But there is something far better to be done,—not always; but still, not seldom. We can turn the forces of ideas against themselves—meet them with their own weapons. We can call in the power of an idea to overcome the tyranny of another idea; and then we come off conquerors, and with a soul-felt joy.
It is a joy to recur, in memory or imagination, to any moral conflict, past or possible, in which all our faculties are needed, and wherein that force is at least conceived to be employed which must otherwise corrode us. But if any such enterprise actually presents itself—confronts us at the moment—how great is the blessing! It may bring toil and difficulty to ourselves, and doubt and blame from others; but if it be clear to ourselves, how keen is the sense of life it gives at some seasons, though it may overpower our weakness at others! It seems hard, when we are feeble and suffering, to have irksome labour to do, to have to oppose the wishes and feelings of some whom we love, and to arouse argument when our longing is for unbroken and lasting rest: but, if our duty be but clear to ourselves, (or for the most part clear, with doubts only in our most sickly hours,) what a new position we find ourselves in, permitted once more to take the offensive side against evil, in alternation with the weary perpetual defensive posture! Happy they, who have been brought up in allegiance to Duty, more or less strict; and happiest they whose loyalty has been the strictest! In the hour of nature’s feebleness, and apparent decay, they find themselves under the eye and hand of the Physician of souls, who has for them a cordial of heavenly virtue—of heavenly virtue for them, but of no virtue to such as have let their moral nature take its chance, and who, in their hour of extreme need, are no more capable of spiritual enterprise than of a bodily flight beyond the precincts of their pain. They must languish in self-corrosion; while they who happily find how Duty gives “power to the faint,” “mount up with wings as eagles.” With every emergency of singular or unpopular moral action, every occasion for saying with courage a true word, or advocating a neglected cause—with every opportunity, in short, of spiritual enterprise, they soar afresh, and their eyes kindle anew in the light of life.
But this kind of solace could not be,—nor any effectual kind,—but for the power of the master idea of our life. But for Him who “stirreth up the nest,” and whose spirit “taketh and beareth them up” sunwards on her wings, the flights of these eagle spirits would utterly fail. But for the ideas inspired by Faith, there could be no enterprise, no true solace, no endurance but of the low, merely submissive kind. Great is the power of all thought, congenial with our nature, over disease of body and morbid tendencies of the mind; but those which connect us with the Maker of our frame and the Ordainer of our lot are absolutely omnipotent. O! let the speculative observer of human nature consider well, and observe that human nature to its extremest limits, before he pronounces that our spirits are not created filial. Let him ponder well the universal aspiration towards a spiritually-discerned parent, before he declares the affection a mere venerable superstition. Let him feel in health and full action,—(or, if he feels it not, let him detect in others,) the pausing horror of a sense of orphanhood, beneath which the moral universe falls in pieces under the hands of its myriad builders. Let him see in the sick-chamber, where the outward and inward world seem alike to the sufferer to be crumbling asunder, how irresistible is the conviction of an upholding power, new-modelling all decaying things, and imbuing them with immortality. If he himself can but learn what protracted sickness is, let him ponder well whether a superstition, however early and solemnly conveyed and cherished, could stand the stress,—not merely of pain, but of the questionings prompted by pain. Let him say if it can be anything but truth,—absolute congeniality with our souls,—which can give such all-conquering power to the idea of our filial relation to the Ruler of all things.
No one will venture to say how this power is enhanced by the earliest associations. No one will presume to declare precisely how happy above others are they, now sufferers, whose infant speech was practised in prayer at a mother’s knee, and who can now forget the dreariness of the night and the weight of the day in listening for the echoes of old psalmody, and reviving snatches of youthful hymns and religious reverie. No one will dare to say how far the sweet call to “the weary and heavy laden” is endeared by the voice of the Shepherd having gone before us over all the hills and vales of our life. But the true philosopher must, as it seems to me, be assured that the power of these spiritual appeals would ooze away, in proportion as our faculties are weakened by disease, if they had not in them the divine force of truth to urge them home.
See what this force is, in comparison with others that are tendered for our solace! One and another, and another, of our friends comes to us with an earnest pressing upon us of the “hope of relief,”—that talisman which looks so well till its virtues are tried! They tell us of renewed health and activity,—of what it will be to enjoy ease again,—to be useful again,—to shake off our troubles and be as we once were. We sigh, and say it may be so; but they see that we are neither roused nor soothed by it.
Then one speaks differently,—tells us we shall never be better,—that we shall continue for long years as we are, or shall sink into deeper disease and death; adding, that pain and disturbance and death are indissolubly linked with the indestructible life of the soul, and supposing that we are willing to be conducted on in this eternal course by Him whose thoughts and ways are not as ours,—but whose tenderness.... Then how we burst in, and take up the word! What have we not to say, from the abundance of our hearts, of that benignity,—that transcendant wisdom,—our willingness,—our eagerness,—our sweet security,—till we are silenced by our unutterable joy!
Whence this imbecility of the “hope of relief?”
Whence this power of the idea of God our Father?
Do we know of anything stronger and higher than ideas? In the strongest and highest,—(even an omnipotent and infinite) idea,—if we have not Truth, what is Truth?