Images de page
PDF
ePub

What may again be noted is, that this biblical language in the internal sense is as definite and immutable as any of the languages which the learned spend their lives in studying. And further, that although everything in Egypt denotes scientifics, yet there is no sameness or confusion in the terms, but each symbol or ideograph carries a distinct signification in the series according to the subject treated of. All things in the spiritual Egypt of the Word are wanted to make up the entire Egypt. The scientific faculty which is the mind of the natural man, the clear beginning of him, is a realm or universe, peopled with all external and internal objects, and the management of that realm has countless exact issues for good and for evil. The science-man is a whole man with every organ in him, from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet. The Word, if we may use the thought, looks at Egypt through Israel, at the natural through the spiritual man; and hence it contains things concerning Egypt which are not written, and scarcely hinted at, in the hieroglyphic remains. The Word contains the real history of Egypt its full inheritance of representatives and ceremonials from the Ancient Church; and then its perversion of these Church-powers through long dynasties of idolatries and enchantments until Egypt is no more.

From the signification of Egypt as science, a presumption is raised that it was indeed the earliest of the cultivated nations. For scientifics ending in knowledges are the proper beginning of the spiritual mind, which without them we may say has no basis, no bones, and no definite human form. And a people that specially represented religious scientifics would stand as the primitive schoolroom of the Ancient Church which as a divine Eon followed the extinction of the Most Ancient Church.

Finally, if you desire to understand Egypt, study its true hierology in the spiritual sense of the inspired Word. It is necessarily and inevitably a religious study.

LXV.-FUTURITY VERSUS IMMORTALITY.

The spiritual world makes history because every nation has its ancestors connected with it, and either above it or below it; and from its own free determination, it receives its life from these invisible but immense kingdoms. Were their pressure estopped, the human will and understanding would be at an end, and the race would be extinct. God rules man indeed from Himself, but angels, spirits, and demons are also His ministers and administrators. An irrelevant word occurs to me here. A school of materialists holds that there is something selfish and shocking to morality in the desire of heavenly happiness for the individual; that he ought to work for the good of future generations, and not otherwise for his own good. The same of course applies to an age; it ought to work for the next age; and so forth. And the most future age of course has the greatest claim of all. Somewhat as a great man still among us, holds that numerical voting-power should increase the further the poor people are from the centres and opportunities of instruction and intelligence. Let us not thus have our "eyes in the ends of the earth." The people directly and remotely above us are the future ages at which we have to aim, to go towards them here, and join them at last, and increase the joy of their power. They are or should be our future ages. The people beyond us in the coming time are not our future at all. They will have their own lives given, and the battle of them given. And if by the regeneration of our hearts, which is our salvation by the Lord, we transmit to them a new and virtuous heredity, we have done the veriest best for them by our useful lives, and in this one essential embracing two points, the present and two futurities, we can safely leave our descendants to take care of themselves; having our little historical example also before them. If on the other hand, we take the downward road, each of us makes one demon

the more to tempt and injure the family heredity frail in us all. Thus no one can work selfishly for his own salvation, but in battling for it and attaining it, he clears and purges human nature, and like his Master, Christ, inevitably works towards the saving of the whole race of man.

It is possible that the materialist tenderness to posterity has in it a large self-love, the very quality which is the serpent-egg of all known immorality. As thus: It is intended to compensate for the annihilation of the individual. To transmit this latter falsehood to human beings is to bind them in our special chains of disbelief; to dominate discovery and experience in their highest meaning and possibility. It is to dictate "the way, the truth, and the life" to those who are to come after us, out of our own present pates. The fruit must be immobility, the sameness of ages; the sap of time stagnating in the branches of the world-tree. Ultimately the death of all new knowledges and sciences in particular. For the very spirit of knowing is killed by it. We are the men, and wisdom dies with us. Posterity lives only upon us. To eat our flesh and drink our blood is its meat and drink. On the other hand the knowledge of God creating the conscience, and hourly purging the individual life, enables us to die daily; in the inner sense to have no care for the morrow, but to let its things care for themselves; and to leave posterity unbound by heredities which it is our constant business to abjure and eliminate. There is no selflove in this, but freedom from our dead oddities, from ourselves, Freedom transmitted to our children's children.

For our dear posterity, which the positivists would bind us to endow and establish, we have a typical lesson to learn in the land of Egypt which inherits the sepulchres of its past. By grace of dryness, a notable quality, its Pharaohs, dead and gone, have delivered their wealth of monuments, mummies, and selfhoods, to the future, and that future an Egypt which has no existence. And following this example, the inventors of our own dead dogmas, of which the pervert

Egypt of the Word is a standing representative, bequeath their monuments to the life of a posterity of which whoso dreams, let him dream. If we are wise we shall visit these simulacra carefully, as insalubrious, and as the abodes and breaths of doleful creatures. If we are foolish, we shall inhabit them, and aim to consign our next generations to their valleys of tombs, their sands and their wildernesses.

LXVI.-BEGINNINGS.

Everything has a beginning, and that beginning a ground before it; but no beginning has an irrelevant or inadequate ground. The arts and sciences of life all commence from small germs, and proceed often to surprising maturities. We must not conclude from this slender initiament that they grow in savage soil; but rather that the ground is tender,. and has been long preparing for them, though not aware of them. They are not developments but implanted lives, not accidents but organisms, not protoplasms but square seeds. No new beginning is a development, though it seems to develop itself from circumstances. It always develops itself according to circumstances, but never from them. Real initiation is not in the nature of things. Originality has long and exact lines of ancestors above and behind, and also below; and it is original in conscious people because they feel and think themselves origins, and the claim is allowed by the supreme Giver, and contentedly endorsed all round. Yet the beginning is not in them excepting as the beginning. of a child is unconsciously in the father, who knows nothing. of the organism which proceeds by him.

The same is the case with the development of important nations, which seem at a certain time to put off a rude or barbarous state, and to enter upon a historical career of greatness. They were not decaying when they were unnoticed or seemingly unimportant, but slumbering and to be

awakened. They had in them the stuff or matrix which was fitted to receive a new impregnation. A condition of their infancy was that they knew nothing of the career which was to come to them. When Abram was led out of Ur of the Chaldees as one of the heads of a pastoral clan, and became the Patriarch Abraham, he was chosen for a quality in which the Jewish Dispensation could be implanted, a quality of reverence for external rituals which was unique, and which no men of the surrounding nations possessed. They were better than he; but they had not this needful quality; and so, as a ritual church was to be established, Abraham and his descendants, for that purpose of use, were the chosen people. But they themselves, with their father Abraham, originated nothing, but were only the fitting ground in which the Jewish future could become a seed, be vitalized and be enacted.

This is a typical instance, but it is also true of the modern nations. They similarly have emerged from rudeness, and as we call it from its grossness, barbarism; but the barbarism was full of industry, even of the industry of war. It was instinct with active will and understanding, and so far was not in the lines of decay. It wanted; nothing but impregnations, square seeds of the future, and they always, if good, come from above, and beget an advancing race: and if predominant, ensure it a long, or what is the same thing, a useful future. Their inheritances as they proceed become larger, more honest and more polite. When the crude races from which we have sprung naturally were born as nations, there was nothing in them of the history through which they have lived, but it is given to them year by year, according to their faculty of reception, as an unintermitting life. Our analogy of the seed flatly contradicts this in appearance, for does not the seed contain its future plant, and evolve itself into stalk,' flower, fruit, and seeds by the heat and light of the suns of spring and summer? We reply, there is an end behind it which does it all, and is the current and present ancestor of

« PrécédentContinuer »