It is to this spirit of lies, and the false splendor of his colossal empire, and to the final conflict which truth will have to wage with it on earth, that the most awful of the prophecies already alluded to refer. And the application is easily made, since a greater part of their warning denunciations have in our age already come to an actual fulfillment. If, then, this giant spirit of destruction and untruth was strong enough even in his cradle to throttle two quarters of the world,[47] what must it be now that the permitted interval of rest has passed away without being profitably employed to the cause of truth, and now that this same spirit of murder and lies, with a far greater body, and endued with far more magical powers, is let loose again to tread the earth for a while with iron feet, and to deceive the nations?
Those whose responsible position in public life, or comprehensive sphere of intellectual activity, enable them to take in at one glance all the various elements of evil and pernicious principles and destructive tendencies which are so actively at work in our days, will not, perhaps, be disposed to regard these remarks as groundless or exaggerated; others, perhaps, may make a mock at them—but they may go on in their delusion for a while.
In conclusion, I have but three observations to add. The first regards the divine permission of evil, and is intended to form a supplement to that Theodicée which I have attempted, in the only way that such a justification of the divine ways is permissible to man, by appealing, viz., to his feelings, rather than by attempting to force his conviction by the rigor of demonstration. The full justification of the ways of Providence is reserved for a future day, when all mouths shall be stopped, whether that awful crisis be near at hand or yet tarries for a while. If, now, the human race be actually sick and in a sickly state, as indeed can not well be denied, then must God’s overruling providence in the affairs of the world be judged of in the same light as, and be compared to, the wise treatment of a skillful physician. For as the latter, in the case of a patient whose death was to be apprehended from a total prostration of his bodily powers and energy, might wish for or even venture to super-induce a violent paroxysm, in the hope that in it he might perhaps be able to throw off his fatal lethargy; even so, in God’s government of the world, those predetermined counsels, which seem so singular, but, nevertheless, are so expressly foretold, may have a somewhat similar design. In the times of the last struggle the power of darkness will probably work itself to death on the earth; and while the remnant shall come out of the crisis and fiery trial purer and healthier, the divine truth is to gain a complete triumph over sin and death.
The second remark I have to make applies to ourselves and all the well-disposed among our cotemporaries, and refers to the disunion which subsists in these evil times even among the best of men. Were two nations threatened in common by a formidable enemy, would they not, however widely they might differ in, or perhaps be estranged from each other by their respective constitutions languages, and customs, forget in the moment of danger their characteristic differences, and, laying aside all previous feelings of jealousy or estrangement, unite for their mutual protection and safety? My heart’s wish, therefore, is that all the truly pious and well-wishers of truth, on whichever of the two sides of the now divided faith they may stand, would unite together without sacrificing those more intimate differences which can not at present be got rid of or reconciled, and, making a righteous peace of mutual forbearance, join together in a firm alliance against the common enemy of all truth and all faith. For that the dearest interests of religion are in our generation exposed to a violent assault, and menaced with great and immediate danger, will not be denied by any lover of truth, even though his conception of the truth may differ from mine.
Lastly, the third observation that I promised will not take the form of the utterance of a wish, as rather of the expression of the firmest conviction, that, however awful and severe this final conflict may prove, the good cause will not eventually be lost, but that the great battle will have a favorable issue in the complete victory of divine revelation, and the celestial wisdom in the government of this kingdom of truth will be fully manifest both to men and angels.
LECTURE VIII.
OF THE DIVINE ORDER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD AND THE RELATIONS OF STATES.
“THE history of the world is the world’s tribunal,”[48] says one of our most famous poets. If by these words he meant to convey an opinion that no other tribunal of judgment is to be expected than that which is even now set up in the history of the world, then such an opinion, implying that the human race is to live forever in its present state, and in this particular terrestrial life, would be even as groundless as that of the fanciful conceit that the human race had existed from all eternity, if, in sooth, any of the philosophical dreamers of antiquity had ever fallen on such a fancy, or, in modern times, any of the antipodes to the usual current mode of thinking should ever stumble upon it. The poet himself, as dramatist and artist, would but have taken it ill had any one laid before him a great drama, composed of several acts and scenes, from which, however, the beginning was torn off, and which, ever going on, untied the existing perplexities only to fall again into new and fresh complications; or like a poor journal ever referring to a continuation, had no true end, no conclusion or proper termination. But unquestionably a better sense is also contained in the poet’s words. He may have merely meant to say that the mind which rules the course of mundane affairs is a mind that inflicts retribution on the world; and that all the great epochs and incidents of history have a retributive character and vindicatory significance.[49] Such an interpretation of the words, which indeed suits well with the author’s serious mind and character, would bring them in perfect unison with my own sentiments, and adequately express the truth which forms the theme of our present consideration on the divine order in the history of the human race.
The human race, then, as it had a beginning, so also will it have an end; it will not continue forever in this present form, but must eventually come to a termination. But, to speak according to the measure of a divine chronology, where a thousand years are but as one day, who can say, who shall dare, off-hand, to decide whether six or seven of these great days of God are fixed for its duration? Enough to know that we stand on the borders of the fourth age, and on the passage from the third to the fourth. And not unimportant is it, on the other hand, for the clear understanding of the whole, to form a right conception of each of these, its great divisions and epochs. The first age is made up of the twenty-five centuries of obscure primeval history. The second, which we called the age of preparation, is formed by the fifteen hundred years which we reckon from the end of the first up to the center and turning-point of the history of the world as known to us, and from which modern history takes its commencement. Even in the oldest traditionary history of the Gentile nations of antiquity we do not meet with any statements that can be relied upon, or any tenable data beyond, if indeed so far back as, the fifteenth century before the epoch of the commencement of modern history. The fifteen centuries which follow this epoch form the third age, in which this principle of a new life in the spiritual, moral, and political world had to develop and completely to unfold itself. In the last Lecture I also reckoned in this period the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries of our era. But if it seems to any more advisable to consider these as the introductory portion of the fourth and subsisting age, there is nothing positively to condemn such a mode of reckoning; only, for my part, I can not but regard it as less correct and more inaccurate than the one which I have proposed. In one case as well as the other the same important consideration will be involved. Reckoning from some point or other within these last forty years, we have, it must be acknowledged by all, entered upon a grand and decisive epoch in the history of the world; and our attention can not be too often or too strongly directed to the fact, that we stand at the critical point of transition from one great period to another.
Now one of the most characteristic signs by which such important moments of general revolution in the history of the world are, for the most part, known and distinguished, is a number of great events pressed closely together and following each other in rapid succession; or, in other words, the accelerated course of time. It is no new remark, that, in the political history of our own age, modern Europe has, in the short space of two-and-twenty years, ran through all the epochs of the old Roman world, from the first party struggles of the republic, and its long wars with Carthage, that mistress of the seas, up to the imperial rule of the Cæsars, in the first reigns mild and indulgent, but at the last so fearfully oppressive and cruel; and even up to the final immigration of the northern nations. Such a simple remark is alone sufficient proof that another law now rules in the history of the world—a quicker life pulsates in its arteries than beat in the calmer days of old. Whether, however, this life be thoroughly sound, or, on the contrary, sickly and feverish, that is quite another question.
But not only in the political world, but also in the intellectual domain of science has the same accelerated course been noticeable. Only, as compared with that of antiquity, the course or direction pursued by modern science is altogether different. We have traveled with equal celerity, but in quite an opposite course to the ancients. Starting from the last term, we have reversed the series of their mental progression. First of all, in the last decades of the preceding century, the Epicurean cast of thought, or one very nearly resembling it, was the one chiefly predominant in the philosophical world. And then, together with but subordinate to it, came scholastic subtilties and hair-splitting distinctions, similar to those of the later Greek schools, not unaccompanied, perhaps, with the same patient industry of research and extensive erudition, and exercising altogether on the minds of men an influence no less wide, nor less pernicious, than did the most brilliant of the sophists of Greece. All the erroneous systems which it was possible for the human mind to embrace, and which are grounded in its essential qualities, or which could possibly originate in any (so to speak) of its inborn misconceptions, which it took the Greeks several centuries to evolve in slow succession, our age has rapidly, and almost simultaneously, run through in as many decades. And in this fact, if I do not greatly deceive myself, there is much ground of consolation. It encourages me to hope that this inverse progression is leading us back again to the truth—that in this ascending line we are gradually coming nearer to the better times of the first great philosophers of Greece—of a Plato, a Socrates, and a Pythagoras. It must be self-evident, that in this case, and still more so in that analogy of political history which I have so recently noticed, as generally, in all such historical parallels, nothing more is intended to be asserted than a general resemblance, which, however, as such, is eminently remarkable. It would not, perhaps, be difficult anxiously to work out the general resemblance into points of detail, but such an overwrought assimilation could only lead to false conclusions and results.