Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland : $b or, The traditional history of Cromarty — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland : $b or, The traditional history of Cromarty
John Stuart Mill · en
Were I asked to illustrate my meaning by an example or two, I do not
know where I could find instances better suited to my purpose than in
the imaginative extravagancies of some of our wilder sectaries. There
is no principle which so deals in unhappy marriages, and as unhappy
divorces, as the fanatical; or that so ceaselessly employs itself in
separating what Heaven has joined, and in joining what Heaven has
separated. Man, I have said, was made for the world he lives in;--I
should have added, that he was intended also for another world.
Fanaticism makes a somewhat similar omission, only it is the other way.
It forgets that he is as certainly a denizen of the present as an heir
of the future; that the same Being who has imparted to him the noble
sentiment which leads him to anticipate an hereafter, has also bestowed
upon him a thousand lesser faculties which must be employed now; and
that, if he prove untrue to even the minor end of his existence, and
slight his proper though subordinate employments, the powers which
he thus separates from their legitimate objects must, from the very
activity of their nature, run riot in the cloisters in which they are
shut up, and cast reproach by their excesses on the cause to which
they are so unwisely dedicated. For it is one thing to condemn these
to a life of celibacy, and quite another to keep them chaste. We may
shut them up, like a sisterhood of nuns, from the objects to which
they ought to have been united, but they will infallibly discover some
less legitimate ones with which to connect themselves. Self-love, and
the natural desire of distinction--proper enough sentiments in their
own sphere--make but sad work in any other. The imagination, which
was so bountifully given us to raise its ingenious theories as a kind
of scaffolding to philosophical discovery, is active to worse purpose
when revelling intoxicated amid the dim fields of prophecy, or behind
the veil of the inner mysteries. Reason itself, though a monarch in
its own proper territories, can exert only a doubtful authority in the
provinces which lie beyond. Indeed, the whole history of fanaticism,
from when St. Anthony retired into the deserts of Upper Egypt to burrow
in a cell like a fox-earth, down to the times that witnessed some of
the wilder heresiarchs of our own country, working what they had faith
enough to deem miracles, is little else than a detail of the disorders
occasioned by perversions of this nature.
[Sidenote: THE DEVOTIONAL SENTIMENT.]