against 
 Christ, had burned itself out in the act of the cruci- 
 6xion. It slept, indeed, for a brief interval : but that 
 /as from necessity ; for the small flock of scattered 
 sheep easily secreted themselves. No sooner did they 
 multiply a little, no sooner did their meetings again 
 proclaim their ' whereabouts,' than the snake found 
 them out, again raised its spiry crest amongst them, 
 and again crushed them for a time. The martyrdom 
 of St. Stephen showed that no jesting was intended
 
 74 THE ESSENES. 
 
 [t was determined that examples should be made. It 
 was resolved that this revolt against the Temple (the 
 Law and the Prophets) must be put down. The next 
 event quickened this agency sevenfold. A great ser- 
 vant of the persecution, in the very agony of the 
 storm which he was himself guiding and pointing, 
 working the very artillery of Jerusalem upon some 
 scent which his bloodhounds had found in Syria, sud- 
 denly, in one hour passed over to the enemy. What 
 of that ? Did that startle the persecution ? Probably 
 it did : failure from within was what they had not 
 looked for. But the fear which it bred was sister to 
 the wrath of hell. The snake turned round ; but not 
 for flight. It turned to fasten upon the revolter. St, 
 Paul's authority as a leader in the Jewish councils 
 availed him nothing after this. Orders were undoubt- 
 edly expedited from Jerusalem to Damascus, as soon 
 as messengers could be interchanged, for his assassina- 
 tion. And assassinated he would have been, had he 
 been twenty St. Pauls, but for his secret evasion, and 
 his flight to Arabia. Idumea, probably a sort of Ire- 
 land to Judea, was the country to which he fled ; 
 where again he might have been found out, but his 
 capture would have cost a negotiation ; and in all like- 
 lihood he lay unknown amongst crowds. Nor did he 
 venture to show his face again in Jerusalem for some 
 years ; and then again not till a term of fourteen years, 
 half a generation, during which many of the burning 
 lealots, and of those who could have challenged him 
 personally as the great apostate, must have gone to 
 their last sleep. 
 
 During the whole of this novitiate for Christianity 
 tnd in fact throughout the whole Epichristian era, ther
 
 THE ESSEXEs. 75 
 
 was a brooding danger over the name and prospects of 
 Christianity. To hold up a hand, to put forth a head, 
 in tha blinding storm, was to perish. It was to solicit 
 a:\d tempt destruction. That could not be right. Those 
 who were answerable for the great interest confided to 
 Ihem, if in their own persons they might have braved 
 the anger of the times, were not at liberty to do so on 
 this account that it would have stopped effectually 
 the expansion of the Church. Martyrdom and perse- 
 cution formed the atmosphere in which it throve ; but 
 not the frost of death. What, then, did the fathers of 
 the Church do ? You read that, during a part of this 
 Epichristian age, ' the churches had peace.' True, they 
 had so. But do you know how they had it ? Do you 
 guess what they did ? 
 
 It was thus: They said to each other If we are to 
 stand such consuming fires as we have seen, one year 
 will finish us all. And then what will become of the 
 nuccession that we are to leave behind us ? We must 
 hide ourselves effectually. And this can be done only 
 by symbolizing. Any lesser disguise our persecutors 
 will penetrate. But this, by its very nature, will baffle 
 them, and yet provide fully for the nursing of an infant 
 Church. They proceeded, therefore, thus : ' Let there 
 t>e darkness ' was the first word of command : ' let 
 (is muffle ourselves in thick clouds, which no human 
 ye can penetrate. And towards this purpose let us 
 immediately take a symbolic name. And, because 
 *ny name that expresses or implies a secret fraternity 
 a fraternity bound together by any hidden tie or 
 purpose will instantly be challenged for the Christian 
 brotherhood under a n.3w masque, instantly the bloody 
 Sanhedrim will get to tneir ol<L practices to r turing
 
 76 THE ESSENES. 
 
 our weaker members, (as afterwards the cruel Pliny 
 selected for torture the poor frail women-servants of 
 the brethren,) and the wolf will be raging amongst 
 our folds in three months, therefore two things 
 are requisite ; one, that this name which we assume 
 should be such as to disarm suspicion, [in this they 
 acted upon the instinct of those birds, which art- 
 fully construct signs and appearances to draw away 
 the fowler from their young ones ;] the other, that 
 in case, after all, some suspicion should arise, and 
 the enemy again break in, there must be three or four 
 barriers to storm before he can get to the stronghold in 
 the centre.' 
 
 Upon this principle all was arranged. First, for the 
 name that was to disarm suspicion what name 
 could do that ? Why, what was the suspicion ? A 
 suspicion that Christian embers were sleeping under 
 the ashes. True : but why was that suspicious ? Why 
 had it ever been suspicious ? For two reasons : be- 
 cause the Christian faith was supposed to carry a secret 
 hostility to the Temple and its whole ritual economy ; 
 secondly, for an earnest political reason, because it 
 was believed to tend, by mere necessity, to such tu- 
 mults or revolutions as would furnish the Roman, on 
 tiptoe for this excuse, with a plea for taking away the 
 Jewish name and nation ; that is, for taking away their 
 Jewish autonomy, (or administration by their own Mo- 
 saic code,) which they still had, though otherwise in a 
 state of dependency. Well now, for this sort of sus- 
 picion, no name could be so admirably fitted as one 
 ibrawn from the very ritual service of that very Tem- 
 ple which was supposed to be in danger. That Tern- 
 PJC was in danger : the rocks on which it stood wera
 
 THE ESSENES. 77 
 
 Already quaking beneath it. All was accomplished. 
 Its doom had gone forth. Shadows of the coming fato 
 were spreading thick before it. Its defenders had a 
 dim misgiving of the storm that was gathering. But 
 they mistook utterly the quarter from which it was to 
 come. And they closed the great gates against an 
 enemy that entered by the postern. However, they 
 could not apprehend a foe in a society that professed 
 a special interest in Israel. The name chosen, there- 
 fore, was derived from the very costume of the Jewish 
 High Priest, the pontifical ruler of the Temple. Thig 
 great officer wore upon his breast a splendid piece of 
 jewelry ; twelve precious stones were inserted in the 
 breast-plate, representing the twelve sons of Jacob, 
 or twelve tribes 1 of Israel : and this was called the 
 Essen. Consequently to announce themselves as the 
 Society of the Essen, was to express a peculiar solici- 
 tude for the children of Israel. Under this masque 
 nobody could suspect any hostility to Jerusalem or 
 its temple ; nobody, therefore, under the existing mis- 
 conception of Christian objects and the Christian char- 
 acter, could suspect a Christian society. 
 
 But was not this hypocritical disguise ? Not at all. 
 A profession was thus made of paramount regard to 
 Judea and her children. Why not ? Christians every- 
 where turned with love, and yearning, and thankful- 
 v ess, the profoundest, to that ' Holy City,' (so called by 
 Christ himself,) which had kept alive for a thousand 
 years the sole vestiges of pure faith, and which, for a fai 
 longer term mystically represented that people which 
 tad known the true God, ' when all our fathers worship- 
 ed stocks arid stones.' Christians, or they would have 
 teen no Christians, everywhere prayed for her peace
 
 78 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 And if the downfall of Jerusalem was conne( /ed with 
 the rise of Christianity, that was not through any 
 enmity borne to Jerusalem by Christians, (as the Jews 
 falsely imagine ;) but because it was not suitable foi 
 the majesty of God, as the father of truth, to keep up 
 a separation amongst the nations when the fulness of 
 time in His counsels required that all separation should 
 be at an end. At His bidding the Temple had been 
 raised. At His bidding the Temple must be destroyed. 
 Nothing could have saved it but becoming Christian. 
 The end was accomplished for which it had existed ; 
 a great river had been kept pure ; that was now to 
 expand into an ocean. 
 
 But, as to any hypocrisy in the fathers of this indis- 
 pensable scheme for keeping alive the fire that burned 
 on the altar of Christianity, that was impossible. So 
 far from needing to assume more love for Judaism than 
 they had, we know that their very infirmity was to 
 have by much too sectarian and exclusive a regard for 
 those who were represented by the Temple. The 
 Bible, which conceals nothing of any men's errors, 
 does not conceal that. And we know that all the 
 weight of the great intellectual apostle was necessary 
 to overrule the errors, in this point, of St. Peter. The 
 fervid apostle erred ; and St. Paul ' withstood him to 
 his face.' But his very error proves the more certainly 
 Lis sincerity and singleness of heart in setting up a 
 society that should profess in its name the service of 
 Jerusalem and her children as its primary function. 
 The name Essen and Essenes was sent before to disarm 
 suspicion, and as a pledge of loyal fidelity. 
 
 Next, however, this society was to b'e a secret so 
 an Eleusinian society a Freemason society
 
 THE ESSENES 79 
 
 For, if it were not, how was it to provide for the cul- 
 ture of Christianity ? Now, if the reader pauses a 
 moment to review the condition of Palestine and the 
 neighboring countries at that time, he will begin to see 
 the opening there was for such a society. The condi- 
 tion of the times was agitated and tumultuous beyond 
 anything witnessed amongst men, except at the Re- 
 formation and the French Revolution. The flame on 
 the Pagan altars was growing pale, the oracles over 
 the earth were muttering their alarm, panic terrors 
 were falling upon nations, murmurs were arising, whis- 
 pers circulating from nobody knew whence that out 
 of the East, about this time, should arise some great 
 and mysterious deliverer. This whisper had spread to 
 Rome was current everywhere. It was one of those 
 awful whispers that have no author. Nobody could 
 ever trace it. Nobody could ever guess by what path 
 it had travelled. But observe, in that generation, at 
 Rome and all parts of the Mediterranean to the west 
 of Palestine, the word ' Oriens ' had a technical and 
 limited meaning ; it was restricted to Syria, of which 
 Palestine formed a section. This use of the word will 
 explain itself to anybody who looks at a map of the 
 Mediterranean as seen from Italy. But some years 
 after the Epichristian generation, the word bogan to 
 extend ; and very naturally, as the Roman armies 
 began to make permanent conquests nearer to the 
 Euphrates. Under these remarkable circumstances, 
 ind agitated beyond measure between the oppression 
 of the Roman armies on the one hand and the con- 
 sciousness of a peculiar dependence on God on the 
 other, all thoughtful Jews were disturbed in mind 
 The more consciontious, the more they were agi
 
 gO THE ESSENE8. 
 
 tated. Was it their duty to resist the Romans ? God 
 could deliver them, doubtless ; but God worked often- 
 times by human means. Was it His pleasure that they 
 should resist by arms ? Others again replied if 
 you do, then you prepare an excuse for the Romans 
 to extirpate your nation. Many, again, turned more 
 to religious hopes : these were they who, in scriptural 
 language, ' waited for the consolation of Israel : ' that 
 is, they trusted in that Messiah who had been prom- 
 ised, and they yearned for his manifestation. They 
 mourned over Judea ; they felt that she had rebelled ; 
 but she had been afflicted, and perhaps her trangres- 
 sions might now be blotted out, and her glory might 
 now be approaching. Of this class was he who took 
 Christ in his arms when an infant in the temple. Of 
 this class were the two rich men, Joseph and Nicode- 
 mus, who united to bury him. But even of this class 
 many there were who took different views of the 
 functions properly belonging to the Messiah ; and 
 many that, either through this difference of original 
 views, or from imperfect acquaintance with the life of 
 Jesus, doubted whether he were indeed the promised 
 Messiah. Even John the Baptist doubted that, and his 
 question upon that point, addressed to Christ himself, 
 ' Art thou he who should come, or do we look for 
 another ? ' has been generally fancied singularly at 
 tvar with his own earlier testimony, ' Behold the Lamb 
 of God, that taketh away the sins of the world ! ' But 
 it is not. The offices of mysterious change for Israel 
 were prophetically announced as coming through a 
 leries and succession of characters Elias, ' that pio 
 phet,' and the Messiah. The succession, might even be 
 more divided. And the Baptist, ";vho did not knov
 
 THE ^SSENES. 81 
 
 himself to be Elias, might reasonably be in doubt (and 
 at a time when his career was only beginning] whether 
 Jesus were the Messiah. 
 
 Now, out of these mixed elements men in every 
 stage and gradation of belief or spiritual knowledge, 
 but all musing, pondering, fermenting in their minds 
 all tempest-shaken, sorrow-haunted, perplexed, hop- 
 ing, seeking, doubting, trusting the apostles would 
 see abundant means for peopling the lower or initiatory 
 ranks of their new society. Such a craving for light 
 from above probably never existed. The land was on 
 the brink of convulsions, and all men felt it. Even 
 amongst the rulers in Jerusalem had been Rome who 
 saw the truth of Christ's mission, though selfish terrors 
 had kept back their testimony. From every ranfc and 
 order of men, would press in the meditative to a 
 society where they would all receive sympathy, what- 
 ever might be their views, and many would receive 
 light. 
 
 This society how was it constituted ? In the 
 innermost class were placed, no doubt, all those, and 
 those only, who were thoroughly Christians. The 
 danger was from Christianity. And this danger was 
 made operative only, by associating with the mature 
 >.nd perfect Christian any false brother, any half- 
 Christian, any hypocritical Christian, any wavering 
 Christian. To meet this danger, there must be a win- 
 nowing and a sifting of all candidates. And because 
 the danger was awful, involving not one but many, 
 not a human interest but a heavenly interest ; therefore 
 these winnowings and siftings nv.ist be many, must be 
 repeated, must be soul-searching. Nay, even that will 
 aot suffice. Oaths, pledges to Gha as well as to man, 
 6
 
 82 THE ESSEN E8. 
 
 must be exacted. All this the apostles did : serpents 
 by experience, in the midst of their dove-like faith, 
 they acted as wise stewards for God. They sur- 
 rounded their own central consistory with lines im- 
 passable to treachery. Josephus, the blind Jew 
 blind in heart, we mean, and understanding, reporting 
 a matter of which he had no compreher^ion, nor could 
 have (for we could show to demonstration that, for 
 a specific reason, he could not have belonged to the 
 society) even this man, in his utter darkness, tele- 
 graphs to us by many signals, rockets thrown up by 
 the apostles, which come round and are visible to us, 
 but unseen by him, what it is that the apostles were 
 About. He tells us expressly, that a preparatory or 
 trial period of two years was exacted of every candi- 
 date before his admission to any order ; that, after this 
 probationary attendance is finished, ' they are parted 
 into four classes ; ' and these classes, he tells us, are 
 so severely separated from all intercommunion, that 
 merely to have touched each other was a pollution 
 that required a solemn purification. Finally, as if 
 all this were nothing, though otherwise disallowing 
 of oaths, yet in this, as in a service of God, oaths, 
 which Josephus styles 'tremendous,' are exacted of 
 each member, that he will reveal nothing of what he 
 earns. 
 
 Who can fail to see, in these multiplied precautions 
 for guarding, what according to Josephus is no secret 
 at all, nor anything approaching to a secret, that here 
 we have a central Christian society, secret from neces* 
 Iity, cautious to excess from the extremity of the dan- 
 ger, and surrounding themselves in their outer rings by 
 merely Jewish disciples, but those wh'jse state of mine
 
 THE ESSENES. 83 
 
 promised a hopeful soil for the solemn ard affecting 
 discoveries which awaited them in ie higher states of 
 their progress ? Here is the true solution of this mys- 
 terious society, the Essenes, never mentioned in any 
 one record of the Christian generation, and that be- 
 cause it first took its rise in the necessities of the 
 Kjiichristian generation. There is more by a good 
 deal to say of these Essenes; but this is enough for 
 the present. And if any man asks how they came to 
 he traced to so fabuloas an antiquity, the account now 
 given easily explains that. Three authors only men- 
 tion them Pliny, Philo- Judaeus and Josephus. Pliny 
 builds upon these two last, and other Jewish roman- 
 cers. The two last may be considered as contempo- 
 raries. And all that they allege, as to the antiquity of 
 the sect, flows naturally from the condition and cir- 
 cumstances of the outermost circle in the series of the 
 classes. They were occupied exclusively with Juda- 
 ism. And Judaism had, in fact, as we all know, that 
 real antiquity in its people, and its rites, and its sym- 
 bols, which these then uninitiated authors understand 
 and fancy to have been meant of the Essenes as a 
 philosophical sect. 
 
 PART II * 
 
 We have sketched rapidly, in the first part of our 
 essay, some outline of a theory with regard to the 
 Esseaes, confining ourselves to such hints as are sug- 
 gested by the accounts of this sect in Josephus. And 
 we presume that most readers will go along with us so 
 Car as to acknowledge some shock, some pause git en 
 [* Tart II. is omitted in De Quincey's latest revision.]
 
 84 I'HE ESSENE8. 
 
 to that blind acquiescence in the Bible statement which 
 had hitherto satisfied them. By the Bible statement 
 we mean, of course, nothing which any inspired part 
 of the Bible tells us on the contrary, one capital 
 reason for rejecting the old notions is, the total silence 
 of the Bible ; but we mean that little explanatory notfl 
 on the Essenes, which our Bible translators under 
 James I. have thought fit to adopt, and in reality to 
 adopt from Josephus, with reliance on his authority 
 which closer study would have shown to be unwar- 
 ranted. We do not wonder that Josephus has been 
 misappreciated by Christian readers. It is painful to 
 r ead any author in a spirit of suspicion ; most of all, 
 that author to whom we must often look as our only 
 guide. Upon Josephus we are compelled to rely for 
 the most affecting section of ancient history. Merely 
 as a scene of human passion, the main portion of his 
 Wars transcends, in its theme, all other histories But 
 considered also as the agony of a mother church, out 
 of whose ashes arose, like a phoenix, that filial faith 
 ' which passeth all understanding,' the last conflict of 
 Jerusalem and her glorious temple exacts from the 
 devotional conscience as much interest as would other- 
 wise be yielded by our human sympathies. For the 
 circumstances of this struggle we must look to Jose- 
 phus : him or none we must accept for witness. And 
 in such a case, how painful to suppose a hostile heart 
 in every word of his deposition ! Who could bear tc 
 lake the account of a dear friend's last hours and fare- 
 veil words from one who confessedly hated him? 
 one word melting us to tears, and the next rousing us 
 V) the duty of jealousy and distrust ! Hence we do no/ 
 wonder at the pious fraud which interpolated the well
 
 THE ESSENES. 85 
 
 known passage about our Saviour. Let us read anj 
 authoi in those circumstances of time, place, or imme- 
 diate succession to the cardinal events of our own 
 religion, and we shall find it a mere postulate of the 
 heart, a mere necessity of human feeling, that we 
 should think of him as a Christian ; or, if not abso- 
 lutely that, as every way disposed to be a Christian, 
 and falling short of that perfect light only by such 
 clouds as his hurried life or his personal conflicts might 
 interpose. We do not blame, far from it we admire 
 those who find it necessary (even at the cost of a little 
 self-delusion) to place themselves in a state of charity 
 with an author treating such subjects, and in whose 
 company they were to travel through some thousands 
 of pages. We also find it painful to read an author 
 and to loathe him. We, too, would be glad to suppose, 
 as a possibility about Josephus, what many adopt as a 
 certainty. But we know too much. Unfortunately, 
 we have read Josephus with too scrutinizing (and, 
 what is more, with too combining) an eye. We know 
 him to be an unprincipled man, and an ignoble man ; 
 one whose adhesion to Christianity would have done 
 no honor to our faith one who most assuredly was 
 not a Christian one who was not even in any tolera- 
 ble sense a Jew one who was an enemy to our faith, 
 a traitor to his own : as an enemy, vicious and igno- 
 rant ; as a traitor, steeped to the lips in superfluoui 
 baseness. 
 
 The vigilance with which we have read Josephus, 
 . as (amongst many other hints) suggested some with 
 regard to the Essenes : and to these \ve shall now 
 Wake our own readers a party; after stepping to say, 
 that thua far, so far as we have gone already, we count
 
 86 THE ESSENES. 
 
 on their assent to our theory, were it only from those 
 considerations : First, the exceeding improbability that 
 g known philosophic sect amongst the Jews, chiefly 
 distinguished from the other two by its moral aspects, 
 could have lurked unknown to the Evangelists ; Sec- 
 ondly, the exceeding improbability that such a sect, 
 laying the chief burden of its scrupulosity in the matter 
 of oaths, should have bound its members by ' tremen- 
 dous ' oaths of secrecy in a case where there was 
 nothing to conceal ; Thirdly, the staring contradictori- 
 ness between such an avowal on the part of Josephus, 
 and his deliberate revelation of what he fancied to be 
 their creed. The objection is too inevitable : either 
 you have taken the oaths or you have not. You have ? 
 Then by your own showing you are a perjured traitor. 
 You have not ? Then you confess yourself to speak 
 from no personal knowledge. How can you know 
 anything of their secret doctrines ? The seal is want- 
 ing to the record. 
 
 However, it is possible that some people will evade 
 this last dilemma, by suggesting that Josephus wrote 
 for Roman readers for strangers and for strangers 
 after any of his countrymen who might be interested in 
 the secret, had perished ; if not personally perished, at 
 least as a body politic. The last vestiges of the theo- 
 retical government had foundered with Jerusalem ; and 
 it might be thought by a better man than Josephus, that 
 all obligations of secrecy had perished in the general 
 wreck. 
 
 We need not dispute that point. There is enough 
 In what remains. The positive points of contact be- 
 tween the supposed Essenes and the Christians axe to 
 many to be got over. But upon these we will not a
 
 THE ESSENES. 87 
 
 present insist. In this place we confine ourselves to 
 the two points : 1. Of the universal silence amongst 
 Christian writers, who, of all parties, would have felt 
 it most essential to notice the Essenes, had there ex- 
 isted such a sect antecedently to Christ : and, 2. Of 
 the absurdity involved in exacting an inexorable con- 
 cealment from those who had nothing to reveal. 
 
 But then recollect, reader, precisely the Christian 
 truths which stood behind the exoteric doctrines of the 
 Essenes, were the truths hidden from Josephus. Rea- 
 son enough there was for concealment, IF the Essenes 
 were Christians ; and reason more than was ever known 
 to Josephus. But then, this reason for concealment in 
 the Essenes could be known only to him who was 
 aware that they had something to conceal. He who 
 saw only the masque, supposing it to be the true face, 
 ought to have regarded the mystifying arrangements 
 as perfect mummery. He that saw the countenance 
 behind the masque a countenance sweet as Paradise, 
 but fearful as the grave at that particular time in Jeru- 
 salem, would never ask again for the motives to this 
 concealment. Those he would apprehend in a mo- 
 ment. But as to Josephus, who never had looked 
 behind the masque, the order for concealment, the 
 adjurations to concealment, the vows of concealment, 
 the adamantine walls of separation between the differ- 
 ent orders of the fraternity, in order to ensure conceal- 
 ment, ought to have been, must have been regarded 
 by him, as the very hyperbole of childishness. 
 
 Partly because Josephus was in this state of dark- 
 ness, partly from personal causes, has he failed to clear 
 up the secret history of Judea, in her final, tnat is, her 
 Kpichristian generation. The evidences of his having
 
 RS THE E8SEXES. 
 
 failed are two, 1st, the absolute fact, as existing in 
 his works ; which present us with a mere anarchy of 
 incidents, as regards the politics of his own times, 
 under no law of cohesion whatsoever, or of intelligible 
 derivation ; 2dly, the a priori necessity that he should 
 fail ; a necessity laid in the very situation of Josephus 
 as a man of servile temper placed amongst elements 
 that required a Maccabee, and as a man without prin- 
 ciple, who could not act so that his actions would bear 
 to be reported without disguise, and as one in whom 
 no confidence was likely to be lodged by the managers 
 of great interests, or the depositories of great secrets. 
 
 This view of things summons us to pause, and to 
 turn aside from our general inquiry into a special one 
 as to Josephus. Hitherto we have derived our argu- 
 ments on the Essenes from Josephus, as a willing wit- 
 ness a volunteer even. But now we are going to 
 extort our arguments ; to torture him, to put him on 
 the rack, to force him into confession ; and upon points 
 which he has done his best to darken, by throwing dust 
 in the eyes of us all. Why ? because hand-in-hand 
 with the truth must go the exposure of himself. Jose- 
 phus stands right in the very doorway of the light, 
 purposely obscuring it. A glare comes round by side 
 snatches ; oblique rays, stray gleams, from the truth 
 which he so anxiously screens. But before the real 
 state of things can be guessed at, it is necessary to 
 destroy this man's character. 
 
 Now, let us try to appreciate the exact position and 
 reasonable credibility of Josephus. as he stands at 
 present, midway between us a distant posterity, and 
 his own countrymen of his own times, sole interpreter 
 tole surviving reporter, having all things his own way
 
 THE ESSENES. 89 
 
 nobody to contradict him, nobody to taint bis evidence 
 with suspicion. His case is most ranarkable ; and yet, 
 though remarkable, is not so rare but that many times 
 it must have occurred in private (sometimes in public) 
 life. It is the case of a solitary individual surviving 
 out of a multitude embarked in a desperate enterprise 
 some playing one part, (a part, suppose, sublime 
 and heroic,) some playing another, (base, treacherous, 
 fiendish.) Suddenly a great convulsion involves all in 
 one common ruin, this man only excepted. He now 
 finds himself with a carte blanche before him, on 
 which he may 'inscribe whatever romance in behalf of 
 himself he thinks proper. The whole field of action 
 is open to him the whole field of motives. He may 
 take what side he will. And be assured that, what- 
 ever part in the play he assumes, he will give himself 
 the best of characters. For courage you will find him 
 a Maccabee. His too tender heart interfered, or he 
 could have signalized his valor even more emphat- 
 ically. And, descending to such base things as 
 treasures of money, jewels, land, &c., the chief part 
 of what had been captured, was of course (strictly 
 Bpeaking) his own property. What impudent false- 
 nood, indeed, may such a man not bring forward, 
 when there is nobody to confront him ? 
 
 But was there nobody ? Reader, absolutely nobody. 
 Prisoners captured with himself at Jotopata there were 
 none not a man. That fact, indeed the inexorable 
 fact, that he only endured to surrender that one fact, 
 taken with the commentary which we could furnish as 
 to the circumstances of the case, and the Jewish 
 casuistry under those circumstances, is one of the 
 damning features of his tale. But was thera
 
 90 THE ESSENES. 
 
 nobody, amongst the ninety thousand prisoners taken 
 at Jerusalem, who could have spoken to parts of this 
 man's public life ? Doubtless there were ; but to 
 what purpose for people in their situation to come 
 forward ? One and all, positively without a solitary 
 exception, they were themselves captives, slaves con- 
 demned, despairing. Ten thousand being selected for 
 the butcheries of the Syrian amphitheatres, the rest 
 were liable to some punishment equally terrific ; mul- 
 titudes were perishing of hunger ; under the mildest 
 award, they were sure of being sentenced to the stone 
 quarries of Egypt. Wherefore, in this extremity of 
 personal misery and of desperate prospects, should 
 any man find himself at leisure for a vengeance on 
 one happier countryman which could bring no profit 
 to the rest ? Still, in a case so questionable as that of 
 Josephus, it is possible enough that Titus would have 
 sought some further light amongst the prisoners under 
 any ordinary circumstances. In his heart, the noble 
 Roman must have distrusted Josephus and his vain- 
 glorious account of himself. There were circumstances 
 outstanding, many and strong, that must have pointed 
 his suspicions in that direction ; and the very con- 
 versation of a villain is sure to entangle him in con- 
 tradictions. But it was now too late to move upon 
 that inquest. Josephus himself acknowledges, that 
 Vespasian was shrewd enough from the first to suspect 
 him for the sycophantish knave that he was. But that 
 time had gone by. And, in the interval, Josephus had 
 used his opportunities skilfully ; he had performed that 
 particular service for the Flavian family, which was 
 the one desideratum they sought for and yearned for 
 By his pretended dreams, Josephus had put that sea
 
 THE ESSENJSS. 91 
 
 of heavenly ratification to the ambitious projects of 
 Vespasian, which only was wanting for the satisfaction 
 of his soldiers. The service was critical. What Titua 
 said to his father is known : This man, be he what 
 he may, has done a service to us. It is not for men 
 of rank like us to haggle and chaffer about rewards. 
 Ha ring received a favor, we must make the reward 
 princely ; not what he deserves to receive, but what is 
 becoming for us to grant. On this consideration these 
 great men acted. Sensible that, not having hanged 
 Josephus at first, it was now become their duty to 
 reward him, they did not do the thing by halves. Not 
 content with releasing him from his chains, they sent 
 an officer to cut his chains to pieces that being a 
 symbolic act by which the Romans abolished the very 
 memory and legal record that ever a man had been in 
 confinement. The fact is, that amongst the Roman 
 public virtues in that age, was an intense fidelity to 
 engagements ; and where they had even tacitly per- 
 mitted a man to form hopes, they fulfilled them 
 beyond the letter. But what Titus said to his staff, 
 though naturally not put on record by Josephus, was 
 very probably this : ' Gentlemen, I see you look 
 upon this Jew as a poltroon, and perhaps worse. 
 Well, possibly we don't much differ upon that point. 
 But it has become necessary to the public service that 
 this man should be reinstated in credit. He will 
 now, perhaps, turn over a new leaf. If he does not, 
 itick him to Hades. But, meantime, give the man a 
 trial.' 
 
 Such, there can be little doubt, was the opinion of 
 Caesar about this man. But now it remains to give 
 our own, with the reasons on which it rests.
 
 52 THE ESSENES. 
 
 I. First of all which we bring merely as a proof 
 of his habitual mendacity in one of those tongue- 
 doughty orations, which he represents himself aa 
 having addressed to the men of Jerusalem, they 
 standing on the walls patiently, with paving-stones 
 in their hands, to hear a renegade abuse them by the 
 fcour, [such is his lying legend,] Josephus roundly 
 asserts that Abraham, the patriarch of their nation, 
 had an army of three hundred and sixty thousand 
 troops, that is, somewhere about seventy-five legions 
 
 an establishment beyond what the first Caesars had 
 found requisite for mastering the Mediterranean sea 
 with all the nations that belted it that is, a ring- 
 fence of five thousand miles by seven hundred on an 
 average. Now, this is in the style of the Baron 
 Munchausen. But it is worthy of a special notice, 
 for two illustrations which it offers of this renegade's 
 propensities. One is the abject homage with which he 
 courted the Roman notice. Of this lie, as of all his 
 lies, the primary purpose is, to fix the gaze and to 
 court the admiration of the Romans. Judea, Jerusalem 
 
 these were objects never in his thoughts ; it was 
 Rome, the haven of his apostasy, on which his anxieties 
 settled. Now, it is a judgment upon the man who 
 carried these purposes in his heart it is a judicial 
 retribution that precisely this very lie, shaped and 
 pointed to conciliate the Roman taste for martial 
 splendor, was probably the very ground of that disgust 
 which seems to have alienated Tacitus from his works. 
 Apparently Josephus should have been the foremost 
 authority with this historian for Jewish affairs. But 
 tnough remains to show that he was not ; and it ii 
 eiear that the confidence of so sceptical a writer mus*
 
 THE ESSENES. 93 
 
 have been shaken from the very first by so extravagant 
 tale. Abraham, a mere stranger and colonist in 
 Syria, whose descendants in the third generation mus- 
 tered only seventy persons in emigrating to Egypt, is 
 here placed at the head of a force greater than great 
 empires had commanded or had needed. And from 
 what resources raised ? From a little section of Syria, 
 which (supposing it even the personal domain of 
 Abraham) could not be equal to Wales. And for 
 what objects ? To face what enemies ? A handful 
 of robbers that might congregate in the desert. Such 
 insufferable fairy tales must have vitiated the credit 
 even of his rational statements ; and it is thus pleasant 
 to see the apostate missing one reward which he 
 courted, purely through his own eagerness to buy it 
 at the price of truth. But a second feature which this 
 story betrays in the mind of Josephus, is the thorough 
 defect of Hebrew sublimity and scriptural simplicity 
 which mark his entire writing. How much more 
 impressive is the picture of Abraham, as the father of 
 the faithful, the selected servant and feudatory of God, 
 sitting in the wilderness, majestically reposing at the 
 door of his tent, surrounded by a little camp of 
 servants and kinsmen, a few score of camels and a 
 few herds of cattle, than in the melodramatic attitude 
 of a general, belted and plumed, with a glittering staff 
 of officers at his orders ? But the mind of Josephus. 
 always irreligious, was now violently warped into a 
 poor imitation of Roman models- He absolutely talks 
 of 'liberty' and ' glory,' as the mo "ing impulses of 
 Hebrew saints ; and does his best to translate the 
 Maccabees, and many an elder soldier of the Jewish 
 faith, into poor theatrical mimics of Spartans and
 
 94 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 Thebans. This depravity of taste, and ab, aration of 
 his national characteristics, must not be overlooked in 
 estimating the value whether of his opinions or hia 
 statements. We have evidence superabundant to 
 these two features in the character of Josephus 
 that he would distort everything in order to meet the 
 Roman taste, and that he had originally no sympathy 
 whatsoever with the peculiar grandeur of his own 
 country. 
 
 II. It is a remarkable fact, that Josephus never speaks 
 of Jerusalem and those who conducted its resistance, 
 but in words of abhorrence and of loathing that amounts 
 to frenzy. Now in what point did they differ from 
 himself? Change the name Judea to Galilee, and the 
 name Jerusalem to Jotopata, and their case was his ; 
 and the single difference was that the men, whom 
 he reviles as often as he mentions them, had persevered 
 to martyrdom, whilst he he only had snatched at 
 life under any condition of ignominy. But precisely 
 in that difference lay the ground of his hatred. He 
 could not forgive those whose glorious resistance 
 (glorious, were it even in a mistaken cause) embla- 
 zoned and threw into relief his own apostasy. This 
 we cannot dwell on ; but we revert to the question 
 What had the people of Jerusalem done, which Jose- 
 phus had not attempted to do ? 
 
 III. Whiston, another Caliban worshipping another 
 Trinculo, finds out a divinity in Josephus, because, on 
 being brought prisoner to Vespasian, he pretended to 
 have seen in a dream that the Roman general would 
 be raised to the purple. Now,
 
 THE ESSENES. 95 
 
 1. When we see Cyrus lurking in the prophecies of 
 Isaiah, and Alexander in those of Daniel, we appre- 
 hend a reasonableness in thus causing the spirit of 
 prophecy to settle upon those who were destined to 
 move in the great cardinal revolutions of this earth. 
 Bui why, amongst all the Caesars, must Vespasian, in 
 particular, be the subject of a prophecy, and a pro- 
 phecy the most thrilling, from the mysterious circum- 
 Btances which surrounded it, and from the silence with 
 which it stole into the mouths of all nations ? The 
 reigns of all the three Flavian Caesars, Vespasian, with 
 his sons Titus and Domitian, were memorable for 
 nothing : with the sole exception of the great revolu- 
 tion in Judea, none of them were marked by any great 
 event ; and all the three reigns combined filled no im- 
 portant space of time. 
 
 2. If Vespasian, for any incomprehensible reason, 
 were thought worthy of being heralded by a prophecy, 
 what logic was there in connecting him with Syria ? 
 That which raised him to the purple, that which sug- 
 gested him to men's minds, was his military eminence, 
 and this was obtained in Britain. 
 
 3. If the mere local situations from which any unin- 
 teresting emperor happened to step on to the throne, 
 merited this special glorification from prophecy, why 
 was not many another region, town, or village, illus- 
 trated in the same way ? That Thracian hamlet, from 
 which the Emperor Maximin arose, had been pointed 
 out to notice befort the event as a place likely to be 
 distinguished by some great event. And yet, because 
 this prediction had merely a personal reference, and 
 QO relation at all to any gioat human interest, it was 
 treated with little respect, and never crept into a gen-
 
 96 THE ESSENES. 
 
 eral circulation. So of this prophecy with respect to 
 one who should rise out of the East, and should ulti- 
 mately stretch his sceptre over the whole world, (rerum 
 potiretur,} if Josephus is allowed to ruin it by his syco- 
 phancy, instantly, from the rank of a Hebrew prophecy 
 
 a vision seen by ' the man whose eyes God had 
 opened * it sinks to the level of a vagrant gipsy's 
 gossip. "What ! shall Rome combine with Jerusalem ? 
 
 for we find this same mysterious prediction almost 
 verbally the same in Suetonius and in Tacitus, no less 
 than in the Jewish prophets. Shall it stretch not only 
 from the east to the west in point of space, but through 
 the best part of a thousand years in point of time, all 
 for the sake of preparing one day's adulatory nuzzur, 
 by which a trembling Jew may make his propitiation 
 to an intriguing lieutenant of Caesar ? And how came 
 it that Whiston (who, to do him justice, was too pious 
 to have abetted an infidel trick, had his silliness suffered 
 him to have seen through it) failed to perceive this 
 consequence ? If the prophecy before us belong to 
 Vespasian, then does it not belong to Christ. And in 
 that case, the worst error of the Herodian Jews, who 
 made the Messiah prophecies terminate in Herod, is 
 ratified by Christians ; for between Herod and Vespa- 
 sian the difference is none at all, as regards any interest 
 cf religion. Can human patience endure the spectacle 
 of a religious man, for perfect folly, combining in their 
 very worst efforts with those whom it was the object 
 uf his life to oppose ? 
 
 4. But finally, once for all, to cut sharp off by the 
 roots this corruption of a sublime prophecy, and to re- 
 enthrone it in its ancient sanctity, it was not in th 
 
 Orient,' (which both technically meant Syria in tha
 
 THE ESSENES. 97 
 
 particular age, and is acknowledged to mean il here by 
 all parties,) that Vespasian obtained the purpie. The 
 oracle, if it is to be translated from a Christian to a 
 Pagan oracle, ought at least to speak the truth. Now, 
 it happens not to have been Syria in which Vespasian 
 was saluted emperor by the legions, but Alexandria ; 
 a city which in that age, was in no sense either in 
 Syria or in Egypt. So that the great prophecy, if it 
 is once suffered to be desecrated by Josephus, fails 
 even of a literal fulfilment. 
 
 IV. Meantime, all this is a matter of personal false- 
 hood in a case of trying personal interest. Even 
 under such a temptation, it is true that a man of 
 generosity, to say nothing of principle, would not 
 have been capable of founding his own defence upon 
 the defamation of his nobler compatriots. But in fact 
 it is ever thus : he, who has sunk deepest in treason, 
 is generally possessed by a double measure of rancor 
 against the loyal and the faithful. What follows, how- 
 ever, has respect not to truth personal, truth of fact, 
 truth momentary but to truth absolute, truth doc- 
 trinal, truth eternal. Let us preface what we are 
 k,oing to say, by directing the reader's attention to this 
 fact : how easy it is to observe any positive feature in 
 a man's writings or conversation how rare to observe 
 the negative features ; the presence of this or that char- 
 acteristic is noticed in an hour, the absence shall often 
 escape notice for years. Tnat a friend, for instance, 
 lalks habitually on this or that literature, we know as 
 familiarly as our own constitutional tastes ; that he 
 does not talk of any given literature, (the Greek sup- 
 pose,) may fail to strike us through a \vhole life, until
 
 1)8 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 lomebody happens to point our attention in that direc- 
 tion, and then perhaps we notice it in every hour of 
 our intercourse. This only can excuse the various 
 editors, commentators, and translators of Josephus, for 
 having overlooked one capital omission in this author ; 
 it is this never in one instance does Josephus allude 
 to the great prophetic doctrine of a Messiah. To 
 suppose him ignorant of this doctrine is impossible ; 
 it was so mixed up with the typical part of the Jewish 
 religion, so involved in the ceremonies of Judaism, 
 even waiving all the Jewish writers, that no Jew what- 
 ever, much less a master in Israel, a Pharisee, a doctor 
 of the law, a priest, all which Josephus proclaims 
 himself, could fail to know of such a doctrine, even 
 if he failed to understand it, or failed to appreciate its 
 importance. 
 
 Why, then, has Josephus suppressed it ? For this 
 reason : the doctrine offers a dilemma a choice be- 
 tween two interpretations one being purely spiritual, 
 one purely political. The first was offensive and unin- 
 telligible (as was everything else in his native religion 
 beyond the merely ceremonial) to his own worldly 
 heart ; the other would have been offensive to the 
 Romans. The mysterious idea of a Redeemer, of a 
 Deliverer, if it were taken in a vast spiritual sense, 
 wai a music like the fabled Arabian voices in the desert 
 i .tterly inaudible when the heart is deaf, and the 
 sympathies untuned. The fleshly mind of Josephus 
 everywhere shows its incapacity for any truths, but 
 those of sense. On the other hand, the idea of a 
 3K)iitica] deliverer that was comprehensible enough ; 
 but unfortunately, it was too comprehensible. It was 
 the very watch ward for national conspiracies ; and the
 
 THE ESSENES. 09 
 
 Romans would state the alternative thus : The idea of 
 ft great deliverer is but another name for insurrection 
 against us ; of a petty deliverer, is incompatible with the 
 grandeur implied by a vast prophetic machinery. With- 
 out knowing much, 01 caring anything about the Jewish 
 prophecies, the Romans were sagacious enough to per- 
 ceive two things 1st, that most nations, and the Jews 
 above all others, were combined by no force so strongly 
 as by one which had the reputation of a heavenly 
 descent ; 2dly, that a series of prophecies, stretching 
 fr'.m the century before Cyrus to the age of Pericles, 
 (confining ourselves to the prophets from Isaiah to 
 Haggai,) was most unlikely to find its adequate result 
 and consummation in any petty change any change 
 short of a great national convulsion or revolution. 
 
 Hence it happened, that no mode in which a Human 
 writer could present the Jewish doctrine of a Messiah, 
 was free from one or other of the objections indicated 
 by the great Apostle : either it was too spiritual and 
 mysterious, in which case it was ' foolishness ' to him- 
 self; or it was too palpably the symbol of a political 
 interest, too real in a worldly sense, in which case it 
 was a 'stone of offence' to his Roman patron* gen- 
 erally to the Roman people, specially to the Roman 
 leaders. Josephus found himself betwofia Scylla and 
 Charybdis if he approached that subject. And there- 
 tore it was that he did not approach U. 
 
 V. Yet, in this evasion of a ti-jiae which interested 
 every Jew, many readers will see only an evidence of 
 that timidity and servile spirit which must, of course, 
 be presumed in one wkj had "old the cause of hi 
 country. His evasior, they will say, does no', argue
 
 lOO THE ESSENES. 
 
 imy peculiar carelessness for truth ; it is simply one 
 instance amongst hundreds of his mercenary coward- 
 ice. The doctrine of a Messiah was the subject of 
 dispute even to the Jews the most religious and the 
 most learned. Some restrained it to an earthly sense ; 
 some expanded it into a glorified hope. And, though 
 a double sense will not justify a man in slighting both 
 senses, still, the very existence of a dispute about the 
 proper acceptation of a doctrine, may be pleaded as 
 some palliation for a timid man, in seeking to pass it 
 sub sihntio. But what shall we say to this coming 
 count in the indictment ? Hitherto Josephus is only 
 an apostate, only a traitor, only a libeller, only a false 
 witness, only a liar; and as to his Jewish faith, only 
 perhaps a coward, only perhaps a heretic. But now 
 ne will reveal himself (in the literal sense of that 
 word) as a miscreant ; one who does not merely go 
 astray in his faith, as all of us may do at times, but 
 pollutes his faith by foul adulterations, or undermines 
 it by knocking away its props a misbeliever, not in 
 the sense of a heterodox believer, who errs as to some 
 point in the superstruction, but as one who unsettles 
 the foundations the external substructions. In one 
 short sentence, Josephus is not ashamed to wrench out 
 ihe keystone from the great arch of Judaism ; so far 
 as a feeble apostate's force will go, he unlocks the 
 whole cohesion and security of that monumental faith 
 upon which, as its basis and plinth, is the ' starry- 
 pointing ' column of our Christianity. He delivers it 
 o the Romans, as sound Pharisaic doctrine, that God 
 nad enjoined upon the Jews the duty of respectful hom- 
 age to all pichorial or national deities to all idols 
 that is to say, provided their rank were attested by
 
 THE ESSENES. JOl 
 
 i suitaolo number of worshippers. The Romans ap- 
 plied this test to the subdivisions amongst princes ; if 
 a prince ruled over a sniaL number of subjects, they 
 called him (without reference to the original sense of 
 the word) a tetrarch : if a certain larger number, an 
 ethnarch ; if a still larger number, a king. So again, 
 the number of throats cut determined the question 
 between a triumph and an ovation. And upon the 
 name principle, if we will believe Josephus, was regu- 
 lated the public honor due to the Pagan deities. Count 
 his worshippers call the roll over. 
 
 Does the audacity of man present us with such 
 another instance of perfidious miscreancy ? God the 
 Jehovah, anxious for the honor of Jupiter and Mercury ! 
 God, the Father of light and truth, zealous on behalf 
 of those lying deities, whose service is everywhere 
 described as ' whoredom and adultery ! ' He who 
 steadfastly reveals himself as ' a jealous God,' jealous 
 also (if we will believe this apostate Jew) on behalf 
 of that impure Pantheon, who had counterfeited his 
 name, and usurped His glory ! Reader, it would be 
 mere mockery and insult to adduce on this occasion 
 the solemn denunciations against idolatrous compli- 
 ances uttered through the great lawgiver of the Jews 
 the unconditional words of tne two first command- 
 ments the magnificent thunderings and lightnings 
 upon the primal question, in the twenty-eighth chapter 
 of Deuteronomy, (which is the most awful peroration 
 to a long series of prophetic comminations that exists 
 even in the Hebrew literature ;) or to adduce the end- 
 less testimonies to the same effect, so unvarying, so 
 profound, from all the Hebrew saints, beginning with 
 Abraham and ending witt the vrophets, through u 
 aeriod of fifteen hundred years.
 
 [02 THE ESSENES. 
 
 Tliis is not wanted : this would be superfluous. But 
 there is an evasion open to an apologist of Josephus, 
 which might place the question upon a more casuist- 
 ical footing. And there is also a colorable vindica- 
 tion of the doctrine in its very worst shape, viz., in 
 one solitary text of the English Bible, according to 
 our received translation. To this latter argument, the 
 answer is first, that the word gods is there amis- 
 translation of an Oriental expression for princes ; sec- 
 ondly, that an argument from an English version of 
 the Scriptures, can be none for a Jew, writing A. D. 
 70 ; thirdly, that if a word, a phrase, an idiom, could 
 be alleged from any ancient and contemporary Jewish 
 Scripture, what is one word against a thousand 
 against the whole current (letter and spirit) of the 
 Hebrew oracles ; what, any possible verbal argument 
 against that which is involved in the acts, the monu- 
 ments, the sacred records of the Jewish people ? But 
 this mode of defence for Josephus, will scarcely be 
 adopted. It is the amended form of his doctrine 
 which will be thought open to apology. Many will 
 think that it is not the worship of false gods which the 
 Jew palliates, but simply a decent exterior of respect 
 to their ceremonies, their ministers, their altars : and 
 this view of his meaning might raise a new and large 
 question. 
 
 This question, however, in its modern shape, is 
 nothing at all to us, when applying ourselves to Jose- 
 phus. The precedents from Hebrew antiquity show 
 as, that not merely no respect, no lip honor, was con 
 reded to false forms of religion ; but no toleration not 
 me shadow of toleration: 'Thine eye shall not spare 
 \hern.' And we must all be sure that toleration is i
 
 THE ESSENES. 103 
 
 rery different thing indeed when applied to varieties of 
 a creed essentially the same toleration as existing 
 amongst us people of Christendom, or even when 
 applied to African and Polynesian idolatries, so long 
 as we all know that the citadel of truth is safe, from 
 the toleration applied in an age when the pure faith 
 formed a little island of light in a world of darkness. 
 Intolerance the most ferocious may have been among 
 che sublimest of duties when the truth was so intensely 
 concentrated, and so intensely militant ; all advantages 
 barely sufficing to pass down the lamp of religion 
 from one generation to the next. The contest waa 
 for an interest then riding at single anchor. This is a 
 very possible case to the understanding. And that it 
 was in fact the real case, so that no compromise with 
 idolatry could be suffered for a moment ; that the Jews 
 were called upon to scoff at idolatry, and spit upon it ; 
 to trample it under their feet as the spreading pesti- 
 lence which would taint the whole race of man irre- 
 trievably, unless defeated and strangled by them, seems 
 probable in the highest degree, from the examples of 
 greatest sanctity amongst the Jewish inspired writers. 
 Who can forget the blasting mockery with which 
 Elijah overwhelms the prophets of Baal the great- 
 sst of the false deities, Syrian or Assyrian, whose 
 worship had spread even to the Druids of the Western 
 islands ? Or the withering scorn with which Isaiah 
 pursues the whole economy of idolatrous worship ? 
 how he represents a man as summoning the carpen- 
 ter and the blacksmith ; as cutting down a tree of his 
 own planting and rearing ; part he applies as fuel, part 
 .o culinary purposes ; and then having satisfied the 
 meanest of his animal necessitias what will he dc
 
 1Q4 TIIH ESSEXES. 
 
 with the refuse, with the offal ? Behold v of the 
 residue he maketh himself a god ? ' Or again, who 
 can forget the fierce stream of ridicule, like a flame 
 driven through a blowpipe, which Jeremiah forces 
 with his whole afflatus upon the process of idol manu- 
 facturing ? The workman's part is described as un- 
 exceptionable : he plates it with silver and with gold : 
 he rivets it with nails ; it is delivered to order, true 
 and in workmanlike style, so that as a figure, as a 
 counterfeit, if counterfeits might avail, it is perfect. 
 But then, on examination, the prophet detects over- 
 sights : it cannot speak ; the breath of life has been 
 overlooked ; reason is omitted ; pulsation has been 
 left out ; motion has been forgotten it must be 
 carried, ' for it cannot go.' Here, suddenly, as if a 
 semichorus stepped in, with a moment's recoil of feel- 
 ing, a movement of pity speaks, ' Be not afraid of 
 them, for they cannot do evil ; neither also is it in 
 them to do any good.' But in an instant the recoil is 
 compensated : an overwhelming reaction of scorn 
 comes back, as with the reflux of a tide ; and a full 
 chorus seems to exclaim, with the prophet's voice, 
 ' They (viz. the heathen deities) are altogethei brutish 
 and foolish ; the stock is a doctrine of vanities.' 
 
 What need, after such passages, to quote the express 
 Injunction from Isaiah, (chap. xxx. 21, 22,) ' And 
 ihine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This 
 js the way ; walk ye in it : Ye shall defile the covering 
 of the graven images, &c. ; ye shall cast them away 
 as a polluted cloth ' ? Or this, (chap. xlii. 8,) ' I am 
 *he Lord ; that is my name : and my glory will I not 
 give to another ; neither my praise to graven images ' 
 Onco for all, if a man would satisfy himself upon thi*
 
 THE ESSEXES. 105 
 
 question of possible compromises with idolatry, let him 
 run over the eleven chapters of Jeremiah, from the 
 tenth to the twentieth inclusive. The whole sad train 
 of Jewish sufferings, all the vast equipage of woes and 
 captivities that were to pursue them through so many 
 a weary century, are there charged upon that one re- 
 bellion of idolatry, which Josephus would havs us 
 believe not only to be privileged, but (and that is the 
 reason that we call him a miscreant) would have us 
 believe to have been promoted by a collusion emanat- 
 ing from God. In fact, if once it had been said auther - 
 tically, Pay an outward homage to the Pagan Pantheon, 
 but keep your hearts from going along with it then, 
 in that countenance to idolatry as a sufferable thing, 
 and in that commendation of it to the forbearance and 
 indulgence of men, would have lurked every advantage 
 that polytheism could have desired for breaking down 
 the total barriers of truth. 
 
 Josephus, therefore, will be given up to reprobation ; 
 apologist he will find none ; he will be abandoned as 
 a profligate renegade, who, having sold his country out 
 of fear and avarice, having sold himself, sold also his 
 eligion, and his religion not simply in the sense of 
 celling his individual share in its hopes, but who sold 
 bis religion in the sense of giving it up to be polluted 
 in its doctrine for the accommodation of its Pagan 
 enemies. 
 
 VI. But, even after all this is said, there are othei 
 aggravations of this Jew's crimes. One of these, though 
 hurrying, we will pause to state. The founder of the 
 Jewish faith foresaw a certain special seduction certain 
 V beset its professors in every age. But how and
 
 106 THE ESSENES. 
 
 through what avenues ? Was it chiefly thrcragh the 
 base and mercenary propensities of human nature that 
 the peril lay ? No ; but through its gentleness, its 
 goodness, its gracious spirit of courtesy. And in that 
 direction it was that the lawgiver applied his warnings 
 and his resistance. What more natural than that an 
 idolatrous wife should honor the religious rites whicb 
 he had seen honored by her parents ? What more 
 essential to the dignity of marriage, than that a husband 
 should show a leaning to the opinions and the wishes 
 of his wife ? It was seen that this condition of things 
 would lead to a collision of feelings not salutary for 
 man. The condition was too full of strife, if you sup- 
 pose the man strong of temptation, if you supper 
 him weak. How, therefore, was the casuistry of such 
 a situation practically met ? By a prohibition of mar- 
 riages between Jews and pagans ; after which, if a 
 man were to have pleaded his conjugal affection in 
 palliation of idolatrous compliances, it would have been 
 answered ' It is a palliation ; but for an error com- 
 mitted in consequence of such a connection. Your 
 error was different ; it commenced from a higher point ; 
 it commenced in seeking for a connection which had 
 been prohibited as a snare.' Thus it was that the 
 ' wisest heart ' of Solomon was led astray. And thus 
 it was in every idolatrous lapse of the Jews ; they 
 fell by these prohibited connections. Through that 
 channel it was, through the goodness and courtesy of 
 Jhe human heart, that the Jewish law looked for its 
 dangers, and provided for them. But the treason of 
 Josephus came through no such generous cause. It 
 .lad its origin in servile fear, self-interest the mos. 
 mercenary, cunning the most wily. Joseph us arguec
 
 THE ESSENES. 107 
 
 arith himself that the peculiar rancor of the Roman 
 mind towards the Jews had taken its rise in religion. 
 The bigotry of the Jews, for so it was construed by 
 those who couid not comprehend any possible ground 
 of distinction in the Jewish God, produced a reaction 
 of Roman bigotry. Once, by a sudden movement of 
 condescension, the Senate and people of Rome had 
 been willing to make room for Jehovah as an assessor 
 to their own Capitoline Jove. This being declined, it 
 was supposed at first that the overture was too over~ 
 whelming to the conscious humility of Judea. TL*3 
 truth neither was comprehended, nor could be com- 
 prehended, that this miserable Palestine, a dark speck 
 in the blazing orb of the Roman empire, had declined 
 the union upon any principle of superiority. But all 
 things became known in time. This also became 
 known ; and the delirious passion of scorn, retorting 
 scorn, was certainly never, before or since, exempli- 
 fied on the same scale. Josephus, therefore, profoundly 
 aware of the Roman feeling, sets himself, in this au- 
 dacious falsehood, to propitiate the jealousy so wide 
 tiwake, and the pride which had been so much irritated. 
 You have been misinformed, he tells the Romans ; we 
 have none of that gloomy unsociality which is imputed 
 to us. It is not true that we despise alien gods. We 
 do not worship, but we venerate Jupiter. Our law- 
 giver commanded us to do so. Josephus hoped in this 
 vay to soothe the angry wounds of the Roman spirit. 
 But it is certain that, even for a moment, he could not 
 have succeeded. His countrymen of Jerusalem could 
 not expose him ; they had perished. Bu* there were 
 many myriads of his countrymen spread over the fac 
 f the world, who would contradict ev?ry word thaf
 
 108 THE ESSENES. 
 
 any equivocating Jew might write- And this treacherj 
 of Josephus, therefore, to the very primal injunction of 
 his native law, must have been as useless in the tven. 
 as it was base in the purpose. 
 
 VII. Now, therefore, we may ask, was there ever a 
 more abject perfidy committed than this which we have 
 exposed this deliberate surrender, for a selfish object, 
 of the supremacy and unity in the Jehovah of the Jews 
 
 this solemn renunciation of that law and its integrity, 
 in maintenance of which seventy generations of Jews, 
 including weak women and children, have endured the 
 penalties of a dispersion and a humiliation more bittet 
 by many degrees than death ? Weighing the grounds 
 of comparison, was a viler treason ever perpetrated ' 
 We take upon ourselves to say No. And yet, ever 
 in treason there is sometimes a dignity. It is by possi- 
 bility a bold act, a perilous act. Even in this case 
 though it will hardly be thought such, the treason of 
 Josephus might have been dangerous : it was certain!'- 
 committed under terror of the Roman sword, but i < 
 might have been avenged by the Jewish dagger. Ha.l 
 t. written book in those days been as much a publica- 
 tion of a man's words as it is now, Josephus would 
 not long have survived that sentence of his Antiquities. 
 This danger gives a shadow of respectability to that 
 act of Josephus. And therefore, when it is asked 
 can a viler act be cited from history ? we now ansvrer 
 
 yes : there is one even viler. And by whom cc-m- 
 nitted ? By Josephus. Listen, reader. 
 
 The overthrow of his country was made the MJ ject 
 af a Roman triumph of a triumph in wulc.i hii 
 Datrons, Vespasian and his two sons. figurM u th
 
 THE ESSENES. 109 
 
 eentres of the public honor. Judea, with her banners 
 trailing in the dust, was on this day to be carried cap- 
 tive. The Jew attended with an obsequious face, 
 dressed in courtly smiles. The prisoners, who are to 
 die by the executioner when the pomp shall have 
 reached the summit of the hill,* pass by in chains. 
 What is their crime? They have fought like brave 
 men for that dear country which the base spectator has 
 sold for a bribe. Josephus, the prosperous renegade, 
 laughs as he sees them, and hugs himself on his 
 cunning. Suddenly a tumult is seen in the advancing 
 crowds what is it that stirs them ? It is the sword 
 of the Maccabees : it is the image of Judas Maccabaeus, 
 the warrior Jew, and of his unconquerable brothers. 
 Josephus grins with admiration of the jewelled trophies. 
 Next but what shout is that which tore the very 
 heavens ? . The abomination of desolation is passing 
 by the Law and the Prophets, surmounted by Capi- 
 toline Jove, vibrating his pagan thunderbolts. Judea, in 
 the form of a lady, sitting beneath her palms Judea, 
 with her head muffled in her robe, speechless, sightless, 
 is carried past. And what does the Jew? He sits, 
 like a modern reporter for a newspaper, taking notes 
 of the circumstantial features in this unparalleled scene 
 delighted as a child at a puppet-show, and finally 
 weaves the whole into a picturesque narrative. The 
 apologist must not think to evade the effect upon all 
 honoraoie minds by supposing the case that the Jew's 
 presence at this scene of triumph over his ruined 
 country, and his subsequent record of its circumstances, 
 uiight be a movement of frantic passion bent on 
 mowing the worst, bent on drinking up the cup of 
 Degradation to the very last drop. No, no ; this escape
 
 110 THE ESSENES. 
 
 is not open. The description itself remains to this 
 hour in attestation of the astounding fact, that this 
 accursed Jew surveyed the closing scene in the great 
 agonies of Jerusalem not with any thought for its 
 frenzy, for its anguish, for its despair, but absorbed in 
 the luxury of its bea*uty, and with a single eye for its 
 purple and gold. * Off, off, sir ! ' would be the cry 
 to such a wretch in any age of the world : to ' spit upon 
 his Jewish gaberdine,' would be the wish of every 
 honest man. Nor is there any thoughtful person who 
 will allege that such another case exists. Traitors 
 there have been many: and perhaps traitors who, 
 trusting to the extinction of all their comrades, might 
 have had courage to record their treasons. But cer- 
 tainly there is no other person known to history who 
 did, and who proclaimed that he did, sit as a volunteer 
 spectator of his buried country carried past in effigy, 
 confounded with a vast carnival of rejoicing mobs and 
 armies, echoing their jubilant outcries, and pampering 
 bis eyes with ivory and gold, with spoils, and with 
 captives, torn from the funeral pangs of his country. 
 That case is unique, without a copy, without a precedent. 
 So much for Josephus. We have thought it neces- 
 sary to destroy that man's character, on the principles 
 of a king's ship in levelling bulkheads and partitions 
 whep clearing for action. Such a course is requisite* 
 for a perfect freedom of motion. Were Josephus 
 trustworthy, he would sometimes prove an impediment 
 in the way of our views : and it is because he has been 
 too carelessly received as trustworthy, that more accu- 
 rate glimpses have not been obtained of Jewish affairs 
 in more instances than one. Let the reader understand 
 ilso that, as regards the Essenes, Josephus is not trust
 
 7 BE ESSENES. Ill 
 
 worthy on a double reason ; first, on account of his 
 perfidy, as now sufficiently exposed, which too often 
 interfered to make secondary perfidies requisite, by way 
 of calling off the field of hunters from his own traces 
 in the first ; secondly, because his peculiar situation as 
 a Pharisaic doctor of the law, combined with his char- 
 acter, (which surely could 'not entirely have concealed 
 itself in any stage of his public life,) must hav,e made 
 it necessary for the Essenes to trust him very cautious- 
 ly, and never to any extent that might have been irre- 
 trievable in the event of his turning informer. The 
 Essenes, at all events, had some secret to guard ; in 
 any case, therefore, they were responsible for the lives 
 of all their members, so far as they could be effected 
 by confidences reposed ; and, if that secret happened 
 to be Christianity, then were they trebly bound to care 
 and jealousy, for that secret involved not only many 
 lives, but a mighty interest of human nature, so that a 
 single instance of carelessness might be the most awful 
 of crimes. Hence we understand at once why it is 
 that Josephus never advanced beyond the lowest rank 
 in the secret society of the Essenes. His worldly 
 character, his duplicity, his weakness, were easily 
 discerned by the eagle-eyed fathers of Christianity. 
 Consequently, he must be viewed as under a perpetua. 
 surveillance from what may be called the police of 
 history liable to suspicion as one who had a frequent 
 interest in falsehood, in order to screen himself; sec- 
 ondly, as one liable to unintentional falsehood, from 
 the indisposition to trust him. Having now extracted 
 the poison-fangs from the Jewish nistorian, we will 
 take a further notice of his history in relation to the 
 Esaenes in Part III.
 
 112 THE ESSENES. 
 
 PART III. 
 
 The secret history of Judea, through the two gene* 
 rations preceding the destruction of Jerusalem, might 
 yet be illuminated a little better than it has been by 
 Josephus. It would, however, require a separate paper 
 for itself. At present we shall take but a slight glance 
 or two .at that subject, and merely in reference to the 
 Essenes. Nothing shows the crooked conduct of Jose- 
 phus so much as the utter perplexity, the mere laby- 
 rinth of doubts, in which he has involved the capital 
 features of the last Je wish war. Two points only we 
 notice, for their connection with the Essenes. 
 
 First, What was the cause, the outstanding pretext, 
 on either side, for the Jewish insurrectionary war? 
 We know well what were the real impulses to that 
 war; but what was the capital and overt act on either 
 side which forced the Jewish irritation into a hopeless 
 contest ? What was the ostensible ground alleged for 
 the war? 
 
 Josephus durst not have told, had he known. He 
 must have given a Roman, an ex parte statement, at 
 any rate ; and let that consideration never be lost sight 
 of in taking his evidence. He might blame a particu- 
 lar Roman, such as Gessius Florus, because he found 
 \,hat Romans themselves condemned him. He might 
 vaunt his veracity and his naQQijota in a little corner of 
 the general story ; but durst he speak plainly on the 
 broad field of Judaean politics ? Not for his life. Or, 
 had the Roman magnanimity taken off his shackles, 
 what becams of his court favor and preferment, in case 
 be spoke freely of Roman policy as a system ? 
 
 Hence it is that Josephus shuffles so miserably when
 
 THE ESSENES. 113 
 
 attempting to assign the cause or causes of the war. 
 Four different causes he assigns in different places, not 
 one of which is other than itself an effect from higher 
 causes, and a mere symptom of the convulsions work- 
 ing Below. For instance, the obstinate withdrawal of 
 the daily sacrifice offered for Caesar, which is one of 
 the causes alleged, could not have occurred until the 
 real and deep-seated causes of that war had operated 
 on the general temper for some time. It was a public 
 insult to Rome : would have occasioned a demand for 
 explanation : would have been revoked : the immedi- 
 ate author punished : and all would have subsided into 
 a personal affair, had it not been supported by exten- 
 sive combinations below the surface, which could no 
 longer be suppressed. Into them we are not going to 
 enter. We wish only to fix attention upon the igno- 
 rance of Josephus, whether unaffected in this instance, 
 or assumed for the sake of disguising truths unaccept- 
 able to Roman ears. 
 
 The question of itself has much to do with the 
 origin of the Essenes. 
 
 Secondly, Who were those Sicarii of whom Jose- 
 |>hu8 talks so much during the latter years of Jerusa- 
 lem ? Can any man believe so monstrous a fable as 
 this, viz. that not one, but thousands of men were con- 
 federated for purposes of murder ; 2dly, of murder not 
 interested in its own success murder not directed 
 against any known determinate objects, but murder 
 indiscriminate, secret, objectless, what a lawyer might 
 call homicidium vagum ; 3dly, that this confederacy 
 hould subsist for years, should levy war, should en- 
 trench itself in fortresses ; 4thly, (whirh is more in- 
 omprehensible than all the rest,) shotild talk and
 
 t!4 THE ESSENES. 
 
 harangue in the spirit of sublime martyrdom to some 
 holy interest ; Sthly, should breathe the same spirit 
 into women and little children ; and finally, that all, 
 with one accord, rather than submit to foreign con- 
 quest, should choose to die in one hour, from the old- 
 est to the youngest ? Such a tale in its outset, in the 
 preliminary confederation, is a tale of ogres and 
 ogresses, not of human creatures trained under a divine 
 law to a profound sense of accountability. Such a 
 tale, in its latter sections, is a tale of martyrs more 
 tban human. Such a tale, as a whole, is self-contra- 
 dictory. A vile purpose makes vile all those that 
 pursue it. Even the East Indian Thugs are not con- 
 gregated by families. It is much if ten thousand fami- 
 lies furnish one Thug. And as to the results of such 
 a league, is it possible that a zealous purpose of murder 
 
 of murder for the sake of murder, should end in 
 nobility of spirit so eminent, that nothing in Christian 
 martyrdoms goes beyond the extremity of self-sacrific 
 which even their enemies have granted to the Sicarv ! 
 
 Whose courage,' (we are quoting from the bitterest 
 of enemies,) ' whose courage, or shall we call it mad- 
 ness, everybody was amazed at ; for, when all sorts of 
 torments that could be imagined were applied to their 
 bodies, not one of them would comply so far as to 
 confess, or seem to confess, that Caesar was their lord 
 
 as if they received those torments, and the very 
 fury of the furnace which burned them to ashes, with 
 bodies that were insensible and with souls that exceed- 
 ingly rejoiced. But what most of all astonished the 
 beholders was the courage of the children ; for not 
 one of all these children was so far subdued by tbf 
 torments it endured, as to confess Caesar for its lord.
 
 THE ESSENE3. 115 
 
 Such a marvellous thing for endurance is the tender 
 ind delicate body of man, when supported by an un- 
 conquerable soul ! ' 
 
 No, no, reader, there is villany at work in this whole 
 story about the Sicarii. We are duped, we are cheat- 
 ed, we are mocked. Felony, conscious murder, never 
 in this world led to such results as these. Conscience 
 it was, that must have acted here. No power short of 
 that, ever sustained frail women and children in such 
 fiery trials. A conscience it may have been erring in 
 its principles ; but those principles must have been 
 divine. Resting on any confidence less than that, the 
 resolution of women and children so tried must have 
 given way. Here, too, evidently, we have the genuine 
 temper of the Maccabees, struggling and suffering in 
 the same spirit and with the same ultimate hopes. 
 
 After what has been exposed with regard to Jose- 
 phus, we presume that his testimony against the Sicarii 
 will go for little. That man may readily be supposed 
 to have borne false witness against his brethren who 
 is proved to have borne false witness against God. 
 Him, therefore, or anything that he can say, we set 
 vide. But as all is still dark about the Sicarii, we 
 shall endeavor to trace their real position in the Jewish 
 war. For merely to prove that they have been calum- 
 niated does not remove the cloud that rests upon their 
 history. That, indeed, cannot be removed at this day 
 in a manner satisfactory ; but we see enough to indi- 
 cate the purity of their intentions. And, with respect 
 to their enemy Josephus, let us remember one fact, 
 which merely the want of a personal interest in the 
 question has permitted to lie so long in the shade, viz. 
 that three distinct causes made it really impossible for
 
 116 THE ESSENES. 
 
 that man to speak the truth. First, his o\vn partisan- 
 ship : having adopted one faction, he was bound to 
 regard all others as wrong and hostile : Secondly, his 
 captivity and interest : in what regarded the merits 
 of the cause, a Roman prisoner durst not have spoken 
 the truth. These causes of distortion or falsehood in 
 giving that history would apply even to honest men, 
 unless with their honesty they combined a spirit of 
 martyrdom. But there was a third cause peculiar to 
 the position of Josephus, viz. conscious guilt and shame. 
 He could not admit others to have been right but iu 
 words that would have confounded himself. If they 
 were not mad, he was a poltroon : if they had done 
 their duty as patriots, then was he a traitor; if they 
 were not frantic, then was Josephus an apostate. This 
 was a logic which required no subtle dialectician to 
 point and enforce : simply the narrative, if kept steady 
 to the fact and faithful, must silently suggest that con- 
 clusion to everybody. And for that reason, had there 
 been no other, it was not steady ; for that reason it was 
 not faithful. Now let us turn to the Sicarii. Who 
 were they? 
 
 Thirdly, It is a step towards the answer if we ask 
 previously, Who were the Galileans 1 Many people 
 read Josephus under the impression that, of course, 
 this term designates merely the inhabitants of the two 
 Galilees. We, by diligent collation of passages, have 
 convinced ourselves that it does not it means a 
 particular faction in Jewish politics. And, which is 8 
 fact already noticed by Eusebius, it often includes 
 many of the new Christian sect. But this requires an 
 explanation. 
 
 Strange it seems to us that men should overlook so
 
 THE ESSENES. 117 
 
 obvious a truth as that in every age Christianity must 
 have counted amongst it nominal adherents the erring 
 believer, the partial believer, the wavering believer, 
 equally with the true, the spiritual, the entire, and the 
 steadfast believer. What sort of believers were those 
 who would have taken Christ and forcibly made him a 
 king ? Erroneous believers, it must be admitted ; but 
 *till in some points, partially and. obscurely, they must 
 have been powerfully impressed by the truth which 
 they had heard from Christ. Many of these might 
 fall away when that personal impression was with- 
 drawn ; but many must have survived all hinderances 
 and obstacles. Semi- Christians there must always 
 have been in great numbers. Those who were such 
 in a merely religious view we believe to have been 
 called Nazarenes ; those in whom the political aspects, 
 at first universally ascribed to Christianity, happened 
 to predominate, were known by the more general 
 name of Galileans. This name expressed in its fore- 
 most element, opposition to the Romans-; in its sec- 
 ondary element, Christianity. And its rise may be 
 traced thus : 
 
 Whoever would thoroughly investigate the very 
 complex condition of Palestine in our Saviour's days, 
 must go back to Herod the Great. This man, by his 
 peculiar policy and his power, stood between the Jews 
 and the Romans as a sort of Janus, or indifferent 
 mediator. Any measure which Roman ignorance 
 would have inflicted, unmodified, on the rawest con- 
 dition of Jewish bigotry, he contrived to have tem- 
 pered and qualified. For his own interest, and not 
 with any more generous purpose, he screened from 
 the Romans various ebullitions of Jewish refractori-
 
 l!8 THE ESSENES. 
 
 ness, and from the Jews he screened all accurate 
 knowledge of the probable Roman intentions. But 
 after his death, and precisely during the course of our 
 Saviour's life, these intentions transpired : reciprocal 
 knowledge and menaces were exchanged ; and the 
 elements of insurrection began to mould themselves 
 silently, but not steadily ; for the agitation was great 
 and increasing as the crisis seemed to approach. 
 Herod the Great, as a vigorous prince, and very rich, 
 might possibly have maintained the equilibrium, had 
 he lived. But this is doubtful. In his old age various 
 events had combined to shake his authority, viz., the 
 tragedies in his own family, and especially the death 
 of Mariamne ; 2 by which, like Ferdinand of Aragon, 
 or our Henry VII., under the same circumstances, he 
 seemed in law to lose his title to the throne. But, 
 above all, his compliance with idolatry, (according to 
 the Jewish interpretation,) in setting up the golden 
 eagle by way of homage to Rome, gave a shock to 
 his authority that never could have been healed. Out 
 of the affair of the golden eagle grew, as we are 
 persuaded, the sect of the Herodians those who 
 justified a compromising spirit of dealing with the 
 Romans. This threw off, as its anti-pole, a sect furi- 
 ously opposed to the Romans. That sect, under the 
 management of Judas, (otherwise called Theudas,) ex- 
 panded greatly ; he was a Galilean, and the sect wer 
 therefore naturally called Galileans. Into this main 
 ea of Jewish nationality emptied themselves all other 
 k*ss powerful sects that, under any modification, 
 avowed an anti-Roman spirit. The religious feet of 
 lh.e Christians was from the first caught and hurriet 
 away into this overmastering vo-t;ex. No matter tba
 
 THE ESSENES. 119 
 
 Christ lost no opportunity of teaching that his kingdom 
 was not of this world. Did he not preach a new 
 salvation to the House of Israel ? Where could that 
 lie but through resistance to Rome? His followers 
 resolved to place him at their head as a King ; and his 
 crucifixion in those stormy times was certainly much 
 influenced by the belief that, as the object of political 
 attachment, he had become dangerous whether sanc- 
 tioning that attachment or not. 
 
 Out of this sect of Galileans, comprehending all 
 who avowed a Jewish nationality, (and therefore many 
 semi-Christians, that is, men who, in a popular sense, 
 and under whatever view, had professed to follow 
 Christ,) arose the sect of Sicarii that is, out of a 
 vast multitude professing good-will to the service, 
 these men separated themselves as the men of action, 
 the executive ministers, the self- devoting soldiers. 
 This is no conjecturei It happens that Josephus, who 
 had kept us in the dark about these Sicarii in that part 
 of his narrative which most required some clue to 
 their purposes, afterwards forgets himself, and inci- 
 dentally betrays [TFars, B. vii. chap. 8, sect. 1] that 
 the Sicarii had originally been an offset from the sect 
 founded by Judas the Galilean ; that their general 
 purpose was the same ; so that, no doubt, it was a 
 lew feature of the time giving a new momentary 
 vlirection to the efforts of the patriotic which had 
 constituted the distinction and which authorized the 
 denomination. Was Miltiades wrong ? Was Tell 
 wrong ? Was Wallace wrong . Then, but not else, 
 were the Galileans ; and from them the Sicarii proba- 
 bably differed only as the brave doer differs from the 
 just thinker. But i,ae Sicdrii, you will say, used
 
 [20 THE ESSENES, 
 
 unhallowed means. Probably not. We do not know 
 what means they used, except most indistinctly fron*. 
 theii base and rancorous enemy. The truth, so far as 
 it can be descried through the dust of ages and the 
 fury of partisanship, appears to be, that, at a moment 
 when law slumbered and police was inefficient, they 
 assumed the duties of resistance to a tyranny which 
 even the Roman apologist admits to have been insuf- 
 ferable. They are not heard of as actors until the 
 time when Gessius Florus, by opening the floodgates 
 to military insolence, had himself given a license to 
 an armed reaction. Where justice was sought in vain., 
 probably the Sicarii showed themselves as ministers of 
 a sudden retribution. When the vilest outrages were 
 offered by foreigners to their women, probably thev 
 1 visited ' for such atrocities. That state of things, 
 which caused the tribunal to slumber, privileged the. 
 individual to awake. And in a 'land whose inspired 
 monuments recorded for everlasting praise the acts of 
 Judith, of Samson, of Judas Maccabseus, these sum- 
 mary avengers, the Sicarii, might reasonably conceive 
 that they held the same heavenly commission under 
 the same earthly oppression. 
 
 Reviewing the whole of that calamitous period, 
 combining the scattered notices of the men and their 
 acts, and the reflections of both thrown back from 
 the mirrors offered to us by the measures of counter- 
 action adopted at the time, we have little doubt that 
 the Sicarii and the Zealots were both offsets from 
 the same great sect of the Galileans, and that in an 
 imperfect sense, or by tendency, all were Christians , 
 whence partly the re-infusion of the ancient Jewisb 
 spirit into their acts and counsels and indomitable 
 resolution.
 
 THE ESSENES. 121 
 
 But also we believe that this very political leaven it 
 tfas, as dispersed through the body of the Galileans, 
 which led to the projection from the main body of a 
 new order called the Essenes ; this political taint, that 
 is to say, combined with the danger of professing a 
 proselytizing Christianity. In that anarchy, which 
 through the latter years of Nero covered Judea as with 
 the atmosphere of hell, the Christian fathers saw the 
 necessity of separating themselves from these children 
 of violence. They might be right politically and 
 certainly they began in patriotism but too often th 
 apprehensive consciences of Christians recoiled from 
 the vengeance in which they ended. By tolerating the 
 belief that they countenanced the Galileans or Sicarii, 
 the primitive Church felt that she would be making 
 herself a party to their actions often bloody and 
 vindictive, and sometimes questionable on any princi- 
 ples, since private enmities would too easily mingle 
 with public motives, and if right, would be right in an 
 earthly sense. But the persecution which arose at 
 Jerusalem would strengthen these conscientious scruples 
 by others of urgent prudence. A sect that prosely- 
 tized was at any rate a hazardous sect in Judea ; and 
 a sect that had drawn upon itself persecution, mast 
 have felt a triple summons to the instant assumption oi 
 a disguise. 
 
 Upon this warning, we may suppose, arose the 
 secret society of the Essenes ; and its organization 
 was most artful. In fact, the relations of Judaism to 
 Christianity furnished a means of concealment such as 
 could not have otherwise existed without positive deceit. 
 By arranging four concentric circles about one mys- 
 erious centre by suffering no advances to be made
 
 122 THE ESSENES. 
 
 from the outside to the innermost ring but through 
 years of probation, through multiplied trials of temper, 
 multiplied obligations upon the conscience to secrecy, 
 the Christian fathers were enabled to lead men ou- 
 wards insensibly from intense Judaic bigotry to the 
 purest form of Christianity. The outermost circle 
 received those candidates only whose zeal for rigorous 
 Judaism argued a hatred of pagan corruptions, and 
 therefore gave some pledge for religious fervor. In 
 this rank of novices no ray of light broke out from the 
 centre no suspicion of any alien doctrine dawned 
 upon t hem : all was Judaic, and the whole Mosaic the- 
 ology was cultivated alike. This we call the ultimate 
 rank. Next, in the penultimate rank, the eye was fa- 
 miliarized with the prophecies respecting the Messiah, 
 and somewhat exclusively pointed to that doctrine, and 
 such other doctrines in the Mosaic scheme as express 
 an imperfection, a tendency, a call for an integration. 
 In the third, or antepenultimate rank, the attention was 
 trained to the general characters of the Messiah, as 
 likely to be realized in some personal manifestation ; 
 wid a question was raised, as if for investigation, in 
 what degree these characters met and were exempli- 
 fied in the mysterious person who had so lately 
 engaged the earnest attention of all Palestine. He 
 had assumed the office of Messiah : he had suffered 
 for that assumption at Jerusalem. By what evidences 
 was it ascertained, in a way satisfactory to just men, 
 that he was not the Messiah ? Many points, it would 
 be urged as by way of unwilling concession, did cer- 
 tainly correspond between the mysterious persjn and 
 iie prophetic delineation of the idea. Thus far ic 
 suspicion has been suffered to reach the discipl^, thaS
 
 THE ESSENES. J 9 
 
 AC is now rapidly aproaching to a .orrent that will 
 luck him into a new faith. Nothii g has transpired 
 which can have shocked the most angry Jewish fanati- 
 cism. And yet all is ready for the great transition. 
 But at this point comes the last crisis for the aspirant. 
 Under color of disputing the claims of Christ, the 
 disciple has heen brought acquainted with the whole 
 mystery of the Christian theory. If his heart is good 
 and true, he has manifested hy this time such a sense 
 of the radiant beauty which has been gradually un- 
 veiJed, that he reveals his own trustworthiness. If he 
 retains his scowling bigotry, the consistory at the 
 centre are warned, and trust him no farther. He is 
 excluded from the inner ranks, and is reconciled to the 
 exclusion (or, if not, is turned aside from suspicion) 
 by the impression conveyed to him, that these central 
 ranks are merely the governing ranks, highest in 
 power, but not otherwise distinguished in point of 
 doctrine. 
 
 Thus, though all is true from first to last, from centre 
 to circumference though nothing is ever taught but 
 the truth yet, by the simple precaution of gradua- 
 tion, and of not teaching everywhere the whole truth 
 in the very midst of truth the most heavenly, were 
 attained all the purposes of deceit the most earthly. 
 The case was as though the color of blue were a pro- 
 hibited and a dangerous color. But upon a suggestion 
 that yellow is a most popular color, and green tole- 
 rated, whilst the tw ) extremes of blue and yellow are 
 both blended and confounded in green, this last is 
 elected for the middle rank ; and then breaking it up 
 by insensible degradations irto the blue tints towards 
 ,bp interior, and the ycllo'v to warns the outermost
 
 124 TUB ESSENES. 
 
 rings, the case is so managed as to present the fuli 
 popular yellow at the outside, and the celestial blue at 
 the hidden centre. 
 
 Such was the constitution of the Essenes ; in which, 
 however, the reader must not overlook one fact, that, 
 because the danger of Christianity as a religious pro- 
 fession was confined, during the Epichristian age, to 
 Judea, therefore the order of the Essenes was confined 
 to that region ; and that in the extra-Syrian churches, 
 the Christians of Palestine were known simply as the 
 Brethren of Jerusalem, of Sepphoris, &c., without 
 further designation or disguise. Let us now see, 
 having stated the particular circumstances in which this 
 disguise of a secret society called Essenes arose, what 
 further arguments can be traced for identifying these 
 Essenes with the Christians of Palestine. 
 
 We have already pursued the Essenes and the 
 Christians through ten features of agreement. Now 
 let us pursue them through a few others. And let the 
 logic of the parallel be kept steadily in view : above, 
 we show some characteristic reputed to be true of the 
 Essenes ; below, we show that this same characteristic. 
 is known from other sources to be true of the Chris- 
 tians. 
 
 No. I. TJie Essenes, according to Josephus, were 
 in the habit of prophesying. The only prophets 
 known in the days of the Apostles, and recognized as 
 such by the Christian writers, Agabus for instance, and 
 others, were Christians of the Christian brotherhood in 
 Judea. 
 
 ' And it is but seldom,' says Josephus, ' they miss in 
 their predictions. .' Josephus could not but have been
 
 THE ESSENES. 1 20 
 
 acquainted with this prophecy of Agabus too prac- 
 tical, too near, too urgent, too local, not to have rung 
 throughout Judea ; before the event, as a warning ; 
 after it, as a great pro-\ idential miracle. He must 
 therefore have considered Agabus as one of those people 
 whom he means by the term Essenes. Now we know 
 him for a Christian. Ergo, here is a case of identity 
 made out between a Christian, owned for such by the 
 Apostles, and one of the Essenes. 
 
 No. II. The Essenes particularly applied them- 
 selves to the study of medicine. This is very re- 
 markable in a sect like the Essenes, who, from their 
 rigorous habits of abstinence, must of all men have 
 had the least personal call for medicine ; but not at all 
 remarkable if the Essenes are identified with the 
 Christians. For, 
 
 1. Out of so small a number as four Evangelists, 
 one was a physician which shows at least the fact 
 that medicine was cultivated amongst the Christians. 
 But, 
 
 2. The reason of this will appear immediately in 
 the example left by Christ, and in the motives to that 
 example. 
 
 As to the example, at least nine in ten of Christ's 
 miracles were medical miracles miracles applied to 
 derangements of the human system. 
 
 As to the motives which governed our Saviour in 
 this particular choice, it would be truly ridiculous and 
 worthy of a modern utilitarian, to suppose that Christ, 
 would have suffered his time to be occupied, and the 
 great vision of his contemplations to be interrupted, 
 oy an employment so trifling, (trifling surely by com-
 
 126 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 parison with Lis transcendent purposes,) as the healing 
 of a few hundreds, more or less, in one small district 
 through one brief triennium. This healing office was 
 adopted, not chiefly for its own sake, but partly as a 
 symbolic annunciation of a superior healing, abun- 
 dantly significant to Oriental minds ; chiefly, however, 
 as the indispensable means, in an eastern land, of 
 adTertising his approach far and wide, and thus con- 
 voking the people by myriads to his instructions. 
 From Barbary to Hiadostan from the setting to the 
 rising sun it is notorious that no travelling character 
 is so certainly a safe one as that of hakim or physician. 
 As he advances on his route, the news fly before him ; 
 disease is evoked as by the rod of Amram's son ; the 
 beds of sick people, in every rank, are ranged along 
 the road-sides ; and the beneficent dispenser of health 
 or of relief moves through the prayers of hope on the 
 one side, and of gratitude on the other. Well may 
 the character be a protection : for not only is every 
 invalid in the land his friend from the first, but every 
 one who loves or pities an invalid. In fact, the char- 
 acter is too favorable, because it soon becomes burden- 
 some ; so that of late, in Afighanistan, Bokhara, dec., 
 Englishmen have declined its aid for inevitably it 
 impedes a man's progress ; and it exposes him to two 
 classes of applications, one embarrassing from the 
 extravagance of its expectations, (as that a man should 
 understand doubtful or elaborate symptoms at a glance,) 
 the other degrading to an Englishman's feelings, by 
 calling upon him for aphrodisiacs or other modes of 
 collusion with Oriental sensuality. This medica. 
 Character the Apostles and their delegates adopted 
 *sing it both as the trumpet o* 1 summons to some cen
 
 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 127 
 
 tral rendezvous, an'i also as the very best means of 
 opening the heart to religious influences the heart 
 softened already by suffering, turned inwards by soli- 
 tary musing ; or melted, perhaps, by relief from 
 anguish into fervent gratitude. This, upon consid 
 eration, we believe to have been the secret key to tha 
 apostolic meaning, in sending abroad the report that 
 they cultivated medicine. They became what so many 
 of us Englishmen have become in Oriental countries, 
 hakims ; and as with us, that character was assumed 
 as a disguise for ulterior purposes that could not have 
 been otherwise obtained 3 our purposes were liberal, 
 theirs divine. Therefore we conclude our argument 
 No. II. by saying, that this medical feature in the 
 Essenes is not only found in the Christians, but is fo'ind 
 radicated in the very constitution of that body, as a 
 proselytizing order, who could not dispense with 
 some excuse or other for assembling the people in 
 crowds. 
 
 No. III. The Essenes think that oil is a defilement. 
 So says Josephus, as one who stood in the outermost 
 rank of the order admitted to a knowledge of some 
 distinctions, but never to the secret meaning upon 
 which those distinctions turned. Now with respect to 
 this new characteristic, what is our logical duty ? It 
 f's our duty to show that the Essenes, supposing them 
 to be the latent Ch ristians, had a special motive for re- 
 acting oil ; wherers on any other assumption they had 
 lo such motive. And next, we will show that this 
 ipecial motive has sustained itself in the traditionary 
 usages of a remote posterity. 
 
 First of all, then, how came the Jews ever to use 01.
 
 128 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 at all for the purpose of anointing their persons : It was 
 adopted as a Grecian luxury, from their Grecian fellow- 
 townsmen in cities without number, under the Syro- 
 Macedonian kings. Not only in Syria proper, but in 
 many other territories adjacent to Judea, there were 
 cities like the two Csesareas, the maritime and the in- 
 land, which were divided between Greeks and Jews ; 
 from which equality of rights came feuds and dreadful 
 calamities in the end, but previously a strong contagion 
 of Grecian habits. Hence, in part, it arose that the 
 Jews in our Saviour's time were far from being that 
 simple people which they had been whilst insulated in 
 gloomy seclusion, or whilst associated only with mo- 
 notonous Oriental neighbors. Amongst other luxuries 
 which they had caught from their Grecian neighbors, 
 were those of the bath and the palaestra. But in Jeru- 
 salem, as the heart of Judea, 4 and the citadel of Jewish 
 principle, some front of resistance was still opposed to 
 these exotic habits. The language was one aid to this 
 resistance ; for elsewhere the Greek was gaining 
 ground, whilst here the corrupted Hebrew prevailed. 
 But a stronger repulsion to foreigners was the eternal 
 gloom of the public manners. No games in Jerusalem 
 no theatre no hippodrome ; for all these you must 
 go down to the seaside, where Caesarea, though built 
 by a Jew, and half-peopled by Jews, was the Roman 
 metropolis of Palestine, and with every sort of Roman 
 luxury. To this stern Jerusalem standard all Jews con- 
 formed in the proportion of their patriotism ; to Graecize 
 or not to Graecize had become a test of patriotic feel- 
 jig ; end thus far the Essenes had the same general 
 reasons as the Christians (supposing them two distinc' 
 rders of men) for setting their faces ajrainst the IUX.D.
 
 THE ESSEXES. 129 
 
 rious manners of the age. But if the Essenes were 
 Christians, then we infer that they nad a much stronger 
 and a special motive to all kinds of abstinence, from 
 che memorable charge of Christ to his evangelizing 
 disciples ; for which charge there was a double motive : 
 1st. To raise an ideal of abstinence ; 2d. To release 
 the disciple from all worldly cares, and concentrate his 
 thoughts upon his duty. Now, the Essenes, if Chris- 
 tine, stood precisely in that situation of evangelizers. 
 Even thus far, therefore, the Essenes, as Christians, 
 would have higher motives to abstinence than simply 
 as a sect of Jews ; yet still against oil, merely as a 
 mode of luxury, their reasons were no stronger than 
 against any luxury in any other shape. But a Chris- 
 tian of that day had a far more special restraint with 
 regard to the familiar use of oil not as a luxury, but 
 as a consecrated symbol, he regarded it with awe 
 oil was to him under a perpetual interdict. The very 
 name Christos, the anointed, gave in one instant an 
 inaugurating solemnity, a baptismal value, to the act 
 of anointing. Christians bearing in their very name 
 (though then, by the supposition, a ' secret name,') a 
 record and everlasting memorial of that chrism by 
 which their Founder was made the Anointed of God, 
 thought it little consistent with reverential feelings to 
 use that consecrated rite of anointing in the economy 
 of daily life. They abstained from this Grecian prac- 
 tise, therefore, not as the ignorant Jew imagines, from 
 despising it, but from too much revering it. The sym- 
 bolic meaning overpowered and eclipsed its natural 
 meaning ; and they abstained from the unction of the 
 ualaestra just as any man amongst ourselves, the' least 
 table to superstition, would (if he had any pious feol- 
 9
 
 130 THE ESSEXES. 
 
 ing at all) recoil from the use of sacramental vessels 
 in a service of common household life. 
 
 After this explanation of our view, we shall hardly 
 need to go forward in proof, that this sanctity of the 
 oil and of the anointing act has sustained itself in tra- 
 ditionary usages, and propagated its symbolic meaning 
 to a posterity far distant from the Essenes. The most 
 solemn of the ceremonies in the coronation of Chris- 
 tian kings is a memorial of this usage so reverentially 
 trealed by the Essenes. The affecting rite by which a 
 new-born stranger upon earth is introduced within the 
 fold of the Christian Church, is but the prolongation of 
 that ancient chrism. And so essential, in earlier ages, 
 was the presence of the holy Judaean oil used by the 
 first Christians, were it only to the amount of one soli- 
 tary drop, that volumes might be collected on the ex- 
 ertions made for tending the trees which produced it, 
 and if possible for multiplying or transplanting them. 
 Many eastern travellers in our own day, have given the 
 history of those consecrated trees, and their slow de- 
 clension to the present moment ; and to this hour, in 
 our London bills of mortality, there is one subdivision 
 headed, ' Chrysom children,' 5 which echoes from a 
 distance of almost two thousand years the very act and 
 ceremony which was surrounded with so much reve- 
 rence by the Essenes. 
 
 No. IV. The Essenes think it a thing of good 
 omen to be dressed in white roles. Yes ; here again 
 we find the external fact reported by Josephus, but 
 with his usual ignorance of its smybolic value, and the 
 ecret record which it involved. He does not pretenc 
 to ha re bnen more than a novice that is, at mos*
 
 THE ESSENES. 131 
 
 be had been admitted into the lowest or outermost 
 class, where no hint would be given of the Christian 
 mysteries that would open nearer to the centre. The 
 white robes were, of course, either the baptismal robes, 
 the albatcR vestes noticed in note (s), or some other 
 of the typical dresses assumed in different ranks and 
 situations by the primitive Christians. 
 
 No. V. In the judgments they pass, the Essenes 
 are most accurate and just ; nor do they pass sentence 
 by the votes of a court that is lower than a hundred. 
 
 Here we find Josephus unconsciously alluding tc 
 the secret arrangements of the early Christian Church 
 
 the machinery established for conducting affairs so 
 vast, by their tendency, in a condition so critical by its 
 politics. The apostolical constitutions show that many 
 of the forms in general councils, long after that age, 
 had been traditionally derived from this infancy of the 
 Christian Church a result which is natural in any 
 case, but almost inevitable where the original organ- 
 izers are invested with that sort of honor and authority 
 attached to inspired apostles. Here are positive traces 
 of the Christian institutions, as viewed by one who 
 knew of their existence under another name, and wit- 
 nessed some of their decisions in the result, but was 
 never admitted to any conjectural glimpse of their 
 rleliberations, or their system of proceeding, or theii 
 principles. Here is the truth, but traced by its shadow. 
 On the other hand, if the Essenes (considered as dis- 
 linct from Christians) were concerned, what need 
 hould they have of courts numerous or not numer- 
 ous ? Had the Sadducees courts ? Had the Pharisees 
 courts ? Doubtless they had, in thtlr general charactei
 
 132 THE ESSENES. 
 
 of Jews, but certainly not in their separate charactei 
 ES sects. Here again, therefore, in this very mention 
 of courts, had there been no \vord dropped of their 
 form, we see an insuperable evidence to the fact of the 
 Christians being the parties concerned. 
 
 No. VI The Essenes are divided by Philo 
 Judaeus into the Therapeutici and the Practici. A 
 division into four orders has already been noticed, ir 
 explaining the general constitution of the society. 
 These orders would very probably have characteristic 
 names as well as barely distinguishing numbers. And 
 if so, the name of Therapeuta would exactly corres- 
 pond to the medical evangelists (the hakims') noticed 
 under No. II. 
 
 No. VII. Moreover the Essenes are stricter than 
 any other of the Jews in resting from their labors on 
 the seventh day : for they even get their food ready on 
 the day before, that they may not be obliged to kindle 
 a fire on that day. Now, then, it will be said, these 
 Essenes, if Christians, ought not to have kept the 
 Jewish Sabbath. This seems a serious objection. But 
 pause, reader. One consideration is most important 
 in this whole discussion. The Jews are now ranged in 
 hostility to the Christians ; because now the very name 
 of Jew makes open proclamation that they have 
 rejected Christianity ; but in the earliest stage of 
 Christianity, the Jew's relation to that new creed was 
 in suspense a,nd undetermined : he might be, 1, in t 
 utate of hostility ; 2, in a state of certain transition 
 3, in a state of deliberation. So far, therefore, fronj 
 shocking his prejudices by violent alterations of form.
 
 THE ESSEXES. 133 
 
 *n 1 of outward symbol, not essential to the truth sym- 
 bolized, the error of the early Christians would lie the 
 other way ; as in fact we know that it did in Judea, 
 that is, in the land of the Essenes, where they retained 
 too much rather than too little of Mosaic rites. Judaism 
 ia the radix of Christianity Christianity the integra- 
 tion of Judaism. And so long as this integration was 
 only net accepted, it was reasonable to presume it the 
 subject of examination; and to regard the Jew as a 
 Christian in transitu, and by tendency as a Christian 
 elect. For one generation the Jews must have been 
 regarded as novices in a lower class advancing grad- 
 ually to the higher vows not as enemies at all, but 
 as imperfect aspirants* During this pacific interim, 
 (which is not to be thought hostile, because individual 
 Jews were hostile,) the Christians most entangled with 
 Jews, viz., the Christians of Palestine, would not seek 
 to widen the interval which divided them. On the con- 
 trary, they would too much concede to the prejudices 
 of their Jewish brethren ; they would adopt too many 
 of the Jewish rites : as at first even circumcision a 
 fortiori, the Jewish Sabbath. Thus it would be during 
 the period of suspense. Hostility would first com- 
 Tasnce when the two orders of men could no longer be 
 viewed as the inviting and invited as teaching and 
 learning ; but as aflirming and denying as worship- 
 pers and blasphemers. Then began the perfect schism 
 of the two orders. Then began amongst the Syrian 
 Ohristians the observance of a Christian Sunday ; then 
 began the general disuse of circumcision. 
 
 Here we are called upon to close this investigation, 
 and for the following reasons : Most subjects offer them* 
 t*J r es under two aspects at the leaf.t, often under more
 
 134 IHE ESSENES. 
 
 This question accordingly, upon the true relations o! 
 fhe Essenes, may be contemplated either as a religious 
 question, or as a question of Christian antiquities. 
 Under this latter aspect, it is not improperly entertained 
 by a journal whose primary functions are literary. But 
 to pursue it further might entangle us more intricately 
 in speculations of Christian doctrine than could be 
 suitable to any journal not essentially theological. "We 
 pause, therefore ; though not for want of abundant 
 matter to continue the discussion. One point only we 
 shall glance at in taking leave : The Church of Rome 
 has long ago adopted the very doctrine for which we 
 have been contending : she has insisted, as if it were 
 an important article of orthodox faith, upon the identity 
 of the Essenes and the primitive Christians. But 
 does not this fact subtract from the originality of our 
 present essay ? Not at all. If it did, we are careless. 
 But the truth is it does not. And the reason is this 
 as held by the Church of Rome the doctrine is 
 simply what the Germans call a machtspruch, i. e. a 
 hard dogmatical assertion, without one shadow of proof 
 or presumptive argument that so it mtist have been, 
 nothing beyond the allegation of an old immemorial 
 tradition that so in fact it was. Papal Rome adopts 
 our theory as a fact, as a blind result ; but not as a 
 result resting upon any one of our principles. Having, 
 as she thinks, downright testimony and positive depo- 
 sitions upon oath, she is too proud to seek the aid of 
 circumstantial evidence, of collateral probability, or of 
 secret coincidence. 
 
 If so, and the case being that the Papal belief on this 
 point (though coinciding with our own) offers it n 
 ollateral support, wherefore do we mention it ? Fo
 
 THE ESSENES. 13.1 
 
 the following reason important at any rate and 
 specially important as a reason in summing up ; as a 
 reason to take leave with as a linch-pin or iron bolt 
 to lock up all our loose arguments into one central 
 cohesion. Dogmatism, because it is haughty, because 
 it is insolent, will not therefore of necessity be false. 
 Nay, in this particular instance, the dogmatism of 
 Rome rests upon a sense of transcendent truth of 
 truth compulsory to the Christian conscience. And 
 what truth is that ? It is one which will reply triumph- 
 antly to the main objection likely to be urged by the 
 reader. He will be apt to say This speculation is 
 curious ; but of what use is it ? Of what consequence 
 to us at this day, whether the Essenes were or were 
 not the early Christians? Of such consequence, we 
 answer, as to have forced the Church of Rome into a 
 probable lie ; that Church chose rather to forge a 
 falsehood of mere historical fact, [in its pretended tra- 
 dition of St. Mark,] than to suffer any risk as to the sum 
 total and principle of truth doctrinal. The Christian 
 religion offers two things a body of truth, of things 
 to be believed, in the first place ; in the second place, 
 a spiritual agency, a mediatorial agency for carrying 
 these truths into operative life. Otherwise expressed, 
 the Christian religion offers 1st, a knowledge ; 2d, a 
 power that is, 1st, a rudder to guide ; 2dly, sails to 
 propel. Now mark : the Essenes, as reported to us 
 by Josephus, by Philo-Judaeus, or three centuries after- 
 wards by Eusebius, do not appear to have claimed No. 
 II. ; and for this reason because, as a secret society 
 and for the very cause which made it prudent for them 
 to be a secret society, that part of tneir pretensions 
 wuld not have been stated safely ; not without avow-
 
 136 THE ESSEXE8. 
 
 ing the very thing which it was their purpose to con- 
 ceal, viz., their allegiance to Christ. But as to No. I. 
 as to the total truths taught by Christianity, taken 
 in contradistinction to the spiritual powers these the 
 Essenes did claim ; these they did appropriate ; and 
 therefore take notice of this : If the Essenes were not 
 the early Christians in disguise, then was Christianity, 
 as a knowledge, taught independently of Christ ; nay, 
 in opposition to Christ ; nay, if we were to accept the 
 hyperbolical fairy-tale of Pliny, positively two thou- 
 sand years before the era of Christ. Grant the affirm- 
 ative of our hypothesis, all is clear, all consistent ; 
 and Christianity here, as forever, justifies herself. 
 Take the negative alternative Suppose the Essenes 
 a distinct body from the primitive Christians of Pales- 
 tine, (i. e. those particular Christians who stood under 
 the ban of Jerusalem,) and you have a deadlier wound 
 offered to Christian faith than the whole army of infi- 
 dels ever attempted. A parhelion a double sun 
 a secondary sun, that should shine for centuries with 
 equal proofs for its own authenticity as existed for the 
 original sun, would not be more shocking to the sense 
 and to the auguries of man than a secondary Chris- 
 tianity not less spiritual, not less heavenly, not less 
 divine than the primary, pretending to a separate and 
 even hostile origin. Much more is to be said in behalf 
 of our thesis. But say more or say less say it well 
 or say it ill the main argument that the Essenes 
 were the early Christians, locally in danger, and there- 
 fore locally putting themselves, with the wisdom of the 
 serpent, under a cloud of disguise, impenetrable to 
 fierce Jewish enemies and to timid or treacherous 
 brethren that argument is essential to the dignity o*
 
 THE ESSENE8 187 
 
 Christian truth. That theory is involved in the al 
 mighty principle that, as there is but one God, but 
 one hope, but one anchorage for man so also there 
 can be but one authentic faith, but one derivation oi 
 truth, but one perfect revelation.
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 AT a very early age commenced my own interest 
 in the mystery that surrounds Secret Societies ; the 
 mystery being often double 1. What they do ; and 
 2. What they do it for. Except as to the premature 
 growth of this interest, there was nothing surprising in 
 that. For everybody that is by nature meditative 
 must regard, with a feeling higher than any vulgar 
 curiosity, small fraternities of men forming themselves 
 as separate and inner vortices within the great vortex 
 of society, communicating silently in broad daylight 
 by signals not even seen, but if seen, not understood 
 except among themselves, and connected by the link 
 either of purposes not safe to be avowed, or by the 
 grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter 
 themselves from the hostility of an age unprepared for 
 their reception, must retire, perhaps for generations, 
 behind thick curtains of secrecy. To be hidden amidst 
 crowds is sublime to come down hidden amongst 
 crowds from distant generations, is doubly sublime. 
 
 The first incident in my own childish experience 
 that threw my attention upon the possibility of such 
 dark associations, was the Abbe Baruel's book, soon 
 fallowed by a similar book of Professor Robison*
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 139 
 
 in demonstration of a regular conspiracy throughout 
 Europe for exterminating Christianity. This I did 
 not read, but I heard it read and frequently discussed. 
 I had already Latin enough to know that cancer meant 
 a crab, and that the disease so appalling to a child's 
 imagination, which in English we call a cancer, as 
 soon as it has passed beyond the state of an indolent 
 Bchirrous tumor, drew its name from the horrid claws, 
 or spurs, or roots by which it connected itself with 
 distant points, running underground, as it were, baffling 
 detection, and defying radical extirpation. What I 
 heard read aloud from the Abbe gave that dreadful 
 cancerous character to the plot against Christianity. 
 This plot, by the Abbe's account, stretched its horrid 
 fangs, and threw out its forerunning feelers and tenta- 
 cles into many nations, and more than one century. 
 That perplexed me, though also fascinating me by its 
 grandeur. How men, living in distant periods and 
 distant places men that did not know each other, 
 nay, often had not even heard of each other, nor spoko 
 the same languages could yet be parties to the same 
 treason against a mighty religion towering to the high- 
 est heavens, puzzled my comprehension. Then, also, 
 when wickedness was so easy, why did they take all 
 this trouble to be wicked ? The how and the why 
 were alike mysterious to me. Yet the Abbe, every- 
 body said, was a good man ; incapable of telling false- 
 hoods, or of countenancing falsehoods ; and, indeed, 
 to say that was superfluous as regarded myself; for 
 every man that wrote a book was in my eyes an 
 essentially good man, being a revealer of hidden 
 truth. Things in MS. might be doubtful, but things 
 printed were unavoidably and profoundly true. So
 
 I. JO SECBEI SOCIETIES. 
 
 that if I questioned and demurred as hotly as an infidel 
 would have done, it never was that by the slightest 
 shade I had become tainted with the infirmity of 
 scepticism. On the contrary, I believed everybody as 
 well as everything. And, indeed, the very starting- 
 point of my too importunate questions was exactly 
 that incapacity of scepticism not any lurking jeal- 
 ousy that even part might be false, but confidence too 
 absolute that the whole must be true ; since the more 
 undeniably a thing was certain, the more clamorous 
 I called upon people to make it intelligible. Other 
 people, when they could not comprehend a thing, had 
 often a resource in saying, ' But, after all, perhaps it's 
 a lie.' J had no such resource. A lie was impossible 
 in a man that descended upon earth in the awful shape 
 of four volumes octavo. Such a great man as that 
 was an oracle for me, far beyond Dodona or Delphi. 
 The same thing occurs in another form to everybody. 
 Often (you know) alas ! too often one's dear 
 friend talks something, which one scruples to call 
 ' rigmarole,' but which, for the life of one (it becomes 
 necessary to whisper), cannot be comprehended. Well, 
 after puzzling over it for two hours, you say, ' Come, 
 that's enough ; two hours is as much time as I can 
 spare in one life for one unintelligibility.' And then, 
 you proceed, in the most tranquil frame of mind, to 
 C*ke coffee as if nothing had happened. The thing 
 does not haunt your sleep : for you say, ' My dear 
 friend, after all, was perhaps unintentionally talking 
 nonsense.' But how if the thing that puzzles you 
 happens to be a phenomenon in the sky or the clouds 
 something said by nature ? Nature never talks 
 nonsense. There's no getting rid of the thing in tha*
 
 SECKET SOCIETIES. 141 
 
 tfay. You can't call that ' rigmarole.' As to youi 
 dear friend, you were sceptical ; and the consequence 
 was, that you were able to be tranquil. There was a 
 valve in reserve, by which your perplexity could 
 escape. But as to Nature, you have no scepticism at 
 all ; you believe in her to a most bigoted extent ; you 
 believe every word she says. And that very belief is the 
 cause that you are disturbed daily by something which 
 you cannot understand. Being true, the thing ought 
 to be intelligible. And exactly because it is not 
 exactly because this horrid unintelligibility is denied 
 the comfort of doubt therefore it is that you are so 
 unhappy. If you could once make up your mind to 
 doubt and to think, ' Oh, as to Nature, I don't believe 
 one word in ten that she says,' then and there you 
 would become as tranquil as when your dearest friend 
 talks nonsense. My purpose, as regarded Baruel, was 
 not tentative, as if presumptuously trying whether I 
 should like to swallow a thing, with an arriere pensee 
 that, if not palatable, I might reject it, but simply the 
 preparatory process of a boa-constrictor lubricating 
 the substance offered, whatever it might be, towards 
 its readier deglutition ; that result, whether easy or 
 not easy, being one that followed at any rate. 
 
 The person, who chiefly introduced me to Baruel, 
 was a lady, a stern lady, and austere, not only in her 
 manners, which made most people dislike her, but also 
 in the character of her understanding and morals 
 an advantage which made most people afraid of her. 
 Me, however, she treated Avith unusual indulgence, 
 ihiofly, I believe, because I kept her intellectuals in a 
 mate of exercise, nearly amounting to persecution. 
 She was just five times my age when our warfare of
 
 42 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 disputation commenced, I being seven, she thirty- five 5 
 *nd she was not quite four times my age when our 
 warfare terminated by sudden separation, I being then 
 ten, and she thirty-eight. This change, by the way, in 
 the multiple that expressed her chronological relation? 
 to myself, used greatly to puzzle me ; because, as the 
 interval between us had diminished, within the memory 
 of man, so rapidly, that, from being five times younger, 
 I found myself less than four times younger, the natu- 
 ral inference seemed to be, that, in a few years, I 
 should not be younger at all, but might come to be 
 the older of the two ; in which case, I should certainly 
 have ' taken my change ' out of the airs she continual- 
 ly gave herself on the score of ' experience.' That 
 decisive word ' experience ' was, indeed, always a sure 
 sign to me that I had the better of the argument, and 
 that it had become necessary, therefore, suddenly 
 to pull me up in the career of victory by a violent 
 exertion of authority ; as a knight of old, at the very 
 moment when he would else have unhorsed his oppo- 
 nent, was often frozen into unjust inactivity by the 
 king's arbitrary signal for parting the tilters. It was, 
 nowever, only when very hard pressed that my fair 
 antagonist took this not fair advantage in our daily 
 tournaments. Generally, and if I showed any modera- 
 tion in the assault, she was rather pleased with the 
 sharp rattle of my rolling musketry. Objections she 
 -ather liked, and questions, as many as one pleased 
 upon the pourquoi, if one did not go on to le pourquoi 
 du pourquoi. That, she said, was carrying things too 
 Car ; excess in anything she disapproved. Now, there 
 I differed from her : excess was the thing I doated on 
 Fhe fun seemed to me only bsginrnng, when sh
 
 SECEET SOCIETIES. 143 
 
 tsserted that it had already ' over-stepped the limits oi 
 propriety.' Ha ! those limits, I thought, were soon 
 reached. 
 
 But, however much or often I might vault over the 
 limits of propriety, or might seem to challenge both her 
 and the Abbe all this was but anxiety to reconcile 
 my own secret belief in the Abbe, with the arguments 
 for not believing ; it was but the form assumed by my 
 earnest desire to see how the learned gentleman could 
 be right, whom my intense faith certified beyond all 
 doubt to be so, and whom, equally, my perverse logical 
 recusancy whispered to be continually in the wrong. 
 I wished to see my own rebellious arguments, which 
 I really sorrowed over and bemoaned, knocked down 
 like ninepins ; shown to be softer than cotton, frailer 
 than glass, and utterly worthless in the eye of reason. 
 All this, indeed, the stern lady assured me that she 
 had shown over and over again. Well, it might be 
 ^.o ; and to this, at any rate, as a decree of court, I 
 saw a worldly prudence in submitting. But, probably, 
 I must have looked rather grim, and have wished 
 devoutly for one fair turn-up, on Salisbury plain, 
 atith herself and the Abbe, in which case my heart 
 told me how earnestly I should pray that they might 
 forever floor me, but how melancholy a conviction 
 oppressed my spirits that my destiny was to floor them. 
 Victorious, I should find my belief and my understand- 
 ing in painful schism : beaten and demolished, I should 
 find my whole nature in harmony with itself. 
 
 The mysteriousness to me of men becoming partners 
 and by no means sleeping partners) in a society of 
 which they had never heard ; or, again, of one fellow 
 tanding at the beginning of a century, and stretching
 
 144 SECEET SOCIETIES. 
 
 out his hand as an accomplice towards another fellow 
 standing at the end of it, without either having known 
 of the other's existence all that did not sharpen the 
 interest of wonder that gathered about the general 
 economy of secret societies. Tertullian's profession 
 of believing things, not in spite of being impossible, 
 but because they were impossible, is not the extrava- 
 gance that most people suppose it. There is a deep 
 truth in it. Many are the things which, in proportion 
 as they attract the highest modes of belief, discover a 
 tendency to repel belief on that part of the scale which 
 is governed by the lower understanding. And here, 
 as so often elsewhere, the axiom, with respect to ex- 
 tremes meeting, manifests its subtle presence. The 
 highest form of the incredible, is sometimes the initial 
 form of the credible. But the point on which our 
 irreconcilability was greatest, respected the cui bono 
 of this alleged conspiracy. What were the conspirators 
 to gain by success ? and nobody pretended that they 
 could gain anything by failure. The lady replied 
 that, by obliterating the light of Christianity, they pre- 
 pared the readiest opening for the unlimited gratifica- 
 tion of their odious appetites and passions. But to 
 this the retort was too obvious to escape anybody, and 
 for me it threw itself into the form of that pleasant 
 story, reported from the life of Pyrrhus the Epirot 
 viz., that one day, upon a friend requesting to know 
 what ulterior purpose the king might mask under his 
 expedition to Sicily, ' Why after that is finished,' re- 
 plied the king, ' I mean to administer a little correction 
 (very much wanted) to certain parts of Italy, an^ 
 particularly to that nest of rascals in Latium.' ' And 
 then ' said the friend: 'and then,' said
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 145 
 
 next we go for Macedon ; and after that job's jobbed, 
 text, of course, for Greece.' ' Which, done,' said the 
 friend : ' which done,' interrupted the king, ' as done 
 it shall be, then we're off to tickle the Egyptians.' 
 ' Whom having tickled,' pursued the friend, ' then we,' 
 
 - ' tickle the Persians,' said the king. ' But after 
 thai is done,' urged the obstinate friend, ' whithei 
 next ? ' ' Why, really man, it's hard to say ; you give 
 one no time to breathe ; but we'll consider the case in 
 Persia, and, until we've settled it, we can crown our- 
 selves \vUh roses, and pass the time pleasantly enough 
 over the best wine to be found in Ecbatana.' ' That's 
 a very just idea,' replied the friend ; ' but, with sub- 
 mission, it strikes me that we might do that just now, 
 and, at the beginning of all these tedious wars, instead 
 of waiting for their end.' ' Bless me ! ' said Pyrrhus, 
 ' if ever I thought of that before. Why, man, you're 
 a conjurer ; you've discovered a mine of happiness. 
 So, here boy, bring us roses and plenty of Cretan 
 wine.' Surely, on the same principle, these French 
 Encyclopedistes, and Bavarian Illuminati, did not need 
 to postpone any jubilees of licentiousness which they 
 promised themselves, to so very indefinite a period as 
 heir ovation over the ruins of Christianity. True, the 
 tnpulse of hatred, even though irrational, may be a 
 stronger force for action than any motive of hatred, 
 however rational, or grounded in self-interest. But 
 the particular motive relied upon by the stern lady, as 
 th central spring of the an ti- Christian movement, 
 >emg obviously insufficient for the weight which it had 
 to wu stain, naturally the lady, growing sensible of this 
 uenelf, became still sterner ; very angry with me ; 
 oid not quite satisfied, in this instance, with the Abbe 
 10
 
 146 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 Vet, after all, it was not any embittered remembrance 
 of our eternal feuds, in dusting tbe jacket of the Abbe 
 Baruel, that lost me, ultimately, tbe favor of this 
 austere lady. All that she forgave; and especially 
 because she came to think the Abbe as bad as myself, 
 for leaving such openings to my inroads. It was on 
 a question of politics that our deadliest difference 
 arose, and that my deadliest sarcasm was launched ; 
 not against herself, but against the opinion and party 
 which she adopted. I was right, as usually I am ; but, 
 on this occasion, must have been, because I stood up 
 as a patriot, intolerant, to frenzy, of all insult directed 
 against dear England ; and she, though otherwise 
 patriotic enough, in this instance ranged herself in 
 alliance with a false anti-national sentiment. My 
 sarcasm was not too strong for the case. But certainly 
 I ought to have thought it too strong for the presence 
 of a lady ; whom, or any of her sex, on a matter of 
 politics in these days, so much am I changed, I would 
 allow to chase me, like a foot-ball, all round the 
 tropics, rather than offer the least show of resistance. 
 But my excuse was childhood ; and, though it may be 
 true, as the reader will be sure to remind me, that she 
 was rapidly growing down to my level in that respect, 
 still she had not quite reached it ; so that there was 
 more excuse for me, after all, than for her. She was 
 no longer five times as old, or even four ; but when 
 she would come down to be two times as old and one 
 time as old, it was hard to say. 
 
 Thus I had good reason for remembering my first 
 introduction to the knowledge of Secret Societies, 
 ince this knowledge introduced me to the more 
 gloomy knowledge of the strife which gather? in
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 14V 
 
 tlo uds over the fields of human life ; and to the 
 knowledge of this strife in two shapes, jne of which 
 none of us fail to learn the personal strife which is 
 awakened so eternally by difference of opinion, or 
 difference of interest ; the other, which is felt, per- 
 haps, obscurely by all, but distinctly noticed only by 
 the profoundly reflective, viz., the schism - so mys- 
 terious to those even who have examined it most 
 between the human intellect and many undeniable 
 realities of human experience. As to the first mode 
 of strife, I could not possibly forget it ; for the stern 
 lady died before we had an opportunity to exchange 
 forgiveness, and that left a sting behind. She, I am 
 sure, was a good forgiving creature at heart ; and 
 especially she would have forgiven me, because it was 
 my place (if one only got one's right place on earth) 
 to forgive her. Had she even hauled me out of bed 
 with a tackling of ropes in the dead of night, for the 
 mere purpose of reconciliation, I should have said 
 * Why, you see, I can't forgive you entirely to-night, 
 because I'm angry when people waken me without 
 uotice, but to-morrow morning I certainly will ; or, if 
 that won't do, you shall forgive me. No great matter 
 which, as the conclusion must be the same in eithei 
 case, viz. to kiss and be friends.' 
 
 But the other strife, which perhaps sounds meta 
 physical in the reader's ears, then first wakened up to 
 my perceptions, and never again went to sleep amongst 
 Day perplexities. Oh, Cicero ! my poor, thoughtless 
 Cicero ! in all your shallow metaphysics, not once did 
 you give utterance to su'jh a bounce as when you as- 
 serted, that aever yet did human reason say one thing, 
 nd Nature say another. On the contrary, every
 
 148 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 part of Nature mechanics, dynamics, morals, meta- 
 physics, and even pure mathematics are continually 
 giving the lie flatly by their facts and conclusions to 
 the very necessities and laws of the human under- 
 standing. Did the reader ever study the Antinomies 
 of Kant ? If not, he has read nothing. Now, there 
 he will have the pleasure of seeing a set of quadrilles 
 or reels, in which old Mother Reason amuses herself 
 by dancing to the right and left two variations of blank 
 contradiction to old Mother Truth, both variations being 
 irrefragable, each variation contradicting the other, 
 each contradicting the equatorial reality, and each 
 alike (though past all denial) being a lie. But he 
 need not go to Kant for this. Let him look as one 
 having eyes for looking, and everywhere the same 
 perplexing phenomenon occurs. And this first dawned 
 upon myself in the Baruel case. As Nature is to the 
 human intellect, so was Baruel to mine. We all be- 
 lieve in Nature without limit, yet hardly understand a 
 page amongst her innumerable pages. I believed in 
 Baruel by necessity, and yet everywhere my under- 
 standing mutinied against his. 
 
 But in Baruel I had heard only of Secret Societies 
 that were consciously formed for mischievous ends ; 
 or if not always for a distinct purpose of evil, yet 
 always in a spirit of malignant contradiction and 
 hatred. Soon I read of other Societies even more 
 secret, that watched over truth dangerous to publish or 
 even to whisper, like the sleepless dragons that Ori- 
 ental fable associated with the subterraneous guardian- 
 ihip of regal treasures. The secrecy, and the reasons 
 for the secrecy, were alike sublime. The very image, 
 unveiling itself by unsteady glimpses, of men linked
 
 8ECJJET SOCIETIES. 149 
 
 by brotherly love anil perfect confidence, met- ting in 
 secret chambers, at the noontide of night, to shelter, 
 by muffling, with their own persons interposed, and 
 at their own risk, some solitary lamp of truth shel- 
 tering it from the carelessness of the world, and its 
 stormy ignorance this would soon have blown it out 
 
 sheltering it from the hatred of the world, that 
 would soon have found out its nature, and made war 
 wpon its life that was superhumanly sublime. The 
 fear of those men was sublime the courage waa 
 sublime the stealthy, thief-like means were sublime 
 
 the audacious end, viz. to change the kingdoms of 
 earth, was sublime. If they acted and moved like 
 towards, those men were sublime : if they planned 
 with the audacity of martyrs, those men were sublime 
 
 not less as cowards, not more as martyrs ; for the 
 cowardice that appeared above, and the courage that 
 lurked below, were parts of the same machinery. 
 
 But another feature of sublimity, which it surprises 
 one to see so many coarse-minded men unaware of, 
 lies in the self-perpetuation and phoenix-like defiance 
 to mortality of such Societies. This feature it is that 
 throws a grandeur even on a humbug, of which there 
 K ave been many examples, and two in particular, 
 which I am soon going to memorialize. Often and 
 often have men of finer minds felt this secret spell of 
 grandeur, and labored to embody it in external forms. ' 
 There was a phosnix-club once in Oxford, (up and 
 down Europe there have been several,) that by its 
 "constitution grasped not only at the sort of immortality 
 Mpired after by Phoenix Insurance offices, viz. a legal 
 or notional perpetuation, liable merely to no practical 
 ntcrruptions as regarded paying ana a fortiori as
 
 150 8ECKET SOCIETIES. 
 
 regarded receiving money, but otherwise fast asleep 
 every night like other dull people far more faithful, 
 literal, intense, was the realization in this case of an 
 undying life. Such a condition as a ' sede vacante,' 
 which is a condition expressed in the constitutions of 
 all other societies, was impossible in this for any 
 office whatever. That great case was realized, which 
 has since been described by Chateaubriand as govern- 
 ing the throne of France and its successions. ' His 
 Majesty is dead ! ' shouts a v jice, and this seems to 
 axgue, at least, a moment's i,. terregnum : not at all ; 
 not a moment's : the thing is impossible : simultaneous 
 (and not successive) is the breath that ejaculates, 
 ' May the King live forever f ' The birth aad the 
 death, the rising and the setting, syncronize by a 
 metaphysical nicety of neck-and-neck, inconceivable 
 to the book-keepers of earth. These wretched men 
 imagine that the second rider's foot cannot possibly 
 be in the stirrup until the first rider's foot is out. If 
 the one event occurs in moment M, the other they 
 'hink must occur in moment N. That may be as 
 regards stirrups, but not as regards metaphysics. I 
 admit that the guard of a mail-coach cannot possibly 
 leave the post-office before the coachman, but upon 
 the whole a little after him. Such base rules, how- 
 ever, find themselves compelled to give way in pres- 
 ence of great metaphysicians. In whose science, as 
 I stoop to inform book-keepers, the effect, if anything, 
 goes rather ahead of the cause. Now that Oxford clut 
 arose on these sublime principles : no disease like in- 
 termitting pulse was known there. No fire, but Vestal 
 fire, was used for boiling the tea-kettle. The rule 
 was that, if once entered upon the matricula of thil
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 151 
 
 amaranthine 6 club, thenceibrwards, come from what 
 zone of the earth you would come without a 
 minute's notice send up your card Mr. O. P., 
 from the Anthropophagi Mr. P. 0., from the men 
 whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders in 
 stantly you were shown in to the sublime presence 
 You were not limited to any particular century. Nay,, 
 by the rigor of the theory, you had your own choice 
 of millennium. Whatever might be convenient to 
 you, was convenient to the club. The constitution 
 of the club assumed, that, in, every successive gene- 
 ration, as a matter of course, a President duly elected 
 (or his authorized delegate) would be found in the 
 chair : scornfully throwing the onus of proof to the 
 contrary upon the presumptuous reptile that doubted 
 it. Public or private calamity signified not. The 
 President reverberated himself through a long sinking 
 fund of Surrogates and Vice-Presidents. There, night 
 and day, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, 
 sat the august man, looking as grim as the Princeps 
 Senatus amongst the Conscript Fathers of Rome, when 
 the Gauls entered on the errand of cutting their throats. 
 If you entered this club on the very same errand, the 
 Fiesident was backed to a large amount to keep his 
 Bea.t until his successor had been summoned. Sup- 
 pose the greatest of revolutions to have passed over 
 the island during your absence abroad ; England, let 
 us say, has even been conquered by a polished race 
 of Hottentots. Very good : an accomplished Hotten- 
 tot will then be found seated in the chair ; you will 
 be allowed to kiss Mr. President's black paw; and 
 will understand that, although farewells might be 
 sommon enough as regarded individual members, yrst
 
 152 8ECKET SOCIETIES. 
 
 by the eternal laws of this eternal club, the word 
 adjournment for the whole concern was a word so 
 treasonable, as not to be uttered without risk of mas- 
 sacre. 
 
 The same principle in man's nature, the everlasting 
 instinct for glorifying the everlasting, the impulse for 
 petrifying the fugitive, and arresting the transitory, 
 which shows itself in ten thousand forms, has also, in 
 this field of secret confederations, assumed many 
 grander forms. To strive after a conquest over Time 
 the conqueror, is already great, in whatsoever direc- 
 tion. But it is still greater when it applies itself to 
 objects that are per se immortal, and mortal only as 
 respects their alliance with man. Glorification of 
 heaven litanies, chanted day and night by adoring 
 hearts these will doubtless ascend forever from this 
 planet. That result is placed out of hazard, and needs 
 not the guarantee of princes. Somewhere, from some 
 climate, from some lips, such a worship will not cease 
 \o rise. But, let a man's local attachments be what 
 they may, he must sigh to think that no assignable 
 spot of ground on earth, that no nation, that no family, 
 enjoys any absolute privilege in that respect. No 
 land, whether continent or island nor race, whether 
 freemen or slaves, can claim any fixed inheritance, or 
 indefeasible heirlooms of truth. Yet, for that very 
 reason, men of deep piety have but the more earnestly 
 striven to bind down, and chain their own conceptions 
 pf truth within the models of some unchanging estab- 
 lishments, even as the Greek Pagans of old chained 
 iown their gods 7 from deserting them ; have striven 
 to train the vagrant water-brooks of Wisdom, lest she 
 night desert the region altogether, into the channel*
 
 SECBET SOCIETIES. 153 
 
 jf some local homestead ; to connect, with a fixed 
 succession of descendants, the conservation of religion ; 
 to root, as one would root a forest that is to flourish 
 through ages, a heritage of ancient truth in the territo- 
 rial heritage of an ancient household. That sounds to 
 some ears like the policy that founded monastic in- 
 stitutions. Whether so or not, it is not necessarily 
 Roman Catholic. The same policy the same 
 principle the sighing after peace and the image of 
 perpetuity have many times moulded the plans of 
 Protestant families. Such families, with monastic 
 imaginations linked to Protestant hearts, existed nume- 
 rously in England through the reign of the First 
 James and Charles families amongst the gentry, or 
 what on the Continent would be called the lower 
 nobility, that remembered with love the solemn ritual 
 and services of the Romish Church ; but with this love 
 combined the love of Protestant doctrines. Amongst 
 these families, and distinguished amongst them, was 
 that of the Farrers. 8 The name of their patrimonial 
 estate was Little Gidding, and, I think, in the county 
 of Hertford. They were, by native turn of mind, and 
 by varied accomplishments, a most interesting family. 
 In some royal houses of Europe it was once a custom, 
 that every son, if not every daughter, should learn a 
 trade. This custom subsisted down to the days of the 
 unhappy Louis XVI., who was a locksmith; and I was 
 once assured by a Frenchman, who knew him well, 
 not so bad a one, considering (you know) that one 
 cannot be as rough as might be wished in scolding a 
 locksmith that one is obliged to address as ' your 
 majesty.' A majestic locksmith has a sort of right to 
 W a bad one. The Farrers adopted this custom, and
 
 154 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 most of them chose the trade of a bookbinder Why 
 this was a good trade to choose, I will explain in a 
 brief digression. It is a reason which applies only to 
 three other trades, viz : to coining, to pnnting books, 
 and to making gold or silver plate. And the reason is 
 this - - all the four arts stand on an isthmus, connecting 
 them, on one side, with merely mechanic crafts, on 
 $he other side, with the Fine Arts. This was the 
 marking distinction between the coinages of ancient 
 classical days and our own. Our European and East 
 Indian 9 coins are the basest of all base products from 
 rude barbaresque handicraft. They are imagined by 
 the man, some horrid Cyclops, who conceived the 
 great idea of a horseshoe, a poker, and a tenpenny 
 nail. Now, the ancient coins were modelled by the 
 same immortal artists that conceived their exquisite 
 gems, the cameos and intaglios, which you may buy, 
 in Tassie's Sulphurs, at a few shillings each, or for 
 much less in the engraved Glyptotheca. But, as to 
 coining, our dear lady the Queen (God bless her !) is 
 so avaricious, that she will have it all to herself. She 
 taboos it. She won't let you or me into the smallest 
 share of the business ; and she lags us if we poach. 
 That is what I call monopoly. And I do wish her 
 Majesty would be persuaded to read a ship-load of 
 political economists that I could point out, on the ruin- 
 ous consequences of that vice, which, otherwise, it may 
 be feared nobody ever will read. After coining, the 
 next best trade is Printing. This, also, might approach 
 to a Fine Art. When entering the twilight of dotage, 
 reader, I moan to have a printing-press in my own 
 Itudy. I shall print some immaculate editions, as fare- 
 veil keepsakes, for distribution amongst people that
 
 SECEET SOCIETIES. 155 
 
 ,ove ; but rich and rare must be the gems on \\ Inch J 
 hall i ondescend to bestow this manual labor. I mean, 
 also, to print n spelling-book for the reader's use. As 
 it seems that he reads, he surely ought to spell. I 
 hope he will not be offended. If he is, and dreadfully, 
 viewing it as the most awful insult that man could offer 
 to his brother man, in that case he might bequeaih it 
 by will to his possible grandson. Two generations 
 might wash out the affront. Or if he accepts, and 
 furnishes me with his name, I will also print on a 
 blank leaf the good old ancestral legend 'A. B., his 
 book, Heaven grant him grace therein to look.' As to 
 Plate-making, it seems to rank with mechanic base- 
 ness ; you think not of the sculptor, the chaser, and 
 their exquisite tools, but of Sheffield, Birmingham, 
 Glasgow, sledge-hammers, and pincers. It seems to 
 require no art. I think I could make a dessert spoon 
 myself. Yet the openings which it offers are vast, 
 wherever wealth exists, for the lovelier conceptions of 
 higher art. Benvenuto Cellini what an artist was 
 he ! There are some few of his most exquisite works 
 in this country, which may be seen by applying in the 
 right quarters. Judge of him by these, and not by his 
 autobiography. There he appears as a vain, ostenta- 
 tious man. 10 One would suppose, to hear him talk, 
 that nobody ever executed a murder but himself. His 
 own are tolerable, that's all you can say ; but not one 
 of them is first-rate, or to be named on the same day 
 with the Pope's attempt at murdering Cellini himsolf, 
 which must command the unqualified approbation of 
 the connoisseur. True, the Papal attempt did not suc- 
 teed, and most of Cellini's did. Whaf of that ? Who 
 >ut idiots judge by the event? Much, therefore, as 1
 
 ,.56 SECBET SOCIETIES. 
 
 condemn the man's vanity, and the more so because 
 he claims some murders that too probably were none 
 of his (not content with exaggerating his own, he abso- 
 lutely pirated other men's murders!) yet, when you 
 turn from this walk of art, in which he practised only 
 as an amateur, to his orfevcrie then you feel the 
 interval that divides the charlatan from the man o. 
 exquisite genius. As a murderer, he was a peer 
 creature ; as an artist in gold, he was inimitable. 
 Finally, there remains Book-binding? 1 of which also one 
 may affirm, that, being usually the vilest of handicrafts, 
 it is susceptible of much higher effects in the enrich- 
 ments, tooling, architecture, heraldic emblazonries, &c. 
 This art Mr. Farrer selected for his trade. He had 
 travelled on foot through Spain ; and I should think it 
 not impossible that he had there seen some magnificent 
 specimens of book-binding. For I was once told, 
 though I have not seen it mentioned in any book, that 
 a century before the date of Farrer's travels, Cardinal 
 Ximenes, when printing his great Complutensian Bible, 
 gave a special encouragement to a new style of bind- 
 ing fitted for harmonizing with the grandeur of royal 
 furniture, and the carved enrichments of gothic libra- 
 ries. 12 This, and the other accomplishments which the 
 Farrers had, they had in perfection. But the most 
 remarkable trait in the family character, was the exal- 
 tation of their devotional feelings. Had it not been for 
 their benignity and humility, they might have been 
 thought gloomy and ascetic. Something there was, 
 us in thoughtful minds loft to a deep rural solitude 
 there is likely to be, of La Trappism and Madame 
 Guyon Quietism. A nun-like aspiration there was in 
 the females after purity and oblmon of earth : in Mr
 
 8ECKET SOCIETIES. 157 
 
 Fairer, the head of the family, a devotional energy, 
 put forth in continual combat with the earthly energies 
 that tempted him away to the world, and with all that 
 offered itself under the specious name of public useful- 
 ness. In this combination of qualities arose the plan 
 which the family organized for a system of perpetual 
 worship. They had a family chapel regularly conse- 
 crated, as so many families of their rank still have in 
 England. They had an organ : they had means of 
 forming a choir. Gradually the establishment was 
 mounted : the appointments were completed : the 
 machinery was got into motion. How far the plan 
 was ever effectually perfected, would be hard to say. 
 The increasing ferment of the times, until the meeting 
 of the Long Parliament in November, 1640, and in less 
 than two years after that, the opening of the great 
 civil war must have made it absolutely impossible to 
 adhere systematically to any scheme of that nature, 
 which required perfect seclusion from worldly cares 
 within the mansion, and public tranquillity outside. 
 Not to mention that the Farrers had an extra source of 
 molestation at that period, when Puritanism was ad- 
 vancing rapidly to a domineering station of power, in 
 the public suspicions which unjustly (but not altogether 
 unplausibly) taxed them with Popish leanings. A 
 hundred years later, Bishop Butler drew upon himself 
 at Durham the very same suspicion, and in some de- 
 gree by the very same act, viz. by an adoption of 
 Bcme pious symbols, open undeniably to the whole 
 Catholic family of Christian Churches, and yet equiv- 
 ocal in their meaning, because popularly appropriated 
 from old associations of haoit to the use of Popish 
 eommun \ties. 13 Abstracting, however, from the violent
 
 158 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 disturbances of those stormy times in the \vay of all 
 religious schemes, we may collect that the scheme of 
 the Farrers was that the chapel services should be 
 going on, by means of successive ' reliefs ' as in camps, 
 or of ' watches ' as at sea, through every hour of the 
 day and the night, from year to year, from childhood 
 to old age. Come when you might, come in the 
 dawning, come in the twilight, come at noonday, come 
 through silent roads in the dead of night, always you 
 were to be sure of hearing, through the woods of Little 
 Gidding, the blair of the organ, or the penitential wail 
 of the solitary choristers, or the glad triumphant burst 
 of the full choir in jubilation. There was some affinity 
 in Mr. Farrer's mind to the Spanish peculiarities, and 
 the Spanish modes of grandeur ; awful prostration, 
 like Pascal's before the divine idea ; gloom that sought 
 to strengthen itself by tenfold involution in the night 
 of solitary woods ; exaggerated impressions (if such 
 impressions could be exaggerated) of human wretch- 
 edness, and a brooding sense of some unknown illim- 
 itable grandeur a sense that could sustain itself at 
 its natural level, only by eternal contemplation of ob- 
 jects that had no end. 
 
 Mr. Farrer's plan for realizing a vestal fire, or 
 something beyond it, viz. a secrecy of truth, burning 
 brightly in darkness and, secondly, a perpetuity of 
 truth did not succeed ; as many a noble scheme, 
 that men never heard of, has been swept away in its 
 infancy by the ruins of flood, fire, earthquake, which 
 also are forgotten no less completely than what they 
 ruined. Thank Heaven for that ! If the noble ij 
 rften crushed suddenly by the ignoble, one forgetfui- 
 travels after both. The wicked earthquake io
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 159 
 
 forgotten not less than the glorious temples which it 
 fuined. Yet the Farrer plan has repeatedly succeeded 
 *nd prospered through a course of centuries, and for 
 purposes of the same nature. But the strange thing 
 is, (which already I have noticed,) that the general 
 principle of such a plan has succeeded most memora- 
 bly when applied to purposes of humbug. The two 
 best known of all Secret Societies, that ever have 
 oeen, are the two most extensive monuments of hum- 
 bug on the one side and credulity on the other. They 
 divide themselves between the ancient world and the 
 modern. The great and illustrious humbug of ancient 
 history was, THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. The great 
 and illustrious humbug of modern history, of the his- 
 tory which boasts a present and a future, as well as a 
 past, is FREEMASONKY. Let me take a few liberties 
 with both. 
 
 The Eleusinian humbug was for centuries the op- 
 probrium of scholars. Even in contemporary times it 
 was such. The greatest philosopher, or polyhistor, of 
 Athens or of Rome, could no more tell you the secret 
 . the to oporeton (unless he had been initiated, in 
 which case he durst not tell it) than I can. In fact, 
 if you come to that, perhaps I myself can tell it. The 
 ancient philosopher would retort, that we of these days 
 are in the same predicament as to our own humbug 
 the Freemasons. No, no, my friend, you're wrong 
 there. We know all about that humbug, as I mean to 
 show you. But for what we Know of Eleusis and its 
 mummeries, which is qiu'^e enough for all practical 
 purposes, we are indebted to none of you ancients, 
 )ut entirely to modern sagacity. Is not that shocking, 
 flip t a hoax should first be unmasked when it has been
 
 160 SECKET SOCIETIES. 
 
 defunct for fifteen hundred years ? The interest which 
 attaches to the Eleusinian shows, is not properly an 
 interest in them, but an alien interest in accidents indi- 
 rectly connected with them. Secret there was virtually 
 none ; but a mystery at length begins to arise how it 
 was that this distressing secret, viz. of there being no 
 secret at all, could, through sp many generations, pass 
 down in religious conservation of itself from all profane 
 curiosity of outside barbarians. There was an endless 
 file of heroes, philosophers, statesmen, all hoaxed, all 
 of course incensed at being hoaxed, and yet not one 
 of them is known to have blabbed. A great modern 
 poet, musing philosophically on the results amongst 
 the mob * in Leicester's busy square,' from looking 
 through a showman's telescope at the moon, is sur- 
 prised at the crowd of spectators going off with an air 
 of disappointment : 
 
 ' One after one they turn aside ; nor have I one espied, 
 That doth not slackly go away, as if dissatisfied.' 
 
 Yes, but I can tell him the reason of that. The fact 
 is, a more pitiful sight for sight-seers, than our own 
 moon, does not exist. The first man that showed me 
 the moon through a glass of any power, was a distin- 
 guished professor of astronomy. I was so incensed 
 with the hoax (as it seemed) put upon me such a 
 weak, watery, wicked old harridan, substituted for the 
 pretty creature I had been used to see that I marched 
 up to him with the angry design of demanding my 
 half-crown back again, until a disgusting remembrance 
 came over me, that, being a learned professor, the 
 showman could not possibly have taken any half- 
 crown, which fact also destroyed all ground of actioR
 
 8ECKET SOCIETIES. 161 
 
 igainst him as obtaining money under false pretence? 
 I contented myself therefore with saying, that, until he 
 showed me the man in the moon, with his dog, lantern, 
 and bundle of thorns, I must decline corroborating hia 
 fancy of being able to exhibit the real old original moon 
 and no mistake. Endymion never could have had such 
 a sweetheart as that. Let the reader take my advice, 
 not to seek familiarity with the moon. Familiarity 
 breeds contempt. 
 
 It is certain that, like the travellers through ' Leices- 
 ter's busy square,' all the visitors of Eleusis must have 
 abominated the hoax put upon them 
 
 nor have I one espied, 
 
 That did not slackly walk away, as if dissatisfied.' 
 
 See now the different luck of hoaxers in this world. 
 Joseph Ady 14 is smoked pretty nearly by the whole race 
 of man. The Continent is, by this time, wide awake ; 
 Belgium has refused to take in his letters ; and the cruel 
 Lord Mayor of London has threatened to indict Joe 
 for a fraud, value twopence, by reason of the said Joe 
 having seduced his lordship into opening an unpaid 
 letter, which was found to contain nothing but an invi- 
 tation from ' yours respectfully ' not to a dinner 
 party but to an early remittance of one pound, for 
 reasons subsequently to be disclosed. I should think, 
 but there's no knowing, that there might be a chance 
 still for Joe, (whom, really one begins to pity, as a 
 persecuted man cruising, like the Flying Dutchman, 
 through seas that have all closed their ports,) in Astra- 
 than, and, perhaps, in Mecca. Some business might be 
 done, for a few years, in Timbuctoo ; and an opening 
 there would undoubtedly be found for a-'Dnnection with 
 11
 
 162 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 Abd-el-Kader. if only any opening could be found to 
 Abd-el-Kader through the French lines. Now, on the 
 other hand, the goddess and her establishment of hoax- 
 ers at Eleusis, did a vast ' stroke of business ' for more 
 than six centuries, without any ' unpleasantries ' ls oc- 
 curring ; no cudgels shaken in the streets, little inci- 
 dents that custom (by making too familiar) has made 
 contemptible to the philosophy of Joe ; no round 
 robbins, signed by the whole main-deck of the acad- 
 emy or the porch ; no praetors or lord mayors threat- 
 ening actions repetundarum, and mourning over 
 twopences that had gone astray. ' Misfortune ac- 
 quaints a man with strange bed-fellows ; ' and the 
 common misfortune of having been hoaxed, lowers 
 the proudest and the humblest into a strange unanim- 
 ity, for once, of pocketing their wrongs in silence. 
 Eleusis, with her fine bronzed face, might say proudly 
 and laughingly ' Expose me, indeed ! why, I 
 hoaxed this man's great-grandfather, and I trust to 
 hoax his great-grandson ; all generations of ms nouse 
 have been or shall be hoaxed, and afterwards grateful 
 to me for not exposing that fact of the hoax at their 
 private expense.' 
 
 There is a singularity in this case, of the same kind 
 as that stratagem, (but how prodigiously exceeded in 
 its scale,) imperfectly executed on the Greek leaders 
 oy the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, but perfectly, in 
 one or two cases, amongst the savage islands of the 
 South Seas, upon European crews, when one victim, 
 naving first been caught, has been used as the means 
 af trepanning all his comrades in succession. Each 
 luccessive novice has been tamed, by terror, into an 
 mstrument for decoying other novices from A t*
 
 SECHET SOCIETIES. 163 
 
 Z. Neit, after this feature of inteiest about the 
 Eleusinian Teletai, is another which modern times 
 have quickened and developed, viz., the gift of enor- 
 mous nonsense, the inspiration of nonsense, which 
 the enigma of these mysteries has been the fortu- 
 nate means of blowing into the brains of various 
 able men. It requires such men, in fact, to suc- 
 ceed as speculators in nonsense. None but a man 
 of extraordinary talents can write first-rate nonsense. 
 Perhaps the prince of all men, ever formed by nature 
 and education, for writing superior nonsense, was 
 Warburton. The natural vegetation of his intellect 
 tended to that kind of funguj which is called ' crotch- 
 et ;' so much so, that if he had a just and powerful 
 thought, (as sometimes he had,) or even a wise and 
 beautiful thought, or even a grand one, by the mere 
 perversity of his tortuous brain, it was soon digested 
 into a crotchet. This native tendency of his was cul- 
 tured and watered, for years, by his practice as an 
 attorney. Making him a bishop was, perhaps, a mis- 
 taka ; it certainly stunted the growth of special plead- 
 ing, perhaps ruined the science ; on the other hand, 
 it saved the twelve judges of that day from being 
 driven mad, as they would have been by this Hermes 
 Trismegistus, this born Titan, in the realms of La 
 Chicane. Some fractions of the virus descended 
 through the Warburtonian commentaries upon Pope, 
 &c., corroding the flesh to the very bones, wherever 
 it alighted. But the Centaur's shirt of W.'s malignity 
 was destined for the Hebrew lawgiver, and all that 
 could be made to fall within that field. Did my 
 reader ever read the ' Divine Legation of Moses ' ? 
 \M he aware of the mighty syllogism, that single block
 
 1G4 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 of granite, such as you can see nowhere but at St. 
 Petersburg, 16 on which that elaborate work reposes ? 
 There is a Welsh bridge, near Llanroost, the birth- 
 place of Inigo Jones, built by that architect with such 
 exquisite skill, that the people astonished me (but the 
 people were two milkmaids), by protesting that invari- 
 ably a little breeze-footed Camilla, of three years old, 
 in running across, caused the bridge to tremble like a 
 guilty thing. So admirable was the equilibrium, that 
 an infant's foot disturbed it. Unhappily, Camilla had 
 sprained her ancle at that time, so that the experiment 
 could not be tried ; and the bridge to me seemed not 
 guilty at all, (to judge by its trembling,) but as inno- 
 cent as Camilla herself. Now, Warburton must have 
 sought to rival the Welsh pontifex in this particular 
 test of architectural skill ; for his syllogism is so di- 
 vinely poised, that if you shake this key-stone of hi a 
 great arch, (as you certainly may,) then you will 
 become aware of a vibration of a nervous tremor 
 running through the entire dome of his divine lega- 
 tion ; you are absolutely afraid of the dome coming 
 down with yourself in the centre ; just as the Llan- 
 *oost bridge used to be near going into hysterics when 
 the light-footed Camilla bounded across it. This syl- 
 logism, on account of its connection with the Eleusin- 
 ian hoax, I will rehearse : it is the very perfection of 
 a crotchet. Suppose the major proposition to be this : 
 That no religion, unless through the advantage of 
 divine inspiration, could dispense with the doctrine of 
 future rewards and punishments. Suppose the minof 
 proposition this : That the Mosaic religion did dispense 
 vith that doctrine. Then the conclusion will be 
 Vgo, the Mosaic religion was divinely inspired. Thi
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 165 
 
 monstrous tenor of this argument made it necesaary to 
 argue most elaborately that all the false systems of 
 false and cruel religions were affectionately anxioua 
 for maintaining the doctrine of a future state ; but, 
 2dly, that the only true faith and the only pure wor- 
 ship were systematically careless of that doctrine. Of 
 course it became necessary to show, inter alia, that 
 the Grecian States and lawgivers maintained officially, 
 as consecrated parts of the public religion, the doctrine 
 of immortality as valid for man's expectations and 
 fears; whilst at Jerusalem, at Hebron, on Mount 
 Sinai, this doctrine was slighted. Generally speaking, 
 a lie is a hard thing to establish. The Bishop of 
 Gloucester was forced to tax his resources as an artist, 
 in building palaces of air, not less than ever Inigo 
 Jones before him in building Whitehall or St. Vitus's 
 bridge at Llanroost. Unless he could prove that Pa- 
 ganism fought hard for this true doctrine, then by his 
 own argument Paganism would be found true. Just 
 as, inversely, if he failed to prove that Judaism coun- 
 tenanced the false doctrine, Judaism would itself be 
 found false. Whichever favored the false, was true 
 whichever favored the true was false. There's & 
 crotchet for yo;i, reader, round and full as any prize 
 turnip ever yet crowned with laurels by great agricul- 
 tural societies ! I suspect that, in Homeric language, 
 twice nine of such degenerate men as the reader and 
 myself could not grow such a crotchet as that ! 
 
 The Bishop had, therefore, to prove it was an 
 obligation self-created by his own syllogism that the 
 I'agan religion of Greece, in some great authorized 
 butitution of the land, taught and insisted on the 
 ioctrine of a future state as the basis on wLich all
 
 166 SECKET SOCIETIES. 
 
 legal ethics rested. This great doctrine he had to 
 suspend as a chandelier in his halls of Pagan mytho- 
 logy. A pretty chandelier for a Christian Bishop to 
 be chaining to the roof and lighting up for the glory ol 
 heathenism ! Involuntarily one thinks of Aladdin's 
 impious order for a roc's egg, the egg of the very 
 deity whom the slave of the lamp served, to hang up 
 in his principal saloon. The Bishop found his chan- 
 delier, or fancied he had found it, in the old lumber 
 garrets of Eleusis. He knew, he could prove, what 
 was taught in the Eleusinian shows. Was the Bishop 
 ever there ? No : but what of that ? He could read 
 through a milestone. And Virgil, in his 6th JEneid, 
 had given the world a poetic account of the Teletai, 
 which the Bishop kindly translated and expanded into 
 the truth of absolute prose. The doctrine of immor- 
 tality, he insisted, was the chief secret revealed in the 
 mysteries. And thus he proved decisively that, because 
 it taught a capital truth, Paganism must be a capital 
 falsehood. It is impossible to go within a few pages 
 into the innumerable details. Sufficient it would be 
 for any casual reader to ask, if this were the very 
 hinge of all legislative ethics in Greece, how it hap- 
 pened that it was a matter of pure fancy or accident 
 whether any Greek, or even any Athenian, were initi- 
 ted or not ; 2dly, how the Bishop would escape the 
 ibllowing dilemma if the supposed doctrine were 
 advanced merely as an opinion, one amongst others, 
 then what authority did it draw from Eleusis ? If, on 
 the other hand, Eleusis pretended to some special 
 argument for immortality, how came it that many 
 Greek and some Roman philosophers, who had beet 
 introduced at Eleusis, or had even ascended to the
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 16? 
 
 highest degree of pvrjat?, did not, in discussing this 
 question, refer to that secret proof which, though not 
 privileged to develop, they might safely have built 
 upon as a postulate amongst initiated brothers ? An 
 opinion ungrounded was entitled to no weight even 
 in the mobs of Eleusis an argument upon good 
 grounds must have been often alluded to in philosophic 
 schools. Neither could a nation of holy cowards, 
 trembling like the bridge at Llanroost, have had it in 
 their power to intercept the propagation of such a 
 truth. The 47th of Euclid I. might have been kept a 
 secret by fear of assassination, because no man could 
 communicate that in a moment of intoxication ; if his 
 wife, for instance, should insist on his betraying the 
 secret of that proposition, he might safely tell her 
 not a word would she understand or remember; and 
 the worst result would be, that she would box his ears 
 for imposing upon her. I once heard a poor fellow 
 complain, that, being a Freemason, he had been led 
 the life of a dog by his wife, as if he were Samson 
 and she were Delilah, witb the purpose of forcing him 
 to betray the Masonic secret and sign : and these, he 
 solemnly protested to us all, that he had betrayed most 
 regularly and faithfully whenever he happened to be 
 drunk. But what did he get for his goodness ? All 
 the return he ever had for the kindness of this invari- 
 able treachery was a word, too common, I regret to say, 
 '.n female lips, viz. jiddle-de-dee : and he declared, 
 with tears in his ayes, that peace for him was out of 
 the question, until he cculd find out some plausible 
 falsehood that might prove more satisfactory to his 
 wife's mind than the truth. Now the Eleusinian secret, 
 if it related to the immortality of the soul, could not
 
 168 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 have the protection of obscurity or complex involution. 
 If it had, then it could not have been intelligible to 
 mobs : if it had not, then it could not have been 
 guarded against the fervor of confidential conversation. 
 A very subtle argument could not have been commu- 
 nicated to the multitudes that visited the shows a 
 very popular argument would have passed a man's 
 lips, in the ardor of argument, before he would himself 
 be aware of it. 
 
 But all this is superfluous. Let the reader study the 
 short essay of Lobeck on this subject, forming one 
 section in three of his Aglaophamus, and he will treat, 
 with derision, all the irrelevant skirmishing, and the 
 vast roars of artillery pointed at shadows, which amuse 
 the learned, but disgust the philosophic in the ' Divine 
 Legation.' Much remains to be done that Lobeck'a 
 rustic seclusion denied him the opportunities for 
 doing ; v much that can be done effectually only in 
 great libraries. But I return to my assertion, that the 
 most memorable of all Secret Societies was the mean- 
 est. That the Society which made more people hold 
 their tongues than ever the Inquisition did, or the 
 mediaeval Vehm-gericht, was a hoax ; nay, except 
 Freemasonry, the hoax of hoaxes. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 Has the modern world no hoax of its own, answer- 
 ,ng to the Eleusinian mysteries of Grecian days 
 Oh, yes, it has. I have a very bad opinion of the 
 wicient world ; and it would grieve me if such a worla
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 169 
 
 could be shown io have beaten us even in the quality 
 of our hoaxes. I have, also, not a very favorable 
 opinion of the modern world. But 1 dare say that 
 in fifty thousand years it will be considerably im- 
 proved ; and, in the meantime, if we are not quite 
 so good or so clever as we ought to be, yet still we 
 are a trifle better than our ancestors ; I hope we are 
 up to a hoax any day. A man must be a poor creature 
 that can't invent a hoax. For two centuries we hava 
 had a first-rate one ; and its name is Freemasonry. 
 Do you know the secret, my reader ? Or shall I tell 
 you ? Send me a consideration, and I will. But 
 stay, the weather being so fine, and philosophers, 
 therefore, so good-tempered, I'll tell it you for nothing, 
 svhereas, if you become a mason, you must pay for it. 
 Here is the secret. When the novice is introduced 
 into the conclave of the Freemasons, the grand-master 
 looks very fierce at him, and draws his sword, which 
 makes the novice look very melancholy, as he is not 
 aware of having had time as yet for any profaneness, 
 and fancies, therefore, that somebody must have been 
 slandering him. Then the grand-master, or his 
 deputy, cites him to the bar, saying, ' What's that 
 you have in your pocket?' To which the novice 
 replies, 'A guinea.' 'Anything more?' 'Another 
 guinea.' 'Then,' replies the official person in a voice 
 of thunder, ' Fork out.' Of course to a man coming 
 sword-in-hand few people refuse to do that. This 
 forms the first half of the mysteries ; the second half, 
 which is by much the more interesting, consists entirely 
 of brandy. In fact, this latter mystery forms the 
 reason, or final cause, for the elder mystery of the 
 Forking out. But how did I learn all this so ac-
 
 170 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 turately ? Isn't a man liable to be assassinated, if hfi 
 betrays that ineffable mystery or ano^tjro of masonry, 
 which no wretch but one since King Solomon's day is 
 reputed e\ er to have blabbed ? And perhaps, reader, 
 the wretch did'nt blab the whole ; he only got as far 
 9.s the Forking out , and being a churl who grudged 
 his money, he ran away before reaching the brandy. 
 So that this fellow, if he seems to you but half as guilty 
 as myself, on the other hand is but haif as learned. 
 It's better for you to stick by the guiltier man. And 
 yet, on consideration, I am not so guilty as we have 
 both been thinking. Perhaps it was a mistake. Dream- 
 ing on days far back, when I was scheming for an 
 introduction to the honorable society of masons, and of 
 course to their honorable secret, with the single-minded 
 intention of instantly betraying that secret to a dear 
 female friend (and, you see, in honor it was not pos- 
 sible for me to do otherwise, because she had made 
 me promise that I would') all this time I was soothing 
 my remorse with a belief that woman was answerable 
 for my treachery, she having positively compelled me 
 to undertake it. When suddenly I woke into a bright 
 conviction that all was a dream ; that I had never been 
 near the Freemasons ; that I had treacherously evaded 
 the treachery which I ought to have committed, by 
 perfidiously forging a secret quite as good, very likely 
 better, than that which I was pledged in honor to 
 betray ; and that, if anybody had ground of complain! 
 against myself, it was not the grand-master, sword-ir 
 hand, but my poor ill-used female friend, so confiding 
 so amiably credulous in my treachery, so cruelly de- 
 ceived, who had swallowed a mendacious account of 
 Freemasonry forged by myself, the same which,
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 171 
 
 r fear that, on looking back, I shall find myself 
 to have been palming, in this very page, upon the 
 touch respected reader. Seriously, however, the whole 
 bubble of Freemasonry was shattered in a paper which 
 I myself once threw into a London journal about the 
 year 1823 or '4. It was a paper in this sense mino, 
 that from me it had received form and arrangement ; 
 but the materials belonged to a learned German, viz. 
 Buhle, the same (Ebelison) that edited the ' Bipont 
 Aristotle,' and wrote a history of philosophy. No 
 German has any conception of style. I therefore did 
 him the favor to wash his dirty face, and make him 
 presentable amongst Christians ; but the substance was 
 drawn entirely from this German book. It was there 
 established, that the whole hoax of masonry had been 
 invented in the year 1629 by one Andrea; and the 
 reason that this exposure could have dropped out of 
 remembrance, is, probably, that it never reacn^d the 
 public ear : partly because the journal had a limited 
 circulation ; but much more because the title of the 
 paper was not so constructed as to indicate its object. 
 A title, which seemed to promise only a discussion 
 of masonic doctrines, must have repelled everybody ; 
 vhereas, it ought to have announced (what in fact it 
 uccomplished) the utter demolition of the whole ma- 
 sonic edifice. At this moment I have not space for 
 an abstract of that paper ; but it was conclusive ; and 
 hereafter, when I have strengthened it by facts since 
 noticed in my own reading, it may be right to place it 
 more effectually before the public eye. 
 
 Finally, I will call the reader's attention to the most 
 remarkable by far of all secret societies ever heard of, 
 tnd for this reason, that it suddenly developed th
 
 172 SECHET SOCIETIES. 
 
 nvost critical wisdom in a dreadful emergency ; second* 
 ly, the. grandest purpose ; and, lastly, with entire 
 success. The purpose was, to protect a jewel by 
 hiding it from all eyes, whilst it navigated a sea 
 swarming with enemies. The critical wisdom was 
 the most remarkable evidence ever given by the 
 primitive Christians of that serpent's subtlety which 
 they had been warned to combine with the innocence 
 of the dove. The success was, the victory of the 
 Christian church over the armies that waylaid its 
 infancy. Without falsehood, without shadow of false- 
 hood, all the benefits of falsehood the profoundest 
 were secured. Without need to abjure anything, all 
 that would have raised a demoniac yell for instant 
 abjuration was suddenly hidden out of sight. In noon- 
 day the Christian Church was suddenly withdrawn 
 behind impenetrable veils, even as the infant Christ 
 himself was caught up 'to the secrecies of Egypt and 
 the wilderness from the bloody wrath of Herod. And 
 whilst the enemies of this infant society were roaming 
 round them on every side, seeking for them, walking 
 upon their very traces, absolutely touching them, 01 
 divided from their victims only as children in bed havi 
 escaped from murderers in thick darkness, sheltered 
 by no screen but a muslin curtain ; all the while the 
 inner principle of the church lurked as in the cell ai 
 the centre of a labyrinth. Was the hon. reader ever 
 \n a real labyrinth, like that described by Herodotus ? 
 We have all been in labyrinths of doubt, labyrinths 
 of error, labyrinths of metaphysical nonsense. But I 
 speak of literal labyrinths. Now, at Bath, in my laby- 
 rinthine childhood, there was such a mystery. This 
 mystery I used to visit ; and I can assert that no typ
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 173 
 
 ever flashed upon my mind so pathetically shadowing 
 out the fatal jrretrievability of early errors in life. 
 Turn but wrong at first entering the thicket, and all waa 
 over ; you were ruined ; no wandering could recover 
 "he right path. Or suppose you even took the right 
 turn at first, what of that ? You couldn't expect to 
 draw a second prize ; five turnings offered very soon 
 after ; your chance of escaping error was now reduced 
 to one-fifth of unity ; and supposing that again you 
 draw no blank, not very far had you gone before 
 fourteen roads offered. What remained for you to do 
 now ? Why, if you were a wise man, to lie down 
 and cry. None but a presumptuous fool would count 
 upon drawing for a third time a prize, and such a 
 prize as one amongst fourteen. I mention all this, I 
 recall this image of the poor Sidney Labyrinth, whose 
 roses, I fear, must long ago have perished, betraying 
 all the secrets of the mysterious house, simply to teach 
 the stranger how secure is the heart of a labyrinth. 
 Gibraltar is nothing to it. You may sit in that deep 
 grave-like recess, you may hear distant steps approach- 
 ing, but laugh at them. If you are coining, and have 
 all the implements of coming round about you, never 
 trouble yourself to hide them. Nobody will in this 
 life ever reach you. Why, it is demonstrable by the 
 arithmetic of combinations, that if a man spent the 
 flower of his life as a police officer in trying to reach 
 your coining-shop, he could not do it ; you might rest 
 as in a sanctuary, that is, hidden and inaccessible to 
 those who do not know the secret of the concealment. 
 In that recess you might keep a private still for a 
 eentury without fear of the exciseman. Light, com- 
 mon daylight will not shc'v you .hp stars; * v "
 
 174 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 contrary, it hides them ; and the brighter this ligh 
 becomes, the more it hides them. Even so, from tht 
 exquisite machinery of the earliest Christian society, 
 whatever suspicions might walk ahout in the darkness, 
 all efforts of fanatical enemies at forcing an entrance 
 within the air-woven gates of these entrenchments 
 were (as the reader will see) utterly thrown away 
 Round and round the furious Jews must have circum- 
 ambulated the camp, like the poor gold fish eternally 
 wheeling round his crystal wall, but, after endless 
 cruisings, never nearer to any opening. That con- 
 cealment for the Christian nursery was absolutely 
 required, because else martyrdom would have come 
 too soon. Martyrdom was good for watering the 
 church, and quickening its harvests ; but, at this early 
 stage of advance, it would utterly have extirpated the 
 church. If a voice had been heard from heaven, 
 saying, ' Let there be martyrs,' soon the great answer- 
 ing return would be heard rolling back from earth, 
 ' And there were martyrs. But for this there must be 
 time ; the fire, to be sure, will never be extinguished, 
 if once thoroughly kindled ; but, in this earliest twilight 
 of the primitive faith, the fire is but a little gathering 
 of scanty fuel fanned by human breath, and barely 
 sufficient to show one golden rallying star in all the 
 mighty wilderness. 
 
 There was the motive to the Secret Society which 
 I am going to describe ? there was its necessity ! 
 * Mask, or you will be destroyed ! ' was the private 
 signal among the Christians. ' Fall flat on your faces, 
 says the Arab to the Pilgrims, when he sees the purpl. 
 haze of tie simoom running before the wind. ' Lie 
 down, men,' says the captain to his fusiliers, ' till these
 
 SECBET SOCIETIES. 17 
 
 nurricanes of the artillery be spent.' To hide from 
 the storm during its first murderous explosion, was so 
 absolutely requisite, that, simply from its sine qua non 
 necessity, and supposing there were no other argument 
 whatever, I should infer that it had been a fact. Be- 
 cause it must have been, therefore (I should say) it 
 teas. However, do as you like ; pray use your own. 
 pleasure ; consider yourself quite at home amongst my 
 arguments, and kick them about with as little apology 
 as if they were my children and servants. What 
 makes me so easy in the matter is, that I use the above 
 argument though, in my opinion, a strong one ex 
 abundanti ; it is one string more than I want to my 
 bow ; so I can afford to lose it, even if I lose it unjustly. 
 But, by quite another line of argument, and dispensing 
 with this altogether, I mean to make you believe, 
 reader, whether you like it or not. 
 
 I once threw together a few thoughts upon this ob- 
 scure question of the Essenes, which thoughts were 
 published a-t the time in a celebrated journal, and my 
 reason for referring to them here is in connection with 
 a single inappropriate expression since applied to that 
 paper. In a short article on myself in his ' Gallery of 
 Literary Portraits,' Mr. Gilfillan spoke of that little 
 disquisition in terms beyond its merit, and I thank him 
 for his kind opinion. But as to one word, not affecting 
 myself but the subject, I find it a duty of sincerity to 
 dissent from him. He calls the thesis of that paper 
 paradoxical. 1 Now paradox is a very charming 
 thing, and, since leaving off opium, I take a great deal 
 too much of it for my health. But, in this case, the 
 paradox lies precisely and outrageously in the opposite 
 direction ; that is, when uso i (as *he word paradox
 
 176 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 commonly is) to mean something that startles bj itt 
 extravagance. Else I have twice 01 three times ex- 
 plained in print, for the benefit of my female or non- 
 Grecian readers, that paradox, being a purely Greek 
 word, ought strictly to be read by a Grecian light, and 
 then it implies nothing, of necessity, that may not b 
 right. Here follows a rigorous definition of paradox 
 in a Greek sense. Not that only is paradoxical which, 
 being really false, puts on the semblance of truth ; 
 but, secondly, that, also, which, being really true, puts 
 on the semblance of falsehood. For, literally speak- 
 ing, everything is paradoxical which contradicts the 
 public doxa ((JoSa), that is, contradicts the popular 
 opinion or the public expectation, which may be done 
 by a truth as easily as a falsehood. The very weight- 
 iest truths now received amongst men, have nearly all 
 of them, in turn, in some one stage of their develop- 
 ment, been found strong paradoxes to the popular 
 mind. Hence it is, viz. in the Grecian sense of the 
 word paradox as something extraordinary, but not ofc 
 that account the less likely to be true, that several 
 great philosophers have published, under the idea and 
 vitle of paradoxes, some first-rate truths on which they 
 desired to fix public attention ; meaning, in a short- 
 hand form, to say ' Here, reader, are some extraor- 
 dinary truths, looking so very like falsehoods, that you 
 would never take them for anything else if you were 
 lot invited to give them a special examination.' Boyle 
 published some elementary principles in hydrostatics 
 as paradoxes. Natural philosophy is overrun with 
 paradoxes. Mathematics, mechanics, dynamics, are all 
 parrially infested with them. .And in morals the Stoic* 
 threw their weightiest doctrines under the rubric of
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 177 
 
 paradoxes a fact which survives to this day in a little 
 essay of C.'cero's. To be paradoxical, therefore, is 
 not necessarily to be unphilosophic ; and that being so, 
 it might seem as though Mr. Gilfillan had laid me 
 under no obligation to dissent from him ; but used 
 popularly, as naturally Mr. Gilfillan meant to use it in 
 that situation, the word certainly throws a reproach of 
 extravagance upon any thought, argument, or specula- 
 tion, to which it is imputed. 
 
 Now it is important for the reader to understand 
 that the very first thing which ever fixed my sceptical 
 eye upon the whole fable of the Essenes, as commonly 
 received amongst Christian churches, was the intolera 
 ble extravagance of the received story. The outrage- 
 ousness the mere Cyclopian enormity of its paradox 
 
 this; and nothing else, it was that first extorted from 
 me, on a July day, one long shiver of horror at the 
 credulity, the bottomless credulity, that could have 
 swallowed such a legend of delirium. Why, Pliny, 
 my excellent Sir, you were a gentleman mixing with 
 men of the highest circles you were yourself a man 
 of fine and brilliant intellect a jealous inquirer 
 and, in extent of science, beyond your contemporaries 
 
 how came you, then, to lend an ear, so learned as 
 yours, to two such knaves as your Jewish authorities ? 
 For, doubtless, it was they, viz. Josephus and Philo- 
 Judaeus, that poisoned the Plinian ear. Others from 
 Alexandria would join the cabal, but these vaga- 
 bonds were the ringleaders. Now there were three 
 reasons for specially distrusting such men, two known 
 equally well to Pliny and me, one separately to myself. 
 Jews had by that time earned the reputation, in Roman 
 Hterature, of being credulous by prefeience amongsf 
 
 12
 
 [78 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 the children of earth. That was one reason ; a second 
 was, that all men tainted with intense nationality, 
 and especially if not the gay, amiable, nationality of 
 Frenchmen, but a gloomy unsocial nationality, are 
 liable to suspicion as liars. So much was known to 
 Pliny : and a third thing which was not, I could have 
 told biro, viz. that Josephus was the greatest knave in 
 that generation. A learned ma"n in Ireland is at this 
 moment bringing out a new translation of Josephus, 
 which has, indeed, long been wanted ; for ' wicked 
 Will Whiston' 18 was a -very moderate Grecian a 
 miserable antiquarian a coarse writer of English 
 and at that time of day, in the absence of the maic 
 German and English researches on the many questions 
 (chronological or historical) in Syro-Judaic and Egyp- 
 tian antiquities, had it not within his physical possibili- 
 ties to adorn the Sparta 19 which chance had assigned 
 him. From what I hear, the history will benefit by 
 this new labor of editorial culture ; the only thing to 
 be feared is, that the historian, the bad Josephus, will 
 not be meritoriously scourged. 1, lictor, colliga manus. 
 One aspect of Josephus and his character occurs to 
 me as interesting, viz. when placed in collision with 
 the character so different, and the position partially the 
 same, of St. Paul. In both, when suddenly detained 
 for inspection at an early stage of their career, we 
 have a bigot of the most intractible quality ; and in 
 both the bigotry expressed its ferocity exclusively upon 
 ihe Christians, as the new-born heretics that troubled 
 the unity of the national church. Thus far the parties 
 agree ; and they agree also in being as learned as the 
 limited affinities in their native studies to exotic learn- 
 ing would allow. But from that point, up to whicb
 
 SECKET SOCIETIES. 179 
 
 the resemblance in position, in education, in temper, 
 Is so close, how entirely opposed ! Both erring pro- 
 foundly ; yet the one not only in his errors, but by 
 his errors showing himself most single-minded, con- 
 scientious, fervent, devout ; a holy bigot ; as incapable 
 of anything mercenary then, of anything insidious, or 
 of compromise with any mode of self-interest, as aftei 
 the rectification of his views he was incapable of com- 
 promise with profounder shapes of error. The other, 
 a time-serving knave, sold to adulation and servile 
 ministries ; a pimp ; a liar ; or ready for any worse 
 office, if worse is named on earth. Never on any 
 human stage was so dramatically realized, as by Jose- 
 phus in Rome, the delineation of the poet : 
 * * * * 
 
 ' A fingering meddling slave ; 
 One that would peep and botanize 
 
 Upon his mother's grave.' 
 
 Yes, this master in Israel, this leader of Sanhedrims, 
 went as to a puppet-show, sat the long day through to 
 gee a sight. What sight ? Jugglers, was it ? buffoons ? 
 tumblers ? dancing dogs ? or a reed shaken by the 
 wind ? Oh, no ! Simply to see his ruined country 
 carried captive in effigy through the city of her con- 
 queror to see the sword of the Maccabees hung up 
 as a Roman trophy to see the mysteries of the 
 glorious temple dragged from secrecy before the 
 grooms and gladiators of Rome. Then when this 
 was finished, a woe that would once have caused 
 Hebrew corpses to stir in their graves, he goes home 
 to find his atrium made glorious with the monuments 
 at' a thousand years that had descended through the 
 orinces of Hebrew tribes ; and to find his luxury, hi*
 
 180 . SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 palace, and his harem, charged as a perpetual tax 
 upon the groans of his brave unsurrendering country- 
 men, that had been sold as slaves into marble quarries : 
 they worked extra hours, that the only traitor to Jeru- 
 salem might revel in honor. 
 
 When first I read the account of the Essems in 
 Josephus, I leaned back in my seat, and apostrophized 
 the writer thus : ' Joe, listen to me ; youS 3 been 
 telling us a fairy tale ; and, for my part, I've no objec- 
 tion to a fairy tale in any situation ; because, if one 
 can make no use of it oneself, one always knows a 
 child that will be thankful for it. But this tale, Mr. 
 Joseph, happens also to be a lie ; secondly, a fraudu- 
 lent lie ; thirdly, a malicious lie.' It was a fiction of 
 hatred against Christianity. For I shall startle the 
 reader a little when I inform him that, if there were a 
 syllable of truth in the main statement of Josephus, 
 then at one blow goes to wreck the whole edifice of 
 Christianity. Nothing but blindness and insensibility 
 of heart to the true internal evidence of Christianity 
 could ever have hidden this from men. Religious 
 sycophants who affect the profoundest admiration, but 
 in their hearts feel none at all, for what they profess to 
 regard as the beauty of the moral revelations made in. 
 the New Testament, are easily cheated, and often have 
 been cheated, by the grossest plagiarisms from Chris- 
 tianity offered to them a? the pure natural growths of 
 paganism. I would engage to write a Greek version 
 somewhat varied and garbled of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, were it hiddeu in Pompeii, unearthed, and 
 published as a fragment from a posthumous work of a 
 Stoic, with the certain result that very few people 
 indeed should detect in it any siirns of forgery. There
 
 SECKET SOCIETIES. 181 
 
 ire several cases of that nature actually unsuspected 
 at this hour, which my deep cynicism and detestation 
 of human hypocrisy yet anticipates a banquet of grati- 
 fication in one day exposing. Oh, the millions of deaf 
 hearts, deaf to everything really impassioned in music, 
 that pretend to admire Mozart ! Oh, the worlds of 
 hypocrites who cant about the divinity of Scriptural 
 morality, and yet would never see any lustre at all La 
 the most resplendent of Christian jewels, provided the 
 pagan thief had a little disguised their setting. The 
 thing has been tried long before the case of the Essenes ; 
 and it takes more than a scholar to detect the impos- 
 ture. A philosopher, who must also be a scholar, is 
 wanted. The eye that suspects and watches, is 
 needed. Dark seas were those over which the ark of 
 Christianity tilted for the first four centuries ; evil men 
 and enemies were cruising, and an Alexandrian Pha- 
 ros is required to throw back a light broad enough to 
 search and sweep the guilty secrets of those times. 
 The Church of Rome has always thrown a backward 
 telescopic glance of question and uneasy suspicion 
 upon these ridiculous Essenes, and has repeatedly 
 come to the right practical conclusion that they 
 were, and must have been, Christians under some mask 
 or other ; but the failure of Rome has been in carrying 
 the Ariadne's thread through the whole labyrinth from 
 centre to circumference. Rome has given the ultimate 
 bolution rightly, but has not (in geometrical language) 
 raised the construction of the problem with its condi- 
 tions and steps of evolution. Shall I tell you. reader, 
 m a brief, rememberablo form, what was the crime of 
 the hound Josephus, through this fable of the Essenea 
 to relation to Christ ? It was the very same crime as
 
 182 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 that of the hound Lauder in relation to Milton. Lau- 
 der, about the middle of the last centuiy, bearing deadly 
 malice to the memory of Milton, conceived the idea of 
 charging the great poet with plagiarism. He would 
 greatly have preferred denying the value in toto of the 
 ' Paradise Lost.' But, as this was hopeless, the next 
 best course was to say Well, let it be as grand ae 
 you please, it is none of Milton's. And, to prepare the 
 way for this, he proceeded to translate into Latin (but 
 with plausible variations in the expression or arrange- 
 ment) some of the most memorable passages in the 
 poem. By this means he had, as it were, melted 
 down or broken up the golden sacramental plate, and 
 might now apply it to his own felonious purposes. 
 The false swindling travesty of the Miltonic passage 
 he produced as the undoubted original, professing to 
 have found it in some rare or obscure author, not 
 easily within reach, and then saying Judge (I be- 
 seech you) for yourself, whether Milton were indebted 
 to this passage or not. Now, reader, a falsehood is a 
 falsehood, though uttered under circumstances of hurry 
 and sudden trepidation ; but certainly it becomes, 
 though not more a falsehood, yet more criminally, 
 and hatefully a falsehood, when prepared from afar 
 and elaborately supported by fraud, and dovetailing 
 into fraud, and having no palliation from pressure and 
 haste. A man is a knave who falsely, but in the panic 
 of turning all suspicion from himself, charges you or 
 tie with having appropriated another man's jewel. 
 But how much more odiously is he a knave, if with nc 
 such motive of screening himself, if out of pure devil- 
 ish malice to us, he has contrived in preparation for 
 his own lie to conceal the jewel about our persons
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 185 
 
 This was what the wretch Lauder tried hard to do for 
 Milton. This was what the wretch Josephus tried hard 
 to do for Christ. Josephus grew up to be a mature 
 man, about thirty-five years old, during that earliest 
 stage of Christianity, when the divine morality of its 
 founder was producing its first profound impression, 
 through the advantage of a dim religious one, still 
 brooding over the East, from the mysterious death of 
 that founder. I wish that the reader would attend to 
 a thing which I am going to say. In 1839-40 and '41, 
 it was found by our force in Affghanistan that, in a 
 degree much beyond any of the Hindoo races, the 
 Affghan Sirdars and officers of rank were profoundly 
 struck by the beauty of the Evangelists ; especially 
 in five or six passages, amongst which were the Lord's 
 Prayer, and the Sermon on the Mount, with one or 
 two Parables. The reason of this was, that the Aff- 
 ghans, though more simple and unpolished than the 
 Hindoos, were also in a far more natural condition of 
 moral feeling being Mahometans, they were much 
 more advanced in their conceptions of Deity ; and 
 they had never been polluted by the fearful distrac- 
 tions of the Hindoo polytheism. Now, I am far from 
 insinuating that the Romans of that first Christian 
 era were no further advanced in culture than the 
 Affghans, yet still I affirm that, in many features, both 
 moral and intellectual, these two martial races resem- 
 bled each other. Both were slow and tenacious (that 
 8 adhesive) in their feelings. BotL had a tendency to 
 dulness, but for that very reason to the sublime. 
 Mercurial races are never sublime. There were two 
 thannels through whom the Palestine of Christ's day 
 wmmunicated with the world outside, viz. the Romans
 
 184 SECRET SOCii/llES. 
 
 of the Roman armies, and the Greek colonists. Syria, 
 under the Syro-Macedonian dynasty ; Palestine, undet 
 the house of Antipater ; and Egypt, under the Ptole- 
 mies were all deluged with Greek emigrants and 
 settlers. Of these two races, the subtle, agile Greek, 
 unprincipled, full of change and levity, was compara- 
 tively of little use to Christianity as a centre, waiting 
 and seeking for means of diffusion. Not only were 
 Jie deeper conscientious instincts of the Romans more 
 suited to a profound religion, as instruments for the 
 radiation of light, but also it is certain that the military 
 condition per se supplies some advantages towards a 
 meditative apprehension of vast eternal problems be- 
 yond what can be supplied by the fractionary life of 
 petty brokerage or commerce. This is also certain, 
 that Rome itself the idea which predominated in 
 Roman camps cherished amongst her soldiery, from 
 the very enormities of her state, and from the chaos 
 of her internal life, a tendency to vast fermentations 
 of thought favorable to revolutions in man's internal 
 worlds of feeling and aspirations. Hence it will be 
 found, if once a man's eye is directed into that current, 
 that no classes of people did so much for the propaga- 
 tion of Christianity as the officers 20 of the Roman army, 
 centurions, tribunes, prefects, legates, &c., or as the 
 aulic officers, the great ceremonial officers of the im- 
 perial court or as the aulic ladies, the great leading 
 ladies that had practically much influence on the ear 
 of Caesar. The utter dying away of the Roman 
 paganism, which had become quite as powerless to all 
 the accomplished men and women of Rome for any 
 purpose of terror or of momentary consolation as to ua 
 English at present the mythology of Faries, left
 
 SECKET SOCIETIES. 185 
 
 frightful vacuum in the mind of Roman grandees a 
 uorror as of voyagers upon some world floating away 
 without helmsman or governor. In this unhappy agi- 
 tation of spirit, and permanent posture of clamorou. 
 demand for light, a nidus was already forming for a 
 deep brooding interest in any great spiritual phenom- 
 ena of breadth and power that might anywhere arise 
 amongst men. Athens was too windy, too conceited, 
 too shallow in feeling, to have been much impressed 
 by the deepest revolutionary movements in religion. 
 But in Rome, besides the far different character^of the 
 national mind, there were what may be called spiritual 
 horrors arising, which (like dreadful nervous diseases) 
 unfolded terrifically to the experience spiritual capaci- 
 ties and openings beyond what had been suspected. 
 The great domestic convulsions of Rome, the poison- 
 ings and assassinations, that gleam so fearfully from 
 the pictures of Juvenal, were beginning about this 
 period. It was not that by any coarse, palpable logic, 
 as dull people understood the case, women or men 
 said ' Accountability there is none ; and we will no 
 longer act as if there were.' Accountability there 
 never had been any ; but the obscure scene of an 
 order with which all things sympathized, men not less 
 than the wheels of society this had blindly produced 
 an instinct of corresponding self-control. At present, 
 when the Pagan religion had virtually died out, all 
 secret restraints were breaking up ; a general delirium 
 carried, aud was felt to carry, a license into all ranks ; 
 it was not a negative merely, but a positive change. 
 ^ religion had collapsed that was negative ; a mock- 
 ery had been exposed that was positive. It was not 
 thai restraints were resisted ; there were none to resist ;
 
 186 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 they had crumbled away spontaneously. What powei 
 still acted upon society ?' Terror from police, and still 
 as ever, the Divine restraints of love and pity, honor, 
 and domestic affections. But the conscience spoke no 
 longer through any spiritual organs. Just at this mo- 
 ment it was when the confusions of Roman society, 
 He 7ast expansion of the empire, the sea-like expan- 
 i >D of the mighty capital, the political tendencies of 
 the whole system, were all moving together towards 
 grpjideur and distraction of feeling, that the doctrine 
 of apotheosis, applied to a man and often to a monster, 
 towered up to cause still greater distraction. 21 The 
 Pagan Pantheon had just sunk away from the support 
 of the Roman mind. It was not only that the Pagan 
 gods were individually too base and polluted to sustain 
 the spiritual feelings of an expanding national intellect, 
 but the whole collective idea of Deity was too feebly 
 conceived by Paganism. Had the individuals of the 
 Pantheon been purer and nobler, their doom was 
 sealed, nevertheless, by their abstract deficiencies as 
 modes of spiritual life for a race so growing as that of 
 man. How unfortunate, therefore, that at this crisis, 
 when ancient religions were crumbling into ruins, new 
 gods should be arising from the veriest beasts amongst 
 men utterly repelled and rejected by the spiritual 
 instinct in man, but suggested by a necessity of polit- 
 ical convenience. 
 
 But oftentimes the excess of an evil is its cure, or 
 the first impulse in that direction. From the connec- 
 tion of the great Augustan 22 and Claudian houses with 
 the family of Herod, much knowledge of Jewish pe- 
 culiarities had been diffused in Rome. Agrippa, the 
 grandson of Herod Bernice, and others of the reigning
 
 SECHET SOCIETIES. 187 
 
 house ,n Judea, had been long resident had bee* 
 loved and admired in the imperial family. The 
 tragical events in Herod's own household 23 had drawn 
 the attention of the Roman grandees and senate to 
 Jewish affairs. The migrations to Rome of Jewisl 
 settlers, since the era of Pharsalia, had strengthened 
 the interest, by keeping the enigma of the Jewish his- 
 tory and character constantly before the Roman eye. 
 The upper and more intellectual circles in Rome of 
 inquiring men and women kept up this interest through 
 their military friends in the legions quartered upon 
 Syria and Lower Egypt, many of whom must have 
 read the Septuagint version of the Law and the Pro- 
 phets. Some whispers, though dim and scarcely 
 intelligible, would have made their way to Rome as to 
 the scenes of the Crucifixion, able at least to increase 
 the attraction of mystery. But a much broader and 
 steadier interest would have been diffused by the 
 accounts transmitted of the Temple, so mysterious 
 from the absence of all idol, so magnificent to ths eye 
 and the ear from its glorious service. By the time 
 when Vespasian and his son commanded in the T'last, 
 and when the great insurrection of the Jewish ~ace 
 in Jerusalem was commencing, Josephus must I~ave 
 been well aware of this deep attention to his rwn 
 people gathering in the highest quarters ; and he rr ust 
 have been aware that what was now creeping rvto 
 the subject of profoundest inquiry amongst tue Jf-wa 
 themselves, viz. the true pretensions, the history, doc- 
 trines, and new morals, of those Nazarene rev.iluti'-n- 
 ists, would, by a natural transfer, soon become +he 
 capital object of attention to all Romans interested in 
 Judfa. The game was up for the separate g^'vy of
 
 188 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 Judaism, the honor of the Mosaic legislation was 
 becoming a superannuated thing, if he suffered the 
 grandeur of Christianity, as such, and recognised for 
 Christianity, to force its way upon the fermenting 
 intellect of Rome. His discernment told him that the 
 new Christian ethics never would be put down. That 
 *ra& impossible ; but he fancied that it might be possi- 
 ble to disconnect the system of moral truth from the 
 new but still obscure Christian sect, and to transfer its 
 glory upon a pretended race of Hebrew recluses or 
 immemorial eremites. As Lander meant to say, ' This 
 may be grand, but it is not Milton's ; ' so did Josephus 
 mean to say, ' This may be very fine and very new, 
 but take notice it is not Christ's.' During his captivity 
 in Roman hands and in Rome, being one of the few 
 cowards who had spiritedly volunteered as a traitor, 
 and being a good scholar for a Jew, as well as a good 
 traitor and the best of cowards, he enjoyed the finest 
 opportunities of insinuating his ridiculous legend about 
 the Essenes into the foremost literary heads of the 
 universal metropolis. Imperial favor, and the increas- 
 ing curiosity of Rome, secured him access to the most 
 intellectual circles. His legend was adopted by the 
 ruling authority in the literature of the earth ; and an 
 impossible lie became signed and countersigned for 
 many centuries to come. 
 
 But how did this particular form arise for the lie ? 
 Were there no such people as the Essenes ? Why, 
 no ; not as Josephus described them : if there were, 
 ir could be, then there were Christians without Christ ; 
 there was Christianity invented by man. Under his 
 delineation, they existed only as King Arthur existed, 01 
 Morgan le Fay, or the sword Excalibur. Considered
 
 SECEET SOCIETIES. 18'J 
 
 In their romantic pretensions, connected with the 
 Round Table, these worthy blades of flesh and steel 
 were pure dreams ; but, as downright sober realities, 
 known to cutlers and others, they certainly have a 
 Hold upon history. So of the Essenes : nobody could, 
 be more certain than Josephus that there were such 
 people ; for he knew the very street of Jerusalem in 
 which they met ; and in fact he had been matriculated 
 amongst them himself. Only all that moonshine about 
 remote seclusions, and antique derivations, and philo- 
 sophic considerations, were fables of the Hesperides, 
 or fit for the future use of Archbishop Turpin. What, 
 then, is my own account of the Essenes ? 
 
 The earliest great danger to which Christianity was 
 exposed, arose with the Jews. This was the danger 
 that besieged the cradle of the religion. From Rome 
 no danger arose until the time of Trajan ; and, as to 
 the nature of this danger, the very wildest mistake is 
 made in books innumerable. No Roman anger ever 
 did, or ever could, point to any doctrine of Chris- 
 tianity ; unless, indeed, in times long subsequent, wher. 
 the Christian doctrines, though otherwise indifferent 
 to the Roman authorities, would become exponents or 
 convertible signs of the firm disloyalty to Caesar which 
 constitutes the one great offence of Christians. Will 
 you burn incense to Caesar ? No. Well, that is your 
 State crime, Christian ; that, and neither less nor more. 
 With the Jews the case was exactly reversed ; they 
 cared nothing about the external ceremonies (or cultus} 
 of the Christians, what it was they practised, or what 
 <t was they refused to practise. A treasonable distinc- 
 "ion would even have been a recommendation in theii 
 eyes; and as to any differences between their own
 
 IyO SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 ritual and the Christian, for these (had they been more 
 or greater than they were) the ruling Jews would 
 readily have found the same indulgence which they 
 found for other schismatics, or imperfect proselytes, 01 
 doubtful brothers, or known Gentiles. All these things 
 were trifles ; what they cared about was exactly what 
 the Romans did not care about, viz. the Christian 
 doctrines in relation to Moses and the Messiah. Was 
 the Messiah come ? Were the prophecies accom- 
 plished ? Was the Mosaic economy of their nation 
 self-dissolved, as having reached its appointed ter- 
 minus, or natural euthanasy, and lost itself in a new 
 order of things ? This concerned their existence as a 
 separate people. If that were the Messiah, whom the 
 Christians gave out for such, then all the fabric of 
 their national hopes, their visions of an earthly restora- 
 tion, were shattered. Into this question shot itself the 
 whole agony of their hereditary interest and pride as 
 the children of Abraham. The Jewish nature was 
 now roused in good earnest. So much we may see 
 sufficiently in the Acts of the Apostles ; and we may 
 be assured by more than one reflection, that the Jewish 
 eaders at that time were resolved not again to commit 
 the error of relaxing their efforts until the work of 
 extermination was perfect. They felt, doubtless not 
 without much surprise, but still with some self- 
 reproach, that they had been too negligent in asgam- 
 ing the sect to have been trampled out by the judicial 
 death of its leader. Dispersion had not prevented the 
 members of the sect from recombining ; and even the 
 public death as a malefactor of the leader was so far 
 from having dimmed the eyes or dejected the hopes o. 
 the body, that, under the new coloring given to it bv
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES 191 
 
 the Christians, this very death had become the most 
 triumphant of victories. There was, besides, a reason 
 to dread the construction of the Romans upon this 
 heresy, if it continued longer to defy public suppres- 
 sion. And there was yet another uneasiness that must 
 greatly have been increasing an uneasiness of an 
 affecting nature, and which long afterwards, in agea 
 nearer to our own, constituted the most pathetic fea- 
 ture in Christian martyrdoms. Oftentimes those who 
 resorted to the fiery spectacle in pure hatred of the 
 martyr, or who were purposely brought thither to be 
 warned by salutary fear, were observed by degrees 
 to grow thoughtful ; instead of reaping confirmation 
 in their feelings of horror, they seemed dealing with 
 some internal struggle, musing, pausing, reflecting, 
 and at length enamored as by some new-born love, 
 languishing in some secret fascination. Those that 
 in Pagan days caught in forests a momentary glimpse 
 of the nymphs and sylvan goddesses, were struck 
 with a hopeless passion ; they were nympholepts : 
 the affection, as well known as epilepsy, was called 
 nympholepsy. 24 This parallel affection, in those that 
 caught a momentary celestial glimpse from the counte- 
 nances of dying martyrs, by the side of their fiery 
 couches, might be called martyrolepsy. And many 
 ivere they that saw the secret glance. In mountainous 
 ands, oftentimes when looking down from eminences 
 far above the Wei of lakes and valleys, it has hap- 
 pened that I could not see the sun : the sun was hidden 
 behind some gloomy mass of clouds ; but far below I 
 beheld, tremuloush r vibrating on the bosom of some 
 lalf-hidden lake, a golden pillar of solar splendor 
 vliich had escaped through rifts and rents in ihf
 
 192 SECRET S(CIETtES. 
 
 clouds that to me were as invisible as the sun himself 
 Sc in the martyrdom of the proto-martyr St. Stephen, 
 Paul of Tarsus, the leai'ned Jew, could see no gates of 
 heaven that opened, could see no solar orb : to him 
 were visible, as the scenery about St. Stephen, nothing 
 but darkness of error and clouds. Yet, as I far below 
 in the lake, so he far below in the countenance of St. 
 Stephen, saw, with consternation, reflected a golden 
 sunlight, some radiance not earthly, which ought not 
 to have been there. That troubled him. Whence 
 came that 1 The countenance of Stephen, when the 
 great chorus was even then arising ' Stone him to 
 death ! ' 25 shone like the countenance of an angel. 
 That countenance, which brought down to earth some 
 revelation of a brightness in the sky, intercepted to 
 Paul, perplexed him ; haunted him sleeping, troubled 
 him when awake. That face of the martyr brought 
 aown telegraphically from some altitude inaccessible 
 to himself, a handwriting that must be authentic. It 
 carried off to heaven, in the very moment of death, a 
 glory that from heaven it must have borrowed. Upon 
 this we may be sure that Paul brooded intensely ; that 
 jhe effect, noticed as so often occurring at martyrdoms, 
 was already commencing in him ; and probably that 
 the noonday scene on the road to Damascus did but 
 quicken and ante-date a result which would at any rate 
 have come. That very case of Paul, and no doubt 
 others not recorded, must continually have been caus- 
 ing fresh uneasiness to the Jewish leaders. Their own 
 ministers were falling off to the enemy. And now, 
 therefore, at last they were determined, once for all 
 that it should be decided who was to be Master ii 
 Jerusi'em.
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 193 
 
 The Apostles, on their side, and all their flock, 
 though not losing a solemn confidence in the issue, 
 could not fail to be alarmed. A contest of life and 
 death was at hand. By what price of suffering and 
 ruins the victory might need to be achieved, they could 
 not measure. They had now faced, as they saw, 
 without power any more to evade it, a fiery trial. 
 Ordinary counsels would not avail ; and according to 
 the magnitude of the crisis, it became the first of duties 
 to watch warily every step they should take, since the 
 very first false one might happen to prove irretrievable. 
 The interests of the youthful church were confided to 
 their hands. Less than faithful they could not be ; 
 but for the present that was not enough. To be faith- 
 ful in extremity was all that might remain at last ; but 
 for the present, the summons was to be wise, so as to 
 intercept that extremity, if possible. In this exigency, 
 and with the sudden illumination which very perplexity 
 will sometimes create, which the mere inspiration of 
 distress will sometimes suggest, they devised the scheme 
 of a Secret Society. 
 
 Armies of brave men have often not only honorably 
 shut themselves up into impenetrable squares, or with- 
 drawn altogether behind walls and batteries, but have 
 oven, by exquisite concert, suddenly dispersed over a 
 thousand hills ; have vanished at noon-day on the 
 clapping of hands, as if into thick shadows ; and 
 again, by the clapping of hands, in a moment have re- 
 assembled in battle array. Such was the magical effecl 
 irom the new device. The Christians are seen off 
 their guard all around ; spearmen wheel suddenly into 
 view, but every Christian nas vanished. The Chris- 
 tian is absolutely in the grasp of the scrjeant ; but, 
 13
 
 194 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 anaccountably, lie slips away, and a shadow only re- 
 mains in the officer's hand. The Christian fugitive is 
 before your face, he rushes round a corner, you see him 
 M he whirls round with a mask upon his face ; one 
 bound throws you round the corner upon his traces ; 
 ind then you see no fugitive at all, no mask, but a man 
 walking in tranquillity, who readily joins you in the 
 pursuit. 
 
 The reader must consider 1st, what it was that 
 the Christians had to accomplish ; and 2dly, how it 
 was that such a thing could be accomplished in such 
 almost impracticable circumstances. If the whole 
 problem had been to bend before the storm, it was 
 easy to do that by retiring for a season. But there 
 were two reasons against so timid a course : first, the 
 enemy -was prepared, and watching for all such 
 momentary expedients, waiting for the sudden forced 
 retirement, waiting for the sudden stealthy attempt 
 at resuming the old station ; secondly, which was a 
 more solemn reason for demur, this course might 
 secure safety to the individual members of the church, 
 but, in the meantime, it left the church, as a spiritual 
 fommunity, in a languishing condition not only 
 without means of extension, but without means even 
 of repairing its own casual waste. Safety obtained 
 on these terms was not the safety that suited apostolic 
 puiposes. It was necessary with the protection (and 
 herefore with the present concealment) of the church 
 to connect some machinery for nursing it feeding 
 it expanding it. No theory could be conceived 
 more audacious than the one rendered imperative by 
 circumstances. Echo was not to babble of the where* 
 bouts assigned to the local stations or points of rcn
 
 SECRET SOCIETIES. 195 
 
 dezvcus for this outcast church ; and yet in this naked 
 aouselcss condition she was to find shelter for her 
 household ; and yet, whilst blood-hounds were on her 
 own traces, while she durst not look abroad through 
 the mighty storm, this church was to be raising a 
 college and a council, de propaganda fide, was to be 
 working all day long in the centre of enemies raging 
 for her blood, and to declare herself in permanent ses- 
 sion when she had no foot of ground to stand upon. 
 
 This object, seemingly so impracticable, found an 
 opening for all its parts in the community of field 
 unavoidably cultivated by the church and the enemy 
 of the church. Did the church seek to demonstrate 
 the realization of the promised Messiah in the charac- 
 ter and history of Christ ? This she must do by 
 diligently searching the prophetic types as the inner 
 wards of the lock, and then searching the details of 
 Christ's life and passion as the corresponding wards 
 of the key. Did the enemy of the church seek to 
 refute and confound this attempt to identify the Mes- 
 siahship with the person of Jesus ? This she could 
 attempt only by labors in the opposite direction applied 
 Vo the very same ground of prophecy and history. 
 The prophecies and the traditions 26 current in Judea 
 that sometimes were held to explain, and sometimes 
 to integrate, the written prophecies about the mys- 
 terious Messiah, must be alike important and alike 
 commandingly interesting to both parties. Having, 
 therefore, this fortunate common ground of theological 
 Study with her own antagonist, there was no reason 
 it all why the Christian churcn should not set up a 
 seminary of laborers for her own vineyard under the 
 mask of enemies trained against herself. There was
 
 196 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 no sort of reason, in moral principle or in prudence 
 why she should not, under color of training learned 
 and fervent enemies to the Christian name, silently 
 prepare and arm a succession of servants for doing 
 her own work. In order to stamp from the beginning 
 a patriotic and intensely national character upon her 
 new institution, leading men already by names and 
 sounds into the impression that the great purpose of 
 this institution was, to pour new blood into the life of 
 old Jtidaic prejudices, and to build up again the 
 dilapidation of Mosaic orthodoxy, whether due to time 
 or to recent assaults, the church selected the name of 
 Essen for the designation of the new society, from 
 the name of an important gate in the temple : so that, 
 from the original use, as well as from another appli- 
 cation to the religious service of the temple, a college 
 or fraternity of Essenes became, by its very name, a 
 brief symbolic profession of religious patriotism and 
 bigotry, or what the real bigots would consider ortho- 
 doxy, from the first, therefore, carried clear away 
 from suspicion. But it may occur to the reader that 
 the Christian founders would thus find themselves in 
 he following awkward dilemma. If they carried out 
 the seeming promise of their Judaic name, then there 
 would be a risk of giving from the first an anti-Chris- 
 tian bias to the feelings of the students, which might 
 easily warp their views for life. And on the other 
 hand, if by direct discipline they began at an early 
 stage to correct this bias, there arose a worse risk, 
 viz. that their real purposes might be suspected or 
 unmasked. In reality, however, no such risk would 
 krise in either direction. The elementary studies 
 Ithat is, suppose in the eight first ascending classes' 1
 
 SECIsET SOCIETIES. 197 
 
 would be, simply to accumulate a sufficient fund of 
 materials, of the original documents, with the com- 
 mentaries of every kind, and the verbal illustrations 
 or glosses. In this stage of the studies, at any rate, 
 and whether the first objects had or had not been 
 Christian, all independent judgments upon subjects 
 so difficult and mysterious would be discouraged as 
 presumptuous ; so that no opening would arise for 
 suspicion against the teachers, on the one hand, as 
 unfaithful to the supposed bigotry of the institution, 
 nor on the other for encouraging an early pre-occupa- 
 tion of mind against Christian views. After passing 
 No. 8 of the classes, the delicacy of the footing would 
 become more trying. But until the very first 01 
 innermost class was reached, when the last reserves 
 must be laid aside, two circumstances would arise to 
 diminish the risk. The first is this that the nearer 
 the student advanced to the central and dangerous 
 circles of the art, the more opportunity would the 
 governors have had for observing and appraising his 
 character. Now it is evident that, altogether apart 
 from any considerations of the danger to the society 
 connected with falseness, treachery, or generally with 
 .inti-Christian traits of character, even for the final 
 uses and wants of the society, none but pure, gentle, 
 truthful, and benign minds would avail the church 
 for Christian ministrations. The very same causes, 
 therefore, which would point out a student as danger- 
 ous to entrust with the capital secrets of the institution, 
 would equally have taken away from the society all 
 motive for carrying him farther in studies that must 
 be thrown away for himself and others. He would 
 be civilly told that his vacation did not seem to such
 
 198 SECRET SOCIETIES. 
 
 pursuits ; would have some sort of degree or literary 
 honor conferred upon him, and would be turned back 
 from the inner chambers, where he was beginning 
 to be regarded as suspicious. Josephus was turned 
 adrift in this way, there is no doubt. He fancied 
 himself to have learned all, whilst in fact there were 
 secret esoteric classes which he had not so much as 
 suspected to exist. Knaves never passed into those 
 rooms. A second reason, which diminished the risk, 
 was, that undoubtedly under the mask of scholastic 
 disputation the student was exercised in hearing all 
 the arguments that were most searchingly profound 
 in behalf of Christ's Messiahship. No danger would 
 attend this : it was necessary for polemic discipline 
 and gymnastics, so that it always admitted of a double 
 explanation, reconcilable alike with the true end and 
 the avowed end. But, though used only as a passage 
 of practice and skill, such a scene furnished means at 
 once to the Christian teachers in disguise for observing 
 the degrees in which different minds melted or froze 
 oefore the evidence. There arose fresh aids to a safe 
 selection. And, finally, whilst the institution of the 
 Essenes was thus accomplishing its first mission of 
 training up a succession to the church, and providing 
 for her future growth, it was also providing for the 
 secret meeting of the church and its present con 
 lolation.
 
 1HE ESSENES.* 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY 
 
 AT this point, reader, we have come to a sudden 
 slose. The paper, or (according to the phraseology 
 of modern journals) the article, has reached its ter- 
 minus. And a very abrupt terminus it seems. 
 Such even to myself it seems ; much more, there- 
 fore, in all probability, to the reader. But I believe 
 that we must look for the true cause of this abrupt- 
 ness, and the natural remedy of the anger, incident 
 to so unexpected a disappointment, in the records 
 of my own literary movements some twenty-five or 
 thirty years back at which time this little paper 
 was written. It is possible that I may, concur- 
 rently (or nearly so) with this " article," have 
 written some other " article " expressly and sepa- 
 rately on the Esser.es leaving, therefore, to that 
 the elucidation of any obscurities as to them which 
 may have gathered in this paper on " Secret Socie- 
 ties." And, now I think of it, my belief begins to 
 
 [* When the previous paper on Secret Societies was reprinted 
 by De Quincey, ten years after its first publication, he added 
 this paper as a note.]
 
 200 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES 
 
 boil up fervently that I did so. "How? Possiblt 
 that I may have written such an article ? Don't I 
 know ? " Candidly, I do not. " In that case, who 
 does ? " Why, perhaps one of the three following 
 New England States Massachusetts, or Connecti- 
 cut, or Rhode Island. If anybody, insular or conti- 
 nental, is likely to know anything whatever in the 
 concern, it is one of these illustrious communities. 
 But such is the extent of my geographical igno- 
 rance, that I am profoundly ignorant in which of the 
 three states it is proper to look for the city of 
 Boston, though I know to a nicety in which of the 
 three it is not. Rhode Island, I am positive, does 
 not grow any huge city, unless, like Jonah's gourd, 
 it has rushed into life by one night's growth. So 
 that I have eliminated one quantity at least from the 
 algebraic problem, which must, therefore, be in a 
 very hopeful state towards solution. Boston, mean- 
 time, it is, wheresoever that Boston may ultimately 
 be found, which (or more civilly, perhaps, who) 
 keeps all my accounts of papers and "paperasses " 
 (to borrow a very useful French word), all my 
 MSS., finished books past, present, or to come 
 tried at the public bar, or to be tried ; condemned, or 
 nly condemnable. It is astonishing how much 
 more Boston knows of my literary acts and pur- 
 poses than I do myself. Were it not indeed through 
 Boston, hardly the sixth part of my literary under- 
 takings, hurried or deliberate, sound, rotting, or rot- 
 ten, would ever have reached posterity : which, be 
 it known to thee, most sarcastic of future censors, 
 already most of them have reached. For surely tc
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 201 
 
 an "article" composed in 1821, a corpulent reader 
 of 1858 is posterity in a most substantial sense, 
 Everything, in short, relating to myself is in the 
 keeping of Boston : and, were it not that the kind- 
 ness of society in Boston is as notorious to us in 
 England as her intellectual distinction and her high 
 literary rank among cities, I should fear at times 
 that if on any dark December morning, say forty or 
 fifty years ago, I might have committed a forgery 
 (as the best of men will do occasionally), Boston 
 could array against me all the documentary evidence 
 of my peccadillo (such it is now esteemed) before I 
 could have time to abscond. But, if such a forgery 
 exists, I rely on her indulgent sympathy with liter- 
 ary men for allowing me six hours' law (as we of 
 old England call it). This little ai-rangement, how- 
 ever, is private business, not meant for public ears. 
 Returning to general concerns, I am sure that 
 Boston will know whether anywhere or a,nywhen I 
 have or have not written a separate " article " on 
 the Essenes. Meantime, as the magnetic cable is 
 not yet laid down across the flooring of the Atlan- 
 tic, and that an exchange of question and answer 
 between myself and my friends Messrs. Ticknor and 
 Fields will require an extra month of time (of 
 " irreparabile tempus"), I will suppose myself not 
 to have written such a paper ; and in that case of so 
 faulty an omission, will hold myself debtor, and will 
 on the spot discharge ray debt, for a few preliminary 
 explanations that ought to have been made already 
 upon a problem which very few men of letters have 
 aad any special motive for investigating. Let me
 
 202 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 
 
 quicken the reader's interest in the question at 
 issue, by warning him of two important facts, 
 namely : 
 
 First, that the Church of Rome, in the persons of 
 Borne amongst her greatest scholars, has repeatedly 
 made known her dissatisfaction with the romance of 
 Josephns. It is dimly apparent, that, so far as she 
 had been able to see her way, this most learned 
 church had found cause to adopt the same conclu- 
 sion practically as myself namely, that under 
 some course of masquerading, hard to decipher,, 
 the Essenes were neither more nor less than early 
 Christians. 
 
 But, secondly, although evidently aware that the 
 account of the Essenes by Josephus was, and must 
 have been, an intolerable romance, she had failed to 
 detect the fraudulent motive of Josephus underly- 
 ing that elaborate fiction ; or the fraudulent tactics 
 by which, throughout that fiction, he had conducted 
 his warfare against the Christians ; or the counter 
 system of tactics by which, were it only for immedi- 
 ate safety, but also with a separate view to self- 
 propagation and continual proselytism, the infant 
 Christian church must have fought under a mask 
 against Josephus and his army of partisans in Jeru- 
 salem. It is inexplicable to me how the Church of 
 Rome could for one moment overlook the fierce 
 internecine hostility borne by the Jewish national 
 faction to the Christians, and doubtless most of all 
 to the Judaizing Christians ; of whom, as we know, 
 there were some eminent champions amongst the 
 Christian apostles themselves. Good reason the
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 203 
 
 Jew bigot really had for hating, persecuting and 
 calumniating the Christian revolutionist more rancor- 
 ously even than the Roman avowed enemy. How 
 stood the separate purposes of these two embattled 
 antagonists first, Rome Imperial ; secondly, the 
 new-born sect of Christians ? Of these two armies, 
 by far the deadliest was the last. Rome fought 
 against the Jewish nation simply as a little faction, 
 mad with arrogance, that would not by any milder 
 chastisement be taught to know its own place ; and 
 the captives, netted in the great haul at Jerusalem, 
 being looked upon not as honorable prisoners of 
 war, but as rebels obstinate and incorrigible 
 were consigned to the stone-quarries of Upper 
 Egypt : a sort of dungeons in which a threefold 
 advantage was gained to the Roman, namely, 1, 
 that the unhappy captives were held up to the 
 nations as monuments of the ruin consequent on 
 resistance to Rome ; 2, were made profitable to the 
 general exchequer ; 3, were watched and guarded at 
 a cost unusually trivial. But Rome, though stern 
 and harsh, was uniform in her policy ; never capri- 
 cious ; and habitually too magnanimous to be vindic- 
 tive. Even amongst these criminals, though so 
 nearly withdrawn from notice, it was not quite 
 impossible that select victims might still win their 
 way back to the regions of hope and light. But, 
 Betting these aside, through Rome it was in Rome 
 and by Rome that vast stratifications of this most 
 headstrong and turbulent of eastern tribes cropped 
 out upon many a western soil ; nor was any memo- 
 rial of the past allowed to speak or to whispei
 
 204 SUPPLEMKNTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENE3. 
 
 against them, if only (as children express it) "they 
 would be good." Rome was singularly wise in that 
 matter ; and knew that obstinate rebellion, though 
 inconvenient and needing sharp coercion, argued a 
 strong and aspiring nature. Even now, even 
 already, when as yet the vast wounds were raw 
 and uncicatrized, Rome, the mighty mother, sat in 
 genial incubation upon generations of the old 
 Hebrew blood, destined to reappear up and down 
 distant centuries in Poland and Russia, in Spain and 
 Portugal ; in the Barbary States and other western 
 lands, not to speak of their Asiatic settlements as 
 far east as China. Rome, therefore, was no ulti- 
 mate or uncompromising enemy to the tribe of 
 Judah. 
 
 But the rising sect of Christians brought simple 
 destruction to the name and pretensions of the Jew. 
 The Temple and sacrificial service of the Temple 
 had become an abomination, and the one capital 
 obstacle to the progress of the true religion ; and 
 Rome, in destroying this Temple, had been uncon- 
 sciously doing the work of Christianity. Jews and 
 Jewish usages, and Judaic bigotry, would continue 
 (it is true) to maintain themselves for thousands of 
 years ; Jewish fanaticism would even reveal itself 
 again in formidable rebellions. But the combina- 
 tion of power and a national name with the Jewish 
 religion and principles had disappeared from the 
 j.irth forever with the final destruction of El Koda 
 And the hostility of the Christians was even more 
 absolute than that of Rome ; since Christianity 
 denied the whole pretensions and visionary pros
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 205 
 
 pects upon which Judaism founded any title to a 
 separate name or nationality. Even without that 
 bitter exasperation of the feud, the quarrels of 
 brothers are almost proverbially the deadliest as 
 regards the chance of reconciliation or compromise ; 
 and in the infancy of the Christian faith nearly all 
 the proselytes were naturally Jews ; so that for a 
 long period the Christians were known in Rome and 
 foreign quarters simply as a variety of provincial 
 Jews, namely, Nazarenes, or Galileans. In these 
 circumstances the siege of Jerusalem must thus far 
 have widened the schism, that everywhere the 
 enlightened Christian would doubtless have seceded 
 from the faction of those who stood forward as 
 champions of the Jewish independence. This is an 
 aspect of the general history which has not received 
 any special investigation. But there can be no 
 doubt that, for the Christians generally, all narrow 
 and too manifestly hopeless calls of patriotism would 
 be regarded as swallowed up in the transcendent 
 duties of their militant religion. Christian captives 
 may have been found amongst the convicts of the 
 stone-quarries ; but they must have been few, and 
 those only whom some casual separation from their 
 r-wn Christian fraternity had thrown in a state of 
 ignorant perplexity upon their own blind guidance. 
 This consequence, therefore, must have arisen from 
 the siege of Jerusalem, that the Jewish acharnement 
 against the Christians, henceforth regarded as politi- 
 cal and anti-national enemies, would be inflamed to 
 a frantic excess. And Josephus, suddenly exalted 
 by an act of the vilest adulation to Vespasian (who
 
 206 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENE3. 
 
 was in effect, through his success in Palestine and 
 through his popularity with the army, already the 
 Imperator elect), instead of visiting the Egyptian 
 quarries as a felon, most unmeritoriously found him- 
 eclf in one hour translated into the meridian sun* 
 shine of court favor ; and equally through that 
 romantic revolution, and through his own previous 
 dedication to literature, qualified beyond any con- 
 temporary for giving effect to his party malice. He 
 would be aware that in the circumstantial accidents 
 of Christianity there was a good deal to attract 
 favor at Rome. Their moral system, and their 
 eleemosynary system of vigilant aid to all their pau- 
 pers, would inevitably conciliate regard. Even the 
 Jewish theological system was every way fitted to 
 challenge veneration- and awe, except in so far as it 
 was associated with the unparalleled and hateful 
 arrogance of Judaism. Now, here for the first time, 
 by the new-born sect of Christians, this grandeur of 
 theologic speculation was exhibited in a state of 
 insulation from that repulsive arrogance. The Jews 
 talked as if the earth existed only for them; and as if 
 God took notice only of Jewish service as having any 
 value or meaning. But here were the Christians 
 opening their gates, and proclaiming a welcome to 
 all the children of man. These things were in their 
 favor. And the malignant faction of mere Jewish 
 bigots felt a call to preoccupy the Roman mind with 
 some bold fictions that should forever stop the 
 mouth of the Christian, whensoever or t/soever any 
 opening dawned for uttering a gleam of truth 
 Josephus, followed and supported by Alexandrian
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE CN THE ESSENE3. 207 
 
 Jews, was evidently the man for this enterprise ; 
 lot so much, or not so exclusively, by his literary 
 talent (for, doubtless, many in Alexandria, and some 
 in Rome, could have matched him) ; but he was the 
 man born with the golden spoon in his mouth ; he 
 was the second Joseph that should be carried cap- 
 tive from Palestine to Egypt ; and on the banks of 
 that ancient Nile should find a Pharaoh, calling him- 
 self Caesar Vespasian, that, upon hearing Joe's 
 interpretation of a dream, should bid him rise rp 
 from his prostration as a despairing felon fresh from 
 bearing arms against S. P. Q. E,., and take his seat 
 amongst the men whom the king delighted to honor. 
 Seated there, Joe was equal to a world of mis 
 chief; and he was not the man to let his talent lie 
 idle. In what way he would be likely to use his 
 experience, gained amongst the secret society of 
 the Essenes, we may guess. But, to move by 
 orderly steps, let us ask after Mr. Joe's own 
 account of that mysterious body. How and when 
 does he represent the Essenes as arising ? I have 
 no book, no vouchers, as generally happens to me ; 
 and, moreover, Joseph is not strong in chronology 
 But I rely on my memory as enabling me to guar- 
 antee this general fact that, at the date of the 
 Josephan record, our shy friends, the Essenes, must, 
 by Joe's reckoning, have existed at least seventy 
 years since Christ's nativity. The reader knows 
 already that I, who make these Essenes the product 
 of Christianity under its earliest storms, cannot pos- 
 Bibly submit to such a registration. But for the 
 present assume it as true. Under such an assump-
 
 808 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENEH 
 
 lion, it must have been, that many writers, in giving 
 un account of the Jewish philosophic sects, have 
 numbered them as three, namely, 1, the Phari 
 sees ; 2, the Sadducees ; 3, the Essenes. And in my 
 childhood there was an authorized Bible, and it must 
 have been a common one, because I remember it as 
 belonging to a female servant, and bearing a writ- 
 ten memorandum that it was a gift from her father, - 
 which boldly ranked the Essenes as assessors of the 
 undeniable Pharisees and Sadducees, on that pre- 
 fatory leaf which assigns the value of a shekel, the 
 measures of capacity, of weight, of distance, &c. 
 Now, then, I would demand of Josephus why it was 
 that Christ, who took such reiterated notice of the 
 elder sects, never once by word or act recognized 
 the Essenes even as existing. Considering their 
 pretensions to a higher purity, or the pretensions in 
 this direction ascribed to them, is it conceivable that 
 Christ should not by one word have countersigned 
 these pretensions if sound, or exposed them if hol- 
 low ? Or, again, if He for any reason had neglected 
 them, would riot some of his disciples, or of his 
 many occasional visitors, have drawn his attention 
 to their code of rules and their reputed habits to 
 what they professed, and what they were said to 
 have accomplished ? Or, finally, if all these chances 
 had failed to secure an evangelical record, can we 
 suppose it possible that no solitary member of 
 that large monastic body, counting (I think, by 
 the report of Josephus) eight thousand breth 
 reii, should have been moved sufficiently by the 
 rumors gathering like a cloud up and down Pales-
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 209 
 
 tine through three consecutive years, about the 
 steps of Christ and his followers, to present himself 
 for a personal interview so as to form a judgment 
 of Christ, if Christ were even careless of him and 
 his brotherhood ? We know that Christ was not 
 without interest in the two elder sects though 
 absolutely sold to worldly interests and intrigues. 
 He himself pointed out a strong argument for allow- 
 ing weight and consideration to the Pharisees, 
 namely, that they, so long as the Mosaic economy 
 lasted, were to be regarded with respect as the 
 depositaries of his authority, and the representa- 
 tives of his system. And it is remarkable enough 
 that here, as elsewhere, at the very moment of 
 heavily blaming the Pharisees, not the less he exacts 
 for them as a legal due the popular respect ; 
 and this, though perfectly aware that they and the 
 ancient system to which they were attached (a sys- 
 tem fifteen hundred years old) would simultaneously 
 receive their doom from that great revolution which 
 he was himself destined to accomplish. The blame 
 which he imputes to them in this place is, that they 
 required others to carry burdens which they them- 
 selves would not touch. That was a vice of habit 
 and self-indulgence, more venial as a natural con- 
 cession to selfishness that might have grown upon 
 them imperceptibly; but, in the second case, the 
 blame strikes deeper, for it respects a defect of 
 principle, that must have been conscious and wilful. 
 Moses, we are told, had laid down express laws for 
 the regulation of special emergencies ; and these 
 laws, when affecting their own separate interests,
 
 210 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 
 
 the Pharisees were in the habit of evading undei 
 some plea of traditional immunity or professional 
 privilege secured to themselves. 
 
 Now, let the reader sternly note down this state 
 of Christ's relations to the great leading sect of the 
 Pharisees. He had high matter of impeachment 
 against them ; and yet, for all that, so profound was 
 his loyalty to the Mosaic system, as a divine revela- 
 tion, so long as it was not divinely superseded, tha\ 
 he would not lend his sanction to any failure of 
 respect towards the representatives of this system 
 in the fickle populace. On the contrary, he bade 
 them hearken to their instructions, because in doing 
 that they were hearkening to the words of Moses, 
 which were the words of God. The words of the 
 Pharisees were consecrated, but not their deeds ; 
 those furnished a false and perilous rule of conduct. 
 Next, as to the Sadducees. This sect, bearing far less 
 of a national and representative character, is less 
 conspicuously brought forward in the New Testa- 
 ment. But it is probable that Christ, though having 
 no motive for the same interest in them as in the 
 Pharisees, who might be regarded as heraldic sup- 
 porters on one side of the national armorial shield, 
 nevertheless maintained a friendly or fraternal inter- 
 course with their leading men as men who laid 
 open one avenue to the central circles of the more 
 aristocratic society in Jerusalem. But had not Christ 
 a special reason for recoiling from the Sadducees, as 
 from those who " say that there is no resurrection 
 of the dead " ? If they really said any such thing 
 he would have had one reason more than we are ce*
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 211 
 
 tain of his having had, for calling upon them to make 
 open profession of their presumed faith, and tho 
 unknown grounds of that faith. If the Sadducees, 
 as a sect, really did hold the doctrine ascribed to 
 them, it would have been very easy to silence them 
 (that is, in a partial sense to refute them), by 
 forcing them to the conclusion that they had no 
 grounds for holding the negative upon the problem 
 of Resurrection, beyond what corresponded to the 
 counter weakness on the side of the affirmative. On 
 either side there was confessedly an absolute blank 
 as regarded even the sJww of reasonable grounds for 
 taking a single step in advance. Guess you might ; 
 but as to any durable conquest of ground, forward or 
 backward to the right or the left "to the shield 
 or to the spear " nobody could contradict you, but 
 then (though uncontradicted) you did not entirely 
 believe yourself. So that, at the worst, the Saddu- 
 cees could not plausibly have denied the Resurrection, 
 though they might have chosen to favor those who 
 doubted it. Meantime, is it at all certain that the 
 Sadducees did hold the imputed opinion ? I, for my 
 part, exceedingly hesitate in believing this ; and for 
 the following reasons : First, it is most annoying to 
 a man of delicate feelings, that he should find him- 
 self pledged to a speculative thesis, and engaged in 
 honor to undertake its defence against all comers, 
 when there happens to be no argument whatsoever 
 >.n its behalf not even an absurd one. Secondly, 
 I doubt much whether it wruld have been safe to 
 avow this doctrine in T udea. And, thirdly, whether 
 m any circles at Jerusalem, even such as might secure
 
 212 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 
 
 it a toleration, this doctrine would not have been 
 most unwelcome. For whose favor, therefore, or 
 towards what final object, should such a speculation 
 originally have been 'ntroduced, or subsequently 
 have maintained itself ,' We are told, indeed, that 
 it won no favor, and coarted none, from those work- 
 ing classes amongst whom lay the strength of the 
 nationality. This is a clear case. Active support, of 
 course, it could not find amongst those who, in my 
 opinion, would have been vainly invoked for a,passive 
 acquiescence or gloomy toleration. But in this case 
 there seems to have been too precipitate a conclu- 
 sion. Because the natural favorers of scepticism and 
 an irreligious philosophy will be found (if at all) 
 exclusively almost in aristocratic circles, it does not 
 follow that, inversely, aristocratic circles will be found 
 generally to be tainted with such a philosophy. Infi- 
 dels may belong chiefly to the aristocracy, but not 
 the aristocracy to infidels. It is true that in the 
 luxurious capitals of great kingdoms there are 
 usually found all shapes of licentious speculation ; 
 yet, even in the most latitudinarian habits of think 
 ing, such excesses tend in many ways to limit them 
 selves. And in Judea, at that period, the state of 
 society and of social intercourse had not, apparently, 
 travelled beyond the boundaries of a semi-barbarous 
 simplicity. A craving for bold thinking supervenes 
 naturally upon a high civilization, but not upon the 
 elementary civilization of the Jews. A man who 
 should have professed openly so audacious a creed 
 as that ascribed to the Sadducees must have been 
 prepared for lapidation. That tumultuary court a
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 213 
 
 Jewish mob, always ready for action, always rich in 
 munitions of war, so long as paving-stones were 
 reasonable in price made it dangerous for any man 
 in Judea, Jew or Gentile, to wade out of his depth 
 in theologic waters. But how, then, did the Saddu- 
 cees come by their ugly reputation ? I understand 
 it thus : what the scandalous part of the public 
 charged against them was, not openly and defy- 
 ingly that they held such an irreligious creed, but 
 that such a creed would naturally flow as a conse- 
 quence from their materialistic tendencies, however 
 much the Saddticees might disavow that consequence. 
 Whatever might be said, fancied, or proved by Bishop 
 Warburton, it is certain that the dominant body of 
 the nation, at the era of Christ, believed in a Resur- 
 rection as preliminary to a Final Judgment. And 
 so intense was the Jewish bigotry, since their return 
 from captivity, that assuredly they would have 
 handled any freethinker on such questions very 
 roughly. But, in fact, the counter sect of Pharisees 
 hold up a mirror for showing us by reflection the true 
 popular estimate of the Sadducees. The Pharisees 
 were denounced by Christ, and no doubt were pri- 
 vately condemned in the judgment of all the pious 
 amongst their countrymen, as making void (virtually 
 cancelling) much in the institutions of Moses by 
 their own peculiar (sometimes pretended) traditions : 
 this was their secret character among the devout and 
 the sternly orthodox. But do we imagine that the 
 Pharisees openly accepted such a character ? By no 
 tneans : that would have been to court an open feud 
 und schism with the great body of the people. And,
 
 214 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENE3. 
 
 iu like manner, the Sadducees had their dark side, 
 from which an answering character was abstracted 
 by their enemies ; but doubtless they themselves 
 treated this character as an odious calumny. 
 
 These things premised, the reader is prepared to 
 understand that the reproach of Christ fastened 
 itself upon the offence, not upon the offenders in 
 any single generation, far less upon the individual 
 offenders, who, separately and personally, often times 
 were unconscious parties to a trespass, which, deep 
 though it were as the hidden fountains of life, yet 
 also was ancient and hereditary as the stings of 
 death. The quarrel of Christ, as regarded the unholy 
 frauds of Phariseeism, had no bearing upon those 
 individually whom education and elaborate discipline 
 had conducted to the vestibule of that learned col- 
 lege by whom alone, at the distance of a millennium 
 and of half a millennium, the Law and the Prophets 
 were still kept alive in the understanding and in the 
 reverence of the unlettered multitude. 
 
 Apart from their old hereditary crime of relaxing 
 and favoring the relaxation of the Mosaic law, the 
 Pharisees especially, but in some degree both sects, 
 were depositaries of all the erudition archaeologic, 
 nistoric, and philologic by which a hidden clue 
 could be sought, or a lost clue could be recovered, 
 through the mazes of the ancient prophecies, in times 
 which drew near, by all likelihood, to their gradual 
 accomplishment and consummation. Supposing that 
 the one sect was even truly and not calumniously 
 reproached with undervaluing the spiritual Future 
 can we imagine them so superfluously to have courteo
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES 215 
 
 popular odium, as by carrying before them a procla- 
 mation of the gloomy creed, which must for any pur- 
 pose be useless ? The answer is found precisely in 
 the parallel case of the counter sect. Because Christ 
 reproached them with virtually neutralizing the 
 whole rigor of the law by their private traditions, 
 are we to suppose the Pharisees to have sent before 
 them a banner, making proclamation that " We are 
 the sect who make void the Law of Moses by human 
 devices of false, counterfeit traditions " ? So far 
 from this, even the undeniable abuses and corrup- 
 tions had probably grown up and strengthened 
 through successive ages of negligence and accumu- 
 lated contributions of unintentional error. The special 
 authors of the corruptions and dangerous innovations 
 were doubtless generations, and not individuals. The 
 individual members of both sects must have embodied 
 the whole available learning of the nation. They 
 jointly were for the Hebrew race what the Brahmins 
 were, and locally are, for the Hindoos ; what the 
 childish " literati " of China are to the childish race 
 of the Chinese ; what the three learned professions 
 af Law, Medicine, and the Church, are in Christian 
 lands. For many purposes, the Pharisees and Sad- 
 ducees were indispensable associates ; and, accord- 
 ing to their personal merits of integrity, sincerity, 
 and goodness of heart, there can be little doubt that 
 Christ honored multitudes amongst them with marks 
 of his personal regard. 
 
 Now, then, under such circumstances, can we sup- 
 pose it possible that a sect, approaching by traits of 
 resemblance far deeper and more conspicuous to thfl
 
 216 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 
 
 coming sect of Christians which Christ was laboring 
 to build up, should have gone unnoticed by Him, or 
 should themselves have left Christ unnoticed and 
 unapproached ? Chronology of itself overwhelm- 
 ingly confounds Josephus. According to him, a 
 sect, whose origin is altogether unaccounted for, 
 suddenly walks forward out of darkness ; and when 
 called upon to unfold the characteristics of this sect, 
 which nobody had ever named before himself, he 
 presents you with such a coarse travesty of the 
 Christians as to usages and doctrines, whom, doubt- 
 less, he knew by having helped to persecute them, 
 that we read at once the full-blown knavery of a 
 scoundrel who had motives more than one or two for 
 suborning, as the anticipators of every feature that 
 could fascinate men in Christianity, a secret society 
 really of Christians, but to him and other members, 
 not trustworthy, masking itself as a society of Jews. 
 It would too much lengthen a note already too long, 
 if I were to expose circumstantially the false color- 
 ing impressed upon the Christian scheme by one who 
 was too unprincipled and worldly even to compre- 
 hend the Christian elements. Enough, however, 
 remains of the archetype in the report of Josephus, 
 to reveal, as lurking beneath the disguise, and gleam- 
 ing through it, an undeniable Christian original ; so 
 that here, as I have said previously, we are faceu 
 suddenly by a Christianity before Christ, and a Chris- 
 tianity without Christ.* 
 
 * 0, no, will be the reply of some critics ; not without Christ 
 But I answer if before Christ, then necessarily without Christ
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 217 
 
 In conclusion, I will confess to the reader, in the 
 foolish excess of my candor, that amongst those who 
 have most inclined to express dissatisfaction (yet as 
 a final, not as an initiatory feeling) with my hypoth- 
 esis accounting for the Essenes, are several of my 
 own oldest friends men distinguished (for one 
 moment I wish they were not) by searching judg- 
 ment and by extensive learning. Does n't the reader 
 think that perhaps much learning may have made 
 them mad ? Certainly they demand unreasonable 
 proofs, considering that time (not to mention other 
 agencies) upon many a topic has made us all bank- 
 
 And besides the profound objection from the whole flagrant pla- 
 giarism of the moral scheme, the other capital objection remains : 
 How did these men, if chronologically anterior to Christ, miss an 
 interview with Christ ; or, if not a personal interview, at least 
 a judgment of Christ sealing their pretensions, or a judgment of 
 Christ sealing their condemnation ? My Essenes escaped this per 
 eonal interview and this judgment approving or condemning, 
 simply because, chronologically, they were not contemporaries 
 of Christ, but by twenty or twenty-five years younger than the 
 Crucifixion. They were, in fact, a masquerading body of Chris- 
 tians an offshoot of Christians that happened to be resident in 
 Judea at a crisis of fiery persecution. Fortunately for them, one 
 great advantage befell them, which in subsequent Roman persecu- 
 tions they wanted, namely, that they and their persecutors occu- 
 pied common ground in much of their several creeds, which 
 facilitated the deep disguise. Both alike adopted the Jewish 
 Prophets into the basis of their faith ; both alike held the truth 
 of all the other Scriptures for instance, of the Law itself, 
 though differing as to its practical validity for the future. 
 Hence, by confining themselves to those parts of the Old Testa- 
 ment which both adopted, the Christians, masked as Essenes, 
 were able to deceive and evade the most cruel of their enemies.
 
 218 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 
 
 rupt in satisfactory argument, Mr. Joe, I presume, 
 not at all less than myself. A little daughter of 
 mine, when about two years old, used sometimes to 
 say at the dinner-table, " Please give me too much.'-' 
 My learned friends, it sometimes strikes me, are 
 borrowing her sentiment, and, with no less gravity 
 than hers, are insisting on having "too much" of 
 certainty in this delicate case too much, in fact, and 
 too complex evidence for the why and the how, for 
 the where and the when, of a masonic brotherhood, 
 that was, by the very tenure and primary motive of 
 its existence, confessedly a secret brotherhood. In 
 the spirit of honest Sancho's Andalusian proverb, it 
 seems to me that my too learned friends are seeking 
 for "better bread than is made of wheat." Since, 
 really, when you subpoena a witness out of the great 
 deeps of time, divided from yourself by fifty-five 
 generations, you are obliged to humor him, and 
 to show him special indulgence ; else he grows 
 " crusty " on your hands, and keeps back even that 
 which by gentler solicitation might have been won 
 from him. 
 
 Meantime, I have retouched the evidence a little, 
 so that he who was restive formerly may now be 
 tractable ; and have attempted to coax the witnesses 
 in a way which is but fair, as no more than balancing 
 and corresponding to those gross tamperings prac- 
 tised (we may be sure) by the Jew courtier. Mr. 
 Joe, we may rely upon it, when packing the jury, 
 did his best. I may have an equal right to do my 
 worst. It t happens that my theory and Mr. Joe's 
 are involved alternatively in each other. If you
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 219 
 
 reject Joe's, a thing that I suppose inevitable^ - - 
 this throws you by rebound upon mine ; if you are 
 inclined to reject mine, a case that is supportable 
 by human fortitude, then you find yourself pitched 
 violently into Mr. Joe's ; a case that is not sup- 
 portable by any fortitude, armed with any philos- 
 ophy. In taking leave, I add, as an extra argument 
 against the possibility that Essenism could have been 
 contemporary with the birth of Christianity, this 
 ugly objection. We may suppose that a Jew, in 
 maintaining the historic truth of Essenism, would 
 endeavor to evade the arguments so naturally 
 emerging from the internal relations of this secret 
 sect to those of the avowed sect called Christians, 
 and at the same time to ignore the vast improbability 
 that two sects wearing features so sisterly should 
 have sailed past each other silently, and exchanging 
 no salutes, no questions of reciprocal interest, no 
 mutual recognitions, no interchange of gratulation 
 in the midst of departing storms, or of solemn vale- 
 diction amongst perilous mists that were slowly 
 gathering. The Jew might argue, in explanation, 
 that the Essenes, under the form of ascetic moralists, 
 would from this single element of their system 
 derive a prejudice against the founder of Christianity, 
 as one who in his own person had deemed it advisa- 
 ble, for the attainment of social influence in the 
 Judea of that day, and for the readier propagation 
 of truth, to adopt a more liberal and genial mode of 
 living. For the stern ascetic may win reverence, 
 but never wins confidence, so that the heart of hia 
 hearer is still for him under a mask. My argument
 
 20 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 
 
 oeing that the Essenes could not have been con- 
 temporary with the great moral teacher (in fact, the 
 revolutionary teacher) of their own century, without 
 seeking Him, or His seeking them we may sup- 
 pose the Jew taking his stand plausibly enough on 
 a primal alienation of the Essenes, through incon- 
 gruities of social habits, such (let us suppose, by 
 way of illustration) as would naturally repel Quakers 
 or Moravians in our own day from any great moral 
 teacher wearing a brilliant exterior, and familiar with 
 courts and princes. Such an estrangement would 
 be matter of regret to all the wise and liberal even 
 of those two sects, but it would be natural ; and it 
 would sufficiently explain the non-intercourse ob- 
 jected, without any call for resorting to the plea of 
 anachronism, as the true bar of separation. 
 
 Answer: It is true that any deep schism in 
 social habits would tend to divide the two parties 
 the great moral teacher on the one side, from the 
 great monastic fraternity on the other, that stood 
 aloof from the world, and the temptations of the 
 world. Pro tanto, such a schism would pull in that 
 direction ; though I am of opinion that the least 
 magnanimous of dissenting bodies would allow a 
 transcendent weight (adequate to the crushing of 
 any conceivable resistance) to the conspicuous orig- 
 inality and searching pathos of Christ's moral doc- 
 trine. Four great cases, or memorable cartoons, in the 
 series of Christ's doctrinal " shows " (to borrow the 
 Eleusinian term), in 1839-40, powerfully affected the 
 Mahometan Affghan Sirdars, namely, 1, tfe afto*? >.
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE E3SENES. 221 
 
 af prayer which he first and last, among all teachers, 
 left as a guiding legacy to infinite generations ; 2, 
 the model of purity which he raised aloft in the little 
 infant suddenly made the centre of his moral system 
 as the normal form of innocence and simplicity of 
 heart ; 3, the Sermon on the Mount, which, by one 
 sudden illumination, opened a new world in man's 
 secret heart ; 4, the translation of moral tests from 
 the old and gross one of palpable acts to thoughts, 
 and the most aerial of purposes, as laid down in the 
 passage, "He that looketh upon a woman," &c. 
 These four revelations of the Christian Founder 
 being once reported to the pretended monastic body, 
 must have caught the affections, and have prompted 
 an insurmountable craving for personal intercourse 
 with such a "Prophet;" that is, in the Hebrew 
 sense of Prophet, such a revealer out of darkness. In 
 Affghanistan, amongst blind, prejudiced, sometimes 
 fanatical, Mahometans, these extraordinary moral 
 revelations had power deeply to shake and .move ; 
 could they have had less in Judea ? But, finally, 
 suppose they had, and that an ascetic brotherhood 
 refused all intercourse with a teacher not ascetic, so 
 much the more zealously would they have courted 
 euch intercourse with a teacher memorably and in 
 an ultimate degree ascetic. Such a teacher was John 
 the Baptist. Here, then, stands the case : in an age 
 which Josephus would have us believe to havo been 
 the flourishing age of the Essenes, there arise two 
 ^reat revolutionary powers, who are also great 
 teachers and legislators in the world of ethics. The
 
 822 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ESSENES. 
 
 first, by a short space of time, was the Baptist ; * 
 the second was Christ. The one was uniquely 
 ascetic, declining not only the luxuries, but the 
 slenderest physical appliances against the wrath of 
 the elements, or the changes of the seasons. The 
 other described himself as one who came eating and 
 drinking, in conformity to the common usages of 
 me a. With neither of these great authorities is 
 there any record of the Essenes having had the most 
 trivial intercourse. Is that reconcilable with their 
 alleged existence on a large scale in an age of deep 
 agitation and fervent inquiry ? 
 
 * That John the Baptist was a moral teacher, as well as a 
 herald of coming changes, may be inferred from the fact (noticed 
 by the Evangelists), that the military body applied to him for 
 moral instruction, which appeal must have grown out of the gen- 
 eral invitation to do so involved in the ordinary course of his 
 ministrations, and in the terms of his public preaching. In what 
 sense he was to be held the harbinger of Christ, over and above 
 his avowed mission for announcing the fast approaching advent 
 of the Messiah, I have elsewhere suggested, in a short comment 
 on the word utruvo/u , which word, as I contend, cannot properly 
 be translated repentance ; for it would have been pure cant to 
 suppose that age, or any age, as more under a summons tc 
 repentance than any other assignable. I understand by (itTarota 
 a revolution of thought a great intellectual change in the 
 accepting a new centre for all moral truth from Christ ; which 
 centre it was that subsequently caused all the offence of Chri* 
 tunity to the Roman people
 
 JUDAS 1SCAKIOT. 
 
 connected with our ordinary concep- 
 tions of this man, of his real purposes, and of aia 
 scriptural doom, apparently is erroneous. Not one 
 thing, but all things, must ra...i as false which 
 traditionally we accept about him. That neither any 
 motive of his, nor any ruling impulse, was tainted 
 with the vulgar treachery imputed to him, appears 
 probable from the strength of his remorse. And this 
 view of his case comes recommended by so much of 
 internal plausibility, that in Germany it has long since 
 shaped itself into the following distinct hypothesis : 
 Judas Iscariot, it is alleged, participated in the 
 common delusion of the apostles as to that earthly 
 kingdom which, under the sanction and auspices of 
 Christ, they supposed to be waiting and ripening for 
 the Jewish people. So far there was nothing in Judas 
 to warrant any special wonder or any separate blame. 
 If he erred, so did the other apostles. But in one 
 point Judas went further than his brethren viz., in 
 peculating upon the reasons of Christ for delaying the 
 inauguration of this kingdom. All things were ap- 
 oarently ripe for it ; all things pointed to it ; the 
 expectation and languishing desires of many Hebrew 
 taints viz., the warning from signs ; the prophetic
 
 224 JUDAS ISCAEIOT. 
 
 ilarms propagated by heralds like the Baptist; the 
 mysterious interchange of kindling signals rising sud- 
 denly out of darkness as secret words between distant 
 parties secret question, or secret answer; the fermen- 
 tation of revolutionary doctrines all over Judea ; the pas- 
 sionate impatience of the Roman yoke ; the continual 
 openings of new convulsions at the great centre of 
 Rome ; the insurrectionary temper of Jewish society, 
 as indicated by the continual rise of robber leaders, 
 that drew off multitudes into the neighboring deserts ; 
 and, universally, the unsettled mind of the Jewish 
 nation, their deep unrest, and the anarchy of their ex- 
 pectations. These explosive materials had long been 
 accumulated ; they needed only a kindling spark. 
 Heavenly citations to war, divine summonses to resist 
 ance, had long been read in the insults and aggressions 
 of paganism ; there wanted only a leader. And such 
 a leader, if he would but consent to assume that office, 
 stood ready in the founder of Christianity. The 
 supreme qualifications for leadership, manifested and 
 emblazoned in the person of Jesus Christ, were evident 
 to all parties in the Jewish community, and not merely 
 f .o the religious body of his own immediate followers. 
 These qualifications were published and expounded to 
 the world in the facility with which everywhere he 
 drew crowds about himself,* in the extraordinary depth 
 
 *" Drew crowds about himself: " As connected with these 
 crowds, I have elsewhere noticed, many years ago, the secret 
 reason which probably governed our Saviour in cultivating tha 
 uharacter and functions of a hakim, or physician. Throughom 
 Ihe whole world of civilization at that era (/, ot'xou^m;) 
 Whatever might be otherwise the varieties of the government,
 
 JUDAS ISCARIOT. 225 
 
 of impression, which attended his teaching, and in the 
 fear as well as hatred which possessed the Jewish rulers 
 against him. Indeed, so great was this fear, so grea . 
 was this hatred, that had it not been for the predomi- 
 nance of the Roman element in the government of 
 Judea, it is pretty certain that Christ would have been 
 crushed in an earlier stage of his career. 
 
 Believing, therefore, as Judas did, and perhaps had 
 reason to do, that Christ contemplated the establishment 
 of a temporal kingdom the restoration, in fact, of 
 David's throne ; believing also that all the conditions 
 towards the realization of such a scheme met and 
 centred in the person of Christ, what was it that, upon 
 any solution intelligible to Judas, neutralized so grand 
 
 there was amongst the ruling authorities a great jealousy of mobs 
 and popular gatherings. To a grand revolutionary teacher, no 
 obstacle so fatal as this initial prejudice could have offered itself, 
 Already, in the first place, a new and mysterious body of truth, 
 having vast and illimitable relations to human duties and pros- 
 pects, presented a field of indefinite alarm. That this truth 
 should, in the second place, publish itself, not through books and 
 written discourses, but orally, by word of mouth, and by personal 
 communication between vast mobs and the divine teacher 
 already that, as furnishing a handle of influence to a mob leader, 
 'ustified a preliminary alarm. But then, thirdly, as furnishing 
 u plea for bringing crowds together, such a mode of teaching 
 must have crowned the suspicious presumptions against itself. 
 One peril there was at any rate to begin with the peril of a 
 mob : that was certain. And, secondly, there was the doctrine 
 taught : which doctrine was mysterious ; and in that uncertainty 
 lay another peril. Thirdly, heside the opening to a mob interest, 
 there was a mob connection actually formed. So that, equally 
 through what was fixed and what was doubtful, there arose that 
 'fear of change " which "perplexes monarchs. " 
 15
 
 22b JUDAS ISCARIOT. 
 
 a scheme of promise? Simply and obviously, to a man 
 with the views of Judas, it was the character of Christ 
 himself, sublimely over-gifted for purposes of specula- 
 tion, but, like Shakspeare's great creation of Prince 
 Hamlet, not correspondingly endowed for the busi- 
 ness of action and the clamorous emergencies of life. 
 Indecision and doubt (such was the interpretation of 
 Judas) crept over the faculties of the Divine Man as 
 often as he was summoned away from his own natural 
 Sabbath of heavenly contemplation to the gross neces- 
 sities of action. It became important, therefore, ac- 
 cording to the views adopted by Judas, that his Master 
 should be precipitated into action by a force from with- 
 out, and thrown into the centre of some popular move- 
 ment, such as, once beginning to revolve, could not 
 afterwards be suspended or checked. Christ must be 
 Compromised before doubts could have time to form. 
 It is by no means improbable that this may have been 
 the theory of Judas. Nor is it at all necessary to seek 
 for the justification of such a theory, considered as a 
 matter of prudential policy, in Jewish fanaticism. The 
 Jews of that day were distracted by internal schisms. 
 Else, and with any benefit from national unity, the 
 headlong rapture of Jewish zeal, when combined in 
 vindication of their insulted temple and temple-wor- 
 ship, would have been equal to the effort of dislodging 
 the Roman legionary force for the moment from the 
 military possession of Palestine. After which, although 
 the restoration of the Roman supremacy could not ul- 
 timately have been evaded, it is by no means certain 
 .hat a temperamentum or reciprocal scheme of conces- 
 sions might not have been welcome at Rome, such at
 
 JUDAS ISCAHIOT. J27 
 
 aad, in fact, existed under Herod the Great and hia 
 father.* The radical power, under such a scheme, 
 would have been lodged in Rome ; hut with such ex- 
 ternal concessions to Jewish nationality as might have 
 consulted the real interests of both parties. Admin- 
 istered under Jewish names, the land would have 
 yielded a larger revenue than, as a refractory nest of 
 insurgents, it ever did yield to the Roman exchequer \. 
 and, on the other hand, a ferocious bigotry, which was 
 really sublime in its indomitable obstinacy, might have 
 been humored without prejudice to the grandeur of the 
 imperial claims. Even little Palmyra in later times 
 
 * " Under Herod the Great and his father : " It was a tra- 
 dition which circulated at Rome down to the days of the Flavian 
 family (t. e. , Vespasian the tenth Caesar, and his two sons Titus 
 the eleventh, and Domitian the twelfth), that the indulgence 
 conceded to Judea by the imperial policy from Augustus down- 
 wards, arose out of the following little diplomatic secret : On 
 the rise of the Parthian power, ambassadors had been sent to 
 Antipater, the father of Herod, offering the Parthian alliance and 
 support. At the same moment there happened to be in Judea 
 a Roman agent, charged with a mission from the Roman Govern- 
 ment, having exactly the same objects. The question was most 
 solemnly debated, for it was obvious, that ultimately this ques- 
 tion touched the salvation of the kingdom ; since to accept an 
 alliance with either empire would be to insure the bitter hostility 
 of the other. With that knowledge fully before his mind, Anti- 
 pater made his definitive election for Rome. The case transpired 
 at Rome the debate, and the issue of the debate and eventu- 
 uly proved worth a throne to the Herodian family ; for the honoz 
 of Rome seemed to be concerned in supporting that oriental man 
 Who, in this sort of judgment of Paris, had solemnly awarded 
 <he prize of superiority (Detur meliori) to the western po- 
 tentate.
 
 228 JtTDA.8 I8CA.BIOT. 
 
 was indulged to a greater extent, without serious in- 
 jury in any quarter, had it not heen for the feminine 
 arrogance in little insolent Zenohia that misinterpreted 
 Kid abused that indulgence. 
 
 The miscalculation, in fact, of Judas Iscariot sup- 
 posing him really to have entertained the views as- 
 cribed to him did not hinge at all upon political 
 oversights, but upon a total spiritual blindness ; in 
 which blindness, however, he went no farther than at 
 that time did probably most of his brethren. Upon 
 them, quite as little as upon him, had yet dawned 
 the true grandeur of the Christian scheme. In this 
 only he outran his brethren that, sharing in their 
 blindness, he greatly exceeded them in presumption. 
 All alike had imputed to their Master views utterly 
 irreconcilable with the grandeur of his new and heav- 
 enly religion. It was no religion at all which they, 
 previously to the crucifixion, supposed to be the object 
 of Christ's teaching ; it was a mere preparation for a 
 pitiably vulgar scheme of earthly aggrandisement. 
 But, whilst the other apostles had simply failed to 
 comprehend their Master, Judas had presumptuously 
 assumed that he did comprehend him ; and understood 
 his purposes better than Christ himself. His object 
 was audacious in a high degree, but (according to the 
 theory which I am explaining) for that very reason not 
 treacherous at all. The more that he was liable to 
 the approach of audacity, the less can he be suspected 
 of perfidy. He supposed himself executing the very 
 amerrnost purposes of Christ, but with an energy which 
 it was the characteristic infirmity of Christ to want 
 He fancied that by Ms vigor of action were fulfilleo
 
 JUDAS ISCABIOT. 229 
 
 Lhose great political changes which Christ approved, 
 but wanted audacity to realize. His hope was, that, 
 when at length actually arrested by the Jewish author- 
 ities, Christ would no longer vacillate; he would be 
 forced into giving the signal to the populace of Jeru- 
 salem, who would then rise unanimously, for the 
 double purpose of placing Christ at the head of an 
 insurrectionary movement, and of throwing off the 
 Roman yoke. As regards the worldly prospects of 
 this scheme, it is by no means improbable that Iscariot 
 was right. It seems, indeed, altogether impossible that 
 he, who (as the treasurer of the apostolic fraternity) 
 had in all likelihood the most of worldly wisdom, and 
 was best acquainted with the temper of the times, 
 could have made any gross blunder as to the wishes 
 and secret designs of the populace in Jerusalem.* 
 
 * " Of the populace in Jerusalem : " Judas, not less than 
 the other apostles, had doubtless been originally chosen, upon 
 the apparent ground of superior simplicity and unworldliness, 
 or else of superior zeal in testifying obedience to the wishes of 
 his Master. But the other eleven were probably exposed to no 
 special temptation : Judas, as the purse-bearer, was. His offi- 
 cial duty must have brought him every day into minute and cir- 
 cumstantial communication with an important order of men 
 viz., petty shopkeepers; what in modern Scotland are called mer- 
 chants. In all countries alike, these men fulfil a great political 
 function. Beyond all others, they are brought into the most 
 extensive connection with the largest stratum by far in the com- 
 position of society. They receive, and with dreadful fidelity they 
 give back, all Jacobinical impulses. They know thoroughly in 
 what channels, under any call arising for insurrectionary action, 
 \hese impulses are at any time moving. In times of fierce politi- 
 eal agitation, these are the men who most of all are kept up au 
 tourant of the interior counsels and policy amongst the great
 
 230 JTTDA.8 I8CAB1OT. 
 
 This populace, however, not being backed by and 
 strong section of the aristocracy, having no confidence 
 again in any of the learned bodies connected with the 
 great service of their national temple, neither in Scribes 
 nor Pharisees, neither in Sadducees nor Levites, and 
 having no leaders, were apparently dejected, and with- 
 out unity. The probability meantime is, that some 
 popular demonstration would have been made on be- 
 half of Christ, had he himself offered it any encourage- 
 ment. But we, who know the incompatibility of and 
 such encouragement with the primary purpose of 
 Christ's mission upon earth, know of necessity that 
 Judas, and the populace on which he relied, must 
 equally and simultaneously have found themselves un- 
 deceived forever. In an instant of time one grand 
 
 body of acting conspirators. Consciousness, which such men 
 always have, of deep incorruptible fidelity to their mother-land, 
 and to her interests, however ill understood, ennobles their 
 politics, even when otherwise base. They are corrupters in a 
 service that never can be utterly corrupt. Traitors to the gov- 
 ernment, they cannot be traitors to the country. They have, 
 therefore, a power to win attention from virtuous men; and, 
 being known to speak a representative language (known, I mean, 
 to speak the thoughts of the national majority) , they would 
 easily, in a land so agitated and unreconciled, so wild, stormy, 
 and desperately ignorant as Judea, kindle in stirring minds the 
 most fiery contagions of principle and purpose. Judas, being 
 thus, on the one hand, kept through these men in vital sympa- 
 thy with the restless politics of the insurrectionist populace; on 
 the other hand, hearing daily from his Master a sublime phi- 
 icsophy that rested for its key-note upon the advent of vast 
 revolutions among men what wonder that he should connect 
 these contradictory but parallel currents of his hourly expe- 
 rience by a visionary synthesis?
 
 JTIDAS ISCAEIOT. 231 
 
 decisive word and gesture of Christ must have put an 
 end peremptorily to all hopes of that kind. In thai 
 brief instant, enough was made known to Judas for 
 final despair. Whether he had ever drunk profoundly 
 enough from the cup of spiritual religion to understand 
 the full meaning of Christ's refusal, not only the fact 
 of this refusal, but also the infinity of what secretly it 
 involved ; whether he still adhered to his worldly inter- 
 pretation of Christ's mission, and simply translated the 
 refusal into a confession that all was lost, whilst in very 
 fact all was on the brink of absolute and triumphant 
 consummation, it is impossible for us, without docu- 
 ments or hints, to conjecture. Enough is apparent to 
 show that, in reference to any hopes that could be 
 consolatory for him, all was indeed lost. The kingdom 
 of this world had melted away in a moment like a 
 cloud; and it mattered little to a man of his nature 
 that a spiritual kingdom survived, if in his heart there 
 were no spiritual organ by which he could appropriate 
 the new and stunning revelation. Equally he might 
 be swallowed up by despair in the case of retaining 
 his old worldly delusions, and finding the ground of 
 his old anticipations suddenly giving way below his 
 feet, or again, in the opposite case of suddenly correct- 
 ing his own false constructions of Christ's mission, and 
 cf suddenly apprehending a far higher purpose ; but 
 which purpose, in the very moment of becoming intel- 
 ligible, rose into a region far beyond his own frail 
 Beshly sympathies. He might read more truly ; but 
 what of that, if the new truth, suddenly made known 
 \s a letter, were in spirit absolutely nothing at all to 
 fiie inner sense of his heart ? The despondency of
 
 232 JUDAS ISCAKIOT. 
 
 Judas might be of two different qualities, more or less 
 selfish ; indeed, I would go so far as to say, selfish or 
 altogether unselfish. And it is with a view to this 
 question, and under a persuasion of a wrong done to 
 Judas by gross mistranslation disturbing the Greek 
 text, that I entered at all upon this little memoran- 
 dum, Else what I have hitherto been attempting to 
 explain (excepting, however, the part relating to the 
 hakim, which is entirely my own suggestion) belongs 
 in part to German writers. The whole construction of 
 the Iscariot's conduct, as arising, not out of perfidy, 
 but out of his sincere belief that some quickening im- 
 pulse, was called for by a morbid feature in Christ's 
 temperament all this, I believe, was originally due 
 to the Germans ; and it is an important correction ; for 
 it must always be important to recall within the fold 
 of Christian forgiveness any one who has long been 
 sequestered from human charity, and has tenanted a 
 Pariah grave. In the greatest and most memorable of 
 earthly tragedies, Judas is a prominent figure. So 
 long as the earth revolves, he cannot be forgotten. If, 
 therefore, there is a doubt affecting his case, he is 
 entitled to the benefit of that doubt; and if he has 
 suffered to any extent if simply to the extent of 
 losing a palliation, or the shadow of a palliation by 
 means of a false translation from the Greek, we ought 
 not to revise merely, or simply to mitigate his sentence, 
 but to dismiss him from the bar. The Germans make 
 it a question in what spirit the Iscariot lived ? My 
 question is in what spirit he died ? If he were a 
 traitor at last, in that case he was virtually a traitoi 
 always. If in the last hours of his connection witlt
 
 JUDAS ISCARIOT. 233 
 
 Christ he perpetrated a treason, and even (which is our 
 vulgar reading of the case) a mercenary treason, then 
 he must have been dallying with purposes of treason 
 during all the hours of his apostleship. If, in reality, 
 when selling his Master for money, he meant to betray 
 him, and regarded the money as the commensurate 
 motive for betraying him, then his case will assume a 
 very different aspect from that impressed upon it by 
 the German construction of the circumstances. 
 
 The life of Judas, and the death of Judas, taken 
 apart or taken jointly, each separately upon indepen- 
 dent grounds, or both together upon common grounds, 
 are open to doubts and perplexities. And possibly the 
 double perplexities, if fully before us, might turn out 
 each to neutralize the other. Taking them jointly, we 
 might ask Were they, this life and this death, to be 
 regarded as a common movement on behalf of a deep 
 and heart-fretting Hebrew patriotism, which was not 
 the less sincere, because it ran headlong into the un- 
 amiable form of rancorous nationality and inhuman 
 bigotry ? Were they a wild degeneration from a prin- 
 ciple originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life 
 and this death, were they alike, the expression of a 
 base, mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the 
 meshes of its own chicanery ? The life, if it could be 
 appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to il- 
 lustrate the probable character of the death. The 
 death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could 
 be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the 
 received report, might do something to indicate retro- 
 spectively the character and tenor of that life. The 
 \ife of Judas, under a German construction of it, as
 
 234 JUDAS ISCARIOT. 
 
 a spasmodic effort of vindictive patriotism and of re- 
 belHous ambition, noble by possibility in its grand 
 central motive, though erring and worldly-minded of 
 necessity in the potential circumstances of its evolu- 
 tion, when measured by a standard so exalted as that 
 of Christianity, would infer (as its natural sequel) a 
 jeath of fierce despair. Read under the ordinary con- 
 struction as a life exposed to temptations that were 
 petty, and frauds that were always mercenary, it could 
 not reasonably be supposed to furnish any occasion for 
 passions upon so great a scale as those which seem to 
 have been concerned in the tragical end of Judas, 
 whether the passions were those of remorse and peni- 
 tential anguish, or of frantic wrath and patriotic dis- 
 appointment. Leaving, however, to others the task of 
 conjecturally restoring its faded lineaments to this 
 mysterious record of a crime that never came before 
 any human tribunal, I separately pursue a purpose that 
 is narrower. I seek to recall and to recombine the 
 elements, not of the Iscariot's life, nor of his particular 
 offence, but simply of his death which final event 
 in his career, as a death marked by singular circum- 
 stances, might, if once truly deciphered, throw back 
 some faint illustrative light, both upon the life, and 
 upon the offence. 
 
 The reader is probably aware that there has always 
 been an obscurity, or even a perplexity connected with 
 the death of Judas. Two only out of the entire five 
 documents, which record the rise and early history 01 
 Christianity, have circumstantially noticed this event 
 The evangelists, Mark, Luke, and John, leave it unde- 
 cribed. St. Matthew and the Acts of the Apostle*
 
 JUDAS ISCABIOT. 235 
 
 have bequeathed to us a picturesque account of it, 
 which, to my own belief, has been thoroughly mis- 
 understood ; and, once being misunderstood, naturally 
 enough has been interpreted as something fearfully 
 preternatural. The crime, though great, of the Iscariot, 
 has probably been much exaggerated. It was, under 
 my interpretation, the crime of signal and earthly pre- 
 sumption, seeking not to thwart the purposes of Christ, 
 still less to betray them on the contrary, to pro- 
 mote them ; but how ? by means utterly at war with 
 their central spirit. As far as can be judged, it was 
 an attempt to forward the counsels of God by weapons 
 borrowed from the armory of darkness. The crime 
 being once misapprehended (as a crime without a name 
 or a precedent), it was inevitable that the punishment, 
 so far as it was expounded by the death of the crimi- 
 nal, should, in obedience to this first erroneous pre- 
 conception, be translated into something preternatural. 
 To a mode of guilt which seemed to have no parallel, 
 it was reasonable enough that there should be appor- 
 tioned a death which allowed of no medical explana- 
 tion.* 
 
 * " JVo medical explanation :" In neutral points, having 
 no relation to morals or religious philosophy, it is not concealed 
 by the Scriptural records themselves, that even inspired persons 
 made grave mistakes. All the Apostles, it is probable, or with 
 the single exception of St. John (which single exception I make 
 in deference to many parts of the Apocalypse arguing too evi- 
 dently an immunity from this error) , shared in the mistake 
 about the second coming of Christ, as an event immediately to 
 be looked for. With respect to diseases, again, it is evident that 
 the Apostles, in common with all Jews, were habitually disposed 
 to read in them distinct manifestations of heavenly wrath. In
 
 36 JUDAS ISCA.KIOT. 
 
 This demur, moreover, of obscurity was not the only 
 one raised against the death of Judas : there war <* 
 separate objection that it was inconsistent with it- 
 self. He was represented, in the ordinary modern 
 versions, as dying by a double death viz. (1.), by a 
 
 olinJaess, for instance, or, again, in death from the faL of a 
 ti.wsr, they read, as a matter of course, a plain expression of the 
 Divine displeasure pointed at an individual. That they should 
 even so far pause as to doubt whether the individual or his 
 parents had been the object of this displeasure, arose only 
 out of those cases where innocent infants were the sufferers. 
 This, in fact, was a prejudice inalienable from their Jewish train- 
 ing; and as it would unavoidably lead oftentimes to judgments 
 not only false, but also uncharitable, it received, on more occa- 
 sions than one, a stern rebuke from Christ himself. In the same 
 spirit, it is probable that the symptoms attending death were 
 sometimes erroneously reported as preternatural, when, in fact, 
 such as every hospital could match. The death of the first Herod 
 was regarded by the early Christians universally as a judicial 
 expression of God's wrath to the author of the massacre at Beth- 
 lehem, though in reality the symptoms were such as often occur 
 in obstinate derangements of the nervous system. Indeed, as to 
 many features, the malady of the French king, Charles IX. , whose 
 nervous system had been shattered by the horrors of the St. Bar- 
 tholomew massacre, very nearly resembled it, with such differ- 
 ences as might be looked for between an old, ruined constitution, 
 such as Herod's, and one so full of youthful blood as that of 
 Charles. In the Acts of the Apostles, again, the grandson of 
 Herod the Great viz., Herod Agrippa is evidently supposed 
 to have died by a judicial and preternatural death, whereas, 
 Apparently, one part of his malady was the morbus pedicularis 
 -cases of which I have myself circumstantially known in 
 persons of all ranks ; one, for instance, being that of an English 
 countess, rich beyond the scale of oriental Sultans, and the othci 
 a female upper servant in my mother's household. Both died 
 Bylla, the great Roman leader, died of the same disease.
 
 JTTDAS ISCA.BIOT. 237 
 
 micidal death : " he went and hanged himself " thia 
 is the brief account of his death given by St. Matthew ; 
 bat (2.) by a death not suicidal : in the Acts of the 
 Apostles we have a very different account of his death, 
 not suggesting suicide at all, and otherwise describing 
 it as mysteriously complex ; that is, presenting us with 
 various sircumstances of the case, none of which, in 
 the common vernacular versions (whether English or 
 continental), is at all intelligible. The elements in 
 the case are three : that he " fell down headlong ; " 
 that he " burst asunder in the middle ; " and that 
 " his bowels gushed out " the first of these elements 
 being unintelligible, as regards any previous circum- 
 stances stated in the report ; and the two others being 
 purely and blankly impossible. 
 
 These objections to the particular mode of that catas- 
 trophe which closed the career of Judas, had been felt 
 pretty generally in the Christian church, and probably 
 from the earliest times ; and the more so on account 
 of that deep obscurity which rested upon the nature oi 
 his offence. That a man, who had been solemnly elect- 
 ed into the small band of the Apostles, should so far 
 wander from his duty as to incur forfeiture of his great 
 office this was in itself sufficiently dreadful, and a 
 shocking revival to the human imagination of that 
 eldest amongst all moral traditions a tradition de- 
 Hcending to us from what date we know not, nor 
 through what channel of possible communication 
 viz., the obscure tale that even into the heaven of 
 neavens, and amongst the angelic hosts, rebellion 
 igainst God, long before man and human frailty existed, 
 ibould have crept by some contagion metaphysically
 
 238 JUDAS ISCAKIOT 
 
 .nconceivable. What search could be sufficient, where 
 even the eye of Christ had failed to detect any germ 
 of evil ? Into the choir of angelic hosts, though watched 
 by God into the choir of apostles, though searched 
 by Christ had a traitor crept ? Still, though the 
 crime of Judas had doubtless been profound,* and 
 evidently to me it had been the intention of the early 
 church to throw a deep pall of mystery over its extent, 
 charity that unique charity which belongs to Chris- 
 tianity, as being the sole charity ever preached to men, 
 which " hopeth all things" inclined through every 
 age the hearts of musing readers to suspend their 
 verdict where the Scriptures had themselves practised 
 a noticeable reserve, and where (if only through the 
 extreme perplexity of their final and revised expres- 
 sions) they had left an opening, or almost an invitation, 
 to doubt. The doubt was left by the primitive church 
 where Scripture had left it. There was not any abso- 
 lute necessity that this should ever be cleared up to 
 man. But it was felt from the very first that some 
 call was made upon the church to explain and to har- 
 monize the apparently contradictory expressions used 
 in what may be viewed as the official report of the one 
 memorable domestic tragedy in the infant stage of the 
 Christian history. Official I call it, as being in a 
 manner countersigned by the whole confederate church, 
 
 * " Profound : " In measuring which, however, the reader 
 must not allow himself to be too much biassed by the English 
 phrase, " son of perdition." To find such words as shall grad 
 oaia and adjust their depth of feeling to the scale of another 
 language, and that language a dead language, is many times 
 bejcmd all reach of human skill.
 
 JUDAS ISCAHIOT 239 
 
 when proceeding to their first common act in filling 
 up the vacancy consequent upon the transgression of 
 Judas, whereas the account of St. Matthew pleaded 
 no authority but his own. And domestic I call the 
 tragedy, in prosecution of that beautiful image under 
 which a father of our English Church has called the 
 twelve apostles, when celebrating the paschal feast, 
 " the family * of Christ." 
 
 This early essay of the church to harmonize the 
 
 * " The family of Christ : " For the reader must not for- 
 get that the original meaning of the Latin word familia was 
 not at all what we moderns mean by & family, but the sum total 
 of the famuli. To say, therefore, in speaking of a Roman noble- 
 man, " that his entire familia, numbering four hundred indi- 
 viduals, had been crucified," would not, to a Roman audience, 
 convey the impression that his children or grandchildren, his 
 cognati or agnati, those of his affinity or his consanguinity, 
 could have entered into the list by the very smallest fraction. 
 It would be understood that his slaves had perished judicially, 
 and none beside. So again, whenever it is said in an ancient 
 classic that such or such a man had a large family, or that he 
 was kind to his family, or was loved by his family, always we 
 are to understand not at all his wife and children, but the train 
 and retinue of his domestic slaves. Now, the relation of the 
 ipostles to their Master, and the awfulness of their dependency 
 upon him, which represented a golden chain suspending the 
 whole race of man to the heavens above, justified, in the first 
 place, that form of expression which should indicate the humility 
 and loyalty that is owned by servants to a lord ; whilst, on the 
 other hand, the tenderness involved in the relations expressed 
 ?y the English word fan. ly redressed what might else have been 
 MO austere in the idea, and recomposed the equilibrium between 
 the two forces of reverential awe and of child-like love which 
 we equally indispensable in the orbicular perfection of Christian 
 foilty.
 
 240 JUDAS I8CARIOT. 
 
 difficult expressions employed in the Acts of the Apos 
 ties an essay which, therefore, recognizes at once 
 the fact that these expressions really were likely to 
 perplex the simple-hearted, and not merely to perplex 
 such readers as systematically raised cavils was 
 brought forward in the earliest stage of the- church, 
 and under the sanction of the very highest authority 
 viz., by one who sat at the feet of the beloved 
 Apostle ; by one, therefore, who, if he had not seer 
 Christ, had yet seen familiarly him in whom Christ 
 most confided. But I will report the case in the words 
 of that golden-mouthed rhetorician, that Chrysostom of 
 the English Church, from whose lips all truth came 
 mended, and who, in spite of Shakspeare himself, 
 found it possible 
 
 " To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, 
 And add another perfume to the violet." 
 
 The following is the account given by Jeremy Taylor 
 of the whole history, in so far as it affects the Scrip- 
 ture report of what Judas did, and what finally he 
 suffered: "Two days before the passover, the 
 Scribes and Pharisees called a council to contrive 
 crafty ways * of destroying Jesus, they not daring to 
 
 * " Crafty ways : " Otherwise it must naturally occur to 
 every reader What powers could Judas furnish towards the 
 arrest of Jesus beyond what the authorities in Jerusalem al- 
 ready possessed ? But the bishop suggests that the dilemma was 
 this : By day it was unsafe to seize him, such was the ven- 
 eration of the populace for his person. If done at all, it mus 
 be done during the darkness. But precisely during those hours 
 Christ withdrew into solitudes known only to his disciples. So 
 that to corrupt one of these was the preliminary step to *hr 
 iiacovery of that secret.
 
 JUDAS 1SCARIOT. 241 
 
 t 
 
 io it by open violence. Of which meeting, when 
 Judas Iscariot had notice (for those assemblies were 
 public and notorious), he ran from Bethany, and 
 offered himself to betray his Master to them, if they 
 would give him a considerable reward. They agreed 
 for thirty pieces of silver." In a case so memorable 
 as this, nothing is or can be trivial ; and even that 
 curiosity is not unhallowed which has descended to 
 inquire what sum, at that era of Jewish history, this 
 expression might indicate. The bishop replies thus : 
 "Of what value each piece was, is uncertain; but 
 their own nation hath given a rule, that, when a piece 
 of silver is named in the Pentateuch, it signifies a 
 side ; * if it be named in the Prophets, it signifies a 
 pound ; if in the other writings of the Old Testament, 
 it signifies a talent." For this, besides other less 
 familiar authority, there is cited the well-known Ariua 
 Montanus, in the Syro-Chaldaic dictionary. It is, 
 however, self-evident that any service open to Judas 
 
 * By which coin I conceive that the illustrious bishop undei 
 stood a Hebrew shekel, which I have always represented to my 
 self as a rupee ; for each alike, shekel or rupee, was 1. a silver 
 coin; 2. a most ugly coin; 3. when in its normal state, worth 
 half-an-ounce of silver i. e., an English half-crown; 4. liable 
 to sink into another coin, equal in ugliness, but less in value 
 viz., the modern English florin. Fifty years ago (as I by a 
 li vely experience remember) , a sound sicca rupee passed current 
 lii Bengal for thirty English pence. But since then it has de- 
 Bcended into decimal uses, being, for a whole generation back, 
 uniformly accounted the exact tenth part of our pound. So 
 (hat a lac of rupees, which means a hur.lred thousand rupees, 
 In the ordinary expression all over India for ten thousand pounds 
 iterling. 
 
 16
 
 242 JUDAS I8CAKIOT. 
 
 > 
 
 would have been preposterously overpaid by thirty 
 Attic talents, a sum which exceeded five thousand 
 pounds sterling. And since this particular sum had 
 originally rested on the authority of a prophet, cited 
 by one of the Evangelists,* " it is probable," proceeds 
 the bishop, " that the price at Avhich Judas sold his 
 Lord was thirty pounds weight of silver [that is, about 
 ninety guineas sterling in English money] a goodly 
 price for the Saviour of the world to be prized at by 
 his undiscerning and unworthy countrymen." Where, 
 however, the learned bishop makes a slight oversight 
 in logic, since it was not precisely Christ that was so 
 valued this prisoner as against the certain loss of thia 
 prisoner but simply this particular mode of contend- 
 ing with the difficulty attached to his apprehension, since 
 in the very worst case, this opportunity lost might be 
 replaced by other opportunities ; and the price, there- 
 fore, was not calculated as it would have been under 
 one solitary chance ; that is, the price was not meas- 
 ured (as the bishop assumes it to have been) against 
 the total and final value of Christ. 
 
 The bishop then proceeds with the rehearsal of all 
 the circumstances connected with the pretended trial 
 of Christ ; and coming in the process of his narrative 
 to the conduct of Judas on learning the dreadful (urn 
 
 * Viz., St. Matthew. Upon which the bishop notices the 
 6. Tor which had crept into the prevailing text of Jeremias in- 
 stead of Zecharias. But in the fourth century some copies had 
 Already corrected this reading; which, besides, had a traditional 
 excuse in the proverbial saying that the spirit of Jeremias haJ 
 fettled and found a resting-place in Zecharias.
 
 JUDAS ISCAJUOT. 2-13 
 
 ivnich things were taking (conduct which surely argues 
 that he had anticipated a most opposite catastrophe), 
 he winds up the case of the Iscariot in the following 
 passage : " When Judas heard that they had passed 
 the final and decretory sentence of death upon hi<? 
 Lord, he, who thought not it would have gone so far. 
 repented him to have been an instrument of so damna- 
 ble a machination, and came and brought the silver 
 which they gave him for hire, and threw it in amongst 
 them, and said, * I have sinned in betraying the in- 
 nocent blood.' But they, incurious of those hell- 
 torments Judas felt within him, because their own 
 fires burned not yet, dismissed him." I pause for a 
 moment to observe that, in the expression " repented 
 him to have been an instrument," the context shows 
 the bishop intending to represent Judas as recoiling 
 from the issue of his own acts, and from so damnable 
 a machination, not because his better feelings were 
 evoked, as the prospect of ruin to his Master drew 
 near, and that he shrank from that same thing when 
 taking a definite shape of fulfilment, which he had 
 faced cheerfully when at a distance. Not at all : the 
 bishop's meaning is, that Judas recoiled from his own 
 acts at the very instant when he began to understand 
 their real consequences now solemnly opening upon his 
 horror-stricken understanding ; not (understand me) as 
 consequences to which he could no longer reconcile 
 himself, now that they drew nearer, but as conse- 
 quences to which he never had reconciled himself for a 
 moment consequences, in fact to which lie had neve* 
 dverted as possibilities. He had noped, probably
 
 M4 JUDAS I8CABIOT. 
 
 much from the Roman interference; and the history 
 itself shows that in this he had not been at ill too 
 sanguine. Justice has never yet been done to the 
 conduct of Pilate. That man has little comprehended 
 the style and manner of the New Testament who does 
 not perceive the demoniac earnestness of Pilate to effect 
 the liberation of Christ, or who fails to read the 
 anxiety of the several Evangelists to put on record his 
 profound sympathy with the prisoner. The falsest 
 word that ever yet was uttered upon any part of the 
 New Testament, is that sneer of Lord Bacon's at 
 "jesting Pilate." Pilate was in deadly earnest from 
 first to last ; never for a moment had he "jested;" 
 and he retired from his frantic effort on behalf of 
 Christ, only when his own safety began to be seriously 
 compromised. Do the thoughtless accusers of Pilate 
 fancy that he was a Christian, or under the moral 
 obligations of a Christian ? If not, why, or on what 
 principle, was he to ruin himself at Rome, in order to 
 favor one whom he could not save at Jerusalem ? 
 How reasonably Judas had relied upon the Roman 
 interference, is evident from what actually took place. 
 Judas relied, secondly, upon the Jewish mob ; and that 
 this reliance also was well warranted, appears from 
 lepeated instances of the fear with which the Jewish 
 rulers contemplated Christ. Why did they fear him at 
 all ? Why did they fear him in the very lowest de- 
 gree ? Simply as he was backed by the people : had 
 it not been for their support, Christ was no more an 
 object of terror to them than his herald, the Baptist. 
 But what I here insist on is (which else, from some
 
 JUDAS ISCAKIOT. 24o 
 
 expressions, the reader might fail to understand), that 
 Jeremy Taylor nowhere makes the mistake of sup- 
 posing Judas to have originally designed the ruin of 
 his Master, and nowhere understands by his " repent- 
 ance " that he /elt remorse on coming near to conse- 
 quences which from a distance he had tolerated or 
 even desired. He admits clearly that Judas was a 
 traitor only in the sense of seeking his Master's ag- 
 grandizement by methods which placed him in revolt 
 against that Master, methods which not only involved 
 express and formal disobedience to that Master, but 
 which ran into headlong hostility against the spirit of 
 all that he came on earth to effect. It was the revolt, 
 not of perfidious malignity, but of arrogant and carnal 
 blindness. It was the revolt (as Jeremy Taylor rightly 
 views it) of one who sought to the last the fulfilment 
 of his Master's will, but by methods running counter 
 to that Master's will. In respect to the gloomy ter- 
 mination of the Iscariot's career, and to the perplexing 
 account of it given in the Acts of the Apostles, the 
 bishop closes his account thus : " And Judas went 
 And hanged himself; and the judgment was made 
 more notorious and eminent by an unusual accident at 
 uuch deaths ; for he so swelled, that he burst, and hie 
 bowels gushed out. But the Greek scholiast and 
 Borne others report out of Papias, St. John's scholar, 
 that Judas fell from the fig-tree on which he hanged 
 before he was quite dead, and survived his attempt 
 some while ; being so sad a spectacle of deformity and 
 pain, and a prodigious tumor, that his plague was 
 deplorable and highly miserable ; till at last he burst
 
 46 JUDAS ISCAtUOT. 
 
 in the very substance of his trunk, as being extended 
 beyond the possibilities * and capacities of nature." 
 
 In this corrected version of Papias, we certainly 
 gain an intelligible account of what otherwise is far 
 from intelligible viz., the falling headlong. But all 
 the rest is a dismal heap of irrationalities ; and the 
 single ray of light which. is obtained viz., the sugges- 
 tion of the fig-tree as an elevation, which explains the 
 possibility of a headlong fall, or any fall whatever is 
 of itself an argument that some great disturbance must 
 have happened to the text at this point ; else how 
 could so material a circumstance have silently dropped 
 out of the narrative ? There are passages in every 
 separate book of the canon, into which accident, or the 
 somnolence of copyists, or their blind stupidity, or 
 rash self-conceit, has introduced errors seriously dis- 
 turbing the sense and the coherence. Many of these 
 have been rectified in the happiest manner by ingeni- 
 ous suggestions; and a considerable proportion of 
 these suggestions has been since verified and approved 
 by the discovery of new manuscripts, or the more ac- 
 curate collation of old ones. In the present case, a 
 much slighter change than might be supposed requisite 
 will suffice to elicit a new and perfect sense from the 
 general outline of that text which still survives. First, 
 as to the phrase "fell headlong," I do not understand 
 't of any fall from a fig-tree, or from any tree whatever. 
 This fig-tree I regard as a purely fanciful and innovat- 
 ing resource ; and evidently any innovation ranks to 
 this extent amongst those conjectural audacities which 
 
 * " Possibilitie* : " Qua- re whether the true reading is nor 
 ore probably "possibilities; " f. ., liabilities to suffering.
 
 JUDAS I8CAKIOT. 247 
 
 ihock the discreet reader, as unsatisfactory and licen- 
 tious, because purely gratuitous, when they rest upon 
 no traces that can be indicated as still lurking in the 
 present text. Fell headlong may stand as at present : 
 it needs no change, for it discloses a very good and 
 sufficient sense, if we understand it figuratively as 
 meaning that he came to utter and unmitigated ruin ; 
 that his wreck was total ; for that, instead of dedicat- 
 ing himself to a life of penitential sorrow, such as 
 would assuredly have conciliated the Divine forgiveness, 
 the unhappy criminal had rushed out of life by suicide. 
 So far, at least, all is coherent, and under no further 
 obligations to change, small or great, beyond the read- 
 ing in a metaphorical sense that which, if read (as 
 hitherto) in a literal sense, would require the very 
 serious interpolation of an imaginary fig-tree. 
 
 What remains is equally simple : the change in- 
 volves as little violence, and the result from this change 
 will appear not at all less natural. But a brief pre- 
 liminary explanation is requisite, in order to place it 
 advantageously before the reader. The ancients use 
 the term bowels with a latitude unknown generally to 
 modern literature, but especially to English literature. 
 In the midst of the far profounder passion which dis- 
 tinguishes the English from all literatures on the 
 modern European continent, it is singular that a fas- 
 tidious decorum never sleeps for a moment. It might 
 be imagined, that this fastidiousness would be in the 
 inverse ratio of the passion : but it is not so. In 
 oarticular, the French, certainly the literature which 
 ranges at the lowest elevation upon the scale of pas- 
 lion, nevertheless ia often homely, and even gross, ir
 
 248 JUDAS ISCAKIOT; 
 
 its recurrences to frank elementary nature. For a 
 lady to describe herself as laughing a gorge deployee, 
 a grossness which with us, equally on the stage or in 
 real life, would be regarded with horror, amongst the 
 French attracts no particular attention. Again, amidst 
 'he supposed refinements of French tragedy, and not 
 the courser (because earlier) tragedy of Corneille, but 
 amidst the more feminine and polished tragedy of Ra- 
 cine, there is no recoil at all from saying of such 01 
 such a sentiment, "// me perce les entrailles " (" it pene- 
 trates my bowels"). The Greeks and Romans still 
 more extensively use the several varieties of expression 
 for the intestines, as a symbolic phraseology for the 
 domestic and social affections. We English even, fas- 
 tidious as we are, employ the term bowels as a natural 
 symbolization for the affections of pity, mercy, or pa- 
 rental and brotherly affection. At least we do so in 
 recurring to the simplicities of the Scriptural style. 
 But, amongst the Romans, the word viscera is so 
 naturally representative of the household affections, 
 that at length it becomes necessary to recall an Eng- 
 lish reader to the true meaning of this word. Through 
 some prejudice, originating in the absurd physiology 
 of our worshipful Pagan masters, Greek and Roman, 
 it is true that the bowels have always been regarded 
 is the seat of the more tender and sorrowing sympa- 
 thies. But the viscera comprehended all the intes- 
 tines, or (as the French term tliem) les entrailles. The 
 heart even is a viscus ; perhaps, in a very large accep- 
 *ation, the brain might be regarded as a co-viscus with 
 the heart. There is very slight ground for holding 
 ihe brain to be the organ of thinking, or the heart u
 
 JUDAS ISCAR1OT. 249 
 
 moral sensibilities, more than the stomach, or the 
 bowels, or the intestines generally. But waive all this: 
 the Romans designated the seat of the larger and 
 nobler (i. e., the moral) sensibilities indifferently by 
 these three terms the pectus, the prvcordia, and the 
 viscera ; as to the cor, it seems to me that it denoted 
 the heart in its grosser and more animal capacities : 
 " Molle meum levibus cor est violabile telis ; " the cor 
 was the seat of sexual passion ; but nobler and more re- 
 flective sensibilities inhabited the pectus or prcecordia ; 
 and naturally out of these physiologic preconceptions 
 arose corresponding expressions for wounded or ruined 
 sensibilities. We English, for instance, insist on the 
 disease of broken heart, which Sterne, in a well-known 
 passage, postulates as a malady not at all the less de- 
 finite than phthisis or podagra, because it is not form- 
 ally recognized in the bills of mortality. But it is 
 evident that a theory which should represent the vis- 
 cera as occupied by those functions of the moral sensi- 
 bilities which we place in the central viscus of the 
 heart, must, in following out that hypothesis, figure 
 the case of these sensibilities when utterly ruined 
 under corresponding images. Our " broken heart " 
 will therefore to them become ruptured viscera, or prce- 
 cordia that have burst. To burst in the middle, id 
 limply to be shattered and ruined in the central 
 organ of our sensibilities, which is the heart ; and in 
 jaying that the viscera of Iscariot, or his middle, bad 
 burst and gushed out, the original reporter meant 
 simply that his heart had broke. That was precisely 
 bis case. Out of pure anguish that the scheme which 
 lie meant for the sudden glorification of his master
 
 250 JTTDA8 I8CABIOT. 
 
 dad recoiled (according to all worldly interpretation*) 
 in his utter ruin ; that the sudden revolution, through 
 a democratic movement, which was to raise himself and 
 his brother Apostles into Hebrew princes, had scattered 
 them like sheep without a shepherd ; and that, super- 
 added to this common burden of ruin, he personally 
 had to bear a separate load of conscious disobedience 
 to God, and insupportable responsibility ; naturally 
 enough, out of all this he fell into fierce despair ; hit 
 heart broke ; and under that storm of affliction he 
 hanged himself. Here, again, all clears itself up by 
 the simple substitution of a figurative interpretation 
 for one grossly and ludicrously physical. All contra- 
 diction disappears ; not three deaths assault him viz., 
 suicide, and also a rupture of the intestines, and also 
 an unintelligible effusion of the viscera but simply 
 suicide, and suicide as the result of that despondency 
 which was figured under the natural idea of a broken 
 heart or ruptured pnecordia. The incoherences are 
 gone ; the contradictions have vanished ; and the gross 
 physical absurdities, which under mistranslation had 
 perplexed the confiding student, no longer disfigure 
 the Scriptures. 
 
 Looking back to the foot-note on the oriental idea 
 of the hakim, or itinerating Therapeuta i. e. (if ex- 
 pressed by a modern idea), missionary physician as 
 a mask politically assumed by Christ and the Evangel- 
 ists, under the conviction of its indispensableness to 
 he propagation of Christian philosophy, I am induced. 
 ;^r the sake of detaining the reader's eye a little 
 longer upon a matter so deeply intertwisted with the 
 birth-throes of dawning Christianity, to subjoin ai
 
 JTTJJA8 I8CAEIOT. 251 
 
 extract from a little paper written by myself hereto- 
 fore, but not published. I may idd these two remarks 
 viz., first, that the attribution to St. Luke, speci- 
 ally or exclusively, of this medical character, probably 
 had its origin in the simple fact, that an assumption 
 made by all the Evangelists, and perhaps by all the 
 Apostles, attracted a more fixed attention in him, and a 
 more abiding remembrance under causes merely local 
 and accidental. One or two of the other Apostle? 
 naving pursued their labors of propagandism under 
 the avowed character of hakims, many others in the 
 same region would escape special notice in that char- 
 acter, simply because, as men notoriously ready to 
 plead it, they had not been challenged to do so by the 
 authorities ; whilst other Christian emissaries, in re- 
 gions where the government had not become familiar 
 with the readiness to plead such a privilege as part of 
 the apostolic policy, would be driven into the necessity 
 'of actually advancing the plea, and would thus (like 
 St. Luke) obtain a traditionary claim to the medical 
 title which in a latent sense had belonged to all, 
 though all had not been reduced to the necessity of 
 loudly pleading it. Secondly, I would venture to 
 suggest that the Therapeutce, or healers, technically so 
 called, who came forward in Egypt during the genera- 
 tion immediately succeeding to that of Christ, were 
 nei'ner more nor less than disguised apostles to Chris- 
 tianity, preaching the same doctrines essentially as 
 Christ, and under the very same protecting character 
 of hakims, but putting forward this character perhaps 
 taore prominently, or even retreading into it altogether 
 \ccording to the increasing danger which everywhere
 
 252 JTTDA.8 ISCAKIOT. 
 
 awaited thorn : for this danger was too generally 
 double ; first, from the Pagan natives resenting the 
 insults offered to their own childish superstitions : sec- 
 ondly, and even more ferociously, from the hostile 
 bigotry of expatriated Jews, as they gradually came 
 to understand the true and anti-national views of those 
 who called themselves, or in scorn were by others 
 called, Christians, sometimes Nazarenes, sometimes 
 Galileans. 
 
 In short, abstracting altogether from the hatred to 
 Christ, founded on the eternal enmity between <~he 
 worldly and the spiritual, and looking only to the po- 
 litical uneasiness amongst magistrates which accom- 
 panied the early footsteps of Christianity, one may 
 illustrate it by the parallel feelings of panic and official 
 persecution which in our own generation (amongst the 
 Portuguese, for instance) have dogged the movements 
 of freemasonry. \Ve in England unwarrantably view 
 this panic as irrational, because amongst ourselves it 
 would be so ; for British freemasonry conceals nothing 
 worse than it professes and broadly displays. But, on 
 the Continent it became a mask for shrouding any or 
 fvery system of anti-social doctrine, or, again, at any 
 moment, for playing into the hands of treason and 
 conspiracy. There was always, in the first place, a 
 reasonable fear of secret and perilous doctrines Com- 
 munism, for instance, under some modification, or ran- 
 corous Jacobinism. And, secondly, suppose that for 
 the present, or in the existing stage of the secret so- 
 ciety, there really were no esoteric and mischievous 
 doctrine countenanced, there was at any rate the cus- 
 torn established of meeting together in secret, of cor
 
 JTTDA8 ISCABIOT. 253 
 
 responding by an alphabet of conventional signals, 
 and of acting by an impenetrable organization, always 
 applicable to evil purposes, even where it might not 
 originally have been so applied or so designed. The 
 machinery which binds together any secret society, as 
 being always available for evil ends, must inevitably 
 justify a little uneasiness, and therefore more than a 
 little severity, in all political authorities.* And, 
 under those circumstances, the public jealousy mnst 
 have operated strongly against the free movement of 
 early Christianity : nothing could have disarmed that 
 jealousy except some counter- principle so managed as 
 to insure the freedom of public meetings ; for such 
 meetings opened the sine qua non channel to the free 
 propagation of religious doctrines. Unless people 
 could be brought together in crowds, and suffered by 
 jealous authorities to attend in tranquillity upon the 
 oral teachings of an impassioned (some thought, of an 
 inspired) rabbi, what publication was possible for any 
 new truth whatever ? The fierce dilemma of the fa- 
 natical Mussulmans is always at hand What new 
 truth ? If it is more than already we possess, then it 
 is false. If the same, then it is superfluous. And the 
 Jewish church, as it happened, was specially and re- 
 dundantly armed to meet such a crisis the crisis, I 
 mean, of a new teacher arising with offers of new 
 truth, whether it were new in the sense of revolution- 
 ary and correcting or new in the humbler sense of 
 additional and supplementary. For the T ews had a 
 
 *The Chinese Triads, which for some generations have lurked ' 
 as the framework of a secret society- are only now coming into 
 minous action.
 
 254 JUDAS ISCABIOT. 
 
 triple organ for uttering religious doubts, hopes, con- 
 victions, or sudden illuminations. There was, first or 
 all (and generally by the sea-shore), the humble Pro- 
 seuche, or oratory for private prayer. Secondly, in 
 every city, domestic or alien, having any considerable 
 resort of Jews (for the Jews were now spread all ove/ 
 the Mediterranean shores and islands, as well as all 
 over Asia Minor), there was a Synagogue ; and in this, 
 duly as Saturday came t. e., the Sabbath the Law 
 and the Prophets were read, and (according to oppor< 
 tunity) were expounded by some rabbi more or less 
 learned. Finally, for the crown in all ornamental 
 senses, and for the working consummation as regarded 
 truth and ceremonial shadows, points of law, casuistry, 
 or personal vows, there was the glorious Temple and 
 the temple service. In these circumstances, what 
 opening was left to the prophet of new truth ? Ap- 
 parently none. To publish a truth, to diffuse it from 
 an oracular centre in other words, to diffuse it with 
 power and corresponding pathos was a mysterious 
 problem. To solve this problem in any sense answer- 
 ing to the great postulates of Christ, seemed hopeless. 
 Books, or newspapers, which now form our main resour- 
 ces for publication, could not, at the inaugural stage of 
 Christianity, be looked for under a thousand and half- 
 a-thousand years. As yet, to meet the necessities of 
 & new doctrine that needed to be set afloat amongst 
 mankind, but, above all, of a doctrine that sought 
 popularization amongst the poor, the unlearned, the 
 . abject, the despised, of earth, what channels were 
 there available, what organs known and tried, tha 
 might be translated to alien uses, and appropriated bv
 
 JUDAS ISCAKIOT. 255 
 
 Christianity ? I know of but three ; ana all moving 
 within severe restrictions of their powers, such as far 
 removed them from any religious alliance. In Athens 
 (and dsrivatively from her, in other great cities) had 
 arisen Theatres, tragic and comic great organs of 
 publication for peculiar modes of truth, and for culture 
 in very ennobling arts, but controlled by bigotry the 
 most ferocious. Another organ of publication, with 
 inferior powers, within even sterner limitations, was 
 found in the dignified resources of the orator, Athe- 
 nian or Roman, for giving depth and impressiveness to 
 such narrow truths as he contemplated. A third or- 
 gan lay in the position and sanctity of an Oracle ; but 
 of an oracle well accredited. To have any value as 
 an organ of publication, the particular oracle must 
 first possess what is so important for a speaker in 
 our British senate " the ear " of its audience : and 
 this very few oracles ever had, except the Delphic. 
 Two centuries before the Christian era, a favorable 
 opinion upon a man or a family from the oracle of 
 Delphi was almost equal to a friendly review at pres- 
 ent in the London " Quarterly." Perhaps the Del- 
 phic concern never rose exactly to the level of the 
 London " Times." Spenser notices that, after all, 
 
 " Not to have been dipp'd in Lethe flood 
 Could save the son of Thetis from to die " 
 
 wto TO dvijGxeiv. And so neither could a first-class es- 
 timate of Socrates by the venerable but palsy- stricken 
 racle of Delphi, save that cunning and libidinous old 
 fellow from to die by hemlock. Laudatur et alget. 
 The wicked old man finds his vanity tickled, but his 
 "feet getting rigid and cold.
 
 256 JCDA.S I8CXHIOT. 
 
 Slight, therefore, and most inconsiderable, was the 
 power practically of the very greatest organs in Greece 
 for publishing truth with effect. The very idol of 
 Athens could reap no aid from the very Panhellenic 
 organ of glorification and world-wide diffusion. All 
 the power of Delphi and her delirious priestess was 
 not good did not tell in practice to the extent of 
 one hour's respite from a public execution. Four 
 centuries later, this oracle had sunk into dotage : like 
 Socrates, laudalur et alget : the oracle still received 
 gifts and lying homage from princes, but, like Socrates, 
 its feet were growing rigid and paralytically cold.* 
 
 In these circumstances, when all the known organs 
 of publication stage, bema, or rostrum, and the 
 superhuman oracle had failed jointly, failed memor- 
 ably and laughably, to create a serviceable patronage 
 on behalf of a man, a book, an event, a public interest, 
 or a truth struggling with the perplexities of develop- 
 
 * One symptom of increasing dotage had caused infinite laugh- 
 ter for many generations; and to those who detest the hellish 
 religious bigotry of Athens, where free-thinking should rightfully 
 have prevailed, but where it was in reality most of all dan- 
 gerous, think with triumphant pleasure of the deadly mortifica- 
 tion which this symptom inflicted upon the Athenian bigots, who 
 could not deny it or hide it, whilst they beyond all people felt the 
 ignominy and the profane inferences attending so vile a descent. 
 The oracles had, from eldest days, been published in verse. In 
 rude age this verse had passed unchallenged, like village epi- 
 taphs amongst ourselves. But then came a literary age a 
 literary public, inexorable critics, all wide awake. What fol 
 V)wed ? Infinite laughter, and finally, on the part of the oracle, 
 &e most abject retreat into humble prose. Apollo, the verj 
 divinity that originated verse, could not cash a cheque upor 
 himself for the sum of six hexameters; he was insolvent
 
 JTTDAS ISCABIOT. 257 
 
 Orient, what engine, what machinery could be set in 
 motion, or suggested, having power to work as a co- 
 agency with the internal forces of Christian truth ? If 
 there were none, then, under all human likelihoods, 
 Christianity must perish in its earliest stage ; or, rather, 
 must collapse as a visionary nisus as a spasm of 
 dreamy yearning before ever it reached such early 
 stage. Standing at the outset of his career in this 
 perplexity, and knowing well that countenance or 
 collusion from the magistrate was hopeless in his own 
 condition of poverty, Christ, from the armory of his 
 heavenly resources, brought forward a piece of artil- 
 lery,* potent for his own purposes, and not evadable 
 by any counter artifice of his opponents. Disease 
 was that separable from man ? He that worked through 
 that ally could he ever need to shrink or to cower 
 before his enemies in the gate ? Nothing in this world 
 was so much the object of dread alike rational and 
 groundless as crowds and the gatherings of the 
 people to the magistrates of the ancient world. Yet, 
 on the other hand, without crowds that he might 
 harangue, might instruct, might melt, might mould to 
 \iis new views, how could the Founder of a new and 
 spiritual faith advance by a solitary foot? 
 
 * "Artillery " is a Scriptural word; at least it is so in the 
 vocabulary of our own vernacular translators. They were much 
 too vigilantly on their guard against all real anachronisms not 
 to have weighed scrupulously this term when applied by Jona- 
 than, the son of Saul, and the youthful David, rather more than 
 ft thousand years B. 0., to the systems of archery (perhaps in- 
 cluding the cross-bow, the catapult, and other mechanic aids) in 
 4ose days known to the warlike tribes of Palestine. 
 17
 
 258 JUDAS ISCABIOT. 
 
 Here, now, are two of the parties interested 
 namely, the magistrate on the one side, and the Pro- 
 phet * on the other. The two parties were directly 
 at issue ; and thus, in any ordinary case, no result 
 would follow. But here there was a third party in- 
 
 * "The Prophet:' 9 Make no mistake, reader. You, ac- 
 cording to modern slang, understand probably by a prophet one 
 who foretells coming events. But this is not the Scriptural sense 
 of the word; nor am I aware that it is once used in such a sense 
 throughout the entire Bible. A prophet is that man, in contra- 
 distinction to another man, originally creating and moulding a 
 new truth, who comes forward to utter and expound that truth. 
 The two co-agents move in couples move dualistically. Each 
 is essential to the other. For instance, such a dualism rose like 
 a constellation rose like the Gemini like the twin brothers 
 Castor and Pollux in two great Hebrew leaders, simulta- 
 neously to guide the hopes and the efforts of Israel, when Israel 
 first moulded himself into a nation a nation that should fur- 
 nish in a new sense an old deliverance, a second ark, with a 
 nobler mission an ark in which might tilt over the angry seas 
 of our mysterious planet that mighty doctrine of God, tjie Trinity 
 in Unity, which else, perishing in storms, would have left man 
 himself to founder. This dualism of brethren Aaron the 
 priest, and Moses the lawgiver luminously illustrate the great 
 dualistic system of functions. Aaron cannot think ; Moses can- 
 not speak. The first is blind, the second is dumb. But, moving 
 as a co-operating duad, they become the salvation of Israel : the 
 dumb man, dumb as he is, can see; the blind man, blind as he 
 is, can speak. Moses it is that furnishes the great ideas, the 
 vast scheme of legislation for Israel : Aaron it is that publishes, 
 that gives vocal utterance to these colossal ideas. Failing a 
 Moses, there would be no ideas to manifest : failing an Aaron, 
 there would be no manifestation of these august entities they 
 would die, and be confounded amidst the clouds of their al- 
 mighty birth. Now, in Scripture, both Old and New, he that 
 fives utterance to these else perishing conceptions is called
 
 JUDAS ISCABIOT. 259 
 
 terested namely, the whole world : after which 
 number one (the magistrate) could no longer be al- 
 lowed to neutralize number two (the Builder of Truth). 
 It is noticeable, and accordingly it has been often 
 noticed, that nowhere are mobs more terrific and per- 
 emptory than in bloody despotisms. And the same 
 truth is illustrated in the English history. During 
 periods in which as yet the multitude enjoyed few abso- 
 lute rights recognized by the law, mobs, when once put 
 in motion, listened to no checks of authority. Seeing 
 their way clearly under simple indications of blank 
 necessity or rightful claim, or old traditional usage, 
 neadlong they went forward, without fear of conse- 
 quences, or regard to collateral results. Pretty nearly 
 the same was doubtless the character of a Jerusalem 
 mob, and precisely because it moved under the same 
 elementary laws of human nature. " I," would say 
 one man, " am not going to weather the torments of 
 a cancer." " Nor will I suffer my poor daughter to pine 
 away under a palsy, only because you are politically 
 jealous of this young man from Naaareth, whom else, 
 
 prophet, and is said to prophesy. How else could be explained 
 those multiplied passages in which St. Paul notices ' gifts of 
 prophecy " as endowments of ordinary occurrence amongst 
 his contemporaries ? How absurd, in the common acceptation 
 of the word prophecy ! And what encouragement would the 
 Apostle be thus giving to false and blundering enthusiasm I 
 " Prophesy unto us who it is that struck thee : " that is, 
 reveal, make manifest, as a thing hidden ; not predict as a thing 
 remote from our present time. How shameful, amidst the real 
 and inevitable difficulties of Scripture, to leave sincere and 
 limple-hearted students in conflict wich mere idle, and, strictly 
 peaking, false, usages of language '
 
 260 JUDA.8 I3CA.RIOT. 
 
 I and all my neighbors know equal to the task of 
 relieving her in one hour." " Do not fancy," another 
 would exclaim, " that I will tamely look on in patient 
 acquiescence, whilst my little grand-daughter is shaken 
 every day by epileptic fits ; and why ? because the 
 Sanhedrim are afraid of the Romans, and therefore of 
 gathering mobs ? To the great fiend with your San- 
 hedrim, if that is to be the excuse from keeping the 
 blind from seeing, and the lame from walking." 
 
 Asking for bread, it is likely enough that the mobs 
 of Judea would have received from their rulers a stone ; 
 but asking for what seemed a stone, and by comparison 
 was not much more, indirectly and under a mask they 
 obtained what in a far higher and spiritual sense was 
 bread. A tumult of the people for daily bread, what 
 is traditionally known to all nations as a bread riot, 
 cannot be met (it is well understood) by any remedy 
 short of absolute concessions to the rebellious appetite. 
 So, also, and in any land, would be the process and the 
 result, such the fury, such the inexorable demand, such 
 the inevitable concession, for the sake of appropriating 
 instant and miraculous relief offered to agonizing dis- 
 eases. 
 
 Once announcing himself, and attesting by daily 
 cures his own mission as a hakim, Christ could not bo 
 rejected as a public oracle of truth and heavenly 
 counsel to human weakness. This explains what else 
 would have been very obscure, the undue emphasis 
 which Christ allowed men to place upon his sanitary 
 miracles. His very name in Greek namely, Iqffu 
 presented him to men under the idea of the healer 
 out then, to all who comprehended his secret and ulti-
 
 JUDAS ISCABIOT. 261 
 
 mate functions, as a healer of unutterable and spiritual 
 wounds. That usurpation, by which a very trivial 
 function of Christ's public ministrations was allowed 
 to disturb, and sometimes to eclipse, far grander pre- 
 tensions, carried with it so far an erroneous impression. 
 But then, on tne other hand, seventy-fold it redeemed 
 that error, by securing (which nothing else could have 
 secured) the benefit of a perpetual passport to the 
 religious missionary : since, once admitted as a medical 
 counsellor, the missionary, the hakim, obtained an un- 
 limited right of intercourse. The public police did 
 not dare to obstruct the bodily healer ; and exactly 
 through that avenue slipped in the spiritual healer. 
 And thus, subsequently, the Apostles and their suc- 
 cessors all exsrcised the same medical powers with the 
 same religious results ; and each in turn benefitted in 
 his spiritual functions by the same privileged character 
 f hakim.
 
 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE TO 
 MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. 
 
 IT is sometimes said, that a religious messenger from 
 God does not come amongst men for the sake of teach- 
 ing truths in science, or of correcting errors in science. 
 Most justly is this said : but often in terms far too 
 feeble. For generally these terms are such as to 
 imply, that, although no direct and imperative function 
 of his mission, it was yet open to him, as a permissible 
 function that, although not pressing with the force 
 of an obligation upon the missionary, it was yet at his 
 discretion if not to correct other men's errors, yet 
 at least in his own person to speak with scientific pre- 
 cision. I contend that it was not. I contend, that to 
 have uttered the truths of astronomy, of geology, &c., 
 at the era of new-born Christianity, was not only 
 below and beside the purposes of a religion, but would 
 have been against them. Even upon errors of a far 
 more important class than errors in science can ever 
 be superstitions, for instance, that degraded the very 
 idea of God ; prejudices and false usages, that laid 
 waste human happiness (such as slavery, and many 
 hundreds of other abuses that might be mentioned) 
 the rule evidently acted upon by the Founder of Chris- 
 tianity was this Given the purification of the well 
 head, once assumed that the fountains of truth are
 
 THE TRUE Kl'.LATIONS OF THE BIBLE, ETC. 263 
 
 cleansed, all these derivative currents of evil wih 
 cleanse themselves. As a general rule, the branches 
 of error were disregarded, and the roots only attacked. 
 If, then, so lofty a station was taken with regard even 
 to such errors as really had moral and spiritual rela- 
 tions, how much more with regard to the comparative 
 trifles (as in the ultimate relations of human nature 
 they are) of merely human science ! But, for my 
 part, I go further, and assert, that upon three reasons 
 it was impossible for any messenger from God (or 
 offering himself in that character) to have descended 
 into the communication of truth merely scientific, or 
 economic, or worldly. And the three reasons are 
 these: First, Because such a descent would have 
 degraded his mission, by lowering it to the base level 
 of a collusion with human curiosity, or (in the most 
 favorable case) of a collusion with petty and transitory 
 interests. Secondly, Because it would have ruined his 
 mission, by disturbing its free agency, and misdirecting 
 its energies, in two separate modes : first, by destroy- 
 ing the spiritual auctoritas (the prestige and consider 
 ation) of the missionary ; secondly, by vitiating the 
 spiritual atmosphere of his audience that is, cor- 
 rupting and misdirecting the character of their thoughts 
 and expectations. He that in the early days of Chris- 
 janity should have proclaimed the true theory of the 
 solar system, or that by any chance word or allusion 
 should then, in a condition of man so little prepared 
 to receive such truths, have asserted or assumed the 
 daily motion of the earth on its own axis, or its annual 
 nnotion round the sun, would have found himself en- 
 angled at once and irretrievably in the following 
 unmanageable consequences: First of all, and in-
 
 264 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 tantaneously, he would have been roused to the almm- 
 ing fact, that, by this dreadful indiscretion he himself, 
 the professed deliverer of a new and spiritual religion, 
 had in a moment untuned the spirituality of his audi- 
 ence. He would find that he had awakened within 
 them the passion of curiosity the most unspiritua! 
 of passions, and of curiosity in a fierce polemic shape. 
 The very safest step in so deplorable a situation would 
 be, instantly to recant. Already by this one may 
 estimate the evil, when such would be its readiest 
 palliation. For in what condition would the reputation 
 of the teacher be left for discretion and wisdom as an 
 intellectual guide, when his first act must be to recant 
 and to recant what to the whole body of his hearers 
 would wear the character of a lunatic proposition. 
 Such considerations might possibly induce him not to 
 recant. But in that case the consequences are far 
 worse. Having once allowed himself to sanction what 
 nis hearers regard as the most monstrous of paradoxes 
 he has no liberty of retreat open to him. He must 
 stand to the promises of his own acts. Uttering the 
 first truth of a science, he is pledged to the second ; 
 taking the main step, he is committed to all which 
 follow. He is thrown at once upon the endless con- 
 troversies which science in every stage provokes, and 
 'n none more than in the earliest. Starting, besides, 
 from the authority of a divine mission, he could not 
 (as others might) have the privilege of selecting arbi 
 trarily or partially. If upon one science, then upon 
 all ; if upon science, then upon art ; if upon art and 
 science, then upon every branch of social economy 
 his reformations and advances are equally due due 
 a? to ail, if due as to any. To move in one direction
 
 TO MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. 265 
 
 p constructively to undertake for all. Without power 
 10 retreat, he has thus thrown the intellectual interests 
 of his followers into a channel utterly alien to the 
 purposes of a spiritual mission. 
 
 The spiritual mission, therefore, the purpose for 
 which only the religious teacher was sent, has now 
 perished altogether overlaid and confounded by the 
 merely scientific wranglings to which his own incon- 
 siderate precipitance has opened the door. But sup- 
 pose at this point that the teacher, aware at length of 
 the mischief which he has caused, and seeing that the 
 fatal error of uttering one solitary novel truth upon a 
 matter of mere science is by inevitable consequence 
 lo throw him upon a road leading altogether away 
 from the proper field of his mission, takes the laudable 
 course of confessing his error, and of attempting a 
 return into his proper spiritual province. This may be 
 his best course ; yet, after all, it will not retrieve his 
 lost ground. He returns with a character confessedly 
 damaged. His very excuse rests upon the blindness 
 and shortsightedness which forbade his anticipating the 
 true and natural consequences. Neither will his own 
 account of the case be generally accepted. He will 
 not be supposed to retreat from further controversy, as 
 inconsistent with spiritual purposes, but because he 
 finds himself unequal to the dispute. And, in the 
 very best case, he is, by his own acknowledgment, 
 tainted with human infirmity. He has been ruined for 
 A servant of inspiration ; and now ? By n process, let 
 it be remembered, of which all the steps are inevitable 
 under the same agency : that is, in the case of any 
 primitive Christian teacher having attempted to speak 
 the language of scientific truth in dealing with the
 
 266 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 phenomena of astronomy, geology, or of any merely 
 h iman knowledge. 
 
 Now, thirdly and lastly, in order to try the question 
 m an extreme form, let it be supposed that, aided by 
 powers of working miracles, some early apostle of 
 Christianity should actually have succeeded in carrying 
 through the Copernican system of astronomy, as an 
 article of blind belief, sixteen centuries before the pro- 
 gress of man's intellect had qualified him for naturally 
 developing that system. What, in such a case, would 
 be the true estimate and valuation of the achievement ? 
 Simply this, that he had thus succeeded in cancelling 
 and counteracting a determinate scheme of divine dis- 
 cipline and training for man. Wherefore did God 
 give to man the powers for contending with scientific 
 difficulties ? Wherefore did he lay a secret train of 
 continual occasions, that should rise, by relays, through 
 scores of generations, for provoking and developing 
 those activities in man's intellect, if, after all, he is to 
 send a messenger of his own, more than human, to 
 intercept and strangle all these great purposes ? This 
 is to mistake the very meaning and purposes of a reve- 
 lation. A revelation is not made for the purpose of 
 Bhowing to indolent men that which, by faculties al- 
 ready given to them, they may show to themselves; 
 no : but for the purpose of showing that which the 
 mora. darkness of man will not, without supernatural 
 light, allow him to perceive. With disdain, therefore. 
 must every thoughtful person regard the notion, thai 
 God could wilfully interfere with his own plans, by 
 accrediting ambassadors to reveal astronomy, or any 
 other science, which he has commanded men, by 
 qualifying men, to reveal for themselves.
 
 TO MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. 267 
 
 Even as regards astronomy a science so nearly 
 Allying itself to religion by the loftiness and by the 
 purity of its contemplations Scripture is nowhere 
 the parent of any doctrine, nor so much as the silent 
 sanctioner of any doctrine. It is made impossible for 
 Scripture to teach falsely, by the simple fact that 
 Scripture, on such subjects, will not condescend to 
 teach at all. The Bible adopts the erroneous language 
 of men (which at any rate it must do, in order to make 
 itself understood), not by way of sanctioning a theory, 
 but by way of using a fact. The Bible, for instance. 
 uses (postulates) the phenomena of day and night, of 
 summer and winter ; and, in relation to their causes, 
 speaks by the same popular and inaccurate language 
 which is current for ordinary purposes, even amongst 
 the most scientific of astronomers. For the man of 
 science, equally with the populace, talks of the sun as 
 rising and setting, as having finished half his day's 
 journey, &c., and, without pedantry, could not in 
 many cases talk otherwise. But the results, which are 
 all that concern Scripture, are equally true, whether 
 accounted for by one hypothesis which is philosophi- 
 cally just, or by another which is popular and erring. 
 
 Now, on the other hand, in geology and cosmology, 
 the case is stronger. Here there is no opening fcr a 
 compliance even with a language that is erroneous; 
 for no language at all is current upon subjects that 
 have never engaged the popular attention. Here, 
 where there is no such stream of apparent phenomena 
 running counter (as .n astronomy there is) to the real 
 phenomena, neither is there any popular language op- 
 posed to the scientific. The whole are abtruse specu- 
 lations, even as regards their 7bjects, nor dreamed of
 
 268 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 as possibilities, either in their true aspects or their fa.se 
 aspects, till modern times. The Scriptures, therefore, 
 nowhere allude to such sciences, either as taking the 
 shape of histories, applied to processes current and in 
 movement, or as taking the shape of theories applied 
 to processes past and accomplished. The Mosaic cos- 
 mogony, indeed, gives the succession of natural births ; 
 and probably the general outline of such a succession 
 will be more and more confirmed as geology ad- 
 vances. But as to the time, the duration, of this suc- 
 cessive evolution, it is the idlest of notions that the 
 Scriptures either have, or could have, condescended to 
 human curiosity upon so awful a prologue to the 
 drama of this world. Genesis would no more have 
 indulged so mean a passion with respect to the myste- 
 rious inauguration of the world, than the Apocalypse 
 with respect to its mysterious close. * Yet the six days 
 of Moses ! ' Days ! But is it possible that human 
 folly should go the length of understanding by the 
 Mosaical day, the mysterious day of that awful agency 
 which moulded the heavens and the heavenly host, no 
 more than the ordinary nychthemeron or cycle of 
 twenty-four hours ? The period implied in a rfay, 
 wnen used in relation to the inaugural manifestation 
 of creative power in that vast drama which introduces 
 God to man in the character of a demiurgus or creator 
 of the world, indicated one stage amongst six ; in- 
 volving probably many millions of years. The silliest 
 of nurses, in her nursery babble, could hardly suppose 
 mat the mighty process began on a Monday morning, 
 and ended on Saturday night. If we are seriously tc 
 study the value and scriptural acceptation of scriptura 
 words and phrases, 1 presume that our first businesi
 
 TO MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. 269 
 
 tv 111 be to collate the use of these words in one part 
 of Scripture, with their use in other parts, holding the 
 same spiritual relations. The creation, for instance, 
 does not belong to the earthly or merely historical 
 records, but to the spiritual records of the Bible ; to 
 the same category, therefore, as the prophetic sections 
 of the Bible. Now, in those, and in the Psalms, how 
 do we understand the word day 1 Is any man so 
 little versed in biblical language as not to know, that 
 (except in the merely historical parts of the Jewish 
 records) every section of time has a secret and sepa- 
 rate acceptation in the Scriptures ? Does an <zo, 
 though a Grecian word, bear scripturally (either in 
 Daniel or in St. John) any sense known to Grecian 
 ears? Do the seventy weeks of the prophet mean 
 weeks in the sense of human calendars ? Already tho 
 Psalms (xc.), already St. Peter (2d Epist.), warn us 
 of a peculiar sense attached to the word day in divino 
 ears. And who of the innumerable interpreters un- 
 derstands the twelve hundred and sixty days in Dan- 
 iel, or his two thousand and odd days, to mean, by 
 possibility, periods of twenty-four hours ? Surely the 
 theme of Moses was as mystical, and as much entitled 
 to the benefit of mystical language, as that of the 
 prophets. 
 
 The sum of this matter is this : God, by a He- 
 brew prophet, is sublimely described as t he ReveaJer ; 
 and, in variation of his own expression, the same pro- 
 phet describes him as the Being ' that knoweth the 
 darkness.' Under no idea can the relations of God to 
 man be more grandly expressed. But of what is he 
 tfie revealer ? Not surely of those things which he has 
 enabled man to reveal for himself, but of those things
 
 270 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIB' fi, ETC. 
 
 which, were it not through special light from heaven, 
 must eternally remain sealed up in inaccessible 
 darkness. On this principle we should all laugh at a 
 revealed cookery. But essentially the same ridicule, 
 not more, and not less, applies to a revealed astron- 
 omy, or a revealed geology. As a fact, there is no 
 such astronomy or geology : as a possibility, by the 
 a priori argument which I have used (viz., that a 
 revelation on such fields would counteract other ma- 
 chineries of providence), there can be no such astro- 
 nomy or geology in the Bible. Consequently there is 
 none. Consequently there can be no schism or feud 
 upon these subjects between the Bible and the philoso- 
 phies outside.
 
 ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EX- 
 PRESSION FOR ETERNITY. 
 
 FORTY years ago (or, in all probability, a good deal 
 more, for we have already completed thirty-seven 
 years from Waterloo, and my remembrances upon this 
 subject go back to a period lying much behind that 
 great era), I used to be annoyed and irritated by the 
 false interpretation given to the Greek word aidn, and 
 given necessarily, therefore, to the adjective aionios 
 as its immediate derivative. It was not so much the 
 falsehood t of this interpretation, as the narrowness of 
 that falsehood, which disturbed me. There was a 
 glimmer of truth in it ; and precisely that glimmer it 
 was which led the way to a general and obstinate 
 misconception of the meaning. The word is remark- 
 ably situated. It is a Scriptural word, and it is also 
 a Greek word ; from which the inevitable inference is, 
 that we must look for it only in the New Testament. 
 Tjpon any question arising of deep, aboriginal, doc- 
 trinal truth, we have nothing to do with translations. 
 Those are but secondary questions, archaeological and 
 critical, upon which we have a right to consult the 
 Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known by 
 the name of the Septuagint. 
 
 Suffer me to paus3 at this point for the sake of
 
 272 ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL 
 
 premising an explanation needful to the unlearned 
 reader. As the reading public and the thinking pub- 
 lic is every year outgrowing more and more notoriously 
 the mere learned public, it becomes every year more 
 and more the right of the former public to give the 
 law preferably to the latter public, upon all points 
 which concern its own separate interests. In past 
 generations, no pains were taken to make explanations 
 that were not called for by the learned public. All 
 other readers were ignored. They formed a mob, for 
 whom no provision was made. And that many diffi- 
 culties should be left entirely unexplained for them, 
 was superciliously assumed to be no fault at all. And 
 yet any sensible man, let him be as supercilious as he 
 may, must on consideration allow that amongst the 
 crowd of unlearned or half-learned readers, who have 
 had neither time nor opportunities for whafr is called 
 " erudition " or learned studies, there must always 
 lurk a proportion of men that, by constitution of mind, 
 and by the bounty of nature, are much better fitted 
 for thinking, originally more philosophic, and are more 
 tapaciously endowed, than those who are, by accident 
 of position, more learned. Such a natural superiority 
 certainly takes precedency of a merely artificial superi- 
 ority ; and, therefore, it entitles those who possess it 
 to a special consideration. Let there be an audience 
 gathered about any book of ten thousand one hundred 
 readers : it might be fair in these days to assume that 
 ten thousand would be in a partial sense illiterate, ana 
 the remaining one hundred what would be rigorously 
 classed as " learned." Now, on such a distribution 
 / the readers, it would be a matter of certainty tha'
 
 EXPBESSION FOB ETERNITY. 273 
 
 the most powerful intellects would lie amongst the 
 illiterate ten thousand, counting, probably, to fifteen 
 to one as against those in the learned minority. The 
 inference, therefore, would be, that, in all equity, the 
 interest of the unlearned section claimed a priority of 
 attention, not merely as the more numerous section 
 but a~30 as, by a high probability, the more philo- 
 ecpnic. And in proportion as this unlearned section 
 widens and expands, which every year it does, in that 
 proportion the obligation and cogency of this equity 
 strengthens. An attention to the unlearned part of 
 an audience, which fifteen years ago might have rested 
 upon pure courtesy, now rests upon a basis of absolute 
 justice. I make this preliminary explanation, in order 
 to take away the appearance of caprice from such 
 occasional pauses as I may make for the purpose of 
 clearing up obscurities or difficulties. Formerly, in a 
 case of that nature, the learned reader would have told 
 me that I was not entitled to delay him by elucidations 
 that in his case must be supposed to be superfluous : 
 and in such a remonstrance there -would once have 
 been some equity. The illiterate section of the readers 
 might then be fairly assumed as present only by 
 accident ; as no abiding part of the audience ; but, 
 l?ke the general public in the gallery of the House of 
 Commons, as present only by sufferance ; and officially 
 in any records of the House whatever, utterly ignored 
 as existences. At present, half way on our pilgrimage 
 through the nineteenth century, I reply to such a 
 learned remonstrant - - that it gives me pain to annoy 
 him by superfluous explanations, out that, unhappily, 
 ;his infliction of tedium upon him is inseparable from 
 18
 
 274 ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL 
 
 what has now become a duty to others. This being 
 said, I now go on to inform the illiterate reader, that 
 the earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures ever 
 made was into Greek. It was undertaken on the 
 encouragement of a learned prince, Ptolemy Phila- 
 delphus, by an association of Jewish emigrants in 
 Alexandria. It was, as the event has shown in very 
 many instances, an advantage of a rank rising to 
 providential, that such a cosmopolitan version of the 
 Hebrew sacred writings should have been made at a 
 moment when a rare concurrence of circumstances hap- 
 pened to make it possible ; such as, for example, a king 
 both learned in his tastes and liberal in his principles 
 of religious toleration ; a language viz., the Greek, 
 which had already become, what for many centuries it 
 continued to be, a common language of communication 
 for the learned of the whole OMU[IEVTJ (i. p., in effect of 
 the civilized world viz., Greece, the shores of the 
 Euxine, the whole of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, 
 Carthage, and all the dependencies of Carthage, 
 finally, and above all, Rome, then beginning to loom 
 upon the western horizon), together .with all the 
 dependencies of Rome, and, briefly, every state and 
 city that adorned the imperial islands of the Medi- 
 terranean, or that glittered like gems in that vast belt 
 of land, roundly speaking, one thousand miles in 
 average breadth, and in circuit running up to five 
 thousand miles. One thousand multiplied into five 
 times one thousand, or, otherwise expressed, a thou- 
 land thousand five times repeated, or otherwise a 
 million five times repeated, briefly a territory measur- 
 aig five millions of square miles, or forty-five timefr
 
 EXPRESSION FOE ETERNITY. 275 
 
 tne surface of our two British islands such was the 
 boundless domain which this extraordinary act of 
 Ptolemy suddenly threw open to the literature and 
 spiritual revelation of a little obscure race, nestling in 
 a little angle of Asia, scarcely visible as a fraction of 
 Syria, buried in the broad shadows thrown out on one 
 side by the great and ancient settlements on the Nile, 
 and on the other by the vast empire that for thousands 
 of years occupied the Tigris and the Euphrates. In 
 the twinkling of an eye, at a sudden summons, as it 
 were from the sounding of a trumpet, or the Oriental 
 call by a clapping of hands, gates are thrown open, 
 which have an effect corresponding in grandeur to the 
 effect that would arise from the opening of a ship 
 canal across the Isthmus of Darien viz., the intro- 
 duction to each other face to face of two separate 
 infinities. Such a canal would suddenly lay open to 
 each other the two great oceans of our planet, the 
 Atlantic and the Pacific ; whilst the act of trans- 
 lating into Greek and from Hebrew, that is, transfer- 
 ring out of a mysterious cipher as little accessible aa 
 Sanscrit, and which never would be more accessible 
 through any worldly attractions of alliance with power 
 and civic grandeur of commerce, out of this darkness 
 into the golden light of a language the most beautiful, 
 the most honored amongst men, and the most widely 
 diffusfd through a thousand years to come, had the 
 immeasurable effect of throwing into the great crucible 
 v>f human speculation, even then beginning to ferment, 
 io boil, to overflow that mightiest of all elements 
 for exalting the chemistry of philosophy grand and. 
 for the first time, adequat3 conceptions of the Deity
 
 276 ON THE SUPPOSED SCBIFTUBA.I, 
 
 For although it is true that, until Elias should come 
 > that is, until Christianity should have applied its 
 final revelation to the completion of this great idea 
 we could not possess it in its total effulgence, it i, 
 however, certain that an immense advance was^aade 
 a prodigious usurpation across the realms of chaos, by 
 the grand illuminations of the Hebrew discoveries. 
 Too terrifically austere we must presume the Hebrew 
 idea to have been : too undeniably it had not with- 
 drawn the veil entirely which still rested upon the 
 Divine countenance ; so much is involved in the sub- 
 sequent revelations of Christianity. But still the 
 advance made in reading aright the Divine lineaments 
 had been enormous. God was now a holy spirit that 
 could not tolerate impurity. He was the fountain of 
 iustice, and no longer disfigured by any mode of sym- 
 pathy with human caprice or infirmity. And, if a 
 frown too awful still rested upon his face, making the 
 approach to him too fearful for harmonizing with that 
 perfect freedom and that childlike love which God 
 seeks in his worshippers, it was yet made evident that 
 no step for conciliating his favor did or could He 
 through any but moral graces. 
 
 Three centuries after this great epoch of the publi- 
 cation (for such it was), secured so providentially to 
 the Hebrew theology, two learned Jews viz., Jose- 
 phus and Philo Judaeus had occasion to seek a cos- 
 mopolitan utterance for that burden of truth (or what 
 they regarded as truth) which oppressed the spirit 
 within them. Once again they found a deliverance 
 from the very same freezing imprisonment in an un- 
 itnown language, through the very same magical key
 
 EXPBESSION FOE ETERNITY. 277 
 
 via , the all-pervading language of Greece, which, car- 
 ried their communications to the four winds of heaveii, 
 and carried them precisely amongst the class of men 
 viz., the enlightened and educated class which pre- 
 eminently, if not exclusively, their wish was to reach. 
 About one generation after Christ it was, when the 
 utter prostration, and, politically speaking, the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation, threw these 
 two learned Jews upon this recourse to the Greek 
 language as their final resource, in a condition other- 
 wise of absolute hopelessness. Pretty nearly three 
 centuries before Christ it was (two hundred and eighty- 
 four years, according to the common reckoning), when 
 the first act of communication took place between the 
 sealed-up literature of Palestine and the Greek Catholic 
 interpretation. Altogether, we may say that three 
 hundred and twenty years, or somewhere about ten 
 generations of men, divided these two memorable acta 
 of intercommunication. Such a space of time allows 
 a large range of influence and of silent, unconscious 
 operation to the vast and potent ideas that brooded 
 over this awful Hebrew literature. Too little weight 
 has been allowed to the probable contagiousness, and 
 to the preternatural shock, of such a new and strange 
 philosophy, acting upon the jaded and exhausted intel- 
 lect of the Grecian race. We must remember, that 
 precisely this particular range of time was that in 
 which the Greek systems of philosophy, having thor- 
 oughly completed their evolution, had suffered some- 
 tning of a collapse ; and, having exhausted their 
 creative energies, began to gratify the cravings for 
 uovelty by remodellings of old forms. It is remark-
 
 278 ON THE SUPPOSED SCBIPTUKAL 
 
 able, indeed, that this very city of Alexandria founded 
 and matured this new principle of remodelling applied 
 to poetry not less than to philosophy and criticism. 
 And, considering the activity of this great commercial 
 city and port, which was meant to act, aitxj^did^act, an 
 a centre of communication between the East and the 
 West, it is probable that a far greater effect was pro- 
 duced by the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures v 
 in the way of preparing the mind of nations for the 
 apprehension of Christianity, than has t frer been dis- 
 tinctly recognized. The silent destruction of books in 
 those centuries has robbed us of all means for tracing 
 innumerable revolutions, that nevertheless, by the 
 ividences of results, must have existed. Taken, how- 
 ever, with or without this additional result, the transla- 
 tion of the Hebrew Scriptures in their most important 
 portions must be ranked amongst what are called 
 "providential" events. Such a king a king whose 
 father had been a personal friend of Alexander, the 
 mighty civilizing conqueror, and had shared in the 
 liberalization connected with his vast revolutionary 
 projects for extending a higher civilization over the 
 globe, such a king, conversing with such a language, 
 having advantages so absolutely unrivalled, and again 
 this king and this language concurring with a treasure 
 BO supernatural of spiritual wisdom as the subject of 
 their ministrations, and all three concurring with po- 
 litical events so auspicious the founding of a new 
 and mighty metropolis in Egypt, and the silent advance 
 to supreme power amongst men of a new empire, 
 martial beyond all precedent as regarded means, bu 
 not as regarded ends working in all things towards
 
 EXPRESSION FOB EXEENITY. 279 
 
 the unity of civilization and the unity of law, so that 
 any new impulse, as, for instance, impulse of a new 
 religion, was destined to find new facilities for its own 
 propagation, resembling electric conductors, under the 
 unity of government and of law concurrences like 
 these, so many and so strange, justly impress upon 
 this translation, the most memorable, because the 
 most influential of all that have ever been accomplish- 
 ed, a character of grandeur that places it on the same 
 level of interest as the building of the first or second 
 temple at Jerusalem. 
 
 There is a Greek legend which openly ascribes to 
 this translation all the characters of a miracle. But, 
 as usually happens, this vulgarizing form of the mi- 
 raculous is far less impressive than the plain history 
 itself, unfolding its stages with the most unpretending 
 historical fidelity. Even the Greek language, on which, 
 as the natural language of the new Greek dynasty in 
 Egypt, the duty of the translation devolved, enjoyed 
 a double advantage : 1st, as being the only language 
 then spoken upon earth that could diffuse a book over 
 every part of the civilized earth ; 2dly, as being a 
 language of unparalleled power and compass for ex- 
 pressing and reproducing effectually all ideas, however 
 alien and novel. Even the city, again, in which this 
 translation was accomplished, had a double dowery of 
 advantages towards such a labor, not only as enjoying 
 ^ large literary society, and, in particular, a large 
 Jewish society, together with unusual provision in the 
 shape of libraries, on a scale probably at that time 
 anprecedented, but also as having the most extensive 
 nachiner then known to human experience for pub-
 
 280 ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL 
 
 lishing, that is, for transmitting to foreign capitals all 
 oooks in the readiest and the cheapest fashion, by 
 means of its prodigious shipping^ 
 
 Having thus indicated to the wiledfnedjK&^Bf the 
 particular nature of that interest which invests this 
 earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures viz,, 
 that in fact this translation was the earliest publication 
 to the human race of a revelation which had previously 
 been locked up in a language destined, as surely as 
 ,ao Welsh language or the Gaelic, to eternal obscurity 
 amongst men I go on to mention that the learned 
 Jews selected for this weighty labor happened to be in 
 number seventy-two ; but, as the Jews systematically 
 reject fractions in such cases (whence it is that always, 
 in order to express the period of six weeks, they say 
 forty days, and not, as strictly they should, forty-two 
 days'), popularly, the translators were called " the 
 seventy," for which the Latin word is septuaginta. 
 And thus in after ages the translators were usually 
 indicated as " The LXX.," or, if the work and not 
 the workmen should be noticed, it was cited as The 
 Septuagint. In fact, this earliest of Scriptural ver- 
 sions, viz., into Greek, is by much the most famous ; 
 or, if any other approaches it in notoriety, it is the 
 Latin translation by St. Jerome, which, in this one 
 point, enjoys even a superior importance, that in the 
 Church of Rome it is the authorized translation. Evi- 
 dently, in every churcn, it must be a matter of primary 
 importance to assign the particular version to which 
 that church appeals, and by which, in any controversy 
 wising, that church consents to be governed. Now, 
 the Jerome version fulfils this function for the Romish
 
 EXPRESSION FOE ETEENITY. 281 
 
 Church ; and accordingly, in the sense of being pub- 
 lished (vulgata), or publicly authorized by that church. 
 it is commonly called The Vulgate. 
 
 But, in a large polemic question, unless, like the 
 Roman Church, we uphold a secondary inspiration as 
 having secured a special privileged translation from 
 the possibility of error, we cannot refuse an appeal to 
 the Hebrew text for the Old Testament, or to the 
 Greek text for the New. The word aionios (awanog), 
 as purely Grecian, could not connect itself with the 
 Old Testament, unless it were through the Septuagint 
 translation into Greek. Now, with that version, in 
 any case of controversy, none of us, Protestants alike 
 or Roman Catholics, have anything whatever to do. 
 Controversially, we can be concerned only with the 
 original language of the Scriptures, with its actual 
 verbal expressions textually produced. To be liable, 
 therefore, to such a textual citation, any Greek word 
 must belong to the New Testament. Because, though 
 the word might happen to occur in the Septuagint, 
 yet, since that is merely a translation, for any of us 
 who occupy a controversial place, that is, who are 
 bound by the responsibilities, or who claim the strict 
 privileges of controversy, the Septuagint has no virtual 
 existence. We should not be at liberty to allege the 
 Septuagint as any authority, if it happened to coun- 
 tenance our own views ; and, consequently, we could 
 not be called on to recognize the Septuagint in any 
 case where it should happen to be against us. I make 
 this preliminary caveat, as not caring whether the 
 word aionios does or does not occur in the Septuagint. 
 Either way, the reader understands that I disown the
 
 282 ON IHE SUPPOSED SCBIPTTTKA.Ii 
 
 authority of that version as in any degree affecting 
 myself. The word which, forty years ago, moved my 
 disgust by its servile misinterpretation, was a word 
 proper to the New Testament ; and any sense which 
 it may have received from an Alexandrian Jew in the 
 third century before Christ, is no more relevant to any 
 criticism that I am now going to suggest, than is the 
 classical use of the word aion (ixoiv) familiar to the 
 learned in Sophocles or Euripides. 
 
 The reason which gives to this word aionian what 
 I do not scruple to call a dreadful importance, is the 
 same reason, and no other, which prompted the dis- 
 honesty concerned in the ordinary interpretation of 
 this word. The word happened to connect itself 
 but that was no practical concern of mine ; me it had 
 not biassed in the one direction, nor should it have 
 biassed any just critic in the counter direction hap- 
 pened, I say, to connect itself with the ancient dispute 
 upon the duration of future punishment. What was 
 meant by the aionian punishments in the next world? 
 Was the proper sense of the word eternal, or was it 
 not? I, for my part, meddled not, nor upon any 
 consideration could have been tempted to meddle, 
 with a speculation repellent alike by the horror and 
 by the hopeless mystery which invest it. Secrets of 
 the prison-house, so afflicting to contemplate steadily, 
 ind so hopeless of solution, there could be no proper 
 motive for investigating, unless the investigation prom- 
 ised a great deal more than it could ever accomplish ; 
 and my own feeling as to all such problems is, tha 4 
 they vulgarize what, left to itself, would take it* 
 uatural station amongst the freezing horrors tha?
 
 EXPRESSION FOB ETEBNITT. 283 
 
 Shakspeare dismisses with so potent an expression of 
 awe, in a well-known scene of " Measure for Measure." 
 I reiterate my protest against being in any way de- 
 coyed in fae controversy. Perhaps I may have a 
 strong opinion upon the suhject. But, anticipating 
 the coarse discussions into which the slightest enter- 
 tainment of such a question would he every moment 
 approaching, once for all, out of reverential regard for 
 the dignity of human nature, I beg permission to de- 
 cline the controversy altogether. 
 
 But does this declinature involve any countenance 
 to a certain argument which I began by rejecting as 
 abominable ? Most certainly not. That argument 
 runs thus that the ordinary construction of the 
 term aionian, as equivalent to everlasting, could not 
 possibly be given up when associated with penal 
 misery, because in that case, and by the very same 
 act, the idea of eternity must be abandoned as appli- 
 cable to the counter-bliss of Paradise. Torment and 
 blessedness, it was argued, punishment and beatifica- 
 tion, stood upon the same level ; the same word it 
 was, the word aionian, which qualified the duration 
 of either ; and, if eternity in the most rigorous accep- 
 tation fell away from the one idea, it must equally 
 fall away from the other. Well ; be it so. But that 
 would not settle the question. It might be very 
 painful to renounce a long-cherished anticipation ; 
 but the necessity of doing so could not be received as 
 % sufficient reason for adhering to the old unconditional 
 nse of the word aionian. The argument is that we 
 must retain the old sense of eternal, because else we 
 .ose upon one scale what we had gained upon the
 
 284 ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL 
 
 other. But what then"? would be tho reasonable 
 man's retort. We are not to accept or to reject a 
 new construction (if otherwise the more colorable) of 
 the word aionian, simply because the consequences 
 migh seem such as upon the whole to displease us. 
 We may gain nothing ; for by the new interpretation 
 our loss may balance our gain ; and we may prefer 
 the old arrangement. But how monstrous is all this . 
 We are not summoned as to a choice of two different 
 arrangements that may suit different tastes, but to a 
 grave question as to what is the sense and operation 
 of the word aionian. Let the limitation of the word 
 disturb our previous estimate of Paradise, grant that; 
 it so disturbs that estimate, not the less all such con- 
 sequences leave the dispute exactly where it was ; 
 and if a balance of reason can be found for limiting 
 the extent of the word aionian, it will not be the less 
 true because it may happen to disturb a crotchet of 
 CUT own. 
 
 Meantime, ail this speculation, first and last, is pure 
 nonsense. Aionian does not mean eternal; neither 
 does it mean of limited duration ; nor would the un- 
 settling of aionian in its old use, as applied to punish- 
 ment, to torment, to misery, &c., carry with it any 
 necessary unsettling of the idea in its application to 
 the beatitudes of Paradise. Pause, reader ; and thou, 
 my favored and privileged reader, that boastest thyseli 
 to be unlearned, pause doubly whilst I communicate 
 toy views as to this remarkable word. 
 
 What is an aion 1 In the use and acceptation of 
 the Apocalypse, it is evidently this viz., the dura 
 lion or cycle of existence which belongs to any object
 
 EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY. 285 
 
 Hot individually for itself, but universally in right of 
 ts genius. Kant, for instance, in a little paper which 
 I once translated, proposed and debated the question, 
 as to the age of our planet the Earth. What did he 
 mean? Was he to be understood as asking whether 
 the Earth were half a million, two millions, or three 
 millions of years old ? Not at ail. The probabilities 
 certainly lean, one and all, to the assignment of an 
 antiquity greater by many thousands of times than 
 that which we have most idly supposed ourselves to 
 extract from Scripture, which assuredly never mean" 
 to approach a question so profoundly irrelevant to the 
 great purposes of Scripture as any geological specula- 
 tion whatsoever. But this was not within the field of 
 Kant's inquiry. What he wished to know was simply 
 the exact stage in the whole course of her development 
 which the Earth at present occupies. Is she still in 
 her infancy, for example, or in a stage corresponding 
 to middle age, or in a stage approaching to superan- 
 nuation? The idea of Kant presupposed a certain 
 average duration as belonging to a planet of our par- 
 ticular system ; and supposing this known, or discov- 
 erable, and that a certain assignable development 
 belonged to a planet so circumstanced as ours, then in 
 what particular stage of that development may we, 
 the tenants of this respectable little planet Tellus^ 
 reasonably be conceived to stand ? 
 
 Man, again, has a certain aionian life ; possibly 
 tanging somewhere about the period of seventy years 
 issigned in the Psalms. That is, in a state as highly 
 improved as human infirmity and the errors of the 
 sarth Vierself, together with the diseases incident to our
 
 B86 ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL 
 
 atmosphere, &c., could be supposed to allow, possibly 
 the human race might average seventy years for each 
 individual. This period would in that case represent 
 the " aion " of the individual Tellurian ; but the 
 " aion " of the Tellurian RACE would probably 
 amount to many millions of our earthly years ; an 1 
 it would remain an unfathomable mystery, deriving 
 no light at all from the septuagenarian " aion " of the 
 individual ; though between the two aions I have no 
 doubt that some secret link of connection does and 
 must subsist, however undiscoverable by human sa- 
 gacity. 
 
 The crow, the deer, the eagle, &c., are all supposed 
 to be long-lived. Some people have fancied that in 
 their normal state they tended to a period of two* 
 centuries. I myself know nothing certain for 01 
 against this belief; but, supposing the case to be as 
 it is represented, then this would be the aionian period 
 of these animals, considered as individuals. Among 
 trees, in like manner, the oak, the cedar, the yew, are 
 
 * I have heard the same normal duration ascribed to the tor- 
 toise, and one case became imperfectly known to myself per- 
 Bonally. Somewhere I may have mentioned the case in print. 
 These, at any rate, are the facts of the case : A lady (by birth a 
 Cowper, of the whig family, and cousin to the poet Cowper; 
 and equally with him, related to Dr. Madan, bishop of Peter- 
 borough) , in the early part of this century, mentioned to me 
 that, in the palace at Peterborough, she had for years known aa 
 a pet of the household a venerable tortoise, who bore some in- 
 scription on his shell indicating that, from 1638 to 1643, he had 
 belonged to Archbishop Laud, who (if I am not mistaken) helo 
 the bishopric of Peterborough before he was translated to LCD 
 don , and finally to Canterbury
 
 EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY. 287 
 
 notoriously of very slow growth, and their aionian 
 period is unusually long as regards the individual. 
 What may be the aion of the whole species is utterly 
 unknown. Amongst birds, one species at least has 
 become extinct in our own generation : its aion was 
 accomplished. So of all the fossil species in zoology, 
 which Palaeontology has revealed. Nothing, in short, 
 throughout universal nature, can for a moment be con- 
 ceived to have been resigned to accident for its normal 
 aion. All periods and dates of this order belong to 
 the certainties of nature, but also, at the same time, to 
 the mysteries of Providence. Throughout the Pro- 
 phet*, we are uniformly taught that nothing is more 
 beloH' the grandeur of Heaven than to assign earthly 
 dates in fixing either the revolutions or the duration of 
 great events such as prophecy would condescend to 
 notice. A day has a prophetic meaning, but what sort 
 of day ? A mysterious expression for a time which 
 has no resemblance to a natural day sometimes com- 
 prehending long successions of centuries, and altering 
 its meaning according to the object concerned. " A 
 time," and " times," or " half a time " " an aion," 
 or " aions of aions " and other variations of this 
 prophetic language (so full of dreadful meaning, but 
 also of doubt and perplexity), are all significant. The 
 peculiar grandeur of such expressions lies partly in the 
 limness of the approximation to any attempt at settling 
 their limits, and still more in this, that the conventional 
 character, and consequent meanness of ordinary human 
 da'es, are abandoned in the celestial chronologies. 
 fit urs and days, or lunations and months, have no true 
 or philosophic relation to the origin, or duration, or
 
 288 ON THE SUPPOSED S( RIFTURA.L 
 
 periods of return belonging to great events, or revolu- 
 tionary agencies, or vast national crimes ; but the 
 normal period and duration of all acts whatever, the 
 time of their emergence, of their agency or their 
 reagency, fall into harmony with the secret proportions 
 of a heavenly scale, when they belong by mere neces- 
 sity of their own internal constitution to the vital 
 though hidden motions that are at work in their own 
 life and manifestation. Under the old and ordinary 
 view of the apocalyptic aion, which supposed it always 
 to mean the same period of time mysterious, indeed, 
 and uncertain, as regards our knowledge, but fixed and 
 rigorously certain in the secret counsels of God it 
 was presumed that this period, if it lost its character of 
 infinity when applied to evil, to criminality, or to pun- 
 ishment, must lose it by a corresponding necessity 
 equally when applied to happiness and the golden 
 aspects of hope. But, on the contrary, every object 
 whatsoever, every mode of existence, has its own 
 separate and independent aion. The most thoughtless 
 person must be satisfied, on reflection, even apart from 
 the express commentary upon this idea furnished by 
 the Apocalypse, that every life and mode of being 
 must have hidden within itself the secret why of its 
 duration. It is impossible to believe of any duration 
 whatever that it is determined capriciously. Always 
 it rests upon some ground, ancient as light and dark- 
 ness, though undiscoverable by man. This only is 
 discovei'able, as a general tendency, that the aion. 01 
 generic period of evil, is constantly towards a fugitive 
 duration. The aion, it is alleged, must always express 
 %e same idea, whatever thai r*ay be ; if it is less thar
 
 EXPBESSION FOB ETERNITY. 289 
 
 eternity for the evil cases, then it must be less for the 
 good ones. Doubtless the idea of an aion is in one 
 sense always uniform, always the same viz., as a 
 tenth or a twelfth is always the same. Arithmetic 
 could not exist if any caprice or variation affected 
 these ideas a tenth is always more than an eleventh, 
 always less than a ninth. But this uniformity of ratio 
 and proportion does not hinder but that a tenth may 
 now represent a guinea, and next moment represent 
 a thousand guineas. The exact amount of the dura- 
 tion expressed by an aion depends altogether upon 
 the particular subject which yields the aion. It is, as 
 I have said, a radix ; and, like an algebraic square-root 
 or cube-root, though governed by the most rigorous 
 laws of limitation, it must vary in obedience to the 
 nature of the particular subject whose radix it forms. 
 
 Reader, I take my leave. I have been too loitering. 
 I know it, and will make such efforts in future to cul- 
 tivate the sternest brevity as nervous distress will allow. 
 Meantime, as the upshot of my speculation, accept 
 these three propositions : . 
 
 A. That man (which i& in effect every man hitherto"), 
 who allows himself to infer the eternity of evil from 
 the counter eternity of good, builds upon the mistake 
 of assigning a stationary and mechanic value A o the 
 idea of an aion ; whereas the very purpose of Scrip, 
 ture in using this word was to evade such a value. 
 The word is always varying, for the very purpose of 
 keeping it faithful to a spiritual identity. The period 
 or duration of every object would be an essentially 
 rariable quantity, were it not mysteriously commen- 
 urate to the inner nature of that object as laid open to 
 19
 
 290 SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY. 
 
 the eyes of God. And thus it happens, that every- 
 thing in this world, possibly without a solitary excep- 
 tion, has its own separate aion : how many entities, so 
 many aions. 
 
 B. But if it be an excess of blindness which can 
 overlook the aionian differences amongst even neutral 
 entities, much deeper is that blindness which overlooks 
 the separate tendencies of things evil and things good. 
 Naturally, all evil is fugitive and allied to death. 
 
 C. I separately, speaking for myself only, profound- 
 ly believe that the Scriptures ascribe absolute and 
 metaphysical eternity to one sole Being viz., to God ; 
 and derivatively to all others according to the interest 
 which they can plead in God's favor. Having anchor- 
 age in God, innumerable entities may possibly be 
 admitted to a participation in divine aion. But what 
 interest in the favor of God can belong to falsehood, 
 to malignity, to impurity ? To invest them with aion- 
 ian privileges, is, in effect, and by its results, to dis- 
 trust and to insult the Deity. Evil would not be evil, 
 if it had that power of self- subsistence which is imputed 
 to it in supposing its aionian life to be co-eternal witfc 
 tnat which crowns and glorifies the good.
 
 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT AGAINST 
 MIKACLES. 
 
 HUME'S argument against miracles is simply this : 
 Every possible event, however various in its degree 
 of credibility, must, of necessity, be more credible 
 when it rests upon a sufficient cause lying within the 
 field of what is called nature, than when it does not : 
 more credible when it obeys some mechanical cause, 
 than when it transcends such a cause, and is miracu- 
 lous. 
 
 Therefore, assume the resistance to credibility, in 
 any preternatural occurrence, as equal to x, and the 
 very ideal or possible value of human testimony as no 
 more than a;, in that case, under the most favorable 
 circumstances conceivable, the argument for and against 
 a miracle will be equal ; or, expressing the human 
 testimony by x, affected with the affirmative sign 
 [-4- a,] ; and expressing the resistance to credibility 
 on the other side of the equation by a;, affected with 
 the negative sign [ a;], the two values will, in alge- 
 braical language, destroy each other, and the result 
 will be = 0. 
 
 But, inasmuch as this expresses the value of human 
 testimony in its highest or ideal form, a form which is 
 never realized in experience, the true result will b
 
 292 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 different, there will always be a negative result =: 
 y ; much or little according to the circumstances, 
 but always enough to turn the balance against believ- 
 ing a miracle. 
 
 " Or in other words," said Hume, popularizing his 
 argument, " it will always be more credible that the 
 reporter of a miracle should tell a falsehood, or should 
 himself have been the dupe of appearances, than that 
 a miracle should have actually occurred that is, an 
 infraction of those natural laws (any or all) which 
 compose what we call experience. For, assume the 
 utmost disinterestedness, veracity, and sound judg- 
 ment in the witness, with the utmost advantage in the 
 circumstances for giving full play to those qualities; 
 even in such a case the value of affirmative testimony 
 could, at the very utmost, be equal to the negative 
 value on the other side the equation : and the result 
 would be, to keep my faith suspended in equilibria. 
 But in any real case, ever likely to come before us, 
 the result will be worse ; for the affirmative testimony 
 will be sure to fall in many ways below its ideal 
 maximum ; leaving, therefore, for the final result a 
 considerable excess to the negative side of the equa- 
 tion." 
 
 SECTION n. 
 
 OF THB ABQUMGNT A3 AFFECTED BT THE COVEKT LIMITATIONS 
 UNDEK WHICH IT 19 PRESENTED. 
 
 Such is the argument : and, as the first step towards 
 investigating its sanity and its degree its kind o 
 force, and its quantity of force, we must direct our
 
 A.QAINST MIBACI/ES. 293 
 
 ittention to the following fact viz., that amongst 
 three separate conditions under which a miracle (or 
 any event whatever) might become known to us, 
 Hume's argument is applied only to one. Assuming 
 a miracle to happen (for the possibility of a miracle is 
 of course left open throughout the discussion, since 
 any argument against that would at once foreclose 
 every question about its communicability), then it 
 might happen under three several sets of circum- 
 stances, in relation to our consciousness. 1st, It might 
 happen in the presence of a single witness that 
 witness not being ourselves. This case let us call 
 Alpha. 2dly, It might happen in the presence of 
 many witnesses, witnesses to a vast amount, but 
 Btill (as befcre) ourselves not being amongst that mul- 
 titude. This case let us call Beta. And 3dly, It 
 might happen in our own presence, and fall within the 
 direct light of our own consciousness. This case let 
 us call Gamma. 
 
 Now these distinctions are important to the whole 
 extent of the question. For the second case, which 
 is the actual case of many miracles recorded in the 
 New Testament, at once cuts away a large body of 
 sources in which either error or deceit could lurk. 
 Hume's argument supposes the reporter of the miracle 
 to be a dupe, or the maker of dupes himself de- 
 luded, or wishing to delude others. But, in the case 
 of the thousands fed from a few loaves and small 
 fishes, the chances of error, wilful or not wilful, are 
 diminished in proportion to the number of observers ; * 
 
 *" In proportion to the number of observers:" Perhaps, 
 however, on the part of Hume, some critical apologist will say
 
 294 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 and Hume's inference as to the declension of the af- 
 firmative a;, in relation to the negative a;, no longer 
 applies, or, if at all, with vastly diminished force. 
 With respect to the third case, it cuts away the whole 
 argument at once in its very radix. For Hume's 
 argument applies to the communication of a miracle, 
 and therefore to a case of testimony. But, wherever 
 the miracle falls within direct personal cognizance, 
 there it follows that no question can arise about the 
 value of human testimony. The affirmative x, ex- 
 pressing the value of testimony, disappears altogether ; 
 and that side of the equation is possessed by a new 
 quantity (viz., ourselves our own consciousness) not 
 at all concerned in Hume's argument. 
 
 Hence it results, that of three possible conditions 
 under which a miracle may be supposed to offer itself 
 to our knowledge, two are excluded from the view of 
 Hume's argument. 
 
 SECTION m. 
 
 THE SECOND OF THESE CONDITIONS IS NOT EXPRESSLY 
 NOTICED BY HUME. 
 
 It may seem that it is. But in fact it is not. And 
 (what is more to the purpose) we are not at liberty to 
 consider it any accident that it is not. Hume had his 
 
 " Doubtless he was aware of that ; but still the reporters o 
 the miracle were few. No matter how many were present, the 
 witnesses for us are but the Evangelists." Yes, certainly, the 
 Evangelists ; and let me add, all those contemporaries to whom 
 the Evangelists silently appealed. These make up the " multi. 
 tude " contemplated in the case Beta.
 
 A.GAJNST MIRACLES. 295 
 
 reasons. Let us take all in proper order: 1st, that it 
 seems so ; 2dly, that in fact it is not so ; and 3dly, 
 that this is no accident, but intentional. 
 
 1st. Hume seems to contemplate such a case, \iz., 
 Beta, the case of a miracle witnessed and attested by a 
 multitude of persons, in the following imaginary miracle 
 which he proposes as a basis for reasoning. Queen 
 Elizabeth, as everybody will remember who has hap- 
 pened to read Lord Monmouth's Memoirs, died on the 
 night between the last day of 1602 and the first day 
 of 1603 :* this could not be forgotten by the reader, 
 because, in fact, Lord M M who was one of Her Majesty's 
 nearest relatives (being a younger son of her first cousin 
 Lord Hunsdon), obtained his title and subsequent pre- 
 ferment as a reward for the furious ride he performed 
 to Edinburgh (at that time at least four hundred and 
 forty miles distant from London), without taking off 
 
 * I.e. ecclesiastically : the queen died on the night of March 
 24, in the year which we should now (1858) call 1603, but which 
 by every class of careful writers was then regarded as 1602. 
 March 24 was the last day of 1602 : for Lady-Day, or the day 
 of our Lady the Virgin Mary (the day .which corresponds by 
 anticipation with December 25, or Christmas Day, so as to 
 allow nine months for the gestation of the Holy Child), is not a 
 moveable festival, but fixed unalterably to March 25. This waa 
 Ihe opening day, the Jour dt VAn of Paris, the New-year's-day 
 tf England, for the year 1603. And all the days which lie between 
 December 31 of ,1602 and March 25 of 1603, were written as a 
 fraction viz., February 10, 155, where the denominator ex- 
 presses the true year, according to our present mode of reckon- 
 ing. But the reader must understand that this has nothing tc 
 do with 0. S. (Old Style) and N. S. (New Style). It simplj 
 ixpresses the ecclesiastic way of counting opposed to the civil
 
 96 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 his boots, in order to lay the earliest tidings of the great 
 event at the feet of her successor. In reality, never did 
 any death cause so much posting, day and night, over 
 the high roads of Europe. And the same causes which 
 made it so interesting have caused it to be the best dated 
 event in modern history ; that one which could least 
 be shaken by any discordant evidence yet discoverable. 
 Now, says Hume, imagine the case, that, in spite of all 
 this chronological precision this precision, and this 
 notoriety of precision Her Majesty's court physi- 
 cians should have chosen to propagate a story of her 
 resurrection. Imagine that these learned gentlemen 
 should have issued a bulletin, declaring that Queen 
 Elizabeth had been met in Greenwich Park, or at 
 Nonsuch, on May-day of 1603, or in Westminster, 
 two years after, by the Lord Chamberlain when detect- 
 ing Guy Faux let them even swear it before twenty 
 Justices of the peace ; I for one, says Hume, am free 
 to confess that I would not believe them. No, nor, to 
 say the truth, would we ; nor would we advise oui 
 eaders to believe them. 
 
 2dly. Here, therefore, it would seem as if Hume 
 were boldly pressing his principles to the very utter- 
 most that is, were challenging a miracle as unten- 
 able, though attested by a multitude. But, in fact, he 
 . not. He only seems to do so ; for, if no number 
 of witnesses could avail anything in proof of a miracle, 
 why does he timidly confine himself to ^he hypothesis 
 of the Queen's physicians only coming forward? Why 
 not call in the whole Privy Council ? or the Lord 
 Mayor and Common Council of London the Sheriffs 
 of Middlesex and the Twelve Judges ? As *o the
 
 AGAINST MIRACLES. 297 
 
 tourt physicians, though three or four nominally, vir- 
 tually they are but one man. They have a common 
 interest, and in two separate ways they are liable to a 
 suspicion of collusion : first, because the same motives 
 which act upon one probably act upon the rest. Tu 
 this respect they are under a common influence ; sec- 
 ondly, because, if not the motives, at any rate tha 
 physi3ians themselves, act upon each other. In this 
 respect, they are under a reciprocal influence. They 
 are tc be reasoned about as one individual. 
 
 3dly. As Hume could not possibly fail to see all 
 this, we may be sure that his choice of witnesses was 
 not accidental. In fact, his apparent carelessness is 
 very discreet management. His object was, under the 
 fiction of an independent multitude, to smuggle in a 
 virtual unity ; for his court physicians are no plural 
 body in effect and virtue, but a mere pleonasm and a 
 tautology. 
 
 And in good earnest, Hume had reason enough for 
 his caution. How much or how little testimony would 
 avail to establish a resurrection in any neutral* case, 
 few people would be willing to pronounce off-hand, 
 and, above all, on a fictitious case. Prudent men, in 
 such circumstances, would act as the judges in our 
 English courts, who are always displeased if it is at- 
 tempted to elicit their opinions upon a point of law by 
 & proposed fiction. And very reasonably ; for in these 
 
 * By ft neutral case is meant, 1st, one in which there is no 
 t revious reason from a great doctrine requiring such an event 
 for its support, to expect a resurrection ; 2dly, a case belonging 
 to a period of time in which it ia fully believed that miraculous 
 agency has ceased.
 
 298 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 fictitious cases all the little circumstances of reality 
 are wanting, and the oblique relations to such circum- 
 stances, out of which it is that any sound opinion can 
 be formed. We all know very well what Hume is 
 after in this problem of a resurrection. And his case 
 of Queen Elizabeth's resurrection being a perfectly 
 fictitious case, we are at liberty to do any one of three 
 different things : either simply to refuse an answer ; 
 or, 2dly, to give such an answer as he looks for viz., 
 tc agree with him in his disbelief under the supposed 
 contingency ; without, therefore, offering the slightest 
 prejudice to any Scriptural case of resurrection : i. e., we 
 might go along with him in his premises, and yet balk 
 him of his purpose ; or, 3dly, we might even join 
 issue with him, and peremptorily challenge his verdict 
 upon his own fiction. For it is singular enough, that 
 a modern mathematician of eminence (Mr. Babbage) 
 has expressly considered this very imaginary question 
 of a resurrection, and he pronounces the testimony of 
 seven witnesses, competent and veracious, and presumed 
 to have no bias, as sufficient to establish such a miracle. 
 Strip Hume's case of the ambiguities already pointed 
 out suppose the physicians really separate and inde- 
 lent witnesses not a corporation speaking by one 
 orgau it will then become a mere question of degree 
 oetween the philosopher and the mathematician 
 seven witnesses ? or fifty ? or a hundred ? For though 
 Uone of us (not Mr. Babbage, we may be sure) seri- 
 ously believes in the possibility of a resurrection 
 occurring in these days, as little can any of us believe 
 in thn possibility that seven witnesses, of honor and 
 sagacity (but say seven hundred), could be found tc 
 attest such an event when not occurring.
 
 A.OAINST MIRACLES. 299 
 
 But the us3ful result from all this is, that Mr. Hume 
 is evidently aware of the case Beta, (of last sect.) as 
 a distinct case from Alpha or from Gamma, though 
 he affects blindness : he is aware that a multituie of 
 competent witnesses, no matter whether seven or sevsn 
 hundred, is able to establish that which, a single wit- 
 ness could not ; in fact, that increasing the number of 
 witnesses is able to compensate increasing incredibility 
 in the subject of doubt ; that even supposing this sub- 
 ject a resurrection from the dead, there may be assigned 
 a quantity of evidence (#) greater than any resistance 
 to the credibility. And he betrays the fact, that he 
 has one eye open to his own Jesuitism by palming upon 
 us an apparent multitude for a real one, thus draw- 
 ing all the credit he can from the name of a multitude, 
 and yet evading the force which he strictly knew to be 
 odged in the thing : seeking the reputation of the 
 ease Beta, but shrinking from its hostile force. 
 
 SECTION IV. 
 
 OF THE ARGUMENT AS AFFECTED BY A CLASSIFICATION Of 
 MIRACLES. 
 
 Lst us now inquire whether Hume's argument would 
 oe affected by such differences in miracles as might 
 emerge upon the most general distribution of their 
 kinds. 
 
 Miracles may be classed generally as inner or outer. 
 
 1 The inner, or those which may be called miracles 
 "or the individual, are such as go on, or may go on, 
 within the separate personal consciousness of each
 
 30Q ox HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 separate man. And it shows how forgetful people ara 
 of the very doctrines which they themselves profess 
 as Christians, when we consider, on the one hand, that 
 miracles, in this sense, are essential to Christianity, 
 and yet, on the other hand, consider how often it is 
 said that the age of miracles is past. Doubtless, in the 
 sense of external miracles, all such agencies are past. 
 But in the other sense, there are distinct classes of the 
 supernatural agency, which we are now considering ; 
 and these three are held by many Christians ; two by 
 most Christians ; and the third by all. They are 
 
 a. Special Providences : which class it is that 
 many philosophic Christians doubt or deny. 
 
 |3. Grace: both predisposing [by old theologians 
 called prevenient *] and effectual. 
 
 f, Prayer considered as efficacious. 
 
 * " Prevenient grace : " Memorable it is, and striking as a 
 record of the changes worked continually by time, that in a 
 trial before one of our English Ecclesiastical Courts some two 
 or three years ago [the parties to the suit being on the one 
 side, as I think, the Bishop of Exeter, and on the other a 
 reverend gentleman, of whom the solitary wreck or floating 
 spar that remains in the custody of my recollection is a capital 
 A, as the initial letter of his name], the technical term " pre- 
 otnie.nl grace " came forward many a score of times. But how 
 completely this was felt to be a resurrection from the grave, 
 may be judged by the declaration of a leading counsel., a most 
 eminent barrister, who protested against the mysterious phrase 
 as one which, in the whole course of his reading [some little 
 being sacred, but a great deal profane'}, he had never once 
 met (or heard of) such a monster : was it something to drink 1 
 r was it something that one would give in charge to a police- 
 man? Now, reader, look into the tenth book of " Paradise
 
 AGAINST MTBACLES- 301 
 
 Of those three we repeat, that the two last are held 
 by most Christians : and yet it is evident that both 
 presume a supernatural agency. But this agency ex- 
 ists only where it is sought. And even where it does 
 exist, from its very nature (as an interior experience 
 for each separate consciousness) it is incommunicable. 
 But that does not defeat its purpose. It is of its 
 essence to be incommunicable. And, therefore, with 
 relation to Hume's great argument, which was de- 
 signed to point out a vast hiatus or inconsistency in 
 the Divine economy " Here is a miraculous agency, 
 perhaps, but it is incommunicable : it may exist, but 
 it cannot manifest itself; which defect neutralizes it, 
 and defeats the very purpose of its existence " the 
 answer is, that as respects these interior miracles, there 
 is no such inconsistency. They are meant for the 
 private forum of each man's consciousness : nor would 
 it have met any human necessity to have made them 
 communicable. The language of Scripture is, that he 
 who wishes experimentally to know the changes that 
 may be accomplished by prayer, must pray. In that 
 way only, and not by communication of knowledge 
 from another, could he understand it as a practical 
 effect. And to understand it not practically, but only 
 in a speculative way, could not meet any religious 
 wish, but merely an irreligious curiosity. 
 
 A.S repects one great division of miraculous agency, 
 
 Lost," and you will find it within the first four or five lines. 
 To be available for the purposes of a great poet, the phrase 
 must have been common at that day [1667] : and in every 
 theological work it is aa common as the songs of birds in 
 Spring.
 
 302 ON HUME'S ABGUMENT 
 
 it is clear, therefore, that Hume's argument does not 
 apply. The arrow glances past : not so much missing 
 its aim, as taking a false one. The hiatus which it 
 supposes, the insulation and incommunicability which 
 it charges upon the miraculous as a capital oversight, 
 was part of the design : such mysterious agencies were 
 meant to be incommunicable, and for the same reason 
 which shuts up each man's consciousness into a silent 
 world of its own separate and inaccessible to all 
 other consciousnesses. If a communication is thrown 
 open by such agencies between the separate spirit of 
 each man and the supreme Spirit of the universe, then 
 the end is accomplished : and it is part of that end to 
 close this communication against all other cognizance. 
 So far Hume is baffled. The supernatural agency is 
 incommunicable : it ought to be so. That is its per- 
 fection. 
 
 II. But now, as respects the other great order of 
 miracles viz., the external first of all, we may re- 
 mark a very important subdivision : miracles, in this 
 sense, subdivide into two most different orders, 1st, 
 Evidential miracles, which simply prove Christianity ; 
 2d, Constituent miracles, which, in a partial sense, are 
 Christianity, as in part composing its substance. And, 
 perhaps, it may turn out that Hume's objection, if 
 applicable at all, is here applicable in a separate way 
 and with a varying force. 
 
 The first class, the evidential miracles, are all those 
 which were performed merely as evidences (whether 
 simply as indications, or "as absolute demonstrations) oi 
 'he divine power which upheld Christianity. The 
 lecond class, the constituent miracles, are those which
 
 AGAINST MIRACLES. 303 
 
 constitute a part of Christianity. Two of these are 
 ibsolutely indispensable to Christianity, and cannot be 
 separated from it even in thought viz , the miracu- 
 lous birth of our Saviour, and his miraculous resurrec- 
 tion. The first is essential upon this ground that 
 unless Christ had united the two natures (divine and 
 human) he could not have made the satisfaction re- 
 quired. For try it both ways : not being human, 
 then, indeed, he might have had power to go through 
 the mysterious sufferings of the satisfaction : but how 
 would that have applied to man ? It would have been 
 perfect, but how would it have been relevant ? Now 
 try it the other way : not being divine, then, indeed, 
 any satisfaction he could make would be relevant : but 
 how would it have been possible in a being himself 
 tainted with frailty ? It is an argument used by 
 Christianity itself that man cannot offer a satisfac- 
 tion for man. The mysterious and supernatural birth, 
 therefore, was essential, as a capacitation for the work 
 to be performed ; and, on the other hand, the myste- 
 rious death and consequences were essential, as the 
 very work itself. 
 
 Now, therefore, having made this distinction, we 
 may observe, that the first class of miracles was occa- 
 sional and polemic : it was meant to meet a special 
 hostility incident to the birth-struggles of a new 
 religion, and a religion which, for the very reason that 
 it was true, stood opposed to the spirit of the world ; 
 of a religion which, in its first stage, had to fight 
 against a civil power in absolute possession of the 
 civilized earth, and backed by seventy legions. This 
 >eing settled, it follows, that if Hume's argument
 
 304 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 were applicable in its whole strength to the evidential 
 miracles, no result of any importance could follow. 
 It is clear that a Christianized earth never can want 
 polemic miracles again ; polemic miracles were wanted 
 for a transitional state, hut such a state cannot return. 
 Polemic miracles were wanted for a state of conflict 
 with a dominant idolatry. It was Christianity militant, 
 and militant with child-like arms, against Paganism 
 triumphant, that needed such weapons, and used 
 them. But Christianity, in league with civiliza- 
 tion, and resting on the powers of this earth allied 
 with her own, never again can speak to idolatrous man 
 except from a station of infinite superiority. If, there- 
 fore, these evidential miracles are incommunicable as 
 respects their grounds of credibility to after genera- 
 tions, neither are they wanted. 
 
 Still it will be urged were not the miracles meant 
 for purposes ulterior to the transitional state ? Were 
 they not meant equally for the polemic purpose of 
 confuting hostility at the moment, and of propping 
 the faith of Christians in all after ages ? The growing 
 opinion amongst reflecting Christians is, that they 
 were not : that the evidential miracles accomplished 
 their whole purpose in their own age. Something of 
 supernatural agency, visibly displayed, was wanted 
 for the first establishment of a new faith. But, once 
 established, it was a false faith only that could need 
 this external support. Christianity could not unroot 
 itself now, though every trace of evidential miracle 
 hould have vanished. Being a true religion, once 
 ooted in man's knowledge and man's heart, it is self 
 lustained ; it never could be eradicated.
 
 AGAINST MIBACLES. 30$ 
 
 But waiving that argument, it is evident, that what- 
 ever becomes of the evidential miracles, Christianity 
 never can dispense with those transcendent miracles 
 which we have called constituent, those which do 
 not so much demonstrate Christianity, as constitute 
 Christianity, and are Christianity by a large integral 
 section. Now as to the way in which Hume's 
 argument could apply to these, we shall reserve 
 what we have to say until a subsequent section. 
 Meantime, with respect to the other class, the 
 simply evidential miracles, it is plain, that if ever 
 they should be called for again, then, as to them, 
 Hume's argument will be evaded, or not, according to 
 their purpose. If their function regards an individual, 
 it will be no just objection to them that they are in- 
 communicable. If it regards a multitude or a nation, 
 then the same power which utters the miracle can avail 
 for its manifestation before a multitude, as happened in 
 the days of the New Testament, and then is realized 
 the case Beta of Sect. II. And if it is still objected, 
 that even in that case there could be no sufficient way 
 of propagating the miracle, with its evidence, to other 
 times or places, the answer must be, 
 
 1st. That supposing the purpose merely polemic, 
 that purpose is answered without such a propagation. 
 
 2dly. That, supposing the purpose, by possibility, 
 an ulterior purpose, stretching into distant iges, even 
 then our modern arts of civilization, printing, &c., 
 give us advantages which place a remote age on a level 
 with the present as to the force of evidence ; and that 
 even the defect of autopsy may be compensated by 
 ufficient testimony of a multitude, it is evident that 
 
 20
 
 JOG ON HUME'S A.EGUMENT 
 
 Hume himself felt, by his evasion in the case of the 
 imaginary Elizabethan miracle proposed oy himself. 
 
 EECAPITTJLATION. 
 
 Now let us recapitulate the steps we have made be- 
 fore going on to the rest. 
 
 1st, We have drawn into notice [Sect. II.] the case 
 Beta, overlooked by Hume in his argument, but 
 apparently not overlooked in his consciousness, the 
 case where a multitude of witnesses overrules the in- 
 cummunicabihty attaching to a single witness. 
 
 2dly. We have drawn into notice the class of inter- 
 nal miracles, miracles going on in the inner econ- 
 omy of every Christian's heart ; for it is essential to a 
 Christian to allow of prayer. He cannot be a Christian 
 if he should condemn prayer ; and prayer cannot hope 
 to produce its object without a miracle. And to such 
 miracles Hume's argument, the argument of incommu- 
 nicability, is inapplicable. They do not seek to trans- 
 plant themselves ; every man's personal experience in 
 this respect is meant for himself alone. 
 
 3dly. Even amongst miracles not internal, we have 
 shown that if one class (the merely evidential and 
 polemic) are incommunicable, i. e., not capable of prop- 
 agation to a remote age or place, they have sufficiently 
 fulfilled their immediate purpose by their immediate 
 effect. But such miracles are alien and accidental to 
 Christianity. Christ himself reproved severely those 
 who sought such signs, as a wicked, unbelieving gen- 
 eration ; and afterwards he reproved, with a mos f 
 pathetic reproach, that one of his own disciples who
 
 AGAINST MIRACLES 307 
 
 demanded such a sign. But besides these evidential 
 miracles, we noticed also, 
 
 4thly. The constituent miracles of Christianity, 
 upon ^yhich, as regarded Hume's argument, we reserved 
 ourselves to the latter section : and to these we now 
 address ourselves. 
 
 But first we premise this 
 
 Lemma : That an a priori (or, as we shall show, 
 an a posteriori) reason for believing a miracle, or for 
 expecting a miracle, will greatly disturb the valuation 
 of x (that is, the abstract resistance to credibility), as 
 assumed in Hume's argument. This is the centre in 
 which we are satisfied, lurks that irporrov i/^evSos, or 
 primary falsehood, which Hume himself suspected : and 
 we add, that as a vast number of witnesses (according 
 to a remark made in Sect. II.) will virtually operate as 
 a reduction of the value allowed to x, until x may be 
 made to vanish altogether, so in the reverse order, 
 any material reduction of value in x will virtually 
 operate exactly as the multiplication of witnesses ; and 
 the case Alpha will be raised to the case Beta. 
 
 This Lemma being stated as a point of appeal in 
 irhat follows, we proceed to 
 
 SECTION V. 
 
 on HUME'S ARGUMENT, AS AFFECTED BT THE PURPOSE. 
 
 This topic is so impressive, and indeed awful, in its 
 -elation to Christianity, that we shall not violate its 
 najesty by doing more than simply stating the case.
 
 308 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 All the known or imagined miracles that ever were 
 recorded as flowing from any Pagan ohgin, were mira- 
 cles 1, of ostentation; 2, of ambition and rivalship; 
 3, expressions of power ; or, 4, were blind accidents. 
 Not even in pretence were any of them more than that. 
 First and last came the Christian miracles, on behalf oi 
 {. moral purpose. The purpose was to change man's 
 idea of his own nature ; and to change his idea of 
 God's nature. Many other purposes might be stated ; 
 but all were moral. Now to any other wieider of 
 supernatural power, real or imaginary, it never nad 
 occurred by way of pretence even, that in working 
 miracles he had a moral object. And here, indeed, 
 comes in the argument of Christ with tremendous 
 effect that, whilst all other miracles might be liable 
 to the suspicion of having been effected by alliance 
 with darker agencies, His only (as sublime mora 
 agencies for working the only revolution that ever was 
 worked in man's nature) could not be liable to such 
 a suspicion ; since, if an evil spirit would lend himseli 
 to the propagation of good in its most transcendent 
 form, in that case the kingdom of darkness would be 
 " divided against itself." 
 
 Here, then, is an a posteriori reason, derived from 
 the whole subssquent life and death of the miracle- 
 worker, for diminishing the value of x according to the
 
 AGAIXST MIRACLES. 309 
 
 SECTION VL 
 
 
 
 OH IBB AHGUMENT OF HUME A8 AFFECTED BT MATTERS OF 
 FACT. 
 
 It is a very important axiom of the schoolmen in 
 this case that, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia ; 
 you can draw no inference from the possibility of a 
 thing to its reality, but that, in the reverse order, db 
 fgse ad posse, the inference is inevitable : if it is, or 
 if it ever has been then of necessity it can be. 
 Hume himself would have admitted, that the proof of 
 any one miracle, beyond all possibility of doubt, at 
 once lowered the x of his argument (i. e., the value 
 of the resistance to our faith) so as to affect the whole 
 force of that argument, as applying to all other mira- 
 cles whatever having a rational and an adequate 
 purpose. Now it happens that we have two cases of 
 miracles which can be urged in this view : one a pos- 
 teriori, derived from our historical experience, and the 
 other a priori. We will take them separately. 
 
 1. The a priori miracle we call such not (as the 
 unphilosophic may suppose) because it occurred pre- 
 viously to our own period, or from any consideration 
 of time whatever, but in the logical meaning, as having 
 been derived from our reason in opposition to our ex- 
 perience. This order of miracle it is manifest that 
 Hume overlooked altogether, because he says express- 
 ly that we have nothing to appeal to in this dispute 
 except our human experience. But it happens that we 
 have ; and precisely where the possibilities of experi- 
 ence desert us. We know nothing through experience 
 'whether physical or historical) of what preceded 01
 
 810 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 accompanied the first introduction of man upon this 
 earth. But in the absence of all expeiience, OUT 
 reason informs us that he must have been intro- 
 duced by a supernatural agency. Thus far w e are 
 sure. For the sole alternative is one which would be 
 equally mysterious, and besides, contradictory to the 
 marks of change of transition and of perishable- 
 ness in our planet itself viz., the hypothesis of an 
 eternal unoriginated race : that is more confound- 
 ing to the human intellect than any miracle whatever : 
 so that, even tried merely as one probability against 
 another, the miracle would have the advantage. The 
 miracle supposes a supersensual and transcendent 
 cause. The opposite hypothesis supposes effects with- 
 out any cause. In short, upon any hypothesis, we are 
 driven to suppose and compelled to suppose a 
 miraculous state as introductory to the earliest state 
 of nature. The planet, indeed, might form itself by 
 mechanical laws of motion, repulsion, attraction, and 
 central forces. But man could not. Life could not. 
 Organization, even animal organization, might perhaps 
 be explained out of mechanical causes. But life 
 could not. Life is itself a great miracle. Suppose 
 the nostrils formed by mechanic agency ; still the 
 breath of life could not enter them without a super- 
 natural force. And a fortiori, man, with his intellect- 
 ual and moral capacities, could not arise upon this 
 planet without a higher agency than any lodged in 
 that nature which is the object of our present expe- 
 rience. This kind of miracle, as deduced by our 
 reason, and not witnessed experimentally, or draws 
 from any past records, we call an a priori miracle
 
 AGAINST MIRACLES. 311 
 
 2. But there is another kind of miracle, which 
 Hume ought not to have overlooked, but which he 
 has, however, overlooked : he himself observes, very 
 justly, that prophecy is a distinct species of the mirac- 
 ulous ; and, no doubt, he neglected the Scriptural 
 Prophecies, as supposing them all of doubtful inter- 
 pretation ; or else believing with Porphyry, that such 
 as are not doubtful, must have been posterior to the 
 event which they point to. It happens, however, that 
 there are some prophecies which cannot be evaded or 
 "refused," some to which neither objection will apply. 
 One we will here cite by way of example : The 
 prophecy of Isaiah, describing the desolation of Baby- 
 lon, was delivered about seven centuries before Christ. 
 A century or so after Christ, comes Porphyry, and 
 insinuates, that all the prophecies alike might be 
 comparatively recent forgeries ! Well, for a moment 
 suppose it : but, at least, they existed in the days of 
 Porphyry. Now, it happens, that more than two 
 centuries after Porphyry, we have good evidence, as to 
 Babylon, that it had not yet reached the stage of 
 itter desolation predicted by Isaiah. Four centuries 
 after Christ, we learn from a father of the Christian 
 Church, who had good personal information as to its 
 condition, that it was then become a solitude, but a 
 golitude in good preservation as a royal park. The 
 vast city had disappeared, and the murmur of myriads : 
 but as yet there were no signs whatever of ruin or 
 desolation. Not until our own nineteenth century 
 was the picture of Isaiah seen in full realization 
 then lay the lion basking at noonday then crawled 
 the serpents from their holes ; and at night the whole
 
 312 ON HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 region echoed with, the wild cries peculiar to arid 
 wildernesses. The transformations, therefore, of Baby- 
 lon, have been going on slowly through a vast number 
 of centuries until the perfect accomplishment of Isaiah's 
 picture. Perhaps they have travelled through a course 
 of much more than two thousand years : and from the 
 glimpses we gain of Babylon at intervals, we know for 
 certain that Isaiah had been dead for many centuries 
 before his vision could have even begun to realize 
 itself. But then, says an objector, the final ruins of 
 great empires and cities may be safely assumed on 
 general grounds of observation. Hardly, however, 
 if they happen to be seated in a region so fertile as 
 Mesopotamia, and on a great river like the Euphrates. 
 But allow this possibility allow the natural disap- 
 pearance of Babylon in a long course of centuries. 
 In other cases the disappearance is gradual, and at 
 length perfect. No traces can now be found of Car- 
 thage ; none of Memphis ; or, if you suppose some- 
 thing peculiar to Mesopotamia, no traces can be found 
 of Nineveh,* or on the other side of that region : 
 none of other great cities Roman, Parthian, Persian, 
 Median, in that same region or adjacent regions, 
 Babylon only is circumstantially described by Jewish 
 prophecy as long surviving itself in a state of visible 
 and audible desolation : and to Babylon only such a 
 description applies. Other prophecies might be cited 
 with the same result. But this is enough. And here 
 ts an a posteriori miracle. 
 
 Now, observe : these two orders of miracle, by theb 
 
 * Of late, however, fully exposed by Layard, Rawlinson. &o.
 
 AGAINST MIRACLES. 313 
 
 rery nature, absolutely evade the argument of Hume. 
 The incommunicability disappears altogether. The 
 value of x absolutely vanishes and becomes 0. 
 The human reason being immutable, suggests to every 
 age, renews and regenerates forever, the necessary 
 inference of a miraculous state antecedent to the 
 natural state. And, for the miracles of prophecy, 
 these require no evidence, and depend upon none : 
 they carry their own evidence along with them ; they 
 utter their own testimonies, and they are continually 
 reinforcing them ; for, probably, every successive period 
 of time reproduces fresh cases of prophecy completed. 
 But even one, like that of Babylon, realizes the case 
 of Beta (Sect. II.) in its most perfect form. History, 
 which attests it, is the voice of every generation, 
 checked and countersigned in effect by all the men 
 who compose it. 
 
 SECTION vn. 
 
 OF THB ARGUMENT A8 AFFECTED BY THE PARTICULAR WORKBS 
 OF THE MIRACLES. 
 
 This is the last " moment," to use the language of 
 Mechanics, which we shall notice in this discussion. 
 And here there is a remarkable petitio principii in 
 Hume's management of his argument. He says, 
 roundly, that it makes no difference at all if God were 
 connected with the question as the author of the sup- 
 posed miracles. And why? Because, says he, we 
 know God only by experience meaning as involved 
 hi nature and, therefore, that in so far as miracles 
 transcend our experience of nature, they transcend bj
 
 314 o* HUME'S ARGUMENT 
 
 implication our experience of God. But the very 
 question under discussion is whether God did, 01 
 did not, manifest himself to human experience in the 
 miracles of the New Testament. But at all events, the 
 idea of God in itself already includes the notion of a 
 power to work miracles, whether that power were ever 
 exercised or not ; and as Sir Isaac Newton thought that 
 space might be the sensorium of God, so may we (and 
 with much more philosophical propriety) affirm that the 
 miraculous and the transcendent is the very nature of 
 God. God being assumed, it is as easy to believe in a 
 miracle issuing from Him as in any operation according 
 to rhe laws of nature (which, after all, is possibly in 
 many points only the nature of our planet) : it is as 
 easy, because either mode of action is indifferent to 
 Him. Doubtless this argument, when addressed to an 
 atheist, loses its force ; because he refuses to assume 
 a God. But then, on the other hand, it must be 
 remembered that Hume's argument itself does not 
 stand on the footing of atheism. He supposes it 
 binding on a theist. Now a theist, in starting from 
 the idea of God, grants, of necessity, the plenary 
 power of miracles as greater and more awful than man 
 could even comprehend. All he wants is a sufficient 
 motive for such transcendent agencies ; but this is 
 supplied in excess (as regards what we have called the 
 constituent miracles of Christianity) by the case of a 
 religion that was to revolutionize the moral nature of 
 man. The moral nature the kingdom of the will 
 is essentially opposed to the kingdom of nature even 
 by the confession of irreligious philosophers ; and, 
 being itself a supersensual field, it seemi
 
 AGAINST MIRACLES. 315 
 
 more reasonably adapted to agencies supernatural than 
 moh as are natural. 
 
 GENERAL RECAPITULATION. 
 
 In Hume's argument, x, which expresses the re- 
 sistance to credibility in a miracle, is valued as of 
 necessity equal to the very maximum or ideal of hu- 
 man testimony ; which, under the very best circum- 
 stances, might be equal to -|- x, in no case more, and 
 in all known cases less. We, on the other hand, have 
 endeavored to show 
 
 1 . That, because Hume contemplates only the case 
 of a single witness, it will happen that the case Beta 
 [of Sect. II.] where a multitude of witnesses exist, 
 may greatly exceed -f- x ; and with a sufficient multi- 
 tude must exceed x. 
 
 2. That in the case of internal miracles opera- 
 tions of divine agency within the mind and conscience 
 of the individual Hume's argument is necessarily 
 set aside : the evidence, the -\- x, is perfect for the 
 individual, and the miraculous agency is meant for 
 him only. 
 
 3. That, in the case of one primary miracle viz., 
 the first organization of man on this planet, the evi- 
 lence greatly transcends x : because here it is an 
 evidence not derived from experience at all, but from 
 the reflecting reason : and the miracle has the same 
 advantage over facts of experience, that a mathematical 
 truth has over the truths whicn rest on induction. It 
 is the difference between must lie and is between 
 ,he inevitable and the merely actual. 
 
 4. That, in the case of another order of miracles 
 viz., prophecies, Hume's argument is again overruled
 
 316 HUME'S AKGTTMENT AGAINST MIBACLES. 
 
 because the -}- x in this case, the affirmative evidence, 
 is not derived from human testimony. Some prophe- 
 cies are obscure ; they may be fulfilled possibly with- 
 out men's being aware of the fulfilment. But others, 
 as that about the fate of Babylon about the fate of 
 the Arabs (the children of Ishmael) about the fate 
 of the Jews are not of a nature to be misunder- 
 stood ; and the evidence which attends them is not 
 alien, but is intrinsic, and developed by themselves in 
 successive stages from age to age. 
 
 5. That, because the primary miracle in No. 3, 
 argues at least a power competent to the working of a 
 miracle, for any after miracle we have only to seek a 
 sufficient motive. Now, the objects of the Christian 
 revelation were equal at the least to those of the original 
 creation. In fact, Christianity may be considered as a 
 second creation ; and the justifying cause for the con- 
 stituent miracles of Christianity is even to us as appa- 
 rent as any which could have operated at the primary 
 creation. The epigenesis was, at least, as grand an 
 occasion as the genesis, the original birth. Indeed, it 
 is evident, for example, that Christianity itself could 
 lot have existed without the constituent miracle of 
 the Resurrection ; because without that there would 
 have been no conquest over death. And here, aa 
 in No. 3, -f- x is derived not from any experience, 
 and therefore cannot be controlled by that sort of 
 hostile experience which Hume's argument relies on; 
 but is derived from the reason which transcends all 
 experience ; that is, which would be valid I do no* 
 kay against the positive case of a hostile experience 
 but, in the neutral or negative case, where all con 
 fjrmalory experience is wanting.
 
 PROTESTANTISM.' 
 
 THE work whose substance and theme are thus 
 briefly abstracted is, at this moment,f making a noise in 
 the Avorld. It is ascribed by report to two bishops 
 not jointly, but alternatively in the sense that, if one 
 did not wiite the book, the other did. The Bishops 
 of Oxford and St. David's, Wilberforce and Thirlwall, 
 are the two pointed at by the popular finger ; and, in 
 some quarters, a third is suggested, viz., Stanley, Bishop 
 of Norwich. The betting, however, is altogether in 
 favor of Oxford. So runs the current of public gossip. 
 But the public is a bad guesser, " stiff in opinion," 
 and almost " always in the wrong." Now let me 
 guess. When I had read for ten minutes, I offered a 
 bet of seven to one (no takers) that the author's name 
 began with H. Not out of any love for that amphibi- 
 ous letter ; on the contrary, being myself what Pro- 
 fessor Wilson calls a hedonist, or philosophical volup- 
 
 * This little paper, founded on a " Vindication of Protestam 
 Principles" by Phileleutheros Anglicanus might perhaps 
 sufficiently justify itself by the importance of the principles dis- 
 cussed, if it replied to a mere imaginary antagonist. But this 
 was not so. "The Vindication" was a real book, and, as a 
 uartling phenomenon made a sudden and deep impression. 
 
 t Viz. in 1847-
 
 318 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 tuary, murmuring, with good reason, if a rose leaf lies 
 doubled below me, naturally I murmur at a letter that 
 puts one to the expense of an aspiration, forcing into 
 the lungs an extra charge of raw air on frosty mornings 
 But truth is truth, in spite of frosty air. And yet 
 upon further reading, doubts gathered upon my mind. 
 The H. that I mean is an Englishman ; now it happens 
 that here and there a word, or some peculiarity in 
 using a word, indicates, in this author, a Scotchman ; 
 for instance, the expletive "just," which so much 
 infests Scottish phraseology, written or spoken, at 
 page 1 ; elsewhere the word " shortcomings" which, 
 being horridly tabernacular, and such that no gentle- 
 man could allow himself to touch it without gloves, it 
 is to be wished that our Scottish brethren would re- 
 sign, together with " backslidings," to the use of field 
 preachers. But worse, by a great deal, and not even 
 intelligible in England, is the word thereafter, used as 
 an adverb of time; i. e., as the correlative of hereafter. 
 Thereafter, in pure vernacular English, bears a totally 
 different sense. In " Paradise Lost," for instance, 
 having heard the character of a particular angel, you 
 lire told that he spoke thereafter, i. e., spoke agreeably 
 to that character. " How a score of sheep, Master 
 Shallow ? " The answer is, " Thereafter as they be." 
 Again, " Thereafter as a man sows shall he reap " 
 i. e., conformably or answerably to what he sows. 
 The objections are overwhelming to the Scottish use 
 of the word ; first, because already in Scotland it is a 
 barbarism transplanted from the filthy vocabulary o 
 attorneys, locally called writers ; secondly, because in 
 England it is not even intelligible, and, what is worse
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 319 
 
 still, sure to be mis-intelligible. And yet, aftei all, 
 these exotic forms may be a mere Mind. The writer 
 is, perhaps, purposely leading us astray wi'h his 
 " i 'hereafters" and his horrid "shortcomings.'' Or, 
 because London newspapers and Acts of Parliament, 
 are beginning to be more and more polluted with 
 these barbarisms, he may even have caught them un- 
 consciously. And, on looking again at one case of 
 " thereafter" viz., at page 79, it seems impossible co 
 determine whether he uses it in the classical English 
 sense, or in the sense of leguleian barbarism. 
 
 This question of authorship, meantime, may seem 
 to the reader of little moment. Far from it ! The 
 weightier part of the interest depends upon that very 
 point. If the author really is a bishop, or supposing 
 the public rumor so far correct as that he is a man of 
 distinction in the English Church, then, and by that 
 simple fact, this book, or this pamphlet, interesting at 
 any rate for itself, becomes separately interesting 
 through its authorship, so as to be the most remark- 
 able phenomenon of the day ; and why ? Because 
 ,he most remarkable expression of a movement, ac- 
 complished and proceeding in a quarter that, if any on 
 this earth, might be thought sacred from change. 3, 
 fearful are the motions of time, when suddenly lighted 
 up to a retrospect of thirty years ! Pathetic are the 
 tuins of time in its slowest advance ! Solemn are the 
 prospects, so new and so incredible, which time unfolds 
 at every turn of its wheeling flight ! Is it come to 
 Shis ? Could any man, one generation back, have an- 
 ticipated that an EngLsh dignitary, and speaking on a 
 very delicate religious question, should deliberately
 
 320 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 appeal to a writer confessedly infidel, and proud of 
 being an infidel, as a " triumphant " settler of Chris- 
 tian scruples ? But if the infidel is right a point 
 which I do not here discuss ; but if the infidel is a 
 man of genius a point which I do not deny was it 
 not open to cite him, even though the citer were a 
 bishop ? Why, yes uneasily one answers, yes ; but 
 still the case records a strange alteration; and still one 
 could have wished to hear such a doctrine, which as- 
 cribes human infirmity (nay, human criminality) to 
 every book of the Bible % , uttered by anybody rather 
 than by a father of the Church, and guaranteed by 
 anybody rather than by an infidel in triumph. A boy 
 may fire his pistol unnoticed ; but a sentinel, mounting 
 guard in the dark, must remember the trepidation that 
 will follow any shot from him, and the certainty that it 
 will cause all the stations within hearing to get under 
 arms immediately. Yet why, if this bold opinion does 
 come from a prelate, he being but one man, should it 
 carry so alarming a sound ? Is the whole bench of 
 bishops bound and compromised by the audacity of 
 any one amongst its members ? Certainly not. But 
 yet such an act, though it should be that of a rash pre- 
 ?ursor, marks the universal change of position ; there 
 is ever some sympathy between the van and the rear 
 of the same body at the same time ; and the boldest 
 could not have dared to go ahead so rashly, if the rear- 
 most was not known to be pressing forward to his 
 support, far more closely than thirty years ago he 
 could have done. There have been, it is true, hetero- 
 iox professors of divinity and free-thinking bishops 
 oefore now. England can show a considerable list o y
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 321 
 
 uch people even Rome has a smaller list. Rome, 
 that weeds all libraries, and is continually burning 
 books, in effigy, by means of her vast Index Expur- 
 gatorius,* which index, continually, she is enlarging 
 by successive supplements, needs also an Index Expur- 
 gatorius for the catalogue of her prelates. Weeds 
 there are in the very flower-garden and conservatory of 
 the church. Fathers of the Church are no more to be 
 relied on, as safe authorities, than we rascally lay au- 
 thors, that notoriously will say anything. And it is a 
 striking proof of this amongst our English bishops, 
 that the very man who in the last generation, most of 
 all won the public esteem as the champion of the Bible 
 against Tom Paine, was privately known amongst us 
 connoisseurs in heresy (that are always prying into ugly 
 secrets) to be the least orthodox thinker, one or other, 
 amongst the whole brigade of eighteen thousand con- 
 temporary clerks who had subscribed the Thirty-nine 
 Articles. Saving your presence, reader, his lordship 
 was no better than a bigoted Socinian, which, in a petty 
 diocese that he never visited, and amongst South Welsh- 
 men, that are all incorrigible Methodists, mattered little, 
 
 ** Index Expurgatorius." A question of some interest 
 arises upon the casuistical construction of this Index. We, that 
 are not by name ncluded, may we consider ourselves indirectly 
 licensed : Silence, I should think, gives consent. And if it 
 wasn't that the present Pope, being a horrid Radical, would be 
 sure to blackball me as an honest Tory, I would send him a copy 
 of my Opera Omnia, requesting his Holiness to say, by return 
 yf post, whether I ranked amongst the chaff winnowed by St. 
 Peter's flail, or had his gracious permission to hold myaell 
 wnongst the pure wheat gathered into the Vatican garner. 
 21
 
 322 PEOTESTANTISM. 
 
 Put would have been awkward had he come to be Arch- 
 bishop of York ; and that he did not turned upon the 
 accident of a few weeks too soon, by which the Fates 
 cut short the thread of the Whig ministry in 1807. 
 Certainly, for a Romish or an English bishop to be a 
 Socinian is un pen fort. But I contend that it is quite 
 possible to be far less heretical, and yet dangerously 
 bold ; yes, upon the free and spacious latitudes, pur- 
 posely left open by the English Thirty-nine Articles (ay, 
 or by any Protestant Confession), to plant novelties not 
 less startling to religious ears than Socinianism itself. 
 Besides (which adds to the shock), the dignitary now 
 before us, whether bishop or no bishop, does not write 
 in the tone or a conscious heretic ; or, like Archdeacon 
 Blackburne* of old, in a spirit of hostility to his own fel- 
 low churchmen ; but, on the contrary, in the tone of 
 one relying upon support from his clerical brethren, he 
 stands forward as expositor and champion of views 
 now prevailing amongst the elite of the English Church. 
 So construed, the book is, indeed, a most extraordi- 
 nary one, and exposes a record that almost shocks one 
 itf the strides made in religious speculation. Opinions 
 change slowly and stealthily. The steps of the changes 
 are generally continuous ; but sometimes it happens 
 that the notice of such steps, the publication of such 
 
 * "Archdeacon Blackburne:" He was the author of The 
 Confessional, which at one time made a memorable ferment 
 amongst all those who loved as sons, or who hated as non-co- 
 Jbrmists, the English Establishment. This was his most popular 
 work, but he wrote many others in the same temper, that fill si* 
 or seven octavos. I fear that it may be a duty to read him; and 
 V it is, then I think of his seven octavos with holy horror
 
 FBOTESTA.NTISM. 323 
 
 Changes, is not continuous, that it comes upon us per 
 taltum, and, consequently, with the stunning effect of 
 an apparent treachery. Every thoughtful man raises 
 Kis hands with an involuntary gesture of awe at the 
 revolutions of so revolutionary an age, when thus 
 summoned to the spectacle of an English prelate serv- 
 ing a piece of artillery against what once were fancied 
 to be main outworka of religion, and at a station some- 
 times considerably in advance of any station ever oc- 
 cupied by Voltaire.* 
 
 It is this audacity of speculation, I apprehend, this 
 etalage of bold results, rather than any success in their 
 development, which has fixed the public attention. 
 Development, indeed, applied to philosophic problems, 
 or research applied to questions of erudition, was 
 hardly possible within so small a compass as one hun- 
 dred and seventeen pages, for that is the extent of the 
 work, except as regards the notes, which amount to 
 seventy-four pages more. Such brevity, on such a 
 subject, is unseasonable, and almost culpable. On 
 such a subject as the Philosophy of Protestantism 
 " satius erat silere, quam parcius dicere." Better 
 were absolute silence, more respectful as regards the 
 
 * " Voltaire.'* Let not the reader misunderstand me; I do 
 not mean that the clerical writer now before us (bishop or not 
 bishop) is more hostile to religion than Voltaire, or is hostile at 
 all. On the contrary, he is, perhaps, profoundly religious, and 
 toe writes with neither levity nor insincerity. But this conscien- 
 tious spirit, and this piety, do but the more call into relief the 
 audacity of his free-thinking do but the more forcibly illus 
 trate the prodigious changes in the spirit of religious philosophy, 
 wrought by time, and by the contagion from secular revolutions
 
 324 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 theme, less tantalizing as regards the reader, than a 
 style of discussion so fragmentary and so rapid. 
 
 But, before we go farther, what are we to call this 
 bold man? One must have some name for a man 
 that one is reviewing ; and, as he comes abroad incog" 
 nito, it is difficult to see what name could have any 
 propiiety. Let me consider : there are three bishops 
 in the field, Mr. H., and the Scotchman that makes 
 five. But every one of these, you say, is represented 
 equally by the name in the title Phileleutheros An- 
 glicanus. True, but that's as long as a team of horses. 
 If it had but Esquire at the end, it would measure 
 against a Latin Hexameter verse. I'm afraid that we 
 must come at last to Phil. I've been seeking to avoid 
 it, for it's painful to say " Jack " or " Dick " either 
 to or o/an ecclesiastical great gun. But if such big 
 wigs will come abroad in diguise, and with names as 
 long as Fielding's Hononchrononthononthologus, they 
 must submit to be hustled by pickpockets and critics, 
 and to have their names docked as well as profane 
 authors. 
 
 Phil., then, be it that's settled. Now, let us in- 
 quire what it is that Phil, has been saying, to cause 
 such a sensation among the Gnostics. And, to begin 
 at the beginning, what is Phil.'s capital object? Phil 
 shall state it himself these are his opening words : 
 '' In the following pages we propose to vindicate the 
 landamsntal and inherent principles of Protestantism.' 
 Good ; but what are the fundamental principles o 
 Protestantism ? " They are," says Phil., " the sole 
 sufficiency of Scripture,* the right of private judgmen 
 
 * * Sole sufficiency of S-ripfure." This is much tooellipti- 
 tal a way of expressing the Pr.itostant meaning. Sufficiency foi
 
 PEOTESTANTISM. 325 
 
 in its interpretation, and the authority ci Individual 
 conscience in matters of religion." Errors of logic 
 show themselves more often in a man's terminology, and 
 nis antithesis, and his subdivisions, than anywhere else. 
 Phil, goes on to make this distinction, which brings 
 out his imperfect conception. " We," says he (and, by 
 the way, if Phil, is we, then it must be my duty to 
 call him they), " we do not propose to defend the varie- 
 ties of doctrine held by the different communities of 
 Protestants." Why, no ; that would be a sad task for 
 the most skilful of funambulists or theological tum- 
 blers, seeing that many of these varieties stand related 
 to each other as categorical affirmative and categorical 
 negative : it's heavy work to make yes and no pull 
 together in the same proposition. But this, fortunately 
 for himself, Phil, declines. You are to understand 
 that he will not undertake the defence of Protestantism 
 in its doctrines, but only in its principles. That won't 
 do ; that antithesis is as hollow as a drum ; and, if the 
 objection were verbal only, I would not make it. But 
 
 what ? " Sufficiency for salvation " is the phrase of many, and 
 I think elsewhere of Phil. But that is objectionable on more 
 grounds than one; it is redundant, and it is aberrant from the 
 true point contemplated. Sufficiency for itself, viithout alien 
 kelps, is the thing contemplated. The Greek autarkeia (avTaQ- 
 xtia), self-sufficiency, or, because that phrase, in English, has 
 received a deflexion towards a bad meaning, the word self- 
 tufficingness might answer; sufficiency for the exposition of its 
 wn most secret meaning, out of fountains within itself ; needing, 
 Iherefore, neither the supplementary aids of tradition, on the 
 ne hand, nor the complementary aids on the other (in the event 
 tt unprovided cases, or of dilemmas arising) , from the infallibility 
 tf a living expounder
 
 826 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 the contradistinction fails to convey the real meaning 
 It is not that he has falsely expressed his meaning, but 
 that he has falsely developed that meaning to his own 
 consciousness. Not the word only is wrong ; but the 
 wrong word is put forward for the sake of hiding the 
 
 mperfect idea. What he calls principles might almont 
 as well be called doctrines ; and what he calls doc- 
 trines as well be called principles. But of these 
 terms, apart from the rectifications suggested by the 
 context, no man could collect his drift, which is simply 
 this. Protestantism, we must recollect, is not an abso- 
 lute and self-dependent idea ; it stands in relation to 
 something antecedent, against which it protests viz., 
 Papal Rome. And under what phasis does it protest 
 against Rome ? Not against the Christianity of Rome, 
 because every Protestant Church, though disapproving 
 a great deal of that, disapproves also a great deal in its 
 own sister churches of the protesting household ; and 
 because every Protestant Church holds a great deal of 
 Christian truth in common with Rome. But what fur- 
 nishes the matter of protest is the deduction of the 
 title upon which Rome plants the right to be a church 
 at all. This deduction is so managed by Rome as to 
 make herself, not merely a true church (which many 
 Protestants grant), but the exclusive church. Now 
 what Phil, in effect undertakes to defend is not prin- 
 ciples by preference to doctrines (for they are pretty 
 nearly the same thing\ but the question of title to 
 teach at all, in preference to the question of what is tha 
 thing taught. There is the distinction, as I appre- 
 aend it. All these terms " principle," " doctrine/ 
 
 ' system," " theory," " hypothesis" are used nearly
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 327 
 
 Iways most licentiously, and as arbitrarily as a New- 
 market jockey selects the colors for his riding-dress. 
 It is true that one shadow of justification offers itself 
 for Phil.'s distinction. All principles are doctrines, 
 but all doctrines are not principles ; which, then, in 
 particular ? Why, those properly are principles which 
 contain the principia, the beginnings, or starting-points 
 of evolution, out of which any system of truth is 
 developed. Now, it may seem that the very starting- 
 point of our Protestant pretensions is, first of all, to 
 argue our title or right to be a church sui juris ; ap- 
 parently we must begin by making good our locus 
 standi, before we can be heard upon our doctrines. 
 And upon this mode of approach, the pleadings about 
 the title, or right to teach at all, taking precedency of 
 the pleadings about the particular things taught, would 
 be the principia, or beginnings of the whole process, 
 and so far. would be entitled by preference to the name 
 of principles. But such a mode of approach is merely 
 an accident, and contingent upon our being engaged 
 in a polemical discussion of Protestantism in relation 
 to Popery. That, however, is a pure matter of choice ; 
 Protestantism may be discussed, as though Rome were 
 not, in relation to its own absolute merits ; and this 
 treatment is the logical treatment, applying itself to 
 what is permanent in the nature of the object ; whereas 
 the other treatment applies itself to what is casual and 
 vanishing in the history (or the origin) of Protestantism. 
 For, after all, it would be no great triumph to Protest- 
 antism that she should prove her birthright to revolve 
 ks a primary planet in the Christian system ; that she 
 tad the same original right as Rome to wheel about the
 
 523 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 great central orb, undegraded to the rank of satellite 
 or secondary projection if, in the meantime, tele~ 
 scopes should reveal the fact that she was pretty nearly 
 a sandy desert. What a church teaches is true or not 
 true, without reference to her independent right of 
 teaching ; and eventually, when the irritations of 
 earthly feuds and political schisms shall be tran- 
 quillized by time, the philosophy of the whole ques- 
 tion will take an inverse order. The credentials of 
 a church will not be put in first, and the quality of 
 her doctrine discussed as a secondary question. On 
 the contrary, her credentials will be sought in her doc- 
 trine. The protesting church will say, I have the 
 right to stand separate, because I do stand ; and from 
 my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est 
 ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrine 
 That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is 
 even now valid with many ; and, when it becomes 
 universally current, then the principles, or great begin- 
 nings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the 
 centre, where Phil, places them, to the very locus 
 which he neglects. One church may say My doc- 
 trine must be holy, because it is admitted that I have 
 the authentic commission from Heaven to teach. But 
 equally another church may say My commission to 
 teach must be conceded, because my teaching is holy. 
 The first deduces the purity of her doctrine from her 
 Divine commission to teach. But the second, with 
 logic as forcible, deduces her Divine commission to 
 teach from the purity of her doctrine. 
 
 There is another expression of Phil.'s, to which I 
 ibject. He describes the doctrines held by all the
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 329 
 
 eparate Protestant churches as doctrines of Fictest- 
 antism. I would not delay either Phil, or myself foi 
 the sake of a trifle ; but an impossibility is not a trifle. 
 If from orthodox Turkey * you pass to heretic Persia, 
 if from the rigor of the Sonnees (orthodox Mussulmans) 
 to the laxity of the Sheeahs (Mahometan heretics), you 
 could not, in explaining those schisms, go on to say, 
 " Aid these are the doctrines of Islamism ; " for they 
 destroy each other. Both are supported by earthly 
 powers : but only one could be supported by a central 
 organ of Islamism, if such there were. So of Calvin- 
 ism and Arminianism ; you cannot call them doctrines 
 of Protestantism, as if growing out of some recon- 
 ciling Protestant principles ; one of the two, though 
 not manifested to human eyes in its falsehood, must 
 secretly be false ; and a falsehood cannot be a doc- 
 trine of Protestantism. It is more accurate to say, 
 that the separate creeds of Turkey and Persia are 
 within Mahometanism ; such, viz., as that neither ex- 
 cludes a man from the name of Mussulman ; and, 
 again, that Calvinism and Arminianism are doctrines 
 within the Protestant Church as a church of gen- 
 
 * " Orthodox Turkey : " At Mecca, or more probably 
 throughout the Mussulman world, the Ottoman Sultan is re- 
 garded as the true filial champion ed deen [i. e., of the faith]. 
 He is the right-hand pillar ; whereas the Shah of Persia is a 
 heterodox believer, and therefore an unsound pillar. But it illus- 
 trates powerfully the non-spirituality of this religion (though 
 pirated chiefly from the Bible) , that this great schism in Islam- 
 Ism does not turn upon any point of doctrine, bui simply upon a 
 most trivial question of historic fact viz . t who were dejure tht 
 Immediate successors of Mahomet
 
 330 TBOTESTANTISM. 
 
 eral toleration for all religious doctrines not demonatra- 
 bly hostile to any cardinal truth of Christianity. 
 
 Phil., then, we all understand, is not going to trav- 
 erse the vast field of Protestant opinions as they are 
 distributed through our many sects ; that would be 
 endless ; and he illustrates the mazy character of the 
 wilderness over which these sects are wandering, 
 
 "ubi passim 
 
 Palantes error recto de tramite pellit," 
 
 by the four cases of 1, the Calvinist ; 2, the* New- 
 manite ; 3, the Romanist ; * 4, the Evangelical enthu- 
 
 * " The Romanist." What, amongst Protestant sects ? Ay, 
 even so. It's Phil.'s mistake, not mine. He will endeavor to 
 doctor the case, by pleading that he was speaking universally of 
 Christian error ; but the position of the clause forbids this plea. 
 Not only in relation to what immediately precedes, the passage 
 must be supposed to contemplate Protestant error ; but the 
 immediate inference from it, viz., that " the world may well be 
 excused for doubting whether there is, after all, so much to be 
 gained by that liberty of private judgment, which is the essen- 
 tial characteristic of Protestantism ; whether it be not, after all, 
 merely a liberty to fall into error," nails Phil, to that construc- 
 tion argues too strongly that it is an oversight of indolence. 
 Phil, was sleeping for the moment, which is excusable enough 
 towards the end of a book, but hardly in section 1. P. S. I have 
 since observed (which not to have observed is excused, perhaps, 
 by the too complex machinery of hooks and eyes between the text 
 and the notes involving a double reference first, to the section ; 
 iecond, to the particular clause of the section) that Phil, has 
 uot here committed an inadvertency ; or, if he has, is determined 
 to fight himself through his inadvertency, rather than break up 
 His quaternion of cases. " In speaking of Romanism, as arising 
 from a misapplication of Protestant principles, we refer, not tl 
 Jiose who were born, but to those who have become members o?
 
 PBOTESTANTISM. 331 
 
 riast as holding systems of doctrine, " no one of 
 (rhich is capable of recommending itself to the favor- 
 Hie Church of Rome." What is the name of those people ? And 
 where do they live ? I have heard of many who think (and there 
 are cases in which most of us, that meddle with philosophy, are 
 apt to think) occasional principles of Protestantism available 
 for the defence of certain Roman Catholic mysteries too indis- 
 criminately assaulted by the Protestant zealot ; but, with thia 
 exception, I am not aware of any parties professing to derive their 
 Popish learnings from Protestantism ; it is in spite of Protestant- 
 ism, as seeming to them not strong enough, or through principles 
 omitted by Protestantism, which therefore seems to them not 
 careful enough or not impartial enough, that Protestants have 
 lapsed to Popery. Protestants have certainly been known to be- 
 come Papists, not through Popish arguments, but simply through 
 their own Protestant books ;*yet never, that I heard of, through 
 an affirmative process, as though any Protestant argument in- 
 volved the rudiments of Popery, but by a negative process, as 
 fancying the Protestant reasons, though lying in the right di- 
 rection, not going far enough; or, again, though right partially, 
 yet defective as a whole. Phil., therefore, seems to me absolutely 
 caught in a sort of Fur cos Caudinee, unless he has a dodge in 
 reserve "to puzzle us all. In a different point, T, that hold myself 
 a doctor seraphicus, and also inexpugnabilis upon quillets of 
 logic, justify Phil., whilst also I blame him. He defends himself 
 rightly for distinguishing between the Romanist and Newmanite 
 n the one hand, between the Calvinist and the Evangelican man 
 m the other, though perhaps a young gentleman, commencing 
 his studies on the Organon, will fancy that here he has Phil, in 
 a trap, for these distinctions, he will say, do not entirely exclude 
 each other as they ought to do. The class calling itself Evan 
 gelical, for instance, may also be Calvinistic ; the Newmanite is 
 not. therefore, anti-Romanish. True, says Phil. ; I am quite 
 aware of it. But to be aware of an objection is not to answer it. 
 fhe fact seems to be, that the actual combinations of life, no* 
 onforming to the truth of abstractions, compel us to seeming
 
 332 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 opinion of an impartial judge." Impartial ! but 
 what Christian can be impartial ? To be free from all 
 bias, and to begin his review of sects in that temper, 
 he must begin by being an infidel. Vainly a man 
 endeavors to reserve in a state of neutrality any pre- 
 conceptions that he may have formed for himself 01 
 prepossessions that he may have inherited from " mam- 
 ma; he cannot do it any more than he can dismiss 
 his own shadow. Every man that lives, has (or has 
 had) a mamma, who has made it impossible for him to 
 be neutral in religious beliefs. And it is strange to 
 contemplate the weakness of strong minds in fancying 
 that they can. Calvin, whilst amiably engaged in 
 hunting Servetus to death, and writing daily letters to 
 his friends, in which he expresses his hope that the 
 executive power would not think of burning the poor 
 man, since really justice would be quite satisfied by 
 cutting his head off, meets with some correspondents 
 who conceive (idiots that they were !) even that little 
 amputation not absolutely indispensable. But Calvin 
 soon settles their scruples. You don't perceive, he 
 
 breaches of logic. It would be right practically to distinguish 
 the Radical from the Whig ; and yet it might shock Duns or 
 Lombardus, the magister sententiarum, when he came to under- 
 stand that partially the principles of Radicals and Whigs coin- 
 cide. But, for all that, the logic which distinguishes them is 
 right ; and the apparent error must be sought in the fact, that 
 all cases (political or religious) being cases of life, are concretes, 
 which never conform to the exquisite truth of abstractions 
 Practically, the Radical is opposed to the Whig, though casually 
 the two are in conjunction continually ; for, as acting parti 
 tens, they work from different centres, and, finally, for differen
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 333 
 
 tells them, what this man has been about. When a 
 writer attacks Popery, it's very wrong in the Papists 
 to cut his head off ; and why ? Because he has only 
 been attacking error. But here lies the difference in 
 this case ; Servetus had been attacking the TRUTH. 
 Do you see the distinction, my friends ? Consider it, 
 and I am sure you will be sensible that this quite 
 alters the case. It is shocking, it is perfectly ridicu- 
 lous, that the Bishop of Rome should touch a hair of 
 any man's head for contradicting him; and why ? 
 Because, do you see ? he is wrong. On the other hand, 
 it is evidently agreeable to philosophy, that I, John 
 Calvin, should shave off the hair, and, indeed, the 
 head itself (as I heartily hope * will be done in this 
 
 * The reader may imagine that, in thus abstracting Calvin's 
 epistolary sentiments, I am a little improving them. Certainly 
 they would bear improvement, but that is not my business. 
 What the reader sees here is but the result of bringing scattered 
 passages into closer juxtaposition ; whilst, as to the strongest 
 (viz., the most sanguinary) sentiments here ascribed to him, it 
 will be a sufficient evidence of my fidelity to the literal truth, 
 if I cite three separate sentences. Writing to Parrel, he says, 
 ' Spero capitale saltern fore judicium." Sentence of the court, 
 he hopes, will, at any rate, reach the life of Servetus. Die he 
 must, and die he shall. But why should he die a cruel death ? 
 Psenos vero atrocitatem remitti cupio." To the same purpose, 
 when writing to Sultzer, he expresses his satisfaction in being 
 able to assure him that a principal civic officer of Geneva was, in 
 this case, entirely upright, and animated by the most virtuous 
 Benliments. Indeed ! What an interesting character ! and in 
 what way now might this good man show this beautiful tender- 
 ness of conscience ? Why, by a fixed resolve that Servetus should 
 not in any case escape the catastrophe which I, John Calvin, am 
 longing for (" ut saltern exitum, quern optamus, non fugiat ")
 
 334 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 present case) of any man presumptuous enough to con- 
 tradict me ; but then, why ? For a reason that makes 
 all the difference in the world, and which, one would 
 think, idiocy itself could not overlook, viz., that I, 
 John Calvin, am right right, through three degrees 
 of comparison right, righter, or more right, Tightest, 
 or most right. 
 
 The self-sufficingness of the Bible, and the right of 
 private judgment here, then, are the two great charac- 
 ters in which Protestantism commences ; these are the 
 bulwarks behind which it intrenches itself against 
 Rome. And it is remarkable that these two great pre- 
 liminary laws, which soon diverge into fields so differ- 
 ent, at the first are virtually one and the same law. 
 The refusal of a Delphic oracle at Rome alien to the 
 Bible, extrinsic to the Bible, and claiming the sole in- 
 terpretation of the Bible ; the refusal of an oracle 
 that reduced the Bible to a hollow mask, underneath 
 which fraudulently introducing itself any earthly voice 
 could mimic a heavenly voice, was in effect to refuse 
 
 Finally, writing to the same Sultzer, he remarks that when we 
 see the Papists such avenging champions of their own super- 
 stitious fables as not to falter in shedding innocent blood, " pudeat 
 Christianos magistratus [as if the Roman Catholic magistrates 
 were not Christians] in tuenda certd veritate nihil prorsus ha- 
 jere aninii " " Christian magistrates ought to be ashamed of 
 themselves for manifesting no energy at all in the vindication of 
 truth undeniable;" yet really since these magistrates had at 
 that time the full design, which design not many days after they 
 executed, of maintaining truth by fire and faggot, one does not 
 nee the call upon them for blushes so very deep as Calvin requires. 
 Hands so crimson with blood might compensate the absence <>> 
 crimson cheeks.
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 335 
 
 the coercion of this false oracle over each man's con- 
 scientious judgment ; to make the Bible independen' 
 of the Pope, was to make man independent of all re 
 ligious controllers. The self-suflicingness of Scripture, 
 its independency of an} 7 external interpreter, passed in 
 one moment into the other great Protestant doctrine of 
 Toleration. It was but the same triumphal monument 
 under a new angle of sight, the golden and silver faces 
 of the same heraldic shield. The very same act which 
 denies the right of interpretation to a mysterious 
 Papal phoenix, renewed from generation to generation, 
 having the antiquity and the incomprehensible omni- 
 science of the Simorg,* that ancient bird in Southey, 
 transferred this right of mere necessity to the individ- 
 uals of the whole human race. For where else could 
 it have been lodged ? Any attempt in any other di- 
 rection was but to restore the Papal power in a new 
 impersonation. Every man, therefore, suddenly ob- 
 tained the right of interpreting the Bible for himself. 
 But the word " right r ' obtained a new sense. Every 
 man has the right, protected by the Queen's Bench, of 
 publishing an unlimited number of metaphysical sys- 
 tems ; and, under favor of the same indulgent Bench, 
 we all enjoy the unlimited right of laughing at him. 
 But not the whole race of man has a right to coerce, 
 in the exercise of his intellectual rights, the humblest 
 of individuals. The rights of men are thus unspeak- 
 
 * " The Simorg:" If the reader has not made the ac- 
 quaintance of this mysterious bird, eldest of created things, it ii 
 lime he should. The Simorg would help him out of all his 
 troubles, if the reader could find him at home. Let him consult 
 Seuthey's " Thalaba."
 
 336 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 ably elevated ; for, being now freed from all anxiety 
 being sacred as merely legal rights, they suddenly ris 
 into a new mode of responsibility as intellectual rights. 
 As a Protestant, every mature man, the very humblest 
 and poorest, has the same dignified right over his own 
 opinions and profession of faith that he has over his 
 own hearth. But his hearth can rarely be abused : 
 whereas his religious system, being a vast kingdom, 
 opening by immeasurable gates upon worlds of light 
 and worlds of darkness, now brings him within a new 
 amenability called upon to answer new impeach- 
 ments, and to seek for new assistances. Formerly 
 another was answerable for his belief; if that were 
 wrong, it was no fault of his. Now he has new rights, 
 but these have burdened him with new obligations. 
 Now he is crowned with the glory and the palms of an 
 intellectual creature, but he is alarmed by the certainty 
 of corresponding struggles. Protestantism it is that 
 has created him into this child and heir of liberty ; 
 Protestantism it is that has invested him with these 
 unbounded privileges of private judgment, giving him 
 in one moaent the sublime powers of a Pope within 
 his one solitary conscience ; but Protestantism it is 
 that has introduced him to the most dreadful of re- 
 iponsibilities. 
 
 I repeat that the twin maxims, the columns of Her- 
 cules through which Protestantism entered the great 
 sea of human activities, were originally but two aspects 
 of on(; law : to deny the Papal control over men's 
 conscience being to affirm man's self-control, was, 
 therefore, to affirm man's universal right to toleration 
 vhich again implied a corresponding duty of toleration
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 337 
 
 Under this bi-fronted law, generated by Protestantism, 
 bat in its turn regulating Protestantism, Phil, under- 
 takes to develop all the principles that belong to a 
 Protestant church. The seasonableness of such an 
 investigation its critical application to an evil now 
 spreading like a fever through Europe he perceives 
 fully, and in the following terms expresses this percep- 
 tion : 
 
 " That we stand on the brink of a great theological crisis, that 
 the problem must soon be solved, how far orthodox Christianity 
 is possible for those who are not behind their age in scholarship 
 and science ; this is a solemn fact, which may be ignored by the 
 partisans of short-sighted bigotry, but which is felt by all, and 
 confessed by most of those who are capable of appreciating its 
 reality and importance. The deep Sibylline vaticinations of 
 Coleridge's philosophical mind, the practical working of Arnold's 
 religious sentimentalism, and the open acknowledgment of many 
 divines who are living examples of the spirit of the age, have 
 all, in different ways, foretold the advent of a Church of the 
 Future." 
 
 This is from the preface, p. ix., where the phrase, 
 Church of the Future, points to the Prussian minister's" 
 Bunsen's) Kirche der Zukunft ; but in the body of 
 the work, and not far from its close (p. 114), he re- 
 jurs to this crisis, and more circumstantially. 
 
 Phil, embarrasses himself and his readers in this 
 development of Protestant principles. His own view 
 of the task before him requires that he should sepa- 
 rate himself from the consideration of any particular 
 thurch, and lay aside all partisanship plausible ot 
 not plausible. If. is his own overture that warrants UB 
 in expecting this. And yet, before we have travelled 
 three measured inches, he is found entangling himself 
 22
 
 338 FROTESTAXTISM. 
 
 with Church of Englandism. Let me not be misun- 
 derstood, as though, borrowing a Bentham word, I 
 were therefore a Jerry Benthamite: I, that may de- 
 scribe myself generally as Philo-PhiL, am not less a 
 son of the " Reformed Anglican Church " than Phil. 
 Consequently, it is not likely that, in any vindication 
 of that church, simply as such, and separately for itself, 
 I should be the man to find grounds of exception. 
 Loving most of what Phil, loves, loving Phil, himself, 
 and hating (I grieve to say), with a theological hatred, 
 whatever Phil, hates, -why should I demur at this 
 particular point to a course of argument that travels 
 in the line of my own partialities ? And yet I do de- 
 mur. Having been promised a philosophic defence of 
 the principles concerned in the great European schism 
 of the sixteenth century, suddenly we find ourselves 
 collapsing from that altitude of speculation into a de- 
 fence of one individual church. Nobody would com- 
 plain of Phil., if after having deduced philosophical!) 
 the principles upon which all Protestant separation 
 'from Rome should revolve, he had gone forward to 
 show, that in some one of the Protestant churches 
 more than in others, these principles had been asserted 
 with peculiar strength, or carried through with special 
 consistency, or associated pre-eminently with the other 
 graces of a Christian church, such as a ritual more im- 
 pressive to the heart of man where lies the defence 
 for the sublime Anglican Liturgy ; or a polity more 
 symmetrical with the structure of English society 
 where lies the defence of Episcopacy. Once having 
 unfolded from philosophic grounds the primary condi- 
 tions of a pure Scriptural church, Phil, might then
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 339 
 
 rithout blame, have turned sharp round upon us, 
 laying, such being the conditions under which the 
 great idea of a true Christian church must be con- 
 structed, I now go on to show that the Church of Eng- 
 land has conformed to those conditions more faithfully 
 than any other. But to entangle the pure outlines QJ 
 the idealizing mind with the practical forms of any 
 militant church, embarrassed (as we know all churches 
 tc have been) by pre-occupations of judgment, derived 
 from feuds too local and interests too political, moving 
 also (as we know all churches to have moved) in a 
 spirit of compromise, occasionally from mere necessi- 
 ties of position ; this is in the result to injure the ob- 
 ject of the writer doubly : first, as leaving an impres- 
 sion of partisanship : the reader is mistrustful from the 
 first, as against a judge that in reality is an advocate ; 
 second, without reference to the effect upon the reader, 
 directly to Phil, it is injurious, by fettering the free- 
 dom of his speculations ; or, if leaving their freedom 
 undisturbed, by narrowing their compass. 
 
 And, if Phil., as to the general movement of his 
 Protestant pleadings, modulates too little in the trans- 
 cendental key, sometimes he does so too much. For 
 instance, at p. 69, sec. 35, we find him half calling 
 upon Protestantism to account for her belief in God ; 
 now then ? Is this belief special to Protestants ? Are 
 Roman Catholics, are those of the Greek, the Arme- 
 .lian, and other Christian Churches, atheistically given ? 
 We used to be told that there is no royal road to 
 geometry. I don't know whether there is or not ; tut 
 I am sure there is no Protestant by-road, no Reforma- 
 tion short-cut, to the demonstration of Deity. It is
 
 340 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 true that Phil, exonerates his philosophic scholar 
 when throwing himself in Protestant freedom upon 
 pure intelbctual aids, from the vain labor of such an 
 effort. He consigns him, however philosophic, to the 
 evidence of " inevitable assumptions, upon axiomatic 
 postulates, which the reflecting mind is compelled to 
 accept, and which no more admit of doubt and cavil 
 than of establishment by formal proof." I am not 
 sure whether I understand Phil, in this section. Ap- 
 parently he is glancing at Kant. Kant was the first 
 person, and perhaps the last, that ever undertook 
 formally to demonstrate the indemonstrability of God. 
 He showed that the three great arguments for the 
 existence of the Deity were virtually one, inasmuch 
 as the two weaker borrowed their value and vis apo- 
 deictica from the more rigorous metaphysical argument. 
 The physico-theological argument he forced to back, 
 as it were, into the cosmological, and that into the 
 ontological. After this reluctant regressus of the 
 three into one, shutting up like a spy-glass, which 
 (with the iron hand of Hercules forcing Cerberus up 
 to daylight) the stern man of Koanigsberg resolutely 
 dragged to the front of the arena, nothing remained, 
 now that he had this pet scholastic argument driven up 
 Into a corner, than to break its neck which he did. 
 Kant took the conceit out of all the three arguments; 
 'cub, if this is what Phil, alludes to, he should have 
 added, that these three, after all, were only the argu- 
 ments of speculating or theoretic reason. To this 
 faculty Kant peremptorily denied the power of demon- 
 strating the Deity ; but then that same apodeixis 
 wh'ch he had thus inexorably torn from reason undef
 
 PKOTESTANTISM. 34] 
 
 Kie manifestation, Kant himself restored to the reason 
 in another (the praktische vernunfi). God he asserts 
 to be a postulate of the human reason, as speaking 
 through the conscience and will, not proved ostensively, 
 out indirectly proved as being wanted indispensably, 
 and presupposed in other necessities of our human 
 nature. This, probably, is what Phil, means by hia 
 short-hand expression of "axiomatic postulates." But 
 then it should not have been said that the case does 
 not " admit of formal proof," since the proof is as 
 " formal " and rigorous by this new method of Kant 
 as by the old obsolete methods of Sam. Clarke and 
 the schoolmen.* 
 
 But it is not the too high or the too low the too 
 much or the too little of what one might call by 
 analogy the transcendental course, which I charge 
 upon Phil. It is, that he is too desultory too 
 eclectic. And the secret purpose, which seems to me 
 predominant throughout his work, is, not so much the 
 defence of Protestantism, or even of the Anglican 
 Church, as a report of the latest novelties that have 
 found a roosting-place in the English Church, amongst 
 the most temperate of those churchmen who keep pace 
 with modern philosophy ; in short, it is a selection 
 from the classical doctrines of religion, exhibited under 
 their newest revision ; or, generally, it is an attempt 
 
 * The method of Des Cartes was altogether separate and pe- 
 culiar to himself; it is a more conjuror's juggle; and yet, what 
 is strange, like some other audacious sophisms, it is capable of 
 being so stated as most of all to baffle the subtle dialectician; 
 uid Kant himself, though not cheated, was never so much per- 
 plexed in his life as in the effort to make its hollow-ness apparent
 
 342 PKOl'KSTANTISM. 
 
 to show, from what is going on amongst the most 
 moving orders in the English Church, how far it is 
 possible that strict orthodoxy should bend, on the one 
 Bide, to new impulses, derived from an advancing 
 philosophy, and yet, on the other side, should recon- 
 cile itself, both verbally and in spirit, with ancient 
 standards. But if Phil, is eclectic, then I will be 
 eclectic ; if Phil, has a right to be desultory, then J 
 have a right. Phil, is my leader. I can't, in reason, 
 be expected to be better than he is. If I'm wrong, 
 Phil, ought to set me a better example. And here, 
 before this honorable audience of the public, I charge 
 all my errors (whatever they may be, past or coming) 
 upon Phil.'s misconduct. 
 
 Having thus established my patent of vagrancy, aizd 
 my license for picking and choosing, I choose out these 
 three articles to toy with : first, Bibliolatry ; second, 
 Development applied to the Bible and Christianity ; 
 third, Philology, as the particular resource against 
 false philosophy, relied on by Phil. 
 
 Bibliolatry. We Protestants charge upon the 
 Ponteficii, as the more learned of our fathers always 
 Called the Roman Catholics, Mariolatry ; they pay un- 
 due honors, say we, to the Virgin. They in return 
 charge upon us, Bibliolatry, or superstitious allegiance 
 an idolatrous homage to the words, syllables, and 
 punctuation of the Bible. TLey, according to us, 
 deify a woman ; and we, according to them, deify an 
 arrangement of printer's types. As to their error, we 
 need not mind that : let us attend to our own. And 
 to this extent it is evident at a glance that Bibliolatrists 
 tiusl be wrong viz., because, as a pun vanishes on
 
 PBOTESTA.NTISM. 343 
 
 being translated into another language, even so would, 
 Mid must melt away, like ice in a hot-house, a large 
 majority of those conceits which every Christian nation 
 is apt to ground upon the verbal text of the Scriptures 
 in its own separate vernacular version. But once 
 aware that much of their Bibliolatry depends upor 
 ignorance of Hebrew and Greek, and often depends 
 upon peculiarity of idiom or structures in modem 
 tongues, cautious people begin to suspect the whole. 
 Here arises a very interesting, startling, and perplexing 
 situation for all who venerate the Bible ; one which 
 must always have existed for prying, inquisitive people, 
 but which has been incalculably sharpened for the 
 apprehension of these days by the extraordinary ad- 
 vances made and being made in Oriental and Greek phi- 
 lology. It is a situation of public scandal even to the 
 deep reverencers of the Bible ; but a situation of much 
 more than scandal, of real grief, to the profound and 
 sincere amongst religious people. On the one hand, 
 viewing the Bible as the Word of God, and not merely 
 to in the sense of its containing most salutary coun- 
 sels, but, in the highest sense, of its containing a 
 revelation of the most awful secrets, they cannot for a 
 moment listen to the pretence that the Bible has 
 benefited by God's inspiration only as other good 
 vooks may be said to have done. They are confiden 
 that, in a much higher sense, and in a sense incommu- 
 nicable to other books, it is inspired. Yet, on the 
 other hand, as they will not tell lies, or countenance 
 lies, even in what seems the service of religion, they 
 cannot hide from themselves that the materials of this 
 imperishable book are perishable, frail, liable to crum-
 
 344 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 ble, and actually have crumbled to some extent, U 
 various instances. There is, therefore, lying brcadly 
 before us, something like what Kant called an anti- 
 nomy a case where two laws equally binding on the 
 mind are, or seem to be, in collision. Such cases 
 occur in morals cases which are carried out of the 
 general rule, and the jurisdiction of that rule, by pe- 
 culiar deflexions; and from the word case \ve derive 
 the word casuistry, as a general science dealing with 
 mch anomalous cases. There is a casuistry, also, for 
 the speculative understanding, as well as for the moral 
 (which in Kant's terminology is the practical} under- 
 standing. And this question, as to the inspiration of 
 the Bible, with its apparent conflict of forces;, repelling 
 it and yet affirming it, is one of its most perplexing 
 and most momentous problems. 
 
 My own solution of the problem would reconcile all 
 that is urged against an inspiration with all that the 
 internal necessity of the case would plead in behalf of 
 an inspiration. So would Phil's. His distinction, like 
 mine, would substantially come down to this that 
 the grandeur and extent of religious truth is not of a 
 nature to be affected by verbal changes such as can be 
 made by time, or accident, or without treacherous de- 
 sign. It is like lightning, which could not be mutilated, 
 or truncated, or polluted. But it may be well to re- 
 hearse a little more in detail, both PLil.'s view and 
 nay own. Let my principal go first ; make way, I 
 desire, for my leader : let this honorable man Phil., 
 whom I, Philo-PhiL, now take by the right hand, and 
 solemnly present to the public iet this Daniel who 
 has come to judgment have precedency, as, in all re* 
 on, it is my duty to see that he has.
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 345 
 
 Whilst rejecting altogether any inspiration as at- 
 taching to the separate words and phrases of the 
 Scriptures, Phil, insists upon such an inspiration as 
 attaching to the spiritual truths and doctrines deliv- 
 ered in these Scriptures. And he places this theory 
 in a striking light, equally for what it affirms and for 
 what it denies, by these two arguments first (ic 
 affirmation of the real spiritual inspiration), thst a 
 series of more than thirty writers, speaking in succes- 
 sion along a vast line of time, and absolutely without 
 means of concert, yet all combine unconsciously to 
 one end lock like parts of a great machine into one 
 system conspire to the unity of a very elaborate 
 scheme, without being at all aware of what was to 
 come after. Here, for instance, is one, living nearly 
 one thousand six hundred years before the last in the 
 series, who lays a foundation (in reference to man's 
 ruin, to God's promises and plan for human restora- 
 tion), which is built upon and carried forward by all, 
 without exception, that follow. Here come a multi- 
 tude that prepare each for his successor that uncon- 
 sciously integrate each other that, finally, when 
 reviewed, make up a total drama, of which each writer's 
 separate share would have been utterly imperfect 
 without corresponding parts that he could not have 
 oreseen. At length all is finished. A profound piece 
 of music, a vast oratorio, perfect and of elaborate 
 unity, has resulted from a long succession of strains, 
 each for itself fragmentary. On such a final creation 
 resulting from such a distraction of parts, it is indis- 
 pensable to suppose an overru'-ing inspiration, in ordei 
 it all to account for the final result of a most elaborate
 
 846 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 harmony. Besides, which would argue some incon- 
 ceivable magic, if we did not assume a providential 
 inspiration watching over the coherencies, tendencies, 
 and intertessellations (to use a learned word) of the 
 whole, it happens that, in many instances, typica. 
 things are recorded things ceremonial, that coulil 
 have no meaning to the person recording prospec- 
 tive words, that were reported and transmitted in a 
 spirit of confiding faith, but that could have little 
 meaning to the reporting parties for many hundreds of 
 years. Briefly, a great mysterious word is spelt, as it 
 were, by the whole sum of the Scriptural books 
 every separate book forming a letter or syllable in 
 that secret and that unfinished word, as it was for so 
 many ages. This cooperation of ages, not able to 
 communicate or concert arrangements with each other, 
 is neither more nor less an argument of an overruling 
 inspiration, than if the separation of the contributing 
 parties were by space, and not by time. As if, for 
 example, every island at the same moment were to 
 send its contribution, without previous concert, to a 
 sentence or chapter of a book ; in which case the re- 
 gult, if full of meaning, much more if full of awful 
 und profound meaning, could not be explained ration- 
 ally without the assumption of a supernatural over- 
 ruling of these unconscious cooperators to a common 
 result. So far on behalf of inspiration. Yet, on the 
 other hand, as an argument in denial of any blind 
 mechanic inspiration cleaving to words and syllables, 
 Phil, notices this consequence as resulting from such 
 in assumption, viz., that if you adopt any one gospel 
 Bt John's suppose, or any one narrative of a particula
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 347 
 
 iransaction, as inspired in this minute and pedantic 
 sense, then for every other report, which, adhering to 
 the spiritual value of the circumstances, and virtuallj 
 the same, should differ in the least of the details, there 
 would instantly arise a solemn degradation. All parts 
 of Scripture, in fact, would thus be made active f.fid 
 Dpeiative in degrading each other. 
 
 Such is Phil.'s way of explaining tysoTtvEvana* 
 {theopneustia), or divine prompting, so as to reconcile 
 the doctrine affirming a virtual inspiration, an inspira- 
 tion as to the truths revealed, with a peremptory 
 denial of any inspiration at all, as to the mere verbal 
 vehicle of those revelations. He is evidently as sin- 
 cere in regard to the inspiration which he upholds as 
 in regard to that which he denies. Phil, is honest, 
 and Phil, is able. Now comes my turn. I rise to 
 support my leader, and shall attempt to wrench this 
 notion of a verbal inspiration from the hands of its 
 champions by a reductio ad absurdum viz., by show- 
 ing the monstrous consequences to which it leads 
 which form of logic Phil, also has employed ; but 
 mine is different and more elaborate. Yet, first of all, 
 
 * " tonvtvarun: " I must point out to Phil, an oversight of 
 his as to this word at p. 45; he there describes ihe doctrine of 
 tkeopneustia as being that of" plenary and verbal inspiration." 
 But this he cannot mean, for obviously this word theopneustia 
 comprehends equally the verbal inspiration which he is denounc- 
 ing, and the inspiration of power or spiritual virtue which he is 
 substituting. Neither Phil., nor any one of his scnool, is to be 
 understood as rejecting theopneustia, but as rejecting that par- 
 ticular mode of theopneustia which appeals to the eye by moul- 
 lering symbols, in favor of that other mode which appeals to 
 the heart by incorruptible radiations of inner truth.
 
 348 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 let me frankly confess to the reader, that some people 
 allege a point-blank assertion by Scripture itself of ita 
 own verbal inspiration ; which assertion, if it really 
 had any existence, would summarily put down all 
 cavils of human dialectics. That makes it necessary 
 to review this assertion. This famous passage oi 
 Scripture, this locus classicus, or prerogative texi, 
 pleaded for the verbatim et literatim inspiration of the 
 Bible, is the following ; and I will so exhibit its very 
 words as that the reader, even if no Grecian, may un- 
 derstand the point in litigation. The passage is this r 
 TlaGa. yQatfrj &f.onvVGTog xai BgMtyog, &c., taken from 
 St. Paul (2 Tim. iii. 16). Let us construe it literally, 
 expressing the Greek by Latin characters : Pasa graphe, 
 all written lore (or every writing) theopneustos, God- 
 breathed, or, God-prompted kai, and (or, also) 
 ophelimos, serviceable pros, towards, didaskalian, 
 doctrinal truth. Now this sentence, when thus rendered 
 into English according to the rigor of the Grecian letter, 
 wants something to complete its sense it wants an is. 
 There is a subject, as the logicians say, and there is a 
 predicate (or, something affirmed of that subject), but 
 there is no copula to connect them we miss the is. 
 This omission is common in Greek, but cannot be al- 
 lowed in English. The is must be supplied ; but where 
 must it be supplied ? That's the very question, for 
 there is a choice between two places ; and according to 
 the choice, will the word theopneustos become part of 
 the subject, or part of the predicate ; which will make 
 a world of difference. Let us try it both ways : 
 
 I. All writing inspired by God (i. e. being inspired 
 >y God, supposing it inspired, which makes theop-
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 349 
 
 ntustos part of the subject) is also profitable for teach- 
 ing, &c. 
 
 2. All writing is inspired by God, and profitable, 
 &c. (which makes theopneustos part of the predicate.) 
 
 Now, in this last way of construing the text, which is 
 the way adopted by our authorized version, one objec- 
 tion strikes everybody at a glance viz., that St. Paul 
 could not possibly mean to say of all writing, indis 
 criminately, that it was divinely inspired, this being so 
 revoltingly opposed to the truth. It follows, there- 
 fore, that, on this way of interpolating the is, we must 
 understand the Apostle to use the word graphe, 
 writing, in a restricted sense, not for writing generally, 
 but for sacred writing, or (as our English phrase runs) 
 " Holy Writ ; " upon which will arise three separate 
 demurs : First, one already stated by Phil, viz., that, 
 when graphe is used in this sense, it is accompanied 
 by the article ; the phrase is either 77 7C<jpJ7, " the 
 writing," or else (as in St. Luke) at yQacpai, " the 
 writings," just as in English it is said, "the Scripture," 
 or " the Scriptures." Secondly, that, according to the 
 Greek usage, this would not be the natural place for 
 introducing the is. Thirdly which disarms the 
 whole objection from this text, howsoever construed 
 that, after all, it leaves the dispute with the bibliola- 
 ters wholly untouched. We also, the anti-bibliolaters, 
 ay that all Scripture is inspired, though we may not 
 therefore suppose the Apostle to be here insisting on 
 fchat doctrine. But no matter whether he is or not, 
 in relation to this dispute. Both parties are contend- 
 ing for the inspiration so far they are agreed ; the 
 question between them arises
 
 350 PKOTESTANTISST. 
 
 point viz., as to the mode of that inspiration, whether 
 incarnating its golden light in the corruptibilities ol 
 perishing syllables, or in the sanctities of indefeasible, 
 word-transcending ideas. Now, upon that question, 
 the apostolic words, torture them how you please, say 
 nothing at all. 
 
 There is, then, no such dogma (or, to speak Gcr- 
 mamce, no such macht-sprucli) in behalf of verbal 
 inspiration as has been ascribed to St. Paul, and I 
 pass to my own argument against it. This argument 
 turns upon the self-confounding tendency of the com- 
 mon form ascribed to Qsonv SVGTIO., or divine inspiration. 
 When translated from its true and lofty sense of an 
 inspiration brooding, with outstretched wings, over 
 the mighty abyss of secret truth to the vulgar sense 
 of an inspiration, burrowing, like a rabbit or a worm, 
 in grammatical quillets and syllables, mark how v it 
 comes down to nothing at all ; mark how a stream, 
 pretending to derive itself from a heavenly fountain, 
 is finally lost and confounded in a morass of human 
 perplexities. 
 
 First of all, at starting, we have the inspiration (No. 
 1) to the original composers of the sacred books. 
 That I grant, though distinguishing as to its nature. 
 
 Next, we want another inspiration (No. 2) for the 
 countless translators of the Bible. Of what use is it 
 to a German, to a Swiss, or to a Scotsman, that, three 
 thousand years (plus two hundred) before the Refor- 
 mation, the author of the Pentateuch was kept from 
 erring by a divine restraint over his words, if the 
 authors of this Reformation Luther, suppose, Zwin 
 gle, John Knox either making translations them
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 351 
 
 selves, or relying upon translations made by others 
 under no such verbal restraint, have been left free to 
 bias his mind, pretty nearly as much as if the orignal 
 Hebrew writer had been resigned to his own human 
 discretion ? 
 
 Thirdly, even if we adopt the inspiration No. 2, that 
 will not avail us ; because many different translators 
 exist. Does the very earliest translation of the Law 
 and the Prophets viz., the Greek translation of the 
 Septuagint, always agree verbally with the Hebrew? 
 Or the Samaritan Pentateuch always with the Hebrew ? 
 Or do the earliest Latin versions of the entire Bible 
 agree verbally with modern Latin versions ? Jerome's 
 Latin version, for instance, memorable as being that 
 adopted by the Romish Church, and known under the 
 name of the Vulgate, does it agree verbally with the 
 Latin versions of the Bible or parts of the Bible made 
 since the Reformation ? In the English, again, if we 
 begin with the translation still sleeping in MS., made 
 five centuries ago in fact about Chaucer's time 
 and passing from that to the first printed translation 
 (which was, I think, Coverdale's, in 1535), if we thence 
 travel down to our own day, so as to include all that 
 have confined themselves to separate versions of some 
 one book, or even of some one cardinal text, countless 
 other versions that differ and to the idolater of 
 words all differences are important. Here, then, on 
 that doctrine of inspiration which ascribes so much to 
 the power of verbal accuracy, we shall want a third 
 inspiration (No. 3) for the guidance of each separate 
 Christian applying himself to the Scriptures in hig 
 mother tongue. The man who seeks to benefit by in
 
 352 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 spiration in his choice of a translator will nave to 
 select from a multitude, since nobody contends that 
 the truth is uniformly exhibited throughout any one 
 version, but grants that it is dispersed in fractions 
 through a multitude. 
 
 Fourthly, as these differences of version arise often 
 under the same reading of the original text ; but as, 
 in the meantime, there are many different readings, 
 here a fourth source of possible error calls for a fourth 
 inspiration overruling us to the proper choice amongst 
 various readings. What may be called a " textual " 
 inspiration for selecting the right reading is requisite 
 for the very same reason, neither more nor less, which 
 supposes any verbal inspiration originally requisite for 
 constituting a right reading. It matters not in which 
 stage of the Bible's progress the error commences ; 
 first stage and last stage are all alike in the sight of 
 God. There was, reader, as perhaps you know, about 
 six score years ago, another Phil., not the same as this 
 Phil, now before us (who would be quite vexed if you 
 fancied him as old as all that comes to oh dear, no ! 
 he's not near as old) well, that earlier Phil, was 
 Bentley, who wrote (under the name of Phileleutheros 
 Lipsiensis) a pamphlet connected with this very sub- 
 ject, partly against an English infidel of that day. In 
 that phamphlet, Phil, the first pauses to consider and 
 value this very objection from textual variation to the 
 validity of Scripture : for the infidel (as is usual with 
 infidels) being no great scholar, had argued as though 
 it were impossible to urge anything whatever for the 
 Word of God, since so vast a variety in the readings 
 'endered it inpossible to know what was the Word of
 
 PBOTESTANTISM. 353 
 
 God. Bentley, though rather rough, from having too 
 often to deal with shallow coxcombs, was really and 
 unaffectedly a pious man. He was shocked at this 
 argument, and set himself seriously to consider it. 
 Now, as all the various readings were Greek, and as 
 Bentley happened to be the first of Grecians, his de- 
 liberate review of this argument is entitled to great 
 attention. There were at that moment when Bentley 
 spoke, something more (as I recollect) than ten thou- 
 sand varieties of reading in the text of the New Testa- 
 ment ; so many had been collected in the early part of 
 Queen Anne's reign by Wetstein, the Dutchman, who 
 was then at the head of the collators. Mill, the Eng- 
 lishman, was at that very time making further colla- 
 tions. How many he added, I cannot tell without 
 consulting books a thing which I very seldom do. 
 But since that day, and long after Bentley and Mill 
 were in their graves, Griesbach, the German, rose to 
 the top of the tree, by towering above them all in the 
 accuracy of his collations. Yet, as the harvest comes 
 before the gleanings, we may be sure that Wetstein's 
 barn housed the very wealth of all this variety. Of 
 this it was, then, that Bentley spoke. And what was 
 it that he spoke ? Why, he, the great scholar, pro- 
 nounced, as with the authority of a Chancery decree, 
 that the vast majority of various readings made no 
 difference at all in the sense. In the sense, observe ; 
 but many things might make a difference in the sense 
 which would still leave the doctrine undisturbed. For 
 instance, in the passage about a camel going through 
 the eye of a needle, it will make a very noticeable 
 Difference in the sense, whether yoa read in the Greek 
 
 23
 
 354 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 word for camel the oriental animal of that name, or a 
 ship's cable, sometimes so called ; but no difference 
 at all arises in the spiritual doctrine. Or, illustrat- 
 ing the case out of Shakspeare, it makes no difference 
 as to the result, whether you read in Hamlet " to take 
 arms against a sea of troubles," or (as has been sug- 
 gested), " against a siege of troubles : " but it makes 
 a difference as to the integrity of the image.* What 
 has a sea to do with arms ? What has a camel,f tho 
 quadruped, to do with a needle ? A prodigous minor- 
 ity, therefore, there is of such various readings as 
 
 * " Integrity of the image :" One of the best notes ever 
 written by Warburton was in justification of the old reading, 
 sea. It was true, that against a sea it would be idle to take 
 arms. We, that have lived since Warburton's day, have learned 
 by the solemn example of Mrs. Partington (which, it is to be 
 ftoped, none of us will ever forget) , how useless, how vain it is 
 to take up a mop against the Atlantic Ocean. Great is the mop, 
 great is Mrs. Partington, but greater is the Atlantic. Yet, 
 though all arms must be idle against the sea considered literally, 
 and xara njv (parraatav under that image, Warburton contend- 
 ed justly that all images, much employed, evanesce into the 
 ideas which they represent. A sea of troubles comes to mean 
 only a multitude of troubles. No image of the sea is suggested ; 
 and arms, incongruous in relation to the literal sea, is not so in 
 relation to a multitude; besides, that the image arms itself, 
 evanesces for the same reason into resistance. For this one note, 
 which I cite from boyish remembrance, I have always admired 
 the subtlety of Warburton. 
 
 t Meantime, though using this case as an illustration, I be- 
 lievs that camel is, after all, the true translation; first on ac- 
 eount of the undoubted proverb in the East about the elepha *4 
 going through the needle's eye; the relation is that of contrntt 
 M to magnitude; and the same relation holds as to the eainaJ
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 355 
 
 lightly affect the sense ; but this minor ty becomes 
 next to nothing, when we inquire for such as affect 
 any doctrine. This was Bentley's opinion upon the 
 possible disturbance offered to the Christian by various 
 readings of the New Testament. You thought that the 
 carelessness, or, at times, even the treachery of men, 
 through so many centuries, must have ended in cor- 
 rupting the original truth ; yet, after all, you see the 
 light burns as brightly and steadily as ever. We, 
 now, that are not bibliolatrists, no more believe that, 
 from the disturbance of a few words here and there, 
 any evangelical truth can have suffered a wound or 
 mutilation, than we believe that the burning of a wood, 
 or even of a forest, which happens in our vast Ameri- 
 can possessions, sometimes from natural causes (light* 
 ning or spontaneous combustion), sometimes from an 
 Indian's carelessness in lighting his culinary fires, 
 Bometimes from an Englishman's carelessness, when 
 throwing away into a drift of dry leaves the fuming 
 reliques of his cigar, can seriously have injured botany, 
 But for him, who conceives an inviolable sanctity to 
 aave settled upon each word and particle of the origi- 
 nal record, there should have been strictly required an 
 inspiration (No. 5) to prevent the possibility of vari- 
 ous readings arising. It is too late, however, to pray 
 for that ; the various readings have arisen ; here they 
 
 and the needle's eye; secondly, because the proper word for a 
 cable, it has been alleged, is not " camelus," but " canu'lug." 
 What has an elephant to do with a needle ? Why, he has this to 
 do : the needle's eye, under its narrow function, takes charge 
 of physical magnitude in one extreme the elephant of the 
 lame idea in another extreme.
 
 856 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 are, thirty thousand in amount ; and what's to be 
 done now ? The only resource for the bibliolatrist ia 
 to invoke a new inspiration for helping him out of 
 his difficulty, by guiding his choice. We anti- biblio- 
 laters, are not so foolish as to believe that God, having 
 once sent a deep message of truth to man, would suf- 
 fer it to lie at the mercy of a careless or wicked copy- 
 ist. Treasures so vast would not be left at the mercy 
 of accidents so vile. Very little more than two hun- 
 dred years ago, a London compositor, not wicked at 
 all, but simply drunk, in printing Deuteronomy, left 
 out the most critical of words ; the seventh command- 
 ment he exhibited thus " Thou shalt commit adul- 
 tery ; " in which form the sheet was struck off. And 
 though in those days no practical mischief could arise 
 from this singular erratum, which English Griesbachs 
 will hardly enter upon the roll of vanous readings, yet 
 harmless as it was, it met with punishment. " Scan- 
 dalous !" said Laud, " shocking ! to tell men in the 
 seventeenth century, as a biblical rule, that they posi- 
 tively must commit adultery! " The brother composi- 
 tors of this drunken biblical reviser, being too honorable 
 to betray thfc individual delinquent, the Star Chamber 
 fined the whole " chapel." A black Monday that must 
 have been for the self-accusing compositors. Now, the 
 copyists of MSS. were as certain to be sometimes 
 drunk as this compositor, famous by his act utterlv 
 forgotten in his person, whose crime is remembered 
 the record of whose name has perished. We there- 
 fore hold, that it never was in the power, or placed 
 within the discretion, of any copyist, whether writer 
 vc printer, to injure the sacred oracles. But the bib-
 
 PEOTESXANTISM. 357 
 
 iolatrist cannot say that ; because, if he does, then he 
 is formally unsaying the very principle which is meant 
 by bibliolatry. He therefore must require another 
 supplementary inspiration viz., No. 5, if I count right, 
 to direct him in his choice of the true reading amongst 
 so many as continually offer themselves.* 
 
 Fifthly, as all words cover ideas, and many a word 
 covers a choice of ideas, and very many ideas split 
 into a variety of modifications, we shall, even after a 
 fifth inspiration has qualified us for selecting the true 
 
 * I recollect no variation in the text of Scripture which makes 
 any startling change, even to the amount of an eddy in its own 
 circumjacent waters, except that famous passage about the three 
 witnesses " There are three that bare record in heaven," &c. 
 This has been denounced with perfect fury as an interpolation ; 
 and it is impossible to sum up the quart bottles of ink, black and 
 blue, that have been shed in the dreadful skirmish. Person 
 even, the all-accomplished Grecian, in his letters to Archdeacon 
 Travis, took a conspicuous part in the controversy; his wish 
 was, that men should think of him as a second Bentley tilting 
 against Phalaris ; and he stung like a hornet. To be a Cam- 
 bridge man in those days was to be a hater of all Establishments 
 in England ; things and persons were hated alike. I hope the 
 same thing may not be true at present. It may chance that on 
 this subject Master Person will get stung through his coffin, be- 
 fore he is many years deader. However, if this particular vari 
 *tion troubles the waters just around itself (for it would desolate 
 a Popish village to withdraw its local saint) , jet carrying one's 
 eye from this Epistle to the whole domains of the New Testament 
 yet, looking away from that defrauded village to universal 
 Christendom, we must exclaim What does one miss ? Surelj 
 Christendom is not disturbed because a village suffers wrong; 
 tfie sea is not roused because an eady in a corner is boiling; th 
 doctrine of the Trinity is not in danger because Mr. I-orsou is ia 
 ft passion.
 
 358 PBOTESTANTISM. 
 
 reading, still be at a loss how, with regard to this 
 right reading, to select the right acceptation. So there, 
 at that fifth stage, in rushes the total deluge of human 
 theological controversies. One church, or one sect, in- 
 sists upon one sense ; second church, or second sect, " to 
 the end of time," insists upon a diiferent sense. BabtJ 
 is upon us ; and, to get rid of Babel, we shall need i 
 sixth inspiration. No. 6 is clamorously called for.* 
 
 * One does not wish to be tedious; or, if one has a gift in that 
 way, naturally one does not wish to bestow it all upon a perfect 
 stranger, as " the reader " usually is, but to reserve a part for 
 the fireside, and the use of one's most beloved friends; else I 
 could torment the reader by a long succession of numbers, and 
 perhaps drive him to despair. But one more of the series viz., 
 No. 6, as a parting gage d'amitie he must positively permit 
 me to drop into his pocket. Supposing, then, that No. 5 were 
 surmounted, and that, super naturally, you knew the value to a 
 hair's breadth of every separate word (or, perhaps, composite 
 phrase made up from a constellation of words) ah, poor trav- 
 eller in trackless forests, still you are lost again for, often- 
 times, and especially in St. Paul, the words may be known, their 
 sense may be known, but their logical relation is still doubtful. 
 The word X and the word Y are separately clear; but has Y the 
 iependency of a consequence upon X, or no dependency at all ? 
 cs the clause which stands eleventh in the series a direct prolon- 
 gation of that which stands tenth ? or is the tenth wholly inde- 
 pendent and insulated ? or does it occupy the place of a paren- 
 thesis, so as to modify the ninth clause ? People that have 
 practised composition as much, and with as vigilant an eye as 
 myself, know also, by thousands of cases", how infinite is the 
 disturbance caused in the logic of a thought by the mere position 
 of a word as despicable as the word even. A mote, that is itself 
 invisible, shall darken the august faculty of sight in a human 
 eye the heavens shall be hidden by a wretched atom that dares 
 act show itself and the station of a syllable shall cloud tin
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 35& 
 
 But we all know, each knows by his own experi- 
 ence, that No. 6 is not forthcoming ; and, in the ab- 
 jence of that, what avail for us the others ? " Man 
 verboard ! " is the cry upon deck ; but what avails it 
 tor the poor drowning creature that a rope being 
 thrown to him is thoroughly secured at one end to the 
 ship, if the other end floats wide of his grasp ? We 
 are in prison : we descend from our prison-roof, that 
 seems high as the clouds, by knotting together all the 
 prison bed-clothes, and all the aids from friends out- 
 Fide. But all is too short : after swarming down the 
 line, in middle air, we find ourselves hanging : sixty 
 feet of line are still wanting. To reascend that is 
 impossible : to drop boldly alas ! that is to die. 
 
 Meantime, what need of this eternal machinery, that 
 eternally is breaking like ropes of sand ? Or of this 
 earth resting on an elephant, that rests on a tortoise, 
 tLat when all is done, must still consent to rest on the 
 common atmosphere of God ? These chains of inspi- 
 ration are needless. The great ideas of the Bible 
 protect themselves. The heavenly truths, by their 
 own imperishableness, defeat the mortality of languages 
 with which for a moment they are associated. Is the 
 iightning enfeebled or emasculated, because for thou- 
 sands of years it has blended with the tarnish of earth 
 and the steams of earthly graves ? Or light, which so 
 long has travelled in the chambers of our sickly air, 
 and searched the haurts of impurity is that less 
 
 judgment of a council. Na-y. even an ambiguous emphasis fall- 
 mg to the right-hairl word, or the left-hand word, shall confound
 
 360 PKOIES1ANTISM. 
 
 pure than it was in the first chapter of Genesis ? Or 
 that more holy light of truth the truth, suppose, 
 written from hi^ creation upon the tablets of man's 
 heart which truth never was imprisoned in any He- 
 brew or Greek, but has ranged forever through courts 
 and camps, deserts and cities, the original lesson of jus 
 tice to man and piety to God has that become tainted 
 by intercourse with flesh ? or has it become hard tr, 
 decipher, because the very heart, that human heart 
 where it is inscribed, is so often blotted with false- 
 hoods ? You are aware, perhaps, reader, that in the 
 Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Asia Minor (and, 
 indeed, elsewhere), through the very middle of the 
 salt-sea billows, rises up, in silvery brightness, an 
 aspiring column of fresh water.* In the desert of the 
 sea are found fountains sister fountains to those of 
 Ishmael and Isaac in the Arabian sands ! Are these 
 fountains poisoned for the poor victim of fever, be- 
 cause they have to travel through a contagion of waters 
 not potable ? Oh, no ! They bound upwards like 
 arrows, cleaving the seas above with as much projectile 
 
 * See Mr. Yates's " Annotations upon Fellowes's Researches in 
 Anatolia," as one authority for this singular phenomenon, which 
 has since been noticed in the Persian Gulf. This most interest- 
 ing phenomenon was witnessed by the Generals Outram and 
 Havelock, in company with most of their army, on the expedition 
 against Persia, within the last twelve months [February, 1858], 
 In fact, if a fountain bursts out with the sudden impetus of a 
 fiery projectile, forced upwards by earthquake, which may hap- 
 pen on the barren floor of the ocsan as probably as in many 
 other situations, then, supposing the column of water above no\ 
 too dense, the fountain of fresh water will naturally cleave tin 
 narine water like an arrow.
 
 PBOTESTANTJSM. 361 
 
 force as the glittering water-works of Versailles cleave 
 the air, and rising as sweet to the lip as ever mountain 
 torrent that comforted the hunted fawn. 
 
 It is impossible to suppose that any truth, launched 
 by God upon the agitations of things so unsettled as 
 languages, can perish. The very frailty of languages 
 is the strongest proof of this ; because it is impossible 
 to suppose that anything so great can have been com- 
 mitted to the fidelity of anything so treacherous. 
 There is laughter in heaven when it is told of man, 
 that he fancies his earthly jargons, which to heavenly 
 ears, must sound like the chucklings of poultry, equal 
 to the task of hiding or distorting any light of revela- 
 tion. Had words possessed any authority or restraint 
 over Scriptural truth, a much worse danger would 
 have threatened it than any malice in the human will, 
 suborning false copyists, or surreptitiously favoring 
 depraved copies. Even a general conspiracy of the 
 human race for such a purpose would avail against the 
 Bible only as a general conspiracy to commit suicide 
 might avail against the drama of God's providence. 
 Either conspiracy would first become dangerous when 
 either became possible. But a real danger seems to 
 lie in the insensible corruption going on forever within 
 ill languages, by means of which they are eternally 
 ilyinsc away from their own vital powers ; and that is 
 a danger which is travelling fast after all the wisdom 
 and the wit, the eloquence and the poetry of this earth, 
 like a mountainous wave, and will finally overtake 
 (hem their very vehicles being lost and confounded 
 to human sensibilities. But such a wave will break 
 harmlessly against Scriptural truth; and not merely
 
 362 JPBOTESTAXTISM. 
 
 because that truth will forever evade such * shock by 
 its eternal transfer from language to language from 
 languages dying to languages in vernal bloom but 
 also because, if it could not evade the shock, supreme 
 truth would surmount it for a profounder reason. A 
 danger analogous to this once existed in a different 
 form. The languages into which the New Testament 
 was first translated offered an apparent obstacle to the 
 translation that seemed insurmountable. The Latin, 
 for instance, did not present the spiritual words which 
 riuch a translation demanded ; and how should it, when 
 the corresponding ideas had no existence amongst the 
 Romans ? Yet, if not spiritual, the language of Rome 
 was intellectual ; it was the language of a cultivated 
 and noble race. But what shall be done if the New 
 Testament seeks to drive a tunnel through a rude 
 forest race, having an undeveloped language, and 
 understanding nothing but war ? Four centuries after 
 Christ, such a case did actually occur : the Gothic 
 Bishop Ulphilas set about translating the Gospels for 
 his countrymen. He had no words for expressing 
 spiritual relations or spiritual operations. The new 
 nomenclature of moral graces, humility, resignation, 
 the spirit of forgiveness, &c., hitherto unrecognized 
 for virtues amongst men, having first of all been shown 
 as blossoms and flowers, and distinguished from weeds, 
 by Christian gardening, had to be reproduced in the 
 Gothic language, with apparently no means whatever 
 of effecting it. In this earliest of what we may call 
 ancestral translations (for the Goths were of our own 
 Wood), and, therefore, by many degrees, this most 
 ^interesting of translations for us, may be seen to thii
 
 PKOTESTANTISM. 353 
 
 day, when nearly fifteen centuries have passed, how 
 the good bishop succeeded, to what extent he suc- 
 ceeded, and by what means. I shall take a separate 
 opportunity for investigating that problem ; but at 
 present I will content myself with noticing a remark- 
 able principle which applies to the case, and illustrat- 
 ing ii by a remarkable anecdote. The principle .a 
 this that in the grander parts of knowledge, which 
 do not deal much with petty details, nearly all ihe 
 building or constructive ideas (those ideas which build 
 up the system of that particular knowledge) lie in- 
 volved within each other ; so that any ore of tho 
 series, being awakened in the mind, is sufficient (given 
 a multitude of minds) to lead backwards or forwards, 
 analytically or synthetically, into many of the rest. 
 That is the principle ; * and the story which illustrates 
 
 * " That is the principle: " I am afraid, on reviewing this 
 passage, that the reader may still say, " What is the principle? " 
 I will add, therefore, the shortest explanation of my meaning. 
 If in any Pagan language you had occasion to translate the word 
 love, or purity, or penitence, &c., you could not do it. The 
 Greek language itself, perhaps the finest (all things weighed and 
 valued) that a man has employed, could not do it. The scale 
 was not so pitched as to make the transfer possible. It was to 
 ixecute organ music on a guitar. And, hereafter, I will endeavor 
 o show how scandalous an error has been committed on thia 
 subject, not by scholars only, but by religious philosophers The 
 relation of Christian ethics (which word ethics, however, is itself 
 most insufficient) to natural or universal ethics, is a field yet 
 uncultured by rational thought. The first word of sense has 
 yet to be spoken. There lies the difficulty ; and the principle 
 which meets it is this, that what anv one idea could never effect 
 for itself (insulated, it must remain an unknown quality forever), 
 Ure total system of the ideas developed from its centre would
 
 364 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 t is this : A great work of Apolloniua, the sublime 
 geometer, was supposed in part to have peiished : 
 seven of the eight books remained in the original 
 Greek ; but the eighth was missing. The Greek, after 
 much search was not recovered ; but at length there 
 was found (in the Bodleian, I think) an Arabic trans- 
 lation of it. An English mathematician, Halley, 
 knowing not one word of Arabic, determined (without 
 waiting for that Arabic key) to pick the lock of this 
 MS. And he did so. Through strength of precon- 
 ception, derived equally from his knowledge of the 
 general subject, and from his knowledge of this par- 
 ticular work in its earlier sections, using also to some 
 
 effect for each separately. To know the part, you must first know 
 the whole, or know it, at least, by some outline. The idea of 
 purity, for instance, in its Christian altitude, would be utterly 
 incomprehensible, and, besides, could not sustain itself for a 
 moment, if by any glimpse it were approached. But when a 
 ruin was unfolded that had affected the human race, and many 
 things heretofore unobserved, because uncombined, were gather- 
 ed into a unity of evidence to that ruin, spread through innu- 
 merable channels, the great altitude would begin dimly to reveal 
 itself by means of the mighty depth in correspondence. One 
 deep calleth to another. One after one the powers lodged in the 
 awful succession of uncoverings would react upon each other ; 
 Mid thus the feeblest language would be as capable of receiving 
 and reflecting the system of truths (because the system is an 
 arch that supports itself) as the richest and noblest ; and for 
 the same reason that makes geometry careless of language. The 
 vilest jargon that ever was used by a shivering savage of Terra 
 del Fuego is as capable of dealing with the sublime and eternal 
 affections of space and quantity, with up and down, with more 
 and less, with circle and radius, angle and tangent, as is th 
 golden language of Athens.
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 365 
 
 extent the subtle art of the decipherer,* now become 
 BO powerful an instrument of analysis, he translated 
 the whole Arabic MS. He printed it ho published 
 t. He tore the hidden truth he extorted it from the 
 darkness of an unknown language he would not suf- 
 fer the Arabic to hide a treasure from man. And the 
 book remains a monument to this day, that a system of 
 ideas, having internal coherency and interdependency> 
 is vainly hidden under a mask of words ; that it may 
 be illuminated and restored chiefly through the recip- 
 rocal involutions of the hidden ideas themselves. The 
 same principle applies, and a fortiori applies, to re- 
 ligious truth, as one which lies far deeper than geom- 
 etry in the spirit of man, one to which the inner 
 attestation is profounder, and to which the key-notes 
 of Scripture (once awakened on the great organ of 
 the human heart) are sure to call up corresponding 
 echoes. It is not in the power of language to arrest 
 or to defeat this mode of truth ; because, when once 
 the fundamental base is furnished by revelation, the 
 human heart itself is able to co-operate in developing 
 the great harmonies of the system, without aid from 
 language, and in defiance of language without aid 
 
 * "Art of the decipherer:" An art which, in the seventeenth 
 aentury, had been greatly improved by Wallis, Savilian Professor 
 of Geometry at Oxford, the improver of analytic mathematics, 
 ind the great historian of algebra. Algebra it was that suggested 
 13 him his exquisite deciphering skill, and the Parliamentary 
 War it was that furnished him with a sufficient field of practice. 
 The King's private cabinet of papers, all written in cipher, and 
 captured in the royal coach on the decisive day of Naseby 
 'June, 1645), was (I believe) deciphered by Wallis, proprio 
 narte ; that is to say, without assistance
 
 366 PHOTESTANTISM. 
 
 from human learning, and in defiance of humau learm- 
 ing, by a machinery of spiritual counterpoint. 
 
 Finally, there is another security against the sup- 
 pression or distortion of any great Biblical truth by 
 false readings, which I will state in the briefest terms. 
 The reader is aware of the boyish sport sometimes 
 called " drake-stone : " a flattish stone is thrown by a 
 little dexterity so as to graze the surface of a river, 
 but so, also, as in grazing it to dip slightly below the 
 surface, to rise again from this dip, again to dip, again 
 to rise, and so on alternately dipping and rising a plu- 
 sieurs reprises. In the same way, with the same effect 
 of alternate resurrections, all Scriptural truths rever- 
 berate and diffuse themselves along the pages of the 
 Bible ; none is confined to one text, or to one mode of 
 enunciation ; all parts of the scheme are eternally 
 chasing each other, like the parts of a fugue ; they hide 
 themselves in one chapter, only to restore themselves 
 in another ; they diverge, only to recombine ; and under 
 such a vast variety of expressions, that even in that 
 way, supposing language to have powers over religious 
 truth which it never had, or can have any abuse 
 of such a power would be thoroughly neutralized. 
 The case resembles the diffusion of vegetable seeds 
 through the air and through the waters ; draw a cordon 
 tanitaire against dandelion or thistle-down, and see if 
 the armies of earth would suffice to interrupt this 
 process of radiation, which yet is but the distribution 
 of weeds. Suppose, for instance, the text about the 
 three heavenly witnesses to have been eliminated finally 
 18 an interpolation. The first thought is there goes 
 vo wreck a groat doctrine ! Not at all. That tex
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 367 
 
 uccupied but a corner of the garden. The truth, and 
 the secret implications of the truth, have escaped at a 
 thousand points in vast arches above our heads, rising 
 high above the garden wall, and have sown the earth 
 with memorials of the mystery which they envelope , 
 
 The final inference is this that Scriptural truth is 
 endowed with a self-conservative and a self-restorative 
 virtue ; it needs no long successions of verbal protection 
 by inspiration ; it is self-protected ; first, internally, by 
 the complex power which belongs to the Christian system 
 of involving its own integrations, in the same way as a 
 musical chord involves its own successions of sound, and 
 its own technical resolutions ; secondly, in an external 
 and obvious way, it is protected by its prodigious 
 iteration, and secret presupposed, in all varieties of form. 
 Consequently, as the peril connected with language is 
 thus effectually neutralized, the call for any verbal 
 inspiration (which, on separate grounds, appears to be 
 self-confounding) shows itself now, in a second form, 
 to be a gratuitous and superfluous delusion, since, in 
 effect, it is a call for protection against a danger which 
 tannot have any existence. 
 
 There is another variety of bibliolatry arising in a 
 afferent way not upon errors of language incident 
 to human infirmity, but upon deliberate errors indis- 
 pensable to Divine purposes. The case is one which 
 has been considered with far too little attention, else 
 it could never have been thought strange that Christ 
 should comply in things indifferent with popular errors. 
 A few words will put the reader in possession of my 
 view. Speaking of the Bible, Phil, says, ' We admit 
 <hat its separate parts are the work of frail and fallible
 
 368 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 human beings. We do not seek to build upon it 
 systems of cosmogony, chronology, astronomy, and 
 natural history. We know no reason of internal or 
 external probability which should induce us to believe 
 that such matters could ever have been the subjects ol 
 direct revelation." Is that all ? There is no reason, 
 certainly, for expectations so unreflecting ; but is there 
 no adamantine reason against them ? It is no business 
 of the Bible, we are told, to teach science. Certainly 
 not ; but that is far too little. It is an obligation 
 resting upon the Bible, if it is to be consistent with 
 itself, that it should refuse to teach science ; and, ii 
 the Bible ever had taught any one art, science, or 
 process of life, capital doubts would have clouded our 
 confidence in the authority of the book. By what 
 caprice, it would have been asked, is a Divine mission 
 abandoned suddenly for a human mission ? By what 
 caprice is this one science taught, and others not? 
 Or these two, suppose, and not all ? But an objection, 
 even deadlier, would have followed. It is clear as is 
 the purpose of daylight, that the whole body of the 
 arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the 
 irritation and development of the human intellect. 
 For this end they exist. To see God, therefore, 
 descending into the arena of science, and contending, 
 as it were, for his own prizes, by teaching science in 
 the Bible, would be to see him intercepting from theii 
 self-evident destination (viz., man's intellectual bene- 
 fit), his own problems by solving them himself. No 
 ipectacle could more dishonor the divine idea could 
 more dishonor man under the mask of aiding him. 
 Tke Bible must not leach anything that man can teack
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 369 
 
 \imself. Does a doctrine require a revelation ? then 
 nobody but God can teacli it. Does it require none ? 
 then in whatever case God has qualified man to do 
 a thing for himself, he has in that very qualification 
 silently laid an injunction upon man to do it. But it 
 is fancied that a divine teacher, without descending to 
 the unworthy office of teaching science, might yet 
 have kept his own language free from all collusion 
 with human error. Hence, for instance, it has been 
 argued, that any language in the Bible implying the 
 earth to be stationary, and central to our system, 
 could not express a mere compliance with the popular 
 errors of the time, but must be taken to indicate the 
 absolute truth. And so grew the anti-Galilean fanatics. 
 Out of similar notions have risen the absurdities of a 
 polemic Bible chronology, &c.* Meantime, if a man 
 sets himself steadily to contemplate the consequences 
 
 * The Bible cosmology stands upon another footing. That ia 
 not gathered from a casual expression, shaped to meet popular 
 comprehension, but is delivered directly, formally, and elabo- 
 rately, as a natural preface to the history of man and his habita- 
 tion. Here, accordingly, there is no instance of accommodation 
 to vulgar ignorance ; and the persuasion gains ground contin- 
 ually that the order of succession in the phenomena of creation 
 will be eventually confirmed by scientific geology, so far as this 
 Bcience may ever succeed in unlinking the steps of the process. 
 Nothing, in fact, disturbs the grandeur and solemnity of the 
 Mosaical cosmogony, except (as usual) the ruggedness of the 
 bibliolater. He, finding the English word day employed in the 
 measurement of the intervals, takes it for granted that this must 
 mean a nychthemeron of twenty-four hours; imports, therefore, 
 into the Biblical text this conceit; fights for his own opinion, as 
 for a revelation from heaven; and thus disfigures the great 
 inaugural chapter of human history with this single feature of 
 24
 
 370 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 which must inevitably have followed any deviation 
 from the customary erroneous phraseology of the peo- 
 ple, he will see the utter impossibility that a teacher 
 (pleading a heavenly mission) could allow himself to 
 deviate by one hair's breadth (and why should he 
 wish to deviate?) from the ordinary language of the 
 times. To have uttered one syllable for instance, that 
 implied motion in the earth, would have issued into 
 the following ruins : First, it would have tainted 
 the teacher with the reputation of lunacy ; secondly, 
 it would have placed him in this inextricable dilemma. 
 On the one hand, to answer the questions prompted 
 by his own perplexing language, would have opened 
 upon him, as a necessity, one stage after another of 
 scientific cross-examination, until his spiritual mission 
 would have been forcibly swallowed up in the mission 
 of natural philosopher ; but, on the other hand, to 
 pause resolutely at any one stage of this public exami- 
 nation, and to refuse all further advance, would be, in 
 
 a fairy-tale, where everything else is told with the most majestic 
 simplicity. Bat this word, which so Sgnorantly he presumes to 
 .>e an ordinary human day, bears that meaning only in common 
 historical transactions between man and man ; but never once in 
 the great prophetic writings, where God comes forward as him 
 self the principal agent. It then means always a vast and mys- 
 terious duration undetermined, even to this hour, in Daniel 
 The heptameron is not a week, but a shadowy adumbration of a 
 week, comprising perhaps millions of years. Let me ask this 
 question In Daniel, whether considered (as in past ages he 
 was) a prophet, or (as in this generation he is, even by pious 
 men like Dr. Arnold of Rugby) simply a writer of history, and 
 posterior to the events contemplated has any man been foolish 
 enough to regard his 1260 days as literally such via., as n* 
 more than 180 weeks ?
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 371 
 
 .he popular opinion, to retreat as a baffled disputani 
 from insane paradoxes which it had not been found pos- 
 sible to support. One step taken in that direction was 
 fatal, whether the great envoy retreated from his own 
 words to leave behind the impression that he was 
 defeated as a rash speculator, or stood to these words, 
 and thus fatally entangled himself in the inexhaustible 
 succession of explanations and justifications. In either 
 event the spiritual mission was at an end : it would 
 have perished in shouts of derision, from which there 
 could have been no retreat, and no retrieval of char- 
 acter. The greatest of astronomers, rather than seem 
 ostentatious or unseasonably learned, will stoop to 
 the popular phrase of the sun's rising, or the sun's 
 motion in the ecliptic. But God, for a purpose com- 
 mensurate with man's eternal welfare, is by these 
 critics supposed incapable of the same petty absti- 
 nence. 
 
 A similar line of argument applies to all the com- 
 pliances of Christ with the Jewish prejudices (partly 
 imported from the Euphrates) as to demonology, 
 witchcraft, &c. By the way, in this last word, " witch- 
 craft," and the two memorable histories connected 
 wi&. it, lies a perfect mine of bibliolatrous madness. 
 As i; illustrates the folly and the wickedness of the 
 bibliolaters, let us pause upon it. 
 
 The word witch, these bibliolaters take it for grant- 
 bd, must mean exactly what the original Hebrew 
 means, or the Greek word chosen by the LXX. ; so 
 much, and neither more nor less. That is, from total 
 ignorance of the machinery by which language moves, 
 Vhey fancy that every idea and word which exists, or
 
 872 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 has existed, for any nation, ancient or modern, must 
 have a direct interchangeable equivalent in all other 
 languages ; and that, if the dictionaries do not show 
 it, that must be because the dictionaries are bad. Will 
 these worthy people have the goodness, then, to trans- 
 late coquette into Hebrew, and post-office into Greek ? 
 The fact is, that all languages, and in the ratio cf 
 their development, offer ideas absolutely separate and 
 exclusive to themselves. In the highly cultured lan- 
 guages of England, France, and Germany, are words, 
 by thousands, which are strictly untranslatable. They 
 may be approached, but cannot be reflected as from a 
 mirror. To take an image from the language of 
 eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the 
 original word and its translated representative is, iu 
 thousands of instances, not annular ; the centres do 
 not coincide ; the words overlap ; and this arises from 
 the varying modes in which different nations combine 
 ideas. The French word shall combine the elements, 
 /, m, n, o the nearest English word, perhaps, m, , 
 o, p by one element richer, by one element poorer. 
 For instance, in all words applied to the nuances of 
 manners, and generally to social differences, how pro- 
 digious is the wealth of the French language ! How 
 merely untranslatable for all Europe ! In the lan- 
 guage of high passion, how bare and beggarly is the 
 French ! how incapable of rendering Shakspeare ! I 
 suppose, my bibliolater, you have not yet finished 
 your Hebrew or Arabic translation of coquette.* Well, 
 
 " Coquette:'''' Virgil comes near to one phasis of thii 
 idea Malo me Galatea petit lasciva puella, et fugit ad salioes 
 it se cupit ante videri. Lasciva is merely frolicsome : in th 
 last line appears the coquette
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 373 
 
 you shall be excused from that, if you will only trans- 
 late it into English. You cannot : you are obliged tc 
 keep the French word ; and yet you take for granted, 
 without inquiry, that in the word " witchcraft," and 
 in the word " witch," applied to the sorceress of 
 Endor, our authorised English Bible of King James's 
 day must be correct. And your wicked bibliolatrous 
 ancestors proceeded on that idea throughout Christen- 
 dom to murder harmless, friendless, and oftentimes 
 crazy old women. Meantime the witch of Endor in 
 no respect resembled our modern domestic witch.* 
 
 * " The aumestic witch: " It is the common notion that the 
 superstition of the evil eye, so widely diffused in the Southern 
 lands, and in some, as Portugal, for example, not a slumbering, 
 but a fiercely operative superstition, is unknown in England and 
 other Northern latitudes. On the contrary, to my thinking, the 
 regular old vulgar witch of England and Scotland was but an 
 impersonatrix of the very same superstition. Virgil expresses 
 this mode of sorcery to the letter, when his shepherd says 
 
 " Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos ? " 
 
 Precisely in that way it was that the British witch operated. 
 She, by her eye, blighted the natural powers of growth and fer- 
 tility. By the way, I ought to mention, as a case parallel to 
 that of the Bible's recognising witchcraft, and of enlightened 
 nations continuing to punish it, that St. Paul himself, in an 
 equal degree, recognises the evil eye ; that is, he uses the idea 
 (though certainly not meaning to accredit such an idea), as one 
 that briefly and energetically conveyed his meaning to those 
 whom he was addressing. " Oh, foolish Galatians, who hath 
 bewitched you?" That is, literally, who has fascinated your 
 $enses by the evil eye ? For the Greek is, tis umas ebaskanen . 
 Now the word ebaskanen is a past tense of the verb baskaino, 
 which was the technical term for the action of the evil eye 
 Without having written a treatise on the JEolic digamma, prob-
 
 374 PKOTESTANTJSM. 
 
 There was as much difference as between a Roman 
 Proconsul, surrounded with eagle-bearers, and a com- 
 mercial Consul's clerk with a pen behind his ear. 
 Apparently she was not so much a Medea as an 
 Erichtho. (See the Pharsalia). She was an Evoca- 
 trix, or female necromancer, evoking phantoms that 
 stood in some unknown relation to dead men ; and 
 then by some artifice (it has been supposed) of ven- 
 triloquism,* causing these phantoms to deliver oracular 
 answers upon great political questions. Oh, that one 
 had lived in the times of those New-England wretches 
 that desolated whole districts and terrified vast prov- 
 
 ably the reader is aware that F is V, and that, in many lan- 
 guages, B and V are interchangeable letters through thousands 
 of words, as the Italian tavola, from the Latin tabula. Under 
 that little process it was that the Greek baskaino transmigrated 
 into the Latin fascino ; so that St. Paul's word, in speaking to 
 the Galatians, is the very same word as Virgil's, in speaking of 
 the shepherd's flock as charmed by the evil eye. For first of all, 
 St. Paul's word Baskaino was undoubtedly pronounced Vas- 
 kaino ; just as Sebastopol is orientally pronounced Sevastopol, 
 and as Sebastos, which is the Greek equivalent for the Roman 
 Augustus, was always pronounced Sevastos. By this process, 
 the Grecian word Baskaino became Faskaino, and then, with 
 aardly any change, the Latin Fascino pronounced " Fas/cino." 
 For the Roman "c " had in all situations the force of " /c." 
 Fhus Caesar was always Keysar (therefore in Greek Aaiaap); 
 and our wicked friend Cicero was always Kikero (in Greek there- 
 fore Kixtiton). Except for the accent on the first syllable of 
 Fascino, the Greek and the Roman word were therefore identica. 
 to the ear, though slightly different to the eye. 
 
 * I am not referring to German infidels. Very pious commen 
 tators have connected her with the engastrimuthoi (iyy 
 ir ventriloquists.
 
 PROTESTANTISM, 375 
 
 inces by their judicial murders of witches, under plea 
 of a bibliolatrous warrant ; until at last the fiery 
 furnace, which they had heated for women and chil- 
 dren, shot forth flames that, like those of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar's furnace, seizing upon his very agents of his 
 cruelty, began to reach the murderous judges them- 
 selves and denouncers ! Oh, glory of retribution 
 to see the wicked judge of New England roasted 
 in the fire which himself had kindled to see the 
 cruel bibliolater, in Hamlet's words, " hoist by iia 
 own petard." 
 
 Yet, after all, are there not express directions in 
 Scripture to exterminate witches from the land ? Cer- 
 tainly ; but that does not argue any Scriptural recog- 
 nition of witchcraft as a possible offence. An imaginary 
 crime may imply a criminal intention that is not imag- 
 inary ; but also, which much more directly concerns 
 the interests of a state, a criminal purpose, that rests 
 upon a pure delusion, may work by means that are 
 felonious for ends that are fatal. At this moment, we 
 English and the Spaniards have laws, and severe ones, 
 against witchcraft viz., in the West Indies ; and in- 
 dispensable it is that we should. The Obeah man from 
 Africa can do no mischief to one of us. The proud 
 and enlightened white man despises his arts ; and foi 
 him, therefore, these arts have no existence, for thej 
 wont only through strong preconceptions of their re- 
 ality, and through trembling faith in their efficacy. 
 But by that very agency they are all-sufficient for the 
 ruin of the poor credulous negro ; he is mastered by 
 original faith, and has perished by a languishing de- 
 lay thousands of times under the knowledge that Obi
 
 376 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 bad been set for him. Justly, therefore, do out 
 colonial courts punish the Obeah sorcerer, who (though 
 an impostor) is not the less a murderer. Now the 
 Hebrew witchcraft was probably even worse ; equally 
 resting on delusions, equally, nevertheless, it woiked 
 for unlawful ends, and (which chiefly made it an ob- 
 ject of Divine wrath) it worked through idolatrous 
 agencies. All the spells, the rites, the invocations 
 were doubtless Pagan. The witchcraft of Judea, 
 therefore, must have kept up that connection with idol- 
 atry which it was the unceasing effort of the Hebrew 
 polity to exterminate from the land. Consequently, 
 the Hebrew commonwealth might, as consistently as 
 our own in Trinidad and Jamaica, denounce and 
 punish witchcraft without liability to the inference 
 that it therefore recognised the pretensions of witches 
 as real, in the sense of working their bad ends by the 
 means which they alleged. Their magic was causa- 
 tively of no virtue at all ; but, being believed in like 
 the equally false but equally operative belief of the 
 African negro in Obi, it became, through and by that 
 potent belief, the occasional means of exciting the 
 imagination of its victims ; after which the consequen- 
 ces were the same as if the magic had acted physically 
 according to its pretences.* 
 
 * Does that argument not cover "the New England wretches,, ' 
 |o unreservedly denounced in a preceding paragraph ? Amer- 
 ican ED. Answer by the Author. No, surely the difference is 
 vast between the two cases. The persons denounced and arrested 
 in New England were entirely passive; or were so generally 
 fiiey did nothing at all they were not seeking to injure others 
 Bat the Obeah man never moved except for evil purposes
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 377 
 
 2. Development, as applicable to Christianity, is a 
 doctrine of the very days that are passing over our 
 heads, and due to Mr. Newman, originally the ablest 
 son of Puseyism, but now a powerful architect of re- 
 ligious philosophy on his own account. I should have 
 described him more briefly as a " master-builder," had 
 my ear been able to endure a sentence ending with two 
 consecutive trochees, and each of those trochees end- 
 ing with the same syllable er. Ah, reader ! I would 
 the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest 
 comprehend the thousandth part of my labors in the 
 evasion of cacophony. Phil, has a general dislike to 
 the Puseyites, though he is too learned to be ignorant 
 (as are often the Low-Church, or Evangelical, party 
 in England), that, in many of their supposed innova- 
 
 either as an agent in the service of some other man's malice, or 
 in the service of his own rapacity as an extortioner relying 
 upon the mystic terrors of his negro victims. Let the reader 
 consult Bryan Edwards in his " West Indies " a well-known 
 book of sixty years back. Or, as I now dimly remember, in Misa 
 Edgeworth's earliest novel of " Belinda," he will find a lively 
 sketch embodying most of the features characterising the African 
 form of magic; that is, the special magic of Obi (which, by the 
 way, was popularised in London and Liverpool some fifty years 
 back by the picturesque drama of " Obi, or Three-fingered 
 Jack "). But for a larger view of African magic, not limited to 
 the Koromantyn form of Obi, I would refer the reader to some 
 interesting disclosures (founded on personal experience) in the 
 " African Memoranda " of Captain Beavor. The book belongs 
 to the last generation, and must be more than forty years old. 
 The author was a Post-captain in our navy; and I may mention 
 Incidentally that he was greatly admired by Coleridge and 
 Wordsworth for the meditative and philosophic style of mind ex 
 hibited in his book
 
 378 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 tions, the Puseyites were really only restoring wha 
 the torpor of the eighteenth century had suffered to go 
 into disuse. They were reforming the church in the 
 sense sometimes belonging to the particle re viz., re- 
 troforming it, moulding it back into compliance with 
 its original form and model. It is true that this effort 
 for quickening the church, and for adorning her exte- 
 rior service, moved under the impulse of too undis- 
 guised a sympathy with Papal Rome. But there is no 
 great reason to mind that in our age and our country. 
 Protestant zealotry may be safely relied on in this 
 island as a match for Popish bigotry. There will be 
 no love lost between them be assured of that and 
 'ustice will be done to both, though neither should do 
 it to her rival ; for philosophy, which has so long 
 sought only amusement in either, is, in these latter 
 days of growing profundity, applying herself steadily 
 to the profound truths which dimly are descried lurk- 
 ing in both. It is these which Mr. Newman is likely 
 to illuminate, and not the faded forms of an obsolete 
 ceremonial that cannot now be restored effectually, 
 were it even important that they should. Strange it 
 is, however, that he should open his career by offering 
 to Rome, as a mode of homage, this doctrine of de- 
 velopment, which is the direct inversion of her own. 
 Rome founds herself upon the idea, that to Jier, by 
 tradition and exclusive privilege, was communicated. 
 >nce for all, the whole truth from the beginning. Mr. 
 Newman lays his corner-stone in the very opposite 
 idea of gradual development given to Christianity bj 
 the motion of time, by experience, by expanding occa- 
 sions, and by the progress of civilization. Is New-
 
 PKOXESTAtfTISM. 379 
 
 manism likely to prosper ? Let me tell a little anecdote. 
 Twenty years ago, roaming one day (as so often I did) 
 with our immortal Wordsworth, I took the liberty of 
 telling him, at a point of our walk, where nobody 
 could possibly overhear me, unless it were old Father 
 Helvellyn, that I feared his theological principles were 
 not quite so sound as his friends would wish. They 
 wanted tinkering a little. But what was worse, I did 
 not see how they could be tinkered in the particular 
 case which prompted my remark ; for in that place, to 
 tinker, or in any respect to alter, was to destroy. It 
 was a passage in the " Excursion," where the Solitary 
 had described the baptismal rite as washing away the 
 taint of original sin, and, in fact, working the effect 
 which is called technically regeneration. In the " Ex- 
 cursion " this view was advanced, not as the poet's 
 separate opinion, but as the avowed doctrine of the 
 English Church, to which church Wordsworth and 
 myself yielded gladly a filial reverence. But was this 
 the doctrine of the English Church ? That I doubted 
 and judging by my own casual experience, I fancied 
 that a considerable majority in the church gave an in- 
 terpretation to this sacrament differing by much from 
 that in the " Excursion." Wordsworth was itartled 
 and disturbed at hearing it whispered ever before 
 Helvellyn, who is old enough to keep a secret, that 
 his theology might possibly limp a little. I, on my 
 part, was not sure that it did, but I feared so ; and, 
 as there was no chance that I should be murdered for 
 speaking freely (though the place was lonely, and the 
 evening getting dusky, and W. W. had a natural re- 
 semblance to Mrs. Ratcliffe's Schedoni and other as-
 
 380 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 sassins roaming through prose and verse), I stood to my 
 disagreeable communication with the courage of a 
 martyr. The question between us being one of mere 
 fact (not what ought to be the doctrine, but what was 
 the doctrine of our English Church at that time), there 
 was no opening for much discussion ; and, on Words- 
 worth's suggestion, it was agreed to refer the point to 
 nis learned brother, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, just 
 then meditating a visit to his native lakes. That visit 
 in a short time " came off," and then, without delay, 
 our dispute " came on " for judgment. I had no bets 
 upon the issue one can't bet with Wordsworth 
 and I don't know that I should have ventured to back 
 myself in a case of that nature. However, I felt a slight 
 anxiety on the subj ect, which was very soon and kindly 
 removed by Dr. Wordsworth's deciding, " sans phrase," 
 that I, the original mover of the strife, was wrong, 
 wrong as wrong could be ; without an opening in fact 
 to any possibility of being more wrong. To this de- 
 cision I bowed at once, on a principle of courtesy. 
 One ought always to presume a man right within his 
 own profession, even if privately one should think 
 him wrong. But I could not think that of Dr. Words- 
 worth. He was a D. D. ; he was head of Trinity 
 College, which has my entire permission to hold its 
 liead up among twenty colleges, as the leading one in 
 Cambridge (provided it can obtain St. John's per- 
 mission), " and which," says Phil., " has done more 
 than any other foundation in Europe for the enlighten- 
 ment of the world, and for the overthrow of literary 
 philosophical, and religious superstitions." I quarre" 
 not with this bold appreciation, remembering reveren
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 381 
 
 dally that Isaac Barrow, that Isaac Newton, that 
 Richard Bentley belonged to Trinity, but I wish to 
 understand it. The total pretensions of the College 
 can be known only to its members ; and therefore 
 Phil, should have explained himself more fully. He 
 can do so, for Phil, is certainly a Trinity man. If the 
 police are in search of him, beyond a doubt they'l 
 hear of him at Trinity. Suddenly it strikes me as a 
 dieam, that Lord Bacon also belonged to this College. 
 As to Dr. Wordsworth, he was, or had been an examin- 
 ing chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Now 
 to suppose Lambeth in fault on such a question, is equiv- 
 alent to the old Roman formula of Solem dicere fal- 
 sum. What other court of appeal was known to man ? 
 So I submitted as cheerfully as if the learned Doctor, 
 instead of kicking me out of court, had been handing 
 me in. Yet, for all that, as I returned musing past 
 Rydal Water, I could not help muttering to myself 
 Ay, now, what rebellious thought was it that I mut- 
 tered ? You fancy, reader, that perhaps I said, " But 
 yet, Doctor, in spite of your wig, I am in the right." 
 No ; you're quite wrong ; I said nothing of the sort. 
 What I did mutter was this " The prevailing doc- 
 trine of the church must be what Dr. Wordsworth 
 says viz., that baptism is regeneration he cannot 
 be mistaken as to that and I have been misled by 
 the unfair proportion of Evangelical people, bishops, 
 and others, whom accident has thi'own in my way at 
 Barley Wood (Hannah More's). These, doubtless 
 form a minority in the church ; and yet, from the 
 nrength of their opinions, frcai their being a moving 
 party, as also from their being a growing party, I pro-
 
 382 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 phesy this issue, that many years will not pass before 
 this very question, now slumbering, will rouse a feud 
 within the English Church. There is a quarrel brew- 
 ing. Such feuds, long after they are ripe for explosion, 
 sometimes slumber on, until accident kindles tl em 
 into flame." That accident was furnished by tbe 
 tracts of the Puseyites, and since then, according to 
 the word which I spoke on Rydal Water, there has 
 been open war raging on this very point. 
 
 At present, with even more certainty, I prophesy 
 that mere necessity, a necessity arising out of continual 
 collisions with sceptical philosophy, will, in a few 
 years, carry all churches enjoying a learned priesthood 
 into the disputes connected with this doctrine of devel- 
 opment. Phil., meantime, is no friend to that Ncw- 
 manian doctrine ; and in sect. 31, p. 66, he thua 
 describes it: "According to these writers" (viz., 
 the writers who advocate the theory of development), 
 " the progressive and gradual development of religious 
 truth, which appears to us " (MS, in the mouth of an 
 anti~Newmanit.e, meaning the 07d-mannians) " to have 
 been terminated by the final revelation of the Gospel, 
 has been going on ever since the foundation of the 
 church, is going on still, and must continue to advance. 
 This theory presumes that the Bible does not contain 
 a full and final exposition of a complete system of 
 religion ; that the church has developed from the 
 'crip"tures true doctrines not explicitly contained 
 therein," &c., &c. 
 
 But, without meaning to undertake a defence of 
 Mr. Newman (whose book I am as yet too slenderly 
 acquainted with), may I be allowed, at this point, tc
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 383 
 
 intercept a fallacious view of that doctrine, as though 
 essentially it proclaimed some imperfection in Chris- 
 tianity. The imperfection is in us, the Christians, 
 not in Christianity. The impression given by Phil, to 
 the hasty reader is, that, according to Newmanism, 
 (he Scriptures make a good beginning, to which we 
 ourselves are continually adding furnish a founda- 
 tion, on which we ourselves build the superstructure. 
 Not so. In the course of a day or a year, the sun 
 passes through a vast variety of positions, aspects, and 
 corresponding powers, in relation to ourselves. Daily 
 and annually he is developed to us he runs a cycle 
 of development. Yet, after all, this practical result 
 does not argue any change or imperfection, growth or 
 decay, in the sun. This great orb is stationary as 
 regards his place, and unchanging as regards his power. 
 It is the subjective change in ourselves that projects 
 itself into this endless succession of apparent changes 
 in the object. Not otherwise on the scheme of religious 
 development ; the Christian theory and system are 
 perfect from the beginning. In itself, Christianity 
 changes not, neither waxing nor waning ; but the 
 motions of time and the evolutions of experience con- 
 tinually uncover new parts of its unchanging disk. 
 The orb grows, so far as practically we are speaking 
 of our own perceptions ; but absolutely, as regards 
 jtself in its essence, the orb, eternally the same, has 
 simply more or fewer of its digits exposed. Chris- 
 tianity, perfect from the beginning, had in its earlier 
 tages a curtain over much of its disk, which Time 
 and Social Progress are continually withdrawing. 
 This I say not as any deliberate judgment on develop-
 
 384 PEOTE8TANTISM. 
 
 ment, but merely as a suspending, or ad interim idea, 
 by way of barring too summary an interdict against 
 the doctrine at this premature stage. Phil., however, 
 hardens his face against Newman and all his works. 
 Him and them he defies ; and would consign, perhaps 
 secretly, to the care of a well-known (not new, but) 
 old gentleman, if only he had any faith in that old 
 gentleman's existence. On that point, he is a fixed 
 infidel, and quotes with applause the answer of Robin- 
 son, the once celebrated Baptist clergyman, who being 
 asked if he believed in the devil, replied, " Oh, no ; 
 7, for my part, believe in God don't you ? " as if 
 each belief alternately involved the negation of the 
 other. 
 
 Phil., therefore, as we have seen, in effect, condemns 
 development. But, at p. 33, when as yet he is not 
 thinking of Mr. Newman, he says, " If knowledge is 
 progressive, the development of Christian doctrine must 
 be progressive likewise." I do not see the must ; but 
 I see the Newmanian cloven foot. As to the must, 
 knowledge is certainly progressive ; but the develop- 
 ment of the multiplication table is not therefore pro- 
 gressive, nor of anything else that is finished from the 
 beginning. My reason, however, for quoting the sen- 
 tence, is because here we suddenly detect Phil, laying 
 down in his own person that doctrine which in Mr. 
 Newman he had regarded as heterodox. Phil, is 
 taken red-hand, as the English law expresses it, crim- 
 son with the blood of his offence ; assuming, in fact, 
 tn original imperfection quoad the scire, not quoad the 
 tsse ; as to the " exposition of the system," though no 
 ts to the "system itself of Christianity. Mr. NPW
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 385 
 
 man, after all, asserts (I believe) only one mode of 
 development as applicable to Christianity. Phil, hav- 
 ing broke the ice, may now be willing to allow of two 
 developments ; whilst I, that am always for going to 
 extremes, finding moderation to be the worst thing in 
 this present world, should be disposed to assert three, 
 viz. : 
 
 First, the Philological development. And this is a 
 point on which I, Philo-Phil. (or, as for brevity you 
 may call me, Phil-Phil.'] shall, without wishing to do 
 so, vex Phil. It's shocking that one should vex the 
 author of one's existence, which Phil, certainly is in 
 relation to me, when considered as Phil-Phil ; for I, 
 in my incarnation of Phil-Phil., certainly could not 
 have existed, had not Phil, pre-existed. Still it is 
 past all denial, that, to a certain extent, the Scriptures 
 must benefit, like any other book, by an increasing ac- 
 curacy and compass of learning in the exegesis applied 
 to them. But if all the world denied this, Phil., my 
 parent, is the man that cannot ; since he it is that re- 
 lies upon philological knowledge as the one resource of 
 Christian philosophy in all circumstances of difficulty 
 .'or any of its interests, positive or negative. Philol- 
 ogy, according to Phil., is the sheet-anchor of Chris- 
 tianity. Already it is the author of a Christianity 
 more in harmony with philosophy ; and, as regards the 
 future, Phil, it is that charges Philology with the 
 whole service of divinity. Wherever anything, being 
 :-ight, needs to be defended wherever anything, 
 being amiss, needs to be improved, on Philology it is 
 tha: the burden rests. Oh, what a life he will lead 
 this poor Philology ! Philology, with Phil., is the 
 25
 
 38G PBOTESTAXTISW. 
 
 is the great benefactress for the past, and the sole trus- 
 tee for the future. Philology is the Mrs. Pavtington 
 that not only engages in single duel with the Atlantic 
 Ocean, armed simply with her mop, but also under- 
 takes to mop out the Atlantic from all trespass or in- 
 trusicn through all time coming. Here, therefore, 
 Phil, is caught in a fix, habemus confitentem. He de- 
 nounces development when dealing with the Newman- 
 ites ; he relies on it when vaunting the functions of 
 Philology ; and the only evasion for him would be to 
 distinguish about the modes of development, were it 
 not that, by insinuation, he has apparently denied all 
 modes. 
 
 Secondly, there is the Philosophic development, from 
 that constant reaction upon the Bible which is maintain- 
 ed by advancing knowledge. This is a mode of develop- 
 ment continually going on, and reversing the steps of 
 past human follies. In every age, man has imported 
 his own crazes into the Bible, fancied that he saw 
 them there, and then drawn sanctions to his wicked- 
 ness or absurdity from what were nothing else than 
 reflexes projected from his own monstrous errors, or, at 
 best, puerile conceits of adventurous ignorance. Thus 
 did the Papists draw a plenary justification of intoler- 
 ance, or even of atrocious persecution, from the Evan- 
 gelical " Compel them to come in /" The right of un- 
 limited coercion was read in those words. People, 
 again, that were democratically given, or had a fancy 
 for treason, heard a trumpet of insurrection in the 
 words " To your tents, oh Israel ! " But far beyond 
 these in multitude were those that drew from the Bible 
 the most extravagant claims for kings and rulers
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 387 
 
 " Rebellion was as the sin of witchcraft." This was 
 t jewel of a text ; it killed two birds with one stone 
 viz., simultaneously condemning all constitutional 
 resistance, the most wise and indispensable, to the 
 most profligate of kings, and also consecrating the fil- 
 thiest of man's follies as to witchcraft. Broomsticks* 
 as aerial horses, were proved out of it most clearly, 
 and also the atrocity of representative government. 
 What a little text to contain so much ! Look into 
 Algernon Sidney, or into Locke's controversy with Sir 
 Robert Filmer's * " Patriarcha," or into any books of 
 those days on political principles, and it will be found 
 that Scripture was so used as to form an absolute bar 
 against human progress. All public benefits were, in 
 the most verbal sense, made to be precarious, as de- 
 pending upon prayers (preces whence precor, and our 
 own precarious) to those who had an interest in refus- 
 ing them. All improvements were eleemosynary; for 
 the initial step in all cases belonged to the crown ; and 
 except as bounty or lordly alms from the crown, no 
 reform was possible. "The right divine of kings to 
 govern wrong " was in those days what many a man 
 would have died for what many a man did die for; 
 und all in pure simplicity of heart faithful to the 
 Bible, but to the Bible of misinterpretation. They 
 obeyed (and most sincerely, because often to their own 
 ruin) an order which they had misread. Their sincer- 
 ty, the disinterestedness of their folly, is evident ; 
 ind in that degree is evident the opening for Scripture 
 
 * " Filmer's Patriarcha :" I mention the book as the an- 
 tagonist, and not the man, because (according to my impression) 
 Sir Robert was dead when Locke was answering him.
 
 388 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 development. Nobody could better obey Scripture as 
 they had understood it. Change in the obedience, 
 there could be none for the better ; it demanded onlj 
 that there should be a change in the interpretation, 
 and that change would be what is meant by a develop- 
 ment of Scripture. Two centuries of enormous pro- 
 gress in the relations between subjects and rulers have 
 altered the whole reading. " How readest thou ? " 
 was the question of Christ himself; that is, in what 
 meaning dost thou read the particular Scripture that 
 applies to this case, so as to escape a superstitious 
 obedience to its mere letter, which so often " killeth ? ' ' 
 All the texts and all the cases remain at this hour just 
 as they were for our ancestors ; and our reverence for 
 these texts is as absolute as theirs ; but we, applying 
 lights of experience which they had not, construe these 
 texts by different logic. There now is development 
 applied to the Bible in one of its many strata that 
 particular stratum which connects itself most with civil 
 polity. Again, what a development have we made of 
 Christian truth ; how differently do we now read our 
 Bibles in relation to the poor tenants of dungeons that 
 once were thought, even by Christian nations, to have 
 no rights at all ! in relation to " all prisoners and 
 captives ; "* and in relation above all to slaves ! The 
 New Testament had said nothing directly upon the 
 question of slavery ; nay, by the misreader it was 
 father supposed indirectly to countenance that institu- 
 tion. But mark it is Mohammedanism, having little 
 
 * Words from one of the beautiful petitions in the Litany o. 
 the Anglican Church.
 
 PBOTESTAHTISM. 389 
 
 faith in its own spiritual power of rectification, that 
 dare not confide in its children for developing anything, 
 but must tie them up for every contingency by the 
 letter of a rule. Christianity how differently d >eg 
 she proceed ! She throws herself broadly upon the 
 pervading spirit which burns within her morals. " Let 
 hem alone," she says of nations ; " leave them to 
 themselves. I have put a new law into their hearts, 
 and a new heart (a heart of flesh, where before was a 
 stony heart) into all my children; and if it is really 
 there, really cherished, that law, read by that heart, 
 will tell them will develop for them what it is 
 that they ought to do in every case as it arises, though 
 never noticed in words, when once its consequences 
 are comprehended." No need, therefore, for the New 
 Testament explicitly to forbid slavery; silently and 
 implicitly it is forbidden in many passages of the New 
 Testament, and it is at war with the spirit of all. Be- 
 sides, the religion which trusts to formal and literal 
 rules breaks down the very moment that a new case 
 arises not described in the rules. Such a case is vir- 
 tually unprovided for, if it does not answer to a cir- 
 cumstantial textual description ; whereas every case is 
 provided for, as soon as its tendencies and its moral 
 relations are made known, by a religion that speaks 
 through a spiritual organ to a spiritual apprehension 
 in man. Accordingly, we find that, whenever a new 
 mode of intoxication is introduced, not depending 
 ipon grapes, the most devout Mussulmans hold them- 
 selves absolved from the interdict of the Koran as to 
 itrong drink, on the ground that this interdict applied 
 tself to the fermentations of grapes, and scandalously
 
 3'JO PKOTESTA.NTISM. 
 
 unaware, in its bee-like limitation of prophetic vision,* 
 that such blessings would arise in the Christian world 
 as brown stout and Bass's medicinal ale, which the 
 Prophet himself might have found useful as a viaticum, 
 on his flight to (0? from, was it?) Medina. 
 
 And so it would have been with Christians, if the 
 New Testament had laid down literal prohibitions of 
 slavery, or of the slave traffic. Thousands of varia- 
 tions would have been developed by time which no let- 
 ter of Scripture could have been comprehensive enough 
 to reach. Were the domestic servants of Greece, the 
 r>^TtV (thetes), within the description ? Were the 
 serfs and the ascripti glebes of feudal Europe to be 
 accounted slaves ? Or those amongst our own bro- 
 thers and sisters, thai within so short a period were 
 
 * " Bee-like limitation of prophetic vision : " Grosser ig- 
 norance than my own in most sections of natural history is not 
 easily imagined. I retreat in panic from a cross-examination 
 upon such themes by a child of five years. But, nevertheless, 
 I am possessed of various odd fragments in this field cf learning, 
 mostly achieved by my own casual observation up and down in- 
 numerable solitary roamings. I am also possessed of one solitary 
 zoological fact, borrowed, and not self-originated (which I fear 
 may turn out to be a falsehood), as to the optics of the bee. I 
 picked it up about fifty years ago in a most unlikely quarter 
 riz., the little work of a sentimentalist and discounting poet 
 namely, Samuel Rogers which is my chief reason for viewing 
 it sceptically. He, in his " Pleasures of Memory," asserts that 
 the bee, too busy for star-gazing, sees only to the extent of haK- 
 nn-inch beyond his own eye. I know people with a range 01 
 vision considerably less. Will the reader permit me to present 
 him with this little contribution to his stores of zoological science 
 t>efore it has time to explode (in the event of being unsound) ." 
 I expect no premium or bonus, by way of commission on fifty 
 yearn' porterage.
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 391 
 
 corn sublerraneously,* in Scottish mines, 01 in the 
 English collieries of Cumberland, and were sup- 
 posed to be ascripti metallo, sold by nature to the 
 mine, and endorsed upon the machinery as so many 
 gpokes in a mighty wheel, shafts and tubes in the 
 " plant" of the concern, and liable to be pursued su 
 fugitive slaves, in the event of their coming up tv 
 daylight, and walking off to some other district | 
 
 * See, for some very interesting sketches of this Pariah popu- 
 lation, the work (title I forget) of Mr. Bald, a Scottish engineer, 
 well known and esteemed in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He may 
 be relied on. What he tells against Scotland is violently against 
 his own will, for he is intensely national, of which I will give the 
 reader one instance that may make him smile. Much of the 
 rich, unctuous coal, from Northumberland and Durham, gives a 
 deep ruddy light, verging to a blood-red, and certainly is rather 
 sullen, on a winter evening to the eye. On the other hand, the 
 Scottish coal, or most of it, being far poorer as to heat, throws 
 out a very beautiful and animated scarlet blaze; upon which 
 hint, Mr. Bald, when patriotically distressed at not being able to 
 deny the double power of the eastern English coal, suddenly re- 
 vivifies his Scottish heart that had been chilled, perhaps, by the 
 Scottish coals in his fire-grate, upon recurring to this picturesque 
 difference in the two blazes ' 'Ah! " he says gratefully, " that 
 Newcastle blaze is well enough for a "gloomy" Englishman, but 
 it wouldn't do at all for cheerful Scotland." 
 
 t These hideous abuses, which worked for generations through 
 the silent aid of dense ignorance in some quarters, and of old 
 traditional maxims in others, under the darkness of general 
 iiredulity, and riveted locally by brazen impudence in lawyers, 
 gave way (I believe), not to any express interference of the 
 legislature [for in these monstrous inroads upon human rights 
 the old proverbial saying was exemplified Out of sight, out of 
 mind , and no bastille can be so much out of sight as a mine or 
 colliery], but simply to the instincts of truth and knowledgf
 
 392 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 Would they, would these poor Scotch and English 
 Pariahs, have stood within any Scriptural privilege 
 
 slowly diffusing their contagious light. Latterly, indeed, the 
 House of Commons interfered powerfully to protect women from 
 working in mines, and the poor creatures most fervently return, 
 ed thanks to the House but, as I saw and said at the time, 
 under the unfortunate misconception that the gracious and pa- 
 ternal senate would send a supplementary stream of gold and 
 silver, in lieu of that particular stream which the honorable 
 House had seen cause suddenly to freeze up forever. Not that I 
 would insinuate the reasonableness, or even the possibility, oi 
 Parliament's paying permanent wages to these poor mining 
 women; but I do contend, that in the act of correcting a ruinous 
 social evil, that never could have reached its climax unless under 
 the criminal negligence of Parliament, naturally and justly the 
 duty fell upon that purblind Parliament of awarding to these 
 poor mining families such an indemnification, once for all, as 
 might lighten and facilitate the harsh transition from double 
 pay to single pay which the new law had suddenly exacted. 
 As a sum to be paid by a mighty nation, it was nothing at all ; 
 as a sum to be received by a few hundreds of working house- 
 holds, at a moment of unavoidable hardship and unforeseen 
 change, it would have been a serious and seasonable relief, 
 acknowledged with gratitude. Meantime, I am net able to say 
 whether all the evils of female participation in mining labor, as 
 contemplated by the wisdom of Parliament, so fearfully disturb- 
 ing the system of their natural household functions, and lowering 
 o painfully the dignity of their sexual position, have even yet 
 been purified. Mr. Bald, a Scottish engineer, chiefly applying 
 his science to collieries, describes a state of degradations as 
 pressing upon the female co-operators in the system of some 
 collieries, which is likely enough to prevail at this hour [Feb- 
 ruary, 1858], inasmuch as the substitution of oiale labor would 
 often prove too costly, besides that the special difiiculty of the 
 case would thus be aggravated : I speak of cases where th 
 avenues of descent into the mine are too low to admit of horses 
 nd the women, whom it is found necessary to substitute beius
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 393 
 
 Had the New Testament legislated by name and let- 
 ter for this class of douloi (slaves) ? Ten thousand 
 evasions, distinctions, and subdistinctions, would have 
 neutralized the intended relief; and a verbal refine- 
 ment would forever have defeated a merely verbal 
 concession. Endless would be the virtual restorations 
 to slavery under a Mahometan appeal to the letter of 
 the Scriptural command : endless would be the defeats 
 of these restorations under a Christian appeal to the 
 pervading spirit of God's revealed command, and 
 under an appeal to the direct voice of God, ventrilo- 
 quizing through the secret whispers of man's con- 
 science. Meantime, this sort of development (it may 
 be objected) is not so much a light which Scripture 
 
 obliged to assume a cowering attitude, gradually subside into 
 this unnatural posture (as a fixed memorial of their brutal 
 degradation). The spine in these poor women, slaving on behalf 
 of their children, becomes permanently horizontal, and at right 
 angles to their legs. In process of time they lose the power of 
 bending back into the perpendicular attitude conferred by 
 nature as a symbolic privilege of grandeur upon the human 
 race ; at least if we believe the Roman poet, who tells us that 
 She (meaning Nature) 
 
 " Os homini sublime dedit, ccelumque tueri 
 Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus : " 
 
 t. e., to the race of man she gave an aspiring countenance, and 
 laid her commands upon that race to fix his gaze upon the 
 heavens overhead, and to lift up all faces erect and bold to the 
 imperishable stars. But these faithful mothers, loyal to their 
 duties in scorn of their own personal interests, oftentimes ex- . 
 ulted in tossing away from them, as a worthless derelict, their 
 womanly graces of figure and motion dedicating and using 
 np these graces as a fund for ransoming their daughters from 
 til similar degradation in time to come.
 
 394 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 throws out upon human life, as inversely a light 
 human life and its eternal evolutions throw back upon 
 Scripture. True : but then the very possibility of 
 euch developments for life, and for the deciphering 
 intellect of man, was first of all opened by the spirit 
 of Christianity. Christianity, for instance, brings to 
 bear seasonably upon some opening, offered by a new 
 phasis in the aspects of society, a new and kindling 
 truth. This truth, caught up by some influential 
 organ of social life, is prodigiously expanded by hu- 
 man experience ; and subsequently, when travelling 
 back to the Bible as an improved or illustrated text, 
 is found to be made up in its details of many human 
 developments. Does that argue any disparagement to 
 Christianity, though she contributed little, and man 
 contributed much ? On the contrary, man would have 
 contributed nothing at all, but for that first elementary 
 impulse by which Christianity awakened man's atten- 
 tion to the slumbering instincts of truth, started man's 
 movement in the new direction, and moulded man's 
 regenerated principles. To give one instance : Public 
 charity, the charity that grows out of tender and ap- 
 prehensive sympathy with human sufferings when 
 did it commence, and where ? Who first thought of it 
 as a paramount duty for all who had any available 
 power as an awful right, clamorously pleading its 
 pangs night and day in the ear of God and man ? 
 What voice, melodious as the harps of Paradise 
 voice which " all the company of heaven " must have 
 echoed with a choral antiphony, first of all insisted on 
 cold and hunger as dreadful realities afflicting pool 
 voraen and innocent children? It was the voice o
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 395 
 
 ne that sat upon a throne ; and he was the first man, 
 having power to realize his benign purposes, that read 
 in the rubric of man's duties any call for such pur- 
 poses. But why it was that he first read the secret 
 writing which the whole pagan world, Rome, and 
 insolent Greece, had so obstinately ignored, suddenly 
 becomes clear as daylight, when we learn that he - 
 the inaugurator of eleemosynary aid to the afflictions 
 of man was the first son of Christianity that sat 
 upon a throne. Yes, Constantine it was, earliest of 
 Christian princes, that first* of all invested Pauperism 
 
 * " Constantine that first: " But let me warn the readet 
 not to fancy that the public largesses of corn to the humbler 
 citizens of Rome had intercepted the possibility of this prece- 
 dency for Constantine by many generations before he was 
 known, or even before Christianity was revealed. There was no 
 vestige of charity in the Roman distributions of grain. .These 
 distributions moved upon the same impulse as the sportula of 
 the great oligarchic houses, and the donati ves of princely officers 
 to their victorious soldiery upon great anniversaries, or upon 
 accessions to the throne, or upon adoptions of successors, &c. 
 All were political, oftentimes rolling through the narrowest 
 grooves of intrigue ; and so far from contemplating any collat- 
 eral or secondary purpose of charity, that the most earnest 
 inquiry on such occasions was to find pretexts for excluding 
 men from the benefit of the bounty. The primary thought 
 was who should not be admitted to participate in the dole. 
 And at any rate none were admitted but citizens in the moal 
 rigorous and the narrowest sense. Constantine it was : I do 
 not certainly know that I have anywhere called the reader's 
 attention to another great monument which connected the name 
 f Constantine by a separate and hardly noticed tie with the 
 i ropagation of Christianity. What name is it that, being still 
 terdant and most interesting to all the nations of Christendom, 
 larves as a daily memorial to refresh our reverence for th
 
 B96 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 with the majesty of an organ amongst political forces^ 
 on the Scriptural warrant that the poor should never 
 
 emperor Constantino ? What but his immortal foundation ol 
 Constantinople, imposed upon the ruins of the elder city Byzan- 
 tium, in the year of Christ 313, now therefore in the 1565th 
 year of its age ; which city of Constantinople is usually regard- 
 ed, oy those who have science comprehensive enough for valuing 
 its various merits, as enjoying the most august site and cir- 
 cumstantial advantages, in reference to climate, commerce, 
 navigation, sovereign policy, and centralization, on this planet, 
 with the doubtful reservation of one single South American 
 station, viz., that of the Brazilian city Rio Janeiro (or, as we 
 usually call it, Rio). Doubtless these magnificent natural 
 endowments did much to influence the choice of Constantino ; 
 and yet I believe that no economic advantages, even though 
 greater and more palpable, would have been sufficient to disen- 
 gage his affections from a scene so consecrated by grand historical 
 recollections as Rome, had not one overwhelming repulsion, 
 ineradically Roman, violently disenchanted him forever. This 
 turned upon religion. Rome, it was found, could not be de- 
 paganised. Too profound, too inveterately entangled with the 
 very soil and deep substructions of Latium were the old traditional 
 records, promises, auguries, and mysterious splendors of con 
 centrated Heathenism in, and on, and nine times round about, 
 and fifty fathoms below, and countless fathoms in upper air 
 above this most memorable of capital cities. Jupiter Capitolinus, 
 the Sybil's Books, which for Roman minds were authentic, the 
 dread cloister of Vestal Virgins, Jupiter Stator, and the undeni- 
 ble omen of the Twelve Vultures * centuries of mysterious 
 
 *' : 0menof the twelve vultures:" The reader must not 
 allow himself to be repelled from the plain historic truth by fool- 
 ish reproaches of superstition or credulity. The fact of twelve 
 Vultures having appeared under ceremonial circumstances, it 
 that may be considered the inauguration of Rome, and wai
 
 PKOTESXANTISM. 31)7 
 
 , 3ase out ol the land Constantine that conferred 
 i-pon misery, as a mighty potentate dwelling forever 
 in the skirts of populous cities, the privilege of appear- 
 
 ^ympathy between dim records and dim inquiries, could no 
 more be washed away from the credulous heart of the Roman 
 plebs, than the predictions of Nostradamus from the expecting 
 and listening faith of Catherine de' Medici and her superstitious 
 court. In short, fifty baptisms could not have washed away the 
 deep-seated scrofula of Paganism in Rome. Constantine, there- 
 fore, wisely drew away a select section of the population to the 
 quiet waters of the Propontis (the Sea of Marmora, which 
 oblige me by pronouncing as if an imperfect rhyme to armory, 
 not as if the o in the penult, were accented). And thus, by a 
 double service to Christianity viz., by a solemn institution of 
 charitable contributions to the poor, as their absolute right 
 under the Christian law, and by a wise shepherd's segration of 
 diseased members' from his flock he earned meritoriously, and 
 did not win by luck, that fortunate destiny which has locked up 
 his name into that of the regenerated Rome the earliest Chris- 
 tian city and the mother of the Second, or the Oriental Roman 
 Empire. 
 
 BO understood at the time, is as certain as any fact the beet 
 attested in the history of Rome. And as it repeatedly announced 
 itself during the lapse of these twelve centuries, when as yet 
 they were far from being completed, there cannot be a reasonable 
 doubt that a most impressive coincidence did occur between the 
 ?arly prophesy and its extraordinary fulfilment. In a gross 
 general statement, such as can be made in a single sentence, we 
 may describe the duration of Rome, from Romulus to Christ, &g 
 jeven hundred and fifty years , which leaves about four hundred 
 Mid fifty to be accounted for, in order to make up the tale of the 
 twelve vultures. And pretty exactly that number of four hun- 
 dred and fifty, plus two or three suppose, measures the interval 
 Setween Christ and Augustulus.
 
 B98 PKOTESTANIISM. 
 
 ing forever in the skirts of populous cities, the privi- 
 lege of appearing by a representative and a spokesman 
 in the council-chamber of the Empire. 
 
 Had, then, the Pagans of all generations before 
 Constantine, or more strictly before the Christian era, 
 no charity, no pity, neither money nor verbal sympa- 
 thy at the service of despairing poverty ? No, none 
 at all. Supposing, for instance, any Gentile establish- 
 ments to have existed up and down Greece, or Egypt. 
 or the Grecianized regions of Asia Minor and Syria, 
 at the Apostolic era, these would undoubtedly have 
 been referred to by the Apostles as furnishing models 
 to emulate, or to copy with improvements, or utterly 
 and earnestly to ignore, under terror of contagion from 
 some of those fundamental errors in their plan theo- 
 retically, or in their administration practically, which 
 might be counted on as pretty certain to pollute the 
 executive details, however decent in their first origi- 
 nating purpose. k. T ion any one of some half-dozen 
 motives, St. Paul, in to "IP boundless activity of inquiry 
 and comparison, would have found cause to mention 
 such institutions. And again, in the next generation, 
 under the Emperor Trajan, Pliny would have had 
 abundant ground for dwelling on this early communism 
 and system of reciprocal charity established amongst 
 the Christians, had he not recoiled from thus embla/on- 
 ing the beneficence of an obnoxious sect, when con- 
 scious that no parallel public bounty could be pleaded 
 ,s a set-oft on the side of those who desired to perse- 
 cute this new-born sect. There remains, moreover, a 
 damnatory evidence on this point, much more unequiv- 
 ocal and direct, in the formal systems of ethics sfil
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 399 
 
 arriving from the Pagan world under the noon-day 
 splendor of its civilization : Ar'etotle's, for example, 
 at the epoch of Alexander the Great; and Cicero's, 
 at a corresponding period of refinement three centuries 
 later in Rome. Now, in these elaborate systems, 
 which have come down to us unmutilated, no traces 
 are to be found of any recognised duty moving in the 
 direction of public aid and relief to the sufferers from 
 poverty. Our wicked friend Kikero,* for instance, 
 who was so had, but wrote so well, who did such 
 naughty things, but said such pretty things, has him- 
 self noticed in one of his letters, with petrifying 
 coolness, that he knew of destitute old women in 
 Rome, who went without tasting food for one, two, or 
 even three days. After making such a statement, did 
 Kikero not tumble down-stairs, and break at least 
 three of his legs, in his hurry to call a public meeting 
 for the redressing of so cruel a grievance ? Not he : 
 the man continued to strut up and down his library, 
 
 * It is interesting to observe, at this moment, how the proofs 
 accumulate from the ends of the earth that the Roman C was 
 always in value equal to K. The imperial name of Caesar has 
 survived in two separate functions. It is found as a family name 
 rooted amongst Oriental peoples, and is always Keyser. But 
 also it has survived as an official title, indicating the sovereign 
 ruler. At this moment, from Milan, under the shadow of the 
 Alps, to Lucknow, under the shadow of the Himalayas, this 
 immortal Roman name popularly expresses the office of the 
 jupreme magistrate. Keyser is the current titular designation 
 ef the king who till lately reigned over Oude ; and der Kayser, 
 n the fiction which made the Empire of Germany a true lineal 
 uccessor to the Western Roman Empire, has always indicated 
 the Emperor once German, now simply Austrian.
 
 400 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 in a toga as big as the " Times " newspaper, singing 
 out 
 
 " Cedant arma togas; concedat laurea laudi." 
 
 And, if Kikero noticed the case at all, it was only as n 
 fact that might be interesting to natural philosophers, 
 or to speculators on the theories of a plenum and a 
 vacuum, or to Greek physicians investigating the powere 
 of the human stomach, or to connoisseurs in old wo 
 men. No drachma or denarius, be well assured, ever 
 left the secret lockers or hidden fobs of this discreet 
 barrister upon so blind a commission as that of carrying 
 consolation to a superfluous old woman not enjoying 
 BO much as the jus suffragii. By a thousand indirect 
 notices, it might be shown that an act of charity would, 
 in the eyes of Pagan moralists, have taken rank as an 
 act of drunkenness. 
 
 Yes, the great planetary orb of charity in its most 
 comprehensive range not that charity only which 
 interprets for the best all doubtful symptoms, not that 
 charity only which " hopeth all things," and which, 
 even to the relenting criminal, gives back an opening 
 for recovering his lost position by showing that for 
 him also there is shining in the distance a reversionary 
 hope but that charity also which brings aid that is 
 effectual, and sympathy that is unaffected, to the house- 
 holds sitting in darkness this great diffusive orb, and 
 magnetic centre of every perfect social system, first 
 wheeled into its place and functions on that day when 
 Christianity shot above the horizon. But the idea, but 
 the principle, but the great revolutionary fountain o 
 benediction, was all that Christianity furnished, 01
 
 PBOTESTA.NTISM. 401 
 
 needed to furnish. The executive arrangements, the 
 endless machinery, for diffusing, regulating, multi- 
 plying, exalting this fountain all this belongs no 
 longer to the Bible, but to man. And why not * 
 What blindness to imagine that revelation would have 
 promoted its own purposes by exonerating man from 
 kis share in the total work. So far from that, thus and 
 no otherwise it was viz., by laying upon a man a 
 necessity for co-operating with heaven that the com- 
 pound object of this great revolution had any chance 
 of being accomplished. It was as much the object of 
 Christianity that he who exercised charity should be 
 bettered, as he that benefited by charity the agent 
 equally with the object. Only in that way is Shaks- 
 peare's fine anticipation realized of a two-fold harvest, 
 and a double moral won ; for the fountain itself 
 
 " Is twice blessed : 
 It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes." 
 
 But if Providence had reserved to itself the whole of 
 the work not merely the first suggestion of anew 
 and divine magnetism for interlinking reciprocally all 
 members of the human family, but had also appro- 
 priated the whole process of deducing and distributing 
 into separate rills the irrigation of God's garden upon 
 earth, in that act it would have defeated on the largest 
 scale its own scheme of training for man; just as 
 qauch as if (according to a former speculation of mine) 
 God, by condescending to teach science in the Bible 
 (astronomy suppose, chronology, or geology), had thus 
 at one blow, besides defrauding the true and avowed 
 mission of the Bible, self-counteractingly stepped in to 
 26
 
 402 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 solve liis own problems, and thus had violently inter- 
 cepted those very difficulties which had beec strewed in 
 man' s path seriatim, and so as to advance by measured 
 increments of difficulty, for the specific purpose of ap- 
 plying graduated irritations to the stimulation of man's 
 intellect. Equally in the training of his moral habits, 
 and in the development by successive steps of his in- 
 tellect, man and the religion of man must move by co- 
 operation ; and it cannot be the policy or the true 
 meaning of revelation to work towards any great pur- 
 pose in man's destiny, otherwise than through the co- 
 agency of man's faculties, improved in the whole 
 extent of their capacities. This case, therefore (of 
 charity arising suddenly as a new command to man), 
 teaches three great inferences : 
 
 First, the power of a religion to stimulate vast de- 
 velopments in man, when itself stimulated by a social 
 condition not sleeping and passive, but in a vigilant 
 state of healthy activity. 
 
 Secondly, that if all continued cases of interchange- 
 able development that is, of the Bible downwards 
 upon man, or reversely of man upwards upon the Bible 
 and its interpretation maybe presumed to argue a 
 concurrent action between Providence and man, it fol- 
 lows that the human element in the co-agency will al- 
 ways account for any admixture of evil or error, with- 
 out impeaching in any degree the doctrine of a general 
 overriding inspiration. For instance, I see little reason 
 to doubt that economically the Apostles had erred, and 
 through their very simplicity of heart had erred, as 
 to that joint-stock company which they, so ignorant 
 of the world, had formed in an early stage of the in-
 
 PBOTESTANTISM. 403 
 
 fant church ; and that Ananias and Sapphira had fallen 
 victims to a perplexity, and a collision between their 
 engagements and their natural rights, such as over- 
 threw their too delicate sensibilities. But, if this wero 
 really so, the human element carries away from the 
 Divine all taint of reproach. There lies one mode 
 of benefit from this joint agency of man and Provi- 
 dence.* 
 
 Thirdly, we see here illustrated one amongst mnu 
 merable cases of development applicable to the Bible 
 And this power of development in general proves 
 one other thing of the last importance to prove 
 viz., the power of Christianity to work in co- 
 operation with time and social progress to work 
 variably, according to the endless variation of time and 
 place. And this is the exact shibboleth of a spiritual 
 religion. 
 
 For, in conclusion, here lies a consideration of dead- 
 liest importance. On reviewing the history of false 
 religions, and inquiring what it was that ruined them, 
 or caused them to tremble, or to exhibit premonitory 
 signs of coming declension, rarely or never amongst 
 such causes has been found any open exhibition of 
 violence. The gay mythologic religion of Greece 
 
 * Coleridge, as may be seen in his " Notes on English Di- 
 vines," though free in a remarkable degree, for one so cloudy in 
 his speculative flights, from any spirit of licentious tampering with 
 the text of the New Testament, or with its orthodox explanation, 
 was yet deeply impressed with the belief that the Apostles had gone 
 far astray in their first provision for the pecuniary necessities of 
 the infant church , and he went so far as to think that they had 
 even seriously crippled its movements, by accumulations of del't 
 that might have been evaded.
 
 404 PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 melted away in silence ; that of Egypt, more revolting 
 to un familiarised sensibilities, more gloomy, and ap- 
 parently reposing on some basis of more solemn and 
 less allegoric reality, exhaled like a dream i. e., 
 without violence, by internal decay. I mean, that no 
 violence existed where the religion fell, and *here was 
 violence where it did not . For even the dreadful fanat- 
 icism of the early Mahometan sultans in Hindostan, 
 before the accession of Baber and his Mogul successors 
 from the house of Timour, failed to crush the mon- 
 strous idolatries of the Hindoos. All false religions 
 have perished by their own hollowness, and by internal 
 decay, under the searching trials applied by life and 
 the changes of life, by social mechanism and the 
 changes of social mechanism, which wait in ambush 
 upon every mode of religion. False modes of religion 
 could not respond to the demands exacted from them, 
 or the questions emerging. One after one they have 
 collapsed, as if by palsy, and have sunk away under 
 new aspects of society and new necessities of man 
 which they were not able to face. Commencing in one 
 condition of society, in one set of feelings, and in one 
 system of ideas, they sank instinctively under any 
 great change in these elements, to which they had no 
 natural power of plastic self-accommodation. A false 
 religion furnished always a key to one subordinate lock , 
 but a religion that is true will prove a master-key for 
 all locks alike. This transcendental principle, through 
 which Christianity transfers herself so readily from 
 climate to climate,* from land to land, from century to 
 
 * From climate to climate : " Sagacious Mahometans are 
 often troubled and scandalized by the secret misgiving that, after
 
 PROTESTANTISM. 405 
 
 century, from the simplicity of shepherds to the utmost 
 refinement of philosophers, carries with it a corres- 
 ponding necessity (corresponding, I mean, to such in- 
 finite flexibility) of an indefinite development. The 
 Paganism of Rome, so flattering and so sustaining to 
 the Roman nationality and pride, satisfied no spiritual 
 necessity : dear to the Romans as citizens, it was at 
 last killing to them as men. 
 
 all, their Prophet must have been an ignorant man. It is clear 
 that the case of a cold climate had never occurred to him; and 
 even a hot one was conceived by him under conditions too palpa- 
 bly limited. Many of the Bedouin Arabs complain of ablutions 
 incompatible with their half- waterless position. Mahomet coming 
 from the Hedjas, a rich tract, and through that benefit the fruit- 
 ful mother of noble horses, knew no more of the arid deserts 
 and Zaarrahs than do I. These oversights of its founder would 
 have proved fatal to Islamism had Islamism succeeded w produc- 
 ing a high civilization.
 
 SECESSION 
 
 THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.* 
 
 A GKEAT revolution has taken place in Scotland. A 
 greater has been threatened. Nor is that danger even 
 yet certainly gone by. Upon the accidents of such 
 events as may arise for the next five years, whether 
 fitted or not fitted to revive discussions in which many 
 of the Non-seceders went in various degrees along with 
 the Seceders, depends the final (and, in a strict sense, 
 the very awful) question, What is to be the fate of 
 the Scottish church ? Lord Aberdeen's Act is well 
 qualified to tranquillize the agitations of that body ; 
 and at an earlier stage, if not intercepted by Lord 
 Melbourne, might have prevented them in part. But 
 Lord Aberdeen has no power to stifle a conflagration 
 once thoroughly kindled. That must depend in a 
 ^reat degree upon the favorable aspect of events yet in 
 the rear. 
 
 Meantime these great disturbances are not understood 
 in England ; and chiefly from the differences between 
 the two nations as to the language of their several 
 
 |* Written in 1844. The reader will find a praphic narrative 
 if the event in Hanna's " Life of Dr. Thomas Clialmers."|
 
 408 SECESSION FBOM THE 
 
 churches and law courts. The process of ordination 
 and induction is totally different under the diffeient 
 ecclesiastical administrations of the two kingdoms. 
 And tho chvjrcli courts of Scotland do not exist in 
 England. We write, therefore, with an express view to 
 the better information of England proper. And, with 
 this purpose, we shall lead the discussion through 
 four capital questions : 
 
 I. What is it that has been done by the moving 
 party ? 
 
 II. How was it done ? By what agencies and 
 influence ? 
 
 III. What were the immediate results of these acts? 
 
 IV. What are the remote results yet to be appre- 
 hended ? 
 
 I. First, then, WHAT is it that has been done 7 
 Up to the month of May in 1834, the fathers and 
 brothers of the " Kirk " were in harmony as great as 
 humanity can hope to see. Since May, 1834, the 
 church has been a fierce crater of volcanic agencies, 
 throwing out of her bosom one-third of her children ; 
 and these children are no sooner born into their earthly 
 atmosphere, than they turn, with unnatural passions, 
 to the destruction of their brethren. What can be the 
 grounds upon which an acharnement so deadly has 
 arisen ? 
 
 It will read to the ears of a stranger almost as an 
 experiment upon his credulity, if we tell the simple 
 truth. Being incredible, however, it is not the less 
 '.rue; and, being monstrous, it will yet be recorded in 
 listory, that the Scottish church has split into morta. 1
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 409 
 
 feuds upon two points absolutely without interest to 
 the nation ; first, upon a demand for creating clergy- 
 men by a new process ; secondly, upon a demand for 
 Papal latitude of jurisdiction. Even the order of suc- 
 cession in these things is not without meaning. Had 
 the second demand stood first, it would have seemed 
 possible that the two demands might have grown up 
 independently, and so far conscientiously. But, ac- 
 cording to the realities of the case, this is not possible ; 
 the second demand grew out of the first. The interest 
 of the Seceders, as locked up in their earliest requisition, 
 was that which prompted their second. Almost every- 
 body was contented with the existing mode of creating 
 the pastoral relation. Search through Christendom, 
 lengthways and breadthways, there was not a public 
 usage, an institution, an economy, which more pro- 
 foundly slept in the sunshine of divine favor or of civil 
 prosperity, than the peculiar mode authorized and 
 practised in Scotland of appointing to every parish its 
 several pastor. Here and there an ultra- Presbyterian 
 spirit might prompt a murmur against it. But the 
 wise and intelligent approved ; and those who had the 
 appropriate that is, the religious interest confessed 
 that it was practically successful. From whom, then, 
 eame the attempt to change ? Why, from those only 
 who had an alien interest, an indirect interest, an in- 
 terest of ambition in its subversion. As matters stood 
 in the spring of 1834, the patron of each benefice, 
 acting under the severest restraints restraints which 
 (if the church courts did their duty) left no room or 
 possibility for an unfit man to creep in nominated 
 the incumbent. In a spiritual sense, the church had al
 
 410 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 power : by refusing, first of all, to " license " unqualified 
 persons ; secondly, by refusing to " admit " out of these 
 licensed persons such as might have become warped 
 from the proper standard of pastoral fitness, the church 
 had a negative voice, all-potential in the creation of 
 clergymen ; the church could exclude whom she pleased. 
 But this contented her not. Simply to shut out was 
 an ungracious office, though mighty for the interests 
 of orthodoxy through the land. The children of this 
 world, who became the agitators of the church, clam- 
 ored for something more. They desired for the church 
 that she should become a lady patroness ; that she 
 should give as well as take away ; that she should 
 wield a sceptre, courted for its bounties, and not 
 merely feared for its austerities. Yet how should this 
 be accomplished ? Openly to translate upon the church 
 the present power of patrons that were too revolu- 
 tionary, that would have exposed its own object. For 
 the present, therefore, let this device prevail let the 
 power nominally be transferred to congregations : let 
 this be done upon the plea that each congregation un- 
 derstands best what mode of ministrations tends to its 
 own edification. There lies the semblance of a Chris- 
 tian plea ; the congregation, it is said, has become 
 anxious for itself ; the church has become anxious for 
 the congregation. And then, if the translation should 
 be effected, the church has already devised a means for 
 appropriating the power which she has unsettled ; for 
 she limits this power to the communicants at the sacra- 
 mental table. Now, in Scotland, though not in England, 
 the character of communicants is notoriously created 01 
 suspended by the clergyman of each parish , so that, by
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 411 
 
 che briefest of circuits, the church causes the power to 
 revolve into her own hands. 
 
 That was the first change a change full of Jaco- 
 binism ; and for which to be published was to be 
 denounced. It was necessary, therefore, to place this 
 Jacobin change upon a basis privileged from attack. 
 How should that be done ? The object was to create a 
 new clerical power ; to shift the election of clergymen 
 from the lay hands in which law and usage had lodged 
 it ; and, under a plausible mask of making the election 
 popular, cirouitously to make it ecclesiastical. Yet, 
 if the existing patrons of church benefices should see 
 themselves suddenly denuded of their rights, and 
 within a year or two should see these rights settling 
 determinately into the hands of the clergy, the fraud, 
 the fraudulent purpose, and the fraudulent machinery, 
 would have stood out in gross proportions too palpably 
 revealed. In this dilemma the reverend agitators devised 
 a second scheme. It was a scheme bearing triple har- 
 vests ; for, at one and the same time, it furnished the 
 motive which gave a constructive coherency and mean- 
 ing to the original purpose, it threw a solemn shadow 
 over the rank worldliness of that purpose, and it 
 opened a diffusive tendency towards other purposes oi 
 the same nature, as yet undeveloped. The device was 
 this : in Scotland, as in England, the total process by 
 which a parish clergyman is created, subdivides itself 
 into several successive acts. The initial act belongs to 
 he patron of the benefice : he must "present ; " tha* 
 is, he notifies the fact of his having conferred the 
 benefice upon A B, to a public body which officially 
 takes cognizance of this act ; and that body is, no
 
 412 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 the particular parish concerned, but the presbytery of 
 the district in which the parish is seated. Thus far 
 the steps, merely legal, of the proceedings, were too 
 definite to be easily disturbed. These steps are sus- 
 tained by Lord Aberdeen as realities, and even by the 
 Non-intrusionists were tolerated as formalities. 
 
 But at this point commence other steps not so rigor- 
 ously denned by law or usage, nor so absolutely within 
 one uniform interpretation of their value. In prac- 
 tice they had long sunk into forms. But ancient 
 forms easily lend themselves to a revivification by 
 meanings and applications, new or old, under the gal- 
 vanism of democratic forces. The disturbers of the 
 church, passing by the act of " presentation "as an 
 obstacle too formidable to be separately attacked on 
 its own account, made their stand upon one of the 
 two acts which lie next in succession. It is the regu- 
 lar routine, that the presbytery, having been warned 
 of the patron's appointment, and having " received " 
 (in technical language) the presentee that is, having 
 formally recognized him in that character next ap- 
 point a day on which he is to preach before the con- 
 gregation. This sermon, together with the prayers by 
 which it is accompanied, constitute the probationary 
 act according to some views ; but, according to the 
 general theory, simply the inaugural act by which the 
 new pastor places himself officially before his future 
 parishioners. Decorum, and the sense of proportion, 
 seem to require that to every commencement of a very 
 weighty relation, imposing new duties, there should 
 )e a corresponding and ceremonial entrance. The new 
 pastor, until this public introduction, could not b
 
 CHTTKCH OP SCOTLAND. 41J 
 
 ,egitimately assumed for known to the parishioners. 
 And accordingly at this point it was viz., subse- 
 quently to his authentic publication, as we may call it 
 that, in the case of any grievous scandal known 
 to the parish as outstanding against him, arose the 
 proper opportunity furnished by the church for lodg- 
 ing the accusation, and for investigating it before the 
 church court. In default, however, of any grave ob- 
 jection to the presentee, he was next summoned by 
 the presbytery to what really was a probationary act at 
 their bar : viz., an examination of his theological 
 sufficiency. But in this it could not be expected that 
 he should fail, because he must previously have satis- 
 fied the requisitions of the church in his original ex- 
 amination for a license to preach. Once dismissed 
 with credit from this bar, he was now beyond all fur- 
 ther probation whatsoever ; in technical phrase, he was 
 entitled to " admission." Such were the steps, ac- 
 cording to their orderly succession, by which a man 
 consummated the pastoral tie with any particular 
 parish. And all of these steps, subsequent to the 
 " reception " and inaugural preaching, were now sum- 
 marily characterized by the revolutionists as " spirit- 
 ual; " for the sake of sequestering them into their own 
 hands. As to the initiatory act of presentation, that 
 might be secular, and to be dealt with by a secular 
 law. But tne rest were acrs which belonged not to a 
 kingdom of this world. " These," with a new-born 
 scrupulosity never heard of until the revolution of 
 1831, clamored for new casuistries ; " these," said the 
 ngitators, " we cannot conssnt any longer to leave in 
 their state of collapse as mere inert or cciemorua,
 
 i!4 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 forms. They must be revivified. By all means, let 
 the patron present as heretofore. But the acts of ' ex- 
 amination ' and ' admission,' together with the power 
 of altogether refusing to enter upon either, under a 
 protest against the candidate from a clear majority of 
 the parishioners these are acts falling within the 
 spiritual jurisdiction of the church. And these pow- 
 ers we must, for the future, see exercised according to 
 spiritual views." 
 
 Here, then, suddenly emerged a perfect ratification 
 for their own previous revolutionary doctrine upon the 
 creation of parish clergymen. This new scruple was, 
 in relation to former scruples, a perfect linch-pin for 
 locking their machinery into cohesion. For vainly 
 would they have sought to defeat the patron's right of 
 presenting, unless through this sudden pause and in- 
 terdict imposed upon the latter acts in the process of 
 induction, under the pretext that these were acts com- 
 petent only to a spiritual jurisdiction. This plea, by 
 its tendency, rounded and secured all that they had 
 yet advanced in the way of claim. But, at the same 
 time, though indispensable negatively, positively it 
 stretched so much further than any necessity or inter- 
 est inherent in their present innovations, that not im- 
 probably they faltered and shrank back at first from 
 the immeasurable field of consequences upon which it 
 opened. They would willingly have accepted less. 
 But, unfortunately, it sometimes happens, that, to gain 
 as much as is needful in one direction, you must take 
 a great deal more than you wish for in another. Any 
 principle, which could carry them over the immediate 
 difficulty, would, by a mere necessity, carry them in.
 
 CHUKCH OF SCOTLAND. 415 
 
 ealculably beyond it. For, if every act bearing in any 
 one direction a spiritual aspect, showing at any angle 
 a relation to spiritual things, is therefore to be held 
 spiritual in a sense excluding the interference of the 
 civil power, there falls to the ground at once the 
 whole fabric of civil authority in any independent 
 form. Accordingly, we are satisfied that the claim to 
 a spiritual jurisdiction, in collision with the claims of 
 the state, would not probably have offered itself to the 
 ambition of the agitators, otherwise than as a measure 
 ancillary to their earlier pretension of appointing vir- 
 tually all parish clergymen. The one claim was found 
 to be the integration or sine qua non complement of 
 the other. In order to sustain the power of appoint- 
 ment in their own courts, it was necessary that they 
 should defeat the patron's power ; and, in order to 
 defeat the patron's power, ranging itself (as sooner or 
 later it would) under the law of the land, it was neces- 
 sary that they should decline that struggle, by attempt- 
 ing to take the question out of all secular jurisdictions 
 whatever. 
 
 In this way grew up that two-fold revolution which 
 has been convulsing the Scottish church since 1834 ; 
 first, the audacious attempt to disturb the settled mode 
 of appointing the parish clergy, through a silent rob- 
 bery perpetrated on the crown and great landed aris- 
 tocracy ; secondly, and in prosecution of that primary 
 purpose, the far more frantic attempt to renew in a 
 practical shape the old disputes so often agitating the 
 "orum of Christendom, as to the bounds of civil an if 
 piritual power. 
 
 In our rehearsal of the s^age? through which the
 
 i!6 SECESSION FROM THB 
 
 process of induction ordinarily travels, we have pur. 
 posely omitted one possible interlude or parenthesis in 
 the series ; not as wishing to conceal it, but for the 
 very opposite reason. It is right to withdraw from a 
 representative account of any transaction such varieties 
 of the routine as occur but seldom : in this way they 
 are more pointedly exposed. Now, having made that 
 explanation, we go on to inform the Southern reader 
 that an old traditionary usage has prevailed in 
 Scotland, but not systematically or uniformly, of send- 
 ing to the presentee, through the presbytery, what is 
 designated a " call," subscribed by members of the 
 parish congregation. This call is simply an invitation to 
 the office of their pastor. It arose in the disorders of 
 the seventeenth century ; but in practice it is generally 
 admitted to have sunk into a mere formality throughout 
 the eighteenth century ; and the very position which it 
 holds in the succession of steps, not usually coming 
 forward until after the presentation has been notified 
 (supposing that it comes forward at all), compels us to 
 regard it in that light. Apparently it bears the same 
 relation to the patron's act as the Address of the two 
 Houses to the Speech from the Throne : it is rather a 
 courteous echo to the personal compliment involved in 
 the presentation, than capable of being regarded as 
 any original act of invitation. And yet, in defiance 
 of that notorious fact, some people go so far as to 
 assert, that a call is not good unless where it is sub- 
 scribed by a clear majority of the congregation. This 
 is amusing. We have already explained that, excep' 
 is a liberal courtesy, the very idea of a call destinec 
 to be inoperative, is and must be moonshine. Yet
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 417 
 
 Between two moonshines, some people, it seems, can 
 tell which is the denser. We have all heard of Bar- 
 mecide banquets, where, out of tureens filled to the 
 brim with nothing, the fortunate guest was helped to 
 vast messes of air. For a hungry guest to take this 
 tantalization in good part, was the sure way to win the 
 esteem of the noble Barmecide. But the Barmecide 
 himself would hardly approve of a duel turning upon 
 a comparison between two of his tureens, question 
 being which had been the fuller, or of two nihilitiea 
 which had been seasoned the more judiciously. Yet 
 this, in effect, is the reasoning of those who say that a 
 call, signed by fifty-one persons out of a hundred, is 
 more valid than another signed only by twenty-six, or 
 by nobody : it being in the meantime fully understood 
 that neither is valid in the least possible degree. But 
 if the " call," was a Barmecide call, there was another 
 act open to the congregation which was not so. 
 
 For the English reader must now understand, that 
 over and above the passive and less invidious mode of 
 discountenancing or forbearing to countenance a pre- 
 sentee, by withdrawing from the direct " call " upon 
 tim, usage has sanctioned another and stronger sort 
 of protest ; one which takes the shape of distinct and 
 clamorous objections. We are speaking of the routine 
 in this place, according to the course which it did 
 travel or could travel under that law and that practice 
 which furnished the pleas for complaint. Now, it was 
 upon these " objections," as may well be supposed, that 
 [lie main battle arose. Simply to want the " call," 
 being a mere zero, could not much lay hold upon 
 nublio feeling. It was a case not fitted for effect. 
 27
 
 418 SECESSION FKOM THE 
 
 You cannot bring a blank privation strongly befoie tne 
 public eye. " The ' call ' did not take place last 
 week ; " well, perhaps it will take place next week. Or 
 again, if it should never take place, perhaps it may be 
 religious carelessness on the part of the parish. Many 
 parishes notoriously feel no interest in their pastes, 
 except as a quiet member of their community. Con- 
 sequently, in two or three cases that might occur, 
 there was nothing to excite the public ; the parish had 
 either agreed with the patron, or had not noticeably 
 dissented. But in the third case of positive " objections," 
 which (in order to justify themselves as not frivolous 
 and vexatious) were urged with peculiar emphasis, the 
 attention of all men was arrested. Newspapers rever- 
 berated the fact : sympathetic groans arose : the patron 
 was an oppressor : the parish was under persecution : 
 and the poor clergyman, whose case was the most to 
 be pitied, as being in a measure endowed with a lasting 
 fund of dislike, had the mortification to find, over and 
 above this resistance from within, that he bore the 
 name of " intruder " from without. He was supposed 
 by the fiction of the case to be in league with his 
 patron for the persecution of a godly parish ; whilst in 
 reality the godly parish was persecuting him, and 
 hallooing the world db extra to join in the hunt. 
 
 In such cases of pretended objections to men who 
 have not been tried, we need scarcely tell the reader, 
 that usually they are mere cabals and worldly in- 
 trigues. It is next to impossible that any parish or 
 tongregation should sincerely agree in their opinion 
 of a clergyman. What one man likes in such cases 
 mother man detests. Mr A., with an ardent nature
 
 CHFKCH OF SCOTLAND. 419 
 
 and something of a histrionic turn, doats upon a fine 
 rhetorical display. Mr. B., with more simplicity ol 
 taste, pronounces this little better than theatrical osten- 
 tation. Mr. C. requires a good deal of critical schol- 
 arship. Mr. D. quarrels with this as unsuitable to a 
 rustic congregation. Mrs. X., who is " under concern " 
 /or sin, demands a searching and (as she expresses it) 
 i " faithful " style of dealing with consciences. Mrs 
 Y., an aristocratic lady, who cannot bear to be mixed 
 up in any common charge together with low people, 
 abominates such words as " sin," and wills that the 
 parson should confine his " observations " to the 
 " shocking demoralization of the lower orders." 
 
 Now, having stated the practice of Scottish in- 
 duction as it was formerly sustained in its first stage 
 by law, in its second stage by usage, let us finish 
 that part of the subject by reporting the existing 
 practice as regulated in all its stages by law. What 
 law ? The law as laid down in Lord Aberdeen's late 
 Act of Parliament. This statement should, histori- 
 cally speaking, have found itself under our third head, 
 as being one amongst the consequences immediately 
 following the final rupture. But it is better placed 
 at this point ; because it closes the whole review of 
 that topic ; and because it reflects light upon the 
 former practice the practice which led to the whole 
 mutinous tumult: every alteration forcing more keenly 
 upon the reader's attention what had been the pre- 
 rious custom, and in what respect it was held by 
 any man to be a grievance. 
 
 This act, then, of Lord Aberdeen's, removes all 
 effect from the " call" Common sense required
 
 420 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 that. For what was to be done with patronage r Was 
 it to be sustained, or was it not ? If not, then why 
 quarrel with the Non-intrusionists ? Why suffer a 
 schism to take place in the church ? Give legal effect 
 to the " call," and the original cause of quarrel is 
 gone. For, with respect to the opponents of the Non- 
 intrusionists, they would bow to the law. On the 
 other hand, if patronage is to be sustained, then why 
 allow of any lingering or doubtful force to what must 
 often operate as a conflicting claim ? "A call," which 
 carries with it any legal force, annihilates patronage. 
 Patronage would thus be exercised only on sufferance. 
 Do we mean then, that a " call " should sink into a 
 pure fiction of ceremony, like the English conge-d'elire 
 addressed to a dean and chapter, calling on them to 
 elect a bishop, when all the world knows that already 
 the see has been filled by a nomination from the 
 crown ? Not at all ; a moral weight will still attach 
 to the " call," though no legal coercion : and what is 
 chiefly important, all those doubts will be removed by 
 express legislation, which could not but arise between 
 a practice pointing sometimes in one direction, and 
 sometimes in another, between legal decisions again 
 upholding one view, whilst something very like legal 
 prescription was occasionally pleaded for the other. 
 Behold the evil of written laws not rigorously in 
 harmony with that sort of customary law founded upon 
 vague tradition or irregular practice. And here, by 
 the way, arises the place for explaining to the reader 
 that irreconcilable dispute amongst Parliamentary law- 
 yers as to the question whether Lord Aberdeen's biL 
 ivere enaclory, that is, created a new law, or declara?
 
 CHUBCH OF SCOTLAX1J 421 
 
 lory, that is, simply expounded an old one. If enac- 
 tory, then why did the House of Lords give judgment 
 against those who allowed weight to the "call"? 
 That might need altering ; that might be highly inex- 
 pedient ; but if it required a new law to make it 
 illegal, how could those parties be held in the wrong 
 previously to the new act of legislation ? On the other 
 hand, if declaratory, then show us any old law which 
 made the " call " illegal. The fact is, that no man 
 can decide whether the act established a new law, or 
 merely expounded an old one. And the reason why 
 he cannot, is this : the practice, the usage, which 
 often is the law, had grown up variously during the 
 troubles of the seventeenth century. In many places 
 political reasons had dictated that the elders should 
 nominate the incumbent. But the ancient practice 
 had authorized patronage : by the act of Queen Anne 
 (10th chap.) it was even formally restored; and yet 
 the patron in known instances was said to have waived 
 his right in deference to the " call." But why ? Did 
 he do so in courteous compliance with the parish, as 
 a party whose reasonable wishes ought, for the sake 
 of all parties, to meet with attention ? Or did he do 
 BO, in humble submission to the parish, as having by 
 their majorities a legal right to the presentation? 
 There lay the question. The presumptions from * 
 jiquity were all against the call. The more modern 
 practice had occasionally been for it. Now, we all 
 know how many colorable claims of right are created 
 by prescription. What was the exact force of the 
 " call," no man could say. In like manner, the exact 
 character and limit of allowable objections had been
 
 422 SECESSION FKOM THE 
 
 ill-defined in practice, and rested more on a vague 
 tradition than on any settled rule. This also made it 
 hard to say whether Lord Aberdeen's Act were enactory 
 or declaratory, a predicament, however, which equally 
 affects all statutes for removing doubts. 
 
 The " call," then, we consider as no longer recog- 
 nized by law. But did Lord Aberdeen by that change 
 establish the right of the patron as an unconditional 
 right ? By no means. He made it strictly a condi- 
 tional right. The presentee is now a candidate, and 
 no more. He has the most important vote in his 
 favor, it is true ; but that vote may still be set aside, 
 though still only with the effect of compelling the 
 patron to a new choice. " Calls'" are no longer 
 doubtful in their meaning, but " objections " have a 
 fair field laid open to them. All reasonable objections 
 are to be weighed. But who is to judge whether they 
 are reasonable ? The presbytery of the district. And 
 now pursue the action of the law, and see how little 
 ground it leaves upon which to hang a complaint. 
 Everybody's rights are secured. Whatever be the 
 event, first of all the presentee cannot complain, if he 
 is rejected only for proved insufficiency. He is put 
 on his trial as to these points only : 1 . Is he orthodox ? 
 2. Is he of good moral reputation? 8. Is he suffi- 
 ciently learned ? And note this (which in fact Sir 
 James Graham remarked in his official letter to the 
 Assembly), strictly speaking, he ought not to be under 
 challenge as respects the third point, for it is your 
 own fault, the fault of your own licensing courts (the 
 oresbyteries), if he is not qualified so far. You should 
 not have created him a licentiate, should not have
 
 CHTTKCH OP SCOTLAND. 423 
 
 given him a license to preach, as must have been done 
 in an earlier stage of his progress, if he were not 
 learned enough. Once learned, a man is learned for 
 life. As to the other points, he may change, and 
 therefore it is that an examination is requisite. But 
 how can he complain if he is found by an impartial 
 court of venerable men objectionable on any score? 
 If it were possible, however, that he should be wronged, 
 he has his appeal. Secondly, how can the patron 
 complain ? His case is the same as his presentee's 
 case ; his injuries the same ; his relief the same. Be- 
 sides, if his man is rejected, it is not the parish man 
 that takes his place. No ; but a second man of his 
 own choice : and, if again he chooses amiss, who is to 
 blame for that 1 Thirdly, can the congregation com- 
 plain ? They have a general interest in their spiritual 
 guide. But as to the preference for oratory for loud 
 or musical voice for peculiar views in religion 
 these things are special : they interest but an exceed- 
 ingly small minority in any parish ; and, what is 
 worse, that which pleases one is often offensive to 
 another. There are cases in which a parish would 
 reject a man for being a married man : some of the 
 parish have unmarried daughters. But this case 
 clearly belongs to the small minority ; and we have 
 little doubt that, where the objections lay " for cause 
 not shown," it was often for this cause. Fourthly, 
 can the church complain ? Her interest is represented, 
 1 , not by the presentee ; 2, not by the patron ; 3, not 
 oy the congregation ; but 4, by the presbytery. And, 
 whatever the presbytery say, that is supported. Speak- 
 jig either for the patron, for the presentee, for the
 
 i24 SECESSION FKOM THE 
 
 congregation, or for themselves as conservators of the 
 church, that court is heard ; what more would they 
 have ? And thus in turn every interest is protected. 
 Now the point to be remarked is that each party in 
 turn has a separate influence. But on any other plan, 
 giving to one party out of the four an absolute or 
 unconditional power, no matter which of the four it be 
 all the rest have none at all. Lord Aberdeen has 
 reconciled the rights of patrons for the first time with 
 those of all other parties interested. Nobody has 
 more than a conditional power. Everybody has that. 
 And the patron, as necessity requires, if property is to 
 be protected, has, in all circumstances, the revisionary 
 power. 
 
 II. Secondly, How were these things done J By 
 what means were the hands of any party strengthened, 
 so as to find this revolution possible ? 
 
 We seek not to refine : but all moral power issues 
 out of moral forces. And it may be well, therefore, 
 rapidly to sketch the history of religion, which is the 
 greatest of moral forces, as it sank and rose in this 
 island through the last two hundred years. 
 
 It is well known that the two great revolutions of 
 the seventeenth century that in 1 649, accomplished 
 by the Parliament armies (including its reaction in 
 1660), and secondly, that in 1688-9 did much to 
 unsettle the religious tone of public morals. His- 
 torians and satirists ascribe a large effect in this change 
 to the personal influence of Charles II., and the foreign 
 character of his court. We do not share in their 
 views, and one eminent proof that they are wrong 
 lies in the following fact viz., that the sublimest ac%
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 425 
 
 of self-sacrifice which the world has ever seen, arose 
 precisely in the most triumphant season cf Charles's 
 career, a time when the reaction of hatred had not 
 yet neutralized the sunny joyousness of his Restora- 
 tion. Surely the reader cannot be at a loss to know 
 what we mean the renunciation in one hour, on 
 St. Bartholomew's Day in 1662, of two thousand bene- 
 fices by the non-conforming clergymen of England. 
 In the same year occurred a similar renunciation of 
 three hundred and sixty benefices in Scotland. These 
 great sacrifices, whether called for or not, argue a 
 great strength in the religious principle at that era. 
 5Tet the decay of external religion towards the close of 
 that century is proved incontestably. We ourselves 
 are inclined to charge this upon two causes : first, that 
 the times were controversial ; and usually it happens 
 that, where too much energy is carried into the con- 
 troversies or intellectual part of religion, a very dimin- 
 ished fervor attends the culture of its moral and prac- 
 tical part. This was perhaps one reason ; for the 
 dispute with the Papal church, partly, perhaps, with a 
 secret reference to the rumored apostasy of the royal 
 family, was pursued more eagerly in the latter half of 
 ihe seventeenth than even in any section of the six- 
 teenth century. But, doubtless, the main reason was 
 the revolutionary character of the times. Morality is 
 at all periods fearfully shaken by intestine wars, and 
 by instability in a government. The actual duration 
 of war in England was not indeed longer than three 
 and a half years viz., from Edgehill Fight in the 
 lutumn of 1642, to the defeat of the king's last force 
 inder Sir Jacob Astley at Sto\r -in-the-walds in the
 
 126 SECESSION FKOM THE 
 
 spring of 1646. Any other fighting in that century 
 belonged to mere insulated and discontinuous war. 
 But the insecurity of every government between 1638 
 and 1702, kept the popular mind in a state of fermen- 
 tation. Accordingly, Queen Anne's reign might be 
 said to open upon an irreligious people. The condi- 
 tion oi things was further strengthened by the unavoid- 
 able interweaving at that time of politics with religion. 
 They could not be kept separate ; and the favor shown 
 even by religious people to such partisan zealots aa 
 Dr. Sacheverell, evidenced, and at the same time pro- 
 moted, the public irreligion. This was the period in 
 which the clergy thought too little of their duties, but 
 too much of their professional rights ; and if we may 
 credit the indirect report of the contemporary litera- 
 ture, all apostolic or missionary zeal for the extension 
 of religion, was in those, days a thing unknown. It 
 may seem unaccountable to many, that the same state 
 of things should have spread in those days to Scotland ; 
 but this is no more than the analogies of all experience 
 entitled us to expect. Thus we know that the instincts 
 of religious reformation ripened everywhere at the 
 same period of the sixteenth century from one end of 
 Europe to the other ; although between most of the 
 European kingdoms there was nothing like so much 
 intercourse as between England and Scotland in ths 
 eighteenth century. In both countries, a cold and life- 
 less state of public religion prevailed up to the Ameri- 
 can and French Revolutions. These great events gave 
 a, shock everywhere to the meditative, and, conse- 
 quently, to the religious impulses of men. And, in th 
 neantime, an irregular channel had been already
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 427 
 
 opened to these impulses by the two founders of 
 Methodism. A century has now passed since Wesley 
 and Whitefield organized a more spiritual machinery 
 of preaching than could then be found in England, for 
 the benefit of the poor anil laboring classes. These 
 Methodist institutions prospered, as they were sure of 
 doing, amongst the poor and the neglected at any time, 
 much more when contrasted with the deep slumbers of 
 the Established Church. And another ground of pros- 
 perity soon arose out of the now expanding manufac- 
 turing system. Vast multitudes of men grew up under 
 that system humble enough by the quality of theii 
 education to accept with thankfulness the ministrations 
 of Methodism, and rich enough to react, upon that 
 beneficent institution, by continued endowments in 
 money. Gradually, even the church herself, that 
 mighty establishment, under the cold shade of which 
 Methodism had grown up as a neglected weed, began 
 to acknowledge the power of an extending Methodistic 
 influence, which originally she had haughtily despised. 
 First, she murmured ; then she grew anxious or fear- 
 ful ; and finally, she began to find herself invaded or 
 modified from within, by influences springing up from 
 Methodism. This last effect became more conspicu- 
 ously evident after the French P evolution. The church 
 of Scotland, which, as a whol<? had exhibited, with 
 much unobtrusive piety, the same outward torpor as 
 the Church of England during the eighteenth century, 
 betrayed a corresponding resuscitation about the same 
 time. At the opening of this present century, both of 
 these national churches began to show a marked re- 
 kindling of religious fervor. In what extent thii
 
 428 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 change in the Scottish church had heen due, mediately 
 or immediately, to Methodism, we do not pretend to 
 calculate ; that is, we do not pretend to settle the pro- 
 portions. But mediately the Scottish church must have 
 been affected, because she was greatly affected by her 
 intercourse with the English church (as e. g., in Bible 
 Societies, Missionary Societies, &c.) ; and the English 
 church had been previously affected by Methodism. 
 Immediately she must also have been affected by Meth- 
 odism, because Whitefield had been invited to preach 
 in Scotland, and did preach in Scotland. But, what- 
 ever may have been the cause of this awakening from 
 slumber in the two established churches of this island, 
 the fact is so little to be denied, that, in both its aspects, 
 it is acknowledged by those most interested in denying 
 it. The two churches slept the sleep of torpor through 
 the eighteenth century ; so much of the fact is acknowl- 
 edged by their own members. The two churches 
 awoke, as from a trance, in or just before the dawning 
 of the nineteenth century ; this second half of the fact 
 is acknowledged by their opponents. The Wesleyan 
 Methodists, that formidable power in England and 
 Wales, who once reviled the Establishment as the 
 uormitory of spiritual drones, have for many years 
 hailed a very large section in that establishment 
 viz., the section technically known by the name of the 
 Evangelical clergy as brothers after their own 
 hearts, and corresponding to their own strictest model 
 of a spiritual clergy. That section again, the Evan- 
 gelical section in the English church, as men more 
 highly educated, took a direct interest in the Scottish 
 dergy, upon general principles of liberal interest in at
 
 CHCBCH OF SCOTLAND. 429 
 
 that could affect religion, beyond what could be ex- 
 pected from the Methodists. And in this way grew up 
 a considerable action and reaction between the two 
 classical churches of the British soil. 
 
 Such was the varying condition, when sketched in 
 outline, of the Scottish and English churches. Two 
 centuries ago, and for half a century beyond that, we 
 find both churches in a state of trial, of turbulent 
 agitation, and of sacrifices for conscience, which in- 
 volved every fifth or sixth beneficiary. Then came a 
 century of languor, and the carelessness which belongs 
 to settled prosperity. And finally, for both has arisen 
 a half century of new light new zeal and, spirit- 
 ually speaking, of new prosperity. This deduction it 
 was necessary to bring down, in order to explain the 
 new power which arose to the Scottish church, during 
 the last generation of suppose thirty years. 
 
 When two powerful establishments, each separately 
 fitted to the genius and needs of its several people, are 
 pulling together powerfully towards one great spiritual 
 object, vast must be the results. Our ancestors would 
 have stood aghast as at some fabulous legend or some 
 mighty miracle, could they have heard of the scale on 
 which our modern contributions proceed for the pur- 
 poses of missions to barbarous nations, of circulating 
 the Scriptures (whether through the Bible Society), 
 that is, the National Society, or Provincial Societies), 
 / translating the Scriptures into languages scarcely 
 _nown by name to scholars, of converting Jews, of 
 organizing and propagating education. Towards these 
 (?real objects the Scottish clergy had worked with 
 energy, and with little disturbance to their unanimity.
 
 130 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 Confidence was universally felt in their piety and in 
 their discretion. This confidence even reached the 
 supreme rulers of the state. Very much through 
 ecclesiastical influence, new plans for extending the 
 religious power of the Scottish church, and indirectly 
 of extending their secular power, were countenanced 
 by the government. Jealousy had been disarmed by 
 the upright conduct of the Scottish clergy, and their 
 remarkable freedom hitherto from all taint of ambition. 
 It was felt, besides, that the temper of the Scottish 
 nation was radically indisposed to all intriguing or 
 modes of temporal ascendency in ecclesiastical bodies. 
 The nation, therefore, was in some degree held as a 
 guarantee for the discretion of their clergy. And 
 hence it arose, that much less caution was applied to 
 the first encroachment of the non-intrusionists, than 
 would have been applied under circumstances of more 
 apparent doubt. Hence, it arose, that a confidence 
 from the Scottish nation was extended to this clergy, 
 which too certainly has been abused. 
 
 In the years 1824 5, Parliament had passed acta 
 " for building additional places of worship in the high- 
 lands and islands of Scotland." These acts may be 
 looked upon as one section in that general extension 
 of religious machinery which the British people, by 
 their government and their legislature, have for many 
 vears been promoting. Not, as is ordinarily said, that 
 the weight of this duty had grown upon them simply 
 through their own treacherous neglect of it during the 
 'atter half of the eighteenth century; but that no 
 reasonable attention to that duty could have kept pace 
 wnr. the scale up^n which the claims of a new mam*
 
 CHUKCH OF SCOTLAND. 43l 
 
 facturing population had increased. In mere equity 
 ire must admit not that the British nation had 
 fallen behind its duties (though naturally it might 
 have done so under the religious torpor prevalent at 
 the original era of manufacturing extension), but that 
 the duties had outstripped all human power of over 
 taking them. The efforts, however, have been pro- 
 digious in this direction for many years. Amongst 
 those applied to Scotland, it had been settled by Par- 
 liament that forty-two new churches should be raised 
 in the highlands, with an endowment from the govern- 
 ment of 120 annually for each incumbent. There 
 were besides more than two hundred chapels of ease 
 to be founded ; and towards this scheme the Scottish 
 public subscribed largely. The money was intrusted 
 to the clergy. That was right, but mark what followed. 
 It had been expressly provided by Parliament that 
 any district or circumjacent territory, allotted to such 
 parliamentary churches as the range within which the 
 incumbent was to exercise his spiritual ministration, 
 should not be separate parishes for any civil or legal 
 effects. Here surely the intentions and directions 
 of the legislature were plain enough, and decisive 
 enough. 
 
 How did the Scottish clergy obey them? They 
 erected all these jurisdictions into bond jide " parish- 
 es," enjoying the plenary rights (as to church govern- 
 ment) of the other parishes, and distinguished from 
 them in a merely nominal way as parishes quoad sacra. 
 There were added at once to the presbyteries, which 
 are the organs of the church power, two hundred and 
 three clerical persons for the chapels of ease, and
 
 432 SECESSION FKOM THE 
 
 forty-two for the highland churches making a total 
 uf two hundred and forty-five new members. By the 
 constitution of the Scottish church, an equal numbei 
 of lay elders (called ruling elders) accompany ihe 
 clerical elders. Consequently four hundred and ninety- 
 new members were introduced at once into that par* 
 ticular class of courts (presbyteries) which form the 
 electoral bodies in relation to the highest court oi 
 General Assembly. The effect of this change, made 
 in the very teeth of the law, was twofold. First, it 
 threw into many separate presbyteries a considerable 
 accession of voters all owing their appointments to 
 the General Assembly. This would at once give a 
 large bias favorable to their party views in every 
 election for members to serve in the Assembly. Even 
 upon an Assembly numerically limited, this innovation 
 would have told most abusively. But the Assembly 
 was not limited ; and therefore the whole effect was, 
 at the same moment, greatly to extend the electors 
 and the elected. 
 
 Here, then, was the machinery by which the faction 
 worked. They drew that power from Scotland re- 
 kindled into a temper of religious anxiety, which they 
 never could have drawn from Scotland lying torpid, 
 as she had lain through the eighteenth century. The 
 new machinery (created by Parliament in order to 
 meet the wishes of the Scottish nation), the money of 
 that nation, the awakened zeal of that nation ; all 
 these were employed, honorably in one sense, that is, 
 not turned aside into private channels for purposes oi 
 individuals, but factiously in the result, as being fcr 
 the benefit of a faction ; honorably as regarded the
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 433 
 
 Dpen mode of applying such influence a mode which 
 did not shrink from exposure ; but most dishonorably, 
 in so far as privileges, which had been conceded alto 
 gether for a spiritual object, were abusively transferred 
 to the furtherance of a temporal intrigue. Such were 
 the methods by which the new-born ambition of the 
 clergy moved ; and that ambition had become active, 
 iimply because it had suddenly seemed to become 
 practicable. The presbyteries, as being the effectual 
 electoral bodies, are really the main springs of the 
 ecclesiastical administration. To govern them, was in 
 effect to govern the church. A new scheme for ex- 
 tending religion had opened a new avenue to this 
 control over the presbyteries. That opening was 
 notoriously unlawful. But not the less the church 
 faction precipitated themselves ardently upon it ; and 
 but for the faithfulness of the civil courts, they would 
 never have been dislodged from what they had so 
 suddenly acquired. Such was the extraordinary leap 
 taken by the Scottish clergy, into a power, of which, 
 hitherto, they had never enjoyed a fraction. It was a 
 movement per saltum, beyond all that history has 
 recorded. At cock-crow they had no power at all ; 
 when the sun went down, they had gained (if they 
 iuld have held) a papal supremacy. And a thing not 
 less memorably strange is, that even yet the ambitious 
 leaders were not disturbed ; what they had gained 
 was viewed by the public as a collateral gain, indirectly 
 adhering to a higher object, but forming no part at all 
 of what the clergy had sought. It required the scru- 
 tiny of law courts to unmask and decompose their true 
 object. The obstinacy of the defence betrayed the
 
 134 SECESSION FE.OM THE 
 
 Teal animus of the attempt. It was an attempt which, 
 in connection with the Veto Act (supposing that to 
 have prospered), would have laid the whole power of 
 the church at their feet. What the law had distrib- 
 uted amongst three powers, patron, parish, and presby- 
 ter, would have been concentrated in themselves. The 
 quoad sacra parishes would have riveted their majori- 
 ties in the presbyteries ; and the presbyteries, under 
 the real action of the Veto, would have appointed 
 nearly every incumbent in Scotland. And this is the 
 answer to the question, when treated merely in out- 
 line How were these things done ? The religion of 
 the times had created new machineries for propagating 
 a new religious influence. These fell into the hands 
 of the clergy ; and the temptation to abuse these 
 advantages led them into revolution. 
 
 III. Having now stated WHAT was done, as well 
 as HOW it was done, let us estimate the CONSEQUENCES 
 of these acts ; under this present, or third section, 
 reviewing the immediate consequences which have 
 taken effect already, and under the next section an- 
 ticipating the more remote consequences yet to be ex- 
 pected. 
 
 In the spring of 1834, as we have sufficiently ex- 
 plained, the General Assembly ventured on the fatal 
 attempt to revolutionize the church, and (as a prelimi- 
 nary towards that} on the attempt to revolutionize the 
 property of patronage. There lay the extravagance of 
 the attempt ; its short-sightedness, if they did not sec- 
 its civil tendencies ; its audacity, if they did. It was 
 one revolution marching to its object through another ; 
 it was a vote, which, if at all sustained, must entail
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 435 
 
 ong inheritance of contests with the whole civil polity 
 >f Scotland. 
 
 " Heu quantum fati parva tabella vehit ! " 
 
 It might seem to strangers a trivial thing, that an 
 obscure court, like the presbytery, should proceed in 
 the business of induction by one routine rather than 
 by another ; but was it a trivial thing that the power 
 of appointing clergymen should lapse into this perilous 
 dilemma either that it should be intercepted by the 
 Scottish clerical order, and thus, that a lordly hier- 
 archy should be suddenly created, disposing of in- 
 comes which, in the aggregate, approach to half a 
 million annually; or, on the other hand, that this 
 dangerous power, if defeated as a clerical power, should 
 settle into a tenure exquisitely democratic? Was 
 that trivial ? Doubtless, the Scottish ecclesiastical 
 revenues are not equal, nor nearly equal, to the Eng- 
 lish ; still, it is true, that Scotland, supposing all her 
 benefices equalized, gives a larger average to each in- 
 cumbent than England, of the year 1830. England, 
 in that year, gave an average of 299 to each bene- 
 ficiary ; Scotland gave an average of 303. That 
 body, therefore, which wields patronage in Scotland, 
 wields a greater relative power than the corresponding 
 body in England. Now this body, in Scotland, must 
 finally have been the clerus ; but supposing the 
 patronage to have settled nominally where the Veto 
 Act had placed it, then it would have settled into the 
 keeping of a fierce democracy. Mr. Forsyth has justly 
 remarked, that in such a case the hired ploughmen of 
 % parish, mercenary hands that quit their engagements
 
 436 SECESSION FHOM THE 
 
 at Martinmas, and can have no filial interest in tto 
 parish, would generally succeed in electing the clergy- 
 man. That man would be elected generally, who had 
 canvassed the parish with the arts and means of an elec- 
 tioneering candidate ; or else, the struggle would lie be- 
 tween the property and the Jacobinism of the district. 
 In respect to Jacobinism, the condition of Scotland 
 is much altered from what it was ; pauperism and 
 great towns have worked " strange defeatures " in 
 Scottish society. A vast capital has arisen in the 
 west, on a level with the first-rate capitalists of the 
 Continent with Vienna or with Naples; far superior 
 in size to Madrid, to Lisbon, to Berlin ; more than 
 equal to Rome and Milan ; or again to Munich and 
 Dresden, taken by couples : and, in this point, be- 
 yond comparison with any one of these capitals, that 
 whilst they are connected by slight ties with the cir- 
 cumjacent country, Glasgow keeps open a commu- 
 nication with the whole land. Vast laboratories of 
 encouragement to manual skill, too often dissociated 
 from consideration of character ; armies of mechanics, 
 gloomy and restless, having no interfusion amongst 
 their endless files of any gradations corresponding to 
 a system of controlling officers ; these spectacles, 
 which are permanently offered by the rostra stativa of 
 combined mechanics in Glasgow and its dependencies 
 ^Paisley, Greenock, &c.), supported by similar dis- 
 tricts, and by turbulent collieries in other parts of 
 that kingdom, make Scotland, when now developing 
 her strength, no longer the safe and docile arena fot 
 popular movements which once she was, with a peopl* 
 hat were scattered ?nd habits that were pastoral
 
 CHUBCH OF SCOTLAND. 437 
 
 \nd at tliis moment, so fearfully increased is the over- 
 Do^rance of democratic impulses in Scotland, that 
 perhaps in no European nation hardly excepting 
 France has it become more important to hang 
 weights and retarding forces upon popular movements 
 amongst the laboring classes. 
 
 This being so, we have never been able to under- 
 stand the apparent apathy with which the landed 
 body met the first promulgation of the Veto Act in 
 May, 1834. Of this apathy, two insufficient explana- 
 tions suggest themselves : Is^ It seemed a matter 
 of delicacy to confront the General Assembly, upon a 
 field which they had clamorously challenged for their 
 own. The quesuon at issue was tempestuously pub- 
 lished to Scotland as a question exclusively spiritual. 
 And by whom was it thus published ? The Southern 
 reader must here not be careless of dates. At present 
 viz., in 1844 those who fulminate such views of 
 spiritual jurisdiction, are simply dissenters ; and those 
 who vehemently withstand them are the church, armed 
 with the powers of the church. Such are the relations 
 between the parties in 1844. But in 1834, the revo- 
 lutionary party were not only in the church, but 
 (being the majority) they came forward as the church. 
 The new doctrines presented themselves at first, not 
 as those of a faction, but of the Scottish kirk assem- 
 bled in her highest court. The prestige of that ad- 
 vantage has vanished since then ; for this faction, after 
 first of all falling into a minority, afterwards ceased to 
 be any part or section of the church ; out in that year 
 834, such a prestige aid really operate ; and this 
 wust be received as one of the reasons which partially
 
 138 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 explain the torpor of the landed body. No one liked 
 to move^/irsZ, even amongst those who meant to move. 
 But another reason we find in the conscientious scru- 
 ples of many landholders, who hesitated to move at 
 all upon a question then insufficiently discussed, and 
 in which their own interest was by so many degrees 
 the largest. 
 
 These reasons, however, though sufficient for sus- 
 pense, seem hardly sufficient for not having solemnly 
 protested against the Veto Act immediately upon its 
 passing the Assembly. Whatever doubts a few per- 
 sons might harbor upon the expediency of such an act, 
 evidently it was contrary to the law of the land. The 
 General Assembly could have no power to abrogate a 
 law passed by the three estates of the realm. But 
 probably it was the deep sense of that truth which 
 reined up the national resistance. Sure of a speedy 
 collision between some patron and the infringers of 
 his right, other parties stood back for the present, to 
 watch the form which such a collision might assume. 
 
 In that same year of 1834, not many months after 
 the passing of the Assembly's Act, came on the first 
 case of collision ; and some time subsequently a 
 second. These two cases, Auchterarder and Marnoch, 
 commenced in the very same steps, but immediately 
 afterwards diverged as widely as was possible. In 
 both cases, the rights of the patron and of the pre- 
 sentee were challenged peremptorily ; that is to say 
 in both cases, parishioners objected to the presentee 
 arithout reason shown. The conduct of the people 
 ras the same in one case as in the other ; that of the 
 wo presbyteries travelled upon lines diametrically op
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 439 
 
 posite. The first case was that of Auchterarder. The 
 parish and presbytery concerned, both belonged to 
 Auchterarder ; and there the presbytery obeyed the 
 new law of the Assembly; they rejected the presentee, 
 refusing to take him on trial of his qualifications : 
 And why ? we cannot too often repeat simply be- 
 cause a majority of a rustic congregation had rejected 
 him, without attempting to show reason for his rejec- 
 tion. The Auchterarder presbytery, for their part in 
 this affair, were prosecuted in the Court of Session by 
 the injured parties Lord Kinnoul, the patron, and 
 Mr. Young, the presentee. Twice, upon a different 
 form of action, the Court of Session gave judgment 
 against the presbytery; twice the case went up by 
 appeal to the Lords ; twice the Lords affirmed the 
 judgment of the court below. In the other case of 
 Marnoch, the presbytery of Strathbogie took precisely 
 the opposite course. So far from abetting the unjust 
 congregation of rustics, they rebelled against the new 
 law of the Assembly, and declared, by seven of their 
 number against three, that they were ready to proceed 
 with the trial of the presentee, and to induct him (if 
 found qualified) into the benefice. Upon this, the 
 General Assembly suspended the seven members of 
 presbytery. By that mode of proceeding, the Assem- 
 bly fancied that they should be able to elude the in- 
 tentions of the presbytery; it being supposed that, 
 whilat suspended, the presbytery had no power to or- 
 dain ; and that, without ordination, there was no pos- 
 Bibility of giving induction. But here the Assembly 
 had miscalculated. Suspension would indeed have 
 Vad ihe effects ascribed tc it ; but in the meantime.
 
 440 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 khe suspension, as being originally illegal, was fouiu] 
 to be void ; and the presentee, on that ground, ob- 
 tained a decree from the Court of Session, ordaining 
 the presbytery of Strathbogie to proceed with the 
 settlement. Three of the ten members composing this 
 presbytery, resisted ; and they were found liable in 
 expenses. The other seven completed the settlement 
 in the usual form. Here was plain rebellion ; and re- 
 bellion triumphant. If this were allowed, all was 
 gone. What should the Assembly do for the vindica- 
 tion of their authority ? Upon deliberation, they de- 
 posed the contumacious presbytery from their func- 
 tions as clergymen, and declared their churches vacant. 
 But this sentence was found to be a brutum fulmen ', 
 the crime was no crime, the punishment turned out no 
 punishment : and a minority, even in this very As- 
 sembly, declared publicly that they would not consent 
 to regard this sentence as any sentence at all, but 
 would act in all respects as if no such sentence had 
 oeen carried by vote. Within their own high Court 
 i f Assembly, it is, however, difficult to see how this 
 refusal to recognize a sentence voted by a majority 
 could be valid. Outside, the civil courts came into 
 play ; but within the Assembly, surely its own laws 
 and votes prevailed. However, this distinction could 
 bring little comfort to the Assembly at present ; for 
 the illegality of the deposal was now past all dispute ; 
 and the attempt to punish, or even ruin a number of 
 professional brethren for not enforcing a by-law, when 
 the by-law itself had been found irreconcilable to the 
 iaw of the land, greatly displeased the public, as vin- 
 dictive, oppressive, and useless to the purposes of the 
 Assembly.
 
 CHtRCH OF SCOTLAND. 441 
 
 Nothing was gained, except the putting on record 
 in implacability that was confessedly impotent. This 
 was the very lunacy of malice. Mortifying it might 
 certainly seem for the members of a supreme court, 
 like the General Assembly, to be baffled by thoee of a 
 subordinate court : but still since each party must be 
 regarded as representing far larger interests than any 
 personal to themselves, trying on either side, not the 
 energies of their separate wits, but the available re- 
 sources of law in one of its obscurer chapters, there 
 really seemed no more room for humiliation to the 
 one party, or for triumph to the other, than there is 
 amongst reasonable men in the result from a game, 
 where the game is one exclusively of chance. 
 
 From this period it is probable that the faction of 
 Non-intrusionists resolved upon abandoning the church. 
 It was the one sole resource left for sustaining their 
 own importance to men who were now sinking fast in 
 public estimation. At the latter end of 1842, they 
 summoned a convocation in Edinburgh. The dis- 
 cussions were private ; but it was generally understood 
 that at this time they concerted a plan for going out 
 from the church, in the event of their failing to alai-n 
 the government by the notification of this design. 
 We do not pretend to any knowledge of secrets. 
 What is known to everybody is that, on the an- 
 nual meeting of the General Assembly, in May, 1843, 
 the great body of the Non-intrusionists moved out 
 \n procession. The sort of theatrical interest which 
 gathered round the Seceders for a few hurried days in 
 May, was of a kind which should naturally have m ide 
 vise men both ashamed and disgusted. If- *as the
 
 42 SECESSION FEOM IHE 
 
 merest effervescence from that state of excitement 
 which is nursed by novelty, by expectation, by the 
 vague anticipation of a " scene," possibly of a quarrel, 
 together with the natural interest in seeing men whose 
 names had been long before the public in books and 
 periodical journals. 
 
 The first measure of the Seceders was to form them- 
 elves into a pseudo General Assembly. When there 
 are two suns visible, or two moons, the real one and 
 its duplicate, we call the mock sun a parhelios, and 
 the mock moon a paraselene. On that principle, we 
 must call this mock Assembly a para-synodos. Rarely, 
 indeed, can we applaud the Seceders in the fabrication 
 of names. They distinguish as quoad sacra parishes 
 those which were peculiarly quoad politica parishes ; 
 for in that view only they had been interesting to the 
 Non-intrusionists. Again, they style themselves The 
 Free Church, by way of taunting the other side with 
 being a servile church. But how are they any church 
 at all ? By the courtesies of Europe, and according 
 to usage, a church means a religious incorporation, 
 protected and privileged by the state. Those who are 
 not so privileged are usually content with the title of 
 Separatists, Dissenters, or Nonconformists. No wise 
 man will see either good sense or dignity in assuming 
 cities not appropriate. The very position and aspect 
 towards the church (legally so called) which has been 
 assumed by the Non-intrusionists viz., the position 
 of protesters against that body, not merely as bearing, 
 tmongst other features, a certain relation to the state, 
 *>ut specifically because they bear that relation, makes 
 _-t incongruous, and even absurd, for these Dissenter
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 443 
 
 to denominate themselves a " church." But there is 
 in Jther objection to this denomination the "Free 
 Church " have no peculiar and separate Confession of 
 Faith. Nobody knows what are their credenda 
 what they hold indispensable for fellow-membership, 
 either as to faith in mysteries or in moral doctrines. 
 Now, if they reply " Oh ! as to that, we adopt for 
 our faith all that ever we did profess when members 
 of the Scottish kirk " then in effect they are hardly 
 so much as a dissenting body, except in some elliptic 
 sense. There is a grievous hiatus in their own title- 
 deeds and archives ; they supply it by referring people 
 to the muniment chest of the kirk. Would it not be 
 a scandal to a Protestant church if she should say to 
 communicants "We have no sacramental vessels, or 
 even ritual ; but you may borrow both from Papal 
 Rome." Not only, however, is the kirk to lend her 
 Confession, &c. ; but even then a plain rustic will not 
 be able to guess how many parts in his Confession are 
 or may be affected by the " reformation " of the Non- 
 intrusionists. Surely, he will think, if this reformation 
 were so vast that it drove them out of the national 
 church, absolutely exploded them, then it follows that 
 it must have intervened and indirectly modified kmu- 
 merable questions : a difference that was punctually 
 limited to this one or these two clauses, could not be 
 such a difference as justified a rupture. Besides, if 
 they have altered this one or these two clauses, or 
 have altered their interpretation, how is any man to 
 know (except from a distinct Confession of Faith) that 
 they have not even directly altered much moro ? 
 \otoriety through newspapers is surely no ground ta
 
 444 SECESSION FKOM THE 
 
 Btand upon in religion. And now it appears that the 
 unlettered rustic needs two guides one to show him 
 exactly how much they have altered, whether two 
 points or two hundred, as well as which two or two 
 hundred ; another to teach him how far these original 
 changes may have carried with them secondary changes 
 as consequences into other parts of the Christian 
 system. One of the known changes viz., the doc- 
 trine of popular election as the proper qualification 
 for parish clergymen, possibly is not fitted to expand 
 itself or ramify, except by analogy. But the other 
 change, the infinity which has been suddenly turned 
 off like a jet of gas, or like the rushing of wind through 
 the tubes of an organ, upon the doctrine and applica- 
 tion of spirituality, seems fitted for derivative effects 
 that are innumerable. Consequently, we say of the 
 Non-intrusionists not only that they are no church ; 
 but that they are not even any separate body of Dis- 
 senters, until they have published a " Confession" or a 
 revised edition of the Scottish Confession. 
 
 IV. Lastly, we have to sum and to appreciate the 
 ultimate consequences of these things. Let us pursue 
 them to the end of the vista. First in order stands the 
 ..'.readful shock to the National Church Establishment ; 
 and that is twofold : it is a shock from without, acting 
 through opinion, and a shock from within, vcting 
 through the contagion of example. Each case is sepa- 
 rately perfect. Through the opinion of men standing 
 outside of the church, the church herself suffers wrong 
 in her authority. Through the contagion of sympathy 
 stealing over men inside of the church, peril arises o. 
 jther shocks in a second scries, which would so ex
 
 CHUECH OF SCOTLAND 445 
 
 haust the church by reiterated convulsions, as U leave 
 her virtually dismembered and shattered for all her 
 great national functions. 
 
 As to that evil which acts through opinion, it acts by 
 a machinery viz., the press and social centralization 
 in great cities, which in these days is perfect. Right 
 or wrong, justified or not justified by the acts of the 
 majority, it is certain that every public body how 
 much more, then, a body charged with the responsi- 
 bility of upholding the truth in its standard ! suffers 
 dreadfully in the world's opinion by any feud, schism, 
 or shadow of change among its members. This is what 
 the New Testament, a code of philosophy fertile in 
 new ideas, first introduced under the name of scandal; 
 that is, any occasion of serious offence ministered to the 
 weak or to the sceptical by differences irreconcilable in 
 the acts or the opinions of those whom they are bound 
 to regard as spiritual authorities. Now here, in Scot- 
 land, is a feud past all arbitration : here is a schism 
 no longer theoretic, neither beginning nor ending in 
 mere speculation ; here is a change of doctrine, on one 
 side or the other, which throws a sad umbrage of doubt 
 and perplexity over the pastoral relation of the church 
 to every parish in Scotland. Less confidence there 
 must always be henceforward in great religious incor- 
 porations. Was there any such incorporation reputed 
 to be more internally harmonious than the Scottish 
 church? None has been so tempestuously agitated. 
 Was any church more deeply pledged to the spirit of 
 meekness ? None has split asunder so irreconcilably 
 As to the grounds of quarrel, could any questions or 
 peculatiens be found so little fitted for a popular in-
 
 146 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 temperance? Yet no breach of unity has ever propa 
 gated itself by steps so sudden and irrevocable. One 
 shcrt decennium has comprehended within its circuit 
 the beginning and the end of this unparalleled hurri- 
 cane. In 1834, the first light augury of mischief 
 skirted the horizon a cloud no bigger than a man's 
 hand. In 1843, the evil had ".travelled on from birth 
 to birth." Already it had failed in what may be called 
 one conspiracy ; already it had entered upon a second 
 viz., to rear up an Anti-Kirk, or spurious establish- 
 ment, which should twist itself with snake-like folds 
 about the legal establishment ; surmount it as a Roman 
 vinea surmounted the fortifications which it belea- 
 guered ; and which, under whatsoever practical issue 
 for the contest, should at any rate overlook, molest, 
 and insult the true church for ever. Even this brief 
 period of development would have been briefer, had 
 not the law courts interposed many delays. Demurs 
 of law process imposed checks upon the uncharitable 
 haste of the odium theologicum and though in a ques- 
 tion of schism it would be a petitio principii for a 
 neutral censor to assume that either party had been 
 >riginally in error, yet it is within our competence to 
 say, that the Seceders it was whose bigotry carried the 
 dispute to that sad issue of a final separation. The es- 
 tablishment would have been well content to stop 
 short of that consummation : and temperaments might 
 have been found, compromises both safe and honorable, 
 had the minority built less of their reversionary hopes 
 upon the policy of a fanciful martyrdom. Martyrs 
 they insisted upon becoming : and that they might be 
 ttiartyrs, it was necessary for them to secede. Tha*
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 447 
 
 Europe thinks at present with less reverence of Prot- 
 sstant institutions than it did ten years ago, is due to 
 one of these institutions in particular viz., to the Scot- 
 tish kirk, aud specifically to the minority in that body. 
 They it was who spurned all mutual toleration, all 
 brotherly indulgence from either side to what it re- 
 garded as error in the other. Consequently upon their 
 consciences lies the responsibility of having weakened 
 the pillars of the reformed churches throughout Chris- 
 tendom. 
 
 Had those abuses been really such, which the Seced- 
 ers denounced, were it possible that a primary law of 
 pure Christianity had been set aside for generations, 
 how came it that evils so gross had stirred no whispers 
 of reproach before 1834 ? How came it that no aurora 
 of early light, no prelusive murmurs of scrupulosity 
 even from themselves, had run before this wild levanter 
 of change ? Heretofore or now there must have been 
 huge error on their own showing. Heretofore they 
 must have been traitorously below their duty, or now 
 mutinously beyond it. 
 
 Such conclusions are irresistible, and upon any path, 
 seceding or not seceding, they menace the worldly 
 tredit of ecclesiastical bodies. That evil is now past 
 remedy. As for the other evil, that which acts upon 
 church establishments, not through simple failure in 
 the guarantees of public opinion, but through their 
 own internal vices of composition ; here undeniably we 
 see a chasm traversing the Scottish church from the 
 very gates to the centre. And unhappily the same 
 chasm, which marks a division of the church internally, 
 is a link connecting it externally with the Seceders.
 
 448 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 For how stands the case ? Did the Scottish kirk, at 
 the late crisis, divide broadly into two mutually ex- 
 cluding sections ? Was there one of these bisections 
 which said Yes, whilst the other responded No 1 Was 
 the affirmative and negative shared between them as 
 between the black chessmen and the white ? Not so ; 
 and unhappily not so. The two extremes there were, 
 but these shaded off into each other. Many were the 
 nuances ; multiplied the combinations. Here stood a 
 section that had voted for all the changes, with two or 
 three exceptions ; there stood another that went the 
 whole length as to this change, but no part of the way 
 as to that ; between these sections arose others .that 
 had voted arbitrarily, or eclectically, that is, by no law 
 generally recognized. And behind this eclectic school 
 were grouped others who had voted for all novelties up 
 to a certain day, but after that had refused to go fur- 
 ther with a movement party whose tendencies they had 
 begun to distrust. In this last case, therefore, the di- 
 risional line fell upon no principle, but upon the acci- 
 dent of having, at that particular moment, first seen 
 grounds of conscientious alarm. The principles upon 
 which men had divided were various, and these various 
 principles were variously combined. But on the other 
 hand, those who have gone out were the men who ap- 
 proved totally, not partially unconditionally, not 
 within limits up to the end, and not to a given day 
 Consequently those who stayed in comprehended &U 
 the shades and degrees which the men of violence ex- 
 cluded. The Seceders were unanimous to a man, and 
 of necessity ; for he who approves the last act, the 
 ext-eme act. which is naturally the most violent act.
 
 CHTTECH OF SCOTLAND. 449 
 
 a fortiori approves all lesser acts. But the establish- 
 ment, by parity of reason, retained upon its rolls all th? 
 degrees, all the modifications, all who had exercised a 
 wise discretion, who, in so great a cause, had thought 
 it a point of religion to be cautious ; whose casuistry 
 had moved in the harness of peace, and who had pre- 
 ferred an interest of conscience to a triumph of parti- 
 sanship. We honor them for that policy ; but we 
 cannot hide from ourselves, that the very principle 
 which makes such a policy honorable at the moment, 
 makes it dangerous in reversion. For he who avows 
 that, upon public motives, he once resisted a tempta- 
 tion to schism, makes known by that avowal that he 
 still harbors in his mind the germ of such a temptation : 
 and to that scruple, which once he resisted, hereafter 
 he may see reason for yielding. The principles of 
 schism, which for the moment were suppressed, are 
 gtill latent in the church. It is urged that, in quest of 
 unity, many of these men succeeded in resisting the 
 instincts of dissension at the moment of crisis. True : 
 but this might be because they presumed on winning 
 from their own party equal concessions by means less 
 violent than schism ; or because they attached less 
 weight to the principle concerned, than they may see 
 cause for attaching upon future considerations ; or be- 
 cause they would not allow themselves to sanction the 
 cause of the late Secession, by going out in company 
 with men whose principles they adopted only in part, 
 or whose manner of supporting those principles they 
 abhorred. Universally it is evident, that little stress 
 is to be laid on a negative act ; simply to have declined 
 joing out with the Seceders proves nothing, for it is 
 29
 
 450 SECESSION FHOM THE 
 
 equivocal. It is an act which may cover indifferently 
 a marked hostility to the Secession party, or an abso- 
 lute friendliness, but a friendliness not quite equal to 
 BO extreme a test. And, again, this negative act may 
 be equivocal in a different way ; the friendliness may 
 not only have existed, but may have existed in suffi- 
 cient strength for any test whatever ; not the princi- 
 ples of the Seteders, but their Jacobinical mode oi 
 asserting them, may have proved the true nerve of the 
 repulsion to many. What is it that we wish the Eng- 
 lish reader to collect from these distinctions ? Simply 
 that the danger is not yet gone past. The earthquake, 
 says a great poet, when speaking of the general ten- 
 dency in all dangers to come round by successive and 
 reiterated shocks 
 
 " The earthquake is not satisfied at once." 
 
 . All dangers which lie deeply seated are recurrent dan- 
 gers ; they intermit, only as the revolving lamps of a 
 light-house are periodically eclipsed. The General 
 Assembly of 1843, when closing her gates upon the 
 Seceders, shut in, perhaps, more of the infected than 
 at the time she succeeded in shutting out. As re- 
 spected the opinion of the world outside, it seemed 
 advisable to shut out the least number possible ; for 
 in proportion to the number of the Seceders, was the 
 langer that they should carry with them an authentic 
 impression in their favor. On the other hand, as re- 
 spected a greater danger (the danger from internal 
 contagion), it seemed advisable that the church should 
 have shut out (if she could) very many of those who 
 for the present, adhered to her. The broader the sep
 
 CHUKCH OF SCOTLAND. 451 
 
 wation, and the more absolute, between the church 
 and the secession, so much the less anxiety there would 
 have survived lest the rent should spread. That the 
 anxiety in this respect is not visionary, the reader 
 may satisfy himself by looking over a remarkable 
 pamphlet, which professes by its title to separate the 
 wheat from the chaff. By the *' wheat," in the view of 
 this writer, is meant the aggregate of those who per- 
 severed in their recusant policy up to the practical 
 result of secession. All who stopped short of that 
 consummation (on whatever plea), are the " chaff." 
 The writer is something of an incendiary, or something 
 of a fanatic ; but he is consistent with regard to his 
 own principles, and so elaborately careful in his details 
 as to extort admiration of his energy and of his patienrv 
 in research. 
 
 But the reason for which we notice this pamphlet, 
 is, with a view to the proof of that large intestine mis- 
 chief which still lingers behind in the vitals of the 
 Scottish establishment. No proof, in a question of 
 that nature, can be so showy and ostensive to a stranger 
 as that which is supplied by this vindictive pamphlet. 
 For every past vote recording a scruple, is the pledge 
 of a scruple still existing, though for the moment sup- 
 pressed. Since the secession, nearly four hundred and 
 fifty new men may have entered the church. This 
 supplementary body has probably diluted the strength 
 of the revolutionary principles. But they also may 
 oerhaps, have partaken to some extent in the contagion 
 of these principles. True, there is this guarantee for 
 taution, on the part of these new men, that as yet 
 they are pledged to nothing ; and that, seeing expori
 
 i52 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 mentally how fearfully many of their older brethren 
 are now likely to be fettered by the past, they have 
 every possible motive for reserve, in committing them- 
 selves, either by their votes or by their pens. In their 
 situation, there is a special inducement to prudence, 
 because there is a prospect, that for them prudence is 
 in time to be effectual. But for many of the older 
 men, prudence comes too late. They are already fet- 
 tered. And what we are now pointing out to the at- 
 tention of our readers, is, that by the past, by the 
 absolute votes of the past, too sorrowfully it is made 
 evident, that the Scottish church is deeply tainted with 
 the principles of the Secession. These germs of evil 
 and of revolution, speaking of them in a personal sense, 
 cannot be purged off entirely until one generation 
 shall have passed away. But speaking of them as 
 principles capable of vegetation, these germs may or 
 may not expand into whole forests of evil, according 
 to the accidents of coming events, whether fitted to 
 tranquillize our billowy aspects of society ; or, on the 
 other hand, largely to fertilize the many occasions of 
 agitation, which political fermentations are too sure to 
 throw off. Let this chance turn out as it may, we 
 repeat for the information of Southerns that the 
 church, by shutting off the persons of particular agi- 
 tators, has not shut off the principles of agitation ; 
 and that the cordon sanitaire, supposing the sponta- 
 neous exile of the Non-intrusionists to be regarded in 
 that light, was not drawn about the church until the 
 jlsease had spread widely within the lines. 
 
 Past votes may not absolutely pledge a man to a 
 course of action ; warned in time, such a mat
 
 CHtTECH OF SCOTLAND. 453 
 
 may stand neutral in practice ; but thus far they poison 
 the fountains of wholesome unanimity that, if a man 
 can evade the necessity of squaring particular actions to 
 his past opinions, at least he must find himself tempted 
 to square his opinions themselves, or his counsels, to 
 such past opinions as he may too notoriously hava 
 placed on record by his votes. 
 
 But, if such are the continual dangers from reac- 
 tions in the establishment, so long as men survive in 
 that establishment who feel upbraided by past votes, 
 and so long as enemies survive who will not suffer 
 these upbraidings to slumber dangers which much 
 mutual forbearance and charity can alone disarm ; on 
 the other hand, how much profounder is the inconsist- 
 ency to which the Free Church is doomed ! They 
 have rent the unity of that church, to which they had 
 pledged their faith but on what plea ? On the plea 
 that in cases purely spiritual, they could not in con- 
 science submit to the award of the secular magistrate. 
 Yet how merely impracticable is this principle, as an 
 abiding principle of action ! Churches, that is, the 
 charge of particular congregations, will be with them 
 (as with other religious communities) the means of 
 livelihood. Grounds innumerable will arise for exclud- 
 ing or attempting to exclude, each other from these 
 official stations. No possible form regulating the 
 business of ordination, or of induction, can anticipate 
 he infinite objections which may arise. But no man 
 interested in such a case will submit to a judge ap- 
 pointed by insufficient authority. Daily bread for his 
 family is what few men will resign without a struggle, 
 that struggle will of necessity come for final ad-
 
 154 SECESSION FROM: THE 
 
 udication to the law courts of the land, whose inter- 
 'erence in any question affecting a spiritual interest, 
 the Free Church has for ever pledged herself to refuse. 
 But in the case supposed, she will not have the powei 
 to refuse it. She will be cited before the tribunals, 
 and can elude that citation in no way but by surren- 
 dering the point in litigation ; and if she should adopt 
 the notion, that it is better for her to do that, than to 
 acknowledge a sufficient authority in the court by 
 pleading at its bar, upon this principle once made pub- 
 lic, she will soon be stripped of everything, and will 
 cease to be a church at all. She cannot continue to be 
 a depository of any faith, or a champion of any doctrines, 
 if she lose the means of defending her own incorpora- 
 tions. But how can she maintain the defenders of her 
 rights, or the dispensers of her truths, if she refuses, 
 upon immutable principle, to call in the aid of the 
 magistrate on behalf of rights, which, under any as- 
 pect, regard spiritual relations? Attempting to main- 
 tain these rights by private arbitration within a forum 
 of her own, she will soon find such arbitration not 
 binding at all upon the party who conceives himself 
 aggrieved. The issue will be as in Mr. O'Connell's 
 courts, where the parties played at going to law ; from 
 the moment when they ceased to play, and no longer 
 'made believe" to be disputing, the award of the 
 udge became as entire a mockery, as any stage mimicry 
 vf such a transaction. 
 
 This should be the natural catastrophe of the case , 
 tnd the probable evasion of that destructive consum- 
 mation, to which she is carried by her principles, will 
 be that as soon as her feelings of ran-?or shall hav*
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 455 
 
 tooled down, these principles will silently drop out of 
 use ; and the very reason will be suffered to perish for 
 which she ever became a dissenting body. With this, 
 however, we, that stand outside, are noways concerned. 
 But an evil, in which we are concerned, is the head- 
 long tendency of the Free Church, and of all churches, 
 adulterating with her principle, to an issue not merely 
 dangerous in a political sense, but ruinous in an anti- 
 social sense. The artifice of the Free Church lies in 
 pleading a spiritual relation of any case whatever, 
 whether of doing or suffering, whether positive or nega- 
 tive, as a reason for taking it out of all civil control. 
 Now we may illustrate the peril of this artifice, by a 
 reality at this time impending over society in Ireland* 
 Dr. Higgins, titular bishop of Ardagh, has undertaken 
 upon this very plea of a spiritual power not amenable to 
 civil control, a sort of warfare with government, upon 
 the question of their power to suspend or defeat the 
 O'Connell agitation. For, says he, if government 
 should succeed in thus intercepting the direct power 
 of haranguing mobs in open assemblies, then will I 
 harangue them, and cause them to be harangued, in 
 the same spirit, upon the same topics, from the altar or 
 the pulpit. An immediate extension of this principle 
 would be that every disaffected clergyman in the 
 three kingdoms, would lecture his congregation upon 
 the duty of paying no taxes. This he would denomi- 
 note passive resistance; and resistance to bad govern- 
 ment would become, in his language, the most sacred 
 of duties. In any argument with such a man, he 
 would be found immediately falling back upon the 
 principle of the Free Church ; he would insist upon it
 
 456 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 as a spiritual right, 'as a case entirely between his con- 
 science and God, whether he should press to an ex- 
 tremity any and every doctrine, though tending to the 
 instant disorganization of society. To lecture against 
 war, and against taxes as directly supporting war, 
 would wear a most colorable air of truth amongst all 
 weak-minded persons. And these would soon appear 
 to have been but the first elements of confusion under 
 the improved views of spiritual rights. The doctrines 
 of the Levellers in Cromwell's time, of the Anabaptists 
 in Luther's time, would exalt themselves upon the 
 ruins of society, if governments were weak enough to 
 recognize these spiritual claims in the feeblest of their 
 initial advances. If it were possible to suppose such 
 chimeras prevailing, the natural redress would soon be 
 seen to lie through secret tribunals, like those of the 
 dreadful Fehmgericht in the middle ages. It would 
 be absurd, however, seriously to pursue these anti- 
 social chimeras through their consequences. Stern 
 remedies would summarily crush so monstrous an evil. 
 Our purpose is answered, when the necessity of such 
 insupportable consequences is shown to link itself with 
 that distinction upon which the Free Church has laid 
 the foundations of its own establishment. Once for 
 all, there is no act or function belonging to an officer 
 of a church which is not spiritual by one of its two 
 Janus faces. And every examination of the case con- 
 vinces us more and more that the Seceders took up 
 he old papal distinction, as to acts spiritual or not 
 spiritual, not under any delusion less or more, but 
 under a simple necessity of finding some evasion or 
 other which should meet and embody the whole ra.nco 
 *f the moment.
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 457 
 
 But beyond any other evil consequence prepared bj 
 the Free Church, is the appalling spirit of Jacobinisir. 
 which accompanies their whole conduct, and which 
 latterly has avowed itself in their words. The case 
 began Jacobinically, for it began in attacks upon the 
 rights of property. But since the defeat of this faction 
 by the law courts, language seems to fail them, for the 
 expression of their hatred and affected scorn towards 
 the leading nobility of Scotland. Yet why ? The 
 case lies in the narrowest compass. The Duke of 
 Sutherland, and other great landholders, had refused 
 sites for their new churches. Upon this occurred a 
 strong fact, and strong in both directions ; first, for the 
 Seceders ; secondly, upon better information against 
 them. The Record newspaper, a religious journal, 
 ably and conscientiously conducted, took part with the 
 Secession, and very energetically ; for they denounced 
 the noble duke's refusal of land as an act of " persecu- 
 tion ; " and upon this principle that, in a county 
 where his grace was pretty nearly the sole landed pro- 
 prietor, to refuse land (assuming that a fair price had 
 been tendered for it) was in effect to show such intoler- 
 ance as might easily tend to the suppression of truth. 
 Intolerance, however, is not persecution ; and, if it 
 were, the casuistry of the question is open still to much 
 discussion. But this is not necessary ; for the ground 
 is altogether shifted when the duke's reason for refus- 
 ing the land comes to be stated ; he had refused it, not 
 unconditionally, notin the spirit of non-intrusion courts, 
 " without reason shown," but on this unanswerable 
 irgument that the whole efforts of the new church 
 were pointed (and professedly pointed) to the one
 
 i58 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 objeiit of destroying the establishment, and " sweeping 
 it from the land." Could any guardian of public in- 
 terests, under so wicked a threat, hesitate as to the line 
 of his duty ? By granting the land to parties uttering 
 such menaces, the Duke of Sutherland would have 
 made himself an accomplice in the unchristian con- 
 spiracy. Meantime, next after this fact, it is the 
 strongest defence which we can offer for the duke 
 that in a day or two after this charge of " persecution," 
 the Record was forced to attack the Seceders in term a 
 which indirectly defended the duke. And this, not in 
 any spirit of levity, but under mere conscientious con- 
 straint. For no journal has entered so powerfully or 
 so eloquently into the defence of the general principle 
 involved in the Secession (although questioning its 
 expediency), as this particular Record. Consequently, 
 any word of condemnation from so earnest a friend, 
 comes against the Seceders with triple emphasis. And 
 this is shown in the tone of the expostulations ad- 
 dressed to the Record by some of the Secession leaders. 
 It spares us, indeed, all necessity of quoting the vile 
 language uttered by members of the Free Church As- 
 sembly, if we say, that the neutral witnesses of such 
 unchristian outrages have murmured, remonstrated, 
 protested in every direction ; and that Dr. Macfarlane, 
 who has since corresponded with the Duke of Suther- 
 land upon the whole case viz., upon the petition for 
 land, as affected by the shocking menaces of the Sece- 
 ders has, in no other way, been able to evade the 
 ilouble mischief of undertaking a defence for the inde 
 'ensible, and at the same time of losing the land irre 
 jrievably, than by affecting an unconsciousness of Ian-
 
 CHUECH OF SCOTLAND. 459 
 
 'uage used by his party little suited to his own sacred 
 calling, or to the noble simplicities of Christianity 
 Certainly it is unhappy for the Seceders, that the only 
 disavowal of the most fiendish sentiments heard in our 
 days, has come from an individual not authorized or at 
 all commissioned by his party from an individual 
 not showing any readiness to face the whole charges, 
 disingenuously dissembling the worst of them, and 
 finally offering his very feeble disclaimer, which equivo- 
 cates between a denial and a palliation not until 
 after he found himself in the position of a petitioner 
 for favors. 
 
 Specifically the great evil of our days, is the abiding 
 temptation, in every direction, to popular discontent, 
 to agitation, and to systematic sedition. Now, we say 
 it with sorrow, that from no other incendiaries have 
 we heard sentiments so wild, fierce, or maliciously 
 democratic, as from the leaders of the Secession. It 
 was the Reform Bill of 1832, and the accompanying 
 agitation, which first suggested the veto agitation of 
 1834, and prescribed its tone. From all classes of our 
 population in turn, there have come forward individ- 
 uals to disgrace themselves by volunteering their aid 
 to the chief conspirators of the age. We have earls, 
 we have marquesses, coming forward as Corn-League 
 agents ; we have magistrates by scores angling for 
 popularity as Repealers. But these have been pri- 
 vate parties, insulated, disconnected, disowned. When 
 we hear of Christianity prostituted to the service of 
 Jacobinism of divinity becoming the handmaid 
 to insurrection and of clergymen in masses offering 
 (hemselves as promoters of anarchy, we go back in
 
 460 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 thought to that ominous organization of irreligion, 
 which, gave its most fearful aspects to the French 
 Revolution. 
 
 Other evils are in the rear as likely to arise out of 
 the funds provided for the new Seceders, were the dis- 
 tribution of those funds confessedly unobjectionable, 
 but more immediately under the present murmurs 
 against that distribution. There are two funds : one 
 subscribed expressly for the building of churches, the 
 other limited to the " sustentation " of incumbents. 
 And the complaint is that this latter fund has been 
 invaded for purposes connected with the first. The 
 reader can easily see the motive to this injustice : it is 
 a motive of ambition. Far more display of power is 
 made by the annunciation to the world of six hundred 
 churches built, than of any difference this way or that 
 in the comfort and decorous condition of the clergy. 
 This last is a domestic feature of the case, not fitted for 
 public effect. But the number of the churches will 
 resound through Europe. Meantime, at present, the 
 allowance to the great body of Seceding clergy aver- 
 ages but 80 a-year ; and the allegation is that, but 
 for the improper interference with the fund on the 
 motive stated, it would have averaged 150 a-year. 
 If anywhere a town parish has raised a much larger 
 provision for its pastor, even that has now become a 
 part of the general grievance. For it is said that all 
 Buch special contributions ought to have been thrown 
 mto one general fund liable to one general principle 
 >f distribution. Yet again, will even this fund, par- 
 tially as it seems to have bean divided, continue to be 
 ivailable ? Much of it lies in annual subscriptions
 
 CHUBCH OF SCOTLAND. 461 
 
 now, in the next generation of subscribers, a sou wiL 
 possibly not adopt the views of his father ; but assur- 
 edly he will not adopt his father's zeal. Here, how. 
 ever (though this is not probable), there may arise 
 some compensatory cases of subscribers altogether new. 
 But another question is pressing for decision, which 
 menaces a frightful shock to the schismatical church : 
 female agency has been hitherto all potent in promot- 
 ing the subscriptions ; and a demand has been made 
 in consequence that women shall be allowed to vote 
 in the church courts. Grant this demand for it 
 cannot be evaded, and what becomes of the model 
 for church government as handed down from John 
 Knox and Calvin ? Refuse it, and what becomes of 
 the future subscriptions ? 
 
 But these are evils, it may be said, only for the 
 Seceders. Not so : we are all interested in the re- 
 spectability of the national teachers , whatever be their 
 denomination : we are all interested in the mainten- 
 ance of a high standard for theological education. 
 These objects are likely to suffer at any rate. But it 
 is even a worse result which we may count on from 
 the changes, than a practical approximation is thus 
 already made to what is technically known as Volun- 
 taryism. 
 
 The " United Succession," that is the old collective 
 _ody of Scottish Dissenters, who, having no regular 
 provision, are carried into this voluntary system, 
 already exult that this consummation of the case can- 
 not be far off. Indeed, so far as the Seceders are 
 dependent upon annual subscriptions, and coupling 
 *hat relation to the public with the great doctrine ol
 
 462 SECESSION FROM THE 
 
 tleae Seceders, that congregations are universally to 
 appoint their own pastors, we do not see how such an 
 issue is open to evasion. The leaders of the new 
 Secession all protest against Voluntaryism : but to 
 that complexion of things they travel rapidly by the 
 mere mechanic action of their dependent (or semi- 
 dependent) situation, combined with one of their two 
 characteristic principles. 
 
 The same United Secession journal openly antici- 
 pates another and more diffusive result from this great 
 movement viz., the general disruption of church 
 establishments. We trust that this anticipation will 
 be signally defeated. And yet there is OL.e view of 
 the case which saddens us when we turn our eyes in 
 that direction. Among the reasonings and expostula- 
 tions of the Schismatic church, one that struck us as 
 the most eminently hypocritical, and ludicrously so, 
 was this : " You ought," said they, when addressing 
 the government, and exposing the error of the law 
 proceedings, " to have stripped us of the temporalities 
 arising from the church, stipend, glebe, parsonage, 
 but not of the spiritual functions. We had no right to 
 the emoluments of our stations, when the law courts 
 had decided against us, but we had a right to the 
 laborious duties of the stations." No gravity could 
 refuse to smile at this complaint verbally so much 
 In the spirit of primitive Christianity, yet in its ten- 
 dency so insidious. For could it be possible that a 
 eompetitor introduced by the law, and leaving the 
 duties of the pastoral office to the old incumbent, but 
 Docketing the salary, should not be hooted on the 
 tmblic roads by many who might otherwise have taker
 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 463 
 
 no part in the feud? This specious claim was a sure 
 and brief way to secure the hatefulness of their suc- 
 cessors. Now we cannot conceal from ourselves that 
 something like this invidious condition of things might 
 be realized under two further revolutions. We have 
 said, that a second schism in the Scottish church is not 
 impossible. It is also but too possible that Puseyism 
 may yet rend the English establishment, by a similar 
 convulsion. But in such contingencies, we should see 
 a very large proportion of the spiritual teachers in 
 both nations actually parading to the public eye, and 
 rehearsing something very like the treacherous pro- 
 posal of the late Seceders viz., the spectacle of one 
 party performing much of the difficult duties, and 
 another party enjoying the main emoluments. This 
 would be a most unfair mode of recommending Vol- 
 untaryism. Falling in with the infirmities of many in 
 these days, such a spectacle would give probably a 
 a fatal bias to that system in our popular and Parlia- 
 mentary counsels. This would move the sorrow of 
 the Seceders themselves : for they have protested 
 against the theory of all Voluntaries with a vehemence 
 which that party even complain of as excessive. Their 
 leaders have many times avowed, that any system 
 which should leave to men in general the estimate of 
 iheir own religious wants as a pecuniary interest, 
 would be fatal to the Christian tone of our national 
 morals. Checked and overawed by the example of an 
 establishment, the Voluntaries themselves are far more 
 fervent ir. their Christian exertions than they could bo 
 when liberated from that contrast. The religious spirit 
 of both England and Scotland under such a change
 
 464 SECESSION FROM THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 would droop for generations. And in that one evil, 
 let us hope, the remotest and least probable of the 
 many evils threatened by the late schism, these nations 
 would have reason by comparison almost to forget 
 the rest.
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 IT is remarkable and, without a previous expl* 
 nation, it might seem paradoxical to say it that 
 oftentimes under a continual accession of light im- 
 portant subjects grow more and more enigmatical. 
 In times when nothing was explained, the student, 
 torpid as his teacher, saw nothing which called for 
 explanation all appeared one monotonous blank. 
 But no sooner had an early twilight begun to solicit 
 the creative faculties of the eye, than many dusky 
 objects, with outlines imperfectly defined, began to 
 converge the eye, and to strengthen the nascent 
 interest of the spectator. It is true that light, in its 
 final plenitude, is calculated to disperse all dark- 
 ness. But this effect belongs to its consummation. 
 In its earlier and struggling states, light does but 
 reveal darkness. It makes the darkness palpable 
 and "visible." 27 Of which we may see a sensible 
 illustration in a gloomy glass-house, where the sullen 
 lustre from the furnace does but mass and accumu- 
 late the thick darkness in the rear upon which the 
 moving figures are relieved. Or we may see an 
 intellectual illustration in the mind of the savage, on 
 whose blank surface there exists no doubt or per 
 olexity at all, none of the pains connected with
 
 4GG THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 ignorance ; he is conscious of no darkness, simply 
 because for him there exists no visual ray of specu- 
 lation no vestige of prelusive light. 
 
 Similar, and continually more similar, has been the 
 condition of ancient history. Once yielding a mere 
 barren crop of facts and dates, slowly it has been 
 kindling of late years into life and deep interest 
 under superior treatment. And hitherto, as the light 
 has advanced, pari passu have the masses of dark- 
 ness strengthened. Every question solved has been 
 the parent of three new questions unmasked. And 
 the power of breathing life into dry bones has but 
 seemed to multiply the skeletons and lifeless re- 
 mains ; for the very natural reason that these dry 
 bones formerly (whilst viewed as incapable of revivi- 
 fication) had seemed less numerous, because every- 
 where confounded to the eye with stocks and stones, 
 so long as there was no motive of hope for marking 
 the distinction between them. 
 
 Amongst all the illustrations which might illum- 
 inate this truth, none is so instructive as the large 
 question of PAGAN ORACLES. Every part, indeed, of 
 Jie Pagan religion, the course, geographically or 
 ethnographically, of its traditions, the vast labyrinth 
 of its mythology, the deductions of its contradictory 
 genealogies, the disputed meaning of its many se- 
 cret "mysteries" [re^sjui, symbolic rites or initia- 
 tions], all these have been submitted of late years 
 to the scrutiny of glasses more powerful, applied 
 under more combined arrangements, and directed 
 according to new principles more comprehensively 
 framed. We cannot in sincerity affirm always 
 with immediate advantage. But even whore the
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 167 
 
 individual effort may have been a failure as regarded 
 the immediate object, rarely, indeed, it has happened 
 but that much indirect illumination has resulted 
 which, afterwards entering into combination with 
 other scattered currents of light, has issued in dis- 
 coveries of value ; although, perhaps, any one con- 
 tribution, taken separately, had been, and would 
 have remained, inoperative. Much has been accom- 
 plished, chiefly of late years ; and, confining our 
 view to ancient history, almost exclusively amongst 
 the Germans by the Savignys, the Niebuhrs, the 
 Otfried Muellers. And, if that much has left still 
 more to do, it has also brought the means of working 
 upon a scale of far accelerated speed. 
 
 The books now existing upon the ancient oracles, 
 above all, upon the Greek oracles, amount to a small 
 library. The facts have been collected from all 
 quarters, examined, sifted, winnowed. Theories 
 have been raised upon these facts under every angle 
 of aspect ; and yet, after all, we profess ourselves to 
 be dissatisfied. Amongst much that is sagacious, we 
 feel and we resent with disgust a taint of falsehood 
 diffused over these recent speculations from vulgar 
 and even counterfeit incredulity ; the one gross vice 
 of German philosophy, not less determinate or less 
 misleading than that vice which, heretofore, through 
 many centuries, had impoverished this subject, and 
 had stopped its discussion under the anile super- 
 stition of the ecclesiastical fathers. 
 
 These fathers, both Greek and Latin, had the ill 
 fortune to be extravagantly esteemed by the church 
 of Rome ; whence, under a natural reaction, they 
 wrere systematically depreciated by the great loaders
 
 4:68 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 of the Protestant Reformation. And yet hardly in a 
 corresponding degree. For there was, after all, even 
 among the reformers, a deep-seated prejudice in be- 
 half of all that was "primitive" in Christianity; 
 under which term, by some confusion of ideas, the 
 fathers often benefited. Piimitive Christianity was 
 reasonably venerated ; and, on this argument, that, 
 for the first three centuries, it was necessarily more 
 sincere. We do not think so much cf that sincerity 
 which affronted the fear of persecution ; because, 
 after all, the searching persecutions were rare and 
 intermitting, and not, perhaps, in any case, so fiery 
 as they have been represented. We think more of 
 that gentle but insidious persecution which lay in 
 the solicitations of besieging friends, and more still 
 of the continual temptations which haunted the ir- 
 resolute Christian in the fascinations of the public 
 amusements. The theatre, the circus, and, far beyond 
 both, the cruel amphitheatre, constituted, for the 
 ancient world, a passionate enjoyment, that by many 
 authors, and especially through one period of time, 
 is described as going to the verge of frenzy. And 
 we, in modern times, are far too little aware in what 
 degree these great carnivals, together with another 
 Attraction of great cities, the pomps and festivals of 
 the Pagan worship, broke the monotony of domestic 
 life, which, for the old world, was even more oppress- 
 ive than it is for us. In all principal cities, so as to 
 be within the reach of almost all provincial inhal)- 
 itauts, there was a hippodrome, often uniting the 
 functions of the circus and the amphitheatre ; and 
 there was a theatre. From all such pleasures the 
 Christian was sternly excluded by his very pro
 
 THE PA3AN ORACLES. 469 
 
 tession of faith. From the festivals of the Pagan 
 religion his exclusion was even more absolute ; 
 against them he was a sworn militant protester from 
 the hour of his baptism. And when these modes 
 of pleasurable relaxation had been subtracted from 
 aucient life, what could remain ? Even less, per- 
 haps, than most readers have been led to consider. 
 For the ancients had no such power of extensive 
 locomotion, of refreshment for their wearied minds, 
 by travelling and change of scene, as we children of 
 modern civilization possess. No ships had then been 
 fitted up for passengers, nor public carriages estab- 
 lished, nor roads opened extensively, nor hotels so 
 much as imagined hypothetically ; because the rela- 
 tion of Ifvta, 28 or the obligation to reciprocal hospi- 
 tality, and latterly the Roman relation of patron and 
 client, had stifled the first motions of enterprise of 
 the ancients ; in fact, no man travelled but the 
 soldier, and the man of political authority. Con- 
 sequently, in sacrificing public amusements, the 
 Christians sacrificed all pleasure whatsoever that was 
 not rigorously domestic ; whilst in facing the contin- 
 gencies of persecutions that might arise under the 
 rapid succession of changing emperors, they faced a 
 perpetual anxiety more trying to the fortitude than 
 any fixed and measurable evil. Here, certainly, we 
 have a guarantee for the deep faithfulness of early 
 Christians, such as never can exist for more mixed 
 bodies of professors, subject to no searching trials. 
 
 Better the primitive Christians were (by no means 
 individually better, but better on the total body), 
 yet they were not in any intellectual sense wiser. 
 Unquestionably the elder Christians participated in
 
 470 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 the local follies, prejudices, superstitions, of theit 
 several provinces and cities, except where any of 
 these happened to be too conspicuously at war with 
 the spirit of love or the spirit of purity which ex- 
 haled at every point from the Christian faith ; and, 
 in all intellectual features, as were the Christians 
 generally, such were the fathers. Amongst the 
 Greek fathers, one might be unusually learned, as 
 Clement of Alexandria ; and another might be re- 
 puted unusually eloquent, as Gregory Nazianzen, or 
 Basil. Amongst the Latin fathers, one might be a 
 man of admirable genius, as far beyond the poor, 
 vaunted Rousseau in the impassioned grandeur of 
 his thoughts, as he was in truth and purity of heart ; 
 we speak of St. Augustine (usually called St. Aus- 
 tin), and many might be distinguished by various 
 literary merits. But could these advantages antici- 
 pate a higher civilization ? Most unquestionably 
 some of the fathers were the elite of their own age, 
 but not in advance of their age. They, like all then 
 contemporaries, were besieged by errors, ancient, 
 inveterate, traditional ; and accidentally, from one 
 cause special to themselves, they were not merely 
 liable to error, but usually prone to error This 
 cause lay in the polemic form which so often they 
 found a necessity, or a convenience, or a temptation 
 for assuming, as teachers or defenders of the truth. 
 
 He who reveals a body of awful truth to a candid 
 and willing auditory is content with the grand sim- 
 plicities of truth in the quality of his proofs. And 
 truth, where it happens to be of a high order, is gen- 
 erally its own witness to all who approach it in the 
 spirit of childlike docility. But far different 'V the
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 471 
 
 position of that teacher who addresses an audience 
 composed in various proportions of sceptical inquir 
 ers, obstinate opponents, and malignant scoffers 
 Less than an apostle is unequal to the suppression 
 of all human reactions incident to wounded sensibili- 
 ties. Scorn is too naturally met by retorted scorn : 
 malignity in the Pagan, which characterized all the 
 known cases of signal opposition to Christianity, 
 could not but hurry many good men into a vindic- 
 tive pursuit of victory. Generally, where truth is 
 communicated polemically (this is, not as it exists in 
 its own inner simplicity, but as it exists in external 
 relation to error), the temptation is excessive to use 
 those arguments which will tell at the moment upon 
 the crowd of bystanders, by preference to those 
 which will approve themselves ultimately to enlight 
 ened disciples. Hence it is, that, like the profes- 
 sional rhetoricians of Athens, not seldom the Chris- 
 tian fathers, when urgently pressed by an antagonist 
 equally mendacious and ignorant, could not resist 
 the human instinct for employing arguments such as 
 would baffle and confound the unprincipled oppo- 
 nent, rather than such as would satisfy the mature 
 Christian. If a man denied himself all specious ar- 
 guments, and all artifices of dialectic subtlety, he 
 must renounce the hopes of a present triumph ; for 
 the light of absolute truth on moral or on spiritual 
 themes is too dazzling to be sustained by the dis- 
 eased optics of those habituated to darkness. And 
 hence we explain not only the many gross delusions 
 of the fathers, their sophisms, their errors of fact and 
 chronology, their attempts to build great truths upon 
 fantastic etymologies, or upon popular conceits in
 
 972 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 science that have long since exploded, but also their 
 occasional unchristian tempers. To contend with an 
 unprincipled and malicious liar, such as Julian the 
 Apostate, in its original sense the first deliberate 
 miscreant, offered a dreadful snare to any man's 
 charity. And he must be a furious bigot who will 
 justify the rancorous lampoons 29 of Gregory Nazian- 
 zen. Are we, then, angry on behalf of Julian ? So 
 far as he was interested, not for a moment would we 
 have suspended the descending scourge. Cut him 
 to the bone, we should have exclaimed at the time ! 
 Lay the knout into every " raw " that can be found ! 
 For we are of opinion that Julian's duplicity is not 
 yet adequately understood. But what was right as 
 regarded the claims of the criminal, was not right as 
 regarded the duties of his opponent. Even in this 
 mischievous renegade, trampling with his orang- 
 outang hoofs the holiest of truths, a Christian bishop 
 ought still to have respected his sovereign, through 
 the brief period that he was such, and to have com- 
 miserated his benighted brother, however wilfully 
 astray, and however hatefully seeking to quench that 
 light for other men, which, for his own misgiving 
 heart, we could undertake to show that he never did 
 succeed in quenching. We do not wish to enlarge 
 upon a theme both copious and easy. But here, and 
 everywhere, speaking of the fathers as a body, we 
 charge them with anti-christian practices of a two-fold 
 order : sometimes as supporting their great cause in 
 a spirit alien to its own, retorting in a temper not 
 'ess uncharitable than that of their opponents ; some- 
 times, again, as adopting arguments that are un- 
 christian in their ultimate grounds ; resting upoi
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 473 
 
 errors the reputation of errors ; upon superstitions 
 the overthrow of superstitions ; and drawing upon 
 the armories of darkness for weapons that, to be dur 
 able, ought to have been of celestial temper. Alter- 
 nately, in short, the fathers trespass against those 
 affections which furnish to Christianity its moving 
 powers, and against those truths which furnish to 
 Christianity its guiding lights. Indeed, Milton's 
 memorable attempt to characterize the fathers as a 
 body, contemptuous as it is, can hardly be chal- 
 lenged as overcharged. 
 
 Never in any instance were these aberrations of 
 the fathers more vividly exemplified than in their 
 theories upon the Pagan Oracles. On behalf of God, 
 they were determined to be wiser than God ; and, in 
 demonstration of scriptural power, to advance doc- 
 trines which the Scriptures had nowhere warranted. 
 At this point, however, we shall take a short course ; 
 and, to use a vulgar phrase, shall endeavor to "kill 
 two birds with one stone." It happens that the ear- 
 .iest book in our modern European literature, which 
 has subsequently obtained a station of authority on 
 the subject of the ancient Oracles, applied itself en- 
 tirely to the erroneous theory of the fathers. This is 
 the celebrated Antonii Van Dale, " De Ethnicorum 
 Oraculis Dissertationes," which was published at 
 Amsterdam at least as early as the year 1682 ; that 
 is, one hundred and sixty years ago. And upon the 
 same subject there has been no subsequent book 
 which maintains an equal rank. Van Dale might 
 nave treated his theme simply with a view to the 
 investigation of the truth, as some recent inquirers 
 bave preferred doing ; and, in that case, the fathers
 
 174 THE PAGAN OKACLES. 
 
 would have been noticed only as incidenta.. occasions 
 might bring forward their opinions true or false. 
 But to this author the errors of the fathers seemed 
 capital ; worthy, in fact, of forming his principal 
 object ; and, knowing their great authority in the 
 Papal church, he anticipated, in the plan of attaching 
 Ids own views to the false views of the fathers, an 
 opening to a double patronage that of the Protest- 
 ants, in the first place, as interested in all doctrines 
 seeming to be anti-papal ; that of the sceptics, in the 
 second place, as interested in the exposure of what- 
 ever had once commanded, but subsequently lost, the 
 superstitious reverence of mankind. On this policy, 
 he determined to treat the subject polemically. He 
 fastened, therefore, upon the fathers with a deadly 
 acharnement, that evidently meant to leave no ar 
 rears of work for any succeeding assailant ; and it 
 must be acknowledged that, simply in relation to 
 this purpose of hostility, his work is triumphant. 
 So much was not difficult to accomplish ; for barely 
 to enunciate the leading doctrine of the fathers is, in 
 the ear of any chronologist, to Overthrow it. But, 
 though successful enough in its functions of destruc- 
 tion, on the other hand, as an affirmative or con- 
 structive work, the long treatise of Van Dale is most 
 unsatisfactory. It leaves us with a hollow sound 
 ringing in the ear, of malicious laughter from gnomes 
 and imps grinning over the weaknesses of man his 
 oaralytic facility in believing his fraudulent villany 
 in abusing this facility but in no point accounting 
 for those real effects of diffusive social benefits froni 
 the Oracle machinery, which must arrest the atten 
 lion of candid students, amidst some opposite monu
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 475 
 
 dents of incorrigible credulity, or of elaborate impos- 
 ture. 
 
 As a book, however, belonging to that small cycle 
 (not numbering, perhaps, on all subjects, above three 
 score), which may be said to have moulded and con- 
 trolled the public opinion of Europe through the last 
 five generations, already for itself the work of Van 
 Dale merits a special attention. It is confessedly 
 the classical book the original fund as for the argu- 
 ments and facts applicable to this question ; and an 
 accident has greatly strengthened its authority. 
 Fontenelle, the most fashionable of European authors, 
 at the opening of the eighteenth century, writing in 
 a language at that time even more predominant than 
 at present, did in effect employ all his advantages to 
 propagate and popularize the views of Van Dale. 
 Scepticism naturally courts the patronage of Prance ; 
 and in effect that same remark which a learned Bel- 
 gian (Van Brouwer) has found frequent occasion to 
 make upon single sections of Fontenelle's work, may 
 be fairly extended into a representative account of 
 the whole " L'on trouve les memes arguments chez 
 Fontenelle, mais degages des longueurs du savant Van 
 Dale, et exprimes avec plus d' elegance." This rifac- 
 cimento did not injure the original work in reputa- 
 tion : it caused Van Dale to be less read, but to be 
 more esteemed ; since a man confessedly distin- 
 guished for his powers of composition had not 
 thought it beneath his ambition to adopt and recom- 
 pose Van Dale's theory. This important position of 
 Van Dale with regard to the effectual creed of Europe 
 so that, whether no were read directly or were 
 alighted for a more fashionable expounder, equally
 
 476 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 la either case it was his doctrines which prevailed 
 must always confer a circumstantial value upon the 
 original dissertations, " De Ethnicorum Oraculis." 
 
 This original work of Van Dale is a book of consid- 
 erable extent. But, in spite of its length, it divides 
 substantially into two great chapters, and no more, 
 which coincide, in fact, with the two separate disser- 
 tations. The first of these dissertations, occupying 
 one hundred and eighty-one pages, inquires into the 
 failure and extinction of the Oracles ; when they 
 failed, and under what circumstances. The second of 
 these dissertations inquires into the machinery and 
 resources of the Oracles during the time of their pros- 
 perity. In the first dissertation, the object is to 
 expose the folly and gross ignorance of the fathers, 
 who insisted on representing the history of the case 
 roundly in this shape as though all had prospered 
 with the Oracles up to the nativity of Christ ; but 
 that, after his crucifixion, and simultaneously with 
 the first promulgation of Christianity, all Oracles had 
 suddenly drooped ; or, to tie up their language to 
 the rigor of their theory, had suddenly expired. All 
 this Van Dale peremptorily denies ; and, in these 
 days, it is scarcely requisite to add, triumphantly 
 denies ; the whole hypothesis of the fathers having 
 .iterally not a leg to stand upon ; and being, in fact, 
 the most audacious defiance to historical records 
 that, perhaps, the annals of human folly present. 30 
 
 Ju the second dissertation, Van Dale combats the 
 Dther notion of the fathers that, during their pros- 
 perous ages, the Oracles had moved by an agency of 
 evil spirits. He, on the contrary, contends that, from 
 the first hour to the last of their long domination
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 477 
 
 over the minds and practice of the Pagan world, 
 they had moved by no agencies whatever, but those 
 of human fraud, intrigue, collusion, applied to human 
 blindness, credulity, and superstition. 
 
 We shall say a word or two upon each question 
 As to the first, namely, when it was that the Oracles 
 fell into decay and silence, thanks to the headlong 
 rashness of the Fathers, Van Dale's assault cannot 
 be refused or evaded. In reality, the evidence 
 against them is too flagrant and hyperbolical. If we 
 were to quote from Juvenal "Delphis et Oracula 
 cessant," in that case, the fathers challenge it as an 
 argument on their side, for that Juvenal described a 
 state of things immediately posterior to Christianity ; 
 yet even here the word cessant points to a distinction 
 of cases which already in itself is fatal to their doc- 
 trine. By cessant Juvenal means evidently what we, 
 in these days, should mean in saying of a ship in 
 action that her fire was slackening. Tlvs power- 
 ful poet, therefore, wiser so far than the Christian 
 fathers, distinguishes two separate cases : idrst, the 
 state of torpor and languishing which might be (and 
 in fact was) the predicament of many famou** Oracles 
 through centuries not fewer than five, six, or even 
 eight ; secondly, the state of absolute dismantling 
 and utter extinction which, even before his time, had 
 confounded individual Oracles of the inferior class, 
 not from changes affecting religion, whether true or 
 false, but from political revolutions. Here, there- 
 fore, lies the first blunder of the fathers, that they 
 confound with total death the long drooping WAich 
 befell many great Oracles from languor in the popnlar 
 sympathies, under changes hereafter to be noticed ;
 
 478 THE PAGAN ORACLES 
 
 and, consequently, from revenues and machinery 
 continually decaying. That the Delphic Oracle it- 
 self of all oracles the most illustrious had not 
 expired, but simply slumbered for centuries, the 
 fathers might have been convinced themselves by 
 innumerable passages in authors contemporary with 
 themselves ; and that it was continually throwing 
 out fitful gleams of its ancient power, when any very 
 great man (suppose a Caesar) thought fit to stimulate 
 its latent vitality, is notorious from such cases as that 
 of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only 
 dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle 
 superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found 
 it but too clear-sighted ; and it was no contempt 
 in him, but too ghastly a fear and jealousy, which 
 labored to seal up the grander ministrations of the 
 Oracle for the future. What the Pythia had fore- 
 shown to himself, she might foreshow to others ; 
 and, when tempted by the same princely bribes, she 
 might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views 
 in other great officers. Thus, in the new condition 
 of the Roman power, there was a perpetual peril, 
 lest an oracle, so potent as that of Delphi, should 
 absolutely create rebellions, by first suggesting 
 hopes to men in high commands. Even as it was, 
 ull treasonable assumptions of the purple, for many 
 generations, commenced in the hopes inspired by 
 auguries, prophecies, or sortileges. And had the 
 great Delphic Oracle, consecrated to men's feelings 
 by hoary superstition, and privileged by secrecy, come 
 forward to countersign such hopes, many more would 
 have been the wrecks of ambition, and even bloodiei 
 would have been the blood-polluted line of the impo-
 
 THE PAGAN OBACLES. 479 
 
 rial successions. Prudence, therefore, it was, and 
 state policy, not the power cf Christianity, which 
 gave the final shock (of the original shock we shall 
 speak elsewhere) to the grander functions of the 
 Delphic Oracle. But, in the mean time, the humbler 
 and more domestic offices of this oracle, though nat- 
 urally making no noise at a distance, seem long to 
 have survived its state relations. And, apart from 
 the sort of galvanism notoriously applied by Ha- 
 drian, surely the fathers could not have seen Plu- 
 tarch's account of its condition, already a century 
 later than our Saviour's nativity. The Pythian 
 priestess, as we gather from him, had by that time 
 become a less select and dignified personage ; she 
 was no longer a princess in the land a change 
 which was proximately due to the impoverished in- 
 come of the temple ; but she was still in existence ; 
 still held in respect ; still trained, though at inferior 
 cost, to her difficult and showy ministrations. And 
 the whole establishment of the Delphic god, if neces- 
 sarily contracted from that scale which had been 
 suitable when great kings and commonwealths were 
 constant suitors within the gates of Delphi, still 
 clung (like the Venice of modern centuries) to her 
 old ancestral honors, and kept up that decent house- 
 hold of ministers which corresponded to the altered 
 ministrations of her temple. In fact, the evidences 
 on behalf of Delphi as a princely house, that had 
 indeed partaken in the decaying fortunes of Greece, 
 but naturally was all the prouder from the irritating 
 contrast of her great remembrances, are so plenti- 
 fully dispersed through books, that the fathers must 
 have been willingly duped. That in sojie way they
 
 480 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 were duped is too notorious from the facts, and might 
 be suspected even from their own occasional lan- 
 guage ; take, as one instance, amongst a whole har- 
 mony of similar expressions, this short passage from 
 Eusebius ot EAA^ves 6/xoAoyowres e/cXeAotTrevai avrwv 
 TO. xprjcrrqpia : the Greeks admitting that their Ora- 
 cles have failed (there is, however, a disingenuous 
 vagueness in the very word e/cXeXotTrevat), oS' dAAore 
 TTOTC e auovos and when ? why, at no other crisis 
 through the total range of their existence ^ Kara 
 TOWS xpovovs Tjys euayyeAiKijs StSaaKaAtas than precisely 
 at the epoch of the evang-elical dispensation, etc. 
 Eusebius was a man of too extensive reading to be 
 entirely satisfied with the Christian representations 
 upon this point. And in such indeterminate phrases 
 as *Ta raj ^govas (which might mean indiiferently 
 the entire three centuries then accomplished from 
 the first promulgation of Christianity, or specifically 
 w hat narrow punctual limit of the earliest promul- 
 gation), it is easy to trace an ambidextrous artifice 
 of compromise between what would satisfy his own 
 brethren, on the one hand, and what, on the other 
 hand, he could hope to defend against the assaults 
 of learned Pagans. 
 
 In particular instances it is but candid to acknowl- 
 edge that the fathers may have been misled by the 
 remarkable tendencies to error amongst the ancients, 
 from their want of public journals, combined with 
 territorial grandeur of empire. The greatest possi- 
 ble defect of harmony arises naturally in this waj 
 amongst ancient authors, locally remote from each 
 other ; but more especially in the post-christian pe- 
 riods, when reporting any aspects of change, or any
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES 481 
 
 esulta from a revolution variable and advancing 
 under the vast varieties of the Roman empire. Hav- 
 ing no newspapers to effect a level amongst the ine> 
 qua! ''ties and anomalies of their public experience in 
 regard to the Christian revolution, when collected 
 from innumerable tribes so widely differing as to 
 civilization, knowledge, superstition, &c. ; hence it 
 happened that one writer could report with truth a 
 change as having occurred within periods of ten to 
 sixty years, which for some other province would 
 demand a circuit of six hundred. For example, in 
 Asia Minor, all the way from the sea-coast to the 
 Euphrates, towns were scattered having a dense 
 population of Jews. Sometimes these were the most 
 malignant opponents of Christianity ; that is, where- 
 ever they happened to rest in the letter of their pecu- 
 liar religion. But, on the other hand, where there 
 happened to be a majority (or, if not numerically a 
 majority, yet influentially an overbalance) in that 
 section of the Jews who were docile children of their 
 own preparatory faith and discipline, no bigots, and 
 looking anxiously for the fulfilment of their prophe- 
 cies (an expectation at that time generally diffused), 
 under those circumstances, the Jews were such 
 ready converts as to account naturally for sudden 
 ..ocal transitions, which in other circumstances or 
 places might not have been credible. 
 
 This single consideration may serve to explain the 
 apparent contradictions, the irreconcilable discrepan- 
 cies, between the statements of contempciary Chris- 
 tian bishops, locally at a vast distance from each 
 other, or (which is even more imrortant) reporting 
 from communities occupying diffdcnt stages of civil-
 
 482 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 ization. There was no harmonizing organ of inter 
 pretation, in Christian or in Pagan newspapers, to 
 bridge over the chasms that divided different prov- 
 inces. A devout Jew, already possessed by the 
 purest idea of the Supreme Being, stood on the very 
 threshold of conversion : he might, by one hour's 
 conversation with an apostle, be transfigured into an 
 enlightened Christian ; whereas a Pagan could sel- 
 dom in one generation pass beyond the infirmity of 
 his novitiate. His heart and affections, his will and 
 the habits of his understanding, were too deeply 
 diseased to be suddenly transmuted. And hence 
 arises a phenomenon, which has too languidly ar- 
 rested the notice of historians ; namely, that already, 
 and for centuries before the time of Constantine, 
 wherever the Jews had been thickly sown as col 
 onists, the most potent body of Christian zeal stooa 
 ready to kindle under the first impulse of encourage- 
 ment from the state ; whils-t in the great capitals of 
 Rome and Alexandria, where the Jews were hated 
 and neutralized politically by Pagan forces, not fcr 
 a hundred years later than Constantine durst the 
 whole power of the government lay hands on the 
 Pagan machinery, except with timid precautions, and 
 by graduations so remarkably adjusted to the cir- 
 cumstances, that sometimes they wear the shape of 
 compromises with idolatry. We must know the 
 ground, the quality of the population, concerned in 
 iny particular report of the fathers, before we can 
 iudge of its probabilities. Under local advantages, 
 insulated cases of Oracles suddenly silenced, of tern 
 pies and their idol-worship overthrown, as by a rup- 
 ture of new-born zeal, were not less certain to arise
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 483 
 
 us rare accidents from rare privileges, or from rare 
 coincidences of unanimity in the leaders of the place, 
 than on the other hand they were certain not to arise 
 in that unconditional universality pretended by the 
 fathers. Wheresoever Paganism was interwoven 
 with the whole moral being of a people, as it was in 
 Egypt, or with the political tenure and hopes of a 
 people, as it was in Rome, there a long struggle was 
 inevitable before the revolution could be effected. 
 Briefly, as against the fathers, we find a sufficient 
 refutation in what followed Christianity. If, at a 
 period five, or even six hundred years after the birth 
 of Christ, you find people still consulting the local 
 Oracles of Egypt, in places sheltered from the point- 
 blank range of the state artillery, there is an end, 
 once and forever, to the delusive superstition that, 
 merely by its silent presence in the world, Christian 
 ity must instantaneously come into fierce activity as 
 a reagency of destruction to all forms of idolatrous 
 error. That argument is multiplied beyond all pow- 
 er of calculation ; and to have missed it is the most 
 eminent instance of wilful blindness which the rec- 
 ords of human folly can furnish. But there is an- 
 other refutation lying in an opposite direction, which 
 presses the fathers even more urgently in the rear 
 than this presses them in front ; any author posterior 
 to Christianity, who should point to the decay of 
 Oracles, they would claim on their own side. But 
 what would they have said to Cicero, by what re- 
 source of despair would they have parried his author- 
 ity, when insisting (as many times he does insist), 
 forty ana even fifty years before the birth cf Christ, 
 in the languishing condition of the Delphic Oiaclef
 
 484 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 What evasion could they imagine here ? How could 
 that languor be due to Christianity, which far antici- 
 pated the very birth of Christianity ? For, as to 
 Cicero, who did not " far anticipate the birth of 
 Christianity," we allege him rather because his work 
 De Divinatione is so readily accessible, and because 
 nis testimony on any subject is so full of weight, 
 than because other and much older authorities cannot 
 be produced to the same effect. The Oracles of 
 orcece had lost their vigor and their palmy pride 
 full two centuries before the Christian era. Histor- 
 ical records show this a posteriori, whatever were 
 the cause ; and the cause, which we will state here- 
 after, shows it a priori, apart from the records. 
 
 Surely, therefore, Van Dale needed not to have 
 pressed his victory over the helpless fathers so un- 
 relentingly, and after the first ten pages by cases 
 and proofs that are quite needless and ex abundanti ; 
 simply the survival of any one distinguished Oracle 
 upwards of four centuries after Christ that is suffi- 
 cient. But if with this fact we combine the other 
 fact, that all the principal Oracles had already be- 
 gun to languish, more than two centuries before 
 Christianity, there can be no opening for a whisper 
 of dissent upon any real question between Van Dale 
 and his opponents ; namely, both as to the possi- 
 bility of Christianity coexisting with such forms of 
 error, and the possibility that oracles should be over- 
 thrown by merely Pagan, or internal changes. The 
 less plausible, however, that we find this error of the 
 fathers, the more curiosity we naturally feel about 
 the source of that error ; and the more so, because 
 Van Dale never turns his eyes in that direction.
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 485 
 
 This source lay (to speak the simple truth) in ab- 
 ject superstition. The fathers conceived of the 
 anmity between Christianity and Paganism, as though 
 t resembled that between certain chemical poisons 
 and the Venetian wine-glass, which (according to 
 the belief* of three centuries back) no sooner re- 
 ceived any poisonous fluid, than immediately it shiv- 
 ered into crystal splinters. They thought to honor 
 Christianity, by imaging it as some exotic animal of 
 more powerful breed, such as we English have wit- 
 nessed in a domestic case, coming into instant col- 
 lision with the native race, and exterminating it 
 everywhere upon the first conflict. In this conceit 
 they substituted a foul fiction of their own, fashioned 
 on the very model of Pagan fictions, for the unvary- 
 ing analogy of the divine procedure. Christianity, 
 as the last and consummate of revelations, had the 
 high destination of working out its victory through 
 what was greatest in a man through his reason, 
 his will, his affections. But, to satisfy the fathers, 
 it must operate like a drug like sympathetic pow- 
 ders like an amulet or like a conjurer's charm. 
 Precisely the monkish effect of a Bible when hurled 
 at an evil spirit not the true rational effect of that 
 profound oracle read, studied, and laid to heart 
 was that which the fathers ascribed to the mere 
 
 * Which belief we can see no reason for rejecting so summarily as 
 is usually done in modern times. It would be absurd, indeed, to 
 suppose a kind of glass qualified to expose all poisons indifferently, 
 considering the vast range of their chemical differences. But, surely, 
 AS against that one poison then familiarly used for domestic murders, 
 ft chemical reagency might have been devised in the quality of tht 
 glass. At least, there is co prima facit absurdity in such a snpposi. 
 Uon.
 
 486 THE PAGAN ORACLES 
 
 proclamation of Christianity, when first piercing the 
 Atmosphere circumjacent to any oracle ; and, in fact, 
 to their gross appreciations, Christian truth was like 
 the scavenger bird in Eastern climates, or the stork 
 m Holland, which signalizes its presence by devour- 
 ing all the native brood of vermin, or nuisances, as 
 fast as they reproduce themselves under local dis- 
 tcmperatures of climate or soil. 
 
 It is interesting to pursue the same ignoble super 
 stition, which, in fact, under Romish hands, soon 
 crept like a parasitical plant over Christianity itself, 
 until it had nearly strangled its natural vigor, back 
 into times far preceding that of the fathers. Spite 
 of all that could be wrought by Heaven, for the pur- 
 pose of continually confounding the local vestiges of 
 popular reverence which might have gathered round 
 stocks and stones, so obstinate is the hankering after 
 this mode of superstition in man that his heart returns 
 to it with an elastic recoil as often as the openings 
 are restored. Agreeably to this infatuation, the 
 temple of the true God even its awful adytum 
 the holy of holies or the places where the ark of 
 the covenant had rested in its migrations all were 
 conceived to have an eternal and a self-vindicating 
 sanctity. So thought man : but God himself, though 
 to man's folly pledged to the vindication of his own 
 Banctities, thought far otherwise ; as we know by 
 numerous profanations of all holy places in Judea, 
 triumphantly carried through, and avenged by no 
 plausible judgments. To speak only of the latter 
 temple, three men are memorable as having polluted 
 its holiest recesses : Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey 
 *bout a century later, and Titus pretty nearly by the
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLE3. 487 
 
 same exact interval later than Pompey. Upon which 
 of these three did any judgment descend ? Attempts 
 have been made to impress that coloring of the sequel 
 in two of these cases, indeed, but without effect upon 
 any man's mind. Possibly in the case of Antiochus, 
 vt ho seems to have moved under a burning hatred, 
 not fo much of the insurgent Jews as of the true 
 l.tith which prompted their resistance, there is some 
 colorable argument for viewing him in his miserable 
 death as a monument of divine wrath. But the two 
 others had no such malignant spirit ; they were tol- 
 erant, and even merciful ; were authorized instru- 
 ments for executing the purposes of Providence ; and 
 no calamity in the life of either can be reasonably 
 traced to his dealings with Palestine. Yet, if Chris- 
 tianity could not brook for an instant the mere coex- 
 istence of a Pagan oracle, how came it that the 
 Author of Christianity had thus brooked (nay, by 
 many signs of cooperation, had promoted) that ulti- 
 mate desecration, which planted " the abomination 
 of desolation" as a victorious crest of Paganism 
 upon his own solitary altar ? The institution of the 
 Sabbath, again what part of the Mosaic economy 
 could it more plausibly have been expected that (rod 
 should vindicate by some memorable interference, 
 eince of all the Jewish institutions it was that one 
 which only and which frequently became the occa- 
 sion of wholesale butchery to the pious (however 
 Erring) Jews ? The scruple of the Jews to fight, or 
 even to resist an assassin, on the Sabbath, was not 
 the less pious in its motive because erroneous in 
 orineiple ; yet no miracle interfered to save them 
 from the consequences of their infatuation. And
 
 488 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 this seemed the more remarkable in the case of theii 
 war with Antiochus, because that (if any that history 
 has recorded) was a holy war. But, after one tragi- 
 cal experience, which cost the lives of a thousand 
 martyrs, the Maccabees quite as much on a level 
 with their scrupulous brethren in piety as they were 
 superior in good sense began to reflect that they 
 had no shadow of a warrant from Scripture for count- 
 ing upon any miraculous aid ; that the whole expect- 
 ation, from first to last, had been human and pre- 
 sumptuous ; and that the obligation of fighting 
 valiantly against idolatrous compliances was, at all 
 events, paramount to the obligation of the Sabbath. 
 In one hour, after unyoking themselves from thi& 
 monstrous millstone of their own forging, about their 
 own necks, the cause rose buoyantly aloft as upon 
 wings of victory ; and, as their very earliest reward 
 
 as the first fruits from thus disabusing their minda 
 of windy presumptions they found the very case 
 itself melting away which had furnished the scruple ; 
 since their cowardly enemies, now finding that they 
 would fight on all days alike, had no longer any mo- 
 tive for attacking them on the Sabbath ; besides that 
 their own astonishing victories henceforward secured 
 to them often the choice of the day not less than of 
 the ground. 
 
 But, without lingering on these outworks of the 
 true religion, namely, 1st, the Temple of Jerusalem ; 
 2dly, the Sabbath, both of which the divine wis- 
 iom often saw fit to lay prostrate before the pre- 
 mmption of idolatrous assaults, on principles utterly 
 '.rreconcilable with the Oracle doctrine of the fathers, 
 
 there is a still more flagrant argument against the
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 489 
 
 fathers, which it is perfectly confounding to find 
 both them and their confuter overlooking. It is this. 
 Oracles, take them at the very worst, were no other- 
 wise hostile to Christianity than as a branch of 
 Paganism. If, for instance, the Delphic establish . 
 ment were hateful (as doubtless it was) to the holy 
 spirit of truth which burned in the mind of an apostle, 
 why was it hateful ? Not primarily in its character 
 of Oracle, but in its universal character of Pagan 
 temple ; not as an authentic distributor of counsels 
 adapted to the infinite situations of its clients often 
 very wise counsels ; but as being ultimately engrafted 
 on the stem of idolatrous religion as deriving, in 
 the last resort, their sanctions from Pagan deities, 
 and, therefore, as sharing constructively in all the pol- 
 lutions of that tainted source. Now, therefore, if 
 Christianity, according to the fancy of the fathers, 
 could not tolerate the co-presence of so much evil as 
 resided in the Oracle superstition, that is, in the 
 derivative, in the secondary, in the not unfrequently 
 neutralized or even redundantly compensated mode 
 of error, then, a fortiori, Christianity could not 
 have tolerated for an hour the parent superstition, 
 the larger evil, the fontat error, which diseased the 
 very organ of vision which not merely distorted a 
 few objects on the road, but spread darkness over 
 the road itself. Yet what is the fact ? So far from 
 any mysterious repulsion externally between idola- 
 trous errors and Christianity, as though the two 
 schemes of belief could no more coexist in the same 
 society than two queen-bees in a hive, as though 
 elementary nature herself recoiled from the abomina- 
 ale concursus, do but open a cnild's epitome of
 
 490 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 oistory, and you find it to have required four entire 
 centuries before the destroyer's hammer and crowbar 
 began to ring loudly against the temples of idola- 
 trous worship ; and not before five, nay, locally six, 
 or even seven centuries had elapsed, could the better 
 angel of mankind have sung gratulations announcing 
 that the great strife was over that man was inocu- 
 lated with the truth ; or have adopted the impressive 
 language of a Latin father, that " the owls were to 
 be heard in every village hooting from the disman- 
 tled fanes of heathenism, or the gaunt wolf disturbing 
 the sleep of peasants as he yelled in winter from the 
 cold, dilapidated altars." Even this victorious con- 
 summation was true only for the southern world of 
 civilization. The forests of Germany, though pierced 
 already to the south in the third and fourth centuries 
 by the torch of missionaries, though already at 
 that time illuminated by the immortal Gothic version 
 of the New Testament preceding Ulppilas, and still 
 surviving, sheltered through ages in the north and 
 east vast tribes of idolaters, some awaiting the bap- 
 tism of Charlemagne in the eighth century and the 
 ninth, others actually resuming a fierce countenance 
 of heathenism for the martial zeal of crusading knights 
 in the thirteenth and fourteenth. The history of 
 Constantino has grossly misled the world. It was 
 very early in the fourth century (313 A. D.) that 
 Constantine found himself strong enough to take his 
 earliest steps for raising Christianity to a privileged 
 station ; which station was not merely an effect and 
 monument of its progress, but a further cause of 
 progress. In this latter light, as a power advancing 
 and moving, but politically still militant, Chriptiamtj
 
 TBS PAGAN ORACLES. 491 
 
 required exactly one other century to carry out and 
 accomplish even its eastern triumph. Dating 1 from 
 the era of the very inaugurating and merely local 
 acts of Constantine, we shall be sufficiently accurate 
 in saying that the corresponding period in the fifth 
 century (namely, from about 404 to 420 A. D.) first 
 witnessed those uproars of ruin in Egypt and Alex- 
 andria fire racing along the old carious timbers, 
 battering-rams thundering against the ancient walls 
 of the most horrid temples which rang so search- 
 ii.gly in the ears of Zosimus, extorting, at every blow, 
 a howl of Pagan sympathy from that ignorant calum- 
 niator of Christianity. So far from the fact being, 
 according to the general prejudice, as though Con- 
 stantine had found himself able to destroy Paganism, 
 and to replace it by Christianity ; on the contrary, 
 it was both because he happened to be far too weak, 
 in fact, for such a mighty revolution, and because he 
 knew his own weakness, that he fixed his new capital, 
 as a preliminary caution, upon the Propontis. 
 
 There were other motives to this change, and par- 
 ticularly (as we have attempted to show in a separate 
 dissertation 31 ) motives of high political economy, sug- 
 gested by the relative conditions of land and agri- 
 culture in Thrace and Asia Minor, by comparison 
 with decaying Italy ; but a paramount motive, we 
 are satisfied, and the earliest motive, was the incur- 
 able Pagan bigotry of Rome. Paganism for Rome, 
 t ought to have been remembered by historians, was 
 \ mere necessity of her Pagan origin. Paganism 
 vas the fatal dowry of Rome from her inauguration : 
 aot only she had once received a retaining fee on 
 behalf of Paganism, in the mysterious Andle, sup-
 
 492 THE PAGAN ORACLES, 
 
 posed to have fallen from heaven, but she actually 
 preserved this bribe amongst her rarest jewels. Sho 
 possessed a palladium, such a national amulet or 
 talisman as many Grecian or Asiatic cities had once 
 possessed a fatal guarantee to the prosperity of 
 the state. Even the Sibylline books, whatever 
 ravages they might be supposed by the intelligent 
 to have sustained in a lapse of centuries, were popu- 
 larly believed, in the latest period of the Western 
 empire, to exist as so many charters of supremacy. 
 Jupiter himself in Rome had put on a peculiar Roman 
 physiognomy, which associated him with the desti- 
 nies of the gigantic state. Above all, the solemn 
 augury of the twelve vultures, so memorably passed 
 downwards from the days of Romulus, through gen- 
 erations as yet uncertain of the event, and, therefore, 
 chronologically incapable of participation in any 
 fraud an augury always explained as promising 
 twelve centuries of supremacy to Rome, from the 
 year 748 or 750 B. C. cooperated with the endless 
 other Pagan superstitions in anchoring the whole 
 Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So 
 long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was 
 impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the 
 College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the 
 indefeasible privileges of the Pontifex Maximus, which 
 (though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work, for 
 many years sought to fight off the evidences for that 
 fact, yet afterwards partially he confessed his error) 
 actually availed historically and medallically can be 
 demonstrated to have availed for the temptation 
 uf Christian Caesars into collusive adulteries with 
 heathenism. Here, for instance, came an emperot
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLE3. 493 
 
 that timidly recorded his scruples feebly protestedj 
 but gave way at once as to an ugly necessity. There 
 came another, more deeply religious, or constitution- 
 ally more bold, who fought long and strenuously 
 against the compromise. " What ! should he, the 
 delegate of God, and the standard-bearer of the true 
 religion, proclaim himself officially head of the false ? 
 No ; that was too much for his conscience." But 
 the fatal meshes of prescription, of superstitions 
 ancient and gloomy, gathered around him ; he heard 
 that he was no perfect Caesar without this office, and 
 eventually the very same reason which had obliged 
 Augustus not to suppress, but himself to assume, the 
 tribunitian office, namely, that it was a popular mode 
 of leaving democratic organs untouched, whilst he 
 neutralized their democratic functions by absorbing 
 them into his own, availed to overthrow all Christian 
 scruples of conscience, even in the most Christian of 
 the Caesars, many years after Constantino. The pious 
 Theodosius found himself literally compelled to 
 become a Pagan pontiff. A bon mot* circulating 
 amongst the people warned him that, if he left the 
 cycle of imperial powers incomplete, if he suffered 
 the galvanic battery to remain imperfect in its circuit 
 of links, pretty soon he would tempt treason to show 
 its head, and would even for the present find but an 
 
 * "A bon mot." This was built on the accident that a certain 
 Maximus stood in notorious circumstances of rivalship to the emperor 
 [Theodosius] : and the bitterness of the jest took this turn that if 
 the emperor should persist in declining the office of Pont. Maximus, 
 In that case, " erit Pontifex Maximus ; " that is, Maximus (the secret 
 spirant) shall be our Pontifex. So the words sounded to those in 
 .he secret [crtivcroaTi], whilst to others they seemed to hare no mean 
 g at all.
 
 194 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 imperfect obedience. Reluctantly therefore the em- 
 peror gave way : and perhaps soothed his fretting 
 conscience, by offering to heaven, as a penitential 
 litany, that same petition which Naaman the Syrian 
 offered to the prophet Elijah as a reason for a per- 
 sonal dispensation. Hardly more possible it was 
 that a camel should go through the eye of a needle, 
 than that a Roman senator should forswear those 
 inveterate superstitions with which his own system 
 of aristocracy had been riveted for better and worse 
 As soon would the Venetian senator, the gloomy 
 " magnifico " of St. Mark, have consented to renounce 
 the annual wedding of his republic with the Adriatic, 
 as the Roman noble, whether senator, or senator 
 elect, or of senatorial descent, would have dissevered 
 his own solitary stem from the great forest of his 
 ancestral order ; and this he must have done by 
 doubting the legend of Jupiter Stator, or by with- 
 drawing his allegiance from Jupiter Capitolinus. 
 The Roman people universally became agitated 
 towards the opening of the fifth century after Christ, 
 when their own twelfth century was drawing near to 
 its completion. Rome had now reached the very 
 condition of Dr. Faustus having originally received 
 a known term of prosperity from some dark power ; 
 but at length hearing the hours, one after the other, 
 tolling solemnly from the church-tower, as they 
 exhausted the waning minutes of the very final day 
 marked down in the contract. The more profound 
 was the faith of Rome in the flight of the twelve 
 vultures, once so glorious, now so sad, an augury, 
 the deeper was the depression as the last hour drew 
 near that had been so mysteriously prefigured The
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 495 
 
 reckoning, indeed, of chronology was slightly uncer- 
 tain. The Varronian account varied from others. 
 But these trivial differences might tell as easily 
 against them as for them, and did but strengthen the 
 universal agitation. Alaric, in the opening of the 
 fifth century [about 410] Attila, near the middle 
 [445] already seemed prelusive earthquakes run- 
 ning before the final earthquake. And Christianity, 
 during this era of public alarm, was so far from 
 assuming a more winning aspect to Koman eyes, as a 
 religion promising to survive their own, that already, 
 under that character of reversionary triumph, this 
 gracious religion seemed a public insult, and this 
 meek religion a perpetual defiance ; pretty much as 
 a king sees with scowling eyes, when revealed to 
 him in some glass of Cornelius Agrippa, the portraits 
 of that mysterious house which is destined to sup- 
 plant his own. 
 
 Now, from this condition of feeling at Rome, it is 
 apparent not only as a fact that Constantine did not 
 overthrow Paganism, but as a possibility that he 
 could not have overthrown it. In the fierce conflict 
 he would probably have been overthrown himself; 
 and, even for so much as he did accomplish, it was 
 well that he attempted it at a distance from Rome. So 
 profoundly, therefore, are the fathers in error, that 
 instead of that instant victory which they ascribe 
 to Christianity, even Constantino's revolution was 
 merely local. Nearly five centuries, in fact, it cost, 
 and not three, to Christianize even the entire Medi- 
 terranean empire of Rome ; and the premature effort 
 t)f Constantine ought to be regarded as a mere fluctux 
 iecumanus in the continuous advance of the neir
 
 496 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 religion, one of those ambitious billows which some- 
 times run far ahead of their fellows in a tide steadily 
 gaining ground, but which inevitably recede in the 
 next moment, marking only the strength of that 
 tendency which sooner or later is destined to fill the 
 whole capacity of the shore. 
 
 To have proved, therefore, if it could have been 
 proved, that Christianity had been fatal in the way 
 of a magical charm to the Oracles of the world, 
 would have proved nothing but a perplexing incon- 
 sistency, so long as the fathers were obliged to con- 
 fess that Paganism itself, as a gross total, as the 
 parent superstition (sure to reproduce Oracles faster 
 than they could be extinguished), had been suffered 
 to exist for many centuries concurrently with Chris- 
 tianity, and had finally been overthrown by the sim- 
 ple majesty of truth that courts the light, as matched 
 against falsehood that shuns it. 
 
 As applied, therefore, to the first problem in the 
 whole question upon Oracles, When, and under 
 what circumstances, did they cease f the Dissertatio 
 of Van Dale, and the Histoire des Oracles by Fonte- 
 nelle, are irresistible, though not written in a proper 
 spirit of gravity, nor making use of that indisi ensa- 
 ble argument which we have ourselves derived from 
 the analogy of all scriptural precedents. 
 
 But the case is far otherwise as concerns the sec- 
 ond problem, How, and by what machinery, did the 
 Oracles, in the days of their prosperity, conduct their 
 elaborate ministrations ? To this problem no justice 
 at all is done by the school of Van Dale. A spirit of 
 mockery and banter is ill applied to questions that 
 it any time have been centres of fear, and hope, and
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES 497 
 
 mysterious awe, to long trains of human generations 
 And the coarse assumption of systematic fraud in the 
 Oracles is neither satisfactory to the understanding, 
 as failing to meet many important aspects of the 
 case, nor is it at all countenanced by the kind of 
 evidences that have been hitherto alleged. The 
 fathers had taken the course vulgar and supersti- 
 tious of explaining everything sagacious, every- 
 thing true, everything that by possibility could seem 
 to argue prophetic functions in the greater Oracles, 
 as the product indeed of inspiration, but of inspira- 
 tion emanating from an evil spirit. This hypothesis 
 of a diabolic inspiration is rejected by the school of 
 Van Dale. Both the power of at all looking into the 
 future, and the fancied source of that power, are 
 dismissed as contemptible chimeras. Upon the first 
 of these dark pretensions we shall have occasion to 
 speak at another point. Upon the other we agree 
 with Van Dale. Yet, even here, the spirit of tri- 
 umphant ridicule, applied to questions not wholly 
 within the competence of human resources, is dis- 
 pleasing in grave discussions : grave they are by 
 necessity of their relations, howsoever momentarily 
 disfigured by levity and the unseasonable grimaces 
 of self-sufficient "philosophy." This temper of 
 mind is already advertised from the first to the ob- 
 serving reader of Van Dale by the character of his 
 engraved frontispiece. Men are there exhibited in 
 the act of juggling, and still more odiously as exult- 
 ing over their juggleries by gestures of the basest 
 collusion, ssch as protruding the tongue, inflating 
 one cheek by means of the tongue, grinning, and 
 winking obliquely. These vilenesses are so ignoble, 
 
 32
 
 498 THE PAGAN CRACLES. 
 
 that for his own sake a man of honor (whether as a 
 writer or a reader) shrinks from dealing with any 
 case to which they do really adhere ; such a case 
 belongs to the province of police courts, not of lite- 
 rature. But, in the ancient apparatus of the Oracles 
 although frauds and espionage did certainly form an 
 occasional resource, the artifices employed were 
 rarely illiberal in their mode, and always ennobled 
 by their motive. As to the mode, the Oracles had 
 fortunately no temptation to descend into any tricks 
 that could look like " thimble-rigging ; " and as to 
 the motive, it will be seen that this could never be 
 dissociated from some regard to public or patriotic 
 objects in the first place ; to which if any secondary 
 interest were occasionally attached, this could rarely 
 descend so low as even to an ordinary purpose of 
 gossiping curiosity, but never to a base, mercenary 
 purpose of fraud. Our views, however, on this pha- 
 sis of the question, will speedily speak for them- 
 selves. 
 
 Meantime, pausing for one moment to glance at 
 the hypothesis of the fathers, we confess ourselves 
 to be scandalized by its unnecessary plunge into the 
 ignoble. Many sincere Christian believers have 
 doubted altogether of any evil spirits, as existences, 
 warranted by Scripture, that is, as beings whose 
 principle was evil [" evil, be thou my good : " p. L.]; 
 others, again, believing in the possibility that spirit- 
 ual beings had been (in ways unintelligible to us") 
 seduced from their state of perfection by temptations 
 analogous to those which had seduced man, acqui- 
 esced in the notion of spirits tainted with evil, but noi 
 therefore (any more than man himself) essentially 01
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 499 
 
 causelessly malignant. Now, it is well known, and, 
 amongst others, Eichhorn (Einletung in das alte Tes- 
 tament) has noticed the fact, which will be obvious, 
 on a little reflection, to any even unlearned student 
 of the Scriptures who can throw his memory back 
 through a real familiarity with those records, that 
 the Jews derived their obstinate notions of fiends 
 Aiid demoniacal possessions (as accounting even for 
 bodily affections) entirely from their Chaldean cap- 
 tivity. Not before that great event in Jewish history, 
 and, therefore, in consequence of that event, were 
 the Jews inoculated with this Babylonian, Persian, 
 and Median superstition. Now, if Eichhorn and 
 others are right, it follows that the elder Scriptures, 
 as they ascend more and more into the purer atmos- 
 phere of untainted Hebrew creeds, ought to exhibit 
 an increasing freedom from all these modes of demo- 
 niacal agency. And accordingly so we find it. Mes- 
 sengers of God are often concerned in the early 
 records of Moses ; but it is not until we come down 
 to Post-Mosaical records, Job, for example (though 
 that book is doubtful as to its chronology), and the 
 -chronicles of the Jewish kings (Judaic or Israelitisk], 
 that we first find any allusion to malignant spirits. 
 As against Eichhorn, however, though readily con- 
 ceding that the agency is not often recognized, we 
 would beg leave to notice, that there is a three-fold 
 agency of evil, relatively to man, ascribed to certain 
 spirits in the elder Scriptures, namely: 1, of mislead- 
 ing (as in the case of the Israelitish king seduced 
 vnto a fatal battle by a falsehood originating with a 
 spiritual being) ; 2, of temptation ; 3, of calumnious 
 accusation directed against absent parties. It is not
 
 500 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 absolutely an untenable hypothesis, that these func* 
 tions of malignity to man, as at first sight thoy ap- 
 pear, may be in fact reconcilable with the general 
 functions of a being not malignant, and not evil in 
 any sense, but simply obedient to superior commands : 
 for none of us supposes, of course, that a " destroy- 
 ing angel " must be an evil spirit, though sometimes 
 appearing in a dreadful relation of hostility to all 
 parties (as in the case of David's punishment). But, 
 waiving all these speculations, one thing is apparent, 
 that the negative allowance, the toleration granted to 
 these later Jewish modes of belief by our Saviour, 
 can no more be urged as ai'guing any positive sanc- 
 tion to such existences (to demons in the bad sense), 
 than his toleration of Jewish errors and conceits in 
 questions of science. Once for all, it was no purpose 
 of his mission to expose errors in matters of pure 
 curiosity, and in speculations not moral, but exclu- 
 sively intellectual. And, besides the ordinary argu- 
 ment for rejecting such topics of teaching, as not 
 necessarily belonging to any known purpose of the 
 Christian revelation (which argument is merely nega- 
 tive, and still leaves it open to have regarded such 
 communications as a possible extra condescension, 
 as a lucro ponatur, not absolutely to have been ex. 
 pected, but if granted as all the more meritorious in 
 Christianity), we privately are aware of an argument, 
 far more rigorous and coercive, which will place this 
 question upon quite another basis. This argument, 
 which in a proper situation, and with ampler dispos- 
 able space, we shall expose in its strengtn, will shov 
 that it was not that neutral possibility which men 
 \iave supposed, for the founder of our faith to have
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 501 
 
 granted light, casually or indirectly, upon ^uestions 
 of curiosity. One sole revelation was made by Him, 
 as to the nature of the intercourse and the relations 
 in another world ; but that was for the purpose of 
 forestalling a vile, unspiritual notion, already current 
 amongst the childish Jews, and sure to propagate 
 itself even to our own days, unless an utter averrun- 
 catio were applied to it. This was its purpose, and 
 not any purpose of gratification to unhallowed curi- 
 osity ; we speak of the question about the reversion- 
 ary rights of marriage in a future state. This mem- 
 orable case, by the way, sufficiently exposes the 
 gross, infantine sensualism of the Jewish mind at 
 that period, and throws an indirect light on their 
 creed as to demons. With this one exception, stand- 
 ing by itself and self-explained, there never was 
 a gleam of revelation granted by any authorized 
 prophet to speculative curiosity, whether pointing 1 
 to science, or to the mysteries of the spiritual world 
 And the true argument on this subject would show 
 that this abstinence was not accidental ; was not 
 merely on a motive of convenience, as evading any 
 needless extension of labors in teaching, which is 
 the furthest point attained by any existing argu- 
 ment ; but, on the contrary, that there was an obli- 
 gation of consistency, stern, absolute, insurmounta- 
 ble, which made it essential to withhold such revela' 
 dons ; and that had but one such condescension, 
 even to a harmless curiosity, been conceded, there 
 would have arisen instantly a rent a fracture a 
 schism in another vast and collateral purpose of 
 Providence . 
 From all considerations of the Jewish condition at
 
 502 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 the era of Christianity, the fathers might have seen 
 the license for doubt as to the notions of a diabolic 
 inspiration. Why must the prompting spirits, if 
 really assumed to be the efficient agency behind the 
 Oracles, be figured as holding any relation at all to 
 moral good or moral evil ? Why not allow of de- 
 moniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power, 
 prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes 
 of man's moral nature ? Or, if revolting angels were 
 assumed, why degrade their agency in so vulgar and 
 unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation 
 to man which can be imputed to a demon his 
 function of secret calumnious accusation ; from which 
 idea, lowering the Miltonic " archangel ruined " into 
 the assessor of thieves, as a private slanderer (dia- 
 bolos), proceeds, through the intermediate Italian 
 diavolo, our own grotesque vulgarism of the devil ; * 
 an idea which must ever be injurious, in common 
 with all base conceptions, to a grand and spiritual 
 religion. If the Oracles were supported by mysteri- 
 ous agencies of spiritual beings, it was still open to 
 have distinguished between mere modes of power or 
 of intelligence, and modes of illimitable evil. The 
 results of the Oracles were beneficent : that was all 
 which the fathers had any right to know : and theii 
 unwarranted introduction of wicked or rebel angels 
 was as much a surreptitious fraud upon their audi- 
 ences, as their neglect to distinguish betweon the 
 Conditions of an extinct superstition and a supersti 
 tion dormant or decaying. 
 
 * But, says an unlearned man, Christ uses the word devil. Not go 
 The word used is dia^oiuf. Translate v. g. "The accuser and hit 
 tngela."
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 503 
 
 To leave the fathers, and to state oui own views 
 on Uie final question argued by Van Dale " What 
 was the essential machinery by which the Oracles 
 moved ? " we shall inquire, 
 
 1. What was the relation of the Oracles (and we 
 would wish to be understood as speaking particularly 
 of the Delphic Oracle) to the credulity of Greece ? 
 
 2. What was the relation of that same Oracle to 
 the absolute truth ? 
 
 3. What was its relation to the public welfare of 
 Greece ? 
 
 Into this trisection we shall decompose the coarse 
 unity of the question presented by Van Dale and his 
 Vandals, as though the one sole "issue," that could 
 be sent down for trial before a jury, were the likeli- 
 hoods of fraud and gross swindling. It is not with 
 the deceptions or collusions of the Oracles, as mere 
 matters of fact, that we in this age are primarily con- 
 cerned, but with those deceptions as they affected 
 the contemporary people of Greece. It is important 
 to know whether the general faith of Greece in the 
 mysterious pretensions of Oracles were unsettled or 
 disturbed by the several agencies at work that natu- 
 rally tended to rouse suspicion ; such, for instance, 
 as these four which follow : 1. Eminent instances 
 of scepticism with regard to the oracular powers, 
 from time to time circulating through Greece in the 
 shape of bon mots ; or, 2, which silently amounted 
 to the same virtual expression of distrust, Refusals 
 (often more speciously wearing the name of neglects) 
 to consult the proper Oracle on some hazardous cn- 
 terprize of general notoriety and interest ; 3. Cases 
 irf direct failure in the event, as understood to have
 
 504 THK PAGAN ORACLK3. 
 
 been predicted by the Oracle, not unfrcquently 
 accompanied by tragical catastrophes to the parties 
 misled by this erroneous construction of the Oracle , 
 4. (which is, perhaps, the climax of the exposures 
 possible under the superstitions of Paganism), A pub- 
 lic detection of known oracular temples doing busi- 
 ness on a considerable scale, as accomplices with 
 felons. 
 
 Modern appraisers of the oracular establishments 
 are too commonly in all moral senses anachronists. 
 We hear it alleged with some plausibility against 
 Southey's portrait of Don Roderick, though other- 
 wise conceived in a spirit proper for bringing out 
 the whole sentiment of his pathetic situation, 33 that 
 the king is too Protestant, and too evangelical, after 
 the model of 1800, in his modes of penitential piety. 
 The poet, in short, reflected back upon one who was 
 too certain in the eighth century to have been tho 
 victim of dark popish superstitions, his own pure and 
 enlightened faith. But the anachronistic spirit in 
 which modern sceptics react upon the Pagan Oracles 
 is not so elevating as the English poet's. Southey 
 reflected his own superiority upon the Gothic prince 
 of Spain. But the sceptics reflect their own vulgar 
 habits of mechanic and compendious office business 
 upon the large institutions of the ancient Oracles. 
 To satisfy them, the Oracle should resemble a modern 
 coach-office where undoubtedly you would suspect 
 fraud, if the question " How far to Derby ? " were 
 answered evasively, or if the grounds of choice 
 between two roads were expressed enigmatically 
 But the TO Ao|oi', or mysterious indirectness of the 
 Oracle, was calculated far more to support the iraag
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 505 
 
 inative grandeur of the unseen God, and was de- 
 signed to do so, than tc relieve the individual suitor 
 in a perplexity seldom of any capital importance. 
 In this way every oracular answer operated upon the 
 local Grecian neighborhood in which it circulated as 
 one of the impulses which, from time to time, re- 
 newed the sense of a mysterious involution in the 
 invisible powers, as though they were incapable of 
 direct correspondence or parallelism with the mo- 
 notony and slight compass of human ideas. As the 
 symbolic dancers of the ancients, who narrated an 
 elaborate story, Saltando Hecubam, or SaUando Loo- 
 damiam, interwove the passion of the advancing 
 incidents into the intricacies of the figure some- 
 thing in the same way, it was understood by all men, 
 that the Oracle did not so much evade the difficulty 
 by a dark form of words, as he revealed his own 
 hieroglyphic nature. All prophets, the true equally 
 with the false, have felt the instinct for surrounding 
 themselves with the majesty of darkness. And in a 
 religion like the Pagan, so deplorably meagre and 
 starved as to most of the draperies connected with 
 the mysterious and sublime, we must not seek to 
 diminish its already scanty wardrobe. But let us 
 pass from speculation to illustrative anecdotes. We 
 have imagined several cases which might seem fitted 
 for giving a shock to the general Pagan confidence 
 in Oracles. Let us review them. 
 
 The first is the case of any memorable scepticism 
 published in a pointed or witty form ; as Demosthe- 
 nes avowed his suspicions "that the Oracle was 
 Philippizing." This was about 344 years B. C 
 Exactly one hundred years earlier, in the 444th year
 
 5UG THE PAGAN OKACI.ES 
 
 B. C., or the locus of Pericles, Herodotus (thcu forty 
 years old) is universally supposed to have read, 
 which for him was publishing, his history. In thia 
 work two insinuations of the same kind occur : dur- 
 ing the invasion of Darius the Mede (about 490 B. C.) 
 the Oracle was charged with Medizing ; and in the 
 previous period of Pisistratus (about 555 B. C.) the 
 Oracle had been almost convicted of Alcmoeonidizing. 
 The Oracle concerned was the same, namely, the 
 Delphic, in all three cases. In the case of Darius, 
 fear was the ruling passion ; in the earlier case, a 
 near self-interest, but not in a base sense selfish. 
 The Alcmoeonidae, an Athenian house hostile to 
 Pisistratus, being exceedingly rich, had engaged to 
 rebuild the ruined temple of the Oracle ; and had 
 fulfilled their promise with a munificence outrunning 
 the letter of their professions, particularly with 
 regard to the quality of marble used in facing or 
 "veneering" the front elevation. Now, these sen- 
 tentious and rather witty expressions, gave wings 
 and buoyancy to the public suspicions, sc as to make 
 them fly from one end of Greece to the other ; and 
 they continued in lively remembrance for centuries. 
 Our answer we reserve until we have illustrated the 
 other heads. 
 
 In the second case, namely, that of sceptical 
 slights shown to the Oracle, there are some memora- 
 ble precedents on record. Everybody knows tho 
 ridiculous stratagem of Croesus, the Lydian king, for 
 trying the powers of the Oracle, by a monstrous 
 culinary arrangement of pots and pans, known (aa 
 he fancied) only to himself. Generally the course 
 f the Delphic Oracle under similar insults was
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 507 
 
 .varmlj to resent them. But Croesus, as a king, a 
 foreigner, and a suitor of unexampled munificence, 
 was privileged, especially because the ministers of 
 the Delphic temple had doubtless found it easy to 
 extract the secret by bribery from some one of the 
 royal mission. A case, however, much more inter- 
 esting, because arising between two leading states 
 of Greece, and in the century subsequent to the 
 ruder age of Croesus (who was about coeval with 
 Pisistratus, 555 B. C.), is reported by Xenophon of 
 the Lacedaemonians and Thebans. They concluded 
 a treaty of peace without any communication, not 
 so much as a civil notification to the Oracle ; KB pev 
 
 &ew ovBev fKOivuxravTO, OTTWS 'fj tlpyvt) yevoiro to the 
 god (the Delphic god) they made no communication 
 at all as to the terms of the peace ; ai-roi 8e e/SouAeuovro, 
 but they personally pursued their negotiations in 
 private. That this was a very extraordinary reach 
 of presumption, is evident from the care of Xeno- 
 phon in bringing it before his readers ; it is probable, 
 indeed, that neither of the high contracting parties 
 had really acted in a spirit of religious indifference, 
 though it is remarkable of the Spartans, that of all 
 Greek tribes they were the most facile and numerous 
 delinquents under all varieties of foreign temptations 
 to revolt from their hereditary allegiance a fact 
 which measures the degree of unnatural constraint 
 and tension which the Spartan usages involved ; but 
 in this case we rather account for the public outrage 
 to religion and universal usage, by a strong political 
 jealousy lest the provisions of the treaty should 
 transpire prematurely amongst states adjacent tx> 
 Breotia a point forgotten by Xenophqp.
 
 508 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 Whatever, meantime, were the secret motive to 
 this policy, it did not fail to shock all Greece pro- 
 foundly. And, in a slighter degree, the same effect 
 upon public feeling followed the act of Agesipolis, 
 who, after obtaining an answer from the Oracle of 
 Delphi, carried forward his suit to the more awfully 
 ancient Oracle of Dodona ; by way of trying, as he 
 alleged, "whether the child agreed with its papa." 
 These open expressions of distrust were generally 
 condemned ; and the irresistible proof that they 
 were, lies in the fact that they led to no imita- 
 tions. Even in a case mentioned by Herodotus, 
 when a man had the audacity to found a colony 
 without seeking an oracular sanction, no precedent 
 was established ; though the journey to Delphi must 
 often have been peculiarly inconvenient to the found- 
 ers of colonies moving westwards from Greece ; and 
 the expenses of such a journey, with the subsequent 
 offerings, could not but prove unseasonable at the 
 moment when every drachma was most urgently 
 needed. Charity begins at home, was a thought 
 quite as likely to press upon a Pagan conscience, in 
 those circumstances, as upon our modern Christian 
 consciences under heavy taxation ; yet, for all that, 
 such was the regard to a pious inauguration of all 
 colonial enterprises, that no one provision or pledge 
 of prosperity was held equally indispensable by all 
 parties to such hazardous speculations. The merest 
 worldly foresight, indeed, to the most irreligious 
 leader, would suggest this sanction as a necessity, 
 under the following reason : colonies the most en- 
 viably prosperous upon the whole, have yet hat' 
 many hardships to contend with in their noviciate of
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES 509 
 
 the first five years ; were it only from the summer 
 failure of water under circumstances of local igno- 
 rance, or from the casual failure of crops under im 
 perfect arrangements of culture. Now, the one 
 great qualification for wrestling strenuously with 
 such difficult contingencies in solitary situations, is 
 the spirit of cheerful hope ; but, when any room had 
 been left for apprehending a supernatural curse rest- 
 ing upon their efforts equally in the most thought- 
 fully pious man and the most crazily superstitious 
 all spirit of hope would be blighted at once ; and the 
 religious neglect would, even in a common human 
 way, become its own certain executor, through mere 
 depression of spirits and misgiving of expectations. 
 Well, therefore, might Cicero in a tone of defiance 
 demand, " Quam vero Grsecia coloniam misit iu Mt^ 
 liain, loniam, Asiam, Siciliam, Italiam, sine Pylhio 
 (the Delphic), aut Dodonseo, aut Hammonis orac- 
 ulo ? " An oracular sanction must be had, and from 
 a leading oracle the three mentioned by Cicero 
 were the greatest ; * and, if a minor oracle could 
 have satisfied the inaugurating necessities of a regu- 
 lar colony, we may be sure that the Dorian states of 
 the Peloponnesus, who had twenty-five decent ora- 
 cles at home (that is, within the peninsula), would 
 not so constantly have carried their money to Del- 
 phi. Nay, it is certain that even where the colonial 
 counsels of the greater oracles seemed extravagant, 
 though a large discretion was allowed to remon- 
 strance, and even to very homely expostulations, 
 
 * To which at one time must be added, as of equal rank, the Oracla 
 of the Branchides, in Asia Minor. But this had been destroyed by 
 the Persians, in retaliation of the Athenian outrages at Sardis.
 
 510 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 Btill, in the last resort, no doubts were felt that tne 
 oracle must be right. Brouwer, the Belgic scholar, 
 who has so recently and so temperately treated 
 these subjects (Histoire de la Civilisation Morale et 
 Religieuse chez les Grecs : 6 tomes : Groningue 
 1840), alleges a case (which, howevei, we do not 
 remember to have met) where the client ventured to 
 object : " Mon roi Apollon, je crois que tu esfou." 3 
 But cases are obvious which look this way, though 
 not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord 
 of prophetic vision. Battus, *rho was destined to be 
 the eldest father of Gyrene, so memorable as the first 
 ground 35 of Greek intercourse with the African shore 
 of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic 
 Oracle in reference to his eyes, which happened to 
 be diseased, but that he was admonished to prepare 
 for colonizing Libya. " Grant me patience," would 
 Battus reply ; " here am 1 getting into years, and 
 never do I consult the Oracle about my precious 
 sight, but you, King Phoebus, begin your old yarn 
 about Gyrene. Confound Gyrene ! Nobody knows 
 where it is. But, if you are serious, speak to my 
 son he's a likely young man, and worth a hun- 
 dred of old rotten hulks, like myself." Battus was 
 provoked in good earnest ; and it is well known that 
 the whole scheme went to sleep for several years, 
 until King Phoebus sent in a gentle refresher to Bat- 
 tus and his islanders, in the shape of failing crops, 
 pestilence, and his ordinary chastisements. The 
 oeople were roused the colony was founded and, 
 after utter failure, was again re-founded, and th| 
 results justified the Oracle. But, in all such casea 
 tnd where the remonstrances were least respectful
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 511 
 
 or where the resistance of inertia was longest, we 
 differ altogether from M. Brouwer in his belief, that 
 the suitors fancied Apollo to have gone distracted. 
 If they ever said so, this must have been mei'ely by 
 way of putting the Oracle on its mettle, and calling 
 forth some plainer not any essentially different 
 answer from the enigmatic god ; for there it was 
 that the doubts of the clients settled, and on that it 
 was the practical demurs hinged. Not because even 
 Battus, vexed as he was about his precious eyesight, 
 distrusted the Oracle, but because he felt sure that 
 the Oracle had not spoken out freely ; therefore, had 
 he and many others in similar circumstances pre- 
 sumed to delay. A second edition was what they 
 waited for, corrected and enlarged. We have a 
 memorable instance of this policy in the Athenian 
 envoys, who, upon receiving a most ominous doom, 
 but obscurely expressed, from the Delphic Oracle, 
 which politely concluded by saying, " And so get 
 out, you vagabonds, from my temple don't cum- 
 ber my decks any longer ; " were advised to answer 
 sturdily " No ! we shall not get out we mean 
 to sit here forever, until you think proper to give us 
 a more reasonable reply." Upon which spirited 
 rejoinder, the Pythia saw the policy of revising her 
 truly brutal rescript as it had stood originally. 3 " 
 
 The necessity, indeed, was strong for not acqui- 
 escing in the Oracle, until it had become clearer by 
 revision or by casual illustrations, as will be seen 
 et en under our next head. This head concerns the 
 case of those who found themselves deceived by the 
 event of any oracular prediction. As usual, there is 
 % Spartan case of this nature Cloomenes com-
 
 512 THE PAGAN ORACI.F.S. 
 
 plained bitterly that the Oracle of Delphi had do- 
 luded him by holding out as a possibility, and under 
 given conditions as a certainty, that he should pos- 
 sess himself of Argos. But the Oracle was justified : 
 there was an inconsiderable place outside the walls 
 of Argos which bore the same name. Most readers 
 will remember the case of Cambyses, who had been 
 assured by a legion of oracles that he should die at 
 Ecbatana. Suffering, therefore, in Syria from a 
 scratch inflicted upon his thigh by his own sabre, 
 whilst angrily sabring a ridiculous quadruped whom 
 the Egyptian priests had put forward as a god, he 
 felt quite at his ease so long as he remembered his 
 vast distance from the mighty capital of Media, to 
 the eastward of the Tigris. The scratch, however, 
 inflamed, for his intemperance had saturated his 
 system with combustible matter ; the inflammation 
 spread ; the pulse ran high : and he began to feel 
 twinges of alarm. At length mortification com- 
 menced : but still he trusted to the old prophecy 
 about Ecbatana, when suddenly a horrid discovery 
 was made that the very Syrian village at his own 
 head-quarters was known by the pompous name of 
 Ecbatana. Josephus tells a similar story of some 
 man contemporary with Herod the Great. And we 
 must all remember that case in Shakspeare, where 
 the first king of the red rose, Henry IV., had long 
 fancied his destiny to be that he should meet his 
 death in Jerusalem ; which naturally did not quicken 
 his zeal for becoming a crusader. " All time 
 enough," doubtless he used to say ; " no hurry at 
 all, gentlemen ! '' But at length, finding himself 
 pronounced by tne doctor ripe for dying, it became
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 1 
 
 % question whether the prophet were a false prophet, 
 or the doctor a false doctor. However, in such a 
 case, it is something to have a collision of opinions 
 a prophet against a doctor. But, behold, it soon 
 transpired that there was no collision at all. It was 
 the Jerusalem chamber, occupied by the king as a 
 bed-room, to which the prophet had alluded. Upon 
 which his majesty reconciled himself at once to the 
 ugly necessity at hand 
 
 " In that Jerusalem shall Harry die." 
 
 The last case that of oracular establishments 
 turning out to be accomplices of thieves is one 
 which occurred in Egypt on a scale of some extent ; 
 and is noticed by Herodotus. This degradation 
 argued great poverty in the particular temples : and 
 it is not at all improbable that, amongst a hundred 
 Grecian Oracles, some, under a similar temptation, 
 would fall into a similar disgrace. 
 
 But now, as regards even this lowest extremity 
 of infamy, much more as regards the qualified sort 
 of disrepute attending the three minor cases, one 
 single distinction puts all to rights. The Greeks 
 never confounded the temple, and household of offi- 
 cers attached to the temple service, with the dark 
 functions of the presiding god. In Delphi, besides 
 the Pythia and priests, with their train of subordi- 
 nate ministers directly billeted on the temple, there 
 vere two orders of men outside, Delphic citizens, 
 one styled ^t?ft, the other tyled 'Oaiot, a sort of 
 honorary members, whose duty was probably inter 
 alia, to attach themselves to persons of correspond- 
 ing rank in the retinues of the fnvoys or consulting 
 
 33
 
 514 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 clients, and doubtless to collect from them, in con- 
 vivial moments, all the secrets or general information 
 which the temple required for satisfactory answers. 
 If they personally went too far in their intrigues 01 
 stratagems of decoy, the disgrace no more recoiled 
 on the god, than, in modern times, the vices or 
 crimes of a priest can affect the pure religion at 
 whose altars he officiates. 
 
 Meantime, through these outside ministers 
 though unaffected by their follies or errors as tre- 
 panners the Oracle of Delphi drew that vast and 
 comprehensive information, from every local nook or 
 recess of Greece, which made it in the end a blessing 
 to the land. The great error is, to suppose the 
 majority of cases laid before the Delphic Oracle 
 strictly questions for prophetic functions. Ninety- 
 nine in a hundred respected marriages, state-treaties, 
 sales, purchases, founding of towns or colonies, &c., 
 which demanded no faculty whatever of divination, 
 but the nobler faculty (though unpresumptuous) of 
 sagacity, that calculates the natural consequences 
 of human acts, cooperating with elaborate investiga- 
 tion of the local circumstances. If, in any paper on 
 the general civilization of Greece (that great mother 
 of civilization for all the world), we should ever 
 fcttempt to trace this element of Oracles, it will not 
 t>e difficult to prove that Delphi discharged the office 
 of a central bureau d' administration, a general depot 
 of political information, an organ of universal combi- 
 nation for the counsels of the whole Grecian race. 
 And that which caused the declension of the Oracles 
 tfas the loss of political independence and autonomy 
 After Alexander, still more after the Roman con
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 515 
 
 juest, each separate state, having no powers and no mo- 
 tive for asking counsel on state measures, naturally con- 
 fined itself more and more to its humbler local interest? 
 of police, or even at last to its family arrangements. 35 
 
 In drawing towards a close upon the great institu 
 tion of Oracles, I would wish to point the reader's 
 attention to a feature of strong analogy between these 
 mysterious incorporations and that great modern prod- 
 uct of high civilization the Banking system. Had 
 the ancients any banks, or any apology for banks ? 
 Formally and directly they certainly had not ; but in- 
 directly they had an imperfect representative of our 
 banks. What was it ? First let me ask What is the 
 primary and elementary function of a bank of a good, 
 honest, hard-working, industrious bank ? Vixere Bank- 
 ers ante Agamemnona. But their task was simpler ; it 
 was merely to take care of a man's money when he 
 could not take care of it himself. What, because he 
 was drunk ? Oh, no : but because housebreakers [family- 
 men, as they are called in our flash dictionaries] were 
 in Greece and circumjacent regions far too plentiful. 
 They swarmed in all quarters of needy Greece. 
 
 What an invitation to you and me, when speculating 
 for a rise in our respective capitals, to suspect a supper 
 table left by the sleeping family to take care of itself and 
 also of all the family plate, with a perfect knowledge 
 on our parts that as small a tool as a mason's trowef 
 ivill introduce us in six minutes to that same abandoned 
 supper-tray. The word Toi\(aftvx';, literally wall-borer, 
 or Toix<opvKTrjs, wall-underminer, the Greek name for a 
 louse-breaker, indicates the brief process through which 
 .he Attic burglar seduced and eloped with anothei
 
 516 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 man's too charming plate. The artist had but to exca- 
 vate a peck or two of earth with his trowel ; a rabbit's 
 burrow was large enough ; this he soon improved and 
 widened, using his own body as a gimlet; and very soon 
 he had gimleted himself down amongst the family rats. 
 Then making free to borrow a rat-hole for a minute, 
 and lying on his back, he soon whittled away or chiselled 
 away the slight piece of carious flooring that divided 
 him from the beautiful object (whether gold or silver) 
 that enamored him. Between Greece and Rome, in 
 this point, how vast the difference ! In Rome the houses 
 were built for eternity twelve to twenty thousand 
 pounds sterling was no uncommon cost, I believe, for 
 the mansion of a senator. In Athens it is notorious 
 that the houses of citizens the most distinguished, Milti- 
 ades, and soon afterwards of Themistocles, were little 
 better than hovels. And although it is true that in 
 forty years more, when the star of Pericles began to 
 dawn upon Athens, the houses showed symptoms of 
 improvement, nevertheless, being still built of slight and 
 frail materials, they continued to rest on no massier or 
 deeper foundations than does at this day a Scotch High- 
 land bothy. Stakes or poles, hand-driven into the 
 ground, formed their whole support not at all stronger 
 than the pegs which hold down the draperies of a sol- 
 dier's tent. This it was viz., the make-shift foundation 
 - which so powerfully facilitated the art, or " profes- 
 sion " (as I find it called by one lexicographer) of the 
 housebreaker. In fact the art might be viewed as a 
 mode of diving ; the Attic burglar dived into the earth 
 on the outside of the walls, and coming up on the other 
 side, found himself comfortably seated in grand-mam- 
 ma's easy chair. And whilst the access was thus easy
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 517 
 
 at Athens, was thus impossible at Rome, on the other 
 hand, the burglars in the former land swanned like 
 flies in a hot August with us, and in the latter were 
 rare as hornets. With robbery a thousand times 
 easier, and a thousand times more plentiful ffl rea- 
 son enough there was in Athens for banks to take 
 charge of a man's money. And banks, therefore, of 
 the very strongest construction the Greeks had, banks 
 that could stand a military siege, and sometimes did. 
 But what was the name of these banks ? The name ? 
 Why, the name of these banks was temples. Upon 
 a two-fold consideration, temples were eligible as 
 banks. In the first place, any temple whatsoever, 
 being regarded as a monument of reverence and grat- 
 itude to a divinity, was naturally made as splendid 
 as the disposable funds would allow. Marble, there- 
 fore, or stone at the least, was used in constructing 
 the walls and porticoes. But the great weight of mar- 
 ble and stone obliged the architects to lay them upon 
 deep foundations. Hence it happened that, in such 
 altered circumstances, the alliance of a rat, and the 
 loan of a rat hole, went but a little way towards a pros- 
 perous burglary. But there was even a deeper pro- 
 tection to a temple. Being placed under the tutelary 
 care of a divinity the building enjoyed the prestige 
 of consecration. And this kept the most audacious 
 burglar at a distance. Hi.s trade was hopeless, he well 
 knew that, against walls so impregnable ; and, had it 
 been otherwise, the burg'iar feared a pursuing curse if 
 he robbed a temple of any peculiar sanctity ; he would 
 M little dally with any such dangerous purpose as a 
 Spanish flibustier would have joined an English buc- 
 caneer in pillaging a shrine of the Virgin. With power
 
 518 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 ten times multiplied did these grounds of strength 
 apply to an oracular temple; most of all to Delphi 
 known to all princes that were themselves known. It 
 is not surprising, therefore, that Delphi should have 
 become the consecrated depot for incalculable property 
 through many generations. And if the reputation of 
 wealth so enormous drew upon that temple and town 
 occasional threats, or even assaults from a distance, no 
 losses arising in this way could counterbalance, by a 
 thousandth part, the vast amount of conservative aid 
 that this temple must, in so many generations, have 
 dispensed ; for Delphi must have been viewed as cen- 
 tral to Greece, to the Grecian Islands, in later days to 
 Macedon, Epirus, Thrace, and (in Asia Minor) to 
 regions stretching all the way to the Euphrates. 
 
 As a bank of deposit, therefore, Delphi and its illus- 
 trious temple discharged a most weighty class of ser- 
 vices ; and with this class at least Christianity could 
 have had no wish to interfere. No rivalship could here 
 be imagined ; no crossing of purposes ; no collision of 
 interests. So far it is not any service offering analo- 
 gies to the modern services of banks that Delphi might 
 have claimed ; it was the direct, undeniable, and ele- 
 mentary service that any and every bank does or can 
 perform. The service done was not of a nature to in- 
 volve any social refinements ; it was plain and homely 
 as a cadgel ; and in fact very like a cudgel ; for one o^ 
 the best uses which the learned have yet discovered in 
 a cudgel is its tendency to mount guard effectually 
 apon a man's pockets ; and precisely that use was ren- 
 dered in perfection by the temple of the Oracle at Del- 
 phi. A bank, which could not be stormed by Brennus 
 and his Gauls, was manifestly in. no danger from the 
 and his trowel.
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 512 
 
 But mere security, though a great point to achieve 
 in a community where hardly anything was safe from 
 moths that corrupt, or from thieves that break through 
 and steal, was yet far from approaching that mysterious 
 discovery as to the powers of capital, which to all man- 
 kind, for many a long century, seemed to involve an 
 impossibility. The exquisite silliness of the ancient 
 doctrine " that money doth not breed money " 
 that one gold or silver coin was never known, in any 
 natural process of generation, to produce another gold 
 or silver coin, gagged the utterance, blindfolded the 
 eyes, paralyzed the understanding of man through 
 much more than a thousand years. From this doc- 
 trine it seemed (in the eyes of our worthy and most 
 stupid ancestors) to radiate as the most irresistible of 
 inferences that, if any man drew a profit, a some- 
 thing extra, from the employment of his money, that 
 profit must take its rise in some unlawful source. The 
 most obvious explanation was, that it arose in fraud. 
 In some way the man must have cheated. This, as 
 most people know, was the theory of Cicero. A man 
 must lie, and must lie pretty strongly [admodum~\, in 
 his opinion, before he could reap any gain whatever 
 the least or most shadowy from a commercial trans 
 action. And if Cicero had been made to understand 
 that the distinction between buyer and seller was imag- 
 inary, that a buyer was necessarily a seller a seller 
 necessarily a buyer, and that in every transaction of ex- 
 change the two parties, the party on each side, might 
 gxin simultaneously, might gam equally, and not by 
 ixny metaphysical trick of words, but by a gain expres- 
 sible in money he would probably, in excess of 
 wrath, have assaulted his opponent. Any use of cap-
 
 520 THE PAGAX OHACLES. 
 
 ital that should imply such doctrines would, in the 
 Grecian stage of civilization, have been impossible. 
 Yet, why ? Simply because all such uses waited for 
 other concurrent agencies, which must meet in combi- 
 nation before their last potential results could be devel- 
 oped. From that Grecian stage of social progress, io 
 which the showy religion of men, and the pomps ; f 
 their gay mythologies, had put forth their uttermost 
 strength in the stationary grandeur of temples and the 
 ecenical beauty of processions, let us leap by a flight 
 across forty generations to that modern period when 
 the bank of Venice, of Amsterdam, &c., had implied 
 as a cause, and had promoted as an effect, that new 
 birth in the science of capital and its uses which the 
 world has now gazed upon for three centuries and up- 
 wards as a gorgeous spectacle towering to the clouds 
 by its multitudinous creations. From this grand sta- 
 tion, commanding both stages the infancy and the 
 maturity of the banking economy, and connecting 
 them into one field of retrospect, let us ask what it is 
 in the upshot that has been gained ? In the Grecian 
 infancy of its power, moneyed power (as regards the 
 western regions of the ancient world) was first of all 
 made safe. The temples (and probably in many in- 
 stances under dim anticipations of future Persian inva- 
 sions, or even of tumultuary invasions by mere Scyth- 
 ian, German, or Gaulish savages) were built with the 
 strength of fortresses ; not meant for the security of 
 money, these massy temples had not the less benefited 
 money. In that cradle of European culture, under the 
 double protection of martial power and of religion, first 
 of all we beheld the great productive power of prop- 
 erty, ar yet, indeed, most slenderly applied to produc
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 521 
 
 tJon, but still reposing in absolute safety. Under all 
 this vast advantage, as yet, however, it slumbers pas- 
 sively, having very little more interest for society than 
 simply as all property, however little employed pro- 
 ductively, nevertheless (in the shape of expenditure as 
 an income) unavoidably stimulates production. But at 
 the modern terminus of our long prospect we behold 
 this property no longer inert and lifeless, but waking 
 magically into a twofold life. Money, to the confusion 
 of the incredulous, now, at last, is found to produce 
 money ; and this intolerable paradox, as through so 
 long a period it has been held, is accomplished often- 
 times through another machinery equally paradoxical. 
 Not the proprietor of the money, in most cases, but an 
 alien as regards any natural relations to the money, 
 reaps the primary benefits from the property ; and out 
 of that seeming intrusion into another man's rights, 
 first of all it becomes possible that a bank should create 
 an income for the true proprietor. This man's share 
 of benefit is so far from being encroached upon by the 
 alien employer of his property, that, on the contrary, 
 in the innumerable cases where the owner could not 
 himself be the employer, it is only through this intru- 
 sion of an alien party that the bank carves out a triple 
 return first, for itself; secondly, for the commercial 
 smployer ; thirdly, for the sedentary and passive pro- 
 prietor. 
 
 Pausing for an instant, let us review the methods 
 through which the bank organizes such great results. 
 All the little rills and runnels of surplus income scat- 
 tered amongst numerous individuals, which in an un- 
 commercial land could not find employment, and would 
 ae as barren accumulation in domestic depositories.
 
 522 
 
 THE PAGAX ORACLES. 
 
 tempting the assaults of housebreakers, are converged 
 by banks into large central reservoirs, from which they 
 are speedily returned, through the channels of many 
 commercial or manufacturing men, into the vast field 
 of productive industry. What the bank does is essen- 
 tially the function of a broker. The bank brings scat- 
 tered interests into communication, and remote inter- 
 ests into contact. Through this agency, the multitudes 
 who have surplus money, and would be glad to lend it, 
 under any sufficient prospect of seeing it profitably 
 employed, are brought face to face with the multitudes 
 who wish to extend their means of creating such profit- 
 able employment. And now, turning back to the great 
 Oracular Temple of Delphi, we may trace more firmly 
 and luminously the direct point of contact, or the more 
 indirect and remote points of analogy, which connect 
 the Delphic Temple with the machineries of banking. 
 In the early and elementary stage of this great organ, 
 we notice (as I remarked above) not so much the anal- 
 ogy, as the direct parity or identity of their public min- 
 istrations. A modern bank contemplates, as its initial 
 service, the safe-keeping of the money confided to its 
 care. The bank provides a strong building, rooms spe- 
 cially protected against burglars, iron safes, proper at- 
 tendants, and watchmen, together with the means of 
 rapid and authentic intelligence upon questions con- 
 nected with the public securities of the national treas- 
 ury dec., and is able to distribute these great advan- 
 tages amongst an immense number of customers, at a 
 cost to each which is little more than nominal. The 
 Delphic Temple, upon terms essentially the same, but 
 very much more costly, indemnified itself for the abso- 
 lute security (both in its English and its Latin sense) * 
 which it had created.
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 523 
 
 What more did the bank of Delphi accomplish to- 
 wards the development of the banking system, than 
 simply to make it safe ? Nothing. Then how was I 
 entitled to say, that Delphi & Co. exhibited strong fea- 
 tures of analogy to our existing banks, in their most 
 improved state of efficiency ? The Bank of England 
 at this day is prepared to stand a siege, if such a neces- 
 sity should arise, only I fear that she is not victualled ; 
 she has not laid in enough of biscuit. However, this 
 is the uttermost extent of her martial capacities ; and 
 Delphi could do as much, besides having actually done 
 it. But what further lineaments of sisterly resemblance 
 do we trace in the two banks ? This one marked ex- 
 pression at the least we trace viz., a systematic use 
 of brokerage in the largest extent ; by which term 
 " brokerage " I understand a regular and known ma- 
 chinery for bringing into practical communication with 
 each other parties that, but for this machinery, were too 
 remote to have learned their reciprocal wants. All peo- 
 ple of rank and distinction, throughout Greece and its 
 dependencies or adjacencies, kept up a respectful inter- 
 course with Delphi ; and consequently that great bank 
 had the advantage of what might be called official re- 
 ports from every corner of Hellas ; and (if need arose) 
 of reports circumstantially minute. Was a high-born 
 lady with ample dowry leading a solitary life, because 
 no suitor of corresponding pretensions existed in her 
 own neighborhood ? The Oracle had a ready means 
 for transmitting this intelligence to a remote quarter, 
 where it would tell effectually. Was a call for coloni- 
 sation becoming clamorous in some particular region ? 
 What more beneficial, or what more easy, than for the 
 Oracle to forward this news by its own channels to a
 
 524 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 tract of country laboring (through causes casual or 
 local) under an excess of pauperized population ? Or, 
 if a chieftain in the north were commencing a sumptu- 
 ous palace, what should hinder the Oracle from for- 
 warding that intelligence to the architects and deco- 
 rators of the south ? Mr. Carlyle's impeachment of 
 Poor-law arrangements, on the ground that they accu- 
 mulated ploughs and ploughmen in one province, whilst 
 the arable lands needing to be ploughed all lay in some 
 other province, would hardly have existed under Del- 
 phi, or not as any subject of complaint where the rem- 
 edy was so prompt. The brief summary of Delphic 
 administration was this : It moved by secret springs ; 
 not being visibly or audibly displayed, it irritated no 
 jealousies. Appealing to no coercive powers, but purely 
 to moral suasion, it provoked no refractoriness. Com- 
 bining with the very highest of religious influences that 
 Hellas recognized, it insured a docile and reverential 
 acceptance for all its directions. And, finally, because 
 this great Delphic establishment held in its hands the 
 hidden reins from every province, therefore it was, that 
 out of universal Greece, as a body of wants, powers, 
 slumbering activities, and undeveloped resources, Del- 
 phi would have constructed, and did construct, so far 
 as her influence escaped the thwarting of cross-cur- 
 rents, a system of political watch-work, where all the 
 parts and movements played into a common centre. 
 We must remember that Greece, after all, and allow- 
 ing for every class of drawbacks, was really the first 
 region upon earth in which (as in our present Chris- 
 tendom) there had formed itself a system of interna- 
 tional law, and fixed modes of diplomacy. Compare 
 Her, this Greece, vith the wretched voluptuaries o'
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 525 
 
 Southern Asia from Western Arabia and Persia to 
 Eastern China, no matter when, whether before or af- 
 ter Mahomet. Greece, though beginning with institu 
 tions as to women too dangerously Asiatic, was yet 
 never emasculated. Men, aspiring men, were what she 
 still produced. And much of this great advantage she 
 owed apparently to that diffusive Delphic influence 
 through which she nourished and expanded her unity, 
 all parts existing for the sake of each, and each for all, 
 in a degree of which no vestige was ever exhibited by 
 the crazy and effeminate policy of any Asiatic state. 
 
 Now, therefore, having laid the foundations of a road 
 for safe footing, let me march to my conclusion. The 
 conclusion of the Fathers was the wildest of errors, 
 into which they were misled by the most groundless of 
 preconceptions. They started with the assumption 
 that there was an essential hostility between Christian- 
 ity and the primary pretensions of Oracles, conse- 
 quently of Delphi as the supreme Oracle. And one 
 result of this startling error, was, that they exacted as 
 a debt from Christianity that expression of hostility 
 which, except in a Patristic romance, never had any 
 real existence. The fathers regarded it as a duty of 
 Christianity to destroy Oracles ; and, holding that base- 
 less creed, some of them went on to affirm, in mere 
 defiance of history, that Christianity had destroyed 
 Oracles. But why did the fathers fancy it so special 
 a duty of the Christian faith to destroy Oracles? 
 Simply for these two reasons viz., that, 
 
 1. Most falsely they supposed prophtcy to be the 
 main function of an Oracle ; whereas it did not enter 
 ts an element into the main ousiness of an Oracle by 
 'o much as once in a thousand response?.
 
 526 
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 2. Not less erroneously they assumed this to be the 
 inevitable parent of a collision with Christianity. Foi 
 all prophecy, and the spirit of prophecy, they supposed 
 to be a regal prerogative of Christianity, sacred, in 
 fact, to the true faith by some inalienable right. But 
 no such claim is anywhere advanced in the Scriptures. 
 And even a careless reader will remember one con- 
 spicuous case, where a prophet of known hostility to 
 the Hebrew interest and the Hebrew faith, and for 
 that reason invoked and summoned to curse the chil- 
 dren of Israel, is nevertheless relied on as a fountain 
 of truth by the Hebrew leaders. 
 
 But suppose that there really were any such exclu- 
 sive pretension to prophecy on behalf of Christianity 
 what is prophecy ? The Patristic error is here in- 
 tolerable. In order to make any comparison as to such 
 a gift between the Greek Oracles and Christianity, we 
 must at least be talking of the same thing ; whereaa 
 nothing can be more extensively distinguished from 
 the vaticinations of the Pagan Oracle than prophecy 
 as it is understood in the Bible. St. Paul is contin- 
 ually referring in his Epistles to gifts of prophecy : 
 but does any man suppose this apostle to mean gifts as 
 to the faculty of prediction ? Nobody, of all whom 
 St. Paul was addressing, pretended to any qualifica- 
 tions of that nature. A prophet in the Bible nowhere 
 means a foreseer or predicter. It means a person 
 endowed with exegetic gifts ; that is, with powers of 
 ''interpretation applicable to truth hidden, or truth im- 
 perfectly revealed. All profound and Scriptural truth 
 may be regarded as liable to misinterpretation, because 
 originally lying under veils of shadowy concealment, 
 many and various. He who removes any one of thesf
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 527 
 
 rarying obscurations he who displays in his commen- 
 taries the gifts of an exegetes, or interpreter is in St. 
 Paul's sense, a prophet. Now, among these obscuring 
 causes, one is time ; some features of what is commu- 
 nicated may chance to be hidden by the clouds which 
 Burround a distant future ; and in that sole case, one 
 case amongst hundreds, the prophet coincides with the 
 predicter. But, in the vast majority of cases, prophecy 
 means the power of interpretation, or of commentary 
 and practical extension, applied to Scriptural doctrines ; 
 u sense not only irrelevant to the Oracles, but without 
 purpose, or value, or meaning to any Pagan whatever. 
 So that competition from that quarter was the idlest of 
 chimeras. Prophecy, therefore, in any sense ever con- 
 templated by a Christian writer, could not be violated 
 or desecrated by any rival pretensions of Paganism, 
 such as the fathers feared ; inasmuch as all such pre- 
 tensions on the part of Paganism were blank impossi- 
 bilities. 
 
 That falsification, therefore, of historic facts, by 
 which the fathers attempted to varnish and mystify the 
 absolute indifference of Christianity to the Oracles, 
 falls away spontaneously, when the motive upon which 
 it moved is exposed as frivolous and childish. Cleared 
 from these gross misrepresentations of the ill-informed, 
 Oracles appear to have fulfilled a most important mis- 
 sion. As rationally might Christianity be supposed 
 hostile to post-offices, or jealous of mail steamers, as 
 indisposed to that oracular mission, of which the noble 
 purpose, stated in the briefest terms, was to knit the 
 extremities of a state to its centre, and to quicken the 
 progress of civilization. 
 
 Why the Oracles really decayed, I presume arose
 
 528 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 thus : I have already noticed their loss of high political 
 functions. This loss, though never intentionally offered 
 as a degradation, not the less had that result. During 
 that long course of generations, when princes or repub 
 lies needed the cooperation of Oracles, that possessed 
 worlds of local information, and that furnished the sanc- 
 tions of heavenly authority, not at all less than the 
 Oracles needed martial protection the two powers 
 were seen, or were felt obscurely, acting always in 
 harmony and coalition. With us in Great Britain a 
 man acquires the title of Right Honorable by entering 
 the Privy Council as a member. Some honor, or some 
 distinction for the ear or for the eye, corresponding to 
 this, no doubt settled upon the high officers at Delphi. 
 They were probably regarded as honorary members of 
 the national council that in one shape or other advised 
 and assisted the ruler of every state having established 
 relations with Delphi. But these flattering distinctions 
 would cease, or would become mere titular honors, 
 when Delphi lost her connection, and her right of sug- 
 gestion, and her " voice potential," with the supreme 
 government of her own land. With us, when a man 
 has been presented to the sovereign, he obtains (or 
 used to obtain), from the Lord Chamberlain, a sort of 
 certificate, which said, " Mr. Thingamby is known at 
 the Court of St. James : " whether known for any 
 good, was civilly suppressed ; and this potent recogni- 
 tion enabled Thingamby to present himself as one 
 having on a wedding garment, and admissible at any 
 other court or courtlet whatsoever, except that of Ash- 
 antee. Let the reader honestly confess that he enviea 
 Thingamby. Now, it is not improbable that the high 
 ministers at Delphi had a power equal to the Lord
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 529 
 
 Chamberlain's, of certifying on behalf of any man 
 going on his travels, were it Pythagoras or Solon, 
 Herodotus or Plato, Anacharsis or Thingamby (every 
 one of whom was a traveller), that the bearer is favor- 
 ably known at Delphi. In the days of Delphic grand- 
 eur, such an introduction would bear a high value at 
 all the surrounding courts ; and this value would be 
 multiplied in that age when the successors of Alexan- 
 der had founded thrones stretching all the way from 
 the Oxus to the Nile. But, after the Roman conquest 
 of Greece and of Macedon, all this would collapse. A 
 large field of economic services would still remain open 
 to the temple ; but the atmosphere of sanctity, with the 
 faith in supernatural cooperation, would have suffered 
 a shock. And the local agents, that once in every dis- 
 trict had emulously disputed the glory of ranking in 
 the long retinue of the god, and of the great lady 
 seated on the tripod, would no longer find a sufficient 
 indemnification for their labors in the glory of the ser- 
 vice. Delphi, like the " Times " newspaper, would have 
 to pay its agents ; and the clouded splendors of the 
 Delphic shrine and temple would reflect themselves, 
 as years went on, in the dilapidations of the town. 
 Delphi, the city, must have been the creation of Delphi, 
 he oracular temple ; and the dismantlings of both must 
 have gone on under the same impulses, and through 
 corresponding stages ; so that either would reflect suf- 
 ficiently to the other its own ruins and superannuations. 
 When earthly grandeurs, however, were gone, there 
 would still survive a large arrear of humbler and eco- 
 nomic services, by which a decent revenue might be se- 
 cured. And the true reason why the ceasing of Ora- 
 eles was so variously timed and so vaguely dated, is to 
 34
 
 530 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 be looked for precisely in this variable declension of 
 humbler ministrations, through local ebbs and flows in 
 casual advantages of position. The case recalls to my 
 eye a scene exhibited in certain streets of London 
 ?ery early on a summer morning nearly forty-four 
 years ago. It was high summer, in the year 1814. 
 All the leaders, royal or not royal, in the three immor- 
 tal campaigns of Moscow (1812), of Leipsic (1813), 
 and of France (1814), were just then in London, and 
 paying a visit of honor to our own Regent. There was 
 the reigning King of Prussia, whom most people lik- 
 ened to " the knight of the rueful countenance." 
 There was the king's sole faithful servant Blucher. 
 There was the imperial fop, Alexander, and in his train 
 men of sixty different languages ; and, distinguished 
 above all others that owed suit and service to this great 
 potentate, rode Platoff, the Hetman of the Cossacks, 
 specially beloved by all men as the most gallant, ad- 
 venturous, and ugly of Cossacks. These Cossacks, if 
 one might believe the flying rumors, drank with rap- 
 ture every species of train oil. The London lamps 
 were then lighted with oil ; and the Cossacks, it was 
 said, gave it the honor of a decided preference : so that, 
 in streets lying near to the hetman's residence, to the 
 north of Oxford Street, the lamps were observed to 
 burn with a very variable lustre. In such a street, 
 I, and others my companions, returning from a ball, 
 &bout an hour before sunrise, saw a mimic sketch ol 
 ihe decaying Oracles. Here, close to the hetman's 
 front-door, was a large overshadowing lamp, that might 
 typify the Delphic shrine, but (to borrow a word from 
 kitchen-maids) u black out." It was supposed to have 
 *>een tapped too frequently by the hetman's sentinels
 
 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 531 
 
 who mounted guard on his Tartar Highness ; then, on 
 the other side the street, was a lamp, ancient and 
 gloomy, that might pass for Dodona, throwing up 
 sickly and fitful gleams of undulating lustre, but draw- 
 ing near to extinction. Further ahead was a huge 
 octagon lamp, that apparently never had been cleaned 
 from smoke and fuliginous tarnish, forlorn ; solitary, 
 yet grimly alight, though under a disastrous eclipse, 
 and ably supporting the part of Jupiter Ammon that 
 unsocial oracle which stood aloof from men in anai- 
 row oasis belted round by worlds of sandy wilderness. 
 And in the midst of all these vast and venerable me- 
 mentoes rose one singularly pert and lively, though not 
 bigger than a farthing rushlight, which probably had 
 singly escaped the Cossacks, as having promised noth- 
 ing ; so that the least and most trivial of the entire 
 group was likely to survive them all. 
 
 Briefly, the Oracles went out lamp after lamp 
 as we see oftentimes in some festal illumination that 
 one glass globe of light capriciously outlives its neigh- 
 bor. Or they might be described as melting away like 
 snow on the gradual return of vernal breezes. Large 
 drifts vanish in a few hours; but patches here and 
 there, lurking in the angles of high mountainous 
 grounds, linger on into summer. Yet, whatever 
 might have been their distinctions or their advantages 
 on collation with each other, none of the ancients ever 
 appear to have considered their pretensions to divina- 
 tion or prescience (whether by the reading of signs, 
 ELS in the flight of birds, in the entrails of sacrificial 
 victims or, again, in direct spiritual prevision) as 
 'orming any conspicuous feature of their ordinary 
 duties. Accordingly, when Cato in the Pharsalia ia
 
 532 THE PAGAN ORACLES. 
 
 advised by Labienus to seek the counsel of Jupiter Am- 
 mon, whose sequestered oracle was then near enough 
 to be reached without much extra trouble, he replies 
 by a fine abstract of what might be expected from an 
 oracle ; viz., not predictions, but grand sentiments bear 
 ing on the wisdom of life. These representative sen- 
 timents, as shaped by Lucan, are fine and noble ; we 
 might expect it from a poet so truly Roman and noble. 
 But he dismisses these oracular sayings as superfluous, 
 because already familiar to meditative men. We know 
 them 
 
 " Scimus " (says he) 
 " Et hsec nobis lion altius inseret Ammon." 
 
 And no Ammon will ever engraft them more deeply 
 into my heart. 
 
 This I mention, when concluding, as a further and 
 collateral evidence against the Fathers. For if any 
 mode of prophetic illumination had been the sort of 
 communication reasonably and characteristically to be 
 anticipated from an Oracle, in that case, Lucan would 
 have pointed his artillery from a very different battery, 
 the battery of scorn and indignation. No people cer- 
 tainly could be more superstitious than the Roman 
 populace : witness the everlasting Bos locutus est of the 
 credulous Livy. Yet, on the other hand, already in 
 the early days of Ennius, we know, by one of his 
 beautiful fragments, that no nation could breed more 
 high-minded denouncers of such misleading follies.
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 IT is said continually that the age of miracles 
 is past. We deny that it is so in any sense which 
 implies this age to differ from all other generations of 
 man except one. It is neither past, nor ought we to 
 wish it past. Superstition is no vice in the constitution 
 of man. It is not true that, in any philosophic view, 
 primus in orbe deos fecit timor meaning by fecit 
 even so much as raised into light. As Burke re- 
 marked, the timor at least must be presumed to pre 
 exist, and must be accounted for, if not the gods. If 
 the fear created the gods, what created the fear ? Far 
 more true, and more just to the grandeur of man, it 
 would have been to say, Primus in orbe deos fecit 
 census infiniti. Even in the lowest Caffre, more goes 
 to the sense of a divine being than simply his wrath 
 or his power. Superstition, indeed, or the sympathy 
 with the invisible, is the great test of man's nature, as 
 an earthly combining with a celestial. In superstition 
 lies the possibility of religion ; and though supersti- 
 tion is often injurious, degrading, demoralizing, it is 
 so, not as a form of corruption or degradation, but as 
 a form of non-development. The crab is harsh, and 
 for itself worthless ; but it is the germinal form of 
 innumerable finer fruits. Not apples only the most
 
 534 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 exquisite, and pears, the peach and the nectarine are 
 said to have radiated from this austere stock when 
 cultured, developed, and transferred to all varieties of 
 climate. Superstition will finally pass into pure forms 
 of religion as man advances. It would be matter 
 of lamentation to hear that superstition had at all 
 decayed until man had made corresponding steps in 
 the purification and development of his intellect ai 
 applicable to religious faith. Let us hope that this 
 is not so ; and, by way of judging, let us throw 
 a hasty eye over the modes of popular superstition. 
 If these manifest their vitality, it will prove that the 
 popular intellect does not go along with the bookish or 
 the worldly (philosophic we cannot call it) in pro- 
 nouncing the miraculous extinct. The popular feeling 
 is all in all. 
 
 This function of miraculous power, which is most 
 widely diffused through pagan and Christian ages 
 alike, but which has the least root in the solemnities 
 of the imagination, we may call the Ovidian. By 
 way of distinction it may be so called ; and with 
 some justice, since Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, gave 
 the first elaborate record of such a tendency in human 
 superstition. It is a movement of superstition under 
 the domination of human affections, a mode of spirit- 
 ual awe, which seeks to reconcile itself with human 
 tenderness or admiration, and which represents su- 
 pernatural power as expressing itself by a sympathy 
 with human distress or passion concurrently with 
 human sympathies, and as supporting that blended 
 ympathy by a symbol incarnated with the fixed 
 agencies of Nature. For instance, a pair of youthfu
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 535 
 
 lovers perish by a double suicide originating in a 
 fatal mistake and a mistake operating in each case 
 through a noble self-oblivion. The tree under which 
 their meeting has been concerted, and which witnesses 
 their tragedy, is supposed ever afterwards to express 
 the divine sympathy with this catastrophe in the gloomy 
 color of its fruit : 
 
 " At tu, quse ramis (arbor !) miserabile corpus 
 Nunc tegis unius, mox es tectura duoram, 
 Signa tene csedis : pullosque et luctibus aptos 
 Semper habe fructus gemini monumenta cruoris." 
 
 Such is the dying adjuration of the lady to the tree; 
 and the fruit becomes from that time a monument of 
 a double sympathy sympathy from man, sympathy 
 from a dark power standing behind the agencies of 
 Nature and speaking through them. Meantime the 
 object of this sympathy is understood to be, not the 
 individual catastrophe, but the universal case of unfor- 
 tunate love exemplified in this particular romance. 
 The inimitable grace w : th which Ovid has delivered 
 these early traditions of human tenderness, blending 
 with human superstition, is notorious ; the artfulness 
 of the pervading connection, by which every tale in 
 the long succession is made to arise spontaneously out 
 of that which precedes, is absolutely unrivalled ; and 
 this it was, with his luxuriant gayety, which procured 
 for him a preference even with Milton a poet so 
 opposite by intellectual constitution. It is but reason- 
 able, therefore, that this function of the miraculous 
 should bear the name of Ovidian. Pagan it was in 
 its birth ; and to paganism its title.? ultimately ascend.
 
 !)36 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 Yet we know that in the transitional state through the 
 centuries succeeding to Christ, during which paganism 
 and Christianity were slowly descending and ascend- 
 ing as if from two different strata of the atmosphere, 
 the two powers interchanged whatsoever they could. 
 (See Conyer's Middleton ; and see Blount of our own 
 days.) It marked the earthly nature of paganism 
 that it could borrow little or nothing by organization ; 
 it was fitted to no expansion ; but the true faith, from 
 its vast and comprehensive adaptation to the nature of 
 man, lent itself to many corruptions some deadly 
 in their tendencies, some harmless. Amongst these 
 last was the Ovidian form of connecting the unseen 
 powers moving in Nature with human sympathies of 
 love or reverence. The legends of this kind are uni- 
 versal and endless. No land, the most austere in its 
 Protestantism, but has adopted these superstitions ; 
 and every where, by *hose even who reject them, they 
 are entertained with some degree of affectionate re- 
 spect. That the ass, which in its very degradation 
 still retains an under power of sublimity, 40 or of sub- 
 lime suggestion through its ancient connection with 
 the wilderness, with the Orient, with Jerusalem, should 
 have been honored amongst all animals, by the visible 
 impression upon its back of Christian symbols, seems 
 reasonable even to the infantine understanding when 
 made acquainted with its meekness, its patience, its 
 Buffering life, and its association with the Founder of 
 Christianity in one great triumphal solemnity. The 
 ery man who brutally abuses it, and feels a hard- 
 hearted contempt for its misery and its submission 
 has a semi-conscious feeling that the same qualities
 
 MODERN SUrERSTlIlON. 537 
 
 were possibly those which recommended it to a dis 
 tinction 41 when all things were valued upon a scale 
 inverse to that of the world. Certain it is, that in all 
 Christian lands the legend about the ass is current 
 amongst the rural population. The haddock, again, 
 amongst marine animals, is supposed, throughout ali 
 maritime Europe, to be a privileged fish. Even in 
 austere Scotland every child can point out the impres- 
 sion of St. Peter's thumb, by which from age to age 
 it is distinguished from fishes having otherwise an ex- 
 ternal resemblance. All domesticated cattle, having 
 the benefit of man's guardianship and care, are be 
 lieved throughout England and Germany to go down 
 upon their knees at one particular moment of Christ- 
 mas eve, when the fields are covered with darkness, 
 when no eye looks down but that of God, and when 
 the exact anniversary hour revolves of the angelic 
 song once rolling over the fields and flocks of Pales- 
 tine. 42 The Glastonbury Thorn is a more local super- 
 stition ; but at one time the legend was as widely 
 diffused as that of Loretto, with the angelic translation 
 of its sanctities. On Christmas morning, it was devout- 
 ly believed by all Christendom that this holy thorn 
 put forth its annual blossoms. And with respect to 
 the aspen tree, which Mrs. Hemans very naturally mis- 
 took for a Welsh legend, having first heard it in Den- 
 bighshire, the popular faith is universal, that it shiv- 
 ers mystically in sympathy with the horror of that 
 mother tree in Palestine which was compelled to fur- 
 nish materials for the cross. Neither would it in this 
 case be any objection if a passage were produced 
 from Solinus or Theophrastus, implying that the aspen
 
 ^158 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 tree had always shivered ; for the tree might presuma 
 bly be penetrated by remote presentiments as well aa 
 by remote remembrances. In so vast a case, the ob- 
 scure sympathy should stretch, Janus-like, each way 
 And an objection of the same kind to the rainbow, con- 
 sidered as the sign or seal by which God attested his 
 covenant in bar of all future deluges, may be parried in 
 something of the same way. It was not then first cre- 
 ated. True ; but it was then first selected by prefer- 
 ence amongst a multitude of natural signs as yet unap- 
 propriated, and then first charged with the new function 
 of a message and a ratification to man. Pretty much 
 the same theory that is, the same way of accounting 
 for the natural existence without disturbing the super- 
 natural functions may be applied to the great con- 
 stellation of the other hemisphere called the Southern 
 Cross. It is viewed popularly in South America and 
 the southern ports of our northern hemisphere as the 
 great banner, or gonfalon, held aloft by Heaven before 
 the Spanish heralds of the true faith in 1492. To 
 that superstitious and ignorant race it costs not an 
 effort to suppose that, by some synchronizing miracle, 
 the constellation had been then specially called into 
 existence at the very moment when the first Christian 
 procession, bearing a cross in their arms, solemnly 
 stepped on shore from the vessels of Christendom. 
 We Protestants know better : we understand the im- 
 possibility of supposing such a narrow and local ref- 
 erence in orbs so transcendently vast as those com- 
 posing the constellation orbs removed from each 
 other by such unvoyageable worlds of space, and 
 having, in fact, no nal reference to each other more
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 539 
 
 than to any other heavenly bodies whatsoever. The 
 anity of synthesis, by which they are composed into 
 one figure of a cross, we know to be a mere accident- 
 al result from an arbitrary synthesis of human fancy. 
 Take such and such stars, compose them into letters, 
 and they will spell such a word. But still it was our 
 DWF. choice, a synthesis of our own fancy, originally 
 .o combine them in this way. They might be divided 
 from each other and otherwise combined. All this 
 is true ; and yet, as the combination does spontaneous- 
 ly offer itself 43 to every eye, as the glorious cross does 
 really glitter forever through the silent hours of a vast 
 hemisphere, even they who are not superstitious may 
 willingly yield to the belief, that as the rainbow was 
 laid in the very elements and necessities of Nature, 
 yet still bearing a prededication to a service which 
 would not be called for until many ages had passed, 
 so also the mysterious cipher of man's imperishable 
 hopes may have been intwined and inwreathed with 
 the starry heavens from their earliest creation, as a 
 prefiguration as a silent heraldry of hope through 
 one period, and as a heraldry of gratitude through the 
 other. 
 
 All these cases which we have been rehearsing, 
 taking them in the fullest literality, agree in this gen- 
 eral point of union they are all silent incarnations 
 of miraculous power miracles, supposing them to 
 have been such originally, locked up and imbodied 
 in the regular course of Nature, just as we see linea- 
 ments of faces and of forms in petrifactions, in varie 
 gated marbles, in spars, or in rocky strata, which ou
 
 540 MODERX SUPERSTITION. 
 
 fancy interprets as once having been real human exist- 
 ences, but which are now confounded with the sub- 
 stance of a mineral product. 44 Even those who are 
 most superstitious, therefore, look upon cases of this 
 order as occupying a midway station between the 
 physical and the hyperphysical, between the regular 
 course of Nature and the providential interruption of 
 that course. The stream of the miraculous is heie 
 confluent with the stream of the natural. By such 
 legends the credulous man finds his superstition but 
 little nursed ; the incredulous finds his philosophy but 
 little revolted. Both alike will be willing to admit, 
 for instance, that the apparent act of reverential thanks- 
 giving in certain birds, when drinking, is caused and 
 supported by a physiological arrangement ; and yet, 
 perhaps, both alike would bend so far to the legendary 
 faith as to allow a child to believe, and would perceive 
 a pure childlike beauty in believing, that the bird was 
 thus rendering a homage of deep thankfulness to the 
 universal Father, who watches for the safety of spar- 
 rows and sends his rain upon the just and upon the 
 unjust. In short, the faith in this order of the physico- 
 miraculous is open alike to the sceptical and the non- 
 sceptical ; it is touched superficially with the coloring 
 of superstition with its tenderness, its humility, its 
 thankfulness, its awe ; but, on the other hand, it is not 
 therefore tainted with the coarseness, with the silliness, 
 with the credulity of superstition. Such a faith re- 
 poses upon the universal signs diffused through Nature 
 und blends with the mysterious of natural grandeur* 
 Vherever found with the -riysterious of the starry
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 541 
 
 Heavens, with the mysterious of music, and with thai 
 infinite form of the mysterious for man's dimmest 
 misgivings, 
 
 " Whose dwelling is the light of setting Buna." 
 
 But, from this earliest note in the ascending scale 
 of superstitious faith, let us pass to a more alarming 
 key. This first, which we have styled (in equity as 
 well as for distinction) the Ovidian, is too aerial, too 
 allegoric almost, to be susceptible of much terror. I' 
 is the mere fancy, in a mood half playful, half tender,, 
 which submits to the belief. It is the feeling, the sen- 
 timent, which creates the faith, not the faith which 
 creates the feeling. And thus far we see that modern 
 feeling and Christian feeling have been to the full as 
 operative as any that is peculiar to paganism ; judging 
 by the Romish legenda, very much more so. The 
 Ovidian illustrations, under a false superstition, are 
 entitled to give the designation, as being the first, the 
 earliest, but not at all as the richest. Besides that, 
 Ovid's illustrations emanated often from himself indi- 
 vidually, not from the popular mind of his country ; 
 ?urs of the same classification uniformly repose on 
 large popular traditions from the whole of Christian 
 antiquity. These again are agencies of the super- 
 natural which can never have a private or personal 
 application ; they belong to all mankind and to all 
 generations. But the next in order are more solemn ; 
 
 hey become terrific by becoming personal. These 
 comprehend all that vast body of the marvellous which 
 
 expressed by the word ominous. On this head, ds
 
 542 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 dividing itself into the ancient and modern, we will 
 speak next. 
 
 Every body is aware of the deep emphasis which 
 the pagans laid upon words and upon names undei 
 this aspect of the ominous. The name of several 
 places was formally changed by the Roman govern- 
 ment, solely with a view to that contagion of evil 
 which was thought to lurk in the syllables if taken 
 significantly. Thus the town of Maleventum (Ill- 
 come, as one might render it) had its name changed 
 by the Romans to Beneventum, (or. Welcome.) Epi- 
 damnum, again, the Grecian Calais, corresponding to 
 the Roman Dover of Brundusium, was a name that 
 would have startled the stoutest-hearted Roman " from 
 his propriety." Had he suffered this name to escape 
 him inadvertently, his spirits would have forsaken him 
 he would have pined away under a certainty of 
 misfortune, like a poor negro of Koromantyn who is 
 the victim of Obi. 45 As a Greek word, which it was, 
 the name imported no ill ; but for a Roman to say, 
 Tbo Epidamnum, was in effect saying, though in a 
 hybrid dialect, half Greek, half Roman, " I will go to 
 ruin." The name was therefore changed to Dyrrach- 
 ium a substitution which quieted more anxieties in 
 Roman hearts than the erection of a lighthouse or 
 the deepening of the harbor mouth. A case equally 
 strong, to take one out of many hundreds that have 
 come down to us, is reported by Livy. There was 
 en officer in a Roman legion, at some period of the 
 republic, who bore the name either of Atrius Umber, 
 or Umbrius Ater ; and this man being ordered on 
 ome expedition, the soldiers refused to follow him
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 543 
 
 Fhey did right. We remember that Mr. Coleridge 
 used facetiously to call the well-known sister of Dr. 
 Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld, " that pleonasm of nakedness " 
 the idea of nakedness being reduplicated and rever- 
 berated in the bare and the bald. This Atrius Umber 
 might be called " that pleonasm of darkness ; " and 
 one might say to him, in the words of Othello, "What 
 needs this iteration ? " To serve under the Gloomy 
 was enough to darken the spirit of hope ; but to serve 
 under the Black Gloomy was really rushing upon de- 
 struction. Yet it will be alleged that Captain Death 
 was a most favorite and heroic leader in the English 
 navy; and that in our own times, Admiral Coffin 
 though an American by birth, has not been unpopular 
 in the same service. This is true ; and all that can 
 be said is, that these names were two-edged swords, 
 which might be made to tell against the enemy as well 
 as against friends. And possibly the Eoman centurion 
 might have turned his name to the same account had 
 he possessed the great dictator's presence of mind; 
 for he, when landing in Africa, having happened to 
 stumble, an omen of the worst character in Eoman 
 estimation, took out its sting by following up his own 
 oversight, as if it had been intentional, falling to the 
 ground, kissing it, and ejaculating that in this way he 
 appropriated the soil. 
 
 Omens of every class were certainly regarded in 
 ancient Rome with a reverence that can hardly be 
 lurpassed; but yet, with respect to these omens de- 
 rived from names, it is certain that our modern times 
 fiave more memorable examples on record. Out of 
 
 large number which occur to us we will cite two
 
 544 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 The present * King of the French bore in his boyish 
 days a title which he would not have borne but for an 
 omen of bad augury attached to his proper title. He 
 was called the Due de Chartres before the revolution, 
 whereas his proper title was Due de Valois. And the 
 origin of the change was this : The regent's father 
 had been the sole brother of Louis Quatorze. He 
 married for his first wife our English princess Hen- 
 rietta, the sister of Charles II., (and through her daugh- 
 ter, by the way, it is that the house of Savoy, i. e., of 
 Sardinia, has pretensions to the English throne.) This 
 unhappy lady, it is too well established, was poisoned. 
 Voltaire, amongst many others, has affected to doubt 
 the fact, for which in his time there might be some 
 excuse ; but, since then, better evidences have placed 
 the matter beyond all question. We now know both 
 the fact, and the how, and the why. The duke, who 
 probably was no party to the murder of his young 
 wife, though otherwise on bad terms with her, married 
 for his second wife a coarse German princess, homely 
 in every sense, and a singular contrast to the elegant 
 creature whom he had lost. She was a daughter of 
 the Bavarian elector, ill tempered by her own con- 
 fession, self-willed, and a plain speaker to excess, but 
 otherwise a woman of honest German principles. Un- 
 happy she was through a long life unhappy through 
 the monotony as well as the malicious intrigues of the 
 French court ; and so much so, that she did her best 
 (though without effect) to prevent her Bavarian niece 
 from becoming dauphiness. She acquits her husband 
 however, in the memoirs which she left behind, of any 
 intentioni>l share in her unhappiness ; she describes 
 * This was written, I belieye, about 1839.
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 545 
 
 lum constantly as a well-disposed prince. But whether 
 it were, that, often walking in the dusk through the 
 numerous apartments of that vast mansion which her 
 husband had so mush enlarged, naturally she turned 
 her thoughts to the injured lady who had presided there 
 before herself, or whether it arose from the inevitable 
 gloom which broods continually over mighty palaces, 
 so much ia known for certain, that one evening, in the 
 twilight, she met, at a remote quarter of the reception 
 rooms, something that she conceived to be a spectie. 
 What she fancied to have passed on that occasion was 
 never known except to her nearest friends ; and, if she 
 made any explanations in her memoirs, the editor has 
 thought fit to suppress them. She mentions only, that 
 in consequence of some ominous circumstances relat- 
 ing to the title of Valois, which was the proper second 
 title of the Orleans family, her son, the regent, had 
 assumed in his boyhood that of Due de Chartres. 
 His elder brother was dead, so that the superior title 
 was open to him; but, in consequence of those mys- 
 terious omens, whatever they might be, which occa- 
 sioned much whispering at the time, the great title of 
 Valois was laid aside forever as of bad augury ; nor 
 has it ever been resumed through a century and a half 
 thai have followed that mysterious warning, nor will 
 it be resumed unless the numerous children of the 
 present Or cans branch should find themselves dis- 
 tressed for ancient titles; which is not likely, since 
 they enjoy the honors of the elder house, and are now 
 lie children of France in a technical sense. 
 
 Here we have a great European case of state omens 
 aa the eldest of Christian houses. The next which wo 
 35
 
 546 MODKRX SUPERSTITION. 
 
 shall cite is equally a state case, and carries its public 
 verification along with itself. In the spring of 1799, 
 when Napoleon was lying before Acre, he became 
 anxious for news from Upper Egypt, whither he had 
 despatched Dessaix in pursuit of a distinguished Mame- 
 luke leader. This was in the middle of May. Not 
 many days after, a courier arrived with favorable do 
 spatches favorable in the main, but reporting one 
 tragical occurrence on a small scale, that to Napoleon, 
 for a superstitious reason, outweighed the public pros- 
 perity. A djerme, or Nile boat of the largest class, 
 having on board a large party of troops and of wound- 
 ed men, together with most of a regimental band, had 
 run ashore at the village of Benouth. No case could 
 be more hopeless. The neighboring Arabs were of 
 the Yambo tribe of all Arabs the most ferocious 
 These Arabs and the Fellahs (whom, by the way, 
 many of our countrymen are so ready to represent as 
 friendly to the French and hostile to ourselves) had 
 f aken the opportunity of attacking the vessel. The 
 t ngagement was obstinate ; but at length the inevitable 
 catastrophe could be delayed no longer. The com- 
 mander, an Italian, named Morandi, was a brave man : 
 any fate appeared better than that which awaited him 
 from an enemy so malignant. He set fire to the pow- 
 der magazine ; the vessei blew up ; Morandi perished 
 in the Nile ; and all of less nerve, who had previously 
 reached the shore in safety, were put to death to the 
 very last man, with cruelties the most detestable, by 
 .heir inhuman enemies. For all this Napoleon cared 
 ottle ; but one solitary fact there was in the repor* 
 *hich struck him with consternation. This ill-fated
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 547 
 
 i/erme, what was it called ? It was called IS Italic, 
 and in the name of the vessel Napoleon read an augury 
 of the fate which had befallen the Italian territory. 
 Considered as a dependency of France, he felt certain 
 that Italy was lost ; and Napoleon was .nconsolable. But 
 what possible connection, it was asked, can exist be- 
 tween this vessel on the Nile and a remote peninsula 
 of Southern Europe ? " No matter," replied Napoleon ; 
 " my presentiments never deceive me. You will see 
 that all is ruined. I am satisfied that my Italy, my 
 conquest, is lost to France ! " So, indeed, it was. 
 All European news had long been intercepted by the 
 English cruisers ; but immediately after the battle with 
 the vizier, in July, 1799, an English admiral first in- 
 formed the French army of Egypt that Massena and 
 others had lost all that Bonaparte had won in 1796. 
 But it is a strange illustration of human blindness that 
 this very subject of Napoleon's lamentation this 
 very campaign of 1799 it was, with its blunders and 
 its long equipage of disasters, that paved the way for 
 liis own elevation to the consulship just seven calen- 
 dar months from the receipt of that Egyptian despatch ; 
 nince most certainly, in the struggle of Brumaire, 1799, 
 loubtful and critical through every stage, it was the 
 pointed contrast between his Italian campaigns and 
 those of his successors which gave effect to Napoleon's 
 pretensions with the political combatants, and which 
 orocured them a ratification amongst the people. The 
 oss of Italy was essential to the full effect of Napoleon's 
 previous conquest. That and the imbecile char- 
 acters of Napoleon's chief military opponents were 
 the true keys to the great revolution of Brumaire.
 
 548 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 Tho stone which he rejected became the keystone of 
 the arch ; so that, after all, he valued the omen false- 
 ly ; though the very next news from Europe, courte- 
 ously communicated by his English enemies, showed 
 that he had interpreted its meaning rightly. 
 
 These omens, derived from names, are therefore 
 common to the ancient and the modern world. But 
 perhaps, in strict logic, they ought to have been classed 
 as one subdivision or variety under a much larger 
 head viz., words generally, no matter whether proper 
 names or appellatives, as operative powers and agen- 
 cies, having, that is to say, a charmed power against 
 some party concerned from the moment that they leave 
 the lips. 
 
 Homer describes prayers as having a separate life, 
 rising buoyantly upon wings, and making their way 
 upwards to the throne of Jove. Such, but in a sense 
 gloomy and terrific, is the force ascribed under a wide- 
 spread superstition, ancient and modern, to words 
 uttered on critical occasions, or to words uttered at 
 any time, which point to critical occasions. Hence 
 vhe doctrine of evyTjfuafios, the necessity of abstaining 
 from strong words or direct words in expressing fatal 
 contingencies. It was shocking, at all times of pagan- 
 ism, to say of a third person, " If he should die," 
 or to suppose the case that he might be murdered. 
 The very word death was consecrated and forbidden. 
 Si quiddam humanum passus fuerit was the extreme 
 form to which men advanced in such cases ; and this 
 *crupulous feeling, originally founded on the supposed 
 efficacy of words, prevails to this day. It is a feeling 
 undoubtedly supported by good taste, which strongly
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION 549 
 
 impresses upon us all the discordant tone of all im- 
 passioned subjects, (death, religion, &c.,) with the 
 common key of ordinary conversation. But good taste 
 is not in itself sufficient to account for a scrupulous- 
 ness so general and so austere. In the lowest classes 
 there is a shuddering recoil still felt from uttering 
 coarsely and roundly the anticipation of a person's 
 death. Suppose a child, heir to some estate, the sub- 
 ject of conversation : the hypothesis of his death is 
 put cautiously, under such forms as, " If any thing but 
 good should happen ; " " if any change should occur ; " 
 " if any of us should chance to miscarry ; " and so 
 forth. Always a modified expression is sought 
 always an indirect one. And this timidity arises 
 under the old superstition still lingering amongst men, 
 like that ancient awe, alluded to by Wordsworth, for 
 the sea and its deep secrets feelings that have not, 
 no, nor ever will, utterly decay. No excess of nautical 
 skill will ever perfectly disenchant the great abyss 
 from its terrors no progressive knowledge will ever 
 medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and 
 pathless power given to words of a certain import, or 
 .altered in certain situations, by a parent, to persecuting 
 or insulting children ; by the victim of horrible oppres- 
 sion when laboring in final agonies ; 46 and by others, 
 whether cursing or blessing, who stand central to great 
 passions, to great interests, or to great perplexities. 
 
 And here, by way of parenthesis, we may stop to ex- 
 plain the force of that expression, so common in Scrip- 
 lure, ''Thou hast said it." It is an answer oftea 
 adopted by our Savior and the meaninor >o VI*JA t n 
 be this : Many forms in eastern idioms, as weil as m
 
 550 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 the Greek occasionally, though meant interrogatively 
 are of a nature to convey a direct categorical affirma- 
 tion, unless as their meaning is modified by the cadence 
 and intonation. Art thou, detached from this vocal 
 and accentual modification, is equivalent to thou art. 
 Nay even apart from this accident, the popular be- 
 lief authorized the notion, that simply to have uttered 
 any great thesis, though unconsciously, simply to 
 have united verbally any two great ideas, though for a 
 purpose the most different or even opposite, had the 
 mysterious power of realizing them in act. An ex- 
 clamation, though in the purest spirit of sport, to a boy, 
 " You shall be our imperator" was many times sup- 
 posed to be the forerunner and fatal mandate for the 
 boy's elevation. Such words executed themselves. 
 To connect, though but for denial or for mockery, the 
 ideas of Jesus and the Messiah, furnished an augury 
 that eventually they would be found to coincide and 
 to have their coincidence admitted. It was an ar- 
 gumentum ad hominem, and drawn from a popular 
 faith. 
 
 But a modern reader will object the want of an 
 accompanying design or serious meaning on the part 
 of him who utters the words he never meant his 
 words to be taken seriously nay, his purpose was 
 the very opposite. True ; and precisely that is the 
 reason why his words are likely to operate effectually 
 a^d why they should be feared. Here lies the critical 
 point which most of all distinguishes this faith. Words 
 took effect, not merely in default of a serious use, buf 
 exactly in consequence of that default. It was the 
 chance word, the stray word, the word uttered in jest
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 551 
 
 r in trifling, or in scorn, or unconsciously, which took 
 effect ; whilst ten thousand words, uttered with purpose 
 and deliberation, were sure to prove inert. One case 
 will illustrate this : Alexander of Macedon, in the 
 outset of his great expedition, consulted the oracle at 
 Delphi. For the sake of his army, had he been even 
 without personal faith, he desired to have his enterprise 
 consecrated. No persuasions, however, would move 
 the priestess to enter upon her painful and agitating 
 duties for the sake of obtaining the regular answer 
 of the god. Wearied with this, Alexander seized the 
 great lady by the arm, and, using as much violence 
 as was becoming to the two characters, of a great 
 prince acting and a great priestess suffering, he 
 pushed her gently backwards to the tripod on which 
 in her professional character, she was to seat herself. 
 Upon this, in the hurry and excitement of the moment, 
 the priestess exclaimed, /2 nai, avixyros si son, thou 
 art irresistible ; never adverting for an instant to his 
 martial purposes, but simply to his personal importu- 
 nities. The person whom she thought of as incapable 
 of resistance was herself; and all she meant con- 
 *ciously was, O son, I can refuse nothing to one so 
 earnest. But mark what followed. Alexander desisted 
 at once ; he asked for no further oracle ; he refused 
 it, and exclaimed, joyously, "Now, then, noble priest- 
 ess, farewell ! I have the oracle ; I have your answer ; 
 and better than any which you could deliver from the 
 tripod. I am invincible ; so you have declared ; you 
 cannot revoke it. True, you thought not of Persia 
 you thought only of my importunity. But that very 
 fact is what ratifies your answer. In its blindness ]
 
 552 MODERN SUPERSTITION*. 
 
 recognize its truth. An oracle from a god might be 
 distorted by political ministers of the god, as in time 
 oast too often has been suspected. The oracle has 
 been said to Medize, and, in my own father's time, to 
 Philippize ; but an oracle delivered unconsciously 
 indirectly, blindly, that is the oracle which cannot 
 deceive." Such was the all-famous oracle which 
 Alexander accepted such was the oracle on which 
 he and his army reposing went forth " conquering and 
 to conquer." 
 
 Exactly on this principle do the Turks act in putting 
 so high a value on the words of idiots. Enlightened 
 Christians have often wondered at their allowing any 
 weight to people bereft of understanding. But that is 
 the very reason for allowing them weight ; that very 
 defect it is which makes them capable of being organs 
 for conveying words from higher intelligences. A fine 
 human intelligence cannot be a passive instrument 
 it cannot be a mere tube for conveying the words of 
 inspiration : such an intelligence will intermingle ideas 
 of its own, or otherwise modify what is given and 
 pollute what is sacred. 
 
 It is also on this principle that the whole practice 
 and doctrine of sortilegy rest. Let us confine our- 
 selves to that mode of sortilegy which is conducted 
 by throwing open privileged books at random, leaving 
 to chance the page and the particular line on which 
 iie oracular functions are thrown. The books used 
 have varied with the caprice or the error of ages 
 Once the Hebrew Scriptures had the preference. 
 Probably they were laid aside, not because the rev 
 erence for their authority decayed, but because i
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 553 
 
 increased. In later times, Virgil has been the favorite. 
 Considering the very limited range of ideas to which 
 Virgil was tied by his theme, a colonizing expedition 
 in a barbarous age, no worse book could have been 
 selected: 47 so little indeed does the Mneid exhibit of 
 human life in its multiformity, that much tampering 
 with the text is required to bring real cases of human 
 interest and real situations within the scope of any Vir- 
 gilian sentence, though aided by the utmost latitude of 
 accommodation. A king, a soldier, a sailor, &c., 
 might look for correspondences to their own circum- 
 stances ; but not many others. Accordingly, every 
 body remembers the remarkable answer which Charles 
 I. received at Oxford from this Virgilian oracle about 
 the opening of the Parliamentary war. But from this 
 limitation in the range of ideas it was that others, and 
 very pious people too, have not thought it profane to 
 resume the old reliance on the Scriptures. No case, 
 indeed, can try so severely, or put upon record so con- 
 spicuously, this indestructible propensity for seeking 
 light out of darkness, this thirst for looking into the 
 future by the aid of dice, real or figurative, as the fact 
 of men eminent for piety having yielded to the temp- 
 tation. We give one instance the instance of a 
 person who, in practical theology, has been, perhaps, 
 more popular than any other in any church. Dr. 
 Doddridge, in his earlier days, was in a dilemma both 
 of conscience and of taste as to the election he should 
 maks between two situations one in possession, 
 both at his command. He was settled at Harboro', in 
 Leicestershire, and was " pleasing himself with the 
 <riev of a continuance " in that situation. True, he had
 
 354 MODERN SUPERSTITION*. 
 
 received an invitation to Northampton ; but the reasons 
 against complying seemed so strong that nothirjg was 
 wanting but the civility of going over to Northampton 
 and making an apologetic farewell. On the last Sun- 
 day in November of the year 1729 the doctor went 
 and preached a sermon in conformity with those pur- 
 poses. " But," says he, " on the morning of that day 
 an incident happened which affected me greatly." 
 On the night previous, it seems, he had been urged 
 very importunately by his Northampton friends to un- 
 dertake the vacant office. Much personal kindness had 
 concurred with this public importunity ; the good doctoi 
 was affected ; he had prayed fervently, alleging in his 
 prayer, as the reason which chiefly weighed with him 
 to reject the offer, that it was far beyond his forces, 
 and chiefly because he was too young 48 and had no 
 assistant. He goes on thus : " As soon as ever this 
 address" (meaning the prayer) " was ended, I passed 
 through a room of the house in which I lodged, where 
 a child was reading to his mother, and the only words 
 I heard distinctly were these : And as thy days, so shall 
 thy strength be." This singular coincidence between 
 his own difficulty and a scriptural line caught at ran- 
 dom in passing hastily through a room (but observe, 
 t line insulated from the context and placed in high 
 relief to his ear) shook his resolution ; accident co- 
 operated ; a promise to be fulfilled at Northampton 
 in a certain contingency fell due at the instant ; the 
 doctor was detained ; this detention gave time for 
 further representations ; new motives arose, old difficul 
 ties were removed ; and finally the doctor saw, in all tin* 
 succession of steps. the first of which, however, la?
 
 MODERN SUPBBSTITION. 555 
 
 in the Sortet Biblica, clear indications of a provi* 
 dential guidance. With that conviction he took up his 
 abode at Northampton, and remained there for the 
 next thirty-one years, until he left it for his grave 
 at Lisbon ; in fact, he passed at Northampton the 
 whole of his public life. It must, therefore, be allowed 
 to stand upon the records of sortilegy, that in the main 
 direction of his life not, indeed, as to its spirit, but 
 as to its form and local connections a Protestant 
 divine of much merit, and chiefly in what regards 
 practice, and of the class most opposed to superstition, 
 took his determining impulse from a variety of the 
 Sortes Virgillana. 
 
 This variety was known in early times to the Jews 
 as early, indeed, as the era of the Grecian Pericles, 
 if we are to believe the Talmud. It is known famil- 
 iarly to this day amongst Polish Jews, and is called 
 Bath-col^ or the daughter of a voice ; the meaning of 
 which appellation is this: The Urim and Thummim, 
 or oracle in the breastplate of the high priest, spoke 
 directly from God ; it was, therefore, the original or 
 mother voice. But about the time of Pericles, that is, 
 exactly one hundred years before the time of Alexan- 
 der the Great, the light of prophecy was quenched 
 n Malachi or Haggai, and the oracular jewels in the 
 Breastplate became simultaneously dim. Hencefor- 
 wards the mother voice was heard no longer ; but to 
 this succeeded an imperfect or daughter voice, (Bath- 
 tolj) which lay in the first words happening to arrest 
 the attention at a moment of perplexity. An illus- 
 tration, which has been often quoted from the TaN 
 mud, is to the following effect : Rabbi Tochanan and
 
 536 MODKKN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 Rabbi Simeon Ben Lachish were anxious about a 
 friend, Rabbi Samuel, six hundred miles distant on the 
 Euphrates. Whilst talking earnestly together on this 
 subject in Palestine, they passed a school : they paused 
 to listen : it was a child reading the First Book of 
 Samuel ; and the words which they caught were these : 
 And Samuel died. These words they received as a 
 Bath-col; and the next horseman from the Euphrates 
 brought word accordingly that Rabbi Samuel had been 
 gathered to his fathers at some station on the Eu- 
 phrates. 
 
 Here is the very same case, the same Bath-col sub- 
 stantially, which we have cited from Orton's Life of 
 Doddridge. And Du Cange himself notices, in his 
 Glossary, the relation which this bore to the pagan 
 Sortes. " It was," says he, " a fantastical way of 
 divination, invented by the Jews, not unlike the Sortes 
 Virgiliana of the heathens; for as with them the 
 first words they happened to dip into in the works of 
 that poet were a kind of oracle whereby they predicted 
 future events, so with the Jews, when they appealed 
 to Bath-col, the first words they heard from any one's 
 mouth were looked upon as a voice from Heaven 
 directing them in the matter they inquired about." 
 
 If the reader imagines that this ancient form of the 
 practical miraculous is at all gone out of use, even the 
 example of Dr. Doddridge may satisfy him to the con- 
 trary. Such an example was sure to authorize a large 
 fmhation. But, even apart from that, the superstition 
 B common. The records of conversion amongst felons 
 And other ignorant persons might be cited by hundreds 
 upon hundreds to prove that no practice '*s more com-
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 557 
 
 than that of trying the spiritual fate and abid- 
 ing by the import of any passage in the Scriptures 
 svhich may first present itself to the eye. Cowper, the 
 poet, has recorded a case of this sort in his own ex- 
 perience. It is one to which all the unhappy are 
 prone. But a mode of questioning the oracles of 
 darkness, far more childish, and, under some shape 
 or other, equally common amongst those who are 
 prompted by mere vacancy of mind, without that de- 
 termination to sacred fountains which is impressed by 
 misery, may be found in the following extravagant 
 silliness of Rousseau, which we give in his own words 
 a case for which he admits that he himself would 
 have shut up any other man (meaning in a lunatic hos- 
 pital) whom he had seen practising the same absurd- 
 ities : 
 
 " Au milieu de mes Etudes et d'une vie innocente autant qu'on la 
 puisse mener, et tnalgre tout ce qu'on m'avoit pu dire, la peur de 
 1'enfer m'agitoit encore. Souvent je me demandois, En quel etat 
 uis-je ? Si je mourrois a 1'instant meme serois-je damnd? Selon 
 mes Jansenistes, [he had been reading the books of the Port Royal,] 
 la chose est indubitable : mais, selon ma conscience, il me paroissoit 
 que non. Toujours craintif et flottant dans cette cruelle incerti- 
 tude, j'avois recours (pour en sortir) aux expedients les plus risi 
 bles, et pour lesquels je ferois volontiers enfermer un homme si je 
 lui en voyois faire autant. * * Un jour, revant a ce triste 
 sujet, je m'exersois machinalement a lancer les pierres centre les 
 troncs des arbres ; et cela avec mon addresse ordinaire, c'est-a-dire, 
 Bans presque jamais en toucher aucun. Tout au milieu de ce bel 
 exercice, je m'avisai de faire une espece de pronostic pour calmer 
 mon inquietude. Je me dis, Je m'en vaia Jeter cette pierre centre 
 k'arbre qui est vis-a-vis de moi : si je le touche, signe de salut : si 
 je le manque, signe de damnation. Tout en disant ainsi, je jette 
 ma pierre d'une main tremblante, et avec un horrible battement de 
 o3or, mais si heureusement qu'elle ^a frapper au beau-milieu de 
 "arbre : ce qui veritablement n'etoit pas difficile car j'avoii eo
 
 ;>58 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 soin de le choisir fort gros et fort pres. Depuis lors j& n'ai pltu 
 double de man salut. Je ne sais, en me rappelaut ce trait, si je doiu 
 fire ou gemir sur moi-meme." Les Confessions, Partie I. Livre VJ. 
 
 Now, really, if Rousseau thought fit to try such Ire- 
 mendous appeals by taking " a shy " at any random 
 object, he should have governed his sortilegy (for such 
 it may be called) with something more like equity. 
 Fair play is a jewel ; and in such a case a man is sup- 
 posed to play against an adverse party hid in darkness. 
 To shy at a cow within six feet distance gives no 
 chance at all to his dark antagonist. A pigeon rising 
 from a trap at a suitable distance might be thought a 
 sincere staking of the interest at issue : but, as to the 
 massy stem of a tree " fort gros et fort pres," the sar- 
 casm of a Roman emperor applies, that to miss under 
 such conditions implied an original genius for stupidity, 
 and to hit was no trial of the case. After all, the sen- 
 timentalist had youth to plead in apology for this ex- 
 travagance. He was hypochondriacal ; he was in 
 solitude ; and he was possessed by gloomy imagina- 
 tions from the works of a society in the highest public 
 credit. But most readers will be aware of similar ap 
 peals to the mysteries of Providence made in public 
 by illustrious sectarians speaking from the solemn sta- 
 iion of a pulpit. We forbear to quote cases of this 
 nature, though really existing in print, because we feel 
 that the blasphemy of such anecdotes is more revolting 
 and more painful to pious minds than the absurdity ia 
 amusing. Meantime it must not be forgotten that the 
 principle concerned, though it may happen to disgust 
 men when associated with ludicrous circumstances, is 
 after all, tho very same which has latently governec
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 559 
 
 many modes of ordeal or judicial inquiry, and 
 which has been adopted, b.indly, as a moral rule or 
 ranon equally by the blindest of the pagans, the most 
 fanatical of the Jews, and the most enlightened of the 
 Christians. It proceeds upon the assumption that man, 
 by his actions, puts a question to Heaven, and that 
 Heaven answers by the event. Lucan, in a well- 
 known passage, takes it for granted that the cause 
 of Caesar had the approbation of the gods. And why ? 
 Simply from the event. It was notoriously the tri- 
 umphant cause. It was victorious, (victrix causa Deis 
 placuit ; sed victa Catoni.) It was the " victrix causa ; " 
 and, as such, simply because it was " victrix," it had a 
 right in his eyes to postulate the divine favor as mere 
 matter of necessary interference ; whilst, on the other 
 hand, the victa causa, though it seemed to Lucan sanc- 
 tioned by human virtue in the person of Cato, stood 
 unappealably condemned. 49 This mode of reasoning 
 may strike the reader as merely pagan. Not at all. 
 In England, at the close of the Parliamentary war, it 
 was generally argued that Providence had decided the 
 question against the royalists by the mere fact of the 
 issue. Milton himself, with all his hightoned moral- 
 ity, uses this argument as irrefragable ; which is odd 
 were it only on this account that the issue oughi 
 necessarily to have been held for a time as merely 
 hypothetic and liable to be set aside by possible counter 
 issues through one generation at the least. 50 But the 
 capital argument against such doctrine is to be found 
 n the New Testament. Strange that Milton should 
 overlook, and strange that moralists in general have 
 overlooked, the sudden arrest given to this dangerous,
 
 560 , MODEKX SUTEKSTITION. 
 
 but most prevalent, mode of reasoning by the Foundei 
 of our faith ! He first, he last, taught to his astonished 
 disciples the new truth, at that time the astounding 
 truth, that no relation exists between the immediate 
 practical events of things on the one side and divine 
 sentences on the other. There was no presumption, 
 he teaches them, against a man's favor with God, or 
 that of his parents, because he happened to be afflicted 
 to extremity with bodily disease. There was no shadow 
 of an argument for believing a party of men criminal 
 objects of heavenly wrath because upon them, by fatal 
 preference, a tower had fallen, and because their bodies 
 were exclusively mangled. How little can it be said 
 that Christianity has yet developed the fulness of its 
 power, when kings and senates so recently acted under 
 a total oblivion of this great, though novel, Christian 
 doctrine, and would do so still, were it not that religious 
 arguments have been banished by the progress of man- 
 ners from the field of political discussion ! 
 
 But, quitting this province of the ominous, where it 
 is made the object of a direct personal inquest, whether 
 by private or by national trials or the sortilegy of events, 
 iet us throw our eyes over the broader field of omens as 
 they offer themselves spontaneously to those who do 
 not seek or would even willingly evade them. There 
 are few of these, perhaps none, which are not univer- 
 sal in their authority, though every land in turn fancies 
 them (like its proverbs) of local prescription and origin 
 The deathwatch extends from England to Cashmere, 
 and across India diagonally to the remotest nook of 
 Bengal, over a three thousand miles' distance from the 
 entrance of the Indian Punjaub. A hare crossing a
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 561 
 
 man's path on starting in the morning has been held 
 in all countries alike to prognosticate evil in the course 
 of that day. Thus, in the Confessions of a Thug, 
 (which is partially built on a real judicial document, 
 and every where conforms to the usages cf Hindos- 
 tan,) the hero of the horrid narrative 51 charges some 
 disaster of his own upon having neglected such an 
 omen of the morning. The same belief operated in 
 pagan Italy. The same omen announced to Lord 
 Lindsay's Arab attendants in the desert the approach 
 of some disaster, which partially happened in the 
 morning. And a Highlander of the forty-second regi- 
 ment, in his printed memoirs, notices the same harbin- 
 ger of evil as having crossed his own path on a day of 
 personal disaster in Spain. 
 
 Birds are even more familiarly associated with such 
 ominous warnings. This chapter in the great volume 
 of superstition was indeed cultivated with unusual 
 solicitude amongst the pagans ornithomancy grew 
 into an elaborate science. But if every rule and dis 
 tinction upon the number and the position of birds, 
 whether to the right or the left, had been collected 
 from our own village matrons amongst ourselves, it 
 would appear that no more of this pagan science had 
 gone to wreck than must naturally follow the difference 
 between a believing and a disbelieving government. 
 Magpies are still of awful authority in village life, 
 according to their number, &c. ; for a striking illus- 
 tration of which we may refer the reader to Sir Walter 
 Scott's Demonology, reported not at second hand, but 
 from Sir Walter's personal communication with some 
 seafaring fellow-traveller in a stage coach. 
 36
 
 562 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 Among the ancient stories of the same class is 
 one which we shall repeat having reference to thai 
 Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great, before 
 whom St. Paul made his famous apology at Caesarea 
 This Agrippa, overwhelmed by debts, had fled from 
 Palestine to Rome in the latter years of Tiberius. His 
 mother's interest with the widow of Germanicus pro- 
 cured him a special recommendation to her son Caligula. 
 Viewing this child and heir of the popular Germanicus 
 as the rising sun, Agrippa had been too free in his 
 language. True, the uncle of Germanicus was the 
 reigning prince ; but he was old, and breaking up. 
 True, the son of Germanicus was not yet on the throne , 
 but he soon would be ; and Agrippa was rash enough 
 to call the emperor a superannuated old fellow, and 
 even to wish for his death. Sejanus was now dead 
 and gone ; but there was no want of spies ; and a 
 certain Macro reported his words to Tiberius. Agrip- 
 pa was in consequence arrested, the emperor himself 
 condescending to point out the noble Jew to the officer 
 on duty. The case was a gloomy one, if Tiberius 
 should happen to survive much longer : and the story 
 of the omen proceeds thus : " Now, Agrippa stood 
 in his bonds before the imperial palace, and in his af- 
 fliction leaned against a certain tree, upon the boughs 
 of which it happened that a bird had alighted which 
 the Romans call bubo, or the owl. All this was stead- 
 fastly observed by a German prisoner, who asked a 
 soldier what might be the name and offence of tha 
 man habited in purple. Being told that the man's 
 name was Agrippa, and that he was a Jew of high 
 rank, who had given a personal offence to the emperor
 
 MODEHN SUPEKSTITIOW. 5G3 
 
 Iho German asked permission to go near and address 
 him ; which being granted, he spoke thus : * This 
 disaster, I doubt not, young man, is trying to your 
 heart ; and perhaps you will not believe me when I 
 announce to you beforehand the providential deliver- 
 ance which is impending. However, this much I will 
 say, and for my sincerity let me appeal to my native 
 gods, as well as to the gods of this Rome, who have 
 brought us both into trouble, that no selfish objects 
 prompt me to this revelation ; for a revelation it is, 
 and to the following effect : It is fated that you shall 
 not long remain in chains. Your deliverance will be 
 speedy ; you shall be raised to the very highest rank 
 and power ; you shall be the object of as much envy 
 as now you are of pity ; you shall retain your pros- 
 perity till death ; and you shall transmit that prosperity 
 
 to your children. But ' and there the German 
 
 paused. Agrippa was agitated ; the bystanders were 
 attentive ; and, after a time, the German, pointing 
 solemnly to the bird, proceeded thus : * But this 
 remember heed fully, that, when next you see the 
 bird which now perches above your head, you will 
 have only five days longer to live ! This event will 
 be surely accomplished by that same mysterious god 
 who has thought fit to send the bird as a warning sign ; 
 and you, when you come to your glory, do not forget 
 me that foreshadowed it in your humiliation. " The 
 story adds, that Agrippa affected *o laugh when the 
 German concluded ; after which it goes on to say, 
 Jhat in a few weeks, being delivered by the death of 
 Tiberius, being released from prison by the very 
 irince on whose account he had incurred the risk,
 
 564 AIODKRN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 being raised to a tetrarch'y, and afterwards to the king 
 dom of all Judea, coming into all the prosperity which 
 had been promised to him by the German, and not 
 losing any part of his interest at Rome through the 
 assassination of his patron Caligula, he began to look 
 back respectfully to the words of the German and 
 forwards with anxiety to the second coming of the 
 bird. Seven years of sunshine had now slipped away 
 as silently as a dream. A great festival, shows and 
 vows, was on the point of being celebrated in honor of 
 Claudius Caesar, at Strato's Tower, otherwise called 
 Caesarea, the Roman metropolis of Palestine. Duty 
 and policy alike required that the king of the land 
 should go down and unite in this mode of religious 
 homage to the emperor. He did so ; and on the 
 second morning of the festival, by way of doing more 
 conspicuous honor to the great solemnity, he assumed 
 a very sumptuous attire of silver armor, burnished so 
 highly as to throw back a dazzling glare from the sun's 
 morning beams upon the upturned eyes of the vast 
 multitude around him. Immediately from the syco- 
 phantish part of the crowd, of whom a vast majority 
 were pagans, ascended a cry of glorification as to 
 some manifestation of Deity. Agrippa, gratified by 
 this success of his new apparel, and by this flattery, 
 not unusual in the case of kings, had not the firmness 
 (though a Jew, and conscious of the wickedness, 
 greater in himself than in the heathen crowd) to 
 reject the blasphemous homage. Voices of adoration 
 continued to ascend ; when suddenly, looking upwara 
 to the vast awnings prepared for screening the audi 
 ence from the noonday heats, the king perceived the
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 565 
 
 same ominous bird which he had seen at Rome in the 
 day of his affliction, seated quietly, and looking down 
 upon himself. In that same moment an icy pang 
 shot through his intestines. He was removed into the 
 palace ; and at the end of five days, completely worn 
 out by pain, Agrippa expired, in the fifty-fourth year of 
 his age and the seventh of his sovereign power. 52 
 
 Whether the bird here described as an owl was 
 really such may be doubted, considering the narrow 
 nomenclature of the Romans for all zoological pur- 
 poses and the total indifference of the Roman mind 
 to all distinctions in natural history which are not upon 
 the very largest scale. We should much suspect that 
 the bird was a magpie. Meantime, speaking of orni- 
 thoscopy in relation to Jews, we remember another 
 story in that subdivision of the subject which it may 
 be worth while repeating ; not merely on its own 
 account, as wearing a fine Oriental air, but also 
 for the correction which it suggests to a very com- 
 mon error. 
 
 In some period of Syrian warfare, a large military 
 detachment was entering at some point of Syria 
 from the desert of the Euphrates. At the head of the 
 whole array rode two men of some distinction : one 
 was an augur of high reputation ; the other was a Jew 
 called Mosollam, a man of admirable beauty, a match- 
 less horseman, an unerring archer, and accomplished 
 in all martial arts. As they were now first coming 
 within enclosed grounds after a long march in the 
 wilderness, the augur was most anxious to inaugurate 
 the expedition by some considerable omen. Watching 
 wsruwsly, therefore, he soon saw a bird of splendid
 
 566 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 plumage perching on a low wall. " Halt ! " he said to 
 the advanced guard ; and all drew up in a line. At 
 that moment of silence and expectation, Mosollara, 
 slightly turning himself in his saddle, drew his bow- 
 string to his ear ; his Jewish hatred of pagan auguries 
 burned within him ; his inevitable shaft went right to 
 its mark ; and the beautiful bird fell dead. The augui 
 turned round in fury. But the Jew laughed at him, 
 " This bird, you say, should have furnished us with 
 omens of our future fortunes ; but, had he known any 
 thing of his own, he would never have perched where 
 he did or have come within the range of Mosollam's 
 archery. How should that bird know our destiny, who 
 did not know that it was his own to be shot by Mosol- 
 lam the Jew ? " 
 
 Now, this is a most common but a most erroneous 
 way of arguing. In a case of this kind, the bird was 
 not supposed to have any conscious acquaintance with 
 futurity, either for his own benefit or that of others. 
 But even where such a consciousness may be supposed, 
 as in the case of oneiromancy, or prophecy by means 
 of dreams, it must be supposed limited, and the more 
 limited in a personal sense as they are illimitable in a 
 sublime one. Who imagines that, because a Daniel 
 or Ezekiel foresaw the grand revolutions of the earth, 
 therefore they must or could have foreseen the little 
 details of their own ordinary life ? And even descend- 
 ing from that perfect inspiration to the more doubtful 
 power of augury amongst the pagans, (concerning 
 which the most eminent of theologians have held very 
 opposite theories,} one thing is certain, that, so long ai 
 we entertain such pretensions or discuss them at all
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 567 
 
 <ve must take them with the principle of those who pro 
 fess such arts, not with principles of our own arbitrary 
 invention. 
 
 One example will make this clear. There are in 
 England* 3 a class of men who practise the pagan rhab- 
 domancy in a limited sense. They carry a rod or 
 rhabdos (p|5<Joj) of willow : this they hold horizon- 
 tally; and, by the bending of the rod towards the 
 ground, they discover the favorable places for sinking 
 wells a matter of considerable importance in a prov- 
 ince so ill watered as the northern district of Somer- 
 setshire, &c. These people are locally called jowsers ; 
 and it is probable that from the suspicion with which 
 their art has been usually regarded amongst people of 
 education, as a mere legerdemain trick of Douster- 
 swivel's, is derived the slang word to chouse, for 
 swindle. Meantime the experimental evidences of a 
 real practical skill in these men, and the enlarged 
 compass of speculation in these days, have led many 
 enlightened people to a Stoic o^, or suspension of 
 judgment, on the reality of this somewhat mysterious 
 art. Now, in the East there are men who make the 
 same pretensions in a more showy branch of the art. 
 It is not water, but treasures, which they profess to find 
 by some hidden kind of rhabdomancy. The very ex- 
 istence of treasures with us is reasonably considered 
 R thing of improbable occurrence ; but in the un 
 settled East, and with the low valuation of human life 
 wherever Mahometanism prevails, insecurity and other 
 causes must have caused millions of such deposits in 
 every century to have perished as to any knowledge 
 of survivors. The sword has been moving backwards
 
 568 MODERN SUPERSTITION*. 
 
 and forwards, for instance, like a weaver's shuttle 
 since the time of Mahmoud the Ghaznevide, 54 in Anno 
 Domini 1000, in the vast regions between the Tigri? 
 the Oxus, and the Indus. Regularly as it approached 
 gold and jewels must have sunk by whole harvests into 
 the ground. A certain percentage has been doubtless 
 recovered ; a larger percentage has disappeared for- 
 ever. Hence naturally the jealousy of barbarous Ori- 
 entals that we Europeans, in groping amongst pyra- 
 mids, sphinxes, and tombs, are looking for buried 
 treasures. The wretches are not so wide astray in 
 what they believe as in what they disbelieve. The 
 treasures do really exist which they fancy ; but then, 
 also, the other treasures in the glorious antiquities have 
 that existence for our sense of beauty which to their 
 brutality is inconceivable. In these circumstances, 
 why should it surprise us that men will pursue the 
 science of discovery as a regular trade } Many dis- 
 coveries of treasure are doubtless made continually, 
 which, for obvious reasons, are communicated to 
 nobody. Some proportion there must be between 
 the sowing of such grain as diamonds or emeralds, and 
 the subsequent reaping, whether by accident or by art ; 
 for, with regard to the last, it is no more impossible 
 prlma fronte, that a substance may exist, having an 
 occult sympathy with subterraneous water or subter- 
 raneous gold, than that the magnet should have a sym- 
 pathy (as yet occult) with the northern pole of our planet. 
 The first flash of careless thought applied to such 
 a case will suggest that men holding powers of this 
 nature need not offer their services for hire to others 
 And this, ; n fact, is the objection universally urged by
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 569 
 
 as Euiopeans as decisive against their pretensions. 
 Their knavery, it is fancied, stands self-recorded , 
 since, assuredly, they would not be willing to divide 
 their subterranean treasures if they knew of any. But 
 the men are not in such self-contradiction as may 
 seem. Lady Hester Stanhope, from the better knowl- 
 edge she had acquired of Oriental opinions, set Dr. 
 Madden right on this point. The Oriental belief is, 
 that a fatality attends the appropriator of a treasure in 
 any case where he happens also to be the discoverer. 
 Such a person, it is held, will die soon, and suddenly ; 
 so that he is compelled to seek his remuneration 
 from the wages or fees of his employers, not from the 
 treasure itself. 
 
 Many more secret laws are held sacred amongst the 
 professors of that art than that which was explained by 
 Lady Hester Stanhope. These we shall not enter upon 
 at present ; but generally we may remark, that the 
 same practices of subterranean deposits, during our 
 troubled periods in Europe, led to the same supersti- 
 tions. And it may be added, that the same error has 
 arisen in both cases as to some of these superstitions. 
 How often must it have struck people of liberal feel- 
 ings, as a scandalous proof of the preposterous value 
 set upon riches by poor men, that ghosts should popu- 
 larly be supposed to rise and wander for the sake of 
 revealing the situations of buried treasures ! For our- 
 selves, we have been accustomed to view this popular 
 belief in the light of an argument for pity rather than 
 for contempt towards poor men, as indicating the ex- 
 treme pressure of that necessity which could so have 
 demoralized their natural sense of truth. But cer
 
 570 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 tainly, in whatever feelings originating, such popular 
 superstitions as to motives of ghostly missions did seem 
 to argue a deplorable misconception of the relation 
 subsisting between the spiritual world and the perisha- 
 ble treasures of this perishable world. Yet, when we 
 look into the Eastern explanations of this case, we find 
 that it is meant to express, not any over-valuation of 
 riches, but the direct contrary passion. A human 
 spirit is punished, such is the notion, punished in 
 the spiritual world, for excessive attachment to gold, 
 by degradation to the office of its guardian ; and from 
 this office the tortured spirit can release itself only by 
 revealing the treasure and transferring the custody. It 
 is a penal martyrdom, not an elective passion for gold, 
 which is thus exemplified in the wanderings of a 
 treasure ghost. 
 
 But, in a field where of necessity we are so much 
 limited, we willingly pass from the consideration of 
 these treasure or khasne phantoms (which alone suffi- 
 ciently insure a swarm of ghostly terrors for all Ori- 
 ental ruins of cities) to the same marvellous appari- 
 tions as they haunt other solitudes even more awful 
 than those of ruined cities. In this world there are 
 two mighty forms of perfect solitude the ocean and 
 the desert the wilderness of the barren sands and 
 the wilderness of the barren waters. Both are the 
 parents of inevitable superstitions of terrors, solemn, 
 ineradicable, eternal. Sailors and the children of the 
 desert are alike overrun with spiritual hauntings, from 
 accidents of peril essentially connected with those 
 modes of life and from the eternal spectacle of the 
 infinite. Voices seem to blend with the raving of thf
 
 MODERN SUPEHSTITION. 571 
 
 ea, which will forever impress the feeling of beings 
 more than human ; and every chamber of the great 
 wilderness which, with little interruption, stretches from 
 the Euphrates to the western shores of Africa, has its 
 own peculiar terrors both as to sights and sounds. In 
 the wilderness of Zin, between Palestine and the Red 
 Sea, a section of the desert well known in these days 
 to our own countrymen, bells are heard daily pealing, 
 for matins or for vespers, from some phantom convent 
 that no search of Christian or of Bedouin Arab has 
 ever been able to discover. These bells have sounded 
 since the crusades. Other sounds, trumpets, the Alala 
 of armies, &c., are heard in other regions of the desert. 
 Forms, also, are seen of more people than have any 
 right to be walking in human paths ; sometimes forms 
 of avowed terror ; sometimes, which is a case of far 
 more danger, appearances that mimic the shapes of 
 men, and even of friends or comrades. This is a case 
 much dwelt on by the old travellers, and which throws 
 a gloom over the spirits of all Bedouins, and of every 
 cafila, or caravan. We all know what a sensation of 
 loneliness or " eeriness " (to use an expressive term 
 of the ballad poetry) arises to any small party assem- 
 bling in a single room of a vast, desolate mansion ; 
 how the timid among them fancy continually that they 
 hear some remote door opening, or trace the sound of 
 suppressed footsteps from some distant staircase. Such 
 is the feeling in the desert, even in the midst of the 
 caravan. The mighty solitude is seen ; the dread si- 
 tence is anticipated which will succeed to this brief 
 transit of men, camels, and horses. Awe prevails 
 ern in the midst of society ; but, if the traveller
 
 572 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 should loiter behind from fatigue, or be so imprudent 
 as to ramble aside, should he from any cause once 
 lose sight of his party, it is held that his chance is 
 small of recovering their traces. And why ? Not 
 chiefly from the want of footmarks where the wind 
 effaces all impressions in half an hour, or of eyemarks 
 where all is one blank ocean of sand, but much more 
 from the sounds or the visual appearances which are 
 supposed to beset and to seduce all insulated wanderers. 
 Every body knows the superstitions of the ancients 
 about the Nympholeptoi, or those who had seen Pan ; 
 but far more awful and gloomy are the existing super- 
 stitions, throughout Asia and Africa, as to the perils of 
 those who are phantom-haunted in the wilderness. 
 The old Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, states them 
 well ; he speaks, indeed, of the Eastern, or Tartar 
 deserts, the steppes which stretch from European 
 Russia to the footsteps of the Chinese throne ; but 
 exactly the same creed prevails amongst the Arabs, 
 from Bagdad to Suez and Cairo from Rosetta to 
 Tunis Tunis to Timbuctoo, or Mequinez. " If, dur- 
 ing the daytime," says he, " any person should remain 
 behind until the caravan is no longer in sight, he hears 
 himself unexpectedly called to by name and in a 
 voice with which he is familiar. Not doubting that 
 the voice proceeds from some of his comrades, the 
 nhappy man is beguiled from the right direction ; 
 and, soon finding himself utterly confounded as to the 
 path, he roams about in distraction until he perishes 
 niserahly. If, on the other hand, this perilous separa- 
 tion of himself from the caravan should happen at 
 night) he is sure to hear the uproar of a great caval
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 573 
 
 eaae a mile or two to the right or left of the true track. 
 He is thus seduced on one side, and at break of day 
 Inds himself far removed from man. Nay, even at 
 noonday, it is well known that grave and respectable 
 men, to all appearance, will come up to a particular 
 traveller, will bear the look of a friend, and will 
 gradually lure him by earnest conversation to a dis- 
 tance from the caravan ; after which the sounds of 
 men and camels will be heard continually at all points 
 but the true one ; whilst an insensible turning by the 
 tenth of an inch at each separate step from the true 
 direction will very soon suffice to set the traveller's 
 face to the opposite point of the compass from that 
 which his safety requires, and which his fancy repre- 
 sents to him as his real direction. Marvellous, indeed, 
 and almost passing belief, are the stories reported of 
 these desert phantoms, which are said at times to fill 
 the air with choral music from all kinds of instruments, 
 from drums, and the clash of arms ; so that oftentimes 
 a whole caravan are obliged to close up their open 
 ranks and to proceed in a compact line of march." 
 Lord Lindsay, in his very interesting travels in 
 Egypt, Edom, &c., agrees with Warton in supposing 
 ^and probably enough) that from this account of the 
 desert traditions in Marco Polo was derived Milton's 
 fine passage in Comus : 
 
 " Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, 
 And aery tongues that syllable men's names 
 On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses." 
 
 But the most remarkable of these desert supersti- 
 tions, as suggested by the mention of Lord Lindsay, is
 
 574 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 one which that young nobleman, in some place which 
 we cannot immediately find, has noticed, but which he 
 only was destined by a severe personal loss immedi- 
 ately to illustrate. Lord L. quotes from Vincent le 
 Blanc an anecdote of a man in his own caravan, the 
 companion of an Arab merchant, who disappeared in 
 a mysterious manner. Four Moors, with a retaining 
 fee of one hundred ducats, were sent in quest of him, 
 but came back re infecta. " And 'tis uncertain," adds 
 Le Blanc, " whether he was swallowed up in the sands, 
 or met his death by any other misfortune ; as it often 
 happens, by the relation of a merchant then in our 
 company, who told us, that two years before, travers- 
 ing the same journey, a comrade of his, going a little 
 aside from the company, saw three men, who called 
 him by his name ; and one of them, to his thinking, 
 favored very much his companion ; and as he was 
 about to follow them, his real companion calling him 
 to come back to his company, he found himself de- 
 ceived by the others, and thus was saved. And all 
 travellers in these parts hold, that in the deserts are 
 many such phantasms seen, that strive to seduce the 
 traveller." Thus far it is the traveller's own fault, 
 warned as he is continually by the extreme anxiety of 
 the Arab leaders, or guides, with respect to all who 
 stray to any distance, if he is duped or enticed by these 
 pseudo men; though in the case of Lapland dogs, 
 tfho ought to have a si r er instinct of detection for 
 counterfeits, we know from Sir Capel de Broke and 
 others that they are continually wiled away by the 
 wolves who roam about the nightly encampments of 
 travelers. But there is a secondary disaster, accora
 
 MODEBN SUPERSTITION. 575 
 
 ng to the Arab superstition, awaiting those whose eyes 
 are once opened to the discernment of these phantoms. 
 To see them, or to hear them, even where the travel- 
 ler is careful to refuse their lures, entails the certainty 
 of death in no long time. This is another form of that 
 universal faith which made it impossible for any man 
 to survive a bodily commerce, by whatever sense, with 
 a spiritual being. We find it in the Old Testament, 
 where the expression, " I have seen God, and shall die," 
 means simply a supernatural being ; since no Hebrew 
 believed it possible for a nature purely human to sustain 
 for a moment the sight of the infinite Being. We find 
 the same faith amongst ourselves, in case of doppel- 
 ganger becoming apparent to the sight of those whom 
 they counterfeit, and in many other varieties. We 
 modern Europeans, of course, laugh at these supersti- 
 tions; though, as Laplace remarks, (Essai sur Us 
 Probabilites,) any case, however apparently incredible, 
 if it is a recurrent case, is as much entitled to a fair 
 valuation as if it had been more probable beforehand. 55 
 This being premised, we who connect superstition with 
 the personal result are more impressed by the disaster 
 which happened to Lord Lindsay than his lordship, 
 who either failed to notice the nexus between the events. 
 or possibly declined to put the case too forward in his 
 reader's eye, from the solemnity of the circumstances 
 and the private interest to himself and his own family 
 of the subsequent event. The case was this : Mr. 
 William Wardlaw Ramsay, the companion (and we 
 elieve relative) of Lord Lindsay, a man whose honor- 
 able character and whose intellectual accomplishments 
 peak for themselves in the posthumous memorabilia of
 
 576 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 his travels published by Lord L., had seen an arraj 
 of objects in the desert, which facts immediately suc- 
 ceeding demonstrated to have been a mere ocular 
 lusus, or (according to Arab notions) phantoms. Dur- 
 ing the absence from home of an Arab sheik, who 
 had been hired as conductor of Lord Lindsay's party 
 a hostile tribe (bearing the name of Tellaheens) had 
 assaulted and pillaged his tents. Report of this had 
 reached the English travelling party: it was known 
 that the Tellaheens were still in motion, and a hostile 
 rencounter was looked for for some days. At length, 
 in crossing the well-known valley of the Wady Araba, 
 that most ancient channel of communication between 
 the Red Sea and Judea, &c., Mr. Ramsay saw, to his 
 own entire conviction, a party of horse moving amongst 
 some sand hills. Afterwards it became certain, from 
 accurate information, that this must have been a delu- 
 sion. It was established that no horseman could have 
 been in that neighborhood at that time. Lord Lindsay 
 records the case as an illustration of " that spiritualized 
 tone the imagination naturally assumes in scenes pre- 
 senting so little sympathy with the ordinary feelings 
 of humanity ; " and he reports the case in these pointed 
 terms : " Mr. Ramsay, a man of remarkably strong 
 jight and by no means disposed to superstitious credu- 
 lity, distinctly saw a party of horse moving among the 
 sand hills ; and I do not believe he was ever able to 
 divest himself of that impression." No ; and, ac. 
 cording to Arab interpretation, very naturally so , for 
 according to their faith, he really had seen the horse- 
 men phantom horsemen certainly, but still objects of 
 light. The sequel remains to be told. By the Arabia*
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 577 
 
 hypothesis, Mr. Ramsay had but a short time to live 
 he was under a secret summons to the next world , 
 and accordingly, in a few weeks after this, whilst 
 Lord Lindsay had gone to visit Palmyra, Mr. Ramsay 
 died at Damascus. 
 
 This was a case exactly corresponding to the pagan 
 nympholepsis he had seen the beings whom it is not 
 lawful to see and live. Another case of Eastern super- 
 stition, not less determined and not less remarkably 
 fulfilled, occurred some years before to Dr. Madden, 
 who travelled pretty much in the same route as Lord 
 Lindsay. The doctor, as a phrenologist, had been 
 struck with the very singular conformation of a skull 
 which he saw amongst many others on an altar in 
 some Syrian convent. He offered a considerable sum 
 in gold for it ; but it was by repute the skull of a saint ; 
 and the monk with whom Dr. M. attempted to negotiate 
 not only refused his offers, but protested that even for 
 the doctor's sake, apart from the interests of the CON 
 vent, he could not venture on such a transfer ; for that, 
 by the tradition attached to it, the skull would endanger 
 any vessel carrying it from the Syrian shore. The 
 vessel might escape ; but it would never succeed in 
 reaching any but a Syrian harbor. After this, for the 
 credit of our country, which stands so high in the 
 East, and should be so punctiliously tended by alf 
 Englishmen, we are sorry to record that Dr. Madden 
 (though otherwise a man of scrupulous honor) yielded 
 to the temptation of substituting for the saint's skull 
 another less remarkable from h. ; s own collection. 
 With this saintly relic he embarked on board a Ore- 
 :an ship ; was alternately pursued a.id met by storms 
 37
 
 578 MODERN SUPKRSTITION. 
 
 the most violent; larboard and starboard, on e/ery 
 quarter, he was buffeted ; the wind blew from every 
 point of the compass ; the doctor honestly confesses 
 that he often wished this baleful skull back in safety on 
 the quiet altar from which he took it ; and finally, after 
 many days of anxiety, he was too happy in finding him- 
 self again restored to some Oriental port, from which 
 he secretly vowed never again to sail with a saint's 
 skull, or with any skull, however remarkable phrenolo- 
 gically, not purchased in an open market. 
 
 Thus we have pursued, through many of its most 
 memorable sections, the spirit of the miraculous as it 
 moulded and gathered itself in the superstitions of 
 paganism ; and we have shown that in the modern 
 superstitions of Christianity, or of Mahometanism, 
 (often enough borrowed from Christian sources,) there 
 is a pretty regular correspondence. Speaking with a 
 reference to the strictly popular belief, it cannot be 
 pretended for a moment that miraculous agencies are 
 slumbering in modern ages. For one superstition of 
 that nature which the pagans had, we can produce 
 twenty. And if, from the collation of numbers, we 
 should pass to that of quality, it is a matter of noto- 
 riety, that, from the very philosophy of paganism 
 and its slight root in the terrors or profounder mys- 
 teries of spiritual nature, no comparison could be 
 sustained for a moment between the true religion and 
 any mode whatever of the false. Ghosts we have 
 purposely omitted, because that idea is so peculiarly 
 Christian 56 as to reject all counterparts or affinitiss 
 from other modes of the supernatural. The Christian 
 ghost is too awful a presence, and with too large ,1
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 579 
 
 substratum of the real, the impassioned, the human, 
 for our present purposes. We deal chiefly with the 
 wilder and more aerial forms of superstition ; not so 
 far off from fleshly nature as the purely allegoric 
 not so near as the penal, the purgatorial, ihe peni 
 tsntial. In this middle class, "Gabriel's hounds," 
 the w phantom ship," the gloomy legends of the char- 
 coal burners in the German forests, and the local or 
 epichorial superstitions from every district of Europe, 
 come forward by thousands, attesting the high activity 
 of the miraculous and the hyperphysical instincts, 
 even in this generation, wheresoever the voice of the 
 people makes itself heard. 
 
 But in pagan times, it will be objected, the popular 
 superstitions blended themselves with the highest polit- 
 ical functions, gave a sanction to national councils, and 
 oftentimes gave their starting point to the very primary 
 movements of the state. Prophecies, omens, miracles, 
 all worked concurrently with senates or princes ; where- 
 as in our days, says Charles Lamb, the witch who takes 
 her pleasure with the moon, and summons Beelzebub to 
 her Sabbaths, nevertheless trembles before the beadle 
 and hides herself from the overseer. Now, as to the 
 witch, even the horrid Canidia of Horace, or the more 
 dreadful Erichtho of Lucan, seems hardly to have 
 been much respected in any era. But, for the other 
 modes of the supernatural, they nave entered into 
 more frequent combinations with state functions and 
 state movements in our modern ages than in the 
 tlassical age of paganism. Look at prophecies, foi 
 example : the Romans had a few obscure oraclea 
 tfloat, and they had the sibylline books under the
 
 580 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 state seal. These books, in fact, had been kept sc 
 long that, like Port wine superannuated, they had losl 
 their flavor and body. 57 On the other hand, look at 
 France. Henry, the historian, speaking of the fifteenth 
 century, describes it as a national infirmity of .he Eng- 
 lish to be prophecy ridden. Perhaps there never was 
 any foundation for this as an exclusive remark , but 
 assuredly not in the next century. There had been 
 with us British, from the twelfth century, Thomas of 
 Ercildoune in the north, and many monkish local 
 prophets for every part of the island , but latterly Eng 
 land had no terrific prophet, unless, indeed, Nixon of 
 the Vale Royal, in Cheshire, who uttered his dark ora 
 cles sometimes with a merely Cestrian, sometimes with 
 a national, reference ; whereas in France, throughout 
 the sixteenth century, every principal event was fore- 
 told successively with an accuracy that still shocks 
 and confounds us. Francis I., who opens the century, 
 (and by many is held to open the book of modern his 
 tory, as distinguished from the middle or feudal his 
 tory,) had the battle of Pavia foreshown to him, not by 
 name, but in its results, by his own Spanish captiv- 
 ity, by the exchange for his own children upon a 
 frontier river of Spain, finally, by his own disgrace- 
 ful death, through an infamous disease conveyed to him 
 under a deadly circuit of revenge. This king's son, 
 Elenry II., read some years before the event a descrip- 
 tion of that tournament, on the marriage of the Scot- 
 tish queen with his eldest son, Francis II., which proved 
 fatal to himself through the awkwardness of the Compte 
 Je Montgomery and his own obstinacy. After this, and 
 we believe a little after the brief reign of Francis II-
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 581 
 
 wose Nostradamus, the great prophet of the age. All 
 the children of Henry II. and of Catharine de Medici, 
 one after the other, died in circumstances of suffering 
 and horror ; and Nostradamus pursued the whole with 
 ominous allusions. Charles IX., though the authorizer 
 of the Bartholomew massacre, was the least guilty of 
 his party, and the only one who manifested a dreadful 
 remorse. Henry III., the last of the brothers, died, as 
 the reader will remember, by assassination. And all 
 these tragic successions of events are still to be read, 
 more or less dimly prefigured, in verses of which we 
 will not here discuss the dates. Suffice it that many 
 authentic historians attest the good faith of the proph- 
 ets ; and finally, with respect to the first of the Bour- 
 bon dynasty, Henry IV., who succeeded upon the 
 assassination of his brother-in-law, we have the per- 
 emptory assurance of Sully and other Protestants, 
 countersigned by writers both historical and contro- 
 versial, that not only was he prepared by many warn- 
 ings for his own tragical death ; not only was the day, 
 the hour, prefixed ; not only was an almanac sent to 
 him, in which the bloody summer's day of 1610 was 
 pointed out to his attention in bloody colors, but the 
 mere record of the king's last afternoon shows beyond 
 a doubt the extent and the punctual limitation of his 
 anxieties. In fact, it is to this attitude of listening ex- 
 pectation in the king, and breathless waiting for the 
 Wow, that Schiller alludes in that fine speech of Wai- 
 enstein to his sister where he notices the funeral knells 
 .hat sounded continually in Henry's ears and, above 
 all, his prophetic instinct that caught the sound r rom a 
 far distance of his murderer's motions, ?\d c uld di
 
 582 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 dnguish, amidst all the tumult of a mighty capital, 
 those stealthy steps 
 
 " which even then were seeking him 
 Throughout the streets of Paris." 
 
 We profess not to admire Henry IV. of France, 
 whose secret character we shall, on some other occa- 
 sion, attempt to expose ; but his resignation to the 
 appointments of Heaven in dismissing his guards, 
 as feeiing that against a danger so domestic and so 
 mysterious all fleshly arms were vain has always 
 struck us as the most like magnanimity of any thing 
 in his very theatrical life. 58 
 
 Passing to our own country and to the times imme- 
 diately in succession, we fall upon some striking proph- 
 ecies, not verbal, but symbolic, if we turn from the 
 broad highway of public histories to the by-paths of 
 private memories. Either Clarendon it is, in his Life, 
 (not his public history,) or else Laud, who mentions 
 an anecdote connected with the coronation of Charles 
 I. (the son-in-law of the murdered Bourbon) which 
 Jirew a gloom upon the spirits of the royal friends, 
 already saddened by the dreadful pestilence which in- 
 augurated the reign of this ill-fated prince, levying a 
 tribute of one life in sixteen from the population of the 
 English metropolis. At the coronation of Charles it 
 was discovered that all London would not furnish the 
 quantity of purple velvet required for the royal robes 
 and the furniture of the throne. What was to be done ? 
 Decorum required that the furniture should be all en 
 uite. Nearer than Genoa no considerable addition 
 *ould be expected. That would impose a delay of
 
 MODEEN SUPERSTITION. 583 
 
 tne hundred and fifty days. Upon mature considera- 
 tion, and chiefly of the many private interests that 
 would suffer amongst the multitudes whom such a so- 
 lemnity had called up from the country, it was resolved 
 to robe the king in white velvet. But this, as it after- 
 wards occurred, was the color in which victims were 
 arrayed. And thus, it was alleged, did the king's 
 council establish an augury of evil. Three other ill 
 omens, of some celebrity, occurred to Charles I. ; viz., 
 on occasion of creating his son Charles a knight of the 
 Bath at Oxford some years after, and at the bar of 
 that tribunal which sat in judgment upon him. 
 
 The reign of his second son, James II., the next 
 reign that could be considered an unfortunate reign, 
 was inaugurated by the same evil omens. The day 
 selected for the coronation (in 1685) was a day mem- 
 orable for England. It was St. George's day, the 23d 
 of April, and entitled, even on a separate account, to 
 be held a sacred day, as the birthday of Shakspeare in 
 1564 and his deathday in 1616. The king saved a 
 sum of sixty thousand pounds by cutting off the ordina- 
 ry cavalcade from the Tower of London to Westmin- 
 ster. Even this was imprudent. It is well known that, 
 amongst the lowest class of the English, there is an 
 obstinate prejudice (though unsanctioned by law) with 
 respect to the obligation imposed by the ceremony of 
 coronation. So long as this ceremony is delayed or 
 mutilated they fancy that their obedience is a matter 
 of mere prudence, liable to be enforced by arms, but 
 not consecrated either by law or by religion. The 
 change made by James was therefore, highly im- 
 prudent : shorn of its antique traditionary usages, the
 
 584 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 yoke of conscience was lightened at a moment when 
 it required a double ratification. Neither was it callea 
 for on motives of economy ; for James was unusually 
 rich. This voluntary arrangement was, therefore, a 
 bad beginning ; but the accidental omens were worse. 
 They are thus reported by Blennerhassett, (History of 
 England to the End of George /., vol. iv. p. 1760, 
 printed at Newcastle upon Tyne ; 1751.) " The crown, 
 being too little for the king's head, was often in a tot- 
 tering condition and like to fall off." Even this was 
 observed attentively by spectators of the most opposite 
 feelings. But there was another simultaneous omen, 
 which affected the Protestant enthusiasts, and the super- 
 stitious, whether Catholic or Protestant, still more alarm- 
 ingly. " The same day the king's arms, pompously 
 painted in the great altar window of a London church, 
 suddenly fell down without apparent cause and broke 
 to pieces, whilst the rest of the window remained stand- 
 ing. Blennerhassett mutters the dark terrors which 
 possessed himself and others." " These," says he, 
 * were reckoned ill omens to the king." 
 
 In France, as the dreadful criminality of the French 
 sovereigns through the seventeenth century began to tell 
 powerfully and reproduce itself in the miseries and 
 tumults of the French populace through the eighteenth 
 century, it is interesting to note the omens which un- 
 folded themselves at intervals. A volume might be 
 written upon them. The French Bourbons renewed 
 tne picture of that fatal house which in Thebes offered 
 o the Grecian observers the spectacle of dire auguries 
 emerging from darkness through three generations, a 
 plusieurs reprises. Every body knows the fatal pol
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 585 
 
 ution of the marriage pomps on the reception of Marie 
 Antoinette in Paris : the numbers who perished are 
 still spoken of obscurely as to the amount, and with 
 shuddering awe for the unparalleled horrors standing 
 in the background of the fatal reign horror 
 
 " That, hushed in grim repose, await their evening prey." 
 
 But in the life of Goethe is mentioned a still more por- 
 tentous (though more shadowy) omen in the pictorial 
 decorations of the arras which adorned the pavilion on 
 the French frontier. The first objects which met the 
 Austrian archduchess, on being hailed as dauphiness, 
 was a succession of the most tragic groups from the 
 most awful section of the Grecian theatre. The next 
 alliance of the same kind between the same great em- 
 pires, in the persons of Napoleon and the Archduchess 
 Marie Louisa, was overshadowed by the same unhappy 
 omens, and, as we all remember, with the same un- 
 happy results, within a brief period of five years. 
 
 Or, if we should resort to the fixed and monumental 
 rather than to these auguries of great nations, such, 
 for instance, as were imbodied in those palladia, or 
 protesting talismans, which capital cities, whether pa- 
 gan or Christian, glorified through a period of twenty- 
 five hundred years, we shall find a long succession of 
 >hese enchanted pledges, from the earliest precedent 
 of Troy (whose palladium was undoubtedly a talisman) 
 down to that equally memorable, and bearing the same 
 name, at western Rome. We may pass, by a vast 
 .ransition of two and a half millennia, to that great 
 alisman of Constantinople, the triple serpent, (having
 
 586 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 
 
 perhaps, an original reference to the Mosaic serpent of 
 the wilderness, which healed the infected by the simple 
 act of looking upon it, as the symbol of the Redeemer, 
 held aloft upon the cross for the deliverance from 
 moral contagion.) This great consecrated talisman, 
 venerated equally by Christian, by pagan, and by 
 Mahometan, was struck on the head by Mahomet 
 II., on that same day, May 29th of 1453, in which 
 he mastered by storm this glorious sity, the bulwark 
 of Eastern Christendom, and the immediate rival of his 
 own European throne at Adrianople. But mark the 
 superfetation of omens omen supervening upon 
 omen, augury ingrafted upon augury. The hour waa 
 a sad one for Christianity. Just seven hundred and 
 twenty years before, the western horn of Islam had 
 been rebutted in France by the Germans, chiefly under 
 Charles Martel ; but now it seemed as though another 
 horn, even more vigorous, was preparing to assault 
 Christendom and its hopes from the Eastern quarter. 
 At this epoch, in the very hour of triumph, when the 
 last of the Caesars had glorified his station and sealed 
 his testimony by martyrdom, the fanatical sultan, 
 riding to his stirrups in blood, and wielding that iron 
 mace which had been his sole weapon, as well as cog- 
 nizance, through the battle, advanced to the column, 
 round which the triple serpent reared spirally upwards. 
 He smote the brazen talisman ; he shattered one head ; 
 he left it mutilated, as the record of his great revolu- 
 tion ; but crush it, destroy it, he did not. As a sym- 
 bol prefiguring the fortunes of Mahometanism, his peo- 
 ple noticed that, in the critical hour of fate which 
 ifamped the sultan's acts with efficacy through agea
 
 MODERN SUPERSTITION. 587 
 
 he had been prompted by his secret genius only to 
 ' scotch the snake," not to crush it. Afterwards the 
 fatal hour was gone by ; and this imperfect augury has 
 since concurred traditionally with the Mahometan 
 prophecies about the Adrianople gate of Constanti- 
 nople to depress the ultimate hopes of Islam in the 
 midst of all its insolence. The very haughtiest of the 
 Mussulmans believe that the gate is already in exist- 
 ence through which the red giaours (the Russi) shall 
 pass to the conquest of Stamboul, and that every 
 where, in Europe at least, the hat of Frangistan is 
 destined to 1 surmount the turban. The crescent mint 
 go down before the croaa.
 
 SORTILEGE ON BEHALF OF THE GLAS- 
 GOW ATHENJEUM. 
 
 SUDDENLY, about the middle of February, I re* 
 ceived a request for some contribution of my OWE 
 proper writing to a meditated ALBUM of the Glasgow 
 Athenaeum. What was to be done ? The 1 3th of the 
 month had already dawned before the request reached 
 me ; ' return of post ' was the sharp limitation notified 
 within which my communication must revolve ; whilst 
 the request itself was dated Feb. 10: so that already 
 three 'returns of post' had finished their brief career 
 on earth. I am not one of those people who, in respect 
 to bread, insist on the discretionary allowance of 
 Paris ; but, in respect to time, I do. Positively, for 
 all efforts of thought I must have time a discretion., 
 In this case, now, all discretion was out of the ques- 
 tion ; a mounted jockey, in the melee of a Newmarket 
 start, might as well demand tune for meditation on the 
 philosophy of racing. There was clearly no resource 
 available but one ; and it was this : In my study I 
 have a bath, large enough to swim in, provided the 
 Bwimmer, not being an ambitious man, is content with 
 going a-head to the extent of six inches at the utmost. 
 This bath, having been superseded (as regards ita 
 original purpose) by another mode of bathing, has 
 yielded a secondary service to me as a reservoir for mj
 
 590 8OETILEQB ON BEHALF OF THE 
 
 MSS. Filled to the brim it is by papers of all sorts 
 and sizes. Every paper written by me, to me, for me, 
 of or concerning me, and, finally, against me, is to be 
 found, after an impossible search, in this capacious 
 repertory. Those papers, by the way, that come under 
 the last (or hostile) subdivision, are chiefly composed 
 by shoemakers and tailors an affectionate class of 
 men, who stick by one to the last like pitch-plasters. 
 One admires this fidelity ; but it shows itself too often 
 in waspishness, and all the little nervous irritabilities 
 of attachment too ardent. They are wretched if they 
 do not continually hear what one is ' about,' what one 
 is 'up to,' and which way one is going to travel. Me, 
 because I am a political economist, they plague for my 
 private opinions on the currency, especially on that 
 part of it which consists in bills at two years after 
 date ; and they always want an answer by return of 
 post. What the deuce ! one can't answer everybody 
 by return of post. Now, from this reservoir I resolved 
 to draw some paper for the use of the Athenseum. It 
 was my fixed determination that this Institution should 
 receive full justice, so far as human precautions could 
 secure it. Four dips into the bath I decreed that the 
 Athenaeum should have ; whereas an individual man, 
 however hyperbolically illustrious, could have had but 
 one. On the other hand, the Athenaeum must really 
 content itself with what fortune might send, and not 
 murmur at me as if I had been playing with loaded 
 dice, To cut off all pretence for this allegation, I 
 requested the presence of three young ladies, haters 
 of everything unfair, as female attorneys, to watch the 
 proceedings on behalf of the Athenseum, to see that 
 he dipping went on correctly, and also to advise the
 
 GLASGOW AlHEN^UM. 591 
 
 court in case of any difficulties arising. At 6 p. K. 
 all was reported right for starting in my study. The 
 bath had been brilliantly illuminated from above, so 
 that no tricks could be played in that quarter ; and the 
 young man who was to execute the dips had finished 
 dressing in a new potato sack, with holes cut through 
 the bottom for his legs. Now, as the sack was tied 
 with distressing tightness about his throat, leaving 
 only a locp-hole for his right arm to play freely, it is 
 clear that, however sincerely fraudulent in his inten- 
 tions, and in possible collusion with myself, he could 
 not assist me by secreting any papers about his person, 
 or by any other knavery that we might wish to perpe- 
 trate. The young ladies having taken their seats in 
 stations admirably chosen for overlooking the move- 
 ments of the young man and myself, the proceedings 
 opened. The inaugural step was made in a neat 
 speech from myself, complaining that I was the object 
 of unjust suspicions, and endeavoring to re-establish 
 my character for absolute purity of intentions; but, I 
 regret to say, ineffectually. This angered me, and I 
 declared with some warmth, that in the bath, but 
 whereabouts I could not guess, there lay a particular 
 paper which I valued as equal to the half of my king- 
 dom ; ' but for all that,' I went on, ' if our hon. friend 
 in the potato sack should chance to haul up this very 
 paper, I am resolved to stand by the event, yes, in that 
 case, to the half of my kingdom I will express my in- 
 terest in the Institution. Should even that prize be 
 drawn, out of this house it shall pack off to Glasgow 
 this very night.' Upon this, the leader of the attor- 
 neys, whom, out of honor to Shakspeare, I may as 
 well call Portia, chilled my enthusiasm disigreeably by
 
 592 SORTILEGE ON BEHALF OF THE 
 
 Baying ' There was no occasion for any extra zeal oa 
 my part in such an event, since, as to packing out of 
 this house to Glasgow, she and her learned sisters 
 would take good care that it did ; ' in fact, / was to 
 have no merit whatever I did. Upon this, by way of 
 driving away the melancholy caused by the obstinate 
 prejudice of the attorneys, I called for a glass of wine, 
 and, turning to the west, I drank the health of the 
 Athenaeum, under the allegoric idea of a young lady 
 about to come of age and enter upon the enjoyment 
 of her estates. ' Here's to your prosperity, my dear 
 lass,' I said; 'you're very young but that's a fault 
 which, according to the old Greek adage, is mending 
 every day ; and I'm sure you'll always continue as 
 amiable as you are now towards strangers in distress 
 for books and journals. Never grow churlish, my 
 dear, as some of your sex are ' (saying which, I looked 
 savagely at Portia). And then, I made the signal to 
 the young man for getting to work Portia's eyes, as 
 1 noticed privately, brightening like a hawk's. ' Pre- 
 pare to dip ! ' I called aloud ; and soon after ' Dip ! 
 At the ' prepare,' Potato-sack went on his right knee 
 (his face being at right angles to the bath) ; at the 
 ' Dip ! ' he plunged his right arm into the billowy 
 ocean of papers. For one minute he worked amongst 
 them as if he had been pulling an oar ; and then, at 
 the peremptory order ' Haul up ! ' he raised aloft in 
 air, like Brutus refulgent from the stroke of Caesar, 
 his booty. It was handed, of course, to the attor- 
 neys, who showed a little female curiosity at first, foi 
 .t was a letter with the seal as yet unbroken, and 
 anight prove to be some old love-letter of my writing, 
 recently sent back to me by the Dead-Letter Office.
 
 GLASGOW ATHEN-ECM. 593 
 
 It still .ooked fresh and blooming. So, if there was 
 no prize for Glasgow, there might still be an interest- 
 ing secret for the benefit of the attorneys. What it 
 was, and what each successive haul netted, I will regis- 
 ter under the corresponding numbers. 
 
 No. 1 . This was a dinner invitation for the 15th of 
 February, which I had neglected to open. It was, as 
 bill-brokers say, ' coming to maturity,' but luckily not 
 past due (in which case you have but a poor remedy), 
 for, though twenty days after date, it had still two 
 days to run before it could be presented for payment. 
 A debate arose with the attorneys Whether this 
 might not do for the Album, in default of any better 
 haul ? I argued, for the affirmative, that, although 
 a dinnor invitation cannot in reason be looked to for 
 tery showy writing, its motto being Esse quam videri 
 (which is good Latin for To eat rather than make 
 lelieve to eat, as at ball suppers or Barmecide ban- 
 quets), yet, put the case that I should send this invita- 
 tion to the Athenaeum, accompanied with a power-of- 
 attorney to eat the dinner in my stead might not 
 that solid bonus as an enclosure weigh down the levity 
 of the letter considered as a contribution to the Album, 
 and take off the edge of the Athenaeum's displeasure? 
 Portia argued contra that such a thing was impossi- 
 ble ; because the Athenaeum had two thousand mouths, 
 and would therefore require two thousand dinners ; 
 an argument which I admitted to be showy, but, 
 legally speaking, hardly tenable : because the Athe- 
 naeum had power to appoint a plenipotentiary some 
 man of immense calibre to eat the dinner, as repre- 
 entative of the collective two thousand. Portia 
 parried this objection by replying, that if the invita- 
 
 38
 
 594 SOBTILEGE ON BEHALF OF TH..B 
 
 tion had been to a ball there might be something in 
 what I said ; but as to a mere dinner, and full fifty 
 miles to travel for it from Glasgow, the plenipoten- 
 tiary (whatever might be his calibre) would decline to 
 work so hard for such a trifle. * Trifle ! ' I replied 
 ' But, with submission, a dinner twenty-two days after 
 date of invitation is not likely to prove a trifle. This, 
 however is, always the way in which young ladies, 
 whether attorneys orjiot, treat the subject of dinner. 
 And as to the fifty miles, the plenipotentiary could go 
 in an hour.' ' How ? ' said Portia, sternly. ' Pet 
 rail,' I replied with equal sternness. What there waa 
 to laugh at, I don't see ; but at this hot skirmish be- 
 tween me and Portia concerning that rather visionary 
 person the plenipotentiary, and what he might choose 
 to do in certain remote contingencies, and especially 
 when the gross reality of ' per rail ' came into collision 
 with his aerial essence, Potato-sack began to laugh so 
 immoderately, that I was obliged to pull him up by 
 giving the word rather imperiously ' Prepare to 
 dip ! ' Before he could obey, I was myself pulled up 
 by Portia, with a triumph in her eye that alarmed me. 
 She and her sister attorneys had been examining the 
 dinner invitation ' and,' said Portia maliciously to 
 me, ' it's quite correct as you observe there are two 
 days good to the dinner hour on the 15th ; " Prepare 
 to dine / " is the signal that should be flying at thia 
 moment, and in two days more " Dine / " only, by 
 misfortune, the letter is in the wrong year it is foul 
 years old ! ' Oh ! fancy the horror of this ; since, 
 beside* the mortification from Portia's victory, I had 
 perhaps narrowly escaped an indictment from the 
 plenipotentiary for sending him what might now be
 
 GLASGOW ATHENAEUM. 595 
 
 tonsidered a swindle. I hurried to cover my confu- 
 sion, by issuing the two orders ' Prepare to dip f ' and 
 'Dip /' almost in the same breath. No. 1, after all 
 the waste of legal learning upon it, had suddenly burst 
 like an air-bubble ; and the greater stress of expecta- 
 tion, therefore, had now settled on No. 2. "With con- 
 siderable trepidation of voice, I gave the final order 
 'Raul up I ' 
 
 No. 2. It is disagreeable to mention that this haul 
 brought up 'a dun.' Disgust was written upon 
 every countenance ; and I fear that suspicion began to 
 thicken upon myself as having possibly (from my 
 personal experience in these waters) indicated to our 
 young friend where to dredge for duns with most 
 chance of success. But I protest fervently my inno- 
 cence. It is true that I had myself long remarked 
 that part of the channel to be dangerously infested 
 with duns. In searching for literary or philosophic 
 papers, it would often happen for an hour together 
 that I brought up little else than variegated specimens 
 of the dun. And one vast bank there was, which I 
 called the Goodwin Sands, because nothing within the 
 memory of man was ever known to be hauled up from 
 it except eternal specimens of the dun some gray 
 with antiquity, some of a neutral tint, some green and 
 lively. With grief it was that I had seen our dipper 
 shoaling his water towards that dangerous neighbor- 
 hood. But what could I do ? If I had warned him 
 off, Portia would have been sure to fancy that there 
 was some great oyster-bed or pearl-fishery in that 
 region ; and all I ehould have effected by my honesty 
 would have been a general conviction of my treachery. 
 I therefore became as anxious as everybody else few
 
 596 SOBTILEQE ON BEHXLF OF THE 
 
 No. 3, which might set all to rights might, but 
 slight were my hopes that it would, when I saw in 
 what direction the dipper's arm. was working. Ex- 
 actly below that very spot where he had dipped, lay, 
 as stationary as if he had been anchored, a huge and 
 ferocious dun of great antiquity. Age had not at all 
 softened the atrocious expression of his countenance, 
 but rather aided it by endowing him with a tawny 
 hue. The size of this monster was enormous, nearly 
 two square feet ; and I fancied at times that, in spite 
 of his extreme old age, he had not done growing. I 
 knew him but too well ; because whenever I happened 
 to search in that region of the bath, let me be seeking 
 what I would, and let me miss what I might, always I 
 was sure to haul up him whom I never wanted to see 
 again. Sometimes I even found him basking on the 
 very summit of the papers ; and I conceived an idea, 
 which may be a mere fancy, that he came up for air in 
 particular states of the atmosphere. At present he 
 wasnoi basking on the surface: better for the Athenae- 
 um if he had : for then the young man would have 
 been cautious. Not being above, he was certainly 
 below, and underneath the very centre of the dipper's 
 plunge. Unable to control my feelings, I cried out 
 ' Bear away to the right ! ' But Portia protested with 
 energy against this intermeddling of mine, as perfidy 
 too obvious. * Well,' I said, ' have it your own way : 
 you'll see what will happen.' 
 
 No. 3. This, it is needless to say, turned out the 
 horrid old shark, as I had long christened him : I knew 
 his vast proportions, and his bilious aspect, the mo- 
 ment that the hauling up commenced, which in hit 
 ase occupied some time. Portia was the more ungry
 
 GLASGOW ATHENAEUM. 597 
 
 because she had thrown away her right to express any 
 anger by neutralizing my judicious interference. She 
 grew even more angry, because I, though sorry for the 
 Athenaeum, really could not help laughing when I 
 saw the truculent old wretch expanding his huge 
 dimensions all umbered by time and ill-temper 
 ander the eyes of the wondering young ladies ; so 
 mighty was the contrast between this sallow behemoth 
 and a rose-colored little billet of their own. By the 
 way, No. 2 had been a specimen of the dulcet dun, 
 breathing only zephyrs of request and persuasion ; but 
 this No. 3 was a specimen of the polar opposite the 
 dun horrific and Gorgonian blowing great guns of 
 menace. As ideal specimens in their several classes, 
 might they not have a value for the museum of the 
 Athenaeum, if it has one, or even for the Album f 
 This was my suggestion, but overruled, like everything 
 else that I proposed ; and on the ground that Glasgow 
 had too vast a conservatory of duns, native and indi- 
 genous, to need any exotic specimens. This settled, 
 we hurried to the next dip, which, being by contract 
 the last, made us all nervous. 
 
 No. 4. This, alas ! turned out a lecture addressed 
 to myself by an ultra- moral friend ; a lecture on pio- 
 crastination ; and not badly written. I feared that 
 something of the sort was coming ; for, at the moment 
 )f dipping, I called out to the dipper ' Starboard 
 your helm ! you're going smack upon the Goodwins ; 
 in thirty seconds you'll founder.' Upon this, in an 
 agony of fright, the dipper forged off, but evidently 
 .juite unaware that vast spurs stretched off from the 
 Goodwins shoals and sand-banks where it was 
 mere destruction to sail without a special knowledge
 
 598 SORTILEGE ON BEHA.LF OF THB 
 
 of the soundings. He had run upon an ethical sand* 
 bank. ' Yet, after all, since this is to be the last dip, 1 
 said Portia, ' if the lecture is well written, might it 
 not be acceptable to the Athenaeum ? ' ' Possibly,' 1 
 replied ; ' but it is too personal, besides being founded 
 in error from first to last. I could not allow myself 
 to be advertised in a book as a procrastinator on prin- 
 ciple, unless the Athenaeum would add a postscript 
 under its official seal, expressing entire disbelief of the 
 accusation; which I have private reasons for thinking 
 that the Athenaeum may decline to do.' 
 
 * Well, then,' said Portia, ' as you wilfully rob the 
 Athenaeum of No. 4, which by contract is the un- 
 doubted property of that body, in fee simple and not 
 in fee conditional,' (mark Portia's learning as an at- 
 torney,) ' then you are bound to give us a 5th dip ; 
 particularly as you've been so treacherous all along.' 
 Tears rushed to my eyes at this most unjust assump- 
 tion. In agonizing tones I cried out, ' Potato-sack ! 
 my friend Potato-sack ! will you quietly listen to thia 
 charge upon me, that am as innocent as the child un- 
 born ? If it is a crime in me to know, and in you not 
 to know, where the Goodwins lie, why then, let you 
 and me sheer off to the other side of the room, and 
 let Portia try if she can do better. I allow her motion 
 for a fresh trial. I grant a 5th dip : and the more 
 readily, because it is an old saying that there is 
 luck in odd numbers : numero dues impure gauiet ; 
 only I must request of Portio to be the dipper on this 
 final occasion.' All the three attorneys blushed a 
 rosy ted on this unexpected summons. It was one 
 thing to criticize, but quite another thing to undertake 
 <lxe performance : and the fair attorneys tremblod fa
 
 GLASGOW ATHEN-ETJM. 599 
 
 iheir professional reputation. Secretly, however, I 
 whispered to Potato-sack, ' You'll see now, such is 
 female address, that whatever sort of monster they 
 haul up, they'll swear it's a great prize, and contrive 
 to extract some use from it that may seem to justify 
 this application for a new trial.' 
 
 No. 5. Awful and thrilling were the doubts, fears, 
 expectations of us all, when Portia ' prepared to dip/ 
 Bnd secondly ' dipped.' She shifted her hand, and 
 ' ploitered ' amongst the papers for full five minutes. 
 I winked at this in consideration of past misfortunes ; 
 but, strictly speaking, she had no right to ' ploiter ' for 
 more than one minute. She contended that she knew, 
 by intuition, the sort of paper upon which ' duns ' 
 were written ; and whatever else might come up, she 
 was resolved it should not be a dun. ' Don't be too 
 sure,' I said ; and, at last, when she seemed to have 
 settled her choice, I called out the usual word of com- 
 mand, 'Haul up.' 
 
 ' What is it ? ' we said ; ' what's the prize ? ' we de- 
 manded, all rushing up to Portia. Guess, reader ; 
 it was a sheet of blank paper . 
 
 I, for my part, was afraid either to laugh or to cry 
 1 really felt for Portia, and, at the same time, for the 
 A-thenaeum. Yet I had a monstrous desire to laugh 
 horribly. But, bless you, reader ! there was no call 
 for pity to Portia. With the utmost coolness she 
 said, ' Oh ! here is carte blanche for receiving your 
 latest thoughts. This is the paper on which you are 
 to write an essay for the Athenaeum; and thus we are 
 providentially enabled to assure our client the Athe- 
 ium of something expressly manufactured for the 
 occasion, and not an old wreck from the Goodwins
 
 600 SORTILEGE ON BEHALF OF THE 
 
 Fortune loves the Athenaeum ; and her four blacks at 
 starting were only meant to tease that Institution, and 
 to enhance the value of her final favor.' ' Ah, in- 
 deed ! ' I said in an under tone, ' meant to tease ! there 
 are other ladies who understand that little science V- 
 side Fortune ! ' However, there is no disobeying th 
 commands of Portia ; so I sate down to write a pape; 
 on ASTROLOGY. But, before beginning, I looked a? 
 Potato-sack, saying only, ' You see : I told you wh' 
 would happen.' 
 
 ASTROLOGY. 
 
 As my contribution to their Album, I will beg the 
 Athenaeum to accept a single thought on this much- 
 injured subject. Astrology I greatly respect ; but it 
 is singular that my respect for the science arose out of 
 my contempt for its professors, not exactly as a 
 direct logical consequence, but as a casual suggestion 
 from that contempt. I believe in astrology, but not 
 in astrologers ; as to them I am an incorrigible infidel. 
 First, let me state the occasion upon which my 
 astrological thought arose ; and then, secondly, the 
 thought itself. 
 
 When about seventeen years old, I was wandering 
 as a pedestrian tourist in North Wales.- For some 
 little time, the centre of my ramblings (upon which 
 T still revolved from all my excursions, whether ellip- 
 tical, circular, or zig-zag) was Llangollen in Denbigh- 
 shire, or else Rhuabon, not more than a few miles 
 distant. One morning I was told by a young married 
 Ionian, at whose cottage I had received some kind
 
 GLASGOW ATHEN-ETJM. 601 
 
 hospitalities, tha* an astrologer lived in the neighbor- 
 hood. ' \^ hat might be his name ? ' Very good Eng- 
 lish it was that my young hostess had hitherto spoken ; 
 and yet, in this instance, she chose to answer me in 
 Welsh. Mochinahante, was her brief reply. I dare 
 say that my spelling of the word will not stand Welsh 
 criticism; but what can you expect from a man's first 
 attempt at Welsh orthography ? I am sure that my 
 written word reflects the vocal word which I heard 
 provided you pronounce the ch as a Celtic guttural ; 
 and I can swear to three letters out of the twelve, viz. 
 the first, the tenth, and the eleventh, as rigorously cor- 
 rect. Pretty well, I think, that, for a mere beginnei 
 only seventy-five per cent, by possibility wrong ! 
 But what did Mochinahante mean ? For a man might 
 as well be anonymous, or call himself X Y Z, as offer 
 one his visiting card indorsed with a name so frightful 
 to look at so shocking to utter so agonizing to 
 spell as Mochinahante. And that it had a trans- 
 latable meaning that it was not a proper name but 
 an appellative, in fact some playful sobriquet, I felt 
 certain, from observing the young woman to smile 
 whilst she uttered it. My next question drew from 
 her that this Pagan-looking monster of a name 
 meant Pig-in-the-dingle. But really, now, between 
 the original monster and this English interpretation, 
 there was very little to choose ; in fact the interpreta- 
 tion, as often happens, strikes one as the harder to 
 understand of the two. ' To be sure it does,' says a 
 ady sitting at my elbow, and tormented by a passion 
 \Q total> unfeminine as curiosity ' to bo sure very 
 much harder ; for Mochina what-d<>-you- call-it t 
 might, you know, mean something or other, for any-
 
 602 SOBTILBQE ON BEHALF OI THE 
 
 thing that you or I could say to the contrary ; but ah 
 to Pig-in-the-dingle what dreadful nonsense ! what 
 impossible description of aii astrologer ! A man that 
 let me see does something or other about the 
 stars : how can he be described as a pig ? pig in any 
 sense, you know pig in any place ? But Pig-in-a- 
 dingle ! why, if he's a pig at all, he must be Pig- 
 on-a-steeple, or Pig-on-the-top-of-a-hill, that he may 
 rise above the mists and vapors. Now I insist, my 
 dear creature, on your explaining all this riddle on the 
 spot. You know it you came to the end of the 
 mystery ; but none of us that are sitting here can 
 guess at the meaning ; we shall all be ill, if you keep 
 us waiting I've a headach beginning already so 
 say the thing at once, and put us out of torment ! ' 
 
 What's to be done ? I must explain the thing to 
 the Athenaeum ; and if I stop to premise an oral ex- 
 planation for the lady's separate use, there will be no 
 time to save the Glasgow post, which waits for no 
 man, and is deaf even to female outcries By way of 
 compromise, therefore, I request of the lady that she 
 will follow my pen with her radiant eyes, by which 
 means she will obtain the earliest intelligence, and the 
 speediest relief to her headach. I, on my part, will 
 not loiter, but will make my answer as near to a tele- 
 graphic answer, in point of speed, as a rigid metallic 
 
 pen will allow. 1 divide this answer into two 
 
 heads : the first concerning ' in the dingle,' the second 
 concerning 'pig.' My philosophic researches, and a 
 visit to the astrologer, ascertained a profound reason 
 "r describing him as in- the- dingle ; viz. because he 
 jas in a dingle. He was the sole occupant of a little 
 cove ammurst the hills the sole householder; anc
 
 GLASGOW A.THENJEUM. 603 
 
 so absolutely such, that if ever any treason should be 
 hatched in the dingle, clear it was to my mind that 
 Mochinahante would be found at the bottom of it ; if 
 ever war should be levied in this dingle, Mochinahante 
 must be the sole belligerent ; and if a forced contribu- 
 tion were ever imposed upon this dingle, Mochinahante 
 (poor man !) must pay it all out of his own pocket. 
 The lady interrupts me at this point to say ' Well, 
 1 understand all that that's all very clear. But 
 what I want to know about is Pig- Come to Pig. 
 Why Pig ? How Pig 1 In what sense Pig ? You 
 can't have any profound reason, you know, for that.' 
 
 Yes I have ; a very profound reason ; and satisfac- 
 tory to the most sceptical of philosophers, viz. that he 
 was a Pig. I was presented by my fair hostess to the 
 great interpreter of the stars, in person ; for I was 
 anxious to make the acquaintance of an astrologer, 
 and especially of one who, whilst owning to so rare a 
 profession, owned also to the soft impeachment of so 
 very significant a name. Having myself enjoyed so 
 favorable an opportunity for investigating the reason- 
 ableness of that namft, Mochinahante, as applied to the 
 Denbighshire astrologer, I venture to pronounce it 
 unimpeachable. About his dress there was a forlorn- 
 ness, and an ancient tarnish or cerugo, which went far 
 to justify the name ; and upon his face there sate that 
 lugubrious rust (or what medallists technically call 
 patina) which bears so costly a value when it is found 
 on the coined face of a Syro-Macedonian prince long 
 lince compounded with dust, but, alas ! bears no value 
 t all if found upon the flesh-and-blood face of a living 
 philosopher. Speaking humanly, one would have in- 
 linuated that the star-gaze wanted much washing and
 
 604 80KTILEGE ON BEHALF OF THE 
 
 icouring ; but, astrologically speaking, perhaps he 
 would have been spoiled by earthly waters for bis 
 celestial vigils. 
 
 Mochinahante was civil enough ; a pig is not neces- 
 sarily rude ; and, after seating me in his chair of state, 
 he prepared for his learned labors by cross-examina- 
 tions as to the day and hour of my birth. The day I 
 knew to a certainty ; and even about the hour I could 
 tell quite as much as ought in reason to be expected 
 from one who certainly had not been studying a chro- 
 nometer when that event occurred. These points set- 
 tled, the astrologer withdrew into an adjoining room, 
 for the purpose (as he assured me) of scientifically con- 
 structing my horoscope ; but unless the drawing of 
 corks is a part of that process, I should myself incline 
 to think that the great man, instead of minding my 
 interests amongst the stars and investigating my horo- 
 scope, had been seeking consolation for himself in 
 bottled porter. Within half-an-hour he returned ; 
 looking more lugubrious than ever ; more grim ; 
 more grimy (if grime yields any such adjective) ; a 
 little more rusty ; rather more phtinous, if numisma- 
 tists will lend me that word ; and a great deal more in 
 want of scouring. He had a paper of diagrams in his 
 hand, which of course contained some short-hand 
 memoranda upon my horoscope ; but, from its smoki- 
 ness, a malicious visitor might have argued a possibility 
 that it had served for more customers than myself. Un- 
 der his arm he carried a folio book, which (he said) was 
 a manuscript of unspeakable antiquity. This he waa 
 Tilous of my seeing ; and before he would open it, as 
 if I and the book had been two prisoners at the bar 
 inspected of meditating some collusive mischi?f (suck
 
 GKLASOQW ATHEN^UM 605 
 
 ta tying a cracker to the judge's wig), he separated us 
 as widely from each other as the dimensions of the 
 room allowed. These solemnities finished, we were all 
 ready I, and the folio volume, and Pig-in-the-dingle 
 for our several parts in the play. Mochinahante 
 began : He opened the pleadings in a deprecatory 
 tone, protesting, almost with tears, that if anything 
 should turn out amiss in the forthcoming revelations, 
 it was much against his will ; that he was power- 
 less, and could not justly be held responsible for 
 any part of the disagreeable message which it might 
 be his unhappiness to deliver. I hastened to assure 
 him that I was incapable of such injustice ; that I 
 should hold the stars responsible for the whole ; by 
 nature, that I was very forgiving ; that any little mal- 
 ice, which I might harbor for a year or so, should all 
 be reserved for the use of the particular constellations 
 concerned in the plot against myself; and, lastly, that 
 I was now quite ready to stand the worst of their 
 thunders. Pig was pleased with this reasonableness ; 
 he saw that he had to deal with a philosopher ; and, 
 in a more cheerful tone, he now explained that my 
 case was msystically contained in the diagrarpi ; these 
 umoke-dried documents submitted, as it were, a series 
 of questions to the book ; which book it was a book 
 of unspeakable antiquity that gave the inflexible 
 answers, like the gloomy oracle that it was. But I 
 was not to be angry with the book, any more than 
 arith himself, since - ' Of course not,' I replied, in- 
 terrupting him, ' the book did but utter the sounds 
 which were predetermined by the white and black 
 keys struck in the smoky diagrams ; and I cculd 
 QO more be angry with the book for spHn# what
 
 506 SORTILEGE ON BEHALF OF THE 
 
 it conscientiously believed to be the truth than with 
 a decanter of port wine, or a bottle of porter, for 
 declining to yield more than one or two wine-glasses 
 of the precious liquor at the moment when I was look- 
 ing for a dozen, under a transient forgetfulness, inci- 
 dent to the greatest minds, that I myself, ten minutes 
 before, had nearly drunk up the whole.' This com- 
 parison, though to a critic wide awake it might have 
 seemed slightly personal, met with the entire approba- 
 tion of Pig-in-the-dingle. A better frame of mind 
 for receiving disastrous news, he evidently conceived, 
 could not exist or be fancied by the mind of man 
 than existed at that moment in myself. He was in a 
 state of intense pathos from the bottled porter. I was 
 In a state of intense excitement (pathos combined with 
 horror) at the prospect of a dreadful lecture on my 
 future life, now ready to be thundered into my ears 
 from that huge folio of unspeakable antiquity, pi ompt- 
 ed by those wretched smoke-dried diagrams. I be- 
 lieve we were in magnetical rapport. Think of that, 
 reader ! Pig and I in magnetical rapport ! Both 
 making passes at each other ! What in the world 
 would have become of us if suddenly we should have 
 taken to somnambulizing ? Pig would have abandoned 
 his dingle to me ; and I should have dismissed Pig to 
 that life of wandering which must have betrayed the 
 unsecured patinous condition of the astrologer to the 
 astonished eyes of Cambria : 
 
 Stout Glos'ter stood aghast [or might have stood] in speechless 
 
 trance. 
 
 IY> arm .' cried Mortimer [or at least might have cried] , and 
 conch'd his quivering lance.' 
 
 But Pig was a greater man than he seemed. H
 
 GLASGOW ATHEN^UM. 607 
 
 rielded neither to magnetism nor to bottled porter ; 
 but commenced reading from the black book in the 
 most awful tone of voice, and, generally speaking, 
 most correctly. Certainly he made one dreadful mis- 
 take ; he started from the very middle of a sentence, 
 instead of the beginning; but then that had a truly 
 lyrical effect, and also it was excused by the bottled 
 porter. The words of the prophetic denunciation, 
 from which he started, were these ' also he [that 
 was myself, you understand] shall have red hair.' 
 ' There goes a bounce,' I said in an under tone ; ' the 
 stars it seems, can tell falsehoods as well as other 
 people.' ' Also,' for Pig went on without stopping, 
 'he shall have seven-and- twenty-children.' Too hor- 
 ror-struck I was by this news to utter one word of 
 protest against it. ' Also,' Pig yelled out at the top 
 of his voice, ' he shall desert them.' Anger restored 
 my voice, and I cried out, ' That's not only a lie in 
 the stars, but a libel ; and, if an action lay against a 
 constellation, I should recover damages.' Vain it 
 would be to trouble the reader with all the monstrous 
 prophecies that Pig read against me. He read with a 
 steady Pythian fury. Dreadful was his voice : dread- 
 ful were the starry charges against myself things 
 that I was to do, things that I must do : dreadful was 
 the wrath with which secretly I denounced all partici- 
 pation in the acts which these wicked stars laid to my 
 charge. But this infirmity of good nature besets me, 
 itat, if a man shows trust and absolute faith in any 
 agent or agency whatever, heart there is :iot in me to 
 resist him, or to expose his folly. Pig trusted oh 
 how profoundly ! in his black book of unspeakable 
 antiquity. It would have killed him on the spot t
 
 808 SORTILEGE ON BEHALF OF THE 
 
 prove that the black book was a hoax, and that ha 
 himself was another. Consequently, I submitted in 
 silence to pass for the monster that Pig, under coer- 
 cion of the stars, had pronounced me, rather than part 
 in anger from the solitary man, who after all was not 
 to blame, acting only in a ministerial capacity, and 
 reading only what the stars obliged him to read. I 
 rose without saying one word, advanced to the table, 
 and paid my fees ; for it is a disagreeable fact to 
 record, that astrologers grant no credit, nor even dis- 
 count upon prompt payment. I shook hands with 
 Mochinahante. ; we exchanged kind farewells he 
 smiling benignly upon me, in total forgetfulness that 
 he had just dismissed me to a life of storms and 
 crimes ; I, in return, as the very best benediction that 
 I could* think of, saying secretly, ' Oh Pig, may the 
 heavens rain their choicest soap-suds upon thee ! ' 
 
 Emerging into the open air, I told my fair hostess 
 of the red hair which the purblind astrologer had 
 obtained for me from the stars, and which, with their 
 permission, I would make over to Mochinahante for a 
 reversionary wig in his days of approaching baldness, 
 But I said not one word upon that too bountiful 
 allowance of children with which Mock, had endowed 
 me. I retreated by nervous anticipation from that 
 inextinguishable laughter which, I was too certain, 
 would follow upon her part; and yet, when we 
 cached the outlet of the dingle, and turned round to 
 lake a parting look of the astrological dwelling, I 
 myself was overtaken by fits of laughter ; for sud- 
 denly I figured in vision my own future return to thii 
 mountain recess, with the young legion of twenty- 
 leven children. ' I desert them, tne darlings ! ' t
 
 GLASGOW ATHEX.EUM. 609 
 
 exclaimed, ' far from it ! Backed by this filial army, 
 I shall feel myself equal to the task of taking ven- 
 geance on the stars for the affronts they have put upon 
 ne through Pig their servant. It will be like the 
 leturn of the Heracleidse to the Peloponnesus. The 
 sacred legion will storm the " dingle," whilst I storm 
 Pig ; the rising generation will take military posses- 
 sion of " -inahante," whilst I deal with " Mbc/t" (which 
 I presume to be the part in the long word answering 
 to Pig).' My hostess laughed in sympathy with my 
 laughter ; but I was cautious of letting her have a 
 look into my vision of the sacred legion. We quitted 
 the dingle for ever ; and so ended my first visit, being 
 also my last, to an astrologer. 
 
 This, reader, was the true general occasion of my 
 one thought upon astrology ; and, before I mention it, 
 I may add that the immediate impulse drawing my 
 mind in any such direction was this : On walking to 
 the table where the astrologer sat, in order to pay my 
 fees, naturally I came nearer to the folio book than 
 astrological prudence would generally have allowed. 
 But Pig's attention was diverted for the moment to 
 the silver coins laid before him ; these he reviewed 
 with the care reasonable in one so poor, and in a state 
 of the coinage so neglected as it then was. By this mo- 
 ment of avarice in Pig, I profited so far as to look over 
 Ihe astrologer's person, sitting and bending forward full 
 upon the book. It was spread open, and at a glance I 
 iaw that it was no MS. but a printed book, printed in 
 olack-letter types. The month of August stood as a 
 rubric at the head of the broad margin ; and below it 
 stocd some days of that month in orderly succession 
 So then, Pig,' said I in my thoaghts, ' it seems that 
 39
 
 610 SOETILEGE ON BEHALF OP THE 
 
 any person whatever, born on any particular day and 
 hour of August, is to have the same exact fate as my- 
 self. But a king and a beggar may chance thus far to 
 agree. And be you assured, Pig, that all the infinite 
 variety of cases lying between these two termini differ 
 from each other in fortunes and incidents of life as 
 much, though not so notoriously, as king and beggar. 
 
 Hence arose a confirmation of my contempt for 
 astrology. It seemed as if necessarily false false by 
 an a priori principle, viz. that the possible differences 
 in human fortunes, which are infinite, cannot be 
 measured by the possible differences in the particular 
 moments of birth, which are too strikingly finite. It 
 strengthened me in this way of thinking, that subse- 
 quently I found the very same objection in Macrobius. 
 Macrobius may have stolen the idea ; but certainly not 
 from me as certainly I did not steal it from him ; so 
 that here is a concurrence of two people independently, 
 one of them a great philosopher, in the very same 
 annihilating objection. 
 
 Now comes my one thought. Both of us were 
 wrong, Macrobius and myself. Even the great phi- 
 losopher is obliged to confess it. The objection truly 
 valued is to astrologers, not to astrology. No two 
 events ever did coincide in point of time. Every 
 event has, and must have, a certain duration ; this 
 you may call its breadth ; and the true locus of the 
 event in time is the central point of that breadth, 
 which never was or will be the same for any two 
 separate events, though grossly held to be contempo-- 
 rap^ous. It is the mere imperfection of our human 
 means for chasing the infinite subdivisibilities of time 
 which causes us to regard two events as even by possi-
 
 GLASGOW A.THENJEXTM. 611 
 
 Dility concurring in their central moments. This im- 
 perfection is crushing to the pretensions of astrologers 
 but astrology laughs at it in the heavens ; and astrol- 
 ogy, armed with celestial chronometers, is true ! 
 
 Suffer me to illustrate the case a little : It is rare 
 that a metaphysical difficulty can be made as clear as a 
 pikestaff. This can. Suppose two events to occur in 
 the same quarter of a minute that is, in the same 
 fifteen seconds ; then, if they started precisely tcgether, 
 and ended precisely together, they would not only have 
 the same breadth, but this breadth would accurately 
 coincide in all its parts or fluxions; consequently, the 
 central moment, viz., the 8th, would coincide rigorously 
 with the centre of each event. But, suppose that one 
 of the two events, A for instance, commenced a single 
 second before B the other, then, as we are still suppos- 
 ing them to have the same breadth or extension, A 
 will have ended in the second before B ends ; and, 
 consequently, the centres will be diferent, for the 8th 
 second of A will be the 7th of B. The disks of the 
 two events will overlap A will overlap B at the 
 beginning ; B will overlap A at the end. Now, go on 
 to assume that, in a particular case, this overlapping 
 does not take place, but that the two events eclipse 
 each other, lying as truly surface to surface as two 
 sovereigns in a tight rouleau of sovereigns, or one 
 iessert-spoon nestling in the bosom of another; in 
 tnat case, the 8th or central second will be the centre 
 for both. But even here a question will arise as to 
 the degree of rigor in the coincidence ; for divide that 
 8th second into a thousand parts or sub-moments, and 
 perhaps the centre of A will be found to hit the 450th 
 sub- moment, whilst that of B may bit th? 600th. Oi
 
 612 SOBTILEOE ON BEHALF OF THE 
 
 suppose, again, even this trial surmounted: the two 
 harmonious creatures, A and B, running neck and 
 neck together, have both hit simultaneously the true 
 centre of the thousand sub-moments which lies half- 
 way between the 500th and the 501st. All is right 
 so far 'all right behind; ' but go on, if you please; 
 subdivide this last centre, which we will call X, into 
 a thousand lesser fractions. Take, in fact, a railway 
 express- crain of decimal fractions, and give chase to A 
 and B ; my word for it that you will come up with 
 them in some stage or other of the journey, and arrest 
 them in the very act of separating their centres 
 which is a dreadful crime in the eye of astrology ; for, 
 it is utterly impossible that the initial moment, or sub- 
 moment, or sub-sub-moment of A and B should abso- 
 lutely coincide. Such a thing as a perfect start was 
 never heard of at Doncaster. Now, this severe accu- 
 racy is not wanted on earth. Archimedes, it is well 
 known, never saw a perfect circle, nor even, with his 
 leave, a decent circle ; for, doubtless, the reader knows 
 the following fact, viz., that, if you take the most per- 
 fect Vandyking ever cut out of paper or silk, by the 
 most delicate of female fingers, with the most exquisite 
 cf Salisbury scissors, upon viewing it through a mi- 
 croscope you will find the edges frightfully ragged; 
 but, if you apply the same microscope to one of God's 
 Vandyking on the corolla or calyx of a flower, you 
 will find it as truly cut and as smooth as a moonbeam. 
 We on earth, I repeat, need no such rigorous truth. 
 Kor instance, you and I, my reader, want little perhaps 
 with circles, except now and then to bore one with an 
 tugre in a ship's bottom, when we wish to sink hei 
 an<l to cheat the underwriters ; or, by wuy of variety
 
 GLASGOW ATHEN^UM. 613 
 
 to cut one with a centre-bit through shop-shut ters, in 
 order to rob a jeweller; so we don't care much 
 whether the circumference is ragged or not. But that 
 won't do for a constellation ! The stars tCentendent 
 vas la raillerie on the subject of geometry. The pen- 
 dulum of the starry heavens oscillates truly ; vnd *f 
 the Greenwich time of the Empyreum can't be repeated 
 upon earth, without an error, a horoscope is as much a 
 chimera as the perpetual motion, or as an agreeable 
 income-tax. In fact, in casting a nativity, to swerve 
 from the true centre by the trillionth of a centillionth 
 is as fatal as to leave room for a coach and six to turn 
 between your pistol shot and the bull's eye. If you 
 haven't done the trick, no matter how near you've 
 come to it. And to overlook this, is as absurd as was 
 the answer of that Lieutenant M., who, being asked 
 whether he had any connection with another officer of 
 the same name, replied ' Oh yes ! a very close one.' 
 But in what way ? ' ' Why, you see, I'm in the 50th 
 regiment of foot, and he's in the 49th : ' walking, in 
 fact, just behind him ! Yet, for all this, horoscopes 
 may be calculated very truly by the stars amongst 
 themselves ; and my conviction is that they are. 
 They are perhaps even printed hieroglyphically, and 
 published as regularly as a nautical almanac ; only, 
 they cannot be re-published upon earth by any mode 
 of piracy yet discovered amongst sublunary book- 
 sellers. Astrology, in fact, is a very profound, or at 
 least a very lofty science ; but astrologers are hum- 
 bugs. 
 
 I have finished, and I am vain of my work ; for I 
 ftave accomplished three considerable things : I 
 tave floored Macrobius ; I have cured a lady of her
 
 614 SORTILEGE ON BEHALF, ETC. 
 
 headache ; and lastly, which is best of all, I have ex- 
 pressed my sincere interest in the prosperity of the 
 Glasgow Athenaeum. 
 
 But the Glasgow post is mounting, and this paper 
 will be lost ; a fact which, amongst all the dangen 
 besetting me in this life, the wretched Pig forgot to 
 warn me of.
 
 NOTES. 
 
 NOTE 1. Page 77. 
 
 " The twelve tribes." It is a beautiful circumstance in tta 
 lymbology of the Jewish ritual, where all is symbolic and all 
 significant, where all in Milton's language ' was meant myste- 
 riously,' that the ten tribes were not blotted out from the breast- 
 plate after their revolt ; no, nor after their idolatrous lapse, 
 nor after their captivity, nor after their supposed utter disper- 
 sion. Their names still burned in the breastplate, though their 
 earthly place knew them no more. 
 
 NOTE 2. Page 118. 
 
 " Especially the death of Mariamne." There is a remarkable 
 proof extant of the veneration attached in Jewish imagination to 
 the memory of this lady as a Maccabee. Long after her death, 
 a pretender (or alleged pretender) to the name and rights of 
 Alexander, one of her two murdered sons, appeared at Borne, 
 and instantly drew to himself the enthusiastic support of all the 
 Jews throughout Italy. 
 
 NOTB 3. Page 127. 
 
 " That could not have been otherwise obtained." One thing 
 s entirely overlooked. Neither in Syria, nor any part of Asia 
 Minor, of Achaia, &o., could the Apostles have called a genera* 
 meeting of the people without instant liability to arrest as public 
 iisturbera But the character of physicians furnished a privi- 
 leged case, which operated as a summons, instant, certain, safe, 
 uniformly intelligible to others, and without effort of their cwn
 
 616 NOTES 
 
 NOTE 4. Page 128. 
 
 " Jls the heart of Judea." It was an old belief amongst the 
 Jews, upon their ideas of cosmography, that Judea was the 
 central region of the earth, and that Jerusalem was the 
 omphalos, or navel of Judea an idea which the Greeks 
 ipplied to Delphi. 
 
 NOTE 5. Page 130. 
 
 " Chrysom children." Tell a child of three years old to pro 
 ounce the word helm ; nine times out of ten it will say helom 
 from the imperfection of its organs. By this mode of corruption 
 lame the word chrysom, from the baptismal chrism of the early 
 Christians. In England, if a child dies within the first month 
 of its life, it is called a chrysom child ; whence the title in the 
 London bills of mortality. In such a case, it was the beautiful 
 custom amongst our ancestors, perhaps still is so amongst those 
 who have the good feeling to appreciate these time-honored 
 usages, to bury the innocent creature in its baptismal robe ; to 
 which the northern Spaniards add, as another symbol of purity, 
 on the lid of the little coffin, 
 
 ' A happy garland of the pure white rose.' 
 
 How profoundly this mysterious chrism influenced the imagina- 
 tions of our forefathers, is shown by the multiplied rir.ocheti 
 through which it impressed itself upon the vocabulary of thf 
 case ; the oil, the act of anointing, the little infant anointed, th 
 white robs in which it was dressed, all and each severally 
 tore the name of the chrysom. 
 
 NOTE 6. Page 151. 
 
 " Amaranthine : " This word, familiar even to non-Grecian 
 readers through the flower amaranth, and its use amongst poets, 
 fs derived from a, not (equivalent to our n), and maraino, tc 
 wither or decay.
 
 NOTES. 617 
 
 NOTE 7. Page 152. 
 
 " Chained down their Gods": Many of the Greek states, 
 though it has not been sufficiently inquired which states and in 
 what age, had a notion that in war-time the tutelary deities of 
 the place, the epichorial gods, were liable to bribery, by secret 
 offers of temples more splendid, altars better served, &c. from 
 the enemy ; so that a standing danger existed, lest these gods 
 should desert to the hostile camp ; and especially, because, not 
 knowing the rate of the hostile biddings, the indigenous worship- 
 pers had no guide to regulate their own counterbiddings. In this 
 embarrassment, the prudent course, as most people believed, was 
 to chain the divine idols by the leg, with golden fetters. 
 
 NOTE 8. Page 153. 
 
 " The Farrers." There is, but by whom written I really for- 
 get, a separate memoir of this family, and published as a separate 
 volume. In the county histories (such as Chauncy's, &c.) will 
 also be found sketches of their history. But the most popular 
 form in which their memorials have been retraced is a biography 
 of Nicholas Farrer, introduced into one of the volumes, I cannot 
 Bay which, of the Ecclesiastical Biography an interesting com- 
 pilation, drawn up by the late Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, a 
 brother of the great poet. 
 
 NOTE 9. Page 154. 
 
 For proof, look only at two coins of our British Empire first, 
 at our current rupee throughout Hindostan. When a child, I 
 was presented by Bengal relatives with a rouleau of rupees by 
 way of playthings : anything so rude in workmanship, so truly 
 Hunnish, and worthy of Attila, I have not seen on this earth of 
 ours. And yet, secondly, our own English florin, though less 
 brutally inartificial, is even more offensive to good taste, because 
 ess unpretending as a work of display. Oh, that dreadful 
 Woman, with that dreadful bust ! the big woman, and the big 
 bust ! whom and which to encircle in " a chaste salute " would 
 require a man with arms fourteen feet long !
 
 618 NOTES. 
 
 NOTE 10. Page 155. 
 
 When a murderer is thoroughly diseased by vaiiity one 
 all confidence in him. Cellini went upon the plan of claiming ari 
 eminent murders, suitable in point of time and place, that no- 
 body else claimed ; just as many a short poem in the Greek 
 Anthologies, marked adespoton (or, without an owner), was 
 sported by one pretender after another as his own. Even simple 
 homicides he would not think it below him to challenge as his 
 own. Two princes, at the very least, a Bourbon and a Nassau, 
 he pretended to have shot ; it might be so, but nobody ever came 
 forward to corroborate his statement. 
 
 NOTB 11. Page 156. 
 
 In youth I saw frequently chefs d'ceuvre of bookbinding from 
 the studios of some London artists (Hering, Lewis, &c.), and of 
 several Germans especially Kaltoeber, Staggemeier, and others 
 (names forgotten by reason of prickliness and thorniness). But 
 read the account of Mr. Farrer's Bible, and you see how far he, 
 in 1635, must have outshone them. 
 
 NOTE 12. Page 156. 
 
 This was the earliest attempt at a Polyglot Bible, and had its 
 name from the town of Complutum, which is, I think, Jllcala de 
 Henarez. The Henarez is a little river. Some readers will 
 thank me for mentioning that the accent is on the first syllable 
 of Complutum, the u in the penultimate being short ; not Coak- 
 plutum but Complutum. 
 
 NOTB 13. Page 157 
 
 Was it not Bishop Halifax who apologized for Butler in this 
 11 stance ? If Butler were in deep sincerity a Protestant, no 
 ipology was sufficient. 
 
 NOTB 14. Page 161. 
 
 Joseph Ady was a useful public servant, although in some de- 
 gree a disreputable servant ; and through half a generation (sa
 
 NOTES. 619 
 
 sixteen or seventeen years, in these days) a purveyor of fun and 
 hilarity to the great nation of newspaper-readers. His line of 
 business was this: Naturally, in the case of a funded debt so 
 vast as cure in Great Britain, it must happen that very numerous 
 lodgments of sums not large enough to attract attention, are 
 dropping into the list of dividends with no apparent claimant 
 every fortnight. Death is always at work in removing the bar- 
 riers between ourselves whoever this ourselves may happen to 
 be and claims upon the national debt that have lost (perhapt 
 long ago) their original owners. The reader, for instance, or 
 myself, at this very moment, may unconsciously have succeeded 
 to some lapsed claim, between which and us five years ago there 
 may have stood thirty or forty claimants with a nearer title. In 
 a nation so adventurous and given to travelling as ours, deaths 
 abroad by fire and water, by contagious disease, and by the dag- 
 ger or secret poison of the assassin (to which of all nations ours 
 is most exposed, from inveterate habits of generous, unsuspecting 
 confidence), annually clear off a large body of obscure claimants, 
 whose claims (as being not conspicuous from their small amount) 
 are silently as snow-flakes gathering into a vast fund (if I recol- 
 ..ect, forty millions sterling) of similar noiseless accumulations. 
 When you read the periodical list published by authority of the 
 countless articles (often valuable) left by the owners in public 
 carriages, out of pure forgetfulness, to the mercy of chance, or 
 of needy public servants, it is not possible that you should be 
 surprised if some enterprising countryman, ten thousand miles 
 from home, should forget in his last moments some deposit of 
 one, two, or three hundred pounds in the British Funds. In 
 such a case, it would be a desirable thing for the reader and my- 
 self that some person practised in such researches should take 
 charge of our interests, watch the future fortunes of the unad- 
 vertised claim, and note the steps by which sometimes it comes 
 'nearer and nearer to our own door. Now, such a vicarious 
 watchman was Joseph Ady. In discharge of his self-assumed 
 duties, he addressed letters to all the world. He communicated 
 the outline of the case ; but naturally stipulated for a retaining 
 fee (not much, usually twenty shillings), as the honorarium for 
 services past and coming. Out of five thousand addressees, if 
 nine-tenths declined to take any notice of his letters, the remain- 
 ing tenth secured to him 500 annually. Gradually he extended
 
 120 NOTES. 
 
 his correspondence to the Continent. And general merriment 
 attended his continual skirmishes with police-offices. But this 
 lucrative trade was at last ungenerously stifled by a new section 
 in the Post-office Bill, which made the writer of letters that were 
 refused liable for the postage. That legislative blow extin- 
 guished simultaneously Adyism and Ady. 
 
 NOTE 15. Page 162. 
 
 " Unpleasantries" this is a new word, launched a very few 
 years back in some commercial towns. It is generally used 
 Dot in any sense that the reader would collect from its antipole, 
 vleasantry, but in a sense that he may abstract from the context 
 in the sentence above. 
 
 NOTE 16. Page 164. 
 
 This block is, I believe, a monolith. Even to obtain in an ac- 
 cessible situation, and still more to remove into its present site, 
 such a granite mass insusceptible of partition, was a triumph of 
 mechanic art ; and consequently superadds to the attraction of 
 the statue (an equestrian statue of Peter the Great founder at 
 once of the city and the possibility of the city in that situation) 
 a scenical record of engineering power. So far, and considered 
 as a conquest over difficulties, the entire mass must be very 
 striking. But two objections must interfere with the spectator's 
 pleasure. If, as I have been told, the monolith is itself the basis 
 of the statue, in that case what is ordinarily viewed as a hors- 
 d'auvre, no more belonging to the statue than the terrace, street, 
 square, or public hall in which it may happen to be placed, sud- 
 Jenly enters into the artist's work as an essential and irremovable 
 member, or integrant feature of his workmanship. Secondly, 
 this granite monolith, being chiselled into the mimic semblance 
 of an ascending precipice, or section of a precipice, unavoidably ' 
 throws the horse into an unnatural action ; not perhaps into an 
 Unnatural or false attitude; for the attitude may be true to the 
 purpO3e ; but that purpose is itself both false and ungraceful, 
 unless for an ibex or an Alpine chamois. A horse is easily 
 trained to ascend a flight of stairs ; and with no training at all 
 at the request of Mr. Pitt, a little horse of the Shetland breeo 
 wag trotted up-stairs into the front drawing-room at the Londoi
 
 NOTES. 621 
 
 mansion of the penultimate Duke of Gordon. That was more 
 than fifty years ago ; for Pitt has been dead now [viz., November, 
 1857] for nearly fifty-two years. But within the recent knowl- 
 edge of us all, a full-sized horse carried his rider in a flying leap 
 over a splendid dinner table glass, china, tureens, decanters, 
 and blazing wax-lights ambling gently down-stairs on taking 
 his leave, and winning a heavy wager. Such feats are accounted 
 noble and brilliant amongst the princes and sirdars round the 
 throne of Persia. But with us of the western world they are 
 reputed more becoming to a Franconi or an Astley than to a 
 Czar of all the Russias, who speaks as God's vicegerent to three 
 hundred nations and languages. But even a flying leap is better 
 than a scrambling, and up-hill over the asperities of a granite 
 rock neither horse nor man is able to do more than scramble, 
 and this is undignified for the Czar ; is perilous and more un- 
 natural than running iip-stairs for the horse ; and to the poor 
 spectator (unless paid for spectating) is sympathetically painful. 
 
 NOTE 17. Page 168. 
 
 It may seem strange to insinuate against the Jlglaophamus 
 any objection, great or small, as regards its erudition that 
 being the main organ of its strength. But precisely here lay the 
 power of Lobeck, and here his weakness ; a-11 his strength, and 
 his most obvious defect. Of this he was sensible himself. At the 
 very period of composing the Jlglaophamus, he found reason to 
 complain that his situation denied him access to great libraries : 
 and this, perhaps, is felt by the reader most in the part relating 
 to the Eleusinian mysteries, least m that relating to the Orphic. 
 Previously, however, Lobeck had used his opportunities well. 
 And the true praise of his reading is, not so much that it waa 
 unusually extensive, as that it was unusually systematic, and 
 connected itself in all its parts by unity of purpose. At the 
 same time it is a remark of cons : ierable interest, that the stu- 
 dent must not look in Lobeck, for luminous logic, or for sim- 
 plicity of arrangement, which are qualifications for good writing, 
 Unknown to the great scholars of modern Germany, to Nie- 
 tmhr altogether, and in the next degree unknown to Ottfried 
 Mueller, and to Lobeck. Their defects in this respect are so 
 Qagrunt, as to argue sonic capital vice in the academic training
 
 622 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 of Germany. Elsewhere throughout the world no such mon- 
 strous result appears of chaotic arrangement from profound 
 research. As regards philosophy, and its direct application to 
 the enigmas of these Grecian mysteries, it is no blame to Lobeck 
 that none must be looked for in him, unless he had made some 
 pretence to it, which I am not aware that he did. Yet in one 
 instance he ought to have made such a pretence : mere good 
 Bense should have opened his eyes to one elementary blunder of 
 Warburton's. I tax W., I tax all who ever countenanced W., I 
 tax all who have ever opposed W., I tax Lobeck as bringing up 
 the rear of these opponents, one and all with the inexcusable 
 blindness of torpor in using their natural eyesight. So much of 
 philosophy as resides in the mere natural faculty of reflectiveness, 
 would have exposed [pure sloth it was in the exercise of this 
 faculty which concealed] the blunder of W. in confounding a 
 doctrinal religion, [such as Judaism, Christianity, Islamism,] 
 with , Pagan religion, which last has a cultus or ceremonia 
 worship, but is essentially insusceptible of any dogma or opinion 
 Paganism had no creed, no faith, no doctrine, little or great 
 shallow or deep, false or true. Consequently the doctrine of 
 future state did not (because it could not) belong to Paganism 
 Having no doctrines of any sort, Grecian idolatry could not have 
 this. All other arguments against W. were a posteriori from 
 facts of archaeology : this was a priori from the essential princi- 
 ple of an idolatrous religion. All other arguments proved the 
 Warburtonian crotchet to be a falsehood : this proves it to be an 
 impossibility. Other arguments contradict it : this leaves it in 
 self-contvadiction. And one thing let me warn the reader to 
 beware of. In the Oriental forms of Paganism, such as Budd- 
 hism, Brahminism, &c., some vestiges of opinion seem at times to 
 intermingle themselves with the facts of the mythology : all 
 which, however, are only an aftergrowth of sectarian feuds, or 
 philosophic dreams, that having survived opposition, and tbe 
 memory of their own origin, have finally confounded themselves 
 rith the religion itself as parts in its original texture. But in 
 Greece there never was any such confusion, even asanatuiaf 
 process of error. The schools of philosophy always keeping them 
 selves alive, naturally always vindicated their own claims again=4 
 ny incipient encroachments of the national religion.
 
 NOTES. 623 
 
 NOTE 18. Page 17 8. 
 
 Wicked Will Whiston," In this age, when Swift is so little 
 feeA it may be requisite to explain that Swift it was who fas- 
 tened this epithet of wicked to Will Whiston ; and the humor of 
 it lay in the very incongruity of the epithet ; for Whiston, thus 
 [ketched as a profligate, was worn to the bone by the anxieties 
 of scrupulousness : he was anything but wicked, being pedantic, 
 crazy, and fantastical in virtue after a fashion of his own. He 
 mined his wife and family, he ruined himself and all that trusted 
 in him, by crotchets that he never could explain to any rational 
 man ; and by one thing that he never explained to himself, which 
 A hundred years after I explained very clearly, viz. that all his 
 heresies in religion, all his crazes in ecclesiastical antiquities, in 
 casuistical morals, and even as to the discovery of the longitude, 
 had their rise, not (as his friends thought) in too much con- 
 scientiousness and too much learning, but in too little rhubarb 
 and magnesia. In his autobiography he has described his own 
 craziness of stomach in a way to move the gravest reader's 
 laughter, and the sternest reader's pity. Everybody, in fact, 
 that knew his case and history, stared at him, derided him, pitied 
 him, and, in some degree, respected him. For he was a man of 
 eternal self-sacrifice, and that is always venerable ; he was a man 
 of primitive unworldly sincerity, and that is always lovely ; yet 
 both the one and the other were associated with so many oddities 
 and absurdities, as compelled the most equitable judge at times 
 to join in the general laughter. He and Humphrey Ditton, who 
 both held official stations as mathematicians, and were both 
 honored with the acquaintance of Sir Isaac Newton, had both 
 oeen candidates for the Parliamentary prize as discoverers of the 
 longitude, and, naturally, both were found wrong ; which fur 
 Dishes the immediate theme for Swift's savage ridicule : 
 " The longitude mist on 
 
 By wicued Will Wiston ; 
 
 And not better hit on 
 
 By good Master Ditton "
 
 624 NOTES. 
 
 NOTE 19. Papc 178. 
 
 " To adorn the Sparta : " This is an old proverbial form of 
 expression amongst the ancients : when any man had assigned 
 to him for culture or for embellishment a barren, a repulsive, or 
 an ungenial field of labor, his friends would often cheer him up 
 by saying, " Spartam, quam nactus es, exorna ; " t. e., " That 
 Sparta (or homely province) which you have obtained as your 
 allotment, improve and make the beet of." 
 
 NOTE 20. Page 184. 
 
 " Officers : " I take advantage of this accidental notice di- 
 rected to the class which amongst ourselves bears the designa- 
 tion of officers, for the purpose of calling attention to this most 
 singular and inexplicable fact that the Romans, by whom 
 more than by any other people was developed the whole economy 
 of war, consequently the whole corresponding nomenclature, had 
 no term expressing the distinction of officers. If you were a 
 captain, they called you a centurion ; if a colonel, tribunus ; and 
 if a private f. e., a common soldier, or soldier in the ranks, 
 which logically stands in centra-position to the term officer 
 they called you miles gregarius. But if, in speaking of you or 
 me, they wished to say that either of us was a bad officer, thougli 
 of what rank they could not say, by Mercury they had no word 
 for conveying their meaning. The thing officer was as well 
 known at Rome as coals at Newcastle ; but not the word, or the 
 idea as abstracted from all varieties of rank. Does not this go 
 far to prove that there were blockheads in those days ? As again 
 the continuity of succession in that great race (viz., blockheads) 
 seems implied in the possibility that to my unworthy self should 
 be left the very first i?idication of this unaccountable lacuna in 
 the Roman vocabulary. 
 
 NOTE 21. Page 186. 
 
 The Romans themselves saw a monstrosity in this practice 
 which did not really exist in the metaphysical necessity. It was, 
 and it was not, monstrous. In reality it was rational, or mon 
 5'rous, according to theoretic construction. Generally speaking, 
 was but a variety of that divinity which in Christendom all c/
 
 NOTES. 625 
 
 ks so long ascribed to kings. We English always laughed at the 
 French with their grand monarque. The Americans of the Uni- 
 ted States have always laughed at us English, and the sanctity 
 with which our constitution invests the Sovereign. We English,. 
 French, and Americans, have all alike laughed at the Romans 
 apon this matter of apotheosis. And when brought befoie ua 
 unier the idea of Seneca's apocolocuntosis, this practice haa 
 seemed too monstrous for human gravity. And yet again, we 
 English, French, Americans, and Romans, should all have united 
 in scorn for the deep Phrygian, Persian, or Asiatic servility to 
 kings. We of European blood have all looked to the constitu- 
 tioual idea, not the individual person of the sovereign. The 
 Asiatics, though they also still feebly were groping after the 
 same deep idea, sought it in such a sensual body of externals, 
 that none but a few philosophers could keep their grasp on the 
 original problem. How profound an idea is the sanctity of the 
 English sovereign's constitutional person, which idea first made 
 possible the responsibility of the sovereign's ministers. They 
 could be responsible, only if the sovereign were not ; let them be 
 kccountable, and the king might be inviolable. Now really in 
 its secret metaphysics the Roman apotheosis meant little more. 
 Only the accountability lay not in Caesar's ministers, but in the 
 personal and transitory Caesar, as distinguished from the eternal 
 Imperator. 
 
 NOTE 22. Page 186. 
 
 " Great Augustan : " The house of Augustus individually, it 
 will be objected, was not great : the Octavian house was petty; 
 but it was elevated by its matrimonial alliance with the Julian 
 bouse, and otherwise. 
 
 NOTE 23. Page 187. 
 
 "Herod's own Household:" Viz., the murder of his wife 
 Mhriamne, to whom (as representing the Asmonean house) he 
 was indebted for his regal rank ; next, the murder of her youthful 
 brother, who stood nearest to the crown upon her death ; lastly, 
 the murder of the two most distinguished amongst his own sons. 
 All which domestic carnage naturally provoked th<; cutting re- 
 mark ascribed to Augustus Caesar (himself bloody enough, aa
 
 626 VOTES. 
 
 controller of his female household), that it was far better to be 
 numbered amongst Herod's swine, than amongst his kinsfolk ; 
 seeing that his swine were protected by the Mosaic law against 
 the butcher's knife ; whereas his kinsfolk enjoyed no such im- 
 munity. 
 
 NOTE 24. Page 191. 
 
 " Nympholepsy : " The English reader will here be reminded 
 of Lord Byron's exquisite line 
 
 " The nympholepsy of some fond despair." 
 
 NOTE 25. Page 192. 
 
 There is a chorus of that title, powerfully conceived, in Dr 
 Mendelssohn's Oratorio of St Paul. 
 
 NOTE 26. Page 195 
 
 " Traditions : " By this term, as distinguished from proph- 
 ecies, I mean to indicate those special characteristics of the ex- 
 pected Messiah, current everywhere amongst the populace of 
 Judea, which had been sent down through possibly sixty gen- 
 erations from Abraham, but were not expressly noticed in the 
 Prophets. There were apparently many of these ; and it is cer- 
 tain that some of them were regarded with reverence by Christ, 
 and deliberately fulfilled by him. 
 
 NOTE 27. Page 465. 
 
 " Visible : " Accordingly, some five-and-thirty years ago I 
 attempted to show that Milton's famous expression in the " Par- 
 adise Lost," "No light, but rather darkness visible," was not (as 
 jritics imagined) a gigantic audacity, but a simple rait of de> 
 ucription, faithful to the literal realities of a phenomenon (suilen 
 light intermingled with massy darkness) whicB Milton had no- 
 ticed with closer attention than the mob of careless observers. 
 Equivalent to this is Milton's own expression, " Teach light to 
 counterfeit a gloom," in " H Penseroso." 
 
 NOTE 28. Page 469. 
 
 ' Relation of Xenia :" A citizen of Rome, if likely to 
 travel, established correspondents all over the Mediterranean 
 of course, therefore, at so splendid a city as Corinth. Afta
 
 HOTK8. 627 
 
 Jiat, the Corinthiau correspondent, when drawn by business of 
 my kind to Rome, went thither without anxiety relying upon 
 his privilege ; and upon producing his tessera, or ticket of iden- 
 tification, he was immediately admitted to all the rights of hos- 
 pitality ; foiemost amongst which ranked the advantage of good 
 counsel against the risk of collision with the laws or usages of 
 a strange city ; and the further advantage of powerful aid in 
 the case of having already incurred that risk. Inversely, the 
 Roman enjoyed a parity of protection and hospitable entertain- 
 ment on going to Corinth. And not unfrequently this recipro 
 cal tie descended through several generations. The distant 
 households drew upon each other at sight. 
 
 NOTE 29. Page 472. 
 
 " Lampoons : " Too literally lampoons ; for, as those meant 
 personal invectives affixed to lamp-posts, where they could be 
 read by everybody, so Gregory of Nazianzum himself entitled 
 each of several successive libels on the Emperor Julian by the 
 name ofstylites, or libel affixed to a pillar of a public portico. 
 
 NOTE 30. Page 476. 
 
 [The passage following, as far as line three, page 489, was 
 omitted by De Quincey, when reprinting this paper in the latest 
 Edinburgh edition.] 
 
 NOTE 31. Page 491. 
 
 [Mr. De Quincey's reference we presume is to his paper on 
 " Greece under the Romans," published in volume vii. of thia 
 levies.] 
 
 NOTE 32. Page 495. 
 
 " Fluetus decumanus:" Connected with this term, once so 
 *ell understood, but now (like all things human) hurrying into 
 oblivion, there was amongst the ancients a fanciful superstition ; 
 or, until it proved such, let us call it courteously a popular 
 treed, that wanted the seal and imprimatur of science. Has the 
 reader himself any creed whatsoever, or even opinion, as to 
 vaves ? Stars, we all know, are of many colors, and of many 
 izes crimson, green, azure orange, and (1 believe, but am 
 not certain) violet. As to size, they range all the way from 
 hose grandees up and down the sky, apparently pleuipoten
 
 C28 NOTES. 
 
 tiaries of the heavens, or (in the Titanic language of JEschy- 
 Ins) \a(j.irpoi Aweurat blazing potentates all the way down to 
 snch as count only amongst the secrets of the telescope : tele- 
 scopic stars, as imperfectly revealed to the children of man as 
 those children are revealed to them. The graduation of stars 
 runs down a Jacob's ladder. Can there be any parallel gradua- 
 tion amongst the billows of old Ocean ? The ancients and per- 
 haps it furnishes not the least conspicuous amongst the many 
 evidences attesting their defect of power to observe accurately 
 enough to meet the purposes of natural philosophy fancied 
 that there was ; and supposing them for the moment right as to 
 the main principle viz., of a secret law moulding the waves 
 in obedience to some geometric pressure, and expressing itself in 
 some recurrent relation to arithemetic intervals, they must yet 
 have been negligent in excess not to have investigated the re- 
 lations of the vulgar waves those, I mean, which apparently 
 escaped the control of the ocean looms. What the ancieuts 
 held was simply this that every tenth wave was conspicu- 
 ously larger than the other nine. But in what respect larger ? 
 In height was it, or generally in bulk? Did the favored wave 
 distribute its superiority of size through the three dimensions 
 of space (consequently the three dimensions of that which fills 
 space) an arrangement which would greatly disturb the ap- 
 parent (though not the real) advantage on the scale of com- 
 parison between the tenth wave and the other nine ? Or did 
 this privileged tenth wave accumulate its entire advantage upon 
 the one dimension of altitude ? Next, as to the nine subordi- 
 nate waves, defrauded of their f a r proportions by unjust nover- 
 cal nature, were they all equally defrauded, or was a bias to- 
 wards favoritism manifested here also? Ani, if unequally en- 
 dowed, did this inequality proceed graduatim and continuously, 
 or discontinuonsly ? And, if continuously, how did the scale 
 move upwards ? Was it by a geometrical progression through 
 a series of multiples, or arithmetically through a series of con- 
 stant increments ? And the tenth wave a thing which I was 
 nearly forgetting to demand being always superior in the 
 icale, was it always equally superior ? And if not, if the superi- 
 ority were liable to disturbances, did these disturbances follow 
 *ny known law ? or was this law suspected of leaning towardi 
 the well-known Cambridge problem Given the captain'
 
 KOTEt,. 629 
 
 name, and the price of b:s knee-buckles, to determine the lati- 
 tude of the ship. 
 
 This question about the tenth wave, together with others sent 
 down to us from elder days snch, in particular, as that which 
 respects the venom of the toad had interested equally myself, 
 the poorest of naturalists, and the late Professor Wilson, among 
 the very best. We both admired, in the highest degree, the im- 
 passioned eloquence of Sir Thomas Brown in those works which . 
 allowed of eloquence, as in his " Keligio Medici," and hia 
 " Urn-Burial ; " but in his works of pure erudition, he, the cor- 
 rector of traditional follies (as in his " Vulgar Errors"), some- 
 times needs correction himself. We had, in Westmoreland, 
 learned experimentally that Shakspeare is right, in describing 
 the toad as venomous. Venomous it is, to the small extent of 
 diluted nitric acid in burning and discoloring the skin, when 
 irritated or more probably when greatly alarmed. Several 
 brute creatures, cats in particular, when driven into a frenzy of 
 fear, have been supposed to fall into a self-generated hydro- 
 phobia, with full power to inflict it. But grieved should we 
 have been, if we had imagined that the full establishment of this 
 persecution-born venom would ever suggest an argument of pal- 
 liation to the cruel persecutors of this most inoffensive creature. 
 Aggressive tendencies it has none : not offended, it will never 
 offend. But the decuman wave was a more elaborate case. We 
 had heard little else than scoffs at the Greek races who had 
 countenanced such a belief. Grcecia mendax, in the brief exsib 
 ilation from the stage by the stern Roman of all Greek testi 
 mony whatsoever, had been the answer of the incredulous. Yel 
 this reference had the effect of suggesting a question favorable to 
 the ancients : might not the phenomenon, in Hibernian phrase, 
 be " thrue for them ? " The tides in the Mediterranean are, 1 
 believe, everywhere in an under-key as compared with those of 
 our angry Atlantic ; in the Enripus, or narrow frith between 
 Euooea (Negropont) and the mainland, there are, by report, 
 none at all. And having confessedly one great diffe..*ence, whj 
 not another ? 
 
 Professor Wilson, therefore, and myself had imposed it upon 
 urselves as a duty to investigate this problem. Of all com- 
 panions that a man could have had, with the world stretcked 
 ut before him to choose from, in any chase after a natural
 
 630 NOTES. 
 
 phenomenon, for any purpose, whether of skeptical inquiry ai 
 of verification, none was equal to Professor Wilson. He had 
 used his youthful (I may say schoolboy) opportunities indefati- 
 gably ; he had won all his knowledge, so varied and so accu- 
 rate, by direct experience, troubling himself little ahout books,* 
 which in A is earlier days, had as yet benefited by no reform 
 (though even then on the brink of it). Professor Wilson has 
 himself most powerfully discriminated (see Christopher in his 
 "Aviary," Cant, i.) the two orders of naturalists: those self- 
 formed among the fields and forests, on the one hand on the 
 other, the dry, sapless students of books in a closet or a mu- 
 seum. To the former class belonged preeminently White of 
 Selborne, Waterton, Audubon, Charles Bonaparte, and those 
 
 * I ought in all gratitude to make an emphatic exception for 
 " Bewick's Quadrupeds," a book to which myself, in common 
 with my brothers and sisters, had been more deeply indebted 
 than to any score of books beside in that department of knowl- 
 edge. But, after all, it was the matchless vignettes of Bewick 
 himself 
 
 " And the skill which he learn'd on the banks of the Tyno " 
 
 that give such golden value to this book ; for the printed text, 
 though I daresay respectable, did not leave a profound impres- 
 sion upon any one of us. The " Birds," in which some of the 
 vignettes struck me as even more beautiful, came to us, how- 
 ever, at a less impressible period. And the " Fables '' we 
 never heard of whilst children. Our experience of this delightful 
 artist on whom rest the benedictions of childhood forever, was 
 gathered in the years 1794 (when Eobespierre might have 
 figured for the Koyal Tiger of Bengal), 1795, and 1796. Since 
 then, two entire generations of the human race, with ifs annual 
 harvests of children, have pursued their flight over the disk of 
 Time. I have elsewhere mentioned " Gnlliver " as one of those 
 books which command a mixed audience where children and 
 grown-up men are seen jostling each other; to this list must be 
 added " Banyan," the " Arabian Nights," " Kobinson Cru- 
 soe," and " Bewick." Publishers, it seems to me, should paj 
 tome regard to this fact in the characteristic embellishments, &c- 
 idapted separately to the two different audiences.
 
 NOTES. 631 
 
 whom Professor Wilson himself indicated as " the two Wilsons," 
 meaning, probably, his own younger brother, James Wilson, and 
 the American Wilson. But we ought now to speak of " the 
 three Wilsons;" for the Professor himself, in so far as his 
 other studies had left him time to pursue this science, was tha 
 most vivid, life-like, and realizing describer of brute animals, 
 especially birds and fishes. He was not the measurer of propor- 
 tions in tins and beaks, but the circumstantiator of habits and 
 variable resources under variable difficulties. 
 
 Perhaps, in earlier days, Swammerdam should be added to 
 this meritorious catalogue. Of him it was said, that, for every 
 one year passed in human society, he had passed three in a 
 ditch amongst frogs. At the time I speak of, our own inquiries 
 concerned a sublimer object!* But, sublime as it might be, 
 that formed no attraction to the feelings morbid, it may be 
 thought, but pathetically morbid of Professor Wilson. The 
 year of which I speak was (to the best of my recollection) 1826. 
 Consequently, I had already known him most intimately for 
 seventeen years ; and year by year, as regards the latter seven, 
 there had been growing upon him a deadly recoil of feeling from 
 the seashore as presenting that peculiar gathering of sights 
 and sounds which more than any other awoke phantom resur- 
 rections to his own mind of his youthful gifts and physical en- 
 ergies, now annually decaying. We made two separate visits, if 
 
 * Not so sublime, however, as at first it may be fancied. 
 Charles Lamb explained the cause of this when accounting for 
 some person's disappointment on his first introduction to the 
 sea. This person had vaguely prefigured the case to himself, as 
 though the total object would present itself in all its tumultu- 
 us extent. Not that, upon a moment's reflection, he could 
 nave expected such a spectacle ; but irreflectively he had allowed 
 himself to anticipate, if not such a spectacle, yet an impression 
 answerable in grandeur to such a spectacle. Meantime, all that 
 be saw, or should reasonably have hoped to see, was a beggarly 
 ection, a fraction of the whole concern ; and even for that frac- 
 tion, the very station of dry laud, from which he viewed it, re- 
 minded him that the ocean was anything but boundless. The 
 ocean pretended to hem in mighty continents; but the nakei' 
 Jruth was that they hemmed in him
 
 S32 NOTES. 
 
 Not three, to the seashore (i, e., the shore of the Frith neai 
 Edinburgh), one perhaps in the year already mentioned, and a 
 Becond some seven years later. One or other of these was to no 
 greater distance than the sands of Poitobello ; but on that oc 
 casion, unfortunately, we met the Yeomanry (of Mid-Lothian, I 
 think), who with some difficulty executed a charge on the very 
 insufficient area of sand exposed at PortobeLo This accident 
 did not improve the spirits of Professor Wilson, who was re 
 minded too keenly of the years 1806 and 1810, when he had 
 himself figured most conspicuously in the ranks, first of the Ox 
 ford, subsequently of the Kendal Volunteers on both occa 
 sions in the light company ; for his powers as an athlete turned 
 altogether upon agility, not upon strength. No man was a bet- 
 ter judge upon questions of bodily prowess ; and no man, at 
 least no gentleman, was better acquainted with the records of 
 the Fancy, as delivered by Mr. Pierce Egan, an amateur of 
 first-rate ability. As to mere strength, though always disposed 
 to speak disparagingly of his own powers, he was right, I be- 
 lieve, in undervaluing his own pretensions to the power of hard 
 hitting. What had been sometimes said of Spring, though 
 champion of England for some years, he has often assured me 
 was true of himself viz., that " he could not make a dint in a 
 pound of butter." But in agility, as manifested in running, leap- 
 ing, and dancing, he was the Pelides of his time. One striking 
 proof of his supreme excellence as a leaper is implied in this an- 
 ecdote: When he was about twenty (Anno 1805), he had started 
 from Oxford at midnight for Moulsey Hurst (fifty miles distant, 
 I believe), where some great event was to come off. After this 
 was decided, Wilson, at the request of several friends on the 
 ground, favored the amateurs with a specimen of his leaping. 
 The crack leaper of the day I rather think Richmond, a black 
 witnessed this performance ; and, upon hearing the circum- 
 stances under which it had been executed viz., the severe pe- 
 destrian effort, and the night's want of sleep declined to un- 
 dertake a contest upon any terms. That advantage upon which 
 Lady Hester Stanhope idly nursed a secret vanity, as peculiar 
 to herself and the Bedouins viz., an instep so highly arched 
 .Hat a rat might have run under her foot formed one in the 
 ystem of muscular machinery by which nature had equipped 
 Urn for unapproachable excellence in one mode of gymnastics
 
 NOTES. 633 
 
 Barely to see him even walk round a table was a pure delight 
 to an eye at all learned in the fluencies of motion. Burke's ex- 
 pression upon the visionary grace of Marie Antoinette that 
 she hardly seemed to touch the earth was realized, and be 
 came suddenly apprehensible to the sense, in him. And through 
 this same structure of foot it was, and the extraordinary strength 
 of his tendon Achillis, that he danced with ease and elegance so 
 perfect. Yet he had never received one hour's instruction. 
 
 I fear that this preliminary account of my partner in the re- 
 search may prove disproportioned ; for the total result was 
 Email and purely negative. In the latter trial we waited and 
 watched from an early stage of a spring tide ; but the answer 
 was none. We began by watching for a wave that should seem 
 conspicuonlsy larger than its fellows, and then counted on- 
 wards to the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth, and so on to the 
 one hundredth dated from that. But we never could detect any 
 overruling principle involving itself in the successive swells ; and 
 the wind continually disturbed any tendency that we had fan- 
 cied to a recurrent law. Southey's brother, Tom, a lieutenant 
 in the navy, whom I had once asked for his opinion upon the 
 question, laughed, and said that such a notion must have come 
 from the log of the ship Argo, Thus raising the Professor, who 
 really had a good deal of nautical skill, and my ignorant self, 
 that had none at all, to the rank of Argonauts. We, however, 
 fancying that the phenomenon might possibly belong to tideless 
 waters, subsequently tried the English lakes, some of which 
 throw up very respectable waves when they rise into angry 
 moods. The Cumberland lakes of Bassenthwaite and Derwent- 
 water fell to my share; Windermere, Coniston, and -Ulles- 
 water, to Professor Wilson. But the issue of all was emptiness 
 and aerial mockeries ; as if the lady of the secret depths Un- 
 dina, or some Grecian Naiad, 
 
 " Or Lady of the Lake,* 
 Sole-Bitting by the shores of old romance " 
 
 * " Lady of the Lake : " Such was the earliest expression of 
 Wordsworth's heavenly image perhaps the loveliest that 
 poetry can show. By altering the word lake to mere, he greatly 
 deteriorated the effect : as he partly perceived himself. Why
 
 034 NOTES. 
 
 had been playing with our credulity. False, however, as it maj 
 DC, this image of the tenth wave furnished the ancients with a 
 Itrong rhetorical expression for any possible excess in any mode 
 of evil. A fiery heat of persecution, a threatening advance oi 
 exterminating war, a sudden and simultaneous rush of calami- 
 ties [as upon Athens in the Peloponnesian War), was termed a 
 fluetus decumanus of evil. Perhaps I have too lightly yielded to 
 the temptation of connecting a personal interest with my imper- 
 fect report of an attempt to investigate the thing, or attempt at 
 least to ascertain whether the supposed " thing " had any real 
 root except in the fanciful creeds of Pagan naturalists. Now 
 let na retreat from this digression into the high-road of the dis- 
 cussion upon ORACLES. 
 
 NOTE 33. Page 504. 
 
 "What teas this situation ? Early in the eighth century after 
 Christ (let us say A. D. 707), Roderick the Goth, King of Spain, 
 taking an infamous advantage from his regal power, was said 
 to have violated the person of Count Julian's daughter by 
 some historians called Cava. Her father, as the deadliest mode 
 of vengeance open to him, had called in the Mahometan inva- 
 ders of the Barbary coasts. Roderick, by a deep prophetic in- 
 stinct, read in vision the desolation which his own perfidious 
 atrocity had let loose upon Spain, his country, and Christianity, 
 his faith, through eight hundred years ; descended into hell by 
 means of despair, reascended by penitence to earth, fought one 
 mighty battle for the Cross, was beaten, and immediately van- 
 then Had he done it ? Simply because amongst the dramatic 
 writers of Shakspeare's era the phrase Lady of the Lake had 
 received a slang meaning, like Bona roba, and other disreputable 
 designations for that frail sisterhood. But this meaning (nevci 
 at any time popularly diffused) had vanished for two entire cen- 
 turies. So weak was William Wordsworth's reason for this, as 
 for many another tampering with his own text. His first 
 thougnts were almost invariably best. Indeed it is very notice- 
 able that William Wordsworth, in earlier life the most obstinate 
 of recusants, as regarded the arrogant mandates of criticism 
 'and in general rightly so), became, towards the close of his life 
 tnost injudiciously indulgent to capricious objectors.
 
 NOTES. 63 5 
 
 :shed from earth leaving no traces for deciphering hia mys- 
 terious fate. 
 
 NOTE 34. Page 510. 
 
 " Tu es fou : " The merely English reader, who is unac- 
 quainted with French, must not mistake fou for sot. Sot is the 
 word for fool ; and the word fou, though looking too like that 
 opprobrious term, denotes a form of intellectual infirmity viz., 
 madness claiming deeper pity, but also deeper awe and re- 
 spect. 
 
 NOTE 35. Page 510. 
 
 " First ground :" In our modern geography, Egypt is the 
 first region of Africa to those who enter it from the east. But 
 exactly at that point it is that Grecian geography differs from 
 ours. The Greek Libya, as regarded the Mediterranean coast, 
 coincided with our Africa, except precisely as to Egypt, which 
 (Herodotus tells us) was, or ought to be, regarded as a transi- 
 tional chamber between Asia and Libya. 
 
 NOTE 36. Page 511. 
 
 At first sight, the reader is apt to wonder why it was that in- 
 golence so undisguised should have been allowed to prosper. 
 But in fact all religions have been indulgent to insolence, where 
 the known alternative has been sycophantic timidity. Chris- 
 tianity herself encourages men to " take heaven by storm." In 
 that spirit it was that the Pagan deities, in the persons of their 
 representative idols, submitted to be caned and horsewhipped 
 without open mutiny, and continually to be chained up by one 
 leg, in cases where the gods were suspected of meditating flight 
 to the enemy. Universally, insolence was but an offence of 
 manner. Even that might have provoked a shade of displeasure, 
 were it not that, more effectually than any other expression of 
 temper, it cured the one unpardonable offence of insincerity, 
 languishing devotion, decay of burning love to which love, ae 
 the one sole pledge of undying loyalty, all frailties were for- 
 given. 
 
 NOTE 37. Page 515. 
 
 [The remainder of this paper was added by De Quincey when 
 revising the latest edition of his works and has not before bee 
 -epr ite<\ in America.]
 
 636 NOTES. 
 
 NOTE 38. Page 517. 
 
 In fact so plentiful, that even the memorials dearest to theii 
 vanity and patriotism viz., their Battle Trophies could no 
 otherwise be protected from the rapacity of domestic robbers 
 than by making them of materials which would hardly pay the 
 cost of removal. The Greeks, after any victory of one little 
 rascally clan over another, of Spartans over Thebans, for in- 
 stance, or (what is more gratifying to imagine) of Thebans over 
 Spartans, used to do two things in the way of self-glorification : 
 first, they chanted a hymn or pcean (iraiaviot>), which was their 
 mode of singing Te Deum ; secondly, they erected a trophy, or 
 memorial of their victory, on the ground. But this trophy one 
 might naturally expect to be framed of the most durable ma- 
 terials ; whereas, on the contrary, it was framed of the very 
 frailest ; viz., firewood, at sevenpence the cart-load ; and the best 
 final result that I, for my part, can suppose from any trophy 
 whatsoever, would be that some old woman, living in the 
 neighborhood of the trophy, went out on favorable nights, and 
 selected fuel enough to warm her poor old Pagan bones through 
 the entire length of a Grecian winter. Why the wood rapidly 
 disappeared, is therefore easy to understand ; but not why it had 
 ever been relied on as a durable record. The Greeks, however, 
 who were masters in the arts of varnishing and gilding, reported 
 the whole case in the following superfine terms : "It is right," 
 said they, " and simply a necessity of our human nature, that we 
 should quarrel intermittingly. We Grecians are all brothers, 
 it is true ; but still even brothers must, for the sake of health, 
 have a monthly allowance of fighting and kicking. Not at all 
 less natural it is, that the conquerors in each particular round 
 of our never-ending battle should triumph gloriously, and crow 
 like twenty thousand game cocks, each flapping his wings on 
 his own dunghill, armed with spurs according to the Socratic 
 mocbl left us by Plato. An allowance, in short, of shouting and 
 jubilating is but fair. Still all this should have a speedy end. 
 Not only upon the prudential maxim that he who is the kick 
 ing party to-day, will often be the kicked party to-morrow ; bat 
 %lso on a moral motive viz., to forget and forgive. Under 
 these auggestions, it becomes right to raise no memorials oi
 
 KOTE8. 637 
 
 fighting triumphs in any but fugitive materials ; not therefore 
 of brass, not therefore jf marble, which (says the cunning Greek) 
 would be too durable, which (say I, revising the Greek dis- 
 sembler) would be too costly, but rather of wood the most worm- 
 eaten, and if it show signs of dry-rot, all the better. Under this 
 limitation our triumph puts on a human and natural shape. It 
 very soon decays ; and typifies our exultation, which decays con- 
 currently." Ay, very plausible and sentimental. But thia ia 
 an ex parte account ; purely Grecian. Mine is different. I ven- 
 ture to suggest that the reason for not using brass or copper 
 was, because, in that case, long before the moon had ran her 
 circuit, the trophy would have been found in a blacksmith's shop 
 at Corinth or Athens, sold or pawned, at the rate of a drachma 
 a-head for a gang of forty thieves. The Grceculus esuriens of 
 Juvenal's sketch (taken from the standing-point of Home) was 
 true for centuries : always he was a knave, a sharp sycophantic 
 knave, that lived by his wits ; and yet, multiplying too fast, al- 
 ways in the large majority he was hungry. Through many a 
 generation he was the dominant physician of the earth ; he left 
 behind him a body of medical research that is even yet worth 
 studying ; he, if nobody else, forestalled Lord Bacon's philosophy, 
 for he at least relied altogether upon experience and tentative 
 approaches ; others he healed by myriads ; but himself he never 
 succeeded in healing permanently or widely of the disease called 
 hunger. Empty stomachs continued to form the reproach of his 
 art. For the truth was, through centuries, that Greece bred too 
 large a population. Her institutions favored population too 
 much, whilst her agriculture and commerce tended (but could 
 not establish a sufficient tendency) to repress population. Too 
 constantly, therefore, Greece was mendax, edax,furax (menda- 
 cious, edacious, furacious), though indisposed to criminal ex 
 cesses. 
 
 NOTE 39. Page 522. 
 
 In English we understand by security neither more nor less 
 than safety ; i. e., freedom from danger. Bnt in Latin, securitaa 
 means freedom not at all from danger, but from the sense of 
 danger and its anxieties. A man is therefore in Latin often 
 described as securus, whilst on the brink of destruction, if only 
 Rot conscious of his danger. Milton, in his occasional tendency
 
 538 NOTES. 
 
 to draw too emphatically upon the Latin elements in our Ian 
 guage, has given to the word secure its Roman acceptation ; bnt 
 he has hardly naturalized that use. 
 
 NOTE 40. Page 536. 
 
 " An under power of sublimity." Every body knows 
 that Homer compared the Telamonian Ajax, in a moment 
 ol heroic endurance, to an ass. This, however, was only 
 under a momentary glance from a peculiar angle of the 
 case ; but the Mahometan, too solemn, and also, perhaps, 
 too stupid, to catch the fanciful colors of things, absolutely 
 by choice, under the Bagdad caliphate, decorated a moat 
 favorite hero with the title of the Ass which title is re- 
 peated with veneration to this day. The wild ass is one 
 of the few animals which has the reputation of never 
 flying from an enemy. 
 
 NOTB41. Page 537. 
 
 " Which recommended it to a distinction." It might be 
 objected that the Oriental ass was often a superb animal ; 
 that it is spoken of prophetically as such ; and that, histori- 
 cally, the Syrian ass is made known to us as having been 
 used in the prosperous ages of Judea for the riding of 
 princes. But this is no objection. Those circumstances in 
 the history of the ass were requisite to establish its sym- 
 bolic propriety in a great symbolic pageant of triumph; 
 whilst, on the other hand, the individual animal, there is 
 good reason to think, was. marked by all the qualities of 
 the general race as a suffering and unoffending tribe in the 
 animal creation. The asses on which princes rode were 
 of a separate color, of a peculiar breed, and improved 
 like the English racer, by continual care.
 
 MOTES. 639 
 
 NOTE 42. Page 537. 
 
 Mahometanism, which every where pillages Christianity, 
 eannot but have its own face at times glorified by its 
 stolen jewels. This solemn hour of jubilation, gathering 
 even the brutal natures into its fold, recalls accordingly the 
 Mahometan legend (which the reader may remember is 
 one of those incorporated into Southey's Thalaba) of a 
 great hour revolving once in every year, during which the 
 gates of paradise were thrown open to their utmost extent, 
 and gales of happiness issued forth upon the total family 
 of man. 
 
 NOTE 43. Page 539. 
 
 "Does spontaneously offer itself." Heber (Bishop ot 
 Calcutta) complains that this constellation is not com- 
 posed of stars answering his expectation in point of mag- 
 nitude ; but he admits that the dark barren space around 
 it gives to this inferior magnitude a very advantageous re- 
 lief. 
 
 NOTE 44. Page 540. 
 
 See upon this subject some interesting speculations (or at 
 least dim outlines and suggestions or speculations) by tbe Ger- 
 man author, Novalis (the Graf von Hardenbcrg.) 
 
 NOTE 45. Page 542. 
 
 n The victim of Obi," It seems worthy of notice that 
 his magical fascination is generally called Obi, and the 
 magicians Obeah men, throughout Guinea, Negroland, &c. : 
 whilst tbe Hebrew or Syriac word for the rites of necro- 
 mancy was Ob, or Obh, at least when ventriloquism WM 
 touceraed.
 
 640 NOTES. 
 
 NOTE 46. Page 548. 
 
 As for example in that mysterious poem of Horace, where a 
 dying boy points the fulminations of his dying words against the 
 witch that presides over his tortures. 
 
 NOTE 47. Page 553. 
 
 " No worse book could have been selected." The probable 
 reason for making so unhappy a choice seems to have been 
 that Virgil, in the middle ages, had the character of a nec- 
 romancer, a diviner, &c. This we all know from Dante. 
 Now, the original reason for this strange translation of 
 character and functions we hold to have arisen from the 
 circumstance of his maternal grandfather having borne 
 the name of Magus. People in those ages held that a 
 powerful enchanter, exerciser, &c., must have a magician 
 amongst his cognati; the power must run in the blood, 
 which on the maternal side could be undeniably ascer- 
 tained. Under this preconception, they took Magus, not 
 far a proper name, but for a professional designation. 
 Amongst many illustrations of the magical character sus- 
 tained by Virgil in the middle ages, we may mention that 
 a writer about the year 1200, or the era of our Robin Hood, 
 published by Montfaucon, and cited by Gibbon in his last 
 volume, says of Virgil, that " Captus a Romania invitililiter 
 txiit, ivitque Neapolim." 
 
 NOTE 48. Page 554. 
 
 " Because he was too young." Dr. Doddridge was bora 
 in the summer of 1702 ; consequently he was at this era 
 f his life about twenty-seven years old, and consequently 
 lot so obviously entitled to the excuse of youth. But he 
 pleaded his youth, not with a view to the exertions re- 
 quired, but to the auctoritas and responsibilities of the 
 situation.
 
 NOTES. 6i 
 
 NOTB 49. Page 559. 
 
 Victrix causa Deis placuit ; sed victa Catoni that cause which 
 triumphed approved itself to the gods ; but, in retaliation, the 
 vanquished cause approved itself to Cato. Perhaps, in ah 
 human experience, in books or in colloquial intercourse, there 
 never was so grand, so awful a compliment paid to an individual 
 as this of Lucas's to Cato ; nor, according to my own judgment, 
 one BO entirely misplaced. One solitary individual, in his single 
 person, is made to counterpoise by weight of auctaritas and 
 power of sanction the entire Pantheon. The Julian cause might 
 have seemed the better, for it won the favor of Heaven. But 
 no. The Pompeian must have been the better, for it won the 
 favor of Cato 
 
 NOTE 50. Page 559. 
 
 And in fact not merely liable to be set aside, but actually set 
 aside in 1660 by the Restoration. This reversal was again par 
 tially reversed, or at least to a great extent virtually reversed, 
 by the Revolution of 1688-9 : upon which great event the true 
 judgment too little perceived by English historians, is, that, for 
 the most part, it was a reaffirmation of the principles contended 
 for by the Long Parliament in the Parliamentary War. But 
 this final verdict Milton did not live to see, or even dimly to 
 anticipate. 
 
 NOTE 51. Page 561. 
 
 " The hero of the horrid narrative." Horrid it certainly 
 is ; and one incident in every case gives a demoniacal ail 
 of coolness to the hellish atrocities viz., the regular for- 
 warding of the bheels, or gravediggers. But else the tale 
 tends too much to monotony, and for a reason -which 
 ought to have checked the author in carrying on the work 
 to three volumes namely, that, although there is much 
 dramatic variety in the circumstances of the several cases, 
 there is none in the catastrophes. The brave man and the 
 coward, the erect spirit fighting to the last and the poor 
 creature that despairs from the first, al 1 are confounded ic 
 roe undistinguishing end by sudden strangulation, Thi 
 41
 
 642 NOTES. 
 
 was the original defect of the plan. The sudden surprise 
 and the scientific noosing as with a Chilian lasso consti- 
 tuted in fact a main feature of Thuggee; but still the 
 gradual theatrical arrangement of each Thug severally by 
 the side of a victim must often have roused violent sus- 
 picion, and that in time to intercept the suddenness of the 
 murder. Now, for the sake of the dramatic effect, this in- 
 terception ought more often to have been introduced, else 
 the murders are but so many blind surprises as if in sleep. 
 
 NOTE 52. Page 565. 
 
 Since this was first written, Haydon the painter, in his Auto 
 biography [I. p. 76], refers to this ancient superstition in terms 
 which I have reason to think inaccurate : " She" (his mother) 
 " appeared depressed and melancholy. During the journey, four 
 magpies rose, chattered, and flew away. The singular supersti- 
 tions about the bird were remembered by us all. I repeated to 
 myself the old saw ' One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a 
 wedding, and four for death.' I tried to deceive my dear mother, 
 by declaring that two were for death, and four for mirth ; but she 
 persisted that four announced death in Devonshire ; and absurd 
 as we felt it to be, we could not shake off the superstition." 
 About three o'clock in the succeeding night Mrs. Haydon died. 
 Meantime, whatever may be the Devonshire version of the old 
 saying, I am assured by a lady that the form current elsewhere 
 is this : 
 
 " One for sorrow; 
 
 Two for mirth ; 
 Three for a wedding; 
 
 And four for a birth." 
 
 And it is clear that the rhyme in the latter reading offers somi 
 guarantee for its superior accuracy. 
 
 NOTE 53. Page 567. 
 
 u There are in England." Especially in Somersetshire 
 And for twenty miles round Wrington, the birthplace of 
 Locke. Nobody sinks for wells without their advice. We
 
 MOTES. 643 
 
 lurselves knew an amiable and accomplished Scottish 
 family, who, at an estate called Behnadrothie, in memory 
 of a similar property in Ross-shire, built a house in Somer- 
 setshire, and resolved to find water without help from the 
 jowser : but after sinking to a greater depth than ever had 
 been known before, and spending nearly two hundred 
 pounds, they were finally obliged to consult the jowser, 
 who found water at once. 
 
 NOTE 54. Page 568. 
 
 Mahmood of Ghizni, which, under the European name 
 of Ghaznee, was so recently taken in one hour by our In- 
 dian army under Lord Keane. Mahmood was the first 
 Mahometan invader of Hindostan. 
 
 NOTE 55. Page 575. 
 
 " Is at much entitled to a fair valuation, under the laws of 
 induction, as if it had been more probable beforehand," 
 One of the cases which Laplace notices as entitled to a 
 grave consideration, but which would most assuredly be 
 treated as a trivial phenomenon, unworthy of attention, by 
 commonplace spectators, is when a run of success, with 
 no apparent cause, takes place on heads or tails, (pile ou 
 croix.) Most people dismiss such a case as pure accident; 
 but Laplace insists on its being duly valued as a fact, 
 however unaccountable as an effect So again, if, in a 
 large majority of experiences like those of Lord Lindsay's 
 oarty in the desert, death should follow, such a phenome- 
 non is as well entitled to its separate valuation as any 
 other.
 
 644 NOTES. 
 
 NOTE 56. Page 578. 
 
 " Because that idea w so peculiarly Christian. 1 " One rea- 
 son, additional to the main one, why the idea of a ghost 
 could not be conceived or reproduced by paganism, lies in 
 the fourfold resolution of the human nature at death viz., 
 I. corpus; 2. manes; 3. spintus ; 4. anima. No rever- 
 sionary consciousness, no restitution of the total nature, 
 sentient and active, was thus possible. Pliny has a storj 
 which looks like a ghost story ; but it is all moonshine a 
 mere simulacrum. 
 
 NOTE 57. Page 580. 
 
 " Like Port wine superannuated, the sibylline booh had 
 lost their flavor and their body." There is an allegoric de- 
 scription in verse, by Mr. Rogers, of an icehouse, in which 
 winter is described as a captive, &c., which is memorable 
 on this account that a brother poet, on reading the pas- 
 sage, mistook it, (from not understanding the allegorical 
 expressions,) either sincerely or maliciously, for a descrip- 
 tion of the housedog. Now, this little anecdote seems to 
 imbody the poor sibyl's history from a stern, icy sover- 
 eign, with a petrific mace, she lapsed into an old, toothless 
 mastiff. She continued to snore in her ancient kennel for 
 above a thousand years. The last person who attempted 
 to stir her up with a long pole, and to extract from her 
 paralytic dreaming some growls or snarls against Chris- 
 tianity, was Aurelian, in a moment of public panic. But 
 the thing was past all tampering ; the poor creature could 
 neither be kicked nor coaxed into vitality. 
 
 NOTE 58. Page 582. 
 
 By the way, it seems quite impossible for the stern and uncoi> 
 ditional skoptic upon all modes of supernatural communication 
 to reconcile his own opinions with the circumstantial report of
 
 NOTES. 645 
 
 Henry's last hours, as gathered from Sully and others. That 
 he was profoundly sensible of the danger that brooded over his 
 person, is past all denying; now, whence was this sense de- 
 rived ? 
 
 NOTE 59. Page 593. 
 
 Esse, to eat : The reader, who may chance to be no great 
 scholar as regards Latin, will yet perhaps be aware of this 
 meaning attached of old to the verb Esse, from a Latin enigma 
 current amongst school-boys, viz., Pes est caput, which at first 
 sight seems to say that the foot is the head ; but in the true vew 
 sion means Pes [in its secondary sense, the same as Pedicului 
 an insect not to be named] est, eats Mid, the bead.
 
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