Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/73

Rh would subscribe the Syllabus at a moment's notice. But, though these qualities would lead the king to welcome any improvement in the relations between himself and the Church, they are of less importance than might be supposed, because, whenever the reconciliation is accomplished, the king's and even the government's part in it will be only secondary. Italy can have but little to give to Rome that she has not already offered. The change of mind that will have the really decisive influence on the result must be a change of mind on the part of the Church. There is nothing to make this probable so long as Pius IX. lives; but, unless circumstances are greatly changed by the time that he dies, it may be looked for with some confidence from his successor.

 

 

, in replying to the rather tenuous argument of the authors of the "Unseen Universe" for a spiritual world, in the new number of the Fortnightly, expresses in keen language his scorn and weariness of the effort of intellectual men to hold fast to any remnant of Christianity or of spiritual belief. "My brothers," he says to the authors he is addressing, — and when a Carlylese layman addresses any body as his brothers, in the vocative case, we are at once aware that he is endeavouring in his largeness of heart to console them by this candid admission of the fraternal tie for being worth very much less both intellectually and spiritually than they had ventured to hope, indeed, that he is pitying them for their delusions, and trying to make it up to them in the only way he can, by acknowledging, in spite of his own freedom from such delusions, his kinship to them all the same, — "that which you keep in your hearts, my brothers, is the slender remnant of a system which has made its red mark on history, and still lives to threaten mankind. The grotesque forms of its intellectual belief have survived the discredit of its moral teaching. Of this what the kings would bear with, the nations have cut down; and what the nations left, the right heart of man by man revolts against day by day. You have stretched out your hands to save the dregs of the sifted remnant of a residuum. Take heed, lest you have given soil and shelter to the seed of that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations, and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is now struggling to live amongst men." That is a somewhat dark oracle in itself, as indeed, is a good deal of the remainder of Professor Clifford's essay; but to those who have read it, it will, at least, be clear that amongst the "seed of that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations" must be reckoned the belief in God and the belief in immortality, — an immortality with the natural and, as the essayist admits, healthy desire for which, as it exists in almost all the members of civilized races, he deals very curtly and cavalierly indeed. "Longing for deathlessness," he says, with that authority of tone which belongs to him, "means simply shrinking from death:" —


 * If we could think of death without shrinking, it would only mean that this world was no place for us, and that we should make haste to be gone to make room for our betters. And therefore that love of action which would put death out of sight is to be counted good, as a holy and healthy thing (one word whose meanings have become unduly severed), necessary to the life of man, serving to knit them together and to advance them in the right. Not only is it right and good thus to cover over and dismiss the thought of our own personal end, to keep in mind and heart always the good things that shall be done, rather than ourselves who shall or shall not have the doing of them; but also to our friends and loved ones we shall give the most worthy honour and tribute, if we never say nor remember that they are dead, but, contrariwise, that they have lived; that hereby the brotherly force and flow of their action and work may be carried over the gulfs of death, and made immortal in the true and healthy life which they worthily had and used. It is only when the bloody hands of one who has fought against the light and the right are folded and powerless for further crime that it is kind and merciful to bury him, and say, "The dog is dead." But for you noble and great ones, who have loved and laboured yourselves not for yourselves, but for the universal folk, in your time, not for your time only, but for the coming generations, for you there shall be life as broad and far-reaching as your love, for you life-giving action to the utmost reach of the great wave whose crest you sometime were.

That says, we suppose, though in language somewhat disguised by its eloquence and its archaic style of enthusiasm, that it is healthy to be so absorbed in life as to forget annihilation; that it 