My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education

by Hugh Miller

I was impressed at this time by another very remarkable feature in the religion of Christ in its subjective character. Kames, in his "Art of Thinking," illustrates, by a curious story, one of his observations on the "nature of man." "Nothing is more common," he says, "than love converted into hatred; and we have seen instances of hatred converted into love." And in exemplifying the remark, he relates his anecdote of "Unnion and Valentine." Two English soldiers, who fought in the wars of Queen Anne—the one a petty officer, the other a private sentinel—had been friends and comrades for years; but, quarrelling in some love affair, they became bitter enemies. The officer made an ungenerous use of his authority, and so annoyed and persecuted the sentinel as almost to fret him into madness; and he was frequently heard to say that he would die to be avenged of him. Whole months were spent in the infliction of injuries on the one side, and in the venting of complaints on the other; when, in the midst of their mutual rage, they were both selected, as men of tried courage, to share in some desperate attack, which was, however, unsuccessful; and the officer, in the retreat, was disabled, and struck down by a shot in the thigh. "Oh, Valentine! and will you leave me here to perish?" he exclaimed, as his old comrade rushed past him. The poor injured man immediately returned; and, in the midst of a thick fire, bore off his wounded enemy to what seemed a place of safety, when he was struck by a chance ball, and fell dead under his burden. The officer, immediately forgetting his wound, rose up, tearing his hair; and, throwing himself on the bleeding body, he cried, "Ah, Valentine! and was it for me, who have so barbarously used thee, that thou hast died? I will not live after thee." He was not by any means to be forced from the corpse; but was removed with it bleeding in his arms, and attended with tears by all his comrades, who knew of his harshness to the deceased. When brought to a tent, his wounds were dressed by force; but the next day, still calling on Valentine, and lamenting his cruelties to him, he died in the pangs of remorse and despair.

This surely is a striking story; but the commonplace remark based upon it by the philosopher is greatly less so. Men who have loved do often learn to hate the object of their affections; and men who have hated sometimes learn to love: but the portion of the anecdote specially worthy of remark appears to be that which, dwelling on the o'ermastering remorse and sorrow of the rescued soldier, shows how effectually his poor dead comrade had, by dying for him "while he was yet his enemy," "heaped coals of fire upon his head." And such seems to be one of the leading principles on which, with a Divine adaptation to the heart of man, the scheme of Redemption has been framed. The Saviour approved his love, "in that while we were yet sinners, He died for us." There is an inexpressibly great power in this principle; and many a deeply-stirred heart has felt it to its core. The theologians have perhaps too frequently dwelt on the Saviour's vicarious satisfaction for human sin in its relation to the offended justice of the Father. How, or on what principle, the Father was satisfied, I know not, and may never know. The enunciation regarding vicarious satisfaction may be properly received in faith as a fact, but, I suspect, not properly reasoned upon until we shall be able to bring the moral sense of Deity, with its requirements, within the limits of a small and trivial logic. But the thorough adaptation of the scheme to man's nature is greatly more appreciable, and lies fully within the reach of observation and experience. And how thorough that adaptation is, all who have really looked at the matter ought to be competent to say. Does an earthly priesthood, vested with alleged powers to interpose between God and man, always originate an ecclesiastical tyranny, which has the effect, in the end, of shutting up the mass of men from their Maker?—here is there a High Priest passed into the heavens—the only Priest whom the evangelistic Protestant recognises as really such—to whom, in his character of Mediator between God and man, all may apply, and before whom there need be felt none of that abject prostration of the spirit and understanding which man always experiences when he bends before the merely human priest. Is self-righteousness the besetting infirmity of the religious man?—in the scheme of vicarious righteousness it finds no footing. The self-approving Pharisee must be content to renounce his own merits, ere he can have part or lot in the fund of merit which alone avails; and yet without personal righteousness he can have no evidence whatever that he has an interest in the all-prevailing imputed righteousness. But it is in the closing scene of life, when man's boasted virtues become so intangible in his estimation that they elude his grasp, and sins and shortcomings, little noted before, start up around him like spectres, that the scheme of Redemption appears worthy of the infinite wisdom and goodness of God, and when what the Saviour did and suffered seems of efficacy enough to blot out the guilt of every offence. It is when the minor lights of comfort are extinguished that the Sun of Righteousness shines forth, and more than compensates for them all.

The opinions which I formed at this time on this matter of prime importance I found no after occasion to alter or modify. On the contrary, in passing from the subjective to the objective view, I have seen the doctrine of the union of the two natures greatly confirmed. The truths of geology appear destined to exercise in the future no inconsiderable influence on natural theology; and with this especial doctrine they seem very much in accordance. Of that long and stately march of creation with which the records of the stony science bring us acquainted, the distinguishing characteristic is progress. There appears to have been a time when there existed on our planet only dead matter unconnected with vitality; and then a time in which plants and animals of a low order began to be, but in which even fishes, the humblest of the vertebrata, were so rare and exceptionable, that they occupied a scarce appreciable place in Nature. Then came an age of fishes huge of size, and that to the peculiar ichthyic organization added certain well-marked characteristics of the reptilian class immediately above them. And then, after a time, during which the reptile had occupied a place as inconspicuous as that occupied by the fish in the earlier periods of animal life, an age of reptiles of vast bulk and high standing was ushered in. And when, in the lapse of untold ages, it also had passed away, there succeeded an age of great mammals. Molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession their periods of vast extent; and then there came a period that differed even more, in the character of its master-existence, from any of these creations, than they, with their many vitalities, had differed from the previous inorganic period in which life had not yet begun to be. The human period began—the period of a fellow-worker with God, created in God's own image. The animal existences of the previous ages formed, if I may so express myself, mere figures in the landscapes of the great garden which they inhabited. Man, on the other hand, was placed in it to "keep and to dress it;" and such has been the effect of his labours, that they have altered and improved the face of whole continents. Our globe, even as it might be seen from the moon, testifies, over its surface, to that unique nature of man, unshared in by any of the inferior animals, which renders him, in things physical and natural, a fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it. And of the identity of at least his intellect with that of his Maker, and, of consequence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares that he was created in God's own image, we have direct evidence in his ability of not only conceiving of God's contrivances, but even of reproducing them; and this, not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker. He may occasionally borrow the principles of his contrivances from the works of the Original Designer, but much more frequently, in studying the works of the Original Designer does he discover in them the principles of his own contrivances. He has not been an imitator: he has merely been exercising, with resembling results, the resembling mind, i.e., the mind made in the Divine image. But the existing scene of things is not destined to be the last. High as it is, it is too low and too imperfect to be regarded as God's finished work: it is merely one of the progressive dynasties; and Revelation and the implanted instincts of our nature alike teach us to anticipate a glorious terminal dynasty. In the first dawn of being, simple vitality was united to matter: the vitality thus united became, in each succeeding period, of a higher and yet higher order;—it was in succession the vitality of the mollusc, of the fish, of the reptile, of the sagacious mammal, and, finally, of responsible, immortal man, created in the image of God. What is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the past—an introduction a second time of "man made in the image of God?" No! The geologist, in the tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish—of the reptile—of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty—the "kingdom"—not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form of man. In the doctrine of the two natures, and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of Him in whom the natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been, a progress Godwards—not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union; and, occupying that point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable Monarch of all the Future. It is, as urged by the Apostle, the especial glory of our race, that it should have furnished that point of contact at which Godhead has united Himself, not to man only, but also, through man, to His own Universe—to the Universe of Matter and of Mind.

I remained for several months in delicate and somewhat precarious health. My lungs had received more serious injury than I had at first supposed; and it seemed at one time rather doubtful whether the severe mechanical irritation which had so fretted them that the air-passages seemed overcharged with matter and stone-dust, might not pass into the complaint which it stimulated, and become confirmed consumption. Curiously enough, my comrades had told me in sober earnest—among the rest, Cha, a man of sense and observation—that I would pay the forfeit of my sobriety by being sooner affected than they by the stone-cutter's malady: "a good bouse" gave, they said, a wholesome fillip to the constitution, and "cleared the sulphur off the lungs;" and mine would suffer for want of the medicine which kept theirs clean. I know not whether there was virtue in their remedy: it seems just possible that the shock given to the constitution by an overdose of strong drink may in certain cases be medicinal in its effects; but they were certainly not in error in their prediction. Among the hewers of the party I was the first affected by the malady. I still remember the rather pensive than sad feeling with which I used to contemplate, at this time, an early death, and the intense love of nature that drew me, day after day, to the beautiful scenery which surrounds my native town, and which I loved all the more from the consciousness that my eyes might so soon close upon it for ever. "It is a pleasant thing to behold the sun." Among my manuscripts—useless scraps of paper, to which, however, in their character as fossils of the past epochs of my life, I cannot help attaching an interest not at all in themselves—I find the mood represented by only a few almost infantile verses, addressed to a docile little girl of five years, my eldest sister by my mother's second marriage, and my frequent companion, during my illness, in my short walks.

TO JEANIE.

Sister Jeanie, haste, we'll go

To whare the white-starred gowans grow,

Wi' the puddock flower o' gowden hue.

The snaw-drap white and the bonny vi'let blue.

Sister Jeanie, haste, we'll go