No More Learning

I was aroused by general excitement. «Meccah!
Meccah! ” cried some voices. «The Sanctuary! O the Sanctuary!
exclaimed others; and all burst into loud Labbayk,” not unfre-
quently broken by sobs. I looked out from my litter, and saw
by the light of the southern stars the dim outlines of a large
city, a shade darker than the surrounding plain. We were pass-
ing over the last ridge by a winding path” flanked on both
sides by watch-towers, which command the Darb el Maala," or
road leading from the north into Meccah. Thence we passed
into the Maabidah (northern suburb), where the Sherif's palace
is built. After this, on the left hand, came the deserted abode
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SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
2903
Op-
of the Sherif bin Aun, now said to be a haunted house. ” *
posite to it lies the Jannat el Maala, the holy cemetery of Mec-
cah. Thence, turning to the right, we entered the Sulaymaniyah
or Afghan quarter. Here the boy Mohammed, being an inhabi-
tant of the Shamiyah or Syrian ward, thought proper to display
some apprehension. These two are on bad terms; children never
meet without exchanging volleys of stones, and men fight furi-
ously with quarter-staves. Sometimes, despite the terrors of
religion, the knife and sabre are drawn. But these hostilities
have their code. If a citizen be killed, there is a subscription
for blood-money.
An inhabitant of one quarter, passing singly
through another, becomes a guest; once beyond the walls, he is
likely to be beaten to insensibility by his hospitable foes.
At the Sulaymaniyah we turned off the main road into a
by-way, and ascended by narrow lanes the rough heights of
Jebel Hindi, upon which stands a small whitewashed and crenel-
lated building called a “fort. ” Thence descending, we threaded
dark streets, in places crowded with rude cots and dusky figures,
and finally at 2 A. M. we found ourselves at the door of the boy
Mohammed's house.
We arrived on the morning of Sunday the 7th Zu'l Hijjah
(11th September, 1853), and had one day before the beginning of
the pilgrimage to repose and visit the Haram. From El Medinah
to Meccah the distance, according to my calculation, was 248
English miles, which was accomplished in eleven marches.
*I cannot conceive what made the accurate Niebuhr fall into the strange
error that apparitions are unknown in Arabia. ” Arabs fear to sleep alone,
to enter the bath at night, to pass by cemeteries during dark, and to sit
amongst ruins, simply for fear of apparitions. And Arabia, together with
Persia, has supplied half the Western World - Southern Europe — with its
ghost stories and tales of angels, demons, and fairies. To quote Milton, the
land is struck «with superstition as with a planet. ”


## p. 2904 (#476) ###########################################

2904
ROBERT BURTON
(1577-1640)
as
HERE are some books of which every reader knows the names,
but of whose contents few know anything, excepting as the
same may have come to them filtered through the work of
others. Of these, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy) is one of the
most marked instances. It is a vast storehouse from which subse-
quent authors have always drawn and continue to draw, even
Burton himself drew from others,—though without always giving the
credit which with him was customary. Few would now have the
courage to read it through, and probably
fewer still could say with Dr. Johnson that
it was the only book that ever took him
out of bed two hours sooner than he wished
to rise. ”
Of Robert Burton himself very little is
known. He was born in 1577, a few years
later than Shakespeare,- probably at Lind-
ley, in Leicestershire; and died at Oxford
in 1640. He had some schooling at Sutton
Coldfield in Warwickshire, and was sent to
Brasenose College at Oxford in 1593; was
elected a student at Christ Church College
in 1599, and took his degree or B. D. in
ROBERT BURTON
1614. He was then thirty-seven years of
age. Why he should have been so long in reaching his degree, does
not appear.
Two years later he was presented by the Dean and
Chapter of Christ Church to the vicarage of St. Thomas in the sub-
urbs of Oxford. To this, about 1630, through presentation by George,
Lord Berkeley, was added the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire,
and he retained both livings until his death. This is about the sum
and substance of his known history. Various legends remain regard-
ing him; as, that he was very good and jolly company, a most learned
scholar, very ready in quotations from the poets and classical authors,
- and indeed no reader of the Anatomy could imagine otherwise.
Yet was he of a melancholy disposition, and it is said that "he com-
posed this book with a view of relieving his own melancholy, but
increased it to such a degree that nothing could make him laugh but
going to the foot-bridge and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen,

1
2


## p. 2905 (#477) ###########################################

ROBERT BURTON
2905
He says:
which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter. He
says himself, “I write of melancholy, by being busie, to avoid melan-
choly. ” He was expert in the calculation of nativities, and cast his
own horoscope; having determined in which, the time at which his
death should occur, it was afterward shrewdly believed that he took
measures to insure the fulfillment of the prophecy.
His life was almost wholly spent in his study at Oxford. He was
a wide and curious reader, and the book to the composition of which
he devoted himself quotes authorities without end. All was fish
which came to his net: divines, poets, astrologists, doctors, philoso-
phers, men of science, travelers, romancers he draws from the
whole range of literature; and often page after page — scores and
hundreds of pages,- is filled with quotations, sometimes of two or
three words only, sometimes translated and sometimes not, an almost
inextricable network of facts, of fancies, and of phrases.
«As those old Romans rob'd all the cities of the world, to set out
their bad-sited Rome, we skim off the cream of other men's wits,
pick the choice flowers of their till'd gardens to set out our own
steril plots. ”
Yet when he sets about it, his handling is steady and assured,
and he has distinctly the literary touch, as well as the marks of
genius; having a very great quaintness withal. The title of his
famous book is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy. What It Is, with All
the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and several Cures of it.
In three Partitions. With their several Sections, Members, and Sub-
sections, Philosophically, Medically, Historically Opened and Cut Up.
By Democritus Junior. The first edition appears to have been
issued in 1621. He continued to modify and enlarge it from time to
time throughout his life; and for the sixth edition, which appeared
some years after his death, he prepared a long address to the reader,
describing his student life, accounting for his choice of subject, and
full of quaint fancies and scathing criticisms of the ill habits and
weaknesses of mankind.
“Melancholy means with Burton Melancholia, but it means also
all sorts of insanity, and apparently all affections of the mind or
spirit, sane or insane. On the one hand he heaps up, in page after
page and chapter after chapter, all the horrid ills to which flesh is
heir, or which it cultivates for itself, and paints the world as a very
pandemonium of evil and outrage. And anon the air blows soft and
sweet, the birds sing, both brotherly love and domestic happiness
are possible, and
“God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. ”
To the first volume is prefixed “The Author's Abstract of Melan-
choly,' beginning :-


## p. 2906 (#478) ###########################################

2906
ROBERT BURTON
“When I go musing all alone,
Thinking of divers things foreknown,
When I build castles in the ayr,
Void of sorrow and void of feare
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time runs very fleet.
All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy. ”
It does not need an expert to tell, after reading this, whence
Milton drew the suggestion of "L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso. '
CONCLUSIONS AS TO MELANCHOLY
GEN
ENERALLY thus much we may conclude of melancholy: that
it is most pleasant at first, I say, mentis gratissimus error,
a most delightsome humor, to be alone, dwell alone, walk
alone, meditate, lie in bed whole days, dreaming awake as it
were, and frame a thousand phantastical imaginations unto them-
selves. They are never better pleased than when they are so
doing; they are in Paradise for the time, and cannot well endure
to be interrupt; with him in the Poet:-
«- pol! me occidistis, amici,
Non servâstis, ait: »
He may
you have undone him, he complains, if you trouble him: tell him
what inconvenience will follow, what will be the event, all is one,
canis ad vomitum, 'tis so pleasant he cannot refrain.
thus continue peradventure many years by reason of a strong
temperature, or some mixture of business, which may divert
his cogitations: but at the last lasa imaginatio, his phantasy is
crazed, & now habituated to such toys, cannot but work still
like a fate; the Scene alters upon a sudden; Fear and Sorrow
supplant those pleasing thoughts, suspicion, discontent, and per-
petual anxiety succeed in their places; so little by little, by that
shoeing-horn of idleness, and voluntary solitariness, Melancholy
this feral fiend is drawn on, et quantum vertice ad auras Æthe-
reas, tantum radice in Tartara tendit; "extending up, by its
branches, so far towards Heaven, as, by its roots, it does down
towards Tartarus; it was not so delicious at first, as now it is
bitter and harsh: a cankered soul macerated with cares and dis-
contents, tædium vitæ, impatience, agony, inconstancy, irresolu.
tion, precipitate them unto unspeakable miseries. They cannot
»
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## p. 2907 (#479) ###########################################

ROBERT BURTON
2907
endure company, light, or life itself, some unfit for action, and
the like. Their bodies are lean and dried up, withered, ugly;
their looks harsh, very dull, and their souls tormented, as they are
more or less entangled, as the humor hath been intended, or
according to the continuance of time they have been troubled.
To discern all which symptoms the better, Rhasis the Arabian
makes three degrees of them. The first is falsa cogitatio, false
conceits and idle thoughts: to misconstrue and amplify, aggravat-
ing everything they conceive or fear: the second is falso cogitata
loqui, to talk to themselves, or to use inarticulate incondite voices,
speeches, obsolete gestures, and plainly to utter their minds and
conceits of their hearts, by their words and actions, as to laugh,
weep, to be silent, not to sleep, eat their meat, &c. ; the third is
to put in practice that which they think or speak. Savanarola,
Rub. ii, Tract. 8, cap. 1, de ægritudine, confirms as much: when
he begins to express that in words, which he conceives in his heart,
or talks idly, or goes from one thing to another, which Gordonius
calls nec caput habentia nec caudam [having neither head nor
tail], he is in the middle way: but when he begins to act it like-
wise, and to put his fopperies in execution, he is then in the ex-
tent of melancholy, or madness itself. This progress of melancholy
you shall easily observe in them that have been so affected, they
go smiling to themselves at first, at length they laugh out; at
first solitary, at last they can endure no company, or if they do,
they are now dizzards, past sense and shame, quite moped, they
care not what they say or do; all their actions, words, gestures,
are furious or ridiculous. At first his mind is troubled, he doth
not attend what is said, if you tell him a tale, he cries at last,
What said you ? but in the end he mutters to himself, as old
women do many times, or old men when they sit alone; upon a
sudden they laugh, whoop, halloo, or run away, and swear they
see or hear Players, Devils, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, strike, or strut,
&c. , grow humorous in the end: like him in the Poet, sæpe
ducentos sæpe decem servos [he often keeps two hundred slaves,
often only ten], he will dress himself, and undress, careless at
last, grows insensible, stupid or mad. He howls like a wolf,
barks like a dog, and raves like Ajax and Orestes, hears Music
and outcries which no man else hears.
Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe
rules to comprehend them? As Echo to the painter in Ausonius,
vane, quid affectas, &c. — foolish fellow, what wilt ? if you must


## p. 2908 (#480) ###########################################

2908
ROBERT BURTON
air,
as
SO
needs paint me, paint a voice, et similem si vis pingere, pinge
sonum; if you will describe melancholy, describe a phantastical
conceit, a corrupt imagination, vain thoughts and different, which
who can do? The four-and-twenty letters make no more variety
of words in divers languages, than melancholy conceits produce
diversity of symptoms in several persons. They are irregular,
obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse;
you may as well make the Moon a new coat, as a true character
of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the
the heart of man, a melancholy man. They are
confused, I say, diverse, intermixt with other diseases. As the
species be confounded (which I have shewed) so are the symp-
toms; sometimes with headache, cachexia, dropsy, stone, (as you
may perceive by those several examples and illustrations, collected
by Hildesheim, spiccl. 2, Mercurialis, consil. 118, cap. 6 et 11), with
headache, epilepsy, priapismus (Trincavellius, consil. 12, lib. 1, con-
sil. 49), with gout, caninus appetitus (Montanus, consil. 26, &c. , 23,
234, 249), with falling-sickness, headache, vertigo, lycanthropia,
&c. (J. Cæsar Claudinus, consult. 4, consult. 89 et 116), with
gout, agues, hæmrods, stone, &c. Who can distinguish these
melancholy symptoms so intermixt with others, or apply them to
their several kinds, confine them into method ? 'Tis hard I con-
fess, yet I have disposed of them as I could, and will descend to
particularize them according to their species. For hitherto I have
expatiated in more general lists or terms, speaking promiscuously
of such ordinary signs, which occur amongst writers. Not that
they are all to be found in one man, for that were to paint a
Monster or Chimæra, not a man; but some in one, some in
another, and that successively, or at several times.
Which I have been the more curious to express and report, not
to upbraid any miserable man, or by way of derision (I rather pity
them), but the better to discern, to apply remedies unto them;
and to shew that the best and soundest of us all is in great
danger; how much we ought to fear our own fickle estates,
remember our miseries and vanities, examine and humiliate our-
selves, seek to God, and call to him for mercy, that needs not
look for any rods to scourge ourselves, since we carry them in
our bowels; and that our souls are in a miserable captivity, if
the light of grace and heavenly truth doth not shine continually
upon us; and by our discretion to moderate ourselves, to be more
circumspect and wary in the midst of these dangers.


## p. 2909 (#481) ###########################################

2909
HORACE BUSHNELL
(1802-1876)
BY THEODORE T. MUNGER
BORACE BUSHNELL was born in 1802 in Litchfield, Connecticut,
and reared in New Preston, a hamlet near by.
He was
graduated at Yale College in 1827, and after a year of
editorial service on the Journal of Commerce in New York he
became tutor in Yale College, studied theology at the same time,
and in 1833 was settled in the ministry over a Congregational church
in Hartford, Connecticut. He resigned his charge in 1853 on account
of ill health, but lived till 1876, filling the years to the last with
arduous study and authorship. He pub-
lished three volumes of sermons, two of
essays and addresses, a treatise on Wo-
men's Suffrage, under the title A Reform
against Nature, and five treatises of a
theological character. Each of the latter
was a distinct challenge to the prevailing
thought of his day, and involved him in
suspicion and accusation that well-nigh cost
him his ecclesiastical standing. It is now
generally acknowledged that he led the
way into the new world of theological
thought which has since opened so widely,
and thereby rendered great and enduring HORACE BUSHNELL
service to the Christian faith.
It is enough to say of his work in this respect that it was char-
acterized by a mingling of the thought of the first three centuries,
and of the modern spirit which had found its way from Germany
into England through Coleridge. The two did not always agree
well, and the latter is the predominating feature in all his writings.
He was the first theologian in New England to admit fully into his
thought the modern sense of Nature, as it is found in the literature
of the early part of the century, and notably in Wordsworth and
Coleridge. Dr. Bushnell was not a student of this literature beyond
a thorough and sympathetic study of The Aids to Reflection,' but
through this open door the whole spirit of that great thought move-
ment entered his mind and found a congenial home. The secret of
this movement was a spiritual interpretation of nature. It was a step
in the evolution of human thought; and appearing first in literature,



## p. 2910 (#482) ###########################################

2910
HORACE BUSHNELL
its natural point of entrance, it was sure to reach all forms of
thought, as in time to come it will reach all forms of social life.
The thing that the world is rapidly learning is, that not only is the
world God's but that God is in his world. Bushnell was by nature
immensely open to this thought, and its undertone can be heard in
almost every page of his writings. It was this that gave value to
his works and made them exceptional in his day and place. Each
of his great treatises is, with more or less distinctness, an effort to
put natural things and divine things into some sort of relevance and
oneness.
He took the path by which superior minds have always found
their way into new realms of truth. They do not pass from one
school to another, but instead rise into some new or some larger
conception of nature and start afresh. All gains in philosophy and
religion and civilization have been made by further inroads into
nature, and never in any other way. Dr. Bushnell, with the unerr-
ing instinct of a discoverer, struck this path and kept it to the end.
At the bottom of all his work lies a profound sense of nature, of its
meaning and force in the realm of the spirit. He did not deny a
certain antithesis between nature and the supernatural, but he so
defined the latter that the two could be embraced in the one cate-
gory of nature when viewed as the ascertained order of God in crea-
tion. The supernatural is simply the realm of freedom, and it is as
natural as the physical realm of necessity. Thus he not only got
rid of the traditional antinomy between them, but led the way into
that conception of the relation of God to his world which more and
more is taking possession of modern thought. In his essay on Lan-
guage he says (and the thought is always with him as a governing
principle):–«The whole universe of nature is a perfect analogon
of the whole universe of thought or spirit. Therefore, as nature
becomes truly a universe only through science revealing its universal
laws, the true universe of thought and spirit cannot sooner be con-
ceived. " Thus he actually makes the revelation of spiritual truth
wait on the unfolding of the facts and laws of the world of nature.
There is something pathetic in the attitude of this great thinker sit-
ting in the dark, waiting for disclosures in nature that would sub-
stantiate what he felt was true in the realm of the spirit. A
generation later he would have seen the light for which he longed -
a light that justifies the central point of all his main contentions.
His first and most important work, Christian Nurture,' contended
that the training of children should be according to nature, - not in
the poor sense of Rousseau, but that it should be divinely natural.
So Nature and the Supernatural,' whatever place may be accorded
to the book to-day, was an effort to bring the two terms that were


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HORACE BUSHNELL
2911
held as opposite and contradictory, into as close relation as God is to
his laws in nature. So in "The Vicarious Sacrifice his main pur-
pose was to take a doctrine that had been dwarfed out of its proper
proportions, and give to it the measure of God's love and the man-
ner of its action in human life. Dr. Bushnell may or may not have
thought with absolute correctness on these themes, but he thought
with consummate ability, he wrote with great eloquence and power,
and he left many pages that are to be cherished as literature, while
theologically they “point the way we are going. ”
One of the most characteristic and interesting things about Dr.
Bushnell is the method he took to find his way between this spiritual
view of things and that world of theological orthodoxy where he
stood by virtue of his profession. It was a very hard and dry world, -
a world chiefly of definitions, but it covered vital realities, and so
must have had some connection with the other world. Dr. Bushnell
bridged the chasm by a theory of language which he regarded as
original with himself. It was not new, but he elaborated it in an
original way and with great ability. In its main feature it was sim-
ply a claim to use in theology the symbolism of poetry; it regarded
language as something that attempts to make one feel the inexpress-
ible truth, rather than a series of definitions which imply that it can
be exactly stated in words; it held that truth is larger than any form
which attempts to express it; it images and reflects truth instead of
defining it.
This theory might be assumed without so long explication as he
gave, but it was greatly needed in the theological world, which at
that time was sunk in a sea of metaphysical definition, and consumed
with a lust for explaining everything in heaven and earth in terms
of alphabetic plainness. Dr. Bushnell was not only justified by the
necessity of his situation in resorting to his theory, but he had the
right which every man of genius may claim for himself. Any one
whose thought is broader than that about him, whose feeling is
deeper, whose imagination is loftier, is entitled to such a use of lan-
guage as shall afford him fullest expression; for he alone knows just
how much of thought, feeling, and imagination, how much of him-
self, he puts into his words; they are coin whose value he himself
has a right to indicate by his own stamp. There is no pact with
others to use language in any given way, except upon some very
broad basis as to the main object of language. The first object is
not to secure definite and comprehensive understanding, but to give
expression, and to start thought which may lead to full understand-
ing - as the parable hides the thought until you think it out.
Dr. Bushnell's theory did not blind the ordinary reader. No writer
is more easily apprehended by the average mind if he has any sym-
pathy with the subjects treated; but it was an inconvenient thing


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2912
HORACE BUSHNELL
for his theological neighbors to manage. While they insisted on
«the evident meaning of the words," – a mischievous phrase, - he
was breathing his meaning into attentive souls by the spirit which
he had contrived to hide within his words. It is a way that genius
has, -as Abt Vogler says: --
“But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear:
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know. ”
The first thing that brought Dr. Bushnell out of the world of
theology into the world of literature was his oration before the Phi
Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1848. He had achieved a
reputation as a preacher of remarkable insight for such as had ears
to hear, and he was already in the thick of theological controversy;
but his fine power of expression and breadth of thought had not been
specially noticed. This oration introduced him into the world of
Mr. J. T. Fields — the most discerning critic of the day-
said to the writer that the oration was heard with surprise and
delight, and that it gave the speaker an assured place in the ranks
of literature. That he should have been so readily welcomed by the
literary guild is not strange, for the title of his oration —'Work and
Play) — led the way into a discussion of the secret that underlies all
works of genius. For once, the possessor of the divine gift heard its
secret revealed and himself explained to himself; his work was set
before him as the full play of his spirit. Beginning with nature,
where our author always began, and finding there a free and sportive
element, he carries it into human life; making the contention that its
aim should be, and that its destiny will be, to free itself from the
constraint of mere work and rise into that natural action of the
faculties which may be called play — a moral and spiritual process.
His conclusion is that -
<if the world were free,- free, I mean, of themselves; brought up, all, out of
work into the pure inspiration of truth and charity,- new forms of personal
and intellectual beauty would appear, and society itself reveal the Orphic
movement. No more will it be imagined that poetry and rhythm are acci-
dents or figments of the race, one side of all ingredient or ground of nature.
But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state of man; the proper
and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they long for, and the rhythmic flow
of that universal play in which all life would live. ”
The key to Dr. Bushnell is to be found in this passage, and it is
safe to say of him that in hardly a page of a dozen volumes is he
false to it. He is always a poet, singing out of the pure inspiration
of truth and charity,” and keeping ever in mind that poetry and
rhythm are not figments outside of nature, but the real and true
state of man and the proper and last ideal of souls.


## p. 2913 (#485) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2913
The centrality of this thought is seen in his style.
It is a
remarkable style, and is only to be appreciated when the man is
understood. It is made up of long sentences full of qualifying
phrases until the thought is carved into perfect exactness; or — chang-
ing the figure — shade upon shade is added until the picture and
conception are alike. But with all this piling up of phrases, he
not only did not lose proportion and rhythm, but so set down his
words that they read like a chant and sound like the breaking of
waves upon the beach. Nor does he ever part with poetry in the
high sense in which he conceived it. I will not compare his style,
as to merit, with that of Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas
Browne, but he belongs to their class; he has the same majestic
swing, and like them he cannot forbear singing, whatever he may
have to say.
His theme may be roads, or city plans, or agriculture,
or emigration, or the growth of law; yet he never fails of lifting his
subject into that higher world of the imagination where the real
truth of the subject is to be found, and is made to appear as poetry.
It would be unjust to identify him so thoroughly with the poets if it
should lead to the thought that he was not a close and rigorous
thinker. It should not be forgotten that all great prose-writers,
from Plato down to Carlyle and Emerson, stand outside of poetry
only by virtue of their form and not by virtue of their thought;
indeed, poet and thinker are interchangeable names. Dr. Bushnell
wrote chiefly on theology, and the value and efficacy of his writings
lie in the fact that imagination and fact, thought and sentiment,
reason and feeling, are each preserved and yet so mingled as to
make a single impression.
This combination of two realms or habits of thought appears on
every page. He was, as Novalis said of Spinoza, “A God-intoxicated
man, but it was God as containing humanity in himself. His
theology was a veritable Jacob's ladder, on which the angels of God
ascend and descend; and if in his thought they descended before
they ascended, it was because he conceived of humanity as existing
in God before it was manifest in creation; and if his head was among
the stars, his feet were always firmly planted on the earth. This
twofoldness finds a curious illustration in the sub-titles of several of
his books. "The Vicarious Sacrifice does not spring alone out of
the divine nature, but is ‘Grounded in Principles of Universal Obli-
gation. Nature and the Supernatural — the great antithesis in
theology — constitute “The One System of God. "Women's Suffrage'
is “The Reform against Nature'— the best book, I must be permitted
to say, on either side of this much-debated question.
It is a popular impression of Dr. Bushnell that he was the sub-
ject of his imagination, and that it ran away
with him in the
V-183


## p. 2914 (#486) ###########################################

2914
HORACE BUSHNELL
treatment of themes which required only severe thought: the impres-
sion is a double mistake: theology does not call for severe thought,
alone nor mainly; but first and chiefly for the imagination, and the
seeing and interpreting eye that usually goes with it; its object is to
find spirit under form, to discover what the logos expresses. For this
the imagination is the chief requisite. It is not a vagrant and
irresponsible faculty, but an inner eye whose vision is to be trusted
like that of the outer; it has in itself the quality of thought, and is
not a mere picture-making gift. Dr. Bushnell trained his imagina-
tion to work on certain definite lines, and for a definite end-
namely, to bring out the spiritual meaning hidden within the external
form. He worked in the spirit of Coleridge's words:
“I had found
That outward forms the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the Life within. ”
No analysis or recapitulation of his works can be given in these
preliminary words. Perhaps his most influential book is the first,
(Christian Nurture); while a treatise for the household, it was
surcharged with theological opinions which proved to be revolu-
tionary and epoch-making. (The Vicarious Sacrifice' has most
affected the pulpit. Nature and the Supernatural,' the tenth
chapter of which has become a classic, has done great service in
driving out the extreme dualism that invested the subject of God's
relation to creation. His ablest essay is the treatise on Language;
the most literary is that on “Work and Play'; the most penetrating
in its insight is 'Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination'; the most
personal and characteristic is “The Age of Homespun. His best
sermon is always the one last read; and they are perhaps his most
representative work.
The sermon is not usually ranked as belonging
to literature, but no canon excludes those preached by this great
They are timeless in their truth, majestic in their diction,
comm
manding in their moral tone, penetrating in their spirituality,
and pervaded by that quality without which a sermon is not one —
the divine uttering itself to the human. There is no striving and
crying in the streets, no heckling of saints nor dooming of sinners,
no petty debates over details of conduct, no dogmatic assumption,
no logical insistence, but only the gentle and mighty persuasions of
truth, coming as if breathed by the very spirit of God.
Language was to him “the sanctuary of thought," and these
sermons are the uttered worship in that temple where reason and
devotion are one.
man.
22. hungen


## p. 2915 (#487) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2915
WORK AND PLAY
From (Work and Play)
ET
L
a
man
me call to my aid, then, some thoughtful spirit in my
audience: not a poet, of necessity, or a man of genius, but
of large meditation, one who is accustomed to
observe, and, by virtue of the warm affinities of a living heart,
to draw out the meanings that are hid so often in the humblest
things. Returning into the bosom of his family in some interval
of care and labor, he shall come upon the very unclassic and
certainly unimposing scene,- his children and a kitten playing
on the floor together; and just there, possibly, shall meet him
suggestions more fresh and thoughts of higher reach concerning
himself and his race, than the announcement of a new-discovered
planet or the revolution of an empire would incite.
He surveys
with a meditative feeling this beautiful scene of muscular play,
— the unconscious activity, the exuberant life, the spirit of glee,–
and there rises in his heart the conception that possibly he is
here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher kind
of play,
which is the noblest exercise and last end of man
himself. Worn by the toils of years, perceiving with a sigh
that the unconscious joy of motion here displayed is spent in
himself, and that now he is effectually tamed to the doom of a
working creature, he may yet discover, in the lively sympathy
with play that bathes his inward feeling, that his soul is playing
now,- enjoying, without the motions, all it could do in them;
manifold more than it could if he were down upon the floor
himself, in the unconscious activity and lively frolic of childhood.
Saddened he may be to note how time and work have changed
his spirit and dried away the playful springs of animal life in his
being; yet he will find, or ought, a joy playing internally over
the face of his working nature, which is fuller and richer as it is
more tranquil; which is to the other as fulfillment to prophecy,
and is in fact the prophecy of a better and far more glorious
fulfillment still.
Having struck in this manner the great world-problem of
AND PLAY, his thoughts kindle under the theme, and he
pursues it. The living races are seen at a glance to be offering
in their history everywhere a faithful type of his own. They
show him what he himself is doing and preparing - all that he
WORK


## p. 2916 (#488) ###########################################

2916
HORACE BUSHNELL
finds in the manifold experience of his own higher life. They
have, all, their gambols; all, their sober cares and labors. The
lambs are sporting on the green knoll; the anxious dams are
bleating to recall them to their side. The citizen beaver is
building his house by a laborious carpentry; the squirrel is lifting
his sail to the wind on the swinging top of the tree. In the
music of the morning, he hears the birds playing with their
voices, and when the day is up, sees them sailing round in
circles on the upper air, as skaters on a lake, folding their wings,
dropping and rebounding, as if to see what sport they can make
of the solemn laws that hold the upper and lower worlds
together. And yet these play-children of the air he sees again
descending to be carriers and drudges; fluttering and screaming
anxiously about their nest, and confessing by that sign that not
even wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. Or,
passing to some quiet shade, meditating still on this careworn
life, playing still internally with ideal fancies and desires unreal-
ized, there returns upon him there, in the manifold and
spontaneous mimicry of nature, a living show of all that is
transpiring in his own bosom; in every flower some bee hum-
ming over his laborious chemistry and loading his body with the
fruits of his toil; in the slant sunbeam, populous nations of
motes quivering with animated joy, and catching, as in play, at
the golden particles of the light with their tiny fingers. Work
and play, in short, are the universal ordinance of God for the
living races; in which they symbolize the fortune and interpret
the errand of man. No creature lives that must not work and
may not play.
Returning now to himself and to man, and meditating yet
more deeply, as he is thus prepared to do, on work and play,
and play and work, as blended in the compound of our human
life; asking again what is work and what is play, what are the
relations of one to the other, and which is the final end of all,
he discovers in what he was observing round him a sublimity
of import, a solemnity even, that is deep as the shadow of
eternity.
I believe in a future age yet to be revealed, which is to be
distinguished from all others as the godly or godlike age,- an
age not of universal education simply, or universal philanthropy,
or external freedom, or political well-being, but a day of reci-
procity and free intimacy between all souls and God. Learning


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HORACE BUSHNELL
2917
and religion, the scholar and the Christian, will not be divided
as they have been. The universities will be filled with a pro-
found spirit of religion, and the bene orasse will be a fountain of
inspiration to all the investigations of study and the creations of
genius.
I raise this expectation of the future, not because some
prophet of old time has spoken of a day to come when the
streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the
streets thereof” (for I know not that he meant to be so inter-
preted), but because I find a prophecy of play in our nature
itself which it were a violation of all insight not to believe will
sometime be fulfilled. And when it is fulfilled it will be found
that Christianity has at last developed a new literary era, the
era of religious love.
Hitherto the passion of love has been the central fire of the
world's literature. The dramas, epics, odes, novels, and even
histories, have spoken to the world's heart chiefly through this
passion, and through this have been able to get their answer.
For this passion is a state of play, wherein the man loses him-
self in the ardor of a devotion regardless of interest, fear, care,
prudence, and even of life itself. Hence there gathers round the
lover a tragic interest, and we hang upon his destiny as if some
natural charm or spell were in it. Now this passion of love,
which has hitherto been the staple of literature, is only a crude
symbol in the life of nature, by which God designs to interpret,
and also to foreshadow, the higher love of religion,- nature's
gentle Beatrice, who puts her image in the youthful Dante, by
that to attend him afterwards in the spirit-flight of song, and be
his guide up through the wards of Paradise to the shining mount
of God. What then are we to think, but that God will some-
time bring us up out of the literature of the lower love, into
that of the higher ? — that as the age of passion yields to the age
of reason, so the crude love of instinct will give place to the
loftier, finer, more impelling love of God? And then around
that nobler love, or out of it, shall arise a new body of litera-
ture, as much more gifted as the inspiration is purer and more
intellectual. Beauty, truth, and worship; song, science, and duty,
will all be unfolded together in this common love.
Most of all to be remembered are those friendly circles gath-
ered so often round the winter's fire — not the stove, but the fire,
the brightly blazing, hospitable fire. In the early dusk, the home


## p. 2918 (#490) ###########################################

2918
HORACE BUSHNELL
circle is drawn more closely and quietly round it; but a good
neighbor and his wife drop in shortly from over the way, and
the circle begins to spread. Next, a few young folk from the
other end of the village, entering in brisker mood, find as many
more chairs set in as wedges into the periphery to receive them
also. And then a friendly sleigh-full of old and young that
have come down from the hill to spend an hour or two, spread
the circle again, moving it still farther back from the fire; and
the fire blazes just as much higher and more brightly, having a
new stick added for every guest. There is no restraint, certainly
no affectation of style. They tell stories, they laugh, they sing. .
They are serious and gay by turns, or the young folks go on
with some play, while the fathers and mothers are discussing
some hard point of theology in the minister's last sermon, or
perhaps the great danger coming to sound morals from the mul-
tiplication of turnpikes and newspapers! Meantime the good
housewife brings out her choice stock of home-grown exotics,
gathered from three realms - doughnuts from the pantry, hickory-
nuts from the chamber, and the nicest, smoothest apples from
the cellar; all which, including, I suppose I must add, the rather
unpoetic beverage that gave its acid smack to the ancient hospi-
tality, are discussed as freely, with no fear of consequences.
And then, as the tall clock in the corner of the room ticks on
majestically towards nine, the conversation takes, it may be, a
little more serious turn, and it is suggested that a very happy
evening may fitly be ended with a prayer. Whereupon the
circle breaks up with a reverent, congratulative look on every
face, which is itself the truest language of a social nature blessed
in human fellowship.
Such, in general, was the society of the homespun age. It
was not that society that puts one in connection with the great
world of letters, or fashion, or power, raising as much the level
of his consciousness and the scale and style of his action; but it
was society back of the world, in the sacred retreats of natural
feeling, truth, and piety.
Passing to the church, or rather I should say, to the meeting-
house -- good translation, whether meant or not, of what is older
and more venerable than church, viz. , synagogue — here again
you meet the picture of a sturdy homespun worship. Probably
it stands on some hill, midway between three or four valleys,
whither the tribes go up to worship, and, when the snow-drifts


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HORACE BUSHNELL
2919
are deepest, go literally from strength to strength. There is no
furnace or stove save the foot-stoves that are filled from the fires
of the neighboring houses, and brought in partly as a rather
formal compliment to the delicacy of the tender sex, and some-
times because they are really wanted. The dress of the assembly
is mostly homespun, indicating only slight distinctions of quality
in the worshipers. They are seated according to age,- the old
king Lemuels and their queens in front, near the pulpit, and the
younger Lemuels farther back, inclosed in pews, sitting back to
back, impounded, all, for deep thought and spiritual digestion;
only the deacons, sitting close under the pulpit by themselves,
to receive, as their distinctive honor, the more perpendicular
droppings of the Word. Clean round the front of the gallery is
drawn a single row of choir, headed by the key-pipe in the
centre. The pulpit is overhung by an august wooden canopy
called a sounding-board — study general, of course, and first lesson
of mystery to the eyes of the children, until what time their ears
are opened to understand the spoken mysteries.
There is no affectation of seriousness in the assembly, no
mannerism of worship; some would say too little of the manner
of worship. They think of nothing, in fact, save what meets
their intelligence and enters into them by that method. They
appear like men who have a digestion for strong meat, and have
no conception that trifles more delicate can be of any account to
feed the system. Nothing is dull that has the matter in it,
nothing long that has not exhausted the matter. If the minister
speaks in his great-coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howl.
ing blasts of winter drive in across the assembly fresh streams of
ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none
the less content, if only he gives them good strong exercise.
Under their hard and, as some would say, stolid faces, great
thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free-will,
fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special
grace, eternity - give them anything high enough, and the
tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing sturdily into
it; and if they go away having something to think of, they have
had a good day. A perceptible glow will kindle in their hard
faces only when some one of the chief apostles, a Day, a Smith,
or a Bellamy, has come to lead them up some higher pinnacle of
thought or pile upon their sturdy minds some heavier weight of
argument — fainting never under any weight, even that which, to


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2920
HORACE BUSHNELL
the foreign critics of the discourses preached by them and others
of their day, it seems impossible for any, the most cultivated
audience in the world, to have supported. These royal men of
homespun— how great a thing to them was religion !
The sons and daughters grew up, all, as you will perceive, in
the closest habits of industry. The keen jocky way of whittling
out a living by small bargains sharply turned, which many sup-
pose to be an essential characteristic of the Yankee race, is yet
no proper inbred distinction, but only a casual result, or incident,
that pertains to the transition period between the small, stringent
way of life in the previous times of home-production and the
new age of trade. In these olden times, these genuine days of
homespun, they supposed, in their simplicity, that thrift repre.
sented work, and looked about seldom for any more delicate and
sharper way of getting on. They did not call a man's property
his fortune, but they spoke of one or another as being worth so
much; conceiving that he had it laid up as the reward or fruit
of his deservings. The house was a factory on the farm, the
farm a grower and producer for the house. The exchanges went
on briskly enough, but required neither money nor trade. No
affectation of polite living, no languishing airs of delicacy and
softness indoors, had begun to make the fathers and sons impa-
tient of hard work out of doors, and set them at contriving some
easier and more plausible way of living. Their very dress rep-
resented work, and they went out as men whom the wives and
daughters had dressed for work; facing all weather, cold and
hot, wet and dry, wrestling with the plow on the stony-sided
hills, digging out the rocks by hard lifting and a good many
very practical experiments in mechanics, dressing the flax, thresh-
ing the rye, dragging home, in the deep snows, the great
woodpile of the year's consumption; and then when the day is
ended — having no loose money to spend in taverns — taking
their recreation all together in reading or singing or happy
talk or silent looking in the fire, and finally in sleep- to rise
again with the sun and pray over the family Bible for just such
another good day as the last. And so they lived, working out,
each year, a little advance of thrift, just within the line of
comfort.
No mode of life was ever more expensive: it was life at the
expense of labor too stringent to allow the highest culture and
the most proper enjoyment.
Even the dress of it was
more


## p. 2921 (#493) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2921
expensive than we shall ever see again. Still it was a life of
honesty and simple content and sturdy victory. Immoralities
that rot down the vigor and humble the consciousness of families
were as much less frequent as they had less thought of advent-
ure; less to do with travel and trade and money, and were closer
to nature and the simple life of home.
It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that
it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt -
a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed all together into
the producing process, young and old, male and female, from
the boy that rode the plow-horse to the grandmother knitting
under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering
lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread and
grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what every-
thing cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully.
Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their
small way in trade or expenditure, are ready, as we often see,
to charge them with meanness— simply because they knew things
only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they
were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big
operations by which other men are wont to get their money
without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was
not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be
found, is really anything but meanness
THE FOUNDERS
From (Work and Play)
HERE is a class of writers and critics in our country, who
T'imagine it is quite "clears that our fathers cannot have been
the proper founders of our American liberties, because it is
in proof that they were so intolerant and so clearly unrepublican
often in their avowed sentiments. They suppose the world to be
a kind of professor's chair, and expect events to transpire logic-
ally in it. They see not that casual opinions, or conventional and
traditional prejudices, are one thing, and that principles and
morally dynamic forces are often quite another; that the former
are the connectives only of history, the latter its springs of life;
and that if the former serve well enough as providential guards
and moderating weights overlying the deep geologic fires and


## p. 2922 (#494) ###########################################

2922
HORACE BUSHNELL
subterranean heavings of the new moral instincts below, these
latter will assuredly burst up at last in strong mountains of
rock, to crest the world. Unable to conceive such a truth, they
cast about them accordingly to find the paternity of our Ameri-
can institutions in purely accidental causes.
We are
clear of
aristocratic orders, they say, because there was no blood of which
to make an aristocracy; independent of king and parliament,
because we grew into independence under the natural effects of
distance and the exercise of a legislative power; republican,
because our constitutions were cast in he molds of British law;
a wonder of growth in riches, enterprise, and population, be-
cause of the hard necessities laid upon us, and our simple modes
of life.
There is yet another view of this question, that has a far
higher significance. We do not understand, as it seems to me,
the real greatness of our institutions when we look simply at the
forms under which we hold our liberties. It consists not in
these, but in the magnificent possibilities that underlie these
forms as their fundamental supports and conditions. In these
we have the true paternity and spring of our institutions; and
these, beyond a question, are the gift of our founders.
We see this, first of all, in the fixed relation between freedom
and intelligence, and the remarkable care they had of popular
education It was not their plan to raise up a body of republi-
cans. But they believed in mind as in God. Their religion was
the choice of mind. The gospel they preached must have minds
to hear it; and hence the solemn care they had, even from the
first day of their settlement, of the education of every child.
And, as God would have it, the children whom they trained up
for pillars in the church turned out also to be more than tools of
power. They grew up into magistrates, leaders of the people,
debaters of right and of law, statesmen, generals, and signers of
declarations for liberty. Such a mass of capacity had never been
seen before in so small a body of men. And this is the first
condition of liberty — the Condensation of Power. For liberty is
not the license of an hour; it is not the butchery of a royal
house, or the passion that rages behind a barricade, or the caps
that are swung or the vivas shouted at the installing of a liber-
ator. But it is the compact, impenetrable matter of much man-
hood, the compressed energy of good sense and public reason,
having power to see before and after and measure action by


## p. 2923 (#495) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2923
was
counsel — this it is that walls about the strength and liberty of a
people. To be free is not to fly abroad as the owls of the night
when they take the freedom of the air, but it is to settle and
build and be strong a commonwealth as much better com-
pacted in the terms of reason, as it casts off more of the re-
straints of force.
Their word «Reformation ” — “the completion of the
Reformation ”; not Luther's nor Calvin's, they expressly say;
they cannot themselves imagine it. Hitherto it is unconceived
by men. God must reveal it in the light that breaks forth from
him. And this he will do in his own good time. It is al-
ready clear to us that, in order to any further progress in this
direction, it was necessary for a new movement to begin that
should loosen the joints of despotism and emancipate the mind
of the world. And in order to this a new republic must be
planted and have time to grow.
It must be seen rising up in
the strong majesty of freedom and youth, outstripping the old
prescriptive world in enterprise and the race of power, covering
the ocean with its commerce, spreading out in populous swarms
of industry,- planting, building, educating, framing constitutions,
rushing to and fro in the smoke and thunder of travel along its
mighty rivers, across its inland seas, over its mountain-tops from
one shore to the other, strong in order as in liberty,-a savage
continent become the field of a colossal republican empire, whose
name is a name of respect and a mark of desire to the longing
eyes of mankind. And then, as the fire of new ideas and hopes
darts electrically along the nerves of feeling in the millions of the
race, it will be seen that a new Christian movement also begins
with it. Call it reformation, or formation, or by whatever name,
it is irresistible because it is intangible. In one view it is only
destruction. The State is loosened from the Church. The Church
crumbles down into fragments. Superstition is eaten away by
the strong acid of liberty, and spiritual despotism flies affrighted
from the broken loyalty of its metropolis. Protestantism also,
divided and subdivided by its dialectic quarrels, falls into the
finest, driest powder of disintegration. Be not afraid.
The new
order crystallizes only as the old is dissolved; and no sooner is
the old unity of orders and authorities effectually dissolved than
the reconstructive affinities of a new and better unity begin to
appear in the solution.
Repugnances melt away. Thought
grows catholic.
Men look for good in each other as well as


## p. 2924 (#496) ###########################################

2924
HORACE BUSHNELL
evil. The crossings of opinion by travel and books, and the
intermixture of races and religions, issue in freer, broader views
of the Christian truth; and so the Church of the Future,” as it
has been called, gravitates inwardly towards those terms of
brotherhood in which it may coalesce and rest. I say not or
believe that Christendom will be Puritanized or Protestantized;
but what is better than either, it will be Christianized. It will
settle thus into a unity, probably not of form, but of practical
assent and love - a Commonwealth of the Spirit, much
stronger in its unity than the old satrapy of priestly despotism,
as our republic is stronger than any other government of the
world.
as
RELIGIOUS MUSIC
From "Work and Play)
A
s we are wont to argue the invisible things of God, even his
eternal power and Godhead, from the things that are seen,
finding them all images of thought and vehicles of intelli-
gence, so we have an argument for God more impressive, in one
view, because the matter of it is so deep and mysterious, from
the fact that a grand, harmonic, soul-interpreting law of music
pervades all the objects of the material creation, and that things
without life, all metals and woods and valleys and mountains and
waters, are tempered with distinctions of sound, and toned to be
a language to the feeling of the heart. It is as if God had
made the world about us to be a grand organ of music, so that
our feelings might have play in it, as our understanding has in
the light of the sun and the outward colors and forms of things.
What is called the musical scale, or octave, is fixed in the origi-
nal appointments of sound just as absolutely and definitely as
the colors of the rainbow or prism in the optical properties and
laws of light. And the visible objects of the world are not
more certainly shaped and colored to us under the exact laws
of light and the prism, than they are tempered and toned,
as objects audible, to give distinctions of sound by their vibra-
tions in the terms of the musical octave. It is not simply that
we hear the sea roar and the floods clap their hands in anthems
of joy; it is not that we hear the low winds sigh, or the storms
howl dolefully, or the ripples break peacefully on the shore, or
1
1
1


## p. 2925 (#497) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2925
or
the waters dripping sadly from the rock, or the thunders crash-
ing in horrible majesty through the pavements of heaven; not
only do all the natural sounds we hear come to us in tones of
music as interpreters of feeling, but there is hid in the secret
temper and substance of all matter a silent music, that only
waits to sound and become a voice of utterance to the otherwise
unutterable feeling of our heart a voice, if we will have it, of
love and worship to the God of all.
First, there is a musical scale in the laws of the air itself,
exactly answering to the musical sense law of the soul.
Next, there is in all substances a temperament of quality related
to both; so that whatever kind of feeling there may be in
a soul — war and defiance, festivity and joy, sad remembrance,
remorse, pity, penitence, self-denial, love, adoration - may find
some fit medium of sound in which to express itself. And, what
is not less remarkable, connected with all these forms of sub-
stances there are mathematical laws of length and breadth, or
definite proportions of each, and reflective angles, that are every
way as exact as those which regulate the colors of the prism,
the images of the mirror, or the telescopic light of astronomic
worlds — mathematics for the heart as truly as for the head.
It cannot be said that music is a human creation, and as far
as the substances of the world are concerned, a mere accident.
As well can it be said that man creates the colors of the prism,
and that they are not in the properties of the light, because he
shapes the prism by his own mechanical art. Or if still we
doubt; if it seems incredible that the soul of music is in the heart
of all created being; then the laws of harmony themselves shall
answer, one string vibrating to another, when it is not struck
itself, and uttering its voice of concord simply because the con-
cord is in it and it feels the pulses on the air to which it cannot
be silent. Nay, the solid mountains and their giant masses of
rock shall answer; catching, as they will, the bray of horns or
the stunning blast of cannon, rolling it across from one top to
another in reverberating pulses, till it falls into bars of musical
rhythm and chimes and cadences of silver melody. I have heard
some fine music, as men are wont to speak — the play of orchestras,
the anthems of choirs, the voices of song that moved admiring
nations. But in the lofty passes of the Alps I heard a music
overhead from God's cloudy orchestra, the giant peaks of rock
and ice, curtained in by the driving mist and only dimly visible


## p. 2926 (#498) ###########################################

2926
HORACE BUSHNELL
athwart the sky through its folds, such as mocks all sounds our
lower worlds of art can ever hope to raise. I stood (excuse the
simplicity) calling to them, in the loudest shouts I could raise,
even till my power was spent, and listening in compulsory trance
to their reply. I heard them roll it up through their cloudy
worlds of snow, sifting out the harsh qualities that were tearing
in it as demon screams of sin, holding on upon it as if it were a
hymn they were fining to the ear of the great Creator, and send-
ing it round and round in long reduplications of sweetness, minute
after minute; till finally receding and rising, it trembled, as it
were, among the quick gratulations of angels, and fell into the
silence of the pure empyrean. I had never any conception before
of what is meant by quality in sound. There was more power
upon the soul in one of those simple notes than I ever expect to
feel from anything called music below, or ever can feel till I
hear them again in the choirs of the angelic world. I had never
such a sense of purity, or of what a simple sound may tell of
purity by its own pure quality; and I could not but say, O my
God, teach me this! Be this in me forever! And I can truly
affirm that the experience of that hour has consciously made me
better able to think of God ever since — better able to worship.
All other sounds are gone; the sounds of yesterday, heard in the
silence of enchanted multitudes, are gone; but that is with me
still, and I hope will never cease to ring in my spirit till I go
down to the slumber of silence itself.


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2927
SAMUEL BUTLER
(1612–1680)
PRETTY picture of the time is the glimpse of young Mr.
Pepys at the bookseller's in London Strand on a February
morning in 1663, making haste to buy a new copy of Hudi-
bras,' and carefully explaining that it was “ill humor of him to
be so against that which all the world cries up to be an example of
wit. ” The Clerk of the Admiralty had connections at court; and
between that February morning and a December day when Mr.
Battersby was at the Wardrobe using the King's time in gossip
about the new book of drollery, the merry
Stuart had found out Sam Butler's poem
and had given it the help of his royal
approval. Erstwhile, Samuel the courtier
had thought the work of Samuel the poet
silly, and had given warranty of his opinion
by suffering loss of one shilling eightpence
on his purchase of the book. A view not
to be wondered at in one who sets down
(Midsummer Night's Dream' as “insipid
and ridiculous,” and Othello' as a “mean
thing”! Perhaps it was because Butler had
a keen knowledge of Shakespeare, and un-
consciously used much of the actor's quick SAMUEL BUTLER
witted method, that his delicately feathered
barbs made no dent on the hard head of Pepys. Like his neighbor
of the Avon, the author of Hudibras) was a merciless scourge to
the vainglorious follies of the time in which he poorly and obscurely
lived; and like the truths which he told in his inimitable satires, the
virtue and decency of his life was obscured by the disorder of the
Commonwealth and the unfaith of the restored monarchy.
Samuel Butler was born near Strensham, Worcestershire, in 1612,
the fifth child and second son of a farmer of that parish, whose
homestead was known to within the present century as Butler's tene-
ment. » The elder Butler was not well-to-do, but had enough to ed-
ucate his son at the Worcester Grammar School, and to send him to a
university. Whether or what time he was at Oxford or Cambridge
remains doubtful. A Samuel Butler went up from Westminster to
Christ Church, Oxford, 1623, too for the Worcester lad of

soon


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2928
SAMUEL BUTLER
eleven years.