Oh! to chant the grander story,
And to muse the melting tale!
Oh! to rouse the soul of glory,
And to charm the happy vale!
I should love to make the nations
Bow before my lofty song,
While my fancy's fair creations
Endless pleasures should prolong.
I should love to have my pages
Eager sought by wise and old,
While throughout the countless ages
Fair and young my numbers told.
II.
Ever thus gay Hope will wander
Up the shining mount of fame;
Ere you follow, pause and ponder,
While she waves her luring flame.
Souls are blest that dwell more lowly,
Braving not the gaze of earth,
Where they lead a life all holy,
And the gentler joys have birth.
You may guide your kindred kindly
Through the rosy ways of life,
While the world shall trample blindly
Down the thorny paths of strife.
You may seek the 'feast of reason,'
And enjoy the 'flow of soul,'
Dearest friends in every season,
Peaceful age the blessed goal.
Nature spreads her rich attractions
On the earth, and sea, and sky;
Art, religion, man's great actions
Food for mind and soul supply.
God in heaven giveth vision
Of the better land beyond:
Good on earth, and joys elysian,
These shall sate thy yearnings fond.
III.
But to wake the hills and valleys
With the poet's sounding lyre!
Glory yet my spirit rallies,
I would breathe the sacred fire.
Nature, art, and holy friendship,
Books and men shall give me aid;
Even Heaven will grant me kinship,
I would tell what God hath made.
I will dwell apart with heroes,
I will mate with saintly men;
God and nature ever near us,
I shall be more blessed then.
Humbled, chaste, my soul shall listen
To the chiming of the spheres,
Where, on high, His glories glisten,
As His throne the spirit nears.
IV.
Yes, ye bands of bright immortals,
Free throughout all earth and time,
I would ope the grand old portals
Leading to your realms sublime;
Suns and starry worlds beneath you,
Lords of wisdom, light, and air,
I would sip rare nectar with you,
I would taste ambrosia there;
There to feel exultant powers
Lift me up the ethereal tide,
O'er your bright and airy towers,
Where the boldest plume is tried.
V.
Holiest helpers, lend assistance,
That I fail not in the flight!
Pride, away! in that grand distance
Thou art black as shades of night.
Faithful, pure, and single-hearted,
I may soar on tireless wing,
Till the folds of light are parted
Where the heavenly muses sing.
Whitmore.
Faith and the Sciences.
In the last half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, the so-called free-thinkers defended their rejection of the Christian mysteries on the alleged ground that the mathematicians had exploded them. Thus Dr. Garth, in his last illness, resisted the efforts of Addison to persuade him to die as a Christian, by saying, "Surely, Mr. Addison, I have good reason not to believe those trifles, since my friend, Dr. Halley, who has dealt much in demonstration, has assured me that the doctrines of Christianity are incomprehensible, and the religion itself an imposture."
In this assurance of Dr. Halley, we see a trace of Cartesianism which places certainty in clearness of ideas, and assumes that what is incomprehensible, or what cannot be clearly apprehended by the mind, is false; as if the human mind were the measure of the true, and as if there were not truths too large for it to comprehend! But since Berkeley, the Protestant Bishop of Cloyne, exposed in his Analyst, and Letters in its defence, the confused and false reasoning of mathematicians, especially in fluxions or the differential calculus, in which, though their conclusions are true, they are not obtained from their premises, the free-thinkers have abandoned the authority of mathematicians, and now seek to justify their infidelity by that of the so-called physicists. They appeal now to the natural sciences, chiefly to geology, zoology, and philology, and tell us that the progress made in these sciences has destroyed the authority of the Holy Scriptures and exploded the Christian dogmas. Geology, we are told, has disproved the chronology of the Bible, zoology has disproved the dogma of creation, and ethnology and philology have disproved the unity of the species; consequently the dogma of original sin, and all the dogmas that presuppose it. Hence our scientific chiefs, whom the age delights to honor, look down on us, poor, benighted Christian believers, with deep pity or supreme contempt, and despatch our faith by pronouncing the word "credulity" or "superstition" with an air that anticipates or admits no contradiction. It is true, here and there a man, not without scientific distinction, utters a feeble protest, and timidly attempts to show that there is no discrepancy between the Christian faith and the facts really discovered and classified by the sciences; but there is no denying that the predominant tendency of the modern scientific world is decidedly unchristian, even when not decidedly anti-christian.
The most learned men and profoundest thinkers of our age, as of every age, are, no doubt, believers, sincere and earnest Christians; but they are not the men who represent the age, and give tone to its literature and science. They are not the popular men of their times, and their voice is drowned in the din of the multitude. There is nothing novel or sensational in what they have to tell us, and there is no evidence of originality or independence of thought or character in following them. In following them we have no opportunity of separating ourselves from the past, breaking with tradition, and boldly defying both heaven and earth. There is no chance for war against authority, of creating a revolution, or enjoying the excitement of a battle; so the multitude of little men go not with them. And they who would deem it gross intellectual weakness to rely on the authority of St. Paul, or even of our Lord himself, have followed blindly and with full confidence an Agassiz, a Huxley, a Lyell, or any other second or third-rate physicist, who is understood to defend theories that undermine the authority of the church and the Bible.
We are not, we frankly confess, learned in the sciences. They have changed so rapidly and so essentially since our younger days, when we did take some pains to master them, that we do not know what they are to-day any more than we do what they will be to-morrow. We have not, in our slowness, been able to keep pace with them, and we only know enough of them now to know that they are continually changing under the very eye of the spectator. But, if we do not know all the achievements of the sciences, we claim to know something of the science of sciences, the science which gives the law to them, and to which they must conform or cease to pretend to have any scientific character. If we know not what they have done, we know something which they have not done.
We said, in our article on the Cartesian Doubt, that the ideal formula does not give us the sciences; but we add now, what it did not comport with our purpose to add then, that, though it does not give them, it gives them their law and controls them. We do not deduce our physics from our metaphysics; but our metaphysics or philosophy gives the law to the inductive or empirical sciences, and prescribes the bounds beyond which they cannot pass without ceasing to be sciences. Knowing the ideal formula, we do not know all the sciences, but we do know what is not and cannot be science.
The ideal formula, being creates existences, which is only the first article of the creed, is indisputable, certain, and the principle alike of all the real and all the knowable, of all existence and of all science. This formula expresses the primitive intuition, and it is given us by God himself in creating us intelligent creatures, because without it our minds cannot exist, and, if it had not been given us in the very constitution of the mind, we never could have obtained it. It is the essential basis of the mind, the necessary condition of all thought, and we cannot even in thought deny it, or think at all without affirming it This we have heretofore amply shown; and we may add here that no one ever thinks without thinking something the contrary of which cannot be thought, as St. Anselm asserts.