Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.Fuller, Margaret
History
Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
Fuller, Margaret
Essays; Literature -- History and criticism; Poetry
1st. They appeal either to the natural or regenerate man, as suits their
purpose. Sometimes all traditions and their literal interpretations are
right; sometimes it is impossible to interpret them aright, unless
according to some peculiar doctrine, and the natural inference of the
common mind would be an error.
2d. They strain, but vainly, to show the New Testament no improvement on
the Old, and themselves in harmonious relations to both. On this subject
we would confidently leave the arbitration to a mind--could such a one
be found--sufficiently disciplined to examine the subject, and new both
to the New Testament and this volume, as that of Rammohun Roy might have
been, whether its views are not of the same strain that Jesus sought to
correct and enlighten among the Jews, and whether the writers do not
treat the teachings of the new dispensation most unfairly, in their
desire to wrest them into the service of the old.
3d. Wherever there is a weak place in the argument, it is filled up by
abuse of the opposite party. The words "absurd," "infidel,"
"blasphemous," "shallow philosophy," "sickly sentimentalism," and the
like, are among the favorite missiles of these _defenders_ of the truth.
They are of a sort whose frequent use is generally supposed to argue the
want of a shield of reason and a heart of faith.
And this brings us to a more close consideration of the spirit of this
book, characterized by our contemporary as "diabolic." And we, also,
cannot excuse ourselves from marking it as, in this respect, one of the
worst books we have ever seen.
It is not merely bitter intolerance, arrogance, and want of spiritual
perception, which we have to condemn in these writers. It is a want of
fairness and honor, of which we think they must be conscious. We fear
they are of those who hold the opinion that the end sanctifies the
means, and who, by pretending to serve the God of truth by other means
than strict truth, have drawn upon the "ministers of religion" the
frequent obloquy of "priestcraft." How else are we to construe the
artful use of the words "dishonest" and "infidel," wherever they are
likely to awaken the fears and prejudices of the ignorant?
Of as bad a stamp as any is the part of this book headed "Spurious
Public Opinion." Here, as in the insinuations against Charles Burleigh,
we are unable to believe the writers to be sincere. Where we think they
are, however poor and narrow we may esteem their statement, we can
respect it, but here we cannot.
Who can believe that such passages as the following stand for any thing
real in the mind of the writer?
"Indeed, there is nothing that can possibly check the spirit of murder,
but the fear of death. That was all that Cain feared; he did not say,
People will put me in prison, but, They will put me to death; _and how
many other murders he may have committed, when released from that fear,
the sacred writer does not tell us_!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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