"As there is," said Coleridge, "much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in man. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed." "I have ever delighted," said Boswell, "in that intellectual chemistry which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person."
"The first lesson of history," says Emerson, "is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better. 'Tis the oppressions of William the Norman, savage forest-laws, and crushing despotism, that made possible the inspirations of Magna Charta under John. Edward I. wanted money, armies, castles, and as much as he could get. It was necessary to call the people together by shorter, swifter ways,—and the House of Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges. In the twenty-fourth year of his reign he decreed, 'that no tax should be levied without consent of Lords and Commons;' which is the basis of the English Constitution. Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility, language, and arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy cities; and united hostile nations under one government. The barbarians who broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon. Schiller says, the Thirty Years' War made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish despots serve man immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest with the pope; as the infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as the ferocity of the Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides of 1789. The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races, and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order." "Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry the house away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it must be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he lift pots and roofs so handily? he was the workman they were in search of."
It is related of Hart, a Baptist minister, that he was so good a preacher and so bad a liver that it was said to him once, "Mr. Hart, when I hear you in the pulpit, I wish you were never out of it; when I see you out of it, I wish you were never in it." One Mr. Nicholls, a Yorkshire clergyman in the days immediately succeeding the Reformation, who was "much addicted to drinking and company-keeping," used to say to his companions, "You must not heed me but when I am got three feet above the earth," that was, into the pulpit. "I have heard of a witty parson," says Dr. Beattie, "who having been dismissed for irregularities, used afterward, in conversation, to say, that he thanked God he was not cashiered for ignorance and insufficiency, but only for vice and immorality." Foster, in a note to one of his Essays, refers to a Spanish story of a village where the devil, having made the people excessively wicked, was punished by being compelled to assume the appearance and habit of a friar, and to preach so eloquently, in spite of his internal repugnance and rage, that the inhabitants were completely reformed.
Cotton Mather has preserved a choice specimen of invective against Dr. Owen, by one of the primitive Quakers, whose name was Fisher. It was, says Southey, a species of rhetoric in which they indulged freely, and exceeded all other sectarians. Fisher addressed him thus: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter; thou hedgehog and grinning dog; thou bastard, that tumbled out of the mouth of the Babylonish bawd; thou mole; thou tinker; thou lizard; thou bell of no metal, but the tone of a kettle; thou wheelbarrow; thou whirlpool; thou whirligig; oh, thou firebrand; thou adder and scorpion; thou louse; thou cow-dung; thou moon-calf; thou ragged tatterdemalion; thou Judas: thou livest in philosophy and logic, which are of the devil." Mather in turn was alike severe upon the Quakers. He applied to them such language as "upstart sect;" "sink of all heresies;" "the grossest collection of blasphemies and confusions that ever was heard of;" "dangerous villains;" "choke-weed of Christianity;" "the quaking which distinguished these poor creatures was a symptom of diabolical possession;" "devil-driven creatures;" "for pride, and hypocrisy, and hellish reviling against the painful ministers of Christ, I know no people can match them." "He was a wise and a good counsellor in Plymouth-colony, who propounded 'that a law might be made for the Quakers to have their heads shaved.' I confess," he said, "the punishment was in some sort capital; but it would have been the best remedy for them; it would have both sham'd and cur'd them." He quotes some choice language of Penn—"Thou gormandizing Priest, one of the abominable tribe; thou bane of reason; thou pest, to be spared of mankind; thou mountebank Priest"—and says, "these are the very words (I wrong them not!) which they vomit out against the best men in the English nation, that have been so hardy as to touch their 'light within:' but let the quills of these porcupines fly as fast as they will, I shall not feel them." The good Luther was a violent saint sometimes. Hear him express himself on the Catholic divines: "The papists are all asses, and will always remain asses. Put them in whatever sauce you choose, boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, beat, hashed, they are always the same asses." Hear him salute the pope: "The pope was born out of the devil's posteriors. He is full of devils, lies, blasphemies, and idolatries; he is Antichrist; the robber of churches; the ravisher of virgins; the greatest of pimps; the governor of Sodom, etc. If the Turks lay hold of us, then we shall be in the hands of the devil; but if we remain with the pope, we shall be in hell. What a pleasing sight would it be to see the pope and the cardinals hanging on one gallows, in exact order, like the seals which dangle from the bulls of the pope! What an excellent council would they hold under the gallows!" And hear him upon Henry VIII.: "It is hard to say if folly can be more foolish, or stupidity more stupid, than is the head of Henry. He has not attacked me with the heart of a king, but with the impudence of a knave. This rotten worm of the earth, having blasphemed the majesty of my King, I have a just right to bespatter his English majesty with his own dirt and ordure. This Henry has lied." The good Calvin was alike violent. He hated Catholic and Lutheran. "His adversaries are never others than knaves, lunatics, drunkards, and assassins. Sometimes they are characterized by the familiar appellatives of bulls, asses, cats, and hogs." Beza, the disciple of Calvin, imitated his master. Upon a Lutheran minister, Tilleman, he bestowed these titles of honor: "Polyphemus; an ape; a great ass who is distinguished from other asses by wearing a hat; an ass on two feet; a monster composed of part of an ape and wild ass; a villain who merits hanging on the first tree we find." As to the Catholics, there is no end to the anathemas and curses of the Fathers.
One of the old bishops called anger "the sinews of the soul." It helped to fortify the rugged reformer in his conflicts, and illuminated the perilous way he trod. "We oft by lightning read in darkest nights." It is said the finest wine is pressed from vintages which grow on fields once inundated with lava. "I never work better," said Luther, "than when I am inspired by anger; when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well; for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart." "No one can suppose," said Bulwer, "that Calvin did not deem that the angels smiled approbation when he burned Servetus. No one can suppose that when Torquemada devised the Inquisition, he did not conscientiously believe that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be best secured by selecting a few for a roast." Burke said, "a vigorous mind is as necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great heat." "It is the strong passions," said Helvetius, "which, rescuing us from sloth, can alone impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts." "No revolution (in public sentiment), civil or religious," said Sir Gilbert Elliot, "can be accomplished without that degree of ardor and passion which, in a later age, will be matter of ridicule to men who do not feel the occasion, and enter into the spirit of the times." "The man who succeeds," said a British reviewer, "is generally the narrow man, the man of one idea, who works at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices everything to that; the fanatic, in short. By fanatics, whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by 'liberal-minded men' at all, has the world's work been done in all ages." "Our passions," said John Norris, "were given us to perfect and accomplish our natures, though by accidental misapplications to unworthy objects they may turn to our degradation and dishonor. We may, indeed, be debased as well as ennobled by them; but then the fault is not in the large sails, but in the ill conduct of the pilot, if our vessel miss the haven." When one commended a certain king of Sparta for a gentle, a good, and a meek prince, his colleague said, "How can he be good who is not an enemy even to vicious persons?" Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle, sometimes like a raving ribald. "When he was angry, invectives rushed from him like bowlder rocks down a mountain torrent in flood." "The same man," said Heine, of Luther, "who could scold like a fish-wife could be as gentle as a tender maiden. At times he was as fierce as the storm that uproots oaks; and then again he was as mild as the zephyr caressing the violets.... The refinement of Erasmus, the mildness of Melancthon, could never have brought us so far as the godlike brutality of Brother Martin." But there was no trace of vanity about him. "Do not call yourselves Lutherans," he said; "call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been crucified for the world?"
"The Latin tongue," says Montaigne, "is, as it were, natural to me; I understand it better than French, but I have not used to speak it, nor hardly to write it, these forty years; and yet, upon an extreme and sudden emotion, which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and once on seeing my father in perfect health, fall upon me in a swoon, I have always uttered my first outcries and ejaculations in Latin; nature starting up and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a discontinuation." "Nature," says Bacon, "will be buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation; like as it was with Æsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her." "A frog," said Publius Syrus, "would leap from a throne of gold into a puddle." In Froissart's Chronicles there is an account of a reverend monk who had been a robber in the early part of his life, and who, when he grew old, used feelingly to lament that he had ever changed his profession. He said "it was a goodly sight to sally out from his castle, and to see a troop of jolly friars coming riding that way, with their mules well laden with viands and rich stores, to advance toward them, to attack and overthrow them, returning to the castle with a noble booty." Layard relates an incident of the party of Arabs which for some time had been employed to assist him in excavating amongst the ruins of Nineveh. One evening, after their day's work, he observed them following a flock of sheep belonging to the people of the village, shouting their war-cry, flourishing their swords, and indulging in the most extravagant gesticulations. He asked one of the most active of the party to explain to him the cause of such violent proceedings. "O Bey!" they exclaimed almost together, "God be praised, we have eaten butter and wheaten bread under your shadow, and are content; but an Arab is an Arab. It is not for a man to carry about dirt in baskets, and to use a spade all his life; he should be with his sword and his mare in the desert. We are sad as we think of the days when we plundered the Anayza, and we must have excitement or our hearts must break. Let us then believe that these are the sheep we have taken from the enemy, and that we are driving them to our tents." And off they ran, raising their wild cry, and flourishing their swords, to the no small alarm of the shepherd, who saw his sheep scampering in all directions. Hazlitt related an Indian legend of a Brahman, who was so devoted to abstract meditation, that in the pursuit of philosophy he quite forgot his moral duties, and neglected ablution. For this he was degraded from the rank of humanity, and transformed into a monkey. But even when a monkey he retained his original propensities, for he kept apart from other monkeys, and had no other delight than that of eating cocoanuts and studying metaphysics. "Perhaps few narratives in history or mythology," says Carlyle, "are more significant than that Moslem one of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same asphaltic lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and other semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,—verging, indeed, toward a certain far deeper lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the asphalt lake formed to themselves of Moses, that probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all changed into apes, sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole universe now a most indisputable humbug! The universe has become a humbug to those apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath, there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit with their wizened, smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as apes may, looking out through those blinking, smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky twilight and undecipherable disordered dusk of things; wholly an uncertainty, unintelligibility, they and it, and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew,—truest, tragicalest humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls." The shark is said to have been the god the Sandwich Islanders, in their savage state, chiefly worshiped, or sought to propitiate. In their present semi-civilized, semi-Christianized condition, it is stated, they pray, and sing, and moralize, in fair weather; but when they get into trouble they are apt to call upon the shark-god of their fathers for help or deliverance.
Sir Walter Scott used to tell a story of a placid minister, near Dundee, who, in preaching on Jonah, said, "Ken ye, brethren, what fish it was that swallowed him? Aiblins ye may think it was a shark; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae shark; or aiblins ye may think it was a sammon; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae sammon; or aiblins ye may think it was a dolphin; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae dolphin." Here an old woman, thinking to help her master out of a dead lift, cried out, "Aiblins, sir, it was a dunter" (the vulgar name of a species of whale common to the Scotch coast). "Aiblins, madam, ye're an auld witch for taking the word of God out of my mouth," was the reply of the disappointed rhetorician. As Dr. Johnson was riding in a carriage through London on a rainy day, he overtook a poor woman carrying a baby, without any protection from the weather. Making the driver stop the coach, he invited the poor woman to get in with her child, which she did. After she had seated herself, the doctor said to her, "My good woman, I think it most likely that the motion of the coach will wake your child in a little while, and I wish you to understand that if you talk any baby-talk to it, you will have to get out of the coach." As the doctor had anticipated, the child soon awoke, and the forgetful mother exclaimed to it: "Oh! the little dear, is he going to open his eyesy-pysy?" "Stop the coach, driver!" shouted Johnson; and the woman had to get out and finish her journey on foot. Frederick William, of Prussia, father of the great Frederick, had a way of addressing, familiarly, the people he met in the streets of Berlin, utterly indifferent, we are told, to his own dignity and to the feelings of others; if he could devise something that was not quite agreeable, it was sure to be said. The fear of such encounters sometimes made nervous people indiscreetly evade the royal presence. One Jew having fairly taken to his heels, he was pursued by the king in hot haste. "Why did you run away from me?" said the king, when he came up with him in breathless dudgeon. "From fear," answered the Jew, in the most ingenuous manner; but the rejoinder of the king was a hearty thwack with his cane, who roared out that he wished himself to be loved and not to be feared!
A writer upon Holland—its Martyrs and Heroes, gives an account of Richard Willemson, a worthy burgess of Aspern, and an Anabaptist, who was chased by an officer of justice. It was a winter day, and he fled across the ice. The frozen surface, however, was so thin that the fugitive had the utmost difficulty in crossing, and his pursuer fell through. Perceiving his danger, Willemson returned and at the risk of his own life saved his enemy. Touched with such generosity, the officer would gladly have let his prisoner go; but the burgomaster, who witnessed the occurrence, called out, "Fulfil your oath," and the good Christian was led away to a fiery martyrdom.
Dr. Livingstone, when he first went into Africa, as a missionary, attached himself to the tribe of Bakwains. Their chief, Sechele, embraced Christianity, and became an assiduous reader of the Bible, the eloquence of Isaiah being peculiarly acceptable to him, and he was wont to say, "He was a fine man, that Isaiah: he knew how to speak." But his people were not so ready for conversion, although he calmly proposed to have them flogged into faith: "Do you imagine," he said, "these people will ever believe by your merely talking to them? I can make them do nothing except by thrashing them; and if you like I shall call my head men, and with our litupa (whips of rhinoceros hide) we will soon make them believe altogether." It has been stated upon authority that when a fugitive from one of the early missions in New California was captured, he was brought back again to the mission, where he was bastinadoed, and an iron rod of a foot or a foot and a half long, and an inch in diameter, was fastened to one of his feet, which had the double use of preventing him from repeating the attempt, and of frightening others from imitating him. Southey says that one of the missionaries whom Virgilius, the bishop of Salzburg, sent among the Slavonic people, made the converted serfs sit with him at table, where wine was served to them in gilt beakers, while he ordered their unbaptized lords to sit on the ground, out of doors, where the food and wine was thrown before them, and they were left to serve themselves. Among our Norse forefathers, King Olaf's mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. "Wilt thou not, Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.