the pastry cook's shop opposite the theatre, and his wife is a saddler's daughter." There was something in this, certainly; and, if I could ever have dared to whistle in that gentle presence, I should surely have done so then. The lady saw her advantage, and continued, "Of course, pride, and all that sort of thing, is very wrong; but then, you see, our clergymen are so terribly bourgeois that we can't possibly see them (as you do yours in England) with the rest of our friends." "And do they not feel offended at being asked alone? "Oh dear, no !—but, to tell the truth, it is not the custom to ask them at all. They go out amongst people of their own class-lawyers, and shopkeepers, and people of that kind -but they don't expect us to invite them." Truly, a religion whose ministers are thus spoken of, and of whom so little account is made, runs a fair chance of sinking into utter oblivion and of being clean forgotten for ever and ever, like a dead man out of mind. "Beautiful women," says Heine, "beautiful women without religion are "like flowers without perfume. They "resemble cold, sober tulips, which look upon us from their china vases as "though they were also of porcelain; "and, if they could speak, they would "explain to us how naturally they grow "from a bulb, how all-sufficient it is "for any one here below not to smell "badly, and how, so far as perfume is concerned, a rational flower has no "need of it whatever." 66 His taste revolted at a defect at which his piety, since it did not exist, could take no exception. I often thought of Heine's words when I was in Germany; and to me it seemed that, the more beautiful the women, the greater their resemblance to the poet's porcelain tulips. Men often go to church because women take them there. A man's religion is often but the reflected glow of a beloved wife's devotion, or of a revered mother's holiness, though by degrees it may become his own. I need not say that amongst men in Germany infidelity is the rule, belief the excep nursing mothers of religion: from the days when Mary eagerly drank in divine truths at the feet of her Lord, from the time when the three stood weeping round the Cross, from the days of virgin martyrs to the poetic Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages down to our own times, they have never forgotten their faith or been false to their love. But in Protestant Germany it would almost seem as though the women were too much "cumbered about much serving" to have time for the beautiful charities and loving-kindnesses of Christianity. The picture drawn by a great German autho rity of the present condition of the Protestant Church in that country is a gloomy and painful one indeed. He says that "it is eaten to the core by unbelief, and sapped in its very foun"dations by infidelity." Germany does not want for theologians. Of these she has enough, just as she has eminent philosophers and geologists and naturalists, historians, and mathematicians and chemists. But talking of religion will not make a people religious, nor will discussing dogmas sow devotion and faith in unbelieving hearts. German theologians, for all their congresses, seem unable to awaken anything like true religious feelings in the hearts of the people. It may be asked, why this should be the case? The answer is not altogether easy; but it lies partly in this, that the clergy are neither respected nor esteemed, as clergy, by those above or by those below them. The cure of souls is, alas! with them, a sinecure. Germans of the upper class will tell you that they cannot associate with their clergy on terms of equality, because their clergy have no claim to be regarded as equals; because their manners are often offensive, and generally unpolished; because there are discrepancies and deficiencies in their address and general way of conducting themselves which are offensive to the prejudices of the more refined. No one who has resided long in Protestant Germany can ignore the general disregard in which the clergy are held. And yet the very persons little incongruities of word and deed, such as those to which I have alluded, are the most clamorous in condemning the spiritual pride which could prefer gospel truths at the hands of the courteous and refined rather than at those of the uncouth and tactless. They say, "If you are a Christian, you should not be so hypercritical about little things: your baker's son can preach evangelical doctrines as pure as an Archbishop. For ourselves, we do not profess these things, and therefore it is allowable for us to object to vulgarity and irrationality." Thus they would fain skilfully extricate themselves from the horns of the dilemma, and take refuge in finding fault, without any sincere desire to remedy the evil. It may be wrong to allow temporal things to outweigh spiritual; but that the things of this world do tell in the balance-ay, and heavily too cannot be denied. Were the social status of the German pastor a different one, his spiritual influence, his priestly authority, would also be different. Even in the old disreputable port-drinking, belle-toasting, fox-hunting days, our clergy were, according to their lights and after their kind, gentlemen-gentlemen of an eccentric pattern perhaps, and of a not altogether reverend cut; but, according to the fashion then in vogue, still gentlemen. They were not despised by the exclusive or sneered at by the inferior, on that score at least. Then came the days of the Wesleys and Whitfield, and the aurora of better times dawned; a more fitting order of things prevailed; and it has continued to prevail, even up to these days of muscular Christianity. But propose to a young German nobleman (the younger. son of a younger son, though he bears his title, according to the unfortunate custom there obtaining), propose, I say, to such a young "Von" that he shall become a clergyman: he will either laugh in your face with scorn and derision, or he will bluster forth huge words, and want to fight a duel with you for insultinghim! The Protestant Church of Germany has no Ritus. Their so-called Symbolical Books and our Prayer-book have nothing in common; neither has their Gesangbuch (which is nothing more nor less than a collection of hymns) any resemblance to a liturgy. There is no positive rule of proceeding in the Church services. One pastor has them performed in this way, another in that; but year by year they have grown colder and more bald, year by year fewer worshippers are seen, and, notwithstanding all the scolding of the preacher, the churches remain empty. The late King of Prussia was aware of the want of religious fervour and enthusiasm in good works, which rendered the Protestant Church in Germany a dead letter. He sought to give more form, more pomp, more beauty to its services; he created bishops and encouraged the nobility to don the cassock. But the time was not ripe. The seed fell in stony places; the episcopal attempt was not renewed; it met with immense ridicule; the King was laughed at for a pietist and an Anglomaniac; anecdotes were told to prove that religion, in so worldly-minded a prince, was but a sorry pretence concealing an attempt at more extended political power, and the movement, if movement it could be called, died a natural death. The Germans have a Reformation, but -no Church. I said at the beginning of this paper that I wished to confine myself exclusively to the social aspects of German Protestantism. With dogmas and articles of faith I have nothing whatever to do. Let men believe what they will; only let them be in earnest in that belief. It may be that out of the dust and ashes of German Protestantism a new faith shall arise, more beautiful, more tender, more enthusiastic and noble and daring and enduring, than the old. It can scarcely be that the Great Elector and the Great Reformer shall have fought so bravely with such singleheartedness, with such simple faith ir a great and good cause, to be betrayed ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE. (From the Fourth Georgic, 452-528.) Aristæus, all whose bees have perished by disease and hunger, inquires of Proteus the cause of this disaster and the remedy. Proteus replies: Nor without wrath of heaven has thee this pest overtaken. Near to her death, that snake of folds enormous beheld not, Coiled in the brake at her feet, and keeping the banks of the river. But then the choir of her equals, the wood-nymphs, with shrill lamentation Filled the high mountain tops; nor wanted voices of weeping All o'er that rugged land, by Mars beloved; and the rivers Mourned, and with high Pangæum Athenian Orithyia. He with his hollow shell his sick soul loving to solace, Thee on the lonely sea-shore, his sweetest partner, sang ever, Thee when the day was breaking, and thee when the day had departed. And on the funeral pile youths stretched in the sight of their parents; Too, too fond and forgetful! must pause and look back at; with that look Broken; the Stygian pools three times with a clamour resounded. And now adieu; I am borne by a night of darkness surrounded, Him they report for seven whole months in order unbroken, Under a lofty rock, by Strymon's desolate waters, This among icy caves to have wept, and weeping recounted; Soothing the tigers with song, and with song compelling the forest; Wails for her ravished young, whom the heartless ploughman observing Under the shadow of night, 'mid rites and orgies of Bacchus, Tearing in sunder the youth, his limbs over wide fields scattered. Nor did not then, when the head from the snow-white shoulders divided, Seaward was rolling, his voice and tongue in death that were failing, Echoed the banks with that name, with that name all the river resounded. RICHARD C. DUBLIN. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE SUBLIME. (FROM HEGEL'S ÆSTHETIC.) BY J. HUTCHISON STIRLING. [The following specimen of the matter of Hegel refers to subjects usually found interesting and easy, but a preliminary word may still prove useful. Hegel's general object is best named, perhaps, when we say that he sought thought everywhere, with the resolution of demonstrating that this thought did not exist, only unconnectedly here and there, as mere pleasing or surprising signs of intelligence, but that it constituted a system-a vast, organic, complete system --but still a system that referred itself to the unity of a single living pulse. With this general aim, he naturally found himself under an obligation to construe not only the present but the past. History became to him a very important portion of his problem, and he was compelled to philosophize it from various points of view. Of these religion was the most important. If the illumination sneeringly objected to the Jehovah of Scripture certain discrepancies, it was easy for Hegel, and without sneering, to retort, "And your être suprème, then, what relation does He bear to all these monstrous and barbarous idolatries which we find in history?" To such a question there can be no reply on the part of the illumination unless, from its atheistic section, an answer, and said, "These superstitions and idolatries cannot possibly be mere meaningless accidents in time; they must belong to a whole of which they are necessary parts." In this way he was led to present religion as a single subject gradually developing itself from Fetichism upwards, till the time was ripe and Revelation vouchsafed. The progress of art Hegel views as having been similarly conditioned-as having always constituted, indeed, but an accessory of religion. While man was yet absorbed in, and identified with, nature through the mere necessities of hunger, &c., art there could be none. Art could only begin when, in stepping back from nature, and looking at it on its own account as different from himself, man first felt wonder. Thenceforward the attempt would be to understand this different thing,-that is, to reduce its difference into his own identity. But such attempt is necessarily accompanied by the desire to express. Passing over Fetichism, &c., symbolism appears as the earliest realization of this desire both in history and reason. But symbolism will have a history of its own, and its course, too, will be from nature to spirit. At first, the two elements of the symbol-the externality or object, and the internality or meaning-are identical; then comes separation, with uncertainty and struggle, with inclination now to this side and now to that; and lastly, the externality will manifest itself as only negative, when compared with the freedom and affirmativeness of the meaning or internality. Historically, we have the first stage among the ancient Parsees, to whom light was at once the absolute and the symbol of the absolute, and for whom, consequently, art was as yet not The second stage, again, we find in the monstrous phantasticism of India. Egypt, lastly, is the land of the symbolical as such, the land where all is enigmatic, where the pyramid is a monstrous crystal that entombs a marvellous meaning, where death and the invisible world become objects of absorbing interest; where, then, we have the direct transition to the liberation of internality, meaning,-spirit. The Symbolical, then, as a whole, leads to the Sublime: Hegel's treatment of which, the Translator hopes, will prove intelligible, despite the various difficulties, whether original or imported. All turns in it on the double relation of the Infinite and the finite. When the Infinite, God, is conceived as affirmatively present in and throughout the finite, then we have the brilliance, the splendour, the universal joy of Oriental pantheism. When, again, the Infinite, God, is conceived as exalted into Himself beyond the finite, which is now a mere negative or accessory, then we have the true sublime, as in the poetry of the Hebrews. Creation as opposed to generation, the prohibition of graven images, the absence of the idea of the immortality, and yet presence of the distinction that leads to the religion of conscience-in such points some fine touches will be found. The notes are the Translator's.] THE unenigmatic manifestation of spirit, which is the aim of symbolical art, can only be attained when there is a consciousness of the import, the meaning itself, apart from the external form that would symbolize it. For on the direct visible unity of both it was, that, among the Parsees (to whom physical light not only symbolized, but was, the Absolute), the want of art depended; while, again, it was the contradiction at once of a separation and of a required unity of both that gave rise to the phantastic art of India; and, lastly, even in Egypt, the cognizableness of the free inner meaning, in independence of the manifesting form, failed, and thus furnished foundation for the obscurity and mystery of the symbolical proper. The first veritable purification, the first express separation of the absolute from the sensuously present objects, that is, from the empirical individualness of the outward, is to be sought in the Sublime; which elevates the absolute thereby brings about that firstly abstract liberation which is at least the basis of spirit. For the import, so elevated, is not yet conceived as concrete spirit; but it is regarded, nevertheless, as the selfsufficing inner that exists within itself, and that only by reason of its abstractness is incapable of finding its true expression in finite forms.1 Kant has discriminated the Sublime and Beautiful in a very interesting manner, and what he accomplishes in this connexion, in the first part of the "Kritik of Judgment," from section 20 onwards, retains-with all its prolixity, and despite his main principle that reduces all to a subjective element, as the influence of the mind, imagination, reason, &c.-its interest to this day. The reduction alluded to must, in 1 The abstractness spoken of here refers to this, that the ancient Egyptians saw that all things perished, that thus what was alone permanent (or absolute) was, as it were, abstract negativity (perishing) itself, but not that this negativity was the concrete immortal |
