XIX.

RELEASE FROM NOTIONS. ENTRANCE UPON KNOWLEDGE.

H. M. To H. G. A.

I AM glad I asked you in what sense you used the words "God," "Origin," &c., for your reply comes to me like a piece of refreshing sympathy, as rare as it is refreshing. I cannot tell you how the pain grows upon me of seeing how little notion men have of the modesty and largeness of conception necessary in approaching the study of themselves or any other part of nature; and in the conduct of their mere daily business. Of all the people I have ever known, how few there are who can suspend their opinion on so vast a subject as the origin and progression of the universe? How few there are who have ever thought of suspending their opinion! How few who would not think it a sin so to suspend their opinion! To me, however, it seems absolutely necessary, as well as the greatest possible relief, to come to a plain understanding with myself about it and deep and sweet is the repose of having done so. There is no theory of a God,* of an author of Nature, of an origin of the universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties;

*Bacon says of Epicurus, (Essay XVI.,) "His words are noble and divine: 'non deos vulgi negare profanum; sed vulgi opiniones diis applicare profanum.'"

mourn.

which is not (to my feelings) so irreverent as to make me blush; so misleading as to make me I can now hardly believe that it was I who once read Milton with scarcely any recoil from the theology; or Paley's Natural Theology with pleasure at the ingenuity of the mechanic-god he thought he was recommending to the admiration. of his readers. To think what the God of the multitude is, — morally, as well as physically! To think what the God of the spiritualist is! and to remember the admission of the best of that class, that God is a projection of their own ideal faculty, recognizable only through that class of faculties, and by no means through any external evidence! to see that they give the same account of the origin of Idols; and simply pronounce that the first is an external reality, and the last an internal illusion! To think that they begin with the superstition of supposing a God of essentially their own nature, who is their friend and in sympathy with them, and the director of all the events of their lives, and the thoughts of their minds; and how, when driven from this grosser superstition by the evidences of Law which are all around them, they remove their God a stage from them, and talk of a general instead of a particular Providence, and a Necessity which modifies the character of prayer; and how, next, when the absolute dominion of Law opens more and more to their perception, excluding all notions of revelation and personal intercourse between a God and man, and of sameness of nature

in God and man;· to think that, when men hav reached this point under the guidance of science, they should yet cling to the baseless notion of a single, conscious Being, outside of Nature, -himself unaccounted for, and not himself accounting for Nature! How far happier it is to see how much wiser to admit that we know nothing whatever about the matter! And, from the moment when we begin to discover the superstition of our childhood to be melting away, to discover how absurd and shocking it is to be talking every day about our own passing moods and paltry interests to a supposed author and guide of the universe,

how well it would be for us to set our minds free altogether, to open them wide to evidence of what is true and what is not! Till this is done, there is every danger of confusion in our faculties of reverence, of conscience, of moral perception, and of the pursuit and practice of truth. When it is done, what repose begins to pervade the mind! What clearness of moral purpose naturally ensues! and what healthful activity of the moral faculties! When we have finally dismissed all notion of subjection to a supreme lawless Will,—all the perplexing notions about sin and responsibility, and arbitrary reward and punishment, and stand free to see where we are, and to study our own nature, and recognize our own conditions, the relief is like that of coming out of a cave full of painted shadows under the free sky, with the earth open around us to the horizon. What a new perception

the

we obtain of "the beauty of holiness," loveliness of a healthful moral condition, -accordant with the laws of nature, and not with the requisitions of theology! What a new sense of reverence awakens in us when, dismissing the image of a creator bringing the universe out of nothing, we clearly perceive that the very conception of origin is too great for us, and that deeper and deeper down in the abysses of time, farther and farther away in the vistas of the ages, all was still what we see it now, a system of ever-working forces, producing forms, uniform in certain lines and largely various in the whole, and all under the operation of immutable Law! But I need not enlarge to you on the privileges of a state of freedom and reality. You know what it is to have no longer cause to blush for the moral character of your faith, and to tremble when a passing breeze finds its way into the old cavern, and shakes the painted vapors, and threatens to dissolve them. I will only just ask whether you know the passages in Sir James Mackintosh's Diary, on Immortality and the Theists' and philosophical Atheists' conceptions of God and Virtue.* They interested me deeply, many years ago, not only on account of the solemnity of their subject and the majestic composure of their tone, but because they first (as far as I remember) opened to me a full conception of the wisdom and beauty of a suspensive state of mind on the subjects of origin and destination or issue. Oh! if we

* Appendix V.

could have Bacon back again, now, when ́ science is daily chastening our views, and he might speak what he knew and thought, and find response in the midst of reprobation! What you quote from him is extremely interesting, and ought to set us studying him from end to end, separating the real from the pretended, tracking the vessel in which he stretched out over the broad ocean of Truth, rather than the tubs he threw out to the whales.

In reading over again your account of the training of a youth of our own time, I can but rejoice that nature is, on the whole, too strong for our perverseness: that the brain of every human creature will work, in some sort of balance of its parts, through all the mischief we do it by our ignorance and faulty aims. What beautiful conscientiousness and earnestness we meet with here and there, amidst the Vanity Fair of such a college life as you describe! - and what a hail to truth makes itself heard now and then amidst the hubbub of dogmatism and denunciation! I see, however, more and more, from year to year, the moral mischief that is arising from the loose and uncertain way in which Christianity is regarded, here and there throughout society in England, and especially in the Universities. I shall be glad of any increase of Science, chemical, physiological, logical, or moral, — which may put an end to the state of pretence in which we are going on from day to day. It would interest you to see a letter I am going to answer from a