nature accrues from their alliance with imaginatiye sentiments, yet it does by no means follow that such sentiments ought to supplant the genuine principles of morals, wherever these may take effect. No one would maintain such a doctrine in the abstract; nevertheless, when we turn to the real world, we find that true virtue and piety have always had to contend (and often with little success) against those splendid forms of excellence which are but vice in disguise, and which owe all their specious graces and fair colours to the admixture we are speaking of. The unalterable maxims of rectitude, purity and mercy, such as we find them in the Scriptures, being well understood and firmly instated in their just authority, then indeed we may allow the imagination to take the part that belongs to it as the general cement-or as the common medium of the various ingredients of animal, social, and intellectual life. There meets us however a special difficulty in assigning its proper office to this faculty when it comes to mingle itself, as it readily does, with the malign emotions; and this embarrassment is much enhanced by those modes of feeling which are found to have got possession of every lettered people. How large a portion of the pleasurable excitement that attends the reading of history springs directly from the recommendations which vindictive or inexorable passions borrow from imaginative F emotions! Then in the world of fictiondramatic or poetic, perhaps half of the power which such creations possess over the mind is attributable to the same cause. The moralist and the preacher (especially when he has to do with the educated classes) and if he would discharge his office without shewing favour to inveterate prejudices, finds that he has to loosen many of the most cherished associations of sentiment, and must denounce as purely evil very much that is passionately admired, and will be eagerly emulated. To affirm in absolute and exclusive terms that the irascible passions ought in no case to be allowed to blend with the imagination, so as may fit them to enkindle emotions of pleasure or admiration, would be going very far, and might bring an argument into serious embarrassments. We stop short then of so stern a conclusion, and shall urge only this more general rule, that the principles of benevolence, and of forbearance, and meekness, and gentleness, and humility, as taught in the discourses of Christ, and as enforced by his apostles, should in all instances to which they are clearly applicable, be carried fully home, notwithstanding the repugnance of certain modes of feeling commonly honoured as generous and noble; and moreover that every one professing obedience to the Gospel should exercise an especial vigilance toward that entire class of sentiments over which profane history, romance, poetry, and the drama, have shed a glory. The time perhaps shall come-nay we devoutly expect it, when, by the universal diffusion of a sound and pure Ethics-the ethics of the Bible, no room shall be left, no need shall be felt for the chastening influence which hitherto the imagination has exerted over the ferocious dispositions of mankind. Yes, an age shall come, when the gods and heroes of history shall hasten to those shades of everlasting forgetfulness which have closed upon their patrons the gods and heroes of mythology. In the same day the charm of fiction shall be dissolved, and the gaudiness of false sentiment, in all kinds, shall be looked at with the cold contempt which now we bestow upon the follies of false worship. Then too, the romance (as well practical as literary) of this nineteenth century shall be bound in the bundle that contains the decayed and childish fables of olden times, and both together shall be consigned, without heed or regret, to sheer oblivion. - The slow but sure progress of society brings with it many substitutions of this sort, in which a less rational principle of action gives way to one that is more so. At the present moment we occupy just that midway position which, while it allows us to gaze with idle curiosity upon the blood-stained stage of chivalry, and upon the deluged field of lawless ambition, quite forbids that any such modes of conduct should find a place among us as living realities. We are too wise and virtuous to give indulgence to that to which we largely give our admiration! May not yet another step or two be taken on the path of reason, and then we shall cease even to admire that which we have long ceased to tolerate? So already it has actually happened in relation to those malign and sanguinary religious excitements which a few centuries ago kindled entire communities, and inflamed kings and mendicants, nobles and serfs, priests and wantons, abstracted monks and the dissolute rabble, with one purpose of sacred ambition. Though we now peruse with wonder and curiosity the story (for example) of the Crusades, there are very few readers in the present day-perhaps hardly one, who can rouse up a sympathy with that vehement feeling which was the paramount motive of the enterprise. Only let us strip the history of the crusades of all its elements of martial and secular glory, and the simple religious residue- the proper fanaticism of the drama, would scarcely touch any modern imagination. How much more is this true of those horrid crusades of which the internal enemies of the Church of Rome have, at different times, been the victims! All feeling of alliance with the illusions that gave impulse to such abhorrent intestine wars has (do we assume too much ?) utterly passed away, nor could by any means be rekindled; and the two emotions of pity for the sufferers, and of detestation of the actors in the scenes of fratricide, are the only sentiments. which the narrative can call up. Yet there was a time when men--born of women, and fashioned like ourselves—yes, and men softened by education, and not uninformed by Christianity-saints and doctors, delicate recluses, and unearthly contemplatists-men who slept only three hours in the twenty-four, and prayed six or ten-when such men gave all the passion of their souls, and · all the eloquence of their lips, to the work of hunting thousands of their fellows, innocent and helpless, into the greedy fires of the Church! Thus it appears that the very order of sentiment which once was allowed and lauded as magnanimous, and even divine, we have learned to regard as either purely ridiculous, or as abominable. A like reprobation inevitably awaits (if mankind is really advancing on the road of virtue) every mode of feeling which, being essentially malevolent, draws specious colours from the imagination. That which is true and just, in conduct and character, must at length supplant whatever, if stripped of its decorations, is loathsome or absurd. So certainly as the calm reason of Christianity spreads itself through the world, will the ground fall in beneath the gorgeous |