Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer | Page 8

ceases, and for which, if the voice within our
hearts mocks us not with an everlasting lie, we spring upon the untiring
wings of a pangless and seraphic life--those whom we love around

us--our nature, universal intelligence, our atmosphere, eternal love."
How exquisite these remarks and his description of a disembodied
spirit:
"it stood All beautiful in naked purity, The perfect semblance of its
bodily frame, Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace, Each stain
of earthliness Had passed away, it re-assumed Its native dignity, and
stood Immortal amid ruin."
It must appear impossible to any rational mind, that, with the full
evidence before their eyes, materialists can attempt to claim Shelley as
endorsing their doctrines, for even in the "Queen Mab," which has been
considered by those not understanding it as a most atheistical poem, he
speaks of--
"the remembrance With which the happy spirit contemplates Its
well-spent pilgrimage on earth."
Positive dogmatists are tyrannically endeavoring to crush the belief in a
soul, that All which makes the-present life happy on earth, the hope of
our heritage in a future state. To them the fact that the race from the
dawn of history, and through the ages has knelt down in abnegation
before this inscrutable truth is nothing. This glorious belief evolved
from the primaeval Cabala, taught in ancient Egypt, found
contemporaneously in India, enunciated by scholarly Rabbis, ever
present before the Chaldaean and Assyrian Magi, and laid down as
axioms in the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome, not only to
be discovered a fundamental in the Egyptian, the Hebraistic, the
Brahminical, the Buddhistic, the Vedic, but also in all the sacred books
of every nation, and handed down and perpetuated to these days as a
sacred legacy from the past, by both Mohammed and Christ. This, the
great co-mystery of all the ancient mysteries, shall remain ever present
through all futurity like "the existing order of the Universe, or rather, of
the part of it known to us," to use the phraseology of John Stuart Mill.
Nations may rise and fall, theologies may flourish and decay, but this
glorious and divine inheritance shall never pass away. Let
pseudo-scientists avail themselves of stale and exploded arguments,

and urge that there is no invisible world, and therefore no immortality
for man, but honest scientists, like Professors Tait and Stewart, in the
"Unseen Universe," will agree with the Illuminati: "in the position
assigned by Swedenborg, and by the Spiritualists, according to which
they look upon the invisible world not as something absolutely distinct
from the visible universe, and absolutely unconnected with it, as is
frequently thought to be the case, but rather as a universe that has some
bond of union with the present;" and like Tyndall, will be obliged in
abject humility to acknowledge, unlike the initiated occultist, that:
"When we endeavor to pass from the phenomena of physics to those of
thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable
expansion of the powers we now possess. We may think over the
subject again and again--it eludes all intellectual presentation--we stand
at length face to face with the incomprehensible."
Shelley was ever calling attention to the fact that either from ignorance
or the casuistical sophistries of mal-interested teachers who have
distorted the divine pristine truths for their own base ends, emanated
superstition, the taint of all it looked upon; and with no unsparing hand
he flagellated the professors of the numerous false faiths, bastardized
from their original purity, which have in their decay, darkened the earth,
and with all the force of his powerful pen, mightier than any sword, he
ridiculed these gross theologies existant among men, as in the
following:
"Barbarous and uncivilized nations have uniformly adored, under
various names, a God of which themselves were the model: revengeful,
blood-thirsty, groveling and capricious. The idol of a savage is a demon
that delights in carnage. The steam of slaughter, the dissonance of
groans, the flames of a desolated land, are the offerings which he
deems acceptable, and his innumerable votaries throughout the world
have made it a point of duty to worship him to his taste. The
Phoenicians, the Druids and the Mexicans have immolated hundreds at
the shrines of their divinity, and the high and holy name of God has
been in all ages the watchword of the most unsparing massacres, the
sanction of the most atrocious perfidies."

Of the treatment Judaism, the foster mother of Christianity, received at
the poet's hands, I will now recite two examples. To Moses, the
Jehovah of the Hebrews is thus made to speak:
"From an eternity of idleness I, God, awoke; in seven days' toil made
earth From nothing; rested, and created man; I placed him in a paradise,
and there Planted the tree of evil, so that he Might eat and perish,