ESSAY XI. Amicas reprehensiones gratissime accipiamus oportet; etiam si reprehendi non meruit opinio nostra, vel hanc propter causam, quod recte defendi potest. Si vero infirmitas vel humana vel propria, etiam cum veraciter arguitur, non potest non aliquantulum contristari, melius tumor dolet dum curatur, quam dum et parcitur et non sanatur. Hoc enim est quod acute vidit, qui dixit: utiliores esse plerumque inimicos objurgantes, quam amicos objurgare metuentes. Illi enim dum rixantur, dicunt aliquando vera quæ corrigamus: isti autem minorem, quam oportet, exhibent justitiæ libertatem, dum amicitiæ timent exasperare dulcedinem. AUGUSTIN. HIERONYMO.* Censures, offered in friendliness, we ought to receive with gratitude: yea, though our opinions did not merit censure, we should still be thankful for the attack on them, were it only that it gives us an opportunity of successfully defending the same. For never doth an important truth spread its roots so wide or clasp the soil so stubbornly, as when it has braved the winds of controversy. There is a stirring and a far-heard music sent forth from the tree of sound knowledge, when its branches are fighting with the storm, which passing onward shrills out at once truth's triumph and its own defeat. But if the infirmity of human nature, or of our own constitutional temperament, can not, even when we have been fairly convicted of error, but suffer some small mortification, yet better suffer pain from its extirpation, than from the consequences of its continuance, and of the false tenderness that has withholden the remedy. This is what the acute ob server had in his mind, who said, that upbraiding enemies were not seldom more profitable than friends afraid to find fault. For the former amidst their quarrelsome invectives may chance on some home truths, by which we may amend ourselves in consequence; while the latter from an over-delicate apprehension of ruffling the smooth surface of friendship shrink from its duties, and from the manly freedom which truth and justice demand. ONLY a few privileged individuals are authorized to pass into the theatre without stopping at the door-keeper's box; but every * August. Op. Tom. ii. Epist. xv. Ed. Basil. The original of the former part of the quotation, which is a good deal altered, stands thus:-Ut et ego amicissimam reprehensionem gratissime accipiam, etiam si reprehendi non meruit quod recte defendi potest. Si vero infirmitas velut hu * * * * mana mea, etiam cum veraciter arguor, non potest non aliquantulum contris tari, melius capitis tumor dolet, &c.-Ed. man of decent appearance may put down the play-price there, and thenceforward has as good a right as the managers themselves not only to see and hear, as far as his place in the house, and his own ears and eyes permit him, but likewise to express audibly his approbation or disapprobation of what may be going forward on the stage. If his feelings happen to be in unison with those of the audience in general, he may without breach of decorum persevere in his notices of applause or dislike, till the wish of the house is complied with. If he finds himself unsupported, he rests contented with having once exerted his common right, and on that occasion at least gives no further interruption to the amuse ment of those who feel differently from him. So it is, or so it should be, in literature. A few extraordinary minds may be allowed to pass a mere opinion;-though in point of fact those, who alone are entitled to this privilege, are ever the last to avail themselves of it. Add too, that even the mere opinions of such men may in general be regarded either as promissory notes, or as receipts referring to a former payment. But every man's opinion has a right to pass into the common auditory, if his reason for the opinion is paid down at the same time: for arguments are the sole current coin of intellect. The degree of influence to which the opinion is entitled should be proportioned to the weight and value of the reasons for it; and whether these are shillings or pounds sterling, the man, who has given them, remains blameless, provided he contents himself with the place to which they have entitled him, and does not attempt by strength of lungs to counterbalance its disadvantages, or expect to exert as immediate an influence in the back seats of the upper gallery, as if he had paid in gold and been seated in the stage box. But unfortunately,—and here commence the points of difference between the theatric and the literary public,—in the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the charge of calumny if I add that they have lost all credit with wise men by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man's money, that is, his argument, because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious character and the most unseemly appearance are suffered to pass without payment, or by virtue of orders which they have themselves distributed to known partisans. Sometimes the honest man's intellectual coin is refused under pretence that it is light or counterfeit, without any proof given either by the money scales, or by sounding the coin in dispute together with one of known goodness. We may carry the metaphor still farther. It is by no means a rare case, that the money is returned because it had a different sound from that of a counterfeit, the brassy blotches on which seemed to blush for the impudence of the silver wash in which they were inisled, and rendered the mock coin a lively emblem of a lie selfdetected. Still oftener does the rejection take place by a mere act of insolence, and the blank assertion that the candidate's money is light or bad, is justified by a second assertion that he is a fool or knave for offering it. The second point of difference explains the preceding, and accounts both for the want of established door-keepers in the auditory of literature, and for the practices of those, who under the name of reviewers volunteer this office. There is no royal mintage for arguments, no ready means by which all men alike, who possess common sense, may determine their value and intrinsic worth at the first sight or sound. Certain forms of natural logic indeed there are, the inobservance of which is decisive against an argument; but the strictest adherence to them is no proof of its actual, though an indispensable condition of its possible, validity. In the arguer's own conscience there is, no doubt, a certain value, and an infallible criterion of it, which applies to all arguments equally; and this is the sincere conviction of the mind itself. But for those to whom it is offered, there are only conjectural marks; yet such as will seldom mislead any man of plain sense, who is both honest and observant. These characteristics I have attempted to comprise în a previous part of this work,* and to describe them more at large in the essays that follow, on the communication of truth. If the honest warmth, which results from the strength of the particular conviction, be tempered by the modesty which belongs to the sense of general fallibility; if the emotions, which accompany all vivid perceptions, are preserved distinct from the expression of personal passions, and from appeals to them in the heart of others; if the reasoner asks no respect for the opinion, as his opinion, but only in proportion as it is acknowledged by that reason, which is common to all men; and, lastly, if he supports an *P. 41.-Ed. opinion on no subject which he has not previously examined, and furnishes proof both that he possesses the means of inquiry by his education or the nature of his pursuits, and that he has endeavored to avail himself of those means; then, and with these conditions, every human being is authorized to make public the grounds of any opinion which he holds, and of course the opinion itself, as the object of them. Consequently, it is the duty of all men, not always indeed to attend to him, but, if they do, to attend to him with respect, and with a sincere as well as apparent toleration. I should offend against my own laws, if I disclosed at present the nature of my convictions concerning the degree, in which this virtue of toleration is possessed and practised by the majority of my contemporaries and.countrymen. But if the contrary temper is felt and shown in instances where all those conditions have been observed, which have been stated at full in the preliminary essays that form the introduction to this work, and the chief of which I have just now recapitulated; I have no hesitation in declaring that whatever the opinion may be, and however opposite to the hearer's or reader's previous persuasions, one or other of all of the following defects must be taken for granted. Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on which his own faith is built; which, therefore, neither is nor can be his own faith, though it may very easily be his imagined interest, and his habit of thought. In this case he is angry, not at the opposition to truth, but at the interruption of his own indolence and intellectual slumber, or possibly at the apprehension, that his temporal advantages are threatened, or at least the ease of mind, in which he had been accustomed to enjoy them. Or, secondly, he has no love of truth for its own sake; no reverence for the divine command to seek earnestly after it, which command, if it had not been so often and solemnly given by revelation, is yet involved and expressed in the gift of reason, and in the dependence of all our virtues on its development. He has no moral and religious awe for freedom of thought, though accompanied both by sincerity and humility; nor for the right of free communication which is ordained by God, together with that freedom, if it be true that God has ordained us to live in society, and has made the progressive improvement of all and each of us to depend on the reciprocal aids, which directly or indirectly each supplies to all, and all to each. But if his alarm and his conse quent intolerance, are occasioned by his eternal rather than temporal interests, and if, as is most commonly the case, he does not deceive himself on this point, gloomy indeed, and erroneous beyond idolatry, must have been his notions of the Supreme Being! For surely the poor heathen who represents to himself the divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and mercy, under multiplied and forbidden symbols in the powers of nature or the souls of extraordinary men, practises a superstition which (though at once the cause and effect of blindness and sensuality) is less incompatible with inward piety and true religious feeling than the creed of that man, who in the spirit of his practice, though not in direct words, loses sight of all these attributes, and substitutes instead of the adoptive and cheerful boldness, which our new alliance with God requires," a "servile and thrall-like fear." Such fear-ridden and thence angry believers, or rather acquiescents, would do well to re-peruse the book of Job, and observe the sentence passed by the All-just on the friends of the sufferer, who had hoped, like venal advocates, to purchase the favor of God by uttering truths of which in their own hearts they had neither conviction nor comprehension. The truth from the lips did not atone for the lie in the heart, while the rashness of agony in the searching and bewildered complainant, was forgiven in consideration of his sincerity and integrity in not disguising the true dictates of his reason and conscience, but avowing his incapability of solving a problem by his reason, which before the Christian dispensation the Almighty was pleased to solve only by declaring it to be beyond the limits of human reason. Having insensibly passed into a higher and more serious style than I had first intended, I will venture to appeal to these self-obscurants, whose faith dwells in the land of the shadow of darkness, these * Milton Of Reformation in England, B. i. sub initio. For in very deed, the superstitious man by his good-will is an atheist; but being scared from thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his fear: which fear of his as also his hope, fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal; and all the inward acts of worship issuing from the native strength of the soul, run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality Hence men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter, and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the spirit.'-Ibid.-Ed. |