We can, however, well understand why religionists deprecate reason, and even the testimony of the senses, when they experience the speedy and certain havoc which these make amongst their doctrines. Paul has told us to walk by faith, not by sight;" and we believe that this is really necessary to the preservation of Christianity. The world, however, has set at nought this blindfolding injunction, and the cause of truth and progress have greatly flourished by its rejection. Mankind, instead of walking by faith, have on the contrary vastly multiplied their visual power, by telescopes, microscopes, and other means, and they are now walking by this multiplied power of vision. Thus faith has become dethroned, and made to hold its proper and subordinate position, and the senses have triumphantly become the crowned queen. To this augmented power of vision we are indebted for revelations of the most ancient, the most sublime, and of the most infallible character. In the nebula of space, in the order and constitution of our solar and astral systems, in the crust of our earth, there are historic and celestial truths wrapt up, more sublime than any which Moses or Paul ever uttered, and which have been developed by the scientific exercise of those senses which Christianity repudiates. Had men, in obedience to the apostolic in valent to saying that science bears testimony | the oracles of reason are, therefore, from my against science. Such palpable inconsisten- view of the case, more powerful and higher cies as these are scarcely worthy of refuta- than any which assume to have come from tion. "Rolla," in declaiming against reason, Deity. We may also add, in further confirmhas charged it with being vaunting, erring, ation of this point, that amongst the many and profane!" Strange that he should have revelations which claim divine authority, then endeavoured to use this vaunting, erring, there are endless and irreconcilable discreand profane thing against Secularism, and pancies; but there are no contradictions in in favour of Christianity. But we will here reason, it is ever consistent with itself and present more clearly the dilemma into which with all facts. our opponent has placed himself. Either "Rolla's" charges against reason are false and absurd, or his own reasoning, in the opening of this debate, must be an exhibition of vaunting error and profanity. Which of these horns our opponent will choose, we know not, he can consult his own convenience. It will, however, be easy to prove that these imputations against reason are not only destitute of truth, but diametrically opposed to it. It is reason that is our only guide to truth; when we are not guided to the truth, then it is not reason which we have employed, for reason alone is that power which distinguishes truth from error. Truth, then, being the noblest and purest of all things, so also is reason, which is the only method of gaining it. Truth, also, is the direct antithesis of all error, so also is reason; that which is erroneous cannot be reasonable, and vice versa. Hence the fallacy of imputing profanity and error to reason. It is in vain that we are told that the so-called oracles of Deity are superior to reason, while it is reason that is the judge which tries and examines it, and revelation must become subjected to the trial. If any man says that we ought to receive a revelation, which is written by men and given to us by men, without trying whether it be true or false, such a man only betrays his disregard for truth, and that he is by mere accident a Christian.junction, continued to exercise their faith He would have remained as faithful to the Mahometan, Pagan, or any other religion, had he received their oracles and their teachings, instead of that which he may happen to profess. Seeing, then, that it is an imperative duty to examine and to try that which is given us as a revelation, and as the judge must be superior to the subject that is judged, the superiority of reason is thereby incontestibly established. No sane mind would do that which it knew to be irrational or immoral, were it commanded in any revelation, or even by a voice from heaven; instead of their senses, then all those mighty discoveries which dignify this age would never have been brought to light. Man would have still been grovelling in the mysteries of faith, superstition, and the opinions which appeared satisfactory to a few Galilean fishermen in the first century. Christianity tells about the heavens opening, and that certain persons on our earth viewed the interior thereof; but the piercing telescope dispels this phantom,-it shows us that the apparent blue vault around us, which the originators of Christianity sup posed to be the footstool of heaven, or at least a partition concealing it, is only the limit to our unaided perception; but the telescope, having penetrated far beyond this, has thereby resolved the Christian's heaven -with its thrones, its angels, and seats of bliss-into empty space. And when we now read of the heavens opening, where there is but space-which is always open-peopled with circumvolving orbs, which, being spherical, are also in their most open condition-we are then struck with the child-like simplicity of our spiritual instructors, and we are almost compelled to exclaim, Alas! what poor work our reason and our senses make of faith! how unsparingly the gorgeous dreams formed by our world's childhood are swept away and torn from us by the after experience of maturer years! It is from this point, then, that we begin to turn secul rists; having discovered that our visions of other worlds is but a dream, we are then more deeply impressed with the fact that this world is a reality. When we perceive that we cannot enjoy heaven nor even our existence above the clouds, we are then the more prepared to realize and to enjoy a heaven under the clouds. This world then becomes the object of our hopes, our studies, and our exertions. Thus it appears that Christianity is a state of speculative childhood, and that Secularism is the matured matter-of-fact manhood. We are called upon by "Rolla" to prove the rationality of our conduct in rejecting the Bible. But he is not authorized to make any such demands until he first proves that his conduct is rational in accepting the Bible as being more than a human work. He ought to have proved that it anywhere contained language which man could not have originated. We reject the infallibility of the Bible, because it exhibits no marks of superhuman wisdom, but many of human imperfection and error; its objectionable parts no enlightened mind will defend; and the good it contains is to be found precedented and surpassed elsewhere. The most advanced and philosophic of our present reformers are fully aware that it is a belief in the divine origin and the infallibility of the Bible which constitutes the prime difficulty in the way of all true reform. The first reformation was a protest against Papal infallibility; the second is a protest against biblical infallibility: and the second will be more glorious than the first. The human conscience and reason, which are now usurped over by a worn out, confused, and misleading standard, will then be liberated and set free to develop themselves in accordance with the higher and the advancing intelligence of this age. The follies, the fanaticism, the errors, and the terrors of Christianity, will then no longer interfere with human happiness, with the progress of science, and with the study and practice of those laws on which man's well-being depends. Man will then receive the unsophisticated intuitions of truth from the facts of science, and the contemplation of the universe around him. HALKET. The Essayist. BYRON. THE life and writings, or actions and creations of Lord Byron, constitute a crisis in the literary epoch of modern times. He rose, a giant genius, on the heights of Parnassus, with the burning ambition to become great and supreme, at whatever cost or peril. On the heights, we say, he awoke to being and doing; he awoke where many died after a life of literary labour. Genius is a birth into this world, not created by any circumstances or agencies whatever in the world. Genius is as much a real existence in the hour of birth, as the body itself in which it comes enshrined. It is a distinct organization of spiritual powers. It may slumber unseen and unheard for years, but it will come forth in all its native glory and dignity when the crisis appears. Ambition to become great with this mighty poet was the one absorbing idea of his gifted soul. Byron came forth into the domain of poetic literature as did his daring contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte into the arena of political power and warfare, panting to achieve for himself a fame which should last through all time, even though it were attained by the violation of the eternal laws of truth and rectitude, at the fearful expense of virtue, moral character, present and future well-being. Herein lies the strangest of mysteries. Oh, reader! it behoves us to ponder it well. That a being so gifted as Byron, with powers of intellect and imagination so stupendous, language and learning so various, time and place so opportune, should come forth into the arena of this wrecked world, this moral chaos of ours, with the whole before his penetrating vision, and should see no sphere of action and life, no pathway to immortality, except through the deepest profanation of the most splendid powers. Is it because genius cannot rise to its true position in the paths of virtue, truth, and piety? Is it because Christianity imposes any real restrictions upon the full exercise of intellect and imagination? Is it because there is no soul-nepenthe to be gathered from the flowers which bloom upon the pathway to heaven and God, that genius ofttimes rushes with lightning speed and thundering footstep into the byways of apostacy, the seas of scepticism, and the quicksands of sin? Has true religion no sublime realities and verities of the past, the present, and the future? holiness no mystic beauty abiding as the soul itself? truth no unscaled heights, no unfathomed depths? regenerate humanity no great heroes and heroines, in the display of which a genius great as Byron's might find full and happy scope for his giant powers? There is but one answer to these inquiries, and under that solemn affirmation lies the fearful condemnation of Byron and others, "Unto you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the sons of men." "They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof." It is one of the saddest sights in the history of humanity to see her most gifted sons toiling among men without God, and without true christian hope, through a long life of strife and anxiety. Such was Byron, on the twofold evidence of his letters and poetic works. If no poet ever sinned more than he, it is equally true that none ever drank oftener and deeper of the bitterest dregs in the cup of human experience and misery. His life is an awful lesson to every sane man, and there is no need for Exeter Hall denunciation to guard any from emulating his man and God-defiant conduct. As it regards his poetical works, they will be read to the latest posterity; and though some may fail to stand their ground on account of their moral character, others will be read, and their excellence increasingly appreciated. To unfold but partially the beauty and glory of Byronic poesy, we need the keen insight of a Coleridge, the language of a Jeffrey, and the critical comprehension of a Foster. In the absence of these, the reader must be content with a few passing reflections upon the character, life, and writings of Lord Byron. The character of Lord Byron. In nothing, perhaps, is the reading world more easily gulled than in biography and biographical works. In these latter days, scarcely any man dies of note or worth in any circle of life, but some literary person, duly qualified, comes forward to write his biography, avowedly, but in nine cases out of ten, to make so many volumes for the publisher's list, which, by some strange fatality, the public will devour. It is one of the most tedious tasks to read anything like a tithe of modern biography, which mostly consists of trivial incidents, anecdotes, and, it may be, a few uninteresting letters-but having a large signature-strung together with a degree of patchwork ingenuity-Lord John Russell's "Life of Moore," to wit, cum multis aliis. Not only so, but there is a constant repetition of this game, and Byron with others meets at length, with a fresh biographer almost every year. Of course the last is the best, according to pretension, though, however, it has often no other claim to superiority than some peculiar view concerning his lordship, or has a letter before unpublished, &c., &c. Now this is to be deprecated. There is no necessity for it. Byron has written his own character. His vices and virtues stand forth on his own written pages. Never did poet throw so much of self-hood into his writings as did Byron. To become familiar with all that Byron has penned, is to know him as he was. only person who had any right to pen his life was Moore, his friend and companion, and to whom was committed his lordship's The private diary and letters. This Moore has done; and what he did not publish of his lordship's diary and letters he destroyed, so that we can know no more than his published letters and writings reveal of Byron himself. Every man is at liberty to form his own estimate of that life, as all the facts are before him, as they were before Moore, but every man is not at liberty to turn Byron's biographer. The consequence of all this is that Byron has suffered from friend and foe. A character which, considered as a whole, is utterly indefensible, has found defenders; a character which is not devoid of much excellence and beauty has been pronounced vile and "Satanic." parte might lead his half million heroes in defiance of the laws of nations, but their power was to be broken, and the world was to be saved from the evil supremacy of such perverted genius genius which, in the earlier ages of the world, would have placed them among its fancied deities. Byron stood before Europe as a revolutionist, whose only sceptre was poesy. Strange to say, he was a revolutionist without any definite aim. He loved chaos for chaos' sake. Had all the then existing dynasties of Europe been hurled to the dust, all the political and social elements of the continent confused, Byron's genius had revelled more fully in its native element, and his poetic genius would have soared to heights of awful daring and potency, which must have produced among men a delirium worse than madness. Byron has ever appeared to us a being of mighty volition, yet always uncontrolled and misguided. At one period he rises before us as Prometheus Vinctus, at another as Enceladus, whom Alps on Alps cannot crush Byron's character, as a whole, is indefensible if brought to the high standard of Christianity. It lacks high and holy motive, self-control, patience, meekness, and, above all, the high morality and purity of the christian life. But let it be remembered that Byron made no pretension to religion, and, in justice to the departed, let it be said that his life was characterized by no formality and hypocrisy, and that in the open--at the thunder of whose voice the mounness and transparency of his conduct he set an example to the religious world. He, like his compeer in poesy, Shelley, gave himself credit for being worse than he was. In fact, both Byron and Shelley, on leaving their native land, were wrecked in life's brightest hopes, and, being abandoned by those who might have influenced them for good, were led to abandon themselves, the one to a life of solemn solitude and Alastorism, and the other to a life of gaiety and continental carnivalism; and in so doing they made no secret of it, therefore half the slandering and unqualified reprobation of these men. Byron was one of the strangest beings who ever fully appeared before the world; there is no real clue to his character beyond this, that he was the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit of his times. He might have clasped hands with Bonaparte as his brother; and the one with the magic of his poesy, the other with the might of his military genius, might have consolidated a colossus of terror, to have awed the world. But it was not so to be. The Eternal had ordered things otherwise. Humanity was to be wrecked upon no such rock. Byron might appear for a time as the sole potentate in the vast dominion of thought, and Bona tains move, at the lightnings of whose genius the midnight stars grow dim. At one time he girds himself with a noble daring, enlists virtue on his side, and sings the redemptive-birth of humanity, as Gabriel might. At another, he summons, as it were, all the dark powers of a woe-stricken world, all the malign and desperate passions of erring manhood, all the mystic agencies of the infernal world, and seems to foretell the fact he labours to deny the perdition of sin. He is most himself in the midst of the wreck of our common humanity. Eoluslike, he enthrones himself upon the big heart of wailing humanity, and glories in the exercise of his control over the dread powers which create its everlasting storms and tornado woes. He sails across the tossing ocean of life, a mariner of no mean power and foresight. But, strange to say, he longs for no peaceful port. He loves the storm that wrecks, the lightning that scathes, the thunderbolt that destroys; and though he knows the path of safety between Scylla and Charybdis, he avoids it, and flatters himself that he hears mystic music in the voice of the angry siren, and longing, casts himself in the everlasting whirlpool of confused waters. His poetry is full of his own bitter tears or angry moods; in fact, he is self-absorbed in his ever active work of self-torture, and yet he gives the world all the credit due to himself. He opens the vein of his vital blood, and, dipping his broken pen therein, writes a "Dream." In it he epitomizes his dark biography. In it he unveils his glorious genius. In it he shows us where he was wrecked: "He had ceased To live within himself: she was his life, Here, reader, a soul like Byron's, wrecked where it ought to have cast anchor for immortality, canst thou wonder that misfortune followed? Rob a lioness of her whelps, and will she fall passive at thy feet? Strangle the firstborn in the mother's arms, and will she smile? Remove the everlasting hills, and shall the vallies still slumber in all their lovely quietude? Send forth sirocco, tornado, whirlwind, and shall there be heavenly calm the while o'er ocean and desert wastes? Wherefore, then, peace and bliss for this lone spirit on life's waste, aided by none, and abandoned by all? Is it any mystery that such an event should end "in madness" and "in misery?" Knowest thou not that love is the only elixir for the soul of man? that all else is worse than unsatisfying, and appetite-creating-yea, maddening, if, indeed, vital love bas ever burned upon the altar of the soul-the heart? There is misery in knowledge alone; satiety in pleasure alone; peace and bliss in full-soul love alone. Thou knowest it? Then thou, too, hast a heart of sympathy for Byron. In this mystic mood of feeling and admiration all great souls cast anchor, at least for time. In the delusion of a dream Byron essayed this much. its dregs, drown the secret agony of his soul? Verily, no. Thought, the giantpower of his soul, henceforth must create new modes of torture. Imagination henceforth must retouch in bolder outline the fact which originated his "vast grief." To this stern fact add these two others-Byron's poverty as a nobleman, and the hostility of his nearest friends, or, rather, bitterest enemies, for such they really were, and every impartial mind must be led to regard Byron as very far from being that incarnation of the Satanic, and so forth, as set forth by some. Byron, in the presence of Christ, is a great sinner! But we may indeed say to his Pharisaic accusers, as Christ did to the accusers of the adulteress-" He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone." The sins of Byron were the sins of our common humanity; the only difference existing between the sinfulness of Byron and the sinfulness of his detractors being, that the former was rendered manifest by the light of a genius which the latter did not possess, neither could appreciate. Here we are The poetry of Byron. launched upon a deep sea of human thought and imagination embodied in verbal symbols. Over it is seen the ever-present angel of beauty; the rocks of sublimity rise from its azure depths; the horrible and infernal, the lovely and ethereal, ever and anon pass and repass before the vision. The true critic of Byron has yet to come. Our literature lacks the criticism. Jeffrey is too superficial, although intensely beautiful. He did not understand Byron. He had no real sympathy with him. Wilson and Moore sympathized, it is true, with the poet, and have laid bare the sinewy structure of some of his writings with masterly hands; but they manifestly did not possess insight and power, as critics, fully to master and unfold Byron's effluent genius. As for George Gilfillan, that giant of the North, in whose vast power of critical comprehension all the Who shall depict the agony of his soul geniuses of England are as pigmies; who, when he awoke to the stern reality that like a city tailor, can take the true measurehe had been standing upon a fleeting ment-. e., intellectually-of any man in sand-drift-that "the tablet of unutterable no time, Byron included, or who can for thoughts" had been read by no responsive ever settle the "exact limits" and define spirit-that his heart was for ever desolate? the precise proportions of the genius of a Could time soften down the rugged features Coleridge or a Byron as he can write bomof that desolation? Could the flowing cup bast and high-flown symbolism;-let his of all sensuous pleasure, though quaffed to | criticism and Exeter Hall pseudo patriotism |
