Under the cedars and the stars; reflections, literary and philosophical

I

HIS is its great, its only merit. It is a hortus conclusus, et disseptus. Three high walls bound it, north, south, and west ; and on the east are lofty stables, effectually shutting out all possibility of being seen by too curious eyes. It is a secluded spot, and in one particular angle, at the western end, is walled in by high trees and shrubs, and you see only leafage and grasses, and the eye of God looking through the interminable azure. The monks' gardens bound it on the northern side ; and here, in the long summer evenings, I hear the brothers chaunting in alternate strophes the Rosary of Mary. The sounds come over and through my garden wall, and they are muffled into a sweet, dreamy monotone of musical prayer. But the monks never look over my garden wall, because they are incurious, and because there is not much to be seen. For I cannot employ a professional gardener, and it is my own very limited knowledge, but great love for flowers — " the sweetest things God has made, and forgot to put a soul in " — and the obedient handiwork of a humble laborer, that keeps my garden always clean and bright, and some are kind enough to say, beautiful. And we have sycamores, and pines, and firs ; and laburnum, and laurel, and lime, and lilac ; and my garden is buried, deep as a well, beneath dusky walls of forest trees, beeches and elms and oaks, that rival in sublimity and altitude their classic brethren of Lebanon, leaving but the tiniest margin of blue mountain, stretching sierra-like between them and the stars.

II

But my garden is something more to me. It is my Stoa — my porch, where some unseen teacher ever speaks, as if with voice authoritative. It is to me the grove of Academe. Here, under the laburnum, or the solitary lime or sycamore, I walk with spirits quite as wise as those who trod the ancient groves with Plato, and questioned him sharply, and drew out his wonderful dialectical powers. But my spirits question not. They are no sophists, weaving subtleties out of the web and woof of dainty words ; nor do they ask why and wherefore. They only speak by their silence, and answer my interrogations. For I am an inquisitive being, and the mystery of the world weighs heavily upon me. I have the faculty of wonder strangely developed in me. An ephemeris, floating in the summer air ; a worm creeping from cave to cave in the warm, open earth ; the pink tips of a daisy's fingers make me glad with surprise. Miracles are all around me, and I take them literally, and wonder at them. Omnia admirari! is my motto ; I have not steeled myself into the stoicism, that can see worlds overturned — with a shrug. I have a child's wonder, and a child's love.

III

For example, I want to know who is the time-keeper and warden and night-watchman of my flowers. It is not the sun, because they are awake before the sun, and after his rays slant high above their heads. It is not light, because whilst it is yet light, light enough to read with ease and pleasure, behold, my little flowers close' their eyes ever so softly and silently, as if they feared to disturb the harmonies of Nature ; and as if they would say : " We are such little things, never mind us ! We are going to sleep, for we are so tiny and humble, why should we keep watch and ward over the mighty Universe ? " And again, who has bidden my crocuses wake up from their wintry sleep, whilst the frost is on the grass, and the snow is yet hiding in the corners of the garden beds ? And here, my little snowdrop, so pure and fragile, braves the keen arrows of frost and sleet, and pushes its pure blossoms out of the iron earth ! This is the bulb of a hyacinth ; this the bulb of a gladiolus or a dahlia. But the former wakes up in early spring, and hangs its sweet bells on the pure virgin air ; while the latter sleep on through the cold of Spring and the blazing heat of Summer, and only wake up when all Nature is dying around them, and seems to be calling, calling for another proof of its immortality. Who is the watchman of the flowers ? Who holds his timepiece in his hands, and says: "Sleep on, O dahlia! Sleep, though Spring should call for universal allegiance, and Summer winds challenge thee to resurrection ; but awake, Narcissus, and tremble at thine own beauty ! " It is not the atmosphere. The Spring might be warm, and the Autumn chilly ; or vice versa. It is not temperature, for the most fragile things flourish in the cold. What is it ? Who hath marked their times and seasons, and warns them when their hour hath struck ? Who but Thou, great Warden of the Universe ?

IV

Yet, whatever be said of times and seasons, which the Father has placed in His own power, I perceive that there is implanted in all being, even in these tiny flowers, a principle, a law, which appears to be universal. That law is what may be called the centrifugal force of being, or the power and tendency to expansion. Wherever it is focalized, there it is — the universal and uniform impulse of everything to get outside itself, to enlarge its sphere of being, to develop its potencies, to become other than it is. It is true of the nebula, which is ever broadening and deepening, until by perpetual accretions it grows into a sun; it is true of the acorn, that yearns to become an oak ; of the bulb that is ambitious to become a flower. And again is there a counter law, that by some hidden, irresistible force is equally bent on repressing this impulse, and destroying it. Expansion means repression. For the solitary, innate force that seeks to develop or reproduce, there are a hundred external forces that try to suspend or check that evolution. When my beautiful gladiolus comes forth, painted in all lovely colors, — saffron tinged with red, or purple streaked with gold, everything around will conspire to destroy the loveliness. And the moment a

S UNDER THE CEDARS AND THE STARS.

nebula rounds its sidereal fires into a central sun, all its sister suns will seek to drag it into the cauldrons of their own terrific fires ; it will be pelted by vagrant comets, and stoned with fiery meteors ; and that Hercules of the heavens, that invisible giant, Gravitation, will drag it hither and thither, and force its centrifugal and expansive powers into the training circles of the Universe.

V

And weep not, O thou child of genius, if obeying the universal law, and driven on, not by ambition, or other unworthy impulse, thou seekest to cast at the feet of men the vast and beautiful efflorescence of thy own mind shouldst thou find all things around thee conspiring to check and destroy thy imperative development. Thou wilt expand and grow and put forth beauty after beauty ; and lo ! men will wonder at thee, but seek to destroy thee. Harsh winds will blow their keen arrows into thy face ; the crystals of ice will nestle in thy bosom to chill thee unto death ; winged demons will probe thee with their stings, and steal away thy perfections. Weep not, and murmur not ! It is the law — the law of the star and the flower; of the clod and the nebula. If thou seekest thy own peace and comfort, hide thyself in the caves of the mountains, or the caverns of the ocean ; repress all thy longings, check nature in its flight after the ideal ; be content to live and not to grow ; to exist but not to develop. But canst thou ? No, alas ! Nature is not to be repressed. Thou, too, must go into the vortices; and in pain and suffering, in mortification and dissolution, pass out to the Unknown !

VI

What then ? Well then, imitate Nature in its work, and— its Indifference ! Keep on never minding. If thou tarriest to pick up the stones flung at thee, or to scrape the mud from thy garments, thou wilt never accomplish thy destiny ! The energies thou dost waste in fretting or philosophizing about human waywardness or malevolence, had better been spent in wholesome work. The time and thought thou expendest in answering the unanswerable, or explaining the inexplicable, would help thee to give the world out of the storehouse of wholesome thought, new vitalizing principles, fresh forces for wellbeing and welldoing. Well said the poet : —

Glory of virtue to suffer, to right the wrong ;

Nay, but she aims not at glory, no lover of glory she ;

Give her the glory of going on, and for ever to be !

Aye, so it is ! Life is for work, not for weeping. Thou, too, hast thy life-work before thee, mapped for thee by the Eternal. It may be the merest drudgery, physical or intellectual ; and the results are not to be foreseen. Thou must work in the dark, and there is no door outward to the future. But work steadily on! There is thy vocation and redemption : —

VII

What if some day it were found that this mighty mystery, gravitation, resolved itself into the universal law of expansion and repression ? The theory of Le Sage that the Universe is filled with infinitely minute particles that are continually colliding with larger masses, pushing them forward; but that two large contiguous masses, shielded from the bombardment, are driven irresistibly toward each other, really resolves itself into this. Or, the more recent theory of the vortex atom, whirling around and creating suction in the ether, thus dragging great inert masses toward each other, is not this the same ? Why is a column of smoke allowed to ascend and expand into rings or plumes until it is lost in the ether? And why is a column of water from its fountain allowed to expand but a little, and is then thrown back violently on the ground ? And why is a stone not allowed to expand at all, but is flung back peremptorily to the earth ? Is it gravitation, or the law of expansion, that obtains fully in the case of smoke, partially in that of water, not at all in the solid matter, unless, as in the case of meteors, the propulsion is so great that it overcomes the resisting and repel-

1 Considering nothing done so long as there remains ought to be done !

lent forces, and following its natural or rather the universal tendency, expands into flame, thence into vapor, and is lost ? And what a parallel with the meteoric flame of genius !

VIII

I think Schelling, that most poetical of German philosophers, pushes this idea too far. He makes the usual mistake of poets, of passing from the abstract to the concrete, and lowers a great idea by making it subservient to a whim. One can understand his theory of Creation as being the attempt of the Infinite to embody itself, or rather to expand its supreme energies in the Finite; and also his conception of Mind as the second movement of the universal law, by which the Finite, driven back and seeking absorption in the Infinite, unfolds itself in Mind. A Catholic philosopher might seize the idea, to explain the existence of the Trinity, as the eternal expansion of the Divine Intellect in the contemplation of its own perfections in the Word; and the continuous expansion of the Father and Word in the procession of the Spirit from both. When Schelling, driving his theory to extremes, explains the fall of Adam by the tendency to break away from law and expand into individualism, and the Incarnation as the reunion or contraction of the vagrant human will into the Divine, one cannot help feeling that truth is being distorted into ingenuity, and that freedom is sacrificed at the shrine of " universal and imperative law."

IX

Is it not singular how that idea of the soul's emanation from God, and its subsequent absorption in God, has always haunted the human mind with its splendid suggestion of a divine origin and a divine destiny ? I can never understand how Novalis could call Spinoza a " god-intoxicated man," for the latter eliminated God from the Universe, making Him a mere substance, if universal. Schelling would have better earned the description, for he preached at first God as the eternal, self-existent, omniscient, and creative mind. But in very truth the epithet might be applied

UNDER THE CEDARS AND THE STARS. II

to every mystic, for all have seemed to be so filled with the idea of the great Supreme Being, as to lose themselves in the contemplation, and to have passed into that sublime trance, where they have leaped beyond the finite conditions of time and space, and to have touched that which is known as the Absolute. This is the Potenz der Subsumption of Schelling ; the " uncreated deep " of Tauler calling to the created, and both becoming one ; it is what Denis the Carthusian calls " the plunging in and swallowing up of the soul in the Abysm of Divinity " ; what Richard of St. Victor calls " the passing of the soul into God " ; what Cardinal Bona describes when he says : " Thou art me and mine ; my whole essence is in Thee." Somehow it has always seemed to me that, with this strange tendency towards Catholic truth manifested by the wandering intellects of philosophy, some day there will be a reconciliation; or rather these cometary lights, which also have derived whatever is luminous in them from the great uncreated Light of lights, will be drawn into their right orbits in that mighty system of which Christ is the Eternal Sun. For whatever far spaces they have illumined, they manifest a tendency of an invincible attraction towards Him ; whilst they wander afar, some unseen power seems to draw them toward itself, and to hold them from being lost in space ; their light, though they believe themselves self-luminous, is an emanation of the light of the Gospel ; and it is the candor lucis aeternae that fills their extinguished lamps. How eternally true is the apothegm : Veram philosophiam esse veram religionem, conversimque veram religionem esse veram philosophiam.

X

And yet, an ingenious thinker could construct a theory of the Universe out of this simple law. For what is evolution but a new name for expansion ; and the interchanges of species, and the systole and diastole of human history ; and the expansion of kingdoms and their destruction ; and the processes of suns ; and the revolutions of seasons; and the eternal strivings of the just and perfect ones ; and the aggressions of the wicked ; and the growth of genius, and all the many other changes and vicissitudes by which God conserves the equilibrium of His Universe — what are all these secret yet unerring forces but modifications of the universal law: increase and multiply, and — pass ! Or, rather: expand, contract, and return !

XL

There never yet was a Moses without a Miriam, a Socrates without a Xanthippe, a Caesar without a Cassius, a Napoleon without his Moscow. The law is universal and inexorable. Every expansive power in Nature and Man, in history, in philosophy, in poetry, has its enemy. Kingdoms do not crumble to pieces from within. It is the outer enemy that destroys. Babylon fell through Cyrus ; Jerusalem through Titus ; Rome through Vandal and Visigoth ; the Eastern Empire through Mohammed ; and if moribund kingdoms, like Spain, drag on their lifeless existence through centuries, it is simply because the antagonist has never arisen to attack and destroy. Similarly, every government has its opposition ; every statesman, his opponent ; every orator, his rival ; every poet, his critic. Milton had to fight for his existence; Wordsworth struggled for fifty years for recognition, reluctantly yielded at last ; Shelley was hounded from England, and unrecognized for half a century after death ; Gifford, the ex-cobbler, and Terry, the actor, drove Keats to a premature grave ; and so on with all the brilliant and expansive geniuses of the earth. The tendency of the great is to grow ; of the vile, to repress and destroy. God's prerogative of creation and development belongs to the former ; man's peculiar bent toward corruption to the latter.

XII

Hence, no one need be, or ought to be, surprised at what some call the slow expansion of the Church. She has all the elements of development centered in her strong heart, or tugging at her breasts for that spiritual and intellectual pabulum which will enable them to grow, and vitalize in turn all the torpid faculties of a worn-out, effete civilization. " Lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes,"

said the Prophet, " for many are the children of the deserted, rather than of her who hath a husband." Yet her progress has been slow ; and her vast utilities circumscribed. Where she has gained, she has lost ; and where she appears the loser, she gains the more. For the first three hundred years of her existence, every attempt to break her bounds, and go forth on her mighty mission, was stopped by fire and sword. When she rose above persecution from without, she was checked by rebellion from within ; and her whole history has been a conflict between her own innate and immense potencies and desires for expansion and development, and the outer forces which make for destruction. What she has gained in the New World she has lost in the Old, and vice versa ; where she has won victories over kings, she has been dishonored by peoples ; what she has gained in art, she has lost in science ; and her very hand-maiden, Philosophy, has grown to be her rival in the affections of her children. Yet, there she pursues her immortal destiny, slowly gaining ground over humanity, every check developing her latent strength, every aggression met with indomitable valor ; the mustard-seed growing, growing in spite of wind and weather, the axe and the fire, the Titan and the pigmy, the parasite and the insect, until it fulfils its promised and prophetic destiny, and overshadows all the earth.

XIII

In a limited and sectional way, the case of the Church's growth and check in England is conspicuous. Fifty years ago, forces were let loose in that country which promised to extend the spiritual power and supremacy of Catholicism over all the land. The revival in Oxford and elsewhere seemed to promise a universal resurrection. The best moral and intellectual forces in England declared for Rome. So sudden, so important, so frequent were the conversions that it was fondly hoped that the end of the century would see the ancient Catholic land once more in union with Christendom. Alas ! the expansion was but temporary. It was tolerated, only to be driven back with greater force. The united energies of agnosticism, indifferentism, and open infidelity amongst the highest and lowest classes, and fierce bigotry and intolerance of the dissenting middle classes, not only stemmed, but drove back the tide of intellectual and religious thought which was tending towards Rome. The mighty fissure which the Tractarian Movement made in the Church of England, and which divided its members into the two broad sections of supernaturalism and latitudinarianism, was again closed up in a kind of common indifferentism. The time was not opportune. When education is more advanced, and toleration universal, there will be a general movement towards positive religion ; and then the final reaction to Catholicism.

XIV

I sat in my garden a few evenings ago. It was in the late summer. The swallows, that had been screaming and circling round and round in ever-narrowing rings far up in the clear sky, had gone down to the eaves of my house, where, in their little mud-cabins, they now slept with their young. There was deep silence on all things — silence of midnight, or midseas. A few tendrils of white jasmine had stolen in over my neighbor's wall. The twilight had suddenly departed, and night had come down. I could barely see the white stars of the jasmine, but I could feel their gentle, perfumed breath. Once or twice a vagrant and wanton breeze stole over the wall and seized the top tassels of my Austrian pine, and lifted the sleepy leaves of the sycamores, which murmured and fell back to rest. Then silence again, deep as the grave ! I saw the suns of glinting green, and red, and yellow. I felt the throb of the Universe. As the lookout on a great steamer on the high seas, staring into the darkness, feels the mighty vessel throb beneath him, and watches the phosphorescence of the waves, and hears the beat of the engines, so felt I the thrill of Being — the vibration of existence. And as far up in the darkness on the bridge of the vessel, silent, invisible, stands the captain, who controls the mighty mechanism beneath him — dumb, watchful, with a light touch on the electric knob before him, so I saw Thee, though Thou, too, wert invisible, O my God — I saw Thy finger on the magnetic key of Thy Universe ; and I feared not the night, nor the darkness, nor the grave, for I knew that the destinies of us and of Thy worlds were safe in Thy keeping.

Science shall never advance on right lines, except by imitating God. It is the wisdom of God in its infancy !

XV

I love the science that reveals. I hate the science that explains, or affects to explain. I confess I revel in mysteries. The more profound and cryptic they are, the greater is my faith and delight. The merely natural palls on me. I see, wonder, measure, and — despise. I feel that I am its equal, no matter how stupendous it is. I measure myself with it, and lo ! I am head and shoulders over it. The tiny retina of the eye of a child grasps and holds the whole dome of worlds. The soul of a hind grasps the revealed universe, whilst man wonders at it. But the mightiest telescope ever invented and the all-searching eye of science cannot penetrate the impenetrable, the Universal ; and the mind of a Newton or a Leibniz sinks paralyzed by Infinity. Tell me all the " fairy tales of Science." I wonder and am glad. But in a little time the wonder ceases. Weigh your suns and analyze them ! Calculate your distances by billions and trillions of miles ! Reveal your purple stars, and the radiant light that is flung from two or three varicolored suns upon their happy planets. I thank you for the revelation. I exult and am glad. But don't go one step further ! Don't speak of Impersonal Force or Universal Motion as explanatory of such mystery ! This time again I laugh, not in pleasure, but in scorn, or rather pity.

XVI

People say to me : " Never seen Rome ! or Florence ! St. Peter's ! The frescoes of the Sistine ! The galleries in the Pitti Palace!" Never! Nor do I much care! If I were to goto Italy I would go to seek the Supernatural, because it is the only thing I could really and permanently admire. I would go to Rome, and see the Spiritual Head of Christ's Empire ; I would go to Loretto, and kiss the ground once trodden by Jesus and

I<5 UNDER THE CEDARS AND THE STARS.

Holy Mary. I would go to Assisi ; and walk every step of the Via Crucis the " poor man " trod. I would make a pilgrimage to Siena ; and I would visit every stigmatica and ecstatica. And there in her humble chamber, I would wonder and rejoice ! I would have emotions which the grandeur of St. Peter's, and the terrors of Vesuvius, and the beauties of Naples, and the sublimity of Pompeii could never excite. For I would come into touch with the Supernatural — with God ; and the work of His fingers is more to me than the most stupendous creations of human hands !

XVII

It is a good thing for men to be scientific. It makes them so humble. At least, it ought to make them so. I am quite prepared to hear that St. Thomas and Suarez were the humblest of men ; that Newton and Leibniz were little children. It is only right and reasonable. When the former in their tremendous researches into some awful mystery, like the Trinity, evolved proposition after proposition, unwound as it were cerements of the awful secret, and then laid down their pens, like the scribes of old, and covered their faces, and murmured with full hearts: Sanctus ! Sanctus ! Sanctus ! one can admire them whilst pitying them. But when a sciolist, also unwrapping mystery after mystery, in search of the Great First Cause, comes suddenly upon an adamantine secret, that refuses to be broken or unweft, and lays down his pen and mutters, Unknowable ! one can pity and despise !

XVIII

God is quite right. He keeps locked the secret chambers of His knowledge and His works, because He knows that if He opened them, we would despise Him. Leibniz said, that if he had a choice he would prefer the pursuit of knowledge forever to the sudden acquisition of perfect knowledge. One of the many pleasures of heaven will be the eternal, but slow unlocking of the secret cabinets of God. There must be mysteries, or man's pride would equal Lucifer's. It is God's way from the beginning. " Of all the trees of the garden, thou may'st eat ; but of this one thou shalt not eat ! " No one shall enter the Holy of Holies but the High Priest ; and that but once a year ! No wonder they tied a rope to his sacrificial vestments to drag forth his dead body, if Jehovah smote him. And yet the Lord is not in the thunder and the storm, but in the breathing of zephyrs, and the sighs of the gentle breeze !

XIX

To a certain class of mind the doctrine of our intuitive knowledge of God has a peculiar fascination. It seems so much higher and more honorable than the slow acquisition of ideas through the senses, that I am quite sure it would give unbounded gratification to this school of Catholic idealists, if it could be shown that it was not inconsistent with the most approved scheme of Catholic philosophy. Some writers deem it quite untenable, as tending to Ontologism. But it may happen that in this, as in so many other things, the confusion arises in tongues, — in different meanings and interpretations of the same word. That fine thinker and metaphysician, Father Dalgairns, 2 seems to teach in his standard work on The Holy Communion, that the idea of God is inborn and immediately certain ; that the Fathers call man, OeoBiSafcros ; that man holds in himself the seeds of the knowledge of God (ra cnrep/jLara tt}? Oeoyvcoaias) ; and all this chimes in so harmoniously with all the experiences and feelings of the above-named school, that it would be an incalculable pleasure and delight to know that one might hold such beautiful and transcendent truths, and yet be at one with the great scholastics, and the most approved views of modern philosophy. There are few souls whom the lines of Wordsworth do not haunt as if with the revelation of a spiritworld : —

"And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

2 Quoting Hettinger. Appendix D. Holy Communion : et passim.

IS UNDER THE CEDARS AND THE STARS.

And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought ; And rolls through all things. ' '

XX

This ethereal sense, this quick intuitive perception, which has often thrown back upon themselves the finest souls, and moved them by its swift and sudden revelation of the infinite, even to tears, is something altogether apart from mere logic or reason. Nay, perhaps, we had best interpret it as not so much a momentary penetration of the spirit behind the veils, as the sudden break in the clouds that hide God's Face ; and the swift dawning, clouded in a moment again, of that transcendent Light that makes the heaven of heavens luminous by its splendors. Hence let us say that this swift perception of the Infinite is not so much the effort of unrestrained fancy, or imagination, as the sudden revelation of God to choice spirits, — the swift and unexpected rending of the veil, the parting of the cloud for a moment ; and then, the darkness, but no longer the doubt. This is akin to the condition ev 0eo$ /cal €fc<f>p(Dv, "bereft of reason, but filled with God"; the sense of the vision,

' ' when the light of sense