полная версияПолная версия
The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864
While we honor our brave soldiers and their glorious deeds, let us also honor their bards,
'Nor suffer them to steal,Unthanked, away, to weep beside the harp,Dejected, prayerful, while the fields are won.'Broken Lights: An Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future Prospects of Religious Faith. By Frances Power Cobbe. Boston: J. E. Tilton & Co. 1864.
A book of decided ability, however much we may regret the conclusions arrived at by its author. Contents of Part I. are: The Present Condition of Religious Faith. Chapter I. The Great Problem. II. The Solutions of the Problem, Historical and Rational, Palæologian and Neologian. Under the head of Palæologian we have The High Church Solution, the Low Church Solution; under Neologian we have the First Broad Church Solution, the Second Broad Church Solution. We have then the Solutions of the Parties Outside the Church, Bishop Colenso on the Pentateuch, and Renan's 'Vie de Jesus.' Part II. gives us 'The Future Prospects of Religious Faith.' Under the head of Rational, we have the Rationalist Solution of the Problems, The Faith of the Future, Theoretic Theism, and Practical Theism.
Our author is of the school of Theodore Parker, a Theist. 'Three great principles—the absolute goodness of God; the final salvation of every created soul; and the divine authority of conscience—are the obvious fundamental canons of the Faith of the Future.' We continue our quotations: 'God will not leave us when all our puny theologies have failed us, and all our little systems shall have had their day and ceased to be. We shall yet praise Him who is the light of life, even though the darkness may seem to gather round us now. Christianity may fail us, and we may watch it with straining eyes going slowly down from the zenith where once it shone; but we need neither regret that it should pass away, nor dread lest we be left in gloom. Let it pass away—that grand and wonderful faith! Let it go down, calmly and slowly, like an orb which has brightened half our heaven through the night of the ages, and sets at last in glory, leaving its train of light long gleaming in the sky, and mingling with the dawn. Already up the East there climbs another Sun.' Again: 'The faith, then, for which we must contend—the faith which we believe shall be the religion of future ages—must be one founded on the Original Revelation of Consciousness, not on the Traditional Revelation of Church or Book—a faith, not resting for its sole support on the peculiar History of one nation, but rated by the whole history of humanity.' … 'The view which seems to be the sole fitting one for our estimate of the character of Christ, is that which regards him as the great REGENERATOR of Humanity. His coming was to the life of humanity what Regeneration is to the life of the individual. He has transformed the Law into the Gospel. He has changed the bondage of the alien for the liberty of the sons of God. He has glorified Virtue into Holiness, Religion into Piety, and Duty into Love.'
What a perpetual stumbling block in the way of all unbelief is the marvellous character of Christ! We may strive to throw away the record, but He remains a living force within the soul forever. The Theist would miss Him even in his certain heaven!
We think we have given, in the few short extracts above, enough to enable our readers to perceive the standpoint from which this work is written. It is a clear statement of the dogmas held, the reasons for their adoption, and the hopes of what is styled the Church of the Future. Of the ability of many of its adherents there can be no doubt. The contest is upon the children of Faith. Let them meet it with candor, fairness, prayer, love, profound biblical and scientific erudition, and may God comfort us with His eternal truth!
Dramatis Personæ. By Robert Browning. Boston: Ticknor & Field. New York: for sale by D. Appleton & Co.
This book has been already reviewed by the English critics, who are always appreciative of Browning's merits, and tender to his faults. It is as wilful as its predecessors, as unintelligible, as fragmentary, its rhythm as distorted and broken, its diction as peculiar, its sequences as disconnected. Yet we think it shows gleams of higher poetic talent than anything he has yet published. It contains eighteen poems. 'A Death in the Desert' is an imaginary portrayal of the death of St. John in his old age in a cave, to which he had been taken by some faithful adherents to save him from persecution. It is a sketch of power and originality. St. John is supposed to speak:
'If I live yet, it is for good, more loveThrough me to men: be nought but ashes hereThat keeps awhile my semblance, who was John—Still when they scatter, there is left on earthNo one alive who knew (consider this!)—Saw with his eyes and handled with his handsThat which was from the first the Word of Life.How will it be when none more saith 'I saw?''Very original and very disagreeable in its highly wrought and subtile Realism is 'Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island,' a study from Shakspeare's 'Tempest.' It is a curious exposition of the philosophy of such a being. At the close, when Caliban, who speaks in the third person, is beginning to think of Setebos, 'his dam's god,' as not so formidable after all, a great storm awakes, which upsets all his reasoning, and makes him fall flat on his face with fright:
'What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes,There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The windShoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,And fast invading fires begin! White blaze—A tree's head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there,His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,Will let those quails fly, will not eat this mouthOne little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!''Mr. Sludge, the Medium,' one of the longer poems, is intended, according to rumor, to demolish Mr. Home, and includes some sharp thrusts at various persons who still patronize him after having found him guilty of fraud.
The story runs that a lady and gentleman of eminence, devout spiritualists, residing at Rome, confessed to Mr. Browning that during Mr. Home's stay at their house they once forbade his putting his hand under the table, and the spirits wouldn't rap, and Home burst into tears, and confessed that on that occasion only he had deceived them; that on one other occasion he had put phosphorus on the tips of wires and stretched them from the roof of their house to represent certain spiritual apparitions. 'And what did you say, how did you act, upon the discovery?' asked Mr. Browning. 'Oh,' replied the lady, 'I rebuked him severely; told him plainly how shameful it was that one who had been so supernaturally gifted should act so, and told him that he ought to repent.' 'And he still remained with you, and—' 'Oh, yes, we are perfectly sure that everything was genuine afterward.' Upon which the poet was so disgusted that he vented his indignation in 'Mr. Sludge.'
Fireside Travels. By James Russell Lowell. 'Travelling makes a man sit still in his old age with satisfaction, and travel over the world again in his chair and bed by discourse and thoughts.'—The Voyage of Italy, by Richard Lassels, Gent. Boston; Ticknor & Fields. 1864. New York: for sale by D. Appleton & Co.
Mr. Lowell says, in big short preface: 'The greater part of this volume was printed ten years ago in Putnam's Monthly and Graham's Magazine. The additions (most of them about Italy) have been made up, as the original matter was, from old letters and journals written on the spot. My wish was to describe not so much what I went to see, as what I saw that was most unlike what one sees at home. If the reader find entertainment, he will find all I hoped to give him.'
And a churl he surely were if he find it not; for a right pleasant book it is to read—genial and full of the real Lowell humor, almost as characteristic as Jean Paul's, der einzige. 'Cambridge Thirty Years Ago' will carry many of our most distinguished men back to the sunny days of youth, while the boys of to-day will be delighted to know how it fared with them then and there. Contents: Cambridge Thirty Years Ago; A Moosehead Journal; Leaves from My Journal in Italy and Elsewhere; At Sea; In the Mediterranean; Italy; A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic.
There is no use in praising a book of Lowell's; everybody knows, reads, and loves him.
Simonson's Circular Zoological Chart. A Directory to the Study of the Animal Kingdom. Published by Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., 130 Grand street, New York, and 25 North Fourth street, Philadelphia.
This chart must prove a valuable guide to the teacher, and a great aid to the student of Natural History. It appears to have been carefully compiled from modern standard works, and is divided and subdivided as accurately as the limited space allows. It is a vast aid to the memory, showing at a glance the classification of the animal kingdom; and, bringing together the various groups of animals on one page, it stamps its complicated lesson on the mind through the rapid power of the eye. When the enormous number of species is considered, the advantage of such a chart may be readily imagined. It may be used as an introduction by the teacher, or side by side with any text book. We heartily recommend it to notice.
Perce's Magnetic Globes. A very ingenious invention is here offered to the public through Mr. J. F. Trow, of 50 Greene street, New York. It consists of a hollow Globe made of soft iron, and Magnetic Objects, representing the races of mankind, animals, trees, light-houses, are supplied with it, which, adhering to the surface, illustrate clearly the attraction of gravitation, the rotundity of the earth, its diurnal motion, the changes of day and night, and many other things very difficult to make intelligible to children. Teachers will find this globe and its magnetic objects of incalculable value in affording facilities for striking illustrations of principles, problems, and various terrestrial phenomena.
SIZES AND PRICES
Suitable Magnetic Objects accompany each Globe.
Christus Judex. A Traveller's Tale. By Edward Roth. Philadelphia: Frederick Leypoldt. 1864.
A singular romance, interwoven of the art life of the Old, and the forest life of the New World. The main character is the Great Stone Face, already immortalized by the lamented Hawthorne. It is here presented to us under a new aspect, and while we think that even those grand old rocks fail to embody the glorious ideal of a Christus Judex, we must acknowledge the pleasure we have derived from the fanciful descriptions and pleasant associations offered us in this dainty little volume.
EDITOR'S TABLE
Christmas is again upon us, dear readers; we may almost hear the gathering chime of its happy bells upon the frosty air. It is a time when even strangers may hold commune; let us take advantage of it, and learn to know something of each other. But are we indeed strangers? It is true that we stand as abstract impersonalities, as disembodied spirits, unknown even by name to one another. Yet have we held relations which we cannot shake off even if we would. 'The most obscure of literary men' we may be, yet has your kind smile often cheered us as we labored to place before you the wants, wishes, tastes, views, hopes, and aims of our common country. Caterer as we are for you, through us and the handywork of our skilful printer have our able writers spun their golden threads through heart, mind, and soul. Contributors, readers, and editor are alike linked in these glittering spiritual meshes, and can never be quite the same as if the web had never held them for its passing moment in its light zone of thought. For ideas generate duties, knowledge stimulates action, and to act in a world of doubt may well be onerous. We frankly confess to you that a dread responsibility has cast a deep shadow upon all our moments since the commencement of our intercourse with you. Our butterfly hours were then past: we grew into work-a-day bees—if only we have stored some honey in your hives to pay us for the lost idlesse of our dreamy summers! If it 'is greatly wise to talk with our past hours, and ask them what report they bear to Heaven' when spent only for ourselves, it is a solemn thing to call them back, and ask them what report they bear to Heaven for the thousands to whom they have ministered. We spread the table lovingly before you: what if there should be something in yourselves to turn our healthful food to poison? On marches The Continental with its light and heavy freight of winged words and thoughts, striding from monthly stepping-stone to stepping-stone on the long route of Time. Stepping-stones in Time are they now truly, but as we gaze they seem to grow into Eternity, and the buds which twine their glow around them ripen slowly into ever-living fruit in the strange clime of the Everlasting Now to which we are all hastening.
How clear that Christmas chime upon the frosty air!
Reader, is it too much to hope that in spite of all our short-comings, we have yet been loyal to your better hours, and faithful in the field given us to sow for the heavenly Reapers? We have labored to interest, amuse, and instruct you for the last eighteen months: have you learned in that time to trust us as we have learned to care for you? Do you know us loyal patriots and true Christians, even if of a broad and all-unsectarian faith? If we are too frank, it is because we are certain that truth can never contradict itself, that nature must be one with revelation, that he errs who fears the crucible of the savant or would hold science in leading strings. The Continental seeks the light, condemns to silence no new Galileo, tortures no creative Kepler, has no fires for heretics, and nothing worse than an incredulous smile for the shivering witches and mediums, the muscular demons of modern spiritualism. It rejects no scientific investigation honorably pursued, for all paths lead back to the Maker of the Universe, and the honest seeker must find Him at the end of his route. That God is our Father, that we are made in His triune image, that Christ is our elder Brother, the great Regenerator of our race, is surely the ever open, ever mystic secret of the universe!
We have travelled on together through a gloomy year. The air has been sad with sighs, dim with tears, restless with great sobs of human anguish. But we are drifting into calmer swells on the great Time-Ocean, and the crimson year of '64 is almost past. The dwellers of the Valley already look for the morning star, while those upon the Hilltop hail the auroral light of '65. Enshrined in and sparkling through its golden glow two mystic figures gleam; the star of the morning pales before their splendor. The one is godlike in her majesty, sublime through conquered suffering, the awful smile of the Crucified seems shining through the features transfigured since He wore them, and the cross glitters in all the glory of Self-sacrifice on her broad breast. She wears a girdle blue as if woven from the depths of heaven, and as we gaze we see great opals with veiled hearts of fire form into quaint old runic letters upon it, and the God-word LOVE flashes down the secret of her inner life upon us. She is still young as when she woke in Paradise, and, seeing the End, is not yet weary with her long journey of Exile. Brighter gates than those of Eden stand unbarred before her! In her right hand she holds unrolled, that all may read, the great Magna Charta of universal Human Rights, and even at this distance we may see EMANCIPATION upon its broad margin. We know the once sad spirit now, no longer sad, the radiant Genius of Humanity.
Her vigorous arm is round a younger and less solemn form, a form of wildering beauty, whose gold hair glitters like a nimbus in the level rays of morning; with an irresistible impulse we take her into the innermost folds of our hearts, we feel her to be our own; our banner in her right hand sways and tosses on the fresh breeze, its stars, round which new suns are ever clustering, throw their dazzling light upon her, and the young eagles turning from the sun throng around her to drink the splendor from her brighter brow. The long streamers from her girdle float athwart the sky, their wavy lines, red, white, and blue, quiver with delight as the wild zephyrs caress them, thrilling the air with shifting play of passionate color. Ha! what miracle is this?—whatsoever light may fall upon them, under what angle soever we may see them, as were it magically woven into their warp and woof, we read the word now graven on our hearts—Union! Her left hand holds closely clasped to her heart a great urn, glowing as it were an immense ruby—ah! we need no words to tell us what the young spirit clasps so fondly to her breast—we feel it is the dust of the holy dead, who gave their lives on the red battle field that she might live: their very ashes glow with living fire! Her white feet rest on the sacred graves of Shiloh, Antietam, Murfreesboro', Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain, the Wilderness, Atlanta, Winchester, and Cedar Creek, from which she has newly risen in her young strength and ever-growing glory.
She is the brilliant Spirit of our Nation! the new hope of all People! Her career is ever onward with the Genius of Humanity into the enchanted realm of the happy Future. No chains are in her white hands now. The tired laborer rests as she smiles upon him; the bay of the bloodhound and sharp crack of the lash cease in the white cotton field; the Indian buries his tomahawk, no longer wounding the still ear of the forest with his shrill war whoop; the maiden walks fearlessly free, for all men are now her brothers; shielding her sanctity; the wife is happy, for the husband has won her esteem, and it is no shame to crown him with her love; and cherub-children sport around, lovely and happy as the heaven-seraphs.
Peace to our glorious dead! Eternal honor to the martyrs of freedom! From the sharp agonies of their true hearts springs now first to conscious birth the vigorous Spirit of our Nation. We never knew aright how very dear to us she was until the traitors tried to tear her limb from limb because her heart was open to all made in the image of their God—because she knew the sacred worth of man.
How near those Christmas chimes peal on the frosty air!
And if we will but think of it, a Nationality is always of slow growth, of gradual development. It, like man himself, is born in pain and anguish. It is indeed a living member of the Grand Man of which Humanity is composed. Since the forty years wandering of the children of Israel in the desert, how much suffering has been endured to hold it sacred! The history of the present time is but a record of fierce struggles to achieve or hold a Nationality. Poland has hung on the cross of her great enemy for centuries rather than yield its sanctity. He has torn and scattered its quivering members, blotted it out in blood from the names known on earth, it has been murdered, and fed upon by three great Christian Powers ('Oh, the pity of it!')—Catholic Austria, Protestant Prussia and Greek-Churched Russia—but it is not dead: it lives in all the energy of self-abnegating suffering on the mountains of Causasus, the steppes of Asia, the frozen plains of Siberia, in the depths of Russian mines, the darkness of Russian prisons, and it still will live until the last Pole is laid in the last grave of his heroic but unfortunate race. Such is its vitality when once truly born. Denmark turns pale and shivers as she feels it may be torn from her; 'Italia, with the fatal gift of beauty for her dower,' the fair land where fairer Juliets breathe the enamored air, art—crowned and genius-gifted, writhes in agony until it may be her own; Greece long bled for it; and the brave and haughty Magyar, to whom a courser fleet and the free air are necessities of daily life, braves and bears prisons, chains, and poverty, in the hope of its attainment. What is this precious Nationality? Like all basic elements, it is difficult to define. It is not a State, a Constitution, nor is it made by man at all. An able writer in The North American Review for October says: 'It may be said, in general, to be the sum of the differences, geographical, historical, political, and moral, which separate a people as a community from every other—of those differences which modify the character of each individual, and the results of which are combined in the traits of national character. The consciousness of its existence is developed slowly, and it is long before the sentiment of Nationality—the true foundation of patriotism—gains force over the hearts and convictions of a people. But this sentiment, when it has once taken root, is one of the most powerful of those by which human conduct is affected. It is a sentiment of the highest order, lifting men out of narrow and selfish individualism into a region where they behold their duties as members one of another, as partakers of the general life of humanity—the inheritors of the past, the trustees of the future.'
'What is planetary humanity?' says Krasinski. 'It is the entirety and unity of all the powers and capacities of the human spirit expressed visibly on the earth through harmony and concord, the love of its members, that is of the various nationalities. As all the members of the human body are the visible and various parts of the invisible human I, which connects and rules them all, so the visible nationalities must in their variety and harmonious unity become in some future time the living members of a universal humanity. The world knows to-day to what point its history is tending: it knows it is governed by the wisdom of God, and that its end is the Humanity, the entire universality brought into perfect accord with the will of God, knowing and executing the laws given it by God. But the means to this end, the instruments, the living members, are the Nationalities, in which all the varieties of the human race have their fairest bloom, their most precious flower. What the tones are in the musical chord they are in humanity, eternal variety in eternal harmony and concord. It is impossible to conceive Humanity without them; it would then be unity without variety, consequently no proper unity at all, a mere lifeness oneness. States are of human creation, an aggregative collection of small parts; but nationalities are made by God alone, and therefore not states without nationalities, but states forming nationalities, belong to the coming union of universal humanity, and pass into the Christian order. States have risen before this to destroy a nationality, dividing and quartering it for the profit of some selfish ideal, tearing asunder a living, palpitating organism, murdering a visible member of the Universal Humanity. He is but a child who calls this merely a political crime: it is a crime of the very deepest dye, a crime against the Humanity itself, against religion, where the daring criminals, striding over all lower spheres, break into the circles of the living God. To tear asunder a state of merely human creation, generated only by human interests and passions, would be a political crime, but to wish to dismember and murder a God-given nationality, when the realization of the idea of humanity on the planet cannot be filled without it, is a rebellion against the eternal truth of God—it is a sacrilege! The recognition of such violation were participation; opposition to such impiety is religion!'
