THE STORM-LIGHT. THERE is a mood which can not tolerate Wherewith the Undeceived would beguile The rage of the common Hours, whose tramplings fall From the heart's thunder-cloud; that forked smile Ah me! how sad is Truth! All things do wear Even kindliest spirits jest while they do bear O'er the world's blighted hopes their many-colour'd pall. THE WAIL OF THE IMPATIENT. "We labour but in vain!—The unrest of thought; A palsied, purposeless, and nerveless Thing, Did Desolation wait; around his brain A numbing wreath of venom'd scorn was tied. "Hope hath brought forth a curse: we labour, but in vain!" FAITH-THE COMFORTER. O, not "in vain"!-Even poor rotting weeds Out of whose dryness, when cold Night dissolves Of healthiest promise leap rejoicingly : Therefore hold on thy way, all undismay'd At the bent brows of Fate, untiringly! Knowing this-that through all woe our earth involves, Z. Man a necessary Agent.-Man is born without his own consent; his organization does in no wise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad-happy or miserable-wise or foolish-reasonable or irrational, without his will going for any thing in these various states; nevertheless, in despite of the shackles by which he is bound, it is pretended he is a free agent. It may be said that necessity strikes at the root of morality to which I would answer, "Are there none who do evil without believing in necessity? And may not men believe themselves equally impelled to do good?"-D'Holbach. Investigation. There is no proper boundary to human investigation but Whatever the faculties enable it to underthe capacity of the human mind. stand, it ought to examine without any restraint on the freedom of its inquiry, and with no other limit as to its extent than that which its great Author has fixed, by withholding from it the power to proceed farther. When the means of conducting the human understanding to its highest perfection shall have become generally understood, this freedom of inquiry will not only be universally allowed, but early and anxiously inculcated as a duty of primary and essential obligation.-Dr. Southwood Smith. Knowledge and Belief.-As our knowledge is supplied by our own individual sensations, and our belief by the attested sensations of others, it is possible, while pretending to communicate knowledge, only to communicate belief. This we know to be the system pursued in all our schools and colleges, where the truths of the most demonstrable sciences are presented under the disguise of oral or written lessons, instead of being exposed, in practical illustrations, to the eye, and the ear, and the touch, in the simple, incontrovertible fact. This method, while it tends to hide and perpetuate the errors of teachers, so does it also inculcate credulity and blind belief in the scholar, and finally establishes the conclusion in the mind, that knowledge is compounded of words, and signs, and intellectual abstractions, instead of facts and human sensations.-Frances Wright. IF Thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride, Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used; that thought with him Is in its infancy. The man, whose eye Is ever on himself, doth look on one, The least of Nature's works, one who might move The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds Unlawful, ever. O be wiser, Thou! Instructed that TRUE KNOWLEDGE LEADS TO LOVE; True dignity abides with him alone Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, Can still suspect, and still revere himself, Wordsworth. THE WORLD'S TOLERATION. A SUMMARY OF EVILS. WHO says that the world is intolerant? Let us not be misunderstood! We have thrown hard words at the world: we did not mean to hurt it. We have accused the world of "manifold sins and wickedness, from time to time most grievously committed." Let us now think about its virtues! To begin with what is not exactly a virtue, though it wears its semblance, on which, indeed, the world prides itself, as if it were never so virtuous-THE WORLD'S TOLERATION; an inexhaustible theme. What is there which it does not tolerate? It tolerates ROYALTY-with all its family of lies and outrages; such as misrule, and useless offices, and profligacy, and pensions, and state-churches for show, and treason against liberty, and selling of one's country, and wholesale murder sometimes called war, and robbery-sometimes thought legislation, and national degradation and ignorance, and inanity throned in the place of wisdom, and a preferring of hypocrisy and outward show to intrinsic worth, and the dividing men into fractions to preserve the "balance" of power, and the desolation of vast territories to fill a treasury, and incessant agonies of millions of more worth than the thing upon the throne, and broken hearts innumerable. Royalty, the parent of this monstrous sarm, is tolerated by the world. O gentle world! much-abused world! most patient world! that puttest up with thine own injury, and meekly waitest the smiters' pleasure: and this long-suffering world, that seeketh not its own, is called intolerant! Show we further proof of its abundant tolerance! The world tolerates PRIESTCRAFT-that most irreligious Thing, that master curse, which has made our beautiful earth a hell, filling man's home with strife and horrible fears and inexpressible agonies; Priestcraft, that great hypocrisy, which, lying to the soul of man, unblushingly calls God the father of its lies which haunts the consciencious with dread of sin, and terrible doubtings, and faithlessness in good; and which is the especial educator of falsehood, and employer of dissension, and maddening and maddest injury, to work its malignantly selfish purposes. Priestcraft is tolerated in all its forms, from the courtly insolence and rapacity of episcopal domination, to the raving of cursing independents, and the sneaking and truckling worldliness of the "supported by voluntary contributions." The mark of the Beast is on them all; yet all are tolerated by the world's-weakness shall we call it? The world tolerates SLAVERY-the desperate and woful slavery of the many for the selfish gratification and pampering of the few; the enslaving of the more beautiful half of humanity by the more brutal; the mental slavery of the whole race; the wrongful serving of the intellectual by the moral, whereas the intellect should ever minister to morality, having no other purpose; the servile following of opinion; and the immoral, idiot obedience to dogma, to custom, to prejudice, to unruly appetite, to fear, to hatred, to anger, to contempt, and to all other such tyrants over poor dim-eyed and fainthearted human creatures, who think themselves the children of God, and despise each other for being of the same family. All this slavery the world says is very tolerable; and would not alter it, no, "not for the world." And COMMERCE is allowed to be very tolerable: ay, tolerable-with all its inevitable associations of selfishness, heart-burning, jealousy, competition, isolation, cunning, fraud, and callousness; inequality of fortune, producing the extreme of misery; the gain of one at the expense of many; waste of labour; the impoverishing of communities; the debasing of humanity by the pulling down of all spiritual soarings into the muck of sordidness and moneygathering sophistry; universal dishonesty and deadness of heart; and the blocking up the entrance to the temple of God with ingots of gold which no man may carry away. All this is esteemed very endurable: even to this injury the world appears resigned. Even WAR is not a thing to be spoken against. Society is passing Christian. It is an evil to be borne unmurmuringly. God is good; all things are for the best: it is not seemly for man to thwart his purposes. He visits us with plagues for some beneficial end: therefore we have doctors. War is so tolerable, that bishops support it; the Head of the Church lets havoc loose; poets write "Thanksgiving Odes" to compliment victorious murder, and to praise God for his proper ordering of the affair; and the Nation pays for it:pays for what? for infamy; for blowing up ships; for sacking and burning towns; for ravaging fertile lands; for maiming and slaying with variety of torture thousands of sensitive beings, and for sending the bloodhound Agony to hunt down the hearts of widows and orphans; for demoralizing both victors and vanquished; for burthening with excessive taxation and high-heaped misery that portion of the community which is least able to bear it; and for retarding the progression of humanity in good toward happiness. The world tolerates MARRIAGE-ay, Marriage Laws: and this albeit there is daily evidence of the intolerable weight of miseries thereby engendered. Though Marriage-Laws have rendered the manifestations of Love fewer than angels' visits, though they have ordered the respectably married into a state of degradation, lower than the mere "brute beasts that have no understanding"; still the world allows it. The world tolerates PROSTITUTION and its most revolting consequences. It could not suffer Marriage without it. The world tolerates INCEST. Noble and gentle men, and honourable and delicate ladies, cast out their nameless children into the social desert; brothers and sisters, thus neglected, and unacquainted with each other, meet and marry the world, with all its horror at brothers and sisters loving one another, permits their connection on such conditions. There are many far worse instances of the world's consideration of this subject. The world tolerates OBSCENITY. A "very respectable" man owned to making a clear profit of £1300 a year by the sale of prints of the most lascivious character. Men of talent spend their lives in the production of these proofs of foul-mindedness and worse than bestiality, for the especial delight of the refined and intellectual, the aristocracy; and a member of the very highest station in society, elegant and polished, no doubt-possibly a regular church-goer, left at his death a collection of disgusting engravings valued at some thousands of pounds. All sorts of INJUSTICES the tolerant world endures. The depriving all, save a fraction of the community, of their social rights; the treating the great mass of the people as mere beasts of burthen; the preference of fraudulent wealth to the honesty that wealth had plundered; the privileging wilful idleness, and punishing with stripes and starvation those who are worn to the heart with long and unrewarded labour; the injustice of dividing men into castes; the injustice of the law of primogeniture-the robbing all but one of a family, for the sake of that one; the bastardizing those who did not beget themselves; the insolences of game-laws, church-rates, tithes, excise-laws, corn-laws, and such like; that most insolent injustice of usurping wrongthe denying the labourer's right to the produce of his own labour, the denial of his right to existence; the unreasonableness of punishing men for offences which the constitution of society has compelled; the unjust folly of private condemnations before judgment, and of judgment without evidence, or, at best, with partial and insufficient evidence; the injustice of anger, hatred, or contempt; the foolishness of repentance;-Oh! the count of the manifold Injustices weighs heavily upon the heart of him who but attempts to reckon them: yet the world looks on complacently, and disturbs not itself to accuse the evil, even to its own intense lovingness. Can the world complain of CRUELTY? Unnecessary and inconsequential or arbitrary punishments, of all kinds, may be considered cruelties, savage and barbarous cruelties; to how great an extent publicly licensed here may be seen in the following Digest of Gaol Returns for the year of Christianity, 1836. Men and Women imprisoned for want of proper Education. Imprisoned upwards of three years 16,418 1,289 592 3,229 99,127 20,456 74 91 Imprisoned before trial, six months and upwards And one person actually confined for more than THREE YEARS before trial. Punishments (such as whipping, solitary confinement, and hard labour) for offences committed in prison At the time of the returns Children under twelve years of age 42,549 2,680 1,851 945 All this is atrocious, because unnecessary, cruelty. Great rewards are offered for the apprehension of murderers: and why is so much trouble taken to find out the offender? That he may be corrected? O, no! It is done merely to prove that the Government has no objection to follow his example, and murder him to show its detestation of his offence. One of a gang of thieves is admitted King's (we should now say Queen's) Evidence: that is, temptation is thrown out to induce a far greater depravity than is necessarily the concomitant of felony. (There should be honour even among thieves: there is no evil so great as the destruction of faith between man and man.) Is such a state of things endurable? "Very endurable, very tolerable!" replies the imperturbable world. No wonder then, when men wantonly and needlessly torment each other, that the brutal treatment of brutes is deemed no offence. None at all, for the little displays of the Society for the annoyance of cruel costermongers and cab-drivers, are not worth noticing. These outrageously virtuous people never meddle with those for whom eels are skinned alive, and cod cut into slices alive, and lobsters boiled alive; they do not prevent the bleeding of calves to whiten the veal for lordly tables, the plucking of poultry alive for the "very reverend ;" and as to angling, hunting, coursing, pheasant and partridge shooting, all for pleasure; as to agonizing and killing horses in racing and travelling 'tis for their own enjoyment; very tolerable-to the sufferers. Even LYING, barefaced and braving censure, the world reproves not. Oaths are multiplied and insisted on, though they be ever and invariably falsehoods. Lawgivers lie by virtue of their office; in the same breath calling each other false and honest, proving themselves the first: being politically notorious liars, "without any reflection upon their personal character," as men wear masks and blame the vizor for the deceit. Priests lie at the altar; and the pious repeat their words. Trade is one monstrous lie: Society an incessant liar. Men lie in "God's House," in their homes, in the public ways; everywhere and at all times; they equivocate toward strangers, with their companions, to themselves in their solitude. The whole intercourse of life is deception. No man utters what he thinks: his every look is put on; his every tone and gesture is a lie. Is this tolerable? "Wherefore not?" says the world. That IGNORANCE is tolerated, is evident even from the miseries we have cited, all of which are indisputably the results of Ignorance. Ignorance is especially fostered by pious people. Governments encourage Ignorance. The intentions of our own Government are very apparent. In the present year their grant for National Education is exactly £30,000: their grant for Stables at Windsor (including a riding-house, for the Queen requires the exercise of riding) is just £70,000. Certainly, in our part of the world, Ignorance is suffered to live--ay, and to thrive. |