Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/142

132 that the world should know little of natural order, and nothing of the effects which it does, and is designed to, produce in the happiness and highest relations of mankind.

If the creations of an infinite Being, or the house and do main in which man is to dwell, are necessarily correspondences, so also are whatever revelations he vouchsafes for the edification of his finite creatures. If, in a real sense, there be a Word of God,—if that Word be not the fruit of an exalted enthusiasm of our finite faculties, but the outward gift of Heaven,—then as the world is made by correspondence, so must the Word be written by correspondence; and the inevitable effect of a devout and still more of an intelligent reading of such a volume must be the instantaneous presence of the Divine Soul in the letter, converting the heart, and making wise the simple. This follows in the strictest manner from the premiss of a Word sent down from heaven by the golden rod of correspondence. How amazing our interest in the existence of such a Word, and the ministrations of such a Science! Better, for very hope's sake, to hold to them, than to sit in the seat of the wittiest scorner, or to wrap up the proud soul in the threefold honors of skepticism! Philosophy has nothing but darkness to offer, when it rejects precise and unitary ideas of inspiration, whether for the emptiness of rationalism, or for the incoherency and caprice of the Protestant ideas of the Divine Truth, from which the only safeguard is the blessed inconsequence of those who entertain them.

A correspondential Word is not, however, necessarily unalterable in its outward form, or incapable of modification and contorsion. On the contrary, its letter may take a new and subversive shape, just as the creation itself has received the imprint of the Fall, and, in the majority of its subjects, reflects the social and individual depravation of its secondary Master. The harshness of the Jewish Word, and the hiddenness of much of the Christian, is, then, no more against the indwelling of the Divine Love in these difficult forms, than the savagery and hostility of the creation is against the fact of a beneficent Creator. It is finite man to whom all things ultimately correspond; and it is even for his benefit