FELIX QUI DIVINE about themselves: they give back reflected images which hide their own depths. The pond said to the ocean, "Why do you rage so? The wind is not so very violent-nay, it is already fallen. Look at me. I rose into no foaming waves, and am already smooth again." Many feel themselves very confidently on safe ground when they say: It must be good for man to know the Truth. But it is clearly not good for a particular man to know some particular truth, as irremediable treachery in one whom he cherishes-better that he should die without knowing it. Of scientific truth, is it not conceivable that some facts as to the tendency of things affecting the final destination of the race might be more hurtful when they had entered into the human consciousness than they would have been if they had remained purely external in their activity? There is no such thing as an impotent or neutral deity, if the deity be really believed in, and contemplated either in prayer or meditation. Every object of thought reacts on the mind that conceives it, still more on that which habitually contemplates it. In this we may be said to solicit help from a generalisation or abstraction. Wordsworth had this truth in his consciousness when he wrote (in the Prelude) : “Nor general truths, which are themselves a sort Of elements and agents, Under-powers not indeed precisely in the same relation, but EXCESS." ENERGY. One can hardly insist too much, in the present “A FINE stage of thinking, on the efficacy of feeling in FEELING IS stimulating to ardent co-operation, quite apart from the conviction that such co-operation is needed for the achievement of the end in view. Just as hatred will vent itself in private curses no longer believed to have any potency, and joy, in private singing far out among the woods and fields, so sympathetic feeling can only be satisfied by joining in the action which expresses it, though the added "Bravo!" the added push, the added penny, is no more than a grain of dust on a rolling mass. When students take the horses out of a political hero's carriage, and draw him home by the force of their own muscle, the struggle in each is simply to draw or push, without consideration whether his place would not be as well filled by somebody else, or whether his one arm be really needful to the effect. It is under the same inspiration that abundant help rushes towards the scene of a fire, rescuing imperilled lives, and labouring with generous rivalry in carrying buckets. So the old blind King John of Bohemia at the battle of Crecy begged his vassals to lead him into the fight that he might strike a good blow, though his own stroke, possibly fatal to himself, could not turn by a hair's-breadth the imperious course of victory. The question, "Of what use is it for me to work towards an end confessedly good?" comes from that sapless kind of reasoning which is falsely taken for a sign of supreme mental activity, but is really due to languor, or incapability of that mental grasp which makes objects strongly present, and to a lack of sympathetic emotion. In the 'Spanish Gypsy' Fedalma says "The grandest death! to die in vain-for Love Greater than sways the forces of the world," 1— referring to the image of the disciples throwing themselves, consciously in vain, on the Roman spears. I really believe and mean this,—not as a rule of general action, but as a possible grand instance of determining energy in human sympathy, which even in particular cases, where it has only a magnificent futility, is more adorable, or as we say divine, than unpitying force, or than a prudent calculation of results. Perhaps it is an implicit joy in the resources of our human nature which has stimulated admiration for acts of selfsacrifice which are vain as to their immediate end. Marcus Curtius was probably not imagined as concluding to himself that he and his horse would so 1 V. what Demosthenes says (De Coronâ) about Athens pursuing the same course, though she had known from the beginning that her heroic resistance would be in vain. fill up the gap as to make a smooth terra firma. The impulse and act made the heroism, not the correctness of adaptation. No doubt the passionate inspiration which prompts and sustains a course of self-sacrificing labour in the light of soberly estimated results gathers the highest title to our veneration, and makes the supreme heroism. But the generous leap of impulse is needed too to swell the flood of sympathy in us beholders, that we may not fall completely under the mastery of calculation, which in its turn may fail of ends for want of energy got from ardour. We have need to keep the sluices open for possible influxes of the rarer sort. THE END. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. |