Page images
PDF
EPUB

sonal and peculiar to invest their history with eminent interests.

His aberration from his true Nature had formed him stamp; not a common

Shelley was the atheistic poet. line of development, is easy to trace. for a religious character of a peculiar but an uncommon Church-man, a priest of the abstract and subtle and etherial in Christianity. He was by nature sincere and virtuous; sensitive, also, to all grossness of doctrine, his own materialism being made attractive by the dress in which his imagination had robed it; more sensitive, still, to personal abuse and unkind treatment. His heart was made to love, deeply and broadly. Coming out of the Cathedral of Pisa one day, he warmly assented to a remark of Leigh Hunt, "that a divine religion might be found out, if charity were only made the principle of it instead of faith." The golden dream of his life was the welfare of mankind; his notion of that welfare may have been an error, we read his good heart therein none the less. Here is Coleridge's word for him: "His (Shelley's) discussions tending to atheism of a certain sort, would not have served me; for me it would have been a semitransparent larva, soon to be sloughed, and through which I should have been the true image-the final metamorphosis. Besides, I have ever thought that sort of atheism the next best religion to Christianity." Wherefore had such a spirit been lost to faith? How has it been made to sing the following strains ?— "Spirit of Nature! All-sufficing Power:

Necessity! thou mother of the world!"-Queen Mab.

"There is no God!

. infinity within,

Infinity without, belie creation;

The exterminable spirit it contains

Is nature's only God; but human pride

Is skilful to invent most serious names

To hide ignorance.”—Queen Mab.

"This world is the nurse of all we know,

This world is the mother of all we feel,

And the coming of death is a fearful blow,

To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;

When all that we know, or feel, or see,

Shall pass like an unreal mystery."-Lines on Death.

[blocks in formation]

"Death has set his mark and seal

On all we are and all we feel:
First our pleasures die, and then

Our hopes, and then our fears-and when
These are dead, the debt is due,

Dust claims dust, and we die too."-On Death.

"I weep-my tears revive it not?

I sigh-it breathes no more on me :
Its mute and uncomplaining lot

Is such as mine shall be."-On a Faded Violet.

Bitter wails are these. Sad the Muse that lent her inspiration to thoughts so dark! Shelley was not made so to sing; but for other song entirely, the sweet lyric of faith and trust. Then why thus? His early religious training was unfortunate ; the current creed was fearful to any one, odious to him; in spirituals the Church had run dry, Shelley, by instinct, thirsting for those waters that stay thirst, "of which if one drink he shall never thirst more," while the cup they offered him was empty; they bid him drink air. He writes to Goodwin : "I have known no tutor, or adviser, not excepting my father, from whose lessons I have not recoiled in disgust." Then came his reading of Hume and the French Philosophers. The case was settled. Never won they an easier victim. They all hated the religion of the day; so did he. Their speculations were both subtle and bold; they met his humor. The French watch-cry, "liberty, equality, and fraternity," struck his ears with the favor of prophecy; his love for humanity found in this the beginning of a better end: the materialists have him again. Then came his bitter experience, the reproach, the neglect, the enmity of his fellows. They drove him from College; his father pointed him to the out-side door of his home; society frowned bleakly in his face. It was enough. Shelley was an atheist to the end of his days, the "Spirit of Nature his only God.

Byron was a man of moods, good and bad, and was a believer or unbeliever according to the humor he was in. His sentiment gave shape to his creed, not his reading or reflection; he thought in many keys, because so he felt; he had no tra

ditional notions, only those of the hour, accepting no teacher but the mood he chanced to be in. Byron, in his worst hours, could be guilty of any heresy, when

"His mind became

In its own eddy, boiling and o'erwrought,
A whirling gulf of fantasy and flame."

Then his Poetry is of the "Satanic school," evincing what Dr. Johnson calls "the frigid villany of studious lewdness and the calm malignity of labored impiety." His aberrations are fearful, seeming the more so, as he sometimes appears on a pathway not devious, at least, human. His remorse is without repentance. His misery is cherished with angry delight, as

.. Mute

The camel labors with the heaviest load,

And the wolf dies in silence."

His hatred is perfect hatred, and blurts its venom at random. He laughs, with infernal laugh, to see the blood he brings from innocence, to catch the sigh he wickedly presses. He is inordinately selfish, and, rather than have his path crossed, he walks alone; alone in cloudy gloom wandering o'er the earth; he confesses his defeated egotism:

"We wither from our youth, we gasp away-
Sick-sick; unfound the boon-unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,

Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first

But all too late,-so we are doubly cursed.

Love, fame, ambition, avarice-'t is the same,
Each idle-and all ill-and none the worst,

For all are meteors with a different name,

And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame."
-Childe Harold, Canto IV.

Byron, the fallen, had little faith in higher things; his vision was of darkness; God faded from before him, and he called

man a

"Poor child of doubt and death, whose hope is built on dreams."

Compte, the Positivist, the worshipper of science, was a

man wholly unlike Shelley or Byron; he stood wide apart from the sphere of sentiment and poetry; he was a professor of mathematics and a student of natural laws. He was Bacon carried out. He ignored causes and stopped with phenomena, congratulating himself that he had got beyond all fetichistic, polytheistic, and monotheistic prejudices, that he had planted his feet on the fourth and final table-land of human progressthe scientific. He put aside all theological problems as simply inaccessible, outside our reach, to be given over to history, whither he thought religion herself was fast hastening, where his had gone surely, all his faith and piety, as he claimed, occuring before his twentieth year. He refused to entertain the question of being behind all phenomena, and, also, the question of creation any way. The theologians who account for all things on the sense of an Infinite personality and power, he leaves to their " chimeras," as he is pleased to call their notions; while he says of the Atheists, trying at these knots none can untie, "they are to be regarded as the most illogical of theologians, since they attempt the theological problems while rejecting the only suitable method." He scorned the terms, atheist and theist; he was a positivist. Practically his materialistic tendency, early fallen into, never carried him to the extremity of unbelief; in later life we find him undergoing an extensive recoil—he takes a back track. Unwonted experiences had touched his heart, and he stood amazed at the kindlings within. Late in his years he learned to love; a blissful twelvemonth was granted him, enough to stir manifold tender emotions; the mathematician becomes sentimental of a sudden; poetry looks better to him now; even divinity must be an attribute of at least one soul. He finds a shrine at which to worship. But, alas! his idol passes away; she goes, however, like one of old, to come again. Henceforth the spirit of humanity is his Etre Suprême. He elaborates a systematic scheme of Saint-worship. He invokes a constant mindfulness and reverence toward the humanity of the past. He dedicates each month of the year to some pre-eminent Saint, as the sixth month to St. Paul; giving each day of each week of each month, to some lesser Saint, as, for example, the first seven

days of the above named month to St. Luke, St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Monica, and St. Augustin. His calender outruns that of the Catholic Church; his Saint's days are not merely occasional, every rising sun brings one along, there are three hundred and sixty-five of them in the year. No priest ever imposed so much of worship. Compte calls us to our knees beyond endurance.

So the atheistic tendency is an aberration from the right line of human development; it is vagrancy; a departure from the highway of the Lord. Some of the causes leading there to have been hinted at.

How shall the tendency be overcome? There were two methods of procedure adopted in the time of greatest need: the rational and the spiritual. At the head of one stood Bishop Butler; of the other, the Wesleys and Whitefield. No third plan seems possible, the wisest wisdom concentrating in these. Let us go forth with a consistent and vital religion, doctrine and spirit in forceful union like body and soul, Butler and Wesley conjoined, its twain made one, and our panoply is ample for victory. Truth is mighty, and

"The heedless world hath never lost

One accent of the Holy Ghost."

ARTICLE VII.

Formula of Baptism.

HAVING been present several times recently when the rite of baptism was administered in some of our Churches, we were struck with the formula,-In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,-which on those occasions was uniformly employed. By a reference to the "Gospel Liturgy we see this formula is there also recognized and

[ocr errors]
« PreviousContinue »