Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

much comfort, since doctors of the most extreme Calvinistic orthodoxy had devised sure means of securing tranquillity to the conscience without rendering either the principles of belief less rigid or the paths of life more rough. The fundamental principle of the Gomarist school was the impossibility of losing the justification once granted to the elect, and of being justified otherwise than by the predeterminate election of God. The refined logic of certain doctors upon this principle was that, grace being irresistible, there was no risk to run by resisting; but, on the contrary, the greater the resistance to the gifts of God, the more abundantly would God impart his gifts; that grace being a gratuitous mercy, no condition was required for enjoying the mercy of God, the merits of Christ being so effectual as to dispense the Christian from the necessity of any exertion. Such subtleties Saurin encountered with the straight rectitude of his sound sense and sound heart. He professed himself a faithful adherent to the Genevese communion, an adversary of the Lutherans and Arminians; he would not hear of any alteration in the orthodox faith, but he would not evade its hardest consequences by metaphysical refinements. The most beautiful sermons of Saurin are those in which he considers these awful difficulties of the Calvinistic faith, and refusing to alleviate them by any approach to some less absolute doctrine about predestination, he takes his refuge against his own and his hearers' perplexity in the humble adoration of the divine profundity:- How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!' This is the text upon which he preaches with the greatest eloquence, because it is the most comforting thought to his soul. And what was the practical conclusion which he derived from having so candidly acknowledged 'the • depth of God's wisdom,' and the unfitness of the thing formed 'saying to Him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?' It was a precept of mutual forbearance and charitable toleration.

[ocr errors]

The uncharitable, intolerant Christians he often censures, as if he had a sad presentiment of the troubles which were to disturb the end of his life. Sectarian intolerance was no longer in Holland the violent passion it had been there in the previous century; but much of it remained as a fit aliment to the habits of slander and the petty jealousies which infested the small circle of the French colony. Preachers had to undergo the strictures of their flocks or of their professional rivals. Saurin, notwithstanding his well-intentioned zeal, was the victim of that sort of provincial malice, which he felt, perhaps, more keenly than it was worth. Many of his brother clergymen decried the distinguished urbanity of his manners as

more becoming a man of the world than a churchman. On the other hand, his thorough acquaintance with mankind had perhaps, given too sharp an edge to his moral criticisms; and the personal animadversions with which he interspersed his sermons were not likely to secure him the easy popularity of an inoffensive teacher. A series of letters, Upon the State of Christianity in France, some passages of which were thought too severe, were the last work of Saurin, and the cause of many attacks against him. His adversaries searched his former books for censurable passages, and succeeded in finding a few words to which exception might be taken in the folios he had written upon the Bible. He was condemned by two successive synods, and died a short time afterwards of grief and

vexation.

His last work, which was never finished, had been begun for a special purpose. He had intended to make an earnest appeal to the Protestants who had remained in France, and to press upon them the duty of leaving a country where they were denied their most sacred rights. He did not live long enough to go to the full length of his scheme; but the idea which he pursued with his last efforts, was one which he had entertained during the whole of his pastoral career. He constantly threw the most decided blame upon those of his brethren who, pretending that they continued faithful in their hearts to their creed, still preferred submitting at home to the daily practices of apostacy, rather than securing the peace and liberty of their consciences by settling abroad. In many sermons of Saurin we see the men of that description urged with a pathetic solicitude to choose a better path, or taunted with the utmost severity for their low-spirited procrastination. He calls them temporisers; he compares them to Nicodemus, who only dared to go to Jesus by night. The unhappy converts had, in fact, always preserved some relics of their former worship, which they concealed under the enforced observances of their new church. Some even contrived to repair to the French colonies in the Protestant countries for a short visit, and there to take, or, as Saurin says, to extort the sacrament, being not the less resolved to return immediately afterwards to their abode of servitude. Saurin condemned this cautious lukewarmness, and disapproved these circuitous methods, by which their integrity could not be but seriously endangered. He did not even consent to supply these timid brethren with the pious directions which they begged from him. He answered, that he would not have them believe that they adequately performed their religious duties, when they concealed their religious profession.

He was, in short, a great promoter of emigration for principle's sake; he considered it as the last resource of a defeated cause and of a sincere conscience against thorough-going oppression, His favourite text was taken from the mystic words of the Apocalypse, which he turned into a rule of practical conduct,

Come out of Babylon, my people, that ye be not partakers 'of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.'

We would not undertake to support the argument of Saurin to its full extent, and to condemn the great majority of the Protestants who remained in France under the conditions which Saurin considered so opprobrious. In fact, had all the French Protestants abandoned their country in answer to his appeal, Protestantism would have been extinguished by the very consistency of its adherents, in a land where, after a time, it was re-established. But these are questions which must be left to the decision of each man's conscience. Only let no man imagine himself called upon to stifle that sacred voice within under the pretence of better working out the mysterious designs of Providence. We are the more lenient towards the temporisers and Nicodemites against whom Saurin inveighed so loudly, as we know that they did not reason upon that slippery principle which has been of late years introduced into the world, and has, indeed, become a commonplace among the nations afflicted with frequent revolutionary visitations. Had the temporisers of the seventeenth century lived in the nineteenth, it is probable that they would have uttered the same sublime cant with which many a man on the Continent has greeted every recent revolution; they would have proclaimed that they belonged to their country before all; that they ought to reserve themselves for its service; that though they did not approve of forcing the conscience, yet their consciences would not be perverted by an outward compliance with the oppressors, and they would reserve themselves for a better epoch; that they would be better fitted for liberty after having had a long experience of bondage; that in the majority there was a divine sign, and the voice of the people could not be but the voice of God. We cannot conceal that we prefer the candour of the old generation of Frenchmen, in spite of the rebukes of Saurin. They confessed their weakness, and did not dogmatise upon it for their glorification. They acknowledged the demoralising power of the material bonds which bound them to a country to which they were no longer attached by any moral ties; they did not boast of their chains. And besides, many among them went to pay their homage to the true faith in those churches of the desert, which, for many a long year, nobody attended but at the risk of his liberty and his life.

-

ART. IV. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. Edited by the Right Honourable Lord JOHN RUSSELL, M. P. Vols. I. to VI. 8vo. London: 1853.

To 'o those who, like ourselves, are verging upon their grand 'climacteric' (all the world knows we were born in 1802), these volumes cannot fail to afford many an hour of delightful and interesting reading. We confess to having been absorbed in the retrospective details of a period which, in a social and literary point of view, had so much to distinguish it; details sketched by one who floated on the tide of pleasurable existence in both these forms, and whose capacity for enjoyment seems to have kept pace with his opportunities.

[ocr errors]

Like many men of ardent sensibility, Thomas Moore had a vivid conception of the value of posthumous celebrity. To be able to interest his fellow men and women in his personal feelings, in his pleasures and pains, his triumphs and successes, was with Moore an object of undisguised solicitude; and to this we are indebted, in great part, though not entirely, for a minute record of his almost daily life, his innermost thoughts, and his relations with society during the meridian of his existence. If it be objected-as, indeed, we have already heard it objected-to this publication, that it is little else than a tissue of egotistical, vain, and trivial passages in the life of an improvident, selfish 'adventurer,' the answer would be, that all autobiography, to be worth reading at all, must be egotistical and vain; because nobody would take so much trouble except for the sake of being allowed to talk of themselves all through the work, and to dwell, ad libitum, upon their own merits and achievements. The use of the personal pronoun has long been, by a very natural instinct of self-protection, restricted within narrow limits by the higher classes of society; hence poor Moore could not talk of his own glory and successes whilst alive, and it was a hard case, considering how much he had to be vain of. To fly to his closet, and record the flattering incidents of the day, was his best and most obvious resource. By thus entering up' the tributes as they poured in, little and great, Moore indemnified himself, by anticipation, for the suppression of all signs of present pride and satisfaction. And since we have discovered incontrovertible evidence in these volumes of the prodigious amount of praise and flattery heaped upon his head, our wonderrecollecting how unaffectedly he bore his honours - becomes greater and greater as we read.

Until the appearance of this publication, it had not, indeed, been fully present to us how extensively Moore was read and relished, nor how widely his reputation, whether as a poet, as a wit, a lyric composer, or, God save the mark, a sound political writer! had circulated, in Europe as well as in the British Isles. Yet it cannot be denied, with the proofs before us, that in each of these walks of composition, Thomas Moore was regarded with enthusiastic admiration by his contemporaries, throughout the social scale, from the man of letters' proper down to the Miss ' in her teens.' And as to personal successes, no one, surely, ever surpassed him. By his touching, sentimental singing, he enchanted all who were susceptible to the charms of music; by his vivacity, sparkling conversation, and literary accomplishments, he captivated those who prized social talents; whilst his more solid merits secured for him a place in the esteem and friendly regard of some of our most celebrated countrymen. Add to these sources of honourable gratification, the remarkable fact that Moore enjoyed, and deserved to enjoy, his own selfrespect, and cherished his mental independence throughout all vicissitudes of life, and we have before us perhaps the amplest justification of human vanity which purely personal qualities can well furnish.

A general outline of Thomas Moore's life will, we apprehend, be acceptable to most of our readers. Born in 1779, of decent, but obscure, Irish parentage, in Dublin, he had the advantage of being the son of a clever, active-minded woman, who seems to have steadily kept in view the main purpose of forcing education upon the boy, as far as her slender means could serve. Moore disliked study, and would much rather have sought his fortune as an actor. But Mrs. Moore compelled him, with her firm, yet affectionate, authority, to acquire such an amount of learning as should qualify him to make his way in some one of the walks of educated labour. This purpose accomplished, by his having graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, young Moore quitted the parental roof, and, at the age of nineteen, dropped down into a humble London lodging near Portman Square, with but a small sum of money in his pocket, and with a faint intention of reading for the bar. He possessed scarcely any friends, and knew nobody of any mark in the world, but after a while contrived, by means of some letters of introduction he had brought from Dublin, to gain admission into a few families (chiefly Irish, however,) where he could pass his evenings and occasionally dine. After getting himself admitted of the Middle Temple, he went back to Dublin for a space, but shortly returned to London (in 1799), with the double

VOL. XCIX. NO. CCII.

K K

« AnteriorContinuar »