should mutually sustain the spiritual edifice, | it to deserve the reward of a generous cup of are thus, by their ill-judging partisans, arrayed sack, so he who had thus submitted himself to as antagonist, or rather as hostile forces. In the penance of tracing, in distinct and legible one direction the march of despotism, in another the progress of anarchy, is advanced by those to whom both should be equally abhorrent, as being equally opposed to their common faith. characters, the progress of spiritual despotism, his task accomplished, soared away into other contemplations more agreeable to himself at least, because more abstruse, which he revealed to the lower world under the enigmatical title of "Saturday Evening." He sought relief and found it, when ordinary mortals find little else than lassitude; for, in the full sense of that profound expression, he was a man spiritually minded. His assent to Christianity was no faint admission that the balance of conflicting arguments inclined in favour of that belief. It was a conviction rooted in the inmost recesses of his mind; the germinating principle of the devout thoughts which grew spontaneously in that well cultured and fertile soil. To measure the heights and the depths of the truths revealed or intimated in the inspired volume, was at once the solace and the habitual labour of his life. From the strife of politicians, the wonders of art, and the controversies of the learned, he turned away to ponder on the hopes and prospects of the Christian Church, on her lapse from original purity, on the fellowship and isolation of her members, the limits of revealed knowledge, the dissolution and the perpetuity of our nature, and the modes of our future existence. Incapable of acquiescing tamely in any of the dogmatic systems of divinity, (all alike definite, cold, sterile, and earth-born,) he aspired to reach that upper region which the pure light visits, and whence alone it is reflected in all its purity. There he proposed to himself and handled problems of which Butler might have surmised t solution, and Milton How copious the eloquence with which the author of "Spiritual Despotism" would have disclaimed all responsibility for the opinions thus ascribed to him, and for the language in which they have been expressed! With what exuberant artifices of style would he have insisted that the mature results of the patient studies of his life, are not to be understood by any less laborious method than that of reading and meditating the volume in which he has himself recorded them! No protest could be more reasonable. Of such a book a fair estimate cannot be formed from the hasty sketch of an inconsiderable fragment, selected not as being more impressive than the rest, but it may be as indicating doctrines for which, as very nearly coinciding with his own, the abbreviator might desire to win at least a transient notice. Gratitude to him who has brought to the birth thoughts with which the mind has been long, though silently teeming, may overflow in unmeasured praise. Little, however, is hazarded in announcing this work as the most original, comprehensive, and profound contribution which any living writer in our own country has made to the science of ecclesiastical polity. They whose delight is in the transcendental and the obscure, who pine for theories which elude their grasp, and believe that to strain is to expand the mind, will judge otherwise. For once our author must submit to the reproach, perhaps the unwelcome re-evolved the latent glories. But he was attemptproach, of being perfectly intelligible. Draw-ing to scale eminences where the mightiest ing outlines of history with a hand as bold and become conscious of their weakness, and the free as that of Guizot, conversant with princi- boldest imagination is taught the penury of ples as recondite as those of Coleridge, and her resources. To throw some unsteady and animated by the same chaste and fervent piety precarious lights on such themes, should limit which hallows the speculations of Mr. Glad- the ambition, as it will unavoidably terminate stone, his was the further praise of bringing to the success, of all intellects but those of the the encounter, with the loftiest abstractions, most exalted order. Yet how abstain altogether that athletic good sense which disdains to en- from such endeavours to explore things unlarge itself by looming through a fog. Master, dreamt of in our popular theology, when the as he was of the chiar' oscuro, the love of truth ear has been trained to hear, however indiswas too strong in him for the love of art. Ad- tinctly, the undertones of the Divine voice, and dressing mankind on a subject of urgent and the heart to understand, however imperfectly, solemn interest, he rose so far above the fash- the inarticulate language of the Divine governions of his age, as to shun the region over ment? Blessed in no vulgar degree with such which sublimity and nonsense hold divided perceptions, our author applied himself with rule; remembering, perhaps, that it has never reverence, and, with freedom of thought, to been frequented by any of the master spirits topics which, when so examined, can never of the world; and that, even amongst men di- be unfruitful, though the fruits may often be vinely inspired, he who was at once the great- unripe, and to the great majority unpalatable. est and the most deeply learned, had preferred Take, as an example, the following abridgment to speak five words to edification than to speak of a chapter, entitled, "The State of Secluten thousand words in an unknown tongue. sion:" To grapple with principles of the widest span, without requiring so much as a momentary repose in the lap of mysticism, is an admirable power. To refuse on such an occasion, the but too familiar and ready aid of that narcotic, is a real, though an unobtrusive virtue. As the unwonted self-denial of thin potations will sometimes appear to him who has made From our narrow survey of the affairs of mankind, no principle of universal morals can be deduced, except as a matter of doubtful speculation and still recurring controversy, triumphant to-day, to be discarded to-morrow. Were it otherwise, the slumber of the soul, with all its attendant dreams and fantasies, must be broken. Our probationary state re yet capable of sufficient proof. Wisdom does not raise her voice in the streets; she calmly offers instruction to the prudent, but does not force it on the thoughtless. The division of created minds into distinct communities, and the various methods by which the members of the same community are separated from each other, are parts of that general ordinance or system by which a certain reserve is imposed on wisdom and on virtue. Things eternal and universal are unseen; things partial and temporal are alone submitted to our observation. quires that we should exist only as the inhabi- | of one great law by which all nature is pertants of a narrow area, shut out from the gene- vaded. Created intelligences are every where ral assembly of intelligent beings, and denied kept apart from that communion with other all access to those vehement and irresistible ranks of being, whose greater comprehensivepersuasions by which, with their comprehen- ness of knowledge would destroy the balance sive knowledge of the universal laws of the of conflicting motives, and reduce the rational divine economy, they would constrain us to will to a state of unresisting subjection. Man obedience. Within the walls of our prison- is isolated from preceding generations, and house we are condemned to grope in vain, if from all but a very inconsiderable number of so we may discover the permanent tendencies his own, because the comprehensive expe and the ultimate issues of things. The great rience which he might otherwise gain of the axioms of eternal virtue are rather obscured course of human affairs, would in the same than illustrated by the complexity, the insig- manner be destructive of his liberty of choice. nificance, and the obtrusive glare of those Each is left to gather from his separate expeoccurrences which make up national and indi-rience moral rules at once unobtrusive, and vidual history. Each man is straightened in his sphere of observation and of thought. His experience is incalculably small when compared to that of the whole human family, of which he is for the time a member. Of the events of preceding ages, he may catch some faint notices; of those of the ages to come, he lives and dies in profound ignorance. Between those who are entering and those who are about to quit this stage of existence, there are such distinctions of physical temperament as greatly intercept the tradition of knowledge from parents to their children. Geographical position, the antipathy of races, discordance of tastes, and differences of speech, contribute still further to segregate communities and their component parts. The intervention of a river, or a chain of mountains, will reduce to mute signs and gestures the language by which man holds intercourse with his fellows. Narrowing his pursuits and thoughts within a single path, the petty cares of life render him ignorant of what is passing beyond his daily walk, and unobservant of the far larger proportion of what occurs within it. So apparently inextricable is the confusion, and so many the seeming anomalies of all that falls under his personal notice, that man's existence assumes the semblance rather of a game of chance than of a system throughout which is to be traced the average result of established rules. So feeble is the faculty of generalization in most-so minute, urgent, and uniform, and yet so numerous the affairs in which they are engaged; such are the contaminations, and such the ridicule of life; so extravagant the folly in one direction, and so abject the misery in another, that the prospect open to any one of us, during his confinement in this sublunary state, is every where hedged round within narrow precincts, and bounded by a horizon as indistinct as it is near. Yet from our prison-house we look out on populous regions of illimitable space, though forbidden to converse with their inhabitants. We perceive that, beyond the limits of our own planet, the same law of seclusion prevails. Creation does not form one continuous surface over which beings of the same order might pursue an unbroken path, but is made up of globes suspended in thin space at incalculable distances. While neighbouring worlds are thus estranged from each other, the vastness of the universe is exhibited to every percipient being within its range. Thus the isolation of man is but the development on earth Such, divested of the embellishments with which they fell from his own hand, are the meditations to which the historian of Enthusi asm has devoted one of his "Saturday Evenings." It is a loss they can ill afford. Winnowed a little further, this splendid essay (for such in the original it really is) might, without the escape of any of its essences, be exhibited in the form of one or two simple and familiar truths-as thus: Moral probation is incompatible with a distinct and certain foresight of all the remote tendencies, and of all the ultimate results of our conduct. If the transient delights which allure us, and the overwhelming evils which follow in their train, were both at once revealed to the mental vision in the vivid colours and hard outlines of the naked reality, neither vice nor virtue could any longer exist among men. As probationers, we must live in the state of seclusion, that is, we must be cut off from those sources of information, which, if we had access to them, would prevent even a momentary equipoise between the present and the futurebetween those desires which crave immediate indulgence, and those which point to a distant but greater good. One of the causes by which the influx of such knowledge is impeded, is the insular position of our globe in the shoreless ocean of space; and as this physical isolation of worlds seems to pervade the celestial system, we may conjecture that "seclusion is a law of the universe," and that throughout the stellar regions imperfect knowledge is made conducive to the exercise and the improvement of virtue. There is but one Being to whom we are taught to ascribe complete and inflexible rectitude, because there is but one to whom we can attribute absolute omniscience. Inconsiderable as is the amount of genuine ore employed in this essay, and in many other parts of the collection of which it forms no unfavourable specimen, it would be difficult to refer to a more apt illustration of the ductility and the brilliance of which moral truth is susceptible. What if Selden or Pascal would have extracted into a page or two of apophthegms the essential oils of all these discourses; and what though the capacity to concentrate thought be a nobler gift than the art to diffuse it; yet may this inferior power exist in a state of rare and admirable excellence. Genuine wisdom has many tongues and many aspects, and employs each in turn to express and to promote that love of mankind which, under all her external forms, is still her animating spirit. Yet it must be confessed, that she so habitually delights in the simplest garb, that when, as in these sabbatical essays, she decks herself out in the literary fashions of the day, one may hope to be forgiven for being unaware of her presence. They are infinitely more rich in knowledge and in power than the generation of the author would confess; and yet was not that generation to blame? Under draperies adjusted with such obtrusive skill, and of so elaborate a texture, men are seldom accustomed to find real beauty, and are therefore but little disposed to search for it. When a biographer has conducted his hero to the tomb, he usually leaves him there. To the list of excepted cases must be added that of the author of " A Physical Theory of a Future Life." In form a speculative treatise, it may be considered as substantially a narrative of his existence beyond the confines of earth, in those scenes which most men occasionally anticipate, and which many have attempted to describe; some from the ambition for immortal fame, and some impelled by the cravings for immortal felicity. From the shelves of his well-filled library, sages and poets were summoned to contribute to the formation of this work. First, and before all, were consulted the writers of the sacred volume; of whom it may with the strictest truth be said, that they have established the triumph of good sense over the mere dreams of excited fancy. Of such dreams, none possessed a firmer hold on the Italian and Greek philosophers and their disciples, than that after death man was to pass into a state of pure incorporeity, and to be absorbed by the great mundane soul. Very different the teaching of the writers of the New Testament. They transferred from this world to the next the great truth-that human happiness requires not only that the mind be sound, but that it be lodged in a sound body. Irenæus and Tertullian informed our theorist that such was also the creed of the immediate successors of the apostles. Origen taught him, that to exist as a spirit wholly detached and separate from matter, is the incommunicable attribute of the omnipresent Deity; and instructed him to understand the luciform body of the Platonic system as identical with the spiritual body of the Christian revelation. From the same great master he learned that, without such an instrumentality, minds created and subordinate must be cut off from all commerce with external things, and become nothing more than so many inert, insulated, and contemplative entities. With these great fathers of the Church he found the rest of that vener able college in harmony-copious in their inquiries respecting the nature of good and bad demons-assigning to the angelic host the nearest possible resemblance, and to the evil spirits the utmost possible dissimilarity, to the defecated intelligences of the Aristotelic learning; the one impassive to all sensual delights, the other inhaling with an unholy relish the savoury fumes of heathen sacrifices, but both clad with material integuments, subtilized to an imponderable and indefinite tenuity. Their volumes, especially, if we remember rightly, those of Augustine, revealed to him the farther secret of the manner in which spirits inhabiting these ethereal vehicles hold intercourse with each other; and even explained the shapes in which they manifest their presence to those exquisite organs of sensation by which alone they are perceptible. Cook, or La Perouse, never drew a plainer chart of their discoveries, than that which was thus laid open to our author of the regions of the blessed. Cuvier never examined the osseous structure of an antediluvian quadruped more closely, than the mental and physical constitution of the immortals was thus analyzed by some of those who in ancient times aspired one day to join that exalted company. Other provinces of our author's literary dominions were yet to be explored. One contemptuous glance was given to the Koran, and to the paradise copied, as it might seem, by the prophet, from the Aphroditan temples of Paphos or Idalia. Homer exhibited to him the illustrious dead as so many victims of the inexorable fates against which they had contended so bravely on earth, and as agitated by passions which it was no longer permitted them to gratify. His great imitator discovered to the student, Elysian fields over which satiety reigned in eternal and undisputed sway, and which the poet himself advantageously exchanged, twelve centuries afterwards, for the outskirts of the "Inferno" with an occasional voyage of discovery through those gloomy mansions. The awful magican who placed him there lost much of his own inspiration, when, quitting the guidance of Virgil for that of Beatrice, he traversed in her company the seven heavens, and listened in the sun to the lectures of Thomas Aquinas, or received from the saints congregated in the form of an eagle in the planet Jupiter, a metaphysical comment on the mysteries of the divine decrees. From the poets, our author next turned to the theological philosophers of his own and other countries. In Cudworth and Brucker he found the doctrines of the schools of ancient and of modern Europe in more perfect symmetry, and in greater clearness than in the works of the sages and schoolmen themselves; but cold as the latitudinarianism of the first, and dry as the antiquarian lore of the second. At length his hand rested on two volumes in which the post-sepulchral condition of man is delineated with a beauty and eloquence to which he rendered a willing, although a silent homage. One of those was the treatise of Thomas Burnett-De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium-the other, that book on the "Light of Nature," in which Abraham Tucker tra H tinuance, in a single case, of customs so generally laid aside; or to arraign an author as making an unjust pretension to the praise of originality, merely because he does not in terms disavow it. If in this new theory there is little to be found in substance with which were not already familiar, there is at least a systematic completeness and symmetry, in this scheme of a future life, unrivalled even in Abraham Tucker's vision. In order to disclose to mankind the prospect which thus awaits them, it will be necessary to convert our author's didactics into the form of a fragment of his posthumous autobiography—a freedom, for the pardon of which the necessity of the case may be urged; since it seems impossible by any other method to convey any adequate conception of a career which, dazzling as it is in itself, is still further obscured by the brilliant polish of the abstract phraseology in which it is described by him by whom, in imagination at least, it was run. He may, then, be supposed to have revealed the incidents of his immortal existence to the associates of his mortal being, in some such terms as the following: verses the world to come in his atomic or vehicular state. Burnett, it may be supposed, best knew his own strength and weakness, and judged rightly in choosing scientific or critical subjects, and in discussing them in a dead language. But to those who read his works it must ever remain a mystery that he could sub-those who are inquisitive about such matters ject himself to such fetters, instead of yielding to the inspiration which was ever at hand to sublimate into impassioned poetry whatever exact knowledge or whatever learned inquiries might happen to engage his thoughts. Tucker, on the other hand, was a matter of fact person; happy beyond all men in the power of illustrating the obscure by the familiar; but happier still in the most benevolent and cheerful temper, and in a style which beautifully reflects the constitutional gayety and kindness of his heart. There is a charm even in his want of method, and in the very clumsiness of his paragraphs; for each sentence bears him testimony that he is too intent on his object to think of any thing else, and that to teach controversialists to understand and to love each other was the single end for which he lived and wrote. Of his metaphysical speculations, the most original and curious is the Inquiry into the Nature and the Operation of Motives. But his excellence consists in the brightness and in the variety of the lights he has thrown round the whole circle of those topics over which natural and revealed religion exercise a common and indivisible dominion. To rid them of mere logomachies, to show how much the fiercest disputants may be unconsciously agreed, to prove how greatly Christianity is misrepresented by many of her opponents, and misunderstood by many of her friends-and, without ever assuming the preacher's office, to explain the depths of the great Christian canon of mutual love as the universal substratum of all moral truth,—this is the duty which he has undertaken, and which he executes, often successfully, and always with such courage, diligence, and vivacity, and with so unbroken a sunshine of a placid and playful temper, as to render the "Light of Nature" one of the most attractive books in our language, both to those who read to be themselves instructed on these questions, and to those who read with a view of imparting such instruction to others. One universal bewilderment of thought, one passing agony, and all was still. I had emerged from the confines of life, and yet I lived. Time, place, and sensation were extinct. Memory had lost her office, and the activity of my reasoning powers was suspended. Apart from every other being, and entombed in the solitude of my own nature, all my sentient and mental faculties were absorbed and concentrated in one intense perception of self-consciousness. Before me lay expanded, as in a vast panorama, the entire course of my mortal life. I was at once the actor and the spectator of the whole eventful scene; every thought as distinct, every word as articulate, and every incident as fresh as at the moment of their birth. The enigmas of my existence were solved. That material and intellectual mechanism of which, for threescore years and ten, I had been the subject, was laid bare, with all the mutual dependencies of the countless events, great and trivial, of my sublunary days. Grasping at length the threads of that vast labyrinth, I perceived that they had all So judged Paley in the last generation; and been woven by the same Divine Artificer. At such is manifestly the opinion of Archbishop each step of the way by which I had come, I Whately, and of Bishop Coppleston, with many now traced the intervention of an ever watchother writers of our own. Amongst the many ful Providence. Complicated and perplexing who have drawn at this fountain, the latest as the condition of human life had formerly would appear to be the author of "The Physi- appeared to me, I at length discovered the cal Theory of a Future Life." Whether he in great ultimate object to which each movement fact availed himself of the sources of informa- of that intricate apparatus had been designed tion which we have indicated, or any other of to minister. I saw that the whole had been the countless books which treat on the myste- one harmonious and comprehensive scheme ries of the world to which we are all passing, for purifying the affections of my nature, and is, however a fact on which it is impossible to invigorating them for nobler and more arduous advance beyond conjecture. The old and obso- exercises. I had gone down to Hades, and lete fashion of commencing a voyage of disco- Deity was there. On earth his existence had very to any terra incognita, by a retrospect of been demonstrated. Here it was felt by a conthe success or failure of former adventurers, sciousness intuitive and irresistible. A priand the still more ancient practice of fencing soner in the flesh, I had been wont to adore round the page with references and quotations, the majesty of the Creator. A disembodied were not without their use. It would, how- spirit, I was awake to the conviction that he ever, be captious to complain of the discon-exists as the perennial source of happiness, which, concentrated in his own nature, is | rested on the numbers without number of inthence diffused throughout the universe, al- telligent and sentient creatures who shared though in degrees immeasurably distant from with me my new abode. Incorruptible, exempt each other, and according to laws unsearch- from lassitude, and undesirous of repose, they able by any finite understanding. Thus im- imbibed energy from rays which in the twinkbibing knowledge of myself and of Deity, and ling of an eye would have dissipated into thin alive only to the emotions inspired by this vapour the world and all that it inherits. On ever-present spectacle, I became the passive that opaque globe, the principles which sustain, recipient of influences instinct with a delight and those which destroy life had been engaged so tranquil, and with a peace so unbroken, within me in a constant but unequal conflict. that weariness, satiety, and the desire for The quickening spirit on earth, though contichange appeared to have departed from me nually recruited by rest and sleep, had at for ever. length yielded to the still-recurring assaults of her more potent adversaries. Here the vital powers had no foes to encounter, and demanded no respite from their ceaseless occupation. In the world below, from man, the universal sovereign, to the animalcula who people a drop of turbid water, I had seen all animated things sustaining themselves by the mutual extermination of each other. In the solar sphere I found all pursuing their appointed course of duty or enjoyment, in immortal youth and undecaying vigour. Death had found no entrance, life demanded no renewal. Change, however, awaited me. So slight and imperfect had been the alliance between my disembodied spirit and the world of matter, that, destitute of all sensation, I had lost all measure of time, and knew not whether ages had revolved, or but a moment had passed away during my isolated state of being. Heir to ten thousand infirmities, the body I had tenanted on earth had returned to the dust, there to be dissolved and recompounded into other forms and new substances. Yet the seminal principle of that mortal frame had adhered to me; and at the appointed season there brooded over it from on high a repro- I anticipated the results of the observations ductive and plastic influence. Fearfully and which I gradually learned to make of the dif wonderfully as I had been made when a deni- ference between solar and planetary existence; zen of the world, the chemical affinities, and for on my entrance into this untried state of the complex organization of my animal struc-being, my thoughts were long riveted to the ture, had borne the impress of decay, of a tran- change which I had myself undergone. While sitory state, and of powers restricted in their incarcerated in my tenement of clay, I had free exercise. Passing all comprehension as given law to my nerves, muscles, and tendons; had been the wisdom with which it was adapted but they had in turn imposed restraints on me to the purposes of my sublunary being, those against which it had been vain to struggle. purposes had been ephemeral, and circum- My corporeal mechanism had moved in prompt scribed within precincts which now seemed to obedience to each successive mandate of my me scarcely wider than those within which mind; but so fragile were the materials of the emmet plies her daily task. In the ca- which it was wrought, that, yielding to inexorreer which was now opening to me, I re-able necessity, my will had repressed inquired a far different instrumentality to give scope to my new faculties, and to accomplish the ends to which I had learned to aspire. Emancipated from the petty cares and the mean pursuits in which, during the period of my humanity, I had been immersed, I now inhabited and informed a spiritual body, not dissimilar in outward semblance to that which I had bequeathed to the worms, but uniform in texture, homogeneous in every part, and drawn from elements blended harmoniously together, into one simple, pure, and uncompounded whole. Into such perfect unison had my mental and my corporeal nature been drawn, that it was not without difficulty I admitted the belief that I was once again clothed with a material integument. Experience was soon to convince me that such an association was indispensable to the use and to the enlargement of my intellectual and moral powers. Emerging from the region of separate spirits into my next scene of activity and social intercourse, I found myself an inhabitant of the great luminary, around which Mercury and his more distant satellites eternally revolve. In all their unmitigated radiance were floating around me, those effulgent beams of light and heat which so faintly visit the obscure and distant planets. Everlasting day, the intense glories of an endless summer noon, numerable desires which, if matured into absolute volitions, would have rent asunder that frail apparatus. I had relaxed the grasp, and abandoned the chase, and thrown aside the uplifted weapon, as often as my overstrained limbs admonished me that their cords would give way beneath any increased impetus. And when the living power within me had subjected my fibres to the highest pressure which they could safely endure, the arrangement, and the relative position of my joints and muscles, had impeded all my movements, except in some circumscribed and unalterable directions. But my spiritual body, incapable of waste or of fracture, and responsive at every point to the impact of the indwelling mind, advanced, receded, rose or fell, in prompt obedience to each new volition, with a rapidity unimpeded, though not unlimited, by the gravitating influence of the mighty orb over the surface of which I passed. At one time I soared as with the wings of eagles, and at another penetrated the abysses of the deep. The docile and indestructible instrument of my will could outstrip the flight of the swiftest arrow, or rend the knotted oak, or shiver the primeval rocks; and then, contracting its efforts, could weave the threads of the gossamer in looms too subtle and evanescent for the touch of the delicate Ariel. |