Observe degree, priority, and place, ...
Office, and custom, in all line of order....
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy.”
Order, writes Southey, is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the State. Diogenes held with the Dorian lawgivers, that order (κόσμος) is the basis of civil government. As the beams to a house, it has been said, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things. Balzac is treating of harmonie politique when he says that harmony is the poetry of order, and that “the peoples” have a keen need of order. The racy author of the “Biglow Papers” discourses in his shrewd, homely style, on the indispensableness (not that he uses such a word) of orderly established law:—
“Onsettle that, an’ all the world goes whiz,
A screw is loose in everything there is.”
Mr. Carlyle, in his apology for Knox in the act of pulling down cathedrals—as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue—urges that he was precisely the reverse of that. Knox, he maintains, wanted no pulling down of stone edifices, but wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. “Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much on that.” Every such man, on Mr. Carlyle’s showing, is the born enemy of disorder—hates to be in it; but what then? “Smooth falsehood is not order; it is the general sum total of disorder. Order is truth—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it. Order and falsehood cannot subsist together.” And it is in treating of another of his heroes elect, that the same philosopher contends on behalf of such others of them as seem to have worked as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every great man, every genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of order, not of disorder—a seeming anarchist, yet to his whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. “His mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order.” Is not all work of man in this world, we are emphatically asked, a making of Order?
The Abbé Duval, writing to Mme. Récamier, as her spiritual counsellor, bids her engrave this elementary truth on her heart of hearts: “Gravez au-dedans de vous-même cette première vérité que la religion veut l’ordre avant tout.” Whatsoever doth make manifest is light, and it is light that reveals a cosmos where before, in the words of Thomson, a formless grey confusion covered all:—