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Title: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc.
Author: by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
April, 2001 [Etext #2575]
Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc.
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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1892 Cassell & Company edition.
CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS
FROM "THE FRIEND"
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Contents:
Introduction
Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit
Letters on the Inspiration of the Scriptures.
An Essay on Faith
Notes on the Book of Common Prayer
A Nightly Prayer
A Sailor's Fortune
Essay I
Essay II
Essay III
Essay IV
Essay V
Essay VI
INTRODUCTION
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on the 21st of October, 1772,
youngest of many children of the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of the
Parish and Head Master of the Grammar School of Ottery St. Mary, in
Devonshire. One of the poet's elder brothers was the grandfather of
Lord Chief Justice Coleridge. Coleridge's mother was a notable
housewife, as was needful in the mother of ten children, who had
three more transmitted to her from her husband's former wife.
Coleridge's father was a kindly and learned man, little
sophisticated, and distinguishing himself now and then by comical
acts of what is called absence of mind. Charles Buller, afterwards a
judge, was one of his boys, and, when her husband's life seemed to be
failing, had promised what help he could give to the anxious wife.
When his father died, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was but eight years
old, and Charles Buller obtained for him his presentation to Christ's
Hospital. Coleridge's mind delighted in far wandering over the
fields of thought; from a boy he took intense delight in dreamy
speculation on the mysteries that lie around the life of man. From a
boy also he proved his subtleties of thought through what Charles
Lamb called the "deep and sweet intonations" of such speech as could
come only from a poet.
From the Charterhouse, Coleridge went to Jesus College, Cambridge,
where he soon won a gold medal for a Greek ode on the Slave Trade,
but through indolence he slipped into a hundred pounds of debt. The
stir of the French Revolution was then quickening young minds into
bold freedom of speculation, resentment against tyranny of custom,
and yearning for a higher life in this world. Old opinions that
familiarity had made to the multitude conventional were for that
reason distrusted and discarded. Coleridge no longer held his
religious faith in the form taught by his father. He could not sign
the Thirty-nine Articles, and felt his career closed at the
University. His debt also pressed upon him heavily. After a long
vacation with a burdened mind, in which one pleasant day of picnic
gave occasion to his "Songs of the Pixies," Coleridge went back to
Cambridge. But soon afterwards he threw all up in despair. He
resolved to become lost to his friends, and find some place where he
could earn in obscurity bare daily bread. He came to London, and
then enlisted as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons. After four
months he was discovered, his discharge was obtained, and he went
back to Cambridge.
But he had no career before him there, for his religious opinions
then excluded belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, and the
Universities were not then open to Dissenters. A visit to Oxford
brought him into relation with Robert Southey and fellow-students of
Southey's who were also touched with revolutionary ardour. Coleridge
joined with them in the resolve to leave the Old World and create a
better in the New, as founders of a Pantisocracy--an all-equal
government--on the banks of the Susquehannah. They would need wives,
and Southey knew of three good liberal-minded sisters at Bristol, one
of them designed for himself; her two sisters he recommended for as
far as they would go. The chief promoters of the Pantisocracy
removed to Bristol, and one of the three sisters, Sarah Fricker, was
married by Coleridge; Southey marrying another, Edith; while another
young Oxford enthusiast married the remaining Miss Fricker; and so
they made three pairs of future patriarchs and matriarchs.
Nothing came of the Pantisocracy, for want of money to pay fares to
the New World. Coleridge supported himself by giving lectures, and
in 1797 published Poems. They included his "Religious Musings,"
which contain expression of his fervent revolutionary hopes. Then he
planned a weekly paper, the Watchman, that was to carry the lantern
of philosophic truth, and call the hour for those who cared about the
duties of the day. When only three or four hundred subscribers had
been got together in Bristol, Coleridge resolved to travel from town
to town in search of subscriptions. Wherever he went his eloquence
prevailed; and he came back with a very large subscription list. But
the power of close daily work, by which alone Coleridge could carry
out such a design, was not in him, and the Watchman only reached to
its tenth number.
Then Coleridge settled at Nether Stowey, by the Bristol Channel,
partly for convenience of neighbourhood to Thomas Poole, from whom he
could borrow at need. He had there also a yearly allowance from the
Wedgwoods of Etruria, who had a strong faith in his future. From
Nether Stowey, Coleridge walked over to make friends with Wordsworth
at Racedown, and the friendship there established caused Wordsworth
and his sister to remove to the neighbourhood of Nether Stowey. Out
of the relations with Wordsworth thus established came Coleridge's
best achievements as a poet, the "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel."
The "Ancient Mariner" was finished, and was the chief part of
Coleridge's contribution to the "Lyrical Ballads," which the two
friends published in 1798. "Christabel," being unfinished, was left
unpublished until 1816.
With help from the Wedgwoods, Coleridge went abroad with Wordsworth
and his sister, left them at Hamburg, and during fourteen months
increased his familiarity with German. He came back in the late
summer of 1799, full of enthusiasm for Schiller's last great work,
his Wallenstein, which Coleridge had seen acted. The Camp had been
first acted at Weimar on the 18th of October, 1798; the Piccolomini
on the 30th of January, 1799; and Wallenstein's Death on the 10th of
the next following April. Coleridge, under the influence of fresh
enthusiasm, rapidly completed for Messrs. Longman his translation of
Wallenstein's Death into an English poem of the highest mark.
Then followed a weakening of health. Coleridge earned fitfully as
journalist; settled at Keswick; found his tendency to rheumatism
increased by the damp of the Lake Country; took a remedy containing
opium, and began to acquire that taste for the excitement of opium
which ruined the next years of his life. He was invited to Malta,
for the benefit of the climate, by his friend, John Stoddart, who was
there. At Malta he made the acquaintance of the governor, Sir
Alexander Ball, whose worth he celebrates in essays of the Friend,
which are included under the title of "A Sailor's Fortune" in this
little volume. For a short time he acted as secretary to Sir
Alexander, then returned to the Lakes and planned his journal, the
Friend, published at Penrith, of which the first number appeared on
the 1st of August, 1809, the twenty-eighth and last towards the end
of March, 1810.
Next followed six years of struggle to live as journalist and
lecturer in London and elsewhere, while the habit of taking opium
grew year by year, and at last advanced from two quarts of laudanum a
week to a pint a day. Coleridge put himself under voluntary
restraint for a time with a Mr. Morgan at Calne. Finally he placed
himself, in April, 1816--the year of the publication of "Christabel"-
-with a surgeon at Highgate, Mr. Gillman, under whose friendly care
he was restored to himself, and in whose house he died on the 25th of
July, 1834. It was during this calm autumn of his life that
Coleridge, turning wholly to the higher speculations on philosophy
and religion upon which his mind was chiefly fixed, a revert to the
Church, and often actively antagonist to the opinions he had held for
a few years, wrote, his "Lay Sermons," and his "Biographia
Literaria," and arranged also a volume of Essays of the Friend. He
lectured on Shakespeare, wrote "Aids to Reflection," and showed how
his doubts were set at rest in these "Confessions of an Inquiring
Spirit," which were first published in 1840, after their writer's
death.
H. M.
CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT.
LETTERS ON THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.
LETTER I.
My dear friend,
I employed the compelled and most unwelcome leisure of severe
indisposition in reading The Confessions of a Fair Saint in Mr.
Carlyle's recent translation of the Wilhelm Meister, which might, I
think, have been better rendered literally The Confessions of a
Beautiful Soul. This, acting in conjunction with the concluding
sentences of your letter, threw my thoughts inward on my own
religious experience, and gave immediate occasion to the following
Confessions of one who is neither fair nor saintly, but who, groaning
under a deep sense of infirmity and manifold imperfection, feels the
want, the necessity, of religious support; who cannot afford to lose
any the smallest buttress, but who not only loves Truth even for
itself, and when it reveals itself aloof from all interest, but who
loves it with an indescribable awe, which too often withdraws the
genial sap of his activity from the columnar trunk, the sheltering
leaves, the bright and fragrant flower, and the foodful or medicinal
fruitage, to the deep root, ramifying in obscurity and labyrinthine
way-winning -
In darkness there to house unknown,
Far underground,
Pierced by no sound
Save such as live in Fancy's ear alone,
That listens for the uptorn mandrake's parting groan!
I should, perhaps, be a happier--at all events a more useful--man if
my mind were otherwise constituted. But so it is, and even with
regard to Christianity itself, like certain plants, I creep towards
the light, even though it draw me away from the more nourishing
warmth. Yea, I should do so, even if the light had made its way
through a rent in the wall of the Temple. Glad, indeed, and grateful
am I, that not in the Temple itself, but only in one or two of the
side chapels, not essential to the edifice, and probably not coeval
with it, have I found the light absent, and that the rent in the wall
has but admitted the free light of the Temple itself.
I shall best communicate the state of my faith by taking the creed,
or system of credenda, common to all the Fathers of the Reformation--
overlooking, as non-essential, the differences between the several
Reformed Churches, according to the five main classes or sections
into which the aggregate distributes itself to my apprehension. I
have then only to state the effect produced on my mind by each of
these, or the quantum of recipiency and coincidence in myself
relatively thereto, in order to complete my Confession of Faith.
I. The Absolute; the innominable [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] et Causa Sui, in whose transcendent I AM, as the Ground,
IS whatever VERILY is:- the Triune God, by whose Word and Spirit, as
the transcendent Cause, EXISTS whatever SUBSTANTIALLY exists:- God
Almighty--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, undivided, unconfounded, co-
eternal. This class I designate by the word [Greek text which cannot
be reproduced].
II. The Eternal Possibilities; the actuality of which hath not its
origin in God: Chaos spirituale:- [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced].
III. The Creation and Formation of the heaven and earth by the
Redemptive Word:- the Apostasy of Man:- the Redemption of Man:- the
Incarnation of the Word in the Son of Man:- the Crucifixion and
Resurrection of the Son of Man:- the Descent of the Comforter:-
Repentance ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]):- Regeneration:-
Faith:- Prayer:- Grace--Communion with the Spirit:- Conflict:- Self-
abasement:- Assurance through the righteousness of Christ:- Spiritual
Growth:- Love:- Discipline:- Perseverance:- Hope in death:- [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]
IV. But these offers, gifts, and graces are not for one, or for a
few. They are offered to all. Even when the Gospel is preached to a
single individual it is offered to him as to one of a great
household. Not only man, but, says St. Paul, the whole creation is
included in the consequences of the Fall--[Greek text which cannot be
reproduced]--so also in those of the change at the Redemption--[Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]. We too shall be raised IN THE
BODY. Christianity is fact no less than truth. It is spiritual, yet
so as to be historical; and between these two poles there must
likewise be a midpoint, in which the historical and spiritual meet.
Christianity must have its history--a history of itself and likewise
the history of its introduction, its spread, and its outward-
becoming; and, as the midpoint abovementioned, a portion of these
facts must be miraculous, that is, phenomena in nature that are
beyond nature. Furthermore, the history of all historical nations
must in some sense be its history--in other words, all history must
be providential, and this a providence, a preparation, and a looking
forward to Christ.
Here, then, we have four out of the five classes. And in all these
the sky of my belief is serene, unclouded by a doubt. Would to God
that my faith, that faith which works on the whole man, confirming
and conforming, were but in just proportion to my belief, to the full
acquiescence of my intellect, and the deep consent of my conscience!
The very difficulties argue the truth of the whole scheme and system
for my understanding, since I see plainly that so must the truth
appear, if it be the truth.
V. But there is a Book of two parts, each part consisting of several
books. The first part (I speak in the character of an uninterested
critic or philologist) contains the relics of the literature of the
Hebrew people, while the Hebrew was still the living language. The
second part comprises the writings, and, with one or two
inconsiderable and doubtful exceptions, all the writings of the
followers of Christ within the space of ninety years from the date of
the Resurrection. I do not myself think that any of these writings
were composed as late as A.D. 120; but I wish to preclude all
dispute. This Book I resume as read, and yet unread--read and
familiar to my mind in all parts, but which is yet to be perused as a
whole, or rather a work, cujus particulas et sententiolas omnes et
singulas recogniturus sum, but the component integers of which, and
their conspiration, I have yet to study. I take up this work with
the purpose to read it for the first time as I should read any other
work, as far at least as I can or dare. For I neither can, nor dare,
throw off a strong and awful prepossession in its favour--certain as
I am that a large part of the light and life, in and by which I see,
love, and embrace the truths and the strengths co-organised into a
living body of faith and knowledge in the four preceding classes, has
been directly or indirectly derived to me from this sacred volume--
and unable to determine what I do not owe to its influences. But
even on this account, and because it has these inalienable claims on
my reverence and gratitude, I will not leave it in the power of
unbelievers to say that the Bible is for me only what the Koran is
for the deaf Turk, and the Vedas for the feeble and acquiescent
Hindoo. No; I will retire UP INTO THE MOUNTAIN, and hold secret
commune with my Bible above the contagious blastments of prejudice,
and the fog-blight of selfish superstition. FOR FEAR HATH TORMENT.
And what though MY reason be to the power and splendour of the
Scriptures but as the reflected and secondary shine of the moon
compared with the solar radiance; yet the sun endures the occasional
co-presence of the unsteady orb, and leaving it visible seems to
sanction the comparison. There is a Light higher than all, even THE
WORD THAT WAS IN THE BEGINNING; the Light, of which light itself is
but the shechinah and cloudy tabernacle; the Word that is Light for
every man, and life for as many as give heed to it. If between this
Word and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to myself to find a
discrepance, I will not conclude that such there actually is, nor on
the other hand will I fall under the condemnation of them that would
LIE FOR GOD, but seek as I may, be thankful for what I have--and
wait.
With such purposes, with such feelings, have I perused the books of
the Old and New Testaments, each book as a whole, and also as an
integral part. And need I say that I have met everywhere more or
less copious sources of truth, and power, and purifying impulses,
that I have found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy,
utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and my
feebleness? In short, whatever FINDS me, bears witness for itself
that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit, even from the same Spirit,
WHICH REMAINING IN ITSELF, YET REGENERATETH ALL OTHER POWERS, AND IN
ALL AGES ENTERING INTO HOLY SOULS, MAKETH THEM FRIENDS OF GOD, AND
PROPHETS. (Wisd. vii.) And here, perhaps, I might have been content
to rest, if I had not learned that, as a Christian, I cannot, must
not, stand alone; or if I had not known that more than this was
holden and required by the Fathers of the Reformation, and by the
Churches collectively, since the Council of Nice at latest, the only
exceptions being that doubtful one of the corrupt Romish Church
implied, though not avowed, in its equalisation of the Apocryphal
Books with those of the Hebrew Canon, and the irrelevant one of the
few and obscure sects who acknowledge no historical Christianity.
This somewhat more, in which Jerome, Augustine, Luther, and Hooker
were of one and the same judgment, and less than which not one of
them would have tolerated--would it fall within the scope of my
present doubts and objections? I hope it would not. Let only their
general expressions be interpreted by their treatment of the
Scriptures in detail, and I dare confidently trust that it would not.
For I can no more reconcile the doctrine which startles my belief
with the practice and particular declarations of these great men,
than with the convictions of my own understanding and conscience. At
all events--and I cannot too early or too earnestly guard against any
misapprehension of my meaning and purpose--let it be distinctly
understood that my arguments and objections apply exclusively to the
following doctrine or dogma. To the opinions which individual
divines have advanced in lieu of this doctrine, my only objection, as
far as I object, is--that I do not understand them. The precise
enunciation of this doctrine I defer to the commencement of the next
Letter. Farewell.
LETTER II.
My dear friend,
In my last Letter I said that in the Bible there is more that FINDS
me than I have experienced in all other books put together; that the
words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and that
whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its
having proceeded from the Holy Spirit. But the doctrine in question
requires me to believe that not only what finds me, but that all that
exists in the sacred volume, and which I am bound to find therein,
was--not alone inspired by, that is composed by, men under the
actuating influence of the Holy Spirit, but likewise--dictated by an
Infallible Intelligence; that the writers, each and all, were
divinely informed as well as inspired. Now here all evasion, all
excuse, is cut off. An infallible intelligence extends to all
things, physical no less than spiritual. It may convey the truth in
any one of the three possible languages--that of sense, as objects
appear to the beholder on this earth; or that of science, which
supposes the beholder placed in the centre; or that of philosophy,
which resolves both into a supersensual reality. But whichever be
chosen--and it is obvious that the incompatibility exists only
between the first and second, both of them being indifferent and of
equal value to the third--it must be employed consistently; for an
infallible intelligence must intend to be intelligible, and not to
deceive. And, moreover, whichever of these three languages be
chosen, it must be translatable into truth. For this is the very
essence of the doctrine, that one and the same intelligence is
speaking in the unity of a person; which unity is no more broken by
the diversity of the pipes through which it makes itself audible,
than is a tune by the different instruments on which it is played by
a consummate musician, equally perfect in all. One instrument may be
more capacious than another, but as far as its compass extends, and
in what it sounds forth, it will be true to the conception of the
master. I can conceive no softening here which would not nullify the
doctrine, and convert it to a cloud for each man's fancy to shift and
shape at will. And this doctrine, I confess, plants the vineyard of
the Word with thorns for me, and places snares in its pathways.
These may be delusions of an evil spirit; but ere I so harshly
question the seeming angel of light--my reason, I mean, and moral
sense in conjunction with my clearest knowledge--I must inquire on
what authority this doctrine rests. And what other authority dares a
truly catholic Christian admit as coercive in the final decision, but
the declarations of the Book itself--though I should not, without
struggles, and a trembling reluctance, gainsay even a universal
tradition?
I return to the Book. With a full persuasion of soul respecting all
the articles of the Christian Faith, as contained in the first four
classes, I receive willingly also the truth of the history, namely,
that the Word of the Lord did come to Samuel, to Isaiah, to others;
and that the words which gave utterance to the same are faithfully
recorded. But though the origin of the words, even as of the
miraculous acts, be supernatural, yet the former once uttered, the
latter once having taken their place among the phenomena of the
senses, the faithful recording of the same does not of itself imply,
or seem to require, any supernatural working, other than as all truth
and goodness are such. In the books of Moses, and once or twice in
the prophecy of Jeremiah, I find it indeed asserted that not only the
words were given, but the recording of the same enjoined by the
special command of God, and doubtless executed under the special
guidance of the Divine Spirit. As to all such passages, therefore,
there can be no dispute; and all others in which the words are by the
sacred historian declared to have been the Word of the Lord
supernaturally communicated, I receive as such with a degree of
confidence proportioned to the confidence required of me by the
writer himself, and to the claims he himself makes on my belief.
Let us, therefore, remove all such passages, and take each book by
itself; and I repeat that I believe the writer in whatever he himself
relates of his own authority, and of its origin. But I cannot find
any such claim, as the doctrine in question supposes, made by these
writers, explicitly or by implication. On the contrary, they refer
to other documents, and in all points express themselves as sober-
minded and veracious writers under ordinary circumstances are known
to do. But perhaps they bear testimony, the successor to his
predecessor? Or some one of the number has left it on record, that
by special inspiration HE was commanded to declare the plenary
inspiration of all the rest? The passages which can without violence
be appealed to as substantiating the latter position are so few, and
these so incidental--the conclusion drawn from them involving
likewise so obviously a petitio principii, namely, the supernatural
dictation, word by word, of the book in which the question is found
(for, until this is established, the utmost that such a text can
prove is the current belief of the writer's age and country
concerning the character of the books then called the Scriptures)--
that it cannot but seem strange, and assuredly is against all analogy
of Gospel revelation, that such a doctrine--which, if true, must be
an article of faith, and a most important, yea, essential article of
faith--should be left thus faintly, thus obscurely, and, if I may so
say, OBITANEOUSLY, declared and enjoined. The time of the formation
and closing of the Canon unknown;--the selectors and compilers
unknown, or recorded by known fabulists;--and (more perplexing still)
the belief of the Jewish Church--the belief, I mean, common to the
Jews of Palestine and their more cultivated brethren in Alexandria
(no reprehension of which is to be found in the New Testament)--
concerning the nature and import of the [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] attributed to the precious remains of their Temple
Library;--these circumstances are such, especially the last, as in
effect to evacuate the tenet, of which I am speaking, of the only
meaning in which it practically means anything at all tangible,
steadfast, or obligatory. In infallibility there are no degrees.
The power of the High and Holy One is one and the same, whether the
sphere which it fills be larger or smaller;--the area traversed by a
comet, or the oracle of the house, the holy place beneath the wings
of the cherubim;--the Pentateuch of the Legislator, who drew near to
the thick darkness where God was, and who spake in the cloud whence
the thunderings and lightnings came, and whom God answered by a
voice; or but a letter of thirteen verses from the affectionate ELDER
TO THE ELECT LADY AND HER CHILDREN, WHOM HE LOVED IN THE TRUTH. But
at no period was this the judgment of the Jewish Church respecting
all the canonical books. To Moses alone--to Moses in the recording
no less than in the receiving of the Law--and to all and every part
of the five books called the Books of Moses, the Jewish doctors of
the generation before, and coeval with, the apostles, assigned that
unmodified and absolute theopneusty which our divines, in words at
least, attribute to the Canon collectively. In fact it was from the
Jewish Rabbis--who, in opposition to the Christian scheme, contended
for a perfection in the revelation by Moses, which neither required
nor endured any addition, and who strained their fancies in
expressing the transcendency of the books of Moses, in aid of their
opinion--that the founders of the doctrine borrowed their notions and
phrases respecting the Bible throughout. Remove the metaphorical
drapery from the doctrine of the Cabbalists, and it will be found to
contain the only intelligible and consistent idea of that plenary
inspiration, which later divines extend to all the canonical books;
as thus:- "The Pentateuch is but ONE WORD, even the Word of God; and
the letters and articulate sounds, by which this Word is communicated
to our human apprehensions, are likewise divinely communicated."
Now, for 'Pentateuch' substitute 'Old and New Testament,' and then I
say that this is the doctrine which I reject as superstitious and
unscriptural. And yet as long as the conceptions of the revealing
Word and the inspiring Spirit are identified and confounded, I assert
that whatever says less than this, says little more than nothing.
For how can absolute infallibility be blended with fallibility?
Where is the infallible criterion? How can infallible truth be
infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions? The
Jewish teachers confined this miraculous character to the Pentateuch.
Between the Mosaic and the Prophetic inspiration they asserted such a
difference as amounts to a diversity; and between both the one and
the other, and the remaining books comprised under the tithe of
Hagiographa, the interval was still wider, and the inferiority in
kind, and not only in degree, was unequivocally expressed. If we
take into account the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of
referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great First
Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes--a
striking illustration of which may be obtained by comparing the
narratives of the same event in the Psalms and in the historical
books; and if we further reflect that the distinction of the
providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of
thinking--at all events not into their mode of conveying their
thoughts--the language of the Jews respecting the Hagiographa will be
found to differ little, if at all, from that of religious persons
among ourselves, when speaking of an author abounding in gifts,
stirred up by the Holy Spirit, writing under the influence of special
grace, and the like.
But it forms no part of my present purpose to discuss the point
historically, or to speculate on the formation of either Canon.
Rather, such inquiries are altogether alien from the great object of
my pursuits and studies, which is to convince myself and others that
the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. But it
concerns both my character and my peace of mind to satisfy
unprejudiced judges that if my present convictions should in all
other respects be found consistent with the faith and feelings of a
Christian--and if in many and those important points they tend to
secure that faith and to deepen those feelings--the words of the
Apostle, rightly interpreted, do not require their condemnation.
Enough, if what has been stated above respecting the general doctrine
of the Hebrew masters, under whom the Apostle was bred, shall remove
any misconceptions that might prevent the right interpretation of his
words. Farewell.
LETTER III.
My dear friend,
Having in the former two Letters defined the doctrine which I reject,
I am now to communicate the views that I would propose to substitute
in its place.
Before, however, I attempt to lay down on the theological chart the
road-place to which my bark has drifted, and to mark the spot and
circumscribe the space within which I swing at anchor, let me first
thank you for, and then attempt to answer, the objections--or at
least the questions--which you have urged upon me.
"The present Bible is the Canon to which Christ and the Apostles
referred?"
Doubtless.
"And in terms which a Christian must tremble to tamper with?"
Yea. The expressions are as direct as strong; and a true believer
will neither attempt to divert nor dilute their strength.
"The doctrine which is considered as the orthodox view seems the
obvious and most natural interpretation of the text in question?"
Yea, and nay. To those whose minds are prepossessed by the doctrine
itself--who from earliest childhood have always meant this doctrine
by the very word Bible--the doctrine being but its exposition and
paraphrase--Yea. In such minds the words of our Lord and the
declarations of St. Paul can awaken no other sense. To those on the
other hand who find the doctrine senseless and self-confuting, and
who take up the Bible as they do other books, and apply to it the
same rules of interpretation--Nay.
And, lastly, he who, like myself, recognises in neither of the two
the state of his own mind--who cannot rest in the former, and feels,
or fears, a presumptuous spirit in the negative dogmatism of the
latter--he has his answer to seek. But so far I dare hazard a reply
to the question--In what other sense can the words be interpreted?--
beseeching you, however, to take what I am about to offer but as an
attempt to delineate an arc of oscillation--that the eulogy of St.
Paul is in nowise contravened by the opinion to which I incline, who
fully believe the Old Testament collectively, both in the composition
and in its preservation, a great and precious gift of Providence;--
who find in it all that the Apostle describes, and who more than
believe that all which the Apostle spoke of was of Divine
inspiration, and a blessing intended for as many as are in communion
with the Spirit through all ages. And I freely confess that my whole
heart would turn away with an angry impatience from the cold and
captious mortal who, the moment I had been pouring out the love and
gladness of my soul--while book after book, law, and truth, and
example, oracle, and lovely hymn, and choral song of ten thousand
thousands, and accepted prayers of saints and prophets, sent back, as
it were, from heaven, like doves, to be let loose again with a new
freight of spiritual joys and griefs and necessities, were passing
across my memory--at the first pause of my voice, and whilst my
countenance was still speaking--should ask me whether I was thinking
of the Book of Esther, or meant particularly to include the first six
chapters of Daniel, or verses 6-20 of the 109th Psalm, or the last
verse of the 137th Psalm? Would any conclusion of this sort be drawn
in any other analogous case? In the course of my lectures on
Dramatic Poetry, I, in half a score instances, referred my auditors
to the precious volume before me--Shakespeare--and spoke
enthusiastically, both in general and with detail of particular
beauties, of the plays of Shakespeare, as in all their kinds, and in
relation to the purposes of the writer, excellent. Would it have
been fair, or according to the common usage and understanding of men,
to have inferred an intention on my part to decide the question
respecting Titus Andronicus, or the larger portion of the three parts
of Henry VI.? Would not every genial mind understand by Shakespeare
that unity or total impression comprising and resulting from the
thousandfold several and particular emotions of delight, admiration,
gratitude excited by his works? But if it be answered, "Aye! but we
must not interpret St. Paul as we may and should interpret any other
honest and intelligent writer or speaker,"--then, I say, this is the
very petitio principii of which I complain.
Still less do the words of our Lord apply against my view. Have I
not declared--do I not begin by declaring--that whatever is referred
by the sacred penman to a direct communication from God, and wherever
it is recorded that the subject of the history had asserted himself
to have received this or that command, this or that information or
assurance, from a superhuman Intelligence, or where the writer in his
own person, and in the character of an historian, relates that the
WORD OF THE LORD CAME unto priest, prophet, chieftain, or other
individual--have I not declared that I receive the same with full
belief, and admit its inappellable authority? Who more convinced
than I am--who more anxious to impress that conviction on the minds
of others--that the Law and the Prophets speak throughout of Christ?
That all the intermediate applications and realisations of the words
are but types and repetitions--translations, as it were, from the
language of letters and articulate sounds into the language of events
and symbolical persons?
And here again let me recur to the aid of analogy. Suppose a life of
Sir Thomas More by his son-in-law, or a life of Lord Bacon by his
chaplain; that a part of the records of the Court of Chancery
belonging to these periods were lost; that in Roper's or in Rawley's
biographical work there were preserved a series of dicta and
judgments attributed to these illustrious Chancellors, many and
important specimens of their table discourses, with large extracts
from works written by them, and from some that are no longer extant.
Let it be supposed, too, that there are no grounds, internal or
external, to doubt either the moral, intellectual, or circumstantial
competence of the biographers. Suppose, moreover, that wherever the
opportunity existed of collating their documents and quotations with
the records and works still preserved, the former were found
substantially correct and faithful, the few differences in nowise
altering or disturbing the spirit and purpose of the paragraphs in
which they were found; and that of what was not collatable, and to
which no test ab extra could be applied, the far larger part bore
witness in itself of the same spirit and origin; and that not only by
its characteristic features, but by its surpassing excellence, it
rendered the chances of its having had any other author than the
giant-mind, to whom the biographer ascribes it, small indeed! Now,
from the nature and objects of my pursuits, I have, we will suppose,
frequent occasion to refer to one or other of these works; for
example, to Rawley's Dicta et Facta Francisci de Verulam. At one
time I might refer to the work in some such words as--"Remember what
Francis of Verulam said or judged;" or, "If you believe not me, yet
believe Lord Bacon." At another time I might take the running title
of the volume, and at another the name of the biographer;--"Turn to
your Rawley! HE will set you right;" or, "THERE you will find a
depth which no research will ever exhaust;" or whatever other strong
expression my sense of Bacon's greatness and of the intrinsic worth
and the value of the proofs and specimens of that greatness,
contained and preserved in that volume, would excite and justify.
But let my expressions be as vivid and unqualified as the most
sanguine temperament ever inspired, would any man of sense conclude
from them that I meant--and meant to make others believe--that not
only each and all of these anecdotes, adages, decisions, extracts,
incidents, had been dictated, word by word, by Lord Bacon; and that
all Rawley's own observations and inferences, all the connectives and
disjunctives, all the recollections of time, place, and circumstance,
together with the order and succession of the narrative, were in like
manner dictated and revised by the spirit of the deceased Chancellor?
The answer will be--must be--No man in his senses! "No man in his
senses--in THIS instance; but in that of the Bible it is quite
otherwise; for (I take it as an admitted point that) it IS quite
otherwise!"
And here I renounce any advantage I might obtain for my argument by
restricting the application of our Lord's and the Apostle's words to
the Hebrew Canon. I admit the justice--I have long felt the full
force--of the remark--"We have all that the occasion allowed." And
if the same awful authority does not apply so directly to the
Evangelical and Apostolical writings as to the Hebrew Canon, yet the
analogy of faith justifies the transfer. If the doctrine be less
decisively Scriptural in its application to the New Testament or the
Christian Canon, the temptation to doubt it is likewise less. So at
least we are led to infer; since in point of fact it is the apparent
or imagined contrast, the diversity of spirit which sundry
individuals have believed themselves to find in the Old Testament and
in the Gospel, that has given occasion to the doubt;--and, in the
heart of thousands who yield a faith of acquiescence to the contrary,
and find rest in their humility--supplies fuel to a fearful wish that
it were permitted to make a distinction.
But, lastly, you object that--even granting that no coercive,
positive reasons for the belief--no direct and not inferred
assertions--of the plenary inspiration of the Old and New Testament,
in the generally received import of the term, could be adduced, yet--
in behalf of a doctrine so catholic, and during so long a succession
of ages affirmed and acted on by Jew and Christian, Greek, Romish,
and Protestant, you need no other answer than:- "Tell me, first, why
it should not be received! Why should I not believe the Scriptures
throughout dictated, in word and thought, by an infallible
Intelligence?" I admit the fairness of the retort; and eagerly and
earnestly do I answer: For every reason that makes me prize and
revere these Scriptures;--prize them, love them, revere them, beyond
all other books! WHY should I not? Because the doctrine in question
petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ with all its harmonies
and symmetrical gradations--the flexile and the rigid--the supporting
hard and the clothing soft--the blood WHICH IS THE LIFE--the
intelligencing nerves, and the rudely woven, but soft and springy,
cellular substance, in which all are imbedded and lightly bound
together. This breathing organism, this glorious panharmonicon which
I had seen stand on its feet as a man, and with a man's voice given
to it, the doctrine in question turns at once into a colossal
Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the
voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one
voice, and the same; and no man uttered it, and never in a human
heart was it conceived. WHY should I not?--Because the doctrine
evacuates of all sense and efficacy the sure and constant tradition,
that all the several books bound up together in our precious family
Bible were composed in different and widely-distant ages, under the
greatest diversity of circumstances, and degrees of light and
information, and yet that the composers, whether as uttering or as
recording what was uttered and what was done, were all actuated by a
pure and holy Spirit, one and the same--(for is there any spirit pure
and holy, and yet not proceeding from God--and yet not proceeding in
and with the Holy Spirit?)--one Spirit, working diversely, now
awakening strength, and now glorifying itself in weakness, now giving
power and direction to knowledge, and now taking away the sting from
error! Ere the summer and the months of ripening had arrived for the
heart of the race; while the whole sap of the tree was crude, and
each and every fruit lived in the harsh and bitter principle; even
then this Spirit withdrew its chosen ministers from the false and
guilt-making centre of Self. It converted the wrath into a form and
an organ of love, and on the passing storm-cloud impressed the fair
rainbow of promise to all generations. Put the lust of Self in the
forked lightning, and would it not be a Spirit of Moloch? But God
maketh the lightnings His ministers, fire and hail, vapours and
stormy winds fulfilling His word.
CURSE YE MEROZ, SAID THE ANGEL OF THE LORD; CURSE YE BITTERLY THE
INHABITANTS THEREOF--sang Deborah. Was it that she called to mind
any personal wrongs--rapine or insult--that she or the house of
Lapidoth had received from Jabin or Sisera? No; she had dwelt under
her palm tree in the depth of the mountain. But she was a MOTHER IN
ISRAEL; and with a mother's heart, and with the vehemency of a
mother's and a patriot's love, she had shot the light of love from
her eyes, and poured the blessings of love from her lips, on the
people that had JEOPARDED THEIR LIVES UNTO THE DEATH against the
oppressors; and the bitterness, awakened and borne aloft by the same
love, she precipitated in curses on the selfish and coward recreants
who CAME NOT TO THE HELP OF THE LORD, TO THE HELP OF THE LORD,
AGAINST THE MIGHTY. As long as I have the image of Deborah before my
eyes, and while I throw myself back into the age, country,
circumstances, of this Hebrew Bonduca in the not yet tamed chaos of
the spiritual creation;--as long as I contemplate the impassioned,
high-souled, heroic woman in all the prominence and individuality of
will and character,--I feel as if I were among the first ferments of
the great affections--the proplastic waves of the microcosmic chaos,
swelling up against--and yet towards--the outspread wings of the dove
that lies brooding on the troubled waters. So long all is well,--all
replete with instruction and example. In the fierce and inordinate I
am made to know and be grateful for the clearer and purer radiance
which shines on a Christian's paths, neither blunted by the
preparatory veil, nor crimsoned in its struggle through the all-
enwrapping mist of the world's ignorance: whilst in the self-
oblivion of these heroes of the Old Testament, their elevation above
all low and individual interests,--above all, in the entire and
vehement devotion of their total being to the service of their divine
Master, I find a lesson of humility, a ground of humiliation, and a
shaming, yet rousing, example of faith and fealty. But let me once
be persuaded that all these heart-awakening utterances of human
hearts--of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning,
rejoicing, suffering, triumphing--are but as a Divina Commedia of a
superhuman--O bear with me, if I say--Ventriloquist;--that the royal
harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as a MANY-STRINGED
INSTRUMENT for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several
nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and-blood
of our common humanity, responded to the touch,--that this SWEET
PSALMIST OF ISRAEL was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an
AUTOMATON poet, mourner, and supplicant;--all is gone,--all sympathy,
at least, and all example. I listen in awe and fear, but likewise in
perplexity and confusion of spirit.
Yet one other instance, and let this be the crucial test of the
doctrine. Say that the Book of Job throughout was dictated by an
infallible intelligence. Then re-peruse the book, and still, as you
proceed, try to apply the tenet; try if you can even attach any sense
or semblance of meaning to the speeches which you are reading. What!
were the hollow truisms, the unsufficing half-truths, the false
assumptions and malignant insinuations of the supercilious bigots,
who corruptly defended the truth:- were the impressive facts, the
piercing outcries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and powerful
reasoning with which the poor sufferer--smarting at once from his
wounds, and from the oil of vitriol which the orthodox LIARS FOR GOD
were dropping into them--impatiently, but uprightly and holily,
controverted this truth, while in will and in spirit he clung to it;-
-were both dictated by an infallible intelligence?--Alas! if I may
judge from the manner in which both indiscriminately are recited,
quoted, appealed to, preached upon by the routiniers of desk and
pulpit, I cannot doubt that they think so--or rather, without
thinking, take for granted that so they are to think;--the more
readily, perhaps, because the so thinking supersedes the necessity of
all afterthought. Farewell.
LETTER IV.
My dear friend,
You reply to the conclusion of my Letter: "What have we to do with
routiniers? Quid mihi cum homunculis putata putide reputantibus?
Let nothings count for nothing, and the dead bury the dead! Who but
such ever understood the tenet in this sense?"
In what sense then, I rejoin, do others understand it? If, with
exception of the passages already excepted, namely, the recorded
words of God--concerning which no Christian can have doubt or
scruple,--the tenet in this sense be inapplicable to the Scripture,
destructive of its noblest purposes, and contradictory to its own
express declarations,--again and again I ask:- What am I to
substitute? What other sense is conceivable that does not destroy
the doctrine which it professes to interpret--that does not convert
it into its own negative? As if a geometrician should name a sugar-
loaf an ellipse, adding--"By which term I here mean a cone;"--and
then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the ellipse is among
the conic sections! And yet--notwithstanding the repugnancy of the
doctrine, in its unqualified sense, to Scripture, Reason, and Common
Sense theoretically, while to all practical uses it is intractable,
unmalleable, and altogether unprofitable--notwithstanding its
irrationality, and in the face of your expostulation, grounded on the
palpableness of its irrationality,--I must still avow my belief that,
however fittingly and unsteadily, as through a mist, it IS the
doctrine which the generality of our popular divines receive as
orthodox, and this the sense which they attach to the words.
For on what other ground can I account for the whimsical
subintelligiturs of our numerous harmonists--for the curiously
inferred facts, the inventive circumstantial detail, the complemental
and supplemental history which, in the utter silence of all
historians and absence of all historical documents, they bring to
light by mere force of logic? And all to do away some half score
apparent discrepancies in the chronicles and memoirs of the Old and
New Testaments--discrepancies so analogous to what is found in all
other narratives of the same story by several narrators--so analogous
to what is found in all other known and trusted histories by
contemporary historians, when they are collated with each other (nay,
not seldom when either historian is compared with himself), as to
form in the eyes of all competent judges a characteristic mark of the
genuineness, independency, and (if I may apply the word to a book),
the veraciousness of each several document; a mark, the absence of
which would warrant a suspicion of collusion, invention, or at best
of servile transcription; discrepancies so trifling in circumstance
and import, that, although in some instances it is highly probable,
and in all instances, perhaps, possible that they are only apparent
and reconcilable, no wise man would care a staw whether they were
real or apparent, reconciled or left in harmless and friendly
variance. What, I ask, could have induced learned and intelligent
divines to adopt or sanction subterfuges, which neutralising the
ordinary criteria of full or defective evidence in historical
documents, would, taken as a general rule, render all collation and
cross-examination of written records ineffective, and obliterate the
main character by which authentic histories are distinguished from
those traditional tales, which each successive reporter enlarges and
fashions to his own fancy and purpose, and every different edition of
which more or less contradicts the other? Allow me to create chasms
ad libitum, and ad libitum to fill them up with imagined facts and
incidents, and I would almost undertake to harmonise Falstaff's
account of the rogues in buckram into a coherent and consistent
narrative. What, I say, could have tempted grave and pious men thus
to disturb the foundation of the Temple, in order to repair a petty
breach or rat-hole in the wall, or fasten a loose stone or two in the
outer court, if not an assumed necessity arising out of the peculiar
character of Bible history?
The substance of the syllogism, by which their procedure was
justified to their own minds, can be no other than this. That,
without which two assertions--both of which MUST be alike true and
correct--would contradict each other, and consequently be, one or
both, false or incorrect, must itself be true. But every word and
syllable existing in the original text of the Canonical Books, from
the Cherethi and Phelethi of David to the name in the copy of a
family register, the site of a town, or the course of a river, were
dictated to the sacred amanuensis by an infallible intelligence.
Here there can be neither more nor less. Important or unimportant
gives no ground of difference; and the number of the writers as
little. The secretaries may have been many--the historian was one
and the same, and he infallible. This is the MINOR of the syllogism,
and if it could be proved, the conclusion would be at least
plausible; and there would be but one objection to the procedure,
namely, its uselessness. For if it had been proved already, what
need of proving it over again, and by means--the removal, namely, of
apparent contradictions--which the infallible Author did not think
good to employ? But if it have not been proved, what becomes of the
argument which derives its whole force and legitimacy from the
assumption?
In fact, it is clear that the harmonists and their admirers held and
understood the doctrine literally. And must not that divine likewise
have so understood it, who, in answer to a question concerning the
transcendant blessedness of Jael, and the righteousness of the act,
in which she inhospitably, treacherously, perfidiously murdered
sleep, the confiding sleep, closed the controversy by observing that
he wanted no better morality than that of the Bible, and no other
proof of an action's being praiseworthy than that the Bible had
declared it worthy to be praised?--an observation, as applied in this
instance, so slanderous to the morality and moral spirit of the Bible
as to be inexplicable, except as a consequence of the doctrine in
dispute. But let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no
difference between the two positions: "The Bible contains the
religion revealed by God," and "Whatever is contained in the Bible is
religion, and was revealed by God," and that whatever can be said of
the Bible, collectively taken, may and must be said of each and every
sentence of the Bible, taken for and by itself, and I no longer
wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the inconsistency of
those who profess the same belief, and yet affect to look down with a
contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting the
Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who exclaim
"Wonderful!" when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old
woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor. In the latter
instance it might, I admit, have been an erroneous (though even at
this day the all but universally received) interpretation of the
word, which we have rendered by WITCH; but I challenge these divines
and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a belief in the
modern astronomy and natural philosophy with their and Wesley's
doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures, without reducing the
doctrine itself to a plaything of wax; or rather to a half-inflated
bladder, which, when the contents are rarefied in the heat of
rhetorical generalities, swells out round, and without a crease or
wrinkle; but bring it into the cool temperature of particulars, and
you may press, and as it were except, what part you like--so it be
but one part at a time--between your thumb and finger.
Now, I pray you, which is the more honest, nay, which the more
reverential proceeding--to play at fast and loose in this way, or to
say at once, "See here, in these several writings one and the same
Holy Spirit, now sanctifying a chosen vessel, and fitting it for the
reception of heavenly truths proceeding immediately from the mouth of
God, and elsewhere working in frail and fallible men like ourselves,
and like ourselves instructed by God's word and laws?" The first
Christian martyr had the form and features of an ordinary man, nor
are we taught to believe that these features were miraculously
transfigured into superhuman symmetry; but HE BEING FILLED WITH THE
HOLY GHOST, THEY THAT LOOKED STEADFASTLY on HIM, SAW HIS FACE AS IT
HAD BEEN THE FACE OF AN ANGEL. Even so has it ever been, and so it
ever will be with all who with humble hearts and a rightly disposed
spirit scan the sacred volume. And they who read it with AN EVIL
HEART OF UNBELIEF and an alien spirit, what boots for them the
assertion that every sentence was miraculously communicated to the
nominal author by God himself? Will it not rather present additional
temptations to the unhappy scoffers, and furnish them with a pretext
of self-justification?
When, in my third letter, I first echoed the question "Why should I
not?" the answers came crowding on my mind. I am well content,
however, to have merely suggested the main points, in proof of the
positive harm which, both historically and spiritually, our religion
sustains from this doctrine. Of minor importance, yet not to be
overlooked, are the forced and fantastic interpretations, the
arbitrary allegories and mystic expansions of proper names, to which
this indiscriminate Bibliolatry furnished fuel, spark, and wind. A
still greater evil, and less attributable to the visionary humour and
weak judgment of the individual expositors, is the literal rendering
of Scripture in passages, which the number and variety of images
employed in different places to express one and the same verity,
plainly mark out for figurative. And lastly, add to all these the
strange--in all other writings unexampled--practice of bringing
together into logical dependency detached sentences from books
composed at the distance of centuries, nay, sometimes a millennium
from each other, under different dispensations, and for different
objects. Accommodations of elder Scriptural phrases--that favourite
ornament and garnish of Jewish eloquence; incidental allusions to
popular notions, traditions, apologues (for example, the dispute
between the Devil and the archangel Michael about the body of Moses,
Jude 9); fancies and anachronisms imported from the synagogue of
Alexandria into Palestine, by or together with the Septuagint
version, and applied as mere argumenta ad homines (for example, the
delivery of the Law by the disposition of angels, Acts vii. 53, Gal.
iii. 19, Heb. ii. 2),--these, detached from their context, and,
contrary to the intention of the sacred writer, first raised into
independent theses, and then brought together to produce or sanction
some new credendum for which neither separately could have furnished
a pretence! By this strange mosaic, Scripture texts have been worked
up into passable likenesses of purgatory, Popery, the Inquisition,
and other monstrous abuses. But would you have a Protestant instance
of the superstitious use of Scripture arising out of this dogma?
Passing by the Cabbala of the Hutchinsonian School as the dotage of a
few weak-minded individuals, I refer you to Bishop Hacket's sermons
on the Incarnation. And if you have read the same author's life of
Archbishop Williams, and have seen and felt (as every reader of this
latter work must see and feel) his talent, learning, acuteness, and
robust good sense, you will have no difficulty in determining the
quality and character of a dogma which could engraft such fruits on
such a tree.
It will perhaps appear a paradox if, after all these reasons, I
should avow that they weigh less in my mind against the doctrine,
than the motives usually assigned for maintaining and enjoining it.
Such, for instance, are the arguments drawn from the anticipated loss
and damage that would result from its abandonment; as that it would
deprive the Christian world of its only infallible arbiter in
questions of faith and duty, suppress the only common and
inappellable tribunal; that the Bible is the only religious bond of
union and ground of unity among Protestants and the like. For the
confutation of this whole reasoning, it might be sufficient to ask:
Has it produced these effects? Would not the contrary statement be
nearer to the fact? What did the Churches of the first four
centuries hold on this point? To what did they attribute the rise
and multiplication of heresies? Can any learned and candid
Protestant affirm that there existed and exists no ground for the
charges of Bossuet and other eminent Romish divines? It is no easy
matter to know how to handle a party maxim, so framed, that with the
exception of a single word, it expresses an important truth, but
which by means of that word is made to convey a most dangerous error.
The Bible is the appointed conservatory, an indispensable criterion,
and a continual source and support of true belief. But that the
Bible is the sole source; that it not only contains, but constitutes,
the Christian Religion; that it is, in short, a Creed, consisting
wholly of articles of Faith; that consequently we need no rule, help,
or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what parts are and
what are not articles of Faith--all being such--and the difference
between the Bible and the Creed being this, that the clauses of the
latter are all unconditionally necessary to salvation, but those of
the former conditionally so, that is, as soon as the words are known
to exist in any one of the canonical books; and that, under this
limitation, the belief is of the same necessity in both, and not at
all affected by the greater or lesser importance of the matter to be
believed;--this scheme differs widely from the preceding, though its
adherents often make use of the same words in expressing their
belief. And this latter scheme, I assert, was brought into currency
by and in favour of those by whom the operation of grace, the aids of
the Spirit, the necessity of regeneration, the corruption of our
nature, in short, all the peculiar and spiritual mysteries of the
Gospel were explained and diluted away.
And how have these men treated this very Bible? I, who indeed prize
and reverence this sacred library, as of all outward means and
conservatives of Christian faith and practice the surest and the most
reflective of the inward Word; I, who hold that the Bible contains
the religion of Christians, but who dare not say that whatever is
contained in the Bible is the Christian religion, and who shrink from
all question respecting the comparative worth and efficacy of the
written Word as weighed against the preaching of the Gospel, the
discipline of the Churches, the continued succession of the Ministry,
and the communion of Saints, lest by comparing them I should seem to
detach them; I tremble at the processes which the Grotian divines
without scruple carry on in their treatment of the sacred writers, as
soon as any texts declaring the peculiar tenets of our Faith are
cited against them--even tenets and mysteries which the believer at
his baptism receives as the title-writ and bosom-roll of his
adoption; and which, according to my scheme, every Christian born in
Church-membership ought to bring with him to the study of the sacred
Scriptures as the master-key of interpretation. Whatever the
doctrine of infallible dictation may be in itself, in THEIR hands it
is to the last degree nugatory, and to be paralleled only by the
Romish tenet of Infallibility--in the existence of which all agree,
but where, and in whom, it exists stat adhuc sub lite. Every
sentence found in a canonical Book, rightly interpreted, contains the
dictum of an infallible Mind; but what the right interpretation is--
or whether the very words now extant are corrupt or genuine--must be
determined by the industry and understanding of fallible, and alas!
more or less prejudiced theologians.
And yet I am told that this doctrine must not be resisted or called
in question, because of its fitness to preserve unity of faith, and
for the prevention of schism and sectarian byways! Let the man who
holds this language trace the history of Protestantism, and the
growth of sectarian divisions, ending with Dr. Hawker's ultra-
Calvinistic Tracts, and Mr. Belsham's New Version of the Testament.
And then let him tell me that for the prevention of an evil which
already exists, and which the boasted preventive itself might rather
seem to have occasioned, I must submit to be silenced by the first
learned infidel, who throws in my face the blessing of Deborah, or
the cursings of David, or the Grecisms and heavier difficulties in
the biographical chapters of the Book of Daniel, or the hydrography
and natural philosophy of the Patriarchal ages. I must forego the
means of silencing, and the prospect of convincing, an alienated
brother, because I must not thus answer "My Brother! What has all
this to do with the truth and the worth of Christianity? If you
reject a priori all communion with the Holy Spirit, there is indeed a
chasm between us, over which we cannot even make our voices
intelligible to each other. But if--though but with the faith of a
Seneca or an Antonine--you admit the co-operation of a Divine Spirit
in souls desirous of good, even as the breath of heaven works
variously in each several plant according to its kind, character,
period of growth, and circumstance of soil, clime, and aspect; on
what ground can you assume that its presence is incompatible with all
imperfection in the subject--even with such imperfection as is the
natural accompaniment of the unripe season? If you call your
gardener or husbandman to account for the plants or crops he is
raising, would you not regard the special purpose in each, and judge
of each by that which it was tending to? Thorns are not flowers, nor
is the husk serviceable. But it was not for its thorns, but for its
sweet and medicinal flowers that the rose was cultivated; and he who
cannot separate the husk from the grain, wants the power because
sloth or malice has prevented the will. I demand for the Bible only
the justice which you grant to other books of grave authority, and to
other proved and acknowledged benefactors of mankind. Will you deny
a spirit of wisdom in Lord Bacon, because in particular facts he did
not possess perfect science, or an entire immunity from the positive
errors which result from imperfect insight? A Davy will not so judge
his great predecessor; for he recognises the spirit that is now
working in himself, and which under similar defects of light and
obstacles of error had been his guide and guardian in the morning
twilight of his own genius. Must not the kindly warmth awaken and
vivify the seed, in order that the stem may spring up and rejoice in
the light? As the genial warmth to the informing light, even so is
the predisposing Spirit to the revealing Word."
If I should reason thus--but why do I say IF? I have reasoned thus
with more than one serious and well-disposed sceptic; and what was
the answer?--"YOU speak rationally, but seem to forget the subject.
I have frequently attended meetings of the British and Foreign Bible
Society, where I have heard speakers of every denomination, Calvinist
and Arminian, Quaker and Methodist, Dissenting Ministers and
Clergymen, nay, dignitaries of the Established Church, and still have
I heard the same doctrine--that the Bible was not to be regarded or
reasoned about in the way that other good books are or may be--that
the Bible was different in kind, and stood by itself. By some indeed
this doctrine was rather implied than expressed, but yet evidently
implied. But by far the greater number of the speakers it was
asserted in the strongest and most unqualified words that language
could supply. What is more, their principal arguments were grounded
on the position, that the Bible throughout was dictated by
Omniscience, and therefore in all its parts infallibly true and
obligatory, and that the men whose names are prefixed to the several
books or chapters were in fact but as different pens in the hand of
one and the same Writer, and the words the words of God Himself: and
that on this account all notes and comments were superfluous, nay,
presumptuous--a profane mixing of human with divine, the notions of
fallible creatures with the oracles of Infallibility--as if God's
meaning could be so clearly or fitly expressed in man's as in God's
own words! But how often you yourself must have heard the same
language from the pulpit!"
What could I reply to this? I could neither deny the fact, nor evade
the conclusion--namely, that such is at present the popular belief.
Yes--I at length rejoined--I have heard this language from the
pulpit, and more than once from men who in any other place would
explain it away into something so very different from the literal
sense of their words as closely to resemble the contrary. And this,
indeed, is the peculiar character of the doctrine, that you cannot
diminish or qualify but you reverse it. I have heard this language
from men who knew as well as myself that the best and most orthodox
divines have in effect disclaimed the doctrine, inasmuch as they
confess it cannot be extended to the words of the sacred writers, or
the particular import--that therefore the doctrine does not mean all
that the usual wording of it expresses, though what it does mean, and
why they continue to sanction this hyperbolical wording, I have
sought to learn from them in vain. But let a thousand orators blazon
it at public meetings, and let as many pulpits echo it, surely it
behoves you to inquire whether you cannot be a Christian on your own
faith; and it cannot but be beneath a wise man to be an Infidel on
the score of what other men think fit to include in their
Christianity!
Now suppose--and, believe me, the supposition will vary little from
the fact--that in consequence of these views the sceptic's mind had
gradually opened to the reception of all the truths enumerated in my
first Letter. Suppose that the Scriptures themselves from this time
had continued to rise in his esteem and affection--the better
understood, the more dear; as in the countenance of one, whom through
a cloud of prejudices we have at least learned to love and value
above all others, new beauties dawn on us from day to day, till at
length we wonder how we could at any time have thought it other than
most beautiful. Studying the sacred volume in the light and in the
freedom of a faith already secured, at every fresh meeting my sceptic
friend has to tell me of some new passage, formerly viewed by him as
a dry stick on a rotten branch, which has BUDDED and, like the rod of
Aaron, BROUGHT FORTH BUDS AND BLOOMED BLOSSOMS, AND YIELDED ALMONDS.
Let these results, I say, be supposed--and shall I still be told that
my friend is nevertheless an alien in the household of Faith?
Scrupulously orthodox as I know you to be, will you tell me that I
ought to have left this sceptic as I found him, rather than attempt
his conversion by such means; or that I was deceiving him, when I
said to him:-
"Friend! The truth revealed through Christ has its evidence in
itself, and the proof of its divine authority in its fitness to our
nature and needs; the clearness and cogency of this proof being
proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge in each individual
hearer. Christianity has likewise its historical evidences, and
these as strong as is compatible with the nature of history, and with
the aims and objects of a religious dispensation. And to all these
Christianity itself, as an existing power in the world, and
Christendom as an existing fact, with the no less evident fact of a
progressive expansion, give a force of moral demonstration that
almost supersedes particular testimony. These proofs and evidences
would remain unshaken, even though the sum of our religion were to be
drawn from the theologians of each successive century, on the
principle of receiving that only as divine which should be found in
all--quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. Be only, my friend!
as orthodox a believer as you would have abundant reason to be,
though from some accident of birth, country, or education, the
precious boon of the Bible, with its additional evidence, had up to
this moment been concealed from you;--and then read its contents with
only the same piety which you freely accord on other occasions to the
writings of men, considered the best and wisest of their several
ages! What you find therein coincident with your pre-established
convictions, you will of course recognise as the Revealed Word,
while, as you read the recorded workings of the Word and the Spirit
in the minds, lives, and hearts of spiritual men, the influence of
the same Spirit on your own being, and the conflicts of grace and
infirmity in your own soul, will enable you to discern and to know in
and by what spirit they spake and acted--as far at least as shall be
needful for you, and in the times of your need.
"Thenceforward, therefore, your doubts will be confined to such parts
or passages of the received Canon as seem to you irreconcilable with
known truths, and at variance with the tests given in the Scriptures
themselves, and as shall continue so to appear after you have
examined each in reference to the circumstances of the writer or
speaker, the dispensation under which he lived, the purpose of the
particular passage, and the intent and object of the Scriptures at
large. Respecting these, decide for yourself: and fear not for the
result. I venture to tell it you beforehand. The result will be, a
confidence in the judgment and fidelity of the compilers of the Canon
increased by the apparent exceptions. For they will be found neither
more nor greater than may well be supposed requisite, on the one
hand, to prevent us from sinking into a habit of slothful,
undiscriminating acquiescence, and on the other to provide a check
against those presumptuous fanatics who would rend the URIM AND
THUMMIM FROM THE BREASTPLATE OF JUDGMENT, and frame oracles by
private divination from each letter of each disjointed gem,
uninterpreted by the Priest, and deserted by the Spirit, which shines
in the parts only as it pervades and irradiates the whole."
Such is the language in which I have addressed a halting friend--
halting, yet with his face toward the right path. If I have erred,
enable me to see my error. Correct me, or confirm me. Farewell.
LETTER V.
Yes, my dear friend, it is my conviction that in all ordinary cases
the knowledge and belief of the Christian Religion should precede the
study of the Hebrew Canon. Indeed, with regard to both Testaments, I
consider oral and catechismal instruction as the preparative provided
by Christ himself in the establishment of a visible Church. And to
make the Bible, apart from the truths, doctrines, and spiritual
experiences contained therein, the subject of a special article of
faith, I hold an unnecessary and useless abstraction, which in too
many instances has the effect of substituting a barren acquiescence
in the letter for the lively FAITH THAT COMETH BY HEARING; even as
the hearing is productive of this faith, because it is the Word of
God that is heard and preached. (Rom. x. 8, 17.) And here I mean
the written Word preserved in the armoury of the Church to be the
sword of faith OUT OF THE MOUTH of the preacher, as Christ's
ambassador and representative (Rev. i. 16), and out of the heart of
the believer from generation to generation. Who shall dare dissolve
or loosen this holy bond, this divine reciprocality, of Faith and
Scripture? Who shall dare enjoin aught else as an object of saving
faith, beside the truths that appertain to salvation? The imposers
take on themselves a heavy responsibility, however defensible the
opinion itself, as an opinion, may be. For by imposing it, they
counteract their own purposes. They antedate questions, and thus, in
all cases, aggravate the difficulty of answering them satisfactorily.
And not seldom they create difficulties that might never have
occurred. But, worst of all, they convert things trifling or
indifferent into mischievous pretexts for the wanton, fearful
difficulties for the weak, and formidable objections for the
inquiring. For what man FEARING God dares think any the least point
indifferent, which he is required to receive as God's own immediate
Word miraculously infused, miraculously recorded, and by a succession
of miracles preserved unblended and without change?--Through all the
pages of a large and multifold volume, at each successive period, at
every sentence, must the question recur:- "Dare I believe--do I in my
heart believe--these words to have been dictated by an infallible
reason, and the immediate utterance of Almighty God?"--No! It is due
to Christian charity that a question so awful should not be put
unnecessarily, and should not be put out of time. The necessity I
deny. And out of time the question must be put, if after enumerating
the several articles of the Catholic Faith I am bound to add:- "and
further you are to believe with equal faith, as having the same
immediate and miraculous derivation from God, whatever else you shall
hereafter read in any of the sixty-six books collected in the Old and
New Testaments."
I would never say this. Yet let me not be misjudged as if I treated
the Scriptures as a matter of indifference. I would not say this,
but where I saw a desire to believe, and a beginning love of Christ,
I would there say:- "There are likewise sacred writings, which, taken
in connection with the institution and perpetuity of a visible
Church, all believers revere as the most precious boon of God, next
to Christianity itself, and attribute both their communication and
preservation to an especial Providence. In them you will find all
the revealed truths, which have been set forth and offered to you,
clearly and circumstantially recorded; and, in addition to these,
examples of obedience and disobedience both in states and
individuals, the lives and actions of men eminent under each
dispensation, their sentiments, maxims, hymns, and prayers--their
affections, emotions, and conflicts;--in all which you will recognise
the influence of the Holy Spirit, with a conviction increasing with
the growth of your own faith and spiritual experience."
Farewell.
LETTER VI.
My dear friend,
In my last two Letters I have given the state of the argument as it
would stand between a Christian, thinking as I do, and a serious
well-disposed Deist. I will now endeavour to state the argument, as
between the former and the advocates for the popular belief,--such of
them, I mean, as are competent to deliver a dispassionate judgment in
the cause. And again, more particularly, I mean the learned and
reflecting part of them, who are influenced to the retention of the
prevailing dogma by the supposed consequences of a different view,
and, especially, by their dread of conceding to all alike, simple and
learned, the privilege of picking and choosing the Scriptures that
are to be received as binding on their consciences. Between these
persons and myself the controversy may be reduced to a single
question:-
Is it safer for the individual, and more conducive to the interests
of the Church of Christ, in its twofold character of pastoral and
militant, to conclude thus:- The Bible is the Word of God, and
therefore, true, holy, and in all parts unquestionable? Or thus:-
The Bible, considered in reference to its declared ends and purposes,
is true and holy, and for all who seek truth with humble spirits an
unquestionable guide, and therefore it is the Word of God?
In every generation, and wherever the light of Revelation has shone,
men of all ranks, conditions, and states of mind have found in this
volume a correspondent for every movement toward the better, felt in
their own hearts, the needy soul has found supply, the feeble a help,
the sorrowful a comfort; yea, be the recipiency the least that can
consist with moral life, there is an answering grace ready to enter.
The Bible has been found a Spiritual World, spiritual and yet at the
same time outward and common to all. You in one place, I in another,
all men somewhere or at some time, meet with an assurance that the
hopes and fears, the thoughts and yearnings that proceed from, or
tend to, a right spirit in us, are not dreams or fleeting
singularities, no voices heard in sleep, or spectres which the eye
suffers but not perceives. As if on some dark night a pilgrim,
suddenly beholding a bright star moving before him, should stop in
fear and perplexity. But lo! traveller after traveller passes by
him, and each, being questioned whither he is going, makes answer, "I
am following yon guiding star!" The pilgrim quickens his own steps,
and presses onward in confidence. More confident still will he be,
if, by the wayside, he should find, here and there, ancient
monuments, each with its votive lamp, and on each the name of some
former pilgrim, and a record that there he had first seen or begun to
follow the benignant Star!
No otherwise is it with the varied contents of the Sacred Volume.
The hungry have found food, the thirsty a living spring, the feeble a
staff, and the victorious warfarer songs of welcome and strains of
music; and as long as each man asks on account of his wants, and asks
what he wants, no man will discover aught amiss or deficient in the
vast and many-chambered storehouse. But if, instead of this, an
idler or scoffer should wander through the rooms, peering and
peeping, and either detects, or fancies he has detected, here a
rusted sword or pointless shaft, there a tool of rude construction,
and superseded by later improvements (and preserved, perhaps, to make
us more grateful for them);--which of two things will a sober-minded
man,--who, from his childhood upward had been fed, clothed, armed,
and furnished with the means of instruction from this very magazine,-
-think the fitter plan? Will he insist that the rust is not rust, or
that it is a rust sui generis, intentionally formed on the steel for
some mysterious virtue in it, and that the staff and astrolabe of a
shepherd-astronomer are identical with, or equivalent to, the
quadrant and telescope of Newton or Herschel? Or will he not rather
give the curious inquisitor joy of his mighty discoveries, and the
credit of them for his reward?
Or lastly, put the matter thus: For more than a thousand years the
Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilisation,
science, law--in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation
of the species, always supporting, and often leading, the way. Its
very presence, as a believed Book, has rendered the nations
emphatically a chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is
more or less generally known and studied. Of those nations which in
the highest degree enjoy its influences it is not too much to affirm,
that the differences, public and private, physical, moral and
intellectual, are only less than what might be expected from a
diversity in species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of
mankind, the kingly spirits of history, enthroned in the hearts of
mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, have declared
it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument, the only
adequate organ, of Humanity; the organ and instrument of all the
gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is privileged
to rise above himself--to leave behind, and lose his individual
phantom self, in order to find his true self in that Distinctness
where no division can be--in the Eternal I AM, the Ever-living WORD,
of whom all the elect from the archangel before time throne to the
poor wrestler with the Spirit UNTIL THE BREAKING OF DAY are but the
fainter and still fainter echoes. And are all these testimonies and
lights of experience to lose their value and efficiency because I
feel no warrant of history, or Holy Writ, or of my own heart for
denying, that in the framework and outward case of this instrument a
few parts may be discovered of less costly materials and of meaner
workmanship? Is it not a fact that the Books of the New Testament
were tried by their consonance with the rule, and according to the
analogy, of faith? Does not the universally admitted canon--that
each part of Scripture must be interpreted by the spirit of the
whole--lead to the same practical conclusion as that for which I am
now contending--namely, that it is the spirit of the Bible, and not
the detached words and sentences, that is infallible and absolute?
Practical, I say, and spiritual too; and what knowledge not practical
or spiritual are we entitled to seek in our Bibles? Is the grace of
God so confined--are the evidences of the present and actuating
Spirit so dim and doubtful--that to be assured of the same we must
first take for granted that all the life and co-agency of our
humanity is miraculously suspended?
Whatever is spiritual, is eo nomine supernatural; but must it be
always and of necessity miraculous? Miracles could open the eyes of
the body; and he that was born blind beheld his Redeemer. But
miracles, even those of the Redeemer himself, could not open the eyes
of the self-blinded, of the Sadducean sensualist, or the self-
righteous Pharisee--while to have said, I SAW THEE UNDER THE FIG-
TREE, sufficed to make a Nathanael believe.
To assert and to demand miracles without necessity was the vice of
the unbelieving Jews of old; and from the Rabbis and Talmudists the
infection has spread. And would I could say that the symptoms of the
disease are confined to the Churches of the Apostasy! But all the
miracles, which the legends of Monk or Rabbi contain, can scarcely be
put in competition, on the score of complication, inexplicableness,
the absence of all intelligible use or purpose, and of circuitous
self-frustration, with those that must be assumed by the maintainers
of this doctrine, in order to give effect to the series of miracles,
by which all the nominal composers of the Hebrew nation before the
time of Ezra, of whom there are any remains, were successively
transformed into AUTOMATON compositors--so that the original text
should be in sentiment, image, word, syntax, and composition an exact
impression of the divine copy! In common consistency the
theologians, who impose this belief on their fellow Christians, ought
to insist equally on the superhuman origin and authority of the
Masora, and to use more respectful terms, than has been their wont of
late, in speaking of the false Aristeas's legend concerning the
Septuagint. And why the miracle should stop at the Greek Version,
and not include the Vulgate, I can discover no ground in reason. Or
if it be an objection to the latter, that this belief is actually
enjoined by the Papal Church, yet the number of Christians who road
the Lutheran, the Genevan, or our own authorised, Bible, and are
ignorant of the dead languages, greatly exceeds the number of those
who have access to the Septuagint. Why refuse the writ of
consecration to these, or to the one at least appointed by the
assertors' own Church? I find much more consistency in the
opposition made under pretext of this doctrine to the proposals and
publications of Kennicot, Mill, Bentley, and Archbishop Newcome.
But I am weary of discussing a tenet which the generality of divines
and the leaders of the religious public have ceased to defend, and
yet continue to assert or imply. The tendency manifested in this
conduct, the spirit of this and the preceding century, on which, not
indeed the tenet itself, but the obstinate adherence to it against
the clearest light of reason and experience, is grounded--this it is
which, according to my conviction, gives the venom to the error, and
justifies the attempt to substitute a juster view. As long as it was
the common and effective belief of all the Reformed Churches (and by
none was it more sedulously or more emphatically enjoined than by the
great Reformers of our Church), that by the good Spirit were the
spirits tried, and that the light, which beams forth from the written
Word, was its own evidence for the children of light; as long as
Christians considered their Bible as a plenteous entertainment, where
every guest, duly called and attired, found the food needful and
fitting for him, and where each--instead of troubling himself about
the covers not within his reach--beholding all around him glad and
satisfied, praised the banquet and thankfully glorified the Master of
the feast--so long did the tenet--that the Scriptures were written
under the special impulse of the Holy Ghost remain safe and
profitable. Nay, in the sense, and with the feelings, in which it
was asserted, it was a truth--a truth to which every spiritual
believer now and in all times will bear witness by virtue of his own
experience. And if in the overflow of love and gratitude they
confounded the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, working alike
in weakness and in strength, in the morning mists and in the
clearness of the full day; if they confounded this communion and co-
agency of divine grace, attributable to the Scripture generally, with
those express, and expressly recorded, communications and messages of
the Most High which form so large and prominent a portion of the same
Scriptures; if, in short, they did not always duly distinguish the
inspiration, the imbreathment, of the predisposing and assisting
SPIRIT from the revelation of the informing WORD, it was at worst a
harmless hyperbole. It was holden by all, that if the power of the
Spirit from without furnished the text, the grace of the same Spirit
from within must supply the comment.
In the sacred Volume they saw and reverenced the bounden wheat-sheaf
that STOOD UPRIGHT and had OBEISANCE from all the other sheaves (the
writings, I mean, of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church), sheaves
depreciated indeed, more or less, with tares,
"and furrow-weeds,
Darnel and many an idle flower that grew
Mid the sustaining corn;"
yet sheaves of the same harvest, the sheaves of brethren! Nor did it
occur to them, that, in yielding the more full and absolute honour to
the sheaf of the highly favoured of their Father, they should be
supposed to attribute the same worth and quality to the straw-bands
which held it together. The bread of life was there. And this in an
especial sense was BREAD FROM HEAVEN; for no where had the same been
found wild; no soil or climate dared claim it for its natural growth.
In simplicity of heart they received the Bible as the precious gift
of God, providential alike in origin, preservation, and distribution,
without asking the nice question whether all and every part were
likewise miraculous. The distinction between the providential and
the miraculous, between the Divine Will working with the agency of
natural causes, and the same Will supplying their place by a special
fiat--this distinction has, I doubt not, many uses in speculative
divinity. But its weightiest practical application is shown, when it
is employed to free the souls of the unwary and weak in faith from
the nets and snares, the insidious queries and captious objections,
of the Infidel by calming the flutter of their spirits. They must be
quieted, before we can commence the means necessary for their
disentanglement. And in no way can this be better effected than when
the frightened captives are made to see in how many points the
disentangling itself is a work of expedience rather than of
necessity; so easily and at so little loss might the web be cut or
brushed away.
First, let their attention be fixed on the history of Christianity as
learnt from universal tradition, and the writers of each successive
generation. Draw their minds to the fact of the progressive and
still continuing fulfilment of the assurance of a few fishermen, that
both their own religion, though of Divine origin, and the religion of
their conquerors, which included or recognised all other religious of
the known world, should be superseded by the faith in a man recently
and ignominiously executed. Then induce them to meditate on the
universals of Christian Faith--on Christianity taken as the sum of
belief common to Greek and Latin, to Romanist and Protestant. Show
them that this and only this is the ordo traditionis, quam
tradiderunt Apostoli iis quibus committebant ecclesias, and which we
should have been bound to follow, says Irenaeus, si neque Apostoli
quidem Scripturas reliquissent. This is that regula fidei, that
sacramentum symboli memoriae mandatum, of which St. Augustine says:-
noveritis hoc esse Fidei Catholicae fundamentum super quod edificium
surrexit Ecclesiae. This is the norma Catholici et Ecclesiastici
sensus, determined and explicated, but not augmented, by the Nicene
Fathers, as Waterland has irrefragably shown; a norm or model of
Faith grounded on the solemn affirmations of the Bishops collected
from all parts of the Roman Empire, that this was the essential and
unalterable Gospel received by them from their predecessors in all
the churches as the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] cui, says
Irenaeus, assentiunt multae gentes eorum qui in Christum credunt sine
charta et atramento, scriptam habentes per Spiritum in cordibus suis
salutem, et veterum traditionem diligenter custodientes. Let the
attention of such as have been shaken by the assaults of infidelity
be thus directed, and then tell me wherein a spiritual physician
would be blameworthy, if he carried on the cure by addressing his
patient in this manner:-
"All men of learning, even learned unbelievers, admit that the
greater part of the objections, urged in the popular works of
infidelity, to this or that verse or chapter of the Bible, prove only
the ignorance or dishonesty of the objectors. But let it be supposed
for a moment that a few remain hitherto unanswered--nay, that to your
judgment and feelings they appear unanswerable. What follows? That
the Apostles' and Nicene Creed is not credible, the Ten Commandments
not to be obeyed, the clauses of the Lord's Prayer not to be desired,
or the Sermon on the Mount not to be practised? See how the logic
would look. David cruelly tortured the inhabitants of Rabbah (2 Sam.
xii. 31; 1 Chron. xx. 3), and in several of the Psalms he invokes the
bitterest curses on his enemies: therefore it is not to be believed
that THE LOVE OF GOD TOWARD US WAS MANIFESTED IN SENDING HIS ONLY
BEGOTTEN SON INTO THE WORLD, THAT WE MIGHT LIVE THROUGH HIM (1 John
iv. 9). Or, Abijah is said to have collected an army of 400,000 men,
and Jeroboam to have met him with an army of 800,000 men, each army
consisting of chosen men (2 Chron. xiii. 3), and making together a
host of 1,200,000, and Abijah to have slain 500,000 out of the
800,000: therefore, the words which admonish us that IF GOD SO LOVED
US, WE OUGHT ALSO TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER (1 John iv. 11), even our
enemies, yea, TO BLESS THEM THAT CURSE us, and to DO GOOD TO THEM
THAT HATE us (Matt. v. 44), cannot proceed from the Holy Spirit. Or:
The first six chapters of the book of Daniel contain several words
and phrases irreconcilable with the commonly received dates, and
those chapters and the Book of Esther have a traditional and
legendary character unlike that of the other historical books of the
Old Testament; therefore those other books, by contrast with which
the former appear suspicious, and the historical document (1 Cor. xv.
1-8), are not to be credited!"
We assuredly believe that the Bible contains all truths necessary to
salvation, and that therein is preserved the undoubted Word of God.
We assert likewise that, besides these express oracles and immediate
revelations, there are Scriptures which to the soul and conscience of
every Christian man bear irresistible evidence of the Divine Spirit
assisting and actuating the authors; and that both these and the
former are such as to render it morally impossible that any passage
of the small inconsiderable portion, not included in one or other of
these, can supply either ground or occasion of any error in faith,
practice, or affection, except to those who wickedly and wilfully
seek a pretext for their unbelief. And if in that small portion of
the Bible which stands in no necessary connection with the known and
especial ends and purposes of the Scriptures, there should be a few
apparent errors resulting from the state of knowledge then existing--
errors which the best and holiest men might entertain uninjured, and
which without a miracle those men must have entertained; if I find no
such miraculous prevention asserted, and see no reason for supposing
it--may I not, to ease the scruples of a perplexed inquirer, venture
to say to him; "Be it so. What then? The absolute infallibility
even of the inspired writers in matters altogether incidental and
foreign to the objects and purposes of their inspiration is no part
of my creed: and even if a professed divine should follow the
doctrine of the Jewish Church so far as not to attribute to the
Hagiographa, in every word and sentence, the same height and fulness
of inspiration as to the Law and the Prophets, I feel no warrant to
brand him as a heretic for an opinion, the admission of which disarms
the infidel without endangering a single article of the Catholic
Faith."--If to an unlearned but earnest and thoughtful neighbour I
give the advice;--"Use the Old Testament to express the affections
excited, and to confirm the faith and morals taught you, in the New,
and leave all the rest to the students and professors of theology and
Church history! You profess only to be a Christian:"--am I
misleading my brother in Christ?
This I believe by my own dear experience--that the more tranquilly an
inquirer takes up the Bible as he would any other body of ancient
writings, the livelier and steadier will be his impressions of its
superiority to all other books, till at length all other books and
all other knowledge will be valuable in his eyes in proportion as
they help him to a better understanding of his Bible. Difficulty
after difficulty has been overcome from the time that I began to
study the Scriptures with free and unboding spirit, under the
conviction that my faith in the Incarnate Word and His Gospel was
secure, whatever the result might be;--the difficulties that still
remain being so few and insignificant in my own estimation, that I
have less personal interest in the question than many of those who
will most dogmatically condemn me for presuming to make a question of
it.
So much for scholars--for men of like education and pursuits as
myself. With respect to Christians generally, I object to the
consequence drawn from the doctrine rather than to the doctrine
itself;--a consequence not only deducible from the premises, but
actually and imperiously deduced; according to which every man that
can but read is to sit down to the consecutive and connected perusal
of the Bible under the expectation and assurance that the whole is
within his comprehension, and that, unaided by note or comment,
catechism or liturgical preparation, he is to find out for himself
what he is bound to believe and practise, and that whatever he
conscientiously understands by what he reads is to be HIS religion.
For he has found it in his Bible, and the Bible is the Religion of
Protestants!
Would I then withhold the Bible from the cottager and the artisan?--
Heaven forfend! The fairest flower that ever clomb up a cottage
window is not so fair a sight to my eyes as the Bible gleaming
through the lower panes. Let it but be read as by such men it used
to be read; when they came to it as to a ground covered with manna,
even the bread which the Lord had given for his people to eat; where
he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little
had no lack. They gathered every man according to his eating. They
came to it as to a treasure-house of Scriptures; each visitant taking
what was precious and leaving as precious for others;--Yea, more,
says our worthy old Church-historian, Fuller, where "the same man at
several times may in his apprehension prefer several Scriptures as
best, formerly most affected with one place, for the present more
delighted with another, and afterwards, conceiving comfort therein
not so clear, choose other places as more pregnant and pertinent to
his purpose. Thus God orders it, that divers men (and perhaps the
same man at divers times), make use of all His gifts, gleaning and
gathering comfort as it is scattered through the whole field of the
Scripture." Farewell.
LETTER VII.
You are now, my dear friend, in possession of my whole mind on this
point--one thing only excepted which has weighed with me more than
all the rest, and which I have therefore reserved for my concluding
letter. This is the impelling principle or way of thinking, which I
have in most instances noticed in the assertors of what I have
ventured to call Bibliolatry, and which I believe to be the main
ground of its prevalence at this time, and among men whose religious
views are anything rather than enthusiastic. And I here take
occasion to declare, that my conviction of the danger and injury of
this principle was and is my chief motive for bringing the doctrine
itself into question; the main error of which consists in the
confounding of two distinct conceptions--revelation by the Eternal
Word, and actuation of the Holy Spirit. The former indeed is not
always or necessarily united with the latter--the prophecy of Balaam
is an instance of the contrary,--but yet being ordinarily, and only
not always, so united, the term, "Inspiration," has acquired a double
sense.
First, the term is used in the sense of Information miraculously
communicated by voice or vision; and secondly, where without any
sensible addition or infusion, the writer or speaker uses and applies
his existing gifts of power and knowledge under the predisposing,
aiding, and directing actuation of God's Holy Spirit. Now, between
the first sense, that is, inspired revelation, and the highest degree
of that grace and communion with the Spirit which the Church under
all circumstances, and every regenerate member of the Church of
Christ, is permitted to hope and instructed to pray for, there is a
positive difference of kind--a chasm, the pretended overleaping of
which constitutes imposture, or betrays insanity. Of the first kind
are the Law and the Prophets, no jot or tittle of which can pass
unfulfilled, and the substance and last interpretation of which
passes not away; for they wrote of Christ, and shadowed out the
everlasting Gospel. But with regard to the second, neither the holy
writers--the so-called Hagiographi--themselves, nor any fair
interpretations of Scripture, assert any such absolute diversity, or
enjoin the belief of any greater difference of degree, than the
experience of the Christian World, grounded on and growing with the
comparison of these Scriptures with other works holden in honour by
the Churches, has established. And THIS difference I admit, and
doubt not that it has in every generation been rendered evident to as
many as read these Scriptures under the gracious influence of the
spirit in which they were written.
But alas! this is not sufficient; this cannot but be vague and
unsufficing to those with whom the Christian religion is wholly
objective, to the exclusion of all its correspondent subjective. It
must appear vague, I say, to those whose Christianity as matter of
belief is wholly external, and like the objects of sense, common to
all alike; altogether historical, an opus operatum--its existing and
present operancy in no respect differing from any other fact of
history, and not at all modified by the supernatural principle in
which it had its origin in time. Divines of this persuasion are
actually, though without their own knowledge, in a state not
dissimilar to that into which the Latin Church sank deeper amid
deeper from the sixth to the fourteenth century; during which time
religion was likewise merely objective and superstitious--a letter
proudly emblazoned and illuminated, but yet a dead letter that was to
be read by its own outward glories without the light of the Spirit in
the mind of the believer. The consequence was too glaring not to be
anticipated, and, if possible, prevented. Without that spirit in
each true believer, whereby we know the spirit of truth and the
spirit of error in all things appertaining to salvation, the
consequence must be--so many men, so many minds! And what was the
antidote which the Priests and Rabbis of this purely objective Faith
opposed to this peril? Why, an objective, outward Infallibility,
concerning which, however, the differences were scarcely less or
fewer than those which it was to heal; an Infallibility which taken
literally and unqualified, became the source of perplexity to the
well-disposed, of unbelief to the wavering, and of scoff and triumph
to the common enemy, and which was, therefore, to be qualified and
limited, and then it meant so munch and so little that to men of
plain understandings and single hearts it meant nothing at all. It
resided here. No! there. No! but in a third subject. Nay! neither
here, nor there, nor in the third, but in all three conjointly!
But even this failed to satisfy; and what was the final resource--the
doctrine of those who would not be called a Protestant Church, but in
which doctrine the Fathers of Protestantism in England would have
found little other fault, than that it might be affirmed as truly of
the decisions of any other bishop as of the Bishop of Rome? The
final resource was to restore what ought never to have been removed--
the correspondent subjective, that is, the assent and confirmation of
the Spirit promised to all true believers, as proved and manifested
in the reception of such decision by the Church Universal in all its
rightful members.
I comprise and conclude the sum of my conviction in this one
sentence. Revealed religion (and I know of no religion not revealed)
is in its highest contemplation the unity, that is, the identity or
co-inherence, of subjective and objective. It is in itself, and
irrelatively at once inward life and truth, and outward fact and
luminary. But as all power manifests itself in the harmony of
correspondent opposites, each supposing and supporting the other; so
has religion its objective, or historic and ecclesiastical pole and
its subjective, or spiritual and individual pole. In the miracles
and miraculous parts of religion--both in the first communication of
Divine truths, and in the promulgation of the truths thus
communicated--we have the union of the two, that is, the subjective
and supernatural displayed objectively--outwardly and phenomenally--
AS subjective and supernatural.
Lastly, in the Scriptures, as far as they are not included in the
above as miracles, and in the mind of the believing and regenerate
reader and meditater, there is proved to us the reciprocity or
reciprocation of the spirit as subjective and objective, which in
conformity with the scheme proposed by me, in aid of distinct
conception and easy recollection, I have named the Indifference.
What I mean by this, a familiar acquaintance with the more popular
parts of Luther's works, especially his "Commentaries," and the
delightful volume of his "Table Talk," would interpret for me better
than I can do for myself. But I do my best, when I say that no
Christian probationer, who is earnestly working out his salvation,
and experiences the conflict of the spirit with the evil and the
infirmity within him and around him, can find his own state brought
before him, and, as it were, antedated, in writings reverend even for
their antiquity and enduring permanence, and far more and more
abundantly consecrated by the reverence, love, and grateful
testimonies of good men, through the long succession of ages, in
every generation, and under all states of minds and circumstances of
fortune, that no man, I say, can recognise his own inward experiences
in such writings, and not find an objectiveness, a confirming and
assuring outwardness, and all the main characters of reality
reflected therefrom on the spirit, working in himself and in his own
thoughts, emotions, and aspirations, warring against sin and the
motions of sin. The unsubstantial, insulated self passes away as a
stream; but these are the shadows and reflections of the Rock of
Ages, and of the Tree of Life that starts forth from its side.
On the other hand, as much of reality, as much of objective truth, as
the Scriptures communicate to the subjective experiences of the
believer, so much of present life, of living and effective import, do
these experiences give to the letter of these Scriptures. In the one
THE SPIRIT ITSELF BEARETH WITNESS WITH OUR SPIRIT, that we have
received the SPIRIT OF ADOPTION; in the other our spirit bears
witness to the power of the Word, that it is indeed the Spirit that
proceedeth from God. If in the holy men thus actuated all
imperfection of knowledge, all participation in the mistakes and
limits of their several ages had been excluded, how could these
writings be or become the history and example, the echo and more
lustrous image of the work and warfare of the sanctifying principle
in us? If after all this, and in spite of all this, some captious
litigator should lay hold of a text here or there--St. Paul's CLOAK
LEFT AT TROAS WITH CARPUS, or a verse from the Canticles, and ask,
"Of what spiritual use is this?"--the answer is ready:- It proves to
us that nothing can be so trifling, as not to supply an evil heart
with a pretext for unbelief.
Archbishop Leighton has observed that the Church has its extensive
and intensive states, and that they seldom fall together. Certain it
is, that since kings have been her nursing fathers, and queens her
nursing mothers, our theologians seem to act in the spirit of fear
rather than in that of faith; and too often, instead of inquiring
after the truth in the confidence that whatever is truth must be
fruitful of good to all who ARE IN HIM THAT IS TRUE, they seek with
vain precautions to GUARD AGAINST THE POSSIBLE INFERENCES which
perverse and distempered minds may pretend, whose whole Christianity-
-do what we will--is and will remain nothing but a pretence.
You have now my entire mind on this momentous question, the grounds
on which it rests, and the motives which induce me to make it known;
and I now conclude by repeating my request: Correct me, or confirm
me.
Farewell.
ESSAY ON FAITH.
Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being, so far as such
being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by
clear inference or implication to being generally, as far as the same
is not the object of the senses; and again to whatever is affirmed or
understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the
same. This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I
am conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do
unto others as I would they should do unto me; in other words a
categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative; that the
maxim (regula maxima, or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and
outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising
therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings.
This, I say, is a fact of which I am no less conscious (though in a
different way), nor less assured, than I am of any appearance
presented by my outward senses. Nor is this all; but in the very act
of being conscious of this in my own nature, I know that it is a fact
of which all men either are or ought to be conscious; a fact, the
ignorance of which constitutes either the non-personality of the
ignorant, or the guilt; in which latter case the ignorance is
equivalent to knowledge wilfully darkened. I know that I possess
this knowledge as a man, and not as Samuel Taylor Coleridge; hence,
knowing that consciousness of this fact is the root of all other
consciousness, and the only practical contradistinction of man from
the brutes, we name it the conscience, by the natural absence or
presumed presence of which the law, both Divine and human, determines
whether X Y Z be a thing or a person; the conscience being that which
never to have had places the objects in the same order of things as
the brutes, for example, idiots, and to have lost which implies
either insanity or apostasy. Well, this we have affirmed is a fact
of which every honest man is as fully assured as of his seeing,
hearing, or smelling. But though the former assurance does not
differ from the latter in the degree, it is altogether diverse in the
kind; the senses being morally passive, while the conscience is
essentially connected with the will, though not always, nor indeed in
any case, except after frequent attempts and aversions of will
dependent on the choice. Thence we call the presentations of the
senses impressions, those of the conscience commands or dictates. In
the senses we find our receptivity, and as far as our personal being
is concerned, we are passive, but in the fact of the conscience we
are not only agents, but it is by this alone that we know ourselves
to be such--nay, that our very passiveness in this latter is an act
of passiveness, and that we are patient (patientes), not, as in the
other case, SIMPLY passive.
The result is the consciousness of responsibility, and the proof is
afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between regret and
remorse.
If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due
proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but
cannot deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can by
repeated efforts render myself finally insensible; to which add this
other difference, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the
same thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length I became
unconscious of my conscience. Frequent are the instances in which it
is suspended, and, as it were, drowned in the inundation of the
appetites, passions, and imaginations to which I have resigned
myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and
there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being
utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness; that
species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long
as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist, either as
a good conscience or as a bad conscience.
It appears, then, that even the very first step--that the initiation
of the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience--partakes of
the nature of an act. It is an act in and by which we take upon
ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty;
and this fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful,
it is the first and fundamental sense of faith. It is likewise the
commencement of experience, and the result of all other experience.
In other words, conscience in this its simplest form, must be
supposed in order to consciousness, that is, to human consciousness.
Brutes may be and are scions, but those beings only who have an I,
scire possunt hoc vel illud una cum seipsis; that is, conscire vel
scire aliquid mecum, or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in
the act of knowing myself as acted upon by that something.
Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the
first but by means of the second. There can be no He without a
previous Thou. Much less could an I exist for us except as it exists
during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of
brutes may be best understood by considering them as somnambulists.
This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the
strictest proof, namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and
that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as
equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this, again, is only
possible by putting them in opposition as correspondent opposites, or
correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the
one which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will.
I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very
act of constructing myself _I_, I take it as the same, and therefore
as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will.
If, then, I MINUS the will be the THESIS, Thou, PLUS will, must be
the ANTITHESIS, but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free
act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is
the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can
be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all
these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness and
the conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the
root of all consciousness--a fortiori, the precondition of all
experience--and that the conscience cannot have been in its first
revelation deduced from experience.
Soon, however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are
other impulses beside the dictates of conscience, that there are
powers within us and without us ready to usurp the throne of
conscience, and busy in tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We
learn that there are many things contrary to conscience, and
therefore to be rejected and utterly excluded, and many that can
coexist with its supremacy only by being subjugated as beasts of
burthen; and others again, as for instance the social tendernesses
and affections, and the faculties and excitations of the intellect,
which must be at least subordinated. The preservation of our loyalty
and fealty under these trials, and against these rivals, constitutes
the second sense of faith; and we shall need but one more point of
view to complete its full import. This is the consideration of what
is presupposed in the human conscience. The answer is ready. As in
the equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the twin
constituents is to be taken as PLUS will, the other as MINUS will, so
is it here; and it is obvious that the reason or SUPER-individual of
each man, whereby he is a man, is the factor we are to take as MINUS
will, and that the individual will or personalising principle of free
agency ("arbitrement" is Milton's word) is the factor marked PLUS
will; and again, that as the identity or co-inherence of the absolute
will and the reason, is the peculiar character of God, so is the
SYNTHESIS of the individual will and the common reason, by the
subordination of the former to the latter, the only possible likeness
or image of the PROTHESIS or identity, and therefore the required
proper character of man. Conscience, then, is a witness respecting
the identity of the will and the reason, effected by the self-
subordination of the will or self to the reason, as equal to or
representing the will of God. But the personal will is a factor in
other moral SYNTHESIS, for example, appetite PLUS personal will =
sensuality; lust of power, PLUS personal will = ambition, and so on,
equally as in the SYNTHESIS on which the conscience is grounded. Not
this, therefore, but the other SYNTHESIS, must supply the specific
character of the conscience, and we must enter into an analysis of
reason. Such as the nature and objects of the reason are, such must
be the functions and objects of the conscience. And the former we
shall best learn by recapitulating those constituents of the total
man which are either contrary to or disparate from the reason.
I. Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from
sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is appetite,
and the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh.
II. Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the
senses, inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or
fancy. Reason is supersensuous, and here its antagonist is the lust
of the eye.
III. Reason and its objects are not things of reflection,
association, discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as
opposed to intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it.
Reason does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time
or in space, but it includes them eminenter. Thus the prime mover of
the material universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause,
but not to be, or to suffer, motion in itself.
Reason is not the faculty of the finite. But here I must premise the
following. The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the
confused impressions of sense to their essential forms--quantity,
quality, relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and
effect, and the like; thus raises the materials furnished by the
senses and sensations into objects of reflection, and so makes
experience possible. Without it, man's representative powers would
be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes; and it is
therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or
substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes
inclusively, called this likewise discourse, discuvsus discursio,
from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but
running, as it were, to and fro to abstract, generalise, and
classify. Now when this faculty is employed in the service of the
pure reason, it brings out the necessary and universal truths
contained in the infinite into distinct contemplation by the pure act
of the sensuous imagination--that is, in the production of the forms
of space and time abstracted from all corporeity, and likewise of the
inherent forms of the understanding itself abstractedly from the
consideration of particulars, as in the case of geometry, numeral
mathematics, universal logic, and pure metaphysics. The discursive
faculty then becomes what our Shakespeare, with happy precision,
calls "discourse of reason."
We will now take up our reasoning again from the words "motion in
itself."
It is evident, then, that the reason as the irradiative power, and
the representative of the infinite, judges the understanding as the
faculty of the finite, and cannot without error be judged by it.
When this is attempted, or when the understanding in its SYNTHESIS
with the personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or
affects to supersede the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the
mind of the flesh ([Greek text]), or the wisdom of this world. The
result is, that the reason is superfinite; and in this relation, its
antagonist is the insubordinate understanding, or mind of the flesh.
IV. Reason, as one with the absolute will (IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE
LOGOS, AND THE LOGOS WAS WITH GOD, AND THE LOGOS WAS GOD), and
therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is
above the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III.
that it stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it
stands in antagonism to all mere individual interests as so many
selves, to the personal will as seeking its objects in the
manifestation of itself for itself--sit pro ratione voluntas;--
whether this be realised with adjuncts, as in the lust of the flesh,
and in the lust of the eye; or without adjuncts, as in the thirst and
pride of power, despotism, egoistic ambition. The fourth antagonist,
then, of reason, is the lust of the will.
Corollary. Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very
different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous
society is not only coexistent with, but virtually organised into,
the multitude of which he is an integral part. His idem is modified
by the alter. And there arise impulses and objects from this
SYNTHESIS of the alter et idem, myself and my neighbour. This,
again, is strictly analogous to what takes place in the vital
organisation of the individual man. The cerebral system of the
nerves has its correspondent ANTITHESIS in the abdominal system: but
hence arises a SYNTHESIS of the two in the pectoral system as the
intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once conductor and boundary.
In the latter, as objectised by the former, arise the emotions, the
affections, and, in one word, the passions, as distinguished from the
cognitions and appetites. Now, the reason has been shown to be
superindividual, generally, and therefore not less so when the form
of an individualisation subsists in the alter than when it is
confined to the idem; not less when the emotions have their conscious
or believed object in another, than when their subject is the
individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections,
attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower
nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room--as
we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher per medium
commune with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the
higher (namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the
latter are indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your
earthly parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love
your Heavenly Father who is invisible;--yet this holds good only so
far as the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim;
and cases may arise in which the Christ as the Logos, or Redemptive
Reason, declares, HE THAT LOVES FATHER OR ANOTHER MORE THAN ME, IS
NOT WORTHY OF ME; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an
equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason.
Here, then, reason appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is
the attachment to individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or
in competition with, the love which is reason.
In these five paragraphs I have enumerated and explained the several
powers or forces belonging or incidental to human nature, which in
all matters of reason the man is bound either to subjugate or
subordinate to reason. The application to faith follows of its own
accord. The first or most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity:
then fidelity under previous contract or particular moral obligation.
In this sense faith is fealty to a rightful superior: faith is the
duty of a faithful subject to a rightful governor. Then it is
allegiance in active service; fidelity to the liege lord under
circumstances, and amid the temptations of usurpation, rebellion, and
intestine discord. Next we seek for that rightful superior on our
duties to whom all our duties to all other superiors, on our
faithfulness to whom all our bounden relations to all other objects
of fidelity, are founded. We must inquire after that duty in which
all others find their several degrees and dignities, and from which
they derive their obligative force. We are to find a superior, whose
rights, including our duties, are presented to the mind in the very
idea of that Supreme Being, whose sovereign prerogatives are
predicates implied in the subjects, as the essential properties of a
circle are co-assumed in the first assumption of a circle,
consequently underived, unconditional, and as rationally
unsusceptible, so probably prohibitive, of all further question. In
this sense, then, faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral
nature to God, in opposition to all usurpation, and in resistance to
all temptation to the placing any other claim above or equal with our
fidelity to God.
The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties,
and to that the whole man is to be harmonised by subordination,
subjugation, or suppression alike in commission and omission. But
the will of God, which is one with the supreme intelligence, is
revealed to man through the conscience. But the conscience, which
consists in an inappellable bearing-witness to the truth and reality
of our reason, may legitimately be construed with the term reason, so
far as the conscience is prescriptive; while as approving or
condemning, it is the consciousness of the subordination or
insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the personal will of man
to and with the representative of the will of God. This brings me to
the last and fullest sense of faith, that is, the obedience of the
individual will to the reason, in the lust of the flesh as opposed to
the supersensual; in the lust of the eye as opposed to the
supersensuous; in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the
infinite; in the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] in
contrariety to the spiritual truth; in the lust of the personal will
as opposed to the absolute and universal; and in the love of the
creature, as far as it is opposed to the love which is one with the
reason, namely, the love of God.
Thus, then, to conclude. Faith subsists in the SYNTHESIS of the
Reason and the individual Will. By virtue of the latter therefore,
it must be an energy, and, inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral
man, it must be exerted in each and all of his constituents or
incidents, faculties and tendencies;--it must be a total, not a
partial--a continuous, not a desultory or occasional--energy. And by
virtue of the former, that is Reason, Faith must be a Light, a form
of knowing, a beholding of truth. In the incomparable words of the
Evangelist, therefore, FAITH MUST BE A LIGHT ORIGINATING IN THE
LOGOS, OR THE SUBSTANTIAL REASON, WHICH IS CO-ETERNAL AND ONE WITH
THE HOLY WILL, AND WHICH LIGHT IS AT THE SAME TIME THE LIFE OF MEN.
Now, as LIFE is here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual
acts, in suffering, doing, and being, so is Faith the source and the
sum, the energy and the principle of the fidelity of man to God, by
the subordination of his human Will, in all provinces of his nature,
to his Reason, as the sum of spiritual Truth, representing and
manifesting the Will Divine.
NOTES ON THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.
PRAYER.
A man may pray night and day, and yet deceive himself; but no man can
be assured of his sincerity who does not pray. Prayer is faith
passing into act; a union of the will and the intellect realising in
an intellectual act. It is the whole man that prays. Less than this
is wishing, or lip-work; a charm or a mummery. PRAY ALWAYS, says the
apostle: that is, have the habit of prayer, turning your thoughts
into acts by connecting them with the idea of the redeeming God, and
even so reconverting your actions into thoughts.
THE SACRAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST.
The best preparation for taking this sacrament, better than any or
all of the books or tracts composed for this end, is to read over and
over again, and often on your knees--at all events with a kneeling
and praying heart--the Gospel according to St. John, till your mind
is familiarised to the contemplation of Christ, the Redeemer and
Mediator of mankind, yea, of every creature, as the living and self-
subsisting Word, the very truth of all true being, and the very being
of all enduring truth; the reality, which is the substance and unity
of all reality; THE LIGHT WHICH LIGHTETH EVERY MAN, so that what we
call reason is itself a light from that light, lumen a luce, as the
Latin more distinctly expresses this fact. But it is not merely
light, but therein is life; and it is the life of Christ, the co-
eternal Son of God, that is the only true life-giving light of men.
We are assured, and we believe, that Christ is God; God manifested in
the flesh. As God, he must be present entire in every creature;--
(for how can God, or indeed any spirit, exist in parts?)--but he is
said to dwell in the regenerate, to come to them who receive him by
faith in his name, that is, in his power and influence; for this is
the meaning of the word "name" in Scripture when applied to God or
his Christ. Where true belief exists, Christ is not only present
with or among us;--for so he is in every man, even the most wicked;--
but to us and for us. THAT WAS THE TRUE LIGHT, WHICH LIGHTETH EVERY
MAN THAT COMETH INTO THE WORLD. HE WAS IN THE WORLD, AND THE WORLD
WAS MADE BY HIM, AND THE WORLD KNEW HIM NOT. BUT AS MANY AS RECEIVED
HIM, TO THEM GAVE HE POWER TO BECOME THE SONS OF GOD, EVEN TO THEM
THAT BELIEVE IN HIS NAME; WHICH WERE BORN, NOT OF BLOOD, NOR OF THE
WILL OF THE FLESH, NOR OF THE WILL OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. AND THE WORD
WAS MADE FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US. John i. 9-14. Again--WE WILL
COME UNTO HIM, AND MAKE OUR ABODE WITH HIM. John xiv. 23. As truly
and as really as your soul resides constitutively in your living
body, personally and substantially does Christ dwell in every
regenerate man.
After this course of study, you may then take up and peruse sentence
by sentence the communion service, the best of all comments on the
Scriptures appertaining to this mystery. And this is the preparation
which will prove, with God's grace, the surest preventive of, or
antidote against, the freezing poison, the lethargising hemlock, of
the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, according to whom the Eucharist
is a mere practical metaphor, in which things are employed instead of
articulated sounds for the exclusive purpose of recalling to our
minds the historical fact of our Lord's crucifixion; in short--(the
profaneness is with them, not with me)--just the same as when
Protestants drink a glass of wine to the glorious memory of William
III.! True it is that the remembrance is one end of the sacrament;
but it is, DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME,--of all that Christ was and
is, hath done and is still doing for fallen mankind, and, of course,
of his crucifixion inclusively, but not of his crucifixion alone. 14
December, 1827.
COMPANION TO THE ALTAR.
First, then, that we may come to this heavenly feast holy, and
adorned with the wedding garment, Matt. xxii. ii, we must search our
hearts, and examine our consciences, not only till we see our sins,
but until we hate them.
But what if a man, seeing his sin, earnestly desire to hate it?
Shall he not at the altar offer up at once his desire, and the yet
lingering sin, and seek for strength? Is not this sacrament medicine
as well as food? Is it an end only, and not likewise the means? Is
it merely the triumphal feast; or is it not even more truly a blessed
refreshment for and during the conflict?
This confession of sins must not be in general terms only, that we
are sinners with the rest of mankind, but it must be a special
declaration to God of all our most heinous sins in thought, word, and
deed.
Luther was of a different judgment. He would have us feel and groan
under our sinfulness and utter incapability of redeeming ourselves
from the bondage, rather than hazard the pollution of our
imaginations by a recapitulation and renewing of sins and their
images in detail. Do not, he says, stand picking the flaws out one
by one, but plunge into the river and drown them!--I venture to be of
Luther's doctrine.
COMMUNION SERVICE.
In the first Exhortation, before the words "meritorious Cross and
Passion," I should propose to insert "his assumption of humanity, his
incarnation, and." Likewise, a little lower down, after the word
"sustenance," I would insert "as." For not in that sacrament
exclusively, but in all the acts of assimilative faith, of which the
Eucharist is a solemn, eminent, and representative instance, an
instance and the symbol, Christ is our spiritual food and sustenance.
MARRIAGE SERVICE.
Marriage, simply as marriage, is not the means "for the procreation
of children," but for the humanisation of the offspring procreated.
Therefore, in the Declaration at the beginning, after the words
"procreation of children," I would insert, "and as the means of
securing to the children procreated enduring care, and that they may
be," &c.
COMMUNION OF THE SICK.
Third rubric at the end.
But if a man, either by reason of extremity of sickness, &c.
I think this rubric, in what I conceive to be its true meaning, a
precious doctrine, as fully acquitting our Church of all Romish
superstition, respecting the nature of the Eucharist, in relation to
the whole scheme of man's redemption. But the latter part of it--"he
doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ
profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the
sacrament with his mouth"--seems to me very incautiously expressed,
and scarcely to be reconciled with the Church's own definition of a
sacrament in general. For in such a case, where is "the outward and
visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace given?"
XI. SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.
Epistle.--l Cor. xv. 1.
Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you.
Why should the obsolete, though faithful, Saxon translation of [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced] be retained? Why not "good
tidings?" Why thus change a most appropriate and intelligible
designation of the matter into a mere conventional name of a
particular book?
Ib.
- how that Christ died for our sins.
But the meaning of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is, that
Christ died through the sins, and for the sinners. He died through
our sins, and we live through his righteousness.
Gospel--Luke xviii. 14.
This man went down to his house justified rather than the other.
Not simply justified, observe; but justified rather than the other,
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced],--that is, less remote from
salvation.
XXV. SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.
Collect.
- that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may
of thee be plenteously rewarded.
Rather--"that with that enlarged capacity, which without thee we
cannot acquire, there may likewise be an increase of the gift, which
from thee alone we can wholly receive."
Ps. VIII.
V. 2. Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou
ordained strength, because of thine enemies; that thou mightest still
the enemy and the avenger.
To the dispensations of the twilight dawn, to the first messengers of
the redeeming word, the yet lisping utterers of light and life, a
strength and power were given BECAUSE OF THE ENEMIES, greater and of
more immediate influence, than to the seers and proclaimers of a
clearer day: even as the first reappearing crescent of the eclipsed
moon shines for men with a keener brilliance than the following
larger segments, previously to its total emersion.
Ib. v. 5.
Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and
worship.
Power + idea = angel.
Idea--power = man, or Prometheus.
Ps. LXVIII.
V. 34. Ascribe ye the power to God over Israel: his worship and
strength is in the clouds.
The "clouds," in the symbolical language of the Scriptures, mean the
events and course of things, seemingly effects of human will or
chance, but overruled by Providence.
Ps. LXXII.
This psalm admits no other interpretation but of Christ, as the
Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense it would be a specimen of more
than Persian or Moghul hyperbole, and bombast, of which there is no
other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to
attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish
Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms.--N.B. The word in St.
John and the Name of the Most High in the Psalms are equivalent
terms.
V. 1. Give the king thy judgments, O God; and thy righteousness unto
the king's son.
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, the only begotten,
the Son of God and God, King of Kings, and the Son of the King of
Kings!
Ps. LXXIV.
V. 2. O think upon thy congregation, whom thou hast purchased and
redeemed of old.
The Lamb sacrificed from the beginning of the world, the God-Man, the
Judge, the self-promised Redeemer to Adam in the garden!
V. 15. Thou smotest the heads of the Leviathan in pieces; and gavest
him to be meat for the people in the wilderness.
Does this allude to any real tradition? The Psalms appears to have
been composed shortly before the captivity of Judah.
Ps. LXXXII. vv. 6-7.
The reference which our Lord made to these mysterious verses gives
them an especial interest. The first apostasy, the fall of the
angels, is, perhaps, intimated.
Ps. LXXXVII.
I would fain understand this Psalm; but first I must collate it word
by word with the original Hebrew. It seems clearly Messianic.
Ps. LXXXVIII.
Vv. 10-12. Dost thou show wonders among the dead, or shall the dead
rise up again and praise thee? &c.
Compare Ezekiel xxxvii.
Ps. CIV.
I think the Bible version might with advantage be substituted for
this, which in some parts is scarcely intelligible.
V. 6.--the waters stand in the hills.
No; STOOD ABOVE THE MOUNTAINS. The reference is to the Deluge.
Ps. CV.
V. 3.--LET THE HEART OF THEM REJOICE THAT SEEK THE LORD.
If even to seek the Lord be joy, what will it be to find him? Seek
me, O Lord, that I may be found by thee!
Ps. CX.
V. 2.--The LORD SHALL SEND THE ROD OF THY POWER OUT OF SION; (saying)
RULE, &c.
V. 3. Understand--"Thy people shall offer themselves willingly in
the day of conflict in holy clothing, in their best array, in their
best arms and accoutrements. As the dew from the womb of the
morning, in number and brightness like dew-drops, so shall be thy
youth, or the youth of thee, the young volunteer warriors."
V. 5. "He shall shake," concuss, concutiet reges die irae suae.
V. 6. For "smite in sunder, or wound the heads;" some word answering
to the Latin conquassare.
V. 7. For "therefore," translate "then shall he lift up his head
again;" that is, as a man languid and sinking from thirst and fatigue
after refreshment.
N.B.--I see no poetic discrepancy between vv. 1 and 5.
Ps. CXVIII.
To be interpreted of Christ's Church.
Ps. CXXVI.
V. 5. As the rivers in the south.
Does this allude to the periodical rains?
As a transparency on some night of public rejoicing, seen by common
day, with the lamps from within removed--even such would the Psalms
be to me uninterpreted by the Gospel. O honoured Mr. Hurwitz! Could
I but make you feel what grandeur, what magnificence, what an
everlasting significance and import Christianity gives to every fact
of your national history--to every page of your sacred records!
ARTICLES OF RELIGION.
XX. It is mournful to think how many recent writers have criminated
our Church in consequence of their ignorance and inadvertence in not
knowing, or not noticing, the contradistinction here meant between
power and authority. Rites and ceremonies the Church may ordain jure
proprio: on matters of faith her judgment is to be received with
reverence, and not gainsayed but after repeated inquiries, and on
weighty grounds.
XXXVII. It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the
magistrate, to wear weapons, and to serve in wars.
This is a very good instance of an unseemly matter neatly wrapped up.
The good men recoiled from the plain words--"It is lawful for
Christian men at the Command of a king to slaughter as many
Christians as they can!"
Well! I could most sincerely subscribe to all these articles.
September, 1831.
A NIGHTLY PRAYER. 1831.
Almighty God, by thy eternal Word my Creator Redeemer and Preserver!
who hast in thy free communicative goodness glorified me with the
capability of knowing thee, the one only absolute Good, the eternal I
Am, as the author of my being, and of desiring and seeking thee as
its ultimate end;--who, when I fell from thee into the mystery of the
false and evil will, didst not abandon me, poor self-lost creature,
but in thy condescending mercy didst provide an access and a return
to thyself, even to thee the Holy One, in thine only begotten Son,
the way and the truth from everlasting, and who took on himself
humanity, yea, became flesh, even the man Christ Jesus, that for man
he might be the life and the resurrection!--O Giver of all good
gifts, who art thyself the one only absolute Good, from whom I have
received whatever good I have, whatever capability of good there is
in me, and from thee good alone,--from myself and my own corrupted
will all evil and the consequents of evil,--with inward prostration
of will, mind, and affections I adore thy infinite majesty; I aspire
to love thy transcendent goodness!--In a deep sense of my
unworthiness, and my unfitness to present myself before thee, of eyes
too pure to behold iniquity, and whose light, the beautitude of
spirits conformed to thy will, is a consuming fire to all vanity and
corruption;--but in the name of the Lord Jesus, of the dear Son of
thy love, in whose perfect obedience thou deignest to behold as many
as have received the seed of Christ into the body of this death;--I
offer this, my bounden nightly sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,
in humble trust that the fragrance of my Saviour's righteousness may
remove from it the taint of my mortal corruption. Thy mercies have
followed me through all the hours and moments of my life; and now I
lift up my heart in awe and thankfulness for the preservation of my
life through the past day, for the alleviation of my bodily
sufferings and languors, for the manifold comforts which thou hast
reserved for me, yea, in thy fatherly compassion hast rescued from
the wreck of my own sins or sinful infirmities;--for the kind and
affectionate friends thou hast raised up for me, especially for those
of this household, for the mother and mistress of this family, whose
love to me hath been great and faithful, and for the dear friend, the
supporter and sharer of my studies and researches; but, above all,
for the heavenly Friend, the crucified Saviour, the glorified
Mediator, Christ Jesus, and for the heavenly Comforter, source of all
abiding comforts, thy Holy Spirit! O grant me the aid of thy Spirit,
that I may with a deeper faith, a more enkindled love, bless thee,
who through thy Son hast privileged me to call thee Abba, Father! O,
thou, who hast revealed thyself in thy holy word as a God that
hearest prayer; before whose infinitude all differences cease of
great and small; who like a tender parent foreknowest all our wants,
yet listenest well-pleased to the humble petitions of thy children;
who hast not alone permitted, but taught us; to call on thee in all
our needs,--earnestly I implore the continuance of thy free mercy, of
thy protecting providence, through the coming night. Thou hearest
every prayer offered to thee believingly with a penitent and sincere
heart. For thou in withholding grantest, healest in inflicting the
wound, yea, turnest all to good for as many as truly seek thee
through Christ, the Mediator! Thy will be done! But if it be
according to thy wise and righteous ordinances, O shield me this
night from the assaults of disease, grant me refreshment of sleep
unvexed by evil and distempered dreams; and if the purpose and
aspiration of my heart be upright before thee, who alone knowest the
heart of man, O in thy mercy vouchsafe me yet in this my decay of
life an interval of ease and strength; if so (thy grace disposing and
assisting) I may make compensation to thy Church for the unused
talents thou hast entrusted to me, for the neglected opportunities
which thy loving-kindness had provided. O let me be found a labourer
in the vineyard, though of the late hour, when the Lord and Heir of
the vintage, Christ Jesus, calleth for his servant.
Our Father, &c.
To thee, great omnipresent Spirit, whose mercy is over all thy works,
who now beholdest me, who hearest me, who hast framed my heart to
seek and to trust in thee, in the name of my Lord and Saviour Christ
Jesus, I humbly commit and commend my body, soul, and spirit.
Glory be to thee, O God!
A SAILOR'S FORTUNE.
ESSAY I.
Fortuna plerumque est veluti
Galaxia quarundam obscurarum
Virtutum sine nomine.
BACON.
(Translation)--Fortune is for the most part but a galaxy or milky
way, as it were, of certain obscure virtues without a name.
"Does Fortune favour fools? Or how do you explain the origin of the
proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all the
languages of Europe?"
This proverb admits of various explanations, according to the mood of
mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, and the soothing
persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful over the helpless,
and extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring
for themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as "God
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"--or the more sportive adage, that
"the fairies take care of children and tipsy folk." The persuasion
itself, in addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and
the scarcely less general love of the marvellous, may be accounted
for from our tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem
disproportionate to their visible cause, and all circumstances that
are in any way strongly contrasted with our notions of the persons
under them. Secondly, it arises from the safety and success which an
ignorance of danger and difficulty sometimes actually assists in
procuring; inasmuch as it precludes the despondence, which might have
kept the more foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, the
depression which would retard its progress, and those overwhelming
influences of terror in cases where the vivid perception of the
danger constitutes the greater part of the danger itself. Thus men
are said to have swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow
bridge, over which they had ridden, the night before, in perfect
safety; or at tracing the footmarks along the edge of a precipice
which the darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause,
yet not wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact that
the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish or bedim
those mysterious instincts of skill, which, though for the most part
latent, we nevertheless possess in common with other animals.
Or the proverb may be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary
of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood
and fool-hardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet
will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the
chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always
availing itself of them: and in this sense Fortune may be said to
favour fools by those who, however prudent in their own opinion, are
deficient in valour and enterprise. Again: an emiently good and
wise man, for whom the praises of the judicious have procured a high
reputation even with the world at large, proposes to himself certain
objects, and adapting the right means to the right end attains them;
but his objects not being what the world calls fortune, neither money
nor artificial rank, his admitted inferiors in moral and intellectual
worth, but more prosperous in their worldly concerns, are said to
have been favoured by Fortune and be slighted; although the fools did
the same in their line as the wise man in his; they adapted the
appropriate means to the desired end, and so succeeded. In this
sense the proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at least,
of both the words, fortune and fools.
How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
REPLY.
For shame! dear friend, renounce this canting strain;
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? Three treasures, love, and light,
And calm thoughts regular as infant's breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.
S. T. C.
But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to fortune,
distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from
that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according
to my favourite proverb, "extremes meet,") the fool not seldom
obtains in as great perfection by his ignorance as the wise man by
the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real
existence in human affairs, from the infinite number of powers that
are in action at the same time, and from the co-existence of things
contingent and accidental (such as to US at least are accidental)
with the regular appearances and general laws of nature. A familiar
instance will make these words intelligible. The moon waxes and
wanes according to a necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the
manifold appearances connected with them, are governed by certain
laws no less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which
determine the latter are known and calculable, while those of the
former are hidden from us. At all events, the number and variety of
their effects baffle our powers of calculation; and that the sky is
clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common
language, as a matter of accident. Well! at the time of the full
moon, but when the sky is completely covered with black clouds, I am
walking on in the dark, aware of no particular danger: a sudden gust
of wind rends the cloud for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses
to me a chasm or precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced
my foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more or
less serious mood or habit of our mind we exclaim, how lucky! or, how
providential! The co-presence of numberless phaenomena, which from
the complexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called
contingencies, and the co-existence of these with any regular or
necessary phaenomenon (as the clouds with the moon for instance),
occasion coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage
or injury, and are at the same time incapable of being calculated or
foreseen by human prudence, form good or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny
afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoilt the farmer's hay; and
this is called ill luck. We will suppose the same event to take
place, when meteorology shall have been perfected into a science,
provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had
neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence.
Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have
greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what
possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself,
his good luck will excite less attention and the instances be less
remembered. That clever men should attain their objects seems
natural, and we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that
success of themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight;
but we dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when
the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, though the
latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might
have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than
might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no
hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other
undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs
by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously
false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn
of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of
some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion
and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having
been as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out
of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the
illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they
presented themselves to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence
of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this
battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident,
and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for
the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his
principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the
inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal
answers to prepared and preconceived questions--yet still they would
not have been talked of or described, as instances of LUCK, but as
the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But
should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic
at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in
consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbours, and partly
with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the
general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh, what a lucky fellow!
Well, Fortune does favour fools--that's certain! It is always so!"--
and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instances.
Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting the
other, we do, as poets in their diction, and quacks of all
denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and at
once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvellous, by the
sweeping proverb, "Fortune favours fools."
ESSAY II.
Quod me non movet aestimatione:
Verum est [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] mei sodalis.
CATULL. xii.
(Translation.)--It interests not by any conceit of its value; but it
is a remembrance of my honoured friend.
The philosophic ruler, who secured the favours of fortune by seeking
wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pathetically
observed--"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and there is a joy
in which the stranger intermeddleth not." A simple question founded
on a trite proverb, with a discursive answer to it, would scarcely
suggest to an indifferent person any other notion than that of a mind
at ease, amusing itself with its own activity. Once before (I
believe about this time last year), I had taken up the old memorandum
book, from which I transcribed the preceding essay, and they had then
attracted my notice by the name of the illustrious chemist mentioned
in the last illustration. Exasperated by the base and cowardly
attempt that had been made to detract from the honours due to his
astonishing genius, I had slightly altered the concluding sentences,
substituting the more recent for his earlier discoveries; and without
the most distant intention of publishing what I then wrote, I had
expressed my own convictions for the gratification of my own
feelings, and finished by tranquilly paraphrasing into a chemical
allegory the Homeric adventure of Menelaus with Proteus. Oh! with
what different feelings, with what a sharp and sudden emotion did I
re-peruse the same question yester-morning, having by accident opened
the book at the page upon which it was written. I was moved; for it
was Admiral Sir Alexander Ball who first proposed the question to me,
and the particular satisfaction which he expressed had occasioned me
to note down the substance of my reply. I was moved; because to this
conversation I was indebted for the friendship and confidence with
which he afterwards honoured me, and because it recalled the memory
of one of the most delightful mornings I ever passed; when, as we
were riding together, the same person related to me the principal
events of his own life, and introduced them by adverting to this
conversation. It recalled too the deep impression left on my mind by
that narrative--the impression that I had never known any analogous
instance, in which a man so successful had been so little indebted to
fortune, or lucky accidents, or so exclusively both the architect and
builder of his own success. The sum of his history may be comprised
in this one sentence--Haec, sab numine, nobismet fecimas, sapientia
duce, fortune permittente. (i.e. These things under God, we have
done for ourselves, through the guidance of wisdom, and with the
permission of fortune.) Luck gave him nothing: in her most generous
moods, she only worked with him as with a friend, not for him as for
a fondling; but more often she simply stood neuter, and suffered him
to work for himself. Ah! how could I be otherwise than affected by
whatever reminded me of that daily and familiar intercourse with him,
which made the fifteen months from May, 1804, to October, 1805, in
many respects the most memorable and instructive period of my life?
Ah! how could I be otherwise than most deeply affected, when there
was still lying on my table the paper which the day before had
conveyed to me the unexpected and most awful tidings of this man's
death? his death in the fulness of all his powers, in the rich autumn
of ripe yet undecaying manhood! I once knew a lady who, after the
loss of a lovely child, continued for several days in a state of
seeming indifference, the weather at the same time, as if in unison
with her, being calm, though gloomy; till one morning a burst of
sunshine breaking in upon her, and suddenly lighting up the room
where she was sitting, she dissolved at once into tears, and wept
passionately. In no very dissimilar manner did the sudden gleam of
recollection at the sight of this memorandum act on myself. I had
been stunned by the intelligence, as by an outward blow, till this
trifling incident startled and disentranced me; the sudden pang
shivered through my whole frame; and if I repressed the outward shows
of sorrow, it was by force that I repressed them, and because it is
not by tears that I ought to mourn for the loss of Sir Alexander
Ball.
He was a man above his age; but for that very reason the age has the
more need to have the master-features of his character portrayed and
preserved. This I feel it my duty to attempt, and this alone; for
having received neither instructions nor permission from the family
of the deceased, I cannot think myself allowed to enter into the
particulars of his private history, strikingly as many of them would
illustrate the elements and composition of his mind. For he was
indeed a living confutation of the assertion attributed to the Prince
of Conde, that no man appeared great to his valet de chambre--a
saying which, I suspect, owes its currency less to its truth than to
the envy of mankind, and the misapplication of the word great, to
actions unconnected with reason and free will. It will be sufficient
for my purpose to observe that the purity and strict propriety of his
conduct, which precluded rather than silenced calumny, the evenness
of his temper, and his attentive and affectionate manners in private
life, greatly aided and increased his public utility; and, if it
should please Providence that a portion of his spirit should descend
with his mantle, the virtues of Sir Alexander Ball, as a master, a
husband, and a parent, will form a no less remarkable epoch in the
moral history of the Maltese than his wisdom, as a governor, has made
in that of their outward circumstances. That the private and
personal qualities of a first magistrate should have political
effects will appear strange to no reflecting Englishman, who has
attended to the workings of men's minds during the first ferment of
revolutionary principles, and must therefore have witnessed the
influence of our own sovereign's domestic character in counteracting
them. But in Malta there were circumstances which rendered such an
example peculiarly requisite and beneficent. The very existence for
so many generations of an order of lay celibates in that island, who
abandoned even the outward shows of an adherence to their vow of
chastity, must have had pernicious effects on the morals of the
inhabitants. But when it is considered too that the Knights of Malta
had been for the last fifty years or more a set of useless idlers,
generally illiterate, for they thought literature no part of a
soldier's excellence; and yet effeminate, for they were soldiers in
name only; when it is considered that they were, moreover, all of
them aliens, who looked upon themselves not merely as of a superior
rank to the native nobles, but as beings of a different race (I had
almost said species) from the Maltese collectively; and finally, that
these men possessed exclusively the government of the island; it may
be safely concluded that they were little better than a perpetual
influenza, relaxing and diseasing the hearts of all the families
within their sphere of influence. Hence the peasantry, who
fortunately were below their reach, notwithstanding the more than
childish ignorance in which they were kept by their priests, yet
compared with the middle and higher classes, were both in mind and
body as ordinary men compared with dwarfs. Every respectable family
had some one knight for their patron, as a matter of course; and to
him the honour of a sister or a daughter was sacrificed, equally as a
matter of course. But why should I thus disguise the truth? Alas!
in nine instances out of ten, this patron was the common paramour of
every female in the family. Were I composing a state memorial I
should abstain from all allusion to moral good or evil, as not having
now first to learn, that with diplomatists and with practical
statesmen of every denomination, it would preclude all attention to
its other contents, and have no result but that of securing for its
author's name the official private mark of exclusion or dismission,
as a weak or suspicions person. But among those for whom I am now
writing, there are, I trust, many who will think it not the feeblest
reason for rejoicing in our possession of Malta, and not the least
worthy motive for wishing its retention, that one source of human
misery and corruption has been dried up. Such persons will hear the
name of Sir Alexander Ball with additional reverence, as of one who
has made the protection of Great Britain a double blessing to the
Maltese, and broken "THE BONDS OF INIQUITY" as well as unlocked the
fetters of political oppression.
When we are praising the departed by our own firesides, we dwell most
fondly on those qualities which had won our personal affection, and
which sharpen our individual regrets. But when impelled by a loftier
and more meditative sorrow, we would raise a public monument to their
memory, we praise them appropriately when we relate their actions
faithfully; and thus preserving their example for the imitation of
the living alleviate the loss, while we demonstrate its magnitude.
My funeral eulogy of Sir Alexander Ball must therefore he a narrative
of his life; and this friend of mankind will be defrauded of honour
in proportion as that narrative is deficient and fragmentary. It
shall, however, be as complete as my information enables, and as
prudence and a proper respect for the feelings of the living permit
me to render it. His fame (I adopt the words of our elder writers)
is so great throughout the world that he stands in no need of an
encomium; and yet his worth is much greater these his fame. It is
impossible not to speak great things of him, and yet it will be very
difficult to speak what he deserves. But custom requires that
something should be said; it is a duty and a debt which we owe to
ourselves and to mankind, not less than to his memory; and I hope his
great soul, if it hath any knowledge of what is done here below, will
not be offended at the smallness even of my offering.
Ah, how little, when among the subjects of The Friend I promised
"Characters met with in Real Life," did I anticipate the sad event,
which compels one to weave on a cypress branch those sprays of laurel
which I had destined for his bust, not his monument! He lived as we
should all live; and, I doubt not, left the world as we should all
wish to leave it. Such is the power of dispensing blessings, which
Providence has attached to the truly great and good, that they cannot
even die without advantage to their fellow-creatures; for death
consecrates their example, and the wisdom, which might have been
slighted at the council-table, becomes oracular from the shrine.
Those rare excellences, which make our grief poignant, make it
likewise profitable; and the tears which wise men shed for the
departure of the wise, are among those that are preserved in heaven.
It is the fervent aspiration of my spirit, that I may so perform the
task which private gratitude and public duty impose on me, that "as
God hath cut this tree of paradise down from its seat of earth, the
dead trunk may yet support a part of the declining temple, or at
least serve to kindle the fire on the altar."
ESSAY III.
Si partem tacuisse velim, quodeumque relinquam,
Majus erit. Veteres actus, primamque juventam
Prosequar? Ad sese mentem praesentia ducunt.
Narrem justitiam? Resplendet gloria Martis.
Armati referam vires? Plus egit inermis.
CLAUDIAN DE LAUD. STIL.
(Translations.)--If I desire to pass over a part in silence, whatever
I omit will seem the most worthy to have been recorded. Shall I
pursue his old exploits and early youth? His recent merits recall
the mind to themselves. Shall I dwelt on his justice? The glory of
the warrior rises before me resplendent. Shall I relate his strength
in arms? He performed yet greater things unarmed.
"There is something," says Harrington, in the Preliminaries to the
Oceana, "first in the making of a commonwealth, then in the governing
of it, and last of all in the leading of its armies, which though
there be great divines, great lawyers, great men in all ranks of
life, seems to be peculiar only to the genius of a gentleman. For so
it is in the universal series of history, that if any man has founded
a commonwealth, he was first a gentleman." Such also, he adds, as
have got any fame as civil governors, have been gentlemen, or persons
of known descents. Sir Alexander Ball was a gentleman by birth; a
younger brother of an old and respectable family in Gloucestershire.
He went into the navy at an early age from his own choice, and, as he
himself told me, in consequence of the deep impression and vivid
images left on his mind by the perusal of "Robinson Crusoe." It is
not my intention to detail the steps of his promotion, or the
services in which he was engaged as a subaltern. I recollect many
particulars indeed, but not the dates, with such distinctness as
would enable me to state them (as it would be necessary to do if I
stated them at all) in the order of time. These dates might perhaps
have been procured from the metropolis; but incidents that are
neither characteristic nor instructive, even such as would be
expected with reason in a regular life, are no part of my plan; while
those which are both interesting and illustrative I have been
precluded from mentioning, some from motives which have been already
explained, and others from still higher considerations. The most
important of these may be deduced from a reflection with which he
himself once concluded a long and affecting narration: namely, that
no body of men can for any length of time be safely treated otherwise
than as rational beings; and that, therefore, the education of the
lower classes was of the utmost consequence to the permanent security
of the empire, even for the sake of our navy. The dangers,
apprehended from the education of the lower classes, arose (he said)
entirely from its not being universal, and from the unusualness in
the lowest classes of those accomplishments which he, like Dr. Bell,
regarded as one of the means of education, and not as education
itself. If, he observed, the lower classes in general possessed but
one eye or one arm, the few who were so fortunate as to possess two
would naturally become vain and restless, and consider themselves as
entitled to a higher situation. He illustrated this by the faults
attributed to learned women, and that the same objections were
formerly made to educating women at all; namely, that their knowledge
made them vain, affected, and neglectful of their proper duties. Now
that all women of condition are well educated, we hear no more of
these apprehensions, or observe any instances to justify them. Yet
if a lady understood the Greek one-tenth part as well as the whole
circle of her acquaintances understood the French language, it would
not surprise us to find her less pleasing from the consciousness of
her superiority in the possession of an unusual advantage. Sir
Alexander Ball quoted the speech of an old admiral, one of whose two
great wishes was to have a ship's crew composed altogether of serious
Scotchmen. He spoke with great reprobation of the vulgar notion, the
worse man the better sailor. Courage, he said, was the natural
product of familiarity with danger, which thoughtlessness would
oftentimes turn into fool-hardiness; and that he always found the
most usefully brave sailors the gravest and most rational of his
crew. The best sailor he had ever had, first attracted his notice by
the anxiety which he expressed concerning the means of remitting some
money, which he had received in the West Indies, to his sister in
England; and this man, without any tinge of Methodism, was never
heard to swear an oath, and was remarkable for the firmness with
which he devoted a part of every Sunday to the reading of his Bible.
I record this with satisfaction as a testimony of great weight, and
in all respects unexceptionable; for Sir Alexander Ball's opinions
throughout life remained unwarped by zealotry, and were those of a
mind seeking after truth, in calmness and complete self-possession.
He was much pleased with an unsuspicious testimony furnished by
Dampier (vol. ii. part 2, page 89): "I have particularly observed,"
writes this famous old navigator, "there and in other places, that
such as had been well-bred were generally most careful to improve
their time, and would be very industrious and frugal where there was
any probability of considerable gain; but on the contrary, such as
had been bred up in ignorance and hard labour, when they came to have
plenty would extravagantly squander away their time and money in
drinking and making a bluster." Indeed it is a melancholy proof how
strangely power warps the minds of ordinary men, that there can be a
doubt on this subject among persons who have been themselves
educated. It tempts a suspicion that, unknown to themselves, they
find a comfort in the thought, that their inferiors are something
less than men; or that they have an uneasy half-consciousness that,
if this were not the case, they would themselves have no claim to be
their superiors. For a sober education naturally inspires self-
respect. But he who respects himself will respect others; and he who
respects both himself and others, must of necessity be a brave man.
The great importance of this subject, and the increasing interest
which good men of all denominations feel in the bringing about of a
national education, must be my excuse for having entered so minutely
into Sir Alexander Ball's opinions on this head, in which, however, I
am the more excusable, being now on that part of his life which I am
obliged to leave almost a blank.
During his lieutenancy, and after he had perfected himself in the
knowledge and duties of a practical sailor, he was compelled by the
state of his health to remain in England for a considerable length of
time. Of this he industriously availed himself to the acquirement of
substantial knowledge from books; and during his whole life
afterwards, he considered those as his happiest hours, which, without
any neglect of official or professional duty, he could devote to
reading. He preferred, indeed he almost confined himself to,
history, political economy, voyages and travels, natural history, and
latterly agricultural works; in short, to such books as contain
specific facts or practical principles capable of specific
application. His active life, and the particular objects of
immediate utility, some one of which he had always in his view,
precluded a taste for works of pure speculation and abstract science,
though he highly honoured those who were eminent in these respects,
and considered them as the benefactors of mankind, no less than those
who afterwards discovered the mode of applying their principles, or
who realised them in practice. Works of amusement, as novels, plays,
etc., did not appear even to amuse him; and the only poetical
composition of which I have ever heard him speak, was a manuscript
poem written by one of my friends, which I read to his lady in his
presence. To my surprise he afterwards spoke of this with warm
interest; but it was evident to me that it was not so much the poetic
merit of the composition that had interested him, as the truth and
psychological insight with which it represented the practicability of
reforming the most hardened minds, and the various accidents which
may awaken the most brutalised person to a recognition of his nobler
being. I will add one remark of his own knowledge acquired from
books, which appears to me both just and valuable. The prejudice
against such knowledge, he said, and the custom of opposing it to
that which is learnt by practice, originated in those times when
books were almost confined to theology, and to logical and
metaphysical subtleties; but that at present there is scarcely any
practical knowledge which is not to be found in books. The press is
the means by which intelligent men now converse with each other, and
persons of all classes and all pursuits convey each the contribution
of his individual experience. It was, therefore, he said, as absurd
to hold book-knowledge at present in contempt, as it would be for a
man to avail himself only of his own eyes and ears, and to aim at
nothing which could not be performed exclusively by his own arms.
The use and necessity of personal experience consisted in the power
of choosing and applying what had been read, and of discriminating by
the light of analogy the practicable from the impracticable, and
probability from mere plausibility. Without a judgment matured and
steadied by actual experience, a man would read to little or perhaps
to bad purpose; but yet that experience, which in exclusion of all
other knowledge has been derived from one man's life, is in the
present day scarcely worthy of the name--at least for those who are
to act in the higher and wider spheres of duty. An ignorant general,
he said, inspired him with terror; for if he were too proud to take
advice he would ruin himself by his own blunders, and if he--were
not, by adopting the worst that was offered. A great genius may
indeed form an exception, but we do not lay down rules in expectation
of wonders. A similar remark I remember to have heard from a gallant
officer, who to eminence in professional science and the gallantry of
a tried soldier, adds all the accomplishments of a sound scholar and
the powers of a man of genius.
One incident, which happened at this period of Sir Alexander's life,
is so illustrative of his character, and furnishes so strong a
presumption, that the thoughtful humanity by which he was
distinguished was not wholly the growth of his latter years, that,
though it may appear to some trifling in itself, I will insert it in
this place with the occasion on which it was communicated to me. In
a large party at the Grand Master's palace, I had observed a naval
officer of distinguished merit listening to Sir Alexander Ball,
whenever he joined in the conversation, with so marked a pleasure
that it seemed as if his very voice, independent of what he said, had
been delightful to him; and once, as he fixed his eyes on Sir
Alexander Ball, I could not but notice the mixed expressions of awe
and affection, which gave a more than common interest to so manly a
countenance. During his stay in the island, this officer honoured me
not unfrequently with his visits; and at the conclusion of my last
conversation with him, in which I had dwelt on the wisdom of the
Governor's conduct in a recent and difficult emergency, he told me
that he considered himself as indebted to the same excellent person
for that which was dearer to him than his life. "Sir Alexander
Ball," said he, "has, I dare say, forgotten the circumstance; but
when he was Lieutenant Ball, he was the officer whom I accompanied in
my first boat expedition, being then a midshipman and only in my
fourteenth year. As we were rowing up to the vessel which we were to
attack, amid a discharge of musketry, I was overpowered by fear, my
knees trembled under me, and I seemed on the point of fainting away.
Lieutenant Ball, who saw the condition I was in, placed himself close
beside me, and still keeping his countenance directed toward the
enemy, took hold of my hand, and pressing it in the most friendly
manner, said in a low voice, 'Courage, my dear boy! don't be afraid
of yourself! you will recover in a minute or so. I was just the same
when I first went out in this way.' Sir," added the officer to me,
"it was as if an angel had put a new soul into me. With the feeling
that I was not yet dishonoured, the whole burden of agony was
removed, and from that moment I was as fearless and forward as the
oldest of the boat's crew, and on our return the lieutenant spoke
highly of me to our captain. I am scarcely less convinced of my own
being than that I should have been what I tremble to think of, if,
instead of his humane encouragement, he had at that moment scoffed,
threatened, or reviled me. And this was the more kind in him,
because, as I afterwards understood, his own conduct in his first
trial had evinced to all appearances the greatest fearlessness, and
that he said this, therefore, only to give me heart and restore me to
my own good opinion."
This anecdote, I trust, will have some weight with those who may have
lent an ear to any of those vague calumnies from which no naval
commander can secure his good name, who knowing the paramount
necessity of regularity and strict discipline in a ship of war,
adopts an appropriate plan for the attainment of these objects, and
remains constant and immutable in the execution. To an Athenian,
who, in praising a public functionary, had said, that every one
either applauded him or left him without censure, a philosopher
replied, "How seldom then must he have done his duty!"
Of Sir Alexander Ball's character, as Captain Ball, of his measures
as a disciplinarian, and of the wise and dignified principle on which
he grounded those measures, I have already spoken in a former part of
this work, and must content myself therefore with entreating the
reader to re-peruse that passage as belonging to this place, and as a
part of the present narration. Ah! little did I expect at the time I
wrote that account, that the motives of delicacy, which then impelled
me to withhold the name, would so soon be exchanged for the higher
duty which now justifies me in adding it! At the thought of such
events the language of a tender superstition is the voice of nature
itself, and those facts alone presenting themselves to our memory
which had left an impression on our hearts, we assent to, and adopt
the poet's pathetic complaint:-
O sir! the good die first,
And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
WORDSWORTH.
Thus the humane plan described in the pages now referred to, that a
system in pursuance of which the captain of a man-of-war uniformly
regarded his sentences not as dependent on his own will, or to be
affected by the state of his feelings at the moment, but as the pre-
established determinations of known laws, and himself as the voice of
the law in pronouncing the sentence, and its delegate in enforcing
the execution, could not but furnish occasional food to the spirit of
detraction, must be evident to every reflecting mind. It is indeed
little less than impossible, that he, who in order to be effectively
humane determines to be inflexibly just, and who is inexorable to his
own feelings when they would interrupt the course of justice; who
looks at each particular act by the light of all its consequences,
and as the representative of ultimate good or evil; should not
sometimes be charged with tyranny by weak minds. And it is too
certain that the calumny will be willingly believed and eagerly
propagated by all those who would shun the presence of an eye keen in
the detection of imposture, incapacity, and misconduct, and of a
resolution as steady in their exposure. We soon hate the man whose
qualities we dread, and thus have a double interest, an interest of
passion as well as of policy, in decrying and defaming him. But good
men will rest satisfied with the promise made to them by the Divine
Comforter, that by her children shall Wisdom be justified.
ESSAY IV.
- the generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought:
Whose high endeavours are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright;
Who, doom'd to go in company with pain,
And fear and bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
By objects, which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate.
WORDSWORTH.
At the close of the American war, Captain Ball was entrusted with the
protection and convoying of an immense mercantile fleet to America,
and by his great prudence and unexampled attention to the interests
of all and each, endeared his name to the American merchants, and
laid the foundation of that high respect and predilection which both
the Americans and their government ever afterwards entertained for
him. My recollection does not enable me to attempt any accuracy in
the date or circumstances, or to add the particulars of his services
in the West Indies and on the coast of America, I now therefore
merely allude to the fact with a prospective reference to opinions
and circumstances, which I shall have to mention hereafter. Shortly
after the general peace was established, Captain Ball, who was now a
married man, passed some time with his lady in France, and, if I
mistake not, at Nantes. At the same time, and in the same town,
among the other English visitors, Lord (then Captain) Nelson happened
to be one. In consequence of some punctilio, as to whose business it
was to pay the compliment of the first call, they never met, and this
trifling affair occasioned a coldness between the two naval
commanders, or in truth a mutual prejudice against each other. Some
years after, both their ships being together close off Minorca and
near Port Mahon, a violent storm nearly disabled Lord Nelson's
vessel, and in addition to the fury of the wind, it was night time
and the thickest darkness. Captain Ball, however, brought his vessel
at length to Nelson's assistance, took his ship in tow, and used his
best endeavours to bring her and his own vessel into Port Mahon. The
difficulties and the dangers increased. Nelson considered the case
of his own ship as desperate, and that unless she was immediately
left to her own fate, both vessels would inevitably be lost. He,
therefore, with the generosity natural to him, repeatedly requested
Captain Ball to let him loose; and on Captain Ball's refusal, he
became impetuous, and enforced his demand with passionate threats.
Captain Ball then himself took the speaking-trumpet, which the fury
of the wind and waves rendered necessary, and with great solemnity
and without the least disturbance of temper, called out in reply, "I
feel confident that I can bring you in safe; I therefore must not,
and, by the help of Almighty God, I will not leave you!" What he
promised he performed; and after they were safely anchored, Nelson
came on board of Ball's ship, and embracing him with all the ardour
of acknowledgment, exclaimed, "A friend in need is a friend indeed!"
At this time and on this occasion commenced that firm and perfect
friendship between these two great men, which was interrupted only by
the death of the former. The pleasing task of dwelling on this
mutual attachment I defer to that part of the present sketch which
will relate to Sir Alexander Ball's opinions of men and things. It
will be sufficient for the present to say, that the two men whom Lord
Nelson especially honoured, were Sir Thomas Troubridge and Sir
Alexander Ball; and once, when they were both present, on some
allusion made to the loss of his arm, he replied, "Who shall dare
tell me that I want an arm, when I have three right arms--this
(putting forward his own) and Ball and Troubridge?"
In the plan of the battle of the Nile it was Lord Nelson's design,
that Captains Troubridge and Ball should have led up the attack. The
former was stranded; and the latter, by accident of the wind, could
not bring his ship into the line of battle till some time after the
engagement had become general. With his characteristic forecast and
activity of (which may not improperly be called) practical
imagination, he had made arrangements to meet every probable
contingency. All the shrouds and sails of the ship not absolutely
necessary for its immediate management, were thoroughly wetted, and
so rolled up that they were as hard and as little inflammable as so
many solid cylinders of wood; every sailor had his appropriate place
and function, and a certain number were appointed as the fire-men,
whose sole duty it was to be on the watch if any part of the vessel
should take fire; and to these men exclusively the charge of
extinguishing it was committed. It was already dark when he brought
his ship into action, and laid her alongside L'Orient. One
particular only I shall add to the known account of the memorable
engagement between these ships, and this I received from Sir
Alexander Ball himself. He had previously made a combustible
preparation, but which, from the nature of the engagement to be
expected, he had purposed to reserve for the last emergency. But
just at the time when, from several symptoms, he had every reason to
believe that the enemy would soon strike to him, one of the
lieutenants, without his knowledge, threw in the combustible matter:
and this it was that occasioned the tremendous explosion of that
vessel, which, with the deep silence and interruption of the
engagement which succeeded to it, has been justly deemed the
sublimest war incident recorded in history. Yet the incident which
followed, and which has not, I believe, been publicly made known, is
scarcely less impressive, though its sublimity is of a different
character. At the renewal of the battle, Captain Ball, though his
ship was then on fire in three different parts, laid her alongside a
French eighty-four; and a second longer obstinate contest began. The
firing on the part of the French ship having at length for some time
slackened, and then altogether ceased, and yet no sign given of
surrender, the senior lieutenant came to Captain Ball and informed
him, that the hearts of his men were as good as ever, but that they
were so completely exhausted that they were scarcely capable of
lifting an arm. He asked, therefore, whether, as the enemy had now
ceased firing, the men might be permitted to lie down by their guns
for a short time. After some reflection, Sir Alexander acceded to
the proposal, taking of course the proper precautions to rouse them
again at the moment he thought requisite. Accordingly, with the
exception of himself, his officers, and the appointed watch, the
ship's crew lay down, each in the place to which he was stationed,
and slept for twenty minutes. They were then roused; and started up,
as Sir Alexander expressed it, more like men out of an ambush than
from sleep, so co-instantaneously did they all obey the summons!
They recommenced their fire, and in a few minutes the enemy
surrendered; and it was soon after discovered that during that
interval, and almost immediately after the French ship had first
ceased firing, the crew had sunk down by their guns, and there slept,
almost by the side, as it were, of their sleeping enemy.
ESSAY V.
- Whose powers shed round him in the common strife,
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
But who, if he be call'd upon to face
Same awful moment, to which Heaven has join'd
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a lover, is attired
With sudden brightness like a man inspired;
And through the heat of conflict keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.
WORDSWORTH.
An accessibility to the sentiments of others on subjects of
importance often accompanies feeble minds, yet it is not the less a
true and constituent part of practical greatness, when it exists
wholly free from that passiveness to impression which renders counsel
itself injurious to certain characters, and from that weakness of
heart which, in the literal sense of the word, is always craving
advice. Exempt from all such imperfections, say rather in perfect
harmony with the excellences that preclude them, this openness to the
influxes of good sense and information, from whatever quarter they
might come, equally characterised both Lord Nelson and Sir Alexander
Ball, though each displayed it in the way best suited to his natural
temper. The former with easy hand collected, as it passed by him,
whatever could add to his own stores, appropriated what he could
assimilate, and levied subsidies of knowledge from all the accidents
of social life and familiar intercourse. Even at the jovial board,
and in the height of unrestrained merriment, a casual suggestion,
that flashed a new light on his mind, changed the boon companion into
the hero and the man of genius; and with the most graceful transition
he would make his company as serious as himself. When the taper of
his genius seemed extinguished, it was still surrounded by an
inflammable atmosphere of its own, and rekindled at the first
approach of light, and not seldom at a distance which made it seem to
flame up self-revived. In Sir Alexander Ball, the same excellence
was more an affair of system; and he would listen, even to weak men,
with a patience, which, in so careful an economist of time, always
demanded my admiration, and not seldom excited my wonder. It was one
of his maxims, that a man may suggest what he cannot give; adding,
that a wild or silly plan had more than once, from the vivid sense or
distinct perception of its folly, occasioned him to see what ought to
be done in a new light, or with a clearer insight. There is, indeed,
a hopeless sterility, a mere negation of sense and thought, which,
suggesting neither difference nor contrast, cannot even furnish hints
for recollection. But on the other hand, there are minds so
whimsically constituted, that they may sometimes be profitably
interpreted by contraries, a process of which the great Tycho Brahe
is said to have availed himself in the case of the little Lackwit,
who used to sit and mutter at his feet while he was studying. A mind
of this sort we may compare to a magnetic needle, the poles of which
have been suddenly reversed by a flash of lightning, or other more
obscure accident of nature. It may be safely concluded, that to
those whose judgment or information he respected, Sir Alexander Ball
did not content himself with giving access and attention. No! he
seldom failed of consulting them whenever the subject permitted any
disclosure; and where secrecy was necessary, he well knew how to
acquire their opinion without exciting even a conjecture concerning
his immediate object.
Yet, with all this readiness of attention, and with all this zeal in
collecting the sentiments of the well informed, never was a man more
completely uninfluenced by authority than Sir Alexander Ball, never
one who sought less to tranquillise his own doubts by the mere
suffrage and coincidence of others. The ablest suggestions had no
conclusive weight with him, till he had abstracted the opinion from
its author, till he had reduced it into a part of his own mind. The
thoughts of others were always acceptable, as affording him at least
a chance of adding to his materials for reflection; but they never
directed his judgment, much less superseded it. He even made a point
of guarding against additional confidence in the suggestions of his
own mind, from finding that a person of talents had formed the same
conviction; unless the person, at the same time, furnished some new
argument, or had arrived at the same conclusion by a different road.
On the latter circumstance he set an especial value, and, I may
almost say, courted the company and conversation of those whose
pursuits had least resembled his own, if he thought them men of clear
and comprehensive faculties. During the period of our intimacy,
scarcely a week passed in which he did not desire me to think on some
particular subject, and to give him the result in writing. Most
frequently, by the time I had fulfilled his request he would have
written down his own thoughts; and then, with the true simplicity of
a great mind, as free from ostentation as it was above jealousy, he
would collate the two papers in my presence, and never expressed more
pleasure than in the few instances in which I had happened to light
on all the arguments and points of view which had occurred to
himself, with some additional reasons which had escaped him. A
single new argument delighted him more than the most perfect
coincidence, unless, as before stated, the train of thought had been
very different from his own, and yet just and logical. He had one
quality of mind, which I have heard attributed to the late Mr. Fox,
that of deriving a keen pleasure from clear and powerful reasoning
for its own sake--a quality in the intellect which is nearly
connected with veracity and a love of justice in the moral character.
Valuing in others merits which he himself possessed, Sir Alexander
Ball felt no jealous apprehension of great talent. Unlike those
vulgar functionaries, whose place is too big for them, a truth which
they attempt to disguise from themselves, and yet feel, he was under
no necessity of arming himself against the natural superiority of
genius by factitious contempt and an industrious association of
extravagance and impracticability, with every deviation from the
ordinary routine; as the geographers in the middle ages used to
designate on their meagre maps the greater part of the world as
deserts or wildernesses, inhabited by griffins and chimaeras.
Competent to weigh each system or project by its own arguments, he
did not need these preventive charms and cautionary amulets against
delusion. He endeavoured to make talent instrumental to his purposes
in whatever shape it appeared, and with whatever imperfections it
might be accompanied; but wherever talent was blended with moral
worth, he sought it out, loved and cherished it. If it had pleased
Providence to preserve his life, and to place him on the same course
on which Nelson ran his race of glory, there are two points in which
Sir Alexander Ball would most closely have resembled his illustrious
friend. The first is, that in his enterprises and engagements he
would have thought nothing done, till all had been done that was
possible:-
Nil actum reputans, si quid superesset agendum.
The second, that he would have called forth all the talent and virtue
that existed within his sphere of influence, and created a band of
heroes, a gradation of officers, strong in head and strong in heart,
worthy to have been his companions and his successors in fame and
public usefulness.
Never was greater discernment shown in the selection of a fit agent,
than when Sir Alexander Ball was stationed off the coast of Malta to
intercept the supplies destined for the French garrison, and to watch
the movements of the French commanders, and those of the inhabitants
who had been so basely betrayed into their power. Encouraged by the
well-timed promises of the English captain, the Maltese rose through
all their casals (or country towns) and themselves commenced the work
of their emancipation, by storming the citadel at Civita Vecchia, the
ancient metropolis of Malta, and the central height of the island.
Without discipline, without a military leader, and almost without
arms, these brave peasants succeeded, and destroyed the French
garrison by throwing them over the battlements into the trench of the
citadel. In the course of this blockade, and of the tedious siege of
Valetta, Sir Alexander Ball displayed all that strength of character,
that variety and versatility of talent, and that sagacity, derived in
part from habitual circumspection, but which, when the occasion
demanded it, appeared intuitive and like an instinct; at the union of
which, in the same man, one of our oldest naval commanders once told
me, "he could never exhaust his wonder." The citizens of Valetta
were fond of relating their astonishment, and that of the French, at
Captain Ball's ship wintering at anchor out of the reach of the guns,
in a depth of fathom unexampled, on the assured impracticability of
which the garrison had rested their main hope of regular supplies.
Nor can I forget, or remember without some portion of my original
feeling, the solemn enthusiasm with which a venerable old man,
belonging to one of the distant casals, showed me the sea coombe,
where their father Ball (for so they commonly called him) first
landed, and afterwards pointed out the very place on which he first
stepped on their island; while the countenances of his townsmen, who
accompanied him, gave lively proofs that the old man's enthusiasm was
the representative of the common feeling.
There is no reason to suppose that Sir Alexander Ball was at any time
chargeable with that weakness so frequent in Englishmen, and so
injurious to our interests abroad, of despising the inhabitants of
other countries, of losing all their good qualities in their vices,
of making no allowance for those vices, from their religious or
political impediments, and still more of mistaking for vices a mere
difference of manners and customs. But if ever he had any of this
erroneous feeling, he completely freed himself from it by living
among the Maltese during their arduous trials, as long as the French
continued masters of their capital. He witnessed their virtues, and
learnt to understand in what various shapes and even disguises the
valuable parts of human nature may exist. In many individuals, whose
littleness and meanness in the common intercourse of life would have
stamped them at once as contemptible and worthless, with ordinary
Englishmen, he had found such virtues of disinterested patriotism,
fortitude, and self-denial, as would have done honour to an ancient
Roman.
There exists in England a gentlemanly character, a gentlemanly
feeling, very different even from that which is the most like it, the
character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of
Europe. This feeling probably originated in the fortunate
circumstance, that the titles of our English nobility follow the law
of their property, and are inherited by the eldest sons only. From
this source under the influences of our constitution, and of our
astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in different modifications
through the whole country. The uniformity of our dress among all
classes above that of the day labourer, while it has authorised all
classes to assume the appearance of gentlemen, has at the same time
inspired the wish to conform their manners, and still more their
ordinary actions in social intercourse, to their notions of the
gentlemanly, the most commonly received attribute of which character
is a certain generosity in trifles. On the other hand, the
encroachments of the lower classes on the higher, occasioned, and
favoured by this resemblance in exteriors, by this absence of any
cognisable marks of distinction, have rendered each class more
reserved and jealous in their general communion, and far more than
our climate, or natural temper, have caused that haughtiness and
reserve in our outward demeanour, which is so generally complained of
among foreigners. Far be it from me to depreciate the value of this
gentlemanly feeling: I respect it under all its forms and varieties,
from the House of Commons to the gentleman in the shilling gallery.
It is always the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support; but it
is a wretched substitute for it. Its worth, as a moral good, is by
no means in proportion to its value, as a social advantage. These
observations are not irrelevant; for to the want of reflection, that
this diffusion of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth of
our moral excellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages
peculiar to England; to our not considering that it is unreasonable
and uncharitable to expect the same consequences, where the same
causes have not existed to produce them; and, lastly, to our
proneness to regard the absence of this character (which, as I have
before said, does, for the greater part, and, in the common
apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in the
detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal or
national worth; we must, I am convinced, attribute a large portion of
that conduct, which in many instances has left the inhabitants of
countries conquered or appropriated by Great Britain, doubtful
whether the various solid advantages which they derived from our
protection and just government, were not bought dearly by the wounds
inflicted on their feelings and prejudices by the contemptuous and
insolent demeanour of the English as individuals. The reader who
bears this remark in mind, will meet, in the course of this
narration, more than one passage that will serve as its comment and
illustration.
It was, I know, a general opinion among the English in the
Mediterranean, that Sir Alexander Ball thought too well of the
Maltese, and did not share in the enthusiasm of Britons concerning
their own superiority. To the former part of the charge I shall only
reply at present, that a more venial, and almost desirable fault, can
scarcely be attributed to a governor, than that of a strong
attachment to the people whom he was sent to govern. The latter part
of the charge is false, if we are to understand by it, that he did
not think his countrymen superior on the whole to the other nations
of Europe; but it is true, as far as relates to his belief, that the
English thought themselves still better than they are; that they
dwelt on and exaggerated their national virtues, and weighed them by
the opposite vices of foreigners, instead of the virtues which those
foreigners possessed and they themselves wanted. Above all, as
statesmen, we must consider qualities by their practical uses. Thus,
he entertained no doubt that the English were superior to all others
in the kind and the degree of their courage, which is marked by far
greater enthusiasm than the courage of the Germans and northern
nations, and by a far greater steadiness and self-subsistency than
that of the French. It is more closely connected with the character
of the individual. The courage of an English army (he used to say)
is the sum total of the courage which the individual soldiers bring
with them to it, rather than of that which they derive from it. This
remark of Sir Alexander's was forcibly recalled to my mind when I was
at Naples. A Russian and an English regiment were drawn up together
in the same square: "See," said a Neapolitan to me, who had mistaken
me for one of his countrymen, "there is but one face in that whole
regiment, while in that" (pointing to the English) "every soldier has
a face of his own." On the other hand, there are qualities scarcely
less requisite to the completion of the military character, in which
Sir A. did not hesitate to think the English inferior to the
continental nations; as for instance, both in the power and the
disposition to endure privations; in the friendly temper necessary,
when troops of different nations are to act in concert; in their
obedience to the regulations of their commanding officers, respecting
their treatment of the inhabitants of the countries through which
they are marching, as well as in many other points, not immediately
connected with their conduct in the field: and, above all, in
sobriety and temperance. During the siege of Valetta, especially
during the sore distress to which the besiegers were for some time
exposed from the failure of provision, Sir Alexander Ball had an
ample opportunity of observing and weighing the separate merits and
demerits of the native and of the English troops; and surely since
the publication of Sir John Moore's campaign, there can be no just
offence taken, though I should say, that before the walls of Valetta,
as well as in the plains of Galicia, an indignant commander might,
with too great propriety, have addressed the English soldiery in the
words of an old dramatist -
Will you still owe your virtues to your bellies?
And only then think nobly when y'are full?
Doth fodder keep you honest? Are you bad
When out of flesh? And think you't an excuse
Of vile and ignominious actions, that
Y' are lean and out of liking?
CARTWRIGHT'S Love's Convert.
From the first insurrectionary movement to the final departure of the
French from the island, though the civil and military powers and the
whole of the island, save Valetta, were in the hands of the
peasantry, not a single act of excess can be charged against the
Maltese, if we except the razing of one house at Civita Vecchia
belonging to a notorious and abandoned traitor, the creature and
hireling of the French. In no instance did they injure, insult, or
plunder, any one of the native nobility, or employ even the
appearance of force toward them, except in the collection of the lead
and iron from their houses and gardens, in order to supply themselves
with bullets; and this very appearance was assumed from the generous
wish to shelter the nobles from the resentment of the French, should
the patriotic efforts of the peasantry prove unsuccessful. At the
dire command of famine the Maltese troops did indeed once force their
way to the ovens in which the bread for the British soldiery was
baked, and were clamorous that an equal division should be made. I
mention this unpleasant circumstance, because it brought into proof
the firmness of Sir Alexander Ball's character, his presence of mind,
and generous disregard of danger and personal responsibility, where
the slavery or emancipation, the misery or the happiness, of an
innocent and patriotic people were involved; and because his conduct
in this exigency evinced that his general habits of circumspection
and deliberation were the results of wisdom and complete self-
possession, and not the easy virtues of a spirit constitutionally
timorous and hesitating. He was sitting at table with the principal
British officers, when a certain general addressed him in strong and
violent terms concerning this outrage of the Maltese, reminding him
of the necessity of exerting his commanding influence in the present
case, or the consequences must be taken. "What," replied Sir
Alexander Ball, "would you have us do? Would you have us threaten
death to men dying with famine? Can you suppose that the hazard of
being shot will weigh with whole regiments acting under a common
necessity? Does not the extremity of hunger take away all difference
between men and animals? and is it not as absurd to appeal to the
prudence of a body of men starving, as to a herd of famished wolves?
No, general, I will not degrade myself or outrage humanity by
menacing famine with massacre! More effectual means must be taken."
With these words he rose and left the room, and having first
consulted with Sir Thomas Troubridge, he determined at his own risk
on a step, which the extreme necessity warranted, and which the
conduct of the Neapolitan court amply justified. For this court,
though terror-stricken by the French, was still actuated by hatred to
the English, and a jealousy of their power in the Mediterranean; and
in this so strange and senseless a manner, that we must join the
extremes of imbecility and treachery in the same cabinet, in order to
find it comprehensible. Though the very existence of Naples and
Sicily, as a nation, depended wholly and exclusively on British
support; though the royal family owed their personal safety to the
British fleet; though not only their dominions and their rank, but
the liberty and even the lives of Ferdinand and his family, were
interwoven with our success; yet with an infatuation scarcely
credible, the most affecting representations of the distress of the
besiegers, and of the utter insecurity of Sicily if the French
remained possessors of Malta, were treated with neglect; and the
urgent remonstrances for the permission of importing corn from
Messina, were answered only by sanguinary edicts precluding all
supply. Sir Alexander Ball sent for his senior lieutenant, and gave
him orders to proceed immediately to the port of Messina, and there
to seize and bring with him to Malta the ships laden with corn, of
the number of which Sir Alexander had received accurate information.
These orders were executed without delay, to the great delight and
profit of the shipowners and proprietors; the necessity of raising
the siege was removed; and the author of the measure waited in
calmness for the consequences that might result to himself
personally. But not a complaint, not a murmur, proceeded from the
court of Naples. The sole result was, that the governor of Malta
became an especial object of its hatred, its fear, and its respect.
The whole of this tedious siege, from its commencement to the signing
of the capitulation, called forth into constant activity the rarest
and most difficult virtues of a commanding mind; virtues of no show
or splendour in the vulgar apprehension, yet more infallible
characteristics of true greatness than the most unequivocal displays
of enterprise and active daring. Scarcely a day passed in which Sir
Alexander Ball's patience, forbearance, and inflexible constancy were
not put to the severest trial. He had not only to remove the
misunderstandings that arose between the Maltese and their allies, to
settle the differences among the Maltese themselves, and to organise
their efforts; he was likewise engaged in the more difficult and
unthankful task of counteracting the weariness, discontent, and
despondency of his own countrymen--a task, however, which he
accomplished by management and address, and an alternation of real
firmness with apparent yielding. During many months he remained the
only Englishman who did not think the siege hopeless, and the object
worthless. He often spoke of the time in which he resided at the
country seat of the grand master at St. Antonio, four miles from
Valetta, as perhaps the most trying period of his life. For some
weeks Captain Vivian was his sole English companion, of whom, as his
partner in anxiety, he always expressed himself with affectionate
esteem. Sir Alexander Ball's presence was absolutely necessary to
the Maltese, who, accustomed to be governed by him, became incapable
of acting in concert without his immediate influence. In the
outburst of popular emotion, the impulse which produces an
insurrection, is for a brief while its sufficient pilot: the
attraction constitutes the cohesion, and the common provocation,
supplying an immediate object, not only unites, but directs the
multitude. But this first impulse had passed away, and Sir Alexander
Ball was the one individual who possessed the general confidence. On
him they relied with implicit faith; and even after they had long
enjoyed the blessings of British government and protection, it was
still remarkable with what child-like helplessness they were in the
habit of applying to him, even in their private concerns. It seemed
as if they thought him made on purpose to think for them all. Yet
his situation at St. Antonio was one of great peril; and he
attributed his preservation to the dejection which had now begun to
prey on the spirits of the French garrison, and which rendered them
unenterprising and almost passive, aided by the dread which the
nature of the country inspired. For subdivided as it was into small
fields, scarcely larger than a cottage garden, and each of these
little squares of land inclosed with substantial stone walls; these
too from the necessity of having the fields perfectly level, rising
in tiers above each other; the whole of the inhabited part of the
island was an effective fortification for all the purposes of
annoyance and offensive warfare. Sir Alexander Ball exerted himself
successfully in procuring information respecting the state and temper
of the garrison, and, by the assistance of the clergy and the almost
universal fidelity of the Maltese, contrived that the spies in the
pay of the French should be in truth his own confidential agents. He
had already given splendid proofs that he could outfight them; but
here, and in his after diplomatic intercourse previous to the
recommencement of the war, he likewise outwitted them. He once told
me with a smile, as we were conversing on the practice of laying
wagers, that he was sometimes inclined to think that the final
perseverance in the siege was not a little indebted to several
valuable bets of his own, he well knowing at the time, and from
information which himself alone possessed, that he should certainly
lose them. Yet this artifice had a considerable effect in suspending
the impatience of the officers, and in supplying topics for dispute
and conversation. At length, however, the two French frigates, the
sailing of which had been the subject of these wagers, left the great
harbour on the 24th of August, 1800, with a part of the garrison:
and one of them soon became a prize to the English. Sir Alexander
Ball related to me the circumstances which occasioned the escape of
the other; but I do not recollect them with sufficient accuracy to
dare repeat them in this place. On the 15th of September following,
the capitulation was signed, and after a blockade of two years the
English obtained possession of Valetta, and remained masters of the
whole island and its dependencies.
Anxious not to give offence, but more anxious to communicate the
truth, it is not without pain that I find myself under the moral
obligation of remonstrating against the silence concerning Sir
Alexander Ball's services or the transfer of them to others. More
than once has the latter aroused my indignation in the reported
speeches of the House of Commons: and as to the former, I need only
state that in Rees's Encyclopaedia there is an historical article of
considerable length under the word Malta, in which Sir Alexander's
name does not once occur! During a residence of eighteen months in
that island, I possessed and availed myself of the best possible
means of information, not only from eye-witnesses, but likewise from
the principal agents themselves. And I now thus publicly and
unequivocally assert, that to Sir A. Ball pre-eminently--and if I had
said, to Sir A. Ball alone, the ordinary use of the word under such
circumstances would bear me out--the capture and the preservation of
Malta were owing, with every blessing that a powerful mind and a wise
heart could confer on its docile and grateful inhabitants. With a
similar pain I proceed to avow my sentiments on this capitulation, by
which Malta was delivered up to his Britannic Majesty and his allies,
without the least mention made of the Maltese. With a warmth
honourable both to his head and his heart, Sir Alexander Ball
pleaded, as not less a point of sound policy than of plain justice,
that the Maltese, by some representative, should be made a party in
the capitulation, and a joint subscriber in the signature. They had
never been the slaves or the property of the Knights of St. John, but
freemen and the true landed proprietors of the country, the civil and
military government of which, under certain restrictions, had been
vested in that Order; yet checked by the rights and influences of the
clergy and the native nobility, and by the customs and ancient laws
of the island. This trust the Knights had, with the blackest treason
and the most profligate perjury, betrayed and abandoned. The right
of government of course reverted to the landed proprietors and the
clergy. Animated by a just sense of this right, the Maltese had
risen of their own accord, had contended for it in defiance of death
and danger, had fought bravely, and endured patiently. Without
undervaluing the military assistance afterwards furnished by Great
Britain (though how scanty this was before the arrival of General
Pigot is well known), it remains undeniable, that the Maltese had
taken the greatest share both in the fatigues and in the privations
consequent on the siege; and that had not the greatest virtues and
the most exemplary fidelity been uniformly displayed by them, the
English troops (they not being more numerous than they had been for
the greater part of the two years) could not possibly have remained
before the fortifications of Valetta, defended as that city was by a
French garrison that greatly outnumbered the British besiegers.
Still less could there have been the least hope of ultimate success;
as if any part of the Maltese peasantry had been friendly to the
French, or even indifferent, if they had not all indeed been most
zealous and persevering in their hostility towards them, it would
have been impracticable so to blockade that island as to have
precluded the arrival of supplies. If the siege had proved
unsuccessful, the Maltese were well aware that they should be exposed
to all the horrors which revenge and wounded pride could dictate to
an unprincipled, rapacious, and sanguinary soldiery; and now that
success has crowned their efforts, is this to be their reward, that
their own allies are to bargain for them with the French as for a
herd of slaves, whom the French had before purchased from a former
proprietor? If it be urged, that there is no established government
in Malta, is it not equally true that through the whole population of
the island there is not a single dissentient? and thus that the chief
inconvenience which an established authority is to obviate is
virtually removed by the admitted fact of their unanimity? And have
they not a bishop, and a dignified clergy, their judges and municipal
magistrates, who were at all times sharers in the power of the
government, and now, supported by the unanimous suffrage of the
inhabitants, have a rightful claim to be considered as its
representatives? Will it not be oftener said than answered, that the
main difference between French and English injustice rests in this
point alone, that the French seized on the Maltese without any
previous pretences of friendship, while the English procured
possession of the island by means of their friendly promises, and by
the co-operation of the natives afforded in confident reliance on
these promises? The impolicy of refusing the signature on the part
of the Maltese was equally evident; since such refusal could answer
no one purpose but that of alienating their affections by a wanton
insult to their feelings. For the Maltese were not only ready but
desirous and eager to place themselves at the same time under British
protection, to take the oaths of loyalty as subjects of the British
Crown, and to acknowledge their island to belong to it. These
representations, however, were overruled; and I dare affirm from my
own experience in the Mediterranean, that our conduct in this
instance, added to the impression which had been made at Corsica,
Minorca, and elsewhere, and was often referred to by men of
reflection in Sicily, who have more than once said to me, "A
connection with Great Britain, with the consequent extension and
security of our commerce, are indeed great blessings: but who can
rely on their permanence? or that we shall not be made to pay
bitterly for our zeal as partisans of England, whenever it shall suit
its plans to deliver us back to our old oppressors?"
ESSAY VI.
"The way of ancient ordinance, though it winds,
Is yet no devious way. Straight forward goes
The lightning's path; and straight the fearful path
Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid,
Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches.
My son! the road the human being travels,
That, on which blessing comes and goes, doth follow
The river's course, the valley's playful windings,
Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines,
Honouring the holy bounds of property!
There exists
A higher than the warrior's excellence."
WALLENSTEIN.
Captain Ball's services in Malta were honoured with his sovereign's
approbation, transmitted in a letter from the Secretary Dundas, and
with a baronetcy. A thousand pounds were at the same time directed
to be paid him from the Maltese treasury. The best and most
appropriate addition to the applause of his king and his country, Sir
Alexander Ball found in the feelings and faithful affection of the
Maltese. The enthusiasm manifested in reverential gestures and
shouts of triumph whenever their friend and deliverer appeared in
public, was the utterance of a deep feeling, and in nowise the mere
ebullition of animal sensibility; which is not indeed a part of the
Maltese character. The truth of this observation will not be doubted
by any person who has witnessed the religious processions in honour
of the favourite saints, both at Valetta and at Messina or Palermo,
and who must have been struck with the contrast between the apparent
apathy, or at least the perfect sobriety of the Maltese, and the
fanatical agitations of the Sicilian populace. Among the latter each
man's soul seems hardly containable in his body, like a prisoner
whose gaol is on fire, flying madly from one barred outlet to
another; while the former might suggest the suspicion that their
bodies were on the point of sinking into the same slumber with their
understandings. But their political deliverance was a thing that
came home to their hearts, and intertwined with their most
impassioned recollections, personal and patriotic. To Sir Alexander
Ball exclusively the Maltese themselves attributed their
emancipation; on him too they rested their hopes of the future.
Whenever he appeared in Valetta, the passengers on each side, through
the whole length of the street, stopped, and remained uncovered till
he had passed; the very clamours of the market-place were hushed at
his entrance, and then exchanged for shouts of joy and welcome. Even
after the lapse of years he never appeared in any one of their
casals, which did not lie in the direct road between Valetta and St.
Antonio, his summer residence, but the women and children, with such
of the men who were not at labour in their fields, fell into ranks
and followed or preceded him, singing the Maltese song which had been
made in his honour, and which was scarcely less familiar to the
inhabitants of Malta and Gozo than "God save the King" to Britons.
When he went to the gate through the city, the young men refrained
talking, and the aged arose and stood up. When the ear heard then it
blessed him, and when the eye saw him it gave witness to him, because
he delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and those that
had none to help them. The blessing of them that were ready to
perish came upon him, and he caused the widow's heart to sing for
joy.
These feelings were afterwards amply justified by his administration
of the government; and the very excesses of their gratitude on their
first deliverance proved, in the end, only to be acknowledgments
antedated. For some time after the departure of the French, the
distress was so general and so severe, that a large proportion of the
lower classes became mendicants, and one of the greatest
thoroughfares of Valetta still retains the name of the "Nix mangiare
stairs," from the crowd who used there to assail the ears of the
passengers with cries of "nix mangiare," or "nothing to eat," the
former word nix being the low German pronunciation of nichts,
nothing. By what means it was introduced into Malta, I know not; but
it became the common vehicle both of solicitation and refusal, the
Maltese thinking it an English word, and the English supposing it to
be Maltese. I often felt it as a pleasing remembrancer of the evil
day gone by, when a tribe of little children, quite naked, as is the
custom of that climate, and each with a pair of gold earrings in its
ears, and all fat and beautifully proportioned, would suddenly leave
their play, and, looking round to see that their parents were not in
sight, change their shouts of merriment for "nix mangiare," awkwardly
imitating the plaintive tones of mendicancy; while the white teeth in
their little swarthy faces gave a splendour to the happy and
confessing laugh with which they received the good-humoured rebuke or
refusal, and ran back to their former sport.
In the interim between the capitulation of the French garrison and
Sir Alexander Ball's appointment as His Majesty's civil commissioner
for Malta, his zeal for the Maltese was neither suspended nor
unproductive of important benefits. He was enabled to remove many
prejudices and misunderstandings, and to persons of no inconsiderable
influence gave juster notions of the true importance of the island to
Great Britain. He displayed the magnitude of the trade of the
Mediterranean in its existing state; showed the immense extent to
which it might be carried, and the hollowness of the opinion that
this trade was attached to the south of France by any natural or
indissoluble bond of connection. I have some reason for likewise
believing that his wise and patriotic representations prevented Malta
from being made the seat of and pretext for a numerous civil
establishment, in hapless imitation of Corsica, Ceylon, and the Cape
of Good Hope. It was at least generally rumoured that it had been in
the contemplation of the Ministry to appoint Sir Ralph Abercrombie as
governor, with a salary of 10,000 pounds a year, and to reside in
England, while one of his countrymen was to be the lieutenant-
governor at 5,000 pounds a year, to which were to be added a long
etcetera of other offices and places of proportional emolument. This
threatened appendix to the State Calendar may have existed only in
the imaginations of the reporters, yet inspired some uneasy
apprehensions in the minds of many well-wishers to the Maltese, who
knew that--for a foreign settlement at least, and one, too,
possessing in all the ranks and functions of society an ample
population of its own--such a stately and wide-branching tree of
patronage, though delightful to the individuals who are to pluck its
golden apples, sheds, like the manchineel, unwholesome and corrosive
dews on the multitude who are to rest beneath its shade. It need
not, however, be doubted, that Sir Alexander Ball would exert himself
to preclude any such intention, by stating and evincing the extreme
impolicy and injustice of the plan, as well as its utter inutility in
the case of Malta. With the exception of the governor and of the
public secretary, both of whom undoubtedly should be natives of Great
Britain and appointed by the British Government, there was no civil
office that could be of the remotest advantage to the island which
was not already filled by the natives, and the functions of which
none could perform so well as they. The number of inhabitants (he
would state) was prodigious compared with the extent of the island,
though from the fear of the Moors one-fourth of its surface remained
unpeopled and uncultivated. To deprive, therefore, the middle and
lower classes of such places as they had been accustomed to hold,
would be cruel; while the places held by the nobility were, for the
greater part such as none but natives could perform the duties of.
By any innovation we should affront the higher classes and alienate
the affections of all, not only without any imaginable advantage but
with the certainty of great loss. Were Englishmen to be employed,
the salaries must be increased fourfold, and would yet be scarcely
worth acceptance; and in higher offices, such as those of the civil
and criminal judges, the salaries must be augmented more than
tenfold. For, greatly to the credit of their patriotism and moral
character, the Maltese gentry sought these places as honourable
distinctions, which endeared them to their fellow-countrymen, and at
the same time rendered the yoke of the Order somewhat less grievous
and galling. With the exception of the Maltese secretary, whose
situation was one of incessant labour, and who at the same time
performed the duties of law counsellor to the Government, the highest
salaries scarcely exceeded 100 pounds a year, and were barely
sufficient to defray the increased expenses of the functionaries for
an additional equipage, or one of more imposing appearance. Besides,
it was of importance that the person placed at the head of that
Government should be looked up to by the natives, and possess the
means of distinguishing and rewarding those who had been most
faithful and zealous in their attachment to Great Britain, and
hostile to their former tyrants. The number of the employments to be
conferred would give considerable influence to His Majesty's civil
representative, while the trifling amount of the emolument attached
to each precluded all temptation of abusing it.
Sir Alexander Ball would likewise, it is probable, urge, that the
commercial advantages of Malta, which were most intelligible to the
English public, and best fitted to render our retention of the island
popular, must necessarily be of very slow growth, though finally they
would become great, and of an extent not to be calculated. For this
reason, therefore, it was highly desirable that the possession should
be, and appear to be, at least inexpensive. After the British
Government had made one advance for a stock of corn sufficient to
place the island a year beforehand, the sum total drawn from Great
Britain need not exceed 25,000 pounds, or at most 30,000 pounds
annually: excluding of course the expenditure connected with our own
military and navy, and the repair of the fortifications, which latter
expense ought to be much less than at Gibraltar, from the multitude
and low wages of the labourers in Malta, and from the softness and
admirable quality of the stone. Indeed much more might safely be
promised on the assumption that a wise and generous system of policy
were adopted and persevered in. The monopoly of the Maltese corn-
trade by the Government formed an exception to a general rule, and by
a strange, yet valid anomaly in the operations of political economy,
was not more necessary than advantageous to the inhabitants. The
chief reason is, that the produce of the island itself barely
suffices for one-fourth of its inhabitants, although fruits and
vegetables form so large a part of their nourishment. Meantime the
harbours of Malta, and its equidistance from Europe, Asia, and
Africa, gave it a vast and unnatural importance in the present
relations of the great European powers, and imposed on its
government, whether native or dependent, the necessity of considering
the whole island as a single garrison, the provisioning of which
could not be trusted to the casualties of ordinary commerce. What is
actually necessary is seldom injurious. Thus in Malta bread is
better and cheaper on an average than in Italy or the coast of
Barbary; while a similar interference with the corn-trade in Sicily
impoverishes the inhabitants, and keeps the agriculture in a state of
barbarism. But the point in question is the expense to Great
Britain. Whether the monopoly be good or evil in itself, it remains
true, that in this established usage, and in the gradual enclosure of
the uncultivated district, such resources exist as without the least
oppression might render the civil government in Valetta independent
of the Treasury at home, finally taking upon itself even the repair
of the fortifications, and thus realise one instance of an important
possession that cost the country nothing.
But now the time arrived which threatened to frustrate the patriotism
of the Maltese themselves, and all the zealous efforts of their
disinterested friend. Soon after the war had for the first time
become indisputably just and necessary, the people at large and a
majority of independent senators, incapable, as it might seem, of
translating their fanatical anti-Jacobinism into a well-grounded, yet
equally impassioned, anti-Gallicanism, grew impatient for peace, or
rather for a name, under which the most terrific of all wars would be
incessantly waged against us. Our conduct was not much wiser than
that of the weary traveller, who having proceeded half way on his
journey, procured a short rest for himself by getting up behind a
chaise which was going the contrary road. In the strange treaty of
Amiens, in which we neither recognised our former relations with
France nor with the other European powers, nor formed any new ones,
the compromise concerning Malta formed the prominent feature; and its
nominal re-delivery to the Order of St. John was authorised, in the
minds of the people, by Lord Nelson's opinion of its worthlessness to
Great Britain in a political or naval view. It is a melancholy fact,
and one that must often sadden a reflective and philanthropic mind,
how little moral considerations weigh even with the noblest nations,
how vain are the strongest appeals to justice, humanity, and national
honour, unless when the public mind is under the immediate influence
of the cheerful or vehement passions, indignation or avaricious hope.
In the whole class of human infirmities there is none that make such
loud appeals to prudence, and yet so frequently outrages its plainest
dictates, as the spirit of fear. The worst cause conducted in hope
is an overmatch for the noblest managed by despondency; in both
cases, an unnatural conjunction that recalls the old fable of Love
and Death, taking each the arrows of the other by mistake. When
islands that had courted British protection in reliance upon British
honour, are with their inhabitants and proprietors abandoned to the
resentment which we had tempted them to provoke, what wonder, if the
opinion becomes general, that alike to England as to France, the
fates and fortunes of other nations are but the counters, with which
the bloody game of war is played; and that notwithstanding the great
and acknowledged difference between the two Governments during
possession, yet the protection of France is more desirable because it
is more likely to endure? for what the French take, they keep. Often
both in Sicily and Malta have I heard the case of Minorca referred
to, where a considerable portion of the most respectable gentry and
merchants (no provision having been made for their protection on the
re-delivery of that island to Spain) expiated in dungeons the warmth
and forwardness of their predilection for Great Britain.
It has been by some persons imagined, that Lord Nelson was
considerably influenced, in his public declaration concerning the
value of Malta, by ministerial flattery, and his own sense of the
great serviceableness of that opinion to the persons in office. This
supposition is, however, wholly false and groundless. His lordship's
opinion was indeed greatly shaken afterwards, if not changed; but at
that time he spoke in strictest correspondence with his existing
convictions. He said no more than he had often previously declared
to his private friends: it was the point on which, after some
amicable controversy, his lordship and Sir Alexander Ball had "agreed
to differ." Though the opinion itself may have lost the greatest
part of its interest, and except for the historian is, as it were,
superannuated; yet the grounds and causes of it, as far as they arose
out of Lord Nelson's particular character, and may perhaps tend to
re-enliven our recollection of a hero so deeply and justly beloved,
will for ever possess an interest of their own. In an essay, too,
which purports to be no more than a series of sketches and fragments,
the reader, it is hoped, will readily excuse an occasional
digression, and a more desultory style of narration than could be
tolerated in a work of regular biography.
Lord Nelson was an admiral every inch of him. He looked at
everything, not merely in its possible relations to the naval service
in general, but in its immediate bearings on his own squadron; to his
officers, his men, to the particular ships themselves, his affections
were as strong and ardent as those of a lover. Hence, though his
temper was constitutionally irritable and uneven, yet never was a
commander so enthusiastically loved by men of all ranks, from the
captain of the fleet to the youngest ship-boy. Hence, too, the
unexampled harmony which reigned in his fleet, year after year, under
circumstances that might well have undermined the patience of the
best-balanced dispositions, much more of men with the impetuous
character of British sailors. Year after year, the same dull duties
of a wearisome blockade, of doubtful policy--little, if any,
opportunity of making prizes; and the few prizes, which accident
might throw in the way, of little or no value; and when at last the
occasion presented itself which would have compensated for all, then
a disappointment as sudden and unexpected as it was unjust and cruel,
and the cup dashed from their lips! Add to these trials the sense of
enterprises checked by feebleness and timidity elsewhere, not
omitting the tiresomeness of the Mediterranean sea, sky, and climate;
and the unjarring and cheerful spirit of affectionate brotherhood,
which linked together the hearts of that whole squadron, will appear
not less wonderful to us than admirable and affecting. When the
resolution was taken of commencing hostilities against Spain, before
any intelligence was sent to Lord Nelson, another admiral, with two
or three ships of the line, was sent into the Mediterranean, and
stationed before Cadiz, for the express purpose of intercepting the
Spanish prizes. The admiral despatched on this lucrative service
gave no information to Lord Nelson of his arrival in the same sea,
and five weeks elapsed before his lordship became acquainted with the
circumstance. The prizes thus taken were immense. A month or two
sufficed to enrich the commander and officers of this small and
highly-favoured squadron; while to Nelson and his fleet the sense of
having done their duty, and the consciousness of the glorious
services which they had performed, were considered, it must be
presumed, as an abundant remuneration for all their toils and long
suffering! It was, indeed, an unexampled circumstance, that a small
squadron should be sent to the station which had been long occupied
by a large fleet, commanded by the darling of the navy, and the glory
of the British empire, to the station where this fleet had for years
been wearing away in the most barren, repulsive, and spirit-trying
service, in which the navy can be employed! and that this minor
squadron should be sent independently of, and without any
communication with the commander of the former fleet, for the express
and solitary purpose of stepping between it and the Spanish prizes,
and as soon as this short and pleasant service was performed, of
bringing home the unshared booty with all possible caution and
despatch. The substantial advantages of naval service were, perhaps,
deemed of too gross a nature for men already rewarded with the
grateful affections of their own countrymen, and the admiration of
the whole world! They were to be awarded, therefore, on a principle
of compensation to a commander less rich in fame, and whose laurels,
though not scanty, were not yet sufficiently luxuriant to hide the
golden crown which is the appropriate ornament of victory in the
bloodless war of commercial capture! Of all the wounds which were
ever inflicted on Nelson's feelings (and there were not a few), this
was the deepest--this rankled most! "I had thought" (said the
gallant man, in a letter written on the first feelings of the
affront), "I fancied--but nay, it must have been a dream, an idle
dream--yet, I confess it, I did fancy, that I had done my country
service--and thus they use me. It was not enough to have robbed me
once before of my West India harvest--now they have taken away the
Spanish--and under what circumstances, and with what pointed
aggravations? Yet, if I know my own thoughts, it is not for myself,
or on my own account chiefly, that I feel the sting, and the
disappointment; no! it is for my brave officers; for my noble-minded
friends and comrades--such a gallant set of fellows! such a hand of
brothers! My heart swells at the thought of them!"
This strong attachment of the heroic admiral to his fleet, faithfully
repaid by an equal attachment on their part to their admiral, had no
little influence in attuning their hearts to each other; and when he
died, it seemed as if no man was a stranger to another; for all were
made acquaintances by the rights of a common anguish. In the fleet
itself, many a private quarrel was forgotten, no more to be
remembered; many, who had been alienated, became once more good
friends; yea, many a one was reconciled to his very enemy, and loved
and (as it were) thanked him for the bitterness of his grief, as if
it had been an act of consolation to himself in an intercourse of
private sympathy. The tidings arrived at Naples on the day that I
returned to that city from Calabria; and never can I forget the
sorrow and consternation that lay on every countenance. Even to this
day there are times when I seem to see, as in a vision, separate
groups and individual faces of the picture. Numbers stopped and
shook hands with me because they had seen the tears on my cheek, and
conjectured that I was an Englishman; and several, as they held my
hand, burst themselves into tears. And though it may awake a smile,
yet it pleased and affected me, as a proof of the goodness of the
human heart struggling to exercise its kindness in spite of
prejudices the most obstinate, and eager to carry on its love and
honour into the life beyond life, that it was whispered about Naples,
that Lord Nelson had become a good Catholic before his death. The
absurdity of the fiction is a sort of measurement of the fond and
affectionate esteem which had ripened the pious wish of some kind
individual, through all the gradations of possibility and
probability, into a confident assertion, believed and affirmed by
hundreds. The feelings of Great Britain on this awful event have
been described well and worthily by a living poet, who has happily
blended the passion and wild transitions of lyric song with the swell
and solemnity of epic narration.
"--Thou art fall'n! fall'n, in the lap
Of victory. To thy country thou cam'st back,
Thou, conqueror, to triumphal Albion cam'st
A corse! I saw before thy hearse pass on
The comrades of thy perils and renown.
The frequent tear upon their dauntless breasts
Fell. I beheld the pomp thick gathered round
The trophied car that bore thy graced remains
Through armed ranks, and a nation gazing on.
Bright glowed the sun, and not a cloud distained
Heaven's arch of gold, but all was gloom beneath.
A holy and unutterable pang
Thrilled on the soul. Awe and mute anguish fell
On all.--Yet high the public bosom throbbed
With triumph. And if one, 'mid that vast pomp,
If but the voice of one had shouted forth
The name of NELSON, thou hadst past along,
Thou in thy hearse to burial past, as oft
Before the van of battle, proudly rode
Thy prow, down Britain's line, shout after shout
Rending the air with triumph, ere thy hand
Had lanced the bolt of victory."
SOTHEBY (Saul, p. 80).
I introduced this digression with an apology, yet have extended it so
much further than I had designed, that I must once more request my
reader to excuse me. It was to be expected (I have said) that Lord
Nelson would appreciate the isle of Malta from its relations to the
British fleet on the Mediterranean station. It was the fashion of
the day to style Egypt the key of India, and Malta the key of Egypt.
Nelson saw the hollowness of this metaphor; or if he only doubted its
applicability in the former instance, he was sure that it was false
in the latter. Egypt might or might not be the key of India, but
Malta was certainly not the key of Egypt. It was not intended to
keep constantly two distinct fleets in that sea; and the largest
naval force at Malta would not supersede the necessity of a squadron
off Toulon. Malta does not lie in the direct course from Toulon to
Alexandria; and from the nature of the winds (taking one time with
another) the comparative length of the voyage to the latter port will
be found far less than a view of the map would suggest, and in truth
of little practical importance. If it were the object of the French
fleet to avoid Malta in its passage to Egypt, the port-admiral at
Valetta would in all probability receive his first intelligence of
its course from Minorca or the squadron off Toulon, instead of
communicating it. In what regards the refitting and provisioning of
the fleet, either on ordinary or extraordinary occasions, Malta was
as inconvenient as Minorca was advantageous, not only from its
distance (which yet was sufficient to render it almost useless in
cases of the most pressing necessity, as after a severe action or
injuries of tempest), but likewise from the extreme difficulty, if
not impracticability of leaving the harbour of Valetta with a NW.
wind, which often lasts for weeks together. In all these points his
lordship's observations were perfectly just; and it must be conceded
by all persons acquainted with the situation and circumstances of
Malta, that its importance, as a British possession, if not
exaggerated on the whole, was unduly magnified in several important
particulars. Thus Lord Minto, in a speech delivered at a county
meeting, and afterwards published, affirms, that supposing (what no
one could consider as unlikely to take place) that the court of
Naples should be compelled to act under the influence of France, and
that the Barbary powers were unfriendly to us, either in consequence
of French intrigues or from their own caprice and insolence, there
would not be a single port, harbour, bay, creek, or roadstead in the
whole Mediterranean, from which our men-of-war could obtain a single
ox or a hogshead of fresh water, unless Great Britain retained
possession of Malta. The noble speaker seems not to have been aware,
that under the circumstances supposed by him, Odessa too being closed
against us by a Russian war, the island of Malta itself would be no
better than a vast almshouse of 75,000 persons, exclusive of the
British soldiery, all of whom must be regularly supplied with corn
and salt meat from Great Britain or Ireland. The population of Malta
and Gozo exceeds 100,000, while the food of all kinds produced on the
two islands would barely suffice for one-fourth of that number. The
deficit is procured by the growth and spinning of cotton, for which
corn could not be substituted from the nature of the soil, or, were
it attempted, would produce but a small proportion of the quantity
which the cotton raised on the same fields and spun into thread,
enables the Maltese to purchase, not to mention that the substitution
of grain for cotton would leave half of the inhabitants without
employment. As to live stock, it is quite out of the question, if we
except the pigs and goats, which perform the office of scavengers in
the streets of Valetta and the towns on the other side of the Porto
Grande.
Against these arguments Sir A. Ball placed the following
considerations. It had been long his conviction that the
Mediterranean squadron should be supplied by regular store-ships, the
sole business of which should be that of carriers for the fleet.
This he recommended as by far the most economic plan in the first
instance. Secondly, beyond any other it would secure a system and
regularity in the arrival of supplies. And, lastly, it would conduce
to the discipline of the navy, and prevent both ships and officers
from being out of the way on any sudden emergency. If this system
were introduced, the objections to Malta, from its great distance,
&c., would have little force. On the other hand, the objections to
Minorca he deemed irremovable. The same disadvantages which attended
the getting out of the harbour of Valetta, applied to vessels getting
into Port Mahon; but while fifteen hundred or two thousand British
troops might be safely entrusted with the preservation of Malta, the
troops for the defence of Minorca must ever be in proportion to those
which the enemy may be supposed likely to send against it. It is so
little favoured by nature or by art, that the possessors stood merely
on the level with the invaders. Caeteris paribus, if there 12,000 of
the enemy landed, there must be an equal number to repel them; nor
could the garrison, or any part of it, be spared for any sudden
emergency without risk of losing the island. Previously to the
battle of Marengo, the most earnest representations were made to the
governor and commander at Minorca by the British admiral, who offered
to take on himself the whole responsibility of the measure, if he
would permit the troops at Minorca to join our allies. The governor
felt himself compelled to refuse his assent. Doubtless, he acted
wisely, for responsibility is not transferable. The fact is
introduced in proof of the defenceless state of Minorca, and its
constant liability to attack. If the Austrian army had stood in the
same relation to eight or nine thousand British soldiers at Malta, a
single regiment would have precluded all alarms as to the island
itself, and the remainder have perhaps changed the destiny of Europe.
What might not, almost I would say, what must not eight thousand
Britons have accomplished at the battle of Marengo, nicely poised as
the fortunes of the two armies are now known to have been? Minorca,
too, is alone useful or desirable during a war, and on the
supposition of a fleet off Toulon. The advantages of Malta are
permanent and national. As a second Gibraltar it must tend to secure
Gibraltar itself; for if by the loss of that one place we could be
excluded from the Mediterranean, it is difficult to say what
sacrifices of blood and treasure the enemy would deem too high a
price for its conquest. Whatever Malta may or may not be respecting
Egypt, its high importance to the independence of Sicily cannot be
doubted, or its advantages as a central station, for any portion of
our disposable force. Neither is the influence which it will enable
us to exert on the Barbary powers to be wholly neglected. I shall
only add, that during the plague at Gibraltar, Lord Nelson himself
acknowledged that he began to see the possession of Malta in a
different light.
Sir Alexander Ball looked forward to future contingencies as likely
to increase the value of Malta to Great Britain. He foresaw that the
whole of Italy would become a French province, and he knew that the
French Government had been long intriguing on the coast of Barbary.
The Dey of Algiers was believed to have accumulated a treasure of
fifteen millions sterling, and Buonaparte had actually duped him into
a treaty, by which the French were to be permitted to erect a fort on
the very spot where the ancient Hippo stood, the choice between which
and the Hellespont, as the site of New Rome, is said to have
perplexed the judgment of Constantine. To this he added an
additional point of connection with Russia, by means of Odessa, and
on the supposition of a war in the Baltic, a still more interesting
relation to Turkey, and the Mores, and the Greek islands. It had
been repeatedly signified to the British Government, that from the
Morea and the countries adjacent, a considerable supply of ship
timber and naval stores might be obtained, such as would at least
greatly lessen the pressure of a Russian war. The agents of France
were in full activity in the Morea and the Greek islands, the
possession of which, by that Government, would augment the naval
resources of the French to a degree of which few are aware who have
not made the present state of commerce of the Greeks an object of
particular attention. In short, if the possession of Malta were
advantageous to England solely as a convenient watch-tower, as a
centre of intelligence, its importance would be undeniable.
Although these suggestions did not prevent the signing away of Malta
at the peace of Amiens, they doubtless were not without effect, when
the ambition of Buonaparte had given a full and final answer to the
grand question: can we remain at peace with France? I have likewise
reason to believe that Sir Alexander Ball, baffled, by exposing an
insidious proposal of the French Government, during the negotiations
that preceded the recommencement of the war--that the fortifications
of Malta should be entirely dismantled, and the island left to its
inhabitants. Without dwelling on the obvious inhumanity and
flagitious injustice of exposing the Maltese to certain pillage and
slavery from their old and inveterate enemies, the Moors, he showed
that the plan would promote the interests of Buonaparte even more
than his actual possession of the island, which France had no
possible interest in desiring, except as the means of keeping it out
of the hands of Great Britain.
But Sir Alexander Ball is no more. The writer still clings to the
hope that he may yet be able to record his good deeds more fully and
regularly; that then, with a sense of comfort, not without a subdued
exultation, he may raise heavenward from his honoured tomb the
glistening eye of an humble, but ever grateful Friend.
End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc.