Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
his fellow crusaders: it seems that he also would willingly have gone
with such an army of the faithful. But when he turns from the past to
the present, all this charity and indulgence are at an end. He finds in
his own mechanico-philosophical age a faith in accordance with its
prevailing modes of thought--faith lying at the foundation of whatever
else of doctrinal theology it possesses--a faith diffused over all
society, and taught not only in churches and chapels to pious
auditories, but in every lecture-room, and by scientific as well as
theological instructors--a faith in God, as creator of the universe, as
the demonstrated author, architect, originator, of this wondrous world;
and lo! this same philosopher who looked with encouraging complacency on
Abbot Samson bending in adoration over the exhumed remains of a fellow
mortal, and who listens without a protest to the cries of sanguinary
enthusiasm, rising from a throng of embattled Christians, steps
disdainfully aside from this faith of a peaceful and scientific age; he
has some subtle, metaphysical speculations that will not countenance it;
he demands that a faith in God should he put on some other foundation,
which foundation, unhappily, his countrymen, as yet unskilled in
transcendental metaphysics; cannot apprehend; he withdraws his sympathy
from the so trite and sober-minded belief of an industrious,
experimental, ratiocinating generation, and cares not if they have a God
at all, if they can only make his existence evident to themselves from
some commonplace notion of design and prearrangement visible in the
world. Accordingly, we have passages like the following, which it is not
our fault if the reader finds to be not very intelligible, or written
in, what our author occasionally perpetrates, a sad jargon.
"For out of this that we call Atheism, come so many other
_isms_ and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its
heels!--A SOUL is not, like wind, (_spiritus_ or breath,)
contained within a capsule; the ALMIGHTY MAKER is not like a
clockmaker that once, in old immemorial ages, having _made_ his
horologe of a universe, sits ever since and sees it go! Not at
all. Hence comes Atheism; come, as we say, many other _isms_;
and as the sum of all comes _vatetism_, the _reverse_ of
heroism--sad root of all woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man
ever saw the above said wind element inclosed within its
capsule, and finds it at bottom more deniable than conceivable;
so too, he finds, in spite of Bridgewater bequests, your
clockmaker Almighty an entirely questionable affair, a deniable
affair; and accordingly denies it, and along with it so much
else."--(P. 199.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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