positive creeds. But that enlightened portion of mankind who satisfy this singular definition, are divided among themselves upon the question of the being of a God. Let us take his own statement of the case: "Many philosophers, and almost all divines, have positively asserted that the human mind discovers the existence of God by a law of its own nature. I have attentively examined this assertion, and am convinced that, on the contrary, there are few men who believe in the true, the spiritual God. This belief, on the contrary, is one of the highest attainments of our developed mental existence."† 68. How then could that be in any way, according to his principles, necessary to the human race, which was only receivable by a very few among them? And which, though capable (as he says), when once discovered, of being imparted with ease, even to children, was only originally to be discovered by the efforts of the highest mental development, and therefore must have remained utterly unknown until the period when the acme of that development was first attained? The argument, from consent therefore, of which he felt the force, though he mistook the application, told against the only remaining dogma by which he held: and whenever he had come to enforce with consistency his canon, that what is contested must be judged indifferent, he must have lost his grasp of the last plank of his shattered vessel. 69. Again, is it possible to conceive a paradox more untenable than for the man who says no evidence, whatever its amount, can prove a miracle, to hold at the same time that from an inward view of our own minds we ought certainly to believe in the existence of a Being of infinite *Life, pp. 38 and 39, and P. 267. + Ibid. III. 452, uncontrollable power? If the power be infinite, can it not suffice for the performance of a miracle? Is not Saint Augustine right when he teaches, that the establishment and maintenance of the ordinary laws of nature required a greater and more wonderful exercise of power, than most of those deviations from them, which we designate by the name of miracles? Cannot the power which is sufficient to create us, and sufficient (for this he does not deny) to perform the miracles, avail to convey its own acts to the perceptions of its own creatures? 70. We cannot then entertain the smallest confidence that, if he had been permitted a few more years of mental activity, he would not have crushed into dust the fragments of belief, which at the period of his death had not yet been decomposed. In that case, the warning which he has left behind him, written by the dispensation of Providence for our learning, would have been even more forcible, but the picture itself would have been in proportion more grievous. And truly, as it is, that picture has abundant power both to convey instruction and to excite a kind of loving pity. As to the last, what can be more deeply moving than to see one, who was endowed from birth upwards with more than an ordinary share of the best worldly goods, and dedicated to the immediate service of God, after he has once fallen into atheism and has been recovered from it, again loosened from his hold, tossed about by every wind of doctrine, pursuing in turn a series of idle phantoms, each more shadowy than that which it succeeds, and terminating his course in a spiritual solitude and darkness absolutely unrelieved but for one single star, and that too of flickering and waning light? And all this under the dismal delusion that he has been a discoverer of truth; that he has been elected from among men to this nakedness and destitution; that, with the multitude of his accumulating errors, he has acquired a weight of authority, increasing in proportion to the years which he has consumed in weaving the meshes that entangle him. Horror, indeed, and not pity, is the appropriate sentiment which, in most cases, the view of that dreadful process, by which faith is eaten out from the soul, would excite. But when we recollect that there is no evidence before us warranting us at least to impute the dark results in this instance to deliberate or habitual perversion of the will, and that he has himself recorded the deep sorrows of his life, though he could not see their cause, it is manifest that the sentiments which this examination should leave upon our minds are those of profound and humble commiseration. 71. As to instruction, we may receive it here, with much pain indeed, but with little danger. When we recollect how often unbelief allies itself with licentiousness of every kind, and thus makes its appearance under the most seductive aspect, we feel a respect for the honesty of such opponents of the Christian faith as do not disguise the bitterness of the fruits which they have reaped from the poisoned seed of their false imaginations. We have a comparative gratitude to those who place before us cases like that of Shelley, and the not wholly dissimilar instance now before us, where the records themselves, prepared by the parties or their friends for the public eye, bear demonstrative testimony to the incapacity of anti-Christian theories, when entertained in subtle and ever-questioning minds, to supply any stable resting-place to the understanding, or any adequate support under the sorrows and the cares of life. Shelley tells us of himself, in those beautiful Verses written, in Dejection, near Naples, "Alas! I have nor hope, nor health, And he indicates in the 'Alastor' that the utmost he hoped to realise was— "Not sobs nor groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope, 72. Mr. Blanco White was happily distinguished from Shelley in so far that, with his understanding in part, and with his heart less equivocally, he even to the last embraced the idea of a personal or quasi-personal God, whom he could regard with reverence and love, and to whom he could apply, with whatever restriction of the signification of the words, that sublimest sentiment of the Christian soul; "In la Sua volontade è nostra pace." Yet the only element of positive consolation which, so far as we can discover, cheered his later days, was the notion that there was something† "ennobling," something "very dignified in a human being, awaiting his dissolution with firmness." But neither had he joy on this side of the grave, nor any hope that would bear his own scrutiny on the other. For, of the first, he repeatedly tells us that to live was torment; ‡ that he dreaded the idea of any improvement in his health; that nothing but the conviction of the criminality of the act kept him from self-destruction. Of the second, again, it is indeed true, that his affections still struggled against the devouring scepticism of his understanding; and, as he had formerly tried to *Paradiso,' c. iv. † Life, III. p. 36. persuade himself of the doctrine of the Trinity, so he tries to persuade himself to the last that he will in some way exist after death. * "God cannot," he says, "have formed his intellectual creatures to break like bubbles and be no more." But others, as far advanced as himself in the destruction of faith, have made efforts as vigorous to keep some hold of some notion of immortality. Thus Shelley has written with splendid force :— "Nought we know dies. Shall that, alone which knows, Be as a sword consumed before the sheath By sightless lightning ?" † 73. Yet from other passages of the work before us it is too plain that Mr. Blanco White did not believe in his own personal immortality. Indeed, that is an idea which he selects for ridicule from his sick-bed: "P. P., clerk of the parish, must be the same identical individual throughout eternity; the same are every one of his neighbour's wishes; against which wishes there are difficulties which every reflecting man must find insuperable." + And we must observe in passing, that this is one of very many instances in which he states the most startling opinions as certainly true in the view of the illuminated portion of mankind, without having anywhere attempted any substantive exposition of their grounds. So again he declares, "there is not one philosophical principle upon which the immortality of Mr. A. and Mrs. B. can be esta blished." So much for his expectation: and as to his desire, he says (April 1839)— "Most of my thoughts are melancholy forebodings, which I *Life, p. 36. † Adonais,' an Elegy. § Ibid. p. 63. |