From: The Dial (April 1842)
Author:
Published: Charles C. Little and James Brown 1842 Boston
ESTEEMED FRIEND,
THE article “Days from a Diary,” is of too little value to waste words upon. My interest in it has so moderated, that when I learned of your want of room in this Dial, I was glad of that pretext for withdrawing it, and the more if not printed entire. The interest of such documents, takes its color from the writer’s moods and varies as these change.
I still incline to receive my manuscript, since you cannot print it in the January Number, for I know it will give me little pleasure to read the same next April. But you shall do as you please. The Dial prefers a style of thought and diction, not mine; nor can I add to its popularity with its chosen readers. A fit organ for such as myself is not yet, but is to be. The times require a free speech, a wise, humane, and brave sincerity, unlike all examples in literature, of which the Dial is but the precursor. A few years more will give us all we desire—the people all they ask.
Concord, 6th Dec. 1841.
[LITERATURE affords but few examples of the Diary. Yet this of all scriptures is simplest, most natural, and inviting; and all men delight in that hospitality, humane as it is magnanimous, which makes them partakers of the privatest life of virtue and genius.—Nor Gods nor true persons have secrets. Their lives are made poetic and noble by divine aims, and to themselves are they spectacles of approbation and hope. They prosecute life with a sweet and tender enthusiasm, and espouse interests so large and universal as to lose their own being therein; and they live, not in the gaze of a selfish and vain egotism, but in the steady eye of conscience, whose voice and missionary they are. Nor till life is made thus sincere and poetic shall we have these private documents. For no man writes worthily who lives meanly. His life degrades his thought, end this defrauds his pen of all simplicity and elegancy. When true and fair souls come shall we have Records of Persons, and a frank sincerity shall pervade life and literature—a spirit above reserve and open as the light of the sun.]
1st. FIRE-SIDE. This family is a mystery. It is of all institutions most sacred. It is the primeval fact—the alpha of the social state—that initial dispensation which the sacred fables of all people have spoken; and which appears atwin with the simplest of arts, the planting of gardens and growing of babes. Great is the house fair the household; the cope of heaven does not cover a holier fact; and whoso restores its order and divines its law solves life’s problem, and recovers to man his loaf Eden. For this the world waits in hope.
“A married life,” says Hierocles, “is beautiful. For what other thing can be such an ornament to a family, as the association of husband and wife. For it must not be said that sumptuous edifices, walls covered with marble plaster, and piazzas adorned with stones, which are admired by those who are ignorant of the good; nor yet paintings and arched myrtle walks, nor anything ells which is the subject of astonishment to the stupid is the ornament of a family. But the beauty of a household consists in the conjunction of man and wife, who are united to each other by destiny, and are consociated to the Gods who preside over nuptials, births, and houses, who accord indeed with each other, and have all things in common, as far as to their bodies, or rather their souls themselves; who likewise exercise a becoming authority over their house and servants; and are properly solicitous about the education of their children; and pay an attention to the necessaries of life, which is neither, excessive nor negligent, but moderate and appropriate. For what can be better and more excellent, as the most admirable Homer says—
Unanimoulsy live.’
7th. Again I have read the “Paradise Regained, the Comus and Sampson Agonistes,” unfolding the doctrines of temptation and chastity. Milton’s theories of sin and redemption, though vitiated somewhat by popular traditions are orthodox on the whole. Beautiful beyond compare is this poem of the Comus; and the Sampson Agonistes is characterized by that universality of insight which inheres in all his works.
The great poets fable each on those spiritual verities which are the being of every man. In the Lost Paradise, Milton adopts the Egyptian, the Christian fable in the Paradise Regained. The Comus and Sampson Agonistes are episodes, each complete in itself—the Comus cast in the Grecian form.
I fancy that the Egyptian and Christian Mythologies may be wrought into the Greek fable of Prometheus, and all subordinated to the new Genesis and Apotheosis of the Soul.
10th. EVENING. And this rare poem on the Life of the Soul—Dr. Henry More’s—I have read at last. It contains great lines, fine thoughts, but is less a poem than prose discourse in the Spenserean stanza. The author’s prose is always most poetic; here he moves with grace and freedom. But the “Cupid’s Conflict,” is truly a poem throughout, and a fine one. It is a noble defence against the injustice of his contemporaries; and so I have copied it for our Dial, as an answer to the literary bigotry of all time.
I. Lines from the Psyche-zoo, or Life of the Soul.
What comes from heaven onely can there ascend,
Nor rage nor bulk that this bulk doth fill
Can profit aught, but gently to attend
The soul’s still working; patiently to bend
Our mind to sifting reason, and clear light,
That strangely figured in our soul doth wend
Shifting its forms, still playing in our sight,
Till something it present that we shall take for right.”
Book III. Cant. I.
That earth by earth, and sea by sea,
And heaven by heaven, and fire more bright than gold,
By flaming fire, so gentle love descry
By love, and hate by hate. And all agree
That like is known by like.”
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to him; he’ll never them forsake;
When they shall die then God himself shall die;
They live, they live in blest eternity.”
And when it fails, only those actions cease
That thence depend. But if new eyes were sent
Unto the aged man, with as much ease
And accurateness as when his youth did please
The wanton lasse, he now could all things see;
Old age is but the watry blood’s disease,
My hackney fails, not I, my pen, not sciencie.”
II. Great prose is the following, and on the sublimest themes. The like we have not in this decline of divine Philosophy.
“Contemplations concerning the dry essence of the Dei are very consuming and unsatisfactory. ‘T is better to drink: of the blood of the grape than bite the root of the grape, smell the rose than to chew the stalk. And, blessed be God, the meanest of men are capable of the former, very few successful in the latter. And the Jesse, because the reports of them that have busied themselves that way, have not onely seemed strange to the vulgar, but even repugnant with one another. But I should in charity referre this to the nature of the pigeon’s neck rather than to mistake and contradiction. One and the same object in nature affords many and different aspects. And God is as infinitely various as simple. Like a circle, indifferent, whether you suppose it of one uniform line or an infinite number of angles. Wherefore it is more safe to admit all possible perfections of God, than rashly to deny what appears not to us from our particular posture.”—Preface to the Philosophical Poems, 1647.
“Seeing our most palpable evidence of the soul’s immortality is from an inward sense, and this inward sense is kept alive the best by devotion and purity, by freedom from worldly care and sorrow, and the grosser pleasures of the body, (otherwise her ethereall will drink in so much of earthly and mortall dregs, that the sense of the soul will be changed, And being outvoted as it were by the overswaying number of terrene particles, which that ethereall nature hath so plentifully imbibed, and incorporated with, she will become in a manner corporeall, and in the extremity of this weakness and dotage, will be easily drawn off to pronounce herself such as the body is, dissolvable and mortal,) therefore it is better for us that we become doubtful of our immortal condition, when we stray from that virgin purity and unspottednesse, that we may withdraw our feet from these paths of death, than that demonstration and infallibility would prove an heavy disadvantage. But this is meant onely to them that are loved of God and their own souls. For they that are at enmity with him, desire no such instructions, but rather embrace all means of laying asleep that disquieting truth, that they bear about with them so precious a charge as an immortal spirit.”
“This body, which dissolution waits upon, helpeth our infidelity exceedingly. For the soul not seeing itself, judgeth itself of such a nature as those things are to which she is nearest united. Falsely saith, but yet ordinarily, I am sick, I am weak, I faint, I die; when it is nought but the perishing life of the body that is in such a plight, to which she is so close tyed in most intimate love and sympathy. So a tender mother, if she see a knife stuck to the child’s heart, would shriek and swound as if herself had been smit; when, as if her eye had not beheld the spectacle, she had not been moved though the thing were surely done. So, I do verily think, that the mind being taken up in some higher contemplation, if it should please God to keep it in that ecstasy, the body might be destroyed without disturbance to the soul; for how can there be or sense or pain without animadversion.”—Preface to Part Second of the Song of the Soul.
“Men of most tam’d and castigate spirits are of the most profound best and most profound judgment, because they can so easily withdraw from the life and impulse of the lower spirit of the body. They being quit of passion, they have upon occasion a clear though, still and quiet representation of everything in their minds, upon which pure, bright sydereall phantasms, unprejudiced reason may work, and clearly discern what is true and probable.”—Preface to Book Third of the Song of the Soul.
“Certainly the purging of our natural spirits and raising soul to her due height of piety, and weaning her from the love of the body, and too tender a sympathy with the frail flesh, be gets that courage and majesty of mind in a man, that both inward and outward fiends shall tremble at his presence, and fly before him as darknesse at light’s approach. For the soul hath then ascended her fiery vehicle, and it is noon to her midnight, be she awake herself.”
Times’ peevish progress to eternity.”
8th. BABE. Beside thee, O Child, I seek to compass thy being. But this idea of thee floating in the depths of my thought mocks me the while. For thou art older and more prescient than thought, and I lose myself in thee. Time stretches backward into the period whence it proceeded, and forward to its return therein, yet dates not thy genesis, thine advent, nor ascension. Thou still art, and wast ever, and shalt remain, the horologue of its transits. Thy history the hours do not chronicle. Thou art timeless, dateless. Before time thou wast, and reason of this thine eternal existence—dost revive eternal memories. The clock that chimes, the sun that rises; but give the chronology of thy terrestrial life; more faithful keepers thou hast of thy spiritual reckoning. For Times’ Dial is set by thee, and the orb of day wheels on his courses to illustrate the story of thy Soul. Nature thou art not, but of thee she is the show—Matter is the shadow as thou runnest on thy behests. Experience itself is lost in thee—perpetuity shines through all thy powers—thou art prophet and historian of God!
And, O child, thou remindest me of the dawn of mine own being. I see relics of ages in thee; and thou comest to me as inhabitant of a clime once mine own; and thy gentle manners are familiar to me, while yet I seem strange and a stranger here in Time. But thou knowest of no change. Thou deemest thyself in the mansions of thy Father, an inmate of his households, still clad from his wardrobes-still fed from his board. At home art thou; and there shall abide while thou retainest memory thereof, though a dweller the while in these vessels of clay: nor shall feel this seeming absence—this exile in Flesh—this errand in time—this commerce with matter—this dalliance with apparitions; where Seeming is but shadow of Being, where Apprehension finds never the complement of its seekings, and Desire yearns ever for what it hath lost; and where Memory and Hope are but Janus-faces of the soul, surveying unknowingly, like tracts of her cycle of years.1—Psyche, 1838.
22d. You desire, my friend, some exegesis of the Doctrine of Inspiration, through its twofold organs of Conscience and Reason,—with their subordinate functions of Sight and Sense (Faith and Understanding): and the authority, original and final, on all Revelations possible to the Soul. Shall I vex these old questions—tax these divine problems, with hope of success? I do, indeed, tempt these spiritual waters with awe; so slender and frail my line, so short withal—the stillness primeval—the depths profound. And each soul, morever, singly and alone sails these seas, her own steersman and observer of the heavens, to find her way unaided, if she may, to the celestial havens. —But yet I will dare the theme.
To the innocent, upright, all is present, instant, in sight. They have not lapsed into forgetfnlness: nor memory foresight divides the intuitions of their souls.2 They partake of the divine omniscience; they are quick with God. They do not fumble, dubious, in the memory; nor dut anxious, in hope, for lost or unexpected goods—they self-fed—they inherit all things. Day by day, hour by hour, yea, pulse by pulse, exhaustless Providence mini to them—each sequel and complement—history a prophesy, of the other—the plenitude, of Life rushing gladly into the chambers of the breast, and illuminati their brow with supernal lights. They are Incarnate Words,—prophets, silent or vocal, as the divine influx retreats to its source, or flows over their cloven tongues, bringing glad tidings to all who have access to the urns of being such are all bards, saints, babes. These reason never—nor seek truth as lost treasure amidst eruditions, or precedents, of the Past, Having eyes, steadfast, they see; ears, quick, they hear; hearts, vigilant, they apprehend in the serenity of their own souls, they behold Divinity, and themselves and the universe in Him. These are they, who “walk not in darkness but in the light of life, bearing record of themselves, and knowing their record to be true; knowing whence they came, and whither they go; who are not alone, but the Father with them, and witnessing themselves, and the Father that sent bearing witness them.”
But this logic of the Breast is subtile, occult. It eludes; the grasp of the Reason. It IS, and perpetually reaffirms itself—the I AM of the Soul. Inspiration speaks alway from present, face to face parley with eternal facts. It darts like lightning, straight to its quarry, and rends all formulas of the schools as it illuminates the firmament of the mind. God enlightens the brain by kindling the heart; he is instant in the breast before he is present in the head. All reasoning is but self-finding, self-recovery.3 And the head but dreams of the heart, whose oracles are clear, as the life is pure, dark as it is base.4 Conscience receives the divine ray, and Reason reflects the same on the sense. The Conscience is an abridgement of God—and Apocalypse of Spirit—and man reads the secrets of ages therein; nor needs journey from his breast to solve the riddles of the world or divine the mysteries of Deity. Therein, the spiritual and corporeal ]aw is enacted and executed; and a true life interprets these to the mind; yea, more, discovers the upholding agencies of all things, and works out the Creator’s idea, moulding the worlds anew day by day.
More of Heaven’s glory than a worldling can:
As man is of the world, the heart of man
Is an epitome of God’s great book
Of creatures, and man needs no farther look.”
Receiving thus the divine ray into his breast, man needs not wander from its shining into another’s darkness. Assured that none comes to the light save as drawn from within, and that vicarious guidance ever misleads or blinds, let him wend his course through this world of sense, distrusting its beaten pathways, its proffered redeemers, his eye fixed perpetually on the load-star within, that by solitary by-roads, leads direct to his birthplace and home.
And this, my friend, is the Doctrine and Method of Revelation, as taught by the Christs of all time. But, Christendom, how false to its spirit, and hostile to its. Discipline! She leans as of old, on traditions, nor dares walk erect, a trustful and self-helpful brother, in the light, of that common beam which illuminated the face of her Prophet and made Him the joy of the nations. She scoffs at the heavenly doctrines of immediate inspiration; she pores blindly over Scriptures, and worships not the word incarnate in Him, but the skirts of his robe. A Messias, sublimer than Him of Judea, must come to dispel the superstitions that darken his Life, and divest his doctrine from the fables in which it is wrapped. For such Prophet the world now waits—and his advent is nigh!
in all sacred friendships.
5th. Of these Foreign Journals Heraud’s Magazine interests me most. It is catholic, free, philosophic. It speaks for universal man, not for sects or districts, and breathes a charity humane and diffusive. It compares (or did) favorably with our Dial, but is more various in its contents and addresses a wider public. But neither those Journals, nor others, content me. They fail to report the bosom life of the hour; they are not Diaries of the Age—scriptures of the ideas taking body now in institutions and men. But yet we wait, with a calm patience, for souls who shall make organs and a public for the life that is in them—men who shall dial not only the evening and morning ray, but the broad noon of piety and genius.
I. A Sketch of Jacob Boëhme. By FRANCES BARHAM.
“1. Boëhme, was, in the opinion of all who have studied his works, a man of high spirituality and strong original genius. His mind was of that heaven-scaling and world-defying heroism, which dares all things, and bears all things, in search of wisdom. By the stern contentions of faith and prayer, by the struggling energies of unflinching reason, and the logical analysis of a few theosophic books, he attained many of the loftiest visions of truth, and completed a system of transcendentalism more brilliant than any which had appeared for ages. He was one of the few coblers who have proved themselves capable of judging above the last. From his dingy: stall and workshop issued the Aurora of a theosophic doctrine, which set Europe in a blaze. None but those personally acquainted with the works of Boëhme, and the Boehmists, can justly estimate the influence his doctrine has had on the world. It is not without some reason that such men as Periet, Fenelon, Ramsey, and Law, have eulogized this extraordinary man. It is astonishing to me that his solitary genius should have worked out so many philosophemes resplendent as those of the Cabalists, the Bramins, the Pythagoreans, whom he had never read. It is a proof, if any were needed, of the essential unity and sympathy of true genius in all times and nations. What would Boëhme have executed had he enjoyed the learning of Mirondola, Richlin, Agrippa. How many of his ideas that now loom large in the midst of rhapsody, shadowy and obscure, yet vast and astounding as the ghosts of the mighty dead would have worn the keen edge and effulgent configuration of positive science. But in spite of his disadvantages, Boëhme is the Plato of Germany, and to him the Kantists owe their brighest theories.”
II. Foreign Aids to Self-Intelligence, designed designed as assistance to the English Student of Transcendental Philosophy.—These are admirable papers by Heraud, who thus speaks of Boëhme’s Theosophic Doctrines.
“2. With Boëhme all opaque matter had a luminous spirit. In the seven planets, in the seven days of the week, he found emblems of the ideas intended by the seven lamps before the throne; and the seven stars in the Apocalypse, the seven pillars of the House of Wisdom; the six steps of Solomon’s throne and the throne itself, as emblematic of Sabbatical Rest; the seven seals, the seven phials, the seven trumpets, and the seven candlesticks,—all these symbolized the Seven Spirits of God, which emblem the complete Deity. Our illiterate theologian dared to soar into this sublime region of speculation, and presumed to analyze the seven-fold perfection of God. Now how was he to conduct this analyzation—how declare its results? What apparatus had he for the process—what language for its expression? Prayer and thought were the intruments of his operations. For language he might select his illustrations from the phenomena of mind, or of matter. The philosophy of mind, however, for him was not; he had to create one for himself. And he had conceived the astonishing idea to account for all material appearances upon spiritual principles, and to prove the identity of the laws which influenced both Nature and Spirit. He was therefore teaching two sciences at the same time—Theology and Natural Philosophy—under one name, Theosophy. And no language had he but what was common to both, and all words are derived from the objects of the latter. He, therefore, at once, elected to set forth spiritual laws by their imperfect resemblances as they are to be found in the laws of nature; and more perfect symbols, indeed, may not be found: for the laws of nature are but the forms of the human understanding. What are both, but ‘as strings in the great harmony; as articulate words, but distinct parts of the Love-Sport,’ as Boëhme says, ‘of the angels.’ Well! of this seven-fold perfection divine, he presumed to call the first spirit an astringent power, sharp like salt, hidden in the Father. The second is an attractive power, vanquishing the astringent. The astringent and attracting powers, he says, by their contrariety, produce anguish—a raging sense—not by agent and patient, but by violence and impatience. This anguish is the third spirit; it is the cause of mind, senses, thoughts. It is an Exultation, the highest degree of joy, excited to a trembling in its own quality. These three spirits are but as millstones without corn, grinding each other. The raging spirit cannot deliver itself from the strong bands of Astringency, and excites Heat by its struggling, the extremity whereof is Fire. Now is the corn found for the millstones to grind. Heat is the fourth spirit, the beginner of life and of the spirit of life; it generates Light. The food of fire is cold; for want of which heat and fire would fall into anguish. But Infinity has no deficience; therefore the fire, by rarefaction, breathes the sullen cold into liberty of Air. Air, again, by condensation, (being imposed upon by its father the Cold,) falls to water, which again, by the kindled element, is licked up by Nutrition. The fifth spirit, which is the produce of Light, which, as we have already learned, is intellectual as well as material, is Love. The sixth spirit is the Divine Word—whence Speech and Language, Colors, Beauty, and all ornament. And the seventh spirit is the Body generated out of the six other spirits, and in which they dwell as in their Sabbath. The seven spirits are the fountain of all Being. All these spirits together are God the Father. The life generated by them all, and generating the life in them all, in triumph, is the Son of God—the second person in the Holy Trinity. The power of the seven spirits, proceeding continually in the splendor of the life forming all things in the seventh, is the Holy Ghost.
“Reader, unless thou canst thyself give meaning to these things, we cannot help thee to the significance, but if thou canst with whatever difficulty understand them, take our word first, that they are worth understanding. Thou mayest, however, form some notion of the same by attending a little to the following illustration, which we have abridged and modernized from William Law.
“The first forms of vegetable life, before it has received the sun and air, are sourness, astringency, bitterness. In a ripened fruit, these qualities improve into rich spirit, fine taste, fragrant smell, and beautiful color, having been enriched by the sun and air. This attraction, astringency, desire, is one and the same in every individual thing, from the highest angel to the lowest vegetable. Attraction is essential to all bodies; Desire, which is the same thing, is inseparable from all intelligent beings. And thus, by an unerring thread, may we ascend to the first Desire, or that of the Divinity. For nothing can come into being but because God wills or desires it. Its desire is creative; and the qualities of the Creator must necessarily pass into the creature. Herein lies the ground of all analogies between the world without and the world within. And as vegetables by their attraction or astringency, which is their desire, and as an outbirth of the divine desire, attain perfection by receiving the Light and Air of the external world, so do au· intelligent beings attain their perfection by aspiring, with their will and desire, to God, and receiving of the word and spirit of God.”
These mystic pietists are to me most aromatic and refreshing. How living is their faith—deep their thought—humane and glowing their zeal! Boëhme, Guion, Fenelon, Law—these are beautiful souls. Sad that few of my contemporaries have apprehension of their thought, or faith in their intellectual integrity. O Age! thou believest nothing of this divine lore, but deemest it all moonstruck madness, wild fanaticism, or witless dream! God has ebbed clean from thy heart, and left thee loveless and blind. But, lo! he is rushing in full blood into the souls of thy youth, and thy sons and daughters, driven from the sanctuaries of wisdom and piety, shall prophesy soon with cloven tongues of fire to thy discomfort and shame; for thy priests are godless, and thou a art slave to “the gauds of sense!
III. Let me quote some passages, profound as true, from papers of J. Westland Marston, another of Heraud’s contributors.
“It is possible to be orthodox in head, and heterodox in heart. It is possible to be credist in view and infidel in character. There is an unloveliness of soul, which is the atheism of being, and _this may clothe itself with the surplice, harangue from the pulpit, marry at the altar, and read prayers at the grave.”
“Facts may be true, and views may be true; but they are not truth. Truth is sincere being: it is not the perception of man; nor the deed of man; but when it is constituted it becomes the heart of man. And take this with you, ye wretched doctrinnaires, who would almost special plead from God’s universe, the privilege of God’s mercy—that all conclusions are heartless of which the heart is not the premise.”
“We are poor cravens—we fight no battles—we blazon the name of some hero on our standard, and art frequent at parade in unsoiled uniforms. Not thus gay and glittering, in mirror-like armor, were the champions we venerate. Not thus marching after some embroidered name were found Plato Aristotle, Socrates, Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Coleridge, or Kant. Not thus calling themselves by some human name and exhibiting to the world in trim costume were Luther, Wickliffe, and the great reformers of all ages. Their garments were stained in the conflict; their swords hacked in the warfare. Say that there were fewer attestations to the merit of tailor and cutler, yet were there more testimonies to valor, and to earnestness of purpose.”
“We shall appeal from the recorded belief of every age to that which inspired it. We shall not be governed by the codes of men, but shall test their declarations by those antecedent mtu1tions common to us and them. Hitherto we have generally too much resembled sailless vessels towed by the more fortunate ones which mount their own canvass. We must hoist our own—we must no longer be attached to the sterns of those who with us constitute the great fleet of humanity. Why should we be dragged along in the course of others? There is the same breeze to urge us that impels them. And need we direction in the voyage to eternity? The wind that wafts is even the pilot that guides.”—Monthly Magazine.
12th. Listen divinely to the sibyl within thee, saith the Spirit, and write thou her words. For now is thine intellect a worshipper of the Holy Ghost; now thy life is mystic—thy words marvels—and thine appeal to the total sense of man—a nature to the soul.
Nature bares never her bones; clothed in her own chaste rhetoric of 6esh and blood—of color and feature, she is elegant and fair to the sense. And thus, O Philosopher, Poet, Prophet, be thy words—thy Scriptures;—thy thought, like Pallas, shaped bold and comely from thy brain-like Venus, formed quick from thy side—mystic as Memnon—melodious as the lyre of Orpheus.
There is neither void in nature, nor death in spirit,—all is vital, nothing Godless. Both guilt in the soul and pain in the flesh, affirm the divine ubiquity in the all of being. Shadow apes substance, privation fullness; and nature in atom and whole, in planet and firmament, is charged with the present Deity.
Nature is quick with spirit. In eternal systole and diastole, the living tides course gladly along, incarnating organ and vessel in their mystic flow. Let her pulsations for a moment pause on their errands and creation’s self ebbs instantly into chaos and invisibility again. The visible world is the extremest wave of that spiritual flood, whose reflux is life, whose reflux death, efflux thought, and conflux light. Organization is the confine of incarnation,—body the atomy of God.
Sense beholds life never,—death always. For nature is but the fair corpse of spirit, and sense her tomb. Philosophy holds her torch while science dissects the seemly carcase. Tis faith unseals the sepulchres, and gives the risen Godhead to the soul’s embrace. Blessed is he, who without sense believeth,—for already, is he resurrect and immortal!
Impious faith! witless philosophy! prisoning God in the head, to gauge his volume or sound his depths by admeasurements of brain. Know, man of skulls! that the soul builds her statue perpetually from the dust, and, from within, the spiritual potter globes this golden bowl on which thy sacrilegious finger is laid. Be wise, fool! and divine cerebral qualities from spiritual laws, and predict organizations from character.
Believe, youth, despite all temptations, the oracle of deity in your own bosom. ‘T is the breath of God’s revelations,—the respiration of the Holy Ghost in your breast. Be faithful, not infidel to its intuitions,—quench never its spirit,—dwell ever in its omniscience. So shall your soul be filled with light, and God be an indwelling fact,—a presence in the depths of your being.
Great is the man whom his age despises. For transcendent excellence is purchased through the obloquy of contemporaries; and shame is the gate to the temple of renown. The heroism honored of God, and the gratitude of mankind, achieves its marvels in the shades of life remote from the babble of crowds.
Praise and blame as little belong to the righteous as to God. Virtue transcends desert—as the sun by day, as heat during frosts. Its light and warmth are its essence, cheering alike the wilderness, the fields, and fire-sides of men,—the cope of heaven, and the bowels of the earth.
Be great even in your leisures; making, accepting, opportunities, and doing lovingly your work at the first or eleventh hour, even as God has need of you. Transcend all occasions; exhausted, overborne, by none. Wisdom waits with a long patience; nor working, nor idling with men and times; but living and being in eternity with God. Great designs demand ages for consummation, and Gods are coadjutors in their accomplishment. Patience is king of opportunity and times.
Solitude is Wisdom’s school. Attend then the lessons of your own soul; become a pupil of the wise God within you, for by his tuitions alone shall you grow into the knowledge and stature of the deities. The seraphs descend from heaven, in the solitudes of meditation, in the stillness of prayer.
All sin is original,—there is none other; and so all atonement for sin. God’s method is neither mediatorial nor vicarious; and the soul is nor saved nor judged by proxy,—she saves or dooms herself. Piety is unconscious, vascular, vital,—like breathing it is, and is because it is. None can respire for another, none sin or atone for another’s sin. Redemption is a personal, private act.
Blessedness consists in perfect willingness. It is above all conflict. It is serenity, triumph, beatitude. It transcends choice. It is one with the divine Will, and a partaker of his nature and tendency. There is struggle and choice only with the wilful. The saints are elect in perfect obedience, and enact God’s decrees.
15th. GARDEN. I planted my seeds and wed my currants and strawberries. I wrought gladly all day,—the air and sun most genial,—and sought my pillow at night with a weariness that made sleep most grateful and refreshing.
How dignified and dignifying is labor—and sweet and satisfying. Man, in his garden, recovers his position in the world; he is restored to his Eden, to plant and dress it again. Once more his self-respect is whole and healthful; and all men, apostate though they be, award him a ready and sincere approval.
The New Ideas bear direct upon all the economies of life. They will revise old methods and institute new cultures. I look with special hope to their effect on the regimen of the land. Our present modes of agriculture exhaust our soil, and must while life is made thus sensual and secular; the narrow covetousness which prevails in trade, in labor, and exchanges, ends in depraving the land; it breeds disease, decline, in the flesh,—debauches and consumes the heart. This Beast, named Man, has yet most costly tastes, and must first be transformed into a very man, regenerate in appetite and desire, before the earth shall be restored to fruitfulness, and redeemed from the curse of his cupidity. Then shall the toils of the farm become elegant and invigorating leisures; man shall grow his orchards and plant his gardens,—an husbandman truly, sowing and reaping in hope, and a partaker of his hope. Labor will be attractive. Life will not be worn in anxious and indurating toils; it will be at once a scene of mixed leisure, recreation, labor, culture. The soil, grateful then for man’s generous usage, debauched no more by foul ordures, nor worn by cupidities, shall recover its primeval virginity, bearing on its bosom the standing bounties which a sober and liberal Providence ministers to his need,—sweet and invigorating growths, for the health and comfort of the grower.
19th. I brought from our village a bag of wheaten flour for our board. Pythagorean in our diet, we yet make small demands on foreign products; but harvest our dust mostly from this hired acre. I would abstain from the fruits of oppression and blood, and am seeking means of entire independence. This, were I not holden by penury unjustly, would be possible. But abstinence from all participation in these fruits of sin, comes near defrauding one of his flesh and blood, raiment and shelter, so ramified and universal is this trade in Providence. One miracle we have wrought, nevertheless, and shall soon work all of them, our wine is water,—flesh, bread,—drugs, fruits, and we defy, meekly, the satyrs all, and Esculapius.
The Soul’s Banquet is an art divine. To mould this statue of flesh, from chaste materials, kneading it into comeliness and strength, this is Promethean; and this we practice, well or ill, in all our thoughts, acts, desires. But specially in the exercise of the appetites. Thus Jesus,—“That which cometh out of the man, that it is which defiles him. For those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart, and they defile the man.” And to like purpose Philostrates,—“The body is not corrupted save through the soul.”
The modern doctrines on diet and regimen derive their authority from man’s constitution and wants. Pythagoras declared them long since, and Porphyry wrote elegantly on this subject.
“The soul,” he says, “is polluted by auger and desire and a multitude of passions, in which, in a certain respect, diet is a cooperating cause. But as water which flows through a rock is more uncorrupted than that which runs through marshes, because it does not bring with it mud; thus, also, the soul, which administers its own affairs in a body that is dry, and is not moistened by the juices of foreign flesh, is in a more excellent condition, is more uncorrupted, and is more prompt for intellectual energy. Thus, too, it is said, that the thyme, which is the driest and the sharpest to the taste, affords the best honey to bees. The dianoetic, therefore, or discursive power of the soul is polluted; or rather, he who energises dianoetically, when this energy is mingled with the energies of either the imagination or doxastic power. But purification consists in a separation from all these, and the wisdom which is adapted to divine concerns, is a desertion of everything of this kind. The proper nutriment, likewise, of each thing is that which essentially preserves it. Thus you may say, that the nutriment of a stone is the cause of its continuing to be a stone, and of firmly remaining in a lapideous form; but the nutriment of a plant is that which preserves it in increase and fructification; and of an animated body, that which preserves its composition. It is one thing, however, to nourish and another to fatten; and one thing to impart what is necessary, and another to produce what is luxurious. Various, therefore, are the kinds of nutriment, and various, also, is the nature of the things that are nourished. And it is necessary that indeed all things should be nourished, but we should earnestly endeavor to fatten our most principal parts. Hence the nutriment of the rational soul is that which preserves it in a rational state. But this is intellect, so that it is to be nourished by intellect; and we should earnestly endeavor that.it may be fattened through this, rather than that the flesh may become pinguid, through esculent substances. For intellect preserves for us eternal life, but the body when fattened causes the soul to be furnished through its hunger after a blessed life not being satisfied, increases our mortal part, since it is of itself insane, and impedes an attainment of an immortal condition of being. It likewise defiles by corporifying the soul, and drawing her down to that which is foreign to her nature. And the magnet, indeed, imparts, as it were, a soul to the iron, which is placed near it; and the iron, though most heavy, is elevated, and runs to the spirit of the stone. Should he therefore, who is suspended from incorporeal and incorruptible deity, be anxiously busied in procuring food which fattens the body, that is an impediment to intellectual perception? Ought he not rather, by contracting what is necessary to the flesh into that which is little and easily procured, be himself nourished, by adhering to God more closely than the iron to the magnet? I wish, indeed, that our nature was not so corruptible, and that it were possible we could live without the nutriment derived from fruits. O! that, as Homer says, we were not in want of meat or drink, that we might be truly immortal:—the poet in thus speaking beautifully signifying that food is the auxiliary not only of life, but also of death. If, therefore, we were not in want of vegetable aliment, we should be by so much the more blessed, in proportion as we should be more immortal. But now, living in a mortal condition, we render ourselves, if it may be proper so to speak, still more mortal, through becoming ignorant that by addition of this mortality, the soul, as Theophrastes says, does not only confer a great benefit on the body by being its inhabitant, but giving herself wholly to it. Hence it is much to be wished, that we could easily obtain the life celebrated in fables, in which_ hunger and thirst are unknown, or that, by stopping the every-way-flowing river of the body, we may in a very little time be present with the most excellent natures, to which he who accedes, since deity is there, is himself a God. But how is it possible not to lament the condition of the generality of mankind, who are so involved in darkness, as to cherish their own evil, and who, in the first place, hate themselves, and him who begot them, and afterwards those who admonish them, and call on them to return from ebriety to a sober condition of being!”—PORPHYRY on Abstinence from Animal Food.
12th. Our garden and fields remind me whenever I step into their presence of your promise of spending awhile with us at the cottage. But lest you should chance to alight at my door, while I am absent, I write now to say, that I purpose to breathe those mountain airs, and shall leave for Vermont on Monday next—so do’nt come till after my return. I shall then have the more to communicate of the spirit of those hills. Lately I have been sent journeying to seek the members of that Brotherhood whom God designs shall dwell together in his Paradise. The time is near when the soul’s fabled innocency shall luxuriate as a visible fact, rooted in the soil of New England; and scribes, wise even as the Hebrews of old, record their version of the Genesis of Man, and the peopling and planting of Eden.
I have visited the city, since I saw you, where I met persons a few of wise hearts and growing gifts and graces. God is breeding men and women, here and there, for the new Heaven and Earth.—Have you seen Human us? He has been passing a few days with me, and a great promise he is to me. The youth is rich in wisdom; a child of deepest and truest life. God has a work for the boy, and set him about it betimes—while his years scarce numbered an halfscore—and now he is great beside his contemporaries and shall honor his trusts. Remember I am to see you on my return.
17th. Bland the air, picturesque the scenery of these hills. This is the Switzerland of our Republic, and these mountaineers are parcel of their mountains, and love them as do the Swiss. This, too, is the scenery, this the clime, these the pursuits, for growing freemen. And here is the Haunt of Reform; cherished by these austere ministries of toil and storm, the Child is waxing in stature, and shall leap, soon, from hill to hill, sounding his trump to the four winds of heaven.
Yet over these primeval hills, clothed in perennial verdure—these passes, whose sides are instinct with bleating sheep and lowing kine, or proudly standing with the growths of ages—the wizard Trade has swept her wand of sorceries, and on these shepherds and swineherds are visited the sordid and debasing vices of the distant towns they feed!
But, apart, on this Alp, on the summit of this green range, and in a region of ideas fitly emblemed by the scene, dwells my friend above the ignoble toils of men below. This forest fell prostrate before his sturdy arm, and gave him these ample ranges for his flocks, with acres now in pasture and tillage; and here, under these cliffs rose his farm house; there more exalted still, his generous barns. And now visited with humane charities, he surrenders portions of the same to sincere and simple persons—the weary and heavy laden children of oppressive institutions—who here find rest in the arms of a Providence, unsold, unbought, and freed from the anxieties of want and dependence. Aware of the change passing fast over all human affairs, he is planting deep in this free soil, the New Ideas, and awaits in faith the growing of a wiser and nobler age.
9th. These journeyings reveal to me the state of the people. They make plain the need of a simpler priesthood—a ministry at the field, road, fire-side, bed-side; at tables, in families, neighborhoods—wheresoever man meets man truly. Now all ministries are aloof from human needs. Societies, senates, preaching, teaching, conversation, game ignobly with men’s hearts; and there is no great and sincere intercourse—souls do not meet; and man, woman, child, bewail their solitude. Sincerity in thought and speech can alone redeem man from this exile and restore confidence into his relations. We must come to the simplest intercourse—to Conversation and the Epistle. These are most potent agencies—the reformers of the world. The thoughts and desires of men wait not thereby the tardy and complex agencies of the booksellers’ favor, printers’ type, or reader’s chances, but are sped forthwith far and wide, by these nimble Mercuries. Christianity was published solely by the lip and pen, and the Christian documents—the entire literature of this great fact—is comprised in a few brief fragments of the Life and Sayings of Jesus, and the Epistles of his immediate adherents. And thus shall the New Ideas find currency in our time and win the people to themselves.
12th. COTTAGE. Again I have read “Coleridge’s Political Essays” in “the Friend.” They please me less than formerly. He distrusts her early dream of realizing a simpler state of society, and plants his State, not in the soil of individual conscience, but in the shallows of expediency; and deems it an institution for the security of freeholds. But to property man has no moral claim whatsoever; use, not ownership of the planet and parts thereof, constitutes his sole inheritance; he is steward of God’s estate, and commissary of Heaven’s stores to his brethren; nor rightfully hoards or appropriates the same to his own sole benefit.
In keeping; makes us hers in seeming ours;
She slides from Heaven indeed, but not in Dames’ showers.”
This sin of appropriation—this planting the state in ownership of the soil, not in man’s spiritual needs—has been the infirmity of all communities called civilized. But the New Order must abrogate this ancient error, and thus remove the fruitful cause of the decline of nations. The Just own nothing. They trade never in the gifts of Providence, perverting these to secular ends, but benefits flow unimpeded through all the channels of household, brotherhood, neighborhood, and Love is the beneficent Almoncerto, all members of the social family.
“All things,” says Grotius, “were at first promiscuously common, and all the world had, as it were, but one patrimony. From hence it was that every man then converted what he would to his own use, and consumed whatever was to be consumed, and a free use of this universal right did at that time supply the place of property. For no man could justly demand of another whatever he had thus just taken to himself; which is the better illustrated by that simile of Cicero, ‘Since the theatre is common for any body that comes, the place that every one sits in is properly his own.’ And this state of things must have continued till now, had men persisted in their primitive simplicity, or lived together but in perfect charity.
3d. These Essays are truly noble. They report a wisdom akin to that which the great of all time have loved and spoken. It is a most refreshing book; and I am sure of its reputation with those who make fames and ages.
And yet I qualify my admiration of the author’s genius. Great in the isolation of thought, he neither warms nor inspires me. He writes from the intellect to the intellect, and hence some abatement from the health of his statements, the depths of his insights—purchased always at the cost of vital integrity; the mind lapsing in the knowledge thus gained. But yet is this the tax on all pure intellect, —the ghost of the heart which it slays to embrace!
A passage in the Essays indicates this fact.
“The most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knock and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light, and know not whence it comes, and call it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease. In these instances, the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of vice, and we feel that a man’s talents stand in the way of advancement in truth. But genius is religious.” And again, “Converse with a mind that is grandly simple and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course that in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and whole atmosphere are ours. The mere author, in such society, is like a pickpocket among gentlemen, who has come in to steal a gold button or a pin. Nothing can pass there or make you one of the circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.”—Oversoul, Essay IX.
This tendency to thought leads often the scholar to undervalue in practice the more spiritual, but less intellectual life of the will of the pietist, or sublimer mystic—those epic souls to whom the world owes mainly its revelations;—and of whom scholars and bards, naturalists and philosophers, are but interpreters and scribes. Thought is, indeed, but the pen of the soul; genius the eye; love the heart; and all expression, save action, is falsehood fabling in the ciphers of truth.
I would be just to the literary function, and give it rightful place in the soul’s order. Character, integrity of will, to this all men yield homage. But thought, the power of drawing the soul from her sanctuary in the breast, and representing her life in words, whether by pen or lip, is in all healthful and innocent natures subordinate to the affections of the will. Then intellect becomes the servant of the moral power; and it is when this function of thought creates a despotism to itself, that its sway becomes evil. Literary men incline to this extreme; their thoughts tyrannize over their actions; they think not to live, but live solely to think. But the man then lives when all his powers are willing and contemporaneous exercise; when feeling, thought, purpose, are instant, consentaneous acts. And this entireness of life is the condition and essence of Virtue and Genius.
Two orders of men there are, each fulfilling high trusts to the world, but serving it in diverse manners. Of the one, the world inquires after his word—his thought, of the other, his intent—his act; and both are its redeemers and saviours—breathing the breath of life into the multitudes.
DEAR SIR,
In addressing you now, I obey an impulse, long felt, to express my sense of the exceeding import of your labors on the well being of mankind; and to declare, moreover, my pleasure in a contemporary who dares, without fear or stint, utter his word to the world. And to this I am urged not from a sense of intellectual benefit merely, but of humanity and justice. For I know how sweet and invigorating is a timely and discerning sympathy to him who suffers for declaring truths above the apprehension of his time; and can appreciate that magnanimous self-respect which appeals greatly from the injustice of contemporaries, to the wiser sight of posterity.
We live when Reform slips glibly off the tongues of men, and when almost every vital interest has made to itself zealots, desperate almost in its advocacy, and forged cumbrous weapons to mitigate the evils in the world. But, to me, these popular measures seem quite external, inadequate; and the charlatanry, and cant of reform, is most offensive. This puling zeal—this shallow philanthropy—this wit of the sense, and not of the soul—will neither heal nor save us. The change must originate within and work outwards. The inner being must first be reorganized. And the method of regeneration must be learned, not by prescription, but from Experience—from self-conquest—self-insight: its law revealed by fidelity to the spiritual constitution. Renovation of being must precede all outward reformation of organs and functions, and the whole man be first sanctified by the wholesome discipline of a true Life.
Hence reform begins truly with individuals, and is conducted through the simplest ministries of families, neighborhoods, fraternities, quite wide of associations, and institutions. The true reformer initiates his labor in the precincts of private life, and makes it, not a set of measures, not an utterance, not a pledge, merely, but a life; and not an impulse of a day, but commensurate with human existence; a tendency towards perfection of being.
Viewed in this wise, your statements of the Doctrine and Regimen of Life, assume great importance in my thought. They demonstrate, and on a scale coordinate with facts, the art of moulding man—of planting the new Eden—of founding the new institutions. They shed a palpable, practical light over the economies of the household—the family—the field—and followed in all their bearings, must give ta life, a fullness of comfort, health, purity, inspiration, piety, peace. They lead men to a re-recovery of his innocency—reinstate him, a primeval creature, in his original estate on the earth, in harmony with nature, the animal world, his fellows, himself, his Creator: and make sure both the redemption and conservation of the human race—even as man’s hope has divined, his faith affirmed, his hand recorded in the Scriptures of all Time.
These, I conceive, are results, to which the New Ideas, espoused now by living minds, and traced more specially by yourself in their vital bearings are tending. A sublime faith is quickening the genius of men; and philosophy, science, literature, art, life, shall be created anew by its heavenly inspirations.
I acknowledge, with thanks, though late, the gift of your Lecture, and learn with hope of your intention of printing soon your book on the Relations of the Hebrew Ritual to the Constitution of Man. It will deal another and sure blow, at the superstitions and usages of the popular faith. I wish it were in my power to urge its claims in prospect on the attention of men; but I am less in favor with the public than yourself even; and shall possibly lose the privilege of availing myself of the lights of your researches—bread, shelter, raiment, being scarce yielded me, by the charity and equity of my time. But,
Your friend and contemporary.
It is either requisite to be silent or to say something better than silence.
It is impossible that he can be free who is a slave to his passions.
Every passion of the soul is hostile to its salvation.
We should avoid and amputate by every possible artifice, by fire and sword, and all various contrivances, from the body, disease; from the soul, ignorance; from the belly, luxury; from a city, sedition; from a house, discord; and at the same time from all things, immoderation.
Expel sluggishness from all your actions; opportunity is the only good in every action.
Do those things which you judge to be beautiful, though in doing them you should be without renown. For the rabble is a bad judge of a good action. Despise therefore the reprehension of those whose praise you despise.
It is better to live lying in the grass confiding in divinity and yourself, than to lie in a golden bed with perturbation.
A statue indeed standing on its base, but a worthy man on the subject of his deliberate choice, ought to be immovable.
It is not death but a bad life that destroys the soul.
The gods are not the causes of evils, and diseases and calamities of the body are the seeds of intemperance.
The soul is illuminated by the recollection of divinity.
When the wise man opens his mouth, the beauties of his soul present themselves to view, like the statues of a temple.—JAMBLICHUS’S Life of Pythagoras.
——————————
1 I shall never be persuaded, says Synesius, to think my soul to be younger than my body. “Before Abraham was, I am,” said Jesus.
2 If souls retained in their descent to bodies the memory of divine concerns, of which they were conscious in the heavens, they would not be dissensions among men about divinity. But all, indeed, in descending drink of oblivion, though some more, and others less. On this account, though truth is not apparent to all men on the earth, yet all have; their opinions about it, because a defect of memory is the origin of opinion. But those discern most who have drank least of oblivion, because they easily remember what they had then before in heavens.—PYTHAGORAS.
3 Now all right and natural knowledge, in whatever creature it is, is sensible, intuitive and its own evidence. But opinion or doubting (for they are all but one thing) can only then begin, when the creature has lost its first right and natural state, and is got somewhere and become somewhat that it cannot tell what to make of. The begins doubting, from thence reason, from thence debating; and this is the high birth from of our magnified reason, as nobly born as groping is, which has its beginning in and from darkness or the loss of light.—LAW’s Way to Divine Knowledge.
4 Everything is and must be its own proof; and can only be known from and by itself. There is no knowledge of anything, but where the thing itself is, and is found, and possessed. Life, and every kind and degree of life, is only known by life; and so far as life reaches, so far is there knowledge, and no farther. Whatever knowledge you can get by searching and working of your own active Reason, is only like that knowledge which you may be said to have got, when you have searched for a needle in a load of straw, till you have found it.—LAW’s Way to Divine Knowledge.
All Sub-Works of The Dial (April 1842):
PDF Sub-Works open in a new tab. Close the tab when done viewing to return here.
