Essays in Literature and HistoryFroude, James Anthony
History
Essays in Literature and History
Froude, James Anthony
History; Literature
in all, and the grave remained the extreme horizon of our hopes
and fears, the "Harmonic Pre-etablie," might be tolerated as
credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful. It is when
forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has no
natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The
world may be in the main good; while the good, from the
unknown condition of its existence, may be impossible without some
intermixture of evil; and although Leibnitz was at times staggered
even himself by the misery and wickedness which he witnessed,
and was driven to comfort himself with the reflection that this
earth might be but one world in the midst of the universe, and
perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity of stainless
globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because it was
imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark subject,
when nothing better than conjecture was attainable.
But as soon as we are told that the evil in these "automata"
of mankind, being, as it is, a necessary condition of this world
which God has called into being, is yet infinitely detestable to
God; that the creatures who suffer under the accursed necessity
of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's eyes, for doing
what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be justly
punished in everlasting fire; our hearts recoil against the paradox.
No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found
this belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the
popular creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage
of his system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the
influence of Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant,
has been so deep and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured
for himself a mere admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza
was not afraid to be consistent, even at the price of the world's
reprobation, and refused to purchase the applause of his own age
at the sacrifice of the singleness of his heart.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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