Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

"Behind the cloud of death,
Once, I beheld a sun; a sun which gilt
That sable cloud, and turn'd it all to gold.
How the grave's alter'd! fathomless as hell!
A real hell to those who dream'd of heaven,
Annihilation! How it yawns before me!
Next moment I may drop from thought, from sense,
The privilege of angels and of worms,
An outcast from existence! and this spirit,
This all-pervading, this all-conscious soul,
This particle of energy divine,
Which travels nature, flies from star to star,
And visits gods, and emulates their powers,
For ever is extinguish'd."

If intellect be, indeed, doomed utterly to perish, why may not we ask God, in that deep despair which, in that case, must inevitably flow from the consciousness of those powers with which He has at once blessed and cursed us—why that intellect, whose final doom is death, and that final doom within a moment, finds no thought that can satisfy it but that of Life, and no idea in which its flight can be lost but that of Eternity? If this earth were at once the soul's cradle and her tomb, why should that cradle have been hung amid the stars, and that tomb illumined by their eternal light? If, indeed, a child of the clay, was not this earth, with all its plains, forests, mountains, and seas, capacious enough for the dreams of that creature whose course was finally to be extinguished in the darkness of its bosom? What had we to do with planets, and suns, and spheres, "and all the dread magnificence of heaven?" Were we framed merely that we might for a few years rejoice in the beauty of the stars, as in that of the flowers beneath our feet? And ought we to be grateful for those transitory glimpses of the heavens, as for the fading splendour of the earth? But the heavens are not an idle show, hung out for the gaze of that idle dreamer Man. They are the work of the Eternal God, and He has given us power therein to read and to understand His glory. It is not our eyes only that are dazzled by the face of heaven—our souls can comprehend the laws by which that face is overspread by its celestial smiles. The dwelling-place of our spirits is already in the heavens. Well are we entitled to give names unto the stars; for we know the moment of their rising and their setting, and can be with them at every part of their shining journey through the boundless ether. While generations of men have lived, died, and are buried, the astronomer thinks of the golden orb that shone centuries ago within the vision of man, and lifts up his eye undoubting, at the very moment when it again comes glorious on its predicted return. Were the Eternal Being to slacken the course of a planet, or increase even the distance of the fixed stars, the decree would be soon known on earth. Our ignorance is great, because so is our knowledge; for it is from the mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these revelations? To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul perishable as the telescope through which it looks into the gates of heaven?

"Oh! star-eyed science, hast thou wander'd there
To waft us home—the message of despair?"

No; there is no despair in the gracious light of heaven. As we travel through those orbs, we feel indeed that we have no power, but we feel that we have mighty knowledge. We can create nothing, but we can dimly understand all. It belongs to God only to create, but it is given to man to know—and that knowledge is itself an assurance of immortality.

"Renounce St Evremont, and read St Paul.
Ere rapt by miracle, by reason wing'd,
His mounting mind made long abode in heaven.
This is freethinking, unconfined to parts,
To send the soul, on curious travel bent,
Through all the provinces of human thought:
To dart her flight through the whole sphere of man;
Of this vast universe to make the tour;
In each recess of space and time, at home;
Familiar with their wonders: diving deep;
And like a prince of boundless interests there,
Still most ambitious of the most remote;
To look on truth unbroken, and entire;
Truth in the system, the full orb; where truths,
By truths enlighten'd and sustain'd, afford
An archlike, strong foundation, to support
Th' incumbent weight of absolute, complete
Conviction: here, the more we press, we stand
More firm; who most examine, most believe.
Parts, like half-sentences, confound: the whole
Conveys the sense, and God is understood,
Who not in fragments writes to human race.
Read his whole volume, sceptic! then reply."

Renounce St Evremont! Ay, and many a Deistical writer of high repute now in the world. But how came they by the truths they did know? Not by the work of their own unassisted faculties—for they lived in a Christian country; they had already been imbued with many high and holy beliefs, of which—had they willed it—they could never have got rid; and to the very last the light which they, in their pride, believed to have emanated from the inner shrine—the penetralia of Philosophy—came from the temples of the living God. They walked all their lives long—- though they knew it not, or strived to forget it—in the light of revelation, which, though often darkened to men's eyes by clouds from earth, was still shining strong in heaven. Had the New Testament never been—think ye that men in their pride, though

"Poor sons of a day,"

could have discerned the necessity of framing for themselves a religion of humility? No. As by pride we are told the angels fell—so by pride man, after his miserable fall, strove to lift up his helpless being from the dust; and though trailing himself, soul and body, along the soiling earth, and glorying in his own corruption, sought to eternise here his very sins by naming the stars of heaven after heroes, conquerors, murderers, violators of the mandates of the Maker whom they had forgotten, or whose attributes they had debased by their own foul imaginations. They believed themselves, in the delusion of their own idolatries, to be "Lords of the world and Demigods of Fame," while they were the slaves of their own sins and their own sinful Deities. Should we have been wiser in our generation than they, but for the Bible? If in moral speculation we hear but little—too little—of the confession of what it owes to the Christian religion—in all the Philosophy, nevertheless, that is pure and of good report, we see that "the dayspring from on high has visited it." In all philosophic inquiry there is, perhaps, a tendency to the soul's exaltation of itself—which the spirit and genius of Christianity subdues. It is not sufficient to say that a natural sense of our own infirmities will do so—for seldom indeed have Deists been lowly-minded. They have talked proudly of humility. Compare their moral meditations with those of our great divines. Their thoughts and feelings are of the "earth earthy;" but when we listen to those others, we feel that their lore has been God-given.

"It is as if an angel shook his wings."

Thus has Christianity glorified Philosophy; its celestial purity is now the air in which intellect breathes. In the liberty and equality of that religion, the soul of the highest Philosopher dare not offend that of the humblest peasant. Nay, it sometimes stands rebuked before it—and the lowly dweller in the hut, or the shieling on the mountain-side, or in the forest, could abash the proudest son of Science, by pointing to the Sermon of our Saviour on the Mount—and saying, "I see my duties to man and God here!" The religious establishments of Christianity, therefore, have done more not only to support the life of virtue, but to show all its springs and sources, than all the works of all the Philosophers who have ever expounded its principles or its practice.