As to poetry. Literature holds a middle position; it cannot indeed pretend to the rank either of pure poetry or pure science; but on the one side it is moulded by principles of Art, on the other it is the expression of the Opinion of powerful minds, that is, of an opinion which is the pioneer of science. aiming at entertainment it is art, at truth it is knowledge; and it is to the labourers in the field of general literature that is committed the maintenance and advancement of the general or non-technical culture and education of the community. § 44. 1. It has been shown in § 38, that the moral sense in its operation subordinates all feelings, and all objects whatever, to two emotions which mutually sustain and interpenetrate each other, love and justice; and that it forms of these an ideal which governs the whole of life. The effecting of this subordination in thought and in act may be called the passion of morality. When this moral ideal has been formed, there arises in it another desire, the desire of feeling it in its greatest intensity, both for the sake of the feeling itself and also in order thereby to effect the subordination of feeling and action, the moral government of life, more thoroughly and securely. These two passions or desires, the one of governing life, the other of intensifying the perception of the governing ideal itself, are inseparable and mutually supporting. This latter passion is Religion; or Religion is the passion of the ideal of the moral sense; and, far from being, as sometimes thought, a mere sentiment, it is a passion which commands action and insists on perfect obedience to its law. But the intensifying of any feeling is also the attentive analysis or knowledge of that feeling; the desire of VOL. I. X BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $43. Poetry in language. $ 44. The religious emotions. BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $ 44. greater intensity can only be gratified by closer knowledge of its framework. There arises therefore The religious a knowledge of the framework of the ideal, at the emotions. It becomes neces same time as the passion for it. 2. It is not here the place to prove that every The re 3. The term Revealed Religion is, as Coleridge truly said, a pleonasm; all religion is revealed. The term revelation means having become self-evident, or evident and incapable of proof. In this sense every immediate feeling, and time and space in all feelings, This are revealed. Religion is nothing else than those ul- 4. The Subject, at its very entrance upon the two ways described in the first paragraph of this §, finds its religious ideal distinguished from its moral ideal, and in this way: the moral ideal consists in the perfect government of its world of thought and feeling by its emotions of love and justice; these emo BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. § 44. The religious emotions. tions are bound to, or are bound up with, a world of actual feelings, thoughts, and actions, which together constitute the mind and its objects; but the religious ideal, consisting in the perfection, imagined as attained, of this government, consists in an image of which nothing is known but the two emotions of love and justice in an intensity of which there has been no other experience than this anticipatory one. The world or body of these two emotions is entirely provisional, because there is no limit to the changes which may be wrought by an infinite perseverance towards the attainment of the moral ideal. แ The 'body prepared" for the religious ideal is entirely 5. Let us now examine the emotions which arise in the Subject in the formation of the religious ideal. They will fall naturally under two heads, those which are felt towards the ideal itself, and those which are felt towards the mind of the Subject in comparison with, or relation to, the religious ideal. God, who is the religious ideal, is the framework of the emotions which are felt, as it is said, towards him. In respect of his love we must feel love; as it is said by St. John, "We love Him, because He first loved us." In respect of his justice we must feel a certain intense admiration, for that is the name of emotion which is excited by beauty or equity of form. Love and admiration when combined together are the complex emotion of Worship. The emotions felt towards our own mind in contemplation of, or relation to, God are intensifications of those of the moral sense itself; they are two, and both refer to past actions or to the present state of the mind; the first is Sin, the intensification of remorse; the second the sense of justification or approval in God's sight, which is the intensification of good conscience. 6. The emotions just described, worship, sense of sin, sense of justification, I will call the primary religious emotions; they are emotions which arise in the framework of the religious ideal, in our contemplation of God. But when we reflect farther upon the relation in which we stand to God, upon the consequences to be drawn from these emotions, as now exhibited, we necessarily arrange them in somewhat varying ways, and experience emotions correspondingly various. The reasonings which we enter on about these primary emotions exhibit aspects of the framework which have their corresponding emo BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. § 44. The religious emotions. |