A Dish of Orts Part 15

I have tried to make you feel something of what Wordsworth attempts to do, but I have not given you the best of his poems. Allow me to finish by reading the closing portion of the _Prelude_, the poem that was published after his death. It is addressed to Coleridge:--

Oh! yet a few short years of useful life, And all will be complete, thy race be run, Thy monument of glory will be raised; Then, though (too weak to head the ways of truth) This age fall back to old idolatry, Though men return to servitude as fast As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame By nations sink together, we shall still Find solace--knowing what we have learnt to know-- Rich in true happiness, if allowed to be Faithful alike in forwarding a day Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work (Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe) Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine.

Sh.e.l.lEY.

Whatever opinion may be held with regard to the relative position occupied by Sh.e.l.ley as a poet, it will be granted by most of those who have studied his writings, that they are of such an individual and original kind, that he can neither be hidden in the shade, nor lost in the brightness, of any other poet. No idea of his works could be conveyed by inst.i.tuting a comparison, for he does not sufficiently resemble any other among English writers to make such a comparison possible.

Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in the county of Suss.e.x, on the 4th of August, 1792. He was the son of Timothy Sh.e.l.ley, Esq., and grandson of Sir Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley, the first baronet.

His ancestors had long been large landed proprietors in Suss.e.x.

As a child his habits were noticeable. He was especially fond of rambling by moonlight, of inventing wonderful tales, of occupying himself with strange, and sometimes dangerous, amus.e.m.e.nts. At the age of thirteen he went to Eton. In this little world, that determined opposition to whatever appeared to him an invasion of human rights and liberty, which was afterwards the animating principle of most of his writings, was first roused in the mind of Sh.e.l.ley. Were we not aware of far keener distress which he afterwards endured from yet greater injustice, we might suppose that the sufferings he had to bear from placing himself in opposition to the custom of the school, by refusing to f.a.g, had made him morbidly sensitive on the point of liberty. At a time, however, when freedom of speech, as indicating freedom of thought, was especially obnoxious to established authorities; when no allowance could be made on the score of youth, still less on that of individual peculiarity, Sh.e.l.ley became a student at Oxford. He was then eighteen.

Devoted to metaphysical speculation, and especially fond of logical discussion, he, in his first year, printed and distributed among the authorities and members of his college a pamphlet, if that can be called a pamphlet which consisted only of two pages, in which he opposed the usual arguments for the existence of a Deity; arguments which, perhaps, the most ardent believers have equally considered inconclusive. Whether Sh.e.l.ley wrote this pamphlet as an embodiment of his own opinions, or merely as a logical confutation of certain arguments, the mode of procedure adopted with him was certainly not one which necessarily resulted from the position of those to whose care the education of his opinions was entrusted. Without waiting to be a.s.sured that he was the author, and satisfying themselves with his refusal to answer when questioned as to the authors.h.i.+p, they handed him his sentence of expulsion, which had been already drawn up in due form.

About this time Sh.e.l.ley wrote, or commenced writing, _Queen Mab_, a poem which he never published, although he distributed copies among his friends. In after years he had such a low opinion of it in every respect, that he regretted having printed it at all; and when an edition of it was published without his consent, he applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to suppress it.

Sh.e.l.ley's opinions in politics and theology, which he appears to have been far more anxious to maintain than was consistent with the peace of the household, were peculiarly obnoxious to his father, a man as different from his son as it is possible to conceive; and his expulsion from Oxford was soon followed by exile from his home. He went to London, where, through his sisters, who were at school in the neighbourhood, he made the acquaintence of Harriet West brook, whom he eloped with and married, when he was nineteen and she sixteen years of age. It seems doubtful whether the attachment between them was more than the result of the reception accorded by the enthusiasm of the girl to the enthusiasm of the youth, manifesting itself in wild talk about human rights, and equally wild plans for their recovery and security. However this may be, the result was unfortunate. They wandered about England, Scotland, and Ireland, with frequent and sudden change of residence, for rather more than two years. During this time Sh.e.l.ley gained the friends.h.i.+p of some of the most eminent men of the age, of whom the one who exercised the most influence upon his character and future history was William G.o.dwin, whose instructions and expostulations tended to reduce to solidity and form the vague and extravagant opinions and projects of the youthful reformer. Shortly after the commencement of the third year of their married life, an estrangement of feeling, which had been gradually widening between them, resulted in the final separation of the poet and his wife. We are not informed as to the causes of this estrangement, further than that it seems to have been owing, in a considerable degree, to the influence of an elder sister of Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, who domineered over her, and whose presence became at last absolutely hateful to Sh.e.l.ley.

His wife returned to her father's house; where, apparently about three years after, she committed suicide. There seems to have been no immediate connection between this act and any conduct of Sh.e.l.ley. One of his biographers informs us, that while they were living happily together, suicide was with Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley a favourite subject of speculation and conversation.

Shortly after his first wife's death, Sh.e.l.ley married the daughter of William G.o.dwin. He had lived with her almost from the date of the separation, during which time they had twice visited Switzerland. In the following year (1817), it was decreed in Chancery that Sh.e.l.ley was not a proper person to take charge of his two children by his first wife, who had lived with her till her death. The bill was filed in Chancery by their grandfather, Mr. Westbrook. The effects of this proceeding upon Sh.e.l.ley may be easily imagined. Perhaps he never recovered from them, for they were not of a nature to pa.s.s away. During this year he resided at Marlow, and wrote _The Revolt of Islam_, besides portions of other poems; and the next year he left England, not to return. The state of his health, for he had appeared to be in a consumption for some time, and the fear lest his son, by his second wife, should be taken from him, combined to induce him to take refuge in Italy from both impending evils. At Lucca he began his _Prometheus_, and wrote _Julian and Maddalo_. He moved from place to place in Italy, as he had done in his own country. Their two children dying, they were for a time left childless; but the loss of these grieved Sh.e.l.ley less than that of his eldest two, who were taken from him by the hand of man. In 1819, Sh.e.l.ley finished his _Prometheus Unbound_, writing the greater part at Rome, and completing it at Florence. In this year also he wrote his tragedy, _The Cenci_, which attracted more attention during his lifetime than any other of his works. The _Ode to a Skylark_ was written at Leghorn in the spring of 1820; and in August of the same year, the _Witch of Atlas_ was written, near Pisa. In the following year Sh.e.l.ley and Byron met at Pisa.

They were a good deal together; but their friends.h.i.+p, although real, does not appear to have been of a very profound nature; for though unlikeness be one of the necessary elements of friends.h.i.+p, there are kinds of unlikeness which will not harmonize. During all this time, he was not only maligned by unknown enemies, and abused by anonymous writers, but attempts of other kinds are said to have been made to render his life as uncomfortable as possible. There are grounds, however, for doubting whether Sh.e.l.ley was not subject to a kind of monomania upon this and similar points. In 1821, he wrote his _Adonais_, a monody on the death of Keats. Part of this poem had its origin in the mistaken notion, that the illness and death of Keats were caused by a brutal criticism of his _Endymion_, which appeared in the _Quarterly Review_. The last verse of the _Adonais_ seems almost prophetic of his own end. Pa.s.sionately fond of boating, he and a friend of his, Mr.

Williams, united in constructing a boat of a peculiar build, a very fast sailer, but difficult to manage. On the 8th of July, 1822, Sh.e.l.ley and his friend Williams sailed from Leghorn for Lerici, on the Bay of Spezia, near which lay his home for the time. A sudden squall came on, and their boat disappeared. The bodies of the two friends were cast on sh.o.r.e; and, according to quarantine regulations, were burned to ashes.

Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Mr. Trelawney were present when the body of Sh.e.l.ley was burned; so that his ashes were saved, and buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, near the grave of Keats, whose body had been laid there in the spring of the preceding year. _Cor Cordium_ were the words inscribed by his widow on the tomb of the poet.

The character of Sh.e.l.ley has been sadly maligned. Whatever faults he may have committed against society, they were not the result of sensuality.

One of his biographers, who was his companion at Oxford, and who does not seem inclined to do him _more_ than justice, a.s.serts that while there his conduct was immaculate. The whole picture he gives of the youth, makes it easy to believe this. To discuss the moral question involved in one part of his history would be out of place here; but even on the supposition that a man's conduct is altogether inexcusable in individual instances, there is the more need that nothing but the truth should be said concerning that, and other portions thereof. And whatever society may have thought itself justified in making subject of reprobation, it must be remembered that Sh.e.l.ley was under less obligation to society than most men. Yet his heart seemed full of love to his kind; and the distress which the oppression of others caused him, was the source of much of that wild denunciation which exposed him to the contempt and hatred of those who were rendered uncomfortable by his unsparing and indiscriminate anathemas. In private, he was beloved by all who knew him; a steady, generous, self-denying friend, not only to those who moved in his own circle, but to all who were brought within the reach of any aid he could bestow. To the poor he was a true and laborious benefactor. That man must have been good to whom the heart of his widow returns with such earnest devotion and thankfulness in the recollection of the past, and such fond hope for the future, as are manifested by Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley in those extracts from her private journal given us by Lady Sh.e.l.ley.

As regards his religious opinions, one of the thoughts which most strongly suggest themselves is,--how ill he must have been instructed in the principles of Christianity! He says himself in a letter to G.o.dwin, "I have known no tutor or adviser (_not excepting my father_) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust." So far is he from being an opponent of Christianity properly so called, that one can hardly help feeling what a Christian he would have been, could he but have seen Christianity in any other way than through the traditional and practical misrepresentations of it which surrounded him. All his attacks on Christianity are, in reality, directed against evils to which the true doctrines of Christianity are more opposed than those of Sh.e.l.ley could possibly be. How far he was excusable in giving the name of Christianity to what he might have seen to be only a miserable perversion of it, is another question, and one which hardly admits of discussion here. It was in the _name_ of Christianity, however, that the worst injuries of which he had to complain were inflicted upon him.

Coming out of the cathedral at Pisa one day, [Footnote: From _Sh.e.l.ley Memorials_, edited by Lady Sh.e.l.ley, which the writer of this paper has princ.i.p.ally followed in regard to the external facts of Sh.e.l.ley's history.] Sh.e.l.ley warmly a.s.sented to a remark of Leigh Hunt, "that a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith." Surely the founders of Christianity, even when they magnified faith, intended thereby a spiritual condition, of which the central principle is coincident with charity. Sh.e.l.ley's own feelings towards others, as judged from his poetry, seem to be tinctured with the very essence of Christianity. [Footnote: His _Essay on Christianity_ is full of n.o.ble views, some of which are held at the present day by some of the most earnest believers. At what time of his life it was written we are not informed; but it seems such as would insure his acceptance with any company of intelligent and devout Unitarians.] He did not, at one time at least, believe that we could know the source of our being; and seemed to take it as a self-evident truth, that the Creator could not be like the creature. But it is unjust to fix upon any utterance of opinion, and regard it as the religion of a man who died in his thirtieth year, and whose habits of thinking were such, that his opinions must have been in a state of constant change.

Coleridge says in a letter: "His (Sh.e.l.ley's) discussions, tending towards atheism of a certain sort, would not have scared _me;_ for _me_ it would have been a semitransparent larva, soon to be sloughed, and through which I should have seen the true _image_--the final metamorphosis. Besides, I have ever thought that sort of atheism the next best religion to Christianity; nor does the better faith I have learned from Paul and John interfere with the cordial reverence I feel for Benedict Spinoza."

Sh.e.l.ley's favourite study was metaphysics. The more impulse there is in any direction, the more education and experience are necessary to balance that impulse: one cannot help thinking that Sh.e.l.ley's _taste_ for exercises of this kind was developed more rapidly than the corresponding _power_. His favourite physical studies were chemistry and electricity. With these he occupied himself from his childhood; apparently, however, with more delight in the experiments themselves, than interest in the general conclusions to be arrived at by means of them. In the embodiment of his metaphysical ideas in poetry, the influence of these studies seems to show itself; for he uses forms which appeal more to the outer senses than to the inward eye; and his similes belong to the realm of the fancy, rather than the imagination: they lack _vital_ resemblance. Logic had considerable attractions for him. To geometry and mathematics he was quite indifferent. One of his biographers states that "he was neglectful of flowers," because he had no interest in botany; but one who derived such full delight from the contemplation of their external forms, could hardly be expected to feel very strongly the impulse to dissect them. He derived exceeding pleasure from Greek literature, especially from the works of Plato.

Several little peculiarities in Sh.e.l.ley's tastes are worth mentioning, because, although in themselves insignificant, they seem to correspond with the nature of his poetry. Perhaps the most prominent of these was his pa.s.sion for boat-sailing. He could not pa.s.s any piece of water without launching upon it a number of boats, constructed from what paper he could find in his pockets. The fly-leaves of the books he was in the way of carrying with him, for he was constantly reading, often went to this end. He would watch the fate of these boats with the utmost interest, till they sank or reached the opposite side. He was just as fond of real boating, and that frequently of a dangerous kind; but it is characteristic of him, that all the boats he describes in his poems are of a fairy, fantastic sort, barely related to the boats which battle with earthly winds and waves. Pistol-shooting was also a favourite amus.e.m.e.nt. Fireworks, too, gave him great delight. Some of his habits were likewise peculiar. He was remarkably abstemious, preferring bread and raisins to anything else in the way of eating, and very seldom drinking anything stronger than water. Honey was a favourite luxury with him. While at college, his biographer Hogg says he was in the habit, during the evening, of going to sleep on the rug, close to a blazing fire, heat seeming never to have other than a beneficial effect upon him. After sleeping some hours, he would awake perfectly restored, and continue actively occupied till far into the morning. His whole movements are represented as rapid, hurried, and uncertain. He would appear and disappear suddenly and unexpectedly; forget appointments; burst into wild laughter, heedless of his situation, whenever anything struck him as peculiarly ludicrous. His changes of residence were most numerous, and frequently made with so much haste that whole little libraries were left behind, and often lost. He was very fond of children, and used to make humorous efforts to induce them to disclose to him the still-remembered secrets of their pre-existence. He seemed to have a peculiar attraction towards mystery, and was ready to believe in a hidden secret, where no one else would have thought of one. His room, while he was at college, was in a state of indescribable confusion. Not only were all sorts of personal necessaries mingled with books and philosophical instruments, but things belonging to one department of service were not unfrequently pressed into the slavery of another. He dressed well but carelessly. In person he was tall, slender, and stooping; awkward in gait, but in manners a thorough gentleman. His complexion was delicate; his head, face, and features, remarkably small; the last not very regular, but in expression, both intellectual and moral, wonderfully beautiful. His eyes were deep blue, "of a wild, strange beauty;" his forehead high and white; his hair dark brown, curling, long, and bushy. His appearance in later life is described as singularly combining the appearances of premature age and prolonged youth.

The only art in which his taste appears to have been developed was poetry. Even in his poetry, taken as a whole, the artistic element is not generally very manifest. His earliest verses (none of which are included in his collected works) can hardly be said to be good in any sense. He seems in these to have chosen poetry as a fitting material for the embodiment of his ardent, hopeful, indignant thoughts and feelings, but, provided he can say what he wants to say, does not seem to care much about _how_ he says it. Indeed, there is too much of this throughout his works; for if the _utterance_, instead of the _conveyance_ of thought, were the object pursued in art, of course not merely imperfection of language, but absolute external unintelligibility, would be admissible. But his art constantly increases with his sense of its necessity; so that the _Cenci_, which is the last work of any pretension that he wrote, is decidedly the most artistic of all. There are beautiful pa.s.sages in _Queen Mab_, but it is the work of a boy-poet; and as it was all but repudiated by himself, it is not necessary to remark further upon it. _The Revolt of Islam_ is a poem of twelve cantos, in the Spenserian stanza; but in all respects except the arrangement of lines and rimes, his stanza, in common with all other imitations of the Spenserian, has little or nothing of the spirit or individuality of the original. The poem is dedicated to the cause of freedom, and records the efforts, successes, defeats, and final triumphant death of two inspired champions of liberty--a youth and maiden. The adventures are marvellous, not intended to be within the bounds of probability, scarcely of possibility. There are very n.o.ble sentiments and fine pa.s.sages throughout the poem. Now and then there is grandeur. But the absence of art is too evident in the fact that the meaning is often obscure; an obscurity not unfrequently occasioned by the difficulty of the stanza, which is the most difficult mode of composition in English, except the rigid sonnet. The words and forms he employs to express thought seem sometimes mechanical devices for that purpose, rather than an utterance which suggested itself naturally to a mind where the thought was vitally present. The words are more a _clothing_ for the thought than an _embodiment_ of it. They do not lie near enough to the thing which is intended to be represented by them. It is, however, but just to remark, that some of the obscurity is owing to the fact, that, even with Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's superintendence, the works have not yet been satisfactorily edited, or at least not conducted through the press with sufficient care. [Footnote: This statement is no longer true.]

_The Cenci_ is a very powerful tragedy, but unfitted for public representation by the horrible nature of the historical facts upon which it is founded. In the execution of it, however, Sh.e.l.ley has kept very much nearer to nature than in any other of his works. He has rigidly adhered to his perception of artistic propriety in respect to the dramatic utterance. It may be doubted whether there is sufficient difference between the modes of speech of the different actors in the tragedy, but it is quite possible to individualize speech far too minutely for probable nature; and in this respect, at least, Sh.e.l.ley has not erred. Perhaps the action of the whole is a little hurried, and a central moment of awful repose and fearful antic.i.p.ation might add to the force of the tragedy. The scenes also might, perhaps, have been constructed so as to suggest more of evolution; but the central point of horror is most powerfully and delicately handled. You see a possible spiritual horror yet behind, more frightful than all that has gone before. The whole drama, indeed, is constructed around, not a prominent point, but a dim, infinitely-withdrawn, underground perspective of dismay and agony. Perhaps it detracts a little from our interest in the Lady Beatrice, that after all she should wish to live, and should seek to preserve her life by a denial of her crime. She, however, evidently justifies the denial to herself on the ground that, the deed being absolutely right, although regarded as most criminal by her judges, the only way to get true justice is to deny the fact, which, there being no guilt, she might consider as only a verbal lie. Her very purity of conscience enables her to utter this with the most absolute innocence of look, and word, and tone. This is probably a historical fact, and Sh.e.l.ley had to make the best of it. In the drama there is great tenderness, as well as terror; but for a full effect, one feels it desirable to be brought better acquainted with the individuals than the drama, from its want of graduation, permits. Sh.e.l.ley, however, was only six-and-twenty when he wrote it. He must have been attracted to the subject by its embodying the concentration of tyranny, lawlessness, and brutality in old Cenci, as opposed to, and exercised upon, an ideal loveliness and n.o.bleness in the person of Beatrice.

But of all Sh.e.l.ley's works, the _Prometheus Unbound_ is that which combines the greatest amount of individual power and peculiarity. There is an airy grandeur about it, reminding one of the vast ma.s.ses of cloud scattered about in broken, yet magnificently suggestive forms, all over the summer sky, after a thunderstorm. The fundamental ideas are grand; the superstructure, in many parts, so ethereal, that one hardly knows whether he is gazing on towers of solid masonry rendered dim and unsubstantial by intervening vapour, or upon the golden turrets of cloudland, themselves born of the mist which surrounds them with a halo of glory. The beings of Greek, mythology are idealized and etherealized by the new souls which he puts into them, making them think his thoughts and say his words. In reading this, as in reading most of his poetry, we feel that, unable to cope with the evils and wrongs of the world as it and they are, he constructs a new universe, wherein he may rule according to his will; and a good will in the main it is--good always in intent, good generally in form and utterance. Of the wrongs which Sh.e.l.ley endured from the collision and resulting conflict between his lawless goodness and the lawful wickedness of those in authority, this is one of the greatest,--that during the right period of pupillage, he was driven from the place of learning, cast on his own mental resources long before those resources were sufficient for his support, and irritated against the purest embodiment of good by the harsh treatment he received under its name. If that reverence which was far from wanting to his nature, had been but presented, in the person of some guide to his spiritual being, with an object worthy of its homage and trust, it is probable that the yet free and n.o.ble result of Sh.e.l.ley's individuality would have been presented to the world in a form which, while it attracted still only the few, would not have repelled the many; at least, not by such things as were merely accidental in their a.s.sociation with his earnest desires and efforts for the well-being of humanity.

That which chiefly distinguishes Sh.e.l.ley from other writers is the unequalled exuberance of his fancy. The reader, say for instance of that fantastically brilliant poem, _The Witch of Atlas_, the work of three days, is overwhelmed in a storm, as it were, of rainbow snow-flakes and many-coloured lightnings, accompanied ever by "a low melodious thunder."

The evidences of pure imagination in his writings are unfrequent as compared with those of fancy: there are not half the instances of the direct embodiment of idea in form, that there are of the presentation of strange resemblances between external things.

One of the finest short specimens of Sh.e.l.ley's peculiar mode is his _Ode to the West Wind_, full of mysterious melody of thought and sound. But of all his poems, the most popular, and deservedly so, is the _Skylark_.

Perhaps the _Cloud_ may contest it with the _Skylark_ in regard to popular favour; but the _Cloud_, although full of beautiful words and fantastic cloud-like images, is, after all, princ.i.p.ally a work of the fancy; while the _Skylark_, though even in it fancy predominates over imagination in the visual images, forms, as a whole, a lovely, true, individual work of art; a _lyric_ not unworthy of the _lark_, which Mason apostrophizes as "sweet feathered lyric." The strain of sadness which pervades it is only enough to make the song of the lark human.

In _The Sensitive Plant_, a poem full of the peculiarities of his genius, tending through a wilderness of fanciful beauties to a thicket of mystical speculation, one curious idiosyncrasy is more prominent than in any other--curious, as belonging to the poet of beauty and loveliness: it is the tendency to be fascinated by what is ugly and revolting, so that he cannot withdraw his thoughts from it till he has described it in language, powerful, it is true, and poetic, when considered as to its fitness for the desired end, but, in force of these very excellences in the means, nearly as revolting as the objects themselves. a.s.sociated with this is the tendency to discover strangely unpleasant likenesses between things; which likenesses he is not content with seeing, but seems compelled, perhaps in order to get rid of them himself, to force upon the observation of his reader. But the admirer of Sh.e.l.ley is not pleased to find that one or two pa.s.sages of this nature have been omitted in some editions of his works.

Few men have been more misunderstood or misrepresented than Sh.e.l.ley.

Doubtless this has in part been his own fault, as Coleridge implies when he writes to this effect of him: that his horror of hypocrisy made him speak in such a wild way, that Southey (who was so much a man of forms and proprieties) was quite misled, not merely in his estimate of his worth, but in his judgment of his character. But setting aside this consideration altogether, and regarding him merely as a poet, Sh.e.l.ley has written verse which will last as long as English literature lasts; valuable not only from its excellence, but from the peculiarity of its excellence. To say nothing of his n.o.ble aims and hopes, Sh.e.l.ley will always be admired for his sweet melodies, lovely pictures, and wild prophetic imaginings. His indignant remonstrances, intermingled with grand imprecations, burst in thunder from a heart overcharged with the love of his kind, and roused to a keener sense of all oppression by the wrongs which sought to overwhelm himself. But as he recedes further in time, and men are able to see more truly the proportions of the man, they will judge, that without having gained the rank of a great reformer, Sh.e.l.ley had in him that element of wide sympathy and lofty hope for his kind which is essential both to the _birth_ and the subsequent _making_ of the greatest of poets.

A SERMON.

[Footnote: Read in the Unitarian chapel, Ess.e.x-street, London, 1879.]

PHILIPPIANS iii. 15, 16.--Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded; and if in anything ye be otherwise minded, G.o.d shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by that same.

This is the reading of the oldest ma.n.u.scripts. The rest of the verse is pretty clearly a not overwise marginal gloss that has crept into the text.

In its origin, opinion is the intellectual body, taken for utterance and presentation by something necessarily larger than any intellect can afford stuff sufficient for the embodiment of. To the man himself, therefore, in whose mind it arose, an opinion will always represent and recall the spirit whose form it is,--so long, at least, as the man remains true to his better self. Hence, a man's opinion may be for him invaluable, the needle of his moral compa.s.s, always pointing to the truth whence it issued, and whose form it is. Nor is the man's opinion of the less value to him that it may change. Nay, to be of true value, it must have in it not only the possibility, but the necessity of change: it must change in every man who is alive with that life which, in the New Testament, is alone treated as life at all. For, if a man's opinion be in no process of change whatever, it must be dead, valueless, hurtful Opinion is the offspring of that which is itself born to grow; which, being imperfect, must grow or die. Where opinion is growing, its imperfections, however many and serious, will do but little hurt; where it is not growing, these imperfections will further the decay and corruption which must already have laid hold of the very heart of the man. But it is plain in the world's history that what, at some given stage of the same, was the embodiment in intellectual form of the highest and deepest of which it was then spiritually capable, has often and speedily become the source of the most frightful outrages upon humanity. How is this? Because it has pa.s.sed from the mind in which it grew into another in which it did not grow, and has of necessity altered its nature. Itself sprung from that which was deepest in the man, it casts seeds which take root only in the intellectual understanding of his neighbour; and these, springing up, produce flowers indeed which look much the same to the eye, but fruit which is poison and bitterness,--worst of it all, the false and arrogant notion that it is duty to force the opinion upon the acceptance of others. But it is because such men themselves hold with so poor a grasp the truth underlying their forms that they are, in their self-sufficiency, so ambitious of propagating the forms, making of themselves the worst enemies of the truth of which they fancy themselves the champions. How truly, in the case of all genuine teachers of men, shall a man's foes be they of his own household! For of all the destroyers of the truth which any man has preached, none have done it so effectually or so grievously as his own followers. So many of them have received but the forms, and know nothing of the truth which gave him those forms! They lay hold but of the non-essential, the specially peris.h.i.+ng in those forms; and these aspects, doubly false and misleading in their crumbling disjunction, they proceed to force upon the attention and reception of men, calling that the truth which is at best but the draggled and useless fringe of its earth-made garment. Opinions so held belong to the theology of h.e.l.l,--not necessarily altogether false in form, but false utterly in heart and spirit. The opinion then that is hurtful is not that which is formed in the depths, and from the honest necessities of a man's own nature, but that which he has taken up at second hand, the study of which has pleased his intellect; has perhaps subdued fears and mollified distresses which ought rather to have grown and increased until they had driven the man to the true physician; has puffed him up with a sense of superiority as false as foolish, and placed in his hand a club with which to subjugate his neighbour to his spiritual dictation. The true man even, who aims at the perpetuation of his opinion, is rather obstructing than aiding the course of that truth for the love of which he holds his opinion; for truth is a living thing, opinion is a dead thing, and transmitted opinion a deadening thing.

Let us look at St. Paul's feeling in this regard. And, in order that we may deprive it of none of its force, let us note first the nature of the truth which he had just been presenting to his disciples, when he follows it with the words of my text:--

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,

And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of G.o.d by faith:

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellows.h.i.+p of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;

If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of G.o.d in Christ Jesus.

St. Paul, then, had been declaring to the Philippians the idea upon which, so far as it lay with him, his life was constructed, the thing for which he lived, to which the whole conscious effort of his being was directed,--namely, to be in his very nature one with Christ, to become righteous as he is righteous; to die into his death, so that he should no more hold the slightest personal relation to evil, but be alive in every fibre to all that is pure, lovely, loving, beautiful, perfect. He had been telling them that he spent himself in continuous effort to lay hold upon that for the sake of which Christ had laid hold on him. This he declares the sole thing worth living for: the hope of this, the hope of becoming one with the living G.o.d, is that which keeps a glorious consciousness awake in him, amidst all the unrest of a being not yet at harmony with itself, and a laborious and persecuted life. It cannot therefore be any shadow of indifference to the truth to which he has borne this witness, that causes him to add, "If in anything ye be otherwise minded." It is to him even the test of perfection, whether they be thus minded or not; for, although a moment before, he has declared himself short of the desired perfection, he now says, "Let as many of us as are perfect be thus minded." There is here no room for that unprofitable thing, bare logic: we must look through the s.h.i.+fting rainbow of his words,--rather, we must gather all their tints together, then turn our backs upon the rainbow, that we may see the glorious light which is the soul of it. St. Paul is not that which he would be, which he must be; but he, and all they who with him believe that the perfection of Christ is the sole worthy effort of a man's life, are in the region, though not yet at the centre, of perfection. They are, even now, not indeed grasping, but in the grasp of, that perfection. He tells them this is the one thing to mind, the one thing to go on desiring and labouring for, with all the earnestness of a G.o.d-born existence; but, if any one be at all otherwise minded,--that is, of a different opinion,--what then? That it is of little or no consequence? No, verily; but of such endless consequence that G.o.d will himself unveil to them the truth of the matter. This is Paul's faith, not his opinion. Faith is that by which a man lives inwardly, and orders his way outwardly. Faith is the root, belief the tree, and opinion the foliage that falls and is renewed with the seasons. Opinion is, at best, even the opinion of a true man, but the cloak of his belief, which he may indeed cast to his neighbour, but not with the truth inside it: that remains in his own bosom, the oneness between him and his G.o.d. St. Paul knows well--who better?--that by no argument, the best that logic itself can afford, can a man be set right with the truth; that the spiritual perception which comes of hungering contact with the living truth--a perception which is in itself a being born again--can alone be the mediator between a man and the truth. He knows that, even if he could pa.s.s his opinion over bodily into the understanding of his neighbour, there would be little or nothing gained thereby, for the man's spiritual condition would be just what it was before. G.o.d must reveal, or nothing is known. And this, through thousands of difficulties occasioned by the man himself, G.o.d is ever and always doing his mighty best to effect.

See the grandeur of redeeming liberality in the Apostle. In his heart of hearts he knows that salvation consists in nothing else than being one with Christ; that the only life of every man is hid with Christ in G.o.d, and to be found by no search anywhere else. He believes that for this cause was he born into the world,--that he should give himself, heart and soul, body and spirit, to him who came into the world that he might bear witness to the truth. He believes that for the sake of this, and nothing less,--anything more there cannot be,--was the world, with its endless glories, created. Nay, more than all, he believes that for this did the Lord, in whose cross, type and triumph of his self-abnegation, he glories, come into the world, and live and die there. And yet, and yet, he says, and says plainly, that a man thinking differently from all this or at least, quite unprepared to make this whole-hearted profession of faith, is yet his brother in Christ, in whom the knowledge of Christ that he has will work and work, the new leaven casting out the old leaven until he, too, in the revelation of the Father, shall come to the perfect stature of the fulness of Christ. Meantime, Paul, the Apostle, must show due reverence to the halting and dull disciple. He must and will make no demand upon him on the grounds of what he, Paul, believes.

He is where he is, and G.o.d is his teacher. To his own Master,--that is, Paul's Master, and not Paul,--he stands. He leaves him to the company of his Master. "Leaves him?" No: that he does not; that he will never do, any more than G.o.d will leave him. Still and ever will he hold him and help him. But how help him, if he is not to press upon him his own larger and deeper and wiser insights? The answer is ready: he will press, not his opinion, not even the man's opinion, but the man's own faith upon him. "O brother, beloved of the Father, walk in the light,--in the light, that is, which is thine, not which is mine; in the light which is given to thee, not to me: thou canst not walk by my light, I cannot walk by thine: how should either walk except by the light which is in him? O brother, what thou seest, that do; and what thou seest not, that thou shalt see: G.o.d himself, the Father of Lights, will show it to you." This, this is the condition of all growth,--that whereto we have attained, we mind that same; for such, following the ma.n.u.scripts, at least the oldest, seems to me the Apostle's meaning.

Obedience is the one condition of progress, and he entreats them to obey. If a man will but work that which is in him, will but make the power of G.o.d his own, then is it well with him for evermore. Like his Master, Paul urges to action, to the highest operation, therefore to the highest condition of humanity. As Christ was the Son of his Father because he did the will of the Father, so the Apostle would have them the sons of the Father by doing the will of the Father. Whereto ye have attained, walk by _that_.

But there is more involved in this utterance than the words themselves will expressly carry. Next to his love to the Father and the Elder Brother, the pa.s.sion of Paul's life--I cannot call it less--is love to all his brothers and sisters. Everything human is dear to him: he can part with none of it. Division, separation, the breaking of the body of Christ, is that which he cannot endure. The body of his flesh had once been broken, that a grander body might be prepared for him: was it for that body itself to tear itself asunder? With the whole energy of his great heart, Paul clung to unity. He could clasp together with might and main the body of his Master--the body that Master loved because it was a spiritual body, with the life of his Father in it. And he knew well that only by walking in the truth to which they had attained, could they ever draw near to each other. Whereto we have attained, let us walk by that.

My honoured friends, if we are not practical, we are nothing. Now, the one main fault in the Christian Church is separation, repulsion, recoil between the component particles of the Lord's body. I will not, I do not care to inquire who is more to blame than another in the evil fact. I only care to insist that it is the duty of every individual man to be innocent of the same. One main cause, perhaps I should say _the one_ cause of this deathly condition, is that whereto we had, we did not, whereto we have attained, we do not walk by that. Ah, friend! do not now think of thy neighbour. Do not applaud my opinion as just from what thou hast seen around thee, but answer it from thy own being, thy own behaviour. Dost thou ever feel thus toward thy neighbour,--"Yes, of course, every man is my brother; but how can I be a brother to him so long as he thinks me wrong in what I believe, and so long as I think he wrongs in his opinions the dignity of the truth?" What, I return, has the man no hand to grasp, no eyes into which yours may gaze far deeper than your vaunted intellect can follow? Is there not, I ask, anything in him to love? Who asks you to be of one opinion? It is the Lord who asks you to be of one heart. Does the Lord love the man? Can the Lord love, where there is nothing to love? Are you wiser than he, inasmuch as you perceive impossibility where he has failed to discover it? Or will you say, "Let the Lord love where he pleases: I will love where I please"?