The Eclipse of Faith Part 5

"Yes," said he, "practically, no doubt, death is the end of the world to us; but to urge this,--what is it, as Mr. Newman says, but abominable selfishness preached as religion'? If we are to labor for posterity, will not our work remain, though we die?

But if the world is to perish in fifty years, or a century, what then?"

"Far be it from me," said Harrington, "to compete with your spiritual philanthropy, which, doubtless, will not be content to work unless under a lease of a million of years. I suppose even if you thought the would come to an end in a hundred years, (and really I have no proof that the Apostles thought it would end sooner,--they spoke of their death as coming first,) you would not think it worth while to do any thing; the welfare of your children and grandchildren would appear far too paltry for so ambitious a benevolence as yours! Most people--Christians, sceptics, or otherwise--are contented to aim at the welfare of his generation and the next, and think as little of their great-great-grandchildren as of their great-great-grandfathers.

That little vista terminates the projects of their philanthropy, just as their own death is to them the end of the world. Meantime, it appears, you would be tempted to neglect the practical little you could do, because you could not do more than for a century or so! Pray, which is really the more benevolent? Moreover, as not one man in a million can or does think of benefiting any but his immediate generation, you ought, upon your principles, still to sit down inactive; for they for whom alone you can work will soon pa.s.s away too. But the whole argument is too refined. No mortal-- except you or Mr. Newman--would be wrought upon by it."

"Well, but," said Fellowes, "as to the mistake of the Apostles, there can be no doubt of that; it really appears to me grossly disingenuous"--looking towards me--"to deny it. What do you say, Mr. B.?" repeating his a.s.sertion that the Apostles clearly thought that the end of the world was close at hand,--in fact, that it would happen in their generation.

I told him I was afraid I must run the risk of appearing in his eyes "grossly disingenuous"; not that I deemed it necessary to maintain that the Apostles had any idea of the period of time which was to intervene between the first promulgation of the Gospel and the consummation of all things; for when I found our Lord himself acknowledging, "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, not even the angels, nor even the Son, but the Father only," I could not wonder that the Apostles were left to mere conjectures on a subject which was then veiled even from his humanity. I said I even thought it probable that their vivid feeling antic.i.p.ated the day,--that the interval between, so to speak, was "foreshortened" to them; but that I could not see how the question of their inspiration, or the truth of Christianity, was at all involved in their ignorance on that point; unless, indeed, it could be proved that they had positively stated that the predicted event would take place in their own time. This, I acknowledged, I could not find,--but much to the contrary; that the charge, indeed, had been so often repeated by the infidel school, that they had persuaded themselves of it, and spoke of it as if it were a decided point; but that as long as the second Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians remained, in which the Apostle expressly corrected misapprehensions similar to those which infidelity still professes to found on the first Epistle, I should continue to doubt whether Paul did not know his own mind better than his modern commentators. I told him that we do not hear that the Thessalonians persisted in believing that they had rightly interpreted Paul's words after he had himself disowned the meaning they had put upon them; that this was a degree of a.s.surance only possible to modern critics; and that I was surprised that Mr. Newman should have quietly a.s.sumed the alleged "mistake" in his "Phases of Faith," without thinking it worth while even to state the opposing argument from the Second Epistle. I added, that the repeated references which both Paul and Peter make to their own deaths, as certain to take place before the dissolution of all things, sufficiently prove that, however their view of the future might be contracted, they did not expect the world to end in their day, and ought to have silenced the perverse criticism on the popular expression, "Then we which are alive and remain," &c.

Having briefly stated my opinion, Fellowes said he saw that he and I were as little likely to agree as Harrington and he. "However," he continued, turning to his friend, "to go back to the point from which we digressed. My new faith, at all events, makes me happy, which it is plain--too plain--that your want of all faith does not make you."

"Whether it is your new faith," said the other, "makes you happy, --whether you were not as happy in your old faith--whether there are not thousands of Christians who are as happy with their faith (they would say much happier, and I should say so too, if they not only say they believe it, but believe it and practise it.), I will not inquire; that my want of faith does not make me happy is a sad truth, which I do not think it worth while to deny; though I must confess that there have been many who have shared in my scepticism who have not shared in my misery. It is just because they have not realized what they did not believe; even as there are thousands of soi-disant Christians who do not realize what they say they do believe; neither the one nor the other are the happier or the more sorrowful for their pretended tenets. This is simply because they stand in no need of the admirable correctives supplied by your new theology; the present engrosses their solicitudes and affections; and the mere talk of the belief or the no-belief suffices to hush and tranquillize the heart in relation to those most momentous subjects, on which if man has not thought at all, he is a fool indeed. In either case the 'future'

and the 'eternal' seem so far removed that they seem to be an 'eternal futurity.' Such parties look at that distant future much as children at the stars; it is a point, an invisible speck, in the firmament.

A sixpence held near the eye appears larger; and brought sufficiently close shuts out the universe altogether. But let us also forget the future, and have a little talk of the past."

They resumed their conversation on subjects indifferent as far as this journal is concerned, and I bade them good night.

July 5. We were sitting in the library after breakfast. The two college friends soon fell into chat, while I sat writing at my separate table, but ready to resume my capacity of reporter, should any polemical discussion take place. I soon had plenty of employment.

After about an hour I heard Harrington say:--

"But I shall be happy, I a.s.sure you, to fill the void whenever you will give me something solid wherewith to fill it."

It was impossible that even a believer in the doctrine that no "creed" can be taught, and that an "external revelation" is an impossibility, could be insensible to the charm of making a proselyte.

"What is it," said Fellowes, "that you want?"

"What do I want? I want certainty, or quasi-certainty, on those points on which if a man is content to remain uncertain, he is a fool or a brute; points respecting which it is no more possible for a genuine sceptic--for I speak not of the thoughtless lover paradox, or the queer dogmatist who resolves that nothing is true--to still the soul, than nakedness can render us insensible to cold; or hunger cure its own pangs by saying, 'Go to, now; I have nothing to eat.' The generality of mankind are insensible to these questions only because they imagine, even though it may be falsely, that they possess certainty. They are problems which, whenever there is elevation of mind enough to appreciate their importance, engage the real doubter in a life-long conflict; and to attempt to appease restlessness of such a mind by the old prescriptions,--the old quackish Epicurean nostrum of 'Carpe diem,'--'Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow die,'--'We do not know what the morrow may bring--is like attempting to call back the soul from a moral syncope by applying to the nostrils a drop of eau de Cologne. 'Enjoy to-day, we do not know what the morrow will bring!' Why, that is the very thought which poisons to-day. No, a soul of any worth cannot but feel an intense wish for the solution of its doubts, even while it doubts whether they can be solved."

"'Carpe diem' certainly would not be my sole prescription," said Fellowes; "you have not told me yet what you want."

"No, but I will. The questions on which I want certainty are indeed questions about which philosophers will often argue just to display their vanity, as human vanity will argue about any thing; but they are no sooner felt in their true grandeur, than they absorb the soul."

"Still, what is it you want?"

"I want to know---whence I came; whither I am going. Whether there be, in truth, as so many say there is, a G.o.d,--a tremendous personality, to whose infinite faculties the 'great' and the 'little' (as we call them) equally vanish,--whose universal presence fills all s.p.a.ce, in any point of which he exists entire in the amplitude of all his infinite attributes,--whose universal government extends even to me, and my fellow-atoms, called men,--within whose sheltering embrace even I am not too mean for protection;--whether, if there be such a being, he is truly infinite; or whether this vast machine of the universe may not have developed tendencies or involved consequences which eluded his forethought, and are now beyond even his control; --whether, for this reason, or for some other necessity, such infinite sorrows have been permitted to invade it;--whether, above all, He be propitious or offended with a world in which I feel too surely, in the profound and various misery of man, that his aspects are not all benignant;--how, if he be offended, he is to be reconciled;--whether he is at all accessible, or one to whom the pleasures and the sufferings of the poor child of dust are equally subjects of horrible indifference;--whether, if such Omnipotent Being created the world, he has now abandoned it to be the sport of chance, and I am thus an orphan in the universe;--whether this 'universal frame' be indeed without a mind, and we are, in fact, the only forms of conscious existence; --whether, as the Pantheist declares, the universe itself be G.o.d,-- ever making, never made,--the product of an evolution of an infinite series of 'antecedents' and 'consequents'; a G.o.d of which--for I cannot say of whom--you and I are bits; perishable fragments of a Divinity, itself imperishable only because there will always be bits of it to perish;--whether, even upon some such supposition, this conscious existence of ours is to be renewed; and, if under what conditions; or whether, when we have finished our little day, no other dawn is to break upon our night;--whether the vale, vale in eternum vale, is really the proper utterance of a breaking heart as it closes the sepulchre on the object of its love."

His voice faltered; and I was confirmed in my suspicions, that some deep, secret sorrow had had to do with his morbid state of mind. In a moment, he resumed:--

"These are the questions, and others like the them, which I have vainly toiled to solve. I, like you, have been rudely driven out of my old beliefs; my early Christian faith has given way to doubt; the little hut on the mountain-side, in which I thought to dwell in pastoral simplicity, has been scattered to the tempest, and I am turned out to the blast without a shelter. I have wandered long and far, but have not found that rest which you tell me is to be obtained.

As I examine all other theories, they seem, to me, pressed by at least equal difficulties with that I have abandoned. I cannot make myself contented, as others do, with believing nothing, and yet I have nothing to believe; I have wrestled long and hard with my t.i.tan foes,--but not successfully. I have turned to every quarter of the universe in vain; I have interrogated my own soul, but it answers not; I have gazed upon nature, but its many voices speak no articulate language to me; and, more especially, when I gaze upon the bright page of the midnight heavens, those orbs gleam upon me with so cold a light, and amidst so portentous a silence, that I am, with Pascal, terrified at the spectacle of the infinite solitudes,--'de ces es.p.a.ces infinis.' I declare to you that I know nothing in nature so beautiful or so terrible as those mute oracles."

"They are indeed mute," said Fellowes; "but not so that still voice which whispers its oracles within. You have but to look inwards, and you may see, by the direct gaze of 'the spiritual faculty,' bright and clear, those great 'intuitions' of spiritual truth which the gauds and splendors of the external universe can no more ill.u.s.trate than can the illuminated characters of an old missal;--just as little can any book teach these truths. You have truly said, the stars will shed no light upon them; they, on the contrary, must illumine the stars; I mean, they must themselves be seen before the outward universe can a.s.sume intelligible meaning; must utter their voices before any of the phenomena of the external world can have any real significance!"

"How different," said Harrington, "are the experiences of mankind!

You well described those internal oracles, if there are indeed such, as whispering their responses; if they utter them at all, it is to me in a whisper so low that I cannot distinctly catch them. Strange paradoxes! the soul speaks, and the soul listens, and the soul cannot tell what the soul says. That is, the soul speaks to itself, and says, 'What have I said?' I a.s.sure you that the ear of my soul (if I may so speak) has often ached with intense effort to listen to what the tongue of the soul mutters, and yet I cannot catch it. You tell me I have only to look down into the depths within. Well, I have. I a.s.sure you that I have endeavoured to do so, as far as I know, honestly; and, so far from seeing clear and bright those splendors which you speak of, I can only see as in the depths of a cavern occasional gleams of a tremulous flickering light, which distinctly shows me nothing, and which, I half suspect, comes from without into these recesses: or I feel as if gazing down an abyss, the bottom of which is filled with water; the light--and that, too, for aught I know, reflected from without--only throws a transient glimpse of my own image on the surface of the dark water; that image itself broken and renewed as the water boils up from its hidden fountain. Or, if I may recur to your own metaphor, instead of hearing in those deep caverns the clear oracles of which you boast, I can distinguish nothing but a scarcely audible murmur; I know not whether it be any thing more than the lingering echoes of what I heard in my childhood: or, rather, my soul speaks to me on all these momentous subjects much as one in sleep often does; the lips move, but no sound issues from them. I retire from these attempts, as those of old from the cave of Trophonius, pale, terrified, and dejected. In short," he continued, "I feel much as Descartes says he did when he had denuded himself of all his traditional opinions,--a condition so graphically described in the beginning of the second of his Meditations. There is this difference, however, and in his favor: that he imposed upon himself only a self-inflicted doubt, which he could terminate at any time. His opinions had been but temporarily laid aside. They were on the shelf, close at hand, ready to be taken down again when wanted. But enough of this. You will, I know, aid me, if you can. And, now I think of it, do so on one point, by justifying your a.s.sertion, made the other evening, as to Mr. Newman's dilemma of the 'impossibility of a book-revelation.'"

"I said, I think, that Mr. Newman has satisfactorily proved to me that a book-revelation of moral and spiritual truth is impossible; that G.o.d reveals himself to us within, and not from without."

"As to what is impossible," said the other, "I fancy it would be difficult to get one thoroughly convinced of his ignorance and feebleness to be other than very cautious how he used the word.

Perhaps, however, Mr. Newman may be more readily excused than most men for the strength with which he p.r.o.nounces his opinions; for, as he has pa.s.sed through an infinity of experiences, it may have given him 'insight' into many absurdities which, to the generality of mankind, do not appear such. I think if I had believed half so many things, I should have lost all confidence in myself. What a strong mind, or what buoyant faith, he must have!"

"Both,--both," said Fellowes.

"Well, be it so. But let us, as you promised yesterday, examine this very point." This led on to a dialogue in which it was distinctly proved that

THAT MAY BE POSSIBLE WITH MAN, WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH G.o.d.

"Mr. Newman affirms, you say," said Harrington, "that in his judgment every book-'revelation' is an absurdity and a contradiction; or, in the words quoted by you, 'impossible.'"

"Yes,--of 'moral and spiritual truth.'"

"And of any other truth--as of historical truth--you say such revelation is unnecessary?"

"Yes."

"Moreover, as you and Mr. Newman affirm, the bulk of mankind are not competent to investigate the claims of such an historic revelation?"

"Certainly."

"And, therefore, it is impossible in fact, if not per se, unless G.o.d is to be supposed doing something both unnecessary and futile."

"I think so, of course," said Fellowes.

"So that all book-revelation is impossible."

"I affirm it."

"Very well,--I do not dispute it. There still remain one or two difficulties on which I should like to have your judgment towards forming an opinion: and they are on the very threshold of the subject.

And, first, I suppose you do not mean to restrict your term of a 'book-revelation' to that only which is literally consigned to a book in our modern sense. You mean an external revelation?"

"Certainly."

"If, for example, you could recover a genuine ma.n.u.script of Isaiah or Paul, you would not think it ent.i.tled to any more respect, as authority, than a modern translation in a printed book,--though it might be free from some errors?"

"I should not."

"You would not allow that parchment, however ancient, has any advantage in this respect over paper, however modern?"

"Certainly not."

"Nor Hebrew or Greek over English or German?

"No."

"All such matters are in very deed but 'leather and prunella'?"

"Nothing more."