English
Though I do not think the conscience alone generated the expectation of a future state, yet it constantly leads men in that direction, both by the presentiment which each one cherishes of some result awaiting his own thoughts, and by the require- ment of some future arbitration to set right all the inequalities of this world. We see all things tending towards the confirma- tion of a rule of Right, and our heart and our wishes, no less than our conscience and our reason, cry out that Right ought to pre- vail; yet all things are not yet put under its absolute sway, so that it remains, as we hope, for the tendency, which hitherto has been interrupted by many exceptions, to be realised hereafter. " At such a junction of our thoughts with our feelings, or of that knowing faculty within us which apprehends the most de- monstrable science with the purer class of our affections, we find the whole man as it were crying out for an immortality, and refusing to be deprived of its great hope. Here also must be remembered what I will venture to call the tentative experience of the best and holiest men. Some persons may mock at the expression experience, as applied to what has not yet come to pass; but it is easy to know by numbers of experiments under what kind of expectations men live holily or happily, as well as the contrary. There are thousands of instances in which men have either recorded the course of their mental thought in books, or embodied it in actions, or in some way made it manifest. We cannot indeed come familiarly in contact with men, without forming some kind of judgment on their belief and the influence it has on their happiness, neither of which can be altogether hidden. Just then as before I ventured to ask, whether the materialist and irreligious tone of sentiment, or the contrary, did most to chasten the affections ; so here I ask, and I do not wish the answer to have any controversial bias, which carries to the mind of any one entertaining it the fullest witness of its being DEVOUT EXPERIENCE. 136 true? You have spoken as if in praise of the purer affections; but theories like yours do not enable men to practise them. But now take the experience of praying men everywhere, and see whether it confirms their faith or militates against it; or consider that groundwork which exists in our mind for the affections of hope and trust, and observe whether these do not peremptorily require some object to fasten upon, and whether every attempt at religion, and every defiance of religion, has not been alike unsa- tisfactory, which did not encourage them to believe in the reality of such an object We shall find here, as before, that the feelings and the intellect correspond. On the one hand, the mere act of praying earnestly, or singing devoutly, and, in short, any exercise of the religious affections, seems, either by eliciting an immediate answer, or in virtue of some general law of Providence, to be a great instrument of mental peace; and, on the other hand, persons who have enjoyed such a consolation could not retain it, unless they believed in the positive reality of that Being whom they address. It is not like the rage of a passionate child, which is soothed after it has vented itself, or like the me- chanical pattering of a mystic, who, with closed eyes or mind excludes firom his piety all intervention of his reason. But reli- gious people in general, and at least in so far as they are intel- ligent or sound-minded, require intellectual belief as well as emotional faith; and when such persons have, from any clash of opinions in speculative times, or from any waywardness or sensual vice on their own part, lost hold of what they once firmly apprehended, they almost all agree in confessing that they suffer a sorrow to which no other earthly sorrow is comparable for magnitude. I do not here speak of mere animal men, who seem never to have risen into any conception of the great capaci- ties of their souls, for indeed of such I know not what to say, except that one would no more envy them than one envies a pig or an elephant; but of all who unite intelligence anjd affections such as we call humane, it may be affirmed that they seem not to retain this standard of humanity uprightly and blessedly, 136 REQUIREMENTS OF HUMANITY. without acquaintance with that higher Being upon which man depends." " Then I am to understand you to argue," here asked Wolff, "that because religion is desirable, therefore it is true." "I beg your pardon," replied Blancombe, " certainly that is not my argument, in such a sense as to bear being put nakedly and apart from the other considerations with which I have connected it. But to Man, considered as a being who naturally aspires to make the best of himself, either for happiness or beneficence, or whatever nobler end he may be capable of conceiving, it seems no slight argument that a particular class of sentiments require his most earnest cultivation, if he finds that without them the very nature of which he is possessed cannot otherwise thrive, or put forth its best powers. Of course this argument would have infinitely more force to persons already persuaded that the world's order is under the direction of Mind ; for they would feel convinced, that whatever is necessary to carry out a design of the grandest magnitude, must have entered into the plan of an intellectual contriver, and it would be a part of natural piety with them to infer a high moral probability of such conceptions being true, as God's creatures cannot be good and happy without conceiving. Whereas at present without such aid, I am compelled to throw myself upon the deep necessities of our being. Nor indeed does this issue frighten me; but even if it should be conceded, to a greater extent than any philosopher has ever yet proved, that all things act, as Sad&nanda tells ns, according to their inherent properties, or that those acts which appear to us the free offspring of volition are only minute links in an infinitely subtle and all-embracing chain of causation, — for that men are a kind of human vegetables, only influenced by more delicate modifications of Pracriti, because we consist of such ourselves, — even so, my friends, I despair neither of morality nor of faith, which seem the cause of God amongst mankind. For I observe among plants too, that they are liable to disease, and that some things cause health to them, and others decay. The hyacinth can- REQUIREMENTS OF HUMANITY. 137 not lie long torn from it stalk, without withering: and I suppose no flower or herb can live without some kindly influence fix>m the light of heaven. At least I observe that plants enclosed in any dark closet grow lank and pale ; and if there should be any crevice through which a fragment of light enters, they stretch their consumptive stalks towards it, so as to imbibe a dubious life. Pretty much in the same way I observe men who in savage places are shut out from opportunities of sound know- ledge, throw all their passions with more desperate swing into some wild or abnormal form of superstition: and generally it may be said, the religious sentiments of which we have spoken, are, at least in some form, as necessary to man's mind or nature, as the light and breath of heaven are to the flower of the field. So that, whatever is the cause of our being so, the fact of our being such as to require the mental nourishment of piety cannot be denied. Prayer, as our Bauddha friend here most truly observed, is a necessary part of human virtue, which the very relief it gives us in many ways sufficiently proves. We have also seen, that together with this experience we have others of the kind. For, not to repeat yet my first argument about Mind, we have seen the innermost will of man protesting against any grosser appetites, as well as any unruly passions which attempt to overbear our more righteous choice ; thus also knowledge, in that it tends daily to more and more of concurrence everywhere in the purest standard of morality, is a witness against any blind materialism which makes virtue or vice a matter of caprice or organisation.