FINAL CAUSES

Ignorance is not a malady contracted on the earth, nor an incidental defect foreign to the purpose of our existence, but is an original want with which we were created, and which it is a chief business of life to supply. As hunger stimulates us to procure the food appointed for our sustenance, ignorance is but an appetite which God made us to gratify..

[METHOD IN STUDY]

December 1, 1824.

I may digress, where all is digression, to utter a wish not altogether fruitless, that there might be an order introduced into the mass of reading that occupies or impends over me. It was a reasonable advice that a scholar gave me to build in the studies of a day; to begin with solid labour at Hebrew and Greek; theological criticism, moral philosophy and laborious writing should succeed; then history; then elegant letters that species of books which is at once the most elevated amusement and the most productive suggester of thought, of which the instant specimens are the bulk of Johnson's

1824]

PLAN OF STUDY

21

works, as Lives of Poets, Rambler, etc., Pope's Moral Essays, and conspicuously Montaigne's Essays. Thus much for the day. But what arrangement in priority of subjects? When shall I read Greek, when Roman, when Austrian, when Ecclesiastical, when American history? Whilst we deliberate, time escapes. A poor plan is better than none, as a poor law. I propose, therefore, every morning before breakfast to read a chapter in Greek Testament with its Commentary. Afterwards, if time serve, Le Clerc; or my reading and writing for dissertations; then Mitford (all history is Ecclesiastical, and all reasonings go back to Greece), and the day end with Milton, Shakspere, Cicero or Everett, Burke, Mackintosh, Playfair, Stewart, Scott, Pope, Dryden.

TIME

December 10.

I confess I am a little cynical on some topics, and when a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. I have generally found the gravest and most useful citizens are not the easiest provoked to swell the noise, though they may be punctual at the

polls. And I have sometimes thought the election an individual makes between right and wrong more important than his choice between rival statesmen, and that the loss of a novel train of thought was ill paid by a considerable pecuniary gain. It is pleasant to know what is doing in the world, and why should a world go on if it does no good? The man whom your vote supports is to govern some millions — and it would be laughable not to know the issue of the naval battle. In ten years this great competition will be very stale, and a few words will inform you the result which cost you so many columns of the newsprints, so many anxious conjectures. Your soul will last longer than the ship; and will value its just and philosophical associations long after the memory has spurned all obtrusive and burdensome con

[FRAGMENT FOR USE IN A SERMON]

A celebrated English preacher, whose praise is in your churches, closed his discourse with a bold appeal which the fervour of his eloquence permitted, to the passions and imaginations of his hearers. He pointed their minds' eyes to the Recording Angel who waited on the wing

1824]

GOD PRESENT

23

in the midst of the assembly to write down some name of all that multitude in his book of Life. "And shall he wait in vain?" he said, "and will you let him take his departure for heaven without making him the witness of a single soul converted from his sins?" My friends, we know that his sentiment was but a flight of oratory, natural enough to a fervid spirit, and which the urgency of the occasion might excuse. My friends, no Recording Angel that we know of hovers over our assembly, but a greater than An Angel is here. There is one in the midst of us, though your eyes see him not, who is not a fictitious or an imaginary being, but who is too great and too glorious for our eyes to bear. There is one here, imparting to us the life and sense we at this moment exercise, whose tremendous power set yonder sun in the firmament, and upholds him and us. You cannot discern him by the gross orbs of sight, but can you not feel the weight of his presence sinking on your heart; does no conscious feeling stir in your bosoms under the eye of your Author and God, who is here? What doth he here? and how shall we acknowledge the almighty mind? . . .

IMAGINATION

I propose to write an Essay on the Evils of Imagination, which, after such a panegyrick on this beautiful faculty as it easily shall admit, may treat of those egregious errors that, growing out of some favourite fancy, have shot up into whole systems of philosophy or bodies of divinity, and have obstructed truth for thousands of years. The Essay should exemplify its statement by some of the most signal instances of this capacity in which the imagination has held the Reason of Man.' Thus the picturesque dogma of a ruined world has had a most pernicious fascination over nations of believers. It was an error locked with their life. They gave up the ghost for the love of this lye. And it clings, to this day, in the high places of know

I "Man," says Brown, "loves what is simple much, but he loves what is mysterious more. I am persuaded,' said Fontenelle, that, if the majority of mankind could be made to see the order of the universe such as it is, as they would not remark in it any virtues attached to certain numbers, nor any properties inherent in certain planets, nor fatalities in certain times and revolutions of these, they would not be able to restrain themselves on the sight of this admirable regularity and beauty from crying out with astonishment, "What is this all?""'BROWN's Philosophy (R. W. E.).