When the world is seen from this spot with the eyes of lovers, with the generous feelings inspired by a noble affection which goes a great way to clear the intelligence, the qualities and the acts opposed to toleration, on many points wear no common or familiar aspect; they appear, let me tell you, startling, singular, extraordinary, and most odious. At this sunny, humble Seat we shall feel the profound wisdom and the unfathomable depth of that poor unpretending policy which Love prescribes, without pretending to discharge another's office. Indeed, the mere scene here spread out before our eyes intimates as much; for "the face of external nature," as a great author remarks, "teaches the same lesson. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When," he adds, 66 we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, or the temperance meeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, 'So hot? my little sir.'" Close and unwholesome is the artificial, uncommon atmosphere, that aspirants to singularity and eminence create for themselves; and that this is not what is natural and intended for us, appears in the pleasure which we feel when we are delivered from it; for even "From the hot, angry, crowding courts of thought Oh! earth, like man her son, is half divine." So when just liberty, and free discourse in accordance with it, are to be denied, the air is common, and to it, when seated in the Lover's bower, we can utter our complaints. "Spatiosa res est sapientia,"- "wisdom is a wide thing," and it needs space to breathe in. But the thoughts that emanate from an ambitious love of the extraordinary as a step to personal distinction, and that shun the common instincts of the heart, are not likely to yield space to others, or to inspire tolerance in any one. The tide of such unamiable passion, when strong, overflows, and gradually insinuates itself into all nooks and corners of the mind. "I see," observes an historian, "among those ambitious to play the chief parts in all differences, egotism, a contempt for men, and even a thirst for blood. Then men must receive and believe all that we like, and not doubt of it." "What tyranny!" exclaims Charron. "Whoever believes something or other thinks it charity to persuade others, and employs every thing, right or wrong, to combat their resistance; so he would use deceit, detraction, command, force, fire, and sword." There are, unhappily, many points of view from which the subject of intolerance can be made to assume a different aspect from that which it wears in the bower of lovers, and that too without the observer being conscious of any tampering on his part with his reason or his conscience. If you doubt it, you are a very daisy, as Steerforth said to young Copperfield. "The daisy of the field, at sunrise, is not fresher than you are!" There are twenty points of view at least from which intolerance can be pronounced the grand thing required. There is the narrow-minded theologian's self-created standing ground raised up by formulas misapplied, and such imposing examples even as are associated with sentences from the pen of a St. Augustin in retractions which some perhaps may think remained to be retracted. God help us! This good man in his study has books and references enough to prove and disprove any thing he likes. We at all events are no match for him. When we tell him, with an expression of horror, that some would even now make war for religion, and convert nations by bloodshed, he will grimly smile, and say, that “that is not exactly what he wants;" leaving us to read in his countenance that it is perhaps quite as well for us all that he has not exactly what he wants. There is also the politician's point of view, to which even the populace can be invited with terrible results; in which the aims of intolerance in high places are varnished by the genius and defended by the learning of parliamentary orators. There is the magistrate's point of view; the corporation point of view; the sectarian point of view; and this last multiplied ad infinitum. But for us, whose object is to see human life from the Lover's point of view, without turning over any learned folios, or hunting through any acts of parliament, or referring to reports of committees, or sentences of judges from the bench, it is easy to conceive how tolerance can be associated with a faith which doubts not, with a maintenance of every legitimate interest and right of government, which degenerates not, and with a wisdom never substituting licence for a scientific or really religious object, which disaccords not with the voice of nature and of God. The uncommon thoughts of pride are intolerant; the degree of weakness which is not general to humanity is intolerant; the vague jealousies of ignorance, when joined in an extraordinary way with a love of singularity, are intolerant; the candidates for favour with intolerant corporations are intolerant; but they who are humble with the lowly, strong in the instinctive force of love, and wise, with a sound reliance on common thoughts, find no difficulty, either speculative or practical, in the esteem and habitual exercise of toleration. It is a sad page of history, little Ignoramus, which unfolds the operation of religious, political, and national intolerance, arising from these unnatural and extraordinary ways of thinking, to which theology, governmental science, and a temporary delusion in the community, have often led. "Against her foes religion well defends Her sacred truths, but often fears her friends; If learn'd, their pride-if weak, their zeal she dreads, The holy strife of controversial men ; Who the blest Gospel's peaceful page explore, Only to fight against its precepts more." O the tearful spectacle, to be mourned not alone by man, but by the shores and the waves; to use the words of an orator, "cedere e patria servatores ejus, manere in patria perditores!" "And though the terrors of the time be past, We in the bower may know nothing of all this; so much the better. That page should be studied in other places where it may be wanted, to enable the highly cultivated classes, and the grave and austere, fully to comprehend not alone the impossibility of attempting "the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key," but also the intellectual and practical evils that in every age attend a departure from common sentiments in this respect, or, in other words, that follow from taking a different view of the subject from that which is obtained at the Lover's Seat, where common thoughts will always find a home. For us it will be sufficient to hear a few statements, and so to observe the phenomenon. In general it is the religious sense that is the first to be thus perverted. Then words, like those of Festus, are muttered to a few, ending with a prayer perhaps like this, Make me thy minister One moment, God! that I may rid the world The French have an old adage which says, "Quand brebis enragent elles sont pires que loups." So it is witnessed then. "Of all metaphysical mysteries," observes a late writer, "the darkest and most fearful is the ferocity which takes possession even of the sweetest and most loving natures when there is a question of religious differences. Whence comes it, what is it, that unholy spell which robs the purest spirits of their purity, and wins the gentlest hearts from their gentleness, the instant that there is an allusion to subjects of this kind? Sectarianism may be compared to that river in Macedonia known to classic writers as the Axius, but now called the Verduri, which makes all creatures black that taste it." Meanwhile, the comment at the Seat of Lovers is but this, 66 Hark, ye things of pride! God, ever gracious, sends his sun abroad, To light, and cheer, and bless more realms and scenes There was a period in this country when these effects were represented as belonging exclusively or pre-eminently to religion, under its ancient and most positive form. Well, if it were so, what would be the use of pretending the contrary? But men of all sides acknowledge now that the time for such a mistake has passed away; and we are told by those who see in it the very symbol of intolerance, that "the Inquisition was not confined to the jurisdiction of the triple crown." Neither of us here can feel any great interest in determining the proportion of cruelty between parties which were all deeply involved in it. No one here seeks to recriminate; for, in fact, all who sought to decry intolerance, however inconsistently, are looked on from this place as being so far our friends and benefactors. Not only is intolerance hateful to us, but perhaps we loathe it most when it wears the most ancient form, and prescribes those peculiar measures of what is called religious caution; for the carrying out of which there does seem, in all ages, to be a most sinister set of instruments ready made to its hand, offered as a kind of horrible abortion in the very workshops of nature itself; but still equity requires us to observe, that in fact the most complete type of the ambitious and intolerant man resolved to make his thought reign over others, is to be found in the chief of the divisions which rose in the sixteenth century. No care of riches, titles, or honours, no pomp,-an apparent humility, -every thing sacrificed to the desire of forming others in his own image,- -a kind of sworn interpreter, arrogating to himself the divine right of defining what is Christian and what antichristian. Such was the terrible figure that the world then beheld with astonishment. Hosts smitten with the rage for the extraordinary, soon followed to carry out his views,—each, like the prophet, justifying his own anger even when arguing with forgiving omnipotence. "They pray, they fight, they murder, and they weep,- We need not say in the style of Reviewers, that no school-boy is ignorant of what we perhaps ourselves have only just discovered; but I think we may affirm, that no one of any consideration in the republic of letters as the learned call it, any longer pretends that intolerance was confined to any class or portion of the world. The Presbyterians of the long Parliament in England, who persecuted three sections of their countrymen, the Puritans of Boston, who wished to sell for slaves those who could not pay the fines incurred by their religious dissent,―the Calvinists, Lutherans, and Anglicans, were all as obnoxious to the charge of intolerance as those who resisted |