A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 16

But deep, deep, Never to waken more!

To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come, Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home; Shut down the marble door, And leave me,-let me sleep!

But deep, deep, Never to waken more!

Now I lie down,-I close my aching eyes, If on this night another morn must rise, Wake me not, I implore!

I only ask to sleep, And deep, deep, Never to waken more!

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Theological Fragments.

1.

THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.

(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)

A certain holy anchorite had pa.s.sed a long life in a cave of the Thebaid, remote from all communion with men; and eschewing, as he would the gates of h.e.l.l, even the very presence of a woman; and he fasted and prayed, and performed many and severe penances; and his whole thought was how he should make himself of account in the sight of G.o.d, that he might enter into his paradise.

And having lived this life for three score and ten years he was puffed up with the notion of his own great virtue and sanct.i.ty, and, like to St. Anthony, he besought the Lord to show him what saint he should emulate as greater than himself, thinking perhaps, in his heart, that the Lord would answer that none was greater or holier. And the same night the angel of G.o.d appeared to him, and said, "If thou wouldst excel all others in virtue and sanct.i.ty, thou must strive to be like a certain minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."

And the holy man was in great astonishment, and he arose and took his staff and ran forth in search of this minstrel; and when he had found him he questioned him earnestly, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee, my brother, what good works thou hast performed in thy lifetime, and by what prayers and penances thou hast made thyself acceptable to G.o.d?"

And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to be so questioned, hung down his head as he replied, "I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not!

I have performed no good works, and as to praying, alas! sinner that I am, I am not worthy to pray. I do nothing but go about from door to door amusing the people with my viol and my flute."

And the holy man insisted and said, "Nay, but peradventure in the midst of this thy evil life thou hast done some good works?" And the minstrel replied, "I know of nothing good that I have done." And the hermit, wondering more and more, said, "How hast thou become a beggar: hast thou spent thy substance in riotous living, like most others of thy calling?"

and the man answering, said, "Nay; but there was a poor woman whom I found running hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and her children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt. And the woman being very fair, certain sons of Belial pursued after her; so I took her home to my hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all I possessed to redeem her family, and conducted her in safety to the city, where she was reunited to her husband and children. But what of that, my father; is there a man who would not have done the same?"

And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these words, wept bitterly, saying, "For my part, I have not done so much good in all my life; and yet they call me a man of G.o.d, and thou art only a poor minstrel!"

At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by Von Schwind, which was conceived in the spirit of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of two twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of them, by profound study, becomes a most learned and skilful physician, and ministers to the sick; attaining to great riches and honours through his labours and his philanthropy. The other brother, who has no turn for study, becomes a poor fiddler, and spends his life in consoling, by his music, sufferings beyond the reach of the healing art. In the end, the two brothers meet at the close of life. He who had been fiddling through the world is sick and worn out: his brother prescribes for him, and is seen culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler touches his instrument for the solace of his kind physician.

It is in such representations that painting did once speak, and might again speak to the hearts of the people.

Another version of the same thought, we find in De Berenger's pretty ballad, "_Les deux Surs de Charite_."

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2.

When I was a child, and read Milton for the first time, his Pandemonium seemed to me a magnificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise, for _that_ was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible and beautiful too. The wondrous fabric that "from the earth rose like an exhalation to the sound of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,"-the splendid piles of architecture sweeping line beyond line, "Cornice and frieze with bossy sculptures graven,"-realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had once seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination: then the throne, outs.h.i.+ning the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,-the flood of light streaming from "starry lamps and blazing cressets" quite threw the flames of perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine, that he always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a great statesman out of place, a sort of leader of the Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend was a hero, like my _then_ favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon, a Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of his country;-such was the moral confusion created in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no horror; on the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic beauty of the creation. I felt that I should like to go and see it; so that, in fact, if Milton meant to inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better. Those who dwell with complacency on the doctrine of eternal punishments must delight in the ferocity and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of a vengeful theology. Wicked lat.i.tudinarians may shudder and s.h.i.+ver at the images called up-grotesque, abominable, hideous-but then Dante himself would sternly rebuke them for making their human sympathies a measure for the judgments of G.o.d, and compa.s.sion only a veil for treason and rebellion:-

"Chi e piu scellerato di colui Ch' al giudicio divin pa.s.sion porta?"

"Who can show greater wickedness than he Whose pa.s.sion by the will of G.o.d is moved?"

However, it must be said in favour of Dante's Inferno, that no one ever wished to go there.

These be the Christian poets! but they must yield in depth of imagined horrors to the Christian Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second century) not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region of despair, but makes the endless measureless torture of the doomed a part of the joys of the redeemed. The spectacle is to give them the same sort of delight as the heathen took in their games, and Pandemonium is to be as a vast amphitheatre for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the New Jerusalem. "How magnificent," exclaims this pious doctor of the Church, "will be the scale of that game! With what admiration, what laughter, what glee, what triumph, shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had been given out as received into the skies, moaning in unfathomable gloom! Persecutors of the Christians liquefying amid shooting spires of flame! Philosophers blus.h.i.+ng before their disciples amid those ruddy fires! Then," he goes on, still alluding to the amphitheatre, "then is the time to hear the tragedians doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own agonies! To observe actors released by the fierceness of their torments from all restraints on their gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer glowing all over in his car of torture, and watch the wrestlers struggling, not in the gymnasium but with flames!" And he asks exultingly, "What praetor, or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by his munificence a game of triumph like this?"

And even more terrible are the imaginations of good Bishop Taylor, who distils the essence from all sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all terrors, all plagues, and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and vengeance to be held to the lips and forced down the unwilling throats of the doomed "with violence of devils and accursed spirits!" Are these mere words? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise what they express?

3.

I was surprised to find this pa.s.sage in one of Southey's letters:-

"A Catholic Establishment would be the best, perhaps the only means of civilising Ireland. Jesuits and Benedictines, though they would not enlighten the savages, would humanise them and bring the country into cultivation. A pet.i.tion that asked for this, saying plainly, 'We are Papists, and will be so, and this is the best thing that can be done for us and you too,'-such a pet.i.tion I would support, considering what the present condition of Ireland is, how wretchedly it has always been governed, and how hopeless the prospect." (1805.)

Southey was thinking of what the religious orders had done for Paraguay; whether he would have penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten years later, is more than doubtful.

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4.

The old monks and penitents-dirty, ugly, emaciated old fellows they were!-spent their days in speaking and preaching of their own and others' sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before them a standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence, aspirations which nothing earthly could satisfy, which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery _comparative_, and their scale was graduated from themselves _upwards_.

We philosophers reverse this. We teach and preach the spiritual dignity, the lofty capabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we seem to be always speculating on the amount of evil which may or can be endured, and on the amount of wickedness which may or must be tolerated; and our scale is graduated from ourselves _downwards_.

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5.

"So long as the ancient mythology had any separate establishment in the empire, the spiritual wors.h.i.+p which our religion demands, and so essentially implies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its purity by means of the salutary contrast; but no sooner had the Church become completely triumphant and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan idolatry totally removed, than the old const.i.tutional appet.i.te revived in all its original force, and after a short but famous struggle with the Iconoclasts, an image wors.h.i.+p was established, and consecrated by bulls and canons, which, in whatever light it is regarded, differed in no respect but the names of its objects from that which had existed for so many ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith of the Gentiles."-_H. Nelson Coleridge._

I think, with submission, that it differed in sentiment; for in the mythology of the Pagans the wors.h.i.+p was to _beauty_, _immortality_, and _power_, and in the Christian mythology-if I may call it so-of the Middle Ages, the wors.h.i.+p was to _purity_, _self-denial_, and _charity_.

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6.

"A narrow half-enlightened reason may easily make sport of all those forms in which religious faith has been clothed by human imagination, and ask why they are retained, and why one should be preferred to another? It is sufficient to reply, that some forms there must be if Religion is to endure as a social influence, and that the forms already in existence are the best, if they are in unison with human sympathies, and express, with the breadth and vagueness which every popular utterance must from its nature possess, the interior convictions of the general mind. What would become of the most sacred truth if all the forms which have harboured it were destroyed at once by an unrelenting reason, and it were driven naked and s.h.i.+vering about the earth till some clever logician had devised a suitable abode for its reception? It is on these outward forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of the invisible grace and majesty of spiritual truth."-_Prospective Review_, Feb. 24. 1845.

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