FullReads

The following passage develops Arthur Hallam’s views on religious feeling; this was the master-idea of his mind, and it would not be easy to overrate its importance. “My son, give me thine heart;”–“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God;”–“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” He expresses the same general idea in these words, remarkable in themselves, still more so as being the thought of one so young. “The work of intellect is posterior to the work of feeling. The latter lies at the foundation of the man; it is his proper self–the peculiar thing that characterizes him as an individual. No two men are alike in feeling; but conceptions of the understanding, when distinct, are precisely similar in all–the ascertained relations of truths are the common property of the race.”

Tennyson, we have no doubt, had this thought of his friend in his mind, in the following lines; it is an answer to the question, Can man by searching find out God?–

“I found Him not in world or sun,
Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;
Nor thro’ the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun:

“If e’er when faith had fallen asleep,
I heard a voice ‘believe no more,’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the godless deep;

“A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath, the heart
Stood up and answered, ‘I have felt.‘

“No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamor made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;

“And what I seem beheld again
What is, and no man understands:
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.”

This is a subject of the deepest personal as well as speculative interest. In the works of Augustin, of Baxter, Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and of Alexander Knox, our readers will find how large a place the religious affections held, in their view of Divine truth as well as of human duty. The last-mentioned writer expresses himself thus:–“Our sentimental faculties are far stronger than our cogitative; and the best impressions on the latter will be but the moonshine of the mind, if they are alone. Feeling will be best excited by sympathy; rather, it cannot be excited in any other way. Heart must act upon heart–the idea of a living person being essential to all intercourse of heart. You cannot by any possibility cordialize with a mere ens rationis. ‘The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,’ otherwise we could not ‘have beheld his glory,’ much less ‘received of his fulness.'”[5]

[Footnote 5: Remains, vol. iii. p. 105.]

Our young author thus goes on:–

“This opens upon us an ampler view in which the subject deserves to be considered, and a relation still more direct and close between the Christian religion and the passion of love. What is the distinguishing character of Hebrew literature, which separates it by so broad a line of demarcation from that of every ancient people? Undoubtedly the sentiment of erotic devotion which pervades it. Their poets never represent the Deity as an impassive principle, a mere organizing intellect, removed at infinite distance from human hopes and fears. He is for them a being of like passions with themselves,[6] requiring heart for heart, and capable of inspiring affection because capable of feeling and returning it. Awful indeed are the thunders of his utterance and the clouds that surround his dwelling-place; very terrible is the vengeance he executes on the nations that forget him: but to his chosen people, and especially to the men ‘after his own heart,’ whom he anoints from the midst of them, his ‘still, small voice’ speaks in sympathy and loving-kindness. Every Hebrew, while his breast glowed with patriotic enthusiasm at those promises, which he shared as one of the favored race, had a yet deeper source of emotion, from which gushed perpetually the aspirations of prayer and thanksgiving. He might consider himself alone in the presence of his God; the single being to whom a great revelation had been made, and over whose head an ‘exceeding weight of glory’ was suspended. For him the rocks of Horeb had trembled, and the waters of the Red Sea were parted in their course. The word given on Sinai with such solemn pomp of ministration was given to his own individual soul, and brought him into immediate communion with his Creator. That awful Being could never be put away from him. He was about his path, and about his bed, and knew all his thoughts long before. Yet this tremendous, enclosing presence was a presence of love. It was a manifold, everlasting manifestation of one deep feeling–a desire for human affection.[7] Such a belief, while it enlisted even pride and self-interest on the side of piety, had a direct tendency to excite the best passions of our nature. Love is not long asked in vain from generous dispositions. A Being, never absent, but standing beside the life of each man with ever watchful tenderness, and recognized, though invisible, in every blessing that befell them from youth to age, became naturally the object of their warmest affections. Their belief in him could not exist without producing, as a necessary effect, that profound impression of passionate individual attachment which in the Hebrew authors always mingles with and vivifies their faith in the Invisible. All the books of the Old Testament are breathed upon by this breath of life. Especially is it to be found in that beautiful collection, entitled the Psalms of David, which remains, after some thousand years, perhaps the most perfect form in which the religious sentiment of man has been embodied.