when having thus modified the present by the past, he at the same time weds the past in the present to some prepared and corresponsive future. The auditor's thoughts and feelings move under the same influence: retrospection blends with anticipation, and hope and memory, a female Janus, become one power with a double aspect. A similar effect the reader may produce for himself in the pages of history, if he will be content to substitute an intellectual complacency for pleasurable sensation. The events and characters of one age, like the strains in music, recall those of another, and the variety by which each is individualized, not only gives a charm and poignancy to the resemblance, but likewise renders the whole more intelligible. Meantime ample room is afforded for the exercise both of the judgment and the fancy, in distinguishing cases of real resemblance from those of intentional imitation, the analogies of nature, revolving upon herself, from the masquerade figures of cunning and vanity. It is not from identity of opinions, or from similarity of events and outward actions, that a real resemblance in the radical character can be deduced. On the contrary, men of great and stirring powers, who are destined to mould the age in which they are born, must first mould themselves upon it. Mohammed born twelve centuries later, and in the heart of Europe, would not have been a false prophet; nor would a false prophet of the present generation have been a Mohammed in the seventh century. I have myself, therefore, derived the deepest interest from the comparison of men, whose characters at first view appear widely dissimilar, who yet have produced similar effects on their different ages, and this by the exertion of powers which on examination will be found far more alike, than the altered drapery and costume would have led us to suspect. Of the heirs of fame few are more respected by me, though for very different qualities, than Erasmus and Luther; scarcely any one has a larger share of my aversion than Voltaire; and even of the better-hearted Rousseau I was never more than a very lukewarm admirer. I should perhaps too rudely affront the general opinion, if I avowed my whole creed concerning the proportions of real talent between the two purifiers of revealed religion, now neglected as obsolete, and the two modern conspirators against its authority, who are still the Alpha and Omega of continental genius. Yet when I abstract the questions of evil and good, and measure only the effects pro duced and the mode of producing them, I have repeatedly found the names of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Robespierre, recall in a similar cluster and connection those of Erasmus, Luther, and Muncer. Those who are familiar with the works of Erasmus, and who know the influence of his wit, as the pioneer of the Reformation; and who likewise know, that by his wit, added to the vast variety of knowledge communicated in his works, he had won over by anticipation so large a part of the polite and lettered world to the Protestant party; will be at no loss in discovering the intended counterpart in the life and writings of the veteran Frenchman. They will see, indeed, that the knowledge of the one was solid through its whole extent, and that of the other extensive at a cheap rate, by its superficiality; that the wit of the one is always bottomed on sound sense, peoples and enriches the mind of the reader with an endless variety of distinct images and living interests; and that his broadest laughter is everywhere translatable into grave and weighty truth: while the wit of the Frenchman, without imagery, without character, and without that pathos which gives the magic charm to genuine humor, consists, when it is most perfect, in happy turns of phrase, but far too often in fantastic incidents, outrages of the pure imagination, and the poor low trick of combining the ridiculous with the venerable, where he, who does not laugh, abhors. Neither will they have forgotten that the object of the one was to drive the thieves and mummers out of the temple, while the other was propelling a worse banditti, first to profane and pillage, and ultimately to raze it. Yet not the less will they perceive, that the effects remain parallel, the circumstances analogous, and the instruments the same. In each case the effects extended over Europe, were attested and augmented by the praise and patronage of thrones and dignities, and are not to be explained but by extraordinary industry and a life of literature; in both instances the circumstances were supplied by an age of hopes and promises the age of Erasmus restless from the first vernal influences of real knowledge, that of Voltaire from the hectic of imagined superiority. In the voluminous works of both, the instruments employed are chiefly those of wit and amusing erudition, and alike in both the errors and evils, real or imputed, in religion and politics are the objects of the battery. And here we must stop. The two men were es X sentially different. Exchange mutually their dates and spheres of action, yet Voltaire, had he been ten-fold a Voltaire, could not have made up an Erasmus; and Erasmus must have emptied himself of half his greatness and all his goodness, to have become a Voltaire. Shall I succeed better or worse with the next pair, in this our new dance of death, or rather of the shadows which I have brought forth-two by two-from the historic ark? In our first couple I have at least secured an honorable retreat, and though I failed as to the agents, I have maintained a fair analogy in the actions and the objects. But the heroic Luther, a giant awaking in his strength, and the crazy Rousseau, the dreamer of love-sick tales, and the spinner of speculative cobwebs; shy of light as the mole, but as quick-eared too for every whisper of the public opinion; the teacher of stoic pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid vanity in his feelings and conduct! From what point of likeness can we commence the comparison between a Luther and a Rousseau? And truly had I been seeking for characters that, taken as they really existed, closely resemble each other, and this, too, to our first apprehensions, and according to the common rules of biographical comparison, I could scarcely have made a more unlucky choice: unless I had desired that my parallel of the German son of thunder and the visionary of Geneva, should sit on the same bench with honest Fluellen's of Alexander the Great and Harry of Monmouth. Still, however, the same analogy would hold as in my former instance: the effect produced on their several ages by Luther and Rousseau, were commensurate with each other, and were produced in both cases by what their contemporaries felt as serious and vehement eloquence, and an elevated tone of moral feeling and Luther, not less than Rousseau, was actuated by an almost superstitious hatred of superstition, and a turbulent prejudice against prejudices. In the relation too which their writings severally bore to those of Erasmus and Voltaire, and the way in which the latter co-operated with them to the same general end, each finding its own class of admirers and proselytes, the parallel is complete. : I can not, however, rest here. Spite of the apparent incongruities, I am disposed to plead for a resemblance in the men themselves, for that similarity in their radical natures, which I abandoned all pretence and desire of showing in the instances of Vol taire and Erasmus. But then my readers must think of Luther not as he really was, but as he might have been, if he had been born in the age and under the circumstances of the Swiss philosopher. For this purpose I must strip him of many advantages which he derived from his own times, and must contemplate him in his natural weaknesses as well as in his original strength. Each referred all things to his own ideal. The ideal was indeed widely different in the one and in the other: and this was not the least of Luther's many advantages, or, to use a favorite phrase of his own, not one of his least favors of preventing grace. Happily for him he had derived his standard from a common measure already received by the good and wise; I mean the inspired writings, the study of which Erasmus had previously restored among the learned. To know that we are in sympathy with others, moderates our feelings as well as strengthens our convictions and for the mind, which opposes itself to the faith of the multitude, it is more especially desirable, that there should exist an object out of itself, on which it may fix its attention, and thus balance its own energies. Rousseau, on the contrary, in the inauspicious spirit of his age and birth-place,* had slipped the cable of his faith, and steered by the compass of unaided reason, ignorant of the hidden currents that were bearing him out of his course, and too proud to consult the faithful charts prized and held sacred by his forefathers. But the strange influences of his bodily temperament on his understanding; his constitutional melancholy pampered into a morbid excess by solitude; his wild dreams of suspicion; his hypochondriacal fancies of hosts of conspirators all leagued against him and his cause, and headed by some arch-enemy, to whose machinations he attributed every trifling mishap-all as much the creatures of his imagination, as if instead of men he had conceived them to be infernal spirits and beings preternatural-these, or at least the predisposition to them, existed in the ground-work of his nature they were parts of Rousseau himself. And what corres * Infidelity was so common in Geneva about that time, that Voltaire in one of his letters exults, that in this, Calvin's own city, some half-dozen only of the most ignorant believed in Christianity under any form. This was, no doubt, one of Voltaire's usual lies of exaggeration : it is not, however, to be denied, that here, and throughout Switzerland, he and the dark master in whose service he employed himself, had ample grounds of triumph. ponding in kind to these, not to speak of degree, can we detect in the character of his supposed parallel? This difficulty will suggest itself at the first thought, to those who derive all their knowledge of Luther from the meagre biography met with in the Lives of eminent Reformers, or even from the ecclesiastical histories of Mosheim or Milner for a life of Luther, in extent and style of execution proportioned to the grandeur and interest of the subject, a life of the man Luther, as well as of Luther the theologian, is still a desideratum in English literature, though perhaps there is no subject for which so many unused materials are extant, both printed and in manuscript.* ESSAY II. Is it, I ask, most important to the best interests of mankind, temporal as well as spiritual, that certain works, the names and number of which are fixed and unalterable, should be distinguished from all other works, not in degree only but even in kind? And that these, collectively, should form THE BOOK, to which in all the concerns of faith and morality the last recourse is to be had, and from the admitted decisions of which no man dare * The affectionate respect in which I hold the name of Dr. Jortin-one of the many illustrious nurslings of the college to which I deem it no small honor to have belonged-Jesus, Cambridge-renders it painful to me to assert, that the above remark holds almost equally true of a life of Erasmus. But every scholar well read in the writings of Erasmus and his illustrious contemporaries, must have discovered, that Jortin had neither collected sufficient, nor the best, materials for his work: and-perhaps from that very cause he grew weary of his task, before he had made a full use of the scanty materials which he had collected. This is one of the hinges on which the gate of egress from the spiritual Rome turns. Historically, the affirmative to the question has been the constant and close companion of Protestantism :-but whether it be likewise its indispensable support, remains yet to be discussed, at the tribunal of sound philosophy. Hitherto both the ay and the no have been, as it appears to me, but very weakly and superficially argued. But I confess that Chillingworth makes me half a Roman Catholic on this point; lest in acceding to the grounds of his arguments against the Romanists, I should become less than half a Christian, and lose the substantive in my earnestness to tear off its parasitical and suffocating epithet:—that is, cease to be a Catholic in aversion to the Papal bull of Roman Catholic. 1830. |