II.
Sooner or later in this life, the earnest, or enthusiastic youth
comes to know, and more or less appreciate this startling solecism:—That
while, as the grand condition of acceptance to
God, Christianity calls upon all men to renounce this world;
yet by all odds the most Mammonish part of this world—
Europe and America—are owned by none but professed Christian
nations, who glory in the owning, and seem to have some
reason therefor.
This solecism once vividly and practically apparent; then
comes the earnest reperusal of the Gospels: the intense self-absorption
into that greatest real miracle of all religions, the Sermon
on the Mount. From that divine mount, to all earnest-loving
youths, flows an inexhaustible soul-melting stream of tenderness
and loving-kindness; and they leap exulting to their
feet, to think that the founder of their holy religion gave utterance
to sentences so infinitely sweet and soothing as these;
sentences which embody all the love of the Past, and all the
love which can be imagined in any conceivable Future. Such
emotions as that Sermon raises in the enthusiastic heart; such
emotions all youthful hearts refuse to ascribe to humanity as
their origin. This is of God! cries the heart, and in that cry
ceases all inquisition. Now, with this fresh-read sermon in his
soul, the youth again gazes abroad upon the world. Instantly,
in aggravation of the former solecism, an overpowering sense
of the world's downright positive falsity comes over him; the
world seems to lie saturated and soaking with lies. The sense
of this thing is so overpowering, that at first the youth is apt to
refuse the evidence of his own senses; even as he does that
same evidence in the matter of the movement of the visible sun
in the heavens, which with his own eyes he plainly sees to go
round the world, but nevertheless on the authority of other persons,—the
Copernican astronomers, whom he never saw—he
believes it
not to go round the world, but the world round it.
Just so, too, he hears good and wise people sincerely say: This
world only
seems to be saturated and soaking with lies; but in
reality it does not so lie soaking and saturate; along with some
lies, there is much truth in this world. But again he refers to
his Bible, and there he reads most explicitly, that this world is
unconditionally depraved and accursed; and that at all hazards
men must come out of it. But why come out of it, if it be a
True World and not a Lying World? Assuredly, then, this
world is a lie.
Hereupon then in the soul of the enthusiast youth two armies
come to the shock; and unless he prove recreant, or unless
he prove gullible, or unless he can find the talismanic secret,
to reconcile this world with his own soul, then there is no
peace for him, no slightest truce for him in this life. Now
without doubt this Talismanic Secret has never yet been found;
and in the nature of human things it seems as though it never
can be. Certain philosophers have time and again pretended
to have found it; but if they do not in the end discover their
own delusion, other people soon discover it for themselves, and
so those philosophers and their vain philosophy are let glide
away into practical oblivion. Plato, and Spinoza, and Goethe,
and many more belong to this guild of self-impostors, with a
preposterous rabble of Muggletonian Scots and Yankees, whose
vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness of their
Greek or German Neoplatonical originals. That profound
Silence, that only Voice of our God, which I before spoke of;
from that divine thing without a name, those impostor philosophers
pretend somehow to have got an answer; which is as
absurd, as though they should say they had got water out of
stone; for how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?
Certainly, all must admit, that if for any one this problem
of the possible reconcilement of this world with our own souls
possessed a peculiar and potential interest, that one was Pierre
Glendinning at the period we now write of. For in obedience
to the loftiest behest of his soul, he had done certain vital acts,
which had already lost him his worldly felicity, and which he
felt must in the end indirectly work him some still additional
and not-to-be-thought-of woe.
Soon then, as after his first distaste at the mystical title, and
after his then reading on, merely to drown himself, Pierre at
last began to obtain a glimmering into the profound intent of
the writer of the sleazy rag pamphlet, he felt a great interest
awakened in him. The more he read and re-read, the more
this interest deepened, but still the more likewise did his failure
to comprehend the writer increase. He seemed somehow to
derive some general vague inkling concerning it, but the central
conceit refused to become clear to him. The reason whereof is
not so easy to be laid down; seeing that the reason-originating
heart and mind of man, these organic things themselves are not
so easily to be expounded. Something, however, more or less
to the point, may be adventured here.
If a man be in any vague latent doubt about the intrinsic
correctness and excellence of his general life-theory and practical
course of life; then, if that man chance to light on any other
man, or any little treatise, or sermon, which unintendingly, as
it were, yet very palpably illustrates to him the intrinsic incorrectness
and non-excellence of both the theory and the practice
of his life; then that man will—more or less unconsciously—
try hard to hold himself back from the self-admitted comprehension
of a matter which thus condemns him. For in this
case, to comprehend, is himself to condemn himself, which is
always highly inconvenient and uncomfortable to a man.
Again. If a man be told a thing wholly new, then—during the
time of its first announcement to him—it is entirely impossible
for him to comprehend it. For—absurd as it may seem—men
are only made to comprehend things which they comprehended
before (though but in the embryo, as it were). Things new
it is impossible to make them comprehend, by merely talking
to them about it. True, sometimes they pretend to comprehend;
in their own hearts they really believe they do comprehend;
outwardly look as though they did comprehend; wag
their bushy tails comprehendingly; but for all that, they do not
comprehend. Possibly, they may afterward come, of themselves,
to inhale this new idea from the circumambient air, and
so come to comprehend it; but not otherwise at all. It will
be observed, that neither points of the above speculations do we,
in set terms, attribute to Pierre in connection with the rag
pamphlet. Possibly both might be applicable; possibly neither.
Certain it is, however, that at the time, in his own heart, he
seemed to think that he did not fully comprehend the strange
writer's conceit in all its bearings. Yet was this conceit apparently
one of the plainest in the world; so natural, a child
might almost have originated it. Nevertheless, again so profound,
that scarce Juggularius himself could be the author;
and still again so exceedingly trivial, that Juggularius' smallest
child might well have been ashamed of it.
Seeing then that this curious paper rag so puzzled Pierre;
foreseeing, too, that Pierre may not in the end be entirely uninfluenced
in his conduct by the torn pamphlet, when afterwards
perhaps by other means he shall come to understand it;
or, peradventure, come to know that he, in the first place, did
—seeing too that the author thereof came to be made known
to him by reputation, and though Pierre never spoke to him,
yet exerted a surprising sorcery upon his spirit by the mere
distant glimpse of his countenance;—all these reasons I account
sufficient apology for inserting in the following chapters
the initial part of what seems to me a very fanciful and mystical,
rather than philosophical Lecture, from which, I confess,
that I myself can derive no conclusion which permanently satisfies
those peculiar motions in my soul, to which that Lecture
seems more particularly addressed. For to me it seems more
the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the
solution of the problem itself. But as such mere illustrations
are almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they
are the only possible human solutions), therefore it may help to
the temporary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so not be
wholly without use. At the worst, each person can now skip,
or read and rail for himself.
