Proverbial Philosophy / The First and Second Series

by Unknown

OF MYSTERY.

All things being are in mystery; we expound mysteries by mysteries;

And yet the secret of them all is one in simple grandeur:

All intricate, yet each path plain, to those who know the way;

All unapproachable, yet easy of access, to them that hold the key:

We walk among labyrinths of wonder, but thread the mazes with a clue;

We sail in chartless seas, but behold! the pole-star is above us.

For, counting down from God's good will, thou meltest every riddle into Him,

The axiom of reason is an undiscovered God, and all things live in His ubiquity:

There is only one great secret; but that one hideth everywhere;

How should the infinite be understood in Time, when it stretcheth on ungrasped for ever?

Can a halting Œdipus of earth guess that enigma of the universe?

Not one: the sword of faith must cut the Gordian knot of nature.

God, pervading all, is in all things the mystery of each;

The wherefore of its character and essence, the fountain of its virtues and its beauties.

The child asketh of its mother,—Wherefore is the violet so sweet?

The mother answereth her babe,—Darling, God hath willed it.

And sages, diving into science, have but a profundity of words;

They track for some few links the circling chain of consequence,

And then, after doubts and disputations, are left where they began,

At the bald conclusion of a clown, things are because they are.

Wherefore are the meadows green, is it not to gratify the eye?

But why should greenness charm the eye? such is God's good will.

Wherefore is the ear attuned to a pleasure in musical sounds,

And who set a number to those sounds, and fixed the laws of harmony?

Who taught the bird to build its nest, or lent the shrub its life,

Or poised in the balances of order the power to attract and to repel?

Who continueth the worlds, and the sea, and the heart, in motion?

Who commanded gravitation to tie down all upon its sphere?—

For, even as a limestone cliff is an aggregate of countless shells,

One riddle concrete of many, a mystery compact of mysteries,

So God, cloud-capped in immensity, standeth the cohesion of all things,

And secrets, sublimely indistinct, permeate that Universe, Himself;

As is the whole, so are the parts, whether they be mighty or minute,

The sun is not more unexplained than the tissue of an emmet's wing.

Thus then, omnipresent Deity worketh His unbiassed mind,

A mind, one in moral, but infinitely multiplied in means:

And the uniform prudence of His will cometh to be counted law,

Till mutable man fancieth volition stirring in the potter's clay:

God, a wise father, showeth not His reasons to His babes;

But willeth in secresy and goodness: for causes generate dispute:

Then we, His darkling children, watch that invariable purpose,

And invest the passive creature with its Maker's energy and skill:

Therefore, they of old time stopped short of God in idols,

Therefore, in these latter days, we heed not the Jehovah in His works.

Mystery is God's great name; He is the mystery of goodness:

Some other, from the hierarchs of heaven, usurped the mystery of sin.

God is the King, yea even of Himself; He crowned Himself with holiness;

The burning circlet of iniquity another found and wore.

God is separate, even from His attributes; but He willed eternally the good;

Therefore freely, though unchangeably, is wise, righteous, and loving:

But ambition, open unto angels, saw the evil, flung aside from the beginning,

It was Lucifer that saw, and nothing loathed those black unclaimed regalia,

So he coveted and stole, to be counted for a king, antagonist of God,

But when he touched the leprous robes, behold! a cheated traitor.

For self-existence, charactered with love, with power, wisdom, and ubiquity,

Could not dwell alone, but willed and worked creation.

Thus, in continual exhalation, darkening the void with matter,

Sprang from prolific Deity the creatures of His skill.

And beings living on His breath, were needfully less perfect than Himself,

Therefore less capable of bliss, whereat His benevolence was bounded;

So, to make the capability expand, intensely progressive to eternity,

He suffered darkness to illustrate the light, and pain to heighten pleasure:

To heap up happiness on souls He loved, allowed He sin and sorrow,

And then to guilt and grief and shame, He brought unbidden amnesty:

Sinless, none had been redeemed, nor wrapt again in God:

Sorrowless, no conflict had been known, and Heaven had been mulcted of its comfort:

Yea, with evil unexhibited, probationary toils unfelt,

Men had not appreciated good, nor angels valued their security.

Herein, to reason's eye, is revealed the mystery of goodness,

Blessing through permitted woe, and teaching by the mystery of sin.

O Christian, whose chastened curiosity loveth things mysterious,

Accounting them shadows and eclipses of Him the one great light,

Look now, satisfied with faith, on minds that judge by sense,

And, dull from contemplating matter, take small heed of spirit.

Toiling feebly upward, their argument tracketh from below,

They catch the latest consequent, and prove the nearest cause:

What is this? that a seed produced a seed, and so for a thousand seasons;

Ascend a thousand steps, thy ladder leaveth thee in air:

Thou canst not climb to God, and short of Him is nothing;

There is no cause for aught we see, but in His present will.

Begin from the Maker, thou carriest down His attributes to reptiles,

The sharded beetle and the lizard live and move in Him:

Begin from the creature, corruption and infirmity mar thy foolish toil,

Heap Ossa on Olympus, how much art thou nearer to the stars?

It is easy running from a mountain's top down to the valleys at its foot,

But difficult and steep the laborious ascent, and feebly shalt thou reach it:

Yet man, beginning from himself, that first deluding mystery,

Hopeth from the pit of lies to struggle up to truth;

So, taxing knowledge to its strength, he pusheth one step further,

And fancieth complacently that much is done by reaching a remote effect:

Then he maketh answer to himself, as a silly nurse to her little one,

Evading, in a mist of words, hard things he cannot solve;

Till, like an ostrich in the desert, he burieth his head in atoms,

Thinking that, if he is blind, no sun can shine in heaven.

Therefore cometh it to pass, that an atheist is ever the most credulous,

Snatching at any foolish cause, that may dispel his doubts;

And, even as it were for ridicule, a spectacle for men and angels,

The captious and cautious unbeliever is of all men weakest to believe:

Cut from the anchorage of God, his bark is a plaything of the billows;

The compass of his principle is broken, the rudder of his faith unshipped:

Chance and Fate, in a stultified antagonism, govern all for him;

Truth sprang from the conflict of falsities, and the multitude of accidents hath bred design!

Where is the imposture so gross, that shall not entrap his curiosity?

What superstition is so abject, that it doth not blanch his cheek?

Whereof can he be sure, with whom Chaos is substitute for Order?

How should his silly structure stand, a pyramid built upon its apex?—

Yea, I have seen grey-headed men, the bastard slips of science,

Go for light to glow-worms, while they scorn the sun at noon:

Men, who fear no God, trembling at a gipsy's curse,

Men, who jest at revelation, clinging to a madman's prophecy!

There is a pleasing dread in the fashion of all mysteries,

For hope is mixed therein and fear; who shall divine their issues?

Even the orphan, wandering by night, lost on dreary moors,

Is sensible of some vague bliss amidst his shapeless terrors;

The buoyancy of instant expectation, spurring on the mind to venture,

Overbeareth, in its energy, the cramp and the chill of apprehension.

There is a solitary pride, when the heart, in new importance,

Writeth gladly on its archives, the secrets none other men have seen:

And there is a caged terror, evermore wrestling with the mind,

When crime hath whispered his confession, and the secrets are written there in blood:

The village maiden is elated at the tenderly confided tale:

The bandit's wife with sickening fear guessed the premeditated murder:

The sage, with triumph on his brow, hideth up his deep discovery;

The idlest clown shall delve all day, to find a hidden treasure.

For mystery is man's life; we wake to the whisperings of novelty:

And what, though we lie down disappointed? we sleep, to wake in hope.

The letter, or the news, the chances and the changes, matters that may happen,

Sweeten or embitter daily life with the honey-gall of mystery.

For we walk blindfold,—and a minute may be much,—a step may reach the precipice;

What earthly loss, what heavenly gain, may not this day produce?

Levelled of Alps and Andes, without its valleys and ravines,

How dull the face of earth, unfeatured of both beauty and sublimity:

And so, shorn of mystery, beggared in its hopes and fears,

How flat the prospect of existence, mapped by intuitive foreknowledge.

Praise God, creature of earth, for the mercies linked with secresy,

That spices of uncertainty enrich the cup of life;

Praise God, His hosts on high, for the mysteries that make all joy;

What were intelligence with nothing more to learn, or heaven, in eternity of sameness?

To number every mystery were to sum the sum of all things:

None can exhaust a theme, whereof God is example and similitude.

Nevertheless, take a garland from the garden, a handful from the harvest,

Some scattered drops of spray from the ceaseless mighty cataract.

Whence are we,—whither do we tend,—how do we feel, and reason?

How strange a thing is man, a spirit saturating clay!

When doth soul make embryos immortal,—how do they rank hereafter,—

And will the unconscious idiot be quenched in death as nothing?

In essence immaterial, are these minds, as it were, thinking machines?

For, to understand may but rightly be to use a mechanism all possess,

So that in reading or hearing of another, a man shall seem unto himself

To be recollecting images or arguments, native and congenial to his mind:

And yet, what shall we say,—who can arede the riddle?

The brain may be clockwork, and mind its spring, mechanism quickened by a spirit.

Who so shrewd as rightly to divide life, instinct, reason;

Trees, zoophytes, creatures of the plain, and savage men among them?

Hath the mimosa instinct,—or the scallop more than life,—

Or the dog less than reason,—or the brute-man more than instinct?

What is the cause of health,—and the gendering of disease?

Why should arsenic kill, and whence is the potency of antidotes?

Behold, a morsel,—eat and die; the term of thy probation is expired:

Behold, a potion,—drink and be alive; the limit of thy trial is enlarged.

Who can expound beauty? or explain the character of nations?

Who will furnish a cause for the epidemic force of fashion?

Is there a moral magnetism living in the light of example?

Is practice electricity?—Yet all these are but names.

Doth normal Art imprison, in its works, spirit translated into substance,

So that the statue, the picture, or the poem, are crystals of the mind?

And doth Philosophy with sublimating skill shred away the matter,

Till rarefied intelligence exudeth even out of stocks and stones?

O Mysteries, ye all are one, the mind of an inexplicable Architect

Dwelleth alike in each, quickening and moving in them all.

Fields, and forests, and cities of men, their woes and wealth and works,

And customs, and contrivances of life, with all we see and know,

For a little way, a little while, ye hang dependent on each other,

But all are held in one right-hand, and by His will ye are.

Here is an answer unto mystery, an unintelligible God,

This is the end and the beginning, it is reason that He be not understood.

Therefore it were probable and just, even to a man's weak thinking,

To have one for God who always may be learnt, yet never fully known:

That He, from whom all mysteries spring, in whom they all converge,

Throned in His sublimity beyond the grovellings of lower intellect,

Should claim to be truer than man's truest, the boasted certainty of numbers,

Should baffle his arithmetic, confound his demonstrations, and paralyse the might of his necessity,

Standing supreme as the mystery of mysteries, everywhere, yet impersonate,

Essential One in three, essential Three in one!

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