CHAPTER III. The Letter and the Spirit-Processes of Pantheism and Atheism-Symphony of Nature prelusive to the great Religious Anthem. In the teachings of Nature there is a distinction, as in those of Scripture, between the letter and the Spirit; and while the Spirit giveth life, the letter, if you stop there, and rest in it, killeth. Materialism, Atheism, Pantheism, have all been found in conjunction with much apparent study of nature. Just so, a man may be an eminent philologist, and yet run through whole pages of eloquence and poetry in a dead language, understanding the words but heedless of the thought, unable to appreciate it. The forms of speech in the New Testament in Greek, may be the subject of profound investigation and knowledge, where all belief, consciousness, and living experience of the meaning of text are excluded from the soul. Just so it may be with the study of the forms of nature. There may be neither glimpse of God, nor any vision or faith of spiritual realities. A man that looks at glass, His windows may be covered with cobwebs and dirt so thick, that he can see nothing through them, and he may never throw them open to let in the fresh air and uninterrupted light. A great many minds, that have windows made for use, see little else but the cobwebs and the sashes. As to the darkening process in Nature, there is little or no difference in the end, between Atheism and Pantheism. The two things might seem to be the extreme opposites and antago nisms of one another; but the truth of the existence and attributes of God is equally distant from both. The none and the all lead here to the same fool's paradise. The fool that hath said in his heart, No God! is the corporal of one platoon, one regiment, one wing of the body of under-fools. The fool that hath said in his intellect, All God! is the recruiting sergeant of the other. The a privative and the pan collective, amount to the same thing; although the blasphemy of the a is more condensed and explicit, less reputable, and therefore less dangerous; while the Atheism of the pan is rarified, transcendental, supportive of balloons, wearing sometimes a reverential, natureworshipping form of mystic piety; mist-piety, we would rather say, shrouding you with a kind of wet, that penetrates to the very bones, if long enough continued, while a strong, drenching rain would have done its work upon the skin and clothes, and left a possibility of drying in the next sunshine. The pan is the drunkenness and pride of the intellect, All God, no creatures! The a has been less in reputation, as savoring rather of the coarseness of the appetites, a pettifogger for the animal passions; All creatures, no God! The pan has. had some of its supporters among the philosophers and poets, and is in general too subtle and refined for a pot-house religion; the a, the no God, is an easier, more tangible, more intelligible creed. But as to religion, said John Howe, "It is all one whether we make nothing to be God, or everything; whether we allow of no God to worship, or leave none to worship him.” It is the fool who thus blinks at nature, but the folly begins in the heart and is native only there; the intellect by itself never was so debased. "Religion," as Coleridge has profoundly remarked, " as both the corner-stone and the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. It were therefore to be expected that fundamental truths would be such as MIGHT be denied, though only by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the heart alone."* But how can there be such a thing as an Atheist? What is that process, by which, if there be such a thing, the soul of man can have come to the conclusion that there is no such reality as soul in the universe, and no such Being as God? A process more singular than that by which human flesh is converted into stone, more anomalous than the change of all animated existences into fossils. If a man were to deny the evidence of his own father, though protected and educated by him for years, though conversing with him every day of his own life, or if he were to assert that what seems to be a man communing with him is nothing in the world but the fabric composing his dress, the stuff denominated clothes; this would be no greater insanity or impudence of intellect, than the denial of a God, or the assertion, by what is termed Pantheism, that there is no other God than the forms and dress of Nature, and that this universe is * Biogr Literaria, Vol. I. p 124. but an accidental clothes-horse. In all the operations of Nature God manifests himself as really to our senses, by as direct material evidence, as we ever ourselves can use, in the manifestation of ourselves to one another by sight and conversation. Whence then came that overwhelming, startling, supernatural intelligence to the soul of the Atheist, that there is no God? From what part of Nature, in himself or in the world around him, came the amazing announcement? "Tell," says John Foster, "of the mysterious voices which have spoken to you from the deeps of the creation, falsifying the expressions marked on its face. Tell of the new ideas, which, like meteors passing over the solitary wanderer, gave you the first glimpes of truth, while benighted in the common belief of the Divine existence." The process by which a man becomes divested of that belief, conducts him to the highest climax of that character marked in Scripture by the name FooL. It is the most utter and infinite debasement of the human reason, though it should even come upon him in the form of an angel taking him, and in the sensation of being taken, to the summit of a high mountain, there to be shown all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. But if he knows that there is no God, if this be not a conjecture a wild, melancholy wish, or a shadow from the wings of Satan darkening the soul as he flies with it, "the wonder then turns," remarks John Foster in one of the most striking passages in his Essays, "on the great process, by which a man could grow to the immense intelligence that can know that there is no God. What ages and what lights are requisite for THIS attainment! This intelligence involves the very attributes of Divinity, while a God is denied. For unless this man is omnipresent, unless he is at this moment in every place in the universe, he cannot know but there may be in some place manifestations of a Deity by which even he would be overpowered. If he does not know absolutely every agent in the universe, the one that he does not know may be God. If he is not himself the chief agent in the universe, and does not know what is so, that which is so may be God. If he is not in absolute possession of all the propositions that constitute universal truth, the one which he wants may be, that there is a God. If he cannot with certainty assign the cause of all that he perceives to exist, that cause may be a God. If he does not know everything that has been done in the immeasurable ages that are past, some things may have been done by a God. Thus, unless he knows all things, that is, precludes another Deity, by being one himself, he cannot know that the Being whose existence he rejects, does not exist. But he must know that he does not exist, else he deserves equal contempt and compassion for the temerity with which he firmly avows his rejection, and acts accordingly." Having no hope, and without God in the world. Such is the description of practical Atheism in the Word of God. And what a melancholy, dreary, desolate announcement! WITHOUT GOD, IN THE WORLD! The conception of an intelligent being in such a state is even more terrible, than the thought of a world without a God. The latter is an impossibility; but if it were not, the condition of intelligent beings in a world without a God would be, indeed, infinitely to be preferred to that of an intelligent accountable being without God in the world. Hence it is that the fool hath said in his heart, No God! It is a wish, a mere corrupt, depraved wish, and not an opinion. It is the smoke of the bottomless pit, not the flame, nor the logic. Hath said in his heart, not in his intellect; for the intellect and the |