GOD, MAN'S SOLE COMPANION 131 everywhere distinguishes him. God's truth like a seal is impressed on our souls. This is why the worst man living "Knows, in his conscience, more Of what right is, than arrives at birth In the best man's acts."1 "It is one thing to know and another to practise;" so the good man knows in a better way. As no two faces are alike, no two leaves identical in form, so the impress of God's seal of truth is not identical in every soul. It is the same truth, but expressed differently to each. This is why every man's soul is the single soul in the world to him. "My own, the single soul," 2 pursues its "lone way ”—lone, because no man can so intimately sound the depths and explore the recesses of his companion's soul as to obtain any real intimacy with it. Disparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone! Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,- This awful fact is the most solemn of our existence; we have one companion only—God! Another proof of the dignity of our life. It 1 Christmas Eve. 2 Asolando: "Reverie." 3 Ferishtah's Fancies: "A Camel-Driver." 132 LOVE CONDUCTS US TO GOD follows, then, that the soul is the most precious thing in the world in God's sight. Says Guido1 "Christ's maxim is-one soul outweighs the world." This accounts for "the terrible patience of God." "Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure."2 What entered into us, all that really influences us, lasts ever, and is past recall. "What once lives never dies."3 Attaining to a beginning here, it can have no end; it must ever gain and never lose aught. Browning's "sun sets to rise again," his daylight does not finish in death "I shall behold Thee, face to face, O God, and in Thy light retrace How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!"5 The soul having learned that love has ever been the sole good of life on earth, shall arise made perfect, because human love is an emanation of the Divine, and must return to its Source. "Love guides the Mortal to the Maker." But the sceptic will reply: All this is poetry. What has science to do with such dreams and ideas? A French critic on Wordsworth once 1 The Ring and the Book: "Guido," 1. 359. 2 Rabbi Ben Ezra. 3 Parleyings with Gerard de Lairesse. 5 Christmas Eve. POETRY AND SCIENCE 133 said, that owing to the special tendency to science and to its all-devouring force, poetry would cease to be read in fifty years. Walt Whitman remarks on this that "the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only." 1 I have elsewhere shown that this is the teaching of Professor Tyndall.2 "The experimental philosopher," he says, in his Scientific Use of the Imagination," is constantly carried beyond the margin of his senses. Imagination with him does not sever itself from the world of fact; [but] his mind must realize the subsensible world and possess a pictorial power." The poet and the man of science, being therefore "two halves of a dissevered world," cannot do without each other, and we have as much warranty for listening to our Browning as we have to our Huxley. Scientists themselves admit this. The greatest of them are as fully alive to the mystery of matter as the poets. The mystery begins where the not-living becomes the living, and scientists do not hesitate to say that it will never be solved. It culminates in man, who is self-conscious, and can speculate on his own origin and destiny. 1 My Book and I. 2 Browning as a Scientific Poet. 134 MAN'S UNIQUE DESTINY Science has never pretended to explain to us how the beef and bread of Stratford-on-Avon became transformed into the Hamlet of Shakespeare. Science confesses she must rest content with observing the facts, without making any attempt to explain the transmutation. "Man's destiny is to occupy the borderland where matter and spirit meet, the lowest in the order of spirits, the highest of corporeal forms, in whom the marriage between spirit and nature is consummated. Man was to be the keystone in the arch of God's creation, binding together the two worlds of spirit and matter in a close and living union. Therefore he was not created for a momentary existence on earth, and then to disappear for ever, or only to survive as an incomplete being. He dies, but he will rise again to be the living link, the harmonizing chord of these two great realms throughout eternity." 1 Every fresh revelation we obtain from the physical world, so far from helping us to understand the spiritual world and tear the veil from its mysteries, serves but to enlarge the domain of the spiritual world, so that we are led to think at times that perhaps all is spirit; for nothing seems to be real but force, and force in its essence we cannot understand. "Science has opened up such elevating views of the mystery of material existence, that if 1 Natural Religion, Franz Hettinger, D.D. THE SOUL IMPERISHABLE 135 poetry had not bestowed herself to handle this theme in her own way, she would have been left behind by her plodding sister. Science knows that matter is not, as we fancied, certain stolid atoms which the forces of nature vibrate through and push and pull about; but that the forces and the atoms are one mysterious, imperishable identity, neither conceivable without the other. She knows, as well as the poet, that destructibility is not one of nature's words; that it is only the relationship of things-tangibility, visibility-that are transitory. She knows that body and soul are one, and proclaims it undauntedly, regardless, and rightly regardless, of inferences. Timid onlookers, aghast, think it means that soul is body-means death for the soul. But the poet knows it means body is soul, the great whole imperishable; in life and in death continually changing substance, always retaining identity. For if the man of science is happy about the atoms, if he is not baulked or baffled by apparent decay or destruction, but can see far enough into the dimness to know that not only is each atom imperishable, but that its endowments, characteristics, affinities, electric ard other attractions and repulsions-however suspended, hid, dormant, masked, when it enters into new combinations-remain unchanged, be it for thousands of years, and, when it is again set free, manifest themselves in the old way |