Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

The first time I was called to the world above, the Heavens and Stars said unto me, O Sasan! we have bound up our loins in the service of Yezdan and never withdrawn from it, because he is worthy of praise; and we are filled with astonishment how mankind can wander so far from the commands of God.

Whatever is on earth is the resemblance or shadow of something that is in the sphere. While that resplendent thing remaineth in good condition, it is well also with its shadow. When that resplendent thing removeth far from its shadow, life removeth to a distance. Again, that Light is the shadow of something more resplendent than itself. And so on up to Me, who am the Light of Lights. Look, therefore, to Yezdan, who causeth the shadow to fall.

Purity is of two kinds, real and formal. The real consisteth in not bending the heart to evil; and the formal in cleansing away what appears evil to the view.

True self-knowledge is knowledge of God.

Life is affected by two evils, Lust and Anger. Restrain them within the proper mean: till man can attain this self-control he can not become a celestial.

The perfect seeth unity in multiplicity, and multiplicity in unity.

The roads tending to God are more in number than the breathings of created beings.

Sasan,

(a Persian prophet contemporary with the Emperor Heraclius.)

Truth is congenial to man. Moral Truth is then most consummate when, like Beauty, it commends itself without argument. Man is apt to gravitate when he does not aspire.

Whatever each man worships inwardly is his god, whether he know it or not.

He who has a Ruling Passion worships one God, good or evil. He who is carried at random by many impulses has many Gods; perhaps as shifting, as shapeless, as unworthy as any heathen divinities.

Fully to know the Right demands the culture of all our powers. The righteous not only does right, but loves to do right.

F. W. Newman.

The frequency with which we hear profane discourse, intemperance, or devotedness to frivolous amusements, characterized as "unbecoming a clergyman," in a sort of tone which implies

the speaker's feelings to be that they are unbecoming merely to a clergyman, is a proof of the general tendency to vicarious religion, which makes men, who take little care to keep their own lights burning, desirous to have one to whom they may apply in their extremity, "Give us of your oil, for our lamps are going Archbishop Whately.

out."

He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. Coleridge.

When every man is his own end, all things will come to a bad end. We want public souls: we want them.

Hacket.

THE TWO SERVANTS:

CALIBAN AND ARIEL.

SHAKSPERE, in "The Tempest," represents the lordly Prospero as served by two strangely diverse beings. The one is a monster with signs of the lower orders of creation about him; he thinks himself rightful sovereign of the island, and Prospero a powerful usurper. He obeys, but only because he must; obeys mutteringly, and is willing to conspire against his master; he serves as a slave. The other servant is an etherial spirit: where Caliban has a claw, Ariel has a wing. The witch Sycorax, who had brought forth the monster, had by her infernal power confined Ariel in the cloven pine, because he was

"A spirit too delicate

To act her earthy and abhorred commands."

Prospero had liberated Ariel, who then served him from gratitude, though longing for greater and greater freedom; and whenever the sprite would grow weary of his high tasks, Prospero had only to recall to his mind the liberation his power had wrought. His service is inspired by Love and Hope, and is performed with delightful activity and joyousness.

These two servants the IDEAL, which waves its wand over the human soul, also has served it is by both; but the one is a groaning and the other a joyful service. The Law and the Gospel do not divide epochs of history so much as classes of men.

CALIBAN represents the religious man. We believe that critics are well-nigh agreed that Paul, standing on Mars' Hill, reproved the Athenians for being "too religious," not "too superstitious;" the entire force of which charge rests on the fact that, as the word indicates (Lat., re and ligere), religion is a binding back of the spiritual nature. The essential idea of religion is a bond; it is an exaction, a chain, a yoke. It is not too much to say that in this, its real significance, Religion had been carried to its utmost extent by the nations before the coming of Christ; our model of strictness (Lat., stringere, to bind) being an ancient Stoic or Pharisee. The old commandments are prohibitory, beginning "Thou shalt not:" they are given as if to a being whose hands, being adapted only to be "pickers and stealers," were also excellently shaped for manacles. It is not recognized that Duty could be to any a joy. Paul complained that the Athenians were too religious, because, when life and reality had ebbed away from their altar, on which they could inscribe only their ignorance, they were still bound back by it; they were not free to follow the new form.

Let us not disparage Religion as such even as a bond and an exaction it is to be valued. If men prepare a feast for the senses, and invite not Piety as a heavenly guest thereto, she must come to suspend over them the hair-hung sword, ready to fall on any excess. We can not trust man to the fiery steeds of Passion, unless he have in his chariot either Divine Love as charioteer, or Divine Law as one to whisper Memento mori! So long as it is the form which the spiritual sentiment really takes in any mind, it is full to its purpose; the mole burrowing the ground is sustaining the harmonious bass to the tenor of the highest angel; Caliban need not abase himself before Ariel. Yet the winged sprite must be taken to represent the spiritual man, in whose mind Thou shalt is changed to Thou mayest, who has passed from Mount Sinai to the Mount of the Beatitudes. Where the religious man heard, "I the Lord, your God, am a jealous God," the spiritual man hears, "Beloved, now are we the sons of God."

Is it not just at this point that Christianity may be most sharply contrasted with all antecedent religions-to wit.: that it is not a Religion, but a Gospel?

Along with the allegory from Shakspere may be read that quoted from Hebrew mythology by the writer to the Galatians : "Thou art no more a servant, but a son. For it is written that

Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond-maid, the other by a free-woman. But he who was of the bond-woman was born after the flesh; but he of the free-woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory. For these are the two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai, which gendereth unto bondage, which is Agar; for this Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. Now, we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless, what saith the Scripture? Cast out the bond-woman and her son; for the son of the bond-woman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman!"

All around us are the Calibans; all around us are the children of the bond-woman, with hands uplifted against the children of the free. How many are adhering to religious beliefs and services which they do not, can not LOVE! How many are sustaining doctrines from a sense of duty, in which they do not rejoice, and which, if their minds were unbound, they would never believe? Is it anything but religion, the soul-ligature, which causes a man to hold to a creed which represents his children and friends as corrupt to their hearts' core, the earth as resting under an angry curse, or which binds on the heart a terrible belief in a hell where immortal beings are consigned to unending torture? Is not this Caliban-service?

We are making no arbitrary statements. The intelligent believer in such a creed will admit, as it is his only title to respect to admit, that he accepts these things by moral obligation: no sane mind or sound heart can rejoice in them; they stifle the heart's outery with, Who art thou that repliest against God? Jonathan Edwards had to wrestle with the angel through many weary years, ere, lame and faint, he could bring his eloquent tongue to say, "God will hold them [non-elect infants] over hell in the tongs of his wrath until they turn and spit venom in his face;" but it went out to his congregation with writhing, and was responded to by a shriek from every mother present. John Calvin honestly added to his conclusion, Decretum quidem horribile fateor.-(Ins., b. iii., ch. 23.) It has been maintained that Coleridge, who was at one time a Unitarian, abandoned that faith

for the Trinitarian simply by mental attraction. Those who have studied closely Coleridge's development will recognize that underneath the external change to Trinitarianism he was entering a more philosophical faith than the Unitarianism of his day allowed. The Platonic Trinitarianism which has furnished a refuge for such thinkers as Tholuck, Coleridge, Bushnell, and others, is really an arrow's-flight beyond Parkerism: it is disguised transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson has given us an account of his interview with Coleridge; during which Coleridge said, "If you and I were taken to the same stake for heresy, my side of it would be the hottest!" I do not deny that the creeds which bind have found some monks in deserts and caves who have had ecstacies; but it is no credit to their joyfulness that men who have crushed the healthy life out of them, animated mummies, should rejoice in them. Only as eyes upon which a dreadful amaurosis is coming see beautiful flashes and circles of light, can human hearts take pleasure in God's wrath or sing hallelujahs over human damnation. Coleridge's opium-eating, which began not long before his Trinitarianism, doubtless had much to do with the unhealthy form in which his essentially higher faith was born. But the great representatives of the popular creed have admitted themselves children of the bond-woman; have acknowledged that the human heart, sense and reason are prone to abandon their rules of life and thought. Orthodoxy is a war to take Human Nature captive; and its principle is expressed in the strong language of a modern Father, who said, "The very heart and marrow of this wretched human-nature is saturated with heresy."

This, then, is not the service of peace and love and joy in the spirit it is as far from these as Caliban's claw from Ariel's wing. We do not forget that claw answers to hand and to wing; we place no impassable barriers. Caliban dreams high dreams amid his hard labors—one day, doubtless, to be realized.

"The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,

That, if I had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again and then, in dreaming,

The clouds, methought, would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again."

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »