Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers eBook

The sum of the matter is this:—­God, by a Hebrew prophet, is sublimely described as the Revealer; and, in variation of his own expression, the same prophet describes him as the Being ’that knoweth the darkness.’  Under no idea can the relations of God to man be more grandly expressed.  But of what is he the revealer?  Not surely of those things which he has enabled man to reveal for himself, and which he has commanded him so to reveal, but of those things which, were it not through special light from heaven, must eternally remain sealed up in the inaccessible darkness.  On this principle we should all laugh at a revealed cookery.  But essentially the same ridicule applies to a revealed astronomy, or a revealed geology.  As a fact, there is no such astronomy or geology:  as a possibility, by the a priori argument which I have used, (viz., that a revelation on such fields, would contradict other machineries of providence,) there can be no such astronomy or geology.  Consequently there can be none such in the Bible.  Consequently there is none.  Consequently there can be no schism or feud upon these subjects between the Bible and the philosophies outside.  Geology is a field left open, with the amplest permission from above, to the widest and wildest speculations of man.

MODERN SUPERSTITION

It is said continually—­that the age of miracles is past.  We deny that it is so in any sense which implies this age to differ from all other generations of man except one.  It is neither past, nor ought we to wish it past.  Superstition is no vice in the constitution of man:  it is not true that, in any philosophic view, primus in orbe deos fecit timor —­meaning by fecit even so much as raised into light.  As Burke remarked, the timor at least must be presumed to preexist, and must be accounted for, if not the gods.  If the fear created the gods, what created the fear?  Far more true, and more just to the grandeur of man, it would have been to say—­Primus in orbe deos fecit sensus infiniti.  Even in the lowest Caffre, more goes to the sense of a divine being than simply his wrath or his power.  Superstition, indeed, or the sympathy with the invisible, is the great test of man’s nature, as an earthly combining with a celestial.  In superstition lies the possibility of religion.  And though superstition is often injurious, degrading, demoralizing, it is so, not as a form of corruption or degradation, but as a form of non-development.  The crab is harsh, and for itself worthless.  But it is the germinal form of innumerable finer fruits:  not apples only the most exquisite, and pears; the peach and the nectarine are said to have radiated from this austere stock when cultured, developed, and transferred to all varieties of climate.  Superstition will finally pass into pure forms of religion as man advances.