"'Carpe diem' certainly would not be my sole prescription," said
Fellowes; "you have not told me yet what you want."
"No, but I will. The questions on which I want certainty are indeed questions about which philosophers will often argue just to display their vanity, as human vanity will argue about any thing; but they are no sooner felt in their true grandeur, than they absorb the soul."
"Still, what is it you want?"
"I want to know—-whence I came; whither I am going. Whether there be, in truth, as so many say there is, a God,—a tremendous personality, to whose infinite faculties the 'great' and the 'little' (as we call them) equally vanish,—whose universal presence fills all space, in any point of which he exists entire in the amplitude of all his infinite attributes,—whose universal government extends even to me, and my fellow-atoms, called men,—within whose sheltering embrace even I am not too mean for protection;—whether, if there be such a being, he is truly infinite; or whether this vast machine of the universe may not have developed tendencies or involved consequences which eluded his forethought, and are now beyond even his control; —whether, for this reason, or for some other necessity, such infinite sorrows have been permitted to invade it;—whether, above all, He be propitious or offended with a world in which I feel too surely, in the profound and various misery of man, that his aspects are not all benignant;—how, if he be offended, he is to be reconciled;—whether he is at all accessible, or one to whom the pleasures and the sufferings of the poor child of dust are equally subjects of horrible indifference;—whether, if such Omnipotent Being created the world, he has now abandoned it to be the sport of chance, and I am thus an orphan in the universe;—whether this 'universal frame' be indeed without a mind, and we are, in fact, the only forms of conscious existence; —whether, as the Pantheist declares, the universe itself be God,— ever making, never made,—the product of an evolution of an infinite series of 'antecedents' and 'consequents'; a God of which—for I cannot say of whom—you and I are bits; perishable fragments of a Divinity, itself imperishable only because there will always be bits of it to perish;—whether, even upon some such supposition, this conscious existence of ours is to be renewed; and, if under what conditions; or whether, when we have finished our little day, no other dawn is to break upon our night;—whether the vale, vale in eternum vale, is really the proper utterance of a breaking heart as it closes the sepulchre on the object of its love."
His voice faltered; and I was confirmed in my suspicions, that some deep, secret sorrow had had to do with his morbid state of mind. In a moment, he resumed:—
"These are the questions, and others like the them, which I have vainly toiled to solve. I, like you, have been rudely driven out of my old beliefs; my early Christian faith has given way to doubt; the little hut on the mountain-side, in which I thought to dwell in pastoral simplicity, has been scattered to the tempest, and I am turned out to the blast without a shelter. I have wandered long and far, but have not found that rest which you tell me is to be obtained. As I examine all other theories, they seem, to me, pressed by at least equal difficulties with that I have abandoned. I cannot make myself contented, as others do, with believing nothing, and yet I have nothing to believe; I have wrestled long and hard with my Titan foes,—but not successfully. I have turned to every quarter of the universe in vain; I have interrogated my own soul, but it answers not; I have gazed upon nature, but its many voices speak no articulate language to me; and, more especially, when I gaze upon the bright page of the midnight heavens, those orbs gleam upon me with so cold a light, and amidst so portentous a silence, that I am, with Pascal, terrified at the spectacle of the infinite solitudes,—'de ces espaces infinis.' I declare to you that I know nothing in nature so beautiful or so terrible as those mute oracles."
"They are indeed mute," said Fellowes; "but not so that still voice which whispers its oracles within. You have but to look inwards, and you may see, by the direct gaze of 'the spiritual faculty,' bright and clear, those great 'intuitions' of spiritual truth which the gauds and splendors of the external universe can no more illustrate than can the illuminated characters of an old missal;—just as little can any book teach these truths. You have truly said, the stars will shed no light upon them; they, on the contrary, must illumine the stars; I mean, they must themselves be seen before the outward universe can assume intelligible meaning; must utter their voices before any of the phenomena of the external world can have any real significance!"
"How different," said Harrington, "are the experiences of mankind! You well described those internal oracles, if there are indeed such, as whispering their responses; if they utter them at all, it is to me in a whisper so low that I cannot distinctly catch them. Strange paradoxes! the soul speaks, and the soul listens, and the soul cannot tell what the soul says. That is, the soul speaks to itself, and says, 'What have I said?' I assure you that the ear of my soul (if I may so speak) has often ached with intense effort to listen to what the tongue of the soul mutters, and yet I cannot catch it. You tell me I have only to look down into the depths within. Well, I have. I assure you that I have endeavoured to do so, as far as I know, honestly; and, so far from seeing clear and bright those splendors which you speak of, I can only see as in the depths of a cavern occasional gleams of a tremulous flickering light, which distinctly shows me nothing, and which, I half suspect, comes from without into these recesses: or I feel as if gazing down an abyss, the bottom of which is filled with water; the light—and that, too, for aught I know, reflected from without—only throws a transient glimpse of my own image on the surface of the dark water; that image itself broken and renewed as the water boils up from its hidden fountain. Or, if I may recur to your own metaphor, instead of hearing in those deep caverns the clear oracles of which you boast, I can distinguish nothing but a scarcely audible murmur; I know not whether it be any thing more than the lingering echoes of what I heard in my childhood: or, rather, my soul speaks to me on all these momentous subjects much as one in sleep often does; the lips move, but no sound issues from them. I retire from these attempts, as those of old from the cave of Trophonius, pale, terrified, and dejected. In short," he continued, "I feel much as Descartes says he did when he had denuded himself of all his traditional opinions,—a condition so graphically described in the beginning of the second of his Meditations. There is this difference, however, and in his favor: that he imposed upon himself only a self-inflicted doubt, which he could terminate at any time. His opinions had been but temporarily laid aside. They were on the shelf, close at hand, ready to be taken down again when wanted. But enough of this. You will, I know, aid me, if you can. And, now I think of it, do so on one point, by justifying your assertion, made the other evening, as to Mr. Newman's dilemma of the 'impossibility of a book-revelation.'"
"I said, I think, that Mr. Newman has satisfactorily proved to me that a book-revelation of moral and spiritual truth is impossible; that God reveals himself to us within, and not from without."
"As to what is impossible," said the other, "I fancy it would be difficult to get one thoroughly convinced of his ignorance and feebleness to be other than very cautious how he used the word. Perhaps, however, Mr. Newman may be more readily excused than most men for the strength with which he pronounces his opinions; for, as he has passed through an infinity of experiences, it may have given him 'insight' into many absurdities which, to the generality of mankind, do not appear such. I think if I had believed half so many things, I should have lost all confidence in myself. What a strong mind, or what buoyant faith, he must have!"