is not progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up new ones in their places—let it be sufficient to leave them behind us, measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.
35.
E—— was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world; but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and even with mental suffering.
36.
“Renoncez dans votre âme, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes, à vouloir vous connaître au-delà de cette existence passagère qui vous est imposée, et vous redeviendrez agréable à Dieu, utile aux autres hommes, tranquille avec vous-mêmes.”
This does not mean “renounce hope or faith in the future.” No! But renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a continuation of this: to anticipate in that future life, another life, a different life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual identity?
If we pray, “O teach us where and what is peace!” would not the answer be, “In the grave ye shall have it—not before?” Yet is it not strange that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us—and what other life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves—how shall there be peace?
As to the future, my soul, like Cato’s, “shrinks back upon herself and startles at destruction;” but I do not think of my own destruction, rather of that which I love. That I should cease to be is not very intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should cease to be—there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.
Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life, merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence—we only fancy we do so.
“I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. Most men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality but a continuation of life—life which is already our own? We have, then, begun our immortality even now.”
For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by which we make life and immortality two (distinct things), do we make time and eternity two, which like the others are really one and the same. As immortality is but the continuation of life, so eternity is but the continuation of time; and what we call time is only that part of eternity in which we exist now.—The New Philosophy.
37.
Strength does not consist only in the more or the less. There are different sorts of strength as well as different degrees:—The strength of marble to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength of the fine gold, which you can twist round your finger, but which can bear the force of innumerable pounds without breaking.
38.
Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attainment is progressive, it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young. Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing.
Then are we to assume, that to do good effectively and wisely is the privilege of age and experience? To be good, through faith in goodness, the privilege of the young.
To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended knowledge of evil, to preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain, and the warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood, is to be at once good and wise—to understand and to love each other as the angels who look down upon us from heaven.
We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.
I observe, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.
39.
“Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering?” was a question debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would depend on the texture of character, its more or less conscientiousness, susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments—from jealousy, that is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of characters; from remorse, that is, from the sense of a wrong inflicted, in another.
40.
The bread of life is love; the salt of life is work; the sweetness of life, poesy; the water of life, faith.
41.
I have seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep intellect; and they reminded me of children throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook, that they might hear them sound.
42.
A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.
“The secret of peace,” said A. B., “is the resolution of the lesser into the greater;” meaning, perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our duties, and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she not rather mean, the resolving of the lesser duties and affections into the higher? But it is true in either sense.
The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for service, but for an offering,