LXIV.
If the angel Gabriel were to come down from heaven, and head a successful rise against the most abominable and unrighteous vested interest which this poor world groans under, he would most certainly lose his character for many years, probably for centuries, not only with upholders of said vested interest, but with the respectable mass of the people whom he had delivered. They wouldn’t ask him to dinner, or let their names appear with his in the papers; they would be very careful how they spoke of him in the Palaver, or at their clubs. What can we expect, then, when we have only poor, gallant, blundering men like Kossuth, Garibaldi, Mazzini, and righteous causes do not always triumph in their hands; men who have holes enough in their armor, God knows, easy to be hit by respectabilities sitting in their lounging-chairs, and having large balances at their bankers?
But you who only want to have your heads set straight to take the right side, bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see a man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can’t join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for, which is just what you have got to do for yourselves; and so think and speak of him tenderly.
LXV.
If you have not already felt it, you will assuredly feel, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the trappings of a worn-out superstition. Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has fallen till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the invisible on which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to that upon which he can build safely—the world of matter, his knowledge of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see and taste and handle. Those who are telling you still in this time that your life can and ought to be lived in daily communion with the unseen—that so only you can loyally control the visible—are either wilfully deceiving you or are dreamers and visionaries.
So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes through our literature, and colors the life of the streets and markets in a thousand ways; and a mammon-ridden generation, longing to be rid of what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions—which they try to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make them uneasy in their own efforts to eat, drink, and be merry—applauds as openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the flesh-pots publicly declared and recognized.
Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you may be ready and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer of many anxious hearts; in a time, charged on every side with signs of the passing away of old things, such as have not been seen above the horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his protest on the church-door of a German village.