Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/119

Rh evil, and forthwith his hand grasps at the forbidden fruit. Not that he is tempted only by the kind of clusters that flourish in the rank orchards of neology and rationalism; only let there be a rumour of some strange fruit, a true exotic, bursting with poisonous seeds within, though alluring as the apples of Sodom without—and, whether it come from Boston or Halle, or be "raised" by a cardinal or a secularist—he is anon restless till he has had a bite. One week his friends apprehend from the books on his table, that he is on the very eve of a junction with the Church of the Seven Hills—so intent appear his researches into the profundities of Father Newman and Mr. Lucas, the Rambler and the Tablet; the next, he is suspected of an infatuated penchant towards Swedenborg, or Quietism, or the "catholic apostolic" excrescences of the new Irvingites; and the week following, of unqualified agreement with some ultra expression of the Straussian spirit—because he has been seen poring over Froude or Francis Newman, R. W. Mackay or James Martineau, perhaps even H. G. Atkinson or G. J. Holyoake. Were he indeed of opinion that any of the diverse authors thus specified are morally insincere, and purposely misleading, in their several teachings, he could not get through a page of their lucubrations; but supposing them to believe themselves in the right, and assuming their anxiety to convince others of its rightness, he is latitudinarian enough, some say "foolhardy" enough, to handle these edge-tools, to see what use they may be put to, and whether their new-fangled make is really calculated to shelve the old patenteed instruments which have lasted the world so long.

This egotistic preamble may be wound up by the acknowledgment, that as he (if "he" can be egotistic) has taken observations of, so he has not been bewitched by, the "new light" of Mr. Theodore Parker. There is the glare of artificial fireworks about it, an upshot of fizzing, sky-scraping pyrotechnics. One word as to P.'s Theistic stand-point (albeit a "power of words" might seem indispensable if such a topic is approached at an). It has been said of a brother-theist at home, that he has created a God after his own mind, and that if he could but have created a universe also after his own mind, we should doubtless have been relieved from all our perplexities. This applies with equal force to Mr. Parker. He too has construed (as a German would say) an ideal First Cause from the depths of his "moral consciousness;" but he has not interpreted the facts of this Cosmos of ours, this "visible diurnal sphere," with its gloomy mysteries and Sphinx-phrased enigmas, into harmony with its supposed Maker. He has cut the Gordian knot of the difficulties of a supernatural revelation; but difficulties of a strikingly cognate aspect, dilemmas of a curiously analogous form, objections of an equally (to say the least)