that which results from a modification, which must be the effect of consciousness itself." A short answer to this quibble, upon the hypothesis of materialism, is, that God so modified and organized matter, as that thought should be one of the necessary effects of such modification. The impossibility of thought being an attribute of matter, being thus demonstrated, our author proceeds, in the second chapter, to investigate the properties and attributes of spirit. Of this chapter we are sorry not to be able to give an analysis, but it is really, for the most part, beyond our reach, we must, therefore, confine ourselves to a few detached observations. Perhaps one of the most striking novelties is the following ingenious definition of the mental act of compleat comprehension. "A full comprehension implies an expansion of faculty which takes a circuit round itself, and travels on those margins of existence where entity begins and ends." One of Mr. Drew's brightest dis.coveries, however, is with regard to consciousness. In answer to a common argument against immaterialism, that certain intervals of time occur in which the soul is unconscious of its own existence, Mr. D. observes, that "it would not at all affect the immateriality of the soul, if it could be proved, that there were intervals in which the mind has no apprehension of its own actions. For that men are not always conscious to themselves of their own consciousness, I readily admit; but it does not follow from hence, that consciousness in these interhence, that consciousness in these intervals has no existence. It proves a want of perception in the thing, but does not prove the non-existence of the thing itself." We bow with respect to Mr. D.'s heaven-taught faculties, but, for our parts, we must acknowledge our utter inability of forming the most distant idea of an imperceptible consciousenss. Part. II. treats of the immortality of the human soul, which Mr. Drew demonstrates by showing, that it is im possible for the soul to suffer death either by dissolution, by privation, or by annihilation. Dissolution, or the separation of parts, cannot take place with regard to the soul, because it is a simple substance: nor can privation, for privation implies at least two substances, the thing taken away, and that from which it is taken. There remains, therefore, only annihilation as a method by which the soul may perish. From the simplicity of the soul, Mr. D. infers that it cannot have two opposite tendencies; being possessed of life, it must naturally, and of itself, persist in a state of life; annihilation, therefore, must be produced by an external force. This force cannot be material; for "It has been already proved, that material bodies can never act but when they bring their surfaces into contact with one another. As an immaterial substance has no surface, it is a contradiction to suppose, that matter can ever be brought into contact is to suppose a surface in an inmaterial with it: to suppose such a contact possible, being, which, at the same time, is supposed to exist without it. 66 Whatever has an exterior, must have an interior; and what has both, must necessarily be extended; and what is extended, cannot be immaterial. An immaterial substance, therefore, can have no surface; and into contact with that which has. The what has no surface, can never be brought that there is a contact, and no contact, at very supposition includes this contradiction, the same time. It therefore follows, that the soul must be inaccessible to all violence from matter, and that it can never perish through its instrumentality' Mr. D. seems here to forget, that in terial part, is acted on by the soul, his the compound, man, the body, his maspiritual part; and that there is no greater difficulty in supposing mind to act on matter, either with or without contact, than matter to act on mind. The inspired metaphysician, however, disregarding these trifling objections, proceeds to show, that no finite being can annihilate the soul, and at length ventures on the question, "whether any power which possesses positive being in itself, can destroy the soul? And this question, Mr. Drew, the live of the cial patronage his book has been pubrev. Mr. Whitaker, through whose spelished, in the direct face of a most awe. ful declaration in the gospel, that there is a Being who can destroy bath soul and the following inexpressibly contemptible body in bell, answers in the negative, by abuse of language. "It is certain, that nothing can communicate what it does not possess; nor produce These propositions are self-evident, and the what it has not the power of producing. reverse of either is a contradiction. A being which can communicate annihilation, must be one which is in existence; for that which it, can communicate nothing; and, for the same reason, can produce no effects. durce annihilation be included in the nature And that being which is in existence, can- of power, power itself can never perform not, from the certainty of its existence, include what it has not the ability to accomplish. the absence of existence within its nature, But in admitting a resident energy in power, and, consequently, can never communicate to produce annihilation, we make this resi to another, that absence of existence or arnihi- dent energy to produce a nonentity (for annilation which it does not possess itself. Annihilation is a nonentity), and that which problation, therefore, can never be communi- duces a nonentity, produces nothing. The cated, either by a being which is in existence, supposition, therefore, of a power whose or by one which is not. octive energy produces nothing, is a contradiction in terms; it attributes to the power an activity, which, in the only effect which it is supposed to produce, we are obliged to deny the existence of; and, a power w which is thus constituted, must be active and not active, at the same time. If, therefore, neither the absence nor presence of power can produce annihilation, it necessarily follows, that the human soul must be immortal." As no being can communicate to another, what it does not possess itself, so neither can it produce what it has not the power of producing. If annihilation be the effect of power, which must be admitted by all who contend that power produces it, annihilation must be produced by an energy residing in that power which is supposed capable of producing it. For unless an ability to pro The following Work is so extraordinary, both in its Plan and Execution, as to render its Arrangement under any of the preceding Subdivisions impossible, we have therefore thought it best to place it here by itself at the Conclusion of the Chapter. ART. LXXXII. Génie du Christianisme, ou Beautés de la Religion Chrétienne, par Français Auguste Chateaubriand. THE English reader has been accustomed to hear of the beauties of Sterne, and the beauties of Shakespear, but it was reserved for a French author to give us the beauties of the Christian religion. This work has made much noise at Paris, one party crying it up as a work of brilliant genius, and an excellent defence of Christianity; the other ridiculing it as puerile and fantastic. The author, who acknowledges that he did not always entertain the sentiments which he at present professes, gives, in his preface, the following account of his conversion: My mother at seventy years of age was thrown into a dungeon, froin which she be held the execution of some of her children, and at length expired in an obscure garret, where her misfortunes had obliged her to take shelter. Her last moments were embittered by the thought of my eccentricities, and on her death-bed she charged one of my sisters to recall me to the faith in which I had been brought up. My sister wrote me word of my mother's dying request, and when I, who was then beyond seà, received the letter, my sister also was no more; she was dead through the consequences of her imprisonment. These two voices calling on me from the tomb, this death, which served as interpreter to another death, struck me to the heart, and I becaine a Christian.-My conversion has not, I confess, been the result of any supernatural illumination, my conviction proceeded solely from the heart; I wept, and I believed." The feeling heart will, no doubt, allow a good deal for situations so inte 8vo. 6 vols. resting; yet such a beginning seems to promise a work more built upon sentiment and fancy than on reason and argument; and so, in fact, the reader will find it. We question if there exists a work on a serious subject so full of weak analogies, absurd reasonings, and fanciful coincidences; yet we must do justice to his powers of writing; they are no doubt considerable; he knows how to spread the charm of style, and the colouring of sentiment, over his fancypieces. How far he is himself in earnest we are somewhat puzzled to guess; but his manner is a singular mixture of the. onction of the divine with the flowery imagination of the poet. In this country, where religion is considered as a serious business, an affair of the understanding, a thing to be proved step by step, and decided upon by weight of argument, it must appear a strange thing to hear a man say, he believes because he has wept, for what have tears to do with the nature of belief, and to find a religion recommended because it affords fine subjects for the poet and the painter. We may be amused, but cannot be greatly edified by a chapter upon bells, by proofs of the Trinity drawn from the wonderful appearances of the sun, which he says, "at the same mothe rising, the noon-day, and the setting ment is, in different parts of the world, sun, three luminous bodies in one substance: nothing can be finer in nature," he adds, "than this triple splendour, because it gives us an image of the glorious Trinity." Nor are we accustomed to see novels, however beautiful, or how ever moral, inserted into the body of a theological work. But the author has But the author has declared he does not write for the sophists, that is to say, we suppose, the reasoners; "a kind of men whom it is impossible to satisfy;" a very convenient declaration. First examine, then believe, and when you have found the truth, let it engage your best affections, is the order which would be recommended by a sober English divine; but this order is inverted by Chateaubriand, who would have us first like, then believe, and when we believe stoutly, we have leave to examine as much as we please. Considering how much the Roman catholic religion addresses itself to the imagination, and what sacrifices it requires of profane reason, this way of proceeding may be very judicious. division which the author makes of his work is into four parts. The first treats of the doctrines of religion; the two next of the poetry of Christianity, its relation to literature and the fine arts; and the fourth, of the worship and ceremonies of the church. At the very first step we find ourselves plunged into the depths of mysticism. The first chapters treat on mysteries, a subject for which the author shows a peculiar predilection; he treats of mysteries in general, the mysteries of the Christian religion, the real mystery of the Trinity, &c. Mysteries, according to him, are to be found every where, and nothing is more agreeable to the nature of man. Without a shade of the mysterious there can be nothing beautiful or interesting in friendship or love, in the sciences or the arts. The A se "What is it makes the bliss of childhood but ignorance, and what the unhappiness of old age but the knowing too much? cret has in it something divine, and therefore the first sages spoke in parables. God himself is the great secret of nature; the divinity was veiled in Egypt, and the sphinx was seated on the threshold of their temples." In proof of that great mystery the Trinity, he enumerates every thing that is reckoned by threes, not forgetting the three Graces, nor the mysterious triad of a man, his wife, and their child, which forms, he says, "the full complement of human life, and the delight of the soul." He forgets, it should seem, that if a second or a third child should happen to come, a circumstance not unfrequent, his trinity is destroyed. Sup posing our readers to be satisfied with these proofs of the Trinity, we beg leave to present him with the following pas sage in praise of the Virgin Mary, which we find under the mystery of incarnation: fire, describe to us the blessed Mary, that "Ye poets who have received the creative vessel of election, adorned with all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, resembling the Athenian galley charged with the sacred presents to Ceres; its stern was crowned with immaculate flowers, and no criminal was allowed to perish till its return. Shew us this Virgin snow; let her appear on this throne like a seated on a resplendent throne, whiter than mystic rose, or like the morning star, the forerunner of the Son of Grace; let her be served by the most beautiful angels; let harps and celestial voices form a melodious concert around her; let the first glance discover in this daughter of man the refuge of sinners, the consolation of the afflicted, and the star wrath of the Lord; let her be all goodness, of the sea; let her be ignorant of the holy all compassion, all indulgence; let her beauty even preserve something terrestrial, something able to inspire the most ardent love, if at the same time it did not throw the beholder into religious extacies." We cannot but agree with the author that many tender confidences might be made to such a being, which a protestant devotee would not so readily find an object for. After the mysteries, the author goes through the sacraments of the Romish church; upon which he says many pretty things, and many strange ones: he defends the celibacy of the clergy with much address, which leads him to expa. tiate on the virtue of celibacy in general, and at length we have a whole chapter on the subject of virginity, under the following title, Examen de la Virginité sous ses Rapports poétiques, Examination of Virginity as connected with Poetry. The chapter is curious: we shall cite only the following, hensible climax: "Thus virginity, as, no doubt, beautiful, but to us incomprecending from the lowest link of the chain of beings up to man, passes on from man to angels, and from the angels to God, where it terminates. God is himself the grand anachorite of the uni verse, the eternal celibatary of worlds." After having said so many fine things on celibacy, the reader would imagine there were none left for the contrary state; but he is mistaken, the author has one of the sacraments; he describes in an eulogium also for marriage, for it is a very pretty manner the ceremony of betrothing as it is still practised in France, and contrasts it with the graver rite of marriage; the one he represents as presenting ideas of love and pleasure, the other of duty. That we may not incur the blame of unfairness by quoting none but the censurable passages of this author, we shall give his picture of the dying Christian receiving the sacrament of extreme unction: author goes through the catalogue of Christian virtues, and the laws of the decalogue; which latter he compares (not very fairly) with the maxims of the ancient legislators. All that remains of the wisdom of antiquity, he says, may be comprised in three pages; these pages he accordingly gives us; and hav ing run over, in a very cursory manner, a few sentences from Minos, Solon, Pythagoras, &c. now, he says, you shall hear Moses. He then describes "the chain of Lebanon, crowned with eternal snows, and her cedars that lose their heads in the clouds:" and when he has raised the imagination of the reader with all these pomps, he bursts out, "Chen mang Israel Anochi Jehovah Elshecha;” very fine sounding words certainly; but what do we learn from them more than the translation, which he afterwards gives us, would have told us; except that Mr. Chateaubriand understands Hebrew. This mode of surprising and elevating resembles, as a French critic has remarked, Sganarelle in Molière: "Ah, you do not understand Latin! Labricias arciturum catalamus singulariter.” In the next chapter, which treats of the Fall, instead of theological arguments, we meet with a beautiful description of the serpent, which would have appeared to advantage in Buffon or Goldsmith. Every where imagination and enthu siasm, an imagination certainly brilliant and poetic; an enthusiasm, whether real or fictitious we pretend not to detersound argument; and when he has the mine, takes the place of reasoning and air of plunging into the depths of chroing far from the world towards the regions where he is invited by hope, the hope of fu- nology or astronomy, he escapes by an turity, daughter of virtue and of death. At affected contempt for human science, length the angel of peace, descending towards or a phrase of studied prettiness. Thus this good man, touches his wearied eye-lids he asserts, that "the herdsman of the with his golden sceptre, and they close deli- Ganges committed fewer errors than the ciously upon the light of day. He dies, and philosopher of Athens, as if the muse of his last sigh has not been heard; he dies, and long after he has expired, his friends keep silence around his couch, for they imagine he still sleeps, so gently has this Christian passed away." "Come, see the noblest spectacle which the whole earth can afford, the death-bed of the faithful. This man is no longer the man of the world, he no longer belongs to his country, all his relations with society have ceased. For him the computation by time is at an end, and he dates only from the grand era of eternity. A priest seated by his bed-side is employed in comforting him. The venerable minister converses with the dying man upon the immortality of the soul, and the sublime scene which all antiquity has only once presented to us in the last moments of the most celebrated of philosophers, is every day renewed on the humble flockbed of the meanest expiring Christian. Behold at length the last moment approaches; a sacrament once opened the gates of this world to this virtuous man, and another sacrament is about to close them. Religion has rocked him in the cradle of life, her solemn hymns and her maternal hand shall again lull him to rest in the cradle of death. She prepares a baptism also for this second birth, but instead of water she chooses oil, the emblem of celestial incorruptibility: little by little this liberating sacrament breaks the ties of the saint; his soul, half freed from the body, becomes almost visible on his countenance. Already he hears seraphic melodies; already he is on the point of fly The fine imagination of the author gives us many of these touching pictures; they remind us of the pencil of Greuse. We perceive, however, on translating it, that a great deal of the beauty is owing to the style, and that we have not been able to transfuse it. It must be remembered also that he addresses catholics. With the same luxuriance of style the astronomy tion for the shepherds, her first loves." commanding the sun to stand still. cuse is made for Joshua that he used the language of the vulgar. Would it not have been more simple to say that he used the language of Newton? If you wanted to stop a watch, you would not break one of the small wheels, but the main spring, which being stopped would immediately stop the whole system." Our author is fond of mentioning our English philosopher, whose fame he has certainly heard of; but we believe Mr. Chateaubriand and Newton would not have three ideas in common. We must not pass over, when speaking of this philosopher's system of geology, the curious chapter upon the youth and old age of the world: "It has been made an objection," he says, "to the system of Moses, that the earth bears marks of being much older than his chronology would make it. Nothing is more easy than to answer this objection; the world was created old; it was both young and old at the same time; the oaks were created with old crows' nests upon them (reader, we are translating literally, vieux nids des corbeaux); the nightingales were surprised to find themselves sitting upon their eggs; amidst the young trees were old decayed oaks, covered with moss and ivy; and the high cliffs were already eaten into caverns by the waves." "Otherwise," he says, "what would have become of the picturesque; of the holy horror inspired by woods and groves; of the sublime, the melancholy, the sentimental in nature, for all these essentially depend upon antique objects." We really should have thought that a new created being might have amused himself among the flowers of Paradise with his young bride, without feeling any want of those melancholy pleasures which are so much allied to the spleen inspired by the present fallen state of things; but it seems Adam himself was not young when created. He was produced a man of thirty, in order to correspond by his majesty with the antique grandeurs of his new empire; and Eve was a beauty of sixteen, that she might harmonize with the flowers, the nestlings, and all the young part of the creation. If in those parts of his work which treat of the most abstruse doctrines and deepest speculations of philosophy, the author has indulged so much his talent for description, the reader will suppose that he gives full scope to the luxuriance of his fancy when he comes to demonstrate the existence of the Deity by the wonders of nature. part of his book; his pictures of nature It is, indeed, the most pleasing are lively and poetical; and though the naturalist might here and there find inaccuracies, and the man of taste some puerile conceits, the richness and variety of his descriptions show indisputably his talents in that walk of genius. He has travelled much in America, and has also made much use of Bartram's description of the Floridas. To the wonders of nature succeeds a display of the wisdom of God in our moral structure. In a chapter on the love of our country, we were somewhat surprised with the following illustration: change his lot with the first potentate of the "Ask a Scottish shepherd if he would earth. At a distance from his beloved clan, he bears about with him every where the remembrance of it; every where he misses his flocks, his torrents, and his clouds; he aspires to nothing higher than to cat his barley bread, to drink the milk of his goats, and to sing in the valley the ballads which were he returns to his native place. He is a mounsung by his forefathers. He perishes unless tain plant, whose root must be in the rock, and which cannot flourish except it is beaten by wind and rain; a rich soil, a sheltered situation, and the sun of the valley destroy it." We apprehend the author has never been in England, or he might have seen that the Scotch bear transplanting, even to the smoky and luxurious town of London, better than he is willing to allow. The author next proceeds to the proofs of the immortality of the soul, most of which are drawn from sentiment: amongst them he mentions the look at the sky. He asserts that all great instinct which he says an infant has to men, and particularly great conquerors and warriors, have been religious. After enumerating Alexander the Great, the in the name of the gods," and a hunScipios, Augustus, "who only reigned. dred other names drawn from heathen antiquity, he exclaims, "And in our days were they atheists who gained the summits of the Pyrennees and the Alps, who affrighted the Rhine and the Danube, subdued the Nile, and made the Bosphorus tremble; who conquered at Fleurus, &c. &c. &c. who have brought under their Brabant, the Grecian isles, and those of Bayoke Germany and Italy, Switzerland and tavia, Munich, and Rome, Amsterdam and Malta, Mentz and Cairo? Were they atheists who gained above sixty pitched battles, t-ok |