The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1

by Thomas De Quincey

We see the great Jewish lawgiver looking forward to cases which actually occurred nearly five hundred years after, as demanding a king, and again looking still farther to cases eight hundred and a thousand years after—their disobedience and rebellion to God. Now, many will think that it must have been an easy thing for any people, when swerving from their law, and especially in that one great fundamental article of idolatry as the Jews so continually did, and so naturally when the case is examined, to always have an easy retreat: the plagues and curses denounced would begin to unfold themselves, and then what more easy than to relinquish the idolatrous rites or customs, resuming with their old rituals to God their old privileges? But this was doubly impossible. First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of God slept often for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions. The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could not recover the station from which they swerved. They that had now realized the casus fœderis, the case in which they had covenanted themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.

In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.

If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a general fire—that word by which sadness is spread over the face of things, but also infinite grandeur—then may I rightly lay this as one chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.

The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating to that which shrinks up to a point—and observe, I do not mean that being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes as a real thing—when this happens, having no subjective existence at all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge; fancying, e.g., like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road out of the wood in which they were then entangled.

It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature, which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly Boeckh—εν γενει—which does not mean that Gods and men are the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread through thousands of years.

It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet, 'Qu'ont gagné les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290). Now how should that case have been tried thoroughly before the printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospel was so tried. True, but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new proof of its reality.

An Analogy.—1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews, probably, when rebuked for wickedness, replied, 'What! are we not the peculiar people of God? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the people of God—the chosen people—implied a license to do wrong, and had a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.

2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to repentance. It is odious to think of, this making God the abettor and encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because God has said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety; though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they—such is their thought—are encouraged to sin by the assurance that repentance will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.

Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this means real penitence;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we mean real penitence.' 'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath, and protest against it as no privilege at all.

The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled in her skirts.