Why smile incred"lous? the rapt Muse"s eye Through earth"s dark caves, o"er heaven"s fair plains, can sweep, Can range its hidden cell, where toils the unfathom"d deep.
On ocean"s craggy floor, beneath the shade Of bushy rock-weed tangled, dusk, and brown, She sees the wreck of founder"d vessel laid, In slimy silence, many a fathom down From where the star-beam trembles; o"er it thrown Are heap"d the treasures men have died to gain.
And in sad mockery of the parting groan, That bubbled "mid the wild unpitying main, Quick gushing o"er the bones, the restless tides complain.
Gloomy and wide rolls the sepulchral sea, Grave of my kindred, of my sire the grave!
Perchance, where now he sleeps, a s.p.a.ce for me Is mark"d by Fate beneath the deep green wave.
It well may he! Poor bosom, why dost heave Thus wild? Oh, many a care, troublous and dark.
On earth attends thee still; the mermaid"s cave Grief haunts not; sure "twere pleasant there to mark, Serene, at noontide hour, the sailor"s pa.s.sing barque.
Sure it were pleasant through the vasty deep, When on its bosom plays the golden beam.
With headlong speed by bower and cave to sweep; When flame the waters round with emerald gleam-- When, borne from high by tides and gales, the scream Of sea-mew softened falls--when bright and gay The crimson weeds, proud ocean"s pendants, stream From trophied wrecks and rock-towers darkly grey-- Through scenes so strangely fair "twere pleasant, sure, to stray.
Why this strange thought? If, in that ocean laid.
The ear would cease to hear, the eye to see, Though sights and sounds like these circled my bed, Wakeless and heavy would my slumbers be: Though the mild soften"d sun-light beam"d on me (If a dull heap of bones retained my name, That bleach"d or blacken"d "mid the wasteful sea), Its radiance all unseen, its golden beam In vain through coral groves or emerald roofs might stream.
Yet dwells a spirit in this earthy frame Which Oceans cannot quench nor Time destroy;-- A deathless, fadeless ray, a heavenly flame, That pure shall rise when fails each base alloy That earth instils, dark grief, or baseless joy: Then shall the ocean"s secrets meet its sight;-- For I do hold that happy souls enjoy A vast all-reaching range of angel-flight, From the fair source of day, even to the gates of night.
Now night"s dark veil is rent; on yonder land, That blue and distant rises o"er the main, I see the purple sky of morn expand, Scattering the gloom. Then cease my feeble strain: When darkness reign"d, thy whisperings soothed my pain-- The pain by weariness and languor bred.
But now my eyes shall greet a lovelier scene Than fancy pictured: from his dark green bed Soon shall the orb of day exalt his glorious head.
I found my two uncles, Cousin George, and several other friends and relations, waiting for me on the Cromarty beach; and was soon as happy among them as a man suffering a good deal from debility, but not much from positive pain, could well be. When again, about ten years after this time, I visited the south of Scotland, it was to receive the instructions necessary to qualify me for a bank accountant; and when I revisited it at a still later period, it was to undertake the management of a metropolitan newspaper. In both these instances I mingled with a different sort of persons from those with whom I had come in contact in the years 1824-25. And, in now taking leave of the lower cla.s.s, I may be permitted to make a few general remarks regarding them.
It is a curious change which has taken place in this country during the last hundred years. Up till the times of the Rebellion of 1745, and a little later, it was its remoter provinces that formed its dangerous portions; and the effective strongholds from which its advance-guards of civilisation and good order gradually gained upon old anarchy and barbarism, were its great towns. We are told by ecclesiastical historians, that in Rome, after the age of Constantine, the term villager (_Pagus_) came to be regarded as synonymous with heathen, from the circ.u.mstance that the worshippers of the G.o.ds were then chiefly to be found in remote country places; and we know that in Scotland the Reformation pursued a course exactly resembling that of Christianity itself in the old Roman world: it began in the larger and more influential towns; and it was in the remoter country districts that the displaced religion lingered longest, and found its most efficient champions and allies. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, St. Andrews, Dundee, were all Protestant, and sent out their well-taught burghers to serve in the army of the Lords of the Congregation, when Huntly and Hamilton were arming their va.s.sals to contend for the obsolete faith. In a later age the accessible Lowlands were imbued with an evangelistic Presbyterianism, when the more mountainous and inaccessible provinces of the country were still in a condition to furnish, in what was known as the Highland Host, a dire instrument of persecution. Even as late as the middle of the last century, "Sabbath," according to a popular writer, "never got aboon the Pa.s.s of Killicrankie;" and the Stuarts, exiled for their adherence to Popery, continued to found almost their sole hopes of restoration on the swords of their co-religionists the Highlanders.
During the last hundred years, however, this old condition of matters has been strangely reversed; and it is in the great towns that _Paganism_ now chiefly prevails. In at least their lapsed cla.s.ses--a rapidly increasing proportion of their population--it is those cities of our country which first caught the light of religion and learning, that have become preeminently its dark parts; just, if I may employ the comparison, as it is those portions of the moon which earliest receive the light when she is in her increscent state, and shine like a thread of silver in the deep blue of the heavens, that first become dark when she falls into the wane.
It is mainly during the elapsed half of the present century that this change for the worse has taken place in the large towns of Scotland. In the year 1824 it was greatly less than half accomplished; but it was fast going on; and I saw, partially at least, the processes in operation through which it has been effected. The cities of the country have increased their population during the past fifty years greatly beyond the proportion of its rural districts--a result in part of the revolutions which have taken place in the agricultural system of the Lowlands, and of the clearances of the Highlands; and in part also of that extraordinary development of the manufactures and trade of the kingdom which the last two generations have witnessed. Of the wilder Edinburgh mechanics with whom I formed at this time any acquaintance, less than one-fourth were natives of the place. The others were mere settlers in it, who had removed mostly from country districts and small towns, in which they had been known, each by his own circle of neighbourhood, and had lived, in consequence, under the wholesome influence of public opinion. In Edinburgh--grown too large at the time to permit men to know aught of their neighbours--they were set free from this wholesome influence, and, unless when under the guidance of higher principle, found themselves at liberty to do very much as they pleased.
And--with no _general_ opinion to control--cliques and parties of their wilder spirits soon formed in their sheds and workshops a standard of opinion of their own, and found only too effectual means of compelling their weaker comrades to conform to it. And hence a great deal of wild dissipation and profligacy, united, of course, to the inevitable improvidence. And though dissipation and improvidence are quite compatible with intelligence in the first generation, they are sure always to part company from it in the second. The family of the unsteady spendthrift workman is never a well-taught family. It is reared up in ignorance; and, with evil example set before and around it, it almost necessarily takes its place among the lapsed cla.s.ses. In the third generation the descent is of course still greater and more hopeless than in the second. There is a type of even physical degradation already manifesting itself in some of our large towns, especially among degraded females, which is scarce less marked than that exhibited by the negro, and which both my Edinburgh and Glasgow readers must have often remarked on the respective High Streets of these cities. The features are generally bloated and overcharged, the profile lines usually concave, the complexion coa.r.s.e and high, and the expression that of a dissipation and sensuality become chronic and inherent. And how this cla.s.s--const.i.tutionally degraded, and with the moral sense, in most instances, utterly undeveloped and blind--are ever to be reclaimed, it is difficult to see. The immigrant Irish form also a very appreciable element in the degradation of our large towns. They are, however, _pagans_, not of the new, but of the old type: and are chiefly formidable from the squalid wretchedness of a physical character which they have transferred from their mud cabins into our streets and lanes, and from the course of ruinous compet.i.tion into which they have entered with the unskilled labourers of the country, and which has had the effect of reducing our lowlier countrymen to a humbler level than they perhaps ever occupied before. Meanwhile, this course of degradation is going on, in all our larger towns, in an ever-increasing ratio; and all that philanthropy and the Churches are doing to counteract it is but as the discharge of a few squirts on a conflagration. It is, I fear, preparing terrible convulsions for the future. When the dangerous cla.s.ses of a country were located in its remote districts, as in Scotland in the early half of the last century, it was comparatively easy to deal with them: but the _sans culottes_ of Paris in its First Revolution, placed side by side with its executive Government, proved very formidable indeed; nor is it, alas! very improbable that the ever-growing ma.s.ses of our large towns, broken loose from the sanction of religion and morals, may yet terribly avenge on the upper cla.s.ses and the Churches of the country the indifferency with which they have been suffered to sink.
I was informed by Cousin George, shortly after my arrival, that my old friend of the Doocot Cave, after keeping shop as a grocer for two years, had given up business, and gone to college to prepare himself for the Church. He had just returned home, added George, after completing his first session, and had expressed a strong desire to meet with me. His mother, too, had joined in the invitation--would I not take tea with them that evening?--and Cousin George had been asked to accompany me. I demurred; but at length set out with George, and, after an interruption in our intercourse of about five years, spent the evening with my old friend. And for years after we were inseparable companions, who, when living in the same neighbourhood, spent together almost every hour not given to private study or inevitable occupation, and who, when separated by distance, exchanged letters enough to fill volumes. We had parted boys, and had now grown men; and for the first few weeks we took stock of each other"s acquirements and experiences, and the measure of each other"s calibre, with some little curiosity. The mind of my friend had developed rather in a scientific than literary direction. He afterwards carried away the first mathematical prize of his year at college, and the second in natural philosophy; and he had, I now found, great acuteness as a metaphysician, and no inconsiderable acquaintance with the antagonistic positions of the schools of Hume and Reid. On the other hand, my opportunities of observation had been perhaps greater than his, and my acquaintance with men, and even with books, more extensive; and in the interchange of idea which we carried on, both were gainers: he occasionally picked up in our conversations a fact of which he had been previously ignorant; and I, mayhap, learned to look more closely than before at an argument. I introduced him to the Eathie Lias, and a.s.sisted him in forming a small collection, which, ere he ultimately dissipated it, contained some curious fossils--among the others, the second specimen of _Pterichthys_ ever found; and he, in turn, was able to give me a few geological notions, which, though quite crude enough--for natural science was not taught at the university which he attended--I found of use in the arrangement of my facts--now become considerable enough to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large acc.u.mulations of fact refuse to hang together in the memory. There was one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter improbability of which I was not yet geologist enough to detect, which for a time filled my whole imagination. It had been said, he told me, that the ancient world, in which my fossils, animal and vegetable, had flourished and decayed--a world greatly older than that before the Flood--had been tenanted by rational, responsible beings, for whom, as for the race to which we ourselves belong, a resurrection and a day of final judgment had awaited. But many thousands of years had elapsed since that day--emphatically the _last_ to the Pre-Adamite race--had come and gone. Of all the accountable creatures that had been summoned to its bar, bone had been gathered to its bone, so that not a vestige of the framework of their bodies occurred in the rocks or soils in which they had been originally inhumed; and, in consequence, only the remains of their irresponsible contemporaries, the inferior animals, and of the vegetable productions of their fields and forests, were now to be found.
The dream filled for a time my whole imagination; but though poetry might find ample footing on a hypothesis so suggestive and bold, I need scarce say that it has itself no foundation in science. Man had _no_ responsible predecessor on earth. At the determined time, when his appointed habitation was completely fitted for him, he came and took possession of it; but the old geologic ages had been ages of immaturity--_days_ whose work as a work of promise was "good," but not yet "very good," nor yet ripened for the appearance of a moral agent, whose nature it is to be a fellow-worker with the Creator in relation to even the physical and the material. The planet which we inhabit seems to have been prepared for man, and for man only.
Partly through my friend, but in part also from the circ.u.mstance that I retained a measure of intimacy with such of my schoolfellows as had subsequently prosecuted their education at college, I was acquainted, during the later years in which I wrought as a mason, with a good many university-taught lads; and I sometimes could not avoid comparing them in my mind with working men of, as nearly as I could guess, the same original calibre. I did not always find that general superiority on the side of the scholar which the scholar himself usually took for granted.
What he had specially studied he knew, save in rare and exceptional cases, better than the working man; but while the student had been mastering his Greek and Latin, and expatiating in Natural Philosophy and the Mathematics, the working man, if of an inquiring mind, had been doing something else; and it is at least a fact, that all the great readers of my acquaintance at this time--the men most extensively acquainted with English literature--were not the men who had received the cla.s.sical education. On the other hand, in framing an argument, the advantage lay with the scholars. In that common sense, however, which reasons but does not argue, and which enables men to pick their stepping prudently through the journey of life, I found that the cla.s.sical education gave no superiority whatever; nor did it appear to form so fitting an introduction to the realities of business as that course of dealing with things tangible and actual in which the working man has to exercise his faculties, and from which he derives his experience. One cause of the over-low estimate which the cla.s.sical scholar so often forms of the intelligence of that cla.s.s of the people to which our skilled mechanics belong, arises very much from the forwardness of a set of blockheads who are always sure to obtrude themselves upon his notice, and who come to be regarded by him as average specimens of their order.
I never yet knew a truly intelligent mechanic obtrusive. Men of the stamp of my two uncles, and of my friend William Ross, never press themselves on the notice of the cla.s.ses above them. A minister newly settled in a charge, for instance, often finds that it is the dolts of his flock that first force themselves upon his acquaintance. I have heard the late Mr. Stewart of Cromarty remark, that the humbler dunderheads of the parish had all introduced themselves to his acquaintance long ere he found out its clever fellows. And hence often sad mistakes on the part of a clergyman in dealing with the people. It seems never to strike him that there may be among them men of his own calibre, and, in certain practical departments, even better taught than he; and that this superior cla.s.s is always sure to lead the others. And in preaching down to the level of the men of humbler capacity, he fails often to preach to men of any capacity at all, and is of no use. Some of the clerical contemporaries of Mr. Stewart used to allege that, in exercising his admirable faculties in the theological field, he sometimes forgot to lower himself to his people, and so preached over their heads. And at times, when they themselves came to occupy his pulpit, as occasionally happened, they addressed to the congregation sermons quite simple enough for even children to comprehend. I taught at the time a cla.s.s of boys in the Cromarty Sabbath-school, and invariably found on these occasions, that while the memories of my pupils were charged to the full with the striking thoughts and graphic ill.u.s.trations of the very elaborate discourses deemed too high for them, they remembered of the very simple ones, specially lowered to suit narrow capacities, not a single word or note. All the attempts at originating a cheap literature that have failed, have been attempts pitched too low: the higher-toned efforts have usually succeeded. If the writer of these chapters has been in any degree successful in addressing himself as a journalist to the Presbyterian people of Scotland, it has always been, not by writing _down_ to them, but by doing his best on all occasions to write _up_ to them. He has ever thought of them as represented by his friend William, his uncles, and his Cousin George--by shrewd old John Fraser, and his reckless though very intelligent acquaintance Cha; and by addressing to them on every occasion as good sense and as solid information as he could possibly muster, he has at times succeeded in catching their ear, and perhaps, in some degree, in influencing their judgment.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] The extreme picturesqueness of these fires--in part a consequence of the great height and peculiar architecture of the buildings which they destroyed--caught the nice eye of Sir Walter Scott. "I can conceive," we find him saying, in one of his letters of the period, "no sight more grand or terrible than to see these lofty buildings on fire from top to bottom, vomiting out flames, like a volcano, from every aperture, and finally crashing down one after another, into an abyss of fire, which resembled nothing but h.e.l.l; for there were vaults of wine and spirits which set up huge jets of flames whenever they were called into activity by the fall of these ma.s.sive fragments. Between the corner of the Parliament Square and the Tron Church, all is destroyed excepting some new buildings at the lower extremity."
CHAPTER XVII.
"Beware, Lorenzo, a slow, sudden death."--YOUNG.
There was one special subject which my friend, in our quiet evening walks, used to urge seriously upon my attention. He had thrown up, under strong religious impressions, what promised to be so good a business, that in two years he had already saved money enough to meet the expenses of a college course of education. And a.s.suredly, never did man determine on entering the ministry with views more thoroughly disinterested than his. Patronage ruled supreme in the Scottish Establishment at the time; and my friend had no influence and no patron; but he could not see his way clear to join with the Evangelical Dissenters or the Secession; and believing that the most important work on earth is the work of saving souls, he had entered on his new course in the full conviction that, if G.o.d had work for him of this high character to do, He would find him an opportunity of doing it. And now, thoroughly in earnest, and as part of the special employment to which he had devoted himself, he set himself to press upon my attention the importance, in their personal bearing, of religious concerns.
I was not unacquainted with the standard theology of the Scottish Church. In the parish school I had, indeed, acquired no ideas on the subject; and though I now hear a good deal said, chiefly with a controversial bearing, about the excellent religious influence of our parochial seminaries, I never knew any one who owed other than the merest smattering of theological knowledge to these inst.i.tutions, and not a single individual who had ever derived from them any tincture, even the slightest, of religious feeling. In truth, during almost the whole of the last century, and for at least the first forty years of the present, the people of Scotland were, with all their faults, considerably more Christian than the larger part of their schoolmasters.
So far as I can remember, I carried in my memory from school only a single remark at all theological in its character, and it was of a kind suited rather to do harm than good. In reading in the cla.s.s one Sat.u.r.day morning a portion of the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm, I was told by the master that that ethical poem was a sort of alphabetical acrostic--a circ.u.mstance, he added, that accounted for its broken and inconsecutive character as a composition. Chiefly, however, from the Sabbath-day catechizings to which I had been subjected during boyhood by my uncles, and latterly from the old divines, my Uncle Sandy"s favourites, and from the teachings of the pulpit, I had acquired a considerable amount of religious knowledge. I had thought, too, a good deal about some of the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, in their character as abstruse positions--such as the doctrine of the Divine decrees, and of man"s inability to a.s.sume the initiative in the work of his own conversion. I had, besides, a great admiration of the Bible, especially of its narrative and poetical parts; and could scarce give strong enough expression to the contempt which I entertained for the vulgar and tasteless sceptics who, with Paine at their head, could speak of it as a weak or foolish book. Further, reared in a family circle, some of whose members were habitually devout, and all of whom respected and stood up for religion, and were imbued with the stirring ecclesiastical traditions of their country, I felt that the religious side in any quarrel had a sort of hereditary claim upon me. I believe I may venture to say, that previous to this time I had never seen a religious man badgered for his religion, and much in a minority, without openly taking part with him; nor is it impossible that, in a time of trouble, I might have almost deserved the character given by old John Howie to a rather notable "gentleman sometimes called Burly," who, "although he was by some reckoned none of the most religious," joined himself to the suffering party, and was "always zealous and honest-hearted." And yet my religion was a strangely incongruous thing. It took the form, in my mind, of a ma.s.s of indigested theology, with here and there a prominent point developed out of due proportion, from the circ.u.mstance that I had thought upon it for myself; and while entangled, if I may so speak, amid the recesses and under cover of the general chaotic ma.s.s, there harboured no inconsiderable amount of superst.i.tion, there rested over it the clouds of a dreary scepticism. I have sometimes, in looking back on the doubts and questionings of this period, thought, and perhaps even spoken of myself as an infidel. But an infidel I a.s.suredly was not: my belief was at least as real as my incredulity, and had, I am inclined to think, a much deeper seat in my mind. But wavering between the two extremes--now a believer, and anon a sceptic--the belief usually exhibiting itself as a strongly-based instinct,--the scepticism as the result of some intellectual process--I lived on for years in a sort of uneasy see-saw condition, without any middle ground between the two extremes, on which I could at once reason and believe.
That middle ground I now succeeded in finding. It is at once delicate and dangerous to speak of one"s own spiritual condition, or of the emotional sentiments on which one"s conclusions regarding it are often so doubtfully founded. Egotism in the religious form is perhaps more tolerated than in any other; but it is not on that account less perilous to the egotist himself. There need be, however, less delicacy in speaking of one"s beliefs than of one"s feelings; and I trust I need not hesitate to say, that I was led to see at this time, through the instrumentality of my friend, that my theologic system had previously wanted a central object, to which the heart, as certainly as the intellect, could attach itself; and that the true centre of an efficient _Christianity_ is, as the name ought of itself to indicate, "the Word made Flesh." Around this central sun of the Christian system--appreciated, however, not as a _doctrine_ which is a mere abstraction, but as a Divine Person--so truly Man, that the affections of the human heart can lay hold upon Him, and so truly G.o.d, that the mind, through faith, can at all times and in all places be brought into direct contact with Him--all that is really religious takes its place in a subsidiary and subordinate relation. I say subsidiary and subordinate.
The Divine Man is the great attractive centre, the sole gravitating point of a system which owes to Him all its coherency, and which would be but a chaos were He away. It seems to be the existence of the human nature in this central and paramount object that imparts to Christianity, in its subjective character, its peculiar power of influencing and controlling the human mind. There may be men who, through a peculiar idiosyncrasy of const.i.tution, are capable of loving, after a sort, a mere abstract G.o.d, unseen and inconceivable; though, as shown by the air of sickly sentimentality borne by almost all that has been said and written on the subject, the feeling in its true form must be a very rare and exceptional one. In all my experience of men, I never knew a genuine instance of it The love of an abstract G.o.d seems to be as little natural to the ordinary human const.i.tution as the love of an abstract sun or planet. And so it will be found, that in all the religions that have taken strong hold of the mind of man, the element of a vigorous humanity has mingled, in the character of its G.o.ds, with the theistic element. The G.o.ds of cla.s.sic mythology were simply powerful men set loose from the tyranny of the physical laws; and, in their purely human character, as warm friends and deadly enemies, they were both feared and loved. And so the belief which bowed at their shrines ruled the old civilized world for many centuries. In the great ancient mythologies of the East--Buddhism and Brahmanism--both very influential forms of belief--we have the same elements, genuine humanity added to G.o.d-like power. In the faith of the Moslem, the human character of the man Mahommed, elevated to an all-potential viceregency in things sacred, gives great strength to what without it would be but a weak theism.
Literally it is Allah"s supreme prophet that maintains for Allah himself a place in the Mahommedan mind. Again, in Popery we find an excess of humanity scarce leas great than in the cla.s.sical mythology itself, and with nearly corresponding results. Though the Virgin Mother takes, as queen of heaven, a first place in the scheme, and forms in that character a greatly more interesting G.o.ddess than any of the old ones who counselled Ulysses, or responded to the love of Anchises or of Endymion, she has to share her empire with the minor saints, and to recognise in them a host of rivals. But undoubtedly to this popular element Popery owes not a little of its indomitable strength. In, however, all these forms of religion, whether inherently false from the beginning, or so overlaid in some after stage by the fict.i.tious and the untrue as to have their original substratum of truth covered up by error and fable, there is such a want of coherency between the theistic and human elements, that we always find them undergoing a process of separation. We see the human element ever laying hold on the popular mind, and there manifesting itself in the form of a vigorous superst.i.tion; and the theistic element, on the other hand, recognised by the cultivated intellect as the exclusive and only element, and elaborated into a sort of natural theology, usually rational enough in its propositions, but for any practical purpose always feeble and inefficient. Such a separation of the two elements took place of old in the ages of the cla.s.sical mythology; and hence the very opposite characters of the wild but genial and popular fables so exquisitely adorned by the poets, and the rational but uninfluential doctrines received by a select few from the philosophers. Such a separation took place, too, in France in the latter half of the last century; and still on the European Continent generally do we find this separation represented by the a.s.sertors of a weak theism on the one hand, and of a superst.i.tious saint-worship on the other. In the false or corrupted religions, the two indispensable elements of Divinity and Humanity appear as if blended together by a mere mechanical process; and it is their natural tendency to separate, through a sort of subsidence on the part of the human element from the theistic one, as if from some lack of the necessary affinities. In Christianity, on the other hand, when existing in its integrity as the religion of the New Testament, the union of the two elements is complete: it partakes of the nature, not of a mechanical, but of a chemical mixture; and its great central doctrine--the true Humanity and true Divinity of the Adorable Saviour--is a truth equally receivable by at once the humblest and the loftiest intellects. Poor dying children possessed of but a few simple ideas, and men of the most robust intellects, such as the Chalmerses, Fosters, and Halls of the Christian Church, find themselves equally able to rest their salvation on the _man_ "Christ, who is over all, _G.o.d_ blessed for ever." Of this fundamental truth of the two natures, that condensed enunciation of the gospel which forms the watchword of our faith, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," is a direct and palpable embodiment; and Christianity is but a mere name without it.
I was impressed at this time by another very remarkable feature in the religion of Christ in its subjective character. Kames, in his "Art of Thinking," ill.u.s.trates, by a curious story, one of his observations on the "nature of man." "Nothing is more common," he says, "than love converted into hatred; and we have seen instances of hatred converted into love." And in exemplifying the remark, he relates his anecdote of "Unnion and Valentine." Two English soldiers, who fought in the wars of Queen Anne--the one a petty officer, the other a private sentinel--had been friends and comrades for years; but, quarrelling in some love affair, they became bitter enemies. The officer made an ungenerous use of his authority, and so annoyed and persecuted the sentinel as almost to fret him into madness; and he was frequently heard to say that he would die to be avenged of him. Whole months were spent in the infliction of injuries on the one side, and in the venting of complaints on the other; when, in the midst of their mutual rage, they were both selected, as men of tried courage, to share in some desperate attack, which was, however, unsuccessful; and the officer, in the retreat, was disabled, and struck down by a shot in the thigh. "Oh, Valentine! and will you leave me here to perish?" he exclaimed, as his old comrade rushed past him. The poor injured man immediately returned; and, in the midst of a thick fire, bore off his wounded enemy to what seemed a place of safety, when he was struck by a chance ball, and fell dead under his burden. The officer, immediately forgetting his wound, rose up, tearing his hair; and, throwing himself on the bleeding body, he cried, "Ah, Valentine! and was it for me, who have so barbarously used thee, that thou hast died? I will not live after thee." He was not by any means to be forced from the corpse; but was removed with it bleeding in his arms, and attended with tears by all his comrades, who knew of his harshness to the deceased. When brought to a tent, his wounds were dressed by force; but the next day, still calling on Valentine, and lamenting his cruelties to him, he died in the pangs of remorse and despair.
This surely is a striking story; but the commonplace remark based upon it by the philosopher is greatly less so. Men who have loved _do_ often learn to hate the object of their affections; and men who have hated sometimes learn to love: but the portion of the anecdote specially worthy of remark appears to be that which, dwelling on the o"ermastering remorse and sorrow of the rescued soldier, shows how effectually his poor dead comrade had, by dying for him "while he was yet his enemy,"
"heaped coals of fire upon his head." And such seems to be one of the leading principles on which, with a Divine adaptation to the heart of man, the scheme of Redemption has been framed. The Saviour approved his love, "in that while we were yet sinners, He died for us." There is an inexpressibly great power in this principle; and many a deeply-stirred heart has felt it to its core. The theologians have perhaps too frequently dwelt on the Saviour"s vicarious satisfaction for human sin in its relation to the offended justice of the Father. How, or on what principle, the Father was satisfied, I know not, and may never know. The enunciation regarding vicarious satisfaction may be properly received in faith as a _fact_, but, I suspect, not properly reasoned upon until we shall be able to bring the moral sense of Deity, with its requirements, within the limits of a small and trivial logic. But the thorough adaptation of the scheme to man"s nature is greatly more appreciable, and lies fully within the reach of observation and experience. And how thorough that adaptation is, all who have really looked at the matter ought to be competent to say. Does an earthly priesthood, vested with alleged powers to interpose between G.o.d and man, always originate an ecclesiastical tyranny, which has the effect, in the end, of shutting up the ma.s.s of men from their Maker?--here is there a High Priest pa.s.sed into the heavens--the only Priest whom the evangelistic Protestant recognises as really such--to whom, in his character of Mediator between G.o.d and man, all may apply, and before whom there need be felt none of that abject prostration of the spirit and understanding which man always experiences when he bends before the merely human priest. Is self-righteousness the besetting infirmity of the religious man?--in the scheme of vicarious righteousness it finds no footing. The self-approving Pharisee must be content to renounce his own merits, ere he can have part or lot in the fund of merit which alone avails; and yet without personal righteousness he can have no evidence whatever that he has an interest in the all-prevailing imputed righteousness. But it is in the closing scene of life, when man"s boasted virtues become so intangible in his estimation that they elude his grasp, and sins and shortcomings, little noted before, start up around him like spectres, that the scheme of Redemption appears worthy of the infinite wisdom and goodness of G.o.d, and when what the Saviour did and suffered seems of efficacy enough to blot out the guilt of every offence. It is when the minor lights of comfort are extinguished that the Sun of Righteousness shines forth, and more than compensates for them all.
The opinions which I formed at this time on this matter of prime importance I found no after occasion to alter or modify. On the contrary, in pa.s.sing from the subjective to the objective view, I have seen the doctrine of the union of the two natures greatly confirmed. The truths of geology appear destined to exercise in the future no inconsiderable influence on natural theology; and with this especial doctrine they seem very much in accordance. Of that long and stately march of creation with which the records of the stony science bring us acquainted, the distinguishing characteristic is progress. There appears to have been a time when there existed on our planet only dead matter unconnected with vitality; and then a time in which plants and animals of a low order began to be, but in which even fishes, the humblest of the vertebrata, were so rare and exceptionable, that they occupied a scarce appreciable place in Nature. Then came an age of fishes huge of size, and that to the peculiar ichthyic organization added certain well-marked characteristics of the reptilian cla.s.s immediately above them. And then, after a time, during which the reptile had occupied a place as inconspicuous as that occupied by the fish in the earlier periods of animal life, an age of reptiles of vast bulk and high standing was ushered in. And when, in the lapse of untold ages, _it_ also had pa.s.sed away, there succeeded an age of great mammals.
Molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession their periods of vast extent; and then there came a period that differed even more, in the character of its master-existence, from any of these creations, than they, with their many vitalities, had differed from the previous inorganic period in which life had not yet begun to be. The human period began--the period of a fellow-worker with G.o.d, created in G.o.d"s own image. The animal existences of the previous ages formed, if I may so express myself, mere figures in the landscapes of the great garden which they inhabited. Man, on the other hand, was placed in it to "keep and to dress it;" and such has been the effect of his labours, that they have altered and improved the face of whole continents. Our globe, even as it might be seen from the moon, testifies, over its surface, to that unique nature of man, unshared in by any of the inferior animals, which renders him, in things physical and natural, a fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it. And of the ident.i.ty of at least his intellect with that of his Maker, and, of consequence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares that he was created in G.o.d"s own image, we have direct evidence in his ability of not only conceiving of G.o.d"s contrivances, but even of reproducing them; and this, not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker. He may occasionally borrow the principles of his contrivances from the works of the Original Designer, but much more frequently, in studying the works of the Original Designer does he discover in them the principles of his own contrivances. He has not been an imitator: he has merely been exercising, with resembling results, the resembling mind, _i.e._, the mind made in the Divine image. But the existing scene of things is not destined to be the last. High as it is, it is too low and too imperfect to be regarded as G.o.d"s finished work: it is merely one of the _progressive_ dynasties; and Revelation and the implanted instincts of our nature alike teach us to antic.i.p.ate a glorious _terminal_ dynasty. In the first dawn of being, simple vitality was united to matter: the vitality thus united became, in each succeeding period, of a higher and yet higher order;--it was in succession the vitality of the mollusc, of the fish, of the reptile, of the sagacious mammal, and, finally, of responsible, immortal man, created in the image of G.o.d. What is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repet.i.tion of the past--an introduction a second time of "man made in the image of G.o.d?"
No! The geologist, in the tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of dynasties once pa.s.sed away again returning. There has been no repet.i.tion of the dynasty of the fish--of the reptile--of the mammal.
The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty--the "_kingdom_"--not of glorified man made in the image of G.o.d, but of G.o.d himself in the form of man. In the doctrine of the two natures, and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of Him in whom the natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been, a progress G.o.dwards--not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union; and, occupying that point as true G.o.d and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable Monarch of all the Future. It is, as urged by the Apostle, the especial glory of our race, that it should have furnished that point of contact at which G.o.dhead has united Himself, not to man only, but also, through man, to His own Universe--to the Universe of Matter and of Mind.
I remained for several months in delicate and somewhat precarious health. My lungs had received more serious injury than I had at first supposed; and it seemed at one time rather doubtful whether the severe mechanical irritation which had so fretted them that the air-pa.s.sages seemed overcharged with matter and stone-dust, might not pa.s.s into the complaint which it stimulated, and become confirmed consumption.
Curiously enough, my comrades had told me in sober earnest--among the rest, Cha, a man of sense and observation--that I would pay the forfeit of my sobriety by being sooner affected than they by the stone-cutter"s malady: "a good _bouse_" gave, they said, a wholesome fillip to the const.i.tution, and "cleared the sulphur off the lungs;" and mine would suffer for want of the medicine which kept theirs clean. I know not whether there was virtue in their remedy: it seems just possible that the shock given to the const.i.tution by an overdose of strong drink may in certain cases be medicinal in its effects; but they were certainly not in error in their prediction. Among the hewers of the party I was the first affected by the malady. I still remember the rather pensive than sad feeling with which I used to contemplate, at this time, an early death, and the intense love of nature that drew me, day after day, to the beautiful scenery which surrounds my native town, and which I loved all the more from the consciousness that my eyes might so soon close upon it for ever. "It _is_ a pleasant thing to behold the sun."
Among my ma.n.u.scripts--useless sc.r.a.ps of paper, to which, however, in their character as fossils of the past epochs of my life, I cannot help attaching an interest not at all in themselves--I find the mood represented by only a few almost infantile verses, addressed to a docile little girl of five years, my eldest sister by my mother"s second marriage, and my frequent companion, during my illness, in my short walks.
TO JEANIE.
Sister Jeanie, haste, we"ll go To whare the white-starred gowans grow, Wi" the puddock flower o" gowden hue.
The snaw-drap white and the bonny vi"let blue.
Sister Jeanie, haste, we"ll go To whare the blossomed lilacs grow-- To whare the pine-tree, dark an" high, Is pointing its tap at the cloudless sky.
Jeanie, mony a merry lay Is sung in the young-leaved woods to-day; Flits on light wing the dragon-flee, An" b.u.ms on the flowrie the big red-bee.
Down the burnie wirks its way Aneath the bending birken spray, An" wimples roun" the green moss-stane, An" mourns. I kenna why, wi" a ceaseless mane.
Jeanie, come; thy days o" play Wi" autumn-tide shall pa.s.s away; Sune shall these scenes, in darkness cast, Be ravaged wild by the wild winter blast.
Though to thee a spring shall rise, An" scenes as fair salute thine eyes; An" though, through many a cludless day, My winsome Jean shall be heartsome and gay;
He wha grasps thy little hand Nae langer at thy side shall stand, Nor o"er the flower-besprinkled brae Lead thee the low"nest and the bonniest way.
Dost thou see yon yard sae green, Spreckled wi" mony a mossy stane?
A few short weeks o" pain shall fly, An" asleep in that _bed_ shall thy puir brither lie.
Then thy mither"s tears awhile May chide thy joy an" damp thy smile; But sune ilk grief shall wear awa", And I"ll be forgotten by ane an" by a".
Dinna think the thought is sad; Life vexed me aft, but this mak"s glad: When cauld my heart and closed my e"e, Bonny shall the dreams o" my slumbers be.
At length, however, my const.i.tution threw off the malady; though--as I still occasionally feel--the organ affected never quite regained its former vigour; and I began to experience the quiet but exquisite enjoyment of the convalescent. After long and depressing illness, youth itself appears to return with returning health; and it seems to be one of the compensating provisions, that while men of robust const.i.tution and rigid organization get gradually old in their spirits and obtuse in their feelings, the cla.s.s that have to endure being many times sick have the solace of being also many times young. The reduced and weakened frame becomes as susceptible of the emotional as in tender and delicate youth. I know not that I ever spent three happier months than the autumnal months of this year, when gradually picking up flesh and strength amid my old haunts, the woods and caves. My friend had left me early in July for Aberdeen, where he had gone to prosecute his studies under the eye of a tutor, one Mr. Duncan, whom he described to me in his letters as perhaps the most deeply learned man he had ever seen. "You may ask him a common question," said my friend, "without getting an answer--for he has considerably more than the average absentness of the great scholar about him; but if you inquire of him the state of any one controversy ever agitated in the Church or the world, he will give it you at once, with, if you please, all the arguments on both sides." The trait struck me at the time as one of some mark; and I thought of it many years after, when fame had blown the name of my friend"s tutor pretty widely as Dr. Duncan, Hebrew Professor in our Free Church College, and one of the most profoundly learned of Orientalists. Though separated, however, from my friend, I found a quiet pleasure in following up, in my solitary walks, the views which his conversations had suggested; and in a copy of verses, the production of this time, which, with all their poverty and stiffness, please me as true, and as representative of the convalescent feeling, I find direct reference to the beliefs which he had laboured to instil. My verses are written in a sort of metre which, in the hands of Collins, became flexible and exquisitely poetic, and which in those of Kirke White is at least pleasing, but of which we find poor enough specimens in the "Anthologies" of Southey, and which perhaps no one so limited in his metrical vocabulary, and so defective in his musical ear, as the writer of these chapters, should ever have attempted.