Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 046.djvu/688

674 of talk, and cleverness, and success, but without a character and a principle higher than himself on which the character depends.

A man must have bread to live on, bread growing in the fields around him, ground in a mill, and baked in an oven within his reach. Dust, indeed, he may find without having it sewn, or reaped, or ground, or baked for him; and a traveller may tell him of fruits and viands much better than bread to be found in India or the Moon; but the dust will not feed him, nor the name of pine-apples and nectar serve him for dinner. So is it with our need of religion. Worldly maxims of prudence and knowledge will not do as a substitute; and philosophy, which, to be comprehensive and lasting, must be religious philosophy, is for all but a few as airy as the rumour of a magic garden, and the tale of lunar feasts and quintessential potations.

The worst education which teaches self-denial is better than the best which teaches every thing else, and not that.

Mere benevolence is little better than worthless as a first principle of life. The loving men, without knowing what we are to love in them, is a moral appetite, which may easily be too indiscriminating. Faith must stand first; the trustful insight into a truth which shows what we are to love, and why; otherwise the love ends in a melancholy dream. It is the mere moonshine of the mind, which, if genuine, and not a stage-carpenter's tallow moonshine, points to, and proves a sunshine, a knowledge and love of good unmingled and pure, and not as in human beings, muddled with infinite dirt and lies.

It is most true and most fitting to be said to many in our day, that a man has no business to cut himself off from communion with so rich and manifold a world as ours, or arbitrarily to harden and narrow his life on any of the sides on which it is open and sensitive. But it is also no less necessary, and perhaps in this time more required, to urge that a man's first vocation is to be a man—a practical, personal being with a reasonable moral existence, which must be kept strong and in working order, at all expense of pleasure, talent, brilliancy, and success. It is easy to lose one's-self, or, as the Scripture has it, one's own soul, in the midst of the many and glittering forms of good which the World offers, and which our life apprehends. But to know any of these as realities, it is necessary to begin by being real in our own human ground of will, conscience, personal energy. Then will the world also begin to be real for us; and we may go on through eternity mining deeper and deeper, and in endless diversities of direction, in a region of inexhaustible realities. It is not by lying down and dreaming of many roads that we get on. By standing up and actually walking, we find a real road under our feet, which in time will lead us into all the roads that we are capable of knowing; and there are many more than we can ever dream of, for dreams are but the confused remains of what we have known already.

Better a cut finger than no knife. The boy, indeed, bears the cut finger for the sake of the knife; but a wise parent will often think the cut the real gain, and the knife expedient for the sake of it.

All nature presents to us the spectacle of a divine light working and moulding twilight shapes in the midst of darkness. But this darkness, out of which all the realities of existence below man rise, is but the want of light. In man the light of God knows itself as light, and shakes off more and more of the darkness mingled with it. But in him there is also, and therefore, a power of thickening the darkness into something far blacker and more palpably dark than can be found in all the rest of the universe. There it is the want of light; here the corruption of light. And this new mischief, this plague-struck good, takes place in every man who consciously, as all of us so often do, prefers wrong to right, and the worse rather than the better.

We laugh at the old worshippers of sticks and stones, pot-herbs, and onions. Yet these are really good and reasonable things, and display a wise and benign power in the production of them. But soft, fashionable sentiment, popular