Slike stranica
PDF
ePub

happens in part to Israel: the lights of the world prove hollow, like flame, which can never burn at its own heart; and the eye, so quick of outward apprehension, does not notice how the inward visions, so divinely fair, have paled away and disappeared. How often do the Censors of mankind, the pious prophets of woe, stalk about in astounding self-ignorance: testifying against one sin, warnings against many! and how sad the spectacle, when the sweet singers of humanity, from whose many-stringed souls flow forth the various melodies to which our grief and joy, our thought and aspiration, yield the dear response, hear not the discords of their own nature, but require the homely skill of some Nathan the prophet, ere they can be made conscious of the spirit out of tune, and be struck down by the words, "Thou art the man." The same tendency drives veneration also to a distance. The men of our own age and neighbourhood, by merely walking in our streets, and sitting at our tables, cease to be revered; and admiration flits away to the heroes and the saints of history, the sages and the martyrs of less familiar lands. That there should be any real, live goodness in the next house seems to be a thing which men find it impossible to believe: how could the father be a tradesman ? and the brothers and sisters, are they not all with us? And so men cry out for a sign: but no sign shall be given, except to them that know the voice of a divine wisdom when they hear it,

and discern the traces of a true sanctity when they behold it.

:

Now this state of mind, in which all faith and love retreat into the horizon, and an outlying band of religious light embraces a field of dull and vulgar life, is unhappily not permanently tenable. The same tendency which has driven the illumination thus far must drive it further, and send it wholly off into infinite vacancy, to be swallowed up in night. There is a palpable inconsistency in the belief, which maintains the reality of divine things in the distance, yet denies it close at hand. What reason is there to suppose that old historic men were more ideal than the people that are living now? They certainly walked the roads as we do they were thirsty and drank: they were sleepy and slept: they married and were given in marriage and why should we think them like the angels in heaven? The Cynic's common sense is quick to perceive this; and when once you have allowed your actual and your ideal to part company, and your devotion to travel far away, he will press upon its retreat with irresistible effect, and defy you to find the zone which will bring you to God and heaven. You have but this alternative; you must go through with him to his negation; or, you must retrace your way to the first childlike mind. You must draw back the old sacredness, till it comes nearer and nearer and touches with its thrill your central heart: you must shed the holy

light on the familiar ground again, and see that the very grass shines with a sunset gold beneath your feet. Say not that this is to resign ourselves to a vain romance. On the contrary, it is an escape from the only state of mind which is really liable to this charge, into the only one which is exempt from it. He is the true victim of romance, who has two worlds to live in, instead of one,-a poetic and an actual; who keeps these entirely apart, the one for entertainment, the other for practice; who spends his time alternately in each, as in a state of double and successive consciousness; who can by no means bridge them together, but feels them separated by a chasm infinite and impassable; and who presents therefore all the inconsistencies of an unharmonized and contradictory nature, which could be described, when he is dead, only by a two-fold biography. And his life is free from these false and changing colourings, who discerns a constant and steady sacredness over all his path; whose God is near as well as far; who feels in this great universe, not a remote heaven divided from the sad pressure of the near earth, but one single world, whose upper or lower abodes the true spirit may tenant with equal repose and trust; who finds it all a "kingdom of heaven"; and receives that kingdom as a little child.

XIII.

His eye seeth every precious thing.

JOB XXviii. 10.

"His eye seeth every precious thing."

WHETHER there is more to be amazed at in the conquests of human knowledge or in the extent of human ignorance, it is difficult to say. In different moods, and under the application of different tests, there is room for astonishment in each. Tried by the standard of feebler and darker times, the achievements of our age may well appear like the magic of a fairy tale; and to the medieval knight or burgher, could he join us in a summer excursion, the world of telegraphs and locomotives, of electric weaving and photographic pictures, would doubtless appear a scene of enchantment. But when we consider that all our boasted discoveries are only of things that for thousands of years have stared us in the face; that the light, the vapour, the voltaic current, have been ever wrapped around and thrilling through the earth, and only today are brought to the service of our will; that the new

found gold which stirs the world with fresh migrations has all the while been stored not a furlong below human feet; that no planet has been found that was not always there, and no law deciphered that was not written from the first upon the vault of time; we must marvel rather at the tardiness than the swiftness of our apprehension, and confess ourselves but fools and slow of heart to perceive what the finger of God has plainly writ. Tested by our school of opportunity it is little that we do, and an infinitude that remains undone. Whatever may be the triumphs reserved for future times, the realities they may disclose are with us now, were we not too blind to see them: if we lift our arm, we very likely knock against them: if we open our eyes, we look through the space where they exist: if we draw a breath or smell a flower, we inhale perhaps the element that holds them: and yet it may be a millennium hence ere what is present in fact comes out in thought. So long as man has been tenant of this universe, with free range through crypt and corridor, it is wonderful how little he knows his way about it: the closet here, the watch-tower there, to which he can introduce you, are as nothing to the vast halls and sublime ascents that lie around and above him unexplored.

It is curious to observe, that some truth and good we miss by reason of their distance and complexity; some, on account of their nearness and simplicity. Physical laws, even when they press upon us close at hand,

VOL. II.

N

« PrethodnaNastavi »