XXIV.

The Transient and the Real in Life.

JOB Xii. 22.

"He discovereth deep things out of darkness; and bringeth out to light the shadow of Death."

It is the oldest, as it is the newest, reproach of the Cynic against the devout, that they construe the universe by themselves; attribute it to a Will like their own; tracing in it imaginary vestiges of a Moral plan, and expecting from it the fulfilment of their brilliant but arbitrary dreams. Instead of humbly sitting at the feet of Nature, copying her order into the mind, and shaping all desire and belief into the form of her usages and laws, they turn out their own inward life into the spaces of the world, and impose their longings and admirations on the courses and issues of Time. With childish self-exaggeration, it is said, we fancy creation governed like a great human life,—peopled with motives, preferences, and affections, parallel to ours, its light and heat, its winds and tides, its seasons and its skies, administered by choice of good

or ill, transparent with the flush of an infinite love, or suffused with the shadow of an infinite displeasure. We set at the helm of things a glorified humanity; and that is our God. We think away from society the cries of wrong and the elements of sin, leaving only what is calm and holy; and that is our Kingdom of Heaven. We picture to ourselves youth that never wastes, thought that never tires, and friendship without the last adieu; and that is our Immortality. Religion, we are assured, is thus born of Misery: it is the soul's protest against disappointment and refusal to accept it; the Pity which our nature takes upon its own infirmities; and is secured only on the pathos of the human heart.

Be it so. Are you sure that the security is not good? Are we so made as to learn everything from the external world, and nothing out of ourselves? Grant the allegation. Let our diviner visions be the native instinct, the home inspiration, of our thought and love: are they therefore false, because we think them? illusory, because beautiful relatively to us? Am I to believe the register of my Senses, and to contradict the divinations of Conscience, and the trusts of pure Affection? Is it a sign of highest Reason to deny God until I see him, and blind myself to the life eternal, till I am born into its surprise? Nothing more arbitrary, nothing narrower, can well be conceived than to lay down the rule, that our lowest endowment,-the Perceptive

powers which introduce us to material things,—have the monopoly of knowledge; and that the surmises of the Moral sense have nothing true, and the vaticinations of devoted Love only a light that leads astray. The wiser position surely is, that the Mind is a balanced organ of truth all round: that each faculty sees aright on its own side of things, and can measure what the others miss the hand, the palpable; the eye, the visible; the imagination, the beautiful; the spirit, the spiritual; and the will, the good. How else indeed could God and Heaven, if really there, enter our field of knowledge, but by standing thus in relation to some apprehensive gift in us, and emerging as the very condition of its exercise and the attendant shadow of its movements?

And, in truth, if we are not strangely self-ignorant, we must be conscious of two natures blended in us, each carrying a separate order of beliefs and trusts, which may assert themselves with the least possible notice of the other. There is the nature which lies open to the play of the finite world, gathers its experience, measures everything by its standard, adapts itself to its rules, and discharges as fictitious whatever its appearances fail to show. And underlying this, in strata far below, there is the nature which stands related to things Infinite, and heaves and stirs beneath their solemn pressure, and is so engaged with them as hardly to feel above it the sway and ripple of the tran

sitory tides. Living by the one, we find our place in nature; by the other, we lose ourselves in God. By the first, we have our science, our skill, our prudence ; by the second, our philosophy, our poetry, our reverence for Duty. The one computes its way by foresight; the other is self-luminous for insight. In short, the one puts us into communication with the order of appearances; the other, with eternal realities. It is a shallow mind which can see to the bottom of its own beliefs, and is conscious of nothing but what it can measure in evidence and state in words;-which feels in its own guilt no depth it cannot fathom, and in another's holiness no beauty it can only pine to seize; which reads on the face of things, on the glory of the earth and sky, on human joy and grief, on birth and death, in pity and heroic sacrifice, in the eyes of a trusting child and the composure of a saintly countenance,—no meanings that cannot be printed; and which is never drawn, alone and in silence, into prayer exceeding speech. Things infinite and divine lie too near to our own centre, and mingle in too close communion, to be looked at as if they were there instead of here: they are given, not so much for definition, as for trust; are less the objects we think of, than the very tone and colour of our thought, the tension of our love, the unappeasable thirst of grief and reverence. Till we surrender ourselves not less freely to the implicit faiths folded up in the interior Reason, Conscience and Affec

tion, than to the explicit beliefs which embody in words the laws of the outward world, we shall be but one-eyed children of Nature, and utterly blind prophets of God.

No doubt, these two sides of our humanity, supplying the temporal and the spiritual estimates of things, are at ceaseless variance: they reckon by incommensurable standards, and the answers can never be the same. The natural world, with the part of us that belongs to it, is so framed as to make nothing of importance to us except the rules by which it goes, and to bid us ask no questions about its origin; since we have equally to fall in with its ways, be they fatal or be they Divine. But to our Reason, in its noblest exercise, it makes a difference simply infinite, whether the universe it scans is in the hands of Dead Necessity or of the Living God. This, which our science ignores, is precisely the problem which our intellect is made to ponder. Again, our Social System of Rights and Obligations, is constructed on the assumption, that with the springs of action we have no concern: they fulfil all conditions, if we ask nothing, and give nothing, beyond the conduct happiest in its results. But the natural Conscience flies straight to the inner springs of action as its sole interest and object it is there, simply as an organ for interpreting them, and finding in them the very soul of righteousness: that which the outward observer shuns, is the inward spirit's holy place. And, once more, Nature, as the mere mother of us all, takes small