The Eclipse of Faith | Page 9

the infinite vagaries of perverted learning.
Neither are they perplexed with the assurances of those who tell them

that, though divine, the Bible is, in fact, a most dangerous book, and
who would request them, in their new-born enlightenment, to be
pleased to shut their eyes, and to return to a religion of ceremony quite
as absurd and almost as cruel as the polytheism they have renounced. I
imagine you and your little flock in the Sabbath stillness of those
mountains and green valleys, of which you give me such pleasant
descriptions, exhibiting a specimen of a truly primitive Christianity; I
imagine that the peace within is as deep as the tranquillity without.
Yet I know it cannot be; for you and your flock are men,--and that one
word alone suffices to dissolve the charm. You and they have cares,
and worse than cares, which make you like all the rest of the world; for
guilt and sorrow are of no clime, and the "happy valley" never existed
except in the pages of Rasselas. You are, doubtless, plagued by every
now and then finding that some half-reclaimed cannibal confesses that
he has not quite got over his gloating recollections of the delicacies of
his diabolical cuisine; or that fashionable converts turn with a yearning
heart, not to theatres and balls, but to the "dear remembrance" of the
splendors 'of tattoo and amocos; or that some unlucky wretch who has
not mastered the hideous passions of his old paganism has almost
battered out the brains of a fellow disciple in a sudden paroxysm of
anger; or that some timid soul is haunted with half-subdued suspicions
that some great goggle-eyed idol, with whose worship his whole
existence has been associated, is not, what St Paul declares it is,
absolutely "nothing in world." And then you vex your soul about these
things, and worry yourself with apprehensions lest "you should have
labored in vain and spent your strength for naught"; and lastly, trouble
yourself still more lest you should lose your temper and your patience
into the bargain.
Yes, your scenery is doubtless beautiful, as the sketches you have sent
me sufficiently show; especially that scene at the foot of the mountain
Moraii or Mauroi, for I cannot quite make out the pencil-marks. But,
beautiful as they are, they are not more so than those which greet my
eye even now from my study window. No, there is no fault to be found
with external nature; it is man only who spoils it all. I see nothing in
sun, moon, or stars, in mountain, forest, or stream, that needs to be

altered; we are the blot on this fair world, "O man," I am sometimes
ready to exclaim, "what a--"; but I check myself, for as Correggio
whispered to himself exultingly, "I also am a painter," so I, though with
very different feelings, say, "I also am a man." Johnson said, that every
man probably worse of himself than he certainly knows of most other
men; and so I am determined that misanthropy, if is to be indulged at
all, shall, like its opposite charity, "begin at home."
Yet, now I think better of it, it shall not begin at all; for I recollect that
HE also was a "man," who was infinitely more; who has penetrated
even this cloudy shrine of clay with the effulgence of His glory and so
let me resolve that our common humanity shall be held sacred for His
sake, and pitied for its own. Thus ends my little, transient fit of spleen,
and may it ever end.
May we feel more and more, my dearest brother, the interior presence
of that "guest of guests," that Divine Impersonation of Truth, Rectitude,
and Love, whose image has had more power to soothe and tranquillize,
stimulate and fortify, the human heart, than all the philosophies ever
devised by man; who has not merely left us rules of conduct, expressed
with incomparable force and comprehensiveness, and illustrated by
images of unequalled pathos and beauty; who was not merely (and yet,
herein alone, how superior to all other masters) the living type of His
own glorious doctrine, and affects us as we gaze upon Him with that
transforming influence which the studious contemplation of all
excellence exerts by a necessary law of our nature; but whose Life and
Death include all motives which can enforce His lessons on
humanity;--motives all intensely animated by the conviction that He is
a Living Personality, in communion with our own spirits, and attracted
towards us by all the sympathies of a friendship truly Divine; "who can
be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, though Himself without
sin." May He become so familiar to our souls, that no suggestions of
evil from within, no incursion of evil from