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“There
is no new thing under the sun,” said the wise king; but had he lived in
our age, where change succeeds change, and where each new discovery
tramples so fast upon the heels of that invention which the last hour gave
birth to, that the latter, for the very shame of priority, has to retire
abashed to make room for its younger brother: he would rather lave
exclaimed, “One day succeedeth another, but in vain doth the sun look
for those objects he beheld but yesterday.”
Let
one tread the vast and commingled circle of science and art, and at each
new step he will be startled at the bold theory, at the simple though
wonderful realization. Man speaks! in an instant the chained lightning
conveys his message to the extremity of a vast continent. He wills! an
agent, too subtle for his senses to perceive, devours space to place
countries and seas between himself and his place of departure. He gazes
upon the living lights of heaven! he longs to mix with, them, “to sound
their depth, to count their number;” they visit his watch-tower, and
range themselves within the view of his now no longer limited sight. He
wishes to preserve the visible representation of objects! a ray of light
instantaneously creates for him a correct copy of nature. He wishes to
commingle the thread of the spider with the hue of the rainbow! science
and art at his bidding, with almost lightning speed, spread before him, in
countless folds, the woof of his desire. He beholds a rare and beauteous
shrub! at his bidding it multiplies and blooms in every garden. Does he
but desire the warmth and fruits of the tropics during the cold and dismal
winter of the dreary North, or the snows of Siberia in the clime of the
sun, his magical-lamp which gives light to the age will achieve all this.
He mounts through the air, and keeps company with the misty clouds without
fear; in a word, he finds himself endowed with apparently limitless
faculties, and, with unsatisfied thirst, he swallows up a Jordan in the
pursuit of new streams, of new fields where difficulties are to be
surmounted, where triumphs are to be achieved. Is it a wonder, then, that,
with facilities apparently as limitless as his imagination, man should
consider himself capable of working out new systems of theology, separate
from, and divested of the cobwebs of antiquity? that, in his eagerness to
show himself equal to all things, he should forget or deem obsolete the
quaint old saying of a past age:
“When
an hatter
Wyll go smatter,
In philosophy;
Or a pedlar,
Ware a medlar
In theology,
All that ensue
Such craftes new,
They drive so farre a cast,
That evermore,
They do, therefore,
Beshrewe themselfe at last?”
Thus,
whilst the Deity permits the mind of man to take so wide a range in the
investigation of nature’s expanse; still he speaks in a voice that comes
reverberating from Sinai’s height. “Untaught, unaided by me, thou
canst not grasp the immaterial.” “Unaided, thou may st attempt to
increase thy spirituality; but thy mind, tossed about upon the tempestuous
sea of metaphysics, upon which thou hast dared to launch thy frail bark,
will only find safety by keeping a steadfast gaze upon that beacon, whose
light stands revealed of old, and whose brilliancy will dispel the gloom
of doubt, and enable thee to regain that rock-bound harbour where the
proud waves of desolation shall be stayed.”
But say science and art, “Look at what we have
achieved in this age; in the knowledge of the past we have dug our
foundations, and each succeeding age shall behold our structure rise
higher and higher, until, from the crown of our temple, we shall be
enabled at one view to read the mysteries of nature, to bound space by our
grasp, and to render evanescent life an eternity, by being able to endow
ourselves with the lightning speed in thought and action. And say you,
that our sister religion shall cling more to earth than ourselves? Say
you, that heaven-born, her flight shall be limited, that she shall not
soar on equal wing? and at each succeeding age become more spiritual by
adding the light of the present to the demi-darkness of past ages, and
throw off at last from the system of man its earthy desires, and render
each heart a living ark, in which the Most High may find a fit and holy
dwelling?” But what says religion? “God has made man of two natures,
spiritual and corporeal—the one retrogressive, the other progressive.
Retrogressive, because the
spirit or soul of man is an emanation of the Supreme Being, and can only
strengthen itself, and increase its beauty by retracing its way, or
endeavouring to ascend to that mount of spirituality from which it took
its source. Progressive, because the spirit or soul of man, possessing
from its source all knowledge, having that knowledge obscured by its
mortal veil, urges the body through which it can only act, to make
attempts to penetrate and develope the mysteries of nature, and a
knowledge of the ways of its Maker, so as to provide the only food it can
partake of that will satisfy its hunger.” Thus, the offsprings of
intellectuality are but the effects of the soul struggling to endow the
body with its foreknowledge; science and art but the developements carried
higher by each succeeding struggle. Each of them is but a part, a parcel
of religion; and whilst they entertain towards her the affectionate and
dutiful love of children, they elevate each other, and, together, render
man but “little less than the angels.” But let the two latter
endeavour to elevate him by their attempts to illuminate the temple of his
heart by their creations, unperfected by the innate, the revealed, the
untreated light of religion, and they will find that this immortal child
will leave the dwelling, now only fit residence for vanity and pride,
whose overshadowing growth will darken the cell of joy, and leave it a
blank, a desolation. Alas! too late will it be found that “a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing;” and found, also, when too late, that
the brightest achievements of science, the greatest creations of art, the
profoundest worldly knowledge, is but little unless used as the adjunct of
religion, and the heart that neglects this, will in sorrow wish it had but
drunk deeper of that spring whose waters flowed of old, whose waters are
still to be fond in their purity by following the path marked out by the
ancients, by men upon whom the spirit of wisdom rested, whose leader was
God himself. But says the enlightened spirit of the age, “These guides
you speak of were steeped in ignorance. What knew they of refinement?
Shall we take for our leaders men far behind us in knowledge? men totally
unversed in the polite arts, who buried their spirituality (if they had
any) in dark forms, in unmeaning observances? who, blinded by the darkness
of the age, groped about in the gloom around, and, for fear others would
be lost in the search for the spring of immortality, planted a fence
around it, and guide-posts to point out the way? But we! we see by the
light of the spirit of the are; no need have we of these accessories: our
march is right onward, and time is too valuable to be thus frittered away
in the search for landmarks. ‘Twas well when the world moved onward with
the snail’s pace to look for these; but now it acts with the quickness
of thought, and shall time, so precious, be wasted upon forms, upon
ceremonies? What guide needs the eagle in his flight towards the sun?
needs the wild bird be told how to reach the sunny South? No! he smells
the spice-tree from afar, and instinct guides him aright. Is his instinct
more true than the promptings of our spirit, that it bears him so surely,
so safely to his heaven? and if not, may not our spirit attain loftier
flight, and bear us to the empyrean unguided?”
Yes!
even so. Is there, then, no difference in our being? He possesses but one
nature; no warring of opposite influences feels he in his bosom. His
heaven is here. He gazes upon the sun, and approaches towards it: whilst
we long for immortality, not evanescent happiness, and untaught know not
the road to it. His heaven he finds in the satisfying of immediate wants,
his happiness in the joys of the body. But with man,—possession robs the
rose of its bloom, the gratification of bodily or mental desires is but as
the seed of new wishes, new hopes. He wishes for immortality; but this
constant changing of the objects of gratification, constantly puts the
road of its attainment out of sight: though it does not stifle the wish,
it often substitutes fame here, a sort of semi-immortality, for the more
precious gem, and almost impresses the child of genius in his daring
realization, that he has indeed created the diamond; though let but the
spirit of true religion breathe upon his gem, and he finds it at most but
crystallized clay. Let him but be divested of the cobwebs of conceit,
which till now have blinded his vision, and the light that he thought had
flickered and expired in the dim mist of years, will burst upon him in all
its pristine splendour: let him but cast far off the world with its
vanities, its pleasures, its cold and polished scepticisms, and purely,
intensely, devoutly examine the spirit of the past, and he will find many
a sparkling gem in what he deemed mere rubbish, gems to whose lustre he
may add much, but whose purity he cannot imitate. He may find, too, under
,the guidance of this spirit of reform, that these guides who lived in
ages long gone, by confining themselves exclusively to the study of the
law under the guidance of that prophetic spirit which had but just passed
away, leaving, like Elijah, its mantle to them, have developed those
ceremonies that the statutes had called into being for their preservation,
and which, taking their rise during the mission of Moses, have protected
the holy law from harm, and preserved its believers from falling away
before the fierce blast of persecution, the withering blight of
infidelity, the thrusts of hate and bigotry, and prevented Israel from
coalescing with surrounding nations.
S. SOLIS.
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