It is no small advance in human history, to get the divine authority of those nobler intuitions, which, in man, anticipate speculation, and their right to command the particular motives, recognised in the common speech of men, incorporated in their speculative belief, incorporated in their books of learning, and embalmed in institutions that keep the divine exemplar of the human form for ever in our eyes. It is something. The warring nations war on. The world is in arms still. The rude instincts are not stayed in their intent. They pause, it may be; 'but a roused passion sets them new a-work.' The speckled demons, that the degenerate _angelic _nature breeds, put on the new livery, and go abroad in it rejoicing. New rivers of blood, new seas of carnage, are opened in the new name of peace; new engines of torture, of fiendish wrong, are invented in the new name of love. But it is some gain. There is a new rallying-place on the earth for those who seek truly the higher good; at the foot of the new symbol they recognise each other, they join hand in hand, and the bands of those who wait and watch amid the earth's darkness for the promise, cheer us with their songs. Truths out of the Eternal Book, truths that all hearts lean on in their need, are spoken. Words that shall never pass away, sweet with the immortal hope and perennial joy of life, are always in our ears.
The nations that have contributed to this result in any degree, whether primarily or secondarily, whether they be Syrians or Assyrians, Arabs or Egyptians, wandering or settled, wild or tame; whether they belong to the inferior unanalysing Semitic races, or whether they come of the more richly endowed, but yet youthful, Indo-European stock; whether they be Hebrews or Persians, Greeks or Romans, will always have the world's gratitude. Those to whose intenser conceptions and bolder affirmations, in the rude ages of instinct and spontaneous allegation, it was given to pronounce and put on everlasting record, these primal truths of inspiration,—truths whose divinity all true hearts respond to, may be indeed by their natural intellectual characteristics,—if Semitic must be—totally disqualified by ethnological laws,—hopelessly disqualified—so hopelessly that it is to lose all to put it on them—for the task of commanding, in detail, our modern civilization;—a civilization which has made, already, the rude ethics of these youthful races, when it comes to details, so palpably and grossly inapplicable, that it is an offence to modern sensibility to name—to so much as name—decisions which stand unreversed, without comment, in our books of learning. But that is no reason why we should not take, and thankfully appropriate as the gift of God, all that it was their part to contribute to the great plot of human advancement. We cannot afford to dispense with any such gain. The movement which respects the larger whole, the divine intent incorporates it all.
'Japhet shall dwell in the tents of Shem,' for they are world wide; but woe to him if, in his day, he refuse to build the temple which, in his day, his God will also require of him. Woe to him, if he think to put upon another age and race the tasks which his Task-Master will require of him,—which, with his many gifts, with his chief gifts, with his ten talents, will surely be required of him. More than his fathers' woe upon him—more than that old-world woe, which he, too, remembers, if he think to lean on Asia, the youthful Asia, when his own great world noon-day has come.
'There was violence on the earth in those days, and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth.' 'Twill come,' says our own poet, prefacing his proposal for a scientific art in the attainment of the chief human ends, and giving his illustrated reasons for it,—
'Twill come [at this rate]
Humanity must, perforce, prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.
But what are these?—these new orders,—these new species of nature, defying nature, that we are generating with our arts here now? What are these new varieties to which our kind is tending now? Look at this kind for instance. What are these? Define them. Destroyers, not of their own image in their fellow-man only, not of the image of their kind only,—sacred by natural universal laws,—but of the chosen image of it, the ideal of it, the one in whom the natural love of their kind was by the law of nature concentred,—the wife and the mother,— destroyed not as the wolf destroys its prey, but with ferocity, or with prolonged and studious harm, that it required the human brain to plan and perpetrate. Look at this pale lengthening widening train of their victims. We must look at it. It will never go by till we do. We shall have to look at it, and consider it well; it will lengthen, it will widen till we do:—ghastly, bruised, bleeding, trampled,— trampled it may be, with nailed, booted heel, mother and child together into one grave. But these are common drunkard's wives;—we are inured to this catastrophe, and do not think much of it. But who are these, whom the grave cannot hold; that by God's edict break its bonds and come back, making day hideous, to tell us what the earth could not, would not keep,—to tell us of that other band who died and made no sign? But this is nothing. Here are more. Here are others. What are these? These are not spectres. Their cheeks are red enough. What loathsome thing is this, that we are bringing forth here now with the human face upon it, in whom the heart of the universal nature has expired. These are murderers,—count them—they are all murderers, wholesale murderers, perhaps,—but of what? Of their own helpless, tender, loving, trusting little ones. The wretched children of our time,—alone in wretchedness,—alone in the universe of nature,—who found, where nature promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the more cruel agonizing drug of death. Was there any cause in nature for it? Yes. They did it for the 'burial fee,' perhaps, or for some other cause as good. They had a reason for it. Let our naturalists throw their learning 'to the dogs,' and come this way, and tell us what this means. Nay, let them bring their books with them, and example us with its meaning if they can. Let them tell us what 'depth' in which nature hides her failures, or yet unperfected hideous germinations,—what formation in which she buries the kinds she repents that she has made upon the earth, or what 'deep'—what ocean cave of 'monsters' we shall drag to find our kindred in these species. Let our wise men tell us whether there be, or whether there ever was, any such thing as this in nature before. If 'such things are,' or have been in any other kind, let them produce the instances, and keep us in countenance and console us for our own.
Let them look at that murderer too, and interpret him for us. For he too is waiting to be interpreted, and he will wait till we understand his signs. He is speaking mute nature's language to us; we must get her key. Look at him as he stands there in the dark, subordinating that faculty which comprehends the whole, which recognises the divinity of his neighbour's right, to his fiendish end: preparing with the judgment of a man his little piece of machinery, with which he will take, as he would take a salmon, or a rat, his fellow-man. Look at him as he stands there now, listening patiently for your steps, waiting to strangle you as you go by him unarmed to-night, confiding in your fellow-man; waiting to drag you down from all the hopes and joys of life, for the sake of the loose coin, gold or silver, which he thinks he may find about you,—perhaps. 'How to KILL vermin and how to PREVENT the fiend,' was Tom's study. How to dispatch in the most agreeable and successful manner, creatures whose notions of good are constitutionally and diametrically opposed to the good of the larger whole, who have no sensibility to that, and no faculty whereby they perceive it to be the worthier; that is no doubt one part of the problem. The scientific question is, whether this creature be really what it seems, a new and more horrid kind of beast—a demoralization and deterioration of the human species into that. If it be, let our naturalists come to our aid here also, and teach us how to hunt him down and despatch him, with as much respect to the natural decencies which the fact of the external human form would seem still to exact from us, as the circumstances will admit of. Is it the beast, or is it 'the fiend?'—that is the question. The fiend which tells us that the angelic or divine nature is there—there still—overborne, trampled on, 'as it were, annihilated,' but lighting that gleam of 'wickedness,'—making of it, not instinct, but crime. Ah! we need not ask which it is. This one has told his own story, if we could but read it. He has left—he is leaving all the time, contributions, richest contributions to our natural history of man,—that history which must make the basis of our arts of cure. He was a wolf when you took him; but in his cell you found something else in him—did you not?—something that troubled and appalled you, with its kindred and likeness, and its exaction on your sympathy. When you hung him as you would not hang a dog;—when you put him to a death which you would think it indecent and inhuman to award to a creature of another species, you did not find him that. The law of the nobler nature lay in him as it were annihilated; he thought there was no such thing; but when nature's great voice was heard without also, and those 'bloody instructions he had taught returned to him'; when that voice of the people, which was the voice of God to him, echoed with its doom the voice within, and 'sweet religion,' with its divine appeals—'a rhapsody of words' no longer, came, to second that great argument,—the blind instincts were overpowered in him, the lesser usurping nature was dethroned,—the angelic nature arose, and had her hour, and shed parting gleams of glory on those fleeting days and nights; and he came forth, to die at last, not dragged like a beast—with a manly step—with heroic grandeur, vindicating the heroic type in nature, of that form he wore,—vindicating the violated law, accepting his doom, bowing to its ignominy, a man, a member of society,—a reconciled and accepted member of the commonweal.
How to prevent the fiend? is the question. Ah! what unlettered forces are these, unlearned still, with all our learning, that the dark, unaided wrestling hour 'in the little state of man,' leaves at the head of affairs there, seated in its chair of state, crowned, 'predominant,' to speak the word of doom for us all. 'He poisons him in the garden for his estate.' 'Lights, lights, lights!' is the word here. There is a cause in nature for these hard hearts, but it is not in the constitution of man. There is a cause; it is nature herself, crying out upon our learning, asking to be—interpreted.
Woe for the age whose universal learning is in forms that move and command no longer; that move and bind no longer with fear, or hope, or love, 'the common people.' Woe for the people who think that the everlasting truths of being—the eternal laws of science—are things for saints, and schoolmasters, and preachers only,—the people who carry about with them in secret, for week-day purposes, Edmund's creed, to whom nature is already 'their goddess, and their law,' ere they know her or her law—ere the appointed teacher has instructed them in it,—ere they know what divinity she, too, holds to,—ere the interpreter has translated into her speech, and evolved from her books, the old truths which shall not—though their old 'garments' should 'be changed'—which shall not pass away. Woe for the nations in whom that greater part that carries it, are godless, or whose vows are paid in secret to Edmund's goddess,—whose true faith is in appetite,—who have no secret laws imposed on that. 'Woe to the people who are in such a case,' no matter on which side of the ocean they may dwell, in the old world, or a new one; no matter under what political constitutions. No matter under what favourable external conditions, the national development that has that hollow in it, may proceed; no matter under what glorious and before unimagined conditions of a healthful, noble human development that development may proceed. Alas! for such a people. The rulers may cry 'Peace!' but there is none. And, alas! for the world in which such a power is growing up under new conditions, and waxing strong, and preparing for its leaps.
As a principle of social or political organisation, there is no religion,—there never has been any,—so fatal as none. That is a truth of which all history is an illustration. It is one which has been illustrated in the history of modern states, not less vividly than in the history of antiquity. And it will continue to be illustrated, on the same grand scale, in those terrific evils which the dissolution, or the dissoluteness of the larger whole creates, whenever the appointed teachers of a nation, the inductors of it into its highest learning, lag behind the common mind in their interpretations, and leave it to the people to construct their own rude 'tables of rejections'; whenever the practical axioms, which are the inevitable vintage of these undiscriminating and fatally false rejections, are suffered to become history.